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0 pointsducleonctor5y ago0 comments

> Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last about 4 billion years using breeder reactors [1].

Are there safe breeder reactor designs? How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?

> Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.

True. But irradiating large patches of land/streams of water just makes for bad publicity. Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site or similar sites, like the one near my home town Hanau (see comment below).

> Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.

South Korea suffers from massive corruption and the country is practically run by a few ultra-rich families, even Chinese are complaining about that fact. ;)

As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few? It is no wonder that regulatory costs there are lower. A human life is apparently less valuable.

> Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.

This is something to consider. Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert? Would wind turbines reduce peak windspeed and stop or revert desertification?

> Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...

If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries" that would be awesome. Unfortunately shielding combined with the fact that it won't work as a closed system for long (need for "refreshing" spent fuel in a breeder periodically) makes that impractical due to hard physics. As far as I know.

How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled? Normal nuclear fuel transport cost lots of money and require high security. Are you going to put those perfectly safe rods in an Uber? Like that radioactive fracking brine on the back of a small truck without shielding? That model could work in Russia... or maybe the US.

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acidburnNSA5y ago

> Are there safe breeder reactor designs?

Yup. As shown in data above, current nuclear is about as safe as you can get. On top of that most breeder reactors operate at low coolant pressure, enabling even more robust safety. For example the Experimental Breeder Reaction-2 did two famous demonstrations in 1986 where they turned off the coolant pump without inserting the control rods and the reactor both shut itself off anyway and removed the afterglow heat with passive natural convection.

> How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?

Same way we do today. Inspections and safeguards. You have to remember that it's wayyy easier to just buy natural uranium and enrich it than it is to steal radioactive plutonium from quasi-military guarded facilities. Furthermore, the latter can be done whether or not we have any commercial nuclear power so it's basically a moot point.

> bad publicity

Sure, but we can try to show people statistics to convince them that scary-looking things can sometimes be appropriate and good. Air travel would be a good example here.

> Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site

They absolutely do. Hanford impact is extremely well studied. These are WW2/Cold War era nuclear weapons sites, which are not necessarily comparable in mission to civilian power generation.

> As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few?

Do you say the same regarding current low solar manufacturing prices, driven almost entirely by the Chinese? If you want a more US-focused example, consider that the US Navy regularly constructs 300 MW nuclear power plants to power submarines and aircraft carriers in shipyard environments with excellent cost and schedule performance.

> Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert?

Surely there are, but most people like to take the precautionary principle about such dramatic and vast geoengineering efforts.

> If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries"

The "perfectly safe" standard you're applying to nuclear but not other energy tech is very perplexing to me. Why not 'anything 2 orders of magnitude safer than fossil and biofuel is safe enough'?

> How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled?

Like this [1] ;)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4

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