this is insane. the full cradle-to-grave lifecycle of nuclear energy on our own planet is shamefully underdeveloped given how much we rely on nuclear power.
-plants are run far longer than their lifespan was ever designed. most have posted leaks and accidents of various sizes that could be easily avoided.
-waste is just buried. no attempt at salvage, and nothing can be done to make it safe. the US has 80 sites alone. most will be dangerous indefinitely.
-3 mile island, fukushima, and chernobyl could likely all have been prevented. all include an exclusion zone of some shape or size. none have experienced meaningful amounts of cleanup.
-Nuclear is a one-time thing. one you exhaust the mines on the moon, youre out of power and you've done nothing to embrace renewable energy.
-renewable energy is essentially infinite on the moon. the moon can reach 120c, easily enough to drive steam turbines. there is plenty of room for both terrestrial and tethered orbital solar sails.
the whole effort smacks of pandering to a dying industry.
- There were metal coupons placed in the reactors at the beginning that they pull out occasionally and test all the time to see if the vessel is still ok to run. So far so good. Other equipment can be maintained or replaced.
- Nuclear power is the only energy source I'm aware of that internalizes all of its waste. Commercial nuclear sits in dry casks which have never, to my knowledge, injured or killed a single person. C.f. fossil and biofuel waste which kills 8 million people per year (!)
- Nuclear energy is renewable. There's enough uranium in seawater to power breeders for millions of years, and that replenishes continuously through runoff and plate tectonics for billions of years (~as long as the sun will run). http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...
For space, Voyager 1 is still sending nuclear-powered signals back from beyond the solar system. It was launched in 1977
Nuclear energy does have some pretty legitimate physical advantages in space thanks to good old E=MC²
This is misinformed. The full cradle-to-grave lifecycle of nuclear power on our planet is underdeveloped or halted due to alarmism.
- Waste can definitely be reprocessed if new power plant reactors were built, capable of burning such waste; we have a few such reactors but too few to process all the waste in a short time. An additional problem is that the waste contains plutonium, and various nuclear weapons limitation treaties may have clauses about production of plutonium. (Pu is of course a fine nuclear reactor fuel, if used correctly.)
- 3 Mile Island disaster [1] and Fukushima disaster ended up with very, very few casualties. Chernobyl, of course, produced many casualties, but to achieve that, the operators had to explicitly switch off almost all the safety systems of the reactor, and then do a number of grossly incompetent actions. Fukushima had a huge tsunami and a huge earthquake, and misconfigured cooling pumps.
- Nuclear is a one-time thing. But that time is plenty long. I do not expect the nuclear reactors on the moon to ever exceed 10 GW of power in total. Also, there are no plans to mine uranium on the Moon; a ton of fuel delivered from Earth would last quite a long time.
- Renewable energy definitely should be harvested on the Moon! But to pass it to the dark side, you'd need to build and maintain serious transmission infrastructure. It could be more expensive and less reliable than a small local reactor.
> 3 mile island, fukushima, and chernobyl could likely all have been prevented. all include an exclusion zone of some shape or size. none have experienced meaningful amounts of cleanup.
That's just wrong. Fukushima has been and still is getting a major cleanup operation. They removed the top layers of soil in many places. For chernobyl it's not economic because the Ukraine is very sparsely populated.
While I like nuclear tech, we do need to acknowledge the cost and time-to-build problem.
Reactors take so long to build that by the time they are operational, the tech is out-dated. While newer reactors should make a meltdown almost impossible, insuring against it is still quite expensive. This lead to high operational costs.
There are some pretty wild solutions to this out there, like building large floating power plants in shipyards. Assembly line style. This was highly developed by a joint venture between Newport news and Westinghouse in the 1970s.
Also, an important true fact is nuclear economics today are on par with system economics of all other hypothesized low carbon energy systems. Though wind and solar generator prices will fall, grid integration and storage will add $40/MWh. Nuclear is already right where other options will end up.
The cost assumptions in that report don't extend high enough for nuclear. The "mid-range" cost for nuclear is given as $4700/kW. The "conservative" cost for nuclear is $7000/kW.
But Flamanville 3 is going to finish at over $8800/kW even if there are no further delays or overruns. Hinkley Point C is also over $8800/kW. Vogtle 3 and 4, if they complete without any further budget overruns, are going to be over $11000/kW.
Nuclear projects have such terrible track records on cost and schedule that they are going to be a last resort in any foreseeable cost-conscious decarbonization plan for the US. Which is too bad, because they really do crank out clean energy after they are completely built and operating.
> renewable energy is essentially infinite on the moon. the moon can reach 120c, easily enough to drive steam turbines.
Why bother with steam turbines (and a system to reject heat), when you could use solar panels? Regardless of how sunlight is captured, how do you handle the 14 days of darkness?
> -renewable energy is essentially infinite on the moon. the moon can reach 120c, easily enough to drive steam turbines. there is plenty of room for both terrestrial and tethered orbital solar sails.
If you're designing for set-it-and-forget-it, nuclear on the moon works remarkably well. Solar panels degrade over time, so it's not like there's a permanent solution anyways. Disposal is also taken care of - just leave it there, where there's no water to carry it anywhere, no potential future primitive peoples to worry about, and nothing to contaminate.
Solar concentration into steam turbines, on the other hand, takes a lot more surface area, more moving parts, and only works for half the month. Same with solar, barring the moving parts. I'm not sure what you're referring to with solar sails, either - that's a propulsion method, not a power source.
> -Nuclear is a one-time thing. one you exhaust the mines on the moon, youre out of power and you've done nothing to embrace renewable energy.
While nuclear is theoretically a limited resource, in practice this means that we could power the entire world for hundreds of years without even touching off-planet solutions. So, "non-renewable", but also long enough to comfortably hold us over until we finally crack fusion sometime in the next 200 years.
> -3 mile island, fukushima, and chernobyl could likely all have been prevented. all include an exclusion zone of some shape or size. none have experienced meaningful amounts of cleanup.
This is just stupid, and standard anti-nuclear FUD. 3 mile island has no exclusion zone, for one - unless you count the reactor building itself. Fukushima Daiichi has seen extraordinary amounts of cleanup, and efforts are still ongoing. Chernobyl has seen minimal attempts to reclaim land in the exclusion zone, though.
> -waste is just buried. no attempt at salvage, and nothing can be done to make it safe. the US has 80 sites alone. most will be dangerous indefinitely.
That we do this with waste is political, not a practical matter. France reprocesses the vast majority of their high-grade waste into more fuel, and low-grade waste is dangerous for a few centuries at most. Stick it in a block of glass at the bottom of a mine and be done with it.
> -plants are run far longer than their lifespan was ever designed. most have posted leaks and accidents of various sizes that could be easily avoided.
Plants receive life extensions, just like most other things in the west today. Like bridges, or combat aircraft. This isn't a sign that we should get rid of all old bridges, or A-10s. And yes, if we were building replacements, small incidents would be less likely to occur. But I'm unaware of any incidents resulting in significant release of radioactivity in the US since 3 Mile Island. (and calling that significant is perhaps a bit of a stretch)
There have been nuclear power plant accidents, listed here [0], but they're not what you're talking about. For instance, from 2013: "One worker was killed and two others injured when part of a generator fell as it was being moved at the Arkansas Nuclear One." This is not a nuclear power accident. This is a conventional accident that happened to occur at a nuclear power plant.
So, I don't think your comment brings anything substantive to the table besides fear, uncertainty, doubt and misinformation. There are valid concerns for using nuclear reactors to power moon bases - I would include "increased risk of schedule slip" and "long term reliance on untested designs", but "just use solar panels" and "nuclear waste is bad" aren't the things that I would have picked.
-plants are run far longer than their lifespan was ever designed. most have posted leaks and accidents of various sizes that could be easily avoided.
-waste is just buried. no attempt at salvage, and nothing can be done to make it safe. the US has 80 sites alone. most will be dangerous indefinitely.
-3 mile island, fukushima, and chernobyl could likely all have been prevented. all include an exclusion zone of some shape or size. none have experienced meaningful amounts of cleanup.
-Nuclear is a one-time thing. one you exhaust the mines on the moon, youre out of power and you've done nothing to embrace renewable energy.
-renewable energy is essentially infinite on the moon. the moon can reach 120c, easily enough to drive steam turbines. there is plenty of room for both terrestrial and tethered orbital solar sails.
the whole effort smacks of pandering to a dying industry.