Piece of a fission reactor became radioactive due to neutron bombardment.
Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!
Neutrons make hardware radioactive.
Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."
I find it funny that you speak about nuclear energy yet you validate it based on a quote from an exceptional game designer. This isn’t a knock on Carmack but more like you should probably hunt for someone in discipline, there are many.
He made a rocket company. I would think as a generalist he knows a thing or two about energy production at least for thrust and propulsion if not more.
I don't think he would even call himself a game designer. He's a programmer and engine builder and rocket scientist and overall deep general nerd.
generalists are underrated nowadays it seems, compared to most of scientific history where they very clearly exist and can make contributions across a ton of “disciplines”
There are any number of cases of “specialists” having arrived at some incorrect consensus due to social factors/groupthink and a failure of the process.
With a neutron source we can control what the isotopes will be by choosing the appropriate metals for construction.
In fission you get, more or less, all the isotopes you can. fission doesn't split U235 into the same parts every time - its a random process and broad distribution of daughter fission isotopes are produced.
But I still agree. We should go with breeder reactors and call it a day
It’s actually really hard, the atoms you normally dope steel with on absorbing neutrons become really quite nasty isotopes. I went to a talk on this a few years ago from a materials scientist at Culham and he was saying while the physics might be getting closer, choosing appropriate vessels is really hard and the expected life of them at the moment is under 5 years which wouldn’t be viable for a commercial reactor running full time. Helium bubbles can form within the steel along grain boundaries, causing it fracture.
> Piece of a fission reactor became radioactive due to neutron bombardment.
> Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!
> Neutrons make hardware radioactive.
> Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
> If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
What do you mean by 95% efficiency? Fission reactors are heat engines, their efficiency is much lower typical reactors are 35% while modern designs can reach up to 45%. That's the thermal efficiency, if we consider the energy stored inside the fission material it's much lower still.
> If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission?
One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of it. People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy, so everything that might be used to make nukes are insanely regulated. This have downstream effects that make nuclear fission hard and expensive:
- With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security. With nuclear fusion power plants, stealing a big tokamak wall to make dirty bomb is hard, so you can still use normal security. With fission power plants you need special armed security
- You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes. This affects the nuclear power plant design, as you don't want to have any blind spot where the operator can smuggle the nuclear material away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HHMAht3gSg
- Some countries ban nuclear waste reprocessing because they don't want someone using the plutonium from reprocessing process to make nukes. This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste. Similar story with breeder reactors
With meltdown risk at least its solvable by safer reactor design, but there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards.
> People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy
This looks like a false-choice. A choice between the presence of nuclear weapons vs unlimited fission energy might be slightly fairer, but many countries have a civil nuclear program without nuclear weapons.
> With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security
Non-"normal security" is not a great cost for a nuclear power station (1+ GW). 50 extra staff might be 5M USD a year extra, so 0.60 USD/MWh more. Scaling to more reactors per site would give economies of scale.
> You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes.
Accountability is good; tracking where each fuel bundle is and goes is fairly standard practice (at least nowadays), no? Audits don't have to be a pain if their requirements mesh with the business processes.
> This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste.
The Plutonium is good stuff for breeder reactors. The depleted Uranium bulk is less useful, as we have thousands of tonnes already sitting around. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of reprocessing is the extraction and vitrification of fission products. Less bulk, splitting the higher activity products out of the bulk, reducing the storage requirements.
> there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards
Consider Helion's design. This reactor will produce copious excess neutrons and tritium from DD fusion. A single 50 MW (average) Helion reactor would produce enough neutrons in a year to make half a ton of plutonium in a fission-suppressed blanket. It would also produce more than enough tritium to enable all the bombs made from the plutonium to be boosted. And this is a single, rather small fusion reactor!
Cheap neutrons would be a proliferation nightmare.
The question really isn't "why not use fission", it's "why should fusion not be more expensive than fission"? Since fission is losing because it's too expensive, any other advantage of fusion over fission means little if it's even more expensive.
I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations. Fusion is kind of unknown to the larger public and is still described as the magical unlimited power source and safe alternative to fission, so it still has a chance.
> I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations.
I just saw an article about financiers not being willing to invest in current fission plant construction, because they don't make business sense - they are not profitable.
Financiers don't just look at current costs, either. They look at the trajectory of costs. A nuclear power plant constructed today will be competing against renewable and storage technologies a half century or more in the future. It's a poor bet that those technologies won't be even cheaper than today, when they've been improving by an order of magnitude in cost each decade.
Any technology that predicates its economics on paying out over 40+ years doesn't make sense in an environment of rapid technoeconomic change. Renewables have accelerated the rate of change in the electrical power industry to a rate not seen since the early 20th century.
Comfort tale or not, my country banned it completely 40 years ago by popular referendum. I don't think the economics were what people had in mind one year after the Chernobyl disaster.
Correlation is not causation. You would need to show that in the absence of that ban, nuclear would have been successful.
The "nuclear would have worked except for the meddling kids" theory needs to explain why all sorts of other destructive technologies plow right along, even in the face of massive campaigns against them. The distinguishing feature is those technologies are economic winners. Large profit flows trump activism. Unprofitable technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend them.
>Unprofitable technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend them.
I think this is the key observation. I have no doubt that the referendum mentioned in this thread was unfairly biased by Chernobyl. But if nuclear were a trillion dollar industry, such a referendum would never have been allowed to take place. Nobody was holding referendums to ban oil after Exxon Valdez.
But I think it's also worth mentioning that a big part of the reason that nuclear is difficult to turn a profit with is regulation (and public opinion) that unfairly holds nuclear to a much higher standard than fossil fuels. In a "nuclear context", any radiation is seen as an environmental catastrophe. Meanwhile coal plants belch radioactive waste out of their smokestacks and nobody bats an eye. Why, just a few days ago an article hit the front page about the US Army burying store bought tape dispensers in 55 gallon drums as hazardous waste, because they contained a small amount of a certain type of beach sand with radiation oh-so-slightly above background. All that pointless burying of harmless crap has got to cost!
> pfdietz: It's also pointless then to make a claim that (as you state) cannot be demonstrated. Airy unjustifiable nothing.
I said my country effectively banned nuclear power with a popular referendum that was completely biased by the aftermath of Chernobyl [1], economics hardly played any role in it. This is a fact. Similar referenda were also held (or tried to be held) in other countries like Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, and if you look you'll find the concerns were not economical, but about the safety and waste management.
The unjustifiable part is the connection of this ban to any consequence. The assumption you try to pass off without justification is that without the ban, nuclear would have triumphed. But then you admitted this conclusion cannot be justified.
So, your pointing to the ban is just dishonestly trying to connect the dots without actually connecting any dots.
Me, I think the raw cost figures speak for themselves. Even if nuclear had not been banned, it would have failed, although perhaps lots of money would have been wasted trying to maintain the pretense it wasn't a failure.
It depends what you consider as costs. France power generation (and consumption as well) is one of the very few with reliably low carbon intensity. You can play around with https://app.electricitymaps.com/map and see how bad the emissions are in the rest of Europe.
> The assumption you try to pass off without justification is that without the ban, nuclear would have triumphed
I never said that, I said I think economics have little to do with the downfall of nuclear power. At least in most european countries, nuclear was banned or phased out for other reasons.
> I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations.
That is, you are claiming that the CAUSE of nuclear's state is the public reaction, not economics. If nuclear would have failed anyway, how can that "because" be valid?
Same but why deal with anything reactive at all? The largest thing in our solar system is an already running fusion reactor that is already beaming 1.361 KW/m^2 to the planet.
Because beamed energy is inefficient in many ways, including space used for collectors, and the damn thing is only working for at most half a day at any given location anyway?
It's a bit of a "why invent wheels when cows already have legs" kind of question.
(Also "why learn to do anything on your own when you have rich parents that provide?")
Because that inefficiency directly impacts whether or not, and how fast, it makes sense to pursue tapping into this source, especially that there's a limit to the build up rate we can sustain, and because there are alternative sources to pursue in parallel, that are better along these dimensions.
Because batteries are expensive but needed for overnight storage or cloudy conditions. There’s also the amount of land and materials needed to produce solar devices.
It’s ultimately more about unit cost of power than total available power.
> Can we not build solar panels in the ocean like we do with wind turbines?
Technically yes, but that's a bad idea: ocean environment is very unforgiving, and has more clouds than land has. It also has more (and more reliable) wind and fewer people complaining about the very large turbines, which is why it works for wind.
> Some back of the napkin math says it would cost $2 Trillion, which is only double the amout we subsidized the fuel industry last year
Napkin maths also says that a global power grid would be 10% of that price. By coincidence, it takes a cross section of almost exactly 1m^2 to make a 40,000 km long line have a resistance of 1 Ω.
Further investigation said that literally only China has that much spare capacity for aluminium production, but still.
That kind of scale of battery production is still needed for the cars, though.
> After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
We still don't know how to build fission power plants cost-effectively. In the last week I saw an article saying that projects can't get financing in the marketplace.
If we still don't after 70 years, it seems doubtful that it will work.
If we can find a cheaper way - even if we could build fission plants cost-effectively now - we should probably do it?
If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission?
Fundamentally: fission fuels are limited, particularly uranium. If humans were to run current energy demands 100% on uranium-based nuclear power, we'd burn through reserves in about two decades.[1]
Breeder reactors and thorium fusion change that calculus, as might viable uranium recovery from seawater. (Uranium, unlike thorium, dissolves in seawater, though the quantities of water which would have to be processed would be absolutely immense and nontrivial on multiple grounds.)
Fusion is based on hydrogen and a few other light elements, which are vastly more prevalent, most notably as water found on Earth (and elsewhere in the solar system should we use so much hydrogen that net water prevalence is affected).
The slight hitch in the scheme is that whilst fission is so simple an untrained janitor can achieve it,[2] or even plain old dumb rocks,[3] fusion turns out to be fiendishly difficult on Earth / at terrestrial conditions.
I was curious about your point that we only have ~20 years supply. The article you linked doesn’t really defend that estimate, I think it’s actually pointing out that’s the absolute floor of our supply.
It mentions estimates of undiscovered uranium and also multiple pathways to extend that estimate if there was demand to improve the technology or increase our supply. It sounds like realistically we could find the material for powering all of our energy using fission if we had the demand to do so.
The resource size is one I've seen many times in many places, and it seems widely accepted. The linked article isn't the best source, but it's characteristics of others I've encountered over the years.
The general point is that uranium ore is not especially abundant, and tends to be highly localised, which suggests a reprise of petroleum-induced geopolitics.
(Uranium in seawater is far more prevalent, but quite difficult and expensive to access.)
I'm also familiar with the long and tedious discussion of just what "resources" and "reserves" constitute. I'd suggest briefly that much of that discussion fails to reflect that the true benefit of energy resources is the surplus EROEI (energy return on energy input) which results from their use, and that whilst it's often possible to increase the total resource quantity that comes with a corresponding decrease in resource quality in the sense of a far lower EROEI.
Early petroleum finds featured EROEI of 200:1 or greater. That is, 1 unit of energy invested returned 200 units returned. Present finds are closer to 10:1 to 20:1. I'm not as versed on uranium, though I'm finding indications that current ore-based finds are ~10:1 to 60:1. Seawater extraction is all but certainly far lower than that. Generally I'm somewhat suspicious of casual claims that we could vastly increase our uranium supply.
Thorium's a somewhat different animal (or mineral, definitely not vegetable) in that it's 3--4 times more abundant than uranium, and if I recall correctly can be "bred" into fissionable forms more readily. Non-thorium breeder reactors rely on a plutonium cycle, which introduces numerous other concerns (weapons, terrorism, etc.).
Moreover, liquid hydrocarbon is fantastically useful stuff and can be stored, transported, and utilised with immense flexibility and (comparative) safety. Nuclear energy must be converted to other forms, at considerable loss, to be utilised. Grid mains current is useful, but nuclear power plant output isn't especially flexible, and transition to storable forms comes at high costs, limited capacity, or high conversion losses (e.g., synfuel production). Hydrocarbon-powered automobiles, lorries, aircraft, construction equipment, hand tools, portable generators, etc., are all readily produced and utilised. Their nuclear variants not so much.
(I'm specifying hydrocarbons rather than petroleum to note that it's the chemical constitution rather than the origin or creation process which is significant here. I'm something of a fan of hydrocarbon fuels, somewhat less so of fossil fuels, despite their past utility.)
If you want to speculate wildly on maybes then it’s also hard to argue that hydrogen is fundamentally one of the most common elements in the entire universe and it’s not particularly controversial to say that a high tech future society would probably want to use that rather than the vastly less abundant heavier elements.
> It sounds like realistically we could find the material for powering all of our energy using fission
For a while
> if we had the demand to do so.
Maybe two decades isn’t spot on, but come on, you’re really grasping at straws.
It’s fundamentally less abundant.
20 years? 50 years? 100 years.
Sooner or later you’re going to run out, and not on geological timescales.
Tell me it ain’t so?
There are reasons to prefer fission, but “we have plenty of uranium” isn’t one of them.
Fission radioactivity is the bad stuff that will be radioactive for millions of years and we don't know how deal with that. It needs heavy metals like plutonium and uranium and when it goes wrong, they melt down and we all have a bad time. Fusion uses tritium and can be made from seawater and makes helium, and doesn't melt down in the same way, and the waste is relatively short lived.
> Fission radioactivity is the bad stuff that will be radioactive for millions of years and we don't know how deal with that.
We also don't know how to deal with lead and it will be poisonous until we figure out how to biologically re-engineer the human species. So far so good, we still use lead, you can buy the stuff by the kilo. This is a minor problem to the point where the people bringing it up aren't taking the situation seriously. The volumes are tiny and we can just dump it somewhere.
You don't have to protect lead from terrorists trying to build a dirty bomb. The radio nuclides you find in nuclear waste are also a lot more poisonous than lead, even if you ignore the radiation.
> there are many things much more poisonous than radionuclide you can use to make terror weapons
I guess that the effectiveness of terror weapons has nothing to do with how many people are directly harmed.
> You can build a dirty bomb from the activated wastes of a fusion plant though so the original point stand still.
Even simpler would be to find a radioactive source (medical, irradiation, industrial radiography). Small quantities, in a portable package, but geiger detectors would definitely be able to detect the fallout.
2000 metric tons! Wow! Look out, we're dealing with the big numbers there! Nearly up to 5 figures assuming we round it wrong.
That is around 3 shipping containers. There is literally a risk of losing it in transit because the volume is so small. If you see 3 shipping containers in a field somewhere that might be a year's worth of nuclear waste.
It is hard to get across how small that number is compared to 20% of the US's annual electricity production. The reason the problem hasn't been "solved" in the last however long reactors have been a thing is it is too small a problem to devote time to.
Except you can’t transport it. We built a giant cave for it in the desert and everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to drive past people’s homes so we just leave it sitting around on site hoping a natural disaster doesn’t wash it away. I’m pro nuclear but we need to be honest with ourselves.
I mean yeah. They do leave it sitting around on site. Because it takes up no space, they can build a bunker to store it without adding all that much to the cost and there are idiots hyperventilating at the thought of transporting dangerous goods around. I'd imagine the nuclear people decided it wasn't worth the hassle.
I feel ridiculous having to argue that volumes of material this small represent a real threat. If you wanted to move it we could. Split it up into little loads and put it in a stupidly over-engineered shielded truck. Goodness me this is not a real problem. They've been ignoring it for decades and the consequences are somewhere between nil and nothing interesting. There is nothing here to be honest about, there is no reasonable threat to debate. We transport explosives, we transport poison, we sometimes get massive port explosions that can level a district. Then we've got old mate claiming 2,000 metric tonnes of a relatively dangerous material represents a serious national problem. The absurdity of that is frustrating to deal with.
Yes, the powers that be have ignored the issue of nuclear materials sitting on site at power plants for decades, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make 5 or 10 times more of the stuff at other sites and trust that the actual knowledgeable experts, who haven’t done shit for decades, will figure out a solution by the time it’s bigger issue.
We should decrease our power usage as a whole planet, and reduce dependence on technology that has outsized biological risks, like nuclear and plastics, rather than rushing into some future that will only enrich the already wealthy.
Why? Using power meaningfully improves people’s lives, and many billions of people are still on the end of the spectrum where “improving lives” involves improvements like “not starving” and “having safe water”.
The benefits of making power available are extremely (!) robust and well-understood, as are the health and safety benefits of switching from combustion-based power to non-combustion-based power.
I have yet to hear skeptics raise specific nuclear concerns that are real, consequential, and also unmanaged. For all its cost and red tape, the past 60 years’ regulatory posture of “you must identify and mitigate every risk to the absolute maximum degree physically possible, damn the cost” seems to have resulted in a system where, well… they have.
Using power meaningfully, sure, but Bitcoin and AI are not meaningful. Using power to make steel or to use tools to make lives easier IS meaningful.
Red tape in nuclear is there for a reason. I don’t trust anyone to do nuclear without tons of red tape. The only reason it’s safe is the red tape. Take red tape away from industries that aren’t inherently unsafe, fine, but not nuclear power.
Don’t go talking about “humanity” needing power, all of the power being built is so the developed countries can write books with LLMs and other stupid shit.
Humanity might need more power some places, but it’s uneven and that probably won’t change. Your argument is moral and right, but the capitalists that choose where power go will continue to put power plants next to where their interests lie.
Developed nations need to reduce power usage so that others who are poor may have power. That is my stance, I don’t care how unpopular.
I want you to consider how much energy would be needed to bring the rest of the world up to a US, or even European, standard of living. This would utterly dwarf energy going into LLMs.
You seem to have this silly idea that LLMs are consuming huge amounts of energy.
The USA wastes so much power! I’m saying we need to use less and bring everyone up to THAT standard, but today every bit of energy added is going to be used for useless bullshit.
You’re simply avoiding my main point, where additional power isn’t going towards helping under developed countries, by trying to appeal to how great the poor downtrodden masses have it without power.
Why aren’t we building renewable power plants in rural poor areas all over the world if that’s the goal? Because it ISN’T; the wealthy capitalists simply want to expend energy and build new plants near developed areas to make themselves wealthier!
I'm pointing out that a plan to greatly limit world energy consumption is necessarily horrible, since it condemns most of the world to energy poverty.
You seem to be evading this simple mathematical point.
Renewables are being installed widely around the world. This is how much of the world will be lifted out of energy poverty.
I think some of the opposition to the idea of a renewable powered world comes from some of those who realize, at some level, that this relatively disadvantages the higher latitude white countries.
Nuclear waste has a density of ~10g/cm^3, so 2000t is about 200m^3. Standard 40’ container has a volume of 59.3m^3, so it’s indeed about 3 to 4 by volume. Of course you shouldn’t pack a container full of something so dense when shipping. Anyway it’s a pretty tiny amount of storage space; single family homes are usually larger by volume.
The problem with nuclear reprocessing is that it creates more nuclear waste as a byproduct so it only really makes sense when you want to make nuclear weapons.
That figure is correct only if you consider the energy content of the U-238 in the fuel. But reprocessing fuel to recover U-238 is idiotic: we have loads of U-238 in enrichment plant waste streams, and the material is so cheap they use it as ballast weights in sailboats.
That is just the high level nuclear waste (the spent control rods) which needs to be kept in cooling pools for about a decade before being transferred to dry cask storage. That definitely takes up a lot more space.
> Dry cask storage is a method of storing high-level radioactive waste, such as spent nuclear fuel that has already been cooled in a spent fuel pool for at least one year and often as much as ten years. Casks are typically steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed. The fuel rods inside are surrounded by inert gas. Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel. Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding to workers and members of the public.
It'd be volume limited, as the other comment points out Uranium is pretty dense.
I would certainly agree that nobody should actually try to put a year's generation of dangerous nuclear waste in 3 shipping containers. It'd be hazardous and the shipping containers couldn't be moved without breaking (probably do some damage to them even without moving them). The point is more that we're dealing with a volume of material that is - for an industrial society - tiny. There is a reason that in practice it is ignored it despite the braying crowd of people insisting that it is an unsolved problem that we can't ignore. It is an extremely ignoreable problem on the scale of benefits that nuclear power provides.
I mostly agree but we should understand that the costs of dealing with the waste are not negligible. I’m pretty agnostic about nuclear power. I used to believe it was necessary but renewables and batteries now seem the more cost effective and a far faster way to reach 90% carbon free electricity.
Radioactive materials needs to be physically protected, shielded against radiation, and have active cooling system or be small enough to have passive cooling.
You may dedicate whole container to transport just a few kg of highly radioactive items.
Dry cask storage is simple, relatively cheap, and forecloses no future option for dealing with waste. By the time the waste is so cooled off it is no longer self protecting from amateur diversion of plutonium -- maybe 300 years -- options should be greatly expanded for its disposal, including shooting it into space on dirt cheap extremely reliable launchers.
In any case, setting the fuel disposal cost to zero still leaves fission uncompetitive, given the cost of building new nuclear power plants. This is especially the case if one imagines a nuclear powered world economy, which likely would have to resort to some flavor of breeder reactors. Reprocessing would be necessary for breeders, but that wouldn't make breeders cheaper than current burner reactors.
I assume you're joking, but for others who might not realise: aneutronic fusion is mostly aneutronic, not entirely. Some neutrons are still released, and the reactor walls will still become radioactive over time, just slower.
Oh, and also, the fuel types that do produce a usefully lower level of neutron radiation are absurdly hard to get to fuse. We're talking 100x harder than the "easy" D-T fusion... which in turn is five decades of technology development away from producing useful amounts of power.
Aneutronic fusion reactors will be used on interstellar craft... in the 2100s.
One interesting fact about nuclear energy I came across the other day is at both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, other reactors on the site continued to operate - and produce electricity - for many years after the incidents.
In Russia today - just outside St Petersburg, a stones throw from Finland and Estonia - they still operate reactors of the same design as Chernobyl (with retrofits) and don't plan to shut them down for at least another decade.
Yes, this is the problem with any kind of nuclear reactors: cost of upgrade is too big, so it's cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor.
Are you sure the other reactors were not upgraded, the procedures were not updated, the operators were not better trained?
> cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor
Considering the reactor operators didn't work from home it suggests there was not a great risk in living on a continent with these reactors. Plus why stop at "on a continent" ... this is one world, no planet B etc.
You assume that nuclear stations are in a world without wars, isn't?
In real world, one nuclear country invaded another nuclear country, shelled and then captured two nuclear stations, and use one of them as shelter for soldiers and as ammo depot, while openly claims that they will bomb other nuclear stations in month or two.
If a experienced operator of a nuclear station will want to make harm to another nation, can it use a RBMK-1000 type reactor to repeat Chornobyl? It's not a theoretical question any more, because Russians forcefully migrate operators from Ukrainian nuclear station to RF stations and from RF to Ukrainian station.
> Yes, this is the problem with any kind of nuclear reactors: cost of upgrade is too big, so it's cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor.
> You assume that nuclear stations are in a world without wars
I was commenting on a statement you made about the cost of upgrade. Somehow you've found a linkage (or absence of a linkage) to war in your response.
> In real world, one nuclear country invaded another nuclear country
> can it use a RBMK-1000 type reactor to repeat Chornobyl?
The captured power stations are not of this kind; they are all VVER. There is also the small matter of Ukraine wanting to build more nuclear power stations.
> I was commenting on a statement you made about the cost of upgrade. Somehow you've found a linkage (or absence of a linkage) to war in your response.
My comment is about danger of RBK-1000 in real life, which cannot be upgraded to a safe reactor type, because of huge cost of upgrade.
> Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union
Ukraine can produce more at any time. It's not a hard problem for the country, which developed nukes and missiles for Soviet Union and RF. Currently, the main problem is that Ukraine cannot produce long-range missiles fast enough.
> The captured power stations are not of this kind; they are all VVER.
Yes, but Russia has RBK-1000 type nuclear reactors in production and they hire former Ukrainian operators to operate their nuclear stations. Do you see a problem here?
> cannot be upgraded to a safe reactor
According to Wikipedia they have been upgraded to be safer (e.g redesign of the control rods). No such a thing as totally safe, except if the thing does not exist.
Worker touches something he shouldn't. Unlike in Los Alamos he survived though, and didn't loose his hand. With higher voltages such incidents are usually deadly, that's why we were explicitly trained to NOT touch anything, and put our hands behind our back.
I have great respect for the safety culture that IAEA has mandated. These accident reports always contain great learnings. Yet, it is so easy for non-experts (and experts forgetting that risks and rewards are connected) to misread this as conclusive evidence og the universal dangers of nuclear.
That a relatively simple human error, with little consequence, is treated like a flight crash signals disproportionately to the public that nuclear isn’t worth the risk.
Piece of a fission reactor became radioactive due to neutron bombardment.
Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!
Neutrons make hardware radioactive.
Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."
I find it funny that you speak about nuclear energy yet you validate it based on a quote from an exceptional game designer. This isn’t a knock on Carmack but more like you should probably hunt for someone in discipline, there are many.
He made a rocket company. I would think as a generalist he knows a thing or two about energy production at least for thrust and propulsion if not more.
I don't think he would even call himself a game designer. He's a programmer and engine builder and rocket scientist and overall deep general nerd.
generalists are underrated nowadays it seems, compared to most of scientific history where they very clearly exist and can make contributions across a ton of “disciplines”
Generalists and specialists veering out of their lane come across the same until there is an incorrect statement about a field you know.
Informed generalists might also be a useful perspective to a field, or bring in relevant knowledge not well known within the field.
There are any number of cases of “specialists” having arrived at some incorrect consensus due to social factors/groupthink and a failure of the process.
I feel like this is a variance of "The worst person you know just made a great point". Who cares where it came from if it's true?
are there some experts on the subject whose writing you would recommend, by any chance? :)
Carmack is not a game designer (never was in fact). Carmack is a God. Also, jist because what you think he is doesn't mean that he is not right.
Let's not normalize placing people who do cool things on unnecessarily large pedestals. Idolization like that never has a good outcome.
I'm sorry people didn't understand the tone of voice of your post. I did though.
There's radioactive and there's radioactive.
With a neutron source we can control what the isotopes will be by choosing the appropriate metals for construction.
In fission you get, more or less, all the isotopes you can. fission doesn't split U235 into the same parts every time - its a random process and broad distribution of daughter fission isotopes are produced.
But I still agree. We should go with breeder reactors and call it a day
It’s actually really hard, the atoms you normally dope steel with on absorbing neutrons become really quite nasty isotopes. I went to a talk on this a few years ago from a materials scientist at Culham and he was saying while the physics might be getting closer, choosing appropriate vessels is really hard and the expected life of them at the moment is under 5 years which wouldn’t be viable for a commercial reactor running full time. Helium bubbles can form within the steel along grain boundaries, causing it fracture.
> Piece of a fission reactor became radioactive due to neutron bombardment.
> Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!
> Neutrons make hardware radioactive.
> Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
> If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
What do you mean by 95% efficiency? Fission reactors are heat engines, their efficiency is much lower typical reactors are 35% while modern designs can reach up to 45%. That's the thermal efficiency, if we consider the energy stored inside the fission material it's much lower still.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
> If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission?
One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of it. People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy, so everything that might be used to make nukes are insanely regulated. This have downstream effects that make nuclear fission hard and expensive:
- With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security. With nuclear fusion power plants, stealing a big tokamak wall to make dirty bomb is hard, so you can still use normal security. With fission power plants you need special armed security
- You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes. This affects the nuclear power plant design, as you don't want to have any blind spot where the operator can smuggle the nuclear material away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HHMAht3gSg
- Some countries ban nuclear waste reprocessing because they don't want someone using the plutonium from reprocessing process to make nukes. This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste. Similar story with breeder reactors
With meltdown risk at least its solvable by safer reactor design, but there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards.
> One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of it.
Are you talking about a dirty bomb? Spent nuclear fuel from PWR/BWR do not contain the right isotopes of Plutonium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium
> People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy
This looks like a false-choice. A choice between the presence of nuclear weapons vs unlimited fission energy might be slightly fairer, but many countries have a civil nuclear program without nuclear weapons.
> With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security
Non-"normal security" is not a great cost for a nuclear power station (1+ GW). 50 extra staff might be 5M USD a year extra, so 0.60 USD/MWh more. Scaling to more reactors per site would give economies of scale.
> You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes.
Accountability is good; tracking where each fuel bundle is and goes is fairly standard practice (at least nowadays), no? Audits don't have to be a pain if their requirements mesh with the business processes.
> This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste.
The Plutonium is good stuff for breeder reactors. The depleted Uranium bulk is less useful, as we have thousands of tonnes already sitting around. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of reprocessing is the extraction and vitrification of fission products. Less bulk, splitting the higher activity products out of the bulk, reducing the storage requirements.
> there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards
Rules can be changed. De-escalation is possible!
One can make nuclear bombs using fusion as well.
Consider Helion's design. This reactor will produce copious excess neutrons and tritium from DD fusion. A single 50 MW (average) Helion reactor would produce enough neutrons in a year to make half a ton of plutonium in a fission-suppressed blanket. It would also produce more than enough tritium to enable all the bombs made from the plutonium to be boosted. And this is a single, rather small fusion reactor!
Cheap neutrons would be a proliferation nightmare.
Modern Thermonuclear bombs (also called Hydrogen bombs) work on fusion. The only reason why they use fission is to trigger a fusion reaction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
Not the only reason. You can get a significant boost in energy release by using uranium in the tamper.
Industrial fertilizer can (and is) used to make bombs. Sometimes accidentally, see Beruit.
Since it's so dangerous and rife for abuse, we shouldn't allow anyone to use it despite the obvious benefits, right?
This is fear mongering and nothing more.
The question really isn't "why not use fission", it's "why should fusion not be more expensive than fission"? Since fission is losing because it's too expensive, any other advantage of fusion over fission means little if it's even more expensive.
I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations. Fusion is kind of unknown to the larger public and is still described as the magical unlimited power source and safe alternative to fission, so it still has a chance.
> I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations.
I just saw an article about financiers not being willing to invest in current fission plant construction, because they don't make business sense - they are not profitable.
Financiers don't just look at current costs, either. They look at the trajectory of costs. A nuclear power plant constructed today will be competing against renewable and storage technologies a half century or more in the future. It's a poor bet that those technologies won't be even cheaper than today, when they've been improving by an order of magnitude in cost each decade.
Any technology that predicates its economics on paying out over 40+ years doesn't make sense in an environment of rapid technoeconomic change. Renewables have accelerated the rate of change in the electrical power industry to a rate not seen since the early 20th century.
No, it's because it's too expensive. The idea that fission is losing because of wrongthink is a comforting tale told by nuclear fans.
Comfort tale or not, my country banned it completely 40 years ago by popular referendum. I don't think the economics were what people had in mind one year after the Chernobyl disaster.
Correlation is not causation. You would need to show that in the absence of that ban, nuclear would have been successful.
The "nuclear would have worked except for the meddling kids" theory needs to explain why all sorts of other destructive technologies plow right along, even in the face of massive campaigns against them. The distinguishing feature is those technologies are economic winners. Large profit flows trump activism. Unprofitable technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend them.
>Unprofitable technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend them.
I think this is the key observation. I have no doubt that the referendum mentioned in this thread was unfairly biased by Chernobyl. But if nuclear were a trillion dollar industry, such a referendum would never have been allowed to take place. Nobody was holding referendums to ban oil after Exxon Valdez.
But I think it's also worth mentioning that a big part of the reason that nuclear is difficult to turn a profit with is regulation (and public opinion) that unfairly holds nuclear to a much higher standard than fossil fuels. In a "nuclear context", any radiation is seen as an environmental catastrophe. Meanwhile coal plants belch radioactive waste out of their smokestacks and nobody bats an eye. Why, just a few days ago an article hit the front page about the US Army burying store bought tape dispensers in 55 gallon drums as hazardous waste, because they contained a small amount of a certain type of beach sand with radiation oh-so-slightly above background. All that pointless burying of harmless crap has got to cost!
It's pointless arguing whether it could have been economically successful, we'll largely never know because people got scared.
> pfdietz: It's also pointless then to make a claim that (as you state) cannot be demonstrated. Airy unjustifiable nothing.
I said my country effectively banned nuclear power with a popular referendum that was completely biased by the aftermath of Chernobyl [1], economics hardly played any role in it. This is a fact. Similar referenda were also held (or tried to be held) in other countries like Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, and if you look you'll find the concerns were not economical, but about the safety and waste management.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_Italian_referendums
The unjustifiable part is the connection of this ban to any consequence. The assumption you try to pass off without justification is that without the ban, nuclear would have triumphed. But then you admitted this conclusion cannot be justified.
So, your pointing to the ban is just dishonestly trying to connect the dots without actually connecting any dots.
Me, I think the raw cost figures speak for themselves. Even if nuclear had not been banned, it would have failed, although perhaps lots of money would have been wasted trying to maintain the pretense it wasn't a failure.
Nuclear seems to have worked out well for France over the last 50 years.
But not cost-effectively, afaik ?
It depends what you consider as costs. France power generation (and consumption as well) is one of the very few with reliably low carbon intensity. You can play around with https://app.electricitymaps.com/map and see how bad the emissions are in the rest of Europe.
> The assumption you try to pass off without justification is that without the ban, nuclear would have triumphed
I never said that, I said I think economics have little to do with the downfall of nuclear power. At least in most european countries, nuclear was banned or phased out for other reasons.
You said:
> I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations.
That is, you are claiming that the CAUSE of nuclear's state is the public reaction, not economics. If nuclear would have failed anyway, how can that "because" be valid?
It's also pointless then to make a claim that (as you state) cannot be demonstrated. Airy unjustifiable nothing.
Same but why deal with anything reactive at all? The largest thing in our solar system is an already running fusion reactor that is already beaming 1.361 KW/m^2 to the planet.
Because beamed energy is inefficient in many ways, including space used for collectors, and the damn thing is only working for at most half a day at any given location anyway?
It's a bit of a "why invent wheels when cows already have legs" kind of question.
(Also "why learn to do anything on your own when you have rich parents that provide?")
Who cares that it's inefficient if it is orders of magnitude more electricity than we need?
Because that inefficiency directly impacts whether or not, and how fast, it makes sense to pursue tapping into this source, especially that there's a limit to the build up rate we can sustain, and because there are alternative sources to pursue in parallel, that are better along these dimensions.
Because batteries are expensive but needed for overnight storage or cloudy conditions. There’s also the amount of land and materials needed to produce solar devices.
It’s ultimately more about unit cost of power than total available power.
Can we not build solar panels in the ocean like we do with wind turbines?
"Because batteries are expensive"
Are they? It would only take 4000 copies of the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility to store all the electricity we currently use in a day.
Some back of the napkin math says it would cost $2 Trillion, which is only double the amout we subsidized the fuel industry last year
> Can we not build solar panels in the ocean like we do with wind turbines?
Technically yes, but that's a bad idea: ocean environment is very unforgiving, and has more clouds than land has. It also has more (and more reliable) wind and fewer people complaining about the very large turbines, which is why it works for wind.
> Some back of the napkin math says it would cost $2 Trillion, which is only double the amout we subsidized the fuel industry last year
Napkin maths also says that a global power grid would be 10% of that price. By coincidence, it takes a cross section of almost exactly 1m^2 to make a 40,000 km long line have a resistance of 1 Ω.
Further investigation said that literally only China has that much spare capacity for aluminium production, but still.
That kind of scale of battery production is still needed for the cars, though.
The kilo prefix is always written with a lowercase "k": kW for kilowatts.
Efficiency is the name of the game.
> After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.
We still don't know how to build fission power plants cost-effectively. In the last week I saw an article saying that projects can't get financing in the marketplace.
If we still don't after 70 years, it seems doubtful that it will work.
If we can find a cheaper way - even if we could build fission plants cost-effectively now - we should probably do it?
If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission?
Fundamentally: fission fuels are limited, particularly uranium. If humans were to run current energy demands 100% on uranium-based nuclear power, we'd burn through reserves in about two decades.[1]
Breeder reactors and thorium fusion change that calculus, as might viable uranium recovery from seawater. (Uranium, unlike thorium, dissolves in seawater, though the quantities of water which would have to be processed would be absolutely immense and nontrivial on multiple grounds.)
Fusion is based on hydrogen and a few other light elements, which are vastly more prevalent, most notably as water found on Earth (and elsewhere in the solar system should we use so much hydrogen that net water prevalence is affected).
The slight hitch in the scheme is that whilst fission is so simple an untrained janitor can achieve it,[2] or even plain old dumb rocks,[3] fusion turns out to be fiendishly difficult on Earth / at terrestrial conditions.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Based on a 200 year supply at ~10% of total energy supply presently, which scales to ~20 years at 100%: <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...>.
2. For example: Oak Ridge prodcedures / Feyman (~1945) <https://robertlovespi.net/2014/09/07/how-richard-feynman-sav...>, Cecil Kelley (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accid...>, Y-12 plant (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-12_National_Security_Complex...>, Vinča Nuclear Institute (1958) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_Nuclear_Institute#1...>, Wood River Junction (1964) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_River_Junction,_Rhode_Isl...>, Mayak (1968) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak#1968_Criticality_Inciden...>, and Tokaimura (1997) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents> being just a few. Wikipedia has a more comprehensive listing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc...>. My point isn't that the perpetrators were necessarily janitors, or untrained (though some effectively were), but that criticality was achieved entirely unintentionally. Accidental fusion criticality incidents are far less frequent.
3. "Natural fission reactors" are a thing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...>. To be fair, so are natural fusion reactors, though few have yet been discovered on Earth: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star>.
I was curious about your point that we only have ~20 years supply. The article you linked doesn’t really defend that estimate, I think it’s actually pointing out that’s the absolute floor of our supply.
It mentions estimates of undiscovered uranium and also multiple pathways to extend that estimate if there was demand to improve the technology or increase our supply. It sounds like realistically we could find the material for powering all of our energy using fission if we had the demand to do so.
The resource size is one I've seen many times in many places, and it seems widely accepted. The linked article isn't the best source, but it's characteristics of others I've encountered over the years.
The general point is that uranium ore is not especially abundant, and tends to be highly localised, which suggests a reprise of petroleum-induced geopolitics.
(Uranium in seawater is far more prevalent, but quite difficult and expensive to access.)
I'm also familiar with the long and tedious discussion of just what "resources" and "reserves" constitute. I'd suggest briefly that much of that discussion fails to reflect that the true benefit of energy resources is the surplus EROEI (energy return on energy input) which results from their use, and that whilst it's often possible to increase the total resource quantity that comes with a corresponding decrease in resource quality in the sense of a far lower EROEI.
Early petroleum finds featured EROEI of 200:1 or greater. That is, 1 unit of energy invested returned 200 units returned. Present finds are closer to 10:1 to 20:1. I'm not as versed on uranium, though I'm finding indications that current ore-based finds are ~10:1 to 60:1. Seawater extraction is all but certainly far lower than that. Generally I'm somewhat suspicious of casual claims that we could vastly increase our uranium supply.
Thorium's a somewhat different animal (or mineral, definitely not vegetable) in that it's 3--4 times more abundant than uranium, and if I recall correctly can be "bred" into fissionable forms more readily. Non-thorium breeder reactors rely on a plutonium cycle, which introduces numerous other concerns (weapons, terrorism, etc.).
Moreover, liquid hydrocarbon is fantastically useful stuff and can be stored, transported, and utilised with immense flexibility and (comparative) safety. Nuclear energy must be converted to other forms, at considerable loss, to be utilised. Grid mains current is useful, but nuclear power plant output isn't especially flexible, and transition to storable forms comes at high costs, limited capacity, or high conversion losses (e.g., synfuel production). Hydrocarbon-powered automobiles, lorries, aircraft, construction equipment, hand tools, portable generators, etc., are all readily produced and utilised. Their nuclear variants not so much.
(I'm specifying hydrocarbons rather than petroleum to note that it's the chemical constitution rather than the origin or creation process which is significant here. I'm something of a fan of hydrocarbon fuels, somewhat less so of fossil fuels, despite their past utility.)
If you want to speculate wildly on maybes then it’s also hard to argue that hydrogen is fundamentally one of the most common elements in the entire universe and it’s not particularly controversial to say that a high tech future society would probably want to use that rather than the vastly less abundant heavier elements.
> It sounds like realistically we could find the material for powering all of our energy using fission
For a while
> if we had the demand to do so.
Maybe two decades isn’t spot on, but come on, you’re really grasping at straws.
It’s fundamentally less abundant.
20 years? 50 years? 100 years.
Sooner or later you’re going to run out, and not on geological timescales.
Tell me it ain’t so?
There are reasons to prefer fission, but “we have plenty of uranium” isn’t one of them.
D
Fission radioactivity is the bad stuff that will be radioactive for millions of years and we don't know how deal with that. It needs heavy metals like plutonium and uranium and when it goes wrong, they melt down and we all have a bad time. Fusion uses tritium and can be made from seawater and makes helium, and doesn't melt down in the same way, and the waste is relatively short lived.
> Fission radioactivity is the bad stuff that will be radioactive for millions of years and we don't know how deal with that.
We also don't know how to deal with lead and it will be poisonous until we figure out how to biologically re-engineer the human species. So far so good, we still use lead, you can buy the stuff by the kilo. This is a minor problem to the point where the people bringing it up aren't taking the situation seriously. The volumes are tiny and we can just dump it somewhere.
You don't have to protect lead from terrorists trying to build a dirty bomb. The radio nuclides you find in nuclear waste are also a lot more poisonous than lead, even if you ignore the radiation.
You can build a dirty bomb from the activated wastes of a fusion plant though so the original point stand still.
Also, there are many things much more poisonous than radionuclide you can use to make terror weapons that are easy to get (take ricin, for instance)
> there are many things much more poisonous than radionuclide you can use to make terror weapons
I guess that the effectiveness of terror weapons has nothing to do with how many people are directly harmed.
> You can build a dirty bomb from the activated wastes of a fusion plant though so the original point stand still.
Even simpler would be to find a radioactive source (medical, irradiation, industrial radiography). Small quantities, in a portable package, but geiger detectors would definitely be able to detect the fallout.
That is of course true, but I don’t think fusion will ever be economical.
Around 2000 metric tons of nuclear waste are produced every year in the US. And that represents under 20% of electricity production.
I do think there are ways to manage the problem, but tiny isn’t the word I’d use.
2000 metric tons! Wow! Look out, we're dealing with the big numbers there! Nearly up to 5 figures assuming we round it wrong.
That is around 3 shipping containers. There is literally a risk of losing it in transit because the volume is so small. If you see 3 shipping containers in a field somewhere that might be a year's worth of nuclear waste.
It is hard to get across how small that number is compared to 20% of the US's annual electricity production. The reason the problem hasn't been "solved" in the last however long reactors have been a thing is it is too small a problem to devote time to.
Except you can’t transport it. We built a giant cave for it in the desert and everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to drive past people’s homes so we just leave it sitting around on site hoping a natural disaster doesn’t wash it away. I’m pro nuclear but we need to be honest with ourselves.
Nuclear waste is transported regularly:
https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-transp.html
> everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to drive past people’s homes
Everyone? A vocal group of activists, perhaps.
The same could be said for transport of chemicals by rail; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de... and still that goes on.
I mean yeah. They do leave it sitting around on site. Because it takes up no space, they can build a bunker to store it without adding all that much to the cost and there are idiots hyperventilating at the thought of transporting dangerous goods around. I'd imagine the nuclear people decided it wasn't worth the hassle.
I feel ridiculous having to argue that volumes of material this small represent a real threat. If you wanted to move it we could. Split it up into little loads and put it in a stupidly over-engineered shielded truck. Goodness me this is not a real problem. They've been ignoring it for decades and the consequences are somewhere between nil and nothing interesting. There is nothing here to be honest about, there is no reasonable threat to debate. We transport explosives, we transport poison, we sometimes get massive port explosions that can level a district. Then we've got old mate claiming 2,000 metric tonnes of a relatively dangerous material represents a serious national problem. The absurdity of that is frustrating to deal with.
Yes, the powers that be have ignored the issue of nuclear materials sitting on site at power plants for decades, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make 5 or 10 times more of the stuff at other sites and trust that the actual knowledgeable experts, who haven’t done shit for decades, will figure out a solution by the time it’s bigger issue.
We should decrease our power usage as a whole planet, and reduce dependence on technology that has outsized biological risks, like nuclear and plastics, rather than rushing into some future that will only enrich the already wealthy.
Why? Using power meaningfully improves people’s lives, and many billions of people are still on the end of the spectrum where “improving lives” involves improvements like “not starving” and “having safe water”.
The benefits of making power available are extremely (!) robust and well-understood, as are the health and safety benefits of switching from combustion-based power to non-combustion-based power.
I have yet to hear skeptics raise specific nuclear concerns that are real, consequential, and also unmanaged. For all its cost and red tape, the past 60 years’ regulatory posture of “you must identify and mitigate every risk to the absolute maximum degree physically possible, damn the cost” seems to have resulted in a system where, well… they have.
Using power meaningfully, sure, but Bitcoin and AI are not meaningful. Using power to make steel or to use tools to make lives easier IS meaningful.
Red tape in nuclear is there for a reason. I don’t trust anyone to do nuclear without tons of red tape. The only reason it’s safe is the red tape. Take red tape away from industries that aren’t inherently unsafe, fine, but not nuclear power.
We should greatly increase our power usage as a whole planet, to improve the quality of life for humanity. Much of humanity is energy starved.
Don’t go talking about “humanity” needing power, all of the power being built is so the developed countries can write books with LLMs and other stupid shit.
Humanity might need more power some places, but it’s uneven and that probably won’t change. Your argument is moral and right, but the capitalists that choose where power go will continue to put power plants next to where their interests lie.
Developed nations need to reduce power usage so that others who are poor may have power. That is my stance, I don’t care how unpopular.
I want you to consider how much energy would be needed to bring the rest of the world up to a US, or even European, standard of living. This would utterly dwarf energy going into LLMs.
You seem to have this silly idea that LLMs are consuming huge amounts of energy.
The USA wastes so much power! I’m saying we need to use less and bring everyone up to THAT standard, but today every bit of energy added is going to be used for useless bullshit.
You’re simply avoiding my main point, where additional power isn’t going towards helping under developed countries, by trying to appeal to how great the poor downtrodden masses have it without power.
Why aren’t we building renewable power plants in rural poor areas all over the world if that’s the goal? Because it ISN’T; the wealthy capitalists simply want to expend energy and build new plants near developed areas to make themselves wealthier!
I'm pointing out that a plan to greatly limit world energy consumption is necessarily horrible, since it condemns most of the world to energy poverty.
You seem to be evading this simple mathematical point.
Renewables are being installed widely around the world. This is how much of the world will be lifted out of energy poverty.
I think some of the opposition to the idea of a renewable powered world comes from some of those who realize, at some level, that this relatively disadvantages the higher latitude white countries.
Shipping containers seem to have a maximum weight of about 20 tonnes so surely around 100 containers?
Nuclear waste has a density of ~10g/cm^3, so 2000t is about 200m^3. Standard 40’ container has a volume of 59.3m^3, so it’s indeed about 3 to 4 by volume. Of course you shouldn’t pack a container full of something so dense when shipping. Anyway it’s a pretty tiny amount of storage space; single family homes are usually larger by volume.
The more important consideration is we're wasting the waste. It still contains 90% of the fissile energy and we're calling it waste: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-....
The problem with nuclear reprocessing is that it creates more nuclear waste as a byproduct so it only really makes sense when you want to make nuclear weapons.
That figure is correct only if you consider the energy content of the U-238 in the fuel. But reprocessing fuel to recover U-238 is idiotic: we have loads of U-238 in enrichment plant waste streams, and the material is so cheap they use it as ballast weights in sailboats.
That is just the high level nuclear waste (the spent control rods) which needs to be kept in cooling pools for about a decade before being transferred to dry cask storage. That definitely takes up a lot more space.
> Dry cask storage is a method of storing high-level radioactive waste, such as spent nuclear fuel that has already been cooled in a spent fuel pool for at least one year and often as much as ten years. Casks are typically steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed. The fuel rods inside are surrounded by inert gas. Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel. Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding to workers and members of the public.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage
There’s also a lot of low level nuclear waste which is a pain to deal with (make sure you pick the right brand of kitty litter…)
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/26/395615637...
It'd be volume limited, as the other comment points out Uranium is pretty dense.
I would certainly agree that nobody should actually try to put a year's generation of dangerous nuclear waste in 3 shipping containers. It'd be hazardous and the shipping containers couldn't be moved without breaking (probably do some damage to them even without moving them). The point is more that we're dealing with a volume of material that is - for an industrial society - tiny. There is a reason that in practice it is ignored it despite the braying crowd of people insisting that it is an unsolved problem that we can't ignore. It is an extremely ignoreable problem on the scale of benefits that nuclear power provides.
I mostly agree but we should understand that the costs of dealing with the waste are not negligible. I’m pretty agnostic about nuclear power. I used to believe it was necessary but renewables and batteries now seem the more cost effective and a far faster way to reach 90% carbon free electricity.
Radioactive materials needs to be physically protected, shielded against radiation, and have active cooling system or be small enough to have passive cooling.
You may dedicate whole container to transport just a few kg of highly radioactive items.
See discussion of dry cask storage here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601833
Dry cask storage is simple, relatively cheap, and forecloses no future option for dealing with waste. By the time the waste is so cooled off it is no longer self protecting from amateur diversion of plutonium -- maybe 300 years -- options should be greatly expanded for its disposal, including shooting it into space on dirt cheap extremely reliable launchers.
In any case, setting the fuel disposal cost to zero still leaves fission uncompetitive, given the cost of building new nuclear power plants. This is especially the case if one imagines a nuclear powered world economy, which likely would have to resort to some flavor of breeder reactors. Reprocessing would be necessary for breeders, but that wouldn't make breeders cheaper than current burner reactors.
Butt whaddäbbaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion ?
I assume you're joking, but for others who might not realise: aneutronic fusion is mostly aneutronic, not entirely. Some neutrons are still released, and the reactor walls will still become radioactive over time, just slower.
Oh, and also, the fuel types that do produce a usefully lower level of neutron radiation are absurdly hard to get to fuse. We're talking 100x harder than the "easy" D-T fusion... which in turn is five decades of technology development away from producing useful amounts of power.
Aneutronic fusion reactors will be used on interstellar craft... in the 2100s.
See the "residual radiation" section in the same article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Residual_rad...
Hmmmm. Then let's try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaseous_fission_reactor instead!1!! :)
Here's a Wayback mirror since the server appears to be struggling: http://web.archive.org/web/20240402165313/https://isoe-netwo...
Edit: While the above link works for me, this link might work better for some: http://web.archive.org/web/20240402165313if_/https://isoe-ne...
That's a pretty good post-mortem report. I hope they have implemented all the proposed process changes.
Wayback link seems to only show the first slide without an option to move forward.
It just displays an image c
One interesting fact about nuclear energy I came across the other day is at both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, other reactors on the site continued to operate - and produce electricity - for many years after the incidents.
In Russia today - just outside St Petersburg, a stones throw from Finland and Estonia - they still operate reactors of the same design as Chernobyl (with retrofits) and don't plan to shut them down for at least another decade.
Well, at least they now know what better not to do and what to watch out for, no?
Yes, this is the problem with any kind of nuclear reactors: cost of upgrade is too big, so it's cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor.
The other RBMK reactors were indeed upgraded after the Chernobyl disaster (and two were built afterwards to improved standards).
> cost of upgrade is too big
Are you sure the other reactors were not upgraded, the procedures were not updated, the operators were not better trained?
> cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor
Considering the reactor operators didn't work from home it suggests there was not a great risk in living on a continent with these reactors. Plus why stop at "on a continent" ... this is one world, no planet B etc.
You assume that nuclear stations are in a world without wars, isn't?
In real world, one nuclear country invaded another nuclear country, shelled and then captured two nuclear stations, and use one of them as shelter for soldiers and as ammo depot, while openly claims that they will bomb other nuclear stations in month or two.
If a experienced operator of a nuclear station will want to make harm to another nation, can it use a RBMK-1000 type reactor to repeat Chornobyl? It's not a theoretical question any more, because Russians forcefully migrate operators from Ukrainian nuclear station to RF stations and from RF to Ukrainian station.
> Yes, this is the problem with any kind of nuclear reactors: cost of upgrade is too big, so it's cheaper to risk life on a continent than to fix a reactor. > You assume that nuclear stations are in a world without wars
I was commenting on a statement you made about the cost of upgrade. Somehow you've found a linkage (or absence of a linkage) to war in your response.
> In real world, one nuclear country invaded another nuclear country
Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...
> can it use a RBMK-1000 type reactor to repeat Chornobyl?
The captured power stations are not of this kind; they are all VVER. There is also the small matter of Ukraine wanting to build more nuclear power stations.
> I was commenting on a statement you made about the cost of upgrade. Somehow you've found a linkage (or absence of a linkage) to war in your response.
My comment is about danger of RBK-1000 in real life, which cannot be upgraded to a safe reactor type, because of huge cost of upgrade.
> Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union
Ukraine can produce more at any time. It's not a hard problem for the country, which developed nukes and missiles for Soviet Union and RF. Currently, the main problem is that Ukraine cannot produce long-range missiles fast enough.
> The captured power stations are not of this kind; they are all VVER.
Yes, but Russia has RBK-1000 type nuclear reactors in production and they hire former Ukrainian operators to operate their nuclear stations. Do you see a problem here?
> cannot be upgraded to a safe reactor According to Wikipedia they have been upgraded to be safer (e.g redesign of the control rods). No such a thing as totally safe, except if the thing does not exist.
> Ukraine can produce more at any time The question of getting appropriate nuclear materials looms large. Also all the Atomgrad appear to have all been in Russia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project)
Safer != safe.
> The question of getting appropriate nuclear materials looms large.
Ukraine has nuclear reactors. It's not a problem for a nuclear country.
> Safer != safe.
Absolute safety is not achievable. Crossing the road is not safe. Going down the stairs is not safe.
> nuclear reactors Reactor plutonium != bomb grade plutonium. The Uranium supply used to be enriched by Russia.
Does anyone understand what the second to last slide about the diver’s TLD being broken and repaired with glue means? Was that part of the dosimeter?
I think this is the incident referenced in WhatIf's exploration of how long you could swim in a nuclear reactor's spent fuel pool.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
This incident in 2010: https://www.ensi.ch/de/2010/08/31/kkl-ueberschreitung-der-zu...
Worker touches something he shouldn't. Unlike in Los Alamos he survived though, and didn't loose his hand. With higher voltages such incidents are usually deadly, that's why we were explicitly trained to NOT touch anything, and put our hands behind our back.
I have great respect for the safety culture that IAEA has mandated. These accident reports always contain great learnings. Yet, it is so easy for non-experts (and experts forgetting that risks and rewards are connected) to misread this as conclusive evidence og the universal dangers of nuclear. That a relatively simple human error, with little consequence, is treated like a flight crash signals disproportionately to the public that nuclear isn’t worth the risk.
You might say it was NSFW.
OSHA has entered the chat.
*2010/2011.
Where did this happen at?
Based on slide captions, "Kernkraftwerk Leibstadt", a/k/a Leibstadt Nuclear Power Plant, in Germany:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibstadt_Nuclear_Power_Plant>
Near Germany, but, it's in Switzerland.
Gah! Too late to edit, but thanks.
Related and easily explained: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/