I argue that these old plants are too expensive to keep, but we lack a safer, cheaper follow on. But I understand the impulse.

...and exceedingly stupid antinuclear organizations ever.

Calling them "green" is like calling steel mills to make wind turbines "green."

Nearly 70 million people died every fucking decade since that misnamed organization was founded while they prattled on with idiotic calculations about the possibility that the Indian Point reactors might melt, and thousands of other stupid head up the ass speculations and appeals to fear and ignorance.

And, after 30 years of these calculations, exactly how many people died from radiation leaks at melting nuclear plants? We may reasonably assume in that period about 200 million plus or minus a few tens of millions people died from air pollution in that period

What a bunch of asses!!!!

That these asses suddenly want to grudgingly do next to nothing to undo the massive damage they have done to the future is little comfort.

Only Greenpeace outdoes them for pixilated and stupid destructive fantasies, and they are second only to Greenpeace for undeserved credibility given by a credulous media run by journalists who qualified for their journalism degrees by having never taken a college level science course of any type.

Are you supporting nuclear power? Why?

Last edited Sun Nov 11, 2018, 09:41 PM - Edit history (1)

Anyone who opposes nuclear energy, as I've learned in 30 years of intense study of the subject, is clueless and has not a even the remotest understanding of energy and the environment.

That’s the argument. Electric grids, even with renewables, have to be balanced with carbon fueled plants. Nuclear is carbon free.

Alas, they are economic boondoggles for a variety of reasons.

NNadir can elaborate on why that is and the disaster we are creating by not embracing them.

How much carbon based fuels are used in the mining of uranium? How about in the processing of the uranium ores? The mfg of the fuel rods?

I will admit I don't know what these costs are but they certainly aren't nothing.

Very little of the uranium used by US nuclear plants comes from the US so we are at the mercy of world markets for cost.

It turns out batteries are very good at providing a lot of the electricity needed to balance the grid. Currently we burn coal just to keep the boiler hot ready to supply the grid with electricity should the need arise. Batteries can provide this function quicker and at much less cost.

The reason is that this specious claim is made is that people routinely ignore external costs.

Imagine if nuclear plants were free to do what gas and coal plants do; which is to dump their wastes directly into the environment.

Dangerous fossil fuel plants are directly responsible for 4.2 million of the 7 million air pollution deaths that occur each year.

The real problem is shit for brains people running around saying "nuclear power is dangerous," with nobody ever asking them to prove it by showing a form of energy that has a lower external cost per exajoule of energy produced.

These cretins insist that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy be risk free, and that everything else can kill at will because, well, they just don't care.

Even if the upfront costs of nuclear needed to be as high as they are because of the creation of FOAKE costs generated by anti-nuke ignoramuses - arsonists complaining about forest fires - their costs can easily be recovered in lower health care costs, since nuclear energy saves lives. Moreover, every nuclear power plant built is a gift to future generations, since they are robust machines with long lifetimes overall; vastly superior to low energy to mass crap like solar and wind plants.

Look here, we have stupid people running around mindlessly carrying on about Fukushima while not one of these people is even remotely aware of the trichlorosilane explosion at the Mitusbishi plant that killed immediately more people than radiation at Fukushima.

Why? Because they're especially ignorant.

I note that the United States, using 1950's technology, built more than 100 nuclear reactors in a period of twenty years while providing the lowest cost electricity of any major industrial nation on Earth.

Suddenly we announce that what has already happened is impossible, and no one asks why that is.

Another thing one can hear from completely ignorant people - something that happens to be true by the way - is that nuclear energy is not "carbon free." It doesn't need to be carbon free to be vastly superior to essentially useless, short lived, and more toxic technologies like solar and wind, never mind the dangerous natural gas without which the solar and wind would even be more useless than they already are.

Most scientific journals report that the carbon cost of nuclear is about 10-25 grams of carbon dioxide/kwh. This is about 5 percent of the carbon cost of the dangerous natural gas that our anti-nukes are using to rob all future generations, while they hype their ineffective and trivial solar and wind garbage, both of which have higher carbon costs than nuclear.

But again, the insistence remains that nuclear energy and only nuclear energy need be carbon free, or everything else will be free, without comment, to be much worse.

Anti-nukes are mindless assholes.

The primary carbon cost of nuclear energy is connected with fuel enrichment, which in theory, but not in practice, could be powered by nuclear electricity.

I think it is probably relatively straight forward to advance way beyond the 1950's and 1960's technology on which nuclear energy has operated for more than half a century.

I argue that fuel enrichment is neither necessary at this point, nor is it desirable, if and only if we exploit the enormous resource represented by used nuclear fuel, perhaps - since most existing reactors utilize the thermal spectrum - with the incorporation of thorium. Ultimately, we should move to the complete uranium/plutonium cycle with minor assists from the thorium/U-233 cycle. I note that the uranium already mined in a plutonium/uranium cycle could power the entire world for many centuries; even without exploiting the 5 billion tons recoverable of uranium in seawater, uranium which could never be depleted, because of crustal recharge.

If we are going to address climate change, we are now at a point where we will need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, not merely stop dumping it. (We are doing neither.)

This an energetically intense process, since we will have to address centuries of accumulated entropy to remove it. Only nuclear energy has the energy to mass ratio sufficient to do this.

This will involve very high temperature systems. Because of grant funding, most of the technologies for doing this are published as involving solar thermal plants, which have not worked, are not working, and will not work on scale. However most of this science is fairly straight forward to apply to high temperature nuclear systems.

Early high temperature reactors were largely failures, except in the UK, because of materials science limitations. (The British AGCR was a moderate success; and the very first commercial reactor built in the Western World, Calder Hall, operated, beginning in 1956 with a carbon dioxide cooling technology until 2003; at the time of its construction it's estimated lifetime was estimated to be as poor as modern wind turbines, about 20 years. It operated for 47 years.) These materials science limitations are now clearly surmountable, and very high temperature nuclear reactors are now possible.

This is where the money should go; it won't; but it should go. Instead, in the last ten years, 2.3 trillion dollars went to solar and wind. Every single solar and wind facility on this planet will be landfill within twenty to thirty years, and the people who will need to clean it up, most of them babies today, will have far fewer resources to do it.

Thanks for your comment.