well four new reactors are being built in the South East, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia. They are scheduled to be online in 2018 and 2019 adding about 1200mw per reactor.
Far from dead they do however show that we aren't even trying to be at the forefront of the technology anymore. While the AP1000 reactors are more modern they are still old school in many senses.
We still need a good solid base power source, renewable sources tend to be highly weather dependent and cover a large area to generate power. It is not reasonable to claim we can store it through batteries to replace the power currently provided by coal, gas, and nuclear. Unless some breakthrough storage means comes out its not going to happen
Renewable energy is an area that is constantly at the forefront of technology, unlike nuclear. That is one of the reasons it is so much more promising.
The way the regulatory and economic winds are blowing, renewables have become the new baseline generating capacity, with fast-spinup combined cycle natural gas as marginal capacity. Renewables may be weather dependent, but it is hard to argue with a 20+ year lifespan, minimal maintenance, and, most importantly, zero marginal cost.
Nuclear and coal are starting to fade, with vastly more retirements than new construction, outside of the deep south for nuclear (because let's do the opposite of the liberals) and coal producing states (because jobs).
> They are scheduled to be online in 2018 and 2019.
Unfortunately as is universally the case with nuclear construction (see the debacle in the UK as well), both reactors recently announced significant delays of ~18 months and at least an additional billion in cost overruns. There may be an economical way to build nuclear but we clearly don't have it.
I'll keep saying nuclear is one of the best technologies we can use for power generation. In addition to the fact that the falures at Fukushima, TMI, and Chernobyl were all caused by HUMANS interfering with engineering plans and systems, or not being trained proeprly (Fukushima designers called for higher seawalls, overrulled; TMI was human error massively compounding a simple mechanical failure which could have been recovered from; Chernobyl had key safety systems disabled). There are several newer, much safer designs that when used with proper training and engineers being listened to, can provide us with very clean power with stability and land use that solar and wind can't match. You combine that with wind/solar/water during the day, and you have yourself an amazingly clean power grid that works 24/7.
I was 1, living in Pittsburgh. My father was called in among many others to help determine how to recover.
The human problem will never go away, though. Ultimately, someone is going to want to cheap out on something, and will be unable or unwilling to consider very-low-probability catastrophic events, probably partly because people are so bad at thinking about very-low-probability events.
The problem is we don't even know what it means to deal with waste for 10,000 years. If the Romans had used nuclear power, we'd still be guarding their waste. And they likely would have put it somewhere really out of the way - like London. If some of the technologies that can transmute waste intro shorter lived stuff come to fruition, fantastic. But until then nuclear power is just the worst kind of deficit spending, kicking the unknown and huge costs way into the future.
Cadmium never decays. It isn't dangerous for 10 kiloyears. It's dangerous forever. And I guarantee you that your average barrel of cadmium is worse to deal with than your average nuclear waste flask.
Even more than that, a nuke plant generates, amortized, several tons of waste per year. A few flasks. Which can get shoved into a volume the size of your garage. And then you basically forget about it. Unlike, say, a coal plant, which generates a reservoir worth of awful ash a year. Containment isn't even an option there.
Even more than that, even if our nuke plants vented directly into the atmosphere every now and then they'd still put out less radioactive waste than coal plants. Seriously, the only reason nuclear waste is dangerous is because it's concentrated. If we held nuclear plants to the same standards we do coal plants, "safe, permanent disposal" would be as simple as dumping it into the ocean and making sure it mixed up.
> If some of the technologies that can transmute waste intro shorter lived stuff come to fruition, fantastic.
Today we could be reducing the volume of HLW if the US deployed pyroprocessing and cadmium distillation. Unfortunately for the USA, those technologies are more mature in Korea.
London wasn't out of the way. Londinium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium) was the heart of their administration, the provincial capital, and a commercial center as well, which could merit imperial visits. Romans storing nuclear waste there would make about as much sense as Americans storing nuclear waste in Okinawa or Baghdad or Kabul (that is, none).
Somewhere out of the way then would be like the Sahara, which not coincidentally, is still out of the way; and desert regions are also where it's usually proposed to store waste.
We know that we can put the "waste" in breeder reactors and burn up >90% of it for energy, leaving only short lived isotopes. We don't build breeder reactors because they can be used to breed Plutonium, not because they're difficult to build. It's a purely political decision.
But how much waste would we be guarding, really? And how does that compare to all the coal we've burned?
At current energy rates & waste production rates etc, if you used only nuclear power, your consumption would result in roughly 7 lbs of nuclear waste over an 80 year lifespan.
We in the US had a plan, store it way deep under Yucca Mountain. The most likely worst case scenario is that there's a seismic event which makes thousands of tons of nuclear waste permanently inaccessible, buried in a mountain. That's concrete encased, sealed steel casks buried in a bloody mountain. That's not a lot to actually worry about. Plus, with reactor designs like fast breeders, you reuse a lot of the waste. And even with old designs, it's STILL less radioactive than coal.
I find it hard to understand why there's still support for nuclear power, particularly given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all.
* It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.
* Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.
* The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.
* Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.
There's really not a lot to like about the nuclear power industry. Can anyone explain why we shouldn't just leave this method of power generation behind as a tragic mistake?
Because we need to get off of fossil fuels and wind/solar is intermittent, so it can't provide base load power without huge numbers of batteries or other technology that hasn't scaled up yet (e.g. molten salt/flywheels).
Technically, no. Artificial hydro (more commonly known as pumped storage) means you can essentially store energy in gravity, anywhere. i.e. build a container at an elevated position, pump water into it using intermittent energy (e.g. wind at night, excess solar etc), drop water down through a turbine to generate electricity again to provide a low baseload.
The reality is that 1) this is hugely expensive and so generally pumped storage is restricted to exploit existing natural resources with lots of elevated mountains between which one can store ridiculous volumes of water rather than build your own giant water container.
So generally hydro is limited to existing water resources (e.g. large rivers), or storage resources (e.g. mountains) which are quite limited.
Sure, it doesn't have to be large scale. But you brought it up as a replacement for base load nuclear, which small-scale pumped storage isn't going to do.
You want to talk about failure modes? The nuclear "worst case" has nothing on hydro.
Hydro power is responsible for the most fatal electricity generation incident ever: Banqiao Dam. It catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.
> According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine.
Utility-scale battery storage could definitely be an option, but batteries can be pretty nasty themselves. The alternatives like I mentioned (molten salt for solar, etc) need to be scaled up and could provide similar capacity.
The "base load" argument for nuclear isn't really convincing any more now that Iceland and Costa Rica are already using 100% renewable energy sources and several other countries are approaching it rapidly.
Bringing up Iceland as an example is a little disingenuous since the whole island is a volcano so they can use geothermal cheaply.
Costa Rica uses its large amount of rainfall and dams to use generate hydro power, and this article discusses a drought they had in the last year that meant they had to fire up the old fossil fuel plants: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/truth-b...
So I'd still consider having some base load capacity available fairly important.
> It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar.
You're probably looking at best-case vs. worst-case here. The expense of getting sufficient wind power in areas without wind or solar power in low-light areas can get pretty crazy. And a large portion of the expense of nuclear power is regulatory hurdles we impose on it.
> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic than the alternatives.
The success mode of the current most popular alternative (fossil fuels) has proven much more catastrophic. As for other things like wind and solar power, I think a lot of people are unconvinced that it's fair to call them "alternatives" yet. Nuclear has proven itself as a good general-purpose solution and they have not, and nuclear seems to be a lot better than what we are doing now.
Ocean floor disposal (also know of Sub-seabed) seems like a quite reasonable way of getting rid of nuclear waste you don't want to see again. Load it into a giant dart, drop it from a ship, allow it to pick up speed as it drops to the ocean floor, and it buries itself deep in the ocean's clay. It helps deal with concerns about access to the waste, as the number of submersibles that can work that deep is likely very small.
> given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all.
Your metrics for "success" are interesting:
> It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.
According to [0] only onshore wind beats nuclear in terms of cost. However, that does not include the scaling issues wind has if you want to produce as much total MWe as a nuclear reactor (ex: there is only so much high quality wind onshore land).
> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.
This is the same logic for many anti-terrorism bills, but I will ignore that for now. This is also why they are regulated to such lengthy extremes, such as having backup power both onsite and offsite. It is also required to withstand winds that occur only once in 10,000 years.
> The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.
Sources? Much of it I know of is stored on site in giant pools because the waste belongs to the DoE, and the DoE still cannot find a compromise on how it should be handled.
> Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.
Replace "nuclear" with anything else and it is just as true. For example, structural engineering has had millenia lengths of time over nuclear to rack up disasters.
Ultimately, nuclear accidents amplify human error to a magnitude that many people find uncomfortable. Which is why the industry is regulated to a magnitude more than any other. It is not like they hand out reactor operator licenses to just anybody, either. 1 out of my undergraduate peers of ~7 got licensed to operate NCSU's PULSTAR research reactor, which has much simpler systems than a commercial power-producing reactor. It is also easy to forget that the nuclear industry in the USA has been near-paralyzed at the 1950's and 1960's level of technology, which is only about 20 years into the commercial reactor field. Unfortunately, there really is not any other industry I know of that, at 20 years into its growth, was paralyzed and allowed to operate for an additional 60-70 years. In that context, I think the US has done well given the little wiggle room regulation has allowed growth in.
The WHO did a massive study[0] and actually found nuclear killed far fewer people per watt than all others, even solar:
Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal – world average 161
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36
Natural Gas 4
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44
Wind 0.15
Hydro 0.10
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4
Nuclear 0.04
Note that rooftop construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US, with high mortality rates from falls.[1]
Coal mining is extremely hazardous, it would top this chart even just looking at production. Folding in air pollution deaths from burning coal and you add thousands of deaths per day.[2]
Each year coal and oil kill more people than the entire 60 year history of nuclear, including every nuclear disaster.
Even if we focus on worst case scenarios, nuclear is safer. The impact of Chernobyl is wildly overestimated by the public.[3]
For hydro, let's just note that a dam failure in Banqiao killed 171,000. The highest death estimates for Chernobyl (and this is including expected early deaths from radiation exposure that still haven't appeared a few decades after the incident) and you're looking at maybe 4,000.
You could add a Chernobyl every year, even take the most aggressive estimates for early deaths caused by that accident, then ignore all air pollution deaths, and coal and oil would still be more dangerous. They're just that insanely deadly an industry. Nuclear's worst case is safer than coal and oil's average.
On cost I think you're mistaken too, nuclear remaining an incredibly cheap source of power per watt, but power economics are complicated and that'd take another discussion. All I can say is that this was the standard wisdom of everyone I knew who worked in the energy industry, despite occasional scare stories in magazines about how the "true" cost of nuclear is disguised by subsidies - the math doesn't quite add up.[4]
[3] An overview of the actual mortality impact of Chernobyl found it responsible for a few dozen deaths in emergency workers (fewer than 50, and some of those dying 20 years after the accident). It might be possible to eventually tie a few thousand early deaths to the incident, but we're still waiting, decades after it happened. In general, radiation hazards were widely exaggerated. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
[4] Admittedly biased source, but it runs a few publically available numbers, even nuclear projects with co...
Interesting references thanks yet "official deaths" inherently underestimates the caused by nuclear energy. For instance there are only 28 official deaths for the Chernobyl disaster [1].
The WHO gives the number as "up to 4000 could eventually die" [2].
And some researchers give the number as "985,000, mostly from cancer" [3].
Since it's so hard to tally long term harm from such a hard to pin down source such stats are very hard to accurately quantify.
You're right that it's often hard to pin down long term impacts, but I don't think this is a debate with quite as wide a field of credible estimates as you suggest.
The 985,000 figure comes from an interesting source. It originated in a book that peer reviewers savaged, for, among other things, making up numbers without providing any justification whatsoever and ignoring the scientific method.
M. I. Balonov decried the book, claiming "it has very little scientific merit while being highly misleading to the lay reader." He called it science fiction.
While you're right that there are hard problems in long term forecasts, but there are entire fields of study, dosimetry and epidemiology, that have had smart people toiling away on those problems for their entire career, and this is maybe the most widely studied industrial disaster in history. We have made enormous strides in how to measure environmental radiation, doses received, and the correlation between those and increases in mortality. Individuals are hard, but population estimates are actually easier to calibrate over time. So if you write a book containing a sensationalist number to get some headlines, researchers will be able to tell you're pulling their leg.
As rtpg says though, this is a bit of a moot point, because, sure, let's call it 985,000, then nuclear remains still the safest form of power by an enormous margin.
In part, b/c nuclear power has had a successful run in other countries. In France, for example, nuclear generates 75% of the electricity and the country is the 7th cheapest in the EU (28 countries) for delivered KwH. [1]
Cascading failures and human error happen in all kinds of complex systems. You can't really say "that doesn't count" just because the failure was easily avoidable in hindsight.
It is a little naive considering how many HN reader probably have experience with complex software systems. If someone suggested running oracle on a grid of mainframes using some esoteric programming language we would be naturally sceptical but nuclear power always gets a free ride. Big and complicated is expensive even when it is the best solution on paper.
That's not an adequate comparison. You're comparing one simple solution to one complex solution. The actual comparison is one complex solution to several thousand simple solutions. What you're comparing is running oracle on a grid of mainframes using some esoteric programming language compared to running about 2,500 MariaDB servers (based on comparisons of modern wind turbines to modern nuclear generators). Oh, and that's just for one site. So you can manage a couple hundred unwieldy Oracle servers, or a quarter million MariaDB servers.
It is mitigating 1 million failure modes in one site or a few simple failure modes in 1 million sites. It wouldn't surprise me if wind turbines run SQLite!
Does this amount to: "If you accept the premise that you can trust people not to be idiots, nuclear power is perfectly safe"?
I say that as someone positively predisposed toward nuclear. People can also be stupid with other sources of energy, of course, but that kind of stupidity is the kind that kills people slowly and unglamorously.
great example of a tech that works perfect in theory, but bombs horribly in practice.
accidents happen all the time, see the massive blasts in china recently. but, with other tech, the effects are limits to proximity.
tchernobyl's fallout cloud swept over europe. no other failure of tech comes close. learning from mistakes in nuclear is very expensive, we might run out of planet until it is perfected.
Chernobyl killed 56 people directly. The full lifespan of the radioactive leak is statistically estimated to result in shortening the lifespan of roughly 4,000 people through cancer[0].
If you can't think of a more deadly technology failure incident, then you're horribly undereducated. You don't even need to go beyond the scope of electricity production to find incidents that were orders of magnitude more deadly. The Banqiao Dam hydro power station catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.
"The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.[5] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[6] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[7] A disputed Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 premature cancer deaths occurred worldwide between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl.[8]"
after the dam in china broke, the area became habitable. tchernobyl's surroundings not so much.
the nice thing about radiation is the long term effects that make it so hard to measure. genetic issues in newborns are kind of hard to stomach.
and right now the waste figures worldwide do not include the reactors and buildings themselves. what exactly are you proposing there? using the nuclear reactor in the center of our solar system seems like a better bet.
I cited the wiki article for you. And from that I cited the most reputable, objective number rather than the unsubstantiated hysterical numbers claimed by activist groups.
Put your prejudices aside for a moment and consider it objectively. Nuclear power is demonstrably the safest form of energy generation per kilowatt with the sole exception of thermal solar. Wind turbines and photovoltaic solar are more deadly. I won't cite any specific source because there are literally hundreds.[0]
Fukushima was caused by the most powerful Japanese earthquake in recorded history, followed by a tsunami that you'd need to build a 10-meter wall around the entire island to avoid. And the only people who died were plant workers trapped in the basement.
That assertion is incorrect. There were other Nuclear Power Plants that were closer to the Tōhoku earthquake epicentre and just as affected by the proceeding tsunami. Of note is the Onagawa NPP which was used as a refuge to house residents (in the site gymnasium) during the event. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...]
To say that the plants construction in an earthquake prone environment, solely, would inevitably lead to the incident is false. Just like with most incidents (e.g aircraft) it is a compound of faults but most importantly obtuse human error and/or mishandling.
The fact is that HUMANS will build the new reactors; interfere with engineering plans and systems; and not be trained properly.
If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built.
I have talked to people in the coal power industry. There are plenty of cases of accidents.
In one case they started up the generator with the oil pumps turned off - the multi-tonne rotor ripped off the bearing then rolled through the hall crushing everything in its path. What if that had been a nuclear power station?
A manager without a clue asked for a chute to be opened, the worker tried to explain why that was a bad idea, the manager insisted and a few kilograms of coal dropped down on them.
It can take minutes for the mulit-tonne generator to synchronise with the 50Hz supply frequency. There are special electric motors that retard or advance the generator until it is in sync, then keep it in sync. Normally there are resistors to allow the sync to happen slowly. However in one case it was thrown to full power before the sync was complete. There was a momentary blackout through the southern UK while a huge amount of power was used to sync the generator in a fraction of a second. Strangely the fuses didn't blow.
You're so paralyzed by fear of a nuclear accident you miss the big picture. For example, the fly ash emitted burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.[1] Sure the results of a nuclear meltdown are scary on the local level. But you know what's a lot scarier on the global level? Runaway climate change.
It took the worse earthquake in the Japan's recorded history along with several human mistakes on an outdated reactor to cause Fukushima. And we don't more of these designs.
Like the article discussed, what we want is the government to be smart about nuclear power. There 7 million deaths annually due to air pollution. How many American lives are lost due to terrorism? And yet we wasted $4 trillion in the Middle East after 911. Imagine if we spent that on new reactor designs and fusion research?
Global warming is the biggest threat facing our species. It's time we stopped worrying about our neighborhood and starting thinking about our planet.
When I was 8, I read a 1970s novel, describing a struggle of young nuclear engineers to promote newer reactor design through the behemoths of rigid bureaucracy. The new design was inherently safer and thus did not need the expensive steel containment shell built around, thus saving resources to the Motherland.
Chernobyl happened the next year, we lived 250km north of it. Luckily for us, most of the fallout precipitated on heads of other people some 100km south. Yet the radiation levels were a part of daily weather forecast for the next decade. We didn't have a toaster, a microwave, a dishwasher or a VCR home then, but we owned a radiometer.
We were instructed to hide from the rain in the weeks after the accident. I remember hiding with a friend under concrete slabs at a construction site on our way from school. The habit kind of stuck in the unconscious: in Belarus, people still scramble for cover at the slightest hint of rain, even though the accident was a full generation ago. I only realized it after living abroad for some years.
Anyway, whenever someone on Reddit or here rediscovers that Nuclear is Safe when Done Right, I always remember that novel.
I doubt anyone ever claimed that Chernobyl was nuclear Done Right. It was probably the most unsafe reactor design ever put into production.
The best modern designs have a strong negative feedback: as the fuel gets hotter, the reaction rate slows down, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. Chernobyl did the opposite: as the fuel got hotter the nuclear reactions happened faster. It relied on human operation of control rods to keep it from blowing up. And on top of that it skipped the containment shell.
Actually, it relied on two complimentary safeguard circuits to restrict the rod movements within its calculated performance envelope. They could not be overriden from the front panel, so electricians were dispatched to cut them off, in order to conduct an "experiment" in the wake of International Labour Day. How safe are the other reactor designs when malicious human intervention is considered is still a very open question.
I would also remark there was a deserved stream of criticism from the West both for the reactor design and the containment effort that followed. The overwhelming opinion throughout the 1990s-2000s was that the Western designs are safe and catastrophic scenarios like Chernobyl are implausible. Then Fukushima happens, the three reactors blow up and the only saving grace for Japan was the wind blowing oceanside. And the containment is done by low wage workers in sneakers, while Asimo and its advanced robot colleagues play robosoccer in Tokyo.
The narrative is now changed to other designs being "inherently safe", although it's not very plausible how any concentrated, massive release of energy can be made inherently safe. Yes you can reduce probabilities and exclude some catastrophic scenarios, but this is a thing with crises: they always come unexpected. I'm sure when the plug in a molten salt reactor fails for some reason (say tectonic shift from a quake), there will no doubt be another design touted as safe.
Now consider that fission power atm is what, 10-15% of compound world power generation? As of now it's focused in a handful of nations, most of whom are known for safety culture. As it proliferates worldwide, the average quality of maintenance will decline and the number of stations would naturally multiply, so perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades. And we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here.
Well frankly, converting to fission in near term (say 15 years) worldwide is pure speculation on our side. This is just not going to happen. I just hope natural gas, hydro and the increasing green generation component can help us get by and perhaps reduce the coal usage.
Which was nowhere close to as bad as Chernobyl. There is a lot of fear-mongering going around that tries to imply they were somehow similar, but most of that relies on people not understanding the difference between a steam explosion in Chernobyl's reactor core (which had no containment building) blowing finely pulverized radioactive graphite and fission products across the landscape, and Fukushima's hydrogen explosions outside the containment chamber, which caused far less damage and left most of the fuel still contained in the reactor cores.
Nobody has died from radiation at Fukushima Daiichi, and there is a good chance any future cancer risk is extremely low. In fact, the way the reactor survived the worse earthquake and tsunami on record without causing a radiation hazard like some places around Chernobyl shows how safe nuclear power is, even in old designs. This was confirmed at the nearby Fukushima Daini reactor, which survived the earthquake and tsunami.
> perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades
Extrapolating from two incidents isn't useful. Since one of those data points wasn't significant nuclear accident, you're now trying to extrapolate form a single data point, which is not the kind of math we should base policy on.
The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly. Even if you count every single nuclear associated disaster (including Chernobyl), there number of people injured/killed and the land impact of those disasters is insignificant noise compared to what the coal (or chemical) industry has done.
> we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here
So you haven't looked at any of the advances in nuclear power that have been made over the last sever decades? Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem. Most technologies advanced a lot over the last 40+ years - why would you assume that nuclear never advanced past the 60s?
Both were Level 7 accidents on INES scale. Fukushima release was about 1/6th of Chernobyl, but ended up blowing 4/5ths of its contents over the ocean. At some point, evacuation of Tokyo metro area was considered. Yeah no, both were pretty bad and the same magnitude events.
> The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly.
Fair point, but there's not much coal use in Belarus (mostly natural gas), nor in Norway where I am now (clean energy from the dam to my car's plug). For Belarus, the impact, in health, land and culture was incomparable to that of other energy accidents.
> Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem.
Right, they have the weapon proliferation problem that you can't design away.
Breeders aren't necessarily proliferative. The IFR for example ends up with a mix of plutonium isotopes which is more difficult to weaponize than natural uranium ore. The main problem is the need for a high fissile load at startup, but the same mix works for that.
Thorium breeders are another possibility, as long as you're not isolating protactinium.
Another route is Transatomic's design. It's not actually a breeder, and runs on uranium enriched as low as 1.6%, but burns up almost all the transuranics because it leaves them in the fuel mix for a long time, removes fission products, and has really good neutron economy.
Even if you use breeders with potential proliferation issues, one way to go would be to keep those reactors in weapons states, and use them to dispose of the waste from non-weapons states.
> shows how safe nuclear power is, even in old designs.
More than that, had the reactors been gravity-shutdown capable ones and gravity fed cooling (rather than pump driven) and the seawalls been higher as originally proposed, none of us would be talking about Fukushima. So like you said, safety isn't unattainable. Just the opposite, it's usually sabotaged by people who have no place making such calls.
Over 40 years ago, when I was checking out colleges to attend, the tour at one school took us thru a fusion research lab that iirc had a Tokomak (or some similar contraption).
IMO no way that practical fusion happens even 40 years from now. I won't be around to see it.
Maybe the Chicago Cubs win another World Series before we see practical fusion? Could that happen? :)
This is like the computer company that loses business after announcing the date for its next model, except worse, because there's no date for fusion. The threat of fusion is sucking the air out of fission.
> How safe are the other reactor designs when malicious human intervention is considered is still a very open question.
Nothing is safe from malicious action, absolutely nothing. You can cut someone with a piece of paper, drown them with a glass of water, or stab them in the throat with a pencil. You can even simply punch someone with your hand in the back of the neck and kill them. We simply make malicious action difficult and unlikely through design and rules, exactly how we manage cars and coal plants and nuclear weapons.
Exactly. And I think we all can agree that a sharp pencil does not have the same worst case scenario potential as an automatic rifle or nuclear weapon. It is really hard to sabotage a coal plant with the same national impact as an INES L7 nuclear accident. I think among the "conventional" energy sources only some of the hydro sites come close.
Let's look at the worst possible case for molten salt reactors and imagine that somehow the reactor gets cracked wide open.
With a solid-fueled reactor, you need enough fuel for 18 months (the normal refueling cycle). With liquid fuel you can add a little bit of fissionable material as often as you want, so your fuel has barely enough reactivity to keep your plant operating.
With solid fuel, the fission products build up over that 18 months. With liquid fuel, three things happen:
- Noble gases bubble right out of the fuel to an outgas system. You get a tank of xenon and krypton. You can take that away to secure storage as often as you like.
- Some metallic fission products plate onto collectors.
- The major fission products we worry about are cesium, strontium, and iodine. In conventional reactors they're gases, but in MSRs they bond very strongly into fluoride salts. Optionally we can remove them as we go.
So in our imaginary catastrophe there's not enough reactivity for a big excursion, there's less decay heat than in a conventional reactor, and most of the radioactive stuff is liquid that quickly cools to solid rock. There's nothing to drive any kind of explosion, since it's all chemically stable and at atmospheric pressure.
It's worth noting that Fukushima's reactor survived a 9.0 earthquake without significant physical damage. It was the loss of electric power that took it out, and that's a problem molten salt reactors don't have at all.
> If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built.
And, as I mentioned, we have designs that can be run safely by fallible humans, we just need to keep penny pinchers from breaking the design during design/construction. And extra $1,000,000 here and there for a safety margin is a far better investment than hundreds of millions in cleanup.
Last week I sat in a meeting with representatives from half a dozen startups attempting GenIV fission reactors, along with a public utility that's investing in that type of work.
They said their main problem was the NRC. It has regulations designed for large light-water reactors. If you're attempting, say, a small modular molten-salt reactor, you have to pay several hundred million dollars up front for an extensive, detailed design and regulations to fit. Then the NRC makes one binary decision: if you're lucky they approve you, in which case all you have so far is a piece of paper that allows you to build something. If you're unlucky they deny and leave you with nothing.
Not surprisingly, it's hard to find investors in this environment. They said if we at least had a phased approach, so they can get some assurance for investors, it'd be an improvement. Even better would be a more flexible regime similar to Canada's.
I admit I'm someone who has asked the NRC to come up with shutdown plans for every existing commercial reactor, considering most are already unable to compete on cost with renewables.
Disgustingly enough, the US taxpayer is going to be on the hook for cleanup costs for each and every one of these sites.
I think you'd be happy with the cleanup procedures for some of these newer reactors. For example, ThorCon and Terrestrial Energy use sealed units they can just ship back to the factory after a few years for decommissioning.
There's a good chance it'd be cheaper than coal. Which is a better comparison, since they'd be dispatchable power. For wind and solar to be dispatchable they need to add overproduction and storage, which increases their cost significantly.
In any case, if wind and solar outcompete nuclear on a level playing field, fine. The nuclear startups just want the opportunity to try.
Given the inherent safety and drastically lower waste production of these reactors, I doubt that'll be a problem. Given your dedication to eliminating subsidies, I'm sure you'll be happy to remove those enjoyed by wind and solar while we're at it.
Or maybe both of us should quit bickering, support each other's favorite technologies, and remember that it's fossil fuels destroying the climate, while benefiting from far larger subsidies than either nuclear or renewables have ever seen.
Fine, then why isn't coal being held to the same standard, which is what you're de facto choosing if you don't want nuclear power. The coal industry has an incredible amount of negative externalities, with the costs and damage largely ignored for most of their life. Fly as spills[1] are incredibly damaging, yet the coal industry still gets to store their waste in open air ponds that occasionally spill in to major rivers.
Even in the areas where solar can be used, are you going make sure that industry pays (at least party in advance, for the same insurance) for not only their manufacturing costs, but also the cleanup and disposal of all those PV cells that necessarily would be distributed over a wide area?
Are you also going make sure the wind and/or solar industry takes responsibility for all of the batteries t hat would be necessary to use their schemes? When you're talking keeping a national grid active on variable sources of power like wind or solar, those battery costs will easily surpass the generation costs. Since we are talking about cheap batteries that can supply decent amounts of current, that means lead acid[2]. Do you really want to distribute that much lead? Did you include the costs of the insurance to clean that up, too, including enforcement to make sure the lead doesn't simply end up in the landfill (or worse)?
The only expensive part about nuclear is the initial development cost. Running the plant isn't particularly expensive, and the fuel and waste costs are practically nothing and those costs are isolated to only a few locations. Everybody else tends to get away with socializing their long-term cleanup and disaster costs.
There's a lot of capital and expertise in the U.S. Most of the companies hope they can stay here.
But Terrestrial Energy is Canadian, and Terrapower is a U.S. company that just signed a deal to build their prototype in China, which is aggressively developing advanced nuclear.
Why do you think Canada hasn't built a nuclear power reactor in 30 years? [0]
If Canada's system is better, then there must be another problem here that's shared with the US and Canada. Since neither is actively expanding nuclear power.
Terrestrial Energy is developing a molten salt reactor in Canada.
Meanwhile Terrapower is building their prototype in China, which is developing half a dozen advanced reactor types and currently building a couple dozen conventional reactors.
Hmm... one project that's currently in the conceptual design phase, and won't start preparing blueprints until late 2016 (if everything goes as planned).
One exception is hardly a vibrant industry that the US needs to copy.
Canada also has almost no coal fired plants in most of its provinces. Hydro is king here with >75% of the country being served. There's no pressing need to invest heavily in nuclear reactors at the moment in Canada.
All this tells us is that large scale power generation, and in particular nuclear generation, is a highly capital-intensive business that probably makes it unsuitable for a startup to tackle.
To the extent that the capital expense is a function of inefficient regulation, I'm not convinced we should just accept it as a natural law.
Many of these reactors are small-scale designs, well within the range of funded startups. In fact, YCombinator invested in a nuclear fission startup: http://blog.samaltman.com/energy
That's what worries me. This "dead" technology still contributes a lot more to the United States' energy budget than solar and wind combined, despite strong resistance to nuclear and everybody pushing renewables like crazy. It looks like the winner of this fight — between a technology people are eager to declare "dead" and other technologies that are apparently stillborn — is fossil fuel.
Coal has been replaced by a combination of natural gas and renewables in every state. As more renewables come online, natural gas plants will run even less.
I'm tired of humanity throwing money down the well that is the nuclear power industry. Pay for the damn turbines and panels already and be done with it (the US alone has enough wind energy potential for 10x its current energy use).
Note: Wind is already so cheap, Exelon's CEO (who manages the largest commercial fleet of nuclear generators in the US) is threatening plant closings if they don't get a bailout.
Do I care that natural gas is going to pick up the slack? Of course not. The natural gas boom won't last forever, prices will rise, and with coal no longer meeting EPA emissions requirements and nuclear plants decommissioned, there will only be one power source to pick up the slack: renewables.
> Wind is already so cheap, Exelon's CEO (who manages the largest commercial fleet of nuclear generators in the US) is threatening plant closings if they don't get a bailout.
Am I missing something? I don't see anything about a bailout in that article. Unless I overlooked something, it sounds like he's just saying that government subsidies on wind power are excessive, which is the opposite of asking for a bailout.
"Exelon, which operates six nuclear power plants in Illinois, says it needs help because — although it made more than $2 billion last year — it has lost about $1 billion in the past five years on three of its plants: Clinton, Quad Cities and Byron. The nuclear plants are having a hard time competing in the marketplace partly because plentiful supplies have driven down the price of natural gas.
The utility says it is unwilling to run any nuclear plant at a loss, though its nuclear fleet is profitable overall. It says Illinois needs all of its nuclear plants for reliability and low-carbon power generation. It also warns that 8,000 jobs in Illinois would be lost if the plants were shuttered."
"This really is a critical time in the 41-years at the Quad Cities station where we have never been in a position where me may have premature shutdown," said Bill Stoermer, Senior Communications Manager at Exelon in Cordova. "We really need the state legislature to act. They of course are focused on the budget and to try to get some budget resolved. We certainly understand that, however we're going to be forced to make some decisions by the end of the year regarding our plans here in Illinois."
"Exelon was happy to embrace risk when wholesale power prices were on the rise and profits from its generation business were flowing, Hendrickson said. Only now, in a market where nuclear power is under pressure from relatively inexpensive natural gas and wind, is the company asking for help in the form of a $300-million-a-year subsidy."
"... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win..." -JFK
We used to see difficulties like that as a challenge we could overcome, instead of running away in fear of risk.
See the other posts in this thread, where this has already been covered: solar and wind are not a replacement for coal. By rejecting nuclear, you are choosing coal, de facto, for the base load.
Why build a reactor? Because it's safer than solar, and cheaer in the long run. Why do you want a power source that kills more people per kWh?
Nuclear has very low running costs (practically no fuel) and a lot of the startup costs are temporary (new design approval). Intermittent technologies like solar and wind need expensive extra redundency and battery storage. Show me the batteries you are going to use, at a price cheaper than both coal and nuclear, Not some vaporware future technology, something we can buy right now. (the grid isn't a battery, even though most people using solar right now use the grid as if it was).
Nuclear isn't easy or cheap, but it's the least worst method we have for generating power. Other technologies will always have niche uses, of course, but choosing to wait for some mythical future technology to become available is choosing to let coal plants continue polluting the world.
> By rejecting nuclear, you are choosing coal, de facto, for the base load.
I'm not. I'm picking natural gas, which while still a fossil fuel, is much cleaner and releases far less CO2 per kwh generated.
Nuclear still takes a decade to build. A decade. I don't have to show you the batteries today, as long as they're built and in production in the next 10 years, which they will be. The Tesla Gigafactory will produce 50GWh of battery capacity per year: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office-mar...
Nuclear isn't the least worst method. Solar, wind, and batteries are the least worst method.
> but choosing to wait for some mythical future technology to become available is choosing to let coal plants continue polluting the world.
Safe nuclear is this mythical future technology you speak of.
That's not a small amount. Nuclear releases 0 CO2.
> 50GWh of battery capacity per year:
Thank you for making my point for me. At that rate, we might have enough battery power (assuming no replacements) in a century or two. We need TWh capacity, not GWh, to change the world over to intermittent generation sources.
You have a strange sense of "least worst", given incidentsw like these happen fairly regularly in the oil and gas industries. Nuclear hasn't killed anywhere near this many people.
Natural gas releases half as much CO2 as coal, and in practice also results in a lot of methane release which according to some researchers makes its warming impact as bad as coal's, at least over the next few decades.
This is my favorite book on the state of atomic energy: http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-M.... The book looks at the history of atomic accidents from an engineering perspective right up to Fukushima. The author is a nuclear engineer and understands the systems he talks about.
Interestingly I came away from a book about atomic disasters being pretty pro nuclear, at least more so than I was before reading the book. Here are my main take aways:
- The US needs to start back up the waste reprocessing program. Jimmy Carter banned this in the hopes of setting a good example for other countries (one of the byproducts being plutonium). But everyone else continues to process nuclear waste except for the US and it just makes the waste storage problem that much harder. 95% of the fuel that comes out of a rector is harmless U-238. We should only be burying a tiny fraction of what we currently bury.
- We need to start innovating beyond PWR and BWR reactors. Things like liquid metal fuel reactors have the nice property of not having to worry about them melting down because they are already melted.
Not a very well informed article, but it starts from a bad premise and just follows it along. The big reveal of "But flaws in the program were becoming clear: nuclear plants were expensive to build, produced waste that was impossible to dispose of safely and generated power far more expensive than had been projected."
Is not even wrong, but I don't expect the author to do any research about the costs of nuclear power, nor to track down cost inflators (regulatory delay, post start regulation changes) or disposal methods (reprocessing, vitrification, incineration) or cost per megawatt.
You know, if we hadn't had such a "Nukes are bad, m'kay" moment in the 70s, we wouldn't be limping along with so many old, past-their-prime plants now, and there'd have been more incentive to continue refining designs for nuclear power. What plants we have are less efficient than they could be, and are pushing up against their designed lifetimes.
Wrong. The Cold War was why we built the nucular power stations we did. The uranium in those tens of thousands of nucular weapons came from somewhere - nucular power plants. Electricity was a mere by-product. None of those power plants were viable without there being the aspect of the Cold War imperative.
So it is the war-mongers and not the hippies to blame for whatever happened to nucular power.
Yeah, the breeder reactors in the first generation were terrible and not good for much other than making A-bomb material.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the dozens of nuke plants that were canceled in the 70s, at the height of the Cold War, and the virtual (and in some countries, legal) moratorium on new construction that was pushed by anti-nuclear activists. Well-intentioned people dedicated to saving the world made things worse us and held back technological progress at the same time.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadFar from dead they do however show that we aren't even trying to be at the forefront of the technology anymore. While the AP1000 reactors are more modern they are still old school in many senses.
We still need a good solid base power source, renewable sources tend to be highly weather dependent and cover a large area to generate power. It is not reasonable to claim we can store it through batteries to replace the power currently provided by coal, gas, and nuclear. Unless some breakthrough storage means comes out its not going to happen
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...
Not only that, batteries aren't the only way to store renewable energy. There's dams, thermal salts, and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Renewable_energ...
Renewable energy is an area that is constantly at the forefront of technology, unlike nuclear. That is one of the reasons it is so much more promising.
Nuclear and coal are starting to fade, with vastly more retirements than new construction, outside of the deep south for nuclear (because let's do the opposite of the liberals) and coal producing states (because jobs).
Unfortunately as is universally the case with nuclear construction (see the debacle in the UK as well), both reactors recently announced significant delays of ~18 months and at least an additional billion in cost overruns. There may be an economical way to build nuclear but we clearly don't have it.
http://www.power-eng.com/articles/2015/05/delays-at-vogtle-v...
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/energy/2015/03/uti...
I was 1, living in Pittsburgh. My father was called in among many others to help determine how to recover.
Even more than that, a nuke plant generates, amortized, several tons of waste per year. A few flasks. Which can get shoved into a volume the size of your garage. And then you basically forget about it. Unlike, say, a coal plant, which generates a reservoir worth of awful ash a year. Containment isn't even an option there.
Even more than that, even if our nuke plants vented directly into the atmosphere every now and then they'd still put out less radioactive waste than coal plants. Seriously, the only reason nuclear waste is dangerous is because it's concentrated. If we held nuclear plants to the same standards we do coal plants, "safe, permanent disposal" would be as simple as dumping it into the ocean and making sure it mixed up.
Today we could be reducing the volume of HLW if the US deployed pyroprocessing and cadmium distillation. Unfortunately for the USA, those technologies are more mature in Korea.
Somewhere out of the way then would be like the Sahara, which not coincidentally, is still out of the way; and desert regions are also where it's usually proposed to store waste.
After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the ore from which it came.
Anyone who pulls the "long half-life" ploy doesn't know what they're talking about.
Long half-life = less radioactive. By definition.
I mean, you do know that "half-life of infinity" is the same thing as "not radioactive at all", right?
At current energy rates & waste production rates etc, if you used only nuclear power, your consumption would result in roughly 7 lbs of nuclear waste over an 80 year lifespan.
* It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.
* Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.
* The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.
* Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.
There's really not a lot to like about the nuclear power industry. Can anyone explain why we shouldn't just leave this method of power generation behind as a tragic mistake?
Technically, no. Artificial hydro (more commonly known as pumped storage) means you can essentially store energy in gravity, anywhere. i.e. build a container at an elevated position, pump water into it using intermittent energy (e.g. wind at night, excess solar etc), drop water down through a turbine to generate electricity again to provide a low baseload.
The reality is that 1) this is hugely expensive and so generally pumped storage is restricted to exploit existing natural resources with lots of elevated mountains between which one can store ridiculous volumes of water rather than build your own giant water container.
So generally hydro is limited to existing water resources (e.g. large rivers), or storage resources (e.g. mountains) which are quite limited.
It's also not particularly environmentally friendly to dam rivers everywhere.
Some of the wave-action stuff is interesting, but you've obviously got to be near a large body of water for that to work.
Hydro power is responsible for the most fatal electricity generation incident ever: Banqiao Dam. It catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.
Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison.
> According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine.
Video with computer simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPLXim9WG8
Costa Rica uses its large amount of rainfall and dams to use generate hydro power, and this article discusses a drought they had in the last year that meant they had to fire up the old fossil fuel plants: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/truth-b...
So I'd still consider having some base load capacity available fairly important.
You're probably looking at best-case vs. worst-case here. The expense of getting sufficient wind power in areas without wind or solar power in low-light areas can get pretty crazy. And a large portion of the expense of nuclear power is regulatory hurdles we impose on it.
> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic than the alternatives.
The success mode of the current most popular alternative (fossil fuels) has proven much more catastrophic. As for other things like wind and solar power, I think a lot of people are unconvinced that it's fair to call them "alternatives" yet. Nuclear has proven itself as a good general-purpose solution and they have not, and nuclear seems to be a lot better than what we are doing now.
[citation needed]
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/04/world/the-us-too-has-dumpe...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023047731045792685...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
http://www.cbrneportal.com/the-disposal-of-nuclear-waste-int...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_floor_disposal
Your metrics for "success" are interesting:
> It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.
According to [0] only onshore wind beats nuclear in terms of cost. However, that does not include the scaling issues wind has if you want to produce as much total MWe as a nuclear reactor (ex: there is only so much high quality wind onshore land).
> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.
This is the same logic for many anti-terrorism bills, but I will ignore that for now. This is also why they are regulated to such lengthy extremes, such as having backup power both onsite and offsite. It is also required to withstand winds that occur only once in 10,000 years.
> The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.
Sources? Much of it I know of is stored on site in giant pools because the waste belongs to the DoE, and the DoE still cannot find a compromise on how it should be handled.
> Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.
Replace "nuclear" with anything else and it is just as true. For example, structural engineering has had millenia lengths of time over nuclear to rack up disasters.
Ultimately, nuclear accidents amplify human error to a magnitude that many people find uncomfortable. Which is why the industry is regulated to a magnitude more than any other. It is not like they hand out reactor operator licenses to just anybody, either. 1 out of my undergraduate peers of ~7 got licensed to operate NCSU's PULSTAR research reactor, which has much simpler systems than a commercial power-producing reactor. It is also easy to forget that the nuclear industry in the USA has been near-paralyzed at the 1950's and 1960's level of technology, which is only about 20 years into the commercial reactor field. Unfortunately, there really is not any other industry I know of that, at 20 years into its growth, was paralyzed and allowed to operate for an additional 60-70 years. In that context, I think the US has done well given the little wiggle room regulation has allowed growth in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Coal mining is extremely hazardous, it would top this chart even just looking at production. Folding in air pollution deaths from burning coal and you add thousands of deaths per day.[2]
Each year coal and oil kill more people than the entire 60 year history of nuclear, including every nuclear disaster.
Even if we focus on worst case scenarios, nuclear is safer. The impact of Chernobyl is wildly overestimated by the public.[3]
For hydro, let's just note that a dam failure in Banqiao killed 171,000. The highest death estimates for Chernobyl (and this is including expected early deaths from radiation exposure that still haven't appeared a few decades after the incident) and you're looking at maybe 4,000.
You could add a Chernobyl every year, even take the most aggressive estimates for early deaths caused by that accident, then ignore all air pollution deaths, and coal and oil would still be more dangerous. They're just that insanely deadly an industry. Nuclear's worst case is safer than coal and oil's average.
On cost I think you're mistaken too, nuclear remaining an incredibly cheap source of power per watt, but power economics are complicated and that'd take another discussion. All I can say is that this was the standard wisdom of everyone I knew who worked in the energy industry, despite occasional scare stories in magazines about how the "true" cost of nuclear is disguised by subsidies - the math doesn't quite add up.[4]
[0] Energy deathprints: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
[1] http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf
[2] Studies on air pollution deaths (spoiler: among the leading contributing factors to mortality worldwide): http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... ; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature1...
[3] An overview of the actual mortality impact of Chernobyl found it responsible for a few dozen deaths in emergency workers (fewer than 50, and some of those dying 20 years after the accident). It might be possible to eventually tie a few thousand early deaths to the incident, but we're still waiting, decades after it happened. In general, radiation hazards were widely exaggerated. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
[4] Admittedly biased source, but it runs a few publically available numbers, even nuclear projects with co...
The WHO gives the number as "up to 4000 could eventually die" [2].
And some researchers give the number as "985,000, mostly from cancer" [3].
Since it's so hard to tally long term harm from such a hard to pin down source such stats are very hard to accurately quantify.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
[2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
[3] http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-de...
The 985,000 figure comes from an interesting source. It originated in a book that peer reviewers savaged, for, among other things, making up numbers without providing any justification whatsoever and ignoring the scientific method.
M. I. Balonov decried the book, claiming "it has very little scientific merit while being highly misleading to the lay reader." He called it science fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
While you're right that there are hard problems in long term forecasts, but there are entire fields of study, dosimetry and epidemiology, that have had smart people toiling away on those problems for their entire career, and this is maybe the most widely studied industrial disaster in history. We have made enormous strides in how to measure environmental radiation, doses received, and the correlation between those and increases in mortality. Individuals are hard, but population estimates are actually easier to calibrate over time. So if you write a book containing a sensationalist number to get some headlines, researchers will be able to tell you're pulling their leg.
As rtpg says though, this is a bit of a moot point, because, sure, let's call it 985,000, then nuclear remains still the safest form of power by an enormous margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
I say that as someone positively predisposed toward nuclear. People can also be stupid with other sources of energy, of course, but that kind of stupidity is the kind that kills people slowly and unglamorously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R31p1q14SU
http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg
accidents happen all the time, see the massive blasts in china recently. but, with other tech, the effects are limits to proximity.
tchernobyl's fallout cloud swept over europe. no other failure of tech comes close. learning from mistakes in nuclear is very expensive, we might run out of planet until it is perfected.
Chernobyl killed 56 people directly. The full lifespan of the radioactive leak is statistically estimated to result in shortening the lifespan of roughly 4,000 people through cancer[0].
If you can't think of a more deadly technology failure incident, then you're horribly undereducated. You don't even need to go beyond the scope of electricity production to find incidents that were orders of magnitude more deadly. The Banqiao Dam hydro power station catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
"The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.[5] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[6] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[7] A disputed Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 premature cancer deaths occurred worldwide between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl.[8]"
after the dam in china broke, the area became habitable. tchernobyl's surroundings not so much.
the nice thing about radiation is the long term effects that make it so hard to measure. genetic issues in newborns are kind of hard to stomach.
and right now the waste figures worldwide do not include the reactors and buildings themselves. what exactly are you proposing there? using the nuclear reactor in the center of our solar system seems like a better bet.
Put your prejudices aside for a moment and consider it objectively. Nuclear power is demonstrably the safest form of energy generation per kilowatt with the sole exception of thermal solar. Wind turbines and photovoltaic solar are more deadly. I won't cite any specific source because there are literally hundreds.[0]
[0] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=deaths+per+kilowatt
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/11/...
To say that the plants construction in an earthquake prone environment, solely, would inevitably lead to the incident is false. Just like with most incidents (e.g aircraft) it is a compound of faults but most importantly obtuse human error and/or mishandling.
If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built.
I have talked to people in the coal power industry. There are plenty of cases of accidents.
In one case they started up the generator with the oil pumps turned off - the multi-tonne rotor ripped off the bearing then rolled through the hall crushing everything in its path. What if that had been a nuclear power station?
A manager without a clue asked for a chute to be opened, the worker tried to explain why that was a bad idea, the manager insisted and a few kilograms of coal dropped down on them.
It can take minutes for the mulit-tonne generator to synchronise with the 50Hz supply frequency. There are special electric motors that retard or advance the generator until it is in sync, then keep it in sync. Normally there are resistors to allow the sync to happen slowly. However in one case it was thrown to full power before the sync was complete. There was a momentary blackout through the southern UK while a huge amount of power was used to sync the generator in a fraction of a second. Strangely the fuses didn't blow.
Like the article discussed, what we want is the government to be smart about nuclear power. There 7 million deaths annually due to air pollution. How many American lives are lost due to terrorism? And yet we wasted $4 trillion in the Middle East after 911. Imagine if we spent that on new reactor designs and fusion research?
Global warming is the biggest threat facing our species. It's time we stopped worrying about our neighborhood and starting thinking about our planet.
[1]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short
Chernobyl happened the next year, we lived 250km north of it. Luckily for us, most of the fallout precipitated on heads of other people some 100km south. Yet the radiation levels were a part of daily weather forecast for the next decade. We didn't have a toaster, a microwave, a dishwasher or a VCR home then, but we owned a radiometer.
We were instructed to hide from the rain in the weeks after the accident. I remember hiding with a friend under concrete slabs at a construction site on our way from school. The habit kind of stuck in the unconscious: in Belarus, people still scramble for cover at the slightest hint of rain, even though the accident was a full generation ago. I only realized it after living abroad for some years.
Anyway, whenever someone on Reddit or here rediscovers that Nuclear is Safe when Done Right, I always remember that novel.
The best modern designs have a strong negative feedback: as the fuel gets hotter, the reaction rate slows down, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. Chernobyl did the opposite: as the fuel got hotter the nuclear reactions happened faster. It relied on human operation of control rods to keep it from blowing up. And on top of that it skipped the containment shell.
I would also remark there was a deserved stream of criticism from the West both for the reactor design and the containment effort that followed. The overwhelming opinion throughout the 1990s-2000s was that the Western designs are safe and catastrophic scenarios like Chernobyl are implausible. Then Fukushima happens, the three reactors blow up and the only saving grace for Japan was the wind blowing oceanside. And the containment is done by low wage workers in sneakers, while Asimo and its advanced robot colleagues play robosoccer in Tokyo.
The narrative is now changed to other designs being "inherently safe", although it's not very plausible how any concentrated, massive release of energy can be made inherently safe. Yes you can reduce probabilities and exclude some catastrophic scenarios, but this is a thing with crises: they always come unexpected. I'm sure when the plug in a molten salt reactor fails for some reason (say tectonic shift from a quake), there will no doubt be another design touted as safe.
Now consider that fission power atm is what, 10-15% of compound world power generation? As of now it's focused in a handful of nations, most of whom are known for safety culture. As it proliferates worldwide, the average quality of maintenance will decline and the number of stations would naturally multiply, so perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades. And we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here.
I'd really really rather wait for fusion.
And also if coal were not killing many thousands of people every year, and we didn't have so many large dams past their designed lifespan.
Which was nowhere close to as bad as Chernobyl. There is a lot of fear-mongering going around that tries to imply they were somehow similar, but most of that relies on people not understanding the difference between a steam explosion in Chernobyl's reactor core (which had no containment building) blowing finely pulverized radioactive graphite and fission products across the landscape, and Fukushima's hydrogen explosions outside the containment chamber, which caused far less damage and left most of the fuel still contained in the reactor cores.
Nobody has died from radiation at Fukushima Daiichi, and there is a good chance any future cancer risk is extremely low. In fact, the way the reactor survived the worse earthquake and tsunami on record without causing a radiation hazard like some places around Chernobyl shows how safe nuclear power is, even in old designs. This was confirmed at the nearby Fukushima Daini reactor, which survived the earthquake and tsunami.
> perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades
Extrapolating from two incidents isn't useful. Since one of those data points wasn't significant nuclear accident, you're now trying to extrapolate form a single data point, which is not the kind of math we should base policy on.
The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly. Even if you count every single nuclear associated disaster (including Chernobyl), there number of people injured/killed and the land impact of those disasters is insignificant noise compared to what the coal (or chemical) industry has done.
> we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here
So you haven't looked at any of the advances in nuclear power that have been made over the last sever decades? Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem. Most technologies advanced a lot over the last 40+ years - why would you assume that nuclear never advanced past the 60s?
Both were Level 7 accidents on INES scale. Fukushima release was about 1/6th of Chernobyl, but ended up blowing 4/5ths of its contents over the ocean. At some point, evacuation of Tokyo metro area was considered. Yeah no, both were pretty bad and the same magnitude events.
> The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly.
Fair point, but there's not much coal use in Belarus (mostly natural gas), nor in Norway where I am now (clean energy from the dam to my car's plug). For Belarus, the impact, in health, land and culture was incomparable to that of other energy accidents.
> Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem.
Right, they have the weapon proliferation problem that you can't design away.
Thorium breeders are another possibility, as long as you're not isolating protactinium.
Another route is Transatomic's design. It's not actually a breeder, and runs on uranium enriched as low as 1.6%, but burns up almost all the transuranics because it leaves them in the fuel mix for a long time, removes fission products, and has really good neutron economy.
Even if you use breeders with potential proliferation issues, one way to go would be to keep those reactors in weapons states, and use them to dispose of the waste from non-weapons states.
More than that, had the reactors been gravity-shutdown capable ones and gravity fed cooling (rather than pump driven) and the seawalls been higher as originally proposed, none of us would be talking about Fukushima. So like you said, safety isn't unattainable. Just the opposite, it's usually sabotaged by people who have no place making such calls.
Over 40 years ago, when I was checking out colleges to attend, the tour at one school took us thru a fusion research lab that iirc had a Tokomak (or some similar contraption).
IMO no way that practical fusion happens even 40 years from now. I won't be around to see it.
Maybe the Chicago Cubs win another World Series before we see practical fusion? Could that happen? :)
This is like the computer company that loses business after announcing the date for its next model, except worse, because there's no date for fusion. The threat of fusion is sucking the air out of fission.
Nothing is safe from malicious action, absolutely nothing. You can cut someone with a piece of paper, drown them with a glass of water, or stab them in the throat with a pencil. You can even simply punch someone with your hand in the back of the neck and kill them. We simply make malicious action difficult and unlikely through design and rules, exactly how we manage cars and coal plants and nuclear weapons.
With a solid-fueled reactor, you need enough fuel for 18 months (the normal refueling cycle). With liquid fuel you can add a little bit of fissionable material as often as you want, so your fuel has barely enough reactivity to keep your plant operating.
With solid fuel, the fission products build up over that 18 months. With liquid fuel, three things happen:
- Noble gases bubble right out of the fuel to an outgas system. You get a tank of xenon and krypton. You can take that away to secure storage as often as you like.
- Some metallic fission products plate onto collectors.
- The major fission products we worry about are cesium, strontium, and iodine. In conventional reactors they're gases, but in MSRs they bond very strongly into fluoride salts. Optionally we can remove them as we go.
So in our imaginary catastrophe there's not enough reactivity for a big excursion, there's less decay heat than in a conventional reactor, and most of the radioactive stuff is liquid that quickly cools to solid rock. There's nothing to drive any kind of explosion, since it's all chemically stable and at atmospheric pressure.
It's worth noting that Fukushima's reactor survived a 9.0 earthquake without significant physical damage. It was the loss of electric power that took it out, and that's a problem molten salt reactors don't have at all.
And, as I mentioned, we have designs that can be run safely by fallible humans, we just need to keep penny pinchers from breaking the design during design/construction. And extra $1,000,000 here and there for a safety margin is a far better investment than hundreds of millions in cleanup.
They said their main problem was the NRC. It has regulations designed for large light-water reactors. If you're attempting, say, a small modular molten-salt reactor, you have to pay several hundred million dollars up front for an extensive, detailed design and regulations to fit. Then the NRC makes one binary decision: if you're lucky they approve you, in which case all you have so far is a piece of paper that allows you to build something. If you're unlucky they deny and leave you with nothing.
Not surprisingly, it's hard to find investors in this environment. They said if we at least had a phased approach, so they can get some assurance for investors, it'd be an improvement. Even better would be a more flexible regime similar to Canada's.
They are tweaking the process. I wonder if that has anything to do with the NRC?
Disgustingly enough, the US taxpayer is going to be on the hook for cleanup costs for each and every one of these sites.
In any case, if wind and solar outcompete nuclear on a level playing field, fine. The nuclear startups just want the opportunity to try.
Or maybe both of us should quit bickering, support each other's favorite technologies, and remember that it's fossil fuels destroying the climate, while benefiting from far larger subsidies than either nuclear or renewables have ever seen.
Even in the areas where solar can be used, are you going make sure that industry pays (at least party in advance, for the same insurance) for not only their manufacturing costs, but also the cleanup and disposal of all those PV cells that necessarily would be distributed over a wide area?
Are you also going make sure the wind and/or solar industry takes responsibility for all of the batteries t hat would be necessary to use their schemes? When you're talking keeping a national grid active on variable sources of power like wind or solar, those battery costs will easily surpass the generation costs. Since we are talking about cheap batteries that can supply decent amounts of current, that means lead acid[2]. Do you really want to distribute that much lead? Did you include the costs of the insurance to clean that up, too, including enforcement to make sure the lead doesn't simply end up in the landfill (or worse)?
The only expensive part about nuclear is the initial development cost. Running the plant isn't particularly expensive, and the fuel and waste costs are practically nothing and those costs are isolated to only a few locations. Everybody else tends to get away with socializing their long-term cleanup and disaster costs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
[2] future technologies could change that, but until we can buy it commercially its just vaporware and wishful thinking
But Terrestrial Energy is Canadian, and Terrapower is a U.S. company that just signed a deal to build their prototype in China, which is aggressively developing advanced nuclear.
If Canada's system is better, then there must be another problem here that's shared with the US and Canada. Since neither is actively expanding nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Canada#Curren...
Meanwhile Terrapower is building their prototype in China, which is developing half a dozen advanced reactor types and currently building a couple dozen conventional reactors.
One exception is hardly a vibrant industry that the US needs to copy.
Many of these reactors are small-scale designs, well within the range of funded startups. In fact, YCombinator invested in a nuclear fission startup: http://blog.samaltman.com/energy
Coal has been replaced by a combination of natural gas and renewables in every state. As more renewables come online, natural gas plants will run even less.
I'm tired of humanity throwing money down the well that is the nuclear power industry. Pay for the damn turbines and panels already and be done with it (the US alone has enough wind energy potential for 10x its current energy use).
Note: Wind is already so cheap, Exelon's CEO (who manages the largest commercial fleet of nuclear generators in the US) is threatening plant closings if they don't get a bailout.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-08/business/ct-bi...
The former Exelon CEO? Says that shutting down struggling nuclear power plants is the right thing to do.
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060022403
Do I care that natural gas is going to pick up the slack? Of course not. The natural gas boom won't last forever, prices will rise, and with coal no longer meeting EPA emissions requirements and nuclear plants decommissioned, there will only be one power source to pick up the slack: renewables.
Am I missing something? I don't see anything about a bailout in that article. Unless I overlooked something, it sounds like he's just saying that government subsidies on wind power are excessive, which is the opposite of asking for a bailout.
"Exelon, which operates six nuclear power plants in Illinois, says it needs help because — although it made more than $2 billion last year — it has lost about $1 billion in the past five years on three of its plants: Clinton, Quad Cities and Byron. The nuclear plants are having a hard time competing in the marketplace partly because plentiful supplies have driven down the price of natural gas.
The utility says it is unwilling to run any nuclear plant at a loss, though its nuclear fleet is profitable overall. It says Illinois needs all of its nuclear plants for reliability and low-carbon power generation. It also warns that 8,000 jobs in Illinois would be lost if the plants were shuttered."
http://wqad.com/2015/08/04/quad-city-wind-energy-farms-on-th...
"This really is a critical time in the 41-years at the Quad Cities station where we have never been in a position where me may have premature shutdown," said Bill Stoermer, Senior Communications Manager at Exelon in Cordova. "We really need the state legislature to act. They of course are focused on the budget and to try to get some budget resolved. We certainly understand that, however we're going to be forced to make some decisions by the end of the year regarding our plans here in Illinois."
http://midwestenergynews.com/2015/05/01/exelon-we-have-to-ha...
"Exelon was happy to embrace risk when wholesale power prices were on the rise and profits from its generation business were flowing, Hendrickson said. Only now, in a market where nuclear power is under pressure from relatively inexpensive natural gas and wind, is the company asking for help in the form of a $300-million-a-year subsidy."
We used to see difficulties like that as a challenge we could overcome, instead of running away in fear of risk.
Why build a reactor on earth that isn't cost competitive when you can better use the one in the sky?
It is a challenge. Train Americans to install solar and wind across the country. Install it. Problem solved.
Why build a reactor? Because it's safer than solar, and cheaer in the long run. Why do you want a power source that kills more people per kWh?
Nuclear has very low running costs (practically no fuel) and a lot of the startup costs are temporary (new design approval). Intermittent technologies like solar and wind need expensive extra redundency and battery storage. Show me the batteries you are going to use, at a price cheaper than both coal and nuclear, Not some vaporware future technology, something we can buy right now. (the grid isn't a battery, even though most people using solar right now use the grid as if it was).
Nuclear isn't easy or cheap, but it's the least worst method we have for generating power. Other technologies will always have niche uses, of course, but choosing to wait for some mythical future technology to become available is choosing to let coal plants continue polluting the world.
I'm not. I'm picking natural gas, which while still a fossil fuel, is much cleaner and releases far less CO2 per kwh generated.
Nuclear still takes a decade to build. A decade. I don't have to show you the batteries today, as long as they're built and in production in the next 10 years, which they will be. The Tesla Gigafactory will produce 50GWh of battery capacity per year: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office-mar...
Nuclear isn't the least worst method. Solar, wind, and batteries are the least worst method.
> but choosing to wait for some mythical future technology to become available is choosing to let coal plants continue polluting the world.
Safe nuclear is this mythical future technology you speak of.
That's not a small amount. Nuclear releases 0 CO2.
> 50GWh of battery capacity per year:
Thank you for making my point for me. At that rate, we might have enough battery power (assuming no replacements) in a century or two. We need TWh capacity, not GWh, to change the world over to intermittent generation sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
> Safe nuclear is this mythical future technology you speak of.
Of course not. Nothing is without risk. Do I need to remind you of the problems natural gas can cause?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_San_Bruno_pipeline_explos...
http://www.news.com.au/world/cctv-footage-shows-natural-gas-...
You have a strange sense of "least worst", given incidentsw like these happen fairly regularly in the oil and gas industries. Nuclear hasn't killed anywhere near this many people.
TL;DR Probably China, in a couple years. Projects in Japan, India, Europe, US, Canada.
[Edit: "couple years"]
Interestingly I came away from a book about atomic disasters being pretty pro nuclear, at least more so than I was before reading the book. Here are my main take aways:
- The US needs to start back up the waste reprocessing program. Jimmy Carter banned this in the hopes of setting a good example for other countries (one of the byproducts being plutonium). But everyone else continues to process nuclear waste except for the US and it just makes the waste storage problem that much harder. 95% of the fuel that comes out of a rector is harmless U-238. We should only be burying a tiny fraction of what we currently bury.
- We need to start innovating beyond PWR and BWR reactors. Things like liquid metal fuel reactors have the nice property of not having to worry about them melting down because they are already melted.
Is not even wrong, but I don't expect the author to do any research about the costs of nuclear power, nor to track down cost inflators (regulatory delay, post start regulation changes) or disposal methods (reprocessing, vitrification, incineration) or cost per megawatt.
Damn hippies
So it is the war-mongers and not the hippies to blame for whatever happened to nucular power.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the dozens of nuke plants that were canceled in the 70s, at the height of the Cold War, and the virtual (and in some countries, legal) moratorium on new construction that was pushed by anti-nuclear activists. Well-intentioned people dedicated to saving the world made things worse us and held back technological progress at the same time.