Whenever I ride around Berkeley, CA I see a sea of "nuclear-free zone" signs on roads filled with Prius traffic. It's not so easy to understand the real agendas here.
> It's not so easy to understand the real agendas here.
The real agenda has a lot more to do with impressing your neighbors with how eco-conscious you are (ideally via cheap signals like signs and bumper stickers) than it does with costly and difficult initiatives like figuring out how to meet the world's energy requirements in a sustainable way.
The real agenda has a lot more to do with impressing your neighbors with how eco-conscious you are (ideally via cheap signals like signs and bumper stickers)
This tired bullshit again?
Yes, we understand that everyone could be doing more to help some cause, and that some people care more about appearances than improving the world, and some people do legitimately good deeds for ‘selfish’ reasons like increased self-esteem.
The “virtue-signaling” “every decent action in the world is done just to impress one’s tribe” meme is getting old.
If you say you support something, but don't want to take actions that demonstrably promote what you are supporting, you are virtue signalling. It's quite simple, and it's maddening.
"Maddening" implies discomfort. If people didn't virtue signal, it would eliminate that discomfort. You don't like the discomfort, otherwise you would have written that you find virtue-signaling being maddening an enjoyable experience. If it was neutral, you wouldn't use an emotional word to describe it. Since you don't find the feeling enjoyable or neutral, and because of the meaning of "maddening," that means you don't like it. Therefore, to prevent your discomfort, you support people not virtue-signaling.
What action are you taking to demonstrably promote the reduction of virtue-signaling?
It seems like much of the calling out of alleged virtue-signaling is virtue-signaling itself.
By the same token, I can complain about a group, and as long as I don't claim that my complaints magically fixed the problem, that's fine.
That's not at all how people use it colloquially.
Nobody is claiming that bumper stickers, Priuses, statements of "thoughts and prayers," or changing one's Facebook profile picture magically fix any problem. And yet those are the exact things that get labeled virtue-signalling.
In this thread alone, jaredhansen mentions "ideally via cheap signals like signs and bumper stickers" - though admittedly doesn't say virtue signals. x220's definition is also at odds with yours. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=virtue-signalling is rife with examples.
The incessant cries of virtue-signalling on the web absolutely do not require someone claiming that they've "magically fixed" any problem, and are almost entirely gate-keeping, goalpost-moving, ad hominem attacks, simple partisanship, and general lazy argumentation.
I support not virtue signalling. I would be happier if people said what they meant and didn't virtue signal. I do not virtue signal; I don't care much what people think about my political opinions. I think I'm internally consistent in this regard.
Nobody is chaining themselves to the equipment and preventing energy companies from building more nuclear plants. Heck, judging by the Dakota Access Line protests, that doesn't work anyways in the long run.
The reason why more plants aren't being built is because they are not cost effective compared to other options. You can argue that maybe the government or whoever could do more research to change this, but every company that wants a nuclear plant in the U.S. has one already. Until the engineering and regulatory situation changes so that it's easier to build a nuclear plant than it is to build a solar one, they're going to keep building the latter instead of the former.
I have a prius and I don't care about my neighbor's opinions.
It was just available cheap to em used and doesn't use as much gas.
How have you decided you can speak for all prius owners?
If people ARE trying to "keep up with the Joneses" by buying priuses instead of SUVs and Corvettes that would be a great agenda.
You can't dismiss the waste problem out of hand given the environmental problems at places like Hanford [0] and the costs of safely decommissioning old plants, especially damaged ones like Fukushima [1]. There's abundant evidence that it's a costly, poisonous mess if done badly.
Personally I don't think this is the biggest problem with nuclear power, and it's certainly not in and of itself a reason to switch to alternatives. But it's not an issue to ignore either.
The output of a nuclear reactor isn’t waste, it is fuel for a different kind of reactor. If we built those reactors (called a breeder reactor) then we could safely and economically use that fuel, recycling so much that the actual waste would go from tons of material filling Olympic class swimming pools, to a few barrels. Nuclear power, done properly, is the cleanest source of energy we have.
Why don’t we? Politics and the lack of military uses.
As opposed to all those military uses of dams and wind turbines. Right. And of course, I wonder what the fuss is all about with Iran, then...
The reason nuclear is in decline is the track record of spectacular disasters: Three Mile, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima. Get at least a generation without massive failures, and people might be willing to give nuclear a chance; but there have been 3 in my lifetime alone!
(Plus, in any country not as big and isolated as the US, any plant is a massive weakness from a defense perspective...)
I mean, if you want to talk about safety records of power production, I'd like to point out that fossil fuels kill about 3 million a year, and biofuel (wood, dung) kills about 4.3 million a year. Those estimates are from 2012.
Nuclear is nowhere close to that over the past half century of use, even if you toss in fatalities caused by nuclear weapons, which is a whole different category.
Realistically, installation of solar and wind is actually more dangerous than Nuclear, because of falls.
What I mean is that the fuel reprocessing designs aren’t miniaturizable, so government money wasn’t spent developing them because they couldn’t be used in aircraft carriers or submarines. When civilian power plants were made, it was basically just scaled up military designs. The same contractors built both.
Also the fact that we use uranium instead of the safer and more abundant thorium is because you can’t make thorium bombs.
The reactors that have failed are these military derivative designs that lack safety features because there is no space for them in a submarine. No modern design has had such a failure, or could have such a failure since they have no reliance on active cooling and have safeguards to structurally prevent a core meltdown.
You can't bring up the externalities of Nuclear and then ignore the externalities of literally every other clean energy source. How many people in China were killed building Hydro plants, how many poisoned by heavy metals manufacturing solar equipment?
Nuclear has its issues, but everything else does too.
"how many poisoned by heavy metals manufacturing solar equipment"
Zero? How many people have died making manufacturing computers, tvs, toys, or appliances; all of which have all the same heavy metals as solar panels by virtue of being electronic goods? This is essentially FUD. A single PV panel can generate 5-10 Mwh over its service life, conservatively. On the low end that is equivalent to about 2 tons of coal. Since coal contains a broad cross section of heavy metals and they become more bioavailable when burned, I think you're better off with the panels.
Hanford is a cite of nulcear production for military use and there were problems with that.
It has little to do with nuclear waste for civilian use today and is in no way comparable to civilian nuclear waste and how it is stored.
Also, Fukushima is the exception of the exception, it is a bit of land that can not be used for long while its not a lot of land and its in a nuclear exclusion zone anyway.
I don't want to ignore the issue, but I will just say that the amount of time, ink and energy spend on it is way out of proportion to how much it matters
People keep making the argument that climate change is a existential issue but then saw, well, nuclear is not a solution because of this nuclear waste problem. That is insane reasoning in my opinion.
No, it actually is a problem. It has to be stored for millennia, and in a way that does not leak/contaminate surroundings (including ground water). Very little technology /materials can meet those requirements[0], and the current situation is a damn mess[1].
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (The same can't be said for coal waste - like just about everything else associated with burning coal, coal waste is an environmental diaster.)
Well, it's not, and there doesn't seem to be much focus by the DoE to do so. Therefore storage of waste is still a major problem if you want to generate electricity with nuclear power plants in the US.
The politics around nuclear waste are preventing the construction of reactor designs which exist today which could take waste that exists today and use it with an output with a much more manageable half-life than the waste we have just sitting around right now.
Right... The only technical problem, how to store waste indefinitely, is only a problem because there's a larger political problem that prevents the waste from being recycled/reused. Since the political problem is highly unlikely to be resolved within a few decades, that leaves us with the technical problem of how to deal with the waste as we are currently generating/storing it.
The amounts of hi-level waste generated are manageable and no one is claiming we are in danger of imminently running out of space. Long before this becomes a problem we will either recycle the waste or use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least.
Only if you don't use it. The intelligent thing would be to burn in in a subcritical reactor[0]. This would let you produce more electricity from nuclear "waste", turning it into different material that's safer to dispose of.
You'd think fossil fuels would have taught us the value of foresight wouldn't you? Even if you were aware of the consequence of excessive CO2 from the advent of the era, it could easily have been dismissed. 'Worrying about a bit of extra CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age is downright idiotic. There's a lot of atmosphere around our planet, and a bit of extra CO2 is good for the plants anyhow!'
There's a huge difference in nuclear going from a small chunk of our present day power generation to eras where some see it as being the primary generator for whatever exponential increases in energy we'll be using in the future. This change in scale really should affect how you look at things. Nuclear in particular has some pretty catastrophic fail scenarios, major decommissioning issues, and other problems. These can kind of be hand-waved away at current levels, but can't when you start talking about increasing operations on the order of magnitudes.
And when you start talking about things like this you're also implicitly alluding to breeder reactors, salt-water extraction, and other technologies that not only add substantial complexity (and side issues) but also greatly increase the costs relative to present day nuclear, which poses even more issues in terms of sustainability.
For all intents and purposes solar is pretty much a flawless method of energy production. The one issue is night time production, but there are countless ways to store energy even if we ignore more utopic scenarios like global high energy direct current lines constantly transiting energy to where it needs to go. Given the practically unlimited generation possibilities the loss of energy involved in either storage or transit are not really that big of a deal, and would not affect expected pricing the same way as dealing with nuclear's practical problems of scale will.
I am fully comfortable with that (not parent though) and have even done so on several occasions.
You do realize we can detect contamination by radioactive elements in quatities many orders of magnitude lower than could conceivably cause any harm right?
On the other hand, I live in Europe and our local government has yet to produce a complete environment monitoring fail such as the Flint incident in the USA.
I would consider Flint to be an infrastructure crisis rather than environmental. Lead piping and insufficient water treatment are due to infrastructure that is inadequate.
That doesn't change the amount of energy you receive from a radio tower at all...
You should be more worried about wearing sunscreen every day than the amount of energy you get from any wireless antenna. The sun puts out vastly more electromagnetic radiation than any wireless device ever will per cubic foot/meter/whatever.
Berkeley is a long-standing home to nuclear physics practitioners, and there are nuclear-you-know-whats designed in the national labs.. its not a settled thing
Absolute bullshit. Its one of the best run and safest nuclear plants in the world.
Union of concerned scientists is nothing but an anti-nuclear lobbying group the same as Greenpeace and others. All they do is spread FUD or outright lies.
I am pro-nuclear and agree that it needs to be shut down. Any nuclear power plant that wasn't built this century needs to go away, we should not be running any pressurized water reactors.
The latest generation of nuclear power plants are very safe and have passive nuclear safety which requires no active measures to shut down a reactor safely which significantly reduces the risk of a meltdown. The biggest problem with nuclear power is old generation power plants that fail and cause negative sentiment towards nuclear power. I really hope we invest in generation IV nuclear power plants which deal with reducing nuclear waste and adds even more safety.
Its insane to shut down something liek 20% of the nations power supply that is zero carbon.
The current generation has its problems but shutting down before end of life is a absolutely insane idea in every possible way.
You can't magically replace 20% of the nations energy production with GenIV reactors. That not how technology works.
GenIV reactors are great and the companies building them will hopefully do it in the 2020 but to even then, the focus should be on replacing coal not existing nuclear.
The alternatives are better. Nuclear is expensive even before you factor in the decommissioning costs. With those costs factored in it just doesn't make any sense.
Invest that money in geothermal, hydro, solar, wind and eventually tidal power and you get far more bang-for-your-buck.
Convert coal plants to burn biomass combined with carbon capture and geological storage and you get power which - whilst more expensive - removes carbon from the air. The more you use it the more carbon it removes.
Given these developments, why build new nuclear plants?
Closing down plants which are still viable on the other hand seems like pure madness.
If (when?) we can design nuclear plants which are both economical, safe and don't have the externalized decommissioning costs then it would also be foolish not to include them in the mix.
>The alternatives are better. Nuclear is expensive even before you factor in the decommissioning costs.
Nuclear is very cheap for producing the base load. You also shouldn't compare the price of different energy sources in isolation. If an electricity market goes 100% solar and wind for example, it will get power outages soon. Storing the energy of varying power generators is expensive with current technology.
>Given these developments, why build new nuclear plants?
You can create cheap and clean eletricity.
>If (when?) we can design nuclear plants which are both economical, safe and don't have the externalized decommissioning costs then it would also be foolish not to include them in the mix.
Geothrenal is limited geographically. Iceland has plenty but a tiny population. California has a lot but it’s largely tapped out and what we do have is sufficient only for the communities nearby to the plants.
Your hypothetical biomass burning coal plants are still that: hypothetical. If they work at scale, add that to the list.
Damming up rivers has its own problems, but this is largely moot: the majority of lakes in California are dam lakes and damn near every river with good capacity in the State is already dammed up.
Tidal power is likely to have other environmental concerns. If mitigating these concerns still makes it cheaper than nuclear plants, fine, but I’m not going to support the installation of any new tech that screws with coastal ecosystems the same way we screwed up prior river and lake ecosystems.
Yeah, tidal power is a joke. First, its not cheap at all, and the type that produce a decent amount of energy do much more harm to the environment than good.
Yeah, economics is where nuclear really falls apart. Once we get our renewable storage game on point there will be no place in the world for nuclear power, economically.
At this point, people have, apparently rightly, concluded that the need for profit is fundamentally incompatible with running a nuclear reactor.
San Onofre is a good example. It has been plagued by operational and mechanical problems over the years simply because nobody is willing to spend enough money to do it right. Given that, shutting it down is pretty much the only option.
New construction of nuclear plants is constitutionally limited in California and has been since well before I was born. Existing capacity is just leftover from before that era.
That might be a possibility, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it is actually pretty pathetic we have to import power to make up our energy needs at all.
When I last looked at the stats a few years ago we were importing about 30% of our power from other States and it was trending upwards.
