Plus the CO2 released in concrete manufacture.
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I think the fundamental problem with liquid salt thorium reactors (which are the ones that are supposed to be so much safer and better) is that they depend on removing non-thorium products from the fuel as you go along. Said technology would be pretty much the same as the tech for removing bomb grade plutonium from regular uranium fuel in a liquid uranium salt reactor. This is the dirty little secret of the thorium reactor boosters - to make their plan work, you’d have to have immense proliferation of nuclear reprocessing technology that those interested in non-proliferation of bomb making tech really want to keep from spreading around too much.
Depends on the battery chemistry.. Everyone has been focusing on lithium because it has the highest energy density per kilogram of battery, (necessary for electric cars), but if cheapness of the materials and lack of toxic waste is a priority and you don’t have to transport the batteries, then there are safer alternatives, like Ni-Fe batteries.
As compared to the physical footprint of coal strip mines? Oil wells? Everything has trade offs, I don’t think square footage required is very high on the list for renewables. After all, you can have pasture or farming or houses, whatever, going on underneath and in between the solar panels or the wind turbines. And unlike coal and oil, you don’t have massive poisoning of air, soil, and water in an immense area around your wind farm or solar array.
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The data on renewables is limited due to the small amount of power produced that way. Note, also, that the article is based on 10 year old data—when renewables were and even smaller piece of the pie.
There is also the problem that the storage isn’t there for renewables yet so the deaths attributed to it can’t be figured at all, and without said storage there must be backup–usually gas (at 40x the death rate of nuke.)
That being said, the admittedly shaky numbers from solar and wind come in second place. Nuke still has them beat, albeit in a close race.
As for those who bring up the storage and decomissioning issues–at least that’s solid stuff that can be stuck somewhere safe. All fossil fuels are spewing CO2 into the atmosphere, the long term cost of that is probably much worse than the nuclear storage issue.
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Except for that one time. And that other one time. And that other other one time. But those things could never happen again. They won’t happen in YOUR town. Trust us!
Does the risk of having to relocate for our own “safety” count as a legitimate “safety concern”?
Because it doesn’t seem to be counted in those death statistics.
Even if nobody dies, is an ever-increasing number of permanent no-go sacrifice areas where there were nuclear accidents hundreds of years ago the future we want to leave for our descendants?
Is this really the best we can do?
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There are places where no dam is necessary, but most of them involve diverting waterfalls, which makes people upset if you do too much of it because waterfalls without water aren’t pretty.
Damless hydroelectric makes the most sense on a small scale - if the building that needs power happens to be near a hillside that has a perennial stream on it, divert the stream into a turbine and you’ve got power without having to mess around with windmills or solar panels.
I was thinking compared to a single power plant. Yes, it’s less than mining, of course.
Right now our dominant ecological existential threat is global warming, and if we could instantly replace all coal and oil energy generation with nuclear then it would make sense to do it, waste storage be damned. Unfortunately, we can’t do that.
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We are seeing solar PPA rates under 2.8 cents/kWh in parts of the US for 2020 procurements already! The main argument against nuclear right now isn’t safety - it is cost. They take a very long time to build, and are extremely expensive. Solar and wind are already cheaper, and fully dispatchable renewable+storage facilities will be cheaper than nuclear in just a few years. Everything else is getting more expensive - but renewables keep getting cheaper. The main reason people aren’t building new reactors is that they can’t pay for themselves.
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Don’t forget it’s incredibly dense stuff. Compared to the huge mountains of toxic ashes to be dealt with from a coal plant, the spent fuel from the entire service life of a nuclear plant can fit in an olympic swimming pool or two. Volume isn’t the problem with nuclear waste, it’s the question of what to do with the damn stuff, made incredibly vexed by nuclear proliferation concerns on the one hand (so reprocessing to remove the 1% spent fuel from the 99% unused fuel in a no longer usable fuel rod is out of the question) and fear of radiation on the other (and given the decades of lies by governments about how nuclear fallout isn’t dangerous, can we blame people for having outsized concern over radiation from spent fuel rods?).
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The main downside is that if you build one, the EU will bribe the Russians to invade and occupy your country.
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Saying that Chernobyl caused “tens of thousands” of (eventual) deaths is conservative at best. UN estimates, conservatively based on the LNT assumption (google it), are 4000-9000. W/o assuming LNT, the number of deaths clearly attributable to the event is only on the order of 100. And of course, Chernobyl is completely non-applicable to any discussion of the safety or merits of nuclear power within the civilized world.
As for Fukushima, scientific consensus is that it will never have any measurable public health impact, and that few if any deaths will ever occur. Even LNT estimates, of deaths associated with radiation exposure, top out at ~100. And counting non-radiation-related deaths due to absurd over-reactions to nuclear releases (e.g., panicked, rapid evacuation of very old people) is completely invalid and downright insulting. Sorry, baseless fears and attitudes about nuclear, and any actions taken as a result of them, is not a legitimate external cost. So, over the last ~50 years (that nuclear has been around), non-Soviet nuclear has caused ~0-100 deaths (from Fukushima), whereas fossil power generation has caused on the order of 10 million deaths, along with global warming.
In summary, even this estimate of nuclear’s risks is very high, probably by orders of magnitude. It’s rather profound that nuclear still comes out as the safest (by far), even under such extremely conservative assumptions.
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Statistics also show nuclear to be safer than solar and wind, and hydro…
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Even though deaths from mundane things like falling off wind towers and roofs aren’t as sexy as deaths from nuclear fallout (gasp), they’re still deaths. All lives being of equal value (wouldn’t you agree?).
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The nuclear waste “problem” is purely political. It is the only waste stream for which they must demonstrate, using rigorous and conservative analysis, that the waste will remain contained and have no significant health impact, for as long as it remains hazardous. And NRC has concluded that Yucca Mtn. meets all those impeccable requirements. It is clear that the waste streams from fossil fuels will be far more hazardous over the very long term, and it’s not even clear that renewables waste streams will be less hazardous.
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If we keep going with what we have now, we’re going to have a lot more permanent no-go areas. I mean, you’ll be able to go there, they’ll just be underwater.
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I would be much happier to have a pile of defunct solar panels in my back yard than several vats of hot reactor water, thank you very much. And even if it’s “purely” a political problem, it’s a very real problem. Would you host the storage mountain in your back yard?
If we are soley talking about the problem of spent fuel rods, you are right, but it’s also geopolitical. 99% of the fuel in a “spent” fuel rod is unused. But reprocessing the rod to extract the fuel would involve using techniques that are directly relevant to making bomb grade materials. If every country that wanted to have nuclear power had the technology to reprocess spent fuel, then that would be major increase in the easy availability of proliferation technology. Basically nuclear waste is not really waste, it’s contaminated fuel, but the geopolitics of trying to keep every little tinpot dictator the world over who wants a bomb from getting one have turned that contaminated fuel into a headache instead of the simple engineering problem that everyone thought it would be back when nuclear power plants were a cool new idea.
On the other hand, non fuel rod long term nuclear waste is a real problem, especially contamination around the plutonium manufacturing facilities from decades of cold war bomb making where safety was never a big concern (because National Defense!) and the degree of the problem has been covered up (literally and bureaucratically), denied, obfuscated, and lied about for decades.
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Nuclear energy is incompatible with capitalism.
A nuclear generator requires a gigantic initial investment and a very large long-term investment in monitoring and safety facilities. Over time, the latter funding will gradually be decreased in the interests of shareholder return, profits, and management salaries because such monitoring seems to have no effect; its desirable result is that nothing be reported. The personnel involved are lulled into complacency.
Eventually a serious failure will occur, and the size of the plant and dangerous materials involved will make the failure much more deadly that failures of other types of generating facilities.
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Welcome to BoingBoing!
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It’s the epitome of crony capitalism and of corporate welfare. Massive subsidies, direct (like the existence of enriched uranium, made available for sale to power companies for a sweetheart price) and indirect (like a favourable regulatory environment) enabled the nuclear industry to exist. When those subsidies stopped, so did construction of new nuclear power plants.
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Thorium reactors are 233U breeders (uranium is the fuel, not thorium). And 233U can be used in nuclear weapons, so the thorium economy is a proliferation nightmare.
The issue of liquid fluoride fuels is also largely unsolved, fluorides are not only highly soluble, but they need to be kept hot to stop the reactor freezing solid. Not an insurmountable problem, the Russians managed something similar with liquid metal cooled submarine reactors, but it all adds cost and complexity.
