Nuclear got a bad vibe because when problems happen they tend to be big problems.

It's like taking a flight and being afraid of crashing, it almost never happens, but when it happens... it's a disaster involving a ton of people. Think of when people hijacked airplanes to use them as impromptu missiles.

Sooo yeah. People do not want to be near anything that can spell disaster in a wide radius affecting them too without their control, and prefer much more the kind of stuff that actually leads to more victims (like cars of fuel plants)... but where they have more control.

Well and that happened with old technology and as a direct result of human error. Chernobyl because it was using a positive feedback loop versus a negative one, and Fukushima because of outdated technology that failed as a result of the flooding.

They other thing with flight accidents, is again, not the technology, but mostly because of human error or judgment. And having a plane hijacked isn't something you can control or blame the technology for, that is human decisions.

I mean people don't directly control coal power plants and those can have equally disastrous outcomes if something causes them to explode, but it is more that they understand the basics of the technology. It is kind of like the push back from Flat-earthers, they feel that science has left the hands of the people and want to return to their observations, even though they ignore it half the time anyway.

dude...

Chernobyl literally happened because russian officials said "let's test what happens if we cut all power and you need to shut this down manually" which the power plant was never designed to do, but russian officials said "yeah but what happens if you get hit by an EMP from a nuclear bomb in case of WW3" which was at least 4 times more dumb than saying "let's first design a system that accounts for that and test it safely."

Meanwhile Fukushima stood really well... for what happened.

And what happened was that it was cut off from the water lines and power (as those were literally ripped away from the plant which was relatively intact, but there was a thing called "a fissure" where the water pipes and electrical lines used to be because... uh... "magnitude 9 earthquake") and could not cool itself anymore so... uh... kinda like the scenario chernobyl did as the poorest ever designed test, but different reason, still... the plant held a lot more than Chernobyl 3 full days of feverishly trying to shut it down instead of a few hours, but still not enough to shut down properly soon enough.

Still this kinda needed a magnitude 9 earthquake (which normally levels entire cities, but the plant was unscathed) followed by a 15 METER WAVE to hit not just the plant but everywhere around it. So the plant needed to have personnel literally sent to it to help shut it down because the people inside it were kinda dead from... you know... drowning. And then the plant started shutting down on its own and when the people arrived they just found out it was doing so too slowly and so 3 reactors were already damaged from the unsupervised overheating and basically what amounted to "water got so heated it became hydrogen and oxygen and then became water again in an explosion".

They still shut 3 out of 6 reactors down in 4 days without external water or power which by itself is like: "HOW??!?!" but the plant was designed to do so... and so it partially succeeded even after being left in a catastrophic disaster, unattended, and unreachable for 1 day... but... uhm... on day 3 the 3 damaged reactors finally melted. So. Yeah. If it were for me i still marvel it held so well to shut down half of its reactors.

Well what I mean is that most modern Nuclear plants are build in a negative feedback loop so if there was a sudden loss of power they'd shut themselves down versus having the reactor continue running on a positive feedback loop.



Well and again, most modern reactors are built with so much redundancy that even being submerged wouldn't be enough to destroy it. So kind of still an older design is what ultimately lead to failure, which is my understanding.


And like in the containment pools for spent rods they have these days you experience less radiance in the building sitting by the edge of the pool than standing outside. Which is just hysterical. So yeah I am all for nuclear as it is cleaner, most cost effective in the long haul, and the waste is pretty small relatively speaking.

That and Chernobyl because "Whoopsy Kommunisty oopsy boomsy...
"nuqneH? HIja'. We are well. Go away"

That was really a nice and informative video. Won't complain about the bias either, since he gave fair warning. I am glad I saw this, so thank you :)
But promoting this as the solution to climate change made me cringe given the availability of fuel, the long and extremely pricy reactor construction and the vastly lower prices achievable with renewables that take weeks to install instead of a decade or two.

What renewables take weeks to install?

Solar panels and smaller wind turbines.
The ridiculously long delays usually come from really weird legal proceedings. At least here in germany it does. The time between funding and operation is over 90% of watching for birds and hamsters and bats to make sure the site is perfectly suitable and no animals are disturbed.
If you want to just dig up the whole forest, dooming all the creatures in it to extract coal or build a highway its ironically less red tape.

How many solar panels? How many small turbines? How small are said turbines?

One wind farm near where I live took almost 10 years to complete, from start of construction to finish. I dont know much about the red tape involved. The farm itself is comprised of 200 Vestas V82 turbines.

That is stupidly long.
Small scale as in what some factories build on their grounds to supplement their energy needs. There is a Porsche Factory in Mexico that produces almost its own energy supply on its own roof. Pretty amazing if you think about an automotive factory that hardly needs external energy input.

Correction: there are 240 turbines on my local farm. It's annual output is well over 1100 GW-h.

For what it's worth, I think the ability to manufacture, transport, pour footers for, assemble, and wire 240 wind turbines (which are ~80m tall at the hub) in nine years is not half bad.

Is small scale like that a viable route to eliminate the need for coal, natural gas, etc on a national or international basis?

We are already seeing regions like Portugal or Scotland running entirely on renewables for weeks on end in good conditions and the learning rate (economical improvement rate of certain tech) is still very steep. So we will see more of that. That is why we see China and India investing huge amounts in such plants. Even the UAE joined in by now.

So the nice thing about nuclear is that it will last a lot longer once it is built. Nuclear is like something where most of the cost and time is upfront, but after it becomes increasingly cheaper to run and maintain.

It is kind of like buying a nice pair of scissors that'll last years and years and years, version buying super cheaper and having to replace often spending more in the same amount of time that the better ones would last.

I totally get that. But the problem is the cost still won't add up. And even if it did, if we had half as many reactors as needed to make dent in our carbon emissions, we would run into a uranium shortage really soon. I think all the nuclear physicists are better used trying to get fusion somewhere while renewables get rolled out in large scale, supplemented with power to gas storages. Another advantage of that route is the huge number of synergies with other technological trends. decentralised power production with electric cars and power to gas with the very necessary switch to clean fuels for ships and airplanes.

So nuclear on its own wouldn't solve all the problem. It would take nuclear plus other renewables.

Also there is the potential to use hydrogen power as well, and hydrogen cars could be another future fuel for vehicles.

It'll always take a combination of renewables and non-carbon sources of fuel to fix a lot of things. And at this point we have already crossed the line of no return, and nuclear and other renewable energy sources will help slow it down.

While there is nothing renewable about nuclear, I agree that it can be really useful to keep the existing ones running at least. I am very doubtful about new reactors ever turning a profit unless subsidised to the moon and back. But there are places where it is necessary because the grid won't allow a rapid transition to spread out intermittend power sources.
Hydroge for cars is a difficult topic. With the current pressurised gas tech it is very difficult to make a point over BEVs and for the next 10 years all the green hydrogen we can get will be used more carbon efficiently in steel and concrete production, then airplanes and ships since those won't cross oceans on batteries. By then it will be a really steep climb in the automotive sector for H2 and while I have always loved fuel cell cars, it might be more efficient by then to locally convert the gas into electricity and charge a BEV with it.

Unless (and that is a big unless) we get a lot of green H2 soon and an efficient way of supplying fuel cells like methanol or LOHC stored H2 takes over. I would love to see that happen. We need a way to trade hydrogen anyway. Energy trade will continue in the renewable age, for the same reason as everyone is buying oil now instead of turning coal or wood into gasoline. Its so much cheaper. H2 will be a big enabler to bring the sun of Africa or the winds of the Andes to Europe or Japan for example.

Sorry for ther nerd rage :) It was one of my favourite topics in university.

Well a lot of the problem is that without the investment in the technology to make it better and cheaper, it won't get cheaper. Like....right now there are companies trying to develop portable Nuclear reactors that could be set up after a natural disaster, something easier to do than set up Wind or Solar. So, they can very easily make their investment back in a fraction of the time the plant will be operational which is decades if not century plus life span.

The problems with Wind and Solar and Water power is they are far more dependent on other natural events and weather. Coal works really well for adjusting to demand, which is where Nuclear would take over, is being that finer adjustment source of power where Solar and Wind and Water would be more for meeting the base line energy needs of an area. Now by using EV's to store some of the power and have a more distributed power grid as you said could be a good thing, but Wind, Solar, and Water will not be able to have that fine tuning the power grid needs minute to minute as appliances are turned on and off to keep it in balance.

Hey, energy technology is something that really needs a lot of development and there is some pretty cool cutting edge stuff in the works that looks really promising.

Glad you enjoy the topic too.
Another interesting thing is just how important storage is. You say coal is good at adjusting, but actually takes hours to regulste power output to a large degree. Switching on or off is slower still and anything with a steam turbine has a sweet spot where it runs well. Any other operating point wastes resources.
That it why factories need to pay 10x the normal price for such power surges and why steel mills and car factories started installing batteries.

My idea is that local dispersed or private production can deal with much of the baseline and the rest can be pulled from self made or imported hydrogen which could be used in fuel cells for reaction times of <10s and turbines (refurbished natural gas plants etc) for ~minutes reaction times.

Also a lot of larger buildings have their own generators too. But like, coal is still faster at balancing electrical loads by spinning up and spinning down generators as needed, which still takes significantly less time than Wind or Solar.

Power storage will be interesting, like dry cell battery technology has not been heavily innovated on for like.....ages. Like it has been very small tiny steps with the exception of Li-Ion batteries getting more commercial use in the last 2 decades, but even then it has still been minimal advancements and most of it has come from making other things more efficient.

Like....I think primary energy production will still be managed as a utility, but the electric companies can "buy" back power from people or take it off their bills if they help load balancing with the use of EV's and etc. But this would also require a lot more "smart" infrastructure that could these sorts of adjustments on the fly, which feels like it could create more problems then solving. I am generally wary of such nice "utopian" ideas like this, but....I mean, getting more use and better advancements in renewables and nuclear feels like a pipe dream as is, so....it is kind of the chicken or the egg problem.

The smart grid won't pop up on a large scale before 2050 I would say. But I also do not know aby home owners under 60 who are not interested in getting a solar roof and some batteries set up. That will becthe starting point.
One of my colleagues has a large house and basically pays no electricity bill besides the connection fee.
But we will see what happens next. One way or snother this sector will shift a lot and its interesting to watch.

Solar is expensive to get and you can't take it with you if you move, and sometimes doesn't really add value to the house. And I feel it will not be as feasible as more 'affordable' housing is going to need to be built being fewer people what full houses for just themselves.

And hopefully battery tech takes a jump and maybe mini-nuclear will too.