Nuclear power and climate targets

Well I do have strong opinions on nuclear power, informed by 50 years of following the pros and cons.

First, anyone who says “we need X to meet climate goals” is selling something. Full stop. So take everything else they say with a large grain of salt.

Second, I really can’t understand trading a partial solution for one dire almost unsolvable problem — climate change — for another dire unsolved problem — keeping nuclear waste out of the biosphere for many thousands of years. And before you say “but what about Y for safeguarding nuclear waste?” – show me someone using Y successfully on a large scale for a few thousand years. I’ll wait.

And long-lived nuclear waste is only one of many hard or unsolved problems with using nuclear power to mitigate climate change.

But all of this is pretty far from backpacking. Discussion probably should be in Chaff.

— Rex

I second the above – please move these poorly informed threads to Chaff or off BPL entirely……

I didn’t pay for membership to read half baked rants on unrelated topics……

I know where to go to seek out more informed discussion about energy policy – definitely NOT on BPL.

The current reactors have several problems – they create waste that we don’t know what to do with, once you “turn them on” you have to constantly pump water through them to cool them or they melt down Fukashima style, there’s a shortage of fuel and producing the fuel creates a pollution problem.  I agree with the above, we shouldn’t build any more of these and we should phase out existing ones.

Breeder reactors “burn” Uranium 238 and other isotopes, the waste from other reactors, so they’re a solution to the waste problem.  They can be designed to be fail safe – if they lose power like Fukashima they’ll just shut down by themselves.  There’s no shortage of fuel because they use the waste from other reactors and the uranium refinement process.  Bill Gates and/or Paul Allen (I forget, but I read about it somewhere, Popular Science maybe) are developing a prototype.  China has agreed to doing one in China.  There’s potential there.  They still have a lot of radiation to deal with.  Wind and solar are probably better.  Maybe do breeder reactors until we’ve processed all the waste we’ve accumulated.  The U.S. should also build a prototype.

There’s always fusion reactors.  They’re 10 years out (like they’ve been for the last 50 years).

“First, anyone who says “we need X to meet climate goals” is selling something. Full stop. So take everything else they say with a large grain of salt.”

Good point.  The climate is so complicated and we know so little it’s over confident to say that.

I didn’t report the topic for inappropriate content : )

I second the above – please move these poorly informed threads to Chaff or off BPL entirely……

I didn’t pay for membership to read half baked rants on unrelated topics……

I know where to go to seek out more informed discussion about energy policy – definitely NOT on BPL.

Chaff?

Kat posted this in the “Environmental Issues” Forum, which is described as,

Activism, news, science reporting, and other topics related to conservation, climate change, land use, energy, water and soil conservation, pollution, etc.

Her link is appropriate to the purpose of this forum, more so than putting it in Chaff. It actually hits the forum description perfectly.

The linked article is on the website of the International Atomic Energy Agency, an organization created by the United Nations is 1957 that reports to the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council.

Is the IAEA “poorly informed” ?

How is this a “half baked rant” or “unrelated topic” ?

The title of the post, “Nuclear Power and Climate Targets” is pretty obvious and those who would rather read the umpteenth post on which stove is most efficient, which is  the best WPB jacket, or what underwear they should buy for the JMT simply shouldn’t click on this tread.

This IAEA was inspired by President Eisenhower’s speech to the U.N. in 1953, where he advocated using nuclear power for peace, not destruction. To commerate this idea, the US Postal Service issued one of my favorite stamps in 1955…

Thanks for posting this Kat.

^^^^Thanks Nick.

Lol, another post of mine reported for inappropriate content. Rant? Lol again.

“I second the above – please move these poorly informed threads to Chaff or off BPL entirely……

I didn’t pay for membership to read half baked rants on unrelated topics……

I know where to go to seek out more informed discussion about energy policy – definitely NOT on BPL.”

You are free to express your opinions, right along with the rest of us.  What you are not free to do is squelch the opinions of others, based on your disagreement with them.  OP very much belongs in the newly formed Environmental Issues forum, as it directly involves environmental issues, in this case dealing with climate change and nuclear power.  Pending a much clearer demonstration of your higher level of knowledge of the issue than you have so far supplied, your comments regarding half baked rants and more informed discussion are about the only content posted so far that deserves to be reported as inappropriate.  Bad form, Pedestrian, bad form.

First, I didn’t report the thread…..

OK my reaction was over the top – mea culpa…..but this is the second hot air thread (my opinion) in recent days.

In the future I’ll know to skip these inane threads and not post on them….

Please carry on….

And it just occurred to me that maybe this is where some seek the answers to life, the universe and everything…..

We know the answer is 42…..

Is anyone familiar with the concept of thorium as an alternative nuclear fuel? It could resolve some of the concerns of nuclear power. It’s unfortunate that the demand to develop nuclear weapons lead to limited research and thus established uranium as the predominant fuel.

Thorium is in the same row as uranium on the periodic table. Elements in the same row share chemical properties, in this case the key similarity is that they can absorb neutrons and transmute into fissile elements. In nature, thorium is more than 3x abundant than uranium. It is not fissile on its own (which means reactions can be stopped when necessary). Because the thorium fuel cycle does not irradiate U-238 it doesn’t produce transuranic byproducts, meaning that the waste products are less radioactive. This also means that the danger of long-term nuclear waste from a health perspective is also less.

This gentleman provides a more thorough explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMuxjHLLk0E

Never heard of Thorium but I will look into it. Can’t watch the video now but thanks.

“Never heard of Thorium but I will look into it. Can’t watch the video now but thanks.”

Interesting discussion.  I’m not a big fan of nuclear but also believe we went the wrong route (Uranium) and should have figured out Thorium as reactor fuel.  Here’s another (and shorter) video on the benefits and safety of Thorium as reactor fuel:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY

PS   For another surprising insight, google “natural nuclear reactor”…..yes, they have occurred in “nature”.

“but this is the second hot air thread (my opinion) in recent days.”

Only the second???  He!!, BPL is a major source of gasses contributing to global warming, right up there with cow farts in India.  The trick is to realize that both are here to stay and roll with it.  ;0)

I have a bunch of thoughts.  First I’ve been worried since my understanding about climate change, circa 2000, about how rapidly we were changing things and now realizing that ocean acidification will have a bunch of foreseeable effects and many unforeseen ones, and when we get things warm enough to melt methane hydrates and to oxidize all the carbon in the tundra, we’ll have reset things for the nest 100,000 years or more.  But, hey, we just had a 7.0 earthquake and lots of people in Anchorage are without power or gas, but it’s only 35F in late November instead of the historic 0-15F this time of year.  An upside to global warming – it makes a power failure a lot easier to bear.

Anyway, personally, prior to 2000, I was slightly against nuclear power because we had no perfect place to put the waste.  If the other 49 states had just told Nevada and Harry Reid, “Sorry, you’re getting it all.” we could proceed.  That said, we never had a perfect place to put all the coal ash or the lead and mercury that comes out of the stack and pollutes all the land, lakes and stream downwind and, ultimately, around the world.

But nuclear power generates VERY little carbon (some for all that concrete and the mining of uranium, but vastly less than coal, oil or gas).  And that now seems like a much bigger issue.  We’ve solved a variety of environmental pollution problems (that is my day job) and we keep getting better at, while we have no great solution to the carbon we’ve already released.

So I now wish the USA after Three-mile Island and non-France Europe after Chernobyl hadn’t abandoned nuclear power.  The US has brought almost no new nukes online after the ones in the pipeline in 1980 were completed.  We’ve mostly lost the technological know-how and institutional memory to put a nuclear reactor anywhere other than an aircraft carrier or missile submarine.  And when we try to do it, since we don’t let the French or Japanese handle it, several have gone so far over budget that they got cancelled after wasting billions of dollars.

But let’s say we could, technologically, politically, financially, permitting, non-NIMBY, non-BANANA, etc, actually build new nukes.  Nukes are base loaded.  You run them, day and night, flat out, at 1 GigaWatt (or 2 or 3 GigaWatts if there are multiple reactors).  Other assets (natural gas in most places, hydro power here in Alaska) are dialed up and down to meet demand which **has to** be met with equal generation minute by minute.  And coal plants for similar reasons are also base loaded.  The reason for each is that the plant is very expensive and slow to modulate while the fuel is cheap.  Versus natural gas turbines which are far cheaper to install and can be ramped up and down quickly (they can be started from cold in 15 minutes, while nukes and coal plants need several days to start from cold).

Why does that matter?  People use more power during the day, especially late in the afternoon / early evening, than in the middle of the night.  My utility has pretty flat demand due to a lot of industrial load – we might swing from 75 MW at 5 pm to 59 MW at 2 am, but most utilities see much more swing than that.  Than add to that solar (which peaks at noon, unless you pitch the panels well to the west, which would be best practices), wind power only during windy hours, constraints on hydro for fish and recreational reasons, and the utility dispatcher runs out of dials to turn to cost-effective match supply and demand.  And don’t say “batteries!”.  A decade ago, the largest battery installation in the world was in Alaska, and it would only carry 30% our little utility (50,000 people in our service area) for 15 minutes.  Yes, batteries are getting better and cheaper, but they still cost a lot.  A bigger opportunity is to incentivize (or require) people to charge their electrical cars when there is excess generation capacity.

The same people who yell at me to bring on more renewables also yell when their power bill goes up just 3%.  Let me double our rates, and your power will be almost 100% carbon-free in a decade.  Let me raise the rates 50% and we could probably get to 70-80% carbon free.  But as soon as it effects people’s pocketbooks, you lose almost all of your support to abandon all the traditional assets we already have (and have already paid for).  Limited to rate increases of about 12%, we’ve managed to greatly improve the efficiency of our main gas turbine (59 MW with the same fuel we used to get 40 MW from), bump our hydro from 10% to 14% by diverting another stream into the reservoir, and will eventually get another few percent (after an 11-year permitting process) with a small-scale, run-of-river hydro project.

yeah, good points

On the east coast they have these pairs of reservoirs separated by about 1000 feet elevation.  When they have excess power pump water up to the higher one, when you need power let the water run the other way and generate power.  They use this to use the steady load of a nuclear plant to provide variable power demand.  That is technically proven compared to batteries.

There’s a lot of Thorium in Uranium mine and refinement waste.  It would be good to burn that.  We could design a reactor that burns all that waste material.  Breeder reactors do that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor  There are two companies currently developing.

Pumped storage works if you already have the reservoirs, generators and penstocks in place (for traditional hydro power).  Like in the California Sierra foothills when there are series’ of small dams, one after another.  If so, it’s a way to arbitrage cheap nighttime power into the next day.  If not, those facilities are too expensive to use for only that purpose.

“Demand-side management” has a lot of potential and has worked well in some markets, but it takes years to build up a significant base of residential users whose water heaters can be controlled remotely in return for cheaper power.

Or, the San Gabriel Mountains have good opportunities for pumped storage. They already have those reservoirs where they store water stolen from the Owens Valley : )

I work in nuclear power and thus see it on the inside, and it’s not perfect, but great measures are taken to ensure that it is safe at least in the US-other countries might not have as much conservatism and defense in depth (Chernobyl for example purposely disabled all of their safety systems for an experiment  prior to the disaster).

Nuclear Power isn’t perfect by any means, but it is, in my opinion, by far the most environmentally friendly generation technology currently available for base load power.   Currently new reactor designs such as the AP1000 and Small Modular Reactor have passive cooling, and pose much less risk to the environment than our current reactors, though construction has been almost cost prohibitive.   Perhaps in time a new technology will become available that will surpass nuclear for environmentally friendly base load power, but for now, nuclear is our best bet.

The upshot of the nuclear energy solution is that it might buy us just enough time to build the machines that will have to replace us before total eco-biological collapse.  Our AI progeny will have no issues inheriting a planet polluted with hundreds of thousands of years worth of life-scrambling radioactive waste. Build for the future, I say.

High time to shuck this mortal coil and upload into The Singularity, folks.

“High time to shuck this mortal coil and upload into The Singularity, folks.”

Welcome to The Age of  Spiritual Machines.  But, gosh, I’m sure going to miss a few things, like sex, beer, backpacking…..

If you give in, the Matrix will provide all that.

OK here’s a bunch of 3rd hand anecdotes: I signed up some petition in opposition to nuclear power back around 71 or 72. It was being pushed by senator Ted Stephens of Alaska. Lots of good info like that plutonium, the deadliest poison known to man with a half life of 25,000 years (or to paraphrase the sheriff in”no country for old men” It’ll do till something more deadly comes along)  I think there are arguments about whether Homo Sapiens has even been around for 25,000 years so that seemed like a pretty good reason to oppose nuclear. Lots of stuff can happen in 25,000 years. We might even live up to the Sapient label.

Then I found out Stephens just might be friendly with the oil industry. How convenient!

I was having a conversation about 12-14 years ago with a group of nice folks in the Los Alamos hiking club on a hiking trip out in Utah. We were basically having a version of this conversation. I was told that a breeder reactor using thorium could theoretically “use” the fuel down to the point where you could almost eat it. Granted that may be a little extreme; plus I assume it would take a massive amount of thorium that weak to generate enough heat to make any reasonably scaled power……. but still that’s a lot better than tons and tons of plutonium with a half life of 25,000 years.

We started or joined a program paying for power based on-peak and off-peak consumption about 35 years ago. The first thing I noticed was that it reduced our overall power consumption by @ 20% plus/minus. That program has been dis-continued but we are still evidently “grand-fathered” in. That’s always an option. Use less.

I’ve come to the conclusion… and it’s a little scary… That the oil and gas boys have trillions of dollars worth of assets and sunk costs and by God they plan to convert that to income. I think; they think, they’ve got a strategy to completely convert their assets without cooking the world in the process. I don’t see how that’s possible without some form of carbon recapture. I mean you free the carbon into the atmosphere…… it isn’t going to Jupiter.

I’ve seen the big trunks of the grand Chestnuts laying on the forest floor in the Smokies. (and the little baby ones that live for awhile before dying)  I actually got to see the big red spruce.The Boulevard trail wound along the ridge from the AT to Le Conte and the entire forest floor was open under the big spruce so you could see ahead for a few hundred yards and the forest floor was covered with ferns and grasses and the trail disappeared around curves in the distance hidden by the ferns.So beautiful. The crest trail from Clingmans to Guyot is now completely different. And lately we’ve lost the Giant Hemlocks; redwoods of the east, from Albright and Maddron and all along the trail to Sterling and the Boogerman and Fork Mt. and so many other places…. Joyce Kilmer… Three major extinctions….. or at least 3 situations where we won’t see that again for many many centuries. It’s sad and it’s scary but it’s still beautiful. How much longer will it last?

Any bets on how long it takes Tall Dude to show up? especially since I didn’t specifically name him?

it’s interesting that we all have a hard time imagining a non technological fix or solution to this problem. Of course technology is what got is in this mess in the first place…but we go on imagining even the post apocalypse in terms of robots and ai and so called spiritual machines, which themselves exhibit this dark logic: there’s nothing we can do to stop technology, even if it means our utter ruin–because we’ve bought into it being better than its alternatives- so let’s embrace our own suicide and salute the advent of our superior successors, the dead machines (there are no spiritual machines). In all of this we forget that WE in fact build or don’t build all of this. Technology is our idol that calls the tune we dance to.

all of our futuristic movies feature people acting exactly as they do now–blowing things up and killing each other–except they have better space ships and teleporters and such. We simply can’t seem to imagine a future where WE would have fundamentally changed.

I honestly doubt that redoubling more of the same technothink is going to work. Just the opposite.

this is definitely chaff, but

I don’t think the problem we’re in now with climate change is because of technology.  1900 era coal burning is much worse.  If there was no technology since then, things would be worse.

The problem is too many people and developed to the point they start using coal

Alternate energy requires a lot of technology to get to the 100% use level

I can see skepticism in nuclear though.  Especially the 20th century reactors.  We shouldn’t build any more of those.