Nuclear power is vital to any "Green" energy plan that will actually work.

[Aristotle]

This title sucks but there is a ton of great info in the article:

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables

It is only nuclear energy, not solar and wind, that has radically and rapidly decarbonized energy supplies while increasing wages and growing societal wealth.

And it is only nuclear that has, by powering high-speed trains everywhere from France to Japan to China, decarbonized transportation, which is the source of about one-third of the emissions humankind creates.

Better article:

=> nuclear is the safest source of electricity.

"Nuclear power has saved 1.8 million lives to date by preventing the burning of fossil fuel.s"

"7 million people die annually from air pollution."

Nuclear is already the safest form of energy:



Nuclear produces four times less carbon pollution than solar farms.

450 times more land is needed for solar than nuclear.

6 nuclear plants scheduled for early closure generated 3% more electricity than *ALL* US solar in 2016.

9 other plans scheduled or at risk of being closed gfenerated 63% more electricity than *ALL* US solar in 2016.

All the nuclear waste ever produced in the US can fit in 50 foot stacks on a single football field.

[Aristotle]

Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible.

And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is - when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction?

"Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It’s not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years. It’s that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind."

[Xywalan]

Nuclear power is complementary to other forms of renewable energy, specially since it can be used to fill the gaps in the variability of wind and solar. That being said, what a lot of articles do not consider is considering the future growth in energy consumption. For example, by looking at "electricity production by source"
we roughly need to increase electricity produced by nuclear power plants by a factor of five. However, that's only to match the *current* electricity consumption! If we assume the rate of consumption is going to double say every two decades or so, to match the needs in 20 years, we need to increase it by 20 times.

So, now go back to that relatively misleading picture of "so little nuclear waste" and then multiply it by 20.

The point is that we need a combination of methods but I agree with the premise that avoiding nuclear power plants is fucking stupid.

[Xywalan]

But that being said, I hate a lot of trickery that goes in the original link.

Let's start here: Stop Letting Your Ridiculous Fears Of Nuclear Waste Kill The Planet

How much is there? If all the nuclear waste from U.S. power plants were put on a football field, it would stack up just 50 feet high. In comparison to the waste produced by every other kind of electricity production, that quantity is close to zero

There are two misleading tricks used in this quote.

1) Ignoring exponential growth: Our electricity consumption and production is growing exponentially and so is the amount of electricity generated by nuclear power plants. For example, if we are doubling our production of electricity from nuclear energy every 10 years,
then during each period of 10 years, we are generating more electricity in *all the prior years*!! However, it also means that in the next 10 years we will be producing more electricity than what has ever been produced. As a result, in every doubling cycle, we will be
producing more nuclear waste than we have ever produced! We cannot ignore this.

2) He writes a lot of irrelevant bullshit regarding the nuclear waste but ignores the real tough issues. For example he writes:

After 60 years of civilian nuclear power we can finally declare that the top prize in the contest to safely and cheaply contain used nuclear fuel rods goes to... the cans the rods are currently stored in!
How do we know the cans are the best solution? Because they have proven 100 percent effective. The used nuclear fuel rods stored in cans have never hurt a fly much less killed a person.
By contrast, transporting cans of used nuclear waste would increase the threat to the continued operation of our life-saving nuclear plants. Anti-nuclear groups like Greenpeace and their PR agents have long planned a campaign of harassment and fear-mongering which would result in more unnecessary and expensive security guards.
Congress has repeatedly tried and failed to move the nuclear waste. Why, after $15 billion and 35 years of effort, are the cans still on-site? Because of fears that the cans would... leak, or “spill,” or be stolen by ISIS. Or something. Nobody’s quite sure.
Trying to solve this non-problem would cost an astonishing $65 billion, according to the NRC — an amount that doesn’t include the additional half billion more to operate the facility annually, or the quarter-billion more for monitoring after filling it up with spent fuel. By contrast, each canister costs just $500,000 to $1 million — a pittance for a plant that needs a few dozen maximum.
But how long will the canisters last? ”I have a difficult time imagining any reason why the [current waste can storage] system cannot work for decades to centuries,” wrote the dean of nuclear energy bloggers, Rod Adams, in 2005.

First, we have not had the time to store the waste canisters for centuries so any claims regarding their longevity over centuries is dubious. And he is quoting some expert as if that is evidence. It is not. This is simply "proof by authority" logical fallacy.
Rod Adam says so in 2005!!!! He must be right! The canisters are safe for over centuries!!!!!

Second, he ignores the problem of long half-life:

In total, the other six LLFPs, in thermal reactor spent fuel, initially release only a bit more than 10% as much energy per unit time as Tc-99 for U-235 fission, or 25% as much for 65% U-235+35% Pu-239. About 1000 years after fuel use, radioactivity from the medium-lived fission products Cs-137 and Sr-90 drops below the level of radioactivity from Tc-99 or LLFPs in general. (Actinides, if not removed, will be emitting more radioactivity than either at this point.) By about 1 million years, Tc-99 radioactivity will have declined below that of Zr-93, though immobility of the latter means it is probably still a lesser hazard. By about 3 million years, Zr-93 decay energy will have declined below that of I-129.

For some of stuff involved, we are talking about millions of years! Let's be generous and ignore those very long lasting nuclear wastes. Let's just stick with the medium half-life dudes of just "thousand years". Think about thousand years of generating nuclear waste and factor in the growth. We are
easily talking about 10,000 times, 20,000 times, or maybe 1,000,000 times more nuclear waste than current levels! So forget the "one stadium" or "one wall-mart" that can hold all the waste, think about "a million wall-marts" full of nuclear wastes.

Basically, the point is that nuclear power plants cannot be the long term solutions. They should be used currently while we develop other forms of renewable energy and hopefully one day we will figure out how to do "nuclear fusion":

No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years.

[Gromgor]

So, now go back to that relatively misleading picture of "so little nuclear waste" and then multiply it by 20.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_D...coal_ash_spill

"In February 2014, an Eden, North Carolina facility owned by Duke Energy spilled 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. "

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/lo...218718570.html

Just two incidents within the last 5 years, local to where I live, from coal.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=207&t=3

I would rather they build enough nuclear plants in the US to offset a 100% reduction in coal/natural gas/non-renewables than to keep going as they are. Until the technology of wind/solar/hydro is sufficient to bypass Nuclear, it is the best thing we have available - and with more Nuclear, Nuclear would advance technologically faster, to become even more efficient.

[Gromgor]

Second, he ignores the problem of long half-life:

For some of stuff involved, we are talking about millions of years! Let's be generous and ignore those very long lasting nuclear wastes. Let's just stick with the medium half-life dudes of just "thousand years". Think about thousand years of generating nuclear waste and factor in the growth. We are
easily talking about 10,000 times, 20,000 times, or maybe 1,000,000 times more nuclear waste than current levels! So forget the "one stadium" or "one wall-mart" that can hold all the waste, think about "a million wall-marts" full of nuclear wastes.

It would be really amusing if one of the commercial actions of SpaceX was to transport nuclear waste offworld. Just a random thought whose imagery I find amusing.

Basically, the point is that nuclear power plants cannot be the long term solutions. They should be used currently while we develop other forms of renewable energy and hopefully one day we will figure out how to do "nuclear fusion":

They can't be long term solutions, no. But don't let Great be the enemy of Good. They're a GOOD option - at least for now. Much better than continuing as we are. And even if the nuclear wastes grow exponentially, it's STILL less than the amount of wastes created by current methods TODAY.

[Xywalan]

It would be really amusing if one of the commercial actions of SpaceX was to transport nuclear waste offworld. Just a random thought whose imagery I find amusing.

Sending nuclear waste to space has a lot of problem:
1) It is difficult to ensure that whatever you send to space does not come flying back to you.
2) It takes a lot of energy to send things into space and to also ensure #1. I would be surprised if nuclear power generation can pay for itself. Maybe it's doable. Maybe you can store them for a thousand years, then send the stuff that has half-life of a million years to space, or something. But it's not something I would bet on it.

They can't be long term solutions, no. But don't let Great be the enemy of Good. They're a GOOD option - at least for now. Much better than continuing as we are. And even if the nuclear wastes grow exponentially, it's STILL less than the amount of wastes created by current methods TODAY.

I don't disagree. I just don't like articles that ignore the problems and only talk about the benefits of given idea. To be honest, I think at this point anything that reduces our CO2 generation is a good idea, even if it ends up being a short-term solution (e.g., nuclear power).

[Aristotle]

They can't be long term solutions, no. But don't let Great be the enemy of Good. They're a GOOD option - at least for now. Much better than continuing as we are. And even if the nuclear wastes grow exponentially, it's STILL less than the amount of wastes created by current methods TODAY.

Nuclear seems like the ONLY long term solution. Everything else is worse in every way.

Nuclear power is dramatically more efficient, cheap, safe, and less damaging to the environment than wind, solar, etc.

Barring the really sci-fi type solar solutions (capturing solar energy in space, building a Dyson sphere around our solar system, etc), solar and wind will most likely never come close to nuclear.

Speaking of sci-fi, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually figure out a way to engineer some kind of bacteria that eats nuclear waste and gives off something harmless as a by product.

[Sier]

I like to follow the ITER progress from time to time. We're still a ways off from "Cheap Fusion", but we're nailing more and more of the concepts and prerequisite knowledge every day. Fusion will end up being the solution to 95% of our localized electricity problems.

"Challenging as all that is, scientists are shocking close to the first reactor that would produce more energy than it consumed. ITER, a massive, international megaproject currently under construction in France is expected to be switched on in 2025. Provided there aren’t any major hiccups (and there very well could be), that would be the date when we’d expect to see some major breakthroughs in nuclear fusion research. From there, it’d be a short hop to the Demonstrational Power Station or DEMO. DEMO is in its planning stages, but it should begin providing the first commercially available fusion power by 2033."

https://www.geek.com/science/how-clo...usion-1726668/

[Xywalan]

@sier:

2025 is ridiculously optimistic.

As the link says (https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines ), they are trying to fuse deuterium-tritium. Tritium has half life of 12 years and the amount of it in Earth is very limited obviously.

So any fusion based solution should:
1) reach the break even point, where more energy can be produced than what is consumed in deuterium-tritium fusion (we are somewhat close to here)
2)surpass that such that the endeavor is economical when considering various inefficiencies on the way to a commercial solution.
3a) Move to much harder deuterium-deuterium fusion and still keep the whole thing economical.
3b) Produce enough tritium economically.

Each one of these steps is much harder than 1.
So basically there is no way in hell all these are solved in less than 20- 30 years and realistically will take 50 years or more.