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Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

nytimes.com

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Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#91

Post by acidburnNSA »

pfdietz wrote: post #83
DennisP wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the article was about the reasons costs are so much higher in the U.S. than South Korea, and how to fix it.

We've heard that sort of thing for decades. How many more times does Lucy have to pull the football away before you catch on?

To be fair, the US never did any of the things that we now know make nuclear cheap. Standard design, experienced workforce, established supply chain. Until we try those things you can't quite say Lucy has been pulling the football.

There's a really awesome way of getting all this: build nuclear reactors in shipyards.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#92

Post by madez »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #41
quelsolaar wrote: post #31

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion. A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that) Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you real…

Just a month before Chernobyl happened, the staff at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II in Idaho successfully demonstrated something new and incredible: passive shutdown. They had the reactor at full power and killed the pumps. It shut down and started cooling itself with natural circulation (no external/backup power needed). No control rods were inserted. This state would last indefinitely. Then they did it again,…

I wonder why nuclear rectors were ever built without the ability to shutdown passively in case of power and equipment failure.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#93

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #85
pfdietz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of MSRs is not that they can't melt down (or that they could use thorium; that's vastly overhyped), it's that there's no volatile material in the containment building. The containment of a LWR has to be large because it fills with radioactive steam in an accident. It has to be able to contain this steam, which means at least a certain amount of structure to withstand its pressure. But MSRs don't use wat…

I'm pretty convinced that they're worth working on today because in 20 years when we have vast renewable deployment we'll either have solved the storage/intermittency problem with no unexpected environmental or economic costs, or we'll desperately need advanced nuclear. It's kind of a Pascal's Wager type of thing: worst case if you work on advanced reactors is that you learn new things about reactors and maybe they'l…

Yes. MSRs are an insurance policy in case renewables suddenly stop getting cheaper. They might have niche uses (very high latitudes, actinide destruction), but that won't be earthshattering if we don't have it.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#94

Post by ianai »

TomMarius wrote: post #89
est31 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't just count deaths and conclude that a nuclear catastrophy isn't that bad. Far more people had to evacuate their home, having to leave most of their belongings behind. And most times with no or too little compensation. Sure, nuclear is prefferable to coal but that doesn't mean that both shouldn't be gotten rid of.

But that kind of reactor is never going to be built again - its design was very outdated and outright bad. Today we can build reactors where any failure that would result in an explosion of any kind is physically nearly impossible.

Bingo, there’s clearly plenty of progress to be made with nuclear power and plenty made already.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#95

Post by ineedasername »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #26
addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

The US cannot do infrastructure, or really any serious investment, period. Our laughable incompetance would seriously hinder any strategy. With other strategies, that is one of many impedements. With nuclear that is the only impedement. Hopefully US figures that our rampent cost diesese on sll the things is just embarrassing, and we need a "time out", a throwing away of the actuarial pessimism, and a command economy…

I don't think it's incompetence, it's a lack of political will. On energy, entrenched interests win out through regulatory capture and lobbying. On other infrastructure issues, most people and politicians simply don't care. Maybe once we get to a few bridge collapse per week.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#96

Post by _ph_ »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #34
hugi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.

Huge areas of land unlivable for generations is an overstatement. Fukishima and Chernobyl exclusion zones are lush green forests that where wildlife thrives.

Well the wildlife prospers around Chernobyl exactly because it is not safe for humans to live there. Absence of humans usually is great for the wildlife. Besides the wild animals just not knowing about radioactivity, humans are way more sensitive to radiation due to their typically longer life spans.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#97

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #79
pfdietz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running nuclear plants just at night would double the cost of that power. This would be insane. Using nuclear instead of solar when solar was available would increase the cost of that power by a factor of 3 or more. That would also be insane. Nuclear just doesn't have a place on a grid with a large renewable supply. EDIT: You wrote: "I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build…

I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day. Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage. Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.

South Korea's numbers lack transparency, and I believe they assume very low interest rates (that is, they socialize the financial risk.)

Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in a position to deliver now; the one that is closest, NuScale, is not promising the kind of cost reductions that would be needed.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#98

Post by rurounijones »

Lammy wrote: post #43
quelsolaar wrote: post #31

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion. A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that) Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you real…

> Even a country like Japan, who have high safety standards Reading about TEPCO’s management of their facilities and people both before and after the Fukushima accident doesn’t really mesh with this claim.

Quite, TEPCO was a shitshow.

These guys had the right idea: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#99

Post by _ph_ »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #82
kakwa_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the small nuclear waste issue. Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic. Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need…

The consensus solution to nuclear waste is to put it in geologic repositories where it will be safely out of the biosphere until well after it decays to stability. This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change. As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.

Is there any geologic repository in existance and operating though? At least in Europe, I am aware of none. Even worse, the one in Germany, which was used for a limited amount of waste (Schachtanlage Asse) got flooded by water and the cleanup cost of that has been estimated to be 6 billion. If there are no cost overruns...

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#100

Post by acidburnNSA »

_ph_ wrote: post #88
istjohn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…

And as a result of the Chernobyl accident, southern Germany is sufficently contaminated, that food from the forests, like mushrooms and wild boar are still not completely safe to consume. Each killed animal has to be checked with a radiation detector, whether its radiation is low enough for it to be eaten, otherwise it has to be disposed as radioactive contaminated. With Fukushima, it was increadible luck that e.g. T…

Can we get a citation on the unsafe food in Germany from Chernobyl? That flies in the face of a lot of current progress in understanding the health effects of low-dose radiation. Precisely how high above natural background radiation levels is the stuff in Germany?
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