Is nuclear energy feasible?

Fukushima and Chernobyl meltdowns were due to human error and just negligence of people who were not professionally trained. Just read up on it.

Thorium when?

>human error
Oh well, then I guess in this post-human era nothing can go wrong!

>negligence of people who were not professionally trained
It's called greed. Training (and everything else related to safety) costs money, and cutting costs means more profit

So, unless you have a method to eliminate human error and human greed, there will always be the possibility that Fukushima and Chernobyl repeat themselves

Next gen reactors will be built in a way that if left alone will result in the chain reaction stoppping.

Literally nothing bad can happen with these things.

>Literally nothing bad can happen with these things.

This thought is human error in and of itself.
A mistake made many times before.

>fukushima/chernobyl is due to human error and it's exclusive to nuclear

Then how about spillages of oil into the sea? I recall that more number of times than nuclear plants failing. That wasn't from human error?

It's plenty feasible, the only reason people are calling it into question is because it didn't take off on the west coast like it did east of the Mississippi. Which is ironic as America's nuclear reactor industry is effectively monopolized by San Francisco based Bechtel now (because they were the company selected for the new navy reactors).

How many died in those again?

Thats literally what Im talking about. They will be beyond human error in that with power outage and the resuling lack of coolant (like chernobyl, fukishima and all the close-calls), they will shut down instead of overheat and melt through their containment vehicle.

>Cons
- mining for uranium is a fucking mess
- storing the waste is a fucking mess

If those were actually included in the price of it all, no way is nuclear nothing more than a dinosaur living off the government tit

Human error will be present in everything humans do, including the machines we build. Nothing has, or will ever, be completely safe.

But I guess there will always be people claiming that, despite all the failed ones, this new and improved ship will be truly unsinkable!

>THORIUM
I just negated all of your arguments.
Either thorium, or the less likely fusion reactors.
Now STFU you (to borrow an expression from a good friend) 'carebears'.

Read the posts you reply to, you fucking retard.

THE ONLY FEASIBLE TECHNOLOGY IS SOLAR YOU MASSIVE RETARD!!!

NO! SUCK IT, I JUST THORIUM'D ALL OVER YOU!

>bigass power plants
No bigger than any other power plant, and they don't go through massive quantities of oil/natural gas/coal

>difficult to store
You can turn reactions off

>if the plants are damaged they could really fuck things up
Not really

>its a nucleartard thread
>someone brings up disasters

Seems to me if there's threat of colossal disaster then it shouldn't ever be done. Why? Because Murphy's Law.

I was supporting nuke you retarded asshat

BUILD THEM ON THE MOON

+ wind and hydro.
but that's also solar, just indirectly!
praise the sun \o/

BUT IT LITERALLY CAN'T FAIL AT ALL NOW ALL THE NEW NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE 10,000% SAFE WITH MILLIONS OF REDUNDANCY SAFETY SYSTEMS! WHY DO YOU FUCKING MORONS THINK NUCLEAR IS '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''BAD'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''?

>It could happen!
>an extremely unlikely chain of events may happen such that bad things happen
You twat there's risk with literally anything

Ok fuck off then.
Give me a definition for "safe".
Then we can continue having this conversation.

Pro tip: if you define it as unreachable then very logically it will indeed never be reached. For no energy source.

What's Thorium?

Enough about risk of accidents, guys. The real reason that power from nuclear fission currently has a low net energy yield.

Sure, nuclear fission produces tons of energy, is clean, and is currently relatively safe. But the amount of effort and resources it takes to mine uranium ore and extract U-235 cancels out much of the energy produced.

Until we can come up with much more efficient methods for the acquisition of Uranium-235, power from nuclear fission cannot be classified as sustainable.

>yfw Thorium is not exploited because you can't get Plutonium from the fission

>Cons
>>bigass power plants
what is SMR?

world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx

What are you talking about moron? The cost of fuel is miniscule compared to coal or gas. Fossil fuel plants have 80-90% of their expenses in the cost of fuel. Nuclear plants have 15-30%.

>yfw thorium is not exploited because uranium and plutonium are more practical and not because of some grand conspiracy

>feasible
yes it would be as they are being used today

What I believe

Its the best what we got, with great possibility for improvements in safety and costs.

I am sad when I read about people cheering for renewables.
How they feel they are saving the earth
I just cant imagine that future of human kind would be having huge turbines on every hill and plastered photovoltaic panels on almost every roof and surface to get pittance of energy that we need.

Its absolutely amazing for some geographical locations.
Offshore windfarms... great, solar farms in deserts, amazing
3rd countries getting cheap and safe source of energy, congrats...

but advanced nations shunning from nuclear and trying to argue that intermittent, huge space demanding, low output source of energy should be our main focus... its infuriating

>expensive as hell
>produces waste that kills you just by standing near it
>said waste has to be kept in maintained and guarded facilities for millenia to come

renewable energy sounds very good, but in practice kinda sucks. the parts needed to make a solar panel use a fuckton of energy to make, and at least 5 years ago when i last checked, most panels break within 5 years, which was the time needed to actually have made a net reduction in carbon footprint. that mightve changed by now, but still to make renewable energy parts, fossil fuels will be needed as of now, and the cost/benefit to using these isnt worth it, so you wont find any one country fully switching yet.

Before that "millenia" come we could've already launched all those wastes into space.

Goddamn.

vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2017/04/cals-bp.html

>BP oil spill did $17.2 billion in damage to natural resources, scientists find in first-ever financial evaluation of spill’s impact

oil is solar too, just more indirect

You and me both know this is never going to happen. It's both economically unviable and highly undesirable considering rockets are at risk of blowing up.

Is nuclear energy worth it in the long run?

The only things we'll have in the "long run" are the sun in the sky and the hot rocks in the ground

I've been doing some thinking and i'm wondering what you guys think of this

Pro
>high output
>relatively clean, non-polluting
>no greenhouse gases (omiting construction and mining)
>produce more than they consume
>could use other sources besides uranium (ie; thorium when feasible)

Cons
>mining rare radioactive elements is a mess and expensive
>when the plants get hit by a disaster they could really fuck things up
>waste is hard to get rid of and lasts for mellenia
>non-renewable

Thorium is an awful nuclear fuel that has been overhyped by shills for years. Thorium reactors are really U233 reactors, which is a more toxic fuel than U235. There's zero reason to build a thorium reactor over a uranium salt reactor.

Not to mention thorium has never been proven on a commercial scale. Pretty much the only thing thorium has going for it is good PR.

Because at the end of the day nuclear fuel is a 100% reliable heat source, while mechanical cooling systems, no matter how redundant, will never be 100% reliable.

The problem with nuclear right now is it isn't cost competitive. The main issue is that D&E costs go through the roof, and can cause projected costs to quadruple. Like the Seabrook nuclear power station was proposed at around 500 $/kWh and ended up at around 2000 $/kWh.

You'll notice every pro-nuclear cost analysis ignores or minimizes design costs. On an LCOE basis (the energy price needed over the lifetime of a project to generate profit) nuclear is about 11 c/kWh, which is higher than natural gas, solar, and wind. Nuclear also has about 10 times the capital cost of solar and wind.

The reality of the situation is that right now, the cheapest energy on a utility scale is natural gas supplemented with solar and wind.

>No reason to build a thorium reactor because it technically runs on a uranium isotope
>never mind the fact that thorium is several times more common than uranium and the uranium isotope it breeds into to power the reaction is completely used up as per the nature of a liquid nuclear fuel that can be continuously cleaned of decay products

A thorium reactor is fueled by adding thorium salt to the thorium loop, having it be bred into U-233, then having that U-233 transferred over to the uranium loop to be fissiled, which results in large release of energy as well as the breeding of more U-233 from the thorium.

In a uranium based cycle plutonium is produced, which is bad because muh bombs :^)

In reality what we need to do is build a majority of thorium salt power plants and a smaller percentage of uranium salt power plants to produce plutonium that is useful for space exploration and development.

Light water reactors are expensive as shit because the entire building the reactor is housed in needs to be a pressure vessel to contain the core if it were to get too hot and cause the coolant water inside to flash to steam. There's also the fact that solid nuclear fuel is a nightmare to manage, 300 degree pressurized water is corrosive, and the uranium used requires enrichment to be useful.

A liquid salt reactor using either thorium or uranium solves all of these issues.

It's about the magnitude of disaster.

Worst thing with wind is someone falling of the turbine and it only effects the person that fucked it up.
Worst thing with nuclear is large areas of the world becoming inhabitable and causing mutantions in wildlife and plants for thousands of years.

But I'll shut up about disaster because it seems to not matter when people talk about nuclear

Also new reactors are getting more expensive to build and old ones more expensive to maintain both because of safety while wind and solar are becoming cheaper than nuclear.

Also everybody seems to forget biomass/biofuels.

Reactor costs aren't the big issue, it's design and engineering costs. China is able to build reactors real cheap because they have standardized the design and their D&E costs are negligible. The US has no standard design, so any new reactor has to be designed from the ground up, which costs significantly more than land, materials and construction.

Molten salt reactors would be hit particularly hard by this, seeing as they have never been built to commercial scale. There are so many fundamental steps that would have to be designed first that would cost a ton of money. Like how do you design a system to purify and process salts before they get to the reactor on a commercial scale?

You talk about corrosion. Radioactive salts are extremely corrosive. You need to find materials that can withstand the temperature and chemical environment of a liquid salt reactor. Then you have to get them certified for use, which is a long process with lots of testing and bureaucracy.

All of this is a massive R&D cash sink that eats up billions of dollars and years of time before you can even build a reactor that will make money.

>Also the magnitude of disaster is so big the damage is irriversible.
Major exaggeration, so far the only major accident that caused significant loss of human life was the result of the perfect storm of terrible plant design coupled with insane incompetence. Even so the damage from the worst case scenario was less than expected and the surrounding ecosystems have recovered quickly. Compare that to something as "mundane" as Coal power, which kills around 8 Million people per year, where even the most liberal estimates of deaths caused by nuclear power top out at just over 4 thousand since its inception.

It's not as if we should ignore the danger, but just going by the numbers less people will die over time if you replaced all coal kwh with nuclear even adjusting for a catastrophe as rare as Chernobyl. And as other anons have mentioned, modern reactor technology and regulations have essentially mitigated the already minimal dangers even further.

>mining rare radioactive elements is a mess and expensive
>waste is hard to get rid of and lasts for mellenia
>non-renewable

We can now use old "spent" fuel in new reactors again, the fuel itself is actually in great abundance in the earth's crust, the energy density of uranium is so high that it doesn't matter if it isn't renewable as it would never be an issue on a human timescale unless we become a solar system spanning species.

> Is nuclear energy feasible?

Yes. The only "real" legitimate complaints IMHO are the harm from contaminating nearby land from a reactor accident, and proliferation concerns.

>bigass power plants

Not really. Coal power plants are big too. Next-gen nuclear plants will be substantially smaller than similar power coal plants.

>difficult to store

The waste problem is a political myth.
thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

>if the plants are damaged they could really fuck things up

Yes. Fukushima was a 50 year old design. Modern designs would not have had a problem. And next-gen designs are even safer still. I'm pretty satisfied that with a proper molten salt reactor, there is no problem.

Keep in mind that Fukushima and Chernobyl are not as bad as commonly represented. The land contamination issue is serious and severe, but not as bad as commonly portrayed.

I need to do more research on the proliferation aspect. Another user on here made some good arguments (mixed with shitty arguments) that made me realize I need to do more research.

>clean, non-polluting
This is one of the most confused talking points of nuclear boosters.

By its inherent attributes, nuclear is the dirtiest power source. It's so dirty that any release of waste is considered unacceptable, therefore, nuclear power is only permitted to operate when it appears to be releasing no waste. Any power source can be made arbitrarily clean. For most, a certain amount of dirtiness is acceptable, in exchange for reduced costs and increased production, but nuclear waste is so unspeakably horrible that nothing less than the appearance of perfection is tolerated.

Furthermore, it's relatively easy to hide leaks, spills, and deliberate improper dumping from the public. The nuclear industry has been caught repeatedly doing so in the past. It almost certainly happens much more often than is discovered.

On top of that, you can't say how clean or cost-effective nuclear power is "in practice" until after thousands of years. That's how long the waste has to be kept out of the environment. Almost none of the waste that has been generated has been put into proper long-term storage so it no longer needs active upkeep.

One of the things people like to claim when they're promoting nuclear power is that it's safe, that the statistics show that it kills less people than other forms of power. But they're talking about clearly attributable deaths.

When you release radioisotopes into the environment, and someone later dies or is born deformed from cancer or mutation, it's extremely difficult to link that to the radiation. The victims can be anywhere on Earth, at any point in time after the release of materials, and the harm is rarely specific to radioactivity. Therefore, the actual number of nuclear-power-related deaths is unknown.

Take ThorCon as a concrete example. In a loss of power situation, which is what happened in Fukushima, coolant will stop flowing, and non-powered circulation will be enough to cool the thing for 70+ days, or for forever, depending on design choices.

There is no operator intervention required. There is no valve that the operator needs to open. In fact, there is no valve that the operator can close. There is no way that the operator can fuck it up, because the "safety systems" are entirely beyond the control of the operator.

The safety systems are also constantly operating, which allows for early detection of problems, as opposed to safety systems that are off until there's a problem.

Chernobyl, possibly as low as 300, maybe 4000 at worst. Fukushima, about 0 from radiation poisoning and cancer. Maybe some of the cleanup workers will have problems, but no one outside the plant will have problems from the radiation.

well crafted bait and people will fall for it

nice trips

Start here: Video or text doc. Your choice.
thorconpower.com/docs/domsr.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=VfsOYzOpYRw

Oh boy, another nuclear reactor design that has never been proven at commercial scale.

>expensive as hell
False. It's expensive in the west because people created needless regulations to make it expensive.
euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

>produces waste that kills you just by standing near it

lolno.
thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

It's based entirely on existing tech that has been well demonstrated, especially at Oak Ridge National Labs, which ran a molten salt reactor for many years.

This is not like fusion. This is ready for immediate full-scale commercial prototyping. They could start full scale commercial production in as little as 4 years, assuming no needless regulatory hurdles, and money problems were solved.

That is correct.
energyfromthorium.com/energy-weinberg-1959/
Average everyday rock, granite, is nuclear fuel. We'll never run out of rock, and therefore we'll never run out of nuclear fuel.

Again, it is cost competitive when you don't have needless regulations and regulatory and legal environments killing it.
euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/
In South Korea, nuclear power plant costs have been steadily /decreasing/ over many decades.

Don't be too quick to dismiss proliferation concerns from the thorium-uranium fuel cycle in molten salt reactors. A lot of those claims may have been vastly exaggerated. U-233 makes a bomb just as good as U-235 and Plutonium.

The first molten salt reactors do not need to be breeders. ThorCon design is not a breeder. If and when those serious design problems are solved, and demonstrated, then we can start building breeder molten salt reactors, but burner molten salt reactors come with significant advantages in cost and safety compared to conventional pressurized light water reactors.

Also, corrosion is practically a non-issue. It's not as bad as people make it out to be. We have 5 years of reactor experience from the MSRE and ORNL. ThorCon design is just going to use standard stainless steel for almost the entire thing. Corrosion is predicted IIRC to be 0.1 mm over 4 years, which is nothing. You can plan around that.

An Oak Ridge experiment in the 60s has no relevance to building a modern, to scale reactor.

And considering people can't even agree on what materials can survive a salt reactor, it's miles away from being brought to scale. The only alloys people have found that can withstand the environment of the reactor also suffer severe embrittlement under neutron flux.

And this isn't even getting into questions like how to process and purify salts, how to reprocess salts on a commercial scale, or how to manage core mixture and remove fission products.

It's not bait, it's the simple truth.

>Chernobyl, possibly as low as 300, maybe 4000 at worst.
4000 isn't anything like a worst case, it's what's presented as a reasonable estimate by nuclear-friendly authorities. Nobody believes it's as low as 300, that's an outright lie.

Estimates range up to a million. Nobody really knows.

The disaster has cost upwards of $30 billion dollars and the use of around 16000 square kilometers of good farm and timber land. It was a major contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union.

>An Oak Ridge experiment in the 60s has no relevance to building a modern, to scale reactor.

They kept very detailed notes, which Kirk Sorensen published. (Thanks Kirk. It's very, very relevant. Without that, I could not say that we're probably 4 years away from full scale production of ThorCon (assuming money and regulatory problems could be overcome). But because of that, and the recent work by others, as cited and thanks in the doc link above, we can do this. This is not a risky gamble. This will very probably work, and damnit we ought to be spending money doing it right now.

>4000 isn't anything like a worst case, it's what's presented as a reasonable estimate by nuclear-friendly authorities. Nobody believes it's as low as 300, that's an outright lie.

I do. You only get those absurdly high numbers by using flagrantly false science, i.e. LNT model.

>And this isn't even getting into questions like how to process and purify salts, how to reprocess salts on a commercial scale, or how to manage core mixture and remove fission products.

Also, as I already said, ThorCon design involves practically no reprocessing. As I already said, it's a burner, not a breeder. I won't say that we can make a breeder in 4 years. There are some problems that have not been solved to my satisfaction for a LFTR breeder. So, you're argument is irrelevant, non-sequitir.

We'll see where we are in 4 years.

Come on. Don't be a dipshit: at least honestly represent my position. I said: If they can solve the money and regulatory problems. Neither has been done yet, AFAIK.

>Nuclear is cheap I swear

Nuclear is cheap. See South Korea, where the regulations are not designed to make it too expensive.
euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

Anything can be made expensive with lots of bad regulations.

>The disaster has cost upwards of $30 billion dollars
Note: the dollar figure costs would be much higher in the West for an accident of this severity. That's how much it cost in the Soviet Union and ex-Soviet countries, with its compulsory labor forces and their low wages, property values, and cost of living.

Fukushima is costing up around $200 billion and was an extraordinarily lucky, low-damage case, because the wind happened to blow the waste out to sea, so only about 600 square kilometers were contaminated. There are few reactors located where such a stroke of luck is even possible.

Which is why we should use safer reactors, like an AP-1000 where that wouldn't happen, or a proper molten salt reactor like ThorCon where it definitely wouldn't happen. ThorCon is so safe that even if you put a TNT bomb inside the reactor core itself and blew it up, practically all radioactivity would be confined to the reactor site itself, due to the differences in chemistry.

Technological development takes time.
Let's not all get impatient.

This is actually mostly due to cost.
It can be seen internationally.

>Nuclear is cheap.
Nuclear is very expensive. The true cost is usually obscured by subsidies, including the understanding that the government (and uncompensated people) will end up bearing the ultimate cost of decommissioning, waste disposal, inspections, anti-proliferation measures, and any major disasters which occur.

>See South Korea, where the regulations are not designed to make it too expensive.
It's still expensive, it's just not as prohibitive as it is in the US.

That analysis looks only at part of the cost.

Three Mile Island was widely seen as the end of the world, at least at the time.

You're simply wrong.

The subsidies are vastly exaggerated, and in some cases, they're actually imposed costs. For example, the so-called subsidy that guarantees liability. In the US, the operators have to pay into this fund, and I forget the exact numbers, but this is a lot of money. Rather than being a subsidy for their operation, it's practically a tax, or fine.

Again, look at the charts in my link: Construction costs were fine in the west until Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Then they skyrocketed. This has everything to do with needless regulation and regulation designed to obstruct.

>That analysis looks only at part of the cost.

Gonna have to do better than this. Start citing sources.

>Which is why we should use safer reactors
New reactors = new unknown unknowns.

Before Chernobyl, you people were saying, "The nuclear industry is really careful so something like that will never happen!" After Chernobyl, you people were saying, "Sure, but something like that'll never happen in a first world country!" After Fukushima, you people are saying, "Sure, but something like that'll never happen with the newest designs!"

As long as we keep using nuclear, these things will keep happening. If we expand nuclear power capacity many times to make it our main source of energy, they will happen many times more often.

There'll always be ways the specific incident could have been avoided, that will be used as excuses by people like you to claim that the next one won't happen, and insist that nuclear is totally safe and worthwhile.

Even with these accidents, nuclear is still the safest and cleanest form of energy generation by far. Safer and cleaner than even hydro, solar, and wind.

Second, we are never going to get risk-free. Nothing is risk free. We can substantially lower the risks. I'm ok with facing these risks, compared to the risks of global warming.

>If we expand nuclear power capacity many times to make it our main source of energy, they will happen many times more often.

+ once the new ones seem to have problems [just like anything ever claimed to be 100% safe] it's going to take lots of time and cost to decommission them again.

In general nuclear energy is quite feasible and is a effective way for power generation, if we work towards containing and finding ways to stabilize the plants easier before chernobyl occurs, then it would be much more reliable. Regardless, within 10 to 20 years from now we will most likely find easier ways to maintain a nuclear reaction and to make it more stable.

No one is claiming "100% safe". Stop doing such ridiculous strawman. Nothing is 100% safe.

What proper pro-nuclear people are claiming, however, is that it's safer and cleaner than solar, wind, and hydro.

>No one is claiming "100% safe". Stop doing such ridiculous strawman. Nothing is 100% safe.
>Literally nothing bad can happen with these things.

>needless regulation and regulation designed to obstruct
You people keep claiming that out of one side of your mouth, and out of the other side you claim that the industry should be credited for its low rate of disasters.

The regulations were increased after failures because they revealed the need for more regulation.

You can't cut the regulations and costs without increasing the risk of failure.

Were you pointing to Japan and saying their reactors were unsafe and needed to be shut down before Fukushima? Anyone who wasn't doing so has no credibility anymore to talk about how safe nuclear power plants. Certainly, no one who was (or would have been, based on the same reasoning they apply today) saying that nuclear is safe and meltdowns simply weren't going to happen has any credibility.

If you've paid any attention to South Korea's politics over the last year, you know that country is not an example to be held up of competent recent management. India's a good deal worse. They'll abandon nuclear or suffer the consequences of their fast and loose policy.

>Chernobyl
>Had some of the earliest reactors made, and despite surviving for several decades, was warned to be changed due to already known security dangers
>Soviet authorities still refused to upgrade the plants
>Inevitable disaster occurs

>Fukushima
>Build nuclear plant on earthquake prone territory
>Inevitable disaster happens

See the trend? In both cases it was already known a disaster was going to happen and it was ignored. This isn't even the scientists messing up, just the government. It's a meme, because with proper procedures and good attention from the government these disasters would never occur.

It sucks really badly. Nuclear is the most feared and hated energy option in Canada, despite us being the second largest producers of uranium. Oh and by the way, there are less deaths associated with nuclear power planets than any other popular form of energy (Coal, oil, wind, hydroelectric, etc)

Give me examples of solar or wind abruptly rendering thousands of square kilometers of prime land permanently uninhabitable and breaking the back of a world superpower with the cost of cleaning up their mess.

Neither presents the kind of disaster risk that nuclear does, and as their efficiency grows and their industries mature, their workplace death per joule statistics will improve accordingly.

You have to be arguing very dishonestly to claim nuclear is safer than solar and wind should be expected to be as mature industries.

>The regulations were increased after failures because they revealed the need for more regulation.

No they weren't. No one was harmed from Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island was a non-issue. And our plants are simply not comparable with Chernobyl (positive coefficient of reactivity).

BUT THIS TIME, WE WON'T BE GREEDY. PROMISED.
NEW REACTORS ARE SAFER!
JUST CUT BACK THE SAFETY REGULATIONS SO WE CAN BEGIN MAKING MONEY!...
i mean GENERATING CLEAN ELECTRICITY ofcourse!

spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think

>permanently uninhabitable

Lol. Go look at Chernobyl. Large areas of the exclusion zone are habitable now. Hundreds of people have been living in certain areas for the entire time, they basically refused to leave. "Permanently uninhabitable" my ass.

Similarly, large areas of the Fukushima exclusion zone are safe to live in. You get more background radiation from living in Denver than you do in most of the exclusion zone around Fukushima.

Like, did you know that there were other reactors at the Chernobyl site? Not many people know that. Fewer still know that these other reactors were operated without incident for many years afterwards. "Uninhabitable" my ass.