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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

clarify please. Are you referring to construction, mining, installation, storage, or just trolling?

Nuclear is very clean. What most people came to hate is the waste, which is surprisingly little (per kW). Also the danger in case of failure, which is massive.

Also, there's literally no way to clean it up in case of accident and you have to keep it out of harms way for thousands of years.

Theoretically, we can put CO2 back in the bottle. Practically, we can do it now, just not with enough efficiency and scale to make it worth it.

We have no practical way to clean CO2 from the atmosphere and we don't need catastrophe for it to be a problem. We're poisoning the planet with real carbon dioxide while we fret about the hypothetical risks of hypothetical nuclear waste.

>hypothetical nuclear waste.

Chernobyl isn't hypothetical. And neither is Fukushima. And those weren't as bad as they could have been.

And we still don't know what to do with all the waste we have.

We could replace coal with nuclear yesterday if the anti-nuclear activists would stand down. Instead, they have fought to continue a status quo whose death toll we start couting at 25,000 people per year lost to black lung [0]. No serial killer or terrorist could dream of effecting mass casualites as efficiently as the proponents of this viewpoint do when they take action that results in the continued and expanding operation of coal power generation, despite an alternative which is actually viable in every respect but their opposition.

Yes, nuclear power has problems. But even if it killed 24,000 people per year, blocking the replacement of coal by nuclear would still be a willful choice to cause the deaths of 1,000 people (it's getting really hard not to say murder).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker's_pneumoconiosis

Of course we know what to do with the "waste": Keep it close, it's precious fuel for breeder reactors.

The waste isn't just the spent fuel though - see my other comments...

The total volume of which would fit in an apartment block. That block could be dropped into the marina trench if you really are that paranoid, total cost a few million dollars.

There is no conceivable way of removing even daily worldwide human carbon waste from the atmosphere for that kind of money.

72000 metric tons - would that be safe to place together in a single container? http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si...

Sure the physical size of a spent fuel might be 'small' but this is not the only issue.

And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?

No you can dump low level waste under 1m of topsoil, and build a hospital or school or kindergarten on top of it. That's why its called low-level waste.

>> And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

Solar panels production. Currently, they are mostly produced from scraps of semiconductor industry, and it's already close to capacity. This process is energy inefficient and environmentally unfriendly (silicon tetrachloride is an intermediate stage).

Pushing for more silicon solar panels beyond what's possible as semiconductor industry byproduct is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.

My impression is that most large-scale clean energy projects go for wind power, indirect solar energy (use sunlight to heat up some medium which then drives turbines or rotors) or bio fuel - with more exotic stuff like geothermic energy where it's applicable.

Solar panels seem to be one of the most inefficient clean energy solutions - so are they actually relevant here?

Most high purity silicon is now destined for solar PV; PV's "scraps of semiconductor industry" phase was a decade or more ago.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2007/05/22/...

"In 2006, for the first time, more than half the world's polysilicon was used to produce solar PV cells."

It's true that the intermediates in silicon refining like are quite hazardous, but in a well-run production facility those intermediates don't get released to the biosphere. They affect the toxicity of the end product no more than the intermediate use of acetic anhydride in aspirin production, or the intermediate use of uranium hexafluoride in nuclear fuel rod production. There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.

There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.

There are some interesting moral gymnastics required there, no? The Chinese lead the world in PV manufacturing right now. Is this PV-revolution necessarily built on dirty manufacturing? Would we still have a PV-revolution if we weren't so accepting of an environmental disaster that takes place in a distant country?

My guess is that there would still be a PV revolution even without the Chinese factories, though the cost drops might have a come a bit slower. Costs were dropping at about the same year-over-year rate for decades before China leapt to the top of the PV manufacturing ranks.

Silicon refiners in the US actually had lower production costs than Chinese refiners even with the extra labor and environmental costs in the US. Unfortunately, a few years ago China imposed punitive trade barriers against silicon imported from the US. It was in retaliation for trade barriers the US put up against imports of Chinese solar modules. Until both sides erected their dueling trade barriers, the value of US-to-China silicon exports just about balanced the value of China-to-US modules. It was like a textbook example of comparative advantage. Now Chinese manufacturers get higher priced silicon made with fewer environmental protections, and US buyers get higher priced modules :-/

It is not that it is impossible to run photovoltaic panels production de novo (and it is done in large scale these days, as you have correctly stated). The problem is that it is economically unsustainable and have to be financed by government subsidies (or, alternatively, moved to cheap Chinese factories disregarding environmental costs completely).

Photovoltaics: scalable, green, economically sustainable (choose two).

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