As with many article about proponents of power from nuclear fission it totally misses the cost rise due to future accidents. If past is any indication, those will inevitably happen increasing the operation cost for all plants. We literally export the cost of dealing with the mess into the future to get cheaper prices now.
> If past is any indication, those will inevitably happen increasing the operation cost for all plants.
What we can learn from the past is that advanced technologies become much safer over time. I don't have the numbers here, but air travel is maybe 1000 times safer than when it started.
So I'd be very confident assuming the accident rate in the future to be vastly less than during the first few decades of nuclear energy.
The problem is that total potential harm from a nuclear accident is very big. It is limited, but if the limit is all fission materials from the reactor dispersed into the air or used to produce a real nuke by terrorists, then the cost can be loss of millions human lives. Compare that with aviation where the worst that can happen is a loss of airplane and few buildings.
Given this potential threat anything that will be discovered to increase its probability will increase operation cost of reactors in the future. This is just not the case with planes. There minimizing the risk beyond a certain threshold is sufficient especially since it is known that an error in estimation of that threshold is bounded.
"Plus, there are thorny issues like how to dispose of radioactive waste and how to decommission old plants."
The fact is, we're creating tremendous amounts of potentially dangerous waste and we have no long-term plan, much less the technology to pull it off. We don't know what the political situation will be in a country 500 years from now. If we put 1/100th of the money that we put into dangerous technologies and subsidizing fossil fuels and put them into renewables, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Germany is on track to be 100% renewable by 2020. Including solar. And they are not exactly known for their excess of sun.
"With wind and PV growing to 80 % of total power production in 2050, the study gives a lot of attention to how – and at what cost – the different regions can fill the gap when neither the wind nor the sun can meet the demand."
This article is really light on the problem of complexity. Even relatively simple reactors have huge amounts of pipes and wires and such many of which need to be able to handle unusual temperatures and acidity levels. This is one of the reasons that Thorium looks great on paper but is doomed in reality. The sheer complexity of even relatively simple implementations is overpowering and causes the costs and organizational challenges to make sustainable alternatives look cheap.
My impression for a while has been that nuclear power is one of those techs that looks good on paper but fails in practice due to what Elon Musk calls a high "PITA factor." (Pain in the A$$) I interpret PITA factor as referring to the existence of a long tail of thorny, hard, nasty, complicated problems that do not show up on a straightforward "paper" model of the tech. Some don't show up because they're complex edge case issues, and others (like "black swan event" risk) are just flat out hard to quantify. I also think wishful thinking plays into it, since if a tech looks sexy and cool on paper there's a desire to believe in it and it leads us to overlook less obvious or less straightforward to analyze issues.
Elon uses high PITA factor when talking about why SpaceX isn't pursuing hydrogen as a rocket fuel. It similarly looks awesome on paper but results in higher TCO and higher complexity in practice. It's cheaper (according to SpaceX) to use kerosene or methane and build a bigger rocket.
For nukes vs. renewables it's likely overall cheaper to just over-build renewables and storage than to handle the long tail of pain from current-type nuclear. Spend a few billion dealing with nuclear waste, or spend a few billion on more generation and storage capacity. The former is sticky and complicated, while the latter is just straightforward commodity scaling of stuff everyone already knows how to build and handle. It's stupid and simple and scalable and if it's not enough just do more of it. In other words: just build a bigger rocket.
What I say applies to conventional and near-term fission. Fusion and other exotics might be a different ballgame. Fusion would likely be complex and high capital cost but it doesn't have the waste and "black swan failure" issues that pee in the pool for fission.
I think the perceived "black swan event risk" of nuclear is the result of over-hyping a few incidents rather than doing a rational across the board risk assessment. When a rational across the board risk assessment is done, nuclear does less harm per unit of power generated than any other energy technology. But the harm from other technologies is distributed in space and time (for example, coal dust in the air and radioactivity in coal ash), so it doesn't get the big media play.
I don't disagree per se, but I think if you also factor in a lot of other sticky nasty things about current-generation nuclear power it's one of the issues that weighs it down.
I also think PITA factor is kind of a death by a thousand cuts -- a "long tail" as I said.
The thing is that overbuilding solar/wind to the point that the minimal output overcomes peak requirements is insanely expensive. Nuclear is expensive, but not as expensive as overbuilt or offshore (consistent) wind or solar.
I think you're over-generalizing from earlier generation designs. Newer designs are simpler because they take advantage of new design features that replace complex, "active" devices with simple, "passive" ones. For example, replacing active emergency cooling with passive emergency cooling removes a big chunk of complexity from newer designs.
Also, complexity in and of itself can be handled. The issue is that handling it requires discipline, and for civilian nuclear power in the US, the discipline has often not been there. (By contrast, military nuclear power in the US has always had strong discipline, and as a result relatively complex reactors are run safely.)
I don't disagree, but at the same time I'm sure the people setting up Fukushima thought they had a high-tech fail-safe plant that wasn't like the old designs...
> I'm sure the people setting up Fukushima thought they had a high-tech fail-safe plant that wasn't like the old designs
No, they thought they could site the backup diesel generators and switchgear behind a seawall that turned out not to be high enough when a tsunami came through. None of the issues at Fukushima had anything to do with the design of the reactor itself; in fact, the reactor was obviously significantly over-engineered given how well it withstood an extended loss of backup cooling.
Arguing whether it's the design of the plant or the design of the reactor seems like purely semantics. I'm sure they thought the seawall was high enough when they built it. Why are we now so sure we couldn't make a similar miscalculation?
> Arguing whether it's the design of the plant or the design of the reactor seems like purely semantics.
Not if the public's reaction is "Aah, nuclear bad, no more nuclear!" instead of "hey, idiots, you need to change your specs for seawalls".
> I'm sure they thought the seawall was high enough when they built it.
The problem was that their definition of "high enough" was wrong. That's not a matter of reactor design, or even an issue that's specific to reactor design; it comes up in any issue involving cities or facilities near seacoasts (for example, specs for levee heights). But in every other area that's affected by this issue, the response is "you need to change the specs for how severe an event the facility needs to withstand", not "stop building this facility altogether". Nobody argues for abandonment of all coastal cities because some levees aren't high enough.
> Why are we now so sure we couldn't make a similar miscalculation?
Who said we were? There is no such thing as zero risk.
But the molten salt reactor doesn't require people monitoring and fail overs because it doesn't rely on being cooled. If the system fails the liquid just drains off.
I still think the waste is the elephant in the room. Exactly how is the (indefinite) cost of safely managing it factored into all those kilowatt-hour costs? Does it include tax-dollars going to projects like Hanford or Yucca Mountain?
Even if we're now experienced-enough to develop good socio-regulatory systems for day-to-day generation safety and standards, is the same really true for the waste? Our collective record is still a sad tale of fraying "temporary" solutions, leaks, NIMBY reactions, and playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato.
Ummm, no. Irrational tho' it may seem, local, regional and national resistance has made Yucca Mountain untenable. So we're back to dry cask and concrete, which is not a long term solution.
Yes, but the solution isn't to store it. The solution is to reprocess it. That's what all the other major nuclear-using countries do. The only reason the US doesn't is politics.
The glassification plant at Hanford is just starting to come online, but Yucca doesn't want it.
We have a political problem now, not a technical one... and yeah that's going to be a tough one. I wonder how long until someone figures out ways to let a 3rd world country be the deep bore storage place and allow export?
What do you think I was referring to by "playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato"? The places you mention are actually examples of failure.
But some do save for retirement, children's education, etc, etc. Even though the present value of all that is ~0. So there's something missing from the accounting perspective.
I don't get it. What's your calculation / estimate to get at a present value of ~0 here?
Also, different people have different discounting rates they use for planning the future. When I talked about `interest rates' in general, I meant the prevailing interest rates on the market.
If your own discounting rate is lower than that, it totally makes sense to save. If your own rate is lower, borrowing is good. (All other things being equal, of course, which they never are.)
OK, so ~0 was exaggerating. At ~4% annual discount rate, you're looking at 13% for 50 years out. But that assumes that you'll be alive to benefit.
Anyway, my point is that accounting calculations tend to justify screwing the future. And that people, when thinking about themselves and their families, typically don't rely solely on accounting calculations.
The future is worth less, and typically discounted at a rate of around 4% a year. So 25 years out is around 36%, 50 years is 13%, 100 years is 1.6%, 200 years is 0.02%...
If that seems a little extreme then consider using 1816's technology to plow a field, travel to Europe, send a message around the world, or treat a cancer patient, and consider whether or not it's 500x better or cheaper or faster. Remember that the hot new technology of the day is the steamboat but transatlantic voyages, Ireland to New York, still run on sail and might take around, say, ~25 days.
Sure. But I was commenting on the concept of discounting future costs in present-value calculations. A 4% discount rate is about right for strontium-90, with a half-life of 28.9 years. But plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24.1 thousand years, so maybe a lower discount rate is appropriate.
Uhm, that's a bit like encountering the question "how do you put this equipment in orbit and what will it tell us" and answering with: "Use something that goes boom."
Sure, it's a starting point, but it's hardly a full plan, a good plan, or the answers we seek.
For starters, maintenance is not an annuity: How exactly did you estimate the number of real-dollars spent on repairing leaky barriers for the year of 2245?
Ask an engineer, and add a margin of safety. As long as the (nominal) maintenance cost-per-year inflation stays below (nominal) interest rates, you get a finite current value.
In some years you'll spend less than your estimate, in some more. Accountants use reserves to deal with these fluctuations.
Gen IV reactors offer a pretty alluring solution to the so-called waste problem. Being able to close the nuclear fuel cycle, and even consume existing nuclear waste from older reactors, would be much more effective than just locking it all away. Right now, we're only using about 5 percent of the energy in nuclear fuel, where we could be looking at something closer to 95 percent. Instead of looking at transuranics as a problem, we should look at them as a resource in themselves in the future.
As far as I can tell the basic problem with Thorium reactors is they would be more complicated and expensive than conventional reactors. Given that, Thorium probably isn't going to happen at scale for a long time even though it's technically doable.
In January 2016, the United States Department of Energy announced a $80m award fund to develop Generation IV reactor designs.[19] One of the two beneficiaries, Southern Company will use the funding to develop a Molten Chloride Fast Reactor (MCFR), a type of MSR developed earlier by British scientists.[16]
The neutron budget of Thorium is much tighter than uranium.
However, Thorium breeder reactors are considered more proliferation resistant, because the weaponizable isotope U-233 contains also some U-232 and U-234 which are hard to separate, and U-232 is really nasty stuff to work with, meaning most would-be terrorists are likely to die of radiation poisoning before they could set a bomb off in Manhattan.
You can make a lot of PV's in the 14 years it takes to make a fission plant. I'm all for Thorium research, but fission as it is now has a lot of downsides.
Everyone is so terrified of nuclear waste, because it lasts "hundreds of years", which seems like a really long time. Why is almost no one terrified of chemical waste, which lasts literally forever, or at least until after the Sun burns out?
Global production last year:
Arsenic (arsenic trioxide): 44,000 metric tons
Mercury: 1,900 metric tons
Selenium: ~3,000 metric tons
Beryllium: 400 metric tons
Lead: 4,000,000 metric tons
Cadmium: 23,000 metric tons
All of this stuff will last literally forever, and is more-or-less impossible to destroy. This doesn't include all the fun chemicals (eg. cyanide) which are possible to destroy, but get dumped into the environment before disposal and so are floating around anyway.
This is silly. That stuff is simply being refined, it was always there on the planet somewhere. The question is where that stuff goes and how we control its movement. The same is the case for nuclear waste, but if we can spend trillions of dollars on war we can send that stuff to outer space, not very far from that technology being feasible. Space elevators and whatnot. Sooner or later we will have nuclear fusion which will solve the problem of waste altogether.
Or even compared to the 8 million tons of plastic dumped into the ocean each year, which will never truly degrade. I understand plutonium has a half life of 25,000 years without anything aiding it.
I always make this point too. It's very weird. My guess is that when you name a timeframe for the danger, like "a million years," people start thinking about waiting it out. And waiting a million years for toxic waste to be safe sounds really tough! With more mundane sorts of toxic waste, it's not even an option, so people are forced to think about it differently.
Well, a million years is a long time for chemicals to change into other chemicals, too. Do you have citations that show chemicals that take longer to convert into harmless chemicals in environmental conditions than the atoms in radioactive waste take to convert into harmless atoms?
The substances listed in the comment I replied to are stable elements. The timeframe for their eventual decay is speculative. If proton decay is real, then these elements will decay with a half-life related to that. There's a rough lower limit on proton decay from available experimental evidence in the neighborhood of 10^34 years. That would give a half life for these elements of something like 10^32 years. All very rough, but it's something along those lines.
If protons don't decay (proton decay is predicted by some theories but has never been observed), then it's even more speculative. Wikipedia's "timeline of the far future" (a fun article to read for many reasons) gives an estimate of 10^46 to 10^200 years for all atoms in the observable universe to decay through other means. I'll leave converting that to a half life up to the reader.
Incidentally, this means that the popular "launch it into the sun" disposal process actually kicks in automatically, before any appreciable decay occurs. Some billions of years in the future, the sun will expand into a red giant and swallow the Earth, and everything on it. Wikipedia says this happens at 7.59 billion years from now, which is a suspiciously accurate number, but I think for the purposes of this discussion, "billions" is sufficiently precise.
> The substances listed in the comment I replied to are stable elements.
The comment you replied to said "more mundane sorts of toxic waste". That would usually be molecules, i.e. built from multiple atoms, probably multiple elements. And every chemical transformation works both ways, and while the probability for a molecule to fall apart or recombine with other molecules might be low, it will never be zero. So to the best of my understanding there's no such thing as a completely stable molecule, the question is simply how long of a time that you consider. Which leads me back to the question what references you have for (toxic, nonetheless, thus probably somewhat reactive) molecules that have a molecular (not radioactive) half life longer than those for the radioactive decay you compare them to.
To restate my point: molecules may be less stable than the atoms they are made of, and less stable than the radioactive elements you compare them to.
Who says no one is afraid of these? Furthermore, who says that switching over to nuclear for a large chunk of domestic energy production (which I am not opposed to, mind you) will do anything to lessen the production of any of this chemical waste? I don't know where your numbers come from, but my guess is that they're not mostly produced from burning of fossil fuels. Some certainly is, particularly arsenic and mercury from coal burning, but not a majority. Yellowcake processing is also not a super green process; it's mostly done by leaching big piles of ground up rock with strong acids.
His point was that the fear over waste isn't necessarily a consistent one: people fear nuclear waste more than other types of waste, even though those other forms of waste are a much more significant concern. It's not really a question of which is objectively more dangerous, but which is more likely to affect the general public. The odds of someone stumbling across nuclear waste are incredibly slim; interacting with chemical waste, much more likely.
Having visited the Hanford site in Washington State, it's a pretty epic thing there trying to deal with the waste from WWII.
Actual nuclear waste is a 10,000+ year problem, not hundreds of years. But the 100s of years problem is more about where long-term storage should be (Yucca Mtn. etc.).
When you tour Hanford, what do you see (free tours for US citizens, BTW)? You see many ancient reactors - all disabled now except the preserved first reactor. You see -every single decommissioned nuclear submarine-'s reactor in long lines. And they remind you: based on ice ages, in 15,000 years or so, it won't matter... the entire plateau around Hanford will be under water. So it's going to need to be somewhere else.
We're talking about a massive amount of mass. Sending mass to space costs tens of thousands per kilogram. Storing mass costs far less in the short term, and the long term isn't perceived as the problem of the person paying the bill for the short term.
For that matter, with the number of launches required, at least one of them would fail badly enough to spread radioactive material.
Not a dumb question, but as the sibling comment reflects - it has been pondered before, and it is indeed a "dumb solution", unfortunately.
In addition to cost of launching such huge mass, and the risks of catastrophic failure (blowing up mid-launch would probably end up being worse than the chernobyl-distaster -- think a really, really big dirty bomb with areal detonation) -- there's also the risk of missing the sun, and ending up with a man-made comet.
The sun is far away in terms of delta-V. Getting to low-Earth orbit requires something like 9.4 km/s of delta-V. Getting from LEO to the Sun requires another 21.3 km/s of delta-V.
There are probably transfer orbits that could use gravity assist to make this figure lower, but those orbits spend a lot of time looping around planets and generally hanging out in the solar system, which is probably not the best thing to do with our waste.
It's actually cheaper to escape the solar system than to shoot for the Sun - around 18.15 km/s delta-V from ground to escape.
You would be throwing away the next generations fuel. We only use a tiny portion of that available energy from nuclear fuel. This is stupidly wasteful - we should be reprocessing it and putting it back into the reactors.
A lot of the waste that remains should be used in breeder reactors, such as the LFTR. The amount of actual waste left over if we actually use the entire fuel is tiny compared to what we currently call "waste".
Rockets still tend to go "boom" on the launchpad or shortly after launch at an uncomfortably high rate. A rocket carrying tons of radioactive waste that exploded 30 seconds after launch would create an environmental disaster that made Chernobyl look like a coffee spill.
Not really. Plenty of people live in areas with radon producing rocks in the ground, or where altitude causes higher exposures. Long-lived waste emits less radiation than short-lived. If people are fine in Guarapari, they would be fine on top of Hanford in 5,000 years.
Chemical waste is a problem but it is not nearly as deadly or difficult to handle as nuclear waste.
Just one obvious example -- you can put lead into metal blocks and store it virtually anywhere (well away from drinking water).
Nuclear waste irradiates stuff around it, generates heat, and causes everything you put it in to rust and deteriorate very quickly. Some nuclear waste generates so much heat that it has to be continually actively cooled so that it does not set itself on fire and spew clouds of radioactive gases.
If there was a warehouse full of blocks of lead in fukushima, the tsunami would not cause much of a disaster. Nothing worth mentioning on TV. But instead there was nuclear waste storage, which had to be actively cooled. So when the tsunami knocked out the cooling systems, it caught on fire and there were the clouds of radioactive gasses.
The radioactivity and maintenance requirements are certainly problems but the extreme regulation in the nuclear industry compared to other industries may drastically mitigate their long term impact, especially compared to the many chemicals we use that bioaccumulate in the food chain. With the amount of mercury, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals that we routinely dump into the environment, we really don't know what the long term effects will be as they make their way in ever greater concentrations into animals across the world.
Already there is mounting evidence that these chemicals are having an extreme effect on the top layer of ocean life (which is estimated to produce the majority of our oxygen) and if we continue on the path of indiscriminately dumping toxic waste the resulting effects could be significantly more dire than if we powered the entire world with fission. Properly regulating nuclear waste from reactors and disposing it might be more practical than regulating all of the other uses of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. If we further manage to develop technologies that can pump waste back into reactors as fuel or to convert them to more unstable isotopes (which decay to stable ones faster than hundreds of years) the entire problem can become much more manageable. Unfortunately we seemed to have written off nuclear almost completely and will never get there.
These are two drastically different industries (power generation vs manufacturing) but the comparison is still worth keeping in mind.
* Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant
* Pripyat, Ukraine - near the Chernobyl power plant
* Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India - near the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant
* Bullitt County, Kentucky - near the "Valley of the Drums"
--
You choose lead as your example for chemical waste, but lead is only a moderate risk compared to the nastier chemical pollutants. The real hazards are things like the PCBs (among hundreds of other nasty chemicals) in the 100,000+ leaking drums at the "Valley of the Drums", or the 42 tons of methyl isocyanate sprayed over Bhopal. These incidents have already had significant costs in human lives and ongoing health problems for the local population.
In comparison, Chernobyl killed only handful of people and Fukushima hasn't killed anybody yet. We are still waiting to see the costs of extra cancer cases from these disasters, but it won't be anything close to the damage from the chemical industries or coal power industries.
If we ignore waste for a minute, this article highlights a key issue for why nuclear in the USA will never be as cheap as France or South Korea. Those countries can impose a single builder, single supplier requirement and enforce it the whole way through. That'd never happen here, everyone would have to get involved. Blame cronyism and the US lobbyist political system, but every nuclear company would freak out if they weren't the chosen provider, and then they'd sue.... and then it'd be as expensive as it is now.
Another difference is the legal regime. The U.S. makes much more extensive use of the courts as a tool for balancing interests, and an indirect way of regulating industries, which makes projects much slower, riskier, and more expensive.
In a country like France, you can't normally sue to stop a nuclear plant being built. Once the government decides to build it, they have sovereign immunity from suits in their own courts. So if you don't want it, you can agitate for the government to stop it, but you can't sue the project to stop it (or at least, there are many fewer ways to do so). The U.S. by contrast has waived its own sovereign immunity in a lot of cases, setting up a more decentralized decision-making process where the legislature passes general laws, agencies like the DOE and EPA are delegated rule-making authority, and courts then adjudicate disputes. The multiple levels of government (federal agencies, state agencies, federal courts, state courts) add another complication.
Little known fact: the legal regime in the US shields the utility from liability in case of accident. Recall the utility wasn't sued after Three Mile Island.
If utilities were made liable for harm for nuclear disasters, how long do you suppose it would be before every last one was decommissioned? I suspect all the cost savings TFA hopefully imagines vanish in comparison to the cost of liability.
I also note TFA makes no attempt to express the South Korean costs in USD terms. It wouldn't surprise me, given the state of South Korea's economic development in 1971, if what the graph depicts is not a miraculous decline in costs, but a predictable trend toward the global norm.
So, I've worked in the nuclear industry (just a scaffold builder), so take this with a grain of salt, but there are a few things I think get left out of the conversation.
One is how absolutely catastrophic coal fired plants are. People often talk about hypothetical scenarios with nuclear, but tens of thousands of people are dying every year as a direct result of coal power and that doesn't even take into account the long term effects of climate change. We need to be aggressively pursuing _any_ and _all_ alternatives to coal, in my opinion. This might sound a little crazy, but I almost feel the situation is urgent enough to justify the president declaring a national emergency and using the national guard to unilaterally shut down these facilities. I realize that's completely unrealistic, but I hope it conveys my sense of urgency.
Another thing I'd like to touch on is the handling of nuclear waste. It's absolutely problematic, but I'm curious about the marginal cost/risk of additional waste now that we already have to deal with it. We already have to devise a solution to the problem, so it seems like that offsets the cost of dealing with the additional waste of more reactors. Even if we didn't use nuclear power, we would be generating waste from research reactors, nuclear medicine, etc, that we would have to deal with. If you have to figure out how to safely store a ton of material for ten thousand years, does it really cost twice as much to store twice as much material?
I don't know of how many completely uninhabited deserts there are in the United States that aren't protected as national or state parks. In addition, how do you transport nuclear waste to the desert, especially from long distances? Nobody wants a truck carrying nuclear waste around. The biggest issue is that I don't think anyone at the federal, state, or congressional representative level would volunteer or accept putting nuclear waste close to their constituencies.
I don't have an answer for where to bury it (though recycling it really ought to be an option. Politics prevents that right now) but the movement of the waste is actually a problem that has been largely solved. Nuclear flasks are designed to withstand incredible accidents. For instance, the UK flasks were tested by placing one one a derailed flatbed car & ramming a locomotive into it at >90mph. The flask was situated so that the hinge (weakest point) would be hit. The flask was minimally damaged while the locomotive was destroyed. [1]
The US flasks are required to withstand similar catastrophic accidents.
It's not that simple. Check out the documentary "Into Eternity" on the impracticability and difficulty of "burying" nuclear waste which remains deadly for 250,000 years.
The burying part is just (materials|nuclear|mining) engineering and it's practical. The forecasting and risk modelling over > 100k years is the uncertain part, even in deep bedrock in very seismically stable areas. IIRC the documentary makes a point about how difficult it is to signal to post apocalyptic stone age generations 100k years in the future not to go there.
Though many people think the used fuel will get dug up before then to be reprocessed into fuel...
Most of the financial reasons are political. NIMBYism makes nuclear in general very expensive, even though coal blatantly kills more than even existing nuclear tech, not to mention potential next gen reactors.
In case of breeders, the 2nd argument that makes them expensive is that they're an "proliferation risk".
In Finland we have a similiar project[0] under construction. The intention is to store spent nuclear fuel there from 2020-2120 and then seal the facility.
Wow, this is a great article. I just assumed that the sun's gravity would assist in pulling a payload in, making it less costly than trying to launch out of the solar system. Really, really, interesting.
Edit: Just wanted to mention that disposing of nuclear material by trying to launch it into space is absurd, but the orbital mechanics of the problem are pretty interesting.
The implicit assumption seems to be that we need nuclear because solar and wind alone (with presumably cheaper batteries in the future) won't be able to supply the needed power.
It is hard to prove something like that, that future technology can't do something, but the author doesn't even try.
> There's a compelling argument that the world ought to be building many more nuclear power plants.
The writer starts the article with the assumption stated explicitly. He punts on that question to discuss cost. Whether or not Nuclear is a requirement can be (and has been) discussed elsewhere. I think that's fine, because it was still an interesting article.
The fear of waste has always struck me as illogical for a couple of reasons:
First, uranium is not some mythic dark magic demon that we conjure from a hellish fairy land in another dimension. It's a naturally-occurring rock that we intentionally dig up because it's useful. Another comment mentions lead, mercury, etc. as being even more terrifying, but again, these are natural elements that we mine for various uses. They're not new. They've always been here. Most of the fear is just superstition.
Secondly, fear seems to be predicated on the idea that we need to dump all the stuff, we need to find a single place to concentrate it all when we dump it, and we need to leave it there for thousands of years. Of course no one wants that next door. But why try to find a place to dump all this lead/mercury/uranium while we're still digging up and refining more? Why not find ways to use it?
We used to take just the kerosene and dump most of the rest of the oil because we just didn't know what to do with it. Turns out gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel did have uses after all. We also didn't know what to do with heavy oils, oil sands, etc., but we've found ways to process them into something useful.
If we do need to dump some (perhaps because we don't yet have the technology to filter out impurities), why not just put it back where we got it, or scatter it around the way that it is found naturally, or better still just tuck it away for a few decades until it becomes useful? Because it won't be a problem for a million years or 10,000 years or hundreds of years. It will soon be a valuable resource.
With nuclear waste it's especially odd. That is by definition mass that naturally produces energy, and we're most worried about how to get rid of the stuff that will produce energy for a long time...while we are simultaneously worried about how we're going to produce enough energy to meet the demands of the future. Yet people are suggesting that we launch it all into space! How different would our world be if we had launched all the gasoline and diesel into space before we knew what to do with it?
107 comments
[ 15.1 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadThat's true of a lot more than nuclear fission...
What we can learn from the past is that advanced technologies become much safer over time. I don't have the numbers here, but air travel is maybe 1000 times safer than when it started.
So I'd be very confident assuming the accident rate in the future to be vastly less than during the first few decades of nuclear energy.
Given this potential threat anything that will be discovered to increase its probability will increase operation cost of reactors in the future. This is just not the case with planes. There minimizing the risk beyond a certain threshold is sufficient especially since it is known that an error in estimation of that threshold is bounded.
Can it really? That would be an order of magnitude worse than the Hiroshima bomb.
It is just the article talks about operation costs of nuclear completely ignoring future costs increases.
The fact is, we're creating tremendous amounts of potentially dangerous waste and we have no long-term plan, much less the technology to pull it off. We don't know what the political situation will be in a country 500 years from now. If we put 1/100th of the money that we put into dangerous technologies and subsidizing fossil fuels and put them into renewables, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Germany is on track to be 100% renewable by 2020. Including solar. And they are not exactly known for their excess of sun.
Do you have a source for this? It seems completely unbelievable.
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-powe...
"New Study: 95% Renewable Power-Mix Cheaper Than Nuclear And Gas"
Applies to both France and Germany.
"With wind and PV growing to 80 % of total power production in 2050, the study gives a lot of attention to how – and at what cost – the different regions can fill the gap when neither the wind nor the sun can meet the demand."
100% renewable is the eventual goal, but the short-term goal is merely to get rid of nuclear.
Elon uses high PITA factor when talking about why SpaceX isn't pursuing hydrogen as a rocket fuel. It similarly looks awesome on paper but results in higher TCO and higher complexity in practice. It's cheaper (according to SpaceX) to use kerosene or methane and build a bigger rocket.
For nukes vs. renewables it's likely overall cheaper to just over-build renewables and storage than to handle the long tail of pain from current-type nuclear. Spend a few billion dealing with nuclear waste, or spend a few billion on more generation and storage capacity. The former is sticky and complicated, while the latter is just straightforward commodity scaling of stuff everyone already knows how to build and handle. It's stupid and simple and scalable and if it's not enough just do more of it. In other words: just build a bigger rocket.
What I say applies to conventional and near-term fission. Fusion and other exotics might be a different ballgame. Fusion would likely be complex and high capital cost but it doesn't have the waste and "black swan failure" issues that pee in the pool for fission.
I also think PITA factor is kind of a death by a thousand cuts -- a "long tail" as I said.
Also, complexity in and of itself can be handled. The issue is that handling it requires discipline, and for civilian nuclear power in the US, the discipline has often not been there. (By contrast, military nuclear power in the US has always had strong discipline, and as a result relatively complex reactors are run safely.)
No, they thought they could site the backup diesel generators and switchgear behind a seawall that turned out not to be high enough when a tsunami came through. None of the issues at Fukushima had anything to do with the design of the reactor itself; in fact, the reactor was obviously significantly over-engineered given how well it withstood an extended loss of backup cooling.
Not if the public's reaction is "Aah, nuclear bad, no more nuclear!" instead of "hey, idiots, you need to change your specs for seawalls".
> I'm sure they thought the seawall was high enough when they built it.
The problem was that their definition of "high enough" was wrong. That's not a matter of reactor design, or even an issue that's specific to reactor design; it comes up in any issue involving cities or facilities near seacoasts (for example, specs for levee heights). But in every other area that's affected by this issue, the response is "you need to change the specs for how severe an event the facility needs to withstand", not "stop building this facility altogether". Nobody argues for abandonment of all coastal cities because some levees aren't high enough.
> Why are we now so sure we couldn't make a similar miscalculation?
Who said we were? There is no such thing as zero risk.
Even if we're now experienced-enough to develop good socio-regulatory systems for day-to-day generation safety and standards, is the same really true for the waste? Our collective record is still a sad tale of fraying "temporary" solutions, leaks, NIMBY reactions, and playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato.
Yes, but the solution isn't to store it. The solution is to reprocess it. That's what all the other major nuclear-using countries do. The only reason the US doesn't is politics.
We have a political problem now, not a technical one... and yeah that's going to be a tough one. I wonder how long until someone figures out ways to let a 3rd world country be the deep bore storage place and allow export?
I very much doubt that'll happen. Political stability for a waste repository is going to be just as much a concern as geological stability.
Not a problem for an accountant. It's easy to value an indefinite stream of future dollars in present value terms.
The UK even has government debt like that, and they trade for finite amounts of money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetuity
Also, different people have different discounting rates they use for planning the future. When I talked about `interest rates' in general, I meant the prevailing interest rates on the market.
If your own discounting rate is lower than that, it totally makes sense to save. If your own rate is lower, borrowing is good. (All other things being equal, of course, which they never are.)
Anyway, my point is that accounting calculations tend to justify screwing the future. And that people, when thinking about themselves and their families, typically don't rely solely on accounting calculations.
If that seems a little extreme then consider using 1816's technology to plow a field, travel to Europe, send a message around the world, or treat a cancer patient, and consider whether or not it's 500x better or cheaper or faster. Remember that the hot new technology of the day is the steamboat but transatlantic voyages, Ireland to New York, still run on sail and might take around, say, ~25 days.
Sure, it's a starting point, but it's hardly a full plan, a good plan, or the answers we seek.
For starters, maintenance is not an annuity: How exactly did you estimate the number of real-dollars spent on repairing leaky barriers for the year of 2245?
In some years you'll spend less than your estimate, in some more. Accountants use reserves to deal with these fluctuations.
India is getting ready to turn on a fast reactor that they can use to produce more fuel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor
But I don't think it will be able to consume as much waste products as the Gen IV stuff, it focuses on making more fuel.
It seems like the Molten Salt Refactor is much safer than a Liquid reactor will ever be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195554
Dunno how that will go.
In January 2016, the United States Department of Energy announced a $80m award fund to develop Generation IV reactor designs.[19] One of the two beneficiaries, Southern Company will use the funding to develop a Molten Chloride Fast Reactor (MCFR), a type of MSR developed earlier by British scientists.[16]
However, Thorium breeder reactors are considered more proliferation resistant, because the weaponizable isotope U-233 contains also some U-232 and U-234 which are hard to separate, and U-232 is really nasty stuff to work with, meaning most would-be terrorists are likely to die of radiation poisoning before they could set a bomb off in Manhattan.
You can make a lot of PV's in the 14 years it takes to make a fission plant. I'm all for Thorium research, but fission as it is now has a lot of downsides.
Global production last year:
Arsenic (arsenic trioxide): 44,000 metric tons
Mercury: 1,900 metric tons
Selenium: ~3,000 metric tons
Beryllium: 400 metric tons
Lead: 4,000,000 metric tons
Cadmium: 23,000 metric tons
All of this stuff will last literally forever, and is more-or-less impossible to destroy. This doesn't include all the fun chemicals (eg. cyanide) which are possible to destroy, but get dumped into the environment before disposal and so are floating around anyway.
List of ways of getting rid of nuclear waste:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
If protons don't decay (proton decay is predicted by some theories but has never been observed), then it's even more speculative. Wikipedia's "timeline of the far future" (a fun article to read for many reasons) gives an estimate of 10^46 to 10^200 years for all atoms in the observable universe to decay through other means. I'll leave converting that to a half life up to the reader.
Incidentally, this means that the popular "launch it into the sun" disposal process actually kicks in automatically, before any appreciable decay occurs. Some billions of years in the future, the sun will expand into a red giant and swallow the Earth, and everything on it. Wikipedia says this happens at 7.59 billion years from now, which is a suspiciously accurate number, but I think for the purposes of this discussion, "billions" is sufficiently precise.
The comment you replied to said "more mundane sorts of toxic waste". That would usually be molecules, i.e. built from multiple atoms, probably multiple elements. And every chemical transformation works both ways, and while the probability for a molecule to fall apart or recombine with other molecules might be low, it will never be zero. So to the best of my understanding there's no such thing as a completely stable molecule, the question is simply how long of a time that you consider. Which leads me back to the question what references you have for (toxic, nonetheless, thus probably somewhat reactive) molecules that have a molecular (not radioactive) half life longer than those for the radioactive decay you compare them to.
To restate my point: molecules may be less stable than the atoms they are made of, and less stable than the radioactive elements you compare them to.
Actual nuclear waste is a 10,000+ year problem, not hundreds of years. But the 100s of years problem is more about where long-term storage should be (Yucca Mtn. etc.).
When you tour Hanford, what do you see (free tours for US citizens, BTW)? You see many ancient reactors - all disabled now except the preserved first reactor. You see -every single decommissioned nuclear submarine-'s reactor in long lines. And they remind you: based on ice ages, in 15,000 years or so, it won't matter... the entire plateau around Hanford will be under water. So it's going to need to be somewhere else.
Wild stuff.
Do the (projected) costs of storing it for 10k+ years exceed the costs of leaving Earths orbit?
For that matter, with the number of launches required, at least one of them would fail badly enough to spread radioactive material.
In addition to cost of launching such huge mass, and the risks of catastrophic failure (blowing up mid-launch would probably end up being worse than the chernobyl-distaster -- think a really, really big dirty bomb with areal detonation) -- there's also the risk of missing the sun, and ending up with a man-made comet.
The sun is far away in terms of delta-V. Getting to low-Earth orbit requires something like 9.4 km/s of delta-V. Getting from LEO to the Sun requires another 21.3 km/s of delta-V.
There are probably transfer orbits that could use gravity assist to make this figure lower, but those orbits spend a lot of time looping around planets and generally hanging out in the solar system, which is probably not the best thing to do with our waste.
It's actually cheaper to escape the solar system than to shoot for the Sun - around 18.15 km/s delta-V from ground to escape.
A lot of the waste that remains should be used in breeder reactors, such as the LFTR. The amount of actual waste left over if we actually use the entire fuel is tiny compared to what we currently call "waste".
Just one obvious example -- you can put lead into metal blocks and store it virtually anywhere (well away from drinking water).
Nuclear waste irradiates stuff around it, generates heat, and causes everything you put it in to rust and deteriorate very quickly. Some nuclear waste generates so much heat that it has to be continually actively cooled so that it does not set itself on fire and spew clouds of radioactive gases.
If there was a warehouse full of blocks of lead in fukushima, the tsunami would not cause much of a disaster. Nothing worth mentioning on TV. But instead there was nuclear waste storage, which had to be actively cooled. So when the tsunami knocked out the cooling systems, it caught on fire and there were the clouds of radioactive gasses.
Already there is mounting evidence that these chemicals are having an extreme effect on the top layer of ocean life (which is estimated to produce the majority of our oxygen) and if we continue on the path of indiscriminately dumping toxic waste the resulting effects could be significantly more dire than if we powered the entire world with fission. Properly regulating nuclear waste from reactors and disposing it might be more practical than regulating all of the other uses of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. If we further manage to develop technologies that can pump waste back into reactors as fuel or to convert them to more unstable isotopes (which decay to stable ones faster than hundreds of years) the entire problem can become much more manageable. Unfortunately we seemed to have written off nuclear almost completely and will never get there.
These are two drastically different industries (power generation vs manufacturing) but the comparison is still worth keeping in mind.
* Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant
* Pripyat, Ukraine - near the Chernobyl power plant
* Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India - near the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant
* Bullitt County, Kentucky - near the "Valley of the Drums"
--
You choose lead as your example for chemical waste, but lead is only a moderate risk compared to the nastier chemical pollutants. The real hazards are things like the PCBs (among hundreds of other nasty chemicals) in the 100,000+ leaking drums at the "Valley of the Drums", or the 42 tons of methyl isocyanate sprayed over Bhopal. These incidents have already had significant costs in human lives and ongoing health problems for the local population.
In comparison, Chernobyl killed only handful of people and Fukushima hasn't killed anybody yet. We are still waiting to see the costs of extra cancer cases from these disasters, but it won't be anything close to the damage from the chemical industries or coal power industries.
In a country like France, you can't normally sue to stop a nuclear plant being built. Once the government decides to build it, they have sovereign immunity from suits in their own courts. So if you don't want it, you can agitate for the government to stop it, but you can't sue the project to stop it (or at least, there are many fewer ways to do so). The U.S. by contrast has waived its own sovereign immunity in a lot of cases, setting up a more decentralized decision-making process where the legislature passes general laws, agencies like the DOE and EPA are delegated rule-making authority, and courts then adjudicate disputes. The multiple levels of government (federal agencies, state agencies, federal courts, state courts) add another complication.
If utilities were made liable for harm for nuclear disasters, how long do you suppose it would be before every last one was decommissioned? I suspect all the cost savings TFA hopefully imagines vanish in comparison to the cost of liability.
I also note TFA makes no attempt to express the South Korean costs in USD terms. It wouldn't surprise me, given the state of South Korea's economic development in 1971, if what the graph depicts is not a miraculous decline in costs, but a predictable trend toward the global norm.
One is how absolutely catastrophic coal fired plants are. People often talk about hypothetical scenarios with nuclear, but tens of thousands of people are dying every year as a direct result of coal power and that doesn't even take into account the long term effects of climate change. We need to be aggressively pursuing _any_ and _all_ alternatives to coal, in my opinion. This might sound a little crazy, but I almost feel the situation is urgent enough to justify the president declaring a national emergency and using the national guard to unilaterally shut down these facilities. I realize that's completely unrealistic, but I hope it conveys my sense of urgency.
Another thing I'd like to touch on is the handling of nuclear waste. It's absolutely problematic, but I'm curious about the marginal cost/risk of additional waste now that we already have to deal with it. We already have to devise a solution to the problem, so it seems like that offsets the cost of dealing with the additional waste of more reactors. Even if we didn't use nuclear power, we would be generating waste from research reactors, nuclear medicine, etc, that we would have to deal with. If you have to figure out how to safely store a ton of material for ten thousand years, does it really cost twice as much to store twice as much material?
The US flasks are required to withstand similar catastrophic accidents.
[1]http://www.railmagazine.com/trains/heritage/it-s-a-lovely-da...
Though many people think the used fuel will get dug up before then to be reprocessed into fuel...
Capitalism is the culprit.
In case of breeders, the 2nd argument that makes them expensive is that they're an "proliferation risk".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Edit: Just wanted to mention that disposing of nuclear material by trying to launch it into space is absurd, but the orbital mechanics of the problem are pretty interesting.
It is hard to prove something like that, that future technology can't do something, but the author doesn't even try.
The writer starts the article with the assumption stated explicitly. He punts on that question to discuss cost. Whether or not Nuclear is a requirement can be (and has been) discussed elsewhere. I think that's fine, because it was still an interesting article.
First, uranium is not some mythic dark magic demon that we conjure from a hellish fairy land in another dimension. It's a naturally-occurring rock that we intentionally dig up because it's useful. Another comment mentions lead, mercury, etc. as being even more terrifying, but again, these are natural elements that we mine for various uses. They're not new. They've always been here. Most of the fear is just superstition.
Secondly, fear seems to be predicated on the idea that we need to dump all the stuff, we need to find a single place to concentrate it all when we dump it, and we need to leave it there for thousands of years. Of course no one wants that next door. But why try to find a place to dump all this lead/mercury/uranium while we're still digging up and refining more? Why not find ways to use it?
We used to take just the kerosene and dump most of the rest of the oil because we just didn't know what to do with it. Turns out gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel did have uses after all. We also didn't know what to do with heavy oils, oil sands, etc., but we've found ways to process them into something useful.
If we do need to dump some (perhaps because we don't yet have the technology to filter out impurities), why not just put it back where we got it, or scatter it around the way that it is found naturally, or better still just tuck it away for a few decades until it becomes useful? Because it won't be a problem for a million years or 10,000 years or hundreds of years. It will soon be a valuable resource.
With nuclear waste it's especially odd. That is by definition mass that naturally produces energy, and we're most worried about how to get rid of the stuff that will produce energy for a long time...while we are simultaneously worried about how we're going to produce enough energy to meet the demands of the future. Yet people are suggesting that we launch it all into space! How different would our world be if we had launched all the gasoline and diesel into space before we knew what to do with it?