10 ms·

"If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored" Well, exactly. The most noisy and alarmist aren't

by brc 11y ago

"If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored" Well, exactly. The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population. Of course nuclear fission is the answer to large scale energy. It always has been. Weapons proliferation can be addressed with new designs and materials. Safety can be addressed with passive systems. The technical answers are simple compared to fusion or elaborate harvesting of diffuse energy such as sunlight, wind or tides. The logical conclusion is that the people making the most noise are not in it for the solutions, but for the noise and attention. I'm not the only one to think this, but expect the groupthink to smite my comment anyway.

cft 11y ago
>The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population. No. They are actually interesting in assuming power in the society by foregoing the standard societal ascension mechanisms.
- Retra 11y ago
  There are no 'standard' ascension mechanisms, and no reason anyone should follow them if there were.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Your comment makes less sense than the underpants gnomes' business plan.
bigdubs 11y ago
Another side benefit is addressing water shortages with nuclear desalinization.
- eitally 11y ago
  Apparently this is starting to happen in select places (like Saudi Arabia). This is a very.good.thing.
tgflynn 11y ago
I agree with you on the problem of modern society seeming to be unable to make good collective decisions. I'm not convinced restarting nuclear makes sense today though. Solar seems to be on an economically winning trajectory and building nuclear plants is very expensive, apparently even for countries that are good at it, like France.
tptacek 11y ago
I'm pro-nuclear, I think, but no argument on HN ever got more persuasive by tacking on a preemptive dismissal of disagreement as "groupthink". Do you want to talk about nuclear energy on HN, or do you want to talk about how you feel about talking about nuclear energy on HN? The former topic seems much more interesting than the latter.
- mgalka 11y ago
  Great! I'll chip in on both. Don't think he meant it as a dismissal, just as a preemptive nudge to discourage actual groupthink. For countries that already have nuclear weapons, I don't even see a valid argument against nuclear power. Agree, the only think holding us back is politicians who are afraid to use the word "nuclear."
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That can't be right. There are obvious arguments against nuclear power. I don't think they're dispositive, but it doesn't seem right to claim they're invalid. For instance: * Serious, INES 7 nuclear incidents can render whole regions uninhabitable. * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. There are probably many other valid arguments. I think people underestimate the impact of coal, and de-industrialization is totally unrealistic and would almost certainly do far more damage to more people than nuclear would. But to suggest that nuclear isn't fraught, or that the only concern was proliferation... that doesn't seem intellectually honest.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      > * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. Incidents from non-nuclear plants cause way more deaths (in short term and long term). Coal kills people too, by polluting the air with fine particles. > * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. Where? There's tons of space deep in the ground, it's not like we are running out of place of where to put it. Plus, there are ways to recycle used nuclear fuel to make it less radioactive.
grecy 11y ago
I've been pro-nuclear for a long time, though the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little. What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?". I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  I think Fukushima, and various investigations and revelations it inspired, showed how the problems are more social than technical. Nuclear power plants produce a lot of power very cheaply for many years. But companies can't help but push the boundaries to boost profits, extending plant life past spec and skimping on maintenance and safety measures, with just a bit of regulatory capture to smooth the process. I'm still pro-nuclear. We just need to follow through on the regulation. Maybe we can start by not being so damn secretive about nuclear stuff. Anyway, we have to build new ones to take on the capacity so we can shut down old ones. Which means we can't be so scared of building them, since not building them is what's unsafe.
  - 3pt14159 11y ago
    Also the Japanese culture is too deferent to authority to really trust that the safeguards are in place. There was not one, but TWO completely failed safeguards that caused Fukushima. Both were reported and went unfixed for over a decade because of top down pressure. This would never happen in Canada. Someone would whistle blow to the government or the press.
- wisty 11y ago
  Fukushima was caused by a Mw 9.0 earthquake / tsunami which cased over 15,000 deaths, in a 1st world country with the world's best earthquake mitigation. The meltdown was caused by an absolutely huge disaster. The contamination might kill a few hundred, and has resulted in an exclusion zone. IMO, the biggest problem with nuclear is how unacceptable disasters are. One old reactors built in high risk zone has a little meltdown, and the entire world freaks out over it. This is a major practical impediment to nuclear - you won't get costs getting driven down (for better or worse), because people see the risk as completely taboo. It's like people worrying about tall buildings, because of 9/11. There's always risks.
datenwolf 11y ago
> The technical answers are simple cough waste management cough We're talking about megayear timescales when it comes to nuclear fission waste. Humans have been around for how long? What's the age of the oldest building around? What's the usual timescale for modern age buildings to deteriorate?
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  Is dumping it in a mountain hoping we'll figure it out in 100,000 years not valid? I'm being completely serious. Our current problems are on the span of hundreds of years. If we have hundreds of thousands we will be able to sort it out. It's barely borrowing on the future.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  I am completely OK with burying it inside a mountain or a geologically suitable mine. True, we should be very selective about where we put it given that waste can be hazardous over geological timescales.
- DennisP 11y ago
  Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, one since 1980. The U.S. had the Integral Fast Reactor almost complete in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration shut down the program. The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. That's a human timescale. When I lived in Germany, we had a brewery in town that had been continuously operating for 800 years.
  - datenwolf 11y ago
    > Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Not every transuran is viable fuel. Some of the stuff is actually actively getting in the way of an efficient fission chain reaction. The key benefit of fast breeder reactors is, that you can fuel them with stuff that's more abundant on Earth, so you're not getting into a fuel shortage (our supplies of U235 are quite limited, some 70 years or so, using conventional fission reactors). So you need to either go through a fast U238→Pu239 or a Th232→U233 process if you want to make use of the abundant stuff. Oh, and most of the fission products are not very pleasant either and you can't efficiently burn them in any way whatsoever. Burner Accelerators? I've got a few things for you to look up: Penetration epth, Bragg peak, small volume active zone. > The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. Unfortunately not. The generation zero of nuclides will decay in that timeframe. But all the other stuff to follow, less radioactive, but still dangerous, takes much more time to decay; and those daughter generation nuclides is where the headaches start. And it's not just the physics that's a problem, it's also chemistry. Some of the elements that are born are quite aggressive, chemically.
DennisP 11y ago
James Hansen is often considered pretty noisy and alarmist. He was one of the first to raise the issue, thinks we can't afford to go above 350ppm (we're at 400), and recently published a paper saying sea level rise could be much worse than generally expected. In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he strongly advocates nuclear power, especially GenIV designs. In particular he talks about the Integral Fast Reactor. Plenty of other prominent environmentalists are advocating nuclear these days; the documentary Pandora's Promise highlights several of them. And James Lovelock, who invented the "Gaia" concept, has advocated nuclear for years.

by brc 11y ago

cft 11y ago

>The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population. No. They are actually interesting in assuming power in the society by foregoing the standard societal ascension mechanisms.

Retra 11y ago
There are no 'standard' ascension mechanisms, and no reason anyone should follow them if there were.
dasil003 11y ago
Your comment makes less sense than the underpants gnomes' business plan.

bigdubs 11y ago

Another side benefit is addressing water shortages with nuclear desalinization.

eitally 11y ago
Apparently this is starting to happen in select places (like Saudi Arabia). This is a very.good.thing.

tgflynn 11y ago

I agree with you on the problem of modern society seeming to be unable to make good collective decisions. I'm not convinced restarting nuclear makes sense today though. Solar seems to be on an economically winning trajectory and building nuclear plants is very expensive, apparently even for countries that are good at it, like France.

tptacek 11y ago

I'm pro-nuclear, I think, but no argument on HN ever got more persuasive by tacking on a preemptive dismissal of disagreement as "groupthink". Do you want to talk about nuclear energy on HN, or do you want to talk about how you feel about talking about nuclear energy on HN? The former topic seems much more interesting than the latter.

mgalka 11y ago
Great! I'll chip in on both. Don't think he meant it as a dismissal, just as a preemptive nudge to discourage actual groupthink. For countries that already have nuclear weapons, I don't even see a valid argument against nuclear power. Agree, the only think holding us back is politicians who are afraid to use the word "nuclear."
- tptacek 11y ago
  That can't be right. There are obvious arguments against nuclear power. I don't think they're dispositive, but it doesn't seem right to claim they're invalid. For instance: * Serious, INES 7 nuclear incidents can render whole regions uninhabitable. * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. There are probably many other valid arguments. I think people underestimate the impact of coal, and de-industrialization is totally unrealistic and would almost certainly do far more damage to more people than nuclear would. But to suggest that nuclear isn't fraught, or that the only concern was proliferation... that doesn't seem intellectually honest.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. Incidents from non-nuclear plants cause way more deaths (in short term and long term). Coal kills people too, by polluting the air with fine particles. > * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. Where? There's tons of space deep in the ground, it's not like we are running out of place of where to put it. Plus, there are ways to recycle used nuclear fuel to make it less radioactive.

grecy 11y ago

I've been pro-nuclear for a long time, though the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little. What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?". I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.

ploxiln 11y ago
I think Fukushima, and various investigations and revelations it inspired, showed how the problems are more social than technical. Nuclear power plants produce a lot of power very cheaply for many years. But companies can't help but push the boundaries to boost profits, extending plant life past spec and skimping on maintenance and safety measures, with just a bit of regulatory capture to smooth the process. I'm still pro-nuclear. We just need to follow through on the regulation. Maybe we can start by not being so damn secretive about nuclear stuff. Anyway, we have to build new ones to take on the capacity so we can shut down old ones. Which means we can't be so scared of building them, since not building them is what's unsafe.
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  Also the Japanese culture is too deferent to authority to really trust that the safeguards are in place. There was not one, but TWO completely failed safeguards that caused Fukushima. Both were reported and went unfixed for over a decade because of top down pressure. This would never happen in Canada. Someone would whistle blow to the government or the press.
wisty 11y ago
Fukushima was caused by a Mw 9.0 earthquake / tsunami which cased over 15,000 deaths, in a 1st world country with the world's best earthquake mitigation. The meltdown was caused by an absolutely huge disaster. The contamination might kill a few hundred, and has resulted in an exclusion zone. IMO, the biggest problem with nuclear is how unacceptable disasters are. One old reactors built in high risk zone has a little meltdown, and the entire world freaks out over it. This is a major practical impediment to nuclear - you won't get costs getting driven down (for better or worse), because people see the risk as completely taboo. It's like people worrying about tall buildings, because of 9/11. There's always risks.

datenwolf 11y ago

> The technical answers are simple cough waste management cough We're talking about megayear timescales when it comes to nuclear fission waste. Humans have been around for how long? What's the age of the oldest building around? What's the usual timescale for modern age buildings to deteriorate?

odonnellryan 11y ago
Is dumping it in a mountain hoping we'll figure it out in 100,000 years not valid? I'm being completely serious. Our current problems are on the span of hundreds of years. If we have hundreds of thousands we will be able to sort it out. It's barely borrowing on the future.
anigbrowl 11y ago
I am completely OK with burying it inside a mountain or a geologically suitable mine. True, we should be very selective about where we put it given that waste can be hazardous over geological timescales.
DennisP 11y ago
Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, one since 1980. The U.S. had the Integral Fast Reactor almost complete in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration shut down the program. The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. That's a human timescale. When I lived in Germany, we had a brewery in town that had been continuously operating for 800 years.
- datenwolf 11y ago
  > Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Not every transuran is viable fuel. Some of the stuff is actually actively getting in the way of an efficient fission chain reaction. The key benefit of fast breeder reactors is, that you can fuel them with stuff that's more abundant on Earth, so you're not getting into a fuel shortage (our supplies of U235 are quite limited, some 70 years or so, using conventional fission reactors). So you need to either go through a fast U238→Pu239 or a Th232→U233 process if you want to make use of the abundant stuff. Oh, and most of the fission products are not very pleasant either and you can't efficiently burn them in any way whatsoever. Burner Accelerators? I've got a few things for you to look up: Penetration epth, Bragg peak, small volume active zone. > The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. Unfortunately not. The generation zero of nuclides will decay in that timeframe. But all the other stuff to follow, less radioactive, but still dangerous, takes much more time to decay; and those daughter generation nuclides is where the headaches start. And it's not just the physics that's a problem, it's also chemistry. Some of the elements that are born are quite aggressive, chemically.

DennisP 11y ago

James Hansen is often considered pretty noisy and alarmist. He was one of the first to raise the issue, thinks we can't afford to go above 350ppm (we're at 400), and recently published a paper saying sea level rise could be much worse than generally expected. In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he strongly advocates nuclear power, especially GenIV designs. In particular he talks about the Integral Fast Reactor. Plenty of other prominent environmentalists are advocating nuclear these days; the documentary Pandora's Promise highlights several of them. And James Lovelock, who invented the "Gaia" concept, has advocated nuclear for years.