Ordinary nuclear reactors have cooler temperatures than coal fire. So it's not straightforward to just replace that part and keep the rest like the steam turbine and generator.
One could have high temperature reactors like pebble bed, that would be a better fit but they are more exotic and experimental.
Didn't read the article because I won't subscribe to WSJ. They have been an anti climate science platform.
The only integration points of the old coal plants are the transmission lines, location footprint, access to power generation employees. Steam and temperature aren't in play.
You would. You might need to screw around with a few of the compressor stages to get peak efficiency on the cooler steam source but that's by no means rocket science.
Are you sure about that? From what I could find reactors are in the 500-1000°C [1][2] while coal turbines are in the 540-600°C range [3]. This is about the small modular reactors which I think are HTGR and run a bit hotter AFAICT (i.e. closer to 1000°C). Seems pretty close regardless.
Do you have anything I can read up about regarding nuclear reactors having cooler temperatures than what coal fire generates?
- "There have been hotter outlets back in the NERVA nuclear rocket days. Also exotic."
Though, those were rocket engines with a design lifespan of several minutes. It's not possible to sustain temperatures like that, is it? (I am not an engineer).
I remember reading that one of the NTR test firings saw bits of molten corium flying out in the exhaust plume.
(And the crazy thing is, if you think about it, they are also gas turbines! The bough I guess perhaps your question was more specific to the reactor itself)
Am I misreading your link? I see temperatures listed "only" up to 2,000 K; but the successful NTR tests went up over 2,500 K. (Excluding the failed ones that melted, of course).
- "The average exit gas temperature was 2,550 K (2,280 °C), the highest ever recorded by Project Rover. The chamber temperature was 2,750 K (2,480 °C), another record."
There's also one notable difference: internal combustion turbines see their highest temperatures in the gas phase, which is somewhat insulated from the turbine blades (by weird fluid dynamic effects I don't understand). No solid material needs to withstand the peak temperature.
300° C. Nuclear reactors are pretty cold, for thermal generation. As I understand it, this is because the cooling system has to remain liquid, and you can only pressurize+heat water so much before it turns to steam (or becomes prohibitively expensive to contain).
Yup. Most of the UK's reactors are an unusual gas-cooled design which does produce steam temperatures similar to coal power plants, but that's pretty much unique to the UK and also a technological dead end - there were apparently enough engineering headaches that they didn't end up a clear win over standard pressurised water reactors and no-one's built any based on that design since.
> Didn't read the article because I won't subscribe to WSJ. They have been an anti climate science platform.
Sadly, the reporting side of the WSJ and "WSJ Opinion" are basically two entirely different universes lumped under the same brand / subscription umbrella. Clearly there's a significant share of subscribers who like the opinion pieces so the Journal has historically chosen not to do away with them, but I keep hoping they will kill or spin off that business. In fact, as a subscriber I was asked not too long ago to fill out a survey about WSJ Opinion and whether I think it adds or subtracts value from my subscription. I'm not sure these types of decisions are best informed by the results of online surveys but wanted to note that just FYI...
I signed up for the WSJ when they had a holiday special and I think I pay something like $5 / month for a year
The WSJ is owned by the Murdochs. If anything, you should hope they spin off the news business, and keep the opinion side. Sadly, I suspect they acquired the former to lend an air of legitimacy to the latter.
I don't believe that is the case. I have been reading the WSJ since the 1980's, before it was acquired by Murdoch, and the Op-Ed section back then was already way to the right of most mainstream media, and the WSJ news gathering organization. I don't think that Murdoch has improved the quality of the WSJ, but he has not changed Op-Ed editing.
I believe they were extra ordinary hard to cancel, like the NYTimes, for and the best tip if you ever consider cancelling was to just cease payments through PayPal or your creditcard. This saves you the lovely trip to a sales rep and whatnot.
Working fluid temperature is much lower than the coal fire, and it's limited by the material science considerations of the piping and turbine, not by the reaction temperature. You are not going to see systems employing steam hotter than 550 degrees C.
LFP has somewhat lower energy density but it also doesn't degrade any faster if you charge it to 100% every time, while the higher-density batteries do degrade faster if you regularly charge them over 80%. So the practical range difference isn't as much as it appears at first glance.
I really would like to know the solution for how to prevent nuclear meltdown induced by a hostile airstrike to the cooling system, generators, electric grid, or the reactor itself.
For the pedantic nuclearphiles, it doesn't have to be an airstrike. Domestic terrorism is a real thing as well.
You mean the 1 to 3 pilots that used the anti-hijacking doors to help them commit suicide by intentionally crashing passenger airliners? It’s a stretch to blame the taliban for that, and 9/11 was over twenty years ago.
I guess that the scenario where Canada chooses to launch airstrikes against the US and is able to do so successfully just doesn't get much weight in my risk modeling. And in that scenario, things are very bad whether or not Canada has nuclear power plants to target...
I suspect they mean “what if someone attacks the nuclear plants in southern Ontario”.
Which, I don’t exactly know Canada-US defense agreements, but given we share assets like NORAD—I assume an attack on southern Ontario would be tantamount to declaring war on the US, which would probably go poorly for everyone.
EDIT: Oh, strike that, they literally mean Canada attacking the US, which is the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a while.
I was responding to someone who asked "Who could strike a nuclear power plant who couldn't use a nuclear bomb." Canada is a very valid answer to that questions. No one is talking about the likelihood of such an event.
“Let’s for sure kill the climate making earth uninhabitable by its current fauna within or not far after our lifetimes because of the small chance somebody might be a terrorist”
Haven’t looked in a while, but I’m pretty sure a Fukushima every month of our life (and onward) is much less worse than current coal consumption.
Airstrike protection is built into the regs. You just make the containment super strong. This is partly why the big new build AP1000s in Georgia are behind schedule.
An older and perhaps more beautiful solution is to put the reactors fairly deep underground, or underwater. Sadly, underground construction is extra pricey.
EDIT: I was thinking of aircraft impact here rather than hostile military attack. Defending against hostile military attack is not built into the regs.
I would have thought digging a hole would be cheaper than a giant concrete containment structures. Maybe the containment structure is mostly needed even if underground so the marginal cost to make it plane proof does not tip the scales to building the whole thing underground
It's straightforward to prevent any ill effects from the cooling or generators or grid being hit.
Reactor buildings themselves are extremely sturdy already. And if you do serious damage to the reactor it'll probably spread out the fuel so nothing particularly bad happens before you can do cleanup.
And how much safer than coal does it have to be, anyway? Coal kills so many people.
It remains a fact that operating a coal plant costs substantially more than getting the same power from wind.
So, continued operation of coal plants depends on uneconomic behavior, typically via cultural inertia or domination by entrenched interests. Of course that is always possible, but it is disfavored.
You could make the same arguments about dams. A much better argument, in fact, since it's actually happened before [1]. But few are seriously considering dismantling hydroelectric facilities.
Um, have you looked up what would happen if an oil refinery got hit by terrorists? The death toll would be much higher than a nuclear meltdown.
Anyway, we know how to build nuclear plants that are physically incapable of melting down. Also, foreign and domestic(1) terrorist organizations are largely funded by oil (and, since I count putin as a terrorist, gas and coal) magnates.
Rapid nuclearization (and renewable energy roll outs) cuts the funding.
(1) Fox News, etc are clearly recruitment tools for right wing domestic terrorist groups. Even if you disagree, my point on foreign terrorists still holds.
I don’t know “the solution” but all of the scenarios you’ve mentioned have definitely been examined by the operator of the plant and by the military/homeland security department of whichever nation the plant belongs to. They are definitely aware of the danger and have corresponding contingency plans.
> They are definitely aware of the danger and have corresponding contingency plans.
If this pandemic has taught me anything, it's that contingency plans are put together with great effort and careful thought, and are then placed into a filing cabinet somewhere.
Physically exploding the reactor core might make a mess, but other then a very small amount of radioactive dust, the pieces, consisting of heavy uranium, would be scattered over a small area around the plant, and promptly stop reacting because there wouldn't be any neutron moderator or enough proximity for them to trigger additional fission.
Meltdowns are hard to cause, because once the reactor slags itself it also stops reacting because it's destroyed its moderator.
You're probably thinking of "what if Chernobyl?" and the issue there is that it took genuine, sustained effort to create Chernobyl, and a reactor design that could do it: Chernobyl's big problem wasn't a meltdown (3 mile island was a meltdown) it was a steam explosion beneath the reactor, and then the subsequent graphite fire which spread radioactive particulates over the surrounding area.
No practical air strike is going to create a Chernobyl equivalent explosion - there's not enough energy in explosives to do it.
> Meltdowns are hard to cause, because once the reactor slags itself it also stops reacting because it's destroyed its moderator.
You don't need a "meltdown". All four of Fukashima's active reactors exploded after the cooling systems lost power. They had been automatically SCRAM'd when the earthquake hit and had been cooling for a while before the tsunami hit and destroyed the generators, but reactors take months to 'cool down.'
One of the spent fuel storage pools at Fukashima was still generating 3MW of thermal heat at the time of the disaster. Waste fuel that hadn't been in the reactor for months. It came within one degree Celsius of its safe storage temperature - 85 degrees. Its normal operating temperature was 30 degrees.
> Physically exploding the reactor core might make a mess, but other then a very small amount of radioactive dust, the pieces, consisting of heavy uranium, would be scattered over a small area around the plant,
"Small area"? The Fukashima explosion has left an area around the size of Tokyo proper uninhabitable in one of the most expensive, constrained real estate markets in the world.
The abounding skeptics don't seem to have any specific criticisms. Overall it seems like a good idea to reuse the heat-to-electricity machinery and grid connection of existing coal plants, since that's a good fraction of the capital required.
The "good fraction of the capital required" is for the nuclear part and nuclear plants also have stratospheric operating costs, which this doesn't address. This also doesn't really address the fact that nukes require a fuckton of power to bring up that coal plants don't; nukes also require that fuckton of power when they're not generating, because reactors have to be cooled continuously, even when not "on". Or the lack of qualified labor to run the plants. Or geological stability to assure the plant, and its waste storage, are safe.
Nuclear has the highest opex of any electrical generation method; it's also estimated by some to have a greenhouse gas impact worse than natural gas. Wind costs a fraction of any other electricity generation method, solar isn't far behind, and continuing to drop around 10% a year.
This is why you see wind and solar replacing decommissioned nukes at a ratio of 6:1 (not including commercial or residential capacity) in the US and growing, and coal plants being decommissioned. There are now multiple technologies for recycling turbine blades, and solar panels are recycleable (or just resellable in the secondhand market where people don't care that they've lost 20% of their capacity.)
Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
Fanboys who think it's as simple as "if only we could work past the NIMBY issue" are ignoring the fact that nuclear power has not been economically viable for three quarters of a century (it has only been viable because of the military applications of nuclear power), while wind and solar keep getting more economically viable, and our grid keeps leaning more and more toward being distributed. Nobody needs the slow-reacting, base load generation nuclear provides.
Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Wind and solar have significantly simpler supply chains, regulations, and maintenance/repair/inspection needs.
You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
Wind and solar have little/no security concerns nor do you need to worry about area social/political/economic stability.
Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
Your comment loses it's value when you're trying to poke all the holes.
> Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
> HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
How do you transform DC up and down? By converting it to AC. Running it through a transformer and converting it back, HVDC isn't gonna take over the world, certain stretches might be HVDC where beneficial but not all over the world.
The difference with nuclear is that anyone can build and operate next-gen storage, so you're commercial right out the door. I could hook my UPS up to the grid and feed back, commercial success!
> Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Not without storage, which is harder to scale than production of other kinds.
> You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
I don't see the USP, there are plenty of geologically stable areas in most countries.
> Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
They have the added downside of only producing power when the weather guy says so.
> Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
Good point, for now.
> You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
No, you need a disposable workforce that can die from workforce accidents without anyone batting an eye.
Bill Gates is a good example of someone with a bit of time around the smartest people on earth asking for advice where he can make a difference, here's a TED talk where he explains that we'll need all solutions to come together rather than one single silver bullet: https://youtu.be/JaF-fq2Zn7I
Does it sound reasonable that we should use all good tech we have? To me it does, and it includes all energy sources in different amounts and situations.
>here's a TED talk where he explains that we'll need all solutions to come together rather than one single silver bullet
Yes, this is a core problem. It seems like a large number of people want to focus on only one solution. They complain that solutions $X is more expensive or solution $Y is less proven or solution $Z isn't consistent. That sounds like a great reason to embrace them all to have each one's strengths complement the other's weaknesses. Cost should also be a secondary issue to speed of scale out & reliability. We're racing a clock where going too slow has its own costs, in capital & lives. It should be a factor but not the factor.
Nuclear, like coal, was cost-effective until natural gas became really cheap. If we had pollution pricing all along we'd be slowly converting our infrastructure from nuclear to solar and wind over the coming decades; instead we're entirely reliant on natural gas.
With added irony that natural gas is touted as being very clean compared to coal. Sure, it burns much cleaner but fracking sites release enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, worse than coal C02 emissions on a pound-for-pound basis.
> reuse the heat-to-electricity machinery and grid connection of existing coal plants, since that's a good fraction of the capital required.
Compare the cost of a coal build to a nuclear build and you will see this is not the case.
Nonetheless, the transmission infrastructure is super valuable, and super expensive, as that is a huge fraction of the cost of electricity in the US, something like 40% on average. Reusing these sites for batteries is probably a good idea.
Underground storage requires specific geography that is unlikely to be near to existing coal burners.
Big industry, such as green ammonia production from electrolyzed hydrogen, could be good though. But I bet those will likely be powered by massive amounts of solar plus batteries, as is being planned in places such as Spain right now. For at least the next generation of electrolyzer tech, energy costs will be dwarfed by the capital costs of electrolyzers, and the electrolyzers will need to be run nearly continuously. It remains to be seen if the tech curve of electrolyzers will decrease more quickly than the cost or batteries and solar do.
EGS also required highly specific geological conditions, so each site would have to be evaluated for suitability. That's not an argument against considering it, but it does mean that EGS isn't a drop-in replacement for every site. For those where it would work? Sure, let's do it.
EGS is a technology related to fracking. It gets a boost from the maturity of fracking itself, but it is also expensive, kind of risky financially -- an expensive hole might need to be abandoned -- and depends on geological details of the site to determine its suitability.
The newer technology, what amounts to drilling by vaporizing rock with microwaves, enables drilling to much greater depths quickly and cheaply. Being new, it has not actually been used yet, but once mature should be less dependent on local geology, and not generate (sometimes reasonable) fears of causing damaging earthquakes, and should yield more power from a single borehole than EGS gets from two more costly holes.
But there seems to be no prospect of commercial deployment before 2028, and something could go wrong on the way, delaying or even deep-sixing it.
EGS, even where it works best, is more costly than solar and wind. Working independently of weather gives it a leg up, but money for it is less available than for those, for now, because we haven't enough of those yet.
You build what works best for the site. Anhydrous ammonia tanks can be anywhere, but are most useful near a port where surplus is easily shipped out and fill-in for shortfalls shipped in. Tankage is always cheap.
The cost for electrolysers is amortized over not just the time to refill local tankage, but over all the time when surplus power is available, generating direct revenue. The presence of electrolysers makes overbuild of top-line generating capacity an obvious win, because it is always generating income.
The overarching criticism is that nukes cost way more than any other power source currently under consideration. Solar and wind cost way, way less. Geothermal costs somewhat less.
If you want to repurpose your steam turbines, geothermal is a better choice. Now that we know how to bore very deep holes electrically, geothermal is practical in many more places than before.
As if that has ever been the case. Cruise ships would be prohibitively expensive, and flying would be too. Almost all products would be twice or thrice the price, if not more, except for a lot of manually laboured locally crafted stuff.
Sometimes I wouldn’t be surprised if wooden ships would be coming back again, especially now with all the modern technology.
You can't directly compare them, because taken individually none of those can replace "base load" fossil fuels by themselves. How much does a solar installation that can reliably output a gigawatt of power, night and day, rain or shine cost? Can't do pumped storage everywhere either - how many batteries do you need? Nuclear starts to look cheap.
There are plenty of pumped storage locations, low wind tends to correspond to sunny days and vice versa.
Battery costs have also plunged to a level where Hawaii pairs them with solar farms to provide baseload.
The extreme low cost of all of these technologies is largely why nuclear power is dying out. It struggles to compete. The consistency just isnt that much of an advantage.
Take away the insurance subsidy so that the taxpayer funded $800 billion cleanup costs for Fukushima are privatized and nuclear moves from struggles to compete to eye wateringly expensive.
It can share some of the costs with nuclear arsenal maintenance though, so some governments will continue to push it on their populace.
I'd argue that, given the downside of not moving quickly, cost is a secondary consideration. If a basket of mixed sources, including nuclear, get us there sooner than renewables alone then cost should not be the main driver of the discussion.
However, you should probably account for solar farms and battery installations taking 6 months to plan, execute and deploy. Offshore wind farms are a couple of years. Large pumped storage projects can take up to 4.
Meanwhile Hinkley point C will be completed in 2026 after being kicked off all the way back in 2010 and will provide power that is "only" 3x the price.
I'd argue that nuclear has really expensive and slick PR.
It seems like we need a bunch of crash projects working at once. Heck, the COVID pandemic showed we're still capable of such projects, given the will to do so. I know, entrenched interest & their lobbying of politicians gets in the way. Well, pay them off! A few quick searches show that the top oil companies had a combined profit of roughly $200 Billion last year. Move off fossil fuels but give them the $200B to stay out of the way! In exchange, they take that to invest in retooling & retraining their workforce for the new methods. Heck, their drilling knowledge base alone makes them great candidates to take the lead on that aspect of geothermal.
I think I'm only half serious about this. Payoffs (well, "subsidies" in political language) might be an awful idea. It's a realpolitik viewpoint, maybe not a good one. But maybe it could get us around the roadblocks.
I'd argue more or less the same. Level the playing field amongst green energy (i.e. eliminate free nuclear insurance) hand offer the same level of subsidy to all of them.
It would either mean no new nuclear plants or somebody comes up with a genuinely cheap, safe version that theyd be willing to put their money behind.
That isnt what the propaganda is demanding though. It wants the perpetuation of free insurance for nuclear and to be given massive subsidies on top of that that solar, wind and pumped storage will never be granted. to produce less electricity for more money. It wants the market contorted out of all recognition to allow this and the only reason I can think of why is because the military needs it.
Each dollar dumped into building a nuke is a dollar taken out of circulation and unavailable for wind/solar/storage. It would (a) in the end displace much less coal, (b) produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. During each of those years, more dollars would go to coal making it also unavailable for wind/solar/storage.
So, starting a nuke plant brings global climate catastrophe nearer, even if it might be made produce some power someday, and not be canceled because of massive cost overruns and delays. Every dollar that can be pulled together for energy should go to building out solar, wind, and storage. And maybe geothermal.
Your argument only makes sense if 1) you take it as a given that nuclear can't help get us reach our goals sooner. And 2) that storage is a solved problem at the highest possible scales needed for this. #2 is highly debatable, and #1 relies on #2.
There are certainly promising options emerging in the area of storage, but I don't think it's a solved problem, especially at the scale necessary here. If I had your confidence about storage then I would agree with you completely, but I don't, and it doesn't seem like there's any consensus that storage is a solved problem. Quite the opposite: the consensus seems to be that we're not ready yet. As such, investments in that area are also potentially places where capital expended might produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. CAES is often cited as a storage mechanism but nothing has been built at utility scale and multiple projects that have tried have fallen apart before getting there.
This is an extreme crisis situation where no single option has a guaranteed outcome. Pursue multiple in parallel. Heck, if we'd done that two decades ago-- massively build out nuclear while massively investing in renewables-- the issue wouldn't be nearly as critical.
Storage in principle is simple because you only need one method that is universally applicable. Storage in practice is complicated just because you always want to use the cheapest and most useful alternative in each place and time, which will be no more expensive than the universal method, and often cheaper.
But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices.
We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us.
In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.
Gas is completely dispatchable and makes up such a huge % of our energy that we should right now just be producing the maximum number of green GWh ASAP at the minimum cost and time and put off worrying about intermittency.
If we can get to the point where we are routinely overproducing from solar and wind and turning off the gas then yea we should ramp up storage. We will see it coming years away though.
China is ahead of the curve on this having just completed a 40GWh 3.6GW pumped storage battery.
Nuclear power would also need a lot of this if we were to rely upon it 100% since it is not dispatchable.
Looking at the full reports on hydrogen and other storage solutions, the conclusion seems to be the same as it has been for a while. Nuclear is cheaper than any combination of renewables + storage except for a few hours of capacity storage when used in combination with PV. What makes storage with PV profitable is the discharge cycle of 24hrs and low capacity, but the energy grid in many countries require long duration capacity and this has yet to make commercial sense.
Thus the most economical way to construct a grid right now is renewables when weather is optimal and fossil fuels when its not. Optimize for cost and that is what you get, and that type of grid is exactly what many countries energy politic has been subsidizing towards. Nuclear don't need storage, but it also cost more than both renewables and fossil fuels.
It is only sunk-cost nukes, ignoring construction and leaning on military subsidies, that match the current cost of renewables + solar. And, of course, the cost of the latter at the time any new nuke construction could (ever) be completed will be much lower.
You are not reading the full report. All the storage solutions that are cheaper than nuclear power has a capacity of 1-6 hours, not days or weeks. Anything longer has yet to achieve economical viability. The few ones that has a prognosis in the near future to start being economical viable has a key assumption of a full discharge cycle of 24hrs for 365 days per year, which I repeat, has yet to exist.
A full discharge cycle mean it must charge and then sell all the energy it captured, and in their prognosis, it need to do so every single day. A battery that does that, and only carries 1-6 hours of capacity, can match the cost of nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear power is cheaper, and in comparison to green hydrogen, nuclear power is cheaper by a very large margin.
Storage cost is still falling very, very fast. When you finally finish building your nuke, lo those many years on, you would not be able to win any bids selling at cost; so could not service your debt. (This is easily predictable, so you will not get the loan.)
And anyway, all the money tied up in it during all that time would be unavailable to displace coal, so you would additionally need to pay for coal that whole time.
The last calculations I saw on green hydrogen put it around 100x the cost of current energy prices. That is a far distance to fall before it reach competitive prices, and until then people are murder each other over fossil fuels and causing global extinctions. If you want to call those nuclear plants for nukes, then I will call current energy policies for planet killers.
Someone has to take responsibility while waiting for that cost to come down. A proper market solution would be to ban fossil fuels now and let non-fossil fuels alternative compete for investment and research. Not hopes and dream but technology that works when one can not just fall back on burning murder gas. Fossil fuel advocates are working very hard to convince people that coal should be replaced with natural gas, rather than non-fossil fuel alternatives.
Saying nuclear is expensive is circular logic because we intentionally made it expensive.
The greenpeace dolts who got it regulated into oblivion (in no small part thanks to the help of a bunch of useful idiots who equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons) with the specific aim of making it not cost competitive.
A generation later, the clipboard warrior dolts point to the results of the prior generation of dolts and say it's not cost competitive.
It's only not cost competitive because we make it that way. You could bring down the cost of nuclear substantially without actually changing the physical requirements of the plants themselves simply by setting the bureaucratic processes up to default to speedy approval rather than default to delay and deny.
Here's a fun and almost forgotten fact. In the early 1960s, the US government built a prototype nuclear reactor that was cooled with liquid metal sodium but had graphite moderators to slow the neutrons down. This reactor could start up with very low enriched uranium (as opposed to sodium cooled fast-neutron reactors which need quite high enrichments to start up) and make superheated steam at the exact same conditions as a coal plant.
Well the local utility just SW of Lincoln Nebraska needed the power one way or the other, and didn't know if the new type of reactor was going to work or not. So they decided to build an equivalent power coal plant on the other side of the turbo-generator building! The idea was that when the nuclear reactor was in an outage, the coal plant could spin the turbine. Two plants, one turbine-generator! Wild.
So anyway the nuclear plant did have a few troubles. The vendor, Atomics International, had them figured out and was planning to fix, but the utility declined it's option to purchase the plant in the end. Today, a grassy outline of a nuclear reactor can be seen right next to the still-operating coal plant down in Hallam, NE.
Honestly it was an awesome reactor concept and I want to see it brought back. I visited this site a few months ago and got a little tour. Very fun.
CANDU reactors (Canadian) use non-enriched/naturally occurring uranium (0.72% u-235) by using heavy water as a moderator. Not sure why you'd use anything but them if you were starting a nuclear program from scratch.
Heavy water reactors have their drawbacks. Heavy water is expensive, which offsets the cost of uranium enrichment. The lower energy density of un-enriched uranium means more frequent refueling. They also produce more waste.
Depleted uranium means “uranium that is even less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium”. You don’t want to eat it, or atomize it and blast it out into the environment, but it’s actually a useful material. It’s sometimes used as a radiation shield for X-ray equipment.
This is entirely off topic, but scrolling around the map you linked, it looks like massive portions of Nebraska and surrounds are gridded by roads. Is this true? I'm an Australian, never been to the US, but is that common? I can't imagine that kind of project here.
EDIT: Massive portions of the US! I find this mindblowing.
I find this fascinating! Do you mind if I ask what you found surprising, exactly? Is it more that those fairly sparsely populated areas have so many roads, or is it more that the inland areas are populated at all? For what it's worth, quite a few people live in the plains states in the US. Not many relative to the real population centers in the country, but I think perhaps significantly more than the inland areas of Australia.
Primarily the sheer number and scale of roads, yes. I’ve done a lot of driving inland in Aus, and even where there is a lot of arable land it is not nearly so neatly or densely carved up, generally just hectares of paddocks/farmland with fire and access trails and fences.
I’m utterly awed at the scale of infrastructure that must’ve been involved in building those thousands of kilometres of roads, let alone maintaining them (I imagine they aren’t particularly “maintained”, but all the same).
As an American who has traveled abroad, I can assure the vast majority of our roads are "maintained" only in the sense that they are passable roads. There really are no standards that are adhered to. It's common where I live to find potholes that would destroy the front suspension of any car attempting to traverse them.
They absolutely cannot. Not in their entirety. The sheer number of roads necessary to be maintained will require more labor and material than we can afford at that scale.
Additionally, many of them criss-cross private land. And some segments of the US population is pretty particular about keeping people of their land. Yeah, hard to do in the mid-west and plains, but that doesn't stop them putting up threatening signs all over.
You might be surprised how well maintained they are. We (I am from the US) spend a lot of money on infrastructure for cars and trucks. This trades off to some extent against rail infrastructure, though freight rail is more robust than commuter / passenger rail.
It's all carved up for farming. This was the norm in my home state (Iowa). They're all gravel roads mind you, so not ideal driving if you don't live there. You kick up dust the whole way.
Note that each grid square is 1 mile by 1 mile. Long history of that, it is an interesting historical rabbit hole.
An interesting historical note is that across much of the west, each of those mile square sections was divided up into 16 pieces at 40-acres, which IIRC was the smallest unit of land you could purchase from the federal government.
You'll still find a lot of old homestead remnants across the west -- I used to climb through a few of them on a ranch I spent time at as a kid.
Also, if you look closely, many of the boundaries are just dirt path, not maintained road. And some don't have roads - it just appears that way from above because one crop/field ends and another starts.
But, yeah, the amount of roads, even just basic gravel or dirt double-track, is pretty amazing. I knew some of it existed, but didn't quite realize it spanned the entire middle third of the US until just now.
Thanks for pointing this out! I'm also an Australian, and my mind is similarly blown. I grew up in Sydney, and whenever I would fly into Melbourne it was always a point of interest to compare the aerial view of Sydney's sprawling mess of streets with Melbourne CBD's clean, and logical grid layout.
People sometimes forget that the middle of the US was populated by millions of immigrants from Northern and Central Europe. Lots of those towns you're looking at were German-speaking towns up until WWI. There are still tons of Norwegian and Swedish cities and towns out there. All of those immigrants were given plots of land to farm, and developed communities accordingly. The Homestead Act was the way that millions made a new life for themselves in the new world.
If you want to have even more fun, most of those roads have Street View.
There's a slow-rolling crisis as many local governments find they can't afford to maintain (much less rebuild) so many roads. Many are being downgraded to gravel.
Similar to sodium cooled reactors, there are also lead or lead-bismuth cooled reactors, which have had one real life deployment ( onboard the Soviet Alfa class submarines), with its own advantages and disadvantages, and there are proposals to develop new versions.
There's so much interesting nuclear-related tech and concepts we haven't fully explored because of nuclear FUD ( much of which would be solved by the new tech).
Thanks, I had no idea lead-bismuth reactors existed. It seems the large number of unstable lead isotopes and their long decay chain would assure a long cooldown requirement before any maintenance could be done in the reactor compartment/primary coolant system. Not only that, but this stuff would present a huge disposal problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_lead
Sodium cooled reactors with graphite moderator have not become common for some reasons. There are some issues like sodium burns in contact with air, as does hot graphite. Potential positive coefficient (unstable) states. But the pressure in the piping could be low, compared to water/steam, so maybe cost could be low and power density high.
I think a lot of these plans to retrofit coal plants with nukes are quite overoptimistic. I'm ambivalent since they could be used as reasons to prop up coal plants longer. "See, we should invest in, and get some subsidy for a new steam turbine in our coal plant so it can be used with the graphite-sodium nuke that's going to replace the boiler in 15 years". But on the other hand, we need all potential, even unlikely solutions to replace coal burning.
"At 19:47 high temperature liquid sodium coolant at one of the three secondary heat exchangers started leaking through a broken thermometer sheath ... on the piping and it ignited on contact with air."
That's a good catch. For some reason I was thinking of room-temperature sodium, but of course the liquid sodium from sodium cooled nuclear reactors is hot, and apparently burns in contact with the air.
If you read more closely though the article you linked to, you'll see that the complaint there was not the fire in particular (which caused some damage, but no radioactive leaks), but the claim of the plant operators that the plant was "absolutely safe", and the attempt of a cover-up. In other words, the safety of this plant was judged not in comparison with the safety of a conventional water-cooled reactor, but in comparison with an absurd goal of "absolute safety".
When people hear the sodium can cause fire when in contact with the air, they immediately remember the spectacular explosions of sodium in contact with water. Then they assume a sodium cooled reactor is a beast that only a madman would contemplate.
In reality, sodium cooled reactors are not any worse than water-cooled reactors. All reactors present various challenges, and some of the challenges faced by sodium cooled reactors will be higher, and some lower than those facing water-cooled reactors.
But sodium cooled reactors have an absolutely tremendous advantage: most of the fissile material they use as fuel (be it Uranium or Plutonium) does undergo fission and creates fission products, as opposed to actinides. Bottom line: the nuclear waste from sodium cooled reactors (and all types of fast neutron reactors) is much, much more manageable than the nuclear waste of conventional nuclear reactors.
If you use a steam turbines, the sodium would be potentially in contact with water easily, on different sides of the wall in the heat exchanger with a lot of surface area etc. I wonder if you used a CO2 turbine instead...
Considering our very recent understanding of sodium Coulombic explosions[0], using liquid sodium for... anything requires an enormous amount of care[1].
Not quite as wild, but there was a similar thing in Sweden 50 years ago, where an oil burner was retrofitted to the cancelled nuclear power plant at Marviken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4_nuclear_reactor . The reactor, which was more or less completed but never loaded with nuclear fuel, was used for various experiments related to reactor safety.
If small nuclear reactors are so great, why isn't China building them? There's one under construction in Hainan, as an experimental project. Larger reactors are being built in quantity.
Small nuclear reactors aren't great - people are only proposing them because there's so much disdain for the normal PWRs that have been in operation successfully for decades. Reactors scale better with size: A pressure vessel's cost largely scales with surface area but its power capacity scales with volume. China is building large PWRs just fine, with nuclear output nearly quadrupling in the last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
Actually, from what I've read reactors scale poorly. Huge, complex, and each site is unique. Each plant is custom and requires many experts on that specific site. Sure the original plan might be attractive, and 10x the power is less than 10x the cost. But then the delays, cost overruns, and inevitable changes to the design add up, delays of a decade are not uncommon. Even refueling the reactor is a huge project, substantial downtime, etc.
The promise of the small reactors is lego like building blocks that are very safe, idiot proof, can be carried on a train, and you return them to the factory for maintenance or refueling. Site integration is literally a cement pad, water in/out, steam in/out, data connection, and some power. If any of those in/outs fail the reactor shuts down. That way the factory builds 1000s, becomes an expert on them, and you get the efficiency of higher volumes. That way you don't need 24/7 coverage by a large team of PhDs just to produce power.
That's the dream anyways, will be interesting to see if anyone can get it to work.
Each plant does not require custom designs for each specific site when the same design is built in series. This is big reason why nuclear plants built in the last few decades have been so expensive: they're usually the first one of their kind build in that country. That first build is when a lot of the design quirks are worked out, and construction teams gain experience. Furthermore, sub-components like steam-generators[1] and heat exchangers can't benefit from economies of scale.
By comparison, when plants of the same design are built in series they're much cheaper. Nuclear plants that started construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s were some of the most effective clean energy investments, delivered at a cost of $1-2 billion per gigawatt. Check out the costs in the historical list and there's a large stretch of plants that were built at this price point [2].
Nothing humans do is "clean", so you always have to read the word in context. In the sixties the alternative would've been coal which in comparison is less clean.
I don't think so. What would be "clean" energy for you? Renewables also take considerable resources to build. I assume you weigh nuclear waste very heavily, but I don't believe it to be such a serious problem. There is not that much highly radioactive waste being produced. I prefer renewables over nuclear because I think that in the end they'll be cheaper while being okay for the environment. But I would be very easily convinced that nuclear energy has a smaller environmental footprint.
The sum total of the waste produced by nuclear power generation in the US occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. The "infrastructure" it requires is concrete cylinders that are perfectly safe to stand next to [2]. The amount of waste it produces is miniscule relative to the amount of power it produces. And most importantly, this waste is contained rather than released out into the atmosphere like greenhouse gases.
Even manure from a pig farm requires infrastructure and expertise to be handled, thats how you get ocean dead zones where everything except jellyfish suffocates
> How can it be called "clean" when it produces toxic waste that requires its own infrastructure and expertise to be handled.
That's always been a paradox with nuclear power. On one hand, of all electric power generation technologies, nuclear power has the most toxic waste; on the other hand, that toxic waste is completely contained under normal operation, so that looking from the outside, it's one of the cleanest. That's why in these discussions you always have people talking past each other: depending on how you look at it, nuclear power can be very clean or very dirty.
Nukes are expensive just because they are expensive. Always have been, always will be.
They probably could be made more cheaply than they have been. Making them cheap enough to be economically competitive will be very hard and and very uncertain of success. And, trying will take time we cannot afford, because you get no power out until it is all finished, and you burn coal until then. Renewables start producing and displacing coal almost instantly.
1-2 billion per gigawatt is very economically competitive. And that's what nuclear has historically cost when it was built at scale in the US. A fair comparison against intermittent sources like wind and solar needs to include the costs of energy storage for the latter.
Why would you include integration costs for renewables but not nuclear? They face very similar challenges with very similar solutions.
The demand curve is lumpy on a daily, weekly and yearly cycle. Nuclear is flat and predictable, renewables are (like demand) predictable to a reasonable degree but variable (weather and energy demand are linked too).
Nuclear (and coals) difficulty meeting peaky demand is a big reason for pumped hydro to exist for decades. It is still the biggest source of energy storage we have. Why should renewables pay for storage built for nuclear?
No, they do not. The demand curve is mostly flat. Peaky demand is not nearly as large as problem as people make it out to be [1]. Furthermore, nuclear poet's output can be modulated by more aggressively cooling the reactor.
I can clearly see daily, weekly and seasonal lumps in your graph. Why do you think that contradicts what I said?
And note that's averaged across 4 years, across the whole US across multiple time zones and doesn't include energy for heat currently not sourced from electricity.
Cold places use more energy in winter and in cold years, the opposite in hot places that need a lot of cooling.
But, let's put that all to one side, on that graph what amount of energy are you intending to generate with nuclear and what are you intending to do with the excess (if you aim high) or with the peaks (if you aim low). Because whatever you do, is almost certainly going to be the same things renewables would do when demand and supply don't meet exactly. Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
Weekly and seasonal changes are not a concern for nuclear power - reactors can scale up or down thermal generation on that larger time frame. Daily power fluctuations are much smaller than you seem to think, 20% to 30%.
Excesses of energy are easily solved: use it to desalinate water, create hydrogen fuel, or some other energy intensive things. And as stated previously, nuclear power plants can reduce their output if needed by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Nuclear plants want to operate at 100% load as much as they can, but they don't need to.
Renewables have the opposite problem: they don't produce energy when we need it. No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down. Peak pricing is not going to help us here. This is why renewable advocates assume that there's going to be some magic storage solution that offers effectively free and unlimited storage.
> Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
The USA has 20 GWh of pumped hydro storage. That's 2.4 minutes of electricity supply at an average hourly consumption of 500 GW.
Okay, so your answer is that you're going to aim for the high end, and your going to waste the extra energy as heat when required on the short term and turn entire plants off during seasonal lulls.
This is called "overprovisioning" and it's exactly what renewables intend to do. In both cases it's more expensive than having magical demand matching production.
Or your going to use it to desalinate when power is abundant. This is "demand response" and again, it's exactly what renewables grids are going to do.
I see you also want to create Hydrogen, another great idea that renewables also plan to do, except nuclear generated is called Pink Hydrogen and renewable powered is called Green Hydrogen for some reason. Same basic idea though.
So, I don't understand why you're so angry about renewables when you already know all the solutions a fossil free grid needs.
> No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down.
Did you happen to notice where the bottom of the lumps in your graph were? Nighttime. So we'll need some wind power and/or storage and/or HVDC lines.
But if you have to pretend you've never heard of wind power in order to justify nuclear power, maybe that's a sign that it's not as good an idea as you think.
And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
I'm fairly chill about storage because cheap solar that lets you turn off gas during the day and cheap wind that lets you turn gas off another half of the time is the quickest and cheapest way to stop burning fossil fuels. We only need to come up with crazy solutions once we try to get rid of the last few bits of fossil fuels. And you already listed them for a fully nuclear grid so we don't need to go over that again.
Some people try to act all appalled about that, as if burning 80% less fossil fuels easily at an overall cost saving in a short period of time is some big conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to undermine nuclear. It doesn't really pencil out though. Not even if you pretend wind power doesn't exist.
Wind still needs to be over-provisioned by a factor of 3 or 4 [1] due to seasonal variation. By comparison, nuclear only needs to be over-provisioned by a factor 1.2 or 1.3.
> And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
No, the reason why we don't have storage on the grid is because we have no feasible way of storing energy at grid scale. Hawaii, California, and parts of Germany all produce excesses of electricity during peak solar and wind generation. We were promised that people would take this energy off the grid, store it, and release it later when energy is in greater demand. But these promises have not panned out, because storage remains infeasible. So instead, we keep burning fossil fuels. And we'll continue to keep burning fossil fuels until we either adopt nuclear power or some massive breakthrough in storage is found.
It'll still take significant amounts of storage even to drive fossil fuel use down to 20%. Estimates say 12 hours of storage [2]. That's an incredible amount of storage, hundreds of times greater than what we have now.
Your first link doesn't say what you think it says. Did you link to the wrong thing? Or just make a wild assumption based on capacity factor, which is what that page talks about?
The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc.
Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further.
So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.
Overproduction without storage results in diminishing returns, as most of the excess energy is wasted.
"New nuclear" is 4-8x more expensive than nuclear power built at scale. When multiple copies of the same plant design built in series, costs in the range of $1-2 billion per GW is typical. And remember, that's a GW of generation with >90% capacitor factor, as compared to 25-35% for most renewables.
"Wasted" solar and wind power was free. Overprovisioned renewable capacity is cheap. Charging storage, later, from overprovisioned renewable capacity, or connecting to the power grid and selling on the open market, converts overproduction to income.
Wasted nuke overcapacity is very, very expensive.
To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
> Charging storage, later, from overprovisioned renewable capacity, or connecting to the power grid and selling on the open market, converts overproduction to income.
Except we have no way of building grid scale storage. Again, we have a few minutes of storage. Until then, wind and solar is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels. We have no plan to get rid of the fossil fuels until a storage breakthrough occurs.
> To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
Like I said: building one power plant of a given design is way more expensive than building repeated copies of the same design. There were dozens of nuclear projects that had a cost to energy production ratio of less than a fifth of Vogtle.
We have many ways of building grid scale storage. All we lack is certainty about which kind will end up cheapest.
It just isn't built out yet. Building out storage will be premature until after there is enough extra renewable generating capacity to charge it from.
If lots of projects would have been cheaper than Vogtle, we may reasonably conclude that they didn't want one cheaper than Vogtle: it would have left too little scope for corruption and graft. Corruption is the ever-present companion of all nuke projects. Any nuke project without a ready conduit for graft will not be funded.
Real research on this looks at hour by hour demand and weather records in specific locations.
If you use more energy in the winter, and wind power works better in the winter, you've got a positive correlation.
You don't just assume you need an average output equal to the max demand.
And the price for solar is based on generation, not capacity.
> The LCOE "represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle", and is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered.
Real research examine both hour by hour and seasonal variations. Both must be offset either by storage and/or overproduction.
Unfortunately for the US, energy use is highest in the summer when wind is producing the least amount of energy. And then there's the hour-by hour variations on top of that.
> Nukes are expensive just because they are expensive. Always have been, always will be.
You are replying to a post that provides historical evidence and geuine argument, and your only counter argument is a Tautology and outright dismissal?
There is a great deal of history in nuke implementation. We don't need to guess how things play out, because we have seen how they play out.
Back in the '50s, the promise was that power from nukes would be "too cheap to meter". They knew they were lying when they promised that, as we now know from internal memos. Cost estimates published have never matched actual costs. Delivery schedules published have never matched actual delivery, when anything is delivered; and when not, none of the money is ever returned.
So, the first and most important lesson about nukes is that what promoters estimate bears no resemblance to what might be delivered, and relying on such estimates puts you in a bottomless moneypit.
> A pressure vessel's cost largely scales with surface area but its power capacity scales with volume
That is if you ignore experience curve effects.
In the US only one nuclear power plant came online in the last 25 years. For plants like Vogtle, the majority of the workers on site have never built another nuclear plant in their career before, and will never build after. That is a very good way to keep construction cost astronomical.
Compare with the reactors for nuclear submarines. They are being built at a rate of about 1 per year. Most workers have participated in building numerous reactors in the past, all of the same design. New workers can learn from experienced peers, and use their learning in building lots more reactors during the rest of their career.
In the last 25 years, the US brought online only one civilian nuclear power plant, but 23 nuclear submarines and 4 aircraft carriers (those have 2 reactors each). The cost of naval reactors is classified, but I’ve seen non-classified information that indicates that a submarine reactor costs in the lew hundreds of millions, and a carrier reactor about one billion ([1] page 10).
The idea of SMR’s is to replicate the success story of naval reactors in the civilian sphere.
because the technology transfer hasnt happened. I wish more people would be aware of this.
This is true for both India and China - two of the fastest growing energy consumers in the world and both who have steadfastedly refused to sign pollution treaties. When you pull out 2 billion people out of abject poverty, you do not have the mandate for pollution.
India has the unique position of granted an exception by the US Senate for nuclear technology transfer, but subsequent administrations have never done it (for multiple geopolitical/trade treaty reasons). There is public appetite for small reactors and power generation - especially in the fast growing smaller towns(which by definition means 3-5 million people in India).
But unless the tech transfer happens - it will take India and China about 2 decades to catch up. All the while being the most polluting nations on earth. and nothing can be done about it.
Nuclear waste disposal is normally outsourced to specialist companies. It turns out that many of those companies have been illegally dumping it in the ocean near Africa. In the last decade or so it's been washing ashore and causing huge harm.
Any time you outsource disposal of such a dangerous substance you're pretty much guaranteeing that it'll all be dumped improperly. That's why it's not a tiny problem at all.
> Project Censored and Boing Boing have been reporting on this horrific situation that is unfolding in the African country:
Uh, Project Censored and Boing Boing? I'm not finding any reporting on this purported nuclear waste dumping in Somalia. I'm seeing reports of toxic waste, but not nuclear waste.
Furthermore, The USSR and United Kingdom both dumped massive amounts of nuclear waste into the Arctic and Atlantic oceans respectively [1]. There are no observed adverse effects of this.
That's blogspam; it's quoting reporting it claims to be from Boing Boing, but actually came from a poorly sourced editorial in the Independent from back in 2009, which in turn is just retelling the allegations from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...
Allegedly, back in the 80s and 90s, organised crime in Italy was involved in the improper disposal of toxic and radioactive waste. Much of it was dumped around Italy, but some was said to have been dumped in Somalian waters. Attempts to verify this have proven difficult; the main informant hasn't proven reliable, and a UN mission to Somalia in 2005 wasn't able to find anything.
Still, it does seem like some toxic waste was dumped in or around Somalia back in the 1980s or early 1990s, and that's certainly terrible.
That being said, it seems to have happened thirty years ago, and although there was concern the 2005 tsunami could have stirred it up, that doesn't seem to be happening, and there's no evidence it's causing any harm at all. (And remember, most of the waste was in the Med off the coast of Italy, where it would be much easier to detect any impact than in Somalia.)
> Any time you outsource disposal of such a dangerous substance you're pretty much guaranteeing that it'll all be dumped improperly.
That seems to be the opposite of what your link is suggesting?
And hope that in 1000 years it is still being managed properly, the water table hasn't changed and caused it to poison the groundwater, no one has used it to make a dirty bomb... etc.
I don't think we can be so cavalier about nuclear waste, it's a heavy responsibility to push off to the future.
I take issue with this kind of argument, because it implies that because we don't know everything that can happen in the future, we should not use nuclear power. We already know the costs of producing energy with coal and oil: thousands of deaths every year, potentially billion of deaths in the medium-term.
Like most things, this decision is about trade-offs. No, we have not figured out how to process nuclear waste in 1000 years. But if that's our major problem in 1000 years, we have succeeded in our most important challenge right now.
Sure. It's called "put it over there in the corner". That's really all the long term solution you need.
I mean, okay, I guess pick a corner that's fairly geologically stable. But the volume is (compared to other energy sources) tiny, and it's just not that dangerous.
Bury it underground, in bedrock. But there's no sense in doing that until the waste has been reprocessed, since non-reprocessed nuclear waste is a valuable fuel source.
Israel, Pakistan, and France reprocess their nuclear waste [1]. And it's not particularly expensive, it's just less expensive than enriching new uranium.
I don't think we have a long term solution for nuclear waste, but I have always held that we don't have a long term plan for the wastes from fossil fuels either and they seem much harder to manage so I think it is a win.
I would much rather live downstream from a nuclear waste "temporary" storage area that has an indeterminate lifespan than downstream from an oilsands tailings retention pond!
Do we have a long term solution for all the toxic waste that coal power plants are blowing into the air and the radioactive ashes that remain?
Nuclear waste seems like a tiny problem to me in comparison.
Also, people seem to be more interested in nuclear waste than in coal waste, so I expect more sophisticated solutions.
Short term solution is similar to nuclear, just gather it in random places and hope you've gone bankrupt before anyone asks you to pay for dealing with it because if you pay up front then you are obviously economic self-harm and people would move straight to the long term solution.
Very cute the promotion of nuclear power, while we are in the middle of a war where the nuclear infrastructure of a country is leveraged to to blackmail the entire planet [1], [2]
Yes, but high-temp corrosive liquids are something we have literally 100+ years in building big pots for in other industries. Compared to extracting lithium and other rare metals from batteries/circuits/dead-solar/dead-electronics this is effectively a solved problem.
It's hard to price in the cost of the very long tail of nuclear waste. This is my greatest hesitation with nuclear power.
I'm sure someone will point to bleeding-edge tech with waste that has shorter half-life, but nuclear power as we build it now generally produces waste that is hazardous for hundreds or thousands of years, afaik.
The other objection will be: yes but what about the price of heating the planet? It's a strong point, but it's still a very hard calculation to balance.
This argument suggests that only nuclear waste has a long half-life. I suppose this is true if you require a half-life, but coal plants also produce heavy metal and ash waste that never decays.
Did you know that all the nuclear waste ever produced by the US would fit in about a dozen Olympic pools? This isn’t some massive amount of fuel we’re talking about here.
Reusing existing infrastructure makes a lot of sense.
Some solar and wind and battery projects are sited to take advantage of disused or in some cases shared infrastructure (e.g. floating solar on hydro dams).
Data centers in old powerplants that use the infrastructure in reverse to buy electricity (and sometimes for cooling) are also a thing.
But anything that uses steam is probably not going to be competitive with renewables even with the savings this adds (particularly if you could have used the infrastructure for something else).
The UK’s Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor was designed specifically as a “drop in” replacement for coal fired boilers as it produced the same steam pressure at the outlet and so could be connected to the same turbine/generator set. Absolutely nobody wanted to buy it, I don’t think we sold a single one for export.
That one had some fundamental problems due to the choice of graphite moderator. Another selling point: the ability to refuel while the plant is running also did not pan out. In the end these reactors had somewhere around 50% capacity factor, compared to more mainstream designs that used water (light or heavy) at 90%. They are also being decommissioned early, again, due to graphite cracking over time. That said, it's not unfeasible to imagine these problems being ironed out in the end, but rollout coincided with the Thatcher Era, which deprioritized industrial developmend and fundamental R&D. It was not a good deal to buy one of these 1st gen UK reactors, compared to a GE/Westinghouse LWR/HWR.
People talk about nuclear accidents like that means we have to stop nuclear energy. Contrariwise. Nuclear LESSONS! They are absolutely essential, and in fact I would hire an engineer who participated in the Chernobyl fuckup with some amount of blame for the catastrophe NO QUESTION, that man learned something with the hide on his back!
The only way to learn is the hard way. Suffering and defeat, failure. I have a high opinion of trauma because it has a biological purpose it is harmful to deny. you remember everything perfectly and vividly so you can bear witness against what happens reliably and accurately, and that sharp memory combined with reliving it over and over reveals little clues that just might solve perfect crimes. Trauma is the only form of memory that can survive a lobotomy.
how there can be any skeptics about nuclear after Germany's fantastically disastrous decision to abandon it and instead become servant to and funder of 21st century facism is beyond me.
There are far too many counties and entities wanting to start building nuclear power plants and keep old ones running.
Present economically viable sources of uranium will last 150 - 300 years.
This article from 2009 puts the number at at least 200 years. [1]
[ ]
With the number of new reactors coming online (being constructed now),
old ones keep running, and new plant construction would cut that number
significantly.
There is a lot of be claimed from the ocean, current that is not economical.
(and I thibnk it wouldl be horrible for the ocean ecosystem to sift through such volumes).
So usually the argument is
a) That reactors will use torium so it wont be a problem.
b) We will build fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors already
has enough fuel to run for a billion years.
As far as I know (and on this I might well be), there are no big
commercial thorium or fast breeder reactors in commercial use.
If true that means
a) we cannot build them today, if we want nuclear power fast the reactors
will be tried and true LWRs
b) if we wait for research to finish up it might take a while.
So, the immediate need for power cannot reasonably be met by nuclear.
Waiting for it to replace coal and fossile fuels will not do much in the
immediate future.
Now building a nuclear plant in a democracy filled with bureaucracy is
an extremely long process anyways. Getting all the permits required for
where to build, how to build it, all the protests because nobody wants
it close to them.
When the plant is ready to start construction of a is fast breeder reactor that is economically, scientifically and environmentally viable.
It would be dumb for all the countries to start building Gen 1.
That is more of a beta best.
Get at least a decade of metrics to learn what works, what does not work,
how could it be optimized, what went wrong? Plus, scientific progress would
make Gen2 a better alternative as a template.
After all after Chernobyl and Fukushima I have heard
"Well, those were old plants and we dont build them like that anymore.
The new ones are much safer".
Then building a fast breeder or thorium should be given time to learn
from the process.
I might be totally wrong about how far along the research for fast breeders
and thorium is, and that would make most of the above pointless.
223 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadOne could have high temperature reactors like pebble bed, that would be a better fit but they are more exotic and experimental.
Didn't read the article because I won't subscribe to WSJ. They have been an anti climate science platform.
That would mean investing in new coal plant steam turbines now would be a dead end.
They are very expensive things.
Do you have anything I can read up about regarding nuclear reactors having cooler temperatures than what coal fire generates?
[1] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/coal-fired-...
The hottest outlet temperature today from a nuclear reactor is about 1000 °C from HTTR in Japan, but that's fairly exotic.
There have been hotter outlets back in the NERVA nuclear rocket days. Also exotic.
Good read is this one: https://www.iaea.org/publications/8692/advances-in-nuclear-p...
Though, those were rocket engines with a design lifespan of several minutes. It's not possible to sustain temperatures like that, is it? (I am not an engineer).
I remember reading that one of the NTR test firings saw bits of molten corium flying out in the exhaust plume.
(And the crazy thing is, if you think about it, they are also gas turbines! The bough I guess perhaps your question was more specific to the reactor itself)
- "The average exit gas temperature was 2,550 K (2,280 °C), the highest ever recorded by Project Rover. The chamber temperature was 2,750 K (2,480 °C), another record."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover
There's also one notable difference: internal combustion turbines see their highest temperatures in the gas phase, which is somewhat insulated from the turbine blades (by weird fluid dynamic effects I don't understand). No solid material needs to withstand the peak temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine_blade#Film_cooling
Indeed, exhaust gases are even hotter.
I believe turbine elements are cooled by grouch internal channels these days, which is quite mind blowing.
Sadly, the reporting side of the WSJ and "WSJ Opinion" are basically two entirely different universes lumped under the same brand / subscription umbrella. Clearly there's a significant share of subscribers who like the opinion pieces so the Journal has historically chosen not to do away with them, but I keep hoping they will kill or spin off that business. In fact, as a subscriber I was asked not too long ago to fill out a survey about WSJ Opinion and whether I think it adds or subtracts value from my subscription. I'm not sure these types of decisions are best informed by the results of online surveys but wanted to note that just FYI...
I signed up for the WSJ when they had a holiday special and I think I pay something like $5 / month for a year
According to this, only entry level batteries where range is limited.
For the pedantic nuclearphiles, it doesn't have to be an airstrike. Domestic terrorism is a real thing as well.
https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-heat.html
You mean the 1 to 3 pilots that used the anti-hijacking doors to help them commit suicide by intentionally crashing passenger airliners? It’s a stretch to blame the taliban for that, and 9/11 was over twenty years ago.
Additionally, they seem to have a budding relationship with China, who are capable of manufacturing more advanced aircraft.
Which, I don’t exactly know Canada-US defense agreements, but given we share assets like NORAD—I assume an attack on southern Ontario would be tantamount to declaring war on the US, which would probably go poorly for everyone.
EDIT: Oh, strike that, they literally mean Canada attacking the US, which is the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a while.
Haven’t looked in a while, but I’m pretty sure a Fukushima every month of our life (and onward) is much less worse than current coal consumption.
An older and perhaps more beautiful solution is to put the reactors fairly deep underground, or underwater. Sadly, underground construction is extra pricey.
EDIT: I was thinking of aircraft impact here rather than hostile military attack. Defending against hostile military attack is not built into the regs.
"partly" seems like it's doing a lot of work in this sentence.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...
Hostile military airstrikes are another thing entirely, that's true. See edit above.
https://assets.sourcemedia.com/8c/d8/6686933e49518782cdc7cc1...
Reactor buildings themselves are extremely sturdy already. And if you do serious damage to the reactor it'll probably spread out the fuel so nothing particularly bad happens before you can do cleanup.
And how much safer than coal does it have to be, anyway? Coal kills so many people.
https://www.iea.org/news/coal-power-s-sharp-rebound-is-takin...
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/energy/india-s-coal-dema...
So, continued operation of coal plants depends on uneconomic behavior, typically via cultural inertia or domination by entrenched interests. Of course that is always possible, but it is disfavored.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise
Anyway, we know how to build nuclear plants that are physically incapable of melting down. Also, foreign and domestic(1) terrorist organizations are largely funded by oil (and, since I count putin as a terrorist, gas and coal) magnates.
Rapid nuclearization (and renewable energy roll outs) cuts the funding.
(1) Fox News, etc are clearly recruitment tools for right wing domestic terrorist groups. Even if you disagree, my point on foreign terrorists still holds.
If this pandemic has taught me anything, it's that contingency plans are put together with great effort and careful thought, and are then placed into a filing cabinet somewhere.
Meltdowns are hard to cause, because once the reactor slags itself it also stops reacting because it's destroyed its moderator.
You're probably thinking of "what if Chernobyl?" and the issue there is that it took genuine, sustained effort to create Chernobyl, and a reactor design that could do it: Chernobyl's big problem wasn't a meltdown (3 mile island was a meltdown) it was a steam explosion beneath the reactor, and then the subsequent graphite fire which spread radioactive particulates over the surrounding area.
No practical air strike is going to create a Chernobyl equivalent explosion - there's not enough energy in explosives to do it.
You don't need a "meltdown". All four of Fukashima's active reactors exploded after the cooling systems lost power. They had been automatically SCRAM'd when the earthquake hit and had been cooling for a while before the tsunami hit and destroyed the generators, but reactors take months to 'cool down.'
https://youtu.be/saM85y8lFm4?t=1997
One of the spent fuel storage pools at Fukashima was still generating 3MW of thermal heat at the time of the disaster. Waste fuel that hadn't been in the reactor for months. It came within one degree Celsius of its safe storage temperature - 85 degrees. Its normal operating temperature was 30 degrees.
> Physically exploding the reactor core might make a mess, but other then a very small amount of radioactive dust, the pieces, consisting of heavy uranium, would be scattered over a small area around the plant,
"Small area"? The Fukashima explosion has left an area around the size of Tokyo proper uninhabitable in one of the most expensive, constrained real estate markets in the world.
Short answer, the design is such that reactor shuts down automatically with loss of cooling.
Cost wise, it’s unclear how much actual savings will take place.
Nuclear has the highest opex of any electrical generation method; it's also estimated by some to have a greenhouse gas impact worse than natural gas. Wind costs a fraction of any other electricity generation method, solar isn't far behind, and continuing to drop around 10% a year.
This is why you see wind and solar replacing decommissioned nukes at a ratio of 6:1 (not including commercial or residential capacity) in the US and growing, and coal plants being decommissioned. There are now multiple technologies for recycling turbine blades, and solar panels are recycleable (or just resellable in the secondhand market where people don't care that they've lost 20% of their capacity.)
Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
Fanboys who think it's as simple as "if only we could work past the NIMBY issue" are ignoring the fact that nuclear power has not been economically viable for three quarters of a century (it has only been viable because of the military applications of nuclear power), while wind and solar keep getting more economically viable, and our grid keeps leaning more and more toward being distributed. Nobody needs the slow-reacting, base load generation nuclear provides.
Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Wind and solar have significantly simpler supply chains, regulations, and maintenance/repair/inspection needs.
You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
Wind and solar have little/no security concerns nor do you need to worry about area social/political/economic stability.
Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
I would expect such outrageous claims to be heavilly substantiated
> You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind
Really? Almost 1,000 feet tall, top heavy structure under huge windload does not need geologican stability?
'require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.'
How or why is this ever relevant, they operate at >90 capacity factor for 2 years at a time
> Storage is also plunging in cost, and additional technologies are already in commercial use (iron flow, for example.)
> HVDC transmission is spreading, with higher capacity, lower cost, and higher efficiency for moving electricity greater distances (in other words, it's less of a deal if it's really windy in one spot and not in another, and ideally-suited wind sites can be further from where electricity is needed.)
How do you transform DC up and down? By converting it to AC. Running it through a transformer and converting it back, HVDC isn't gonna take over the world, certain stretches might be HVDC where beneficial but not all over the world.
The difference with nuclear is that anyone can build and operate next-gen storage, so you're commercial right out the door. I could hook my UPS up to the grid and feed back, commercial success!
> Wind and solar are as distributable and scaleable as you want.
Not without storage, which is harder to scale than production of other kinds.
> You don't need to worry about geological stability with wind and solar.
I don't see the USP, there are plenty of geologically stable areas in most countries.
> Wind and solar don't require tens or hundreds of megawatts of cold-start / post-operation (cooling) power.
They have the added downside of only producing power when the weather guy says so.
> Wind/solar don't generate waste that is weaponizeable.
Good point, for now.
> You don't need a highly trained workforce to install, operate, repair, and decommission wind/solar.
No, you need a disposable workforce that can die from workforce accidents without anyone batting an eye.
Bill Gates is a good example of someone with a bit of time around the smartest people on earth asking for advice where he can make a difference, here's a TED talk where he explains that we'll need all solutions to come together rather than one single silver bullet: https://youtu.be/JaF-fq2Zn7I
Does it sound reasonable that we should use all good tech we have? To me it does, and it includes all energy sources in different amounts and situations.
Yes, this is a core problem. It seems like a large number of people want to focus on only one solution. They complain that solutions $X is more expensive or solution $Y is less proven or solution $Z isn't consistent. That sounds like a great reason to embrace them all to have each one's strengths complement the other's weaknesses. Cost should also be a secondary issue to speed of scale out & reliability. We're racing a clock where going too slow has its own costs, in capital & lives. It should be a factor but not the factor.
Who are those "some"? It's an outrageous claim. Are you sure you aren't mistaking it for hydro?
Compare the cost of a coal build to a nuclear build and you will see this is not the case.
Nonetheless, the transmission infrastructure is super valuable, and super expensive, as that is a huge fraction of the cost of electricity in the US, something like 40% on average. Reusing these sites for batteries is probably a good idea.
Big industry, such as green ammonia production from electrolyzed hydrogen, could be good though. But I bet those will likely be powered by massive amounts of solar plus batteries, as is being planned in places such as Spain right now. For at least the next generation of electrolyzer tech, energy costs will be dwarfed by the capital costs of electrolyzers, and the electrolyzers will need to be run nearly continuously. It remains to be seen if the tech curve of electrolyzers will decrease more quickly than the cost or batteries and solar do.
The newer technology, what amounts to drilling by vaporizing rock with microwaves, enables drilling to much greater depths quickly and cheaply. Being new, it has not actually been used yet, but once mature should be less dependent on local geology, and not generate (sometimes reasonable) fears of causing damaging earthquakes, and should yield more power from a single borehole than EGS gets from two more costly holes.
But there seems to be no prospect of commercial deployment before 2028, and something could go wrong on the way, delaying or even deep-sixing it.
EGS, even where it works best, is more costly than solar and wind. Working independently of weather gives it a leg up, but money for it is less available than for those, for now, because we haven't enough of those yet.
The cost for electrolysers is amortized over not just the time to refill local tankage, but over all the time when surplus power is available, generating direct revenue. The presence of electrolysers makes overbuild of top-line generating capacity an obvious win, because it is always generating income.
If you want to repurpose your steam turbines, geothermal is a better choice. Now that we know how to bore very deep holes electrically, geothermal is practical in many more places than before.
Sometimes I wouldn’t be surprised if wooden ships would be coming back again, especially now with all the modern technology.
Battery costs have also plunged to a level where Hawaii pairs them with solar farms to provide baseload.
The extreme low cost of all of these technologies is largely why nuclear power is dying out. It struggles to compete. The consistency just isnt that much of an advantage.
Take away the insurance subsidy so that the taxpayer funded $800 billion cleanup costs for Fukushima are privatized and nuclear moves from struggles to compete to eye wateringly expensive.
It can share some of the costs with nuclear arsenal maintenance though, so some governments will continue to push it on their populace.
However, you should probably account for solar farms and battery installations taking 6 months to plan, execute and deploy. Offshore wind farms are a couple of years. Large pumped storage projects can take up to 4.
Meanwhile Hinkley point C will be completed in 2026 after being kicked off all the way back in 2010 and will provide power that is "only" 3x the price.
I'd argue that nuclear has really expensive and slick PR.
I think I'm only half serious about this. Payoffs (well, "subsidies" in political language) might be an awful idea. It's a realpolitik viewpoint, maybe not a good one. But maybe it could get us around the roadblocks.
It would either mean no new nuclear plants or somebody comes up with a genuinely cheap, safe version that theyd be willing to put their money behind.
That isnt what the propaganda is demanding though. It wants the perpetuation of free insurance for nuclear and to be given massive subsidies on top of that that solar, wind and pumped storage will never be granted. to produce less electricity for more money. It wants the market contorted out of all recognition to allow this and the only reason I can think of why is because the military needs it.
Each dollar dumped into building a nuke is a dollar taken out of circulation and unavailable for wind/solar/storage. It would (a) in the end displace much less coal, (b) produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. During each of those years, more dollars would go to coal making it also unavailable for wind/solar/storage.
So, starting a nuke plant brings global climate catastrophe nearer, even if it might be made produce some power someday, and not be canceled because of massive cost overruns and delays. Every dollar that can be pulled together for energy should go to building out solar, wind, and storage. And maybe geothermal.
There are certainly promising options emerging in the area of storage, but I don't think it's a solved problem, especially at the scale necessary here. If I had your confidence about storage then I would agree with you completely, but I don't, and it doesn't seem like there's any consensus that storage is a solved problem. Quite the opposite: the consensus seems to be that we're not ready yet. As such, investments in that area are also potentially places where capital expended might produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. CAES is often cited as a storage mechanism but nothing has been built at utility scale and multiple projects that have tried have fallen apart before getting there.
This is an extreme crisis situation where no single option has a guaranteed outcome. Pursue multiple in parallel. Heck, if we'd done that two decades ago-- massively build out nuclear while massively investing in renewables-- the issue wouldn't be nearly as critical.
But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices.
We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us.
In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.
If we can get to the point where we are routinely overproducing from solar and wind and turning off the gas then yea we should ramp up storage. We will see it coming years away though.
China is ahead of the curve on this having just completed a 40GWh 3.6GW pumped storage battery.
Nuclear power would also need a lot of this if we were to rely upon it 100% since it is not dispatchable.
I'd love to know more about this. Links?
Thus the most economical way to construct a grid right now is renewables when weather is optimal and fossil fuels when its not. Optimize for cost and that is what you get, and that type of grid is exactly what many countries energy politic has been subsidizing towards. Nuclear don't need storage, but it also cost more than both renewables and fossil fuels.
It is only sunk-cost nukes, ignoring construction and leaning on military subsidies, that match the current cost of renewables + solar. And, of course, the cost of the latter at the time any new nuke construction could (ever) be completed will be much lower.
A full discharge cycle mean it must charge and then sell all the energy it captured, and in their prognosis, it need to do so every single day. A battery that does that, and only carries 1-6 hours of capacity, can match the cost of nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear power is cheaper, and in comparison to green hydrogen, nuclear power is cheaper by a very large margin.
And anyway, all the money tied up in it during all that time would be unavailable to displace coal, so you would additionally need to pay for coal that whole time.
Someone has to take responsibility while waiting for that cost to come down. A proper market solution would be to ban fossil fuels now and let non-fossil fuels alternative compete for investment and research. Not hopes and dream but technology that works when one can not just fall back on burning murder gas. Fossil fuel advocates are working very hard to convince people that coal should be replaced with natural gas, rather than non-fossil fuel alternatives.
The greenpeace dolts who got it regulated into oblivion (in no small part thanks to the help of a bunch of useful idiots who equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons) with the specific aim of making it not cost competitive.
A generation later, the clipboard warrior dolts point to the results of the prior generation of dolts and say it's not cost competitive.
It's only not cost competitive because we make it that way. You could bring down the cost of nuclear substantially without actually changing the physical requirements of the plants themselves simply by setting the bureaucratic processes up to default to speedy approval rather than default to delay and deny.
Well the local utility just SW of Lincoln Nebraska needed the power one way or the other, and didn't know if the new type of reactor was going to work or not. So they decided to build an equivalent power coal plant on the other side of the turbo-generator building! The idea was that when the nuclear reactor was in an outage, the coal plant could spin the turbine. Two plants, one turbine-generator! Wild.
So anyway the nuclear plant did have a few troubles. The vendor, Atomics International, had them figured out and was planning to fix, but the utility declined it's option to purchase the plant in the end. Today, a grassy outline of a nuclear reactor can be seen right next to the still-operating coal plant down in Hallam, NE.
Honestly it was an awesome reactor concept and I want to see it brought back. I visited this site a few months ago and got a little tour. Very fun.
https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html#the-hallam-so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallam_Nuclear_Power_Facility
Google maps view of the outline: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hallam,+NE+68368/@40.55864...
EDIT: Massive portions of the US! I find this mindblowing.
I’m utterly awed at the scale of infrastructure that must’ve been involved in building those thousands of kilometres of roads, let alone maintaining them (I imagine they aren’t particularly “maintained”, but all the same).
An interesting historical note is that across much of the west, each of those mile square sections was divided up into 16 pieces at 40-acres, which IIRC was the smallest unit of land you could purchase from the federal government.
You'll still find a lot of old homestead remnants across the west -- I used to climb through a few of them on a ranch I spent time at as a kid.
See:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(United_States_land_su...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Ordinance_of_1785
But, yeah, the amount of roads, even just basic gravel or dirt double-track, is pretty amazing. I knew some of it existed, but didn't quite realize it spanned the entire middle third of the US until just now.
If you want to have even more fun, most of those roads have Street View.
Very interestingly, this is a 1974(!!) program plan to resume development of MSR from the US ORNL MSR team
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4227904
There's so much interesting nuclear-related tech and concepts we haven't fully explored because of nuclear FUD ( much of which would be solved by the new tech).
It seems the Alfa class was decommissioned for scrapping, though one was refitted with a pressurized water reactor for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine#Decommiss...
An interesting issue with this design is that if the Pb-Bi coolant ever solidified, the reactor control rods became frozen in place.
> graphite moderators
Nope.
I think a lot of these plans to retrofit coal plants with nukes are quite overoptimistic. I'm ambivalent since they could be used as reasons to prop up coal plants longer. "See, we should invest in, and get some subsidy for a new steam turbine in our coal plant so it can be used with the graphite-sodium nuke that's going to replace the boiler in 15 years". But on the other hand, we need all potential, even unlikely solutions to replace coal burning.
Is that so? I think you are confusing air with water here. In contact with air, sodium oxidizes quickly, but it does not burn spontaneously.
"At 19:47 high temperature liquid sodium coolant at one of the three secondary heat exchangers started leaking through a broken thermometer sheath ... on the piping and it ignited on contact with air."
https://onlineethics.org/cases/case-1-fire-sodium-coolant-le...
If you read more closely though the article you linked to, you'll see that the complaint there was not the fire in particular (which caused some damage, but no radioactive leaks), but the claim of the plant operators that the plant was "absolutely safe", and the attempt of a cover-up. In other words, the safety of this plant was judged not in comparison with the safety of a conventional water-cooled reactor, but in comparison with an absurd goal of "absolute safety".
When people hear the sodium can cause fire when in contact with the air, they immediately remember the spectacular explosions of sodium in contact with water. Then they assume a sodium cooled reactor is a beast that only a madman would contemplate.
In reality, sodium cooled reactors are not any worse than water-cooled reactors. All reactors present various challenges, and some of the challenges faced by sodium cooled reactors will be higher, and some lower than those facing water-cooled reactors.
But sodium cooled reactors have an absolutely tremendous advantage: most of the fissile material they use as fuel (be it Uranium or Plutonium) does undergo fission and creates fission products, as opposed to actinides. Bottom line: the nuclear waste from sodium cooled reactors (and all types of fast neutron reactors) is much, much more manageable than the nuclear waste of conventional nuclear reactors.
Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
The promise of the small reactors is lego like building blocks that are very safe, idiot proof, can be carried on a train, and you return them to the factory for maintenance or refueling. Site integration is literally a cement pad, water in/out, steam in/out, data connection, and some power. If any of those in/outs fail the reactor shuts down. That way the factory builds 1000s, becomes an expert on them, and you get the efficiency of higher volumes. That way you don't need 24/7 coverage by a large team of PhDs just to produce power.
That's the dream anyways, will be interesting to see if anyone can get it to work.
By comparison, when plants of the same design are built in series they're much cheaper. Nuclear plants that started construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s were some of the most effective clean energy investments, delivered at a cost of $1-2 billion per gigawatt. Check out the costs in the historical list and there's a large stretch of plants that were built at this price point [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
I think you meant "co2-emission-free-while-operating"
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File:N...
That's always been a paradox with nuclear power. On one hand, of all electric power generation technologies, nuclear power has the most toxic waste; on the other hand, that toxic waste is completely contained under normal operation, so that looking from the outside, it's one of the cleanest. That's why in these discussions you always have people talking past each other: depending on how you look at it, nuclear power can be very clean or very dirty.
They probably could be made more cheaply than they have been. Making them cheap enough to be economically competitive will be very hard and and very uncertain of success. And, trying will take time we cannot afford, because you get no power out until it is all finished, and you burn coal until then. Renewables start producing and displacing coal almost instantly.
The demand curve is lumpy on a daily, weekly and yearly cycle. Nuclear is flat and predictable, renewables are (like demand) predictable to a reasonable degree but variable (weather and energy demand are linked too).
Nuclear (and coals) difficulty meeting peaky demand is a big reason for pumped hydro to exist for decades. It is still the biggest source of energy storage we have. Why should renewables pay for storage built for nuclear?
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
And note that's averaged across 4 years, across the whole US across multiple time zones and doesn't include energy for heat currently not sourced from electricity.
Cold places use more energy in winter and in cold years, the opposite in hot places that need a lot of cooling.
But, let's put that all to one side, on that graph what amount of energy are you intending to generate with nuclear and what are you intending to do with the excess (if you aim high) or with the peaks (if you aim low). Because whatever you do, is almost certainly going to be the same things renewables would do when demand and supply don't meet exactly. Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
Excesses of energy are easily solved: use it to desalinate water, create hydrogen fuel, or some other energy intensive things. And as stated previously, nuclear power plants can reduce their output if needed by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Nuclear plants want to operate at 100% load as much as they can, but they don't need to.
Renewables have the opposite problem: they don't produce energy when we need it. No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down. Peak pricing is not going to help us here. This is why renewable advocates assume that there's going to be some magic storage solution that offers effectively free and unlimited storage.
> Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
The USA has 20 GWh of pumped hydro storage. That's 2.4 minutes of electricity supply at an average hourly consumption of 500 GW.
This is called "overprovisioning" and it's exactly what renewables intend to do. In both cases it's more expensive than having magical demand matching production.
Or your going to use it to desalinate when power is abundant. This is "demand response" and again, it's exactly what renewables grids are going to do.
I see you also want to create Hydrogen, another great idea that renewables also plan to do, except nuclear generated is called Pink Hydrogen and renewable powered is called Green Hydrogen for some reason. Same basic idea though.
So, I don't understand why you're so angry about renewables when you already know all the solutions a fossil free grid needs.
> No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down.
Did you happen to notice where the bottom of the lumps in your graph were? Nighttime. So we'll need some wind power and/or storage and/or HVDC lines.
But if you have to pretend you've never heard of wind power in order to justify nuclear power, maybe that's a sign that it's not as good an idea as you think.
And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
I'm fairly chill about storage because cheap solar that lets you turn off gas during the day and cheap wind that lets you turn gas off another half of the time is the quickest and cheapest way to stop burning fossil fuels. We only need to come up with crazy solutions once we try to get rid of the last few bits of fossil fuels. And you already listed them for a fully nuclear grid so we don't need to go over that again.
Some people try to act all appalled about that, as if burning 80% less fossil fuels easily at an overall cost saving in a short period of time is some big conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to undermine nuclear. It doesn't really pencil out though. Not even if you pretend wind power doesn't exist.
> And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
No, the reason why we don't have storage on the grid is because we have no feasible way of storing energy at grid scale. Hawaii, California, and parts of Germany all produce excesses of electricity during peak solar and wind generation. We were promised that people would take this energy off the grid, store it, and release it later when energy is in greater demand. But these promises have not panned out, because storage remains infeasible. So instead, we keep burning fossil fuels. And we'll continue to keep burning fossil fuels until we either adopt nuclear power or some massive breakthrough in storage is found.
It'll still take significant amounts of storage even to drive fossil fuel use down to 20%. Estimates say 12 hours of storage [2]. That's an incredible amount of storage, hundreds of times greater than what we have now.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112
2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc.
Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further.
So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.
Overproduction without storage results in diminishing returns, as most of the excess energy is wasted.
"New nuclear" is 4-8x more expensive than nuclear power built at scale. When multiple copies of the same plant design built in series, costs in the range of $1-2 billion per GW is typical. And remember, that's a GW of generation with >90% capacitor factor, as compared to 25-35% for most renewables.
Wasted nuke overcapacity is very, very expensive.
To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
Except we have no way of building grid scale storage. Again, we have a few minutes of storage. Until then, wind and solar is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels. We have no plan to get rid of the fossil fuels until a storage breakthrough occurs.
> To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
Like I said: building one power plant of a given design is way more expensive than building repeated copies of the same design. There were dozens of nuclear projects that had a cost to energy production ratio of less than a fifth of Vogtle.
It just isn't built out yet. Building out storage will be premature until after there is enough extra renewable generating capacity to charge it from.
If lots of projects would have been cheaper than Vogtle, we may reasonably conclude that they didn't want one cheaper than Vogtle: it would have left too little scope for corruption and graft. Corruption is the ever-present companion of all nuke projects. Any nuke project without a ready conduit for graft will not be funded.
If you use more energy in the winter, and wind power works better in the winter, you've got a positive correlation.
You don't just assume you need an average output equal to the max demand.
And the price for solar is based on generation, not capacity.
> The LCOE "represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle", and is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered.
Unfortunately for the US, energy use is highest in the summer when wind is producing the least amount of energy. And then there's the hour-by hour variations on top of that.
Wind production: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112
Energy use: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
You are replying to a post that provides historical evidence and geuine argument, and your only counter argument is a Tautology and outright dismissal?
Back in the '50s, the promise was that power from nukes would be "too cheap to meter". They knew they were lying when they promised that, as we now know from internal memos. Cost estimates published have never matched actual costs. Delivery schedules published have never matched actual delivery, when anything is delivered; and when not, none of the money is ever returned.
So, the first and most important lesson about nukes is that what promoters estimate bears no resemblance to what might be delivered, and relying on such estimates puts you in a bottomless moneypit.
That is if you ignore experience curve effects.
In the US only one nuclear power plant came online in the last 25 years. For plants like Vogtle, the majority of the workers on site have never built another nuclear plant in their career before, and will never build after. That is a very good way to keep construction cost astronomical.
Compare with the reactors for nuclear submarines. They are being built at a rate of about 1 per year. Most workers have participated in building numerous reactors in the past, all of the same design. New workers can learn from experienced peers, and use their learning in building lots more reactors during the rest of their career.
In the last 25 years, the US brought online only one civilian nuclear power plant, but 23 nuclear submarines and 4 aircraft carriers (those have 2 reactors each). The cost of naval reactors is classified, but I’ve seen non-classified information that indicates that a submarine reactor costs in the lew hundreds of millions, and a carrier reactor about one billion ([1] page 10).
The idea of SMR’s is to replicate the success story of naval reactors in the civilian sphere.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...
India has the unique position of granted an exception by the US Senate for nuclear technology transfer, but subsequent administrations have never done it (for multiple geopolitical/trade treaty reasons). There is public appetite for small reactors and power generation - especially in the fast growing smaller towns(which by definition means 3-5 million people in India).
But unless the tech transfer happens - it will take India and China about 2 decades to catch up. All the while being the most polluting nations on earth. and nothing can be done about it.
https://www.expertsure.com/2011/03/27/more-illegally-dumped-...
Any time you outsource disposal of such a dangerous substance you're pretty much guaranteeing that it'll all be dumped improperly. That's why it's not a tiny problem at all.
Uh, Project Censored and Boing Boing? I'm not finding any reporting on this purported nuclear waste dumping in Somalia. I'm seeing reports of toxic waste, but not nuclear waste.
Furthermore, The USSR and United Kingdom both dumped massive amounts of nuclear waste into the Arctic and Atlantic oceans respectively [1]. There are no observed adverse effects of this.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
Allegedly, back in the 80s and 90s, organised crime in Italy was involved in the improper disposal of toxic and radioactive waste. Much of it was dumped around Italy, but some was said to have been dumped in Somalian waters. Attempts to verify this have proven difficult; the main informant hasn't proven reliable, and a UN mission to Somalia in 2005 wasn't able to find anything.
Still, it does seem like some toxic waste was dumped in or around Somalia back in the 1980s or early 1990s, and that's certainly terrible.
That being said, it seems to have happened thirty years ago, and although there was concern the 2005 tsunami could have stirred it up, that doesn't seem to be happening, and there's no evidence it's causing any harm at all. (And remember, most of the waste was in the Med off the coast of Italy, where it would be much easier to detect any impact than in Somalia.)
> Any time you outsource disposal of such a dangerous substance you're pretty much guaranteeing that it'll all be dumped improperly.
That seems to be the opposite of what your link is suggesting?
I don't think we can be so cavalier about nuclear waste, it's a heavy responsibility to push off to the future.
Like most things, this decision is about trade-offs. No, we have not figured out how to process nuclear waste in 1000 years. But if that's our major problem in 1000 years, we have succeeded in our most important challenge right now.
I mean, okay, I guess pick a corner that's fairly geologically stable. But the volume is (compared to other energy sources) tiny, and it's just not that dangerous.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...
US got 15,000 tons of massively subsidized fuel processed from Soviet bombs.
I would much rather live downstream from a nuclear waste "temporary" storage area that has an indeterminate lifespan than downstream from an oilsands tailings retention pond!
Also, people seem to be more interested in nuclear waste than in coal waste, so I expect more sophisticated solutions.
Short term solution is similar to nuclear, just gather it in random places and hope you've gone bankrupt before anyone asks you to pay for dealing with it because if you pay up front then you are obviously economic self-harm and people would move straight to the long term solution.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61048256
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/russians-in-chernobyl-to-suf...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
Top comment: "Advantages of thorium:
Much safer than uranium-no pressure vesel, no fuel rods to melt down
Much simpler reactor-Thorium salt liquid is pumped from the reactor tank through a heat exchanger and back into the tank
Thorium is much more plentiful than uranium--in fact so plentiful it is considered a waste product from rare earth mining
Thorium doesn't need expensive enriching to make it usable
Thorium is of little use for weapons
If power goes off liquid fuel simply drains into a pit which stops reaction. No fuel rods to cool or melt down if power fails
This technology has been around for years. Why was it not developed long ago?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI
I'm sure someone will point to bleeding-edge tech with waste that has shorter half-life, but nuclear power as we build it now generally produces waste that is hazardous for hundreds or thousands of years, afaik.
The other objection will be: yes but what about the price of heating the planet? It's a strong point, but it's still a very hard calculation to balance.
How do we least burden future humanity?
Some solar and wind and battery projects are sited to take advantage of disused or in some cases shared infrastructure (e.g. floating solar on hydro dams).
Data centers in old powerplants that use the infrastructure in reverse to buy electricity (and sometimes for cooling) are also a thing.
But anything that uses steam is probably not going to be competitive with renewables even with the savings this adds (particularly if you could have used the infrastructure for something else).
The only way to learn is the hard way. Suffering and defeat, failure. I have a high opinion of trauma because it has a biological purpose it is harmful to deny. you remember everything perfectly and vividly so you can bear witness against what happens reliably and accurately, and that sharp memory combined with reliving it over and over reveals little clues that just might solve perfect crimes. Trauma is the only form of memory that can survive a lobotomy.
Present economically viable sources of uranium will last 150 - 300 years. This article from 2009 puts the number at at least 200 years. [1] [ ] With the number of new reactors coming online (being constructed now), old ones keep running, and new plant construction would cut that number significantly.
There is a lot of be claimed from the ocean, current that is not economical. (and I thibnk it wouldl be horrible for the ocean ecosystem to sift through such volumes).
So usually the argument is
a) That reactors will use torium so it wont be a problem. b) We will build fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors already has enough fuel to run for a billion years.
As far as I know (and on this I might well be), there are no big commercial thorium or fast breeder reactors in commercial use.
If true that means
a) we cannot build them today, if we want nuclear power fast the reactors will be tried and true LWRs
b) if we wait for research to finish up it might take a while.
So, the immediate need for power cannot reasonably be met by nuclear. Waiting for it to replace coal and fossile fuels will not do much in the immediate future.
Now building a nuclear plant in a democracy filled with bureaucracy is an extremely long process anyways. Getting all the permits required for where to build, how to build it, all the protests because nobody wants it close to them.
When the plant is ready to start construction of a is fast breeder reactor that is economically, scientifically and environmentally viable. It would be dumb for all the countries to start building Gen 1. That is more of a beta best.
Get at least a decade of metrics to learn what works, what does not work, how could it be optimized, what went wrong? Plus, scientific progress would make Gen2 a better alternative as a template.
After all after Chernobyl and Fukushima I have heard "Well, those were old plants and we dont build them like that anymore. The new ones are much safer".
Then building a fast breeder or thorium should be given time to learn from the process.
I might be totally wrong about how far along the research for fast breeders and thorium is, and that would make most of the above pointless.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...