let's have a nuclear power thread

[adam_grif]

Inspired by the discussion in the thread about the waste disposal site.


The following is a TED debate on the nuclear power issue. During said debate, every time the antinuclear guy was talking, I wanted to pull my hair out. He just kept asserting things like "WE CAN DO IT WITH RENEWABLES". At one point, he's comparing death tolls for nuclear vs non-nuclear, and he piles on "deaths caused by using fossil fuels to plug the gap while we build nuclear plants", and then, even more disingenuously, "WHAT IF A CITY GETS BLOWN UP BY A BOMB?"



What will it take to shut idiots like that up? Why is there this false dichotomy where we have to be either Nuclear or non-Nuclear? Why can't we invest in solar, wind etc at the same time as investing in Nuclear?

There was an eBook I read months ago that basically used Britain as a case study, and combined all of the potential "renewables" (I hate that word) and stacked them up against power demands. It included best case extrapolations for the potential of various energy sources, and even made some pretty generous assumptions for it, and still came up short. Does anybody remember what it was called? I think someone here linked it to me initially.

Moving into the midfuture, how will Fusion stack up as a power source? ITER keeps getting delays and setbacks, when are we going to start seeing practical reactors? Will it be worth it when we do?

[Hillary]

There was an eBook I read months ago that basically used Britain as a case study, and combined all of the potential "renewables" (I hate that word) and stacked them up against power demands. It included best case extrapolations for the potential of various energy sources, and even made some pretty generous assumptions for it, and still came up short. Does anybody remember what it was called? I think someone here linked it to me initially.

David McKay: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air.

He came to my workplace to talk about the book - he's an extremely good speaker and largely jargon-free.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

[adam_grif]

Cheers, that was it.

[Hawkwings]

There's a false dichotomy because the anti-nuclear crowd creates one. There's also an abundance of dishonest debate tactics that are not too hidden. And then there's the all-important glossing over of wind and solar's downsides. Honestly, I would listen to them more if they didn't sound so zealously one-sided and dogmatic in their speaking. The fact that they need to "cheat" to make wind and solar "better" than nuclear speaks boatloads.

I have no problem with wind and solar power used where they're appropriate. What I do have a problem with is wind and solar being used where it's not appropriate, in an attempt to "replace" nuclear power.

[Shroom Man 777]

I think someone posted a piece here, or I think I saw this in the Beeb or something, where this guy talks about the energy future of Britain and that filling the entire country with windmills or something wouldn't even come close to meeting the UK's needs compared to a few nuke plants. Heh.

[Crossroads Inc.]

As much as a Tree hugging Hippie as I am, I am realistic enough to know no 'green' technology today can come close to matching nuclear energy in terms of effectiveness and energy production.

The thing I hate is seeing both sides trash the other. Nuclear energy proponents tend to trash wind and solar down to being useless. And of course Anti-nuke people will go out of their way to incite the fear of Chernobyl into any attempt at building new nuke plants.

As with so many things, a mix of the two is best. Solar power can never meet our energy needs, but putting it everywhere would go a long way to easing the strain on the power grid. Its most useful application is largely for private houses. Putting Solar panels on houses across the west would be a huge saver. My folks have a modest 10x10 solar panel on their roof and it effectively generates about 90% of their monthly electricity.

Imagine the same thing on houses all across the west from Texas to California.

Wind energy is less applicable just because it requires such massive space to be useful. However IMHO I see wind power as a good system for providing power to far out places. Rather then spending millions running a line to some small town or a small building way off the grid, building a small wind farm could go a long way ot providing energy close at hand. Naturally you would still need a supplemental source of energy, just because its not windy all the time.

As for nuclear power. Well as far as I'm concerned it's biggest application is Industrial. No amount of 'green' tech would offput the massive energy requirements for factories, foundries, smelters, and other large scale industrial complexes. They may help of course, every little bit helps, but I don't know if you could run a place like Boeing construction plant even if all those hangers were tiled in solar panels. Nuclear power really is the only sensible energy option for increasing future growth.

Really I often feel like I want to take the 'leaders' on each side and lock them in a room together shouting "We need BOTH of you" Ironically its the anti nuke people that are the most dogmatic about things. I remember in grade school getting a 'lesson' in why nuclear energy was so terrible.

While taking about how "Its a lie to call it 'clean' " the guest speaker went out of his way to mention that a Nuclear plant would be built using lots of polluting equipment and cause lots of pollution in the process of construction! Even in 5th grade I was bright enough to think "Wouldn't ANY power-plant need vehicles that pollute to build it?"

[Hawkwings]

Here's a fun thing to mention to counter that: those far-ranging fields of wind turbines and solar panels need maintenance, right? Well, how are the technicians going to get out there? Certainly they can't walk, not with all the equipment and replacement parts they're going to need. They must drive. Now, how many turbines/panels are in your farm again? And how far away are they from the central maintenance station? And how many are there? And what is the anticipated amount of work that needs to be done on each (or each section) in its operational lifetime? Equals how much gas burned in maintenance transportation? Compare this to a nice compact and centralized nuclear plant.

[Zixinus]

Essentially, watching the TED video, the "against" guy basically handwaves the problem of land away by saying "we'll build in the ocean" and "its not land size but spacing" (somehow density isn't a problem and putting all those windfarms up one by one isn't a problem either).

Can windwarms actually be build over the sea economically?

Also, the guy was talking about long build times. Some of it seemed more like the time required to do all the bureaucracy than what's required to build the damn thing.

As for nuclear weapons, I find it hilarious that he keeps mentioning Pakistan and India. Does this guy not get that if these nations want these weapons, they will get it? The guy implies that nuclear power plants make nuclear weapons! Gee, I wonder where Hungary keeps its nukes? Oh, wait, it doesn't have any and will not have any!

Moving into the midfuture, how will Fusion stack up as a power source? ITER keeps getting delays and setbacks, when are we going to start seeing practical reactors? Will it be worth it when we do?

About after half a century, unless something unexpected happens (Pollywell works out or one of the other border schemes). ITER is not really meant to be a proper power plant, but a research item that could be applied to double as a minor power plant (most likely more like a experimental power plant, to see all the possible glitches that could show up), if I recall my browser-literature correctly.

First generation of fusion reactors will likely be about as good or perhaps less so than fission, due them likely being Deuterium-Tritium based reaction. Energy is gained trough heat and it would actually be cheaper to build a fission equivalent.

Once the technology develops enough, and that can easily take a century, we can move towards He3 or even Boron-Hydroeng (IIRC) reactions, where you can get a lot of charged particles that you can get energy more effective. However, currently that's mostly speculation.

[ThomasP]

Moving into the midfuture, how will Fusion stack up as a power source? ITER keeps getting delays and setbacks, when are we going to start seeing practical reactors? Will it be worth it when we do?

Next Big Future has been doing a lot of updates on fusion and fusion-fission hybrid technologies which appear promising.

One of the things that stands out in the anti-nuclear argument is the assumption that nuclear power must be One Big Plant with all the capital costs and perceived risks that implies, when a lot of these newer technologies seem much more compatible with smaller and more distributed reactors. Even concerns over weapons proliferation aren't as worrisome with many of these options.

[PaperJack]

I'm very pro-nuclear, however the best anti-nuclear argument I've heard in that video was about the danger of transporting all the nuclear waste.
Also, how is NIF doing ? All I heard is that they begun the tests a while ago, but I have no idea if they succeeded or not.

[Uraniun235]

I'm very pro-nuclear, however the best anti-nuclear argument I've heard in that video was about the danger of transporting all the nuclear waste.

If that's the best argument then there's no argument at all. The transport casks are built such that they can be hit by a runaway train, be on a runaway train that crashes into a wall, and sit above a pool of burning jet fuel for over half an hour without releasing their contents. I'd rather have nuclear waste casks rolling through my town than, say, tanks full of gasoline.

[Temujin]

I'm very pro-nuclear, however the best anti-nuclear argument I've heard in that video was about the danger of transporting all the nuclear waste.

If that's the best argument then there's no argument at all. The transport casks are built such that they can be hit by a runaway train, be on a runaway train that crashes into a wall, and sit above a pool of burning jet fuel for over half an hour without releasing their contents. I'd rather have nuclear waste casks rolling through my town than, say, tanks full of gasoline.

That is the funny thing. Numerous times I've lived near rail lines / yards and have been witness to literally mile long strings of cars, many of them tankers, and many full of volatiles that could wipe out a small town if a major accident and rupture and/or explosion occurred. But one car with one cask of nuclear material, that people would otherwise never notice, and people fucking freak as if just being near to it is going to make them grow two heads.

Of course, if we built the right kind of reactors that would allow reprocessing, waste would be even less of a non-problem.

[open_sketchbook]

Moving into the midfuture, how will Fusion stack up as a power source? ITER keeps getting delays and setbacks, when are we going to start seeing practical reactors? Will it be worth it when we do?

It's doubtfull fusion will outstrip fission except in the extremely long term. Small fusion plants won't do anything fission plants won't do cheaper, and it's unlikely we'll ever see those super-awesome power-the-whole-country fusion reactors that are often proposed by fusion wankers because of security concerns. While it'll probably be possible to eventually build a fusion reactor that can supply an ungodly amount of power, it'll be extremely expensive to build and it'd represent a massive infastructual weakness; it goes down for any reason, and everything goes dark. Thus you want multiple smaller plants, and that means multiple smaller fission plants as they will much cheaper to make and easier to operate.

[adam_grif]

SDNet advisory warning: Video may contain trace elements of Penn & Teller.

[Night_stalker]

I'm very pro-nuclear, however the best anti-nuclear argument I've heard in that video was about the danger of transporting all the nuclear waste.

If that's the best argument then there's no argument at all. The transport casks are built such that they can be hit by a runaway train, be on a runaway train that crashes into a wall, and sit above a pool of burning jet fuel for over half an hour without releasing their contents. I'd rather have nuclear waste casks rolling through my town than, say, tanks full of gasoline.

True, but thanks to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the public is now against nuclear power thanks in part to those accidents. I'm pro-nuclear, but we just need a spot to dump the waste safely. That and goverment funding to help build the reactors are what's really needed, not people whining about how we can switch from fossil fuels to non renewable enertgy sources quickly, without realizing how expensive they are, and how small scale they are.

[loomer]

I got in a debate recently with a friend who's part of the anti-nuclear brigade. He legitimately thought we could power everything by filling the desert with solar farms - what's never mention with that scheme is the ecological damage. To do that, you not only need the materials to make the farms themselves, but you also have to fill a burning hot desert with shade and change the local reflectivity. If we did actually do that, we'd completely fuck desert ecosystems and potentially cause drastic changes to global or regional weather patterns.

Fortunately, he walked away considering the nuclear option a lot more carefully. PArt of it was the 'but the waste! THE WASTE!' thing that always comes up - the response we floated was basically a large concrete lined dump site well away from the water tables for anything that couldn't be reprocessed. Would this actually be a feasible response, even if unnecessary, to take some of the fear away from the anti-nuclear folk?

[Hawkwings]

You are aware that the whole Yucca Mountain project is basically this "concrete-lined dump" that you propose?

Some of the criticisms its had to endure are pretty outrageous though. For example, it's got to last for 100,000 years without breach. 100,000 years! If I were to build a site capable of lasting 100 millenia, I wouldn't use it for storing nuclear waste, I'd make it a monument to myself! In 99 millenia, when archaeologists discover it, they're going to wonder "Why did the ancient humans build such an elaborate facility for garbage?"

Check it out here: http://ensign.senate.gov/public/index.c ... d05500737a

particularly:

It is not believable to suggest that we are certain that Yucca Mountain will prove safe for 100,000 years as truly needed.

Another tidbit, shared by my school's Dean of Engineering, was that the Yucca Mountain analysts were told to run a risk study on how damaging and likely it would be for a vein of magma to come up through the mountain, intersect the storage facility, then shoot through and cause an eruption that would send nuclear waste flying everywhere. I'm not sure what the number was, but the analysts had to use an awful lot of zeros after the decimal point to express the percent likelyhood of it happening.

[loomer]

Apparently not then, if they're reacting to Yucca mountain so poorly. Ah well.

[Eternal_Freedom]

See, thats what I always say when some muppet says we shouldn't build nuke plants. Sadly, my former school was infested with the Brit political correctness, so everything had to be GREEN! or else.

I say build them nuke plants. I read in the paper the other day that they have approved construction of a new plant in Devon, and that the construction alone will provide 5,000 jobs for at least six years, and a further 900 full time for 60 years. And that's just for the site itself. Nuke plant building = good economy

I know it's not that simple and you can say that for any large construction project, but still

Also, has anyone considered the oft-heard argument "we'll build lots of off-shore wind farms" and how badly that could fuck up sealife, and shipping, and increase risks of collisions in fog and so on? Plus the sheer amount of space you need for a not very great power source

I'll concede that nuclear plants alone can't do everything, but they better than saying that wind farms can do everything, at least nuke plants have a reasonable chance of succeeding

[Zixinus]

I'll concede that nuclear plants alone can't do everything, but they better than saying that wind farms can do everything, at least nuke plants have a reasonable chance of succeeding

Windmills would be great in more remote areas as they can deliver electricity directly to where its needed. That is why I raise my eyebrow over building windmills on the sea. You still need to maintenance those fuckers and you still need to get the electricity out of them. Meaning cables under the sea, which is a pain in the ass.

Meanwhile, placing them in small patches between farmlands of BehindeLordiesBackVille will benefit (mostly) the village inhabitants and the government: the government doesn't have to build a grid over there (or doesn't have to hurry, unless mayor industry moves in) and people can take care of their own electricity.

I say build them nuke plants. I read in the paper the other day that they have approved construction of a new plant in Devon, and that the construction alone will provide 5,000 jobs for at least six years, and a further 900 full time for 60 years. And that's just for the site itself. Nuke plant building = good economy

Same here: a village near by father's home-village protested a nuclear waste dump being built. So they built it at another village further away. That village got a lot of money for renovations and other stuff from it, and we saw lots of houses being renovated as well as new roads and what looked like new buildings.

Meanwhile, the denizens of the original location got squat.

It pays to protest with far more than just your gut. Because for the weakness in the head, the body will suffer.

[CaptainChewbacca]

It really bugs me when someone looks at Yucca mountain and says 'You can't guarantee it will be safe for 100,000 years!'

News Flash: Our whole COUNTRY is only 235 years old. Would you be happy with 25,000 years, or 100 times longer than the United States has existed? Its like they plan on having a picnic in southern nevada for the next few dozen milennia.

[Tanasinn]

What I think it really boils down to is that these folks see how big the power pie is, and they definitely don't want to share a piece of that pie with an objectively superior competitor. So what do they do? Drum up hysteria, lie, throw out non-sequiturs, and fund well-meaning idiots. Like the coal guys.

[Zixinus]

On top of it all, they don't need 100 000 years. The waste can be processed or even turned into more fuel. So if it can last a 100 years, guranteed, that's enough.

[Crossroads Inc.]

It really bugs me when someone looks at Yucca mountain and says 'You can't guarantee it will be safe for 100,000 years!'

News Flash: Our whole COUNTRY is only 235 years old. Would you be happy with 25,000 years, or 100 times longer than the United States has existed? Its like they plan on having a picnic in southern nevada for the next few dozen milennia.

Is it funny what we tend to think about long term?

Humans and America at large have trouble thinking a year ahead of time... Oil troubles? Climate Change? Pollution? Deforestation? They can't bother to think about those. But Nuclear waste...

100,000 years!!!