I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?

  • IamtheMorgz@lemmy.world
    11·
    6 days ago

    I’m nuclear industry adjacent, and I work in public safety. My thoughts, which are only my own:

    1. Renewables are the future. Nuclear power is expensive and takes a long time to build, mostly because people don’t like the idea of a reactor near them. While that’s also true of things like wind farms, the lawsuits on those don’t take as long, I guess.
    2. Small modular reactors may have a place in our future energy landscape, but the specifics remain to be seen. SMRs are (obviously) smaller, so they have less fuel in them, generate less waste, and would be easier to build (like modular homes, they’d be all made basically the same in a factory and shipped to their site). They are in a race against good enough battery technology to carry the base load. Who will win? Well, nuclear is getting a lot of extra support currently, but still, who knows?
    3. Nuclear power is so much safer than people assume. Nuclear reactors have reactor buildings which are big thick concrete monstrosities (part of the reason they’re so dang expensive to build). It’s quite hard for them to leak, so releases will end up being little amounts out of limited area. Yes, even Fukushima, which while very bad and very expensive to clean up, wasn’t the thing killing people. One person officially died, years later from lung cancer. Cancer he might have gotten anyway; we can’t know. In the US at least, a lot of money goes into emergency preparation at nuclear power plants, trying to mitigate the impacts of any kind of event, but the concern is cancer, not radiation poisoning. 3.5 interestingly, SMRs will probably not get big thick concrete structures around them, or at least not as big or as thick. It’s because the risk is lower in those designs but also because there’s just not as much material that could be flung around. This may have changed though (this is not my specific area, just something I hear a lot about). Maybe it will be more akin to naval reactors or something. Those are very small, and very very safe.
    4. Nuclear waste storage is a political problem. The nuclear industry has been paying for a long-term storage solution for decades and recently sued the US government over it. We absolutely built a house without a toilet, but we could change that with enough political will. Until then, the waste sits at the plant under guard. It’s not great but none of the plants are going to run out of room or anything.
    5. The US government is going away from certain standards that are generally recognized as being the safest approach to radiological exposure. This, quite frankly, may be disastrous, but likely not immediately. Eventually I could see it leading to eroded safety culture and that could be a problem long term. But I’m a notorious pessimist, so…
    6. Renewables are the future. Anyone telling you anything different is selling something. Probably stock in an SMR company.
    • Forester@pawb.socialEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      I’m struggling to believe your nuclear industry adjacent if you think that the energy density of any type of battery system known to man starts to compare to the energy density of thorium let alone u-232

      • IamtheMorgz@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        It’s not about energy density. It’s about base load issues. One of the big items that the nuclear industry harps on is that they handle base load energy requirements when wind and solar aren’t producing as much. But a good battery system would also solve that problem, by allowing excess wind and solar energy to be stored for use when the base load is high but wind and solar aren’t able to produce that amount of energy at that exact time.

        • Forester@pawb.socialEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          It literally is about energy density. You don’t understand how many batteries you would need to replace one mid sized nuclear plant. Batteries are not 100% efficient closer to 70% after charge and discharge. A mid sized plant is 500-700MW. A 1 MW battery is a 20-foot shipping container. It weighs about 15 tons and you would need about 1000 to replace the plant and enough renewables to recharge all of those 1000 batteries to get the 700MW back out to note, this would be 1,360,000 cubed feet of batteries, not counting housing, cooling systems, sprinkler systems, or anything else. This doesn’t even get into the fact the battery bank isn’t producing live load and is only good for 1 to 3 hours of draw till the cells are drained (1 to 3MWH ). While the plant produces round the clock energy. So quadroople your batteries minimum.

          • IamtheMorgz@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 days ago

            I guess the point is that they’re working on better batteries, right? Ones that can get better efficiencies and all that? I am not an expert in this area of course, but I’m also not able to build you an SMR, so again, idk what technology will eventually win out (in terms of cost effectiveness or overall viability) I just know it’s something everyone’s talking about.

            • Forester@pawb.socialEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              Are you the current president of the United States? Because I’ve just explained to you the exact flaw with this system in detail. And you have glossed over this with a platitude that everybody’s talking about it while providing no insight or understanding of the problem at hand, while also admitting you do not understand the fundamentals.

              Lots of people talk about world peace. Turns out world peace is hard.

      • IamtheMorgz@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 days ago

        This is absolutely my main concern too (and the specific area in which I work, so the thing I feel lost comfortable commenting on). I don’t think it’s going to be an overnight shift or anything. What I think will happen is that the US will step away from standard international practices when it comes to how much radiation a person can receive (and therefore how much the general public can receive) and while nothing will change right away, eventually nuclear plants will cut costs somewhere and not filter out as much material as they have been required to up til now. Any increases in cancer 20-30 years from now will probably get blamed on something else though, knowing how our system works. For nuclear workers, the effects will probably be more noticable and quicker, but again, attempts will be made to hide any negative health consequences. Lord forbid we have a release incident during that time though. And even worse if regulations relax to the point where the utility doesn’t have to carry the burden of fixing the problem they created (which is where I see things going over the long term). Right now, if a plant releases radioactive material they are legal responsible for that material. If that eroded what incentive will they have to make sure they don’t lose it?

    • CyberneticOwl@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 days ago

      As an industry adjacent person, I’m curious to know your thoughts on the potential for nuclear fuel reprocessing. Is it at all feasible to start up again or is it a pipe dream?

      • IamtheMorgz@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 days ago

        This isn’t my exact area, but my understanding is that this is also a political will thing. There are concerns about reprocessing because some of the reprocessing could make bombs and we’re scared of it getting stolen? I think? Idk, not my area. But as I understand it, other places in the world already do reprocessing. I’m not sure we will ever get there. We can’t even get a storage facility!