5 ms·

Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower tha

Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar, higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the potential of being renewable. Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy... [2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-electricity.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...

worik 4y ago
> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. In the Australian outback those are places people used to live. How are you going to stop people returning for 200,000 years? Greed. Hubris.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your original question directly, there's a whole area of study that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings. [3] Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most radioactive land on earth). What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I recognize it's more expensive than some competing options but it's a better solution. As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the table with data on the risks, especially since we've got 80 years of experience with nuclear power. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
  - jsmith45 4y ago
    Exactly right. The goal with nuclear waste is basically to get it back down to levels similar the original ore. At that point, it isn't especially dangerous. Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity. The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years. The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.
  - markvdb 4y ago
    > fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean. The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again. P.S. Thank you nevertheless for pointing out several advantages of fast breeder reactors.
    - gattilorenz 4y ago
      > Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. There's plenty of buildings that took centuries to make, this projects are comparatively simple/require less coordination once started.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Fast reactors are also in principle subject to Chernobyl-like criticality accidents (only worse) in case of meltdowns.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
You fell into the same trap. You linked 2 studies. Other side could link 2 studies with very different conclusion. We should understand it is fundamentally a political issue, and both side shouldn't hide behind 2 links to support them.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't political. The total number of people killed in nuclear accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.
  - dieortin 4y ago
    Not when deaths caused by nuclear energy are incredibly hard to quantify.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Are they though? Do you have some quantification of that difficulty? Any studies? Any citations to back up your thesis?
      - dieortin 4y ago
        When someone is exposed to radiation and dies of cancer many years later it’s impossible to know whether he’s a victim of radiation or just unlucky. As simple as that.
  - oezi 4y ago
    Unfortunately despite the track record nuclear won't make a revival. The planning cycles for new plants are just too long. Renewables will yet again half in price by the time you could just build another nuclear plant. That's why really nobody is trying anymore.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
throw827474737 4y ago
Besides this being studies for which other studiest exist the same, we also learned in the pandemic that "deaths" cannot be the sole metric (however you want to interpret that). And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium below that from which it's replenished as it is extracted. [1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field. Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Sir. There's a practically unlimited quantity of uranium available to meet our energy needs now and for as long as humans wander this rock. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best. A huge reason breeder reactors aren't used right now is that there's plenty of land-based uranium already and fuel is not a concern. So much so that stretching it with breeders doesn't really matter, and as a percentage of the cost of generated electricity the uranium input barely registers. By the time we need to dip into the renewable water-based sources, we'll long since have been carbon-free. It'll scale just fine. Stop worrying about problems that won't matter for 10-100,000 years. We've gotta clear the century first.
oezi 4y ago
Still nuclear is finished everywhere (or on the way out except in China) and won't come back from the grave. It is like asking for cars from the 70ties to return.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Isn't that exactly what Tesla just did? The electric car was of course the 'car of the 70s' until it was the car of the 2020's. Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.
- nixass 4y ago
  No, the nuclear from the 70s won't come back. Modern ones will.
wolverine876 4y ago
> environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas. Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont > Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says anything about putting them back in the original mines? Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for nuclear waste storage?
- brunes 4y ago
  The cost to store nuclear waste is $600 / kg When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.
  - sam345 4y ago
    I agree with more nuclear but blasting waste (at least highly radioactive) to space is a problem as there's always a risk the rocket explodes and spreads the radiation on earth. At least I've always understood that's the objection and seems to me reasonable. Yucca mountain type solutions seem more palatable.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      You encapsulate the waste so it survives any accident. This adds some weight, but not an enormous amount of weight.
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        If you can encapsulate the pellets to the point that they can survive getting blown out of orbit, catching fire and raining down over the human population without causing any harm - you can encapsulate them and throw them into Yucca Mountain and save the whole exiting earth step.
pfdietz 4y ago
The safety of nuclear assumes no nuclear accidents. Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.
- naasking 4y ago
  Renewables literally can't beat nuclear at power generation until long term grid storage is a proven thing. We're not there yet.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    They can beat nuclear right now -- you get more CO2 reduction per $ from adding renewables than you do from adding nuclear. And you get it sooner. Little or no storage is required. By the time storage becomes necessary, the economic environment (price as a function of time) on the grid will be so hostile to new nuclear that there will be no sense even trying to pretend nuclear makes sense.
    - naasking 4y ago
      You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out. If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.

worik 4y ago

> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. In the Australian outback those are places people used to live. How are you going to stop people returning for 200,000 years? Greed. Hubris.

arcticbull 4y ago
Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your original question directly, there's a whole area of study that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings. [3] Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most radioactive land on earth). What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I recognize it's more expensive than some competing options but it's a better solution. As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the table with data on the risks, especially since we've got 80 years of experience with nuclear power. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
- jsmith45 4y ago
  Exactly right. The goal with nuclear waste is basically to get it back down to levels similar the original ore. At that point, it isn't especially dangerous. Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity. The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years. The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.
- markvdb 4y ago
  > fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean. The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again. P.S. Thank you nevertheless for pointing out several advantages of fast breeder reactors.
  - gattilorenz 4y ago
    > Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. There's plenty of buildings that took centuries to make, this projects are comparatively simple/require less coordination once started.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Fast reactors are also in principle subject to Chernobyl-like criticality accidents (only worse) in case of meltdowns.
  - arcticbull 4y ago

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

You fell into the same trap. You linked 2 studies. Other side could link 2 studies with very different conclusion. We should understand it is fundamentally a political issue, and both side shouldn't hide behind 2 links to support them.

arcticbull 4y ago
I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't political. The total number of people killed in nuclear accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.
- dieortin 4y ago
  Not when deaths caused by nuclear energy are incredibly hard to quantify.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Are they though? Do you have some quantification of that difficulty? Any studies? Any citations to back up your thesis?
    - dieortin 4y ago
      When someone is exposed to radiation and dies of cancer many years later it’s impossible to know whether he’s a victim of radiation or just unlucky. As simple as that.
- oezi 4y ago
  Unfortunately despite the track record nuclear won't make a revival. The planning cycles for new plants are just too long. Renewables will yet again half in price by the time you could just build another nuclear plant. That's why really nobody is trying anymore.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

throw827474737 4y ago

Besides this being studies for which other studiest exist the same, we also learned in the pandemic that "deaths" cannot be the sole metric (however you want to interpret that). And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?

arcticbull 4y ago
Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium below that from which it's replenished as it is extracted. [1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field. Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Sir. There's a practically unlimited quantity of uranium available to meet our energy needs now and for as long as humans wander this rock. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best. A huge reason breeder reactors aren't used right now is that there's plenty of land-based uranium already and fuel is not a concern. So much so that stretching it with breeders doesn't really matter, and as a percentage of the cost of generated electricity the uranium input barely registers. By the time we need to dip into the renewable water-based sources, we'll long since have been carbon-free. It'll scale just fine. Stop worrying about problems that won't matter for 10-100,000 years. We've gotta clear the century first.

oezi 4y ago

Still nuclear is finished everywhere (or on the way out except in China) and won't come back from the grave. It is like asking for cars from the 70ties to return.

arcticbull 4y ago
Isn't that exactly what Tesla just did? The electric car was of course the 'car of the 70s' until it was the car of the 2020's. Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.
nixass 4y ago
No, the nuclear from the 70s won't come back. Modern ones will.

wolverine876 4y ago

> environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas. Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont > Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says anything about putting them back in the original mines? Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for nuclear waste storage?

brunes 4y ago
The cost to store nuclear waste is $600 / kg When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.
- sam345 4y ago
  I agree with more nuclear but blasting waste (at least highly radioactive) to space is a problem as there's always a risk the rocket explodes and spreads the radiation on earth. At least I've always understood that's the objection and seems to me reasonable. Yucca mountain type solutions seem more palatable.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    You encapsulate the waste so it survives any accident. This adds some weight, but not an enormous amount of weight.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      If you can encapsulate the pellets to the point that they can survive getting blown out of orbit, catching fire and raining down over the human population without causing any harm - you can encapsulate them and throw them into Yucca Mountain and save the whole exiting earth step.

pfdietz 4y ago

The safety of nuclear assumes no nuclear accidents. Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.

naasking 4y ago
Renewables literally can't beat nuclear at power generation until long term grid storage is a proven thing. We're not there yet.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  They can beat nuclear right now -- you get more CO2 reduction per $ from adding renewables than you do from adding nuclear. And you get it sooner. Little or no storage is required. By the time storage becomes necessary, the economic environment (price as a function of time) on the grid will be so hostile to new nuclear that there will be no sense even trying to pretend nuclear makes sense.
  - naasking 4y ago
    You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out. If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.