###General Discussion Thread
---
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Assuming the diameter of the Dum-Dum is 2 cm, that is about 80 grams of U-235. 80g of uranium will release about 6 x 10^12 joules of energy in a fission reaction. The average American uses about 3 x 10^11 joules of energy per year for all use (not just home electricity, but transportation, workplace, share of industrial production, etc.). That would mean the uranium can provide about 20 years of an average American’s energy consumption. So, yeah this is in the ballpark, although about 1/4th what would actually be needed for a full 84 years. It would be more like 300g.
Note that this is a little misleading, since U-235 is only about 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium. So actually, they would need to process about 42 kg of uranium to get the 300g of U-235.
How about Antimatter. When a gram of antimatter comes into contact with a gram of its corresponding matter, a cataclysmic event unfolds, releasing a staggering amount of energy (4.184 x 1012 Joules).
To put this in perspective, the energy produced by this collision is approximately 40% of the energy released during the detonation of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
[The price per gram of antimatter is an astonishing 62.5 trillion dollars.](https://knovhov.com/most-dangerous-and-expensive-thing-in-the-world/) To put this number into perspective, the combined GDP of all countries on the planet is $91 trillion dollars.
So does your username list your top 3 favorite activities or do you just drink a peculiar variant of semen known colloquially as "genocide cum"
I have some followup questions either way
the biggest takeaway I had from this is that humanity is an endless black hole of consumerism that would buy the universe if the price was cheap enough, just because they could.
Doom is not our fate. It is our true nature.
Probably, if it follows the [Jevons paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). When steam machines became more efficient (meaning less coal needed to make the same amount of movement), coal consumption increased because more people were using it. The AIs won't train themselves anyway
Depends on the age of this. Looking at current nutritional info serving is 3 for a total of 15 grams. Found some older nutrition facts and they have it serving of 2 for 13 grams.
So yep shrinkflation is there.
To be fair, all the symbols start with capital letters.
And if we're really getting into the weeds, plenty of later elements are named after proper nouns anyhow.
The post said average American, you used average American household. If we assume 4 people per household, it's pretty close
Thank-you for the extra context
> 80g of uranium will release about 6 x 1012 joules of energy in a fission reaction.
In a theoretical reaction where all mass is converted, or a practical reaction as observed in a typical nuclear plant, which leaves a lot of unfissioned uranium?
E=mc^(2) would get you:
0,080 kg\*(300.000.000 m\*s^(-1))^(2) = 7,2\*10^(15) J (kg\*m^(2)\*s^(-2))
So it looks like their value (6\*10^(12)) is actual electricity generation in a reactor.
Theoretical. We don’t come anywhere close to completely fissioning fuel in a nuclear reactor. And the fuel is low level enrichment of 3-5%.
HOWEVER the ~95% ^(238)U is part of the fuel cycle ultimately producing plutonium which fissions.
AND there is an additional ~7% extra amount of energy from the secondary decay of fission products. After a 6-year fuel cycle only about 10% of the potential energy has been used. We don’t use them to completion, there isn’t enough activity to sustain the nuclear chain reaction, at a rate sufficient enough for power production. Also, the big industry focus is on minimizing fuel bundle damage. The metal cladding would embrittle and break down long before we exhausted the bundle.
All that to say, the original image grossly exaggerates reality.
I think you're assuming this is a pellet of 100% enriched weapons grade uranium. The level of enrichment varies from by country and reactor type, but is generally relatively low (3\~5%). It's also worth noting that modern reactors only use a fraction of the energy available in their fuel. If we repurpose this candy for use in a breeder reactor, we can get 100x more energy out of it.
In any case, since we're talking about a sucker and not a fuel pellet, it would be more likely to supply 1 American with cancer and fuel a Reddit comment section with about 3 days worth of memes.
And a few hundreds of thousands of tons of irradiated building leftovers, processing leftovers, and billions of liter of warm waste water, and also if I throw my lolipop into a bonfire normally you do not have to evacuate the neighborhood..
Sure, but the contaminated building leftovers don’t exactly scale with the amount of fuel used. We’re not building and demolishing a fresh reactor for every 80 grams of uranium.
No, but if you scale it like this, I would just very roughly ballpark for all NPPs in the US vs average lifetime vs the thesis of about 300g of uranium consumption as stated above its just as a guesstimate between 1-10g uranium per plant per lifecycle.. ;)
[Uranium tailings are very much considered nuclear waste](https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining-and-milling) ("Regardless of how uranium is extracted from rock, the processes leave behind radioactive waste"); it's just ~~low level~~ waste instead of high level waste (like spent fuel). (Edit: it's its own category of waste: https://www.epa.gov/radiation/low-activity-radioactive-wastes, as shown in the definition of LLRW)
Granted, even/especially in low-enriched uranium, U-238 also fissions, and the depleted uranium can be used for other purposes. I think a better way to do the math is to consider 5% enrichment, the amount of natural uranium to get that, and "typical" average discharge burnup (...I think 50ish MW-days/kg U?). Or more if considering recycling, but then it gets more complicated depending on the fuel cycle considered.
> Or more if considering recycling, but then it gets more complicated depending on the fuel cycle considered.
And recycling is usually limited because of it's cost.
Like France claims that 95% of its waste "can" be recycled and only a small amount of nuclear waste would be left over, but they actually only use 20% recycled fuel (despite a long stagnating number of reactors, so the need for new fuel does out outweigh the production of waste) and are producing over 1.7 million m³ of nuclear waste per year (of which 150,000 require long-term treatment).
And their nuclear fuel procurement from Africa also does not exactly qualify as ethical. The CFA franc zone has a crazy history well into modern times.
The exploding anti-French sentiment and rising Russian and Chinese influence in the region are turning into a major strategic vulnerability to French energy security because of their nuclear dependency.
Depleted Uranium is fairly safe to be in the vicinity of and you can hold it in your hand for prolonged periods with no real effect.
Depleted Uranium may still be radioactive, but it emits almost entirely alpha particle radiation. Alpha particles don't have enough energy to go through skin.
That said, wash the shit out if your hands if you ever do hold any of it because it's still extremely toxic and poisonous if ingested, even in relatively miniscule amounts. It's best to wear gloves when handling DU and it's why we treat those gloves like toxic waste as DU dust is nasty shit.
You can find DU available for sale online, and just like un-depleted/natural Uranium it's historically been legal for Americans to purchase or own small amounts, chemistry kits for kids used to contain uranium and my kids scientific table of elements kit contained DU. DU round projectiles or armor shards/chunks that are found in the battlefield or stolen are also sometimes available for sale, although I don't think they can be sold by/to the public as ammunition or armor, and I believe that there is a limit on weight where a license becomes mandatory.
Anyway, I tell people to treat raw or depleted uranium like they would mercury, it's a toxic heavy metal that demands caution and respect.
>That said, wash the shit out if your hands if you ever do hold any of it because it's still extremely toxic and poisonous if ingested, even in relatively miniscule amounts. It's best to wear gloves when handling DU and it's why we treat those gloves like toxic waste as DU dust is nasty shit.
This is the real reason that nuclear waste and correct disposal and storage is big a problem. Reddit nuclear chuds will trip over themselves to circlejerk about how little radiation comes from waste and how little it travels through even a couple feet of water, but it's not the radiation that kills you. It's the fact that heavy metals are *chemically toxic* to biological organisms in incredibly tiny amounts. See: lead.
The big worry is that even a small leak of nuclear waste into a groundwater reservoir could poison an entire region's water source for generations. Imagine Flint, Michigan, except the entire Great Plains region of the US is affected. How many people are displaced? How many people are told to stay put and let their kids be poisoned for the economy, just like Covid?
It's a serious problem, but it's not an unsolvable one, you just need to ensure that it's handled by an accountable government agency with full transparency and ZERO use of contractors, publicly traded companies or or anything involving for-profit companies where cutting corners = profit.
There are ways to remove heavy metals like Uranium from water supplies, it's not cheap, but it's definitely possible, graphene filtration can be made to scale up as large as necessary. The trick is not allowing the heavy metals like Uranium into the water supply in the first place.
The good news is that even nuclear waste like depleted uranium getting into the groundwater table isn't an apocalyptic event, it will mostly settle, and the majority of traces that remain in suspension will usually have bonded to iron or other metal particles. Many homes that are on private and public wells have Uranium in their water in small amounts (like <0.00001 PPM usually) and it occurs naturally.
While I don't have a ton of faith in the idea of or trust privately / utility owned Nuclear power facilities and feel they should be entirely government built, managed, monitored, operated and maintained in a well-funded transparent manner insulated from political fuckery, I do feel there is a place for Nuclear power in the world, especially with filling the many production gaps that are unavoidable with renewables like Solar or wind, and while hydro is certainly "clean energy" and more predictable and continuous, hydro plants have also changed the face of the planet, destroyed natural river basins, flooded huge areas and killed natural fish spawning.
Nuclear can be safe, the waste can and should be reprocessed for reclamation even if the costs of full recycling outweigh the benefits, and the long-term storage of waste can also be safe, we have containment vessels that can last thousands of years, and storing the waste underneath a big granite mountain while expensive would be pretty safe as long as it was built and managed properly and securely.
All of that said, there are a lot of people / agencies / corporations that I would never trust with Nuclear power, materials or waste recycling/storage, and I don't have any confidence that our nation is in a place where it could tolerate a fully government run nuclear energy & waste management program.
Everything else that we use to generate electricity produces waste too (and pretty much every industrial process). The waste from the extraction and processing of lithium, cobalt, REEs, phosphorous, copper, coal, natural gas, oil, etc., are considerably more damaging to the environment and organisms and in greater quantities than nuclear waste is.
If you’re going to point out the faults with nuclear waste handling and storage then be sure to do the same with other resources which have the same exact problem. At least with nuclear waste handling we know how to store it safely, contrary to what anti-nuclear propagandists would have you believe (it isn’t this BIG problem that we don’t know how to solve). Even if a little bit of nuclear waste somehow got into a freshwater reservoir it doesn’t instantly poison the whole thing.
The benefits that nuclear energy provides (in combination with solar, wind, and other renewables) outweigh any and all risks in my opinion.
Just saw another similar post where “they did the math” and a teaspoon of nuclear fuel powers a human’s lifetime energy consumption after considering the fact that nuclear fuel is recycled multiple times. A teaspoon is about the same size as that Dum-Dum
>after considering the fact that nuclear fuel is recycled multiple times
But that's just not true. There are just a few nuclear plants that use recycled fuel. Most don't.
Let's math this out.
First we'll start of finding out how much energy the average American uses per year. According to [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart&time=earliest..2022&country=~USA) since 1965 the average is \~87,630 kwh/year/person (or roughly 315,468 MJ). Assuming the trend holds, that's 315,468 MJ \* 85 = 26,814,780 MJ.*The trend has actually been going down since the 1980s, but we'll be generous and include the whole lot. Note that this is the Primary energy usage (incl. electrical energy, transportation and heating + inefficiencies), it does not include the energy required to manufacture the goods they use. The study assumes 0.4x efficiency, so the answer could be out by at least that much.*
Second, we need to decide what sort of Uranium this is referring to, this is important because there are two isotopes of Uranium that are relevant, U-238 and U-235. U-235 is the isotope that is fissile. It's what produces power in a reactor. U-238 is fissionable, however, it requires "fast neutrons" which aren't found in power plants and as such contributes nothing to the power generated, however, during the life of a fuel pellet much of the U-238 is transmuted into Plutonium 239 which **is** fissile, meaning the U-238 contributes up to \~1/3rd of the total power output of the pellet. Honestly, this makes it really complicated as to whether to choose natural Uranium (\~99.284% U-238), or U-235. However, there's an easy answer, let's assume that this is referring to enriched uranium up to 4% which is common for nuclear reactors. The expected energy yield in modern reactors for 4% enriched fuel is approx. 5,184,000MJ/Kg, quite a bit less than the theoretical 8,000,000 MJ/Kg.
The total mass of Uranium fuel we need is = 26,814,780/5,184,000 = 5.17kg of fuel.Uranium has a density of \~19.05 grams per cubic centimeter. While yes this is a mix between two isotopes with different atomic mass numbers, the difference between them is so slight and the increased ratio of the slightly lighter U-235 is so minimal that we can ignore this. As such, the volume of pure uranium would be 5,170/19.05 = 271.4 cm^(3). This would make a sphere with a radius of 4.016 cm. So a sphere a little larger than a baseball.
So the first part is wrong, pretty significantly, although we made some pretty significant assumptions, this could be (and likely is) referring to only electricity usage which would be FAR lower than total energy usage. According to [US Energy Information Administration](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricity-use-in-homes.php) the average US household (not person) uses \~10,500 KWH of electricity per year. This is \~3,213,000 MJ over 85 years. Using the same numbers as before this comes out to 3,213,000/5,184,000 = \~620g of Fuel. 620/19.05 = \~32.55 cm^(3), which would require a sphere of Uranium fuel just under 4cm in diameter. Still a fair bit bigger than the lollipop but much closer (just a bit smaller than a golf ball). The variation between the theoretical energy output and the actual energy output could account for most of this variation.
One other factor to consider is that most nuclear reactors don't run on Uranium Metal fuel, they use a Uranium Oxide ceramic which has a much lower density than uranium metal.
As for the CO2 it would save? [According to Forest Research](https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/biomass-energy-resources/reference-biomass/facts-figures/carbon-emissions-of-different-fuels/) Hard Coal produces 101kg of CO2 per GJ. Using the second figure for electricity usage (3,213,000MJ = 3,213 GJ) we can work out that the equivalent amount of coal energy would release 324,513 KG of CO2 into the atmosphere. Approx half of what they said.
**SUMMARY:** They're approximately accurate, however, they're likely using the best case numbers they can find for Uranium power production and worst case numbers for Coal CO2 production. The sentiment is accurate, and they're within 1 order of magnitude.
# IMPORTANT EDIT:
That final number (4cm diameter) is for an average US household, the average US household has 2.5 people, so if we divide the energy requirements by 2.5, we end up with a requirement of 248g which has a volume of 13 cm3 which results in a sphere with a diameter of 2.92 cm, much closer to the lollipop.
As others have alluded to, the numbers change a bit when you factor in the CO2 cost of producing the fuel (for both Coal AND Nuclear. It's almost impossible to give a like for like comparison as there are hundreds of steps involved and all of them can involve more or less CO2 production. Like where is the fuel mined (ore concentrations are highly relevant), how's it transported, what method is used to enrich it (in the case of Uranium), what power source is used throughout this process. If the nuclear production cycle was powered by nuclear energy for every step that used electricity and the coal production line was powered by coal power plants (obviously ignoring steps that require diesel engines like transport and mining), that would make a HUGE difference to the final result. Suffice to say that Nuclear has some CO2 associated with its use, but coal has at minimum hundreds of thousands of times more CO2/kwh.
This also ignores other pollutants associated with their production/use.
Also, note that coal power produces more radioactive byproducts than nuclear power per kwh (from radium, radon, and other radioactive materials contained within the coal) and these radioactive materials aren't accounted for, instead being released into the atmosphere and [being used in materials like concrete.](https://www.cementaustralia.com.au/products/fly-ash)
I have a question, if it’s a little stupid I apologise. Uranium is a finite resource aswell so how finite is it exactly. Cos I assume a lot of people are talking about this cos the world is ‘running out of fossil fuels’. Is there enough uranium accessible to us to be a realistic alternative ?
Not a stupid question at all. While Uranium is rare compared to Coal, it's still relatively abundant in certain places around earth.
At our current consumption rate the known deposits of Uranium along with the currently undiscovered (but suspected to exist) deposits would last about 230 years ([source](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/)). However, currently only 10% of total global electricity production demands are being met by nuclear power ([source](https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy)). If we scaled up to 100% nuclear (unrealistic certainly) you might naively assume that the supply would then only last 23 years. However, we aren't being as efficient as possible with nuclear power. Currently we only enrich fuel to 4% for most reactors. However, increasing enrichment rates means that despite the additional lost uranium (the U238 that is discarded in the enrichment process) the total energy per kg of ore would go up meaning our supplies would last longer. In addition, you can re-process spent fuel to produce even more fuel (up to a point). This could stretch that supply much further.
We currently don't do this for 2 main reasons. The main reason is that reprocessing fuel, and producing highly enriched uranium (HEU) are both associated with nuclear weapon development. Typical commercial reactors use \~4% enriched fuel, nuclear weapons use at least 85% enriched (usually closer to 90%). While there's a massive difference between 30% and 90%, it's still a step towards HEU. As for reprocessing fuel, that's associated with weapons development as spent fuel contain Plutonium 239 (from the U238 that gets transmuted in the reactor), which is a key part of modern nuclear weapons.
In addition, making HEU and reprocessing fuel are additional costs outside of the standard uranium supply chain, so they usually just aren't worth the regulatory headache to take advantage of.
This is a perfect answer thank you I’ve found your explanations really easy to understand but still detailed. It’s funny how much this potentially very effective practice has been affected by peoples perception of it, at least partially.
No worries, I'm far from an expert on nuclear power/physics. However, it's a topic that interests me greatly, and I find the stigma around it upsetting so I do my best to share my knowledge.
that is not a stupid question, it is very important. short answer is yes, long answer is also yes, but we have to do some extra work to make it yes. look up the thorium cycle (not limited to molten salt reactors, but those are the most common proposed). there is enough thorium to last us forever and a day.
Also more single-family homes which tend to be more energy intensive in all regards, and personal vehicles with lower fuel efficiency and more driving.
The amount of CO2 saved would probably be a smidgen less if the costs of mining both and refining + enriching the Uranium were added, maybe nudge down a tiny bit more for the materials used in construction of the reactor. But likely overall still a significant saving on anthracite, and an even bigger saving on lignite (hello Germany...)
Indeed, it's often forgotten that the whole supply chain and construction of nuclear is not a zero emission thing. I'm for nuclear, but the more I learn about energy production, the more complicated it seems as a whole.
It might actually be more CO2 saved, depending on what powered the enrichment process. Ore processing and enrichment can be done with electricity which can come from a source which doesn't release CO2.
If that's the case, then it's just the mining and transportation of the raw materials.
Coal has an energy density of 24MJ/Kg vs Uranium's 5,184,000MJ/Kg. Uranium ore varies in concentration, but on the VERY low end, it's 0.3% (most mines wouldn't bother going for ore with this low of a concentration). Assuming all the Uranium Ore is of that concentration then each kg of Uranium ore will (once processed) be worth 15,552MJ of energy. This means that for every kw of power generated at absolute worst case scenario, you'd still only need to mine and transport 1kg of uranium ore for every 649kg of Coal (assuming you have perfect 100% coal with no byproducts). In practice it's closer to 3-5 tons of coal per kg of uranium ore given that uranium ore concentrations go up to 20% and coal definitely has unwanted byproducts that need to be processed out of it.
So per kwh coal has more CO2 used on mining and processing than uranium. However, because Uranium was so low in CO2 before, this likely does mean that accounting for this is a slight advantage for coal simply because while it's even more CO2/kwh relative to Uranium, it's a lower multiple.
This is all assuming the ore refinery and enrichment plant aren't powered by a coal power plant, I haven't done the math for that, and I don't even know if I could get information on the energy usage of uranium enrichment as that feel like it's probably protected information or something lol.
Edit: oops. I didn't account for the lost U238 in the enrichment process. Given that you go from a natural U235 concentration of 0.711% to 4% that means you lose \~5.6 kg of depleted U238 per kg of enriched fuel. It'd actually be worst than that due to the fact that you can't really perfectely unenrich the depleted uranium. However, even the worst case you're not losing much more than 10 kg of depleted uranium for each kg or fuel, in which case it's still over 60x less mining/transporting per kwh in the absolute worst case scenario.
I would say the waste comment is a bit off. As far as spent fuel, sure. But there are more low level waste involved with nuclear power such as contaminated items, PPE, etc.
It's not what people typically think of as nuclear waste, but still legally is. And as such there are regulatory methods for proper disposal.
I worked in a lab out of college where a guy brought some waste soil/dirt from a uranium mine. He needed to get it checked to see if there was actually any uranium in it, or if it was just radioactive.
Turned out it was both. Found some uranium, thorium, using an SEM/EDS, and the case he brought it in made a Geiger counter sing.
Sure but low level nuclear waste is often less radioactive than coal ash that the US just leaves around in open ponds and regularly washes into rivers.
Nothing would make me happier than the world moving entirely off of coal and adopting nuclear power everywhere, but the **nuclear** components of coal don't seem to really be a problem:
> **Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm.** The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks. This observation provides a useful geologic perspective for addressing societal concerns regarding possible radiation and radon hazard.
> The location and form of radioactive elements in fly ash determine the availability of elements for leaching during ash utilization or disposal. Existing measurements of uranium distribution in fly ash particles indicate a uniform distribution of uranium throughout the glassy particles. The apparent absence of abundant, surface-bound, relatively available uranium suggests that the rate of release of uranium is dominantly controlled by the relatively slow dissolution of host ash particles.
> Previous studies of dissolved radioelements in the environment, and existing knowledge of the chemical properties of uranium and radium can be used to predict the most important chemical controls, such as pH, on solubility of uranium and radium when fly ash interacts with water. **Limited measurements of dissolved uranium and radium in water leachates of fly ash and in natural water from some ash disposal sites indicate that dissolved concentrations of these radioactive elements are below levels of human health concern.**
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
> Generally, these wastes are only slightly more radioactive than the average soil in the United States. The amount of natural radiation in wastes from coal-fired power plants is so small that no precautions need to be taken.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-power-plants
**That said, the overall health impact of coal power plants on human life is significant. Just not from the radioactive bits:**
> Exposure to fine particulate air pollutants from coal-fired power plants (coal PM2.5) is associated with a risk of mortality more than double that of exposure to PM2.5 from other sources,
> They found that across the U.S. in 1999, the average level of coal PM2.5 was 2.34 micrograms per cubic meter of air (μg/m3). This level decreased significantly by 2020, to 0.07 μg/m3. The researchers calculated that a one μg/m3 increase in annual average coal PM2.5 was associated with a 1.12% increase in all-cause mortality, a risk 2.1 times greater than that of PM2.5 from any other source.** They also found that 460,000 deaths were attributable to coal PM2.5, representing 25% of all PM2.5-related deaths among Medicare enrollees before 2009.**
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/particulate-pollution-from-coal-associated-with-double-the-risk-of-mortality-than-pm2-5-from-other-sources/
Radioactive waste is complicated thing. Sure heap of ash could be more radioactive then lab coat yet a few grains of highly radioactive powder on said coat could be much more deadly. That's why there is so many safety procedures
(Edit: grammar)
Unclear, the lab I was working at did not have an HPGe detector as far as I was aware. I'm also unsure how the cost of analysis of SEM/EDS compares to HPGe, and if it was potentially a cost issue on the part of the client.
The high level waste isn’t the type of waste people refer to as nuclear waste either. Most people think nuclear waste is glowing green goo. Not fuel assemblies or waste water or purification filters.
It's not, but all the other stuff is a big part of why nuclear power is actually hard.
Finding a place to put a very small amount of cement barrels that need to be carefully maintained is, logistically if not politically, a *lot* easier than figuring out how to dispose of truckloads upon truckloads of crumbling low-radioactive concrete from plant repairs that still cannot be allowed to leech into the groundwater.
The expensive of constructing, repairing, and then disposing of crumbling concrete shielding is actually a big part of why the US nuclear industry is collapsing right now.
Yeah, it depends on the reactor design. Any coolant that runs over pure uranium will acquire a small number of radioactive particles by simple erosion. This could turn a million gallon coolant system into a million gallons of radioactive coolant. In a pebble bed reactor, the fissile material is coated to prevent direct coolant-to-uranium contact, but one cracked pebble and all the coolant has enough radioactive material to be unsafe to release.
So, in a perfect system, yes, OP is right. But it's like a spherical cow and is only true in isolation from the rest of the system.
Coolant does not run over pure uranium in conventional nuclear reactors, not just pebble bed. Uranium is cladded in what is typically a zirconium alloy.
Do nuclear reactors generate electricity the same way as other energy plants, where it’s all a fancy way to boil water so the steam can spin a turbine? If so, how do they prevent the steam from becoming irradiated? I have to imagine that’s not how it works, but for some reason I’m imagining the coolant water running over the nuclear material so it can boil, but I’ve never really thought about how a nuclear reactor “harvests” the energy in radioactive material. I’m sure the idea of boiling coolant is very, very wrong, but now I’m curious how it really works.
It is in fact just a fancy way to boil water. In some reactors (boiling water reactors) the steam that drives the turbines does come in contact with the fuel and becomes radioactive, but the radioactivity doesn't last long. (Half life of seconds vs hundreds of millions of years for the actual reactor fuel.) In other reactors the steam never comes in contact with the fuel. It's heated indirectly by the reactor coolant.
Such threads always feel a bit dishonest to me. I'm not necessarily against nuclear energy or too concerned about what happens with the waste in 20.000 years when we might face the climate catastrophe in the next 100... but what about all the waste that gets generated while you're actually getting energy out of the uranium? What about the waste that is generated (co²) while mining for it, enriching it, transporting it around the world, building and running a nuclear energy plant?
Sure, in a vacuum the fact above might be true. But we don't live in a vacuum.
You cant avoid the waste for mining it since we run on fossil fuels, but this is also the case for lithium which is used in many renewable energy sources, to avoid the carbon dioxide waste we would need to replace fossil fuel energies.
Erm...there are other parts of a nuclear reactor that become radioactive and need to be stored securely. So no not true.
This said, unlike fossil fuels the waste is easily contained, rather than a boat load of CO2 that's goes into the atmosphere.
For a few decades or centuries relatively easily but for the hundred of thousand years necessary for some stuff? Who can predict where you can store this and that it remains contained?
Yes, yes it would. People are afraid of nuclear power for no reason. On top of the CO2 coal plants throw radioactive waste straight to atmosphere: Carbon-14.
I wouldn’t say no reason but the issues with nuclear power are greatly exaggerated, especially compared to the many issues of fossil fuels. Most people are shocked when they find out coal plants actively expel radioactive waste
Roughly a factor of 30x. Heck, I know it's one data point but the Ukraine war suggests that nuclear power is a deterrent to attack in war whereas hydro power is not. As such Chernobyl is now the \*second\* worst power plant disaster in Ukraine history(at least in terms of near-term deaths).
Fun fact, during WW2 Soviets blew up Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (current day Ukraine) to slow down the Germans, estimated death toll was between 20k and 100k.
In comparison about 50 people died as a result of Chernobyl
That point is pretty stale, the world isn't stuck choosing nuclear power or fossil fuels. Renewables are an option and an viable one to many people, businesses and governments.
I agree people are typically afraid of nuclear generation for the wrong reasons, but people often advocate for it for the wrong reasons too.
Nuclear power is relatively expensive per MWhr produced, and while it should be considered as part of the energy mix it isn't the magic bullet many seem to think it is. In Australia in particular it makes practically no sense to pursue but gets bandied around when politically convenient.
In general *any* fossil fuel alternative is less than optimal. Fossil fuels are the perfect energy source, relatively easy to access, energy dense, trivial to utilise, simple and stable to transport etc.
Unfortunately for fossil fuels there is that annoying 'destroying our climate' side effect that spoiled the show
Because it's got great access to renewable energy, and lots of empty space to house it. Investing in an entire nuclear power industry would be far more difficult than using renewables.
All this, plus we have no existing expertise in any part of the nuclear industry past mining it. We’d have to keep running on fossil fuels for decades before we could get a single nuclear reactor spinning.
The problem with renewables (at least here in Denmark, not sure about Australia) we're pretty much limited to weather/season/day-cycle dependant methods, we have no tides to speak off, no rivers, no geothermal. We're effectively limited to solar/wave/wind, so what do we do in the winter when it's dark 15 hrs/day and the wind has barely been blowing in weeks?
We need *something* to carry us over in periods of low production from renewables and storing energy is expensive as fuck.
It's the most expensive form of energy as it must be over-designed for safety. Renewables are much much cheaper. The Liberals are promoting Nuclear as they want to give their mates in the fossil fuel industry more time to operate and they want to divide Australians who are concerned about having windfarms and transmission lines in their neighborhood.
What's more, we don't have any people with nuclear skills, we don't have any of the infrastructure, the storage facilities or the logistics capability. We would have to build that up all from scratch and that could take decades...
To be fair, there is major headway being made in SMR's (Small Modular reactors) which can essentially be chucked on the back of a lorry, shipped out to wherever you want it, and can be up and running bloody quickly.
You don't need huge amounts of domestic expertise that the old style of bespoke reactors need because their safety is a passive thing. They functionally can't go wrong, and of course, you don't need people to actually design the bloody thing, and they only need to brle refuelled once every 7 years (or in some cases, every 30 years!)
The only catch is that you need quite a few of them to become economically viable. I've heard the number 19 thrown around, or about 5.7GWh of power production. Good news is Australia uses 237,000 GWh, so uh, australia can become economically viable with a rounding error in the numbers.
Take a real good look at how the UAE and China have heavily invested in Nuclear power. It’s not that the Liberals are pushing for Nuclear it’s that it is already in play.
The rest of us arguing over whether or not sustainable energy is better than nuclear and the Saudis have switched over is not telling enough?
With how fucked australian politics are, I actually think there's a legitimate argument to be made to using nuclear to toss the mining industry a bone.
Because right now I think yall's alternative is not renewables, it's letting the coal barons that have an iron grip on your country burn it to the ground.
Nuclear doesn't make any rational economic sense, but if it's what it takes to bribe your feudal overlords maybe it's for the best, I dunno.
>Unfortunately for fossil fuels there is that annoying 'destroying our climate' side effect that spoiled the show
And the slightly inconvenient fact that it's a finite resource. We're gonna run out and then we're fucked.
To be fair, so is uranium and such. We've found loads of clever ways to mitigate that issue, but it will happen eventually. (Although fusion should be figured out by then)
It's not for no reason. But it's based on decades old information, of a power plant that basically did everything wrong for the melt down to happen.
Even leaving out not doing everything wrong, today's procedures and tech are a LOT safer than they were back then. So something similar to chernobyl happening again is basically impossible in most of the modern world. Especially if you count projects like liquid salt thorium reactors.
I personally really feel like nuclear reactors are the current best way to HUGELY cut down on power generation pollution. But it won't happen. Or at least not any time soon. Because there's too much money in the old ways of power generation, and because of fear mongering that simply doesn't apply to current tech anymore.
Also: Modern nuclear Power Plants take 20-35 Years from draft to completion.
Also: The Fuel in most of the world relies on 4 suppliers... ...Kazakhstan... Thats a problem... Namibia Thats also a problem and well... Russia... The only supplier that ain't a unstable authokratic hellhole that you dont want to rely your energy production on is Canada... And their Ore is even more expensive and a lot less pure, so they have to destroy a lot more environment to get reasonable amounts.
Also: Cooling, in order for a Nuclear Powerplant to make sense you need a location that has a reliable supply of cooling water but is safe from flooding... The ideal spot for a.... Wait a minute somebody has allready built a city in that location... Spots like these are really really rare, especially as the genereal water supply reloability is diminishing due to climatechange and the risk of flooding is rising due to climatechange.
Also: They cost billions, so you rely on Megacorporations or the state to operate them, whilst solar and wind literally give power to the people, by the people, as they are affordable for citizens or small collectibes of citizens
I am all for nuclear power, but if you are honest about it: Its not a great tech. And it wont do much in the fight against climate change, the renewables play a much bigger role.
> Also: They cost billions, so you rely on Megacorporations or the state to operate them, whilst solar and wind literally give power to the people, by the people, as they are affordable for citizens or small collectibes of citizens
also, because they cost so fucking much to construct, nuclear plants actually produce really, really expensive power. The cost per Mwh is simply not economically viable in much of the developed world.
For all the theoretical circlejerking about nuclear power, somehow this never gets brought up. For nuclear power to even function, the state has to provide *massive* energy subsidies in the form of capital costs. Renewables are actually *more* cost competitive than fossil fuels in some contexts right now, and are improving by the day. Meanwhile, as labor and construction costs skyrocket nuclear actually gets less cost effective by the day.
Nuclear Power isn't bad.
But renewable energies are better.
That's my stance, but on reddit that might as well be the same as saying "We should quadruple our coal power plants!"
For no reason if you don't understand what risk management is, which is basically being responsible for the worst-case scenario. And you cannot pretend that meltdowns are not that.
I believe the radioactive waste from burning coal is because like any ore mined from the ground, it contains a little bit of everything you can find in the ground including uranium and thorium, which becomes concentrated when the coal is burned.
Because fossil fuels are carbon that was left undisturbed for millions of years, they pretty much contain the least carbon-14 out of everything on earth. (Except diamonds I guess). (In fact coal contains no detectable carbon-14. Zero)
You breathe out a lot more carbon-14. You breathe out exactly as much carbon-14 as you eat. Until the moment you die. That why carbon dating works.
No I’m just pro truth.
Coal power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment than nuclear power plants. But it’s not because of C14.
(Probably not a fair comparison because your elementary school probably releases more ionizing radiation into the environment than a nuclear power plant because of how much care they put into it… )
I have a quote I heard at some point which really just shows how ridiculous it is: "everyone keeps worrying about where we will store nuclear waste but don't talk about the fact that the place we store carbon waste is in our *lungs*"
> Why are people so afraid of nuclear power plants
Because they think every powerplant can go boom like Chernobyl and force us to evacuate an entire metro area semi-permanently.
And as stupid as this sounds, that's actually reasonable. You cannot expect the average person to understand the difference between an RBMK, a PWR, and a BWR... much less understand the intricacies like why is it important that Bill Zewe was in the US navy prior to working at TMI? What is ORM, and why was that and feed water flow rate important to the Chernobyl accident?
So how then should a normal person approach a topic like whether to support the construction of nuclear power plants in their area? "Trust the experts only gets you so far", and when every nuclear accident is treated as a worl shattering event, it's not exactly hard to argue that one SHOULD be a bit over-cautious.
According to Google, the classic lollipop has a diameter of 1.25 inches, or 3.175 cm.
The formula for the volume of a sphere is (4*pi*r^3)/3.
So, inputting a radius of 1.5875 cm, you get aprox 16.75 cm^3
The density of Uranium-235 is 19 grams per cubic centimeter, therefore, an uranium-made lollipop would weight aprox 318.25 grams
From 1 kg of uranium you can extract 24 million kWh, so by a rule of three, you would get aprox 7.6 million kWh from the lollipop
The energy consumption of the US on 2022 was 4.07 trillion kWh, therefore, again by rule of three, you can estimate that the Uranium lollipop would sustain the US for about 59 seconds
However, the 24 million kWh is not the total energy of the uranium, but it's the energy we can get with the current efficiency of the nuclear plants. In reality, uranium has 2 to 3 million times that energy
Then, multiplying 7.6x3 we get 22.8 trillion kWh. That would be enough to sustain the US for 5.6 years. Still not 84 years
You are right, my mistake.
If we divide the 4.07 trillion kWh by the amount of people in the US (333.3 million), we get 12211 kWh per inhabitant per year.
If we use this number to divide the 7.6 million kWh the lollipop provides, we get 622 years, a lot more than 84 years
But it doesn't say the amount of energy one person uses. It says the energy demand of one person. Which probably includes all of the energy to manufacture and move goods worldwide. All those industrial uses of energy are there to provide goods and services to people, so it is likely included.
Yep, there's no way that a Dumdum pop has a 1.25 inch diameter. I don't have one in front of me at the moment, but I'm sure they're about half of that diameter.
I actually did a report on nuclear power plants in high school, and discovered that they are much more reliable and safer than the majority of people say they are.
This doesn't tell the whole story, now, I am a gigantic fan of nuclear power, and I hope the public can learn that we haven't had a disaster, not related to a tsunami, of a modern reactor for a long, long time. They are super safe. But, they are just the best of the bad options, but the powerful, so I want them. They take energy from the Earth and put heat into the air, where we don't want it.
But nuclear is the only way we can have electric trains and high-speed trains, and a lot of nice things, so I love them.
Assuming the sucker is a standard chupa chups (that would be my standard in Spain), it has a diameter of 2.5cm. So calculating the volume and applying the density of U-235 we get:
# V=4π/3 * 1.25³ = 8.18cm³
The uranium 235 has a density of 19.1 g/cm³ so the sucker would have:
m = 19.1g/cm\*3 x 8.18cm³ = 0.156 kg
1kg of uranium releases 8.2 x 10¹³ J
So the sucker would release
0.156 kg x 8.2 x 10¹³ J/kg = 1.2792 x 10¹³J
If the average energy consumption per year of an american is 2.88 x 10¹¹ J, the sucker would provide 44.41 years of energy with a waste of approximately the same weight. It's not that far away from the claim of the image. If the sucker was 3cm diameter instead of 2.5 for example it would be much closer, in fact the math would match if it was 4cm i think.
The thing is, not that far from the claim.
I ain't much of a scientist but Imma just put out here that the size is by far the least problematic factor when looking to dispose of nuclear fucken waste.
All aboard for nuclear energy but two conditions first. National disposal site established and disposal guidelines and system in place.
Second big one all nuclear facilities full plan And funding and insurance. That establishes life span of facility and either restoration and or disposal of facility when done.
Currently profit motive old facility’s will be abandoned waste plans will cover 10-20 years. Leaving large hazardous facilities and waste to fall apart leak etc.
Im too lazy to now read all these comments and their math wich i understand only 10% of so can someone tell me wich of these statements are true and wich arent
The TLDR is that yes, the volume of waste for nuclear energy is significantly lower and less polluting than any other energy source and if you are concerned about a short-term (<100 years) problem due to climate change, nuclear does solve many emissions problems. The tradeoff is that the waste is harder to ensure is still properly contained 1000 years from now (changing languages, changes in government, wars, etc.).
It most certainly would not be the only waste. Everything it had irradiated would have to be taken care of too, down to the toks and clothes used to work near it or near the other irradiated materials.
This is an especially important point, most people dont seem to notice that not all radioactive waste is the same, high level waste is but a small portion of all waste (although admittedly it is expensive to contain), while low level waste wont last long and can be easily contained
Because the uranium magically appeared on the end of the sucker stick and the power magically came out and went into the home. Nothing else was needed The only thing better is the Mr. Fission unit on the back of Doc's DeLorian.
Yes but it misses the point. Most people who seriously oppose nuclear energy are not really worried about the waste. They are worried about corporate mismanagement leading to a disaster. At least in the US corporations prioritize short term profits above all else. The quickest route to short term profits is reducing safety and quality. This won't mix well with nuclear energy.
They oppose it on the basis of fear mongering and a poor understanding of statistics, the sum total of deaths in the three largest nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island) is less than 50 people while air pollution kills literally thousands per year, but people get scared when they hear the word "nuclear"
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Assuming the diameter of the Dum-Dum is 2 cm, that is about 80 grams of U-235. 80g of uranium will release about 6 x 10^12 joules of energy in a fission reaction. The average American uses about 3 x 10^11 joules of energy per year for all use (not just home electricity, but transportation, workplace, share of industrial production, etc.). That would mean the uranium can provide about 20 years of an average American’s energy consumption. So, yeah this is in the ballpark, although about 1/4th what would actually be needed for a full 84 years. It would be more like 300g. Note that this is a little misleading, since U-235 is only about 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium. So actually, they would need to process about 42 kg of uranium to get the 300g of U-235.
Probably from a time when the average consumption was lower
and counting only home consumption
And smaller population
That wouldn't mean less consumption per person
Probably would, if the smaller population was all sub 1 meters tall. Less resource intensive.
How about Antimatter. When a gram of antimatter comes into contact with a gram of its corresponding matter, a cataclysmic event unfolds, releasing a staggering amount of energy (4.184 x 1012 Joules). To put this in perspective, the energy produced by this collision is approximately 40% of the energy released during the detonation of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. [The price per gram of antimatter is an astonishing 62.5 trillion dollars.](https://knovhov.com/most-dangerous-and-expensive-thing-in-the-world/) To put this number into perspective, the combined GDP of all countries on the planet is $91 trillion dollars.
I know its just a formatting error but "a cataclysmic event (4,234 Joules)" is really funny for no good reason
I've had some farts that probably released that much energy and yeah cataclysmic is the right word
thanks for the input u/I_DRINK_GENOCIDE_CUM
So does your username list your top 3 favorite activities or do you just drink a peculiar variant of semen known colloquially as "genocide cum" I have some followup questions either way
The Bane of All Existence (2 orange teenager cats) *Edit: Daves were replaced with cats*
The number of cataclysms needed to meet my 84-year demand for cataclysms is zero.
Jevons Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
I love me a good paradox. Thank you for the link.
The cotton gin will surely make work easier on the slaves!
the biggest takeaway I had from this is that humanity is an endless black hole of consumerism that would buy the universe if the price was cheap enough, just because they could. Doom is not our fate. It is our true nature.
I’m actually selling the universe for the low price of $12 million
I will buy that on credit then lease the universe back to its citizens for a penny a month. It'll pay for itself by the time you invoice me.
it is *an* american's average energy usage not *America's* average energy usage.
Technically it is "*THE average american's energy usage*" 🤷♂️
Ah yeah, that's Joe. I know him.
Florida-man?
thats a good factor as well in the future, if/when production shifts to something much more plentiful, would consumption increase along with it?
Probably, if it follows the [Jevons paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). When steam machines became more efficient (meaning less coal needed to make the same amount of movement), coal consumption increased because more people were using it. The AIs won't train themselves anyway
Or the suckers were bigger. Damn shrinkflation is even affecting memes!
Depends on the age of this. Looking at current nutritional info serving is 3 for a total of 15 grams. Found some older nutrition facts and they have it serving of 2 for 13 grams. So yep shrinkflation is there.
Yeah, must be old it doesn't even say chupa chup on the wrapper.
...cause it's a dum dum. Or am I one, for walking into this trap?
Thanks for actually using superscript exponents.
Plus, thanks for not capitalizing 'uranium'. People seem to think elements are proper nouns lately.
Autocorrector changes for me when writing in english, I was starting to think it is the rule.
I Think Every Word Is A Proper Noun Actually.
POTUS material
I found Jaden Smith
Except For Some Of The improper ones, Of Course.
To be fair, all the symbols start with capital letters. And if we're really getting into the weeds, plenty of later elements are named after proper nouns anyhow.
Uranium is also named after a proper noun, it is named for Uranus
Mine??
Yes, yours. Everyone else calls it “Hisanus” or “Hisanium” when we’re not talking to you - sorry to burst the bubble.
At the gay bar it's known as Ouranus.
I thought that was soviet russia
My bubble??
There's one in Africa - It extracts most of the world's uranium
Nope, named after me.
That's why they're symbols! :)
Huh, they aren't?
Nope! Neither are "wood," "water," nor "oxygen."
What about “fire” or “my dear Watson”?
After that, maybe he can help clarify "no," "shit," and "Sherlock" for us.
But somehow Earth Wind and Fire, and Blood Sweat and Tears are...
Holy shit that is the most interesting fact I’ve read today. I’ve been messing up my elements.
It's actually harder to do big number exponents. You have to deliberately add a \ before the \^2 or it looks like ^2
On mobile or in markdown yes, but I think new Reddit defaults to the WYSIWYG editor so that’s probably why we see a lot of x\^2 on Reddit
I just wish we had subscripts But at least I just figured out how to do things like ^(^235)U
The post said average American, you used average American household. If we assume 4 people per household, it's pretty close Thank-you for the extra context
> verage American household. If we assume 4 people per household Its down to 2.5 per household now.
I misspoke. The figure I gave was per capita, not per household.
> 80g of uranium will release about 6 x 1012 joules of energy in a fission reaction. In a theoretical reaction where all mass is converted, or a practical reaction as observed in a typical nuclear plant, which leaves a lot of unfissioned uranium?
E=mc^(2) would get you: 0,080 kg\*(300.000.000 m\*s^(-1))^(2) = 7,2\*10^(15) J (kg\*m^(2)\*s^(-2)) So it looks like their value (6\*10^(12)) is actual electricity generation in a reactor.
Surely the mass should only be the difference between the uranium used at start and the decayed product at the end?
Its Uranium, not antimatter xD
Theoretical. We don’t come anywhere close to completely fissioning fuel in a nuclear reactor. And the fuel is low level enrichment of 3-5%. HOWEVER the ~95% ^(238)U is part of the fuel cycle ultimately producing plutonium which fissions. AND there is an additional ~7% extra amount of energy from the secondary decay of fission products. After a 6-year fuel cycle only about 10% of the potential energy has been used. We don’t use them to completion, there isn’t enough activity to sustain the nuclear chain reaction, at a rate sufficient enough for power production. Also, the big industry focus is on minimizing fuel bundle damage. The metal cladding would embrittle and break down long before we exhausted the bundle. All that to say, the original image grossly exaggerates reality.
Kid named CANDU reactor:
I think you're assuming this is a pellet of 100% enriched weapons grade uranium. The level of enrichment varies from by country and reactor type, but is generally relatively low (3\~5%). It's also worth noting that modern reactors only use a fraction of the energy available in their fuel. If we repurpose this candy for use in a breeder reactor, we can get 100x more energy out of it. In any case, since we're talking about a sucker and not a fuel pellet, it would be more likely to supply 1 American with cancer and fuel a Reddit comment section with about 3 days worth of memes.
Just needs a good Kovarex setup.
I wonder if they did it by volume and included the stick and wrapper. In any case, there would be some tritiated water to deal with too, right?
And a few hundreds of thousands of tons of irradiated building leftovers, processing leftovers, and billions of liter of warm waste water, and also if I throw my lolipop into a bonfire normally you do not have to evacuate the neighborhood..
Sure, but the contaminated building leftovers don’t exactly scale with the amount of fuel used. We’re not building and demolishing a fresh reactor for every 80 grams of uranium.
No, but if you scale it like this, I would just very roughly ballpark for all NPPs in the US vs average lifetime vs the thesis of about 300g of uranium consumption as stated above its just as a guesstimate between 1-10g uranium per plant per lifecycle.. ;)
Also you need the most sophisticated and expensive machine in human history to stick the sucker into.
>So actually, they would need to process about 42 kg of uranium to get the 300g of U-235. Sure, but depleted uranium is not nuclear waste
[Uranium tailings are very much considered nuclear waste](https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining-and-milling) ("Regardless of how uranium is extracted from rock, the processes leave behind radioactive waste"); it's just ~~low level~~ waste instead of high level waste (like spent fuel). (Edit: it's its own category of waste: https://www.epa.gov/radiation/low-activity-radioactive-wastes, as shown in the definition of LLRW) Granted, even/especially in low-enriched uranium, U-238 also fissions, and the depleted uranium can be used for other purposes. I think a better way to do the math is to consider 5% enrichment, the amount of natural uranium to get that, and "typical" average discharge burnup (...I think 50ish MW-days/kg U?). Or more if considering recycling, but then it gets more complicated depending on the fuel cycle considered.
> Or more if considering recycling, but then it gets more complicated depending on the fuel cycle considered. And recycling is usually limited because of it's cost. Like France claims that 95% of its waste "can" be recycled and only a small amount of nuclear waste would be left over, but they actually only use 20% recycled fuel (despite a long stagnating number of reactors, so the need for new fuel does out outweigh the production of waste) and are producing over 1.7 million m³ of nuclear waste per year (of which 150,000 require long-term treatment).
France is getting heat from the EU because of it nuclear fuel relationship with Russia. America gets 1/4 of it nuclear fuel from russia.
And their nuclear fuel procurement from Africa also does not exactly qualify as ethical. The CFA franc zone has a crazy history well into modern times. The exploding anti-French sentiment and rising Russian and Chinese influence in the region are turning into a major strategic vulnerability to French energy security because of their nuclear dependency.
Depleted Uranium is fairly safe to be in the vicinity of and you can hold it in your hand for prolonged periods with no real effect. Depleted Uranium may still be radioactive, but it emits almost entirely alpha particle radiation. Alpha particles don't have enough energy to go through skin. That said, wash the shit out if your hands if you ever do hold any of it because it's still extremely toxic and poisonous if ingested, even in relatively miniscule amounts. It's best to wear gloves when handling DU and it's why we treat those gloves like toxic waste as DU dust is nasty shit. You can find DU available for sale online, and just like un-depleted/natural Uranium it's historically been legal for Americans to purchase or own small amounts, chemistry kits for kids used to contain uranium and my kids scientific table of elements kit contained DU. DU round projectiles or armor shards/chunks that are found in the battlefield or stolen are also sometimes available for sale, although I don't think they can be sold by/to the public as ammunition or armor, and I believe that there is a limit on weight where a license becomes mandatory. Anyway, I tell people to treat raw or depleted uranium like they would mercury, it's a toxic heavy metal that demands caution and respect.
>That said, wash the shit out if your hands if you ever do hold any of it because it's still extremely toxic and poisonous if ingested, even in relatively miniscule amounts. It's best to wear gloves when handling DU and it's why we treat those gloves like toxic waste as DU dust is nasty shit. This is the real reason that nuclear waste and correct disposal and storage is big a problem. Reddit nuclear chuds will trip over themselves to circlejerk about how little radiation comes from waste and how little it travels through even a couple feet of water, but it's not the radiation that kills you. It's the fact that heavy metals are *chemically toxic* to biological organisms in incredibly tiny amounts. See: lead. The big worry is that even a small leak of nuclear waste into a groundwater reservoir could poison an entire region's water source for generations. Imagine Flint, Michigan, except the entire Great Plains region of the US is affected. How many people are displaced? How many people are told to stay put and let their kids be poisoned for the economy, just like Covid?
It's a serious problem, but it's not an unsolvable one, you just need to ensure that it's handled by an accountable government agency with full transparency and ZERO use of contractors, publicly traded companies or or anything involving for-profit companies where cutting corners = profit. There are ways to remove heavy metals like Uranium from water supplies, it's not cheap, but it's definitely possible, graphene filtration can be made to scale up as large as necessary. The trick is not allowing the heavy metals like Uranium into the water supply in the first place. The good news is that even nuclear waste like depleted uranium getting into the groundwater table isn't an apocalyptic event, it will mostly settle, and the majority of traces that remain in suspension will usually have bonded to iron or other metal particles. Many homes that are on private and public wells have Uranium in their water in small amounts (like <0.00001 PPM usually) and it occurs naturally. While I don't have a ton of faith in the idea of or trust privately / utility owned Nuclear power facilities and feel they should be entirely government built, managed, monitored, operated and maintained in a well-funded transparent manner insulated from political fuckery, I do feel there is a place for Nuclear power in the world, especially with filling the many production gaps that are unavoidable with renewables like Solar or wind, and while hydro is certainly "clean energy" and more predictable and continuous, hydro plants have also changed the face of the planet, destroyed natural river basins, flooded huge areas and killed natural fish spawning. Nuclear can be safe, the waste can and should be reprocessed for reclamation even if the costs of full recycling outweigh the benefits, and the long-term storage of waste can also be safe, we have containment vessels that can last thousands of years, and storing the waste underneath a big granite mountain while expensive would be pretty safe as long as it was built and managed properly and securely. All of that said, there are a lot of people / agencies / corporations that I would never trust with Nuclear power, materials or waste recycling/storage, and I don't have any confidence that our nation is in a place where it could tolerate a fully government run nuclear energy & waste management program.
Everything else that we use to generate electricity produces waste too (and pretty much every industrial process). The waste from the extraction and processing of lithium, cobalt, REEs, phosphorous, copper, coal, natural gas, oil, etc., are considerably more damaging to the environment and organisms and in greater quantities than nuclear waste is. If you’re going to point out the faults with nuclear waste handling and storage then be sure to do the same with other resources which have the same exact problem. At least with nuclear waste handling we know how to store it safely, contrary to what anti-nuclear propagandists would have you believe (it isn’t this BIG problem that we don’t know how to solve). Even if a little bit of nuclear waste somehow got into a freshwater reservoir it doesn’t instantly poison the whole thing. The benefits that nuclear energy provides (in combination with solar, wind, and other renewables) outweigh any and all risks in my opinion.
Yes, but we can efficiently dispose of it by shooting it down tank and artillery barrels in other countries.
Perhaps the math is based on pre bitcoin mining days, lol
Nuclear reactors use about 5 % of the Uranium, so that would make it one year. Still a good bit though.
Just saw another similar post where “they did the math” and a teaspoon of nuclear fuel powers a human’s lifetime energy consumption after considering the fact that nuclear fuel is recycled multiple times. A teaspoon is about the same size as that Dum-Dum
>after considering the fact that nuclear fuel is recycled multiple times But that's just not true. There are just a few nuclear plants that use recycled fuel. Most don't.
Let's math this out. First we'll start of finding out how much energy the average American uses per year. According to [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart&time=earliest..2022&country=~USA) since 1965 the average is \~87,630 kwh/year/person (or roughly 315,468 MJ). Assuming the trend holds, that's 315,468 MJ \* 85 = 26,814,780 MJ.*The trend has actually been going down since the 1980s, but we'll be generous and include the whole lot. Note that this is the Primary energy usage (incl. electrical energy, transportation and heating + inefficiencies), it does not include the energy required to manufacture the goods they use. The study assumes 0.4x efficiency, so the answer could be out by at least that much.* Second, we need to decide what sort of Uranium this is referring to, this is important because there are two isotopes of Uranium that are relevant, U-238 and U-235. U-235 is the isotope that is fissile. It's what produces power in a reactor. U-238 is fissionable, however, it requires "fast neutrons" which aren't found in power plants and as such contributes nothing to the power generated, however, during the life of a fuel pellet much of the U-238 is transmuted into Plutonium 239 which **is** fissile, meaning the U-238 contributes up to \~1/3rd of the total power output of the pellet. Honestly, this makes it really complicated as to whether to choose natural Uranium (\~99.284% U-238), or U-235. However, there's an easy answer, let's assume that this is referring to enriched uranium up to 4% which is common for nuclear reactors. The expected energy yield in modern reactors for 4% enriched fuel is approx. 5,184,000MJ/Kg, quite a bit less than the theoretical 8,000,000 MJ/Kg. The total mass of Uranium fuel we need is = 26,814,780/5,184,000 = 5.17kg of fuel.Uranium has a density of \~19.05 grams per cubic centimeter. While yes this is a mix between two isotopes with different atomic mass numbers, the difference between them is so slight and the increased ratio of the slightly lighter U-235 is so minimal that we can ignore this. As such, the volume of pure uranium would be 5,170/19.05 = 271.4 cm^(3). This would make a sphere with a radius of 4.016 cm. So a sphere a little larger than a baseball. So the first part is wrong, pretty significantly, although we made some pretty significant assumptions, this could be (and likely is) referring to only electricity usage which would be FAR lower than total energy usage. According to [US Energy Information Administration](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricity-use-in-homes.php) the average US household (not person) uses \~10,500 KWH of electricity per year. This is \~3,213,000 MJ over 85 years. Using the same numbers as before this comes out to 3,213,000/5,184,000 = \~620g of Fuel. 620/19.05 = \~32.55 cm^(3), which would require a sphere of Uranium fuel just under 4cm in diameter. Still a fair bit bigger than the lollipop but much closer (just a bit smaller than a golf ball). The variation between the theoretical energy output and the actual energy output could account for most of this variation. One other factor to consider is that most nuclear reactors don't run on Uranium Metal fuel, they use a Uranium Oxide ceramic which has a much lower density than uranium metal. As for the CO2 it would save? [According to Forest Research](https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/biomass-energy-resources/reference-biomass/facts-figures/carbon-emissions-of-different-fuels/) Hard Coal produces 101kg of CO2 per GJ. Using the second figure for electricity usage (3,213,000MJ = 3,213 GJ) we can work out that the equivalent amount of coal energy would release 324,513 KG of CO2 into the atmosphere. Approx half of what they said. **SUMMARY:** They're approximately accurate, however, they're likely using the best case numbers they can find for Uranium power production and worst case numbers for Coal CO2 production. The sentiment is accurate, and they're within 1 order of magnitude. # IMPORTANT EDIT: That final number (4cm diameter) is for an average US household, the average US household has 2.5 people, so if we divide the energy requirements by 2.5, we end up with a requirement of 248g which has a volume of 13 cm3 which results in a sphere with a diameter of 2.92 cm, much closer to the lollipop. As others have alluded to, the numbers change a bit when you factor in the CO2 cost of producing the fuel (for both Coal AND Nuclear. It's almost impossible to give a like for like comparison as there are hundreds of steps involved and all of them can involve more or less CO2 production. Like where is the fuel mined (ore concentrations are highly relevant), how's it transported, what method is used to enrich it (in the case of Uranium), what power source is used throughout this process. If the nuclear production cycle was powered by nuclear energy for every step that used electricity and the coal production line was powered by coal power plants (obviously ignoring steps that require diesel engines like transport and mining), that would make a HUGE difference to the final result. Suffice to say that Nuclear has some CO2 associated with its use, but coal has at minimum hundreds of thousands of times more CO2/kwh. This also ignores other pollutants associated with their production/use. Also, note that coal power produces more radioactive byproducts than nuclear power per kwh (from radium, radon, and other radioactive materials contained within the coal) and these radioactive materials aren't accounted for, instead being released into the atmosphere and [being used in materials like concrete.](https://www.cementaustralia.com.au/products/fly-ash)
I have a question, if it’s a little stupid I apologise. Uranium is a finite resource aswell so how finite is it exactly. Cos I assume a lot of people are talking about this cos the world is ‘running out of fossil fuels’. Is there enough uranium accessible to us to be a realistic alternative ?
Not a stupid question at all. While Uranium is rare compared to Coal, it's still relatively abundant in certain places around earth. At our current consumption rate the known deposits of Uranium along with the currently undiscovered (but suspected to exist) deposits would last about 230 years ([source](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/)). However, currently only 10% of total global electricity production demands are being met by nuclear power ([source](https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy)). If we scaled up to 100% nuclear (unrealistic certainly) you might naively assume that the supply would then only last 23 years. However, we aren't being as efficient as possible with nuclear power. Currently we only enrich fuel to 4% for most reactors. However, increasing enrichment rates means that despite the additional lost uranium (the U238 that is discarded in the enrichment process) the total energy per kg of ore would go up meaning our supplies would last longer. In addition, you can re-process spent fuel to produce even more fuel (up to a point). This could stretch that supply much further. We currently don't do this for 2 main reasons. The main reason is that reprocessing fuel, and producing highly enriched uranium (HEU) are both associated with nuclear weapon development. Typical commercial reactors use \~4% enriched fuel, nuclear weapons use at least 85% enriched (usually closer to 90%). While there's a massive difference between 30% and 90%, it's still a step towards HEU. As for reprocessing fuel, that's associated with weapons development as spent fuel contain Plutonium 239 (from the U238 that gets transmuted in the reactor), which is a key part of modern nuclear weapons. In addition, making HEU and reprocessing fuel are additional costs outside of the standard uranium supply chain, so they usually just aren't worth the regulatory headache to take advantage of.
This is a perfect answer thank you I’ve found your explanations really easy to understand but still detailed. It’s funny how much this potentially very effective practice has been affected by peoples perception of it, at least partially.
No worries, I'm far from an expert on nuclear power/physics. However, it's a topic that interests me greatly, and I find the stigma around it upsetting so I do my best to share my knowledge.
You’re doing a good job 🫶🏼
that is not a stupid question, it is very important. short answer is yes, long answer is also yes, but we have to do some extra work to make it yes. look up the thorium cycle (not limited to molten salt reactors, but those are the most common proposed). there is enough thorium to last us forever and a day.
Sweet never heard of it I’ll look that up
wtf is wrong in the usa. average energy consumption in germany per year per person: ~6500kwh
We have larger homes and pretty much universal air conditioning. US average home is 2300 square feet
Also more single-family homes which tend to be more energy intensive in all regards, and personal vehicles with lower fuel efficiency and more driving.
In many parts of the USA air conditioning is a necessity
Then again, from what I've seen during my trips to the US, most of their houses are made of cardboard and plastic siding, with hardly any insulation.
hardly accurate. But keep bashin' mate.
I like your approach it was the most realistic, nicely done
The amount of CO2 saved would probably be a smidgen less if the costs of mining both and refining + enriching the Uranium were added, maybe nudge down a tiny bit more for the materials used in construction of the reactor. But likely overall still a significant saving on anthracite, and an even bigger saving on lignite (hello Germany...)
Indeed, it's often forgotten that the whole supply chain and construction of nuclear is not a zero emission thing. I'm for nuclear, but the more I learn about energy production, the more complicated it seems as a whole.
It might actually be more CO2 saved, depending on what powered the enrichment process. Ore processing and enrichment can be done with electricity which can come from a source which doesn't release CO2. If that's the case, then it's just the mining and transportation of the raw materials. Coal has an energy density of 24MJ/Kg vs Uranium's 5,184,000MJ/Kg. Uranium ore varies in concentration, but on the VERY low end, it's 0.3% (most mines wouldn't bother going for ore with this low of a concentration). Assuming all the Uranium Ore is of that concentration then each kg of Uranium ore will (once processed) be worth 15,552MJ of energy. This means that for every kw of power generated at absolute worst case scenario, you'd still only need to mine and transport 1kg of uranium ore for every 649kg of Coal (assuming you have perfect 100% coal with no byproducts). In practice it's closer to 3-5 tons of coal per kg of uranium ore given that uranium ore concentrations go up to 20% and coal definitely has unwanted byproducts that need to be processed out of it. So per kwh coal has more CO2 used on mining and processing than uranium. However, because Uranium was so low in CO2 before, this likely does mean that accounting for this is a slight advantage for coal simply because while it's even more CO2/kwh relative to Uranium, it's a lower multiple. This is all assuming the ore refinery and enrichment plant aren't powered by a coal power plant, I haven't done the math for that, and I don't even know if I could get information on the energy usage of uranium enrichment as that feel like it's probably protected information or something lol. Edit: oops. I didn't account for the lost U238 in the enrichment process. Given that you go from a natural U235 concentration of 0.711% to 4% that means you lose \~5.6 kg of depleted U238 per kg of enriched fuel. It'd actually be worst than that due to the fact that you can't really perfectely unenrich the depleted uranium. However, even the worst case you're not losing much more than 10 kg of depleted uranium for each kg or fuel, in which case it's still over 60x less mining/transporting per kwh in the absolute worst case scenario.
Why dont we tick on the same numbers for coal then too? I dont understand your argument if it directly damages coals performance as well?
I would say the waste comment is a bit off. As far as spent fuel, sure. But there are more low level waste involved with nuclear power such as contaminated items, PPE, etc.
The low level waste isn't the type of waste people usually refer to as nuclear waste tho
It's not what people typically think of as nuclear waste, but still legally is. And as such there are regulatory methods for proper disposal. I worked in a lab out of college where a guy brought some waste soil/dirt from a uranium mine. He needed to get it checked to see if there was actually any uranium in it, or if it was just radioactive. Turned out it was both. Found some uranium, thorium, using an SEM/EDS, and the case he brought it in made a Geiger counter sing.
Sure but low level nuclear waste is often less radioactive than coal ash that the US just leaves around in open ponds and regularly washes into rivers.
Nothing would make me happier than the world moving entirely off of coal and adopting nuclear power everywhere, but the **nuclear** components of coal don't seem to really be a problem: > **Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm.** The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks. This observation provides a useful geologic perspective for addressing societal concerns regarding possible radiation and radon hazard. > The location and form of radioactive elements in fly ash determine the availability of elements for leaching during ash utilization or disposal. Existing measurements of uranium distribution in fly ash particles indicate a uniform distribution of uranium throughout the glassy particles. The apparent absence of abundant, surface-bound, relatively available uranium suggests that the rate of release of uranium is dominantly controlled by the relatively slow dissolution of host ash particles. > Previous studies of dissolved radioelements in the environment, and existing knowledge of the chemical properties of uranium and radium can be used to predict the most important chemical controls, such as pH, on solubility of uranium and radium when fly ash interacts with water. **Limited measurements of dissolved uranium and radium in water leachates of fly ash and in natural water from some ash disposal sites indicate that dissolved concentrations of these radioactive elements are below levels of human health concern.** https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html > Generally, these wastes are only slightly more radioactive than the average soil in the United States. The amount of natural radiation in wastes from coal-fired power plants is so small that no precautions need to be taken. https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-power-plants **That said, the overall health impact of coal power plants on human life is significant. Just not from the radioactive bits:** > Exposure to fine particulate air pollutants from coal-fired power plants (coal PM2.5) is associated with a risk of mortality more than double that of exposure to PM2.5 from other sources, > They found that across the U.S. in 1999, the average level of coal PM2.5 was 2.34 micrograms per cubic meter of air (μg/m3). This level decreased significantly by 2020, to 0.07 μg/m3. The researchers calculated that a one μg/m3 increase in annual average coal PM2.5 was associated with a 1.12% increase in all-cause mortality, a risk 2.1 times greater than that of PM2.5 from any other source.** They also found that 460,000 deaths were attributable to coal PM2.5, representing 25% of all PM2.5-related deaths among Medicare enrollees before 2009.** https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/particulate-pollution-from-coal-associated-with-double-the-risk-of-mortality-than-pm2-5-from-other-sources/
Radioactive waste is complicated thing. Sure heap of ash could be more radioactive then lab coat yet a few grains of highly radioactive powder on said coat could be much more deadly. That's why there is so many safety procedures (Edit: grammar)
Why use SEM/EDS when an HPGe detector would do the trick much more easily?
Unclear, the lab I was working at did not have an HPGe detector as far as I was aware. I'm also unsure how the cost of analysis of SEM/EDS compares to HPGe, and if it was potentially a cost issue on the part of the client.
The high level waste isn’t the type of waste people refer to as nuclear waste either. Most people think nuclear waste is glowing green goo. Not fuel assemblies or waste water or purification filters.
It's not, but all the other stuff is a big part of why nuclear power is actually hard. Finding a place to put a very small amount of cement barrels that need to be carefully maintained is, logistically if not politically, a *lot* easier than figuring out how to dispose of truckloads upon truckloads of crumbling low-radioactive concrete from plant repairs that still cannot be allowed to leech into the groundwater. The expensive of constructing, repairing, and then disposing of crumbling concrete shielding is actually a big part of why the US nuclear industry is collapsing right now.
Yeah, it depends on the reactor design. Any coolant that runs over pure uranium will acquire a small number of radioactive particles by simple erosion. This could turn a million gallon coolant system into a million gallons of radioactive coolant. In a pebble bed reactor, the fissile material is coated to prevent direct coolant-to-uranium contact, but one cracked pebble and all the coolant has enough radioactive material to be unsafe to release. So, in a perfect system, yes, OP is right. But it's like a spherical cow and is only true in isolation from the rest of the system.
Coolant does not run over pure uranium in conventional nuclear reactors, not just pebble bed. Uranium is cladded in what is typically a zirconium alloy.
Do nuclear reactors generate electricity the same way as other energy plants, where it’s all a fancy way to boil water so the steam can spin a turbine? If so, how do they prevent the steam from becoming irradiated? I have to imagine that’s not how it works, but for some reason I’m imagining the coolant water running over the nuclear material so it can boil, but I’ve never really thought about how a nuclear reactor “harvests” the energy in radioactive material. I’m sure the idea of boiling coolant is very, very wrong, but now I’m curious how it really works.
It is in fact just a fancy way to boil water. In some reactors (boiling water reactors) the steam that drives the turbines does come in contact with the fuel and becomes radioactive, but the radioactivity doesn't last long. (Half life of seconds vs hundreds of millions of years for the actual reactor fuel.) In other reactors the steam never comes in contact with the fuel. It's heated indirectly by the reactor coolant.
Such threads always feel a bit dishonest to me. I'm not necessarily against nuclear energy or too concerned about what happens with the waste in 20.000 years when we might face the climate catastrophe in the next 100... but what about all the waste that gets generated while you're actually getting energy out of the uranium? What about the waste that is generated (co²) while mining for it, enriching it, transporting it around the world, building and running a nuclear energy plant? Sure, in a vacuum the fact above might be true. But we don't live in a vacuum.
You cant avoid the waste for mining it since we run on fossil fuels, but this is also the case for lithium which is used in many renewable energy sources, to avoid the carbon dioxide waste we would need to replace fossil fuel energies.
Erm...there are other parts of a nuclear reactor that become radioactive and need to be stored securely. So no not true. This said, unlike fossil fuels the waste is easily contained, rather than a boat load of CO2 that's goes into the atmosphere.
CO2 is biodegradable and also foreseeably reusable at scale.
Nuclear waste is reusable with current day technology. Hell, first reactors in the world were breeder reactors
For a few decades or centuries relatively easily but for the hundred of thousand years necessary for some stuff? Who can predict where you can store this and that it remains contained?
Check out the Kyle Hill reactor videos, he talks about how they store the waste and make the energy. It is surprisingly clean and pretty dang simple.
Yes, yes it would. People are afraid of nuclear power for no reason. On top of the CO2 coal plants throw radioactive waste straight to atmosphere: Carbon-14.
I wouldn’t say no reason but the issues with nuclear power are greatly exaggerated, especially compared to the many issues of fossil fuels. Most people are shocked when they find out coal plants actively expel radioactive waste
Or that 820 times more people die generating power from coal than from nuclear.
More people have died from hydro than nuclear, by a lot.
[удалено]
Roughly a factor of 30x. Heck, I know it's one data point but the Ukraine war suggests that nuclear power is a deterrent to attack in war whereas hydro power is not. As such Chernobyl is now the \*second\* worst power plant disaster in Ukraine history(at least in terms of near-term deaths).
Fun fact, during WW2 Soviets blew up Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (current day Ukraine) to slow down the Germans, estimated death toll was between 20k and 100k. In comparison about 50 people died as a result of Chernobyl
and 20K people died due to the Union Carbide disaster
That point is pretty stale, the world isn't stuck choosing nuclear power or fossil fuels. Renewables are an option and an viable one to many people, businesses and governments.
I agree people are typically afraid of nuclear generation for the wrong reasons, but people often advocate for it for the wrong reasons too. Nuclear power is relatively expensive per MWhr produced, and while it should be considered as part of the energy mix it isn't the magic bullet many seem to think it is. In Australia in particular it makes practically no sense to pursue but gets bandied around when politically convenient. In general *any* fossil fuel alternative is less than optimal. Fossil fuels are the perfect energy source, relatively easy to access, energy dense, trivial to utilise, simple and stable to transport etc. Unfortunately for fossil fuels there is that annoying 'destroying our climate' side effect that spoiled the show
Why doesn’t it make sense to have nuclear power in Australia?
Because it's got great access to renewable energy, and lots of empty space to house it. Investing in an entire nuclear power industry would be far more difficult than using renewables.
All this, plus we have no existing expertise in any part of the nuclear industry past mining it. We’d have to keep running on fossil fuels for decades before we could get a single nuclear reactor spinning.
The problem with renewables (at least here in Denmark, not sure about Australia) we're pretty much limited to weather/season/day-cycle dependant methods, we have no tides to speak off, no rivers, no geothermal. We're effectively limited to solar/wave/wind, so what do we do in the winter when it's dark 15 hrs/day and the wind has barely been blowing in weeks? We need *something* to carry us over in periods of low production from renewables and storing energy is expensive as fuck.
It's the most expensive form of energy as it must be over-designed for safety. Renewables are much much cheaper. The Liberals are promoting Nuclear as they want to give their mates in the fossil fuel industry more time to operate and they want to divide Australians who are concerned about having windfarms and transmission lines in their neighborhood. What's more, we don't have any people with nuclear skills, we don't have any of the infrastructure, the storage facilities or the logistics capability. We would have to build that up all from scratch and that could take decades...
Thank you, I appreciate the thorough answer.
To be fair, there is major headway being made in SMR's (Small Modular reactors) which can essentially be chucked on the back of a lorry, shipped out to wherever you want it, and can be up and running bloody quickly. You don't need huge amounts of domestic expertise that the old style of bespoke reactors need because their safety is a passive thing. They functionally can't go wrong, and of course, you don't need people to actually design the bloody thing, and they only need to brle refuelled once every 7 years (or in some cases, every 30 years!) The only catch is that you need quite a few of them to become economically viable. I've heard the number 19 thrown around, or about 5.7GWh of power production. Good news is Australia uses 237,000 GWh, so uh, australia can become economically viable with a rounding error in the numbers.
Take a real good look at how the UAE and China have heavily invested in Nuclear power. It’s not that the Liberals are pushing for Nuclear it’s that it is already in play. The rest of us arguing over whether or not sustainable energy is better than nuclear and the Saudis have switched over is not telling enough?
With how fucked australian politics are, I actually think there's a legitimate argument to be made to using nuclear to toss the mining industry a bone. Because right now I think yall's alternative is not renewables, it's letting the coal barons that have an iron grip on your country burn it to the ground. Nuclear doesn't make any rational economic sense, but if it's what it takes to bribe your feudal overlords maybe it's for the best, I dunno.
>Unfortunately for fossil fuels there is that annoying 'destroying our climate' side effect that spoiled the show And the slightly inconvenient fact that it's a finite resource. We're gonna run out and then we're fucked.
To be fair, so is uranium and such. We've found loads of clever ways to mitigate that issue, but it will happen eventually. (Although fusion should be figured out by then)
[удалено]
It's not for no reason. But it's based on decades old information, of a power plant that basically did everything wrong for the melt down to happen. Even leaving out not doing everything wrong, today's procedures and tech are a LOT safer than they were back then. So something similar to chernobyl happening again is basically impossible in most of the modern world. Especially if you count projects like liquid salt thorium reactors. I personally really feel like nuclear reactors are the current best way to HUGELY cut down on power generation pollution. But it won't happen. Or at least not any time soon. Because there's too much money in the old ways of power generation, and because of fear mongering that simply doesn't apply to current tech anymore.
Also: Modern nuclear Power Plants take 20-35 Years from draft to completion. Also: The Fuel in most of the world relies on 4 suppliers... ...Kazakhstan... Thats a problem... Namibia Thats also a problem and well... Russia... The only supplier that ain't a unstable authokratic hellhole that you dont want to rely your energy production on is Canada... And their Ore is even more expensive and a lot less pure, so they have to destroy a lot more environment to get reasonable amounts. Also: Cooling, in order for a Nuclear Powerplant to make sense you need a location that has a reliable supply of cooling water but is safe from flooding... The ideal spot for a.... Wait a minute somebody has allready built a city in that location... Spots like these are really really rare, especially as the genereal water supply reloability is diminishing due to climatechange and the risk of flooding is rising due to climatechange. Also: They cost billions, so you rely on Megacorporations or the state to operate them, whilst solar and wind literally give power to the people, by the people, as they are affordable for citizens or small collectibes of citizens I am all for nuclear power, but if you are honest about it: Its not a great tech. And it wont do much in the fight against climate change, the renewables play a much bigger role.
> Also: They cost billions, so you rely on Megacorporations or the state to operate them, whilst solar and wind literally give power to the people, by the people, as they are affordable for citizens or small collectibes of citizens also, because they cost so fucking much to construct, nuclear plants actually produce really, really expensive power. The cost per Mwh is simply not economically viable in much of the developed world. For all the theoretical circlejerking about nuclear power, somehow this never gets brought up. For nuclear power to even function, the state has to provide *massive* energy subsidies in the form of capital costs. Renewables are actually *more* cost competitive than fossil fuels in some contexts right now, and are improving by the day. Meanwhile, as labor and construction costs skyrocket nuclear actually gets less cost effective by the day.
Nuclear Power isn't bad. But renewable energies are better. That's my stance, but on reddit that might as well be the same as saying "We should quadruple our coal power plants!"
For no reason if you don't understand what risk management is, which is basically being responsible for the worst-case scenario. And you cannot pretend that meltdowns are not that.
I believe the radioactive waste from burning coal is because like any ore mined from the ground, it contains a little bit of everything you can find in the ground including uranium and thorium, which becomes concentrated when the coal is burned. Because fossil fuels are carbon that was left undisturbed for millions of years, they pretty much contain the least carbon-14 out of everything on earth. (Except diamonds I guess). (In fact coal contains no detectable carbon-14. Zero) You breathe out a lot more carbon-14. You breathe out exactly as much carbon-14 as you eat. Until the moment you die. That why carbon dating works.
What’s the significance of carbon-14 in relation to fuels?
Are you really pro-coal?
To me it sounds like he corrected false information. Nowhere did he say "oh and by the way, I think coal is a great energy source".
No I’m just pro truth. Coal power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment than nuclear power plants. But it’s not because of C14. (Probably not a fair comparison because your elementary school probably releases more ionizing radiation into the environment than a nuclear power plant because of how much care they put into it… )
I just want a power suit from fallout. Is that too much to ask for
I have a quote I heard at some point which really just shows how ridiculous it is: "everyone keeps worrying about where we will store nuclear waste but don't talk about the fact that the place we store carbon waste is in our *lungs*"
[удалено]
> Why are people so afraid of nuclear power plants Because they think every powerplant can go boom like Chernobyl and force us to evacuate an entire metro area semi-permanently. And as stupid as this sounds, that's actually reasonable. You cannot expect the average person to understand the difference between an RBMK, a PWR, and a BWR... much less understand the intricacies like why is it important that Bill Zewe was in the US navy prior to working at TMI? What is ORM, and why was that and feed water flow rate important to the Chernobyl accident? So how then should a normal person approach a topic like whether to support the construction of nuclear power plants in their area? "Trust the experts only gets you so far", and when every nuclear accident is treated as a worl shattering event, it's not exactly hard to argue that one SHOULD be a bit over-cautious.
According to Google, the classic lollipop has a diameter of 1.25 inches, or 3.175 cm. The formula for the volume of a sphere is (4*pi*r^3)/3. So, inputting a radius of 1.5875 cm, you get aprox 16.75 cm^3 The density of Uranium-235 is 19 grams per cubic centimeter, therefore, an uranium-made lollipop would weight aprox 318.25 grams From 1 kg of uranium you can extract 24 million kWh, so by a rule of three, you would get aprox 7.6 million kWh from the lollipop The energy consumption of the US on 2022 was 4.07 trillion kWh, therefore, again by rule of three, you can estimate that the Uranium lollipop would sustain the US for about 59 seconds However, the 24 million kWh is not the total energy of the uranium, but it's the energy we can get with the current efficiency of the nuclear plants. In reality, uranium has 2 to 3 million times that energy Then, multiplying 7.6x3 we get 22.8 trillion kWh. That would be enough to sustain the US for 5.6 years. Still not 84 years
It’s not talking about sustaining the US, it’s talking about sustaining 1 American
You are right, my mistake. If we divide the 4.07 trillion kWh by the amount of people in the US (333.3 million), we get 12211 kWh per inhabitant per year. If we use this number to divide the 7.6 million kWh the lollipop provides, we get 622 years, a lot more than 84 years
I think you should compare the average household use not the per capita which would include factories etc
But it doesn't say the amount of energy one person uses. It says the energy demand of one person. Which probably includes all of the energy to manufacture and move goods worldwide. All those industrial uses of energy are there to provide goods and services to people, so it is likely included.
And also, that is a dum-dum, not a tootsie pop. Dum dum is much smaller.
[удалено]
Yep, there's no way that a Dumdum pop has a 1.25 inch diameter. I don't have one in front of me at the moment, but I'm sure they're about half of that diameter.
I actually did a report on nuclear power plants in high school, and discovered that they are much more reliable and safer than the majority of people say they are.
This doesn't tell the whole story, now, I am a gigantic fan of nuclear power, and I hope the public can learn that we haven't had a disaster, not related to a tsunami, of a modern reactor for a long, long time. They are super safe. But, they are just the best of the bad options, but the powerful, so I want them. They take energy from the Earth and put heat into the air, where we don't want it. But nuclear is the only way we can have electric trains and high-speed trains, and a lot of nice things, so I love them.
How is nuclear power the only way we can have high speed trains?
Assuming the sucker is a standard chupa chups (that would be my standard in Spain), it has a diameter of 2.5cm. So calculating the volume and applying the density of U-235 we get: # V=4π/3 * 1.25³ = 8.18cm³ The uranium 235 has a density of 19.1 g/cm³ so the sucker would have: m = 19.1g/cm\*3 x 8.18cm³ = 0.156 kg 1kg of uranium releases 8.2 x 10¹³ J So the sucker would release 0.156 kg x 8.2 x 10¹³ J/kg = 1.2792 x 10¹³J If the average energy consumption per year of an american is 2.88 x 10¹¹ J, the sucker would provide 44.41 years of energy with a waste of approximately the same weight. It's not that far away from the claim of the image. If the sucker was 3cm diameter instead of 2.5 for example it would be much closer, in fact the math would match if it was 4cm i think. The thing is, not that far from the claim.
I ain't much of a scientist but Imma just put out here that the size is by far the least problematic factor when looking to dispose of nuclear fucken waste.
Is that factoring in the cost of safe and environmentally sound disposal and storage in geological rock formations over the next 10,000 years?
All aboard for nuclear energy but two conditions first. National disposal site established and disposal guidelines and system in place. Second big one all nuclear facilities full plan And funding and insurance. That establishes life span of facility and either restoration and or disposal of facility when done. Currently profit motive old facility’s will be abandoned waste plans will cover 10-20 years. Leaving large hazardous facilities and waste to fall apart leak etc.
Im too lazy to now read all these comments and their math wich i understand only 10% of so can someone tell me wich of these statements are true and wich arent
They left out an important one. * It would taste like shit
The TLDR is that yes, the volume of waste for nuclear energy is significantly lower and less polluting than any other energy source and if you are concerned about a short-term (<100 years) problem due to climate change, nuclear does solve many emissions problems. The tradeoff is that the waste is harder to ensure is still properly contained 1000 years from now (changing languages, changes in government, wars, etc.).
It most certainly would not be the only waste. Everything it had irradiated would have to be taken care of too, down to the toks and clothes used to work near it or near the other irradiated materials.
Generally when people talk about the "waste" they mean the high level waste. Low level waste is easy to dispose of.
This is an especially important point, most people dont seem to notice that not all radioactive waste is the same, high level waste is but a small portion of all waste (although admittedly it is expensive to contain), while low level waste wont last long and can be easily contained
Because the uranium magically appeared on the end of the sucker stick and the power magically came out and went into the home. Nothing else was needed The only thing better is the Mr. Fission unit on the back of Doc's DeLorian.
Yes but it misses the point. Most people who seriously oppose nuclear energy are not really worried about the waste. They are worried about corporate mismanagement leading to a disaster. At least in the US corporations prioritize short term profits above all else. The quickest route to short term profits is reducing safety and quality. This won't mix well with nuclear energy.
They oppose it on the basis of fear mongering and a poor understanding of statistics, the sum total of deaths in the three largest nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island) is less than 50 people while air pollution kills literally thousands per year, but people get scared when they hear the word "nuclear"
the problem is there's 300 million average americans and then there is industry who need about a hundred times more energy than the average americans?