The Environment

RedDenver said:
Nuclear fission is just kick the can down the road IMO, and we have better options.
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We do but it won't power the whole grid and what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Nuclear isn't perfect but give me renewables backed with nuclear over renewables backed by coal - any day of the week. 

 
Enhance said:
(For background, my dad worked for a nuclear power company for 35 years.)

Safely storing nuclear waste isn't actually that big of a deal in the long term. Most of the waste collected in recent decades was transported by rail to safe storing locations, often known as 'dry casks.'. And the material itself isn't like what people may think or imagine i.e. a bucket of green hazard waste that could leak into the soil and pollute natural resources. The fuel rods are largely just left to their own devices, and it's very unlikely a dry cask would fail. And in the event that it did, the radioactive impact would be relatively minute.

The more 'dangerous' type of storage is what happens just after a fuel road is spent when it is put inside a cooling tank. It's best to get them out of a cooling tank and into a dry cask within a few years of being spent because the cooling tanks pose a greater risk.

Nuclear energy, in and of itself, is still quite safe and powerful. The problem is that it has been regulated into the dirt in a variety of ways, which is a big reason the Fort Calhoun plant closed.
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I worked on nuclear reactors in the Navy and have some experience with radioactive waste sites such as Hanford. Storing radioactive waste long-term is not a solved problem neither technologically nor politically.

https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us#gs.t1jkrz

It’s very common for people to say there are no technical problems, that it’s just political. They say, “We know how to do it. It’s just a difficult public. Strict regulations. No one will let us solve this problem.”

I think what people don’t realize is that it is actually a serious technical challenge. The half-lives of some of these elements stretch into tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. We’re asked to design solutions that will last as long as the risk. That’s not something we usually do. The technical and scientific challenge for nuclear waste is, whatever our solution, that we will never see whether we were correct or not. Designing a system where you don’t have feedback is very difficult.
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RedDenver said:
It's better than coal for greenhouse gases, but how many acres of farmland could be rendered unusable by that amount of contamination? And after 70 years of nuclear energy, we still have no long-term plan to deal with the radioactive waste because it's such a difficult problem. Nuclear fission is just kick the can down the road IMO, and we have better options.
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The problem with nuclear energy is mostly cost. Why would any utility company spend the money necessary to build a nuclear power plant when you can just... build more solar and wind energy and invest in battery storage.

Nuclear is a fine option, but it is inflationary, with budget overruns and inflationary costs. Renewable plus battery storage is the opposite. By 2030, you can build more renewable power and store it for less than building a nuclear power plant today, with minimal upkeep and little future risk.

 
RedDenver said:
I worked on nuclear reactors in the Navy and have some experience with radioactive waste sites such as Hanford. Storing radioactive waste long-term is not a solved problem neither technologically nor politically.

https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us#gs.t1jkrz
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I don't think it's a 'solved problem,' but it's also not just a scientific one. Politics have played a massive role. Oil/coal stakeholders have long funded anti-Nuclear messages and policies. By and large, although we don't know what'll happen in the next 10-20 millennia, the current practices are largely safe and reliable.

I'm not saying there aren't concerns, but the answer to the problem over the last 10-15 years has seemingly shifted to freak outs and can kicking. Nuclear may not be the long term energy solution for the world, but many of the environmental standards we're aiming to meet nationally and globally are anchored to power provided by nuclear plants that are closing up more and more every single year. If those continue to shutter at their current pace, I don't know what governments think they're going to do as a replacement.

 
Enhance said:
I don't think it's a 'solved problem,' but it's also not just a scientific one. Politics have played a massive role. Oil/coal stakeholders have long funded anti-Nuclear messages and policies.
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Yes, I noted that there are challenges both technologically and politically.

By and large, although we don't know what'll happen in the next 10-20 millennia, the current practices are largely safe and reliable.
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I strongly disagree. We literally have no materials that can guarantee containment for thousands of years. And we cannot say that our current practices will be good for even a single century let alone millennia.

I'm not saying there aren't concerns, but the answer to the problem over the last 10-15 years has seemingly shifted to freak outs and can kicking. Nuclear may not be the long term energy solution for the world, but many of the environmental standards we're aiming to meet nationally and globally are anchored to power provided by nuclear plants that are closing up more and more every single year. If those continue to shutter at their current pace, I don't know what governments think they're going to do as a replacement.
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Renewables are already much less expensive than nuclear and can be built much, much faster. Energy storage is the difficult part but costs have decreased exponentially for lithium ion batteries and there are other promising technologies such as liquid air energy storage, liquid metal batteries, and gravity energy storage are in the process of being scaled up.

And as @Dr. Strangelove already mentioned, building a nuclear plant takes a really long time (6-10 years typically), so it's not even a short-term solution.

Note that I'm not advocating that we decommission nuclear plants (unless deemed unsafe), but rather that we not build more nuclear plants and instead put those resources into renewables and storage. At some point in the future when we've got sustainable energy and storage at massive scale and fossil fuel plants are being eliminated, we can start decomming nuclear plants.

 
RedDenver said:
I strongly disagree. We literally have no materials that can guarantee containment for thousands of years. And we cannot say that our current practices will be good for even a single century let alone millennia.
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FWIW, I agree on your comments about renewable energies.

But, IIRC, spent fuel rods drop to one-thousandth of their radioactivity within a few decades of beings spent, so the risks decrease significantly. And there's a strong consensus right now in the international scientific community about the safety and of long term prospects of radioactive waste storage in geological repositories.

Ultimately, I think a lot of the nuclear waste storage worries are overblown, but I'm not married to nuclear as the future and would prefer we look toward renewables.

 
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RedDenver said:
Yes, I noted that there are challenges both technologically and politically.

I strongly disagree. We literally have no materials that can guarantee containment for thousands of years. And we cannot say that our current practices will be good for even a single century let alone millennia.

Renewables are already much less expensive than nuclear and can be built much, much faster. Energy storage is the difficult part but costs have decreased exponentially for lithium ion batteries and there are other promising technologies such as liquid air energy storage, liquid metal batteries, and gravity energy storage are in the process of being scaled up.

And as @Dr. Strangelove already mentioned, building a nuclear plant takes a really long time (6-10 years typically), so it's not even a short-term solution.

Note that I'm not advocating that we decommission nuclear plants (unless deemed unsafe), but rather that we not build more nuclear plants and instead put those resources into renewables and storage. At some point in the future when we've got sustainable energy and storage at massive scale and fossil fuel plants are being eliminated, we can start decomming nuclear plants.
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Extremely well put.

Cold hard economics has simply made Nuclear a poor solution at this point.

 
Enhance said:
FWIW, I agree on your comments about renewable energies.

But, IIRC, spent fuel rods drop to one-thousandth of their radioactivity within a few decades of beings spent, so the risks decrease significantly. And there's a strong consensus right now in the international scientific community about the safety and of long term prospects of radioactive waste storage in geological repositories.

Ultimately, I think a lot of the nuclear waste storage worries are overblown, but I'm not married to nuclear as the future and would prefer we look toward renewables.
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I agree.

The problem I have with the risks of nuclear waste is that while the chances of an event occurring are small, there's a LOT of time over which a small event can happen and the consequences of even one event are potentially disastrous.

 
teachercd said:
Pretty clear none of you have watched The Saint with Val Kilmer and Elizebeth Shue.  The answer to all of this is cold fusion...or maybe it is dressing up in really bad disguises while fooling all of Russia.
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As I was typing up posts in this thread, I thought of that movie.  :lol:

 
Enhance said:
As I was typing up posts in this thread, I thought of that movie.  :lol:
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I watched it again recently, I forgot how bad his costumes were!  Talk about insulting to the Russians!

Oppp, there is the saint with glasses

There he is again with long hair

There is he again with fake teeth. 

 
DevoHusker said:
...because cows fart too much...
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I'm always disappointed with the environmental take that we shouldn't eat beef. I get that CAFO's are an environmental disaster, but where do they think the crops being grown get their nitrogen fertilizer from? Trying to break an entire ecosystem into pieces is a terrible idea when nature has already figured it out. Synthetic beef doesn't actually solve the underlying issues.

 
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