Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [video]

> Following the exposure on 2 December 2001, all three patients exhibited in the first 24h symptoms of nausea, vomiting, asthenia (weakness), headaches and dizziness, followed by cutaneous radiation syndrome (CRS). These early clinical manifestations and anamnesis of the patients strongly indicated ARS of a haematological type for the three patients. Furthermore, Patient1-DN developed transitory oropharyngeal syndrome.

The last medical condition is usually found in older people, making swallowing difficult: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oropharyngeal_dysphagia

Also the PDF has some helpful pictures and diagrams. Looks like both original containers were nearly stacked and sideways on a rocky/hilly path, in a difficult to get to place.

It's not Russia.

However, thinking I understand something when I really don't will probably be the end of me :-P

On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.

Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear on price many hours of the day this becomes an even harder calculation.

Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation of storage can make the same, and still undercut you.

This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.

The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.

These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.

I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.

I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location.

security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.

Nuclear proliferation is a worldwide concern, but a new power plant in your backyard is as safe as relative to the national record.

Actually in some countries nuclear waste is already (part of) today's fuel using existing reprocessing technology.

For similar reasons note that coal burning power plants add WAY more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants.

So humans don't create radiation, they just mine it, concentrate it, extract energy from it, and then dispose of it. So we are just moving it around, not creating additional radiation.

Imagine we extract uranium from ocean water, the radiation levels in the ocean would go from low, to even lower. If we take the nuclear waste and distribute it across the ocean the radiation levels would (at worst) raise to the levels we started with.

Based on what I've read all the scientists that are experts in relevant fields say that dealing with nuclear waste is a political problem, not a scientific one. There are multiple reasonable solutions. My favorite it making giant spikes out of a mix of radioactive material and glass. Covering the spike with steel and dropping it where the ocean is deep, near a subduction zone, and the sedimentation rate is higher than the leakage rate. By the time the spike hits the ocean floor it's going fast enough to bury itself deeply, the sediment fills in behind and will keep getting deeper, and the spikes will get sucked beneath the continental plate and not bother anyone ever again.

The reason why the "waste" is dangerous is that there's a lot of energy in it - energy that can still be extracted at a later date. It might very easily be very valuable in the future.

Germany is really sad case, where they stopped using nuclear and replaced it with "clean coal". Terrible thing for the planet.

The Greens talk about nuclear waste and Fukushima, and meanwhile German green-washed coal plants and cheating diesel engines put crazy things in the air.

You can hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hand and be fine. Once it goes in the reactor to be fissioned, you'd get a fatal radiation dose in seconds if you stood next to it unshielded.

How much will it cost to re-capture an contain the CO2 generated by coal and gas?

Surely the onus is on whoever is claiming the technology does exist to provide some details of it.

I checked Wikipedia though [0] and the world's total installed P2G capacity looks like...less than 100 MW? It's at best one step above vapourware.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

Nobody serious is suggesting we do nothing but deploy nuclear reactors. Just in the energy sector, we should do a massive build-out of wind, solar, transmission, and, yes, nuclear.

> switching to wind+solar+storage and in the process democratizing energy production

These have large economies of scale too. While you might want to install a small propeller in your back yard, it's much more cost effective to get the energy from the grid supplied by a large scale wind farm.

> rethinking mobility (massive expansion of public transport, massive price reduction of public transport, massive investion in biking infrastructure, making outer city districts more attractive), putting a prize on CO₂ with a substantial steering effect (but ensuring that the proceeds of such a tax are given, in equal parts, to the population, so that people who contribute less-than-average to the climate crisis have more money available at the end of the day), transforming the system (because even with a prize for CO₂, there are lots of valuable things which cannot be measured in dollars, and competition pressure in unchecked capitalism deepens inequality and exploitation), ...

These may all be good ideas (and personally, I would certainly agree with some of those), but has nothing to do with whether the needed energy is produced by renewables, nuclear, or mass deployment of hamster wheels.

We don't actually know that. It's a model projection. Academic models have a long history of being wrong and seemingly always in the direction of being too pessimistic, across a variety of fields.

Do we need to transition away from fossil fuels? Sure. Are the models so robust and so beyond question that nuclear should be ruled out on the basis of a handful of years of construction time? No way. The science is nowhere near solid enough for that.

I think it amounts to "this only solves half the problem, so we shouldn't do it".

Most big problems aren't solved by just doing one thing. When global warming is finally solved, it will have been by 10 separate things that each solved 5-20% of the problem.

Also, imposing an arbitrary deadline in 2029 is horrible project management. In a commercial project it's also dumb, but at least there you can cancel the project, and people move on to do other things.

For Earth, we can't cancel the planet in 2029 if targets weren't met.

The story of how the Students made it is pretty great! https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/homemade-breeder-r...

Delivery and deployment costs to the middle of the ice sheet are not cheap.

Plus. nuclear material are only expensive because there are not enough usage - hence the economy of scale is small. They're arguably cheaper in the Soviet Union (even if they followed market terms).

The last diesel class was the 3x 1950s Barbels, decommissioned by 1990: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbel-class_submarine

And while giving RTGs to general population isn't the brightest idea, it's stupid to consider these issues as a wholesale dealbreaker for nuclear technologies.

Read: if there is no feasible route for them to be aspirated, ingested, or get into your eyes.

Making a new device that has this property seems to be a pretty straightforward problem that we know how to do. The problem comes when an old device has been damaged or destroyed kinetically or via pyrotechnics.

Considering cars are typically used for <10% of the day, the battery's static output wattage only needs to be about 1/10 of a car's operational wattage.

Basically when you get home and park your car, it just starts charging on its own from its nuclear battery. Optimize the nuclear battery size to minimize excess. If that battery gets full, release the excess as heat to the ground or sky, and also use some of it to maintain the lithium battery at optimal temperature. It will be only 1/10 of the driving wattage, so it will be much easier to do something with it.

Or plug in the car when you get home and it can power a good fraction of your home.