Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenthrow | Hacker News Reader

Consumption is lower at night pretty much everywhere, so it's not true we need 50% consumption in storage.

Additionally, it's obvious there are many other things we can do besides just match current consumption with renewables. We can and must mandate less wasteful consumption. Anyone who has flown at night in a window seat knows just how much energy is being wasted on completely pointless night time signage and lighting for businesses that are closed, as just one small example.

Regardless, nuclear and its permanent poisoning of the earth is not the answer.

View on HN

It's only in the summer where peak electricity demand happens around noon. It's largely flat across the board for much of the year [1]. Simply telling people to use less electricity is not a viable option.

> Regardless, nuclear and its permanent poisoning of the earth is not the answer.

By "poisoning the earth" you mean burying extremely small amounts of uranium half a kilometer under the ground. The entirety of the USA's nuclear waste from power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high. That's 70 years of nuclear waste.

By comparison, renewables + natural gas is poisoning the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. And there's no plan to operate wind and solar without natural gas until a breakthrough storage solution is discovered.

1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

> By "poisoning the earth" you mean burying extremely small amounts of uranium half a kilometer under the ground. The entirety of the USA's nuclear waste from power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high. That's 70 years of nuclear waste.

Citation needed, just looking and the temporal storage facilities of a single nuclear power plant is bigger than a football field.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

> 5. Nuclear fuel is extremely dense

>Because of this, the amount of used nuclear fuel is not as big as you think.

> All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.

nice disengenous quote used out of context, used nuclear fuel is a subset of waste from a nuclear power plant.

btw, in case a football field at a depth of 10 yards sounds small: http://www.ccnr.org/max_plute_aecb.html#1

> nice disengenous quote used out of context, used nuclear fuel is a subset of waste from a nuclear power plant.

What's disingenuous about it? I guess there's used concrete that needs to be cleaned up, but used concrete is hardly unique to nuclear plants.

Also, your link about plutonium overdoses seems like a non-sequitur. Most spent fuel is uranium, not plutonium. Furthermore, chances of it contaminating people when that waste is buried 400 meters underground beneath impermeable rock is zero. The only things that would make it get into the ecosystem is deliberate excavation, or maybe a meteor strike kicking.

The comment was about all nuclear waste from a power plant. You responded with figures for quantity of spent nuclear fuel, which is volumetrically a mere fraction of the total waste from a nuclear reactor.

Low level rad waste still has cumulative health exposure risks, subject to many requirements for proper handling and disposal. there are lots of materials "not unique to nuclear plants" which do become irradiated once used in a nuclear plant.

BTW in hanford washington each year 10% of the DoE's budget goes to preventing plutonium leaking into a river, a lot of hubris to trivialize the geoengineering involved in designing a "zero risk" containment

Wake me up when the Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act gets repealed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

This is the second time I've seen someone link to this graph on HN.

Both times they've claimed it showed demand is flat, when it very, very clearly shows a daily variation in power usage that correlates with sunlight hours.

Was that you as well or am I missing something obvious that everyone else can see?

Also, you know there's no plan to run a nuclear grid without natural gas and/or storage right? This isn't new information so it feels like your sources are more anti-reneweable than pro-nuclear if they've convinced you this is a reason to prefer nuclear.

The graph shows that there's isn't nearly as much hourly fluctuation as people seem to think. Even in the summer peak and trough electricity demand difference is only about a a third. Most of the time the difference is about 1/5th. People speak about demand fluctuation as though there's hardly any electricity usage at night. The reality is that solar and wind's intermittency is a big problem that cannot be solved by overproduction.

Nuclear does not require energy storage, its power output can be modulated by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Plants don't do this because they want to operate at 100% capacity as much as they can, it's not that nuclear plants can't modulate power output as is commonly stated.

> nuclear and its permanent poisoning of the earth is not the answer.

But somehow the "nuclear is bad" people are fine with coal plants throwing literal radioactive fumes on the atmosphere and prefer that to nuclear plants

So color me skeptic the worry is legitimate

Reply on news.ycombinator.com