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Wildlife and plants in parts of Sweden still occasionally, but not rarely, have unsafe levels of caesium-137 (source in Swedish), despite caesium-137 having a 30-year half-life, due to Chernobyl. The idea that wildlife "thriving" in Chernobyl means radiation isn't so bad is naïve as gak. Hiroshima has among the highest incidents of liver cancer in the world, with heightened risk of a bunch of other cancers as well.

 LunarSol wrote:
Realistically the only solution is all the solutions, even coal likely having a place (though nuclear could make up the gap). Renewable sources aren't reliable enough to be the only source (and battery tech is no where near capable of powering a city), but they're good enough to get the job done as long as you have a coal/nuclear backup to fill in the gaps in demand.

Pumped. Hydro. Storage.

Battery tech doesn't need to be capable of powering a city, because nobody is suggesting battery tech be used outside of micro-generation for individual buildings/houses. For full scale power generation, you construct artificial, self-contained dams with two reservoirs - when renewables are over-producing(during the day for solar, during flood & ebb for tidal, strongest weather patterns for offshore wind etc), you run the pumps and draw the water out of the lower reservoir to fill the top one, when renewables are under-producing and the grid draw is higher you allow the water to sluice through the dam and run the hydro turbines to put the stored energy into the grid.

It's not 100% efficient, but it's more efficient than batteries - even hypothetical designs - and can scale up to pretty much any level you need it to.

Nuclear is only actually required in a handful of places if we actually built the infrastructure to support a renewables-focused energy strategy, and that would cost a fair whack less than building new nuclear capacity(unfortunately we're not longer allowed to discuss why that's not actually enough to get it done).

So much talk about Chernobyl...

One thing to remember is the design of the Chernobyl plant was never be authorized for construction by any western nation.

Another thing is that the Russians have a far higher rate of nuclear accidents in general than the west, including naval nuclear accidents.

Thus Chernobyl is hardly an unimpeachable recitation of western nuclear programs.

Also an interesting note on Chernobyl: mushrooms and other fungus have adapted to feed on radiation near the core.

https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/chernobyl-fungus-radiotrophic-08122011/

The cost of a nuclear plant is not only the chance of it going kablooie. It's the cost of construction, the eventual cost of deconstruction and long term waste storage, and also the cost of long-distance transmission lines.

What I mean by "cost" is not simply the monetary value, it is also the environmental and social impacts. These have to be offset against changing requirements for energy. As heavy industry declines, the need for major power plants is reduced and a lot more towns will be able to supply a lot of their needs by local micro-generation.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The cost of a nuclear plant is not only the chance of it going kablooie. It's the cost of construction, the eventual cost of deconstruction and long term waste storage, and also the cost of long-distance transmission lines.

What I mean by "cost" is not simply the monetary value, it is also the environmental and social impacts. These have to be offset against changing requirements for energy. As heavy industry declines, the need for major power plants is reduced and a lot more towns will be able to supply a lot of their needs by local micro-generation.

Indeed. The problem with this is there are a lot of obstacles to this kind of thing right now. For one, without a big, national programme of investment to take advantage of economies of scale, microgeneration can often be prohibitively expensive. It also often falls foul of local planning laws and NIMBY campaigners - if your building is listed or located in a "conservation area" then good luck getting permission to install solar panels or a wind turbine. Another problem is that some of the most efficient concepts for local renewables are less "micro" and more "mini" - solar-fuelled district heating, for example - which run into problems in an era when local government funding is often being cut. And of course, you have to deal with lobbying efforts by the existing energy industry, who don't take kindly to the government funding or incentivising local generation schemes that can provide people with heat & energy for a fraction of the cost big companies demand for grid electricity and piped gas.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
The chinese claim to be getting v=very close to fusion power, but in all honeslty I cannot hope that that country succeeds in making it a reality.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/china-attempts-to-create-an-artificial-sun/10495536

It's still a long way off (assuming no sudden unseen break through). The achievement is impressive but it was only for a several seconds. A sustainable long term output that produces more energy than is put in we are still waiting for (ITER might achieve this). After that we then have to start considering how commercially they can be designed to last tens of years. There is still a long way to go. Yes a milestone has been reached which is a good thing but the commercially viable tech is still at least 20 years away (if not more).

You bring up another obstacle of course, it has to be "commercially viable", not just viable. Imagine how much quicker we could progress without having to tax everything's efficiency by 5-10% to allow for profit extraction.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Wildlife and plants in parts of Sweden still occasionally, but not rarely, have unsafe levels of caesium-137 (source in Swedish), despite caesium-137 having a 30-year half-life, due to Chernobyl. The idea that wildlife "thriving" in Chernobyl means radiation isn't so bad is naïve as gak. Hiroshima has among the highest incidents of liver cancer in the world, with heightened risk of a bunch of other cancers as well.

I don't know. There are people living virtually right next to the plant, even in the exclusion zone, who grow and eat their own vegetables, keep animals, and they are perfectly fine. Many of them are 70 or 80 years old without ever having had cancer or anything. Again, people often overreact. The standards of what constitutes an "unsafe" level are just set very low. So low, that it is unlikely to have much effect on you. Well, it will give you a very slightly higher risk of developing cancer which is why they mark it as "unsafe", no matter the fact that you already have a high risk of developing cancer in the first place (cancer being as common as it is). Eating processed meat, food from a microwave, living near an oil or gas plant and many other things also give you a higher risk of developing cancer. People who work in the petroleum industry have a higher risk of cancer than people working in a nuclear power plant. Yet people aren't nearly as scared of processed meat or petroleum as they are of radiation, despite radiation being much rarer (or perhaps because of that. People are often irrationally afraid of something they don't understand well). The article mentions that the degree of radiation people get from Cesium-137 in food is less than the cosmic background radiation. They also estimate that 300 people in total in Sweden will die from cancer as a result of Chernobyl-related radiation, while noting that over 20,000 people in Sweden die from cancer each year from other sources. In other words, the amount of people that developed cancer as result of Chernobyl in Sweden is negligible. And again, this is the biggest nuclear reactor accident in history, the likes of which simply couldn't happen anymore with modern reactors. Accidents with nuclear reactors are extremely rare. Serious accidents are even more extremely rare. And even in the only two cases where a serious accident occured (both of which were because of extraordinary circumstances and would not have happened under normal operating conditions) the damage was rather limited. The Exxon Valdez oil spill killed more people through cancer than the Chernobyl meltdown did. The benzene that is in petroleum products is much more carcinogenic than caesium.

Of course, I am not saying that nuclear radiation isn't dangerous. High enough doses of radiation are downright lethal. But the risk of ever being exposed to high doses of radiation is negligible. What I am saying is that the risks of nuclear radiation are often overblown. It is often singled out as a danger because people think radiation is scary, without realising there are much more dangerous risks to our health that we do not find nearly as scary.




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 Techpriestsupport wrote:
So much talk about Chernobyl...

One thing to remember is the design of the Chernobyl plant was never be authorized for construction by any western nation.

Another thing is that the Russians have a far higher rate of nuclear accidents in general than the west, including naval nuclear accidents.

Thus Chernobyl is hardly an unimpeachable recitation of western nuclear programs.

Also an interesting note on Chernobyl: mushrooms and other fungus have adapted to feed on radiation near the core.

https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/chernobyl-fungus-radiotrophic-08122011/

The majority of the world's modern nuclear power plants are built by Russians: https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/08/02/the-world-relies-on-russia-to-build-its-nuclear-power-plants
Russia is probably the country with the biggest expertise in building nuclear power plants (or in nuclear anything). The Chernobyl disaster happened not because the plant was faulty in any way, it was because the Soviet government was using it to run a irresponsible military experiment which included deliberately turning off all of the the plant's safety features.
Other nuclear accidents in Russia happened mostly during the 1990's and early 2000's when Russia was still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union and nuclear infrastructure and things like ships and submarines could not be maintained well.

The RBMK reactor did have a couple of design features that contributed to the explosion, and that don't generally appear in other designs; firstly, overheating and boiling of the coolant water causes the reaction rate to increase rather than decrease, and the control rods (to shut down the reaction) had graphite tips, which caused the reaction rate to initially increase as the rods were inserted. Still, neither or both of those things would have happened without the human error involved.

I've read that small reactors, such as are used in submarines, can circulate enough coolant by convection to be safe from meltdown without the need for mechanical circulation by pumping.

Another option for solar energy is to use reflected sunlight to heat water for a furnace or a steam turbine. That just needs mirrors, no photovoltaic cells.

You know I hear people talking about economic viability, and I just can't hep thinking that fossil fuel use is helping affect climate change which is going to cost us so much it's beyond calculation, and I wonder what these people think Mooey is going to be worth is we collapse the whole damn ecosystem to save a few percent of financial expenses.

There was an article last week, probably on the BBC, about how several private companies believe they'll have a working, commercially viable, fusion reactor within 5 years.

Here in Victoria the state government has put significant investment into solar with battery storage, and is offering subsidies for people to add solar to their house (whether owned or rented).

Let me just throw this into the mix... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I've read that small reactors, such as are used in submarines, can circulate enough coolant by convection to be safe from meltdown without the need for mechanical circulation by pumping.

Some of them are designed this way, yes. Specifically, the ones in the Ohio class submarines. This was done less as a safety feature than as a way to eliminate the noise of the pumps, to make the Ohios harder to hear with passive sonar.

This seems to put an upper limit on power generation, which limited the top speed of the Ohios to well below that of the smaller fast-attack submarines with pumps for high-power operation.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Let me just throw this into the mix... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

A massive kilometer-high tower and 20 square kilometer greenhouse just to produce a measly 100 MW? No thank you, that has got to be one of the least efficient ways to generate energy ever tested (by contrast, a single nuclear power plant generates on average between 500-1300 MW, a typical fossil fuel plant between 250-500 MW). Maybe a good idea if you essentially live in a desert and have loads of empty space and relatively low power needs.

A timely report from the BBC about how the Chinese seem to be financing dozens of huge coal-fired power stations all over the world.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46310807

Nuclear power is a necessity. No other option really has the potential for long term solutions. Solar and Wind power are too geographically dependent on ideal locations, while nuclear power can be built anywhere with access to water. Its easier to artificially pump the water to the reactor than it is to alter the landscape so its ideal for wind or solar.

Given that nuclear power is extremely safe, has very high energy output, and we have enough fuel for even our primitive fission plants to run for 10s of thousands of years, its a no brainer unless you have fallen for the "nuclear is evil and dangerous" lies. Plenty of time to develop an alternative energy source.

In terms of space exploration, Nuclear power also has the benefit of it being more likely that a new colony could find fuel to sustain the reactor. A colony could be on a planet that has poor visibility for solar panels or no good places to put wind turbines, but the chances of finding radioactive elements and water will be good on planets we decide to colonize. We'd never colonize some place that didn't have at least some water. Solar would still have a place as a energy source that could be set up quickly, but it would not be capable of providing large scale power generation without favorable conditions that couldn't be guaranteed.

Nuke is probably the most efficient, yet it has its obvious downsides. I'm a huge fan of hydroelectric power. With all the tributaries spiderwebbing the world, putting several waterwheels along them seems like a viable alternative. I'd also combine wind and solar as it seems neither can produce enough power to suit typical human needs by itself, ESPECIALLY in an urban environment.

Of course uranium supplies won’t even last 100 years, and if we upscale the number of plants it will decrease quite rapidly from that . One solution is reprocessing the nuclear waste to produce plutonium which is highly efficient by comparison and would extend the lifetime of the original fuel into hundreds or thousands of years. However, I recall this is largely prevented by the nuclear proliferation treaty. And clearly we don’t want to encourage legitimate reasons for stockpiling plutonium to use ‘for energy’ when there are so many unstable/untrustworthy countries, terror groups and regimes common sense says shouldn’t be allowed near the stuff.

Thorium is the best nuclear fission fuel, and India has heaps of it.

That said, unless you build "breeder" reactors to create plutonium, fission is ultimately a fossil fuel.

However 100 years might be enough to develop reliable fusion, while sustainable technology is only going to improve even further.

Kilkrazy wrote: long term waste storage

I'd read an article several, several years back detailing that the tech is already available, but lobby groups have halted, a 3 stage process of reactors that would largely reduce, nearly to the point of eliminating waste. . . Now, I'm no engineer, but the jist of this ages old article that stuck with me, was that current reactors today produce some train load of waste per year. . . What the 2nd "stage" reactor would do, was create power while taking the waste from 1, and its by-product was produced at a rate of about one semi-truck trailer per year, and "stage" 3 took that waste, did its magic and produced a single 55-gallon drum of waste per year, which strikes me as much more manageable.

I think even without considering the safety concerns and costs you mentioned, other articles that I'e read on the nuke power industry is that a HUGE cost gets sunk in basically fighting a losing battle against "green" activists/lobbyist groups.

Just Tony wrote:Nuke is probably the most efficient, yet it has its obvious downsides. I'm a huge fan of hydroelectric power. With all the tributaries spiderwebbing the world, putting several waterwheels along them seems like a viable alternative. I'd also combine wind and solar as it seems neither can produce enough power to suit typical human needs by itself, ESPECIALLY in an urban environment.

One of the problems with hydropower is that, with our current system of damming rivers/waterways, is that we're damn near tapped out in terms of where dams can be built, as they have a long list of actual requirements (and that's before we even begin to consider more recent developments in terms of wildlife impacts). . . .

That said, I do think that submerged "floating" turbines on buoy systems may be a way to mitigate those issues. . . There's been talk around Washington state area of how to make the tidal flows within the relative safety of Puget sound produce usable power for consumers. . . The biggest hold up has, and remains the danger to wildlife (ie, in simulations salmon cannot see the spinning blades of the submerged turbines, and get turned into sushi because they swim through it).


Though, I must say I am disappointed. . . 2 pages in and no one has mentioned turning humans into batteries and controlling these human-duracells with a computer generated environment

Well, I was wondering if we could offer free beans and beer to certain people in certain parts of america in exchange for inserting gas collector tubes in their colons to collect farts to urn for power....

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote: long term waste storage

I'd read an article several, several years back detailing that the tech is already available, but lobby groups have halted, a 3 stage process of reactors that would largely reduce, nearly to the point of eliminating waste. . . Now, I'm no engineer, but the jist of this ages old article that stuck with me, was that current reactors today produce some train load of waste per year. . . What the 2nd "stage" reactor would do, was create power while taking the waste from 1, and its by-product was produced at a rate of about one semi-truck trailer per year, and "stage" 3 took that waste, did its magic and produced a single 55-gallon drum of waste per year, which strikes me as much more manageable.

I think even without considering the safety concerns and costs you mentioned, other articles that I'e read on the nuke power industry is that a HUGE cost gets sunk in basically fighting a losing battle against "green" activists/lobbyist groups.

Just Tony wrote:Nuke is probably the most efficient, yet it has its obvious downsides. I'm a huge fan of hydroelectric power. With all the tributaries spiderwebbing the world, putting several waterwheels along them seems like a viable alternative. I'd also combine wind and solar as it seems neither can produce enough power to suit typical human needs by itself, ESPECIALLY in an urban environment.

One of the problems with hydropower is that, with our current system of damming rivers/waterways, is that we're damn near tapped out in terms of where dams can be built, as they have a long list of actual requirements (and that's before we even begin to consider more recent developments in terms of wildlife impacts). . . .

That said, I do think that submerged "floating" turbines on buoy systems may be a way to mitigate those issues. . . There's been talk around Washington state area of how to make the tidal flows within the relative safety of Puget sound produce usable power for consumers. . . The biggest hold up has, and remains the danger to wildlife (ie, in simulations salmon cannot see the spinning blades of the submerged turbines, and get turned into sushi because they swim through it).


Though, I must say I am disappointed. . . 2 pages in and no one has mentioned turning humans into batteries and controlling these human-duracells with a computer generated environment

You wouldn't even need dams. Seriously a simple water wheel will generate power. Stream flows under it, spinning the wheel. If you need multiple wheels, no problem. Combine it with wind and solar. Problem solved.


And yes, I'm aware of our concern for the adorable fishies. It's the reason California is next to an OCEAN yet can't seem to desalinate seawater (an inexpensive process) to solve both its supply AND drought issues.

 Just Tony wrote:
You wouldn't even need dams. Seriously a simple water wheel will generate power. Stream flows under it, spinning the wheel. If you need multiple wheels, no problem. Combine it with wind and solar. Problem solved.

It will generate power, yes, but how much and with what efficiency? How much infrastructure will be required to put that water wheel onto the grid, and how much will it cost relative to the power provided? The answers here are not favorable outside of specific geographical areas, the same ones that are useful for hydroelectric dams.

Once again, read combined with wind and solar. The problem is that every renewable resource is inefficient aside from dams. The windmill farm required to generate enough power to keep a city like LA lit would take up FAR too much real estate.

Besides, there are ways to create water flow for dynamos. Put a pipe in a lake with the dynamo's water wheels in the pipe. Have a redirect that discharges the water back into the lake. Depending on the pathway and how many dynamos you can put along the pathway it could be fairly lucrative. It just takes looking at it in ways other than "this one way is the only way to make it work". If an old flour mill can be converted over to a functioning power plant based on that one water wheel turning a single dynamo and can power a small town, it's folly to think it won't work on the same principle elsewhere. Look at the Mississippi River. That flows MORE than fast enough to facilitate hydro power.

It's unrealistic to say that renewable can't make a realistic contribution. In the UK, renewables already account for 20% of our power.

Obviously there's a big gap between 20% and 100%, so I think the problem is whether renewables will top out at 40% or 60% or whatever, and what other generation technology should fill the gap.

The other side of the equation is reducing energy use. The UK has reduced per capita consumption by things like LED lighting.

Aye but have a look at the Amazon and the effects that dams and hydro power have had. There are multiple species, including the river dolphins that are or are so near its basically going to happen, extinct because of hydropower. If its not intakes sucking them in its the barriers blocking migration and territories leading to fractured populations and broken food chains (esp when those chains vary through the year.

Scale is indeed the issue with most renewables, they require huge areas to function and as one of their prime considerations for use is conversation, one has to balance the clean air angle with the fact that they take up vast chunks of land and disrupt pathways and connections and thus cause direct harm to the wildlife. Heck I seem to recall of wind turbines built in wind channels right in the path of migratory butterflies. Remember blades don't have to hit you, the churning up of the air by the passing blades can be just as deadly. Much like how in a car you might not hit a low flying bird as it passes by/over; but the wind moving over the car can catch them, throwing them against ground/other vehicles/signs or trees on the edges of the road.


On reduced use - LED lighting, better building design and materials (insulation to keep heat out in summer and warm in in winter). Heck From what I gather the USA could make a vast saving in heat if they could ween themselves off in-door air-conditioning. Heck consider retail outlets on the highstreet today whcih have heat blazing down in huge amounts. I actually find they run heat so hot that hte staff are in full summer heatwave uniform, whist if you come in from outside you get so hot in even light winter clothing that I find I end up leaving stores faster to get back to a more sane temperature. And you've got the whole highstreet doing this (well at least the big stores that have survived)

Big hydro dams have been deprecated for the reasons you mention, and others. Unfortunately, a lot of big schemes are going ahead anyway.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
In more related news, the BBC reports on a looming energy crisis for the small Channel Island of Sark...

The BBC wrote:Lights out on one island?

What's happening?

All the electricity on one British island could be turned off at the end of the week.

Why does it matter?

About 500 people live on the island of Sark in the English Channel, and one official there says they will all have to adopt "a bit of a wartime mentality" from this week.

On Friday, the island's electricity provider will withdraw its services. This is because it was ordered to reduce its prices earlier this year, a situation it says has caused it to lose a significant amount of money.

There was some concern all the residents may be forced to evacuate, but that looks unlikely to happen now. But they are having to find whatever alternative they can to keep the lights on - including an emergency generator and a plan to share whatever renewable energy is created on the island.

 Just Tony wrote:
Nuke is probably the most efficient, yet it has its obvious downsides. I'm a huge fan of hydroelectric power. With all the tributaries spiderwebbing the world, putting several waterwheels along them seems like a viable alternative. I'd also combine wind and solar as it seems neither can produce enough power to suit typical human needs by itself, ESPECIALLY in an urban environment.

Water wheels provide so little energy that they are barely noticeable. You'd need a massive wheel or an incredibly fast streaming river to be able to have it generate enough power to justify its costs. And rivers deep enough for such a massive wheel are close to non-existent while rivers that stream fast enough are also pretty rare.

Wind and solar combined can't produce anywhere near enough energy to power a city, unless you literally jam an entire area full of wind turbines and solar panels, which will destroy the local flora and fauna (so much for "green" energy). Wind and solar energy are only serious options for wealthy areas that have lots of flat, empty space such as deserts (and even then the ecological impact is a big problem). In densely populated or poor areas it just won't be possible. That is not to say wind and especially solar energy are useless, it can make a valuable contribution, but it can't power the world. Which is why despite the ridiculous amounts of money that have been pumped into wind and solar energy over the past 20 years, we still rely almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Basically, we need a more efficient source of energy to do the bulk of power generation. Ideally, in the future we would have nuclear fusion plants (and until the time we can control fusion reactions nuclear fission plants) to generate the bulk of the world's energy with wind, solar and hydro energy playing a supporting role or even taking the lead in places where efficient power generation with these methods is possible. That way, our fuel supply would be virtually infinite.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
B
In more related news, the BBC reports on a looming energy crisis for the small Channel Island of Sark...

The BBC wrote:Lights out on one island?

What's happening?

All the electricity on one British island could be turned off at the end of the week.

Why does it matter?

About 500 people live on the island of Sark in the English Channel, and one official there says they will all have to adopt "a bit of a wartime mentality" from this week.

On Friday, the island's electricity provider will withdraw its services. This is because it was ordered to reduce its prices earlier this year, a situation it says has caused it to lose a significant amount of money.

There was some concern all the residents may be forced to evacuate, but that looks unlikely to happen now. But they are having to find whatever alternative they can to keep the lights on - including an emergency generator and a plan to share whatever renewable energy is created on the island.

And is why privatising essential services and utilities is one of the dumbest plans Humans have ever carried out in the modern age.