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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Nuclear power is strictly superior. You can do it anywhere you can stick a big turbine (so anywhere near a lot of water). Most of civilization is also near large bodies of water like rivers, lakes or seas, so it's not like there's a shortage of places to build them. Renewables need lots of sun or wind or certain kinds of rivers with big height differentials...

The power is very reliable, capacity factor is around 80-90% compared to renewables which struggle to reach 40%. Nuclear plants are usually only offline for maintenance and refuelling, so their off-time is fairly predictable. Renewables often produce their power when it's not needed and go offline randomly, demanding extremely expensive batteries.

Ecological damage is minuscule, in the grand scheme of things. Everyone knows about Chernobyl but few know about the 1.4 million people who were relocated to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. In Australia, the original purpose of the nascent Green movement was opposing a hydroelectric dam in Tasmania which would need to clear a lot of trees. They wanted us to burn more coal instead. Renewables use up hundreds of times more land than nuclear, wind turbines mince up many birds. They all need immense amounts of extra transmission cables which will further mar the rural skyline. Nuclear plants are so small they can be contained within large ships and even submarines. They can be built near where they're needed, for cheaper transmission.

And the waste products from nuclear power plants are trivially easy to manage! There's so little waste in terms of mass that it can be stored on-site. Because the US decided to bungle its nuclear waste dump in Yucca mountain (to the tune of tens of billions of dollars with absolutely nothing to show for the money), waste has just been left with the plants. A simple and easy solution is to put waste in a big lead-lined box and take it away, stick all the boxes in a warehouse in the desert and leave some guards to protect it, from a safe distance. An even better solution would be to actually use breeder reactors to turn that waste into electricity. U-238 can be converted into plutonium and provide power, it's possible to burn all the uranium not just the U-235.

Finally, the price of nuclear energy, without the sabotage of power-plant construction, is very low. It's only the farcical hysteria that drives up costs. They invented ridiculous standards of safety. From: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

An example was a prohibition against multiplexing, resulting in thousands of sensor wires leading to a large space called a cable spreading room. Multiplexing would have cut the number of wires by orders of magnitude while at the same time providing better safety by multiple, redundant paths. A plant that required 670,000 yards of cable in 1973 required almost double that, 1,267,000, by 1978, whereas “the cabling requirement should have been dropping precipitously” given progress at the time in digital technology.

Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.

A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.

The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

Without these clownish safety requirements, nuclear energy would be cheap (like it is in South Korea), we could allocate the enormous sums invested in renewables elsewhere, reliance upon the Middle East would be lower and millions of people wouldn't have choked to death from air pollution. The death toll of nuclear energy speaks for itself, it is amongst the safest in deaths per gigawatt.

Fuel is not a problem. Breeder reactors can increase the fuel available to us by 50x, burning the U-238 that is in the majority. Thorium can also be burnt if we bothered to develop the technology. Fuel costs are only a small contributor to the cost of nuclear energy, so the price of uranium could be doubled to incentivize exploration. We could work out how to extract uranium from the ocean as well. The history of nuclear energy is littered with technologies that were just abandoned since fuel was so cheap, nobody could be bothered developing them. (Molten salt reactors are one such innovation).

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