Both the OP and the WSJ article are op-eds, written by people who are not paid by the publications. Op-Eds get their name from the phrase, “opposing/opposite the editorial page”, so it’s not particularly accurate to think of this as the NYT and WSJ stating a position.
If you want to see if an environmentalist really believes that climate change is as bad as scientists say it will be, look at their stance on nuclear power. If they are against it, they are basically denying the seriousness did climate change.
There is no way you are going to convince voters that they need to cut their energy usage, especially before the worst of the climate change effects are felt. You need to provide steady, stable carbon free power. Nuclear power is the only current technology that can provide it. If you really care about slowing down climate change, you need to be all in on nuclear power.
> There is no way you are going to convince voters that they need to cut their energy usage
Indeed. Thus the question is what undemocratic institutions, can we use? Can we put in treaties that reduce national sovereignty like the TPP? Can we make it a second order or third order effect of regulations on how insurance works so that most people can't follow the chain back to the source?
>Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early.
Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy but I feel when convincing other people of this you need to portray the good and the bad.
There was a decades long discussion about nuclear energy in Germany. You can bet that the public was much better informed about nuclear, than the politicians and the nuclear industry liked.
There were a bunch of failed nuclear projects like the pebble bed reactor, the fast breeder or the storage sites. Watching them made the decision to get out of that type of industry much easier. Germany had the same level of corrupt nuclear industry, which is known from Japan and which has been exposed there.
Tl;dr, Germany politic interest in nuclear phase-out began around 2000 as misdirected "green" activism and was escalated by irrational public fears in response to Fukushima in 2011.
nuclear was being phased out before fukushima anyways in germany, it was just accelerated a few years. New nuclear power plants are just way too expensive - take a look at Flamanville, Hinkley point C, Olkiluoto 3, Wylfa Newydd and Hanhikivi and you'll see that they are just too expensive. You can argue for having the old ones run a bit longer but the older the plants become the more maintenance issues arise.
It's well established that the West has forgotten how to build nukes. But Hitachi, KEPCO, and the Russians have not forgotten, and can build them effectively today. Perhaps with some effort the West can re-learn how its done from these modern success stories.
Wylfa Newydd was a project by Hitachi before it got cancelled despite being guaranteed a higher-than-market compensation of £75 per MWh[0], yet despite those heavy subsidies it apparently is not worht it.
Not exactly good governance was what she did before too, going back on existing long-term exit plans that the majority supported. Fukushima just moved that from somewhat unpopular to entirely politically untenable.
Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.
I always thought that nuclear waste was a non problem. It is a minuscule amount of confined hazardous material. Even if you don't recycle it, the impact on the environment is negligible.
But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors. More modern design do not present those risks [1]. Judging nuclear energy based on 1960s design is like judging aviation based on the safety records of 1930s planes.
> But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors.
With "early generation reactors" you mean all the ones that exist. The whole "next generation reactor" / "generation 4 reactor" thing is at this point nothing more than vague plans for what could be.
That's overstating things. Fukushima was built in the 70s. A nearby reactor faced the same challenges but was built a decade later, and it was fine. That's just a GenII, still not as safe as the GenIII+ we're building now.
Chernobyl, of course, was a horrific design that didn't even have a containment dome. Nobody builds reactors like that anymore.
And GenIV is a little more than vague plans; e.g. Terrestrial Energy's molten salt reactor has already gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process, which puts them on track for a demo reactor by 2025 or so.
If your country is the size of the USA and nobody bothers if you let it disappear somewhere in the desert. Which is not the case in Germany and most of the countries. People just don't want to have a nuclear waste dump near by and Germany needs to spend a hell lot of money to clean up the last mine they used as a dump already.
The tech is dead and the lobby won't be able to ride that current artificial hype for ever...
Huge areas of land unlivable for generations is an overstatement. Fukishima and Chernobyl exclusion zones are lush green forests that where wildlife thrives.
Well the wildlife prospers around Chernobyl exactly because it is not safe for humans to live there. Absence of humans usually is great for the wildlife. Besides the wild animals just not knowing about radioactivity, humans are way more sensitive to radiation due to their typically longer life spans.
This point about devastating huge areas of land re Fukushima is so wrong I don't even. It was idiocy and blame-shifting from top to bottom. And yes people die from other people's idiocy in rather much bigger numbers.
A 13 kiloton fission bomb produces about .01% of the long lived fission products that are resident in the core of a 1 GW(e) reactor just before refueling.
Is that sarcasm? The exclusion zone of Fukushima is very small and people already live there again. The total impact of Fukushima (the nuclear disaster) is one death of a plant employee and 3 people getting cancer.
That's too simplistic. Retiring nuclear power plants has been the long term goal of the German anti-nuclear movement since the 70s. They were an important faction in the founding of the Green Party. When the Green party came into power in 1998 in a coalition government, they passed a law to retire all nuclear power plants by restricting the remaining energy output they could produce. BTW, this was done in consensus with the German nuclear industry. In 2009, a free-market/conservative coalition came into power again and they reversed course. Then Fukushima happened, a couple hundred thousand people demonstrated against nuclear power in Germany, a Green-led government won the elections in a historically conservative state, and Andrea Merkel changed her opinion.
Long story short, phasing out nuclear energy has been a long term goal and has broad support in Germany.
> a Green-led government won the elections in a historically conservative state, and Andrea Merkel changed her opinion.
Chronologically was the other way around, and her "Our party now consider nuclear harmful" stance didn't change the outcome post-Fukushima. But it's typical Merkel of the time, changing her tune to whatever's politically advantageous.
You are aware that the "long-term strategy" had been to phase out nuclear, with laws and contracts laying out a gradual shutdown in place, and Merkels government slowed that process down against majority opinion in the population before Fukushima? The shallow "Merkel did it after Fukushima" meme is a mockery of what has been a long democratic process that Merkels government tried to renege on, with nuclear power having been a contested topic for decades.
Also the beginning of this statement is not really true:
> Germany, which went all-in for renewables…
This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible.
> From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy
Not really,
* It's expensive as hell, it just might seem cheap because a lot of the cost is offloaded to the tax payer in the long run
* Even western first world countries operate nuclear power plants which have known safety issues (look at e.g. France or Belgium) so even if we could technically do it safely, our societies are not politically mature enough to implement it.
* Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster so it's not even as clean as often advertised
> Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster
[citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels.
Remember E=MC2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. There are 2 million times more Joules in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal/gas/diesel/lithium. Thus you don't have to mine all that much of it to power the planet.
In fact, with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story), you could power the entire US for a few hundred years off the depleted uranium sitting in the yard of an enrichment plant in Kentucky.
> with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story)
Till and Chang argue in their book about the IFR that if we start building IFR style plants for production usage it's entirely possible that costs drop to about LWR levels.
So far fast breeders have been expensive, but that's largely because they've all been one-off designs largely for R&D purposes without much effort to reduce costs.
For reprocessing, their argument is that electrorefining (pyroprocessing) would be much cheaper than PUREX. To the point that the lower fuel acquisition cost and cheaper waste disposal could make it roughly comparable to once-through LWR costs, even with relatively cheap uranium.
Most of Germany's plants were built in the 1970s and were reaching end of life dates anyway. They probably would have been decommissioned in the early 2020s but Merkel accelerated the process due to the Fukushima disaster.
The problem isn't cost of power generated, its the ability to respond to rapid volatility - when clouds obscure solar panels, and when the wind stops blowing.
Nuclear cannot do this so it is useless. Batteries and gas power plants can which is why they are being rolled out.
Wind, Solar, Gas, Batteries and Electric Vehicles are existing solutions to the climate problem. The market will implement them slowly, since they are cheaper and superior to legacy solutions, but we need political effort to do it more quickly.
It's also interesting to see the volatility of solar and wind be used as an argument against baseline generation, as this has traditionally been an argument against renewables.
It's an argument against renewables only when the renewables are expensive. When renewables are cheap, then nuclear is placed in an impossible situation, as nuclear either displaces the renewables when they ARE available (incurring a large marginal cost), or only runs when they aren't (forcing nuclear's large fixed costs to be amortized over much less output).
It's likely that a cost optimized grid will have little or no nuclear in it.
Unless you do solar and mostly skip wind, in which case you can build enough nuclear to run the nighttime load and solar for just the extra daytime load, then you can run the nukes 24/7. That minimizes both nuclear downtime and storage requirements.
But if we're going to build a lot of wind, that still doesn't necessarily doom nuclear, if we can lower the capital cost of nuclear. The article describes some fairly simple ways to go about that; a recent study at MIT had the same recommendations.
Down the road a decade or so, molten salt reactors will start to be available, and those look to have much lower capital costs and good load-balancing.
I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day.
Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage.
Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.
South Korea's numbers lack transparency, and I believe they assume very low interest rates (that is, they socialize the financial risk.)
Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in a position to deliver now; the one that is closest, NuScale, is not promising the kind of cost reductions that would be needed.
You believe that do you? Do you have a source? Because there's a recent MIT study that says they really are much cheaper, for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with assuming low interest rates.
"Robin Mills, CEO of Dubai-based energy consultancy Qamar Energy, has projected that Barakah will supply energy at a cost of roughly 11 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, assuming the startup delays are not substantial. (All four reactors are scheduled to be operating by 2021.) Mills regards that as inexpensive for low-carbon power that can be ramped up as demand increases. But solar is now even cheaper in the Gulf region, where the same intense sun that keeps the seawater hot puts solar power plants on steroids. “Solar has become the lowest-cost source of electricity compared to pretty much anything,” says Mills."
No, it's the cost of power. And even if nuclear were technically able to respond instantly, it's economically pointless, since if you don't run a nuclear plant most of the time the cost of power goes all to hell.
* Couple the nuke to a large thermal storage system and load follow with that
* Use steam bypass to switch energy from the turbogenerator to desalination, direct decarbonization, liquid fuel synthesis, district heating, industrial processes, and so on.
Batteries and things like batteries serve shifting demand relative to slower-moving supply for nuclear even better than they fit unpredictable/irregular supply renewables.
Unlike sunny or windy days, nuclear power is consistent 24/7 and output can be modulated (albeit, with delay) by raising and lowering control rods. Batteries (electrical or mechanical) can store extra nuclear-produced energy and use it to power the grid while output increases to match demand, and vice versa.
No. If renewables are cheap, then batteries and other storage will just serve to reduce the fraction of time renewables are not covering demand (why charge the batteries with nuclear if cheaper renewable power is available?) The smaller this fraction is, the worse nuclear does economically.
What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based) or some kind of super battery. Which doesn't exist yet.
The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity by 3-6x to cover all other energy requirements (including sucking carbon from the air to counter chemical processes we can't decarbonize).
Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low capacity factor nuclear.
The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe.
I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.
Some non-trivial nuclear capacity is expected to make high-renewable deep-decarbonization scenarios significantly cheaper [1]. That hydrogen and battery storage stuff quickly adds numbers to the system cost. Solar alone with no storage doesn't work even a little (because of night time).
Not yet. But if you extrapolate out the cost of solar. using the historical experience curve, as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there.
If you extrapolate this trend line far enough, does it reach zero? There's only so much future prediction you can accurately make from historical performance.
> as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there
And that's kind of the other problem. How much land is that?
Per this perhaps dated 2013 report[0],
It takes "3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year." Unclear on if that's only in sunny desert locales like California/Nevada, or average over the US, or whatever.
Anyway, if my math isn't radically incorrect, that comes out to 114 kW of capacity on average, in whatever these test conditions were.
Just 10 TW of capacity would require, uh, 1.2e12 m², or 13k "survey townships" (US land units get weird), or 466k "sections" (weird US land unit that equals mi²) or 298 million acres.
For some comparison, California is 164k mi². Texas is 269k. You could (hypothetically) cover the entirety of California and Texas with solar panels (433 mi²) and you still would not reach 10 TW of average production.
Admittedly, your scope is global and these examples are US states. But it is still a ton of land. Perhaps efficiency has increased slightly since 2013, but by a factor of 2 or more? 10? And how much space will we need in landfills for EOL panels?
Global demand was about 22,100 TWh/yr in 2011 (random figure), so say it's doubled since then; we'd still need something like 233k mi² of these panels to supply the world, assuming perfect capture from season to season and overnight. That's most of Texas in (2013) solar panels...
Interesting this gets quickly downvoted. I totally agree with what he/she says. Screwing up once, then the site is fucked for total human eternity, and you have a no-go zone on the map forever. Afterall, "Anything That Can Possibly Go Wrong, Does".
"Forever" may be a bit of an overstatement as we get better understandings of the health effects of low-dose radiation. Wolves are loving it in there (people were worse than radiation for them) [1].
If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now.
That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers...
Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time.
If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propose a solution for irrational community fears. You’ll also be able to solve the SF housing and homelessness crisis at one go then.
New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition.
...
Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open- ended, all‑or‑nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon.
...
[I]n 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.
> The US never had the ability to build affordable nuclear plants.
Sure it has. They're just getting used by the Navy, not by civilians. There's no reason why the same methods that have been successfully used to control cost and schedule for those reactors couldn't be used for civilian reactors.
Navy reactors are extremely expensive. They are worth it because of logistics around oil.
Even when comparing to oil, Nuclear is still more expensive. “Specifically, total life-cycle costs would be 19 percent higher for a fleet of nuclear destroyers.” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454
Navy reactors are also designed differently due to the confined space in which they typically operate. This is why they use the much more expensive super grade plutonium, as it reduces the amount of heavy shielding required to protect crew who must live very close to their reactors.
Super grade plutonium is for warheads that humans will spend a lot of time near, like those in submarine launched ballistic missiles. But American naval reactors do use highly enriched uranium, which is much more expensive and needs more safeguarding than the low enriched uranium used in power reactors.
They're expensive because of certain design features, yes. But their cost is predictable and we know how to build them on schedule. Those are the key skills that should be just as usable for civilian reactors.
“Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.” just that is all I need to know to prefer nuclear to coal.
You shouldn't just count deaths and conclude that a nuclear catastrophy isn't that bad. Far more people had to evacuate their home, having to leave most of their belongings behind. And most times with no or too little compensation. Sure, nuclear is prefferable to coal but that doesn't mean that both shouldn't be gotten rid of.
But that kind of reactor is never going to be built again - its design was very outdated and outright bad. Today we can build reactors where any failure that would result in an explosion of any kind is physically nearly impossible.
Maybe we won't build those reactor types any more. But they are still operational, and this is what matters. There is a huge incentive in keeping them operational as the major cost of nuclear energy is building the reactor. Already built reactors don't incur that cost any more so they make loads of money for their operators, especially when they are old and "mortage free". Due to this gigantic incentive, every political support of new nuclear plants will be misdirected into prolonging the operational life of existing highly dangerous reactors.
As to your "physically near impossible": people said about the titanic that it was unsinkable. This only led to a major shortage of lifeboats once it sank because why would a unsinkable ship need so many lifeboats.
There are 11 still in operation, and heavily modified to not allow anything like that thirty-year old disaster.
If this bullshit cloud over nuclear got dissolved they'd be replaced with much more safe design. Instead they are forced to continue operation because nothing new can be built. Because of unfounded fears.
That's what caused the Fukushima disaster. No new plants - no decommisioning of old plants - old plants blow up.
> If this bullshit cloud over nuclear got dissolved they'd be replaced with much more safe design.
I've outlined above why this doesn't happen. Japan has been severely pro-nuclear in the 80s and 90s, and built tons of reactors, yet they only decommisioned a single old reactor in the 80s and 90s, according to this list [1].
If anything, you supported my line of reasoning - if the insane push against nuclear didn't happen, then the plants would have been modernised or rebuilt and there would not have been a Fukushima.
I wonder whether the tsunami would have been so bad if not for the effects of climate change on sea levels. A literally physical attack on nuclear from fossil fuels.
You need to accept that all trust is lost. You cannot take backsies every few decades and expect people to trust you that this time you really know what you#re talking about.
I couldn't find a definite number, but the total number of people who evacuated are somewhere around 100-200k. (Every source has different numbers because the zone kept changing, I guess.)
Meanwhile, coal emission kills ~1M every year, or ~100k every month. (I guess the numbers are just an order-of-magnitude estimate, so take them with a grain of salt.)
So, during the month of Fukushima disaster (the second worst nuclear power disaster in history) it displaced a few times more people than coal killed in that month.
Thankfully we are using far less coal now in the UK and plan to carry on using less.
Yes coal is terrible and the sooner the world stopa using it the better, but the answer isn't 'if we can't have nuclear then we can only have coal' is a lie.
Should we also get rid of hydro? Because the worst power plant accident in history was Banqiao Dam, which killed 26,000 people by drowning and another 150,000 in the aftermath. The entire area was devastated.
There have been a fair number of other serious hydro accidents as well. In the U.S., Teton Dam wiped out two towns, and Oroville Dam just recently prompted the evacuation of 180,000 people.
Nuclear may well be better than coal, but coal isn't the plant of choice if you build something today. Coal is more expensive than natural gas, too expensive and slow to turn on and off (which is an increasing requirement as solar and wind become more common) and are opposed by the population for health reasons.
To be a viable alternative beating coal is irrelevant, nuclear would have to be at least better than natural gas. And with natural gas burning much cleaner than coal I'm not so sure nuclear has the advantage
The president of Exelon, a US corporation that operates 23 nuclear power reactors here, has stated that for new nuclear to be competitive with gas in the US the effective CO2 tax would have to be $300/ton or more.
Exelon is focusing on NG w. CO2 capture and renewables/storage for new capacity.
And as a result of the Chernobyl accident, southern Germany is sufficently contaminated, that food from the forests, like mushrooms and wild boar are still not completely safe to consume. Each killed animal has to be checked with a radiation detector, whether its radiation is low enough for it to be eaten, otherwise it has to be disposed as radioactive contaminated.
With Fukushima, it was increadible luck that e.g. Tokyo didn't get contaminated. The consequences if that had happened don't need to be described. So far, most of the contamination ended up in the ocean, the pacific ocean is really large, so the contamination got quite diluted. We don't know though, whether it doesn't come back to haunt us in some so far unexpected way.
Can we get a citation on the unsafe food in Germany from Chernobyl? That flies in the face of a lot of current progress in understanding the health effects of low-dose radiation. Precisely how high above natural background radiation levels is the stuff in Germany?
The short version is, that mushrooms accumulate cesium-137 which contaminates the soil in Bavarian forests. Equally affected are animals eating the mushrooms, mainly wild boar.
I'm going to save everyone some time here. acidburnNSA is a reactor scientist (he pops up in most of these nuclear threads). He's leading you on because your information is bad. Fact is that food didn't get to dangerous levels. (I'd trust the domain expert)
Pulling from __ph__'s link (and a google translate).
> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms containing 3,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram results in a load of 0.008 millisieverts.
This corresponds to the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria.
> In Germany, it is not permitted to market foods with a radio cesium content of more than 600 becquerels per kilogram. For self-consumption, this restriction does not apply.
(may notice here how overly cautious we tend to be with radioactive dosages.)
> If venison or wild mushrooms are consumed in normal amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low, but avoidable.
To summarize the article:
Wild mushrooms and some wild life may have higher than normal radiation levels. Take caution if you intend to consume vast amounts of quantities. You'll probably be fine, but why risk? If you are only taking "normal" amounts then there is no concern.
The website I linked is the federal agency for nuclear safety.
Depends entirely what you mean by "dangerous levels". It is contaminated enough, that mushrooms from the forests are not allowed to be sold as food. Yes, a single serving won't have a significant impact on your health, but it is recommended not to eat much of them. The situation is worse with some wild boar, which eat a lot of those mushrooms and accumulate cesioum over many years.
And perhaps a relevant information: the Bavarian forests are about 600 miles from the Chernobyl site.
Dangerous levels has an exact definition. The EU sets them at 20mSv/yr. To put that in perspective, 1Sv is equivalent to a 5% increase in chance of getting cancer during your lifetime (granted, that dose needs to be spread out). So you can see that they keep it REALLY low. Extra safety is used because they use the linear no-threshold model. Yes, the model is linear so you can extrapolate easily.
Those levels that acidburn was talking about, mentioned in the article, are REALLY low. The reason government is overly cautious with radiation is 1) fear 2) you can't control sources so you say "if we set this threshold we'll never put anyone in danger even if they take in large amounts from other sources that we can't control."
Remember, each of those 200g of mushrooms (which looks like an upper limit of measurement, not average nor lower) is like a 5hr plane ride in a non-northern route (8uSv). People take plane rides worse than that several times a week and are safe. (see below for ridiculousness of this "danger")
You also realize that over time these things degrade, right? Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test).
Side note:
200g mushrooms = 0.008mSv (upper limit)
20mSv/(0.008mSv)*200g = 500kg of mushrooms.
That's how many you would need to eat in a year to get to the legal limit. Let's be real here, this is just a ridiculous amount of mushrooms that you have to consume within a year. That's over a kilo a day.
Note that this limit used to also be 50mSv for radiation workers. Astronauts are allowed much more.
tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet.
>You also realize that over time these things degrade, right?
Yes, with a half-time of 30 years.
>Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials.
We are talking about radioactive isotopes. Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions
>You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test).
No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.
>tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet.
It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.
First off, fix your formatting. This is hard to read. You need two new lines to form one in HN, but it kinda looks like you already know that.
> Yes, with a half-time of 30 years.
Biological half lives tend to be A LOT shorter. It is something like 90 days in humans (for Cesium). There's also the uptake rate, which IIRC is about 10%.
> Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions
Oh, sorry. I didn't realize that radiation means that electrons will no longer form bonds. That's really interesting. But I have a question. This being true, can you tell me how we get solids? Or are you saying that radioactive materials can only bind to other materials with similar radioactive properties? I can tell you that I never learned this in any of many physics classes nor while I was working as a radiation researcher. If this is a new study done by you I'm excited to see you win the Nobel. Really groundbreaking work.
> No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.
10% uptake, shorter biological half life. This isn't a system with positive feedback. The more degrees the more dilution. The Cs is in the ground, mushrooms eat that (1 degree), boars eat that (2 degrees), humans eat that (3 degrees). Minimum. We are assuming that the Cs is just laying nicely and not being diluted by worms and bugs before it is absorbed by the mushrooms.
> It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.
You're pulling from much more than that article. Your domain experts in this thread are breaking down that official information and explaining what things mean (note, neither of us have disputed it). For example, what is a Sievert? How dangerous is it? How much is safe? Can this be explained in a way without years of studying atomic physics and nuclear medicine?
What you're doing is reading that and saying "Look how dangerous this stuff is!" We're looking at it and saying "Ah cool, so as long as I don't eat 500 kilos of wild mushrooms in a year I'll be good". There's a big difference between these two points of view. But again, I'm not disputing what is in that documentation. I am drawing from it to demonstrate how safe things are.
Then you'd have to count all the accidents on every scientific and military reactor, not discounting naval reactors and especially in the early times, up until ~1975.
Can I remind you that that's almost 60 years ago and we're not talking about military?
I disagree. In the public mind, Windscale isn't distinguished as a military accident; a power station was on the same site and the accident caused great public concern. It might be 60 years ago but it is still part of the PR legacy that affects nuclear energy in the UK today.
1: France is 75% nuclear and has some of the cheapest electricity.
2: there are a ton of small reactor designs that would be substantially cheaper and quicker to build. Problem is that you can't get them out of research labs.
The way mining works is that when the price goes up due to demand, mines are opened on new and existing deposits.
Uranium is not very expensive right now, so a lot of mines have closed or mothballed. That doesn't mean there's any shortage of the stuff. Australia's known reserves are enormous. Throw a dart at a map of northern Australia and you'll probably hit an orebody.
France is phasing out its nuclear fleet and plans to have retired 1/3 of it by 2025.
Its only new NPP under construction, Flammanville, is 9 years over schedule and over 300% over budget. It is still not certain when it will open due to safety defects that are still being evaluated.
That’s not what happens with next-gen renewables —- they are modular and can be built much faster and much cheaper.
New build nuclear is not cost competitive with new build wind and solar (even when you account for firming costs), and the cost of wind and solar is still falling at an astonishing rate.
> New build nuclear is not cost competitive with new build wind and solar (even when you account for firming costs), and the cost of wind and solar is still falling at an astonishing rate.
The future will tell, as it is now, Germany already spent more on renewable than the total French nuclear industry, even when you add decommissioning and with the bad results we know. Maybe countries should learn on the German mistakes? Also the renewables built to replace the nuclear plants in France are pointed out for being far over-budget as well.
The cost studies for renewable tend to remove a lot of external costs in order to make them appear cheaper than they are.
Germany already spent more on renewable than the total French nuclear industry
Source? What does that even mean? Where'd you find an honest assessment of the regulatory and construction costs for France's nuclear power plants, much less a sensible estimate for decommissioning plants that are still running? Does it include research and development in either case? Does it include maintenance, personnel, fuel, cleanup, storage of spent fuel both temporarily and long term?
Germany spent around around 250 billions euros since 2005 on renewables [1]. The french nuclear energy (total) had a cost of 228 billions euros [2]. Renewables are not nearly as cheap as people make you believe, they do have a lot of external costs.
Electricity in France is not "one of the cheapest", it is average in Europe and quickly rising. Moreover part of the total related costs (R&D...) was historically paid by the taxpayer. Future decommission and waste-management costs may lead to a financial disaster.
Others were buried like the SSFL. No doubt many more events buried like soviet submarines. Deaths within a few weeks don’t count all the cancer deaths in the area for generations.
I’m in favor of nuclear research and improvements, but let’s be honest.
This! Totally correct. Check out the a mount of coal the UK is using for energy generation right now: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk - tiny amounts and that will only get smaller.
So in other words, nuclear is the faster way to slash GHG emissions... if you can reform the US nuclear regulatory regime. And how long do you suppose that will take to push through Congress?
In the meantime, we can put out an RFP for a new wind project today and have it online in a year.
Something that depends on hypothetical political developments in a country that shuts down its government because of political gridlock a couple of times a year cannot reasonably be described as the fastest way to do anything.
The US cannot do infrastructure, or really any serious investment, period. Our laughable incompetance would seriously hinder any strategy. With other strategies, that is one of many impedements. With nuclear that is the only impedement.
Hopefully US figures that our rampent cost diesese on sll the things is just embarrassing, and we need a "time out", a throwing away of the actuarial pessimism, and a command economy "probation" in these important matters. Get the costs under control, and then we earn the right to do capitalism for essential goods again.
I don't think it's incompetence, it's a lack of political will. On energy, entrenched interests win out through regulatory capture and lobbying. On other infrastructure issues, most people and politicians simply don't care. Maybe once we get to a few bridge collapse per week.
Bingo. This is simply a political problem and nothing else. FUD and "not-in-my-backyard!" reigns supreme when it comes to the final approval process.
As things currently stand, no group of politicians could survive the political fallout of getting a reactor build in their district. How can anything get done if doing so buys you unemployment from the ultimate cushy job of being an elected representative?
Also, no one, not even the most ardent supporters, really wants a reactor built anywhere near them or their kids playgrounds. The anti-nuke-power crowd has just done too good a job on the older generation to ever hope things can change for them.
Let's hope the Millennials can do a better job getting these things built.
First: I'm not anti-nuclear. It's tons cleaner than coal, and coal kills people every year.
But, if nat gas, wind, and solar are cheaper and faster to bring online, and can be build at pretty much any scale we want from single household to freaking huge, why would we build nuclear?
That is untrue. The Vogtle 3 and 4 construction project has received $12 billion in federal loan guarantees over the last ten years. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/reuters-america-update-1-u-s... The project is a complete clusterfuck and I think the cost overruns is about 300% or so of original estimates. The evidence clearly shows that US politicians love nuclear power. Despite that love they can't get nuclear reactors built. That is telling!
My comment was more in regards to infrastructure in general, not necessarily nuclear in particular. However, even there you're not completely right. Regardless of how much has been spent on failed/failing projects, many of these began their planning a decade or more in the past. Now, the tide has pretty much turned against nuclear power. More people oppose it than support it [0]
IMHO that's exactly wrong. The problem is far too much will, and not enough competence. This is the second forum where I've seen a "not enough will" comment, despite it making no sense when you look at the history of the excessive amounts of capital thrown unproductively at the task.
Nuclear has some amazing lobbying going for it, amazing backers that will throw away billions of tens of billions of dollars into black pits of construction hell, despite knowing the rate of so many construction projects before it. And they take this massive risk without the possibility of VC like upsides; the financial upside of nuclear is minesxule compared to the massive risk of building. It makes no financial sense to any rational person.
No, the problem is certainly not a lack of will. The problem is that those pushing nuclear don't know how to build it. They like the idea, but don't have the skills and can't hire people with the skills. Nuclear construction is all a game of raking in some contracting cash and making sure that when the inevitable lawsuit comes due to failed construction, your side doesn't lose.
As I said in my other reply, my comment was more in regards to infrastructure in general, not necessarily nuclear in particular. However, even there you're not completely right. Regardless of how much has been spent on failed/failing projects, many of these began their planning a decade or more in the past. Now, the tide has pretty much turned against nuclear power. More people oppose it than support it [0]
I don’t know much about how things work in other nations, but in the US, the government is not as readily liberal with the necessary subsidies. When you consider the slow motion train crash that is Vogtie, you can see the issue. Government doesn’t want to out and out pay for everything, so they set up structures that actually turn out to be more problematic than simply handing over 50 billion would be.
> It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time.
"The estimated cost of the remaining border wall segments are between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million." [1]
"The total investment for the stellarator itself over 1997–2014 amounted to €370 million, while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (personnel and material resources) amounted to [$1.2 billion USD] for that 18-year period." [2]
If ITER were augmented with a blanket and turbine to turn its gross fusion output into electrical power at 40% efficiency, the cost would be just ~$100/W(e), or two orders of magnitude higher than PV. Even adjusting for capacity factor (stipulating the fusion reactor at 100%), it would be ludicrously uncompetitive.
Part of the reason for this is just how massive ITER is. The power density of the reactor is 0.05 MW/m^3, some 400 times lower than the power density of the reactor vessel of a commercial PWR.
It's a really complex machine and it hasn't been designed to produce any electricity yet. So it's a fusion experiment and not a power plant. The hope is that this device leads to another one which might be able to sustain operation and produce electricity. But how much will that cost? Will one be able to mass produce such a machine at competitive costs? Will we see larger and smaller designs?
"Nuclear is expensive in the U.S." seems like an inadequate rebuttal to an article that spends so much time explaining why it's expensive in the U.S. and how to fix it.
Some countries are able to do nuclear at much lower cost, e.g. South Korea.
> clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers
What is the fastest, new renewable power capacity any country has at any time build, in added W/year/capita? In both nominal and actual power generation? Or the fastest you can see or hope will happen in near future?
Sweden built 10850MW nuclear in 20 years from 1965 to 1985. This means about 68W per year per capita. How do the already existing, and potential future endeavors in building renewal capacity compare to this number?
The number is nominal, but for nuclear I'd guess the actual long term power output is about 90% of the nominal.
The only reason there are commercial nuclear power plants in the USA is because their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant by the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...).
Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.
I think the insurers have a good point. And that's why I don't think we should subject our civilian population to risks which the experts in risk (actuaries) have decided are so bad that they refused to touch them.
>their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant [...] The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.
Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but something like slightly increasing the rate of cancer doesn't get any punishment because the damage is so spread out and not worthwhile to prosecute/sue. Given this, I would argue that coal power plants also have their liabilities "artificially limited".
Alright sure. Coal is also a terrible idea for energy and we also shouldn't be having coal.
Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear.
In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in the lifetime of the plant compared to things like wind.
Pennsylvania had a bill recently to keep some nuclear plants open... It would involve an increase in the cost of electricity because it's more expensive.
That's why investors have run away from it. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are increasingly cheaper and easier to deploy and scale and the future trajectories heavily favor them.
The only thing nuclear has is a centralization of power, capital, control, and ownership. You have one robber baron waving his scepter over the entire energy consuming public because nuclear is extraordinarily centralized. It keeps energy being run as feudal monarchies and that's a power the industry doesn't want to cede.
I used to work on design of onshore wind farms. Protecting the public was as simple as measuring the distance to the closest road or building. So that if the turbine failed catastrophically it would not hurt anyone. Add a big red flashing light and aviation is safe. Compare this to nuclear where you need to understand an incredibly complex machine and how it interacts with an unpredictable environment and people. And you need to employ expensive nuclear engineers and scientists to do the work, and then check the work repeatedly. Sounds expensive!
I would love it if nuclear energy could be a success. But why not do wind/solar/battery as well in the meantime.
I certainly agree that large power companies can be unfair to the public. Particularly when renewables has such big upfront costs. It's like renting a house, paying off someone else's mortgage, and never getting to own anything. However, there is a huge benefit in connecting large generators because they are connected to the high voltage transmission system. Power can be exported to where it is needed. In comparison generation that is attached to low voltage networks are more limited in how much can be exported longer distance. Battery storage in particular is much more versatile when used at the grid level.
If there were proper funding into nuclear plants, why wouldn't there also be some kind of reduction in price as new technologies are improved, like we are seeing with renewables?
What about those molten salt thorium reactors from a few years ago that promised we could basically burn dirt to power our cities for forever?
Nuclear has always been subsidized. Way more than renewables and many times that of fossil fuels.
Over $89 billion has been dumped in to it. That's like 20 companies the size of Lyft or Airbnb and it still performs and delivers poorly. How much more do you want?
Maybe, just maybe, it's a fundamentally bad technology and we can do better than nuclear.
Exactly, people can't agree on basic stuff that will help people at a small scale. This is beyond a technical problem but more a problem with a disfunctional processes. We could solve lots of current problems if there was the collective will to.
seems like air travel, a crash in Siberia with 57 victims makes world news. 1200 car crashes and deaths at the same period don't. (made the numbers up but air travel is much safer)
It's exactly like air travel. We use that analogy in the industry all the time. The question for me is, OK so how did the airline industry make most people ok with it? And does that work for nuclear public education too? It's funny, people who live near nuclear plants are very significantly more supportive of nuclear plants. Anecdotally, I grew up 9 miles from an operating plant and love them.
If this interests you, I would highly recommend reading this article on molten salt reactors [0].
TL;DR: Molten salt reactors are safer (can't have a meltdown if it's already melted), smaller (could fit on the back of a truck), able to run on more abundant materials like Thorium (which in turn come from more politically stable regions), and to top it all off: not only do they leave much less nuclear waste, they can actually use up current nuclear waste, turning it into much less harmful and shorter lived stuff in the process!
Also, Mike Shellenberger [1] is a great proponent of nuclear power and has some great points on why the current focus on renewables is damaging. Well worth the follow on Twitter.
The point about meltdowns is cute, but probably wrong; the insurance against meltdown is a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity, if I understand correctly. In other words, the thermal expansion drives the fuel out into the piping as the reaction heats up, away from the compact reacting core, and also reduces the density in the core, allowing more neutrons to escape.
All reactors have negative temperature coefficients of reactivity, including LWRs (the water moderator boils away), SFRs (the core thermally expands), and MSRs (the fuel density decreases). The key to avoiding radiation leakage out of any nuclear plant is decay heat removal [1]. If you can passively remove decay heat, your reactor is very safe. MSRs do this easily, as do other reactors with low-pressure coolants (like sodium metal-cooled reactors).
The advantage of MSRs is not that they can't melt down (or that they could use thorium; that's vastly overhyped), it's that there's no volatile material in the containment building.
The containment of a LWR has to be large because it fills with radioactive steam in an accident. It has to be able to contain this steam, which means at least a certain amount of structure to withstand its pressure.
But MSRs don't use water as a coolant. They circulate salt in and out of the building. They can be designed to remain at low pressure even in a bad accident, just from heat transfer that occurs from thermal radiation at elevated temperature. As a result, the cost of the containment could be as much as 1/5th that of a LWR.
Unfortunately, MSRs are not available today, and likely will not be for decades (especially if new materials must be qualified; no one will buy an MSR if there is any question about the materials not lasting their projected lifespans.) By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable.
I'm pretty convinced that they're worth working on today because in 20 years when we have vast renewable deployment we'll either have solved the storage/intermittency problem with no unexpected environmental or economic costs, or we'll desperately need advanced nuclear. It's kind of a Pascal's Wager type of thing: worst case if you work on advanced reactors is that you learn new things about reactors and maybe they'll be useful in deep space (far from the sun). Worse case if you don't work on advanced reactors is you get screwed by climate change when running into logistical issues with renewable intermittency.
Yes. MSRs are an insurance policy in case renewables suddenly stop getting cheaper. They might have niche uses (very high latitudes, actinide destruction), but that won't be earthshattering if we don't have it.
> By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable.
You're posting this and statements like it all over this thread without a lot of supporting evidence that indicates very strong probability of it happening. Hacker News currently has a highly-ranked article on the main page regarding how there are massive battery and energy storage problems, and this particular issue is raised weekly here and in the news.
Why are you so optimistic that seemingly significant blockers will be for sure eliminated in the short decades to come?
The reason to be optimistic about renewables is they have a proven track record of improvement. These experience curve effects are somewhat mysterious, but they've been shown to occur in a wide variety of industries.
Solar has declined in price by 20% (or perhaps a bit more) for each doubling of cumulative production. This empirical observation has been sustained over a history during which solar's cost has declined by more than two orders of magnitude. Wind has showed similar learning effects.
Nuclear, on the other hand, has not shown consistent experience effects (or, arguably, any, if one discard as unreliable the numbers from South Korea).
Talk is cheap, but renewables have actually demonstrated, in the real world, that they get cheaper as they are built out (and, if anything, the learning rate has increased recently). Nuclear proponents are hanging the future of their technology on the assumption, unsupported by much of anything, that these real world trends will suddenly switch places.
Yes, for reactors operating at atmospheric pressure like MSR or metal cooled reactors, the containment building is much cheaper. And by not needing stuff that stands up to 15 MPa, you can frickin' stamp out the reactors from sheet metal. Well, not quite, but a lot simpler and faster than building large pressure vessels capable of LWR pressures with 25cm thick walls.
While it would certainly be welcome to get our electricity from something more modern than steam engines, it is also important to note that fundamental material science breakthroughs are required to actually build these things.
Molten salt reactors are interesting but more in the context of funding research than how we should put together the energy mix of a country. Especially considering how much funding fusion power have gotten, which is still in the basic physics stage and things like materials breakdown and heat transport is largely not even a known problem yet.
Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion.
A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that)
Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you realize that once we double or triple the number of reactors, accidents will be so frequent, that the public wont stand for additional expansion within the time it takes to build more reactors.
We need 10x nuclear to solve global warming. Thats a major accident every 3 years or so. Yes, Nuclear can be made safer, but probably not by as much as needed. Even a country like Japan, who has high safety standards, and a historical heritage of nuclear fallout, has had an accident, and most new reactors are likely to be built by China who has less then stellar safety record.
Just a month before Chernobyl happened, the staff at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II in Idaho successfully demonstrated something new and incredible: passive shutdown. They had the reactor at full power and killed the pumps. It shut down and started cooling itself with natural circulation (no external/backup power needed). No control rods were inserted. This state would last indefinitely. Then they did it again, this time cutting off the heat sink. Same result [1]. This was the ultimate energy source. But we all turned our backs on this team. Clinton cut funding in '94 and the reactor shut down.
Advanced low-pressure reactors can do this, and eliminating loss-of-decay-heat-removal accidents takes the probability of a large early release well into the 10^-7 or even 10^-8 range according to probabilistic risk assessments.
So even though nuclear is, by the actuarial tables, almost as safe as you can get in energy systems, you're right that the public opinion is a big hurdle and that Fukushimas are not acceptable. These low-pressure designs get us there, and it's been demonstrated.
Molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, and some gas cooled reactors all have this capability. It's basically the main event of what the nuclear industry called Gen IV reactors [2].
Normal reactors do shut down when the power fails. the control rods lose power and fall in. The hard part is cooling the reactor afterwards due to nuclear decay heat. Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this. This works fine until you out your diesel in the basement in a tsumani zone. Ebr-2 can shut down without CR insertion (crazy robust, CRs always go in) and then can cool itself without external power.
We'll have to go deeper in to the history and physics. The first reactor was passively cooled by air. It was very low power and didn't split very many atoms, so the nuclear decay heat was low after shutdown. Many reactors have been made that cool with natural circulation of air or water but they're all low power. Quickly, the Manhattan Project came along and the military wanted enough plutonium to make an atomic bomb to fight the Nazis. They built a reactor that could do this out at Hanford (the B reactor). They realized that to make enough plutonium, they'd have to increase the rates of the reactions that produce it. This required splitting more atoms, which released more heat, which required more cooling. They quickly went past the regime where it was possible to use natural circulation with the known coolants at the time (air, water) so they used forced flow, eventually passing the heat into the Columbia River.
Fast forward to the 1950s. Admiral Rickover wants nuclear powered submarines to effectively fight the Russians in the Cold War. Submarines are small but want high power, on the order of a few hundred megawatts. This puts them beyond natural circ decay heat removal regime for air and water. So he builds them, and installs appropriate redundant backup systems.
Now Eisenhower has given the Atoms for Peace speech and the commercial industry is starting. They can build a compact high power reactor or large low power reactor (recall it's a heat removal issue). They choose compact, high-power one modeled after the Naval reactors. They were running great and had a whole supply chain. The low-power ones would be orders of magnitude more expensive per kWh.
Meanwhile, starting in the late 1940s and continuing for a few decades, exotic-coolant reactors were developed, with things like Mercury, liquid sodium metal, molten salt, organics, aqueous homogeneous slurry, etc. These reactors can do high power compact cores with passive natural circ. Many were built and operated. But they remained exotic and underdeveloped. The Navy and commercial nukes had built up an infrastructure and experience base. Exotic reactors were more expensive and the LWRs were fine instead of passively-cooled ones.
Today, dozens of startup companies have dug up the paperwork on these exotic reactors and are rushing to try to develop them and associated supply chains to build them cheaply.
So that's how we ended up with the reactors we have.
Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure.
Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few people e.g. from ice throw and falling off roofs).
Radioactive? Ok, fission products are radioactive. Can't argue with that.
Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
>Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby
No, he's just safely away from any fallout, hugely optimistic, naive about government competence and private sector morality (e.g. in cutting corners), and perfectly fine to rush technology and just wait and see the consequences and let the second order effects and externalities be suffered by others (which has nothing to do with science per se)...
> Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure.
Old as in "outdated".
> hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident
Yeah flooding are surely more dramatic than a slow death through cancer, I give you that...and it's such a good selling point isn't it? You just can't see it or put a finger on it. Some numbers are far less dramatic then a flood. Too bad Netflix comes with that documentary on Chernobyl now. Need to pay for some more op-eds to cover that up.
> Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
Do you have to be part of the lobby if you take the money? And I doubt it came from Goldstein or his publishers just to promote his book. The timing of the whole nuclear hype is just too coincidental.
Nuclear hype is timeless, it's caused by the fact that there are 2 million times more Joules in each kg of uranium than in any chemical fuel. This natural resource is astounding, and it's a very human thing to try to put it to work for the good of humankind.
Anti-nuclear media is also status quo. The industry has been dealing with it for decades. I don't think the HBO thing is going to tip the scale too much. There are documentaries about plane crashes too, yet we still fly.
The key point I don't think you granted me is that the numbers are in, and nuclear is definitively and quantitatively a very safe form of energy. Certainly the perception is not in line with this, but if you look at the numbers it's clear.
The only timeless thing about nuclear is the the waste. Something many future generations can have to be pissed about us.
Nobody was talking about nuclear for years before that new hype started a few months ago and suddenly it's allover the place. Come on...
> Thus we have a public education issue.
No we don't and painting the opposition to the hype as stupid or uneducated only hurts nuclear. It's been a constant mistake by the nuclear lobby throughout their history and it's one more reason why the hype will fail in the end. The lobby can scream as loud as they want it won't be louder as the rapid development in renewables and the unwillingness of the whole world to invest into a dead technology nobody outside the hype wants. The investors jumped off already years ago. Get over it.
There are hundreds of millions of dollars per year going into advanced nuclear from big investors right now in the USA. Check out Kairos, USNC, TerraPower, etc.
I am not painting opposition as stupid. I'm painting the general public as unaware that nuclear is statistically quite safe compared with almost all other energy sources.
There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.
> There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.
You have to be kidding me. Even if you somehow missed the recent hype driven by people like Michael Shellenberger, you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".
> Why would you even invest in anything that looks like that?
You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear. I suspect you'll hear something about how nuclear can produce low-footprint 24/7 carbon-free energy in sites all over the world.
Certainly I wouldn't expect a traditional investor to invest in nuclear to make a buck. It's mostly people who are trying to build a safe and prosperous world and believe nuclear can help us get there.
> you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".
Sure I can. This industry has no pure-nuclear stakeholders. All the owner/operators are utilities, which have vast fossil, wind, solar resources to operate. The utility executives don't give two shoots about nuclear, they only see bottom lines in current markets. Among the vendors, GE is largely divesting from nuclear to make gas and wind turbines. I've seen pro-nuclear advertising, but only in France. I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA. You see wind and natural gas ads all over the damn place. If there were a functional nuclear lobby, you could probably point me to at least one pro-nuclear advertisement on TV. Can you?
I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:
* https://mothersfornuclear.org/ -- a bunch of moms who worked at nuclear plants and wanted to tell people that they were actually good
* Seattle Friends of Fission: https://seattlefof.org/ -- a couple local grandparents who heard about nuclear wanted to spread the news of its low-carbon capabilities to other Seattle environmentalists.
* https://whatisnuclear.com -- a bunch of ~2006-era nuclear graduates who were trying to spread information about nuclear to help with climate change. Disclaimer: I founded this one so I know the story very well.
* https://energyfromthorium.com/ -- a NASA tech named Kirk in Alabama who read an old book, got crazy excited, single-handedly rallied thousands of people with excitement about thorium, started a company, and recently got awarded a DOE voucher to develop his tech. If you've heard of Thorium, it's because of this guy, and it's about as grassroots as it gets.
The actual nuclear lobby group (NEI) is funded almost entirely by utilities who will rarely allow them to explain nuclear advantages over either fossil or renewables (because all the stakeholders have interests in those). They do good work, but it's not as targeted or hard-hitting as you might expect from a typical lobby group.
> You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear.
I would but they are probably not likely to talk about it anymore. Because...you know...it went so well ;)
> I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA.
Sure you did. You comment underneath it. People like Michael Shellenberger need to be payed too.
Btw, thanks for giving even more arguments to why nuclear is on the away out in this paragraph.
> I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:
Omg lol. The first two look like this John Oliver episode about fake grassroots pages. I mean what is this?
whatisnuclear is a guy who works for TerraPower.
> a few Minnesota folks who learned about nuclear and dedicated their efforts to it
I'm sure they are making nationwide impact paying for NYT and WP op-eds no wait...they probably are just like you and those fan boys here and not even relevant to the topic.
And last but not least THE NASA (uhuuuu!) guy with his "just around the corner" Thorium Reactor touring tedX talks I'm sure he has absolutely no money left to pay for this hype too.
So I don't know what you point was with this hilarious list but you seem to have missed mine and as I'm on cool down here for my contribution against this circle jerk, please consider reading my posts slowly so your answers make it worth being regarded.
In the US, public opinion has nearly nothing to do with the lack of new construction. The problem is far simpler here: nobody can build a reactor reliably without going vastly over budget, or off schedule. Going off schedule also means going off budget because costs are front loaded over the 40-60 year lifespan and therefore every year of delay costs massive amounts of interest.
There are plenty of viable sites for nuclear in the US where the local population is eager and willing, usually where there's already a nuclear power plant and it forms a strong economic force for the area. The NRC can't wait to approve more reactors and is doing its best to come up with new ways to certify safety.
So why wasn't nuclear built? Project management failures in the 1970s, combined with utility management far overestimating demand, led to a glut of reactors that were gigantic losses for those trying to build them. This was happening before TMI and Chernobyl turned more public opinion against nuclear. There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment, but the massive financial losses taught the money guys to stay the hell away from nuclear.
Fast forward to the 2000s, there's a renewed push to build more reactors, especially as the current fleet ages and will need to be retired. Nobody wants to do it, because of massive financial risk for little gain. Finally, regulatory capture of the Georgia and North Carolina state legislatures enables bills so that the utitlties socialize all risks of construction failure into their ratepayers, while keeping the profits privatized. Only in that remarkable situation would any utility be willing to take on the insane risk of trying to build a reactor. Four were attempted, two have been abandoned, and North Carolina electricity customers pay something like an average of $20/month on their bill for reactors that will never get completed. Georgia is behind schedule, 2x-3x over budget at the moment, with no end in sight of the cost overruns.
So it's not public opinion that kills nuclear, it's nuclear construction that kills nuclear, at least in the US. We do not build massive projects well, and it blows out any sort of competitive nature for nuclear.
Even if nuclear costs 5x renewables stored in energy, there may still be a financial case for it being a part of a grid, just as peaker plants right now cost much more than, say, combined cycle gas turbines. But it seems unlikely that the massive GW+ reactors of yore will be attempted again any time soon. "Small" modular reactors in the 50MW range will be attempted next, even though in the past these were disregarded as too small to be cost effective. We shall see what their costs end up being, but the best I've been able to glean from news articles is that it's about the cost of Vogtle's new construction in Georgia, I.e. not going to be price competitive with batters and renewables in 10-15 years.
Building nuclear right now is a massively expensive bet on a technology that gets more expensive the more experience we have with it. Meanwhile it's competitors are getting cheaper every day. There may be a spot for it in the future grid, but only if it's boosters focus on nuclear's true problems rather than wasting effort on excuses that are not truly blocking the tech.
Part of this came down to the logic of pursuing economies of scale. It costs a lot to build a 750MW plant, but not twice as much to build a 1500MW plant. So the utilities leaned towards bigger plants (for everything, not just nuclear).
But bigger plants take longer, overall. That means you need more capacity in the development pipeline, because you're forecasting that the market is growing. Soon you're needing to have finance and regulatory movement for multiple gigawatts of capacity at all times to keep up with what you think is coming.
If you then find you've overshot demand, you are in an ugly position.
Utilities that did the "dumb" thing and prioritised smaller plants, which are ostensibly more expensive per kwh, tended to do better because they didn't need to tie up so much capital at any given time. Bringing a gigawatt online in five years as a single plant is very different from bringing 200MW a year online. Especially if it turns out in the third year that 600MW was as much as the market wanted to buy.
Yes, that's a great point to bring up. Nuclear, as it's been deployed so far, doesn't scale very well. In contrast, renewables are deplorable at basically any scale desired, without nearly as many one time costs. Transmission is the biggie, of course, but nuclear has the same issue when it's trying to connect the grid to a gigantic thermal dump like a river or ocean.
No, nuclear is sadly not a viable solution, due to cost. If nuclear were affordable it would be pushed through regardless of opposition. But it has just not worked out.
The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were just unable to execute.
This failure should not have been a surprise, as it mirrored what happened in the last big nuclear construction boom. That didn't stop because of accidents; it stopped because the nuclear plants in that boom experienced substantial cost overruns (i.e., the nuclear vendors were not honest about what the technology would actually cost.)
To be fair, the US never did any of the things that we now know make nuclear cheap. Standard design, experienced workforce, established supply chain. Until we try those things you can't quite say Lucy has been pulling the football.
There's a really awesome way of getting all this: build nuclear reactors in shipyards.
Electricity in France is not "one of the cheapest", it is average in Europe and quickly rising. Moreover part of the total related costs (R&D...) was historically paid by the taxpayer. Future decommission and waste-management costs may lead to a financial disaster (take a look at decommission costs in the UK).
Olkiluoto was not an exercise to make nuclear power affordable. The company was granted with a permission to build a single reactor, the first permit in decades, so they chose the most powerful one available, a first of its kind.
With all the overruns, it has certainly proved to be an expensive build. However, it's all been done with private money, unlike the so called cheap renewables that cost the public hundreds of millions in subsidies.
Hey, downvoter. You forgot to name yourself as to who we should look up to. In any case, I'll dedicate an extra litre of petrol for you -- hope it was worth it! (I hope you understand why you "greens" don't fare so well when it comes to elections -- you don't have a message to stand on!)
Can you please not post dross comments to HN? They break the site guidelines in many ways. It would be great if you're review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart.
Thorium is an alternate fuel that can be used in breeder reactors with fast or slow neutrons. It's particularly well-suited for thermal breeders, which work best in fluid fuel systems. Fluid fuel systems (like the now internet-famed Molten Salt Reactor) have lots of great capabilities that fall into the broader category of Gen-IV nuclear reactors (near infinite sustainability, super-safe, reduced waste, higher temperature, etc.).
There was some internet hype for a while that Thorium was a end-all/be-all but those were slightly misguided in the sense that all Gen-IV reactors are end-all/be-alls. The Thorium itself had very little to do with it. It was an attempt at rebranding nuclear. As a nuclear engineer I prefer precision and promote all Gen-IV stuff including Th-fueled ones. Maybe I should have gone with the rebrand.
Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic.
Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need to be managed for thousands of years.
The consensus solution to nuclear waste is to put it in geologic repositories where it will be safely out of the biosphere until well after it decays to stability.
This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change.
As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.
Is there any geologic repository in existance and operating though? At least in Europe, I am aware of none. Even worse, the one in Germany, which was used for a limited amount of waste (Schachtanlage Asse) got flooded by water and the cleanup cost of that has been estimated to be 6 billion. If there are no cost overruns...
>As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person
You'd be surprised:
By October several thousand shipments were illegally dumped at the landfill in north St. Louis County, in violation of federal standards; they contained an estimated 43,000 tons of radioactive uranium processing wastes and contaminated soil. (...) No strangers to advanced statistical tools, within two years, Wright, an accountant, and Schanzenbach, an economics professor at Northwestern University, documented 700 cases of cancers and immune system diseases within a four-square-mile area. Some of these cancers have a one-in-a-million chance of occurring. (...) Wright and Schanzenbach updated their survey and reported in August 2015 that the number of diseases, including rare cancers, had increased to 2,725 cases.
Or how about:
A few days before I visited the rather scruffy Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, southern Italy, a boy aged 11 arrived complaining of headaches. Doctors feared the worst – and sure enough, he was rapidly diagnosed as another child with brain cancer. Some of these young patients arrive in agonising pain, others mystified by falling over all the time; they do not know that lethal tumours are swelling up inside their heads. Yet more turn up with cancer in their blood, their bones, their bladders. There are so many cases that not all can be treated in the hospitals of Campania, a largely rural region. (...) Tosti explained that the Mafia dumped huge quantities of contaminated industrial waste there, then obtained backdated permission for their actions. (...) A criminal investigation was launched 18 months ago, but local people do not expect convictions. This was far from an isolated incident. (...) There are thousands of similar dumps all over this once-paradisiacal slice of Italy: in canals and caves, in quarries and wells, under fields and hills, beneath roads and properties.
Or worse:
Fonti said he had been involved in sinking three vessels, and that the 'Ndrangheta made millions of pounds illegally dumping radioactive and other toxic waste from businesses in Italy and other parts of Europe. A regional prosecutor, Bruno Giordano, said that if the exploration of the wreck does produce evidence of toxic waste, authorities will start a hunt for more sunken vessels. They believe there could be up to 32 in Italian waters. The introduction of more stringent environmental legislation in the 1980s made illegal waste disposal a lucrative business for organised crime groups in Italy. "The problem of ships loaded with radioactive waste and sunk deliberately is an Italian mystery that should have been resolved years ago," said Ermete Realacci, an opposition MP.
Acute high-dose radiation is a significant health hazard. We know this from atomic bomb survivors, the Chernobyl first-responders, and some other instances, and it's horrible.
However, lots of people have gone around into low radiation zones and found really sick people with horrible diseases, and claimed it was linked to the radiation. What they haven't done is linked those diseases to low-dose radiation with anything near scientific rigor. It's very often just confirmation bias. "There's low-dose radiation here, and cancer, therefore low-dose radiation caused this cancer."
I'm not saying we have enough data to show that low-dose radiation causes no cancer. It just doesn't cause an easily-measurable amount, if any. A counterexample is places like Ramsar, Iran, where the natural background radiation is 80x higher than average. Would you guess that the cancer rate is higher than average?
Generation III+ reactors are orders of magnitude safer than everything else that was built before the turn of the century. China is actually leading the charge right now, with AP1000 reactors under construction. One of the plants just went live last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station
The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.
> The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.
Early reactors were hailed as paragons of safety too. Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops.
I mean, look. It's... fine. Go nuclear. I agree with you, that these are probably safe designs and are probably not going to poison anyone due to misanalyzed failure modes. Nuclear is carbon free power and preferable to coal and gas for sure.
But in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants and handle the grid buffering with batteries, I just don't care much anymore. If we run out of ridgeline real estate and still need more power, we'll call you.
The US doesn't "need" to do anything with nuclear, at all. The nuclear industry (and its geek proponents here on HN) needs to find a way to make itself worthwhile on a balance sheet.
> in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants and handle the grid buffering with batteries
I notice you left the batteries out of your cost comparison with natural gas. Building enough battery for a carbon-free grid without fossil backup is not so cheap.
Nuclear is "not so cheap" either. But even wind and solar with legacy plants for peaking (i.e. something we can do right now without citing fantasy vaportech) is a relatively affordable 80% solution. Nuclear doesn't clear even that bar as it stands.
> Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops.
Yeah, and then they installed the backups below where the main plant was, rendering them completely useless. Oops.
This was a human failure. Not a technological one.
If it happened once what's to stop it happening again. Think about the type of people who design nuclear power plants. These are some of the smartest people on the planet and they still managed to make this terrible error.
I'm not sure how they can calculate safety levels that represent anything measurable or measured accurately. Nuclear plants are black swans, they should be built deep below.
Nuclear could have saved the world 30 years ago. I'm afraid it's just too risky now. Nuclear is not dangerous if we have organized human life managing it. However, the risks are such that there may not be the know-how or organization in the future to keep the plants going or have an organized decommissioning of the existing plants.
The technology change would also need to be drastic because we cannot rely on cold ocean waters to cool the plants.
In other words, we should have done it 30 years ago when the risk of societal collapse wasn't so great and we had the confidence that we can maintain this technology.
If you solve this problem, you'll solve a problem much greater than energy consumption. This is not unspoken and unpopular, it is thought to be impossible given the human condition.
Nuclear power can save the world if we can prevent any more Fukushimas. It requires so much more responsibility than wind or solar seem to on the part of plant operators.
Strong public policy can save the world. Nuclear can help. But, without public policy, nothing will happen. So call it cap-and-trade, or green new deal, or cap-and-dividend, but we need it now.
Can we talk about the waste that’s cast off when the reactor has finished its use of it? I understand the material will remain radioactive for centuries. Nobody wants that in their backyard.
Not to downplay the issue, but global warming is a much more urgent issue. It's expected to cause far more disasters a lot sooner than any potential disaster from our nuclear waste.
To answer your question more practically though, our nuclear waste would fit into a building the size of a football field. There's even a proposal to put it in some mine/cave in the western United States.
I would be pro-nuclear except for the waste problem. I don’t trust humanity to be able to confine the waste for centuries. For all we know it could be seen as some sort of “treasure” by future, ignorant, civilizations, dug up, and spread around in trinkets. If there is a way of permanently and completely removing them from the biosphere, I’d change my mind.
...if the alternative is climate change continuing to worsen until renewable technologies (particularly energy storage and transmission) are up to par and scale, which one do you prefer?
That's a tough call, but I'd prefer pushing harder on renewable research or finding a permanent solution to the nuclear waste problem, because, as bad as humans are at dealing with medium term consequences of our activities (see climate change), we have no track record of dealing with the long term, and ultra-long term consequences of what we do.
You have worse waste than nuclear waste, some chemical waste does not even degrade with time and will be there forever, doesn't that sound even scarier?
Can we just get something straight about the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant?
Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw...
Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP.
Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not survive the tsunami because said tsunami overcame the tidal wall in front of it, and then the backup generators got flooded. But for that one event, if the generators were placed up on higher ground, the outcome would have been so much different.
I have first-hand knowledge, due to..
1) Knowing the area. I lived in my Japanese father-in-law's mountain house, situated 1.5km out of Miyakoji-machi, Tamura-shi. That town was just inside the 20km evacuation zone from the power plant, the mountain house was just outside at 21km - myself and my family lived in our own house in the outskirts of Koriyama city.
2) My (now deceased) Japanese father-in-law was president of the Hitachi subsiduary company which built Fukushima Dai-ich No.4 reactor, which wasn't operating at the time of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami but did suffer an explosion thought due to hydrogen gas from the spent fuel situated in the Spent Fuel Pool in its upper level.
3) Mentioned in point (1) above, I owned a house in Tobu New Town on the Eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, and I was working at Flextronics in Koriyama at the time the M9 quake occurred - things got a tad 'exciting' at the time. I should write a book.
My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account - in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job, and at some point in time it was decided that placing backup generators underneath the buildings was sufficient - that unfortunately did not turn out to be the case :/
And lastly, I still fully support the idea of nuclear power.
Indeed. I'll point out, however, that the Error Cascade began with the loss of the underground backup generators - hydrogen would not have been a problem if the backup generators were operative.
I grew up near Chernobyl. My parents still work on CNPP (which was closed in 2000 but still needs personnel).
In my opinion nuclear is the only reallistic solution to solve global warming. Per kw produced it is safer than even solar or wind and modern reactors are even safer.
I now live in bay area and have high end solar panels. While this is a nice thing, looking at their output - it is just not enough (covers our family consumption at about 70%, this is house plus electric cars, but, obviously, not including products consumed and long distance travel. And this is California)
Not to be rude but that seems like a silly qualification to be speaking on a matter. I grew up next to a Lockheed factory and my father worked for NASA, but I fail to see how that qualifies me to comment on what a "realistic" solution for interstellar travel would be.
Yes, this is anecdotal evidence. But having grew up there I obviously read up about it a lot and this is why I am speaking my opinion on this matter.
Also, in my opinion, what I saw written about it in the US media is fear mongering or outright lies about death tolls, radiation levels in nearby areas, cancer rates, etc.
To give you an example. Did you know that CNPP was profitably working until 2000 while the disaster was in 1986?
Or another, fact - CNPP is an almost exact copy of an older nuclear plant which still profitably produces clean energy near St. Petersburg in Russia
Yes but the RBMK is still an irresponsible design: highly positive void coeficient, no containment, then the control rod misdesign which was fixed. VVER reactors (Russian PWRs) are much more safer by contrast. Of course it was profitable, it ran on natural Uranium and it was cheaper to build (no containnent).
You should watch the "A is for Atom" episode from Adam Curtis "Pandora's Box" series. It also talks about US designs and how they upscaled the naval PWRs to utility level which was not deemed safe by nuclear scientists of the time.
I am not advocating for building more CNPP - like plants. Those reactors are obsolete. There are much, much safer options now ( such as generation 3 reactors in US).
However, even those older designes are statistically much safer than coal - how many people died just in coal mines colapses?
>But having grew up there I obviously read up about it a lot
I disagree, what you read isn't obvious and still doesn't qualify you to speak on the matter unless it was legitimate and vetted information. Reading a bunch of infowars doesn't make me a legitimate political commentator.
Exactly my point, I don't know, and it isn't "obvious" as he claims. For all I know its the equivalent of infowars, skepticism is my default position, like it or not.
I think he’s speaking as someone whose family history is directly impacted by a nuclear disaster, the fear of which has greatly affected the politics of nuclear power.
Sure that doesn’t qualify as expert opinion, but that also only gets you so far. In a debate that gets emotional it can’t hurt to have someone stand up and say “yes, bad things can happen. It happened to me and my family, but I still support it because it makes sense overall”
It's a valid qualification to speak on the reasonableness of community fears.
As someone who grew up near a Lockheed factory and a father that worked for NASA, you are qualified to speak about the community impacts of building and operating flying machines.
less deaths. I was myself surprised when I learned this, but apparently people fall off while installing solar and wind; combine that with much smaller energy output and you'll get nuclear to be the safest
Rooftop solar is quite different to industrial solar plants. The latter is on the ground, for example. Also, the installation of the latter is less ad-hoc and not done by small scale operators.
I don't think the safety of a large power plant vs lots of home power installations is at all a fair metric.
The people falling off is just one example of death, not the only. You have to include total solar, industrial and home. But you get numbers that show that per kwhr nuclear results in less deaths (even when including predictions of deaths caused by future cancer incidents from Chernobyl and Fukushima). It honestly is a surprising result.
The definition of "safer" is fewer people killed per kilowatt hour of energy generated. By that very reasonable metric, nuclear power is objectively less deadly than rooftop solar or wind turbines.
People are usually more ok with predictable risks that can be mitigated by the parties involved. Example taking proper safety precautions against falls vs oops we melted down and gave you cancer 10 years later.
The problem is that "taking all disaster scenarios into account" is easy in hindsight, but maybe not in planning. But I believe that modern nuclear power reactors can be build intrinsically safe. For me, the real problem begins with the treatment of the waste: It's hard to find a good place to store it or reprocess it. Not so much because finding the actual place is hard, but because using that place will face hard opposition of the locals, which leads, at least in a democracy, to a political compromise for the location (to see this in action, look at the story for long term storage in Germany). If I have to chose between nuclear power and democracy, my vote is on the latter.
I will support nuclear if you have a solid solution that will work for the waste for the island living populations of the world. Hawaii for example. If a good solution for the waste can be presented there, we can more effectively move forward. Looking just at large continental areas when solving the problem leaves some holes to fill.
Not saying nuclear is bad, it does have a solid cost presentation and a low pollution foot print.
I mean, if the world switches largely to nuclear power, it’s probably fine if small populated islands that don’t have anywhere to store nuclear waste keep using whatever power source they’re using now (or switch to other clean energy sources if possible). There’s no reason to let the perfect get in the way of the better.
The positive thing about hindsight is that we the human race can learn from it and subsequently re-design things like nuclear power plants, amongst a whole swathe of other technology.
Situated in an earthquake/tsunami-prone land? Situate backup generators on higher ground, build tidal walls sufficiently high.
The human race is built upon hindsight. Who was the first human who unfortunately tried eating a poisonous plant? We subsequently learned which plants were safely edible and which were not, for example.
So don't go dissing those who speak with hindsight - we humans stand on the shoulders of those who, unfortunately, lost their lives for everyone else to have the knowledge to progress :/
I'm not dissing anybody, but I believe that there are more ways something can go wrong than we have tried yet. Luckily, our progress is not only dependent on hindsight.
My response was not directed at you personally, but was a response in general for the benefit of everyone reading the topic.
The point being that the human race's total knowledge and subsequent forward movement is based entirely on "that <event> happened therefore <these lessons have been learned and subsequent actions shall be enacted>."
> The positive thing about hindsight is that we the human race can learn from it and subsequently re-design things like nuclear power plants, amongst a whole swathe of other technology.
most reactors fail because of humans and money, how can you learn about that?
just look at fukushima, some problems were known, but the management have found that such a event cant happen and saved some money here and there.
Look at Australia. We've been very easily influenced by the coal lobby. If there's plenty of jobs and investment flowing in, we'll do the same for nuclear.
Population density argues otherwise [0]. The aboriginal population of Australia pre-colonization is estimated to be around 750K spread out over nearly 3 million square miles.
There may be differing perspectives about how much of it is unusable, but the debate is between "most of the continent" and "even more than that". A nuclear waste storage facility in an unvisited portion of the outback would rank rather low on the list of bad things happening to the indigenous people of Australia, wouldn't you say?
I'm not so sure I'd pick Democracy over nuclear power. Recent years have made me question our idea of the absolute superiority of Democracy. Look at the clusterfuck that is the US "democracy" vs the success of Singapore or even China. The rest of the Western world in Europe is barely better off than the US.
On the other hand, not getting nuclear power deployed ASAP everywhere essentially means the long term destruction of our planet.
So all in all, I don't think it's nearly as clear cut a decision on nuclear vs. democracy, and if forced to choose I may pick the former.
Not sure I'd take that definition of success. China seems like an absolute failure in the face of almost certain success. The CCP seems to ruin every good thing about the Chinese culture, suppress every positive instinct, and punish every decent behaviour. They absolutely do not care about your silly environmental causes, and if you got in the way of any one of their state-sponsored ecological disasters, you would be crushed like roadkill.
I think nuclear power generation is an excellent idea, but if it is somehow incompatible with representative democracy, there just isn't an option, I guess we have to find some other good way to generate power. Though I think the idea that the two are incompatible is nonsense.
>Look at the clusterfuck that is the US "democracy" vs the success of Singapore or even China
Tell that to the millions of people in concentrations camps because they practice the wrong religion or were born into the wrong ethnic group.
China also produces more carbon dioxide emissions than the US and Europe combined and it's growing at a faster rate, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese model is offering up a better solution for climate change.
A considerable part of the waste can be reprocessed and further burned in fast breeder reactors, creating fuel for the conventional ones. The rest can be vitrified and stored. Why we don't already do this? Fear of nuclear proliferation, breeders are quite expensive, anti nuclear sentiment.
The waste from fast reactors is just the fission products. It's about 1% as much waste by volume as conventional reactors. Encased it in glass, and the overall mix will be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.
The waste from conventional reactors is the fission products plus lots of U238, a fair amount of plutonium, some U235, and various transuranics. The transuranics and plutonium are the really long-lived radioactive waste.
We don't reprocess spent fuel because it's a net economic loss to do so. The separated plutonium is sufficiently difficult to turn into fuel that, far from saving money, it costs more than just enriching fresh uranium.
How many times do we have to hear this "1 in 10,000 year accident!" Argument (3? This guy wants 4!) Before we realize that the idiots designing nuclear power plants don't understand probability?
To be clear there is no "safe" option. But this 60+ year old nuclear facility survived the 4th largest earthquake in record history, a tsunami, and only failed because the placements of the back, back up generators. Other plants (e.g. the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plan) that were closer to the epicenter survived just fine.
Old outdate plants aren't perfect, but even still its better than the guaranteed best case scenario for fossil fuels.
Your post makes it sound like Fukushima failed in a catastrophically unsafe manner. I think it’s important to be explicit about the casualties that resulted from the disaster. The death toll currently stands at... maybe 1. A plant worker died of lung cancer in September 2018–over 7 years after the incident—and the government thinks it might have been caused by the plant.
And over a thousand people died due to the evacuation. Every one of those deaths is the moral fault of generations of anti-nuclear fear mongers who created the atmosphere of paranoia.
> My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account
To be honest, you could probably make that argument for anything under question in any scenario. But even if we were to skip the logical loopholes ("We took it into account, but we decided the benefits outweighed the costs because of <fill in any reason>"), let's just look at the raw numbers or simply just historical facts. Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries? OK, take one step back. Would those disasters have occurred if "all disaster scenarios [were] taken into account"?
The reality is that we have no one good and practical energy solution for the world. And even though I believe that there's no practical solution that can beat a tried and tested solution like nuclear in terms of efficiency, I also believe that there's been no tried and tested solution that's been worse in terms of failure.
Anything is "arguably" worse or better. But honestly, I would challenge that point any day. As much as I'm against fossil fuels, coal powered plants only contribute a very minor part to global warming compared to lets say... ships, planes and cars. And my point is not about coal specifically - it was just mentioned because that's what the main opposition is to nuclear. Not solar/wind/water.
My point is that failure of nuclear energy provision is demonstrably worse than the failure of any other options we've tried. Does this mean it's better/worse? Who knows.
But you simply cannot say that something is safe if <xyz>, especially when history says otherwise.
I'm flabbergasted at the number of people talking unironically about "human error" as if it's historically insignificant...
> My point is that failure of nuclear energy provision is demonstrably worse than the failure of any other options we've tried.
No it isn't; when dams fail villages get swept away and everyone dies. Bad mining disasters can wipe out ~50 people too.
When Fukushima failed, basically nobody got hurt, and there is a lot of inconvenience and resources have to go to cleaning the thing up.
Obviously it is still awful for the people involved, but I'd personally rather go through a nuclear accident than a dam failure or have a mine fall on me, because I'd still be basically ok after a nuclear accident. The argument might be that it is uneconomic after accounting for the costs, but it is demonstrably safe and so a far better failure mode than anything else we've tried.
I mean, Fukushima has basically proven that the only question is economic cost/benefit.
From what I understand, far more people have been radiated to a far larger degree by coal plants operating as designed than by nuke plants in disasters. It’s just not as obvious and doesn’t make for a good breaking-emergency headline.
> As much as I'm against fossil fuels, coal powered plants only contribute a very minor part to global warming compared to lets say... ships, planes and cars.
Do you have a source behind this? From what I can tell this statement seems wrong. E.g.:
Coal is a huge source of energy. And the dirtiest available. And if electricity+heat production accounts for 25% of global greenhouse gasses, and transportation 14%, there's a decent chance coal power plants contribute just as much to global warming as all of transportation does, and basically zero chance that it plays a "very minor part" when compared to ships, planes, and cars.
This varies by region. In the US transport and coal power are equal in terms of their contribution. In Nigeria it's diesel and deforestation. But I will concede that it's not "minor" (not sure why I said that...)
I'm not saying that coal is good or nuclear is bad or vice versa. As I said in my original comment, there is no one practical (in terms of safety, efficiency, cost etc) global energy solution right now. I don't believe any coal-powered plants should be built. Should existing ones be replaced by nuclear? Depends on the actual area, geo-political situation (which changes over time) etc.
How many people died because of Fukushima? How many died when the oil train blew up in the Canadian town? How many coal miners died from silicosis? How many die when a dam fails and wipes out entire towns?
The failure scenario is demonstrably better than everything we’ve tried. More people have died installing solar and wind than have from nuclear.
> Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries?
Not a coal plant per se, but there's the Centralia mine fire [1] in PA, which is expected to burn for over 250 years, resulting in the entire town being abandoned.
Right in the middle of Toronto is the Hearn Generating Station, which only used coal for a portion of its operating life. The area around it requires considerable remediation to be considered for most land uses; only film companies have leased it (and recently purchased it AFAIK) since.
>Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries?
Yes, the very use of fossil fuels at the extent we use them is causing an extinction level event for the entire planet. Does the gravity of that really sink in?
Have nuclear plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries? I'm pretty sure Pripyat can be made habitable if someone wanted to live there, with enough financial investments. It's just that there's so much already habitable land in Belarus/Ukraine that nobody really bothered. Japan is actually trying to cleanup Hamadoori coast, which I believe they will in a few decades, and I think we'll get a lot of valuable decontamination tech and experience out of this.
It is extremely difficult to clean up thousands of kilometers of contaminated land - esecially if said land is comprised of mountainous area...
Miyakoji-machi itself is situated in a valley surrounded by hundreds of square kilometers of mountainous terrain. To blithley claim it would somehow be easy to decontaminate thousansd of square kilometers of mountainous area is naive folly.
But blithley saying it is difficult is different than explaining why it /appears/ that very little effort, relative to the scope of the problem, has been applied.
Especially goven that tepco didnt even ADMIT to the other reactir failure, nor the acale of the catastrophy for a really really long time. They down played the whole thing feom day one and failed to even seek out external help immediately. Thats why thousands of kilometers and trillions of galllons of sea wer contaiminted
> in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job,
Plate tectonics was not understood or scientifically described until 65-67. It was not a widely accepted theory until later, at least the 70s. By that point, Fukushima had already been permitted and built.
Without plate tectonics to create the plate shift earthquake which resulted in the tsunami which caused the disaster, the only mechanism to create tsunamis known was underground rockfalls from steep slopes. Afaik the builders of the plant studied the bathymetry around the area, and saw limited risk of tsunamis.
The primitive science of the time ruled out the possibility of a tsunami overcoming a tsunami wall that was X feet tall. So they built a tsunami wall that was X+k feet tall, and called it a day. When later scientific theory showed that larger tsunamis were not just possible, but inevitable, the plant was not retrofitted to deal with the new reality. Oops.
yet, this is specific to this one incident, one specific threat.
The issue is more likely to be systemic. Once a production system is up and running, it is not consistantly being improved and iterated upon, but instead left to stagnate technologically (and in this case, in safety in light of new research etc).
But the argument is that such level of continuous improvement/iteration is costly, and the owners would not recouperate the costs! And so hence the economics goes, and so does the human condition continues to revolve around profit and loss.
Thus regulate mandatory re-certified every 10 years. Also that such process must involve meeting or exceeding //current// engineering standards and safety, with the potential for limited exceptions if approved by need and actively in progress plans for achieving the specifications.
> When later scientific theory showed that larger tsunamis were not just possible, but inevitable, the plant was not retrofitted to deal with the new reality.
You are saying the process of risk assessment and mitigation was not regularly actualized with new scientific knowledge. How is that possible ? Is there communication issue between different fields ?
For our information, does someone know : As soon as the engineers / executives were informed of this new risk, what was their decision at the time ? (Maybe this was asked during a court hearing)
You typically don't have a design engineer actively monitoring safety features that are permitted by the regulator, built and maintained to standard. In a dynamic environment where the situation changes regularly there is a little more defense for catching that type of thing. In a static environment like fixed plant it could well be they just weren't ready for that sort of change.
That style of hazard, where existing controls passed through a rigorous system but become insufficient with time, are really insidious. It is certainly easy to understand why they would have missed it; even though it isn't an acceptable outcome. Especially given that communication in the 70s/80s involved a lot more talking to people and reading the right journals.
In Japan? Maybe. Globally? Not even close. As recently as 2004, there was a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that caused over 200,000 casualties (compared to the 15,000-20,000 casualties of the 2011 Japanese tsunami).
Death toll really isn't a good number to use for gauging the risk to nuclear reactors. Indonesia was more vulnerable to tsunami damage and deaths than Japan for basically the same reasons why Japan has nuclear power plants and Indonesia doesn't.
Sorry if it seemed insensitive, I didn't mean the most harmful, but the most powerful in terms of physics, as an engineering reference point if you will.
The tsunami which hit Fukushima was 43-49 feet tall. For seismic originated tsunamis, this is near the upper limit.
Not all tsunamis are caused by earthquakes though. On July 9th, 1958, there was a rockfall in Lituya Bay, Alaska. A cliff face broke off, and fell 3000 feet into the ocean. This resulting in a tsunami which stripped vegetation at up to 1720 feet in the surrounding areas.
It's not even about knowledge. When you include active human attackers that have nothing to loose or state actors in times of war in the equation it's simply impossible to secure.
> My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account
I don't know if you are old enough to remember it, but that's exactly what nuclear energy proponents said in the 70s.
Since then, actual experience showed that about every 20 years, there has been a big incident with global impact, and it will take decades if not centuries until the affected area is usable again. And the latter is something that might be tolerable in less densely populated countries or locations (Chernobyl), but in very densely populated ones it would be a major catastrophe.
And so far we've only seen disaster scenarios caused by human error and force of nature, and there's a third one (human malice), which thankfully hasn't happened yet, but which is impossible to guard against.
So my conclusion from reality is that no, we can't make nuclear power completely safe: The consequences of a disaster are too great, the monetary incentives are all wrong (it's not the nuclear companies which pay in case of the disaster, the state takes over; and the costs of the risk are not factored in into the actual running costs; and safety measures are expensive, so economics will always lead to, say, putting the backup generators NOT on the hill, because that would have cost more).
And then there's the problem that in some countries using nuclear energy and producing nuclear waste, the problem of actually storing that waste safely for the next few centuries is still not solved. Even after 50 years of producing it. And that is just insane.
I wish we could make nuclear safe. It would be a great way to reduce carbon emissions. Looking at reality, I can only conclude that we can't, and it's wishful thinking. (Yes, I know, that opinion is not popular, and the nuclear fanboys will be all over me, but so be it).
The counter risk is having the entire planet rendered uninhabitable for human life, right? Let's see, some area rendered uninhabitable versus the planet rendered uninhabitable... I'm going with A.
The worst of the lies about nuclear is that it can somehow help create a carbon-neutral economy.
Of course it wouldn't. Designing a carbon-neutral economy is a much bigger problem that requires much broader strategic thinking.
The levelized cost of renewables is already cheaper than the equivalent for nuclear power, with much smaller capital costs, much faster start-up and build costs, and no concerns about long-lived waste.
And the trend lines are clear.
There is simply no case for nuclear power now - economic, political, or environmental.
The levelized cost of renewables with enough battery storage to make reliable carbon-free power is higher than nuclear, except in areas where lots of hydro or geothermal is available.
>The levelized cost of renewables is already cheaper than the equivalent for nuclear power,
Not if you want electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. If renewables were competitive for providing constant load, nobody would be having this fucking conversation.
Who says nuclear is carbon neutral? It definitely has a footprint. But so does solar, wind, and hydro. All 4 of which are extremely small though. The advantage nuclear has over the other two is that it can generate power 24/7, it can vary its output, and it has a small footprint on land usage per kilowatt-hour it produces.
AFAIK there are no high energy producers that are end-to-end carbon neutral (or negative). Doing so needs some type of sequestration.
Not claiming those are the only options. I'm comparing the advantages with the risks. It just seems easier to watch a thousand tons of spent fuel than to dim the sun or remove a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.
If you know of a baseload power source with similar carbon emissions to nuclear, I'm listening.
No, it's nothing like that - although it might be like refusing to fly in a 737 MAX.
First, any coal analogy is out of date. Only the coal lobby wants to continue burning coal. Everyone else is like "No, that's stupid and self-harming, let's just not."
Secondly, plane crashes don't make entire areas uninhabitable for long periods.
Third, the problem with nuclear isn't the engineering, it's the management. The nuclear industry has proven time and time again that it can't be trusted with nuclear technology. The long list of smaller accidents, cover-ups, and outright lies make it clear that trust has not been earned.
Four, the waste problem still hasn't been solved. I'm not sure how a technology that creates waste that remains toxic for thousands of years can be considered "clean", but the very curious pretence that is somehow clean - or that it can always be buried under a "Keep Out" sign that will somehow remain in place for many centuries - is a handy example of the toxic rhetorical pollution the nuke industry generates.
Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
> Only the coal lobby wants to continue burning coal. Everyone else is like "No, that's stupid and self-harming, let's just not."
How I wish that was true.
What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
As an example, when the choice is between being cold in Stockholm (Sweden) or burning coal, the citizen of Stockholm rather burn the coal until the water heating plant has been replaced sometimes 2022 (to be burning other fuels). It is only used in the exceptional cases when the other systems are not enough, and yet it stands for 20% of the total pollution of the city.
> Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic
If we include the use of burning fossil fuel when renewable energy is not delivering, then the cost of renewable is uneconomic and very polluting.
We have not solved the continuously supply problem for renewable energy. Hydro is not enough, large scale battery technology is not a reality yet, adaptive energy policy has never been attempted at a global scale. People want continuously energy 24/7. They will pay for clean and cheap energy when they can, and burn coal when it is not available. The only current clean alternative is to have nuclear when solar and wind is not producing, but the marginal cost of running the nuclear plant is low enough so it will most likely also run when wind and solar is running. A little more environmental friend strategy is to lift up the rods to save fuel and reduce waste, but that means the whole cost need to be recouped during low production periods.
> Apart from that, it's a great idea.
The great idea is to have a full ban on burning fossil fuels for electricity and heat. A full stop. How people then want to solve the problem of continuous power is road full of issues. It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
>What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
It is true.
Germany has already built its last coal fired power plant and has already mandated the closure of all 84 plants by 2020.
Germany is already shifting to generating by renewables, demand shifting to deal with fluctuations in the cost of power, overproduction and pumped water / batteries to make up the rest of the difference.
>It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
Germany will just continue to cheat and import from France during lulls. Either that or they will just burn natural gas. Renewables (excluding dams because they aren’t supported by zealots) for base load are a complete fantasy. Pumped storage and batteries are so inefficient that we can’t switch without quintupling electricity costs for everyone.
>It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
Renewables are not competitive with nuclear for base load, at all. That’s why “environmentalists” conveniently allow the burning of coal and gas for the base load while they sit around waiting on a miracle for storage. Nuclear is a solution that works now. Hoping for storage tech 50 years from now is just stoking the fossil fuel burn.
Which countries? The closest I know of is Norway. But they do burn some gas and also import from Sweden (and others). Even if they didn't have gas I don't think it is fair to say that a country runs on 100% renewables if they import energy from a country that isn't 100% renewable.
These countries do not exist. There is no county getting by without burning fossil fuels or using nuclear for baseload somewhere. The 100% you might be thinking of are countries that import fossil/nuclear baseload during lulls and export spare renewables during high generation times for a “net 100% renewable”. This is a start, but it’s marketing bullshit because it’s not actually sustainable for all countries to do that. Someone needs to provide baseload.
I've been trying to figure out this problem. It seems like people understand the dangers of nuclear (with some overstatement[0]). The problem I see is that people don't understand dangers of other sources. Like even solar kills more than nuclear (on a per kilowatt basis, and including predicted deaths from cancer of Fukushima and Chernobyl). Or they don't understand how small the waste is in comparison to other sources (~soda can a year compared to train fulls a day (coal)). I don't know if this is due to fear or humans having a hard time comparing large numbers. Or some combination.
[0] example being that meltdowns make a place inhospitable for centuries. Fukushima's exclusion zone is shrinking fast. And only Chernobyl and Fukushima have exclusion zones. Plus, those ares have thriving wildlife and vegetation.
>The nuclear industry has proven time and time again that it can't be trusted with nuclear technology.
You can count these events on your hands. The same can’t be said for aviation accidents caused by incompetence. Thousands of deaths have been caused by bad management/bad engineering/bad operations/bad pilots and yet we still fly more and more every day.
>Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
Only if you make up arbitrary numbers for cleanup costs. See what happens to solar if you remove all of the subsidies for the panels as well as the required storage batteries as well as the cleanup costs for the mines providing all of the materials and it won’t be “economic” either.
We burn a tiny amount of fuel to get a lot of nuclear energy, and we burn a huge amount of coal to get a lot of thermal energy.
You need to consume orders of magnitude more coal than atomic fuel to get the same amount of energy; so the trace elements in coal become a big deal.
The radiation from coal isn't even the worst contaminant, you get all sorts of trace elements. Sulphur (causes acid rain around the power plant) leaps to mind, and there are other really nasty impurities. It is hard to understate the tiny, tiny nature of the nuclear waste 'problem'. Storm in a teacup stuff. It is barely an industrial quantity of dangerous material, and the energetic bits are Very Likely to be recyclable as diluted fuel for a more advanced reactor.
Pretending nuclear waste isn't an actual problem basically means your entire analysis is disastrously wrong. Consider contributing after doing further analysis.
It means my analysis is informed by a working knowledge of how we treat existing risk factors that affect human society. Everything I've seen suggests that in practice the macro-scale threat posed by radioactive material is similar to that posed by lead, but easier to deal with because the volumes are so tiny we can afford to isolate it completely from the biosphere.
We produce tiny amounts of waste, I can't find a great source but the numbers seem to be of the order of 10,000 to 100,000 m^3 of material that needs special handling and a much larger quantity that can be scientifically measured to have come from a nuclear plant if you have the right equipment. Those are tiny numbers compared to what industrial processes working with waste have to deal with (for scale, 1 small mine open pit coal mine would move that much material a week).
People are trying to protect the world from smaller risks than the environment already faces. It isn't rational, and it isn't very clever either. The volume of the problem is truly tiny compared to stuff we just walk on by as a society.
Your numbers seem way off. My first google results [0] mentions a single plant producing more than 100,000m³ waste requiring special treatment. Most of it on the less bad end, though. Or are you just talking about fuel waste and conveniently ignore everything else?
[1] compares solid waste from different power sources. Little info for solar/wind. Both nuclear and coal seem bad. But none of us wants to build coal plants anyway. But i sure as hell also don't want lots of public resources spend for new nuclear that is decommissioned a few years later once more environmentally friendly alternatives go online. Especially if those resources could accelerate renewables in the first place. I have no problem with keeping existing nuclear plants running as long as they are safe.
I'd love read better concise summaries from official sources, if you can recommend some.
I don't have any decent sources on waste. I wasn't ignoring decommissioning, but what I was trying to and failing to communicate was per-annum figures (comparing per annum production vs. the storage required over the same time period).
From a volumetric perspective compared to what we know how to handle industrially the numbers are tiny. I strongly suspect the only reason we treat the waste with such care is because there is so little of it that that sort of care is feasible.
I've seen a big lead mine in operation. I wouldn't live anywhere near to one of them, containing the waste is basically impossible. With nuclear waste, there is so little we could literally ship worldwide waste production to the middle of the Sahara and just dump it there. 100,000m³ just isn't that big a number - I mean, we wouldn't because it is a silly idea, not because we can't. It isn't a very responsible approach, but in practice it would work. The volumes are small enough that in my view world-wide nuclear waste storage crosses the boundary from a technical issue to an economic and political issue.
There are lots of uninhabitable wastelands that have been created here and there by industrial processes. One more in a location chosen to be remote would make literally no difference given the scale of the benefits. There are a lot of deserts out there.
> Your conclusion is different than mine, therefore you are talking nonesense. Consider coming back when you get closer to my level of knowledge.
Be careful about how you know what you think you know. How informed are you about these matters? Have you taken a good look at the numbers? I know I haven't. How trustworthy are your sources? Why do you trust your sources? Are they expert or something, or do they happen to appeal to you emotionally?
This is a problem at the global scale we're talking about. We need good solid numbers. The number of articles in the newspaper for instance is not a good solid number. Emotion is not a good number.
It's a huge issue that I work with an international team on. It's also almost politically impossible to address in the us. Technology (for safe isolation of waste) is not the problem. Democracy is. So, it collects in aging leaky dams around each plant because it can not be moved and can not be centrally disposed of.
I think the debate is now shifting from nuclear vs. coal to nuclear vs. solar/wind. In that context, this argument doesn't help. Especially recently, people have been really bullish about solar and wind power, and I think that has lead to weakening of the support for nuclear power.
China is extraordinarily bullish on renewables.
From wikipedia:
"China's renewable energy sector is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity. ... In 2017, renewable energy comprised 36.6% of China's total installed electric power capacity, and 26.4% of total power generation, the vast majority from hydroelectric sources."
Nobody wants to burn more coal except people who own stocks in coal. In other news being beat with a stick sounds like a better alternative to being blown up but most of use would prefer a massage.
The Germans seems to prefer coal to nuclear. Oh, maybe they thought lowering nuclear would increase the renewable? The renewable sure did increase, but it doesn't compensate the decrease in nuke power. What did is the other fossil fuels.
Of course, most Germans would deny that. But the fact is, reducing nuke power leave us only two alternatives: increase the consumption of coal/oil etc, or decrease energy consumption period. Solar and wind are all the rage, but they're still very little compared to nuke.
And good luck with significantly reducing energy consumption: energy is more or less the limiting factor in our economy, so decreasing it decreases the GDP. So it would mean a big fat, long term recession. Now it doesn't have to be bad, but it sure needs a significant overhaul of our societies.
Renewables today produce twice as much power as nuclear plants back when Germany had twice as much nuclear than it has now and the share is growing by 4-5% per year. By the time a new nuclear plant is done Germany would be at 90% renewables.
Your numbers are a bit off (2018: 155TWh solar+wind; 65TWh biomass+hydro; 2006: 158TWh nuclear as of [0]), but I'd agree with your conclusion. The biggest disappointment in those graphs is the near constant use of lignite, but politicians seem still very resistant giving up the jobs of that industry.
I agree with you that I don't think we can make nuclear safe. But if the choice seems to be between millions of deaths from global warming or thousands of deaths from nuclear, isn't the latter vastly preferable? Shouldn't we set out and build out nuclear to steer us away from the edge, and then worry about better solutions once we're safe?
I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly believe global warming is as bad as they say. We have a history of solving problems in the past, so we'll solve this one too. There's no need to panic.
Can you provide a timeline and justification on "millions of deaths from global warming".
Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"
How much money and time would it take to research battery technology that could put coal and nuclear plants out of business?
We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.
This does nothing to the fission products. And reprocessing only lets you destroy the actinides if you burn them in a fast reactor. Fast reactors have, so far, been even more expensive than thermal reactors.
Fast reactors have been disappointing all over the world. The harder neutron spectrum is more damaging to materials, and liquid sodium has serious drawbacks. Fabrication of fuel elements with mixed actinides is also difficult. Fast reactors also require a higher density of fuel (due to the lower fission cross section at high neutron energy), which presents safety issues.
The french choice was clearly the wrong one. It's a net economic loss for them. It was predicated on the use of the separated Pu in fast reactors, but their experience with fast reactors was dismal.
If they weren't going to use the plutonium immediately, reprocessing was stupid. Spending the money they didn't have to, in order to make Pu they didn't need, just to have the Pu sit around, made no economic sense. And no, it doesn't improve the economics of waste disposal.
Understand where reprocessing came from. Way back then, the story was that nuclear was going to be dirt cheap, but would ultimately be limited by the cost of uranium. The solution was breeding, to provide all the expensive fuel those thousands of cheap reactors would need. Reprocessing was needed to close this fuel cycle.
But this story bears no resemblance to reality. Reactors turned out to be expensive, the number of installed reactors was far below projections, and uranium is not in short supply.
One still hears echoes of this old narrative from people who don't really understand where it came from, and why it doesn't apply.
No, the point is to minimize the cost of dealing with waste. Reprocessing doesn't do that.
But let's stipulate that they want to destroy the waste. What's the cheapest way to do that? If they wait to reprocess the fuel, and destroy the actinides in the future, it comes out cheaper than if they reprocess now. That's because reprocessing, and developing and building fast reactors, is quite expensive, and the net present value of that cost is minimized by moving it off into the future. Moreover, reprocessing becomes easier as the fuel cools off.
So, reprocessing NOW is a pointless waste of money, even if ultimately you want to do it. The ONLY reason you'd want to reprocess now was if you needed the actinides now for use in energy generation. And no one needs them for that.
No. You're missing the point of the entire discussion.
The point is to deal with the waste. The whole argument is that we can't go to nuclear power because "waste". So deal with it.
No one cares about the cost of it -- it's far cheaper to deal with it now than to manage it for a thousand years anyway -- especially in political capital with a bunch of nimbys who think nuclear power is scary.
The book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is a good start. It has extensive references to peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change.
We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.
I feel like it's bad to talk about safety of nuclear without comparing it to another option. What's the safety of fossil fuels? What bar would have to be met for nuclear to save lives when compared to alternatives?
For the most part nuclear falls victim to the same human reasoning flaws that make us more worried about flying on a plane than driving even though driving is way riskier.
Seeing the number of "nuclear energy is our saviour, and will solve all our problems, and is the only option" posts on the Internet, yes, the first step is to talk about the safety of nuclear without comparing it to other options.
And no, the comparison to plane vs. car is not appropriate: In both kinds of accidents, a number of people get injured or killed. In case of a nuclear accident, a sizeable area becomes inhabitable for centuries. That's on a completely different scale.
(And just for the record, I'm neither worried about flying in a plane, nor I am worried about driving a car. I am also not worried that the nuclear power plant near me will explode next.)
If we can agree that nuclear is not safe in the long run, and should eventually be abandoned, then we've made progress in the discussion.
It's also not "nuclear or coal". That's another thing in those discussions that bugs me. Fossil fuels (not only coal) are not the answer, either: they'll eventually run out, and they contribute to global warming.
And comparing them by "counting deaths" and "how many lives can be saved" is completely missing the point. Neither nuclear accidents nor coal usage immediately kill people. And it gets totally ridiculous when people try to argue that "there are accidents during wind power constructions; people have fallen to death. So wind power is mucher more dangerous than both nuclear and coal (if you only count the deaths)."
So in the long run, we need alternatives to both nuclear and fossil fuels. If those who say "nuclear is the only solution, it's so great" get the upper hand, we'll never develop those alternatives. And that's the point.
As for the short run, I don't really care. If we can efficiently stop global warming by shutting down all coal plantes and keeping the nuclear plants for a few decades, I'm all for it. Though I doubt that will be enough to stop global warming; we must also drastically reduce energy usage; up usage of renewables, redesign the electric grid, and efficient means of storage to it, restart projects like Desertec, etc., etc.
There's enough we can do. but arguing "let's just bet everything on nuclear, it's totally safe" is the wrong thing to do.
While I agree mostly what you are saying, I would want to add that one thing we should have in mind and it’s that most of our current risk assessments of nuclear power are done on current technologies. And also the other technologies we could use aren’t risk free either. I think it’s too early to give up on all of the our energy sources, but coal/oil. Unless we find a way to contain all of the emissions immediately.
Dang, I’m going to have to remember “if we can all agree with my thesis, we’ve made progress in the discussion” for my next argument! That’s a great and intellectually valid way to participate in a debate, for sure.
>a sizeable area becomes inhabitable for centuries
Well no, reactors in chernobyl remained operative until 2000 ,and chernobyl is not inhabitable look at all the animals that live there , the level of radiation is low.Regarding fukushima people are already returning in evacuated zones
This is interesting because you blame human error or malice on the failure of a reactor causing a potentially global issue. For about 60 years now we’ve had nuclear powered ships without a single issue (with exception to the russian subs rusting and decaying while waiting for decommissioning). Wouldn’t malice or human error be more of an issue here vs a land based reactor? I think most enemies would rather bring down a military naval ship over a land based reactor unless causing terror is their goal. Either way, the reactors generally manage themselves, get replaced every few years but overall are very stable and safe. Nuclear is here to stay in ships and the potential to irradiate the world is much higher when you’re floating in water.
Tack onto this you’ll have eras of better and worse regulation and privatization (with the accompanying emphasis on profit over all else), depending on which parties are in office.
I think it’s inevitable you will have bad disasters. The human race is not smart nor mature enough.
> Since then, actual experience showed that about every 20 years
That's not really a good metric. What you need to do is a time varying analysis and consider the total number of reactors (globally).
Eg. if we hold danger of reactors constant but we increase the number of reactors over time then you'd see disasters being more frequent (but the opposite is true).
Alternatively if we hold the number of reactors constant and pretend that all new reactors replace old reactors you can determine if new reactors are more, the same, or less dangerous.
But to do a real analysis you have to combine both of these (and some more stuff). Otherwise you're pretty much just saying that the average of the set {1,2,3} is 2. That 20 year thing is a bit contrived and I'm surprised it has popped up a few times.
I'm pretty pro-nuclear. Nuclear power has proven to be extremely safe relative to the alternatives. In this specific case though, to say that there was one design flaw is failing to go beyond the first why.
The second why is "why does the reactor require an uninterrupted supply of electrical power in order to not melt down? Gen 2 nuclear power is inherently dangerous, and is only made safe through active safety systems. If the reactor trips, the cooling pumps must run or decay heat will cause a meltdown. Gen 3 reactors tend to incorporate a lot more passive safety systems or at least ones that don't require electricity.
It's just a trade-off of mathematical probabilities. The alleged extreme safety comes with an extreme destructive disasters.
When it comes to risk management, the human brain that is bound by evolution to dangers close in time and location, is not capable of assessing the consequences of losing a piece of the planet earth's habitat for millions of years.
The arctic and antarctic regions are literal ninth-circle hellscapes (the ninth circle of hell is the one that is frozen over). Significantly worse than the areas around Chernobyl which is apparently well on the way to becoming a national park.
I'm not sure that there is a 'risk' that the human brain can't process. Risk of what, exactly? Huge cost to the generation that has to move, massive risk if it hits farmland, sure. But even assuming that the 'millions of years' figure is factual - which I doubt - we are certainly going to run out of human race before we run out of land. The risks are all fairly short-term things.
Radiation is not as scary as you've been led to believe. The main long-term dangers from a really bad nuclear accident are Cs 137 and Sr 90. Both of these have half lives of about 30 years. We past the first half life of the Chernobyl fallout.
Let me argue that there's at least one more design flaw: backup generators are generally not very reliable. So for any given plant, there's a comparatively high risk that they don't work when you need them. This risk is non trivial even when the generators are well taken care of (both maintenance and regular test runs) but it's very easy to skimp on the tests.
My knowledge is from another industry that relies heavily on backup generators.
Friend of mine has a high school friend that a maintenance engineer. He has contracts to maintain diesel back up generators for hospitals. And sometimes they don't start. It's very disconcerting when that happens.
The other design flaw is diesel or no they require cooling water during shutdown. What bothers me for instance is during the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes the Mississippi ran backwards for a while. During other earthquakes you see significant uplift. If the intakes run dry because the local hydrology suddenly changes you're just fucked.
To add to that: backup generators are also a logistical mess. Diesel doesn't last infinitely. Do in particular if you expect to run large generators to sustain significant load (like in big data centers, I don't know how significant the load is for the backup gens of a nuclear plant), the amount of diesel you get to store is impressive. Which in turn means that the logistics/tank life issues of the fuel get worse.
The physical&power infrastructure side of big data centers is really quite interesting, by the way. Not something we all get exposed to regularly but I can only encourage anyone who has a chance to learn about it to take that opportunity.
Also the generators were originally situated in a raised location but had been moved to the ground level after their installation. If the generators had not been moved they would have functioned through the tsunami.
Well then maybe we should develop reactors that solve the problem. Any fast reactor or molten salt breeder will do it. Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, and a bunch of startups are working on various designs.
My opinion is that you might underestimate the magnitude of potential nuclear accidents. I think that Germany's decision to decommission over time their nuclear power plants was pretty well studied. Please see: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/...
That has little to do with the decommissioning itself, and more with the Governments stupidity and ignorance. The decommissioning is only one part of that screw-up.
Germany wants (and the whole world should):
* enough energy
* carbon-free
* nuclear-waste-free
On order to do that, you need massive investments in renewable energy and storage.
Instead, they found a way to have:
* large investment in solar energy, without protectionist measures, leading to the German solar industry dying an creating demand that lead to cheap China solar (overly simplified - feel free to elaborate in your answers)
* laws that limit the building of wind power significantly
* failure to build a power line from the north (offshore windparks) to the south (high power demands, less power resources) which currently leads to insane situations with the neighbors
* first extending the nuclear power plants permits, shortly afterwards deciding to shut down, which lead to Germany having to pay compensations to the companies (in addition to a completely botched nuclear fuel tax, that they had to pay back after it was found invalid in court)
* subsidies for dirty coal plants over decades (300 billion was a number floating around) and another I think 50 billions to help the regions which rely on the coal business after the coal shutdown
Politicians deal in compromise. They see different interests and they try to find a middle ground between those two. They do that with a pretty heavy disregard of science. Scientist are just another interest group.
Scientists: If we don't cut CO2 but this much until this date, the effects of climate change will become this nasty.
Industry: If we do that, that will cost us X moneys and endanger Y jobs and we will make Z less profit.
What's green about an energy source that produces waste that has to be stored for thousands of years by a nation which only exist since 1945?
There is still no final depot for that waste, and the depots they have now are currently running full of water.
I get the argument of nuclear being zero-emission and maybe nuclear can be the solution - but not in its current form. If they wanna play, they need the new kind of reactors, which are actually safe and minimize nuclear waste. Also maybe figure out what to do with the waste before you produce it.
* building reactors in areas with severe earthquakes and tsunamis was the main design flaw
* flood protection too low, even though this was known
* backup-generators not safe against flooding
* loss of outside electricity over a long period of time -> powerlines were not working, other sources of electricity on the grid were offline due to earthquake
* too long time to restore electricity, we are talking about many MWs for cooling and other purposes -> generators were difficult to bring in with further problems making them work
* various damage due to earthquake on reactors, buildings and infrastructure around the plant
* too much spent fuel in pools, required large amount of electricity for cooling
* spent fuel pools high in the buildings, hard to reach
* no cooling capability in case of days-long loss of electricity -> then needs to be cooled with seawater pumped with vehicles with concrete pumps (which were flown in from remote places, even from the US) -> caused structural damages to buildings and spread radiation
* no idea what to do with the contaminated cooling water
* no protection in main buildings against the explosions that happened
* no technology existed for a decade or more to deal with molten cores
* ineffective security/safety process -> the plant had checks a few months before the accident with no consequences
* unwillingness to invest major amounts of money into upgrades
* life extension for outdated reactors, due to economical pressure
* no independent controlling instances for the nuclear industry
That may all very well be true, but it still means that the power plant was unsafe.
All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe".
And all the time bad things happen and they have to admit "well, not when X happens". Or "not when A and then B happens".
Just as you did here. It's nice that Fukushima could have survived an earthquake, but the tsunami isn't a freak accident, it's actually a common cause thing.
It's nice that Fukushima could have survived both the earthquake and the tsunami, had it been built differently.
But it hadn't. And that's why all this "This time everything is safe" is just as unbelievable as over the last decades.
Now, you can certainly say that decarbonization is worth the risk, and I might even be on the fence about it.
But please don't insult the general public's intelligence by ever telling us again that nuclear power is safe and it was only those stupid Russians who totally mismanaged their power plant.
Disclaimer: I am not really pro- or con- nuclear energy but try to keep an open mind.
How does what you are saying not apply to any other technology? Cars are “save” but kill more people than all nuclear power plants and accidents combined. Still we say to ourselves we can deal with the risk, which is obviously the case for lot’s of cases but might not be in some exceptions.
I think your reaction seems a little bit too emotional to an interesting and seemingly informative (haven’t fact checked his claims) personal perspective. The problem with discussions about nuclear energy is that there is a strong dogma towards openly thinking about the costs/risk/benefits in the political sphere. In Germany postponing our nuclear exit could buy us some time to get coal offline earlier and provide some stability to the grid. Ironically, the green party would never consider such a move due to ideological (and historical) reasons.
You're right. It fully applies to cars, as well. That's why we have those "more bikes" discussions here every now and then.
But that's no reason not to point out the obvious flaws in the comment I replied to.
And re: emotionality: you can wish it away, but it is real. Nuclear fans always act as if they only had to show this one scientific study to citizens, and everyone would immediately fall in line. That's hilarious.
Nuclear is done. It may be irrational, but the nuclear community has richly earned that. A little bit of humility and risk-weighing instead of grandiose claims of "perfect safety" would have helped.
But these lies of "perfect safety" were useful back then. They were a shortcut. A cheat. They could get their reactors much quicker if they made false claims.
Now they get the long-term results to their short-term thinking.
Yeah, you have point. I am certainly not in favor of large energy companies stealing their way around paying for the long-term containment of spent fuel rods for example. People should be held accountable for the damage they do and the waste that they cause. Offloading of negative externalities should be reduced as much as possible. For example, meaningful taxation of carbon emissions or the set up of a nuclear waste recycling and emergency fund where required contributions are determined by external auditors.
However, I am still a staunch defender of differentiated learning from the past and rational planning of the future. Given the information we have right now, nuclear might actually be an important (probably temporary) piece of a rational plan for a good future. Moving forward means setting the stage and right incentives for people to learn from mistakes, improve and grow.
>All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe".
This is a strawman argument. No one is claiming that old reactors are getting safer as we come up with better designs. None of the newer designs that people are claiming are safer have had issues. Fukushima was literally constructed before Chernobyl.
Even if you were right the spent fuel ponds were not safe. Just let an airplane crash there - the reactor may survive it the ponds will not and they may very well be the bigger problem. The amount of radioactivity stored in these ad-hoc structures globally is staggering. Increasing the problem by further investing in nuclear is not a good idea.
And yet, very few companies (in the U.S. at least) want to build them. It's because the worst case scenario they're planning for is very bad indeed, so they have to spend all this expense to keep it from happening. Compared to every other renewable energy technology, it is more risky and has a much higher cost to get up and running.
And that's setting aside the other problem which is that many of the countries that are still growing, and will need new, clean sources of power are countries that don't have as much nuclear expertise to begin with. And some of them are countries that the West has tried to actively keep from having nuclear capability.
Better solar, wind, etc., has fewer risks than better nuclear tech in the long run.
I think this can be a win/win. Higher levels of carbon dioxide mean more plants, and more oxygen, which leads to bigger animals. And nuclear waste leads to mutations ...
How about we put the reactors in the middle of the desert, then there is no danget of killing a city and no risk of nuclear material leaking into the sea. You really don't need that many people to staff a reactor and if you really do, you can always build a train so people don't need to live close. I know power transmission is an issue. But we have gotten a lot better at that as well, with things like that big DC underwater powerline from scandinavia to the middle of europe.
Is the resistance to nuclear power mostly at the state/local level or is there also a lot of federal opposition? I wonder if some western state with unpopulated land could make a lot of money by doing a huge nuclear project and sell the power to California with UHV lines.
The politics seem kind of similar to pipeline projects, but the ultimate goal would be to save the earth rather than burn it down so maybe there would be less opposition. Maybe you could even generate enough energy and wealth to convert some legacy fossil fuel businesses (and the politicians they own).
> I wonder if some western state with unpopulated land could make a lot of money by doing a huge nuclear project and sell the power to California with UHV lines.
You mean California? California is mostly empty, unused space.
> How about we put the reactors in the middle of the desert
Nuclear reactors, much like other kinds of industrial power stations, require enormous amounts of water for cooling towers. They don't put them next to rivers because it looks cool.
For folks who think solar/wind/other sources are just as good or better, why not invest in all energy sources anyway? In most cases anyway this will be private investment and there is no reason not to experiment with all types of energies (including new types of nuclear reactors) instead of waiting and see if renewables can achieve their promise.
If you are going to make bets, take as many bets as you can.
We are talking about new nuclear reactor designs, not like the ones from the 50s. And frankly nuclear plants, even with their disasters, have killed very few people compared to all other sources of energy.
Renewable energy is cheaper than nuclear, or will be imminently.
Proponents of nuclear tend to ignore the long-run costs associated with nuclear (eg. waste transport and storage), and the potential for cost blowouts due to acute disasters like Fukushima (estimated cost to taxpayers: USD $100 Billion).
The fact tax money is going towards Fukushima highlights another problem with nuclear power: the agency problem. The individuals and organizations that planned and built Fukushima are not directly shouldering the full cost of the problem it created. You can extrapolate from this to many other problems and risks associated with nuclear power, because the timeframe is long relative to the life of a human. If the average human lifespan was 200 years or more, maybe this would be less of an issue, but as it is now, profits now will inevitably trump responsibility tomorrow (and by tomorrow, I mean 30+ years from now).
There's also the risk of weaponization, which increases as the number of plants increase, particularly if those plants are built in countries which currently do not possess much technical nous. It's not a technology that should be disseminated, because the risks are real, and catastrophic in their consequences. If this sounds paranoid, Warren Buffett had this to say about the threat of cyber, biological, nuclear, or chemical attack on in the US:
"“What’s a small probability in a short period approaches certainty in the longer run. (If there is only one chance in thirty of an event occurring in a given year, the likelihood of it occurring at least once in a century is 96.6%.) The added bad news is that there will forever be people and organizations and perhaps even nations that would like to inflict maximum damage on our country. Their means of doing so have increased exponentially during my lifetime. “Innovation” has its dark side.
There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk. If an event occurs in the U.S. that leads to mass devastation, the value of all equity investments will almost certainly be decimated.
No one knows what “the day after” will look like. I think, however, that Einstein’s 1949 appraisal remains apt: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”"
[Source: 2016 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders]
In 2018, renewables provided 713 TWh of energy to the US electricity grid. Nuclear provided 807 TWh. They're already at the same scale, and renewables are rapidly increasing while nuclear has stagnated for decades.
Renewables already supply a similar amount of power to nuclear, its growth rate is higher, and its cost curve is improving faster.
As for plant capacity, the largest power plant in the world is renewable (Hydropower):22.5 GW. Compare that with the largest nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (currently closed due to safety concerns): 8GW.
If you limit "renewables" to only solar and wind, there are already 1GW+ wind and solar PV projects operating, and more in the planning and construction phase. There's no theoretical obstacle to building 8GW solar PV projects, though it might be unnecessary, as they can be deployed in a modular fashion. There are several 500MW solar thermal projects operating and more planned.
The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster of 2011 may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
> As for plant capacity, the largest power plant in the world is renewable (Hydropower):22.5 GW. Compare that with the largest nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (currently closed due to safety concerns): 8GW.
Hydro works well and is the best solution if our country has capacity for it, unfortunately, it's not available everywhere.
> The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of Fukushima may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
The downsides are completely understood and the consequences of Fukushima (please specify in your message the nuclear plant) are well studied, the result is that there's not much impact.
I do limit "renewables" to only solar and wind in this context. I mean, of course Hydropower is very renewable, but it is mostly already built out, and in the context of replacing fossil fuels and "saving the planet" from global warming, it will have no substantive role to play.
Hydropower is also an example of one of my points. It is a mature technology, and we now know of its big environmental costs as well as it's benefits. We could technically probably double the hydroelectric power of the world, but the natural devastation would be too large, so we mostly chose not to.
We have yet to see what those downside are for solar and wind. For nuclear we know, and also know how to handle them.
We haven't even come close to seeing the downside of nuclear waste. All we've seen is countries fumbling trying to find solutions for nuclear waste.
It's already hard to find a safe solution for waste that'll survive for millennia. Simply because predicting what might happen over those time scales is hard.
Now factor in that it'll be paid for by humans with a lifespan left of 50 years, and usually a decision horizon of 4 years (i.e. politicians).
The chances off getting it wrong technically are non zero. The chances of getting it wrong for budgetary reasons are even bigger. Incentives do not line up.
One of the biggest advantages renewable energy has over both nuclear and mega-dams is that the size of project required to achieve the commonly quoted LCOE (levelized cost of energy) is much, much smaller. 50 MW or perhaps less per site, versus 1000+ MW.
This means:
1. no mega projects that attract similarly sized public opposition
2. 1-2 year construction timelines instead of 10+
3. much, much less financial and regulatory risk
4. if an individual project goes off the rails because of bad management, it just gets cancelled instead of being pushed forward with endless public dollars because of sunk cost fallacies
The private sector is well able to stomach the risk level of wind and solar and finance and build it on their own, whereas nuclear and mega hydro essentially require government financial backing, which again contributes to the agency problem.
We know we can build 1,000s of MW of wind and solar per year in a safe and cost-effective way because we're already doing that. Every single nuclear or dam project in North America right now is a delayed, over-budget financial and project management boondoggle.
There are a lot of problems with large scale dams.
They interfere with fish migration. For some species, this means disrupting their reproductive cycle.
They gradually accumulate sediment, so their reservoir slowly fills up and turns into land. This is one of the issues with the Aswan Dam, which is projected to have a much shorter lifespan than was initially projected due to high sediment accumulation.
The Aswan met all of its goals, but it's a disaster. The sediment rapidly accumulating behind the dam used to provide free fertilizer for farmers. Use of commercial fertilizer skyrocketed.
It's also the cause of a serious health crisis. Schistosomiasis cases have also skyrocketed.
The annual floods used to keep snail populations in check. The snails are the vector for this gruesome parasitic infection.
The problem is the "mega project" part of it, not the means of production.
Unlike coal or nuclear, renewables are easily scaled down without creating a huge risk: for coal, you want to go large for efficiency reasons and to ensure that the right set of filters are installed and maintained. For nuclear, there were ideas of building a nuclear power plant in every basement, but given how the power plants we have look like military bases, that seems rather unfeasible.
Once you go big, you have the issues mentioned elsewhere in the thread (sunk cost fallacy, NIMBY, ...) but also corruption and that these big sites become single points of failure.
Dams are in the same space: NIMBY, once started you can't stop, large scale construction (which is rife with corruption).
Create financially reasonable basement/rooftop level nuclear or coal systems that can be safely installed by any random electrician and operated by the home owner and the entire discussion may shift.
It's also interesting to note the headline is "Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions.."
Even if the US was totally committed, and decided to build a brand new reactor right now, how long would it take? A decade?
We can slap up renewables in a fraction of that time, and spend the next decade reaping the rewards, not sitting around waiting for the magical payoff of a reactor that will cost billions to build and operate, and doesn't do us a lick of good for an entire decade!
> Even if the US was totally committed, and decided to build a brand new reactor right now, how long would it take? A decade?
Totally committed? You sure? Ok.
The US could bring at least two dozen new nuclear power plants online per year. It could do that with only modest impact on its massive economy.
National security declaration (probably numerous). Bypass all environmental building concerns and impact reviews. Pull most of the US military out of Europe and all of it out of the Middle East. Mobilize at least 100,000 soldiers in support of the mission (ideally twice that number; clearing land, hauling materials, dealing with protestors, providing area security, restricting access including by drones). Whatever needs to be done, will be done. Redirect several agencies (DARPA, DOE, etc) to almost exclusively working on this mission for ten years. Have Congress declare a draft on the back of the national security declarations, pull relevant scientists and engineers out of the private economy via draft. Suspend all emigration. Federalize the control of all national guard troops, draft them all formally under the command of the US Military and remove them from their states to avoid potential state resistance (numerous states would attempt to resist this very strong-armed Federal plan). Nuclear plants would be reasonably distributed across the country, some states would attempt to resist any plants being built inside their borders, which is another reason you remove their national guard troops. This is serious, so we'll do what is necessary. It's life or death after all, right? If the Supreme Court attempts to block it, expand the size of the Supreme Court and stuff the bench until your votes win.
Use eminent domain where necessary. Limit taking private land as much as reasonably possible; doing so just gives the resistance groups an issue to play up. Fortunately in this case the Federal Government owns a ridiculous amount of land (particularly in the western states).
The US has an epic scale labor force, and millions of healthy people doing nothing that could be drafted into various basic positions in support of this large national project. Jobs! (there's that sound bite) Another plus: absolute secrecy would not be particularly paramount, unlike with the Manhattan Project. You wouldn't need a bunch of Oak Ridges. There isn't anything that special about a modern nuclear power plant, and the US wouldn't be using any radically new technology in these plants anyway.
Initially getting up to speed would take several years (standardizing and getting new workers enough experience, etc), after which you could get to a rate of bringing a new plant or two online in a given month.
Fund it with a trivial Federal Reserve Nuclear QE program. $20-$30 billion per month in 'printing.' The dollar wouldn't even notice, and it'd keep the budget from getting further stretched (which would keep the general population more calm than if you spiked their taxes or took from their social programs).
Task the major banks - all of which are realistically under direct supervisory control of the Federal Reserve and Treasury these days - with helping to keep the US financial system stable (there might initially be some panic), including where interest rates are concerned. The US has the most powerful banking and financial system by a considerable margin, it would be told to accomodate and assist, or else (look what they did for funding the shale build-out, a spigot of hundreds of billions of dollars; private loans involved in the program would largely be back-stopped by the Fed; thousands of companies in the private economy would need loans to ramp up early on; the banks making some money on this would remove a potential resistance point). Put the talking heads on TV to work pushing the agenda favorably, to calm the population; spin how positive this will be for the economy, jobs jobs jobs (just keep repeating that). Do the exact same thing for the business & financial media to soot...
I always find it odd how the people talking about climate change being an extinction level event aren't even prepared to execute a few dozen CEOs of large fossil fuel companies.
If the fate of the world is in question then Ted Kaczynski is a rational individual who reacted with restraint.
one small correction: the fate of the world isn’t in question. it’s the fate of humans that is.
meaning: the planet has seen several extinction events. it will survive anything we throw at it. but humans need to start building rockets and space stations asap if they want to survive.
I'm always baffled by the idea that we need to get people living in space for the human race to survive climate chance or other catastrophes. What do you think we could possibly do to the Earth that would make it less habitable than space? Even in the worst, worst case scenario, the Earth's gonna be left with some amount of oxygen-containing atmosphere, arable soil, gravity, and survivable if possibly uncomfortably hot or cold temperatures. Any station we could possibly build to withstand the temperatures and vacuum of space would be much more easily built on Earth.
Long term a big difference would be your space station being isolated from everyone else. This avoids many bad incentives (like prisoners dilemma / tragedy of the commons).
For now, space is just a good training ground. It is not necessary to build isolated eco systems / livable environments on earth and doing so makes no sense financially. Space enthusiasm is a good tool to push R&D.
On an even longer scale it would certainly provide a diverse range of evolutionary benefits, but that would probably go a far bit off topic.
It makes absolutely no sense to start building nuclear now. Even if you could guarantee 10 year build time at a fixed cost today (which you can't), by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today. The cost curves are simply too favorable for any private market to favor nuclear over solar currently. Everyone in this thread keeps talking about the technology, but it's purely about the economics. Solar+storage at grid-scale will be cheaper than basically all other forms of power generation within 5 years based on current cost curves. Within 10 years the cost of new solar+battery will be cheaper than the operational cost of nuclear, not even accounting for the billions in construction costs over decades.
If the billions spent on nuclear plants now was instantly diverted to solar, we'd have way more clean energy in the grid on a way shorter timeline. That's the reality today. It's time to stop arguing and stop wasting money. Nuclear is dead.
>It makes absolutely no sense to start building nuclear now.
Imagine if the developed world invested in nuclear to the extent that France did in the 60s and 70s - how many trillions of tons of CO2 would NOT have been emitted into the atmosphere? You can talk about Republican denialism, but it is anti-nuke lobby that will be held responsible for climate change.
>by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today.
Will it? Will the sun shine at night? when it's cloudy? No? Then it doesn't matter how cheap solar and wind are. You're not going to use either as a cornerstone of modern energy generation. So if not solar and wind, then what else is left? Germany knows - they are signing multi-decade deals for natural gas and coal-based power (from Russia and neighbors), as they are shutting down their nuclear plants.
"magine if the developed world invested in nuclear to the extent that France did in the 60s and 70s - how many trillions of tons of CO2 would NOT have been emitted into the atmosphere? "
I think OPs point is essentially that, even if nuclear would have helped in the 70s, it is now too late.
As for the intermittent issues of power. I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
I'm from Australia, the only thing that a grid without nuclear or coal has proven is that it can't deal with sustained demand. This year we came perilously close to having to choose which hospitals to cut power to when the there were two 40C days in a row.
If we have a week of that weather Mad Max will be a become a documentary.
This is the solution, but currently only operating at a small scale. This is something that can be scaled up insanely quickly for a fraction the cost of alternatives. The success of this relatively small installation has already resulted in many more battery projects coming online this year.
The Tesla battery stores enough energy to run the South Australian grid for 5 minutes and cost 40 million. It's only use is to keep the frequency of the grid from drifting.
This being my day job, it would add $8k to the electricity bill of the two child household in Australia if we used your solution to store the wind and solar power.
Was it actually renewables slumping in production or demand surging? If the second, how different would the situation have been with traditional power?
I ask because a 40C day sounds like a problem due to AC usage, but would probably come with pretty effective solar, and decent wind near the sea.
France and Sweden built very low-carbon electric grids with nuclear. No country in the world has done that with wind/solar. Some have done it with lots of hydro/geothermal, but those aren't available everywhere.
>I think OPs point is essentially that, even if nuclear would have helped in the 70s, it is now too late.
I get that. But it's worth going through the exercise how bad well-intentioned policies can be. It's worth to consider that anti-nuke activism is much worse than Conservative denialism.
And if nuclear is too late now, then there's nothing we can do to replace carbon-based power.
>I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
Oh come on. Hydro is great if you can get it. Places that can get hydro, already get hydro. Most places can't get hydro. Ditto for geothermal.
So what's the solution to replacing carbon emitting power sources? I want someone to explain that to me. Because all I hear is how solar and wind one day will be cheap and prices are falling every day - even though price is not the problem with solar and wind. Variability is. We need power when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, and power requirements keep growing. People want electric cars and trains, those need huge amount of energy. I hear how batteries will save the day, except that we are not anywhere close to having battery technology capable of storing city-sized power requirements for a few minutes, much less hours or days. It may not even be physically possible to create a battery like that. So what's left? Coal and Gas - and this is exactly what EVERY nation is doing if they are not investing in (or divesting from) nuclear.
Batteries are much farther along than most realize, and decreasing in cost rapidly. 2019 will see the first GWh-scale battery installations (plural, as in multiple of them). Grid-scale lithium-ion battery storage is at the beginning of an exponential growth curve.
Energy density and cost have almost no correlation. Gasoline is less dense, but I can package a gas generator into a small box for very little cost. Uranium requires a giant reactor the size of a small town and costs billions.
Given this statement and the chart that shows solar and wind already being the cheapest energy sources this must mean we can just switch to solar and wind ... right?
Except we know we can't. We know that the variablity of solar and wind makes those impossible replacements for coal and gas. I guess price isn't the only metric that matters.
Touche. I agree, "only metric" is hyperbolic, but it is the main metric that determines future investments.
This is why the most important number is $/MWh for "solar/wind + storage". Storage has to be included in the equation. At current prices that puts "solar/wind + storage" about equal with natural gas, but those prices are dropping rapidly.
Installation times are also very significant factors in reaching emission reduction targets. Waiting 10+ years for nuclear to come online just isn't viable. Solar+storage can be operational at the same scale as a nuclear plant within 2-3 years.
It really depends on the location if nuclear makes sense. For example to fully go solar here in Finland you would need enough storage to basically store 2 or 3 months of winter usage of power as the efficiency of the panels goes down to less then 5% of peak during winter as the sun just isn’t up and when it is it at such a low angle that it produces next nothing.
So basically one would need a lot of overcapacity to be able to produce and store enough power during the summer to last over the winter. But in places like California sure go full solar as it actually works all year around.
Ok so now we are beholden to whatever political powers that are south of us (or our friendly neighbor to the east "accidentally" cutting the sea cable). For now it is a bunch of friendly EU countries but putting the lives our citizens in their hands doesn't sound that nice. Freezing to death during winter if power gets cut for more then a day or two is a very real possibility in huge parts of the country as we have moved from oil/gas to electric heating.
You realize this is like the US saying "lets give money to Mexico to build all of our solar power there (it is closer to the equator and thus would provide more even output throughout the year and would make more econimical sense) and just rely on them selling it to us forever at a nice price as they are a friendly country at this very moment". Or even better would be the countries further south and build a sea cable on international waters so anyone with a sub can go and cut it to fuck with you,
From a national security perspective relying on such a vital resource as electricity on someone else is just plain stupid. I realize most countries are in such a relationship with oil/gas countries at the very moment but I think the goal should be to lessen this kind of relationships not increase them.
The most important question is if wind and solar capacity can come online sooner than nuclear in order to slow down stop global warming, which is estimated to cause 250,000 deaths/year worldwide 2030-2050 by the WHO. Solar and wind were only 9.2% of the U.S. total in 2018 and the US has very good conditions for them. Solar energy will have a harder time replacing base load plants. It might work out fine in the US but how about other countries? I think both renewables and nuclear will be needed. Carbon caputre technology would need to be ~5 times cheaper than currently to be viable.
>Renewable energy is cheaper than nuclear, or will be imminently.
Solar and wind are plenty cheap. That's not their problem. The problem, as the article stated, is that "they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon."
Passive solar design as a requirement for new construction would help reduce how much energy buildings require. It also makes them more comfortable, not less.
Design cities for pedestrians, bicycles and public transit. This will help reduce heat island effect, thereby reducing the need for AC.
I slept in a tent for nearly six years. I plugged in at the library during the day. I got by on battery power in the evening until I fell asleep.
I'm currently in a hundred year old building with radiant heat and no AC. It has good design that helps keep the building comfortable without a lot of modern amenities we think are required.
I spend a lot of time online. I don't own a TV.
You can have a very modern life on a lot less electricity than many people use.
It's really not a given that we must use high levels of electricity to maintain a high quality of life. The first thing we should do is question such assumptions. The second is start actively challenging them.
This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
Doesn’t work unless you live in a place that has no weather (e.g. the Bay Area). People in Minneapolis aren’t going to turn off their heater at night when it’s 30 below 0 because the wind stopped and their battery went dead.
No, not true. Design of this sort used to be the norm. There are variations of it in all climates.
Igloos:
On the outside, temperatures may be as low as −45 °C (−49 °F), but on the inside the temperature may range from −7 °C (19 °F) to 16 °C (61 °F) when warmed by body heat alone.
I can't readily find a source with details, but traditional desert cities were located on high ground and the streets oriented to catch the winds such that daytime street temperatures were pleasant.
We used to design buildings and cityscapes to work with the local climate. Now, we slap up cardboard boxes, inject insulation and add HVAC systems, counting on technology to keep things comfortable in place of good design. In reality, well designed buildings are more comfortable and probably less likely to suffer from sick building syndrome.
No, igloos were never the norm as far south as Minneapolis because the wide temperature swings make them untenable. Native Americans burned the fuck out of wood for heat and that’s terrible for the environment if we all do it.
>You can have a very modern life on a lot less electricity than many people use.
Let me get this straight, The only way to curb emissions is to severely reduce our energy use?
>This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
No. This is a problem of people not wanting a subsistence-based lifestyle. Your suggested policies are insane. They are not reasonable, at all. You're talking about replacing all roads and buildings (and cities)? Use non-existent battery technology to power a modern economy?
Internalize the fact that power requirements will keep growing and that expecting people to live in tents is not a reasonable policy.
More like first-hand testimony from someone who gave up their car more than a decade ago while working a corporate job.
I'm an environmental studies major whose dream job would be urban planning or similar. I've been looking for real solutions to such problems for a lot of years.
One conclusion I've drawn is that passive solar really needs a lot more attention than it gets. It's an elegant solution with no real downside.
Nuclear has a couple of big downsides. 1. When things go wrong, it's really bad, a la Chernobyl. 2. Even if nothing goes wrong, safely storing the spent fuel is a significant issue and goes on "forevy."
Everyone knows about those two issues. It's precisely why nuclear is controversial.
It's also possible for someone to be pro nuclear power and also pro conservation. There is no need to set this up as an either-or thing. People could be pro passive solar while being pro nuclear power.
I'm not pro nuclear power. I'm also not strongly against it. I'm just trying to let people know that passive solar exists and can play a role in solving these issues.
The batteries have already materialized, and once they start installations at scale this will be taking over the energy market. This makes solar/wind viable as a base load power source virtually everywhere in the world. Even in places that get heavy cloud cover such as Northern Europe will start using these solutions at scale within the next few years.
No. That's the entire problem. There are no batteries that can scale to city needs.
What you're citing is a completely different use case. There is very good case to be made that battery farms can replace gas-burning power ONLY when they are used as a way to quickly scale power production. Battery farms also make sense to even out supply and demand (i.e. serve as a place to dump excess power, or provide stored energy when supply temporarily drops).
ALL new battery projects are around those two use cases. And that's great!! It isn't nothing, and it's a great technology solution for a very real need.
HOWEVER, it's one thing for a battery farm to supply power for seconds or minutes in specific cases, it's another for a battery farm to provide hours or days of constant supply ... every day. Not only is it expensive because you need to over-provision your generation and storage capacity (i.e. in order to provide power for 1 hour at night, you actually need solar to produce 1.5-2 hours of surplus energy). Worse, because wind/solar power generation output is affected by seasons, you'll actually have to over-provision just to match peak seasonal output, meaning that in-season, you invested in infrastructure that's sitting around doing nothing. Then there are also major durability issues. Current battery tech is simply not durable enough and will never be durable enough to solely backup wind and solar in a cost effective way. We're talking about batteries needing to operate for days and weeks when wind and solar output dips (or drops to nothing) at huge scale.
This is why no nation is actually replacing any nuclear or fossil-fuel-based power with SOLELY wind/solar+battery solution.
There are other issues that are typically glossed over, such as the fact that solar, wind and battery tech are typically environmentally destructive to make (requiring mining, and complex refining processes), and are very hard and expensive to recycle.
It's possible that some battery-tech breakthrough occurs and changes this (and the article references tech like using surplus power to create molten-salt to use as a storage medium), but the reality is that today, we don't have the technology that is anywhere close to cost-effective, and it isn't clear if there will be one in the next X years.
Proponents of renewables fail to take into account the need for baseload. It’s nowhere near being cheaper when you take into account the over provisioning and storage costs required to actually compete with the reliability of nuclear (and coal/gas).
But the people do and they are in charge of what we adopt. Choosing renewables and poo-pooing nuclear is choosing fossil fuels for base load. It’s that simple.
This falsehood gets rolled out regularly. New reactors take a decade to manufacture, have nearly zero private investment, and the icing on the turd cake produce waste lasting for centuries.
Why is there not a singular global body that includes all nations to build out, manage and secure ALL nuclear power plants. Basically a single body, comprised of all the top minds and efforts of every nation's nuclear SMEs - which will create a grid of nuclear power all over the world and every country contributes based on their draw from the system?
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 818 ms ] threadThere is no way you are going to convince voters that they need to cut their energy usage, especially before the worst of the climate change effects are felt. You need to provide steady, stable carbon free power. Nuclear power is the only current technology that can provide it. If you really care about slowing down climate change, you need to be all in on nuclear power.
and the opposite is happening...
Indeed. Thus the question is what undemocratic institutions, can we use? Can we put in treaties that reduce national sovereignty like the TPP? Can we make it a second order or third order effect of regulations on how insurance works so that most people can't follow the chain back to the source?
Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy but I feel when convincing other people of this you need to portray the good and the bad.
Politicians bowing to the wishes of an ill-informed public.
There were a bunch of failed nuclear projects like the pebble bed reactor, the fast breeder or the storage sites. Watching them made the decision to get out of that type of industry much easier. Germany had the same level of corrupt nuclear industry, which is known from Japan and which has been exposed there.
It does, although it doesn't draw the connection directly.
> I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's.
The con's (both for Germany, and the US) are (quotes below from the article):
> irrational dread among the public and many activists
> ...
> people estimate risk according to how readily anecdotes like well-publicized nuclear accidents pop into mind.
For Germany in particular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...
Tl;dr, Germany politic interest in nuclear phase-out began around 2000 as misdirected "green" activism and was escalated by irrational public fears in response to Fukushima in 2011.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/17/hitachi-set...
But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors. More modern design do not present those risks [1]. Judging nuclear energy based on 1960s design is like judging aviation based on the safety records of 1930s planes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
With "early generation reactors" you mean all the ones that exist. The whole "next generation reactor" / "generation 4 reactor" thing is at this point nothing more than vague plans for what could be.
Chernobyl, of course, was a horrific design that didn't even have a containment dome. Nobody builds reactors like that anymore.
And GenIV is a little more than vague plans; e.g. Terrestrial Energy's molten salt reactor has already gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process, which puts them on track for a demo reactor by 2025 or so.
If your country is the size of the USA and nobody bothers if you let it disappear somewhere in the desert. Which is not the case in Germany and most of the countries. People just don't want to have a nuclear waste dump near by and Germany needs to spend a hell lot of money to clean up the last mine they used as a dump already.
The tech is dead and the lobby won't be able to ride that current artificial hype for ever...
In particular Fukushima case, the evacuation caused more harm than fallout would do, so, in retrospective, it would be better to not evacuate.
There is no "huge areas devastated and unlivable for generations".
Long story short, phasing out nuclear energy has been a long term goal and has broad support in Germany.
Chronologically was the other way around, and her "Our party now consider nuclear harmful" stance didn't change the outcome post-Fukushima. But it's typical Merkel of the time, changing her tune to whatever's politically advantageous.
Didn't you say the same as OP, with a lot more words?
> Germany, which went all-in for renewables…
This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible.
> From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy
Not really,
* It's expensive as hell, it just might seem cheap because a lot of the cost is offloaded to the tax payer in the long run
* Even western first world countries operate nuclear power plants which have known safety issues (look at e.g. France or Belgium) so even if we could technically do it safely, our societies are not politically mature enough to implement it.
* Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster so it's not even as clean as often advertised
[citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels.
Remember E=MC2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. There are 2 million times more Joules in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal/gas/diesel/lithium. Thus you don't have to mine all that much of it to power the planet.
In fact, with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story), you could power the entire US for a few hundred years off the depleted uranium sitting in the yard of an enrichment plant in Kentucky.
Till and Chang argue in their book about the IFR that if we start building IFR style plants for production usage it's entirely possible that costs drop to about LWR levels.
So far fast breeders have been expensive, but that's largely because they've all been one-off designs largely for R&D purposes without much effort to reduce costs.
For reprocessing, their argument is that electrorefining (pyroprocessing) would be much cheaper than PUREX. To the point that the lower fuel acquisition cost and cheaper waste disposal could make it roughly comparable to once-through LWR costs, even with relatively cheap uranium.
Such a shame IFR was shut down.. sigh
Nuclear cannot do this so it is useless. Batteries and gas power plants can which is why they are being rolled out.
Wind, Solar, Gas, Batteries and Electric Vehicles are existing solutions to the climate problem. The market will implement them slowly, since they are cheaper and superior to legacy solutions, but we need political effort to do it more quickly.
It's also interesting to see the volatility of solar and wind be used as an argument against baseline generation, as this has traditionally been an argument against renewables.
It's likely that a cost optimized grid will have little or no nuclear in it.
But if we're going to build a lot of wind, that still doesn't necessarily doom nuclear, if we can lower the capital cost of nuclear. The article describes some fairly simple ways to go about that; a recent study at MIT had the same recommendations.
Down the road a decade or so, molten salt reactors will start to be available, and those look to have much lower capital costs and good load-balancing.
Using nuclear instead of solar when solar was available would increase the cost of that power by a factor of 3 or more. That would also be insane.
Nuclear just doesn't have a place on a grid with a large renewable supply.
EDIT: You wrote:
"I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day."
This is case #2, using nuclear power during the day when you could have used cheap solar. It makes no sense economically at current nuclear costs.
Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage.
Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.
Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in a position to deliver now; the one that is closest, NuScale, is not promising the kind of cost reductions that would be needed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/10/01/3-reason...
Maybe the U.S. will keep dragging its feet, but that doesn't mean the technology is inherently expensive, it just means we're bad at it in the U.S.
(And you're still ignoring storage savings in the solar/nuke scenario.)
There actually is a simple solution: follow UAE and let Koreans build standardized APR-1400.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-united-arab-emi...
At the same time, solar PPAs in the US are falling so fast it's hard to keep track of the record holder. Here's one from last year for $0.023/kWh.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nevada-beat-ari...
* Couple the nuke to a large thermal storage system and load follow with that
* Use steam bypass to switch energy from the turbogenerator to desalination, direct decarbonization, liquid fuel synthesis, district heating, industrial processes, and so on.
Unlike sunny or windy days, nuclear power is consistent 24/7 and output can be modulated (albeit, with delay) by raising and lowering control rods. Batteries (electrical or mechanical) can store extra nuclear-produced energy and use it to power the grid while output increases to match demand, and vice versa.
The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity by 3-6x to cover all other energy requirements (including sucking carbon from the air to counter chemical processes we can't decarbonize).
Nuclear has to be part of the solution.
The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe.
I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.
[1] http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-...
> as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there
And that's kind of the other problem. How much land is that?
Per this perhaps dated 2013 report[0],
It takes "3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year." Unclear on if that's only in sunny desert locales like California/Nevada, or average over the US, or whatever.
Anyway, if my math isn't radically incorrect, that comes out to 114 kW of capacity on average, in whatever these test conditions were.
Just 10 TW of capacity would require, uh, 1.2e12 m², or 13k "survey townships" (US land units get weird), or 466k "sections" (weird US land unit that equals mi²) or 298 million acres.
For some comparison, California is 164k mi². Texas is 269k. You could (hypothetically) cover the entirety of California and Texas with solar panels (433 mi²) and you still would not reach 10 TW of average production.
Admittedly, your scope is global and these examples are US states. But it is still a ton of land. Perhaps efficiency has increased slightly since 2013, but by a factor of 2 or more? 10? And how much space will we need in landfills for EOL panels?
Global demand was about 22,100 TWh/yr in 2011 (random figure), so say it's doubled since then; we'd still need something like 233k mi² of these panels to supply the world, assuming perfect capture from season to season and overnight. That's most of Texas in (2013) solar panels...
[0]: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf
And no, an experience curve never reaches zero. It's a power law in cumulative production.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a22011471/c...
If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now.
That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers...
Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time.
If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propose a solution for irrational community fears. You’ll also be able to solve the SF housing and homelessness crisis at one go then.
[1] https://www.eti.co.uk/library/the-eti-nuclear-cost-drivers-p...
New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition.
...
Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open- ended, all‑or‑nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon.
...
[I]n 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.
Sure it has. They're just getting used by the Navy, not by civilians. There's no reason why the same methods that have been successfully used to control cost and schedule for those reactors couldn't be used for civilian reactors.
Even when comparing to oil, Nuclear is still more expensive. “Specifically, total life-cycle costs would be 19 percent higher for a fleet of nuclear destroyers.” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454
As to your "physically near impossible": people said about the titanic that it was unsinkable. This only led to a major shortage of lifeboats once it sank because why would a unsinkable ship need so many lifeboats.
If this bullshit cloud over nuclear got dissolved they'd be replaced with much more safe design. Instead they are forced to continue operation because nothing new can be built. Because of unfounded fears.
That's what caused the Fukushima disaster. No new plants - no decommisioning of old plants - old plants blow up.
I've outlined above why this doesn't happen. Japan has been severely pro-nuclear in the 80s and 90s, and built tons of reactors, yet they only decommisioned a single old reactor in the 80s and 90s, according to this list [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#Japan
No, you didn't.
If anything, you supported my line of reasoning - if the insane push against nuclear didn't happen, then the plants would have been modernised or rebuilt and there would not have been a Fukushima.
You need to accept that all trust is lost. You cannot take backsies every few decades and expect people to trust you that this time you really know what you#re talking about.
No, it wasn't. Please back it up if you have any proof, but this is not true IMO.
Meanwhile, coal emission kills ~1M every year, or ~100k every month. (I guess the numbers are just an order-of-magnitude estimate, so take them with a grain of salt.)
So, during the month of Fukushima disaster (the second worst nuclear power disaster in history) it displaced a few times more people than coal killed in that month.
Yes coal is terrible and the sooner the world stopa using it the better, but the answer isn't 'if we can't have nuclear then we can only have coal' is a lie.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
There have been a fair number of other serious hydro accidents as well. In the U.S., Teton Dam wiped out two towns, and Oroville Dam just recently prompted the evacuation of 180,000 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
Electricity isn't some luxury we can get rid of if there are a few thousand deaths here and there associated with the production.
To be a viable alternative beating coal is irrelevant, nuclear would have to be at least better than natural gas. And with natural gas burning much cleaner than coal I'm not so sure nuclear has the advantage
Exelon is focusing on NG w. CO2 capture and renewables/storage for new capacity.
The short version is, that mushrooms accumulate cesium-137 which contaminates the soil in Bavarian forests. Equally affected are animals eating the mushrooms, mainly wild boar.
If this is 8 microsieverts... what's the timescale? 8 microsieverts is quite small compared to everyday things like cosmic rays [1].
[1] https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Pulling from __ph__'s link (and a google translate).
> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms containing 3,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram results in a load of 0.008 millisieverts. This corresponds to the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria.
> In Germany, it is not permitted to market foods with a radio cesium content of more than 600 becquerels per kilogram. For self-consumption, this restriction does not apply.
(may notice here how overly cautious we tend to be with radioactive dosages.)
> If venison or wild mushrooms are consumed in normal amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low, but avoidable.
To summarize the article:
Wild mushrooms and some wild life may have higher than normal radiation levels. Take caution if you intend to consume vast amounts of quantities. You'll probably be fine, but why risk? If you are only taking "normal" amounts then there is no concern.
Depends entirely what you mean by "dangerous levels". It is contaminated enough, that mushrooms from the forests are not allowed to be sold as food. Yes, a single serving won't have a significant impact on your health, but it is recommended not to eat much of them. The situation is worse with some wild boar, which eat a lot of those mushrooms and accumulate cesioum over many years.
And perhaps a relevant information: the Bavarian forests are about 600 miles from the Chernobyl site.
Those levels that acidburn was talking about, mentioned in the article, are REALLY low. The reason government is overly cautious with radiation is 1) fear 2) you can't control sources so you say "if we set this threshold we'll never put anyone in danger even if they take in large amounts from other sources that we can't control."
Remember, each of those 200g of mushrooms (which looks like an upper limit of measurement, not average nor lower) is like a 5hr plane ride in a non-northern route (8uSv). People take plane rides worse than that several times a week and are safe. (see below for ridiculousness of this "danger")
You also realize that over time these things degrade, right? Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test).
Side note:
200g mushrooms = 0.008mSv (upper limit)
20mSv/(0.008mSv)*200g = 500kg of mushrooms.
That's how many you would need to eat in a year to get to the legal limit. Let's be real here, this is just a ridiculous amount of mushrooms that you have to consume within a year. That's over a kilo a day.
Note that this limit used to also be 50mSv for radiation workers. Astronauts are allowed much more.
tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet.
>Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. We are talking about radioactive isotopes. Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions
>You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test). No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.
>tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet. It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.
> Yes, with a half-time of 30 years.
Biological half lives tend to be A LOT shorter. It is something like 90 days in humans (for Cesium). There's also the uptake rate, which IIRC is about 10%.
> Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions
Oh, sorry. I didn't realize that radiation means that electrons will no longer form bonds. That's really interesting. But I have a question. This being true, can you tell me how we get solids? Or are you saying that radioactive materials can only bind to other materials with similar radioactive properties? I can tell you that I never learned this in any of many physics classes nor while I was working as a radiation researcher. If this is a new study done by you I'm excited to see you win the Nobel. Really groundbreaking work.
> No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.
10% uptake, shorter biological half life. This isn't a system with positive feedback. The more degrees the more dilution. The Cs is in the ground, mushrooms eat that (1 degree), boars eat that (2 degrees), humans eat that (3 degrees). Minimum. We are assuming that the Cs is just laying nicely and not being diluted by worms and bugs before it is absorbed by the mushrooms.
> It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.
You're pulling from much more than that article. Your domain experts in this thread are breaking down that official information and explaining what things mean (note, neither of us have disputed it). For example, what is a Sievert? How dangerous is it? How much is safe? Can this be explained in a way without years of studying atomic physics and nuclear medicine?
What you're doing is reading that and saying "Look how dangerous this stuff is!" We're looking at it and saying "Ah cool, so as long as I don't eat 500 kilos of wild mushrooms in a year I'll be good". There's a big difference between these two points of view. But again, I'm not disputing what is in that documentation. I am drawing from it to demonstrate how safe things are.
I think Windscale would count amongst such accidents, too.
Can I remind you that that's almost 60 years ago and we're not talking about military?
1: France is 75% nuclear and has some of the cheapest electricity.
2: there are a ton of small reactor designs that would be substantially cheaper and quicker to build. Problem is that you can't get them out of research labs.
Uranium is not very expensive right now, so a lot of mines have closed or mothballed. That doesn't mean there's any shortage of the stuff. Australia's known reserves are enormous. Throw a dart at a map of northern Australia and you'll probably hit an orebody.
Its only new NPP under construction, Flammanville, is 9 years over schedule and over 300% over budget. It is still not certain when it will open due to safety defects that are still being evaluated.
New build nuclear is not cost competitive with new build wind and solar (even when you account for firming costs), and the cost of wind and solar is still falling at an astonishing rate.
The future will tell, as it is now, Germany already spent more on renewable than the total French nuclear industry, even when you add decommissioning and with the bad results we know. Maybe countries should learn on the German mistakes? Also the renewables built to replace the nuclear plants in France are pointed out for being far over-budget as well.
The cost studies for renewable tend to remove a lot of external costs in order to make them appear cheaper than they are.
Source? What does that even mean? Where'd you find an honest assessment of the regulatory and construction costs for France's nuclear power plants, much less a sensible estimate for decommissioning plants that are still running? Does it include research and development in either case? Does it include maintenance, personnel, fuel, cleanup, storage of spent fuel both temporarily and long term?
[1] CPI - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303286860_Policy_an... - page 6 in pdf pages or 1 with their numbers.
[2] Cour des comptes - http://cpdp.debatpublic.fr/cpdp-cigeo/docs/docs-complementai... - page 265 pdf / page 270 with their page numbers
I can't tell from a quick glance how the French number comes to be, what's included and what isn't and who is the ultimate source.
Given the fraught nature of the subject, I'm taking any number with a grain of salt, especially if it purports to assign a single price tag to things.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
I’m in favor of nuclear research and improvements, but let’s be honest.
You have to compare nuclear against the best alternative, not the worst. This is just kindergarten-level debate.
In the meantime, we can put out an RFP for a new wind project today and have it online in a year.
Something that depends on hypothetical political developments in a country that shuts down its government because of political gridlock a couple of times a year cannot reasonably be described as the fastest way to do anything.
Hopefully US figures that our rampent cost diesese on sll the things is just embarrassing, and we need a "time out", a throwing away of the actuarial pessimism, and a command economy "probation" in these important matters. Get the costs under control, and then we earn the right to do capitalism for essential goods again.
As things currently stand, no group of politicians could survive the political fallout of getting a reactor build in their district. How can anything get done if doing so buys you unemployment from the ultimate cushy job of being an elected representative?
Also, no one, not even the most ardent supporters, really wants a reactor built anywhere near them or their kids playgrounds. The anti-nuke-power crowd has just done too good a job on the older generation to ever hope things can change for them.
Let's hope the Millennials can do a better job getting these things built.
But, if nat gas, wind, and solar are cheaper and faster to bring online, and can be build at pretty much any scale we want from single household to freaking huge, why would we build nuclear?
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppo...
Nuclear has some amazing lobbying going for it, amazing backers that will throw away billions of tens of billions of dollars into black pits of construction hell, despite knowing the rate of so many construction projects before it. And they take this massive risk without the possibility of VC like upsides; the financial upside of nuclear is minesxule compared to the massive risk of building. It makes no financial sense to any rational person.
No, the problem is certainly not a lack of will. The problem is that those pushing nuclear don't know how to build it. They like the idea, but don't have the skills and can't hire people with the skills. Nuclear construction is all a game of raking in some contracting cash and making sure that when the inevitable lawsuit comes due to failed construction, your side doesn't lose.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppo...
I don’t know much about how things work in other nations, but in the US, the government is not as readily liberal with the necessary subsidies. When you consider the slow motion train crash that is Vogtie, you can see the issue. Government doesn’t want to out and out pay for everything, so they set up structures that actually turn out to be more problematic than simply handing over 50 billion would be.
"The estimated cost of the remaining border wall segments are between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million." [1]
"The total investment for the stellarator itself over 1997–2014 amounted to €370 million, while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (personnel and material resources) amounted to [$1.2 billion USD] for that 18-year period." [2]
It's more a matter of funding than cost, IMO.
[1]: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cost-of-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Financing
Part of the reason for this is just how massive ITER is. The power density of the reactor is 0.05 MW/m^3, some 400 times lower than the power density of the reactor vessel of a commercial PWR.
Some countries are able to do nuclear at much lower cost, e.g. South Korea.
What is the fastest, new renewable power capacity any country has at any time build, in added W/year/capita? In both nominal and actual power generation? Or the fastest you can see or hope will happen in near future?
Sweden built 10850MW nuclear in 20 years from 1965 to 1985. This means about 68W per year per capita. How do the already existing, and potential future endeavors in building renewal capacity compare to this number?
The number is nominal, but for nuclear I'd guess the actual long term power output is about 90% of the nominal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_S...
But two other things against them ... 1. They take a long time to build 2. They provide a large base power and are costly to stop and start.
Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.
I think the insurers have a good point. And that's why I don't think we should subject our civilian population to risks which the experts in risk (actuaries) have decided are so bad that they refused to touch them.
Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but something like slightly increasing the rate of cancer doesn't get any punishment because the damage is so spread out and not worthwhile to prosecute/sue. Given this, I would argue that coal power plants also have their liabilities "artificially limited".
Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear.
In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in the lifetime of the plant compared to things like wind.
Pennsylvania had a bill recently to keep some nuclear plants open... It would involve an increase in the cost of electricity because it's more expensive.
That's why investors have run away from it. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are increasingly cheaper and easier to deploy and scale and the future trajectories heavily favor them.
The only thing nuclear has is a centralization of power, capital, control, and ownership. You have one robber baron waving his scepter over the entire energy consuming public because nuclear is extraordinarily centralized. It keeps energy being run as feudal monarchies and that's a power the industry doesn't want to cede.
I used to work on design of onshore wind farms. Protecting the public was as simple as measuring the distance to the closest road or building. So that if the turbine failed catastrophically it would not hurt anyone. Add a big red flashing light and aviation is safe. Compare this to nuclear where you need to understand an incredibly complex machine and how it interacts with an unpredictable environment and people. And you need to employ expensive nuclear engineers and scientists to do the work, and then check the work repeatedly. Sounds expensive!
I would love it if nuclear energy could be a success. But why not do wind/solar/battery as well in the meantime.
I certainly agree that large power companies can be unfair to the public. Particularly when renewables has such big upfront costs. It's like renting a house, paying off someone else's mortgage, and never getting to own anything. However, there is a huge benefit in connecting large generators because they are connected to the high voltage transmission system. Power can be exported to where it is needed. In comparison generation that is attached to low voltage networks are more limited in how much can be exported longer distance. Battery storage in particular is much more versatile when used at the grid level.
What about those molten salt thorium reactors from a few years ago that promised we could basically burn dirt to power our cities for forever?
Over $89 billion has been dumped in to it. That's like 20 companies the size of Lyft or Airbnb and it still performs and delivers poorly. How much more do you want?
Maybe, just maybe, it's a fundamentally bad technology and we can do better than nuclear.
https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/nuclear-su...
TL;DR: Molten salt reactors are safer (can't have a meltdown if it's already melted), smaller (could fit on the back of a truck), able to run on more abundant materials like Thorium (which in turn come from more politically stable regions), and to top it all off: not only do they leave much less nuclear waste, they can actually use up current nuclear waste, turning it into much less harmful and shorter lived stuff in the process!
Also, Mike Shellenberger [1] is a great proponent of nuclear power and has some great points on why the current focus on renewables is damaging. Well worth the follow on Twitter.
[0] https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2019/nuc...
[1] https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD
The point about meltdowns is cute, but probably wrong; the insurance against meltdown is a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity, if I understand correctly. In other words, the thermal expansion drives the fuel out into the piping as the reaction heats up, away from the compact reacting core, and also reduces the density in the core, allowing more neutrons to escape.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-heat.html
The containment of a LWR has to be large because it fills with radioactive steam in an accident. It has to be able to contain this steam, which means at least a certain amount of structure to withstand its pressure.
But MSRs don't use water as a coolant. They circulate salt in and out of the building. They can be designed to remain at low pressure even in a bad accident, just from heat transfer that occurs from thermal radiation at elevated temperature. As a result, the cost of the containment could be as much as 1/5th that of a LWR.
Unfortunately, MSRs are not available today, and likely will not be for decades (especially if new materials must be qualified; no one will buy an MSR if there is any question about the materials not lasting their projected lifespans.) By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable.
You're posting this and statements like it all over this thread without a lot of supporting evidence that indicates very strong probability of it happening. Hacker News currently has a highly-ranked article on the main page regarding how there are massive battery and energy storage problems, and this particular issue is raised weekly here and in the news.
Why are you so optimistic that seemingly significant blockers will be for sure eliminated in the short decades to come?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#The_e...
Solar has declined in price by 20% (or perhaps a bit more) for each doubling of cumulative production. This empirical observation has been sustained over a history during which solar's cost has declined by more than two orders of magnitude. Wind has showed similar learning effects.
Nuclear, on the other hand, has not shown consistent experience effects (or, arguably, any, if one discard as unreliable the numbers from South Korea).
Talk is cheap, but renewables have actually demonstrated, in the real world, that they get cheaper as they are built out (and, if anything, the learning rate has increased recently). Nuclear proponents are hanging the future of their technology on the assumption, unsupported by much of anything, that these real world trends will suddenly switch places.
Molten salt reactors are interesting but more in the context of funding research than how we should put together the energy mix of a country. Especially considering how much funding fusion power have gotten, which is still in the basic physics stage and things like materials breakdown and heat transport is largely not even a known problem yet.
A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that)
Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you realize that once we double or triple the number of reactors, accidents will be so frequent, that the public wont stand for additional expansion within the time it takes to build more reactors.
We need 10x nuclear to solve global warming. Thats a major accident every 3 years or so. Yes, Nuclear can be made safer, but probably not by as much as needed. Even a country like Japan, who has high safety standards, and a historical heritage of nuclear fallout, has had an accident, and most new reactors are likely to be built by China who has less then stellar safety record.
Advanced low-pressure reactors can do this, and eliminating loss-of-decay-heat-removal accidents takes the probability of a large early release well into the 10^-7 or even 10^-8 range according to probabilistic risk assessments.
So even though nuclear is, by the actuarial tables, almost as safe as you can get in energy systems, you're right that the public opinion is a big hurdle and that Fukushimas are not acceptable. These low-pressure designs get us there, and it's been demonstrated.
Molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, and some gas cooled reactors all have this capability. It's basically the main event of what the nuclear industry called Gen IV reactors [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II#Passive_safety
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
Which is true, until it isn't.
Relying on diesel generators is not a passive solution. That is basically the part where I wonder why not a passive solution was picked.
Fast forward to the 1950s. Admiral Rickover wants nuclear powered submarines to effectively fight the Russians in the Cold War. Submarines are small but want high power, on the order of a few hundred megawatts. This puts them beyond natural circ decay heat removal regime for air and water. So he builds them, and installs appropriate redundant backup systems.
Now Eisenhower has given the Atoms for Peace speech and the commercial industry is starting. They can build a compact high power reactor or large low power reactor (recall it's a heat removal issue). They choose compact, high-power one modeled after the Naval reactors. They were running great and had a whole supply chain. The low-power ones would be orders of magnitude more expensive per kWh.
Meanwhile, starting in the late 1940s and continuing for a few decades, exotic-coolant reactors were developed, with things like Mercury, liquid sodium metal, molten salt, organics, aqueous homogeneous slurry, etc. These reactors can do high power compact cores with passive natural circ. Many were built and operated. But they remained exotic and underdeveloped. The Navy and commercial nukes had built up an infrastructure and experience base. Exotic reactors were more expensive and the LWRs were fine instead of passively-cooled ones.
Today, dozens of startup companies have dug up the paperwork on these exotic reactors and are rushing to try to develop them and associated supply chains to build them cheaply.
So that's how we ended up with the reactors we have.
Reading about TEPCO’s management of their facilities and people both before and after the Fukushima accident doesn’t really mesh with this claim.
These guys had the right idea: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...
So why even bother with that old, dangerous and radioactive tech?
I really hope the lobby runs out of money soon...this artificial hype is terrible.
Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few people e.g. from ice throw and falling off roofs).
Radioactive? Ok, fission products are radioactive. Can't argue with that.
Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
No, he's just safely away from any fallout, hugely optimistic, naive about government competence and private sector morality (e.g. in cutting corners), and perfectly fine to rush technology and just wait and see the consequences and let the second order effects and externalities be suffered by others (which has nothing to do with science per se)...
Old as in "outdated".
> hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident
Yeah flooding are surely more dramatic than a slow death through cancer, I give you that...and it's such a good selling point isn't it? You just can't see it or put a finger on it. Some numbers are far less dramatic then a flood. Too bad Netflix comes with that documentary on Chernobyl now. Need to pay for some more op-eds to cover that up.
> Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
Do you have to be part of the lobby if you take the money? And I doubt it came from Goldstein or his publishers just to promote his book. The timing of the whole nuclear hype is just too coincidental.
Anti-nuclear media is also status quo. The industry has been dealing with it for decades. I don't think the HBO thing is going to tip the scale too much. There are documentaries about plane crashes too, yet we still fly.
The key point I don't think you granted me is that the numbers are in, and nuclear is definitively and quantitatively a very safe form of energy. Certainly the perception is not in line with this, but if you look at the numbers it's clear.
Thus we have a public education issue.
The only timeless thing about nuclear is the the waste. Something many future generations can have to be pissed about us.
Nobody was talking about nuclear for years before that new hype started a few months ago and suddenly it's allover the place. Come on...
> Thus we have a public education issue.
No we don't and painting the opposition to the hype as stupid or uneducated only hurts nuclear. It's been a constant mistake by the nuclear lobby throughout their history and it's one more reason why the hype will fail in the end. The lobby can scream as loud as they want it won't be louder as the rapid development in renewables and the unwillingness of the whole world to invest into a dead technology nobody outside the hype wants. The investors jumped off already years ago. Get over it.
https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/keeping-up-with-the-advance...
I am not painting opposition as stupid. I'm painting the general public as unaware that nuclear is statistically quite safe compared with almost all other energy sources.
There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.
Meanwhile at the construction sites: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/03/fate-of-...
> There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.
You have to be kidding me. Even if you somehow missed the recent hype driven by people like Michael Shellenberger, you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".
You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear. I suspect you'll hear something about how nuclear can produce low-footprint 24/7 carbon-free energy in sites all over the world.
Certainly I wouldn't expect a traditional investor to invest in nuclear to make a buck. It's mostly people who are trying to build a safe and prosperous world and believe nuclear can help us get there.
> you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".
Sure I can. This industry has no pure-nuclear stakeholders. All the owner/operators are utilities, which have vast fossil, wind, solar resources to operate. The utility executives don't give two shoots about nuclear, they only see bottom lines in current markets. Among the vendors, GE is largely divesting from nuclear to make gas and wind turbines. I've seen pro-nuclear advertising, but only in France. I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA. You see wind and natural gas ads all over the damn place. If there were a functional nuclear lobby, you could probably point me to at least one pro-nuclear advertisement on TV. Can you?
I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:
* https://mothersfornuclear.org/ -- a bunch of moms who worked at nuclear plants and wanted to tell people that they were actually good
* Seattle Friends of Fission: https://seattlefof.org/ -- a couple local grandparents who heard about nuclear wanted to spread the news of its low-carbon capabilities to other Seattle environmentalists.
* https://whatisnuclear.com -- a bunch of ~2006-era nuclear graduates who were trying to spread information about nuclear to help with climate change. Disclaimer: I founded this one so I know the story very well.
* https://www.generationatomic.org/ -- a few Minnesota folks who learned about nuclear and dedicated their efforts to it
* https://energyfromthorium.com/ -- a NASA tech named Kirk in Alabama who read an old book, got crazy excited, single-handedly rallied thousands of people with excitement about thorium, started a company, and recently got awarded a DOE voucher to develop his tech. If you've heard of Thorium, it's because of this guy, and it's about as grassroots as it gets.
The actual nuclear lobby group (NEI) is funded almost entirely by utilities who will rarely allow them to explain nuclear advantages over either fossil or renewables (because all the stakeholders have interests in those). They do good work, but it's not as targeted or hard-hitting as you might expect from a typical lobby group.
I would but they are probably not likely to talk about it anymore. Because...you know...it went so well ;)
> I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA.
Sure you did. You comment underneath it. People like Michael Shellenberger need to be payed too.
Btw, thanks for giving even more arguments to why nuclear is on the away out in this paragraph.
> I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:
Omg lol. The first two look like this John Oliver episode about fake grassroots pages. I mean what is this?
whatisnuclear is a guy who works for TerraPower.
> a few Minnesota folks who learned about nuclear and dedicated their efforts to it
I'm sure they are making nationwide impact paying for NYT and WP op-eds no wait...they probably are just like you and those fan boys here and not even relevant to the topic.
And last but not least THE NASA (uhuuuu!) guy with his "just around the corner" Thorium Reactor touring tedX talks I'm sure he has absolutely no money left to pay for this hype too.
So I don't know what you point was with this hilarious list but you seem to have missed mine and as I'm on cool down here for my contribution against this circle jerk, please consider reading my posts slowly so your answers make it worth being regarded.
There are plenty of viable sites for nuclear in the US where the local population is eager and willing, usually where there's already a nuclear power plant and it forms a strong economic force for the area. The NRC can't wait to approve more reactors and is doing its best to come up with new ways to certify safety.
So why wasn't nuclear built? Project management failures in the 1970s, combined with utility management far overestimating demand, led to a glut of reactors that were gigantic losses for those trying to build them. This was happening before TMI and Chernobyl turned more public opinion against nuclear. There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment, but the massive financial losses taught the money guys to stay the hell away from nuclear.
Fast forward to the 2000s, there's a renewed push to build more reactors, especially as the current fleet ages and will need to be retired. Nobody wants to do it, because of massive financial risk for little gain. Finally, regulatory capture of the Georgia and North Carolina state legislatures enables bills so that the utitlties socialize all risks of construction failure into their ratepayers, while keeping the profits privatized. Only in that remarkable situation would any utility be willing to take on the insane risk of trying to build a reactor. Four were attempted, two have been abandoned, and North Carolina electricity customers pay something like an average of $20/month on their bill for reactors that will never get completed. Georgia is behind schedule, 2x-3x over budget at the moment, with no end in sight of the cost overruns.
So it's not public opinion that kills nuclear, it's nuclear construction that kills nuclear, at least in the US. We do not build massive projects well, and it blows out any sort of competitive nature for nuclear.
Even if nuclear costs 5x renewables stored in energy, there may still be a financial case for it being a part of a grid, just as peaker plants right now cost much more than, say, combined cycle gas turbines. But it seems unlikely that the massive GW+ reactors of yore will be attempted again any time soon. "Small" modular reactors in the 50MW range will be attempted next, even though in the past these were disregarded as too small to be cost effective. We shall see what their costs end up being, but the best I've been able to glean from news articles is that it's about the cost of Vogtle's new construction in Georgia, I.e. not going to be price competitive with batters and renewables in 10-15 years.
Building nuclear right now is a massively expensive bet on a technology that gets more expensive the more experience we have with it. Meanwhile it's competitors are getting cheaper every day. There may be a spot for it in the future grid, but only if it's boosters focus on nuclear's true problems rather than wasting effort on excuses that are not truly blocking the tech.
https://www.backissues.com/issue/Forbes-February-11-1985
But bigger plants take longer, overall. That means you need more capacity in the development pipeline, because you're forecasting that the market is growing. Soon you're needing to have finance and regulatory movement for multiple gigawatts of capacity at all times to keep up with what you think is coming.
If you then find you've overshot demand, you are in an ugly position.
Utilities that did the "dumb" thing and prioritised smaller plants, which are ostensibly more expensive per kwh, tended to do better because they didn't need to tie up so much capital at any given time. Bringing a gigawatt online in five years as a single plant is very different from bringing 200MW a year online. Especially if it turns out in the third year that 600MW was as much as the market wanted to buy.
The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were just unable to execute.
This failure should not have been a surprise, as it mirrored what happened in the last big nuclear construction boom. That didn't stop because of accidents; it stopped because the nuclear plants in that boom experienced substantial cost overruns (i.e., the nuclear vendors were not honest about what the technology would actually cost.)
There's a really awesome way of getting all this: build nuclear reactors in shipyards.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
With all the overruns, it has certainly proved to be an expensive build. However, it's all been done with private money, unlike the so called cheap renewables that cost the public hundreds of millions in subsidies.
There was some internet hype for a while that Thorium was a end-all/be-all but those were slightly misguided in the sense that all Gen-IV reactors are end-all/be-alls. The Thorium itself had very little to do with it. It was an attempt at rebranding nuclear. As a nuclear engineer I prefer precision and promote all Gen-IV stuff including Th-fueled ones. Maybe I should have gone with the rebrand.
Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic.
Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need to be managed for thousands of years.
This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change.
As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.
In Europe, Finland has one under construction, not in operation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
You'd be surprised:
By October several thousand shipments were illegally dumped at the landfill in north St. Louis County, in violation of federal standards; they contained an estimated 43,000 tons of radioactive uranium processing wastes and contaminated soil. (...) No strangers to advanced statistical tools, within two years, Wright, an accountant, and Schanzenbach, an economics professor at Northwestern University, documented 700 cases of cancers and immune system diseases within a four-square-mile area. Some of these cancers have a one-in-a-million chance of occurring. (...) Wright and Schanzenbach updated their survey and reported in August 2015 that the number of diseases, including rare cancers, had increased to 2,725 cases.
Or how about:
A few days before I visited the rather scruffy Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, southern Italy, a boy aged 11 arrived complaining of headaches. Doctors feared the worst – and sure enough, he was rapidly diagnosed as another child with brain cancer. Some of these young patients arrive in agonising pain, others mystified by falling over all the time; they do not know that lethal tumours are swelling up inside their heads. Yet more turn up with cancer in their blood, their bones, their bladders. There are so many cases that not all can be treated in the hospitals of Campania, a largely rural region. (...) Tosti explained that the Mafia dumped huge quantities of contaminated industrial waste there, then obtained backdated permission for their actions. (...) A criminal investigation was launched 18 months ago, but local people do not expect convictions. This was far from an isolated incident. (...) There are thousands of similar dumps all over this once-paradisiacal slice of Italy: in canals and caves, in quarries and wells, under fields and hills, beneath roads and properties.
Or worse:
Fonti said he had been involved in sinking three vessels, and that the 'Ndrangheta made millions of pounds illegally dumping radioactive and other toxic waste from businesses in Italy and other parts of Europe. A regional prosecutor, Bruno Giordano, said that if the exploration of the wreck does produce evidence of toxic waste, authorities will start a hunt for more sunken vessels. They believe there could be up to 32 in Italian waters. The introduction of more stringent environmental legislation in the 1980s made illegal waste disposal a lucrative business for organised crime groups in Italy. "The problem of ships loaded with radioactive waste and sunk deliberately is an Italian mystery that should have been resolved years ago," said Ermete Realacci, an opposition MP.
However, lots of people have gone around into low radiation zones and found really sick people with horrible diseases, and claimed it was linked to the radiation. What they haven't done is linked those diseases to low-dose radiation with anything near scientific rigor. It's very often just confirmation bias. "There's low-dose radiation here, and cancer, therefore low-dose radiation caused this cancer."
I'm not saying we have enough data to show that low-dose radiation causes no cancer. It just doesn't cause an easily-measurable amount, if any. A counterexample is places like Ramsar, Iran, where the natural background radiation is 80x higher than average. Would you guess that the cancer rate is higher than average?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Mazandaran#Radioactivi...
Plus the ones we had were happy accidents thus far. We could have much worse, and they also involve terrorism and other such motives.
Plus disposing toxic byproducts that last almost forever (and which we regularly dump on the lowest bidder to take care off).
Lastly, to do nuclear properly costs too much. If it weren't for huge subsidies it wouldn't be viable...
The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.
Early reactors were hailed as paragons of safety too. Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops.
I mean, look. It's... fine. Go nuclear. I agree with you, that these are probably safe designs and are probably not going to poison anyone due to misanalyzed failure modes. Nuclear is carbon free power and preferable to coal and gas for sure.
But in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants and handle the grid buffering with batteries, I just don't care much anymore. If we run out of ridgeline real estate and still need more power, we'll call you.
The US doesn't "need" to do anything with nuclear, at all. The nuclear industry (and its geek proponents here on HN) needs to find a way to make itself worthwhile on a balance sheet.
It might be that your world is Arizona desert.
Please do not dive into latitudianizm.
I notice you left the batteries out of your cost comparison with natural gas. Building enough battery for a carbon-free grid without fossil backup is not so cheap.
Yeah, and then they installed the backups below where the main plant was, rendering them completely useless. Oops.
This was a human failure. Not a technological one.
And nobody wants to build lots of them because in most countries nuclear is extremely unpopular and there are issues with disposal of waste.
The technology change would also need to be drastic because we cannot rely on cold ocean waters to cool the plants.
In other words, we should have done it 30 years ago when the risk of societal collapse wasn't so great and we had the confidence that we can maintain this technology.
There are unspoken and unpopular things that could really work - limiting consumerism, and decreasing population.
If you solve this problem, you'll solve a problem much greater than energy consumption. This is not unspoken and unpopular, it is thought to be impossible given the human condition.
> decreasing population
Good luck with that one.
To answer your question more practically though, our nuclear waste would fit into a building the size of a football field. There's even a proposal to put it in some mine/cave in the western United States.
CO2 emissions are a globally-uncontainable problem that we don’t know how to solve.
Nuclear is strictly better on the scale of waste problems.
Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw...
Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP.
Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not survive the tsunami because said tsunami overcame the tidal wall in front of it, and then the backup generators got flooded. But for that one event, if the generators were placed up on higher ground, the outcome would have been so much different.
I have first-hand knowledge, due to..
1) Knowing the area. I lived in my Japanese father-in-law's mountain house, situated 1.5km out of Miyakoji-machi, Tamura-shi. That town was just inside the 20km evacuation zone from the power plant, the mountain house was just outside at 21km - myself and my family lived in our own house in the outskirts of Koriyama city.
2) My (now deceased) Japanese father-in-law was president of the Hitachi subsiduary company which built Fukushima Dai-ich No.4 reactor, which wasn't operating at the time of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami but did suffer an explosion thought due to hydrogen gas from the spent fuel situated in the Spent Fuel Pool in its upper level.
3) Mentioned in point (1) above, I owned a house in Tobu New Town on the Eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, and I was working at Flextronics in Koriyama at the time the M9 quake occurred - things got a tad 'exciting' at the time. I should write a book.
My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account - in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job, and at some point in time it was decided that placing backup generators underneath the buildings was sufficient - that unfortunately did not turn out to be the case :/
And lastly, I still fully support the idea of nuclear power.
There were other design flaws, too, like venting hydrogen inside the building rather than outside.
To give you an example. Did you know that CNPP was profitably working until 2000 while the disaster was in 1986?
Or another, fact - CNPP is an almost exact copy of an older nuclear plant which still profitably produces clean energy near St. Petersburg in Russia
You should watch the "A is for Atom" episode from Adam Curtis "Pandora's Box" series. It also talks about US designs and how they upscaled the naval PWRs to utility level which was not deemed safe by nuclear scientists of the time.
However, even those older designes are statistically much safer than coal - how many people died just in coal mines colapses?
I disagree, what you read isn't obvious and still doesn't qualify you to speak on the matter unless it was legitimate and vetted information. Reading a bunch of infowars doesn't make me a legitimate political commentator.
Sure that doesn’t qualify as expert opinion, but that also only gets you so far. In a debate that gets emotional it can’t hurt to have someone stand up and say “yes, bad things can happen. It happened to me and my family, but I still support it because it makes sense overall”
As someone who grew up near a Lockheed factory and a father that worked for NASA, you are qualified to speak about the community impacts of building and operating flying machines.
how do you define "safer"?
This ignores the point of above comments which is to educate people about which energy is safer per kWh generated.
It's not like solar/wind installations are done w/out safety precautions already.
Per kWh generated, nuclear is safer.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/recycling-atomic-...
I think that's a big problem.
Situated in an earthquake/tsunami-prone land? Situate backup generators on higher ground, build tidal walls sufficiently high.
The human race is built upon hindsight. Who was the first human who unfortunately tried eating a poisonous plant? We subsequently learned which plants were safely edible and which were not, for example.
So don't go dissing those who speak with hindsight - we humans stand on the shoulders of those who, unfortunately, lost their lives for everyone else to have the knowledge to progress :/
The point being that the human race's total knowledge and subsequent forward movement is based entirely on "that <event> happened therefore <these lessons have been learned and subsequent actions shall be enacted>."
most reactors fail because of humans and money, how can you learn about that? just look at fukushima, some problems were known, but the management have found that such a event cant happen and saved some money here and there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...
It's honestly nuts that they use carbon-emitting fossil fuels at all given their nuclear, solar, and wind potential.
There may be differing perspectives about how much of it is unusable, but the debate is between "most of the continent" and "even more than that". A nuclear waste storage facility in an unvisited portion of the outback would rank rather low on the list of bad things happening to the indigenous people of Australia, wouldn't you say?
[0] https://www.mapsofworld.com/australia/population.html
Yes, observant reader, parts of the ocean floor are some of the best candidate areas.
By humans.
On the other hand, not getting nuclear power deployed ASAP everywhere essentially means the long term destruction of our planet.
So all in all, I don't think it's nearly as clear cut a decision on nuclear vs. democracy, and if forced to choose I may pick the former.
Not sure I'd take that definition of success. China seems like an absolute failure in the face of almost certain success. The CCP seems to ruin every good thing about the Chinese culture, suppress every positive instinct, and punish every decent behaviour. They absolutely do not care about your silly environmental causes, and if you got in the way of any one of their state-sponsored ecological disasters, you would be crushed like roadkill.
I think nuclear power generation is an excellent idea, but if it is somehow incompatible with representative democracy, there just isn't an option, I guess we have to find some other good way to generate power. Though I think the idea that the two are incompatible is nonsense.
Tell that to the millions of people in concentrations camps because they practice the wrong religion or were born into the wrong ethnic group.
China also produces more carbon dioxide emissions than the US and Europe combined and it's growing at a faster rate, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese model is offering up a better solution for climate change.
Longer half-lives = less radioactivity.
The waste from conventional reactors is the fission products plus lots of U238, a fair amount of plutonium, some U235, and various transuranics. The transuranics and plutonium are the really long-lived radioactive waste.
To be clear there is no "safe" option. But this 60+ year old nuclear facility survived the 4th largest earthquake in record history, a tsunami, and only failed because the placements of the back, back up generators. Other plants (e.g. the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plan) that were closer to the epicenter survived just fine.
Old outdate plants aren't perfect, but even still its better than the guaranteed best case scenario for fossil fuels.
You make it sound like this is unbelievably improbable. Like "multiply the probabilities of an earthquake and a tsunami".
In fact, this is a prime example for a common cause failure.
15,896 people died that day, and no one (outside Japan) gives a shit because there was some radiation leakage and property damage.
To be honest, you could probably make that argument for anything under question in any scenario. But even if we were to skip the logical loopholes ("We took it into account, but we decided the benefits outweighed the costs because of <fill in any reason>"), let's just look at the raw numbers or simply just historical facts. Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries? OK, take one step back. Would those disasters have occurred if "all disaster scenarios [were] taken into account"?
The reality is that we have no one good and practical energy solution for the world. And even though I believe that there's no practical solution that can beat a tried and tested solution like nuclear in terms of efficiency, I also believe that there's been no tried and tested solution that's been worse in terms of failure.
My point is that failure of nuclear energy provision is demonstrably worse than the failure of any other options we've tried. Does this mean it's better/worse? Who knows.
But you simply cannot say that something is safe if <xyz>, especially when history says otherwise.
I'm flabbergasted at the number of people talking unironically about "human error" as if it's historically insignificant...
No it isn't; when dams fail villages get swept away and everyone dies. Bad mining disasters can wipe out ~50 people too.
When Fukushima failed, basically nobody got hurt, and there is a lot of inconvenience and resources have to go to cleaning the thing up.
Obviously it is still awful for the people involved, but I'd personally rather go through a nuclear accident than a dam failure or have a mine fall on me, because I'd still be basically ok after a nuclear accident. The argument might be that it is uneconomic after accounting for the costs, but it is demonstrably safe and so a far better failure mode than anything else we've tried.
I mean, Fukushima has basically proven that the only question is economic cost/benefit.
Do you have a source behind this? From what I can tell this statement seems wrong. E.g.:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-and-changing-en...
Coal is a huge source of energy. And the dirtiest available. And if electricity+heat production accounts for 25% of global greenhouse gasses, and transportation 14%, there's a decent chance coal power plants contribute just as much to global warming as all of transportation does, and basically zero chance that it plays a "very minor part" when compared to ships, planes, and cars.
I'm not saying that coal is good or nuclear is bad or vice versa. As I said in my original comment, there is no one practical (in terms of safety, efficiency, cost etc) global energy solution right now. I don't believe any coal-powered plants should be built. Should existing ones be replaced by nuclear? Depends on the actual area, geo-political situation (which changes over time) etc.
The failure scenario is demonstrably better than everything we’ve tried. More people have died installing solar and wind than have from nuclear.
Not a coal plant per se, but there's the Centralia mine fire [1] in PA, which is expected to burn for over 250 years, resulting in the entire town being abandoned.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
Yes, the very use of fossil fuels at the extent we use them is causing an extinction level event for the entire planet. Does the gravity of that really sink in?
Miyakoji-machi itself is situated in a valley surrounded by hundreds of square kilometers of mountainous terrain. To blithley claim it would somehow be easy to decontaminate thousansd of square kilometers of mountainous area is naive folly.
It is an extremely diffcult problem to solve.
Especially goven that tepco didnt even ADMIT to the other reactir failure, nor the acale of the catastrophy for a really really long time. They down played the whole thing feom day one and failed to even seek out external help immediately. Thats why thousands of kilometers and trillions of galllons of sea wer contaiminted
Plate tectonics was not understood or scientifically described until 65-67. It was not a widely accepted theory until later, at least the 70s. By that point, Fukushima had already been permitted and built.
Without plate tectonics to create the plate shift earthquake which resulted in the tsunami which caused the disaster, the only mechanism to create tsunamis known was underground rockfalls from steep slopes. Afaik the builders of the plant studied the bathymetry around the area, and saw limited risk of tsunamis.
The primitive science of the time ruled out the possibility of a tsunami overcoming a tsunami wall that was X feet tall. So they built a tsunami wall that was X+k feet tall, and called it a day. When later scientific theory showed that larger tsunamis were not just possible, but inevitable, the plant was not retrofitted to deal with the new reality. Oops.
And so goes hindsight.
And we (the human race) have learned.
yet, this is specific to this one incident, one specific threat.
The issue is more likely to be systemic. Once a production system is up and running, it is not consistantly being improved and iterated upon, but instead left to stagnate technologically (and in this case, in safety in light of new research etc).
But the argument is that such level of continuous improvement/iteration is costly, and the owners would not recouperate the costs! And so hence the economics goes, and so does the human condition continues to revolve around profit and loss.
You are saying the process of risk assessment and mitigation was not regularly actualized with new scientific knowledge. How is that possible ? Is there communication issue between different fields ?
For our information, does someone know : As soon as the engineers / executives were informed of this new risk, what was their decision at the time ? (Maybe this was asked during a court hearing)
That style of hazard, where existing controls passed through a rigorous system but become insufficient with time, are really insidious. It is certainly easy to understand why they would have missed it; even though it isn't an acceptable outcome. Especially given that communication in the 70s/80s involved a lot more talking to people and reading the right journals.
Not all tsunamis are caused by earthquakes though. On July 9th, 1958, there was a rockfall in Lituya Bay, Alaska. A cliff face broke off, and fell 3000 feet into the ocean. This resulting in a tsunami which stripped vegetation at up to 1720 feet in the surrounding areas.
https://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml
It is impossible for us to take all disaster scenarios into account. Our knowledge is very limited.
I don't know if you are old enough to remember it, but that's exactly what nuclear energy proponents said in the 70s.
Since then, actual experience showed that about every 20 years, there has been a big incident with global impact, and it will take decades if not centuries until the affected area is usable again. And the latter is something that might be tolerable in less densely populated countries or locations (Chernobyl), but in very densely populated ones it would be a major catastrophe.
And so far we've only seen disaster scenarios caused by human error and force of nature, and there's a third one (human malice), which thankfully hasn't happened yet, but which is impossible to guard against.
So my conclusion from reality is that no, we can't make nuclear power completely safe: The consequences of a disaster are too great, the monetary incentives are all wrong (it's not the nuclear companies which pay in case of the disaster, the state takes over; and the costs of the risk are not factored in into the actual running costs; and safety measures are expensive, so economics will always lead to, say, putting the backup generators NOT on the hill, because that would have cost more).
And then there's the problem that in some countries using nuclear energy and producing nuclear waste, the problem of actually storing that waste safely for the next few centuries is still not solved. Even after 50 years of producing it. And that is just insane.
I wish we could make nuclear safe. It would be a great way to reduce carbon emissions. Looking at reality, I can only conclude that we can't, and it's wishful thinking. (Yes, I know, that opinion is not popular, and the nuclear fanboys will be all over me, but so be it).
And how many plants failed that were built after the 70s?
>The consequences of a disaster are too great
Even with the disasters, it kills fewer people than coal even without taking into account the damage from global warming.
It’s like refusing to fly because plane crashes stick out in memory and then choosing to drive instead, despite how much more unsafe it is.
Of course it wouldn't. Designing a carbon-neutral economy is a much bigger problem that requires much broader strategic thinking.
The levelized cost of renewables is already cheaper than the equivalent for nuclear power, with much smaller capital costs, much faster start-up and build costs, and no concerns about long-lived waste.
And the trend lines are clear.
There is simply no case for nuclear power now - economic, political, or environmental.
Not if you want electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. If renewables were competitive for providing constant load, nobody would be having this fucking conversation.
AFAIK there are no high energy producers that are end-to-end carbon neutral (or negative). Doing so needs some type of sequestration.
Of course it wouldn't
nope
If you know of a baseload power source with similar carbon emissions to nuclear, I'm listening.
First, any coal analogy is out of date. Only the coal lobby wants to continue burning coal. Everyone else is like "No, that's stupid and self-harming, let's just not."
Secondly, plane crashes don't make entire areas uninhabitable for long periods.
Third, the problem with nuclear isn't the engineering, it's the management. The nuclear industry has proven time and time again that it can't be trusted with nuclear technology. The long list of smaller accidents, cover-ups, and outright lies make it clear that trust has not been earned.
Four, the waste problem still hasn't been solved. I'm not sure how a technology that creates waste that remains toxic for thousands of years can be considered "clean", but the very curious pretence that is somehow clean - or that it can always be buried under a "Keep Out" sign that will somehow remain in place for many centuries - is a handy example of the toxic rhetorical pollution the nuke industry generates.
Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
Apart from that, it's a great idea.
How I wish that was true.
What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
As an example, when the choice is between being cold in Stockholm (Sweden) or burning coal, the citizen of Stockholm rather burn the coal until the water heating plant has been replaced sometimes 2022 (to be burning other fuels). It is only used in the exceptional cases when the other systems are not enough, and yet it stands for 20% of the total pollution of the city.
> Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic
If we include the use of burning fossil fuel when renewable energy is not delivering, then the cost of renewable is uneconomic and very polluting.
We have not solved the continuously supply problem for renewable energy. Hydro is not enough, large scale battery technology is not a reality yet, adaptive energy policy has never been attempted at a global scale. People want continuously energy 24/7. They will pay for clean and cheap energy when they can, and burn coal when it is not available. The only current clean alternative is to have nuclear when solar and wind is not producing, but the marginal cost of running the nuclear plant is low enough so it will most likely also run when wind and solar is running. A little more environmental friend strategy is to lift up the rods to save fuel and reduce waste, but that means the whole cost need to be recouped during low production periods.
> Apart from that, it's a great idea.
The great idea is to have a full ban on burning fossil fuels for electricity and heat. A full stop. How people then want to solve the problem of continuous power is road full of issues. It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
>What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
It is true.
Germany has already built its last coal fired power plant and has already mandated the closure of all 84 plants by 2020.
Germany is already shifting to generating by renewables, demand shifting to deal with fluctuations in the cost of power, overproduction and pumped water / batteries to make up the rest of the difference.
>It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
>It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
Renewables are not competitive with nuclear for base load, at all. That’s why “environmentalists” conveniently allow the burning of coal and gas for the base load while they sit around waiting on a miracle for storage. Nuclear is a solution that works now. Hoping for storage tech 50 years from now is just stoking the fossil fuel burn.
[0] example being that meltdowns make a place inhospitable for centuries. Fukushima's exclusion zone is shrinking fast. And only Chernobyl and Fukushima have exclusion zones. Plus, those ares have thriving wildlife and vegetation.
You can count these events on your hands. The same can’t be said for aviation accidents caused by incompetence. Thousands of deaths have been caused by bad management/bad engineering/bad operations/bad pilots and yet we still fly more and more every day.
>Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
Only if you make up arbitrary numbers for cleanup costs. See what happens to solar if you remove all of the subsidies for the panels as well as the required storage batteries as well as the cleanup costs for the mines providing all of the materials and it won’t be “economic” either.
You need to consume orders of magnitude more coal than atomic fuel to get the same amount of energy; so the trace elements in coal become a big deal.
The radiation from coal isn't even the worst contaminant, you get all sorts of trace elements. Sulphur (causes acid rain around the power plant) leaps to mind, and there are other really nasty impurities. It is hard to understate the tiny, tiny nature of the nuclear waste 'problem'. Storm in a teacup stuff. It is barely an industrial quantity of dangerous material, and the energetic bits are Very Likely to be recyclable as diluted fuel for a more advanced reactor.
We produce tiny amounts of waste, I can't find a great source but the numbers seem to be of the order of 10,000 to 100,000 m^3 of material that needs special handling and a much larger quantity that can be scientifically measured to have come from a nuclear plant if you have the right equipment. Those are tiny numbers compared to what industrial processes working with waste have to deal with (for scale, 1 small mine open pit coal mine would move that much material a week).
People are trying to protect the world from smaller risks than the environment already faces. It isn't rational, and it isn't very clever either. The volume of the problem is truly tiny compared to stuff we just walk on by as a society.
[1] compares solid waste from different power sources. Little info for solar/wind. Both nuclear and coal seem bad. But none of us wants to build coal plants anyway. But i sure as hell also don't want lots of public resources spend for new nuclear that is decommissioned a few years later once more environmentally friendly alternatives go online. Especially if those resources could accelerate renewables in the first place. I have no problem with keeping existing nuclear plants running as long as they are safe.
I'd love read better concise summaries from official sources, if you can recommend some.
[0] https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... [1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/Environm...
From a volumetric perspective compared to what we know how to handle industrially the numbers are tiny. I strongly suspect the only reason we treat the waste with such care is because there is so little of it that that sort of care is feasible.
I've seen a big lead mine in operation. I wouldn't live anywhere near to one of them, containing the waste is basically impossible. With nuclear waste, there is so little we could literally ship worldwide waste production to the middle of the Sahara and just dump it there. 100,000m³ just isn't that big a number - I mean, we wouldn't because it is a silly idea, not because we can't. It isn't a very responsible approach, but in practice it would work. The volumes are small enough that in my view world-wide nuclear waste storage crosses the boundary from a technical issue to an economic and political issue.
There are lots of uninhabitable wastelands that have been created here and there by industrial processes. One more in a location chosen to be remote would make literally no difference given the scale of the benefits. There are a lot of deserts out there.
Be careful about how you know what you think you know. How informed are you about these matters? Have you taken a good look at the numbers? I know I haven't. How trustworthy are your sources? Why do you trust your sources? Are they expert or something, or do they happen to appeal to you emotionally?
This is a problem at the global scale we're talking about. We need good solid numbers. The number of articles in the newspaper for instance is not a good solid number. Emotion is not a good number.
~17% of France's electricity comes from recycled nuclear[0]. Just the recycled part (75% is from total nuclear).
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
Of course, most Germans would deny that. But the fact is, reducing nuke power leave us only two alternatives: increase the consumption of coal/oil etc, or decrease energy consumption period. Solar and wind are all the rage, but they're still very little compared to nuke.
And good luck with significantly reducing energy consumption: energy is more or less the limiting factor in our economy, so decreasing it decreases the GDP. So it would mean a big fat, long term recession. Now it doesn't have to be bad, but it sure needs a significant overhaul of our societies.
[0] https://energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&perio...
I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly believe global warming is as bad as they say. We have a history of solving problems in the past, so we'll solve this one too. There's no need to panic.
Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"
We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.
Again, the only reason we're not all nuclear today is because of politics.
That's probably the wrong choice.
It's a way to drastically reduce the waste from the process.
Understand where reprocessing came from. Way back then, the story was that nuclear was going to be dirt cheap, but would ultimately be limited by the cost of uranium. The solution was breeding, to provide all the expensive fuel those thousands of cheap reactors would need. Reprocessing was needed to close this fuel cycle.
But this story bears no resemblance to reality. Reactors turned out to be expensive, the number of installed reactors was far below projections, and uranium is not in short supply.
One still hears echoes of this old narrative from people who don't really understand where it came from, and why it doesn't apply.
But let's stipulate that they want to destroy the waste. What's the cheapest way to do that? If they wait to reprocess the fuel, and destroy the actinides in the future, it comes out cheaper than if they reprocess now. That's because reprocessing, and developing and building fast reactors, is quite expensive, and the net present value of that cost is minimized by moving it off into the future. Moreover, reprocessing becomes easier as the fuel cools off.
So, reprocessing NOW is a pointless waste of money, even if ultimately you want to do it. The ONLY reason you'd want to reprocess now was if you needed the actinides now for use in energy generation. And no one needs them for that.
The point is to deal with the waste. The whole argument is that we can't go to nuclear power because "waste". So deal with it.
No one cares about the cost of it -- it's far cheaper to deal with it now than to manage it for a thousand years anyway -- especially in political capital with a bunch of nimbys who think nuclear power is scary.
We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.
For the most part nuclear falls victim to the same human reasoning flaws that make us more worried about flying on a plane than driving even though driving is way riskier.
For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
And no, the comparison to plane vs. car is not appropriate: In both kinds of accidents, a number of people get injured or killed. In case of a nuclear accident, a sizeable area becomes inhabitable for centuries. That's on a completely different scale.
(And just for the record, I'm neither worried about flying in a plane, nor I am worried about driving a car. I am also not worried that the nuclear power plant near me will explode next.)
If we can agree that nuclear is not safe in the long run, and should eventually be abandoned, then we've made progress in the discussion.
It's also not "nuclear or coal". That's another thing in those discussions that bugs me. Fossil fuels (not only coal) are not the answer, either: they'll eventually run out, and they contribute to global warming.
And comparing them by "counting deaths" and "how many lives can be saved" is completely missing the point. Neither nuclear accidents nor coal usage immediately kill people. And it gets totally ridiculous when people try to argue that "there are accidents during wind power constructions; people have fallen to death. So wind power is mucher more dangerous than both nuclear and coal (if you only count the deaths)."
So in the long run, we need alternatives to both nuclear and fossil fuels. If those who say "nuclear is the only solution, it's so great" get the upper hand, we'll never develop those alternatives. And that's the point.
As for the short run, I don't really care. If we can efficiently stop global warming by shutting down all coal plantes and keeping the nuclear plants for a few decades, I'm all for it. Though I doubt that will be enough to stop global warming; we must also drastically reduce energy usage; up usage of renewables, redesign the electric grid, and efficient means of storage to it, restart projects like Desertec, etc., etc.
There's enough we can do. but arguing "let's just bet everything on nuclear, it's totally safe" is the wrong thing to do.
Well no, reactors in chernobyl remained operative until 2000 ,and chernobyl is not inhabitable look at all the animals that live there , the level of radiation is low.Regarding fukushima people are already returning in evacuated zones
And they broke ground at Fukushima in the 60s. We've come a long way in reactor design in 50 years.
I think it’s inevitable you will have bad disasters. The human race is not smart nor mature enough.
That's not really a good metric. What you need to do is a time varying analysis and consider the total number of reactors (globally).
Eg. if we hold danger of reactors constant but we increase the number of reactors over time then you'd see disasters being more frequent (but the opposite is true).
Alternatively if we hold the number of reactors constant and pretend that all new reactors replace old reactors you can determine if new reactors are more, the same, or less dangerous.
But to do a real analysis you have to combine both of these (and some more stuff). Otherwise you're pretty much just saying that the average of the set {1,2,3} is 2. That 20 year thing is a bit contrived and I'm surprised it has popped up a few times.
The second why is "why does the reactor require an uninterrupted supply of electrical power in order to not melt down? Gen 2 nuclear power is inherently dangerous, and is only made safe through active safety systems. If the reactor trips, the cooling pumps must run or decay heat will cause a meltdown. Gen 3 reactors tend to incorporate a lot more passive safety systems or at least ones that don't require electricity.
When it comes to risk management, the human brain that is bound by evolution to dangers close in time and location, is not capable of assessing the consequences of losing a piece of the planet earth's habitat for millions of years.
I'm not sure that there is a 'risk' that the human brain can't process. Risk of what, exactly? Huge cost to the generation that has to move, massive risk if it hits farmland, sure. But even assuming that the 'millions of years' figure is factual - which I doubt - we are certainly going to run out of human race before we run out of land. The risks are all fairly short-term things.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...
My knowledge is from another industry that relies heavily on backup generators.
The other design flaw is diesel or no they require cooling water during shutdown. What bothers me for instance is during the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes the Mississippi ran backwards for a while. During other earthquakes you see significant uplift. If the intakes run dry because the local hydrology suddenly changes you're just fucked.
The physical&power infrastructure side of big data centers is really quite interesting, by the way. Not something we all get exposed to regularly but I can only encourage anyone who has a chance to learn about it to take that opportunity.
It's still not solved. As long as that is the case, I think nuclear energy is not an option.
Germany wants (and the whole world should):
* enough energy
* carbon-free
* nuclear-waste-free
On order to do that, you need massive investments in renewable energy and storage.
Instead, they found a way to have:
* large investment in solar energy, without protectionist measures, leading to the German solar industry dying an creating demand that lead to cheap China solar (overly simplified - feel free to elaborate in your answers)
* laws that limit the building of wind power significantly
* failure to build a power line from the north (offshore windparks) to the south (high power demands, less power resources) which currently leads to insane situations with the neighbors
* first extending the nuclear power plants permits, shortly afterwards deciding to shut down, which lead to Germany having to pay compensations to the companies (in addition to a completely botched nuclear fuel tax, that they had to pay back after it was found invalid in court)
* subsidies for dirty coal plants over decades (300 billion was a number floating around) and another I think 50 billions to help the regions which rely on the coal business after the coal shutdown
Politicians deal in compromise. They see different interests and they try to find a middle ground between those two. They do that with a pretty heavy disregard of science. Scientist are just another interest group.
Scientists: If we don't cut CO2 but this much until this date, the effects of climate change will become this nasty.
Industry: If we do that, that will cost us X moneys and endanger Y jobs and we will make Z less profit.
Government: OK. let's meet halfway.
Earth: LOL
yes they cut the main source of green energy
There is still no final depot for that waste, and the depots they have now are currently running full of water.
I get the argument of nuclear being zero-emission and maybe nuclear can be the solution - but not in its current form. If they wanna play, they need the new kind of reactors, which are actually safe and minimize nuclear waste. Also maybe figure out what to do with the waste before you produce it.
* building reactors in areas with severe earthquakes and tsunamis was the main design flaw
* flood protection too low, even though this was known
* backup-generators not safe against flooding
* loss of outside electricity over a long period of time -> powerlines were not working, other sources of electricity on the grid were offline due to earthquake
* too long time to restore electricity, we are talking about many MWs for cooling and other purposes -> generators were difficult to bring in with further problems making them work
* various damage due to earthquake on reactors, buildings and infrastructure around the plant
* too much spent fuel in pools, required large amount of electricity for cooling
* spent fuel pools high in the buildings, hard to reach
* no cooling capability in case of days-long loss of electricity -> then needs to be cooled with seawater pumped with vehicles with concrete pumps (which were flown in from remote places, even from the US) -> caused structural damages to buildings and spread radiation
* no idea what to do with the contaminated cooling water
* no protection in main buildings against the explosions that happened
* no technology existed for a decade or more to deal with molten cores
* ineffective security/safety process -> the plant had checks a few months before the accident with no consequences
* unwillingness to invest major amounts of money into upgrades
* life extension for outdated reactors, due to economical pressure
* no independent controlling instances for the nuclear industry
All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe".
And all the time bad things happen and they have to admit "well, not when X happens". Or "not when A and then B happens".
Just as you did here. It's nice that Fukushima could have survived an earthquake, but the tsunami isn't a freak accident, it's actually a common cause thing.
It's nice that Fukushima could have survived both the earthquake and the tsunami, had it been built differently.
But it hadn't. And that's why all this "This time everything is safe" is just as unbelievable as over the last decades.
Now, you can certainly say that decarbonization is worth the risk, and I might even be on the fence about it.
But please don't insult the general public's intelligence by ever telling us again that nuclear power is safe and it was only those stupid Russians who totally mismanaged their power plant.
How does what you are saying not apply to any other technology? Cars are “save” but kill more people than all nuclear power plants and accidents combined. Still we say to ourselves we can deal with the risk, which is obviously the case for lot’s of cases but might not be in some exceptions.
I think your reaction seems a little bit too emotional to an interesting and seemingly informative (haven’t fact checked his claims) personal perspective. The problem with discussions about nuclear energy is that there is a strong dogma towards openly thinking about the costs/risk/benefits in the political sphere. In Germany postponing our nuclear exit could buy us some time to get coal offline earlier and provide some stability to the grid. Ironically, the green party would never consider such a move due to ideological (and historical) reasons.
But that's no reason not to point out the obvious flaws in the comment I replied to.
And re: emotionality: you can wish it away, but it is real. Nuclear fans always act as if they only had to show this one scientific study to citizens, and everyone would immediately fall in line. That's hilarious.
Nuclear is done. It may be irrational, but the nuclear community has richly earned that. A little bit of humility and risk-weighing instead of grandiose claims of "perfect safety" would have helped.
But these lies of "perfect safety" were useful back then. They were a shortcut. A cheat. They could get their reactors much quicker if they made false claims.
Now they get the long-term results to their short-term thinking.
However, I am still a staunch defender of differentiated learning from the past and rational planning of the future. Given the information we have right now, nuclear might actually be an important (probably temporary) piece of a rational plan for a good future. Moving forward means setting the stage and right incentives for people to learn from mistakes, improve and grow.
This is a strawman argument. No one is claiming that old reactors are getting safer as we come up with better designs. None of the newer designs that people are claiming are safer have had issues. Fukushima was literally constructed before Chernobyl.
And that's setting aside the other problem which is that many of the countries that are still growing, and will need new, clean sources of power are countries that don't have as much nuclear expertise to begin with. And some of them are countries that the West has tried to actively keep from having nuclear capability.
Better solar, wind, etc., has fewer risks than better nuclear tech in the long run.
no https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
The politics seem kind of similar to pipeline projects, but the ultimate goal would be to save the earth rather than burn it down so maybe there would be less opposition. Maybe you could even generate enough energy and wealth to convert some legacy fossil fuel businesses (and the politicians they own).
You mean California? California is mostly empty, unused space.
How are you proposing to cool them? Remember, 2/3rd of the fission energy in an LWR goes out as low temperature waste heat.
Nuclear reactors, much like other kinds of industrial power stations, require enormous amounts of water for cooling towers. They don't put them next to rivers because it looks cool.
I suspect someone could figure out some kind of a heat sink that works without lots of fresh water.
But water is much better at carrying waste heat and the population centres demanding electricity tend to be close to rivers and lakes anyhow.
The cost of building and operating a nuclear power plant WAY exceeds solar and wind, hands down.
If you are going to make bets, take as many bets as you can.
Proponents of nuclear tend to ignore the long-run costs associated with nuclear (eg. waste transport and storage), and the potential for cost blowouts due to acute disasters like Fukushima (estimated cost to taxpayers: USD $100 Billion).
The fact tax money is going towards Fukushima highlights another problem with nuclear power: the agency problem. The individuals and organizations that planned and built Fukushima are not directly shouldering the full cost of the problem it created. You can extrapolate from this to many other problems and risks associated with nuclear power, because the timeframe is long relative to the life of a human. If the average human lifespan was 200 years or more, maybe this would be less of an issue, but as it is now, profits now will inevitably trump responsibility tomorrow (and by tomorrow, I mean 30+ years from now).
There's also the risk of weaponization, which increases as the number of plants increase, particularly if those plants are built in countries which currently do not possess much technical nous. It's not a technology that should be disseminated, because the risks are real, and catastrophic in their consequences. If this sounds paranoid, Warren Buffett had this to say about the threat of cyber, biological, nuclear, or chemical attack on in the US:
"“What’s a small probability in a short period approaches certainty in the longer run. (If there is only one chance in thirty of an event occurring in a given year, the likelihood of it occurring at least once in a century is 96.6%.) The added bad news is that there will forever be people and organizations and perhaps even nations that would like to inflict maximum damage on our country. Their means of doing so have increased exponentially during my lifetime. “Innovation” has its dark side.
There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk. If an event occurs in the U.S. that leads to mass devastation, the value of all equity investments will almost certainly be decimated.
No one knows what “the day after” will look like. I think, however, that Einstein’s 1949 appraisal remains apt: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”"
[Source: 2016 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders]
Renewable energy at that scale is still theoretical and hasn't shown its downsides yet.
Nuclear has shown all its downsides, and they have been 95% corrected. It's a mature, known technology.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
As for plant capacity, the largest power plant in the world is renewable (Hydropower):22.5 GW. Compare that with the largest nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (currently closed due to safety concerns): 8GW.
If you limit "renewables" to only solar and wind, there are already 1GW+ wind and solar PV projects operating, and more in the planning and construction phase. There's no theoretical obstacle to building 8GW solar PV projects, though it might be unnecessary, as they can be deployed in a modular fashion. There are several 500MW solar thermal projects operating and more planned.
The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster of 2011 may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
Hydro works well and is the best solution if our country has capacity for it, unfortunately, it's not available everywhere.
> The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of Fukushima may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
The downsides are completely understood and the consequences of Fukushima (please specify in your message the nuclear plant) are well studied, the result is that there's not much impact.
Hydropower is also an example of one of my points. It is a mature technology, and we now know of its big environmental costs as well as it's benefits. We could technically probably double the hydroelectric power of the world, but the natural devastation would be too large, so we mostly chose not to.
We have yet to see what those downside are for solar and wind. For nuclear we know, and also know how to handle them.
It's already hard to find a safe solution for waste that'll survive for millennia. Simply because predicting what might happen over those time scales is hard.
Now factor in that it'll be paid for by humans with a lifespan left of 50 years, and usually a decision horizon of 4 years (i.e. politicians).
The chances off getting it wrong technically are non zero. The chances of getting it wrong for budgetary reasons are even bigger. Incentives do not line up.
This means:
1. no mega projects that attract similarly sized public opposition
2. 1-2 year construction timelines instead of 10+
3. much, much less financial and regulatory risk
4. if an individual project goes off the rails because of bad management, it just gets cancelled instead of being pushed forward with endless public dollars because of sunk cost fallacies
The private sector is well able to stomach the risk level of wind and solar and finance and build it on their own, whereas nuclear and mega hydro essentially require government financial backing, which again contributes to the agency problem.
We know we can build 1,000s of MW of wind and solar per year in a safe and cost-effective way because we're already doing that. Every single nuclear or dam project in North America right now is a delayed, over-budget financial and project management boondoggle.
They interfere with fish migration. For some species, this means disrupting their reproductive cycle.
They gradually accumulate sediment, so their reservoir slowly fills up and turns into land. This is one of the issues with the Aswan Dam, which is projected to have a much shorter lifespan than was initially projected due to high sediment accumulation.
The Aswan met all of its goals, but it's a disaster. The sediment rapidly accumulating behind the dam used to provide free fertilizer for farmers. Use of commercial fertilizer skyrocketed.
It's also the cause of a serious health crisis. Schistosomiasis cases have also skyrocketed.
The annual floods used to keep snail populations in check. The snails are the vector for this gruesome parasitic infection.
Unlike coal or nuclear, renewables are easily scaled down without creating a huge risk: for coal, you want to go large for efficiency reasons and to ensure that the right set of filters are installed and maintained. For nuclear, there were ideas of building a nuclear power plant in every basement, but given how the power plants we have look like military bases, that seems rather unfeasible.
Once you go big, you have the issues mentioned elsewhere in the thread (sunk cost fallacy, NIMBY, ...) but also corruption and that these big sites become single points of failure.
Dams are in the same space: NIMBY, once started you can't stop, large scale construction (which is rife with corruption).
Create financially reasonable basement/rooftop level nuclear or coal systems that can be safely installed by any random electrician and operated by the home owner and the entire discussion may shift.
beacuse they stop working
Even if the US was totally committed, and decided to build a brand new reactor right now, how long would it take? A decade?
We can slap up renewables in a fraction of that time, and spend the next decade reaping the rewards, not sitting around waiting for the magical payoff of a reactor that will cost billions to build and operate, and doesn't do us a lick of good for an entire decade!
Totally committed? You sure? Ok.
The US could bring at least two dozen new nuclear power plants online per year. It could do that with only modest impact on its massive economy.
National security declaration (probably numerous). Bypass all environmental building concerns and impact reviews. Pull most of the US military out of Europe and all of it out of the Middle East. Mobilize at least 100,000 soldiers in support of the mission (ideally twice that number; clearing land, hauling materials, dealing with protestors, providing area security, restricting access including by drones). Whatever needs to be done, will be done. Redirect several agencies (DARPA, DOE, etc) to almost exclusively working on this mission for ten years. Have Congress declare a draft on the back of the national security declarations, pull relevant scientists and engineers out of the private economy via draft. Suspend all emigration. Federalize the control of all national guard troops, draft them all formally under the command of the US Military and remove them from their states to avoid potential state resistance (numerous states would attempt to resist this very strong-armed Federal plan). Nuclear plants would be reasonably distributed across the country, some states would attempt to resist any plants being built inside their borders, which is another reason you remove their national guard troops. This is serious, so we'll do what is necessary. It's life or death after all, right? If the Supreme Court attempts to block it, expand the size of the Supreme Court and stuff the bench until your votes win.
Use eminent domain where necessary. Limit taking private land as much as reasonably possible; doing so just gives the resistance groups an issue to play up. Fortunately in this case the Federal Government owns a ridiculous amount of land (particularly in the western states).
The US has an epic scale labor force, and millions of healthy people doing nothing that could be drafted into various basic positions in support of this large national project. Jobs! (there's that sound bite) Another plus: absolute secrecy would not be particularly paramount, unlike with the Manhattan Project. You wouldn't need a bunch of Oak Ridges. There isn't anything that special about a modern nuclear power plant, and the US wouldn't be using any radically new technology in these plants anyway.
Initially getting up to speed would take several years (standardizing and getting new workers enough experience, etc), after which you could get to a rate of bringing a new plant or two online in a given month.
Fund it with a trivial Federal Reserve Nuclear QE program. $20-$30 billion per month in 'printing.' The dollar wouldn't even notice, and it'd keep the budget from getting further stretched (which would keep the general population more calm than if you spiked their taxes or took from their social programs).
Task the major banks - all of which are realistically under direct supervisory control of the Federal Reserve and Treasury these days - with helping to keep the US financial system stable (there might initially be some panic), including where interest rates are concerned. The US has the most powerful banking and financial system by a considerable margin, it would be told to accomodate and assist, or else (look what they did for funding the shale build-out, a spigot of hundreds of billions of dollars; private loans involved in the program would largely be back-stopped by the Fed; thousands of companies in the private economy would need loans to ramp up early on; the banks making some money on this would remove a potential resistance point). Put the talking heads on TV to work pushing the agenda favorably, to calm the population; spin how positive this will be for the economy, jobs jobs jobs (just keep repeating that). Do the exact same thing for the business & financial media to soot...
If the fate of the world is in question then Ted Kaczynski is a rational individual who reacted with restraint.
For now, space is just a good training ground. It is not necessary to build isolated eco systems / livable environments on earth and doing so makes no sense financially. Space enthusiasm is a good tool to push R&D.
On an even longer scale it would certainly provide a diverse range of evolutionary benefits, but that would probably go a far bit off topic.
There is limited global capacity to do the very heavy forgings required for reactor pressure vessels (and no capacity at all for that in the US).
It makes absolutely no sense to start building nuclear now. Even if you could guarantee 10 year build time at a fixed cost today (which you can't), by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today. The cost curves are simply too favorable for any private market to favor nuclear over solar currently. Everyone in this thread keeps talking about the technology, but it's purely about the economics. Solar+storage at grid-scale will be cheaper than basically all other forms of power generation within 5 years based on current cost curves. Within 10 years the cost of new solar+battery will be cheaper than the operational cost of nuclear, not even accounting for the billions in construction costs over decades.
If the billions spent on nuclear plants now was instantly diverted to solar, we'd have way more clean energy in the grid on a way shorter timeline. That's the reality today. It's time to stop arguing and stop wasting money. Nuclear is dead.
Imagine if the developed world invested in nuclear to the extent that France did in the 60s and 70s - how many trillions of tons of CO2 would NOT have been emitted into the atmosphere? You can talk about Republican denialism, but it is anti-nuke lobby that will be held responsible for climate change.
>by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today.
Will it? Will the sun shine at night? when it's cloudy? No? Then it doesn't matter how cheap solar and wind are. You're not going to use either as a cornerstone of modern energy generation. So if not solar and wind, then what else is left? Germany knows - they are signing multi-decade deals for natural gas and coal-based power (from Russia and neighbors), as they are shutting down their nuclear plants.
I think OPs point is essentially that, even if nuclear would have helped in the 70s, it is now too late.
As for the intermittent issues of power. I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
If we have a week of that weather Mad Max will be a become a documentary.
This is the solution, but currently only operating at a small scale. This is something that can be scaled up insanely quickly for a fraction the cost of alternatives. The success of this relatively small installation has already resulted in many more battery projects coming online this year.
This being my day job, it would add $8k to the electricity bill of the two child household in Australia if we used your solution to store the wind and solar power.
I ask because a 40C day sounds like a problem due to AC usage, but would probably come with pretty effective solar, and decent wind near the sea.
No country will do it with nuclear in the future, because nuclear won't be competitive.
I get that. But it's worth going through the exercise how bad well-intentioned policies can be. It's worth to consider that anti-nuke activism is much worse than Conservative denialism.
And if nuclear is too late now, then there's nothing we can do to replace carbon-based power.
>I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
Oh come on. Hydro is great if you can get it. Places that can get hydro, already get hydro. Most places can't get hydro. Ditto for geothermal.
So what's the solution to replacing carbon emitting power sources? I want someone to explain that to me. Because all I hear is how solar and wind one day will be cheap and prices are falling every day - even though price is not the problem with solar and wind. Variability is. We need power when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, and power requirements keep growing. People want electric cars and trains, those need huge amount of energy. I hear how batteries will save the day, except that we are not anywhere close to having battery technology capable of storing city-sized power requirements for a few minutes, much less hours or days. It may not even be physically possible to create a battery like that. So what's left? Coal and Gas - and this is exactly what EVERY nation is doing if they are not investing in (or divesting from) nuclear.
I thought batteries just weren't there yet. Especially if you take wear cycles into account.
How much lithium is there, actually?
One should add wind and solar, both at around 0.5MJ/h per m2.
$/MWh is the only real metric that matters.
Edit: http://solarcellcentral.com/images/avg_cost_of_energy.jpg
Given this statement and the chart that shows solar and wind already being the cheapest energy sources this must mean we can just switch to solar and wind ... right?
Except we know we can't. We know that the variablity of solar and wind makes those impossible replacements for coal and gas. I guess price isn't the only metric that matters.
This is why the most important number is $/MWh for "solar/wind + storage". Storage has to be included in the equation. At current prices that puts "solar/wind + storage" about equal with natural gas, but those prices are dropping rapidly.
Installation times are also very significant factors in reaching emission reduction targets. Waiting 10+ years for nuclear to come online just isn't viable. Solar+storage can be operational at the same scale as a nuclear plant within 2-3 years.
So basically one would need a lot of overcapacity to be able to produce and store enough power during the summer to last over the winter. But in places like California sure go full solar as it actually works all year around.
You realize this is like the US saying "lets give money to Mexico to build all of our solar power there (it is closer to the equator and thus would provide more even output throughout the year and would make more econimical sense) and just rely on them selling it to us forever at a nice price as they are a friendly country at this very moment". Or even better would be the countries further south and build a sea cable on international waters so anyone with a sub can go and cut it to fuck with you,
From a national security perspective relying on such a vital resource as electricity on someone else is just plain stupid. I realize most countries are in such a relationship with oil/gas countries at the very moment but I think the goal should be to lessen this kind of relationships not increase them.
Solar and wind are plenty cheap. That's not their problem. The problem, as the article stated, is that "they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon."
So now what do you do?
Design cities for pedestrians, bicycles and public transit. This will help reduce heat island effect, thereby reducing the need for AC.
I slept in a tent for nearly six years. I plugged in at the library during the day. I got by on battery power in the evening until I fell asleep.
I'm currently in a hundred year old building with radiant heat and no AC. It has good design that helps keep the building comfortable without a lot of modern amenities we think are required.
I spend a lot of time online. I don't own a TV.
You can have a very modern life on a lot less electricity than many people use.
It's really not a given that we must use high levels of electricity to maintain a high quality of life. The first thing we should do is question such assumptions. The second is start actively challenging them.
This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
Igloos:
On the outside, temperatures may be as low as −45 °C (−49 °F), but on the inside the temperature may range from −7 °C (19 °F) to 16 °C (61 °F) when warmed by body heat alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igloo
I can't readily find a source with details, but traditional desert cities were located on high ground and the streets oriented to catch the winds such that daytime street temperatures were pleasant.
We used to design buildings and cityscapes to work with the local climate. Now, we slap up cardboard boxes, inject insulation and add HVAC systems, counting on technology to keep things comfortable in place of good design. In reality, well designed buildings are more comfortable and probably less likely to suffer from sick building syndrome.
Let me get this straight, The only way to curb emissions is to severely reduce our energy use?
>This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
No. This is a problem of people not wanting a subsistence-based lifestyle. Your suggested policies are insane. They are not reasonable, at all. You're talking about replacing all roads and buildings (and cities)? Use non-existent battery technology to power a modern economy?
Internalize the fact that power requirements will keep growing and that expecting people to live in tents is not a reasonable policy.
this is just an intellectual dishonest excuse to ignore nuclear energy
I'm an environmental studies major whose dream job would be urban planning or similar. I've been looking for real solutions to such problems for a lot of years.
One conclusion I've drawn is that passive solar really needs a lot more attention than it gets. It's an elegant solution with no real downside.
Nuclear has a couple of big downsides. 1. When things go wrong, it's really bad, a la Chernobyl. 2. Even if nothing goes wrong, safely storing the spent fuel is a significant issue and goes on "forevy."
Everyone knows about those two issues. It's precisely why nuclear is controversial.
It's also possible for someone to be pro nuclear power and also pro conservation. There is no need to set this up as an either-or thing. People could be pro passive solar while being pro nuclear power.
I'm not pro nuclear power. I'm also not strongly against it. I'm just trying to let people know that passive solar exists and can play a role in solving these issues.
This is simply untrue.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pges-recording-...
The batteries have already materialized, and once they start installations at scale this will be taking over the energy market. This makes solar/wind viable as a base load power source virtually everywhere in the world. Even in places that get heavy cloud cover such as Northern Europe will start using these solutions at scale within the next few years.
No. That's the entire problem. There are no batteries that can scale to city needs.
What you're citing is a completely different use case. There is very good case to be made that battery farms can replace gas-burning power ONLY when they are used as a way to quickly scale power production. Battery farms also make sense to even out supply and demand (i.e. serve as a place to dump excess power, or provide stored energy when supply temporarily drops).
ALL new battery projects are around those two use cases. And that's great!! It isn't nothing, and it's a great technology solution for a very real need.
HOWEVER, it's one thing for a battery farm to supply power for seconds or minutes in specific cases, it's another for a battery farm to provide hours or days of constant supply ... every day. Not only is it expensive because you need to over-provision your generation and storage capacity (i.e. in order to provide power for 1 hour at night, you actually need solar to produce 1.5-2 hours of surplus energy). Worse, because wind/solar power generation output is affected by seasons, you'll actually have to over-provision just to match peak seasonal output, meaning that in-season, you invested in infrastructure that's sitting around doing nothing. Then there are also major durability issues. Current battery tech is simply not durable enough and will never be durable enough to solely backup wind and solar in a cost effective way. We're talking about batteries needing to operate for days and weeks when wind and solar output dips (or drops to nothing) at huge scale.
This article goes into some details:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...
This is why no nation is actually replacing any nuclear or fossil-fuel-based power with SOLELY wind/solar+battery solution.
There are other issues that are typically glossed over, such as the fact that solar, wind and battery tech are typically environmentally destructive to make (requiring mining, and complex refining processes), and are very hard and expensive to recycle.
It's possible that some battery-tech breakthrough occurs and changes this (and the article references tech like using surplus power to create molten-salt to use as a storage medium), but the reality is that today, we don't have the technology that is anywhere close to cost-effective, and it isn't clear if there will be one in the next X years.
Why is there not a singular global body that includes all nations to build out, manage and secure ALL nuclear power plants. Basically a single body, comprised of all the top minds and efforts of every nation's nuclear SMEs - which will create a grid of nuclear power all over the world and every country contributes based on their draw from the system?