Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia?

No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. This comic illustrates the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

>... How can you guarantee that a certain place is safe to store millions of tons of radioactive waste for thousands of years if we can't even guarantee what will happen tomorrow?

Millions of tons? Where are you getting that number from? Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

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"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

>...We need to stop this nuclear madness!

NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by fossil fuels: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...

As someone in a previous discussion pointed out, the historical record for deaths from nuclear power have been very low:

Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)

Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)

Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)

Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)

Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

>> Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia?

> No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. This comic illustrates the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

The comic is a bit disingenious as it implies that all renewables are intermittent.

But many renewable energy sources are base load as well, e.g. hydro or wind. Yes, they have variations, but so does the load -- from the perspective of power grid management there's nothing new.

In fact this is part of the problem: renewables and nuclear (or coal) are competing for base load. If we build a nuclear plant, we need to run it for 50 years for the investment to make sense. This means that it will economically and politically impede the installation of e.g. wind power for 50 years.

Wind most certainly isn't base load. It's highly weather dependent. Occasionally, Ireland's wind infrastructure produces the country's entire electricity demand, and they actually have to start shutting down wind turbines. Also occasionally the whole system only produces a couple of hundred megawatts for a period of about a week.

There are some locations with very reliable constant wind (though usually only for part of the year) but that's not the norm. Offshore wind does better, but is still far from base load.

> Wind most certainly isn't base load.

The German government's scientific service, for one, disagrees with you.

Do you have a link to an article on this? My impression was that Germany was trying to move away from base load as a concept entirely, using unreliable renewables plus highly responsive fossil plants instead.

They moved away from Nuclear. However, now they import power from France, etc. Which has Nuclear and fossil fuel plants.

In 2016, Germany was a net exporter of electrical energy: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...

However you're right that Germany was a net importer from (among others) France: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/180862/umfrag...

Which is surprising as I remember reading that France has tremendous difficulties satisfying their electricity demand, especially in winter (lots of electric heating apparently).

Here's the link: http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/de/untersuchungen/u140.html

It being a German government publication it's in German unfortunately.

As far as I can tell from skimming it your impression is correct.

So I apparently misremembered the article, and my claim about base load a few posts above may be incorrect after all. Sorry, rsynnott.

>...The comic is a bit disingenious as it implies that all renewables are intermittent.

No, I don't think it does that.

>...But many renewable energy sources are base load as well, e.g. hydro or wind.

As user rsynnott said "Wind most certainly isn't base load." While hydro is base load power, only a few countries like China are considering building more hydro plants. We aren't going to be able to use hydro as a means to get off of burning fossil fuels.

"The budget for Hanford alone is about $2.3 billion in the current fiscal year, about $1.5 billion of that going to the management and treatment of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored in underground storage tanks." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/0...

Ultimately, however, the core problem may be that such new reactors don't eliminate the nuclear waste that has piled up so much as transmute it. Even with a fleet of such fast reactors, nations would nonetheless require an ultimate home for radioactive waste, one reason that a 2010 M.I.T. report on spent nuclear fuel dismissed such fast reactors. Or, as Cochran puts it: "If you want to get rid of milk, don't feed it to cows."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-reactors-to-...

"Do the math! 1.1 additional GT out of 36 GT emitted is only a 3% difference. This 3% value is not a typographical error. Worldwide, all those nukes made only a 3% dent in yearly CO2 production. Put another way, each of the 438 individual nuclear plants contribute less than seven thousandths of one percent to CO2 reduction[18]. That’s hardly enough to justify claims that keeping your old local nuke running is necessary to prevent the sea from rising."

http://www.fairewinds.org/demystify//demystifying-nuclear-po...

>The budget for Hanford alone is about $2.3 billion in...

Hanford was started in the Manhattan project to produce plutonium and during the cold war produced plutonium for tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. All of these government weapons plants were quickly started with inadequate policies for handling the material.

>...Ultimately, however, the core problem may be that such new reactors don't eliminate the nuclear waste that has piled up so much as transmute it.

A 4th gen design like the IFR would allow you to end with a much smaller volume of waste that would only be dangerous for a few centuries.

In terms of natural gas, the numbers given are probably out of date - CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are lower than a coal plant, but that doesn't account for the methane emissions that come with fracking and distributing the methane.

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...

As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947

Reply on news.ycombinator.com