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Fidel Castronaut posted:I thought Fukushima was the end of nuclear power for most people because natural disasters happen. The 2008 recession killed off a lot of the "Nuclear Renaissance" that was predicted under Bush, Fukishima put it in intensive care, and Westinghouse recently filing bankruptcy and possibly taking down all of Toshiba due to cost overruns at VC Summer and Vogtle is pretty much the nail the coffin. More of the older plants are shutting down now because they can't compete with natural gas on price.
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Apr 24, 2017 22:23
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Badger of Basra posted:it's cool how germany, because they're so concerned about public safety, shut down all their nuclear plants and replaced them with coal I think they're also importing a bunch of power from France which is like 95% nuclear. Security at French nuclear plants is hilariously bad, but so was US security until 9/11.
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Apr 24, 2017 22:25
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deadgoon posted:holy poo poo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
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Apr 24, 2017 22:26
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Coolguye posted:even in water impact fossil fuel plants require the same general order of magnitude of water as nuclear plants to function. it depends on the specific fossil fuel and the specific nuclear reaction involved but yeah to run a coal power plant you need tons of water to clean out all the lovely effluent, a nuclear plant needs tons of water but all it does is make the water hot lmao Turkey Point in south Florida has hundreds of miles of cooling channels that alligators like to chill in. e: I think the big cooling ponds actually circulate the water back into the plant, typically. At least for ones that aren't on oceans/rivers/big natural lakes.
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Apr 26, 2017 14:31
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Coolguye posted:Yes, this includes all mining grounds and support infrastructure. Renewables still require two orders of magnitude more land. One of the primary benefits to both nuclear and fossil fuels is power density. One strip mine in South Dakota or one disassembled coal mountain in Appalachia can easily generate enough coal to power the entire United States for over a decade. The reason we don't do that is because it costs more than gas, which is even less land hungry. To do this same thing with a solar/wind/hydro mix we would need to devote more land to power generation than we currently do to farming. Entire forests have not been felled and entire habitats are still there because we use fossil fuels and not renewables to keep our lights on. Climate change is a serious problem, but let's not pretend like renewables are universally green. They're not. This paper comments on the land usage and has a nifty little diagram comparing nuclear, gas, coal, wind, solar and biomass https://wilderness.org/sites/default/files/legacy/Website-Land%20Use%20and%20Renewable%20Energy%20Generation.pdf
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Apr 26, 2017 15:22
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I like nuclear from a technical standpoint, but economically it sucks balls and "short term" is like 15 years and about $10B from "hey lets build a plant" to generating power.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:00
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Nevvy Z posted:If only there were things we could do collectively as a society to change any of that. Short of deregulation (gutting safety and security at nukes is a bad idea), probably not. Westinghouse thought they had it figured out with their "standard plant" design but now they're bankrupt. Unless there's a massive tax on carbon emissions from NG plants, nuclear just isn't economically feasible. That's why a lot of the older, smaller plants are shutting down as their licenses expire rather than filing for renewals.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:10
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hey guys I don't disagree I am a fan of nuclear but I'm just saying economically they're not going to be build because they're a lot more expensive than natural gas! I think that holds true even if you put a decent carbon tax on natural gas.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:20
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Coolguye posted:those land usage statistics are staggering, i'm not sure what you're looking at there. you couldn't just drop solar cells over a few national parks and call it a day due to the power storage problem, you're going to need the biofuel and wind portions in there too. we already tried the biofuel portion with biodiesel and it caused widespread misery due to rising food prices. come on, now you're just being dumb. "drop solar cells over a few national parks." California's managed to figure out how to deploy a fuckload of solar without dropping it on Yosemite or King's Canyon. Much of Nevada and Utah are uninhabited wastelands. Wind has a high land use ratio, but I'm not sure how much those figures consider the mixed usage where you've got turbines plopped down in the middle of farms maybe taking up an acre each out of thousands of acres. quote:i've heard a lot of proponents of nuclear say that we really need to come up with a new word with regard to the pebble beds because they're as different in terms of both construction and output to a traditional fission plant as a model t is from a lambo. instead of proposing a 'pebble bed nuclear power station' or whatever you call it a thermal reactor or something to emphasize that it's doing much more work by virtue of its temperature vs its neutron activity. pebble bed and other Gen 4 reactors are cool, but they're all still a ways away from being able to be scaled up to full-size reactors.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:47
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financially racist posted:i mean the real way for solar to work is to decentralize our power grid and throw solar panels on every loving roof in the country That could really help for residential and to some extent commercial, but it wouldn't be too helpful for industrial.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:53
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Coolguye posted:california's power mix is still 7.7% solar. natural gas has a smaller footprint in land in california even when you include the mining zones out of state and produces almost 8x the gigawatt hours. to scale solar you would, in fact, probably be forced into dropping solar stations into yosemite. No, that is still dumb, and nobody is actually advocating for 100% solar. quote:turbines plopped into farmland is just as bad as wilderness because the farm will then be producing less food or clothing fiber to suit other basic needs. you will not be putting down a single wind turbine because that's pointless; the electrical equipment you need to hook it up to will cost more than the turbine itself and make it completely infeasible economically. the entire reason large scale wind farms are the preferred way of doing wind is because you can collectivize these needs and capture an economy of scale. I didn't say anything about a single wind turbine wind farm? I live in the midwest and we have plenty of these. The turbine footprint takes up a negligible amount of acreage when you're dealing with commercial sized farms. Wind farms are huge in total acreage because of how far apart the turbines need to be spaced, but a "10,000 acre wind farm" is probably only really taking up 10 acres of actual farmland and the rest is perfectly farmable. If you're talking about out west, then it's just turbines on rocky hills that aren't be farmed anyway or can still easily be used for livestock grazing. e: It's not like we have a farmland shortage so talking about how we'll be producing less food due to wind turbines is crazy.
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Apr 26, 2017 18:14
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financially racist posted:i mean most people who want power to be more publicly controlled also want to greatly increase taxes on the rich, so they make more money by spending tons on questionably useful capital projects and lobbying their state boards for rate increases! TVA already owns and operators several nuclear plants, and publicly owned utilities are at least partial owners of many other ones including Santee Cooper who controls much (all?) of SC's electrical grid and has a stake in VC Summer.
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Apr 26, 2017 19:03
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Coolguye posted:i mean sprawling bureaucracies are basically synonymous with decadent stasis and inefficiency and that was true before rand was even born so kinda? just look at the ming dynasty or the byzantine empire let me tell you about the finely tuned bureaucracies that are California utilities companies
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Apr 26, 2017 19:34
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Coolguye posted:it reduces people to objects. 
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Apr 27, 2017 16:04
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That's not shocking to me as Turkey Point is sort of a shithole. It's located right next door to Biscayne Bay National Park.
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Apr 27, 2017 16:14
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Dairy Days posted:this might be a valid concern if they melted down say, as often as cspam posters. fortunately, you are more likely to die falling off a roof trying to put a solar panel on it than inhaling nuclear radiohell particles and melting into a neon green pool you get more dosage flying on an airplane than walking around a nuclear plant
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Apr 27, 2017 17:12
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mister magpie posted:Sure, if we are looking at acute dosage but we also need to consider exposure time. 1 fission per year per kg sounds extremely low, but have a large quantity of that material and a long enough exposure, somatic exposure goes up. Granted, most of the public just hears half-life and thinks it is a bad thing. What? I think storing them in big concrete cylinders in random locations around the country that need to be guarded 24/7 indefinitely is a perfectly fine long-term plan!
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Apr 27, 2017 18:55
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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. Chernobyl wasn't just a flawed reactor design. It was also an idiot who had no idea what he was doing running some experiments and pushing the whole system way, way beyond it's capabilities. A better reactor design doesn't allow for it to happen and having an actual containment building prevents the damage from spreading as much as it did, but fundamentally it was an extreme human error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_and_explosion
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Apr 28, 2017 14:16
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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. 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.
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Apr 28, 2017 14:18
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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. 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. brugroffil has issued a correction as of 14:24 on Apr 28, 2017 |
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Apr 28, 2017 14:20
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Lindsey O. Graham posted:...and no 
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Apr 28, 2017 14:21
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It wouldn't have been Chernobyl-bad because we actually build containment structures in this country, but Davis-Bessie in Ohio almost had a very, very bad situation about a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station#2002_reactor_head_hole Luckily, they caught it before the last 3/8" of steel gave way to an extremely high pressure jet of radioactive water.
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Apr 28, 2017 16:19
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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.  The ISFSI is on the left, and the plant used to be between it and the lake.
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Apr 28, 2017 16:49
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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. This is no place of honor 
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Apr 28, 2017 16:56
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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). re: the bolded, does that include if you correctly price in the externalities of coal such as spewing heavy metals everywhere and pumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere? we also haven't sited a new nuclear facility in this country since the 1970's. The most recent reactor to come online, Watts Bar, was under construction for a long rear end time and is the second unit at the facility. VC Summer and Vogtle are existing old plants that are building the new AP1000's.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:28
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Concerned Citizen posted:westinghouse's reactors are gen III+, not gen IV. it's a PWR so it's hardly skunk works. and talking about operating costs, if their operating costs were really that low, half of us nuclear reactors wouldn't be unprofitable. the operating costs are only low on paper, but in reality they significantly increase as the reactors age. and, of course, most of the cost is in building the things in the first place. yeah AP1000 is just a fancy, streamlined Gen III PWR with a bunch of passive safety features and some reduced complexity. The core technology (heh) is still the same as we've been running for decades. They're expensive systems to maintain, operate and secure. That's a good thing, because we really do not want private companies cutting corners when it comes to safety and security at nuclear facilities. Even with the regulations currently in place, you can see big differences in how some companies maintain their plants and go above and beyond the regulator bare minimums.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:31
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Coolguye posted:the entire concept of Gen III+ is a colossal load of crap brought on by exactly the sort of stuff I mentioned in my post. A Gen III+ PWR is almost invariably trying to crowbar advanced fuel types into a design that wasn't put out to accept that fuel, which is like trying to convert an unleaded car into a diesel one. Sure, you can technically do it, but there's basically never any reason to. Again, this is to dodge regulation that makes building otherwise modern, battle-ready designs not viable. As someone who actually is dealing first-hand with AP1000 projects, lol. Gen III+ is just better engineering for safety, maintainability, and operability of Gen III technology. There's no advanced fuel types. Gen iV reactors are still all research-grade and we're a ways away from them being commercially viable.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:35
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Coolguye posted:probably doesn't include those situations, nope! but since nobody can agree on how much a ton of CO2 should cost, nor things like heavy metal poisoning, you can't include them in any economic model without it being really, really shaky. You can't talk about "but renewables are so expensive!" without acknowledging the hidden subsidies/externalities of what you're comparing them to and why people are pushing for renewables in the first place,.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:36
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Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:I was under the impression that wind farms also functioned as pasture as well. It's not like cows give a poo poo. This isn't the case? Yes, it is. My wife's family used to own some farmland in central Illinois that was part of one of the big wind farms down there. They got paid something like $7k/year per turbine to lease the land. I have no idea why Coolguye thinks windfarms displace a non-negligible amount of farmland. Maybe he's never flown over the many midwestern states littered with them that still grow immense amounts of food?
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Apr 28, 2017 18:38
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Coolguye posted:could you provide a place to take a look at these AP1000 proposals? i'm fine with it if it's some agency or whatever that i have to write to and not an immediate gratification URL. i'm happy to be wrong on this matter, but the "GenIII+" proposals that got run around and murdered in committee in kansas and missouri were invariably trying to cram some flavor of thorium into a much older reactor type jury-rigged for the job, and had basically every nuclear engineer i hung out with reacting with horror. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0715/ML071580895.pdf
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Apr 28, 2017 18:42
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Maybe it's the suck rear end states you live in, there doesn't seem to be a problem in more northern Midwest states with wind? Do you have any links to studies about those sorts of claims? Because a quick google doesn't really turn up anything reputable. e: why are you stopping and talking to random wind farm managers btw? brugroffil has issued a correction as of 18:58 on Apr 28, 2017 |
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Apr 28, 2017 18:47
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Concerned Citizen posted:every part of nuclear is subsidized, both new constructions and existing infrastucture. it's apples-to-apples because neither industry can survive without enormous government subsidies, and nuclear will require more over the lifetime of a plant until such time that we develop more economical reactors. Spent fuel storage is also 100% subsidized (well, the companies regularly sue the DoE) because the government was supposed to have opened a storage facility decades ago. So even though a plant like Dairyland in Wisconsin shut down in 1987, they're still paying for monitoring and security upgrades and 24/7 security and maintenance staff at the site. There are only going to be more and more of these sites as more reactors are shuttered thanks to cheap natural gas. http://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/energy/2016/10/21/feds-pay-dairyland-735-million-nuclear-settlement/92514596/
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Apr 28, 2017 18:50
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Coolguye posted:okay, your sense of scale is absolutely insane here for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which is you're effectively implying that they receive proportional subsidy, which isn't true - renewables receive tons more for a much more sustained time period, especially in the case of new construction. your comparisons over lifetime are also insane because nuke reactors are routinely exceeding their targeted design life span by a decade or more and that is not even remotely comparable to the windmills and solar farms that are already eating comparable amounts in constant battery replacements. i'm willing to drop all of that in an agree-to-disagree. They are able to do this thanks to very expensive upgrades that sometimes go horribly wrong and break the entire plant, like when SONGS replaced their steam generators with new ones that had a critical design flaw, leading to both reactors being permanently shuttered. Or when Crystal River thought "hey, we can save $20m on this steam generator project by running it ourselves instead of hiring the one company that's done dozens of them around the country!" and promptly broke their containment building twice. Collectively, that flushed over $10B worth of assets down the drain. The industry as a whole had to spend over $1B on Fukashima upgrades. Similar numbers were spent on post-9/11 security upgrades. fun fact about SONGS: it's right next to a state park and there's a public walkway that runs along the seawall directly in front of the plant. Camp Pendelton is also just across the highway so you can hear artillery shells going off in the background! brugroffil has issued a correction as of 19:06 on Apr 28, 2017 |
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Apr 28, 2017 19:02
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Coolguye posted:the most reputable thing i can offer is the economic impact assessments done by the oklahoma legislature when deciding to end the recent wind subsidies, but those aren't online because lol oklahoma. i read them thoroughly when i was in tulsa for a week alternately working on a contract and getting drunk on their microbrews. i'll see if i can request a copy of the report to be delivered since it was actually an interesting read, but no promises. I'm very skeptical about anything coming out of the Oklahoma legislature, especially when it's being used as a justification to say "lol gently caress liberals and their dumb green energy, ROLL COAL!"
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Apr 28, 2017 19:03
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Don't forget Operation Plowshare, wherein we'd use nuclear weapons for civil construction projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare Need a new harbor? Just detonate a bunch of nuclear bombs! 
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May 1, 2017 14:31
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Southern is still moving ahead with finishing up Vogtle's two new plants, but yeah  nuclear
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Aug 1, 2017 21:38
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