I'm willing to live moderately close. I don't really want to be in the shade of a cooling tower; I wouldn't want to be next door to a coal-fired power plant or a gas turbine, either, or even really a wind farm.
But if you want to put it in an industrial area a few blocks away, sure, I'm good with it. I'm not sure we have a great source of cooling water here, though, except up in the hills which is really not a wonderful siting for a nuclear plant.
Different issue, but yes, I very much hope so too. There aren't any good alternatives for long haul flights so I shouldn't judge people for doing them for work or visiting family (even if we should avoid them for holidays), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't collect money for projects like compensating the emissions, literally pulling it back out of the air (Climeworks), developing alternatives, or something else I can't think of right now. And for short haul we need to push people to trains (or in the USA, to create proper trains).
At the risk of violating site guidelines, Fukushima was mentioned in the article as well. I understand that you’re against nuke power because of the scary problems, but reading the article first and responding to the points raised is a better approach then the same old same old repetition.
I doubt it, it seems there's enough cognitive dissonance that he'd be happy living next to Chernobyl, the station he grew up next to leaks like a sieve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
For living next to? Obviously the solar installation. For generating energy to power our economies as we scramble to mitigate the impact of climate change? Obviously nuclear.
The thread is about what you would like to live next to. I agree with you, I would like to live next to solar.
With regard to powering our economies, I think we should just use a lot less energy. Turn the lights off, turn down the aircon, shut down the malls and find better ways to do things.
Factories might need to find efficiencies as well, or invest in enough solar to run themselves.
We'll have to pay the true cost of consuming the products they produce.
Update: I didn't do it very well, but what I wanted to say was that nobody runs their home like a shopping mall. Thousands of lights blasting, air so cold you have to put a jumper on in summer, and doors wide open to let the cold out. There is a lot of waste in the commercial world that I think we should fix before we freak out that there is not enough energy.
> I am now pro-nuclear—at least as an intermediate technology until we really get renewables, and, as you say, BETTER BATTERIES, sorted out.
> An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized.
Isn't this why we won't get nuclear power? It's always been my impression than nuclear is more financial challenging than technical, it takes forever to recoup the initial cost of the reactor and by the time it does, we will want to move onto 'cleaner/safer' renewables.
Perhaps if public perception changed considerably and we were willing to have our base energy load (what coal & natural gas* provide today) come from nuclear. I just don't think nuclear makes financial sense currently if it's only intended to be temporary.
So far, we don’t have any technology even in design phase, much less in the deployment stage, to deal with the storage problem. For our current needs, lithium batteries simply will not do, and we do not have enough viable sites or water for pumped storage either. There is nothing suggesting we’re going to solve the storage problem in our lifetimes, so nuclear is really the only viable solution to get off fossil fuels completely.
Large grids (with DC interconnects) make the storage problem less (because the covariance falls between different generation sources and demand sinks), as do a diversity of approaches (e.g. solar, wind, hydro; only tapping hydro when there's a shortfall).
People will point to power->gas->power as a technology for this, and I do think that's something we should be pursuing... It is probably viable for some fraction of fill-in power.
I still think some nuclear in the mix makes things much easier, though as some people point out the economics of nuclear get even worse when there's a lot of renewables on the grid (because nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize extensive construction costs, and a lot of that time power is basically free).
Flow batteries, thermal salt storage and simple overcapacity + long-distance transmission are all possibilities.
There's an 800 MWh / 200 MW Vanadium flow battery being built in Dalian, China, for example. Thermal salt storage is already coupled to thermal solar plants in Spain, but could be run with a heat pump, using any power source.
There are actually several promising technologies. It's not as dire as you're suggesting.
You could just keep the combined cycle peeking plants around for a while while figuring out the load cycle and storage. It's pretty simple since they are already built.
We don't have any nuclear capacity to deploy cost effectively anywhere near a planning table. The reality with nuclear is that it is already more expensive than anything else out there while clean energy solutions are on the other side of the spectrum and dropping in price fast. That makes investing in nuclear a spectacularly bad idea. So, from a price point of view, nuclear is completely pointless and there don't seem to be any plans that don't come with multi billion $ price tags. Hence the snail pace at which new reactors are coming online for the last few decades. Many countries bothering with this do this for military reasons rather than cost reasons.
Also, what storage problem? This argument seems to pop up in a lot of HN threads where somebody just pulls this out of the head "We must do nuclear because OMG storage". Storage is an super easy problem with plenty of low tech solutions. You are confusing lack of demand with a lack of possible solutions. As demand ramps up, there will be gazillions of companies making good money using all kinds of creative plans to store energy.
Nuclear waste storage on the other hand is something most nuclear proponents don't like to talk about because it involves a lot of waffling about the fact that we've just been dumping it in temporary sites all over the place. E.g. France and a few other countries used to dump it in the oceans until people figured out that was a pretty horrible idea. Some countries still consider this a plan they can get away with.
Fluctuations in solar and wind happen (locally). But that's easily worked around by simply using cables to move power around. There's always wind somewhere and even with clouds, you still get some solar panel output. At 10x price differences you could just buy 10x more of them. 10x would be overkill. But just driving the point home that this is a complete non issue from both a cost and technical perspective. Storage is needed for short term fluctuations. The rest we can handle with overcapacity and interconnecting sites of production and some battery deployments.
Also, what storage problem? This argument seems to pop up in a lot of HN threads where somebody just pulls this out of the head "We must do nuclear because OMG storage". Storage is an super easy problem with plenty of low tech solutions.
Can you name one solution that will allow us to store, say, 3 days worth of US daily energy use? Please, show me the math. I did the math and it didn’t seem even close to feasible given today technology.
E.g. France and a few other countries used to dump it in the oceans until people figured out that was a pretty horrible idea.
It’s horrible, because throwing away what mostly is still good fuel that’s not economical to reprocess compared to fresh fuel is stupid. It’s not really horrible otherwise.
Storage is needed for short term fluctuations. The rest we can handle with overcapacity and interconnecting sites of production and some battery deployments.
How much overcapacity exactly we need with the amount of storage you assume? Please, show me the math. I did the math and with feasible amount of storage, the amount of extra capacity required is insane.
> Isn't this why we won't get nuclear power? It's always been my impression than nuclear is more financial challenging than technical, it takes forever to recoup the initial cost of the reactor and by the time it does, we will want to move onto 'cleaner/safer' renewables.
Does anyone see the contradiction with the leaders on the left calling for "unprecedented action" like the Green New Deal, but then they object to nuclear with the argument that it requires too much government oversight and financing?
It’s because the Green New Deal is, as its name implies, primarily about rehabilitating socialism, not addressing climate change. Start reading AOC’s bill, at page 3: https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/sites/ocasio-cortez.house.go.... The whereas clauses spend more time addressing things like wealth inequality and labor protections than the scientific findings of the IPCC.
For example, section 4(H):
> (H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaing wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;
Can anyone seriously look at provisions like this and say the Green New Deal is actually about climate change and not socialism?
Nuclear (or technology in general) doesn’t give you a big new stick to for addressing, for example, the declining influence of labor unions, or wealth inequality. Technology is something you typically do with markets and investors. That’s why technological solutions have fallen into disfavor on the left.
Is nuclear waste even still a problem? We have been storing nuclear waste for more than 60 years in ‘temporary facilities ’ while we’re looking for permanent solutions. As far as I know, nothing happened in that time. Let’s just drop the ‘temporary’ label, keep doing what we’re doing and stop worrying about hypothetical scenarios where society will collapse and some farmer 1000 years from now will get radiation poisoning.
The temporary really sucks. We shouldn't have lots and lots of waste sitting in spent fuel pools random places and should move to something more permanent and reliable.
No it wasn't. The US has a perfect place for nuclear waste that we discovered a while ago but politics made it be Yucca Mountain and that is not a good place. And then even worse becuase of politics the technical targets have been moved to absurd demands that make it utterly impossible to move forward.
The US has the right location and the money already stored, there is still the Yuca Mountain inpass as it currently required to be the selected site.
I think finding such a site in the first place is nonsense as in 50-100 years we should be consume that fuel anyway.
I can't find the name at the moment but its a structure that has been unchanging for 1000s of years and has been evaluated as perfect for nuclear waste since the very early days of nuclear in the US.
I think it was evaluated at about 1/5 the cost of bringing Yucca Maintain to the same standard.
'Combating climate change: The role of nuclear power' from University of University of Michigan had a number of lectures where some of this is mentioned if I remember correctly.
Yeah, they should be moved within a few years from pools to sarcophagus style containers. Those containers can later be moved to end storage or wherever without nearly as much hassle as abandoned rods in pools.
I think this is generally true, but poor storage and processing at a couple of early sites (I’m thinking Hanford in particular) have had negative effects on the communities.
I'm a good few miles from Sellafield, but well within the "you're screwed" radius in the event of major leak.
On waste it depends what you call "still a problem". Sellafield still has pools storing the spent Magnox fuel resulting from running Britain's nuclear stock flat out through the 1973 miners strike. Those are decaying "nicely". Risk of fuel fires has been mentioned more than once. Sellafield is a reprocessing plant, that hasn't yet touched the 45 year old waste.
Yes I'd say nuclear waste is still a problem. I'm far enough outside London that politicians probably think it's perfectly fine.
Can you elaborate on what the problem is? I see a photo of a pond with the sun shining, grass growing and seagulls bathing. Authorities say it is safe.
I have friends who live next to an explosives manufacturing plant. They are at a much higher risk then it sounds like you are. I don't see nuclear fuel as being different from any other hazardous industrial material we deal with.
Those are tiny ponds, by the way. I reckon they could have a 2nd set as a backup somewhere near by if it came to it. You should see the size of a mine tailings pond, when they fail it causes real problems.
Authorities lie, seagulls get cancers too, and there are superfund everywhere you find a nuclear industry.
Temporary storage on site is a very bad idea. Leaks, non uniform site security, drums that were designed for a few decades now being called to serve for a century.
Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
> Authorities lie, seagulls get cancers too, and there are superfund everywhere you find a nuclear industry.
So based on information that you don't have but assume exists there is a problem? There is actual evidence of known problems that nuclear solves. Like air pollution from coal.
I don't want to sound unsympathetic, the government does lie and I also subscribe to a couple of out-there conspiracy theories. It is just there is a lot of evidence that the nuclear threat is way overblown.
> Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
You could move them in to new decade-long storage once a decade. As mentioned, those are small ponds. The world is not made up of absolutes.
We do have evidence, and we have a distinct pattern of behaviour from the many public inquiries and investigations into the standard of management at Seascale / Windscale / Sellafield / THORP.
To be glib, that's why there were so many renamings. To bury the inept history.
> Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
And burn coal instead, spread heavy metals and CO2 around and slowly poison everyone.
That is the alternative, we saw it in Japan after the Fukushima accident. Oh, btw, Tepco has announced it will discharge further nuclear contaminated water in the ocean as they ran out of space to store it.
Like the trace amounts of Uranium in coal. And don't forget the Radon that comes up with natural gas either. For added fun, Radon is a noble gas so good luck economically removing it as opposed to just venting it all into the atmosphere.
The main concern are arsenic and mercury which accumulate in bottom feeding sea critters some of which we eat (mainly shellfish and shrimp). The uptake of uranium are thorium in marine species is rather low, but yes, burning coal also spreads radiation. Some of the byproducts of nuclear fission (I131, Sr90) are more dangerous because they tend to stick around in our bodies. Uranium and thorium get excreted but the first one is also toxic.
Of the two Radon isotopes, one has a half life of 55 seconds, the other 2.5 days. The main problem are its decay products: Pb210, Bi210 and Po210. It's better to vent it off into the atmosphere than to let it accumulate in mines and basements.
Care to point out a couple of those superfund sites? The only ones I'm even familiar with are the Hanford site and Savannah River which were military sites producing nuclear material for nuclear bombs and ICBMs. Hardly comparable to the limited processing that goes into fuel preparation for nuclear power plants, especially considering that fresh fuel is only weakly radioactive and requires no shielding at all between the fuel and the technicians wearing dosimeters all the time.
The problem is nuclear advocates can take the poster child for poor management and say it's perfectly safe:
> Between 1950 and 2000, there were 21 serious incidents or accidents involving off-site radiological releases that warranted a rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, one at level 5, five at level 4 and fifteen at level 3. Additionally during the 1950s and 1960s there were protracted periods of known, deliberate discharges to the atmosphere of plutonium and irradiated uranium oxide particulates.[81] These frequent incidents, together with the large 2005 THORP plant leak which was not detected for nine months, have led some to doubt the effectiveness of the managerial processes and safety culture on the site over the years. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
On the other hand those events are monitored and taken seriously while other sources of pollution and their long term effects are routinely handwaved by leaders of important countries
That is what perfectly safe looks like. The poster child for poor management is acceptably safe. The wiki page includes incidents that are paranoid from the perspective of strategy, eg:
* "resulted in temporary warnings against swimming in the sea along a 10-mile (16 km) stretch of coast between St. Bees and Eskmeals"
* A paperwork issue that was within tolerance of the relevant international standard
* "No radiation was released to the environment, and no one was injured by the incident, but because of the large escape of radioactivity to the secondary containment the incident was given an International Nuclear Event Scale level 3 categorisation."
2/3 of those will be INES rated.
This is all describing a situation that is substantially safer than most industrial operations I've ever seen. Including many building sites. Try running a building site using granite or a banana plantation with no injuries and no radiation escaping into the surrounding environment; this is a high standard.
To put aside the whataboutism first. Yes I have seen the consequence of coal mining, on both people and place, which is why I am pleased that the UK now has under fifty coal miners, working in a few small scale open mines. From a peak of around 1 million down the mines. Coal is almost completely out of UK generation, and would be with no nuclear. It is presently the source of last resort - the few coal plants that remain spend most of their time idling. By 2025 there will be zero.
If the authorities were able to show an ongoing period of best-practice, excellent management and regulation to ensure the industry (all industry) pays the environmental cost up front from their profit, I'd still be a vocal advocate of nuclear like I was in my naive twenties. No, every time there is systemic ineptness and a public purse left holding the bill for the after-closure clean up. Decades of renaming, cover-up, lies, official inquiries and ignoring the locals. Many of whom are like me - they'd love to accept it and perhaps work there were it not so criminally inept. Same would go for an explosives plant. :p
Have confidence in a reprocessing plant that was going to make the UK billions of good Thatcherite pounds reprocessing the world's nuclear waste, that caused an international outrage, and has not actually made profit if you include the large leak and decomissioning cleanup. In fact even if you discount cleanup THORP looks pretty questionable as to whether it was really profitable at all.
The UK is a small place, a major accident or Chernobyl scale catastrophe would be easily and rapidly nationwide as guessing, Sellafield is perhaps 300 miles as the crow flies from London - maybe 400 by road. I'm maybe about 40 or 50 miles straight line from the plant - it's 80 or 90 by road. A major sea incident would be similar. No one in the UK can get further than 70 miles from the sea.
Authorities say it is safe, neighbouring country Ireland and others in Europe have been campaigning against Sellafield for decades. Not just nuclear activists that you would dismiss, but they have made governmental approaches at diplomatic level and within the EU. That's been because there have been countless incidents, reports of malpractice, official reports and public inquiries of lies and cover ups, and two or three official renamings so we'd forget about the scandal of the Windscale fire, or Seascale. This seam is so rich I am not going to mine it for you. That's all on top of the couple of dozen International Nuclear authority reporting incidents that must be reported. Extensive history of (inadequate) fines too.
The TL;DR is Seascale / Windscale / Sellafield is a Western gold standard for how not to do it. It would take considerable evidence and persuasion for me to have faith and confidence in say the USA or French nuclear management competence. I'm entirely prepared to believe there is someone, somewhere doing it with excellence, but capitalism and communism appears to rule that out, so um, where now?
The open air storage pond in not ok, but I think the fuel fire scenario is greatly exagerated. I'd have gas masks and plastic suits for family members just in case the site needs to be evacuated. Probably not but it doesn't hurt to at least be prepared.
Nuclear waste from nuclear weapons is quite a bit different compared to what civilan nuclear power tends to produce. Its pretty hard to come up with situations where civilian nuclear waste would be very harmful to anybody.
That problem was solved long ago, just reprocess it through breeder reactors and get even more energy!
The problem with the anti-nuclear lobby is that they block progress, then point at 50-year-old problems - that they have blocked implementing the solutions for - as current and unsolvable. They don’t actually want clean power. They want a reversion to a pre-industrial society, with themselves in charge.
It takes a very specific design of breeder reactor to make weapons grade plutonium. Proliferation concerns are a red herring by anti-nuclear activists who intentionally conflate non-weapons grade plutonium with weapons grade to make ALL breeders sound dangerous.
"Weapons grade plutonium" obfuscates that you can make a nuclear weapon from non-weapons grade plutonium, albeit with an increased risk of only getting the fizzle yield.
Nuclear weapons that are "only" a couple kilotons are scary enough for me, kthx.
What mess? The waste is being kept in manned facilities and will likely be repurposed in the next 20 years as fuel for a new generation of nuclear reactors. The first commercial nuclear power plant was in 1956. If you think about it, we are dealing with the 'mess' of the previous generation. And we are doing fine.
No, we're not dealing with it at all. We are just keeping it around because we don't really have a solution. The stuff that was stored decades ago lies mostly untouched, and if it has been touched it is usually because the containment failed and there have been leaks.
The earth is 1 trillion km^3 in volume. I don't get your problem with using 0.00000000003% (that 1000 year estimate of waste from earlier in the thread) of that to store nuclear waste so that we can stop pumping 32.5 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year.
Nuclear waste is really non-issue, especially compared to what it could help replace - for instance, sludge that comes from oil sands extraction processes, which is equivalently toxic, but there's orders of magnitude more of it, and it's in liquid form, making it much more difficult to handle.
(Sure, to be fair, uranium mining isn't particularly eco-friendly either, but AFAIK even if you count that in, nuclear still comes on top.)
Nuclear waste - rather than a non-issue - is a giant issue. The amount of nuclear waste is only increasing, our ways of dealing with it for the longer term - say up to the next 500 years - do not stand up to scrutiny and there is a fair chance that we will end up with numerous sites that make your average Superfund site look like Disney Land.
In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries. Alternatives have been suggested (such as - ridiculous - shooting the waste into space or dumping it into the deepest parts of the ocean). But none of those are even remotely viable or politically or socially acceptable.
As for the waste from fracking and tar sand processing, yes, that's terrible and it should stop. But nuclear is not the only alternative there.
To my knowledge, the actual amounts of nuclear waste are not that big at all. [0] is a biased source, but taking its number of 34,000m³ of high-level nuclear waste worldwide per year, that's just a 32x32x32m cube of waste per year, without even considering potential reprocessing. It's surprisingly little. Investing in nuclear as a part of the solution to climate issues and energy security would initially raise this amount (which would still remain very small), but would also enable deployment of waste reprocessing technologies that would eat into this considerably.
> In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries.
Couple of centuries really isn't much. Industrial waste is problematic on the same timescales, and there's orders of magnitude more of it.
> Alternatives have been suggested (such as - ridiculous - shooting the waste into space or dumping it into the deepest parts of the ocean). But none of those are even remotely viable or politically or socially acceptable.
There's a catch-22 in here. We know how to deal with nuclear waste, but can't implement it because the industry is underfunded, because people are afraid of nuclear waste.
(1) You're linking to a site that is not exactly objective, I would assume the 'world nuclear association' to be somewhat biased in their information.
(2) The problem isn't just the 'high level' nuclear waste, it is all nuclear waste.
But let's just assume that that 34000 cubic meters is all off the problem. And let's assume that you need to store it for 1,000 years and that you're going to make 100% of your electricity baseload using nuclear. Right now, at roughly 10% that's 34000 so for 100% you'd then need 34000x10x1000 cubic meters of storage.
That's a cube 700 meters on it's side. And because of the nature of the waste you can't just stack it that close, you're going to have to space it out and you're going to have to cool it because that much nuclear material is going to output a very large amount of heat.
You're making this all look way easier than it really is.
Yeah, I've mentioned that it's a biased source. It's what I could dig up the fastest that gave the amounts of waste in units of volume, and the value is in the ballpark of what I remember reading elsewhere.
That 700m cube is still, in other words, ten thousand 30m cubes. Even accounting for spacing things out, that's on the order of magnitude of a large city. A single city made of high-level waste, in exchange for running 100% of today's energy needs on nuclear for thousand of years[0]. That's, again, not much relative to all the other kinds of waste we're creating. And in reality, it would be a city made of fuel for a different type of reactors.
There's a few times more of mid-level waste, which is another thing potentially worth caring about. Rest of the waste is considered low-level and is either buried or enters regular waste management pipeline.
I'm not saying nuclear waste is not a problem, just that it isn't particularly special compared to other types of highly toxic industrial waste. There's not much of it by volume, unlike most other waste it actually becomes less dangerous with time, and there are ways to put it to use that are blocked pretty much only by people saying nuclear waste is a big issue.
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[0] - Or, eyeballing the doubling time of 2.5% growth rate, something like 150 years of 100% energy at current energy use growth.
Let me tell you a little story. There is an area North of Amsterdam, where they stashed some by-products of the Agent-Orange production during the Vietnam war.
2-4-5T and a bunch of other nasties (Dioxins). That's bad industrial waste, not radioactive but still, you really don't want it near your village or water supply.
Those vats were stored there at the end of the Vietnam war and conveniently forgotten (by Philips Duphar). It was only about 10,000 barrels of junk, a very small fraction of your initial 32x32x32 meter cube, less than 10%.
It took decades to clean it all up, and some parts of it will never be cleaned up because we can't dig deep enough. Because in the meantime the Dioxin had made it into the groundwater plume, the damage of which will not be known for another couple of decades.
If that had been radioactive waste they wouldn't have been able to do much about it for another couple of hundred years.
I don't follow your push to minimize this problem, it is a huge issue and just thinking of a 'a single city made of high-level radio active waste' makes my skin crawl. Such a place should not exist, and the Philips-Duphar story should give you at least one datapoint on why burying stuff and letting future generations deal with it so we can have our perks today is not - in my opinion - a viable strategy.
Energy is a great thing but we are not lacking for energy at all, it's raining energy continuously, we are awash in it. But just like with a rain of soup, if you bring a fork you're not going to do much.
However there would be far fewer storage sites where that risk would be occurring. Compared to the number of incidents caused by the chemical and fossil fuel industries on any time scale, and the hypothetical risk of small areas of contamination far outweighs the level of global contamination that is going on today (most of which isn't being acknowledged, let alone cleaned up).
You're going to run straight into 'NIMBY' and other political constraints for your eventually designated storage sites. I'm sure someone will find a way to argue that we should send it to the third world as long as we get to control the burial sites on account of proliferation worries. We've already done this with many other kinds of waste.
In the end it isn't about the area directly affected in the near future, it is about the long term effects and those are very hard to model accurately when it comes to massive deposits of nuclear waste.
Just a couple of the risks: massive terrorist target, risk of pooling, risk of large scale groundwater contamination, risk of the whole thing blowing up. These are not trivial and not all of them can be dealt with over the time-scales that the waste would still be significantly radio active.
Political structures are not stable across the time-scales that you are looking at here, you might end up seriously regretting any particular site a few hundred years into the future.
You aren't wrong, but how is that any different than the current situation with fossil fuels, chemicals, fertilizer plants, etc.? Historically, they've been put into poor and minority neighborhoods, since those groups couldn't NIMBY it, but I don't think that's going to be acceptable going forward.
Let me counter that story with observation that there's something on the order of 500 000 tons of high-level nuclear waste currently stored by countries worldwide, and so far they manage. Point being that it can be handled responsibly. It probably wouldn't be the best idea in a perfect world, but we are kind of in a hurry right now, with every year of still being on fossil fuels adding to severity of future consequences.
My push to "minimize" this problem is a push towards recognizing that the problem is manageable in practice. The image of "single city made of high-level waste" was meant to picture just how little there is to manage, by volume, and once again - most of that we already know how to use as fuel; we just can't, because appropriate reactors aren't being built, primarily because people are afraid of the waste.
We may be technically drowning in energy from the Sun, but we're still not fast enough with making use of it. In the meantime, we have the closest thing after fusion to an energetic magic bullet - very high density, clean energy source with manageable waste - and we've been mostly sitting on it for decades now.
But maybe at this point it's really too late, maybe by the time enough reactors could come on-line, there really would be enough renewables to take over. It's unclear to me at this point whether the recent growth of solar and wind capacity is sustainable.
Yes, by doing not much of anything and only across a very very short span of time compared to how long it will have to work eventually. That's a bit like saying that the landmine you are sitting on hasn't gone off yet. True, it hasn't. And it may never go off. But it is still a landmine and it is still quite dangerous. If you had the choice between not having a landmine to sit on in the first place vs sitting on one to keep it safe which would you take?
Of course "no landmine". But I'm not convinced yet we have that choice - that renewables really are growing fast enough and sustainably enough for there to be no point in building up nuclear capacity.
We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables. The major reason why so many countries wanted to have nuclear reactors was mostly because it was convenient cover for weapons research, and a way to make fissile material for weapons (Plutonium, for instance), not because it made clean or commercially viable energy.
France is a perfect example of this. When the oil crisis hit in the 70's they then used this knowledge to rapidly expand their use of nuclear power, which is now the highest in the world. But the reactors are aging, the waste is piling up and new construction has been delayed or halted indefinitely (and is already over budget).
Whether renewables are growing fast enough is something we control in a very direct way, and cranking out windmills and solar panels is really a mere matter of engineering. The latest iteration windmills make impressive power (8 to 12 MW design power is now a reality, something I did not expect to see in my lifetime), and can be mass produced economically.
They also tie into the grid at many locations, something aging grid infrastructure appreciates (the variability is another problem, but there are fortunately some solutions for that now).
> We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables.
Out of curiosity, is there a good estimate for how much money the world has spent on nuclear/renewable energy research? You'd think this information should be easy to find given the importance of the nuclear vs renewables debate, but it's not obvious to me how to find it.
Most of the money spent on nuclear research is spent on fusion projects and things like pebble bed reactors, most of this is in the proof-of-concept or early production stage and funded by governments.
Most of the money spent on renewables (solar, wind) is spent on scaling up and (boring, but necessary) production. Some (tidal, geothermal) has gone into proof of concept level projects. The amounts specified vary greatly based on the source.
ITER alone (originally projected to cost $5B) already clocks in at $20B and doesn't seem to be much closer to something resembling a working prototype than it was several years ago.
>We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables.
It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.
>Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources
> It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.
That's a very bold statement for which I have seen absolutely no proof. Solar and wind do not have the long term waste issues associated with nuclear and cost a small fraction of nuclear per installed Watt of power generation.
There is no significant difference in CO2 output of nuclear vs solar or wind so you'd have a climate crisis just the same. If you're looking to displace fossil fuel with nuclear you're going to have to look much further than just electricity, and solar and wind are just as good or even better at that as nuclear power is. Working fusion would be better than all of these options, but unfortunately we don't have it.
> There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.
It may seem unlikely to you but it is a well established fact. France, China the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, some of the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material. The power generated was a by-product. Countries that got into the game later and that did not have access to nuclear technology were licensed 'safe' tech that could not be used for enrichment.
Iran and North Korea are only interested in nuclear power for weapons purposes, everything else is just a fig leaf.
> the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material
You got that exactly backwards. These five states all used production reactors to make their weapons Pu, which didn't produce useful power. Only later did they build power reactors, which don't produce weapons grade Pu.
Do you honestly think, Germany, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Finland, S Korea, Czechoslovakia etc. are/were also only interested in nuclear power as a cover for their weapons program?
> There's a catch-22 in here. We know how to deal with nuclear waste, but can't implement it because the industry is underfunded, because people are afraid of nuclear waste.
There's a whole lot of failed attempts [0] that people conveniently just glance over like they never happened to then proclaim "Nuclear is so underfunded and never saw research".
While for many decades all things nuclear, not just weapons but also energy production, saw massive funding and hype all over the world.
People thought nuclear would be used for anything from moving earth to powering the jetpacks they'd use to fly to work, they thought we'd be running out of uranium because every country would have hundreds and thousands of nuclear reactors.
Why ain't we living in this amazing future now? Because it turned out nuclear isn't all that economical and practical as we originally believed it to be.
>In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries
In the US this might make people "feel bad" but it's not a real problem. In the southwest there are unimaginably large deserts where no one lives and no one ever will live. A lot of it is federal government property and has been used for nuclear bomb testing in the past precisely because it is land that no one will ever care about. See: Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
500 years is an Information Revolution and an Industrial Revolution ago. It wouldn't surprise me if literally any problem they tried to foresee in 1519 has turned out to not be an issue.
By 2,500 the technological and the social state of the world is either going to be unimaginably advanced from now or so horrible that nuclear issues are going to be bottom of the list of problems that they are dealing with.
We don't need to worry about the longer term beyond about 50-100 years. The waste is probably going to turn out out be an economic fuel source or a nonissue. The volumes are tiny and the risks largely undetectable outside a localised area.
It isn't a massive problem, it is a tiny problem. Our ancestors have done much the same thing to us and nobody notices, cares or is even inconvenienced. Australia has some truly monumental slag heaps if you know which desolate wastelands to look in.
Thinking that you can run an industrial process with no waste is the magical thinking. Producing solar panels and wind turbines could easily produce more toxic waste watt-for-watt than nuclear does. Nobody is going to bother to check because the volumes are too small.
Which global warming impact is critical in the next 5 years? For climate, 5 years is nothing. It's difficult to even see the temperature trend over such a short timespan, given noise sources like El Niño that have periods of several years.
You'll have to wait longer in order to really see the effects of global warming, as far as I understand it.
I'm a global warming skeptic myself, but have been told that we need to take action within the next five years or else it will be too late. But I've been hearing similar things for the past 30 years, so I take it with a grain of salt.
Emissions are growing exponentially, and are accumulative. When you look at the CO₂ footprint graph, the damage done to the climate is essentially proportional to the area under the curve. What 30 years ago was just a concern of some scientists, today is becoming visible to people, and 30 years from now will be obvious (under current growth, between today and 30 years from now, we'll have emitted more CO₂ than we had between today and the dawn of mankind - a "neat" feature of exponential growth).
In the real world, exponents don't last forever. The economy will eventually give in, the question is how. 60 years ago the bet was that we'll run out of resources to burn. Today, the consensus is that we'll most likely destabilize the climate to the point of total civilizational collapse before we exhaust economically exploitable fossil fuel deposits.
As for the next years being critical in determining how the world will look like many decades from now, keep in mind that the damage CO₂ is causing is proportional to the integral of the yearly emissions curve, and also that feedback loops take time to settle at a new equilibrium. Models predicting average temperatures and sea levels take into account that even when we become completely net carbon neutral, the already accumulated CO₂ will still warm up the climate for decades. So it very much matters when we get to carbon neutrality, and the sooner we get there the (exponentially) better.
In addition to TerraPower, moltexenergy.com desribes another conversation-changer. Not a PWR. Walk-away safe. Molten salt in tubes. Can burn existing waste. Apparently can use Thorium. Projected costs less than coal. Uses existing materials.
> In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries.
I’m contrast, all the lead we’ve scattered around the soil is a problem forever. (Lead is an element. It does not decay. All forms are toxic to varying degrees.). Various polymer waste and other petroleum and coal waste are, as far as I know and until new bacteria evolve that can eat it, problems forever.
Global warming is also a huge issue. But there is no direct line between 'global warming is a huge issue' to 'we should therefore ignore the issue of nuclear waste and go all in on nuclear'.
The nuclear lobby is seizing on climate change to push through an agenda that would not stand a chance otherwise, and I refuse to have the wool pulled over my eyes. If we go into this we need to readily acknowledge the problem and budget for it accordingly. This will - at present, barring new developments - price nuclear as it is today right out of the equation compared to the alternatives.
Solar and wind have become viable alternatives, tackling baseload using them is still tough but getting better every day with new developments in short term storage and transmission line technology.
The whole nuclear waste of the last 50 years of french nuclear fills a couple of buildings. The volumne is really not a problem at all.
We could fuel the whole world with nuclear fuel and not have any significant issue with nuclear waste storage.
Specially if we are moving to more modern reactors who can consume the current nuclear waste and massivly reduce the volumne (something we should manage over the next 500 years I'm sure).
In fact with modern reactors you can get to a point where you only have 300 years of storage requirment until it hits background radiation.
And even if you want a 1000s of year solution, we can absolutly build those already and its not really all that much of a technical issue. As has been done in Finland I believe.
”It seemed such a good idea at the time. At least, to the German politicians in charge.
But in hindsight, the Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.”
Because it doesn’t store highly radioactive waste, it isn’t _that_ much of a concern, but it started leaking ten years into operation. That, IMO, is a concern, as it indicates sloppiness.
What makes it even more absurd is that storing in a salt mine was considered the "best option" back then, backed by a scientific consensus.
That consensus came out of an international conference in the 50s in, I believe, Beirut. Asse II was supposed to be one of the experimental sites to prove the theory, but over the decades ended up being run much more like a "general dump" with extremely lackluster documentation habits.
This has to be one of the most short-sighted comments I’ve ever read on HN. 60 years for something with a half life of 24,000 years or so and you are calling it good?
In fairness, the stuff with a half life of 24,000 years isn't that radioactive/scary.
It's the stuff with half lives of 3-300 years that you need to worry about, really.
Compared to its activity a month after being removed from the reactor-- spent fuel loses 90% of its activity in 80 years or so and 99% of its activity in 200 years, at which time it's still about 150x as active as the original uranium ore (which itself is 6x or so diluted, so about 25x as active as the original uranium)
Storing nuclear waste is very tricky. It changes chemically due to the atomic decay, so you have to figure out a container that is stable against scores of different chemicals in many concentrations.
On top of that, it’s emitting heat so the container can’t be too big otherwise it’ll melt.
Then the waste evolves gases, some radioactive, that make the pressure build up.
Then your container is getting bombarded by alpha rays which wedges itself between the grain boundaries and embrittlement the container.
All of this is made up nonsense. Only 14 radioactive fission product isotopes end up in the final waste form, and they are in an inert oxide form. Their decay chains are short and hardly change the chemistry, if anything, it becomes more stable. They also don't produce gasses, much less radioactive ones.
The only kernel of truth is that __if__ you throw out fuel instead of waste, then you get a heat problem over the long term and the container is irradiated by alpha particles. It won't melt, but it might corrode. But why would you throw away fuel?
I’ve always thought of nuclear waste as a thinly veiled euphemism for Plutonium.
Plutonium is an unavoidable product of U235 fission - and can be extracted from the resulting “nuclear waste” by chemical processes.
Having seen stuxnet, I’m convinced that there’s a lot of investment in preventing people from gaining access to U238. Starting from Uranium ore, getting to Plutonium would be much simpler than getting to sufficient quantities of U238 and have the benefit of generating energy along the way. Additionally, Plutonium based bombs have a “higher yield” according to what I’ve read.
I wonder if USA and Russia agreed to limit Plutonium production- and that’s the real reason behind severely limiting nuclear energy.
There's different types of plutonium that's made. Bombs are made from Pu-239. But reactors will normally produce Pu-240 as well, unless you specifically design your reactor and fuel it appropriately to produce mostly Pu-239.
So what's the difference? Pu-240 is hot. It's too radioactive to make bombs out of, because you'll end up cooking your workers. And because it's so similar in weight to Pu-239, you can't effectively separate it out.
Brian Eno's full name:
Brian Peter George De La John Sieur LaBaptiste Roger Farfisa Schweppes Lea Bernard Fancourt Richard Peter Loonhouse De La Salle Eno
Nuclear power plants are not safe, never have been, and never will be. That's because no matter how great your technology and redundant safety systems are, it's all still run by humans who are fallible, often stupid, and very often greedy.
If you can make a buck by cutting corners and shirking security regulations, someone will.
Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology. And as the 737 MAX and its insights into Boeing company culture and the FDA shows, people can and will piss away already gained safety improvements.
At this moment talking about how few people has killed nuclear versus other energy sources is BS. We can compare both values only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, in a world that is getting unstable at a fast pace, with politicians even more unstable that act in totally random ways.
We will not have a trustable nuclear body count value until many generations in the future. Is not over until is over.
> only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years,
But rapidly becomes less lethal, with the vast majority of the risk removed in tens of years. Vs. many kinds of chemical waste which are potent effectively forever.
Electricity Generation and Health, Markandya & Wilkinson, The Lancet, 2007.
It finds a death rate of 0.074 deaths per terawatt-hour for nuclear, compared to 24.5 for coal, 18.4 for oil, and 2.8 for gas. The edges of the nuclear and gas confidence interval get somewhat close to each other but do not overlap.
While there was not enough data for the author to estimate the rate for solar and wind, subsequent estimates are about 2 for solar and 10 for wind.
Of the 0.074, 0.003 deaths are non-occupational from accidents; 0.022 are total deaths from accidents. The vast majority of this 0.022 is not radiological, but instead ordinary industrial and mining accidents where people are in traffic accidents, asphyxiate, are killed by hot steam, or crushed to death.
The rest is from various kinds of air pollution impacts in the nuclear fuel and transportation chain. Even if we have a horrid accident that has 1000x the impact of previous accidents, we will not reach the death rates associated with other sources of power.
Lowest death toll in the best-case scenario, but what about the worst-case scenario? It's not like a fluke once in a lifetime event, we've had meltdowns and partial meltdowns all over the world from the US to Switzerland to the Soviet Union to Japan time and again, and while they were bad, they could have been worse, substantially worse.
We're investing tons of money into fusion though, so maybe that'll make all these fission plants a moot point.
There's also the alternative view that maybe we've gotten better at things, and the safety record of nuclear going forward might be better than what we've experienced so far.
Calling our history of accidents so far the "best-case" scenario may be misleading.
I'm not calling our history the best case, it's a bad case, but it's not the worst case.
Nuclear is completely safe in the best-case scenario. Nuclear is safe if nothing goes wrong, if the weather is fine, if the people follow the protocols, if nothing unforeseen occurs. If one of those things isn't true, we get Chernobyl, or Fukushima, or perhaps next time, instead of being "not that bad", or "pretty bad", it's worse, because of something we didn't foresee, and we regret it for the rest of human history.
> I'm not calling our history the best case, it's a bad case, but it's not the worst case.
Well, in our "bad case" it's still orders of magnitude better than the alternatives...
> it's worse, because of something we didn't foresee, and we regret it for the rest of human history.
Or this is hyperbole, because nuclear plants just aren't that scary in potential worst case harms. You have less harm in 70 years than one typical year of coal power does-- perhaps less than one typical month of coal power inflicts.
Also I don't think your list is fair: counting deliberately nuking places, mining accidents, and radiotherapy accidents.
Again, while nuclear is scary-- it at least is self-limiting. There's plenty of shit we do with chemicals and industrial processes that could be bad forever.
If climate scares are true, we're actually doomed if we are to avoid nuclear. I'm OK with increasing risk more than plenty, way above coal deaths, if it prevents a larger crisis for society.
Lowest death toll including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Those are arguably not representative of the safety improvements we've made over the last 50 years since those plants were built. As bad as those were, solar, wind, and hydro kill more people per TWh produced.
> Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology.
Why not? We accept aircraft accidents as one of the costs of air travel. Why do we not accept power station accidents as one of the costs of having power?
The worst nuclear power station accidents have killed far fewer people than the worst aircraft accidents. Why is one so feared and the other not?
Chernobyl killed less than 100 people. 31 direct deaths, later raised to 54.
There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis).
In contrast, there have been more than 500 aircraft accidents with 50 or more deaths.
Aviation accidents have killed 83,000 people since 1970.
Top 3 Nuclear Power accidents: Chernobyl: 54 deaths, SL-1: 3 deaths, Fukushima Daiichi: 1 death
> Chernobyl killed less than 100 people. 31 direct deaths, later raised to 54.
Repeating a lie does not make it true. The official numbers are completely worthless because the Soviet leadership massively mis- and underdocumented pretty much everything related to the accident.
> There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis).
...so you'll simply assume that all that radioactive material spread far and wide over huge swaths of Asia and Europe had no ill effects at all?
I absolutely love Brian Eno's music. Apollo and The Pearl are engraved in my memory and will stay with me until my last day. But I really don't see why I would take Brian Eno's ideas on why we need nuclear power any more serious than some sports person talking about politics or a computer programmer talking or writing about the finer bits of mechanical engineering.
This whole 'famous person speaks about subject they have little knowledge about with authority' thing goes right past me, it's weird how we seem to project all kinds of magical properties onto those who manage to get name recognition. As though fame somehow automatically bestows instant expertise on a hundred unrelated fields on the famous.
I'd love to hear Brian Eno write and say more about music though, like Vangelis, Tomita, Jean-Michel Jarre and Klaus Doldinger he managed to make electronic music sound organic, which was - given the tools at hand - a magnificent accomplishment.
Renewables are sorted out, massive deployment is more of a political problem than a technical one. Better batteries would be useful but windpower doesn't need batteries as much as solar does. Better transmission lines, that would make a big difference.
Creating more nuclear power plants is a dead end economically, the power produced is going to be more expensive than the same amount of power produced using renewable energy. On top of that you will still have to deal with the waste and the eventual decommissioning, assuming you get the license to operate the thing in the first place and your budget overruns won't kill the project.
So regardless of what - insert favorite famous musician - who was against nuclear power for all the wrong reasons and now is pro nuclear power - also for all the wrong reasons - thinks we are on a different path now and just maybe it will be possible to get through the eye of the needle without relying on nuclear technology. And if it has to be nuclear, then let's hope that fusion will finally be delivered, that would be a game changer.
> But I really don't see why I would take Brian Eno's ideas on why we need nuclear power...
This was my initial reaction also.
On any story about 'nuclear power' I tend to search for fission and fusion, just to see if the author is sufficiently informed / concise.
I'm starting to dismiss any article that doesn't qualify this basic difference. I'm happy to see money poured into fusion R&D, but not happy to advocate more fission reactors being constructed -- and the appellations pro/anti-nuclear simply doesn't describe that not uncommonly held position.
I've worked on a number of renewable energy projects and these hold true for any scale. We can make turbines rated > 10 MW now, and solar panel production at scale is a solved problem. We're looking at logistics issues now, not at manufacturing, reliability or basic physics issues.
As for why wind does not need batteries: Wind power fluctuates on short time scales, these are not a good match for batteries. There are some interesting solutions to these problems that involve superconducting material (in actual production, not lab level stuff).
For solar with a 24 hour cycle batteries are much more important.
You are just throwing off claims like "renewable energy is best in every way" which I find hard to believe. So how solar works in winter and cloudy weather? Better than nuclear? What about windpower, can you build it everywhere? Do people want those massive structures flapping away with their noise on every coastline?
And frankly I'm sure experts have had numerous change-of-minds in nuclear power but the general population doesn't seem to be interested in hearing them. While famous people are not experts in general, they speak to the people because they aren't experts. You see, it's more about having rapport than just believing whatever the so-called experts are saying.
Taking your argument even further; are you an expert? If not, should I then even consider your opinion as of any value? It's the lacking of perception that bothers me in comments like yours, I think you come off as condescending and trying to put yourself above others. I value Brian's opinion, I think it's interesting to see his opinion to change. I have had similar experiences, where I have let go of my ego and thought about a thing in a non-judgemental way. Those moments have been quite transformational to me.
It's been my view for a long time that Green Party has been unreasonably stupid being generally so hard core anti-nuclear that they can't even think about logically anymore. Like it's one of the best clean energy sources out there, works in any climate and location and the waste is quite trivial to store away for time being - until we find out a way to use it. But no, they rather stoke fear with doomsday scenarios scarier than another and advocate building expensive wind turbines and solar panels in places where they just can't support the energy demands of the whole country.
It's just dumb. They are too stuck emotionally with their idealism on "non-polluting" things. Everything pollutes, nuclear waste albeit worse than the normal garbage can be taken care of quite easily. I'd rather have that than coal plants. Sure it would be nice to not to have even the nuclear waste, but sometimes you have to be pragmatic. That's what engineering is about.
Here's a fun story I heard about the woefully famous Finnish Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant. As some of you might know it was the most expensive building in the world for a while costing 8.5 billion euros (it seems some hotel complex in Mecca is now more expensive with 12 billions). Why you might ask? Well Olkiluoto 3 is a nuclear plant with 1600 MW output consisting of only a single reactor, unlike no other plant. Commonly nuclear plants are built in sets of 2 reactors, so that they are easier to maintain (one is still running when the other is offline) and in general easier to build than one massive reactor. But why only 1 reactor you ask? Well, as some Nokia engineer told me in sauna, the administration at the time consisted of multiple parties one of them being the Green Party. And Green Party was terribly afraid of nuclear energy, and the decision to build a new nuclear power plant really didn't sit well with them. Everybody knew that Finland needed a new power source and nuclear power plant was the only viable option. But Green Party just didn't. want. the. nuclear. plant.
So a compromise was made. Green Party agreed to allow the building of a new nuclear plant but only with one reactor. Dumb idea, but I guess they thought that 1 nuclear reactor was less scarier than 2. What the other parties then decided to? Well in order to supply the energy demands Finnish industry required, they said "hey let's build a reactor that in fact has the power of two reactors". Which was never done before, and the results are now well-known.
In the end, what Green Party gained from this? A nuclear power plant with only a one reactor, but which is double the size of regular one and whole thing billions of euros over-budget and everyone generally unhappy. But hey, only one reactor.. I'm not even sure does it produce the same nuclear waste as two reactors would. A major success nonetheless.
So you think he was lying then? Jesus christ what an attitude, do you want me to find some news to support my claim? Should I put disclaimer marks around my text that I have not researched this with a notebook in my hand? I can't believe how arrogant one can be, to write-off my whole reply while subjective, well explained, because that I couldn't verify the sources of what somebody said to me and which is only a story to validate my original point - that Green Party doesn't seem to be capable thinking about nuclear power rationally.
EDIT: Really, downvotes? It's easy to disagree but to do so without contributing anything constructive is just worthless. I'm not changing my mind, frankly it's doing the opposite. It's a fact that Green Party was in the administration at the time the Olkiluoto 3 was decided, but I'm not going to research it any further than that.
It's just so low-effort for you to press down or just write a two sentence snarky reply. Should I then return the favor and do the same for any reasonable anti-nuclear comment that I just don't disagree with? That is what a petty person would do, but I'm fine with my downvotes. I think it's just reinforcing my point.
TLDR: Extrapolating current trends in renewable power generation, by the time we’re able to complete construction of new nuclear plants those plants won’t be necessary.
There are six significant flaws in most recent pro-nuclear arguments I’ve read. To me, these flaws undermine the pro-nuclear case.
1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online (>7 years).
2. Authors focus on the percentage of energy production contributed by clean sources (solar, wind, etc.) TODAY, but ignore the growth trend (which matters since reactors take so long to bring online).
3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years.
4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted.
5. Authors ignore energy efficiency trends (electronics get more efficient over time).
6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported.
> 1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online
As per the article:
> An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized.
True, development costs are big, but these can be spread over multiple reactors. And once you have trained the workforce constructing one, the others can come much quicker. See historical values for France [1].
If we were to pipeline new reactors buildup everywhere, we'd be quite close to netting 0% emission in the energy sector. Granted, calculations and finding the optimal isn't that simple.
> 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years.
The consequences of our fossil fuel reliance are staging _right now_ what the ecosystem will look like millions of years in the future. Even if we were to produce 1000 times the amount of nuclear waste we currently have, we wouldn't come close to that. At least, it is easier to keep the stuff in one place.
This is an emergency. Yes, nuclear is far from optimal, but is a whole lot better than the status quo.
The other arguments aren't really valid in my opinion.
2. Builds on 1. The point is that nuclear can ramp up pretty quickly, as has been shown in the past.
> 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted.
This isn't really a problem with nuclear. Provide the baseload. You can tune up/down the amount of power, depending on your renewable output. Exchange energy with the neighbors depending on the needs. Pumped hydro can store quite a bit of energy as well.
> 5.
I fail to understand your point. Are we using less energy? I don't think so. [2] And a lot more stuff is going to need electricity in a clean energy transition (heaters, cars, industrial ovens...). If anything, cleaner/cheaper energy is likely going to increase consumption.
> 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported.
What safety data? The points they talk about in the article and use to say that reactors seem safe? Other energy generators aren't that safe, and also likely under-report.
>Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted.
This "problem" is why we need nuclear. You can't store power generated by solar and wind, so when the sun goes down or the wind dies down, the power goes out unless you rely on some other source. Nuclear can work every hour of the day. It's the only power generation method which can supply power at every hour of the day and can be deployed almost everywhere (hydroelectric is neat but you're screwed if you don't have a good river). All these other "problems" have been written about extensively by specialists, just not by journalists.
As for the rest of your problems with nuclear specifically, I don't think you're comparing the negatives of nuclear with the negatives of literally any other power source.
The real reason we won't go nuclear is that Democrats and progressives don't like it because it's scary and makes them quake at night. We could use nuclear as one tool in fighting climate change, but we aren't willing to do that. We're dying by our own hands.
If the transmission and storage isn't a problem, why hasn't Germany's carbon emissions from energy stayed roughly the same? Since 2000 they've invested a lot into solar and wind, and yet they still produce roughly the same amount of energy from coal and gas.
Are you sure about that? I've been keeping an eye on the German numbers because it is the fairest experiment and it looks to me like they've failed to have any sort of environmentally positive outcome. Their energy use is flat, and they've swapped nuclear for renewables, with a little reduction in hard-coal [0].
If the goal of Germany's Energiewende was cleaner energy, France is thrashing them without even trying. That is really a stunning endorsement of just how technically excellent nuclear power is.
Transmission is actually one of the biggest problems identified by US ISOs. Not easy to get the power where it is needed bc big transmission lines are costly.
There is a whole revolution happening in grid transmission right now. High voltage DC lines that were considered impossible not all that long ago now span 1000's of KM between unsynchronized grids and with reduced transmission losses to boot.
I don't think your TLDR accurately covers the entire article, but fine. As for the rest, the big thing missing is that the per-capita energy consumption has been on the rise for as long as we have electricity. It's at 2.5 MWh/y or thereabouts. As developing countries move up on the ladder their consumption will increase, drastically so.
This is going to cause substantial challenges.
Personally, I'd love to see a Manhattan style project to get us to fusion. We know that it can be done, we have a shining example for proof of that every day.
And in the meantime throw every $, Euro or Yen aimed at more nuclear power based on fission either at the fusion project or at renewables. You can build an awful lot of windmills for the price of one nuclear plant, and you can do it a lot quicker too.
And some of the increase is in our interest to happen. Moving cars from petrol to electric makes sense since we have ways to generate electricity is reasonable ways.
Unluckily, you can't just extrapolate from current trends for solar and wind, because storage becomes more and more of a problem as the percentage of power coming from uncontrollable sources becomes higher and higher. When going from 0 to 10%, you don't need storage at all. But, if you want to go from eg 50% to 100%, then you need MASSIVE storage to guarantee that you have power when you need it.
By the way, your point 4 for nuclear power doesn't hold ground. If you have lots of nuclear power plants, then you're going to not use (waste) a percentage of the power you produce at night by burning fissile material. But if you don't have any nuclear power plants, then 100% of the potential energy from fissile material that is available on Earth is going to be "wasted" (ie, not used).
> if you want to go from eg 50% to 100%, then you need MASSIVE storage to guarantee that you have power when you need it.
You really dont, you just need to burn fuel to fill in for gaps caused by weather, that become increasingly less frequent the more wind and solar is oversupplied. And oversupply is not a big problem - it can be easily curtailed. The optimal amount of renewables supply to build is over the level where they regularly exceed demand - and that is the stage where big batteries become very economical to build.
Carbon neutral fuel-wise, biofuels and electrically generated fuels are very viable future options.
Storage doesn't become more of a problem with more wind and solar - it becomes more of an opportunity to further reduce fuel consumption.
Storage is not a problem now - economic solutions exist already to build it where it is valuable. Its just not needed much yet.
> You really don't, you just need to burn fuel to fill in for gaps caused by weather
That suggests that we'd need to keep most of the existing infrastructure for power generation and also replicate its capacity with wind and solar plants.
That sounds both expensive and inefficient.
> Storage is not a problem now - economic solutions exist already to build it where it is valuable. Its just not needed much yet.
Nuclear has actually proven that it can work at the scale we need it (~20% of actual power generation from memory). Renewables and storage have not. So this is an argument of hypotheticals vs actuals. The burden of evidence on the hypothetical solution is a bit higher than an assertion that it'll work.
The only grid-level storage solutions that actually store energy (not just modulate grid supply short-term) is big hydroelectric dams which are not one size fits all solutions.
They're not fairly consistent, its a genuine misunderstanding of the system that they have to be. UK has a bit of nuclear, a lot of gas and biomass plant, some very useful pumped hydro and sizable interconnects to trade electricity with Europe. Everything is adjusted to match generation to demand. Generation is dynamic - Demand is dynamic. There is no panic when demand or generation changes, its handled.
There's a small amount of pre-existing pumped hydro storage in the system, but mostly it relies on the UK having already built a lot of CCGT plants which can cover the gaps.
> That suggests that we'd need to keep most of the existing infrastructure for power generation and also replicate its capacity with wind and solar plants. That sounds both expensive and inefficient.
Its efficient to use existing plant for as long as it is useful. The main expense of running most of it is fuel - and the cost of that in legacy terms and in CO2 is slashed by 'replicating' its capacity with wind/solar.
Currently when we add wind and solar capacity almost their entire output replaces fuel burn. When in a handful of years wind and solar have replaced 30-40% of demand supply, about 10-20% of their output may possibly be getting rejected. That makes wind/solar maximally 10-20% more expensive than what they would be with full storage and use. Hydro, batteries and long distance transmission is already economically viable in certain situations. Hydrogen synthesis will become increasingly economically viable, with carbon pricing and development. There are technologies existing which are ready to reduce waste supply from wind/solar as it arises. But even without them a potential overhead of 10-20% cost wont stop more wind/solar getting built, because its already currently cheaper than fuel burning -without carbon pricing and has been getting more efficient year on year, with no end in sight.
This actual economic performance contrasts with new nuclears promises which are in truth in their final throws, completely outperformed already by the alternatives which have been developed. Investment in Nuclear is no real threat to wind and solar anymore, the arguments seem to persist only to delay overall action on policy transition. New nuclear plants may or may not get built, wind and solar IS getting built and its variable nature will make nuclear supply uneconomic - there's no sense in financing plants on the basis of supplying constant power, when a huge competitor supplies much much cheaper power 75% of the time, and encourages hydro, biofuels and maybe cheap storage to fill in its gaps. Nuclear is not going to be economical for that, and that is the opportunity which is being created by wind and solar manufacturers and installers, as we hash over this outdated debate.
Burning fuel to fill the gaps is technically possible; I'd like to see an analysis of costs though. Building and maintaining those plans is expensive even when you don't use them. Who is going to pay for those expenses?
It's cheating to require a perfect solution before admitting a better one.
So, concretely, which source of universally available baseload power meets your criteria? Which would YOU advocate, given the urgent need to reduce emissions?
I think it makes sense to keep operating reactors that are currently active. We’re already on the hook for storing that waste and managing those decommissioned sites.
Similarly, I’m okay with a phased decommissioning of other dirty fuels. I just think it’s insane to set a long-term goal of growing dirty power jobs/industry.
I’d advocate for an immediate stop to any anti-renewable efforts. We should be doing everything we can to help achieve renewables.
Last, if we really think it’s a problem, we need to reduce energy consumption.
I feel like you might be missing some key knowledge here, including nuclear in "dirty power".
Unless you live near to a geothermal or hydro source, there is no renewable option available today that can provide baseload power, the "day in, day out" load that must always be available on the grid. The options are fossils and nuclear.
Coal waste is massive: 68 tons of solid and 77 tons of CO2 per person-lifetime of electricity. The majority of that waste goes into the air, where we can't control it and don't know what it's up to (apart from fucking our climate of course). That's not counting fly ash and flue gases, the world's largest source of released radioactivity. That stuff is packed with heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and mercury. The air pollution from coal causes 35,000 deaths from lung disease per year in the US alone - when it's working perfectly. The same figure for China is estimated to be 350,000 deaths per year.
In contrast, one person-lifetime of nuclear waste is about 12oz of solid, dry matter, which we can watch (and apparently re-use in modern reactor models). It produces zero CO2, and zero gaseous emissions. The total lifetime death toll from nuclear power is - at it's most generous - under 1,000 people.
Renewables are a part of the solution, and long term, they will be the complete solution. But even if we could solve all the power generation, storage, and transmission problems within 50 years (which would be amazing)... we need a way to provide base load in the meantime. And we have an option that is safe, zero-carbon, and produces a fraction of the waste of the alternatives.
Additionally, "we need to reduce energy consumption" is only an option if you're cool with 2/3 of the world continuing to live in abject poverty. By the end of this century the global population is projected to level off at 11 billion or so, with almost all of that growth coming outside the wealthy West. The 90% of the world which is currently using a fraction of global power generation wants washing machines, electric lighting, and computers, too. If the US cut average power consumption in half to match Europe, and then we all cut power consumption by a further 50%... we would still need to build multiples of our current baseload power generation capability.
TL;DR: We need way more baseload power than we've got. It's not helpful to lump all our options into one category and rule them out completely... especially when one option comes with zero carbon.
> 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years.
Taking on debt is profitable if the interest rate is less than the return on investment. I'd rather take on the nuclear waste storage 'debt' (does no real damage if we do it properly, can be paid back later with much more powerful technological resources) than the climate change 'debt' (does real damage now, resulting in permanent loss of some amount of economic growth).
I don't understand why point 5 about efficiency trends is relevant. Power consumption trends show us power consumption is continuing to climb irrespective of efficiency. It's clear that civilisation's need for power continues to expand even if some of our devices get more efficient.
> 1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online (>7 years).
Most of the wait time is due to lack of demand, e.g. it takes multiple years to build a pressure vessel but this production could be ramped up 10-100x if need be. The Quora source you cite actually says 48 months for modern reactors so I'm not sure where >7 years came from.
> 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years.
There is no waste storage problem. This is a myth that should have died a decade ago. Vitrified nuclear waste is inert and harmless. Modern reactors are also able to consume most of current waste. We already tolerate far worse waste products from e.g. the coal industry where it's a non-newsworthy occurrence for toxic tailings to completely destroy river systems.
> 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted.
The energy (not power) storage problem is unique to unreliable peaky power sources like solar and wind. Nuclear power plants provide a consistent and diallable power output. Energy storage is also a big impediment to large scale rollout of renewables because energy storage costs are superlinear with respect to demand.
> 5. Authors ignore energy efficiency trends (electronics get more efficient over time).
Increase in efficiency does not lead to decrease in consumption. It does the opposite. Look up induced demand.
> 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported.
Nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer and cleaner than anything else that exists including renewables.
This comment is entirely misleading and the author is seriously misinformed about nuclear power. This should not be top comment on any discussion of nuclear power. This is just perpetuating FUD and myths that have all been deconstructed years ago.
I would also argue that #2 was already being said 7 years ago. Further, growth is not always constant growth, let alone exponential growth. It may plateau, and then grow again further down the track after other problems (eg storage) are solved.
There are 5 Quora answers: 3.3-5 years, 9 years, 7 years, 10-12 years (with 35 year outliers), and 4.8 years. 7 years is near the average of all those answers.
> “ Most of the wait time is due to lack of demand”
None of the Quora answers cited this as a reason. And the Quora answers are the low end of the scale (40 months) only included construction time in their answer, not site finding, licensing, or startup.
I think building modern reactors just stretches our industrial capability too far. Doesn't help that in the US due to de-industrialization there isn't enough skilled managers, engineers or skilled workers either.
The world is an oil based economy. If people really want to move away from oil you need to transform the economy from being based on it to on based on electricity.
Which means you need a lot more power. Solar and wind still factor in but you still want that massive amount that a power plant provides, because all current storage technology won’t be able to keep up.
Plus if all reactors were the same design such as in France it lowers costs dramatically as well.
Your comment is entirely misleading, based on outdated data, and whitewashes the hell out of nuclear power. The fact you're trying to claim the parent post is bad is not cool.
1. Please look at actual data for power plant construction times. [1] provides an overview. Estimates are useless - if we look at how long things actually take to build... "The mean construction time of 441 reactors in use today was 7.5 years."
3. Are you actually serious right now? Radioactive waste sitting in temporary pools that will be an environmental catastrophe for hundreds of years if they leak isn't a problem? No, just because we tolerate other ecological disasters doesn't make this one ok.
4. This is no longer true, and will definitely not be true in another 5 years. Battery costs are decreasing at a reliable rate year over year. Power plants are already being built making use of them. Here's one going up now with 300MWh of storage [2].
5. No, you look up per capita demand. Here: [3]. It’s been dropping for a decade.
6. Your link does not report solar farm deaths because as far as I can tell there haven't ever been any. Unless you count birds. Rooftop solar is "dangerous" because installers fall off roofs.
Spent fuel is sitting in cooling pools because it emits enough residual heat to melt if not in water. Spent fuel will typically sit in these pools for around a decade. At which point the residual heat is low enough to process it via vitrification (turning it into chemically inert glass) and then moving it to a permanent storage site. Vitrified spent fuel is radiologically and chemically safe. The only way it can become a danger is if somehow liquefied or aerosolised. The volume needed to store a century worth of all humanity's spent nuclear fuel is less than a single large landfill site, of which we have hundreds of thousands.
> that will be an environmental catastrophe for hundreds of years if they leak
If what leaks? Do you actually know what's in those pools and why? Spent fuel pools are harmless. You can go for a swim in them and receive a lower radiation dose than background. There's nothing to leak. The only failure mode is if water is not supplied to them and eventually evaporates.
> This is no longer true, and will definitely not be true in another 5 years
Cite this. Show that at any point in the foreseeable future the cost of energy storage with regard to total capacity is not superlinear. China would love to hear from you since they're stuck unable to use renewables at large scale because of this issue.
> No, you look up per capita demand. Here: [3]. It’s been dropping for a decade.
Per capita is not a relevant number, The number that is being discussed is total demand. The number that matters, since power sources need to supply a total demand not a per capita demand, whatever that would even mean. The number that's rapidly increasing.[1]
Actually take the time to read up on induced demand, then you will understand that it results in a per-capita decrease in consumption (since higher efficiency) and a paradoxical higher total consumption, since now there are more consumers who were previously priced out.
GP post is bad and your post is bad. Sorry. If you don't understand the very eli5 basics of nuclear power like the purpose of cooling ponds (and the fact that most modern reactor designs don't need them), then be aware that you're perpetuating a bunch of myths every time you talk about it. Energy science is not a topic where all opinions are equal.
Here we go again, downplaying risks and ignoring facts that aren't supportive of your argument.
What do I think is in the pools? Radioactive waste that will have a mini meltdown if the pools leak enough water to expose the waste to air. You know, the kind of leak that can result from a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or just plain old maintenance negligence [1]. But that's ok, we'll just pretend Fukushima never happened, I guess.
I already provided a link to a renewable power plant that's going up, backed by battery storage for non-generating hours. Perhaps you didn't like it? Here's a report on how costs of batteries are dropping fast enough to make them cost competitive with traditional sources [2]. You probably won't like that, either, since you're hung up on the whole "linear with demand" thing, which no one actually cares about. What they do care about is total cost per reliable kWh, taking into account all negative externalities. But I guess we'll just pretend nuclear accidents don't occur, especially small ones [3], and that the whole long-term storage problem doesn't exist because that whole Yucca Mountain thing is just needless worrying.
I like how you focus on total demand globally because if you look at total demand in the West, it's been flat for years. You conveniently don't point out that the places demand is increasing are in the developing world, which is the last place we should build nuclear plants. Do you want more accidents due to poor maintenance or operating procedures? Because that's how you'll get them.
And I understand induced demand perfectly - my whole point of showing per capita consumption is to point out that it's bullshit in this case. Electricity has been plentiful in the US and EU for decades, but per capita use peaked 9 years ago. Induced demand is only relevant in developing markets where there is latent demand, which again is back to the developing world where I will never agree we should build nuclear.
You like nuclear, I get it. It's a good power source. It's just not the best one anymore and it's time to recognize that. But it's clear you have already made up your mind on the issue, so I won't be engaging in any more discussion with you on this.
> Induced demand is only relevant in developing markets where there is latent demand
...Yeah. And since the topic of this entire post is climate change, the developing nations and induced demand are all that matters. No one gives a fuck about per capita energy consumption in the US, the question is about the total energy demand of the planet and how it's supplied.
What the developed world does from here on out is irrelevant in terms of first order effects on climate change. It's already done the bulk of the damage it was going to do. Switch all of the developed world to fairy-powered zero emission fusion overnight, or anything else you want, it won't make a difference.
The deciding factor for climate change is how China and India will power themselves, and if the answer isn't nuclear, then we're all screwed. Just like TFA states.
As far as #6, it is disingenuous to count indirect coal deaths due to respiratory issues and completely ignore the indirect nuclear deaths.
For example, the article you link does not seem to account for the 2000+ deaths that occurred due to the Fukushima evacuation, nor those that survived but later starved due to their homes and livelihood being destroyed in the Chernobyl accident.
A proper model needs to take into account the economic implications of a nuclear incident.
Unfortunately, nuclear is just too far away from being a popular option for it to be considered by politicians, policy-makers, or anyone else that makes important enough decisions. Politicians will continue to silently approve the creation of new nuclear centrals (because they know we need them) but won't publicly push for them. Public opinion has been biased so much against nuclear that no one of those people sees a benefit _for themselves_ to solve the environmental crisis with nuclear.
Which brings me to the core point of this post: a lot of people care about the environment, and would like to help as much as they can, learning what's best to pursue. But politicians, policy-makers, and public personalities in general are not among the ones that really want to help the environment. For them, being an environmentalist is just a _mean_ to capture some votes, some money, some power. _That_ is what the seek. Paradoxically, I think they will attempt to delay the solution to the problem as much as they can, because that would mean they lose their power.
Nuclear power suffers from piss poor economies of scale. If you want your country to invest into nuclear then it should be prepared to build dozens of identical plants at the same time. Of course this will require at least a trillion dollars of funding but the upside is that costs per plant will go down significantly after the learning phase.
Uranium is the most energy dense material on this planet, check out energy density of various fuels on wiki. Uranium like any fossil fuel ie crude and coal has waste issues, its also, due to its energy density, more of a hazard that a tank full of coal or gasoline. Saying that in the 50's nuclear aircraft were built and tested but the risk of fallout from any number of potential aviation incidence put paid to that idea becoming common place. Smaller nuclear reactors are still used in secure trusted locations though, like submarines, ships and even the US embassy in London (you'll need to analyse metadata to find that out). I do sometimes wonder if the eco warriers are Nazi's hiding under the green banner, wanting to send everyone back to the stone age or whether they just like acting as the brake on technological developments that could otherwise rush off into the sunset. Any country would be sensible to have a range of electrical power generation technologies, the isotopes from nuclear fuel can be used in medicines, depleted uranium in military armour (tanks) and ballistics. In fact when the US dropped the nukes on Japan, the ensuing scientific knowledge gained spawned the radiotherapy developments in cancer treatments, after it was observed that nuclear radiation killed stem cells in bone marrow and the spleen. Doctors even worked out the minimum amount of stem cells and spleen cells to kick start the immune system as a result of the WW2 nukes.
So its hard for many to quantify the benefits of nuclear power and military experiments, but the problems still remain, how to deal with the waste. Robots need to be made nuclear proof, there is a spill over into space technology here as space is highly irradiated, so solving things like Fukashima and Chernobyl will benefit space exploration even more. And there is the attainment of knowledge which gets us closer to understanding and importantly, controlling fusion.
Besides waste disposal could be made into the fastest fault lines of two plates of the earth crust, effectively sending the radation back into the earth's core. If people are worried about radiation, they should look up Radon and granite rocks. That kills more people than uranium waste.
It is an abject failure of our amplification systems, notably HN and Stewart Brand's Long Now, that we are listening to two Baby Boomer musicians debate energy policy. Who cares what Eno and Byrne think about nuclear power?
Imo, the fact that the world didn't put a huge dent in global warming by building lots of nuclear plants is one of the saddest "misses" of our recent history.
This I feel is due to irrational, emotional public opinion. Nuclear is the safest cleanest and most stable energy source we have so far but it's also "scary" because radiation is spooky and invisible. Coal is simple and local and it just silently kills millions through pollution. It's similar to the common fear of flying vs the common non-fear of driving.
Even today when people talk about the "cons" of nuclear power (spent fuel management, risk of catastrophe, terrorist target, etc) they are usually oblivious to the fact that there are 450 active NPPs today, and they are supplying 10% of the worlds energy and things are going great.[0] So even if these were acute concerns (and they're not) we would only have needed to increase them by a max factor of 10 to get 100% non polluting energy. That's not a lot, and definitively worth the "hassle". Even in Chernobyl (which was the main reason for the doom the nuclear effort) the number of casualties due to radiation, including long term effects, are estimated to be in the thousands, not millions as most people assume. [1] In Fukushima that number is 1. [2]
The number of NPPs were growing exponentially until suddenly plateauing globally since 1987 til today [0]. This is because building a new NPP is very expensive, time consuming, and since Chernobyl, headline-grabbing. Keeping an existing one running on the other hand is almost free, and a non-issue.
The other culprit is the fact that it seems that NPPs are not dominantly cost-effective as of now [3]. If they were, then maybe savvy entrepreneurs would have found a way to circumvent the public opinion and convince governments to build them. But as it stands, no one has the incentive to push this agenda: Not businesses, and not politicians who couldn't stand the backlash (on the contrary, France, who leads the world with 75% reliance on nuclear power, wants to reduce that number to 50% by 2035 because that's the will of the people [4])
In a (better) parallel world, the people would demand more nuclear power and get the governments to subsidence the costs to make it cost effective and removing the reliance on coal. Instead we're building wind turbines and solar panels that are so unreliable they stop producing energy when there's no wind or it's cloudy/night. I think it's quite clear that these green technologies can't really be effective at a large scale (at least without some major break-throughs), but it's what the people demand, so it's what we do while we continue to burn coal.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadBut if you want to put it in an industrial area a few blocks away, sure, I'm good with it. I'm not sure we have a great source of cooling water here, though, except up in the hills which is really not a wonderful siting for a nuclear plant.
> And here’s a little story. I grew up within a few miles of Britain’s first, and largest, nuclear power plant.
What was the point you were trying to make?
With regard to powering our economies, I think we should just use a lot less energy. Turn the lights off, turn down the aircon, shut down the malls and find better ways to do things.
We'll have to pay the true cost of consuming the products they produce.
Update: I didn't do it very well, but what I wanted to say was that nobody runs their home like a shopping mall. Thousands of lights blasting, air so cold you have to put a jumper on in summer, and doors wide open to let the cold out. There is a lot of waste in the commercial world that I think we should fix before we freak out that there is not enough energy.
But if that was the case it would be a safer option. Probably. Do they explode?
> An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized.
Isn't this why we won't get nuclear power? It's always been my impression than nuclear is more financial challenging than technical, it takes forever to recoup the initial cost of the reactor and by the time it does, we will want to move onto 'cleaner/safer' renewables.
Perhaps if public perception changed considerably and we were willing to have our base energy load (what coal & natural gas* provide today) come from nuclear. I just don't think nuclear makes financial sense currently if it's only intended to be temporary.
People will point to power->gas->power as a technology for this, and I do think that's something we should be pursuing... It is probably viable for some fraction of fill-in power.
I still think some nuclear in the mix makes things much easier, though as some people point out the economics of nuclear get even worse when there's a lot of renewables on the grid (because nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize extensive construction costs, and a lot of that time power is basically free).
There's an 800 MWh / 200 MW Vanadium flow battery being built in Dalian, China, for example. Thermal salt storage is already coupled to thermal solar plants in Spain, but could be run with a heat pump, using any power source.
There are actually several promising technologies. It's not as dire as you're suggesting.
Also, what storage problem? This argument seems to pop up in a lot of HN threads where somebody just pulls this out of the head "We must do nuclear because OMG storage". Storage is an super easy problem with plenty of low tech solutions. You are confusing lack of demand with a lack of possible solutions. As demand ramps up, there will be gazillions of companies making good money using all kinds of creative plans to store energy.
Nuclear waste storage on the other hand is something most nuclear proponents don't like to talk about because it involves a lot of waffling about the fact that we've just been dumping it in temporary sites all over the place. E.g. France and a few other countries used to dump it in the oceans until people figured out that was a pretty horrible idea. Some countries still consider this a plan they can get away with.
Fluctuations in solar and wind happen (locally). But that's easily worked around by simply using cables to move power around. There's always wind somewhere and even with clouds, you still get some solar panel output. At 10x price differences you could just buy 10x more of them. 10x would be overkill. But just driving the point home that this is a complete non issue from both a cost and technical perspective. Storage is needed for short term fluctuations. The rest we can handle with overcapacity and interconnecting sites of production and some battery deployments.
Can you name one solution that will allow us to store, say, 3 days worth of US daily energy use? Please, show me the math. I did the math and it didn’t seem even close to feasible given today technology.
E.g. France and a few other countries used to dump it in the oceans until people figured out that was a pretty horrible idea.
It’s horrible, because throwing away what mostly is still good fuel that’s not economical to reprocess compared to fresh fuel is stupid. It’s not really horrible otherwise.
Storage is needed for short term fluctuations. The rest we can handle with overcapacity and interconnecting sites of production and some battery deployments.
How much overcapacity exactly we need with the amount of storage you assume? Please, show me the math. I did the math and with feasible amount of storage, the amount of extra capacity required is insane.
Does anyone see the contradiction with the leaders on the left calling for "unprecedented action" like the Green New Deal, but then they object to nuclear with the argument that it requires too much government oversight and financing?
For example, section 4(H):
> (H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaing wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;
Can anyone seriously look at provisions like this and say the Green New Deal is actually about climate change and not socialism?
Nuclear (or technology in general) doesn’t give you a big new stick to for addressing, for example, the declining influence of labor unions, or wealth inequality. Technology is something you typically do with markets and investors. That’s why technological solutions have fallen into disfavor on the left.
The US has the right location and the money already stored, there is still the Yuca Mountain inpass as it currently required to be the selected site.
I think finding such a site in the first place is nonsense as in 50-100 years we should be consume that fuel anyway.
I think it was evaluated at about 1/5 the cost of bringing Yucca Maintain to the same standard.
'Combating climate change: The role of nuclear power' from University of University of Michigan had a number of lectures where some of this is mentioned if I remember correctly.
I'm working so I don't have time at the moment.
On waste it depends what you call "still a problem". Sellafield still has pools storing the spent Magnox fuel resulting from running Britain's nuclear stock flat out through the 1973 miners strike. Those are decaying "nicely". Risk of fuel fires has been mentioned more than once. Sellafield is a reprocessing plant, that hasn't yet touched the 45 year old waste.
Yes I'd say nuclear waste is still a problem. I'm far enough outside London that politicians probably think it's perfectly fine.
Photos: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/29/sellafie...
Can you elaborate on what the problem is? I see a photo of a pond with the sun shining, grass growing and seagulls bathing. Authorities say it is safe.
I have friends who live next to an explosives manufacturing plant. They are at a much higher risk then it sounds like you are. I don't see nuclear fuel as being different from any other hazardous industrial material we deal with.
Those are tiny ponds, by the way. I reckon they could have a 2nd set as a backup somewhere near by if it came to it. You should see the size of a mine tailings pond, when they fail it causes real problems.
Temporary storage on site is a very bad idea. Leaks, non uniform site security, drums that were designed for a few decades now being called to serve for a century.
Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
So based on information that you don't have but assume exists there is a problem? There is actual evidence of known problems that nuclear solves. Like air pollution from coal.
I don't want to sound unsympathetic, the government does lie and I also subscribe to a couple of out-there conspiracy theories. It is just there is a lot of evidence that the nuclear threat is way overblown.
> Either have long term storage, or drop nuclear. There’s no in between
You could move them in to new decade-long storage once a decade. As mentioned, those are small ponds. The world is not made up of absolutes.
To be glib, that's why there were so many renamings. To bury the inept history.
And burn coal instead, spread heavy metals and CO2 around and slowly poison everyone.
That is the alternative, we saw it in Japan after the Fukushima accident. Oh, btw, Tepco has announced it will discharge further nuclear contaminated water in the ocean as they ran out of space to store it.
Like the trace amounts of Uranium in coal. And don't forget the Radon that comes up with natural gas either. For added fun, Radon is a noble gas so good luck economically removing it as opposed to just venting it all into the atmosphere.
Of the two Radon isotopes, one has a half life of 55 seconds, the other 2.5 days. The main problem are its decay products: Pb210, Bi210 and Po210. It's better to vent it off into the atmosphere than to let it accumulate in mines and basements.
> Between 1950 and 2000, there were 21 serious incidents or accidents involving off-site radiological releases that warranted a rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, one at level 5, five at level 4 and fifteen at level 3. Additionally during the 1950s and 1960s there were protracted periods of known, deliberate discharges to the atmosphere of plutonium and irradiated uranium oxide particulates.[81] These frequent incidents, together with the large 2005 THORP plant leak which was not detected for nine months, have led some to doubt the effectiveness of the managerial processes and safety culture on the site over the years. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
There's been more than enough problems with nuclear plants that I wouldn't live anywhere near one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...
* "resulted in temporary warnings against swimming in the sea along a 10-mile (16 km) stretch of coast between St. Bees and Eskmeals"
* A paperwork issue that was within tolerance of the relevant international standard
* "No radiation was released to the environment, and no one was injured by the incident, but because of the large escape of radioactivity to the secondary containment the incident was given an International Nuclear Event Scale level 3 categorisation."
2/3 of those will be INES rated.
This is all describing a situation that is substantially safer than most industrial operations I've ever seen. Including many building sites. Try running a building site using granite or a banana plantation with no injuries and no radiation escaping into the surrounding environment; this is a high standard.
If the authorities were able to show an ongoing period of best-practice, excellent management and regulation to ensure the industry (all industry) pays the environmental cost up front from their profit, I'd still be a vocal advocate of nuclear like I was in my naive twenties. No, every time there is systemic ineptness and a public purse left holding the bill for the after-closure clean up. Decades of renaming, cover-up, lies, official inquiries and ignoring the locals. Many of whom are like me - they'd love to accept it and perhaps work there were it not so criminally inept. Same would go for an explosives plant. :p
Have confidence in a reprocessing plant that was going to make the UK billions of good Thatcherite pounds reprocessing the world's nuclear waste, that caused an international outrage, and has not actually made profit if you include the large leak and decomissioning cleanup. In fact even if you discount cleanup THORP looks pretty questionable as to whether it was really profitable at all.
The UK is a small place, a major accident or Chernobyl scale catastrophe would be easily and rapidly nationwide as guessing, Sellafield is perhaps 300 miles as the crow flies from London - maybe 400 by road. I'm maybe about 40 or 50 miles straight line from the plant - it's 80 or 90 by road. A major sea incident would be similar. No one in the UK can get further than 70 miles from the sea.
Authorities say it is safe, neighbouring country Ireland and others in Europe have been campaigning against Sellafield for decades. Not just nuclear activists that you would dismiss, but they have made governmental approaches at diplomatic level and within the EU. That's been because there have been countless incidents, reports of malpractice, official reports and public inquiries of lies and cover ups, and two or three official renamings so we'd forget about the scandal of the Windscale fire, or Seascale. This seam is so rich I am not going to mine it for you. That's all on top of the couple of dozen International Nuclear authority reporting incidents that must be reported. Extensive history of (inadequate) fines too.
The TL;DR is Seascale / Windscale / Sellafield is a Western gold standard for how not to do it. It would take considerable evidence and persuasion for me to have faith and confidence in say the USA or French nuclear management competence. I'm entirely prepared to believe there is someone, somewhere doing it with excellence, but capitalism and communism appears to rule that out, so um, where now?
That problem was solved long ago, just reprocess it through breeder reactors and get even more energy!
The problem with the anti-nuclear lobby is that they block progress, then point at 50-year-old problems - that they have blocked implementing the solutions for - as current and unsolvable. They don’t actually want clean power. They want a reversion to a pre-industrial society, with themselves in charge.
Nuclear weapons that are "only" a couple kilotons are scary enough for me, kthx.
That problem is far from solved, as you can see by the near-zero number of breeder reactors currently in activity around the world.
How about instead, we use only what we can produce without waste.
What you're proposing is the equivalent of wanting to eat only such things that don't cause you to have to take a dump.
"energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another."
(Sure, to be fair, uranium mining isn't particularly eco-friendly either, but AFAIK even if you count that in, nuclear still comes on top.)
In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries. Alternatives have been suggested (such as - ridiculous - shooting the waste into space or dumping it into the deepest parts of the ocean). But none of those are even remotely viable or politically or socially acceptable.
As for the waste from fracking and tar sand processing, yes, that's terrible and it should stop. But nuclear is not the only alternative there.
We (the US) had a decent plan with the planned Yucca Mountain storage facility. But, you know, politics.
If you compare nuclear to traditional coal-fired plants, nuclear plants are a fucking god send from an emissions perspective.
> In France, the UK, Japan and the United States there are dumps of radioactive waste that are off-limits for the next couple of centuries.
Couple of centuries really isn't much. Industrial waste is problematic on the same timescales, and there's orders of magnitude more of it.
> Alternatives have been suggested (such as - ridiculous - shooting the waste into space or dumping it into the deepest parts of the ocean). But none of those are even remotely viable or politically or socially acceptable.
There's a catch-22 in here. We know how to deal with nuclear waste, but can't implement it because the industry is underfunded, because people are afraid of nuclear waste.
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[0] - https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
(2) The problem isn't just the 'high level' nuclear waste, it is all nuclear waste.
But let's just assume that that 34000 cubic meters is all off the problem. And let's assume that you need to store it for 1,000 years and that you're going to make 100% of your electricity baseload using nuclear. Right now, at roughly 10% that's 34000 so for 100% you'd then need 34000x10x1000 cubic meters of storage.
That's a cube 700 meters on it's side. And because of the nature of the waste you can't just stack it that close, you're going to have to space it out and you're going to have to cool it because that much nuclear material is going to output a very large amount of heat.
You're making this all look way easier than it really is.
That 700m cube is still, in other words, ten thousand 30m cubes. Even accounting for spacing things out, that's on the order of magnitude of a large city. A single city made of high-level waste, in exchange for running 100% of today's energy needs on nuclear for thousand of years[0]. That's, again, not much relative to all the other kinds of waste we're creating. And in reality, it would be a city made of fuel for a different type of reactors.
There's a few times more of mid-level waste, which is another thing potentially worth caring about. Rest of the waste is considered low-level and is either buried or enters regular waste management pipeline.
I'm not saying nuclear waste is not a problem, just that it isn't particularly special compared to other types of highly toxic industrial waste. There's not much of it by volume, unlike most other waste it actually becomes less dangerous with time, and there are ways to put it to use that are blocked pretty much only by people saying nuclear waste is a big issue.
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[0] - Or, eyeballing the doubling time of 2.5% growth rate, something like 150 years of 100% energy at current energy use growth.
2-4-5T and a bunch of other nasties (Dioxins). That's bad industrial waste, not radioactive but still, you really don't want it near your village or water supply.
Those vats were stored there at the end of the Vietnam war and conveniently forgotten (by Philips Duphar). It was only about 10,000 barrels of junk, a very small fraction of your initial 32x32x32 meter cube, less than 10%.
It took decades to clean it all up, and some parts of it will never be cleaned up because we can't dig deep enough. Because in the meantime the Dioxin had made it into the groundwater plume, the damage of which will not be known for another couple of decades.
If that had been radioactive waste they wouldn't have been able to do much about it for another couple of hundred years.
I don't follow your push to minimize this problem, it is a huge issue and just thinking of a 'a single city made of high-level radio active waste' makes my skin crawl. Such a place should not exist, and the Philips-Duphar story should give you at least one datapoint on why burying stuff and letting future generations deal with it so we can have our perks today is not - in my opinion - a viable strategy.
Energy is a great thing but we are not lacking for energy at all, it's raining energy continuously, we are awash in it. But just like with a rain of soup, if you bring a fork you're not going to do much.
In the end it isn't about the area directly affected in the near future, it is about the long term effects and those are very hard to model accurately when it comes to massive deposits of nuclear waste.
Just a couple of the risks: massive terrorist target, risk of pooling, risk of large scale groundwater contamination, risk of the whole thing blowing up. These are not trivial and not all of them can be dealt with over the time-scales that the waste would still be significantly radio active.
Political structures are not stable across the time-scales that you are looking at here, you might end up seriously regretting any particular site a few hundred years into the future.
My push to "minimize" this problem is a push towards recognizing that the problem is manageable in practice. The image of "single city made of high-level waste" was meant to picture just how little there is to manage, by volume, and once again - most of that we already know how to use as fuel; we just can't, because appropriate reactors aren't being built, primarily because people are afraid of the waste.
We may be technically drowning in energy from the Sun, but we're still not fast enough with making use of it. In the meantime, we have the closest thing after fusion to an energetic magic bullet - very high density, clean energy source with manageable waste - and we've been mostly sitting on it for decades now.
But maybe at this point it's really too late, maybe by the time enough reactors could come on-line, there really would be enough renewables to take over. It's unclear to me at this point whether the recent growth of solar and wind capacity is sustainable.
Yes, by doing not much of anything and only across a very very short span of time compared to how long it will have to work eventually. That's a bit like saying that the landmine you are sitting on hasn't gone off yet. True, it hasn't. And it may never go off. But it is still a landmine and it is still quite dangerous. If you had the choice between not having a landmine to sit on in the first place vs sitting on one to keep it safe which would you take?
France is a perfect example of this. When the oil crisis hit in the 70's they then used this knowledge to rapidly expand their use of nuclear power, which is now the highest in the world. But the reactors are aging, the waste is piling up and new construction has been delayed or halted indefinitely (and is already over budget).
Whether renewables are growing fast enough is something we control in a very direct way, and cranking out windmills and solar panels is really a mere matter of engineering. The latest iteration windmills make impressive power (8 to 12 MW design power is now a reality, something I did not expect to see in my lifetime), and can be mass produced economically.
They also tie into the grid at many locations, something aging grid infrastructure appreciates (the variability is another problem, but there are fortunately some solutions for that now).
Out of curiosity, is there a good estimate for how much money the world has spent on nuclear/renewable energy research? You'd think this information should be easy to find given the importance of the nuclear vs renewables debate, but it's not obvious to me how to find it.
Most of the money spent on renewables (solar, wind) is spent on scaling up and (boring, but necessary) production. Some (tidal, geothermal) has gone into proof of concept level projects. The amounts specified vary greatly based on the source.
ITER alone (originally projected to cost $5B) already clocks in at $20B and doesn't seem to be much closer to something resembling a working prototype than it was several years ago.
It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.
>Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources
From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11...
There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.
That's a very bold statement for which I have seen absolutely no proof. Solar and wind do not have the long term waste issues associated with nuclear and cost a small fraction of nuclear per installed Watt of power generation.
There is no significant difference in CO2 output of nuclear vs solar or wind so you'd have a climate crisis just the same. If you're looking to displace fossil fuel with nuclear you're going to have to look much further than just electricity, and solar and wind are just as good or even better at that as nuclear power is. Working fusion would be better than all of these options, but unfortunately we don't have it.
> There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.
It may seem unlikely to you but it is a well established fact. France, China the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, some of the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material. The power generated was a by-product. Countries that got into the game later and that did not have access to nuclear technology were licensed 'safe' tech that could not be used for enrichment.
Iran and North Korea are only interested in nuclear power for weapons purposes, everything else is just a fig leaf.
You got that exactly backwards. These five states all used production reactors to make their weapons Pu, which didn't produce useful power. Only later did they build power reactors, which don't produce weapons grade Pu.
Do you honestly think, Germany, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Finland, S Korea, Czechoslovakia etc. are/were also only interested in nuclear power as a cover for their weapons program?
There's a whole lot of failed attempts [0] that people conveniently just glance over like they never happened to then proclaim "Nuclear is so underfunded and never saw research".
While for many decades all things nuclear, not just weapons but also energy production, saw massive funding and hype all over the world.
People thought nuclear would be used for anything from moving earth to powering the jetpacks they'd use to fly to work, they thought we'd be running out of uranium because every country would have hundreds and thousands of nuclear reactors.
Why ain't we living in this amazing future now? Because it turned out nuclear isn't all that economical and practical as we originally believed it to be.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
In the US this might make people "feel bad" but it's not a real problem. In the southwest there are unimaginably large deserts where no one lives and no one ever will live. A lot of it is federal government property and has been used for nuclear bomb testing in the past precisely because it is land that no one will ever care about. See: Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
By 2,500 the technological and the social state of the world is either going to be unimaginably advanced from now or so horrible that nuclear issues are going to be bottom of the list of problems that they are dealing with.
We don't need to worry about the longer term beyond about 50-100 years. The waste is probably going to turn out out be an economic fuel source or a nonissue. The volumes are tiny and the risks largely undetectable outside a localised area.
This is terribly irresponsible.
Creating a massive problem for other people, and believing that the future will solve it, is the very definition of magical thinking.
Which one is worse?
Nuclear has one destabilizing factor: proliferation. Climate change will kill us more effectively however.
Thinking that you can run an industrial process with no waste is the magical thinking. Producing solar panels and wind turbines could easily produce more toxic waste watt-for-watt than nuclear does. Nobody is going to bother to check because the volumes are too small.
If that's really the case, we should stop worrying about global warming.
I don't agree with this position, for what it's worth.
You'll have to wait longer in order to really see the effects of global warming, as far as I understand it.
In the real world, exponents don't last forever. The economy will eventually give in, the question is how. 60 years ago the bet was that we'll run out of resources to burn. Today, the consensus is that we'll most likely destabilize the climate to the point of total civilizational collapse before we exhaust economically exploitable fossil fuel deposits.
As for the next years being critical in determining how the world will look like many decades from now, keep in mind that the damage CO₂ is causing is proportional to the integral of the yearly emissions curve, and also that feedback loops take time to settle at a new equilibrium. Models predicting average temperatures and sea levels take into account that even when we become completely net carbon neutral, the already accumulated CO₂ will still warm up the climate for decades. So it very much matters when we get to carbon neutrality, and the sooner we get there the (exponentially) better.
I’m contrast, all the lead we’ve scattered around the soil is a problem forever. (Lead is an element. It does not decay. All forms are toxic to varying degrees.). Various polymer waste and other petroleum and coal waste are, as far as I know and until new bacteria evolve that can eat it, problems forever.
The fact that nuclear waste decays is a win.
Bigger issue than global warming? It seems that's what environmentalists think.
The nuclear lobby is seizing on climate change to push through an agenda that would not stand a chance otherwise, and I refuse to have the wool pulled over my eyes. If we go into this we need to readily acknowledge the problem and budget for it accordingly. This will - at present, barring new developments - price nuclear as it is today right out of the equation compared to the alternatives.
Solar and wind have become viable alternatives, tackling baseload using them is still tough but getting better every day with new developments in short term storage and transmission line technology.
We could fuel the whole world with nuclear fuel and not have any significant issue with nuclear waste storage.
Specially if we are moving to more modern reactors who can consume the current nuclear waste and massivly reduce the volumne (something we should manage over the next 500 years I'm sure).
In fact with modern reactors you can get to a point where you only have 300 years of storage requirment until it hits background radiation.
And even if you want a 1000s of year solution, we can absolutly build those already and its not really all that much of a technical issue. As has been done in Finland I believe.
https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/
”It seemed such a good idea at the time. At least, to the German politicians in charge.
But in hindsight, the Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.”
Because it doesn’t store highly radioactive waste, it isn’t _that_ much of a concern, but it started leaking ten years into operation. That, IMO, is a concern, as it indicates sloppiness.
That consensus came out of an international conference in the 50s in, I believe, Beirut. Asse II was supposed to be one of the experimental sites to prove the theory, but over the decades ended up being run much more like a "general dump" with extremely lackluster documentation habits.
It's the stuff with half lives of 3-300 years that you need to worry about, really.
Compared to its activity a month after being removed from the reactor-- spent fuel loses 90% of its activity in 80 years or so and 99% of its activity in 200 years, at which time it's still about 150x as active as the original uranium ore (which itself is 6x or so diluted, so about 25x as active as the original uranium)
Storing nuclear waste is very tricky. It changes chemically due to the atomic decay, so you have to figure out a container that is stable against scores of different chemicals in many concentrations.
On top of that, it’s emitting heat so the container can’t be too big otherwise it’ll melt.
Then the waste evolves gases, some radioactive, that make the pressure build up.
Then your container is getting bombarded by alpha rays which wedges itself between the grain boundaries and embrittlement the container.
It’s a bloody (and expensive) mess!
The only kernel of truth is that __if__ you throw out fuel instead of waste, then you get a heat problem over the long term and the container is irradiated by alpha particles. It won't melt, but it might corrode. But why would you throw away fuel?
Plutonium is an unavoidable product of U235 fission - and can be extracted from the resulting “nuclear waste” by chemical processes.
Having seen stuxnet, I’m convinced that there’s a lot of investment in preventing people from gaining access to U238. Starting from Uranium ore, getting to Plutonium would be much simpler than getting to sufficient quantities of U238 and have the benefit of generating energy along the way. Additionally, Plutonium based bombs have a “higher yield” according to what I’ve read.
I wonder if USA and Russia agreed to limit Plutonium production- and that’s the real reason behind severely limiting nuclear energy.
So what's the difference? Pu-240 is hot. It's too radioactive to make bombs out of, because you'll end up cooking your workers. And because it's so similar in weight to Pu-239, you can't effectively separate it out.
If you can make a buck by cutting corners and shirking security regulations, someone will.
Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology. And as the 737 MAX and its insights into Boeing company culture and the FDA shows, people can and will piss away already gained safety improvements.
We will not have a trustable nuclear body count value until many generations in the future. Is not over until is over.
But rapidly becomes less lethal, with the vast majority of the risk removed in tens of years. Vs. many kinds of chemical waste which are potent effectively forever.
It finds a death rate of 0.074 deaths per terawatt-hour for nuclear, compared to 24.5 for coal, 18.4 for oil, and 2.8 for gas. The edges of the nuclear and gas confidence interval get somewhat close to each other but do not overlap.
While there was not enough data for the author to estimate the rate for solar and wind, subsequent estimates are about 2 for solar and 10 for wind.
Of the 0.074, 0.003 deaths are non-occupational from accidents; 0.022 are total deaths from accidents. The vast majority of this 0.022 is not radiological, but instead ordinary industrial and mining accidents where people are in traffic accidents, asphyxiate, are killed by hot steam, or crushed to death.
The rest is from various kinds of air pollution impacts in the nuclear fuel and transportation chain. Even if we have a horrid accident that has 1000x the impact of previous accidents, we will not reach the death rates associated with other sources of power.
So, producing electricity isn't safe, but doing the safest thing isn't usually called unsafe.
We're investing tons of money into fusion though, so maybe that'll make all these fission plants a moot point.
Calling our history of accidents so far the "best-case" scenario may be misleading.
Nuclear is completely safe in the best-case scenario. Nuclear is safe if nothing goes wrong, if the weather is fine, if the people follow the protocols, if nothing unforeseen occurs. If one of those things isn't true, we get Chernobyl, or Fukushima, or perhaps next time, instead of being "not that bad", or "pretty bad", it's worse, because of something we didn't foresee, and we regret it for the rest of human history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
It's not like we've only had one or two incidents with one or two technologies.
I think we're not ready, yet.
> I'm not calling our history the best case, it's a bad case, but it's not the worst case.
Well, in our "bad case" it's still orders of magnitude better than the alternatives...
> it's worse, because of something we didn't foresee, and we regret it for the rest of human history.
Or this is hyperbole, because nuclear plants just aren't that scary in potential worst case harms. You have less harm in 70 years than one typical year of coal power does-- perhaps less than one typical month of coal power inflicts.
Also I don't think your list is fair: counting deliberately nuking places, mining accidents, and radiotherapy accidents.
Again, while nuclear is scary-- it at least is self-limiting. There's plenty of shit we do with chemicals and industrial processes that could be bad forever.
With your list of fears, we never will be.
If climate scares are true, we're actually doomed if we are to avoid nuclear. I'm OK with increasing risk more than plenty, way above coal deaths, if it prevents a larger crisis for society.
But we really aren't with nuclear.
Why not? We accept aircraft accidents as one of the costs of air travel. Why do we not accept power station accidents as one of the costs of having power?
The worst nuclear power station accidents have killed far fewer people than the worst aircraft accidents. Why is one so feared and the other not?
This is just simply a lie.
There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis).
In contrast, there have been more than 500 aircraft accidents with 50 or more deaths. Aviation accidents have killed 83,000 people since 1970.
Top 3 Nuclear Power accidents: Chernobyl: 54 deaths, SL-1: 3 deaths, Fukushima Daiichi: 1 death
Top 3 Aviation accidents: Tenerife disaster: 583 deaths, JAL Flight 123: 520 deaths, 1996 Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision: 349 deaths
Repeating a lie does not make it true. The official numbers are completely worthless because the Soviet leadership massively mis- and underdocumented pretty much everything related to the accident.
> There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis).
...so you'll simply assume that all that radioactive material spread far and wide over huge swaths of Asia and Europe had no ill effects at all?
This whole 'famous person speaks about subject they have little knowledge about with authority' thing goes right past me, it's weird how we seem to project all kinds of magical properties onto those who manage to get name recognition. As though fame somehow automatically bestows instant expertise on a hundred unrelated fields on the famous.
I'd love to hear Brian Eno write and say more about music though, like Vangelis, Tomita, Jean-Michel Jarre and Klaus Doldinger he managed to make electronic music sound organic, which was - given the tools at hand - a magnificent accomplishment.
Renewables are sorted out, massive deployment is more of a political problem than a technical one. Better batteries would be useful but windpower doesn't need batteries as much as solar does. Better transmission lines, that would make a big difference.
Creating more nuclear power plants is a dead end economically, the power produced is going to be more expensive than the same amount of power produced using renewable energy. On top of that you will still have to deal with the waste and the eventual decommissioning, assuming you get the license to operate the thing in the first place and your budget overruns won't kill the project.
So regardless of what - insert favorite famous musician - who was against nuclear power for all the wrong reasons and now is pro nuclear power - also for all the wrong reasons - thinks we are on a different path now and just maybe it will be possible to get through the eye of the needle without relying on nuclear technology. And if it has to be nuclear, then let's hope that fusion will finally be delivered, that would be a game changer.
This was my initial reaction also.
On any story about 'nuclear power' I tend to search for fission and fusion, just to see if the author is sufficiently informed / concise.
I'm starting to dismiss any article that doesn't qualify this basic difference. I'm happy to see money poured into fusion R&D, but not happy to advocate more fission reactors being constructed -- and the appellations pro/anti-nuclear simply doesn't describe that not uncommonly held position.
What if you don't have wind? Sun? Is that also sorted out?
As for why wind does not need batteries: Wind power fluctuates on short time scales, these are not a good match for batteries. There are some interesting solutions to these problems that involve superconducting material (in actual production, not lab level stuff).
For solar with a 24 hour cycle batteries are much more important.
And frankly I'm sure experts have had numerous change-of-minds in nuclear power but the general population doesn't seem to be interested in hearing them. While famous people are not experts in general, they speak to the people because they aren't experts. You see, it's more about having rapport than just believing whatever the so-called experts are saying.
Taking your argument even further; are you an expert? If not, should I then even consider your opinion as of any value? It's the lacking of perception that bothers me in comments like yours, I think you come off as condescending and trying to put yourself above others. I value Brian's opinion, I think it's interesting to see his opinion to change. I have had similar experiences, where I have let go of my ego and thought about a thing in a non-judgemental way. Those moments have been quite transformational to me.
It's just dumb. They are too stuck emotionally with their idealism on "non-polluting" things. Everything pollutes, nuclear waste albeit worse than the normal garbage can be taken care of quite easily. I'd rather have that than coal plants. Sure it would be nice to not to have even the nuclear waste, but sometimes you have to be pragmatic. That's what engineering is about.
Here's a fun story I heard about the woefully famous Finnish Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant. As some of you might know it was the most expensive building in the world for a while costing 8.5 billion euros (it seems some hotel complex in Mecca is now more expensive with 12 billions). Why you might ask? Well Olkiluoto 3 is a nuclear plant with 1600 MW output consisting of only a single reactor, unlike no other plant. Commonly nuclear plants are built in sets of 2 reactors, so that they are easier to maintain (one is still running when the other is offline) and in general easier to build than one massive reactor. But why only 1 reactor you ask? Well, as some Nokia engineer told me in sauna, the administration at the time consisted of multiple parties one of them being the Green Party. And Green Party was terribly afraid of nuclear energy, and the decision to build a new nuclear power plant really didn't sit well with them. Everybody knew that Finland needed a new power source and nuclear power plant was the only viable option. But Green Party just didn't. want. the. nuclear. plant.
So a compromise was made. Green Party agreed to allow the building of a new nuclear plant but only with one reactor. Dumb idea, but I guess they thought that 1 nuclear reactor was less scarier than 2. What the other parties then decided to? Well in order to supply the energy demands Finnish industry required, they said "hey let's build a reactor that in fact has the power of two reactors". Which was never done before, and the results are now well-known.
In the end, what Green Party gained from this? A nuclear power plant with only a one reactor, but which is double the size of regular one and whole thing billions of euros over-budget and everyone generally unhappy. But hey, only one reactor.. I'm not even sure does it produce the same nuclear waste as two reactors would. A major success nonetheless.
That sounds like a very reliable source. Thanks for enlightening us.
EDIT: Really, downvotes? It's easy to disagree but to do so without contributing anything constructive is just worthless. I'm not changing my mind, frankly it's doing the opposite. It's a fact that Green Party was in the administration at the time the Olkiluoto 3 was decided, but I'm not going to research it any further than that.
It's just so low-effort for you to press down or just write a two sentence snarky reply. Should I then return the favor and do the same for any reasonable anti-nuclear comment that I just don't disagree with? That is what a petty person would do, but I'm fine with my downvotes. I think it's just reinforcing my point.
There are six significant flaws in most recent pro-nuclear arguments I’ve read. To me, these flaws undermine the pro-nuclear case.
1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online (>7 years).
2. Authors focus on the percentage of energy production contributed by clean sources (solar, wind, etc.) TODAY, but ignore the growth trend (which matters since reactors take so long to bring online).
3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years.
4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted.
5. Authors ignore energy efficiency trends (electronics get more efficient over time).
6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle..., “Quora”
[6]: https://youtu.be/rUeHPCYtWYQ, “Chernobyl Podcast”
Edit: added TLDR. I’ll update with references for points 2-5 later. Slow internet connection now.
As per the article:
> An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized.
True, development costs are big, but these can be spread over multiple reactors. And once you have trained the workforce constructing one, the others can come much quicker. See historical values for France [1]. If we were to pipeline new reactors buildup everywhere, we'd be quite close to netting 0% emission in the energy sector. Granted, calculations and finding the optimal isn't that simple.
> 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years.
The consequences of our fossil fuel reliance are staging _right now_ what the ecosystem will look like millions of years in the future. Even if we were to produce 1000 times the amount of nuclear waste we currently have, we wouldn't come close to that. At least, it is easier to keep the stuff in one place. This is an emergency. Yes, nuclear is far from optimal, but is a whole lot better than the status quo.
The other arguments aren't really valid in my opinion.
2. Builds on 1. The point is that nuclear can ramp up pretty quickly, as has been shown in the past.
> 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted.
This isn't really a problem with nuclear. Provide the baseload. You can tune up/down the amount of power, depending on your renewable output. Exchange energy with the neighbors depending on the needs. Pumped hydro can store quite a bit of energy as well.
> 5.
I fail to understand your point. Are we using less energy? I don't think so. [2] And a lot more stuff is going to need electricity in a clean energy transition (heaters, cars, industrial ovens...). If anything, cleaner/cheaper energy is likely going to increase consumption.
> 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported.
What safety data? The points they talk about in the article and use to say that reactors seem safe? Other energy generators aren't that safe, and also likely under-report.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
This "problem" is why we need nuclear. You can't store power generated by solar and wind, so when the sun goes down or the wind dies down, the power goes out unless you rely on some other source. Nuclear can work every hour of the day. It's the only power generation method which can supply power at every hour of the day and can be deployed almost everywhere (hydroelectric is neat but you're screwed if you don't have a good river). All these other "problems" have been written about extensively by specialists, just not by journalists.
As for the rest of your problems with nuclear specifically, I don't think you're comparing the negatives of nuclear with the negatives of literally any other power source.
The real reason we won't go nuclear is that Democrats and progressives don't like it because it's scary and makes them quake at night. We could use nuclear as one tool in fighting climate change, but we aren't willing to do that. We're dying by our own hands.
Power can be transmitted reasonably efficiently over very long distances. Long enough that this need not be a problem.
Solar is more predictable than wind in this respect but the combination is more reliable than either alone.
If the goal of Germany's Energiewende was cleaner energy, France is thrashing them without even trying. That is really a stunning endorsement of just how technically excellent nuclear power is.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
This is going to cause substantial challenges.
Personally, I'd love to see a Manhattan style project to get us to fusion. We know that it can be done, we have a shining example for proof of that every day.
And in the meantime throw every $, Euro or Yen aimed at more nuclear power based on fission either at the fusion project or at renewables. You can build an awful lot of windmills for the price of one nuclear plant, and you can do it a lot quicker too.
By the way, your point 4 for nuclear power doesn't hold ground. If you have lots of nuclear power plants, then you're going to not use (waste) a percentage of the power you produce at night by burning fissile material. But if you don't have any nuclear power plants, then 100% of the potential energy from fissile material that is available on Earth is going to be "wasted" (ie, not used).
You really dont, you just need to burn fuel to fill in for gaps caused by weather, that become increasingly less frequent the more wind and solar is oversupplied. And oversupply is not a big problem - it can be easily curtailed. The optimal amount of renewables supply to build is over the level where they regularly exceed demand - and that is the stage where big batteries become very economical to build.
Carbon neutral fuel-wise, biofuels and electrically generated fuels are very viable future options.
Storage doesn't become more of a problem with more wind and solar - it becomes more of an opportunity to further reduce fuel consumption.
Storage is not a problem now - economic solutions exist already to build it where it is valuable. Its just not needed much yet.
That suggests that we'd need to keep most of the existing infrastructure for power generation and also replicate its capacity with wind and solar plants.
That sounds both expensive and inefficient.
> Storage is not a problem now - economic solutions exist already to build it where it is valuable. Its just not needed much yet.
Nuclear has actually proven that it can work at the scale we need it (~20% of actual power generation from memory). Renewables and storage have not. So this is an argument of hypotheticals vs actuals. The burden of evidence on the hypothetical solution is a bit higher than an assertion that it'll work.
The only grid-level storage solutions that actually store energy (not just modulate grid supply short-term) is big hydroelectric dams which are not one size fits all solutions.
Meanwhile the nuclear power station we started building ten years ago is contributing 0%.
Its efficient to use existing plant for as long as it is useful. The main expense of running most of it is fuel - and the cost of that in legacy terms and in CO2 is slashed by 'replicating' its capacity with wind/solar.
Currently when we add wind and solar capacity almost their entire output replaces fuel burn. When in a handful of years wind and solar have replaced 30-40% of demand supply, about 10-20% of their output may possibly be getting rejected. That makes wind/solar maximally 10-20% more expensive than what they would be with full storage and use. Hydro, batteries and long distance transmission is already economically viable in certain situations. Hydrogen synthesis will become increasingly economically viable, with carbon pricing and development. There are technologies existing which are ready to reduce waste supply from wind/solar as it arises. But even without them a potential overhead of 10-20% cost wont stop more wind/solar getting built, because its already currently cheaper than fuel burning -without carbon pricing and has been getting more efficient year on year, with no end in sight.
This actual economic performance contrasts with new nuclears promises which are in truth in their final throws, completely outperformed already by the alternatives which have been developed. Investment in Nuclear is no real threat to wind and solar anymore, the arguments seem to persist only to delay overall action on policy transition. New nuclear plants may or may not get built, wind and solar IS getting built and its variable nature will make nuclear supply uneconomic - there's no sense in financing plants on the basis of supplying constant power, when a huge competitor supplies much much cheaper power 75% of the time, and encourages hydro, biofuels and maybe cheap storage to fill in its gaps. Nuclear is not going to be economical for that, and that is the opportunity which is being created by wind and solar manufacturers and installers, as we hash over this outdated debate.
So, concretely, which source of universally available baseload power meets your criteria? Which would YOU advocate, given the urgent need to reduce emissions?
Similarly, I’m okay with a phased decommissioning of other dirty fuels. I just think it’s insane to set a long-term goal of growing dirty power jobs/industry.
I’d advocate for an immediate stop to any anti-renewable efforts. We should be doing everything we can to help achieve renewables.
Last, if we really think it’s a problem, we need to reduce energy consumption.
Unless you live near to a geothermal or hydro source, there is no renewable option available today that can provide baseload power, the "day in, day out" load that must always be available on the grid. The options are fossils and nuclear.
Coal waste is massive: 68 tons of solid and 77 tons of CO2 per person-lifetime of electricity. The majority of that waste goes into the air, where we can't control it and don't know what it's up to (apart from fucking our climate of course). That's not counting fly ash and flue gases, the world's largest source of released radioactivity. That stuff is packed with heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and mercury. The air pollution from coal causes 35,000 deaths from lung disease per year in the US alone - when it's working perfectly. The same figure for China is estimated to be 350,000 deaths per year.
In contrast, one person-lifetime of nuclear waste is about 12oz of solid, dry matter, which we can watch (and apparently re-use in modern reactor models). It produces zero CO2, and zero gaseous emissions. The total lifetime death toll from nuclear power is - at it's most generous - under 1,000 people.
Renewables are a part of the solution, and long term, they will be the complete solution. But even if we could solve all the power generation, storage, and transmission problems within 50 years (which would be amazing)... we need a way to provide base load in the meantime. And we have an option that is safe, zero-carbon, and produces a fraction of the waste of the alternatives.
Additionally, "we need to reduce energy consumption" is only an option if you're cool with 2/3 of the world continuing to live in abject poverty. By the end of this century the global population is projected to level off at 11 billion or so, with almost all of that growth coming outside the wealthy West. The 90% of the world which is currently using a fraction of global power generation wants washing machines, electric lighting, and computers, too. If the US cut average power consumption in half to match Europe, and then we all cut power consumption by a further 50%... we would still need to build multiples of our current baseload power generation capability.
TL;DR: We need way more baseload power than we've got. It's not helpful to lump all our options into one category and rule them out completely... especially when one option comes with zero carbon.
Taking on debt is profitable if the interest rate is less than the return on investment. I'd rather take on the nuclear waste storage 'debt' (does no real damage if we do it properly, can be paid back later with much more powerful technological resources) than the climate change 'debt' (does real damage now, resulting in permanent loss of some amount of economic growth).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
Most of the wait time is due to lack of demand, e.g. it takes multiple years to build a pressure vessel but this production could be ramped up 10-100x if need be. The Quora source you cite actually says 48 months for modern reactors so I'm not sure where >7 years came from.
> 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years.
There is no waste storage problem. This is a myth that should have died a decade ago. Vitrified nuclear waste is inert and harmless. Modern reactors are also able to consume most of current waste. We already tolerate far worse waste products from e.g. the coal industry where it's a non-newsworthy occurrence for toxic tailings to completely destroy river systems.
> 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted.
The energy (not power) storage problem is unique to unreliable peaky power sources like solar and wind. Nuclear power plants provide a consistent and diallable power output. Energy storage is also a big impediment to large scale rollout of renewables because energy storage costs are superlinear with respect to demand.
> 5. Authors ignore energy efficiency trends (electronics get more efficient over time).
Increase in efficiency does not lead to decrease in consumption. It does the opposite. Look up induced demand.
> 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported.
Nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer and cleaner than anything else that exists including renewables.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
This comment is entirely misleading and the author is seriously misinformed about nuclear power. This should not be top comment on any discussion of nuclear power. This is just perpetuating FUD and myths that have all been deconstructed years ago.
> “ Most of the wait time is due to lack of demand”
None of the Quora answers cited this as a reason. And the Quora answers are the low end of the scale (40 months) only included construction time in their answer, not site finding, licensing, or startup.
Which means you need a lot more power. Solar and wind still factor in but you still want that massive amount that a power plant provides, because all current storage technology won’t be able to keep up.
Plus if all reactors were the same design such as in France it lowers costs dramatically as well.
1. Please look at actual data for power plant construction times. [1] provides an overview. Estimates are useless - if we look at how long things actually take to build... "The mean construction time of 441 reactors in use today was 7.5 years."
3. Are you actually serious right now? Radioactive waste sitting in temporary pools that will be an environmental catastrophe for hundreds of years if they leak isn't a problem? No, just because we tolerate other ecological disasters doesn't make this one ok.
4. This is no longer true, and will definitely not be true in another 5 years. Battery costs are decreasing at a reliable rate year over year. Power plants are already being built making use of them. Here's one going up now with 300MWh of storage [2].
5. No, you look up per capita demand. Here: [3]. It’s been dropping for a decade.
6. Your link does not report solar farm deaths because as far as I can tell there haven't ever been any. Unless you count birds. Rooftop solar is "dangerous" because installers fall off roofs.
[1] http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle...
[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/10/08/the-sun-shines-only-a...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32212
Spent fuel is sitting in cooling pools because it emits enough residual heat to melt if not in water. Spent fuel will typically sit in these pools for around a decade. At which point the residual heat is low enough to process it via vitrification (turning it into chemically inert glass) and then moving it to a permanent storage site. Vitrified spent fuel is radiologically and chemically safe. The only way it can become a danger is if somehow liquefied or aerosolised. The volume needed to store a century worth of all humanity's spent nuclear fuel is less than a single large landfill site, of which we have hundreds of thousands.
> that will be an environmental catastrophe for hundreds of years if they leak
If what leaks? Do you actually know what's in those pools and why? Spent fuel pools are harmless. You can go for a swim in them and receive a lower radiation dose than background. There's nothing to leak. The only failure mode is if water is not supplied to them and eventually evaporates.
> This is no longer true, and will definitely not be true in another 5 years
Cite this. Show that at any point in the foreseeable future the cost of energy storage with regard to total capacity is not superlinear. China would love to hear from you since they're stuck unable to use renewables at large scale because of this issue.
> No, you look up per capita demand. Here: [3]. It’s been dropping for a decade.
Per capita is not a relevant number, The number that is being discussed is total demand. The number that matters, since power sources need to supply a total demand not a per capita demand, whatever that would even mean. The number that's rapidly increasing.[1]
Actually take the time to read up on induced demand, then you will understand that it results in a per-capita decrease in consumption (since higher efficiency) and a paradoxical higher total consumption, since now there are more consumers who were previously priced out.
GP post is bad and your post is bad. Sorry. If you don't understand the very eli5 basics of nuclear power like the purpose of cooling ponds (and the fact that most modern reactor designs don't need them), then be aware that you're perpetuating a bunch of myths every time you talk about it. Energy science is not a topic where all opinions are equal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Trend...
What do I think is in the pools? Radioactive waste that will have a mini meltdown if the pools leak enough water to expose the waste to air. You know, the kind of leak that can result from a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or just plain old maintenance negligence [1]. But that's ok, we'll just pretend Fukushima never happened, I guess.
I already provided a link to a renewable power plant that's going up, backed by battery storage for non-generating hours. Perhaps you didn't like it? Here's a report on how costs of batteries are dropping fast enough to make them cost competitive with traditional sources [2]. You probably won't like that, either, since you're hung up on the whole "linear with demand" thing, which no one actually cares about. What they do care about is total cost per reliable kWh, taking into account all negative externalities. But I guess we'll just pretend nuclear accidents don't occur, especially small ones [3], and that the whole long-term storage problem doesn't exist because that whole Yucca Mountain thing is just needless worrying.
I like how you focus on total demand globally because if you look at total demand in the West, it's been flat for years. You conveniently don't point out that the places demand is increasing are in the developing world, which is the last place we should build nuclear plants. Do you want more accidents due to poor maintenance or operating procedures? Because that's how you'll get them.
And I understand induced demand perfectly - my whole point of showing per capita consumption is to point out that it's bullshit in this case. Electricity has been plentiful in the US and EU for decades, but per capita use peaked 9 years ago. Induced demand is only relevant in developing markets where there is latent demand, which again is back to the developing world where I will never agree we should build nuclear.
You like nuclear, I get it. It's a good power source. It's just not the best one anymore and it's time to recognize that. But it's clear you have already made up your mind on the issue, so I won't be engaging in any more discussion with you on this.
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2017/08/pushing-the-storage-horse-wi...
[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/09/indian-point...
...Yeah. And since the topic of this entire post is climate change, the developing nations and induced demand are all that matters. No one gives a fuck about per capita energy consumption in the US, the question is about the total energy demand of the planet and how it's supplied.
What the developed world does from here on out is irrelevant in terms of first order effects on climate change. It's already done the bulk of the damage it was going to do. Switch all of the developed world to fairy-powered zero emission fusion overnight, or anything else you want, it won't make a difference.
The deciding factor for climate change is how China and India will power themselves, and if the answer isn't nuclear, then we're all screwed. Just like TFA states.
For example, the article you link does not seem to account for the 2000+ deaths that occurred due to the Fukushima evacuation, nor those that survived but later starved due to their homes and livelihood being destroyed in the Chernobyl accident.
A proper model needs to take into account the economic implications of a nuclear incident.
Nuclear has been shown to be able to build fast and with massive scale. Faster then renewable by far.
The waste problem is really no an issue once you understand it.
Modern nuclear power plants and future nuclear plants can actually load follow quite well.
Efficiency does not lead to less consumtion, but rather more consumtion. That is a basic and well known fact.
Civilian Nuclear has a steller safty record and nuclear has the strictest observation of any industry.
Which brings me to the core point of this post: a lot of people care about the environment, and would like to help as much as they can, learning what's best to pursue. But politicians, policy-makers, and public personalities in general are not among the ones that really want to help the environment. For them, being an environmentalist is just a _mean_ to capture some votes, some money, some power. _That_ is what the seek. Paradoxically, I think they will attempt to delay the solution to the problem as much as they can, because that would mean they lose their power.
https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/
but yes, it's a rare position.
And because nuclear is so country-by-country you don't get global economics of scale.
So its hard for many to quantify the benefits of nuclear power and military experiments, but the problems still remain, how to deal with the waste. Robots need to be made nuclear proof, there is a spill over into space technology here as space is highly irradiated, so solving things like Fukashima and Chernobyl will benefit space exploration even more. And there is the attainment of knowledge which gets us closer to understanding and importantly, controlling fusion.
Besides waste disposal could be made into the fastest fault lines of two plates of the earth crust, effectively sending the radation back into the earth's core. If people are worried about radiation, they should look up Radon and granite rocks. That kills more people than uranium waste.
This I feel is due to irrational, emotional public opinion. Nuclear is the safest cleanest and most stable energy source we have so far but it's also "scary" because radiation is spooky and invisible. Coal is simple and local and it just silently kills millions through pollution. It's similar to the common fear of flying vs the common non-fear of driving.
Even today when people talk about the "cons" of nuclear power (spent fuel management, risk of catastrophe, terrorist target, etc) they are usually oblivious to the fact that there are 450 active NPPs today, and they are supplying 10% of the worlds energy and things are going great.[0] So even if these were acute concerns (and they're not) we would only have needed to increase them by a max factor of 10 to get 100% non polluting energy. That's not a lot, and definitively worth the "hassle". Even in Chernobyl (which was the main reason for the doom the nuclear effort) the number of casualties due to radiation, including long term effects, are estimated to be in the thousands, not millions as most people assume. [1] In Fukushima that number is 1. [2]
The number of NPPs were growing exponentially until suddenly plateauing globally since 1987 til today [0]. This is because building a new NPP is very expensive, time consuming, and since Chernobyl, headline-grabbing. Keeping an existing one running on the other hand is almost free, and a non-issue.
The other culprit is the fact that it seems that NPPs are not dominantly cost-effective as of now [3]. If they were, then maybe savvy entrepreneurs would have found a way to circumvent the public opinion and convince governments to build them. But as it stands, no one has the incentive to push this agenda: Not businesses, and not politicians who couldn't stand the backlash (on the contrary, France, who leads the world with 75% reliance on nuclear power, wants to reduce that number to 50% by 2035 because that's the will of the people [4])
In a (better) parallel world, the people would demand more nuclear power and get the governments to subsidence the costs to make it cost effective and removing the reliance on coal. Instead we're building wind turbines and solar panels that are so unreliable they stop producing energy when there's no wind or it's cloudy/night. I think it's quite clear that these green technologies can't really be effective at a large scale (at least without some major break-throughs), but it's what the people demand, so it's what we do while we continue to burn coal.
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537816/why-dont-we-have-m... [4] http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-...