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Shutting down nuclear power could increase air pollution: study
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ubermonkey 4y agoI mean, obviously?
- nestorD 4y agoThe headline feels very "water is wet" (nuclear does not produce air pollution so replacing is a net loss fir air quality) but the text is slightly more motivated in pointing out that policy should take into account the (predictable) mortality due to air quality when considering ways to phase out nuclear (which they estimate to 5200 death a year in the US if one were to fully replace nuclear power).
- KennyBlanken 4y agoThe only reason "nuclear does not produce air pollution" is because everyone pretends that there's no air pollution from the massive supply chain the plants require (and no, not just fuel. Consider how expensive almost any part that is destined for a nuclear power plant is, how much technical and administrative and safety overhead there is to everything, etc.) In the US, nuclear power is being replaced at several times the rate it is being decommissioned...by solar and wind, both of which are significantly cheaper. Those plants are being shut down because they don't make economic sense. The biggest problem we have right now is that bitcoin mining operators are chewing up massive amounts of power, in many areas causing coal fired power plants to come back into service because of how much demand they're placing on the grid...and states are encouraging this, because it's helping prop up demand for coal.
- andrewmutz 4y agoOf course, there is a polluting supply chain for solar and wind as well. If you do an all-in comparison on the total emissions, nuclear is about the same as wind, and is three times better than solar: 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...
- tmn 4y agoThis reads like a silly cartoon. I wish the biggest problem we had is bitcoin mining power consumption.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoIndeed - there is a range of frivolous human activities that gobble up insane amount of power, cars that are too big, casinos...
- survirtual 4y agoHere’s a thought experiment for you. You have 3 power generation systems adjacent to each other. One is a massive solar power field. One is a massive wind turbine field. And one is a nuclear power plant. In the ideal conditions, all 3 generate an equivalent amount of power. Suddenly, the sun goes down and all the wind stops. Which one is now generating the most power?
- tcfhgj 4y agothis never happens
- _ache_ 4y agoLow sunshine and low wind are pretty common in winter. Depending on the location obviously. In some places, winter imply too much wind !
- tcfhgj 4y agodefine low - usually there's always wind on a sufficient large area
- KptMarchewa 4y agoLast time this discussion was here I posted link from literally that same day at 5AM here in Poland. No sun yet, wind below 5% capacity.
- simondotau 4y agoArtificially inflated prices and administrative overhead causes air pollution? You seriously wrote that with a straight face? You know what also produces air pollution? Manufacturing and transport of wind turbines. Construction of hydro power dams. Manufacturing and distribution of solar panels. Mining, manufacturing and distribution of grid batteries. By your logic, no grid-scale source of energy is good enough. I hope you're browsing Hacker News using landfill-diverted computer hardware powered by a landfill-diverted off-grid solar power array, because otherwise your objections to nuclear power apply equally to your own life.
- defrost 4y ago> I hope you're browsing Hacker News using landfill-diverted Just as an aside and a reasonable data point, I can't be the only person with a majority of formerly commercial refabbed EOL equipment (more than just computers + solar panels). As a non urban Australian in a sparse area scoring and repurposing other people's "crap" has been a way of life for six decades .. nine for my father who is still actively trawling auction sites, curb dumps, and local tip sites.
- eru 4y agoTo go off on that tangent: If you use your own 'crap' for long enough, it's has the same impact: you just skip the step of switching ownership.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago> Artificially inflated prices and administrative overhead causes air pollution? You seriously wrote that with a straight face? What artificially inflated prices? And...No? Nice strawman, though? Nuclear power plants have a massively expensive supply chain - their capex and opex expenses are huge, the highest of any form of generation. Every worker the plant requires, every manager, every gauge, every piece of pipe - all has a carbon footprint. And because it's for nuclear, all those parts are a lot more expensive because of all the documentation, engineering and reliability, and that means a higher carbon footprint. > You know what also produces air pollution? Manufacturing and transport of wind turbines. Construction of hydro power dams. Manufacturing and distribution of solar panels. Mining, manufacturing and distribution of grid batteries. All the things you name immediately start paying back 'dividends', solar/wind have a fraction of the opex, and produce electricity at a far lower cost than nuclear and are dropping in cost per GWhr, whereas nuclear plants take decades to "break even", only do so if you ignore the carbon footprint of their supply chain, and the cost of electricity from nuclear is going up. > I hope you're browsing Hacker News using landfill-diverted computer hardware powered by a landfill-diverted off-grid solar power array, because otherwise your objections to nuclear power apply equally to your own life. So cliche a response it's literally a meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
- ch4s3 4y ago> The biggest problem we have right now is that bitcoin mining operators are chewing up massive amounts of power, in many areas causing coal fired power plants to come back into service Other than the single time a mining group bought an old coal plant in NY, is there a single other example of this happening?
- brightlancer 4y agoAs a more positive example, I read about crypto miners who had something like shipping containers that they would put at oil wells to capture gases that weren't economical for the energy companies to use and are instead burned off. While I'm sure some folks would jump on that because it was using Fossil Fuels, I look at as it's profitable for crypto miners to use _excess_ energy where it's produced and would otherwise be wasted, which will happen regardless of how energy is sourced.
- ch4s3 4y agoThat's pretty neat, and an interesting use of nat-gas, but I'm just really ambivalent about crypto and the miners.
- natmaka 4y agoThe more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity (this is your proposition, if I understand correctly) will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions. Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050")...
- pydry 4y agoWhich is balanced against the rather significant safety risks of running plants beyond their expected lifetime: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nuclear-reactors-pose-significant-safety-risks/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl...
- simondotau 4y agoI’m unfamiliar with the publisher but the content is unquestionably written by someone who has a sub-high-school understanding of nuclear physics and is egregiously misusing numbers out of context for maximum fear. Seek better sources.
- XorNot 4y ago[flagged]
- simondotau 4y ago[Replying to my own comment] There is a sibling comment to this one which is flagged and "dead". It was inflammatory in tone but something I would vouch for in substance. My advice to its author is to not give censcorious people an excuse to mob away your views. Avoid the hyperbole. Greenpeace, for one reason or another, has been obsessed with nuclear power to the objective net detriment of the environment. Their activism has directly resulted in a strengthening of legacy fossil fuel industries and the increased reliance on fossil fuel consumption. Absent the campaigning by Greenpeace there would certainly be more, newer, safer nuclear energy reactors in Europe today. This would directly result in offsetting need for coal power — especially if Greenpeace had applied as much effort to opposing coal as they did nuclear power.
- HyperSane 4y agoWe could have completely replaced coal power with nuclear if it wasn't for Greenpeace.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoGo move downwind from husab and then get back to us on the lack of air pollution.
- TimTheTinker 4y agoI don't understand the reasoning for phasing out nuclear power. Is that really what we want to aim for? Why? I understand the public as a whole is afraid because they remember events like Chernobyl and Fukushima, but those were pre-Generation-III reactors (Chernobyl was generation 1, Fukushima was generation 2). Modern designs are far safer. We've learned so much since the mid-20th century. Micro-reactors in particular could become a huge boon to society. All US submarines and aircraft carriers have been nuclear-powered for decades; and it's been decades without any military reactor-related incidents. The conspiracy theorist in my head wants to blame it on *someone* in the US government/industrial complex who stands to make a lot of money from selling other energy sources. :-/
- charlieyu1 4y agoAll things work perfectly until they don't. We are at a stage of humanity right before fusion power becomes the norm anyway. No point using a short term solution where an accident makes land of the size of a city uninhabitable for 1000 years.
- notfromhere 4y agoThere is little evidence to suggest we’re anywhere near fusion power.
- charlieyu1 4y agoNot 10-20 years maybe, but 50 years? Pretty high chance.
- nippoo 4y agoWe've been saying it's 50 years away for about 50 years... https://www.engineering.com/story/why-is-fusion-power-is-always-50-years-away https://www.engineering.com/story/why-is-fusion-power-is-alw...
- 4y ago
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago> Our scenario of removing nuclear power results in compensation by coal, gas and oil, resulting in increases in PM2.5 and ozone that lead to an extra 5,200 annual mortalities. They assume they'll be replaced with fossil fuels. So really the title should be "burning more fossil fuels will increase air pollution".
- geraldwhen 4y agoSolar and wind will also increase death count.
- tmtvl 4y agoIt could very well increase the rate of casualties (with people falling off roofs when installing solar, for example) as well as fatality rate... though I'm not sure if that takes into account casualty/fatality rates for uranium mining, which is something I'm too unfamiliar with to make any quantitative staatements.
- Vecr 4y agoI'm not sure why this is downvoted, it's actually correct. Solar panels are quite often put on roofs of buildings, and falling off buildings causes deaths. Wind turbines are about a dangerous as you think they would be, and especially offshore ones can get iffy. Solar and wind are not really any worse overall than communication towers, etc, but they are still worse than nuclear, as nuclear requires many fewer installations.
- harg 4y agoPerhaps, but by an amount that is negligible when compared with fossil fuels: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- nephanth 4y agoBut not when compared to nuclear power (same source)
- elhudy 4y ago>The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Apologies to everyone for the upcoming tangential rant. Am I the only person who is exhausted with news outlets disingenuously comparing the US to all other individual countries as if that is a fair comparison? A quick google search shows there are 108 reactors operating in the European Union, which is 16 more than in the US. Yes, this also means that the US has more reactors operating per person than the EU. But why can't news outlets just say that? Why do we default to comparing the absolute number of most things in the United States to individual western countries? This was at its worst during COVID but it seems to have stuck. It makes for a completely misleading narrative.
- atdrummond 4y agoProbably because there are subconscious and conscious rationales for why they’re creating the comparisons and narratives that they are. It’s also quite rare that a news story spends time talking positively about a subject, unless it is something emotionally charged (marine vet surprises family by coming home early) or is part of a submarine PR push by the subject of the piece (university researcher finds curse for cancer).
- guhcampos 4y agoAs a non-north-american I can empathize, but I believe the main reason for that is simply these news outlets are from the US, so naturally they'll use that frame of reference. Down here in Brazil news outlets will compare stuff to Brazil. The fact we are reading English news probably accounts for a good part of that bias.
- BenFranklin100 4y agoOver half those in the EU are deployed in France too. For the US to match France’s 80% electricity generated by nuclear energy, we’ll need to deploy about 300 additional equivalent reactors. I my opinion, this a good thing: 1. The per unit reactor costs will plummet if we build 300 identical units 2. France enjoys the lowest per capita CO2 emissions for electrical generation than any nation in the world. America should match them.
- destitude 4y agoMIT does have a nuclear engineering department so not sure how un-biased this would be.
- seventytwo 4y agoA perfect example of the baseless, conspiratorial speculation that seems to plague discourse everywhere.
- destitude 4y agoMeanwhile in Minnesota the largest nuclear plant in the state shut down for repairs because it had been leaking radioactive water into the ground. They also didn't inform the public for months after it was discovered.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoIt's not just Minnesota. Nuclear plants around the country leak Tritium almost constantly...but if it's below some figure (in the range of hundreds of thousands of gallons of contaminated water), no disclosure of any kind is required.
- firstlink 4y ago"Contaminated water" is a very misleading phrase, because the more of it there is, the less danger it poses (from "almost none" to "none").
- midoridensha 4y agoAll the water in the ocean is contaminated and is radioactive: it has naturally-occurring uranium in it.
- lostlogin 4y agoSounds like the perfect place to hide a million tons of radioactive Fukushima water.
- midoridensha 4y agoExactly, since the radioactive Fukushima water is actually less radioactive than regular ocean water.
- natmaka 4y agoSome don't like the idea of releasing it: https://www.naml.org/policy/documents/2022-12-12%20Position%20Paper,%20Release%20of%20Radioactively%20Contaminated%20Water%20into%20the%20Ocean.pdf https://www.naml.org/policy/documents/2022-12-12%20Position%... (US) National Association of Marine Laboratories: https://insidestory.org.au/water-water-everywhere/ https://insidestory.org.au/water-water-everywhere/
- robomartin 4y agoOver the years I have changed my perspective on nuclear power. I still think it is useful, yet, I do understand it brings to the table some potentially serious black swan events. In trying to understand energy transition I have come to the conclusion that neither grid-scale solar nor nuclear are the answer. Wind, however, seems to be. It isn't hard for people to understand why wind is likely a better idea than nuclear. I won't waste any time exploring that comparison. Wind, I have learned, seems to be massively better than solar across many vectors. BTW, I am not talking about offshore wind. Not sure that compares well at all. Energy production per installed GW: Wind: 3.07 TWh/GW Solar: 1.33 TWh/GW (solar is reliably off half the time) Land use per GW: Wind: 750 acres/GW Solar: 3,900 acres/GW Land use to provide all Tesla Master Plan solar + wind: Wind: 1 Hawaii (area of all islands) Solar: 12 Hawaii's or, Wind: 2.5% of California Solar: 30% of California Annual Operations and Maintenance costs : Wind: 1.00 Solar: 1.33 times wind O&M Initial investment in factories: Wind: $212 billion Solar: $ 11 billion Storage required for 95% reliability: Wind: 3 hours Solar: >12 hours Wind requires 4x less batteries, with all the cost, recycling and ecological advantages this delivers. Build supply chain origin: Wind: Diverse Solar: Heavy reliance on China Long term supply chain (maintenance, parts, etc.) origin: Wind: Diverse Solar: Heavy reliance on China (forever) Frankly, I used to think we really needed a large number (200+) of new nuclear power plants to be able to make a full transition to electric ground, sea and air transport as well as 100% electrification of homes and various industrial processes. From my current perspective I think it might be far more intelligent to focus on using wind for grid-scale, no grid-scale solar and residential/commercial solar + storage for local load mitigation. This is where I disagree with Tesla's Master Plan 3. I don't think that grid-scale solar is a good idea at all.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNow compare wind and solar and existing hydro and 2-5% w2e to just wind instead of just wind vs. just solar. At a mix appropriate for the region (for example some regions get 800kWh/kWp/yr, others get 2400, wind ranges between 2000 and 5000), and include reasonable predictons of demand curves. Wind and solar are negatively correlated. Adding both reduces storage and makes the system more robust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_relationship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_relationship
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago[dead]