3 ms·

Not really. Besides the obviously unsolved waste-disposal problem, one of the main problems in Texas seems to have been non-weatherproof control and distributio

Not really. Besides the obviously unsolved waste-disposal problem, one of the main problems in Texas seems to have been non-weatherproof control and distribution systems. Nuclear does nothing to solve that. Texas has nuclear plants, and they've been unable to contribute for the same reasons as every other generation technology.

macintux 6y ago
Well, only 1 of Texas' 4 plants is offline, so it's doing a heck of a lot better than natural gas.
ALittleLight 6y ago
The waste disposal problem isn't solved? What part of "Put it in a hole" isn't solved yet? The waste issue seems very well solved to me. Nuclear has been providing a fifth of US power for decades - and more in some other countries. Better sensor maintenance and weatherproofing systems seem like they could solve the issue Texas faced with nuclear power. That seems like a much more minor change than figuring out how to solve the issues with gas, wind, or solar. Plus, as far as I can tell the problem was with a fifty year old power plant. If we had been building new nuclear plants and investing in them I bet we'd have better, more modular, and safer systems (that might not rely on a single safety sensor system like this).
- notacoward 6y ago
  You are aware that those holes are leaky relative to the half-life of the waste they contain, right? Decades? Pffft. No, that problem's only deferred, not solved.
  - db48x 6y ago
    There is no nuclear waste, only different kinds of nuclear fuel. We _could_ have started building reactors that can extract power from that fuel decades ago.
    - notacoward 6y ago
      Considering that we still haven't exactly perfected U-238 technology in 70+ years, when exactly do you think we'll be able to separate and use things like Np-237 or Tc-99? Is there even anyone seriously working on that? There's a reason so many people are actively working on better containment technologies, and I don't think it's because they're dumber than a bunch of HN dilettantes.
      - db48x 6y ago
        You don't need isotope separation or enrichment. What is needed is chemical separation of transuranics. The only real expense there is just the care that must be exersized when dealing with radioactive elements.
  - vimy 6y ago
    The waste is less radioactive than most people assume and it's put deep enough that it doesn't even matter. In fact, we don't even need to put it underground. Because of activists fear mongering, the construction of underground storage has been blocked for decades. So the waste has been safely sitting on the surface all that time. Why change what works?
  - 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
    Yucca Mountain would've been a ten-millennia can kick. Would there be a radioactive problem then if we did absolutely nothing? Absolutely so. But in less than a century Miami could be under water. We missed a huge opportunity to buy time.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    It's not like the waste comes up after decades. The waste will still there until we find a better purpose for it.
    - notacoward 6y ago
      Have you heard of water table contamination? If these problems were so simple that someone approaching them for what is obviously the first time could solve them with the first facile idea that comes into their head, those solutions would already be implemented. As it turns out, though, storing things so they won't leak for 100K years or more is a hard problem. Rock is not the perfect barrier you think it is. We're just barely getting to the point where the most specialized kinds of glass, buried in rock, with other measures to prevent material degradation, might be sufficient. It hasn't actually been tried yet, not even to determine whether our measurements for the first 0.1% of that timescale are correct. Literal lifetimes have already been spent getting us that far. Do you seriously think you're smarter than all of those people put together?
      - ALittleLight 6y ago
        You are being needlessly hostile in a way that is very confusing. You're asking if I think I'm "smarter than all of those people put together" when you are the person going against the status quo. Nuclear has been in use for decades providing significant portions of power in multiple countries throughout the world and waste is demonstrably a solved problem - solved by putting it in the ground. Nuclear is extremely safe and clean. The passage of time will make it more so as we develop reactors that consume nuclear waste, better storage or nuclear technology, etc.
        notacoward 6y ago
        > You are being needlessly hostile in a way that is very confusing. Challenges to your hand waves are not "needlessly hostile"; they're exactly as "hostile" (i.e. skeptical) as the situation warrants. Maybe it's confusing because you're unaware that the consensus here is not the consensus among people who actually work on this stuff. They recognize that the current "solutions" are only stopgaps. > Nuclear is extremely safe and clean. Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Hanford. Not actually a great record considering the number of deployments involved. Yes, newer kinds of reactors are likely to be safer. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm not actually against nuclear power. I just recognize that it's not easy or perfect. Blind faith is not my thing.
- ianlevesque 6y ago
  We’ve had some difficulty deciding whose backyard to dig that hole in after Nevada changed their mind and said no. If only we could just sprinkle radioactivity from nuclear power up into the air the way we do with radioactivity from coal...
  - rhodozelia 6y ago
    So you’d prefer radioactivity and c02 in the air from coal to spent nuclear fuel in holding pools at nuclear power plants? Which potentially could be used as fuel again for a different type of reactor? This is literally the choice - something needs to be Baseload generation on a cloudy week with no wind.
    - notacoward 6y ago
      > something needs to be Baseload generation on a cloudy week with no wind That's not the only solution. Texas is big enough that a lack of wind across the entire state is even less likely than the weather they've been having. Wind has held up better than oil and gas there, and properly weatherproofed wind would be even better. Texas also has rivers, and waves. There's still untapped potential in energy storage. Most significantly, better interconnection to other grids would be pretty helpful but has been foregone to protect Texas suppliers' profits. There really doesn't need to be that much non-renewable baseload generation in Texas. Also, why do you (and others) assume that anyone who mentions unsolved problems with nuclear must be flat-out against it? I for one am not. It can be part of a complete energy solution, but until some of those problems are solved it can't be a primary solution by itself. What I object to, mostly, is not nuclear power itself the simplistic "atomic energy please, this is a solved problem" hand wave. Contrary to the HN ethos, not every problem has a simple technical solution, and people who point that out wrt energy are not necessarily shills or dupes of the oil industry. It's a matter of being empirical about things and working them out instead of turning technologies into new religions.
      - ALittleLight 6y ago
        I don't get why you think there's an open problem. 20% of US energy currently comes from nuclear. If waste is an open problem - what problem is it causing now? Would scaling nuclear related problems by a factor of five be better or worse than current energy problems? My view is that it would be better.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  "Put it in a hole that will keep it stable for 100,000 years" is not a solved problem, especially since Nevada cancelled Yucca Mountain.
andbberger 6y ago
Nope the waste-disposal problem has conclusively solved: you bury it in a deep unmarked hole [1] I tire of the constant opposition to nuclear energy on HN and in general. We discovered rocks spicy enough to power our civilization 50+ years ago, but got outplayed so hard by big oil that to this day people are still opposed to it. Waste? Nope not a problem Too expensive (HN's favorite critique), nope, not really. Unsafe? Patently false Doesn't work in cold weather? Only because of ERCOT's ineptitude The current crisis in Texas is a direct result of anthropogenic climate change. Had we gone big into nuclear 50+ years ago this might have never have happened [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... I'm not even really responding to GP anymore I'm just salty. Give me an ENORMOUS breakthrough in energy storage. Or give me fission power plants.
- notacoward 6y ago
  > Or give me fission power plants. We have those. Did you mean fusion?
  - andbberger 6y ago
    I want more. Modern designs, not the old dangerous (but still extremely safe) kind that is predominant today.
- bcrl 6y ago
  They had to turn off a nuke because the water intake was freezing. Everywhere else in the world, you put your water intake deep enough into the body of water that it's not going to freeze. Sounds like engineers in Texas cheaped out on their designs because they thought "oh, that will never happen". We all know what happens when we do that in software...

macintux 6y ago

Well, only 1 of Texas' 4 plants is offline, so it's doing a heck of a lot better than natural gas.

ALittleLight 6y ago

The waste disposal problem isn't solved? What part of "Put it in a hole" isn't solved yet? The waste issue seems very well solved to me. Nuclear has been providing a fifth of US power for decades - and more in some other countries. Better sensor maintenance and weatherproofing systems seem like they could solve the issue Texas faced with nuclear power. That seems like a much more minor change than figuring out how to solve the issues with gas, wind, or solar. Plus, as far as I can tell the problem was with a fifty year old power plant. If we had been building new nuclear plants and investing in them I bet we'd have better, more modular, and safer systems (that might not rely on a single safety sensor system like this).

notacoward 6y ago
You are aware that those holes are leaky relative to the half-life of the waste they contain, right? Decades? Pffft. No, that problem's only deferred, not solved.
- db48x 6y ago
  There is no nuclear waste, only different kinds of nuclear fuel. We _could_ have started building reactors that can extract power from that fuel decades ago.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    Considering that we still haven't exactly perfected U-238 technology in 70+ years, when exactly do you think we'll be able to separate and use things like Np-237 or Tc-99? Is there even anyone seriously working on that? There's a reason so many people are actively working on better containment technologies, and I don't think it's because they're dumber than a bunch of HN dilettantes.
    - db48x 6y ago
      You don't need isotope separation or enrichment. What is needed is chemical separation of transuranics. The only real expense there is just the care that must be exersized when dealing with radioactive elements.
- vimy 6y ago
  The waste is less radioactive than most people assume and it's put deep enough that it doesn't even matter. In fact, we don't even need to put it underground. Because of activists fear mongering, the construction of underground storage has been blocked for decades. So the waste has been safely sitting on the surface all that time. Why change what works?
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
  Yucca Mountain would've been a ten-millennia can kick. Would there be a radioactive problem then if we did absolutely nothing? Absolutely so. But in less than a century Miami could be under water. We missed a huge opportunity to buy time.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  It's not like the waste comes up after decades. The waste will still there until we find a better purpose for it.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    Have you heard of water table contamination? If these problems were so simple that someone approaching them for what is obviously the first time could solve them with the first facile idea that comes into their head, those solutions would already be implemented. As it turns out, though, storing things so they won't leak for 100K years or more is a hard problem. Rock is not the perfect barrier you think it is. We're just barely getting to the point where the most specialized kinds of glass, buried in rock, with other measures to prevent material degradation, might be sufficient. It hasn't actually been tried yet, not even to determine whether our measurements for the first 0.1% of that timescale are correct. Literal lifetimes have already been spent getting us that far. Do you seriously think you're smarter than all of those people put together?
    - ALittleLight 6y ago
      You are being needlessly hostile in a way that is very confusing. You're asking if I think I'm "smarter than all of those people put together" when you are the person going against the status quo. Nuclear has been in use for decades providing significant portions of power in multiple countries throughout the world and waste is demonstrably a solved problem - solved by putting it in the ground. Nuclear is extremely safe and clean. The passage of time will make it more so as we develop reactors that consume nuclear waste, better storage or nuclear technology, etc.
      - notacoward 6y ago
        > You are being needlessly hostile in a way that is very confusing. Challenges to your hand waves are not "needlessly hostile"; they're exactly as "hostile" (i.e. skeptical) as the situation warrants. Maybe it's confusing because you're unaware that the consensus here is not the consensus among people who actually work on this stuff. They recognize that the current "solutions" are only stopgaps. > Nuclear is extremely safe and clean. Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Hanford. Not actually a great record considering the number of deployments involved. Yes, newer kinds of reactors are likely to be safer. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm not actually against nuclear power. I just recognize that it's not easy or perfect. Blind faith is not my thing.
ianlevesque 6y ago
We’ve had some difficulty deciding whose backyard to dig that hole in after Nevada changed their mind and said no. If only we could just sprinkle radioactivity from nuclear power up into the air the way we do with radioactivity from coal...
- rhodozelia 6y ago
  So you’d prefer radioactivity and c02 in the air from coal to spent nuclear fuel in holding pools at nuclear power plants? Which potentially could be used as fuel again for a different type of reactor? This is literally the choice - something needs to be Baseload generation on a cloudy week with no wind.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    > something needs to be Baseload generation on a cloudy week with no wind That's not the only solution. Texas is big enough that a lack of wind across the entire state is even less likely than the weather they've been having. Wind has held up better than oil and gas there, and properly weatherproofed wind would be even better. Texas also has rivers, and waves. There's still untapped potential in energy storage. Most significantly, better interconnection to other grids would be pretty helpful but has been foregone to protect Texas suppliers' profits. There really doesn't need to be that much non-renewable baseload generation in Texas. Also, why do you (and others) assume that anyone who mentions unsolved problems with nuclear must be flat-out against it? I for one am not. It can be part of a complete energy solution, but until some of those problems are solved it can't be a primary solution by itself. What I object to, mostly, is not nuclear power itself the simplistic "atomic energy please, this is a solved problem" hand wave. Contrary to the HN ethos, not every problem has a simple technical solution, and people who point that out wrt energy are not necessarily shills or dupes of the oil industry. It's a matter of being empirical about things and working them out instead of turning technologies into new religions.
    - ALittleLight 6y ago
      I don't get why you think there's an open problem. 20% of US energy currently comes from nuclear. If waste is an open problem - what problem is it causing now? Would scaling nuclear related problems by a factor of five be better or worse than current energy problems? My view is that it would be better.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
"Put it in a hole that will keep it stable for 100,000 years" is not a solved problem, especially since Nevada cancelled Yucca Mountain.

andbberger 6y ago

Nope the waste-disposal problem has conclusively solved: you bury it in a deep unmarked hole [1] I tire of the constant opposition to nuclear energy on HN and in general. We discovered rocks spicy enough to power our civilization 50+ years ago, but got outplayed so hard by big oil that to this day people are still opposed to it. Waste? Nope not a problem Too expensive (HN's favorite critique), nope, not really. Unsafe? Patently false Doesn't work in cold weather? Only because of ERCOT's ineptitude The current crisis in Texas is a direct result of anthropogenic climate change. Had we gone big into nuclear 50+ years ago this might have never have happened [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... I'm not even really responding to GP anymore I'm just salty. Give me an ENORMOUS breakthrough in energy storage. Or give me fission power plants.

notacoward 6y ago
> Or give me fission power plants. We have those. Did you mean fusion?
- andbberger 6y ago
  I want more. Modern designs, not the old dangerous (but still extremely safe) kind that is predominant today.
bcrl 6y ago
They had to turn off a nuke because the water intake was freezing. Everywhere else in the world, you put your water intake deep enough into the body of water that it's not going to freeze. Sounds like engineers in Texas cheaped out on their designs because they thought "oh, that will never happen". We all know what happens when we do that in software...