Nuclear Is Now 'Clean Energy' In Colorado (cpr.org) 135
With the signing of HB25-1040 on Monday, Colorado now defines nuclear as a "clean energy resource" since it doesn't release large amounts of climate-warming emissions. "The category was previously reserved for renewables like wind, solar and geothermal, which don't carry the radioactive stigma that's hobbled fission power plants following disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima," notes Colorado Public Radio. From the report: In an emailed statement, Ally Sullivan, a spokesperson for the governor's office, said the law doesn't advance any specific nuclear energy project, and no utility has proposed building a nuclear power plant in Colorado. It does, however, allow nuclear energy to potentially serve as one piece of the state's plan to tackle climate change. "If nuclear energy becomes sufficiently cost-competitive, it could potentially become part of Colorado's clean energy future. However, it must be conducted safely, without harming communities, depleting other natural resources or replacing other clean energy sources," Sullivan said.
By redefining nuclear energy as "clean," the law would let future fission-based power plants obtain local grants previously reserved for other carbon-free energy sources, and it would allow those projects to contribute to Colorado's renewable energy goals. It also aligns state law with a push to reshape public opinion of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy proponents promise new reactor designs are smaller and safer than hulking power plants built in the 20th century. By embracing those systems, bill supporters claimed Colorado could meet rising energy demand without abandoning its ambitious climate goals.
By redefining nuclear energy as "clean," the law would let future fission-based power plants obtain local grants previously reserved for other carbon-free energy sources, and it would allow those projects to contribute to Colorado's renewable energy goals. It also aligns state law with a push to reshape public opinion of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy proponents promise new reactor designs are smaller and safer than hulking power plants built in the 20th century. By embracing those systems, bill supporters claimed Colorado could meet rising energy demand without abandoning its ambitious climate goals.
It is low CO2 (Score:5, Insightful)
From the point of view of climate change, Nuclear produces low CO2 relative to the amount of energy generated so it makes sense to call it "clean energy". There are issues of waste, proliferation, and cost, but countries like France have shown that nuclear can be operated successfully.
Re:It is low CO2 (Score:5, Insightful)
The waste isn't even that bad, simply because unlike the waste products from coal, oil, and gas, it's actually illegal to let the nuclear waste into the environment.
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The waste isn't even that bad, simply because unlike the waste products from coal, oil, and gas, it's actually illegal to let the nuclear waste into the environment.
If the US would simply embrace spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, as France and Russia has for years, there'd be dramatically less nuclear waste anyway. The whole "proliferation" bugaboo concerning the plutonium leftovers is not really a problem. It's not like we're going to give it away or anything.
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The real reason for no reprocessing is they want to hang on to the FUD about having to figuire out how to store "waste" for 10,000 years.
With reprocessing, you get valuable fuel and actual waste that will decay to background in 250-500 years max. A back of the napkin calculation suggests we could run on just reprocessed "waste" for a couple decades and at the end of that time we would have less "waste" than we do now.
Meanwhile, the toxic sludge from fossil fuel processing and consumption will still be here
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The cost issue can't be under-estimated though. You can get a lot more renewable energy for the money. Colorado tax payers are going to get fleeced by this.
The other issue not mentioned is speed. It takes so long to build nuclear that it can't be part of any realistic plan to address climate change, and it also makes it very prone to corruption because nothing gets delivered for decades.
Re:It is low CO2 (Score:5, Insightful)
You can get a lot more renewable energy for the money. Colorado tax payers are going to get fleeced by this.
The other issue not mentioned is speed. It takes so long to build nuclear that it can't be part of any realistic plan to address climate change, and it also makes it very prone to corruption because nothing gets delivered for decades.
These are all issues directly related to regulation and unnecessary red tape created out of NIMBYism and irrational fear around radiation. India, Canada, and China aren't stupid. They're building and/or modernizing nuclear power plants like crazy because they're so effective at reliable baseline power, which renewables simply are not. In the US, we force years - sometimes decades - of reviews and permits and defending court cases and other bullshit unrelated to the construction and operation of clean, safe nuclear power.
The other issue going to cost is that the US - again, stupidly - bars reuse of high energy spent fuel. If you simply separate the low energy (relatively safe, but useless for generating power) waste from the high energy fuel remaining and feed the high energy stuff back in, you can extract nearly all the energy, save a ton of fuel costs, mine less fuel, and have vastly less volume of waste and vastly less energetic waste.
Let's assume some sort of absolute mandate were passed to build 5 CANDU-6 (known, proven, safe, reliable design) reactors. No reviews, no permits, no red tape, no lawsuits. Just build the damn things now. You can get one operational in ~3.5 years, all of them in about 4ish years. South Korea and China have built PWRs in 5. Assuming we also lifted the ban on fuel reprocessing, CANDU-6 plants will produce power at a cost of 5-6 cents per kWh, yielding a retail price of 13-17 cents per kWh. US average is about 16.2 cents, California has rates pushing 50 cents. But we're too stupid to get out of our own way and just do it, so we'll keep strangling the poor and middle class economically.
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It's funny how China uses slave labour and doesn't care about safety, pollution, or quality... Until they build nuclear, when they suddenly become the the paragons of safe, clean, ethical energy production.
China is actually a great example of why nuclear is not needed. Their have already cancelled a lot of new reactors because renewables and storage are growing so fast. They just don't need it, and it won't be cost effective.
As for doing away with safety rules and reviews, given that all the accidents we ha
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It's funny how China uses slave labour and doesn't care about safety, pollution, or quality... Until they build nuclear, when they suddenly become the the paragons of safe, clean, ethical energy production.
It's marginally possible that there is actually more than one person on slashdot who doesn't agree with every single opinion you hold, and those people might also not hold all the same opinions. So it might be a different person pointing out they are building nukes from the person pointing out how their s
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It's marginally possible that there is actually more than one person on slashdot who doesn't agree with every single opinion you hold, and those people might also not hold all the same opinions.
I was under the impression it was all just CowboyNeil!
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The point is that the same people who say we shouldn't have solar because of slave labour, are also promoting nuclear from the same source as an example we should follow.
The claim that it's all due to regulation doesn't work anyway. The UK doesn't have particularly heavy regulation by nuclear standards, all the legal stuff was resolved quickly, and the site houses an existing plant so most of the survey and environmental work was already done. It still ended up costing tens of billions and taking at least 2
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The point is that the same people who say we shouldn't have solar because of slave labour, are also promoting nuclear from the same source as an example we should follow.
Do they? Is it that guy? I mean I say we should have solar, but not the polysilicon made by slave labour, and we should have nuclear, but not following China's example.
The UK doesn't have particularly heavy regulation by nuclear standards, all the legal stuff was resolved quickly, and the site houses an existing plant so most of the survey
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Funny you should mention coal, because nuclear tends to support it. Instead of just replacing fossil fuels with renewables, they keep them going until the nuclear plant comes online a few decades later.
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Oh like Germany? Or was that the other way around??
Are you trying to score points or have a conversation?
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Like Australia, for example. Germany has been reducing coal usage steadily.
It's just a fact. The longer you cling to centralized generation like nuclear, the longer you need to keep fossil fuels around waiting for it.
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Germany has been reducing coal usage steadily.
It's just a fact. The longer you cling to centralized generation like nuclear, the longer you need to keep fossil fuels around waiting for it.
I don't know why you keep promoting Germany as some sort of low CO2 poster child for why nuclear is bad.
Germany: 381g CO2/kWh
UK: 238
France: 56
Germany is reducing it's co2 from a very high bar.
In fact France is one of the lowest CO2 electricity produces in the world, the lowest of any major economy by a very long way. The o
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If you simply separate the low energy (relatively safe, but useless for generating power) waste from the high energy fuel remaining and feed the high energy stuff back in, you can extract nearly all the energy, save a ton of fuel costs, mine less fuel, and have vastly less volume of waste and vastly less energetic waste.
Let me just stop you right there.
Fuel reprocessing is wildly expensive and dangerous, and uses the exact same techniques to extract plutonium for bomb making to extract plutonium and uranium from "spent" fuel so it's a proliferation nightmare. There's no "simply separate one radioactive material from a whole bunch of other radioactive materials" because it's not simple at all.
Japan started building a facility to reprocess their own waste in 1993 [wikipedia.org]. After spending $27.5B on the place, guess how much fuel the
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Did the Japanese reprocessing plants not reprocess fuel because they were incapable, or because of the protests and political roadblocks that your linked article details?
As for reprocessing using the same/similar processes as used for making weapons-grade materials, exactly who are we trying to keep that byproduct from at this point? Iran is making their own, NK is making their own, Russia and Ukraine allegedly have lost a bunch to who knows where. I'm not sure who it is that we want to keep this stuff fr
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I'm really not sure why you are dismissing the proliferation angle. The answer of "exactly who are we trying to keep that from" is "everyone that doesn't already have nuclear weapons."
That really shouldn't be hard to figure out.
So which is it that you would prefer? Wide proliferation of nuclear arms, or shipping nuclear waste across the globe to the countries that are allowed to reprocess at great expense and ecological damage?
In any event, the original statement of "simply" reprocessing is absolutely stu
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Another issue is the timeline. By the time any new nuclear plant is operational we will be deep into climate change. Solar and wind can b
About time (Score:2, Insightful)
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Absolutely. Fast tracking modern nuclear plant designs is a win for everyone on both sides of the aisle. Clean reliable 24/7 energy.
Gen III plant designs are exceptionally reliable and safe, and the waste they produce is trivial compared to fossil fuels, and even solar / wind.
I would absolutely feel great about my tax dollars going into this kind of effort to electrify our energy infrastructure.
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The problem is that it's impossible to fast track these things. It simply can't be done in the West. And while on paper some of these designs look better than previous ones, in practice what gets built rarely lives up to the hype, and is usually scaled back or an older design to reduce risk and cost.
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The problem is that it's impossible to fast track these things. It simply can't be done in the West. And while on paper some of these designs look better than previous ones, in practice what gets built rarely lives up to the hype, and is usually scaled back or an older design to reduce risk and cost.
If only there were an administration willing to reduce/streamline the regulatory environment to reflect the maturity of the technology.
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It doesn't seem very mature, given they keep finding issues, and keep promising that the next iteration will finally be the really good one.
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There are standardized plant designs, like the AP1000, that make the build times far shorter and therefore cheaper. Because it's a proven design already in use, unless you have misguided activists standing in the way, you can get them online relatively quickly.
Building Gen III reactors only require the will to do so.
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The UK's Hinkley Point C is a standard EPR design, of which several already exist. It's still taking 20+ years and tens of billions, only to produce some of the most expensive electricity in the UK.
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There's no physical reason for it to take that long - it's the massive tangle of red tape that slows it down.
A government backed "fast track" I would expect could cut construction time down to 2-4 years which in turn reduces initial costs and makes the generated power much cheaper.
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The reason is safety. You can't just throw one up because time and time again we have seen that the builders don't stick to the specs, don't do the work properly. It needs to be checked. But before that it needs a careful design review, because every site is different.
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The problem has been that each new plant seems to be getting redesigned which in turn requires evaluation and approval and also that portions are untested.
But we have have well established and tested gen III designs that can be replicated which seriously reduces the approval process and builders have a far better grasp of the project costs which allows them to properly bid and execute their work.
Really, only the will to move forward remains.
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Some of the plant has to be bespoke for the location. Some of it gets redesigned because they are trying to avoid costly problems that arose with the last one.
Even if the design is perfect on paper, the finished thing is never built to that exact specification. No building ever is.
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Meanwhile in China, they brought their first Westinghouse AP1000 online in 2019 after 9 years of construction. They have since brought 3 more online as of 2022 and have four more approved and under construction.
That's what construction times look like with a standardized reactor design and the backing of the government.
We could do that here, we just need a willing administration
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9 years is pretty bad still, and that's with the full weight of the Chinese construction industry and government behind it. There is no way we can match that.
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It was the first one they built, and that takes time. The additional reactors seem to be coming online within 3-4 years which is pretty fast. I have to believe (or maybe I just want to believe) that shortening the build time that much would make this type of reactor more commercially competitive.
And it appears there will indeed be a push here in the US, at least for SMR's:
https://www.washingtontimes.co... [washingtontimes.com]
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I would absolutely feel great about my tax dollars going into this kind of effort to electrify our energy infrastructure.
While I fully agree with your aforementioned enthusiasm regarding modern designs, you might want to limit that excitement until you find out how many of your precious taxpayer dollars it’s gonna take to buy a single kilowatt hour of that “premium” nuclear energy.
I’ll feel good if the nuclear powered solution goes from breaking ground to operational in less than 20 years.
I’ll feel great if we find the new kW per hour rate isn’t killing people just as efficiently via unaffo
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This is an obvious win. Why did it take so long?
Because of stupidity. Not theirs but yours. Nuclear isn't "clean energy". It requires mining, and produces waste. It is however "green energy". Yet here you are celebrating giving it the wrong definition.
Words matter. This piece of legislation can now be remembered along other brilliant pieces of gaslighting legislation like House Bill No. 246 in Indiana which attempted to set pi = 3.
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This is an obvious win. Why did it take so long?
Because Greed N. Corruption was hired on as CEO to pimp solar and wind to IPO prosperity by any means necessary.
Thats why.
Now all that’s left to do is fire Major Redtape and his merry army of NIMBY grifters and actually make a nuclear-powered anything happen before the next fucking century rolls around. Or the next World War. Whichever is far more predictable to happen first at this rate of regulatory handcuffing.
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This is an obvious win. Why did it take so long?
Because the rest of the world did it years ago, with nuclear power producing little CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, so the US had to be different. Europe has considered it clean for decades with waste being disposed of responsibly.
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Europe isn't so keen on nuclear, actually. The French went all-in on it, and it cost them dearly. The subsidies are massive and eventually the government had to bail out the operator when their debt exceeded their assets.
It takes a minimum of 20 years to build a new nuclear plant here, and they always go over budget and get delayed.
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This is an obvious win. Why did it take so long?
Because Denver and Boulder are still filled with nuke-hating types, many leftover from the 70's and 80's protests. There is a certain sector on the Left that will never, ever accept nuclear. They're not the majority on the Left, but they're numerous enough and have enough influence to put a monkey wrench into any real nuclear power expansion in their states.
While the Climate Warms (Score:2, Insightful)
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And as bullish as Gates is for nuclear, has his investments over the past two decades produced a single kWh of electricity? Over the same time period, he could have deployed several GW of solar, made a profit, and offset his lifetime CO2 emissions many times over.
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And as bullish as Gates is for nuclear, has his investments over the past two decades produced a single kWh of electricity? Over the same time period, he could have deployed several GW of solar, made a profit, and offset his lifetime CO2 emissions many times over.
Gates' goal isn't producing electricity. It's producing "investment opportunities" so he can soak up money like o fucking sponge for the rest of his life while being patted on the head for being a humanitarian. In that way, he's been successful. And we're supposed to all be happy about it because one of the most evil men in history has "reformed" by turning his greed in a different direction.
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I think there's a reasonable possibility that the new reactor designs will yield a good result, climate-wise. There's no fundamental reason why they can't provide reliable, carbon-free power.
They'll still have to figure out what to do with the nuclear waste in the long term, though; but compared to climate change that's a relatively easy problem to solve.
I am curious to what residents of Colorado think about this, though. Are they okay with it or are they going to go NIMBY on this?
Re: While the Climate Warms (Score:2)
How do you figure, given the waste will remain a concentrated toxic heavy metal until the sun goes nova.
A concentrated heavy metal is much easier to segregate and isolate than an evenly-dispersed gas like CO2. You put it in a solid container, dig a deep-enough hole, and bury it.
I'm not saying it's ideal, just easier to deal with than the alternative.
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A concentrated heavy metal is much easier to segregate and isolate than an evenly-dispersed gas like CO2.
We are talking about an extremely dangerous and toxic substance. CO2 isn't. If it leaks, its no big deal. If there is an accident in transportation, its no big deal. If someone digs it up, its no big deal. If the wrong person/people get their hands on that waste they can do a lot of damage. So you not only need to store it, you need to secure it for thousands of years.
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We are talking about an extremely dangerous and toxic substance. CO2 isn't.
You're imagining re-fighting the last war, rather than seeing the actual upcoming one. If some radioactive material that is buried deeply underground leaks, the most likely result is that nobody ever even notices. A less-likely result is that people near the leak get radiation poisoning, which is bad but it's a local problem that affects hundreds or thousands, not a global problem that affects billions.
Excess atmospheric CO2, OTOH, has a very good chance of killing both of us (one way or another) and/or o
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I'd still prefer to run that risk over the guaranteed mass-destruction that awaits us in the keep-using-fossil-fuels-forever scenario.
And prefer it to having to use mass transit? Or giving up computer games? The issue here is not reducing CO2, we know how to do that. Its how to continue our current lifestyle while reducing CO2 that is the challenge. We can't even get people to drive slower to reduce emissions and we are supposed to take the risks and costs of nuclear power as the alternative. /p
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And prefer it to having to use mass transit? Or giving up computer games? The issue here is not reducing CO2, we know how to do that. Its how to continue our current lifestyle while reducing CO2 that is the challenge. We can't even get people to drive slower to reduce emissions and we are supposed to take the risks and costs of nuclear power as the alternative.
I don't have super-strong feelings about how CO2 emissions get reduced, only that they need to be reduced if we don't want the rest of our lives to consist of an endless series of disaster recoveries. So if we could do it by getting everyone to use mass-transit (or take up bicycling instead of driving) I'd be all for that, but that only works if people are actually willing to do that, and (gestures broadly).
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that only works if people are actually willing to do that
Or they have no choice. The point was not that we will do that. Its that nuclear power is an alternative only if people are willing to take the risks it involves and it can actually deliver on its promises in a reasonable length of time at a reasonable price. It can't and people likely won't. The alternative to nuclear power is not more carbon emissions, its more solar wind and storage.
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A concentrated CO2 leak would actually be a big deal - 1% is hazardous, 10% fatal.
And as others have pointed out:
1. Storing it is relatively easy.
2. Reprocessing it would mean NOT having to store it for thousands of years.
3. Reprocessing would also make it so that the "wrong hands" getting ahold of it would be less of a deal. For that matter, with nuclear waste, the most likely result is they poison/irradiate themselves; making a dirty bomb is more dangerous due to panic than actual harm level.
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1. Storing it is relatively easy.
So build the storage facility first.
Why after 75 years of talk don't we have any place to store it? The answer is that it is only easy in concept. Its hard when you start trying to deal with issues of transportation, security and, yes, politics. People will claim its perfectly safe until someone proposes putting the permanent storage facility at the Pentagon in Northern Virginia where it will be secure. It may be safe, but its not that safe.
2. Reprocessing it would mean NOT having to store it for thousands of years.
So build a reprocessing facility that makes the waste harmless.
making a dirty bomb is more dangerous due to panic than actual harm level.
Tha
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Transportation is a solved problem. Security is also solved. Poiitics is the only major remaining problem.
The problem with storing it at the Pentagon would be "too expensive and too much traffic".
Reprocessing doesn't make waste harmless, just the opposite in some regards - it concentrates the high level waste (most radioactive) and separates it from the lower radiation stuff which is still fuel. It's still dangerous stuff if not handled properly. It's just that because you now how all the shorter half-l
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Transportation is a solved problem. Security is also solved. Poiitics is the only major remaining problem.
The problem with storing it at the Pentagon would be "too expensive and too much traffic".
Didn't you just say the "transportation problem is a solved problem". Now "too much traffic" in this instance is a fatal problem. Expense was never mentioned as a problem but in this instance it is a fatal problem. Security is "solved" as long as you never need to actually make stuff secure for several centuries. Which no one alive today will ever be accountable for. This is pretty much a standard propaganda from the nuclear industry - every problem has an easy theoretical intellectual solution until you p
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Sigh..,
Moving nuclear waste is straight forward. Fixing DC traffic is considerably harder.
You could do it, it would just be way more expensive than necessary. No different than proposing using NYC for a massive solar farm.
Basically, you don't site your hazardous waste facility in a dense city with high property values. There's plenty of cheap desert with mostly deserted roads where you don't have to fight traffic.
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Moving nuclear waste is straight forward.
Moving it safely isn't.
Fixing DC traffic is considerably harder.
You don't need to fix it.
You could do it, it would just be way more expensive than necessary.
The time it takes to move the waste is inconsequential.
There are lots of reasons for not northern Virginia, for one it isn't centrally located. The problem with putting it near dense cities is safety which translates to political resistance.
The waste problem is only easily solved in a fantasy world. Which is why it hasn't been solved in over 80 years of trying.
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Moving nuclear waste safely is actually straight forward. We have actual specially designed containers for it specifically for rail and road travel. That said, it's still easier to pick a spot without excessive traffic and preferably a rail spur.
As for not needing to fix DC traffic - we don't want to make it worse either.
The time it takes to move the waste is inconsequential.
Didn't say that it wasn't. Building a facility, presumably under the pentagon, to store nuclear waste would be drastically more expensive than building it somewhere that doesn't already h
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Problem isn't that it's clean or dirty (Score:2)
Basically reactors require maintenance and maintenance costs money and money for maintenance bites into quarterly profits.
It's not a question of if it's a question of when the CEO starts cutting corners so he can get his bonus. And because he doesn't live anywhere near where the disaster is going to hit he doesn't care.
And over and over and over again we have shown that we do not punish people up the f
Re:Problem isn't that it's clean or dirty (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that even with the best reactors it is not safe to run them in an unsafe manner.
The worst case accident for the current generation of reactors: Three Mile Island. In other words, no lives list, very minor radiation leakage.
No operator wants to _lose_ a reactor and all of the future profits.
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The worst case accident for the current generation of reactors:
1) This is a new generation, remember. They have no safety record at all.
2) Chernobyl. Yes, it was a one off. Lots of different problems converged to create it. But it shows you one thing that is certainly possible. Almost as certainly, it was not the worst possible.
3) There were literally thousands of other safety problems at plants that never came together to create a disaster.
4) There is no need for nuclear power. We can easily replace fossil fuel electricity far faster, cheaper, more reliably and
Re:Problem isn't that it's clean or dirty (Score:4, Interesting)
1) This is a new generation, remember. They have no safety record at all.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are all second generation nuclear power plants. There's plenty of 3rd generation nuclear power plants in operation with many operating for something like 30 years now. If you believe there's no safety record for cunnrent generation nuclear power then it is likely because there's not been any accidents that made the national news.
2) Chernobyl. Yes, it was a one off. Lots of different problems converged to create it. But it shows you one thing that is certainly possible. Almost as certainly, it was not the worst possible.
Fukushima was also a one off. I just watched a video on nuclear power safety with a nuclear engineer narrating. The earliest reactors at Fukushima were older than those at Chernobyl, but because Soviets do Soviet things they saw people killed by radiation leaks while the Japanese did not. I know that there's been one or two deaths by cancer of people that worked at Fukushima, one was a case of lung cancer as I recall. Lots of things cause cancer, and we can infer the source by where the cancer is found. Smoking tobacco, even second hand smoke, tends to cause lung cancer. Radiation accidents tend to cause cancer of the thyroid, skin, bones, blood, but rarely in the lungs. An exception to that might be radon gas but that is from natural sources of radiation than from a fission reactor.
3) There were literally thousands of other safety problems at plants that never came together to create a disaster.
If your concern on nuclear power safety is that we didn't see any big disasters *YET* from nuclear power, and can't be explained by a combination of old technology, incompetence that only Soviets could attain, and/or rare "black swan" events, then I believe you will be waiting a long time for seeing evidence that current generation nuclear power is not safe.
There's a common policy of "safety in depth" as in having redundant systems, and even redundant people, so there's not likely a disaster but only minor violations. To see a failure at a nuclear power plant, even one as old as Fukushima, there would have to be many failures at the same time. The earthquake in 2011 tripped automatic safety shutdowns on all operating reactors at Fukushima. Then a 15 foot wave cleared their 14 foot seawall, few people expected any waves to reach that high. With no reactors running the plant is consuming power than producing it, good thing they had batteries, diesel generators, and a connection to the electrical grid. Or they did until the waves took out the grid connection, fouled the fuel for the generators, and the batteries ran dead. The world learned from that, it will be highly unlikely to see anything like it again.
4) There is no need for nuclear power. We can easily replace fossil fuel electricity far faster, cheaper, more reliably and with little risk.
This is not about reducing emissions by replacing current energy use. This is about building industrial scale electrical plants to feed an enormous growth in the use of energy. For crypto and AI for instance. But also for industries whose overall operation and products will produce huge amounts of additional emissions.
If there's no need for nuclear power because we have better options then I'm confused on why you'd see a need to say anything more than that. If true then we have our energy problems solved forever, or at least beyond the lives of the grandchildren for anyone reading this today. I'm confused about all the worry of global warming, it appears we got it solved. Sure, we need to see existing fossil fuel burners run their course and be replaced by low CO2 options. How long could that take? 40 years? I believe we have at least 40 years to get to net zero carbon emissions, we may need to make some adaptations in the process to account for some sea level rise an
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can't be explained by a combination of old technology, incompetence that only Soviets could attain, and/or rare "black swan" events,
There is no disaster that can't be explained. The problem isn't explaining them, its anticipating all the possible ways they can happen. And every disaster is a "black swan" if it wasn't anticipated.
The idea that American's aren't capable of the same incompetence as the Soviet engineers has been amply proved untrue on numerous occasions. But its a time tested industry propaganda talking point that uses emotional appeals to patriotism to silence criticism.The problem with Chernobyl was it was designed by hum
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How is that the worst case? They can still have a full on meltdown and explosions that release large amounts of radioactive material into the environment. The safety systems are better, but not foolproof and not guaranteed to work in all scenarios.
That's why nuclear plants still can't get insurance. The insurers aren't falling for it, they can see that the worst case scenario would bankrupt them.
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and explosions
What do you think can explode on a nuclear power plant? For your reference, Three Mile Island buildings also successfully contained a hydrogen explosion.
That's why nuclear plants still can't get insurance.
They certainly do. Nuclear power plants in the US pay around $1B a year for liability insurance.
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And no driver wants to _lose_ a car, or their life, in a crash. Yet, reckless driving still happens.
Re:Problem isn't that it's clean or dirty (Score:5, Insightful)
At this juncture, this is no magic bullet for generating electricity. However, nuclear energy has been a reliable source of electricity for the better part of a century and makes a hueg contribution to the power grid. The longer we delay a transition away from fossil fuels, the more people will be condemned to die in the future because of climate change. So, my question to you is, how many people's lives are you willing to sacrifice because you are afraid of nuclear technology?
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Using nuclear energey, or lack thereof, was never the issue with the move away from fossil fuels.
Really? So you're saying that there is no problem with solar energy prices going negative because of a lack of energy storage capability before switching over to coal to generate power at night? We need to utilize all the tools at our disposal to save the most lives.
As others have pointed out, nuclear power is not a quick fix and creates problems of its own.
I never claimed it was perfect, in fact, I claimed the exact opposite when I wrote, "there is no magic bullet".
The issues with nuclear power are real and they can be dealt with in the long-term. However, your reaction to nuclear power is similar
Re: (Score:2)
All power plants require maintenance.
guess what -- (Score:1)
"...amounts of climate-warming emissions"
-- it releases heat.
Get a clue (Score:2)
All sources of energy emit heat which includes the Earth itself. The part that matters is nuclear power does not release CO2 which is a GHG that prevents heat from radiating into space by reflecting it back to Earth.
Re: (Score:2)
And the radioactive materials that are on Earth, they do what? They decay, releasing heat! Or do they start decaying only after we put them in a plant?!? All of that heat will be released. Taking a minuscule part of the material, generating electricity from that heat and then using the energy to do work (which of course is not 100% efficient but nothing is) DECREASES the heat load of the planet. Just like what you claim about solar. Radioactive materials decay releasing heat all the time; they are an ever p
Fusion power (Score:2)
Perfect for when fusion is ready.
As they say though, it still has to be cost competitive. I'd bet fusion will have a much better chance of achieving such a goal than fission could ever hope for.
Is it really "clean"? (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
772 tons of spent nuclear fuel going nowhere!
Clean and safe ... (Score:1)
... sureley there is no waste and Fukushima and Chernobyl never happened.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look at Barakah nuclear power plant in the UAE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Four years late and only $2 billion over budget (total was $32 billion) they have a working plant. Do you think any environmentalists impeded progress in that country?
Re: (Score:2)
Take a look at Barakah nuclear power plant in the UAE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Four years late and only $2 billion over budget (total was $32 billion) they have a working plant. Do you think any environmentalists impeded progress in that country?
Check how fast China is cranking them out.
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It takes China about a decade to build one, if you include the planning process. That's still a long time. They're slowing their nuclear builds because it's too slow and too expensive.
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$32 billion for 5.6GW. Took a decade to build, using literal slave labour at times. The International Atomic Energy Agency has questioned the safety of the plant and been refused full access to evaluate it.
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Japan just "cranked one out" in ~2 years and a quarter our costs, proving it can be done with western expertise and resources. And as someone else mentioned, China cranks them out even quicker, nonstop.
Can't find any numbers anywhere close to that. Have a citation?
I'm reading they just allowed operating reactors past 60 years (implying they're having trouble getting new power onboard even though the majority of the reactors in the country are currently shut down and not being decommissioned), and the one under construction has been a project since the early 2010s. Construction just started in 2021 with the first reactor expected to come online in 2027. From what I'm reading, the cost to build look to be
Re: (Score:1)
Can't find any numbers anywhere close to that. Have a citation?
It appears Japan can get a nuclear power plant online in ~3 years. Maybe I missed it but I didn't see cost estimates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I'm reading they just allowed operating reactors past 60 years (implying they're having trouble getting new power onboard even though the majority of the reactors in the country are currently shut down and not being decommissioned), and the one under construction has been a project since the early 2010s. Construction just started in 2021 with the first reactor expected to come online in 2027. From what I'm reading, the cost to build look to be about equivalent to the US, and most of the reactors in the country are still shut down following Fukushima, even though they've been allowed to restart since 2015, with multiple really bad safety problems, and several of the restarts have resulted in near immediate shutdowns.
I didn't go through and exhaustive list of nuclear power plants but it does appear that the nuclear power industry in Japan is recovering after 2011.
I see this as a much of a repeat of what happened in the USA. The USA had a boom in the nuclear power industry which came to a halt after Three Mile Island. Once those building nuclear power plants see that t
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that there's a lot of overselling of the expense and danger of nuclear power.
There is.
Also the safety of them.
It seems near fucking impossible to find a person who isn't passionate enough about the topic to not sell their intellectual honesty to make their point.
I'm not accusing you of this, but it is how it is.
Nuclear power plants are dangerous. Period. Very fucking dangerous.
But then again, so are a lot of things that mankind does.
We're perfectly capable of doing really dangerous things safely. I feel it's important not to pretend like those things aren't dangerous, though
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It was a joint venture with South Korea.
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Where's DOGE when you need them?
Where where you when you last saw DOGE? Did you check the couch cushions? The pockets of clothes you were wearing yesterday? I don't know, I thought you were keeping an eye on DOGE. I'll go check in the truck, maybe someone left it there.
Everyone stop for a minute and help us look about here, DOGE can't be far.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Very few environmentalists oppose nuclear energy these days. Even Greenpeace is in favor of it.
Waste is still a huge, unsolved issue, though. And nuclear power stations are very expensive to build. Other types of nuclear reactors (thorium etc) are promising with less nuclear waste, but still a ways off.
And of course there is environmental destruction during uranium mining operations (and lots of human health concerns), but compared to coal mining of the last 200 years, it's quite acceptable in my opinion.
Re: (Score:1)
Even Greenpeace is in favor of it.
Got proof about that? I just watched a video on how Chernobyl killed thousands, and could have killed millions if things weren't contained when they were. The source cited was GreenPeace. Estimates on deaths from that nuclear accident from government sources put deaths in the dozens, and a small increased risk of cancer for those in the community, so small as to be difficult to see or definitively prove radiation as the cause.
Re:No shit it's clean. It's been clean since 1958 (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes. [greenpeace.org]
While estimates of deaths from Chernobyl are contentious, and you stating with certainty that the extended mortality is basically nothing is completely unscientific, what should not be is the large area of land where it is quite literally unsafe to live even today.
Pretending like we should be building these things in the center of our cities is fucking absurd- just as absurd as the idea that they shouldn't be built at all.
Don't play down the scope of that disaster.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't play down the scope of that disaster.
I do not believe I was playing down the disaster at Chernobyl. I was retelling something I heard from a nuclear engineer on YouTube.
Maybe I didn't get the numbers right but I believe it a rather moot point now since nobody has built a reactor like those at Chernobyl in decades, nobody is likely to build anything so flawed ever again, and whatever reactors from that era are still operating today have had changes made to apply what was learned from Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island.
It appears Three
Re: (Score:3)
I do not believe I was playing down the disaster at Chernobyl. I was retelling something I heard from a nuclear engineer on YouTube.
Then the nuclear engineer you watched on YouTube was downplaying the disaster.
Extended mortality from Chernobyl is unknown, but credible estimates range from hundreds to thousands. There just isn't a good way to know, and the arguments for both hold water. We have to treat the situation as if it could be either of the extremes.
Maybe I didn't get the numbers right but I believe it a rather moot point now since nobody has built a reactor like those at Chernobyl in decades, nobody is likely to build anything so flawed ever again, and whatever reactors from that era are still operating today have had changes made to apply what was learned from Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island.
I do tend to agree with this.
Nuclear power continues to improve in safety.
It appears Three Mile Island will return to operation. It will take years and millions of dollars in upgrades to restore operation of one reactor but still worth it as that would take less time and money for the same power output than any other option.
It is debatable how much it's "worth it", as the math equation on similar renewable capacity continues to
Re: (Score:2)
It appears Three Mile Island will return to operation. It will take years and millions of dollars in upgrades to restore operation of one reactor but still worth it as that would take less time and money for the same power output than any other option.
And if something goes wrong, the company that owns the plant will go bankrupt and the public will pick up the tab. The tech companies that used the power will walk away with no liability. If you made the customers liable for those costs there wouldn't be any customers. This is the standard process where the corporation makes the money and the public gets the risk.
Re: (Score:2)
In a way the public still pays
Exactly. It wasn't as if Three Mile Island customers who picked up the tab in proportion to the amount of power they had received. Amazon,Google et. al are not going to pay the tab if the nuclear power plant they are buying power from melts down or even just shuts down without the resources to decommission it. Much less pay the costs of permanent secure storage of the resulting waste.
Re: No shit it's clean. It's been clean since 1958 (Score:1)
Maybe third world countries shouldn't operate reactors?
Re: (Score:3)
And stable countries with strong regulatory and inspection systems, I trust whole heartedly here.
The US, frankly, I do not.
We seem to keep oscillating politically from the most reckless capitalism we can make- to comical levels, and something approaching sanity.
We are currently trying to Make America 1861 Again over here, and I don't think countries with 1861 mindsets should be operating nuclear reactors.
Re: (Score:2)
This doesn’t highlight the risk of nuclear power as much as it highlights the risk of nuclear power not managed properly.
This is an idiotic statement.
You cannot have one without the other.
Consider the following statement,
Person falls off building. Creates expected-by-basic-physics-understand combination of pancake and red mist on the pavement below.
One person opines, "This is why you have to be careful on ledges high above the ground."
You come along and say, "I disagree. This is why you always need to wear a parachute."
The lack of the parachute isn't what killed them. The several acceleration at 1G followed by a sudde
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Nuclear is simply too expensive. But hey if you want some corporate welfare to keep them afloat you better run that line item by president Elon.
Re: (Score:2)
Out of interest, why is it so expensive?
Everytime the subejct comes up people start making claims - its the greens! it's the politicians! it the regulators! I rarely see much in the way of a rational informed explanation for these positions, and it isn't very easy to find this information out on one's own.
Why is nuclear power so expensive, compare to equivalent non-nuclear plants? We've been making these plants for nearly 70 years now, you'd have thought we'd have learned how to do it efficiently, so what i
Re: (Score:2)
It's kind of you to be so civilised in your reply, thank you.
Yes, I've read the above, and each person contradicts the other. No one reading the thread is any better off than they were before. No one has gone into any details, but rather just outlined a broad theme (regulations! safety!) without anything to contextualise their position.
I'd like to hear some details - if it is regulation, then can we have some details: which regulations? where do the cost fall (is it on the construction costs, is it due to i
Re: No shit it's clean. It's been clean since 1958 (Score:2)
Re: No shit it's clean. It's been clean since 195 (Score:2)
Fuck the voices. If it's not in grainy black and white in a poorly xeroxed newsletter, it doesn't exist.
Re: (Score:2)
And there have been absolutely no advances in detecting and diagnosing cancer in that same time period, right?
Don't you think that CT scanners and MRI machines might have had an effect on elevated cancer detection rates, if we can detect cancers now without finding them during an autopsy?