6 ms·

> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The

> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0] "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1] Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"[2], and we're still waiting... [0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-of-nuclear-reactors-will-produce-even-more-radioactive-waste/4015753.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-of-n... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_waste/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_wast... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf

a_shovel 4y ago
There was a discussion about this a few days ago, and this comment thread [0] featured some criticism from experts on these claims. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424
- logifail 4y ago
  and yet one of the comments from that thread stated: > The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    There are countries where no combination of renewables + storage is possible. Places with little sunlight and little wind. What do they do?
    - logifail 4y ago
      Q: Do those countries already have long term nuclear waste storage facilities? There are countries that have been spectacularly failing to provide their own such facilities for decades.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Suppose they don't - so what is you proposed solution - they live in the dark ages?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        That is not the alternative.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        How about they just prepay another country for ten thousand years of storage multiplied by 100 square meters? I don't see why it has to be local.
        logifail 4y ago
        > I don't see why it has to be local If we propose to allow countries to outsource their nuclear waste disposal, wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper and safer to just skip nuclear entirely and outsource the power generation? All those countries with apparently not enough access to sunlight or wind will save an awful lot of time and money messing about with nuclear and just buy in their renewable power. If it works, could the Xlinks Morocco-UK power project could be a template for this kind of solution?[0]: "A 10.5 gigawatt (GW) solar and wind farm will be built in Morocco’s Guelmim-Oued Noun region, and it will supply the UK with clean energy via subsea cables. The twin 1.8 GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cables will be the world’s longest." [0] https://electrek.co/2022/04/21/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cable-will-send-clean-energy-from-morocco-to-the-uk/ https://electrek.co/2022/04/21/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cab...
        4y ago
theptip 4y ago
35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk. Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven/unjust levels of harm). I think it's misleading to throw out individual objections like this without considering the systemic trade-offs that we need to make. > the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter" I think this kind of blame-throwing is unhelpful. I couldn't care less what marketing claims were made in the past. Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we should be having. To address your object-level claim, as the OP describes in detail, one reason nuclear is more expensive now is the ever-increasing regulatory framework that has changed under the feet of in-progress projects. Maybe those regulations have resulted in a good ROI, but it's hard for me to buy that claim. Nuclear is now 10-100x safer than most other traditional/fossil forms of power generation[1], and it's excruciatingly expensive to buy that safety margin. These are tiny death rates caused by power generation. The problem here is that it's political suicide to say "I think we should reduce safety regulations to make nuclear power 10x more dangerous, because that will avert far more deaths from climate change". In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- zackees 4y ago
  Post like this make me hopeful that rational minds will prevail and we get clean abundant nuclear energy. It’s becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't about solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase “carbon credits” from Saudi Arabia and other sovereign wealth funds ranked high in the ESG index.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    Posts like this make me just despair... we couldn't even scale up this to the world wide needs, but if we could the waste would be huge. Only thing that could get us out there and would only make sense is going renewables everywhere in Manhatten-like projects, but that won't happen because people argueing like this got us into this situation where there is allegedly only a binary choice between failed and failed..

a_shovel 4y ago

There was a discussion about this a few days ago, and this comment thread [0] featured some criticism from experts on these claims. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424

logifail 4y ago
and yet one of the comments from that thread stated: > The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  There are countries where no combination of renewables + storage is possible. Places with little sunlight and little wind. What do they do?
  - logifail 4y ago
    Q: Do those countries already have long term nuclear waste storage facilities? There are countries that have been spectacularly failing to provide their own such facilities for decades.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Suppose they don't - so what is you proposed solution - they live in the dark ages?
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        That is not the alternative.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      How about they just prepay another country for ten thousand years of storage multiplied by 100 square meters? I don't see why it has to be local.
      - logifail 4y ago
        > I don't see why it has to be local If we propose to allow countries to outsource their nuclear waste disposal, wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper and safer to just skip nuclear entirely and outsource the power generation? All those countries with apparently not enough access to sunlight or wind will save an awful lot of time and money messing about with nuclear and just buy in their renewable power. If it works, could the Xlinks Morocco-UK power project could be a template for this kind of solution?[0]: "A 10.5 gigawatt (GW) solar and wind farm will be built in Morocco’s Guelmim-Oued Noun region, and it will supply the UK with clean energy via subsea cables. The twin 1.8 GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cables will be the world’s longest." [0] https://electrek.co/2022/04/21/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cable-will-send-clean-energy-from-morocco-to-the-uk/ https://electrek.co/2022/04/21/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cab...
        4y ago

theptip 4y ago

35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk. Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven/unjust levels of harm). I think it's misleading to throw out individual objections like this without considering the systemic trade-offs that we need to make. > the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter" I think this kind of blame-throwing is unhelpful. I couldn't care less what marketing claims were made in the past. Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we should be having. To address your object-level claim, as the OP describes in detail, one reason nuclear is more expensive now is the ever-increasing regulatory framework that has changed under the feet of in-progress projects. Maybe those regulations have resulted in a good ROI, but it's hard for me to buy that claim. Nuclear is now 10-100x safer than most other traditional/fossil forms of power generation[1], and it's excruciatingly expensive to buy that safety margin. These are tiny death rates caused by power generation. The problem here is that it's political suicide to say "I think we should reduce safety regulations to make nuclear power 10x more dangerous, because that will avert far more deaths from climate change". In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

zackees 4y ago
Post like this make me hopeful that rational minds will prevail and we get clean abundant nuclear energy. It’s becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't about solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase “carbon credits” from Saudi Arabia and other sovereign wealth funds ranked high in the ESG index.
- throw827474737 4y ago
  Posts like this make me just despair... we couldn't even scale up this to the world wide needs, but if we could the waste would be huge. Only thing that could get us out there and would only make sense is going renewables everywhere in Manhatten-like projects, but that won't happen because people argueing like this got us into this situation where there is allegedly only a binary choice between failed and failed..