Japan Lacks the Expertise For Renewed Nuclear Power After Fukushima (theregister.com) 141
Japan's decision to reignite its nuclear power industry is facing serious setbacks: 11 years of prohibition has led to a shortage of engineers, a lack of students training to fill vacant positions and a dearth of domestic nuclear manufacturing capability. The Register reports: The Japan Electrical Manufacturers' Association claims the number of "skilled engineers responsible for manufacturing nuclear equipment" has declined by 45 percent since the government banned nuclear power projects and shut existing reactors in response to the Fukushima meltdown in 2011. In addition, the JEMA said there are 14 percent fewer students in nuclear engineering programs at Japan's universities and graduate schools, the Financial Times reports. [...]
Japanese officials previously planned to phase out nuclear power entirely by 2030, but now hopes nearly a quarter of the country's power will come from nuclear sources by the end of the 2020s. According to NPR, that goal might be out of reach because it would require construction of an additional 17 reactors by 2030 -- a tough goal under the best of circumstances. Japan's reversal of the nuclear power ban didn't do anything to address supply shortages, NPR said. Add manpower shortages to that equation, and Japan's nuclear ambitions seem increasingly out of reach.
Japanese officials previously planned to phase out nuclear power entirely by 2030, but now hopes nearly a quarter of the country's power will come from nuclear sources by the end of the 2020s. According to NPR, that goal might be out of reach because it would require construction of an additional 17 reactors by 2030 -- a tough goal under the best of circumstances. Japan's reversal of the nuclear power ban didn't do anything to address supply shortages, NPR said. Add manpower shortages to that equation, and Japan's nuclear ambitions seem increasingly out of reach.
Offshore Wind-power farms (Score:5, Insightful)
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Offshore wind turbines near Japan would need to be built to withstand earthquake and tsunami events which should be possible but increases the cost. Nuclear plants also need to be built to withstand these events, in the case of Fukushima the tsunami overwhelmed the defensive sea wall.
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No they wouldn't. First, tsunamis far out at sea are long fast waves, and boats often pass them without even noticing them. The worst that can reasonably happen is some anchors coming loose. Second, even if the tsunami were enough to somehow topple the turbines, they are just pieces of metal like any other wreck in the sea - no possibility of further pollution beyond lubrication oil in the gears, and no crew t
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That is true - but *anchoring* wind farms far out to sea is challenging (=expensive) to impossible. If you're going to anchor anything at sea, you really want to be over the relatively shallow continental shelf. Which I think is the point at which tsunamis start becoming more of a concern.
Nothing like they are when they hit land - and you're right, the worst that *immediately* happens is probably anchors coming loose... but tsunamis are horizontal flows of displaced water rather than the normal vertical oc
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And the earthquake destroyed the cooling system ...
Both have nothing to do with wind power ...
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And the earthquake destroyed the cooling system ...
No, no it didn't. The water drown the diesel backup and the external grid interconnect went down. The cooling system never failed. It was the external feed of power that failed. Newer reactors don't have this requirement for an external power feed.
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The earthquake also cracked the spent fuel cooling pools that were located on top of the reactors. Those were leaking and a real fear at the time (I was living in Tokyo when it happened) was that if the pools emptied the spent fuel would self-ignite and we'd get a nice cloud of radioactive dust floating towards Tokyo.
The biggest thing that wasn't handled in the disaster planning was that not only was the nuclear power plant damaged, but all of the surrounding infrastructure was destroyed and a national sca
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Re: Offshore Wind-power farms (Score:2)
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I don't understand why you are trying to equate wind turbines with nuclear (Fukushima) here. If some wind turbines get taken offline for a while by a once-in-a-generation tsunami, it's too bad so sad. Whereas wi
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Because China might decide to interfere with Japan installing offshore wind farms?
After all, China is willing to play games with Taiwan, why should they refrain from playing games with Japan?
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Re: Offshore Wind-power farms (Score:2)
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Japan aims to produce 45GW of Wind power by 2040 [japantimes.co.jp]. 45GW x 0.3 capacity factor x 365 days x 24 hours per day = 118,260 GWh = 118 TWh. In 2014 they produced ~1000 TWh of electricity [wikipedia.org] through a mix of nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, and fossil fuels. 25% of that production was nuclear so that's ~250MW. So their 2040 goal is only ~10% of their current, already reduced, nuclear production.
So are they being lazy? Is their goal too low? Well, if we compare that 118TWh
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Well, some people always get filthy rich when some tech is massively oversold. Nuclear is no different. Also, nuclear has a lot of truly stupid fanbois that really do not understand the tech.
Re: Offshore Wind-power farms (Score:2)
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History? Nah, neverhöörd.
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Sure. We can build them taller, so when they do generate power, they generate more of it per unit.
Which increases the main problem with wind, that being intermittency. Now you don't have a single megawatt per unit going offline when wind can no longer produce. Now you have closer to five megawatts.
In before "but they don't have the gearboxes any more!" True. But that advancement happened quite a while ago, and it does nothing for intermittency. It just reduces maintenance and machining costs while increasin
Re: Offshore Wind-power farms (Score:3)
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At this point you are just disgracing yourself. How can you be so stupid?
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I stand proud in being just as stupid as every history professor in agreeing with me that citing wikipedia is graded F for failure.
But it's good that we have such brilliant paragons of knowledge, dropping truth bombs on us.
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So I can explain how wikipedia has no clue on history and provide examples...
And you post another article from wikipedia talking about history. Except it's limited to last 22 years.
You can't make this shit up!
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Just wait, he's still posting.
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Indeed. "Moron denies being a moron and instead claims nobody else besides him has a clue".
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Now you can go and rage at every history professor currently teaching for giving your Fs for citing it. They're clearly just as dumb as I am. It's good that we have paragons of knowledge such as yourself to carry the torch of history in face of this dumb opposition!
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Wait, I need to be a historian to know basics about human history?
Does that mean that understanding that if I'm feeling like I have a flu, I should probably take ibuprofen to reduce sympthoms makes me a medical doctor?
Re: Offshore Wind-power farms (Score:5, Insightful)
You do understand that there is no ROI on nuclear power. Plants weren't shutdown by environmentalists. They were shutdown because they reached the end of their lives and required extensive investment to retrofit to extend their lives. Some locations had an ROI which is why we still have nuclear power plants running on Gen 1 designs from more than 60 years ago. Nuclear power plants universally required massive incentives to build and massive amounts of insurance. It is a very expensive way to produce electricity. That doesn't mean its not worth investing in, but pretending like environmentalists are stupid for opposing it is rather misguided.
Cleaner designs have not been proven and trusting corporate entities with nuclear power famous for cutting costs that can result in catastrophic releases of nuclear material is concerning despite the baseload importance of nuclear power. The good news is that money is being spent on R&D again for newer designs and that could pave the way for a future energy grid that is far more capable especially with designs that actually fail safely.
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>You do understand that there is no ROI on nuclear power.
One of the greatest lies of wind and solar fetishists. In my native Finland, we had a study on most profitable industrial projects. There were four massive outliers, far more profitable than anything else. Those were Loviisa 1 reactor, Loviisa 2 reactor, Olkiluoto 1 reactor and Olkiluoto 2 reactor. Everything else was so far behind in profitability, it wasn't even funny.
This is why wind and solar fetishists went to great lengths to politically sabo
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Like many offshore areas with good wind resources, there is always a base load of power available there.
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Ah, yes, Tell that to the French. Maybe it will make their massive problems with nuclear appear a little less bad.
ProTip: Wind on the seas is a bit different than wind on land and generally _more_ reliable than nuclear. You apparently do not know that very basic fact.
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Their "massive problems" are a result of decades long actions by the same wind and solar cult to defund maintenance. Same problems Japanese had since the 1970s that led to Fukushima disaster.
Those nations that managed to contain and constrain the corrupting influence of this political movements do not have this problem. Additionally the "massive problems" they have is something that their neighbours dream of having. Imagine having a grid that even with "massive problems" is far more reliable, far less costl
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The nuclear industry is so much in bed with the government that they were banned from operating for 10 years?
Obviously if there was a strong wind lobby, they'd be milking the sweet subsidies now of course.
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The government had little choice after Fukushima, but see how they bent over backwards to get the industry running again. A lot of the delays were because local government branches objected.
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The government had little choice after Fukushima, but see how they bent over backwards to get the industry running again. A lot of the delays were because local government branches objected.
Much of this slow running disaster has been kept from the public. The most relevant event for Japan's nuclear industry that would even allow discussion of a restart was emptying the Unit 3 spent fuel cooling pool [world-nuclear-news.org].
Japan had been sitting on a potential disaster and has worked hard to sort it out whilst keeping it out of the news. By paying attention to what happened to Unit 3 much of the activities that Japan was conducting to upgrade the reactor to increase its power output towards the end of its service
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The nuclear industry is so much in bed with the government that they were banned from operating for _only_ 10 years?
Fixed that for you. After all, with just a bit worse wind, they would have lost Tokyo with about 30% of the japanese population living there. In any sane system that would mandate a death-sentence for the industry that risked this.
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Japan need the nuclear industry to maintain their nuclear deterrent. The one they keep pretending doesn't exist while they do things like demonstrate the most precise and capable all solid fuel launchers in the world. You know, for science. Like those times you just HAVE to launch a satellite into SSO with a crew of 6 from a mobile location.
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Yeah, defence is the other big issue. What with NK and China both being nuclear powers.
Only 14% fewer? (Score:3)
Re: Only 14% fewer? (Score:3)
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Yes, but Japan is still a very closed society and are not welcoming to foreigners for any reason. So you'd be asking Europeans and North Americans to go an alien culture where they do not speak the language just to work on nuclear. Korea has its own issues with Japan that is an old animosity.
I'm not saying it is impossible to get foreigners interested in going, but I doubt it will be an easy sell. Maybe if they offered them a stupid amount of money and relatively short term contracts, Japan might buy some b
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It depends on the company. There are newer tech companies, particularly start ups, where the culture is a lot more relaxed, the working language is English, and they have a high percentage of foreign staff.
The nuclear industry isn't like that though. It's very old and entrenched. A lot of it is heavy industry and ancient technology. Decades long timescales, move slowly and stick to established procedures. Strong hierarchy.
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I've never been to Japan but Japan's immigration policy is most certainly not welcoming to foreigners. They won't even prop up their declining population with immigration as Western countries currently are, they're just going to take all of the economic pain it will cause despite the fact that there are millions of poor Asians right in their neighborhood who would love a shot at working in an affluent country like Japan.
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Tell us you've never been to Japan, without telling us you've never been to Japan.
They teach english in primary school, and there is a wide swath of Japanese people that are at least bilingual.
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More like Russia, China and India. Everyone else has mostly academics, all the knowhow is retired.
I don't think I've seen anyone of importance suggest batteries as able to handle renewable intermittencies, the plan was always natural gas for the near future. Natural gas as a transition technology is where the problem now lies.
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I do believe you've neglected France, who've earned quite a reputation for selling their technology to India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. Israel also pays attention to their nuclear research plants, and I suspect they're limited not by lack of expertise but by the overwhelming fear by their Muslim neighbors.
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France isn't the greatest example to use. Exporting their technology basically bankrupted EDF, to the point where it had to be re-nationalized, after getting multiple bail-outs. Every current project is in crisis, and the reactors in France are unreliable and in dire need of replacement. The stuff they are building is the same old failed technology, and extremely expensive.
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That will be a hard sell. Japan's nuclear industry is in crisis. Trying to keep old reactors online, unsure how to proceed because of newly discovered natural disaster vulnerabilities, and unpopular with the public. A relatively rare language that most engineers can't speak, and most Japanese companies do not work in English.
Much of the design will require understanding of Japanese industry, and working with that industry to be able to manufacture the new reactors and infrastructure. That requires a good ma
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Not me.
I'm studying COBOL.
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homer simpson (mr sparkle) will get the job! (Score:2)
homer simpson (mr sparkle) will get the job!
An island with no energy, clearly dumb (Score:2)
Nuclear. Always crap. (Score:2)
Bad planning, bad reliability, excessive cost, disregard for human life, still no waste storage, massive safety problems, etc. etc.
Why again is this obsolete and immature tech not dead?
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So, just like peak oil?
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Thanks for agreeing with me. The same thing would be true for nuclear fuels.
Re:Just imagine all the tons of carbon (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah yes, the Way the Malthas, where "what we know now" is all that we will ever now, which is why planet cannot possible support even a billion people. We'll all starve.
Wait, there are over eight billion, and biggest food related problem is obesity. How did that happen?!
What you're espousing is an offshoot of Christianity from pre-industrial age. In real world on the other hand, we understand that when we need something, we start looking for it. And if we need something more than before, we start looking for it in places we haven't looked yet.
I.e. the "peak oil" nonsense. We haven't really even began searching for uranium as current deposits are more than sufficient and cheap and easy to exploit. And that's before we even start recycling fuel.
Re:Just imagine all the tons of carbon (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, the Way the Malthas, where "what we know now" is all that we will ever now, which is why planet cannot possible support even a billion people. We'll all starve.
Wait, there are over eight billion, and biggest food related problem is obesity. How did that happen?!
It should be very obvious that a system can "support" an oversize population temporarily, but not forever. There's a certain level of usage that's sustainable, and then there's a level of usage that slowly (or even rapidly) destroys the system in order to squeeze more out of it. When this happens, you can expect to see things like fisheries collapsing because they've been overfished and can't replenish themselves any more, groundwater receding and rivers and other water sources running dry, increasing areas of unfarmable land, etc. Now, Malthus was wrong about a lot, the basic idea that there's a limit to the number of people a system can sustainably support is not wrong. Of course, how many it can support is dependent on all sorts of factors including technology level. No rational discussion of population vs. resources can occur, however, without recognizing the truth that, currently, we are using up the resources of our environment faster than is sustainable.
Also, the numbers for world hunger are pretty close to the numbers for obesity. So... first world problems?
What you're espousing is an offshoot of Christianity from pre-industrial age. In real world on the other hand, we understand that when we need something, we start looking for it. And if we need something more than before, we start looking for it in places we haven't looked yet.
The notion that, if we just try, we'll meet any resource shortfall is the weird religious notion. Not the idea that resources are limited. Plenty of christians seem to take "God will give us what we need out of His unlimited riches" - Philippians 4:19 quite literally and use that as an excuse to consume and pollute. Heck, there seem to be some evangelicals who literally believe that they need to hasten Armageddon by polluting and consuming as much as possible so that they will go to heaven sooner. Sure, human ingenuity is a thing, and we absolutely can do more with what we have than we are. It's not a wacky religious notion to think that technology and resource usage will improve and that we will find new sources of vital resources, etc. The wacky religious idea comes in when people start insisting that it will happen on a just in time schedule without any periods of extreme difficulty.
I.e. the "peak oil" nonsense. We haven't really even began searching for uranium as current deposits are more than sufficient and cheap and easy to exploit. And that's before we even start recycling fuel.
But nuclear power is currently very expensive, and that's with extremely low operating costs. The capital costs are not really showing signs of dropping, so what happens if the operating costs go up?
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>It should be very obvious that a system can "support" an oversize population temporarily, but not forever.
Reality check 1. When you have to reference "forever", you tacitly admit that you have no idea when the doomsday you in your Christian worship are referencing will occur. Heat death of the universe is indeed coming. It's however utterly irrelevant to this point.
And in more realistic timelines, people of your religious convictions lost every single bet for two centuries at this point. None of their c
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Reality check 1. When you have to reference "forever", you tacitly admit that you have no idea when the doomsday you in your Christian worship are referencing will occur. Heat death of the universe is indeed coming. It's however utterly irrelevant to this point.
Oh please. The collapse of ecosystems due to resource limits has been observed many times. It's pretty straightforward. You have wood for fires and lumber, etc. on Easter Island up until the last tree is chopped down, then you don't have any, but it's very obvious that, for a while there, the trees are plentiful if you don't bother taking conservation into account. If you have a forest of a million trees and you can sustainably cut down 5 per day, you can cut down 50 per day for close to sixty years, but th
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>Quite simply, the modern world can't feed its population long-term because the resources being used to feed them now
What is Einstein's definition of insanity? Ah yes, to try to do the same thing after it's been proven wrong. People like you making this claim has been debunked by reality consistently for a very long time time.
And yet, you ignore reality and continue to make this claim. Because you are driven by faith, and faith alone. And human religious impulse is in large part about being able to deny
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What is Einstein's definition of insanity? Ah yes, to try to do the same thing after it's been proven wrong. People like you making this claim has been debunked by reality consistently for a very long time time.
Well, in reference to your question - rhetorical though it was - you mangled the Einstein quote. It's also worth noting that Einstein was talking about quantum theory when he said that and he's been quite thoroughly shown to have been wrong about quantum theory. Einstein, above all, believed in an ordered universe where cause followed effect and were predictable and knowable.
Anyway, your unfounded optimism about staying the course is irrational. Mainly because we're not staying the course. It's not about ca
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When you are so divorsed from reality by the tenets of your faith, that you genuinely believe that increase in population has not been a massively good thing:
>The world's population has quadrupled in the last century, not to mention that the resources consumed by the average person have also increased, so we're obviously not even in the same situation we've always been. What you seem to be proposing is more like closing your eyes while driving down the road. Because you were able to blink and you were fi
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When you are so divorsed from reality by the tenets of your faith, that you genuinely believe that increase in population has not been a massively good thing:
You are a bit of a nut, aren't you? Massive, rapid growth in population is almost always problematic for infrastructure, distribution of food and other resources, etc. housing, simple crowding and so forth.
Reality check. Pretty much every metric of human well being also massively increased in the same time frame. About the only logical argument against this is if you genuinely want to maximize human misery. Or just you just think likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol-Pot had a problem of being far too selective with people they culled.
I'm not sure how you're drawing the conclusion that improvements in human well being are _caused_ by population growth. There certainly have been improvements in areas like life-expectancy, but those are mostly due to factors like improvement in medical technology and nutrition. The causative link between
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>You are a bit of a nut, aren't you? Massive, rapid growth in population is almost always problematic for infrastructure, distribution of food and other resources, etc. housing, simple crowding and so forth.
Is someone who stares reality in the face and concludes that reality is wrong?
Because that is what you just did. While topic about increase in number of humans, you state that this is "almost always problematic for infrastructure, distribution of food and other resources, etc."
Reality check. Every sin
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Is someone who stares reality in the face and concludes that reality is wrong?
Sorry, what is? Maybe your English isn't so great, you're kind of missing a subject there. Do you mean that you are someone who stares reality in the face and concludes reality is wrong? Sounds about right. The current state of the world basically sums up to "in trouble" on the resource usage front.
Because that is what you just did. While topic about increase in number of humans, you state that this is "almost always problematic for infrastructure, distribution of food and other resources, etc."
Slightly problematic language usage again, although I think I get what you're saying, as little sense as it actually makes.
Reality check. Every single thing on your list (other than nebulous "etc") has gotten BETTER as human population growth. I.e. the only way this statement is correct is if we interpret "problematic" as "excellent".
Is the language barrier possibly a cause for your reading comprehension problems. I was q
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>I was quite clear that improvements in all those areas were due to factors other than population growth
And I am quite clear that in trying to explain this away as not a consequence of population growth, but something that happens "in spite of my cult's doomsday predictions" is no different from any other doomsday cult when their next deadline is once again... no resulting in predicted consequences.
Again. Founders of your cult have argued for "growth causing lack of resources causing doomsday" from at le
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And I am quite clear that in trying to explain this away as not a consequence of population growth, but something tha. t happens "in spite of my cult's doomsday predictions" is no different from any other doomsday cult when their next deadline is once again... no resulting in predicted consequences.
The predicted consequences are all happening though. Water tables are falling and water sources are drying up. Easily recoverable oil is, in fact, running out. Most announcements of newly "discovered" oil reserves are now the oil companies just the oil companies announcing oil shale reserves. Fossil fuel consumption has gone up steadily since the 1950s. In 1950, it was about 20K TeraWatt hours worth then, and now it's just about 140K TeraWatt hours worth now. The distribution between coal, oil and gas has s
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"I see what you're saying, now let me tell you why while all previous predictions were wrong, this time they will be right, using the exact same claims as were used before".
The post.
Literally NOTHING about your post is original. It's simply regurgitating the same dogmaic statements of "peak oil", "water running out" etc.
>I've been _very_ clear that I do think that humans are, in fact, great problem solvers. I am just recognizing that we don't always solve the problem in time.
We don't need to "always solv
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"I see what you're saying, now let me tell you why while all previous predictions were wrong, this time they will be right, using the exact same claims as were used before".
Ignoring your blatant strawman pseudo-quote.
Literally NOTHING about your post is original. It's simply regurgitating the same dogmaic statements of "peak oil", "water running out" etc.
Sorry, you think there's something original about _your_ post? Not understanding that we're both treading philosophical ground that's been well trodden before seems to be another huge comprehension fail on your part. I've been straightforward about the fact that the points I'm making are simple and obvious and well understood. As a result, they're clearly not original. That does not mean that I'm parroting anyone. It just means that reaching the same conclusions f
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>When the game is feeding people, goals being missed means that people starve.
Another regurgitated Malthusian talking point that is opposite of reality. As we gained more people, we became more food secure. Today we're more food secure than ever in human history. In large part because of population explosion and logistical buildup it necessitated, building up infrastructure so that massive ag surpluses could be easily shipped worldwide.
And we're getting better and better. Today, the single biggest proble
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Another regurgitated Malthusian talking point that is opposite of reality. As we gained more people, we became more food secure. Today we're more food secure than ever in human history. In large part because of population explosion and logistical buildup it necessitated, building up infrastructure so that massive ag surpluses could be easily shipped worldwide.
You sound like a 1920's banker before Black Monday, blithely confident that, this time, there will just be high returns forever. Reality operates on cycles. It doesn't matter if you're talking about economics or predator/prey populations: systems that maintain homeostasis do so through cycles of boom and bust. The larger systems can have many separate boom/bust cycles that average together for a more stable system, but boom and bust are always there. It's really pretty straightforward. Let's consider an isl
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>You sound like a 1920's banker before Black Monday, blithely confident that, this time, there will just be high returns forever.
And you sound like a numerologist, telling us all that you just got the combination for doomsday wrong, but now that you know more you have a new combination of numbers. Boom/bust cycles are an issue with the way evolution works. But the reason we haven't had any for civilizational level is for the same reason that you still keep pointedly ignoring in your thought model.
Human i
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And you sound like a numerologist, telling us all that you just got the combination for doomsday wrong, but now that you know more you have a new combination of numbers. Boom/bust cycles are an issue with the way evolution works. But the reason we haven't had any for civilizational level is for the same reason that you still keep pointedly ignoring in your thought model.
It's funny how you just can't possibly have a rational argument, you've got to try to reduce my perfectly rational and well founded position to something insane like numerology. No, I'm not like a numerologist. I have a firm grasp on the realistic potential consequences of human activity. As for no boom/bust cycles at the "civilizational level", that doesn't really seem to be a term with a prior well-defined meaning, so it's tricky to respond to that. I feel pretty sure that you'll simply redefine it to mea
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Imagine being so ignorant of reality, that you're literally complaining about modern food not being good enough.
When it's literally the best its ever been. As evidenced by the fact that starvation is no longer a concern outside political situations, and human lifespans lasting longer than ever in known history.
Re: Just imagine all the tons of carbon (Score:2, Informative)
Go to Ohio or the Grand Canyon, nuclear fuel, radioactive material is literally laying on the surface.
Uranium ore deposits are more abundant than gold and silver and mercury.
And as others have said, we have lots of unspent nuclear fuel that can be reused.
Re: Just imagine all the tons of carbon (Score:4, Interesting)
First off, just because something is radioactive doesn't mean that it's suitable as nuclear fuel, in fact most decent nuclear fuel is barely radioactive at all. The fact that nuclear waste is radically more radioactive than nuclear fuel should make that clear.
But yes, even with uranium specifically there's s tons of it around - in fact, roughly 250 years worth at current consumption rates.
However,
While *uranium* is 500x more common than gold, and 40x more common than silver. However,
- uranium *ore* concentrated enough to be worth mining is not - most uranium is heavily diluted within granite and other stone, or dissolved in tiny quantities within seawater.
- that's still not much when you're steadily destroying it instead of repeatedly reusing the same metal century after century as is done with gold and silver.
- almost none of it is fissile - only about 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium is suitable for non-breeder reactors (and uranium breeder reactors are a huge weapon proliferation risk). Which means that for every kg of fuel you dig up, you've also produced over 99kg of highly concentrated, radioactive, toxic heavy metal that's pretty much useless.
That's not to say there isn't hope. I don't see us getting to a world where uranium breeder reactors aren't a huge threat any time soon, but modern reactors typically only consume about 5% of the fuel before the waste products build up enough to damp the reaction, so fuel reprocessing could greatly amplify the energy reserves while simultaneously eliminating the need to safely store the waste for multiple millenia, since it decays MUCH faster when fresh waste isn't being constantly produced from the unused fuel.
And of course fission is not limited to uranium. Thorium is *only* suitable for breeder reactors, but comes without the same proliferation risk since thorium transforms into uranium fuel, rather than weapons-grade plutonium.
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Unlike renewables, where the same arguments are made for much rarer metals, nuclear produces enough energy to do its own eg uranium salt harvesting from sea water. And uranium is just one fuel, as you mention, the only downside to other methods that it could be used for nuclear weapons (then again, so could spent fuel rods be made much easier into dirty bombs) which is the sole reason we aren't investing in the tech.
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Renewables don't consume resources unless you're really stupid about how you build them, so that recycling isn't worth the effort... which admittedly we currently do tend to be, but e.g. every atom of lithium used in a battery today can continue being re-used in new batteries until the heat-death of the universe. Even the stuff that's not worth recycling today will be patiently waiting forever for either the recycling technology or resource value to improve enough to change that.
There are issues along the
Re:Just imagine all the tons of carbon (Score:5, Interesting)
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Every prototype thorium reactor has been an expensive failure, developing problems that needed a lot of further money throwing at them, and making decommissioning expensive and difficult.
While it might be possible to make them work, who is going to throw an unknown amount of money at them to find out? Only governments are willing to take that risk, and so far they have all had very poor returns.
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Every prototype thorium reactor has been an expensive failure,
Name one.
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THTR-300
Name one that wasn't a disaster.
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The thing the Thorium boosters never talk about: show us a reactor that works.
Spoiler alert: a functional prototype has never been built, much less one ready for commercial operation and wide deployment.
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Spoiler alert: a functional prototype has never been built, much less one ready for commercial operation and wide deployment.
The MSRE [wikipedia.org]. You are lying.
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India's three-stage nuclear power programme was formulated by Homi Bhabha, the well-known physicist, in the 1950s to secure the country's long term energy independence, through the use of uranium and thorium reserves found in the monazite sands of coastal regions of South India...
According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected "3–4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time". Full exploitation of India's domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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The price of uranium is a very small pro
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Does that ~250 year estimate for Uranium factor in reprocessing spent fuel from other reactors? Just asking since your don't cite a source I can find out from. I haven't heard an estimate for just Uranium that was that short before
And then there is that little fact that U-235 is not the only fissile fuel available on Earth. Thorium is vastly more abundant than Uranium and is 100% usable as fuel while also producing much shorter lived fission by-products than the Uranium fuel chain.
Also consider that by y
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I was looking at a Scientific American article, at https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com] . No thorium based nuclear energy plants exist, and its designs rely on some uranium or plutonium to provide neutron radiation.
My suggestion is that, if we scale up uranium to replace even more of carbon fuels, it won't last long enough to justify the investment.
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Nope.
Everyone likes to say this because of the scary sounding "there's 100 years of known reserves of uranium" or whatever, but the reality is this: there's 100 years of known reserves, because we stopped looking when we already had 100 years worth. If we start using more, it becomes economical to look for and find more. Uranium is not particularly rare. In fact, with more nuclear energy, desalinating seawater becomes practical, and uranium can be extracted from seawater in the process.
If you're going to
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Is there any reason to think there is more uranium available, other than wishful thinking?
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Let me ask a more reasonable question - why do you think there isn't, other than pessimism?
There is plenty of reason to think there is more - because literally every geologist out there involved with mineral extraction and surveying says there is.
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I see consistent claims from World Nuclear Org, at:
https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
According to that article, there is more to discover, but it's not vast amounts, The amount of money spent on exploration has skyrocketed, but the supply discovered has only increased modestly in the last 10 years. And it's not a chain reaction: discovering some easily mined uranium does not indicate that that there is a great deal more to be found, since much larger amounts of natural uranium co
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An anonymous coward brings the insult, but also an interesting story. I'd never heard of it. It seems a bit like the prototype of what became Idiocracy. Wonder how deeply that DNA is embedded in Mike's story? Looks like it's up on Gutenberg along with its sister story, "The Little Black Bag." So, though you may be a bit uncouth, I thank you anonymous coward, for giving me another couple stories to soak up.