7 ms·

It was my understanding that fission and fusion both use the same Nuclear Power Plant sized facility. Fusion just replaces the radioactive bit, you still need

by jvm_ 6y ago

It was my understanding that fission and fusion both use the same Nuclear Power Plant sized facility. Fusion just replaces the radioactive bit, you still need steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling... it's not like a suitcase you can plug wires into, you still need a massive 'factory' to make electricity, just the one bit is a safer.

m0zg 6y ago
Just the little bit responsible for Chernobyl and Fukushima is not a part of the design at all. No big deal. :-)
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  I am really tired of this line - the taunami killed 18,500 people. The reactor incident killed no-one through radiation and 32 people through physical injuries. One failure of Banqiao Dam killed an estimated 240,000 people. That's more than all people who have ever died from anything to do with nuclear, reactors and bombs combined. Air pollution kills about 2,000 people every single day. Reactor incidents are like plane crashes - they get attention. Fissil fuels are like car crashes - they kill more people every day and noone gives a shit.
  - dougabug 6y ago
    But the tsunami didn’t render large areas of land uninhabitable, as in the case of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
    - bserge 6y ago
      The nuclear incidents didn't, either. Decontamination of Okuma has been successful and residents are already returning. Pripyat is an animal and vegetation haven. Really shows how dangerous our species is to the planet. Point is, nuclear power plants, even the old ones, are nowhere near as dangerous as the media portrays them.
      - dougabug 6y ago
        The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 30km in radius. It’s not at all clear that serious effects do not extend beyond that, for instance to agricultural lands in Belarus.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    I'm really tired of this line as well. Had they failed to contain Chernobyl, much of Eastern Europe would be contaminated for thousands of years. It is true that today's reactor designs are much safer than RBMK, but I will prefer the reactor can can't go supercritical to one that can any day, especially if it's nearby.
    - outworlder 6y ago
      > but I will prefer the reactor can can't go supercritical to one that can any day, especially if it's nearby. Newer design's can't go supercritical.
  - drran 6y ago
    Tsunami and earthquakes are not man generated events, so we can dismiss them. Yes, they killed a lot of people, but cancer kills even more: about 10 millions per year. In part, cancer is caused by contamination of food by radionuclides from reactor leaks (Chornobyl) and nuclear bomb testing.
    - FriskyAlter 6y ago
      Yes, cancer did not exist before nuclear. We can blame cancer on nuclear plants and bombs. That's quality commentary.
      - drran 6y ago
        Radionuclides are major contribution to growth of cancer rate. Quote: Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests probably caused 17,000 cancer deaths in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1849471.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1849471.stm
        FriskyAlter 6y ago
        "probably" 17000 in 70 years against 700 000 000 total cancer death. Pack it up, boys. And if anything, that shows how bad nuclear weapons are, not the power plants.
        Retric 6y ago
        The 17000 is US numbers and the US is a long way from 10 million cancer deaths per year. The point stands fine without using misleading numbers.
        FriskyAlter 6y ago
        There are not many countries who did nuclear weapon tests and even those that did, did not do it in such numbers. Maybe russia, but I doubt that would push the numbers much.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Killing people is hardly the only issue. Rendering large tracts of land uninhabitable is extremely expensive. All told 4 nuclear reactors have had major issues, 2 subs and 1 power plant run by the USSR, and then another one very recently by Japan. Plus several near misses. That’s a significant percentage of total reactors ever built including what was considered a safe design. We could go 1000 years without another incident, but from an insurance standpoint what would you charge a new power plant next to NYC? That means you need them in an a less expensive area, but everyone feels their area is valuable. That causes vast NIMBY issues and heavy regulation. In theory modern Nuclear should cost less and be both clean and safe, but people gonna people both inside and outside the industry.
    - MagnumOpus 6y ago
      > Rendering large tracts of land uninhabitable is extremely expensive Have you ever been near a coal ash pond? You probably haven't because it is an extreme health hazard to get anywhere near it, as it is full of mercury, arsenic, heavy metals and occasionally radioactive slurry. There about a thousand of these ponds in the US alone totaling maybe 100,000 acres. Meanwhile all the nuclear power plant waste ever produced could fit into a single large hangar...
      - Retric 6y ago
        Every nuclear accident was completely avoidable, but it’s not clear if future plant operators can avoid making similar mistakes. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1,000 square miles. Fukushima had a much smaller exclusion zone but Estimates of radioactivity released ranged from 10–40%[163][164][165][166] of that of Chernobyl. The significantly contaminated area was 10[163]-12%[164] of that of Chernobyl.[163][167][168] On 12 October 2012, TEPCO admitted for the first time that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants. That’s the core issue not physics.* ... A 2008 in-house study identified an immediate need to better protect the facility from flooding by seawater. This study mentioned the possibility of tsunami-waves up to 10.2 meters (33 ft). Headquarters officials insisted that such a risk was unrealistic and did not take the prediction seriously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warned of a risk of losing emergency power in 1991 (NUREG-1150) and NISA referred to that report in 2004, but took no action to mitigate the risk.[149] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#2008:_Tsunami_study_ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... France and the US have a solid nuclear track record, but so did Japan.
RealityVoid 6y ago
I am really not buying the fact that nuclear is expensive because it's nuclear. I think the fears around it, the overregulation and opposition to it make it costly. Obviously, there have been plenty of plants that were profitable. Also, nuclear fusion is possibly the cleanest energy source we could get. If we touch this, we might have a real path forward.
- Maursault 6y ago
  That just isn't the case. Nuclear (fission) has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity, and the expense has only increased. Uranium is crazy expensive. Security is very expensive. Spent fuel storage effectively never stops costing, and it isn't ever cheap. If nuclear was simply expensive because of regulations, investors would find a way, and you could not beat them away from building nuclear power plants. But that just isn't where the expense lies. Today it costs $20B to build a nuclear power plant, and that does not include the cost of spent fuel storage or decommissioning. Investors are actually pretty shrewd to stay away from that kind of an investment that always loses. The idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" simply never materialized. Today, electricity generated from solar power is cheaper than electricity generated from nuclear power. The main reason the 110 or so commercial nuclear plants were ever built is that the US military vastly overestimated its need for fuel for bombs.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Thats not accurate at all, Uranium itself is much cheaper than coal / any fuel per unit energy. Some contries have permanent, final storage for nuclear waste, it does not cost any more once created. Furthermore, not only was solar power borderline non existent when those reactors were built, it is also still intermittent. You are just glossing over the biggest challenge of energy - balancing the powe grid. No-one needs energy if it's only avaliable at the wrong time. Energy storage multiplies cost of renewable electriciry several times over, and no country-scale grid has ever operated on wind and solar. Lastly, energy is actually cheap - you can see that because we can afford transporting a pair of jeans 4 times across the world in the process of manufacture. We could have had zero-carbon grid since the 70s with nuclear - and France did. Even though France has cheapest energy in EU, suppose energy would be 30% more expensive. So what? We would be so much better off in terms of climate change.
xyzzyz 6y ago
You don't need as much containment as you do for fission, because you don't deal similarly large amounts of highly radioactive isotopes. Consequently, the safety standards required are closer to fossil plants than to nuclear plants, and these safety standards are really what drives the cost of nuclear fission. The steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling" are also present in fossil plants, and these are significantly cheaper than fission plants.
- Retric 6y ago
  It’s not that simple. Fission’s primary form of shielding is generally large pools of water or other coolant which don’t directly become radioactive. Fusion on the other hand needs to maintain a near vacuum so your pressure vessel is under heavy neutron bombardment. However, small amounts of radioactive materials get dissolved in the fission’s water which the goes on to contaminate the primary coolant loop which increased decommissioning costs. Fusion reactors primarily containment vessels becomes extremely radioactive and all the remote handling equipment also needs decontamination, but it’s unclear if the primary coolant loop will need similar types of decontamination. And by small amounts, divers occasionally go in the same pools storing years of spent fuel rods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool Running the numbers the real difference is fission reactors need more protection from the outside world and containment for a potential meltdown. Thus thick though still fairly cheap walls, which generally don’t become radioactive. They last for 50 years and don’t actually cost that much to construct. Fusion however is a vastly more complex device which will also increase construction and decommissioning costs.
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    In ARC the containment is not under vacuum, the reactor chamber is surrounded by molten salt of fluoride and lithium, and so the neutrons produced travel into molten salt where they collide and produce tritium. It would help to actually watch the presentations. They’ve solved a lot engineering problems from Routine maintenance to blanket Renewal.
    - 6y ago

by jvm_ 6y ago

m0zg 6y ago

Just the little bit responsible for Chernobyl and Fukushima is not a part of the design at all. No big deal. :-)

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
I am really tired of this line - the taunami killed 18,500 people. The reactor incident killed no-one through radiation and 32 people through physical injuries. One failure of Banqiao Dam killed an estimated 240,000 people. That's more than all people who have ever died from anything to do with nuclear, reactors and bombs combined. Air pollution kills about 2,000 people every single day. Reactor incidents are like plane crashes - they get attention. Fissil fuels are like car crashes - they kill more people every day and noone gives a shit.
- dougabug 6y ago
  But the tsunami didn’t render large areas of land uninhabitable, as in the case of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
  - bserge 6y ago
    The nuclear incidents didn't, either. Decontamination of Okuma has been successful and residents are already returning. Pripyat is an animal and vegetation haven. Really shows how dangerous our species is to the planet. Point is, nuclear power plants, even the old ones, are nowhere near as dangerous as the media portrays them.
    - dougabug 6y ago
      The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 30km in radius. It’s not at all clear that serious effects do not extend beyond that, for instance to agricultural lands in Belarus.
- m0zg 6y ago
  I'm really tired of this line as well. Had they failed to contain Chernobyl, much of Eastern Europe would be contaminated for thousands of years. It is true that today's reactor designs are much safer than RBMK, but I will prefer the reactor can can't go supercritical to one that can any day, especially if it's nearby.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > but I will prefer the reactor can can't go supercritical to one that can any day, especially if it's nearby. Newer design's can't go supercritical.
- drran 6y ago
  Tsunami and earthquakes are not man generated events, so we can dismiss them. Yes, they killed a lot of people, but cancer kills even more: about 10 millions per year. In part, cancer is caused by contamination of food by radionuclides from reactor leaks (Chornobyl) and nuclear bomb testing.
  - FriskyAlter 6y ago
    Yes, cancer did not exist before nuclear. We can blame cancer on nuclear plants and bombs. That's quality commentary.
    - drran 6y ago
      Radionuclides are major contribution to growth of cancer rate. Quote: Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests probably caused 17,000 cancer deaths in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1849471.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1849471.stm
      - FriskyAlter 6y ago
        "probably" 17000 in 70 years against 700 000 000 total cancer death. Pack it up, boys. And if anything, that shows how bad nuclear weapons are, not the power plants.
        Retric 6y ago
        The 17000 is US numbers and the US is a long way from 10 million cancer deaths per year. The point stands fine without using misleading numbers.
        FriskyAlter 6y ago
        There are not many countries who did nuclear weapon tests and even those that did, did not do it in such numbers. Maybe russia, but I doubt that would push the numbers much.
- Retric 6y ago
  Killing people is hardly the only issue. Rendering large tracts of land uninhabitable is extremely expensive. All told 4 nuclear reactors have had major issues, 2 subs and 1 power plant run by the USSR, and then another one very recently by Japan. Plus several near misses. That’s a significant percentage of total reactors ever built including what was considered a safe design. We could go 1000 years without another incident, but from an insurance standpoint what would you charge a new power plant next to NYC? That means you need them in an a less expensive area, but everyone feels their area is valuable. That causes vast NIMBY issues and heavy regulation. In theory modern Nuclear should cost less and be both clean and safe, but people gonna people both inside and outside the industry.
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    > Rendering large tracts of land uninhabitable is extremely expensive Have you ever been near a coal ash pond? You probably haven't because it is an extreme health hazard to get anywhere near it, as it is full of mercury, arsenic, heavy metals and occasionally radioactive slurry. There about a thousand of these ponds in the US alone totaling maybe 100,000 acres. Meanwhile all the nuclear power plant waste ever produced could fit into a single large hangar...
    - Retric 6y ago
      Every nuclear accident was completely avoidable, but it’s not clear if future plant operators can avoid making similar mistakes. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1,000 square miles. Fukushima had a much smaller exclusion zone but Estimates of radioactivity released ranged from 10–40%[163][164][165][166] of that of Chernobyl. The significantly contaminated area was 10[163]-12%[164] of that of Chernobyl.[163][167][168] On 12 October 2012, TEPCO admitted for the first time that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants. That’s the core issue not physics.* ... A 2008 in-house study identified an immediate need to better protect the facility from flooding by seawater. This study mentioned the possibility of tsunami-waves up to 10.2 meters (33 ft). Headquarters officials insisted that such a risk was unrealistic and did not take the prediction seriously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warned of a risk of losing emergency power in 1991 (NUREG-1150) and NISA referred to that report in 2004, but took no action to mitigate the risk.[149] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#2008:_Tsunami_study_ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... France and the US have a solid nuclear track record, but so did Japan.

RealityVoid 6y ago

I am really not buying the fact that nuclear is expensive because it's nuclear. I think the fears around it, the overregulation and opposition to it make it costly. Obviously, there have been plenty of plants that were profitable. Also, nuclear fusion is possibly the cleanest energy source we could get. If we touch this, we might have a real path forward.

Maursault 6y ago
That just isn't the case. Nuclear (fission) has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity, and the expense has only increased. Uranium is crazy expensive. Security is very expensive. Spent fuel storage effectively never stops costing, and it isn't ever cheap. If nuclear was simply expensive because of regulations, investors would find a way, and you could not beat them away from building nuclear power plants. But that just isn't where the expense lies. Today it costs $20B to build a nuclear power plant, and that does not include the cost of spent fuel storage or decommissioning. Investors are actually pretty shrewd to stay away from that kind of an investment that always loses. The idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" simply never materialized. Today, electricity generated from solar power is cheaper than electricity generated from nuclear power. The main reason the 110 or so commercial nuclear plants were ever built is that the US military vastly overestimated its need for fuel for bombs.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Thats not accurate at all, Uranium itself is much cheaper than coal / any fuel per unit energy. Some contries have permanent, final storage for nuclear waste, it does not cost any more once created. Furthermore, not only was solar power borderline non existent when those reactors were built, it is also still intermittent. You are just glossing over the biggest challenge of energy - balancing the powe grid. No-one needs energy if it's only avaliable at the wrong time. Energy storage multiplies cost of renewable electriciry several times over, and no country-scale grid has ever operated on wind and solar. Lastly, energy is actually cheap - you can see that because we can afford transporting a pair of jeans 4 times across the world in the process of manufacture. We could have had zero-carbon grid since the 70s with nuclear - and France did. Even though France has cheapest energy in EU, suppose energy would be 30% more expensive. So what? We would be so much better off in terms of climate change.

xyzzyz 6y ago

You don't need as much containment as you do for fission, because you don't deal similarly large amounts of highly radioactive isotopes. Consequently, the safety standards required are closer to fossil plants than to nuclear plants, and these safety standards are really what drives the cost of nuclear fission. The steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling" are also present in fossil plants, and these are significantly cheaper than fission plants.

Retric 6y ago
It’s not that simple. Fission’s primary form of shielding is generally large pools of water or other coolant which don’t directly become radioactive. Fusion on the other hand needs to maintain a near vacuum so your pressure vessel is under heavy neutron bombardment. However, small amounts of radioactive materials get dissolved in the fission’s water which the goes on to contaminate the primary coolant loop which increased decommissioning costs. Fusion reactors primarily containment vessels becomes extremely radioactive and all the remote handling equipment also needs decontamination, but it’s unclear if the primary coolant loop will need similar types of decontamination. And by small amounts, divers occasionally go in the same pools storing years of spent fuel rods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool Running the numbers the real difference is fission reactors need more protection from the outside world and containment for a potential meltdown. Thus thick though still fairly cheap walls, which generally don’t become radioactive. They last for 50 years and don’t actually cost that much to construct. Fusion however is a vastly more complex device which will also increase construction and decommissioning costs.
- cromwellian 6y ago
  In ARC the containment is not under vacuum, the reactor chamber is surrounded by molten salt of fluoride and lithium, and so the neutrons produced travel into molten salt where they collide and produce tritium. It would help to actually watch the presentations. They’ve solved a lot engineering problems from Routine maintenance to blanket Renewal.
  - 6y ago