Comments
CloudiusWhite t1_is77bii wrote
Nuclear waste is not the big baddie that people keep thinking it is. That said, even if it actually was, more investment and building of plants means more development into new more efficient tech, meaning less waste over time. Every problem with nuclear can be solved through technological progression.
blastuponsometerries t1_is7984l wrote
The problem with nuclear now is less technological, but startup costs and time.
You can spend 10 Billion for a decade and still need more time and money before its running. But then its good. We can just deploy solar/wind/batteries much faster and in smaller pieces, to save carbon immediately.
That said, we need a ton of power and we need to change with the speed and intensity of a Marshall plan. So it makes perfect sense to get 10-20% of world power from nuclear. That means we have to build a lot of it, right now.
But as governments drag their feet and pretend some new magic will save us in the future (not the working tech we already got right now), its doesn't make sense to invest limited budgets into it.
nuke621 t1_is7ffv7 wrote
I’d argue the biggest obstacle is will. We certainly ended up with a nuclear weapons arsenal that is much bigger then the power generation industy with all the waste products to boot. Sometime in the 1970s, the US lost the will to bet big. The moon landing and interstate highway system come to mind. We put our minds to it and did it. Problems came up and were addressed. You can’t start a huge project with all the reasons you can’t do it first.
LithiumTomato t1_is8efm8 wrote
The book Zero to One by Peter Theil talks about this. Really interesting read.
He makes the argument that the United States used to be a definite optimist country- the US looks positively on the future because it’s people plan, build, and achieve, despite risk of failure.
But now, he continues, the US is an indefinite optimist country. It has kept its optimism. But there’s no concrete planning or investment by many members of the US. In order to get something accomplished in the US, you must fight industry red tape, government intervention, and public criticism. So what do people do? Nothing. They spend. They eat, drink, and party.
When the expected public reaction to ideas is to try and destroy them before they even get off the ground, you create an environment that discourages creativity and persistence, which consequently leads to a less productive society.
blastuponsometerries t1_is7k3lv wrote
>I’d argue the biggest obstacle is will.
And who's will specifically? Why do we allow those who benefit massively from the status quo to stymie any change or progress?
​
>We certainly ended up with a nuclear weapons arsenal that is much bigger then the power generation industy with all the waste products to boot. ... The moon landing and interstate highway system come to mind.
All of those were in the interests of the powerful. Luckily most coincided with the interests of the people as well. Nuclear weapons both protected the country as well as allowed it to have massive leverage over others. The moon landing was invested in out of fear of loss to communism, not some noble good. But the science that came along was a nice bonus.
Coincidentally the interstate highway system just so happened to result in the final dismantling of the US passenger train network. So cars went from a luxury to mandatory for participation in the US economy. Great for oil interests.
​
>Sometime in the 1970s, the US lost the will to bet big.
After the whole generation was locked into car culture and the banks got stuffed with middle eastern oil money (foreign money in US banks did not have to fall under US financial regulations).
Suddenly the extremely wealthy interests had sidestepped the US controls that had helped the US dominate in world growth since the great depression. Then using this power to outsource jobs from the US to undermine the accumulated power of the American middle class and employees.
A decade later, enough power and wealth had been concentrated to go after the tax base of the country and dramatically centralize economic power. The power of the American voter shrunk proportionally. Its no mystery why popular reforms and investments are seemingly impossible, yet unpopular changes sail through nearly unopposed.
Its not some magic that caused the US to lose its ability for large investments in the 1970s. It was an intentional strategy to concentrating power in a way that no longer required projects to benefit multiple economic classes. Instead only serving the interests of the same small group of wealthy billionaires.
iiioiia t1_is81p8s wrote
> Why do we allow those who benefit massively from the status quo to stymie any change or progress?
Democracy. The current governance of the country is literally The Will of The People.
And in case you're the type to criticize it, first realize: it is literally our most sacred institution (as seen on TV - over, and over, and over).
gandzas t1_is86ji7 wrote
I think you missed the rest of his post.
iiioiia t1_is8g92y wrote
Oh I read it, and agree with it.
What is happening in the US is very much not the will of the people, it is extremely sophisticated theatre.
blastuponsometerries t1_isb65da wrote
Just a few basic things we have to do. Deeper changes come from questioning how on earth people still think the senate is a reasonable institution after increasing the number of states by 5x. Many of which have minuscule populations. Of course the Senate is the only body that can approve Supreme Court appointments. How convenient
In general the US population gets most things right over time.
But our current system is designed to constrain the will of the people at many key points. Then the people can be blamed for failures even as the people are basically ignored.
Nearly all our problems can be fixed by more democracy and giving the people a greater influence.
- Removing money and bribes from political elections
- Ranked choice to remove the 2 party duopoly
- Anti-gerrymandering protections and 2 winner districts to reduce polarization
Just a few basic things we have to do. Deeper changes come from questioning how on earth people still think the senate is a reasonable institution after increasing the number of states by 5x. Many of which have minuscule populations. Of course the Senate is the only body that can approve Supreme Court appointments. How convenient 🙄
iiioiia t1_isbf4ao wrote
> Just a few basic things we have to do. Deeper changes come from questioning how on earth people still think the senate is a reasonable institution. after increasing the number of states by 5x.
FTFY.
And regarding "how on earth people still think":
See also: https://ml4a.github.io/ml4a/how_neural_networks_are_trained/
> Of course the Senate is the only body that can approve Supreme Court appointments. How convenient.
The entire structure of the systems seems rather convenient. And archaic. And...some other things.
Nothing strategically planted heuristics can't paper over though!
> In general the US population gets most things right over time.
I suspect knowing this would require access to a counterfactual reality machine. No such machine is required to believe it though!
> Nearly all our problems can be fixed by more democracy and giving the people a greater influence.
Perhaps, but maybe only for very specific definitions of "nearly", "can", "fixed", "democracy", "giving", and "influence". People tend to have strong aversions to complexity/accuracy though, so maybe best avoid such styles of thinking - leave that up to The Experts, and of course, Democracy (our most sacred institution)!
I'm sure it will all work out in the end.
anotherjustlurking t1_is8ovdn wrote
I’d argue that it’s not will, it’s money. Speaking as an absolute idiot in all things nuclear, and with zero expertise in energy subjects of any sort, I’ll bet the legacy fossil fuel industry was a part of the effort to vilify nuclear, went to great lengths to gin up fear after some near-catastrophes and led the call for hyper regulation and greater “safety procedures” to hamper construction. I have absolutely no proof, have no documentation and zero evidence to support my outlandish claims, but it wouldn’t be the first time one mega industry sullied the reputation of another that it perceived as a threat. Follow the money. Oil, coal and natural gas would lose billions of dollars if nuclear power took off and replaced just a fraction of the fossil fuel industry’s death grip on America. Will power? Come on, man. It’s not like people were sitting around a table and sighing in frustration because nuclear SEEMED hard…”Godh, this seems really really hard…,” it BECAME hard, it was MADE difficult, it was over regulated and it’s dangers were hyped to ensure that it was hysterically feared. But that wasn’t by accident - that was by design. When there’s THAT much money to lose, things don’t happen by accident. No facts, actual documentation nor other legitimate technical or industry references were used in the development of this pessimistic, anti-capitalist screed. Any similarity to any well-articulated thesis, hypothesis or argument, living or dead is purely coincidental.*
CloudiusWhite t1_is7ak51 wrote
Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric are not really feasible means of space travel (panels are not efficient enough yet and we have never even built a solar wind styled craft. Im not sure we even could without fantasy technology for the sail), nuclear technology is a possibility though. We cannot just think of today and tommorrow, we have to look at things from a scale of 10 and 50 and 100 years from now.
avocadro t1_is802hu wrote
Why doesn't IKAROS count?
CloudiusWhite t1_is830mp wrote
IKAROS was a great step in testing the tech that we currently have, but that was a probe, an actual ship will require much more going on than we are currently ready for. Also IKAROS was designed with solar cells in the sail to power it, because it was essentially facing the sun and so that worked. If youre in a manned ship, youre not always heading towards the sun, so you would still need an alternative power source, if the solar can generate enough to power a manned vessel like it did the probe.
I think a solar sail would be a good secondary deployable mode of transport and possibly power from solar as well, maybe just to save power if theres no rush or something.
blastuponsometerries t1_is7i52h wrote
>Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric are not really feasible means of space travel
So what % of greenhouse gases are from space travel? Is that what you think we are trying to solve here? Just make everything solar for fun?
If you want to make chemical rockets "green" the propellant can be made from bio-fuels that don't add total CO2 to the atmosphere. But given that it is in the 1-2% range for the entire world, its pretty low on the priority list.
If you want to look at a 100 year timescale, green tech for the grid is inevitable. Its just so much cheaper to produce than fossil fuels. The next generation will look back in shock that we allowed our world politics to be dictated by such a messy and inefficient supply chain, all while obvious alternatives were available.
CloudiusWhite t1_is7lcv1 wrote
We have the power to work on both at once, denying one in the hope that magical fusion tech will just happen with the tiny amount of research being done today is just pointless and only holds up back in the greater scale.
Green is fine, but nuclear isnt the evil people make it out to be and we should be working on both of them.
ConfusedObserver0 t1_is8ukt2 wrote
Completely agree.
It’s expensive and takes a long time before that cost pays for its self. The pollution and cost to / lost life is lower than even green energy’s.
We can see the national security risk that petroleum is. We have cower to the petrol states ability to be nefarious and pull us by the balls. All of our worst foes come in the form of these states accept China (which is another thing altogether).
The faster we stop suckling from the black gold tit, the faster we extend the force of the liberal homogeny by muttering the worst actors power economically. The only down side is that areas like the Middle East will become even worse humanitarian crisis stricken when their cash cow sinks. The managing of that decline will be trying. None of these place are looking at the long term post fossil fuel world. And Russia will fade unless they get more resource rich when the permafrost opens up the attic.
notschneider t1_is8ouep wrote
If you haven’t, check out Small Module Reactors - by being much smaller they reduce a lot of the upfront costs
hO97366e6 t1_is8uvhz wrote
Yes, people always look to nuclear as some magic fix but ignore the fact that scaling up nuclear would take decades with huge up front costs and even then the power generated is not cost competitive with renewables today, let alone in decades when they start generating power.
We probably need some more nuclear capacity, and we'll probably need government incentives to make it financially viable for power companies to do it, but really 80-90% of our generation can be done pretty easily with renewables (including point of use generation) and an improved grid.
Dreadfulmanturtle t1_is90utk wrote
> we need to change with the speed and intensity of a Marshall plan
I'll up that and say we need it with speed and intensity of program Apollo
Jentleman2g t1_isadr07 wrote
There is a micro/modular reactor that just got approved by the US DoE for prototype testing. It's design is probably the best bet we have for striking a balance between nuclear power generation and costs. I would recommend looking up info on the project.
blastuponsometerries t1_isb6g87 wrote
Hopefully it works. We don't need 1 solution, we need 50 and to pursue them all aggressively.
Its ok if some ideas don't pan out, the cost of not getting at least some to succeed is basically everything.
marcusaurelius_phd t1_is9oxfo wrote
> e can just deploy solar/wind/batteries much faster and in smaller pieces, to save carbon immediately.
No we can't. There's absolutely no way we can build enough batteries. No way.
blastuponsometerries t1_isb3icc wrote
Actually batteries have come a very long way in just the past decade!
The really bad materials have been basically entirely phased out (cobalt/cadmium).
The main materials have all mature supply chains and batteries will use relatively little of them (compared to other uses, like construction). The main materials are iron/aluminum/manganese/carbon/silicon. All super easy.
Lithium was basically economically useless until recently. So its supply chain is very immature. But the material itself is extremely abundant and shortages are only in the near term.
Nickle is the final material that will be expensive and batteries will stress this supply chain. But they are only needed for the most dense applications (like high performance auto). But grid batteries and most commuter cars won't bother.
The economics of current gird batteries (compared to gas peaker plants) is amazing. The grid battery in southern Australia returned its investment costs in 6 months. That is an insane return for infrastructure.
The only reason its not the dominate form of grid management is because the whole supply chain and factories are taking some years to build. But that is just temporary. Its coming like a train.
marcusaurelius_phd t1_isb7c6z wrote
> Actually batteries have come a very long way in just the past decade
Still a couple orders of magnitude off.
blastuponsometerries t1_isbn6m9 wrote
~10 GWH of batteries were produced in 2010
~600 GWH of batteries will be produced this year. That is an order of magnitude in a little over a decade (with primarily venture back companies investing and less governments).
It will take ~10 TWH (transport) and ~20 TWH (grid), per year to transition to full renewable. So yes, 2 orders of magnitude off is about right.
Definitely within reach and cleaner non-renewables (like nuclear) can help bridge the gap sooner. But its coming. And that's just with the current generation of tech, if we think a decade or more into the future, additional material advancements can accelerate this further.
The best part is that batteries at the end of life are high grade ore. So recycling valuable materials will close the loop. After the transition, very little additional mining will be needed to maintain the world's battery supply. Unlike oil, which for generations has to be constantly replenished as the material nearly fully turns over every few months. So much waste.
marcusaurelius_phd t1_isbo7jx wrote
Now look at the amount of lithium and other materials required to produce those batteries. Compare and contrast with the material cost of nuclear plants -- hint: they're the lowest of any power generation amortized over lifetime. Incidentally, they require less CO₂-emitting concrete than windmills per Wh.
blastuponsometerries t1_isbsynv wrote
I am not arguing against Nuclear, its part of the solution. But only part.
Solar and wind can be built out much much faster. You can see that from the economics alone.
Nuclear requires government funding to make it feasible. Wind/solar are being built out currently in a major way with private investments. Sure gov incentives help, but are no longer mandatory. Private capital going towards wind/solar is a massive advantage in the fight on climate change because it bypasses political processes that oil money has stymied.
I would like more nuclear. But its simply not economic to do so. If we could get governments to move past inaction and invest in the future grid, sure it would come along. But in the meantime, significant nuclear will be nothing more than a nice idea.
marcusaurelius_phd t1_isbtfd7 wrote
> Solar and wind can be built out much much faster.
The necessary storage cannot, even accepting the overly optimistic prediction you posted earlier.
blastuponsometerries t1_isbv512 wrote
Batteries are economic for gird use right now. Its just production constrained. Just so happens capitalism is really good at solving that particular issue.
Nuclear is totally different. Massively expensive, high risk, and long time horizons. Something capitalism is bad at solving. Thus gov intervention is required to change the dynamic. This is borne out in the empirical reality of how private companies are currently investing.
Still grid storage can dramatically lag wind/solar for a few reasons:
- Wind/solar naturally complement each other (wind tends to produce more at night, when solar is offline)
- Existing hydro is easily retrofitted to be more on demand and act as grid storage (already currently happening)
- EVs are not picky about charging times and are easily setup to take advantage of low prices and reduce at times of high prices, helping to decouple generation and demand
- If we dramatically overproduce during the day, there are plenty of productive uses for basically free power, desalination is a great place to start
marcusaurelius_phd t1_isbzxzn wrote
> Batteries are economic for gird use right now. Its just production constrained. Just so happens capitalism is really good at solving that particular issue
You're just waving away a very obvious problem, and I don't understand how you can. Lithium production is constrained. Batteries cost money, that means energy, production capacity, and lithium as well as other stuff. On top of that, they don't improve à la Moore's law as you appear to believe. We gain a few % every year, not an order of magnitude every 5.
Currently, grid-level storage cover at best minutes, sometimes hours in very small areas. To cover windless, sunless periods, we need days, and indeed more like 2 weeks.
You say nuclear plants take too long to build, but there is no way we can produce enough batteries in 20 years, which is plenty of time to build reactors.
blastuponsometerries t1_isc2jdv wrote
>You're just waving away a very obvious problem, and I don't understand how you can. Lithium production is constrained.
So separate out discussing batteries and lithium.
Batteries are production constrained and require fairly significant capx into new factories to get. That has been happening in a major way for the past few years and is only accelerating. It will take many years of scaling to truly satisfy world demand, but that means a lot of money and investment (again already happening).
Lithium itself has a different dynamic.
Lithium is quite abundant and has been considered a waste product from other types of mining for quite a long time. That has now changed and will be solved in reasonably short order. No new tech is required and tons of reserves are already proven. Within 5 years the price should be reasonably stabilized.
Also, most of the battery mass are what I mentioned. Iron/Aluminum/Carbon/Silicon. People fixate on lithium because it is in the name of the battery, but its a relatively small part by mass. Its just not a serious problem outside of the next few years.
​
>Currently, grid-level storage cover at best minutes, sometimes hours in very small areas. To cover windless, sunless periods, we need days, and indeed more like 2 weeks.
The more solar you build, the more predictable it becomes. The solar panel on your house might change based on relative cloud cover, but solar over a whole region becomes quite predictable.
To make power reliable, you have to over build it. The current fossil fuel is overbuilt. So you would need more solar than for you average day. Also major appliances (like EVs) will become more responsive to changing grid prices. Demand will become more elastic.
​
>You say nuclear plants take too long to build, but there is no way we can produce enough batteries in 20 years, which is plenty of time to build reactors.
Plenty of time. Now someone actually has to put up the money.
Its already happening in renewables, hopefully government or capital desires to actually invest in nuclear. In the meantime, nuclear is standing still and will waste out another decade.
Xjsar t1_is7oecm wrote
Nuclear waste management is already here man, I saw an article not too long ago about a scientist developed a system to use lasers to reduce the half-life of the spent fuel rods, while others were working on recycling and reusing the nuclear material as new rods.
The actual amount of waste can fit inside of a football field, and of that only a small percentage is the really bad waste. The vast majority of it can be recycled and with the laser tech (once fully developed), reduce its effects to something far manageable.
CloudiusWhite t1_is7oqkv wrote
That was my point, its not an issue we have no solutions for, and it only gets better as we grow those technologies. Honestly I tend to consider people thinking nuclear waste is some big problem are people who haven't actually looked into nuclear technology and are just parroting things they heard.
PAXICHEN t1_is9jyfk wrote
From what I have read…it’s not so much the spent fuel (which can be reprocessed but it’s really expensive) but the radioactive fittings and stuff that you need to deal with when decommissioning a plant. The spent fuel takes up a really small volume.
Sumsar01 t1_is9ljjp wrote
Its still not a big problem. You can just store them in the ground. There already exist natural underground nuclear engines and we can always place it away from ground water if that worries people.
8Splendiferous8 t1_is980i6 wrote
I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just genuinely not sure. To me, it just doesn't seem like the slam dunk option that people often present it to be. I do recognize the best of the evils argument, I guess. But it doesn't seem consequence-free.
Would you be able to quantify, "not the big baddie that people keep thinking it is." How bad is it, and how bad would it be if scaled up to meet all our energy needs? I've never gotten a straight answer on that. Radioactive decay lasts an extremely long time, and nuclear power mishaps don't not happen. How can we be sure our plants are resistant against natural disaster (like Fukushima,) especially as natural disasters are predicted to increase in spate and severity? How can we be sure they won't be susceptible to accidental leaks (like San Onofre?)
As for your second point, you're assuming integration into the capitalist system by way of investors automatically implies the best results to humanity. Environmental sustainability is a goal for investors/private companies unless and until it interferes with the bottom line. Then it's a nice-to-have. Call me a cynic, but I type this from a phone with a lithium ion battery which, if designed as intended, should end up in a landfill right around when the next galaxy comes along. I suspect that advances in radioactive waste safety will improve until it's cheaper/easier to dispose of waste in the way that's worse for the environment (which after some point, it always is.)
Sumsar01 t1_is9m86f wrote
Physicist here. Fukushima is the second worst nuclear plant disaster ever and its result is so minisucule that we cant measure any adverse results on environment or population.
There also already exist nuclear engines underground naturally, so its already unavoidable to have nuclear waste there.
8Splendiferous8 t1_ise1vn9 wrote
I'm also a sorta physicist (if you consider a physics masters student a physicist.) That could be due to difficulty in isolating variables. But assuming it's true, would it continue to be safe if we assumed occasional nuclear disasters every few years if we scaled up during an era of more frequent natural disasters?
Sumsar01 t1_isfc695 wrote
Nuclear power is currently the second safest energy scource based on death per joule. Caol kills about 15 times as many people every years as nuclear has done ever. Which thus leaves a pretty big margin to what we deem acceptable.
Nuclear disasters are pretty rare. There is chernobyl which was many mismanagement but besides that what happened was a explosion of the 300+ degrees hot steam. In never nuclear plant designs the water is emptied out if power is cut and thus such a thing could not happen.
Then we have fukushima. Besides it maybe not being to smart building a nuclear powerplant in the most active earthquake zone might not be to smart. Currently total death from radiation is 0 and no increase in cancer has been measured.
The leak of radioactive waste has also been deemed harmless. Probably mainly because water is pretty good at absorbing radiation, so it doesnt matter much to the fish.
8Splendiferous8 t1_isfdacu wrote
This is very informative. Thank you for taking the time to explain it.
Sumsar01 t1_isfgcz8 wrote
There is probably plenty of more details but i would have to provide real data and lecture notes. But what I can say is that all my nuclear physics professors where huge proponents for nuclear power and talked a lot about it in both the nuclear physics courses l took.
8Splendiferous8 t1_isfivgk wrote
Same with mine. Just it was uncomfortable to ask certain genuine questions I didn't know the answer to, lest I be treated like I have a tinfoil hat. Nuclear was one of my least favorite subjects, so there were other more pressing questions to focus on for the exam.
Sumsar01 t1_isfj3ji wrote
Well nuclear physics is kind of a everything goes meeting put because we cant efficiently compute QCD, so it is pretty wild.
8Splendiferous8 t1_isfjmoo wrote
Yeah. It was a lot of, "Okay, we don't have any first principles for you, but here's the function that seems to be describing what's going on. Just memorize it." And there were so many patterns, and patterns of patterns to memorize. And it just wasn't fun or interesting to me at all, haha.
Sumsar01 t1_isfotxx wrote
I read the russian lecture book for the exams of the seconds course. I like my books with a bit more math and a bit less hand wavy, but it helped a lot.
The first course was a mess.
8Splendiferous8 t1_isfvez6 wrote
Yeah, I only took a single survey course and still hated it. I'll stick to E+M and quantum...those are more straightforward.
Hohumbumdum t1_isffihl wrote
Sounds like BS. How can we not measure any adverse results. The popular understanding is that immense amount of radioactive waste was dumped directly into the Pacific. Is that not the case?
Sumsar01 t1_isfhpgw wrote
Its the case a nuclear material was dunped into the pacific, and you can measure that and right after there was a lot of fear mongering about it.
However the emperical evidence does not seem to show that it is as bad as one might think. From "the environmental impact of the fukushima nuclear power plant disaster" paper: despite the significant increase in ceasium isotope levels in the water, their risk is below thode generally considered harmfull to Marine animals and human consumers.
The same goes for the japanese population, there has not been found an increase in the cancer rate after the incident. (At least last i checked) Thise who died mostly died from being moved and not from the actual incident.
Hohumbumdum t1_isfil89 wrote
I’m all for nuclear power, but this sounds like absolute nonsense.
Sumsar01 t1_isfixsa wrote
Well I cited a stanford paper. You can also go look what they the research groups monitoring the situation say.
Jentleman2g t1_isada32 wrote
I'm going to refrain from turning to debate on this subject because kids take alot of energy that I just don't have atm. Go look up Kyle Hills videos on nuclear history as well as the potential future. There's also a video or two by Kurzgezagt.
8Splendiferous8 t1_isdt36c wrote
There are less condescending ways to speak to people. I'm getting an MSc in physics. My PI is a computational nuclear physicist. He collaborates with Lawrence Livermore National Lab. And no one I've asked has addressed these points whenever I ask them beyond "lesser of two evils." Which if it is, then I'm willing to accept it. But things are still designed by fallible humans. Nuclear mistakes can't happen anywhere close to as frequently as oil spills do. And cleanup can't be as shoddy as what we see from oil companies (spreading chemical coagulant to sink massive blankets of oil onto the ocean floor, for instance.) And no one seems to have projections.
Also, if you're under the impression that this whole capitalism thing is good for public safety, boy do I have some pipelines, plumbing systems, pollution standards, global policies, safe contamination levels, and Healthcare systems for you, friend.
Jentleman2g t1_isetxo1 wrote
I do apologize if that came off as condescending, my intent was far from it.
anotherjustlurking t1_is8macp wrote
I’m not sure tech can solve the problem of a 24,000 year half life problem of Plutonium 239. That’s more of a physics thingy.
CloudiusWhite t1_is8ngx2 wrote
You don't see how technology and innovation can deal with problems currently out of our reach? Really? Technology means more efficient reactors, possibly different fuels, better storage and other things that are involved with nuclear technology. They are already working on ways to reduce the half life of waste materials as well as repurpose those waste materials to be used in other reactors. The more nuclear gets invested into it the better it will get, its plain and simple and the entirety of human technological advancement over our history shows that.
anotherjustlurking t1_itqmv42 wrote
I think the abundant fossil fuels led to advancement, but without coal, oil and nat gas, very few innovations are possible. Steel, silicon wafers, ICE tech - all BECAUSE we had cheap fuels, not because we had technology. There have been innovations, but if you were dealing with wood chips for fuel, most of what we have today is not possible.
Zvenigora t1_is8xi2e wrote
Pu-239 should be burned up for energy, not stored. Newer reactor designs try to do this. Cs-137 is a bit more of an issue.
8Splendiferous8 t1_is9831s wrote
I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just genuinely not sure. To me, it just doesn't seem like the slam dunk option that people often present it to be. I do recognize the best of the evils argument, I guess. But it doesn't seem consequence-free.
Would you be able to quantify, "not the big baddie that people keep thinking it is." How bad is it, and how bad would it be if scaled up to meet all our energy needs? I've never gotten a straight answer on that. Radioactive decay lasts an extremely long time, and nuclear power mishaps don't not happen. How can we be sure our plants are resistant against natural disaster (like Fukushima,) especially as natural disasters are predicted to increase in spate and severity? How can we be sure they won't be susceptible to accidental leaks (like San Onofre?)
As for your second point, you're assuming integration into the capitalist system by way of investors automatically implies the best results to humanity. Environmental sustainability is a goal for investors/private companies unless and until it interferes with the bottom line. Then it's a nice-to-have. Call me a cynic, but I type this from a phone with a lithium ion battery which, if designed as intended, should cease to work right around when the next galaxy comes along. I suspect that advances in radioactive waste safety will improve until it's cheaper/easier to dispose of waste in the way that's worse for the environment (which after some point, it always is) if we continue to leave our energy demands to the private sector.
MuelDaddyLongLegs t1_is91ool wrote
Haven’t we made enough deep holes in the ground to easily bury it safely in many locations and never care?
CloudiusWhite t1_is92qjx wrote
We could arguably, there's even a company which wants to make that their business model, nuclear waste disposal by drilling super deep holes about 18 inches in diameter and sending the waste to the deep. That said, we are working on methods of reducing halflife, and making fuel for other reactors with the waste that other plants make.
Hell I mean once we are in space, we are most likely going to be shooting our nuclear waste off into the surface of the sun.
Sinowhino t1_is9710p wrote
Why do we get rid of it anyway?
Why can't we use the depleted rods and enrich 10 depleted into 1 new rod infinitely.
CloudiusWhite t1_is97huj wrote
We are working on doing things just like that actually! Not exactly that, but using waste as fuel for more advanced reactors is something thats being worked on.
jonbest66 t1_is7p1gv wrote
Perfect, we have a volunteer, from now on we will store all radioactive waste under your house. Appreciate your courage mate:)
CloudiusWhite t1_is7ps8n wrote
Thanks for your valuable contribution to the discussion.
jonbest66 t1_is7rleb wrote
Your welcome mate and if i am allowed to say your contribution was also very valuable," you know bruh we need more...eh...technology and with more technology we will beat nature and all laws that constitute our reality....yeah just more technology bruh", just AMAZING mate. Liberalism is truly a mental disease.
CloudiusWhite t1_is7ti5l wrote
> Liberalism is truly a mental disease.
Resorting to political garbage just makes you look childish, in case it matters to you at all. Would you like to actually join the discussion or are you just trolling?
jonbest66 t1_is7umhe wrote
What discussion? You are totally delusional mate and besides that this is reddit, put the stick out of our ass and have some fun god damn.
VitriolicViolet t1_is85k8c wrote
>Liberalism is truly a mental disease.
lol, considering its about a hairs breadth apart from conservatism.
you do realise 'liberalism' is a right wing ideology?
Shadow_CZ t1_is7qcm5 wrote
You know I actually would have zero problems with it. As long as my location fulfils the criteria for storage.
VitriolicViolet t1_is85eca wrote
id be fine with it as im actually educated on how it works.
for one radiation is either dangerous or lasts for 10,000 years never both. due to how decay works the most dangerous half lives are in seconds minutes and hours, by the time you are hitting 2 hundred years its not much worse then background radiation.
next pyro-processing allows for recycling a good percentage of that total waste and does so by removing the shorter more dangerous half lives to re-use as fuel.
finally coal alone has released more radiation then all nuclear reactors, weapons, tests and accidents combined.
anyone who is afraid of nuclear but not oil or coal isn't rational enough to be part of the discussion.
i love that environmentalists are so ideological they chose to hurt the environment over using nuclear .
FaeTaleDream t1_is78wej wrote
Yes nuclear waste is a big deal You can have multiple oil disasters and we can clean it up, cities will still be livable.
All it takes is one time, just one time for radiation to seep into underground water from whatever source, not properly contained sources, earthquakes, war (such as ukraine which proves it's always a possibility). Technology will never take away all chance of risk of our current nuclear energy there is always a way it can go wrong.
And the whole point is if it does go wrong now you've just doomed how many hundreds of miles to a nuclear wasteland. It's not worth the risk. Fusion if I recall and was not lied to is safe but until Fusion becomes a thing we shouldn't use Nuclear and certainly shouldn't promote it's use in developing countries that are cutting corners.
DrarenThiralas t1_is7bpyt wrote
It is absolutely worth the risk. You can do the math on it, and find that statistically, oil kills a lot more people per kWh than nuclear, even when counting the nuclear accidents. Just because it kills by slowly poisoning the environment, and not with extremely rare but flashy meltdowns, doesn't mean that it's any safer. And that is without even going into the fact that modern reactors have gotten a lot safer over the last couple decades, and Chernobyl-style meltdowns aren't even remotely likely anymore - but even if they were, nuclear would still be safer than fossil fuels.
FaeTaleDream t1_is7cb0u wrote
That is such a bad faith argument.
Of course oil kills more we use it more and used it more and are more careless with it.
The data doesn't exist on this because we've only had one "major" nuclear disaster.
So you can't use data to math this out. You use logic, you know what it does, you know the effects radiation has, you know how hard it is to clean that's what matters.
NotACockroach t1_is7eqz0 wrote
The deaths statistic is power kWh so it's not significantly biased by the amount used.
I get what you're saying about the one big nuclear disaster, one more disaster would effectively double those numbers. However in that regard nuclear power is a victim of its own success. It's not some niche power source, it's been producing ~10% of the world's power for decades so it's not a question of small sample size. I think it's a bit silly to suggest that the lack of disasters is evidence of it's danger when it's been used so much.
FaeTaleDream t1_is7fsd6 wrote
No one is looking at the prospect of say that Ukrainian reactor melting down from Russia sabotage the same as oil spills.
And again it's not about numbers, you can say one disaster would double it, that's not the issue, the issue is that's it. it's done, you can't fix nuclear fallout.
Imagine if enough contamination got into the ground water around New York. What then? It's not just "oh the numbers are going to increase" no it's your done. That's it.
Planes are safer statically than cars but if you put half the worlds population on a plane and said planes almost never crash so it's fine. That's not a good bet.
NotACockroach t1_is7i2uu wrote
I don't think your listing plausible disasters for nuclear disasters. How would a nuclear power plant contaminate the new york water supply? On the other hand I can think of a different source of energy that has contaminated the water supply in real life. Nobody is cleaning the air pollution that's responsible for so many deaths worldwide out of fossil exhausts either, and that's another worldwide disaster that's already happening and responsible for so many deaths.
It seems like a number of your "it's over, that's it" scenarios that you speculate could happen for nuclear have already happened because of fossil fuels.
Not to mention global warming, you'd need a lot of meltdowns to get anywhere near the kind of long term damage that's going to do to us.
FaeTaleDream t1_is7ir1k wrote
The reason I said underground water is because that isn't set in stone, ironically.
Fault lines happen, drilling happens, erosion happens. And this isn't taking into account air currents if it goes that way, or if misplaced waste just sits in an area. I wonder how much was dumped in the ocean honestly.
Talking about the disaster that's already happening to justify turning the other way for the potential world ending disaster of radiation is just as bad as when they did the same for Oil, Lead, Coal etc.
NotACockroach t1_is7ljlw wrote
Speaking of bad faith arguments, we're in a thread discussing the safety and deaths and disasters of different energy sources, and when you I do exactly that you tell me I'm justifying turning the other way from world ending disasters. I'm not here telling you that you think global warming is ok because your concerned about nuclear. It must be possible to discuss the comparative risks of energy sources without trying to twist each other's words to have a go at each other.
Unless we go without energy it has to come from somewhere. If not generating energy is not an option, then the risks and harms of the alternative energy sources is relevant to any discussion of the risks and harms of nuclear.
VitriolicViolet t1_is865l9 wrote
>No one is looking at the prospect of say that Ukrainian reactor melting down from Russia sabotage the same as oil spills.
because they are not rational.
humans are fucking horrid at accurate risk assessment: more people fear planes then cars, more people fear terrorists then police, more people fear weed then alcohol, more people fear the China then the US.
in all 4 cases the one people fear is less deadly then the other but more psychologically impactful.
we have little to no ability to actually gauge risk, its why you look at statistics not peoples feelings.
Keepersofthearcane t1_is7e6zp wrote
This is such a bad faith argument.
There has only been one major nuclear disaster because you can engineer your way out of releasing nuclear waste into the environment, not because we dont use enough nuclear. Nuclear is the only form of power generation with enough capacity where you can contain the pollution. Solar, wind, natural gas, oil, coal(or the production of) all pollute the enviroment in normal operation. Nice try though.
brobeanzhitler t1_is7f7aa wrote
Two.. but the second involved large-scale engineering to contain it, along with world-wide cooperation and fact sharing which was notably absent from the first incident
Keepersofthearcane t1_is7lolc wrote
Ya I just repeating what the person said that I was commenting on. Your correct, there have been 2. There has also been breaches of nuclear waste containment(Washington State is the only one I know of but there could be more). Again, all these things can be mitigated with proper funding, engineering and oversight.
DrarenThiralas t1_is9ktpz wrote
This argument would work, in a world where the deaths caused by oil didn't amount to, by the most conservative estimate, 38 Chernobyl disasters every year. Even if we built 7 times more nuclear plants (which is how many we would need to cover the energy currently generated by oil), do you think that would result in over 38 Chernobyl-style disasters per year? And that's just oil - coal is even deadlier than that.
FaeTaleDream t1_is9m2p7 wrote
How do so many of you people not understand those comparisons make zero sense, you WANT this to be the case.
DrarenThiralas t1_is9p3bg wrote
This comparison is based on reliable data - the data about the deaths caused by oil-based energy, and the data about the death toll of the Chernobyl disaster. It shows that, while you can certainly question the available data on the frequency with which nuclear disasters occur, that data would have to be off by a factor of more than a hundred before it would indicate the opposite conclusion. If that was the case, we would expect to see 2-3 Chernobyl-scale events every year with the amount of nuclear plants we have right now. It is technically possible that we've just been insanely lucky for the past 50+ years, but that's not really a possibility worthy of serious consideration.
FaeTaleDream t1_is9rnce wrote
YEA you can certainly question it because it's bullshit. Here is the actual comparison you guys are giving.
World ending asteroids rarely ever hit the planet, so they are actually safer than fossil fuels cause less people have died to them.
THAT is the data legalism bullshit you people keep telling me.
Your data is ether wrong, politically driven and or probably done by companies who have their hands in the energy sector.
We can have multiple oil spills and disasters with fossil fuels all of that is fixable, you arn't playing with fire with radiation because burns heal. How is this hard to understand Chernobyl is SMALL compared to the Reactors we have now, what France has like a hundred of them too. Imagine if a World War actually happened.
We wouldn't need nukes to fuck the planet because our energy would do that for us once it starts getting targeted with strikes.
DrarenThiralas t1_is9sknw wrote
> World ending asteroids rarely ever hit the planet, so they are actually safer than fossil fuels cause less people have died to them.
> THAT is the data legalism bullshit you people keep telling me.
That is not what I'm saying.
To keep going with your analogy, we are in a situation where an asteroid (actually two, for Chernobyl and Fukushima) has already hit the planet, and we have calculated how many people have died as a result of the impact. That calculation shows that oil use kills as many people as 38 asteroid impacts a year would.
Now, the probability of an asteroid impact is difficult to estimate, but we can say for certain that it's absolutely nowhere near 38 world-ending asteroids a year. This allows us to conclude that asteroid impacts are indeed safer than fossil fuels, even without knowing the precise frequency with which they occur.
Again, it's possible that the data we have is off by a factor of 2 or 3 or so, but it's not possible that nuclear disasters on the scale of Chernobyl actually occur every couple of months, and we have somehow failed to notice for 50+ years.
FaeTaleDream t1_is9utgu wrote
Ukraine is definitive proof that as long as conflict is a possibility, nuclear reactors aren't safe because they will always be targets. And all those safety measures aren't guaranteed against direct attack or sabotage.
It doesn't have to occur constantly just once in one thousand years in a worse enough way is all it takes to make a country unlivable. That isn't worth the risk, no data represents this. It's common sense.
But common sense flies out the window when political and social narratives go against it.
DrarenThiralas t1_isa310b wrote
Keep in mind that there has, of yet, been no actual nuclear incidents connected with the Ukraine war, only threats. Just like with nuclear weapons, nobody wants to open the Pandora's box of turning nuclear plants into military targets, because that may very well backfire on them. Russia has its own nuclear plants that it doesn't want to see sabotaged either. This doesn't mean it won't happen, of course, but the risk is much lower than you present it to be.
Besides, in a thousand years it is very likely that we will have much better technology for containing and cleaning up radioactive fallout than we do now - and what we have now is already miles ahead of what we had during Chernobyl, as was made apparent during the Fukushima incident.
CloudiusWhite t1_is7cn2b wrote
> And the whole point is if it does go wrong now you've just doomed how many hundreds of miles to a nuclear wasteland.
Chernobyl didnt result in this except for short term. People literally tour all but the very worst of remaining hotspots. The fact is all the problems and disasters we have had happen in history have been the result of human failure to remain vigilant. Back in the day, we could somewhat forgive this because we didnt know what we do now, but today we should be far more strict in nuclear plant operations and not have things like that even occur. Its called stop trying to push the boundaries with the production model and take the testing to the lab where it belongs.
Nuclear is also going to be key for our future development off world, to sit there and pretend otherwise is foolish. I won't even regard the argument of fusion because it isnt possible yet, and until it is its no more real than Jesus coming back and just snapping his fingers and giving everyone magical powered batteries. and even then fusion research will only increase as nuclear fission tech is researched.
Living in fear of some possibility is the same as never going outside because that sunlight could be the little bit which creates cancer in you and kills you.
FaeTaleDream t1_is7g0ab wrote
The city is unlivable.....
You people can not be comparing the sun to possible radiation contamination.
CloudiusWhite t1_is7h8z5 wrote
Stalkers literally live there and people have lived in the exclusion zone since the 90s and are alive and old as fuck. I know three such people who before the war lived there more often than outside of the zone personally, two of them were going to take me exploring there when I did my trip across the pond.
FaeTaleDream t1_is7i0iw wrote
And people can live on top an active volcano, that doesn't make it livable for a nation.
CloudiusWhite t1_is7lgzf wrote
The thousands or possibly millions of people living on islands across the planet with active volcanos being what formed them would disagree, but okay.
VitriolicViolet t1_is871yt wrote
dont bother, most people hear nuclear and think of the simpsons or the intentionally misleading propaganda show, Chernobyl.
what i find funny is nuclear is the lowest profit option of all power generation, taking 10+ years for ROI (even if you build them in 6 years its takes a decade to make money) and somehow it is the 'evil' form of power generation.
its almost like renewables were chosen, not because they were better, because they are just as profitable as fossil fuels (if we went 100% nuclear the energy industry would lose more then half its profits)
VitriolicViolet t1_is86i5i wrote
some people have done enough chemistry and physics to know how radiation works and thus do not fear it.
Coal has killed more people via radiation than all nuclear technologies and accidents combined.
once waste hits 100+ years old its comparable to getting an x-ray ffs.
anti-nuclear activists have harmed the environment as much as fossil fuels lobbyists have, hell they teamed up in the 90s to kill nuclear.
FaeTaleDream t1_is8qnrs wrote
Bad faith argument ignoring reality.
NathanTPS t1_is7c7nt wrote
But like I stated before, nuclear waste isn't always going to be the outcome of nuclear energy. We are steadily moving away from hot waste and modern techniques are considerably cleaner. Not perfect, but a resounding improvement. And if we ever get to cold fusion then there will no longer be nuclear waste or mining issues for that matter.
FaeTaleDream t1_is7ge1z wrote
And Fusion is good, not the Nuclear we have now. I feel like people who advocate for Nuclear don't understand those are two very different things.
So because of politics they get wrapped up together when they should be seperate.
We have Hydro, Solar, Air, we can use those with Oil and Gas until Fusion is figured out.
Makes no sense to risk the world by putting hundreds of Nuclear Reactors everywhere.
palland0 t1_is7ywx5 wrote
We currently do not have the technology to provide a baseline for energy without nuclear or fossil. Hydro cannot grow, while solar and air depend on weather/time of day. There are risks with nuclear, but they're not as dramatic as what you seem to think.
VitriolicViolet t1_is85m6v wrote
>for one radiation is either dangerous or lasts for 10,000 years never both. due to how decay works the most dangerous half lives are in seconds minutes and hours, by the time you are hitting 2 hundred years its not much worse then background radiation.
>
>next pyro-processing allows for recycling a good percentage of that total waste and does so by removing the shorter more dangerous half lives to re-use as fuel.
>
>finally coal alone has released more radiation then all nuclear reactors, weapons, tests and accidents combined.
>
>anyone who is afraid of nuclear but not oil or coal isn't rational enough to be part of the discussion.
>
>i love that environmentalists are so ideological they chose to hurt the environment over using nuclear .
>
>all accidents combined have killed less people and released less radiation than coal so what are you afraid of exactly?
Sketti_n_butter t1_is8hdbu wrote
Why is everyone so obsessed with fusion 😂. There has not been a single nuclear accident in America that caused injury to the public. Not a single time. Why do we need to chase the unicorn when we already have a viable and safe option.
NathanTPS t1_is8n1jg wrote
Look into three mile island.
Also saying we haven't had any accidents isn't really a great reason. We also hardly have any nuclear power plants left. The US hasn't built a new power plant in like 40+ years. There are plenty of conventional power plants that cause work place injuries every year, of we had the same number of nuclear power plants as those, thered be no doubt that we'd have issues. And all it takes is one 3 mile island, one chyrnople, one Fukushima, and the public will be against fission again.
Fusion is the holy grail of nuclear energy. It uses light elements to create power so there aren't heavy radioactive isotope byproducts. Plus fusion is considerably more powerful, aka energy efficient compared to fission.
Fusion is clean nuclear energy while Fission is dirty nuclear energy.
We can create Fusion bombs, but that's hot Fusion, meaning we have to use a fission bomb to jump start the process, making the detonation dirty.
Nuclear reactors don't work like bombs, so we can't just nuke a Fusion reactor into existence.
Jumpstarting a Fusion reactor without a hot detonation is the holy grail of limitless clean energy-cold Fusion. And is why everyone is so "obsessed" over it.
Sketti_n_butter t1_is8ppde wrote
>Look into three mile island.
Three mile island did not cause a single injury to the public. The reactor broke. Yes. But it was contained. Everyone in the community was safe.
NathanTPS t1_is8ur2d wrote
Just think about that for a second. The reactor didn't merely "break" that makes it sound like a simple mechanical failure in your car. When a reactor fails you have as good a likelihood of severe disaster as you do containment. And the containment of three mile island wasn't really containment, they just managed to stop the meltdown from going critical. Radioactive smoke still spewed into the air, even if there wasn't a chrynople style explosion with the meltdown or a Fukushima melt through the floor and into the ocean. Either was entirely possible, and it's less that the incident happened in the "good ol' US of A" than it was fortunate luck.
My main point was that if we ended up opening enough ractors to meet our current and future energy needs, eventually, sooner than later, we would have reactor meltdowns, and some would be like Fukushima and some would be like chrynople, and yes, some would be like three mile island.
Point is, we don't want that old 40 year technology running our reactors. As has been mentioned, there are way safer reactor designs now than what we are using ones that contribute far less waste. There is still was, but it is fractions upon fractions of what the current in use reactors produce.
zowie54 t1_is9czpd wrote
Sorry, but treating either of those situations like inevitable problems is not accurate or useful. Look at the US Navy's track record. There are 15 reactors in Pearl Harbor that no one bats an eye about, but if you suggest swapping nuclear for Oahu's fossil fuel based power generation, the public would lose their minds. People need to remember that nuclear isn't the villain
Sketti_n_butter t1_is9juhc wrote
The technology is mature. That means the bugs have been worked out. Nuclear is the the safest technology on earth when you look at deaths per megawatt hour either in the industry or from the public. Hell, coal plant put out more radiation that nuclear plants. Literally the safest technology on earth and anyone who says otherwise hasn't read the data.
ExileFrontier t1_is9mlyv wrote
The navy has 160 nuclear reactors and a lot of them run off that 40 year old technology. Yet the navy has not had a nuclear accident in the roughly 70 years it's nuclear program has been alive.
jbr945 t1_is8s6q0 wrote
There's a lot of myths to unpack there. First, the USA is completing 2 new reactors in Georgia. As for accidents, the current fleet is run very well, and newer designs like the AP1000 design in Georgia are dramatically safer.
As for fusion being "the holy grail" not so much really for a few reasons: 1. Fission is so much easier to accomplish with the benefits of a clean waste stream, 2. As for efficiency, it depends on what aspect. For net energy return on energy investment, we shall see when the ITER project is completed in France, and conversion that depends on how much of that heat can be converted to electric energy. 3. The waste stream of fission is an easy to manage problem, especially relative to fossil fuels (zero management). 4. Gen 3 and 4 reactors take on the emergency cooling issues very well, and especially the scaling factor of the new reactors from Nuscale offer a repeatability to make a faster mass scale deployment.
So fission may not be perfect but fuels with far less energy density have made energy revolutions before (coal). Fusion just may end up needing a support network of fission reactors in order to make it cleaner from end to end, and if you're at that point then why add the extra layer of complexity with fusion? To me, fusion is a distraction from an already vastly superior fission reactors we can build now.
[deleted] t1_is8u69t wrote
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NathanTPS t1_is8v3dw wrote
Um, I was directly answering the question asked "why is everyone so hung up over fusion anyway? What's so great about fusion?" I understand that most know why fusion is so great, I wasn't spouting the obvious just for my chuckles, a question was asked, I gave a reply
Theoreocow t1_is7vz8m wrote
We can put nuclear waste into a thorium salt reactor. The initial costs and contruction times of reactors is the big hindrance but in terms of paying for itself, it always does. And it has the least amount of deaths per killiwatt hour of any energy source.
NathanTPS t1_is8exwx wrote
Yes, I have seen the idea and think it's one of the ways we can mitigate nuclear waste and is why I'd rather side with nuclear at this point. Nuclear is cleaner than people realize amd through innovation will become cleaner still. It should be the horse we ride
thecatismarmite t1_is9gt1z wrote
Fission energy and cold fusion are totally unrelated.
Fission is a mature technology which produces difficult to handle waste products, although as others have highlighted certain reactor designs could use these as fuel.
Cold fusion is pure science fiction. It has as much plausibility as a star trek warp drive.
zowie54 t1_is9cixs wrote
Cold fusion is not really as game-changing an improvement over fission anyways, tbh.
marcusaurelius_phd t1_is9oviy wrote
> While both have long lasting impacts in their waste products
The impact of nuclear waste products is completely overblown. Consider: the whole waste of 50 year of French nuclear production fits in one (1) warehouse. It's not going anywhere, it's not going to leak, it's nicely packaged and, more importantly from an ethical point of view: it's only a burden to the user who benefitted from it.
Compare and contrast with fossil fuels, whose waste is a burden to everyone, including those who never got any benefit from them.
Wild_Sun_1223 t1_itnbsx7 wrote
Or hot fusion - hot fusion is quite likely with sufficient further development. If we collapse as a civilization that won't happen of course.
Nuclear needs to be on the table. It needs to be treated with due diligence, of course, but so does everything else. That's not reason to keep it categorically off the table. It is funny because if you asked me this 16 years ago I would have been talking a lot of raving anti-nuke nonsense.
NathanTPS t1_itnc75i wrote
The problem woth hot fusion is that it's not clean energy. Hot fusion required a fusion reaction to Jumpstart the fusion reaction, this is how a hydrogen bomb works. If there's a clean way to do hot fusion then yeah, I'd be on that, but so far as I can tell, thered be no point to hot fusion that fission doesn't already solve
RyukHunter t1_is9cgrz wrote
Hell... Nuclear waste would not be as big a problem if we push towards thorium plants until fusion becomes a reality.
Elarbolrojo t1_is88209 wrote
also cudn't we just send nuclear waste into space?
NathanTPS t1_is8epvq wrote
A few things.....
It's really hard to get things into space. We can send up an empty trash can every now and again, sometimes we can send up a half filled trashcan. To send up more just for the purpose of dumping is realistic. We aren't talking about a few dozen trashcan here, we are talking about tens of thousands of barrel of wast and waste products like spent fuel rods, radioactivity cooling water, etc.
It's cost prohibitive. I can't remember the price but per pound it's extradoinarily expensive to send stuff up. I think it's like $40,000 per pound to launch supplies just to the space station. Now extrapolate that out to some location I assume you are thinking the sun, 90 million miles isn't too hard if we get the payload going on the right trajectory I suppose.
Finnally, we would have a duty to track each and every payload making sure we know where and when they make it to their destination. If a waste package doesn't make it to the dun it will likely end up crashing into Venus or mucury, or go jetosoning off into space. It might boomerangs back to earth, last thing we'd want is radioactive flaming trash raining from the skies. We owe it to our future decendants that will likely be off exploring and mining the asteroid belt to not run into Un tracked nuclear waste.
A practical concern I have is the rocket fuel expended in the launch will become radioactive. How many of those trips would it take to poison the air and ground water with nuclear fallout from its exhaust and discarded rocket boosters?
Unfortunately the space idea at this point isn't feasible.
Elarbolrojo t1_is8qije wrote
interesting, thanks:)
jbr945 t1_is8siqt wrote
It's a valuable future resource. Absolutely no need to do this.
efh1 t1_is8ngfk wrote
It’s shocking how few people understand nuclear energy doesn’t have to have radiative waste and it doesn’t require mythical physics. It’s called aneutronic fusion and it’s accepted conventional theory. We just have to actually fund the research and we could have plenty of cheap and clean fusion energy using hydrogen boron fuel.
We also have nuclear battery technology that is getting impressive and it’s feasible we could find solutions that are eventually cost competitive using relatively safe materials.
Also, current compact fission reactors designs are projected to go on the market by 2026. They have a ceramic coated fuel source to make it more safe and this likely will eventually become cost competitive with natural gas for certain industrial markets.
I’m glad your also open to cold fusion. The DOE is funding $10M in this research is it’s a long shot but deserves more attention.
AduroTri t1_is720q1 wrote
Nuclear energy is safe. It's just people being stupid and lazy that cause problems.
blastuponsometerries t1_is7a9qi wrote
>people being stupid and lazy that cause problems
That is not how safety engineering works.
If an individual being lazy or making a mistake means the whole thing blows up, you just made disaster inevitable because people will sometimes be lazy.
But good design and good organizational design can nearly eliminate entire classes of failure modes.
The real big problem is creating durable organizational culture that can last for the decades the plant is operational. Maintenance and training are annoying to deal with and get in the way of short term profits. The work culture has to be able to strongly resist these forces for a few generations of employees. From new plant with the builder available all the way to when it is deeply out of date and eventually needs to wind down operations and get decommissioned.
Life cycle management of major projects is challenging in governments with low turnover and long time horizons. Its extremely difficult in the private sector where management can change at the drop of a hat.
AduroTri t1_is7xezw wrote
Too true.
HoundsOfChaos t1_is9kiip wrote
>The real big problem is creating durable organizational culture that can last for the decades the plant is operational.
More than anything, this is what worries me. It's not just operating the plants, it's the whole chain, including waste management. Can we trust that our safety culture will still be intact in 50 years from now? What about 100 years?
We can be optimistic and hope so, but there's just no guarantee.
That's a pretty bold bet with hazardous material dumped in various locations that can be dangerous for hundreds of years or even longer (and not just nuclear waste, btw).
Tubtimgrob t1_is94fsk wrote
And the only way a work culture can resist errors is through a rigid system of processes, error identification, feedback and tedious repetition.
blastuponsometerries t1_isar0yj wrote
I think that is too gloomy of a lens. Maybe you are correct with regards to maintenance schedules. But there is so much more then that.
If an organization is too rigid, it won't be able to respond effectively to newly arising problems. A lot of it comes down to a few basic principles (they are just hard to do consistently).
One major piece is empowering the low-level employees that are actually doing the real work and day to day interactions with the equipment. That means sometimes they are going to raise problematic issues at inconvenient times.
Are these individuals punished or ignored? Or are they taken seriously and allowed to make consequential decisions, like stopping work until a problem is solved? The Toyota Production System is famous for this feature. A line worker can shut down a whole production train if they find a defect at great cost to the company. Yet, over time the company understands that solving defects early on is overall far far cheaper then allowing them to accumulate silently.
But that means a specific plant can't only be judged on total output at any given time, so the incentives and directives given to middle management have to align with longer term company goals. The work culture has to incorporate these ideas into everyday operations, not just tacked on as an afterthought.
A second major piece involves looking at top level design and revisit periodically as time goes by. Etc...
[deleted] t1_isdtbv5 wrote
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Tubtimgrob t1_isdtj8j wrote
You are highlighting the freedom aspects of a quality system and everything you say is correct. But you will also know that it all still needs to exist within a rigid system. The system is routinely updated based on feedback and the expertise of employees. On a daily basis it's still a framework with strict rules and procedures. The culture must exist inside that framework with the power and authority to make improvements.
Toyota is a good example. They pioneered a lot of quality principles. Yes, a worker can shut down production - if shutting down is part of the process. Not if they suddenly feel like it. Can the employee ask for the process to change because they have a better practice? Of course. The system restricts the individual in certain tasks, so they have time and power to do other things. Besides, all Toyota production is done by robots. Why? To avoid variation and increase performance. In other words, humans are slow and erratic. Automation is now replacing many retail jobs for the same reason.
This may seem gloomy and tedious, but it's the main way companies stay competitive. I also believe philosophy should spend more time on these principles. They are the only solution to urgent problems in larger society.
[deleted] t1_is88sel wrote
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NotACockroach t1_is7f04p wrote
People are stupid and lazy. If something depends on people not being stupid and lazy to be safe, then it's unsafe.
AduroTri t1_is7x6qk wrote
Well, the thing is, you have to make it reasonably easy and simple to check it and make sure there are at least 3:1 ratio of competent people that will actively do the job and know what they're doing.
I mean if the philosophy of giving a difficult job to a lazy person so they could find the most efficient route applies here. Then great.
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_is76ax3 wrote
>It's just people being stupid and lazy that cause problems.
but that has been the major problem with fossil fuels. its been known since the industrial revolution that adding CO^(2) to the atmosphere would increase global warming. 100 years later and we're still arguing about it while suffocating. had we taken action early on we could have mitigated a lot of the problems.
i'm all for switching to nuclear with that issue nailed down in advance: Once we identify (publicly and transparently) how the industry should operate any deviation would be a criminal offense.
So that sticky safety valve at 3 mile island that the designer knew about but didn't replace? Prison time for that board of directors. That experimental overheating paradigm they were trying at Chernobyl? Life in prison for anybody signing off on those gymnastics.
in my mind it's not about switching to a new source; it's about operating outside of the stupid-box.
Sovhan t1_is7hn69 wrote
Modern reactors are foolproof, and nowhere near resembling the design of the Chernobyl ones. Meaning that even if nothing is done ( as in, "there is no human intervention possible, and/or no control available" ) the reaction will shutdown itself by lack of moderator. And even if a nefarious agent was to still force corium creation, the underbellies of reactor vessels now make the corium deposit thinner, stopping the reaction altogether.
And even if all these passive protections were folded by heavily modifying the powerplant at the cost of billions, you would still endanger "only" a 200km² area (size of the Chernobyl no go zone, and this is a worst case scenario as the Fukushima accident proved by only having a risk zone just around the power plant, and the city having residual radioactivity bellow safety standards.) If you weigh this against risking the destruction of all our support ecosystems; there's no need to be awfully bright to understand the non issue the is nuclear energy.
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_is7ku9y wrote
>Modern reactors are foolproof
this is exactly the stupid-box that we need to be out of imo.
i remember that oil rig in the gulf that had a "foolproof" valve that would disengage from the well in case there was a leak. there was a leak and it didn't disengage and it leaked for months and they couldn't figure out how to shut it off (to my knowledge its still leaking today.)
I've studied engineering. nothing is foolproof.
try this: "there's absolutely no risk" -full stop stupidity.
or this: "passive protections" -institutionalized complacency.
try throwing in "modern algorithms" which are "foolproof" and have many "passive protections" in place.
i don't buy any of it and you shouldn't either. this mentality is what stops me from advocating nuclear energy because its the exact same mentality that gave us problems with fossil fuels.
imho.
Sovhan t1_is7nioc wrote
So you tell me you don't understand that by design, if the water inside the reactor boils the reaction stops, is foolproof? This means you don't believe in the absoluteness of the laws of physics. Big claim on your part.
When I say that current gen are foolproof, I mean they are humanproof. You would have to literally distort the functional possibilities of physics to have a meaningful accident, or cause a literal cataclysm on the site of the powerplant that would make the underlying nuclear accident a joke in comparison.
The reactors do no rely on valves or other complicated industrial design gor security. They rely on basic geometry and physics. If you don't want to hear that from a lowly internet lurker, i can understand, but refuting an expert on the subject would be much harder; so i invite you to read :
Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima by James Mahaffey, an actual seasoned nuclear energy scientist and PhD.
Xjsar t1_is7nrv9 wrote
I honestly don't know what your experience is with nuclear, but seriously look into it. It's not just a single save all fulcrum device like on an oil rig. There are safeties upon safeties upon safeties.
Palo Verde nuclear plant near Phoenix, from what little I know have at a minimum 3, redundancies for any major system on top of redundancies for those systems. Not to mention the insane safety precautions and procedures required for anything to happen.
Thats not to say shit doesn't happen or won't happen. At least in the US, the regulation bodies are beyond anal about keeping things safe. Reactor technology is lightyears ahead of what it was decades ago making it incredibly safe and viable for energy production.
To say anything can fail is why I don't like it is ignorant.
TxAho t1_is8pk93 wrote
Please go look up void coefficients in reactor physics. Positive vs. negative makes a big difference.
AduroTri t1_is7xn6t wrote
If something is foolproof, the universe will give us a greater fool.
madmanthan21 t1_is8k9r8 wrote
If the greater fool can break the laws of physics, that's even better, means our understanding of them was wrong, and now we can improve it.
AduroTri t1_isa8mub wrote
And then the universe will refine the fool and give us an even more foolish one.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people, especially when they're in large groups.
PM_ME_YOUR_LUNATICS t1_is6q7ii wrote
Timely. As an IR Scholar, I'll be using this. Thanks!
vbcbandr t1_is8khab wrote
This may be naive, but I feel like we need to treat the climate crisis like it's wartime: spending tons on R&D, massive clean energy deployment and speedy nuclear plants.
For me, climate change is a societal tipping point that will either force us to adapt and change in a hurry or our damage to the planet will result in societal collapse. I read recently that 25,000 deaths in Europe this summer were attributed to extreme heat. It is completely ignored by the media and politicians.
Chonn t1_is98ny5 wrote
Source please?
vbcbandr t1_isdd0yw wrote
Evidently it was 53,000 in the EU alone in the month of July based on excess deaths during the heatwave...
https://globalnews.ca/news/9134651/european-union-excess-deaths-july/
demouseonly t1_is8wuky wrote
You better hope an enemy, foreign or domestic, never successfully sabotages or blows one up. The nuclear lobby is really hoping for instance that Putin doesn’t blow up a nuclear plant in Ukraine.
Francesco_D_Q_ t1_isa3xlh wrote
If he does it, it means he's launched enough missiles to be seen as a world threat. At that point, he wouldn't send that many missiles to a nuclear power plant, but to a strategic objective like a city instead. Not to say that completely blowing up a nuclear plant (which are designed to survive a military attack) that close to your country doesn't seem the best choice. Journalists are often only interested in making big numbers with exaggerated news just to scare people
[deleted] t1_is52sct wrote
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GrinninGin t1_is87g8x wrote
Personally I can't get over my fear of war breaking out and a missile hitting a reactor and the effects that would have on the surrounding environment. But that's a whole different conversation.
deathhead_68 t1_is9mkp8 wrote
You'd have to target the reactor specifically and that would be an extremely bold statement. And I think even in Russia's case, they just wanted to force Ukraine to shut it down.
Francesco_D_Q_ t1_isa4bye wrote
If Putin does it, it means he's launched enough missiles to be seen as a world threat. At that point, he wouldn't send that many missiles to a nuclear power plant, but to a strategic objective like a city instead. Not to say that completely blowing up a nuclear plant (which are designed to survive a military attack) that close to your country doesn't seem the best choice. Journalists are often only interested in making big numbers with exaggerated news just to scare people
Gawkhimm t1_is8xj7b wrote
instead of only building large nuclear reactor power station for whole cities, I would think that smaller, modular reactors, mass produced and transportable, thats easily expanded, maintained and replaced would be an important part of the solution to also incorporate where viable. A reactor thats an isolated "single-use" closed-system. Where the manufacturer comes and replaces it after some years and rebuilds a new one from the recyclable parts of the old one. I even think there are types that can use decommissioned nuclear warheads as fuel.
and Finland Have a Solution to Nuclear Power’s Waste Problem
MrWoodlawn t1_is91st5 wrote
This is not an ethical dilemma. We should be building nukes all over the world. They can be built safely now with only a small amount of waste.
undivided-assUmption t1_is9bbpk wrote
Collective action my arse. I bet your bed doesn't lie 80 miles south of Yucca Mountain. If we can get SpaceX to shot all the toxic waste to Mars, I'd be on board for an all Nuclear energy option. Maybe then we could use the fossil fuel distribution system to ship all the fresh water pouring into the Oceans and ship it my way. Climate change sucks. We're all about to die of thirst out here and we're talking about ethics. Seriously?
KeitaSutra t1_isq7n38 wrote
The waste is so safe you could literally put it in your backyard.
undivided-assUmption t1_it1f4ex wrote
If that wastes safe, we'd be finding ways to profit from the toxic. Not arguing over shipping and holding costs. If, chemistry can't turn nuclear byproducts into cash, and Noone wants radioactive radiation transported through their yard, down their streets, or through their cities, is it really safe?
KeitaSutra t1_it1h5kj wrote
Recycling the waste with fast reactors isn’t economical right now because uranium prices are so cheap.
It’s perfectly safe. SNF usually sits in a cooling pool for a few years and then is moved into dry casks shielded by steel and concrete. Has never killed a single person. Transporter all the time and extremely safe.
PAXICHEN t1_is9k7n1 wrote
Yucca mountain is a crappy place geologically for a spent fuel holding place. But the spent fuel in the casks are very safe. You get more radiation exposure on a trans continental flight than you would standing next to a cask. Source: an episode of The Titans of Nuclear podcast.
undivided-assUmption t1_is9rlnh wrote
I agree. It can't be any worse then the nukes they exploded 90 miles north of my head, when I was a kid. Its as if science couldn't understand that the geology of the great basin is synonymous with ground water. I suppose living my whole life in the heart of the Las Vegas Valley water shed makes me bias towards fall-out.
TrevorBOB9 t1_is86rqe wrote
> Finally, using a sensitivity analysis, we consider which other aspects of nuclear energy deployment, apart from climate change, have the potential to overturn the ultimate ethical verdict on investments in nuclear energy. Out of several potential considerations (e.g., nuclear waste, accidents, safety), we suggest that its potential interplay — whether beneficial or adverse — with the proliferation of nuclear weapons is the most plausible candidate.
Ok good, I think this is true. With modern nuclear plant designs, it definitely seems like meltdowns or waste disposal are a far smaller concern than putting such powerful tech in the hands of extremely suspect governments
jbr945 t1_is8tm75 wrote
Conversely greater energy security and independence makes for a more stable economy and political climate.
Though power reactors don't make an easy path to bombs, more importantly the educational infrastructure a nation should mature to to support nuclear energy would provide the kind of brain power needed to get a weapons program started. Still never cheap or easy.
TrevorBOB9 t1_is90fgn wrote
Absolutely
PAXICHEN t1_is9k9o4 wrote
Abundant energy will bring billions out of poverty
TrevorBOB9 t1_isach1r wrote
Absolutely
It’s just still more of a concern than meltdowns because of how crazy safe modern nuclear designs are
ddrcrono t1_is87zk6 wrote
My general understanding of why nuclear, despite looking so good has been basically ignored is that countries that have it have a wink wink nudge nudge agreement not to let it proliferate any further because of concerns about nuclear arms proliferation and not for any of the overtly stated reasons.
Thinking about it that way, and looking at how sketchy some of the global state actors are, I'm not sure this is, despite how inefficient it is energy-wise, the worst decision.
jbr945 t1_is8ubw8 wrote
Why would you describe it as energy inefficient? Heat conversion efficiency is just as good as any other thermal electric generator. With higher temperature reactors newer Brayton cycle could be used for 60%+ heat conversion efficiency. As far as mass to energy produced, there's nothing that even comes close, it's in a class all by itself with a 2 million to one mass/unit advantage over fossil fuels.
ddrcrono t1_is8vqma wrote
When I say energy inefficient, I mean that choosing not to pursue nuclear is an inefficient energy policy.
jbr945 t1_is8vyz4 wrote
Gotcha. Some would argue the contrary insofar as deployment time and ease. New nuclear has been taking some time, except in China.
ddrcrono t1_is8zmp9 wrote
There are certainly more upfront costs/pain but I suspect it's actually not the main reason we don't see more of it. It would also kind of explain why they aren't as upfront with the public about it / the reasons we're given don't seem logical, because avoiding nuclear war is a pretty decent reason all things considered.
jbr945 t1_is94vr8 wrote
Right, but there's also a reasonable burden for those who pollute the most to do the most with the best tools. I remember looking at the stats for the top 20 coal polluting nations and only about 3 (Poland, Indonesia, Australia) don't already have nuclear energy. Australia outlawed it, but given their development index, small population, existing uranium mines, and vast coastline - they are the perfect mix of a would be nuclear success story. Both Poland and Indonesia are working on development of nuclear programs. If these nations built a supply chain and cooperative nuclear development consortium, we could knock out the worst of the coal burning in just a few decades. But we have yet to see anything close to a concerted effort like this, which makes me believe mother nature will inevitable "win" the climate change struggle.
ddrcrono t1_is9y2t5 wrote
I'm still assuming that there is an implicit or explicit but not known agreement between a number of developed countries not to pursue nuclear energy programs further.
ex: If we all solve all our energy problems with nuclear it makes it look like "Why don't we give it to the little guys," / makes it indefensible not to / still talk about climate change. But we don't want to because giving every country in the world (or even a lot of them) the ability to make nuclear weapons means that you have even more chances for "something to go wrong," which can mean the end of the world.
So basically that's why most countries won't do it even though they could if they wanted to. The possibility of the world more or less ending outweighs the less concrete on the horizon maybe we can deal with another way threats of climate change.
ddrcrono t1_is9y5w1 wrote
The main exception to this would be if there was nuclear technology that was useless for weapons production. (Ex: I've heard a lot speculated about Thorium fitting this but I'm not well-versed in nuclear tech enough to comment on the weapons side of things).
kostakonkordia t1_is83t5p wrote
Its over however you turn it.
BeatoSalut t1_is7ti01 wrote
People will try everything against a consistent ecological politics, they will blame us for protesting fracking, for rejecting 'natural' gas, and nowadays reddit nerds love to talk pretentiously about the 'safeness' of nuclear energy
Meta_Digital t1_is7d36v wrote
Nuclear is preferable to fossil fuels, of course, but it runs into a fatal problem; it's incompatible with capitalism. Plants are expensive and time consuming to build, and the returns simply don't come within the timescale this economic system (especially in its late stage) allows.
It's also a very incomplete solution. Energy isn't just produced and then that's the end of it. It's used, and what it's used for tends to be in the extraction, refining, manufacturing, and transportation of goods. All of these activities are just as (or more) damaging than the production of energy itself, especially if we consider the extreme levels of energy one can acquire from nuclear sources.
Ultimately, the answer is degrowth, because the scale and speed of our economy is the true engine for climate change. It's extremely reductionist to view it as a problem of CO2 levels. Especially under capitalism, producing massive amounts of cheap energy simply saves companies on energy expenses and allows them to consume more energy for the same price. This is Jevon's Paradox.
The conversation about nuclear power, I believe, is more of a distraction than a real attempt at a solution to climate change. Ultimately, capitalism as a belief and practice is at the core of environmental destruction, and as a result, technological solutions will simply empower the capitalist system to sacrifice the health of the planet for the short term profit of the owning class. Even if nuclear didn't have the problems of potential accidents, nuclear waste, and nuclear weapons, it would still have more costs than benefits if we don't also radically restructure society to fundamentally change how we employ technology.
Keepersofthearcane t1_is87kfg wrote
I'll bite, if you throw out accidents, nuclear waste amd nuclear weapons, how does nuclear have more costs than benefits? I hope your answer is not, "because it allows capitalism to continue"
Southern_Winter t1_is8k5ee wrote
Why did you link to a Wikipedia article about Jevon's Paradox that argues that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption? It's not at all clear to what extent this occurs, and it shouldn't be taken for granted that it happens to the degree you claim it does.
"However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the effect arising.[3]"
If you have something philosophical to say about the merits of capitalism, you ought to make a separate point, or at the very least tie the two together in a coherent way.
Pezotecom t1_is7ym8w wrote
This fallacious idea of capitalism not thinking in long terms has long been refuted. We don't even have to go to the roots of ideas for this, just watch the major corporations today and their plans. Uber's been losing money for a lot of years, and many other enterprises are in the same venue. Amazon keeps getting more and more sophisticated and you can barely call it a 'marketplace' today given the scope of its operations and the general road they want to take.
If anything, I believe this 'nuclear is incompatible with capitalism' is more like 'nuclear is incompatible with the free market' because unless you find a way to calm everyone, you are always a threat to people everywhere. The disaster chernobyl could have caused to the entire world means nobody, not even a government should run something so devastating as such. Same for nuclear weapons.
VitriolicViolet t1_is87xx9 wrote
>This fallacious idea of capitalism not thinking in long terms has long been refuted.
nope.
industry chose renewables due to the massive short term profits associated with it, if we wanted lowest costs over a 100 year period nuclear would have been done a decade ago.
instead we are gambling on Battery RnD pulling super batteries out of a hat in order to go renewable.
seems to me like a choice motivated solely by profit seeking.
also fucking lol what threat? coal alone has released more radiation than all nuclear technologies and accidents combined, killed more people than all nuclear technologies and accidents combined.
only the irrational fear nuclear or think its worse then fossil fuels.
Pezotecom t1_is8bzpq wrote
At some point you need to give credit to the financial system and agree it's efficient.
If we at least assume that, then we are giving incredible leaps towards an even more energy intensive society. At least that's what data shows. What I mean by this is that the market is incredibly good at directing resources, in this case, energy, where its needed. Can we do it better? hell yes. I am not sure how a couple of benevolent geniuses would outperform decades of market capitalism, if you sugest some people actually know better than the decentralized system.
And about pollution: yes, I agree on what you said. But you can't deny that even that can't compare to the absolute wreck chernobyl could have been. That's a huge precedent and actually having fear of it is more than rational.
jonbest66 t1_is7qaaz wrote
>Nuclear is preferable to fossil fuels, of course, but it runs into a fatal problem; it's incompatible with capitalism. Plants are expensive and time consuming to build, and the returns simply don't come within the timescale this economic system (especially in its late stage) allows.
Yeah france is the least capitalistic country in the world, you got it mate.
P.s. Fuck atomic energy;)
NathanTPS t1_is73ed8 wrote
Personally I'd rather be riding the nuclear train than the fossil fuel train. While both have long lasting impacts in their waste products, the nuclear option at least has the unicorn dream of cold fusion maybe being somewhere down the road. Fossil fuel doesn't. Obviously if we could get to some sort of sustainability level with solar, WI d, and wave energy production then we might be in a better position then, but until that day co.es, I wish the US hadn't stopped building g nuclear power plants almost 50 years ago.