Shutting Down Nuclear Power Could Increase Air Pollution, Finds MIT Study 155
If reactors are retired, polluting energy sources that fill the gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths, researchers estimate. The findings appear in the journal Nature Energy. MIT News reports: They lay out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year. Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power's absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year.
If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year. When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities -- a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants -- experienced the greatest exposure. "They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power's absence," adds the report. "The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century."
Lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said: "We need to be thoughtful about how we're retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system. Shutting down something that doesn't have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond."
If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year. When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities -- a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants -- experienced the greatest exposure. "They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power's absence," adds the report. "The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century."
Lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said: "We need to be thoughtful about how we're retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system. Shutting down something that doesn't have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond."
This should not be surprising (Score:5, Informative)
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In other news, water gets you wet.
Re: This should not be surprising (Score:2, Flamebait)
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I spent a fuck ton of money on a huge solar system. And also believe nuclear power is worthwhile and new plants should be built. Those are not mutually exclusive concepts.
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I've often thought that mod points went to clueless people, and this joke (about poor wording by the GP) flying over their heads confirms it.
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The GP made a joke about a solar power generation system, but left out the modifiers in the middle of the phrase. I capitalized Solar to emphasize I was silently shifting the subject to the star system containing Sol. I cannot claim ownership of the Solar system as a whole, but I was certainly born into it.
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solar zealots who have never heard of base load
You don't need "base load" to complement wind and solar. You need dispatchable peakers.
Re: This should not be surprising (Score:2)
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Dispatchable peakers assume you can get base load from wind and solar- which you cannot..
Dispatchable peakers mesh with intermittent power sources, like wind and solar.
Re: This should not be surprising (Score:2)
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The problem with Nuclear Power is simply that, particularly in the US. Waste is not a solved problem. We aren't properly disposing of it, just sealing it away for generations to come to deal with.
Even then, ALL thermal plants (basically everything that is not hydroelectric, solar, wind, or geothermal*) put water vapor into the air, which is a green house gas itself. Not the worst one, but unless these thermal plants are boiling sea water, the net result is fresh water is lost and oceans still rise.
Geotherma
Re:This should not be surprising (Score:5, Informative)
BLUF: No, thermal plants, especially nuclear ones, don't need to emit large amounts of water vapor.
Even then, ALL thermal plants (basically everything that is not hydroelectric, solar, wind, or geothermal*) put water vapor into the air, which is a green house gas itself. Not the worst one, but unless these thermal plants are boiling sea water, the net result is fresh water is lost and oceans still rise.
The GHG from the extra water vapor is a rounding error compared to that of carbon dioxide, methane(including that emitted by cows), etc...
In addition, you commenting on "boiling sea water" and "fresh water is lost" indicates that you haven't read up enough on power plant operation, specifically the cooling therein. Different plants operate in different ways, of course.
Natural gas plants produce water as a part of their operation - the hydrogen combines with oxygen to produce H2O. That means that you don't actually need to involve "fresh water", it actually generates fresh water.
Coal plants produce a trivial amount of water - but they frequently use it for cooling, the same as nuclear plants.
Nuclear plants, well, their primary loops are sealed. You're not boiling seawater, you're not boiling freshwater. You're boiling what is generally distilled water with very specific additives/doping. Think of the fluid in your car radiator - mostly water, but also antifreeze. Mix is completely different, and you only have trace amounts of other stuff.
Where you get large amounts of water flow through is for cooling that water after it has gone through the turbines to generate electricity. Note, some nuclear plants use a 2nd loop so you aren't passing water with trace radioactive materials through the turbines.
With this, you have 3 options for cooling, only one of which releases large amounts of water vapor:
1. Direct water flow through - you bring in lots of water, such as from a river or the ocean, warm it up a few degrees, then introduce it back to the source. Benefit: It's about the cheapest way. Downside: You may not have enough volume to provide the necessary cooling while also not heating the water up so much as to negatively affect the river life.
2. Evaporation: Due to the "enthalpy of vaporization", IE it takes energy to transform liquid water into gas water, same principle as swamp coolers and such, you can evaporate some of the water, which means you need a lot less of it. Orders of magnitude less. Benefits: Less water needed, can still operate when the river water gets too hot, etc... Downsides: A bit more expensive than #1, more visible, and introduces the water vapor you complain about. Also requires much more maintenance because evaporating water tends to leave solids behind, which you'll need to clean up occasionally.
3. Air Cooling: You build a tower that looks a lot like an evaporation tower, except you don't put any holes in the pipes. Thus it needs to be a LOT bigger than #2 type cooling towers. Benefits: Works without the need for a water source, is relatively immune to the weather(if properly designed), etc... Downsides: Most expensive option.
Many nuclear plants these days can operate off a mix of the above. For example, after experiencing river water at temperatures above that of what they could legally release water at(thus can't cool), they install evaporation towers so they can keep operating if necessary. A nuclear plant, considering limited water in the face of expansions, or loss of water rights, installs at least some air cooling so they can make do with less evaporation. Hybrid cooling towers are also possible - under less heat emission needs, colder weather, whatever, they can operate dry, but if they need to dump more heat they can start evaporating.
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The cooling needs of nuclear plants do have a serious environmental impact though.
They can't just pump water out of a river or the sea. They need to keep wildlife and plants out. That means UV lights, mesh, and underwater speakers that scare fish away.
When things go wrong they end up dumping warm water into the environment, killing off even more river life. It happens regularly in Europe, especially in France.
There are more expensive options that help mitigate some of this, but nuclear is already too expens
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Nuclear bad, nuclear bad, Nuclear bad....
Just more of the same old bullshit. Same old song and dance. The cooling needs of nuclear plants are no different than the needs of coal and gas plants. An no, nuclear isn't more expensive to compete.
Get some fresh FUD please. This line is getting tired and worn out.
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This article [ucsusa.org] says natural gas plants withdraw up to 60,000 gallons of water per MWh of electricity produced.
Remember, there are 3 types of natural gas plants: steam turbine, combustion turbine, and combined cycle. So anytime you say "natural gas plant," it helps to be more specific.
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We aren't properly disposing of it, just sealing it away for generations to come to deal with.
What's wrong with that? Future generations will know more than us, have better robots to handle the materials, and the waste will be less radioactive.
Kicking the can down the road isn't a good idea for many problems because delay makes them worse. But it is the right thing to do with nuclear waste because delay makes the problem easier.
Waste less radioactive (Score:5, Interesting)
and the waste will be less radioactive.
A very good point I've brought up before.
With most chemical waste - arsenic, mercury, lead, and such, if you put it in a barrel and come back in a thousand years, the stuff is exactly as hazardous as it used to be. Might be a bit worse, if the barrel corroded in the meantime.
With nuclear waste, you come back in a thousand years and it's substantially less dangerous. How substantially depends on how dangerous(hot) it was in the first place, and the exact details of the substance and decay chain.
But something that you wanted to stay 100 meters away from, unshielded, 1k years ago, might have you only wanting to stay 1-10 meters away.
Plus, well, it's still ~90% fuel for the right sorts of reactors, so once it's cooled off enough, reprocessing it should be a lot cheaper.
Unlike, say, the toxic tailings from all the coal we've burnt.
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In theory, yes. In practice, we don't know because we don't have any 1000 year old barrels of nuclear waste to check.
In the past unexpected things have happened to reactor vessels and fuel storage systems. The radiation damages them, or they degrade and corrode. That's over a timeframe of decades. It's really not clear at all if we can safely store that waste for a millennia.
At the moment a lot of it is sat in cooling pools with nowhere to go.
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At the moment a lot of it is sat in cooling pools with nowhere to go.
An who's fault is that? You see the problem every morning when you look in the mirror. If you hippie freaks had kept your bong holes closed in the '70s we would be recycling most of it, and safely disposing of the rest.
Let's not forget virtually every problem we have today with nuclear power is because of people like you.
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If people really had that much power there wouldn't be coal plants spewing out crap everywhere. Anyway, it's not like windmills don't get objected to, often by people with the wealth to mount legal challenges. Somehow wind farms seem to be getting built anyway.
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Oh bullshit. If you and people like you hadn't protested and did everything in your power to derail every nuclear project over the last 50 years, there never would have been so many coal plants built. You are so ignorant of the terminology you even protested nuclear medicine.
So, basically, every modern problem can be laid at the feat of you and people like you. You and your sidekick dinkypoo are just a modern continuance the ignorance and stupidity of the anti nuclear kooks from the last generation.
B
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I've never protested against nuclear power, not even wrote a letter. I don't need to, it's failing hard enough on its own. I do have family members who benefitted from nuclear medicine though, and I understand perfectly what it is.
When you reach the point where you have to imagine I'm something I'm not and rail against that, rather than addressing the issues, that's when you have lost the argument. That's also why nuclear is struggling - people like you who want it to happen don't actually have any solution
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I've never protested against nuclear power, not even wrote a letter
My what a selective memory you have, that or you are just lying like you always do. You have been spreading fud and protesting against anything to do with nuclear power since you started posting here. Every time it is brought up, even a little one- or two-line comment. Here you and your sidekicks come, "nuclear bad, nuclear bad." You don't even have a fucking clue what is going on in the nuclear fields. So out of touch with fucking reality.
SMR are just now coming into the test phase, barely out of
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Oh I see, in your mind merely disagreeing on an internet forum is "protesting". Well Mr Nuclear Activist, might I suggest that your efforts would be better spent somewhere that actually matters in this debate?
I doubt many energy investors hang out on Slashdot.
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The biggest problem is the radioactive isotopes that get spewed out of the stacks, mostly thorium but also uranium
No. Nearly all the thorium and uranium in coal ends up in the ash, not up the smoke stack.
Also, thorium is not biologically active and isn't dangerous. Every cubic meter of dirt in your backyard contains a dozen grams or so.
including fissile uranium.
0.3% of naturally occurring uranium is fissile. So what?
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Nearly all the thorium and uranium in coal ends up in the ash, not up the smoke stack.
We can find coal plants with excessive emissions as fast as we can pay people to sample them.
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We aren't properly disposing of it, just sealing it away for generations to come to deal with.
That's a good thing. Countries like the US, France, Russia, China, consider most of this "waste" to be a future source of fuel for the Gen IV reactors. Having a supply of it will prove handy in a few decades.
Speaking of sealing things away: we are emitting a shit-ton of CO2 into the athmosphere, and letting future generations deal with it too. And this is a far bigger/harder problem to solve than the small quantity (in comparison to the billions of tons of CO2 we emit with other energy-production means) of
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Maintaining expensive storage of spent nuclear fuel for decades, on the off chance that someone finally invents a viable Gen IV reactor, renewables don't work, and we are desperate enough to pay the price for nuclear, does not seem like a very sensible thing to do.
Most of that fuel probably can't be used anyway. It's been sitting in pools of water for years or decades, and it's unlikely to be economical to refurbish it into something useful. Being high level nuclear waste, it's not like you can just upend i
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Most of that fuel probably can't be used anyway.
Thankfully for the rest of us, people in charge of that stuff are not doing things based on "probably" guesses. Science is actually involved in it, you might want to get interested in it instead of spreading your bullshit again and again.
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Do you really imagine that the operators of these plants are making an effort to preserve the waste for some theoretical time when it can be reused?
In the UK they can't even be bothered to keep the spend fuel pools properly covered. Birds get at them and carry off the green gunk that is forming on the surface. Highly regulated, carefully managed facilities, these are not.
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I heard some of those birds carried that green gunk away, dropped it in a street, and some turtles started chewing at it. They then later became... the Teenage Mutant Ninka Turtles!
I mean, if we are making stuff up like you do, let's at least make it funny please.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Pool B30, known as Dirty 30, was the worst. It wasn't the only one though. The UK paid fines over it. Not because of our own regulator though, they ignored it. It was Euratom that took action.
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> because processing spent fuel is how you get the plutonium for nuclear weapons
Ummm, no.
The extraction of Pu is a pretty difficult thing when the fuel is "burned all the way" as it is in a power reactor. Yeah, you can do it, but the effort required is *significant*, generally more than just building a dedicated breeder.
The machines they use for breeders are dramatically different designs, where the fuel spends much less time inside, and that's why they aren't generally economical to operate for power to
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In the US it is highly expensive because we have made ridiculous degrees of regulatory requirements
False. Nuclear power has shown to be highly expensive all over the world because as it turns out, ... it is a highly expensive thing to build to modern safety standard.
Even the Chinese with their woeful safety standards, lack of red tape, history of trampling over protestors, and effectively free labour costs can't get a reactor on the ground for under $7bn USD.
That's how you get things like Germany shutting down all its nuclear plants
Honestly it's a stupid policy to keep Germany's nuclear reactors open. They are very old, don't meet any modern safety requirements, and critically
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> the US it is highly expensive because we have made ridiculous degrees of regulatory requirements
Nuclear is just as expensive in places where the regulatory load is much less and public acceptance is much higher.
One only has to look across the border to Canada, where the public is highly supportive of nuclear power, the entire licensing structure is different, and there is an entire government body dedicated to getting new sites built, with buy-in at all three levels of government, local, provincial an
Re:A fire at a coal plant or a nuclear metldown (Score:5, Informative)
Coal plants kill in the course of their daily operation. No "fire" needed. Nuclear plants, only if there is a serious accident. And then they don't kill so many [wikipedia.org].
Re:A fire at a coal plant or a nuclear metldown (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear power plants are being shut down now, when there are still many coal plants operating, before there is enough renewable energy.
So now, for the existing nuclear plants, this is a choice between nuclear and coal.
Outdated information, blades can now be recycled (Score:2)
Recycling the blades is somewhat new, so it's kind of OK that you're ignorant about it. Here's an article [prweb.com] from when Global Fiberglass Solutions [globalfiberglassinc.com] opened their first recycling facility in Texas, the #1 state for wind power.
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> Wind farms gives you landfills with old wings and other non recyclable parts
And what does that have to do with "Renewables are a much safer bet, and you see a return on the investment much sooner"?
> Chinese solar panels are made by Uyghur slaves
And what does that have to do with "Renewables are a much safer bet, and you see a return on the investment much sooner"?
The people who pay for these things are the same people who paid to build Bhopal and continue to fund oil and gas. You think they give a c
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The US required backup generators to be in a safe zone for like a dozen years if the plant was in an area that could get tsunamis for Fukushima type generators. Japan was building them, but they were too late for some of them. Japan is entirely at fault for what happened at Fukushima - they knew the reactors were vulnerable and delayed fixing the issue until it was too late.
Meanwhile, coal and natural gas plants spew out radiation every day and don't get anywhere near the scrutiny they deserve. You want rad
Re:A fire at a coal plant or a nuclear metldown (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's ask Japan [reuters.com]. Oh wait, they are restarting and planning new nuclear plants, even though you might think they would be the ones more reluctant to do so given their history (both with military nuclear bombs and civil nuclear incident).
Here is a funny coïncidence, there was fire 4 hours ago at a nuclear plant in Japan [newstodaynet.com]. Long story short: flames were seen near the motor of a washing machine on the first floor of a building close to the reactor, fire was extinguished, nothing to see. But it still makes the headlines because of the irrational fear people have toward nuclear.
At the same time, CO2-related deaths happen all year-round [nature.com], and people blissfully ignore it. For instance, a year’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions from a single average coal-fired powerplant in the United States in 2020 causes 904 excess deaths (between 2000 and 2100 averaged).
A study from 2018 showed that more than 8 million people died in 2018 from fossil fuel pollution [harvard.edu]. Yet nobody cares, and countries like Germany close down nuclear plants and keep coal-plants open, while also building new gas plants. You can actually calculate how many deaths could have been prevented by going a differente route, and find out the price the German government puts on a life there.
Re:This should not be surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
I live not too far from a nuclear power plant, also I was born in Zaporojie (Zaporizhzhia, however you want to write it) and we had pollution there from all sorts of factories, the nuclear power plant was not a problem at all. Metallurgy, machine factories, coal power plants - those were the actual problems. Also there is the first hydro power plant in the former USSR in that city, it stands on Dnepr.
I would gladly live near a nuclear power plant for any duration of time than to any coal power plant.
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I will add one more thing: American economy is in trouble (and many other economies as well), this is the result of decades of printing and borrowing money to spend.
Here is what could really turn this around: become the world's nuclear plant provider. Start building parts of nuclear power plants as modules, add hundreds of nuclear power plants all over the States and become a nuclear power plant supplier to all the countries in the world.
This would create huge numbers of actually productive jobs, it would
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I will add one more thing: American economy is in trouble (and many other economies as well), this is the result of decades of printing and borrowing money to spend.
Worldwide economies are in trouble because Oil, Gas and Coal productions are not rising anymore and are actually getting down. As the amount of energy available is a natural cap to the GDP (worldwide at least) such GDP goes down. However hype nuclear, wind and solar are getting, they only affect electricity production, which is a *very* small part of all energy used in the world. Negligible for now at least. As around 80% of all energy used is fossil, and those fossil production is going down, so it the wor
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There is no shortage of energy. Producers are shutting down to manipulate price (OPEC), or shutting down due to regulations (US oil and coal).
The only way to kill oil and coal, and its arguable on whether or not we should be doing that, is to make something cheaper. We can have all the clean energy we want here, but China, India, and Africa are going to use whatever is cheaper, because they have to.
Instead of making something cheaper than oil and coal, we're making oi
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The only way to kill oil and coal
Coal still has loads of stock underground (as compared to what we already extracted). Gas and oil not so much. Basic mathematics tells you than when a resource is available in a fixed quantity (whatever the quantity), you cannot increase production forever on it. Heck, you cannot even have a flat production. It will peak then will get down. To zero. The only way to kill oil, gas and coal for sure is to wait.
By all current measurements (by oil and gas company but not only) we have extracted a very sizeable p
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> they only affect electricity production, which is a *very* small part of all energy used in the world
20% is "very small" in your world?
> As around 80% of all energy used is fossil
And about 2/3rds of that is ultimately wasted.
Consider transport. This currently accounts for 28 quads per year in the US. Of that, less than 6 quads are delivered as motion, and the other 22 are waste heat.
If we were to electrify that sector, of which individual cars represent the majority, the total energy needed would fa
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American economy is in trouble (and many other economies as well), this is the result of decades of printing and borrowing money to spend.
This turns out to not be a huge problem. All you have to do is spend a few years inflating the currency, and the problem is solved. A little painful, but tried and true, and it doesn't cause the economy to collapse at all.
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> Metallurgy, machine factories, coal power plants - those were the actual problems
Are they though?
Let me ask you something: do you smoke? Because 40% of Ukrainian males do, so it's not too bad a guess that you might.
And that smoking kills 130,000 people a year.
I find it difficult to believe that all of those "Metallurgy, machine factories, coal power plants" come close to that figure. For instance, "Ukraine is home to some of the most highly emitting coal power plants in Europe and the world" yet this a
Re:This should not be surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
If you take rational decisions, you realize that it is far better to live near a nuclear plant than a coal-plant, a chemical factory, or almost any heavy-industry plant.
The fear you are referring to is the same one as people who fear taking the planes, and provide links to all the major planes incidents that happened over the year. While at the same time driving around mindlessly, and not seeing that driving has a far greater death rate than air travel [nsc.org].
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So if nuclear plants are so safe, will you be moving to downtown Okuma?
I grew up within a 30 minute drive of three nuclear power plants and would have no problem moving back if there were a high quantity of high paying jobs in rural America. Nuclear plants in the area didn't even register on the list of reasons I didn't move back to my home town after college. If a couple of medical conditions didn't keep me out of the Navy nuclear program it's quite likely I would have lived out my life in my home town since I certainly would have had plenty of job opportunities after my disc
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The engineers deserve some of the blame for Fukushima too. They were over-confident in the ability of the containment buildings to contain the fallout from the explosions. They knew of the failure mode that eventually lead to the three meltdowns, but considered it too unlikely to be worth protecting against. They also over-estimated the ability of the staff to understand what was happening and react accordingly.
The Japanese are capable of operating things safely. Their high speed trains have never suffered
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The Japanese are capable of operating things safely. Their high speed trains have never suffered a single fatal or serious injury accident, and they have been operating longer than any others in the world. They got the culture and emergency procedures right. TEPCO did not.
TEPCO is "The Japanese".
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Some people have claimed that it is Japanese culture that is the issue here, but the operation of the Shinkansen high speed rail lines seems to prove otherwise.
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The problem isn't Japanese culture. The problem is human greed and how it interacts with the environment created by a nuclear plant. The numbers are so big and the oversight so inadequate (almost no matter how much there is) that there are simply many opportunities for fuckery. In the best case with nuclear, you do everything right and then your uptime is garbage.
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I tend to agree. It's just not something humans can safely operate.
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Do you suppose there are any meaningful differences between the design, maintenance, and operation of a high speed rail network and a nuclear power plant?
If the answer is "yes" then you really shouldn't be comparing them as you are.
=Smidge=
There was a concerted effort by the plant owners (Score:2)
The engineers repeatedly told management the risks and were ignored. They had been telling management that the sea walls needed to be built up and that they needed more generators off site.
I don't think anything could have stopped that disaster once it started. TEPCO skipped out on required maintenance to save money and then blamed the engineers for not fixing t
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> They were over-confident in the ability of the containment buildings to contain the fallout from the explosions
Yeah, nothing about that statement is correct.
They didn't have containment buildings in the first place, and they were perfectly aware of that in the second.
> They knew of the failure mode that eventually lead to the three meltdowns
The failure mode was operator error. None of those reactors should have melted down even under the tsunami.
In the case of Unit 1, for instance, they went against
They shut down Three Mile Island (Score:2)
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TMI reactor 2 only partially melted down, and it was operator error. Many still in operation nuclear reactors have a negative coefficient and can't melt down at all. Basically, if temperature goes up, reactivity goes down until the reactor shuts down. [wikipedia.org]
Despite the wiki page giving mixed information, a lot of 4th gen reactors are both breeder reactors and have moderators.
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Just wanted to point out that Fukushima was also a negative void coefficient design. There's a lot more to go wrong with a nuclear pant than the core melting down, even though that's the most popular/feared scenario in pop culture.
=Smidge=
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The department of the obvious Strikes again! (Score:2, Insightful)
Thinking about nuclear waste is cumbersome (Score:2, Interesting)
who cares about his grand-grand-grand children having to deal with the nuclear waste if we can live like kings now?
Re:Solutions already exist for the waste. (Score:2)
Besides we have solutions, such as the place they were wanting to put it in Nevada or that Texas volunteered to take when the anti-nuke people in nevada complained.
Re:Thinking about nuclear waste is cumbersome (Score:5, Insightful)
who cares about his grand-grand-grand children having to deal with the nuclear waste if we can live like kings now?
Let me rephrase it for you:
Who cares about his grand-grand-grand children having to deal with the climate change related to CO2 emissions if we can live like kings now?
The CO2 we emit now will have an impact on global warming for the more than the next 100 years, because CO2 doesn't naturally break down at a fast rate (emphasis the fast rate) in the athmosphere. After 100 years, half the CO2 we emit now will still be there. After 1000 years, between 20-30% of the CO2 will still be there. After 10000 years, between 10-20% still be there. This is all documented in the 5th IPCC report from 2014, based on the different ways the CO2 has to "decay" (land update, ocean invasion, reaction with CaCO3...).
On the nuclear waste side, the decay is actually exponential (unlike CO2). Something that is highly radioactive has a short half-life. For instance iodine 131, which is highly radioactive, has an half-life of 8 days. There is 0 chance that your children, and even less your grand-grand-grand children, will die of iodine 131 exposure that we emit now...
There is something that kills between 8 and 10 millions premature deaths each year [sciencedirect.com] though: fossil fuel air pollution. Then you also have the indirect deaths by CO2-related emisions [nature.com] (one single average coal-plant in the US causes 904 excess death between 2000-2100 for instance).
But as you say: who cares if we can live like kings now.
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Thinking about nuclear waste is a pointless strawman. Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technical one.
Actually thinking about grand grand grand children at a time where we're doing our best to fuck the planet in the shortest possible timeframe is also a strawman.
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NO SHIT! (Score:2)
I mean, cue my completely and utter lack of surprise.
The term renewable is meaningless (Score:2)
The term renewable is simply bogus. Wind and Solar rely on photons and radiation from nuclear reactions in the sun. Once the nuclear fuel in the sun has been used up, no more wind or solar.
Similarly nuclear powerplants use the high energy photons and kinetic energy from nuclear reactions to generate electricity on earth. By using Thorium and the Nuclear fuel in the oceans and the crust we would have more energy on tap at our present rate of use than the remaining lifespan of the sun. So existing nuclear tec
In other shocking news (Score:2)
In other shocking news today it was learned after a multi-year study costing millions of dollars that water is wet.
The world was also shocked to hear the first experiment to put the world's largest cork in Kilauea volcano failed and incinerated the entire research staff.
'reactors are retired' (Score:2)
The reactors addressed by the study were shut down because they aged out. The alternative would have been decommissioning much of the existing structure and a rebuild, very expensive and time-consuming. Also the examples given were from decades in the past.
"In 1985, the closure of reactors in Tennessee Valley prompted a spike in coal use"
"the 2012 shutdown of a plant in California led to an increase in natural gas"
They modeled three scenarios, and two of them were "an energy grid with no nuclear power". Tha
Increase in radioactive emissions as well (Score:2)
Note that shutting down all nuclear plants would also have the counterintuitive effect of releasing more radioactives into the environment as well.
Fossil fuels don't burn clean, as they are often contaminated with other minerals and are only refined enough to where they can burn (and reducing can release emissions of it's own). While this is clearly true for coal it also applies to oil to some degree. For this reasons, coal power plant emissions are several orders of magnitude more radioactive than you get
SMRs (Score:2)
Re:Industry Propaganda (Score:4, Informative)
Well that's a fuckton of lies.
Germany just replaced their nuclear with coal. Indian point in NY replaced their nuclear with natural gas.
And there are 90+ reactors in the United States which sell electricity for significantly less than the average cost of electricity. Indian point sold electricity for 2.45 cents per kWh. That proves it is commercially viable.
The average emissions for nuclear is 12 g CO2 per kWh which is for the entire lifetime. Wind is 11 and 12, solar is 41, coal is at 890.
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Well that's a fuckton of lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
As you can clearly see, nuclear is being replaced by renewables. So is coal.
Older US reactors can be cheap, but a lot of that is because at the time they were built they didn't need to worry about trashing the local environment so much, or about using modern technology to survey the area. Over the years they have been upgraded to be safer, but of course with new reactors we expect them to be safe from the get-go. That means a high up-front cost
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Scotland has. It still uses some non-renewable energy, but only because it exports so much renewable power in order to benefit from higher prices paid in places that aren't so green. Right now Scotland produces far more renewable energy than the total energy it consumes. If forced to it could go fully renewable with the addition of some storage. Currently Scottish Power is seeking planning permission to build some new pumped storage in the highlands, using the natural shape of the landscape to its advantage
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> So it sounds like Scotland failed to deep decarbonize with wind
CO2 intensity fell 51% between 1990 and 2020.
What is this "deep" you keep talking about, and what country do you feel meets it?
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Germany just replaced their nuclear with coal.
Stop lying. Germany's coal consumption went down along with their nuclear. It was replaced largely by green projects and a shitton of natural gas. They "just" restarted *some* coal plants to replace the loss of natural gas due to the Ukraine war, but have executed a shitload of LNG projects in the past year (with more to come this year) so they can close those coal plants again.
Indian point in NY replaced their nuclear with natural gas.
The OP was correct. Indian Point nuclear plant shut down because it was end of life. It was replaced with something non-nuclear du
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Lets actually look at some research instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
A 2020 study by the Haas School of Business found that the lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports.
https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
The reality is that German would be producing far fewer greenhouse gas emissions, have lower cost electricity and far greater energy security if they left their nuclear reactors runnin
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> Lets actually look at some research instead.
Ok.
Oh, you mean a wikipedia page. Ok, if that's where we're going:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany_electricity_production.svg
According to the same source you're quoting, nuclear and fossil fuel use has been more than offset by new renewables.
> A 2020 study by the Haas School of Business found that the lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports.
That'
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Re:Industry Propaganda (Score:5, Funny)
No one is proposing replacing nuclear
Talk about gas lighting...
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Lot of emissions, lol. Coal and natural gas I can assure you create FAR more emissions than uranium mining. Like FAR FAR FAR FUCKING FAR more emissions. When it comes to thorium mining, well, you like solar and wind? They depend on thorium mining, even if it is a waste product, and China dumps it in a landfill so it can seep into the water supply and they supply 95% of rare earths (used in solar and wind construction). Not saying conventional nuclear is good by any means, it has serious issues, especially e
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All the studies point to the fact that when you shut down nuclear it gets replaces by greenhous gas emitting generation. Nuclear generation capacity directly reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
The reason for this is that nuclear power generation is dispatchable and a like for like substitution for coal and gas. While some loads on the grid can use power when it is being generated such as chlorinating a pool, most loads are time sensitive. You want to charge your car when you get home from work, most people pu
Re:No Shit (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at Germany. Those idiots are burning a fuckton coal.
Not to mention natural gas. They built 6 (!) new LNG conversion facilities since Russia invaded Ukraine to import LNG from western nations. They had to kick all the environmental pressure groups to the curb to get this done so quickly.
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Honestly a lot of environmental pressure groups deserve to be kicked. To expect a country to convert end users in a short time frame to a different energy source is just naive. The LNG terminals serve to shut down coal plants which were restarted due to the gas crisis as well as keep industry (which has no alternate heat source) and housing (which can't get an alternate heat source - no seriously try buying an air source heatpump right now in German, expected waiting time is about a year+) nice an warm.
Also
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>They built 6 (!) new LNG conversion facilities since Russia invaded Ukraine to import LNG from western nations.
Counterpoint: LNG is fungible and those facilities do not represent an increase in consumption, but a change in source from pipeline to tanker ships.
Upside: This has seemingly clued the powers that be in Germany that their reliance on energy imports is a huge liability (as it is for any nation) and they are increasing their efforts to reduce that reliance, which will result in less LNG use in
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Look at Germany.
That isn't fair. Compared to German energy policy, anything else looks sensible.
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Look at Germany. Those idiots are burning a fuckton coal.
Yeah I wonder why that is? Did anything significant happen to the energy market in Europe in the past year?
They also spent 500 billion euros on renewables
No they didn't. Over the past 2 decades they've spent less than half of that on renewable projects *total* and a significant portion of that were not energy related projects.
and failed to deep decarbonize
Germany's per capita CO2 emissions have halved from their peak, despite the population increasing by 8% since the peak.
Their electricity is ~9x as dirty as nuclear France and 2x as expensive.
The cost of electricity in France is subsidised by the state. The cost of electricity in Germany has a tax put o
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> Germany failed to deep decarbonize
Here's a chart of Germany, France and the USA on a per-capita basis:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1990..latest&country=FRA~DEU~USA
USA went from 20.7 to 14.9, down 28%
France went from 6.9 to 4.4, down 36%
Germay went from 13.3 to 7.7, down 42%
I don't know what you mean by "deep", but Germany has significantly outperformed its peers.
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Above is meant to be informative, and not a personal attack. This is a common misuse, and I try to challenge it whenever I see it because it is wrong. Citation: https://time.com/12597/the-ukr... [time.com]
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> whereas nuclear plants in France rely on state handouts to keep them afloat
And their main company still managed to go bankrupt three times since 2000.
Framitome, or whatever they call it this week, is something like 68 billion in debt. That's something like twice the total value of every state-owned business put together.
It's also a huge amount compared to the savings in retirement Marcon blew up the country for, which is estimated at 17 billion a year, 30 years from now.