7 ms·

I once tried to have this conversation with people who were keen on clean solar power, I suggested the evidence supports nuclear energy as the cleanest option w

I once tried to have this conversation with people who were keen on clean solar power, I suggested the evidence supports nuclear energy as the cleanest option we have to date. Needless to say I was vilified and insulted. (The sun is nuclear anyway :) )

pjc50 8y ago
Cleanest if and only if nobody makes a mistake. Otherwise you end up with unfixable messes. And decommissioning is hardly a solved or cheap problem.
- AngryData 8y ago
  There might not be many mistakes if we weren't forced to use reactors designed in the 50s and built in the 60s when we barely understood nuclear chemistry, but rather modern designs using advanced nuclear chemistry and advanced materials and design improvements. If nuclear power was equated to cars then arguing about nuclear safety using our current examples of failure would be like arguing about automobile safety risks using a Model A.
  - Teknoman117 8y ago
    The largest sticking point for me with nuclear is the whole bigger is better mentality. I'm all for it if we're going with passively safe designs. In theory this could help the whole decentralized grid ideas along. I think it would go a long way to ease public fear if we actually built reactors that can't melt down under any circumstance. I'm just scared of the big reactors. Nothing on this Earth is going to passively remove 1.5 GW of heat coming from something the volume of a hot water heater. We also need to be recycling our waste like the other nations which use nuclear power, not just chuck what's still 90% useful material in a holding tank for eternity.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      People think about this completely upsides down IMO. Nature is killing more people every year than have been killed by nuclear in all its time. The sun is killing more people than dies of nuclear (Melanomas and skin cancer) I could go on. Nuclear isn't as dangerous as it's been claimed and with never reactors the actual security procedure is physical. On top of that investments into thorium and fusion could have gotten us much further. It's not that bigger is better it's that bigger is safer from a number of perspectives. Nuclear is by far the safest, greenest, most scalable, reliable energy source we know how to use and it's many times safer than the very mother nature everyone seems to want to save. Nature doesn't give us a safe, friendly environment we then make unsafe it gives us a hostile and dangerous environment which we then make safe. Funny how disagreement in this always gets met with downvotes rather than at least argument or reasoned disagreement. Why is it so hard for people to disagree about this without it turning into a downvote competition?
      - pjc50 8y ago
        https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-Britain-still-feels-the-effects-of-Chernobyl.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-... https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior The problem with nuclear has always been trust, and repeated breaches of trust - often in regards to weapons proliferation, from which fission can never really be separated. See the ongoing efforts to prevent Iran's nuclear programme, for example. It also has a nasty habit of cost overruns, because projects don't scale down. How overrun is Hinckley Point C now again? Whereas solar cells scale down to the level of a few square milimeters on a watch or calculator. The great lesson of silicon valley - AWS and everything else - is that "big bang" projects always get beaten by things that can start tiny and scale incrementally. We need to deploy solar and wind now. Maybe in the 25 year lifetime of a solar panel we can get a nuclear plant finished. Maybe fusion will work. Maybe someone will find a way to stop Thorium reactors dissolving their own plumbing.
        ThomPete 8y ago
        That's not a problem with nuclear that's a problem with people. Cost overruns come from extreme security legislation and the fact that we haven't built enough so those are simply not proper arguments. Add on top of that that solar will never, as in never ever be able to deliver cheap (at scale), clean, plentiful and consistent energy which is the minimum requirement for any type of energy any sane person would support. Promoting something that is currently not providing more than 1% of the worlds energy being heavily favored politically and with plenty of subsidies and which will never support maybe more than 10% of the worlds energy needs which is being very generous sounds like something the world will look back at in a hundred years and think "What the hell were they thinking".
    - jabl 8y ago
      > The largest sticking point for me with nuclear is the whole bigger is better mentality. Historically, bigger reactors (and bigger turbines etc.) have been one of the few things that have reduced the $/kWh. Now, if you have followed developments in the nuclear sector, you are surely aware that SMR's (small modular reactor) are all the rage these days. There are certainly good engineering reasons behind them as well; more series production in factories with less built on-site, easier to provide passive safety due to smaller size, etc., but so far they have not been deployed in reality, so it remains to be seen whether they will be able to provide a lower $/kWh in reality. But certainly they are an interesting development, we'll see if they become a commercial success as well. As for recycling, with current uranium prices being so low it doesn't make economic sense. But I can certainly see the appeal (breeder reactors are catnip for physicists).
  - merb 8y ago
    well the problem most often comes down to money. if we would operate the power plants within their calculated/fixed lifespan it would've been a better world. however due to the money inside the energy markets many plants will life way above their safety standards. it happens today and it would happen with future plants. besides the waste is not recycable
    - peter_retief 8y ago
      It is actually recycled :) Maybe is we spent a bit more research on recovery it could be at 100%
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      Yes, the waste is actually recyclable and will become even more so in the future. Anyone who is against nuclear simply hasn't looked at the facts. If you did and still came out against nuclear I would be pretty surprised and love to hear your arguments.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        The fuel is potentially recyclable. The large amount of contaminated material making up a nuclear power plant isn't.
        ThomPete 8y ago
        But that contaminated material is easily stored. You are spreading false information.
        merb 8y ago
        in the usa it is maybe easily to store it. but in germany it is a huge problem. asse II is probably already wrecked and nobody knows for sure if "konrad" can withstand the time.
        ThomPete 8y ago
- peter_retief 8y ago
  Sadly there is a lot of ignorance and misinformation around nuclear, here is a link to a long life battery (clean?) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/09/radioactive-diamond-batteries-making-good-use-of-nuclear-waste/#2ec33625a044 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/09/radioacti...
- dangom 8y ago
  Lots of unfixable messes that come from mining, yet nobody blinks an eye [1,2,3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_Rodrigues_dam_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_Rodrigues_dam_disaster [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Polley_mine_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Polley_mine_disaster
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Cleanest even when people make a mistake. Nuclear has in all it's time killed less than coal does in a year, cars do in a year, nature does in a year. More people die from setting up solar or wind, the amount of animals that get killed by wind is in the millions I could go on. The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Furhtermore more investing in Thorium and Fusion would be much much more beneficial and clean. Alternative energies are linear solutions to exponential problems.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    > The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Oh it uses physics? Not code and algorithms? (For those out of the loop, it refers to this meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5ylndv/so_thats_how_they_did_it_its_brilliant/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5ylndv/so_... ) Sorry to nitpick, I totally agree with what you're saying. But I am curious what this "physics" thing is that would magically prevent meltdowns.
    - kortex 8y ago
      I read that to mean "uses [a] physics", meaning a specific reaction chain, not physics the entire field. Kind of like talking about "battery chemistry" meaning Li-based, Pb-based, etc., does not mean "the field of chemistry". Could it have been worded better? Sure.
    - blihp 8y ago
      I think that's referring to newer designs which fail-safe by using things like gravity so that the reaction automatically terminates in the event of failure.
    - jabl 8y ago
      Usually it means that the plant relies on natural processes like gravity or convection to cool down the reactor after it has been shutdown, rather than needing "active" measures like emergency generators providing electricity to run the water pumps etc. E.g. the Fukushima reactors melted down because the tsunami destroyed the emergency generators (as well as blocking the roads so they couldn't get new generators on site in time). A newer design using, say, convection to get rid of the decay heat wouldn't have this problem.
Brometheus 8y ago
We don't know this yet. We need a few thousand years to see, what had happend to the nuclear waste in the meantime. (Leaked to ground water? Used by terrorist? Accidents in migration of waste? Unknown unknowns?)
- ThomPete 8y ago
  There is very little nuclear waste as most can be resused in new reactors and will soon be 100% reusable. The amount of nuclear waste that actually exist is microscopic and I think you would be surprised when you actually see how little exist compared to the claims about it.
dtech 8y ago
The sun is a hydrogen nuclear fusion reactor, when we talk about nuclear energy those are uranium nuclear fission reactor. Those are very very different.
- peter_retief 8y ago
  and your point is?
- peter_retief 8y ago
  So do we develop fission/fusion for safer energy?
gaius 8y ago
Solar has far more deaths per terawatt than nuclear too (fitters falling off roofs really jacks the figures up). People need to look at the big picture or the entire lifecycle. All things considered nuclear is the cleanest and safest form of power we know.
- dwaltrip 8y ago
  Not sure how accurate it is, but I found this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... According to that page, it is 4x higher than nuclear. But it is also 10x less than natural gas, 100x less than oil, and 200x less than coal.
starbeast 8y ago
Given that you cannot cheerfully give it to your worst enemy, nuclear has massive problems as the global solution for power. People are saying on the one hand that nuclear is the solution, but on the other that certain countries aren't allowed near it because it is much too dangerous.
- mmirate 8y ago
  If our worst enemy is indeed a bad enemy, then why should we cheerfully give anything of value to them? (except maybe some fast-moving lead balls) Lots of those countries (e.g. Iran) we have full trade embargoes against.

pjc50 8y ago

Cleanest if and only if nobody makes a mistake. Otherwise you end up with unfixable messes. And decommissioning is hardly a solved or cheap problem.

AngryData 8y ago
There might not be many mistakes if we weren't forced to use reactors designed in the 50s and built in the 60s when we barely understood nuclear chemistry, but rather modern designs using advanced nuclear chemistry and advanced materials and design improvements. If nuclear power was equated to cars then arguing about nuclear safety using our current examples of failure would be like arguing about automobile safety risks using a Model A.
- Teknoman117 8y ago
  The largest sticking point for me with nuclear is the whole bigger is better mentality. I'm all for it if we're going with passively safe designs. In theory this could help the whole decentralized grid ideas along. I think it would go a long way to ease public fear if we actually built reactors that can't melt down under any circumstance. I'm just scared of the big reactors. Nothing on this Earth is going to passively remove 1.5 GW of heat coming from something the volume of a hot water heater. We also need to be recycling our waste like the other nations which use nuclear power, not just chuck what's still 90% useful material in a holding tank for eternity.
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    People think about this completely upsides down IMO. Nature is killing more people every year than have been killed by nuclear in all its time. The sun is killing more people than dies of nuclear (Melanomas and skin cancer) I could go on. Nuclear isn't as dangerous as it's been claimed and with never reactors the actual security procedure is physical. On top of that investments into thorium and fusion could have gotten us much further. It's not that bigger is better it's that bigger is safer from a number of perspectives. Nuclear is by far the safest, greenest, most scalable, reliable energy source we know how to use and it's many times safer than the very mother nature everyone seems to want to save. Nature doesn't give us a safe, friendly environment we then make unsafe it gives us a hostile and dangerous environment which we then make safe. Funny how disagreement in this always gets met with downvotes rather than at least argument or reasoned disagreement. Why is it so hard for people to disagree about this without it turning into a downvote competition?
    - pjc50 8y ago
      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-Britain-still-feels-the-effects-of-Chernobyl.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-... https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior The problem with nuclear has always been trust, and repeated breaches of trust - often in regards to weapons proliferation, from which fission can never really be separated. See the ongoing efforts to prevent Iran's nuclear programme, for example. It also has a nasty habit of cost overruns, because projects don't scale down. How overrun is Hinckley Point C now again? Whereas solar cells scale down to the level of a few square milimeters on a watch or calculator. The great lesson of silicon valley - AWS and everything else - is that "big bang" projects always get beaten by things that can start tiny and scale incrementally. We need to deploy solar and wind now. Maybe in the 25 year lifetime of a solar panel we can get a nuclear plant finished. Maybe fusion will work. Maybe someone will find a way to stop Thorium reactors dissolving their own plumbing.
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        That's not a problem with nuclear that's a problem with people. Cost overruns come from extreme security legislation and the fact that we haven't built enough so those are simply not proper arguments. Add on top of that that solar will never, as in never ever be able to deliver cheap (at scale), clean, plentiful and consistent energy which is the minimum requirement for any type of energy any sane person would support. Promoting something that is currently not providing more than 1% of the worlds energy being heavily favored politically and with plenty of subsidies and which will never support maybe more than 10% of the worlds energy needs which is being very generous sounds like something the world will look back at in a hundred years and think "What the hell were they thinking".
  - jabl 8y ago
    > The largest sticking point for me with nuclear is the whole bigger is better mentality. Historically, bigger reactors (and bigger turbines etc.) have been one of the few things that have reduced the $/kWh. Now, if you have followed developments in the nuclear sector, you are surely aware that SMR's (small modular reactor) are all the rage these days. There are certainly good engineering reasons behind them as well; more series production in factories with less built on-site, easier to provide passive safety due to smaller size, etc., but so far they have not been deployed in reality, so it remains to be seen whether they will be able to provide a lower $/kWh in reality. But certainly they are an interesting development, we'll see if they become a commercial success as well. As for recycling, with current uranium prices being so low it doesn't make economic sense. But I can certainly see the appeal (breeder reactors are catnip for physicists).
- merb 8y ago
  well the problem most often comes down to money. if we would operate the power plants within their calculated/fixed lifespan it would've been a better world. however due to the money inside the energy markets many plants will life way above their safety standards. it happens today and it would happen with future plants. besides the waste is not recycable
  - peter_retief 8y ago
    It is actually recycled :) Maybe is we spent a bit more research on recovery it could be at 100%
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    Yes, the waste is actually recyclable and will become even more so in the future. Anyone who is against nuclear simply hasn't looked at the facts. If you did and still came out against nuclear I would be pretty surprised and love to hear your arguments.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      The fuel is potentially recyclable. The large amount of contaminated material making up a nuclear power plant isn't.
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        But that contaminated material is easily stored. You are spreading false information.
        merb 8y ago
        in the usa it is maybe easily to store it. but in germany it is a huge problem. asse II is probably already wrecked and nobody knows for sure if "konrad" can withstand the time.
        ThomPete 8y ago
peter_retief 8y ago
Sadly there is a lot of ignorance and misinformation around nuclear, here is a link to a long life battery (clean?) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/09/radioactive-diamond-batteries-making-good-use-of-nuclear-waste/#2ec33625a044 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/09/radioacti...
dangom 8y ago
Lots of unfixable messes that come from mining, yet nobody blinks an eye [1,2,3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_Rodrigues_dam_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_Rodrigues_dam_disaster [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Polley_mine_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Polley_mine_disaster
ThomPete 8y ago
Cleanest even when people make a mistake. Nuclear has in all it's time killed less than coal does in a year, cars do in a year, nature does in a year. More people die from setting up solar or wind, the amount of animals that get killed by wind is in the millions I could go on. The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Furhtermore more investing in Thorium and Fusion would be much much more beneficial and clean. Alternative energies are linear solutions to exponential problems.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  > The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Oh it uses physics? Not code and algorithms? (For those out of the loop, it refers to this meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5ylndv/so_thats_how_they_did_it_its_brilliant/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5ylndv/so_... ) Sorry to nitpick, I totally agree with what you're saying. But I am curious what this "physics" thing is that would magically prevent meltdowns.
  - kortex 8y ago
    I read that to mean "uses [a] physics", meaning a specific reaction chain, not physics the entire field. Kind of like talking about "battery chemistry" meaning Li-based, Pb-based, etc., does not mean "the field of chemistry". Could it have been worded better? Sure.
  - blihp 8y ago
    I think that's referring to newer designs which fail-safe by using things like gravity so that the reaction automatically terminates in the event of failure.
  - jabl 8y ago
    Usually it means that the plant relies on natural processes like gravity or convection to cool down the reactor after it has been shutdown, rather than needing "active" measures like emergency generators providing electricity to run the water pumps etc. E.g. the Fukushima reactors melted down because the tsunami destroyed the emergency generators (as well as blocking the roads so they couldn't get new generators on site in time). A newer design using, say, convection to get rid of the decay heat wouldn't have this problem.

Brometheus 8y ago

We don't know this yet. We need a few thousand years to see, what had happend to the nuclear waste in the meantime. (Leaked to ground water? Used by terrorist? Accidents in migration of waste? Unknown unknowns?)

ThomPete 8y ago
There is very little nuclear waste as most can be resused in new reactors and will soon be 100% reusable. The amount of nuclear waste that actually exist is microscopic and I think you would be surprised when you actually see how little exist compared to the claims about it.

dtech 8y ago

The sun is a hydrogen nuclear fusion reactor, when we talk about nuclear energy those are uranium nuclear fission reactor. Those are very very different.

peter_retief 8y ago
and your point is?
peter_retief 8y ago
So do we develop fission/fusion for safer energy?

gaius 8y ago

Solar has far more deaths per terawatt than nuclear too (fitters falling off roofs really jacks the figures up). People need to look at the big picture or the entire lifecycle. All things considered nuclear is the cleanest and safest form of power we know.

dwaltrip 8y ago
Not sure how accurate it is, but I found this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... According to that page, it is 4x higher than nuclear. But it is also 10x less than natural gas, 100x less than oil, and 200x less than coal.

starbeast 8y ago

Given that you cannot cheerfully give it to your worst enemy, nuclear has massive problems as the global solution for power. People are saying on the one hand that nuclear is the solution, but on the other that certain countries aren't allowed near it because it is much too dangerous.

mmirate 8y ago
If our worst enemy is indeed a bad enemy, then why should we cheerfully give anything of value to them? (except maybe some fast-moving lead balls) Lots of those countries (e.g. Iran) we have full trade embargoes against.