We don’t need any new nuclear power plants. They are wastefully expensive. For every billion dollars spent on one, you could get 5 times the clean electrical energy out by spending it on clean renewable energy sources of generation and storage: Wind, water, and solar. See, for example, Stanford researchers point the way to avoiding blackouts with clean, renewable energy | Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
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Most experts in the field believe that Yucca Mountain is the best available long term storage option. Whether you agree with that assessment or not, it’s unquestionably better than the status quo of storing waste on-site at multiple decommissioned coastal power plants. My point is that if we can’t even agree as a society to move existing waste from very bad, unstable locations to a less bad location, there’s no point in trying to build new reactors that will generate new waste.
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That’s certainly true.
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More than just brown outs too, actual damage to the grid can occur. Ramp up, down, storage, rotating masses, fault clearance, time of day demand, time shifting. There’s all kinds of things that are needed to keep the grid running and working.
We’re going to need a mix of power plants. There isn’t a single one type that’s the winner to do them all. What we want to do is change the current mix to one that’s more environmentally friendly and more renewable based. Reduce not necessarily eliminate everything we have today. At least until we can find different solutions for each of those different requirements.
If it it was just “generate power” and nothing else, it would be a much simpler problem to solve.
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The problem with thorium reactors, though, is that the intermediate product between Th-233 and U-233 is Pa-233, which is in the uncomfortable zone of being considerably radioactive and with a half-life of about a month. This means that the fuel stock has to be periodically scrubbed of it via human intervention (which is bad), just in case something goes wrong (bad-bad) and they can’t wait months (bad-bad-bad) for it to decay away to safe levels.
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Even wind power will indirectly release radionuclides.
There seams to be a strong tendency for people to over estimate the amount and complications around the waste from nuclear power generation while ignoring or minimizing just how prevalent radioactive wastes are in resource and power generation in general. The parent comments hyperbolic “spew” is just absurd.
Nuclear power generation might result in more waste and more concentrated waste, but it also is where most of the focus on containing and storing wastes has been done. While the lesser sources of waste tend to be mostly ignored as long as there isn’t an obvious contamination incident.
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A couple of interesting links for details.
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Fukushima was an example of the flawed approach to earthquake proofing. Buildings, roadways, and other parts of infrastructure are always designed based on the damage caused by the previous earthquake. Which is what the tidal wall height was based on. Had the engineers said, “You know, let’s figure on a wall 10 meters high, and that should cover almost any eventuality,” then it would have been sufficient to protect the backup generators, rather than what was done, which was just a meter higher than the previous high-water mark there.
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It was also flawed in the sense that the reactors required active, functional control systems in order to shut down safely. (The main issues being that powered pumps were needed to actively circulate coolant through the reactor cores, and valves required electricity to open and close). It’s possible to design a reactor that can (at least theoretically) shut itself down without any external control or pumping required.
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Considering one of the dirtiest power production engines are on cargo ships, I wonder if anyone’s looking at fitting one of these onboard. Yeah, it would probably be a lot safer to just use the power to make fuel oil from other sources, but if one of these modules produces ~50 megawatts, that’s in the same ballpark as the requirements of the largest fully laden cargo ships at cruising speed. Mind you, there would have to be serious requirements for engineering training, disaster training, end-of-life disposal, and so on, but if we can’t otherwise wean ourselves off of rapid oceanic transport of vast quantities of materials and products, it might just be the answer to quite a few problems.
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FFS, humans can’t be trusted with fireworks nor guns, there’s no way we can deal with nuke power. We certainly haven’t yet.
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Bunker fuel oil is so cheap that it’s hard to see nuclear ever being competitive. Especially since shipping companies have done a bang up job of frustrating any attempts at international regulation of emissions - not just CO2, but sulfur and nitrogen oxides. If anything, the shipping industry looks like it will start using synthetic ammonia as the replacement for heavy oil. Less polluting by far, just a tiny bit extremely toxic and energy intensive to make.
There were a few nuclear merchantmen in the 1950s and 60s that used the pressurised water reactor for power. None were successful, although the NS Savannah has to be one of the prettiest big ships ever built.
Only the Russians have persevered with the technology with their monster nuclear ice breakers.
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So do coal plants, and at a much higher rate.
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Radioactive potassium? I don’t believe it exists.
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We can’t. We should have embarked on a massive nuclear power transition program 20 years ago. The US would have carbon-free electricity by now if we had done that. But it’s not too late to start and I’m happy to hear that they have approved this design. It’s a lot smarter than older systems and has basically nothing in common with Chernobyl or Three Mile Island except they all use uranium.
I don’t believe waste is a real issue. I think if we started using more nuclear power, we would also start reprocessing fuel and burning the waste.
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That’s one buzzkill for nuclear power that can’t be shrugged off, imho. What do you do with waste you need to store for tens of thousands of years? That’s a hard number to work with, until you ask yourself “what’s the oldest building on Earth?” We need to build a containment system that’ll work for around ten times longer than the pyramids, just to power this generation.
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Ah yes and fusion power is just 50 30 15 years away.
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It’s a lot simpler to dump a broken reactor in the ocean as a last resort if it’s, like, already there
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Waste reprocessing is negative years away. It’s done now, it’s just expensive.
