This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Damn, that is very cool.
Though Nuclear power is still needed to cover base load during the winter season in northen Europe.
And I am still pissed at how environmentalists killed nuclear power just as energy demand surged during the 90s, 00s and 10s.
Under the radar, those "environmentalists" were possibly funded by petroleum companies.
No we weren't. We were fucking scared when theoretical statistics about nuclear accidents actually manifested in the real world, and didn't want to have one of those in our neighborhood. so we took the opportunity to shut it down when it presented itself.
Those people who were funded by petroleum simultaneously made sure to delay wind and solar as long as they possibly could, and that is while we're still stuck at coal and gas. Those same people have the majority of the vote nowadays once again, and you can watch them do it again: even though wind and solar is the most economic choice by now, they are doing what they can to slow it down.
they are doing what they can to slow it down
... to slow down wind, solar and nuclear, exactly.
Not really. They sometimes bring the nuclear idea to the table as an alleged alternative to solar and wind. But the reality is that in today's democracies nuclear is near impossible to build for a variety of reasons. It's never a real alternative, only one to slow down wind and solar.
For as long as I can remember, the entire world has had 400-something running nuclear power plants. I suspect 400-something is a fundamental nuclear constant.
Nuclear power is so cool. After SneakerNet (Sandworm) and Chernobyl Is think a lot of people would be scared of it. I used to think wind power was an awesome source until you look at life expectancy and cost for replacement parts. You can get like 10-15years but a solar farm lasts 25+ before degrading.
Not to mention the recycling of the blades :(
Afaik they are practically impossible to recycle efficiently.
Nuclear is still the most expensive power source, while wind turbines are one of the cheapest per MWH produced.
Half a decade ago I was fully pro nuclear, but battery technology have developed to a point we're almost capable of using it as a base loader; There's an added power grid capacity requirement for battery farm baseloading, but there's ideas of how to solve this. By having batteries sitting locally at the largest power generating sites, with a switch to determine whether batteries should be filled or power should be pushed to the grid
Improved battery tech helps nuclear just as much as it helps solar and wind, as you can design reactors to run peak efficiency at a specific output, allowing you to target a base load where during low demand hours nuclear, wind and solar as available charge batteries or energy storage devices and then during peak hours draw from that reserve without having to increase or decrease the load and allow a much more efficient consumption of fuel.
As for nuclear being expensive, that entirely comes down to the extremely flawed policy of no radiation exposure, which was put in a place when very little was known about exposure at all, let alone how many natural sources of similar radiation there is. If those policies were relaxed to much more realistic standards, the cost of nuclear would be competitive with solar.
Praising nuclear and deploring the cost of wind? That's funny, considering the still-unsolved problem of securely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years. It's almost like we have left the factor with the largest potential cost out of our calculation...
20 years of nuclear waste vs less than 10 years (2017-2023) of wind turbine blades (dumped illegally no less)
Which one is the unsolved problem again?
To help answer your question, could you first
a) provide information on the total energy generated by the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2, just so we can be sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison and we can be sure that we're looking at roughly the same amount in both pictures?
b) assess the capacity of the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2 for 1) further damages to the environment and human health, as well as 2) their potential for being recycled?
c) fast-forward these images about 250-500 years and then reasses which one depicts the greater environmental problem and cost factor?
The Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, produced approximately 119 billion kilowatt-hours (119 terawatt-hours) of electricity during its operation from 1972 to 1996.
The Sweetwater Wind Farm is a 585.3-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Nolan County, Texas. Annual production estimates are 1,700,000 MWh, or approx 1.7 terrawatt hours per year on average
So giving the Wind farm the most generous output figures, in a ten year span it produces less than 20 Terrawatt hours, almost 1/6th (one sixth) of the power the single reactor nuclear plant produced in it's life time.
So yeah, balls in your court.
Uh, that's energy, not power. Also, it's means it is.
You could transfer that apostrophe to "ball's".
Unless you really mean balls. In my court.
That's fair.
Now let's see which of these waste materials I can recycle, and which of them I could, theoretically, leave untouched in their current state for 250-500 years without investing a single Dollar. (The illegal Sweetwater dump was cleaned up, btw. Picture 1 is supposed to be the clean-up.)
From the turbines? Basically nothing. Millions have been spent and best has been figured out is shredding them and using them as filler, which no one is going to use when dirt and sand are cheaper and no risk of break down. All other attempts to recycle turbine blades has resulted in just better ways to crush the down to bury them, which funnily enough is what most of the 'clean up' for Sweetwater was.
For nuclear? They can be recycled today if the incentive was there, France recycles almost all of it's nuclear waste with something like an 80% recovery rate and predict they could go 95% if that ever became economically viable. Most of the nuclear waste in the above picture will be inert after 100 years, though there is no data publicly available of the make up the waste though it should be fewer than 1% plutonium which could be recovered for use else where, such as if thorium reactors ever become viable or for space probes as NASA loves to use it for.
The main reason the US doesn't recycle is because US's flawed policy of no radiation exposure means setting up a reprocessing and recycling facility would never become viable for the amount of waste produced annually. And as other posters have pointed out, even stuff that can't be recycled or reprocessed for other uses could still be simply buried and used to boost a geothermal powerplant.
Unresolved?
It's a super simple problem.
You dig a hole, put the waste in the hole and backfill with clay.
Done.
As a Swede, I would love it if we built a huge underground storage site and sold space to other countries needing space for waste. We have a solid bedrock and a generally stable political situation, we also have the skills to build a facility like it and could make bank off of it.
Yeah, that is why almost 80 years after the start of the nuclear age nearly no country has such a storage. It's so easy to build!
Or your know, the amount of waste produced by nuclear reactors produced global is so low relative to output that the majority of it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Yeah, it is quite startling to see the difference in physical fuel use between a coal plant and a nuclear plant.
And the really funny thing is that a coal plant releases far more radiation than a nuke plant.
100%, there re natural rock formations that emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, hell if the US Capitol building was rezoned as a nuclear power plant, half of DC would need to be evacuated and an exclusion zone setup without any change to the building or fuel brought to the site. The granite used in it's construction emits more radiation naturally that exceeds the legal limit that nuclear power plants are allowed.
Meanwhile self professed environmentalists are anti-nuclear energy despite it having the least impact environmentally per kw produced.
Nuclear fuel is the smallest fraction of nuclear waste. Every bit of PPE, every part replaced, tool used, etc is nuclear waste.
At the end of life the entire reactor and part of the building are nuclear waste. They go through them with a concrete mill and remove the inner layer of concrete because it has become radioactive.
it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Oh yeah. These issues are so mild that after your "half a century", we need to dig everything back up, reseal it and find a new place. Playing a thousand years' worth of musical chairs with radioactive waste may sound fun to you - until one day, the music stops and you can't find a chair.
Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts 'thousands and thousands of years' is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives.
So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.
It is easy to build, but as noted, it is also expensive to build.
Then you also need the right kind of bedrock and geology.
Sweden has everything needed to build such a facility, I could even see a large benefit of a permanent storage facility here.
We could get "boosted geothermal", nuclear waste still produce heat for a long time, why not put in pipes in place in the storage facility and use the extra heat energy to heat houses or other useful things, we are already doing geothermal heating here, so much so that there has been noted issues with depleating the geothermal boreholes, with a boosted system you would get a much longer life time of using it.
This kicks ass. I hate that my country is ruining itself and parts of the world with pointless weapons and war... but I am glad that the United States' self-defeating idiocy has the whole world turning away from oil.
Environmentalists have been in a pretty happy mood about energy generation in recent years. The orange turd clogging up global oil and gas supply only accelerates what was already inevitable: Complete renewable victory. It cannot be stopped anymore. Not with all the Lobbying and bribing money in the world. Renewables are too cheap, too reliable to ever switch back. That fight is basically won. At least long term.
Indeed. Even in Germany, we have the second Minister of Economic Affairs who trying to hinder PV by several actions. It’s still unstoppable.
I bet you guys in US will get this balcony solar boost as we had in Germany. This will kick ass the energy companies badly by the pure mass. Deserved.
In Germany we say “stromerzeugende Haushaltsgeräte” and I think that’s beautiful.
