What's your thoughts on Nuclear Power?

[GDRRiley]

I've always been ok with nuclear power but my Parents have always be someone dismayed by it. My mom's like all this toxic waste; its not good.

So i'm just going to say a few interesting thoughts.

1. we have made less than a football field cubed of it over the 75 years by thousands of bombs and a few hundred reactors.

2. Most of the accidents have happened with early or poorly kept up and upgraded reactors. 

3. Things like wind and solar (Please stop with panels lets get back to mirrors with oil or molten salt there so much better) have the issues of not lasting 24/7

So with the possibility of Melton salt or Liquid Metal mixtures cooling or better designed water reactors do you all thing nuclear power will come back?

[sazrocks]

Some thoughts:

• Thorium. WHY THE HECK ARE WE (the US; I think China actually is) NOT RESEARCHING THIS STUFF. Thorium reactors solve basically 95% of the problems with current nuclear power. They literally cannot melt down. Thorium is way, way more common. They produce so much less waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
• No one seems to understand that we can't go 100% renewable right now. We need a solid backbone for the grid. Without stupidly large batteries (beyond what tesla could dream of right now), which in themselves cause lots of inefficiency and pollution, solar and wind will never be more than supplemental.
• Current nuclear is good. It's a shame that public hysteria kept more from being built.
• That being said, current nuclear has issues, namely, the possibility of melting down, the length of time that waste is dangerous (thousands of years), and cost to build new stations.
• Personally I feel that we should be investing more in fusion research as that has the potential to be nearly waste-free (aside from some harmless helium, which we actually need), has virtually limitless fuel, is completely safe (despite what was shown in spider-man 2, there is a 0% chance of a fusion meltdown) and could produce stupid amounts of power.

/ramble

[Fred Castellum]

No indifferent option? See it for what it is?

 

Fusion power stepping stone?

[ARikozuM]

I'm all for it. It just makes sense to supplement our needs among many avenues that we can control vs oil/coal that's controlled by another nation or power. 

[ARikozuM]

19 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

• That being said, current nuclear has issues, namely, the possibility of melting down, the length of time that waste is dangerous (thousands of years), and cost to build new stations

Wouldn't fusion waste be a good candidate for fission? Or is that not how nuclear works?

[sazrocks]

3 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Wouldn't fusion waste be a good candidate for fission? Or is that not how nuclear works?

With the large amount of energy required to fission helium and the fairly minuscule amount of energy gained it's not worth it.

[captain_to_fire]

While renewables are nice and definitely worth investing and researching, I'd take nuclear power over burning fossil fuels for a couple of reasons:

1. Nuclear power plants doesn't generate greenhouse gases or any pollutants associated to greenhouse. All fossil fuels do and some of their byproducts leads to acid rain.
2. Contrary to what POTUS45/Fox News has been saying, "clean coal" is basically washing shit with water. Anthracite is the highest quality of coal and creates lesser greenhouse gases than bituminous coal but it is still coal and produces the same pollutants as burning gasoline. Water has to be sprayed at the exhaust to reduce the spewing of pollutants but that water pressure requires so much more energy. 
3. Most of the fears about nuclear power stem from the Chernobyl incident in Ukraine (RBMK-1000) but remember that a lot has changed over the years and safety has improved with newer safety precautions like when should control rods drop. Also, with the aid from seismographers, fault lines are easily located and those are the places you don't want to build nuclear plants
4. 1 kg of Uranium/Plutonium can provide more energy than burning tons of coal or barrels of oil. In fact, 1 kg of Uranium-235 can provide energy for decades.

Depending where you live, energy sources should be what is the best for that place. There are definitely places where solar and wind are feasible or geothermal if you live near a volcano, but I think nuclear serves a better purpose than burning any fossil fuel.

 

4 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Wouldn't fusion waste be a good candidate for fission? Or is that not how nuclear works?

I'm not aware an existing technology that can contain 1 million^C for the sole purpose of generating power to millions of people. Most are still prototypes afaik.

[Cole5]

32 minutes ago, sazrocks said:

Some thoughts:

• Thorium. WHY THE HECK ARE WE (the US; I think China actually is) NOT RESEARCHING THIS STUFF. Thorium reactors solve basically 95% of the problems with current nuclear power. They literally cannot melt down. Thorium is way, way more common. They produce so much less waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
• No one seems to understand that we can't go 100% renewable right now. We need a solid backbone for the grid. Without stupidly large batteries (beyond what tesla could dream of right now), which in themselves cause lots of inefficiency and pollution, solar and wind will never be more than supplemental.
• Current nuclear is good. It's a shame that public hysteria kept more from being built.
• That being said, current nuclear has issues, namely, the possibility of melting down, the length of time that waste is dangerous (thousands of years), and cost to build new stations.
• Personally I feel that we should be investing more in fusion research as that has the potential to be nearly waste-free (aside from some harmless helium, which we actually need), has virtually limitless fuel, is completely safe (despite what was shown in spider-man 2, there is a 0% chance of a fusion meltdown) and could produce stupid amounts of power.

/ramble

The first one is easy

Cant make nukes from it, its why America has few if any Recycler reactors too

[lewdicrous]

 

[Unimportant]

This video pretty much matches my viewpoints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

 

What I think is the most dangerous now is all the political grandstanding about closing down nuclear power plants within X amount of years. When the time comes there's still no viable alternatives so they stay open and the cycle repeats. This results in old, long overtime nuclear plants remaining in operation. Politicians should admit we cannot do without and actually invest in them.

[Trik'Stari]

3 hours ago, Unimportant said:

This video pretty much matches my viewpoints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

 

What I think is the most dangerous now is all the political grandstanding about closing down nuclear power plants within X amount of years. When the time comes there's still no viable alternatives so they stay open and the cycle repeats. This results in old, long overtime nuclear plants remaining in operation. Politicians should admit we cannot do without and actually invest in them.

Call the hippies out on their ignorance, tell them if they're so worried about it perhaps they should get careers in that field as safety officers (with appropriate education and training) and help ensure the future safety of mankind.

 

We need thorium reactors. Not 20 years from now, but now.

 

6 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

While renewables are nice and definitely worth investing and researching, I'd take nuclear power over burning fossil fuels for a couple of reasons:

1. Nuclear power plants doesn't generate greenhouse gases or any pollutants associated to greenhouse. All fossil fuels do and some of their byproducts leads to acid rain.
2. Contrary to what POTUS45/Fox News has been saying, "clean coal" is basically washing shit with water. Anthracite is the highest quality of coal and creates lesser greenhouse gases than bituminous coal but it is still coal and produces the same pollutants as burning gasoline. Water has to be sprayed at the exhaust to reduce the spewing of pollutants but that water pressure requires so much more energy. 
3. Most of the fears about nuclear power stem from the Chernobyl incident in Ukraine (RBMK-1000) but remember that a lot has changed over the years and safety has improved with newer safety precautions like when should control rods drop. Also, with the aid from seismographers, fault lines are easily located and those are the places you don't want to build nuclear plants
4. 1 kg of Uranium/Plutonium can provide more energy than burning tons of coal or barrels of oil. In fact, 1 kg of Uranium-235 can provide energy for decades.

Depending where you live, energy sources should be what is the best for that place. There are definitely places where solar and wind are feasible or geothermal if you live near a volcano, but I think nuclear serves a better purpose than burning any fossil fuel.

 

I'm not aware an existing technology that can contain 1 million^C for the sole purpose of generating power to millions of people. Most are still prototypes afaik.

Worth pointing out that a significant part of the Chernobyl incident was the communist system. You did what you were told or got sent to Siberia. Always had to tell the boss what he wanted to hear, etc.

 

The guy running the place at the time, who was later 100% blamed for the incident, basically threatened the operators under him into conducting a safety test, well outside established parameters, and the worst nuclear accident in history occurred as a result.

 

That system of government/economy also resulted in the reactor which was constructed being rather horribly designed with shortcuts here and there that compromised safety. It was prone to hotspots that the operators could not see.

[captain_to_fire]

15 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

-snip-

Other than the Chernobyl incident, I don't know how the Soviet Union and its political system becomes relevant in the discussion of power generation via nuclear energy in this thread. Granted, all I know is that control rods are dropped way too late which lead to the generation of too much heat. When the operators saw it's getting way too hot, they dropped the control rods but it simply melted and the explosion happened.

 

[rmac52]

6 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

Wouldn't fusion waste be a good candidate for fission? Or is that not how nuclear works?

The typical materials used to fuel a fission reactor are many times larger than the byproducts of a typical fusion reactor.  

 

[TetraSky]

They are great and all for not really polluting while operating and creating a lot of energy....

But if anything goes really wrong, suddenly the entire zone around it is uninhabitable for the next twenty thousand years.(Granted it'd be a bit hard for thing to go as wrong as they did in Chernobyl, but the fact that it could even happen is the issue here)

Add to that the fact that they produce radioactive waste that won't degrade anytime soon and you just have an environmental disaster waiting to happen because the only thing we found to "get rid of them" is to bury them in concrete and pretend they don't exist for the many generations to come.

 

Nuclear is basically the thing you use if you give zero shit about the far future since you'll be long dead anyway.

[GDRRiley]

2 hours ago, TetraSky said:

They are great and all for not really polluting while operating and creating a lot of energy....

But if anything goes really wrong, suddenly the entire zone around it is uninhabitable for the next twenty thousand years.(Granted it'd be a bit hard for thing to go as wrong as they did in Chernobyl, but the fact that it could even happen is the issue here)

So this is the case for current water cooled reactors. There was a test ran in the early 1980s of a reactor that used a mixture of molten sodium and a metal that would auto shutdown even if no one was there and there was no power based on it expanding and then nuclear fission stopping.  It had the coolant valves closed which in a normal water reactor would have caused an explosion, the biggest issue with it was is that it happened about a month before Chenobyl 

It was ran for over 30 years as a test reactor.

2 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Other than the Chernobyl incident, I don't know how the Soviet Union and its political system becomes relevant in the discussion of power generation via nuclear energy in this thread. Granted, all I know is that control rods are dropped way too late which lead to the generation of too much heat. When the operators saw it's getting way too hot, they dropped the control rods but it simply melted and the explosion happened

In some ways it is because there are still some of the reactors from Chernobyl's generation that are still running. that were run so poorly for so many years

 

One of the issues I see is that we have to many old reactors. Its fine to operate them for 60-70 years but there reaches a point when gen 1 and gen 2 reactors need to be rebuilt to gen 3.

[Firewrath9]

10 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

I've always been ok with nuclear power but my Parents have always be someone dismayed by it. My mom's like all this toxic waste; its not good.

So i'm just going to say a few interesting thoughts.

1. we have made less than a football field cubed of it over the 75 years by thousands of bombs and a few hundred reactors.

2. Most of the accidents have happened with early or poorly kept up and upgraded reactors. 

3. Things like wind and solar (Please stop with panels lets get back to mirrors with oil or molten salt there so much better) have the issues of not lasting 24/7

So with the possibility of Melton salt or Liquid Metal mixtures cooling or better designed water reactors do you all thing nuclear power will come back?

nuclear power has killed less than 100 people in the past 50 years.

100 people die every year from coal mining accidents.

i think 10,000 people died in china when a dam broke

wind and solar take up too much space but are fine if you have plenty of space

france gets 40% of its energy and has pretty cheap power, its the 7th cheapest out of like 30 in europe.

 

[wasab]

I love nuclear power. I want to sleep next to an enrich uranium as a matter of fact. 

[Cookybiscuit]

NIMBY.

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, Cookybiscuit said:

NIMBY.

So you want your house to be ok that's fine.  

[Egg-Roll]

I chose destroy them because it was the best option. I'm fine with the ones running right now so long as they are maintained, however I don't think building new ones will solve our issues. I don't think Canada has any plans on building new ones for now which I'm happy about. For the USA I would say build them to get rid of coal, or as above invest in thorium reactor.

 

The issue isn't running them it's storing the used reactors, something people have to worry about for generations. Nuclear isn't as green as many may think(and what Ontario clowns where pushing in the late 90's early 2000's). If the Oshawa plant was to melt down there is a chance thousands will die from related causes/people being stupid during the incident and could negatively affect Toronto, possibly forcing a evacuation of the east side.

[Trik'Stari]

9 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Other than the Chernobyl incident, I don't know how the Soviet Union and its political system becomes relevant in the discussion of power generation via nuclear energy in this thread. Granted, all I know is that control rods are dropped way too late which lead to the generation of too much heat. When the operators saw it's getting way too hot, they dropped the control rods but it simply melted and the explosion happened.

 

Those control rods actually caused the explosion. They had a design flaw. The tip of them was a different material that acted as a neutron reflector rather than absorber.

 

That reactor had a number of inherent safety flaws.

 

 

Only tangentially related to the current subject. Still worth noting in my book. Those reactors were developed and constructed as quickly and cheaply as possible, resulting in numerous safety problems. It's important to remember this and ensure it never becomes tolerable to sacrifice safety to save money or time or whatever.