EVs and chargers

I wonder if we will ever see a planet – from another star.

We can already “see” exoplanets (to some degree), with equipment such as the JWST.
[edit: link kindly posted above, thanks Stuart]

So, I’m assuming you mean “see” as in literally being there.

Probably not. Potential exoplanets are mostly all called Kepler followed by numbers. One potential is 300, one is 1,400 and one is 2,700 light years away. Given the distances, we don’t know if there’s a biosphere or even water. What we do know is their size and position puts them in a place where it’s a good possibility.

But, given that a human space craft has only just exited the confines of our solar system (about a light day away), how would we hope to make those sorts of distances? We can’t even send a probe, it’ll likely take a thousand years or more to get to the closest, and hundreds of years more to get back telemetry…if anybody is still watching.

(this, by the way, is why I believe in extraterrestrial life, but absolutely not in aliens visiting)

Ref: Kepler-69c (the far one), Kepler-452b, and Kepler-1649c (the close one).

(this, by the way, is why I believe in extraterrestrial life, but absolutely not in aliens visiting)

Almost snap. I neither believe nor disbelieve in extraterrestrial life; and I suspect humankind will never know either way anyway.

The only kind of aliens who could conceivably visit would be something like the ones in my story: with lifespans in the thousands or tens of thousands of years, to be able to contemplate journeys of that sort of duration.

I’m interested to know where Germany gets its uranium,

Mainly from Canada and Australia, with a slight bit from one mining operation in Germany which was active till the early 90s. That’s West Germany – East Germany had the most disgusting uranium mining operation ever seen (Wismut AG – a Soviet-GDR cooperation and a prime example of what happens with your environment and the workforce if you give socialism/communism free rein), and produced all the uranium needed for the GDR reactors (and much more).

and where it puts its used fuel.

At the moment, everything is packaged in CASTOR thingies and either in central interim storage (Ahaus and Gorleben) or in the interim storage that was built decentrally besides every nuclear power station after the violent protests blocked every CASTOR transport to Gorleben or Ahaus.

The permanent repository was planned to be in Gorleben in one of the many untouched-for-milllions-of-years salt domes in northern Germany. Billions of euros were spent to examine it in every detail, and everything was fine. Then, politics decided (with the “help” of violent protestors) to start all over again with the search for a geological repository for permanent storage. Results are expected starting with 2050 I think. Or 2060?

The original plan (devised in the 70s) was quite sophisticated, with a nearly-closed fuel cycle involving the WAA Wackersdorf (reprocessing plant), the SNR-300 Kalkar (fast breeder reactor) and the THTR (prototype high temperature reactor built and run in Hamm-Uentrop with a very fancy cooling tower) for switching to Thorium as fuel. The unavoidable minimal rest of the burned fuel was always intended to go into deep geological storage however. WAA was not built, and SNR was built but not put into operation. The overall strategy was finally changed in the mid-90s, when reprocessing was made illegal and only direct storage was allowed, with the government being solely responsible for determining where to store the stuff and to operate the storage sites. Billions of euros were paid by the operators of the nuclear power stations to the state for the storage that up to now has not happened. Research into transmutation and other post-processing has been mostly stopped.

All in all, you see that politics tried extremely hard to make all things nuclear as complicated and expensive as possible in Germany. The history of the permanent repository trial in Asse is also a prime example for that.

For low-level radioactive waste, there is “Schacht Konrad” (a former iron ore mine) as a permanent repository available, and there are the historic waste relics of socialism in Morsleben, which has its own interesting history.

For non-radioactive dangerous waste (i.e. the stuff that stays dangerous for eternity), we have e.g. the permanent storage in Herfa-Neurode. Since it does not deal with radioactive waste, everything is nice and cheap there, and nobody is interested. Because we all know that dying from non-radioactive dangers is much less deadly.

Because we all know that dying from non-radioactive dangers is much less deadly.

<spits tea>

The problem with radiation? It’s invisible. It’s freaky. It creeps in the night. It’ll sneak up on you in the dark and give your kittens cancer, make your hair fall out, and worse everybody lied about stuff glowing in the dark…

Radioactive waste varies rather. Some of it is incredibly dangerous but doesn’t last very long, and can – with a reasonable degree of certainty – be contained until it’s safe. Some of it lasts for millions of years or more, but isn’t really terribly dangerous at all.

Unfortunately fission products, and even worse, transuranics produced in reactors, include a whole lot of isotopes that fall somewhere between these two: they’re not as nasty as the short half-life stuff, and they don’t last as long as the long half-life stuff. But they last for hundreds or thousands of years – far too long for it to be possible to contain them safely with any confidence – and they’re a hell of a lot more dangerous than ANYTHING non-radioactive.

Okay, maybe you don’t give a shit about people a few hundred or a few thousand years in the future, but some of us do. Not to mention caring about what might happen sooner in the event of accidents – when those short half-life isotopes can be relevant too, as well as the medium ones.

At any time, a nuclear reactor contains something of the order of several hundred to a thousand or so times as much radioactive crap as a nuclear bomb, and produces many times as much again over the course of its service life.

The chemical toxicity of various of the radioactive elements is, erm, interesting.
Many will kill you with very low doses. e.g. 20-30 milligrams of Plutonium

Beryllium enters the conversation… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_beryllium_poisoning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_beryllium_poisoning

Diagnosis → This section is empty.

Hmm. 🤔

What is already there: next to nothing. What is on the way: not much more. The reason: it is very expensive to build and operate. Ever looked at the price of the Tesla Megapack?

They are eye-wateringly expensive.

I’ve just been reading up some more about them. I hadn’t realised how popular they are, how many of them there are, in Australia. Those that have been in operation have been so successful that many more are on their way. It appears that they are now beyond needing government subsidy.

The Hornsdale Reserve recouped its cost within two years of going live, and saved its industrial customers huge sums of money too.

There are various organic poisons of biological origin that have considerably lower LD50 values than Pu249 (the main isotope of polonium in nuclear waste, with a 24,000 year half-life) – botulinum toxin, for example. But the quantities that exist are tiny, and they’re very far from everlasting.

Incidentally, the toxicity of plutonium is actually due to its radioactivity. They call it toxicity because it has to be ingested or inhaled for its alpha emissions to kill you, because externally only its gamma rays will get to anything vital, and most of those will go right through you without hitting anything. But alpha, almost harmless externally, is really nasty internally.

The nuclear industry love the confusion they can cause by calling it toxicity – but the ugly truth is made plain by the fact that the LD50 values for the different isotopes of plutonium are in inverse proportion to their half-lives.

Like other heavy metals, it probably would be chemically toxic – if it hadn’t killed you with alpha radiation first.

Beryllium is indeed nasty – LD50 ~80 mg/kg – that is, nasty, but not in the same league as say Po210 estimated at ~10ng/kg – but then Po210 does have a half-life of only 138 days – or botulinum toxin at ~1ng/kg…or even that Pu239 at ~400μg/kg

(Note how the LD50 values for Po210 and Pu239, neither of them known terribly accurately, are again not far from inversely proportional to their half-lives…their alpha emissions are pretty similar, both a little over 5MeV.)

I found this interesting:

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/18/renewables-have-provided-more-than-half-of-all-germanys-electricity-this-year/