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Lord Waffle Beard posted:Over enough time you would offset the cost of them, and you would also help save the environment which is more important. not really with the costs of maintenance and replacement
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Sep 17, 2014 23:32
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Dancer posted:As cool as nuclear may be, it's not renewable. no, but if thorium ever gets off the ground (a big if) it's plentiful enough that it might as well be
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Sep 17, 2014 23:34
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KoRMaK posted:I don't really consider them green. When something goes wrong, it goes colossally wrong and stays there for a long time. Longer than oil accidents. things very very rarely go wrong, and that's no reason to not consider them green especially when actually viable alternatives for large power systems not in hydro heavy areas is coal (worse) or the status quo (also worse on all possible metrics)
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Sep 18, 2014 02:56
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KoRMaK posted:Then what the gently caress have I been worrying about this whole time. How long does an area remain unsafe after a meltdown? So if this is true, why isn't Chernobyl cleaned up and inhabited? Or is it because it's only like 30-40 years old, and in another 20 it will be fine? The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous exposure is. The real big problem wastes from the old light-water reactors are the transuranics - and (again if thorium breeder reactors ever get off the ground) we may be able to use those old waste products again in the reactors - and almost entirely eliminate all waste. I like posting this video as it's very informative and will answer some of your general questions as well as maybe get you pumped on some possible future tech: LFTR in 5 minutes - Thorium Remix 2011 Note that the first 5 minutes are a short synopsis of the rest of the video - watch the whole thing, I know it's over an hour, but it's worth watching. e: as mentioned, the thing to remember with Chernobyl is that a WHOLE bunch of things that should never have been able to happen were allowed to happen due to saftey regulations being actively ignored as well as a very silly design using graphite in the core I believe. Read up on it - it's not a mistake that will ever happen again, or frankly should have happened if people weren't intentionally being unsafe. JawKnee fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 18, 2014 04:19
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Lord Waffle Beard posted:If you think nuclear power is good you should put your fedora down and quit living your jizz stains everywhere I don't think it's good I think it's great but I have no fedoras to put down I look forward to your E/N thread about falling off a roof while cleaning your inneffective solar panels
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Sep 18, 2014 05:09
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Fukushima on the other hand was a generating station that got obliterated when the ocean decided to come visit. Because the Japanese aren't totally insane and actually build safe plants it didn't go totally tits-up immediately. A few design flaws allowed some of the reactors to get out of control before they could be fully shut down and they destroyed themselves and breached containment. The Japanese government reacted with an abundance of caution and evacuated a HUGE zone. The result was a lot of people displaced, no serious exposures to the public, and some mildly radioactive fish. The reactors were actually already offline by that point, but still contained waaaaay too much heat and needed constant pressure to be kept up by pumping water into the chambers. Because the reactors were offline they couldn't supply this power themselves and the backup diesel generators had to do this; they decided that the best place for backup generators keeping poo poo from getting ruined was in the basements - which got flooded and knocked out the backup power. They did have emergency backups in the form of batteries but once those ran out there was no way to keep water pumping into the reactors, so the water turned to steam, and some (or all) of the hydrogen separated and eventually exploded (which was what those explosions that everyone on the news was freaking out over were).
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Sep 18, 2014 05:22
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Bedshaped posted:"Uranium-235 is a finite non-renewable resource." breeder reactors exist already even a thorium reactor has already been built and was operational in the states in the loving 1960's Solar/Wind are: 1) not efficient enough AND too expensive to ever fully replace the energy even currently produced by fossil fuels (never mind what our energy demands might be in the future) 2) given that, and with respect to the very simple truth that coal/gas produced energy is far more damaging to the environment AND directly deadly to humans than nuclear energy ever has been or will be on any metric and: 3) assuming that we cannot simply 'cut back' on energy use more than a token amount without deeply impacting quality of life - we will need a viable alternative that can replace the quantity of power produced by fossil fuels, which is both efficient and cheap AND reliable enough to actually do so and the only such alternative is nuclear. I will agree that if we keep burning U-235 we will run out in a quantifiable amount of time - luckily U-235 is not the only fuels source available to us, and likely we're well on the way to developing a new set of reactors that don't need it AND don't operate under high pressure restrictions or use solid fuels.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:49
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MizPiz posted:Economically, it makes more sense to use an energy source that doesn't create dangerous waste that needs to be securely housed for thousands of years. unless your alternative source has extreme economic drawbacks in other areas: like unreliability of operation or a lack of efficiency requiring much larger costs to even get it running on a scale that could begin to replace existing power needs.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:51
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ease isn't the issue, viability is.
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Sep 19, 2014 16:55
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computer parts posted:Well, it's pursued in China because the party bosses live in Beijing and don't want to live in Beijing's air. This, essentially. China, with a much larger population mostly below western ideals for a standard quality of life, ratcheted up coal burning (and hydro-electric, and natural gas, and...) to provide energy for a whole shitload of infrastructure and other poo poo - enter massive environmental problems, so much so that the government there is looking to thorium as an alternative. Also, as to how politically viable this tech is in the states, here's  Kirk Sorensen again, with a much more recent, slightly more technical video on the LFTR (being pursued by his own company FLIBE energy) talking about both the political will (and climate) for new energy in the US, and also briefly about China I believe
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Sep 20, 2014 21:20
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