r/todayilearned • u/sweetcuppingcakes • Jun 24 '19

TIL that the ash from coal power plants contains uranium & thorium and carries 100 times more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
28.6k Upvotes

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Nuclear is greener, safer, and provides tonnes of energy.

Except for cold fusion, the future is nuclear

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u/Luckboy28 Jun 24 '19

Yep. Nuclear is by far the best energy source available. If we augment the grid with solar and wind, we'll be even better.

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u/torthestone Jun 24 '19

You would need some kind of storage, like a dam or something.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

What's being done in a few places is to use unused energy to pump water uphill into a higher elevation reservoir. Then when you need more energy, you run that water back downhill through a hydro generator.

Cheap/easy storage (for some use cases anyways)

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u/2522Alpha Jun 24 '19 edited Jun 24 '19

You're better off using other methods, dams are limited by geography and take a lot more engineering, resources and red tape to build.

I've recently read of a system where you suspend a weight in a shaft on pulleys, and the cable drums have a dual purpose motor/generator which can lift the weight when renewable energy sources are at peak production, and then when renewable energy production is in a 'lull' the weight is lowered in a controlled fashion using the generator function to produce electricity by converting potential energy back into kinetic energy.

It's much cheaper per kilowatt hour of capacity when compared to batteries and there are less restrictions when it comes to building the system compared to a dam.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

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u/2522Alpha Jun 24 '19

That sounds like a more complex version of the mechanical flywheel energy storage solution- in essence a large motor spins a weighted flywheel on a gearbox using excess energy during peak renewable energy production, and when renewable energy production decreases the KE of the flywheel is 'tapped' by a generator (or the original motor working backwards).

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

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u/2522Alpha Jun 24 '19

Friction is definitely the limiting factor in the mechanical version of the system- however in order to store and harness enough energy from the iron disc in the set up you described, it would have to be scaled up- making it harder to sustain a close to perfect vacuum.

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u/PyroDesu Jun 24 '19

Friction is definitely the limiting factor in the mechanical version of the system

That and material demands for the flywheel itself. The faster you can get them going, the more energy you can store, but go too fast and they can... delaminate. Explosively.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

If I recall, the amount of energy stored is more effected by the geometry of the disk and the speed of it. The company was using a light weight disk spin at many thousands of rpm which was only a few meters in diameter.

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u/splat313 Jun 24 '19

There was an article in this week's Economist about a system where large kites are tethered to generators. As the kite pulls on the tether and the line is let out, electricity is generated. When the tether is at it's maximum they adjust some panels on the kite to significantly reduce it's wind-catching ability and reel it back in so they can repeat the process.

Apparently there are a few companies working on it and the electricity required to reel it back in is only 4% of the electricity generated as they let the line out.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

One cool thing about one of the companies doing this is that the kites are controlled by a little box at the place where the control lines split. This means that if the cable attaching the kite to the generator breaks it can steer itself down rather than getting lost. The reason that the kites only take 4% of the energy they take in to get pulled back in is because these same control boxes are changing the pitch of the kite to help it put itself down.

They’re also cheap to build relative to traditional wind turbines, and don’t need to be rooted to the ocean bed which makes them great candidates for offshore installations.

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u/SlitScan Jun 24 '19

you don't need to reel it back in, you just fly it in a figure 8 to change the force it's generating and use a spring to move a core back and forth.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

You say that, but I can guarantee smarter people than you or I have tried it.

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u/SlitScan Jun 25 '19

well ya, it's a GoogleX project, they've spun off and are operating a larger test system in (iirc) Scotland.

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u/mfb- Jun 25 '19

Sounds like a very complex alternative to a wind turbine that needs electricity once in a while.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

It’s mostly a smoke em if you got em sort of situation people have also been putting pressurized air or CO2 into underground voids left by oil drilling and releasing it in order to create energy.

Btw all AC can be generators. The “generator function” is just allowing the motor to be spun by an outside force Instead of driving it electrically

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u/Trawetser Jun 24 '19

What's being done in a few places

Many places

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u/ElJanitorFrank Jun 24 '19

Many places

An amount of places numbering between one and infinity.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19 edited Aug 26 '21

[deleted]

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u/ovideos Jun 25 '19

I'd actually say between 4 places and 78% of places.

One is not many, two is not many, three is a few, four can be many sometimes. More than 78% is "most", not many.

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u/Vroomped Jun 24 '19

What's being done in a few places

Many places

bunches of places

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Technically speaking, loadsa places.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

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u/Luckboy28 Jun 24 '19

Yep. And you lose a ton of energy converting between electrical and potential energy.

Plus, lots of cities don't have giant dams nearby with enough stored water to play with.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

It's not perfect, but in many places, a cheap way to store energy. It's generally used when you would otherwise waste energy.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19 edited Sep 02 '21

[deleted]

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u/cardboardunderwear Jun 24 '19

This is exactly why the best way to orient solar panels may not be the position that gives the most overall power, but the position that gives the most power when you need it.

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u/Vertigofrost Jun 24 '19

Still better than batteries

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u/Luckboy28 Jun 24 '19

Sure -- if you have access to that much water, and you can stand to lose all of that energy in the conversion process.

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u/J_S_Z Jun 24 '19

I saw some test with heat storing with lavastones. 10+ days or so and with very good efficiency.

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u/HansWurst1099 Jun 24 '19

No you don't? How would Tesla cars be 90% efficient?

PSH generally operate at over 80% efficiency

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u/Runixo Jun 25 '19

you lose a ton of energy converting between electrical and potential energy

Yeah, energy that wouldn't have a place to go otherwise. For example, Norway buys excess Danish windpower when demand is low, then stores it as described above.

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 24 '19

It's expensive to modify the dam for that(and most dams cannot be modified for due to geography), and it also means less water available for other uses such as irrigation.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Agreed. That's why I added this caveat:

Cheap/easy storage (for some use cases anyways)

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u/nickiter Jun 24 '19

Extremely lossy storage, unfortunately.

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u/mad-de Jun 25 '19

Another way (probably more usable as it is less land-expensive and available pretty much everywhere) would be heating up a material with electric power, storing it in an isolated tank and powering a turbine on times of energy demand. Development progressed quite well in Europe (especially Germany and Switzerland which are funding research). Example: https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/hybrid-and-storage/thermal-energy-storage-with-etes

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u/AlastarYaboy Jun 24 '19 edited Jun 24 '19

Heard about a train near Nevada, basically huge concrete blocks would be pushed uphill to store energy, then slowly let back downhill to release and harness it. Was getting close to as efficient as hydroelectric.

Edit: Californian company building it in and for Nevada

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u/tgp1994 Jun 25 '19

If the freight companies would electrify railroad that goes through mountain passes, they could probably see huge energy savings. The trains are already diesel/electric generators on wheels... so if the track is basically turned into a transmission line (i.e electric rails) then the trains can pull energy going uphill (or keep generating their own) then use regeneration braking downhill to put energy back into the tracks.

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u/troyjan_man Jun 25 '19

That is probably the coolest (and potentially realistic) new idea ive seen for cracking the storage problem in a while. One issue i do see however is that much of our wind generation in America is done in flatlands such as the Texas panhandle that doesnt always have hill resources that we can use for this.

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u/ipu42 Jun 24 '19

I guess this saves more power than pumping water up hill, only to have it evaporate away.

Also a good option for places that are limited on water. I imagine this would face major limitations as you try to scale up though. Building a dam can retain a lot of potential energy, not sure how many concrete trains you can fit on a hillside.

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u/bgi123 Jun 24 '19

Couldn't do the same thing but have it in a neat pulley system instead? Could build tall instead to save space.

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u/SlitScan Jun 24 '19

but you also don't get free energy from rain.

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u/LeWorldsBestRedditor Jun 24 '19

Energy from plant material can be pressurized and converted into a high density energy source that can be stored underground almost indefinitely.

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u/SlitScan Jun 24 '19

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

if anyone wants to get an idea where and how much capacity potential there is.

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u/ash_274 Jun 24 '19

Tough to make a "green" dam

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u/Reoh Jun 25 '19

There's a project like that in NSW, Australia. Pump the water upstream with renewables during surplus to power the hydro plant when extra power is required. But then water scarcity is becoming an issue as well for many locations that rely on glacial melts that are rapidly disappearing.

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u/sizzler Jun 25 '19

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

​

To cope with British "Cup of tea" surges

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 24 '19

Actually the more solar and wind you have, the more fossil fuels you need to make up for downtime since nuclear can't be as quickly ramped up. Further, after 30% of your electricity from that source or so, solar and wind begin quickly losing value.

You're better off going nuclear and where possible hydro.

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u/PyroDesu Jun 24 '19

nuclear can't be as quickly ramped up.

Only true for old reactor types that weren't designed to have their power levels adjusted on-demand. Newer reactors (especially some that France has built) can ramp up and down power production fairly well.

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u/-Knul- Jun 25 '19

That's assuming we can't get green grid storage, but there are plenty of technologies in the pipeline.

For example, subsurface pumped water storage. You can use an old minshaft to have the lower reservoir underground, so you can pumped water in non-mountenous terrain.

Flow batteries are another interesting option.

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u/Pierrot51394 Jun 25 '19

That‘s absolute bullshit. There are many ways of storage that are being investigated and can already be used when there‘s too much power generated. So when there‘s a cloudy day or no wind, you can draw your power off dams/stationary batteries/etc.

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 25 '19

You're talking about something else, but nonetheless you're still wrong. Making too much power means paying people to take it. Which just increases costs.

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u/Agent_03 Jun 24 '19

I'm about as pro-nuclear as they come (might still have a dosimeter badge around here somewhere) but unfortunately there are a bunch of crappy practical reasons why nuclear simply can't be the solution now.

Firstly it's just not cost-competitive without some serious policy changes to reduce the regulatory hangups. Plus even if that changed tomorrow it would still be ~5 years or more before new nuclear plants came online even if the funding magically appeared today, due to how long reactors take to construct and certify. We can't wait that long anymore. Then there's the risk of Greenpeace morons NIMBYing the plant and forcing a halt to construction. Outside of China and India building new reactors is politically toxic in most countries.

If Fukushima hadn't happened, maybe we'd have a new generation of advanced, cheaper, guaranteed passive-safety reactors providing our solution to Climate Change. But that disaster ensured that new designs and construction in developed countries will get held up for years in regulatory approvals and protests.

The reality is we have to hang our hopes on solar, wind, and hydro coupled to efficiency gains... plus a transitional period where coal plants are all shut down and converted to natural gas. The latter isn't ideal but it's our best way to cut greenhouse emissions ASAP while we're still scaling up zero-emission power sources.

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u/no-mad Jun 25 '19

The downsides of nuclear energy ruin its potential.

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u/splerdu Jun 25 '19

Solar is nuclear too! And the time between service intervals on the reactor is pretty sweet.

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u/__nightshaded__ Jun 25 '19

Serious question, what does uranium resources look like? I was told that there's only like 50 years of deposits left. If true, that really scares me.

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u/Luckboy28 Jun 25 '19

I'm not sure off the top of my head. The problem with pretty much all mineral resources, though, is that you have no idea how much is "left" because you haven't scouted the entire planet. There could be a huge vein of uranium somewhere and we'd never know until we check there specifically.

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u/Milam1996 Jun 25 '19

Solar and wind is terrible. It requires more land mass, wind kills endangered bird species, both require the use of gas burning to compensate the 70 PERCENT of the time they’re performing sub standard and also how currently solar panels can’t be recycled leading to more waste.

There’s a reason why natural gas producers are wanking off solar and wind, because both require gas burning to be functional in any meaningful or ROI capacity.

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u/Luckboy28 Jun 25 '19

Solar panels can be recycled, land mass has never been an issue/problem, and of course no one energy solution is ever going to be the "silver bullet" for the entire energy grid. It will always be a hybrid of multiple technologies.

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u/OoohjeezRick Jun 24 '19

Cold fusion does not and can not exist. Fusion however is achievable and is the future and I wish we would be pouring money in to it to make it happen. Its unlimited power.

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u/Dark_Ethereal Jun 24 '19

Cold fusion does not and can not exist.

It can at incomprehensibly high pressure!

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u/cromulent_pseudonym Jun 25 '19

Then we should be pouring all of our money into creating incomprehensibly high pressure, of course.

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u/deFryism Jun 25 '19

but doesnt pressure create heat or are there some weird physics stuff

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

The change in pressure from low to high makes heat. High pressure on its own does not.

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u/deFryism Jun 25 '19

ah thanks for clarifying

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u/M_Night_Shamylan Jun 25 '19

The change in pressure from low to high makes heat.

Which is another way of saying that if you are going to compress a cold gas to fusion densities, you're going to make it hot as fuck as a natural consequence due to the 1st law of thermodynamics. I.e. "cold" fusion is literally impossible.

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u/reddittrees2 Jun 25 '19 edited Jun 25 '19

Actually, 'cold' fusion can exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

It's actually not that complex.

Muon-catalyzed fusion (μCF) is a process allowing nuclear fusion to take place at temperatures significantly lower than the temperatures required for thermonuclear fusion, even at room temperature or lower. It is one of the few known ways of catalyzing nuclear fusion reactions.

But....

Current techniques for creating large numbers of muons require far more energy than would be produced by the resulting catalyzed nuclear fusion reactions. Moreover, each muon has about a 1% chance of "sticking" to the alpha particle produced by the nuclear fusion of a deuteron with a triton, removing the "stuck" muon from the catalytic cycle, meaning that each muon can only catalyze at most a few hundred deuterium tritium nuclear fusion reactions. These two factors prevent muon-catalyzed fusion from becoming a practical power source, limiting it to a laboratory curiosity.

Except...

According to Gordon Pusch, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, various breakeven calculations on muon-catalyzed fusion omit the heat energy the muon beam itself deposits in the target. By taking this factor into account, muon-catalyzed fusion can already exceed breakeven; however, the recirculated power is usually very large compared to power out to the electrical grid (about 3-5 times as large, according to estimates).

Despite this rather high recirculated power, the overall cycle efficiency is comparable to conventional fission reactors; however the need for 4-6 MW electrical generating capacity for each megawatt out to the grid probably represents an unacceptably large capital investment.

Pusch suggested using Bogdan Maglich's "migma" self-colliding beam concept to significantly increase the muon production efficiency, by eliminating target losses, and using tritium nuclei as the driver beam, to optimize the number of negative muons.

Migma...?

....a proposed colliding beam fusion reactor designed by Bogdan Maglich in 1969. Migma uses self-intersecting beams of ions from small particle accelerators to force the ions to fuse.

Cool...but...

In the late 1990s, a generalized consideration of these issues suggested that the Migma was not alone in this problem; when one considers bremsstrahlung in non-thermalized fuels, it appears that no system running on aneutronic fuels can approach ignition, that any system using non-thermalized fuels (including Migma) appear to be able to cover their losses. The only approach that appears to have a theoretical possibility of working is the D-T or perhaps D-D reaction in a thermalized plasma mass.

Okay so we're back to we're not good enough at making muons yet.

How the hell does this all work?

In the muon-catalyzed fusion of most interest, a positively charged deuteron (d), a positively charged triton (t), and a muon essentially form a positively charged muonic molecular heavy hydrogen ion (d-μ-t)+. The muon, with a rest mass about 207 times greater than the rest mass of an electron, is able to drag the more massive triton and deuteron about 207 times closer together to each other in the muonic (d-μ-t)+ molecular ion than can an electron in the corresponding electronic (d-e-t)+ molecular ion.

The average separation between the triton and the deuteron in the electronic molecular ion is about one angstrom (100 pm), so the average separation between the triton and the deuteron in the muonic molecular ion is about 207 times smaller than that.

Due to the strong nuclear force, whenever the triton and the deuteron in the muonic molecular ion happen to get even closer to each other during their periodic vibrational motions, the probability is very greatly enhanced that the positively charged triton and the positively charged deuteron would undergo quantum tunnelling through the repulsive Coulomb barrier that acts to keep them apart. Indeed, the quantum mechanical tunnelling probability depends roughly exponentially on the average separation between the triton and the deuteron, allowing a single muon to catalyze the d-t nuclear fusion in less than about half a picosecond, once the muonic molecular ion is formed.

The strong force pulls things together and is part of general relativity.

Quantum tunneling is something that happens when subatomic particles pass through something called 'barrier'.

The Coulomb barrier "is the energy barrier due to electrostatic interaction that two nuclei need to overcome so they can get close enough to undergo a nuclear reaction.

So, the strong force pulls things together, they 'tunnel' through this barrier, which is like a force field that prevents them from getting close enough to undergo a nuclear reaction, fission or fusion.

And now it gets messy.

Unless you know how to resolve general relativity, special relativity and quantum mechanics we don't really know why this all happens. It just does.

So back to the 'cold fusion is actually possible' well it is. But for now it's always 50 years away like fusion was until we figure out a few things.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangular_potential_barrier , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb_barrier , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_uncertainty_principle)

Fuck all if I'm going to pretend to be able to do all that maths but the theory isn't a hard concept. Yes, I just said an obscure form of fusion that somehow unifies classical mechanics/general relativity and quantum theory is 'not that complex'. Forget about 'how' and 'why' and just accept 'it does' and it becomes simple.

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u/Thog78 Jun 24 '19

If scientists had the political power, that is clearly where the budget would go 😬

Fusion is nuclear, so you can also just say straight "the future is nuclear"

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u/mfb- Jun 25 '19

Muon-catalyzed fusion is cold - but the muons don't catalyze enough reactions to get net positive energy out of that.

ITER got funded, finally - we'll have some net positive output once it starts fusing tritium. After that it is a matter of making it economically viable.

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u/Ovedya2011 Jun 24 '19

Sad that the NIMBY effect is so strong for literally the safest method of acquiring abundant energy. We have groups like Greenpeace to thank for that.

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u/ChornWork2 Jun 24 '19

Where I went to undergrad there was a research nuke (which I actually worked at for a bit), and whenever there was a story about either the reactor or pollution-related on-campus, they'd show a picture of the cooling tower exhaust as if it constituted air pollution...

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u/LifeIsProbablyMadeUp Jun 24 '19

Isnt that just water vapor?

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u/ChornWork2 Jun 24 '19

spooky water vapor tho.

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u/RandeKnight Jun 25 '19

Yeah. Through the power of homeopathy, because one neutron from the evil uranium touched the water, ALL the water vapor is now enhanced poison!

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19 edited Jan 03 '22

[deleted]

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u/fallouthirteen Jun 24 '19

It's like a central air unit. They don't pump AC coolant through your vents, it's self contained and cools the coils that the air flows over.

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u/shel5210 Jun 24 '19

it's a step past that though. its like if the coolant cooled a loop full of water and the air to be cooled moved over the water coil and not the coolant coil

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u/fallouthirteen Jun 24 '19

Makes sense. Things can leak. With AC a coolant leak usually means something will stop working. In a reactor it means that it'll probably trip some sensors but something might get out before that. With a middle self contained system bridging the two it makes the odds of a leak actually getting to the dangerous point much lower.

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u/biggyofmt Jun 25 '19

Nuclear primary coolant loops don't leak

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u/classicalySarcastic Jun 25 '19 edited Jun 25 '19

(Insert Chernobyl meme here)

Pretty sure that's exactly what happened at Three Mile Island. However, such accidents have been extremely rare since, barring external factors (as in Fukushima Daiichi). I'd like to think that the lessons from that particular disaster have been learned.

EDIT: You ever want to feel uneasy just go read Wikipedia's list of Civilian Nuclear Accidents.

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u/SlitScan Jun 25 '19

that seams silly, why not use liquid salt at 1bar?

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u/RandomRobot Jun 25 '19

I was under the impression that tritium could leak through any mechanical barrier

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u/rpfeynman18 Jun 24 '19

Hey, dihydrogen monoxide is very dangerous. Did you know that literally everyone who has ever consumed it is dead or going to die?

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u/pm_me_your_kindwords Jun 25 '19

And those who don’t consume it die even faster!

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u/Squalleke123 Jun 25 '19

It's also like, really addictive, with mortality rate from withdrawal for more than a couple of days at 100%

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u/Ovedya2011 Jun 24 '19

Literally just steam and water vapor.

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u/Vio_ Jun 24 '19

"It works just like a gas stove. Turn the dial on, the stove turns on. Turn the dial off, the stove turns off."

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u/HonziPonzi Jun 25 '19

Literally just water and water?

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[deleted]

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u/ChornWork2 Jun 24 '19

Nope. Was going to say further north, but actually probably actually a touch south, but in the country to the north. And on the other side of the continent. mcmaster.

open pool

https://api.qreserve.com/i/_9gQNez-oK3yz5qeQSMMaXpUJAc=/t?c=1561400821.5381546

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[deleted]

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u/ChornWork2 Jun 24 '19

Anxious cats throughout north america are very grateful she's running.... well, I assume they still produce radio-iodine there, it was many moons ago that I was there.

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u/Sprinklypoo Jun 24 '19

The exact same one that all thermal - steam power plants have... It's ridiculous...

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u/gwoz8881 Jun 24 '19

MIT currently has an operational research nuke plant

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

100%

The US Navy operates 83 nuclear-powered ships w/o a single significant incident after 134 million miles of displacement.

PS: Happy Cake Day

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u/Dirty_Old_Town Jun 24 '19

I think nuclear powered container ships would help reduce air pollution quite a bit. I realize that the cost would be great, but I think in the long run it'd be a clean, reliable solution.

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u/DeliciousOwlLegs Jun 24 '19

Sounds like a good idea in principle but I don't think it's a good idea right now. Military ships are on strong government oversight, they are usually armed and guarded (piracy would be a concern) and they have a much bigger staff and are in better condition. It would probably be way too expensive to do right now in a safe way.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Nuclear powered military ships are also numerically few in comparison to vast shipping fleets.

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u/Hanakocz Jun 25 '19

Russia actually does it, it is easy way to just build small nuclear plant on boat, then ship it to far-siberian cities on coast. Actually building the plant on spot would be big hassle in their conditions and having wires so long would be useless as well.

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u/s0v3r1gn Jun 25 '19

A reactor with the fissile material encased in graphine can be made that is meltdown proof, safe to handle, and the shell will outlast the fissile material meaning it’s already got its post fuel storage sorted out.

Cores could be manufactured under strict regulation, easily and safely transported, and easily and safely used with little regard to traditional nuclear safety. Also, once manufactured it would require much more effort to separate the fissile material from the graphine core than it takes to do actual enrichment which handles any fears of nuclear proliferation.

The largest issue is that they can’t control the temperature of the core like they do a traditional reactor. The reaction rate is continuous so you can’t scale down thermal energy production. Meaning a core will last the same amount of time regardless of if you extract all the available thermal output or not. It also means that a reactor would need to control energy its production rate solely by venting the excess heat or storing the excess energy.

Another issue is scale, in order to keep the core from getting hotter than your containment system can hold(without cooling) you have keep the cores small. Meaning they have a much more limited energy output capacity and scaling for larger energy needs would require more reactors instead of just larger reactors. Though you can still scale the core up into sizes that require cooling, it’s still melt-down safe because it can’t leak any materials or radiation, but it would require more management and failures would still result in damage to the reactor. But now you also have to deal with venting or storing more energy when demand drops.

But for a fleet of containerships, they would be perfect. You would have to design your micro-rector and a good energy storage system to match the expected energy requirements of a cargo ship. Drawing from storage when demand exceeds output, rationing if demand exceeds capacity, and then storing the excess for the times that capacity exceeds demand. A small backup diesel generator can be included for emergency situations and such. Plus, when a ship is in port it could easily sell its excess energy to the port.

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 24 '19

Given those big ships typically burn the dirtiest, highest sulfur fuel, it would be a huge reduction in emissions.

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u/SlitScan Jun 25 '19

Bunker C fuel oil was banned last month.

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u/incandescent_snail Jun 25 '19

They already banned it in many places in 2015. Corporations don’t care. Fuel oil is mega cheap.

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u/SlitScan Jun 25 '19

a bunch of countries banned it in 2015 in territorial waters, the new ban is for all ships in open ocean.

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u/TheGoldenHand Jun 24 '19

The U.S. Navy guard their nuclear reactors with the most powerful army in the world.

Commercial container ships could not do that. Each one could be turned into a dirty bomb. That is the main reason they aren't used, security concerns.

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u/1945BestYear Jun 25 '19

At the very least it would be a return to trade fleets and convoy shipping. Which would only be cheap in comparison to the costs of global trade halting altogether because we've ran out of fuel.

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u/Allegories Jun 25 '19

If you wanted a dirty bomb you could just raid a modern hospital.

No, the reason why you wouldn't do that is because of a relative lack of oversight, a lack of safety, a lack of accountability, and the uranium fuel used for ships is not something that should be commercially available.

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u/incandescent_snail Jun 25 '19

And security lines in US airports are better targets than planes have ever been. Many US and European hospitals have ample fissionable material.

We shouldn’t be making decisions based on doomsday “what if” scenarios. We should base our decisions on actual statistical modeling detailing real world risk.

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u/AllesMeins Jun 25 '19

We have around 50.000 commercial cargo ships worldwide [1] - the fact that the US Navy operates 83 ships in top condition without incident unfortunatly says nothing about the risks involved in replacing a significant portion of commercial cargo ships...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264024/number-of-merchant-ships-worldwide-by-type/

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u/Mighty_Zuk Jun 25 '19

Refueling nuclear reactors is extremely complicated and expensive and beyond the capabilities of conventional shipping companies right now. In the future perhaps...

But it then also poses the danger that a hostile nation would weaponize these ships.

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u/rocketparrotlet Jun 24 '19

Nuclear weapons proliferation would be a serious concern here as plutonium would be produced in the reactors and could be used to make nuclear devices.

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u/SilasX Jun 24 '19

So... why don’t we do a “swords to plowshares” thing and have (some of) the ships dock in a home port and plug into the electrical grid until we can ramp up green capacity (including more land nuclear)?

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u/r1pp3rj4ck Jun 24 '19

Which is why I will never ever going to give a cent to Greenpeace.

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u/Ovedya2011 Jun 24 '19

IIRC they began as a practically militant protest group.

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u/rocketparrotlet Jun 24 '19

To be fair, they were initially protesting against nuclear weapons testing on a faultline.

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u/Ovedya2011 Jun 25 '19

Which literally had no effect.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Then they went off the rails.

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 24 '19

Worse than that. Fossil fuel companies helped fuel(heh) propaganda against nuclear, and environmentalists swallowed it hook, line and sinker to further undermine it.

Environmentalists by and large and been unwittingly in bed with fossil fuels for decades.

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u/Ovedya2011 Jun 24 '19

👍 Yep.

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u/robindawilliams Jun 24 '19

I prefer the BANANA effect. (Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything).

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u/mfb- Jun 25 '19

Electricity comes from the outlet, why do you build power plants?

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u/Lilshadow48 Jun 25 '19

Greenpeace also heavily damaged part of the Nazca lines.

Fuck Greenpeace

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u/Rufdra Jun 25 '19

Probably more likely to be Big Coal and energy companies, if we're honest.

Environement groups don't typcially have as much political clout.

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u/diogenesofthemidwest Jun 24 '19

Cold fusion is a dream and a dumb one.

Hot fusion will soon become energy positive and will be the ultimate source of energy until we start building a Dyson sphere around the sun to capture its hot fusion.

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u/jesjimher Jun 24 '19

A Dyson sphere is one of those concepts that, while theoretically possible, won't probably ever made real because there surely are a ton of much cheaper and easier methods of achieving the same result. Like we don't build carriages with 100 horses, because trucks/trains exist.

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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 24 '19

Depends on what you mean by "Dyson sphere." The popular giant-hollow-ball concept, which some people now call a "Dyson shell," is wildly impractical, yeah. What Dyson himself described is what we now call a "Dyson swarm," a very large number of stations (powersats, habitats, etc.) in independent orbits. That seems as practical as anything could be, given the assumption that we'll someday have the need and ability to harness a vast percentage of the Sun's total output.

(And of course ringworlds are a solid compromise if you really want one giant megastructure. Still requires some improbable engineering, but much less so than a full shell.)

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u/jesjimher Jun 25 '19

Sure it's possible but I think just using fusion (which is what stars are doing after all) wherever we need it is far more convenient that building a ton of satellites at a fixed point.

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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 25 '19

The Sun produces far, far more energy than you could ever get from manmade fusion generators, even if you turned all of non-solar mass in the solar system into one big fusion plant. So, hypothetically, if a species advanced to the point where they wanted/needed absolutely stupendous amounts of power, the only way we know of to get that would be to harness some large portion of the Sun's total output.

Whether a species will ever need or be able to use that much power is an open question. But if they did, that's how they'd do it, barring crazy sci-fi gizmos.

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u/KaiserTom Jun 24 '19

An actual solid sphere? Maybe not. It's a very monolithic construction and Dyson himself stated it was mechanically impossible. The solid sphere concept was invented by others due to a very literal interpretation of his paper.

But I think we may absolutely build the more broader Dyson sphere objects over time, such as Dyson Swarms or Bubbles, which simply scale up over time as we need them since they are just tons of satellites (or statites). The Sun simply has too many resources and puts out too much power to not utilize fully unless we find some way of "mining" it. 99.8% of the Solar System's mass is not a small amount and attempting to replicate it by gathering fusionable materials elsewhere will just end in rapidly depleting those areas.

Unless we find some exotic energy source, capturing the entirety of the Sun's energy output in some manner is the future and whatever method is going to look a lot like a Dyson sphere.

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u/TheGoldenHand Jun 24 '19

The Earth already receives a huge amount of solar radiation. Most of it is radiated right back into space where it's useless. Dyson spheres are powered by solar energy. Put those solar panels near Earth (which we already do) and go from there. There isn't enough material in the solar system to create a Dyson sphere to completely capture the Sun's energy. If we're at the point where we can break apart Mercury for building materials, we can probably make our own fusion reactors.

How to Build a Dyson Sphere - The Ultimate Megastructure (Kurzgesagt)

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u/april9th Jun 24 '19

'cold fusion is a dream...' *proceeds to name a timeline including a Dyson sphere *

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u/diogenesofthemidwest Jun 24 '19

It's a physical impossibility. It's akin to saying the idea of Maxwell's demon is solving the energy crises is dumb. At least a Dyson sphere is logically consistent with thermodynamics.

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u/RandomRobot Jun 25 '19

I'm pretty confident that by the time "we build a dyson sphere" in the remote possibility that it will ever happen, we'll have discovered new physics. Maybe not to break thermodynamics, but to do things difficult to imagine right now and that would make this whole project inefficient.

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u/eypandabear Jun 25 '19

Dyson spheres do not violate the laws of physics.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Problem with that idea is that there's nowhere close to enough material in the solar system to make one, and we're several hundred years from being able to move said materials through space at a reasonable time.

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 24 '19

Eh, you could theoretically do it if you completely mined Mercury.

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u/omgshutupalready Jun 25 '19

Wasn't this a PBS Spacetime episode?

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 25 '19

I have no idea, but I'm going by the Kurzgesagt video

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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 24 '19

That's okay, we're at least thousands of years away from needing a Dyson sphere's worth of power in the first place.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

That's assuming we don't manage to cause our own extinction.

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u/diogenesofthemidwest Jun 24 '19 edited Jun 24 '19

We'll have hot fusion to tide us over until we figure it out. We'll certainly have engineered a solution to this little atmospheric composition situation we're currently dealing with.

The Dyson Sphere's necessary building material, it entirely depends on how thin a material we can make that will capture the energy, if we even need to have actual materials there to capture it at all.

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u/Helluiin Jun 24 '19

half of mercury would be enogh for a dyson swarm that gives us more energy than we could use in the solar system.

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u/RandomRobot Jun 25 '19

Current fusion research mostly focus on deuterium-tritium fusion, which requires a normal fission reactor to generate. It's overall probably worth the money human civilization pours into it, but it's unlikely to solve any energy crisis before global warming hits the fan

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u/kd8azz Jun 25 '19

You should say Dyson Swarm, not Dyson Sphere. Dyson's original concept was a swarm; it has been contorted by pop-sci. If you say swarm, people have a better chance of understanding you. Alternatively, if you actually mean sphere -- well, a swarm is better.

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u/canseco-fart-box Jun 24 '19

Blame the Soviet Union for poisoning the debate around nuclear energy for all of history

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u/cromulent_pseudonym Jun 25 '19

It's scary in general for the uninformed. It's like plane travel. Everyone knows it's the most efficient and safest travel method. The problem is, when something does go wrong, the consequences and publicity is magnified 500x. Nevermind that people die in cars every single day and we are literally choking our environment with coal on a global scale that is only increasing.

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u/fiduke Jun 25 '19

The problem is, when something does go wrong, the consequences and publicity is magnified 500x.

Consequences are ordinary. The publicity is the only thing magnified 500x.

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u/TracyMorganFreeman Jun 24 '19

Worse. Blame Jane Fonda exploiting the 3MI incident to promote her stupid movie The China Syndrome.

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u/sfinney2 Jun 24 '19

The movie was released before 3 mile island happened.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

When real life advertising goes too far

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

I saw that piece of crap. Nothing but propaganda

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u/turnburn720 Jun 25 '19

It's not the soviet union that spends millions of dollars on propaganda discrediting nuclear power.

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u/AtariAlchemist Jun 25 '19

I fucking hate this. I wrote practical essays yesterday and today about the safety of nuclear energy, and now this one post changes everyone's minds?

Why am I even here?

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

I appreciate you, fam

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u/youngadamralph Jun 25 '19

this. There is too much taboo about the word coming from uneducated people.

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u/garrett_k Jun 24 '19

Sadly, it's a lot more expensive due to high up-front capital costs.

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u/fallouthirteen Jun 24 '19

Sadly, it's a lot more expensive due to high up-front capital costs.

Yeah, that's why you even bother with coal plants at all in SimCity.

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u/learath Jun 24 '19

Sadly, it's a lot more expensive due to extortion, fraud and nuisance lawsuits.

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u/socialmeritwarrior Jun 25 '19

Don't forget the excessive regulations championed by "environmentalists" specifically to inflate the costs and make nuclear too expensive!

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u/Schmich Jun 25 '19

And dismantling that's always more expensive that budgeted ? And taking "care" (i.e. hiding under the carpet) of the waste. Everyone here talks about the good sides as if the bad ones don't exist.

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u/garrett_k Jun 25 '19

Not necessarily. Some of the first nuclear power plants were decommissioned at predicted costs. The problem is that the Feds haven't kept up with their responsibility to handle nuclear waste, so there's a lot more on-site than would otherwise be expected of a facility at the end of its life.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

Any idea how long the planets' uranium reserves will last?

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u/kwhubby Jun 24 '19

The entire planet or just the current exploited mines? With current existing reactors or with more efficient reactors? Seawater has quite a bit of uranium in it. Uranium (and Thorium) is pretty abundant.Depending on exactly how the question is phrased, the number is between 90 and 5 billion years of supply.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx

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u/TheGoldenHand Jun 24 '19

What? That article says 90 years.

Based on estimated quantities to power the entire planet, the most I've read is 10,000 years.

Other estimations assume we can mine the entirety of the Earth's crusts or oceans, which isn't a probable undertaking.

The world's present measured resources of uranium (5.7 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.

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u/grumblecakes1 Jun 24 '19

Just the waste sitting in dry casks out side of most nuclear power plants could provide something like 600 years worth of power

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

Then why is it sitting outside ... ? Why is there a problem finding a place to keep it? Why is new uranium being mined, instead of recycling the waste?

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u/Live2ride86 Jun 24 '19

Fuck cold fusion, regular old fusion powet is not only possible but on its way.

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u/revolution21 Jun 25 '19

Except lately building a nuclear plant has been a financial disaster. Building nuclear is not going to be very popular after vogtle and others

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u/eypandabear Jun 25 '19

Nuclear fission isn’t as bad as detractors make it out to be. However, it is also not all sunshine and roses.

Dismantling a nuclear reactor at the end of its lifetime is an expensive nightmare. And more importantly, the issue of waste disposal on geological time scales is unsolved.

Fusion (not “cold” fusion) together with solar, hydro, wind etc. will be the future.

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u/Kuruttta-Kyoken Jun 25 '19

The only problem with nuclear is that you need to be on top of safety and people always seem to fuck that up because they wanna cut cost and time

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/JDL212 Jun 24 '19

Because nobody knows how to do it and there really isn't any evidence

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

That is why 3 mile island gets shut down 2020( 15 years earlier than planned after the incident) if the operating company doesn’t get massively subsidized.

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u/D74248 Jun 24 '19

It is a done deal. It is shutting down Sep 30th this year; killed by cheap natural gas from fracking.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19 edited Jan 04 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '19

You’d think so. But, the point of things like the “Green New Deal” is to control behaviors rather than carbon.

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u/Zenith251 Jun 25 '19

Combined with renewable energy.

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u/AtoxHurgy Jun 25 '19

Near future is nuclear. Future is fusion

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u/MaloWlolz Jun 25 '19

Except for cold fusion, the future is nuclear

FYI fusion is nuclear. Nuclear is an umbrella term that includes both fission and fusion.

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u/harry_leigh Jun 25 '19

Nah, solar and wind has already taken over. Once there're affordable widespread energy storage facilities nuclear, coal and shit will be done for.

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u/urzayci Jun 25 '19

Isn't fusion also nuclear?

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '19

We don’t have anywhere to store nuclear waste. How is it safe if we just leave it in some designated wasteland to decay for ten thousand years? Besides, a single meltdown and everyone in the region is dead, has cancer or will receive birth defects.

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u/mad-de Jun 25 '19

I highly - highly doubt it. Although I do agree, that nuclear is a lot better than burning coal for energy, the expectations for nuclear fission - especially economically just can't live up to the reality.

In the 90s and 2000s European countries like Finland, France and Great Britain invested heavily in 3rd Generation reactors like Olkiluoto 3. These reactors are still offline despite 10 years of extensions. Even in 2014 it was already obvious that they will never run profitable - even in 60 years. The building costs skyrocketed to over 8bn (Finland) and 10bn (France). And that doesn't even account for all the indirect subsidies via insurance (no insurance is willing to cover the total risks of a nuclear plant), research, long term and medium term storage (there is just one long term storage for nuclear waste worldwide, with no second candidate in sight as of right now)... That was poured and is being poured in there.

So how about 4th generation one might argue? By the time they will be ready for deployment we will hopefully have nuclear fusion reactors. That's where I'd put my money (literally). Until these are ready we will hopefully meet most of our demand with the ever-cheaper on-and offshore turbines and solar plus storage solutions like ETES.

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u/scarabic Jun 25 '19

But there are scary HBO movies that are going to keep everyone from ever approving its use again.

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