There might not be many mistakes if we weren't forced to use reactors designed in the 50s and built in the 60s when we barely understood nuclear chemistry, but rather modern designs using advanced nuclear chemistry and advanced materials and design improvements.
If nuclear power was equated to cars then arguing about nuclear safety using our current examples of failure would be like arguing about automobile safety risks using a Model A.
The largest sticking point for me with nuclear is the whole bigger is better mentality. I'm all for it if we're going with passively safe designs. In theory this could help the whole decentralized grid ideas along. I think it would go a long way to ease public fear if we actually built reactors that can't melt down under any circumstance.
I'm just scared of the big reactors. Nothing on this Earth is going to passively remove 1.5 GW of heat coming from something the volume of a hot water heater.
We also need to be recycling our waste like the other nations which use nuclear power, not just chuck what's still 90% useful material in a holding tank for eternity.
> The largest sticking point for me with nuclear is the whole bigger is better mentality.
Historically, bigger reactors (and bigger turbines etc.) have been one of the few things that have reduced the $/kWh.
Now, if you have followed developments in the nuclear sector, you are surely aware that SMR's (small modular reactor) are all the rage these days. There are certainly good engineering reasons behind them as well; more series production in factories with less built on-site, easier to provide passive safety due to smaller size, etc., but so far they have not been deployed in reality, so it remains to be seen whether they will be able to provide a lower $/kWh in reality. But certainly they are an interesting development, we'll see if they become a commercial success as well.
As for recycling, with current uranium prices being so low it doesn't make economic sense. But I can certainly see the appeal (breeder reactors are catnip for physicists).
People think about this completely upsides down IMO.
Nature is killing more people every year than have been killed by nuclear in all its time. The sun is killing more people than dies of nuclear (Melanomas and skin cancer) I could go on.
Nuclear isn't as dangerous as it's been claimed and with never reactors the actual security procedure is physical. On top of that investments into thorium and fusion could have gotten us much further.
It's not that bigger is better it's that bigger is safer from a number of perspectives.
Nuclear is by far the safest, greenest, most scalable, reliable energy source we know how to use and it's many times safer than the very mother nature everyone seems to want to save.
Nature doesn't give us a safe, friendly environment we then make unsafe it gives us a hostile and dangerous environment which we then make safe.
Funny how disagreement in this always gets met with downvotes rather than at least argument or reasoned disagreement.
Why is it so hard for people to disagree about this without it turning into a downvote competition?
The problem with nuclear has always been trust, and repeated breaches of trust - often in regards to weapons proliferation, from which fission can never really be separated. See the ongoing efforts to prevent Iran's nuclear programme, for example.
It also has a nasty habit of cost overruns, because projects don't scale down. How overrun is Hinckley Point C now again?
Whereas solar cells scale down to the level of a few square milimeters on a watch or calculator. The great lesson of silicon valley - AWS and everything else - is that "big bang" projects always get beaten by things that can start tiny and scale incrementally.
We need to deploy solar and wind now. Maybe in the 25 year lifetime of a solar panel we can get a nuclear plant finished. Maybe fusion will work. Maybe someone will find a way to stop Thorium reactors dissolving their own plumbing.
> The problem with nuclear has always been trust, and repeated breaches of trust - often in regards to weapons proliferation, from which fission can never really be separated.
There are lots of countries with civilian nuclear power, but no weapons. And also, there are nuclear weapon states with no civilian nuclear power program in sight (e.g. North Korea). And AFAIK, no nuclear weapon state have done it by reprocessing civilian spent nuclear fuel. There are much easier and cheaper ways of doing it.
Now, it's theoretically possible to build a weapon from reactor grade Pu (i.e. by reprocessing spent civilian nuclear waste). And that's why we have international safeguards to prevent nuclear waste falling into the wrong hands. Nothing is foolproof of course, but it's a tradeoff. IMHO it's less bad than continuing to use fossil fuels.
In the end, acquiring nuclear weapons capability is a political decision. An existing civilian nuclear power capability doesn't make it noticeably easier. Heck, even a backwards isolated 3rd world country like NK is able to acquire weapons, suggesting that pretty much any state which really wants one can get it, if they want it bad enough that they are prepared to endure economic sanctions and becoming an international pariah state by doing it.
That's not a problem with nuclear that's a problem with people.
Cost overruns come from extreme security legislation and the fact that we haven't built enough so those are simply not proper arguments.
Add on top of that that solar will never, as in never ever be able to deliver cheap (at scale), clean, plentiful and consistent energy which is the minimum requirement for any type of energy any sane person would support.
Promoting something that is currently not providing more than 1% of the worlds energy being heavily favored politically and with plenty of subsidies and which will never support maybe more than 10% of the worlds energy needs which is being very generous sounds like something the world will look back at in a hundred years and think "What the hell were they thinking".
Blowing off real problems with breezy, unsupported denial is not helping your credibility. If your goal is effective advocacy you should be acting like a nuclear engineer, acknowledging the problems, and talking in detail about how they’re being addressed in-depth. I generally agree that we need nuclear power but that’s because I’ve read those articles rather than what you’re posting in this thread.
Here’s an example: “The amount of nuclear waste that actually exist is microscopic”
It’d be wonderful if it’s true but you didn’t exactly cite sources or otherwise explain how a claim which has been not true to a degree which has factored into national politics is no longer true.
No its not at all the same cause thats not what i mean. I mean that people are ignorant to the dangers not that its dangerous. Has nothing to do with communism, wind and solar on the other hand do.
well the problem most often comes down to money.
if we would operate the power plants within their calculated/fixed lifespan it would've been a better world. however due to the money inside the energy markets many plants will life way above their safety standards. it happens today and it would happen with future plants.
Yes, the waste is actually recyclable and will become even more so in the future.
Anyone who is against nuclear simply hasn't looked at the facts. If you did and still came out against nuclear I would be pretty surprised and love to hear your arguments.
Nuclear reactors are not economically competitive. This is the main problem with nuclear, not waste, safety, proliferation, or mind control by Greenpeace.
Reprocessing doesn't reduce the cost of nuclear power, it increases it.
Yes it is competitive, i would challenge you to find any evidence thst solar and wind can provide energy enough for the worlds needs, otherwise you are just a victim of you own blind ideology.
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Very well. The person I was responding to was posting obviously false comments and ignoring correction, though, which seriously compromises the SNR of this forum.
And in denmark they get more but its not reliable which means you have to support it with other more reliable sources such as coal. Which happens all the time.
Plus you use it for almost zero percent of your transportation.
in the usa it is maybe easily to store it. but in germany it is a huge problem.
asse II is probably already wrecked and nobody knows for sure if "konrad" can withstand the time.
Nuclear has in all it's time killed less than coal does in a year, cars do in a year, nature does in a year. More people die from setting up solar or wind, the amount of animals that get killed by wind is in the millions I could go on.
The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Furhtermore more investing in Thorium and Fusion would be much much more beneficial and clean.
Alternative energies are linear solutions to exponential problems.
If we are insisting on end to end analysis of solar then we must do that with nuclear which means including not only the decommissioning but also the mining of the fuel.
Of course. And I don't think anybody is claiming uranium mining is a particularly benign industry. The point is that the energy density of uranium is so huge that you need an absolutely minuscule amount of it over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant.
And if we ever deploy breeder reactors and reprocessing at scale, we can further extract about two orders of magnitude more energy per kg of uranium ore. Heck, with the amount of depleted uranium lying around as tailings, spent reactor fuel, surplus military nuclear fuel, with breeders and reprocessing we could power the planet for a couple of centuries before needing to start digging up more.
We haven't deployed breeders and reprocessing because uranium is so cheap it doesn't make economic sense.
Usually it means that the plant relies on natural processes like gravity or convection to cool down the reactor after it has been shutdown, rather than needing "active" measures like emergency generators providing electricity to run the water pumps etc.
E.g. the Fukushima reactors melted down because the tsunami destroyed the emergency generators (as well as blocking the roads so they couldn't get new generators on site in time). A newer design using, say, convection to get rid of the decay heat wouldn't have this problem.
I think that's referring to newer designs which fail-safe by using things like gravity so that the reaction automatically terminates in the event of failure.
I read that to mean "uses [a] physics", meaning a specific reaction chain, not physics the entire field. Kind of like talking about "battery chemistry" meaning Li-based, Pb-based, etc., does not mean "the field of chemistry".
