IIIpl4sm4III t1_is70ixv wrote on October 13, 2022 at 7:31 PM

Reply to comment by ialsoagree in US Federal Reserve sees EV “battery belt” developing as greater than 15 battery manufacturing facilities worth greater than $40 billion are in development in the US by ForHidingSquirrels

Sure, it might take that time (10yrs for each plant), but at least we are doing something during that time which essentially guantees a respectable power output. Im not sure about the economics, because nuclear is expensive to build but cheap to run, so what timeline is being used to judge kwh cost? Id rather pay more for reliable energy generation.

Im not going into the waste thing because its been beat to death, and not to be as big of an issue people thought when properly stored, and we have breeder reactors that use waste too.

ialsoagree t1_is73wuu wrote on October 13, 2022 at 7:52 PM

>Im not going into the waste thing

Of course not. Why would you deal with a problem that there's no good solution for? It kind of blows up your whole argument. Why acknowledge that.

Oh, there's good long term storage solutions? Where?

Oh, there's breeder reactors we can send it to? Where?

>Sure, it might take that time (10yrs for each plant)

10 years is about the minimum time, 40+ years is not an unreasonable length of time for it to take to complete a single nuclear power plant.

Watts Bar began construction in 1973, unit 1 was completed in 1996, unit 2 was completed in 2015. Combined, the plant can produce ~2.33GW of power and cost more than $23 billion to construct.

Meanwhile, offshore wind costs about $1.3 million per MW.

For $23 billion, you can build about 17.7GW of offshore wind, and it will be finished sooner than the 1 nuclear plant that produces about 1/10th the power.

IIIpl4sm4III t1_is7fyfk wrote on October 13, 2022 at 9:10 PM

If you think the waste management problem of nuclear "brings down my whole arguement", I dont know if you realize just how small of a drop in the ocean it really is compared to the shit we are doing now.

>Oh, there's good long term storage solutions? Where?

Using vitrification? Anywhere. >Oh, there's breeder reactors we can send it to? Where?

I wonder why there are none after the big stink people made about nuclear. Putting the cart before the horse.

ialsoagree t1_is7kxmw wrote on October 13, 2022 at 9:42 PM

>I dont know if you realize just how small of a drop in the ocean it really is compared to the shit we are doing now.

It's such a small problem, that beyond all the environmental regulations and monitoring we have to do, we also have an entire government program dedicated to the security of just nuclear waste:

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Nuclear%20SRMA%20Fact%20Sheet_508.pdf

It's literally described as "the most highly regulated and heavily guarded of all civilian infrastructure."

But tell me more about how small an issue it is.

>Using vitrification? Anywhere.

Which currently isn't being practiced in any substantial quantity in the US.

Even if it were, vitrified waste is still radioactive and must be carefully stored. While it does make the issue a little easier to manage, it is not a solution to the storage problem.

You cannot store vitrified nuclear waste "anywhere."

>I wonder why there are none after the big stink people made about nuclear. Putting the cart before the horse.

Actually it has nothing to do with that.

Breeder reactors were phased out primarily for two reasons:

We found more uranium fuel sources, so the need to get all the energy out of the uranium we had greatly diminished.

The navy needed pressurized water reactors because they were the only design that could be shrunk down to a size that would fit on ships - submarines in particular.

Because the navy poured so much money into the research and development of PWRs, the cost to build them commercially was highly subsidized. There was far less research completed on making reliable, safe breeder reactors, so the costs to pursue them were substantially higher.

I also appreciate that you didn't address the fact that per dollar, we can get almost ten times the power output from offshore wind, and we can do it faster.