Nuclear Power - Pros and Cons

Pretty sure it would be yes.

You can always dig down.

If you dig down isn't there a risk of contamination for either stuff under the zone or stuff that's connected to stuff under the zone? Though in fairness there's nothing to stop us reninforcing the exclusion zone, simply turning it into a giant waste bunker with a reinforced bottom to prevent leakage.

edited 18th Apr '16 7:39:31 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Nope, I was speaking from an American perspective; I probably should have mentioned that. I know that France gets most (like 75%, IIRC) of their power from nuclear plants, but there was talk of scaling that back after the Fukushima disaster (not sure if anything ever came of it). On the flip side, Germany plans to close all its nuclear plants after Fukushima, and Japan (which previously got about 30% from nuclear and planned to expand that share) actually has shut down all its nuclear plants, ostensibly to do safety inspections and upgrades, but whether they'll be allowed to restart is in question.

That said, it's not all bad news. In 2012, after Fukushima, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued the first licenses for new nuclear plant construction since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

There are legitimate environmental concerns regarding nuclear power, particularly with regards to uranium mining and waste disposal. But coal mining and petroleum drilling aren't exactly super happy fun times either, and waste can be contained while greenhouse gasses basically cannot.

Unfortunately, the only real way to get rid of radioactive waste is to let it decay naturally. It's just a physical limit of the substances involved — you can't force it to decay any faster. There are some designs that would let you take the waste from one kind of reactor and use it in another kind of reactor after some reprocessing, but as far as I'm aware no one's actually doing that, or even has concrete plans to do so. So basically, the best plan we have for the foreseeable future is something like the Yucca Mountain facility — a central site designed for the safe storage of nuclear waste in a location picked specifically for the purpose (geologically stable, well above the local water table, etc). Of course, the Yucca Mountain site was eventually killed off for political reasons (mostly because "zomg nuclear bad scary no want here!")... which ironically leaves waste disposal up to individual sites, resulting in ultimately less safety than a centralized facility.

As the saying goes, you can't fix stupid.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Hm. Makes me wonder if investing in reactors that use reprocessed fuel is the way to go then, in future....

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

If we start investing heavily in nuclear power again, it won't be too long until we get fusion reactors, which produce less waste, the waste doesn't last as long, and the reactor has a much smaller chance of melting down dangerously (and fission plants already have a very small chance of melting down). That won't solve the waste issue, but it will definitely make it easier to handle.

We restarted the nuclear program last year actualy.

So no its not a question.

I'm really leery about counting on nuclear fusion for the foreseeable future. The joke is that it's been ten years away for fifty years, and they're not wrong. Working nuclear fusion reactors that can produce electricity at commercial scales would solve damn near all of our problems, but I won't hold my breath until it's actually generating power.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Positive gain exists now though, as of 2 years ago.

So a massive steping stone has been hit, like absolutly massive.

It DOES generate power now, just not for long (keeping it running is the issue)

edited 18th Apr '16 8:03:44 PM by Imca

If the US hasn't built anything new in close to 40 years then a development being ten years away for the last 50ish years kinda makes sense. It's ten years of development and progress away, but we've been frozen for the last 40 years. Almost all our current reactors are generation 2, the lack of generation 3 reactors being build on a proper scale is probably why the next keep is taking so long, gen 4 stuff is looking serious despite the fact that we never invested properly in gen 3.

Oh and I just realised the problem with Chernobyl as a global waste containment site, politics, it's in a weird political position as is, plus I doubt anyone would feel good about putting a shit tone of nuclear waste (that would maybe be turned into fuel) in Eastern Europe, that's just asking for something to go wrong, I don't know what a war or uprising would do to a nuclear waste containment site but I'd rather we not find out.

edited 18th Apr '16 8:10:25 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

There are several different "break even" points. The one that was hit recently was within the reaction itself, IIRC. As in, it doesn't count the energy lost in powering the whole system. It might take (completely made up numbers, here) 100 MW of electricity to get 10 MW of energy (in the form of lasers) into the reaction, and the reaction produced 11 MW of energy (in the form of exploding plasma), none of which was reclaimed and turned back into electricity. Ultimately you've got to get more electricity out than the 100 MW you put in, and we haven't gotten to that point yet. Then you have to figure out how to do it consistently for long periods of time, instead of with carefully prepared one-shot fractions-of-a-second reactions that we're talking about now.

They've absolutely been making progress, but the technology is nowhere near ready for application.

Completely different technologies. Current nuclear reactors use nuclear fission — they take very large, unstable atoms (like uranium and plutonium) and break them apart to generate energy. Nuclear fusion takes very small, stable atoms (like hydrogen and helium) and sticks them together to generate energy. Experimental fusion reactors have been chugging along at universities and the like pretty much the whole time, it's only commercial nuclear fission reactors that have been on hold.

edited 18th Apr '16 8:22:11 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Except fusion and fission are entirely different technologies. Fission reactions use fast neutrons to split heavy (and usually unstable) atomic nuclei to produce a mix of two (or theoretically more) smaller atomic nuclei, more fast neutrons to keep the process going and waste heat (which then generates electricity).

Fusion technology involves heating the lightest atomic nuclei (hydrogen and helium mostly) to insanely high temperatures and squeezing them in magnetic fields to high pressure until its enough to overcome the repulsion between atomic nuclei, fusing them into a larger atomic nuclei, releasing some fairly exotic subatomic particles and a lot of EM radiation. There are several proposals of how to extract energy from such a reactor, including advanced photovoltaic tech to directly convert it to electricity which would be an order of magnitude more efficient than using the heat to drive a steam turbine.

Generally one uses hydrogen as fusion fuel. Any additional proton means an extra positive charge that the ignition has to overcome. Hence why deuterium+tritium is the favoured method, it has the best proton (=positive electrical charge that hampers fusion by pushing the atoms apart)/neutron (=nuclear force which favours fusion by keeping the atoms together without the drawback of an repulsive charge).

Also, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is much larger than the plant itself, about 2600 square kilometres, it's not something you can just bury beneath concrete.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I suggest we send all our nuclear waste into the sun, instead of dumping it on the moon. We might want to build a colony on the moon someday...

Of course, this assumes that our space technology will be reliable enough (i.e, the rocket won't explode or crash and spill radioactive toxic waste all over the earth.)

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.

The main problems is that idea is that in addition to a lot of nuclear waste being quite heavy, tossing something into the Sun usually means it winds up getting vaporised in the corona and photosphere and then blowing back out in the solar wind. Meaning your just going to be spraying a fine mist of heavy radioactive particles all over the solar system... including Earth.

So yeah, Superman throwing all nuclear weapons into the Sun. Superdickery on a grand scale.

What if we dumped it into a gas giant?

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Not sure how serious you're being, but it is insanely difficult to launch things into the sun. It costs somewhere on the order of thousands of dollars per pound just to get things into low Earth orbit — getting them to the moon is roughly twice as hard, and the sun is another matter entirely.

In order to dispose of nuclear waste at a reasonable cost, it's going to have to be here on Earth.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I think I started the discussion last page on the premiss that space tech advanced considerably.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Dumping nuclear waste on the Moon does not sound like a good idea no matter what your tech level is.

Direct all enquiries to Jamie B Good

If we can get it to space we don't really have to put it anywhere; just dump it in a high inclination orbit way out of the way of anything else with some kind of radio beacon so it can be avoided.

As long as you get all of it in a reasonably tight cluster well away from the ecliptic and far enough out nothing will ever get anywhere near it without trying to.

Orbit naturaly decays, it WILL eventualy fall back to earth like that.

I think he means an orbit way out on the edge of the solar system somewhere, not in orbit around the Earth. By the time it becomes a hazard to space traffic, our technology will (hopefully) have advanced to the point where we can dispose of such waste, permanently and safely.

Still, as Jovian pointed out, it would be WAY too expensive to even get it into orbit at all, at our current tech level.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.

The waste also naturally decays. You just have to engineer the orbit so that it decays slower than the waste and/or have some small station keeping thrusters on the canisters; with a high orbit it wouldn't take much to stabilize the orbit.

We could always just pick either of the L4/5 points and stash it there but I figured those might be useful enough that we'd want to keep them clear but compared to L1 through 3 those two have fairly minimal utility.

Edit: No, getting out there would be absurdly expensive. I just meant a very high earth orbit probably out past the moon as close to the edge of Earth's SOI as we can manage. The main reason that I'd avoid the moon even though it'd be cheaper is that we might eventually end up discovering that that crater we've been using as a trash heap for a few decades is right on top of something we want to get to.

edited 19th Apr '16 4:08:40 PM by Jaustin89*

But the mist would be dispersed in the complete solar system and in three dimensions. Even if all of the radioactive material on Earth was taken and dispersed so widely, I can't imagine it wouldn't be much more of a problem than natural space gamma-rays.

The problem is the cost of bringing it out to space. Both in dollars and energie. All the rockets bringing out the trash can't be environmental friendly either.

To add on since I missed the original post, the sun is already EXTREAMLY radioactive any way, what being a giant unsheilded nuclear reaction... On a scale orders of magnitude higher then what we could ever dream of..., adding uranium to the mix really won't do any thing at that point.

Its like dumping water into the ocean, you wont change any thing.

edited 19th Apr '16 10:17:33 PM by Imca

Today's the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. It is the worst disaster in a nuclear power plant in history so far, with 31 direct fatalities and a large number of indirect fatalities. Parts of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus are still heavily contaminated.

Will re-post in the Ukraine thread.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman