“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”
It's 4 guys. Former heads of nuclear regulation US, UK, Germany, France.
"
Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany
Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety
Dr. Paul Dorfman, former Secretary UK Govt. Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters
"
Reasons:
Too costly in absolute terms to make a relevant contribution to global power production
More expensive than renewable energy in terms of energy production and CO2 mitigation, even taking into account costs of grid management tools like energy storage associated with renewables rollout.
Too costly and risky for financial market investment, and therefore dependent on very large public subsidies and loan guarantees.
Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived radioactive waste.
Financially unsustainable as no economic institution is prepared to insure against the full potential cost, environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation release – with the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public.
Militarily hazardous since newly promoted reactor designs increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults, and external impacts; vulnerability to climate-driven sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, inundation and flooding hazard, resulting in international economic impacts.
Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including ‘Advanced’ and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
Too unwieldy and complex to create an efficient industrial regime for reactor construction and operation processes within the intended build-time and scope needed for climate change mitigation.
Unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030’s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction costs of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.
One unfortunate but plausible take: wind and solar advocates correctly argue that nuclear cannot scale up, and nuclear advocates correctly argue that wind and solar cannot scale up. I have seen 15 years of peak-oil debate characterized this way.
One figure-of-merit, seldom emphasized, is how many tonnes of material per MW are required to create a generating facility/installation.
EDIT: That's a figure-of-demerit. MW/tonne would be the figure-of-merit, I suppose.
It's a clown argument as it pertains to climate change or climate issues in general.
For example:
> Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly.
We don't need it to be cheap (and it should be subsidized as far as consumers are concerned re cost). Who in the past few decades has successfully argued that nuclear is inexpensive? Nobody is making that argument, it's a straw-argument the author set up. We need it to produce energy at massive scale and reliably. Nuclear does that, and it's a technology we can keep improving upon (we should have spent the last 40-50 years aggressively improving upon it with large R&D expenditures; best time to plant a tree and all that).
Current US energy mix is coal at ~19.3% and nuclear at ~19.7% (2020 EIA numbers).
That's 93 nuclear reactors or less to wipe out US coal use. Hit the print button, get it to it already. In terms of US contributions on climate, that'd be a huge win. And more realistically, we could build toward 1/3 nuclear mix (instead of ~40%), while traditional renewables continue to expand, which would wipe out coal's share in tandem.
So your non expert opinion is superior to that of four regulators who oversaw the tech in question? Show your work. Wind and solar are cheap and abundant, and will continue to be so. No waste risk, no proliferation concerns, no catastrophic failure modes, and very little permitting (compared to nuclear). Clean power for decades once installed.
It boggles the mind that the armchair engineers continue to advocate for a technology subject matter experts conclude is a dead end. Nuclear advocates might as well be in the same camp as climate deniers.
It's actually not true that wind and solar have "no waste risk". They both produce large amounts of waste, actually, some of which is toxic. Granted, it's not nuclear waste, but it's waste nonetheless.
It's also plainly not accurate to compare nuclear advocates to climate deniers. Whether nuclear is still a good option is still an entirely legitimate debate with good points to be had on both sides.
I was a nuclear engineer in a past life.
Your appeal to biased experts does nothing to further the discussion.
You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about, so you breathlessly appeal to those who agree with you, all the while comparing those arguing in good faith, to another group you disagree with.
That we can just change "depends upon" to "depended upon", and it works the same.
Unlike the "former nuclear leaders", most aren't gonna bad mouth an industry they work or worked for - and to work for it, they also shared all its premises.
> Renewables account for most new U.S. electricity generating capacity in 2021
Capacity doesn’t buy you much for volatile renewable energies since the capacity factors for PV and wind are relatively low and wind production is unpredictable.
Despite the huge growth in PV and wind capacity, nuclear is still the largest source of carbon-free energy in the US according Argonne National Laboratory and the Department of Energy.
Russia built two Gen III+ reactors with 1200 MW each at the site of the existing Novovoronezh nuclear power plant for just about three billion Euros (250 billion Rubles).
Currently not going swimmingly adapting the VVER to western standards though. Looking to be at least €8 B if everything goes to plan, which would be lunacy to bank on given all other western examples. I wonder why only autocratic governments manage to build them?
> On 21 December 2018, Fennovoima announced that it had received a new schedule to receive the construction license and start construction of the plant in 2021. The commercial operation should start in 2028.[21]
> In April 2021, Fennovoima announced that bringing the design and licensing material to the level of Finnish requirements has taken longer than expected. The company estimated that it could obtain the construction license in 2022 and that construction of the power plant would begin in 2023. Commercial operation of the plant would begin in 2029.[1]
First, let's start with the fact that €8B is a wrong number. The last estimate is €7–7.5B. Next, you should consider the following factors:
- The Finish nuclear regulation is quite paranoid, even by "western" standards. Also add political pressure on the top of it.
- The project probably includes significant modification of the standard Russian design. Meaning additional design and certification costs. While Russia and most other foreign countries use mostly "standard" designs. But note that it's effectively a one-time cost, i.e. it will not apply to the same extent to additional reactors in the same country.
- It's a greenfield project, meaning the cost includes supporting infrastructure. Building additional reactors at an existing site or close to it will be noticeably cheaper (as the case with VVERs build today in Russia).
- Usually, in such projects the hosting side wrestles as much as possible for stuff to be built and procured locally. Meaning, labor and materials which are relatively cheap in Russia/Turkey/Egypt/etc. will cost 1.5-3x more in Finland.
Unsubsidized Wind is basically cheaper per the second graph on that report.
Unsubsidized Solar is right in the middle of nuclear
Coal is already uncompetitive, it's existence in the market is driven by availability of financing and material to replace it: energy companies are losing money on coal.
The holy grail is unsub wind/solar beating gas combined cycle, but I'll take subsidized. Coal and nat gas are implicitly subsidized: aside from the usual subsidies oil/gas get, they aren't subject to realistic carbon taxes.
I was going to make a comment saying the nuclear was fundamentally noncompetitive today, but that's not true per the graph. Nuclear is surprisingly still competitive, it's just that those plants are ancient and dangerous PWR/LWR almost across the board, Fukushimas waiting to happen.
What is needed is LFTR or other new generation projects, but the issue with those is they are 10-20 years out, even if we had a proven design. Solar/wind have a lot of price dropping still to go as economies of scale kick in. No one knows what the costs will be in 10-20 years, so how do you finance a nuke plant given you don't know a realistic profitable cost?
Also, Yucca mountain was a crappy idea. We should have had LFTRs in use at a minimum to be used to process/breed spent nuclear fuel rods and waste. As I understand it, LFTR can burn/use/convert nuke waste to power or other usable fuel.
Or we should have been on LFTR the whole time with its ability to use 99% of nuclear fuel.
But the boat was missed on this two or three decades ago. We are riding solar/wind and whatever remains for baseload/evening and storage.
What we NEED is a rapid phase-in carbon tax on coal/gas that is directly fed to consumer solar/storage and utility solar/wind.
Keep in mind that the second graph is the marginal cost. The first graph includes the numbers necessary for the initial investment in new builds. Fram that it is easy to see that nuclear new builds are completely uneconomical.
In the US and Japan the fraction of primary energy supplied by nuclear power is almost negligible (8% [1] and 3% [2]). Even the famously large French nuclear industry only manages 39% [3]. Nuclear power would have to be scaled up by orders of magnitude worldwide in order to make any difference to the global CO2 budget.
I don't know if I'd use proportion of national energy use when a reactor offers a fixed output while each nation's consumption (and area for alternative renewables) can drastically differ.
In 2019, the 93 nuclear reactors in the US produced 809.41 terawatt-hours of electricity[0]. Each reactor, as an average, produced about 8.7 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. Using a list with the power consumption per country[1], it seems like everything beneath rank roughly 100[2] would have their entire power needs met by a single reactor performing at the avg return of a US reactor (assuming peaks can be met as well).
To me, that seems promising and exciting. Smaller (by landmass) countries may not have the same ability to deploy renewables across wide swaths of land. A nuclear power plant can offset some of the necessity for land to scale energy use in a green-powered world without relying on importing energy.
I'm not sure that this is a good enough argument on its own to develop nuclear, especially given some of the lifetime costs, but I think it's a reasonable concern to want domestic power stability.
[2] Ranking is not representing total energy consumption per year, it seems, since sometimes the energy consumption goes up as rank decreases. Roughly though, everything in the bottom half of countries is within the reaches of at most 1 reactor.
It's somewhat disingenuous to use "primary energy" stats in this discussion. IIUC it includes stuff like gasoline used for transportation and natural gas used for heating and cooking. In France they produce 70-80% of their electricity from nuclear plants. Installing more renewables will not solve migration to EV and heat pumps, it's a whole another discussion barely relevant here.
>IIUC it includes stuff like gasoline used for transportation and natural gas used for heating and cooking.
As it should, as those are the things we should be replacing with environmental friendly sources and consumers (e.g. EVs). So if nuclear can't cover energy uses of 'stuff' currently using gasoline and nature gas, it's no real good...
What? Of course, the existing nuclear capacity is not enough to cover full migration to EV. The same applies to the existing capacity of renewables. You can not have 150% of nuclear (or any other kind of) generation relative to your current electricity consumption in anticipation of future migration to EV.
The point is that it was demonstrated in practice that high (~80%) nuclear ratio of electricity generation works well and results in stable and affordable long-term electricity prices, so you can scale it following mass migration to EV (it's a multi-decade process, so quite enough time to build new reactors). Meanwhile, we can see that grid starts to struggle when renewables get to 30-40% of generation capacity and you have to rely on fossil fuels to back them up during unfavorable conditions. Yes, in theory it could be solved, but those solutions have not been demonstrated in practice on large scale and long time frame.
> In the US and Japan the fraction of primary energy supplied by nuclear power is almost negligible (8% [1] and 3% [2]). Even the famously large French nuclear industry only manages 39% [3].
See the province of Ontario where 50-70% of power is from nuclear generation ("Supply" tab):
And if a reactor blows up (happens roughly ever 35 years) there are huge additional costs. Last time we were extremely lucky that we hadn't to evaluate Tokiyo.
If something like this would happen in Central Europe it would be extremely costly for the whole world.
But something like this could happen trice right?!
People live happily in Denver Colorado or New Jersey. Nobody ever says we should evacuate them. But they get an extra dose of radiation from living there, which reactors don't get. It's about costs and benefits.
Chernobyl was the only one of those that blew up and it was based an idiotic graphite pile design abandoned everywhere outside of the USSR in the 50s. Fukushima Daiichi experienced 3 small hydrogen explosions that were fully contained by the reactor building, and wouldn't have happened if they hadn't built their backup power for that reactor underground. According to a linear no-threshold model, the accident would most likely cause at most 130 cancer deaths in total assuming everyone in the zone of highest exposure received the maximum possible exposure, which they did not.
Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone and no one was exposed to enough radiation to increase their risk of cancer. The accident happened because someone trained on submarine reactors misapplied that training and turned off the cooling system. No operating reactor allows an operator to do that anymore. The reactor did not blow up.
Only one civilian nuclear power reactor has ever "blown up", Tokyo was never in danger, no one died because of Three Mile Island, and even around Chernobyl the predicted incidence of cancer is failing to materialize.
Ok let's change the perspective from cost in human lives to cost in money as the parent comment statet: is nuclear power still cheap if we count these disasters?
> The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm.
It's unbelievably safe, it has the among the lowest death toll per TWh of generated electricity. Depending on who you ask, it's lower than or in the same order of magnitude as solar and wind. [1]
It's definitely clean, they're ultra-low-carbon - and especially breeder or fast neutron reactors, generate tiny quantities of waste relative to the amount of power that comes out. And these spicy rocks can just be placed back down into the earth from whence they came.
Is it cheap? No. And that's ok, because that's not always the most important thing. However it's important to remember that nuclear prices in all externalities due to the public's fear and distrust. However, coal does not. The NRC uses a price of about $9M per additional death, and coal kills 9 million people per year. [2] If you price them at the same $9M per life, and divide by coal power generated - nuclear is cheaper than coal.
Irrelevant comparing to coal. It is a dead industry sharing the same issue nuclear has, steam cycles are too costly to build and operate[1]. A dollar spent on nuclear power plants is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue. Keep some R&D for the future magical break through, but current designs are dead in the water.
You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost.
> You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost.
Coal is unfortunately not a dying industry. [1]
My point isn't that it should be compared to coal but rather that it is actually not far and away the most expensive once you price in externalities. If we're talking subsidies, coal, oil, and natural gas received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020. [2] Makes the once-in-a-generation Fukushima cleanup look cheap no?
I strongly suspect that renewables received huge subsidies too,
the US alone threw a hundred billion or so their way in 2020.
Nuclear gets almost nothing.
To be clear I don't mind that renewables get subsidies - they should, and we should build them even if they're more expensive. Ditto for nuclear.
> A dollar spent on nuclear energy is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue.
Por que no los dos? Solar requires a ton of footprint and wind requires mining rare earth metals in hellscapes in Mongolia. [3] There's no free lunch. More good lunches are good.
Then, lets agree then on that it is a dead industry where options exist. Gas plants require more infrastructure investment up front, therefore coal exists in lower development countries.
Nuclear got the R&D subsidies for half a century without much to show for it. Nowadays renewables rightly has taken over that lead due to actual results.
> Nuclear got the R&D subsidies for half a century without much to show for it. Nowadays renewables rightly has taken over that lead due to actual results.
Nuclear hasn't received meaningful funding in like 30-ish years. That's the period of time where the largest leaps would have been made.
Because they simply could not be economically built, it's not all fun and games to light the ratepayers money on fire. That lead to the first SMR craze from a reeling industry, with nothing to show for it.
By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[49][50][51]
Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[52] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt. Al Gore has commented on the historical record and reliability of nuclear power in the United States:
"Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable."[53]
[...]
A cover story in the February 11, 1985, issue of Forbes magazine commented on the overall management of the nuclear power program in the United States:
"The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible."[55]
> It's unbelievably safe, it has the among the lowest death toll per TWh of generated electricity.
I have never understood the rationale behind that measure. First of all, radiation only directly causes death in most extreme circumstances - but even before it will increase the likelihood of severe diseases like cancer or will cause birth defects in the next generation. Deaths/TWh captures none of that stuff.
Second, why is the energy output even in there? We know nuclear is a high-yield energy source. That doesn't tell me anything about the likelihood of accidents over time or my personal risk while living next to a power station (or next to a disposal site).
By the same logic, you could conclude that binge-drinking alcohol is safer than drinking water as it's deaths/hours of fun measure is lower.
Or that chucking Earth into the sun would actually be an even safer method of producing energy than nuclear: Sure that would cause some 8 billion deaths, but look at that energy output!
Published death rates include models of excess mortality. Those models include accidents. Output is relevant because demand is constrained by price and applications. Not deaths from available technologies.
Further the nuclear excess mortality is in my opinion likely to be overstated, as - correct me if I'm wrong - they are primarily computed using the LNT (linear, no-threshold) dose-response model. This model is quite controversial and at best represents a worst-case. [1]
Of course it isn't. If climate change were a scientific reality in which if we didn't switch off fossil fuels immediately we'd face drastic consequence people like this would be gung ho on any technology that could save the planet, but would destroy a single mountain in Arizona.
Since climate change isn't a reality but is a political problem created to benefit solar and wind we can safely ignore nuclear as a solution to climate change because it also has some but very limited environmental costs.
It's the same reason in BC where I live all the climate change people are against hydro power (Site C).
It's very clear to me that anyone against nuclear doesn't really believe that we're on the brink of destroying the planet.
I think it's possible that many feel that either option (global warming) or (nuclear meltdown) could easily doom our nation. In other words, if one solution to freezing to death would be to burn down your house, they wouldn't take it. Sure it would fix your problem for a few minutes and then you'd be dead.
Note that I'm not against nuclear, just trying to point out how those you're referring to would view the situation.
When I was growing up my dad and I would talk about the people who froze to death in their cars out in the valley every few years when there was a freak storm and chat about how to burn the family car down to survive should we get stuck in a storm like that.
A report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell accused Jaczko of "strategically" withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing.[11][12]
In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—sent a letter to the White House expressing "grave concern" about Jaczko's actions at the NRC. On December 14, 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican, told a House oversight committee that Jaczko's "bullying and intimidation... should not and cannot be tolerated."[13]
At a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing on December 14, 2011, NRC Commissioner William Magwood, a fellow Democrat, testified about what he called Jaczko's abusive behavior towards employees, especially female subordinates. “One woman told me that she felt the chairman was actually irritated with someone else, but took it out on her,” Magwood said. “Another said she was angry at herself for being brought to tears in front of male colleagues. A third described how she couldn’t stop shaking after her experience. She sat, talking with her supervisor until she could calm down sufficiently to drive home.”[14]
> In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation.
It makes me question some of the people that are on the NRC. Government regulators want to err on the side of caution, as they don't want to be responsible if things go wrong. So many of these bureaucrats hold positions that likely aren't actually the optimal for society at large.
> I'm not sure how anything you said is a reason to discount him. You seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't take his position seriously because he backs up his beliefs with action. And what about the others standing along side him??
Yeah when Democrats and Republicans manage to agree on something, and that something is that you are apparently a not very ethical person (with alleged bullying on top) and the same President who appointed you made you step down.... I indeed stop taking your position, and everything you write/say, seriously. I won't discount the other 3 experts from France, Germany and UK, I'll read the article, but Jaczko's name is a sizeable black stain on the paper.
This argument relies on fiddling with the definition of "clean" in a way it is not otherwise used when discussing climate change. In the context of climate change, nuclear is clean because it does not release greenhouse gases.
It is the same tactic used by climate change deniers when they go on about how a wind turbine ended up in a landfill and as a result how there is no such thing as “clean” energy.
I really dislike how people talk about waste. We can sit on it safely for a few hundred years. But people call that passing the buck. It's not if we pursue more recycling technology. It isn't if we pursue more long term storage options. I promise you that we'll advance in technology in the next 300 years. (The waste also doesn't have a feedback loop like carbon emissions do). It's naive to think we can safely store things for tens of thousands of years for civilizations that won't be able to speak our language. There's a lot of artificial constraints on this problem that people don't understand. They also seem to not understand that there's far more dangerous materials that we dump every day that don't have half lives, meaning they are forever. Lead doesn't go away. Most heavy metals are stable.
Most of the anti nuclear points that the average person knows comes from oil propaganda. The same people who brought you the "reducing your carbon footprint" propaganda. It's basically the argument for perfection. Which we know perfection is the enemy of good. Because if they can sell this notion then we'll keep doing what we've been doing because momentum is also a powerful force.
Furthermore, solutions for the waste problem already exist in the form of fast breeder reactors [1] which can be used to create new fuel for (conventional) reactors. Using these the total amount of waste needing storage is reduced by a factor of 10. The remaining waste has a far shorter half life (none of the reaction products has a half-life between 100 to 210.000 years, all actinides are consumed in the reaction) which results in a relatively short (200-300 years) storage period instead of the thousands for spent fuel.
This is not just some piece of fiction, there are several active FBRs with several more on the drawing board or under construction.
I’d take this with a hefty pinch of thorium salts.
These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate. The current political climate says nuclear bad, because it’s a safe position for re-election - no government wants to invest in nuclear power because the optics of nuclear disasters are terrible, and because the payback time is much longer than an election cycle.
The slow death of poor air quality (fossil fuels kill millions a year) and climate change are easy to wrangle politically, because you can treat them as externalities.
>These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate.
The biggest problem with nuclear isn’t waste management, fuel procurement, nimby, not even black swans. The top problem is that if we commission enough nuclear plants today, they won’t produce the first watt until after it’s way too late to prevent catastrophic climate change. It could have been a solution 20 years ago, now you can build, operate and decommission a wind farm or solar plant in the time it takes to design and build a nuclear reactor.
That's a problem of our own making, and we could revert. The timelines are driven by permitting (both at the local level and at the NRC) and the customization of each reactor.
We desperately need reactors to roll off of an assembly line to drive down physical costs. And we also desperately need to trim down the regulatory burden. Together, those changes would dramatically speed up deployment and cut costs.
For me the pessimism is really starting to set in. Those most extremely passionate about climate change are ignoring the most immediate solutions and instead waiting future tech and economies of scale for expensive half-steps. If projections are correct, the chance of the global community figuring out the political solution seems nearly impossible.
I am at the point where it is something that comes out of Y Combinator or defense companies that solve the problems of climate change. Either tech solves the problem or we fight over what is left.
Tech is the problem of climate change. Tech powers economic growth, which has a price in joules, that incurs a debt in carbon.
And not only that, the solution to the problem is already known. Have fewer babies and reduce the population over time, travel less, produce goods closer to where they are needed, eat more produce and less meat, and increase prices for goods and services that require more energy and produce more carbon emissions.
Those are not technical solutions, they're political and economic.
You would have an easier time negotiating the laws of physics or lobbying the sun to be a little less hot. Those are not happening, so we need to take a look at what is next on the list of possibilities.
There are no technological possibilities that are predicated on sustained increases in human economic activity and energy usage. At best they slow the pace of climate change and at worse are fools errands.
That's ridiculous, having fewer babies does nothing to help us fight climate change, and proposing that shows a horribly muddled view of the problem.
The maximum climate effect from reducing having babies would mean no children for, say, the next 20 years. What does that do to reduce emissions to negative by 2050? Nothing! The very best it could possibly do is reduce emissions a tiny bit. It does not solve the problem, and it handicaps the workforce right when we need more people producing the tech to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, in all the multitude of ways we need reconfigure our economy to be carbon negative.
Tech is the only only only way out, unless you advocating for the premature deaths of billions and a return to nomadic lifestyles. Suggesting having fewer babies as a solution is just completely unserious.
The other major fallacy is that more goods and services requires more carbon emissions. That's just BS. In general, goods require a lot more carbon at the moment, but that's absolutely not a requirement, it's only because we are pulling geological carbon out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere to capture stored energy. We have newer, better tech to capture energy from the sun and wind and store it, that does not require any emissions.
Meat, similarly, is a red herring for those of us in the US. It's nothing compared to out driving, nothing at all. But brining up meat sure does rile up people to think that they aren't willing to make any changes.
We have the tech, and I agree that the problems are political for their deployment, but solar wind and storage will be far more economically efficient when deployed.
Climate change policy will always incur asymmetrical costs, and the people who it effects wouldn't willingly enact them, and others would rarely share that burden in a meaningful way. Outside of innovation, any other policy will most likely incur economic cost which politicians are hesitant to do, especially now with how stretched lower classes are.
I think the only way out is to make non hydrocarbon based energy production cheaper and as dependable as hydrocarbons.
100% agree. We innovate our way out of this or we go over a cliff, as if politicians tried to reduce standards of living instead, they would be thrown out in favour of authoritarians who simply would not care about environmental harm.
Which is the immediate solution, nuclear? Unfortunately it isn't. Solar and wind are way more immediate.
Nuclear takes bloody ages to build and is too expensive, both in building costs and in the power it delivers. It's not being built because effectively nobody wants it.
* Energy companies don't want it because it's long and tricky to make it actually happen -- if you're in the business of producing power, most anything else is an easier option.
* Financial entities don't want it because it's billions of dollars upfront that may not ever make a profit.
* Governments don't want it because it takes ages to build, so you're signing up for investing lots of tax money into something that your successor might cancel, and that they won't see the benefits of.
* Consumers don't want it because the power costs more, and if given the choice pretty much will choose to pay for something else.
At this point a single nuclear plant can take a decade to build, and if you were to try to have a huge build-up, it would take much longer. Because we're talking about a small and very specialized industry. You can't just get a nuclear reactor made down the street, and there isn't factories out there with an enormous amount of unused capacity for that because that makes no business sense.
I'm more optimistic than ever. The past few decades have been an absolute revolution in the economics of solar, wind, and storage. They are both getting cheaper than fossil fuels and scaling their production levels to just barely replace our carbon-emitting energy system with a carbon-free energy system on the schedule we need it.
The biggest hurdles will be traditional powerful economic forces resisting the disruption of cheaper, cleaner technology eating their lunch. This will be a biiig problem in places like the US. But once we have clean, cheap electricity and storage, a lot of the other problems become so much easier. A lot of chemical processes will need to be sorted out, like ammonia for fertilizer and concrete and aviation/shipping fuels, but all these will be far easier when we have the cheaper form of electricity.
We are in such a better place than we were a decade ago. There is tremendous reason to have hope, all we have to do is stay the course and speed our pace.
I don't care what it is that keeps power running. If removing nuclear reactors means that the whole energy grid is at risk, then I prefer having nuclear reactors compared to suddenly having a huge chunk of a population out of power.
I don't understand how your response relates to the article. Only two of the ten arguments apply to existing reactors: cascading accidents from internal or external problems some of which will be amplified by climate change, and dealing with nuclear waste.
His position is that building more reactors isn't the most effective method for combating climate change, primarily because the vast majority of reactor projects have been massively late and massively over-budget. Because of this, the window for investment in nuclear to stop the most severe results of climate change has already passed.
If he has argued for shutting down existing reactors then I apologize, but to me that is a major misrepresentation of the argument.
My perspective is a european one. Germany turned off three of its reactors while at the same time tons of people are screaming out of their lungs that it's a really bad idea doing so, because of technical reasons related to the safety of the european power grid.
From our, the people's perspective, we should only care about making sure that the power keeps running, while it does so without harming the environment more than really necessary.
I don't care about governments building new reactors when they shut down the old ones. New ones aren't going to help us, when the grid starts to fail, because they're not even going to be built yet.
Talking about new reactors is just distracting from the fact that powergrids need to be in order, which apparently they aren't. The reason, why talking about new reactors is a waste of time, is because more reactors help NOTHING when the powergrid fails, which is a far more pressing matter than literally anything else related to power and energy.
The reason, why my words don't really relate to the article, is because it's bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit.
Its a chicken and egg problem. It would be trivial in 2022 at a technical level for my electric clothes dryer to "pause" for five minutes mid cycle if a cloud passes over the solar farm. Nobody implements that because its not needed. It can't be implemented because nobody uses it now. We can't have it in the future because we didn't have it in the past. If solar power was "too cheap to meter" I'd use 10 KW to dry my clothes in 30 minutes instead of 60 and I wouldn't care if a cloud interrupted the solar panel and it took an extra five minutes at 35 minutes. But we can't have that because we never had that in the past so we'll never have that. We'll have uninterrupted electric clothes drying until we have no electric clothes drying at all due to catastrophic system collapse.
Nobody insulated aluminum refinery crucibles, in fact they worry about cooling. Because nobody ever considered cutting power to a crucible, its now impossible to cut power to a crucible without destroying it.
Nobody ever built a battery backed up CNC machine tool, because nobody ever needed to, so flipping the circuit breaker at a machine tool shop will cause thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. It would be trivial to include circuitry and CAM design models to prevent that but the first guy to spend the money will go out of business because it provides no advantage next quarter. Therefore its impossible to interrupt power to a CNC machine tool without mass destruction therefore solar powered factories are "impossible". Although if someone wanted to, it would be pretty trivial to implement.
The load on the grid at midnight for charging cell phones must add up to a nuclear power plant or two. We can't tell those chargers to chill and charge up later if there's a lull in the breeze and advertisers market how fast they charge. So we can't charge phones, or cars, with wind power we must use coal or nuclear. There's no technological reason interrupting the power would matter.
This even gets to house or hospital issues. Don't want to lose power during a surgery? Who cares, just make sure the UPS is bigger than the surgery. The batteries should last a long time if they're rarely used. Ditto my TV, I don't care if it runs off battery for five minutes as long as I can't tell the difference. But no TVs can do that right now so they MUST be coal or nuclear powered instead of wind powered.
Repeat thousands of times for every device that makes power interruption "impossible". If everything you owned was like your laptop and as long as on average the charge rate was higher than the use rate and the battery was "big enough" then you wouldn't care if the power was out 50% of the time, as long as it was 100% green and "too cheap to meter" the other 50% of the time.
It can't be clean, safe, smart (what does that mean?), or cheap because each installation must be handmade and completely custom and bespoke.
Much like for better or worse we could never have had "car culture" if every car ever made had to be custom designed and hand-built.
Also note that we could never produce tens of millions of custom designed cars per year because there are not that many human car designers alive; likewise we simply cannot built 10,000 more nuclear reactors because we do not have that many living nuclear engineers such that we can afford to custom design 10,000 totally bespoke reactors.
Also note that it took a century or so, but mass produced cars allow massive simulation for safety resulting in mass produced cars being VASTLY safer and less polluting than ancient 120 year old handmade cars.
The argument in the linked article essentially boils down to a list of huge advantages that would come from mass production and mass investment in nuclear energy that cannot be permitted to happen because simple linear extrapolation of handmade production shows it would be "impossible" to reach those levels because there are no advantages from mass production. In summary, the authors can't make their minds up, do the economic gains from mass production exist or not exist?
Now in practice, screwed up planet earth in 2022 might not be able to pull off mass production of nuclear power any more than we can currently pull off an interstellar space ship or similar technological daydreams. That's a serious argument against nuclear power, but the authors chose to be wishy washy instead and claim both sides of the argument that mass production either is awesome or doesn't exist, both at the same time.
Former nuclear reactor operator here. It's time for this 1970s style fear mongering to stop so we can get the planet fixed.
Dr. Jaczko is one of the worst NRC commissioners in history and was appointed by an anti-nuclear president to be obstructionist. Every one of the arguments in the letter are valid only because of regulations that have been put in place to make nuclear reactors impossible to build quickly or on budget.
The fear mongering isn't the problem with nuclear these days. The problem is that the US can't build it. VC Summer was a scam, billing rate payers of something like $9B for an abandoned construction site, and jail time for executives.
Vogtle is little better, and by the time it's finished, it will be some of the most expensive energy on the grid, and spending that money on solar and storage would have had a much much bigger climate impact.
Utilities know the financial risk of attempting nuclear construction, and the only reason these two sites attempted new nuclear is because laws were passed to pass all financial risk on to the public when there are construction failures. The public deserves better.
Though this editorial may be annoying, it's a complete distraction from the true cause of nuclear's failure in the 21st century, and that cause is entirely the nuclear industry's own fault.
I'm talking about the general failure of all large construction projects, not just highly regulated ones like nuclear builds.
The US economy no longer has the productive capacity to do large-scale logistical coordination needed for building big things. Until this is fixed, nuclear will be a pipe dream. And by the time it is fixed, it may well be the case that all steam-driven electricity generation has been made obsolete, in terms of cost, by solar wind and storage. Maybe not, but in any case that's more than a decade away.
$5-$15B isn't big in your opinion?! What sort of construction project is bigger? Miles of high precision welding, massive concrete pours that don't really happen in the same way anywhere else...
Have you followed any nuclear construction? Which projects? What project do you consider to be bigger?
Nuclear is insanely complex and large and difficult, I can't imagine what your basis for comparison could be here.
Submarines (lol, nuclear reactor + weapons systems all in a hull that can withstand insane pressure and protect and support 100 people), aircraft carriers (airport + nuclear reactor, support 5,000 people, weapons systems, air traffic control), electric car plants, large industrial parks (like the 30M SF one they built in 1 year in my hometown). The only thing holding nuclear back is a tether made of paper.
I used to operate a reactor and I now make software. The internals of your average video game or relational database are orders of magnitude more complex than a reactor. A reactor is a big machine, and the process involved is somewhat novel, but ultimately, it's making steam to turn a turbine with heat from decaying metal. It's not magic or even all that high-tech. Honestly, this stuff has been around for close to 80 years now. That means we can construct them using tech my great granddad would have been very familiar with.
Large shop floors like 30M sq ft industrial parks are trivial engineering, not anything at all like a large nuclear reactor. Even check out the pictures here, this is the simpler stuff, the big pieces. The tubing pulling it all together is insanely more complex:
Similarly, the military reactors are not of the same size, cost efficiency, fuel source, or manufacture as civilian reactors. People always bring them up, but if it's so easy to do the same thing in the civilian sphere, why didn't Westinghouse or literally anybody else do it?
There are so many deep dives into the failures at VC Summer now, and not a single one of them says there's some regulatory switch that could be flipped.
What is this particular tether made of paper holding back nuclear? If it's a regulation, name it. I've looked, and looked, and found none. Yet you still haven't even talked about the most relevant nuclear experience, that of the past 15 years in the US and Europe.
You have strong intuition and feelings, but can you back them up with some documentation?
> There are so many deep dives into the failures at VC Summer now, and not a single one of them says there's some regulatory switch that could be flipped.
Just last week the NRC shot down a VC funded reactor project citing inadequate documentation. I believe it was coverd here on HN. The issue isn't a magic switch, the issue is the whole regimen is impossible even for some of the world's largest companies, foreign or domestic, let alone a well funded startup. If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground?
And the consensus among everyone with experience was that the rejection was a just one, they didn't bother documenting basic stuff that had been asked for.
> If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground?
Im not sure what you are talking about here.
I keep on bringing up the AP1000 design that was certified for construction in Vogtle and VC Summer, using a new certification process specifically requested by industry where they could start building earlier.
Nobody is bothering to look at why these reactors failed construction, because it does not validate their pre-conceived notions about regulatory inhibition of nuclear.
Fine, eliminate the NRC and all regulation of nuclear. What's going to be built? Nothing, because nobody can figure out how to to do it in the US, and no utility wants to take the financial risk because of our lack of basic construction capacity.
Maybe Rosatom could bring in a construction crew, or we could contract with China, and somehow bring their methods to the US. But nobody is even suggesting that route to build new nuclear, they are hung up on false political battles rather than the true technical challenges.
And even if we bring in outside design and construction management, how quickly can we scale that process? Not fast enough to even replace our current fleet of reactors before it ages out.
The attempted "nuclear renaissance" that was attempted back in the mid-2000s has failed miserably, and people who claim to advocate for nuclear aren't even bothering to examine what went wrong or how to fix it. Which means that attempting nuclear again will have the same problem.
SMRs are the next wave from actual nuclear entrepreneurs, but at least one of them has revealed themselves to be a sham, based on their inability to document standard parts of their design that everybody else can.
The problem with nuclear is that there are far too many grifters in it. Most (but not all!) smart people have moved on to more promising tech, and the people left have not purged the dead weight, and the dead weight is killing projects, and killing the reputation.
Reading Voices from Chernobyl changed my opinion on nuclear. The potential human cost is so great it doesn’t seem worth it.
One other way of thinking about the issue is this: what would you consider a safe power plant? How about one that has a probability of failing once every ten thousand years. That sounds pretty safe, doesn’t it? Well with hundreds of power plants, the probability of a single one failing starts to get quite high on any given year. And that matches reality: three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, among many others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide...
The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Is that really a wise bet to make in the face of climate change?
> The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable.
Modern reactor designs cannot explode high into the atmosphere the way that Chernobyl did. That is, their contamination will never be as far-reaching as Chernobyl was. With modern designs, it's really a question of local contamination. Pit this against the global impact of climate change and it's pretty clear which issue is the more serious one. The potential impact of climate change is big enough that we shouldn't let potential local contamination be an obstacle to building out nuclear power.
So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? It’s undeniable that there are failure scenarios that are unknown with any design.
> So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination?
Well, for a start that doesn't contradict what I said above. Overall, the impact from Fukushima was really not that bad, all things considered. Compare for example to pollution and deaths attributed to coal power plants around the world. Pollution and deaths due to nuclear have a tendency to get vastly more media exposure though.
Second, they didn't evacuate all of Japan. They evacuated locally.
And finally, Japan is arguably the worst possible place you could build a bunch of nuclear power plants. On top of that, Fukushima was under-engineered. The fact that it didn't go worse than it did is actually a good example of how harmless nuclear power can be. But of course, that's no reason not to have stringent safety measures in place. I'm by no means advocating a wild west of nuclear power.
This isn’t convincing, sorry. While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential to make a large region of Japan uninhabitable and poison the food supply. That is super serious. Just because nothing bad happened this time, doesn’t mean that we’ll be so lucky in the future.
The biggest issue with your argument is that you have inadequate explanations for the failures that have happened. Chernobyl: bad reactor design. Fukushima: under engineered. Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant. How do we know that we haven’t missed anything significant and crucial to long term safe operation? Such a thing is unknowable, so all we can do is look at the evidence, and the evidence is that there is a history of poor design choices leading to events that border on calamity. Humans are fallible. Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion.
> Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant.
But quite importantly, in both of those cases the failure scenarios were not unknown (though the risk was deemed acceptable, for whatever reasons). Unknown failure scenarios don't really happen in this space -- such a thing is neither acceptable nor expected.
> Humans are fallible.
But of course, this I can't argue with. Nor that Chernobyl and Fukushima did in fact happen.
> Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion.
So what it boils down to, in my mind, is a numbers game. We know that climate change has the potential for killing hundreds of millions of people, if not more. We know that coal power plants routinely and completely expectedly kill a bunch of people (the numbers really are staggering for something so common).
So the point I'm making is that Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the general risk with nuclear, should not on its own stop us from building out nuclear. It has to be a balance with the risks of the other options. (large-scale battery capacity and the economics of nuclear are additional jokers in this debate, but let's not get into that)
> While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential...
Finally -- while I understand where you're coming from -- this particular argument doesn't sit that well with me. It's a little too easy to use this as a "slippery slope" style appeal to emotions, rather than objective evidence. To turn it around: climate change has the potential to wipe out humanity. We should shut down literally all coal power plants tomorrow, and start building thousands of nuclear power plants.
This is of course not a reasonable argument, and nor is it reasonable of me to completely denounce your concern here. So this is where the details of the risk/benefits analysis matters, and above all it has to be an evidence-based argument. I don't think emotive arguments about how bad Fukushima or Chernobyl was or could have been, have a place in this debate.
While most of the nuclear debate focuses on this concern, I think it misses an even earlier concern: we do not have the capability to build nuclear at the scale needed for it to deal with the problem.
We would need to start and complete ~100 reactors in the next 20 years just to keep our current level of nuclear. Back in 2008, we started 4, have abandoned two due to construction incompetence, and the other two are taking 2-3x as long as expected, and cost 2-3x as much. This is with only four reactors. If we tried to scale this 25-50x, our problems would multiply, not get easier. And that's just to keep our current level of nuclear, not switch to a high level of nuclear like we would need to do in order for nuclear to be a significant part of our energy interchange.
We have far better routes to a carbon-free energy economy than paying contractors Thai have no clue what they are doing.
115 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadThe Verge : https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904943/nuclear-power-cl...
" Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety Dr. Paul Dorfman, former Secretary UK Govt. Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters "
Reasons:
One figure-of-merit, seldom emphasized, is how many tonnes of material per MW are required to create a generating facility/installation.
EDIT: That's a figure-of-demerit. MW/tonne would be the figure-of-merit, I suppose.
For example:
> Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly.
We don't need it to be cheap (and it should be subsidized as far as consumers are concerned re cost). Who in the past few decades has successfully argued that nuclear is inexpensive? Nobody is making that argument, it's a straw-argument the author set up. We need it to produce energy at massive scale and reliably. Nuclear does that, and it's a technology we can keep improving upon (we should have spent the last 40-50 years aggressively improving upon it with large R&D expenditures; best time to plant a tree and all that).
Current US energy mix is coal at ~19.3% and nuclear at ~19.7% (2020 EIA numbers).
That's 93 nuclear reactors or less to wipe out US coal use. Hit the print button, get it to it already. In terms of US contributions on climate, that'd be a huge win. And more realistically, we could build toward 1/3 nuclear mix (instead of ~40%), while traditional renewables continue to expand, which would wipe out coal's share in tandem.
It boggles the mind that the armchair engineers continue to advocate for a technology subject matter experts conclude is a dead end. Nuclear advocates might as well be in the same camp as climate deniers.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 (Renewables account for most new U.S. electricity generating capacity in 2021)
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.01.11/main.svg
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 (Solar power will account for nearly half of new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2022)
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2022.01.10/main.svg
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/26/sunrise-brief-the-int... (Solar interconnection queue in the US jumped from 139GWac in 2019 to 639GWac today)
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... (US renewable pipeline poised to add 172.5 GW through 2024)
It's also plainly not accurate to compare nuclear advocates to climate deniers. Whether nuclear is still a good option is still an entirely legitimate debate with good points to be had on both sides.
You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about, so you breathlessly appeal to those who agree with you, all the while comparing those arguing in good faith, to another group you disagree with.
In short, you’re a mess.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, what’s your point?
Unlike the "former nuclear leaders", most aren't gonna bad mouth an industry they work or worked for - and to work for it, they also shared all its premises.
Capacity doesn’t buy you much for volatile renewable energies since the capacity factors for PV and wind are relatively low and wind production is unpredictable.
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
Despite the huge growth in PV and wind capacity, nuclear is still the largest source of carbon-free energy in the US according Argonne National Laboratory and the Department of Energy.
> https://youtu.be/MlMDDhQ9-pE > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclea...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novovoronezh_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
Germany spends 20-30 billion Euros every year on its subsidies for renewable energies (EEG-Umlage):
> https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Mediathek/Monito... (page 32)
Nuclear isn’t expensive if you do it right.
> On 21 December 2018, Fennovoima announced that it had received a new schedule to receive the construction license and start construction of the plant in 2021. The commercial operation should start in 2028.[21]
> In April 2021, Fennovoima announced that bringing the design and licensing material to the level of Finnish requirements has taken longer than expected. The company estimated that it could obtain the construction license in 2022 and that construction of the power plant would begin in 2023. Commercial operation of the plant would begin in 2029.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- The Finish nuclear regulation is quite paranoid, even by "western" standards. Also add political pressure on the top of it.
- The project probably includes significant modification of the standard Russian design. Meaning additional design and certification costs. While Russia and most other foreign countries use mostly "standard" designs. But note that it's effectively a one-time cost, i.e. it will not apply to the same extent to additional reactors in the same country.
- It's a greenfield project, meaning the cost includes supporting infrastructure. Building additional reactors at an existing site or close to it will be noticeably cheaper (as the case with VVERs build today in Russia).
- Usually, in such projects the hosting side wrestles as much as possible for stuff to be built and procured locally. Meaning, labor and materials which are relatively cheap in Russia/Turkey/Egypt/etc. will cost 1.5-3x more in Finland.
Unsubsidized Wind is basically cheaper per the second graph on that report.
Unsubsidized Solar is right in the middle of nuclear
Coal is already uncompetitive, it's existence in the market is driven by availability of financing and material to replace it: energy companies are losing money on coal.
The holy grail is unsub wind/solar beating gas combined cycle, but I'll take subsidized. Coal and nat gas are implicitly subsidized: aside from the usual subsidies oil/gas get, they aren't subject to realistic carbon taxes.
I was going to make a comment saying the nuclear was fundamentally noncompetitive today, but that's not true per the graph. Nuclear is surprisingly still competitive, it's just that those plants are ancient and dangerous PWR/LWR almost across the board, Fukushimas waiting to happen.
What is needed is LFTR or other new generation projects, but the issue with those is they are 10-20 years out, even if we had a proven design. Solar/wind have a lot of price dropping still to go as economies of scale kick in. No one knows what the costs will be in 10-20 years, so how do you finance a nuke plant given you don't know a realistic profitable cost?
Also, Yucca mountain was a crappy idea. We should have had LFTRs in use at a minimum to be used to process/breed spent nuclear fuel rods and waste. As I understand it, LFTR can burn/use/convert nuke waste to power or other usable fuel.
Or we should have been on LFTR the whole time with its ability to use 99% of nuclear fuel.
But the boat was missed on this two or three decades ago. We are riding solar/wind and whatever remains for baseload/evening and storage.
What we NEED is a rapid phase-in carbon tax on coal/gas that is directly fed to consumer solar/storage and utility solar/wind.
Yeah, what do the experts in charge of nuclear evergy policies in 4 major western countries know.
It's better to trust the opinion of random nuclear fans on the web, or the "facts" of nuclear commercial industry astroturfers...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/USA/total-ene...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/jpn/total-ene...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/FRA/total-ene...
In 2019, the 93 nuclear reactors in the US produced 809.41 terawatt-hours of electricity[0]. Each reactor, as an average, produced about 8.7 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. Using a list with the power consumption per country[1], it seems like everything beneath rank roughly 100[2] would have their entire power needs met by a single reactor performing at the avg return of a US reactor (assuming peaks can be met as well).
To me, that seems promising and exciting. Smaller (by landmass) countries may not have the same ability to deploy renewables across wide swaths of land. A nuclear power plant can offset some of the necessity for land to scale energy use in a green-powered world without relying on importing energy.
I'm not sure that this is a good enough argument on its own to develop nuclear, especially given some of the lifetime costs, but I think it's a reasonable concern to want domestic power stability.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
[2] Ranking is not representing total energy consumption per year, it seems, since sometimes the energy consumption goes up as rank decreases. Roughly though, everything in the bottom half of countries is within the reaches of at most 1 reactor.
Edit: Edited for formatting on sources
As it should, as those are the things we should be replacing with environmental friendly sources and consumers (e.g. EVs). So if nuclear can't cover energy uses of 'stuff' currently using gasoline and nature gas, it's no real good...
The point is that it was demonstrated in practice that high (~80%) nuclear ratio of electricity generation works well and results in stable and affordable long-term electricity prices, so you can scale it following mass migration to EV (it's a multi-decade process, so quite enough time to build new reactors). Meanwhile, we can see that grid starts to struggle when renewables get to 30-40% of generation capacity and you have to rely on fossil fuels to back them up during unfavorable conditions. Yes, in theory it could be solved, but those solutions have not been demonstrated in practice on large scale and long time frame.
See the province of Ontario where 50-70% of power is from nuclear generation ("Supply" tab):
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
A steady 10,000 MW. Hydro tends to supply another 3000 MW for baseload. As wind fluctuates, gas turbines can brought online as needed.
We could use another 3000MW of nuclear capacity IMHO.
(I live 50km from one of the nuke plants.)
But something like this could happen trice right?!
Central Europe also doesn't have tsunamis.
Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone and no one was exposed to enough radiation to increase their risk of cancer. The accident happened because someone trained on submarine reactors misapplied that training and turned off the cooling system. No operating reactor allows an operator to do that anymore. The reactor did not blow up.
Only one civilian nuclear power reactor has ever "blown up", Tokyo was never in danger, no one died because of Three Mile Island, and even around Chernobyl the predicted incidence of cancer is failing to materialize.
It's unbelievably safe, it has the among the lowest death toll per TWh of generated electricity. Depending on who you ask, it's lower than or in the same order of magnitude as solar and wind. [1]
It's definitely clean, they're ultra-low-carbon - and especially breeder or fast neutron reactors, generate tiny quantities of waste relative to the amount of power that comes out. And these spicy rocks can just be placed back down into the earth from whence they came.
Is it cheap? No. And that's ok, because that's not always the most important thing. However it's important to remember that nuclear prices in all externalities due to the public's fear and distrust. However, coal does not. The NRC uses a price of about $9M per additional death, and coal kills 9 million people per year. [2] If you price them at the same $9M per life, and divide by coal power generated - nuclear is cheaper than coal.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...
You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost.
[1]: Table ES3 https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_G...
Coal is unfortunately not a dying industry. [1]
My point isn't that it should be compared to coal but rather that it is actually not far and away the most expensive once you price in externalities. If we're talking subsidies, coal, oil, and natural gas received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020. [2] Makes the once-in-a-generation Fukushima cleanup look cheap no?
I strongly suspect that renewables received huge subsidies too, the US alone threw a hundred billion or so their way in 2020.
Nuclear gets almost nothing.
To be clear I don't mind that renewables get subsidies - they should, and we should build them even if they're more expensive. Ditto for nuclear.
> A dollar spent on nuclear energy is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue.
Por que no los dos? Solar requires a ton of footprint and wind requires mining rare earth metals in hellscapes in Mongolia. [3] There's no free lunch. More good lunches are good.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/far-from-dyin...
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...
Completely agree that subsidies for fossil fuels should be gone. The issue is that Fukushima is not once in a generation. Seems to be about once every 10-20 years given TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima and the near misses or other costly mistakes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents in Japan or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... in Sweden where pure luck avoided a meltdown. Other nice ones include Monju in Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant.
Nuclear got the R&D subsidies for half a century without much to show for it. Nowadays renewables rightly has taken over that lead due to actual results.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much...
Nuclear hasn't received meaningful funding in like 30-ish years. That's the period of time where the largest leaps would have been made.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[49][50][51]
Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[52] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt. Al Gore has commented on the historical record and reliability of nuclear power in the United States:
"Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable."[53]
[...]
A cover story in the February 11, 1985, issue of Forbes magazine commented on the overall management of the nuclear power program in the United States:
"The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible."[55]
I have never understood the rationale behind that measure. First of all, radiation only directly causes death in most extreme circumstances - but even before it will increase the likelihood of severe diseases like cancer or will cause birth defects in the next generation. Deaths/TWh captures none of that stuff.
Second, why is the energy output even in there? We know nuclear is a high-yield energy source. That doesn't tell me anything about the likelihood of accidents over time or my personal risk while living next to a power station (or next to a disposal site).
By the same logic, you could conclude that binge-drinking alcohol is safer than drinking water as it's deaths/hours of fun measure is lower.
Or that chucking Earth into the sun would actually be an even safer method of producing energy than nuclear: Sure that would cause some 8 billion deaths, but look at that energy output!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
Since climate change isn't a reality but is a political problem created to benefit solar and wind we can safely ignore nuclear as a solution to climate change because it also has some but very limited environmental costs.
It's the same reason in BC where I live all the climate change people are against hydro power (Site C).
It's very clear to me that anyone against nuclear doesn't really believe that we're on the brink of destroying the planet.
Note that I'm not against nuclear, just trying to point out how those you're referring to would view the situation.
I'm definitely more in the Dudley and Stephens camp than most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens
I think the US comes out slightly ahead in the worst case climate change scenario, Canada is a huge winner.
so, let's see who that may be.....
.....aaand it's Greg Jaczko, nothing to see, move along, dude's biased as hell, with some really poor work ethics on top.
From his wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko):
A report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell accused Jaczko of "strategically" withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing.[11][12]
In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—sent a letter to the White House expressing "grave concern" about Jaczko's actions at the NRC. On December 14, 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican, told a House oversight committee that Jaczko's "bullying and intimidation... should not and cannot be tolerated."[13]
At a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing on December 14, 2011, NRC Commissioner William Magwood, a fellow Democrat, testified about what he called Jaczko's abusive behavior towards employees, especially female subordinates. “One woman told me that she felt the chairman was actually irritated with someone else, but took it out on her,” Magwood said. “Another said she was angry at herself for being brought to tears in front of male colleagues. A third described how she couldn’t stop shaking after her experience. She sat, talking with her supervisor until she could calm down sufficiently to drive home.”[14]
A key passage:
> In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation.
It makes me question some of the people that are on the NRC. Government regulators want to err on the side of caution, as they don't want to be responsible if things go wrong. So many of these bureaucrats hold positions that likely aren't actually the optimal for society at large.
> I'm not sure how anything you said is a reason to discount him. You seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't take his position seriously because he backs up his beliefs with action. And what about the others standing along side him??
Yeah when Democrats and Republicans manage to agree on something, and that something is that you are apparently a not very ethical person (with alleged bullying on top) and the same President who appointed you made you step down.... I indeed stop taking your position, and everything you write/say, seriously. I won't discount the other 3 experts from France, Germany and UK, I'll read the article, but Jaczko's name is a sizeable black stain on the paper.
This argument relies on fiddling with the definition of "clean" in a way it is not otherwise used when discussing climate change. In the context of climate change, nuclear is clean because it does not release greenhouse gases.
It is the same tactic used by climate change deniers when they go on about how a wind turbine ended up in a landfill and as a result how there is no such thing as “clean” energy.
Most of the anti nuclear points that the average person knows comes from oil propaganda. The same people who brought you the "reducing your carbon footprint" propaganda. It's basically the argument for perfection. Which we know perfection is the enemy of good. Because if they can sell this notion then we'll keep doing what we've been doing because momentum is also a powerful force.
This is not just some piece of fiction, there are several active FBRs with several more on the drawing board or under construction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Can you eat it, can you drink it, can you breath it?
Does it actively destroy/damage other living things that come with in proximity of it knowingly or not?
Does it pollute when used? Now we can have a similar debate on the word pollute.
Does it make the air/ground/water toxic from the use of it?
Can it be freely released without harmful side effects without being securely contained.
Yes.
> Does it actively destroy/damage other living things that come with in proximity of it knowingly or not?
No.
> Does it pollute when used? Now we can have a similar debate on the word pollute.
No.
> Does it make the air/ground/water toxic from the use of it?
No.
> Can it be freely released without harmful side effects without being securely contained.
Yes.
Most human activities, including all methods of power production except hydro (and it has other problems), would fail this standard.
That is a reason to treat sewage, not ban soap.
> https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html
These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate. The current political climate says nuclear bad, because it’s a safe position for re-election - no government wants to invest in nuclear power because the optics of nuclear disasters are terrible, and because the payback time is much longer than an election cycle.
The slow death of poor air quality (fossil fuels kill millions a year) and climate change are easy to wrangle politically, because you can treat them as externalities.
See also: Fauci, Anthony
We desperately need reactors to roll off of an assembly line to drive down physical costs. And we also desperately need to trim down the regulatory burden. Together, those changes would dramatically speed up deployment and cut costs.
This was an interesting essay and I will probably read the book it is reviewing: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
We have plenty of technological solutions already, and look at the mess we have. Sure, none of them is perfect, but none ever will be, either.
Mostly standard fights over unions and subsidies.
And not only that, the solution to the problem is already known. Have fewer babies and reduce the population over time, travel less, produce goods closer to where they are needed, eat more produce and less meat, and increase prices for goods and services that require more energy and produce more carbon emissions.
Those are not technical solutions, they're political and economic.
There are no technological possibilities that are predicated on sustained increases in human economic activity and energy usage. At best they slow the pace of climate change and at worse are fools errands.
The maximum climate effect from reducing having babies would mean no children for, say, the next 20 years. What does that do to reduce emissions to negative by 2050? Nothing! The very best it could possibly do is reduce emissions a tiny bit. It does not solve the problem, and it handicaps the workforce right when we need more people producing the tech to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, in all the multitude of ways we need reconfigure our economy to be carbon negative.
Tech is the only only only way out, unless you advocating for the premature deaths of billions and a return to nomadic lifestyles. Suggesting having fewer babies as a solution is just completely unserious.
The other major fallacy is that more goods and services requires more carbon emissions. That's just BS. In general, goods require a lot more carbon at the moment, but that's absolutely not a requirement, it's only because we are pulling geological carbon out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere to capture stored energy. We have newer, better tech to capture energy from the sun and wind and store it, that does not require any emissions.
Meat, similarly, is a red herring for those of us in the US. It's nothing compared to out driving, nothing at all. But brining up meat sure does rile up people to think that they aren't willing to make any changes.
We have the tech, and I agree that the problems are political for their deployment, but solar wind and storage will be far more economically efficient when deployed.
Climate change policy will always incur asymmetrical costs, and the people who it effects wouldn't willingly enact them, and others would rarely share that burden in a meaningful way. Outside of innovation, any other policy will most likely incur economic cost which politicians are hesitant to do, especially now with how stretched lower classes are.
I think the only way out is to make non hydrocarbon based energy production cheaper and as dependable as hydrocarbons.
Nuclear takes bloody ages to build and is too expensive, both in building costs and in the power it delivers. It's not being built because effectively nobody wants it.
* Energy companies don't want it because it's long and tricky to make it actually happen -- if you're in the business of producing power, most anything else is an easier option.
* Financial entities don't want it because it's billions of dollars upfront that may not ever make a profit.
* Governments don't want it because it takes ages to build, so you're signing up for investing lots of tax money into something that your successor might cancel, and that they won't see the benefits of.
* Consumers don't want it because the power costs more, and if given the choice pretty much will choose to pay for something else.
At this point a single nuclear plant can take a decade to build, and if you were to try to have a huge build-up, it would take much longer. Because we're talking about a small and very specialized industry. You can't just get a nuclear reactor made down the street, and there isn't factories out there with an enormous amount of unused capacity for that because that makes no business sense.
How about:
* stop shutting down current nuclear electrical generation capacity
* build more solar and wind capacity
* as more renewable capacity comes online use it retire fossil fuel generators
Once all the carbon-emitting stuff is offline then perhaps look at shutting down current nuclear.
You know: the opposite of what Germany is doing.
The biggest hurdles will be traditional powerful economic forces resisting the disruption of cheaper, cleaner technology eating their lunch. This will be a biiig problem in places like the US. But once we have clean, cheap electricity and storage, a lot of the other problems become so much easier. A lot of chemical processes will need to be sorted out, like ammonia for fertilizer and concrete and aviation/shipping fuels, but all these will be far easier when we have the cheaper form of electricity.
We are in such a better place than we were a decade ago. There is tremendous reason to have hope, all we have to do is stay the course and speed our pace.
No fucking thanks.
His position is that building more reactors isn't the most effective method for combating climate change, primarily because the vast majority of reactor projects have been massively late and massively over-budget. Because of this, the window for investment in nuclear to stop the most severe results of climate change has already passed.
If he has argued for shutting down existing reactors then I apologize, but to me that is a major misrepresentation of the argument.
My perspective is a european one. Germany turned off three of its reactors while at the same time tons of people are screaming out of their lungs that it's a really bad idea doing so, because of technical reasons related to the safety of the european power grid.
From our, the people's perspective, we should only care about making sure that the power keeps running, while it does so without harming the environment more than really necessary.
I don't care about governments building new reactors when they shut down the old ones. New ones aren't going to help us, when the grid starts to fail, because they're not even going to be built yet.
Talking about new reactors is just distracting from the fact that powergrids need to be in order, which apparently they aren't. The reason, why talking about new reactors is a waste of time, is because more reactors help NOTHING when the powergrid fails, which is a far more pressing matter than literally anything else related to power and energy.
The reason, why my words don't really relate to the article, is because it's bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit.
Its a chicken and egg problem. It would be trivial in 2022 at a technical level for my electric clothes dryer to "pause" for five minutes mid cycle if a cloud passes over the solar farm. Nobody implements that because its not needed. It can't be implemented because nobody uses it now. We can't have it in the future because we didn't have it in the past. If solar power was "too cheap to meter" I'd use 10 KW to dry my clothes in 30 minutes instead of 60 and I wouldn't care if a cloud interrupted the solar panel and it took an extra five minutes at 35 minutes. But we can't have that because we never had that in the past so we'll never have that. We'll have uninterrupted electric clothes drying until we have no electric clothes drying at all due to catastrophic system collapse.
Nobody insulated aluminum refinery crucibles, in fact they worry about cooling. Because nobody ever considered cutting power to a crucible, its now impossible to cut power to a crucible without destroying it.
Nobody ever built a battery backed up CNC machine tool, because nobody ever needed to, so flipping the circuit breaker at a machine tool shop will cause thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. It would be trivial to include circuitry and CAM design models to prevent that but the first guy to spend the money will go out of business because it provides no advantage next quarter. Therefore its impossible to interrupt power to a CNC machine tool without mass destruction therefore solar powered factories are "impossible". Although if someone wanted to, it would be pretty trivial to implement.
The load on the grid at midnight for charging cell phones must add up to a nuclear power plant or two. We can't tell those chargers to chill and charge up later if there's a lull in the breeze and advertisers market how fast they charge. So we can't charge phones, or cars, with wind power we must use coal or nuclear. There's no technological reason interrupting the power would matter.
This even gets to house or hospital issues. Don't want to lose power during a surgery? Who cares, just make sure the UPS is bigger than the surgery. The batteries should last a long time if they're rarely used. Ditto my TV, I don't care if it runs off battery for five minutes as long as I can't tell the difference. But no TVs can do that right now so they MUST be coal or nuclear powered instead of wind powered.
Repeat thousands of times for every device that makes power interruption "impossible". If everything you owned was like your laptop and as long as on average the charge rate was higher than the use rate and the battery was "big enough" then you wouldn't care if the power was out 50% of the time, as long as it was 100% green and "too cheap to meter" the other 50% of the time.
Much like for better or worse we could never have had "car culture" if every car ever made had to be custom designed and hand-built.
Also note that we could never produce tens of millions of custom designed cars per year because there are not that many human car designers alive; likewise we simply cannot built 10,000 more nuclear reactors because we do not have that many living nuclear engineers such that we can afford to custom design 10,000 totally bespoke reactors.
Also note that it took a century or so, but mass produced cars allow massive simulation for safety resulting in mass produced cars being VASTLY safer and less polluting than ancient 120 year old handmade cars.
The argument in the linked article essentially boils down to a list of huge advantages that would come from mass production and mass investment in nuclear energy that cannot be permitted to happen because simple linear extrapolation of handmade production shows it would be "impossible" to reach those levels because there are no advantages from mass production. In summary, the authors can't make their minds up, do the economic gains from mass production exist or not exist?
Now in practice, screwed up planet earth in 2022 might not be able to pull off mass production of nuclear power any more than we can currently pull off an interstellar space ship or similar technological daydreams. That's a serious argument against nuclear power, but the authors chose to be wishy washy instead and claim both sides of the argument that mass production either is awesome or doesn't exist, both at the same time.
To which I say: “this is my shocked face”
Dr. Jaczko is one of the worst NRC commissioners in history and was appointed by an anti-nuclear president to be obstructionist. Every one of the arguments in the letter are valid only because of regulations that have been put in place to make nuclear reactors impossible to build quickly or on budget.
Vogtle is little better, and by the time it's finished, it will be some of the most expensive energy on the grid, and spending that money on solar and storage would have had a much much bigger climate impact.
Utilities know the financial risk of attempting nuclear construction, and the only reason these two sites attempted new nuclear is because laws were passed to pass all financial risk on to the public when there are construction failures. The public deserves better.
Though this editorial may be annoying, it's a complete distraction from the true cause of nuclear's failure in the 21st century, and that cause is entirely the nuclear industry's own fault.
With the current regulatory situation that is accurate.
See also other large builds in the US which do not have the nrc.
The US economy no longer has the productive capacity to do large-scale logistical coordination needed for building big things. Until this is fixed, nuclear will be a pipe dream. And by the time it is fixed, it may well be the case that all steam-driven electricity generation has been made obsolete, in terms of cost, by solar wind and storage. Maybe not, but in any case that's more than a decade away.
Have you followed any nuclear construction? Which projects? What project do you consider to be bigger?
Nuclear is insanely complex and large and difficult, I can't imagine what your basis for comparison could be here.
I used to operate a reactor and I now make software. The internals of your average video game or relational database are orders of magnitude more complex than a reactor. A reactor is a big machine, and the process involved is somewhat novel, but ultimately, it's making steam to turn a turbine with heat from decaying metal. It's not magic or even all that high-tech. Honestly, this stuff has been around for close to 80 years now. That means we can construct them using tech my great granddad would have been very familiar with.
https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_pr...
Similarly, the military reactors are not of the same size, cost efficiency, fuel source, or manufacture as civilian reactors. People always bring them up, but if it's so easy to do the same thing in the civilian sphere, why didn't Westinghouse or literally anybody else do it?
There are so many deep dives into the failures at VC Summer now, and not a single one of them says there's some regulatory switch that could be flipped.
What is this particular tether made of paper holding back nuclear? If it's a regulation, name it. I've looked, and looked, and found none. Yet you still haven't even talked about the most relevant nuclear experience, that of the past 15 years in the US and Europe.
You have strong intuition and feelings, but can you back them up with some documentation?
Just last week the NRC shot down a VC funded reactor project citing inadequate documentation. I believe it was coverd here on HN. The issue isn't a magic switch, the issue is the whole regimen is impossible even for some of the world's largest companies, foreign or domestic, let alone a well funded startup. If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground?
> If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground?
Im not sure what you are talking about here.
I keep on bringing up the AP1000 design that was certified for construction in Vogtle and VC Summer, using a new certification process specifically requested by industry where they could start building earlier.
Nobody is bothering to look at why these reactors failed construction, because it does not validate their pre-conceived notions about regulatory inhibition of nuclear.
Fine, eliminate the NRC and all regulation of nuclear. What's going to be built? Nothing, because nobody can figure out how to to do it in the US, and no utility wants to take the financial risk because of our lack of basic construction capacity.
Maybe Rosatom could bring in a construction crew, or we could contract with China, and somehow bring their methods to the US. But nobody is even suggesting that route to build new nuclear, they are hung up on false political battles rather than the true technical challenges.
And even if we bring in outside design and construction management, how quickly can we scale that process? Not fast enough to even replace our current fleet of reactors before it ages out.
The attempted "nuclear renaissance" that was attempted back in the mid-2000s has failed miserably, and people who claim to advocate for nuclear aren't even bothering to examine what went wrong or how to fix it. Which means that attempting nuclear again will have the same problem.
SMRs are the next wave from actual nuclear entrepreneurs, but at least one of them has revealed themselves to be a sham, based on their inability to document standard parts of their design that everybody else can.
The problem with nuclear is that there are far too many grifters in it. Most (but not all!) smart people have moved on to more promising tech, and the people left have not purged the dead weight, and the dead weight is killing projects, and killing the reputation.
This is true.
One other way of thinking about the issue is this: what would you consider a safe power plant? How about one that has a probability of failing once every ten thousand years. That sounds pretty safe, doesn’t it? Well with hundreds of power plants, the probability of a single one failing starts to get quite high on any given year. And that matches reality: three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, among many others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide...
The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Is that really a wise bet to make in the face of climate change?
Modern reactor designs cannot explode high into the atmosphere the way that Chernobyl did. That is, their contamination will never be as far-reaching as Chernobyl was. With modern designs, it's really a question of local contamination. Pit this against the global impact of climate change and it's pretty clear which issue is the more serious one. The potential impact of climate change is big enough that we shouldn't let potential local contamination be an obstacle to building out nuclear power.
Well, for a start that doesn't contradict what I said above. Overall, the impact from Fukushima was really not that bad, all things considered. Compare for example to pollution and deaths attributed to coal power plants around the world. Pollution and deaths due to nuclear have a tendency to get vastly more media exposure though.
Second, they didn't evacuate all of Japan. They evacuated locally.
And finally, Japan is arguably the worst possible place you could build a bunch of nuclear power plants. On top of that, Fukushima was under-engineered. The fact that it didn't go worse than it did is actually a good example of how harmless nuclear power can be. But of course, that's no reason not to have stringent safety measures in place. I'm by no means advocating a wild west of nuclear power.
The biggest issue with your argument is that you have inadequate explanations for the failures that have happened. Chernobyl: bad reactor design. Fukushima: under engineered. Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant. How do we know that we haven’t missed anything significant and crucial to long term safe operation? Such a thing is unknowable, so all we can do is look at the evidence, and the evidence is that there is a history of poor design choices leading to events that border on calamity. Humans are fallible. Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion.
But quite importantly, in both of those cases the failure scenarios were not unknown (though the risk was deemed acceptable, for whatever reasons). Unknown failure scenarios don't really happen in this space -- such a thing is neither acceptable nor expected.
> Humans are fallible.
But of course, this I can't argue with. Nor that Chernobyl and Fukushima did in fact happen.
> Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion.
So what it boils down to, in my mind, is a numbers game. We know that climate change has the potential for killing hundreds of millions of people, if not more. We know that coal power plants routinely and completely expectedly kill a bunch of people (the numbers really are staggering for something so common).
So the point I'm making is that Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the general risk with nuclear, should not on its own stop us from building out nuclear. It has to be a balance with the risks of the other options. (large-scale battery capacity and the economics of nuclear are additional jokers in this debate, but let's not get into that)
> While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential...
Finally -- while I understand where you're coming from -- this particular argument doesn't sit that well with me. It's a little too easy to use this as a "slippery slope" style appeal to emotions, rather than objective evidence. To turn it around: climate change has the potential to wipe out humanity. We should shut down literally all coal power plants tomorrow, and start building thousands of nuclear power plants.
This is of course not a reasonable argument, and nor is it reasonable of me to completely denounce your concern here. So this is where the details of the risk/benefits analysis matters, and above all it has to be an evidence-based argument. I don't think emotive arguments about how bad Fukushima or Chernobyl was or could have been, have a place in this debate.
We would need to start and complete ~100 reactors in the next 20 years just to keep our current level of nuclear. Back in 2008, we started 4, have abandoned two due to construction incompetence, and the other two are taking 2-3x as long as expected, and cost 2-3x as much. This is with only four reactors. If we tried to scale this 25-50x, our problems would multiply, not get easier. And that's just to keep our current level of nuclear, not switch to a high level of nuclear like we would need to do in order for nuclear to be a significant part of our energy interchange.
We have far better routes to a carbon-free energy economy than paying contractors Thai have no clue what they are doing.