Radiation level increase in northern Europe may ‘indicate damage’ to nuclear power plant in Russia

[El_Machinae]

Build nuclear because some investors want to build nuclear. This means that you need good policy to produce good regulations that concomitantly build in sufficient safety but also allow investors to do what they do best. Just make sure that the pricing reflects a fair value to the people local to the risk.

Delays in tackling AGW are enormously costly and watching the tech curve on solar and wind is fine, but it's still causing delays. This is a problem of opportunity cost, where any useless delays put in between nuclear development and decommissioning carbon sources could have been better spent reducing carbon elsewhere. You want people to play to their strengths.

 

[Kyriakos]

You did.not.see.graphite!

 

[Birdjaguar]

Wind and solar are already more cost effective baseline power than nuclear or fossil. And they're just going to keep getting better.

You vastly overestimate how much area would have to be covered with solar.

Yes; and how it will be harvested.

Change is coming. How about office building windows?

 

[timtofly]

Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Very flammable. It comes from the sky lots of places. It has no economic benefits except sold as water. Yet, some have figured out how to harness the energy from water, and since it does not demand extreme conditions like huge dams, that could flood people's homes, or radioactive fallout that can kill people, or needs to be stored as DC power in dangerous batteries like solar energy, it is not economically beneficial in creating much more work for more people. Why use clean water effeciently, when you can make it cause more damage in so many other ways?

 

[red_elk]

Wind and solar are already more cost effective baseline power than nuclear or fossil. And they're just going to keep getting better.

I'm all for it, but more cost effective is a generalization. I doubt solar power is much cost effective somewhere in Arctic.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Here we go again. And we should build more nuclear power plants why?

They have by far one of the lowest body counts out of any power source.

• https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
• https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
• https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html

The biggest case against nuclear, and the one leading to fewer plants being built, is the financial risk that you allude to later in the thread. They are extremely expensive to construct up front and take quite a few years to pay off...prior to which the investor continues to eat a loss. Not many are willing to go with that kind of timeframe.

In near future if we can get away from coal and stop burning up our oil that would be the most useful step. Supposedly we're getting closer to viable fusion, but I've been hearing that for more than two decades now.

 

[Seon]

Try six decades.

 

[Gorbles]

Uh, no?

Chernoblyl? Fukushima?

Incredibly old reactors, the former of which was basically ran badly to cause the incident in the first place. The latter survived a tsunami, as well as being partly-submerged (preventing cleanup operations from accessing it effectively) and didn't actually deal significant amounts of radiation damage.

Coal is also not great and responsible for a lot of damage in its own right (perhaps not surprisingly). Everyone knows the bad nuclear meltdowns, sure, but how many people are familiar with the impact of coal mining, and also the impact of coal-powered power stations? Less so. If you take Chernobyl and Three Mile Island out of the equation (as they account, significantly, for most of the damage done by nuclear station-related damage), it skews even more against coal and other fossil fuels. I'm not saying that the two mentioned should therefore be ignored, but we also need real education about modern reactor designs (as well as the theoretical designs proposed going forwards).

The holy grail is (self-sustaining) fusion, and while I don't doubt we're a way off that, it's something I still follow from time to time (I used to follow it more avidly). The problem is for nuclear in general, beyond the upfront costs for reactor design and implementation, it's become a cultural (and therefore political) question (while fossil fuels hasn't in the same way. Abandoning fossil fuels? Yep, politicised and thus polarised. The existence of the stations themselves? They're already / still there).

Waste storage is a problem with current-generation designs (basically anything with the standard plutonium or uranium isotypes), but could be less of a question with fourth-generation designs, or even alternative radioactive materials like thorium. We also have a split between light water reactors (the more known model) and molten salt reactors, the latter of which comes with a "fun" anecdote about the realities of nuclear fuel development (for those who don't need the click, it's because a CERN scientist claimed that a lack of funding is due to the inherent lack of weaponisation of thorium into a nuclear warhead).

Wind and solar are already more cost effective baseline power than nuclear or fossil. And they're just going to keep getting better.

Wind and solar are incredibly terrain-reliant and have impact on local ecosystems that aren't often well-evaluated. I would imagine there are stretches of the US for which this is less of a problem, but UK and a lot of Europe in particular there's a lot of land that would be impacted.

There are ocean-based wind farms that I believe exist (or have definitely been proposed), but it's more infrastructure work to maintain and also integrate back to the mainland.

 

[Seon]

it did take a magnitude 6.6 earthquake to cause Fukushima disaster. Presumably it is safer elsewhere, provided that it's safely maintained. Unfortunately its return on investment is poor, so likely it will not see much private development in the near future.

Wind and solar can certainly be used a lot more than we are using today, but is unlikely to be the be all end all solution. That being said, given the choice between nuclear and wind/solar, I'll still choose the latter to invest in as a state entity.

 

[Gorbles]

Oh yeah, sorry, don't mistake my post for being against wind and solar investment. The latter probably has more research potential, which is good news there. Hydroelectric is also very, very strong, but incredibly terrain-dependent and has more ecological side-effects by its very nature (you're plonking it on a river or very similar source).

However I don't think there's enough available land to provide equal throughput for fossil fuels currently. Nuclear would benefit from a much smaller relative footprint, factory-for-factory. Plus the theoretical end goal of fusion means I'll always support it conceptually.

 

[Seon]

I'm... unsure if research into fission power will lead to further research on fusion. Can you explain the connection?

 

[red_elk]

Chernobyl disaster was in most part caused by operators error. Reactor had design flaws which, if fixed, could prevent the disaster, but the primary reason was human factor and low "safety culture". Reactor flaws were fixed back in 80-s and this type of reactors is being gradually phased out. Only a few stations remain operational in former USSR republics.

Fukushima also had design flaws, but not in reactor itself. Reserve power generators were put in cellar, in coastal seismic area, which was a huge mistake. It actually release quite a lot of radiation, just most of it dissolved in the ocean and didn't cause similar to Chernobyl long term effects. Also, problems with Fukushima reactors are still far from being completely solved, while Chernobyl reactor was pretty much fully contained back in 1986.

Fusion power unfortunately won't be a panacea either. Even if all technological obstacles will be solved, fusion power plants will be nuclear objects and produce nuclear waste.

Further development of solar power and clean energy accumulators, such as hydrogen, is IMO a way to go. Also, complete removal of CO2 emitting energy sources. But we'll need nuclear power in foreseeable future and we'll need to improve its safety a lot.

 

[Gorbles]

I'm... unsure if research into fission power will lead to further research on fusion. Can you explain the connection?

In unfortunate terms, both have military potential. As linked previously, there is some opinion that the lack of investment into less weaponisable fuels (that would be an improvement) is because they're less weaponisable (that doesn't read like a real world, but it's better than "to wield"). Fusion doesn't have this "drawback" (we already have thermonuclear weapons, but that's a relative aside. We already have fission-based warheads as well).

There's also a lot of interest from the private sector in the general concept, because capitalism.

Also, in logistical terms, fusion yield is far higher than fissionable yield. In an eventual future where we would further need to optimise output, fusion would be the simple advancement in terms of replacing deprecated / out of date fission reactors. Fusion is really only at the conceptual stage (semi-successful tests have been run, last I read, but nothing more than that. The energy required to kickstart and possible maintain fusion basically exceeds the hardiness of the supportive materials required). Here's a read from 2019 on the general subject - looks like estimates put it no earlier than 2050 at current progress (if that).

 

[Cutlass]

I'm all for it, but more cost effective is a generalization. I doubt solar power is much cost effective somewhere in Arctic.

But wind is.

 

[Cutlass]

Oh yeah, sorry, don't mistake my post for being against wind and solar investment. The latter probably has more research potential, which is good news there. Hydroelectric is also very, very strong, but incredibly terrain-dependent and has more ecological side-effects by its very nature (you're plonking it on a river or very similar source).

However I don't think there's enough available land to provide equal throughput for fossil fuels currently. Nuclear would benefit from a much smaller relative footprint, factory-for-factory. Plus the theoretical end goal of fusion means I'll always support it conceptually.

Wind and solar really don't take much land. Solar goes over land that is already currently developed. Wind takes what? 100sq meters per installation?

 

[red_elk]

But wind is.

Wind also has serious downsides and not a stable source.
In some areas, even tidal wave or geothermal power plants are preferable.
Imagine installing and maintaining a field of wind generators somewhere in Kamchatka or Alaska.

 

[Gorbles]

Wind and solar really don't take much land. Solar goes over land that is already currently developed. Wind takes what? 100sq meters per installation?

A quick Google would disagree, but I'm not as well-read on US installations (there could be valid counterpoints to the article I literally just found). I have to insist that in other countries (or even in areas of the US that are far more densely-populated), wind has more logistical difficulties in terms of planning, layout and impact on ecology.

Solar is a different case, but also has different throughput and consequences of installation / maintenance (for example, it's often mounted on houses here in the UK - who owns that? It's unlikely to be the state, unless there's a caveat for private property. From memory I believe there are opt-in schemes to reduce energy bills if you can prove you're using solar yourself. Which isn't viable for a renting population in terms of control, either).

 

[Cutlass]

Wind also has serious downsides and not a stable source.
In some areas, even tidal wave or geothermal power plants are preferable.
Imagine installing and maintaining a field of wind generators somewhere in Kamchatka or Alaska.

There's also not enough population density to use a nuke. So a different source has to be used in any case.

A quick Google would disagree, but I'm not as well-read on US installations (there could be valid counterpoints to the article I literally just found). I have to insist that in other countries (or even in areas of the US that are far more densely-populated), wind has more logistical difficulties in terms of planning, layout and impact on ecology.

Solar is a different case, but also has different throughput and consequences of installation / maintenance (for example, it's often mounted on houses here in the UK - who owns that? It's unlikely to be the state, unless there's a caveat for private property. From memory I believe there are opt-in schemes to reduce energy bills if you can prove you're using solar yourself. Which isn't viable for a renting population in terms of control, either).

What your article fails to say is that that land is not single use. While it is true that you won't be building any windmills in a city, it is also true that that land can still be used for farming and pasture. So it's not like you're just taking land from other uses.

 

[red_elk]

There's also not enough population density to use a nuke. So a different source has to be used in any case.

Wind power may be enough for household consumption, but when you add industry to the equation, replacing non-renewable power sources can be problematic.
I read wiki about Alaska wind energy - it actually has generators with about 64MW power capacity in total. Supplies households and saves quite a lot of diesel fuel.

But the power of Kola nuclear plant mentioned in OP (the one near Murmansk) alone is ~25 times more than all wind power capacity of Alaska generators.
Replacing it with alternative sources can be difficult. And it is not very big plant, less than 2GW power.

Viable alternative in many places can be tidal and geothermal plants instead of solar/wind. For example, Penzhin Bay in Sea of Okhotsk has 9 meter high tides. The energy resources there are virtually unlimited. There are projects of building monstrous power plant there, up to 90GW (Three Gorges Dam is 22.5 GW), but the problem is nobody lives there and there is no obvious way to put all this energy in use. Would be a shame to waste it on bitcoin mining or something like that.

 

[Zkribbler]

... Wind and solar plants depend on weather

Not since the invention of the battery.

and also costly to build and maintain.

Not when compared to nuclear.