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Energy Discussion

sevenhelmet said:
There is a lot to be desired with this. Alternative energy has its place, but it’s been treated like a silver bullet in Europe (and in portions of the US)- one which does not eliminate a carbon footprint, it only relocates the pollution elsewhere, while driving up cost and reducing redundancy.
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While the manufacture of some renewable energy sources generate pollution their overall impact is still likely less than continuing to burn (literally) fossil fuels that provide most of our energy today, in addition to energy used in extracting them.

Overall I think it is a good goal to strive for, not something to be dictated and adhered to at any cost.

sevenhelmet said:
Properly designed grids should have a base load capacity covered by strategically located, large-capacity plants (ideally modern nuclear designs), alternative sources like wind and solar, and sufficient capacity for storage and surge demands. It doesn’t drive carbon emissions to zero, but it reduces them per capita, and yields time and capacity while more sustainable energy production methods are developed (…fusion maybe…?)
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I largely agree, though the nuclear bit is a bit of a hot potato politically. We've had enough nuclear accidents that it makes a lot of politicians and the voting public wary, even with newer designs that reduce the possibility of an accident. Then there is what to do with the waste, that we still have figured out.

sevenhelmet said:
Treating alternative energy like a carbon-free panacea has gotten to a point where it is causing problems, and special interests going to the opposite extreme are equally problematic.
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And that is one of the things I'm seeing becoming national policy right now, rejecting almost all renewables on a national scale just to 'own the greens' when very valuable contributions could be made by renewables.
 
Flash said:
Then there is what to do with the waste, that we still have figured out.
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Modern reactor designs are much more efficient, and can even run on current and older reactors' spent fuel.

While the problem won't be solved, I believe as we continue to develop nuclear energy capabilities the problem won't be as large is it now.

But yes, it will produce waste products that will be dangers for thousands of years to come.
 
exNavyOffRec said:
Most of the waste is low level waste and poses no actual danger compared to other things we are exposed to.
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It’s also an overstated problem for the mass of it that exists.

The fracking industry absolutely has a way to dispose of it safely in a manner that would lead to the near impossibility of it being a problem, but it would require some open mindedness on handling of something that brings about a lot of ideological gridlock. Oak Ridge labs already has demonstrated the ability to put the stuff into the ground at depth and the growth in the skill sets caused by the commercial sector provide for ways forward on it. https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/scientist-sees-fracking-way-dispose-nuclear-waste-2d11732363

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Nuclear energy isn't popular mostly because it's currently one of the most expensive ways, in terms of dollars per kW-hr generated, to deliver power to the American people.

Everything about building and operating the plant costs an order of magnitude more money to manage the risk of a reactor accident, and it still hasn't been fool proof.

It's not a special interest conspiracy or people being risk-adverse due to TMI and Fukushima. It's because it costs too much money for too little ROI.
 
Spekkio said:
Nuclear energy isn't popular mostly because it's currently one of the most expensive ways, in terms of dollars per kW-hr generated, to deliver power to the American people.

Everything about building and operating the plant costs an order of magnitude more money to manage the risk of a reactor accident, and it still hasn't been fool proof.

It's not a special interest conspiracy or people being risk-adverse due to TMI and Fukushima. It's because it costs too much money for too little ROI.
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That’s true today, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A lot of that cost is in maintaining older plants, and like any old equipment, maintenance cost increases over time. The cost structure of new generation plants is fundamentally different than cold-war era tech. Streamlining getting new gen plants online and scaling factors could reduce that cost in similar fashion to how wind and solar have reduced per-kWh cost over time. We would have to suck up the initial expense, regulatory hurdles, and long lead time somewhere, and that’s the challenge nobody has been willing or able to tackle. Special interest groups that represent quick money and 4-year election cycles generally don’t help with that situation.

Bottom line, you can build wind and solar, or “drill baby drill” before the next election. Nuke takes a longer vision, and we aren’t very good at that.


I will probably die on this hill, but I maintain my argument nuke is a critical part of our future, unless we want to slowly degrade to third-world status.
 
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In the end, we are going to have to rely on a multi source energy system. Nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, and even some fossil fuels. Every part of this will require costs that in turn will be passed on to the users. Put simply, electricity is not a fundamental right so we are going to have to pay for our addictions.
 
Spekkio said:
or people being risk-adverse due to TMI and Fukushima
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And Chernobyl

This is a cool story about a nuclear meltdown not many people are aware of


The most important part of the restart process was lifting the central control rod manually a mere four inches to reconnect it to its drive mechanism. Burns prepared to lift the more than 80-central pound rod with his bare hands while his supervisor Legg stood with him at the top of the reactor. Nearby stood Mckinley. At 9.01 pm a reactor that was rated for 200 kilowatts of power generation spiked to 100 000 times that amount producing 20 gigawatts in just four milliseconds. In a minuscule moment much faster than the blink of an eye, SL-1 obliterated itself, going supercritical and claiming the lives of all three operators. The aftermath left no witnesses, only speculation and controversy.
Prompt critical neutrons are the neutrons released first in a fission event. In the case of SL-1 the release of prompt critical neutrons in a 100-trillionth of a second created a power surge of 10 million percent above normal operation and explosively vaporised the core of the reactor.

Cooling water was blasted upwards by this vaporised fuel and struck the top of the vessel with an extreme amount of momentum that was sufficient to lift the entire 26-thousand-pound apparatus over nine feet into the air, create 500 pounds per square inch of pressure which forced the plugs at the top of the reactor open and fire the control rods like missiles into the ceiling.
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taxi1 said:
And Chernobyl

This is a cool story about a nuclear meltdown not many people are aware of

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That was in 1961.

Safety systems across all industries are exponentially better now than they were in 1961.

There are people with vested interests against nuclear power who continue to feed these fear mongering narratives to the public. Where is the counter narrative, where hundreds of thousands of sailors over the last 50 years have lived in close proximity to nuclear reactors with only a handful of very minor incidents? Yeah, we lost the Scorpion in 1968.

If the bus or train industry did the same wrt aviation accidents of the 50s and 60s we wouldn't have the passenger aviation industry that we have today. 1972 had the most fatalities in aviation at just over 3,300. That's more than the total deaths (that we can confirm, there are ideas about leukemia from Chernobyl) caused by nuclear accidents in the history of nuclear energy.
 
Swanee said:
Safety systems across all industries are exponentially better now than they were in 1961.
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And yet we had Fukushima. What's the result of it? It completely shut down Japan's nuclear power industry and made about 600 km^2 into a no-go zone. Some of that is technical and some is sociological, but the sociological part is as important as the technical (people vote).

I'm not automatically against nuclear, but I am also a realist on any system constructed by humans. Nuclear is particularly susceptible to generating Black Swan events it appears. I taught risk and aviation, and like to cite Wiener's Laws on the regular:
  • Every device creates its own opportunity for human error
  • Exotic devices create exotic problems
  • Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors
  • Invention is the mother of necessity.
  • Some problems have no solution
  • It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot
  • Whenever you solve a problem, you usually create one. You can only hope that the one you created is less critical than the one you eliminated
  • You can never be too rich or too thin (Duchess of Windsor) or too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system (Wiener)
 
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taxi1 said:
And yet we had Fukushima. What's the result of it? It completely shut down Japan's nuclear power industry and made about 600 km^2 into a no-go zone. Some of that is technical and some is sociological, but the sociological part is as important as the technical (people vote).

I'm not automatically against nuclear, but I am also a realist on any system constructed by humans. Nuclear is particularly susceptible to generating Black Swan events it appears. I taught risk and aviation, and like to cite Wiener's Laws on the regular:
  • Every device creates its own opportunity for human error
  • Exotic devices create exotic problems
  • Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors
  • Invention is the mother of necessity.
  • Some problems have no solution
  • It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot
  • Whenever you solve a problem, you usually create one. You can only hope that the one you created is less critical than the one you eliminated
  • You can never be too rich or too thin (Duchess of Windsor) or too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system (Wiener)
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Japan still operates nuclear reactors and Fukushima probably wouldn't have happened if their emergency power supply had been protected, my understanding is that most of the nuclear plants in Japan had their emergency power sources protected.
 
taxi1 said:
I'm not automatically against nuclear...
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And yet, it's clear you are against nuclear- despite the fact that the tech and safeguards have come a long way, even since Fukushima. Remember those plants were 40 years old when that happened, and active cooling that requires a secondary power source is not a requirement for modern plant designs.

However, point taken- because of what happened 50-60 years ago (or 14 years ago on an early 1970s model reactor), public acceptability simply won't get where it needs to be in order for the big nuclear pieces to fall into place. We might as well plan for a future with very expensive electricity, and little to no nuclear power base. That's where we are clearly headed, because most people can't balance a household budget, much less understand the tremendous systemic improvements that have happened in nuclear power.
 
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sevenhelmet said:
And yet, it's clear you are against nuclear- despite the fact that the tech and safeguards have come a long way, even since Fukushima. Remember those plants were not new when that happened, and active cooling that requires a secondary power source is not a requirement for modern plant designs.

However, point taken- because of what happened 50/60 years ago when we were stupid, public acceptability simply won't get where it needs to be in order for the big nuclear pieces to fall into place. We might as well plan for a future with very expensive electricity, and little to no nuclear power base. That's where we are clearly headed.
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Fukushima was not 50-60 years ago.

Actually, fusion is the way. We should keep pouring effort into that.

In fission, you have to have a containment to keep the bad stuff in. In fusion, no containment = everything stops.

Fission generates reams of radioactive byproducts and requires layers upon layers of safety systems, to the point that it is difficult to state that it is provably safe (we've thought of everything!)

Fusion doesn't generate a chain of radioactive decay and since it just stops when not contained, would be greatly simplified safety-wise.

Etcetera
 
taxi1 said:
Fukushima was not 50-60 years ago.

Actually, fusion is the way. We should keep pouring effort into that.

In fission, you have to have a containment to keep the bad stuff in. In fusion, no containment = everything stops.

Fission generates reams of radioactive byproducts and requires layers upon layers of safety systems, to the point that it is difficult to state that it is provably safe (we've thought of everything!)

Fusion doesn't generate a chain of radioactive decay and since it just stops when not contained, would be greatly simplified safety-wise.

Etcetera
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Did you even read my post? I did make some edits to make my point more clear... I am aware of the timeline of major nuclear disasters, as well as the age of those designs.

As for fusion being a panacea, no. There are plenty of byproducts that get irradiated as a result, leading to waste. Despite the promises of sci-fi writers everywhere, it's also abundantly clear the tech is still so far from maturity that we need something to bridge the gap- I argue that is modern fissile reactors.
 
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