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2019-01-13, 04:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. Even a controlled nuclear chain reaction requires far more stuff built around it to contain it and direct it to boil the water for the turbine. Any improvement in turbines or designs will be applicable to all such plants, not nuclear. So the floor of cost for a nuclear power station will always be higher than coal or natural gas. That is all I said.
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2019-01-13, 04:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Yes, but coal mining wouldn't happen if it weren't for coal power. And coal mining is a lot more dangerous than many other types of mining. If you're going to count the production of the raw materials for solar and wind, you also have to do the same for coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The whole point is to look at the entire lifecycle of the energy production.
And while silicone, natural gas, and nuclear material are all mined too, they all have different problems and safety issues. Nuclear at least has the advantage of needing a very small amount of fuel to operate compared to the other ones. Silicone is pretty benign to mine, but refining it is very energy intensive.
Yes, but domestic heating is very much a part of the energy used by people. Natural gas is (as far as I'm aware) still by far the most efficient method of heating, and electric heating is one of the least efficient methods (and you've got to use electric heating for pretty much every other main source of energy, nuclear, solar, wind, and most coal is not done via individuals burning it any more). Although the main point was that coal pollution can and does kill.
It doesn't have to be though. In most cases they are made huge because a few large power plants is a lot easier to run and with less overhead than many small plants. Most coal plants are also huge, but there are a lot of not so big ones too. Nuclear reactors are already made small enough to go into submarines, size isn't inherent to their function.
Well it does say right there the data is from 7 years ago. But the energy density of solar and wind is very low compared to coal and nuclear. Since I'm from Wyoming, I'll just use that as an example.
It is a good place for wind, we've got turbines going up everywhere, see them all along the interstates. The largest one in the state is 144MW. The largest coal plant in the state is2,318 MW, so about 16x more energy.I don't have a relative size of each of them, but I used to live close to both and I can say for sure that the wind turbines were much more obvious. The point being, what looks like a huge amount of wind turbines could still be a relatively small amount of total power.
Yes, retrofitting something is always more expensive and more work than building it like that in the beginning. We could make much safer and efficient nuclear reactors if the fear of nuclear didn't make it so that no one has even tried in the USA in decades. I did a project on it in school.... about 20 years ago, and they had designs then that couldn't melt down even if all of the safety measures were turned off (like what happened in Chernobyl). I think they were trying to get a pilot plant up in Africa as a proof of concept, but I don't know if it ever actually happened. And of course since Fukashima virtually no one in the world wants to even entertain the possibility of nuclear.
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2019-01-13, 04:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2007
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I don't have numbers to prove it, but I would be very surprised if the cost per MW went down if you made the plant smaller. More likely, the military uses nuclear power in submarines because they don't care about money cost or CO2 cost when purchasing their toys of war. For everyone else, massive nuclear plants are not just cheaper to operate, but cheaper to build by the MW. Economies of scale and all that.
Grey WolfLast edited by Grey_Wolf_c; 2019-01-13 at 05:02 PM.
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
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2019-01-13, 05:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Windmills date from a really long time ago. There was a miller's son in Robin Hood's band:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_the_Miller%27s_Son
Also, Chernobyl is a bad example to use for radiation poisoning, as it turns out most people's exposure came about because the Communists really screwed up the prophylactic treatments by giving everyone extremely high doses of radioactive iodides.The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-13, 05:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I'm sure the cost is lower the bigger they go. But the quote I was responding to was saying that cost was high "because the equipment is huge" which... just isn't the case. All the industrial scale power equipment is big, there is nothing unique to nuclear that makes their equipment larger and therefor more expensive because of it. The high cost is regulatory/safety overhead almost exclusively.
Last edited by Erloas; 2019-01-13 at 05:42 PM.
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2019-01-13, 05:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
[citation needed]. Sorry, but I do not believe that is true. It think the large majority of the cost is due to needing to build a damn large building that can contain a nuclear chain reaction, water to heat with it, and turbines to turn the steam into electricity.
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2019-01-13, 05:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Because coal and natural gas also need huge buildings, made mostly of concrete and steel, to hold their combustion, and then they need water to heat with that, and then they need to put that steam into turbines to generate electricity. The furnace vs the reactor core is the only real difference between the two methods of generation. As we've already established, there isn't anything inherently "huge" about a nuclear reactor. They wouldn't put them on subs if they *required* huge amounts of space and weight to contain.
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2019-01-13, 06:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Actually, they use Nuclear in their submarines, because other fuel sources require oxygen to burn and it's difficult to get sufficient oxygen to keep that going while underwater. Early submarines were forced to surface every so often to replenish the oxygen stores not only for the crew, but also for the engine. Nuclear allows them to remain under for longer.
While I don't know that it's the MAJORITY of the cost. Just thinking about the salaries for Nuclear Engineers alone, let alone construction, makes my head spin. But I have to drive past a Nuclear plant every day. I've been on tours. While the construction is certainly something, it's not all that different from the coal plant across the way. It's actually smaller.
Just as an example of the sort of traffic jams Nuclear Power faces regularly....Last edited by druid91; 2019-01-13 at 06:14 PM.
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2019-01-13, 07:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Quoth Rogar Demonblud:
Also, Chernobyl is a bad example to use for radiation poisoning, as it turns out most people's exposure came about because the Communists really screwed up the prophylactic treatments by giving everyone extremely high doses of radioactive iodides.
And I know that Fukushima scared a lot of people off of nuclear power, but I have no idea why. The disaster in Fukushima was an entirely natural tsunami. Everything in that region of Japan failed, not just the nuclear plant. And most of the failures, including multiple fossil-fuel facilities of various sorts, had worse consequences than the nuclear plant. I think that people heard about a nuclear failure, and saw the devastation, and connected them, even though almost all of the devastation had nothing at all to do with the nuclear plant. Oh, and there's also some meaningless made-up scale for nuclear disasters that it got a 5 on, because that represents "really bad disaster", and of course it was really bad, because it got a 5 on that scale.Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
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2019-01-14, 12:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
I think the main issue at Chernobyl was the somewhat baffling design decision to have the first eighteen inches of the control rods being made from a non-neutron-absorbing material. This meant that when they realised it was going wrong and hit the SCRAM button to shut it down, the control rods went in, replacing neutron-absorbing water with a non-neutron-absorbing material and thus actually increasing the rate of reaction.
As for why they didn't use water, it takes good engineering and a lot of money to make a PWR or equivalent--a big graphite block with holes drilled in it is far easier and cheaper to make!
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2019-01-14, 12:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Oh, I have barely even touched on the issues involved with Chernobyl. If Stalin was still in charge when the 80s came about, most Soviet nuclear plants would've had their upper management shot as Wreckers, since they had a habit of sabotaging the plants to cause a 'meltdown', then stopping the 'meltdown' to collect fat bonus checks. And the maintenance dollars (well, rubles) were being embezzled to fund dachas in the countryside. And as part of a fire safety training exercise, someone took a fire axe to certain (unspecified) systems to enhance 'realism' in the training---and this when much of the safety systems are already sabotaged (see above).
Then you get such fun things that the evacuees were just shoved into your typical late-Soviet apartment complexes and given no jobs, no counseling and a pittance of a welfare check to sustain themselves. The resultant depression, suicides, murder suicides and crime wave were listed as radiation poisoning deaths rather than admitting that Moscow made the issue horribly worse.
The worst part of the whole deal may well be that it makes think positively about ****ing Stalinism. I hate that pig.
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2019-01-14, 12:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Radiation is scary stuff, and there was enough released that the evacuated people aren't being allowed back yet.
That scale is silly, it stops at five because they didn't think anything worse than a five could possibly happen, but if it went to say ten or fifteen, then Fukushima would be a seven and Chernobyl would be much more than that, halfway to a Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombThe end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-14, 04:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Fukushima looked like a perfectly built nuclear plant up until the engineers went to restart the cooling pumps after the tidal wave hit. They found that not only were the backup diesel generators under water, but the power connections to plug in a generator on a truck to drain the backup generators were under water.
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2019-01-15, 12:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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2019-01-15, 01:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
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2019-01-15, 06:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Exactly. The Japanese are pretty good when it comes to earthquake and tsunami-related construction and engineering. The whole thing showed that even with all that knowledge and experience, major errors were made, resulting in the melt down. The tsunami itself is not to blame for where the diesel engines were located or why the emergency systems failed.
As an analogy, the Alps region is quite well know for heavy snowfall. Get a expansive structure with a flat roof and you will know what can happen, which extra tonnage and pressure the core structure must be able to lift. All of that is known, each engineer understands the basics behind it and why structures in such an area will be a bit more costly.
Still, with depressing regularity, hospitals, schools and such will collapse from the snow, because someone in management or in one of the bureaucracies did not know that, went for cost-cutting schemes or was advised by the wrong people.
The second import thing to keep in mind are size and population density of a country. When a meltdown happens, you will lose an entire region for a very long time. That might not be a big deal for sparsely populated countries like the USA, Canada or Russia, with plenty of regions were nobody will ever life anyways, but for more densely populated countries like Germany, where there's basically no spot farther from a metropolis than 100 KM, Fukushima was a drastic example how human failure can be disastrous.
(Town I live in is pretty contaminated, at points beyond recovery. Happens, when someone carpet bombs a research facility that deals with uranium.)
I think that the claims are based on the widely different production and environmental protection standards, as well as the infrastructure already in place. For example, renewable energy is already very wide-spread in Germany, environmental protection standards are fairly high, so locally produced nuclear power plants or wind power plants have an extremely small carbon footprint when compared to solar panels produced in and shipped from China.
The cleaner your infrastructure already is, the cleaner the products created using that infrastructure will be as a result.Last edited by Florian; 2019-01-15 at 08:02 AM.
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2019-01-16, 02:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Yes, Japan is used to earthquakes and tsunamis, but not on that scale. Nothing in the affected areas was able to withstand that tsunami. But the nuclear plant fared better than most.
Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2019-01-16, 03:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Last edited by halfeye; 2019-01-16 at 03:24 PM.
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-16, 04:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
But what we don't know is what the situation would have been if they had been using something other than nuclear. Given that the plant was built in the 60s (brought online in 71, and given the construction times that means it was probably planned and started in the mid 60s) that means that the alternative probably would have been coal.
What would the environmental impacts of 40 years worth of coal pollution on the same area?
40 years worth of flyash waste would probably have been stored close by, and that would have been washed all over the area instead. It isn't radiation, but it is far from benign. Depending where they got the coal from it could have a lot of heavy metals. (The exact waste would depend entirely on where the coal was mined, it varies a lot in terms of heavy metals, sulfur, ash content, and other things depending exactly where in the world it comes from).
The main difference would be that people automatically thing radiation is bad, but so many other equal or worse things don't conjure up the fear that radiation does.
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2019-01-16, 04:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Radiation is invisible. The other stuff you can probably see and then dodge, but not radiation.
This was a coal disaster, the after effects were apparently mostly psychological, not much outside the affected village:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
I'm not saying that coal hasn't always been horrible, because it pretty much always has been horrible, but the effects are mostly local to the mining.
The fallout from Chernobyl was detected in Sweden if I remember rightly.
Oil and gas are less involved in killing people than coal, usually.Last edited by halfeye; 2019-01-16 at 04:58 PM.
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-16, 05:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Natural gas is quite a bit better in terms of safety and impact, but it is also a much less dense energy. Fine if you can pipe it, but doesn't work nearly as well when you need to ship it. Not that shipping can't be done, but it is a pain. And given the time, pretty unlikely for Japan to have done because of it.
While that was a pretty big accident, it doesn't really seem to go into any of the long term impacts, such as heavy metal releases. Which is either due to Wikipedia just not really going into it, or maybe the exact situation meant that not much went other places. The Kingston plant flyash release mentioned earlier happened to be close to a river so the release was able to cover a much larger area. We can assume a similar release during a tsunami and flood would have spread the toxic flyash over a huge area, and not been relatively contained like those containment pond breaches.
You can also take into account that simply burning coal will spread some heavy metals over a very large area, mercury being the most common (that I'm aware of). That is one of the reasons high levels of mercury is being found in all types of the aquatic food chain. As it is, one of the main "fixes" for coal pollution in the USA is to make stacks very tall, so that the waste is released higher into the atmosphere so it spreads over a large area, that means that no one area gets doses above a certain range, but it does mean smaller doses are spread over huge areas.
I worked in the environmental department of an industrial plant with coal boilers until a year and a half ago. Dilutions of pollutants, rather than removal, is very common. It is a side effect of passing and enforcing laws written by people without a good understanding of what they're passing. We had some pollution problems at the plant that were "fixed" simply by increasing the area that was considered "part of the plant" rather than an "ambient area." Granted it was only possible because our plant was out in the middle of no where and increasing the boundary was little more than drawing a line on a map and turning it into the state for approval.
Much like an RPG is balanced for the designers, then they give it to the players and suddenly there are a lot of loopholes they didn't see.
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2019-01-17, 01:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Yeah, that's annoying.
Most living organisms can´t process heavy metals, but also lack the means to properly expel them from the body, so they get stored in the soft tissues, causing long-term conditions. As a side note, Chlorella algae are a good way to bind and process stuff like mercury.
On the industry side of things, what pisses me off a bit is that we're more or less talking about shifting the costs around, in most cases from utilities to state/citizen, or simply to other kinds of industry. For example, avoiding the installation and maintenance costs for installing high-performance catalyst to clear the exhaust gases, means that someone else has to install and maintain more sophisticated water filtration/reverse osmosis units to meet water standards and so on.
Ok, back to solar panels. I haven't really been following the development outside of Germany. Here, we are in the middle of a shift how solar energy is used. It´s getting less common that people plaster the roofs of their houses with solar panels to sell the energy they feed into the grid, the actual trend is more towards combining solar panels with a geothermal heat pump to make houses more self-sustainable and reduce the overall load on the grid.
On the industry side of things, Biogasanlagen (anaerobic digestion reactors) are becoming quite common. We try to separate our waste and the waste products of the agrarian industry as well as the "bio waste" generated by regular household are a prime source for generating gas and energy, first by anaerobic digestion, then by pyrolysis, with the side effect of producing mineral fertilizers. A lot of companies try to install a CHP (combined heat and power plant) as part of their facility, using "bio gas" as fuel, also reducing the net load on the grid.
As for the "invisible" side effects when something goes wrong with radiation: Visit Oranienburg one day, if you want (and call me up for a beer). You'll find a small town next to the metropolis of Berlin with the odd case of what should be prime land for developing project being empty and filled with ruins. Alternatively, you'll find oddly expansive parking lots, build on elevated concrete platforms "haphazardly" scattered around the place, or odd, brutal looking raised-bed gardening lots containing ugly plants, or an entire wood and a scenic lake island with warning signs, cautioning of immediate death.
When we bought our facility, we had the replace the whole earth around the building up to a depth of 10m, get a permission to wreck and rebuild the historic and protected tower the has been incorporated into the newer structure to decontaminate the whole thing and make it useable for humans once again.
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2019-01-17, 02:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
The technologies involved have almost nothing in common except the shared science. Heck, you can't even make a decent bomb out of any fissiles in a nuclear power plant! Granted, it's easier to hide facilities for processing weapons-grade uranium if you have a non-weapon-related excuse to buy uranium, but that's the biggest nuke-related risk involved in nuclear power.
You also called "a controlled nuclear chain reaction" "nuclear explosions". Which is not only wrong, but a phrase which seems intentionally designed to make nuclear power sound way less stable than it is. I mean, sure, turn off the safety measures or get hit by two natural disasters in quick succession and you're in hot water (possibly literally), but aside from that?
...but not so contaminated that wildlife isn't thriving there. Granted, that just means that the radiation is less bad than the effects of having people live nearby (which is sadly a low bar), but given how paranoid people get about radiation*, and how Chernobyl tournism is already a thing, I'm inclined to file most of Chernobyl under "It's less bad than people make it out to be". Which isn't to say I'd want to live there, of course, just that it's another example of nuclear getting worse PR than it deserves.
*I remember reading that you would get more radiation from hanging out in Denver than next to a nuclear power plant at sea level. Assuming it wasn't just hit by a tsunami, of course...
A point which Grey Wolf brought up himself, ironically enough.
Originally Posted by Various
Adding more arbitrary numbers to an arbitrary scale doesn't make it a better scale. It makes people more likely to make DBZ jokes.
That's not mutually exclusive with "the nuclear power plant survived better than most buildings". It's just mutually exclusive with "It would be better if the nuclear power plant was the one building that didn't survive".
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2019-01-17, 06:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
No chemical toxin contamination? Where did you get an absurd idea like that? Of course there was plenty of chemical toxin contamination from the Fukushima tsunami. What do you think happens when an oil refinery gets destroyed?
And the difference between nuclear contamination and chemical contamination is that the nuclear contamination is visible. It's tough to test for, say, dioxins, but you can pick up radioactivity on a hand-held Geiger counter.Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2019-01-17, 09:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
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2019-01-17, 11:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Also, the F***ing plant did not explode at all. They had issues with the spent rod cooling pool, ironically aggravated because the Greens were making it extra difficult to send a batch out for recycling.
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2019-01-17, 11:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Yes, the plant did explode. There were a series of hydrogen explosions that exposed the fuel rods to open air for a while. The fuel rods also melted down in some of the reactors. This is not the same as a nuclear explosion, which did not happen. There is also a current problem that groundwater seeps under the plant and gets enriched with tritium.
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2019-01-17, 02:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Fast breeder reactors are a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dounreay
The second operational reactor (although the first to commence construction) was the Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR), which achieved criticality on 14 November 1959. Power was exported to the National Grid from 14 October 1962 until the reactor was taken offline for decommissioning in March 1977.[4]:81 During its operational lifespan, DFR produced over 600 million kWh of electricity. [5]
...but not so contaminated that wildlife isn't thriving there. Granted, that just means that the radiation is less bad than the effects of having people live nearby (which is sadly a low bar), but given how paranoid people get about radiation*, and how Chernobyl tournism is already a thing, I'm inclined to file most of Chernobyl under "It's less bad than people make it out to be". Which isn't to say I'd want to live there, of course, just that it's another example of nuclear getting worse PR than it deserves.
*I remember reading that you would get more radiation from hanging out in Denver than next to a nuclear power plant at sea level. Assuming it wasn't just hit by a tsunami, of course...
Yup, that was a whole clusterfrig. Of course, we have to remember that the USSR had different priorities than the USA did; basically everything I've heard about their big projects suggests that their version of OSHA was quite low on that priority list.
Adding more arbitrary numbers to an arbitrary scale doesn't make it a better scale. It makes people more likely to make DBZ jokes.
That's not mutually exclusive with "the nuclear power plant survived better than most buildings". It's just mutually exclusive with "It would be better if the nuclear power plant was the one building that didn't survive".
I don't remember hearing about an oil refinery being destroyed.
Nuclear contamination is detectable, but not with human eyes, hence it is not technically visible.
This is what I was saying, and if I was unclear I apologise. Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion either, just steam disassociating into hydrogen and oxygen then recombining with a huge bang, releasing a lot of radioactive particles.Last edited by halfeye; 2019-01-17 at 02:36 PM.
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-01-17, 05:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
At the moment, the Wikipedia page on that earthquake lists oil refinery fires in Ichihara and in Sendai. But it was easy to miss if you didn't follow the details of the news from Japan.
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2019-01-21, 09:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?
Getting away from the nuke disaster porn...
It would seem that residential solar would ultimately have the smallest footprint and general environmental impact. Look at Germany, which has an overabundance of electricity generation just through residential panels over the last decade. Germany - the cloudiest nation in Europe, on the same latitude as Michigan in the US - not exactly known for its sunny days!
Anecdotally, wind, at least here in the Southwest, has been pretty horrible, on both an environmental and CO2 level. The turbines routinely overheat, causing friction fires if they're not caught. They leak motor oil like a 1962 Chevy truck, leading to more CO2 impact in regards to obtaining oil, driving out for maintenance and regular checkups. The power they generate is moderate at best. It's a patch between fossil fuels and 100% renewables, but as a power source for the communal grid, it's pretty bad.
If every large metropolitan center, say anything over 50,000 people got off the grid and built a single transformer hub to collect excess electricity generated by photo-voltaic collectors on roofs and other covered areas, we'd solve the general electric problem full stop. Smaller, more rural areas might still deal with cross county/country transmission lines, or draw upon their closest metro center hub for power - offset by their own personal solar panels, and mini wind turbines (the kind we've used forever, not the massive 5+ story behemoths that blot out the landscape and catch fire .
I'm not sure how the rest of the 1st World's infrastructure is - having most of it blown to bits 75 years ago probably helps a bit compared to the US's 150+ year old infrastructure... but I'd be shocked if there couldn't be massive improvements nearly everywhere.... tackling both problems at once, rebuilding the infrastructure while building it in a meaningful way that limits CO, CO2, methane, butane, etc. production and sets up regional metro power hubs at the same time? Save the planet and make everything nicer all at once... win/win!Trollbait extraordinaire