9 ms·

If we push ahead with nuclear as people want, there will be trillions in clean up costs to be claimed.

by LatteLazy 4y ago

fundad 4y ago
Money Printer Go Brrr
narrator 4y ago
There will also be a lot of really cool work in tethered and/or autonomous robotics.
- ge96 4y ago
  Automata (film)
  - narrator 4y ago
    I was reading about a lot of these nuclear cleanup projects at Hanford and Fukushima and the only way to do it is with specially designed robots that are highly radiation resistant. This is difficult since the radiation regularly causes them to glitch out permanently and radio communication doesn't really work with that much radiation around. They usually have to be tethered to be controllable. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclear-power-plant-robot-radioactive-fuel-tepco-little-sunfish https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclea...
    - ge96 4y ago
      I see that is pretty interesting. Surprised hardening isn't enough. My comment was more on humanoid robots being powered by small nuclear batteries.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      Hanford is a different situation from Fukushima in that the wastes have had a long time to decay at Hanford but Fukushima is still pretty fresh. The trouble at Hanford was that the current methods for reprocessing produce a stream of fission product raffinates that they originally stored in liquid form in tanks. Later on the technology was developed to trap the fission products in glass which is not too hard to dispose of (and that decays mostly in 500 years) but the Hanford tanks had started to fail before then. Future reprocessing plants will store liquid waste temporarily but like THORP in the UK and COGEMA in France they will plan on vitrification from day one.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  The tough problem in the plutonium economy is not extracting plutonium from spent fuel but fabricating that plutonium into fuel. The "gold standard" today is to pulverize plutonium oxide together with uranium oxide in a high energy ball mill which produces homogeneous fuel that won't come apart. That makes nanoparticles of plutonium which you could potentially inhale and have lodge deep in your lungs. Experiments in dogs show a single particle can develop a cancerous tumor. Handling the fuel pellets is a high touch operation (you gotta pick up the pellets with gloves and load them in the fuel rod) and there's a lot of controversy about safety. France has workers at COGEMA wear a respirator all the time, the U.S. doesn't accept that as safe working conditions. Both the U.S. and U.K. failed to import mixed oxide technology from France. Russia was looking at a different method of fuel processing they called "vibropacking" but for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor they adopted something like the French process. Some advance in remote handling that keeps workers away from the dust would be welcome.
  - jabl 4y ago
    Pyroprocessing was AFAIU developed so it could be done completely hands off. But that produces metallic fuel which is poorly suited to water cooled reactors.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Humans already emit 35 billion metric tons of CO2 a year with what ultimately will be deadly effect. (Just a matter of time before a hot summer kills 1 million plus people in India.) $100 per ton is an optimistic figure for capturing it out of the atmosphere and injecting it underground, so that is $3.5 trillion a year to clean out the stuff we put in that year. Fossil fuels: what are you going to do with the waste?
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  So throw up a few solar panels, hook up some cell phone batteries to it for night time, and we'll easily be able to power our productive system, charge our Teslas, desalinate water for the worsening droughts everywhere, and sequester carbon to undo all the damage we're doing. Luckily, solar panels pretty much grow on trees so we shouldn't have to burn much more fossil fuels to build the panels we need to power everything and then some. Plus, I heard solar is cheap and nuclear is expensive. Can't argue with price (which is never distorted by unincorporated externalities)! We don't need nuclear!
  - clarionbell 4y ago
    I think sarcasm doesn't always translate into text.
  - tedk-42 4y ago
    Haha love the sarcasm! You forgot to add how solar panels are ethically produced in a carbon neutral and sustainable way from our trading fwend China :)
    - greenthrow 4y ago
      And nuclear reactors are created in an ethical and carbon neutral way and don't contain tons of components from China?
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        Nuclear power has the lowest net carbon emissions of any electricity source besides hydroelectricity [1]. And no, most don't contain many components from China (besides the nuclear plants actually built in China). Most nuclear plants in the west were built during the 1960s through the 1980s before China became the manufacturing powerhouse it is today. The main components of nuclear plants are concrete containment structures, pressure vessels, heat exchanges, and turbines. These are too large to ship long distances. Good luck shipping one of these [2] across the Pacific! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions_of_energy_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCPOST_BabcockWilcox_Train.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCPOST_BabcockWilcox_Trai...
omginternets 4y ago
Are you suggesting this is somehow different from coal, oil and gas? The only difference is that nuclear waste actually can be cleaned up and/or contained in the first place. You are simply externalizing the health and environmental impact of fossil fuels and calling it a day. (I am charitably assuming that you know enough about renewals to know that they are not currently a realistic replacement for the entirety of FFs.)
- greenthrow 4y ago
  By what definition of "cleaned up" and "contained"? By stuffing them in a mountain and putting signs outside that we hope people in 10,000 years will understand means death is inside? Nuclear power is not needed and it is worse than fossil fuels. Renewables with battery storage can be 100% of our power. We just have to stop being distracted by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries who keep telling us we can't do it.
  - onepointsixC 4y ago
    This is just incorrect on all accounts. > By stuffing them in a mountain and putting signs outside that we hope people in 10,000 years will understand means death is inside? You can visit the Elephants foot safely today. Nuclear fuel is no where as deadly as you make it out to be. > Renewables with battery storage can be 100% of our power. We just have to stop being distracted by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries who keep telling us we can't do it. No it cannot. 100% Battery storage would cost trillions and be beset by toxic waste that is toxic forever and since it's a consumable and need to be replaced every decade. It's a full non starter. Compare that to the tiny amount of spent nuclear waste which is solid, can be safely stored or even recycled. Nuclear is a solution which works well right now. No need for fantasy battery technologies which would be better used in transportation anyways.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)

If we push ahead with nuclear as people want, there will be trillions in clean up costs to be claimed.

fundad 4y ago

Money Printer Go Brrr

narrator 4y ago

There will also be a lot of really cool work in tethered and/or autonomous robotics.

ge96 4y ago
Automata (film)
- narrator 4y ago
  I was reading about a lot of these nuclear cleanup projects at Hanford and Fukushima and the only way to do it is with specially designed robots that are highly radiation resistant. This is difficult since the radiation regularly causes them to glitch out permanently and radio communication doesn't really work with that much radiation around. They usually have to be tethered to be controllable. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclear-power-plant-robot-radioactive-fuel-tepco-little-sunfish https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclea...
  - ge96 4y ago
    I see that is pretty interesting. Surprised hardening isn't enough. My comment was more on humanoid robots being powered by small nuclear batteries.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Hanford is a different situation from Fukushima in that the wastes have had a long time to decay at Hanford but Fukushima is still pretty fresh. The trouble at Hanford was that the current methods for reprocessing produce a stream of fission product raffinates that they originally stored in liquid form in tanks. Later on the technology was developed to trap the fission products in glass which is not too hard to dispose of (and that decays mostly in 500 years) but the Hanford tanks had started to fail before then. Future reprocessing plants will store liquid waste temporarily but like THORP in the UK and COGEMA in France they will plan on vitrification from day one.
PaulHoule 4y ago
The tough problem in the plutonium economy is not extracting plutonium from spent fuel but fabricating that plutonium into fuel. The "gold standard" today is to pulverize plutonium oxide together with uranium oxide in a high energy ball mill which produces homogeneous fuel that won't come apart. That makes nanoparticles of plutonium which you could potentially inhale and have lodge deep in your lungs. Experiments in dogs show a single particle can develop a cancerous tumor. Handling the fuel pellets is a high touch operation (you gotta pick up the pellets with gloves and load them in the fuel rod) and there's a lot of controversy about safety. France has workers at COGEMA wear a respirator all the time, the U.S. doesn't accept that as safe working conditions. Both the U.S. and U.K. failed to import mixed oxide technology from France. Russia was looking at a different method of fuel processing they called "vibropacking" but for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor they adopted something like the French process. Some advance in remote handling that keeps workers away from the dust would be welcome.
- jabl 4y ago
  Pyroprocessing was AFAIU developed so it could be done completely hands off. But that produces metallic fuel which is poorly suited to water cooled reactors.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Humans already emit 35 billion metric tons of CO2 a year with what ultimately will be deadly effect. (Just a matter of time before a hot summer kills 1 million plus people in India.) $100 per ton is an optimistic figure for capturing it out of the atmosphere and injecting it underground, so that is $3.5 trillion a year to clean out the stuff we put in that year. Fossil fuels: what are you going to do with the waste?

orthecreedence 4y ago
So throw up a few solar panels, hook up some cell phone batteries to it for night time, and we'll easily be able to power our productive system, charge our Teslas, desalinate water for the worsening droughts everywhere, and sequester carbon to undo all the damage we're doing. Luckily, solar panels pretty much grow on trees so we shouldn't have to burn much more fossil fuels to build the panels we need to power everything and then some. Plus, I heard solar is cheap and nuclear is expensive. Can't argue with price (which is never distorted by unincorporated externalities)! We don't need nuclear!
- clarionbell 4y ago
  I think sarcasm doesn't always translate into text.
- tedk-42 4y ago
  Haha love the sarcasm! You forgot to add how solar panels are ethically produced in a carbon neutral and sustainable way from our trading fwend China :)
  - greenthrow 4y ago
    And nuclear reactors are created in an ethical and carbon neutral way and don't contain tons of components from China?
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Nuclear power has the lowest net carbon emissions of any electricity source besides hydroelectricity [1]. And no, most don't contain many components from China (besides the nuclear plants actually built in China). Most nuclear plants in the west were built during the 1960s through the 1980s before China became the manufacturing powerhouse it is today. The main components of nuclear plants are concrete containment structures, pressure vessels, heat exchanges, and turbines. These are too large to ship long distances. Good luck shipping one of these [2] across the Pacific! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions_of_energy_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCPOST_BabcockWilcox_Train.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCPOST_BabcockWilcox_Trai...

omginternets 4y ago

Are you suggesting this is somehow different from coal, oil and gas? The only difference is that nuclear waste actually can be cleaned up and/or contained in the first place. You are simply externalizing the health and environmental impact of fossil fuels and calling it a day. (I am charitably assuming that you know enough about renewals to know that they are not currently a realistic replacement for the entirety of FFs.)

greenthrow 4y ago
By what definition of "cleaned up" and "contained"? By stuffing them in a mountain and putting signs outside that we hope people in 10,000 years will understand means death is inside? Nuclear power is not needed and it is worse than fossil fuels. Renewables with battery storage can be 100% of our power. We just have to stop being distracted by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries who keep telling us we can't do it.
- onepointsixC 4y ago
  This is just incorrect on all accounts. > By stuffing them in a mountain and putting signs outside that we hope people in 10,000 years will understand means death is inside? You can visit the Elephants foot safely today. Nuclear fuel is no where as deadly as you make it out to be. > Renewables with battery storage can be 100% of our power. We just have to stop being distracted by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries who keep telling us we can't do it. No it cannot. 100% Battery storage would cost trillions and be beset by toxic waste that is toxic forever and since it's a consumable and need to be replaced every decade. It's a full non starter. Compare that to the tiny amount of spent nuclear waste which is solid, can be safely stored or even recycled. Nuclear is a solution which works well right now. No need for fantasy battery technologies which would be better used in transportation anyways.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)