/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11417369
Nuclear waste is the most well contained waste product, making it the safest. We don't have a waste plan for old solar panels

>>11417369
Solar is nuclear. lol

>>11417382
Why do we keep building reactors next to waterways, when a remote desert would be easier to bury and contain?

>>11417416
They need a fuck tonne of water to operate

>>11417416
nuclear power plants works around heating water with energy from nuclear reactions

>>11417424
>>11417419
So build a fuckhuge pipeline. Why is spilling radioactive waste into the fishing supply considered a good idea?

>>11417369
Depends what you mean by reliable. Basically the sun doesn’t always shine and wind doesn’t always blow, but you always have more uranium, until no-one has any more uranium that is.
Renewables will improve with time as we get better grid power storage methods and more efficient solar cells.

>>11417628
They don’t spill radioactive waste into the water, you watch too many cartoons. pumping water has an energetic cost, while the entire point of a power plant is to minimize energetic cost.

>>11417628
Nuclear Power plants have a closed cycle coolant loop thats used in a heat exchanger to boil open cycle water, which is then run through turbines and released back out
They do heat up the open cycle water, but the alpha, beta, and gamma given off by the closed cycle coolant water doesn't make the open cycle water radioactive; the neutron flux is insignificant as well outside the reactor core, which is how the coolant gets weakly radioactive in the first place

btw the reason Fukushima is so bad is that the closed cycle water pipes melted along with the rest of the core. So they have to run open cycle over the molten core, which isn't cladded and thus also leeches material into the coolant water slowly in addition to neutrons.

nuclear - god tier
solar - tranny tier

>>11417636
You're telling me meltdowns don't release waste into the oceans?

>>11417741
maybe into the groundwater

Isn’t the radioactive fuel still a limited resource

>>11417382
Nuclear power is dead and no amount of paid spam here will change that.

>>11417369
Nuclear-solar plants

>>11417369
Because no one want to keep the waste near them and the gov. has decided that waste recycling is proliferation

>>11417790
the whole fusion meme claims by using MAGNETS, we can rip up cheap ordinary feedstocks (like lithium) into nucular fuel

>>11417828
Lmao most nigs are still using deuterium-tritium cells. Like nigga good luck harvesting a substantial amount of that long term

>>11417801
Thats where you're wrong kiddo

>>11417790
Less limited than Carbon fuels. Also the idea is that CO2 is the main problem.

Since nobody actually builds new reactors, what do nuke engineers even do? I'm trying to summon Purdue nuke autist.

Lowest deaths per twh.

>>11418409
>hydro is smaller

LFTR of course.

Current nuclear waste = fuel for future reactors.

>>11418409
no one cares, at $150 per MWh it's 3x the cost of renewables

>>11418431

No it isn't. California can't build high-speed rail cheaply, but that doesn't mean the technology itself is uneconomical.

>>11418415
>>11418417
So are there plant designs for thorium reactors or just flow diagrams?

>>11418436
https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-130-vf.pdf

page 6

>>11418436
https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-130-vf.pdf

page 8

Nuclear power killed my father

>>11418496
If solar or wind had to deal with the same bullshit as nuclear it would be just as dead

>>11418532
>oh noes, reality

>>11417416
fasciation is a very common plant mutation, i see it in my garden about every other year or so.

>>11417801
t.greens

>>11417369
24/7 operations(Hydro too). Nuclear is great as a backup. Solar/Wind can be used as the main horse with battery tech.

>>11417369
solar ionly works when the sun shines, wind only when it blows, hydro is not possible everywhere. Nuclear is reliable and doesn't have the flaws mentioned.

>>11417369
Neither

>>11418637
technically the sun is always shining

>>11418652
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_tower_(downdraft)

>>11418675

>>11418403
But they are building them all the time just not in the west

>>11418934
wrong

>>11417416
>>11417628
youve got to be trolling

>>11417790
Fissile is, but we have so much of the stuff that it's not a concern. The end-game is always fusion, which while theoretically limited, in practice is completely unlimited.

>>11417697
Fukushima happened because of an earthquake, hurricane, flood, AND power outage all at once.

>>11417801
https://www.statista.com/statistics/238835/estimated-size-of-the-global-nuclear-energy-market-by-segment/
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx#ECSArticleLink0
lol

>>11418431
>cost is the only relevant factor
Ask me how I know you are american

>>11419100
>cucking out and saying american instead of jewish
Sad

If ancient egyptians would have used nuclear powers to watch anime 4000 years ago, we still had to manage their nuclear waste.
In perspective, fusion plants would have much, much less nuclear waste. Hoping that commercially available ones will be ready withing my lifetime.

>>11419091
Yeah but fusion requires hydrogen. That’s still a limited resource. Shit flies out into space unless it’s trapped under hard rock deposits. Still needs to be mined like gasoline. Worse yet modern fusion attempts still require the rarer deuterium and tritium

>>11418327
Really it’s easier to find uranium than fucking gasoline?
>CO2
miss me with that shit

>>11417369
Nuclear Energy is much safer, as the gas it emits isn't Carbon and isn't harmful to the environment. Furthermore its waste can be easily stored in Nevada or where ever else in other countries. Solar is inefficient and breaks easy, Wind is the same, but also kills birds and fucks with migration patterns as well as costing a shit ton more in maintenance, and Hydro fucks with natural water flow and can fuck up entire ecosystems. The current problem is convincing a retarded mass that has been fed propaganda for the past 2 decades from big oil and big green that Nuclear energy is very efficient and the only reason Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island happened were from a need to cover up, horrible location for a reactor, and from technical incompetence.

>>11419669
This.

>>11419533
By the time we actually get fusion to work right "LMFAO just mine jupiter!!!!11111!" will be a valid solution to your post.

(This is where the "theoretically limited" comes in)

>>11417369
Nuclear is only the better option if we immediately start building Thorium thermal cycle reactors immediately.

The upsides are numerous:

1. The abundance of Thorium in the Earth which can be immediately used in a thermal cycle reactor absolutely eclipses that of Uranium. Compare this to Uranium, where you have to survey specifically for rich deposits, then further refine the material for 235 content.

2. Uranium mining is dangerous and massively destructive to ecology. On the flip side, basically all refuse dirt from any precious metal or rare earth mine contains Thorium in useful quantities.

3. The reactor has a higher up-front cost, but can be expected to provide near-indefinite generation due to the abundance of Thorium.

4. Since these are thermal cycle reactors, they breed their own fuel, but because it's not a fast-cycle, you have no chance of a meltdown. The reactor chamber needs a medium to keep the molten salts fissile, so the addition of a freeze plug and emergency dump tanks can immediately end fission in an overheating scenario.

5. The waste decays in timescales that are orders of magnitude smaller than that of coal or existing nuclear power plants.

6. Solar is too volatile- You need vast power storage infrastructure (batteries) in order to solve this problem. Additionally, solar panels' efficiency decreases over time which means there needs to be constant manufacturing in order to replace them. The manufacturing of solar and batteries is not ecologically sustainable for an indefinite timeperiod.

7. Wind is damaging to wildlife. The best place for them is out at sea, but again these are volatile and will be constantly in need of repairs. Also, ocean storms can completely destroy these in rare occasions.

8. You can literally place a thorium reactor ANYWHERE. Any barren and totally unusable piece of land can situate one. The same can't be said for solar and wind due to climate constraints.

>>11417416
>Why don't we build plants where workers need to commute two hours and we need to build 100 million in water pipes and ultra high voltage DC lines/equipment to get the power anywhere useful.

>>11419956
>thorium is the same as uranium but costs more

And that’s why it’s just a silly meme

>>11417369
>nuclear waste
It's only used 2-4% of the energy and is discarded because the cladding of the pellets break from radioactive gas. This is why it have such a long half-life. If properly used in only needs to be stored for 300 years like fly-ash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDqCpfVwdP4

>>>11417419
>They need a fuck tonne of water to operate
Not molten salt reactors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyDbq5HRs0o

The Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) would put thorium to better use than poisoning unknowing people with, like Chinese companies do today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

>>11420210
That is not at all what anon's post above says

Hydro is the cheapest per kw/h but is greatly limited by geography and has a huge environmental impact locally.
Nuclear is the second cheapest is plants are run for their full ~50 year lifespan and not shutdown decades early. The waste is easier to contain and deal with than coal, oil or natural gas plants, the best disposal option is deep borehole disposal but the outlay means it would have to be publicly funded.
As for wind and solar they are good for onsite generation but too unreliable for grid base load until we have practical grid level storage.

>>11420247
Now I want a radioactive massage wand!

Eh in general there are 5 major solutions:
Hydro and Geothermal are both really good and don't do too much bad, but there aren't many natural resources of this.
Wind and Solar are remarkably inefficient and vulnerable, and they consume fossil fuels to make.

Nuke in general is the best way.

technological progress is leading us down a very grim path. this 300 year experiment with industrial society will come to an end soon

>>11420332
I can see the appeal of primitivism but enjoy the benefits of industrialization too much to ditch them.
As for a "grim path" I disagree, just as we used lead pipes until we learnt the danger so it'll be with environmental impact. Most of the people still doubting anthropogenic climate change are older and will be removed from the democratic process by death soon enough.

>>11420346
The reason I think the future is grim is that we are currently being taken on a joyride by a system that is acting against our interests, slowly taking us away from the ideal state of living. People will become dissatisfied with their way of life and become depressed, which will be "remedied" by advanced "medicines" that will remove our depression, anxiety, and other negative reactions to the undesirable state of modern life. This will render us slaves, incapable of rebelling. It will only get worse as genetic modification is utilized by the System in engineering an entirely docile, controllable public, optimized for productivity. We are being enslaved by technology, slowly and surely.

>>11420365
I see where you are coming from, personally I'm ready to rebel against neoliberalism while everyone around me seem to be frogs in slowly warming water.
I hold out hope that as those that made their wealth are replaced by those that inherit it they will be stupider and more blatant with their abuses of power leading to more people realizing it's time to act.
That said I do see the irony in saying that while an incompetent trust fund kid is the POTUS.

>>11420255
You think you can’t make bombs with U233?

There is zero fucking benefit to thorium
It’ll suffer all the same ridiculous regulation that made nuclear power basically illegal

>>11420388
Are you an actual schizo? Where was that claim about bombs even made?

>>11418441
In development. India is investing a lot on it since they have a shit ton of thorium.

>>11417369
>What makes Nuclear Energy a more reliable source of energy than Solar, Wind, or Hydro?
Nuclear can't be stopped by picnic-ruining weather.

>>11417397
No.

>>11417369
It's weather-independent.

>>11420573
Neither can a robust decentralized renewable based grid. So pick a better strawman

>>11418414
Not everyone has access to hydro due to geographics but yes it's very clean and safe

>>11418675
Humans are trying to make fusion work when we have and endless fusion reactor right there, already running.
We should be putting resources into tapping that power, not trying recreate it and using our oceans as fuel

>>11420391
The fact that you can breed material for weapons is the whole reason it is regulated up the ass and nuclear reactors are forced to operate in such a retarded manner

Thorium is the same thing and will run into all the same regulatory issues
Plus thorium is simply worse than uranium for these purposes which is why it wasn’t used in the first place.

who wins
an entire field of light gatherers
or
one cloudy boi

>>11421117
the solar farm 100 miles away

>>11419186
>nope I meant american
The only country I know of where people complain about the social programs they depend on being shit while also refusing to pay taxes to improve them. Americans literally cannot conceive of a public utility.

>>11420365
>guys I read teds manifesto, he was like so right!
underage anons need to be banished

>>11420772
>proper renewable grid where each building has a net positive
Do you have a cool quadrillion dollars lying around to rebuild the entire globes infrastructure? Or some revolutionary construction method that will allow you to do it in less than 200 years?

>>11419536
You managed to out yourself as a double retard in ONE post.
Impressive!

>>11421328
To be fair, you're saying that from a country where America is responsible for protection and paying for the maintenance of your economic interests. You basically are a child living in America's house and then complaining that they don't take care of themselves as well as they take care of you.

>>11421355
That's been good and bad for the US. US hegemony has been promoted for almost 100 years now, but he US citizenry and economy has to foot the bill, potentially at the expense of social programs.
I suppose it just depends if you, personally, are in the position to benefit from that hegemony. The military actually works like a social program in many ways, giving a solid middle class income with benefits to people with no qualifications.

>>11421337
>proper renewable grid where each building has a net positive
hardly necessary, renewables are already out competing Nuclear in every market, and even fossil fuels in some. If external costs of fossil fuels were actually paid by utilities simple economics would force the transition virtually overnight.

>>11421418
What do you propose for on-demand generation then?
You'd either need massive grid storage that doesn't exist yet, or fossil-fuel/nuclear plants that can run when the sun goes down.

>>11417369
>What makes Nuclear Energy a more reliable source of energy than Solar, Wind, or Hydro?

Only hydro is comparable to nuclear in its ability to provide constant, reliable energy.

> How do you argue against the nuclear waste

Nuclear waste is irrelevant. Uranium ore came out of the ground and you can throw it right back in.

>>11417382
>We don't have a waste plan for old solar panels

It’s called recycling.

>>11419091
Fusion is limited only by the availability of fusile materials, which are quite literally some of the most plentiful molecules in the universe. We’re good until heat death.

>>11419669
> Wind is the same, but also kills birds and fucks with migration patterns as well as costing a shit ton more in maintenance, and Hydro fucks with natural water flow and can fuck up entire ecosystems.

Who cares? Fuck birds. Fuck ecosystems. We’re going to pave over it all.

>>11420332
>technological progress is leading us down a very grim path. this 300 year experiment with industrial society will come to an end soon

Technological progress is leading us down a very bright path. This 300 year experiment with industrial society will last until the universe itself dies, if not longer. Fuck off with your edgy doomer caveman shit and die of smallpox.

>>11420365
>slowly taking us away from the ideal state of living.

There is no such thing. You’re an idiot.

>>11421434
long range HVDC transmission and overcapacity takes care of a huge chunk of the problem. Storage is already competitive with nuclear so it's very achievable. Personally i think the best option is heavily subsidizing consumer vehicle to grid capable EVs which would kill two of the largest sources of pollution with one stone.

>>11421457

>>11421459
Why don’t we make giant batteries?

>>11421457
>$300/MWh for utility-scale lithium storage
Unless I'm reading that wrong, that's literally off by 1000. $300 per KWh of lithium storage is what's actually achievable.

>>11421447
>Fuck birds
Fuck you too.

>>11421495
Okay, pidgeon.

>>11420302
That dude doesn't know shit on how radiation actually affects a person. The LNT model is bullshit and so is the fear mongering. That thorium is way more likely to cause heavy metal poisoning than ever cause any damage from radiation

>>11419091
The reason the Fukushima disaster was so bad though is the plant manager didn't want to flood the core with seawater right away like the world nuclear association told him to, instead using freshwater from hydrants to try to save the reactor, when the hydrants ran dry he still delayed in flooding the core with seawater in an attempt to get water delivered, which it never did, so the core partially melted and when they finally started pumping seawater in to cool it it was to late and was leeching nuclear material into the water which was going back to the ocean.

>>11421447
I'll burn your fucking ghetto to the ground first, nigger.

>>11421447
quite the opposite, boomer. We're going to restore nature and eliminate constant advancement.

>>11420247
>LFTR
Will retards STOP fucking peddling thorium! Fucking learn engineering you retards!!

>>11419956
Doesn’t the recycling process for thorium create a lot of toxic waste?

>>11421483
Could you please provide your source? Lazard and BNEF seem to agree.

>>11418415
>>11418417
>>11420247
>>11420431
>>11419956
retards, see >>11421791

>>11421749
>We-we’ll totally save da nature

Daily reminder that over one hundred species go extinct every day because of human activity, and every day the Amazon shrinks.
Nature is dead. We win.

>>11421742
Your impotent rage achieves nothing. Brb gonna throw some plastic on the ground

>>11421968
https://www.cibsejournal.com/technical/cost-model-battery-storage/
https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-as-market-ramps-up-with-market-average-at-156-kwh-in-2019/

I was off, they're closer to $150/KWh. If they were in the same realm as $300/MWh, EVs would be amazingly cheap. I'm pretty sure your graphics are somehow talking about the cost of generation, or wholesale price of electricity.
That said, Li-ion batteries are getting cheaper every year. Combine that with the high sale price of electric from sundown until 11pm, and storage solutions are being rolled out right now.

It's way cheaper and easier to just run natural gas turbines for your base load than it is to build nuclear, but if the point is clean energy, then we need to eat the cost and run nuke until grid-level storage is possible.

>>11422076
Please google what LCOE means and come back, thank you.

>>11421418
With respect to everyone praising the gospel of lazard, their LCOE calculation is on a 20 year timeline iirc. Moreover the cost isnt the most important factor. The most important factors are
1) base load generation
2) environmental footprint

Both of which current renewables + storage are garbage at, which is something lazards own report discusses.

There are only two realistic and reasonable options for industrialized nations for the following 50-100 years, consume less or nuclear with renewables.

>>11419533
>That’s still a limited resource.
Welcome to the universe.

>>11421355
>But like America protects you
1)Being the global hegemon is its own reward, states that profit off it indirectly dont owe them anything and arent obliged to judge them with it as a concession.
2) America funding a massive military doesnt preclude it from also funding (other) proper social programs.
3) If you actually think foreign states, even the allies, think of the US as explicitly protecting them or their interests you are straight delusional.

>>11420822
Great thinking right here. Let's just have our spaceships tie a huge rope around the sun so we can take it with us, whenever we want to leave the solar system.

>>11422076
>until grid-level storage is possible.
Gonna run out of gas before that happens. Batteries are about 40 to 50 times more expensive than nuclear generation. Fuck that I'm not paying that much because morons don't understand physics and are tricked by greentard propaganda.

>>11422419
>Gonna run out of gas before that happens.

Two hundred years+ lol

>send self replicating drones to mercury
>have them construct a mine for metal
>then a factory for photovoltaics
>and a space launch system
>start sending solar cells in close orbit around the sun
>relay the power back to earth
>more power than we could ever hope to use
And then it would backfire because the waste heat from all our electronics would cause a new form of greenhouse effect.

>>11422440
Move to Titan where it’s colder

>>11419956
>muh thorium
every single time
thorium is garbage meme conjured up up by some TEDx asshole and dumbass Redditors lap it up like retards they are
only Indians bother with it and only because there's basically no uranium in India

>>11421456
There may not be a totally ideal state of living, but there definitely are objectively worse ways of living. The average person's quality of life is decreasing due to rapid changes in our behavior that are caused by technological progress.

>>11422386
>leave the solar system
We can't even visit the moon with out serious damage from radiation and 0 G.

>>11422419
Already addressed in this thread pv+storage is already cheaper than nuclear, next question please.

Why isnt nuclear waste just thrown into volcanos?

>>11421791

>reddit
>implying Pa radioactivity is a problem in a fucking reactor core fuel fluid, full of other highly active fission products anyway

There is no need to access anything contaminated by Pa in a LFTR. If those pipes burst they will be wholly replaced, not serviced. Pa radioactivity is a classic misinformation spread about LFTR by know-nothing idiots.

>>11423886

Yup. See discussion here:

>>11423892

>>11423886

>>11423892

https://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4956&p=68197

>>11423855
Retards raising stupid points about cost that you can easily rebut doesnt improve the case for renewable+storage because cost was never the principal factor.

>>11417715
this

Nuclear=High T
Renewables=Low T

>>11423875
It would make them erupt, duh.