Ideas about how to run governments need to be thought of in context of how the government operates. If was emporer of the USA, I would do what you suggest. But if I was president, I probably could not.
Nuclear power capital requirements (up front) are one of the biggest roadblocks to building new plants, followed by regulatory complexity and cruft that hasn’t been streamlined to allow new reactor designs to be implemented.
Doing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving them to nuclear, would be the best case.
Nuclear power requirements (up front) has also a big issue: the cost of money. The only viable solution is to have state-owned nuclear energy, because only states can borrow cheap money (ie. even at negative rates), where private companies are required to bleed interests during decades.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
Have the Navy run them, make the land Navy bases (Crane Naval Support [1] near Bloomington, IN comes to mind). Encourage efficiency, require transparency, but have no tolerance for safety deficiencies or shortcuts.
Or have the government own the plants and lease out operation to a qualified commercial operator with rigorous certification requirements and regular recertification requirements.
I have more faith in the military chain of command versus a contractor who isn’t going to give AF if they lose a contract and the US gov has to pay out to rehabilitate a facility that wasn’t properly maintained.
Contractors have less fear than someone who can be jailed (and let’s be honest, contractors and other commercial entities are never held accountable when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites).
However, I agree that at least the military has the culture that will follow orders if asked, and more importantly, it's the only government program that the US population is willing to put unchecked amounts of money towards.
Google USS Fitzgerald as well as Fat Leonard, that will put you on the path to understanding the pervasive problems in 7th fleet. They've chopped off heads in leadership, so maybe things are moving towards better, but it's undeniable there's been a huge problem festering for ages.
Familiarize yourself with the Zumwalt and LCS procurement programs. Both are nearly total failures, with the Navy grasping at straws to find ways to make the ships that have been constructed useful. Congress bears some of the blame here, particularly in relation to Zumwalt, but it's also clear Navy leadership has been often incompetent in planning future acquisitions. Those two programs cost US tax payers about $50 billion.
It's probably time to abandon the 90s mental model of the military as effective and efficient. The cultural rot has reached them too. The officer corp will virtue signal all day about paying for sex changes for their soldiers, but the affirmative action hires that run the place can't get anything right anymore. And no one is dumb enough or courageous enough to try to fire them. The wastefulness of the military budget is at this point legendary. Consider the comical flop of the F35 and other such boondoggles.
When was the last time there was a safety incident on a nuclear Navy vessel? Or a loss of radiological material? I am aware of the culture causing loss of life due to overwork and hubris on their non nuclear vessels, but nuke specialists run a tight ship, and reactors on land are stationary and need nuke folks (not sailors).
Just wait for it. The nuclear submarines were one of the last holdouts from woke politics and affirmative action, but that ended in the last five years. Within a decade they will be as woke and mismanaged as the rest of the military.
Trump was basically unable to do anything about any part of the federal bureaucracy, including the military, which is entrenched through a combination of civil service laws and Supreme Court decisions that make it impossible for the President to effectively control the bureaucracy if they don't see eye to eye.
At a guess I'd say that a number of them are regarded as Top Secret, a big issue would be hard to cover up.
Although I'd imagine if there were many issues they be known about. I'd love to learn morea about nuclear reactors on carriers and submarines, but I imagine most of the engineering knowledge is secret.
I'll have to dig up a citation. But the [] Three Mile Island accident was in part caused by (former) naval nuclear specialists making poor choices based on optimizing for the wrong things.
My memory is fuzzy, but this 37 minute video [2] has a breakdown.
If memory serves, the root causes were faults in the pumps and delays in the 28 baud diagnostic printouts running minutes or hours behind which left everyone operating on bad data.
Part of that was exacerbated by the operators applying techniques used on subs (something about preferring to keep low pressure in some vessel, because high pressure there could sink the boat if containment was lost), the TMI design didn't need this as it could vent/blow-off, and the operators became somewhat fixated on "trying to save the boat" and missed a bunch of procedures.
Of course this doesn't invalidate your point, but even if the reactor designs are really similar, it may be a mistake to cross train anyone.
(disclosure: haven't seen this video in a year or so, and am generally a fan of nuclear power considering the alternatives, but it needs to be done with different, safer reactor designs and probably with new branding because no matter what it's going to take _forever_ to convince anyone to trust nuclear, when they associate that term with the dangerous, BWR designs that were never intended for land)
You're blaming F35 cost overruns on trans people and minority hires? Wierd, my first guess would have been something about the complex and ultimately corrupt interplay between military contractors, congressional pork-barrelling, and government bureaucracy.
These things usually boil down to money and power, not {{cultural_issue_of_the_day}}.
No, not exactly. I'm blaming it on a culture of reduced accountability. You can't enforce high standards because you will end up firing the affirmative action hires first. Inability to enforce high standards is a problem with government bureaucracy, and increasingly private bureaucracy, in general, but what's notable is that it's reached the military and federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which used to be the exception.
If the promotion figures don’t include enough minorities, certain members of Congress get very mad and threaten all sorts of things. This is also why academic and honor standards at the military academies have collapsed.
It is in no way the case that affirmative action is being used as an excuse to promote incompetent officers, let alone that this is somehow destroying the military. In fact the military historically has had the opposite problem. "Legacy" counts for far to much, particularly with the families at military academies, leading to a senior leadership structure that is very out of step with ordinary Americans, and fails to grapple the cross cultural international issues inherent to the US projecting military power globally.
Stop disparaging our military with your alt right fantasy nonsense. The rank and file certainly don't deserve it.
That's just absolutely not true. They are promoting incompetent people because of demands for diversity, and everyone in the military knows it. There are ways of achieving that while still being able to claim you are "blind" to this or that factor in the process. And no system can be blind because it eventually has to incorporate feedback from your commanding officer and others who deal with you. Do you think those people don't face political pressure to make sure the right outcome happens? Do you want to be accused of racial discrimination?
The F35 was doomed from the start. It was asked to do too many roles, inherently making it the jack of all trades, king of none. The military would have been much better served by making a few related airframes with as much commonality of parts as practical.
It's unclear to me that the military is currently any less effective and efficient than it was in the 90s. In Hollywood films in those days, it was typically portrayed as being incredibly efficient, but that has nothing to do with reality.
My own anecdote says that "The wastefulness of the military budget" has been an issue for many decades -- go look up Eisenhower's warnings of the military/industrial complex, and consider that the problem had been building for quite a while at that point.
Back then, of course, "cultural rot" would've meant "Treating black soldiers as equals"; in the 90s, IIRC, it would've meant "Treating female soldiers as equals". Just wondering, are you in favor of racism and sexism as well, or are you just anti-trans? Please note that anti-trans attitudes are likely to age about as well as racism and sexism have.
IMHO, every social change feels a little weird at the time; you're used to thinking a certain way, and now you're told that it's wrong; people take that sort of things personally. Other self-righteous people sometimes realize they can use the new woke attitude to swan around and club people who're moving more slowly -- bullying, really, and this bullying is the serious problem on the left, not the wokeness itself. We'd all be better off if we were better at granting grace to people making good-faith efforts to change their habits and attitudes.
So social change is hard. But that doesn't make it wrong, or rot, or virtue-signaling; it really does make life better for unfairly marginalized people, and as it spreads, the power of the leftist bullies will dissipate, and we'll be left with a better world overall.
And: if you want to disempower those leftist bullies faster, support racial justice, support women's rights, support trans rights. You don't have to club people over the head with it; just offer quiet support, because it's the right thing to do, and it'll make the bullies all the madder if there's nothing they can use to feel superior to you. :-)
I'm gonna take the other option and keep being against chopping off the penises of mentally ill people. Call me whatever you want. I only answer to God.
Not all "progress" is good. Societies can change for the worse too.
It's true the seeds of our decline were planted long ago. Some would say as far back as the Enlightenment or even earlier. But things have come to a head rapidly in the last few decades.
I've talked to people in the military and federal agencies about this, and they agree it's gone rapidly downhill lately.
There is a difference between inclusion and affirmative action. Including women and gays in the military is a mistake, I think, for unit cohesion purposes. But affirmative action is much worse, because it creates a nomenklatura of untouchable woke hires and promotions who run everything but are unaccountable to anyone.
Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to go boom.
Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be. First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239 you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.) Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with it.
Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as possible. That means very highly enriched uranium. Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to be treated with extreme security.
Apologies if my thesis wasn't clear. I'm advocating for Navy administration of the commercial nuclear fleet being subsidized by the federal gov, not Naval reactors of the same design you'd put at sea. The value is in accountability and chain of command ("safety culture"), not the marine vessel reactor design.
I think nuclear might have been the cheapest in the past, but it needs to be compared to modern technologies again and reassessed if it's going to have that crown now. It never got as cheap as it was claimed it would be, accounting for loan interest or not. And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy. And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days to increase profitability.
Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs, we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when comparing to nuclear.
> It never got as cheap as it was claimed it would be, accounting for loan interest or not.
I would say "citation needed". France typically had a documented public investment plan for nuclear energy, and is enjoying one of the cheapest and low-carbon emission electricity in Europe.
> And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy
I still read this here and there, but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidiaries to exist. How so ?
Other renewable such as hydro are fine, though, but they tend to be already at their max everywhere.
> And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days
We don't have real storage solutions for now. Batteries ? Won't scale. Reversible dams ? Doable if you have the chance to have a lot of hydro.
I would love to see some documented costs for France, so I agree 100% with "citation needed". As for the US, the historical document I read that gave me the impression that it never got as cheap as claimed was this 1985 article in Forbes:
> but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidies to exist
Citation needed here, too! The unsubsidized costs of solar and wind are still the cheapest sources, so they don't "need" subsidies to be deployed. The existence of tax breaks subsidies for wind/solar doesn't mean that the subsidies are needed, any more than the special tax break subsidies for oil/gas/coal are needed for those sources to keep on going.
> Batteries? Won't scale
This is a very strange claim! Not only do batteries scale beautifully in theory, we already have scaled them for deployment, with GWh grid batteries that can be scaled at the same site to 5-6GWh (Moss Landing, CA). Batteries can be deployed in homes, at distribution substations, underneath utility scale solar or wind farms, at old decommissioned fossil fuel sites so that the transmission capacity can be reused, on one side of a congested transmission line to avoid massive upgrade costs... Batteries are practically defined by their beautiful scalability, a real Swiss Army knife for any grid application
Current global production capacity for the lithium ion types of batteries is 285GWh, which on a GW completely dwarfs global nuclear deployment. Projections from the battery industry are for this amount to increase 10x every five years. And though lithium ion tech is by far in the lead, there are many other chemistries perfectly suited to grid use (but perhaps not cars), if lithium ion's improvement pace ever slows to let them catch up.
We are in a new era for energy, an era that is far more like tech, and less like the staid commodity industry that energy has been for the past century. Depreciation of grid assets is very slow, far slower than the tech change of energy tech, so we need to start paying very close attention to tech change curves if we don't want to waste massive amounts of money and screw up our fight against climate change.
Where batteries stop scaling you can produce Hydrogen or Methane. The efficiency sucks, but most countries already have infrastructure to store huge amounts of gas.
One can also go to alternate battery chemistries optimized for longer term storage. In particular, this means capital cost is more important, but specific power and efficiency are less important. Electrodes optimized for cost rather than ion mobility, for example.
Hydrogen would still be hard to beat for seasonal storage, though.
I hear about regulatory cruft, but have never heard of examples of what would be changed.
We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors.
But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.
> By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable.
Because the commission is biased towards safety above all else. They need to be more realistic and not cave in to fearmongering. The design needs to be safe, but against a realistic threat model.
The designs also need to be assembly line and not so highly customized. French style reactor designs are good for this reason. Part that holds the reactor? Fine, evaluate for weather and calamity resistance and build per location. The reactor? Hope you like black.
From the outside, you have large-scale accidents that caused a lot of fear that killed the drive for us. Notably Three Mile Island in the US and the effects of seeing what happened in Chernobyl that was drummed up by the US government to show failures by the Soviets (even though the Soviet reactor design was far more dangerous). Additionally, I live near a plant and they hold extreme safety training on iodine distribution and such to school children that makes kids fear the plant.
No denying that there's been fearmongering in general. But I'm still asking for an example of what regulation on the construction of nuclear plants should be changed.
What killed the drive for nuclear in the 1970s in the US was more that the costs came in very high, that electric power demand growth suddenly moderated, and that the grid was opened to external non-utility competition by PURPA in 1978 (four months before TMI).
How about starting with mountainous environmental impact reports that no one reads?
Theres lots of room for maintaining effective oversight while making the overall processes more efficient.
The problem is the current processes were designed to be onerous due to those lobbying against nuclear power.
Also with new concepts like micro reactors or reviving long abandoned technology like liquid thorium reactors that would burn what we stupidly label “waste” and if the active systems are interrupted coast to a stop on their own instead of running away like our fast breeder water based designs a lot of the existing regulations and requirements are suddenly moot.
Most importantly Nuclear is the only “clean” technology that is predictable and controllable. Until you have a way to reliably meet base load requirements, fossil fuel generation is going to continue.
So if you really do think that climate change represents impending doom, resisting nuclear power is pretty dumb. It’s not perfect - but there isn’t any technology that is perfect or without some risk. Pretending nuclear is the only energy technology with serious issues is also dumb. 50 years of people painting nuclear as the boogie man hasn’t helped either. If you strongest arguments are emotionally based those aren’t very good arguments at all.
I don't see any evidence humans are smart enough to operate nuclear power safely. There are too many examples of humans not fully understanding nuclear, or just being stupid with nuclear. For example, building a nuclear power plant near an earthquake fault line in CA, or where tsunamis occur in Japan. We can't get the basics of safety right here.
Even with all the disasters included, nuclear power is safer than almost all other kinds (the exception being very large hydro plants), per unit energy.
Interesting. I know nuclear power is far safer than it's general reputation.
Is nuclear really safer than solar?
This[1] has some data and estimations for death rates measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour (TWh), which suggests nuclear has 0.07 deaths per TWh, which is marginally higher than wind (0.04), hydro (0.02), and solar (0.02).
That's bad data. Nuke is getting blamed for the Fukushima deaths that were due to the evacuation--neglecting the fact that the safest option was to stay put. If you replace the evacuation deaths (IIRC ~500) with the stay-put deaths (most likely zero) you about halve the nuke death rate.
The larger deployment of utility-scale solar does seem to have reduced it's death rate. (Many of the solar deaths are from falling off the roof during installation or maintenance. Utility-scale solar is normally on the ground and with better safety measures.)
> Nuke is getting blamed for the Fukushima deaths that were due to the evacuation
I think this is fair. /All/ deaths from nuclear and renewable power are due to accidents and bad decisions. Accidents and bad decisions aren't going to go away. It takes a monumentally boneheaded decision to make a nuclear power plant dangerous, but apparently the rate of monumentally boneheaded decisions is one per thirty years at our current level of nuclear power usage.
> but apparently the rate of monumentally boneheaded decisions is one per thirty years at our current level of nuclear power usage.
That rate is very likely to increase as time goes on and reactors become older and thus more prone to failure/some freak low probability incident happening.
At the # of deaths produced by nuclear in normal operation, or by wind or solar, the "deaths" are dominated by the statistical lives due to the cost of energy itself.
The NRC uses a value of $9M for the value of a statistical life. That is, it is worth spending $9M if that will save one expected life.
Nuclear, solar and wind have deaths/energy somewhere in the ballpark of 1 life per 10^10 kWh. So, at $9M/life this cost is roughly $0.001/kWh. This is very small, which says that even minor differences in the cost of energy from various sources will be more important than the direct number of lives lost.
(This would not be true of fossil fuels, though.)
TLDR: it's more important to reduce the cost of energy from these non-fossil sources, and to choose the sources with lowest cost, than it is to make them safer. For nuclear, inherent safety could be useful if it would enable cost to be reduced, but not because nuclear needs to be safer.
All of the problems with nuclear reactors have happened to plants which were designed and constructed in the 1950->1970s. As it turns out, we've learned a ton about safely operating nuclear plants. The problem is upgrading these old plants rarely happens and getting newer plants to replace them is equally daunting.
There are 3 examples of major nuclear plant problems. That doesn't seem like too many.
In contrast, there are hundreds of operating plants. The newer ones are particularly safe because they require positive input to keep the nuclear reaction going. Any sort of earthquake, tsunami, mudslide, etc that causes the plant systems to fail will cause the nuclear reaction to be halted.
Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and fukushima are all impossible in plants built in the last 25 years. (Gen III or newer)
The US army tried and failed. The US Air Force tried and failed. The marines keep trying. Japan has had several fatal accidents in their civilian program just handling fuel. Even the navy limits them to specialist roles, and their success and safety record might all hinge on the legacy of one gifted man (Rickover).
I support research and trials of the SMRs, but you might want to consider the possibility that it really is hard at the full-system level. The human mind does not readily understand invisible, exponential process like radiation.
Every power source has accidents. Deaths per TWh for nuclear are comparable to wind and solar. Every form of fossil is much worse. Hydro beats everything for major disasters; Banqaio Dam killed 26,000 people immediately and many more in the aftermath.
> Deaths per TWh for nuclear are comparable to wind and solar.
A statistic that only works because epidemiological studies into the long term effects of radiation exposure are extremely difficult, complex and time consuming.
Something made even more difficult by the fact that we blasted uranium fallout in the atmosphere that's hanging around to this day, so getting a non-affected control group has become pretty much impossible.
Ain't helping that any research attempting to investigate the problem will very quickly be labeled as highly controversial by pro-nuclear lobbies [0]
What makes it even more difficult is natural background radiation. The global average is 2.4 millisieverts/year, with the US averaging 3.1 and Japan averaging 1.5. Medical scans add 0.6 mSv/year. Airline crews get an extra 2 mSv/year.
By comparison, atmospheric nuclear tests added 0.11 mSv at their peak in 1963, declining to 0.005 mSv/year today. Chernobyl added 0.04 mSv in 1986, declining to 0.002 today. The nuclear fuel cycle adds 0.0002 to the global average, and is required to be less than 1 mSv for all members of the public.
The highest natural background radiation is in Ramsar, Iran, with 6.0 mSv/year. Studies are ongoing but the evidence so far shows no negative health effects.
Note that Sieverts are normalized to the health effects on the human body. Any concerns about different types of radioactivity are already accounted for in this measurement.
Chernobyl and Fukushima of course caused larger exposures to nearby inhabitants, and these exposures are accounted for in the statistics I mentioned.
I'm sure the Army, Air Force, or Marines would if they practically could. The promise of power density with no logistics tail is magic. They choose not to because of practical, operational reasons.
This one is particularly interesting considering Fukushima wasn't the first time something like that happened. On the other side of Japan is the Kahiwazaki-Kariwa plant [0], the largest of its kind on the planet.
In 2007 that plant was already hit by an earthquake, shaking the plant beyond design basis, it was shut down for 21 months after that.
And even tho it wasn't affected by the 2011 earthquake that blew Fukushima up, it still was shut down to implement safety improvements, it remains shut down to this day with no date for resuming operations.
In the documentary 'inside bill's brain', you hear that regulatory problems led his team of physicists to look to China for a manufacturing partner and a location to build a new reactor (which the trade war between US and China also squashed). If they could have built it on US soil, they would have.
Based on the review, the short version is that the regulators use the wrong threat model for radiation (LNT), and a regulatory model which effectively requires nuclear to be unprofitable (ALARA).
The review describes briefly what needs to be changed.
Setting a firm limit on radiation release ahead of time, rather than one based on economics like ALARA just seems like it would be far safer. The other examples also seem like they are bad regulations that don't help safety or construction either. Would be great to see if they could result in more efficient construction.
Another way of setting a limit on radiation would be: 1/10 as much as an average coal plant per kWh. Current nuclear plants are already below this, because coal plants release a fair bit of radioactive material into the air, from trace elements like thorium in coal.
When regulations prevent deploying something 10x safer than the currently deployed alternatives, they're not making us safer.
Nuclear plants may be below this in normal operation, but what matters is the dose in accident scenarios. That's what drives things like containment buildings, which are large and expensive.
LNT stands for Linear No Threshold: cancer risk is directly proportional to dose, that doses are cumulative over time (rate doesn‘t matter), and that there is no threshold or safe dose. This contradicts studies that we have about people who received enough CUMULATIVE doses of radiation that they would be dead if it was at the same time.
ALARA: Radiation should be As Low As Reasonably Achievable. In practice this means that any cost reduction simply means freed money that you're now required to spend on safety.
Yeah, that's utterly stupid. We need to define a value per life saved and apply it across the board to safety regulations. Any safety regulation that comes in cheaper than that is required, no safety regulation that comes in more expensive than that is required. There should be no singling out of industries. All such regulations must include a reasonable description of how it can be done for that cost--which can be challenged in court. Likewise, outside groups can challenge proposals which have been rejected by showing there's a cheaper way to do it. (And this would include companies that stand to benefit. A company that comes up with a cheap enough way to implement a safety measure can get it mandated. While this could cause a monopoly situation they can't exploit it because if they make it too expensive the rule goes away.)
It looks like private enterprise is maybe incompatible with Nuclear Power then. I find this to be pleasing, and we should simply side step private enterprise and build public plants.
> is that the regulators use the wrong threat model for radiation (LNT)
Nuclear fans like to complain about the LNT, but I don't think they're really thinking this through.
In a nuclear accident, most of the population exposure will be a minor increase spread across a vast population. At those doses, we basically cannot check whether LNT is true or not -- the small cancer incidence it predicts is statistically invisible against all the other causes of cancer.
So foes of LNT want to say "we can't show LNT is correct", which is fine, but then they say "so we must assume the actual effect is smaller, perhaps zero", which is not fine. The evidence doesn't support that second step, and this is not a court of criminal law where radiation must be presumed innocent unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. One might very well argue that one should take a precautionary approach, which is to assume that low level radiation has the worst effect it could have that is not ruled out by evidence. This would imply even larger threat than under LNT.
We know the mechanism by which radiation causes damage: Particles knock into DNA, changing its structure. This causes mutations, and once too many of those accumulate, you get cancer, or your cells just stop working and you die.
This would suggest that the risk should be linear with radiation dose. But cells have DNA repair mechanisms. If a person receives a very large dose in a short amount of time, it makes sense that the repair systems might be too overwhelmed to fix all the damage that has occurred. Of course, the repair system isn't perfect, and some small fraction of damage will be permanent. This suggests that LNT should be true for small doses, but the harmfulness of radiation per particle should increase at larger doses.
A few consequences if that's true:
Depending on how the constant coefficient is determined, a fully linear health risk model will tend to overestimate risk at low dose rates, but underestimate at high dose rates.
This also suggests that radiation concentrated in a particular spot on the body is particularly dangerous. The cells in that location will be bearing the brunt of the radiation dose, so their repair systems are more likely to fail. So inhaling a bit of plutonium dust means you're in for a worse time than absorbing an equivalent dose spread out over your body.
Of course, whatever health risk model we choose, it should also be applied to the regulation of coal plants, since they put radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere as a part of their regular operation.
It's also possible that repair mechanisms can be induced, with the body making more repair enzymes under higher damage load. If so, this would imply the danger from a single particle would be higher at low doses where less induction has occurred. This is radiation hormesis, but of a kind that means LNT could be underestimating the danger of very low doses of radiation.
You could be right, maybe there's a hormetic valley somewhere in the risk curve. I think it still has to be linear close to the background radiation level, and grow faster than linear as one approaches the lethal level, though.
Isn't it true that the proportionality coefficient for LNT was calculated using cancer rates for atomic bomb survivors? The dose for them would be very rapid, and there would be little time for enzymes to be produced. This would explain why such a valley didn't show up in that particular set of data.
LNT has been checked as far down as the statistics lets it be checked (including with animal experiments). Those doses are much higher than the doses I was talking about, the doses that actually matter for nuclear accidents. It's conceivable that the slope of the effect/dose curve at very low doses could be very steep. The results at those higher doses wouldn't be able to tell.
A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people had one complaint: that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. It cost several hundred million dollars to get to that point, then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business, and if yes then you still just had a paper reactor.
That's a really difficult environment for investors. They said it would be a huge help just to have a multi-stage process. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and brushed off climate change arguments.
Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and things seem to be improving a bit.
Tbh I can understand the need for near complete blueprints: Trying to judge a systems safety, based on plans of only half the system, does not sound like it would be a very useful judgement.
What's to prevent cutting massive corners after the original half plan was approved?
They weren't asking for final approval at an earlier stage. They were just asking for feedback along the way. That way they wouldn't have to guess whether their basic idea had a chance, and they could make changes to address concerns before spending hundreds of millions nailing down the details on something the NRC could have told them it considered fundamentally flawed. It would also help them with investors, when they could show favorable early feedback.
A lot of it is chicken-and-egg problem. New nuclear plants are so rare that they each end up with being slightly different from one another, which adds to regulatory requirements.
If we started mass producing plants, there would be stronger push for uniformity in design and that would translate into significant cost savings. But no one is going to start mass producing plants because it's so difficult to get just one plant online.
Whether subsidies are a good idea or not in general for nuclear is an interesting question. The article states that the current plan is to give production tax credits - tax credits for energy produced. Such a subsidy, which does not help mitigate the up front capital costs, would therefore not really address the root problem in the US.
To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.
So don’t build big plants. Micro reactors are far cheaper, easier to maintain and a distributed network of micro reactors would greatly reduce the burden on our already archaic national electric grid.
As much as you need. Modern designs are modular - chain together as many as you need to provide base load and also provide some overage so you have coverage when they do inevitably need servicing.
Or since they are modular if significant long term loads shift geographically, you can easily move them around to where needed too.
I agree the concepts of massive plants aren’t desireable - luckily there are alternatives if we can ever get past the emotional arguments and actually discuss things rationally.
NuScale is still moving, but they have slipped on schedule and budget, far enough some of their project partners have pulled out.
So far everyone who's pursued this small modular reactors built by factories approach has failed in the ambition. Doesn't mean it's impossible but just maybe we should be a bit more bearish than bullish on the idea of this sparking a revolution in the capital costs and time scales of nuclear power.
NuScale is the furthest along. Their design has been certified by the NRC, their first project is scheduled to come online towards the end of this decade.
One issue with micro-reactors is that they make non-proliferation harder. It's much easier to verify that no uranium goes missing from 100 giant reactors than 100,000 small ones.
The 100,000 smaller reactors can still be put in the same place as the 100 giant reactors to make inspection and monitoring easier. The modular design makes incremental capacity upgrades easier, makes maintenance and repair easy, and helps to put more testing and QA on the modular design. Just think of it as 100 locations where you can either have 1 giant reactor each or up to 1000 modular micro-reactors.
I assume the risk is that a bad actor could make a dirty bomb from the uranium. If that's the case, how does the risk of that compare to the risk of other attacks against our water supplies, pipelines, bridges, or even poison gas attacks?
How do you compare the deaths from a distributed reactor network to the deaths from additional global warming?
Are there any micro-reactor designs that use non-enriched or minimally enriched uranium? My understanding is that natural uranium isn't really that dangerous, even in a dirty bomb, and then in terms of proliferation it already isn't that hard to get it.
Most reactors use somewhere in the range of 3-5% U235 (compared to .7% naturally). That by itself won't let you make a bomb, but it gets you about 1/8th of the way to 20% which is about where a bomb is possible.
Yes, I'd much rather that my taxes go to an up-front long term investment than have it blown away reacting to something that could have been prevented!
It's a good investment for taxpayers, unlike subsidizing dino juice.
> The notion that there are large subsidies for fossil fuels is not backed up by the data.
The absence of Pigovian taxes to internalize te environmental externalities is a de facto subsidy equal to the value of the externalized negative impacts (it's paid by society at large through the externalized impacts rather than through government, but the impact is the same.)
Calling it a subsidy makes it seem like it's something governments are doing on purpose. That they can easily say "this subsidy has expired, we're not giving it to you anymore". That is not the case.
Implementing a new tax for CO2 emissions is a much, much bigger political endeavour than simply letting a subsidy expire and not renewing it.
That's why there's not much value in perverting language to somehow argue that fossil fuels are subsidised. They are not, there's no way to "remove subsidies from their dirtier competitors", as the parent poster suggested.
There is a way to tax CO2 emissions, but that's a different discussion altogether.
I think you view subsidy a little too narrowly. I'd be inclined to toss in a good chunk of the money spent in Iraq over the past ~20 years as a fossil fuel (and military complex) subsidy.
Domestic natural gas is only “cheap” because the government is allowing frackers to extract resources from the commons without paying for the costs of the problems they cause.
“Cheap” in quotes because anyone who thinks it is cheap is not accounting for some significant hidden costs.
The tragedy of the commons applies here. If you are not familiar with that, it’s worth looking up. I’ll assume you are.
Government can have a role in mitigating the tragedy of the commons by having the industry pay for the problems they create.
Or government can look the other way, which is a defacto subsidy.
We didn’t used to be a net exporter. Part of the reason fracking even got the traction it has now is that government was alarmed by how much money they were paying for the oil wars, and got desperate for any way to stop the bleeding.
Firstly the US was not a petroleum exporter at the time of the Iraq wars.
Secondly, one take on the Iraq war was that it happened not to obtain fossil fuel resources, but rather to obtain control over them, and prevent them being exploited in a way which threatened the interests of US and/or Saudi oil.
Massive repeated bailouts for the fossil fuel auto industry, gutting of EPA regulations to redefine pollution so as to let oil and gas and auto industries avoid financial responsibility for the pollution and other environmental damage (fracking quakes for example) they cause, and multi-trillion-dollar decades-long wars and military engagements all in the service of oil and gas, taxpayer funded, would beg to differ with your claim.
Couldn't say it better. Subsidies don't work out the way you want. Look at ethanol: it's an incredibly dirty fuel source (using tons of diesel to make "fuel", smart!) but the ethanol lobby and unions have entrenched themselves permanently so its not worth the fight.
It just occurred to me that the EV transition will also affect food prices, that should be interesting. Big agro and big oil batting against it. Not sure how we are making even the little progress we are.
Indeed, 40% of US corn is used for ethanol so the potential effect could be huge. However, there's a lot of movement afoot in the ethanol industry for using carbon capture. My guess is given the Ag lobby biofuel will be retained for some time.
As someone opposed to nuclear power, I agree with both points. Nuclear power cannot exist without subsidies for development, construction and all the externalities.
It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
> It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
Right, because free markets are not capable of pricing in externalities (and in fact they actively incentivize externalities). If they were capable of this, fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive, and nuclear would be cheap.
I think a better approach is to change some of the regulation. Most of it is good, but some of it is kinda insane. My father worked on nuclear plants in the 70-80's. According to him, from the 80's on it effectively was so much regulation that it was not at all worth building a plant.
With technological advancement, a little change in regulations could go a long way.
If you know, I would love to hear some of the specific regulations that he thought were ineffective and or hampering our nuclear power construction. I've seen it mentioned in this thread without specifics.
According to my father, the unions were requiring some crazy stuff like you had a pipe fitter do X, then a different pipe fitter do Y. Both had to be on seperate days.
My dad actually left his role when he was stuck in a pipe shaft in 120 degree heat. A pipe fitter went up and the person who helped him out of the pipe and was fired for not following protocol.
The regulation came in when they started codifying the union rules. There was also an incident where Westinghouse and GE were faking inspections. I don't have specifics on hand.
Generally though, it seems corrupt. At least at the time, the unions essentially controlled construction and wanted to line their pockets, the politicians also lined their pockets. Eventually, the cost was too high to build.
Nuclear radiation safety is assessed using the "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" standard, which essentially says that if you make a nuclear power plant produce power at half the price of the next-door coal power plant, you have to spend all of the increased profit on increased safety measures. Nuclear can never out-compete non-nuclear power under that regulatory regime.
In general I oppose subsidies, but I think it's a good idea here. Nuclear solves some major problems with other types of clean energy - it's just prohibitively expensive. I'm all for exploring all alternatives to fossil fuels in parallel - I think the seriousness of the climate situation warrants it.
But that cost is largely a function of strong regulations and lack of innovation. If the government gets the ball rolling with subsidies it might get to the point where it doesn't need them anymore. Reducing regulation where appropriate could help too - but in general there are risks and regulation is warranted.
And because it makes so much sense - implement a carbon tax that ramps up slowly to the full cost of the externalities of fossil fuels. It's the most effective thing to fight climate change, but instead of doing that we actually subsidize fossil fuels?!? I don't get it.
In a free market perhaps, but nuclear power comes with loads of government oversight and regulations (and therefore costs) due to the inherent risk factors. Given that, subsidies seems appropriate.
The capital requirements for starting a nuclear company is likely much large than starting, say, an EV company. Subsidies for EV companies greatly helped in getting the technology off the ground. Subsidies might be a necessary evil in this case.
According to 2014 Elon Musk, if you cover the same square footage as taken up by a nuclear power plant and its exclusion zone with solar cells, you’ll get more electricity than the nuclear power plant would have supplied.
2014 was a long time ago. It’s possible both technologies have improved since then. I wonder why we don’t hear about this comparison more.
Real-life non-vaporware solar + battery combo installations are improving and spreading all the time.
By the time vaporware small nuclear materializes outside of demonstration projects (10 years? 20?) there’s no telling how efficient and ubiquitous solar + batteries will be.
They are huge, but they're also rare, and excessive. Especially for Chernobyl the exclusion zone includes vast areas no more radioactive than, say, Denver or other high altitude cities, and people kept working at Chernobyl (several of the reactors remained operational) for many years, and people have kept living within the exclusion zones. It was probably the right thing to set it as big as it was given we didn't know better at the time, but if anything Chernobyl has shown that the effects are far less severe than feared.
Yeah, but per the Musk quote, I bet you really could pack enough solar panels into the Chernobyl exclusion zone to overtake the power produced by the plant itself.
Probably because it ignores the fact that solar isn’t predictable (nighttime? clouds? dust?) and nuclear is.
Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells - is not a reliable base load provider.
No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store electrical power that’s far more reliable and cost effective than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but we aren’t there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost effective that never get discussed because everyone emotionally freaks out as soon as the word “nuclear” is uttered :p
Solar + hydrogen is just as predictable as nuclear. It costs roughly twice as much (because of 50% loss on electrolysis and back), but ends up providing a stable power output independent of weather.
It’s conparable in place to nuclear if I’m not mistaken, and it’s fault scenarios are less severe.
Especially in US, with vast amounts of deserts, it seems like a no-brainer.
(having said that, climate change is so urgent that I’d say do whatever it takes to get to zero emmissions - be it nuclear or solar)
In support of your point, I’d add that when doing cost comparisons with nuclear, one has to be wary of the accounting tricks they play such as not factoring in the costs of failure scenarios. Or even end of life decommissioning in some cases.
Except if you are pitching it as a solution for the base load problem - where is anyone doing solar+hydrogen at scale? Where is anyone committing to doing it at scale - let alone in the near future? How do we know it will remain economical at scale? All kinds of fun things can happen between theory/demonstration and implementation in the real world.
We do nuclear at scale today. The vast majority of blockers from doing more nuclear at scale today are political; not technical.
That’s the other facet of this that always seems to get overlooked.
You don’t need one huge plant to manage the baseload when we’re talking about renewables.
You can just as well have the same wattage distributed across multiple places in the country, removing a single point of failure and lowering transmission costs (although requiring a redesign of the energy grid).
No hand waving required. It’s fine for other sources (even nuclear) to fill in the gaps. Also no need for accusations of emotional freak outs. I think the nuclear side has its fair share of deluded people who for some reason pretend that both solar and batteries are not improving year by year. And who pretend that solar advocates demand solar-only solutions. It’s just not the case.
If batteries were viable Elon wouldn’t just be talking about them.
Batteries are no where near the cost efficiency of, say, pumped hydro. Nor can batteries touch the overall capacity of pumped hydro. And pumped hydro can’t happen just anywhere - you need the right physical environment for it to be effective.
So yeah, unless you have something more concrete than “batteries, obviously” it is hand waving.
Batteries aren't going to cut it. The last I checked batteries are an expensive source of power even if you can charge them for free. The cost of the battery / cycles it can deliver is already more than the cost of electricity in most places. We need a major breakthrough in storage before renewables are more than a way to reduce fossil fuel use in powerplants. (You still need the plants, just not as much fuel for them.)
There is also somewhat of a use case for renewables for powering things that can make do with highly unreliable power. Consider, for example, a desalination plant. The heart of the plant is pumping water through membranes--but do you really need to do that? Lets build our plant differently, build a storage system high enough up that gravity provides the pressure. When you have power you run the pumps to fill the storage system, when you don't have power you don't run the pumps. You need bigger pumps and you need a big storage tank but it can be done.
Or flip the scenario--don't pump the seawater in the first place. Place your desalination plant on the ocean floor and use your pumps to extract the fresh water. In this case you need fresh water storage underwater rather than salt water storage up high.
In the 2030 cost model they use, batteries are 142 euro/kWh of capacity and 160 euro/kW of power. This (using 2011 weather data, along with various other assumptions, and also includes use of hydrogen) gives "synthetic baseload" in the US for 53.7 euro/MWh, cheaper than nuclear. The LCOS in batteries and (even more so) in hydrogen is higher than the cost of electricity, but that's ok.
(If you look at other countries, or specific states in the US, the results vary but remain broadly similar. The mix of solar vs. wind can change a lot though. Places like Poland are the worst for renewables in this model.)
The demand for battery materials could eventually exceed the pace that we can mine them, so the world's grids will need significantly more types of non-battery energy storage like pumped hydro and flywheels. This will ensure that the market for grid storage materials doesn't have to compete with the car market's growing demand for batteries.
There are a few new flywheel plants that have popped up in the US in recent years, and it'll be interesting to compare the material costs and benefits over the coming decades.
The same I would think is true with coal power plants. Our local coal plant has a huge footprint, especially when you consider the cooling pond/lake, scrubbers, support buildings etc. This is not even considering the mining of fissile material/coal to feed these facilities as well, which also often have a large footprint as well. Plus the additional storage of waste, both short term and long term.
Politics is like 25% solving problems and 75% a popularity contest and that's being generous. No sane politician would ever remove something providing a benefit until well after it's outlived it's usefulness.
Yeah, agreed. And it’s super annoying when people use the fact that a subsidy isn’t as efficient as a carbon tax (or some other broad measure) as justification for ending it (without a carbon tax replacement). For instance, Virginia (a Blue state) passed a usage fee on EVs (that’s actually higher than the typical state gas tax would be for the same distance traveled in a regular vehicle) in order to “compensate” for the fact that EVs don’t pay gas tax. Therefore turning the Pigouvian gas tax into an anti-Pigouvian fee for acting on the desire to use more efficient and lower emissions transportation. (Not to mention you ALSO were taxed on electricity and the battery... plus personal property tax for the battery... just to add insult to injury.) I guess because of the (false) perception that only rich f**ks buy electric cars. “Oh, but it’s JUST for paying for the roads!” Yeah, like the Pigouvian aspect didn’t matter and as if the state gas tax is solely used for roads.
I support not destroying the planet. Whatever gets the job done at this point. Removing subsidies is a political shitshow, and you're effectively saying "I support a decades-long political sparring contest while the planet burns."
I think it's safe to say we're not operating under a democracy/republic anymore, so whatever will appease the coroporate/banking overlords the quickest is the best path forward.
I support serious measures to address climate change and oppose anything that gets in the way of such measures. If the government wants to give a free pony to people who installs solar panels, that's fine by me. More optimal policies are preferably, of course, but that's a secondary concern.
Right now, it seems the most likely outcome is that we keep using fossil fuels, so I'm desperate for anything!
(The exception are measures such as banning plastic straws, which I oppose because it's actually a significant inconvenience—which means spent political capital—but will do exceedingly little for the planet.)
The french didn't need anything fancy. They stadardized and then scaled production of reactors. They now have the cheapest energy on the planet, sell excess to others, and have no carbon output from electricity generation.
The problem is capital doesn't care about the big picture. Nuclear power is an upfront costly measure, you don't see a return for perhaps decades. That's fine if you are a public agency since in time, this will pay for itself, and the concern is about bettering the public in the best way possible, not making a quick return on investment.
It's not fine if you are a private energy company with shareholders who are looking to take on a gain and who are only looking at life one quarter at a time. Executives would rather invest in something cheaper where their investors will see a quicker return, because that's how executives keep their jobs. Executives and shareholders care about themselves and their profit, while the government is designed to care about the collective, although its great power is frequently commandeered by individuals seeking personal profit.
If we're treating this as a world-critical issue, we shouldn't wait for market forces to fix it. Like evolution, market forces may converge on good solutions, but not quickly enough to save a species from near extinction.
So, yeah, stop subsidizing dirty companies, but also subsidize those solutions that get us out of this mess faster.
It takes long enough to build a nuclear reactor that it makes more sense to build it somewhere else than on the site of an operating reactor which is still viable to continue operations. Keep all the existing plants that can reasonably be kept operating online until after the last coal plant is shut down, then start retrofitting existing reactors.
by then, it might be easier to retrofit them with solar panels and batteries, or H2 power to gas, who knows? Not joking, the lines and transformers are a very big part of a new plant cost, and you already have that setup in place.
not sure that's going to work, because nuclear requires some massive concrete insulation bubbles. Also the cooling is wildly different, nuclear power plants are built on large bodies of water, If there isn't one, sometimes they built a large dammed lake to have enough water to cool down the reactors in case of an emergency.
Instead, there are coal-> gas and coal->biomass retrofits. Gas works because the installations are TINY compared to coal. Look at Drax, this plan would have replaced the entire capacity of the coal plant. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/30/uk-sued-...
(I think the plan was dropped eventually).
Nuclear to solar I think there is Chernobyl as an example.
New nuclear is a challenge right now, because they're not standardized and the costs and timings are insane. Also, everyone wants nuclear, unless it's in their county. I think we have a good chance of seeing factory produced small nuclear reactors that are easier, cheaper and faster to install than what we have now.
> not sure that's going to work, because nuclear requires some massive concrete insulation bubbles.
That implies you might need somewhat more land. Take a look around most coal power plants. It's commonly unimproved land because ain't nobody want to live next to that.
> Also the cooling is wildly different, nuclear power plants are built on large bodies of water, If there isn't one, sometimes they built a large dammed lake to have enough water to cool down the reactors in case of an emergency.
You sure it's that different? They both operate on the principle of generating heat to turn water into steam and run turbines. That implies the same amount of generating capacity would require approximately the same amount of water.
With the implication that most of the existing coal power plants are already on bodies of water.
> New nuclear is a challenge right now, because they're not standardized and the costs and timings are insane.
But this is chicken and egg. If you've built none then the first installation you do of its kind has high costs. Build a hundred and that isn't true.
What happened to nuclear being so much cheaper than coal? Is it really just subsidies for coal that tip the balance? Then the logical consequence would be to remove subsidies from that. But I suspect the "nuclear=cheap" mantra is not the end of the story.
Nuclear is cheaper than coal, which is why coal market share is collapsing way faster than nuclear’s is shrinking. But they’re both having trouble competing against cheap gas and solar.
Nuclear is cheaper to operate, so existing reactors mostly keep running. Construction costs are high for nuclear though. Given the current interest rate environment, nuclear should be looking more attractive.
What is the TCO of nuclear, factoring in waste disposal and eventually cleaning up the site? The one thing Germany learnt from exiting nuclear, is that proper demolishing and removal of nuclear power plants is quite costly. Plus, there's nowhere to safely store the waste.
Storing nuclear waste safely underground requires having a rock formation that is geologically stable over 100,000+ years. Not easy to find. Otherwise the waste will eventually enter ground water and from there inevitably the food chain.
For the sake of argument, suppose it leaks after only 1000 years. The radioactivity will have diminished dramatically, although it will be quite a bit higher than background. It's possible that it would contaminate the local water table somewhere in the middle of the desert.
This assumes that the people 1000 years from now won't be much more technologically sophisticated than us and figure out a better way to deal with it in the meantime.
If that's true, and there are humans, but something terrible has happened in the meantime, my guess is that they would much rather some aquifer in the middle of nowhere be polluted than have massive global ecosystem devastation due to pumping CO2 into the air.
In general, the risks from nuclear power are not something to dismiss, but they pale in comparison to the risks of currently acceptable alternatives. Even the very fact that radioactivity decays over some time scale seems to be used against nuclear -- if you pollute the groundwater with cadmium or lead or some other heavy metal, it literally never goes away, so we just accept the risk since no containment can last forever. If fission products decay after 100,000 years though, we have to guarantee containment for that length of time.
Didn't France, a nuclear power plant "superpower" produce like only a half of Wembley Stadium of waste in like 50 years?
If this is a price of clean air and pushing the global warming further into the future we can build a couple of mini pyramids of nuclear doom and call it day.
I am pretty sure the reason is that France did not ban nuclear fuel reprocessing for several decades, and thus recycled large amounts of spent fuel elements. In the US reprocessing was banned and power plants built up large piles of spent fuel rods as a result.
Reprocessing was banned in the US for a few years. Carter banned it, Reagan lifted the ban. But reprocessing didn't pick up again because it's economically absurd. The plutonium separated from spent fuel has negative value -- it costs more to produce fuel rods containing it than you save in enriched uranium.
Reprocessing may have made sense in a world where enrichment was expensive, uranium resources becoming limited, and fast reactors practical. We do not live in a world with any of those properties. Enrichment prices crashed with gas centrifuges; uranium resources are ample; and fast reactors have turned out to be difficult to make competitive even with thermal nuclear reactors.
Still you have to put that half Wembley stadium somewhere. It's not like you can just put it in landfill with the toxicity levels you get from some of the stuff is in the micrograms.
Due to increased regulation the capital cost of building nuclear power plants has gone up about 400% since 1970. It was much cheaper than coal, but now it's a wash.
Nuclear + Solar + Wind + Storage + Hydrogen + Biogas + Small hydro. Subsidize all of the above to the point that they are on an even playing field of coal and O&G (who are heavily subsidized).
To everyone's point removing subsidies is politically challenging (especially as this is almost a red / blue state issue) - however subsidizing something else so that it has a competitive advantage is essentially the same thing albeit the money flow is a bit different.
Edit: Why is this getting downvoted so much without any negative comments? weird...
I fail to see how "removing energy" from a river system isn't directly destroying a habitat. Things like water surges play an important role in create sand bars and other microhabitats. It's best to leave them alone.
I think you misread my comment. I was agreeing with you in that we need to keep the energy in the water systems. Only small hydro which doesn't destroy rivers / ecosystems make sense.
I ask this out of ignorance: How is coal heavily subsidized? Do you mean it's subsidized because they're not being charged for the emissions that they generate?
Direct subsidies are from deductions made on taxes and direct government investment into modernizing the equipment on older coal power plants.
One way they do this is Percentage Depletion. A mine take out 10% of the available coal, they can deduct 10% of the value of the mine, to the point where the total deductions can exceed capital costs.
There is also deduction that came about because they wanted to promote domestic energy production and reduce dependence on foreign energy fuel, which between the year 2002-2010 awarded $12.2 billion in tax credit to coal alone.
I think that the lack of pollution taxes is the main subsidy, but it should not be brushed aside just because it is not a direct payment. Coal emissions (not just CO2) are really, really bad and kill many thousands of people every year. Imagine if the main source of organ transplants was kidnapping young people and stealing their organs. Now imagine that the government knew who was doing the kidnapping and just let them do it because it allowed for an abundant supply of cheap organ replacements. Not to mention, all of the kidnappers would be out of a job if the government cracked down.
Coal power was probably a net benefit in the beginning, but there are much better alternatives now.
The long-term "waste" is Plutonium. Half-life 24,000 years. We don't want to have to secure it for that long, but we already have tons of it, so the answer is to permanently destroy it, because Plutonium is fissionable. It can be used as reactor fuel.
So the answer for what to do with the waste is to build reactors that use it as fuel. That not only doesn't create more long-lived waste, it gives us a way to get rid of what we already have.
I thought that was what fast breeder reactors did.
They have only low grade waste. The disadvantage is that you don't get free plutonium to put in your nukes
There are some political ramifications to admitting that you use plutonium from civilian reactors to make nuclear weapons. It's possible that they're doing this without admitting it and that's the reason reactors that consume rather than produce plutonium are disfavored. But in that case you still don't have a "waste storage problem" -- you know what you're doing with the plutonium, you're just not admitting to it.
But I don't think the scale adds up for that. We don't need this amount of plutonium to make weapons, even if that's what we're doing with some of it. So still destroy the rest of it.
"Repair an entire planet's atmosphere" vs "store a few hundred tons of radioactive material safely" are definitely very different levels of problems.
Not to mention the possibility that spent fuel could be of use to future generations for some kind of future science and it would all conveniently be in one place.
or if you burn today’s “waste” in reactors that can easily do so, you not only don’t have to securely store it while also getting carbon neutral energy that will displace existing fossil fuel derived sources.
Nuclear is predictable which means it’s perfect for base load generation. Something all the other “clean” technologies are not.
An even more apt analogy might be: if your living room is on fire, you should dump water on it. You shouldn't let the fire rage because the water could damage the carpet.
You can either let the fire rage while you make a plan for how to repair the carpet, or you can pour the water now and deal with the carpet later.
There is in fact a limit to how much you can get legislatures to do at once. I’m all for coming up with policies for nuclear waste, I just don’t think it should hold up the construction of reactors. The world is on fire.
We should try! But I think the logical end result of "we should do X hard thing before Y" will be that Y never gets done!
It's almost like a form of bike shedding—except that the bike shed is in fact important, but its construction can trail launch, and launch is on a tight deadline.
The current strategy in many countries is to first generate as cheap energy as possible, and then subside alternative sources to be ready when the cheaper energy can't fulfill demand. The cheapest energy source get determined by market forces, while the alternative is about the government buying stability.
I would suspect that the nuclear subsidies is taken from the later strategy and not the former. Companies can still compete on the market to produce the cheapest possible energy, while the government are moved away from fossil fuels and into alternatives that are clean and provide the desired stability for which existing subsidies are paying for.
So cheap it needs huge subsidies. So safe no one will insure it. So clean we have no idea how to deal with the waste. So simple they take decades to build.
A better idea - have the navy build them and then sell the completed, operational plant (say, after a year of successful operation) to the highest bidder in an auction. Put whatever constraints are needed on the sale, and guarantee the construction for a decade.
Hmm. That's an interesting idea. Seems like they are experts in building relatively small nuclear plants and maintaining them in harsh conditions for years. Wonder if it's feasible though. Maybe they are too slow to build. Maybe they are too expensive.
Yeah I'm not sure why they think the Navy is doing it… I think the Navy is "just" the customer. Of course there's a lot involved in being the customer too.
I don't think the Navy is "just" the customer in a normal DOD contracting sense. It looks like more joint research and DOE involvement. Plus, mix it multiple contractors and locations and you have a very complicated chain.
I think the premise is that the US Navy is quite good at building nuclear power plants as multiple reactors power each and every submarine and Aircraft carrier we have. By the numbers the Navy has more nuclear powered ships than the US has nuclear power plants. There's also precedent for smaller scale plants that are lower maintenance and less dangerous.
I wouldn't necessarily say they are less dangerous. The designs can be very different and might even require more maintenance and safely procedures than the land based ones.
Also, the Navy isn't the the one actually building it. The contracting companies do that. Many of the people who run the systems in the Navy leave and become contractors/consultants for the higher pay.
It's a neat idea; based on the fact that the Navy has a lot of operational experience with nuclear power (especially small heat sources)? How well does that experience translate to a large-scale reactor? And is the Navy particularly good at building things? I would imagine that the (private) shipbuilder has at least as much knowledge around the tech.
I think its more fund the navy under the guise of a defense spending bill that ends up going for an RFP to energy companies to build the reactors "for the navy"
The Navy acquires many reactors annually and operates a ton of small to medium reactors. I think they mostly buy the reactors from contractors, but either way, they have a ton of operational experience.
Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
Fukasima was a dumb design from the start, and plenty of people pointed it out before it was built. Holding it up as the poster child for why all talk about nuclear power generation should not even be discussed is beyond disingenuous.
What you said shows exactly why the point was valid.
This is what happens with nuclear power projects: They can take a dumb design, as you said, and people point out the problems beforehand, as you said, then it is built, as you said, regardless.
It's important that it was still built even though people said, beforehand, that it was, as you say, dumb. This is a key point really. These things are still built regardless of the quality of the design.
And then later, reality and physics have their say.
And all the guarantees and promises are broken, and the costs are way higher than were accounted for.
Of course some designs are better, and that is fantastic. I'm all for safety and predictability. I have other problems with nuclear, having nothing to do with radiation or safety, but I agree that there are much safer designs.
Even though there are better and worse designs, and Fukashima may be a bad design with a bad placement, this lack of full accounting for potential costs is a recurring pattern with these huge boondoggle projects.
I think the manufacturing is required to be contracted out. The military can and does sell many things if they no longer have need for them. You can find some of that stuff in surplus shops, but they even sell old aircraft and other vehicles.
At that point, they should create a government-owed corporation to hand off operation to.
End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup, then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of millions) get put into an escrow account.
Of course, these new owners are limited liability corporations who find that it's cheaper to provide campaign donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of business.
If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
> At that point, they should create a government-owed corporation to hand off operation to.
The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't see the military spending as wasteful government spending in the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some, health programs like Medicaid.
There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the climate change denying sections of the population is to have the military involved in its implementation.
If you think about it, the military has functions of 1) protecting the US against existential threats and 2) providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of the population. Climate change also poses existential threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with renewables.
The military isn't going to want anything to do with renewables. They run on oil, almost exclusively. The military's exalted position in society is also largely artificial. Yes it serves to defend the country but it could be far smaller and still achieve that. No this should be a civilian effort, although it could be a state one.
US Naval reactors are not a substitute for commercial power plants. They use highly enriched fuel, and are optimized for small volume and low maintenance costs, not net generation efficiency. They're at least one if not two orders of magnitude smaller than what's economic in power plants, and they are not in any way built with an efficient "model T" style production line.
US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory built small modular reactors vs any other company that's attempted it so far.
Exactly, people who bring this up don't understand the different one-off reactor designs used in maybe a handful of vessels, or that the Navy reactors are meant to go without refueling for up to 25 years. They are also made by third-party contractors, not hand-built by the Navy itself.
The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go home".
Yeah, I learned this harsh lesson doing deeper research in recent years. I was really hopeful for NuScale and similar SMR style approaches, but now I understand more clearly why that's so unlikely to work out.
I'd love it if someone shows up tomorrow with some clever idea that changes the capital costs and long timelines, but I don't think we should be allocating significant capital towards that as hope alone.
Do they ever use a parked carrier to power something? It seems like it would be useful to run at least a portion of a base using a carrier anchored in the harbor, or as response to downed power infrastructure after a natural disaster. Quick googling indicates an aircraft carrier allegedly could be able to power 12,000 homes.
No. The naval plants are optimized to generate steam for the propulsion turbines first, and electric generation capacity second. Plugging generation capacity into a grid is far more complex than plugging in a consumer appliance. It'd require a lot of dedicated infrastructure on the carrier, and suitable tie in points from the grid.
The US did have a floating nuclear power plant for a while, intended for disaster response and such. It ultimately didn't prove to be useful enough vs the cost and complexity of keeping it running. Russia recently completed fabrication of a modern take on the same idea, but it's not clear how useful that will be to them other than being as part of a suite of nuclear technologies they're marketing militarily.
I was talking to an ex-navy reactor man at a bar once. He said one of the most important things for naval reactors is to make sure you were making the "right kind of bubbles." I never found out if this was some kind of navy joke or if he was talking about Nucleate boiling.
Naval reactors are currently built by GE and Bechtel. They are designed at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, a national lab of DOE, operated by Fluor. Fluor is a parent company of NuScale which just got a license from the NRC to be able to build a civilian small modular reactor (SMR). Their first project is scheduled to come online at the end of the decade.
Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets. The construction is too expensive and too slow - allocating capital to nuclear ends up slower than allocating the same capital to renewables for hitting climate targets. If you look at reports of lifetime costs for utility scale energy, Nuclear is the most expensive and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Solar and wind is already 3-4x cheaper than nuclear, and by the time the decade is out it will likely be 10x cheaper even with attendant storage.
China seriously invested in it heavily, met a modicum of success in building a wave of nuclear plants, but near the middle of the full plan decided to halt any new construction. I think even with low regulation, and a focused investment it was turning out more expensive than the alternatives.
Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.
Loan subsidies passed under GWB were supposed to result in a nuclear renaissance in the form of Westinghouse's AP1000 GEN III+ reactor. The 2 projects started under Obama have been unmitigated financial disasters. One was cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground, the other is about to come online after going 2x+ over money and time budget.
All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.
> The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
Nuclear power plants aren't just an all-or-nothing kind of risk. There is plenty that could go wrong and either halt its operations or affect its environment.
For instance, a lot of plants increase the average temperature of the rivers they dump their cooling water in. That issue has become more threatening over time since climate change is doing the same.
You need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have brownouts and blackouts.
And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
Most countries are pretty far away from the amount of renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any storage at all.
“Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.
Technically, from your own numbers... Denmarks intermittent renewables (wind + solar) is 43%. Germany is 34%. Biofuel & Hydro are not intermittent.
I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.
Germany is a net-exporter of electricity to France. Especially in summer when nuclear reactors have to be shut down, because the water temperature in the streams they use already is too high or when the tide is too low, or in winter when the rivers freeze.
"This article is a list of countries and territories by electricity generation from renewable sources every year. Note that most countries import and/or export electricity, so the percentage figures do not reflect the percentage of consumption that is renewable based. "
Increasingly, nations are analyzing their grid requirements and concluding that 100% renewables is feasible, the baseload concept ends up being a constraining requirement that nuclear plants levy upon the rest of a future grid design.
As the Texas power outage demonstrated, the US grid is not monolithic. Having more interconnected regional grids actually makes it easier to get individual regions to high renewable percentages while allowing the market to continue to mature lower cost storage. Storage is slightly behind the solar manufacturing S-curve in terms of dropping costs, but once a number of EV supply plants start ramping up, I think that cost optimization will strongly drop storage costs.
Is there a reason to believe that a solution that works on the scale of a reasonably sized country suddenly stops working on the scale of a tight federation of states or comparable size?
Here in Sweden we have a date when nuclear plants will be gone. We got a date for when internal combustion engines will be gone from the roads. We have a plan for when the sum of green exports of energy will exceed that of total consumption of energy.
We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables.
1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future.
2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import.
3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built.
The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.
I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a 100% renewable grid is possible.
One does not need 2-3x average power production over average demand. With some combination of transmission, batteries, and (importantly) hydrogen storage, the overcapacity and curtailment needed can be quite modest.
Is it possible to create enough gas powered power plants and hydrogen storage facilities to have 100% of a nations capacity running for several weeks during the winter? Yes. Can it all be generated from ocean based windfarms with pipelines? Yes. Will it be cheap? No.
Just the production side, the cost in a 2019 study put the numbers around $7-9 per kg of hydrogen. This does not take into the account the cost of the pipeline, the storage facility, or the gas powered power plant. Remember that return of investment only occurs when demands actually exceeds that of cheaper renewable production, unless government steps in and adds subsidies like it does today with oil.
Is massive amounts of hydrogen a cheaper and safer alternative to nuclear? Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms I suspect the answer is no on the commercial side. On the safety side it would be interesting to hear about operating large liquid hydrogen pipelines and storage facilities.
Any energy system large enough to power the world will be a very expensive thing. Fortunately, the world economy is also a very large thing, and can pay for it.
We can say with some confidence that while this renewable energy system will be expensive, it will be less expensive than a nuclear energy system that serves the same purpose, and likely cheaper than a system with any substantial amount of nuclear energy.
> Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms
This is a completely bogus argument in an environment where natural gas is still plentiful and legal and its carbon largely untaxed. The CO2 tax needed to get to wind farms + hydrogen being competitive is likely much less than the CO2 needed to get nuclear to be competitive (against natural gas).
I’ve yet to see any renewable plan that could cover big northern cities.
Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January.
NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area.
You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.
Why is there a requirement that power be generated within 300 miles? NYC already gets plenty of power from further away than that. With HVDC transmission, we can transmit power thousands of miles efficiently. PNW hydro power is used in LA, for example.
First of all, did you look at a map? 300 miles from NYC gets you to upstate New York, or western Pennsylvania, or rural West Virginia. Second, NYISO, which covers New York State, already imports lots of power from Quebec, Ontario, New England, and PJM (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and more).
You say 'did you look at a map' but have you looked at a topographical map? I don't see much room that isn't either protected forests or the Appalachian mountains, in some cases it's both.
Well, I don't know enough about the industry to analyze specific locations, but it's easy to find real-world projects in upstate NY and elsewhere: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/03/large-scale-so.... The projects named in that article will apparently get more than halfway to the "11,000 megawatt hours per day" estimate.
Anyway, the more important point is that we already have large regional grids across the country, and while it's obviously nice to have generation and consumption close to each other, it's not a requirement.
Why do you think solar and wind could not be built in the Appalachian mountains? Wind in particular would benefit there. And the mountains are an excellent place to build off-river pumped hydro storage facilities.
Have you looked at a map? I live in NY, and there is absolutely no place for such a massive solar farm.
The numbers I quoted were just for NYC, and they weren’t adjusted for the winter sunlight problem. To power the entire metro area would likely require 40,000 acres. To cover the entire region likely 60,000 acres. This land does not exist.
It isn't that big an area in the scheme of things. If you try to find a single place for it it probably won't work of course, but it is a tiny little fraction of the developed land already devoted to New York.
New York State is 35 million acres. You don't think 0.2% of that, including rooftops of existing buildings, might be useable for solar/wind/battery storage? And again, NY already uses tons of out-of-state energy.
There is no renewable energy source that is faster than simply maintaining existing nuclear capacity. Lots of nuclear power plants are at risk of closing. A small subsidy to keep them open until we build out sufficient renewables to shut down all fossil fuels is a freaking steal considering the effects of climate change.
You're not responding to the premise of the article: subsidize existing nuclear, not new nuclear. You're taking on an easier argument, but instead you need to clarify: how is allowing carbon-free existing nuclear fall due to price a good thing for the climate?
I am perhaps missing it, but my takeaway from the article was that doesn't seem to actually specify existing nuclear, preferring to talk about nuclear subsidy. If it were only existing nuclear I would mostly agree on keeping it save for certain certain end of life reactors (e.g diablo canyon built near an earthquake fault).
I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
Current US electricity. To decarbonize transportation and industry, we will need 200-300% more. That drops rooftops to 10%, and that does not account for night and winter (overbuilding and storage).
Solar and wind are nuclear power. We keep the reactor 93 million miles away, in a huge gravitational containment system, and even so tens of thousands of people die from cancer caused by the radiation every year in the United States alone, despite two layers of shielding and multiple kinds of voluntary prevention protocols.
I guess subsidies make sense but I think it could make a lot more sense of the government acted as capital investors or something of the sort.
Regardless I'm very curious to see how this goes. It'd be neat if they used thorium.
Building a startup for on-demand nuclear plant submarines for coastal cities worldwide.
Coastal mayors and governors have access dashboard to order nuclear submarines and pay by the hour. Submarine plant comes within a week, plugs itself to the local grid from the shore and electricity flows in. You may want to reserve an instance for a year or the submarine may move to a higher bidder municipality. Emergency cooling handled by construction even in worst case scenarios, no pumping necessary.
Regulations are fine because the submarine plants are not built in your country. Nuclear waste moves out of the country with the submarine when submarine is done powering your local grid. A real-time marketplace lets cities and countries worldwide bid to host the waste for good money.
Cute idea, but nuclear submarines aren't that powerful. Output for ballistic submarine reactors are in the 150-250MW range.
For reference, natural gas power plants can hit the GW range easily. Even those diesel backup generators you see outside of hospitals and such are about 1kW. You could throw a bunch of those on a tanker ship and probably provide more power output than a nuclear sub reactor.
This is misleading. Gas turbines used for power plants usually put out 100-250mw. Most gas plants just stack 3-5 of them together in a common location - same thing could be done for small reactors.
If it were, then massive amounts of money and time wouldn't go into trying to make it safe. Nuclear control rooms wouldn't be locked down like Fort Knox. And every major population center would have a nuclear power station nearby.
There's this idea that the only thing stopping nuclear from saving the world is a bunch of hippies perpetuating a myth that it's not safe — like nuclear energy is a genetically modified tomato.
It's not that. It's actually just not safe — or rather, the only way of making it safe is by having round the clock security, big brains monitoring it the whole time, and lots of money.
So, given that climate change will bring with it more pandemics, civil unrest, and natural disasters, is it wise to assume that there will always be people around who know how to look after nuclear power stations? Or people who can stop terrorists who want to make dirty bombs from the waste?
There's a reasonable argument to be made that it's a risk we should take to avoid worse distasters.
But, given that there are cheaper alternatives, that don't take a decade to build, why don't we just not build nuclear?
Let's generate non-controversial power, while massively reducing our usage.
Nuclear power is very safe - far safer in aggregate impacts to the environment than any other technology. And even more important, it’s predictable - something most other “clean” energy sources are not.
As for “cheaper” - citation needed. Especially for handling base load requirements in reliable and predictable ways. Most of the cost around nuclear power, especially in the United States, is from bloated, ineffectual policy decisions designed to artificially suppress it.
I do agree we should be doing more with the existing “waste” - we should be burning it in better reactor designs instead of burying or storing it. Note I didn’t say newer or modern designs - we have had the technology since the 50’s to burn what we (ridiculously) term “waste” today but it wasn’t pursued for numerous political and ill informed social issues. These designs also coast to a natural stop if their support systems are interrupted, negating the problems of active systems (like cooling) failing leading to problems in most of our currently deployed reactors.
I think OP meant nuclear is only safe because of massive capital expenditure making it safe. A community of almost any size can run a bank of solar panels or wind turbines safely, but a nuclear planet needs an well-trained and expensive staff on standby to monitor and address any issues.
But is it only safe, because lots of time and energy goes into making it safe? If the systems keeping it safe no longer exist — let's say all the security staff are killed by a pandemic, or there's a civil war, or society collapses, is it still safe?
I can put a solar panel on my roof and not have to worry about it destroying my neighbourhood — even in the event of a disaster.
> cheaper
It's well documented now that solar is the cheapest energy source.
That may well be because it's had a lot of investment — maybe if people weren't so afraid of nuclear it would be the cheapest instead — but given that it isn't and we're on the clock...
Using old waste to power nuclear reactors sounds like a good idea — but is it possible in our time frame? If yes, then I'd be on board, but I suspect the answer is that it that it isn't.
A almost 1% failure rate is not safe.
Not by a long shot.
Would you fly planes that had these failure rates?
Also, it is the potential of catastrophic events that is the issue here.
Look at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on the central coast in California.
This thing sits on a fault line.
Without a retrofit, it wouldn't have survived a Fukushima event.
If this thing would have blown up, half a million people would have been directly affected and massive cleanup costs.
That is unacceptable risk and it is economically unjustified to add more risk by building additional plants.
> Am I seriously supposed to ignore the fact that nuclear metldowns have the potential to kill millions of people — because they didn't in 2012?
Can you elaborate on how meltdowns are supposed to be able to kill millions of people? We've already experienced the worst-case scenario in a nuclear catastrophe: Chernobyl.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this was a worse-case scenario: A complete reactor containment failure with no secondary containment. Burning fuel rods were directly exposed to the atmosphere for days. In the end this directly killed 50 people. A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from cancer related to the incident. But to date only 60 people are known to have died due to radiation exposure from Chernobyl.
So yeah I think you're several orders of magnitude off in your risk assessment of nuclear power.
> > A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from cancer related to the incident.
> How many people could conceivably be downwind of a nuclear meltdown? I think it could be much much more than that. I can't imagine why we would not include the people who eventually die of cancer.
The several thousand figure does include the people who are predicted to eventually die from cancer.
Only 31 people died as a direct consequence of the meltdown.
I’d prefer to see continuing or additional tax credits for solar and battery storage directly to the consumer. This would dovetail nicely with an infrastructure plan by making the incentives higher for panels made in the U.S.A. Keeping the incentives directly to the consumer would take a good deal of the chances of corruption and back room deals out of the equation I.E. the Solyndra scandal.
We're not talking about the perfect vs. the good here. We're talking about a power source (nuclear) that can result in virtually unlimited harm to human life in cases of serious failure vs. power sources that, while not as well-developed, are much lower-risk long-term.
Nuclear is still better than coal and gas. At this rate we will never limit temperature below 2.1C pre-industrial, so anything that gets helps getting rid of fossil fuels ASAP is a good deal.
Also, even worst-case scenario like Chernobyl ultimately wasn't that bad. Several natural disasters in the 2000's have killed way more than it did.
> Also, even worst-case scenario like Chernobyl ultimately wasn't that bad.
The problem with statements like this is that we don't actually know what a worst case scenario truly looks like. The day before Chernobyl, the worst-cast scenario, by definition, not as bad as Chernobyl. Similarly, the engineers who built Fukishima were aware of tsunamis and earthquakes and built the plant to withstand what was considered the worst case scenario at the time. Then an even worse case scenario happened.
It's fairly simple to find an upper bound for the damage a nuclear incident can cause. Take all the radioactive material in the reactor and put it in the most dangerous location, like the air or an underground aquifer. I don't understand why you think that the worst case scenario somehow got worse after Chernobyl.
Wasn’t that bad. Wow. Maybe in a Excel spreadsheet kind of way it wasn’t that bad but what a horrific experience for those involved - humans, animals and the environment.
Ah yes, unlimited harm to human life in cases of failure, versus the unlimited harm to human life and planet earth that comes guaranteed everyday with the use of coal and gas.
Don't put up a straw man. Folks who question the safety of nuclear are not advocating for coal and gas, they're advocating for increased investment in myriad other clean energy sources. Suggesting that anyone who questions nuclear is advocating for coal and gas is a bad faith argument.
There are no other clean technologies that can deliver power at scale on their own.
Solar and wind and hydro takes up immense amounts of what should be undisturbed natural environment. Solar and wind needs storage, in the form of hydro or batteries.
Nuclear is a proven, safe tech that pumps out steady, squeaky-clean energy. People imagine that it’s dangerous because of high-profile accidents but don’t see the daily small catastrophes caused by every other tech.
Nuclear wins, hands down. It’s just such a no-brainer. It’s like we’re back in the days of Edison and Tesla and AC vs DC.
We have come a long way since the RBMK reactors in use at Chernobyl. Generation III reactors are significantly safer than the older nuclear reactors. They are now passively safe, in that they shut themselves down without operator intervention.
Which ones are those? As far as I can see, ALL “clean energy” has some trade offs.
Mining lithium is a horrible, polluting process that wastes tons of fresh water. One thing to put small quantities into phones and computers. Another to suggest that they should be used for all cars (unless the end goal is to have only the super rich driving cars).
Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving away from the coal economy) and quartz, and will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
Wind turbines can’t be repurposed after their useful and short (comparatively) life and will pile up as junk.
It’s not even a question of “don’t have catastrophic outcomes”, it’s a question of a slow-moving guaranteed catastrophic outcome, or the possibility of a fast catastrophic outcome.
> Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving away from the coal economy)
I can't think of any use for coal in production of a solar panel, so is your argument here that manufacturing anything uses electricity and therefore coal?
That doesn't seem like a good argument. Especially given that a nuclear plant tends to involve a huge quantity of concrete (which gives off major amounts of greenhouse gases and requires mining as well).
> will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
The lifespan of a commercial panel is 25-30+ years (most look to be warrantied to 25)
And in reality, many will continue producing power longer than that, just at a lower rate than their original nameplate capacity. I expect most of those solar farms will wind up in service for many decades.
Claiming that their lifespan is 10 years is something I feel needs some sort of supporting evidence.
> I can't think of any use for coal in production of a solar panel
Silicon is produced by carbothermic reduction of silica in arc furnaces. Charcoal can be used, though (and is use by some producers; I think the porosity helps silicon monoxide gas react with the carbon.)
The issue with solar is that there are a lot more deaths for a given amount of energy than for nuclear. Yes, they're spread out so it's less dramatic, but overall nuclear is safer and also produces very useful medical isotopes.
What's really missing for nuclear is economics of scale. If we could just organize a repeatable build model so many operational challenges would be solved.
That said, I'll take anything. Wind, solar, batteries, tidal, nuclear. They're all far, far better than coal or oil from a public health and climate change standpoint. It's such a shame so much was wasted on the Iraq War, since the entire USA could have been powered by green energy with half what was spent.
This is some cockamamie figure that is based on rooftop solar panel installers having accidents and falling down.
A fall from a rooftop while installing a solar panel is preventable; it is not a necessary consequence of solar energy. That worker didn't have to die for the sake of two terawatts; he or she could have used safety equipment and common sense.
If we are counting deaths that way per amount of energy, we must count electrocutions among the energy user base too, not only installation and production side deaths.
If there are health risks and accidents working in a solar panel factory, that ought to be counted.
Installations and deaths across the entire grid should be counted: deaths of all electricians installing any sort of residential and commercial wiring, transformers on poles down the street, and everything else.
Possibly deaths arising form unreliable electricity should also be counted as risks of energy use. If a few people die in a heatwave because their AC cuts out due to a blackout, maybe those are energy-related deaths.
Health problems and accidents in solar panel factories should be counted, as well those in mines for nuclear ore, and industries that produce all grid components: wiring, switch boxes, transformers, you name it.
Deaths in every vehicular accident involving an electrician en route to a repair job should also be counted (whether the electrician was at fault or not).
I mean, yes? We should seek to contrast fatalities across every major energy source if we can?
But given that we don't have perfect numbers we have to go off of the ones we have, and solar installations are over 4x the death rate than nuclear. The only reason I bring it up is this constant barrage of anti-nuclear sentiment even though nuclear works great in countries where it is approached correctly. Canada and France, for example, have professional, reasonable cost nuclear that create the medical isotopes we need.
It's all besides the point though, because coal is 1000x more fatal than nuclear, and like I said in my original comment, I'll take anything but coal and oil.
And we should recognize that solar that powers an entire society will be mostly utility scale, because that's so much cheaper. Utility scale solar is installed at ground level, not on roofs.
Folks thought the same thing about Fukushima at the time. If history has shown us anything, it's that we're consistently not as smart as we think we are.
It is not as though the Fukushima operators were blindsided. They knew exactly what would happen if they could not restore power within a certain period of time; they could not restore power and the disaster proceeded as anticipated. What makes modern reactors different is that the worst case is not a catastrophe, and a loss of power does not cause a catastrophe. With older reactors the design philosophy was to make the worst case sufficiently unlikely; with newer designs the philosophy is to not have a catastrophic worst case.
Yeah While on one hand I am supportive of more money going to clean energy tech / infra build out, I can’t help but be disappointed that this legislation ISN’T technology agnostic.
We are at the point now where there are enough “options on the table” (solar, onshore offshore wind, hydro, nuclear, various storage applications ) that incentives should go towards the cheapest “clean electrons”, regardless of technology. This way the money contributed as subsidy can go the furthest distance.
Nuclear power’s Achilles heel on the economics side are particularly problematic for new builds. With increasing construction costs (compared to declining solar and wind), an almost 10 year timeframe to build out, and potentially half a century operating lifespan, it can be hard to ultimately pencil out. That said, nuclear refurbs and upgrades of existing setups is probably a better direction, even if life extension is likely to be more limited.
It's safer to invest both in green power and nuclear. As long as we get rid of fossil fuels ASAP it's a victory, we can always replace those nuclear plants with solar/wind in 50 years if that seems to make sense by then.
It's time we understand that renewables have a poor benefit/cost ratio when you compare it to nuclear.
Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy in a world that will require more electricity if it uses electric vehicles and move away from fossil fuels. The coal and gaz industry love renewables because you NEED gaz and coal if there's no wind or sun.
It's not clear to me how current market prices contain enough information to support or refute the assertion that renewables won't be able to supply enough for a hypothetical future where fossil fuels are no longer used even for transportation. I think you need to also demonstrate that renewable energy prices can remain low even when required to scale up significantly beyond current levels, and that we won't run out of locations amenable to cheap and easy deployment of wind, solar and hydro power.
Yup - but they aren’t everywhere. Power transmission doesn’t happen without loss.
One of the many issues with solar that doesn’t get addressed.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge proponent of solar when it make sense. I grew up in the Desert Southwest so it can make a lot of sense there in particular.
But solar is NOT a replacement for technology like nuclear energy.
My understanding that is wind/solar are significantly cheaper than nuclear is on a cost basis. The costs required to build and safely dismantle nuclear plants are major cost contributors. The downside of course is lack of baseload, which nuclear can cover quite happily, albeit at a higher cost.
Which is an unfair point because we have yet to see what costs are associated with safely dismantling and replacing all those miles upon miles of solar panels and wind turbines will be. Nuclear has been deployed on a larger scale for a long time so the costs are known.
How many miles of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery backup are needed to produce the same amount of energy as a single nuclear plant? I imagine if you do the math at scale, it turns out to be negligible, if not more expensive for renewables.
Old wind power plants are often repowered. Wind turbines that have reached their EOL are replaced with newer and more efficient ones, significantly incrasing the output of the plant:
> “Repowering is happening and will increase. It’s a great opportunity to get more energy from today’s wind farms. Repowering reduces the number of turbines by a third while tripling the electricity output. And it preserves the existing wind farm sites which often have the best wind conditions. Governments need repowering strategies that set the right framework and ensure efficient permitting procedures for repowering”, says WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson.
Most of the material used in wind turbines can be recycled:
> Wind turbines are a valuable source of resources which can be reused in the circular economy. 85-90% of a dismantled wind turbine are recycled today, including the towers, foundations, generators and gearboxes. Most of these materials are made up of concrete, steel and cast iron which are easy to recycle and for which there is an active circular economy market in Europe.
We've been running electric wind turbines for 70+ years (and non-electric for thousands) at this point, the costs are well-known. Less so for solar panels, but still decades. And the bonus here is that neither can fail catastrophically the way nuclear plants do.
As for size, sure, nuclear plants are more compact. But you can't build nuclear plants on top of people's houses, or in the North Sea. Investors and actuaries have done the math, and renewables are just plain cheaper per Kwh, at least in today's landscape.
You can't compare wind turbines from 70 years ago to today. (I noticed the convenient deemphasizing of solar farms. Look up issues with abandoned solar farms.)
The last point is moot. Land is abundant in America. I also question the hand-wavy "investors have done the math"
No kidding. Search for abandoned wind farm - it’s pretty frighting. Fiberglass is not easy to recycle.
Same with solar cells. I see them putting up thousands of acres of solar cells in the Nevada desert - will be fun to see what happens 20 years from now. Local cities who leased the land out to those farms are making money now - but are they going to get stuck with an expensive clean up if those companies go bust in 20 years because the market changes, subsidies have ended, etc? It’s nuts.
Besides the material wastage you mention, also think of the habitat destruction this causes. One small nuclear plant can replace many acres of noisy, ugly, inefficient and bird-killing windmills and panels
Ironically, wind turbines are more efficient than nuclear power plants. Solar panels are not, but at least they do direct energy conversion from sunlight (whereas the nameplate efficiency of nuclear power plants additionally ignores the requirements of the fuel processing chain that starts with removing mountains of ~500ppm ore these days).
Nuclear is more expensive per KWH basically entirely because of the regulatory environment. Not because of anything physical about the method or its fuel; it's not more expensive in France, for example. Get the costs of regulatory compliance down and nuclear becomes the cheapest power source for both capital and ongoing costs.
France's reliance on nuclear is almost 100% government-and-geopolitics driven, to avoid relying on foreign states for energy imports, the market has little to do with it. I can't speak for how much regulation is needed or not, but given nuclear failure is catastrophic, I can see why we should err on the regulated side. Nuclear is incredibly safe, but only because we made it safe by spending on it. Solar/wind just doesn't have the same risk profile.
That's not a particularly good solution, since it doesn't halt climate change. We're already starting to hit during peak renewable production in several states. We're reaching the point where those peaker gas plants are the main source of emissions that we're trying to eliminate.
Renewables are better on a raw $/KW measure. But that's a naive way of assessing intermittent sources. Once you start saturating the market during peak production, only part of the newly installed capacity actually displaces fossil fuels. Non-intermittent sources of energy like hydroelectricity and nuclear power aren't subject to this constraint
Solar panels produce energy in a sine wave. Once the peak of the sine wave exceeds energy demand, you start hitting diminishing returns. The fluctuations in wind production are more complicated, but it's subject to the same problem. You can over-produce to make up for the troughs in energy demand, but the nature of overproduction means that a portion of generated energy goes to waste. This is already happening in California: daytime energy production is saturated.
This is why most renewable plans assume that there will be some silver bullet that makes energy storage effectively free. Without some way to turn an intermittent source into a consistent source, it'll be very difficult to decarbonize with wind and solar.
That’s the real problem today - there is no ability to compromise. Everything is a zero sum game :(
Nuclear can replace fossil fuels today. If we finally get other renewables to a place where they can address issues like predictability and reliability, then we look at de-commissioning nuclear.
But preemptively removing a very viable tool from your toolset is just bananas.
> Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy
NEVER is a long, long time. We definitely need nuclear to step in for quite a while, but it's plausible that we can be completely renewable and non-nuclear some time in the future.
Some time can be a very long time. The goal of the current administration is to be net zero emission by 2050. If after a certain time, let’s say 2025, there are no major break throughs in storage technology, then we have to start building nuclear plants. It’s good that we are preparing for that scenario right now.
Why wait? I'm quite aware of the various downsides of nuclear. Yes, it's currently expensive. But one way or another, every functional nuclear power plant displaces several natural gas and coal plants.
It's really that simple.
If we assume that CH4 and CO2 emissions have a strong chance of being an existential threat to our civilization, then we can make no other option but to embrace nuclear ASAP, even with all of its problems.
At the same time, pour funding into research: there's all kinds of fission technologies that show promise in safety, cost and in minimizing byproducts.
Even more important, pour funding into batteries and other energy storage technologies.
As far as renewables have come, we they have hardly scratched the surface for base load requirements. Except for hydro in some locations.
The time is just an example. But I see that you get my point. We need concrete climate goals. We can't wait forever for a breakthrough in storage tech to happen "someday". To meet these climate goals, there has to be a deadline, maybe even tomorrow, where we have to place a bet on nuclear.
I’m curious about the assumptions that lead to that conclusion. I suspect you’re approaching this from a viewpoint of energy austerity; if we only consume so many gigawatts of power, we can sustainably supply that many gigawatts with renewables without needing any nuclear. Sure—but why would that be our goal? Why assume that we wouldn’t have some valuable use for all the energy we can cleanly produce?
> I suspect you’re approaching this from a viewpoint of energy austerity
Not really. I'm just saying that all renewable, non-nuclear is possible...some time in the future.
Realistically, I think even in some kind of idealized future, there will be a lot of nuclear power in the mix. Hopefully it's safe, low cost and produces minimal harmful byproducts.
In truth, if nuclear can get excellent enough, which is a real possibility, then it becomes effectively more clean than solar and wind, right? The energy density is so high, there is a LOT less to build.
Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as well, if needed.
> Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as well, if needed.
From my perspective, there are a lot of things that become significantly easier to do if we can produce as much energy as possible, ranging from synthesizing liquid fuels from air and water (chemically possible but energy-intensive) to extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it in some sterile chemical sludge that we can pump into empty oil wells to large-scale water desalination (combined with removing the salt). And that’s just in the realm of climate change and sustainability—we are also going to need energy to do new things, not just to do the same things we’re doing now with less ecological impact, or even reversing the ecological impacts we’ve already caused.
We’re going to find productive uses of energy faster than we’re going to be able to develop the energy production needed to sustain them. So I’m not sure we’ll be given the choice—we’ll need to do both. The main difference being that a high amount of nuclear baseload would obviate the need for batteries.
Seriously large amounts of sustainably created energy opens all kinds of doors, and might actually be one of the only ways out of our current and upcoming climate crisis.
The other elephants in the room are (1) the material requirements (required metals, plastics, glass, electronics and reinforced concrete) per GWh, and (2) the required space per GWh (less space for buildings, fields or nature).
At this point it seems like, for nuclear to play a big role in the future power mix, someone needs to fund a program to develop carbon neutral concrete that still meets or exceeds the construction parameters for part - or preferably all - of the concrete used in building these plants.
Since they use so much of it, that would build up capacity for other uses, and the subsidy doesn't even have to necessarily go straight to nuclear power, which might improve the optics.
Here's a discount for specialty concrete that only nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams would be interested in...
I would rather have seen downvoters approach the merits of this claim in comments first. We do not need HN to turn into devolving to ad populum for every contentious topic.
I was willing to take the downvote hits.
This narrative of "we need a baseload" or "the sun doesn't always shine" is just not countered often enough.
WWS would be sufficient for the majority of countries around the world including the US and all it takes is the political will to implement this.
Not technology.
WWS doesn’t work without your diverse and distributed sources being interconnected.
Which they conveniently hand wave off since that was a subject for another paper.
If they had confidence in their ideas, they would at least summarize the findings of that paper that justify their implying the grid as not being an issue in the practicality of their plan. For example: even if the grid is 100% reliable (which - spoiler - it’s not), what are the sizing implications due to transmission loss? How do you get power across continents to have true geographic diversity? This paper presents all upside with no downside? Ha!
Again, nice theory in a perfect world. We do not live in a perfect world.
Not sure how that distinction makes a difference. So it’s an article that makes an incomplete and thus poor argument and not a paper that makes an incomplete and thus poor argument. Those are still equally bad.
OK - here’s a key question - where do they talk about base load and predictable generation? Indeed, they hand wave it off with “The present study does not examine grid stability, since it is evaluated in separate work”.
Well since they are countering the unreliable generation arguments with “unreliable generation isn’t a problem if you have enough diverse sources” - if you can’t interconnect those diverse sources then you don’t have much of a solution, do you?
Nice theory, zero discussion of how you make the theory practical reality.
> Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy in a world that will require more electricity if it uses electric vehicles and move away from fossil fuels. The coal and gaz industry love renewables because you NEED gaz and coal if there's no wind or sun.
Let's see - the per capita total energy consumption - which includes transportation, industry, agriculture (everything) in the US is 80 MWh yearly[0]. The global population is expected to peak at 10 billion. Assuming the whole world consumes energy like a drunk sailor like the US does (and by the way, BEVs, for example, are twice as energy-efficient per mile than gasoline vehicles [1]) - that comes to 800 PWh.
The average solar cell produces 150 watts per square meter[2]. Running at 6 hours per day for a year, thus a square meter produces 0.3285 MWh. Therefore you need 2.4 million sq. km of land to supply the total global energy consumption (where the average consumption is 15 times higher than current consumption) only through solar. How much land is it? Quite a lot - twice that of India, and a quarter of the Sahara desert[3]. But remember this is spread all over the world. As a percentage of the total land area, it's not even a single percent. Agriculture itself consumes 60 times more area than this.
However, this is only from solar. The current state-of-the-art offshore turbines produce 15MW peak power already. Such a turbine has a rotor diameter of 236m. The optimal distance between turbines is 10D, where D is the rotor diameter [5]. Thus assuming a 50% capacity factor, an offshore wind farm produces 11.8 kWh per square meter per year. You would also need 12 million such turbines to supply the entire world's energy consumption per year. Assuming we get half of our annual energy consumption from offshore wind, you would need 33 million square kilometers covered in wind turbines. When it comes to areal efficiency wind, it is an order of magnitude worse than solar - however, the advantage is that the area is mostly free. Offshore turbines spaced kilometers apart can coexist easily with shipping lanes, while onshore turbines can and do exist without issues with ranches and farmland. By the way, the US coastline itself is 150,000km [6]. Thus, if you cover the coastline with turbines (only five deep), you can only generate the entire combined US energy demand from offshore wind.
And we have not touched on rooftop solar and onshore wind at all. So I fail to see how renewables will NEVER supply enough energy to the world.
Even in the super unlikely case that we institute a (much needed) carbon tax, I just can't see nuclear ever being competitive in a free market. By "competitive" I mean no insurance subsidies.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadDoing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving them to nuclear, would be the best case.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
[1] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Crane/
Contractors have less fear than someone who can be jailed (and let’s be honest, contractors and other commercial entities are never held accountable when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites).
The military doesn't have a great track record on Superfund sites i.e:
https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...
However, I agree that at least the military has the culture that will follow orders if asked, and more importantly, it's the only government program that the US population is willing to put unchecked amounts of money towards.
As Reagan said: "trust, but verify".
Familiarize yourself with the Zumwalt and LCS procurement programs. Both are nearly total failures, with the Navy grasping at straws to find ways to make the ships that have been constructed useful. Congress bears some of the blame here, particularly in relation to Zumwalt, but it's also clear Navy leadership has been often incompetent in planning future acquisitions. Those two programs cost US tax payers about $50 billion.
Although I'd imagine if there were many issues they be known about. I'd love to learn morea about nuclear reactors on carriers and submarines, but I imagine most of the engineering knowledge is secret.
My memory is fuzzy, but this 37 minute video [2] has a breakdown.
If memory serves, the root causes were faults in the pumps and delays in the 28 baud diagnostic printouts running minutes or hours behind which left everyone operating on bad data.
Part of that was exacerbated by the operators applying techniques used on subs (something about preferring to keep low pressure in some vessel, because high pressure there could sink the boat if containment was lost), the TMI design didn't need this as it could vent/blow-off, and the operators became somewhat fixated on "trying to save the boat" and missed a bunch of procedures.
Of course this doesn't invalidate your point, but even if the reactor designs are really similar, it may be a mistake to cross train anyone.
(disclosure: haven't seen this video in a year or so, and am generally a fan of nuclear power considering the alternatives, but it needs to be done with different, safer reactor designs and probably with new branding because no matter what it's going to take _forever_ to convince anyone to trust nuclear, when they associate that term with the dangerous, BWR designs that were never intended for land)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xQeXOz0Ncs
These things usually boil down to money and power, not {{cultural_issue_of_the_day}}.
The military has been shifting to demographic and gender blinded promotion systems, like this for example: https://hbr.org/2020/11/reinventing-the-leader-selection-pro...
It is in no way the case that affirmative action is being used as an excuse to promote incompetent officers, let alone that this is somehow destroying the military. In fact the military historically has had the opposite problem. "Legacy" counts for far to much, particularly with the families at military academies, leading to a senior leadership structure that is very out of step with ordinary Americans, and fails to grapple the cross cultural international issues inherent to the US projecting military power globally.
Stop disparaging our military with your alt right fantasy nonsense. The rank and file certainly don't deserve it.
It's unclear to me that the military is currently any less effective and efficient than it was in the 90s. In Hollywood films in those days, it was typically portrayed as being incredibly efficient, but that has nothing to do with reality.
My own anecdote says that "The wastefulness of the military budget" has been an issue for many decades -- go look up Eisenhower's warnings of the military/industrial complex, and consider that the problem had been building for quite a while at that point.
Back then, of course, "cultural rot" would've meant "Treating black soldiers as equals"; in the 90s, IIRC, it would've meant "Treating female soldiers as equals". Just wondering, are you in favor of racism and sexism as well, or are you just anti-trans? Please note that anti-trans attitudes are likely to age about as well as racism and sexism have.
IMHO, every social change feels a little weird at the time; you're used to thinking a certain way, and now you're told that it's wrong; people take that sort of things personally. Other self-righteous people sometimes realize they can use the new woke attitude to swan around and club people who're moving more slowly -- bullying, really, and this bullying is the serious problem on the left, not the wokeness itself. We'd all be better off if we were better at granting grace to people making good-faith efforts to change their habits and attitudes.
So social change is hard. But that doesn't make it wrong, or rot, or virtue-signaling; it really does make life better for unfairly marginalized people, and as it spreads, the power of the leftist bullies will dissipate, and we'll be left with a better world overall.
And: if you want to disempower those leftist bullies faster, support racial justice, support women's rights, support trans rights. You don't have to club people over the head with it; just offer quiet support, because it's the right thing to do, and it'll make the bullies all the madder if there's nothing they can use to feel superior to you. :-)
Not all "progress" is good. Societies can change for the worse too.
It's true the seeds of our decline were planted long ago. Some would say as far back as the Enlightenment or even earlier. But things have come to a head rapidly in the last few decades.
I've talked to people in the military and federal agencies about this, and they agree it's gone rapidly downhill lately.
There is a difference between inclusion and affirmative action. Including women and gays in the military is a mistake, I think, for unit cohesion purposes. But affirmative action is much worse, because it creates a nomenklatura of untouchable woke hires and promotions who run everything but are unaccountable to anyone.
Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to go boom.
Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be. First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239 you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.) Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with it.
Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as possible. That means very highly enriched uranium. Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to be treated with extreme security.
Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs, we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when comparing to nuclear.
I would say "citation needed". France typically had a documented public investment plan for nuclear energy, and is enjoying one of the cheapest and low-carbon emission electricity in Europe.
> And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy
I still read this here and there, but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidiaries to exist. How so ?
Other renewable such as hydro are fine, though, but they tend to be already at their max everywhere.
> And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days
We don't have real storage solutions for now. Batteries ? Won't scale. Reversible dams ? Doable if you have the chance to have a lot of hydro.
https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
> but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidies to exist
Citation needed here, too! The unsubsidized costs of solar and wind are still the cheapest sources, so they don't "need" subsidies to be deployed. The existence of tax breaks subsidies for wind/solar doesn't mean that the subsidies are needed, any more than the special tax break subsidies for oil/gas/coal are needed for those sources to keep on going.
> Batteries? Won't scale
This is a very strange claim! Not only do batteries scale beautifully in theory, we already have scaled them for deployment, with GWh grid batteries that can be scaled at the same site to 5-6GWh (Moss Landing, CA). Batteries can be deployed in homes, at distribution substations, underneath utility scale solar or wind farms, at old decommissioned fossil fuel sites so that the transmission capacity can be reused, on one side of a congested transmission line to avoid massive upgrade costs... Batteries are practically defined by their beautiful scalability, a real Swiss Army knife for any grid application
Current global production capacity for the lithium ion types of batteries is 285GWh, which on a GW completely dwarfs global nuclear deployment. Projections from the battery industry are for this amount to increase 10x every five years. And though lithium ion tech is by far in the lead, there are many other chemistries perfectly suited to grid use (but perhaps not cars), if lithium ion's improvement pace ever slows to let them catch up.
We are in a new era for energy, an era that is far more like tech, and less like the staid commodity industry that energy has been for the past century. Depreciation of grid assets is very slow, far slower than the tech change of energy tech, so we need to start paying very close attention to tech change curves if we don't want to waste massive amounts of money and screw up our fight against climate change.
Hydrogen would still be hard to beat for seasonal storage, though.
But how much does a nuclear plant actually cost?
We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors.
But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.
Because the commission is biased towards safety above all else. They need to be more realistic and not cave in to fearmongering. The design needs to be safe, but against a realistic threat model.
The designs also need to be assembly line and not so highly customized. French style reactor designs are good for this reason. Part that holds the reactor? Fine, evaluate for weather and calamity resistance and build per location. The reactor? Hope you like black.
Also with new concepts like micro reactors or reviving long abandoned technology like liquid thorium reactors that would burn what we stupidly label “waste” and if the active systems are interrupted coast to a stop on their own instead of running away like our fast breeder water based designs a lot of the existing regulations and requirements are suddenly moot.
Most importantly Nuclear is the only “clean” technology that is predictable and controllable. Until you have a way to reliably meet base load requirements, fossil fuel generation is going to continue.
So if you really do think that climate change represents impending doom, resisting nuclear power is pretty dumb. It’s not perfect - but there isn’t any technology that is perfect or without some risk. Pretending nuclear is the only energy technology with serious issues is also dumb. 50 years of people painting nuclear as the boogie man hasn’t helped either. If you strongest arguments are emotionally based those aren’t very good arguments at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348520
Is nuclear really safer than solar?
This[1] has some data and estimations for death rates measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour (TWh), which suggests nuclear has 0.07 deaths per TWh, which is marginally higher than wind (0.04), hydro (0.02), and solar (0.02).
So, it's very close!
1. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
The larger deployment of utility-scale solar does seem to have reduced it's death rate. (Many of the solar deaths are from falling off the roof during installation or maintenance. Utility-scale solar is normally on the ground and with better safety measures.)
I think this is fair. /All/ deaths from nuclear and renewable power are due to accidents and bad decisions. Accidents and bad decisions aren't going to go away. It takes a monumentally boneheaded decision to make a nuclear power plant dangerous, but apparently the rate of monumentally boneheaded decisions is one per thirty years at our current level of nuclear power usage.
That rate is very likely to increase as time goes on and reactors become older and thus more prone to failure/some freak low probability incident happening.
The NRC uses a value of $9M for the value of a statistical life. That is, it is worth spending $9M if that will save one expected life.
Nuclear, solar and wind have deaths/energy somewhere in the ballpark of 1 life per 10^10 kWh. So, at $9M/life this cost is roughly $0.001/kWh. This is very small, which says that even minor differences in the cost of energy from various sources will be more important than the direct number of lives lost.
(This would not be true of fossil fuels, though.)
TLDR: it's more important to reduce the cost of energy from these non-fossil sources, and to choose the sources with lowest cost, than it is to make them safer. For nuclear, inherent safety could be useful if it would enable cost to be reduced, but not because nuclear needs to be safer.
All of the problems with nuclear reactors have happened to plants which were designed and constructed in the 1950->1970s. As it turns out, we've learned a ton about safely operating nuclear plants. The problem is upgrading these old plants rarely happens and getting newer plants to replace them is equally daunting.
There are 3 examples of major nuclear plant problems. That doesn't seem like too many.
In contrast, there are hundreds of operating plants. The newer ones are particularly safe because they require positive input to keep the nuclear reaction going. Any sort of earthquake, tsunami, mudslide, etc that causes the plant systems to fail will cause the nuclear reaction to be halted.
Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and fukushima are all impossible in plants built in the last 25 years. (Gen III or newer)
I support research and trials of the SMRs, but you might want to consider the possibility that it really is hard at the full-system level. The human mind does not readily understand invisible, exponential process like radiation.
A statistic that only works because epidemiological studies into the long term effects of radiation exposure are extremely difficult, complex and time consuming.
Something made even more difficult by the fact that we blasted uranium fallout in the atmosphere that's hanging around to this day, so getting a non-affected control group has become pretty much impossible.
Ain't helping that any research attempting to investigate the problem will very quickly be labeled as highly controversial by pro-nuclear lobbies [0]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2696975/
By comparison, atmospheric nuclear tests added 0.11 mSv at their peak in 1963, declining to 0.005 mSv/year today. Chernobyl added 0.04 mSv in 1986, declining to 0.002 today. The nuclear fuel cycle adds 0.0002 to the global average, and is required to be less than 1 mSv for all members of the public.
The highest natural background radiation is in Ramsar, Iran, with 6.0 mSv/year. Studies are ongoing but the evidence so far shows no negative health effects.
Note that Sieverts are normalized to the health effects on the human body. Any concerns about different types of radioactivity are already accounted for in this measurement.
Chernobyl and Fukushima of course caused larger exposures to nearby inhabitants, and these exposures are accounted for in the statistics I mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
This one is particularly interesting considering Fukushima wasn't the first time something like that happened. On the other side of Japan is the Kahiwazaki-Kariwa plant [0], the largest of its kind on the planet.
In 2007 that plant was already hit by an earthquake, shaking the plant beyond design basis, it was shut down for 21 months after that.
And even tho it wasn't affected by the 2011 earthquake that blew Fukushima up, it still was shut down to implement safety improvements, it remains shut down to this day with no date for resuming operations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is a review of "Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop" by Jack Devanney.
Based on the review, the short version is that the regulators use the wrong threat model for radiation (LNT), and a regulatory model which effectively requires nuclear to be unprofitable (ALARA).
The review describes briefly what needs to be changed.
Setting a firm limit on radiation release ahead of time, rather than one based on economics like ALARA just seems like it would be far safer. The other examples also seem like they are bad regulations that don't help safety or construction either. Would be great to see if they could result in more efficient construction.
When regulations prevent deploying something 10x safer than the currently deployed alternatives, they're not making us safer.
LNT stands for Linear No Threshold: cancer risk is directly proportional to dose, that doses are cumulative over time (rate doesn‘t matter), and that there is no threshold or safe dose. This contradicts studies that we have about people who received enough CUMULATIVE doses of radiation that they would be dead if it was at the same time.
ALARA: Radiation should be As Low As Reasonably Achievable. In practice this means that any cost reduction simply means freed money that you're now required to spend on safety.
Nuclear fans like to complain about the LNT, but I don't think they're really thinking this through.
In a nuclear accident, most of the population exposure will be a minor increase spread across a vast population. At those doses, we basically cannot check whether LNT is true or not -- the small cancer incidence it predicts is statistically invisible against all the other causes of cancer.
So foes of LNT want to say "we can't show LNT is correct", which is fine, but then they say "so we must assume the actual effect is smaller, perhaps zero", which is not fine. The evidence doesn't support that second step, and this is not a court of criminal law where radiation must be presumed innocent unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. One might very well argue that one should take a precautionary approach, which is to assume that low level radiation has the worst effect it could have that is not ruled out by evidence. This would imply even larger threat than under LNT.
This would suggest that the risk should be linear with radiation dose. But cells have DNA repair mechanisms. If a person receives a very large dose in a short amount of time, it makes sense that the repair systems might be too overwhelmed to fix all the damage that has occurred. Of course, the repair system isn't perfect, and some small fraction of damage will be permanent. This suggests that LNT should be true for small doses, but the harmfulness of radiation per particle should increase at larger doses.
A few consequences if that's true:
Depending on how the constant coefficient is determined, a fully linear health risk model will tend to overestimate risk at low dose rates, but underestimate at high dose rates.
This also suggests that radiation concentrated in a particular spot on the body is particularly dangerous. The cells in that location will be bearing the brunt of the radiation dose, so their repair systems are more likely to fail. So inhaling a bit of plutonium dust means you're in for a worse time than absorbing an equivalent dose spread out over your body.
Of course, whatever health risk model we choose, it should also be applied to the regulation of coal plants, since they put radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere as a part of their regular operation.
Isn't it true that the proportionality coefficient for LNT was calculated using cancer rates for atomic bomb survivors? The dose for them would be very rapid, and there would be little time for enzymes to be produced. This would explain why such a valley didn't show up in that particular set of data.
A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people had one complaint: that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. It cost several hundred million dollars to get to that point, then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business, and if yes then you still just had a paper reactor.
That's a really difficult environment for investors. They said it would be a huge help just to have a multi-stage process. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and brushed off climate change arguments.
Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and things seem to be improving a bit.
What's to prevent cutting massive corners after the original half plan was approved?
If we started mass producing plants, there would be stronger push for uniformity in design and that would translate into significant cost savings. But no one is going to start mass producing plants because it's so difficult to get just one plant online.
To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.
Kill two birds with one stone and all that…
Or since they are modular if significant long term loads shift geographically, you can easily move them around to where needed too.
I agree the concepts of massive plants aren’t desireable - luckily there are alternatives if we can ever get past the emotional arguments and actually discuss things rationally.
So far everyone who's pursued this small modular reactors built by factories approach has failed in the ambition. Doesn't mean it's impossible but just maybe we should be a bit more bearish than bullish on the idea of this sparking a revolution in the capital costs and time scales of nuclear power.
How do you compare the deaths from a distributed reactor network to the deaths from additional global warming?
And there are far more easily obtainable things than uranium if you want to construct a dirty bomb. Another fantastic anti-nuke red herring.
It's a good investment for taxpayers, unlike subsidizing dino juice.
There are currently more subsidies for solar and wind.
The absence of Pigovian taxes to internalize te environmental externalities is a de facto subsidy equal to the value of the externalized negative impacts (it's paid by society at large through the externalized impacts rather than through government, but the impact is the same.)
Implementing a new tax for CO2 emissions is a much, much bigger political endeavour than simply letting a subsidy expire and not renewing it.
That's why there's not much value in perverting language to somehow argue that fossil fuels are subsidised. They are not, there's no way to "remove subsidies from their dirtier competitors", as the parent poster suggested.
There is a way to tax CO2 emissions, but that's a different discussion altogether.
Governments are not unaware of the environmental impacts, so that impression is accurate.
“Cheap” in quotes because anyone who thinks it is cheap is not accounting for some significant hidden costs.
The tragedy of the commons applies here. If you are not familiar with that, it’s worth looking up. I’ll assume you are.
Government can have a role in mitigating the tragedy of the commons by having the industry pay for the problems they create.
Or government can look the other way, which is a defacto subsidy.
We didn’t used to be a net exporter. Part of the reason fracking even got the traction it has now is that government was alarmed by how much money they were paying for the oil wars, and got desperate for any way to stop the bleeding.
There are only a hand full of temporary cases of local well water contamination with benzene.
Secondly, one take on the Iraq war was that it happened not to obtain fossil fuel resources, but rather to obtain control over them, and prevent them being exploited in a way which threatened the interests of US and/or Saudi oil.
Massive repeated bailouts for the fossil fuel auto industry, gutting of EPA regulations to redefine pollution so as to let oil and gas and auto industries avoid financial responsibility for the pollution and other environmental damage (fracking quakes for example) they cause, and multi-trillion-dollar decades-long wars and military engagements all in the service of oil and gas, taxpayer funded, would beg to differ with your claim.
Hell the 2003 invasion was originally called "Operation Iraqi Liberation" - before that blatant of an acronym was deemed unseemly.
It's amazing that this is being glossed over now when it was such a major part of public discussion at the time. Seems like someone pushing an agenda.
I see this argued a lot for many industries, has it ever actually happened for any of them? It doesn't seem realistic, but I'd love to be wrong.
It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
Right, because free markets are not capable of pricing in externalities (and in fact they actively incentivize externalities). If they were capable of this, fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive, and nuclear would be cheap.
With technological advancement, a little change in regulations could go a long way.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nuclear-Power-Been-Flop/dp/109830...
My dad actually left his role when he was stuck in a pipe shaft in 120 degree heat. A pipe fitter went up and the person who helped him out of the pipe and was fired for not following protocol.
The regulation came in when they started codifying the union rules. There was also an incident where Westinghouse and GE were faking inspections. I don't have specifics on hand.
Generally though, it seems corrupt. At least at the time, the unions essentially controlled construction and wanted to line their pockets, the politicians also lined their pockets. Eventually, the cost was too high to build.
But that cost is largely a function of strong regulations and lack of innovation. If the government gets the ball rolling with subsidies it might get to the point where it doesn't need them anymore. Reducing regulation where appropriate could help too - but in general there are risks and regulation is warranted.
And because it makes so much sense - implement a carbon tax that ramps up slowly to the full cost of the externalities of fossil fuels. It's the most effective thing to fight climate change, but instead of doing that we actually subsidize fossil fuels?!? I don't get it.
2014 was a long time ago. It’s possible both technologies have improved since then. I wonder why we don’t hear about this comparison more.
Real-life non-vaporware solar + battery combo installations are improving and spreading all the time.
By the time vaporware small nuclear materializes outside of demonstration projects (10 years? 20?) there’s no telling how efficient and ubiquitous solar + batteries will be.
[1] https://cdn.britannica.com/s:800x1000/00/196800-050-E30A2B4A...
It's likely to remain the only one with an exclusion zone that big given what we have learned about how low the lethality of Chernobyl was.
Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells - is not a reliable base load provider.
No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store electrical power that’s far more reliable and cost effective than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but we aren’t there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost effective that never get discussed because everyone emotionally freaks out as soon as the word “nuclear” is uttered :p
It’s conparable in place to nuclear if I’m not mistaken, and it’s fault scenarios are less severe.
Especially in US, with vast amounts of deserts, it seems like a no-brainer.
(having said that, climate change is so urgent that I’d say do whatever it takes to get to zero emmissions - be it nuclear or solar)
We do nuclear at scale today. The vast majority of blockers from doing more nuclear at scale today are political; not technical.
That’s the other facet of this that always seems to get overlooked.
Or is your argument just "We're not doing it yet, therefore it can never be done"?
You don’t need one huge plant to manage the baseload when we’re talking about renewables.
You can just as well have the same wattage distributed across multiple places in the country, removing a single point of failure and lowering transmission costs (although requiring a redesign of the energy grid).
No hand waving required. It’s fine for other sources (even nuclear) to fill in the gaps. Also no need for accusations of emotional freak outs. I think the nuclear side has its fair share of deluded people who for some reason pretend that both solar and batteries are not improving year by year. And who pretend that solar advocates demand solar-only solutions. It’s just not the case.
If batteries were viable Elon wouldn’t just be talking about them.
Batteries are no where near the cost efficiency of, say, pumped hydro. Nor can batteries touch the overall capacity of pumped hydro. And pumped hydro can’t happen just anywhere - you need the right physical environment for it to be effective.
So yeah, unless you have something more concrete than “batteries, obviously” it is hand waving.
Just talking? He’s making them at scale.
There is also somewhat of a use case for renewables for powering things that can make do with highly unreliable power. Consider, for example, a desalination plant. The heart of the plant is pumping water through membranes--but do you really need to do that? Lets build our plant differently, build a storage system high enough up that gravity provides the pressure. When you have power you run the pumps to fill the storage system, when you don't have power you don't run the pumps. You need bigger pumps and you need a big storage tank but it can be done.
Or flip the scenario--don't pump the seawater in the first place. Place your desalination plant on the ocean floor and use your pumps to extract the fresh water. In this case you need fresh water storage underwater rather than salt water storage up high.
https://model.energy/
In the 2030 cost model they use, batteries are 142 euro/kWh of capacity and 160 euro/kW of power. This (using 2011 weather data, along with various other assumptions, and also includes use of hydrogen) gives "synthetic baseload" in the US for 53.7 euro/MWh, cheaper than nuclear. The LCOS in batteries and (even more so) in hydrogen is higher than the cost of electricity, but that's ok.
(If you look at other countries, or specific states in the US, the results vary but remain broadly similar. The mix of solar vs. wind can change a lot though. Places like Poland are the worst for renewables in this model.)
There are a few new flywheel plants that have popped up in the US in recent years, and it'll be interesting to compare the material costs and benefits over the coming decades.
If Elon is a willing to start selling power walls at 100$ / kwh retail at scale then we’ll talk.
But if the objective were to curry favour with as many people as possible, subsidising everything works better than leveling the playing field.
Everybody gets a taste.
Since there is not sufficient political consensus for the former in the US, the latter is a good interim solution.
I think it's safe to say we're not operating under a democracy/republic anymore, so whatever will appease the coroporate/banking overlords the quickest is the best path forward.
Right now, it seems the most likely outcome is that we keep using fossil fuels, so I'm desperate for anything!
(The exception are measures such as banning plastic straws, which I oppose because it's actually a significant inconvenience—which means spent political capital—but will do exceedingly little for the planet.)
"Freedom fries?"
Also, I think you're confusing cost and price there.
If nuclear had to compete with coal on actual safety, nuclear would already be cheaper than coal.
It's not fine if you are a private energy company with shareholders who are looking to take on a gain and who are only looking at life one quarter at a time. Executives would rather invest in something cheaper where their investors will see a quicker return, because that's how executives keep their jobs. Executives and shareholders care about themselves and their profit, while the government is designed to care about the collective, although its great power is frequently commandeered by individuals seeking personal profit.
So, yeah, stop subsidizing dirty companies, but also subsidize those solutions that get us out of this mess faster.
Instead, there are coal-> gas and coal->biomass retrofits. Gas works because the installations are TINY compared to coal. Look at Drax, this plan would have replaced the entire capacity of the coal plant. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/30/uk-sued-...
(I think the plan was dropped eventually).
Nuclear to solar I think there is Chernobyl as an example.
New nuclear is a challenge right now, because they're not standardized and the costs and timings are insane. Also, everyone wants nuclear, unless it's in their county. I think we have a good chance of seeing factory produced small nuclear reactors that are easier, cheaper and faster to install than what we have now.
That implies you might need somewhat more land. Take a look around most coal power plants. It's commonly unimproved land because ain't nobody want to live next to that.
> Also the cooling is wildly different, nuclear power plants are built on large bodies of water, If there isn't one, sometimes they built a large dammed lake to have enough water to cool down the reactors in case of an emergency.
You sure it's that different? They both operate on the principle of generating heat to turn water into steam and run turbines. That implies the same amount of generating capacity would require approximately the same amount of water.
With the implication that most of the existing coal power plants are already on bodies of water.
> New nuclear is a challenge right now, because they're not standardized and the costs and timings are insane.
But this is chicken and egg. If you've built none then the first installation you do of its kind has high costs. Build a hundred and that isn't true.
This assumes that the people 1000 years from now won't be much more technologically sophisticated than us and figure out a better way to deal with it in the meantime.
If that's true, and there are humans, but something terrible has happened in the meantime, my guess is that they would much rather some aquifer in the middle of nowhere be polluted than have massive global ecosystem devastation due to pumping CO2 into the air.
In general, the risks from nuclear power are not something to dismiss, but they pale in comparison to the risks of currently acceptable alternatives. Even the very fact that radioactivity decays over some time scale seems to be used against nuclear -- if you pollute the groundwater with cadmium or lead or some other heavy metal, it literally never goes away, so we just accept the risk since no containment can last forever. If fission products decay after 100,000 years though, we have to guarantee containment for that length of time.
If this is a price of clean air and pushing the global warming further into the future we can build a couple of mini pyramids of nuclear doom and call it day.
Reprocessing may have made sense in a world where enrichment was expensive, uranium resources becoming limited, and fast reactors practical. We do not live in a world with any of those properties. Enrichment prices crashed with gas centrifuges; uranium resources are ample; and fast reactors have turned out to be difficult to make competitive even with thermal nuclear reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Nuc...
There's also no good reason to dispose of waste at the moment, since we don't reprocess our nuclear fuel. Existing waste is a future source of fuel.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
To everyone's point removing subsidies is politically challenging (especially as this is almost a red / blue state issue) - however subsidizing something else so that it has a competitive advantage is essentially the same thing albeit the money flow is a bit different.
Edit: Why is this getting downvoted so much without any negative comments? weird...
The Wikipedia page has a nice breakdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy
One way they do this is Percentage Depletion. A mine take out 10% of the available coal, they can deduct 10% of the value of the mine, to the point where the total deductions can exceed capital costs.
There is also deduction that came about because they wanted to promote domestic energy production and reduce dependence on foreign energy fuel, which between the year 2002-2010 awarded $12.2 billion in tax credit to coal alone.
Coal power was probably a net benefit in the beginning, but there are much better alternatives now.
So the answer for what to do with the waste is to build reactors that use it as fuel. That not only doesn't create more long-lived waste, it gives us a way to get rid of what we already have.
But I don't think the scale adds up for that. We don't need this amount of plutonium to make weapons, even if that's what we're doing with some of it. So still destroy the rest of it.
Both are immense problems with immense dangers, but it seems to me that one is clearly easier to solve.
Not to mention the possibility that spent fuel could be of use to future generations for some kind of future science and it would all conveniently be in one place.
Nuclear is predictable which means it’s perfect for base load generation. Something all the other “clean” technologies are not.
There is in fact a limit to how much you can get legislatures to do at once. I’m all for coming up with policies for nuclear waste, I just don’t think it should hold up the construction of reactors. The world is on fire.
It's almost like a form of bike shedding—except that the bike shed is in fact important, but its construction can trail launch, and launch is on a tight deadline.
I would suspect that the nuclear subsidies is taken from the later strategy and not the former. Companies can still compete on the market to produce the cheapest possible energy, while the government are moved away from fossil fuels and into alternatives that are clean and provide the desired stability for which existing subsidies are paying for.
The doomsday clock is ticking and we don't have time to waste debating. We must buy time now
Also, the Navy isn't the the one actually building it. The contracting companies do that. Many of the people who run the systems in the Navy leave and become contractors/consultants for the higher pay.
They are also really good at the operational aspects.
Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
There’s the problem, this kind of short term thinking that is just long enough to let someone else deal with it.
Also, guarantees on paper don’t mean as much as physical reality. Ask any native American or Fukashima resident about how much guarantees are worth.
This is what happens with nuclear power projects: They can take a dumb design, as you said, and people point out the problems beforehand, as you said, then it is built, as you said, regardless.
It's important that it was still built even though people said, beforehand, that it was, as you say, dumb. This is a key point really. These things are still built regardless of the quality of the design.
And then later, reality and physics have their say.
And all the guarantees and promises are broken, and the costs are way higher than were accounted for.
Of course some designs are better, and that is fantastic. I'm all for safety and predictability. I have other problems with nuclear, having nothing to do with radiation or safety, but I agree that there are much safer designs.
Even though there are better and worse designs, and Fukashima may be a bad design with a bad placement, this lack of full accounting for potential costs is a recurring pattern with these huge boondoggle projects.
Great argument.
End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup, then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of millions) get put into an escrow account.
Of course, these new owners are limited liability corporations who find that it's cheaper to provide campaign donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of business.
If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't see the military spending as wasteful government spending in the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some, health programs like Medicaid.
There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the climate change denying sections of the population is to have the military involved in its implementation.
If you think about it, the military has functions of 1) protecting the US against existential threats and 2) providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of the population. Climate change also poses existential threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with renewables.
US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory built small modular reactors vs any other company that's attempted it so far.
The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go home".
I'd love it if someone shows up tomorrow with some clever idea that changes the capital costs and long timelines, but I don't think we should be allocating significant capital towards that as hope alone.
The US did have a floating nuclear power plant for a while, intended for disaster response and such. It ultimately didn't prove to be useful enough vs the cost and complexity of keeping it running. Russia recently completed fabrication of a modern take on the same idea, but it's not clear how useful that will be to them other than being as part of a suite of nuclear technologies they're marketing militarily.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.
All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.
> The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Act
In Fukushima total cleanup costs could go up to a trillion dollars : https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
“Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.
https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.
Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and population density also helps.)
We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables.
1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future.
2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import.
3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built.
The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.
I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a 100% renewable grid is possible.
With enough batteries and 2x-3x power production over demand you can have 100% renewable grid.
It might require to cut amazon forest and cover it with solar panels, but possible, yes.
Just the production side, the cost in a 2019 study put the numbers around $7-9 per kg of hydrogen. This does not take into the account the cost of the pipeline, the storage facility, or the gas powered power plant. Remember that return of investment only occurs when demands actually exceeds that of cheaper renewable production, unless government steps in and adds subsidies like it does today with oil.
Is massive amounts of hydrogen a cheaper and safer alternative to nuclear? Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms I suspect the answer is no on the commercial side. On the safety side it would be interesting to hear about operating large liquid hydrogen pipelines and storage facilities.
Any energy system large enough to power the world will be a very expensive thing. Fortunately, the world economy is also a very large thing, and can pay for it.
We can say with some confidence that while this renewable energy system will be expensive, it will be less expensive than a nuclear energy system that serves the same purpose, and likely cheaper than a system with any substantial amount of nuclear energy.
> Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms
This is a completely bogus argument in an environment where natural gas is still plentiful and legal and its carbon largely untaxed. The CO2 tax needed to get to wind farms + hydrogen being competitive is likely much less than the CO2 needed to get nuclear to be competitive (against natural gas).
As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.
Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January.
NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area.
You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.
We do need more transmission (another thing the White House is working on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...), but power import/export over long distances is already commonplace.
Edit: And if you really want to look to the future, you could read the proposal for a North American Supergrid: http://northamericansupergrid.org/
Anyway, the more important point is that we already have large regional grids across the country, and while it's obviously nice to have generation and consumption close to each other, it's not a requirement.
The numbers I quoted were just for NYC, and they weren’t adjusted for the winter sunlight problem. To power the entire metro area would likely require 40,000 acres. To cover the entire region likely 60,000 acres. This land does not exist.
It isn't that big an area in the scheme of things. If you try to find a single place for it it probably won't work of course, but it is a tiny little fraction of the developed land already devoted to New York.
New York State is 35 million acres. You don't think 0.2% of that, including rooftops of existing buildings, might be useable for solar/wind/battery storage? And again, NY already uses tons of out-of-state energy.
2) Rooftop solar
3) National grid improvements that make transferring power from renewable sources further away more efficient
4) There are massively huge areas of empty land within 100 miles of NYC. This map shows roughly the 100 miles west of NYC. Take note of all of that unused space, which is most of it: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7560624,-75.4552232,170414m/...
I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
You don’t need to cover the whole planet.
No one questions whether the zero emissions target is rational. Natural gas in North America should complement the variability of wind and solar, IMO.
Your statement there is the equivalent of "work harder, not smarter."
Coastal mayors and governors have access dashboard to order nuclear submarines and pay by the hour. Submarine plant comes within a week, plugs itself to the local grid from the shore and electricity flows in. You may want to reserve an instance for a year or the submarine may move to a higher bidder municipality. Emergency cooling handled by construction even in worst case scenarios, no pumping necessary.
Regulations are fine because the submarine plants are not built in your country. Nuclear waste moves out of the country with the submarine when submarine is done powering your local grid. A real-time marketplace lets cities and countries worldwide bid to host the waste for good money.
For reference, natural gas power plants can hit the GW range easily. Even those diesel backup generators you see outside of hospitals and such are about 1kW. You could throw a bunch of those on a tanker ship and probably provide more power output than a nuclear sub reactor.
If it were, then massive amounts of money and time wouldn't go into trying to make it safe. Nuclear control rooms wouldn't be locked down like Fort Knox. And every major population center would have a nuclear power station nearby.
There's this idea that the only thing stopping nuclear from saving the world is a bunch of hippies perpetuating a myth that it's not safe — like nuclear energy is a genetically modified tomato.
It's not that. It's actually just not safe — or rather, the only way of making it safe is by having round the clock security, big brains monitoring it the whole time, and lots of money.
So, given that climate change will bring with it more pandemics, civil unrest, and natural disasters, is it wise to assume that there will always be people around who know how to look after nuclear power stations? Or people who can stop terrorists who want to make dirty bombs from the waste?
There's a reasonable argument to be made that it's a risk we should take to avoid worse distasters.
But, given that there are cheaper alternatives, that don't take a decade to build, why don't we just not build nuclear?
Let's generate non-controversial power, while massively reducing our usage.
As for “cheaper” - citation needed. Especially for handling base load requirements in reliable and predictable ways. Most of the cost around nuclear power, especially in the United States, is from bloated, ineffectual policy decisions designed to artificially suppress it.
I do agree we should be doing more with the existing “waste” - we should be burning it in better reactor designs instead of burying or storing it. Note I didn’t say newer or modern designs - we have had the technology since the 50’s to burn what we (ridiculously) term “waste” today but it wasn’t pursued for numerous political and ill informed social issues. These designs also coast to a natural stop if their support systems are interrupted, negating the problems of active systems (like cooling) failing leading to problems in most of our currently deployed reactors.
But is it only safe, because lots of time and energy goes into making it safe? If the systems keeping it safe no longer exist — let's say all the security staff are killed by a pandemic, or there's a civil war, or society collapses, is it still safe?
I can put a solar panel on my roof and not have to worry about it destroying my neighbourhood — even in the event of a disaster.
> cheaper
It's well documented now that solar is the cheapest energy source.
That may well be because it's had a lot of investment — maybe if people weren't so afraid of nuclear it would be the cheapest instead — but given that it isn't and we're on the clock...
Using old waste to power nuclear reactors sounds like a good idea — but is it possible in our time frame? If yes, then I'd be on board, but I suspect the answer is that it that it isn't.
Also, it is the potential of catastrophic events that is the issue here.
Look at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on the central coast in California. This thing sits on a fault line. Without a retrofit, it wouldn't have survived a Fukushima event.
If this thing would have blown up, half a million people would have been directly affected and massive cleanup costs.
That is unacceptable risk and it is economically unjustified to add more risk by building additional plants.
Especially when to power the world we might be talking about 100,000 SMRs.
Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-te...
0.04 deaths per TWH of nuclear vs 0.01 deaths per TWH of solar in 2012!
Am I seriously supposed to ignore the fact that nuclear metldowns have the potential to kill millions of people — because they didn't in 2012?
Edit: sorry that sounded mean.
Can you elaborate on how meltdowns are supposed to be able to kill millions of people? We've already experienced the worst-case scenario in a nuclear catastrophe: Chernobyl.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this was a worse-case scenario: A complete reactor containment failure with no secondary containment. Burning fuel rods were directly exposed to the atmosphere for days. In the end this directly killed 50 people. A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from cancer related to the incident. But to date only 60 people are known to have died due to radiation exposure from Chernobyl.
So yeah I think you're several orders of magnitude off in your risk assessment of nuclear power.
> A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from cancer related to the incident.
How many people could conceivably be downwind of a nuclear meltdown? I think it could be much much more than that.
I can't imagine why we would not include the people who eventually die of cancer.
That's just meltdowns. Given that you can also use nuclear material to create weapons, I'd also point you toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples.
The point I was making in my original comment, is that it's only safe when the systems are in place to keep it safe.
Which is not something you can guarantee.
> How many people could conceivably be downwind of a nuclear meltdown? I think it could be much much more than that. I can't imagine why we would not include the people who eventually die of cancer.
The several thousand figure does include the people who are predicted to eventually die from cancer.
Only 31 people died as a direct consequence of the meltdown.
Also, even worst-case scenario like Chernobyl ultimately wasn't that bad. Several natural disasters in the 2000's have killed way more than it did.
The problem with statements like this is that we don't actually know what a worst case scenario truly looks like. The day before Chernobyl, the worst-cast scenario, by definition, not as bad as Chernobyl. Similarly, the engineers who built Fukishima were aware of tsunamis and earthquakes and built the plant to withstand what was considered the worst case scenario at the time. Then an even worse case scenario happened.
Nuclear is a proven, safe tech that pumps out steady, squeaky-clean energy. People imagine that it’s dangerous because of high-profile accidents but don’t see the daily small catastrophes caused by every other tech.
Nuclear wins, hands down. It’s just such a no-brainer. It’s like we’re back in the days of Edison and Tesla and AC vs DC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
If all Nuclear had desalination, it still wouldn't offset it's waste heat capture problem which ruins downstream ecologies.
[1] https://monarchpartnership.co.uk/nuclear-power-water-consump...
Mining lithium is a horrible, polluting process that wastes tons of fresh water. One thing to put small quantities into phones and computers. Another to suggest that they should be used for all cars (unless the end goal is to have only the super rich driving cars).
Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving away from the coal economy) and quartz, and will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
Wind turbines can’t be repurposed after their useful and short (comparatively) life and will pile up as junk.
It’s not even a question of “don’t have catastrophic outcomes”, it’s a question of a slow-moving guaranteed catastrophic outcome, or the possibility of a fast catastrophic outcome.
I can't think of any use for coal in production of a solar panel, so is your argument here that manufacturing anything uses electricity and therefore coal?
That doesn't seem like a good argument. Especially given that a nuclear plant tends to involve a huge quantity of concrete (which gives off major amounts of greenhouse gases and requires mining as well).
> will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
The lifespan of a commercial panel is 25-30+ years (most look to be warrantied to 25)
Failure rates appear to be very low, per NREL: https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2017/failures-pv-panels-de...
And in reality, many will continue producing power longer than that, just at a lower rate than their original nameplate capacity. I expect most of those solar farms will wind up in service for many decades.
Claiming that their lifespan is 10 years is something I feel needs some sort of supporting evidence.
Silicon is produced by carbothermic reduction of silica in arc furnaces. Charcoal can be used, though (and is use by some producers; I think the porosity helps silicon monoxide gas react with the carbon.)
What's really missing for nuclear is economics of scale. If we could just organize a repeatable build model so many operational challenges would be solved.
That said, I'll take anything. Wind, solar, batteries, tidal, nuclear. They're all far, far better than coal or oil from a public health and climate change standpoint. It's such a shame so much was wasted on the Iraq War, since the entire USA could have been powered by green energy with half what was spent.
A fall from a rooftop while installing a solar panel is preventable; it is not a necessary consequence of solar energy. That worker didn't have to die for the sake of two terawatts; he or she could have used safety equipment and common sense.
If we are counting deaths that way per amount of energy, we must count electrocutions among the energy user base too, not only installation and production side deaths.
If there are health risks and accidents working in a solar panel factory, that ought to be counted.
Installations and deaths across the entire grid should be counted: deaths of all electricians installing any sort of residential and commercial wiring, transformers on poles down the street, and everything else.
Possibly deaths arising form unreliable electricity should also be counted as risks of energy use. If a few people die in a heatwave because their AC cuts out due to a blackout, maybe those are energy-related deaths.
Health problems and accidents in solar panel factories should be counted, as well those in mines for nuclear ore, and industries that produce all grid components: wiring, switch boxes, transformers, you name it.
Deaths in every vehicular accident involving an electrician en route to a repair job should also be counted (whether the electrician was at fault or not).
But given that we don't have perfect numbers we have to go off of the ones we have, and solar installations are over 4x the death rate than nuclear. The only reason I bring it up is this constant barrage of anti-nuclear sentiment even though nuclear works great in countries where it is approached correctly. Canada and France, for example, have professional, reasonable cost nuclear that create the medical isotopes we need.
It's all besides the point though, because coal is 1000x more fatal than nuclear, and like I said in my original comment, I'll take anything but coal and oil.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
We are at the point now where there are enough “options on the table” (solar, onshore offshore wind, hydro, nuclear, various storage applications ) that incentives should go towards the cheapest “clean electrons”, regardless of technology. This way the money contributed as subsidy can go the furthest distance.
Nuclear power’s Achilles heel on the economics side are particularly problematic for new builds. With increasing construction costs (compared to declining solar and wind), an almost 10 year timeframe to build out, and potentially half a century operating lifespan, it can be hard to ultimately pencil out. That said, nuclear refurbs and upgrades of existing setups is probably a better direction, even if life extension is likely to be more limited.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM2RxWtF4Ds
Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy in a world that will require more electricity if it uses electric vehicles and move away from fossil fuels. The coal and gaz industry love renewables because you NEED gaz and coal if there's no wind or sun.
Please look at the number.
One of the many issues with solar that doesn’t get addressed.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge proponent of solar when it make sense. I grew up in the Desert Southwest so it can make a lot of sense there in particular.
But solar is NOT a replacement for technology like nuclear energy.
How many miles of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery backup are needed to produce the same amount of energy as a single nuclear plant? I imagine if you do the math at scale, it turns out to be negligible, if not more expensive for renewables.
> “Repowering is happening and will increase. It’s a great opportunity to get more energy from today’s wind farms. Repowering reduces the number of turbines by a third while tripling the electricity output. And it preserves the existing wind farm sites which often have the best wind conditions. Governments need repowering strategies that set the right framework and ensure efficient permitting procedures for repowering”, says WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson.
Most of the material used in wind turbines can be recycled:
> Wind turbines are a valuable source of resources which can be reused in the circular economy. 85-90% of a dismantled wind turbine are recycled today, including the towers, foundations, generators and gearboxes. Most of these materials are made up of concrete, steel and cast iron which are easy to recycle and for which there is an active circular economy market in Europe.
https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/what-happens-...
As for size, sure, nuclear plants are more compact. But you can't build nuclear plants on top of people's houses, or in the North Sea. Investors and actuaries have done the math, and renewables are just plain cheaper per Kwh, at least in today's landscape.
You can't compare wind turbines from 70 years ago to today. (I noticed the convenient deemphasizing of solar farms. Look up issues with abandoned solar farms.)
The last point is moot. Land is abundant in America. I also question the hand-wavy "investors have done the math"
Same with solar cells. I see them putting up thousands of acres of solar cells in the Nevada desert - will be fun to see what happens 20 years from now. Local cities who leased the land out to those farms are making money now - but are they going to get stuck with an expensive clean up if those companies go bust in 20 years because the market changes, subsidies have ended, etc? It’s nuts.
People bristle at terms like “virtue signal” - here’s an opportunity for our “elites” to show some real leadership.
I won’t hold my breath.
Ironically, wind turbines are more efficient than nuclear power plants. Solar panels are not, but at least they do direct energy conversion from sunlight (whereas the nameplate efficiency of nuclear power plants additionally ignores the requirements of the fuel processing chain that starts with removing mountains of ~500ppm ore these days).
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/exclusive-india-may-buil...
Renewables are better on a raw $/KW measure. But that's a naive way of assessing intermittent sources. Once you start saturating the market during peak production, only part of the newly installed capacity actually displaces fossil fuels. Non-intermittent sources of energy like hydroelectricity and nuclear power aren't subject to this constraint
> We're already starting to hit during peak renewable production
What do you mean by that?
This is why most renewable plans assume that there will be some silver bullet that makes energy storage effectively free. Without some way to turn an intermittent source into a consistent source, it'll be very difficult to decarbonize with wind and solar.
Nuclear can replace fossil fuels today. If we finally get other renewables to a place where they can address issues like predictability and reliability, then we look at de-commissioning nuclear.
But preemptively removing a very viable tool from your toolset is just bananas.
> Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy
NEVER is a long, long time. We definitely need nuclear to step in for quite a while, but it's plausible that we can be completely renewable and non-nuclear some time in the future.
Why wait? I'm quite aware of the various downsides of nuclear. Yes, it's currently expensive. But one way or another, every functional nuclear power plant displaces several natural gas and coal plants.
It's really that simple.
If we assume that CH4 and CO2 emissions have a strong chance of being an existential threat to our civilization, then we can make no other option but to embrace nuclear ASAP, even with all of its problems.
At the same time, pour funding into research: there's all kinds of fission technologies that show promise in safety, cost and in minimizing byproducts.
Even more important, pour funding into batteries and other energy storage technologies.
As far as renewables have come, we they have hardly scratched the surface for base load requirements. Except for hydro in some locations.
Not really. I'm just saying that all renewable, non-nuclear is possible...some time in the future.
Realistically, I think even in some kind of idealized future, there will be a lot of nuclear power in the mix. Hopefully it's safe, low cost and produces minimal harmful byproducts.
In truth, if nuclear can get excellent enough, which is a real possibility, then it becomes effectively more clean than solar and wind, right? The energy density is so high, there is a LOT less to build.
Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as well, if needed.
> Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as well, if needed.
From my perspective, there are a lot of things that become significantly easier to do if we can produce as much energy as possible, ranging from synthesizing liquid fuels from air and water (chemically possible but energy-intensive) to extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it in some sterile chemical sludge that we can pump into empty oil wells to large-scale water desalination (combined with removing the salt). And that’s just in the realm of climate change and sustainability—we are also going to need energy to do new things, not just to do the same things we’re doing now with less ecological impact, or even reversing the ecological impacts we’ve already caused.
We’re going to find productive uses of energy faster than we’re going to be able to develop the energy production needed to sustain them. So I’m not sure we’ll be given the choice—we’ll need to do both. The main difference being that a high amount of nuclear baseload would obviate the need for batteries.
Seriously large amounts of sustainably created energy opens all kinds of doors, and might actually be one of the only ways out of our current and upcoming climate crisis.
And solar/wind are also "cheap" because they are mostly produced in mainland China, with coal and cheap labor (including "very cheap labor": https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...). Not a very sustainable solution...
Since they use so much of it, that would build up capacity for other uses, and the subsidy doesn't even have to necessarily go straight to nuclear power, which might improve the optics.
Here's a discount for specialty concrete that only nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams would be interested in...
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Coun...
WWS would be sufficient for the majority of countries around the world including the US and all it takes is the political will to implement this. Not technology.
Which they conveniently hand wave off since that was a subject for another paper.
If they had confidence in their ideas, they would at least summarize the findings of that paper that justify their implying the grid as not being an issue in the practicality of their plan. For example: even if the grid is 100% reliable (which - spoiler - it’s not), what are the sizing implications due to transmission loss? How do you get power across continents to have true geographic diversity? This paper presents all upside with no downside? Ha!
Again, nice theory in a perfect world. We do not live in a perfect world.
Well since they are countering the unreliable generation arguments with “unreliable generation isn’t a problem if you have enough diverse sources” - if you can’t interconnect those diverse sources then you don’t have much of a solution, do you?
Nice theory, zero discussion of how you make the theory practical reality.
Edited after cooler head prevailed.
Let's see - the per capita total energy consumption - which includes transportation, industry, agriculture (everything) in the US is 80 MWh yearly[0]. The global population is expected to peak at 10 billion. Assuming the whole world consumes energy like a drunk sailor like the US does (and by the way, BEVs, for example, are twice as energy-efficient per mile than gasoline vehicles [1]) - that comes to 800 PWh.
The average solar cell produces 150 watts per square meter[2]. Running at 6 hours per day for a year, thus a square meter produces 0.3285 MWh. Therefore you need 2.4 million sq. km of land to supply the total global energy consumption (where the average consumption is 15 times higher than current consumption) only through solar. How much land is it? Quite a lot - twice that of India, and a quarter of the Sahara desert[3]. But remember this is spread all over the world. As a percentage of the total land area, it's not even a single percent. Agriculture itself consumes 60 times more area than this.
However, this is only from solar. The current state-of-the-art offshore turbines produce 15MW peak power already. Such a turbine has a rotor diameter of 236m. The optimal distance between turbines is 10D, where D is the rotor diameter [5]. Thus assuming a 50% capacity factor, an offshore wind farm produces 11.8 kWh per square meter per year. You would also need 12 million such turbines to supply the entire world's energy consumption per year. Assuming we get half of our annual energy consumption from offshore wind, you would need 33 million square kilometers covered in wind turbines. When it comes to areal efficiency wind, it is an order of magnitude worse than solar - however, the advantage is that the area is mostly free. Offshore turbines spaced kilometers apart can coexist easily with shipping lanes, while onshore turbines can and do exist without issues with ranches and farmland. By the way, the US coastline itself is 150,000km [6]. Thus, if you cover the coastline with turbines (only five deep), you can only generate the entire combined US energy demand from offshore wind.
And we have not touched on rooftop solar and onshore wind at all. So I fail to see how renewables will NEVER supply enough energy to the world.
References:
[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1
[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml#:~:text=EVs%20h....
[2] https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolat....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara
[4] https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1706915/vestas-laun...
[5] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/29/14495
[6] intrasight ↗ Even in the super unlikely case that we institute a (much needed) carbon tax, I just can't see nuclear ever being competitive in a free market. By "competitive" I mean no insurance subsidies. downrightmike ↗ Really? Just spend the billions to build them directly and cut out the bloat.