I don't really want my neighbours to be able to buy an unregulated nuclear reactor! They need to be sited away from built-up areas, water sources etc because the contamination from a potential failure is "forever", including areas rendered uninhabitable.
In addition to your concern (definitely a good one!), I don't think the current political climate is such that we'll see progress in nuclear energy anytime soon.
Let's certainly not let the risks or difficulties of operating nuclear reactors or disposing of their waste get in the way of nuclear startups. Fortunately, those from the West Coast only look at the upside of these things per DeWitte. An attitude that existed during the Manhattan Project and some reactors with serious issues. I can't wait to see what comes of this.
Even the author of Learned Optimism that brought us Cognitive Therapy pointed out that pessimism made sense when we're talking risk management. The context here is nuclear materials. I have a hard time being optimistic given what past 60+ years have shown us about that.
Nuclear was the first kind of energy production without externalized costs (mostly). Solar seems pretty good, but i think the manufacturing is pretty toxic. I guess the same could be said of the concrete in nuclear reactors.
having a plan for dealing with waste and paying for that plan from the start is pretty cool. Even if the plan sucks, it's way way better than our plans for coal and oil. Which, as far as i can tell, is to just not worry about it.
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I guess there's no good plan, but it's not like the reactor operators wake up one Tuesday and wonder where their waste went. Unlike me when i drive. Carbon is much more dump it in the air and hope for the best. Nuclear waste is, as far as i know, logged, tracked, audited and generally completely accounted for.
Nuclear waste management is a partly externalized cost (nuclear waste will outlive the companies that produced them).
Sometimes decomissioning is externalized (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300#Decommissioning).
The effects of Uranium mining are externalized (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#Histor...).
The effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima were externalized. E.g. many boars are still too radioactive for human consumption in Germany.
Are these things you're comparing nuclear to guaranteed to be a problem for thousands of years? Or are they just chemicals that we might recombine or destroy in various ways? I'm pretty sure they're the latter. I'm not aware of anything that turns radioactive waste into non-radioactive waste.
Far as toxic waste, we could always build more of these maybe:
Even that article mentions a specific type of waste as an exception that can cause fire or explosions in the equipment. Even mighty plasma has trouble with it. What hope is there for other methods? ;)
> I'm not aware of anything that turns radioactive waste into non-radioactive waste.
You use a breeder reactor. Some of the designs for thorium breeders, for example, can be used to process existing waste from other reactors.
> guaranteed to be a problem for thousands of years?
Note that it gets safer over time as it decays, and in general the radiation danger of an isotope goes down the longer the half-life. Once you get into the particularly long lived isotopes, the radiation danger becomes very small. Also, the amount of waste is trivial; nuclear power only makes a millionth the waste as traditional power, because of the vast difference in usable energy density.
Even if you consider the waste that stays around for "thousands of years", that's a short time compared to some types of chemical waste that doesn't decay. How many Superfund sites already exist?[1] There are quite a few in Silicon Valley[2].
"Even if you consider the waste that stays around for "thousands of years", that's a short time compared to some types of chemical waste that doesn't decay."
I did mention a plasma converter and the possibility of chemical options coming up down the line. Not many possibilities like that for nuclear.
> I did mention a plasma converter and the possibility of chemical options coming up down the line.
Yes, you did. You also (correctly) suggest we aren't actually going to solve all chemical pollutant problems with plasma converters. That's an interesting tech that should be useful in some areas, but even then chemical pollution is still a far bigger problem than the nuclear power industry ever will be.
> Not many possibilities like that for nuclear.
I did mention a breeder reactor and that nuclear power converts a microscopic[1] amount of fuel into waster for the same energy. Not only is nuclear waste a solved problem, it's utterly ridiculous to compare such trivial amounts of waste to what other industries produce.
[1] literally micro- as in 1/1,000,000 (because we get much more energy[2] from U or Th)
So, breeders solve waste problem. Reactors are producing microscopic amounts. One person's basement worth of space should handle US's waste storage needs. So, what was the Yucca Mountain proposal for again? I seem to have got the wrong impression they needed space for tons of hot waste.
- Carter put a moratorium on conventional fuel reprocessing, like France uses.
- The Clinton administration shut down the Integral Fast Reactor project.
- The NRC created a very difficult regulatory environment for anyone attempting to develop more advanced types of reactors, including the fast reactors and molten salt reactors that would produce far less waste and consume most of our existing waste as fuel.
Even if we were to intentionally just scatter all the nuclear waste along road sides in urban areas, nuclear would likely still remain one of the safest power sources.
Disposing the waste is largely a political problem.
And that is with old designs producing nasty waste. There are newer designs that would be able to reuse some of that waste as fuels, and there are many newer designs that produces far less dangerous waste to begin with.
"Even if we were to intentionally just scatter all the nuclear waste along road sides in urban areas, nuclear would likely still remain one of the safest power sources."
It would be if you ignore the effects of radiation on biological and electronic systems. If you don't, the idea is as ridiculous as you may have intended.
"Disposing the waste is largely a political problem."
It's actually a problem of making a material non-radioactive or storing arbitrary amounts of it safely for longer than we've existed as a civilization. Neither is a political problem: one is impossible so far per science; other faces risks from logistics, environment, personnel, and politicians. I'd expect us to be able to build out CO2 capture systems at local power plants before we could successfully counter all the above for thousands of years straight given global issues.
So, no, it is one of the least safe power sources if one considers the risks of operation or waste. Japan had a recent reminder of that.
The article content does not match the title. Lots of talk about how the guy grew up, what shaped his outlook, etc. I saw nothing about how he is building a "small, waste- and carbon-negative reactor."
Is it even possible to build a reactor that meets those criteria, let alone be financially viable?
I presume waste-negative means it can take existing waste as fuel, and make it less dangerous while making energy still (as current fast breeder reactors can, though not on a small scale afaik). Carbon negative presumably just means "uses less carbon per kwh over the whole lifecycle than the diesel generator it replaces" which shouldn't be too hard to achieve.
"Small" presumably makes this harder.
You're right though, some more technical details would be nice.
When nuclear was developed, it was foreseen the waste of the first generation could still be reused by a "next generation" reactor and maybe turned into non radioactive matter. Nuclear reaction and transmutation says that the most stable atomic number is around 49 so with N>100 for actual nuclear wastes there is still potential energy usable.
Then oil went cheap investments were frozen.
As everybody noticed the "most advanced" deployed IIIrd generation of nuclear reactor are not really a success (EPR).
And the 5th?/4th supposed to come generation is promising a lot, but still has not delivered a lot. We are lagging way behind schedules, notably because cheap oil has been a curse.
Oil is getting more and more costly to extract.
PV and wind turbine activity do not follow our 9am/7pm seasonal activity. Eolian is so massively subsidized in USA Texas had negative prices this summer on their grid.
So cheap and convenient (non subsidized) energy seems to be our past. Not the future we will live in.
I guess some activity will slowly disappear ... And that the part of energy in Internet's price will have to be paid more fairly among users.
Cheap energy is physically soon to be dead. The watt consumed per software use will matter as soon as government will stop subsidizing the market with public money. And Artificial Intelligence may not beat human intelligence and adaptive workforce when costs are fully supported by the software makers.
Human have more value than what google and uber thinks, and their technological dystopia based on clean non human work force and cheap energy is a nightmare for both the workers and the ecosystem.
IT industry is not sustainable in its actual trend to not care about efficiency. Agile is a symptom of it, and we need government to stop their politic to deregulate on one hand so that those who waste energy don't pay their bills and on the other hand subsidize the market in favor of those producing so called cheap energy (fracking, PV, eolian, batteries) that are polluting.
Sorry, but sails, men, mechanical windmill and horses are some of the trivially cheap energies that will be available in the future.
This is interesting to hear about somebody approaching nuclear with a start-up type approach. As a lay person I hear about reactor designs that can reduce nuclear waste and make a truck load more energy off it at the same time, which leaves me wondering why these things don't get made. Is it all institutional politics as this article makes out, or is there a safety/proliferation issue there as well?
If the institutional inertia has a large part to play then a startup model would be very promising.
Short answer: it's politics, NIMBY nonsense, and radiophobia.
Longer answer:
Yes, there are obviously safety and proliferation concerns with nuclear power, but a lot of these are solvable problems. Many industries solve difficult/dangerous problem all the time. Unfortunately, paranoia and misleading (or simply wrong) information about radiation made a lot of people treat the very idea of nuclear power as something that is "always bad".
This, and the usual political stupidity, has kept nuclear power restricted to the same designs for decades. Imagine if the computer industry was was never able to move past the relay and vacuum tube designs made in the WW2 era; today we might have very good vacuum tubes instead of the integrated circuit. Newer reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 are a nice improvement in safety and cost, but it's still basically the same solid uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor we've always used. Newer designs are never always considered "too risky" in either money or physics.
Monstrously capital intensive industries are conservative for obvious reasons. Computers were never as capital intensive as a large power plant, and transistors and ICs made them exponentially less. When a project that costs twenty billion dollars fails companies go bankrupt and politicians lose their careers. Lots of pressure to stick with what you know will work.
Also everyone blames the hippies for nuclear stagnation but nobody looks at the fossil fuel industry. The latter has far more money and political influence and is more than happy for nukes to get stuck in the 50s.
They're just as conservative too. They'll go to .22nm from .32nm but they're not going to invest billions up front in a fab to produce a completely untested chip technology based on graphene and optics or something. Not unless someone (like the government) coughs up the money risk-free. Same with nukes.
Gradual evolution of the overgrown 50s submarine reactor is the AP1000. To really make fission work and scale would require something like the liquid thorium cycle or accelerator driven reactors or pebble beds... something not an evolution of 50s tech.
Indeed. So, now with Moore's law coming to an end there will be an incentive to try 'strange' and off-the-beaten-path technology, it will in a way be the most interesting time for semiconductors in many decades. There is just a chance that we'll hit on something that would not even be considered only 10 years ago that will actually make a huge difference. Before that all you could pretty much set the clock by was a predictable speed increase, now we're going to either get stuck or there will be something revolutionary in computing to move us to the next level.
Some of the options:
- 3D (heat issues, but biology got that one solved to some extent by using massive parallel low power, extremely slow and clockless architectures)
- Quantum Computing
- biological computing
- exotic semiconductors (for instance: GaAs)
- optical computing
- Totally new software architectures to take advantage of existing hardware in an un-foreseen way
- non Von-Neumann machinery (for instance, computing memory)
And a whole raft of even lesser known and researched tech. I'm really very curious what the next decade will bring.
Why? If end user devices are just thin clients for the cloud and we can always just make data centers bigger, where is the trillion dollar incentive necessary to make the leap?
The constraint on tech is usually more about what is economically justifiable rather than what is physically possible. It's 2016 and passenger flight is still subsonic for example.
That depends on the amount of computing capacity required for those data centers and if the last years have been any indication the amount of data center capacity is not even close to where we will end up. Even the 'thin clients' will acquire features and more capacity as time goes on, that's just the eternal terminal->personal computer pendulum on one end of it's swing at the moment.
Cutting edge chip production is still highly dependant on possessing the required experience within your institution. You may be able to build a FAB from parts, but that doesn't mean you can immediately start mass producing the latest CPU's or memory. And there are other comparably complex project's with similar issues (like designing rocket engines).
I think the same applies to reactor building where only a few companies know how to do a particular thing (like build a reactor vessel). Cutting edge development is unavoidably going to be limited to a small group of people who have limited capacity. Merely maintaining that capacity is tricky.
We're stuck with massively large nuclear plants in part because the only way of making a new plant cost effective given the regulatory regime is to make them big.
I'd be interested in hearing which "newer designs" exactly you think got postponed for stupid political reasons.
As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field. Basically, uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor is what you can get. Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go...
> As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field.
The nation that should have been the primary driver of nuclear technologies (the US) saw an explosion in the cost of development. This was not seen in other countries, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones.
> Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go...
This is a common misconception. In fact, the authoratative government body on energy research made it very clear 40 years ago what it would cost to develop fusion power. Fusion power never got the required funding so it never materialized -- as predicted.
>Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like ... Japan kept costs fairly stable during this period
So if we keep costs down like Japan did we can experience the same cost savings they did?
Compared to the radiation deaths caused by coal power plants, Fukushima was a little inconsequential blip, so even if we assume that it represented what you get if you follow Japanese regulations, it'd still be a plus.
Except we're easily at a point now where both coal and nuclear plants can be phased out as they reach the end of their natural lives and replaced with solar + wind farms at a reasonable cost, as Germany and Denmark are currently demonstrating.
The variability problem turned out to be smaller than nuclear+coal industry led us to believe and relatively easily managed with market based solutions (e.g. ramping up/down power usage by aluminum smelters and simply building in extra capacity) rather than by building massive batteries (an idiotic idea).
Massive batteries is an idiotic idea, as you said. Which is why the constant and large and instantaneous fluctuations from solar and wind are smoothed largely by natural gas. Recommend checking out the video of RFK, Jr saying a solar or wind plant is a gas plant.
Pebble bed reactors and Thorium reactors are two types that are just now being taken seriously, and largely because of work outside of the US. E.g. China's HTR-10 and coming HTR-PM [1] is based on decades old designs that were originally largely shelved because their advantages were not advantages then (the waste from traditional reactors was a plus when you want to produce lots of nuclear weapons, so why design reactors that produce different waste?). HTR-PM modules are designed to be "mass produced" once the first reactor is operational.
This [2] article covers both China's pebble bed and Thorium ambitions, as well as an evolutionary design based on a Westinghouse design that they are hoping to export.
While running nuclear power plants might be manageable, reliably storing the nuclear waste for the next 1,000,000 is almost impossible. No other industry has a similar problem.
The long-term waste is transuranics, like plutonium. Fission products are much shorter-lived.
Some advanced reactor types, including fast reactors and molten salt reactors, produce very little transuranic waste, and can use our existing transuranic wastes as fuel, converting them to fission products. These reactors produce a much lower volume of waste, which goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries.
Russia has two large fast reactors connected to their electric grid, one since the 1980s. The U.S. nearly completed its Integral Fast Reactor before the program was shut down by the Clinton administration. Half a dozen startups around the world are working on molten salt reactors, and China has a billion-dollar R&D program for them.
Many other countries did not see the same explosion in the cost of nuclear as the US did, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones.
From your link: "Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like France, Japan, and Canada kept costs fairly stable during this period."
Well now Japan had it's own meltdown and keeping the costs stable after seeing it happen in America and, worse, Ukraine, didn't help preventing it.
And I don't know about Canada, but France has some good candidates for the next meltdown all over the place...
I did not want to engage into another discussion about which technology kills more people. I wanted to point out that nuclear is expensive. Very expensive. And the USA maybe did a good job requiring that money to be paid. And if nuclear doesn't pay out when the real costs are to be paid, then that's it.
Because losing, let's say, a major city to a nuclear disaster, that would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
Once deaths are circa zero, people can spend an unlimited amount of money hypothetically reducing them further, with essentially no feedback to know if they're helping.
Areva[0] is in big trouble, losing a few billions (yes billions) every year. At the same time, the nuclear regulation authority have found some defects on EPR construction site and in La Hague plant.
The government is pushing EDF to take a major stake in Areva to save it. But today in the press there were multiple articles on a 100 billions "wall" that EDF will have to overcome to maintain, upgrade or decommission the current nuclear plants. And this is further complicated by the fact that the price of electricity is fixed by law, so EDF don't have many ways to increase its revenue. (This will likely have to change because it is not sustainable)
I don't know about safety, but financially this is looking bad. And with drastic cost cutting measures will likely come more incidents (or accidents..)
That's one negative point of nuclear power, we don't really know the price of decommissioning because it has never been done on large scale. So the total life cost of a nuclear plant, and thus nuclear power, can only be estimated.
Last year I got to sit in a meeting with people from various nuclear fission startups, along with a former director of the NRC.
The startup people said their biggest problem was the NRC's regulatory model. All the current regulations are written for conventional reactors, with mandates that don't make sense for other reactor types.
If you want to build something else, you can, but you have to spend a couple hundred million dollars on up-front design. Once you have that, you submit it to the NRC, which only then decides whether you can move forward and actually run some experiments.
That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. The startup people said if we at least had a staged process, giving them some kind of hint about whether the NRC might approve the project before spending all that money, then they'd have a much easier time getting investment.
Because of all this, reactor startups have been going to other countries. Terrapower is building a demo in China, Thorcon in Indonesia. Terrestrial Energy's in Canada and has good things to say about regulators there. Congress is starting to move towards reforming the system, but it's slow going.
Some of these designs have dramatic safety and proliferation advantages. Some other interesting startups are Transatomic and Moltex.
When people claims newer designs have "dramatic safety and proliferation advantages" they make it sound like existing reactor technology is subject to poor safety record and proliferation problems.
We just isn't true.
The nuclear reactor technology that's been in use for the past 50 years has killed fewer people per kilowatt hour than any of solar, wind, or hydro power [1].
And despite all the proliferation concerns there are only 9 states states with nuclear weapons[2]. You don't magically get nuclear weapons by having domestic nuclear power.
That's true, but part of this is because of the extreme level of safety and security measures, many of which aren't needed for newer designs.
E.g. for a long time the waste was seen as a positive because it could go to weapons manufacture. Yes, you don't magically get weapons that way, but you get raw materials. Security and safety features for these plants must be designed accordingly to prevent accidents and to prevent theft of exceedingly dangerous materials. Especially after the end of the nuclear arms race meant most of this waste wasn't of use any more.
Reactors that produces much less dangerous waste can get away without a lot of those issues.
Likewise, a lot of the regulatory regime is based on reactors where a mistake or accident can lead to a runaway reaction, but are totally wasted on reactors that are "walk-away safe" because they require an outside, powered, neutron source to keep running for example.
Nuclear is amazingly safe, and I like to point that out to people too. But old-style nuclear reactors are that safe thanks to an array of extensive and expensive countermeasures against very real dangers, while at least some of the newer designs, assuming the various claims holds, are safe because the failure scenarios themselves are far more benign.
That's the point of these designs. A large proportion of the price of nuclear today is because of these safety features. Remove the need for a good chunk of them, and nuclear becomes far cheaper.
James Conca is a pro-nuclear advocate. His claims and methodology are rather suspect.
The IPCC's SRREN -- a review of carbon-neutral energy alternatives -- notes that nuclear has a good safety record, but is not safer than solar or wind, or hydro in the US and Europe (a couple of absolutely massive dam failures, including China's Banqiao Dam failure in 1975 killing ~175,000 taint the picture elsewhere).
But, and this is the big but: the most pressing concerns for nuclear power are where it goes wrong from human factors. Including mismanagement, mafia influence (as occurred at Fukushima), unforseen consequences, poor design, terrorism, war, and weapons proliferation. The worst case failure modes for nuclear power are unspeakably bad. For solar and wind, not so much. Global experience to date has been about 400 production reactors, plus construction, supply, waste reprocessing and storage (still not a politically viably solved problem), and decommissioning. Full replacement of present electrical generation only would require some 15,000 plants globally, with ~40 year lifetimes. That's one plant per day being commissioned and decommissioned. Around the world, war and peace, boom-times and recessions. Until doomsday.
And nothing will go wrong?
And the scene of the 1975 Banqiao disaster isn't some barb-wired glowing hole in the ground, but home to some 7 million plus inhabitants. Dam breaks are bad, but the consequences are fairly short-lived.
Look up Banqiao at Wikipedia. The failure was only peripherally a consequence of the dam and far more one of poor system planning, poor engineering, poor management, poor communication, a thousand-year storm (1,000+ mm rain in 24 hours), resulting comms failures, and the inevitable dam failure.
A relatively small proportion of the deaths were directly due to flooding. Most occurred from disease and starvation -- far more infrastructure and response failures than the catastrophe itself.
Even given massive flooding, access to a solidly-constructed building 2-3 stories tall would suffice to provide protection from immediate risks, as would comms, evacuation and response plans, emergency and relief supplies, etc.
China is a country which in the past century has seen tens of millions of deaths from starvation alone, most recently about 20 years before Banqiao. On the scale of Chinese tragedies, of which there've been many, this was relatively modest.
And, as noted, the region is more than fully recovered.
Contrast Chernobyl and Fukushima. 30 years after Chernobyl (the anniversary will be this April), primary containment still isn't achieved. Radiation risk was presented across an entire continen, including the 450 million inhabitants of Europe. Eating of wild foods in Germany is still restricted (particularly mushrooms and boar). Fukushima likewise still hasn't stabilised five years on, and remains uncontained.
Nuclear accidents have very long risk tails.
And all of the management, engineering, communications, and response failures of Banqiao apply equally to nuclear power.
The industry is quite fond of downplaying risks. Has done so since the first experiments. Wanting a thing doesn't make it so.
The U.N. estimates that Chernobyl caused cancer in 4,000 people. It's an estimate because it's not statistically detectable. Chernobyl was a horrible design that didn't even have a containment dome.
The level of radioactivity around Fukushima is lower than naturally-occurring radioactivity in some parts of the world. Few if any deaths are expected.
The Fukushima plant was built in the 1970's. Another plant nearby was built in the 1980's with improved safety features, and got through the same events without difficulty. Nobody advocates building more 1970's-era reactors.
Meanwhile, engineers are saying a dam in Mosul, Iraq in on the verge of failing and killing at least 500,000 people by drowning, and possibly up to 1.5 million. Google "Mosul dam" for a slew of articles. Here's one: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/1-5-million-may-die-if-mos...
Our other baseload energy sources have safety issues too. The American Lung Association estimates that coal emissions kill 13,000 Americans every year.
Nuclear risk has been reduced. Can be reduced further. Including the holy grail of Thorium, which has a negligible future risk (almost entirely consumed and made harmless in the reactor).
I do agree with all that. Modern conventional reactor have achieved admirable safety. But they've done that with a lot of complicated and expensive safety mechanisms. With a reactor that's inherently safer due to the physics of fuel and coolant, you don't need as much of that, and have the potential to achieve lower costs.
I also agree that proliferation is an overblown concern, but the international community does have some level of discomfort with nuclear power in third-world countries. If we could provide them with, say, a Transatomic reactor that runs on very low-enriched uranium and produces very little plutonium, that would go a long way towards alleviating that concern.
Exactly! Most all of these concepts do not have proliferation risks. And many can destroy weapons material. However, these groups have to be careful about what they can do with the fuel cycle. Transatomic gets a lot of press, but their technology has glaring holes. They cannot burn waste well at all. You have to have fast neutrons and only fast neutrons to do that. Their claim of a dual spectrum is a brush over of this issue. The thermal neutrons account for 95% of reactions and thermal neutrons have a tendency to transmute fissile actinides into higher and higher transuranic actinides until you have so much stuff like Pu-240 and Cm-244 that you cannot continue the chain reaction. TAP only gets an extra 30 MWD/kg out of spent fuel at most before their salt saturates with too many non-fissile actinides so the reaction cannot continue. Compare this to a fast reactor that can get 200-700 MWD/kg. There are salt designs that can do this, but not this one.
The NRC can handle advanced reactors, but it could be better. Much of this comes from understanding the regulatory process, as well as design choices. Only 3 or 4 of the nuclear startups have an actual regulatory team, and I know Oklo is one of them. Fuel qualification is the elephant in the room. If you are doing something new, it gets expensive and takes time. Going international opens some opportunities, but there is nuance and the grass is not always greener.
I've met Jake and he gives one of the most inspiring and pragmatic pitches about the future of energy I've ever heard. What they're building sounds like magic--massive amounts of energy with incredible safety and portability. Super exciting stuff.
It's an exciting project, but having chosen Oklo [1] as their name makes them extremely difficult to search for (try 'oklo reactor' for example), which is a little problematic for a startup...
It's 2016 and we still don't have a ultimate disposal place for nuclear waste. No one knows how much the whole process will cost in the end. At least in Germany law says whoever produces nuclear waste has to ensure it will be stored securely. I don't see how this is possible with a startup. Startups usually take high risk in most of their decisions. Most startups fail within few years. Who will be responsible for the waste produced by a startup that goes bankrupt?
There's no other solution than to stop nuclear power now and investing all we can to care about reliably storing the waste forever (in human terms). And even if there were ways to store something reliably for 1,000,000 years, it's impossible to keep future civilizations from opening what shouldn't be. The pyramids weren't meant to be opened either. ;)
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadEven the author of Learned Optimism that brought us Cognitive Therapy pointed out that pessimism made sense when we're talking risk management. The context here is nuclear materials. I have a hard time being optimistic given what past 60+ years have shown us about that.
having a plan for dealing with waste and paying for that plan from the start is pretty cool. Even if the plan sucks, it's way way better than our plans for coal and oil. Which, as far as i can tell, is to just not worry about it.
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I guess there's no good plan, but it's not like the reactor operators wake up one Tuesday and wonder where their waste went. Unlike me when i drive. Carbon is much more dump it in the air and hope for the best. Nuclear waste is, as far as i know, logged, tracked, audited and generally completely accounted for.
Far as toxic waste, we could always build more of these maybe:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/plasma...
Even that article mentions a specific type of waste as an exception that can cause fire or explosions in the equipment. Even mighty plasma has trouble with it. What hope is there for other methods? ;)
You use a breeder reactor. Some of the designs for thorium breeders, for example, can be used to process existing waste from other reactors.
> guaranteed to be a problem for thousands of years?
Note that it gets safer over time as it decays, and in general the radiation danger of an isotope goes down the longer the half-life. Once you get into the particularly long lived isotopes, the radiation danger becomes very small. Also, the amount of waste is trivial; nuclear power only makes a millionth the waste as traditional power, because of the vast difference in usable energy density.
Even if you consider the waste that stays around for "thousands of years", that's a short time compared to some types of chemical waste that doesn't decay. How many Superfund sites already exist?[1] There are quite a few in Silicon Valley[2].
[1] http://toxmap-classic.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/combo/mapControls.d...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
I did mention a plasma converter and the possibility of chemical options coming up down the line. Not many possibilities like that for nuclear.
Yes, you did. You also (correctly) suggest we aren't actually going to solve all chemical pollutant problems with plasma converters. That's an interesting tech that should be useful in some areas, but even then chemical pollution is still a far bigger problem than the nuclear power industry ever will be.
> Not many possibilities like that for nuclear.
I did mention a breeder reactor and that nuclear power converts a microscopic[1] amount of fuel into waster for the same energy. Not only is nuclear waste a solved problem, it's utterly ridiculous to compare such trivial amounts of waste to what other industries produce.
[1] literally micro- as in 1/1,000,000 (because we get much more energy[2] from U or Th)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...
- Carter put a moratorium on conventional fuel reprocessing, like France uses.
- The Clinton administration shut down the Integral Fast Reactor project.
- The NRC created a very difficult regulatory environment for anyone attempting to develop more advanced types of reactors, including the fast reactors and molten salt reactors that would produce far less waste and consume most of our existing waste as fuel.
Disposing the waste is largely a political problem.
And that is with old designs producing nasty waste. There are newer designs that would be able to reuse some of that waste as fuels, and there are many newer designs that produces far less dangerous waste to begin with.
It would be if you ignore the effects of radiation on biological and electronic systems. If you don't, the idea is as ridiculous as you may have intended.
"Disposing the waste is largely a political problem."
It's actually a problem of making a material non-radioactive or storing arbitrary amounts of it safely for longer than we've existed as a civilization. Neither is a political problem: one is impossible so far per science; other faces risks from logistics, environment, personnel, and politicians. I'd expect us to be able to build out CO2 capture systems at local power plants before we could successfully counter all the above for thousands of years straight given global issues.
So, no, it is one of the least safe power sources if one considers the risks of operation or waste. Japan had a recent reminder of that.
Afghanistan.
> It’s something that we know people want, and we can build it now, and here’s why
Right. These 'people' are called 'Army', 'Airforce' and 'Navy':
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/mobile-nucl...
Is it even possible to build a reactor that meets those criteria, let alone be financially viable?
"Small" presumably makes this harder.
You're right though, some more technical details would be nice.
Then oil went cheap investments were frozen.
As everybody noticed the "most advanced" deployed IIIrd generation of nuclear reactor are not really a success (EPR).
And the 5th?/4th supposed to come generation is promising a lot, but still has not delivered a lot. We are lagging way behind schedules, notably because cheap oil has been a curse.
Oil is getting more and more costly to extract.
PV and wind turbine activity do not follow our 9am/7pm seasonal activity. Eolian is so massively subsidized in USA Texas had negative prices this summer on their grid.
So cheap and convenient (non subsidized) energy seems to be our past. Not the future we will live in.
I guess some activity will slowly disappear ... And that the part of energy in Internet's price will have to be paid more fairly among users.
Cheap energy is physically soon to be dead. The watt consumed per software use will matter as soon as government will stop subsidizing the market with public money. And Artificial Intelligence may not beat human intelligence and adaptive workforce when costs are fully supported by the software makers.
Human have more value than what google and uber thinks, and their technological dystopia based on clean non human work force and cheap energy is a nightmare for both the workers and the ecosystem.
IT industry is not sustainable in its actual trend to not care about efficiency. Agile is a symptom of it, and we need government to stop their politic to deregulate on one hand so that those who waste energy don't pay their bills and on the other hand subsidize the market in favor of those producing so called cheap energy (fracking, PV, eolian, batteries) that are polluting.
Sorry, but sails, men, mechanical windmill and horses are some of the trivially cheap energies that will be available in the future.
If the institutional inertia has a large part to play then a startup model would be very promising.
Longer answer:
Yes, there are obviously safety and proliferation concerns with nuclear power, but a lot of these are solvable problems. Many industries solve difficult/dangerous problem all the time. Unfortunately, paranoia and misleading (or simply wrong) information about radiation made a lot of people treat the very idea of nuclear power as something that is "always bad".
This, and the usual political stupidity, has kept nuclear power restricted to the same designs for decades. Imagine if the computer industry was was never able to move past the relay and vacuum tube designs made in the WW2 era; today we might have very good vacuum tubes instead of the integrated circuit. Newer reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 are a nice improvement in safety and cost, but it's still basically the same solid uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor we've always used. Newer designs are never always considered "too risky" in either money or physics.
Also everyone blames the hippies for nuclear stagnation but nobody looks at the fossil fuel industry. The latter has far more money and political influence and is more than happy for nukes to get stuck in the 50s.
Gradual evolution of the overgrown 50s submarine reactor is the AP1000. To really make fission work and scale would require something like the liquid thorium cycle or accelerator driven reactors or pebble beds... something not an evolution of 50s tech.
Some of the options:
- 3D (heat issues, but biology got that one solved to some extent by using massive parallel low power, extremely slow and clockless architectures)
- Quantum Computing
- biological computing
- exotic semiconductors (for instance: GaAs)
- optical computing
- Totally new software architectures to take advantage of existing hardware in an un-foreseen way
- non Von-Neumann machinery (for instance, computing memory)
And a whole raft of even lesser known and researched tech. I'm really very curious what the next decade will bring.
The constraint on tech is usually more about what is economically justifiable rather than what is physically possible. It's 2016 and passenger flight is still subsonic for example.
I think the same applies to reactor building where only a few companies know how to do a particular thing (like build a reactor vessel). Cutting edge development is unavoidably going to be limited to a small group of people who have limited capacity. Merely maintaining that capacity is tricky.
The nation that should have been the primary driver of nuclear technologies (the US) saw an explosion in the cost of development. This was not seen in other countries, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones.
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us...
> Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go...
This is a common misconception. In fact, the authoratative government body on energy research made it very clear 40 years ago what it would cost to develop fusion power. Fusion power never got the required funding so it never materialized -- as predicted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8311566
So if we keep costs down like Japan did we can experience the same cost savings they did?
Where do I sign up?
The variability problem turned out to be smaller than nuclear+coal industry led us to believe and relatively easily managed with market based solutions (e.g. ramping up/down power usage by aluminum smelters and simply building in extra capacity) rather than by building massive batteries (an idiotic idea).
This [2] article covers both China's pebble bed and Thorium ambitions, as well as an evolutionary design based on a Westinghouse design that they are hoping to export.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-10
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-02-21/china-wants-...
Some advanced reactor types, including fast reactors and molten salt reactors, produce very little transuranic waste, and can use our existing transuranic wastes as fuel, converting them to fission products. These reactors produce a much lower volume of waste, which goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries.
Russia has two large fast reactors connected to their electric grid, one since the 1980s. The U.S. nearly completed its Integral Fast Reactor before the program was shut down by the Clinton administration. Half a dozen startups around the world are working on molten salt reactors, and China has a billion-dollar R&D program for them.
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us...
Well now Japan had it's own meltdown and keeping the costs stable after seeing it happen in America and, worse, Ukraine, didn't help preventing it.
And I don't know about Canada, but France has some good candidates for the next meltdown all over the place...
"Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear"
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_mor...
Because losing, let's say, a major city to a nuclear disaster, that would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
Areva[0] is in big trouble, losing a few billions (yes billions) every year. At the same time, the nuclear regulation authority have found some defects on EPR construction site and in La Hague plant.
The government is pushing EDF to take a major stake in Areva to save it. But today in the press there were multiple articles on a 100 billions "wall" that EDF will have to overcome to maintain, upgrade or decommission the current nuclear plants. And this is further complicated by the fact that the price of electricity is fixed by law, so EDF don't have many ways to increase its revenue. (This will likely have to change because it is not sustainable)
I don't know about safety, but financially this is looking bad. And with drastic cost cutting measures will likely come more incidents (or accidents..)
That's one negative point of nuclear power, we don't really know the price of decommissioning because it has never been done on large scale. So the total life cost of a nuclear plant, and thus nuclear power, can only be estimated.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva
The startup people said their biggest problem was the NRC's regulatory model. All the current regulations are written for conventional reactors, with mandates that don't make sense for other reactor types.
If you want to build something else, you can, but you have to spend a couple hundred million dollars on up-front design. Once you have that, you submit it to the NRC, which only then decides whether you can move forward and actually run some experiments.
That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. The startup people said if we at least had a staged process, giving them some kind of hint about whether the NRC might approve the project before spending all that money, then they'd have a much easier time getting investment.
Because of all this, reactor startups have been going to other countries. Terrapower is building a demo in China, Thorcon in Indonesia. Terrestrial Energy's in Canada and has good things to say about regulators there. Congress is starting to move towards reforming the system, but it's slow going.
Some of these designs have dramatic safety and proliferation advantages. Some other interesting startups are Transatomic and Moltex.
We just isn't true.
The nuclear reactor technology that's been in use for the past 50 years has killed fewer people per kilowatt hour than any of solar, wind, or hydro power [1].
And despite all the proliferation concerns there are only 9 states states with nuclear weapons[2]. You don't magically get nuclear weapons by having domestic nuclear power.
1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...
E.g. for a long time the waste was seen as a positive because it could go to weapons manufacture. Yes, you don't magically get weapons that way, but you get raw materials. Security and safety features for these plants must be designed accordingly to prevent accidents and to prevent theft of exceedingly dangerous materials. Especially after the end of the nuclear arms race meant most of this waste wasn't of use any more.
Reactors that produces much less dangerous waste can get away without a lot of those issues.
Likewise, a lot of the regulatory regime is based on reactors where a mistake or accident can lead to a runaway reaction, but are totally wasted on reactors that are "walk-away safe" because they require an outside, powered, neutron source to keep running for example.
Nuclear is amazingly safe, and I like to point that out to people too. But old-style nuclear reactors are that safe thanks to an array of extensive and expensive countermeasures against very real dangers, while at least some of the newer designs, assuming the various claims holds, are safe because the failure scenarios themselves are far more benign.
That's the point of these designs. A large proportion of the price of nuclear today is because of these safety features. Remove the need for a good chunk of them, and nuclear becomes far cheaper.
The IPCC's SRREN -- a review of carbon-neutral energy alternatives -- notes that nuclear has a good safety record, but is not safer than solar or wind, or hydro in the US and Europe (a couple of absolutely massive dam failures, including China's Banqiao Dam failure in 1975 killing ~175,000 taint the picture elsewhere).
Starting at p. 993: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Annex_II.pdf
And p. 745: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Ch10.pdf
But, and this is the big but: the most pressing concerns for nuclear power are where it goes wrong from human factors. Including mismanagement, mafia influence (as occurred at Fukushima), unforseen consequences, poor design, terrorism, war, and weapons proliferation. The worst case failure modes for nuclear power are unspeakably bad. For solar and wind, not so much. Global experience to date has been about 400 production reactors, plus construction, supply, waste reprocessing and storage (still not a politically viably solved problem), and decommissioning. Full replacement of present electrical generation only would require some 15,000 plants globally, with ~40 year lifetimes. That's one plant per day being commissioned and decommissioned. Around the world, war and peace, boom-times and recessions. Until doomsday.
And nothing will go wrong?
And the scene of the 1975 Banqiao disaster isn't some barb-wired glowing hole in the ground, but home to some 7 million plus inhabitants. Dam breaks are bad, but the consequences are fairly short-lived.
A relatively small proportion of the deaths were directly due to flooding. Most occurred from disease and starvation -- far more infrastructure and response failures than the catastrophe itself.
Even given massive flooding, access to a solidly-constructed building 2-3 stories tall would suffice to provide protection from immediate risks, as would comms, evacuation and response plans, emergency and relief supplies, etc.
China is a country which in the past century has seen tens of millions of deaths from starvation alone, most recently about 20 years before Banqiao. On the scale of Chinese tragedies, of which there've been many, this was relatively modest.
And, as noted, the region is more than fully recovered.
Contrast Chernobyl and Fukushima. 30 years after Chernobyl (the anniversary will be this April), primary containment still isn't achieved. Radiation risk was presented across an entire continen, including the 450 million inhabitants of Europe. Eating of wild foods in Germany is still restricted (particularly mushrooms and boar). Fukushima likewise still hasn't stabilised five years on, and remains uncontained.
Nuclear accidents have very long risk tails.
And all of the management, engineering, communications, and response failures of Banqiao apply equally to nuclear power.
The industry is quite fond of downplaying risks. Has done so since the first experiments. Wanting a thing doesn't make it so.
The U.N. estimates that Chernobyl caused cancer in 4,000 people. It's an estimate because it's not statistically detectable. Chernobyl was a horrible design that didn't even have a containment dome.
The level of radioactivity around Fukushima is lower than naturally-occurring radioactivity in some parts of the world. Few if any deaths are expected.
The Fukushima plant was built in the 1970's. Another plant nearby was built in the 1980's with improved safety features, and got through the same events without difficulty. Nobody advocates building more 1970's-era reactors.
To whatever extent you excuse Banqiao for its "thousand-year storm," you should also excuse Fukushima for its thousand-year tsunami: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12740649
Meanwhile, engineers are saying a dam in Mosul, Iraq in on the verge of failing and killing at least 500,000 people by drowning, and possibly up to 1.5 million. Google "Mosul dam" for a slew of articles. Here's one: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/1-5-million-may-die-if-mos...
Our other baseload energy sources have safety issues too. The American Lung Association estimates that coal emissions kill 13,000 Americans every year.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
Not so much nuclear.
I also agree that proliferation is an overblown concern, but the international community does have some level of discomfort with nuclear power in third-world countries. If we could provide them with, say, a Transatomic reactor that runs on very low-enriched uranium and produces very little plutonium, that would go a long way towards alleviating that concern.
Moltex looks like it might be ideal for waste burning.
Yes, go fast or go home on this. The IFR program showed that is way.
Communist Czechoslovakia was working on something like that, civil reactor for small remote villages. They got stuck on cooling.
BTW there is atomic reactor in center of Prague ;-)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
There's no other solution than to stop nuclear power now and investing all we can to care about reliably storing the waste forever (in human terms). And even if there were ways to store something reliably for 1,000,000 years, it's impossible to keep future civilizations from opening what shouldn't be. The pyramids weren't meant to be opened either. ;)