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What happens to reactors after 50 or 100 years of global/national decline due to environmental and geopolitical circumstances?
by DangitBobby 6y ago
What happens to reactors after 50 or 100 years of global/national decline due to environmental and geopolitical circumstances?
- politician 6y agoWould you be OK with putting the reactors on the Moon and beaming the power down to Earth?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoSure, 8 light minutes away sounds great. We’ll even get some light out of the transmission of energy to us and the waste is taken care of.
- Pfhreak 6y agoThe moon is much, much closer than 8 light minutes away. Are you thinking of the sun? It's already doing a good job at sending energy to us from nuclear reactions.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThat’s the joke. The Sun is safe, cheap fusion at a distance. Enough sunlight hits the Earth in 30 minutes (I’ve seen figures as low as 2 minutes from the UAE, but am conservative for argument’s sake) to power humanity for a year.
- kergonath 6y agoWe’re never going to cover any significant portion of the Earth with solar panels, though. And the photoelectric effect has efficiency limits.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoCan you provide evidence why we wouldn’t or can’t? We are only limited by panel production and deployment rates. We’re not going to run out of land or raw materials.
- kergonath 6y agoFor a start, 2 thirds of the Earth’s surface are oceans. Then, fields and other agricultural land is about 40% of the land surface area. And we are supposed to grow forests as carbon sinks. Then, you have mountains ranges, which might or might not be good places to put solar panels depending on a whole bunch of factors. Similarly, some deserts can be used to put solar panels, at the cost of long-range transport for the produced electricity, but a lot of them aren’t nice places for this type of installations (either very cold or with wide temperature fluctuations, harsh environment). That’s a lot of places where we can’t. And we need to be careful where we can put them. We are causing a mass extinction event just because of how we destroy ecosystems and degrade our environment, and crop fields of pastures are much less disruptive than covering massive areas with panels. I am not saying we don’t or should not use solar panels where it makes sense, just that using the total energy received by the Earth as a measure is not really relevant, because the land we can allocate to that will always be insignificant compared to the surface of the Earth. If you factor land use, it is clear that solar panels by themselves cannot be all of the answer.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago> If you factor land use, it is clear that solar panels by themselves cannot be all of the answer. Disagree. Rebuttal: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127 https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127 Direct img link: http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequired1000.jpg http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08...
- kergonath 6y agoRight. What does it have to do with this? I pointed out that using the total radiation input on Earth as a measure is irrelevant, because we are never going to use anything close to this.
- politician 6y agoUnfortunately, the same NIMBY crowd that hates nuclear also hates the idea of fields of solar cells and the idea of fields of wind farms.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoAnd yet, renewables account for almost all new generation being turned up. Turns out there are lots of places to install panels and turbines where there aren’t NIMBYs. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416
- yellowapple 6y agoThere are also lots of places to build nuclear power plants without NIMBYs. Point being, NIMBYs often have a rather inflated idea of what counts as "in my back yard".
- throwawayboise 6y agoNo. Riduculously expensive idea, dangerous and unnecessary.
- jayd16 6y agoThis is my favorite SimCity 2000 disaster type.
- nabla9 6y agoThey produce no greenhouse gases.
- DangitBobby 6y agoWell actually I believe they have a rather large upfront carbon footprint, but the question is not whether they are worse than fossil fuels, but whether we should rely on other forms of "green" energy which do not have catastrophic failure conditions or rely on a competent society to safely maintain. We have already failed to stop global warming and we should expect to be in decline, so that's the future we should prepare for.
- effie 6y agoIt is not either solar/wind or nuclear, it is use both. Technology on worldwide scale isn't in decline.
- thereisnospork 6y agoI dunno, but that worries me much less than what happens to the thermonuclear warheads so I'd say that ship has sailed.
- politician 6y agoThe half-life of Tritium is ~12 years. In a scenario where upkeep stopped, eventually enough would decay that the warheads would no longer be able to attain their design yield.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThat's not really a worry, it's relatively easy to tear down thermonuclear devices and then pitch the plutonium into the deepest part of the ocean.
- throwawayboise 6y agoThey are shut down and they sit where they are?
- DangitBobby 6y agoIn a competent society, yes.
- pc86 6y agoWhat happens after another century of dumping 45+ billion tons of CO2 and other GHGs into the air? The question is whether it's better to use nuclear power or fossil fuel power. There's little difference, practically speaking, between hemming and hawing about statistically small events happening re: nuclear power, or what we do a lifetime from now, and actively advocating for increased fossil fuel usage. If nuclear can be replaced with something even cleaner and even safer then I'm all for it. But it's short sighted in the extreme to actively tear nuclear down when the only realistic alternative at that scale is fossil fuel.
- DangitBobby 6y agoOr the discussion is about nuclear versus other forms of "green" energy.
- dntrkv 6y agoAnd what do you do when the other forms of green energy aren't available?
- DangitBobby 6y agoWell, then nuclear is better than fossil fuels. Has that been a barrier to adoption?
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYes, NIMBYs
- Daho0n 6y ago>the only realistic alternative at that scale is fossil fuel. Are the alternatives widespread in places like Denmark not realistic (wind from 50% in 2020 to 84% by 2035)? 4th best energy architecture performance and the second best energy security in the world. Is it not realistic elsewhere?
- bserge 6y agoSoviet-built nuclear power plants did fine... with one notable exception.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI don't know about newer Russian designs (if there are any) but the Soviet era ones are terrible.