The timing of the cold war and the climate change crisis have been unfortunate. A lot of people in the west were opposed to nuclear power, often due to the association with our struggle against the communist world.
If we'd kept going with nuclear, we'd have more investment and more experience in it and it's hard to know for sure, but you could make an argument that we'd be in less of a pickle with the carbon reduction goals. We'd know more about how to make it safer and we'd know more about how to make it better.
Also the million year commitment to storing trash.
Globally building nuclear power plants will be too slow to solve climate change. We still should keep it to solve future problems. Like conquering the universe and stuff.
Hardly. Most of it decays quite fast. (think tens of years to get below backround radioactivity) While there is some extremely long lived radioactive waste, it is, quite frankly, miniscule in the amount.
Radioactive stuff is kinda interesting. Longer it is active less it produces radiation, more it produces faster it breaks down... Ofc, it is not that clear cut as power of radiation differs.
It is just that I wouldn't be too worried about properly stabilised long lived waste. Just like I'm not too worried about natural uranium...
> I don’t think anyone is afraid of nuclear power, I mean, some people are but no one serious.
People are afraid of it, I have spoken with multiple people which are fundamentally/seriously afraid of nuclear power.
Also most idk. 5
50+ years old people (i.e. majority of people with power) in the Green German party (and other parties) have spend their "Jung political years" by being obsessed with stopping Nuclear power, try convincing them that maybe we need it. (Or try make them accept that their movement had been partially financed and instrumentalized by eastern Germany, or that most problems of nuclear wast storage in the area which once was western Germany are 100% fault of the Politician of the time choosing a known to be bad mine for petty reasons).
We're from the same country, so I know a bit about it.
There was always a fear of contamination, and the Three-Mile-Island accident in the US didn't help. This was before Chernobyl. But of course it's worth remembering why everyone thought that might be such a big problem: there was a siren each Wednesday reminding people that we're in a Cold War, and if it turns hot there's a nuke somewhere with "Copenhagen" written in Cyrillic. So people understood that nuclear fallout is not nice. Plus Denmark ain't big, so basically if something were to happen the whole country could be radioactive. For the same reason, many Danes took issue with the Swedes building a nuclear plant that you can still see from Copenhagen.
The OOA (the organization that led the anti-nuclear movement) made a nice logo with a smiling sun and a "Nuclear Power? No Thanks" message that got thousands of people on the street to protest. Some of the people maintained that if we only could solve what to do about the waste, they'd be fine with it. Often the debate has been "if the tech were better I'd be for it".
I'm not sure this is a reasonable decision. Tech gets better with experience, and you don't build experience by not engaging. Much like mini-mills from Clayton Christensen, often the tech that wins looks crappy and niche when it starts.
Nuclear power has plenty of problems even without the association with bombs. How about the very real association with accidents with civilian nuclear reactors. And how about the fact that after each one of them the industry always said that this would never happen again and then it happened again.
I am not sure what you mean "if we kept going with nuclear". We are keeping going with it. It is a continued disaster. The last plant being built, two reactors at Vogtle are now estimated to cost over 25 billion, a massive overrun over an original estimate of 14 billion. That construction already caused the bankruptcy of one of the builders (Westinghouse), massive losses at another (Chicago Bridge and Iron). Eventually Chicago Bridge and Iron was acquired at depressed valuation by McDermott, but the valuation was not depressed enough because McDermott itself declared bankruptcy last year.
Just last month there was another 3 month delay announced at Vogtle. This will certainly increase costs even more.
There is also the VC Summer plant that was recently cancelled after massive delays and cost overruns. That plant was also partially to blame for Westinghouse's bankruptcy.
What makes these examples nuclear power problems, rather than bad organization problems? Large projects are known to have issues like cost overruns. Airports, carriers, etc are all things that tend to cost more than the sticker price.
Look at cars. People used to get run over all the time, they'd hurt themselves in crashes, etc. But so much effort has been spent investing in them that things like seat belts became a thing, we made laws about driving, and so on.
You also have to look at the tradeoffs. Putting carbon in the air is basically a bad idea, and we need to reduce it. Here's a replacement for doing that, we should put some of our chips on that. Perfectly fine to have windmills as well, not saying there aren't other bets.
Did it happen again? We haven't had anything close to another Chernobyl, and that was 35 years ago (more than 50% of the entire history of the nuclear power industry.)
Why are these cost overruns an issue? The solutions our politicians are putting forward now are going to cost taxpayers trillions and just go to some vague idea of green energy. I’d much rather throw that at nuclear research and building nuclear plants, as opposed to some slush fund that will only line insiders pockets.
> The main reason for the success of the pro-nuclear movement is the failure of renewables and the global energy crisis. The share of global energy from fossil fuels is unchanged since 1980 because solar and wind do not replace fossil fuel power plants, and, in fact, depend upon them. Only baseload hydro-electric and nuclear power plants can replace fossil fuels. And over-investment in unreliable renewables and underinvestment in nuclear, hydro-electricity, and natural gas, over the last decade, directly resulted in today’s energy shortages, skyrocketing electricity prices, and a return to coal around the world.
> The most important thing is to tell the truth about nuclear, I argued to friends and colleagues, starting in 2016, and build an honest pro-nuclear movement worldwide around the truth. Anti-nuclear people have been lying about the technology for decades.
> The renewable energy industry has financed misinformation efforts against us. We have been censored by Facebook. And we have lost some supporters. But through it all, EP kept up our work, directly supporting and championing the work of pro-nuclear advocates around the world, giving popular TED talks, and writing a best-selling book, Apocalypse Never, which has been translated into 15 languages
In Finland 18% of all energy is produced with Nuclear, which almost the double of the global average (~10%). We don't have earthquakes or other very strong weather phenomena (apart from freezing temperatures up to -40C/-40F), which makes Nuclear a very feasible option.
Not to forget stable geology suitable for long term storage of our own waste. Solar isn't great for most of the year. Wind is some parts, but long periods of downtime. Hydro can't really be extended. Geothermal would require very deep wells. Outside biomass nuclear is only sane option.
That is blowing the risks out of proportion. Normal houses won't be earthquake proof, and people will actually be living in them and get squished if there is a bad earthquake. There will be death and destruction.
Whether or not the nuclear plant survives intact is a bit of a minor issue. It just has to fail without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake.
Citing Fukushima - Fukushima was bad. Bud the mounds of corpses caused by the natural disaster that also caused Fukushima are a far more important thing to spend resources preventing than Fukushima itself was.
> without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake
You're overlooking the exaggerated panic-and-horror reaction of the public to literally any kind of nuclear incident. If you design merely for statistically acceptable results it's basically guaranteeing political blowback at some point.
The Dominant Media has an exaggerated role in this when they whip up paranoia for ratings (really no different than Facebook prioritizing angry posts in your feed — eyeballs get ads).
IMHO being hit by a natural disaster is by far better than the same + also radiation (not even mentioning lack of electricity). I wouldn't mind a nuclear power plant to cost twice its normal cost if that could make the latter completely impossible.
But if you had to pick one to prevent, preventing the disaster is more important. So before earthquake-proofing the nuclear plant you should worry about earthquake proofing your home.
There is an objective ordering to what should be earthquake-proofed. Nuclear plants are not actually at the top of the list to worry about - places where people are likely to live and work are. Draw up a list of things that hurt people around the time of the Fukushima disaster. Fukushima barely makes the list. Fukushima might not even be on the list, the toll in human suffering of Fukushima is very small compared to the natural disaster that hit Japan that day.
We can also overbuild the nuclear plant because nuclear is so crazily efficient why not. There is only one plant to secure. But it isn't a blocker if it doesn't happen, and it is an irrational concern.
> But if you had to pick one to prevent, preventing the disaster is more important. So before earthquake-proofing the nuclear plant you should worry about earthquake proofing your home.
If I could, I would earthquake-proof and flood-proof everything even where the probability of these dissertation is near-zero. But this obviously isn't going to happen (in fact it baffles me how people insist on living non-proof way even in areas where disastrous floods actually happen every now and then).
Nevertheless I feel like I would prefer my home destroyed and even myself crippled over the neighboring nuclear power plant blowing up.
> Nevertheless I feel like I would prefer my home destroyed and even myself crippled over the neighboring nuclear power plant blowing up.
How much have you thought about it? Again, Fukushima, one of the worst nuclear disasters of all time. As far as I know nobody crippled.
I'd go for the plant meltdown myself, I like life, liberty and having use of my legs. It is reasonably likely that nobody would get hurt in a meltdown, the damage is largely economic.
I just fear the radiation which might come out. I believe loosing a home and a leg is better than getting irradiated. It would probably ruin my nighttime sleep for the rest of my life if my body would start glowing in the dark, you know :-]
I am a proponent of nuclear power generation nevertheless.
> I just fear the radiation which might come out. I believe loosing a home and a leg is better than getting irradiated.
Why? Even purely on that scenario you'r cutting off your leg to avoid a typically undetectable statistical risk.
We've got 50 years of records on the risk of plant meltdowns, a surprise earthquake hitting homes that aren't prepared is much, much worse than a nuclear plant meltdown. An earthquake will kill people. There will be deaths. Destruction. Suffering on a scale that is much worse than a nuclear meltdown.
You should earthquake proof your house if you think that is a possible risk.
consequences of having a considerable area contaminated and uninhabitable for basically forever are not to be understated. humanity does not have the tools to predict black swans which lead to such results.
you're seeing what happened and extrapolate the future based on this. what didn't happen is equally important. Chernobyl was the worst accident, but it was by far not the worst possible outcome. e.g. if the core burned through concrete and contaminated ground water, it'd be way, way worse.
Nuclear energy is clean, until it is not. When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.
Such 180 degree swings in public opinion seems dangerous. In 2018 Macron talks about reducing France' reliance on nuclear energy [1], now he declares its a tool to achieve energy independence [2].
Building, maintaining, upgrading and dealing with issues caused by nuclear reactors is a very engineering and science heavy.
I am curios if there is enough talent to be able to do it? Will this rhetoric be attended with enough investment in education to make sure that we have talent to service this need for generations? Nuclear energy skill is akin to space exploration, just because the nation had Apollo program and could put a man on the moon 50 year ago, does not mean it can do it now. If it were not for Elon and SpaceX US would not have an ability to bring astronauts to ISS without a third nation. Financial investment alone won't solve it, as you need time to establish pool of qualified people.
"We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country and continue to develop renewable energies," – so people who launched it in the past have long retired? The newes reactor in the US was launched in 2016, the newest plant is 1996, so 20+ years ago.
And there are still problems to be solved with nuclear energy. The most obvious one – nuclear waste. No one wants to have in their backyard. Once it is stored, it is essentially a permanent commitment to keep it safe there until a better option emerges. A better option will emerge if there is a constant effort to find it. But what if something goes wrong, how will the public and politicians react? Are they going to reverse 180 again? Fukushima scared politicians, that were afraid of saying "nuclear energy" in public for 10 years.
In the US, nuclear goes wrong before construction even begins. Typically, many billions of dollars, sometimes tens of, are spent, rolling into a broad selection of pockets for years before the project is, finally, ignominiously cancelled. Often a great deal of concrete has been poured. No one is indicted. The money is just "gone".
Are you referring to 2 new units at Vogtle? What scares me there is that there were already few acquisitions and reactor manufactured filed for bankruptcy. Seems like entities that started it aren't the same, that are finishing it.
And all for 2GW, provided it ever produces any power at all: "We spent $30B, and you have nothing. Give us more $billions, and maybe you might get something" does not inspire confidence.
Imagine how much solar that $30B could have bought.
But the real reason I'm replying is to ask why the waste factor is only ever brought up for nuclear, and not for coal (which also emits radiation into the atmosphere), wind (do you know how old turbine blades are disposed?), gas (where does the CO2 go?), etc.
Nuclear waste is such an overblown risk. If something is highly radioactive, it won't be radioactive for long. If it is lowly radioactive, it isn't a big problem to begin with. Conflating these two things so that people think that waste is both highly radioactive and radioactive forever was a fantastic trick by the environmental lobby, and one that has almost certainly doomed the ecosphere since instead of relying on clean nuclear power, we continued to rely on fossil fuels, adding decades of emissions to the atmosphere. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory...
No, that's not the question at all. You are lumping together all forms of nuclear waste, and applying the long-term storage requirement of the least dangerous waste to the dangerous waste that is only radioactive for a few decades.
Pretending that there is even a need to securely store material for millennia when equally radioactive products are found everywhere in the Earth's crust is disingenuous. Below a certain level it isn't any more dangerous than loads of other chemicals we have lying around that nobody cares about.
When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.
Coal-fired power stations release significantly more radioactive material into the atmosphere than any nuclear accident[1]. If your concern is about radioactive material then worry about coal ash first.
Massive banks of toxic lithium or lead based batteries to store solar energy? Wonder what the end of life plan for those batteries will be. And you thought nuclear waste was bad…
> When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.
I encourage you to look at the numbers for yourself. The equivalent baseload power technologies are all WAY more dangerous.
Go and tally up the human casualties from nuclear over its entire history. Use the most damning numbers you can possibly find. Go ahead and include the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you like. Include any count of potential cancer cases too. Even using the most biased, openly political casualty counts you can find, it is challenging to get to 1.5 million over the entire history of the power source. If you stick to relatively credible sources you'll certainly be below half a million.
Now look at the human casualties from coal when it's working properly. No accidents, just regular power production. The first duckduckgo result for me estimates about 8.7 million deaths per year, not including accidents, bombs, or non fatal casualties.
The casualty rate from nuclear's entire history doesn't even approach the death rate from coal, oil, or gas in a single year.
> nuclear waste
One person lifetime of electricity creates about 350ml (about a coke can) of solid nuclear waste. We know where that waste is, and what it is doing. We can monitor and control access and keep people away from it.
In contrast, one person lifetime of coal power produces hundreds of thousands of TONS of waste, much of which is also radioactive, but lets not forget about the toxic heavy metals and carbon. Most of that waste goes into the atmosphere, where it cannot be tracked or controlled at all, and where it causes millions of deaths per year. To be fair a lot of it goes into the water and ground, too.
The fact that there are options AT ALL for nuclear waste puts it miles ahead of the competition.
Nuclear is by far the lowest carbon, safest, lowest waste universally available baseload power source ever invented. Casualties from nuclear aren't even a rounding error compared to the alternatives on the table.
You are absolutely right however, that it is highly volatile politically.
If we could get away with it, I would prefer if we could stick to options that are not so centralized.
Unfortunately the sun doesn't shine everywhere all the time (especially in higher latitudes during their winter), and wind power is not perfect everywhere either, so nuclear will be a necessary evil as part of the mix alongside other low carbon options.
I say necessary evil not only because of safety and proliferation issues, both of which can be mitigated by some designs although choice of those designs is not assured, but rather because of central control, large budgets, political lobbying, and the corruption and massive consumer and taxpayer costs that all that tends to bring on.
Rolls-Royce are developing small modular reactors which will help decentralise nuclear power as you’d have fewer small reactors spread over a larger area.
SVBR design has been around since 1995 or so. Other than geopolitical issues, main problem is that any mass production would eat considerable percentage of world's bismuth production.
However the design is safe and based on battle-tested submarine reactors from Alfa class attack subs.
I love the aspect of rolling out more nuclear as a solution, but the centralization issue is a good point. While I love the idea of rolling out more Nuclear, I still don't see it as a forever and always solution. Nuclear at the very least, should be a viable option until other green energy sources get further along in their development where needed. I would love to see a day when people could generate most of all their energy needs themselves.
And why couldn't that be with a small nuclear battery ? Can you point to anything that could make remotely sense everywhere on the planet and in space?
> Unfortunately the sun doesn't shine everywhere all the time (especially in higher latitudes during their winter), and wind power is not perfect everywhere either, so nuclear will be a necessary evil as part of the mix alongside other low carbon options.
No, it wont be necessary, because there are solutions to storage as well.
Oh pray tell. What solutions will fix the following two problems:
1. What type of storage is able to provide for, say, Northern Europe, where there may be weeks without wind and months without any significant sunlight? Keep in mind that the answer must be realistic, and not, for example, require that we suddenly increase global battery production by several orders of magnitude.
2. Renewable energy is already vastly insufficient to meet demand, even at moments when it is producing at full capacity. When will you actually fill those batteries?
Oh, and while we are at it, which part of the already densely populated landscape of Northern Europe should be sacrificed to put all this equipment?
1. a) You build more than you need on any particular day so even when the wind is low you get something.
b) when you have more than you need as electricity, which is basically all the time, you make hydrogen to decarbonize the production of steel, fertilizer, avgas etc. (This is something we need to do even if we had lots of cheap nuclear plants)
c) If you are hit by some freak event you didnt plan for, and you can't just import via wires, you burn the hydrogen in fairly standard cheap turbines to provide more power. You have a lot stored as hydrogen anyway that you were going to make stuff with, so just delay that a little. (In the short term, while every bit of electricity is needed to clean the grid, stored natural gas can take this role)
d) do this all over the world, and when convenient, trade hydrogen or things made from it as a way of exporting/importing renewable energy from wherever it's cheapest.
e) lithium batteries for grid use would only be economic for shifting a small amount of power on a daily schedule (e.g. solar peaks to evenings or night wind to mornings) but..
f) the entire vehicle fleet shifting to battery means theres a giant demand response fleet that can absorb energy when its available at no (extra) loss since they were going to charge anyway.
extra: there's no reason to not include nuclear in the above, except for the fact that it's more expensive than the other options for producing electricity and we already need a method to flex demand to meet needs. So new nuclear is mostly useless, unless you need some excuse to talk about how crap renewables are.
This website is great. I love hearing software developers solve the world’s energy problems in on post.
Just keep building windmills and solar panels until you have enough generation! Easy! Then store it for a rainy day. It’s just common sense! Also, electric cars.
I hope they use imminent domain to steal your backyard and local park for those solar panels. I’ve already got a ton of windmills in my backyard and was without power for three days this February.
The only way to dissuade you people of these horrible ideas is going to be for you to get what you asked for good and hard, and then suffer the consequences of your hubris. So bring it on, bulldoze what few nuclear plants and coal plants are left so you can sit in the cold and dark this winter, basking in the glory of the solar panels on your roof that won’t heat your house.
I'm not a fan of the software engineers telling everyone that something isn't possible, when all the experts in the relevant field are getting on and doing it.
The above isnt my crazy idea, its a summary of the plans the entire world are putting into effect for the future.
They're not doing it at scale right now, because just building lots of renewables to displace other generation is the low hanging fruit. But if you're scared of renewables because you are really worried about that last 20% of awkward cases is impossible, the above is a fair summary of how it'll likely go down when we get to that part.
I shouldn't have to summarize this stuff for someone who asks rhetorical questions about how will we deal with x, because Google exists, but it seems I do because people are putting a lot of effort into remaining uninformed about these things.
There are some solutions but they don't cover all inhabited parts of the earth. You can have solar collection in Nevada and batteries to store the power, but when Alaska is in the dark for a couple months are you going to have transmission lines from Nevada all the way to Alaska? I don't think so. Perhaps you could tell us what you have in mind instead of just downvoting.
Because ultimately that’s a drop in the bucket. Vehicle emissions are only a small part of overall emissions, which includes power generation, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. And even among vehicle emissions, personal transportation makes up only a portion. Lots of emissions come from logistics and supply chain transportation. And to revamping public transportation in the US requires overhauling infrastructure and systems 80 years in the making, which will take time. So while reconsidering public transportation is a good thing in the long term, it will do very little in the short to medium term, which is when we need results.
China have an experimental molten-salt Thorium reactor going live very soon. It's only small, but if it's successful there are plans to build a much bigger one by 2030. That's really interesting tech, notably because the supply of Uranium is very limited and there isn't enough in nature for every nation to go all in on nuclear power. Using Thorium and turning it in to U-233 for power generation is a good idea. Plus, there's loads of Thorium on the moon, so if we get good reactors on Earth the tech will apply to our extra-terrestrial expansion plans.
Actually some companies that got hundreds of millions of funding are pitching commercial viability this decade. That's the reason these investments are happening. The breakthrough is basically that funding is now happening because the technology has progressed enough for investors to be willing to start taking that risk. They wouldn't do that on a 30 year plan.
The fallacy is believing that because it has historically been so far away that is still that far away.
E.g. Helion, a y combinator backed company (our beloved HN overlords), just raised half a billion from investors for a series E round that include Peter Thiel and a few others with well earned reputations for making lucrative investments. I think there's a good chance that we'll have operational fusion plants next decade already. It's not money in the bank yet but clearly enough of a chance for the likes of Peter Thiel to commit some serious money to this.
Helion is pitching 1 cent per khw. That completely kills the business case for new nuclear plants. The payoff on those investments is going to be insanely good if this works as advertised.
> It's not money in the bank yet but clearly enough of a chance for the likes of Peter Thiel to commit some serious money to this.
That doesn't sound right. If Thiel thinks eg it has 1/100 chance of working, but if it works the stock value will be 10.000x what it is today, then it's a sound investment, but it still has a 1% chance of working.
My estimate was a pessimistic one. I would be SHOCKED if they are available this decade, looking at the fact that not a single one has positive net generation (this is just net thermal heat generation, AKA amount of heat put into the system and amount of heat out of the system). On top of that, current fission plants take over a decade to setup.
I'd also posit that a return on investment in a company like this isn't only going to happen if it achieves its goal. Looking at how research intensive/cutting edge the end goal is, they could stumble across 100 different new innovations in the process that could sprout into their own business ideas.
Helion has been "pitching" for a long time now. Which is fine! But its not really worth believing their estimates until they have something. Their schedule, like all fusion schedules before them, is definitely not working as advertised. From 2014:
> The breakeven machine will need about $35 million in funding (2015-2016) and the target is to develop it in 2016.
> If all proceeds on schedule then a Helion Energy machine that that proves commercial energy gain would be a 50 Megawatt system built in 2019. $200 million will be needed for the commercial pilot plant. The plan would be to start building commercial systems by 2022.
Nuclear is just cleaner when it's done right. Look at the top producing plants in the US (https://findenergy.com/power-plants/). All fossil fuels, mostly around 1,000 KGs of CO2/MWh produced. Nuclear is around 15 KGs/MWh. Just for reference, the #1 polluting plant in the US produces more CO2 than all of the passenger vehicles in the US combined.
It's hard to say Fukushima was a case of "doing it wrong." You can only protect against a certain level of natural disasters. Even if you get totally paranoid and put the plant deep under earth you can never be sure an earthquake doesn't damage it. We just can't be 100% sure.
On the other hand, can we afford not doing it? We don't yet have clean and efficient energy storage technologies that would allow us to switch to renewables completely. So if the alternative is to burn coal and worsen our already bad situation, the nuclear risk seems much smaller.
> It's hard to say Fukushima was a case of "doing it wrong."
If you tsunami safety plan in a country prone to have tsunamis fits in one page and has not been updated in the last 9 years to include the new scientific data, yes, you are doing it wrong.
If your plans calculate less than 6m high waves as a maximum and there is a 14m high wave event. If your calculus failed for more than 50%, not, this is not a good job. You could have done much more.
Can blame the nature or the bad luck, or the constellations, but you are just lying to yourself.
Looking at the link, it looks like it poses its own challenges:
>The most common criticism of pebble-bed reactors is that encasing the fuel in combustible graphite poses a hazard. When the graphite burns, fuel material could be carried away in smoke from the fire.
These sound like solvable engineering and process challenges, though, so perhaps in the less anti-nuclear climate we’ll have the will to actually make it work.
Increasing the CO2 concentration in the air we breathe, even by the relatively small amount caused by burning fossil fuels, has been shown to lower human cognitive function. Does that count as poisoning?
(Source: it's discussed in the book The Uninhabitable Earth, although I don't have a copy to hand so can't find the exact citations.)
> Increasing the CO2 concentration in the air we breathe, even by the relatively small amount caused by burning fossil fuels, has been shown to lower human cognitive function. Does that count as poisoning?
Very minor cognitive impairment levels can happen in worst-case scenario in 2100 and assuming current increase of CO2 concentration over time, it shouldn't happen before 2300.
Don’t believe everything you read. Astronauts and submariners function in cognitively demanding jobs at an order of magnitude higher CO2 concentration than the Earth’s atmosphere for months on end.
They're scary in the same way that plane crashes are scary. Make the news and get into dramatic TV shows and cause people to be irrationally afraid of a virtually non-existent threat.
I don't think your last statement is correct. According to the linked page, the James H. Miller Jr. plant produces around 19 million metric tons of CO2 per year, while passenger cars produce around 760 million metric tons per year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235091/us-passenger-car...
Yes you are correct, my bad I was misremembering. It's the sum of the top 100 most polluting plants (656 million metric tons in 2020) which is close to the total emission of all passenger vehicles. It was closer in 2019, because 2020 saw a 10% drop in emissions due to COVID.
Actually the notion of cleaner should be taken with pinch of salt.
I was very pro nuclear until it came out of my mind.
Given its construction, the nuclear plan can have an intensive use of the sulfur hexafluoride ( SF6 Gas)
Which according to Wikipedia
"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF
6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO
2 when compared over a 100-year period"
This puzzled me as pro- nuclear tend not to mention it.
Unless new technology come up addressing this issue, I would not judge nuclear as clean for the time being.
That's still peanuts compared to coal. Largest plant had 18 billion kgs of CO2 released last year. 2000 * 23,900 = 47.8 million kg of CO2 equivalent. Obviously the prior calculation also depends on plant size, etc.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF
6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO
2 when compared over a 100-year period.[37] Sulfur hexafluoride is inert in the troposphere and stratosphere and is extremely long-lived, with an estimated atmospheric lifetime of 800–3,200 years.
Yes I saw that. Comment was comparing the CO2 emissions of the largest fossil fuel plant with a nuclear plant that releases 2000 KG of SF 6. If estimate the impact of SF 6 in terms of CO2 as 23,900 times the CO2 weight, than 2000 KG of SF 6 would be 2000 * 23900 = 47.8 million equivalent KG of CO2. Largest plant fossil fuel plant had emissions of 18 billion KG of CO2.
I think you all have been trolled. Because SF6 is not exclusive to nuclear power generation. It is used in the transformer/switching station behind the turbines. To avoid arc lightning there. Which almost all other power generation is also using in the same way, like in almost all larger switching/substations also. It's the thing to use if you don't want to have arc lightning.
So...in addition to all the CO2 some fossil fueled power plant emits, you have that, and the SF 6. Because behind the turbines they have the same halls with transformers and switching equipment.
Nuclear has a huge waste issue, persisting between hundreds and a million years.
Storage isn't that expensive, E.g. through gas.
E.g. Germany maintenances Gas storage (currently filled with non renewable gas) that can power the entire country a Quarter of a year. Without the actual need through renewables.
Nuclear with waste management would have to be cheaper than that.
(Aside from the subjective evaluation of the associated risk of nuclear energy)
With per megawatt waste for nuclear per 20 years being exponentially smaller in volume.
And where the alternative is coal /natural gas (rather than wind or solar) where these produce more volume of waste in a month/year than nuclear does in a decade. (And in the case of coal, we store worse waste in ways it often enters our fresh water supplies.
I think the current nuclear attention actually has more to do with oil and gas price instability scaring consumers, and more importantly voters, than with the climate. Climate is a vague threat in the future for most people. But high gas and electricity prices are something to be feared right now.
Of course the irony is that nuclear is actually more expensive than gas powered electricity and it will be consumers and tax payers that will pay for it.
The key metric to focus on is $/kwh. Anything else is just noise. People will wield terms like base load and speak in very assertive terms about how important it is to have it. Ask them 1 question: how many GWH at what price? It's a simple question with a simple answer for nuclear: not a whole lot at great cost.
Anything above 10 cents is ludicrously expensive. It's not competitive. It can't be done without raising energy prices and taxes or increasing national debt. I'm not talking consumer rates but actual cost per kwh for the producer. The difference is their profit. Profitability of nuclear plants in a market with dirt cheap renewables, is going to be a challenge and the mitigation plan for that is charging consumers and tax payers for it. It's beyond stupid to support that. Put a price on it and do the math. It doesn't add up to anything good.
Slightly below 2 cents is about the best you can get right now. E.g. solar in the United Emirates is bidding close to 1 cent in recent years (unsubsidized). Offshore wind is a few cents more expensive (5-6 cents). Onshore is actually cheaper but less reliable. Consumer cost is much higher than that. Which is why relatively expensive roof top solar (15-20 cents/kwh) is attractive to consumers paying much more than that for grid energy.
Prices are trending down over time (learning effect, improved technology, etc). Probably half a cent is a good cost target a few years from now. I.e. by the time these planned nuclear plants become operational. Certainly less than 1 cent. The most rosy projections for new nuclear plants tend to be closer to 10 than to 1 cents per kwh. Emphasis on rosy. Nuclear plants never get build on time and on budget. So that's an order of magnitude difference in cost in the best case. Worst case (i.e. what you should plan for), it's much worse.
And that's of course on top of raised taxes needed to pay for all this. Nuclear plants are expensive and not really doable without vast amounts of subsidies. The reason they are being lobbied for is, ironically, that they are that expensive and that it involves vast amounts of government handouts to build them. Good old greed is the main motive here. The nuclear lobby represents many billions of interests and they'll be happy to take your tax money. They'll take the money and then make you pay again on your monthly bill. And they are spending billions on lobbying to make you believe that's a good thing.
How much would fossil fuels cost if the west hadn't spent tens of trillions of 'your tax money' on security, and statecraft in the name of oil only to pass on the profits to private companies.
How much would it cost if demand wasnt subsidized by tens of billions of 'your tax money' going into mega highways, and three lane roads in rural places who's property taxes couldn't pay it in 500 years.
Price for nuclear includes the cost of all externalities typically, whereas fossil fuel power assumes CO2 can be dumped for free (or cheap CO2 credits).
Quoting solar costs in UAE as representative for general solar production is clearly wrong. What about countries with seasons and clouds?
And it’s nice to have cheap energy when the sun doth shine and the wind doth blow, but it doesn’t always. Maybe we’ll develop battery technology that lets renewables take us to 100%, but we’re not there yet.
And if you include even modest storage costs in renewables, you don’t end up with fractions of a penny per kWh anymore, either.
Your assumption is that storage is expensive. Where expensive is unspecified. That's long term simply wrong and even short term, electricity companies are already some relatively expensive options to save money relative to using gas/coal powered peaker plants. Because it saves them money. So, never mind nuclear here: this is cheaper than gas powered plants already.
But again, a simple question of expressing the requirement in $/kwh. It's a good measure of cost for batteries too. You pay for MWH of storage and GW delivery capacity. Lithium Ion hits the sweet spot of lots of capacity (GW) with modest amounts of storage (GWH). Other storage options store more but are less able to deliver quickly. There's a nice tradeoff here. Combining the different options gives you the best of both worlds. E.g. thermal mass is dirt cheap, because it can literally be made of dirt (well sand or rocks). Takes relatively long to charge but it can deliver power for weeks or months. Lithium ION is the opposite but it only lasts a few hours.
The dirty little secret with base load is that a few hours is all that is needed mostly to deal with, again, the typically unspecified intermittency.
It's a simple matter of how much GWH you need to mitigate against e.g. a few clouds or windless days. There are many solutions and it all boils down to $/kwh. I'd say long term fractions of a penny is exactly what this will be. And by long term I mean less than the lifetime of the nuclear plants that we're debating here that have yet to be planned and built; and possibly even their construction phase (this could take decades).
Great post, but somebody has to care about base load, round-the-clock power, grid frequency and so on, right?
The cost argument is quite compelling, but there seems to be a narrowing menu of options at the whole-system level. Bet on battery storage to save the day. Keep burning fossil fuels (internationally unacceptable, plus they're not renewable!). Massive degrowth (far from acceptable). Edit: fusion! (I love this one, but betting society on it would be a stretch right now).
Gritting our teeth and paying the cost of nuclear seems to have some value as an option on the table.
Looking only at the price is how we have renewable-caused instabilities and need to build up extra plants while having trouble financing stable sources - because by purely cost when the wind blows right or sun shines you suddenly have a lot of cheap energy you want to dump into grid.
We definitely need to start including dispatchability into price calculations.
You're not wrong. But how many GWH of baseload for how much do you think is reasonable for this? Specifying it allows us to run some numbers. I can bet you it's not going to look good for nuclear. Baseload just means having enough GW available for x hours/days/weeks/months. GWH in other words.
The reason the Chinese are investing in nuclear is actually really interesting.
This is just speculation but I believe that the reason is not that it they believe it is cheaper but simply because they want to replace a lot of dirty coal (well over 1000 GW) and are willing to pay the price for that. So far, the plan was to build more coal plants, and then get rid of it as early as they can in a few decades once they have enough renewables. Not a bad plan but coal has become an embarrassing problem for them (smog, lots of finger pointing internationally, etc).
They've been floating 2065 as a deadline for going fully carbon neutral. So, those new coal plants they have been building would only be in operation for less than 50 years. To go fully carbon neutral, they'll need more than just that 1000GW; a couple of thousands minimum; possibly more. It's not just current energy consumption but also transport, heavy industry, etc. that are currently powered by fossil fuels. To power all of that with clean electricity or hydrogen created using clean electricity, they would need a lot of power. Many TW of capacity.
The issue is that renewable capacity is only deploying world wide at a rate of 100-200GW. That is globally and it's happening as fast as we can do and we're getting better at it. And while that is a lot, it's not nearly enough.
Over a few decades it of course adds up to plenty of capacity; especially as production processes improve over time and scale up. But for the Chinese to be able to start shutting down coal plants in the near future they need an alternative. Even if that is more expensive. So, they just announced well over a TW of nuclear power capacity in the form of 150 nuclear plants. Problem solved but it won't be cheap.
To me it looks like their plan is to ramp up nuclear at great cost so they can commit to shutting down coal sooner than the second half of this century; which is increasingly becoming a hard to defend position. A few decades in, they'll have quite a bit of nuclear capacity, much more renewable capacity, and a vanishingly small minority of fossil fuel based production; which they will pull the plug on at some point. Once that is done, they'll shift attention at reducing cost.
A lot of those nuclear plants might not even reach their planned end of life. They'll have served their purpose long before that. Once there is enough renewable capacity producing energy cheaper, they'll start doing to those plants what is happening to many expensive coal plants all over the world right now: shut them down. They'll cut their losses.
When you think about the risk / rewards to society of nuclear power, compare it to cars. Which is more absurd. Environmental and physical impact, cost of human life, etc. It's a much worse ratio but 99% never think about it
Not directly related to the article, but I wonder if the renewables industry being so hostile to nuclear is actually because renewables don't make sense with nuclear.
We started off with 100% of power generation being either fossil fuels or nuclear (+hydro etc. but these are minor for most places). As part-time renewables enter the stage, they take priority over the fossil fuel plants when they do produce, and simply go quiet when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine. We accept that, because we're fundamentally still in a fossil fuel energy mindset.
So what does the post-fossil fuel world look like, with a nuclear+renewables mix? Well, we have as much renewables as we'd like, but really (and here's the kicker) we also need enough nuclear for windless nights (or winter days which in e.g. Northern Europe barely count as daytime). So really, we need to be able to power nearly 100% of the economy through nuclear alone in those cases.
But then, that begs the question, do we still need the renewables at all? Right now it probably makes sense, because it lets you throttle back the fossil fuel burning, so is a net win. But if your baseload generation is carbon-free (at the margin anyway), it doesn't matter. You just don't need the renewables.
This is somewhat oversimplified, perhaps. E.g. the times when you are less likely to have wind and solar are at night, when energy use is lower (though will that remain the case when everyone's electric car is then charging?). Also, winters drive heating demand. Perhaps some small amount of storage makes a big difference; e.g. if we could store a week's worth of power, that takes us through all but the biggest troughs in power generation, and you need less nuclear (though again, not sure how that works with winters).
I'm not nuclear-crazy, if we could do solar+wind+batteries, why not. But I find the renewables lobby just says "yeah prices will fall, we will solve energy storage, just go all in on renewables, perish nuclear", which just seems like crazy wishful thinking. Whereas nuclear is always described based on 1970s technology and with the most exaggerated (un)safety numbers.
There's only two viable paths to a zero emissions society. One is nuclear and the other is hydrogen. We have to pick one or the other (or both) as all other ideas have fallen far short of the goal.
Well, I don't know. Are batteries + renewables a prior impossible? I can't see why, especially if we're talking about utility-scale batteries, which could be heavy and bulky.
My point is we don't have them at a competitive price, and yet the renewables people insist we definitely well. We might, we might not.
One of the big issues with nuclear plants is that they aren't very flexible in terms of their energy production. Their production is super steady, so what happens when there's a huge peak in electricity demand at 6 pm when everyone gets home? Fossil fuels are great for their relatively short start up time. Maybe renewables + batteries could somehow fill this niche?
"...when there's a huge peak in electricity demand at 6 pm when everyone gets home?"
The entire electrical generation industry knows all this. They know when clouds are coming and when wind will stop and model it all. Pricing information is sent ahead of time and plants know if they will be required to spin up or spin down well in advance. Especially something as simple as "everyone gets home at 6pm at a regular time every weekday". It is easy for plants with slow ramp times, such as nuclear and coal, to plan for that.
People who looked at that strategy have realized that you need way more energy storage than originally thought. Especially in places that need winter heating.
The only way we can get there at a reasonable cost is via hydrogen energy storage. The other ideas are orders of magnitude too expensive.
There’s nothing wrong with more energy. People seem to assume that we need X amount of energy and if we can provide X amount of energy with one source or the other, we don’t need any more energy. That’s ridiculous. Energy is a commodity like anything else, and when you have more of it, you can do more stuff.
Would hate to think of how much worse crypto would be If power was free.
Mining for materials, waste products, waste heat, noise.
Already have regular extended family complaining about the huge number of noisy shipping containers in their communities. These are middle of nowhere towns.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. People have the intuition that it's somehow inherently virtuous to use less energy, even if it's from clean and sustainable sources.
Steel production require massive amount of energy, especially if you want to go coal free. Forest products also depend on cheap energy. An other area is concrete production.
After those I suspect it is food production. Read somewhere that fish farms on land is suffering in particular.
Basically any production dealing with raw materials.
Can you use these if they are intermittent and unreliable?
I'm thinking, maybe we get to the point where we have lots of nuclear humming at a constant (ish) rate, and some much cheaper, but unreliable renewables. Can steel mills start and stop? Forestry, ming etc. work on the schedules of wind and sun?
Sounds tricky for sure. Especially because then, renewables will have to compete with marginal cost of nuclear (which is drastically lower than average, since it doesn't include the massive cape, fuel is cheap etc.)
I don't know off the top of my head how much of industry runs 24/7 and how much is just during the day, but it's possible that "solar power only works during the day" and "factories operate during the day when their workers are awake and at work" will both sort of work out together.
Employees cost money, as does buildings and storage. They can shutdown for periods when the energy cost is high but it hurts profitability and the economical viability.
The steel industry here try to build next to hydro, in areas where the price is relative low. The price point can differ by more than 100% when we compare the cheapest regions with the most expensive, for reason that has to do with transmissions. There is also experiments with hydrogen.
A few paper mills have cut down on employees, and in some cases shutdown the plants during periods of low wind.
Food production can't shutdown. A fish farm need to keep the water at a set temperature or the fish dies. Greenhouses that depend on artificial light can't just close down or the plants dies.
I would say that the answer is mostly a no. Short term some industries can adapt a little while waiting for the energy prices to stabilize, but long term it is a hard sell to have employees and building just sitting around.
That's because too much power overloads the power wires. You can only get that by making surplus, and when surplus occurs a lot of that power is lost from overload. And before you say to upgrade the wires, that would cost a lot of money and be an infrastructural nightmare.
Two ideas: desalination and direct air CO2 capture plants? Though maybe the primary bottleneck isn’t lack of energy, and you don’t want all that expensive equipment idle while you are waiting for excess electricity from renewables.
I still havent heard of a solution to nuclear waste. In my opinion nuclear could be the transition technology though. Also nuclear is not cheap at all from what ive read..
I remember reading that nuclear costs about the same as fossil fuel + carbon capture, and, at current prices, much less than renewables + enough storage to make them continuous. This to me is the fair comparison. Further, I'd rather live near a nuclear plant than a coal plant sitting on tons of compressed CO2, ready to pop and asphyxiate everyone in the vicinity.
I agree storage is a problem, maybe not as big as it is generally made out, but even then, would I rather struggle with nuclear waste, or millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? The latter will lead to a planetary-scale disaster, the former at worst to minor regional ones.
The solution to nuclear waste is "status quo". As far as I know, no person has ever been harmed much less killed by waste from a nuclear power plant.
Also, the dangerous isotopes are also the ones which decay most quickly. Let the waste sit for 300 years and it will be no more radioactive than the uranium ore it was originally mined from. At that point you can dump it back into the uranium mine, or else keep it anywhere else you think would be safer than an abandoned uranium mine, the risks are miniscule either way.
But generally this isn't what happens right? Often the waste gets dumped in surrounding oceans of Europe.
Nuclear is an amazing source of cheap and clean energy, but the problem has always been the management of Nuclear plants and waste that has resulted in environmental disasters.
I'm honestly not confident in anyone to handle the Nuclear properly, not private enterprise or government. As history tells us, nobody can seem to get it right 100% of the time.
Maybe advancement in technology means safer Nuclear plants and easier to manage waste, but maybe they thought the same thing when they built the Fukushima or Chernobyl plants.
> Often the waste gets dumped in surrounding oceans of Europe
Citation needed. (Or in less polite words: stop lying, it doesn't.)
> waste that has resulted in environmental disasters
Have you ever seen a coal ash pond? Do you know how many there are? Do you know what is in them? (There are thousands, they are filled with arsenic, heavy metals and often radioactive waste, and they are all across the landscape.)
Have you seen how brown coal is mined? Obliterating entire towns and villages as a matter of routine? All waste by all nuclear reactors in the world would fit in a single brown coal open pit and would do less human and environmental damage...
> Citation needed. (Or in less polite words: stop lying, it doesn't.)
Sorry, you are right, let me clarify my answer. Dumping of radioactive waste in Europe was prevalent back in the 80's, but the effects of this are still felt today. Just recently a large number of barrels were found in the Baltic [1]. Japan also has announced it will be dumping large quantities of radioactive material into the ocean, because they simply don't know how to handle the situation any better [2]. The Japanese government claims that they intend to make the waste safe, personally I wouldn't trust such a statement.
> Have you seen how brown coal is mined? Obliterating entire towns and villages as a matter of routine?
I never mentioned the environmental impact of burning or mining coal, nor did I claim it was any better or worse than nuclear power.
I'm highlighting that mismanagement of Nuclear has historically been a problem and I don't feel confident that those mistakes aren't repeated in the future.
No. By the time it bites, it will be too late to do anything other than adapt. And there definitely won't be money for long term morally driven projects like cutting co2 or nuclear in general (which is more expensive than pretty much any other power source)
Why not use nuclear for decarbonizing the atmosphere and for production of liquid hydrocarbons for industrial uses when the wind is blowing and sun is shining and when the renewable are not available use nuclear for base loads?
The article briefly mentions an enormous practical difference between the US and Europe:
>Third, a heatwave in August of 2020 led to rolling blackouts across [California] as demand for electricity (to power air conditioners) outpaced supply.
Dry hot places have a better power solution, trivially.
Cold places, for the same reason, do not.
Meanwhile, parts of the former USSR have heat that really is too-cheap-to-meter.
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[ 418 ms ] story [ 3463 ms ] threadIf we'd kept going with nuclear, we'd have more investment and more experience in it and it's hard to know for sure, but you could make an argument that we'd be in less of a pickle with the carbon reduction goals. We'd know more about how to make it safer and we'd know more about how to make it better.
What anti nuclear movements in my country fear isn’t the technology but rather the people who have to maintain it.
I’m not sure that last part can be easily fixed.
Globally building nuclear power plants will be too slow to solve climate change. We still should keep it to solve future problems. Like conquering the universe and stuff.
Along with that, we have enough geographically stable regions for long enough storage.
Hardly. Most of it decays quite fast. (think tens of years to get below backround radioactivity) While there is some extremely long lived radioactive waste, it is, quite frankly, miniscule in the amount.
It is just that I wouldn't be too worried about properly stabilised long lived waste. Just like I'm not too worried about natural uranium...
People are afraid of it, I have spoken with multiple people which are fundamentally/seriously afraid of nuclear power.
Also most idk. 5 50+ years old people (i.e. majority of people with power) in the Green German party (and other parties) have spend their "Jung political years" by being obsessed with stopping Nuclear power, try convincing them that maybe we need it. (Or try make them accept that their movement had been partially financed and instrumentalized by eastern Germany, or that most problems of nuclear wast storage in the area which once was western Germany are 100% fault of the Politician of the time choosing a known to be bad mine for petty reasons).
There was always a fear of contamination, and the Three-Mile-Island accident in the US didn't help. This was before Chernobyl. But of course it's worth remembering why everyone thought that might be such a big problem: there was a siren each Wednesday reminding people that we're in a Cold War, and if it turns hot there's a nuke somewhere with "Copenhagen" written in Cyrillic. So people understood that nuclear fallout is not nice. Plus Denmark ain't big, so basically if something were to happen the whole country could be radioactive. For the same reason, many Danes took issue with the Swedes building a nuclear plant that you can still see from Copenhagen.
The OOA (the organization that led the anti-nuclear movement) made a nice logo with a smiling sun and a "Nuclear Power? No Thanks" message that got thousands of people on the street to protest. Some of the people maintained that if we only could solve what to do about the waste, they'd be fine with it. Often the debate has been "if the tech were better I'd be for it".
I'm not sure this is a reasonable decision. Tech gets better with experience, and you don't build experience by not engaging. Much like mini-mills from Clayton Christensen, often the tech that wins looks crappy and niche when it starts.
I am not sure what you mean "if we kept going with nuclear". We are keeping going with it. It is a continued disaster. The last plant being built, two reactors at Vogtle are now estimated to cost over 25 billion, a massive overrun over an original estimate of 14 billion. That construction already caused the bankruptcy of one of the builders (Westinghouse), massive losses at another (Chicago Bridge and Iron). Eventually Chicago Bridge and Iron was acquired at depressed valuation by McDermott, but the valuation was not depressed enough because McDermott itself declared bankruptcy last year.
Just last month there was another 3 month delay announced at Vogtle. This will certainly increase costs even more.
There is also the VC Summer plant that was recently cancelled after massive delays and cost overruns. That plant was also partially to blame for Westinghouse's bankruptcy.
Look at cars. People used to get run over all the time, they'd hurt themselves in crashes, etc. But so much effort has been spent investing in them that things like seat belts became a thing, we made laws about driving, and so on.
You also have to look at the tradeoffs. Putting carbon in the air is basically a bad idea, and we need to reduce it. Here's a replacement for doing that, we should put some of our chips on that. Perfectly fine to have windmills as well, not saying there aren't other bets.
Did it happen again? We haven't had anything close to another Chernobyl, and that was 35 years ago (more than 50% of the entire history of the nuclear power industry.)
Some selected quotes:
> The main reason for the success of the pro-nuclear movement is the failure of renewables and the global energy crisis. The share of global energy from fossil fuels is unchanged since 1980 because solar and wind do not replace fossil fuel power plants, and, in fact, depend upon them. Only baseload hydro-electric and nuclear power plants can replace fossil fuels. And over-investment in unreliable renewables and underinvestment in nuclear, hydro-electricity, and natural gas, over the last decade, directly resulted in today’s energy shortages, skyrocketing electricity prices, and a return to coal around the world.
> The most important thing is to tell the truth about nuclear, I argued to friends and colleagues, starting in 2016, and build an honest pro-nuclear movement worldwide around the truth. Anti-nuclear people have been lying about the technology for decades.
> The renewable energy industry has financed misinformation efforts against us. We have been censored by Facebook. And we have lost some supporters. But through it all, EP kept up our work, directly supporting and championing the work of pro-nuclear advocates around the world, giving popular TED talks, and writing a best-selling book, Apocalypse Never, which has been translated into 15 languages
Nevertheless one should never take this as guaranteed. Nuclear power plants should be carefully designed everything-proof wherever they are built.
Whether or not the nuclear plant survives intact is a bit of a minor issue. It just has to fail without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake.
Citing Fukushima - Fukushima was bad. Bud the mounds of corpses caused by the natural disaster that also caused Fukushima are a far more important thing to spend resources preventing than Fukushima itself was.
You're overlooking the exaggerated panic-and-horror reaction of the public to literally any kind of nuclear incident. If you design merely for statistically acceptable results it's basically guaranteeing political blowback at some point.
Wait until you learn about a thing called COVID-19.
There is an objective ordering to what should be earthquake-proofed. Nuclear plants are not actually at the top of the list to worry about - places where people are likely to live and work are. Draw up a list of things that hurt people around the time of the Fukushima disaster. Fukushima barely makes the list. Fukushima might not even be on the list, the toll in human suffering of Fukushima is very small compared to the natural disaster that hit Japan that day.
We can also overbuild the nuclear plant because nuclear is so crazily efficient why not. There is only one plant to secure. But it isn't a blocker if it doesn't happen, and it is an irrational concern.
If I could, I would earthquake-proof and flood-proof everything even where the probability of these dissertation is near-zero. But this obviously isn't going to happen (in fact it baffles me how people insist on living non-proof way even in areas where disastrous floods actually happen every now and then).
Nevertheless I feel like I would prefer my home destroyed and even myself crippled over the neighboring nuclear power plant blowing up.
How much have you thought about it? Again, Fukushima, one of the worst nuclear disasters of all time. As far as I know nobody crippled.
I'd go for the plant meltdown myself, I like life, liberty and having use of my legs. It is reasonably likely that nobody would get hurt in a meltdown, the damage is largely economic.
I am a proponent of nuclear power generation nevertheless.
Why? Even purely on that scenario you'r cutting off your leg to avoid a typically undetectable statistical risk.
We've got 50 years of records on the risk of plant meltdowns, a surprise earthquake hitting homes that aren't prepared is much, much worse than a nuclear plant meltdown. An earthquake will kill people. There will be deaths. Destruction. Suffering on a scale that is much worse than a nuclear meltdown.
You should earthquake proof your house if you think that is a possible risk.
http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation...
So no, I do not buy into the "basically forever".
Such 180 degree swings in public opinion seems dangerous. In 2018 Macron talks about reducing France' reliance on nuclear energy [1], now he declares its a tool to achieve energy independence [2].
Building, maintaining, upgrading and dealing with issues caused by nuclear reactors is a very engineering and science heavy. I am curios if there is enough talent to be able to do it? Will this rhetoric be attended with enough investment in education to make sure that we have talent to service this need for generations? Nuclear energy skill is akin to space exploration, just because the nation had Apollo program and could put a man on the moon 50 year ago, does not mean it can do it now. If it were not for Elon and SpaceX US would not have an ability to bring astronauts to ISS without a third nation. Financial investment alone won't solve it, as you need time to establish pool of qualified people.
"We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country and continue to develop renewable energies," – so people who launched it in the past have long retired? The newes reactor in the US was launched in 2016, the newest plant is 1996, so 20+ years ago.
And there are still problems to be solved with nuclear energy. The most obvious one – nuclear waste. No one wants to have in their backyard. Once it is stored, it is essentially a permanent commitment to keep it safe there until a better option emerges. A better option will emerge if there is a constant effort to find it. But what if something goes wrong, how will the public and politicians react? Are they going to reverse 180 again? Fukushima scared politicians, that were afraid of saying "nuclear energy" in public for 10 years.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/macron-says-france-w...
Imagine how much solar that $30B could have bought.
Why not go Thorium?
But the real reason I'm replying is to ask why the waste factor is only ever brought up for nuclear, and not for coal (which also emits radiation into the atmosphere), wind (do you know how old turbine blades are disposed?), gas (where does the CO2 go?), etc.
Nuclear waste is such an overblown risk. If something is highly radioactive, it won't be radioactive for long. If it is lowly radioactive, it isn't a big problem to begin with. Conflating these two things so that people think that waste is both highly radioactive and radioactive forever was a fantastic trick by the environmental lobby, and one that has almost certainly doomed the ecosphere since instead of relying on clean nuclear power, we continued to rely on fossil fuels, adding decades of emissions to the atmosphere. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory...
However, I am not convinced that the blades are near the problems regarding nuclear waste
The question is how long do you have to deal with that waste and how much it costs for that entire duration.
Pretending that there is even a need to securely store material for millennia when equally radioactive products are found everywhere in the Earth's crust is disingenuous. Below a certain level it isn't any more dangerous than loads of other chemicals we have lying around that nobody cares about.
Coal-fired power stations release significantly more radioactive material into the atmosphere than any nuclear accident[1]. If your concern is about radioactive material then worry about coal ash first.
[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
I encourage you to look at the numbers for yourself. The equivalent baseload power technologies are all WAY more dangerous.
Go and tally up the human casualties from nuclear over its entire history. Use the most damning numbers you can possibly find. Go ahead and include the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you like. Include any count of potential cancer cases too. Even using the most biased, openly political casualty counts you can find, it is challenging to get to 1.5 million over the entire history of the power source. If you stick to relatively credible sources you'll certainly be below half a million.
Now look at the human casualties from coal when it's working properly. No accidents, just regular power production. The first duckduckgo result for me estimates about 8.7 million deaths per year, not including accidents, bombs, or non fatal casualties.
The casualty rate from nuclear's entire history doesn't even approach the death rate from coal, oil, or gas in a single year.
> nuclear waste
One person lifetime of electricity creates about 350ml (about a coke can) of solid nuclear waste. We know where that waste is, and what it is doing. We can monitor and control access and keep people away from it.
In contrast, one person lifetime of coal power produces hundreds of thousands of TONS of waste, much of which is also radioactive, but lets not forget about the toxic heavy metals and carbon. Most of that waste goes into the atmosphere, where it cannot be tracked or controlled at all, and where it causes millions of deaths per year. To be fair a lot of it goes into the water and ground, too.
The fact that there are options AT ALL for nuclear waste puts it miles ahead of the competition.
Nuclear is by far the lowest carbon, safest, lowest waste universally available baseload power source ever invented. Casualties from nuclear aren't even a rounding error compared to the alternatives on the table.
You are absolutely right however, that it is highly volatile politically.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... is a nice reference for easy comparison, but really, duckduckgo it yourself.
Unfortunately the sun doesn't shine everywhere all the time (especially in higher latitudes during their winter), and wind power is not perfect everywhere either, so nuclear will be a necessary evil as part of the mix alongside other low carbon options.
I say necessary evil not only because of safety and proliferation issues, both of which can be mitigated by some designs although choice of those designs is not assured, but rather because of central control, large budgets, political lobbying, and the corruption and massive consumer and taxpayer costs that all that tends to bring on.
However the design is safe and based on battle-tested submarine reactors from Alfa class attack subs.
No, it wont be necessary, because there are solutions to storage as well.
1. What type of storage is able to provide for, say, Northern Europe, where there may be weeks without wind and months without any significant sunlight? Keep in mind that the answer must be realistic, and not, for example, require that we suddenly increase global battery production by several orders of magnitude.
2. Renewable energy is already vastly insufficient to meet demand, even at moments when it is producing at full capacity. When will you actually fill those batteries?
Oh, and while we are at it, which part of the already densely populated landscape of Northern Europe should be sacrificed to put all this equipment?
Energy: put solar on every roof, and some land, use 2% land for wind, use wasted energy better, reduce power consumption, ...
There are multiple studies that show a path to renewables for Germany using just renewables.
And it can happen before any nuclear reactor can be used...
2. We need to build lots more renewables.
1. a) You build more than you need on any particular day so even when the wind is low you get something.
b) when you have more than you need as electricity, which is basically all the time, you make hydrogen to decarbonize the production of steel, fertilizer, avgas etc. (This is something we need to do even if we had lots of cheap nuclear plants)
c) If you are hit by some freak event you didnt plan for, and you can't just import via wires, you burn the hydrogen in fairly standard cheap turbines to provide more power. You have a lot stored as hydrogen anyway that you were going to make stuff with, so just delay that a little. (In the short term, while every bit of electricity is needed to clean the grid, stored natural gas can take this role)
d) do this all over the world, and when convenient, trade hydrogen or things made from it as a way of exporting/importing renewable energy from wherever it's cheapest.
e) lithium batteries for grid use would only be economic for shifting a small amount of power on a daily schedule (e.g. solar peaks to evenings or night wind to mornings) but..
f) the entire vehicle fleet shifting to battery means theres a giant demand response fleet that can absorb energy when its available at no (extra) loss since they were going to charge anyway.
extra: there's no reason to not include nuclear in the above, except for the fact that it's more expensive than the other options for producing electricity and we already need a method to flex demand to meet needs. So new nuclear is mostly useless, unless you need some excuse to talk about how crap renewables are.
Just keep building windmills and solar panels until you have enough generation! Easy! Then store it for a rainy day. It’s just common sense! Also, electric cars.
I hope they use imminent domain to steal your backyard and local park for those solar panels. I’ve already got a ton of windmills in my backyard and was without power for three days this February.
The only way to dissuade you people of these horrible ideas is going to be for you to get what you asked for good and hard, and then suffer the consequences of your hubris. So bring it on, bulldoze what few nuclear plants and coal plants are left so you can sit in the cold and dark this winter, basking in the glory of the solar panels on your roof that won’t heat your house.
The above isnt my crazy idea, its a summary of the plans the entire world are putting into effect for the future.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eu-green-hydrog...
They're not doing it at scale right now, because just building lots of renewables to displace other generation is the low hanging fruit. But if you're scared of renewables because you are really worried about that last 20% of awkward cases is impossible, the above is a fair summary of how it'll likely go down when we get to that part.
I shouldn't have to summarize this stuff for someone who asks rhetorical questions about how will we deal with x, because Google exists, but it seems I do because people are putting a lot of effort into remaining uninformed about these things.
Superconducting magnets and faster computers to accurately model magnetic containment.
The fallacy is believing that because it has historically been so far away that is still that far away.
E.g. Helion, a y combinator backed company (our beloved HN overlords), just raised half a billion from investors for a series E round that include Peter Thiel and a few others with well earned reputations for making lucrative investments. I think there's a good chance that we'll have operational fusion plants next decade already. It's not money in the bank yet but clearly enough of a chance for the likes of Peter Thiel to commit some serious money to this.
Helion is pitching 1 cent per khw. That completely kills the business case for new nuclear plants. The payoff on those investments is going to be insanely good if this works as advertised.
That doesn't sound right. If Thiel thinks eg it has 1/100 chance of working, but if it works the stock value will be 10.000x what it is today, then it's a sound investment, but it still has a 1% chance of working.
I'd also posit that a return on investment in a company like this isn't only going to happen if it achieves its goal. Looking at how research intensive/cutting edge the end goal is, they could stumble across 100 different new innovations in the process that could sprout into their own business ideas.
PS. Am I the only one who thinks this page sucks? https://www.helionenergy.com/our-technology/
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/08/nextbigfuture-intervie...
> The breakeven machine will need about $35 million in funding (2015-2016) and the target is to develop it in 2016.
> If all proceeds on schedule then a Helion Energy machine that that proves commercial energy gain would be a 50 Megawatt system built in 2019. $200 million will be needed for the commercial pilot plant. The plan would be to start building commercial systems by 2022.
The question is whether “doing it wrong” (Fukushima) outweighs the benefits of “doing it right”.
On the other hand, can we afford not doing it? We don't yet have clean and efficient energy storage technologies that would allow us to switch to renewables completely. So if the alternative is to burn coal and worsen our already bad situation, the nuclear risk seems much smaller.
If you tsunami safety plan in a country prone to have tsunamis fits in one page and has not been updated in the last 9 years to include the new scientific data, yes, you are doing it wrong.
If your plans calculate less than 6m high waves as a maximum and there is a 14m high wave event. If your calculus failed for more than 50%, not, this is not a good job. You could have done much more.
Can blame the nature or the bad luck, or the constellations, but you are just lying to yourself.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
>The most common criticism of pebble-bed reactors is that encasing the fuel in combustible graphite poses a hazard. When the graphite burns, fuel material could be carried away in smoke from the fire.
These sound like solvable engineering and process challenges, though, so perhaps in the less anti-nuclear climate we’ll have the will to actually make it work.
As of 2021, nuclear powerplant accidents killed less than 2 people per year since 1970s. As of 2018, nuclear powerplants produced 10% of energy.
WHO estimates that climate change causes 150000 deaths per year.
Fossil-fuels powerplants produce surprisingly low air pollution due to all required by law filters, technologies etc.
(Source: it's discussed in the book The Uninhabitable Earth, although I don't have a copy to hand so can't find the exact citations.)
Very minor cognitive impairment levels can happen in worst-case scenario in 2100 and assuming current increase of CO2 concentration over time, it shouldn't happen before 2300.
I actually had this in mind for storage.
I was very pro nuclear until it came out of my mind.
Given its construction, the nuclear plan can have an intensive use of the sulfur hexafluoride ( SF6 Gas) Which according to Wikipedia
"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF 6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO 2 when compared over a 100-year period"
This puzzled me as pro- nuclear tend not to mention it.
Unless new technology come up addressing this issue, I would not judge nuclear as clean for the time being.
Page Wiki for additional information:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride
Based on the ref below (in French) Up to 2000 kg can be released each year.
https://www-boursorama-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bourso...
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF 6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO 2 when compared over a 100-year period.[37] Sulfur hexafluoride is inert in the troposphere and stratosphere and is extremely long-lived, with an estimated atmospheric lifetime of 800–3,200 years.
So...in addition to all the CO2 some fossil fueled power plant emits, you have that, and the SF 6. Because behind the turbines they have the same halls with transformers and switching equipment.
Glad to hear have some folks like you to providing additional for non expert like me.
https://www-boursorama-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bourso...
Hydro is bad for the local environment.
Nuclear has a minor waste problem which isn't really that bad.
None of these are perfect solutions. Nuclear shouldn't be ruled out of a green mix.
Storage isn't that expensive, E.g. through gas. E.g. Germany maintenances Gas storage (currently filled with non renewable gas) that can power the entire country a Quarter of a year. Without the actual need through renewables.
Nuclear with waste management would have to be cheaper than that.
(Aside from the subjective evaluation of the associated risk of nuclear energy)
With per megawatt waste for nuclear per 20 years being exponentially smaller in volume.
And where the alternative is coal /natural gas (rather than wind or solar) where these produce more volume of waste in a month/year than nuclear does in a decade. (And in the case of coal, we store worse waste in ways it often enters our fresh water supplies.
Of course the irony is that nuclear is actually more expensive than gas powered electricity and it will be consumers and tax payers that will pay for it.
The key metric to focus on is $/kwh. Anything else is just noise. People will wield terms like base load and speak in very assertive terms about how important it is to have it. Ask them 1 question: how many GWH at what price? It's a simple question with a simple answer for nuclear: not a whole lot at great cost.
Anything above 10 cents is ludicrously expensive. It's not competitive. It can't be done without raising energy prices and taxes or increasing national debt. I'm not talking consumer rates but actual cost per kwh for the producer. The difference is their profit. Profitability of nuclear plants in a market with dirt cheap renewables, is going to be a challenge and the mitigation plan for that is charging consumers and tax payers for it. It's beyond stupid to support that. Put a price on it and do the math. It doesn't add up to anything good.
Slightly below 2 cents is about the best you can get right now. E.g. solar in the United Emirates is bidding close to 1 cent in recent years (unsubsidized). Offshore wind is a few cents more expensive (5-6 cents). Onshore is actually cheaper but less reliable. Consumer cost is much higher than that. Which is why relatively expensive roof top solar (15-20 cents/kwh) is attractive to consumers paying much more than that for grid energy.
Prices are trending down over time (learning effect, improved technology, etc). Probably half a cent is a good cost target a few years from now. I.e. by the time these planned nuclear plants become operational. Certainly less than 1 cent. The most rosy projections for new nuclear plants tend to be closer to 10 than to 1 cents per kwh. Emphasis on rosy. Nuclear plants never get build on time and on budget. So that's an order of magnitude difference in cost in the best case. Worst case (i.e. what you should plan for), it's much worse.
And that's of course on top of raised taxes needed to pay for all this. Nuclear plants are expensive and not really doable without vast amounts of subsidies. The reason they are being lobbied for is, ironically, that they are that expensive and that it involves vast amounts of government handouts to build them. Good old greed is the main motive here. The nuclear lobby represents many billions of interests and they'll be happy to take your tax money. They'll take the money and then make you pay again on your monthly bill. And they are spending billions on lobbying to make you believe that's a good thing.
How much would it cost if demand wasnt subsidized by tens of billions of 'your tax money' going into mega highways, and three lane roads in rural places who's property taxes couldn't pay it in 500 years.
Quoting solar costs in UAE as representative for general solar production is clearly wrong. What about countries with seasons and clouds?
And it’s nice to have cheap energy when the sun doth shine and the wind doth blow, but it doesn’t always. Maybe we’ll develop battery technology that lets renewables take us to 100%, but we’re not there yet.
And if you include even modest storage costs in renewables, you don’t end up with fractions of a penny per kWh anymore, either.
But again, a simple question of expressing the requirement in $/kwh. It's a good measure of cost for batteries too. You pay for MWH of storage and GW delivery capacity. Lithium Ion hits the sweet spot of lots of capacity (GW) with modest amounts of storage (GWH). Other storage options store more but are less able to deliver quickly. There's a nice tradeoff here. Combining the different options gives you the best of both worlds. E.g. thermal mass is dirt cheap, because it can literally be made of dirt (well sand or rocks). Takes relatively long to charge but it can deliver power for weeks or months. Lithium ION is the opposite but it only lasts a few hours.
The dirty little secret with base load is that a few hours is all that is needed mostly to deal with, again, the typically unspecified intermittency.
It's a simple matter of how much GWH you need to mitigate against e.g. a few clouds or windless days. There are many solutions and it all boils down to $/kwh. I'd say long term fractions of a penny is exactly what this will be. And by long term I mean less than the lifetime of the nuclear plants that we're debating here that have yet to be planned and built; and possibly even their construction phase (this could take decades).
The cost argument is quite compelling, but there seems to be a narrowing menu of options at the whole-system level. Bet on battery storage to save the day. Keep burning fossil fuels (internationally unacceptable, plus they're not renewable!). Massive degrowth (far from acceptable). Edit: fusion! (I love this one, but betting society on it would be a stretch right now).
Gritting our teeth and paying the cost of nuclear seems to have some value as an option on the table.
We definitely need to start including dispatchability into price calculations.
The reason the Chinese are investing in nuclear is actually really interesting.
This is just speculation but I believe that the reason is not that it they believe it is cheaper but simply because they want to replace a lot of dirty coal (well over 1000 GW) and are willing to pay the price for that. So far, the plan was to build more coal plants, and then get rid of it as early as they can in a few decades once they have enough renewables. Not a bad plan but coal has become an embarrassing problem for them (smog, lots of finger pointing internationally, etc).
They've been floating 2065 as a deadline for going fully carbon neutral. So, those new coal plants they have been building would only be in operation for less than 50 years. To go fully carbon neutral, they'll need more than just that 1000GW; a couple of thousands minimum; possibly more. It's not just current energy consumption but also transport, heavy industry, etc. that are currently powered by fossil fuels. To power all of that with clean electricity or hydrogen created using clean electricity, they would need a lot of power. Many TW of capacity.
The issue is that renewable capacity is only deploying world wide at a rate of 100-200GW. That is globally and it's happening as fast as we can do and we're getting better at it. And while that is a lot, it's not nearly enough.
Over a few decades it of course adds up to plenty of capacity; especially as production processes improve over time and scale up. But for the Chinese to be able to start shutting down coal plants in the near future they need an alternative. Even if that is more expensive. So, they just announced well over a TW of nuclear power capacity in the form of 150 nuclear plants. Problem solved but it won't be cheap.
To me it looks like their plan is to ramp up nuclear at great cost so they can commit to shutting down coal sooner than the second half of this century; which is increasingly becoming a hard to defend position. A few decades in, they'll have quite a bit of nuclear capacity, much more renewable capacity, and a vanishingly small minority of fossil fuel based production; which they will pull the plug on at some point. Once that is done, they'll shift attention at reducing cost.
A lot of those nuclear plants might not even reach their planned end of life. They'll have served their purpose long before that. Once there is enough renewable capacity producing energy cheaper, they'll start doing to those plants what is happening to many expensive coal plants all over the world right now: shut them down. They'll cut their losses.
We started off with 100% of power generation being either fossil fuels or nuclear (+hydro etc. but these are minor for most places). As part-time renewables enter the stage, they take priority over the fossil fuel plants when they do produce, and simply go quiet when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine. We accept that, because we're fundamentally still in a fossil fuel energy mindset.
So what does the post-fossil fuel world look like, with a nuclear+renewables mix? Well, we have as much renewables as we'd like, but really (and here's the kicker) we also need enough nuclear for windless nights (or winter days which in e.g. Northern Europe barely count as daytime). So really, we need to be able to power nearly 100% of the economy through nuclear alone in those cases.
But then, that begs the question, do we still need the renewables at all? Right now it probably makes sense, because it lets you throttle back the fossil fuel burning, so is a net win. But if your baseload generation is carbon-free (at the margin anyway), it doesn't matter. You just don't need the renewables.
This is somewhat oversimplified, perhaps. E.g. the times when you are less likely to have wind and solar are at night, when energy use is lower (though will that remain the case when everyone's electric car is then charging?). Also, winters drive heating demand. Perhaps some small amount of storage makes a big difference; e.g. if we could store a week's worth of power, that takes us through all but the biggest troughs in power generation, and you need less nuclear (though again, not sure how that works with winters).
I'm not nuclear-crazy, if we could do solar+wind+batteries, why not. But I find the renewables lobby just says "yeah prices will fall, we will solve energy storage, just go all in on renewables, perish nuclear", which just seems like crazy wishful thinking. Whereas nuclear is always described based on 1970s technology and with the most exaggerated (un)safety numbers.
My point is we don't have them at a competitive price, and yet the renewables people insist we definitely well. We might, we might not.
Imagine if we had said that 40 years ago. We’d be talking about getting to net zero by 2075 instead of 2050.
Now we’re still waiting for renewables
The entire electrical generation industry knows all this. They know when clouds are coming and when wind will stop and model it all. Pricing information is sent ahead of time and plants know if they will be required to spin up or spin down well in advance. Especially something as simple as "everyone gets home at 6pm at a regular time every weekday". It is easy for plants with slow ramp times, such as nuclear and coal, to plan for that.
The only way we can get there at a reasonable cost is via hydrogen energy storage. The other ideas are orders of magnitude too expensive.
For the UK, the solution might look something like this: https://hydrogeneast.uk/study-explores-uks-geological-hydrog...
For whatever reason, energy production seems to be about meeting demand, rather than finding use for surpluses.
Mining for materials, waste products, waste heat, noise.
Already have regular extended family complaining about the huge number of noisy shipping containers in their communities. These are middle of nowhere towns.
Steel production require massive amount of energy, especially if you want to go coal free. Forest products also depend on cheap energy. An other area is concrete production.
After those I suspect it is food production. Read somewhere that fish farms on land is suffering in particular.
Basically any production dealing with raw materials.
I'm thinking, maybe we get to the point where we have lots of nuclear humming at a constant (ish) rate, and some much cheaper, but unreliable renewables. Can steel mills start and stop? Forestry, ming etc. work on the schedules of wind and sun?
Sounds tricky for sure. Especially because then, renewables will have to compete with marginal cost of nuclear (which is drastically lower than average, since it doesn't include the massive cape, fuel is cheap etc.)
The steel industry here try to build next to hydro, in areas where the price is relative low. The price point can differ by more than 100% when we compare the cheapest regions with the most expensive, for reason that has to do with transmissions. There is also experiments with hydrogen.
A few paper mills have cut down on employees, and in some cases shutdown the plants during periods of low wind.
Food production can't shutdown. A fish farm need to keep the water at a set temperature or the fish dies. Greenhouses that depend on artificial light can't just close down or the plants dies.
I would say that the answer is mostly a no. Short term some industries can adapt a little while waiting for the energy prices to stabilize, but long term it is a hard sell to have employees and building just sitting around.
I agree storage is a problem, maybe not as big as it is generally made out, but even then, would I rather struggle with nuclear waste, or millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? The latter will lead to a planetary-scale disaster, the former at worst to minor regional ones.
Also, the dangerous isotopes are also the ones which decay most quickly. Let the waste sit for 300 years and it will be no more radioactive than the uranium ore it was originally mined from. At that point you can dump it back into the uranium mine, or else keep it anywhere else you think would be safer than an abandoned uranium mine, the risks are miniscule either way.
Nuclear is an amazing source of cheap and clean energy, but the problem has always been the management of Nuclear plants and waste that has resulted in environmental disasters.
I'm honestly not confident in anyone to handle the Nuclear properly, not private enterprise or government. As history tells us, nobody can seem to get it right 100% of the time.
Maybe advancement in technology means safer Nuclear plants and easier to manage waste, but maybe they thought the same thing when they built the Fukushima or Chernobyl plants.
History has a knack for repeating itself.
Citation needed. (Or in less polite words: stop lying, it doesn't.)
> waste that has resulted in environmental disasters
Have you ever seen a coal ash pond? Do you know how many there are? Do you know what is in them? (There are thousands, they are filled with arsenic, heavy metals and often radioactive waste, and they are all across the landscape.)
Have you seen how brown coal is mined? Obliterating entire towns and villages as a matter of routine? All waste by all nuclear reactors in the world would fit in a single brown coal open pit and would do less human and environmental damage...
Sorry, you are right, let me clarify my answer. Dumping of radioactive waste in Europe was prevalent back in the 80's, but the effects of this are still felt today. Just recently a large number of barrels were found in the Baltic [1]. Japan also has announced it will be dumping large quantities of radioactive material into the ocean, because they simply don't know how to handle the situation any better [2]. The Japanese government claims that they intend to make the waste safe, personally I wouldn't trust such a statement.
> Have you seen how brown coal is mined? Obliterating entire towns and villages as a matter of routine?
I never mentioned the environmental impact of burning or mining coal, nor did I claim it was any better or worse than nuclear power.
I'm highlighting that mismanagement of Nuclear has historically been a problem and I don't feel confident that those mistakes aren't repeated in the future.
[1] - https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/2800-ra...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/13/fukushim...
Change will happen where regulatory capture isn’t strong.
Coal: 100000
Oil: 36000
Nuclear: 90
Solar: 440 (rooftop)
Wind: 150
Nuclear is the clear winner, closely followed by wind and solar.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
>Third, a heatwave in August of 2020 led to rolling blackouts across [California] as demand for electricity (to power air conditioners) outpaced supply.
Dry hot places have a better power solution, trivially.
Cold places, for the same reason, do not.
Meanwhile, parts of the former USSR have heat that really is too-cheap-to-meter.