I believe the point is that coal plants are understood to always pollute, whereas nuclear plants are promised to never pollute. Can you see where that distinction is important?
Who has ever promised that nuclear plants will never pollute? That's a ludicrous statement to make, and it's almost as ludicrous to state that someone respectable has ever promised so.
Option 1: coal plant that, statistically and averaged over all plants, kills x amount of people every day of the year (through exhaust pollution, killed miners, etc.)
Option 2: nuclear plant that kills y amount of people, averaged the same; direct kills through accidents + indirect through increased cancer risks (discounted for natural occurrences of those cancers etc.)
When x > y, it's better to use nuclear. And y, despite the Fukushima fear mongering, is quite small.
The matter is not 'nuclear can fail, so we shouldn't use it'; the matter is 'which one has the lowest overall cost' (cost taking into account lives, health risks, economic risks etc); and then choosing that one.
People that coal kills have accepted the risk to the same extent that you or I have accepted the risk of nuclear. In many cases, they don't have practical alternative to working in the coal mines. So yes, they choose to work in the coal mines, much like most of us choose not to move as far away from nuclear plants as possible, but it's not really that much of a choice.
By some estimates, nuclear would be among the safest energy sources (in deaths by TWh, one of the few honest ways of comparing the risks), even safer than wind and rooftop solar power.
What kind of numbers did this estimate use as 'deaths by nuclear power'? I bet they used that two-digit death toll for Chernobyl. Look it up on Wikipedia. Estimates range from less than a hundred to one million deaths.
Alright, so the article claims 0.04 d/TWh, 0.037 of which are a direct result of Chernobyl at a claimed cost of 4000 lives. Other sources claim 1000000 deaths. That would be a 250-fold increase to 9.25 d/TWh from Chernobyl alone.
Even Greenpeace seems to claim at most roughly a quarter million deaths. Thirty one people were killed directly, everything else is the result of trying to measure the increase in cancer and such. Clearly, the real cost was far higher than those 31, but how high is a good question.
Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously: Thirty one deaths are directly attributed to the accident, all among the reactor staff and emergency workers.[10] A UNSCEAR report places the total confirmed deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000.[11] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[12] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[13] A Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 excess deaths occurred between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination.[14]
With most energy generation schemes, including nuclear, many costs and risks are externalized to a third party -- namely the taxpayer.
I'm not familiar enough with the methodology to dispute it's finding regarding deaths, but I'd argue that evaluating risks solely on the number of attributable deaths is not a full accounting of risk.
What is the economic and social impact of the 20 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima? You're looking at a handful of deaths, but many lives have been affected nonetheless. If my rooftop solar panel kills my family somehow, that is a personal tragedy, but the scope in terms of people affected is nothing like a rare, but catastrophic nuclear failure.
That's a problem -- engineers are frequently frustrated with the public perception of nuclear because they focus on a single metric which is just one of many considerations.
But that's wrong. Just because this thread is about human safety doesn't mean that a lot (lot, lot) hasn't been written about socioeconomic aspects of the different energy sources.
Many things are "externalized" in the process and we are pretty naive about risk.
Do we count the cost of side-effects like wars and oppression in our energy ? Think about Libya for oil or Niger for Uranium.
Do we count the cost for democracy of the impact of energy lobbies ? Centralized production entails centralized structures which often have a tremendous influence (in France there was never ever any democratic feedback loop about nuclear energy).
The cynical view though is that this is nothing compared to other "industrial risks" and to the insiduous and continuous risk we are producing by saturating our planet with garbage.
> However, anyone would invest in something and promote it if they believe in it.
Yeah, you're right, but then again, the title should have been more like "Atomic Industry Investor Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer", because right now I tend to read it more like "Renowned philanthropist Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer"
I think you're making as assumption that Gates cares about making more money at this point in his life. Based on his other philanthropy it looks to me that he cares more about his legacy as it pertains to changing the world for the better and very little about money now.
The flip side of your argument is that if Gates thinks nuclear is the next great thing then why is he NOT investing in it? Personally, I would find it odd if Gates thinks something is the right way to go and didn't invest. It would signal he's not very serious about the issue.
Good TED talk by Gates explaining his vision for nuclear. Basically, fill up old missile silos with nuclear waste, and burn it from the top down. The waste is disposed of, heat energy is produced that can be harnessed, and there are no significant by-products (iirc). Very interesting, I'd never heard of that before, worth watching.
Can't watch the video here at work, but wouldn't burning nuclear waste be energy-intensive? I assume you have to turn it to plasma to eliminate any radioactive byproducts.
That's not really what he means. I'm pretty sure, he's talking about creating special nuclear reactors to do the job and generate power at the same time.
A plasma is basically a just a gas where the atoms have no electrons. To get rid of nuclear waste, you need to get the nuclei to split into less volatile isotopes.
The most long-lived class of nuclear waste, transuranics, is produced by neutron activation of Uranium-238 (~95% by mass) found in the low-enriched uranium used in power reactors. If you remove these nuclides from spent fuel by chemical separation and place them either into a Thorium (Uranium-233, really) reactor or a highly-enriched U-235 reactor, the transuranics will continue to absorb neutrons until they reach mass numbers where they spontaneously fission, and, since there is no U-238, there won't be any new transuranics.
Something of this nature is usually what is meant when people say "burn nuclear waste".
There will still be the other kind of nuclear waste, namely fission products, but their half-lives are on the order of decades instead of centuries.
Apparently, TerraPower's TWR design doesn't actually burn from the top down like a candle anymore.
I guess it's easier to put all the cooling apparati around one criticality region and then move the fuel through.
We spend shitloads of money on trying to make coal safe. If you listen carefully to budget proposals there are always a lot of money allocated on "clean coal" research.
Unfortunately, it all goes nowhere because there is no way to make it safe. Burning stuff is an old and well understood process, there is just no way to burn stuff in a radically different way. You can use filters of course but the coal pollutants are so small and the smoke is so much filtering gets too expensive. Coal plants do have filters but they do not catch many of the thousands of pollutants that result from burning coal. And filtering cannot take away the CO2 gas.
So our only option is to trap the gas underground, which is pretty much impossible. Thus, safe coal becomes a mirage that is always a couple of years away but you can never get to.
It is clear that we spend less money on safe coal than we do on nuclear. Nuclear receives enormous amounts of subsidies. Most of the budget of the DoE is devoted to nuclear in one way or another. But it is pretty clear that even if we spent more money on coal it would not get us anywhere.
Bill Gates here seems to be talking about the world in general, however, for the USA I don't see a high risk for nuclear energy.
The reactor can be installed in a relatively safe place and far from any habitants. This is different from Japan which has relatively a smaller and more dangerous land.
The fact of the matter is that our outdated laws lead to a lot of waste that really isn't waste. The example of France in the article is very telling.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
If you think that nuclear power has a fair amount of tail risk (very small probabilities of catastrophic accidents) then any safety considerations based on historical data is meaningless.
In that case, most of the deaths & cost that occurred in the past would come from the single most sever accident (and this seems to be the case [1])
Moreover, the worse accident (Chernobyl) is not a good guide of how bad things can go: if the probability distribution of number of deaths per accident is fat tailed, then if an accident occurs that is worse than Chernobyl it will probably be much worse.
I'd accept that nuclear can be safer, if I had any faith in the operational model for the plants.
I live in Albany, NY about 80 miles from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, a Mark 1 GE reactor whose operator has a history of bad practices, like operating at 120% of capacity for extended periods and regularly releasing tritium into the Connecticut River. The facility has exceeded it's service life, and the operator is suing the State of Vermont for a license extension to make some more money on the place before having to clean up the site.
While coal plants in Ohio and Western NY probably pose a greater health hazard, there are other risks as well -- if a black swan event causes a serious incident at this aging facility, I live just outside of the "no humans allowed" zone. My family and relatives are in that radius and would be financially ruined by such an event.
I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner. I want aging reactors replaced by designs where operating safety was a bigger consideration in the design of the reactor. Operating these facilities with a bias towards making money for the operator is not in the public's interest.
Any technology that makes human interaction and even plain observation impossible in the event of failure is a bad thing.
To my mind, No One can be responsible for something that is impossible to control when things go bad. It is not that I don't trust engineers, but you can not compare profit vs. risk when you can not control risk.
Sure it's a bad thing, but how can anyone possibly rationalize away the fact that coal plants kill more people than nuclear plants per kilowatt hour produced?
For every one person killed by nuclear plants, thousands die because of coal, and other kinds of power plants don't stack up well against nuclear either.
> coal plants kill more people than nuclear plants per kilowatt hour produced
Not to be picky, but we are seeing some of the first aging nuclear facilities being operated beyond their designed lifetime by people who don't deserve to be qualified as competent. Coal has killed more people than nuclear, but it certainly seems nuclear power operators are well prepared to close that gap. :-/
I worry about future failures as those reactors grow old.
Having said that, it would be much wiser to build more modern, resilient, nuclear power plants than the equivalent capacity in coal.
Well, why do reactors grow old to begin with? Because nuclear isn't an area where funding for research is pouring in. Had we not pulled the nuclear handbreak, we wouldn't be stuck with aging reactors in the first place.
Now that we have them though, why can't we just shut them down? Because of the energy deficit that would create since we're still pulling on the nuclear handbreak.
Minamata and Bhopal were chemical plants, not power generation plants. Dam failures are always ugly, but they are rather predictable and preventable. And the Great Smog of London killed more people than Chernobyl but was caused by low-grade coal burning in low-tech furnaces. Even if we buy the suspicious number of 12 million, it's not a coal power plant accident.
Don't get me wrong. I like nuclear. I just know it's dangerous and the consequences of one accident can be pretty scary and long lasting.
Where did you find statistics on deaths attributable to waste stored in holding ponds over the next few centuries? How did you roll that figure into the per-kilowatt death rate?
Note that I'm not arguing in favor of coal by any stretch of the imagination.
But, you can accurately quantify the risks of coal using current facts, because the direct effects of coal power are measurable. When you stop using coal, the effects start to go away.
Even with rooftop solar, you can measure the risks of maintenance personnel falling off of roofs and production accidents. Again, current risks that can be measured and evaluated. If you take the panel off of your roof, there is zero risk of someone dying as a result of your panel. In the year 2200, I can say conclusively that no human will be injured as a result of the solar panel on my roof.
Nuclear is different, because while the operating lifetime of the plant is dozens of years, it leaves behind waste products which introduce life-threatening risks for hundreds or thousands of years. Nobody on earth has a viable long-term strategy for managing waste products today, nor an ETA for when that strategy will be devised and implemented.
That doesn't mean that nuclear energy is evil or otherwise morally reprehensible -- it is not. But ignoring obvious long term risks by narrowing the scope of what you consider a risk to be is not an apples to apples comparison.
There are, in fact, perfectly good methods for permanently disposing of nuclear waste, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires that the waste material be retrievable for a certain period after emplacement. So we have to get rid of it... but keep it close. Therein lies most of the long-term safety issues with storing/disposing of it.
From 'Retrievability of high-level nuclear waste from geologic repositories - Regulatory and rock mechanics/design considerations' by Naiem S.Tanious, Mysore S.Nataraja, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Jaak J.K.Daemen, University of Arizona
"The NRC will require retrieval to protect public health and safety in the event the site, design, or operations proves to be unsuitable. Based on performance confirmation data, the NRC will determine whether the repository system or subsystem (natural or engineered) has failed or is expected to fail to meet the performance criteria. If such failure is determined at any time during the preclosure period, the NRC may direct the DOE to retrieve the waste. The DOE could retrieve waste for its own reasons without being directed by the NRC. Such activity, however, must be carried out under applicable NRC regulations governing movement of waste. It should be noted that the NRC retrievability provision in Part 60 is only intended to protect the public radiological health and safety."
Summary: in case the repository method is all screwed up and we gotta put it somewhere else.
I'm not trying to say you support coal. However, you are trying to saddle the nuclear option with future problems which have not actually happened yet. How is that fair?
FWIW I do not see what is so hard about long term storage of nuclear waste. 1. Go to somewhere which never has earthquakes 2. build a shed 3. put the waste in it
It's not like coal's figures have deaths attributable to massive CO2 emissions dramatically changing the climate over the next couple centuries factored into them either.
The phrasing of that is a bit odd, so in case anybody is unclear on this, I'd like to note that it's common practice for spent fuel to be kept in a cooling pool for 10-20 years while the more radioactive isotopes decay away, then moved to dry cask storage (or recycling, in countries like France).
However, there are designs which would keep the fuel underwater for longer periods of time, like the B&W mPower modular reactor, which has a cooling pool in the containment structure with enough capacity to hold all waste generated during the 60-year design lifetime.
All this is, of course, figured into the per-kilowatt-hour death rate when it actually hurts someone. The spent fuel pools are considered part of the plant for the purposes of risk assessment. In normal operation, of course, the spent fuel pool keeps the radioactivity nicely contained and doesn't hurt anyone.
Nope. Insurance companies explicitly exclude these type of events. That should tell you something -- insurance companies don't like open-ended, catastrophic risk.
In some way, that is honest, too. Very low-probability, but highly correlated risks (if it happens to you, it likely will happen to your neighbor, too) simply aren't a good fit for a capitalist system that does not look ahead more than say ten years.
If an insurance company were to insure against such risks it would happily collect money from its customers. After a couple of years, its shareholders would force it to make dividend payouts.
Then if the 'un'thinkable were to happen, it would go broke, and the customers would not get the money they paid for.
<i>I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner.</i>
The lack of people who can reliably operate in a perfectly incorruptible governing capacity, whether governing people, budgets, or nuclear power plants, is precisely why we had to invent democracy.
If you find a non-profit, quasi-military like organization working in a transparent manner, give them the freaking world.
I think the general aversion to nuclear is explained in part by our tendency to overestimate the risk of rare, catastrophic events and underestimate the risk of everyday events. This is precisely why we tend to fear flying more than driving, although the latter is far more dangerous. Ezra Klein has a nice summary of this phenomenon today, "How We Get Risk Wrong":
Not to mention the generous amount of non-nuclear catastrophic industrial events that already happen from time to time. Oddly enough, nuclear still has a worse reputation than hidroelectric energy, the chemical industry or coal burning.
Doesn't need to blow up like a nuke to kill 10% of the population inside the quarantined zone within 10 years from cancer caused by radiation exposure.
Arguably, Gates and Winfrey have built significant companies and become very powerful people. However, I see no good reason to ever listen to McCarthy.
That's fine with me. In all honesty, I would vote for any candidate who proposed a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood. I'm sure you don't believe this, but during a natural disaster the odds are that it would be the safest place in town.
Well somebody has to talk about it, and people don't seem to trust the people who really are experts on nuclear safety, because they all seem to work for the nuclear industry.
I put more stock into Bill Gates' opinion than random-internet-person though, not just because he's smart but because he has been spending the last decade in the habit of dispassionately ooking through actuarial tables and thinking about real dangers. That's why so much of his philanthrophic efforts are going towards unsexy things like malaria reduction -- because he and his staff decided to look dispassionately at the statistics and figure out where the greatest lives-saved-per-million-spent is.
If he's telling me that nuclear is safer than coal then I believe he's gone and genuinely satisfied himself that this is the actual statistical truth.
> It's about as relevant as any random person on the internet.
He's also investing in them, as you can see from the article, which makes him more newsworthy than some random person.
> My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.
I already live near one. Also, if you look at all the accidents, the workers suffer the most. If they were that against nuclear power, they wouldn't work there.
According to Gates in his TED talk (reference elsewhere in these comments) the US has enough nuclear waste stockpiled to power the country for 200 years. After that, we can get enough thorium(?was that it?) from ocean filtration to continue for the imaginable future. Hopefully, before then we'll have switched to 100% solar.
Far in the future, the sun will expand, turning into a red giant, engulfing the earth and boiling the oceans away. Ultimately, it will turn into a white dwarf. This hardly counts as renewable energy; it's just really vast energy.
Nuclear energy is far less vast, but still huge compared to what we're using today. If you think of easy energy sources as civilization's starting capital, nuclear can give us a very long runway.
This seems a like a faulty argument to me. Those are not our only two choices. Sure coal is really really bad. But that does not mean that nuclear is our only alternative.
Currently solar power is getting much cheaper and more practical. Same thing with wind power. We also have a natural gas which recently has been getting cheaper as large new discoveries are being made.
Natural gas is still a fossil fuel but it is much much cleaner than coal both in terms of health pollutants and in terms of CO2. There are some issues with natural gas extraction, but even if the various environmentally damaging methods of mining the stuff get banned as they should, we still have plenty of natural gas from new discoveries to last us for the foreseeable future.
Thus, we can use natural gas while solar and wind catch up price wise, which will happen sooner than we think. Solar especially is improving faster than anyone thought. Then we can still use natural gas for occasions where solar and wind aren't working.
So the coal/nuclear argument is a false dichotomy. We can have neither. Of course we should run the current nuclear plants until the end of their lives, but there is no reason to build new ones unless some revolutionary technology that makes everything much safer emerges. I would say the only new nuclear plants we should build are ones that burn the waste of the old ones, because those would technically make things safer by removing waste.
But your argument seems like a straw man to me, as nobody is proposing that dichotomy. As long as renewable energy sources can't stand as a viable substitute in terms of costs (economic, environmental, power per unit land, etc) and can't cope with an increasing energy demand, I don't see the need of relinquishing an energy source that has proven viable by all those standards and moreover is pretty safe.
This comment reads like a clever way of getting people to nod their heads (natural gas does indeed seem better than coal) while at the same time getting them to overlook an unsupported assumption (that nuclear is less safe than natural gas in the long run).
Statistically, the long-term damages attributable to total nuclear fuel chains are lower than those of the total natural gas fuel chain.
Currently solar power is getting much cheaper and more practical.
Every now and then, I see a tech news article about a new breakthrough in solar that should be ready for the market in the mythical "3-5 years" timeframe, then I never hear about it again. I'd be very happy to see some evidence that there's real, marketable progress being made right now that isn't marginal improvements to existing inefficient and expensive technology.
In the next 30 years a significant fraction of the transportation and other oil-powered infrastructure is going to get connected to the power grid. Solar and wind can barely make a dent in current demand with current technology.
When electric cars get cheap, power demand will explode.
Electric cars (and solar) will work a lot better when we figure out a better way to store the energy. So far, our battery technology barely fits the bill, and is expensive.
This doesn't make Nuclear energy a smart choice, just because it is better than an even worse choice. We need to stop limiting our view to these two technologies, and start funding crazier energy options that could be cleaner, safer and smarter for the long run.
In order to actually address the total energy consumption of the world using solar energy, based on 2009 consumption numbers (~500 EJ), we'd have to convert 30% of the total incident solar energy (~1600 EJ) to a usable form.
Doing this would cool the earth by about the same amount as moving it ~12.5% further away from the sun.
You're absolutely right. The source for my original number was quoting a narrow band of wavelengths and making some additional assumptions about usability of energy flux. Thanks for the correction; I'm a bit less of a pessimist now :)
Something that's often overlooked in these debates is that if we were willing to eat the proliferation risk and increased cost of high-enriched uranium we could reduce our production of long-lived alpha-emitters by an enormous amount.
This would make the storage of waste a lot more manageable.
Current nuclear reactors basically suck because they are the children of war ! They wanted to make a big scary bomb first. No surprise they chose the most dangerous element ! It's the same thing as why space flight is so expensive. Each communications satellite has to be the shape of a hydrogen bomb.
Thorium reactors are still in research phase. However, take a look at these quick bits from Wikipedia:
- Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.
- just 8 tablespoons of thorium could provide the energy used by an American during his or her lifetime.
- there is no possibility of a meltdown
- it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles
- Weapons-grade fissionable material (233U) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor
- Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste
- Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235
- Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming, so fission stops by default.
- However, unlike uranium-based breeder reactors, thorium requires a start-up by neutrons from a uranium reactor. But experts note that "the second thorium reactor may activate a third thorium reactor
- Thorium is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about four times more abundant than uranium, and is about as common as lead
- Thorium-containing minerals occur on all continents.
Nuclear power presupposes a competent and responsible society continuously from now until the distant future. Now look at Japan: no other society was better prepared for disaster, and still they came very close to a catastrophic nuclear disaster. Then look at all the other countries in the world w/ nuclear power, and project their histories forward 100 years. How many will experience a civil war? An external war? regulatory incompetence? etc. The chance of a catastrophic disaster somewhere, sometime, is 100%.
You can apply that same logic to any potentially dangerous industrial technology. And yet, for some reason, I don't see people fretting too terribly much about, say, oil drilling technology in irresponsible hands.
there isn't much difference between coal and nuclear. A primitive civilization mines a substance that produces heat after performing a primitive operation upon it. It is like "gathering and hunting" state of civilization when compared to the "animal domestication and agriculture" state. It is time for human civilization to move on to renewable energy the same way like it moved to renewable food production 10K years ago.
DO you know why originally Nuclear power was pushed as a safe energy source?
To make nuclear weapons, they needed a guaranteed supply of
raw fuel material. All nuclear plants with the exception of
some recent designs which get further away from this produce
nuclear material that is ideal to use in nuclear weapons.
It had very little due with any actual safety concerns.
It is one of the most extreme hazards forced on the world by the industrial-military complexes of all nations.
Lets stop calling it safe and call it what it is in reality..in fact a experimental way to generate energy
that is somewhat dangerous.
That's not a fair statement — branding all nuclear energy technology as a means to generate material for weapons is incorrect.
A good example? Thorium reactors [1], which generate very little in the way of weapons-grade by products. Why is it we cannot get our governments to allow research & construction into this arm of nuclear power?
114 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadOption 1: coal plant that, statistically and averaged over all plants, kills x amount of people every day of the year (through exhaust pollution, killed miners, etc.)
Option 2: nuclear plant that kills y amount of people, averaged the same; direct kills through accidents + indirect through increased cancer risks (discounted for natural occurrences of those cancers etc.)
When x > y, it's better to use nuclear. And y, despite the Fukushima fear mongering, is quite small.
The matter is not 'nuclear can fail, so we shouldn't use it'; the matter is 'which one has the lowest overall cost' (cost taking into account lives, health risks, economic risks etc); and then choosing that one.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
That does not look all that well now. Just sain'
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chernobyl_dis...
Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously: Thirty one deaths are directly attributed to the accident, all among the reactor staff and emergency workers.[10] A UNSCEAR report places the total confirmed deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000.[11] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[12] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[13] A Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 excess deaths occurred between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination.[14]
I'm not familiar enough with the methodology to dispute it's finding regarding deaths, but I'd argue that evaluating risks solely on the number of attributable deaths is not a full accounting of risk.
What is the economic and social impact of the 20 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima? You're looking at a handful of deaths, but many lives have been affected nonetheless. If my rooftop solar panel kills my family somehow, that is a personal tragedy, but the scope in terms of people affected is nothing like a rare, but catastrophic nuclear failure.
Do we count the cost of side-effects like wars and oppression in our energy ? Think about Libya for oil or Niger for Uranium. Do we count the cost for democracy of the impact of energy lobbies ? Centralized production entails centralized structures which often have a tremendous influence (in France there was never ever any democratic feedback loop about nuclear energy).
The cynical view though is that this is nothing compared to other "industrial risks" and to the insiduous and continuous risk we are producing by saturating our planet with garbage.
It's a valid concern, but we seem to fixate on the health dangers when coal kills many times more during normal operation and gets a free pass.
http://nuclearfissionary.com/2010/06/09/energy-density-and-w...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...
Conflict of interests. Move on, people.
Yeah, you're right, but then again, the title should have been more like "Atomic Industry Investor Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer", because right now I tend to read it more like "Renowned philanthropist Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer"
The flip side of your argument is that if Gates thinks nuclear is the next great thing then why is he NOT investing in it? Personally, I would find it odd if Gates thinks something is the right way to go and didn't invest. It would signal he's not very serious about the issue.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
A plasma is basically a just a gas where the atoms have no electrons. To get rid of nuclear waste, you need to get the nuclei to split into less volatile isotopes.
Something of this nature is usually what is meant when people say "burn nuclear waste".
There will still be the other kind of nuclear waste, namely fission products, but their half-lives are on the order of decades instead of centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor#Travelli...
Unfortunately, it all goes nowhere because there is no way to make it safe. Burning stuff is an old and well understood process, there is just no way to burn stuff in a radically different way. You can use filters of course but the coal pollutants are so small and the smoke is so much filtering gets too expensive. Coal plants do have filters but they do not catch many of the thousands of pollutants that result from burning coal. And filtering cannot take away the CO2 gas.
So our only option is to trap the gas underground, which is pretty much impossible. Thus, safe coal becomes a mirage that is always a couple of years away but you can never get to.
It is clear that we spend less money on safe coal than we do on nuclear. Nuclear receives enormous amounts of subsidies. Most of the budget of the DoE is devoted to nuclear in one way or another. But it is pretty clear that even if we spent more money on coal it would not get us anywhere.
The reactor can be installed in a relatively safe place and far from any habitants. This is different from Japan which has relatively a smaller and more dangerous land.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690627522614525.html
The fact of the matter is that our outdated laws lead to a lot of waste that really isn't waste. The example of France in the article is very telling.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
In that case, most of the deaths & cost that occurred in the past would come from the single most sever accident (and this seems to be the case [1])
Moreover, the worse accident (Chernobyl) is not a good guide of how bad things can go: if the probability distribution of number of deaths per accident is fat tailed, then if an accident occurs that is worse than Chernobyl it will probably be much worse.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents
I live in Albany, NY about 80 miles from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, a Mark 1 GE reactor whose operator has a history of bad practices, like operating at 120% of capacity for extended periods and regularly releasing tritium into the Connecticut River. The facility has exceeded it's service life, and the operator is suing the State of Vermont for a license extension to make some more money on the place before having to clean up the site.
While coal plants in Ohio and Western NY probably pose a greater health hazard, there are other risks as well -- if a black swan event causes a serious incident at this aging facility, I live just outside of the "no humans allowed" zone. My family and relatives are in that radius and would be financially ruined by such an event.
I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner. I want aging reactors replaced by designs where operating safety was a bigger consideration in the design of the reactor. Operating these facilities with a bias towards making money for the operator is not in the public's interest.
A quasi-military / government organization operating transparently? Good luck with that.
To my mind, No One can be responsible for something that is impossible to control when things go bad. It is not that I don't trust engineers, but you can not compare profit vs. risk when you can not control risk.
For every one person killed by nuclear plants, thousands die because of coal, and other kinds of power plants don't stack up well against nuclear either.
Not to be picky, but we are seeing some of the first aging nuclear facilities being operated beyond their designed lifetime by people who don't deserve to be qualified as competent. Coal has killed more people than nuclear, but it certainly seems nuclear power operators are well prepared to close that gap. :-/
I worry about future failures as those reactors grow old.
Having said that, it would be much wiser to build more modern, resilient, nuclear power plants than the equivalent capacity in coal.
Now that we have them though, why can't we just shut them down? Because of the energy deficit that would create since we're still pulling on the nuclear handbreak.
It won't be pretty.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
Chernobyl, an INES-7 killed 56 people. Plus another 4000 from radiation.
As previously linked, check these out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
The Great Smog of London killed twelve million people. Banqiao Dam killed 171 000 and destroyed homes for another eleven million people.
Don't get me wrong. I like nuclear. I just know it's dangerous and the consequences of one accident can be pretty scary and long lasting.
Let's stick to the current facts please. When someone dies from exposure to one of these "holding ponds" then we can update the model.
But, you can accurately quantify the risks of coal using current facts, because the direct effects of coal power are measurable. When you stop using coal, the effects start to go away.
Even with rooftop solar, you can measure the risks of maintenance personnel falling off of roofs and production accidents. Again, current risks that can be measured and evaluated. If you take the panel off of your roof, there is zero risk of someone dying as a result of your panel. In the year 2200, I can say conclusively that no human will be injured as a result of the solar panel on my roof.
Nuclear is different, because while the operating lifetime of the plant is dozens of years, it leaves behind waste products which introduce life-threatening risks for hundreds or thousands of years. Nobody on earth has a viable long-term strategy for managing waste products today, nor an ETA for when that strategy will be devised and implemented.
That doesn't mean that nuclear energy is evil or otherwise morally reprehensible -- it is not. But ignoring obvious long term risks by narrowing the scope of what you consider a risk to be is not an apples to apples comparison.
"The NRC will require retrieval to protect public health and safety in the event the site, design, or operations proves to be unsuitable. Based on performance confirmation data, the NRC will determine whether the repository system or subsystem (natural or engineered) has failed or is expected to fail to meet the performance criteria. If such failure is determined at any time during the preclosure period, the NRC may direct the DOE to retrieve the waste. The DOE could retrieve waste for its own reasons without being directed by the NRC. Such activity, however, must be carried out under applicable NRC regulations governing movement of waste. It should be noted that the NRC retrievability provision in Part 60 is only intended to protect the public radiological health and safety."
Summary: in case the repository method is all screwed up and we gotta put it somewhere else.
FWIW I do not see what is so hard about long term storage of nuclear waste. 1. Go to somewhere which never has earthquakes 2. build a shed 3. put the waste in it
IIRC this is not true. There are, however, a strategies that people don't like.
Doesn't mean they're not viable.
However, there are designs which would keep the fuel underwater for longer periods of time, like the B&W mPower modular reactor, which has a cooling pool in the containment structure with enough capacity to hold all waste generated during the 60-year design lifetime.
All this is, of course, figured into the per-kilowatt-hour death rate when it actually hurts someone. The spent fuel pools are considered part of the plant for the purposes of risk assessment. In normal operation, of course, the spent fuel pool keeps the radioactivity nicely contained and doesn't hurt anyone.
Isn't this exactly the case that insurance is designed for? A catastrophic event that is exceedingly unlikely to happen?
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/fu...
If an insurance company were to insure against such risks it would happily collect money from its customers. After a couple of years, its shareholders would force it to make dividend payouts.
Then if the 'un'thinkable were to happen, it would go broke, and the customers would not get the money they paid for.
The lack of people who can reliably operate in a perfectly incorruptible governing capacity, whether governing people, budgets, or nuclear power plants, is precisely why we had to invent democracy.
If you find a non-profit, quasi-military like organization working in a transparent manner, give them the freaking world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-we-g...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
It's about as relevant as any random person on the internet.
My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.
Their solution is to turn off your electricity. Hope you enjoy your hand-cranked laptop.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Japanese-take-shelter-in-N-rea...
I put more stock into Bill Gates' opinion than random-internet-person though, not just because he's smart but because he has been spending the last decade in the habit of dispassionately ooking through actuarial tables and thinking about real dangers. That's why so much of his philanthrophic efforts are going towards unsexy things like malaria reduction -- because he and his staff decided to look dispassionately at the statistics and figure out where the greatest lives-saved-per-million-spent is.
If he's telling me that nuclear is safer than coal then I believe he's gone and genuinely satisfied himself that this is the actual statistical truth.
He's also investing in them, as you can see from the article, which makes him more newsworthy than some random person.
> My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.
I already live near one. Also, if you look at all the accidents, the workers suffer the most. If they were that against nuclear power, they wouldn't work there.
We need a better long term solution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
Nuclear energy is far less vast, but still huge compared to what we're using today. If you think of easy energy sources as civilization's starting capital, nuclear can give us a very long runway.
Currently solar power is getting much cheaper and more practical. Same thing with wind power. We also have a natural gas which recently has been getting cheaper as large new discoveries are being made.
Natural gas is still a fossil fuel but it is much much cleaner than coal both in terms of health pollutants and in terms of CO2. There are some issues with natural gas extraction, but even if the various environmentally damaging methods of mining the stuff get banned as they should, we still have plenty of natural gas from new discoveries to last us for the foreseeable future.
Thus, we can use natural gas while solar and wind catch up price wise, which will happen sooner than we think. Solar especially is improving faster than anyone thought. Then we can still use natural gas for occasions where solar and wind aren't working.
So the coal/nuclear argument is a false dichotomy. We can have neither. Of course we should run the current nuclear plants until the end of their lives, but there is no reason to build new ones unless some revolutionary technology that makes everything much safer emerges. I would say the only new nuclear plants we should build are ones that burn the waste of the old ones, because those would technically make things safer by removing waste.
Statistically, the long-term damages attributable to total nuclear fuel chains are lower than those of the total natural gas fuel chain.
Every now and then, I see a tech news article about a new breakthrough in solar that should be ready for the market in the mythical "3-5 years" timeframe, then I never hear about it again. I'd be very happy to see some evidence that there's real, marketable progress being made right now that isn't marginal improvements to existing inefficient and expensive technology.
Two more words: electric car.
In the next 30 years a significant fraction of the transportation and other oil-powered infrastructure is going to get connected to the power grid. Solar and wind can barely make a dent in current demand with current technology.
When electric cars get cheap, power demand will explode.
This doesn't make Nuclear energy a smart choice, just because it is better than an even worse choice. We need to stop limiting our view to these two technologies, and start funding crazier energy options that could be cleaner, safer and smarter for the long run.
Doing this would cool the earth by about the same amount as moving it ~12.5% further away from the sun.
Solar is not a viable long-term solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Incomin...
I'm getting 5.510^24 J/yr ~= 5,500,000 EJ/yr (all wavelenghts).
This would make the storage of waste a lot more manageable.
Current nuclear reactors basically suck because they are the children of war ! They wanted to make a big scary bomb first. No surprise they chose the most dangerous element ! It's the same thing as why space flight is so expensive. Each communications satellite has to be the shape of a hydrogen bomb.
Thorium reactors are still in research phase. However, take a look at these quick bits from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fu...DO you know why originally Nuclear power was pushed as a safe energy source?
To make nuclear weapons, they needed a guaranteed supply of raw fuel material. All nuclear plants with the exception of some recent designs which get further away from this produce nuclear material that is ideal to use in nuclear weapons.
It had very little due with any actual safety concerns.
It is one of the most extreme hazards forced on the world by the industrial-military complexes of all nations.
Lets stop calling it safe and call it what it is in reality..in fact a experimental way to generate energy that is somewhat dangerous.
A good example? Thorium reactors [1], which generate very little in the way of weapons-grade by products. Why is it we cannot get our governments to allow research & construction into this arm of nuclear power?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fu...
I'll wait for the next option, thanks.