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The ignorance of the externalities of fossil fuels and a bipolar hyper focus on those of nuclear energy is mind boggling at this point. I’m all for developing
by snuxoll 6y ago
The ignorance of the externalities of fossil fuels and a bipolar hyper focus on those of nuclear energy is mind boggling at this point.
I’m all for developing renewables, but we cannot abandon the one good technology we have for generating massive amounts of energy our base loads demand without polluting our air.
- SCHiM 6y agoIndeed that is the strangest thing. By _any_ metric coal is far worse. Even the metric "amount of radioactive material that ended up in the atmosphere per watt of energy." (Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive material, that gets spread when burned). The fact of the matter is, that we can dump all our waste on a couple of football fields worth of space. Or even better: store it in a cave somewhere deep and dark and away from rivers.
- Multicomp 6y agoThis is probably one of those hacker news comments where it sounds good for 1 second then when you stop to think about it it falls apart, bu here goes. throw the waste in a bucket strong enough to survive hitting earth at terminal velocitty. place bucket in spacex falcon9 rocket. launch rocket into orbit with escape velocity. watch nuclear waste vanish into vacuum of space forever. if crash, collect bucket and restart with new rocket. financially costly? yes. solves the 'what about in 5000 years when someone opens it or it leaks?' questions, yes.
- cperciva 6y agoThe standard answer is "there's too much of a risk that an explosion would spread nuclear waste through the atmosphere". These days I'm not sure if it's true -- we've learned a lot about building containers which are safe even during rapid unscheduled disassemblies, and used them e.g. when sending nuclear powered rovers to Mars -- but that's the usual concern.
- throwaway894345 6y agoI mean we’re wishing for a bucket that can survive terminal velocity impact with the earth and is yet light enough to ride a rocket, why not add to that wish that it could survive explosion from said rocket?
- perardi 6y agoI think there’s a few orders of magnitude difference in the amount of radioactive material in an RTG in a probe bounds for Mars, and the total radioactive daughter particle output of a nuclear reactor.
- shadowgovt 6y agoIronically perhaps, the best reason not to do this is "It is extremely likely that, given sufficient time, we will either figure out a way to use the waste besides high-yield weapons or a cheaper way to dispose of the waste." Earth is huge. At the rate reactors create waste, the amount of land consumed by storing it is staggeringly low (the higher risks are transportation, which unfortunately the rocket idea doesn't solve unless we build a dedicated rocket site next to each reactor). Low enough to justify the risk-over-time of securely sequestering it instead of throwing it away.
- whatshisface 6y agoOne hundred million years later, a tribe of evolved cats sees an asteroid streak through the sky...
- secfirstmd 6y agoHaha. I've often said cats would likely take over.
- yellowapple 6y agoAnother crazy idea would be to put nuclear reactors themselves in orbit, and then beam the energy down to the surface. Space is already pretty thoroughly radioactive, so a meltdown goes from "ZOMG WE'RE GONNA GROW EXTRA ARMS AND DIE OF CANCER" to "meh, just another Tuesday".
- cpeterso 6y agoBut then you have nuclear-powered space lasers, which will scare people.
- yellowapple 6y agoYeah, but if people don't like it, what are they gonna do? Complain? That'll just draw the attention of the nuclear-powered space lasers :)
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoHow does one efficiency “beam down” gigawatts of energy? Or at all?
- cthalupa 6y agoLight. Focusing mirrors or lasers. But as others have pointed out, why would you bother with building space based nuclear plants and then converting that energy to light when you could just use the sun?
- DennisP 6y agoMicrowaves. Ground station has to be several square kilometers, but it's cheap and birds can fly through the beam without harm. For economic reasons you pretty much have to use phased array transmitters, with a reference signal from the ground to make it coherent, so if the beam gets repointed it gets a lot more diffuse than that.
- zdragnar 6y agoI've seen how this plays out in SimCity. No thank you!
- VT_Dude 6y agoI'm torn on which one second response is best. Contenders are: 1. Reprocessing is a better technological solution. 2. That waste is much safer in it's current location in a dry cask in the back lot behind a power plant than it would be on even the safest rocket. 3. Even if we punt waste disposal or reprocessing to future generations, we are still better off stacking waste in dry casks in the back lot behind power plants than burning coal.
- numpad0 6y ago4. “Actually, giving up nuclear and politics on Earth and using said rockets to start building space habitat on L2, L4, L5, Moon surface and so on and do life and society and nuclear up there makes far more sense”
- BurningFrog 6y agoThere are a lot of schemes that will solve the factual problem. But I think the real problem is emotional. People are afraid of mushroom clouds and mutants. They don't say that because that's not how we're wired. We come up with better sounding arguments to believe. But what need to be solved is the emotional problem.
- Blackthorn 6y agoNuclear waste is a lot more than spent fuel. It's water, piping, tubes, maintenance tools...basically anything that went through or was part of a reactor. The fuel itself is just a small part of it.
- w0de0 6y agoPay spaceX to shoot it into the sun, why not?
- yellowapple 6y agoGiven unlimited money, this might be reasonable, but it's worth noting that the delta-V requirements for shooting something into the Sun are pretty astronomically (pun intended) high.
- _Microft 6y agoFrom Earth, it is much easier to eject something from the solar system than to get it to fall into the sun by the way. Well, not just Earth but from almost everywhere in the solar system (assuming being on an almost circular orbit).
- eloff 6y agoYou'd need to fire the rocket to slow down sufficiently to fall into the sun right? Just imagining the solar system as a bowling ball at the center of a trampoline surrounded by fast moving billiard balls. The problem is probably the speed the earth is moving at, plus the speed we had to get the rocket up to, to get it off earth.
- pdonis 6y ago> You'd need to fire the rocket to slow down sufficiently to fall into the sun right? Yes, which is around 30 km/s of delta-v, as compared with only 12 km/s delta-v to boost an object from Earth's orbit (assuming you launch it in the same direction that Earth is traveling) to escape velocity from the solar system.
- notriddle 6y agoAs long as you're sure it'll actually go into space and not just explode in the upper atmosphere.
- ldbooth 6y agoWhy not? Because the environmental cost of a failed launch is massive. It's radioactive roulette. Where it lands... Depends on which way the wind is blowing.
- lainga 6y agoI'm going to sound tinfoil-y, but coal doesn't have dual strategic purposes which made it in the Soviet Union's best interests to focus opposition on it. Look into what happened to funding for the CND in Britain after 1991.
- dls2016 6y ago> Even the metric "amount of radioactive material that ended up in the atmosphere per watt of energy." My old man worked at TMI. We moved to a new house and one day he set off the radiation monitors going into work. Turns out we had a radon problem. This part of PA isn't exactly coal country, but close enough. My bro was an auxiliary operator at TMI until a few months ago... shut down.
- effie 6y agoPlease define you acronyms. What is TMI and PA?
- complexworld 6y agoThree mile island, Pennsylvania
- redwall_hp 6y agoI've always said that if coal's waste was conveniently in solid form instead of destroying the entire planet's ability to host mammalian life, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's the pinnacle of "perfect is the enemy of good."
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI simply don't understand those people who claim to want to fix the problem but balk at nuclear. It's like they'd prefer going back to rubbing two sticks together for heat and building lean-tos for shelter. Which is where we might end up going back to if we keep overpopulating and destroying the earth and climate.
- jhayward 6y agoI simply don't understand those people who claim to want to fix the problem but insist on only getting 1/10th the electricity for their invested dollar, and at a schedule 10x slower than renewables. It's like they are being deliberately obtuse.
- effie 6y agoIt's not about money, but about replacing the coal and gas power plants. Renewable sources can't do that alone, they need massive energy storage facilities (which so far do not exist).
- ldbooth 6y agoBecause storage isn't tax credit incentivized, at least in the US. Coal still is. And FYI California will install 1.3GW of storage this year, and a storage tax credit is likely by end of this year. It's coming. Hopefully we find something more elegant or ways to recycle storage/battery materials.
- redwall_hp 6y agoI see two options: 1. They're ignorant and follow a fallacious "appeal to nature" mentality. They seriously think that some sort of return to nature will result in a utopia instead of disease and famine. 2. They're Malthus apologists who want to cause an energy crisis and cause people (who aren't them) to die. It also overlaps with the anti-GMO types.
- arithmomachist 6y agoThree Mile Island and Chernobyl loom very large in the imaginations of the boomers and gen x, respectively. Nuclear plant meltdowns are world news on the few occasions they've happened, whereas horrifying explosions and accidents at fossil fuel plants aren't considered remarkable. It's the same reason people overestimate the risk of flying relative to driving.
- petre 6y agoJust wait until a lithium battry storage facility catches on fire.
- godelski 6y agoThere's also an ignorance of the externalities of renewables. Yes, they are magnitudes better than fossil fuels, but it amazes me how much people bring up uranium mining and ignore everything to do with rare earth mining in general. Or talk about waste storage of heavy metals and lithium. The problem is that everything has a cost. You can't make good comparisons if you only look at the costs of one system and the benefits of another. These are extremely complicated equations that people act like they are simple. I also frequently see a lot of belief that the issues are purely political (renewables and nuclear) when there is so much technical challenges still left. There's no free lunch. I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to say "nuclear > renewables" or even "renewables > nuclear" (this is a dumb comparison imo), but rather that every time we have these conversations in HN and most places we aren't even attempting to make a one-to-one fair comparison. I just wish that, especially on a technical form, that the conversations would focus on technology and science rather than the politics. Though I understand that not every (anyone) is really qualified to talk technically so we talk politically because we still want to engage.