/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8843961
>clean, non-polluting
until something fucks up.

human error can never be fully ruled out.

we should try to get rid of all nuclear power plants because another Chernobyl/Fukushima is inevitable.

No distaster can be called 'the last' if there are still plants active.

>>8843961
>if the plants are damaged they could really fuck things up
Literally a meme.

>>8843970
France did it right since the 2000s. They generated 75% of its energy from nuclear since with no severe incidents

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx

>>8843987
The United States also has quite a lot of plants but the fact that it hasn't gone wrong yet isn't proof it never will.

The chances of disaster are small, but the more plants we build, the bigger the chances become. Also the magnitude of disaster is so big the damage is irriversible.
At least with CO2 we can have the option of carbon negative technologies to clean the atmosphere again.

There are a lot of old plants still running that should have already been decommissioned but kept alive because it's cheaper.

Solar, wind, hydro, biomass are all becoming cheaper and cheaper, so nuclear is pretty much done at this point.

>if the plants are damaged they could really fuck things up

This is easily avoidable by not putting plants in tectonically active areas

Honestly nuclear is probably the best "short" term solution to the energy crisis.

>>8844015
Literally this. Sorry California.

>>8843977
>Chernobyl and Fukushima are memes

>>8843970
Fukushima and Chernobyl meltdowns were due to human error and just negligence of people who were not professionally trained. Just read up on it.

Thorium when?

>>8844053
>human error
Oh well, then I guess in this post-human era nothing can go wrong!

>negligence of people who were not professionally trained
It's called greed. Training (and everything else related to safety) costs money, and cutting costs means more profit

So, unless you have a method to eliminate human error and human greed, there will always be the possibility that Fukushima and Chernobyl repeat themselves

>>8844059
Next gen reactors will be built in a way that if left alone will result in the chain reaction stoppping.

Literally nothing bad can happen with these things.

>>8844066
>Literally nothing bad can happen with these things.

This thought is human error in and of itself.
A mistake made many times before.

>>8844059
>fukushima/chernobyl is due to human error and it's exclusive to nuclear

Then how about spillages of oil into the sea? I recall that more number of times than nuclear plants failing. That wasn't from human error?

>>8843961

It's plenty feasible, the only reason people are calling it into question is because it didn't take off on the west coast like it did east of the Mississippi. Which is ironic as America's nuclear reactor industry is effectively monopolized by San Francisco based Bechtel now (because they were the company selected for the new navy reactors).

>>8844051
How many died in those again?

>>8844076
Thats literally what Im talking about. They will be beyond human error in that with power outage and the resuling lack of coolant (like chernobyl, fukishima and all the close-calls), they will shut down instead of overheat and melt through their containment vehicle.

>>8843961
>Cons
- mining for uranium is a fucking mess
- storing the waste is a fucking mess

If those were actually included in the price of it all, no way is nuclear nothing more than a dinosaur living off the government tit

>>8844117
Human error will be present in everything humans do, including the machines we build. Nothing has, or will ever, be completely safe.

But I guess there will always be people claiming that, despite all the failed ones, this new and improved ship will be truly unsinkable!

>>8843961
>>8843966
>>8843970
>>8844020
>>8844053
>>8844076
>>8844103
>>8844113
>THORIUM
I just negated all of your arguments.
Either thorium, or the less likely fusion reactors.
Now STFU you (to borrow an expression from a good friend) 'carebears'.

>>8844136
Read the posts you reply to, you fucking retard.

>>8843961
THE ONLY FEASIBLE TECHNOLOGY IS SOLAR YOU MASSIVE RETARD!!!

>>8844139
NO! SUCK IT, I JUST THORIUM'D ALL OVER YOU!

>bigass power plants
No bigger than any other power plant, and they don't go through massive quantities of oil/natural gas/coal

>difficult to store
You can turn reactions off

>if the plants are damaged they could really fuck things up
Not really

>its a nucleartard thread
>someone brings up disasters

Seems to me if there's threat of colossal disaster then it shouldn't ever be done. Why? Because Murphy's Law.

>>8844136
I was supporting nuke you retarded asshat

>>8843961
BUILD THEM ON THE MOON

>>8844151
+ wind and hydro.
but that's also solar, just indirectly!
praise the sun \o/

>>8844131
BUT IT LITERALLY CAN'T FAIL AT ALL NOW ALL THE NEW NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE 10,000% SAFE WITH MILLIONS OF REDUNDANCY SAFETY SYSTEMS! WHY DO YOU FUCKING MORONS THINK NUCLEAR IS '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''BAD'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''?

>>8844131
>It could happen!
>an extremely unlikely chain of events may happen such that bad things happen
You twat there's risk with literally anything

>>8844131
Ok fuck off then.
Give me a definition for "safe".
Then we can continue having this conversation.

Pro tip: if you define it as unreachable then very logically it will indeed never be reached. For no energy source.

>>8844136
What's Thorium?

Enough about risk of accidents, guys. The real reason that power from nuclear fission currently has a low net energy yield.

Sure, nuclear fission produces tons of energy, is clean, and is currently relatively safe. But the amount of effort and resources it takes to mine uranium ore and extract U-235 cancels out much of the energy produced.

Until we can come up with much more efficient methods for the acquisition of Uranium-235, power from nuclear fission cannot be classified as sustainable.

>yfw Thorium is not exploited because you can't get Plutonium from the fission

>>8843961
>Cons
>>bigass power plants
what is SMR?

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx

>>8844319
What are you talking about moron? The cost of fuel is miniscule compared to coal or gas. Fossil fuel plants have 80-90% of their expenses in the cost of fuel. Nuclear plants have 15-30%.

>>8844328
>yfw thorium is not exploited because uranium and plutonium are more practical and not because of some grand conspiracy

>>8843961
>feasible
yes it would be as they are being used today

What I believe

Its the best what we got, with great possibility for improvements in safety and costs.

I am sad when I read about people cheering for renewables.
How they feel they are saving the earth
I just cant imagine that future of human kind would be having huge turbines on every hill and plastered photovoltaic panels on almost every roof and surface to get pittance of energy that we need.

Its absolutely amazing for some geographical locations.
Offshore windfarms... great, solar farms in deserts, amazing
3rd countries getting cheap and safe source of energy, congrats...

but advanced nations shunning from nuclear and trying to argue that intermittent, huge space demanding, low output source of energy should be our main focus... its infuriating

>>8843961
>expensive as hell
>produces waste that kills you just by standing near it
>said waste has to be kept in maintained and guarded facilities for millenia to come

>>8844682
renewable energy sounds very good, but in practice kinda sucks. the parts needed to make a solar panel use a fuckton of energy to make, and at least 5 years ago when i last checked, most panels break within 5 years, which was the time needed to actually have made a net reduction in carbon footprint. that mightve changed by now, but still to make renewable energy parts, fossil fuels will be needed as of now, and the cost/benefit to using these isnt worth it, so you wont find any one country fully switching yet.

>>8844901
Before that "millenia" come we could've already launched all those wastes into space.

>>8844103
Goddamn.

https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2017/04/cals-bp.html

>BP oil spill did $17.2 billion in damage to natural resources, scientists find in first-ever financial evaluation of spill’s impact

>>8844167
oil is solar too, just more indirect

>>8844997
You and me both know this is never going to happen. It's both economically unviable and highly undesirable considering rockets are at risk of blowing up.

Is nuclear energy worth it in the long run?

>>8845201
The only things we'll have in the "long run" are the sun in the sky and the hot rocks in the ground

>>8843961
I've been doing some thinking and i'm wondering what you guys think of this

Pro
>high output
>relatively clean, non-polluting
>no greenhouse gases (omiting construction and mining)
>produce more than they consume
>could use other sources besides uranium (ie; thorium when feasible)

Cons
>mining rare radioactive elements is a mess and expensive
>when the plants get hit by a disaster they could really fuck things up
>waste is hard to get rid of and lasts for mellenia
>non-renewable

>>8844136
Thorium is an awful nuclear fuel that has been overhyped by shills for years. Thorium reactors are really U233 reactors, which is a more toxic fuel than U235. There's zero reason to build a thorium reactor over a uranium salt reactor.

Not to mention thorium has never been proven on a commercial scale. Pretty much the only thing thorium has going for it is good PR.

>>8844169
Because at the end of the day nuclear fuel is a 100% reliable heat source, while mechanical cooling systems, no matter how redundant, will never be 100% reliable.

The problem with nuclear right now is it isn't cost competitive. The main issue is that D&E costs go through the roof, and can cause projected costs to quadruple. Like the Seabrook nuclear power station was proposed at around 500 $/kWh and ended up at around 2000 $/kWh.

You'll notice every pro-nuclear cost analysis ignores or minimizes design costs. On an LCOE basis (the energy price needed over the lifetime of a project to generate profit) nuclear is about 11 c/kWh, which is higher than natural gas, solar, and wind. Nuclear also has about 10 times the capital cost of solar and wind.

The reality of the situation is that right now, the cheapest energy on a utility scale is natural gas supplemented with solar and wind.

>>8845484

>No reason to build a thorium reactor because it technically runs on a uranium isotope
>never mind the fact that thorium is several times more common than uranium and the uranium isotope it breeds into to power the reaction is completely used up as per the nature of a liquid nuclear fuel that can be continuously cleaned of decay products

A thorium reactor is fueled by adding thorium salt to the thorium loop, having it be bred into U-233, then having that U-233 transferred over to the uranium loop to be fissiled, which results in large release of energy as well as the breeding of more U-233 from the thorium.

In a uranium based cycle plutonium is produced, which is bad because muh bombs :^)

In reality what we need to do is build a majority of thorium salt power plants and a smaller percentage of uranium salt power plants to produce plutonium that is useful for space exploration and development.

>>8845852
Light water reactors are expensive as shit because the entire building the reactor is housed in needs to be a pressure vessel to contain the core if it were to get too hot and cause the coolant water inside to flash to steam. There's also the fact that solid nuclear fuel is a nightmare to manage, 300 degree pressurized water is corrosive, and the uranium used requires enrichment to be useful.

A liquid salt reactor using either thorium or uranium solves all of these issues.

>>8844206
It's about the magnitude of disaster.

Worst thing with wind is someone falling of the turbine and it only effects the person that fucked it up.
Worst thing with nuclear is large areas of the world becoming inhabitable and causing mutantions in wildlife and plants for thousands of years.

But I'll shut up about disaster because it seems to not matter when people talk about nuclear

Also new reactors are getting more expensive to build and old ones more expensive to maintain both because of safety while wind and solar are becoming cheaper than nuclear.

Also everybody seems to forget biomass/biofuels.

>>8845890
Reactor costs aren't the big issue, it's design and engineering costs. China is able to build reactors real cheap because they have standardized the design and their D&E costs are negligible. The US has no standard design, so any new reactor has to be designed from the ground up, which costs significantly more than land, materials and construction.

Molten salt reactors would be hit particularly hard by this, seeing as they have never been built to commercial scale. There are so many fundamental steps that would have to be designed first that would cost a ton of money. Like how do you design a system to purify and process salts before they get to the reactor on a commercial scale?

You talk about corrosion. Radioactive salts are extremely corrosive. You need to find materials that can withstand the temperature and chemical environment of a liquid salt reactor. Then you have to get them certified for use, which is a long process with lots of testing and bureaucracy.

All of this is a massive R&D cash sink that eats up billions of dollars and years of time before you can even build a reactor that will make money.

>>8843995
>Also the magnitude of disaster is so big the damage is irriversible.
Major exaggeration, so far the only major accident that caused significant loss of human life was the result of the perfect storm of terrible plant design coupled with insane incompetence. Even so the damage from the worst case scenario was less than expected and the surrounding ecosystems have recovered quickly. Compare that to something as "mundane" as Coal power, which kills around 8 Million people per year, where even the most liberal estimates of deaths caused by nuclear power top out at just over 4 thousand since its inception.

It's not as if we should ignore the danger, but just going by the numbers less people will die over time if you replaced all coal kwh with nuclear even adjusting for a catastrophe as rare as Chernobyl. And as other anons have mentioned, modern reactor technology and regulations have essentially mitigated the already minimal dangers even further.

>>8845307
>mining rare radioactive elements is a mess and expensive
>waste is hard to get rid of and lasts for mellenia
>non-renewable

We can now use old "spent" fuel in new reactors again, the fuel itself is actually in great abundance in the earth's crust, the energy density of uranium is so high that it doesn't matter if it isn't renewable as it would never be an issue on a human timescale unless we become a solar system spanning species.

>>8843961
> Is nuclear energy feasible?

Yes. The only "real" legitimate complaints IMHO are the harm from contaminating nearby land from a reactor accident, and proliferation concerns.

>bigass power plants

Not really. Coal power plants are big too. Next-gen nuclear plants will be substantially smaller than similar power coal plants.

>difficult to store

The waste problem is a political myth.
thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

>if the plants are damaged they could really fuck things up

Yes. Fukushima was a 50 year old design. Modern designs would not have had a problem. And next-gen designs are even safer still. I'm pretty satisfied that with a proper molten salt reactor, there is no problem.

Keep in mind that Fukushima and Chernobyl are not as bad as commonly represented. The land contamination issue is serious and severe, but not as bad as commonly portrayed.

I need to do more research on the proliferation aspect. Another anon on here made some good arguments (mixed with shitty arguments) that made me realize I need to do more research.

>>8843961
>clean, non-polluting
This is one of the most confused talking points of nuclear boosters.

By its inherent attributes, nuclear is the dirtiest power source. It's so dirty that any release of waste is considered unacceptable, therefore, nuclear power is only permitted to operate when it appears to be releasing no waste. Any power source can be made arbitrarily clean. For most, a certain amount of dirtiness is acceptable, in exchange for reduced costs and increased production, but nuclear waste is so unspeakably horrible that nothing less than the appearance of perfection is tolerated.

Furthermore, it's relatively easy to hide leaks, spills, and deliberate improper dumping from the public. The nuclear industry has been caught repeatedly doing so in the past. It almost certainly happens much more often than is discovered.

On top of that, you can't say how clean or cost-effective nuclear power is "in practice" until after thousands of years. That's how long the waste has to be kept out of the environment. Almost none of the waste that has been generated has been put into proper long-term storage so it no longer needs active upkeep.

One of the things people like to claim when they're promoting nuclear power is that it's safe, that the statistics show that it kills less people than other forms of power. But they're talking about clearly attributable deaths.

When you release radioisotopes into the environment, and someone later dies or is born deformed from cancer or mutation, it's extremely difficult to link that to the radiation. The victims can be anywhere on Earth, at any point in time after the release of materials, and the harm is rarely specific to radioactivity. Therefore, the actual number of nuclear-power-related deaths is unknown.

>>8844059
Take ThorCon as a concrete example. In a loss of power situation, which is what happened in Fukushima, coolant will stop flowing, and non-powered circulation will be enough to cool the thing for 70+ days, or for forever, depending on design choices.

There is no operator intervention required. There is no valve that the operator needs to open. In fact, there is no valve that the operator can close. There is no way that the operator can fuck it up, because the "safety systems" are entirely beyond the control of the operator.

The safety systems are also constantly operating, which allows for early detection of problems, as opposed to safety systems that are off until there's a problem.

>>8844113
Chernobyl, possibly as low as 300, maybe 4000 at worst. Fukushima, about 0 from radiation poisoning and cancer. Maybe some of the cleanup workers will have problems, but no one outside the plant will have problems from the radiation.

>>8846000
well crafted bait and people will fall for it

nice trips

>>8844311
Start here: Video or text doc. Your choice.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfsOYzOpYRw

>>8846016
Oh boy, another nuclear reactor design that has never been proven at commercial scale.

>>8844901
>expensive as hell
False. It's expensive in the west because people created needless regulations to make it expensive.
http://euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

>produces waste that kills you just by standing near it

lolno.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

>>8846024
It's based entirely on existing tech that has been well demonstrated, especially at Oak Ridge National Labs, which ran a molten salt reactor for many years.

This is not like fusion. This is ready for immediate full-scale commercial prototyping. They could start full scale commercial production in as little as 4 years, assuming no needless regulatory hurdles, and money problems were solved.

>>8845215
That is correct.
http://energyfromthorium.com/energy-weinberg-1959/
Average everyday rock, granite, is nuclear fuel. We'll never run out of rock, and therefore we'll never run out of nuclear fuel.

>>8845852
Again, it is cost competitive when you don't have needless regulations and regulatory and legal environments killing it.
http://euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/
In South Korea, nuclear power plant costs have been steadily /decreasing/ over many decades.

>>8845876
Don't be too quick to dismiss proliferation concerns from the thorium-uranium fuel cycle in molten salt reactors. A lot of those claims may have been vastly exaggerated. U-233 makes a bomb just as good as U-235 and Plutonium.

>>8845912
The first molten salt reactors do not need to be breeders. ThorCon design is not a breeder. If and when those serious design problems are solved, and demonstrated, then we can start building breeder molten salt reactors, but burner molten salt reactors come with significant advantages in cost and safety compared to conventional pressurized light water reactors.

Also, corrosion is practically a non-issue. It's not as bad as people make it out to be. We have 5 years of reactor experience from the MSRE and ORNL. ThorCon design is just going to use standard stainless steel for almost the entire thing. Corrosion is predicted IIRC to be 0.1 mm over 4 years, which is nothing. You can plan around that.

>>8846033
An Oak Ridge experiment in the 60s has no relevance to building a modern, to scale reactor.

And considering people can't even agree on what materials can survive a salt reactor, it's miles away from being brought to scale. The only alloys people have found that can withstand the environment of the reactor also suffer severe embrittlement under neutron flux.

And this isn't even getting into questions like how to process and purify salts, how to reprocess salts on a commercial scale, or how to manage core mixture and remove fission products.

>>8846008
It's not bait, it's the simple truth.

>>8846007
>Chernobyl, possibly as low as 300, maybe 4000 at worst.
4000 isn't anything like a worst case, it's what's presented as a reasonable estimate by nuclear-friendly authorities. Nobody believes it's as low as 300, that's an outright lie.

Estimates range up to a million. Nobody really knows.

The disaster has cost upwards of $30 billion dollars and the use of around 16000 square kilometers of good farm and timber land. It was a major contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union.

>>8846053
>An Oak Ridge experiment in the 60s has no relevance to building a modern, to scale reactor.

They kept very detailed notes, which Kirk Sorensen published. (Thanks Kirk. It's very, very relevant. Without that, I could not say that we're probably 4 years away from full scale production of ThorCon (assuming money and regulatory problems could be overcome). But because of that, and the recent work by others, as cited and thanks in the doc link above, we can do this. This is not a risky gamble. This will very probably work, and damnit we ought to be spending money doing it right now.

>>8846055
>4000 isn't anything like a worst case, it's what's presented as a reasonable estimate by nuclear-friendly authorities. Nobody believes it's as low as 300, that's an outright lie.

I do. You only get those absurdly high numbers by using flagrantly false science, i.e. LNT model.

>>8846053
>And this isn't even getting into questions like how to process and purify salts, how to reprocess salts on a commercial scale, or how to manage core mixture and remove fission products.

Also, as I already said, ThorCon design involves practically no reprocessing. As I already said, it's a burner, not a breeder. I won't say that we can make a breeder in 4 years. There are some problems that have not been solved to my satisfaction for a LFTR breeder. So, you're argument is irrelevant, non-sequitir.

>>8846033
We'll see where we are in 4 years.

>>8846063
Come on. Don't be a dipshit: at least honestly represent my position. I said: If they can solve the money and regulatory problems. Neither has been done yet, AFAIK.

>Nuclear is cheap I swear

>>8846073
Nuclear is cheap. See South Korea, where the regulations are not designed to make it too expensive.
http://euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

Anything can be made expensive with lots of bad regulations.

>>8846055
>The disaster has cost upwards of $30 billion dollars
Note: the dollar figure costs would be much higher in the West for an accident of this severity. That's how much it cost in the Soviet Union and ex-Soviet countries, with its compulsory labor forces and their low wages, property values, and cost of living.

Fukushima is costing up around $200 billion and was an extraordinarily lucky, low-damage case, because the wind happened to blow the waste out to sea, so only about 600 square kilometers were contaminated. There are few reactors located where such a stroke of luck is even possible.

>>8846082
Which is why we should use safer reactors, like an AP-1000 where that wouldn't happen, or a proper molten salt reactor like ThorCon where it definitely wouldn't happen. ThorCon is so safe that even if you put a TNT bomb inside the reactor core itself and blew it up, practically all radioactivity would be confined to the reactor site itself, due to the differences in chemistry.

>>8846063
Technological development takes time.
Let's not all get impatient.

>>8846089
This is actually mostly due to cost.
It can be seen internationally.

>>8846075
>Nuclear is cheap.
Nuclear is very expensive. The true cost is usually obscured by subsidies, including the understanding that the government (and uncompensated people) will end up bearing the ultimate cost of decommissioning, waste disposal, inspections, anti-proliferation measures, and any major disasters which occur.

>See South Korea, where the regulations are not designed to make it too expensive.
It's still expensive, it's just not as prohibitive as it is in the US.

That analysis looks only at part of the cost.

>>8843995
Three Mile Island was widely seen as the end of the world, at least at the time.

>>8846103
You're simply wrong.

The subsidies are vastly exaggerated, and in some cases, they're actually imposed costs. For example, the so-called subsidy that guarantees liability. In the US, the operators have to pay into this fund, and I forget the exact numbers, but this is a lot of money. Rather than being a subsidy for their operation, it's practically a tax, or fine.

Again, look at the charts in my link: Construction costs were fine in the west until Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Then they skyrocketed. This has everything to do with needless regulation and regulation designed to obstruct.

>That analysis looks only at part of the cost.

Gonna have to do better than this. Start citing sources.

>>8846085
>Which is why we should use safer reactors
New reactors = new unknown unknowns.

Before Chernobyl, you people were saying, "The nuclear industry is really careful so something like that will never happen!" After Chernobyl, you people were saying, "Sure, but something like that'll never happen in a first world country!" After Fukushima, you people are saying, "Sure, but something like that'll never happen with the newest designs!"

As long as we keep using nuclear, these things will keep happening. If we expand nuclear power capacity many times to make it our main source of energy, they will happen many times more often.

There'll always be ways the specific incident could have been avoided, that will be used as excuses by people like you to claim that the next one won't happen, and insist that nuclear is totally safe and worthwhile.

>>8846118
Even with these accidents, nuclear is still the safest and cleanest form of energy generation by far. Safer and cleaner than even hydro, solar, and wind.

Second, we are never going to get risk-free. Nothing is risk free. We can substantially lower the risks. I'm ok with facing these risks, compared to the risks of global warming.

>>8846118
>If we expand nuclear power capacity many times to make it our main source of energy, they will happen many times more often.

+ once the new ones seem to have problems [just like anything ever claimed to be 100% safe] it's going to take lots of time and cost to decommission them again.

>>8843961
In general nuclear energy is quite feasible and is a effective way for power generation, if we work towards containing and finding ways to stabilize the plants easier before chernobyl occurs, then it would be much more reliable. Regardless, within 10 to 20 years from now we will most likely find easier ways to maintain a nuclear reaction and to make it more stable.

>>8846134
No one is claiming "100% safe". Stop doing such ridiculous strawman. Nothing is 100% safe.

What proper pro-nuclear people are claiming, however, is that it's safer and cleaner than solar, wind, and hydro.

>>8844066
>>8846139
>No one is claiming "100% safe". Stop doing such ridiculous strawman. Nothing is 100% safe.
>Literally nothing bad can happen with these things.

>>8846112
>needless regulation and regulation designed to obstruct
You people keep claiming that out of one side of your mouth, and out of the other side you claim that the industry should be credited for its low rate of disasters.

The regulations were increased after failures because they revealed the need for more regulation.

You can't cut the regulations and costs without increasing the risk of failure.

Were you pointing to Japan and saying their reactors were unsafe and needed to be shut down before Fukushima? Anyone who wasn't doing so has no credibility anymore to talk about how safe nuclear power plants. Certainly, no one who was (or would have been, based on the same reasoning they apply today) saying that nuclear is safe and meltdowns simply weren't going to happen has any credibility.

If you've paid any attention to South Korea's politics over the last year, you know that country is not an example to be held up of competent recent management. India's a good deal worse. They'll abandon nuclear or suffer the consequences of their fast and loose policy.

>>8844051
>Chernobyl
>Had some of the earliest reactors made, and despite surviving for several decades, was warned to be changed due to already known security dangers
>Soviet authorities still refused to upgrade the plants
>Inevitable disaster occurs

>Fukushima
>Build nuclear plant on earthquake prone territory
>Inevitable disaster happens

See the trend? In both cases it was already known a disaster was going to happen and it was ignored. This isn't even the scientists messing up, just the government. It's a meme, because with proper procedures and good attention from the government these disasters would never occur.

It sucks really badly. Nuclear is the most feared and hated energy option in Canada, despite us being the second largest producers of uranium. Oh and by the way, there are less deaths associated with nuclear power planets than any other popular form of energy (Coal, oil, wind, hydroelectric, etc)

>>8846139
Give me examples of solar or wind abruptly rendering thousands of square kilometers of prime land permanently uninhabitable and breaking the back of a world superpower with the cost of cleaning up their mess.

Neither presents the kind of disaster risk that nuclear does, and as their efficiency grows and their industries mature, their workplace death per joule statistics will improve accordingly.

You have to be arguing very dishonestly to claim nuclear is safer than solar and wind should be expected to be as mature industries.

>>8846146
>The regulations were increased after failures because they revealed the need for more regulation.

No they weren't. No one was harmed from Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island was a non-issue. And our plants are simply not comparable with Chernobyl (positive coefficient of reactivity).

>>8846148
BUT THIS TIME, WE WON'T BE GREEDY. PROMISED.
NEW REACTORS ARE SAFER!
JUST CUT BACK THE SAFETY REGULATIONS SO WE CAN BEGIN MAKING MONEY!...
i mean GENERATING CLEAN ELECTRICITY ofcourse!

>>8846152
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think

>permanently uninhabitable

Lol. Go look at Chernobyl. Large areas of the exclusion zone are habitable now. Hundreds of people have been living in certain areas for the entire time, they basically refused to leave. "Permanently uninhabitable" my ass.

Similarly, large areas of the Fukushima exclusion zone are safe to live in. You get more background radiation from living in Denver than you do in most of the exclusion zone around Fukushima.

>>8846152
Like, did you know that there were other reactors at the Chernobyl site? Not many people know that. Fewer still know that these other reactors were operated without incident for many years afterwards. "Uninhabitable" my ass.

>>8846148
>>Fukushima
>it was already known a disaster was going to happen and it was ignored.

See: >>8846146
>Were you pointing to Japan and saying their reactors were unsafe and needed to be shut down before Fukushima? Anyone who wasn't doing so has no credibility anymore to talk about how safe nuclear power plants. Certainly, no one who was (or would have been, based on the same reasoning they apply today) saying that nuclear is safe and meltdowns simply weren't going to happen has any credibility.

It was certainly not a common position in nuclear power advocacy to hold out Japan as an exception, with unsafe reactors in unsafe locations. Nobody was saying, "Other than Japan, the nuclear power industry is safe, but Japan really needs to get its shit together."

Rather, the sort of people who advocate for more nuclear power only learned about the issues with the Fukushima plant after the disaster happened. Then they made up a lot of half-assed arguments like, "Oh, just don't do this then, and nuclear is safe. I'm sure there are no problems anywhere else. How about cutting down on those regulations? Nuclear is so overregulated. We need to cut the red tape so we can build at least twenty times more nuclear plants, right away!"

It's insanity.

>>8846163
I would be all for nuclear if we could turn mass -directly- into electricity.
But nuclear energy is just a steam engine on steroids that produces cancer causing waste.

>>8846170
Japan was using 40 year old technology. If that plant was an AP-1000, there would not have been an accident. It would have survived entirely fine, with no radiation release of any kind, and it would have been up and running the next day (or whenever the tsunami cleanup allowed). It's fundamentally unfair and irrational to conflate the danger of all nuclear reactor designs. Some are quite radically different, with radically different risk scenarios and dangers of a full disaster.

And again, I'd rather take these small and manageable risks than suffer the harms of global warming.

>>8846174
Literally no one has ever gotten cancer from nuclear waste from a civilian nuclear reactor, and it's likely that no one ever will. The waste disposal issue is a political myth.

>>8846155
In both Fukushima and Chernobyl the authorities were clearly warned by the scientists of the dangers, and due to terrible bureaucracy we all know how that ended.

I agree that the nuclear option is less enticing due to requiring constant attention but with proper regulations it's very beneficial on the long run. Here in my province we quickly shut down our reactor Gentilly 1 back in 1977 due to technical problems, the proper thing to do. Dumb Soviet authorities forgot the memo and tried milking the reactor in Chernobyl despite their own security concerns.

>>8846175
global warming [or better said, climate change] is reverseable though.

carbon negative technologies!!!

>>8846153
>>The regulations were increased after failures because they revealed the need for more regulation.
>No they weren't. No one was harmed from Three Mile Island.
Holy shit! The issue was not whether people were harmed! It was how close it came to being a major disaster.

>Three Mile Island was a non-issue.
Three Mile Island showed that things were happening in America's nuclear power plants that should NEVER happen, that the measures taken to prevent them from happening were inadequate.

If you ignore lessons like that, you get disasters like Chernobyl.

>>8846180
Those carbon negative technologies are going to require a metric shitton of energy (that's a technical term), and that only thing that has a chance in hell of doing that in the foreseeable future is conventional and next-gen nuclear.

For example, from what little I know, the limestone quicklime basalt approach looks really promising, but it's going to require a shitton of energy.

>>8846104
because China Syndrome (a complete bullshit nuclear scare movie) came out RIGHT before the incident

>>8846181
>It was how close it came to being a major disaster.

That's asinine. We have to go by the actual risks, not by the risks that exist only in your own head. In the real world, how it's actually played out, nuclear has killed way less people than solar, wind, and hydro (per joule of electricity produced), and that's including Chernobyl, which isn't even fair, because the reactor was more or less designed to explode (positive coefficient of reactivity).

Production of solar is really toxic, and the mining is no joke either due to the massive amount of materials required.

And finally, it's all academic anyway, because solar, wind, hydro, etc., cannot work, because of the EROEI problem, and because of scaling problems of reliable (e.g. non-intermittent) non-nuclear green techs.

https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

>>8846181
>If you ignore lessons like that, you get disasters like Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is a completely different thing. Nothing as bad as Chernobyl will ever happen again, because of differences in design. Fukushima was not as bad as Chernobyl. Chernobyl had a positive reactivity coefficient, and every other reactor ever made in the west does not. That means that during an accident, more and more radioactivity is created. In Fukushima, fission stopped less than 10 seconds after the automatic sensors detected the earthquake. This is also why Chernobyl is still a ridiculously bad cleanup mess, and Fukushima is not, and Three Mile Island is not.

>>8846112
If the problem was only COST then nuclear powerplants would still be built in the west, even at high costs they are still profitable.

The problem is more that these bureaucrats sit on approvals for a decade or more.

>>8846175
>Japan was using 40 year old technology. If that plant was an AP-1000, there would not have been an accident.
So why aren't you advocating for the immediate shutdown of all old nuclear plants?

Why are you pushing "nuclear is safe!" rather than "nuclear could be safe, but the current installed base is a mess, and we really need to shut down the old stuff right away before something terrible happens"?

Anyway, we don't know what will happen with AP1000s. Not one has ever been tested for even a day, let alone a decade. Plus it's not only the design, but the actual construction, maintenance, and operation that determines safety. Belief in a safe design can lead to foolish behavior, and the societies that maintained nuclear power over the last half century are not what they were.

>>8846200
There's a lot of problems, but they're all political (and legal). I'm not going to pretend to list them all out, but there's more than just that one problem. There's also the uncertainty and financing problems when so-called environmentalists can file legal motions to delay construction of your plant. There's also the ridiculous "as low as reasonably possible" standard for radiation exposure, based on the antiscientific dogma of LNT. There's also the large costs associated with building high pressure vessels for conventional reactors, and the triple redundant safeties that don't need to exist in other designs like IFR and MSRs.

If those did not exist, such as in South Korea, then we see that nuclear prices actually go down. In South Korea, nuclear prices have been going down steadily for several decades.
http://euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

>>8846204
>So why aren't you advocating for the immediate shutdown of all old nuclear plants?

Because they're still safer than coal by a ridiculous margin, and if you shut them down, and also prevent next-gen reactors, then we're use coal. Coal and other dirty fuel usage kills 8 million people every year from airborne particulates alone.

My preferred approach is continued research into all of the above, and blowing like 10 billion dollars on a bunch of different independent full scale commerical prototyping of ready next-gen reactor designs, including IFR, ThorCon, Kirk's LFTR if he's ready, and so forth. Then, when one of them works, especially ThorCon, we start building those like candy, and we shut down all coal plants and old nuclear plants.

>>8846187
>>>Three Mile Island was a non-issue.
>>It was how close it came to being a major disaster.
>That's asinine. We have to go by the actual risks, not by the risks that exist only in your own head.
MENTAL ILLNESS

>>8846187
>hydro, etc., cannot work, because of the EROEI problem
M E N T A L I L L N E S S

I really wish you would stop shitting up our board.

>>8846211
For emphasis, continue research into solar, wind, hydro, and other green techs too. Research money should continue into every reasonably and even remotely promising technology.

But we have a serious problem that we need to fix now, and that means we need to start full scale commercial prototypes of tech that has a good chance to fix it /now/, which means things like ThorCon full scale commerical prototyping, and also immediate massive rollout of the AP-1000.

>>8846215
I wish you would make grounded arguments against my positions. Are you that same fool who said that we can do /seasonal/ storage by splitting water for hydrogen and storing it in caves? Jesus Christ.

As I said in that other thread, it's a pipedream. Practically no one is doing hydrogen storage for cars, where the problem is a billion times easier than competing for grid storage. Therefore, if no one is even thinking about doing it for cars commercially, then it's definitely not ready for grid storage. PS: There's potentially material shortage problems too. Platinum for the fuel cells is not exactly common.

>>8846211
Find me a single paper by a reputable author that talks about the practicality of your ridiculous seasonal storage by splitting water into hydrogen and storing it in caves.

PS: Mark Jacobson is a liar and a fraud, and should never be cited for anything.

>>8846211
>Coal and other dirty fuel usage kills 8 million people every year from airborne particulates alone.
Most of that figure is woodfires on the floors of crude huts with no chimneys.

Most of the rest is coal burned at a Chinese emissions standard or worse rather than an American one.

If the people burning other fuels this incompetently were instead building nuclear power plants, they'd rapidly depopulate their countries.

>>8846241
True, but it's still 250 thousand deaths per year estimated in Europe. That's already about a thousand times more deaths every year than from the entirely of Chernobyl. This is no small matter. This is serious deadly business.

>>8846241
Further, we have a moral duty to help save those people, lift them out of poverty, and to do that, we need more electricity. This is also the best and only way to stop world population growth, without genocide or famine or something.

>>8846229
>I wish you would make grounded arguments against my positions.
I do fine at that. You pretend their groundless as part of your mental illness.

Seriously, you just claimed that what happened at Three Mile Island was a non-issue and should have been ignored, and hydroelectric power can't work because of EROEI.

Your brain does not do normal, basic things that people depend on to get through life.

>>8846250
Unsinkable Titanic.
Radon toothpaste.
Clean coal.
Safe nuclear.

I'm gonna make lists now because people keep making these 'this time we know it all' 'this time it's safe' claims

>This nuclear shill saying reactor designs that have never before been tested are safe

>>8846254
I misspoke, or was unclear. Solar and wind cannot work because of EROEI.

Hydro is great and all, except for the ecological disasters, and the chance of thousands or tends of thousands of human deaths in extremely rare accidents, and the simple fact that all of the good dam sites are taken. It's unlikely that we could even expand hydro by a factor of 2x worldwide, which means it's a rounding error when talking about energy production in the world going forward. Use it where you want, but it's not going to be able to take the place of nuclear.

>>8846257
It is safe. How many ocean liners go down every year? Very few. Sometimes some do, like the Titanic. You have to look at the statistics, not the anecdotes, and the statistics is that nuclear is the safest by far.

>>8846259
There are no shills in this thread. No one is going to pay money to someone to post about nuclear on 4chan.

>>8846257
Seriously: What if someone told you that we should stop all ocean cruise ships, because of a single ship (the Titanic) that sunk like a century ago. That's your argument. That's also analogous for your argument for nuclear. It's obscene and ridiculous in every way.

Again, no one (of competence) will argue that ocean cruise ships are 100% safe, but nothing is 100% safe. That's a ridiculous standard. You need to do real cost benefit analysis. Stop this strawmanning already.

>>8846268
Ships aren't radioactive.

Why people see no problem with gamma radiation?

and besides, I choose myself to take the risk and go on the ship or plane or whatever. however OTHER PEOPLE can deside to put a nuclear power plant near my house.

The risks of nuclear power are minuscule. More people die each year while installing solar panels than have died in all nuclear power accidents combined.

>>8846275
A plane could crash on your house.

>>8846275
Because I don't subscribe to the pseudoscientific myths concerning the highly exaggerated dangers of radiation. The public is grossly misinformed when it comes to the actual concrete dangers of radiation. Green Peace et al say with a straight face that half a million people die from Chernobyl, or some shit. They also say with a straight face that 8 mSv / year is so dangerous that people should be immediately evacuated. It's obscene in the highest degree. This is just as bad as creationism. We need to have a discussion with proper knowledge of the real risks, and knowledge that there are no other plausible solutions with readily available tech.

the only real argument against nuclear is it will put coal out of business completely

>>8846279
Again, please find me a single paper by a reputable source that says that splitting water and storing the hydrogen in caves can provide seasonal storage. You are the same anon from the other thread that made this extraordinary claim, right? I give citations for every point that I make. It's time for you to do the same.

And again, Mark Jacobson is a liar and fraud. Do not cite this person. So is Sovacool.

>Thorium Salt reactor
>Literally imposible to meltdown
>Thorium in incredibly abundant
>Only reason it's not universal right now is because of the nuclear submarine
>Fuck nuclear submarines

>>8846289
I'm not the guy you were arguing with earlier. I don't know anything about storing hydrogen in caves or whatever.

But you've piqued my interest. How about just pumping water way up high to store energy? When you want to get that energy back, just let it flow through a turbine.

>>8843970
You are literally the worst sort of person, I hope you die

>>8846295
You did hit upon the only practical grid storage tech. It's currently in use, but it's limited to a few hours of storage. To cover for wind and solar, we would need days. I suggest:

https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

The short version is "cannot work for a grid that uses large (i.e. 80%) wind and solar".

And then I suggest:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

And then I suggest:

https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

>>8846264
>There are no shills in this thread. No one is going to pay money to someone to post about nuclear on 4chan.
I believe you when you say you're an obsessive mentally ill shut-in rather than actually getting paid, but people do pay money for people to shill for industries and other monied interests on places like 4chan, and it's a reasonable assumption when someone is making such blatantly biased and unreasonable arguments.

>>8846253
We have a duty to our own people first
Not to foreigners

>>8846309
Again, please step up with citations and let's argue about this.

>>8846312
Die in a fire.
And as someone who has survived near third degree burns, I know what this means.

>>8846313
the thread is heating up!

inb4 meltdown.

>>8846313
When the race that has produced everything worthwhile on this earth is gone, who will carry the torch?
We have a duty to our race, to our people, not to sub80 IQ animals in Africa or South America or asia

>>8846320
>>>/pol/
this is about nuclear power not white supremacy

>>8846301
The first link mentions that all the good dam sites are already taken.

Why can we not reuse them? Meade Lake, behind the Hoover Dam is hundreds of feet lower than it used to be, thanks to the constant droughts. If we pumped more water back into it, couldn't we run HD at higher speed? Further, I imagine Hoover Dam isn't the only hydro station with a similar problem.

>>8846329
Did you read the whole link? It would require an amount of dams roughly the size of Lake Eerie. And that's just for US demand. Good luck trying to scale that up for the rest of the world.

>>8846301
>To cover for wind and solar, we would need days.
This assumes that the capacity is barely adequate for what's needed on the grid, and that there's no change in power consumption patterns when power's cheap during the day and expensive at night.

Most grid power used overnight is for light, heat, and air conditioning. But now we've got LEDs, and storing heat or cold over night with thermal masses is pretty cheap and easy. There just wasn't much motivation for thermal masses when the price of electricity was close to the same, day or night.

>https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
>https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
These are both garbage essays, which have been repeatedly debunked, but he keeps posting them like he's working from a script. We have several feasible tech options for grid batteries, the industry just isn't developed because the actual market demand for it wasn't there, and the EROEI of solar and wind are already perfectly adequate, and still rapidly improving with no end in sight.

>>8846289
>please find me a single paper by a reputable source that says that splitting water and storing the hydrogen in caves can provide seasonal storage.
Please stop pretending that the hydrogen economy is some kind of fringe thing that nobody's heard of or studied. You can find this stuff in seconds on google. I'm not going to pick out individual papers for you to vent your mental illness on.

>>8846346
>Most grid power used overnight is for light, heat, and air conditioning.
There's this thing called "industrial processes". Residential electricity usage is not the primary usage of electricity, let alone energy.

>>8846346
>These are both garbage essays, which have been repeatedly debunked,
You're just a dogmatic dipshit who cannot help themselves but to strawman their opponents. The author covers this already, and preemptively argues that even if you go from 7 days storage to 1 day storage, it still doesn't work.

>>8846346
As far as I know, practically no one has suggested seasonal storage with hydrogen that is stored in large caves. This is an extraordinary claim.

Hell, even the hydrogen economy is an extraordinary claim. I'm seeing Tesla electric cars becoming a thing, but I still don't see commercial cars with hydrogen fuel cells. Why is that?

>>8846334
I still am reading it.

What if we use salt water? Then our lower reservoir can just be the ocean. Should cut our used area drastically.

>>8846353
I suppose. You need large differences in elevation for it to work, e.g. mountains. I'd have to check the geography. Even then, cut it in 7 for 1 day of storage, and cut it in 3 for using the ocean as the lower reservoir, and it's still impossibly big. This is still for the US only. The amount of land that we would need to dedicate to water reservoirs worldwide is unbelievably big. When you start talking on scales of "more than all of the Great Lakes Of Michigan" put together, which is the scope of this problem, you know that it's impossible.

>>8846352
>There's this thing called "industrial processes".
...most of which currently run, or can be run, during the day when people are awake rather than through the night.

>The author covers this already, and preemptively argues that even if you go from 7 days storage to 1 day storage, it still doesn't work.
With the same absurd arguments, like "our only option is lead-acid batteries", which have been repeatedly debunked in the past.

>As far as I know, practically no one has suggested seasonal storage with hydrogen that is stored in large caves.
>As far as I know
I believe this. You know very little, and when you're presented with something inconvenient to your viewpoint, you resist learning anything about it, and refuse to take the least effort to research it. That's what keeps it from being worthwhile to try to discuss these things with you, rather than just warn people that you're a mentally-ill shut-in obsessed with promoting nuclear power.

>>8844059
Ah, but if we look at the Long Term incentives, the greedy capitalist will see that an exploded plant no longer produces money. A safe plant does continue to produce money. Therefore, safety training is the incentivized option because it produces more long term wealth.

Most "people are too greedy" issues don't take into account the long term.

>>8846378
>...most of which currently run, or can be run, during the day when people are awake rather than through the night.

Yes and no. For many industrial heat processes, they cannot be shut down. Aluminum smelting is a good example: It must be running all the time, and if they lose power, then the entire manufacturing plant is bricked. (They have backup diesel on site to prevent this.)

Let me tell you a story. My late uncle used to work for Guardian glass, one of the last flat-glass manufacturers in the United States. The dominant method of manufacturing flat glass is to heat up the glass stuff, and pour it over a bath of molten tin. This is how you get it so flat.

Over Thanksgiving dinner one year, as fun conversation, he described what he would be doing at work. He said that they were going to shut down the entire plant, check for wear and tear, replace parts as normal, and then start it up. It takes 2 months to start up the plant. It takes that long to safely heat up the plant without causing damage from heat stresses on the plant, and to allow for other necessary observation and safety.

Many industrial heat processes are like this. It's not something that you can just start up and shut down every hour or every day.

Further, there's also the problem of unutilized capital. If you start shutting down the grid every night, that menas all of the manufacturing capital loses capicity factor, which means greatly increased prices for us the end consumers for all sorts of goods.

Our society needs reliable power.

>>8846378
Come on. The author also did nickle and lithium. Would you please at least not strawman your opposition, and represent the arguments of the other side honestly?

>>8846378
I'm betting people are going to side with me, who's providing reasoned arguments and sources, as opposed to you, who doesn't provide sources, and whose arguments are nothing more than wild-assed assertions and name-calling. So please, keep it up.

>>8846389
>please cite sources when talking about the obvious.

>>8846396
Seasonal storage of hydrogen is non-obvious. Solutions to the EROEI problem of solar and wind is non-obvious. Number of deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima are non-obvious. The safety of returning to many areas of the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones are non-obvious. The money costs of nuclear power plants are non-obvious. Very little about this conversation is obvious. You need to do the math.

>>8846399

And you need to look into the history of said math and realize it has never gone as predicted..
>>8846073

"...BUT THIS TIME ITS DIFFERE.."

>>8846403
Again, South Korea shows what actually happens with proper regulations, where nuclear power costs have actually /decreased/ for many decades.
http://euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/
Please engage with my arguments, instead of just repeating yourself.

>>8846403
>>8846407
Also India.

>>8846403
France is also about 75% nuclear electricity, and has about the lowest electricity prices in Europe, and has about the lowest CO2 emissions in Europe. Guess who has about the highest electricity prices and about the highest CO2 emissions in Europe? Green Germany of course!

>>8846412
Because Germany is one of the few pioneers in green energy.

>>8846412
green energy on suicide watch

>>8846415
What's your point? That your logic that you applied to me should not be applied to you? That your (erroneous) argument that nuclear is expensive means it forever be expensive is logically valid, but my point that green is even more expensive based on Germany is invalid? Such blatant hypocritical double standards.

This guy probably posts as 'Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH' just to post as a few anons to make it seem he's being backed up by others.

>>8846420
So, when your name calling and empty arguments fail, you're going to go to distraction and another ad hom-like arguments. You're such a shitter. If I was a janitor or mod, I'd ban your ass.

>>8846420
>get BTFO
>y-your just samefagging
pathetic

>>8846423
>thinks hees talking to single anon

>>8846428
There's several anons here, but I'd be willing to bet that there's this one particular anon who is responsible for several posts of staggering dishonesty, and that was just one of them.

>>8846389
>Come on. The author also did nickle and lithium.
No he didn't. He mentioned them in passing. Setting aside the total insanity of his assumption (presented as if it were reasonable, or even conservative) that a full seven days of grid power storage would be needed, there are battery technologies which use only non-scarce elements, like sodium, carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur.

This has been pointed out to you repeatedly in the past. You always just pretend it hasn't been.

You wouldn't know a strawman argument if one bit you.

>>8846432
I didn't link to that to show that all battery tech is impossible. I'm linking to it just to show the scope of the problem. I have been consistent in my position that it's not going to work because all electrochemical batteries have energy manufacture costs that make the whole system fail the EROEI check.

Sodium-sulfur batteries do not have material shortage problems, but they do have energy shortage problems.

My apologies for not being more clear about this point. I shall endeavor to be more clear about this point in the future when posting that link "nation-sized battery".

Of course, I'm convinced that your complaint is disingenuous, and you're engaging in bad faith.

>>8846432
Also, he did enough math to show that there's not enough nickel and lithium. Again, I linked to this article as an education article, to show the scale and scope of the problem. I agree that I should mention sodium-sulfur batteries in the same breadth to avoid giving the wrong impression, and I should emphasize that EROEI is the major stumbling block for sodium-sulfur batteries, and there is no material shortage problem for sodium-sulfur batteries.

>>8846436
>I'm linking to it just to misrepresent the scope of the problem.
Assuming a need for seven full days of battery storage for the entire power grid is ridiculous.

You dismiss mainstream, thoroughly-discussed options for carbon-free energy infrastructure like seasonal hydrogen storage as if they were some fringe thing, and embrace absurdism like "we have to build enough batteries to disconnect all power sources in the country for an entire week".

>>8846441
>he did enough math to show that there's not enough nickel and lithium
Math is a garbage-in, garbage-out thing. You can do the arithmetic correctly, and still come to idiotic conclusions. You're so blown away by his correct arithmetic that you haven't noticed that the calculation

There's over 200 billion tons of lithium in the ocean, and the seawater extraction methods are becoming increasingly efficient.

>I should emphasize that EROEI is the major stumbling block for sodium-sulfur batteries
So stop spamming an article every day which argues we can't use solar power because there's not enough lead, and pay some attention the next time your EROEI argument gets debunked.

You argue like a whack-a-mole game. Today I beat down the "there's not enough lead" argument, but you just switched to EROEI and tomorrow you'll just link the lead argument again, recommending it without qualification or proviso.

The other day, I beat down your EROEI argument decisively, and you backed off on it and responded with some bullshit about needing to pave over the entire Sahara Desert with solar panels to generate 8 times as much grid power as the world's entire all-sources power consumption all in one place, an "ecological disaster of unmitigated proportions!" and "won't someone think about the desert ecosystems?!", as if we would actually put the entire world's power generation in one desert, and here you are again, arguing EROEI.

It's a mental illness. Sane people don't argue this way.

>>8846479
>You dismiss mainstream, thoroughly-discussed options for carbon-free energy infrastructure like seasonal hydrogen storage as if they were some fringe thing,
Haven't heard of it before. It's not mainstream.

>The other day, I beat down your EROEI argument decisively,
lolno

>and you backed off on it and responded with some bullshit about needing to pave over the entire Sahara Desert with solar panels to generate 8 times as much grid power as the world's entire all-sources power consumption all in one place
No, we got sidetracked. And you refused to recognize reality, where energy usage is going to increase drastically. Energy usage is not going to remain at current levels. The rest of world is industrializing, and world population is quickly increasing.

You want to run by me again your "knockdown" arguments for why EROEI is not a problem? I'm going to expect some citations.

>>8846481
Here's a randomly googled source, first one I found:

https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/HydrogenBatteries_GridStorage.pdf

> In our reference scenario, the RHFC system has an ESOIe ratio of 59, more favorable than the best battery technology available today (Li-ion, ESOIe =35).

So, still less than pumped storage, which IIRC is around 200, which means hydrogen also won't work at current tech. I'm not surprised.

If you wish to dispute this, you're the one who needs to find sources.

>>8843966
and yet its still cleaner overall, and it can only get better, and fusion

>>8846486
m8 I wish people at my school thought like you, did a presentation on nuclear, kids were visibly offended I said solar energy and wind energy are retarded wastes of money and not doing shit (obviously I used my nice words)

>>8843970
hmmmmm

>>8846491
I really do wish that solar and wind would work. It would allow us to combat global warming without having to penetrate the dogma of these goddamned greens.

Unfortunately, I believe it's easier to win the political battle compared to changing physics, or getting some radical and unpredictable tech breakthrough. The political battle is still super hard.

>>8846495
honestly, its frustrating, my city is super liberal, and any ideals contrary to their beliefs gets you immediately ostracized. its part of the reason I don't join any of our organizations even though they relate to my profession, full of simple minded fucks with a narrow world view who have never been outside their 25 mile radius of existence

>>8846497
I understand, even though I identify as super liberal. Liberals are generally better than conservatives regarding lack of dogma, but goddamn green dogma and anti-nuclear hysteria is big and strong on the left.

Keep up the good fight, for all of us, and our children.

>>8846500
I was pretty left leaning, but with all the shit that went down, I kinda abandoned ship. Each side has its achilles heels regarding science, I like the fact that most republicans embrace nuclear, but I get the feeling they are doing it to spite the liberals... I hate politics, I just wanna get my degree and tweak nozzles for 80k a year

>>8846508
>I like the fact that most republicans embrace nuclear
Dubious. They're not quite as actively hostile, but I don't think it's fair to say that they're supporters of it either. AFAICT, there's a lot of NIMBY among them too. Neither American party favors nuclear, which means we might all be screwed by climate change.

>>8843961

Fuck off shill. Your NE degree is and will forever be worthless.

>>8846510
True, Republicans are dubious and sneaky, but still; people have their priorities in the wrong place. It's shitty to think about the way our Earth is going, but I've become pretty apathetic. I'm sure something some asshat says in our atrium will make me want to flip a desk, but until then I'm just trying to build better rockets to get the fuck outta here; gn anon, gl to you

>8846526
>gn anon, gl to you
Same.

>>8846525
>I flip burgers hur dur

"Your NE degree is worthless hur dur"

fuck outta here, finish your undergrad before you say speak another word lil pup

>>8846481
>you refused to recognize reality, where energy usage is going to increase drastically
You calculated that solar alone, with low-efficiency panels, could supply eight times the current world power consumption from all sources using well under 10% of the land area currently used for agriculture, and tried to make out that this was not only somehow bad, but a showstopper by putting it all in one place.

If people suggested planting crops to grow food, by your methods of doing a little napkin math about the whole world's needs and then acting shocked that big numbers are involved, it would be completely infeasible.

You don't talk about nuclear power disaster rates by assuming 100 TW is needed and accordingly multiplying historical rates by 300.

>>8846486
>ESOIe ratio of 59
>less than pumped storage... which means hydrogen also won't work at current tech
I haven't seen any argument that pumped storage is at or under the minimum viable ESOIe. The problem with pumped storage is where to put enough of it. Having to spend under 2 percent of your energy-that-needs-storage on the storage system isn't a showstopper.

Remember when you're thinking about EROEI that manufacturing the system doesn't necessarily have the same storage requirements as typical grid power. The manufacturing stuff that's most sensitive to energy costs (like production of solar cells and batteries) can be powered from places with consistent sunlight and run only during the day.

>https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/HydrogenBatteries_GridStorage.pdf
They assumed costly, 47% efficient fuel cells when big turbine generators are cheaper, get higher efficiency, and can be modified from ones built to burn natural gas, so their method is fundamentally fucked. They also assumed steel tanks, and I can't be arsed to read any more of this drivel.

>Here's a randomly googled source, first one I found
>If you wish to dispute this, you're the one who needs to find sources.
MENTALLY ILL

We're going to use solar cells that can be plausibly produced to the scales needed, at reasonable prices. That means polycrystal silicon. That means 15% conversion efficiency and 25 year lifetime.

Energy requirements: 2.172e9 joules / square meter of solar cell, including all accompanying equipment. http://science-and-energy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Weissbach-et-al-2013-Energy-intensities-EROIs-and-energy-payback-times-of-electricity-generating-plants.pdf

Let's consider a system with the requirement of producing a constant 1 W, including for the average day in winter.

Here I obtain a reasonable value for daily average solar radiation for winter.
http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-irradiance.html
I played around with a few cities in Libya, and using auto-tracking orientation, the best value that I get for January is: 4.69 KWh / (day m^2).
= about 195 W / m^2 ... daily average

Just assume 90% conversion efficiency for storage, and assume all produced energy goes through storage.

For Sahara to middle of Europe, that's about 3000 km. HVDC transmission losses are often quoted at 3.5% per 3,000 km, for about 10% losses overall.

How much solar cell do we need to meet the 1 W requirement?
(1 W) = (solar cell area) (195 W / 1 m^2) (15% solar to electricity efficiency) (95% inverter losses) (90% losses from storage) (90% losses from transmission)
Therefore
(solar cell area)
= (1 W) / [ (195 W / 1 m^2) (15% solar to electricity efficiency) (95% inverter losses) (90% losses from storage) (90% losses from transmission) ]
= approx 4.44e-2 m^2

How much energy does that amount of solar cell and associated equipment cost?
(4.44e-2 m^2) (2.172e9 joules / m^2)
= approx 9.64e7 joules

How much useful energy will this produce over its lifetime? Remember, we need to target for winter, and so excess energy in summer doesn't count.
(1 W) (25 years)
= approx 7.89e8 joules

To Be Continued.

EROEI
= (production) / (costs)
= (production) / ((solar cell et al costs) + (storage costs))
= (production) / ((solar cell et al costs) + (production) / ESOI)

Take 200 ESOI
EROI
= (production) / ((solar cell et al costs) + (production) / ESOI)
= (7.89e8 joules) / ((9.64e7 joules) + (7.89e8 joules) / 200)
= 7.86 approx

Take 50 ESOI
EROI
= (production) / ((solar cell et al costs) + (production) / ESOI)
= (7.89e8 joules) / ((9.64e7 joules) + (7.89e8 joules) / 50)
= 7.03 approx

Take 35 ESOI
EROI
= (production) / ((solar cell et al costs) + (production) / ESOI)
= (7.89e8 joules) / ((9.64e7 joules) + (7.89e8 joules) / 35)
= 6.63 approx

It's not looking good. I'm using pretty generous assumptions here. I'm also not even counting the energy costs of the ultra-high voltage inverter stations, which is going to be quite big IIRC. IIRC, you can claim Sahara numbers, but then you have to pay for the UHVDC stations, or you can lose the UHVDC stations and also lose the high Sahara sun numbers. So, the given number is, practically speaking, going to be substantially lower than what I've given here, IIRC.

There's also all of the unsolved problems of using solar cells in the Sahara, i.e. where do you get the water to wash off the cells, or what tricks do you do and how much energy does that cost to keep sand off the cells?

>>8846529
How many nuclear plants have you built this year? Oh yeah, none.

>>8846630
>>8846632
Realistically, a real system will have to overbuild solar by several factors in order to have excess energy on good days in order to be able to supply and also charge the storage in order to have storage for the bad days. Throw another factor of "2x" in the appropriate spot in the calculation.

>>8846640
With that in mind:
Take 35 ESOI
EROI
= (production) / ((solar cell et al costs) + (production) / ESOI)
= (7.89e8 joules) / ((2) (9.64e7 joules) + (7.89e8 joules) / 35)
= 3.66 approx

>>8846643
Of course, all of this is grossly approximate. I should whip up that German paper. I believe that they even published spreadsheets so one can plug-in one's own numbers. Model of transparency.

In particular, I don't like ESOI that much. Storage is often more complicated. The max life of a electrochemical battery depends on the minimum of shelf life and number of charge cycles. ESOI doesn't adequately capture this.

>>8846055
>Chernobyl is the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union

>>8846680
Here. I have some much better calculations that don't use published ESOI numbers, and instead directly use base numbers. I'm going to delete my previous posts to avoid confusion. Posting new stuff in a second.

>>8846735
Welp, won't let me delete. Whatever.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_0aZwNFdJIZW8MG1P-D7NjaY3Hc6DkEe42lSFlcULHk/edit#


We're going to use solar cells that can be plausibly produced to the scales needed, at reasonable prices. That means polycrystal silicon. That means 15% conversion efficiency and 25 year lifetime.

Energy requirements: 2.172e9 joules / square meter of solar cell, including all accompanying equipment. Source: http://science-and-energy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Weissbach-et-al-2013-Energy-intensities-EROIs-and-energy-payback-times-of-electricity-generating-plants.pdf

Let's consider a system with the requirement of producing a constant 1 W, including for the average day in winter.

Here I obtain a reasonable value for daily average solar radiation for winter.
http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-irradiance.html
I played around with a few cities in Libya, and using auto-tracking orientation, the best value that I get for January is: 4.69 KWh / (day m^2).
= about 195 W / m^2 ... daily average

Storage. Lithium Ion.
With 80% depth of discharge: 5000 cycle life. Source:
https://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/09/tesla-powerwall-powerblocks-per-kwh-lifetime-prices-vs-aquion-energy-eos-energy-imergy/
Max shelf lifetime 20 years. Source:
https://insightmaker.com/insight/35986/Energy-transition-to-lower-EROI-sources-v2-5
Energy cost: 1.4 MJ cost / 1 Wh max capacity. Source:
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/05/sustainability-off-grid-solar-power.html
Roundtrip storage efficiency (including inverters) 87%. Source:
??

For Sahara to middle of Europe, that's about 3000 km. HVDC transmission losses are often quoted at 3.5% per 3,000 km, for about 10% losses overall.

How much solar cell do we need to meet the 1 W requirement?
(1 W) = (solar cell area) (195 W / 1 m^2) (15% solar to electricity efficiency) (95% inverter losses) (87% losses from storage) (90% losses from transmission)
Therefore
(solar cell area)
= (1 W) / [ (195 W / 1 m^2) (15% solar to electricity efficiency) (95% inverter losses) (87% losses from storage roundtrip) (90% losses from transmission) ]
= approx 4.60e-2 m^2

How much energy does that amount of solar cell and associated equipment cost?
(4.60e-2 m^2) (2.172e9 joules / m^2)
= approx 9.99e7 joules

How much useful energy will this produce over its lifetime? Remember, we need to target for winter, and so excess energy in summer doesn't count.
(1 W) (25 years)
= approx 7.89e8 joules

The sun only shines for about 1/6 of the day. Therefore, every day, we'll need to store about 5/6 of the total daily production. The lifetime of this storage will be limited by number of charge cycles.
Energy cost of storage for 25 years (same as solar cells):
= (storage reqs) (energy manufacture of a battery / max storage of the battery) (number of replacements)
= [(5/6) (1 day) (1 W)] [(1.4 MJ / 1 Wh) (1 / 80% depth of discharge)] [(25 years) (365 cycles / year) (1 / 5000 cycles)]
= approx 6.39e7 joules

We'll also need a reserve of about 7 days of storage that is used occasionally. The lifetime of this storage will be limited by max shelf life.
Energy cost of storage for 25 years (same as solar cells):
= (storage reqs) (energy manufacture of a battery / max storage of the battery) (number of replacements)
= [(7 days) (1 W)] [(1.4 MJ / 1 Wh) (1 / 80% depth of discharge)] [25 years / 20 years]
= approx 3.68e8 joules

For the sake of argument, just use the bigger number for storage, assuming it covers both uses.

The results:

Unbuffered EROEI
= (production) / (costs)
= (production) / (solar costs)
= (7.89e8 joules) / (9.99e7 joules)
= approx 7.90

Buffered EROEI with 7 days of storage:
= (production) / (costs)
= (production) / ((solar costs) + (battery costs))
= (7.89e8 joules) / ((9.99e7 joules) + (3.68e8 joules))
= approx 1.69

Assume just 1 day of storage:
Storage cost = [(1 days) (1 W)] [(1.4 MJ / 1 Wh) (1 / 80% depth of discharge)] [25 years / 20 years] = approx 5.25e7 joules
Buffered EROEI = (7.89e8 joules) / ((9.99e7 joules) + (5.25e7 joules)) = approx 5.17716535

Assume solar panels are free, and assume 7 days of storage:
Buffered EROEI = (7.89e8 joules) / ((0 joules) + (3.68e8 joules)) = approx 2.14

Note: The cost of solar should be doubled, because overbuilding is necessary in order to provide enough power on the good days to have extra power to charge the storage and also to meet external demand for that day. I didn’t include that here to avoid complaints, and I don’t need to. The storage costs dominate the equations.

>>8846751
PS:
Given these values for the energy costs of a lithium-ion battery, I have no idea how sources calculate such extremely high ESOIs for lithium-ion batteries. Perhaps I'm using an out-of-date source for the energy costs of the battery. That's the most important number. Let me poke around some more and see what other values that I can find.

Ok. I found a source that projects roughly half the energy cost of lithium ion batteries in the future, based on existing learning curves and such. Specifically: 163 J energy cost / 1 J max energy capacity

So, that gives:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_0aZwNFdJIZW8MG1P-D7NjaY3Hc6DkEe42lSFlcULHk/edit#

Unbuffered EROEI = approx 7.90
Buffered EROEI with 7 days of storage = approx 2.56
Buffered EROEI with 1 day of storage = approx 6.47
Assume solar panels are free, buffered EROEI, with 7 days of storage = approx 5.12

Ok. Found an even more optimistic source, putting the critical number at 136.

Unbuffered EROEI = approx 7.90
Buffered EROEI with 7 days of storage = approx 2.79
Buffered EROEI with 1 day of storage = approx 6.67
Assume solar panels are free, buffered EROEI, with 7 days of storage = approx 6.12

>>8846782
Hmm. I calculate ESOI of Lithium ion with these numbers as 35 (approx). I must have made some really obvious and basic errors in my initial go. From many other sources that I recall, this is about as optimistic as I've seen for stated ESOI numbers for lithium ion.

ESOI
= (total energy stored over lifetime) / (energy cost)
= (max energy capacity) (number of charge cycles) / (energy cost)
= (1 J * 80% depth of discharge) (6000) / (136 J)
= 35

>>8846786
I see... basically, the ESOI numbers I've seen are for when the lifetime is limited by charge cycles. However, it's inappropriate to use ESOI to calculate the energy costs to maintain a "spinning reserve" of 7 days of storage. The 7 days of storage is used only intermittently, which means it's limited by shelf lifetime and not charge cycles, which means ESOI is inappropriate to use.

This should be obvious from consulting my math here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_0aZwNFdJIZW8MG1P-D7NjaY3Hc6DkEe42lSFlcULHk/edit#
(also see above).

>>8846145
see >>8844206

>>8845898
Well there you go. If you define safe as there is no chance that an accident on the scale you mentioned happens, then yes: Gen IV reactors will be safe.

And I dont think we should look on the price tag for this too much, as sustainability, cleanliness and resource efficiency should be much higher priorities.

Also just so you know: solar is really only this cheap because its heavily subsidized by governments. Its not actually a clean energy source either if you consider how much emission and waste you face when manufacturing them, compared to how long they last until they need replacement.
Wind is clean to build and operate, but has other disadvantages like fucking up birds routes between their summer and winter habitats although that should probably be considered a much lesser concern than what they offer.

>>8845307
Waste is piss easy to get rid of. You can even recycle it. The US has this nice big storage facility buried under a mountain that was all set to open until environmentalists started screaming about it and got Harry Reid to cockblock it. The only reason there's any problems of storage is because people who know nothing want something to bitch about.

>>8845898
>Large areas
Chernobyl was about as bad as a nuclear accident can get, yet I wouldn't call the exclusion zone "Large" in comparison to the world. I also wouldn't call it "uninhabitable."

>>8843961
You forgot about the con of left over radioactive material being stored in lead boxes until they decompose in millions of years

>>8846055
>One million
The only source I've ever seen for such an absurd claim comes from Greenpeace outright lying. If you're taking Greenpeace at their word, you're either retarded, 12 years old, or both.

>>8846063
Fixt for you.

>>8846915
>"Waste is piss easy to get rid of"
>Dangerous for tens of thousands of years
>Majority of the world has no plan for final storage
>We're already facing problems with waste from less than 50 years ago

>>8846118
More like "Something like that would never happen anywhere other than Japan with its ass backwards ways." The blame rides entirely on TEPCO and the Japanese government for letting them do whatever they wanted.

>>8846254
Not him, but TMI was a great example of containment structures (What Chernobyl lacked) and western reactor designs being safe. Despite legendary incompetence by the reactor operators, the core was contained in the reactor vessel, and all radiation was contained within the containment building. The big worry at the time was a possible explosion of the Hydrogen bubble that formed due to the breakdown of the coating on the fuel rods, which is what happened at Fukushima due to a slightly different design and TEPCO refusing to lose face and ask for help.

>>8846275
>Ships aren't radioactive
Here's one with 8 reactors that operated for over 50 years.

>>8846295
That's already done.

>>8843961
What is the largest detriment to nuclear power (which should be our sole-power source, aside from renewables like wind and solar) is the ignorance of the masses.

They have no understanding of radioactive materials, nor do they understand what becomes of the 'waste' produced by conventional reactors. Isotopes are mined from the ground, concentrated, then returned to the ground when they are no longer usable. From the ground to the ground. The environment isn't being poisoned or damaged, as these materials came from the environment to begin with.

They also believe that disasters are likely and will be large-scale like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Reactors nowadays are made to be fail-safe. The control rods will fall into the reactor in the event of failure. The Chernobyl reactor, the one people always love to talk about, was in a country with little in the way of safety. This reactor was lacking the proper safety precautions and procedures necessary to ensure the prevention of large-scale disaster. The Fukushima reactor was failure on the part of poor engineering in every sense of the phrase. The reactor was constructed in an earthquake prone area, next to the ocean, with emergency generators placed in the basement. The tsunami damaged the reactors and flooded the generators, making it one big cascading clusterfuck of problems. Now, that is not to say that nuclear power is free of incidents, because like any man-made system, it is prone to failure in some capacity. The idea is eliminating the possibility of wide-spread/large-scale disaster, which is entirely how modern-day reactors are made.

Strictly speaking, nuclear reactors have had, and will continue to have, far less environmental/global impact than the burning of fossil fuels.

>>8847017
what's wrong with offshore Natural gas mining?

>>8844167
stoping fish from reaching their spawn grounds

in 1850 the river in my town had the first weir on the route from the ocean, in the sumer hundreds Allis shad´s gathered every summer.
(They live in the ocen and get their offspring in rivers) after they reproduced farmers colected them and threw them on the fields as fertilizer.

but now their path is blocked by hundreds of hydro plants so they cant reach their spawninggrounds and are nearly extinct.

>>8846153
Are you a nuclear scientist?

>>8846417
Feels bad

>>8846525
OP here. I'm just asking a curious question about nuclear. I'm not even familiar with this board.

I have a idea for solar energy but it requires deep undersea cables and globalism
interlinked global solar panels for energy 24/7

>>8847490
Sorry, not at all. Just an interested layman.

>>8843961
Seriously, who could've hate these?

>>8847017
??
How does "the masses" force politicians to secretly block nuclear power plants via regulatory/legal burdens

>>8843961
NUCLEAR ENERGY IS RASCIST YOU FUCKING NAZIS DIE DIE DIE!!!!

>>8849522
This. Fuck you OP you white supremacist.

>>8846492

this

>>8846055

>It was a major contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union.

as someone from a post-communist republic, the contribution had to do with government coverup being yet another insult to the already oppressed population, not necessarily any consequence of the Chernobyl itself

Unless they start mass producing nuclear plants, they'll remain prohibitively expensive.

Right now nuclear is only built for political reasons. They make no economic sense. See Hinkley Point.

>nuclear is an old dead technology, nevermind that it could get better
>solar is getting better guys just hold up

the second point is true but the first is silly.
it's almost entirely a perception issue, and because of fukushima boiling water reactor perception probably won't ever reverse.
Really is time to shift into liquid fuel reactors, they have better PR

>>8850210
>as someone from a post-communist republic, the contribution had to do with government coverup being yet another insult to the already oppressed population, not necessarily any consequence of the Chernobyl itself
Just because you lived there doesn't mean you understood everything that happened and why.

The Soviet Union crumbled economically and the crushing expense of the Chernobyl containment and cleanup was a significant contributing factor.

>>8850364
>liquid fuel reactors, they have better PR
Only in a nerdy enthusiast community. Neither the general public nor people who have seriously studied them see a major difference to molten salt reactors over other technology options.

The fundamental issues with nuclear power are never going to go away:
1) any access to nuclear materials and technology makes it far easier and cheaper to produce nuclear weapons,
2) any fission reactor is going to produce lots of extremely nasty radioisotopes which will be around far longer than a human lifetime.

Anyone who says they think any kind of nuclear power is safe and proliferation-proof isn't saying they trust the science or engineering, but that they trust government and corporate bureaucracies and work crews to never fuck up or try and make weapons.

Nuclear power isn't compatible with human nature, which is inherently sloppy and often malicious. We need to base our society on forgiving technologies which untrustworthy people can be allowed access to.

>>8850526
something-proof is an impossible goal and not worth pursuing, diminishing returns and all that
something-resistant it.
your two points are basically just proliferation and waste storage. For proliferation, the sort of "main" liquid fuel reactor technology to go for is a two fluid reactor which produces material that could potentially be used to make a weapon but it's a VICIOUS gamma emitter and would kill your bomb assemblers right quick in any fissionable concentrations.

as for waste, you're right, a two fluid reactor makes some NASTY products. like seriously bad shit, but it doesn't make much of it at all, and because it's so nasty it tumbles down the decay chain fast as fuck. boiling water reactors make kinda dangerous stuff that's dangerous for a fucklong time, this stuff is horrible but only for a few years and is back to background levels within a century or two, and designing low-volume waste storage for two centuries is actually rather easy

The real problems with liquid fuel right now is designing machinery and containment for fucking neutron-rich fluorine salt, like the worst kind of hell lava you can imagine.


>Nuclear power isn't compatible with human nature, which is inherently sloppy and often malicious. We need to base our society on forgiving technologies which untrustworthy people can be allowed access to.
that's a fancy brand soap box you just leaped onto at the last second there bub

>>8850550
>For proliferation, the sort of "main" liquid fuel reactor technology to go for is a two fluid reactor which produces material that could potentially be used to make a weapon but it's a VICIOUS gamma emitter and would kill your bomb assemblers right quick in any fissionable concentrations.
Please stop spreading this ridiculous lie. LFTRs are a good deal less proliferation-resistant than conventional light-water reactors.

Bomb assemblers risking cancer won't stop anyone serious about building nuclear weapons, and anyway, this is the 21st century. You don't need hands-on "bomb assemblers", there are many workable options for remote manipulation. Besides, separating out a modest amount of isotopic contamination from a concentrated useful isotope is not remotely the same challenge as concentrating a small amount of useful isotope hidden in a useless one. It's lab-scale vs. industrial scale. For that matter, any concentrated fission fuel, regardless of contamination, makes it easy to build a small isotope-production reactor and make plutonium.

>it doesn't make much of it at all, and because it's so nasty it tumbles down the decay chain fast as fuck
Some fission fragments have half-lives of over 200,000 years, and so does U-234.

>>Nuclear power isn't compatible with human nature, which is inherently sloppy and often malicious. We need to base our society on forgiving technologies which untrustworthy people can be allowed access to.
>that's a fancy brand soap box you just leaped onto at the last second there bub
That's the simple reality.

The case for nuclear depends on there being no serious fuck-ups. Only a few lunatic-fringe fanatics are okay with nuclear power ever resulting in an area needing to be evacuated and abandoned or a rogue state or terrorist group getting nuclear weapons. No one can provide realistic guarantees that these will never happen, so nuclear power acceptance has always depended on deceiving the public.

>>8850705
if your objections are based largely around "if done wrong, there will be serious health risk and loss of life", that applies to absolutely any method of generating energy.
solar panels and wind farms require mining plenty of rare earths, and a lot of those come from china which has a non existent environmental protection agency, so all the waste products of processing go into rivers and dramatically increase the cancer risk of anyone downstream (which is to say, a shitload of people). We don't care because these people are essentially invisible.

could china be more serious about cleaning up its mining act and stop this? of course. Can it be 100% eliminated? of course not. Can the same logic of "if it was better it would be less bad" be applied to nuclear energy? Of course, but you're demanding perfection unevenly

nuclear energy's downsides are very dramatic to think about. The downsides of everything else are just as real, but more subtle and distributed and vague, not as exciting.

To put things in perspective; Fukushima is about the worst case scenario for a 70 year old reactor. However you have to remember that it is SEVENTY years old. Newer reactor designs are not nearly so vulnerable so a worst case scenario for them is bad but not even close. Also the fukushima area has been essentially safe to live in for about two years now since everything's decayed down pretty far, it's just nobody wants to because muh radiashun.

>>8850729
>if your objections are based largely around "if done wrong, there will be serious health risk and loss of life", that applies to absolutely any method of generating energy.
Stopped reading there.

It's not "if done wrong, to an arbitrarily horrible degree, there will be some kind of bad effect", it's "if not done perfectly, unspeakably horrible things happen".

That's where nuclear differs from all the other options: it's unforgiving. You're not going to screw up building or maintaining a windmill and have to abandon a nearby city for generations. You're not going to send Iran a shipload of solar panels and ten years later terrorists blow up New York with bits of solar panels.

>solar panels and wind farms require mining plenty of rare earths
Okay, I started reading a little more, but then I stopped again. This is just blatantly false. Neither solar panels nor wind turbines require rare earth elements, or other scarce or hard-to-extract materials. They might be able to use them, but both of them can be produced entirely from readily-available, common stuff.

You shouldn't go around advocating stuff you don't understand, and arguing against stuff you don't understand.

>>8850729
>Fukushima is about the worst case scenario
God damn it, I let my eyes wander over your post again.

Fukushima was not nearly the worst case scenario. The reactor failure itself was far from the worst possible, the wind blew most of the radioisotopes out to sea, and Japan executed a highly competent evacuation and exclusion program.

Fukushima was about the gentlest warning we could have hoped to receive about the dangers of continuing to use nuclear power.

>>8850763
you seem to be ignoring reactor safety systems exist, which for a seventy year old reactor could have been much better. There is such a thing as a worst case scenario given the design and exterior factors like a once in 5000 year tsunami.

I'll give you wind patterns did help but losing ALL cooling for hours is about as bad as it gets, and an evacuation and exclusion program are intrinsically part of reactor safety, you can't just pretend as if it's some nebulous completely separate factor which won't be present for any other reactor out there.

You're going directly for the worst possible case and ignoring anything else, which is great for clickbait articles but not productive for solving energy problems. Even the NRC which is about as neurotic about reactor safety as you can get does reach a point where they say "ok, that's not a reasonable concern"

>>8850526
>We should purposely gimp ourselves and use junk because some people are assholes

>>8850791
>you seem to be ignoring reactor safety systems exist
You seem to be pretending they always act like they're supposed to. Something that was supposed to work didn't, and we got the Fukushima disaster. Other things could have failed, instead or in addition to, causing a far more serious disaster.

This is pure spin, as intellectually dishonest as it gets. Fukushima was nowhere near the worst case. There could have been a much larger release of radioisotopes, blown down the length of Japan's densely-populated coast in the midst of post-tsunami chaos.

>You're going directly for the worst possible case and ignoring anything else
YOU are the one who called it a "worst case scenario", I'm just pointing out that it was not even close to being that.

>>8850882
If you want to deny nuclear power to most of the world, then don't argue that it's the solution to the world's energy needs.

>>8850914
>You seem to be pretending they always act like they're supposed to. Something that was supposed to work didn't, and we got the Fukushima disaster. Other things could have failed, instead or in addition to, causing a far more serious disaster.

the other end of the spectrum, which you're sitting on, is "if everything fails and nothing works ever, how bad can it be?" which of course is very bad. I really fail to see how much else could have gone wrong given the design of the reactor, complete coolant failure is very very bad for a reactor of that era and due to both the reactor's design and hard work by the operators, it didn't get worse. A much more modern reactor would not have all its generators in a basement, and would have more passive safety and more failsafes. However modern reactors are buried under litigation and political pressure from all sides which drives costs way up and by doing so gives even more fuel to those opposing nuclear energy, "it's too expensive and never goes according to budget"

in the end you have a philosophical opposition to it which i don't think anyone could ever remove from you, since you'll just keep moving the goalposts and say "well what if" until eventually you're talking about what if a meteor hits the reactor vessel head on

>>8851061
>A much more modern reactor would not have all its generators in a basement, and would have more passive safety and more failsafes.
...and that tells us nothing about what its safety will actually be. Both of the big nuclear power disasters were caused by things meant to improve safety and prevent meltdowns: Chernobyl was caused by a botched test of an emergency shutdown system, and in Fukushima, the reactors were shut down because there was an earthquake, making the system rely on the backup power for cooling, which failed because of flooding related to the earthquake.

Every additional safety system is a complication of the system and an excuse for people to shrug over problems elsewhere. You see this all the time in other activities: multiple layers of safeguards mean the people responsible for each layer do a half-assed job, expecting at least one of the other layers to work. And complicated systems turn out to have unanticipated emergent properties with lead to unexpected failure modes.

>you'll just keep moving the goalposts
I haven't moved any goalposts, you chimp, you're the one who keeps changing your argument as I point out how it's inconsistent with reality or offering a value proposition that's unacceptable to most people. You just don't actually succeed in making it consistent with reality or acceptable, instead you edge a little closer to what's right, act like it's basically the same as what you said before, and try some "the truth is in the middle" bullshit.

Like when you claimed Fukushima was a "worst case scenario", I explained how it was not, and you accused me of focusing unreasonably on worst case scenarios. You're not interested in an honest discussion, you're just throwing everything and seeing what sticks.

>>8851252
honestly, it doesn't really matter in the end. Folks like you are the ones in power making decisions and writing on the topic, so nuclear will never get a fair shake and solar and wind will be the defacto standard even with their problems. but might as well point out some things

>Chernobyl was caused by a botched test of an emergency shutdown system
so, here's where i know you're very uninformed about reactor design, reactor safety systems, soviet era nuclear engineering, and soviet area nuclear "politics". Chernobyl was a worse case scenario for that particular reactor design, which itself was about as bad a design as you could get. The safety test was botched on top of a critical flaw in the reactor's design (one of many) being hidden from the operators due to soviet era bullshit on top of layers and layers of shit going wrong and fucking up.
You're boiling it down to "a botched safety test and thus more safety systems = more bad things happen", which is about as gross an oversimplification as "quantum mechanics is weird dude lol"

>The reactors were shut down because there was an earthquake, making the system rely on the backup power for cooling, which failed because of flooding related to the earthquake.
So the alternative is to keep the reactors running? Again this was a confluence of factors that are unique to the design and age of the reactor. None of that shit would fly on a newly built reactor but we're not getting any of those ever again thank to people like you.

>you're the one who keeps changing your argument as I point out how it's inconsistent with reality or offering a value proposition that's unacceptable to most people.
I think the problem is you're operating in a reality that doesn't actually exist and i'm trying to bring you back to the real one where engineers design for things and newer things are generally better than older things, also a gross oversimplifcation but yeah.

>>8851293
there's lots of great information on both chernobyl and fukushima, a number of good documentaries on chernobyl in particular
this one has good detail on the incident itself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eEpaSLi5WQ
and this one touches a lot on the atmosphere of paranoia and ass kissing and secrecy that was the soviet union at the time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njTQaUCk4KY

perhaps a general rule is that if you're making some kind of generalization about nuclear power as a whole, you're missing important information about something. There are so many factors and ways to do it right (and wrong, but nowadays its god damn hard to do it wrong because of regulation)

>>8851293
>You're boiling it down to "a botched safety test and thus more safety systems = more bad things happen", which is about as gross an oversimplification as "quantum mechanics is weird dude lol"
That's a lot of words to say, "What you said was totally correct, but I don't like how short it was and how it bears on my position."

My point stand that the two biggest nuclear disasters were caused by safety measures. You need to do a detailed critical analysis of the system to be able to say whether a safety measure will actually make it safer, and even then you can be surprised. You can't just believe what you read in the marketing brochure.

>>The reactors were shut down because there was an earthquake, making the system rely on the backup power for cooling, which failed because of flooding related to the earthquake.
>So the alternative is to keep the reactors running?
If they hadn't shut the reactors down just in case something bad might happen because of the earthquake, there wouldn't have been a meltdown. So yeah, maintaining normal operation was an alternative to shutting down the main source of power for the cooling system.

>>8851304
>the atmosphere of paranoia and ass kissing and secrecy
You mean like there is in the nuclear industry today about how everyone's against them for no reason, and it's totally unfair, and they should just lift all of these regulations and shut all the NIMBYs up?

Or how about in the shuttle program? This stuff happens in America with politically-vulnerable endeavors. People hide problems to prevent giving ammunition to opponents. You can't know what's being hidden until it bites you.

>>8846920
We haven't had a meltdown hit groundwater yet. That might fuck things up even more than Chernobyl.

>>8851400
i want to stop buy you keep bringing up shit
>My point stand that the two biggest nuclear disasters were caused by safety measures. You need to do a detailed critical analysis of the system to be able to say whether a safety measure will actually make it safer, and even then you can be surprised. You can't just believe what you read in the marketing brochure.

no, the two biggest nuclear disasters were caused by many conflating factors, failures of some systems and success of others, design problems and people causing problems and people fixing problems and on and on. It's really unfair to judge the building of a new nuclear reactor based on the madness of the soviet union and reactor design standards from 70 years ago, essentially. I'm sure a reactor build today could experience something bad happen to it, but they're far more resilient than anything that came before.

>If they hadn't shut the reactors down just in case something bad might happen because of the earthquake, there wouldn't have been a meltdown. So yeah, maintaining normal operation was an alternative to shutting down the main source of power for the cooling system.
You really, really, REALLY don't want a running reactor during an earthquake for a shitload of reasons. You shut that bitch down the second seismographs say it's on the way. Normally this is fine, backup generators keep it cooled during the most dangerous parts of the shutdown. With fukushima several things went wrong in succession for it to get worse.

>You mean like there is in the nuclear industry today about how everyone's against them for no reason, and it's totally unfair, and they should just lift all of these regulations and shut all the NIMBYs up?
oh god no, the modern nuclear industry's safety is great. As much as i belly ache about the NRC they run a fucking tight ship. My only wish is that they be a little more willing to permit testing on new reactor designs instead of "if it aint BWR it aint shit"

>>8851498
>I'm sure a reactor build today could experience something bad happen to it, but they're far more resilient than anything that came before.
and before you jump on this; Yes, there are scenarios you could dream up that are catastrophic, but being so removed from the industry you really have no idea what's in place to prevent that. Sidestepping all of those prevention with "well what if" is silly.

Do you apply that reasoning to everything else or just nuclear energy?
How do you feel about disease research? what if we make a horrible virus by accident and its accidentally gets out?
How do you feel about <potentially very bad thing>? How many things do you need to ignore or handwave in order for that to happen? Probably a lot.
Alternatively you're focusing this philosophy on nuclear energy alone because the hypothetical worst case is very dramatic

>>8846024
>we've never tried this reactor type, despite the overwhelming evidence that it's amazing
>WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU WANT TO TRY IT?? IT'S NEVER BEEN TRIED I JUST TOLD YOU
nice

>>8851252
Holy goddamn you're stupid.

Chernobyl was a perfect storm of Russian incompetence and awful reactor design. The test would have gone just fine if the operators didn't intentionally disable safety systems and manually draw most of the rods out of the core. Besides that, it would have been averted if it didn't have a positive void coefficient, which is something western reactors don't have. It also didn't have a containment structure, because the reactor was so cheap that a containment structure cost half as much as building the reactor itself, and the USSR didn't care. If you bothered to read more than popsci articles about how scary chernobyl was, you'd understand what an unlikely and unique series of decisions led to it, and why it would have never happened in the west.

Fukushima was due to TEPCO halfassing everything, promising to fix it, then never bothering to because they knew they wouldn't get in trouble. If they had bothered to listen to their engineers, the plant would be producing power today. Every additional safety system is a system that can stop a disaster from happening if other safety systems don't work.

>>8851400
The two most severe nuclear accidents were caused by human error. Had the operators of Chernobyl followed procedure and not second guessed the safety systems, it would have been fine. Had TEPCO bothered to install their systems like their engineers and the government told them to, Fukushima would have been fine. Instead, people decided that politics and saving face were more important than doing things the right way, and the safety systems were useless as a result.

>>8843987
Socialist France triumphs again.

>>8851498
>i want to stop but you won't let me have the last word after saying I'm right and you're wrong and silly

>no, the two biggest nuclear disasters were caused by many conflating factors
Yeah, you don't know what "conflating" means, so don't use it.

Of course there were other problems, but in each case there was an action taken with the intention of improving safety in the causal chain. In both cases, without that safety measure, the disaster wouldn't have happened.

>You really, really, REALLY don't want a running reactor during an earthquake for a shitload of reasons.
...most of which also apply to a recently-shut-down reactor. If you really, really, REALLY don't want a running reactor during an earthquake, you should not build a reactor where an earthquake can ever, ever, EVER happen.

See now, you're here defending a design/operation choice, a safety measure, which caused the second biggest nuclear power disaster ever. Shouldn't that give you pause about your assumption that other safety measures you figure will make new reactor designs much safer, might cause some problems you haven't thought of?

Have you thought about where passive safety comes from? Isn't it implicit that there's a larger surface area exposed to possible corrosion and coolant loss? Doesn't that present new failure modes, or larger risks of old ones?

You like to harp on the Fukushima reactor being of a 70-year-old type, but modern judgement was applied to keeping it running right up until 2011. Was that good judgement? It's the same quality of judgement that's been applied to the design of new power plants.

>>8851589
>Had TEPCO bothered to install their systems like their engineers and the government told them to, Fukushima would have been fine.
TEPCO wasn't ordered to install anything else by the government, and in a big project there are always engineers suggesting more safety precautions.

If you only read these after-disaster analyses, where the focus is on the specific thing that happened, you get this "they knew all along!" impression, but I guarantee you there are always many such things, where someone thinks something isn't safe enough and should be done differently, but other people disagreed and it went ahead as it was anyway.

Like in this thread, the AP1000 is being held up as a modern, safe design, but look at all the "they knew all along!" there will be if one does have a disaster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#Design_disputes

They, of course, haven't only changed things to increase safety. They also changed things to reduce cost. If you can't keep the cost down, there's no value proposition for the customer, so if you put money into safety somewhere, you have to take it out somewhere else. You can't just throw unlimited money at every possible issue, you have to compromise on safety somewhere, and there'll usually be a record of where you did it.

>>8850235
>Right now nuclear is only built for political reasons. They make no economic sense. See Hinkley Point.

And some places do "mass produce" them, and they make economic sense, such as South Korea and India, and also France at one point recently.
http://euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

Also, it's not about "mass production". It's about overbearing and needless regulations that happened because of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

>>8850526
>2) any fission reactor is going to produce lots of extremely nasty radioisotopes which will be around far longer than a human lifetime.
Complete non-issue. This is a political fiction. Yes, it's technically true, but it's also true that no one should care, because it's not going to hurt anyone ever.

>1) any access to nuclear materials and technology makes it far easier and cheaper to produce nuclear weapons,
Countries like North Korea will still continue to build nuclear weapons even if the rest of the world stops using nuclear power. We need a diplomatic or military solution no matter if the rest of the world stops using nuclear power.

Compared to the risks of global warming, I think that these risks can be mitigated and handled sufficiently well.

>>8850705
>The case for nuclear depends on there being no serious fuck-ups. Only a few lunatic-fringe fanatics are okay with nuclear power ever resulting in an area needing to be evacuated and abandoned or a rogue state or terrorist group getting nuclear weapons. No one can provide realistic guarantees that these will never happen, so nuclear power acceptance has always depended on deceiving the public.
The risk scenarios for different nuclear reactors are simply drastically different, and you're in the wrong here to keep conflating Chernobyl with a reactor like ThorCon concerning possible accidents and negative consequences of those accidents.

>>8850754
>"if not done perfectly, unspeakably horrible things happen".
And what is this "unspeakably horrible thing" for ThorCon?

I'll grant that weapons are something that we should talk about in more detail, but other accident scenarios are not. The physics and chemistry is different, and accidents like Chernobyl are more or less physically not possible with a ThorCon plant.

>>8851693
Look who those disputes came from. Hardly reliable sources. The best cost reduction in nuclear is designing it and building it right from the get-go, and you're a moron if you're seriously implying that TEPCO wasn't ignoring glaring issues with Fukushima.

>>8846152
Chernobyl exclusion zone became the most nature friendly reserve in europe, all kinds of wild life are thrieving there
All because people are afraid to go near it

Just gonna throw this out there. U.S. Navy Nuclear Propulsion has been running PWR's for more than half a decade with ZERO incidents.

>>8851758
>Look who those disputes came from. Hardly reliable sources.
I can tell you didn't actually read where they came from:
>[John] Ma, a [senior structural engineer] member of the NRC since it was formed in 1974, filed the first "non-concurrence" dissent of his career after the NRC granted the design approval.

Go back and try again.

>>8851739
>also France
France's nuclear power didn't make economic sense and they're regretting it. The electric bills are only cheap because they're mainly paying for it with taxes. They're also coming up to that painful time when the benefits stop for power plants but the costs just keep on coming: decommissioning and waste management.

>EDF is substantially owned by the French government
>EDF remains heavily in debt
>In 2016, the European Commission assessed that France's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded

>>8851820
Waste management is a non-issue, and you're a liar or a fool for pretending that it is.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

As for the claim that you can make up that drastic difference in price via taxes, I'm going to need some citations which explain wtf you're talking about, in concrete detail.

>>8851820
http://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-and-the-high-price-of-european-electricity/

>>8851820
Thus far, the only sites that I can find with googling are unsourced blog posts and the like which say that France nuclear prices do not include:
- proper decommissioning costs
- proper waste disposal costs
- proper costs for the harms from inevitable nuclear power plant accidents

Is this going to be your position? Don't give me this "but taxes" when you're really arguing about something very different.

Reminds me of the liar and fraud Mark Jacobson, who repeatedly touts his 100% renewable energy plan as cheaper than the current situation. IIRC, it's actually 5 times higher money costs, according to his own admissions in the actual paper, but he says that it's cheaper by including externalities of global warming.

Look, I have nothing against putting money costs to externalities and then comparing total risks in terms of money costs, but you have to be up front about it - otherwise you're a dishonest shit. People hear you and Mark Jacobson say "it's cheaper", and practically none of them hear that and understand it to include "5 times more money costs", and practically none of them understand that it's only "cheaper" if you put money costs on externalities. They understand it in the usual sense, and this sort of rhetoric is just dishonest.

>>8851797
>U.S. Navy Nuclear Propulsion has been running PWR's for more than half a decade with ZERO incidents.

>running PWR's in secret hidden underwater locations (and a handful of surface vessels)
>ZERO incidents made public
You don't say...

Anyway, the U.S. Navy runs under 100 small reactors, under little pressure to keep costs down, and with the power of military discipline over technicians. There's over 400 much larger, more cost-sensitive power-plant reactors running worldwide right now, and there have only been a few major failures of them.

>more than half a decade
heh

>>8851865
And as for the particular facts:
Waste disposal is a non-issue. It's a political myth, sustained by misinformation and lies concerning the dangers of radiation, especially nonsense analysis based on LNT.

I'd betting that France has accurate estimates for decommissions costs, and that naysayers are again being flatly ridiculous by requiring asinine safety standards because of fictitious dangers.

I'll give some respect to the dangers of a nuclear power plant accident. Fukushima and Chernobyl were not "nothing". This is why we should be building prototypes for safer reactor tech, like IFR and MSRs, especially ThorCon. However, in the same breadth, the dangers are again exaggerated, based on the nonsense harm model LNT.

Even when one puts reasonable money costs on the external harms of nuclear, and also solar and wind, I'm pretty well convinced that it's going to come out better than solar and wind.

>>8846148
>because with proper procedures and good attention from the government these disasters would never occur
Proper procedures and good attention from the government is always the norm these days.

Yes, you can always count on the finer echelons of bureaucracy, single-issue politics, and vested interests to take the utmost care and dedicate the utmost diligence when it comes to proper procedures and good attention.

A disaster caused by ignorance or partisan favor. It's never happened before. Not even once. And it'll never happen!

>>8851926
But back in reality where those things do happen, nuclear is still the safest form of energy generation by far, according to the historical record. Quite clean too, especially if you know something about how solar cells are made.

I watched this docu on nuclear power the other day. It's pretty good.
https://youtu.be/QiNRdmaJkrM

>>8851929
Believe me, I'm following the thread here. I know how the various solar cells operate, and the various systems involved with the cells regarding power generation and power storage. But in reality, where people fuck up, and people are more content with burning coal because it's "cheaper and easier" than investing and constructing what would even go for a modest, fairly modern-day nuclear power plant site, barring even the possibility of staffing it with moderately competent and knowledgeable personnel... I wouldn't hold my breath.

It's going to be an uphill battle.

>>8851936
Thankfully, nuclear is cost competitive with coal with a proper regulatory environment, (see elsethread for citations), and so there's one less problem that we have to deal with.

The battle is almost entirely political, and our enemy is almost entirely the environmentalists. The oil interests will be annoying, but we can win over their base by giving the ability to be energy independent and not have to fuck around in the middle east any more.

>>8851832
>As for the claim that you can make up that drastic difference in price via taxes
What drastic price difference? France is middle-of-the-pack for electricity prices among European countries. Its primarily-state-owned utility, EDF (which runs all the nuclear power plants), is also 260 billion euros in debt before factoring in the 50 billion euros it's underfunded for decommissioning.

France has always played shell games around its subsidies to avoid embarassment over its huge investment in nuclear. Currently, France doesn't "subsidize nuclear", it subsidizes and "invests in" EDF (ostensibly a private corporation now, though 85% owned by the French government), which does mostly nuclear and works mostly in France, but does a little of other things and elsewhere. For instance, in 2013, it gave them 5 billion euros "for renewables and the poor". This year, it gave them 3 billion euros as a "stock purchase". In 2015, the EU ordered EDF to pay back a 1.4 billion euro subsidy disguised by the French government as a tax deduction.

They've deliberately obscured the cost of nuclear power, because they committed themselves to it in such a big way. This is fairly typical of nuclear power, since the up-front investment is so huge and there's always government involvement.

To give an example of the economics of nuclear under the French model, EDF demanded huge UK government subsidies and guaranteed consumption at much higher than the going rate to build new power plants in Britain. There was no confidence that they could compete and be profitable.

>>8851874
>Waste disposal is a non-issue. It's a political myth, sustained by misinformation and lies concerning the dangers of radiation
I see. Paranoid schizophrenic. I wasn't sure exactly what kind of mentally ill shut-in you were before.

>>8851968
>France is middle-of-the-pack for electricity prices among European countries.

Liar.

http://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-and-the-high-price-of-european-electricity/

>>8851976
BTFO already. Enough of your name-calling in place of arguments.

Again:
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

>>8851968
5 billion Euros in a single year is less than 1 Euro-cent per KWh end cost. France electricity prices are around 17 euro cent per KWh, and Germany's are around 30 euro cent per KWh. Not even close.

Your unstated numbers for decommissioning costs are almost certainly bullshit, based on your other demonstrated of extreme irrational radiophobia.

>>8851968
>There was no confidence that they could compete and be profitable.
Not under English regulations, of course. Nuclear isn't competitive in most of the west because of needless and stifling regulations. You won't get any argument from me here. Of course, to the extent that it's true, it's not what you meant to communicate, which means this is just another example of dishonesty.

Is there anything that you say anymore which is not a lie?

>>8844151
What is Bane doing here?

>>8843961
>Is nuclear energy feasible?
what's more feasible is the production of ever efficient means of production and technology, there's no point in increasing energy input or replacing the whole system by a "cleaner alternative" if the power efficiency numbers is over the floor.
Transporting energy has always been the biggest challenge when it comes to the deficiency of a system and when putting that into scale of a city, a state or a country the number grows ridiculously high.
Sure fission is fucking amazing, but what's the point of it all if a big chunk of it will be wasted. The research for better efficiency in technology should be the biggest concern, not how much more energy can we produce or how can we replace the existing means of getting it.

>>8852029
This is asinine. It's one of the standard Green Myths: diversion.

I would be amazed if you could get 50% reduction in energy requirements, globally, through efficiency. I would be utterly flabbergasted if you managed 80%, e.g. 1/5.

Total energy demand is going up, and fast, because of increased world population, and because of increased industrialization among existing populations. This is easily going to dwarf even a 80% efficiency gains (which is ludicrously high).

People don't appreciate the scope of the problem. Currently, worldwide electricity production is around 2.5 TW. To solve for global warming, we need to aim for something much much higher, at least 30 TW, possibly as high as 100 TW, before the end of the century. This is the size needed if we're serious about solving global warming. This is what it means to raise everyone to an industrial standard of living, and to move all non-electricity fossil fuel usage to electricity, and to solve liquid fuel transport problems. Thus, it's easy to foresee energy needs of 3 KW electric per person, with a population total of 10 billion people, gives 30 TW.

Even then, this might not be enough, and we might need negative carbon emissions, which is going to require a metric shitton of energy.

Please, do energy efficiency improvements, but it doesn't matter one iota for the discussion here of the need for nuclear power.

>>8851995
>http://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-and-the-high-price-of-european-electricity/
anti-renewables blog
Also pic related from your biased blog source: "Fra" in the middle. Middle of the pack. Just like I said.

>http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
nuclear marketing materials

What it says:
>Keep the spent fuel in dry casks for say 100 years. At this point, the fission product decay
will be down by another factor of ten.
>Transfer the 100 year old fuel to fewer, larger dry casks
>Repeat for 2 or 3 cycles.
>At this point, it will be quite cheap to separate the non-radioactive uranium from the rest of the fuel by fluoride volatility, the same process that was used in enriching the fuel. This will reduce the amount of waste be more than a factor of twenty.
>separate the valuable TRU from the decayed fission products. The fission products — some of which, such as platinum, are also valuable — could then be put in a Low Level Waste (Class C) landfill.
>We are now down to 10 tons of TRU. 10 tons of TRU is a cube about 2.6 ft on a side. This cube could be dumped down a borehole.
>separate out the extremely valuable isotopes such as 238Pu and 241Am, and then burn the rest in a fast reactor
note: making fresh waste
>The material in Figure 1 is now down to a cube about 1 ft on a side. This material, dangerous only if ingested or inhaled, can go to deep geologic disposal

A non-issue? That's a plan calling for a complex five-hundred-year active waste disposal program, with a fresh new waste-disposal problem left at the end! Five hundred years with no fuck-ups or sabotage, then start all over again!

So, your hand-picked, biased sources don't support your position at all. Were you just won over by them calling this ridiculous half-millennium plan "obvious and cheap" at the end?

Are you getting treatment? You know, there are things they can do for that, sometimes it's enough that you can live a normal life.

>>8852029
>what's more feasible is the production of ever efficient means of production and technology
Energy efficiency is subject both to the laws of physics and to the law of diminishing returns, not to mention Jevon's Paradox.
That's not to say that I don't approve of efforts to make things more energy-efficient, but they can only accomplish so much

>>8852016
>France electricity prices are around 17 euro cent per KWh, and Germany's are around 30 euro cent per KWh. Not even close.
Germany's not a relevant example. Their government delights in hurting its people to prove how liberal and progressive they are. They overinvested ridiculously in solar and wind long before it made any sense, as a virtue-signalling exercise.

>>8852054
a system in which power is used doesn't limit itself inside the machine or physical phenomenon it takes advantage of, technological efficiency refers to everything that reduces the amount of energy required to make a process, not to make a machine work, machines are not made just for the sole propuse of being turn on and consume energy, they are made to facilitate human activities.
to be efficient is to both make machines ever more efficient in their job and to make human activities less energy consuming.
I think this kind of research is way more important to our future selves than any other current stuff we're entertaining us now with because it not only affects on reducing our footprint in the atmosphere but also in land usage, nature and resources.
There's just enough fossil fuel or uranium to dig up from the earth crust.

>>8851870
>Runs under 100 small reactors
Funny how you omit all the other reactors they've decomissioned over the years.
>Little pressure to keep costs down
Tell that to the seawolf program
>Power of military discipline
Training makes things run better, who knew.

>>8851870
>and with the power of military discipline over technicians.

TOP KEK. Navy fag here. you don't know what you are talking about. those """"disciplined technicians""""" are just a bunch of twenty something drunks that cut corners at every opportunity and gun deck log books. the reactors are built so retards can't fuck them up.

>>8852052
What's a "fuckup" for nuclear waste look like? One of those casks falls over!?

Also, I'm not going to engage with you if you don't have better responses than "it's a biased source". All sources are biased. It's commonly said that reality has a liberal bias, and I'll also say here that it should be said that reality has a pro-nuclear and anti-solar wind bias. I like sources that are biased in favor of the truth.

Put up for shut up.

> Were you just won over by them calling this ridiculous half-millennium plan "obvious and cheap" at the end?

For the sake of argument: The amount of fuel waste that is produced to power the entire city of Paris for a decade will fit in my living room. The amounts are extremely small, and that's why it both easy and cheap.

The reason why it's safe is that there is no vector to get that stuff airborne. There's no more decay heat. There's no high pressure water. The worst kind of accident imaginable is a run-of-the-mill heavy-equipment error where someone loses a hand.

>>8852063
Irrelevant to the point being made. Someone cited hidden taxes and subsidies for France, and pretended that this was a big deal. It's obvious that this anon could not do math, as i just demonstrated.

>>8851874
>Waste disposal is a non-issue.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#Cleanup_under_superfund

yeah. non issue.

>>8852251
You realize that was from an entirely separate chemical and nuclear process, right? That mess is from plutonium weapons manufacture, not civilian nuclear power.

Again, is there anything that comes out of your mouth which isn't a lie?

>>8852236
>What's a "fuckup" for nuclear waste look like? One of those casks falls over!?
Just how deep are you in your delusions? The plan is for half a millennium of active management, replacing the casks once per century, and then much more elaborate measures.

And yes, casks can fail in the course of a century, especially in the first century, because nobody has experience with storing nuclear waste (which is emitting heat and ionizing radiation, which can have odd effects on materials) for a century. They can corrode, or be damaged by inspections or other site operations. Terrorists or scavengers or curious kids may break in. The casks can be forgotten in a war or revolution, or just lost track of in the course of hundreds of years.

Just guarding the site for half a millennium is well beyond any reasonable estimate of our competence as a civilization. Five hundred years ago, the Americas and sea route to India were recent discoveries. Shakespeare was half a century from being born.

>I'm not going to engage with you
I fucking wish you wouldn't. I don't enjoy talking to paranoid schizophrenic shut-ins who value their time way less than I do.

>if you don't have better responses than "it's a biased source".
Holy shit, were you not actually paying attention to the parts where I pointed out clearly how the sources you cherry-picked to be biased in your favor did not support your position?

>The amount of fuel waste that is produced to power the entire city of Paris for a decade will fit in my living room.
...and a single grain of dust from it in your lung would kill you. Of course, while it might physically occupy that much volume, you couldn't keep it in a space that small, because it would get too hot and destroy the containment.

>The amounts are extremely small, and that's why it both easy and cheap.
Come on now, even you can't be this simpleminded. No active program with no tolerance for error over half a millennium could be considered easy or cheap.

>>8852241
>Irrelevant to the point being made.
How? Why are you focusing on the bizarre outlier of Germany's self-destructive behavior, in response to the point that France's (subsidized) electricity prices are middle-of-the-pack?

>Someone cited hidden taxes and subsidies for France, and pretended that this was a big deal.
They are though. France's electricity prices are normal rather than crazy high because the power company is state-owned, they put a half-trillion-euro investment of taxpayer money into it that they're never going to see a penny of return on (and have to pay the interest on every year), and still have to slip it subsidy money to keep the money-losing thing afloat.

A quarter of France's national debt is in their nuclear power system.

What do you not understand about what it means for the government to own a utility that does not turn a profit without subsidies?

The prices France charges for their nuclear electricity barely cover *ongoing expenses* and will never pay for the capital investment, which is the main cost of nuclear power. That comes out of the taxpayer's pocket.

>It's obvious that this anon could not do math, as i just demonstrated.
In what fucking world? You didn't make any case to support your point. What does Germany's prices being crazy high have to do with France's subsidies for nuclear power?

>>8852326
At half a trillion Euros over 50 years for French electricity, guess what that comes to? About 2 Euro cents per KWh, which is still quite small. You're trying to make this out to be massive, but it's not.

> A quarter of France's national debt is in their nuclear power system.

Well then, they're doing quite well for themselves.

>>8852306
>Of course, while it might physically occupy that much volume, you couldn't keep it in a space that small, because it would get too hot and destroy the containment.

I don't know what you're talking about. They already do.
https://youtu.be/9mWCjApw3-0

>>8852408
Never heard of interest? The time value of money? If you pay something fifty years ago, and you receive a benefit for it today, that's not at all the same as paying that amount for it today. If you had the option of paying for it today, you could have invested that money in something else all those years ago and made half a century of returns, or reduced your debt and avoided half a century of interest.

They've been paying interest all along, and the debt is still there. It'll be bigger when they've decommissioned all of their reactors. They'll still be paying interest on it. They'll still be paying to take care of the waste.

>>8852306
>...and a single grain of dust from it in your lung would kill you.

Yes, nuclear waste is dangerous, but lots of things are dangerous that are also dangerous. Example:

Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricin
> The median lethal dose (LD50) of ricin is around 22 micrograms per kilogram of body weight if the exposure is from injection or inhalation (1.78 milligram for an average adult).[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin
> The LD50 of subcutaneously injected sarin in mice is 172 μg/kg.

You still don't get it. There's such so fantastically little nuclear waste. That's largely why it's a non-problem.

Coal kills millions every year from airborne particulate pollution, and creates millions if not billions of dangerous toxic waste that remains dangerous and toxic forever, compared to nuclear waste.

For nuclear waste, it's a solid. There's no inherent explosive tendencies. There's no high pressure water. There's no vector for it to get airborne. It's just going to sit there, indefinitely, harming no one in the process.

Suppose it gets in the ground water. Well, again, the amounts that we're dealing with are so staggeringly low, that the only way that anyone can argue that it will harm someone is by invoking the bullshit science LNT model of harm.

As for terrorists who want to make a dirty bomb, there's going to be easier targets for the bang, and it's small enough that it will be easy to guard.

If all of this really bothers you, and it shouldn't, then deep ocean disposal should satisfy any of your concerns. Dump it in a subduction zone, like the Mariana Trench; problem solved. Super cheap, super safe, and more or less absolutely nothing can go wrong. I'd rather not do that with current waste, because it can be used as fuel for next-gen reactors, which will lower needs for future mining. There's also a bunch of other valuable stuff in there which I'd want to keep access to.

>>8852454
> If you pay something fifty years ago, and you receive a benefit for it today, that's not at all the same as paying that amount for it today.

Only because of bankers and capitalists. I don't care about financing games. I care about overnight capital costs, overnight fuel costs, and overnight decommissioning costs. This is the measure that matters. This is the measure for sustainability. Playing financing games obfuscates this.

>>8852462
>let's dump radioactive waste in the mariana trench
>there's nothing down there
>this is fine

>>8852306
Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not going to engage with your ludicrous standard of "must be entirely accident free". No, we must look at it in terms of reasonable and expected costs. There will be costs and dangers for having and storing nuclear waste, but everything has dangers and costs. Creating dams runs the risks of exceptionally rare accidents where 100,000+ people die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
> China. Its failure in 1975 caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history at an estimated 171,000 deaths and 11 million displaced.

Does this mean that dams are inherently unsafe? No. Am I going to use this one data point in isolation to draw conclusions about other dams? No.

Yet, this sort of dishonest shenanigans is exactly what you're doing for nuclear power. Abandon this ridiculous standard of "must never kill anyone ever", because you're never going to get that for anything in the real world. You might die when you cross the street, but you still do, because you have analyzed the risks, and deemed them small enough.

No one has ever died from radiation poisoning from civilian nuclear power plant waste. No land has been contaminated from accidents dealing with nuclear power plant waste. I grant that some time, in the future, some thing might happen where a few people will die. Compare that to the actual millions of deaths that is happening now from coal. It's obscene in the highest degree to worry about a few deaths spread out over thousands and millions of years, when we know that millions are dying every year right now.

>>8852478
Exactly right. Glad you're coming around.

>>8852481
No one has died because the standars for nuclear power plants are still high, the problem arises if they become more common.

>>8852481
I... You have to be joking around.

>>8852486
And what happens when the standards become less? 10 people die in the worst and only human-death accident involving nuclear waste in the entire century? There is no plausible scenario where lots of people die from having and storing nuclear waste (give or take weapons concerns, but then that's not an accident, and that deserves it own full discussion because of all of the complications).

>>8852487
I am not.

>>8852491
There's a reason to believe that the expansion of nuclear energy will lead irresponsible disposal of nuclear waste, because it's what happens with every other type of energy.

>>8852427
>I don't know what you're talking about. They already do.
I'm not going to watch some general 8-minute video about nuclear waste that inspired your vague hand-waving. I've tried digging through the shit you post. It never supports your claims. Never. Not once.

>>8852462
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricin
>Once deployed an area contaminated with ricin remains dangerous until the bonds between chain A or B have been broken, a process that takes two or three days.
>Ricin is easily denatured by temperatures over 80 °C (175 °F)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin
>sarin can have a short shelf life. Therefore, it is usually stored as two separate precursors that produce sarin when combined
>easily broken by nucleophilic agents, such as water

You're comparing it to some of the most infamous deadly poisons, except it lasts much longer in the environment and can't be destroyed by any chemical process.

>There's such so fantastically little nuclear waste.
So fantastically little that if we just dumped what we have outside it would render large areas permanently uninhabitable and increase the global cancer risk significantly, never mind what we'll accumulate if we make nuclear power our main energy source and continue using it for hundreds of years.

That it's physically compact is irrelevant. Nuclear physics is involved. A nuclear bomb you could move with a hand truck can devastate a city. A similarly-sized crate of waste can force the abandonment of a city.

>>8852487
To emphasize: You have to come back to reality, to the real risks and real harms from radiation. You have to stop getting your medicine and health science from sources like Green Peace, Sierra Club, etc., because on this particular topic, they're bald-faced liars. Linear-no threshold is a falsified hypothesis, and yet these liars still use it to develop fantastic and absurd number of deaths, like half a million from Chernobyl. Once you adopt real science, nuclear waste is not a problem, because if leaks, it will diffuse, and there is a threshold below which harm is substantially reduced below linear, if not outright zero harm.

You can run the numbers assuming LNT for regular old natural uranium ore that we know is in the ground, and by that sort of reasoning, we should expect a holocaust on the surface. It's absurd and obscene and completely irrational.

>>8852491
You have to be. I don't even know where to start with how tremendously erroneous dumping waste in the trench, let alone dumping waste in the ocean, is. I don't even know if I can summon the effort for words. I hope you aren't actually involved with that process, because if you are, you're part of the "woeful disregard for protocol and safety" problem.

This is analogous to killing the rest of the honeybees in the pursuit for more reactors.
>>8852508
There are far more intelligent ways to tackle this solution, especially given that the real world is not ideal. This proposed action is borderline... I have no greater disgust.

>>8852505
And it will still kill less than coal and oil, by several orders of magnitude.

Further, because the amount of waste is so extremely small, there's no motive to improperly dispose of it - assuming that we get some reasonable and science-based disposal strategies. Reasonable and science-based disposal strategies would lead to incredibly cheap disposal costs. Again, this entire debate about nuclear waste disposal is a political creation, with no bearing on reality. What we really should be discussing is the disposal of coal ash waste, and mining runoff, which will actually kill lots of people, based on rules that Trump just did, unlike the largely mythical future deaths from nuclear waste.

There is no easy way to put this: You have been lied to, and lied to in a most outrageous manner. It's not that they lied a little bit. They lied a lot. They told a huge whopper of lie. Danger from accidents from nuclear waste is a non-problem.

>>8852512
Hit me. What is going to happen? We know a lot about the ocean floor. We know that there are areas on the ocean floor which have remained untouched by animal life for millions of years. Most of the ocean floor is dead, give or take microbial life which I do not give a fuck about.

Put it there, and it will slowly be covered by sediment, with absolutely no drivers for anything to happen.

Why is this irresponsible? This is one of the most responsible things that we could do.

>>8852515
You suggested placing nuclear waste in the Mariana trench. Do you have any idea what the Mariana trench is? It's not just ocean floor.

>give or take microbial life which I do not give a fuck about
So you would kill a lifetime's worth of data and analysis for a cheap, and dangerous, burial site. The more you know.

>>8852520
>You suggested placing nuclear waste in the Mariana trench. Do you have any idea what the Mariana trench is? It's not just ocean floor.
So sue me.

>>8852520
>So you would kill a lifetime's worth of data and analysis for a cheap, and dangerous, burial site. The more you know.
Yes. Yes I would. To borrow a phrase from Penn and Teller, I would have every chimpanzee in the world killed too, if I knew that this would be part of a process that would cure HIV / AIDS (loosely borrowing their example).

Compared to that, I would not give a fuck at all about some absolutely irrelevant microbial life in some small patch on the ocean floor, which almost certainly wouldn't be harmed anyway, give or take the microbes that happen to be during under the concrete blocks that we put on the ocean floor.

You would take a shit on a solution to global warming et al, because it kills some ocean floor microbes? I don't even know how to express my own disgust. What the fuck is wrong with you!? Have you no decency sure? No empathy?

>>8852525
The Mariana trench is named so, because two tectonic plates came together against one another and formed what is called a subduction zone. A subduction zone is essentially one planet moving under the other. This is not a neat process. Thus, things like earthquakes, emerging heat vents stemming from the mantle, and other geological (unstable) phenomena can occur.

You want to store waste there. The best thing that happens is that the subduction zone swallows the waste, container and all, and all is well and we never see it again. Life is not picture perfect. Just as well, high temperatures, corrosive saltwater, high pressures, and potential for the waste to be knocked around if not outright spilled can give way to an ecological disaster that doesn't just include microbes; everything is contingent in the ocean, and messing with an as-of-now poorly understood part of the ecology is begging for more unnecessary future concerns. Think about fault lines. You wouldn't put a nuclear waste disposal site on a fault line, would you? What about on top of a volcano? No? Yes? Because I think that would void the concept of safely disposing the waste. The implication there is that you then do not need to worry about where you dump it, or worry about the tedious process of making sure it can even be dumped safely in the first place.

Christ, man. Good for you and your convictions, but this is awful. Given the state of affairs today, an accident of that magnitude would matter more than the global warming, as a large chunk of the effect/s we're predicted to encounter in the next 100 years or so is essentially set in stone.

It would be nice, if all of a sudden the countless designated waste sites lining various spots in the trench were disturbed, and we both had to deal with devising a contemporary modification to the solution for global warming, on top of a potential ecological disturbance. As opposed to, in this reality where we're not dead yet, mere global warming.

>>8852468
>> If you pay something fifty years ago, and you receive a benefit for it today, that's not at all the same as paying that amount for it today.
>Only because of bankers and capitalists. I don't care about financing games.
...and you don't understand how rejecting the time value of money makes you completely unqualified to have an opinion on the relative costs of competing technologies?

>>8852555
I reject your system, capitalist pig. This is a problem that requires a command economy. Did I forget to mention that I'm a card-carrying radical Marxist? Fuck the bourgeoisie.

As I said, accounting is just games for democracies and market economies. Overnight costs is the actual measure of whether something is possible, i.e. possible in a command economy, and that should be the focus of our conversation. After all, we are discussing changing governmental policy, are we not? That is a discussion about command economies.

I don't give a fuck that you've tricked yourself into constraining your thinking in this idiotic, capitalist, "free market" system. Think outside the box. Think like "if I could force by proper law the investment of 1% of the entire working population into my project, can I do it?". This is a problem that requires a Manhattan project level of commitment and funding. The free market is not relevant. We need governmental action, right now.

>>8852554
>on top of a potential ecological disturbance
Spare me. Have you run the numbers for how much radiation would be released? And how long it would take to reach the surface of the ocean or other significant animal life? Run those numbers, like I've seen run. Until then, you're just speaking out of your ass, repeating the lies of the environmental movement that nuclear waste is this magic substance that is infinitely harmful no matter how diluted. It's no better than homeopathy.

>>8852566
>Spare me
I will, because I can't take this seriously anymore.
>repeating the lies of the environmental movement that nuclear waste is this magic substance that is infinitely harmful no matter how diluted
Hyperbole, I haven't even said that. You go one way suggesting that the reasons there have been failures and hiccups (specifically the events other anons have cited) is because of general human error and ignorance, then you go the other way and suggest a sentiment not unlike suggesting no one will ever irresponsibly handle nuclear waste or mismanage nuclear operations- let alone decide that, since the Mariana trench is such a nice, far away place from the mind and from the cities, it's a great place to dump waste, and surely no one else in the world will decide to store waste there.

In almost everything I've seen you propose so far, you have these strange and stringent, specific qualifiers that need to come into play throughout select aspects of working society, economy, and general workings in contemporary human civilization- in the real world where people do dumb things for dumb reasons, just so nuclear power can be wholly viable and effectively, if not completely harmless.

If it is effectively harmless, then the waste in of itself is no issue. Yet if it is harmless if done right, and there exists the probability that it is not done right always, there exists the potential for harm where there is any handling of fissionable material beyond the act of fission. Nuclear waste isn't magical, but the solutions to nuclear waste aren't magical either. On paper, almost never in person. If there need to be specific conditions for any of what you propose to work, how is anything you propose supposed to work if the conditions are well close to improbable in the real world?

How is anything supposed to get done?

This has to be elaborate shitposting. This is /sci/. This has to be a joke. If it isn't, either way, I'm rattled enough.

>>8852563
>Did I forget to mention that I'm a card-carrying radical Marxist?
I'd assume you were pulling my leg, but this is fully consistent with the general level of idiocy you've displayed so far. Rather, I think you're losing the argument so badly that you've shifted to trolling to try and salvage the feeling of winning in some tiny way.

Anyway, regardless of the political system you favor, the time value of resources is real and if you ignore it you make bad decisions.

Measuring getting a dollar now and getting a dollar in 50 years as the same thing is making the same level of mistake as buying things without paying attention to whether they'll be delivered promptly or after 50 years. The price of economic incompetence is doing without.

>>8852589
>This has to be elaborate shitposting. This is /sci/. This has to be a joke.
He's a mentally ill shut-in. Paranoid schizophrenia. He feels in control of big things in the world by propagandizing for nuclear power at the only forum that won't ban him.

>>8852622
>regardless of the political system you favor
Economic system. That's different than political.

>>8852589
Goddamnit. I try to offer cheap alternatives to put your mind at ease - meeting you half way so to speak - and you turn this around on me as a sign of weakness which is indicative that my position is wrong.

To that, fuck you and fuck your shit.

>>8852627
And stop with the ableist slurs already. It's not funny, it's not scientific accurate, and it just makes you look bad that you need to resort to name-calling.

>>8852026
He's taking the Hobbits to Isengard

>>8852644
Not even him.
Grow up, you retarded commie and stop giving nuclear power a bad name. Thorium is a complete pipe dream, and your belief in communism points to you being a mental defect who rejects reality if it doesn't suit him, just like the other moron you're arguing with.

>>8844121
Uranium can be extracted from the sea which is much cleaner than mining it.

>>8852563
Whoa there. I was listening intently to what you're saying then you go all
>capitalist pig! Fuck the bourgeoisie, heil Stalin. Glory for the motherland!

Like, settle down man.