- cross-posted to:
- energy@slrpnk.net
- videos@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- energy@slrpnk.net
- videos@lemmy.world
This may be a “hot” one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my “bias”, well I have always been “pro nuclear”. So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.
Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.
TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)
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Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.
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Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no “safe limits” of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.
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If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.
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Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.
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Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.
And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get
- Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.
Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like
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solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big “stability” bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.
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wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.
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hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.
The main issue with nuclear is that it just doesn’t make economic sense. It’s far too expensive to build and it takes ages to get running too.
Second problem is that due to the variability in output of other renewable sources, anything that intends to be the “backup power” has to be very variable as well. Nuclear can’t quickly scale up and down, and even if it could it’d make nuclear even less economically viable. It’s why currently gas plants are used as backup: they’re cheap and can scale up/down very quickly.
And then there’s the big advantage that solar has, which is that people can own the power generation themselves, saving a lot of money and in some cases even making money. It’s also decentralized: an accident or attack at a nuclear plant would have huge consequences for electricity availability (not to mention other safety problems). Solar is also dirt-cheap and getting cheaper every year, faster than most scientists predicted it would.
It can though. Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
Historically, they were built as baseload plants without load following capability in order to keep the design simple which led to many anti-nuclear activists claiming this. It’s just not true though.
Why?
No. They’re not. The costs are just externalized and safety is, comparitively, neglected.
In the power grid of today (and even more so in the future), that’s fairly slow. On good days wind and solar already produce more than 100% in several countries, so it needs to be able to drop to 0%. Worse however is that nuclear is already expensive, and shutting it down means it’s just a hunk of a building costing money. It’s why private investors have largely shunned nuclear in the modern days: it’s not econonically viable anymore, or even if it is it’s just not profitable enough. And that picture seems to be getting worse and worse every year.
Sure, but the power companies don’t pay for that so to them it’s cheap, which was the point.
Not really. Reciprocating gas engines are specifically designed for balancing loads with renewables and have maneuvering capabilities in the 25-100% range with the state of the art at ~25%/minute slope.
Startup time is 15min-1hr for gas, 30min-2hr for nuclear.
You’re correct that gas is better on all these metrics, but it’s far more comparable than you’re making it out to be.
Also needs to be mentioned that these are very oversimplified metrics and things look better for nuclear the deeper in the weeds you go imo.
That’s not how any kind of turbine works.
The same could be said of solar. ‘It’s a very expensive capitol investment and as soon as the sun goes down it’s just a stupidly expensive roof costing money’.
Solar is significantly cheaper. Like it’s not even funny how much cheaper it is. This means that other than the sun going down, they’re always going to be producing because it’s by far the cheapest power available. And because they easily earn back what they cost, it’s perfectly fine if they don’t operate at 100% efficiency.
For nuclear to remain economically viable in these market conditions it has to be similarly profitable, and it just isn’t.
The point wasn’t to denigrate solar, but to demonstrate the fallacious beliefs you’re operating under.
Yes, the plant owner will want to maximize the profit of their investments and get as quick a return as possible.
If gas/coal was held to the same exact safety, environmental and waste disposal standards as nuclear, and they should, then those would also need to be run at max throttle to justify the initial expense and have significantly shorter lifespans. It’s a “plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit” type issue.
Nothing you have said is an argument against a solar in the day + nuclear at night type of setup. It would certainly be a huge improvement over building out more CO2 based generators.
That’s just an issue with capitalism, not with nuclear energy itself. Placing solar panels everywhere may be easier and cheaper short-term, but it’s far from optimal. Ideally we’d like to have a bit of both.
You’d have similar problems doing this under communism tbf. It’s expensive under any economic system. Solar at least has the advantage that any Joe Shmoe can put it on their roof and produce their own power, not being dependent on big energy corpos.
China seems to be proving this false. They are building the molten salt reactors that we designed in the '60s and never tested. Two major bonuses of molten salt reactors are that they are physicsly impossible to melt down, and they don’t really create nuclear waste. In fact China will probably start selling us nuclear waste disposal contracts since those reactors can use our waste as fuel.
They do create some waste, but the half-life of said waste is like 6 week/months, so it is safe after a few years.
China is investing more in solar. But China is also very power-hungry, so any energy they produce will get sold to the market, so their market looks significantly different. Their economy is different and so is their power usage.
True, that advantage of solar is very beneficial and I think it’s great because of it. Independence is worth a lot.
Though the point about nuclear doesn’t make sense to me. Of course, it’d be just as expensive regardless of the economic system in place. The problem here is, capitalist economies often focus on short-term profits instead of investing into long-term infrastructure. Which can be seen in thorium reactors research.
At this point, it’s practically confirmed that thorium power plants will meet our expectations. China already has one operational (though it’s a relatively small one) and several under construction. No western country invested any significant resources into this research, because it didn’t align with quick and easy gains that capitalists love. This is the problem.
Just a quick point on the cost of nuclear. A large part of the cost of nuclear is due to the very intense safety systems which have been added on a little at a time. Each small safety thing has increased the cost but nobody has taken all of the intentions of those changes and integrated them into a stable and safe system without the need for all the little safety features.
The best example I can give is cars. Adding air bags, lane change detection, car in front detection, ABS, and so on each makes cars safer, but never questions the underlying adduction that cars are good. Why not trains?
In rectors we can have passive safety systems where the moderator is a liquid which is blocked in by a solid plug. The solid plug is frozen moderator and sits at the bottom of the system. If the power is cut or fails the plug stops being cooled and melts, draining the moderator. Without the moderator the neutrons are going too fast to trigger the chain reactions and everything stops. No sensors or control systems are needed, it just passively stops and cools naturally, while also being way cheaper.