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Devil Dog Hog

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Fun fact...

Stories are starting to come out of two brothers in my country that ran off with people's crypto "investments" of around $3.5 billion.They alleged the keys were "stolen" and they "lost" access to the system back ends. They (both brothers and crypto) have now disappeared completely, and are rumored to have fled the country.


//Edit: This is the second such case this year. 🤨
Thats why I only invest in UEC.
 

Dirtbag_Leader

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i feel that not enough important information on the subject is ever put out and people get misinformed from bs on the internet.
You and I are of like minds, fellow Tester! Disclosure: my brother is a nuclear engineer, so I'm both biased and know what I'm talking about. As far as disposal goes, the spent fuel itself is almost a non-issue at this point. Various types of breeder reactor designs exist to either not create fuel waste in the first place or even repurpose previously spent fuels. Non-proliferation with breeder reactors is still a somewhat valid concern, however this is also starting to be addressed in modern reactor designs. The French do a lot of vitrification of high level waste, basically encapsulating it in glass that blocks all the radiator; personally I think this opens up some great additional possibilities such as direct heating or RTG usage, but societally we're certainly not there yet.
The larger concern in terms of waste is actually with the lower level stuff that gets irradiated - equipment, supplies, etc. This stuff, while much lower levels of radiation, is unfortunately more difficult to deal with since it can't really be repurposed and for the present pretty much can only be buried in concrete.
But now some good or bad news depending on how you choose to view it: transitioning to nuclear power for energy production is all but inevitable, though the US is really starting to lag behind the rest of the world. Russia, Sweden, China, and South Korea are not only building their own but are also starting to build reactors for EXPORT to other nations. As climate change pressure continues to increase and/or conventional energy sources either fall short of demand or are increasingly taxed, do you think the 1.3B people in India are going to 'cut back' their energy usage (Texas tried. . .), deploy 60 million acres of solar panels, or just buy a dozen reactors from Russia? The availability of the technology and laws of supply and demand are going to become increasingly difficult to fight against.
 

NaffNaffBobFace

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In case of a nuclear disaster (from all that spent nuke fuel mining crypto coins) we can still burn money to keep us warm, but can you burn crypto?
You can warm yourself by the heat of all those worn out GPUs :-D
 

NaffNaffBobFace

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You and I are of like minds, fellow Tester! Disclosure: my brother is a nuclear engineer, so I'm both biased and know what I'm talking about. As far as disposal goes, the spent fuel itself is almost a non-issue at this point. Various types of breeder reactor designs exist to either not create fuel waste in the first place or even repurpose previously spent fuels. Non-proliferation with breeder reactors is still a somewhat valid concern, however this is also starting to be addressed in modern reactor designs. The French do a lot of vitrification of high level waste, basically encapsulating it in glass that blocks all the radiator; personally I think this opens up some great additional possibilities such as direct heating or RTG usage, but societally we're certainly not there yet.
The larger concern in terms of waste is actually with the lower level stuff that gets irradiated - equipment, supplies, etc. This stuff, while much lower levels of radiation, is unfortunately more difficult to deal with since it can't really be repurposed and for the present pretty much can only be buried in concrete.
But now some good or bad news depending on how you choose to view it: transitioning to nuclear power for energy production is all but inevitable, though the US is really starting to lag behind the rest of the world. Russia, Sweden, China, and South Korea are not only building their own but are also starting to build reactors for EXPORT to other nations. As climate change pressure continues to increase and/or conventional energy sources either fall short of demand or are increasingly taxed, do you think the 1.3B people in India are going to 'cut back' their energy usage (Texas tried. . .), deploy 60 million acres of solar panels, or just buy a dozen reactors from Russia? The availability of the technology and laws of supply and demand are going to become increasingly difficult to fight against.
Personally I'm for Fusion over Fission. It's like people who favour Gas over Coal, they use both but have a clear preferance for one over the other.
 

Bambooza

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Personally I'm for Fusion over Fission. It's like people who favour Gas over Coal, they use both but have a clear preferance for one over the other.
Indeed Fusion is the better solution but the issue is how far out until we can successfully harness fusion reactions? It's been 10 years out for several decades.

In the meantime, @Dirtbag_Leader is correct unless we want to decrease our energy consumption and in turn a drastic reduction in population we will need to start looking towards lifting the restrictions on breeder reactors (the restriction at the time made sense but needs to be changed for the future) so that we can use up all of the fissionable material instead of just a small percent of it. I am also sure if breeder reactors become commonplace then a workable solution for the irradiated equipment could be found and thus the net waste from such a facility would be zero. Until then all those electric cars we see driving around are simply coal-burning steam engines (just less efficient due to the distance away from the power generation).

But back on the subject of cryptocurrency it really needs a way to make itself legitimate. Right now it seems its only purpose is in a form of gambling as people invest in speculation they can pull out before it crashes on the other side of the peek. Bitcoin really did not become valuable until the silk road make it possible to buy something (it's always entertaining how sex and drugs make so much of our world happen). Until there is a legitimate marketplace for the transfer of currency for goods and services it's not going to be more than what we are currently seeing and its price fluctuations reflect that. And then once that happens @Ploeperpengel is right in that a few major players own the vast majority of the distributed systems and thus it becomes susceptible to manipulation. The other part is not as Ploeperpengel mentioned with the blockchain block length as most are still small and there is built-in prune and archive functionality. This is not the cause of the high waste, that is due to the algorithm calculation that is used to slow down the distribution of free cryptocurrency and is adjusted to keep the rate within projected tolerances. But this does lead to a higher fixed cost per transaction and time involved in transactions being committed to the blockchains. This works great for high-cost purchases but killed the possibility of using it for small purchases like buying a candy bar at the corner store when it costs several factors more than the candy bar in fees and takes a few hours to process.

Not that Dogecoin works any better with its built in inflation making it pointless to hold onto it and thus requiring the coin to always be in motion meaning if I sell something for Dogecoin I need to already know what I want to spend those coins on as I am not able to hang on to them for some ambiguous future purchase. While the same can be said for government currency they have the advantage that one can easily transition into and out of the currency.
 

Dirtbag_Leader

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Personally I'm for Fusion over Fission.
Indeed Fusion is the better solution but the issue is how far out until we can successfully harness fusion reactions? It's been 10 years out for several decades.
So the issue with fusion is that the physics are a real bitch. Works great in the center of the sun because you have both high temperatures and HUGE pressures due to the gravitational field that something as massive as a star creates. But on earth. . . we can't really create pressures on the order of 4 TRILLION psi. So to compensate, we need even higher temperatures than exist at the center of the sun. Some SIX TIMES higher. And not just creating, but then *sustaining*, and then CONTROLLING stuff at 100 Million degrees is, to put it mildly, a very tall order. These are real numbers BTW, I'm not just making up random -illions.
It's all perfectly possible of course, but here's one of my favorite pictures to help illustrate the challenge. The Z-Machine (great name too!) was built in the 60s, and basically they charge up hundreds of supercapacitors the size of doors and then discharge them all at once to 'zap' a tiny point in space with 3MJ at the rate of 80TW in order to research inertial confinement principals for fusion. It's pretty cool, but 60 years on even with lots of learning, we're still not really there. . .
6288961527_25737fe1a2_b.jpg


Sorry, physics lesson over for the day, back to more crypto speculation!
 

Sirus7264

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On the topic of fusion..


View attachment 20960
That reactor is Beautiful..... any idea of what they will be using as fuel? I'm guessing hyrdogen most likely as it has the most gain from fusing than any other molecule.
 

Ploeperpengel

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They are then put into dry storage casks or other forms of storage and put 300M under the earth's crust. in secure locations. Now you might here things such as "Nuclear waste has 24,000 years of half life." what they are talking about there is Plutonium-239 and a few other rare fission products that can occur. This does not happen very often at all you get about 1.15% of spent fuel as plutonium overall 53% of it being Pu-239 now we might think oh plutonium 239 is awful but actually it is used further when reprocessed as either reactor grade fuel or weapons grade plutonium. so sure we could let it decay for that long or we can use it. i hope this eases your concerns a bit and gives you a bit more education on the subject. pretty much we dont take spent fuel out of a fuel assembly unless we are reprocessing it it stays inside the plugs along with all of their nuclear by products.

As for the 445,000 tons of heavy metal fuel waste 250,000 of that is spent nuclear fuel dating back all the way to the 1950s. The 84000 tons i mentioned earlier is only the united states which none of that fuel has been reprocessed it just sits in their storage facilities underground never to be touched because the United states refuses to acknowledge reprocessing it. I'm sure it will come one of these days which will reduce the amount of waste we have.

If you want to be against nuclear power thats fine like i said to the other guy we can agree to disagree that is way more clean than coal oil etc. I will never agree that putting as much carbon dioxide into the air is better than a little space we use 300 m below the surface to store not completely depleted uranium. if anything destroys this planet those will be the culprit long before nuclear reactors.(Nuclear bombs are not nuclear reactors lets get that straight now)
While I admid you are certainly more knowledable about the technical aspects of this topic than myself and I can respect that I have to crittize your perspective as being limited to the technical aspects as well as limited to a geographical focus on the US as it is now.

In Europe many nuclear deposits are temporary / not deemed safe for final deposit. We don't have a desert in the middle of Europe (edit: yet) were we can dump this stuff and not worry about it leaking into a water reservoir at some point in the future. I don't even want to begin to list the possible dangers nuclear waste deposits in Russia might have in store for future generations (another edit: actually I can't. Who would really know?)

But even in the US nobody can guarantee society will still actually be fit to secure nuclear deposits even hundred years from now or less. I'm only half joking when I say I think it entirely possible the USA might be taken over by a doomsday cult within my lifetime if things like MAGA or QAnon continue to spread. Please don't take it personal but we have all seen how crazy americans can be the last couple of years... edit: and it's not getting better over here either
1624911497347.png
 
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Dirtbag_Leader

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I have to crittize your perspective as being limited to the technical aspects as well as limited to a geographical focus on the US as it is now.
We're shifting from crypto to the 'bigger picture' again but I think that's OK. This is a fair observation and I'm actually quite interested in Ploeperpengel's German perspective (wegen der Flagge und Handle, vermuete ich dass du Deutscher bist, oder?) There are several interesting dynamics regarding nuclear power generation in Europe right now and I'd be very interested in the insider opinion on them. Here are my external observations that I'd be interested in hearing more German opinion on:
- Germany has planned to shut down all of their existing nuclear plants, however thusfar while a good portion of it has been replaced with a fair amount of wind power, the other roughly half of the deficit is imported from France (so still nuclear power) along with, most unfortunately, some additional increases from brown coal production. My specific knowledge on this is at least a year to 18 months old now, so is this still basically the case, or has the landscape changed more since then?
- Sweden is basically the role-model nation for power generation, where they have the luxury of getting almost half of their power from hydroelectric, the other half from nuclear, and they are/have been for many years effectively a carbon-neutral nation at least in terms of grid production, AND they even export a bunch of excess power. Pretty cool, but what I DON'T know is what their waste storage plan looks like in detail; I'll need to research this at some point. So how is Sweden in the eyes of other Europeans? Celebrated for being a carbon-neutral model, or criticized for their nuclear waste production and management? Obviously I hope the former, but I really don't know.
- The last point I think is also valid, insofar as we as a society allow more weight to be given to what people who are completely nuts say. I don't think there's actually that many MORE crazies in the world though, just that we actually allow ourselves to listen to their rants now, especially on social media and so on, where we used to previously take much less heed of such verbal diarrhea. I guess you can argue that's free speech, but frankly I don't see that it serves the advancement of society all that much.
 

Ploeperpengel

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Yes I'm German though I wouldn't say my opinion can be seen as a majority opinion - I would orient myself within a green-socialist-democratic non dogmatic but pragmatic spectrum so I might be biased towards but not uncritical towards green leftwing policies. I detest any kind of cancel culture or dogmatism. That being said.

The most likely outcome of the next election will be a conservative + green party coalition under conservative leadership. So I think it's safe to say there is a shift towards a greener policy going on. Many see this most likely outcome as another progress blockade as we had the last 16 years - I count myself among them. I'll give some data charts but won't translate them to save space. You might have to google translate them.

- Germany has planned to shut down all of their existing nuclear plants, however thusfar while a good portion of it has been replaced with a fair amount of wind power, the other roughly half of the deficit is imported from France (so still nuclear power) along with, most unfortunately, some additional increases from brown coal production. My specific knowledge on this is at least a year to 18 months old now, so is this still basically the case, or has the landscape changed more since then?
Renewable energy sources actually surpassed 50% of the net production for the first time at the beginning of this year. Roughly 12.5% of produced Energy is still nuclear.
Total production was 488.7 TWh in 2020
1624923168140.png


Imports were 48 TWh . That's a little less than 10% mostly to cover for indeed still inefficient storage technology. Production would be sufficient, we can't yet preserve enough energy to compensate for production fluctuations in renewables to match the demand at all times:

1624923416786.png


This shows the shift from conventional towards renewable energy over the years, coal and brown coal has been declining:

1624923732314.png


The current government is often critized by the green party to slow down the trend by providing false incentives. I.e. they claim the policy of the last decade let to more jobs lost in windenergy than preserved in coal. Conservative initiatives indeed let to cuts in windenergy subsidies while oil is still actively subsidied for home heating. Social Democrats have a strong active coal lobby, conservatives still like nuclear energy, oil and gas. Go figure. ;)

Edit: it might be important to notice this developement mostly has been set in motion law wise by a social democratic + green coaltion in the beginning of the 2000s + later on the event of Fukushima Meltdown (conservatives prolonged nuclear plant lifetime first thing they came to power and suddenly rolled back their changes after fukushima which let to billions of losses for the taxpayer as energy companies successfully filed for compensation). The last 16 years we were allways governed by Ms. Merkel and we're stagnating and are getting set backs in many areas since then.

- Sweden is basically the role-model nation for power generation, where they have the luxury of getting almost half of their power from hydroelectric, the other half from nuclear, and they are/have been for many years effectively a carbon-neutral nation at least in terms of grid production, AND they even export a bunch of excess power. Pretty cool, but what I DON'T know is what their waste storage plan looks like in detail; I'll need to research this at some point. So how is Sweden in the eyes of other Europeans? Celebrated for being a carbon-neutral model, or criticized for their nuclear waste production and management? Obviously I hope the former, but I really don't know.
I don't know much about Sweden and wouldn't know how to read their official statistics and charts. Sorry can't help you here much. In general many consider large parts of Scandinavia (not only Sweden) advanced in many areas compared to Germany. They are better with energy, digitalization, are considered to have better laws and loans. Unfortunatly that doesn't generate much interest in German media. I regret that. Denmark is an oddball atm regarding migration policies. And Swedish poeple seem to hate Danish. That's my extent of knowledge :D

- The last point I think is also valid, insofar as we as a society allow more weight to be given to what people who are completely nuts say. I don't think there's actually that many MORE crazies in the world though, just that we actually allow ourselves to listen to their rants now, especially on social media and so on, where we used to previously take much less heed of such verbal diarrhea. I guess you can argue that's free speech, but frankly I don't see that it serves the advancement of society all that much.
Won't object too much here. Just social media certainly is an amplifier and we should be watchful. Not everyone who voted for Trump is ah QAnon idiot I'm sure. Many might be just cynical or have particular interests. Also Cynicism isn't a monopoly of conservatives. That's a vast topic...
 

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Bambooza

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While I admid you are certainly more knowledable about the technical aspects of this topic than myself and I can respect that I have to crittize your perspective as being limited to the technical aspects as well as limited to a geographical focus on the US as it is now.

In Europe many nuclear deposits are temporary / not deemed safe for final deposit. We don't have a desert in the middle of Europe (edit: yet) were we can dump this stuff and not worry about it leaking into a water reservoir at some point in the future. I don't even want to begin to list the possible dangers nuclear waste deposits in Russia might have in store for future generations (another edit: actually I can't. Who would really know?)

But even in the US nobody can guarantee society will still actually be fit to secure nuclear deposits even hundred years from now or less. I'm only half joking when I say I think it entirely possible the USA might be taken over by a doomsday cult within my lifetime if things like MAGA or QAnon continue to spread. Please don't take it personal but we have all seen how crazy americans can be the last couple of years... edit: and it's not getting better over here either
View attachment 20978
The only reason why there is a need to secure and store nuclear waste as of the moment is because of treaties signed decades ago that prevent the enrichment of nuclear material We will defer indefinitely the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium produced in the U.S President Carter 1978 Nuclear Nonproliferation Act (Besides USSR and USA other countries due to treaties also signed on). Because of it natural uranium ore at 3 to 5% is used and when it drops below 3% it's no longer able to maintain enough fission to make it viable for energy production and so it becomes spent fuel that needs to be cooled and stored.

So the waste is in large part due to not being able to recycle and enrich the fissile material when we have the technology to reduce the amount of waste significantly and the waste that is left if any has a life of fewer than 100 years.

Renewable energy sources actually surpassed 50% of the net production for the first time at the beginning of this year. Roughly 12.5% of produced Energy is still nuclear.
Total production was 488.7 TWh in 2020
View attachment 20982

Imports were 48 TWh . That's a little less than 10% mostly to cover for indeed still inefficient storage technology. Production would be sufficient, we can't yet preserve enough energy to compensate for production fluctuations in renewables to match the demand at all times:

View attachment 20983

This shows the shift from conventional towards renewable energy over the years, coal and brown coal has been declining:

View attachment 20984

*Removed political parts*
Solar and Wind are an interesting power source. The biggest advantage is once they are installed they have a lower upkeep cost than a lot of energy sources but they also have two downsides. One being the easiest to understand in the need for a way to storage surplus to cover the times when there is no sunlight or wind. There have been attempts to store excess on-demand energy in large battery banks, kinetic energy storage IE flywheel energy storage, and even as water pump storage (two lakes connected by pumps and generators). So far these have all come up short in being able to store days worth of grid energy. The other issue is Grid inertia which helps to stabilize imbalances between supply and demand and is built in due to the mechanical to electrical generation of most power plants especially seen with steam generators.

While Wind and Solar are seen as a future solution the issue with them is their volatility and we currently do not have the technology to build large enough capacitors to handle the nonstable supply demand that the grid requires and we have already seen cascading blackouts due to the oversupply of electricity.
 
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Lorddarthvik

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Very interesting to read about this energy stuff.
For the total energy cost of mining, what people seem to forget to take into account is the cooling. Has anyone measured how much extra energy is wasted just to cool a room that has like 10 mining rigs pumping out 80 degree C air 24/7? Cos that could be a significant number as well in the long run.


Recently I came upon multiple studies about solar panel waste, something that no one seems to care about, even though it is becoming a serious environmental issue, slowly but surely.
The point is that while the energy it produces might be very happy super green and good for you polar bears, the panels themselves are hazardous and hard to dispose of properly. With the use expected to rise more and more every year as technology advances and they become cheaper, we can expect boatloads of it getting dumped, even before they reached end of life, because of these advancements.

.




You can follow the links in the articles for a more in-depth look.

So, while using the panels might be great, the waste issue is way more prevalent in the short term to the environment than nuclear waste. With less oversight, lax regulation and not enough technology and facilities recycling, these panels containing cadmium and lead will end up dumped somewhere and left to rot. In the worst cases, in the sea. I don't need to tell you how cadmium and lead effects the fishies and our beloved polar bears.



TLDR is, you can go out, buy some panels and be all fancy green about mining your Quantanium or your doge coins using solar, just be aware of the implications. And for the love of god don't dump your panels in the nearby pond after just 5 years when a better one comes to market.
 

Bambooza

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Very interesting to read about this energy stuff.
For the total energy cost of mining, what people seem to forget to take into account is the cooling. Has anyone measured how much extra energy is wasted just to cool a room that has like 10 mining rigs pumping out 80 degree C air 24/7? Cos that could be a significant number as well in the long run.

.

it’s the same issue large dada centers face. That and land. Most data centers go for a more economic solution with thermal ground loops, salt water thermal storage and evaporate cooling.
Now I’m going to have to see if anyone has calculated the cost of high powered cards vs low powered cards in crypto currency data mining.
 
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BUTUZ

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Now I’m going to have to see if anyone has calculated the cost of high powered cards vs low powered cards in crypto currency data mining.
Yes
 
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Sirus7264

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While I admid you are certainly more knowledable about the technical aspects of this topic than myself and I can respect that I have to crittize your perspective as being limited to the technical aspects as well as limited to a geographical focus on the US as it is now.

In Europe many nuclear deposits are temporary / not deemed safe for final deposit. We don't have a desert in the middle of Europe (edit: yet) were we can dump this stuff and not worry about it leaking into a water reservoir at some point in the future. I don't even want to begin to list the possible dangers nuclear waste deposits in Russia might have in store for future generations (another edit: actually I can't. Who would really know?)

But even in the US nobody can guarantee society will still actually be fit to secure nuclear deposits even hundred years from now or less. I'm only half joking when I say I think it entirely possible the USA might be taken over by a doomsday cult within my lifetime if things like MAGA or QAnon continue to spread. Please don't take it personal but we have all seen how crazy americans can be the last couple of years... edit: and it's not getting better over here either
View attachment 20978
No offenses taken yes my focus was mostly on america since we have the most reactors out there. As for europe you guys are much much more clean than we ever could be as you actually reprocess fuel as @Dirtbag_Leader called out in his post up above. Every country in the world is not created equal i agree. Russia always has Siberia lol nothing survives there anyhow. As for storage facilities they are kept deep underground and smaller countries require alot less energy so that is alot less fuel waste and usage. you can make a nuclear storage site right under a city and it wouldn't be a problem i think the sweeds do this very well. https://www.skb.com/
 

Montoya

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But speaking of $30,000, BTC is just toying with that level now. Im expecting a drop below this coming week to set off some panic and put a bottom into this current downtrend.
 
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