What is Veeky Forums's opinion on nuclear energy?

Don't know if this is the right place for this question

I'm doing a project on its application in Australia as a replacement for traditional coal and gas plants. I'm an advocate for renewable energy, but I think there should be a mix between that and nuclear power. Is this the correct outlook?

I've raised this issue to my colleagues and their main arguments against boil down to:

- Nuclear waste
- Put all the money towards renewables
- The danger of nuclear reactors (chernobyl etc)

Is there basis to these arguments?

Other urls found in this thread:

arxiv.org:443/find/all/1/AND ti: AND nuclear waste abs: AND nuclear waste/0/1/0/all/0/1
pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4271
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>Is this the correct outlook?
It's an outlook, it doesn't need to be correct. Just keep dropping your flawed opinions as you go, develop the ones that seem to work. For the record, I agree with you.

>Nuclear waste
The biggest issue on this list, but not a huge one by any stretch because of several factors. The output of toxic waste by reactors is minuscule compared to the output of toxic waste by refineries/bleaching facilities/anything industrial involving chemicals. The only difference is they tend to last longer, be far more dangerous to local wildlife, and need to be kept under far more stringent guard. As long as they're responsibly contained and buried, and the location of the toxic waste burial site is available immediately to all echelons of government, this problem disappears over a few hundred years.

Also there's a lot of work being done on finding uses for nuclear waste, or at least mitigating it's effect. Here are some papers to back me up: arxiv.org:443/find/all/1/AND ti: AND nuclear waste abs: AND nuclear waste/0/1/0/all/0/1

>Put all the money towards renewables
Why? What money? Funding is hard enough to come by, let's use this useful, clean, cheap energy while we can, the fuck else are we going to use uranium for apart from lethal medical tracers and over-the-top smoke detectors?

>The danger of nuclear reactors (chernobyl etc)
Ahahahah no. Chernobyl was by far the worst because of poor Soviet management. You can't even blame the scientists or managers at the plant, they were brave and industrious to the end by all accounts. The danger came when poor planning met with experimental technology - they tried to safety test the control rods and accidentally short-circuited them because graphite conducts electricity. Besides, the region is well under control now. Provided regulations are stringent, you're safe. Plus a lot of the negative stigma is media-driven. Even the worst nuclear disasters have nothing on a natural disaster.

lemmi guess year 12 physics ERT?

In the US the future is bleak for nuclear right now. The major issue is economic, building a nuclear power plant takes many year before any ROI can be expected.

Compare this to shale gas with the new drilling technologies developed over the last ~15 years. Much cheaper start-up, quicker ROI, lots of untapped resources, and congress is certainly pro-fracking, but slashed the DOE budget for nuclear fusion significantly last week.

Nuclear waste and meltdowns are negligible issues that get exaggerated by morons who know nothing about it. The only way to have clean energy everywhere all the time is through nuclear.

The interesting thing is, now that uranium seawater extraction is 100% confirmed to work, nuclear power is renewable. Not only is there several billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater right now, but due to an estimated 150 trillion tons of uranium containing rock in the ocean floor that constantly leeches the stuff into the ocean it's known that we could keep using nuclear power even longer than the lifetime of the sun, ie, for billions of years.

We could go fully fossil fuel free in a decade or two if we wanted.

pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4271

>but slashed the DOE budget for nuclear fusion significantly last week.

Thanks for all of this, there's some really interesting stuff in that link.

My opinion from a non science background is that the major nuclear disasters were all a result of human short sightedness. In the case of Fukushima, building a reactor right on the coast of an earthquake prone country was just asking for it.

My current sort of angle for the project is portraying nuclear power as a 'stopgap' of sorts for Australia's power requirement. I think there is a future albeit distant where 100% of our energy comes from renewable source but we're nowhere near there in technology or economy yet. So before renewables are mature enough, I think nuclear should fill the void left by traditional power generation since all the research I've done into it shows it's vastly more efficient and environmentally friendly.

This is much more Australia centric but I think there may be a flaw in my argument from an economic standpoint. From what I've seen, the nuclear industry in Aus is very immature and the cost of building it up may be prohibitive versus the alternatives.

Regarding the "Put all the money towards renewables" thing, what a colleague meant by that is take all the funding allocated to the nuclear industry and put it towards renewables which in theory would get us to 100% faster.


Business and Marketing at uni

yes I know that is tangential (OP was talking about fission) but it does suggest congress is moving away from nuclear in general

Elaborating on the biz/marketing thing

I'm not writing up a science report, I'm constructing an advertising campaign that seeks to inform and possibly change the generally negative public view of nuclear energy. But this needs to be backed up with evidence.

I think you need to start by answering the question "Where does Australia get our energy from now?" and then "Why nuclear is a good choice to replace XYZ"

yeah it's pretty steep, is this mostly hammering ITER funding?

Admittedly, I'm a theoretical physicist. Everything I say is from an economically naive perspective, but I do firmly believe that either a lot of short-term work has to be done on renewables to make them remotely viable, or they need to be phased in slowly.

From a purely physical point of view, yeah no, renewables are useless on a large scale right now - even if individual facilities could be built that could power more than small towns, they;d be impossibly large, difficult to maintain, expensive, and largely inefficient.

On days with a lot of sunlight/rain/wind/waves, the energy is functionally wasted unless you have a capacitor the size of Sussex available. And on days without it's just a heap of useless metal.

Renewables have a long way to go. Fracking sounds fun but isn't. Fusion is science fiction at this point.

Nuclear is the way forward.

Since the definition of "renewable" is rather vague these days, I'll be more specific and say getting 100% of your energy from solar and wind is a pipe dream, we are nowhere close to that and will not be anytime during our lives.

I agree with you that all nuclear disasters were a result of multiple human failures, but you cannot stop humans from fucking up so there needs to be some logic in your proposal about why these things won't happen again.

Thankfully there's been extensive research into building nuclear reactors that are much harder to fuck up, and Fukushima has basically made something that most nuclear reactors understood already even more apparent-DON'T BUILD A REACTOR ON AN EARTHQUAKE PRONE COAST AND DONT BUILD IT SO ITS BACKUP GENERATORS CAN BE FLOODED BY A TSUNAMI THAT YOU ALREADY KNOW CAN HAPPEN.

Who fucking auhorized Fukushima? Why not build it, I don't know, inland? And put the back-up generators on a fucking hill?

>the fuck else are we going to use uranium for?

Hey, I don't disagree with you at all. But the fact is idiots still authorized it and placed the generators where they did. Probably set back investment in nuclear ten years (to be clear, I am all for nuclear, see germany as an example of anti-nuclear idiocy pushed to the brim) due to stupid decisions.

I think part of the issue is that anything having to do with a nuclear power plant involves the government heavily. 99% of the people in government are not scientists, and won't necessarily consult (or care) about the opinion of scientists when making decisions. That is why you get monumental fuck ups like these.

Contrast that with Shale or Petroleum, by comparison much smaller operations, where the majority of people involved in the decision making are scientists and engineers.

The only way to actually solve carbon emissions n the near term is to ban outright the use of fossil fuels for cars and power generation on a maybe 20 year timescale. Good fucking luck with that tho. About the only way I could see it happening is if you did something totally insane like literally amending the Constitution to say "In light of the damage to its environment and the global climate, all use of fossil fuels of any kind in cars, power plants,or any other capacity involving the large-scale discharge of Co2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere is banned after "insert date here".

At that point you'd have put a gun to the heads of the oil and other industries and they'd angrily and reluctantly make nuclear-solar,wind/water work for us and start building electric cars and a better grid.

This will almost certainly never happen but it's kind of funny to imagine.

The dirty secret of climate change is that it will affect first-world countries the least, since they have the resources to deal/respond to it. The earth getting a few degrees warmer is not going to cause humans to go extinct.

Solar energy is where it is at. Don't bring Nucleartards to Veeky Forums please. A Dyson swarm is the end all to our energy needs.

That being said, nuclear would be fine and dandy for space travel. That is really its best use. Piddling around with these power plants is fucktarded.

I like solar but holy shit get out of here with this sci-fi shit, we'll be fighting cylons not liberals by the time we have them

>Don't bring nucleartards to Veeky Forums
>Instead we need to advance as a civilization to the point where we have millions of rocket launches every year to put up a massive array of solar panels around the solar system for all of our energy needs
>And it's obviously going to be powered by a giant Nuclear reactor millions of miles away so we get horrible energy efficiency

Genius.

No, the dirty secret of climate change is that all those mouth breathers howling about immigrants and muhhh big science are in for a really rude awakening when that trickle of millions of Africans and Middle Easterners turn into a tsunami of hundreds of millions and it triggers a mass migration.

i guess i am glad i voted for trump then

>dyson swarm

Good luck with your next NSF proposal user!

Look up Kirk Sorenson, The Thorium Energy Alliance, LFTRs, etc. Nuclear won't be a stop gap for renewables, period. We'll use fossil fuels for vehicles for hundreds of years because nothing can beat the energy density of the hydrocarbon (i.e. modern batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.), and Nuclear breeder reactors can be used much more efficiently with less waste for thousands of years.

Bonus Round: Australia has some of the largest/most easily accessible Thorium deposits in the world. You can easily make a pitch for your project about government funding into LFTR research creating future sources of revenue for your country by increasing the value of one of your most abundant resources. It's feasible that all the money can be paid back with interest to your tax payers in taxes on thorium exports alone (not to mention job creation for the mines/refineries).

I'm an Engineer w/ and MBA btw, I find the opportunities of breeder reactors to be astounding (from both economic and scientific perspectives).

Even if we managed to advance technology to amlinan status, their isn't enough resource in our galaxy to make half a dyson swarm.

>we just need a multi trillion dollar project

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."

Face it. There is nothing more efficient. We will drill for every bit of carbon on the planet. When we are almost done, mass production of synthetic fossil fuels (already being researched) will become a reality, just in time.

So we'll terraform the shit out of Mars and pollute it as well. And when we are done with that we will pollute the shit out of the rest of the universe.

And there is nothing you and your hippie pipedreams can do to stop us.

Just look at this beautiful baby.

waste is kind of a catch all term that describes the inflexibility of nuclear power.

you can't just up and move a nuclear plant if there is a shift in demand, you can decommission and commission at will with little disregard to the future. you need a stack of PhD's and other highly trained technicians to work the plant itself.

actual waste disposal just compounds these factors.

convince my why I should invest in nuclear instead of natural gas. without any hippy shit

Retarded and dead. Fuck off shills.

Why dont they for saftey install what I guess you could call negative feedback loops?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor
Classification by moderator material
Used by thermal reactors:
Water moderated reactors
Light-water-moderated reactors (LWRs). Light-water reactors (the most common type of thermal reactor) use ordinary water to moderate and cool the reactors. When at operating temperature, if the temperature of the water increases, its density drops, and fewer neutrons passing through it are slowed enough to trigger further reactions. That negative feedback stabilizes the reaction rate.

Efficient nuclear fission reactors (none of this light water bullshit) would produce enough energy from the nuclear isotope fuel content of one ton of granitic rock to be able to refine more than 30 tons of granitic rock for the fuel content. This means a 30-1 ratio of power spent to power produced, with an essentially limitless supply of fuel. We aren't going to run out of granitic rock; we'd run out of limestone to make concrete first. That fuel content is just for ubiquitous rocks by the way, the stuff we use for road fill and counter-tops. There are concentrated deposits which alone would power current civilization for hundreds of thousands of years.

Nuclear power uses much more energy dense fuel, and having the ability to build high efficiency liquid fuel nuclear reactors would give us the expertise needed to build efficient and lightweight space-based nuclear reactors, allowing for high-energy space propulsion and for deep space exploration and colonization. Solar panels are only really good for out to Mars, and at Jupiter they're nearly useless. The Juno probe currently has several dozen square meters of solar panels and produces about as much energy as is needed to light up a single bulb. A nuclear powered space probe at Jupiter would have enough energy available that it could melt its way through the icy out crusts of Europa, Ganymede, or Callisto.

>possibly change the generally negative public view of nuclear energy
I wish you well, Sisyphus

I've seen nuclear-fear mongering people push the most ridiculous shit as truth.
My favorite is that over 1 million people died at Chernobyl and not 30-ish, and that this is somehow suppressed by the UN, WHO and every other alphabet soup agency.
Which, ironically enough, puts them in the same box as anti-vaxxers, moonladning-hoaxers and GCC-numbnuts

>without any hippy shit
arn't hippies against nuclear energy?

What about liberal cylons?

Thats like giving up

OP from yesterday back

Yeah, the easiest part of the sell will be the comparison between nuclear and coal/gas, they won't be able to deny the comparisons of efficiency and emissions.

It'll be harder to convince people that the major downsides (waste and chance of accidents) aren't that major. Something like "You'd have a higher chance of being struck by x than being caught by a nuclear meltdown" would be useful but again this is something that has to be based on facts.

There's already a good discussion going on, so I'll just add this .
Do some research on thorium ,it's supposedly safer than uranium

the problem is not that they are bad, the problem is they are too good (thorium is too abundant), energy is a very very useful product, allowing anyone to have that makes your potential enemies, or turncoat allies.

Gas = good because you can control the supply by controlling to pipes and drills/countries

uranium = good because its very rare via mining

Solar = bad too expensive/

wind = bad because unreliable, or alternatively too expensive with batteries.

it will require an age of true military supremacy by a nation to allow thorium reactors outside of specialized secret locations.

>MUH suppressed technology
kys

How?

why would you allow your enemy (of the USA) to make near limitless amounts of power, that directly grants them a better standard of living among obvious other benefits.

organizations want
A - control over their environment
B - reduce the costs for operation in its environment
C - to look more legitimate in its environment

thorium reactors give opposing forces more control
reduce USA costs of making energy, but also competitors can reduce the inputs needed to output some given amount of energy, and would make them a legitimate organization as compared to the subject organization i.e USA.

they have no reason to allow it. the pay offs aren't worth the international hassle.

Yes and why would pharmaceutical companies release the cure for cancer they so obviously have when they can make much more money by treating it as they are now? I don't need evidence of the crime as long as I can make up a motive!

Anyway this argument makes no sense because all the information one needs to make a thorium reactor is public knowledge. The hard part is simply a matter of practical production. Same as fission reactors.

^^ this, stop being a pseudo-green tard and look at thorium.

muh thorium

its not just money you nigger its about control over their operating environment.

an thats a false analogy,
1cure for cancer has lots of publicity attached to it, people dont give a shit about some new nuclear reactor.
2 most energy companies are competing for the same end product, energy production. so its more like "the treatment i believe is successful for Cancer X has competitors ABC and they all try to stop me." they stop them with nuclear regulations.
3 nuclear reactors make the fueling companies money, if you watch the kirk sorenson stuff you'd know that. the fueling guys are left out to dry under thorium model, thats bad.


I could go on, these are problems with the science or the application, i like both of those things involved in the LFTR, its the (market) environment reaction that gives me less hope for it.

>Nuclear waste
People actively forget the cost and complexity and time frame of reactor decommissioning. The cure is heavily irradiated by neutron flux and thus highly radioactive. It is also huge and a pain to take apart and bury.

In the UK they looked at this and the expenses were calculated to be on the far side of painful. This is probably the main reason why a lot of reactors are operating way beyond their design life - that gives an alibi for NOT decommissioning it yet.

If you love the sun so much why don't you launch yourself at it.

>The output of toxic waste by reactors is minuscule compared to the output of toxic waste by refineries/bleaching facilities/anything industrial involving chemicals.
There is a lot of chemistry involved both in turning ore to fuel pellets and in recycling fuel pellets separating out the various elements.

>arxiv
I had a look but that didn't really look like a lot of activity.

>accidents
With complexities comes danger of things going wrong. And it is hard to simplify a nuclear reactor.

>Provided regulations are stringent, you're safe.
Agreed. However many plants, especially in the UK and FR, were under military secrecy protection so any mishap was immediately covered up. We know the Irish Sea is radioactive and that there is a suspicious amount of Technetium and that they had to rename Windscale. most of the rest is secret and digging around will land you in jail.

If the dumb nips had bought heavy water CANDU instead of light water GE CANTDU they wouldn't of had these issues.

>Just keep dropping your flawed opinions as you go, develop the ones that seem to work
Shit nigger that's profound

>I'm doing a project on its application in Australia
Stupid in Australia, from purely logistics and cost considerations..

What does Australia lack?
>An established nuclear industry
>A large pool of skilled labour
>Highly concentrated hydro use
>Lax waste disposal laws

What does Australia have in droves?
>Girt surrounded by water
>Light
>Wind
>Uranium
>Access to Chinese industry
>Access to Chinese labour

Everything about Australia makes it expensive to do nuclear and inexpensive to do solar and wind

>There is a lot of chemistry involved both in turning ore to fuel pellets and in recycling fuel pellets separating out the various elements.
Use liquid salt fuel instead of solid pellets and this process becomes vastly simpler, easier, more economical, and safer.

>With complexities comes danger of things going wrong. And it is hard to simplify a nuclear reactor.
Yes, but it is far easier to simplify a liquid fueled reactor than it is to simplify a solid fueled reactor. Liquid fuel reactors also come with the features of not being physically capable of melting down, because as the fuel heats up it expands so much that the reaction slows down, and it is not possible for a liquid fuel reactor to undergo a steam explosion, because there's no water in the reactor.

>Irish Sea is radioactive
All sea water is radioactive.

>most of the rest is secret and digging around will land you in jail.
And how do you know this?

>inexpensive to do solar and wind
kek, maybe you mean less expensive.

>Use liquid salt fuel instead of solid pellets and this process becomes vastly simpler, easier, more economical, and safer.
The topic was about ore to fuel. And if you really believe dumping raw ore into salt will do you have absolutely no idea about this.

>All sea water is radioactive.
Some more than others. And technetium has too short lifetime compared to geological time frames to be naturally occurring. Again I suspect you having no idea.

>And how do you know this?
Oh, you know, like living in the UK. The Official Secrets Act does have teeth.