From the Conclusion at the end of the paper addressing all types of nuclear technologies, fast breed reactors, Generation IV reactors and "fusion or fission, uranium or thorium":
"Even a lesser goal of several terawatts of nuclear power would run into many of the outlined limitations. Therefore, the notion of a nuclear utopia is a false one. But there are two types of nuclear advocates: the nuclear utopian and the nuclear realist. A nuclear realist would only suggest that we need about 1 TW of nuclear power as part of our world energy mix. However, one only has to divide the results, in this paper, by 15 to see that 1 TW still stretches resources and risks considerably.
One then has to count the cost, consider the safety, the complexity, and the issues surrounding governance of nuclear power. Also if the technology cannot be fundamentally scaled further than 1 TW, one has to ask if the same investment would have been better spent on a truly scalable technology.
It has been suggested that for the same investment, solar thermal farms (with storage) would exceed the power output of nuclear stations and eliminate many of the problems [5]. Solar thermal is also scalable as it has the capacity to deliver hundreds of terawatts should mankind require it in the future.
The weakness of a scalable renewable solution, however, is intermittency. In the short term, this problem can be addressed via dual use of solar thermal with natural gas. Then, the natural gas can be phased out, as storage and grid balancing techniques come online to solve the intermittency problem."
That's a big gamble. We know fracked natural gas emits vastly too many CO2 molecules per kWh generated for decarbonization, and it also leaks methane through the pipelines.
Nuclear has been a boogeyman to fossil fuels for a long time. Intermittent renewables with storage are awesome, but when backed by gas they're antiproductive to decarbonizing.
France deeply decarbonized their entire grid with nuclear in 15 years by standardizing plants and building in serial. This is a good success story.
Building gas now and hoping it goes away in 50 years is a terrible solution.
Curious on your thoughts about feasibility of manufacturing compact reactors on floating barges in ship yards and floating to where needed to plug into grid (most populations are coastal). Idea would be to solve for political risk/perception in that it can be unplugged and floated away in case of meltdown.
Is this a plant question? I am in the middle of writing a page explaining that is the best and greatest idea in the history of nuclear reactor development.
It was seriously considered and big money was spent on it in the 1970s for the Atlantic Generating Station. A production facility was made. Thousands of studies of wildlife were done. An environmental impact statement was approved by the NRC. The coast guard signed off on it. It is amazing.
But demand leveled off after the oil shocks and they were never built.
To rapidly decarbonize this is simply one of the most enticing ideas out there.
Please keep me posted on the page you're writing, email in profile.
It's a fascination I've had since highschool after visiting an aircraft carrier in San Diego. Almost went to school for nuclear engineering but studied ECE instead.
In France this 'success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 10,3% of gridpower in 2017).
The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 10 years behind schedule and 4x overbudget.
Which is probably a mistake. We need every tool in the toolbox and nuclear is one of the best we have. It's also worth noting that France has been producing much cleaner and cheaper energy than Germany, which eschewed nuclear.
And that Flamanville is behind schedule and over budget is not a problem specific to nuclear. The same thing happens with building bridges or any big construction project, in many countries. That's a different systemic issue that needs to be resolved.
Mistake or not, the net fact remains: as experts and themselves users of nuke power the French are winding it down. We (I'm French) recently closed a plant (Fessenheim).
Many big construction projects are indeed over budget and behind schedule, however I'm not sure that 4x budget and 3x time (at least, because it is not yet completed) for a project which design is only a minor enhancement of an ubiquitous design is the norm in France.
>Building gas now and hoping it goes away in 50 years is a terrible solution
To me, that's your money statement. People get complacent. That's just the nature of animal life here on earth. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if gas was still with us in 50 years.
At the same time, as the article points out, nuclear really does have some real scaling issues. Even if we "just want a little", so to speak. It's a solution that's really only going to work if the government takes the lion's share of the risk. (ie - pays for it.) Even then, will it do everything for us? The mathematician in me looking at the physics says probably not, but you can't dismiss the possibility of revolutionary advances. I mean maybe fusion comes along? Who knows? Of course that puts us right back where we were with gas. Gambling on tech advances. But at least you're not pumping out CO2.
I don't know? My gut tells me the developing world will innovate and hodge podge together something that will make us rethink the problem. Like doing something unexpected with under or above ground pumped hydro storage maybe? Or something a bit easier like molten salt since they'd likely be using solar thermal anyway? They're also more willing to play fast and loose with safety, so cracking water for hydrogen fuel cells becomes really attractive in that environment. I don't know? Just think it might be interesting to keep an eye on what projects pop up in, say, island nations in Asia? Or, perhaps, coastal nations in Africa? If you have a lot of relatively simple local generation and storage, your grid level stuff doesn't even need as much load shedding or "gap filling"?
This needs a 2011, neglects discussion of implications of construction of first long time nuclear waste storage facility in Finland couple of years ago (i.e. is that scaleable or even repeatable given politics now that we have an example) https://psmag.com/ideas/the-hiding-place-inside-the-worlds-f...
Deep core drilling seems to solve all the problems. Burying waste 3 km deep under 2 km of dirt makes it immune to even geological timescale movements. It also solves the problem of security; it's hard to see how a bad actor could drill a 2 km deep hole without being noticed.
Wells can be up to 200m deep. Aquifers are usually level, but the land above them might not be. So burying something 1k deep can leak into an aquifer that is drilled into elsewhere or even a high-table aquifer that drains into surface water downhill.
You will obviously notice any aquifer while drilling on the way down. And there may indeed well be water very deep down. But from what I understand, they are not connected with more surface level, and any diffusion of material takes a very long time. Keep in mind the pressure at those depths. Water is obviously lighter than rock, and if it had a way to go up, it would have.
>The problem with drilling is, you have a bore hole connecting your cavern to the surface.
Is that actually a problem? What kind of events could occur that would make it a problem?
>And the bad actor potentially does not care about being noticed.
Presumably this hypothetical hole in the ground would be in someplace like the US or Western Europe, under government control, and relatively heavily guarded. In that context, if a bad actor truly doesn't care about being noticed, we probably have bigger problems to worry about, like the collapse of modern civilization.
> Is that actually a problem? What kind of events could occur that would make it a problem?
Leckage
> Presumably this hypothetical hole in the ground would be in someplace like the US or Western Europe, under government control, and relatively heavily guarded.
I find your trust in the stability of the US or Western Europe for the next few hundred millennia surprising.
You don't need to worry about government stability when you bury stuff under 2km of dirt. Any group with the ability to drill that deep would have the means to do serious damage whether they do indeed drill or not.
We're talking about covering the stuff with a concrete plug, and then 2 km of dirt. There is no bore hole left. Drilling back in the same spot may be marginally easier than drilling the original hole, but it's still drilling a 2km hole.
Sure, if you restrict yourself to 1950s technology, Nuclear is pretty handicapped.
It’s just crazy to me that these articles presume some sort of revolution in solar technology scalability but forbid nuclear power from using any better design than the first one we invented.
Completely agreed. I was surpised reading the article about how fusion (irrespective of being able to achieve it with positive energy output) was obviously a non-starter due to neutron embrittlement.
I think there is a place for this kind of work, however simply looking backwards at technology and propagating it forward with no change isn't it. The author points out many problems that weren't evident to me prior to reading, but also doesn't comment on how any of them are being solved or have progressed in within the past few decades.
For example modern reactors last 80 years not 60 [0] (and can be extended to over 100).
Thorium reactors are breeders. Molten salt reactors share many issues related to the corrosive radioactive colant with fast breeder reactors that are discussed in the article.
Firstly, fast breeder reactors get a small fraction of the article, which is mostly devoted to the old stuff.
Secondly, there are several different kinds of breeder reactor, and I don't see that lumping them all together helps understand their scalability. A liquid sodium cooled reactor fueled with uranium has completely different properties from a molten salt reactor fueled with thorium.
After 70 years of research, LWRs are still the only reactor type that has ever been anywhere near economically viable. Many other approaches, such as Thorium pebble-bed reactors and sodium-cooled fast breeders have been tried and abandoned. It is simply unrealistic that all the issues that have plagued these designs will magically disappear with new ones.
I'm convinced that the reason so many oil and gas companies are on board with scaling up intermittent renewables is because it secures demand for natural gas for future.
You have to question the assumptions if the basic math at the beginning doesn't even seem right. They claim 440 reactors today need to scale to 15,000. That is a 34x increase.
So, just that one change pretty much blows most of their argument away, particularly if you assume that simply replacing many of the existing reactors would give a capacity increase due to turbine/heat efficiency improvements now done at modern plants.
So the scare mongering about having to build/replacing a reactor each day sounds like utter bollocks.
This is probably a confusing on your part between energy consumption and electricity consumption. For a fossil free future we also have to replace fossil fuels used for heating and transportation. It's likely that we won't need a 1:1 replacement (by far) because heating and transportation can be done much more efficiently with electricity (thanks to heat pumps and the efficiency of electric motors).
1. We don't need to replace all fossil fuels to just do better than we're doing now. It'd be a big help to just replace all fossil-fuel power plants, which is what the OP was talking about.
2. Cars and trucks can be powered by electricity in the near-term. Airplanes cannot; we'd need much better battery tech for that to happen. Heating can't be replaced by heat pumps entirely; heat pumps don't work in subfreezing conditions. They have to resort to "auxiliary heat" (electric resistance heating) when it gets too cold. Of course, doing that and just having more nuclear plants is still better than burning hydrocarbons, but it does mean we need more electricity generation.
Not with the refrigerants used in retail AC units, which are sub-optimal even for that use when compared with some of the older HCFC's and CFC's. A lot of the current designs also likely ice up, so you need much larger evaporator coils/fields. Then there ends up being the question of what the efficiency looks like.
Anyway, I'm just trying to say, that there is still heat in the air/etc below the freezing point of water, the science says it can work, and if you do a bit of googling you can even find vendors advertising fairly cold weather devices (-27C).
Right now they primarily use refrigerants that have ~2000 times more GWP than CO2. They need to be refilled every 5-10 years.
My brother had one installed recently. They leaked the entire contents twice due to over tightened connectors. A back of the envelope calculation indicates that his heat pump will emit more GWP gas than if he has just burned natural gas by a wide margin.
Recently I recall reading an analysis that half of the heating since the 70s is attributable from refrigerants.
So while heat pumps are more efficient from am energy standpoint, with current refrigerants they are not helpful for climate change.
I've been in the same house in south-central USA for 15 years now. It has a heat pump, first I've owned. It provides reliable, inexpensive service. I have only good things to say about the heat pump.
I hope the additional emissions (if that's factual) are offset by the many years of reduced electricity usage (which I am certain is factual.)
Electricity is not everything. Heating and transport eat up much more fossil fuel. That can be replaced by, uh… nuclear-powered electricity and synthetic fuels, I guess? However you do it, it adds a lot to the necessary power budget.
If you use nuclear waste heat for district heating and load follow with steam bypass to make hydrogen or just charge batteries you can cover transportation and heat.
You can't use nuclear waste heat for heating. No one wants to live next door to a nuclear power plant, so you can't feasibly transport the heat to someplace where it can be used. Nuclear plants are always located remotely for a reason.
No, I get it. I know you didn't mean using heat from nuclear waste, but from the reactor itself: nuclear reactors do produce an enormous amount of heat. But the same is true of fossil-fuel plants; nuclear plants simply substitute burning fuel with a controlled nuclear reaction to produce heat, which then creates steam, which drives steam turbines. It's a heat engine. The problem I see is that it's hard to transport heat. Putting steam in pipes only works so far; you lose too much heat to the environment because the pipe's insulation isn't perfect. There are places (like university campuses) which heat buildings this way, but they're not transporting that steam hundreds of miles.
Anti-nuclear FUD. I wonder who's paying for this stuff.
> Currently, the total global power consumption by mankind is about 15 terawatts (TW) —so the question we address is: Can nuclear power feasibly supply at least 15 TW?
This is a downright idiotic question. Humans use and will continue to use a variety of different energy sources. Which sources specifically depends on economic viability that differs based on the location, availability of raw materials, current energy prices and government incentives.
If you're really serious about preventing drastic climate change due to C02 emissions, you should consider scaling up all energy sources that don't produce CO2.
> Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969 in San Francisco by David Brower, Donald Aitken and Gary Soucie after Brower's split with the Sierra Club[4] due to the latter's positive approach to nuclear energy. The founding donation of $500,000 (in 2019 USD) was provided by Robert Orville Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield oil company.[5]
All of this is interesting, but for instance it states that nuclear plants occupy large amount of land (20.5km2 on average) and needs lots of resources. However without a comparison to alternative technology, this is a moot point.
Having a quick look at requirements for solar plants, it's easy to check that typical ones occupy about 14km2 per GW of power. So solar requires several orders of magnitude more land than nuclear (taking into account actual power production: 80% yield for nuclear, 15% at most for solar).
Furthermore, it's also easy to check that contrary to nuclear plants where land grab is largely a safety zone, a solar plant actually covers land with hardware, most of it requiring much more rare earths and exotic materials than nuclear power plants (where 95% of stuff in weight is concrete and steel).
The actual take for me is the following: in the coming years, we'll go through a huge reduction in energy availability, because fossil fuels are at least 80% of world energy consumption and they'll run out at some point anyway; which implies a huge reduction in economic activity. This is absolutely unavoidable in the next few decades unless some actual miracle such as cheap and easy cold fusion happens real soon now .
To be a somewhat believable alternative to nuclear, you'll also need tons of batteries. Many, many tons of them, full of lithium and cobalt and other things. Because a solar plant produces power along a very steep bell curve centered around noon, while a nuclear plant produces linearly exactly the amount you're asking for 80 to 95% of the time.
This is only alluded to in the article, but intermittency is a major nuisance and hinders significantly actual utility of renewable power, because we need a base level of production they're totally incapable to provide unless backed with literal mountains of storage (storage technology at scale we don't know how to build or manage today).
while a nuclear plant produces linearly exactly the amount you're asking for 80 to 95% of the time.
Only if it serves as baseload. In other cases you have to throttle it, which quickly makes the whole business much more expensive per kWh.
And this is the reason nuclear will never be the solution. Overprovisioned renewables combined with gas peaker plants are simply way cheaper and much faster to deploy.
Also batteries needen't be li-ion. Here's an example of a company that is currently in the process of scaling up their battery product:
...which is the whole point of nuclear. It's constant power.
The means to manufacture, service and maintain battery capacity sufficient to meet our civilization's energy needs from renewables simply does not exist in any technology, period.
Renewables are extremely cheap only because they produce power when it isn't needed and therefore is literally worth nothing.
As for batteries, the biggest batteries in service now are 150MWh. If we want to power the world with renewable, we'll need TWh of batteries. We just don't know how to build something like that. We haven't got the technology (lithium isn't an option at these scales).
Renewables have an effect only as long as you have a steerable baseload of coal, gas or nuclear to actually feed the demand. They have a positive effect only as long as you haven't phased out all of your coal. As long as there is no coal burner left, they'll set a high limit on emissions. Unless, of course, we build as many nuclear plants as possible in the meanwhile instead of masses of gas firing plants (400g/CO2/KWh).
We could build batteries and much more solar and wind power plant instead, but even if we suppose a non-existent cheap battery technology, providing large scale power this way would be tremendously expensive (5 to 30 times more expensive than nuclear, depending upon the hypotheses).
Solar has an actual output of 15% its theoretical power. Wind is about 30% (onshore) to 40% (offshore). So to produce x GW of power, first you'll need x * 3 to x * 6 GW of installed capacity; second you'll need additional capacity and batteries to offset times of no wind or no sun. Figuring the price of several hundred GWh of battery storage is left as an exercise to the reader, but it can't be cheap. Plus the grid enhancements needed to transport the additional peak capacity from power plants to batteries, etc.
In France 75% of our electricity is produced with nuclear power, and we're able to dynamically change its power to follow demand (though we also use hydro power plants to deal with shorter term variations). And we have one of the cheapet electricity in Europe.
Unfortunately that is changing, because governments want to reduce the share of nuclear down to 50%. But that's a political choice and not a technical limitation.
These small solar arrays are connected to the grid and can't work without it. Furthermore, they actually tend to add too much load to the grid because it's not built to manage numerous random power sources dispatched across the network.
And this is not the efficient thermal solar power the article mentions, either. They're between pretty inefficient and very inefficient (depending upon roof angle and orientation), heavily subsidized and in a period of dwindling resource availability, a piss-poor allocation of money compared to unsexy things such as proper building insulation and heat pumps everywhere.
Anyone spending some time on analysing the numbers would be baffled by how poor the ROI is on renewable overall. They really can't stand on their own much.
>These small solar arrays are connected to the grid and can't work without it.
Huh? Everything is connected to the grid, whether it's producing or consuming electricity. What kind of argument is this?
>Furthermore, they actually tend to add too much load to the grid because it's not built to manage numerous random power sources dispatched across the network.
Apparently, it works just fine in Germany.
>They're between pretty inefficient and very inefficient (depending upon roof angle and orientation), heavily subsidized and in a period of dwindling resource availability, a piss-poor allocation of money compared to unsexy things such as proper building insulation and heat pumps everywhere.
Insulation and heat pumps don't generate electricity. Germany generates a huge portion of its total electricity with renewables, including solar, which is pretty remarkable considering it has a high latitude.
>Anyone spending some time on analysing the numbers would be baffled by how poor the ROI is on renewable overall. They really can't stand on their own much.
Do you work for the oil industry? Considering that Germany is one of the leading economies of the whole world, and especially the EU, and that they're quite successful with renewables, your statement sounds ridiculous.
Germany is able to generate power using renewable and lower its emissions doing so only because they still have a huge base of coal power (about a third) to modulate down when wind blows or sun shines.
I'm working in computers. I think we're on the verge of peak oil; that we absolutely must cease burning any fossil fuel as fast as possible starting 10 years ago, and that we're heading straight into civilisational collapse. I think it's time to get serious and stop pretending we can do everything and that we can avoid difficult choices and zero-sum games, and that we can reach pipe dreams such as "green growth" and all of this bullshit.
>Germany is able to generate power using renewable and lower its emissions doing so only because they still have a huge base of coal power (about a third) to modulate down when wind blows or sun shines.
I totally agree that renewables aren't really feasible for providing all power: we'd need massive storage technology to do that, since the sun doesn't shine all the time and it isn't always windy. However, coal could easily be mostly replaced by nuclear for baseline generation. And if Germany doesn't want to do nuclear, I'm sure the French next door would be happy to sell it to them.
>I think it's time to get serious and stop pretending we can do everything and that we can avoid difficult choices and zero-sum games, and that we can reach pipe dreams such as "green growth" and all of this bullshit.
I agree about the dangers facing us. But I think it's wrong to bash green technologies like solar and wind: they are absolutely viable (in places, obviously wind power isn't feasible everywhere), and can contribute greatly to power needs. No, they aren't a silver bullet, and no, they really aren't able to supply ALL our power needs 24/7. Most other methods aren't either: nuclear for instance isn't really usable for total power generation because it can't spin up and down quickly to meet changing demand. But solar power is getting more efficient all the time, and there is a lot of work on storage technologies, so there is progress, but I also recognize we can't entirely rely on solar/wind for everything yet. Many places are generating large amounts of power with solar, which means there's that much power that doesn't need to be generated with fossil fuels. Personally, I'd like to see coal power phased out completely, as fast as possible, and nuclear brought back (with very modern, safe designs, not 50-year-old designs) to provide baseline power until we can find other ways of providing all the power we need without pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Then we agree. Notice however that nuclear in France is able to provide up to 98% of power and follow very precisely the demand; only the slightest peaks and bumps require hydro.
This article is really poor. I don't even disagree with the point they make since I don't think nuclear is scalable at all, but this article has mistakes or bad reasonning like in every paragraph!
I'm on my phone so I won't list them all, but come on!
81 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] thread"Even a lesser goal of several terawatts of nuclear power would run into many of the outlined limitations. Therefore, the notion of a nuclear utopia is a false one. But there are two types of nuclear advocates: the nuclear utopian and the nuclear realist. A nuclear realist would only suggest that we need about 1 TW of nuclear power as part of our world energy mix. However, one only has to divide the results, in this paper, by 15 to see that 1 TW still stretches resources and risks considerably.
One then has to count the cost, consider the safety, the complexity, and the issues surrounding governance of nuclear power. Also if the technology cannot be fundamentally scaled further than 1 TW, one has to ask if the same investment would have been better spent on a truly scalable technology.
It has been suggested that for the same investment, solar thermal farms (with storage) would exceed the power output of nuclear stations and eliminate many of the problems [5]. Solar thermal is also scalable as it has the capacity to deliver hundreds of terawatts should mankind require it in the future.
The weakness of a scalable renewable solution, however, is intermittency. In the short term, this problem can be addressed via dual use of solar thermal with natural gas. Then, the natural gas can be phased out, as storage and grid balancing techniques come online to solve the intermittency problem."
Nuclear has been a boogeyman to fossil fuels for a long time. Intermittent renewables with storage are awesome, but when backed by gas they're antiproductive to decarbonizing.
France deeply decarbonized their entire grid with nuclear in 15 years by standardizing plants and building in serial. This is a good success story.
Building gas now and hoping it goes away in 50 years is a terrible solution.
It was seriously considered and big money was spent on it in the 1970s for the Atlantic Generating Station. A production facility was made. Thousands of studies of wildlife were done. An environmental impact statement was approved by the NRC. The coast guard signed off on it. It is amazing.
But demand leveled off after the oil shocks and they were never built.
To rapidly decarbonize this is simply one of the most enticing ideas out there.
It's a fascination I've had since highschool after visiting an aircraft carrier in San Diego. Almost went to school for nuclear engineering but studied ECE instead.
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 10,3% of gridpower in 2017).
The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 10 years behind schedule and 4x overbudget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
And that Flamanville is behind schedule and over budget is not a problem specific to nuclear. The same thing happens with building bridges or any big construction project, in many countries. That's a different systemic issue that needs to be resolved.
Many big construction projects are indeed over budget and behind schedule, however I'm not sure that 4x budget and 3x time (at least, because it is not yet completed) for a project which design is only a minor enhancement of an ubiquitous design is the norm in France.
To me, that's your money statement. People get complacent. That's just the nature of animal life here on earth. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if gas was still with us in 50 years.
At the same time, as the article points out, nuclear really does have some real scaling issues. Even if we "just want a little", so to speak. It's a solution that's really only going to work if the government takes the lion's share of the risk. (ie - pays for it.) Even then, will it do everything for us? The mathematician in me looking at the physics says probably not, but you can't dismiss the possibility of revolutionary advances. I mean maybe fusion comes along? Who knows? Of course that puts us right back where we were with gas. Gambling on tech advances. But at least you're not pumping out CO2.
I don't know? My gut tells me the developing world will innovate and hodge podge together something that will make us rethink the problem. Like doing something unexpected with under or above ground pumped hydro storage maybe? Or something a bit easier like molten salt since they'd likely be using solar thermal anyway? They're also more willing to play fast and loose with safety, so cracking water for hydrogen fuel cells becomes really attractive in that environment. I don't know? Just think it might be interesting to keep an eye on what projects pop up in, say, island nations in Asia? Or, perhaps, coastal nations in Africa? If you have a lot of relatively simple local generation and storage, your grid level stuff doesn't even need as much load shedding or "gap filling"?
I guess we'll see how it all works out.
Like what? Almost everything from the linked article is false, I'm surprised it's in IEEE at all.
As far as I am aware, nuclear has only the same scaling issues as any other power source.
...
"We just need to figure out how to store and transport many terawatts of harvested solar power, and then we can finally phase out natural gas."
Insanity. This sounds like it was written by Gazprom.
https://archive.is/REV0t
Deep core drilling seems to solve all the problems. Burying waste 3 km deep under 2 km of dirt makes it immune to even geological timescale movements. It also solves the problem of security; it's hard to see how a bad actor could drill a 2 km deep hole without being noticed.
And the bad actor potentially does not care about being noticed.
Is that actually a problem? What kind of events could occur that would make it a problem?
>And the bad actor potentially does not care about being noticed.
Presumably this hypothetical hole in the ground would be in someplace like the US or Western Europe, under government control, and relatively heavily guarded. In that context, if a bad actor truly doesn't care about being noticed, we probably have bigger problems to worry about, like the collapse of modern civilization.
Leckage
> Presumably this hypothetical hole in the ground would be in someplace like the US or Western Europe, under government control, and relatively heavily guarded.
I find your trust in the stability of the US or Western Europe for the next few hundred millennia surprising.
One design is the TWR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
It’s just crazy to me that these articles presume some sort of revolution in solar technology scalability but forbid nuclear power from using any better design than the first one we invented.
I think there is a place for this kind of work, however simply looking backwards at technology and propagating it forward with no change isn't it. The author points out many problems that weren't evident to me prior to reading, but also doesn't comment on how any of them are being solved or have progressed in within the past few decades.
For example modern reactors last 80 years not 60 [0] (and can be extended to over 100).
[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
Secondly, there are several different kinds of breeder reactor, and I don't see that lumping them all together helps understand their scalability. A liquid sodium cooled reactor fueled with uranium has completely different properties from a molten salt reactor fueled with thorium.
Yet, https://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-1/glbnrg.html says that 18% of worldwide generation is already nuclear. So, to get to 100% that would be ~5x, not 34x.
So, just that one change pretty much blows most of their argument away, particularly if you assume that simply replacing many of the existing reactors would give a capacity increase due to turbine/heat efficiency improvements now done at modern plants.
So the scare mongering about having to build/replacing a reactor each day sounds like utter bollocks.
"Around 10% of the world's electricity is generated by about 440 nuclear power reactors" [0]
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...
2. Cars and trucks can be powered by electricity in the near-term. Airplanes cannot; we'd need much better battery tech for that to happen. Heating can't be replaced by heat pumps entirely; heat pumps don't work in subfreezing conditions. They have to resort to "auxiliary heat" (electric resistance heating) when it gets too cold. Of course, doing that and just having more nuclear plants is still better than burning hydrocarbons, but it does mean we need more electricity generation.
Anyway, I'm just trying to say, that there is still heat in the air/etc below the freezing point of water, the science says it can work, and if you do a bit of googling you can even find vendors advertising fairly cold weather devices (-27C).
https://daikinatlantic.ca/2019/11/03/what-are-the-best-heat-...
So, making better ones is an engineering problem.
Right now they primarily use refrigerants that have ~2000 times more GWP than CO2. They need to be refilled every 5-10 years.
My brother had one installed recently. They leaked the entire contents twice due to over tightened connectors. A back of the envelope calculation indicates that his heat pump will emit more GWP gas than if he has just burned natural gas by a wide margin.
Recently I recall reading an analysis that half of the heating since the 70s is attributable from refrigerants.
So while heat pumps are more efficient from am energy standpoint, with current refrigerants they are not helpful for climate change.
I've been in the same house in south-central USA for 15 years now. It has a heat pump, first I've owned. It provides reliable, inexpensive service. I have only good things to say about the heat pump.
I hope the additional emissions (if that's factual) are offset by the many years of reduced electricity usage (which I am certain is factual.)
We do have a few communities heated by nuclear district heat. It can ship about 50km ok
> Currently, the total global power consumption by mankind is about 15 terawatts (TW) —so the question we address is: Can nuclear power feasibly supply at least 15 TW?
This is a downright idiotic question. Humans use and will continue to use a variety of different energy sources. Which sources specifically depends on economic viability that differs based on the location, availability of raw materials, current energy prices and government incentives.
If you're really serious about preventing drastic climate change due to C02 emissions, you should consider scaling up all energy sources that don't produce CO2.
Recommended viewing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKH_iLhhkTyt8Dk4dmeCQ9w/pla...
Oil companies, of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth
> Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969 in San Francisco by David Brower, Donald Aitken and Gary Soucie after Brower's split with the Sierra Club[4] due to the latter's positive approach to nuclear energy. The founding donation of $500,000 (in 2019 USD) was provided by Robert Orville Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield oil company.[5]
By the way, your comment is nothing but a shallow dismissal of his comment...
Having a quick look at requirements for solar plants, it's easy to check that typical ones occupy about 14km2 per GW of power. So solar requires several orders of magnitude more land than nuclear (taking into account actual power production: 80% yield for nuclear, 15% at most for solar).
Furthermore, it's also easy to check that contrary to nuclear plants where land grab is largely a safety zone, a solar plant actually covers land with hardware, most of it requiring much more rare earths and exotic materials than nuclear power plants (where 95% of stuff in weight is concrete and steel).
The actual take for me is the following: in the coming years, we'll go through a huge reduction in energy availability, because fossil fuels are at least 80% of world energy consumption and they'll run out at some point anyway; which implies a huge reduction in economic activity. This is absolutely unavoidable in the next few decades unless some actual miracle such as cheap and easy cold fusion happens real soon now .
The most exotic material in crystalline solar panels is silver or perhaps tin. No rare earths whatsoever.
This is only alluded to in the article, but intermittency is a major nuisance and hinders significantly actual utility of renewable power, because we need a base level of production they're totally incapable to provide unless backed with literal mountains of storage (storage technology at scale we don't know how to build or manage today).
Only if it serves as baseload. In other cases you have to throttle it, which quickly makes the whole business much more expensive per kWh.
And this is the reason nuclear will never be the solution. Overprovisioned renewables combined with gas peaker plants are simply way cheaper and much faster to deploy.
Also batteries needen't be li-ion. Here's an example of a company that is currently in the process of scaling up their battery product:
https://eosenergystorage.com/
...which is the whole point of nuclear. It's constant power.
The means to manufacture, service and maintain battery capacity sufficient to meet our civilization's energy needs from renewables simply does not exist in any technology, period.
For this reason nuclear is already losing on the economical front.
As for the batteries: citation needed.
As for batteries, the biggest batteries in service now are 150MWh. If we want to power the world with renewable, we'll need TWh of batteries. We just don't know how to build something like that. We haven't got the technology (lithium isn't an option at these scales).
Renewables have an effect only as long as you have a steerable baseload of coal, gas or nuclear to actually feed the demand. They have a positive effect only as long as you haven't phased out all of your coal. As long as there is no coal burner left, they'll set a high limit on emissions. Unless, of course, we build as many nuclear plants as possible in the meanwhile instead of masses of gas firing plants (400g/CO2/KWh).
We could build batteries and much more solar and wind power plant instead, but even if we suppose a non-existent cheap battery technology, providing large scale power this way would be tremendously expensive (5 to 30 times more expensive than nuclear, depending upon the hypotheses).
Solar has an actual output of 15% its theoretical power. Wind is about 30% (onshore) to 40% (offshore). So to produce x GW of power, first you'll need x * 3 to x * 6 GW of installed capacity; second you'll need additional capacity and batteries to offset times of no wind or no sun. Figuring the price of several hundred GWh of battery storage is left as an exercise to the reader, but it can't be cheap. Plus the grid enhancements needed to transport the additional peak capacity from power plants to batteries, etc.
We need to reduce CO2 today. Your average nuclear plant takes 7.5 years to complete.
I don't think that in current circumstances the cost of reducing emissions is lower for nuclear.
Unfortunately that is changing, because governments want to reduce the share of nuclear down to 50%. But that's a political choice and not a technical limitation.
And this is not the efficient thermal solar power the article mentions, either. They're between pretty inefficient and very inefficient (depending upon roof angle and orientation), heavily subsidized and in a period of dwindling resource availability, a piss-poor allocation of money compared to unsexy things such as proper building insulation and heat pumps everywhere.
Anyone spending some time on analysing the numbers would be baffled by how poor the ROI is on renewable overall. They really can't stand on their own much.
Huh? Everything is connected to the grid, whether it's producing or consuming electricity. What kind of argument is this?
>Furthermore, they actually tend to add too much load to the grid because it's not built to manage numerous random power sources dispatched across the network.
Apparently, it works just fine in Germany.
>They're between pretty inefficient and very inefficient (depending upon roof angle and orientation), heavily subsidized and in a period of dwindling resource availability, a piss-poor allocation of money compared to unsexy things such as proper building insulation and heat pumps everywhere.
Insulation and heat pumps don't generate electricity. Germany generates a huge portion of its total electricity with renewables, including solar, which is pretty remarkable considering it has a high latitude.
>Anyone spending some time on analysing the numbers would be baffled by how poor the ROI is on renewable overall. They really can't stand on their own much.
Do you work for the oil industry? Considering that Germany is one of the leading economies of the whole world, and especially the EU, and that they're quite successful with renewables, your statement sounds ridiculous.
I'm working in computers. I think we're on the verge of peak oil; that we absolutely must cease burning any fossil fuel as fast as possible starting 10 years ago, and that we're heading straight into civilisational collapse. I think it's time to get serious and stop pretending we can do everything and that we can avoid difficult choices and zero-sum games, and that we can reach pipe dreams such as "green growth" and all of this bullshit.
I totally agree that renewables aren't really feasible for providing all power: we'd need massive storage technology to do that, since the sun doesn't shine all the time and it isn't always windy. However, coal could easily be mostly replaced by nuclear for baseline generation. And if Germany doesn't want to do nuclear, I'm sure the French next door would be happy to sell it to them.
>I think it's time to get serious and stop pretending we can do everything and that we can avoid difficult choices and zero-sum games, and that we can reach pipe dreams such as "green growth" and all of this bullshit.
I agree about the dangers facing us. But I think it's wrong to bash green technologies like solar and wind: they are absolutely viable (in places, obviously wind power isn't feasible everywhere), and can contribute greatly to power needs. No, they aren't a silver bullet, and no, they really aren't able to supply ALL our power needs 24/7. Most other methods aren't either: nuclear for instance isn't really usable for total power generation because it can't spin up and down quickly to meet changing demand. But solar power is getting more efficient all the time, and there is a lot of work on storage technologies, so there is progress, but I also recognize we can't entirely rely on solar/wind for everything yet. Many places are generating large amounts of power with solar, which means there's that much power that doesn't need to be generated with fossil fuels. Personally, I'd like to see coal power phased out completely, as fast as possible, and nuclear brought back (with very modern, safe designs, not 50-year-old designs) to provide baseline power until we can find other ways of providing all the power we need without pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.
I'm on my phone so I won't list them all, but come on!