Nuclear Power - C/D

Folks, there ain't nothing wrong with nuclear power. Chernobyl blew up because it was run by the atheist god-less Communists, and look where they are now, folks.

Also note how we are just investing in Noo Nooclear power just before a decision has to be made on Noo Nookes for the Nooclear Subs and without Nooclear Power we can't make Nooclear material for Nooclear Nookes.

Pillocks.

Atomkraft? Nein Danke!

is renewables stuff like wind farms? i have to admit a smidge of sympathy for the horrible tory country-dwellers who dislike the wind farms.

i like the idea of damns.

Nuclear power is bad becasue we still haven't worked out what to do with the waste. Nuclear power stations make pretty good terror targets. Accidents, whilst infrequent, have the potential to be much worse than other industrial accidents. Shiping fuel and spent fuel around is a dangerous business. No one has ever built a nuclear power station on time or on budget (same goes for most major projects though).

None of these problems are insurmountable. Would have been bettre if we'd bought into wave power 15 years ago.

no idea dude

http://glen.utdallas.edu/chernobyl.jpg

One gets the impression that national policy decisions on this have already been made.

http://www.tarifa-ar.de/Fotos/images/spinoutsurfschool_jpg.jpg

yeah, they are. see 'em when they're moving...

I think that windfarms can also be problematic for birds if they're placed on migration routes.

so don't put them in migration routes :) no, i heard something about this on the radio a year or so ago. birds can fly into them, yeah, but birdpeople know what heights birds generally fly at and it's not hard to build them at a height to make it less likely. also birds can see and stuff. also aeroplanes kill birds all the time (um i am basing this scientific fact on an 3ddi3 1zz4rd video) ("they call it bird-strike. it shouldn't be called bird-strike; it should be called engine-SUCK!" etc) and i don't see all these fucks using that as an argument against wind farms opposing new airports/runways/subsidised fuel for aeroplanes for the same reason.

Unfortunately, that would discount most of the windy exposed coasts in the south and east of the UK. And Tarifa for instance is right on the route from Africa to Europe.

Wasn't the large numbers of birds in the area one of the main objections to Maplin Airport, or have I just imagined that

It's also one of the main objections to the major expansion of Lydd (London Ashford) - Dungeness is one of the most important sites for birds in Europe.

Also, birds and other animals die in great numbers from oil spills. So take your pick.

xpost
Nick - good point about controlling usage...

there is an alternative to SO MUCH air travel.

Unfortunately, that would discount most of the windy exposed coasts in the south and east of the UK. And Tarifa for instance is right on the route from Africa to Europe.

i realised when i read that that i was picturing migration routes as similar to aeroplane corridors. BARGH.

There is no Tax on Aviation fuel. Everyone else apart from farmers and sailors pays tax on fuel.

Some renewables don't suit the national grid paradigm, (wave, hydro and offshore wind are the ones that do). There would be a lot of milage in community, borough and city level biomass CHP, solar and wind projects. One could argue for replacing the High tension electricity grid, which is inherrently lossy, with a liquified hydrogen distribution system feeding local level fuel cell generation, to supplement these other sources.

James Aach
http://RadDecision.blogspot.com

If the predicted mid-century climate effects of famine (and its riding buddy disease) weren't so severe I'd put all my chips on renewable energy. But its starting from such a small base, and has so many problems with intermittancy, that I think the ideal approach to reducing greenhouse emissions appears to be:

1) Provide incentives to ramp up utility scale renewable as fast as possible (primarily offshore and great-plains wind, and desert southwest solar thermal with storage)
2) Replace all coal burning plants with combined cycle natural gas plants (this wasn't feasable prior to the paradigm shift of horizontal drilling + multistage frac jobs in shale overcame a 30 year decline in availability. Combined cycle gas still produces around 0.5-0.6 as much CO2 as coal, so this is an interim solution.)
3) Increase nuclear power production as the lowest carbon cost base-load generation until mid-century, when hopefully renewable generation is sufficiently geographically dispersed and the distribution network sufficiently advanced to guarantee minimum availability.
4) As the reliability of mostly renewable electrical generation is demonstrated, slowly decommission nuclear plants, keeping a few thorium breeders to maintain the knowledge base.

The Sendai tsunami will be a global disaster if it prevents the world from reducing greenhouse emissions as fast as possible.

funny article about the current best-case disposal solution of casking, which most reactors are on the whole postponing due to cost & just winging it by increasing the capacity of spent fuel pools

Exelon Nuclear, operator of the twin-reactor LaSalle plant, says it pays about $1 million for each cask and that loading each one with fuel costs another $500,000. It has filled six casks so far, and the concrete pad on which they sit outdoors cost the company another $1 million.

The assumption is that the fuel will remain in the casks for “years, maybe decades,” said Peter Karaba, the plant manager. The fuel that was loaded the other day dates from the mid-1980s, when Mr. Karaba, 42, was still in high school.

Once the fuel enters a cask and has left the pool at the LaSalle plant, it joins others on a concrete pad a short walk from the reactor buildings. Maintenance is relatively simple. A worker checks twice a day to ensure that nothing is blocking the vents at the bottom of the outer cask so that air can circulate past the sealed steel capsule inside, carrying away the heat generated by the fuel.

Cask manufacturers anticipate decades of healthy demand for their product. “I joke my children will be doing my job,” said Joy Russell, a corporate development director at the manufacturer Holtec International.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/business/energy-environment/06cask.html?src=recg

after that last sentence, the only thing I can think of our civic duty as americans to vote eco-terrorists into office

/ is our civic duty

etc

Maintenance is relatively simple: Just check them twice a day, and transfer the fuel into new dry casks at a cost of $1.5 million every other decade or so for the next 100,000 years

Joy the corporate development director is quick to point out the benefits of this in terms of sustained consumer demand & job creation

putting aside all of the other (significant) critiques, i still don't see how building additional nuclear plants makes sense financially.

Maintenance is relatively simple: Just check them twice a day, and transfer the fuel into new dry casks at a cost of $1.5 million every other decade or so for the next 100,000 years

What could possibly go wrong?

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110620/ap_on_re_us/us_aging_nukes_part1
US Nuke Regulators Weaken Safety Rules

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_aging_nukes_part2
Tritium leaks found at many nuke sites

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110627/ap_on_re_us/us_aging_nukes_part3
Populations around US nuke plants soar

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_aging_nukes_part4
NRC and industry rewrite nuke history

dumb dumb dumb question from someone who doesn't understand, but if spent fuel still generates heat, why can't it continue being used for fuel?

probably not worth all the shielding and escape pods you'd have to build around it in return for the heat you'd get

yes it will keep generating heat for millenia, just not enough to generate the steam to efficently push the turbines

one of the more interesting promises made in the early years of nuclear power was that all the spent rods would be recycled, minimizing waste. but in 1976 when it came time to begin doing this, President Ford recognized that commercial reprocessing sites in other countries could lead to nuclear weapon proliferation, and so they shut down domestic recycling businesses and the world followed suit. so the early reassurances didn't pan out and the rods are piling up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

There's currently a wildfire very close to San Onofre:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnoAoa6IMAEvB9W.jpg:large

You may remember San Onofre from such films as:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5OQMoSCrqw

plant has been inoperative for a couple years now

Damn son. Save the boobies!

I didn't know it wasn't operational anymore!

permanently retired:
http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactor/songs/decommissioning-plans.html

one of the only good things to come out of the Fukushima meltdown

that leaves only one operating nuclear power plant in CA, PG&E's Diablo Valley plant and god willing one day that fucker will get shut down too

great, just great

http://www.king5.com/news/local/investigations/catastrophic-event-at-hanford-prompts-emergency-response/140990679

hmmmmmmmm

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/09/527605496/emergency-declared-at-nuclear-contaminated-site-in-washington-state

I'm sure Rick Perry is all over it

he probably even put on his glasses

his 3D safety goggles

This book looks interesting and terrifying

In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society, while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia--they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment--equaling four Chernobyls--laying waste to hundreds of square miles and contaminating rivers, fields, forests, and food supplies. Because of the decades of secrecy, downwind and downriver neighbors of the plutonium plants had difficulty proving what they suspected, that the rash of illnesses, cancers, and birth defects in their communities were caused by the plants' radioactive emissions.

There's been another delay in the plan to clean up the Fukushima nuclear plant. The Japan Times reported today that the country's government approved another revision to the cleanup schedule that will push removal of radioactive fuel rods from reactor Units 1 and 2 three years further down the road. This latest delay, which is due to newly uncovered damage in the storage pools, means that the cleanup is now six years behind schedule.

Along with developing a safe plan for removing radioactive fuel rods and melted fuel, even just getting a good look at the state of the reactor units has proven to be pretty difficult. In February, it took just two hours for extremely high radiation levels in the reactor's Unit 2 to destroy a robot sent in to clear debris and locate melted fuel. A second robot sent in a few days later also failed, though it was unclear whether that was due to radiation or the debris. In July, another robot fared a little better, snapping pictures of some melted fuel below Unit 3.

While fuel rod removal in Units 1 and 2 is now scheduled for 2023, debris removal in those units is still planned to begin in 2021. Unit 3 rod removal is expected to take two years to complete and is still scheduled to begin in 2018, though Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings -- the plant operator -- then has another major issue to deal with. It still doesn't know what it's going to do with all of the radioactive waste that starts to come out of the plant next year during cleanup. Decommissioning is expected to take 30 to 40 years to complete.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/27/japan-delayed-fukushima-nuclear-cleanup-again/

we are completely fucked. the technology to stop this leak hasn't even been invented yet. they keep sending robots in to just look at what's going on and they don't last more than a few hours. meanwhile they are storing radioactive water in thousands of giant storage pools sitting right next to this leak. best case scenario: if all goes well and another tsunami doesn't happen in the next 50 years and the massive electrified ice wall they are constructing to contain it holds up, someone invents a way out of this mess.

https://vimeo.com/24905300

^also this needs to be required viewing. the US nuked Japan twice but has exploded nearly a thousand on its own citizens.

From 2011-2020 (10 years) Germany's nuclear phase-out has resulted in ~10,000 deaths (1,100 per year) & $33 billion

The Private and External Costs of Germany's Nuclear Phase-Out

Germany having something of a rethink on this, but Taiwan continuing with plans to phase out nuclear by the end of the decade (I think?), which is quite interesting. Presidential elections next year, wonder if that will start to become more of a debate

They've had two referendums on this in recent years, with different results, so looks to be somewhat divisive.

Germany's last three nuclear plants closing down today

understandable now they're fossil fuel free

they just love that smell of burnt lignite smoke in the morning.

it seems quite mad when you've grown up in an area where all old the pit-heads are demolished + concreted over since the 70's/80's and the only remaining coal mine is a museum - that some European countries still have quite big and active coal-mining industries.

Just like in Dark

Somehow, we all missed the news that Amazon bought a nuke-plant powered data center

Talen Energy announced its sale of a 960-megawatt data center campus to cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon, for $650 million.

The data center, Cumulus Data Assets, sits on a 1,200-acre campus in Pennsylvania and is directly powered by the adjacent Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, which generates 2.5 gigawatts of power.

“We believe this is a transformative transaction with long term benefits,” said Mark “Mac” McFarland, Talen president and chief executive officer of Talen, on a Monday call with investors and media. As power demand continues to rise worldwide, “data centers are at the heart of that growth,” he added.

“Several years ago, Amazon set an ambitious goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040—ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement. As part of that goal, we’re on a path to power our operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original 2030 target,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “To supplement our wind and solar energy projects, which depend on weather conditions to generate energy, we’re also exploring new innovations and technologies and investing in other sources of clean, carbon-free energy. This agreement with Talen Energy for carbon-free energy is one project in that effort.”

"steam electric"

isn't solar power technically 'nuclear'? I'm mean... it's atoms and electrons and shit

i mean technically all modes of power generation involve atoms, which have nuclei

that's why you're the Doctor

Bezos being competitive since Bill Gates is trying to perfect nuclear fusion.

reactor envy

https://ifunny.co/picture/way-to-i-made-a-new-generate-energy-new-or-HMUhVG64A?s=cl

THANK YOU

even fusion. it's outrageous.

supposedly the guy who invented super soakers has also invented a brand new non steam powered way to generate electricity but idk how viable it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_thermoelectric_energy_converter

"She’s a Model. She’s Also a Nuclear Power Influencer. What?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/style/isabelle-boemke-nuclear-influencer-rad-future.html

In 2020, Ms. Boemeke, a Brazilian model who has posed for brands including Cult Gaia, began posting on social media as Isodope, a persona she created for her nuclear advocacy work. On Isodope’s Instagram and TikTok pages, Ms. Boemeke uses familiar influencer tropes like “get ready with me” videos, fitness regimens and beauty routines.

The point is to make nuclear energy appear cool while rendering high-level concepts digestible for a mainstream, very online audience. Ms. Boemeke has explained fusion and fission using Legos, and compared uranium pellets (which she also calls “magic spicy rocks”) to gummy bears, for scale.

The question is: Why?

Have I got angry about this on this thread? Not sure but try this argument.

This is so fucking stupid. Aside from the obvious issues - a high marginal cost, inflexible generator will never get dispatched in a market with zero marginal cost generation with low cost, highly flexible storage. Not without huge and continuous subsidies- and it gets worse by the time any of these white elephants get operational there will so many fully depreciated renewable assets in any energy system that any joker with a trading desk will scalp any nuclear generator every single settlement period.

And the Bs over AI needs baseload is, well, BS. when the VC period of AI ends th winners will be those that can optimise in tokens/W and $/token. Back anyone looking at scheduling and prioritizing compute. Not everything has to happen right now. Or just back China - banning the export of current generation chips is the best thing that could have happened to their AI industry. They are going to beat western bloat, are beating western bloat.

The worst thing though is the waste of intellectual capital - people are going dedicated their lives building this utterly useless shit and more are going to have to waste their lives fighting it, regulating it permitting it, making concrete for it…

As with many things this is a grift to capture public money and dafter investor money.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

(grift strengthens)

Britain plots atomic reboot as datacenter demand surges
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/25/uk_nuclear_power_reform/

where are they gonna get the water to cool the moon reactor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwCawrLaSzE