7 ms·

Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). I don't think this is going to matter in the end, t

by beat 9y ago

Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses. Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or beat nuclear, with lower setup costs and other barriers to entry. A wide variety of storage are being actively developed (with real investor support) to cache cheap surplus production from solar/wind, making a mostly-solar grid viable. What will our solar/wind/storage grid look like in 30 years? Nuclear as a stepping-stone to solar won't matter. It's faster and easier to just to straight to solar.

pil4rin 9y ago
Not to mention not having some nuclear waste to store for the rest of the foreseeable future.
- mitchty 9y ago
  What is the rest of the forseeable future exactly? If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment. The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.
  - specialist 9y ago
    I support traveling wave reactors, explicitly to reduce our stockpiles. If we get some other benefits, like some electricity, bonus.
  - beat 9y ago
    Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation. They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
    - acidburnNSA 9y ago
      The Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 on what is now the Idaho National Lab was the first reactor to demonstrate full passive safety in 2 related tests in 1986. In the first, they turned off all primary pumps and did not insert the control rods. The reactor shut itself down and established natural circulation decay-heat removal. This class of event (unprotected loss of flow) would melt the core of almost any other kind of reactor. Then they did a unprotected loss of heat sink to the same result. My dissertation advisor was there, and said that it was glorious. They knew that they had finally achieved truly safe, socially acceptable nuclear energy. Less than a month later Chernobyl happened and the advanced breeder reactors with their inherent safety have still not been developed commercially. Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II#Passive_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
    - mitchty 9y ago
      Breeder reactors are as noted by acidburnNSA extremely safe. And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower. It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage. > Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon? Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?
- fsloth 9y ago
  Yes, it's much better to burn up the fuel and spread it into the atmosphere where it will cause a massive climate change. Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
  - bsder 9y ago
    > Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago. Last I checked, it still is. Solar can't get anywhere near baseline production that we need currently due to lack of storage options. And solar is the only thing which currently has even the possibility of scaling.
    - beat 9y ago
      Careful how you phrase that. There are lots of storage options that are viable - batteries, gravity, thermal, compressed air, etc - but none that have become major commercial products or installed on the grid at scale. Yet. But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that. This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest. So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.
    - gwbas1c 9y ago
      I can build a house today in the Northeastern US that's completely solar powered and off-grid. It adds about 15% to the cost to build. (2500 square foot home, 68k for panels, 18k for batteries, an extra 5k for a heat pump instead of a gas or propane heater.) The price of the panels and batteries is only going to drop. For on-grid solar, the panels are already the cheapest form of energy available, when paired with a heat pump instead of natural gas. (When paired with using a giant resistor they cost equivalent to natural gas.)
- bsder 9y ago
  Fracking sludge isn't a thing? Coal tar sands waste isn't a thing? Mines that leak sulfuric acid aren't a thing? Black lung isn't a thing? Radioactive coal dust isn't a thing? Our current energy production has hazards and costs that we do not currently account for while we place far too much burden on the alternatives to justify themselves.
hashmal 9y ago
Nuclear being safer than other major sources just means we shouldn't demonize it and stop everything right now out of panic. it means it's just an important asset while waiting for renewables to take off.
- beat 9y ago
  See my argument above, though... it's going to be faster and cheaper to replace a standard deviation's worth of fossil electricity with solar/wind than it would be to replace it with nuclear. So the "transitional power" argument doesn't really hold.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    That ignores another factor- we've been decommissioning nuclear and replacing it with natural gas & coal capacity while we wait for the eventual renewable ramp.
    - beat 9y ago
      Yes, but that's not an effective argument for building new plants in the face of my critique. It's possibly an argument for delaying the decommissioning of older nuclear plants, but those decommissions are probably due to age-related safety concerns - the owners would likely prefer to keep the old plant running, if possible. I've argued elsewhere for a flat-out ban on new domestic coal-fired plants. Coal is by far the worst safety and environmental offender. If we forced power companies onto a renewable-or-nothing path, we might see faster progress.
      - _Tev 9y ago
        It IS an effective argument when public accepts solutions like Energiewende - ignore age of nuclear plants and decomisdion them all while building coal capacity. Guess why so many people like nuclear when observing such stupidity.
  - Regist 9y ago
    I have a hard time buying into this. What's the lifespan of an solar farm with equal output to a nuclear plant? We're about to approve nukes for 80 year life spans. Nuclear has super low operating cost and a long lifespan. The only real economic downside is how flipping expense they are to build and a major reason for that is we don't have much experience building them (because they've lasted so many decades). You're also assuming that solar/wind will be faster when we don't have any real solutions for using those sources as a baseload. Storage and distribution is nowhere near being able to handle such demand. The cost of revamping our grid once those technologies do reach maturity is going to be staggering aswell. Solar and wind are promising but they are still a __long__ way from being proven enough to gamble an entire energy plan on.
ars 9y ago
> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead. Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.) From here: http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/ http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear... (and you can google tons more sources): Deathprint: Wind ……………… 0.15 deaths / TWh CSP ………………… 0.44 deaths / TWh Nuclear ……… 0.04 deaths / TWh Or here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#7a9ec6da709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
- beat 9y ago
  I have a friend who makes that argument. It sounds laughably absurd when he makes it, too. Do you understand anything about risk management? edit: I've stated elsewhere in this thread that the absurdist language used by nuclear power proponents greatly undermines their credibility. This is a perfect example.
  - am1988 9y ago
    I see one person posting an argument with numbers and links to the source and another just calling them absurd. Wonder who I should listen to.
    - beat 9y ago
      Adding numbers to an absurd argument does not make it magically not absurd. On one side, a nervous public is concerned with Fukushima and Chernobyl, cities made suddenly uninhabitable by nuclear accidents. On the other side, someone counts people falling off of ladders while putting panels on a roof, and declares it some sort of rhetorical victory. Arguing that nuclear is safer than solar because solar is so dangerous is a terrible argument. It makes you look like a fanatic who doesn't stop and listen to reason, like someone who cherry-picks "facts" to support a nonsense argument. edit, to be perfectly clear: I am not saying nuclear power is unsafe.
okreallywtf 9y ago
This is the thing I don't get about nuclear proponents. While I'm not an opponent, we can scale sustainable energy sources now, we could have a Manhattan project type of program that, while costly, could replace the majority of our energy sources as fast as we can manufacture the panels and turbines. There is so much lead time in building a nuclear plant, it costs so much and then continues to be pretty costly in maintenance.
- beat 9y ago
  I think a lot of the love for nuclear is technophilia, not reason. We love nuclear because it's hard, requiring exotic engineering and, yes, risk. There's a bigger sense of triumph in it.
  - acidburnNSA 9y ago
    I think people love it because you can get an average American's lifetime supply of energy from 1.5 soda cans of fuel and produce 3 soda cans of waste. And it's 24/7 reliable and emission free. That astounding energy density and associated tiny footprint is exciting all on its own.
- dpark 9y ago
  Solar and wind don't provide predictable power. Even places with high reliance on these tend to have an ongoing dependency on coal (or nuclear) to handle times when supply from renewables drops.
  - beat 9y ago
    Only until we provide energy storage as part of the power grid - which is coming. Capture surplus from solar/wind when the sun shines and the wind blows, dump it back into the grid when demand exceeds generation. This is doable with technology that's a century old. We just haven't built it yet. We will.
    - okreallywtf 9y ago

by beat 9y ago

pil4rin 9y ago

Not to mention not having some nuclear waste to store for the rest of the foreseeable future.

mitchty 9y ago
What is the rest of the forseeable future exactly? If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment. The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.
- specialist 9y ago
  I support traveling wave reactors, explicitly to reduce our stockpiles. If we get some other benefits, like some electricity, bonus.
- beat 9y ago
  Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation. They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
  - acidburnNSA 9y ago
    The Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 on what is now the Idaho National Lab was the first reactor to demonstrate full passive safety in 2 related tests in 1986. In the first, they turned off all primary pumps and did not insert the control rods. The reactor shut itself down and established natural circulation decay-heat removal. This class of event (unprotected loss of flow) would melt the core of almost any other kind of reactor. Then they did a unprotected loss of heat sink to the same result. My dissertation advisor was there, and said that it was glorious. They knew that they had finally achieved truly safe, socially acceptable nuclear energy. Less than a month later Chernobyl happened and the advanced breeder reactors with their inherent safety have still not been developed commercially. Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II#Passive_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
  - mitchty 9y ago
    Breeder reactors are as noted by acidburnNSA extremely safe. And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower. It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage. > Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon? Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?
fsloth 9y ago
Yes, it's much better to burn up the fuel and spread it into the atmosphere where it will cause a massive climate change. Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
- bsder 9y ago
  > Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago. Last I checked, it still is. Solar can't get anywhere near baseline production that we need currently due to lack of storage options. And solar is the only thing which currently has even the possibility of scaling.
  - beat 9y ago
    Careful how you phrase that. There are lots of storage options that are viable - batteries, gravity, thermal, compressed air, etc - but none that have become major commercial products or installed on the grid at scale. Yet. But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that. This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest. So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    I can build a house today in the Northeastern US that's completely solar powered and off-grid. It adds about 15% to the cost to build. (2500 square foot home, 68k for panels, 18k for batteries, an extra 5k for a heat pump instead of a gas or propane heater.) The price of the panels and batteries is only going to drop. For on-grid solar, the panels are already the cheapest form of energy available, when paired with a heat pump instead of natural gas. (When paired with using a giant resistor they cost equivalent to natural gas.)
bsder 9y ago
Fracking sludge isn't a thing? Coal tar sands waste isn't a thing? Mines that leak sulfuric acid aren't a thing? Black lung isn't a thing? Radioactive coal dust isn't a thing? Our current energy production has hazards and costs that we do not currently account for while we place far too much burden on the alternatives to justify themselves.

hashmal 9y ago

Nuclear being safer than other major sources just means we shouldn't demonize it and stop everything right now out of panic. it means it's just an important asset while waiting for renewables to take off.

beat 9y ago
See my argument above, though... it's going to be faster and cheaper to replace a standard deviation's worth of fossil electricity with solar/wind than it would be to replace it with nuclear. So the "transitional power" argument doesn't really hold.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  That ignores another factor- we've been decommissioning nuclear and replacing it with natural gas & coal capacity while we wait for the eventual renewable ramp.
  - beat 9y ago
    Yes, but that's not an effective argument for building new plants in the face of my critique. It's possibly an argument for delaying the decommissioning of older nuclear plants, but those decommissions are probably due to age-related safety concerns - the owners would likely prefer to keep the old plant running, if possible. I've argued elsewhere for a flat-out ban on new domestic coal-fired plants. Coal is by far the worst safety and environmental offender. If we forced power companies onto a renewable-or-nothing path, we might see faster progress.
    - _Tev 9y ago
      It IS an effective argument when public accepts solutions like Energiewende - ignore age of nuclear plants and decomisdion them all while building coal capacity. Guess why so many people like nuclear when observing such stupidity.
- Regist 9y ago
  I have a hard time buying into this. What's the lifespan of an solar farm with equal output to a nuclear plant? We're about to approve nukes for 80 year life spans. Nuclear has super low operating cost and a long lifespan. The only real economic downside is how flipping expense they are to build and a major reason for that is we don't have much experience building them (because they've lasted so many decades). You're also assuming that solar/wind will be faster when we don't have any real solutions for using those sources as a baseload. Storage and distribution is nowhere near being able to handle such demand. The cost of revamping our grid once those technologies do reach maturity is going to be staggering aswell. Solar and wind are promising but they are still a __long__ way from being proven enough to gamble an entire energy plan on.

ars 9y ago

> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead. Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.) From here: http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/ http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear... (and you can google tons more sources): Deathprint: Wind ……………… 0.15 deaths / TWh CSP ………………… 0.44 deaths / TWh Nuclear ……… 0.04 deaths / TWh Or here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#7a9ec6da709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

beat 9y ago
I have a friend who makes that argument. It sounds laughably absurd when he makes it, too. Do you understand anything about risk management? edit: I've stated elsewhere in this thread that the absurdist language used by nuclear power proponents greatly undermines their credibility. This is a perfect example.
- am1988 9y ago
  I see one person posting an argument with numbers and links to the source and another just calling them absurd. Wonder who I should listen to.
  - beat 9y ago
    Adding numbers to an absurd argument does not make it magically not absurd. On one side, a nervous public is concerned with Fukushima and Chernobyl, cities made suddenly uninhabitable by nuclear accidents. On the other side, someone counts people falling off of ladders while putting panels on a roof, and declares it some sort of rhetorical victory. Arguing that nuclear is safer than solar because solar is so dangerous is a terrible argument. It makes you look like a fanatic who doesn't stop and listen to reason, like someone who cherry-picks "facts" to support a nonsense argument. edit, to be perfectly clear: I am not saying nuclear power is unsafe.

okreallywtf 9y ago

This is the thing I don't get about nuclear proponents. While I'm not an opponent, we can scale sustainable energy sources now, we could have a Manhattan project type of program that, while costly, could replace the majority of our energy sources as fast as we can manufacture the panels and turbines. There is so much lead time in building a nuclear plant, it costs so much and then continues to be pretty costly in maintenance.

beat 9y ago
I think a lot of the love for nuclear is technophilia, not reason. We love nuclear because it's hard, requiring exotic engineering and, yes, risk. There's a bigger sense of triumph in it.
- acidburnNSA 9y ago
  I think people love it because you can get an average American's lifetime supply of energy from 1.5 soda cans of fuel and produce 3 soda cans of waste. And it's 24/7 reliable and emission free. That astounding energy density and associated tiny footprint is exciting all on its own.
dpark 9y ago
Solar and wind don't provide predictable power. Even places with high reliance on these tend to have an ongoing dependency on coal (or nuclear) to handle times when supply from renewables drops.
- beat 9y ago
  Only until we provide energy storage as part of the power grid - which is coming. Capture surplus from solar/wind when the sun shines and the wind blows, dump it back into the grid when demand exceeds generation. This is doable with technology that's a century old. We just haven't built it yet. We will.
  - okreallywtf 9y ago