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Nuclear Power: Is anything like pic related actually happening??

Anonymous Wed 21 Oct 23:53:56 2020 No.12258437 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>12258444 >>12258458 >>12259082 >>12259925 >>12259939 >>12260090

I don't get it, when is plutonium "spent"? Isn't it still hot and needs a long time to cool down? Isn't that heat exactly what is used to boil the water for power generation?

Is anything like pic related actually happening (i.e. only 3% turns into waste, the rest is recycled to be used again)?

Is this system really more cost effective and better than geothermal or geodynamic energy?

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 21 Oct 2020 23:58:40 No.12258444 Report

Quoted By: >>12258453

>>12258437
Nuclear fuel isn't only "spent" because it fissions.
There's also other factors, like the fuel rod cladding becoming damaged by prolonged radiation, or gaseous fission products (xenon) accumulating and risking a rupture. This is why we remove fuel rods before they are 100% reacted, and then reprocess them.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 00:03:34 No.12258453 Report

Quoted By: >>12258475

>>12258444
I see, thanks, so what percent of it do you think is actually recycled? Is it really 96-97%?

Do you genuinely think this system is better or more efficient than other energy production techniques or did the industry lobby make it the worldwide choice over the last several decades?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 00:05:35 No.12258458 Report

Quoted By: >>12258926

>>12258437
Spent fuel is (for various reasons) unsuitable for generating energy, sure it's still warm but you need it to be able to generate the designed temperature for the plant. Some of the being spent part is simply the amount of usable atoms diminishing over time but most of it's due to buildup of fission byproducts and other such unrelated things, which is why it can be recycled at such a high rate. The byproducts can't be extracted from the pellets without taking them out first e.g. the pellets being spent even though most of the content is still good. You could think of a nuclear plant as a combustion engine that instead of burning perfectly, actually throws 99% of the fuel out of the exhaust along with bit of water and other stuff straight into it's own fuel tank. Eventually the byproducts of the burning will spoil the fuel even if there is still mostly gas in the tank.

>Is anything like pic related actually happening (i.e. only 3% turns into waste, the rest is recycled to be used again)?
Yes.
>Is this system really more cost effective and better than geothermal or geodynamic energy?
Yes.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 00:13:49 No.12258475 Report

Quoted By: >>12258789

>>12258453
>Do you genuinely think this system is better or more efficient than other energy production techniques
"Efficiency" is a tricky word.
For example - a coal power plant typically has an energy efficiency of ~45%, while a solar panel is only around ~30%. Does it mean that solar power is inherently worse than coal power? Not necessarily, because coal has a price, while sun is for free. So what you should be really looking at is not energy efficiency but rather the total cost per unit energy. And nuclear energy is looking pretty good in that regard. It's also very ecological, in the sense that it doesn't produce absolutely ny emissions during operartion - all the waste is solid that can be easily packaged and reprocessed or disposed in a safe location.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 02:33:43 No.12258789 Report

Quoted By: >>12258799 >>12258858 >>12259658 >>12260020

>>12258475
>easily (...) disposed in a safe location.

This is the thing though, with earthquakes and general tectonic movement happening everywhere at all times, there really doesn't seem to be a safe long term storage anywhere in the world. Even mountains move when you consider the timescale being in the thousands of years.

How can cost per energy unit actually be calculated for nuclear power if no end disposal site exists and no system of long term managing such a site has even been devised.

If your total cost per energy unit actually factored in the cost of waste disposal and long term management /maintance /supervision, I think your calculation would look very bad indeed for nuclear energy.

As far as I understand, this crucial factor in the calculation is constantly overlooked and has, somehow, been removed from the responsibility of those running the power plant and profiting from its operation, I assume because no private company would invest in any nuclear project if they were also responsible for cleanup and disposal and long term maintance of such sites..

Isn't nuclear energy therefore just a massive long con that future generations of taxpayers will endlessly have to pay for (and likely suffer from leaks and contaminations and associated cleanup costs)?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 02:38:55 No.12258799 Report

Quoted By: >>12258824 >>12259108

>>12258789
Dude, in a 100 years we're gonna have superintelligent AI, fusion energy, utility fog, planet-scale terraforming... You seriously lack perspective on what's going to be important long-term.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 02:56:39 No.12258824 Report

Quoted By:

>>12258799
Haha, yep, just look at what was predicted, when they already had electric cars and various advanced technologies before they got bought and shelved by powers that be 100 years ago, we got none of those things, except a super convenient surveillance device that everybody carries around with them at all times.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 03:13:28 No.12258858 Report

Quoted By: >>12259060

>>12258789
Natural gas deposits have remained sealed for tens or hundreds of millions of years, storing solid waste is not going to be that difficult.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 03:47:11 No.12258926 Report

Quoted By:

>>12258458
>>Is anything like pic related actually happening (i.e. only 3% turns into waste, the rest is recycled to be used again)?
>Yes.
outside France?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 05:05:47 No.12259060 Report

Quoted By:

>>12258858
are you implying that natural gas never leaks or has leaked in the last hundred million years?

Also why then hasn't any country except norway managed to find a suitable location for storage of nuclear waster? They have been looking for over 50 years now. In which time there has been no significant advances in nuclear waste management, so this >just wait 100 years and we'll figure it out with totally cool technology is already halfway and shaping up to be total bullshit.

Probably doesnt help that there is no incentive since private investors have no duty to deal with the waste created during their profiteering..

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 05:24:36 No.12259082 Report

Quoted By:

>>12258437

There are some countries that have fast breeder reactors which will enrich the U-238 that makes up most of the nuclear fuel and enrich it to U-239 which is fissionable. The U-238 is what we consider waste after the fuel is spent along with some other high decaying byproducts.

This seems like a great thing, less radioactive waste that doesn't have to be managed for no more than 100 years and creates more energy. So why aren't countries doing it? Simply put, it is more expensive then mining new uranium and putting it into existing reactors. It is also more difficult to run versus conventional reactors.

Perhaps this could ultimately change, but with governments generally not wanting to expand nuclear power, there isn't much incentive in researching better designs.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 05:44:59 No.12259108 Report

Quoted By: >>12259537

>>12258799
this is a smoothbrain take, you could have literally said the same thing before shittons of CO2 was released into the air under the assumption we would beyond needing to worry about it because of technological advancement.
Technology has a price to pay and it's form is energy, our need for it will only grow exponentially

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 09:22:35 No.12259537 Report

Quoted By: >>12259658

>>12259108
I was assuming that post was sarcastic, but it is obviously the basis upon which nuclear power has been sold since the 60s and what has allowed, even to this day, the topic of waste management and who should be responsible for it to be ignored and just pushed on to taxpayers (who are already subsidising the building of power stations) and the future generations and generations.

If, of course, techonology doesn't just continue to improve, but was in fact set back, say because some kind of global event (such as another world war), then what hope is there of ever dealing with all the timebombs and catastrophic amounts of waste just waiting to leak into atmosphere and oceans..

Nuclear power seems the alround smoothbrain approach to fulfilling our energy needs..

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 10:37:34 No.12259658 Report

Quoted By: >>12259717

>>12258789
>>12259537
You're clearly biased against nuclear, but think about the environmental impact of fossil fuel: they produce most of the green house gases, with a quarter due to energy production; they consume shitloads of fuel that has to be extracted with more environmental costs. Nuclear on the other hand has insane energy density, thus requiring orders of magnitude less fuel and thus producing orders of magnitude less waste per unit of energy. Still, nuclear is a political issue, not a technical one, as there are ways to handle the waste, like open air storage, which is currently used in some facilities in the US and has great advantages, or safe burial, which has its problems but it's still better than dumping the waste straight into the atmosphere.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 11:11:59 No.12259717 Report

Quoted By: >>12259775 >>12259856

>>12259658
I am convinced that anywhere near the level of subsidising and funding that nuclear has received, there could be very viable alternatives to it and to the fossil fuel industry. It's a fact that several technologies where bought out , copyright and prevented from being developed by the fossil fuel industry, to prevent them from being replaced by something cleaner and superior. I am sure the same has happened with nuclear power.

I personally believe geothermal, use of the tides, more advanced solar technology, off shore or high altitude (kite) wind farm and numerous intelligent ways of storing energy have been withheld and sabotaged and the narrative has been purposefully controlled to make the choice seem like it is just between fossil fuel or nuclear power (just as it has been economically dumbed down to capitalism vs communism/socialism).

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 11:47:58 No.12259775 Report

Quoted By: >>12259784

>>12259717
Luckily reality doesn't care what you think.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 11:55:13 No.12259784 Report

Quoted By:

>>12259775
It's fact regarding fossil fuel. Chances are it is the same with nuclear power. Not sure why so many shill for it, guess not reading anything but the corporate press releases and their sales reps blather about it will make you think it's great (just like vaccines)

Anonymous

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Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 12:32:18 No.12259856 Report

Quoted By: >>12259913

>>12259717
That's schizo tier beliefs. You have no idea of the scale of production each energy source is capable of providing, the efficiency at which it can be harvested, not only in thermodynamic terms, but also in terms of space required and economic viability. Nuclear just dwarfs everything else in terms of energy density, but nuclear powerplants are not that common due to political pressure and high initial investment needed, so roughly 80% of global energy production is still produced through fossil fuels because, well, combustion power plants are extremely refined, cheap to build and very efficient. Still, there are gargantuan investment into fusion energy, look into ITER, but that takes time, because turns out that no matter how much money the world dumps on the problem, it's still a problem at the cutting edge of technology. What you listed just can't have the power output needed because renewable energy is neither reliable nor efficient and on top of that we still don't have practical and economical ways of creating the large energy buffers needed to compensate for their unreliability.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:06:47 No.12259913 Report

Quoted By: >>12260220

>>12259856
>schizo tier beliefs
Alright smoothbrain, calm down, don't to cause you such cognitive dissonance derived discomfort. You keep plodding on believing that scientists from Tesla to Reich and hundreds of others haven't had their work confiscated and destroyed or that much of the technology being released now as new (e.g. electric cars, fuel cells, etc.) hasn't been around and actively supressed and withheld for decades.

Also your pic fucking stupid since it only compares burnable energy sources, as if boiling water and spinning a turbine was actually the only way to generate electricity. There are many far more powerful forces of energy constantly acting around us and it's fucking obvious and simple to harness some of them, the only logical explanation is that it has been held back by existing powers invested in nuclear and fossil fuel turbine spinning.

Did you know that the energy generated by cars breaking has been known to be significant for 100 years now, but only recently the geniuses in F1 and the brilliant scientist of the fossil fuel industry sponsoring it have allowed for this super obvious form of energy generation to be integrated in to cars.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:13:49 No.12259925 Report

Quoted By: >>12259928 >>12259933

>>12258437
No they store all the waste on some te because NIMBYs single handedly sealed the date of humanity by forever crippling nuclear.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:15:03 No.12259928 Report

Quoted By:

>>12259925
>Some te
Site* sorry my phone fag is showing.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:16:53 No.12259933 Report

Quoted By: >>12259936

>>12259925
Hey man, we should totally volunteer your place for the final storage. Yeah, and let's also make sure that any children of yours and anyone in your extended family and their descendants will have it on their properties too and will have to live with it forever.

That way it would just cripple your shitty bloodline forever, excellent.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:18:20 No.12259936 Report

Quoted By:

>>12259933
It would be stored under a mountain not near any ground water. Not in someone's literal back yard.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:20:01 No.12259939 Report

Quoted By: >>12259965

>>12258437
don’t nuclear power plants cause cancer around a certain radius around the plant?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:22:05 No.12259944 Report

Quoted By: >>12259968

>Nuclear power thread
Whats with all the fuss about japan leaking fukushima's treated water into the ocean? Is that water from the reactor or from one of the circuits inside the vapor turbine? News outlets aren't really clear about that and just like to side with mindless ecologists.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:30:10 No.12259965 Report

Quoted By:

>>12259939
Well for that to be real it would have to follow Hill's criteria. For one, this study shows that the relative risk is not that big, so even if there were confound factors, the criteria are not verified.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.31116
That doesn't mean that if the power plant had an accident the risk wouldn't go up (such as people in the vicinity of chernobyl).

Anonymous

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Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 13:30:56 No.12259968 Report

Quoted By: >>12260090

>>12259944
The several cores that have melted deep underground during the catastrophic collapse of fukushima have to be perpetually cooled to prevent further explosions into the atmosphere. Therefore tons of seawater is being pumped daily into the pits of the reactor cores to cool them down. This heavily contaminated cooling water is being kept in shitty plastic bags and is overflowing on the site. They claim to have removed most of the radioactive materials, except tritium which is too similar to water to be removed, so they want to release that into the ocean (with the tides taking it straight across to california).

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 14:05:37 No.12260020 Report

Quoted By:

>>12258789
You're right, which is why unironically we should dilute it with glass and make it into concrete for buildings or drop a tiny bit of it all over the ocean so it barely registers above background levels with our most sensitive instruments.

Nuclear waste is only dangerous because people insist on keeping it all together in one place. Radiation is everywhere already through nature. Take bananas, they're full of radioactive potassium, safely dilute. Go to a potassium chloride shelf at home Depot and you'll be getting a sizable radiation count approaching unsafe, get a source of pure potassium-40 it will be unsafe.
Mix it all back into bananas and we could all eat the waste. Remember all nuclear waste on earth is roughly one single tennis court worth with it's containers, in total it's probably a single 1x1m cube. Just disperse it

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 14:36:28 No.12260090 Report

Quoted By:

>>12258437
>I don't get it, when is plutonium "spent"? Isn't it still hot and needs a long time to cool down? Isn't that heat exactly what is used to boil the water for power generation?
It’s spent because there’s too many waste products that absorb neutrons and stop fission, then temps drop below usable for power generation

>Is anything like pic related actually happening (i.e. only 3% turns into waste, the rest is recycled to be used again)?
The Integrated fast reactor is designed to just that, the issue is that spent rods are still 95% fuel stuck inside ceramic so it’s radioactive and hard to get it out, many reactor designs are switching to metallic fuel as it’s easier to separate

Once supercritical CO2 turbines are ironed out, then we won’t have to deal with needing water to cool the primary loop, so that it’s no longer dependent on large water bodies and get better efficiency out of it

>>12259968
>with the tides taking it straight across to california.
Good, fuck California

If only we invested more in nuclear power that wasn’t just to breed weapons grade plutonium

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 22 Oct 2020 15:18:34 No.12260220 Report

Quoted By:

>>12259913
>smoothbrain
>MUH TESLA
>fuel cells
You're not an engineer and it shows. You're just a schizo. My suggestion: be humble, recognize you know way less than you believe, take your meds, and stop going on /pol/.

> but only recently the geniuses in F1 and the brilliant scientist of the fossil fuel industry sponsoring it have allowed for this super obvious form of energy generation to be integrated in to cars.
You clearly never heard of Toyota. Also you never considered the historical context and the economics behind consumer choices and industry decisions of the past. Damn you're ignorant as a brick.

This not to say oil corporations haven't done shitty things to protect their businesses, but not everything is a fucking conspiracy.

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