Activists who embrace nuclear power
newyorker.com
Activists who embrace nuclear power
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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#2I think it behooves the US and any other country serious about both climate change and extra-planetary exploration and colonization to develop a robust terrestrial nuclear power program as well as encouraging a trained cadre of nuclear engineers who can manage nuclear power sources on other planets, satellites and space-craft.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#3According to the Department of Energy, nuclear energy creates minimal waste, has a small land footprint, and is cleaner for the air.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-nuclear-cle...
Interestingly: “ All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!”
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#4Go heavy nuclear and invest in fusion. The later will lead to clean abundant energy and eventually a reduction in resource scarcity. What is the economics of air? That's the economics we want.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#5I would rather risk a few local meltdowns than a global heatup.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#6When she first contemplated working at Diablo Canyon, she imagined the rat-infested Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on “The Simpsons,” where green liquid oozes out of tanks. Eventually, like Hoff, she changed her thinking. “What we were doing actually aligned with my environmental values,” she told me. “That was shocking to me.”
You can tell from my username what an enormous fan of The Simpsons I am. One of the few things I wish the show hadn’t done is inserted into its world such a thoroughly negative vision of nuclear energy. If you don’t know much about the subject, The Simpsons leaves you thinking that using nuclear power at all is incredibly dangerous and foolish, and motivated by simple greed. It’s especially effective in this because the show is so pitch-perfect in how it depicts so many other aspects of society and human nature. I see this one element of the show as an unfortunate relic of the prevailing counterculture that informed Matt Groening’s otherwise generally brilliant worldview.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#7I think it behooves the US and any other country serious about both climate change and extra-planetary exploration and colonization to develop a robust terrestrial nuclear power program as well as encouraging a trained cadre of nuclear engineers who can manage nuclear power sources on other planets, satellites and space-craft.
Is the US serious about extra-planetary colonization?
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#8Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.
The issues aren't safety, waste, and environments opposition. There are plenty of climate hawks that support nuclear too. It's all excessive costs.
They briefly mention the cooling retrofits for Diablo Canyon in San Lui Obispo, but they don't mention that they bids from Bechtel to simply build a modern cooling system were all billions of dollars of expense. Just the cooling system is more expensive than alternatives.
And this is a trend we will see in the future. For primary generation of electrons, steam based thermodynamic cycles are pretty much obsolete. The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build, say, a cooling system for coal steam. A nuclear plants cooling is pretty much identical. Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon.
So the name of the game is now storage. Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.
The best estimate of what the cheapest possible future grid looks like is: solar/wind capacity at 4x of total demand (thermal generators are roughly at 2x on the current grid), with 3-4 days of storage. This translates to world with abundant energy, at certain times, that's generated at zero marginal cost. There are still lots of transmission costs however. The future of energy is all about spatial and temporal arbitrage of renewable electrons.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#9i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. its just not an ideal situation. the government cant even keep the water potable in certain places.
meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage. if flint michigan has a solar array, then the worst that can happen is that their lights go out. this is a small but critical advantage in my eyes.
and then look at the bigger picture. there hasnt been a nuclear reactor that is perfectly safe to operate. its still hypothetical. solar is growing every year, the battery market is growing every year. panels and packs never truly retire, just decline in capacity. solar wins.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#10I think it behooves the US and any other country serious about both climate change and extra-planetary exploration and colonization to develop a robust terrestrial nuclear power program as well as encouraging a trained cadre of nuclear engineers who can manage nuclear power sources on other planets, satellites and space-craft.
> encouraging a trained cadre of nuclear engineers who can manage nuclear power sources