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Not a fan of nuclear power, but changed my opinion because climate change is a bigger and harder to handle problem. "Solved Problem" however isn't a thing I li
by turbinerneiter 5y ago
Not a fan of nuclear power, but changed my opinion because climate change is a bigger and harder to handle problem.
"Solved Problem" however isn't a thing I like to hear in this context. Solvable problem, sure, managable risk, yes. But solved problem is strong wording for waste, which you have to keep safe for roughly 4 times the age of the oldest democratic country.
Nuclear powers biggest problem is the price in the one hand, and bombs on the other hand. Nuclear bombs are bad halo product for a technology, nobody associates good stuff with doomsday machines.
- sofixa 5y ago> the age of the oldest democratic country. Which one? Depending on your definition of democratic and country, and if you meant continuous or not, this is between a few hundred and few thousand years, quite a delta.
- pedro1976 5y agoIMO nuclear power won't help us in the climate crisis. The inertia to change our technologies, behaviour... is already extremely large, with nuclear energy (which is very limited) there will be less incentive to change anything at all. Hence, we will just prolong the party and not make use of this tiny thread of hope.
- q1w2 5y agoThis argument is so odd given that the alternatives of green energy require often and even greater shift in political will and consumer behavior.
- Zababa 5y agoAt least it can be stored, unlike the gasses that escape into the atmosphere.
- drran 5y agoWe can convert CO2 into coal and then store it underground, just like nuclear waste.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoSurely you understand that this is likely to cost a similar amount in energy terms as was released in burning the hydrocarbon in the first place?
- hutzlibu 5y agoNo problem, we just burn more coal then, oh wait ..
- credit_guy 5y agoThere's a slight variation of what the GP is proposing, called methane pyrolysis [1]. In that, you separate the hydrogen and the carbon from methane, and then you can burn the hydrogen to get energy, and store the carbon in a landfill. Burning hydrogen creates more energy than it takes to split the methane, so overall the process is exothermic. Right now that process is not economical yet (you need some catalysts, and the carbon doesn't just come out, it sticks to something, you need to wash it with some acids, then retrieve the acids, etc). But active research is ongoing, so there's a chance this will become viable in the next few years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis#Methane_pyrolysis_for_hydrogen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis#Methane_pyrolysis_fo...
- kaba0 5y agoThat is for methane only, which you can just as well simply burn, because the resulting CO2 has less green house effect.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoOr burn and capture the CO2 before it has been dispersed into the atmosphere (where at a concentration of 0.04% you have to pump a lot of inert gases around your system to remove a small amount of CO2.
- kiryin 5y agoIt's good to keep in mind that nuclear power is a (arguably beneficial and good) "halo product" of nuclear bombs, not the other way around.
- gnfargbl 5y agoSzilard proposed the possibility of a self-sustaining fission reaction in 1933. In a hypothetical universe where WWII never occurred and the Manhattan Project never existed, it seems likely that we would still have had nuclear power plants at some point in the twentieth century. And of course, bombs too.
- dane-pgp 5y agoThat's a really interesting hypothetical universe, and I think it could have played out in various ways. For example, without the Manhattan Project, perhaps fossil fuel companies would have become even more powerful and prevented any commercial research into "dangerous" nuclear energy. Also, without nuclear power, climate change would have become a problem much sooner, when nuclear technology was more experimental and costly. Perhaps the money that went into nuclear weapons would have gone into space programs instead, and we'd have the option of beaming energy down from orbiting solar panels.
- throw0101a 5y ago> Szilard proposed the possibility of a self-sustaining fission reaction in 1933. In a hypothetical universe where WWII never occurred and the Manhattan Project never existed […] For a good history on this see The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It doesn't just look at the MP, but the first third (?) is about how nuclear physics developed in the early 1900s (Rutherford, the Curies, Fermi, etc) as well. Szilard was actually 'inspired' by H. G. Wells' (sci-fi?) novel The World Set Free: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free See also his: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come
- murermader 5y agoNuclear energy is expensive. Nuclear reactors are dangerous, if not handled properly (which they won‘t). If we build nuclear power plants now, the will be ready in 15 to 25 years, which is too late, because we need green energy now. Just invest in renewable energies, which are better overall
- Cantinflas 5y agoThis is a false dichotomy. It's not nuclear OR renewables. It's (nuclear OR gas/oil/coal) AND renewables
- mimimi31 5y agoWhy should we use nuclear power at all, when renewables already have a far lower levelized cost of energy[1]? Is there any reason why only using renewable energy sources would be impossible? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy
- wmiel 5y agoSun isn't shining at night and it's not always windy, hence other sources, mainly natural gas is used to balance the grid, but it's deepening our dependance on fossil fuels. Nuclear is the only power source at the moment that is clean and stable.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoDon't forget hydro-power. In my area, the word "hydro" is synonymous to "electricity" (in the sense of the utility, ie "hyrdo bill").
- nickpp 5y agoDon’t forget hydro =/= green. Its ecological impact is significant and it’s producing greenhouse gases.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoI am a fan of nuclear, though I do find some truth in the arguement that it's simply too expensive. Until there are GW scale batteries in operation (that aren't highly topography dependant) it's definitely worth gambling on some new investment in Nuclear, at least maintaining the current nuclear component of our power generation mix for the midterm.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoHow much of that cost is associated with the extreme safety measures that have to be put in place? The green movement has instilled the idea that nuclear power is dangerous, which means the general public won't accept anything but the extreme safety measures.
- turbinerneiter 5y agoIf you act like the dangers or nuclear power are made up and safety measures not needed you are really, really hurting the cause.
- varajelle 5y agoI can't answer for the parent, but the fallacy I often hear is that it is too expensive *and* dangerous. But it is just taking the same argument twice. Nuclear in Japan before Fukushima was in fact quite cheap if I'm not mistaken. New reactor are expensive but shouldn't be dangerous anymore.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoI suppose I should have stressed "risk compared to other forms of power generation with similar outputs". All forms of power generation come with risk.
- dane-pgp 5y agoAsk the people of Fukushima if they think the safety measures for nuclear power stations are "extreme".
- maccard 5y ago>But solved problem is strong wording for waste, which you have to keep safe for roughly 4 times the age of the oldest democratic country. The problem with this argument is we're ignoring that cost of carbon because we don't physically bury it in the ground. We need to compare like for like here.
- sdfzug 5y agocost of carbon which is there as much/little with renewables as it is with nuclear
- stareatgoats 5y agoI would have changed my opinion too, were it not for the seemingly gollumic enchantment that nuclear proponents display, as if straight out of dr. Strangelove. An enchantment that constantly twists facts, which becomes understandable once one learns that it is an industry built on lies and deception, from its inception.
- q1w2 5y agoAs always, you cannot judge a movement or idea based upon its most radical proponents.
- nix23 5y ago>Nuclear bombs are bad halo product for a technology So are Biological/Chemical Weapons to Medicine..but no one makes that connection
- mrtksn 5y agoI find nuclear to be extremely cool but I'm unsure of it's long term viability due to the human factor. We already have a few major nuclear incidents that could have gone way worse which suggest that our designs are not as resilient as claimed, be it due to poor design or poor maintenance and human interaction. When things go bad, we need heroism to fix it, it's not simply like losing electricity or money but people are required to do extraordinary things to save the rest and I don't believe we can keep doing it successfully each time. Also, the responsibility it creates stretches for far beyond human life and even generations. I will call it a solved problem if we can get rid of the waste somehow in less than a human life. I don't trust our species to do the reasonable thing every time and even if we want to do it right, we tend to forget or downplay the consequences of a failure. It's not just that we keep doing the same shockingly stupid or brutal things but at the same time we can have very dark side of self harm and delusions. For example, there are groups of people who believe that after a cataclysmic event, we all will go to heaven where everything is perfect, therefore the logical action to do is to force god for the rapture day by starting one. These days that kind of groups are managed but I don't think that it's impossible of them gaining power to do horrible things like nuclear annihilation. Just look at the Middle East, the place used to be technological and cultural powerhouse not that long ago in nuclear waste time scale. Places that are complete shitholes today used to be nice places just two cesium-137 half life cycles ago.
- lrem 5y agoChernobyl's plant was built in 1972. Fukushima's in 1971. One would hope the technology improved a bit in 40 years...
- mrtksn 5y agoOf course it did but do you think that people in the 70's were promised anything less than perfect safety? Was the deal something like “now you get electricity and a salary but there’s a chance that you will die or lose everything you worked for your entire life overnight if an experiment goes wrong or earthquake hits”.
- 5y ago
- chmsky00 5y agoLaunch the waste into space. We sure as hell will never use the rockets for human panspermia if we keep expecting to power all this crap we throw out
- entropicgravity 5y agoAnd then drop it into the sun. CO2 in space doesn't count toward global warming.
- number6 5y agoIt's actually pretty hard to drop something into the sun. You have to slow down quite a bit, which in turn needs a lot of fuel
- krapp 5y agoIt would be prohibitively expensive just to launch a bit of it into orbit, much less to enough of it far enough into space that it won't just get recaptured and dumped back on us eventually. Plus, the process of creating the spacecraft alone (with near physics-defying fuel efficiency and carrying capacity, and more rockets than we have the physical capacity to launch, to boot) would create more pollution than gets carried off, per simple thermodynamics. Also become sometimes rockets explode, and you don't want to be anywhere around the exploding rocket full of nuclear waste. https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19666/we-cant-just-throw-our-garbage-into-the-sun/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19666/we-cant-just-t... https://astronomy.com/news/2016/07/heres-why-we-cant-just-rocket-garbage-into-the-sun https://astronomy.com/news/2016/07/heres-why-we-cant-just-ro...
- credit_guy 5y ago>"Solved Problem" however isn't a thing I like to hear in this context. Solvable problem, sure, managable risk, yes. The guy is engaging in a bit of hyperbole. If you reduce the size of a problem by 90%, and the problem was not that bad to begin with, you are not exaggerating too much by saying "solved problem". First, how bad is the problem right now? A 1GW nuclear power plant produces 3 cubic meters of high level waste per year, while a similar coal power plant produces 300000 tons of ash per year (plus a lot of CO2)[1]. Now, for those 3 cubic meters, the radioactivity is reduced by 99.9% after 40 years [2] (without any reprocessing). If you add reprocessing, you can extract the very long half-life elements, especially Plutonium, and make use of them, by "burning" them in other nuclear reactors. Not everything can be disposed off, but the problem can be reduced by at least a factor of 10. [1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#Economics