whomupclicklike posted:

And then you can use that lead for nuclear shielding, right? The whole problem solves itself?

Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:

Well, in the case of uranium, you'd have to wait a few billion years, and it's really kinda hard to separate out the lead from the uranium that hasn't turned into lead yet. Some atoms decay faster than others and we can talk about reliably predicting them in terms of large numbers. It's not so bad, since a 2.2 lbs of uranium is something like 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Coolguye posted:

whomupclicklike: To give you an idea of the scale of waste we're talking about in terms of nuclear reactors incidentally, if you replaced EVERY coal fired power plant in the lower 48 states except one with a modern, ready-to-build-right-now nuke plant using plain jane uranium (which is arguably not even the best available fuel), you would be able to dispose of all of the waste generated by all of those reactors for the next 100 years with a single waste sarcophagus built over the site of the last coal fired power plant.

The measurable environmental disturbance at the other sites would be some hydro-engineering to provide settling ponds for the water used to cool the reactors and the associated heat pollution in the immediate area. There would be no detectable radiation, no carbon emissions, no soot, no ash, etc.

whomupclicklike posted:

I'm willing to like, have my mind changed here but I don't understand why nuclear energy is worth the risk of a disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima? I recognize that these sort of events are incredibly uncommon and even that Fukushima probably wouldn't have happened had it not been for that tsunami.

Lindsey O. Graham posted:

...and no
no one is bringing nuclear back in any kind of genuine way

rudatron posted:

Chernobyl was a flawed reactor design (that the designers knew about but which the plant technicians were never informed of) and fukushima wasn't nearly as bad aa the reaction to it would have you believe - the evacuation occurred as a precaution but its not as if the entire site was irradiated, it was mostly leakage into the ocean.

In terms of death per kilowatt hr, nuclear kills less people than coal, biofuels or even solar (mostly people dying when they fall off roofs). Importantly, nuclear is the only feasible non-carbon baseload that's not limited by geography (hydro is better but there's a maximum capacity to that that we've already practically reached).

Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:

Waste is more fuel waiting to be recycled. The U.S. has a (really goddamn tiny) re processor in South Carolina that we don't use intelligently, but there is no physical reason we can't have a literal Department of Energy "Send your reactor waste here and we'll send you back some fuel". There'd be some mildly radioactive cladding that we'd have to deal with, but I think blending it with regular aluminum would dilute it to safe levels until it finished decaying.


We still haven't figured out a good way to decommission the reactors them other than "Fill that bitch in concrete". There are several old rear end reactors from the 1950s where I work that are literally mountains of concrete. Luckily concrete is pretty easy, but there are some (underfunded) DOE projects looking at doing something less dramatic than. I did a minor bit on epoxies for fixing contaminated areas in decommissioning reactors.

As for waste weapons grade radioactive stuff, we either blend some of it in with the nuclear fuel or we encase it in high temperature, fission decay, and acid resistant ceramics or glass mixes. I am literally working on a journal article on this subject, we should be able to fill the ceramic with 10% wt weapons Pu and then put it in a drum and forget about it, it's a neat project, though not super sexy science.

I work for the DOE. I'm not an authority by any means, but I know some of what is going on in one of the national labs.

Not a Step posted:

Eventually you get down to stuff thats not worth the cost of dealing with anymore. Its still radioactive and needs to be contained, but theoretically we might want to someday dig up that waste and reprocess it when it is economically worthwhile.

Reprocessing gets rid of a lot of the high energy stuff by turning it back into more fuel, but you're always going to have radioactive waste from bits of machinery that were in the reactor or whatever. That stuff still has to be dealt with so you never really eliminate all nuclear waste or even the bulk of it.

Lindsey O. Graham posted:

...and no
no one is bringing nuclear back in any kind of genuine way

brugroffil posted:

Right now, this is what we're doing with it:


That's an ISFSI, or Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation. That's all of the waste that couldn't be recycled/reprocessed for the entire life of a nuclear plant. The area where the rest of the plant used to be is now just trees and grass and stuff.

Baloogan posted:

i like nuclear power and thers like lots of uranium in the sea and its not hard to centrifuge the uranium out because its so heavy and also u can make fresh water from the salt water and irrigate the planet

brugroffil posted:

There are some shut down commercial reactors that have gone back to green fields now. I've been to a few of them. You've got the relatively small storage area where they're storing the spent fuel and greater-than-class-C waste, but 90% of the old plant site is just an open field now.

Coolguye posted:

yeah it absolutely amazes me that all these years later we are still explaining to people _{that should know better like those educated in scientific fields, let alone others} that chernobyl was the single greatest instance of 'hold my beer' in human history, not some inevitable consequence of the powers we were playing with

brugroffil posted:

There are some shut down commercial reactors that have gone back to green fields now. I've been to a few of them. You've got the relatively small storage area where they're storing the spent fuel and greater-than-class-C waste, but 90% of the old plant site is just an open field now.

Condiv posted:

seems p irresponsible tbqh

what if aliens came and tried to open those up? they'd die!

Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:

Oh cool! Good to know. The only reactors I'm familiar with were ones in the U.S. from just after WW2 that were made to make nuclear bombs. I wish I knew more to know the difference on how they operated to comment/know more.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Of all the paper-thin bullshit that's made me roll my eyes about why we just can't open up Yucca Mountain or any other centralized storage site yet, the mewling complaints of "b-b-but what if tens of thousands of years from now a post-apocalyptic society which can't read English and has literally no knowledge of any human history that preceded it somehow finds the vault and gets into it!? We've gotta come up with an effective warning sign before we can even think of doing permanent nuclear waste storage!" has to be the worst.

Coolguye posted:

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Of all the paper-thin bullshit that's made me roll my eyes about why we just can't open up Yucca Mountain or any other centralized storage site yet, the mewling complaints of "b-b-but what if tens of thousands of years from now a post-apocalyptic society which can't read English and has literally no knowledge of any human history that preceded it somehow finds the vault and gets into it!? We've gotta come up with an effective warning sign before we can even think of doing permanent nuclear waste storage!" has to be the worst.

Coolguye posted:

yeah it absolutely amazes me that all these years later we are still explaining to people that chernobyl was the single greatest instance of 'hold my beer' in human history, not some inevitable consequence of the powers we were playing with

Nebakenezzer posted:

Yeah, it's difficult to understate how hosed up Chernobyl was compared to every other nuclear accident

Like, if the people making decisions before the accident to specifically create the worst possible nuclear disaster, they couldn't have done much better

Concerned Citizen posted:

the issue with nuclear power is not its safety, but rather the fact that despite two pro-nuclear administrations in a row investing billions of dollars in subsidies to support the industry, we have not come close to making it economically viable. private investors will not even get involved with a nuclear reactor unless the government will guarantee the loan. the poo poo about how it'd totally be cheap if we'd just cut some of those darn safety regulations is absolutely absurd. it's expensive because the projects are incredibly hard to build, and expensive to maintain and repair once they reach a mature age.

Condiv posted:

Hmm

Would you say this is a market failure?

Maybe we shouldn't be relying on private markets to provide vital infrastructure?

Concerned Citizen posted:

well it's a market failure if you assume none of the reactors will be expensive boondoggles that never meet projections. which has not been the case for any nuclear reactors we've tried to build

even china's huge nuclear expansion, which is of course state funded, is looking at $100b~ between new reactors and safety upgrades over the next few years even prior to the inevitable cost overruns.

Condiv posted:

And how much do the spills and environmental damage from other power generation techs add to their overall cost?

It seems to be a market failure to me when the markets select underregulated and highly polluting and destructive plants like coal because they're cheaper in the short term

Concerned Citizen posted:

it still has less potential than renewables for the same money we'd have to invest.

Coolguye posted:

it requires almost five dozen extra certifications and permits to receive clearance that a nuclear power plant proposal is safe vs a gas or coal plant, which is required before the proposal can even be brought to politicians, who then must be convinced all over again and will frequently demand that the site be moved a couple of miles in one direction or another to make it more palatable to their constituents, which then triggers recertification procedures. not a huge deal for the moderately regulated fossil fuel plants (which might lose a couple ten or a hundred thousand dollars and be delayed a couple of months), a huge setback for nuclear projects (which can lose hundreds of thousands and be delayed up to a year).

the question of economically viable is not, like wind or solar, a matter of mathematics and logistics. there's nothing you can do to make a solar panel deliver a MW/hr as cheaply as a coal plant with current tech. a nuke plant delivers a MW/hr as cheaply as a coal plant in the majority of situations, right this minute. the difference is entirely regulation, which has been ratcheted upward since the cold war with paranoid statutes that do not increase the safety of a plant but definitely decrease its economic viability due to the literal years and millions of dollars spent on just getting inspectors out at the site to poke around. not to mention, when these processes take so long, you run the real risk of having new legislation passed to affect current building. it's really dishonest to call something a boondoggle when the rug's ripped out from under a project, which has happened at least a half-dozen times in the last 15 years in the USA. this is, like, not even remotely arguable as a market force, these are regulation forces. the USA at this juncture has regulated nuclear power out of viability.

saying china's spending a lot of money on nuke power is misleading too because they're spending a lot of money on power period. up until 2015 huge areas of the country had zero access to electricity, and even now most rural areas have rolling blackouts because the capacity of their power infrastructure is flatly insufficient.

Concerned Citizen posted:

the us has not "regulated nuclear out of viability." the policy of the last nearly 2 decades has been to actively encourage the building of new nuclear plants. the cost of regulation is the tiniest fraction of the overall cost. westinghouse's issues have been entirely technical - they have been unable to fabricate and build at the pace & cost they were meant to. and every single reactor being built has faced that exact problem.

Concerned Citizen posted:

no one is selecting coal. it's a dying industry, and coal plants are shutting down like whoa. they're selecting natural gas and (to a much lesser extent) renewables. while natural gas isn't exactly an environmental plus vs. nuclear, it's far cleaner than coal.

while nuclear certainly has a place in our energy mix, and it's preferable to fossil fuel sources, it still has less potential than renewables for the same money we'd have to invest.

Coolguye posted:

it's really, really difficult to imagine a context of 'potential' where this is true. could you elaborate?

Coolguye posted:

westinghouse is promising gen IV reactors for the projects you're mentioning which are subject to less regulation by not using a lot of the hot-topic fuels that trigger so many of the regulations, despite the fact that we have poured so much work into securing and handling gen III reactors that they have fewer deaths per kW/h, less environmental impact, and lower operating costs than equivalent fossil fuel stations. regulation is forcing people to spend profligately on technologies that are not ready for prime time and not ready to be out of the skunkworks, per attestations of dozens upon dozens of nuclear engineers paid lots and lots of money to make high end breeders and pebble beds a real thing.

Concerned Citizen posted:

wind/solar are developing technologies that are still declining in cost, and in general are now competitive with coal (or at least wind is) while still lagging behind crazy cheap natural gas. their share in the energy mix has grown bigly over the past 8 years, and it's projected by most energy companies to continue to do so. investing in renewables makes sense. we should invest enough in nuclear to maintain its place in the energy mix (since so many reactors will soon be going offline) but a france-like future isn't going to happen.

Coolguye posted:

it requires almost five dozen extra certifications and permits to receive clearance that a nuclear power plant proposal is safe vs a gas or coal plant, which is required before the proposal can even be brought to politicians, who then must be convinced all over again and will frequently demand that the site be moved a couple of miles in one direction or another to make it more palatable to their constituents, which then triggers recertification procedures. not a huge deal for the moderately regulated fossil fuel plants (which might lose a couple ten or a hundred thousand dollars and be delayed a couple of months), a huge setback for nuclear projects (which can lose hundreds of thousands and be delayed up to a year).

the question of economically viable is not, like wind or solar, a matter of mathematics and logistics. there's nothing you can do to make a solar panel deliver a MW/hr as cheaply as a coal plant with current tech. a nuke plant delivers a MW/hr as cheaply as a coal plant in the majority of situations, right this minute. the difference is entirely regulation, which has been ratcheted upward since the cold war with paranoid statutes that do not increase the safety of a plant but definitely decrease its economic viability due to the literal years and millions of dollars spent on just getting inspectors out at the site to poke around. not to mention, when these processes take so long, you run the real risk of having new legislation passed to affect current building. it's really dishonest to call something a boondoggle when the rug's ripped out from under a project, which has happened at least a half-dozen times in the last 15 years in the USA. this is, like, not even remotely arguable as a market force, these are regulation forces. the USA at this juncture has regulated nuclear power out of viability.

saying china's spending a lot of money on nuke power is misleading too because they're spending a lot of money on power period. up until 2015 huge areas of the country had zero access to electricity, and even now most rural areas have rolling blackouts because the capacity of their power infrastructure is flatly insufficient.