Nuclear Power Stations - Yes or No

[Cynic]

Answer to the uranium and the storage problems are both, ultimately, space. Unlike coal, oil, and natural gas, uranium is all over the solar system. Long before we start running out of uranium on Earth, acquiring it from places outside the Earth (via robotics craft) will have become almost trivial. Likewise, shooting stuff into the sun or just "out" will also have become trivial. In fact, that's already trivial, except for the fear of certain unreliability problems. That should be solved by the invention of containers that are nigh impervious to crashes and explosions.

 

[Fishstick]

What do they do with their waste?

From the beginning the French had been recycling their nuclear waste, reclaiming the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricating new fuel elements. This not only gave energy, it reduced the volume and longevity of French radioactive waste. The volume of the ultimate high-level waste was indeed very small: the contribution of a family of four using electricity for 20 years is a glass cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter. It was assumed that this high-level waste would be buried in underground geological storage and in the 80s French engineers began digging exploratory holes in France's rural regions. This gave rise to a NIMBY mentality to the people in those regions - they loved nuclear power, but they didn't want to live in France's nuclear dustbin.

Nowadays a lot of it is still stocked in rural areas, in the hopes that technology will improve more so it can be further reclaimed. A significant part of it also goes to Russia.

 

[Cynic]

While I don't have any real issues with nuclear power from a safety point of view I am starting to think that they aren't the answer. One reason for this is that their lack of flexibility doesn't really make them well suited to supporting electricity grids with high proportions of renewables and distributed generation - things which are no doubt the future of energy.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. There are base levels of power need, day and night, summer and winter, that will have to be met. More flexible means and, when it comes to alternate power, the more variable means of generation would fill in the gaps. Plus, power can and is redistributed to where it needs to go, regardless of where it was generated.

As a far-future, long-term planning point, I agree that if we can come up with a more renewable, less toxic method and get those methods up to the task of handling grid needs, fantastic. In the meantime, I think nuclear is probably the best stopgap option immediately available.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Chernobyl shows what might happen when a high risk design is badly managed.

Fixed that for you.

Honestly - I need to know more.

Hindmost (poster here) is quite knowledgable on the topic. Seek his posts with nuclear power in them. Much good info there.

For the OP:

Yes.

 

[Darth Rotor]

People are frightened of nuclear Arth. I think they are right to be frightened. I

Fear mongering has gotten to you, has it? Education is one way to alleviate or resolve fear.

We had a thread on anti nuclear woo months ago, (a year or more ago?) which is either dead or somewhere in the archives. I think it was in Science forum. A superb back and forth discussion that highlighted pros and cons, and some of the actual experts who post here addressed the nuclear byproducts issue, which is non trivial.

DR

 

[WildCat]

I can't imagine it costing more than a pathetically tiny portion of the overall cost.

According to this a nuke plant cost about $2.4 billion in 1988.

An average lawyer (in today's money) costs about $200 an hour. If 20 lawyers worked for 10 years (40 hours a week), that would equal just under 3.5% of the total cost.


Clearly I'm overestimating. That's 1988 plant being charged at 2009 rates for a giant legal team working full time for a full decade.

Almost none.

Ask 'how much of the cost is refining uranium through a ridiculously time consuming and expensive process of gas centrifuges that has only recently been somewhat supplanted' and you'd be closer to the mark.

It's a great strawman, but refining uranium is TOUGH. Really tough.

Nuclear is a good source of power, but there's been a tendency for certain political ends of the spectrum to whitewash the difficulties of nuclear power, especially when the intial plants were being constructed, and pretend they were all due to 'crazy environmentalists.' In fact, many failed on their own 'merits.' That kinda ruins the 'holy grail' narrative that's being built though.

It's not the lawyers that drive up the cost of the legal challenges, it's the never-ending resulting requirements to produce a study of this, that, and the other thing. Studies that can take years and tens of millions of dollars each.

How much does it cost France and Japan to build their nuke plants? According to this page France exports a lot of electricity because their nuke plants allow them to produce it cheaply.

eta: more on costs here: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
The argument that nuclear power costs too much don't stand up to scrutiny, particularly if you include the cost of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel plants. Nuclear is in fact the cheapest way to generate electricity we've found to date.

 

[geni]

Supply doesn't seem to be a problem.

Except there are almost no fast breeders in existance and no plans to build any non experimental ones. Oh and the next well documented fast breeder not to have acidents will be the first.

 

[Fishstick]

Except there are almost no fast breeders in existance and no plans to build any non experimental ones. Oh and the next well documented fast breeder not to have acidents will be the first.

No plans yet, and good thing the in-earth supply is enough for at least a few decades and probably much longer.

 

[GreyICE]

It's not the lawyers that drive up the cost of the legal challenges, it's the never-ending resulting requirements to produce a study of this, that, and the other thing. Studies that can take years and tens of millions of dollars each.

How much does it cost France and Japan to build their nuke plants? According to this page France exports a lot of electricity because their nuke plants allow them to produce it cheaply.

eta: more on costs here: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
The argument that nuclear power costs too much don't stand up to scrutiny, particularly if you include the cost of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel plants. Nuclear is in fact the cheapest way to generate electricity we've found to date.

Who says it costs 'too much?' Not me. Not Merv. Do you only deal in strawmen?

 

[Darth Rotor]

Supply doesn't seem to be a problem.

Which is just a bonus, since fusion is just 40 years away ...

"And Moses stood atop the Mountain of El (LLL) and showed us the promised land of unlimited clean energy ... "

http://www.newsweek.com/id/222792/page/1

(Edward Moses of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, hard at work to solve the controllable nuclear fusion problem with seriously Gucci lasers.)

 

[The_Fire]

OP related:

Would I seriously contemplate nuclear power? Absolutely. Would I build it? PRobably. And I would make bloody sure that it was build to the newest specs on fall-out/"china syndrom" security and then some. The biggest caveat I can see is how to safely store the waste safely untill its no longer dangerous.

 

[WildCat]

Who says it costs 'too much?' Not me. Not Merv. Do you only deal in strawmen?

Who's making a strawman? Merv brought up costs, I pointed out that they can be very cost-effective, more so than coal, oil, gas, wind, and solar power. Especially the last 2.

 

[Belz...]

What do they do with their waste?

I think they eat it.

No, I think France is doing some level of recycling.

But, anyway, the stuff that you CAN'T recycle, you can only store somewhere. I don't see why that's so much of a problem.

 

[Cynic]

But, anyway, the stuff that you CAN'T recycle, you can only store somewhere. I don't see why that's so much of a problem.

NIMBYs, for one.

 

[Soapy Sam]

As an oil industry worker, I've long felt we have no real alternative to nuclear and we need to get it going before we burn all the oil we need for other things.
That said, it's a stopgap, not a permanent solution to energy demand.
The only long term solution is to use a lot less in the first place.

 

[Cynic]

Using less (though more efficient products) will at least help mitigate rising population and the "switching on" of existing large populations as "third-world" populations industrialize.

I see a lot of promise in orbital collectors with microwave delivery, actually. That's probably far more likely than fusion right now.

 

[The Shrike]

Generally pro-nuke here, based on the problems we seem to accept without question from our largely coal-based energy supply in the U.S. My biggest concern with coal lies in its extraction, and that mountaintop removal stuff in the Appalachians is a dreadful thing to do to a landscape.

But the smart thing to do with nukes is compare it to other power sources in terms of life expectancy of the resource and collateral environmental damage per megawatt produced. If it takes 15 years to get a plant going but we only can bank on a 40 year supply of material to fiss then that's not such a great investment.

While we'll always need a base energy source in every grid, we can do so much more than we are now in terms of solar, wind, geothermal, etc. I see the future in decentralization, however. It's not 50,000 giant turbines in the Plains that we need, it's 50,000,000 little ones - preferably vertical axis as opposed to "prop" designs - on every home and business. I'm in Oklahoma, and we have 300+ days of the year in which solar panels could make a serious dent in our consumption. We should also be powering our televisions with treadmills and exercise bikes, but that's a different story . . .

 

[Darth Rotor]

Using less (though more efficient products) will at least help mitigate rising population and the "switching on" of existing large populations as "third-world" populations industrialize.

I see a lot of promise in orbital collectors with microwave delivery, actually. That's probably far more likely than fusion right now.

Thirty years ago, I did a modest undergrad level project on that. At the time, the energy conversion factor from solar to array to receiver on earth was about 0.13. (13% of what you got at the array ended up at the user end at the distribution station, with line losses to follow, up to 50%).

Has this changed?

Sunk cost of the arrays being launched and installed in reliable orbit was, for the square miles of array required, staggering. We almost ran out of zeroes.

Hindmost, in another thread, posited the global demand at about 360 quads(or was that national?). We weren't even in that ball park.

DR

 

[GreyICE]

Who's making a strawman? M

erv brought up costs, I pointed out that they can be very cost-effective, more so than coal, oil, gas, wind, and solar power. Especially the last 2.

Lets recap, because the answer to your question is: you.

• So basically Merv pointed out that new nuclear plants are very expensive to build.
• You ask 'how much of that is legal costs?'
• We point out... none.
• You say "well who says Nuclear plants cost 'too much?'"

The answer is nobody. Nobody said that. Merv said, and your link agrees, that Nuclear power plants are more expensive than conventional plants to build.

If you stuck to the argument 'they have really low ongoing costs' you'd be in a nice good territory. You instead decided to resurrect the tired old strawman that the green movement and the crazy environmentalists destroyed nuclear power.

Actually the fact that the plants were farking expensive to build, many of them had to be redesgined midbuild because of the Chernobyl design flaw, and the low price of oil meant that enrichment didn't even look that appealing, and you had a recipe for the failure of Nuclear power in the US.

But blaming environmentalists for all the problems is a fun meme, and some people can't let it go (like the DDT-mosquito-malaria myth).

 

[Cynic]

Thirty years ago, I did a modest undergrad level project on that. At the time, the energy conversion factor from solar to array to receiver on earth was about 0.13. (13% of what you got at the array ended up at the user end at the distribution station, with line losses to follow, up to 50%).

Has this changed?

I don't know much about the specifics, except that it's one of those ideas that seems reasonable on the surface and keeps getting brought up. I understand that collectors are waay more efficient than they were 30 years ago and newer collector technolgies (layered designs to catch more wavelengths) are getting even better. There's a guy out west somewhere making solar balloons, which have a collector inside with reflectic mylar in the back such that light is concentrated on the collector increasing power. Something like that might make sense -- the material needed to concentrate light is way lighter and cheaper to deploy than the sensors themselves. Solar is free cheese -- it's just a matter if you can make it worth your while to pick it up.