Seeing that they need quite a lot of clean water, which is not widely available everywhere during the entire year in big amounts, especially with these droughts due to climate change.
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There’s many different nuclear reactor designs
For the traditional ones that require lots of cooling water, oceans are typically used so they don’t suffer from droughts. If you actually need fresh water you have desalinization available, and nuclear power can power that.
There are more self-contained designs, as you would see on ships.
They’re also some hands-off designs that generate low amounts of power over a long period of time used for remote installations.
Would the hypothetical nuclear fusion power plant require less water? And do you think that when we finally find out how to do it, a fusion based design will become widespread?
Fusion designs currently require a ton of water for cooling (first wall and divertor) beyond what is needed for electricity production.
You’re asking me to speculate about a hypothetical. Depending on the type of nuclear fusion that actually comes to be … maybe.
Regardless of the fusion process itself, which might require prodigious amounts of heavy water or maybe even normal water I don’t know.
There’s what do you do with the heat, so in a traditional power plant, you generate heat, the heat is used to create steam, and the steam is used then generate electricity or do other types of useful mechanical work. This could be a closed circuit design, but it might be easier to have open circuits if you have available water. But once the water, steam has done the work, you might have to recycle it recapture it, cool it down. IE evaporative towers…
Could you build a nuclear power plant, or even a fusion power plant, that runs in the desert? Yes probably. Would it be more expensive than the equivalent plant near water source? Yes of course…
Ah, that you for your detailed response
Look at Helion. Their tech is kinda great and shows a lot of promise. Their fusion implementation dispenses with the whole “boil water to spin a turbine” method of power generation entirely. They rely on induction and the strong magnetic flux that the fusion process releases to directly convert the fusion process into electricity. Honestly, is is pretty genius. Further reading: Their patants Technology Review article
You need water to generate steam to turn a turbine and make electricity (same for coal, natural gas, fusion). However, many advanced reactor designs do not use water for the reactor coolant itself, unlike light water reactors that do. They use gas, molten salt, or liquid metals. As a result, you can get to quite high temperatures useful for process heat, such as hydrogen production. Direct desalination might also be doable, the issue/question being on the design of the non-nuclear side of the plant.
A lot of Gen IV designs are in the process of commercialization now, with demonstrations slated for later this decade.
Nuclear is feasible in lots of places if the question is, “given enough money can we build a nuclear plant here?”
Nuclear gets much less feasible if the question is, “how do we generate electricity in the most cost effective way we can?”
Yeah, let’s not add a financial incentive to cut corners on the nuclear reactor.
What do you define as nuclear power? Because something like Pioneer 10 which is in space since 1972, is using a nuclear reactor to provide its power, and it is still working.
yep. a lot of variance in different configurations of radioisotope thermoelectric generators - anywhere between a few watts to 5kW if they’re designed to be modular. TEG’s are crazy efficient, they just sit there & decay, producing power.
I wouldn’t worry too much about water availability for cooling (even though it’s an issue). I see a bigger “political” issue
A safe nuclear industry requires at laest the two following stuff
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A solid academic and industrial tradition, able to train skilled engineer and technician, but also researcher to prepare the future.
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A government strong enough to deal with the NIMBY, but weak enough to have an independent nuclear safety agency able to perform audits without caring about political pressure.
This works in a country like France, may still work in a country like Germany or US (even though NIMBY have more power there) but many country especially in the * third world* don’t have either trained “nuclear scientists” or a government able to guarantee nuclear safety
We can deal with NIMBY in certain situations, we (US) do have eminent domain laws where the govt is legally allowed to take your stuff, write you a check for an amount that should cover it, and wave you on your way.
We use it to build highways and stuff.
Nuclear is much harder, admittedly.
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Most power generation methods like coal have similar requirements, and it doesn’t have to be clean water. In costal areas, seawater can be used just fine.
Can this be an effective method of desalinization?
If seawater is used, couldn’t the steam be captured for fresh water?
You use seawater for cooling the systems. You could use excess power to run desalination plants, but not use the reactor directly.
They’re not economically feasible anywhere right now. Unfortunately nuclear power is very expensive compared to all the alternatives. Unless there’s some radical breakthrough I can’t see much nuclear being built in the future. No company would pay such a huge up-front cost to produce uneconomic electricity.
So the strict answer is - no, they’re not feasible everywhere. And also not feasible pretty much anywhere.
If anyone bothered to include externalities, nuclear is more than competitive. And a ton of the costs are purely regulatory. Sadly, the incompetence of the Soviets ruined nuclear power and likely doomed the planet.
Three Mile Island and Fukushima would like a word.
How much do you know about Three Mile Island? Fukushima was built in a stupid location, so lets not do that again. But Three Mile Island is often way over blown.
It’s public perception that is important here. That’s where the impact of Chernobyl is for building new plants. Public perception of the other events furthers doubts about the safety. It’s also easy to have hindsight about Fukushima, but it was built nonetheless.
With Three Mile Island everything that could go wrong did and it still wound up being an overblown non-issue. There have been exactly 0 environmental or health impacts due to Three Mile Island despite it being the worst nuclear disaster in US history.
Fukushima was built in a stupid location. How about we don’t build nuclear power plants on fault lines in tsunami prone areas. Literally 4 different fault lines converge on Japan, it is not a place anyone should be building nuclear power plants.
A word with what? Great examples of safe and effective design that kept all the fuel in the containment vessel?
Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown with no release of isotopes or actinides. Could it have been better, for sure, and the decommissioning and clean up had their own issues but in a single day the amount of toxic chemicals and radioactive dust given off in a single coal burner is greater than ALL the radiation released at TMI. If we are going to cite it as an example of failure or harm its only fair to show comparable harm for other currently subsidized forms of energy that are uncounted when it comes to their full harm outside of just global warming gasses.
No significant level of radiation was attributed to the TMI-2 accident outside of the TMI-2 facility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Fukushima was another great example of how safe nuclear can be when properly regulated. When the quake hit all of the online reactors went into shutdown stopping the reactors. The flaw at Fukushima was in emergency power and cooling as well as management. The backup cooling pumps were below the sea wall and in the basements of the buildings so they flooded. With the pumps flooded they could not keep the fuel in the reactors cool. Fukushima also had warnings that the sea wall was not sufficient to protect the facility. They ignored the warnings and did not raise the walls and as such the reactors ended up melting down but remained within the containment buildings. The explosions at Fukushima were related to hydrogen and were not related to reactors going prompt critical. The sister facility to Fukushima had higher walls, pumps above the reactors, and better management who used on-site materials to extend power to the facilities to keep the pumps running after they lost local power. https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived
So yeah outside of Chernobyl and some early test reactors, Nuclear has been shown to be the safest and least polluting form of power generation in history.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0832/ML083260701.pdf https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
Yes and no. Renewables are the best, but they’re inconsistent.
The environmental impact of coal is much worse than nuclear, so nuclear is a good consistent baseline power to be supplemented by renewable generation.
The base load argument doesn’t hold water any more - not when there are places which are progressing towards being totally free of base load. Eg. South Australia is already nearly all renewable power with in-fill from batteries and transient gas power when needed. They’re still currently getting some base load from other states but it’s small and gradually being phased out.
The largest hurdles to nuclear power are PR. Water usage of nuclear plants is able to recycle most if not all of what they utilize and the high energy density and capable power output makes it much more economical to pump water from further away to sustain the plant and needs of regional communities, especially compared to fossil fuels plants that largely use water in the same capacity as nuclear. If a coal or gas plant was viable in a location, then nuclear would be just as if not more capable in that location.
You could replace every coal plant in the world with nuclear and the only major logistics disruption would be supplying them with enough uranium.
Wouldn’t want them anywhere that is prone to earthquakes - the entire Pacific rim, for example.
They can be built to deal with things like earthquakes. The catch is the cost goes up. Nuclear is already an expensive option, so that can get prohibitive.
For the foreseeable future, nuclear would work fine. As long as there isn’t corrosive compounds the water works fine, and there is enough uranium alone to power nuclear plants for the next 2000 years
Wait, only 2000 years? As in this is how much we’ve mined or is this how much is available to mine? And is that assuming we maintain our current level of consumption? 2000 years feels way too short for something that all of humanity relies on.
Considering how long we’ve had nuclear power and how short a time electricity has widely been in use, 2000 years is a crazy long time. Given how quickly we’ve developed power generation technology, it’s highly likely that we adopt other technologies like solar, wind, and hopefully fusion reactors long before we run out of uranium.
Slightly off topic, there are about 450 nuclear plants on earth. A noted MIT study in 1989 estimated that each nuclear plant only has a worst case nuclear accident every 20000 years.
Statistically that would make one every 44 years.
In our history we have had nuclear power plants for about 60 years, and so far there were three worst case nuclear accidents.
Yeah, but those worst case nuclear accidents have nothing on coal in terms of a death count. They sound scary, but overall don’t come even close to it.
True but In 2023 the alternatives are not nuclear vs coal, but nuclear vs wind and solar. The fallout for each accident is immense. Western Europe dealt with Tschernobyl for years. Japan was just lucky that the wind blew in the other direction.
If the world triples nuclear power plants, and we deal with an accident every 7-10 years, that’s gonna be a serious problem, even if it is “just” country sized areas that become unfarmable or so.
Pitting nuclear against wind and solar is stupid given how much they compliment each other.
A study from 1989 doesn’t apply to modern plants built 35 years later, it really doesn’t make sense to extrapolate it like this.
While true, the study obviously underestimated the evidence we gathered in the real world. It’s not simple to handle numbers with many 0 behind them, therefore it’s good to have multiple approaches.
“Dealt with Chernobyl for years…”
You realise that all the estimated premature deaths are less than respiratory issues from air pollution. We could have a Chernobyl every year and it would be an improvement.
We can not have clean emergy because coal miners have to mine coal.
If they don’t mine that coal then the whole thing falls apart.
That 3 in 60 is pretty loaded since Chernobyl simply would not have been possible with western reactors of the same design year, to say nothing of what passed as modern than and even more so now.
It would also not have been possible with their design, if all the failguards wouldn’t have failed.
But 2 in 60 years, both of western design, is still more than that study estimated.
What study is that? Can you give a reference?
Nowhere where humans are in control. Humans make mistakes.
No shit.
The solution there is that ideally no human is allowed to make a mistake significant enough to have any impact.
If Bob the nuclear engineer does something fucking stupid, but there’s an automated failsafe that resolves the problem… was there really that big of a problem?
This issue is… that stuff gets expensive quick.
If Bob the nuclear engineer does something fucking stupid, but there’s an automated failsafe that resolves the problem… was there really that big of a problem?
Sure. The idea is plausible. They have tried such strategies, and improved them for several decades, and they seriously believed that all would be good enough. But Chernobyl and Fukushima have taught us that it is not possible to do it without super terrible accidents that cost simply too much (money, lives, health etc). So, we know now that mankind is not able.
“super terrible accidents”
Yes. Super terrible accidents that result in fewer deaths than any other power source per kilowatt/hr. (Even factoring in generous increases in cancer rates).
Like burning coal which releases uncontrolled and unmeasured quantities of radiation and heavy metals like Mercury.
burning of coal are environmentally and biologically toxic elements, such as lead, mercury, nickel, tin, cadmium, antimony, and arsenic, as well as radio isotopes of thorium and strontium.
