Nuclear power

[Ahriman]

Fukushima probably isn't a great example of the risks of nuclear, as it wasn't built to it's own design and that was precisely why it failed.  There was a chance to rectify that mistake after it had been made, years worth of chances, too.  

It's a great example of the risks of human avarice, ever present in any endeavor, ofc.

Put more politely

In the final analysis, the Fukushima accident does not reveal a previously unknown fatal flaw associated with nuclear power. Rather, it underscores the importance of periodically reevaluating plant safety in light of dynamic external threats and of evolving best practices, as well as the need for an effective regulator to oversee this process.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06...-pub-47361

..and where to begin with chernobyl.   The failure of chernobyl is why the world turned against nuclear.  Not because it failed, mind you, but because the soviets could not accept the pr nightmare of their specific failure and so created a vast disinformation campaign with a door into the budding us environmental movement.   If we can't do it safely, no one can..said the soviets..and just look at these bastard americans trying to kill us all with their nuclear toys.  If there was some alternate reality where we did manage to kill ourselves off by building too many (or too many shoddy) nuclear plants..ironically, a cynical attempt to make political chips in the light of a personal failure will account for some significant portion of our having avoided that fate.

The short version of a long story, is that even if we zero out malfeasance and incompetence and just roll those things into the risks of nuclear, it's still cleaner and safer than fossil fuel.  Has been from the beginning.  The reason we didn't go for it is entirely political.

I don't care if a few people get melted, or even if I get melted, the standardization of nuclear power should be a top priority. Get this fucking energy going.

[brewer]

I'm in favor of more, but smaller, nuclear plants.

[pocaracas]

The actual amount of highly radioactive material is quite low. And the lower level stuff is less dangerous overall than a lot of the stuff emitted by conventional plants.
People tend to freak out about radioactivity, but you get more from a stone wall than you would get from most man-made sources. And definitely more if you ever fly in an airplane.

Allow me to play devil's advocate a bit here. (For rhetorical purposes.)

First, we can acknowledge that, with climate change on our plate, the benefits outweigh the risks of nuclear power. But there are still risks. Chernobyl. Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Yes

And isn't solar activity a concern? (I'm asking. Because I don't really know the science involved.) Isn't it bad if we install mini nuclear plants all over the place and then get hit with a barrage of solar activity? Couldn't that lead to potential meltdowns all over the place?

Again. I'm just being rhetorical here, and maybe hoping to learn something.

No, I don't think solar activity can reach the Earth with such power that it can jeopardize any structure, let alone a heavily (radiation) shielded place like the radioactive region of a power station.
Out in space, high neutron fluxes can damage semiconductor based electronics and biological tissue... Most everything else should be fine. There's is also the risk of electromagnetic interference and some satellites getting blacked out, but these should be temporary.
Our atmosphere absorbs most neutrons and other energetic radiation from the sun and other cosmic sources and we get a small amount of those on the surface.


I think the higher risk of having many small nuclear stations is keeping all that enriched uranium away from unintended hands. Many plants represent many nuclear sites licenses, lots of security forces and many more opportunities for failure.


Maybe one station per 5 or 10 million people, complemented by renewables...
Let me see... At ~6MWh per capita per year, your need 30,000 GWh of power for 5 million people. The UK is currently building Hinkley point C which will have an output of ~3MW, which amounts to ~26,000 GWh in a year..., So yeah, that's a good estimate.
If we can make it so that renewables count for half the supply, then we can extend it to one station per 10 million people.
If nuclear fusion ever becomes viable, it will replace all fission plants and most renewables... Until then, we have to juggle all the options.

[Anomalocaris]

And it's also worth noting that Chernobyl failed because they decided to do an extremely risky test that could only work well under some very specific circumstances and they did everything so wrong that if HBO hadn't done their Chernobyl miniseries and on the off-chance that FOX ever decides to end The Simpsons, they could have done the Chernobyl .

The fact that the reactor was out-of-date and that the plant didn't actually have a proper containment structure (something that most Western nuclear reactors tend to take for granted) didn't help things. And that's to say nothing of the incompetence of the people who worked there, something the miniseries exaggerated only slightly.





The problem, on several levels, seems to be rooted more in the flaws in the Soviet system than anything inherent in nuclear power, from the RBMK design that was specifically created to cut corners (for instance, instead of the standard steel-reinforced concrete containers, all that separated the core from the outside world was a single lid that could be and was blown off by a sufficiently large explosion) to staffing them with people who valued their place in the party far more than, y'know, making sure the damn reactor doesn't explode, and when it does explode, caring more about how bad it would be for them if it were true than trying to contain the fucking radiation before it's too late.

It is untrue and unfair to say RBMK was specifically designed to cut corners.   Every commercial nuclear reactor design must consider multiple economic factors or else it will never be built.    HBO specially decided to heavily shade that aspect of the story with its portrayal of Legasov’s testimony so as to pander to popular western prejudice.      In reality Legasov never gave such testimony, and was not called as witness during the trial.     The real background story how RBMK design contributes to Chernobyl accident was much more complicated.   RBMK has several very unusual, but compelling intrinsic safety characteristics amongst the world’s commercial reactors.    As a result, careful economic and safety analysis would recommend different combination of safety features for RBMK than PWR And BWR type reactors common in the west.   But that is not the same as “designed to cut corners” 

What is true is the RBMK reactor as specifically implemented in Chernobyl reveal deep disfunction across Soviet establishment, only some of which was touched upon by the show.     Plus there was also contribution to the accident from the fact that there was an hidden Soviet agenda to adapt the reactor to dual use by configuring it to refine parts of its fuel into weapons grade uranium as it runs, that was never discussed during in the show.    

Chernobyl accident itself revealed a pervasive macho culture of risk taking amongst their World War II generation and gerenation that grew up immediately after WW2, which ran Chernobyl.   As an indication of the chevalier attitude to safety,  Chernobyl was frequently run with emergency cooling loop shut down because it was too much trouble to recall the shift to work start the cooling loop.    As it turns out when Chernobyl accident occurred the emergency cooling loop had been shut down for 10 hours.

[Anomalocaris]

Allow me to play devil's advocate a bit here. (For rhetorical purposes.)

First, we can acknowledge that, with climate change on our plate, the benefits outweigh the risks of nuclear power. But there are still risks. Chernobyl. Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Yes

And isn't solar activity a concern? (I'm asking. Because I don't really know the science involved.) Isn't it bad if we install mini nuclear plants all over the place and then get hit with a barrage of solar activity? Couldn't that lead to potential meltdowns all over the place?

Again. I'm just being rhetorical here, and maybe hoping to learn something.

No, I don't think solar activity can reach the Earth with such power that it can jeopardize any structure, let alone a heavily (radiation) shielded place like the radioactive region of a power station.
Out in space, high neutron fluxes can damage semiconductor based electronics and biological tissue... Most everything else should be fine. There's is also the risk of electromagnetic interference and some satellites getting blacked out, but these should be temporary.
Our atmosphere absorbs most neutrons and other energetic radiation from the sun and other cosmic sources and we get a small amount of those on the surface.


I think the higher risk of having many small nuclear stations is keeping all that enriched uranium away from unintended hands. Many plants represent many nuclear sites licenses, lots of security forces and many more opportunities for failure.


Maybe one station per 5 or 10 million people, complemented by renewables...
Let me see... At ~6MWh per capita per year, your need 30,000 GWh of power for 5 million people. The UK is currently building Hinkley point C which will have an output of ~3MW, which amounts to ~26,000 GWh in a year..., So yeah, that's a good estimate.
If we can make it so that renewables count for half the supply, then we can extend it to one station per 10 million people.
If nuclear fusion ever becomes viable, it will replace all fission plants and most renewables... Until then, we have to juggle all the options.

A nit to pick.  Hinkley C’s designed power output is 3.2GW, not 3MW. 

How much non-renewable is required to support a renewable heavy system depends on a combination of the types of renewables are on the grid, their output curves and the variability of their outputs under local conditions, how well their combined outputs curves match grid load curve, and how variable are their combined grid wide outputs,  how much energy storage and other load shifting capability are there on the grid. 

There is also the consideration of how much consumer pressure is there on electric rates, how strong is NIMBY, related difficulties in establishing transmission corridors.

There is also the concern that most nuclear power plants requires relatively frequent (every 2 years or more) long duration (several weeks) outages for refueling.  In addition experience shows nuclear plants have greater chance of protracted outages of a year or more.

[Paleophyte]

Lots to unpack here. For the record I am pro-nuclear.

For those who seem wary of the safety of future nuclear power projects, take a look at this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxXlD4e-wTE

Mini and micro nuclear systems are terrifying. One of nuclear power's big problems is the potential for low probability/high loss events. Scattering thousands of small reactors around the countryside vastly increases the likelihood of one of these occurring. As does putting them under the management of anybody but a consummate professional. What we need is a few large reactors that we can inspect every inch of the construction and operation of. We have a power grid for distributing the output. Much safer than trying to regulate, inspect, and secure thousands of small, independent reactors.

All that said, I am excited to see some of the new reactor designs getting off the ground.

Also worth noting, America’s entire nuclear power program has made about as much waste in 60 years as the average coal plant emits in less than an hour. Yes, you read that correctly, our entire fleet of nuclear power plants creates .0002% of the waste of a single coal plant.

And the kicker is that a lot of that waste (96%, specifically) can still be recycled. and we know this because France has been doing exactly that for decades.

NEI is an industry-slanted website that's as biased in its own direction as Green Peace would be to the opposite. It's good at providing context-free factoids that, while strictly true, have little to do with the truth. Take this one for example. It's true that the total mass of nuclear waste produced to date is less than that produced by a coal-fired power plant in an hour. For a given value of nuclear waste. And ignoring that the two types of waste are vastly different and that one is much more dangerous. They'd have done a better job pointing out the fact coal kills far more people than nuclear ever has for far less energy and that you'll take ten times the radiation does living next to a coal-fired plant than you will to a nuclear reactor.

Fuel recycling makes good sense so long as you can keep people from weaponizing the transuranic by-products. The potential for concentrating Plutonium and its friends and diverting them to weapons programs makes nuclear fuel recycling a touchy subject.

Like fossil fuels, nuclear fuel is non-renewable.  It's just another short-term fix.

For a given value of "short-term". Existing resources could run our entire power grid for millennia. The climate crisis that fossil fuels has produced needs fixing within decades. OK, decades ago, but you get the sense of immediacy. We can implement nuclear now or we can suck back another few decades of CO2 emissions as the sea levels rise. Those may not be palatable options to you but they're what's on the table for our energy-hungry society.

No new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States since the 70s, and I hope that such will continue to be the case.

That should terrify you. It means that you're surrounded by an ageing fleet of nuclear power plants that were built largely using slide rules by the same luminaries that gave you DDT, leaded gasoline, and thalidomide. You should be championing the construction of fast neutron reactors that would allow us to simultaneously remove old, last century reactors from service, reduce carbon emissions, and destroy much of the existing nuclear waste that we've already generated. It's clear that you don't like nuclear power, but building nuclear "incinerators" that consume nuclear waste is the only sensible solution for that mess. Sticking it in a hole in the ground is incredibly unreliable and just begging to make it the next generation's problem.

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

Althougn encasing the waste in 'Synrock' and burying it under a few Km of geologicaly stable Australia such that far future generations can dig up the resulting lead would seem a viable option?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

At work.

 Althougn encasing the waste in 'Synrock' and burying it under a few Km of geologicaly stable Australia such that far future generations can dig up the resulting lead would seem a viable option?

There's also the fact that nuclear waste may not always be 'waste'. Leaving aside the uses 'far future generations' may have for lead, it's perfectly plausible that the very next generation (or the one after that) may discover a use for what we now throw away. This is largely a response to the ill-considered notion that nuclear power byproducts should be rocketed into space.

Boru

[Jehanne]

Like fossil fuels, nuclear fuel is non-renewable.  It's just another short-term fix.

For a given value of "short-term". Existing resources could run our entire power grid for millennia. The climate crisis that fossil fuels has produced needs fixing within decades. OK, decades ago, but you get the sense of immediacy. We can implement nuclear now or we can suck back another few decades of CO2 emissions as the sea levels rise. Those may not be palatable options to you but they're what's on the table for our energy-hungry society.

And, you've proven my point.  Replace the 200+ coal plants in the United States with nuclear power ones.  The coal that exists all throughout the United States will still be mined and will be shipped overseas to be burned in coal fired plants elsewhere.

[pocaracas]

Yes

No, I don't think solar activity can reach the Earth with such power that it can jeopardize any structure, let alone a heavily (radiation) shielded place like the radioactive region of a power station.
Out in space, high neutron fluxes can damage semiconductor based electronics and biological tissue... Most everything else should be fine. There's is also the risk of electromagnetic interference and some satellites getting blacked out, but these should be temporary.
Our atmosphere absorbs most neutrons and other energetic radiation from the sun and other cosmic sources and we get a small amount of those on the surface.


I think the higher risk of having many small nuclear stations is keeping all that enriched uranium away from unintended hands. Many plants represent many nuclear sites licenses, lots of security forces and many more opportunities for failure.


Maybe one station per 5 or 10 million people, complemented by renewables...
Let me see... At ~6MWh per capita per year, your need 30,000 GWh of power for 5 million people. The UK is currently building Hinkley point C which will have an output of ~3MW, which amounts to ~26,000 GWh in a year..., So yeah, that's a good estimate.
If we can make it so that renewables count for half the supply, then we can extend it to one station per 10 million people.
If nuclear fusion ever becomes viable, it will replace all fission plants and most renewables... Until then, we have to juggle all the options.

A nit to pick.  Hinkley C’s designed power output is 3.2GW, not 3MW. 

How much non-renewable is required to support a renewable heavy system depends on a combination of the types of renewables are on the grid, their output curves and the variability of their outputs under local conditions, how well their combined outputs curves match grid load curve, and how variable are their combined grid wide outputs,  how much energy storage and other load shifting capability are there on the grid. 

There is also the consideration of how much consumer pressure is there on electric rates, how strong is NIMBY, related difficulties in establishing transmission corridors.

There is also the concern that most nuclear power plants requires relatively frequent (every 2 years or more) long duration (several weeks) outages for refueling.  In addition experience shows nuclear plants have greater chance of protracted outages of a year or more.

Right... foiled by the comma that I was conditioned to consider as a decimal point... rats!
3,200MW, so... one Hinkley Point C can provide power for the whole of the UK and have more to spare, provided no losses.
Brilliant! We need even less power plants than I estimated at first.