|
AreWeDrunkYet posted:That said, a broad expansion of nuclear power would just about eliminate the carbon footprint of US power generation - a nearly 40% drop in CO2 emissions. On top of that, all of the particulate pollution and other fun stuff spewed out by coal and gas plants would be replaced by waste sealed in casks and nice, clean steam. I would argue that those social benefits would far outweigh the cost of subsidizing the risk of a nationalized nuclear industry. Versus the status quo? Sure. Versus other options using the same resources required in reality to achieve what you want, far less clear. Herm, top of page you say? Better edit in a pretty chart:  edit2: that chart may actually be outdated already, I think coal % in bau is already expected to go lower than that Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Nov 21, 2015 |
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 00:19
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 15:05 |
|
|
Not sure I'm parsing this correctly but isn't the fed already subsidizing financing and project costs? http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/USA--Nuclear-Power-Policy/ World Nuclear Association on the Energy Policy Act 2005 posted:Federal loan guarantees for advanced nuclear reactors or other emission-free technologies up to 80% of the project cost.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 00:24
|
|
|
Anosmoman posted:Not sure I'm parsing this correctly but isn't the fed already subsidizing financing and project costs? From what it sounds like, a loan guarantee just makes it so if the bank lends money to someone and they go bankrupt, the bank gets paid by the feds. It doesn't do anything to the actual contractor.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 00:33
|
|
|
computer parts posted:From what it sounds like, a loan guarantee just makes it so if the bank lends money to someone and they go bankrupt, the bank gets paid by the feds. It doesn't do anything to the actual contractor. But it has the effect of lowering the exposure of the bank, so it has the effect of getting the utilities more capital at better rates. It's an indirect subsidy, anyway.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 00:40
|
|
|
The argument is more that, given long term investment strategies rather than quarterly shareholder bitching, nuclear power makes sense despite high up-front costs. It especially makes sense if you care about socialised benefits and not just direct profits. If you can't wait for five years to build the thing and then another five or ten till it starts being profitable then you won't ever build a nuclear power plant. Especially in an electricity market that is less stable than it used to be.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 02:15
|
|
I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
|
Trabisnikof posted:You're correct, the U.S. Government would be able to eat the costs of shutting down a nuclear plant early without a problem. No one is arguing that nuclear power is particularly cheap, easy, or the most economical source of power. But even taking into account all of those additional costs and risks, you still wind up with a power source that is economically competitive with other green sources like wind and solar while being a lot more scalable. Or in other words, this is a good candidate for public investment, just like I said earlier If the goal is to provide cleaner air and to produce less CO2, then nuclear power is a slum dunk technology for furthering that goal. I think that's the most important "social aspect" here, so I disagree with your earlier assessment that nuclear power doesn't make sense from a social perspective. It has economic risks, sure, but when you prioritize the minimization of short-term economic risks then you wind up with the situation that we have today: a lot of coal and natural gas consumption. I'm not ignoring that economic risk, I'm embracing it and saying that the societal benefits of cleaner air and reduced CO2 emissions outweigh the public financial risk by a vast degree.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 10:37
|
|
|
silence_kit posted:Would you be willing to make a prediction about the future cost of solar electricity?  This is the current prediction for installed DC watt. There are limits in how low it can go due to the fact that rooftop solar installation is a skilled labor, so that will always be a factor in the cost. There is a peak in demand during summer daytime from air conditioning, and solar is exceptionally well suited to handle that. That demand is roughly 5%-7% of energy usage in California and no matter what the primary source of power, it will always make sense to have increased summer daytime demand offset by solar. Solar generation above that would require additional infrastructure, either for transfer or storage, but there is an increased demand for batteries as electric vehicles are becoming viable and the Tesla Powerwall, etc. could possibly result in a distributed storage infrastructure from battery backups able to handle leveling out a few percent of daily generation/demand. Nuclear is likely the best green option to replace coal power plants, but it takes a while for a nuclear plant to come online and significant political action. Solar being something that just one person decides they want and having it up and running a couple months later gives it an advantage that few other power sources have, and will probably result in it having a larger share of generation than it otherwise would.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 21:17
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:Nuclear power is a slunk dunk technology from a science and engineering perspective, but the purse strings are held by politicians. Politicians seek to get reelected. Large government expenditures (putting up capital for new nuclear power plants) and nuclear power are both unpopular right now, so it's hard to find politicians that support government capital investment for nuclear power. It doesn't take an environmentalist conspiracy for that to be true, it just requires more people to be afraid of nuclear power than not (which is true) and for a political environment where new government spending is verboten (also true, thanks Tea Party!) Look, the bottom line is if you want to substantially ramp up nuclear capacity, it will take a huge amount of money--substantially more than what the US government is accustomed to spending on public infrastructure. This leaves you with the following options: 1.) Rely on (mostly) private funding, with some government investment or subsidizing. This is basically the status quo. And unfortunately, if you have the kind of cash required to invest in a nuclear power plant, it turns out nuclear power plants are a kind of lovely way to invest it from a purely economical (profit based) point of view. The amount of government intervention that would required to really significantly change this is large enough that you might as well just: 2.) Rely on mostly public funding. This frees you from the burden of having to generate a (competitive) profit, and while nuclear power isn't the best money maker in the world, it is at least economically viable and won't bankrupt your nation in the long run. The problem with this approach is indeed political, but people being "afraid of nuclear power" isn't the main or even a significant political barrier. The main one is that massive government spending is a tough sell in the first place, and not just due to the Tea Party. Spending on the scale we are talking about here is significant enough that it means making hard decisions about taxes, cutting other planned or ongoing spending, or cutting defense, and these are all tough issues in ANY political environment. Secondly, the fossil fuel industry is of course going to lobby HARD against any such massive government investment in nuclear power, and their voice is infinitely more significant than lolgreenpeace. A third option is to increase the cost of using fossil fuels. Something like a carbon tax, cap and trade, or whatever, could have the effect of making nuclear power much more attractive, and its risks more worthwhile. Pricing-in carbon also has the bonus effect of helping other forms of carbon free energy, and most importantly can be implemented without even having to address public perception of nuclear power, or being accused of unfairly giving hand outs to a specific industry. Overall I think this is the best approach. While we are at it, the nuclear industry could maybe pull its head out of its collective rear end and start delivering plants on schedule and within budget. And also hurry their poo poo up with small modular reactors. And if we are really making a Christmas wishlist, maybe all the internet troglodytes who are out their shouting from the rooftops about thorium reactors and how them drat environmentalists are the only thing holding back clean, safe, and cheap power can go do something useful and become nuclear engineers instead of masturbating to techno-utopian fantasies in between bouts of fallout 4.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 00:07
|
|
|
-Troika- posted:Reprocessing in the US has zero proliferation risk because no one is going to be able to steal plutonium out of the middle of the US. The point is that reprocessing in and of itself is a major nuclear weapons technology. Making nuclear weapons is essentially the act of separating or synthesizing fissile material. If your end goal is the vast reduction of existing nuclear weapon stockpiles, and to ensure no new nations develop nuclear weapons, then its desirable to avoid the spread of infrastructure like PUREX plants or uranium enrichment. This is arguably a tougher sell if you yourself reprocess fuel on a large scale. Bonus points if you already made a jillion nuclear weapons and can halt all reprocessing without any detriment to your nuclear deterrent, while getting to ride the high horse of nuclear disarmament and peace.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 00:24
|
|
|
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3748147&pagenumber=1#lastpost
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 09:56
|
|
|
Praelin posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3748147&pagenumber=1#lastpost The first sentence said it was outside the universe. A later sentence implored us to ignore the effects of the sun's gravity in the solar system. To the best I can decipher your post you want to build a giant space flywheel, which, even if it could be done, would almost certainly require far more energy input than would ever be received as output for the foreseeable future. Your post reads more like time cube than science.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 15:17
|
|
|
Bringing over the nucular derail from the conspiracy thread:Tias posted:Hell, I'll be the first to admit that I'm probably irrationally paranoid about nuclear power, but I'm not convinced it would not be an overall better solution to take all efforts put into nuke and coal and develop sustainable renewable sources. Regarding your argument that renewable is better than nuclear: in what ways? Regarding funding for nuclear: there has been little investment in nuclear power in western countries compared to fossil fuel anything for a very long time. Recent revivals of interest in nuclear energy have only happened because everyone is scrambling to find cleaner energy sources, almost always in parallel to increased renewable funding rather than by eating up renewable funding. Except for some really really old reactors, the most recent round of announced nuclear shutdowns is because of punitive taxes that have been levied against nuclear power in some European states that want to do a nuclear exit for ideological reasons like Germany but don't have the balls to straight up kill nuclear like Germany, or by extreme volatility in electricity prices caused by a failure to internalise externalities of renewable power sources in many cases (grid restructuring and storage necessary to accomodate them if your power grid and your neighbouring countries' power grids go majority-renewable) and by a glut of natural gas in the US. Germany's half trillion euro renewable rollout alone would pay for all the reactors built worldwide since 2000, or at least be close. European efforts to develop more modern nuclear plants are very slow for building properly-working breeders (after Areva/EDF built a pile of fail with superphenix everyone just tried to forget about the topic and the next prototype is planned for, like, in a decade or two) and the slow improvements in commercially deployed powerplants have been largely limited to France, where Areva/EDF has managed to shoot itself in the foot by producing yet another pile of fail in the form of the EPR (the thing you sometimes hear about as going a bazillion euros over budget, so badly that France itself is not going to build any  ). In the UK everyone just sorta lost interest after the Cold War ended and electricity got privatised. Now that all the Magnoxes are off and even the AGRs are getting a bit old while the EU is breathing down their necks to limit coal, the tory government has just now commited to what is likely the only worthwhile thing it will ever accomplish by starting a new nuclear rollout. Being tories, they have obviously chosen the most retarded way possible to do so that mainly involves sucking up to France (sure, let's buy some EPRs with an inflated initial price tag since there'll be a cost overrun anyway ) and to China (sure, we'll also buy some derivatives of old US reactors ).In America, basically the same thing happened as in the UK, and in an environment where long term investments that start becoming profitable after fifteen or twenty years are discouraged no amount of federal loan guarantees can make a company happy about deploying a large number of nuclear reactors, especially if cheap natural gas power plants can be built more quickly and cheaply. Any possible nuclear buildup that might be spurred by coal becoming less viable will be delayed until gas gets expensive again. The current efforts to develop advanced nuclear power plants started under Obama so yeah that'll still take a while. The most promising thing is the very recent small modular reactor programmes of nuscale and South Korea is a rare example of consistently doing it right, by developing a standard type of reactor that's not overly elaborate and is mass-produced until the next standard type of reactor is developed. To the surprise of everyone without a concept of economies of scale and workforce experience, their nuclear power plants tend to be largely on budget and on time. Glorious Mother Russia  has, through sheer stubbornness, become the country with the most successful breeder programme, and is the only country to have a modern commercial-scale fast reactor up and running. It turns out that if you fail, you should try, try, try again till you succeed. Cheap fossil fuels have delayed the planned rollout of larger numbers of modern reactors (I see a pattern here).India is poor but wants to be energy independent so it has a nuclear programme with a focus on thorium (India has tons of thorium) which might be going somewhere useful. China recently noticed that coal is bad since unlike oppressed minorities air pollution can't be arrested when it starts annoying party officials. Now it's drowning every non-fossil fuel power plant type in funding, and amongst other things is test-building pretty much every type of nuclear reactor that money can buy to see which ones are the most practical, making it pretty much the main investor in nuclear in the world (it's also one of the main investors in renewables in the world). Jack Gladney posted:The US doesn't have a suitable location for long-term storage that isn't fiercely opposed by somebody. Yucca Mountain is unsuitable because leaking waste could move into the water table if rainfall rates change over 10,000 years or whatever, right? Yes, Yucca mountain seems to be a moderate clusterfuck, though less so than the totally-sealed-off salt mine (please ignore the recent flooding) or the other place that was totally going to be the final storage site and saw billions in investment before being shut down in Germany. Stored waste is required to be accessible for future use in the US, taking some more stable alternative salt mines in actually dry places without a high water table off the table. Apart from that, it looks like the perfect designed-by-committee solution for a country full of NIMBYs. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Nov 28, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 20:51
|
|
|
I don't even understand why nuclear waste needs to be sent into he sun or burried in some million year stable mountain. Isn't the waste vitrified and stored in casks that basically survive orbital reentry and then being hit by a train made out of missiles? Don't we store way more harmful poo poo in less paranoid ways? Just stack the stuff in a secure warehouse near the reactor or at the reactor its self, keep it accessible for reprocessing. Also isn't a ton of nuclear waste only "technically" nuclear waste? As like "some latex gloves that are 1% above background radiation levels therefor need to be sealed away under a mountain for ten thousand years" sort of insanity? It seems like we could eliminate a ton of "nuclear waste" by not politicizing the process and treating normal garbage like garbage and only worry about the waste that is actually potentially harmful.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 21:17
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:I don't even understand why nuclear waste needs to be sent into he sun or burried in some million year stable mountain. Isn't the waste vitrified and stored in casks that basically survive orbital reentry and then being hit by a train made out of missiles? Don't we store way more harmful poo poo in less paranoid ways? Just stack the stuff in a secure warehouse near the reactor or at the reactor its self, keep it accessible for reprocessing. We don't reprocess, and the main concern is actually water infiltration, not some kind of impact. (Well, proliferation also.) Most of the waste is pretty low level or even non-radioactive, but because we don't do reprocessing we can't take the trivial products out of the waste.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 21:20
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:I don't even understand why nuclear waste needs to be sent into he sun or burried in some million year stable mountain. Isn't the waste vitrified and stored in casks that basically survive orbital reentry and then being hit by a train made out of missiles? Don't we store way more harmful poo poo in less paranoid ways? Just stack the stuff in a secure warehouse near the reactor or at the reactor its self, keep it accessible for reprocessing. Yes to both, though the casks used by some countries (cough Germany cough) are apparently lovely. Also an asteroid might hit a nuclear reactor's on-site storage so We Have To Prepare For Every PossibilityTM. By the way, when I did a tour of the Grundremmingen power plant in Germany this summer there were some ludicrous wastes of money mandated as safety measures for the site, including the on-site storage building. For instance, the waste storage is now defended against a tank attack (lol) with big fuckoff concrete barriers and a giant wall so the tanks can't shoot their guns at the waste storage (lol) for tens of millions of euros. Because Fukushima happened, in addition to somewhat sensibly moving some backup generators on elevated platforms in case of never-before-seen Danube water levels (climate change is a thing after all), there is now also an anti-flooding wall on the other side of the waste storage building in case of sudden Danube tsunamis (lol), which however is not connected to the tank barrier wall so that the hypothetical Danube tsunamis would flood the place anyway (holy gently caress lol). The restrictions on waste radiation levels are, as you say, quite ridiculous. Having a medical thyroid screen using radioisotopes makes you glow enough that your thyroid, the rest of your body, and the minibus driving you across the power plant grounds get tagged for going into the cask by the geiger counters at the exits and me bringing my novelty tritium keychain light bought off amazon through the checkpoint would have locked down the place for the day - iirc it's something ridiculous like a few percent above the background radiation of the location for anything exiting the place. All the recent nuclear waste leaks going through German newspapers have been of such low-level waste, so "oh noes this tissue paper from the bin in the reactor building will kill us all" does seem kinda overblown. e: Kalman posted:Most of the waste is pretty low level or even non-radioactive, but because we don't do reprocessing we can't take the trivial products out of the waste. That still goes into a high- or mid level cask though, the really ridiculous thing is the category of low level (and arguably the lower end of mid level) waste. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Nov 28, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 21:38
|
|
|
blowfish posted:e: Right, because (out of the reactor) it's mixed with the high level waste, and we don't reprocess to separate the two. Which is dumb.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 23:52
|
|
|
It is actually the nuclear power operators who are most opposed to on-site cask storage. They don't want to spend the money.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 00:00
|
|
|
Kalman posted:Right, because (out of the reactor) it's mixed with the high level waste, and we don't reprocess to separate the two. Which is dumb. I'm not talking about any fuel waste, I'm talking about general waste (like working clothes, bin contents, piping, concrete). Proper reprocessing would be a good idea though.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 00:19
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:It is actually the nuclear power operators who are most opposed to on-site cask storage. They don't want to spend the money. This is an entirely reasonable stance for them, as the federal government is basically required by law to take care of it, to the point where it's lost multiple lawsuits from various energy companies on the subject. Unsurprisingly, the companies in question arn't too keen on paying money to the government forever for a permanent repository that hasn't been built. ugh its Troika fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Nov 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 04:07
|
|
|
blowfish posted:Bringing over the nucular derail from the conspiracy thread: Apart from the (admittedly large) footprint made by setting up renewable infrastructure, renewables (at least in the case of solar, wind and water) don't carry any environmental destruction. My issue with the prevailing mode of political thought (consumerism, unchecked capitalism, egoism etc) is that no one considers that the earth has to remain habitable for future generation. There is no realistic potential for a dignified and safe existence for humanity on other planets (as far as I am informed), and so we have to do whatever it takes to keep earth safe. This means converting to energy sources that don't destroy the environment, such as solar, wind and waves - even if we have to use destructive coal/gas sources to set it up, because just doing nothing (or going nuclear) brings with it the potential of meltdowns and material depletion that can end our species.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 14:09
|
|
|
Tias posted:Apart from the (admittedly large) footprint made by setting up renewable infrastructure, renewables (at least in the case of solar, wind and water) don't carry any environmental destruction. [...] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam quote:brings with it the potential of meltdowns and material depletion that can end our species You'd need a lot of meltdowns to end our species. You even need a lot of meltdowns to even match the current pollution by coal power.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 14:21
|
|
|
Yeah, but coal power is what exists right now, we can't use the past as an excuse to make more mistakes - let's use the coal/gas infrastructure to set-up renewable infrastructure for good.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 14:23
|
|
|
Tias posted:Apart from the (admittedly large) footprint made by setting up renewable infrastructure, renewables (at least in the case of solar, wind and water) don't carry any environmental destruction. My issue with the prevailing mode of political thought (consumerism, unchecked capitalism, egoism etc) is that no one considers that the earth has to remain habitable for future generation. There is no realistic potential for a dignified and safe existence for humanity on other planets (as far as I am informed), and so we have to do whatever it takes to keep earth safe. In what way does nuclear power destroy the environment more than renewables? Land use is environmental destruction. Every renewable energy source uses more land than nuclear. Material inputs are environmental destruction. Every other energy source uses more bulk materials than nuclear. Meltdowns don't matter if they are contained, and even if they are not radiation is overrated. Meltdowns cannot happen in most breeder fuels which in the future would necessarily replace once-through fuel cycles. Once built, nuclear uses up no resources except uranium/thorium and possibly some cooling water. If uranium or thorium run out then nothing happens except we need to build some new power stations running on (hopefully) fusion, or if humans completely fail to invent anything new we can still go back to renewable, or whatever, because nothing in the world except maybe some radiophilic bacteria and fungi will be affected by a lack of these elements in the planet's crust. Every other energy source currently used is better than coal, but none are clearly better than nuclear. From an environmental point of view, full nuclear is sustainable. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Nov 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 14:41
|
|
|
blowfish posted:If uranium or thorium run out There is a lot of Uranium. It is a not insignificant fraction of the total mass of Earth.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 14:49
|
|
|
blowfish posted:In what way does nuclear power destroy the environment more than renewables? I am clearly not talking about the land used to set up plants, this is necessary to produce energy, no matter the sort. Meltdowns poison soil, water and wildlife. Even though Fukushima turned out to have no impact on fish health, it just seems to be too big a gamble to have taken. Renewable plants failing just become an inert building taking up some space, melting down reactors destroy arable land and can potentially destroy vulnerable biosystems.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 14:54
|
|
|
Tias posted:Yeah, but coal power is what exists right now, we can't use the past as an excuse to make more mistakes - let's use the coal/gas infrastructure to set-up renewable infrastructure for good. Just wanted to show you that renewable energy can be destructive as well. Everything is if there is enough energy involved. Solar can still burn down a house if the wiring is faulty. It's also hard to make more hydroelectric dams if all the suitable natural occuring spaces are already used. Renewables aren't the panacea people like to present it as. You need a mix of renewables and nuclear to responsibly replace fossil energy. Solar is great for day-use, wind is a good support when the wind blows, but both need either a huge overhead and storage or a good baseline power supply. Huge overhead and storage mean more environmetal damage just for the footprint. And there might still be events that leave areas powerless. Tias posted:I am clearly not talking about the land used to set up plants, this is necessary to produce energy, no matter the sort. Humans presence has more of an impact on biosystems than radioactive fallout from a meltdown. See Chernobyl. Also, meltdowns aren't the norm. Newer plants are more resistant to meltdowns and this only becomes better with newer designs. You don't measure current and general car safety with Ford Pintos. Lurking Haro fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Nov 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 14:54
|
|
|
Tias posted:Renewable plants failing just become an inert building taking up some space Renewable power generation is an industrial process that is no less harmful to the environment than most other industrial processes. Remediation will still have to be carried out when renewable infrastructure is obsoleted or ends its service life.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:01
|
|
|
Tias posted:I am clearly not talking about the land used to set up plants, this is necessary to produce energy, no matter the sort. You overestimate radiation impacts on wildlife. You would have to have thousands of meltdowns to meaningfully destroy habitats on a large scale. It's possible to pin down precisely how radiation affects ecosystems because there are naturally radioactive places where stuff and people are living just fine under radiation loads so high they would have been evacuation zones in case of a nuclear accident. Even Chernobyl is a wildlife sanctuary now with only very small areas where radiation is actually harmful to the environment because plants and animals don't freak out like overly scared people. Fukushima is a complete non-event except for the people overreacting to it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:01
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:Just like old chemical refineries and waste dumps. Just inert building taking up space, nothing to see here. I'm not replying to smug assholes who can't see the difference betwen a chemical refinery and a wave energy station. Bye. blowfish posted:You overestimate radiation impacts on wildlife. You would have to have thousands of meltdowns to meaningfully destroy habitats on a large scale. It's possible to pin down precisely how radiation affects ecosystems because there are naturally radioactive places where stuff and people are living just fine under radiation loads so high they would have been evacuation zones in case of a nuclear accident. Even Chernobyl is a wildlife sanctuary now with only very small areas where radiation is actually harmful to the environment because plants and animals don't freak out like overly scared people. Huh, that's pretty cool I guess! But I'm still not sure why we'd want to risk it when we can just use non-coal and non-nuke renewable sources? E: Lurking Haro posted:Also, meltdowns aren't the norm. Newer plants are more resistant to meltdowns and this only becomes better with newer designs. No, of course not, and I don't claim all plants are potential chernobyls. I'm just not convinced we need a source with the damage potential of nuclear, when we can go in other directions. Tias fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Nov 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:04
|
|
|
Tias posted:
Because building a dam fucks up the environment in a much more active way than a nuclear plant ever will. Ditto with building a bunch of solar panels on "useless" land, especially at the magnitude you need for US power generation.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:07
|
|
|
Tias posted:Huh, that's pretty cool I guess! But I'm still not sure why we'd want to risk it when we can just use non-coal and non-nuke renewable sources? Life is full of risks and by trying to avoid every risk, you make things worse. Coal has to be replaced because it is actively destroying the environment, but nuclear doesn't do more than renewables already did.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:07
|
|
|
Tias posted:I'm not replying to smug assholes who can't see the difference betwen a chemical refinery and a wave energy station. Bye.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:09
|
|
|
Tias posted:I'm not replying to smug assholes who can't see difference betwen a chemical refinery and a wave energy station. Bye. Because it's actually not that much of a risk and is possible to implement at a sufficient scale to make a meaningful impact vs climate change (which will also destroy much of the environment) and coal in particular beyond what renewables alone can achieve. Countries where leaders and public opinion overestimate nuclear risks and underestimate other risks will fail to take advantage of this opportunity (Germany, some other European countries, the US depending on whether it has the will to encourage long term planning in the electricity market) but China and India are large quickly-growing energy users and have embraced nuclear. India could do better because they are merely slowing the expansion of coal rather than actively dismantling it, but we are still looking at a large amount of coal that's not being burnt every year (for example, notoriously energy inefficient coal-powered Australia offsets more CO2 emissions by selling uranium than it produces).
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:09
|
|
|
Tias posted:going nuclear brings with it the potential of meltdowns and material depletion that can end our species  Oh, yeah? Well what about the equally plausible scenario in which a solar panel goes rogue and begins rampantly absorbing all available sources of light - leaving the Sun a burnt-out cinder in the sky? Seriously - the numbers don't work: According to the World Nuclear Association, there were 438 reactors operating at the beginning of this month. The EIA says that nuclear reactors generated 2,344.806 PWh of electricity in 2012, out of a total of 21,531.709 PWh. So let's crudely boost that number. We now have 4022 reactors, supplying all of the world's electricity. Now let's push every one of them through the worst-case nuclear meltdown disaster known to mankind. Ignore the fact that most of those reactors aren't RBMK and that they have secondary containment systems. Long-running international investigation and review work has estimated the eventual death toll from Chernobyl at 4000. But let's apply the precautionary principle and assume the worst. There was a report published a few years ago which claimed 985,000 deaths. It had a few methodological flaws, and peer review wasn't exactly kind to it, but let's ignore that and just round it off to a million corpses. For simplicity, let's also assume that all of those people die immediately of acute radiation poisoning. The actual results involve stuff like "guy should have died at 70 of heart failure, but instead died at 68 of thyroid cancer", which is less exciting from a doomsday perspective. So: every power plant on the planet is replaced by a nuclear reactor. Each reactor spontaneously turns itself Russian, overrides all of its safety mechanisms, and shits itself sideways until the desperate survivors manage to entomb it in concrete. 4,022,000,000 people die. The three billion survivors are going to be pretty upset, and life is going to be pretty lovely for a while without any electricity. But you're going to need bigger numbers if you want to actually kill off the species. GulMadred fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Nov 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:24
|
|
|
I find it highly amusing that people think that dams are ecologically sound things to build. It's not like anything actually lives in those rivers, after all.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 15:33
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I find it highly amusing that people think that dams are ecologically sound things to build. It's not like anything actually lives in those rivers, after all. They have clear water and there's some pretty trees around them, so why could they possibly be bad?
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 16:10
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:Hey guys if it breaks there's absolutely nothing wrong with just leaving a power plant to sit and rust in the intertidal zone right? Dude, you were born a shitposter, and you'll die a shitposter. Provoke yourself if you want to, but I got better things to do with my time than replying to your shitbrained flailings. GulMadred posted:The three billion survivors are going to be pretty upset, and life is going to be pretty lovely for a while without any electricity. But you're going to need bigger numbers if you want to actually kill off the species. Allright, it seems I was wrong. I'm still not too stoked about a death toll of millions when we could just use other sources, though.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 16:10
|
|
|
Tias posted:Allright, it seems I was wrong. I'm still not too stoked about a death toll of millions when we could just use other sources, though. 1.) GulMadred posted:But let's apply the precautionary principle and assume the worst. There was a report published a few years ago which claimed 985,000 deaths. It had a few methodological flaws, and peer review wasn't exactly kind to it, but let's ignore that and just round it off to a million corpses. To specify what "methodolocial flaws" means: the authors compared the number of people dying before chernobyl and after chernobyl in areas of the Soviet Union, ignoring minor confounding factors such as the collapse of the Soviet Union 2.) actual death numbers for Chernobyl are, depending on whether you think very low dose effects exist or not, a couple dozen dead liquidators at the low end and a few thousand people with extra cancers at the high end (we kill about 30000 people per year via fossil fuel air pollution in Europe alone, for comparison) 3.) a scenario where every nuclear reactor in the world melts down and blows up simultaneously is a hypothetical point against your fear of human existence ending due to atomz, not anything resembling reality suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Nov 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 16:21
|
|
|
Tias, I thought I'd respond to your post more generally with a point no one has brought up yet. I don't think anyone here is opposed to renewable sources, but it isn't really a question of what is good versus better. The operative question is: what can people do to start generating power without carbon emissions immediately? That answer inevitably involves nuclear power. I agree there are other environmental issues that might need to be tackled later, but at the moment reducing carbon output has to come first.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 16:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 15:05 |
|
|
Dreissi posted:Tias, blowfish posted:Because it's actually not that much of a risk and is possible to implement at a sufficient scale to make a meaningful impact vs climate change (which will also destroy much of the environment) and coal in particular beyond what renewables alone can achieve. But you are right, this is a very important point that bears repeating.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2015 16:27
|
|