/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5729110
>http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html
>they diminish or delay support for more economical and less risky alternatives like energy efficiency and renewable energy.
>"renewables have no inherent risk so subsidies are ok for them"
>ignoring nuclear energy stability, and that a sizable fraction of npp construction costs is paying for lawyers to keep the ninbys away

oh christ it's THOSE people

>>5729076
this
i don't really understand the all or nothing approach here. keep solar chugging along getting more efficient, but DO NOT EVER use it as baseload power. put it on your roof with a grid tie for 70 cents a peak watt.

nuclear power for baseload

>boiling water reactors constructed with proper permits, authorization, and built to acceptable NRC safety standards
love it, rock solid, shit loads of juice, almost no waste outside of a concrete cask ten feet long. great shit

>boiling water reactors build to poor standards (see, China)
I CANNOT BITE MY KNUCKLES HARDER
although westinghouse is doing most of the construction of the 150+ chinese reactors, WH makes very good product, so i probably shouldn't worry as much.

>experimental reactor designs like LFTR, once through modular-core style molten salt, high temperature pebble bed
STOP SOAKING UP ALL THE FUNDING, TOKAMAK, YOU WORTHLESS FUCK

look, i like vsauce and all, but do you really need to viral, michael?

>>5698586
>it's still 5 minutes to midnight
fucking seriously?

the doomsday clock was relevant twenty years ago

this is rather neat, but i'll wait on some independent verification and results

probably never, because it's a bunch of tinfoil hat shit

reactors would generally shut down pretty uneventfully, assuming they had operating coolant pumps and such.
the rods in the waste pools would be a little more problematic, but i believe that water is automatically circulated and updated, so it'd run till the power went out, and that's actually kind of bad (water slowly evaporates, heats up the structure, it catches fire, smoke carries some nasty stuff)

>>5690089
that always sounded pretty hokey to me, is there any direct evidence that actually happened?

>>5690040
look up witricity, has to do with efficiencies and how electromagnetism doesn't really work that way.

there are ways around it, like really exotic coil geometries, but it's primarily a sub-10-meters phenomenon

>>5689390
for instance his wireless energy thing was probably based on some small scale inductance tests of his, and he assumed it could be scaled up infinitely, which is not true

tesla went pretty fucking bonkers later in life, i suspect he was running up to his potential level of understanding the subject, then starting making wild claims while extrapolating things

>>5651871
well, as far as i know, not much is actually put into making new nuclear weapons, or manufacturing plutonium for weapons specifically (some isotopes are useful for other things).
In the US at least

you mean use plutonium as a fuel source?
look up liquid metal fast breeder or plutonium burning reactors. they....don't really work
right now we just use MOX, which is mixing some plutonium in with the uranium in reactor fuel rods. it actually works very well

>>5639954
they can, they just probably won't.
also fuck wind.
solar's alright

>>5639318
the costs of building the actual plant are well known
the costs of hiring lawyers to keep local nimbys from suing you into the ground and blockading the build site? not as determinate

The NRC could be blamed for a respectable proportion of those costs, because of their extremely tight regulation, but it's a curse and a blessing. nrc regulated NPPs are absolutely rock solid

>>5638943
well, if you need a couple acres to generate a few gigawattsnuclear, and a couple thousand acres to generate a few gigawatts solar, what seems more sensible?
but yes it's only one metric, and not that important of a metric. i just find it amusing

>>5638114
wait, so, power per unit area is a useless measure of performance for a method of energy production?
i don't have a witty follow i'm just seriously wondering what led you to this conclusion

neat
let me know when it can equal the power per unit area of nuclear power plants. it probably never will. in fact i don't think the sun's rays (with no efficiency loss) can match it

it'd be great on your roof though, good for small scale, terribad for baseload

most people's definition of "math" is calculus, basically
computer science has a lot of math. but it's not calculus

>>5631237
oh shit yeah sprint missiles are boss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA
>at 14 feet above the pad, the missile was faster than a .45 caliber bullet
>after 5 seconds it had hit mach 10

>>5633268
see
>>5631553
>every single one of the nuclear reactors in japan (including fukushima) went into immediate cold shutdown and "brace mode" once the earthquake was detected.
every single one except fukushima (obviously) was cleared for duty, and started to power back up within a month

>>5632202
>Saying nuclear power is safe apart from a few bad designs is like telling your insurance that you're a safe driver apart from the time that guy in chicago got inhumanly drunk and drove a custom car of his own design that had a jet engine strapped to a go cart chassis clear off an overpass into a truck filled with neurotoxin that then crashed into a truck containing large volumes of gasoline and the guy remained alive just long enough to wait for the gasoline from the ruptured fuel tanker to reach a magical fuel/air mixture and lit a match at precisely the right time for it to create a fuel air bomb which dispersed the neurotoxin over a fifty mile radius.
>and also somehow all the cats in america died

better analogy