How bad is it really? Nuclear technology -- facts and feelings: Sunniva Rose at TEDxOslo 2013
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- Sunniva Rose is a Norwegian physicist and has her own blog. She doing a PhD in nuclear energy at the University of Oslo, where she is currently focusing on the use of Thorium in nuclear power stations. In her spare time she is blogging about nuclear energy, research, fashion, interior design and her daughter. This year she also was representing the student candidate for the Presidents office at the University of Oslo. We are proud to invite her on stage. The topic she will be talking to us about is how media´s coverage of the risk of nuclear energy is wrong.
In Germany there is a "Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz", the "Federal Bureau of Radiation Protection". They calculatet, that the highest amount of radiation to the average German comes from burning coal.
erock yeah i also like how renewables are already at 36% in germany and we have decided to end both nuclear and coal in the next decade.
Smoking is also a nice source, as are poorly ventilated granite houses.
@@hanswurst1660 Nice pipe-dream you have there. Solar and wind is all about scarcity. If you want to use solar and wind, go live off the grid and use them. No one is stopping you(or maybe they are in Germany?), just don't try to force your preferred lifestyle on the entire country/world. Government subsidies *force* everyone to pay for some people's shortsighted obsession with wind/solar power. "Green" energy only provides power about 20% of the time, and can even cause increases in carbon emissions for various indirect reasons such as production of said "green" energy devices. The rest has to come from conventional power production. It simply is not sustainable.
Nuclear is the answer we have the technology to implement.
You are falling for a massive scam that uses environmentalism(a new religion) propaganda to persuade the serfs.
@@hanswurst1660 Yet you are polluting Western Europe with the burning of coal and fossil fuels. We are gonna stick with our nuclear plants here in France ;)
@@kevin-munch J'espère que non, moi je crois au projet ITER et j'espère bien qu'on passera le plus rapidement possible à la fusion.
Fission until fusion. It’s the best way forward 100%
Women won't listen to other women.
Until we have working molten salt thorium rectos we also have fusion energy.
crayzy guy wha??
Thorium developments in India are proof it works.
Cheap, safe, flexible
if half of the promises for LFTR are true then Fusion is effectively obsolete.
There would be little point to invest such huge amounts of money into it.
Her final remark is highly relevant. Indeed, climate change is why I'm pro-nuclear.
What happens to the worlds nuclear plants in the event of a worldwide event like what has happened to the planet every 20,000 or so years that we're long over due for, not even speaking of an asteroid of the size the dinosaurs experienced but something more common like that of the cause of the Younger Dryas ? Is there then just world wide meltdowns of every nuclear plant on earth to compound the problems the survivors?
@@DJ-cp8hz Yes indeed. Everyone seems to think our civilization is invincible and perpetual and therefore Humanity will always know the exact location of every pit of nuclear waste, what was buried there, when it was buried, and when it will be (relatively) safe to enter the area again. Human civilization is transient in the extreme; what survives of history surely teaches this lesson.
@@BecksHobbyProductions Look into Nikola Tesla sometime and his magical disappearing research. The answers exist.
@@BecksHobbyProductions Nuclear is an unnecessary risk. We should be pushing for the truth of Nikola Tesla's magically disappearing papers. Greed is the problem.
@@BecksHobbyProductions Obviously you've yet to investigate Tesla's death or even his life. I don't know of any other inventor who gave away his patents for the good of Humanity. All the electricity we're using today is because of him. I think we should at least find out what was in the papers that were seized when he died before we say "no PoC" (by which I have to assume you mean "Proof of Concept?") and continue to use high-risk methods of generation and distribution, none of which are necessary at all.
I want someone to love me as much as she loves to talk about nuclear energy xD
German Shepard puppy, my friend.
@@gilian2587 They don't stay puppies forever. You might not be one, but I hate the kind of people that expect their pet to stay being a baby. Same goes for real babies. If someone wants a 'forever' baby, they should get a stuffed animal.
@@Aethelhadas You treat that puppy the right way; it'll grow into a dog. No creature on this Earth is likely to love you as much as that dog. That was my point. :)
@@gilian2587 That's a great point and true at that!
The more I hear about nuclear energy, the better it sounds. It has less environmental problems than even wind and solar. I liked the point you made about the earthquake and tsunami doing the majority of the devastation in Japan. People tend to forget about that. They focus on the nuclear plant only.
Even worse, the media often lumps all the injuries and deaths together and then describes them as the result of the nuclear, earthquake, and tsunami disaster, leaving people to associate most of it to the nuclear meltdown, when in fact, only one person eventually died as a direct result of the radiation.
12:47 it was discovered in Norway but it was a Swedish Chemist named Jöns Jacob Berzelius who identified it and named it.
How is it possible to worry about global warming and not be pro nuclear? Because they are delusional...
Global warming was changed to climate change because the politicians couldn’t get it to work. But if you don’t have global warming, how can that change the climate?
I believe that energy sources, as seen in Star Trek, that go way beyond current nuclear will be a reality.
Ken Shackleton, Thorium MSR technology sounds a lot better than windmill technology.
@Ken Shackleton Wind turbines and solar panels are good for local, small scale production (farms that are off the main grid, low density suburban areas, etc), but the bulk of out power should come from nuclear.
dan r.r. ... someone is delusional here ... and not the fukushima or chenobyl residents ....
@Ken Shackleton no it is not ! ... nukes were never an answer ... neither did chernobyl had great casualty numbers, 'only' two died after the explosion ... in both cases, thousands died during evacuation and long term effects of radiation exposure ... many more thousands still to die ... a russian md estimates 1,000,000 ... fukushima is tight lipped and prosecutes whistleblowers as criminals ... this is so fake and dishonest ....
I would love a personal lesson from Sunniva Rose, about anything she's willing to teach. What a natural speaker, seems unrehearsed but heart-felt. Really enjoyed this.......
I'm sure you would you dog lol
Milfy material
Dear Phil : Our absolutely gorgeous Miss Rose would eat all of us alive I am afraid.
Don't even think about going there mate.
There are plenty of other women on this planet that might be a lot safer option for you.
Yes --She is very beautiful , I agree.
We'd better start seriously reconsidering nuclear power. I've thought this for decades.
I was expecting another TED's "Atoms are bad!" video.
I'm definitely not disappointed, thank you very much!
I hope that I will see thorium MSRs in my lifetime. An endless amount of nearly free energy that could be scaled to need would change humanity like no other event in human history. Imagine being able to live almost anywhere on earth or in space with the ability to grow, heat, cool, manufacture, create water and oxygen as needed.
you will, China and India are already building them. If the US doesn't follow the same, we will be at a severe disadvantage.
Dear Sunniva, don't be so dismissive of thorium gas mantles. One of the more distinct memories of my eight -year-old self was the Tilley lamp. For a short period, my family was living in a small house un-equipped with electricity, overlooking the coal mining town of Milngavie, with very sooty skies.
We had candles, oil wick lamps, and two Tilley lamps. The Tilley was wonderful. Paraffin (kerosene to Americans) was forced by stored air pressure, refreshed at intervals not inconveniently short, through a fine jet, and burned to make the thorium oxide mantle incandescent. It was much the brightest light we had, and it could reliably by taken outside, there being a glass cylinder around the mantle that protected its light from the wind.
Might I ask your approximate age and location of your childhood home?
That's one perfectly fitted Countryman mic. It follows the contour of her face so well.
Nuclear energy has been supported for decades by James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis and father of modern environmentalism.
valar
"modern environmentalism" ?
"modern"?
What in tarnation does that entail?
Has he personally handled plutonium and uranium etc...?
He may well have....but has he?
@@bipolatelly9806 I'm guessing he/she means the religion of environmentalism, where they don't care what's best for the planet, but always stick to their unscientific religious tenets.
For example, wind and solar are dependent on coal/natural gas power plants. They reject nuclear power based on pure idiocy like a flat earther rejects a globe..
David Cloes
correct.
@@davidcloes9048 Well there are legitimate reasons not to be pro-nuclear fission.
Outstanding! No doubt; if anyone makes it work well, it will be you.
I've been researching "civil-defense", since 1983. Hoping you do this, so to retire me.
From what I’ve learned about nuclear power so far, I assume dealing with a bunch of canisters of nuclear waste is perhaps easier than trying to pull a mess of CO2 from the air. Although I’ve also learned that nuclear power, despite gathering more earnings over time, is a risky business venture due to the high cost of instillation.
The THERMAL POLLUTION is likely to cause us massive problems in the near future. .... All that technology just to boil water.
Well first of all nuclear waste is highly recyclable and can be re-used at 95-97% efficiency cheaply and safely. France is already utilizing nuclear recycling techniques, the reason the US and Germany and other countries don't is primarily due to an abundance of fear and caution. Nuclear plants do have a very high startup cost, but part of the reason why is because nuclear power plant construction has about a decade long planning, approval, and construction process that many power companies just don't want to deal with. Governments being willing to approve nuclear power plant construction on a more reasonable timeline and give out loans for the construction cost, which many countries hesitate to do, would help a lot.
The real problems with coal isn't CO2 but rather the mercury and acid rain. Coal isn't just a simple chemical equation to balance, it is full of contaminants including radioactive ones. That is why you can get higher Geiger counter readings at the main gate of a coal plant compared to those obtained at the main gate of a nuclear plant (at least in the US where nuclear power is highly regulated).
Thorium molten salt reactors, a really interesting nuclear alternative.. look it up!
+Banzay20 It's a shame that Nixon canceled the funding for the MSR program at Oak Ridge. We might of had this technology today, and could have been leading the way in clean energy. But we had other agenda's and wanted plutonium to make bombs instead. Mankind can be so short sighted and dumb.
Yes indeed we can for sure. Money are the ruler of this World but we have some interesting times ahead where the energy productions (renewables) are starting to move to the people instead of big centralized systems as today, more Power to the people.
Hell, at this point it doesn't even need to be a full on LFTR. A Waste Burner would do wonders to this country's energy demand while doing what MSR's do... low risk, passively safe, waste reducing, cheap power producing nuclear plants. LFTR is a great concept that I can't wait to see implemented, but realistically, if MSR's as waste burners can be built now with less regulatory headache, then lets get it done and prove the principle on the commercial scale. LFTR can be implemented later as current waste stockpiles have decades of power left in them for us to burn through.
In Fantasia, you're right: MSR is an interesting opportunity!
In the real world, however, MSR is just a scam.
10/10, well supported Argument, would recommend again.
How exactly is it a scam pray tell?
Nuclear power is our green future.
@WarIock glowing.
WarIock it does not produce C02 nearly as much as other energy sources
@@Darkworldxl nuclear produces zero co2. And it is the quickest way to be "green". Research France versus Germany's carbon footprint
Luke Dupin I’m writing a paper on nuclear power, the actual gathering of materials and the building of reactors is were you get some C02 for the initial start up, after that it’s zero except the C02 the workers expel.
@@Darkworldxl that's awesome. Hit me up when you're done, I'd like to read it. Also, worker CO2, lol.
Excellent talk. I would love to hear more from Ms. Rose, who explained the general outlines of Thorium better than any talk or video about Thorium I've seen. Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
The world should have put 100 percent effort in nuclear as soon as we split the atom .
If you write a balanced "chemical equation" for a uranium fission reaction, and do the same for coal, you get *50 million* times more energy from fission than coal. I'm so mind-blown!
2/3rds of which is waste ..... Look up THERMAL POLLUTION.
@@craftmole
Do you have any understanding of thermodynamics? Heat engines have to discard some waste heat to the low temperature cold sink.
@@craftmole Any power that is generated by heated gas or fluid flowing over a turbine does the same. It's a solved problem, you just dilute the hot water enough, if you have to pump it into the ocean or a lake or river.
Alternatively, you can use the waste heat for other purposes that don't require such a steep energy gradient, such as piping into buildings for heating, or desalinating water for drinking.
Great speech especially the last question! I’ve been wondering the same thing.
I can tell you...it is price.
People claim the reason for not more nuclear is fear or environmentalists, but the issue is actually that nuclear is so expensive that you can barely find private investors without huge government subsidies and guarantees.
When you build new nuclear you have a levelized cost of 70 to 130€/MWh. For new Wind it is close to 30 and dropping to 20 in the next few years.
@@TBFSJjunior This is mostly due to the extremely strict government regulations placed on nuclear plants add to that how relatively cheap oil energy is makes building nuclear reactors extremely expensive. As for wind power and solar i completely disagree with your observation of price dropping. While mass production and demand will lower the prices, wind in particular requires expensive rare earth metals meaning that a radical increase will cause the price for these metals to sky rocket. Just to give you some idea you need 450 times the space for solar to produce as much as a single reactor and about as much for wind meaning that you need a lot of these rare metal resources. There is also the amount of investment into solar and wind; due to their unreliable power production oil companies have invested into it in order for them to be the back up system as it is very easy to regulate an oil based power plant while on the other hand it is not so easy to throttle up or down a nuclear power plant
@@frking100
Oh also do you have a source showing how the regulations caused nuclear to be so expensive?
I've heard that claim, in combination with other conspiracy theories and each time I end up with a lobbyist, but no hard data to back up that claim.
@@TBFSJjunior Nuclear power creates highest profits in long term say 25 years even more than Natural gas.
Only problem is the investment.
@@alchemist6819
Can you be a bit more specific?
Cause if we ignore investment then solar is unbeatable.
According to lazard the running cost of nuclear is 29$/MWh. That alone is pretty expensive.
I wonder if for the purpose of comparison, to cal, she used total energy of the fission event or subtracted out neutrino energy?
After I'm done my electrical engineering course in college I'm going to work at a nuclear power plant. No one has ever died in a nuclear accident in Canada. Next best thing is hydroelectric (in deaths per GW/h).
Also I would love to have all those coal ash pits in America mined for their uranium and that is a massive amount of power they just throw away.
leerman22 Good luck I'm pretty jealous
Not very many get to do really useful work these days
The Eh Team
Those ash pits are hazardous waste because of the heavy metals in them such as Mercury and cadmium.
"No one has ever died in a nuclear accident in Canada."
More people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than in nuclear power accidents in North America.
@Steve Fortuna Only if you move right up next to a coal mine.
@Steve Fortuna Not discrediting your experience, but I just did a Google Maps street tour and it seems really green around the plant - looks like any countryside here in the UK
A good sword and a good plowshear are both made out of good steel.
Aside from the steel, the two could hardly be more different from one another.
Common sense doesn't seem to be a common virtue.
idk why but I really like her voice
15:34 guy on his phone... forever immortalized
Why is nuclear waste such a big issue?
- you take a radioactive element out of the ground, use it, then put a radioactive element back into the same patch of ground at the same density etc
What am i missing?
thulgrum: a lot ! ... you are missing a lot of energy needed between 'take it' and 'put it' ... a lot of it, mostly coming from the burning of fossil fuels .. in fact so much that makes the entire nuke industry go broke, as is the case of france and all other countries, where nuke 'energy' is only possible by huge subsidies, tax breaks and policy exclusions ... why ? ... because wall street won't even touch it ...
Plutonium can also be used to produce energy just as Uranium 235. Fast reactors combined with the use of thorium reactors is the answer when china shortly starts mass producing reactors.
Thorium is the way to go
bert: no it is not ! ... thorium is a pipe dream ... it has been around
for 50 yrs or more, there isn't a single reactor built and rightly so ...
@@solartonytony5868 Yes, because thorium is useless to make bombs. It's far more efficient than uranium 235. There were attempts at making it popular back when uranium was being sought like crazy but US government (the one that wanted to harness nuclear energy crazily) denied any fundings for such a project just because it wasn't beneficial in making bombs. Thorium is much more abundant and produces as less as 0.6% of nuclear waste as compared to U235 that itself is actually much less toxic than conventional fuels but who needed a cleaner fuel? They just needed bombs. There are countries pushing for thorium, let's see what happens in the next decade
thorium encapsulated in fuel rods is just as ridiculous as any other reactor.
At this point thorium seems more near term than fusion. And wind/solar lack reasonable storage so it's sorta a forced hand. Though nuclear would aid space faring so extra bonus point to it.
Battery and other power storage technologies are advancing by leaps and bounds. L.A. just contracted for a combined solar/battery plant that will be cheaper power than any other alternative.
Minus many points for THERMAL POLLUTION.
Well, I wish there were more competant nuclear scientists like her all over the world! Unfortunately, there aren’t! Here in France, we don’t have the money or expertise to decommision the crumbling nuclear power stations. Did she count the huge decommision costs in her discussion? No. Several of them are in a critical condition here in France. They’re made of 50 year old concrete that’s decomposing. Did she propose making nuclear power stations that can last more than 50 years? No. Did she propose new materials that can last? No. She mentioned thorium but that’s not the point that limits nuclear power stations longevity. Did she mention the massive financial and environmental cost of concrete power stations? No. Did she mention radiation related cancers? No. Did she include them in her statistics? No. I understand thata coal is awful and solar and wind are ineffectual. She she mention that maybe cutting consumption is the only real solution? No.
Climate change is catastrophic and who knows, maybe nuclear energy is the answer? Who can tell? I can see that nuclear scientists are not really taking on the enormity of the problem though. They’re reproducing similar errors that we made in the 50s.
Love the statistics, Ive been looking for this info for a long time. Pro-nuclear here.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think of exposing our great great great great great great great great great great great great (you get the picture) grandchildren to our nuclear waste? It has already happened, it's irreversible. We don't have permanent solutions to long-term storage.
Pro-solar here.
+ *tyrred*
You write trash! That's HOW new generation work:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lwrvslftr2.png
Thorium FTW !!!
And out " great great great great great great great great great great great great (you get the picture) grandchildren" were use this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%E2%80%93Harrop_satellite
and fusion.
Stupid human...
How exactly will that dispose of all of our nuclear waste? Putting irradiated gloves in a thorium reactor? Barrels of mixed liquid waste? Please enlighten me with your thorium magic.
I do not know magic. I have only spiritual energy.
:\
NOW we can't do more about nuclear wastes.
Thorium waster are small compare to uranium.
(yes - depleted uranium is waste too!)
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Lwrvslftr2.png
After 10 years we can use 83% of Thorium wastes.
17% need to be store for 300 years.
If Thorium reactors start work NOW first problem with it will be 30 years from now. After 300 years 17% of wastes become inactive.
And burning only 5000 tons per year.
P.S. Funny fact - we can burn all uranium in that same reactor.
@@tyrred burry it deep, it's as simple as that.
I hope we can make thorium a major source of power along with wind, wave and solar, yet more than this i hope we come to see each other and the earth as one living being. If we do not see this it is still an inescapable reality
Nice how she sweetly skirts around the real dangers of nuclear waste.
South Korean president Moon needs to watch this. South Korea has one of the best technology in building nuclear plant and he is ruining it
Moon is an ideologue, who has no business being in a position of power... he was the advisor behind the disastrous “sunshine policy.” The DPRK could barely afford gas for a military parade in Kim I’ll Sung’s honor... insert SunshinePolicy... now they have Nuclear Weapons and ballistic missiles. They took the $ ROK gave them and spent it on stuff to destroy the ROK... while their people still starved. Great Job! Instead of doing what was required for THEIR country, the chose “feelings” and idealistic BS. Moon is the typical progressive-type leader who thinks they can mold the world to how they think it SHOULD be, instead of operating based on how the world IS. In the end, It’s just a soft-tyranny of the application of government power couched in moral superiority type flowery, feel-good language.
Hi there
First to say I am a physicist, and, despite I do not work on the nuclear subjects till a long time Ithink I may express a reasonably informed point of view.
That said i take the words of Sunniva Rose in the presentation Why science should be more pink "Chernobil accident was, and accidents in general are, a multidisciplinar subject event involving politics, economy, psychology, sociology, biology, medicine and of course physics..." as a good expression of the complexity of the nuclear subject, but not restricted to it. In fact, there are not the nuclear accidents alone that present that complexity. Every human activity and the respective impacts are equally complex and multidisciplinar, including nuclear plant construction, operation and maintenance, in particular when it is viewed as a business. So, the problem is not the physics involved, all this have to do with the human nature and the way we do things in general. Again this is a very complex subject since things are done with more or less care in in different parts of the world, but, on average, we do many things wrong.
Seeing in a bit more detail our capacity to do it wrong:
- Overpopulation is the main, but not the exclusive, source of most of the problems that people like Sunniva Rose are trying to solve by using nuclear. It is important to notice that overpopulation is not a natural incident, it results instead from a chain of cumulative mistakes, many of them originated from colonial interferences on the population dynamics of the, now, overpopulated territories. We have done it wrong.
- Industrialization. Industrialization is not a bad thing on itself. It is possible to build things and not destroing the sorrounding ecosystems. But the common practice is a complete mess. We have done it wrong. It is possible to build things without massive wastes of energy. Industry consummes insane amounts of energy to build and sell products to replace fully functional ones because they are "outdated". We have done it wrong.
-Monoculture farming. Polluted lands, lakes, rivers and oceans. Systematic and increasing events of extinction. Ecological disasters caused by the use of toxic agrochemicals and expected to increase as the GMO disperse in the ecosystems. We have done it wrong.
etc.
etc.
We have done it wrong with all those things and I see a tremendous resistence to admit that. Even more resistence is put on trying to solve the problems from the root. Have you heard from any politician that we need to decrease the population (decreasing the birth rate of course). How many times you see a mainstream campain to lower the use of gadgets because of their ecological footprint. How many times have you seen people worried about the fruit they are buying travelled 10000 km?
Anyone expects that we will do it right with something so critically exigent to be managed in a secure manner like nuclear. I sincerely dont.
Pedro +10
So that's your point... we need nuclear power centrals to save the planet from overpopulation? I don't know nothing about nuclear energy and radiations except for what i could read for getting some Zero knowledge about a big IF, but... how much time it's needed that a radiated land or object to return into normal accepted level of radiation 20years... 100years, more? I wonder about impact an accident of nuclear central might have - will it make the area around it inhabitable by humans?
Another thing i could read is (since you mentioned GMO food disaster) - nuclear radiations even on smaller portions within accepted levels can also lead to GMO of our foods... what is the impact that might have into humans consuming GMO or better say Radiated GMO?
So... if what i read is as near as possible to a truth, nuclear energy can solve the problem of overpopulation for earth. Yes, in the minimum of an accident it will make area a dangerous place full with cancer, GMO foods, and abandoned by humans. OK, someone might argue the disasters just happens and people might choke eating bread... but while that disaster gives 2 min to have a chance for saving and might happen to a few people where risks are individual, Radiation will kill everyone without exception and will do this for several years, but also there's no way to stop it's propagation.
OK, let me ask a fair question... Would you keep your family around a Nuclear Central and would you feed your family with radiated food?
@@valkia-innos4972 Living next to nuclear power stations is very safe, (as pointed out in the talk) and we all eat radiated food all the time. Banas and Brazil nuts are famously extra-radioactive. Low levels of radiation are totally normal and (so far as we can tell) harmless.
You also missed the point of the OP, which is that people are very bad at running things in a sensible way in general, and that includes nuclear power stations, so he doesn't think they are a very good idea.
@@xxwookey While I asked a simple question - How much time is needed for an radiated object to enter in normal levels, seems like you skip that answer... So you're saying that Chernobyl effects are fake? People can live there? Are Brazil bananas out of accepted radiation levels and are those safe to eat? Can you provide an evidence of your claims?
As I said, i don't know nothing about nuclear, but let us face the problem in a citizens level. Why would i accept this dangerous risk and your word as granted, when this nuclear thing is the same energy I'll pay and the same price as I do today? Just because a corporation finds this a profitable way?
@@valkia-innos4972 "How much time is needed for an radiated object to enter in normal levels" Well, that depends. There are radioactive isotopes that will decay within microseconds, others will last millions of years. But that's exactly what a thorium decay chain could prevent: the long-lived isotopes of heavy elements. No plutonium, no curieum, no americium. But I don't know if lighter isotopes of caesium or strontium could be created in this process, like in conventional water-cooled reactors.
As Pedro Rodrigues said. The problem is not physics, it's complexity. The question is: can we develop less complex and passively safe reactor types? Well, nothing is certain, but there are several startups in the US trying exactly this. Or take German THTR-3000. It was a thorium-based high temperature (more efficient) reactor with helium as coolant (helium can't become radioactive). It didn't use conventional fuels rods, instead the thorium was in small spheres coated with graphite (graphite slows down neutrons, to make fission possible). The energy density of the core was low enough to ensure that no meltdown could happen. But they had massive problems with broken fuel spheres and abandoned the project after the tchernobly incident. China purchased the technology and it seems, they perfected it and will have the first commercial reactor operational in a few years.
Thorium reactors are breeder reactors that don't just produce U 233 they also produce u232 which is enormously radioactive and hard to separate from the mix. She should have mentioned this and the difficulty in separating out the u232. It's true that the U232 is a relatively short-lived isotope but the first two fission steps release highly energetic gamma rays that require inordinate shielding and distance from the public for at least 100years.
So what if U232 is produced ? the entire nuclear industry has a fatality rate thats dwarfed by the coal mining to the order of thousands ! Have you ever lobbied for the safety of coalminers ? Which "public" are you so concerned about shielding ?
@@yousernameish I am specifically concerned about protecting the image of the entire nuclear energy business. Molten Salt Thorium reactors have incredible promise but not without significant challenges. Leaving out important details might make some people think it's a con job. Let's not do that. It's unnecessary. And yes, you are correct about safety.
P.S. Two-phase nuclear plants- aka MOX power plants are the possible sollution to nuclear waste.
Rather than looking for a solution to the waste problem, how about we stop creating more of the problem? We can take a lesson from plants and algae - convert sunlight into energy. It's worked for millennia.
@@tyrred It's too slow and inefficient to fuel our fast-paced, energy hungry civilization.
@@tyrred
Yeah there's lots of problems with solar power it needs lots of space it needs the sun to shine and it needs lots of storage.
If you live in a place where it's largely cloudy then solar power is not effective there as well to develop more batteries require more pollution as batteries create battery acid
@@tyrred sadly it hasn't worked, or we wouldn't be looking at coal or gas at all. We're not trying to create more energy than we require, we're only responding to demand.
MOX fuel is indeed one of the solutions to current waste and it should be implemented.
@@Azrudi how about making more energy efficient applications that consume less.. in combination with an uptake of renewable energy that's the only real workable combo for the long term. Nuclear has it's role in the intermediate transition phase for sure..
Thorium nuclear power is the way to go!
How do you keep the fizzle solution from eating the reactor with out constantly running the kidney thought 🤦🏼♀️
@@BrockMarketingRnD You find solutions to the problems.
@@BrockMarketingRnD look no further than the hastalloy-n used in the Molten Salt Reactor experiment
🤔
nuclear fusion is*
Having a reserve of Thorium isn't really anything to brag about, Thorium if used in a nuclear reactor is so energy dense and so common that you can pretty much take a meters cubed of dirt just average dirt that you can find anywhere, and you will get about a 1cm cubed of Thorium, the energy you can extract from that would be equivalent to 19 meters cubed of oil. You can literally take dirt you can find anywhere and turn into a LOT of energy.
You wouldn't do it that way because there is no need, but it would still be far more economical to extract that than coal if we didn't have massive consecrations of Thorium all over the planet...
As Kirk Sorensen would say "I mean, It's a nice mine, but it's not like it's the only place on earth to find this stuff."
Still creates THERMAL POLLUTION.
@@craftmole So does everything that creates or uses power... so I assume this is a joke of some kind.
@@AgentExeider Although I would go one step further and say that we don't need thorium at all yet, and wont for a long long long time as we have enough nuclear waste that if it were used in a breeder reactor which can burn 100% of the fuel.
So considering we just have it siting in barrels ready to go, like why even bother mining thorium when we could take a waste product of conventional nuclear power and turn it into 20 times more energy that we got out of it in the first place.
so basically go the fast breeder route, like it doesn't have the absolute safety of a Thorium reactor, because if you have a drain tank it need to have a certain geometry to stop fission taking place, so if you have a drain tank breach you fission could start up again.
however, I assume you would put a neutron absorber material underneath the drain tank for such an occasion, so it's still walk away safe and you get all the benefits of a LIFR plus the reactor is just a metal container and doesn't need a moderator, so you don't need to replace the carbon lattice like in a LFTR, so maintenance costs are lower.
@@Etheoma Google etc. THERMAL POLLUTION - for human activities THERMAL nuclear power plants take top spot - pumping horrendous quantities of HOT water into bodies of water where it can't escape because of the blanket of greenhouse gasses - it's really simple: HOT + HOT = 2 HOT
A good rational explanation on why nuclear must be perceived ...
Liked the part of "Norway has both oil and thorium ... may be that's a little bit infair .."
;o) ...
Useful in welding electrodes also.
Am I the only one thinking, "Damn...I wish she was my science teacher in high school."
Problem is none of us would ever have got any work done.
😅😂🤣
A bit overqualified to be a high school teacher don't you think?
Nope.
Just dust off the Breeder 2 Integral fast reactor that makes less waste and can reuse waste. This reactor could shut itself down safely when catastrophic failures happen with no human needed.
For those who believe nuclear power is the best way to go if we are to reduce our carbon emissions or have come across social media experts throwing numbers and facts that is based on scientific terms not familiar to you, than please refer to " Plainly Difficult ".
Its a youtube channel that has a comprehensive list of accidents and mishaps
Just one question: where to put the waste?
you mean those few kilograms? where we put it already, until a better recycle system is discovered. certainly better than mega and giga tons of coal or oil waste, i.e. pollution, don't you think?
@@misterbeach8826 C´mon - you know better: we´re talking of hundreds of thousands of tons of a waste that keeps being lethal in microgram quantities for hundreds of thousands of years.
How about using thorium and not even producing plutonium in the first place. At least nucleaur waste is taken seriously, unlike the 300 million tons of toxic solar waste produce in California alone each year.
This post was made by science gang
Unfortunately, as many of the comments show, a large segment of the American population lives in a state of baseless fear. Cell phone radiation, vaccinations, nuclear power, and just about any technology they don't understand terrifies them. Given the state of education in the US, that's an awful lot of things to be afraid of.
Jill Nachtsanger you must be so smart. Only a genius would judge an entire population based off of a few CZcams comments. What a wonderful and unbiased observation. I will head back into my cave and try to comprehend the large words you just used. Thank you
It takes 100s of years for the radiated land to return back to normal, and another nuclear disaster such as Chernobyl and Fukushima would result in the place of the disaster taking place being inhabitable. However, the Chernobyl accident happened when harnessing power from nuclear was new, the Fukushima accident was a result of a natural disaster as mentioned on the video. Nuclear energy is environmentally friendly and with the modern technology we have today, it is extremely safe.
A future in nuclear power seems to our best answer, coal is slowly warming up our planet and renewable energy such as hydro and solar are unreliable.
The downside to nuclear energy is the productions of nuclear waster, but using thorium can solve this problem at an extent.
Using breeder reactors in general can not only solve this issue moving forward but it can also reduce the waste we have now from making weapons and fuel for older reactors. The breeder reactor is an amazing thing and I encourage people to learn about it and spread the word. Fear is the topic with nuclear power and it should be hope. Is there any tech that we have not improved since the 50's? None! Let's improve this tech and get cheap energy to the world!
Tell me if I'm wrong. Nuclear waste, technically isn't generated because the materials were already present, and would continue to be radioactive and split into other radioactive materials even if we leave them in the ground. However, when we use them, we concentrate them, and then store them in a secure spot after we are done with them. Coal, gas, oil were all in the ground, and would stay in the ground and stay in there state and out of the air as long as we don't use them. Quite the difference.
CVTR (Carolina Virginia Test Reactor) project was a thorium oxide slurry test reactor project at Westinghouse in 1957. Never went anywhere.
was that because it couldn't be used for nuclear warhead?
@@JohnSmith-tw3rw yup
For Norway, and this delightful woman researcher, I am very happy.
But there's a slight catch in the fact that thorium is three or four times as abundant as uranium The fact that Norway, and I think also China, have a disproportionate amount of that global abundance, means that the advantage is not all that widely spread.
But the same molten salt reactor design is calculated by at least two nascent companies to be capable of creating and consuming the 239_Pu plutonium from the non-fissile 238_U.
Also, the thorium enthusiasts are, I believe, guilty of giving some aid and comfort to the antii-nuke activists when they call plutonium "nasty" or something equivalent.
thorium is available everywhere. it's in every shovel of dirt. you need to inform yourself a little better before you infer that thorium supporters have an agenda.
I shall be impressed if you can prove yourself better informed than I am about this.
I did not accuse thorium supporters of an "agenda", although I even recognise that injustice was done to the original molten salt reactor plans for it.
But I still insist that *_nobody_* who is in favour of nuclear power, should give any support to the idea that transuranic elements are a special problem. Quite possibly, the transuranic plutonium's isotope 239 diluted to a modest concentration with the residual uranium, could serve as a starter fro a thorium-to-uranium breeder.
But there is enough uranium in the sea that the world could run IFR technology on it at no great cost for the fuel.
There is usually more thorium in coal ash than uranium, and the sum of the two in the
fly ash exceeds the allowable radioactivity of a nuclear reactor. Even so, it is trifling.
just google "thorium deposits in the usa" the stuff is everywhere.
The supposed problem with uranium running out is that so little of it is fissile. We have solved that.
At no time have I been unaware that thorium to uranium availability is in about the same proportion as the ratio of their half lives, which is entirely to be expected.
You can start a nuclear atomic pile, to breed plutonium, with natural metallic uranium and sufficiently pure graphite.
You need something more elaborate to get thorium to make U-233.
*_Not That It Matters_*
The woman in this video is a treasure and Norway is particularly rich in thorium. I'd rather my grandchildren's energy companies or better, their govenrments, bought reactors from Norway than from China.
read about the thorium reactor the usa ran during the 60's. i don't think you understand the process. there are several vids on it as well. it's a no brainer. thorium is available everywhere and it requires little processing. don't argue, just check it out.
Why are we not pushing thorium power more than other sources..
Because there is not a working model right now that can be standardized and mass produced. Im down to fund research on it but until then we need conventional nuclear energy.
Thorium requires more shielding due to the high-energy decays from Th233 to U233. It's also not as well-understood as the Uranium-Plutonium fuel cycles.
Dont worry, China, India, Russia and some private companies in the USA are already busy working out the kinks for Thorium Breeder Power Plants and a lot of leeway had been made with the materials required that can withstand the malten salt solution. Best guess is that we will see fully functioning units within the next 5 years.
because you can't get plutonium to create bombs with this technology, so the money didn't go on it
When thorium is irradiated, or exposed to radiation to prepare it for use as a fuel in nuclear reactions, the process forms small amounts of uranium-232. That highly radioactive isotope makes any handling of the fuel outside of a large reactor or reprocessing facility incredibly dangerous.
Well thorium reactors are supposed to 100% burn any U-232 created for a reason.
I live in a rural area surrounded by pristine farmland and now I have a view of an ethanol plant, several windmills and soon a 100 acre solar farm. None provide reliable energy that will survive when government subsidies end. Give me nuclear power any day!
Love that last question.
If you are concerned about CO2 emissions, it is probably cheaper to add a mix of solar, wind plus short and long term storage (EV + power-to-gas).
@Sasha Da Masta Wind and solar plants are dependent from intermittent energy souces, that is perfectly clear. Therefore I wrote: mix of solar, wind and storage. Long term storage could be a power-to-gas converter, combined with a gas cavern plus a gas fired power plant (even small domestic fuel cells fall under this description). In the case of a cold dark calm with no sun and no wind, you just switch on the cogeneration plant and you are sitting not in the dark anymore.
i cant continue, the constant clicking is too much D:
The worst thing is, the people irrationally fighting against these technologies are often intelligent people who genuinely care about the environment and human health.
@PhotoGeorge Concern about nuclear ≠ fighting *against* nuclear.
I'm not gonna argue, because the TedTalk above has already presented my case more eloquently than I ever could.
Nuclear energy is almost certainly worth the minor drawbacks, that almost all of, if not absolutely all of, can be solved by technology and hard work.
There is a huge propaganda industry, some of it genuinely deluded, all of it working to not get rid of the fossil fuel industries of which the Entire World needs to be RID. The Renewable Energy lot, whether fraudulent or deluded, is also part of the problem.
The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility has an annual output of 856 GWh, the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant has an output of 17,058 GWh with a much smaller geographic footprint.
20x the punch, less than a 3rd of the size of a single Ivanpah, carbon free, works at night...why are we not taking Nuclear seriously?
3.6 Roetgen not great but not terrible!
well her hair bun really is a nuclear wonder 😮 looking good tho
If you think that nuclear accidents are nothing to worry about why would billions be spent on clean up? Why wouldn't the power company just say no there is no need for clean up and just fix the reactor and get back to making money? Why did Russia spend billions building a huge metal enclosure? Most companies will avoid spending thousands of dollars even when it is the right thing to do why would anyone believe they are spending billions on cleanup if it was not dangerous. The amount spent on waste cleanup should tell you how dangerous it is not only to the biosphere but to the tax payer. When we say very few deaths from nuclear accidents lets not forget many thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes, work and schools and turned into homeless refugees. If they had not been evacuated the death toll would have been much higher.
Rose is looking at nuclear power through rose-tinted spectacles. No-one has a clue what to do with the long-lasting nuclear waste, yet we blithely continue producing the stuff. At present it is stored, rather riskily, above ground. Even if deep storage underground eventually becomes a reality (Finland seems to be leading the way), the challenges of designing and building a repository are considerable. And will it work? No-one knows. The timescales are vast. A sealed repository may be vulnerable to geological shifts. A monitored repository may be vulnerable to societal collapse . . .
The people who know the least about nuclear energy worry the most about waste. The people who know the most about nuclear energy worry the least about waste.
I studied nuclear physics some 40 years ago, yes she's right I also think you cannot dismiss this energy source, she however fails to mention the main radio active fission products are cesium, iodine strontium with half-life of a few dozens years, this is still the issue at Chernobyl.
They are only an issue if they are released into the environment following a catastrophic failure, new reactor designs don't allow this to happen and so is completely not an issue.
I was told by a radiation tech of 30 years that all radiation is cumulative in the human body. So short durations of high exposure can kill you several years later. Also accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima or Three Mile Island don't do very much to instill public confidence. The only reason deaths from radiation are so low, is after the nuclear accidents, people immediately vacant the areas of contamination. If people tried to move back into those particular areas, how many people would prematurely die because of the high levels of radiation, something she conveniently left out.
Still, there appear to have been significant improvements in failsafe technologies such that another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island can't happen again. And Fukushima was basically stomped on by Godzilla, for crying out loud, and still held it together.
You tell'em Sunniva. Nuclear Tech is the future. By the way when someone is good looking and smart, I switch off because I fear arrogance but you sound exceptionally genuine .
Its cost has been estimated at , with the total cost of the New Safe Confinement Project exceeding 3 billion euros. It took nine years after the fall of the USSR to close the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station and more than a quarter century to build a new shelter over the damaged reactor.
Exactly, these are the most brainwashed people I’ve experienced since Jim Jones.
Nothing is 100% safe & accidents will happen. We ought to be able to foresee the necessary safely features if only politicians would allow sensible discussions. Please note that the French & US navy have a record of zero accidents, probably about 80 reactors in total. Finally where do you suppose the needed energy will come from if we don'y go nuclear?
@@peterowens290, Los Alamos is batting a 100% also. When someone tests high they are shipped to a new location.
People pushing nuclear either don’t care, don’t know, or don’t want to know. Energy has always been about money, power, and control.
I saw a shirt documentary on san onofrio. All of the nuclear waste generated there is still being stored on site. That is crazy.
Thing is, if you abandon moderated reactors entirely, Uranium breeders work just as well as Thorium. The US has used them before, and Russia even sent them to space. Liquid Metal fast using Na-K, or Pb-Bi. Upcoming Molten Salt based on Cl or Na salts is also a possibility.
The thing is, nuclear power is only commercially viable through massive government subsidies. With less subsidies than nuclear, we could easily build out and research renewables like solar, wind and storage tech, so we can use it 100% for our needs. This would mean a democratisation of power generation, as any commune could easily put up their own generation. We would save money, create jobs and have a safer environment. An extreme nuclear event such as Tchernobyl or Fukushima claims many millions of lives over hundreds of years, costs trillions in health care costs for cancer and other related diseases. This is not even counting nuclear waste problem, we still don't know how or where to permanently store it.
It would take $20 trillion to build an all renewable grid for the US. Nuclear isn’t getting anything near the whole US GDP in subsidies. Also, besides wasting absurd amounts of money, renewables are a lot more dangerous. Per unit of energy nuclear is by far the fastest, and anyone claiming millions of deaths from and nuclear accidents is lying.
kokofan50 You are probably not lying, but simply misinformed. A typical modern nuclear plant costs around 10 billion $ to build. It can generate electricity at around 6 cent per kWh, much more expensive than hydro or solar per kWh. This is not yet accounting for secondary problems with nuclear power generation; you still have to add the enormous long-term cost of nuclear waste management (an as of yet completely unsolved problem), as well as increased healthcare cost in the immediate area surrounding the station. Since 1948, nuclear power has received 85 billion $ in public subsidies (not accounting for inflation), while the secondary costs I mentioned are entirely carried by the public. The total loss of human life due to the Chernobyl accident alone is expected to go in the hundreds of thousands globally, but it is very difficult to determine: we already observed increased rates of thyroid cancer and leukemia, as well as other forms of cancer, in the area of the former Soviet Union, Belarus, and Western Europe. As of 2009, sheep farmed in some areas of the UK are still subject to inspection which may lead to them being prohibited from entering the human food chain because of contamination arising from the accident. The same goes for meat raised in Germany, where especially boars show too high contamination for safe human consumption today. But even for the non-lethal effects, the increased health care costs and life impact around the world are astronomical. These types of costs are generally not added to the nuclear tally, but are silently carried by the public, as well as losses e.g. in the agricultural business. Wind and solar power generation, in comparison, have much fewer of these hard to determine secondary costs. But even considering just the immediate costs, Harvard University estimates the total cost of Wind power at around 35-40$ per MWh in the US. Solar is slightly higher at around 50$ per MWh. Nuclear power immediate cost is 100$ per MWh, according to Harvard. Please explain how renewable energy is “more dangerous”. Are you expecting wind mills to fall on someone’s head? Pretty ridiculous!
kokofan50 However, the most important effect of alternative energy is not yet mentioned: breaking up the large power monopolies, democratizing and de-centralizing power generation.
Guys could you please tell me what term "fishing" means?
Fission, not fishing. ;) In simple words: splitting atoms is called fission and the opposite, join them, is fusion. Fusion is even a far more efficient energy source than fission, but it's extremly difficult to achieve a controlled and sustained fusion reaction on earth, that delivers more energy than the reactor needs to sustain the requirements of a nuclear fusion (extrem heat, pressure and very strong magnetic fields).
@@webcodr thanks:)
what's the worst that will happen if a windfarm or a solar farm or wave farm or even a coal fired plant stops working or explodes? consider that versus what happens when a nuclear plant hours wrong or explodes. that should end the debate right there.
current reactors which burn only 2% of the fuel rods? they will explode (Japan, Ukraine et all.......) A molten salt reactor? It will turn off with out any human intervention. That is kind of the point
The poison gases alone, not counting the carbon dioxide, from burning coal OR running gas turbines of 1000 MW power kill more people annually than the Chernobyl meltdown did, which is the only one that caused actual rather than merely predicted deaths. Nuclear explosions do not happen at any possible kind of reactor. Merely chemical hydrogen explosions have happened, with no actual casualties, and far less spreading of toxicity than a year's operation of comparable power in even gas turbines.
Sunniva is talking about a more advanced technology, that is immune to meltdown, and free even from the high pressure coolant water of the fifty-year-old designs that but for fear, would already be retired by the MSR technology.
Strictly speaking, it is a bit misleading to call it an explosion, because the destruction is not as violent as for example what happens in a methane explosion of a coal mine, or a gas pipeline explosion.
I believe that construction, maintenance, and blade failure accidents at wind turbines have killed more people per gigawatt hour of energy produced, than nuclear reactor failures.
There are more deaths in solar / wind and especially coal than nuclear. So no, it doesn't end the discussion at all.
Someone didn't watch the video. Tsk tsk.
See 9:15
You are truly a moron if you turn to coal, oil, or even wind
believing that they are "safer" than nuclear.
Has anyone watched this in 2018? I'd like to know what you think
Think it is going to happen in the future. India and China are going forward, I am told.
2019, but, well,,, it's kinda like fusion-tech imo. Always 'just a decade' away, with lots of potential that would solve so much, if only it would work.
It's interesting, and would certainly be nice, but not holding my breath for it to happen any time soon. At least not on a significant scale
She killed it!
I've met many people by chance who've lived near a nuclear reactor and children ended up deformed, or child died at birth or got cancer. I've never met anyone who's died of coal.
+Raw Poet I grew up in WV. I know plenty. Thanks.
Finally, so glad to hear more about thorium. It's about time molten salts got more of a spotlight
only clean power thats gonna get us anywhere. buildem
There has never been a single kw produced by nuclear power that wasn't heavily subsidized . We haven't even begun to pay for the power we have already used. Wait for the decommissioning costs that will be due shortly. Then there is the waste sitting on roofs everywhere with no place to go. Maybe if you live in a country with a lot of social capital like Norway you can imagine keeping the waste secure for thousands of years. In the US we can't even complete a plant no matter how much money we throw at it. Nuclear power failed.
Scientist here
Is it possible to use radioactive waste as a source of low voltage battery to supplement renewable energy (solar and wind).
I.E a betavoltic batteries that kicks in when there is no wind or sun to power the power grid ?
I don't know but what we call waste is just underutilized fuel that our old technology reactors can't use anymore without expensive reprocessing the way France does. Molten salt fast reactors in the licensing process right now can use that waste as fuel with minimal or no processing. That waste is worth a fortune in future energy production.
It's already an established technology to use something called Radio-isotope Thermal Generators (RTG's for short) as nuclear batteries. That is similar, but not identical, to your idea, since it involved just using the decay heat from isotopes with relatively short half-lives spontaneously decaying, as opposed to creating a circuit with the beta particles directly. RTG's have been used on several Mars rovers, as well as on deep space probes. They have also been used in Russia to power light houses in remote arctic locations.
Note that an RTG does not qualify as a reactor, since humans are not inducing a reaction to happen, just harnessing the natural behaviour of the atoms -- there is no chain reaction.
what's her blog?
rose-blogg.blogspot.no/
It's in Norwegian though.
thanks Anders.
Perhaps those against nuclear power have the images of the Chernobyl and other similar disasters on their minds.
Images of nuclear power leading to a nuclear battlefield like hellscapes post accident have been pushed since the late 1960's an early 1970s. Ralph Nader, proclaimed while fighting s reactor near Cleveland "A nuclear plant cild wipe out Cleveland, and the survivors would envy the dead." Younger people probably focus on Chernobyl. But they don't know that the reactor type ran out of control easily, has a flammable neutron modulator, and to top it all off did not include a containment vessel which only this one type of soviet reactor lacked. Even so, Chernobyl wasn't survivors envy the dead bad! Though they might think it, given numbers put out by antinuclear groups. Who, when they didn't just make up numbers of deaths, routinely assumed that any increase in any death rate after 1986 in the former soviet union was due to Chernobyl. Liver Cirrhosis deaths? Chernobyl. Suicides? Chernobyl. Auto accidents? Chernobyl. Shot during robberies? Chernobyl. Because nothing happened in the former soviet union during that time (huh wonder wht they mean bu hetmy "former.") But people did die. Unlike in Japan. She mentioned deaths from the quake and tsunami, but not the toll from the 4 reactor meltdowns (were the containment vessels did their jibs FYI). Number who died at the Fukushimadied from a cancerFukushima
Just think if it was not for Chernobyl and Fukushima the death rate per TWH would be zero.
And even with those it's lower than wind. :o
Well, there have been some deaths associated with development of nuclear technology... Not sure how they divide up between weapons R&D vs power R&D.
no one died from anything to do with the Fukushima reactor.
Good presentation! We need quality presentations comparing energy sources like this - though honestly I thought the thorium section was a bit disjointed. At 5:00 Sunniva mentions that 10K are born every hour (~9,900 successful copulations - with a few twins & triplets), but how many die each hour? About 6K; making 4K net population increase hourly.
+Chris Bergan 10K an hour is the net growth
I’m all for nuclear power, but the major setback I see is the storage for spent fuel, because if we got more nuclear power plants around the world, the places to store the spent nuclear fuel will be filled up eventually.
“How is it possible to worry about global warming and to be against nuclear?” Good question!
I love spray-on jeans on a savvy lady :)
Very lovey as well as savvy.
According to Galen Winsor the question is: Who owns the Plutonium?
The long-living tale of thorium.
As long as thorium does not producing elements suitable for nuclear weaponry and as long as states are in control of producing and trading of nuclear fuel - thorium would still be in its current place. As it were last 50 years.
Sad but true.
In my country the tipycal family everage composition is 2 adults,1 kid,1 canary and a bottle of wine.
Good, that is a configuration that will reduce the global population eventually - we need all families to look something like that.
Tepco, the operator of the nuclear reactors that exploded in Fukushima, would be bankrupt if it had not been rescued with taxpayer money.
Waste in another problem: nuclear power operators expect the public to pick up the burden of disposing of their waste.
Investors would one would put a penny in nuclear power if they could not externalize so much of its costs.
This is why no new nuclear reactor is being built in the Netherlands: their government refused to subsidize it. Just check out Borssele.
1) subsidizing unreliable renewables, while refusing to subsidize reliable, resilient and clean nuclear power speaks the volumes of double standards of your government, 2) while questions about waste handling are rational, you ignore the fact that it can be reprocessed and used again (France and India do it)
Oil companies do this all the time. They expect local governments to clean up oil spills and federal governments to bail them out of costly explosions at sea...
@@vishalgiraddi5357 What, Sun doesn't rise every morning?
It's easier to protest nuclear without know much about it, than it is to learn about next generation nuclear power. And therein lies the problem.
i have often wondered what would have happened if the power was not turned off at the reactor when the earth quake happen at the nuclear power plant at Fukashema.?
The last line sums up all..Nuclear energy is our future.
solar and battery storage is the future
deep: ... not ! ... we closed all our nuclear 'disasters to be' stations in california and we are fine ... 4th largest economy in the world ...
@@solartonytony5868 yeah, and when you close nuclear powerplant you open gaz powerplants
the 4th economy of the world need to be feed when their is no sun
@@gustavetoison6279 no, no longer ... for a brief period gas was cheaper and 'cleaner' according to the fake & dishonest people ... well guess again, no longer they are, wind/solar is cheaper, fake and dishonest lies about nuclear being cheaper loose to the market, and that's the way it goes ... scotland in 2018 produced, not once, twice, two times all the electricity it needed for the year from wind alone ... twice ... most areas in the world can do that, the rest from rooftop solar pv and other renewables ... my home is already fed 100% solar pv/wind energy for less than 10% in the monthly bill ... nuclear is not the future, nuclear is the horrible nightmare past ... france is closing 50% of their nuclear ... california closed all its nukes w/ no new gas, oil or coal ... lala is now 10% overall wind/pv and growing ... read lala's energy plan and learn .... hasta la vista, nukies !
Solartony Tony How about nuclear fusion
I've been going around liking every video like this so that it gets into more peoples hands. Nuclear is the way forward!
Some criticism: you should quantify your figures. Saying that you cannot see the nodule of uranium energetically equivalent to the pile of coal is not very helpful. Neither is comparing reaction energies, that is quite abstract and isn't immediately applicable in the day-to-day world.
Sorry to go off topic but seeing a Norwegian woman speaking English in what to me sounds like a real mid-Atlantic accent, English and US, is a true delight
she has a bright future in the industry. lol
If you look at the history of all the low level nuclear power plant accidents it becomes clear that the problem is that nuclear systems are so complex that we humans and our human institutions are not smart enough and disciplined enough to design, operate and regulate.
have your looked at amonia and ocean temperatures reactors
"How is it possible to be worried about global warming and not be pro-nuclear?"
Sunniva Rose is speaking to the wrong audience. She has to address the real problems that have fallen on the nuclear power plant industry. In the U.S. there were three NPPs being built: Two Summer units and one Vogtle. Due to years of delays and horrendous cost overruns, apparently causing Westinghouse to go bankrupt, only Vogtle might be finished. The other two have been cancelled. These are caused by economic issues; no utility can afford to wait more than a decade and pay more than 20 Billion dollars for a NPP. These are the issues that have to be addressed.
This is actually a nuanced issue with uranium reactors because they create plutonium. Thorium reactors do not have plutonium so it would cut down on the proliferation of nuclear weapons an intern cut down on governmental red tape and restrictions which is a very high cost in building new. That's why plants that have already been approved tend to to run longer than they should. We need decommissioning and rebuilding the governments need to help with this venture.
The NPP that they started on Long Island, New York.....almost finished after huge investment.....but they disallowed energy production. Then, when they could have mothballed it for future use, they DEMOLISHED it, at enormous cost. Energy bills on Long Island doubled overnight and continue to climb with no end in sight.