Tar_Alcaran

What is this adoringly derpy brown egg?

So let me counter ask you a very similar question: how much radioactive material (weight or volume, your choice) do you think was spread in Chernobyl,

Some 60 tons of reactor fuel were expelled “locally”. That wasn’t easy to Google, but easily to convert back from the radiation released. I might be a bit high due to iodine being released which isn’t part of the fuel.

Thanks for once again proving my point. As soon as I point out how nuclear waste isn’t actually a real problem, opponents of nuclear power tend to immediately move the goalposts, without actually answering the question too.

But the preemptively adress your moved goalpost:

That might be flippant, but does this matter at all? You might as well say solar panels are deadly because some idiot didn’t tie his safety line while installing rooftop solar panels. Or some DIYer wired the electrics wrong and burned their house down. People have died from solar panels, so using your logic, solar panels might at any moment strike and kill someone!

It doesn’t work like that. Solar panels are entirely safe when used properly. Nuclear is entirely safe when you don’t intentionally build a gigantic bombs and then intentionally push it past all limits and override all safeties. No electricity reactor before or after Chernobyl has been capable of failing this way, it was literally uniquely terrible.

Since you also didn’t answer, for everyone who actually does care: since 1957 till today, humanity has created, from all sources of nuclear power generation, about 260.000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. If you were to stack it into a single pile, it would form a 23m cube, or cover a soccer field 2m deep. For ALL fuel ever. And we could reprocess all of it, if not legal opposition to it.

That’s the amount nuclear opponents complain about. One 23m cube in 70 years of power generation.

Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.

Honestly, that sounds extremely unlikely. I don’t live that far north in europe, and while I manage about 0kWh on my residental panels on a yearly basis. Thanks to seasonal changes, I would either need 4 more rooftops to keep the power on during january, or I would need to bank something like 700kWh to make it through 3 winter months. That’s not counting the electric car, or heating. Heating would roughly quadruple the numbers (being almost entirely clustered when solar isn’t producing), and the car would add roughly another house on top (assuming 50% is charged away from home).

Quick maths that I did because I wanted to try going off-grid: I would need ~100m2 of solar panels, and 2500kWh of battery storage. Or on a national level, 63 TWh of storage as well as just under a 1000km2 of solar panels if everyone lived as low-footprint as we do. And that’s just housing, it doesn’t include commercial buildings or industry.

The big buffers next to the solar farm are actually quite tiny. The largest under-construction battery park in the netherlands banks about 1200 MWh. With an average househould consumption, that’s just about enough to carry some ~4000 2-person households through the 3 winter months, assuming you put down enough solar to meet your yearly energy household energy demands (which we don’t have). They’re obviously not meant for long-term storage, but long-term storage is exactly what you need to make solar work.

And nuclear doesn’t have any of these issues. The only issue is that it’s expensive, because we stopped building them.

Because of the long build-time, you can buy the batteries 10 years from now, comparing to a nuclear plant that starts construction today.

Sure, but that’s a shitty comparison, because I can also build 20 nuclear powerplants, and bring costs WAY down. And that’s the thing. These comparisons are always “If we keep boosting X, and supressing Y, then X will perform better!”. Yes. Duh.

Look at what China is doing. They’ve built dozens of plants in the past years, and have >30 under construction right now, with ~150 planned. They’re building them for a fraction of the cost, because they’re not completely reinventing them every single time.

It’s not like I am saying we should scrap ongoing constructions.

Fair, we shouldn’t. But my worry is that even in 10 years, we’re still going to be using lots of fossil fuels, and that will always be lower if we ALSO build nuclear. Or at the very least stop heavily opposing it.

My momma doesn’t work in hazardous materials handling, I do. So maybe your mom can ask me?

Nuclear is bad for the climate

Nuclear has basically no CO2 output, so that’s wrong.

has the worst waste humanity can produce (…) we do not have the tools to plan for that kind of timespan AT ALL, everyone saying he can build structures safe for that time is lying or mislead.

There’s one super simple method. We just don’t use it, because it flies in the face of regular waste disposal and remediation methods: Grind up the waste, pour it in concrete pellets, mix it with the mining tailings and chuck it back into the hole you found it. You’re basically restoring the status quo if you do that. The only reason we don’t do this is because legal frameworks don’t allow this. In a way, long term geologic storage is exactly this. Drill holes in the ground, stuff the spent fuel inside, cap the hole. You can do that far easier, but it’s legally not allowed because people like greenpeace (and you) think radiation is magically dangerous.

And nuclear is hard and expensive to build. There is not a single reason someone to build reactors,

There are 62 nuclear plants in china right now, most from the past 10 years, and there are 34 being built now, with 150 planned. They are basically disproving every “Expensive and slow” stereotype, simply by doing what nuclear proponents have been saying since the 50’s: “Build more, and it’ll get cheaper”. It’s the exact same way solar, wind and batteries are getting cheaper. China builds nuclear because it hugely improves air quality, because the alternative is coal.

We used to be able to build nuclear plants quickly and affordably in the west too, but eeeeeveryone stopped doing it when chernobyl happened, which was basically specifically built to explode.

1 - stop being so angry.

2 - Nuclear and renewables are the way to go. Renewables are the bicycles of energy, cheap, clean, easily to make and you can put em anywhere. But sometimes a bike won’t work. Nuclear are the trains, expensive to build and requiring lots of effort… but without trains, people will drive cars every time a bike won’t work.

If you oppose Nuclear, you’re promoting coal. If you oppose solar, you’re promoting coal.

There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.

I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.

Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.

And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren’t incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn’t build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you’ll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you’ll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.

What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains “in favour of bikes”, you’re actually promoting cars. And vice versa.

But solar and nuclear aren’t the same thing. You can’t compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.

The choice isn’t “Solar/Wind OR Nuclear”, the choice is “Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels” or “Solar/Wind AND nuclear”. Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you’re promoting renewables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc

Pretty much, yeah

I would love to ask everyone who opposes nuclear power one question. It’s a really simple question, you can Google it. I’ve never had an opponent of nuclear power answer the question, because it brings everything into perspective.

How much spent nuclear fuel is there in the entire world? What is the total amount of long term waste that the entire history of nuclear power generation has created? If you piled it up, how big of a pile would it form?

Nuclear is dirt cheap if you level the playing field and also make all other sources pay to store waste eternally. The damage caused by climate change is ranging into the trillions, but no other fossil fuel pays for it.

Only nuclear power is expected to nearly package their waste, everyone else gets to spread it around the entire planet, slowly killing every living species.

They’re just monumentally xenophobic and entitled.

Why do you think I drink so much water?

No. It’s absolutely the next penicillin

I can do (some of) the maths, but I definitely can’t explain why any of it is like that, or how it works.

I found my first mosquito sting of the year this morning. Hurray…

Reminds of Kipling’s Hymn of Breaking Strain

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_strain.htm

Correct. I didn’t reply to the binary search post.

No, it’s very different.

When you have multiple allergies/intolerances, starting at zero and then adding one thing at a time is a lot more efficient than removing one thing at a time.

Removing one thing at a time will create many false negatives, where you remove a hit but don’t notice because you left another hit behind.