Fukushima: Would anyone dare to say that nuclear power is a nightmare of Statism?

[Cornellius]

Fukushima because the tiny plant has become a hotspot of long-reaching environmental damage. Sea life in the pacific is dying at an accelerated rate in several related places, radiation levels are peaking on the west coast. Milk consumption could become out of the question for at least most of west side US for lord knows how long, a reminder of what happened in Ukraine (and in Eurp for that matter) in April 1986.

 

How does such a civilized device as a nuclear power plant turn into an environmental plague that can affect who lives at the other side of the world? Is it just a matter of robotizing operations to make them failsafe (Tchernobyl) or not dumping them near international waters susceptible to earthquakes like an asshole? Is it really civilized, or is it just anti-life tech?

[WorBlux]

Fukushima because the tiny plant has become a hotspot of long-reaching environmental damage. Sea life in the pacific is dying at an accelerated rate in several related places, radiation levels are peaking on the west coast. Milk consumption could become out of the question for at least most of west side US for lord knows how long, a reminder of what happened in Ukraine (and in Eurp for that matter) in April 1986.

 

How does such a civilized device as a nuclear power plant turn into an environmental plague that can affect who lives at the other side of the world? Is it just a matter of robotizing operations to make them failsafe (Tchernobyl) or not dumping them near international waters susceptible to earthquakes like an asshole? Is it really civilized, or is it just anti-life tech?

 

 

The choice of the Light Water Reactor (LWR) was driven by wartime requirements of plotonium production.  The LWR is a disaster waiting to happen without extensive and intensive intervention to keep reactor conditions from going supercritical. The create wastes that are too 'hot' to handle for 10,000 years, a time period that has never been successfully engineered for.  It burns about 0.5% of it's fuel before reprocessing is required, but the high transuranics prevent successfull reprossing.

 

Back at the beginning there were other promising designs that were were set aside in favour of the LWR because of it's potential to create plutonium.  The gen IV reactors are much more promising designed to completely burn trans-uranics (reduces wastes by 99% and reducing the holding required to two centuries), and many of them are designed to be walk-away safe, where cooling failure activate secondary measure to stop and contain the nuclear reaction. (The salt plug in the LFTR)

[LovePrevails]

Yes because it would be impossible to underwrite the insurance for a nuclear power plant on a freemarket because the cost to the insurance company of paying for damages would be too high to risk, so no one would trade with you if you couldn't guarantee safety. Plus since everything would be privately owned including waste disposal no one could insure disposal of dangerous waste materials from your plant since it would be to expensive, no one would accept the waste therefor you'd have to keep it yourself, therefor it would be impossible.

 

Besides, nuclear power is expensive, the only reason it was economic was because it underwrote the cost of developing nuclear weapons during the cold war. The governments put a lot of money into making red look black.

[Cornellius]

The choice of the Light Water Reactor (LWR) was driven by wartime requirements of plotonium production.  The LWR is a disaster waiting to happen without extensive and intensive intervention to keep reactor conditions from going supercritical. The create wastes that are too 'hot' to handle for 10,000 years, a time period that has never been successfully engineered for.  It burns about 0.5% of it's fuel before reprocessing is required, but the high transuranics prevent successfull reprossing.

 

Back at the beginning there were other promising designs that were were set aside in favour of the LWR because of it's potential to create plutonium.  The gen IV reactors are much more promising designed to completely burn trans-uranics (reduces wastes by 99% and reducing the holding required to two centuries), and many of them are designed to be walk-away safe, where cooling failure activate secondary measure to stop and contain the nuclear reaction. (The salt plug in the LFTR)

 

Wow, frankly I'm blown away, I thought nuclear energy was much more black and white. Thank you, you give me a lot of hope for the betterment of mankind.

[PatrickC]

Yes, it's certainly true that this is a disaster for Japan, certainly within a 100 mile radius of Fukishima. Chernobyl promised to bring all kinds of disasters to the shores of Europe, but it was mostly contained within the Ukraine. Certainly the risk of disaster is acerbated by nuclear power being in the hands of the state. But a lot of misinformation is propagated about the hazzards by certain enviromental groups. And as Worblux points out, nuclear power stations have improved vastly.

 

However, I'm in agreement with LP. It's unlikely anyone would underwrite nuclear power without a state that can enforce it. Even though I would trust private hands better. But I imagine by the time we get to a position of considering to privately underwrite these power stations. We will probably have a cheaper, more efficient and safer forms of energy elsewhere. The trouble with existing energy resources is that most states are paranoid about being dependent on other states for those resources. Nuclear power has been seen by some politicians as a way of resolving that state made dilemma.

[ribuck]

Chernobyl promised to bring all kinds of disasters to the shores of Europe, but it was mostly contained within the Ukraine.

 

True, but "mostly" is the key word. There are still valleys in the UK where crops and sheep cannot be grown for food because of radioactive dust that fell from Chernobyl.

[PatrickC]

True, but "mostly" is the key word. There are still valleys in the UK where crops and sheep cannot be grown for food because of radioactive dust that fell from Chernobyl.

 

Good point ribuck.. I was generalising of course.

[ribuck]

I looked it up so that I could post a reference for those who are interested. In doing so I discovered that the restrictions were lifted a year ago, 26 years after the Chernobyl accident.

 

Chernobyl made 9800 UK farms unable to raise sheep for food, affecting the four million sheep that were on these farms, and harming the economic viability of those farms (and costing the taxpayer a lot of money) for 26 years.

 

Reference: "Post Chernobyl monitoring and controls"

[FriendlyHacker]

Nuclear power is not a bad thing by itself, it's just not something foolproof enough for us stupid monkeys to deal with. Cold fusion might be greatest discovery yet to come, but as long as humans are in charge of it, I don't trust on it being safe.

 

There is plenty of wind, solar, wave and geothermal energy to go around, so I just don't see the point in dealing with something as potentially dangerous as uranium.

 

A nuclear power plant works in a similar way a coal plant does, the radiation generates heat, the heat turns water into vapor and vapor turns a turbine, the turbine generates electricity.

 

The thing about nuclear material though is that it will release heat continuously, you can shut down a coal power plant if you stop burning the coal, but uranium will remain hot for thousands of years. So in order to keep the reactor from exploding you need to keep it cool at all times, in case of power failure a backup system should come along to keep the cooling down process going, but because of the earthquake and human error, the backup system was not turned on, causing the reactor to explode when power failed.

 

The reactor has exploded, but the uranium will remain releasing heat and radiation anyway, since the leak has not been contained it becomes a fucking disaster.

[lee1138]

If you look at Nuclear Reactors for power generation from a philosophical standpoint, you will see it as a centralization of control.  The power is generated and distributed from a central point.  Those who use the power have no control over it's creation or it's cost.  If power generation could be decentralized to where some, if not most of the consumers were generating their own power by whatever means is expedient, then they have more control over its distribution and cost.

[EmperorNero]

The problem with wind and solar its that they don't produce any energy. You have to put more or almost as much fossil fuel into them as you get out. Wind and solar require twenty (!) times as much steel and concrete per kwh as 70s antiquated nuclear technology. And half of that is safety regulations. Think about that, for every 20 tons of steel used for wind energy we could have used one to produce the same electricity with nuclear power and then use the 19 tons left to build hospitals or end world hunger. Wind and solar are energy "purifiers", not energy sources.

 

Modern pebble-bed nuclear technology can't meltdown, they just run out of fuel. Its really great for the environment, bur now that the environmentalists worked to delay nuclear energy for so long, they can't admit they were wrong. The real problem with nuclear energy though is that it's too cheap and abundant, an age of plenty would put incumbent elites out of a job. Not to mention oil companies.

 

Also, you got to keep things in perspective. People expect nuclear energy to be perfect before they accept it. Its not perfect, but its better than the alternatives. Coal is an environmental disaster, its the reason fish is full of mercury. Wind and solar killed millions of people by wasting resources that could have been used for useful stuff like hospitals. But people don't count these costs.

 

Banning DDT killed a million people a year, yet for some reason people think that cost is worth it. But nuclear energy is considered "dangerous" even though there was no major accident in 50 years that wasnt in a crazy communist country or on top of the worlds most active earth quake zone. A few valleys without sheep? Environmentalist policies are regularly more destructive, yet nobody cares. Nuclear energy is the least deadly energy source, but there's just an irrational gut fear of it. I had it too before I learned the facts. The challenge for humanity is to overcome such irrational biases.

 

Also, nuclear doesn't have to be centralized. It is imaginable that everyone has a small reactor in their basement, and stores the waste themselves. (Roughly one soda can of waste in a lifetime.) Green energy has to be far away from the consumer, because thats where the sun and the wind is.

[ribuck]

The problem with wind and solar its that they don't produce any energy. You have to put more or almost as much fossil fuel into them as you get out.

 

I've tried to find good evidence to back up your claim, but I can't. Do you have a reference?

 

I can buy a solar panel from Amazon UK for £200 which generates 100 watts under full sunshine, which it would receive for about 2000 hours per year where I live. Over a 20-year lifespan, that's 4000 kW-hours, which would cost me £800 if I bought the same amount of power from the grid.

 

The panel is unsubsidised, so if it costs £200 it's not going to use more than £200 worth of energy in its production.

[EmperorNero]

Yeah, I was slightly inaccurate. This is from The Rational Optimist: "Wind turbines require five to ten times as much concrete and steel per watt as nuclear power plants". In another place he says that half of the cost of nuclear energy is to comply with statist safety regulations. A tenth times a half is a twentieth, or 5%. Add in the efficiency gains of actually beging permitted to build nuclear power plants of this generation and free market nuclear energy costs a few percentages of wind and solar. That's within the margin of error of "nothing".What you're forgetting with your £200 solar panel is the cost of energy storage. You pretty much couldn't cook a meal after dawn. What about all the energy you need in winter? The inefficient part about solar energy is storing it for when people actually need it (and getting it to where the people actually are). Unfortunately that's not when there's lots of sun. Large-scale solar and wind parks often fail to break even with subsidies, so I doubt that a single solar panel could do it without.

[ribuck]

What you're forgetting ...

 

No, I'm not "forgetting" anything. My post was exploring your claim that "You have to put more or almost as much fossil fuel into them as you get out".

 

You have raised an entirely different point: that sunshine is not constant. If you're interested in exploring that, there's a good introduction here:

Can you get “green energy” when the sun's not shining?

[EmperorNero]

I read somewhere that some northern European solar parks have negative EROEI over their lifetime. Unfortunately I can't find it, so I guess that makes it a useless claim for a debate. So I concede that the EROEI of most solar energy is probably above zero. They "only" waste like 95% of resources, compared to free market nuclear.

 

"You're forgetting" was just a manner of speaking, I didn't mean to say that you are actually unaware of it, just that it wasn't part of that example calculation.

 

As for pumping water into reservoirs, that's fine if you happen to have a hill with a reservoir on top of it near metropolitan areas. Now we have to start building hills with pools on top of them so we can use our expensive "green" energy to pump water up there at huge losses. So all those expensive wind turbines got you was a bit of water in the right place. Instead of just using a sustainable energy source that is available when you need it.

[FriendlyHacker]

The problem with wind and solar its that they don't produce any energy. You have to put more or almost as much fossil fuel into them as you get out.

 

Don't know what you mean there, Solar/Wind is an one time investment that generates energy for decades, if you burn fossil fuel it's gone. Does not matter if you use nuclear, fossil or solar, energy is not being made it's being converted, with different degrees of efficiency, but being converted.

 

Human error is too great of a factor to deal with when survival of species is at stake, I don't trust nuclear power for this sole reason.

 

Ever heard of solar shingles? You can replace your roof shingles with it and generate more energy from it than your house will ever need, in fact there is a whole industry in Germany on selling the extra energy from it.

 

Solar cell energy efficiency is developing at near Moore's law scale, if you read any report on solar energy efficiency that is a few years old, you should know that the information presented there is now irrelevant. Same goes for electric batteries.

[WorBlux]

I've tried to find good evidence to back up your claim, but I can't. Do you have a reference?

 

I can buy a solar panel from Amazon UK for £200 which generates 100 watts under full sunshine, which it would receive for about 2000 hours per year where I live. Over a 20-year lifespan, that's 4000 kW-hours, which would cost me £800 if I bought the same amount of power from the grid.

 

The panel is unsubsidised, so if it costs £200 it's not going to use more than £200 worth of energy in its production.

Free shipping? How many hours will it take to install? Whats the charge per hour. Do you have an inverter? Batteries? Even the best battery banks cost about a dime USD per kWhr stored and discharged. Are you going to sell back to the grid -that requires a special meter? And when you sell to the grid you can really only count in the wholesale price rather than the retail price as the power company still has to  distribute the power to someone else. Oh and solar cells degrade over time. Your lucky to have 50% capacity at the end of twenty years.  The realities start stacking up. In some place you can make it work, especially in particular sunny area of the globe with high utility costs with new construction where you can roll the cost into a mortgage, and you can set up the angles for maximum efficiency.

 

Instead of putting solar panel on your roof you may be better off painting it white.

 

...Also, nuclear doesn't have to be centralized. It is imaginable that everyone has a small reactor in their basement, and stores the waste themselves. (Roughly one soda can of waste in a lifetime.) Green energy has to be far away from the consumer, because thats where the sun and the wind is.

 

You can't really achieve criticality at that mass in a way that's controllable. But you can get them much smaller. 30MW plants about the size of a semi-trailer are feasible.

 

If you look at Nuclear Reactors for power generation from a philosophical standpoint, you will see it as a centralization of control.  The power is generated and distributed from a central point.  Those who use the power have no control over it's creation or it's cost.  If power generation could be decentralized to where some, if not most of the consumers were generating their own power by whatever means is expedient, then they have more control over its distribution and cost.

Some places centralization makes sense. The land is simply too valuable to build windmills or square footage of a house too scarce to install a battery.

 

...

There is plenty of wind, solar, wave and geothermal energy to go around, so I just don't see the point in dealing with something as potentially dangerous as uranium.

 

A nuclear power plant works in a similar way a coal plant does, the radiation generates heat, the heat turns water into vapor and vapor turns a turbine, the turbine generates electricity.

...

 

The reactor has exploded, but the uranium will remain releasing heat and radiation anyway, since the leak has not been contained it becomes a fucking disaster.

It's not dense so it costs a lot to harness it wheras you can fit a lifetime's supply energy in of thorium or uranium (233 or 235) in the palm of your hand. Cheap energy saves lives. In addition cheap energy allows us to derive our biological energy from chemiosynthetic organisms rather only photosynthetic organisms reducing or eliminating damage to marginal land from cultivation, even perhaps allowing the human population grow to a trillion without adversely affecting natural ecosystems.

 

An argument against current designs, not all nuclear.  Many of the designs in the works have methods to quickly (and some of the passively) remove fuel from the core and passively cool the fuel for long periods of time.

 

 

Don't know what you mean there, Solar/Wind is an one time investment that generates energy for decades, if you burn fossil fuel it's gone. Does not matter if you use nuclear, fossil or solar, energy is not being made it's being converted, with different degrees of efficiency, but being converted.

 

Human error is too great of a factor to deal with when survival of species is at stake, I don't trust nuclear power for this sole reason.

 

Ever heard of solar shingles? You can replace your roof shingles with it and generate more energy from it than your house will ever need, in fact there is a whole industry in Germany on selling the extra energy from it.

 

Solar cell energy efficiency is developing at near Moore's law scale, if you read any report on solar energy efficiency that is a few years old, you should know that the information presented there is now irrelevant. Same goes for electric batteries.