What are the pros and cons of nuclear power over common renewables like solar and wind...

Next gen of nuclear plants will be even more cheaper and produce more electricity for less expenses and even less harmful to the enviroment
it's already in use in south korea

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never listen to those uneducated "muh green energy" idiots, and their only argument "muh nuclear waste"

you should know that in nature there are more radioactive materials and radioactive caves and in higher altitude than the nuclear waste

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Except for all the radioactive waste, danger of fallout, danger of cancer and danger of derailing for the use in nuclear bombs, totally safe tech.

Now here's an example of theose uneducated masses

>Except for all the radioactive waste
like I said, it's put in a place safer and less radioacive than your smartphone
>danger of fallout
in what way? nuclear war? we are talking about the energy
>danger of cancer
in a well managed plant the possibility of leaking radioactivity is at 0.000001%
>danger of derailing for the use in nuclear bombs
Not talking about the energy

>totally safe tech
safe as long it's operated by vodka drinking slavs, or by idiot japs that try to look smart and use open sea water as a moderator

>safe as long it's
safe as long it's not*

with people like you running things, an accident is guaranteed.

Well, part of the problem is it's hard to justify. Today, a new plant might end up costing $20 billion and it has to compete with, say, new gas turbine plants, which take much less time to build, require 1/10 the investment and still produce 1/10 the power while not dealing with any of the nasty nuclear problems. So nuclear is not going to make money back easily in such a market.

Solar/wind end up needing all kinds of secondary systems and grid considerations that make them much more expensive than estimates may suggest.

Some multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar investment seems like it could achieve a lot, but then we'd have to find large programs that can be cut in exchange.

1) Smartphone radiation is not ionizing, you are comparing apples and oranges.

2) Meltdown and fallout happened several times in human history, most notably in Tschernobyl. Besides that, the same uranium centrifugal machines that produce fuel, may be used to produce a higher once traction for fission bombs. Thus is why the US made sure Iran imported their fuel from Russia and not build and operate their own mills, AFAIK.

3) Well-managed plants are a myth, everything ages and is prone to malfunction and error.

Question. why would solar and wind would generate CO2?

>3) Well-managed plants are a myth, everything ages and is prone to malfunction and error.
well, that´s true, but so far nuclear energy has killed way less people than any other energy source.

Not the person who posted, but solar panels require silicon processes (Czochralski process) which require a high temperature, and obviously you need steel or aluminum to make a wind tower.

That is not an argument for nuclear, but against hydroplants, coal etc.

Too dangerous to be left in this beautiful, green world.

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is it true that the only reason why we don't use nuclear is because there will be not enough uranium for every one to use for 30 year ?

Nuclear pros
>Easily able to supply power to an industrial society
>Stable power with no undervoltage
>No need for shit tons of batteries
>Very safe due to weapons proliferation fears

Cons
>Weapons proliferation
>It's scary

Coal pros
>Can provide power to an industrialized society, low chance of undervoltage as long as maintenance is done
>Easy and cheap
>Infrastructure inertia helps keep the supply going
>No weapons proliferation
Cons
>Quite dangerous
>We will run out someday

Solar and wind pros
>No weapons proliferation
>Renewable, safe when in operation
>Maintenance for solar is easy, few moving parts to fail
Cons
>Inconsistent power generation, needs battery stations
>Cost isn't low enough to supply power to an industrialized society... Yet

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you're out of arguments, my brainlet friend?

>Smartphone radiation is not ionizing
I stopped reading here you idiot

there's shit tons of Uranium not exploited all over the world, especially in the underdeveloped countries, most of politicians say that just to keep 3rd world from digging for it to sell it fr some money which leads to Uranium everywhere and chaos

You're more likely to get cancer from living near a coal plant than from a nuclear plant.

>That is not an argument for nuclear
it actually is you are just an idiot

Chernobyl does not start with the letter Ц.

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> I stopped reading here you idiot

OK, what ions may I create with 860 MHz, 2.4 or 5 GHz waves? Care to name the element or experiment?

That is not an argument for nuclear power.

>Tanks killed more people so using firearms is better.
Your logic.

English spelling of ч is ch.

>Tanks killed more people so using firearms is better.
your comparison method is flawed. In your example, tanks and firearms are tools designed to kill and incapacitate the enemy (even tough they are wildly different because one is a firearm and the other a vehicle, but i won´t focus on that), meanwhile energy sources are not, an thus, you can use as an argument the fact that nuclear kill more, because it means is a safer energy source.

I've literally been to Chernobyl

You are wrong and an idort

The actual come is that when shit hits the fan it can be pretty dangerous, but we need to be more rational than that. Even with all the the crisis combined, nuclear still has killed less than solar total and also per kilowatt hour, and it's the best alternative. Just look how much BP fucked up? The environmental damage alone is enough to be concerned. In the past, our knowledge about how radiation affected health was poor and misguided, but if you trust that some intern X ray your chest it's free clinic, then you can trust profesionals will usually not fuck up.

That's not what he said at all you dense fuck. People are researching renewables and actively improving them, they just can't get up to the efficiency of nuclear. They may eventually be reasonable, they may not.

But utilities should not kill or endanger people at all, because they are utilities, this is my argument.

OK I will give you a better example. Cars are not a safer transportation choice just because more people die while riding motorcycles, compared to cars. That speaks not for cars, but against motorized personal vehicles in general.

Coasian theory suggests that there is more than one way to skin a cat, but activists tend to only think in terms of black and white.
To put it another way: We know having a healthy society benefits everyone, but it's unclear how we encourage people into getting flu shots. Do we subsidize the flu shot? Or do we penalize those who choose not to get a flu shot? If you tamper with the market by using some form of tax/subsidy, you are simply trying to correct some form of externality and replacing it with another - i.e. not ACTUALLY solving the problem.
So if solar/wind ever actually becomes a thing, it would be mandatory for every house to have solar or some variant to help reduce pressure (during peak hours) on fossil fuels. It will never replace it until we find a way to store that energy, and even then the wattage from these renewables is laughable.
It's also a joke to expect people to back off from using electricity as well.
The best we can do on that front is to encourage public transportation, and possibly getting rid of shit like free parking in the cities and suburbs (which would never fly).

Nuclear has like every benefit, including cost, safety, and practicality. Solar and wind have the unique negatives of not being able to scale to more than approx 30% of total demand because of their unreliable intermittent nature and the lack of a scalable storage tech.

Renewables are like a modern religion among the left, funded in some significant part by the fossil fuel industry, but since then it's become self-sustaining to a large degree based on anti-scientific pseudoscience nonsense, and a general "let's get back to nature" bullshit Gaia-worshiping philosophy. It's also based on the false assumption that giving humans more energy will cause them to do more damage to the environment, when the opposite is true. We need more energy to help protect and preserve the environment.

Yep.

>radioactive waste
So what? There's so little of it, it's not a problem. It's not like it's magically infinitely dangerous or anything.

>danger of fallout
Coal kills like 300 people /every day/ from airborne particulate pollution alone. That's more than some reasonable estimates of the total death count from nuclear in the history of mankind.

>danger of cancer
Generally exaggerated. It's still a concern, but it's generally very exaggerated.

>danger of derailing for the use in nuclear bombs
Largely exaggerated. The link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is very flimsy. Countries that want nuclear weapons get nuclear weapons, no matter whether they already have nuclear power. Also, practically every nuclear bomb, if not every nuclear bomb, has been made with centrifuges or weapons-purpose reactors, and not with civilian power reactors. For example, North Korea had no nuclear power program, and it got the bomb, and South Korea has a large nuclear power program, and no bombs. The connection is really quite tenuous.

Not really. There's plenty more conventional uranium stores. Maybe in a few hundred to few thousand years we would need to switch to a more efficient breeder reactor, but that's a far way away. With a breeder reactor, nuclear fuel supplies are unlimited. Breeder reactors can more or less literally take every rock as fuel, and we'll run out of sun before we run out of rock.
energyfromthorium.com/energy-weinberg-1959/

>But utilities should not kill or endanger people at all, because they are utilities, this is my argument.
And I want a pony.
urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I want a pony

no its because certain energy industries are prepared to throw billions into lobbying to make sure coal and gas are the number one options. theyre even willing to bankroll greenie agitators as long as it keeps nuclear off the table

Denmark is producing 50% of its energy with wind turbines.

It's cooking the books. The only reason why they can make such a ridiculous claim is that they rely extensively on fossil fuel and nuclear imports from other countries.

Nuclear is way too expensive. The construction and decommissioning costs more than wipe out any savings from the efficiency of nuclear reactions. The UK is building a nuclear power station, and the people building it have been guaranteed electricity prices way higher than the market price, so we'll have to pay way more for our power than without nuclear.

It's a first-of-a-kind project, under a shitty regulatory regime. Of course it's going to cost a lot. In countries with reasonable practices, nuclear capital costs have been dropping for decades. In South Korea, nuclear capital costs are like 1/3 or 1/4 of the costs in USA and England.

This must be the dumbest thing I read this week, congrats.

to play the devil's advocate, human error is not something you can prevent. the argument against nuclear is that even though the risk is small, the consequences are too high.
other problems with nuclear are the waste (very difficult to store safely) and the limited fuel supply

If it's that expensive then why are we doing it? Renewables and battery storage are only getting cheaper.

>Fukushima being built in a fucking tsunami zone

By that logic, absoluetely every incident with nuclear reactors can only be human error.

Anyway, nulcear isn't by far as cheap as the industry claims. Even France, who tried to produce economies of scale by building the exact same reactors dozens of times, and have absoluetely percect conditions for nuclear power plants (lots of fresh water sources throughout the land, no natural hazards at all to worry about, a government that strongly pushed nuclear etc) are slowly realizing that costs in the double digit billion range are coming towards them in form of demontation costs.

>battery storage
>only getting cheaper.
No it's not.

Are you talking about lithium? There's not enough lithium in the whole world for even 1/1000 of the battery that we would need. Ditto for nickel and lead.
dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

Those decommissioning costs are artificial, fake, invented by the greens and their pseudoscience regarding the dangers of radiation.

>a battery that can power the whole world for a whole week without any new energy fed into it

So this is the kind of argument you need to withdraw to to shit talk renewables, I see.

>and an armada of gas-fired peak-load plants would offset the need for full storage.

Yeah, or just hydroplants and biomass.

Ah, the standard gish gallop of the greens. Shoot down one piece of bullshit, and they move on to the next position. I'll play this game for now.

From Wikipedia, worldwide hydro nameplate capacity is like 800 GW. With a reasonable capacity factor, that drops down to an actual average production of like 400 GW. It's doubtful that you could even double that because most of the good dam sites are already taken.

We're going to need like 50 TW, and maybe even 70 TW, before the end of the century, due to increase in population, and continued industrialization, and hopefully because fossil fuels will be replaced by electricity (directly or indirectly). In other words, less than 1% of our target.

The infamous Mark Jacobson tried this same line of argument, and he was called out on this bullshit. Look up the 100% WWS paper, and the recent rebuttal that focused on Jacobson's lie about hydro, which exactly mirror yours. Rather than attempt to defend his position with another paper, he tried to sue them for defamation. Remember, this is the foremost expert of the green energy movement, who is also a liar and a fraud.

And how big would that dam be? For the US, just a few of the Great Lakes Of Michigan. Try scaling that to the rest of the world. It's impossible.

dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

I can tell a similar story for biomass. Not enough land.

As soon as you try to put numbers to these things, you quickly realize that it's all pipe dreams and lies, and only nuclear has a chance to avert climate change and ocean acidification.

If the whole world switched to nuclear uranium reserves would be gone within 50 years.

There is absoluetely no reason whatsoever why a mix of renewable energies can't power a nation. China is on its way to 80% renewables by 2050.

Does his stand not have legs

>If the whole world switched to nuclear uranium reserves would be gone within 50 years.
Mostly false. When we look for uranium, we keep finding more of it. Also, that's only talking about the best of the best sources. We can use lesser sources. The cost of raw uranium is a very small fraction of the total electricity cost, and so you could increase the raw cost of uranium by 100x and not noticeably effect the electricity cost. The distribution of materials in the Earth's crust is generally logrithmic - increasing the price by 100 will drastically increase available supply.

>There is absoluetely no reason whatsoever why a mix of renewable energies can't power a nation.

Yes there is. Except for unusual cases of countries with small populations and very large hydro reserves, it cannot happen. Only solar and wind can scale to the amounts of power needed, and both are intermittent, and the energy storage tech doesn't exist.

>China is on its way to 80% renewables by 2050.

Yea. Some people said the same thing about Germany. Did you know that their CO2 emissions haven't changed for many years? Did you know that a nearby country has a much smaller per capita CO2 footprint? 3 guesses. It's nuclear France.

Sorry, also posting to /k/ at the same time, without the trip, and so sometimes I miss adding it back here.

>Mostly false. When we look for uranium, we keep finding more of it

It's still going to run out. Our grandchildren will be really thankful if we spent trillions on building an energy infrastructure based on a ressource that doesn't exist anymore when they are grown ups.

>Yes there is. Except for unusual cases of countries with small populations and very large hydro reserves, it cannot happen. Only solar and wind can scale to the amounts of power needed, and both are intermittent, and the energy storage tech doesn't exist.

This is not true. Every nation on earth, maybe with the expectation of micro nations, can cover its energy consumption with renewable energies.

>Yea. Some people said the same thing about Germany. Did you know that their CO2 emissions haven't changed for many years? Did you know that a nearby country has a much smaller per capita CO2 footprint? 3 guesses. It's nuclear France.

That's because France is sunnier and warmer and thus needs less energy. Spain has a similar energy mix to germany, and a similar CO2 foot print to France.

>It's still going to run out. Our grandchildren will be really thankful if we spent trillions on building an energy infrastructure based on a ressource that doesn't exist anymore when they are grown ups.
No, it won't. Eventually, we'll get a breeder reactor working. No rush. But when we do, nuclear reactors will be able to use everyday rock as fuel. We'll run out of sun before we run out of rock.
energyfromthorium.com/energy-weinberg-1959/

>This is not true. Every nation on earth, maybe with the expectation of micro nations, can cover its energy consumption with renewable energies.

Again, how? What part of my argument do you not buy? Hydro cannot scale. Only solar and wind can scale, but the intermittency plus lack of storage tech means that they cannot work. What part of this story do you think is wrong?

>That's because France is sunnier and warmer and thus needs less energy. Spain has a similar energy mix to germany, and a similar CO2 foot print to France.
I'm betting that there's more to this story, like maybe less electricity usage per capita, less manufacturing, etc. I don't care enough to do research now. I will again point out that France has decarbonized their entire grid, mostly, and it took less than 20 years to do. Germany has been at it a while, and they've made no progress at all at reducing CO2 emissions.

My grandparents lived in one of Russia's secret towns constructed during the 50s for nuclear research, having a reactor burried under a hill formation.

They mopped the streets every week to prevent radiation poisoning, still my granddad and my dad got sick from cancer.

Think twice before propagatinga tech you know too little about. Pic related

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what does it take to be a nuclear engineer and what's the daily routine like? (anyone with knowledge, please respond.)

Uh-huh.

Nuclear waste from power plants isn't a liquid. What are you even talking about?

Whereas, back in the real world, coal kills 300 people /every day/ from premature deaths from airborne particulate pollution alone, and that's even before we talk about climate change and ocean acidification. That's more people dead every day than have ever died from civilian nuclear power according to WHO estimates. Ignoring climate change and ocean acidification, we should already be replacing coal and nat gas plants with nuclear to save many, many lives. The CO2 problem just makes this need even stronger.

To continue, perhaps you're confusing weapons manufacture with nuclear electricity production? It's a common mistake by people who don't know what they're talking about, and by people with an agenda. Weapons waste is generally a lot nastier, and also a liquid. I'm not suggesting that we use those nuclear processes. I'm suggesting that we make electricity.

>No, it won't. Eventually, we'll get a breeder reactor working. No rush. But when we do, nuclear reactors will be able to use everyday rock as fuel. We'll run out of sun before we run out of rock.
energyfromthorium.com/energy-weinberg-1959/

Oh, so now we need sci-fi to make it work. See this:

scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/

200 years with current rates of consumption means 10 years if the whole energy production of the globe switched to nuclear (currently at 5%, so 20 times more nuclear plants means the uranium reserves will last 1/20 as long). Even if you assume huge new ressources and everything, more than 100 years of ressources are impossible.

>Again, how? What part of my argument do you not buy? Hydro cannot scale. Only solar and wind can scale, but the intermittency plus lack of storage tech means that they cannot work. What part of this story do you think is wrong?

Pumped-storage-hydroplants have an efficiency of 80-90%. Storing is literally a non-issue.

I literally just explained why you're wrong on both points.

Please see:
>Mostly false. When we look for uranium, we keep finding more of it. Also, that's only talking about the best of the best sources. We can use lesser sources. The cost of raw uranium is a very small fraction of the total electricity cost, and so you could increase the raw cost of uranium by 100x and not noticeably effect the electricity cost. The distribution of materials in the Earth's crust is generally logrithmic - increasing the price by 100 will drastically increase available supply.

>And how big would that dam be? For the US, just a few of the Great Lakes Of Michigan. Try scaling that to the rest of the world. It's impossible.
>dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

And finally, I don't know why you think breeders are impossible. They're not. Are you unfamiliar with the research done by Oak Ridge National Lab on the molten salt reactors and the research done by Argonne National Lab on the entirely different integral fast reactor? Two independent and very promising lines of research.

And finally, to paraphrase from the ThorCon people. So what if we run out of fuel in 20 years. That's 20 years more than what we have now, delaying climate change and ocean acidification. That's 20 years that we really, really need right now, because we don't have anything else that will work, and really need to stop CO2 emissions right now, and nothing else is ready, and that 20 years might buy us time to figure something else out. -- Of course, supplies even with conventional reactors will last a lot longer than 20 years - again the papers that you're citing are artificially limiting the reserves based on today's prices, but if you permit the prices to increase by 100x, then you get a lot more uranium.

So the fuel just magically appears as rods inside the reactor? Or do you have to transport it using machinery and humans - drive it around the streets. Sometimes workers make mistakes, it's only human. Forgot to change clothes? Now your car, your shops, your street is all contamined.

We are talking about the 50s and 60s here, it was all brand new tech, and people had to adapt first, which takes time.

I worked in a semiconductor department back in 2012, yet the people still managed to routinely overexpose themselves with arsenic waste from wafers.

>CO2-Problem
I'd rather listen to someone like Freeman Dyson on this one (he makes the argument of us knowing too little about the earth to make such a bold claim as climate change being man made).

>So the fuel just magically appears as rods inside the reactor? Or do you have to transport it using machinery and humans - drive it around the streets. Sometimes workers make mistakes, it's only human. Forgot to change clothes? Now your car, your shops, your street is all contamined.
Still killed less than 300 people in the entire history of nuclear power, and coal kills that many worldwide in an entire day. You need to put the risks into perspective.

>"After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion

You should stop with the "we need storage for 7 days without any energy production whatsoever" bullshit.

>I can’t say that I’ve studied the topography of our lands to see how many places are amenable to these grand-scale engineering marvels. I may be oblivious to the widespread existence of natural bowls perched on the edges of cliffs. Whatever the case, the 22 GW of pumped storage we do have at present presumably picked the primo spots.

What an idiot. "I have no clue what I'm talking about, but here are some bullshit equastions I did" Is that you?

>I'd rather listen to someone like Freeman Dyson on this one (he makes the argument of us knowing too little about the earth to make such a bold claim as climate change being man made).
So, going to listen to a celebrity, instead of the consensus of experts and the available evidence? Excellent choice. However, I think you're on the wrong board. I would suggest the following boards for you:

Yeah dude, let's just abandon electricity and go back to burning wood in the woods and hunting with sticks.

It's a self fulfilling prophesy. People don't like nuclear, and so it doesn't get built, and therefore people say "aha, nuclear doesn't work". All of the scientists in the IFR project say that it was working, and they were close, and then Clinton shut it down as part of a campaign promise to the greens. A similar thing happened earlier when Nixon shut down the MSR project in order to divert funds to his home state of California. It hasn't worked because no one has given it a chance.

>You should stop with the "we need storage for 7 days without any energy production whatsoever" bullshit.
And why should I do that?

>What an idiot. "I have no clue what I'm talking about, but here are some bullshit equastions I did" Is that you?
You're ridiculous. That's not how geology and topology works. Look at the numbers, and adjust them as you want, and you're still going to get something absolutely impossible in size. There's just not enough proper geography to make this work - even 1% of the target is probably impossible.

>300 people

Excuse me, are you even aware of what you suggest? Have you forgot about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobl, Kyshtym... ?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
I'd rather listen to someone who made advances in science, worked with noble laureates and almost got one himself, and a Christian, over a tripcode stranger.

"Experts" and politicians, professionals have too much to loose, while Freeman Dyson is just too old and too accomplished to really care for his image.

>People don't like nuclear

Except countries like Japan and France, where it was seen as the salvation energy up until recently. Also most other highly developed economies use and developed them. Breeder reactors, like liquid salt reactors, are just internet memes.

Even if we assume three Lake Michigans for the US, why exactly would that be so outrageously much? The US is big. And you can store a good portion of that energy in coastal seawaters or underground. That's like saying "dude, a nationwide railway system, are you insane? Do you even know how much iron we would need? Completely insane dude"

Building a 100% sustainable (nuclear isnt), clean and safe energy infrastructure should be the goal for this century, and you can only do that with renewables.

>Hiroshima, Nagasaki
Not nuclear power. Those are nuclear bombs.

>Kyshtym
A weapons manufacturing plant. Again, not nuclear power.

>Chernobl
According to the WHO, killed about 300 people.

Let me add a few more to the list:

>Fukushima.
Killed about 0 people.

>Three Mile Island
Killed about 0 people.

>Except countries like Japan and France, where it was seen as the salvation energy up until recently.
People are stupid, yes. What's your point?

>Breeder reactors, like liquid salt reactors, are just internet memes.
That's simply not true.

>Even if we assume three Lake Michigans for the US, why exactly would that be so outrageously much?
Seriously? Even granting the obvious stupidity here, which my link lays out, what about the rest of the world? Good thing that we have plenty of spare land and lots of spare water for the plan.

>dude, a nationwide railway system, are you insane? Do you even know how much iron we would need? Completely insane dude
No, it's really not. You can run the numbers, and you don't get an obscene conclusion for building a railroad.

>you can only do that with renewables.
No you cannot. None of the renewables scales to the average power demand that we need except solar and wind, and solar and wind will not work because of the intermittency problem and the lack of scalable storage.

Also, breeder reactors:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
One working as a breeder since 1980.

You really shouldn't trust green sources on this one. They're all liars and frauds, or fools who are simply repeating what the liars and frauds say. The entire green energy movement is a sham, a religious cult.

>people don't like nuclear

Yes, because the risk of failure means you have to move away from you town or die, and even if everything goes right, the tech is still very expensive, messy and impractical. Even in Germany, without state subsidies and a misled population, nuclear owner stations would never been build, because coal and oil is cheaper.

Following the 2011 Japanese Fukushima nuclear disaster, authorities shut down the nation's 54 nuclear power plants. As of 2013, the Fukushima site remains highly radioactive, with some 160,000 evacuees still living in temporary housing, and some land will be unfarmable for centuries. The difficult cleanup job will take 40 or more years, and cost tens of billions of dollars.

>and you can only do that with renewables.

WROOOOOONG

>No, it's really not. You can run the numbers, and you don't get an obscene conclusion for building a railroad

The railway system throughout the US cost more than a trillion to build in todays dollars. If you would spend that kind of money over the next 80 years on renewables, 100% by 2100 would be guaranteed.

Again, going by the history, nuclear is not actually dangerous. People think it is, but it's not. Coal kills more people worldwide in a single day than have ever died from nuclear power plant accidents. Repeating your falsehood doesn't make it true.

>tech is still very expensive
Only because of choices that society has made, including excessive and needless government regulation, and poor choices on designs. In countries that make the correct choices, you see different results. In South Korea, capital costs have been decreasing for 3 decades, and the cost is 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost in the west.

The area around Fukushima is not highly radioactive. It's under 10 mSv / year, which means that it's about as radioactive as Denver. We are not evacuating Denver. Why are we still keeping people out of Fukushima?

And Fukushima was like 50 year old technology. We know how to build safer reactors. And even then, one of the worst possible accidents, and no one died.

>Not nuclear power. Those are nuclear bombs.

It's the same tech. I will stop arguing with you as you are quite obviously biased.

This is not a question about money. Money cannot solve fundamental problems like making the sun shine at night, or getting enough extra land and water to store the needed energy during the night. Your comparison to the continental railroad is simply non-sequitir. There were no radical material or land shortages involved.

>It's the same tech. I will stop arguing with you as you are quite obviously biased.
Yes, I'm biased for the truth. Why should we include nuclear bombs? It's not the same tech. Practically every nuclear bomb ever made was made from purpose built military installations, whether centrifuges or dedicated reactors. Civilian power reactors are not used and have not been used to make bombs. Further, the idea that access to nuclear power means access to bombs is not supported by the historical data. For example, look at Korea. South Korea has plenty of nuclear power, and no bombs. North Korea was denied access to nuclear power tech from the outside world, and they built lots of nuclear bombs.

Attributing nuclear bomb deaths to nuclear power is just not reasonable in any way. It would be like attributing deaths from tanks to indoor heating with heating oil because tanks run on gasoline.

Seriously?

>Why should we include nuclear bombs? It's not the same tech.

There are three ways of making nuclear material for atom bombs, gas centrifugal, gas diffusion or by breeding plutonium in conventional power plants, afaik. Every process is inseparably linked with the civil use of nuclear power. It's the same tech.

There aren't either for renewables. You can build pumped-storage hydroelectric plants literally everywhere, including underground or underwater. The technology is really, really simple. Off shore windparks could have their energy reservoirs right where they are built. There is no need for three big lakes. It would probably be more desirable for efficiency reasons to have them close to population centres.

Only at the crudest level. Again, that's like saying that tanks are the same tech as heating a house with heating oil. You take oil, and you burn it. Yet, we would consider tanks to be wildly different from houses that are heated with heating oil.

Again, I say, look at the history. There are plenty of examples of countries that got nuclear weapons in spite of worldwide embargoes on giving them nuclear power tech, and there are plenty of countries with nuclear power tech that don't have bombs.

Furthermore, again, practically every bomb ever made had its weapons material come from a dedicated military reactor, and not a civilian power reactor. They're different things. They're designed differently, built differently, and operated differently. Having a civilian nuclear reactor doesn't actually help you get a bomb. We can say this somewhat confidently, because everyone who has ever built a bomb did not use a civilian nuclear reactor, and instead used centrifuges (or gas diffusion), or dedicated plutonium production reactors.

>You can build pumped-storage hydroelectric plants literally everywhere,
No you cannot. You need a large vertical distance over a short horizontal distance in order for the economics to work out.

>including underground or underwater
You're an idiot.

>The technology is really, really simple.
And exceptionally expensive, and requires a ludicrous amount of land.

>There is no need for three big lakes.
That was just for the US demand you goddamned idiot. Now scale that up from 300 million users to 7 billion users. Now scale that up by another factor of 3 or 5 because of increased electricity demand as we transition away from fossil fuels for industrial heat and transport and towards electricity. It will not work. Take your head out the sand.

>Only at the crudest level.

So it would be OK to allow citizens to own their own little reactors at home, like a smaller version of submarine reactors? Sell rods in supermarkets? That would be safe? Are you even aware of what you suggest?

>ever made had its weapons material come from a dedicated military reactor, and not a civilian power reactor.

Dude I visited the town where they made fuel for disaster several times. There is one large hidden facility responsible for electricity and nuclear fuel. Go read about
it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai?wprov=sfla1

>So it would be OK to allow citizens to own their own little reactors at home, like a smaller version of submarine reactors? Sell rods in supermarkets? That would be safe? Are you even aware of what you suggest?
Uhh, what? I didn't suggest anything like that. You're taking the analogy way too far. I don't want people to have nuclear weapons nor nuclear reactors at home.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai?wprov=sfla1
>It was established in 1950 for the production of weapons-grade plutonium.
Again, what are you talking about? Did you even read the link before posting it?

Ok, but seriously, describe to me the accident in more detail please. What did the accident involve? Did it involve the light water reactor? Did it involve other sorts of waste from the weapons material cycle outside of the light water reactor? How many people died? What sort of evidence and sources do we have?

I'll believe that there was a major accident, but probably far less bad than Chernobyl, which means the death count, if any, is going to be quite small. A dozen at most, if I had to guess.

I'm not answering the question here, but how does something like solar or wind adapt to demand? what do they do with access energy?

>I'm not answering the question here, but how does something like solar or wind adapt to demand?
They don't.

>what do they do with access energy?
Currently, they dump it, e.g. it goes to waste.

In the green's fantasy, they use magical storage technology to store the energy and use it later when it's needed. The problem is such storage technology does not exist, and is unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future.

>Uhh, what? I didn't suggest anything like that. You're taking the analogy way too far. I don't want people to have nuclear weapons nor nuclear reactors at home.

Well, the oil analogy implies a comparison between oil and uran rods. There is a reason uran is so restricted for civilians, and the reason is not hazardous radiation (think of asbestos or lead) but the ability to make bombs.

>Did you even read the link?

I visited the town. There is one large facility, гopa, which both fueled the whole town as well as developing plutonium warheads, in the 60s. It's all shut down now afaik.

Pic related, view on the park.

Attached: IMG_20170910_150219.jpg (1184x1600, 426K)

So, based on this brief description, we had a weapons reactor that also produced a small amount of electricity as a byproduct. Not unheard of. However, it won't be a normal civilian reactor design. They would have made substantial sacrifices in design and operation concerning the electrical output in order to produce weapons plutonium.

I ask again: Do you know what sort of accident it was? Details please. And how many people died? Any estimates?

Thorium MSRs has a better chance of succeeding as a green energy source than solar or wind. Both Wind and solar depend on expensive low energy density batteries that are non renewable and need to be replaced every 10 years. Solar and wind will never be industry friendly and unless you live in a country with o a service economy and a sunny climate like Israel or Dubai, it will never replace coal or gas.

Storage is indeed not an issue. You can just produce Hydrogen. The problem is the economies of storing, since producing hydrogen is not very efficient. So 100% wind and solar is definetely possible, it's just very expensive, at least with current technologies.

Are you assuming combustion in something like a hydrogen fuel cell, or using a heat engine? Don't hydrogen fuel cells require rare and expensive materials that probably wouldn't scale? And heat engines take a further severe dip in round-trip efficiency. I think you're underselling just how "very expensive" it's going to be.

Also, time to bring out the big guns:
bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

>And how many people died? Any estimates?

My granddad (engineer at the plant) and my dad died from cancer earlier than they should have, lots of other people working there got cancer, they had to spray the roads regularly. Radiation kills slowly, just like coal.

Sure. Know anything about the kind of accident? I mean, at this point, it seem reasonable to write this off as some kind of weapons manufacture accident, outside of the light water reactor. You're not giving me any reason to believe that it was a problem with the light water reactor.