I find it asonishing that only now I learn that radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous. Also other good arguments are put forward by normalizing material costs VS expected energy production capacity.
radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous
If it’s radioactive it’s dangerous. The article points out that radioactive waste doesn’t stay radioactive for very long, contrary to what is commonly believed.
Radioactive sources have all kinds of applications in industry and medicine. If you have been to the dentist, you have probably been near one. They are dangerous in the same sense that a falling brick is dangerous.
Come to New York to see the extent to which a fearful people will go to prevent the danger from falling bricks. [1] /s
I'm joking here, but the joke underscores a painful truth: an irrationally fearful, small group of people seem to be able to utterly paralyze democratic society, and this pathology seems to be worse in societies that self-identify as focused on collective good. People who define themselves by their own idealism are easily sidetracked by hypothetical risks.
As for New York, it isn't entirely unrelated that they're shutting down their one remaining nuclear plant (and as a result, dramatically increasing NYCs dependency on fossil fuels) [2].
It can kill you like taking a fork to the nearest power outlet can kill you. Do you suggest we get rid of them? Of course not. They are risks to be managed, and history suggests the risk is fantastically low.
> But the amount of concrete and steel for sun and wind is striking. This has to do with the low energy density of these two.
No, it's not striking at all, and this is just as BS argument as the people arguing that nuclear isn't clean. As far as the energy density, include all the steel and concrete used outside of the reaction chamber, and you will find that nuclear and solar are pretty much on the same order of magnitude, and that's using the numbers from newer reactor designs that have consciously tried to reduce the amount of concrete by a factor of two.
But of course, all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy.
To me, it's about the shape of the logistic curve from planning, through construction to supply, and it's lifetime.
We should start nuclear construction now, but for supply in 8+ years time. And therefore we should start increasing construction of wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery now, to supply lower watts, but useful watts inside the 8 year window. As supply matches demand we can remove coal and gas, and when the nuclear comes on line, increase the pace of their removal and repurpose surplus wind and solar to hydrogen production for ammonia, and hydrogen fuel cells, and domestic gas replacement.
We should do some of all of that, I agree in large part (along with some diversified storage), the issue as the parent comment pointed out is who is going to stake billions on what looks like it will be a risky and poor ROI with significant construction delays and cost overruns. Would be easier for China
> all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy.
I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There are numerous startups working to bring down cost.
For someone like me, who believes the problem is not regulatory approval but the difficulty and cost of the build, I'm no more hopeful than pre-approval. But I have never questioned whether a good design could be conceived and approved.
But if someone thinks that construction/manufacturing is easy and the difficult part is regulatory approval, then perhaps this is cause for hope!
The renewable industry has been scaling at levels that are fairly hard to imagine, and yet people continually doubt its ability to scale fast enough to meet the challenge of the energy transition. SMRs are unfortunately decades behind and haven't even gotten a single device manufactured. So I think there are serious questions about how quickly SMRs could scale up to a GW/year, or 10GW/year, or the TW/year that we really need.
This is a design that is meant to be mass produced in an assembly line factory, then shipped to its destination and plugged into the grid. It definitely had the potential for economies of scale in manufacturing.
Maybe? It all depends on execution and costs. And that's where most nuclear firms and proponents have been wearing rose-colored glasses for decades.
The preliminary estimates of numbers for cost were not terribly impressive, so I hope that they became wise and are under-promising. But only time will tell.
There are multiple nuclear (fission) startups in the last decade or so. My understanding is that financial backing is not their problem; outdated regulations are. And fear stokes outdated regulations.
It's one thing to spend a fraction of $1B backing a startup that says it has a new small modular design that will finally turn around the economics, and have a big upside.
It's a far far more difficult thing to risk $10B on a reactor that may or may not actually ever complete construction, and has no potential for growth in value.
People never seem to cite which regulations they want to change. The NRC allowed the AP1000 at Vogtle and Summer to be constructed under a new regulatory regime at the request of industry, but the industry still seemed to mess up their construction process. And France at Flamanville has also had terrible construction problems despite having different and friendly regulatory processes.
My main problem with the nuclear industry is that it continually fails to focus on what would actually deliver nuclear, and just complains about everybody else instead of improving process or becoming accountable for results.
You know how they discovered radon gas was a problem in basements? A guy working at a nuclear power plant showed up at work one day and tripped their radiation detectors.
There was more radiation in a random guy’s basement than at the entire nuclear plant.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are soaking up US subsidy money for producing solar panels using slave labor. They strip mine for toxic rare earth metals to do it, destroying the environment and using coal power to boot.
Here's the real reason nuclear power did not succeed in the US (I can't speak of other countries). It was opposed by the Democrats, and the Republicans, although some in favor of it, decided they don't want to spend whatever political capital they had on this. Now both Democrats and Republicans are pro nuclear power.
You may not like it, but nuclear power is having a comeback.
The last time to start nuclear to address climate change was the mid-2000s.
And we did start four reactors, with many more planned! However they are all construction failures, and the two at Summer were actually even abandoned half completed, it was so bad. And executives our going to jail for their lies during the construction process.
That's what I mean when I say nobody knows how to build it. We will likely never attempt another new 1GW reactor in our lifetimes, because even is some brave EPC firm thinks they could tackle the challenges, getting the money for that is nearly impossible.
Oh, did I mention that the only reason the four reactors were attempted at all in the mid-2000s is that the two utilities captured state legislatures and changed the law so that they could charge rate payers whether or not construction completed? Utilities memory of stopping nuclear in the 80s isn't because of protestors, it because of bankruptcy.
In any case, the only hope for nuclear is SMRs from new startups. But we can't depend on them because we don't know the costs. Fortunately nuclear is no longer our only hope, and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago.
Politics has nearly nothing to do with stopping nuclear. It all came down to construction mucking it up.
> and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago.
We do, but those options are not enough. If they were, the Democrats in Washington would not have turned pro-nuclear.
They saw the numbers. You can store electricity from day to night, but not from Summer to Winter. Months-long electricity storage will never make economic sense (or at least not in the next 30 years).
Nuclear reactor construction is currently a decades-long affair. Can we make it shorter?
Here's a little historical tidbit: in WW2, when the Liberty ships started being built, it took the first such ships about 250 days to be built. They took down that number to 150, then to 105, then to 71, then to 30 and then to 10. They even built one in less than 5 days, and that one did survive the war, and kept working until 1963.
The secret was to build large components separately, each on its own assembly line, and then to just snap them together as a giant Lego toy.
The fact that current nuclear reactors take 20 years to build is not a mathematical proof that any design will take as long. It is entirely possible for SMRs to be build in a matter of months, maybe, just like the Liberty ships, in a matter of days. If the politicians in Washington want to make that happen, then the engineers can make it happen.
> They saw the numbers. You can store electricity from day to night, but not from Summer to Winter. Months-long electricity storage will never make economic sense (or at least not in the next 30 years).
It's just math. If you have a storage solution where you can recoup you capital costs by charging every day and selling electricity every night, you will recoup only one hundredth of that if you charge one day and sell 100 days later. Currently the capital costs of batteries add a few cents to the kWh (the average price of 1 kWh in the US in 2021 was 14 cents). If you multiply that number by one hundred, you end up with dollars for kWh, and you can sell that kWh, because nobody will buy it.
If you find a storage solution that adds only hundredths of cents to a kWh if sold daily, that would be absolutely fantastic. But no such solution is in sight.
The only long term storage solution that has a shadow of a chance to make it is hydrogen. But we are so, so much behind the plan in building green hydrogen production facilities. As for hydrogen liquefaction and shipping, that's just a distant plan.
They are correct about this bit, but not the wider conclusion.
Months long storage of electricity is uneconomic compared with alternatives.
Which is a shame for nuclear, as it would really benefit from it if you could just build enough for the average demand and run then 100% of the time.
Instead, flexible demand is much cheaper. So you overbuild the nuclear and modulate the demand for making green hydrogen and ammonia and store that. Much cheaper than long term storage. Note we don't use that to generate electricity, but for chemical feedstocks. Again, cheaper to overgenerate with nuclear.
However, now that you have overbuild and responsive demand in the equation there is no advantage of nuclear over renewables, which are much cheaper to build for the same capacity.
You're so confident about nuclear that you feel you need to compare it to purely solar in Germany to make a good case for it?
Doesn't this just show that you know it can't compete with solar in equatorial regions or wind in the UK, never mind appropriate combinations of the two across Europe and the rest of the world?
And you didn't even compare price. Solar would only need to be 6x cheaper to still win that rigged comparison and provide masses of cheap energy in the summer.
It's about 4 or 5x cheaper at the moment and predicted to fall further as it gets rolled out globally at massive scale.
And every watt rolled out at the moment can displace coal.
I'm not so confident about nuclear. Nuclear power generation is a very high end technology, where humankind instead of climbing the learning curve, somehow managed to go in the opposite direction. However, Elon Musk has demonstrated that you can take a technology where costs are going up, and make it do a 180, and take down costs by a factor of 10 and then 100. Can nuclear power generation get to be 100 times cheaper? I think so.
Do we absolutely need nuclear energy to combat climate change? I don't think so.
I do think a solution could be based on huge arrays of solar panels in countries like Australia, Mexico, Morroco or South Africa, and shipments of liquefied hydrogen to countries like Germany, China, Japan or Canada. The US can be quite self-sufficient, with solar panels in California, Nevada, Arizona, and wind turbines in Texas, Oklahoma and the rest of the wind corridor, and pipes of hydrogen from one state to another. I can even see the US exporting liquefied hydrogen as a natural succession from exporting LNG now.
It's essentially impossible for anything that drives a steam turbine to generate electricity to get that cheap. Just the cost of the steam parts, if everything else was free struggles to compete with solar today.
Distributed solar also avoid transmission costs, at a certain point a point source of free energy gets outcompeted by distributed solar.
So nuclear might have niches, or exciting new applications but is mostly a dead-end.
Shipping hydrogen about seems likely to be a big thing though, easy transition for existing infrastructure.
I read this opinion in that blog of Austin Vernon that made the HN rounds about a year ago [1]. In the end his argument is basically "if some energy generation method has moving parts, it has to be more expensive that one that doesn't".
But let's look at the numbers.
Here's a study by the EIA that looks at the capital costs and also at the Operating and Maintenance costs of various types of power plants [2].
The costs that are interesting for us are (all costs per GW alternative current of capacity):
- solar without storage: $1.3 BN (page 175)
- solar with 4 hours of storage: $1.8 BN (p. 180)
- coal without CO2 sequestration: $3.7 BN (p. 46)
- nuclear AP1000 (similar to Vogtle): $6.0 BN (p. 107)
- natural gas power plant: $1.0 BN (p. 83)
First of all, notice that the natural gas power plant comes to be the cheapest, despite the fact that it has turbines, including steam turbines. So the general assertion that things with moving parts are more expensive than those without is not quite correct.
You can counter that the estimates are from 2019, and by now solar is probably already cheaper and it will continue to get so, and I suppose you are right. But the panels constitute only 18% of the cost of the solar panel plant, the rest being inverters, transformers, something called BOP (balance of plant), etc. So, if the panels go to zero, the cost of the solar power plant gets reduced by 20% only.
On the other hand, the same is true for nuclear: only about 20% of the cost of a nuclear power plant is attributed to the nuclear part, the rest to the turbines, BOP, etc. So, even if by a miracle the nuclear part were to cost zero, the cost per GW would still be about $5 BN. This is higher than the coal power plant, because the steam generated by coal is much hotter than the one generated by the current generation of nuclear reactors.
Does this prove Austin Vernon's point?
Not necessarily.
First, the fact that gas power plants are very cheap is reason to hope. If we make nuclear reactors that don't use steam (which is corrosive) but some other gas, then it's possible the cost could go down significantly.
Well, less than one year ago China hooked to the grid exactly such a plant [3]. It uses Helium as a coolant, which means that the turbines can be cheaper (they should be similar to the ones used in a gas-firing plant). It also runs much hotter than a regular pressurized water reactor (about 700 Celsius vs 300 Celsius), which means the efficiency is higher.
Can the US build such reactors? I don't see why not, see for example Xe-100 [4]. But the first step is to get back to the nuclear technology learning curve.
Gas is cheap because it substantially reduces the number of heat exchangers.
Transferring heat across a solid/fluid interface is kind of expensive. The more of that you have to do, the more expensive your power plant will be.
A simple cycle combustion turbine involves no heat exchangers at all. Heat is generated in the compressed air by combustion; the waste heat is carried away in the air + combustion products exiting the turbine. A combined cycle plant does have a boiler and a condenser for the steam section, but that part is only producing 1/3rd the power.
For nuclear to get cheap we'd need something like an open air Brayton cycle, but that would involve running air either through the reactor or through a high temperature heat exchanger made of silicon carbide.
It's interesting (well, to me) to consider how much easier that sort of open cycle system would be on Titan, where one could use 90K N2 rather than 300K air as the input fluid. Titan may be the best place in the solar system for nuclear power.
That's the idea behind the gas-cooled fast reactor [1]:
The reference reactor design is a helium-cooled system operating with an outlet temperature of 850 °C using a direct Brayton closed-cycle gas turbine for high thermal efficiency.
Helium does not absorb neutrons when it passes through the core, and if the nuclear fuel is well insulated (such as the TRISO fuel that Xe-100 plans to use), then you are safe to send it to spin the turbine. If you have any concerns that the cooling gas may become contaminated somehow, then you use a heat-exchanger.
At this point nobody is using direct cooling-gas-to-turbine cycle. But after people gain experience with cooling-gas-to-heat-exchanger, at some point they'll move to the direct cycle.
A problem with these reactors using TRISO fuel is it greatly increases the volume of waste. The spent fuel is now mixed with a large amount of carbon. Cask storage becomes less practical.
Also, any time the temperature is above 550 C you can't use ordinary steels, as they will creep. So these reactors have materials challenges.
All things being equal TRISO fuel should increase the waste volume. But a fast reactor will tremendously reduce both the waste volume (because it can burn U238) and its nastiness (it will have virtually no long half life actinides).
As for steel. Steel is one of the cheapest materials, with an average price below $1000/ton. Nuclear reactors need to use special steels that are resistant to neutron embrittlement, and even those have a price less than $1000/ton. There are more expensive steels out there (for example those used for tools), but generally the price is less than $3000/ton. But let's say that an alloy of steel that resists both neutron embrittlement and temperatures of 750C is $10000/ton. Then a reactor such as Xe-100 which weighs 700 tons in total will be able to procure the steel at less than $7 million, or $28 million for a group of 4; a powerplant with 4 Xe-100 reactors is estimated to cost $2.4 billion, so this cost would be less than 1% of that.
I'm sure there will be 1000 problems that Xe-100 will need to solve before they get their NRC approval and they will be able to economically build their first reactors, but the cost of steel will not be one of them.
Does TRISO have higher burnup? Not convinced. Fast reactors that involve reprocessing will greatly increase waste volume due to generation of low level contaminated material in the reprocessing process. Once you let the stuff out of the fuel elements it can get all over things.
Fast neutron reactors just use fast neutrons, neutrons that are thousands of times faster than the neutrons used in the current generation of reactors (called thermal neutrons). A thermal neutron is much more likely to hit a nucleus of Uranium. If it hits U-235, it generally makes it undergo fission, but 18% of the time it is just absorbed and becomes the nasty U-236, which is a very long lived radioactive element. If it hits U-238, it's absorbed, eventually becomes Plutonium-239, which in turns may absorb further neutrons, so a bunch of transuranic elements are produced.
That's bad on two counts. The transuranic elements are radioactive and tend to be very long lived so the nuclear waste is long lived. And whenever a nucleus just absorbs a neutron and does not undergo fission, it's a shame, it's energy that's not being produced.
Fast neutrons solve both problems. They are about 1000 times less likely to hit a nucleus, but when they do they almost invariably trigger fission for U-235 and very often for U-238 as well. That results in a massively higher burnup, and massively lower amount of transuranic elements in the waste.
So, not only will a fast reactor produce much less waste for each GWh of electricity, it will be a much nicer type of waste, one that decays to the background radiation level in a few hundreds of years, rather than millions of years.
Again, there is no reprocessing. The TRISO particle are not broken or milled at the end. They become nuclear waste as they are, but after they gave a huge amount of energy.
TRISO fuels may have higher burnup, but they also have large dead volume in the fuel elements. The fissionable material is surrounded by barrier layers, and these encapsulated particles are embedded in a non-fuel matrix. The volume of spent pebbles will I think be considerably larger than the volume of spent fuel elements from a conventional reactor per unit of produced thermal energy.
Synthetic hydrocarbons can do that much better than hydrogen.
Also ammonia can do that much better than hydrogen.
There are also several types of flow batteries which can store energy for any time desired, without losses. Compared to hydrocarbons or ammonia they have a low energy density (which is not prohibitive for stationary applications), but they have a higher energy efficiency for a charge and discharge cycle, similar to the other kinds of batteries.
Hydrogen is the worst solution for long-term energy storage, compared to the many other alternatives, which are also already proven in practice, unlike hydrogen. Hydrogen is good only for rockets, when its low mass is more important than its high volume and all its other disadvantages.
Synthetic hydrocarbons requires you either capture CO2 from the atmosphere, or capture, store, and reuse the CO2 of combustion from your turbines (so you're still storing compressed gases underground; you've also made the per-output-power part of your system more costly, which is very undesirable for rarely used backup storage). The round trip efficiency with hydrogen will also be higher, since you don't have to do either of those and the process that makes hydrocarbons starts with H2 and CO2 and is significantly below 100% efficient.
Flow batteries would be better than ordinary batteries, but would still be costly for seasonal storage or rare event backup compared to hydrogen (especially flow batteries using vanadium).
I agree with you that Hydrogen can do that. Or that at least it stands a chance.
Both nuclear and Hydrogen are unproven at this point, for the scale we need. Europe has chosen to bet it all on Hydrogen. Although, in the last one year France decided to get back in the game of building nuclear. I see no talk of Hydrogen in the US.
Space X are building the worlds largest Green Hydrogen project in Texas (intended for turning into methane for rockets amongst other things).
Will probably be one of those things where there will be a new worlds largest record every month for years and it'll get into arguments about who has actually started production and so on, but it's definately a global thing.
Current headlines suggest US Green Hydrogen could be the cheapest in the world due to some mooted subsidies:
There's plenty of reason to believe that we can't replicate those numbers, because we have vastly different labor costs, vastly different technological skill sets. Plus, costs in China are always a bit of a mystery. Russia or South Korea may also provide potential routes towards cheaper construction, but South Korea's success was based on at least a bit of corruption. And who knows what's actually going on at Rosatom.
I would also point out that China's only planning something like 50GW of new reactors from here on out, but nearly TW of renewables, so new nuclear there is mostly coming from hedging their primary bets, not as a primary source of future electricity.
The US definitely does need to relearn how to do big construction projects. But I think that the limited construction capacity we have would be best spent on projects that have no replacement, like mass transit. Or on building factories to produce energy generating widgets, which has an exponential return on construction effort when compared to constructing energy generating widgets directly.
Super interesting how there is a big push for nuclear in the tech world right now.
To play the devils advocate, there are some pretty solid reasons why Nuclear is not ideal.The biggest one to me is the risk or nuclear material proliferation: Iran for instance is hiding their military nuclear program behind a civilian nuclear goal.
Nuclear is probably net better than coal but it's not the (only) solution to climate change.
> Iran for instance is hiding their military nuclear program behind a civilian nuclear goal.
This is so much nonsense. Even the CIA has long said that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. This is just a myth propagated by people who hate Iran. According to Isreali politicans, Iran is '1 year a away from the bomb' since literally 1998. There has never been real evidence presented and many intelligence services have said so.
What Iran in fact needs, is civilian nuclear power. Their power generation was mostly gas/oil and they realized in the 1990s that this was a huge issue. And in fact, Iran asked France to provide that for them. They made a deal with France and France would provide all that is needed and take back all the nuclear waste to France. All of this would be totally monitored by the IAEA.
Now of course the US used their power to prevent this. Then Iran said, well I guess we have to make our own civilian nuclear program. Once they started that the US and Isreal started to publish huge amounts of PR about how Iran was building the bombs and used that as an excuse to make the whole nation suffer.
If you want to build nuclear weapons, civilian nuclear power are not really very useful, there are far better proven methods to do this.
Nuclear power has a paradox with respect to pollution: it's a highly dangerous form of pollution (heavy metals which are also radioactive), but in normal operation, it's completely contained (and nuclear power operators tend to be very paranoid about it; minor amounts of radiation which would be considered harmless everywhere else are treated as unacceptable outside the designated radioactive areas). So depending on how you look of it, it can either have a high amount of dangerous pollution, or none at all.
(There's another form of pollution from nuclear power plants, which is heat pollution from discharged cooling water, but most people aren't talking about that.)
And uranium mining operations are also known for leaving a bit of a mess around them, polluting nearby rivers, etc. Suspiciously often close to indigenous lands as well.
Nuclear power pollution is the best kind: dense and contained. Imagine I tell you we could put 10% of the world's trash in a olympic sized swimming pool. Pretty appealing eh?
We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics.
This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power.
Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.
On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.
But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.
> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.
The most difficult part of the grid is the transmission infrastructure. The most valuable, high-lead-time part probably being the HV transformers that live near power plants.
Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years. In the United States, most nuclear waste is stored on site at the plant. This is because there is simply nowhere else to put it. Uranium is a natural material and will eventually run out, much like fossil fuels. In other words, cross nuclear off the list of sustainable energy. Solar energy would be the most obvious sustainable source, we just need better ways of converting the energy.
Pretty much each statement in your post is incorrect. Nuclear plants produce tiny amount of waste, which we know what to deal with. Amount of fuel if you count thorium is enough for many millennia. And solar can not possibly replace other forms of energy production, not in a state it's in. I don't know why you are spewing misinformation, but you are clearly not going to solve climate crisis with that attitude
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Also, it looks like you've been repeatedly posting flamewar comments. Can you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling. It's against the site guidelines. It also discredits what you're arguing for, and is therefore not in your interest.
> it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.
This is true for any other system of centralized energy production, including, notably, the one we have right now.
> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.
You underestimate the cost and lead times of the big distribution transformers found in grid substations. As an example, a fire two years ago on a substation transformer in the state of Amapá (while another transformer was broken and awaiting maintenance, and IIRC the third transformer of the set was also damaged by the fire) led to most of that state being without power for AFAIK nearly three weeks, until a replacement sent from another substation could be installed (and as a consequence, that other substation ended up without a spare until it could receive weeks later a replacement transformer from yet another substation). Note that building a new transformer instead of shuffling them between the substations wasn't an option, because it would take too long.
Estimates are that when the (technically already overdue) Pacific Northwest earthquake and tsunami rolls in, it will take two years to restore power to most of the coastal and downriver areas.
Eh, we live in an age when a few dozen well placed missiles can kill millions and destroy entire countries, not just their electrical grid. A few retaliatory strikes later and an entire region is gone, if not the world as a whole.
That doesn't sound like a very useful way to make decisions about anything except maybe missile defense and second strike capabilities. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient violence.
There are many juicy targets like that, whether it's power plants or airports or dams or bridges or whatever. We don't typically worry about hardening them against smart munitions. If you're in a hot war with an adversary like that you're pretty screwed regardless.
There's just no practical way to harden all of it against attack. And a tiny chance of some hypothetical future war isn't a good reason to choose a technology (combusting fossil fuels) that's gonna kill your own citizens every year, guaranteed. Why do your hypothetical future enemy's job for them?
Attacking a nuclear plant on purpose will be seen as similar to attacking with a nuclear bomb in the eyes of the world.
If all you want to do is to knock out the electrical system of a country, you can use an EMP burst bomb over that country, and the grid will be down for months.
“Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.”
Solar panels and batteries require the damaging mining of all sorts of rare and/or nasty materials. This kills a lot of people, although predominantly in other countries nowadays. It's an argument that could be applied to nearly any mineral resource, and is more of an indictment of unsafe mining practices and capitalist exploitation. If we allowed practical research on breeder reactors, the need for uranium mining would nearly vanish.
Nothing prevent us to put the grids safely protected under tons of concrete so they can't be destroyed to easily. Plus the bonus of isolate it better from water and flooding damage.
Look at the numbers though. Fossil fuels kill many people every year, while nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical. The point of the article is to show that fears like the ones expressed above just aren’t supported by the data.
> nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical
Nothing to see here.
> Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).
All of those accidents combined killed less than 10% of the people that are killed by fossil fuel pollution every single year. Most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.
Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.
The dispersed fallout? Hard to quantify because of it's dispersedness and long term slowness. But it is for example plutonium and we know it's effects on life on Earth, so one could proceed from there with some math and futurological trend extrapolation. And simply by using the knowledge we have about plutonium mixed with common sense.
i’m not at all anti-nuclear but i’m not sure what you mean by
> most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.
i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick.
but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear.
i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.
Just the nature of a plant requiring active management (and power) to prevent meltdown is a weak point. The reasonable answer to this concern imo is explaining how passive safety systems have advanced and are implemented in new reactor designs, and how plants are built so when intentionally attacked or incidentally damaged a meltdown or release of highly radioactive material does not ensue, especially for folks advocating for the widespread adoption of nuclear energy worldwide. Strikes me as odd that the typical response is instead 'but this old energy generation tech which we all agree needs to go has downsides'.
If we remove Chernobyl from this list, we'll find that probably just 1 person died from radiation after power plant accidents.
Fossil plants are killing millions of people every year.
During heatwave this year, when we had temperatures around 43C for almost 2 weeks, hundreds of people died in my country because our energy grids were overloaded and ACs turned off. And many people can't even afford to pay for AC energy bills anyway so they don't use it. Our energy needs are growing every year and energy production can't keep up.
We NEED cheap energy that nuclear can give. This is the matter of survival at this point.
If you have to resort to "it's better than fossil fuels" you have damned nuclear with faint praise. And you have also wasted our time, because nuclear is competing with renewables now, not with fossil fuels.
Okay, how about; it's safer than literally every other method of energy production? Less deaths per thousand terawatt-hours produced (90) than wind (150), solar (440), or hydroelectric (1400).
If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar will be mostly ground mounted.
If you don't agree with that statistical value, and think it should be higher, why you've just argued we're not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants -- because $9 M is the value the NRC uses when determining if additional safety systems are warranted.
And I happen to think the NRC is wrong and the vast number of safety regulations imposed on nuclear power is harmful to the ultimate goal of getting off coal as quickly as possible. We should be building more nuclear reactors, even if we lower safety standards to do so, to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and the ongoing ecological disaster they entail. But that won't happen because both fossil fuel lobbyists and environmentalists loathe nuclear power.
Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!).
But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.
You can't count solar or wind deaths at present because neither is a viable power system.
To count deaths you need to look at a whole system--solar, wind + the gas plants that cover the gaps, or the hypothetical storage system that covers the gaps. Since we can't count deaths from a tech that doesn't even exist it's solar + wind + gas -- and most of those deaths will be from the gas.
This is the same tiring argument - using plane crashes to say that flying is unsafe, because it makes headlines once a crash happens, while tens of thousands of people die every year on the roads. But hey, diffuse deaths, nobody cares about it.
So the anti-nuclear guys keeping point at the same list of 3-4 incidents time and time again, unable to recognize the ridiculousness and weakness of their argument - and the fact that their opposition to nuclear actively kills people year after year.
Actually, your comparison between planes and cars is quite adapt. The airline industry likes to use death per km as a measure and you are correct they come out very safe with that measure. However, experts have argued that it is a very flawed metric because of the vary different distances covered by both means and the way risk is distributed (i.e. for flying the risk is almost entirely in the starti g and landing phase, while for a drive it is evenly distributed over the trip). If you use a metric like deaths per hour flying does not look so much more safe that driving actually (essentially the same as driving) [1]
But people generally aren't choosing between driving somewhere 120 miles away or flying somewhere 1150 miles away. Generally, someone already has a destination in mind, and then chooses whether to drive or fly to get there. That makes deaths by time an extremely flawed metric, and deaths by distance the correct one to use.
Maybe yours is a US perspective, but I never decided between flying and driving. I fly when driving or the train typically does not make sense, i.e. flights over 800km. I'm not sure even in the US is such a decision, most people will not drive from the east to the west coast, while only a small percentage of people would take flying from e.g. LA to San Diego over driving
Hypothetical, but the occurrence of future large scale conflict is overwhelmingly likely. This will remain a valid concern - not just accidents, but intentional attacks - until design of plants advances to be robust against strikes to failsafe without active management
I'd be willing to bet you don't actually believe a post-war Ukraine with several metropolitan areas flattened is no worse off if widespread radioactive contamination is added.
Ukraine does not quality as "a large scale conflict" in any measure. If we had ww3, you'd be much more likely to die by actual nukes falling from the skies than residual radiation form destroyed nuclear plants.
No, that isn't correct. Still it's a moot point. Feel free to either change my example from Ukraine to a hypothetical larger area if you care, or change large to regional scale — regardless 'if there is military action that could affect nuclear plants it will involve nuclear weapons and kill us anyway' is a poor argument.
What isn't correct? What's the definition of a large scale conflict then? Anything above 2 neighbors fighting over their fence?
> egardless 'if there is military action that could affect nuclear plants it will involve nuclear weapons and kill us anyway' is a poor argument.
How is that a poor argument. In war you care about what is the most likely to kill you. Nukes are a very real risk when there's 50 000 out there ready to be launched at one moment's notice. Radiations that would kill you in 30 years is the least of anyone's worry. Just like you don't care about a cancer that could kill you 10 years from now if you are run over by a car.
After Chernobyl you still today cannot eat fish from the lakes and rivers in 1000+ km radius from the site by Finnish recommendations. Because they are top predators and have enriched the gamma dose in themselves. How often could you eat human meat?
Finland. In Finland. According to Finnish authorities. Countries with East Block histories like Poland tend to not care as much what the actual science of the stuff is. Nor does the Nuclear Is Clean - crowd is seems. "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation". Yeah, right.
> After Chernobyl you still today cannot eat fish from the lakes and rivers in 1000+ km radius from the site by Finnish recommendations.
Limit your eating of pike, but otherwise no major objections:
> Children, young people and persons of fertile age may not eat pike caught in a lake or in the sea more often than once or twice a month.
> Dioxin and PCB levels in fish from inland waters are normally low, and mercury levels are lower in other lake fish than in pike. The mercury and cesium-137 levels of fish vary from one lake to the other.
Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants.
The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could.
If we could use only wind and solar power to fully replace fossil fuels and hydro, that could be a reasonable argument...
But it seems unrealistic to get enough energy without using some higher-density sources of energy, whether that's hydro or nuclear or oil, and if we're picking based on which one causes the least death, even accounting for wars and failures, nuclear seems to be a head and shoulder above the rest.
The primary thing that seems to be driving using coal plants and not using nuclear is purely monetary cost: nuclear plants take a huge up-front investment, coal plants already exist, and wind/solar can be transitioned to gradually with less up-front cost. The talk about nuclear's "danger" to me seems, quite plausibly, to be a post-facto justification based on not wanting to put up the money.
Until we live in a world where we can micro-generate terawatts of power on a fully distributed, dynamic electrical grid -- if that's even possible -- the only practical technologies we have for satisfying our hunger for energy involve concentrated areas of high potential energy. Big energy, big target.
If one more reactor goes down nuclear isn’t either in your country. Germany has to run their load balancing gas plants right now to fix your nuclear fever dreams.
France currently runs its nuclear plants at 60% due to maintanance and heat. In the last years the amount of times they had to shut down a nuclear power plant due to to warm cooling water has increased. Given where global warming is going that will happen more and more.
Texan politicians didn't miss a chance to blame wind power for the outages. Unfortunately, those initial lies are still circulating. The primary cause was that the pipes supplying natural gas froze. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
I don't really want wind turbines and solar panels to cover the whole planet. I used that to calculate some numbers for canada, and we'd need about 64k average offshore wind turbines, and 3200 square kilometers of solar farms.
> Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by heavy rain, and the danger feels similar. In fact, hydroelectric dams can even help prevent (or contain) flooding, so it's the opposite of causing damage in that case. Of course, we're not talking about tailings dams, which do leave behind a trail of contamination when they fail.
(An interesting case is the failure of a tailings dam many years ago which flooded the Rio Doce with pollution, with that flood being mostly stopped by a hydroelectric dam downriver. The hydroelectric dam contained the damage instead of causing it.)
Rio Doce was 43.7 million cubic metres and 18 deaths.
If someone blows up Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, it'll be about 18e9 m3, hundreds of thousands dead, wholesale destruction of everything downstream, shutdown of every energy plant that uses the resevoir for cooling, not to mention the hydroelectic station, and untold damage when winds blow the exposed sediment all over the steppe. Which is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.
So? This Kakhovka dam is a legitimate military target as the last remaining supply route for russian troops in/around Kherson.
Not a dam, but such a military strategy has already happened and was extremely foolish.
Intentionally breaching the dikes of the Yellow River killed nearly a million people, displaced several million more, and was a contributing factor to people turning towards the Chinese Communists and away from the KMT.
> This Kakhovka dam is a legitimate military target
Not under the Geneva Convention "Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population." https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
Couple of 1000lb bombs misplaced, some confusion and you can't stop it, only watch. Has to be a very unfortunate hit, but shit happens.
Compared to that, the Zaporoshya nuclear plant will just shut down as designed even if hit in all its reactors; release maybe a week's worth radiation, completely harmless, and then sit still. And it's just upstream.
Think about it.
So-called 'green energy' bears so much more hazards.
After thousands of war crimes identified, Russians have let crystal clear that they piss on the Geneva Convention.
They have violated yet the Geneva convention (and its laws that oblige to hummanitary treatment of civils in a war) countless times in a few months, and at a level rarely seen before.
> many people are used to floods caused by heavy rain, and the danger feels similar.
I don't know what "people feel", but the reality of a large dam that is blown up is more like a tsunami than a normal flood. If it hits a city, casualties can easily reach the 10s or 100s of thousands, instantly.
In a way, an upstream dam is a health hazard for anyone in the area that might be flooded that should be concerning at the same level as living in an area that has had some nuclear contamination.
Rivers are often dammed to create an artificial body of water that can be used for power generation. You are storing water from the river when it has a high flow rate, in order to be able to generate power when needed.
There is nothing that requires the area downstream from the dam to have been previously underwater.
I guess there's also the argument that in case of dam failure, most people don't live to tell the tale, so it does not stay in the news for a long time.
In case of nuclear incident, actual death may be lower but the affected people will keep being concerned about health issues and complain (rightfuly so) about the necessary relocation, which makes for stronger staying power in the news.
Hydroelectric dams actively save lives by reducing flooding. It’s the only power source with net negative death rates and as such doesn’t see the same kind of pushback from disasters.
Okay, but wouldn't a hydroelectric dam encourage people to build in areas that would be otherwise unsafe, thus putting them at risk of a terrorist attack on the dam?
That’s tricky as people have a shocking propensity to build in flood plains either way and dams only mitigate flooding rather than prevent it. I personally doubt that many people are going to change their mind because the location they want to build their home likely floods every 90 years vs every 30.
Bill a friend of mine built a large addition on a house which had flooded twice while he had been living there, once actually reaching the second story. In his mind it’s picture perfect 99.9% of the time so what’s an inconvenience every few decades. In the end he died before the next flood, but now there is a nice house in a flood plain.
I think the economic decision making eventually trickles down from banks and insurance companies who actually do the math themselves and charge building-owners/mortgage-owners competitively. It's sort of an continuous invisible hand.
Russians never wanted to truly damage any reactor, including the one at Zaporizhzhia; they made some noise to spread fear and remind the world about the dangers of nuclear war and what could happen should anyone think of attacking them over there. Then they seized the reactors to take control of powerful sources of energy so they could cut them at will, then amassed weapons there for being the safest places around. Their strategy there was 50% PsyOps, that is, propaganda, and 50% military tactics. I find it extremely unlikely, but should something nasty happens to any of the Ukrainian nuclear reactors, it will be 99.9% by mistake.
Could one aim be to increase anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe to further delay/prevent nuclear power development which would reduce dependency on Russian fossil fuels?
Although this would have no effect short-term since plants take a long time to build.
When you say "nuclear", do you mean all forms of fission reactors? Or do you mean today's inferior designs? Your comment makes sense in the context of conventional light-water reactors. However, there exist more advanced reactor designs that are essentially meltdown-proof.
The small nuclear reactor designs by NuScale are commercially viable and are going to be approved by the nuclear regulatory commission rather soon. Thorium isn’t as important as the small and modular aspects. Also Gen IV and breeder reactors are basically perfectly viable commercially if it was held to the same kind of scrutiny as most other power sources whether it’s coal or solar. But politically it’s not viable which is expressed by being so hard to finance with long time scales that investors simply don’t have the patience and nobody can raise the capital worthwhile to bother trying. It’s very much a chicken-egg dynamic impeding its viability similar to what popular renewables faced for different reasons for several decades.
Note that South Korea and France both have large operational nuclear power that is rather cheap to deploy because they basically copy-paste the same proven design and processes again and again. South Korea in particular has been under constant threat of attack by its neighbors for basically over a thousand years now yet went with nuclear decades ago. Comparatively, Switzerland didn’t choose nuclear for reasons I can’t quite remember even though they are fully capable technologically and in terms of process / bureaucracy able to manage the systems perfectly safely. Unsure about France’s reasoning but it’s difficult to compare power costs between France and neighboring Germany in good faith comparisons of energy policy either due to how different their electrical grid needs are.
particularly relevant because the need for more energy is by far strongest in regions that are geopolitical hotbeds with often unstable governments and threats of terrorism. With nuclear infrastructure both as a target and source for material.
> Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens
On the surface this is very true. However, types of solar have caveats that do not manifest until you have a certain amount of utilization in the grid. Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions. The more inertia you have, the more work it takes to speed up or slow down the grid.
Hypothetically, a grid that is 50% PV solar and 50% others would experience severe stability issues if the other class of generation were to be substantially impacted (i.e. your big-bang-for-buck military targets).
You cannot run a power grid on PV solar alone. It just won't work at scale.
> Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions.
Wait what, Newton's inertia was about physical objects, not voltage stability? You talking base vs peak demand or what?
That voltage stability is electromagnetically coupled to huge chunks of spinning iron. That's your inertia. It buffers voltage spikes. Solar, and surprisingly enough wind as well, do not contribute to this stability. It's one of the big challenges we need to figure out.
Besides "synthetic inertia" on the PV inverters, there exist also synchronous condensers (basically a motor/generator spinning a heavy mass) which can already be found in many substations.
Batteries are more "inertia" than any rotational generator could ever hope to be. Inertia is only a concept because the grid has traditionally relied on rotational generators (which do have inertia). It's by no means necessary for the functioning of a power grid - isolated inverters don't need it, nor do portable rotational generators.
It's useful in traditional grids because we didn't have electronics that could more or less instantaneously respond to load changes - they had to rely on spinning generators instead.
Even with synthetic inertia supplied by every inverter, you will still eventually run into a situation where the system begins to oscillate wildly if you do not have enough spinning mass.
I will grant you a hypothetical wherein the inverters are all perfectly synchronized by some central system and have no reliance on grid voltage as the primary signaling mechanism.
But, this is a precipitous arrangement. If there is any drift in the clocks or some fault in the sync protocol, you can quickly wind up with a completely dead grid (because all your inverters will have killed each other).
Spinning metal is very simple and robust. The failure modes are all much more gradual in nature. Today, one or 2 bad inverters would not start a chain of horrible events because hundreds of tons of metal are not easily perturbed. Without inertia, a bad element in the grid can have substantially more impact.
I must admit to not being an expert in the matter - but it seems odd to expect inverters to spontaneously desync. Grid-tie inverters take their cue from the existing grid presence, so it's not like we'll have a grid full of inverters attempting to drive their own frequency slowly getting out of sync. I don't actually know how they work, but presumably they will attempt to match the available frequency at their outputs within some tolerance of their own notion of 50/60Hz (eg. they want 50Hz, if grid is 50.5 they will match that, if grid is 51 problems might start - but that's a bit contrived)
A grid without rotating generators would act differently, for sure, as you won't have varying frequency to indicate if the grid is overloaded - you'd have to rely on different measures to understand how close parts of it might be to failure.
"Bad actors" in the grid can already cause severe problems regardless of spinning generators; if a power station goes offline the unexpected load spike can easily trip off most of the grid anyway. Smaller, distributed generators/inverters if anything are more reliable, as a fault in one is less likely to constitute an outsize portion of power generation. "Grid inertia" today is largely a result of the total machinery attached to the grid just massively outweighing any individual actor.
Inverters that see excess frequency make a point of lagging. Collectively, they can bring the frequency back in line, just as control systems in rotating machinery do.
The rotating machines are wholly as dependent on controls as the inverters.
It's a weird argument to say "Nuclear does this, solar does not" as if the two are against one another and you are comparing them.
Here, I'll do the same thing: "Nuclear produces power 24/7, while solar can only usefully produce power for ~8 hours a day, or 1/3 of the day".
Sure, for that 1/3 of the day, solar does not have political problems like being shut down for danger. However, for 2/3 of the day, nuclear does not have the physics problem of being useless.
Each solution has pros and cons and I want my power to come from both.
Real world grid scale solar + storage is not cheaper, and humanity doesn't even have the battery capacity and won't for some time longer.
And speaking of regional poisoning, I guess all of those heavy metal mines in poorer countries creating some quite dystopian scenes of large scale ecological destruction leading to total ecosystem collapse are OK because "NIMBY"! Can't wait to 10X that, especially when I remember that the energy density of nuclear fuels is so insanely high that the mining impact for powering all of humanity on it is something like 50X less than powering all of humanity on lithium batteries!
You missed the part (well, you IGNORED the part...) where I talk about energy density.
That's obvious because you don't want to compare the amount of lithium required for billions of cars and grid scale solar to cover 16 hours of energy per day.
You ignored it because 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.
Not only is uranium extremely energy dense, but power facilities are extremely small. Nuclear facilities are by far the smallest energy producing facilities, and solar fields are among the largest (both in terms of space and raw materials). This produces mining and material savings at every single step.
A world powered by Uranium only would require probably somewhere between 10,000X to 100,000 less mining than a world powered by solar batteries.
Energy density is absolutely irrelevant except in a vehicle. Which utility power manifestly ain't.
And the energy density of uranium is irrelevant even sessile, because it takes hundreds to thousands of times more mass around it to get useful energy out.
I had ignored it so as not to embarrass you further.
Lol wow! This feels like one of those situations that Germans have a very long and special word for: When someone tries to spare you a minor embarrassment but in doing so creates a major one for themselves.
While you might not think several orders of magnitude have meaning, fortunately here in reality the fact that it requires far less overall mining to create and supply a uranium power station that it does to create and supply an equivalent (in power output) solar field with batteries has huge meaning.
While I do thank you for looking out for me, I urge you to in the future take time to introspect on yourself and views, so as to save yourself these issues. I know no one tries to be a hypocrite intentionally, so I know these are resolvable problems for the average HN'er. Good luck!
What matters in (clean) utility power generation is cost. Period.
Unless this magickal energy density results in lower-cost electrical output, in quantity, it is just a load of guff.
What we know is that every use of uranium for civil power generation, ever, delivered only extremely expensive power. There has never been a single reactor, worldwide, that was not heavily subsidized by taxpayers, coerced above-market rates, or both. Nukes get even less competitive with each passing year, as the cost for renewables continues plummeting with no bottom in sight.
So, the compelling evidence is that energy density is of extremely limited value for civil power generation. If it has any practical value at all, its copious orders of magnitude are yet insufficient to overcome its extremely poor cost effectiveness.
And, places in the US where uranium was mined are marked by poisoned groundwater and early death. Those poisoned are not impressed with its magick. Nor am I.
Dedicated batteries are not cheaper yet, but (a) price is still on a rapid downward trend, (b) repurposing old batteries from electric cars once the batteries are no longer good enough for transport is cheaper, and (c) it isn't the only storage mechanism, for example pumped hydroelectric and hydrogen are both really cheap.
The battery production capacity is currently in a rapid growth phase. I'm not sure what timescales you think are "for some time longer", but I think 10 (optimistic) to 20 years (pessimistic) would be enough to see the global electricity market almost totally (95% or more) transformed to renewables.
While I personally am relaxed about nuclear power if it's done right, the political realities are that it terrifies people and that corners get cut just often enough to make the terror not entirely unjustified, so it's not going to happen on a significant scale unless there's a reason for the government to ignore the will of the people.
You do have a relevant point. In time of war safety of many things cannot be guaranteed. However, I promise you, for the Ukrainians the bigger issue is not the reactor. It is a concern, but it is not the major concern.
While Russia has been irresponsible with how they dealt with Ukrainian nuclear reactors, I don't think they're that much of a problem in case of invasion as you suggest: if an attacker really wants your land, they'd prefer if it is not covered by nuclear fallout.
In some respects, vulnerability to attack is a feature, not a flaw for promoting peace and collaboration instead of violence. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to piss neighbors off enough to lead to an invasion. If invasion occurs, everyone will be extra careful. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to be bombed to shit by other countries due to the reactor's radioactivity inventory potentially containing other countries as well as the country in question - ie. don't spoil the prize.
> In some respects, vulnerability to attack is a feature, not a flaw for promoting peace and collaboration instead of violence. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to piss neighbors off enough to lead to an invasion.
That feels like saying "a woman who's not allowed to carry pepper spray is less likely to dress provocatively enough to lead to getting raped".
That’s an interesting, theoretical point. The containment structures around a nuclear plants are designed to withstand forces more powerful than even advanced artillery, so there’s really no chance a stray rocket breaks the structure. A concerted effort is a possibility, but it’s not a tactic we’ve ever see used so far and I think the strategic value of doing so is limited. If an adversary had a fully subterranean power grid, maybe an attack on a nuclear plant could make sense, but that’s hypothetical because most energy infrastructure around the world is not protected in anyway.
But another takeaway from the current conflict is how incredible nuclear is at shoring up energy security. A nuclear plant can easily keep 18 months of fuel onsite as required storage space is trivial. A 2 or 3 year strategic reserve of uranium would likewise be a trivial project.
Meanwhile other base load sources like coal need dozens of rail cars worth of coal every single day. Gas needs a pipeline or again daily shipments of LNG.
So now Russia has cut off the gas and energy costs in Europe are exploding and they are having to build out tons of new LNG infrastructure.
Russia can basically turn the heat off in Europe because they under invested in nuclear power.
In peace time CO2 emissions from nuclear are at the same order of magnitude as hydro. Similarly, the number of deaths per twh produced is also similar to hydro. Both are at least an order of magnitude lower than coal.
A hydro plant can be attacked in a war situation just as much as a nuclear plant, so I don't see how that should be weighted as highly as you seem to imply. In fact, I'd argue that energy dependence on nations such as Russia are a much higher risk to geopolitical stability than nuclear power.
Also, we can build a nuclear plant in a desert country (where I live), but not much hydro. In fact, our hydro plants are generating less and less energy every year as our rivers are drying up.
True, but again there is Palo Verde nuclear plant that is located in the middle of the desert in Arizona and is cooled by sewage water from nearby cities.
Some new fast reactor designs don't even need water for cooling. Also, China has built an experimental thorium reactor in Gobi desert which also doesn't need water for cooling.
I believe a lot if interesting stuff is coming in a few years.
A counterpoint is that wind and solar are impossible to defend in a conflict (especially off-shore wind), and can be irretrievably wrecked with minimal risk to the attacking force. I don't think this should be any sort of impediment to putting renewables everywhere we can though. If there is a war big enough that countries are destroying each other's energy infrastructure we'll almost all be dead anyway. Nuclear winters will kill solar production (and also most of the demand, I guess).
Solar leaks heavy metals into top soil. Most of solar is not recycled properly. Nobody seems to worry about that at all.
If a solar facility gets carpet bombed during a war, you think it's more likely it will all just get somewhat cleaned up, and lots of it will be left in-situ and plowed over, or someone will actually remove every little dust particle? I think the lazy way out is what is most likely.
I think nuclear power plants aren't worth the risk. I often hear arguments such as that modern reactors don't have the issues old ones had etc.. As long as it can't be guaranteed to me that e.g. a terror attack doesn't cause a 1000 km2 area around the plant to be unlivable for 100 years, I most likely won't change my opinion.
I think living in the stone age is better than taking the risk.
I think this line of thinking has defaulted us onto a path of drastically increased carbon in the atmosphere, with no signs of stopping, which is at best going to drastically change the world and take centuries to remove, and at worst could trigger a massive biosphere collapse that drives our species to extinction.
The Earth has 150 MILLION km2 of land. We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 km2 unlivable patches of ground and still be perfectly fine.
I don't. I think the generation before me misprioritized their fear and decided to block progress on nuclear fission, which implicitly supported the continued expansion of carbon fuel burning, to the detriment of future generations. It's an observation of historical fact, not a future decision.
> I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle.
I think we should prioritize the continuance of civilization over the planet.
The planet and life on it will be perfectly fine after we're gone. It's been through drastically worse.
>We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 km2 unlivable patches of ground and still be perfectly fine.
Your numbers are off by orders of magnitude. The exclusion zone for Chernobyl alone is 2600 km2, the areas immediately affected in the 3 neighboring countries is 130 000 km2, food and livestock in areas over 3000 km from the site have to be fed special food supplements in order to pass regulation for human consumption to this day.
And this was despite the fire in Chernobyl being handled, limiting the actual amount of fallout released into the atmosphere.
IMO, correctly prioritizing our fears means we should put all efforts towards solar and energy storage solutions. That's the optimal solution after all, aiming for anything else is like playing not to win.
I can't actually find what mock terrorist attack these were and what effects there were.
Sure in theory enough radio active materials exists that if you somehow blew it up and vaporized the whole spend fuel pool it would require a significant exclusion zone. To put such amount of explosives into that pool to vaporize the spent fuel roads would require an absurd amount of explosives.
And the exclusion zone for these things is way to big anyway, many people live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and they are not actually negatively impacted.
But of course if you assume terrorist of unlimited capabilities there lots of technologies that are not viable and we use them anyway.
Plutonium problem multiplies in top predators. Here already for thousands of years now thanks to nuclear plant disasters. Which are avoided by causing a slow power plant disaster by releasing radioactive pressure to the environment. Guy Debord's comment on this from Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: "much more civilized to sip a littl wine all of the time than to drink the whole bottle all at once like a Pole" :-)
Nuclear energy is a subsidised energy source, lobbied by powers that be on the corridors of power in the EU and everywhere else. Solar is cheaper.
Humanity is out of it's depth with this stuff. Could cause massive extinction event eventually even if we stopped now by killing and mutating sperm cells and all that. Go have a holiday in Fukushima. Go visit the deformed children still born in Uzbekistan near these places.
Ok, so another pro-nuclear puff piece. Why do I say that? Because it talks about nuclear waste without ever mentioning the other kind: fuel processing waste.
Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different processes.
So U-235 and U-238 are chemically identical. So how do you enrich a sample? Centrifuges. You make a Uranium gas. The U-238 molecules will be heavier. Spin them in a centrifuge and you can extract them at a greater percentage and then pass on the gas to the next centrifuge. You do this repeatedly until you get the enrichment level you want and then extract the metal from the gas.
The gas of choice is UF6 (Uranium Hexaflouride). That itself is a toxic byproduct that needs to be stored or otherwise dealt with. We don't really have a good solution for this either. There is some reprocessing that basically turns UF6 into less toxic UF4 but it's not really economic.
As always, pro-nuclear propaganda focuses on deaths because deaths doesn't capture the negative impact of nuclear. Why? Because the Chernobyl disaster directly killed less than 100 (it also probably killed tens of thousands through cancers in the following years but that's harder to attribute and easier for people to collectively ignore).
But still the Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone, from one incident, is quite literally 1,000 square miles even now, almost 40 years later.
Deaths or deaths per TWh just doesn't capture that impact and those failure modes, which is precisely why such propaganda focuses on deaths.
But none of that is the big problem with commercial nuclear power. It's the fallibility of humans to manage, maintain, build and transport and store (fuel and waste) to a sufficient level to avoid disasters. The profit motive provides an incentive to skimp on some or all of these. Corruption is an issue with both corporations and governments.
Humans are just incredibly bad at managing long-term consequences, which is why we have the climate crisis to begin with.
How many years have France been safely operating their Nuclear plants? Germany too?
You speak of a Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I don't see anyone living where they've put up large scale solar farms or next to wind turbines.
You're right about humans not managing long term consequences well. From lead poisoning 40 years ago to 20 years from now when we have to deal with the waste of solar left behind (perhaps toxic waste if not dealt with right now).
We need nuclear now. No nonsense blockers. Build more plants and replace the coal, oil and gas base load stations we're running now to try slow the rate of carbon we're throwing into the sky.
And yes, we need more investment into solar and wind. It's a solution that is solved by multiple alternatives, not dummies getting behind one alternative and saying no to the rest.
> We need nuclear now. No nonsense blockers. Build more plants and replace the coal, oil and gas base load stations we're running now to try slow the rate of carbon we're throwing into the sky.
you can't get it now.
You have to wait at least 10 years to get a plant up & running.
FWIW, South Korea is quite corrupt as a system (all its presidents have gone to jail following their term minus one who was jailed already by a previous administration) yet is able to operate its nuclear reactors fine at high safety levels. It doesn’t have the kind of earthquake risks that Japan does but it does have plenty of typhoons / hurricanes hit that could impact structural integrity of its infrastructure quite regularly. This is a country where one of its largest malls collapsed killing many people while its executives hid the problems and tried to flee the country.
There are not many data points in terms of number of countries using nuclear nor do I think it’s a panacea or anything for our problems, but from a realistic standpoint we need as many solutions other than fossil fuels on the table right now as a species if we’re to tackle the climate crisis with the gravity it deserves, and nuclear can buy some more options especially if we start deploying small modular reactors that can quickly shutdown fossil fuel power plants. As it stands, aging nuclear power plants tend to be replaced not with another, modern plant but with fossil fuel based plants to meet similar performance and logistical characteristics.
I really want to believe nuclear is as clean as the author says, but the biggest challenge is storing the waste for three hundred years.
were talking small amounts, sure, but contamination of groundwater and surrounding soil isn't something we in the US have a stellar track record with. camp lejunes benzene contaminated drinking water happened in only a 29 year span, and the only real remedy is a class action lawsuit. no one admitted fault.
most of our reactors are elderly, and most of the regulatory capture means they leak like a sieve and rarely face any consequences or shutdowns. until we reform the edifice that controls this waste I fear nuclear will just be another headline crisis event.
Storing waste for 300 years isn't a huge problem. Dry casks shouldn't go anywhere.
The problem is dealing with the waste at that point, because it's so radiologically cold an amateur terrorist group could extract the plutonium, which is almost entirely still there.
The article is a bit fast and loose with its data. Borssele indeed has limited high-energy radioactive waste; the article omits that there is also low-energy radioactive waste - a lot more, in fact.
Similarly, recycling may be a problem for solar panels, but is that better for nuclear? I have never heard / read about how to recycle the (radioactive) non-fuel parts of a nuclear reactor.
I'm not against nuclear per se, but articles such as this one don't help. I think there's a genuine case for nuclear to be made; this isn't it.
Recycling is not in fact any kind of problem for solar. There is a large, organized campaign by the derelict energy industry to plant the meme of solar as some kind of toxic menace but it just isn't one.
There is no cadmium in solar panels. There was a small amount in thin film panels briefly favored by utility-scale solar plants but thin film is economically dead and nobody is buying those.
Antimony is used in the glass, not the panel. The glass contains ~1g/kg of antimony, and PV panels contain about 50 tonnes of glass per MW (most of the panel mass is the glass). That works out to 50kg of antimony per MW, i.e. basically none. If you took all the antimony out of a 1GW solar plant and somehow dissolved it in water - which can't happen because antimony trioxide isn't even soluble in water, and dissolving metals out of glass with water is practically impossible - and if you dumped all that into Lake Shasta, it would still be within drinking water standards. And again, nobody will dump this into the environment because fifty million kilos of high-grade glass is going to get recycled, not dumped.
I think it's sad that the nuclear boosters are being duped into spreading these lies about solar panels.
Waste disposal isn't that hard. The Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland pretty much has it covered.
First, you find a hard-rock mountain where geology shows nothing much happening in the last few million years, and there's nothing worth mining. Worldwide, there are many mountain ranges like that.
Then tunnel way down, but preferably above the water table. Drill holes in the tunnel floor. Put waste in suitable containers. There are a few approaches. Mixing the waste with molten glass and pouring it into big stainless steel thimbles is one approach.
Put containers in holes. Fill with bentonite. Seal off with concrete. Eventually, seal off the whole installation and forget about it.
Current thinking is not to mark the place. Why attract attention to it?
Any future civilization capable of finding that it's interesting and digging down through a mile or more of hard rock and concrete probably knows about radioactivity.
> How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?
The more dangerous stuff burns itself out quickly (short half-life), and the longer-lasting stuff is not very dangerous given the type of radiation it is and can be blocked quite easily
So, probably bury it deep enough with little external sign that it's actually there, and if it is actually discovered it won't be that big of a deal:
> The main concern associated with spent nuclear fuel – radioactivity – diminishes with time.
> About 40 years after it's done making power, the heat and radioactivity of the fuel bundle will have fallen by over 99%.
> About three containers are needed to store the quantity of fuel that is removed each 12-24 months; the space taken up by even a 60 year plant life is less than is needed for a Wal-Mart even without any efforts to efficiently stack the containers.
Doesn't seem impossible. Just see how much trouble we have understanding writing systems from 8000 BCE.
You only need a few generation of lost ability to read/write for solid documentation of nuclear waste and radioactivity to turn into myth at best. This does not seem unlikely over a duration of 10000y. Such a myth may be just enough for people to seek out a dangerous place without understanding the danger.
See The art of the 10,000-year warning[1] and the full Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory Across Generations report[2].
Other proposed solutions include: the breeding of so-called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.[3]
Maybe we should be more concerned about ensuring that there is an advanced civilization to worry about in 10,000 years. We can start by making sure humanity is well situated with energy supplies for the next few centuries, and nuclear is part of the answer to that step.
Besides, nuclear fuel dumps are few and far between, and easily avoided once identified. I'm touched that you care so much about a few individual lives 10,000 years from now, but we've got millions if not billions of lives to worry about in this century.
This is for the most part not a realistic practical issue. Either the civilizations in the future are continuations of our current civilization and have records or they're advanced enough to have the ability to detect radiation thus making the issue moot or they've regressed enough to lose that knowledge and people stumbling into a radioactive waste storage facility is the least of our concerns.
How do we communicate with civilizations in the future to not eat the fish and mollusks out of the rivers. You know, the ones that are currently being contaminated with mercury and other forever chemicals from both coal ash and rare earth tailing?
Please, let us know your plan.
P.S. This is not a hypothetical problem, like the demands you are making of nuclear. This is a current and ongoing one. Your green energy isn't as green as you claim it is, please tell us your solution.
We talk about humans, is guaranteed that they will lick the warm shiny stones behind a huge "don't lick this" banner.
But they will learn eventually after a couple of deaths, as we did every single time. We are trying to solve the wrong problem here; Is the population what counts.
Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge drop in the cost of solar and wind. Not only is solar/wind cheap but because these can be built in a year or two, as opposed to decades for nuclear, governments accountants will much prefer them over nuclear. Nuclear will have some niche segments and I see a small nuclear design is about to be approved in the US that would be useful. But in the big picture of over all power generation nuclear will continue to fade away.
Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are only clean if their backup is clean, too. Otherwise they are an incomplete solution. Nuclear a better, greener backup.
> Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels.
It depends on where you live. In my country (which is a huge country), the backup is hydroelectric dams. Burning fossil fuels (and nuclear) is mostly kept constant during the day, it's the hydroelectric dams which follow both the load and the changes in solar and wind.
A big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't dispatchable. A 100 MWe nuclear power plant fitting in the space of small local power plant isn't equivalent of a 100MW solar or wind plant - for my local area, the equivalent solar/wind plant is about a combination of few Gigawatts of nameplate capacity of solar and wind plants (allowing for very optimistic storage tech, it gets "down" to 1180 MW solar + 410 MW wind + 840 MWh battery at 170MW output + 50MW hydrogen turbine backed by 10186 MWh stored hydrogen. It's also 1.5x the cost of plonking EPR-based NPP.)
Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.
The larger the geography of the grid (tied with HVDC) the more supply and demand average out. This minimizes the need for pumped storage (and its variations). To give just one example the UK is building an underwater HVDC directly between Morocco (solar) and the UK. So the known solutions are already available they just have to be implemented.
Except those solutions tend to ignore the cost of failures and that even with interconnects balancing the grid is not trivial - just inside european grid the problems are considerable, and there's still the issue of interconnects failing.
And even then, you now need to overbuild not just for replacement of local plants, but also for replacement of plants on the other end of the continent.
Great if you're selling gas or gas power plants, I guess, not so great if you want zero CO2 emissions especially with how powerhungry the replacement techs can be.
Nuclear isn't dispatchable. If it's not always running the cost/kWh escalates dramatically. Solar and wind with storage are somewhat dispatchable, because you can decide when to discharge the storage systems.
It's much more dispatchable than renewables, it's just cheaper to run it always at full capacity. Solar/wind/storage combination requires overbuilding in range of 15-25 times the nameplate capacity.
Personally I'm of the opinion that we should have nuclear+renewables with less focus on storage and more on opportunistic production of, for example, green hydrogen - not for grid storage but for all other uses like steel production, off-grid power systems (including cars/trains that have needs beyond battery capability) etc.
Current approach with renewables always being graded on their lowest possible price point and silently ignoring the growing gas generation required to smooth them and larger and larger grid instability is not great.
Ah, so solar/wind is not dispatchable because it's more costly you claim, not because one can't actually do it?
You don't need 15-25x overbuilding. That is nonsense. Perhaps you're assuming no storage whatsoever, and are oversizing the renewables to deliver sufficient power instantaneously? What terrible and foolish engineering.
The round trip efficiency of power -> hydrogen -> power is maybe 40%, so if you sent the entire renewable output through hydrogen the overbuilding (in the sense of how much energy you'd have to produce / how much energy was delivered to the grid) would be 2.5. And of course you'd send only a bit of energy through hydrogen; most would be delivered either directly to the grid or through diurnal storage at higher round trip efficiency.
If I go to https://model.energy/, click on the US, and solve for 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 historical weather data, I find the renewable + storage system to provide a synthetic baseload output to the US involves 0.1% solar curtailment, 23.8% wind curtailment, and delivers nearly 3/4 of the renewable power directly to the grid. If I narrow it down to just, let's say, Texas, the wind curtailment goes up to 32.1%. All this is a far, far cry from 15-25x overbuilding.
You use Texas (or whole of USA). Which is considerably more southern than most of Europe, and definitely more southern than Poland. IIRC Texas is also much more flat, which benefits availability of wind power.
The 15-25x numbers I get from model.energy, in fact - lowest I get is 15x assuming way too optimistic ideas about availability of salt caverns in Poland, 25x is with mainly battery power, the numbers for no storage are too hilarious too discuss.
Are there luckier locations that can get better numbers? Sure. I'm not against building renewables and storage, far from it. I am, however, against building new fossil fuel plants, including gas backup for renewables, and would rather we take the minimum average power use, fill it with nuclear, then get renewable/storage Virtual Power Plants to fill in the peaks (with some load following from reactors if necessary). If necessary, we can find new power sinks to make it more economical, in fact I'd love if we had large scale green hydrogen and synthetic fuel production backed by hydrogen electrolysers taking in overproduction.
The real problem isn't cost of nuclear, it's that we still leave profit as the main guiding principle (to the point that building new solar might crash in some states) and not optimizing for 0 emissions.
Poland has huge salt formations, so I spit on your "optimism" slur.
OF COURSE it's much higher if you turn off hydrogen and try to use batteries and curtailment to deal with high seasonality environments. This is Dumb Engineering. Don't do that. You multiply the cost in Poland by more than a factor of 2 when you turn off hydrogen.
Poland, as I've said elsewhere in these comments, is also close to the worst place in the world for renewables. That's hardly a condemnation of renewables in the entire world. Maybe industry will just leave Poland to somewhere it makes more sense to operate.
I bet your 15-25x also is looking at the nameplate capacity on the renewables, before adjusting for the expected capacity factor. But LCOE already takes that into account. Just looking at raw peak output, wind and solar are massively cheaper than nuclear.
The salt formations we have aren't necessarily accessible for those purposes. I would not mind being wrong though.
As for overbuilding including capacity factor - the size of renewable powerplant tends to be reported in nameplate capacity, not the adjusted for capacity factor, so I'm just trying to keep within common units. And I'm all for building more renewables anyway, I'm just against building fossil backup for them. Which means also not greenwashing things by "we will add storage in the future". We need it now, not in some murky future.
There are many places that are "bad for renewables" - that doesn't mean people who live there have to be forcefully resettled or removed to support religious combination of laissez-faire with german green philosophy.
People aren't forcefully resettled. Their livelihoods just evaporate if they try to compete with places with natural advantages. I mean, we don't say agriculture is impossible because we can't feasibly grow bananas in Alaska.
If a place that's a renewable energy ghetto tries to compete with sun-soaked places by using nuclear, it won't go well. When solar is being pumped out at $0.013/kWh in UAE, trying to drive internationally competitive heavy industry with nuclear that's an order of magnitude more expensive just won't work. This is a disconcerting new reality for places that have been competitive in a fossil fuel era. They are competing with the best case renewables in a global market.
A good estimate to gauge the societal investment needed to generate electricity in a certain way, is to look at its total cost in dollar/MWh. Wikipedia has a nice graphic prepared for just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... (which ignores externalized costs like CO2 or nuclear waste)
You can see in there that nuclear has triple the cost compared to solar.
As we need to replace as much fossil-fueled power plants as possible and as quickly as possible, wasting ressources into building nuclear power plants sounds stupid.
Other interesting factors:
And how does that compare to the business-as-usual shutdowns of solar (every night, cloudy days, winter as a whole) which unlike nuclear are highly correlated between separate plants?
If storage is cheap enough then solar will be an important part of the mix. But unless you have the right geography for geothermal or hydro (which probably means flooding a bigger area than the chernobyl exclusion zone before you've even started, but leaving that aside), nuclear is still the only viable option for clean, reliable baseline power. It's not an either/or, we should be building both.
That is just to show that nuclear isn't a magical always-on power source that some of the pro-nuclear folks make it out to be. Also: we can install twice the capacity in MW for solar and still have money left over to put into a smarter grid or storage compared to nuclear.
The big con for a solar/battery grid isn't the cost, it's the raw materials. We need an absurd amount of copper/lithium/cobalt etc.. and we need to be mining orders of magnitudes more than we do now.
That is not a proven fact. We probably need more silicon for the solar cells. But there is nothing about lithium ion batteries which makes them our only good choice for storing energy from renewables. Gravity is probably our best energy storage at present, there is also nickle metal hydrade for home storage, and in the near future we are probably gonna be looking at molten salt batteries (e.g. calcium-antimony liquid-metal batteries) for large scale storage. We are probably only gonna need to mine the lithium and cobalt for our consumer electronics (including electric cars). For public transit systems that can’t connect to the power grid for some reason, there is always hydrogen fuel-cells.
So no, we are not going to be needing an absurd amount of any one mineral (except maybe silicon) as they all have alternatives which quite often are even better then lithium and cobalt.
Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust. Pick up a random rock and it will average 26% silicon. There is absolutely not ever going to be a shortage of the element silicon.
Firstly, you talk about $ per capacity in MW, however solar capacity factor is 20%. Only use a levelized cost per MWh.
Secondly, solar needs storage which you think is trivial, but which turns out to be wayyyy more expensive than the solar panels. Some reports[1] only compare short-term (peaker generation) for storage. Nuclear is expensive, but battery storage is far more expensive to cover daily or longer load variation (non-peaker). That report mentions in a footnote a levelized cost of storage of crazy high $1613/MWh to $3034/MWh.
I strongly disagree with your point “we can install twice the capacity in MW for solar and still have money left over to put into a smarter grid or storage” because you appear to be making up numbers - what is your reference to sources?
You used MW in that comment - your new comment is not clarifying whether you made a mistake or what your actual point is.
LCOE is an averaged cost/MWh, which is absolutely inappropriate to use when discussing whether nuclear is expensive or not, because LCOE ignores usage patterns (which you obviously know, but are hand-waving away as “money left over”). From your Wikipedia link: “One of the most important potential limitations of LCOE is that it may not control for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand” and “To ensure enough electricity is always available to meet demand, storage or backup generation may be required, which adds costs that are not included in the LCOE”.
Finally, almost any plot that uses “installed capacity” is deceptive by design: because capacity factors make solar/wind appear 5x better, which is not a trivial difference on a graph. Instantaneous capacity is usually not relevant (except during “peaker” loads).
But the storage costs for winter are on the order of 100x the power generation. Solar does not contribute to baseload, so it's just a waste of effort, talent, and resources.
I heard somewhere that the base load of power is an mostly an outdated concern at this point. As more homes get solar and offload their excess power back into the grid during the the daytime. Reducing the baseload to negative.
You have to read these partisan pieces carefully. When they say "a mix of renewables and natural gas can x", they actually mean "natural gas can x" - but burning natural gas emits CO2. And a 30% wind grid in Texas worked out right until it didn't (the media blamed it all on lack of "winterization" which may be the immediate cause, but the fact is that the high wind mix meant the grid was having to work a lot harder and is one of the biggest underlying causes).
For all that article's efforts to quibble with definitions, the fact is that a grid that is all or mostly renewables (except for hydro and geothermal, which are great for the places that are suitable for them, but not available everywhere) will have blackouts. Lots of things can be demand-managed but lots of things can't. If you want electricity to be available 24/7 then the grid absolutely does need to "overpay" for generators that are available 24/7 (and sure, nuclear plants have unexpected shutdowns like anything else, but those outages are going to be uncorrelated with each other), and whether you call that "baseload" or some other term is neither here nor there.
Agreed. Natural gas is not a feasible alternative to coal and oil on its own as the greenhouse emissions are simply to high. However, a natural gas power plant that runs only when demand calls for it and renewables (+ stored renewables) are unable to supply is not an end of the world scenario (which our current climate trajectory certainly is).
I’m even hopeful of a future where these natural gas plants will have carbon capture employed. But you are right, as it stands natural gas power plant is not a solution to the climate crisis.
No one is saying that they don't have problems. What they are saying is that they have less problems than the alternatives.
In your example: when there's clouds and the wind doesn't blow, what happens? Currently we burn coal, gas and petrol. This means that in order to accept hydro and solar as the main source of energy, we have to take fossil fuels along, as a backup. Unless we find a different backup.
"when there's clouds and the wind doesn't blow, what happens?" Meteorologically speaking that won't happen over a large enough area like Europe or USA. When there's clouds there's always wind close by. It's also never cloudy over a whole continent (air has to come back down somewhere)
You back up the entire grid with combined cycle plants burning hydrogen. Even if you hardly ever use them, that's affordable compared to running nuclear power plants.
Or you use some even cheaper (but more complex) combination of various storage solutions, transmission, and demand dispatch.
What is more interesting to me is asking the question based on first principles.
If you consider the global electricity and energy demand and wanted to meet it, what you produce the least amount of green house gases, use the least amount of land, require the least amount of mining.
If you actually do that nuclear wins easily witch suggest there is some other process at work that makes sure this is not translated into reality.
I was asking why land and mining are so all-important that minimizing either (or both, is that even possible simultaneously) is the relevant objective function here.
Land use is a cost. Mining is a cost. We minimize overall cost, not one specific thing that has a cost.
I will add that society is clearly happy with using land for that very low payoff activity we call "farming". The $/acre from PV is much higher than that from farming, you know.
I don't get the impression you've thought very clearly about all this.
The most interesting thing in the article for me was that the 250 reactors needed to power Europe would produce 1.3 cubic kilometers of nuclear waste per year. That’s actually way more waste volume than I assumed. I wonder what the figure is for the United States.
It is not not a known fact, it is in fact not true. France has over 1 million m3 of waste, and I assure you they have not been operating nuclear plants for over a million years. :)
> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper.
It is indeed harmless outside of your body, but it is devastating inside of your body.
The reason is that outside of your body, it is blocked by your layer of dead skin, if it gets to it, your dead skin ends up pretty messed up as it absorbs all the energy of the alpha particle. But no big deal, it is dead, doesn't take part of your biology, can't turn cancerous. But now, if that alpha emitter ends up inside of your body, maybe in your lungs as you breathe in radioactive dust, it will end up dumping all of its energy inside of your live cells, damaging DNA and doing everything bad ionizing radiation can do.
Gamma radiation, the unstoppable one is actually less dangerous if it finds its way inside your body, that's because it will go right through it, it will mess up a few cells on its way out, but most of its energy will be dumped outside of you.
> And in one famous case, injected by a secret agent using an umbrella
I think you're mixing up the Litvinenko murder, which used polonium in a beverage, and Makenko, who got injected with poision with the tip of an umbrella.
Apparently the author has never heard of Polonium-210, arguably the deadliest substance on Earth. what makes it so deadly is it has an extremely short half life (~138 days) and releases almost all of that energy as alpha particles.
How leathal? Roughly 6.8 trillionths of a gram [1].
Luckily Po-210 isn't a huge danger because of the short half life and it's really only produced by governments in very small quantities. But the point is that any alpha particle emitter ingested is potentially a massive health risk.
And what happens at an accident like Chernobyl? It scatters a ton of dust over a huge area that consists of many radioactive isotopes, some of which are just toxic by themselves (eg Caesium) but also some of them are alpha particle emitters. That dust gets into the food chain.
Except when it isn’t. Granted it’s cleaner than coal and gas. But there’s the pesky problem of waste, plants that cost billions, decom is not cheap, easy or clean.
Oh and the financial incentives to operate longer and cheaper than is safe.
Really interesting to see how much people fight nuclear power. We’ve been complaining about fossil fuels for decades, and now that the US seems to be seriously exploring a viable alternative you’re going to complain about it?
I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it?
> I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it?
This is really what the whole argument boils down to: nuclear, or global warming. There's really not real, feasible renewable answer. It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors. Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power.
> It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors.
At least for solar, that comparison is specious. It would be like separately counting each rod or even each pellet of nuclear fuel in a reactor's core, and using that as an argument against nuclear power. It makes more sense to compare whole solar power plants, not individual panels. From a quick look at the data for my country, most solar power plants have over 20 MW output each, and they are in facilities with 3-10 solar power plants. Looking at the same data source, wind also seems to use a similar grouping here (power plants containing several turbines with a total output over 20MW, then grouped into facilities with 3-10 power plants).
> Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power.
Cost is not the only argument. If you want to make it quickly, construction time is just as important, and nuclear loses badly here (though I might be a bit biased on that, since the latest reactor being built near where I live has been under construction for decades, with no end in sight). Solar and to a lesser extent wind have the advantage of simplicity and modularity, which tend to not only reduce the cost, but also enable them to be built quicker and in parallel, and make them much less risky to build; if one out of ten 20 MW solar power plants being built hits a problem, you still have the other nine, but if your single 1350 MW reactor being built since the 1980s hits some unexpected problem, you have nothing.
As for the level of regulation, it's an unavoidable consequence of how dangerous nuclear fuel (and the materials and fluids irradiated by it in the reactor core) is; you have to make sure it stays contained, so that a nuclear power plant is as safe as (or even safer than) other kinds of power plant. But that's not the whole reason for the high cost; there's the complexity of the reactor itself (including materials which can resist the radiation), and nuclear power plants tend to use things like a single hydrogen-cooled gigawatt-power turbine for each reactor core. Just the electrical infrastructure (transformers, circuit breakers, etc) which can deal with gigawatt levels of power at once is already costly.
> and now that the US seems to be seriously exploring a viable alternative
This phrase sounds weird to me, given that US explored nuclear power more than 50 years ago, and is also exploring other viable alternatives now (wind and solar).
Before we get all gung-ho on nuclear power, perhaps we could try solving the existential nuclear problems we already have.
FACTS [0]:
1. The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'.
2. The transport of this waste poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.
3. Plutonium is the most dangerous material in the world.
4. Nuclear waste is hazardous for tens of thousands of years. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations.
5. Even if put into a geological repository, the waste might emerge and threaten future generations.
6. Nobody knows the true costs of waste management. The costs are so high that nuclear power can never be economic.
IMO, nuclear power does not represent what's best about the US but highlights its weaknesses. Americans love their quarterly reports, but are not good so good at 100 year plans, let alone 100,000 year plans.
Nuclear waste lasts for a very long time. The amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at US nuclear power plants continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year [1].
The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. Federal funding for the Repository ened amidst widespread national, state, regional and tribal opposition. [2]. Meanwhile the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades. So yeah you the US taxpayer are paying for it, whether your utility use nuclear generated electricity or not. => The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'.
Without a permanent national storage solution, the government pays the utilities to store the waste on site. Over time utilities move some of the older spent fuel into "dry cask" storage. These casks are stainless steel canisters surrounded by concrete. Fuel is typically cooled at least five years in the pool before transfer to cask. NRC has authorized transfer as early as three years; the industry norm is about 10 years. The NRC certifies cask designs and licenses dry cask storage facilities for up to 40 years. [3] Not thousands of years!
Assuming idealistically that generation of nuclear power stops today, then the EXISTING nuclear waste will have to be stored not for hundreds of years, not for thousands of years, not for tens of thousands of years, but for hundreds of thousands of years. That is the existing waste, which will continue to cost "tens of billions of dollars per decades", with a lifetime storage cost that makes the cost of the original nuclear power plant (typically with only a 30-year life anyway) negligible by comparison. Again that is the exsiting waste. So assuming we continue to generate nuclear power, the nuclear waste continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year, each ton with its own lifetime storage cost. And we're talking about GROWING that nuclear capacity. Let's grow the already exponential lifetime storage cost. Not even the Federal Reserve of the United States of America will be able to create enough money to pay for the total cost of ownership of nuclear power.
There are different types of nuclear waste - high-level waste, transuranic waste, Uranium or thorium mill tailings, Low-level waste, Technologically enhanced naturally-occurring radioactive material (TENORM) [4]. Like most things, these too follow the 80/20 rule - 80% of the waste is lower level waste and 20% is higher level waste. Make sure you know which waste is being discussed. Each type must be disposed of according to its risk to human health and the environment. Plutonium Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years! That is the time it takes for the radioactive level to become half of what it is...
1. The fossil fuel industry still has no solution to the 'CO2 problem'
2. The continuous emission of this gas poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.
3. There are many compounds more dangerous than plutonium, which we happily use in day-to-day life: botulinum, ricin, hydrazine.
4. A runaway greenhouse effect is hazardous for tens of thousands of years, if not permanent. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations.
5. Many known geological repositories of carbon-based compounds (permafrost, bogs) are unstable; given the right triggers, the captured methane might emerge and threaten future generations.
6. Nobody knows the true cost of climate change. The costs are so high that fossil fuel use can never be economic.
Yet we make fossil fuel use economic to the tune of 6 trillion dollar in subsidies per year. So please, stop using your "facts" to delay action against fossil fuel use.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadIf it’s radioactive it’s dangerous. The article points out that radioactive waste doesn’t stay radioactive for very long, contrary to what is commonly believed.
I'm joking here, but the joke underscores a painful truth: an irrationally fearful, small group of people seem to be able to utterly paralyze democratic society, and this pathology seems to be worse in societies that self-identify as focused on collective good. People who define themselves by their own idealism are easily sidetracked by hypothetical risks.
As for New York, it isn't entirely unrelated that they're shutting down their one remaining nuclear plant (and as a result, dramatically increasing NYCs dependency on fossil fuels) [2].
[1] https://www.6sqft.com/the-number-of-sidewalk-sheds-in-nyc-ha...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/nyregion/indian-point-pow...
No, it's not striking at all, and this is just as BS argument as the people arguing that nuclear isn't clean. As far as the energy density, include all the steel and concrete used outside of the reaction chamber, and you will find that nuclear and solar are pretty much on the same order of magnitude, and that's using the numbers from newer reactor designs that have consciously tried to reduce the amount of concrete by a factor of two.
But of course, all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy.
We should start nuclear construction now, but for supply in 8+ years time. And therefore we should start increasing construction of wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery now, to supply lower watts, but useful watts inside the 8 year window. As supply matches demand we can remove coal and gas, and when the nuclear comes on line, increase the pace of their removal and repurpose surplus wind and solar to hydrogen production for ammonia, and hydrogen fuel cells, and domestic gas replacement.
I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There are numerous startups working to bring down cost.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
It's the right idea to switch away from construction to manufacturing, but it's unclear how quickly the manufacturing process could scale.
But if someone thinks that construction/manufacturing is easy and the difficult part is regulatory approval, then perhaps this is cause for hope!
The renewable industry has been scaling at levels that are fairly hard to imagine, and yet people continually doubt its ability to scale fast enough to meet the challenge of the energy transition. SMRs are unfortunately decades behind and haven't even gotten a single device manufactured. So I think there are serious questions about how quickly SMRs could scale up to a GW/year, or 10GW/year, or the TW/year that we really need.
The preliminary estimates of numbers for cost were not terribly impressive, so I hope that they became wise and are under-promising. But only time will tell.
And we could have done that 40 years ago.
There are multiple nuclear (fission) startups in the last decade or so. My understanding is that financial backing is not their problem; outdated regulations are. And fear stokes outdated regulations.
It's a far far more difficult thing to risk $10B on a reactor that may or may not actually ever complete construction, and has no potential for growth in value.
People never seem to cite which regulations they want to change. The NRC allowed the AP1000 at Vogtle and Summer to be constructed under a new regulatory regime at the request of industry, but the industry still seemed to mess up their construction process. And France at Flamanville has also had terrible construction problems despite having different and friendly regulatory processes.
My main problem with the nuclear industry is that it continually fails to focus on what would actually deliver nuclear, and just complains about everybody else instead of improving process or becoming accountable for results.
You know how they discovered radon gas was a problem in basements? A guy working at a nuclear power plant showed up at work one day and tripped their radiation detectors.
There was more radiation in a random guy’s basement than at the entire nuclear plant.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are soaking up US subsidy money for producing solar panels using slave labor. They strip mine for toxic rare earth metals to do it, destroying the environment and using coal power to boot.
I think their complaints are justified.
You may not like it, but nuclear power is having a comeback.
And we did start four reactors, with many more planned! However they are all construction failures, and the two at Summer were actually even abandoned half completed, it was so bad. And executives our going to jail for their lies during the construction process.
That's what I mean when I say nobody knows how to build it. We will likely never attempt another new 1GW reactor in our lifetimes, because even is some brave EPC firm thinks they could tackle the challenges, getting the money for that is nearly impossible.
Oh, did I mention that the only reason the four reactors were attempted at all in the mid-2000s is that the two utilities captured state legislatures and changed the law so that they could charge rate payers whether or not construction completed? Utilities memory of stopping nuclear in the 80s isn't because of protestors, it because of bankruptcy.
In any case, the only hope for nuclear is SMRs from new startups. But we can't depend on them because we don't know the costs. Fortunately nuclear is no longer our only hope, and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago.
Politics has nearly nothing to do with stopping nuclear. It all came down to construction mucking it up.
We do, but those options are not enough. If they were, the Democrats in Washington would not have turned pro-nuclear.
They saw the numbers. You can store electricity from day to night, but not from Summer to Winter. Months-long electricity storage will never make economic sense (or at least not in the next 30 years).
Nuclear reactor construction is currently a decades-long affair. Can we make it shorter?
Here's a little historical tidbit: in WW2, when the Liberty ships started being built, it took the first such ships about 250 days to be built. They took down that number to 150, then to 105, then to 71, then to 30 and then to 10. They even built one in less than 5 days, and that one did survive the war, and kept working until 1963.
The secret was to build large components separately, each on its own assembly line, and then to just snap them together as a giant Lego toy.
The fact that current nuclear reactors take 20 years to build is not a mathematical proof that any design will take as long. It is entirely possible for SMRs to be build in a matter of months, maybe, just like the Liberty ships, in a matter of days. If the politicians in Washington want to make that happen, then the engineers can make it happen.
where's your crystal ball?
If you find a storage solution that adds only hundredths of cents to a kWh if sold daily, that would be absolutely fantastic. But no such solution is in sight.
The only long term storage solution that has a shadow of a chance to make it is hydrogen. But we are so, so much behind the plan in building green hydrogen production facilities. As for hydrogen liquefaction and shipping, that's just a distant plan.
Another thing: Demand based power consumption
Months long storage of electricity is uneconomic compared with alternatives.
Which is a shame for nuclear, as it would really benefit from it if you could just build enough for the average demand and run then 100% of the time.
Instead, flexible demand is much cheaper. So you overbuild the nuclear and modulate the demand for making green hydrogen and ammonia and store that. Much cheaper than long term storage. Note we don't use that to generate electricity, but for chemical feedstocks. Again, cheaper to overgenerate with nuclear.
However, now that you have overbuild and responsive demand in the equation there is no advantage of nuclear over renewables, which are much cheaper to build for the same capacity.
This link [1] shows that solar energy generation is 6 times higher in the summer than in the winter in Germany.
The total electricity consumption varies is about 1.5 times higher in the winter than in the summer [2].
In other words, you need to overbuild nuclear by a factor of 1.5, and solar by a factor of 9.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-gener...
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
Doesn't this just show that you know it can't compete with solar in equatorial regions or wind in the UK, never mind appropriate combinations of the two across Europe and the rest of the world?
And you didn't even compare price. Solar would only need to be 6x cheaper to still win that rigged comparison and provide masses of cheap energy in the summer.
It's about 4 or 5x cheaper at the moment and predicted to fall further as it gets rolled out globally at massive scale.
And every watt rolled out at the moment can displace coal.
Do we absolutely need nuclear energy to combat climate change? I don't think so.
I do think a solution could be based on huge arrays of solar panels in countries like Australia, Mexico, Morroco or South Africa, and shipments of liquefied hydrogen to countries like Germany, China, Japan or Canada. The US can be quite self-sufficient, with solar panels in California, Nevada, Arizona, and wind turbines in Texas, Oklahoma and the rest of the wind corridor, and pipes of hydrogen from one state to another. I can even see the US exporting liquefied hydrogen as a natural succession from exporting LNG now.
Distributed solar also avoid transmission costs, at a certain point a point source of free energy gets outcompeted by distributed solar.
So nuclear might have niches, or exciting new applications but is mostly a dead-end.
Shipping hydrogen about seems likely to be a big thing though, easy transition for existing infrastructure.
But let's look at the numbers.
Here's a study by the EIA that looks at the capital costs and also at the Operating and Maintenance costs of various types of power plants [2].
The costs that are interesting for us are (all costs per GW alternative current of capacity):
First of all, notice that the natural gas power plant comes to be the cheapest, despite the fact that it has turbines, including steam turbines. So the general assertion that things with moving parts are more expensive than those without is not quite correct.You can counter that the estimates are from 2019, and by now solar is probably already cheaper and it will continue to get so, and I suppose you are right. But the panels constitute only 18% of the cost of the solar panel plant, the rest being inverters, transformers, something called BOP (balance of plant), etc. So, if the panels go to zero, the cost of the solar power plant gets reduced by 20% only.
On the other hand, the same is true for nuclear: only about 20% of the cost of a nuclear power plant is attributed to the nuclear part, the rest to the turbines, BOP, etc. So, even if by a miracle the nuclear part were to cost zero, the cost per GW would still be about $5 BN. This is higher than the coal power plant, because the steam generated by coal is much hotter than the one generated by the current generation of nuclear reactors.
Does this prove Austin Vernon's point?
Not necessarily.
First, the fact that gas power plants are very cheap is reason to hope. If we make nuclear reactors that don't use steam (which is corrosive) but some other gas, then it's possible the cost could go down significantly.
Well, less than one year ago China hooked to the grid exactly such a plant [3]. It uses Helium as a coolant, which means that the turbines can be cheaper (they should be similar to the ones used in a gas-firing plant). It also runs much hotter than a regular pressurized water reactor (about 700 Celsius vs 300 Celsius), which means the efficiency is higher.
Can the US build such reactors? I don't see why not, see for example Xe-100 [4]. But the first step is to get back to the nuclear technology learning curve.
[1] https://austinvernon.site/blog/nuclear.html
[2] https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM
[4] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/x-energy-developing-pebbl...
Transferring heat across a solid/fluid interface is kind of expensive. The more of that you have to do, the more expensive your power plant will be.
A simple cycle combustion turbine involves no heat exchangers at all. Heat is generated in the compressed air by combustion; the waste heat is carried away in the air + combustion products exiting the turbine. A combined cycle plant does have a boiler and a condenser for the steam section, but that part is only producing 1/3rd the power.
For nuclear to get cheap we'd need something like an open air Brayton cycle, but that would involve running air either through the reactor or through a high temperature heat exchanger made of silicon carbide.
It's interesting (well, to me) to consider how much easier that sort of open cycle system would be on Titan, where one could use 90K N2 rather than 300K air as the input fluid. Titan may be the best place in the solar system for nuclear power.
At this point nobody is using direct cooling-gas-to-turbine cycle. But after people gain experience with cooling-gas-to-heat-exchanger, at some point they'll move to the direct cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-cooled_fast_reactor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel#TRISO_fuel
Also, any time the temperature is above 550 C you can't use ordinary steels, as they will creep. So these reactors have materials challenges.
As for steel. Steel is one of the cheapest materials, with an average price below $1000/ton. Nuclear reactors need to use special steels that are resistant to neutron embrittlement, and even those have a price less than $1000/ton. There are more expensive steels out there (for example those used for tools), but generally the price is less than $3000/ton. But let's say that an alloy of steel that resists both neutron embrittlement and temperatures of 750C is $10000/ton. Then a reactor such as Xe-100 which weighs 700 tons in total will be able to procure the steel at less than $7 million, or $28 million for a group of 4; a powerplant with 4 Xe-100 reactors is estimated to cost $2.4 billion, so this cost would be less than 1% of that.
I'm sure there will be 1000 problems that Xe-100 will need to solve before they get their NRC approval and they will be able to economically build their first reactors, but the cost of steel will not be one of them.
Fast neutron reactors just use fast neutrons, neutrons that are thousands of times faster than the neutrons used in the current generation of reactors (called thermal neutrons). A thermal neutron is much more likely to hit a nucleus of Uranium. If it hits U-235, it generally makes it undergo fission, but 18% of the time it is just absorbed and becomes the nasty U-236, which is a very long lived radioactive element. If it hits U-238, it's absorbed, eventually becomes Plutonium-239, which in turns may absorb further neutrons, so a bunch of transuranic elements are produced.
That's bad on two counts. The transuranic elements are radioactive and tend to be very long lived so the nuclear waste is long lived. And whenever a nucleus just absorbs a neutron and does not undergo fission, it's a shame, it's energy that's not being produced.
Fast neutrons solve both problems. They are about 1000 times less likely to hit a nucleus, but when they do they almost invariably trigger fission for U-235 and very often for U-238 as well. That results in a massively higher burnup, and massively lower amount of transuranic elements in the waste.
So, not only will a fast reactor produce much less waste for each GWh of electricity, it will be a much nicer type of waste, one that decays to the background radiation level in a few hundreds of years, rather than millions of years.
Again, there is no reprocessing. The TRISO particle are not broken or milled at the end. They become nuclear waste as they are, but after they gave a huge amount of energy.
Hydrogen can do that.
Also ammonia can do that much better than hydrogen.
There are also several types of flow batteries which can store energy for any time desired, without losses. Compared to hydrocarbons or ammonia they have a low energy density (which is not prohibitive for stationary applications), but they have a higher energy efficiency for a charge and discharge cycle, similar to the other kinds of batteries.
Hydrogen is the worst solution for long-term energy storage, compared to the many other alternatives, which are also already proven in practice, unlike hydrogen. Hydrogen is good only for rockets, when its low mass is more important than its high volume and all its other disadvantages.
Flow batteries would be better than ordinary batteries, but would still be costly for seasonal storage or rare event backup compared to hydrogen (especially flow batteries using vanadium).
Both nuclear and Hydrogen are unproven at this point, for the scale we need. Europe has chosen to bet it all on Hydrogen. Although, in the last one year France decided to get back in the game of building nuclear. I see no talk of Hydrogen in the US.
Will probably be one of those things where there will be a new worlds largest record every month for years and it'll get into arguments about who has actually started production and so on, but it's definately a global thing.
Current headlines suggest US Green Hydrogen could be the cheapest in the world due to some mooted subsidies:
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/world-s-large...
During China's 13th Five-Year Plan period from 2016 to 2020, the country built 20 new nuclear power generators with a total capacity of 23.44 million kilowatts - https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-04-14/China-has-most-nuclear...
So clearly it's possible. With the right policy incentives, there's no reason to believe the US can't replicate China's success in this area.
I would also point out that China's only planning something like 50GW of new reactors from here on out, but nearly TW of renewables, so new nuclear there is mostly coming from hedging their primary bets, not as a primary source of future electricity.
The US definitely does need to relearn how to do big construction projects. But I think that the limited construction capacity we have would be best spent on projects that have no replacement, like mass transit. Or on building factories to produce energy generating widgets, which has an exponential return on construction effort when compared to constructing energy generating widgets directly.
Nuclear is probably net better than coal but it's not the (only) solution to climate change.
And about the why, here's the reason.
https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti...
This is so much nonsense. Even the CIA has long said that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. This is just a myth propagated by people who hate Iran. According to Isreali politicans, Iran is '1 year a away from the bomb' since literally 1998. There has never been real evidence presented and many intelligence services have said so.
What Iran in fact needs, is civilian nuclear power. Their power generation was mostly gas/oil and they realized in the 1990s that this was a huge issue. And in fact, Iran asked France to provide that for them. They made a deal with France and France would provide all that is needed and take back all the nuclear waste to France. All of this would be totally monitored by the IAEA.
Now of course the US used their power to prevent this. Then Iran said, well I guess we have to make our own civilian nuclear program. Once they started that the US and Isreal started to publish huge amounts of PR about how Iran was building the bombs and used that as an excuse to make the whole nation suffer.
If you want to build nuclear weapons, civilian nuclear power are not really very useful, there are far better proven methods to do this.
It does? News to me.
(There's another form of pollution from nuclear power plants, which is heat pollution from discharged cooling water, but most people aren't talking about that.)
Waste =/= pollution.
Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens, like in the case of the stolen solar power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokmak_Solar_Energy).
So we have to make decisions with those two factors in mind
We need nuclear energy precisely because humans are not safe.
Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.
On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.
But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.
The most difficult part of the grid is the transmission infrastructure. The most valuable, high-lead-time part probably being the HV transformers that live near power plants.
One wonders whether famously-protected Finland keeps spares.
The highly radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years is actually quite small.
> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II. [2]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-let... [2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2022/05/ener...
Much of which stops being radioactive in the first year,
> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II.
Which is to be expected given that a (tiny) part of the waste is long term.
The article says otherwise. You can remove "large" from your sentence.
Also, it looks like you've been repeatedly posting flamewar comments. Can you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is true for any other system of centralized energy production, including, notably, the one we have right now.
You underestimate the cost and lead times of the big distribution transformers found in grid substations. As an example, a fire two years ago on a substation transformer in the state of Amapá (while another transformer was broken and awaiting maintenance, and IIRC the third transformer of the set was also damaged by the fire) led to most of that state being without power for AFAIK nearly three weeks, until a replacement sent from another substation could be installed (and as a consequence, that other substation ended up without a spare until it could receive weeks later a replacement transformer from yet another substation). Note that building a new transformer instead of shuffling them between the substations wasn't an option, because it would take too long.
That doesn't sound like a very useful way to make decisions about anything except maybe missile defense and second strike capabilities. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient violence.
There's just no practical way to harden all of it against attack. And a tiny chance of some hypothetical future war isn't a good reason to choose a technology (combusting fossil fuels) that's gonna kill your own citizens every year, guaranteed. Why do your hypothetical future enemy's job for them?
If all you want to do is to knock out the electrical system of a country, you can use an EMP burst bomb over that country, and the grid will be down for months.
“Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...
...oh wait, https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complica...
(Spoiler: there is no such material.)
Nothing to see here.
> Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).
> most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.
i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick.
but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear.
i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.
Fossil plants are killing millions of people every year.
During heatwave this year, when we had temperatures around 43C for almost 2 weeks, hundreds of people died in my country because our energy grids were overloaded and ACs turned off. And many people can't even afford to pay for AC energy bills anyway so they don't use it. Our energy needs are growing every year and energy production can't keep up.
We NEED cheap energy that nuclear can give. This is the matter of survival at this point.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591
If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar will be mostly ground mounted.
If you don't agree with that statistical value, and think it should be higher, why you've just argued we're not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants -- because $9 M is the value the NRC uses when determining if additional safety systems are warranted.
Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!).
But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.
To count deaths you need to look at a whole system--solar, wind + the gas plants that cover the gaps, or the hypothetical storage system that covers the gaps. Since we can't count deaths from a tech that doesn't even exist it's solar + wind + gas -- and most of those deaths will be from the gas.
So the anti-nuclear guys keeping point at the same list of 3-4 incidents time and time again, unable to recognize the ridiculousness and weakness of their argument - and the fact that their opposition to nuclear actively kills people year after year.
[1] https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat... couldn't find a more up to date source
If you are worrying about future large scale conflict then nuclear plants will be the least of your problems causing death and other things.
That is incorrect. Large scale != global or world war. It's a moot point though.
What isn't correct? What's the definition of a large scale conflict then? Anything above 2 neighbors fighting over their fence?
> egardless 'if there is military action that could affect nuclear plants it will involve nuclear weapons and kill us anyway' is a poor argument.
How is that a poor argument. In war you care about what is the most likely to kill you. Nukes are a very real risk when there's 50 000 out there ready to be launched at one moment's notice. Radiations that would kill you in 30 years is the least of anyone's worry. Just like you don't care about a cancer that could kill you 10 years from now if you are run over by a car.
Energy, water, food, resource security. Back to basics.
I'd rather the answer be a push for more advances in passive safety and planning that treats military attack as an eventuality.
> "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation".
Perhaps you should become a bit more informed before spouting nonsense like this.
Limit your eating of pike, but otherwise no major objections:
> Children, young people and persons of fertile age may not eat pike caught in a lake or in the sea more often than once or twice a month.
> Dioxin and PCB levels in fish from inland waters are normally low, and mercury levels are lower in other lake fish than in pike. The mercury and cesium-137 levels of fish vary from one lake to the other.
* https://www.ruokavirasto.fi/en/private-persons/information-o...
Coal poisons the water far worse, both from mining, air pollution, and coal ash. It even emits far more radiation than nuclear power.
Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants.
The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could.
If we could use only wind and solar power to fully replace fossil fuels and hydro, that could be a reasonable argument...
But it seems unrealistic to get enough energy without using some higher-density sources of energy, whether that's hydro or nuclear or oil, and if we're picking based on which one causes the least death, even accounting for wars and failures, nuclear seems to be a head and shoulder above the rest.
The primary thing that seems to be driving using coal plants and not using nuclear is purely monetary cost: nuclear plants take a huge up-front investment, coal plants already exist, and wind/solar can be transitioned to gradually with less up-front cost. The talk about nuclear's "danger" to me seems, quite plausibly, to be a post-facto justification based on not wanting to put up the money.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/12/11/mosul-dam-coll...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-probl...
Until we live in a world where we can micro-generate terawatts of power on a fully distributed, dynamic electrical grid -- if that's even possible -- the only practical technologies we have for satisfying our hunger for energy involve concentrated areas of high potential energy. Big energy, big target.
I think we learned the answer to that question last winter down in Texas.
A combined cycle plant costs around $1/W. A nuclear power plant costs around $10/W.
Why do you want to spend so much more money than you have to, just so you can split atoms?
Replace the wind farms with nuclear power and the problem goes away.
https://model.energy/
I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by heavy rain, and the danger feels similar. In fact, hydroelectric dams can even help prevent (or contain) flooding, so it's the opposite of causing damage in that case. Of course, we're not talking about tailings dams, which do leave behind a trail of contamination when they fail.
(An interesting case is the failure of a tailings dam many years ago which flooded the Rio Doce with pollution, with that flood being mostly stopped by a hydroelectric dam downriver. The hydroelectric dam contained the damage instead of causing it.)
If someone blows up Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, it'll be about 18e9 m3, hundreds of thousands dead, wholesale destruction of everything downstream, shutdown of every energy plant that uses the resevoir for cooling, not to mention the hydroelectic station, and untold damage when winds blow the exposed sediment all over the steppe. Which is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.
So? This Kakhovka dam is a legitimate military target as the last remaining supply route for russian troops in/around Kherson.
Intentionally breaching the dikes of the Yellow River killed nearly a million people, displaced several million more, and was a contributing factor to people turning towards the Chinese Communists and away from the KMT.
Not under the Geneva Convention "Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population." https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
More sanctions? Direct military action against a major (or any) nuclear power? Condemnation and isolation for decades or longer?
Couple of 1000lb bombs misplaced, some confusion and you can't stop it, only watch. Has to be a very unfortunate hit, but shit happens.
Compared to that, the Zaporoshya nuclear plant will just shut down as designed even if hit in all its reactors; release maybe a week's worth radiation, completely harmless, and then sit still. And it's just upstream.
Think about it.
So-called 'green energy' bears so much more hazards.
They have violated yet the Geneva convention (and its laws that oblige to hummanitary treatment of civils in a war) countless times in a few months, and at a level rarely seen before.
I don't know what "people feel", but the reality of a large dam that is blown up is more like a tsunami than a normal flood. If it hits a city, casualties can easily reach the 10s or 100s of thousands, instantly.
In a way, an upstream dam is a health hazard for anyone in the area that might be flooded that should be concerning at the same level as living in an area that has had some nuclear contamination.
This isn’t common, to say the least.
Water is not that polite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...
Rivers are often dammed to create an artificial body of water that can be used for power generation. You are storing water from the river when it has a high flow rate, in order to be able to generate power when needed.
There is nothing that requires the area downstream from the dam to have been previously underwater.
They very easily could, especially if they wipe out a chemical plant, a dump site, or a number of other things.
In case of nuclear incident, actual death may be lower but the affected people will keep being concerned about health issues and complain (rightfuly so) about the necessary relocation, which makes for stronger staying power in the news.
Bill a friend of mine built a large addition on a house which had flooded twice while he had been living there, once actually reaching the second story. In his mind it’s picture perfect 99.9% of the time so what’s an inconvenience every few decades. In the end he died before the next flood, but now there is a nice house in a flood plain.
This isn’t reserved to individuals, companies didn’t abandon large areas of NYC after the last flood. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/flood-hazard-ma...
So such trickle down just shifts who builds in such areas but it doesn’t prevent people from living or building in them.
Although this would have no effect short-term since plants take a long time to build.
Note that South Korea and France both have large operational nuclear power that is rather cheap to deploy because they basically copy-paste the same proven design and processes again and again. South Korea in particular has been under constant threat of attack by its neighbors for basically over a thousand years now yet went with nuclear decades ago. Comparatively, Switzerland didn’t choose nuclear for reasons I can’t quite remember even though they are fully capable technologically and in terms of process / bureaucracy able to manage the systems perfectly safely. Unsure about France’s reasoning but it’s difficult to compare power costs between France and neighboring Germany in good faith comparisons of energy policy either due to how different their electrical grid needs are.
It is absolutely uncompetitive, without.
[0] https://x-energy.com/media/news-releases/x-energy-canada-and...
[1] https://smrroadmap.ca/
On the surface this is very true. However, types of solar have caveats that do not manifest until you have a certain amount of utilization in the grid. Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions. The more inertia you have, the more work it takes to speed up or slow down the grid.
Hypothetically, a grid that is 50% PV solar and 50% others would experience severe stability issues if the other class of generation were to be substantially impacted (i.e. your big-bang-for-buck military targets).
You cannot run a power grid on PV solar alone. It just won't work at scale.
Wait what, Newton's inertia was about physical objects, not voltage stability? You talking base vs peak demand or what?
Besides "synthetic inertia" on the PV inverters, there exist also synchronous condensers (basically a motor/generator spinning a heavy mass) which can already be found in many substations.
It's useful in traditional grids because we didn't have electronics that could more or less instantaneously respond to load changes - they had to rely on spinning generators instead.
But, this is a precipitous arrangement. If there is any drift in the clocks or some fault in the sync protocol, you can quickly wind up with a completely dead grid (because all your inverters will have killed each other).
Spinning metal is very simple and robust. The failure modes are all much more gradual in nature. Today, one or 2 bad inverters would not start a chain of horrible events because hundreds of tons of metal are not easily perturbed. Without inertia, a bad element in the grid can have substantially more impact.
A grid without rotating generators would act differently, for sure, as you won't have varying frequency to indicate if the grid is overloaded - you'd have to rely on different measures to understand how close parts of it might be to failure.
"Bad actors" in the grid can already cause severe problems regardless of spinning generators; if a power station goes offline the unexpected load spike can easily trip off most of the grid anyway. Smaller, distributed generators/inverters if anything are more reliable, as a fault in one is less likely to constitute an outsize portion of power generation. "Grid inertia" today is largely a result of the total machinery attached to the grid just massively outweighing any individual actor.
The rotating machines are wholly as dependent on controls as the inverters.
Here, I'll do the same thing: "Nuclear produces power 24/7, while solar can only usefully produce power for ~8 hours a day, or 1/3 of the day".
Sure, for that 1/3 of the day, solar does not have political problems like being shut down for danger. However, for 2/3 of the day, nuclear does not have the physics problem of being useless.
Each solution has pros and cons and I want my power to come from both.
And speaking of regional poisoning, I guess all of those heavy metal mines in poorer countries creating some quite dystopian scenes of large scale ecological destruction leading to total ecosystem collapse are OK because "NIMBY"! Can't wait to 10X that, especially when I remember that the energy density of nuclear fuels is so insanely high that the mining impact for powering all of humanity on it is something like 50X less than powering all of humanity on lithium batteries!
That's obvious because you don't want to compare the amount of lithium required for billions of cars and grid scale solar to cover 16 hours of energy per day.
You ignored it because 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.
Not only is uranium extremely energy dense, but power facilities are extremely small. Nuclear facilities are by far the smallest energy producing facilities, and solar fields are among the largest (both in terms of space and raw materials). This produces mining and material savings at every single step.
A world powered by Uranium only would require probably somewhere between 10,000X to 100,000 less mining than a world powered by solar batteries.
The energy density of uranium is truly amazing.
And the energy density of uranium is irrelevant even sessile, because it takes hundreds to thousands of times more mass around it to get useful energy out.
I had ignored it so as not to embarrass you further.
While you might not think several orders of magnitude have meaning, fortunately here in reality the fact that it requires far less overall mining to create and supply a uranium power station that it does to create and supply an equivalent (in power output) solar field with batteries has huge meaning.
While I do thank you for looking out for me, I urge you to in the future take time to introspect on yourself and views, so as to save yourself these issues. I know no one tries to be a hypocrite intentionally, so I know these are resolvable problems for the average HN'er. Good luck!
Unless this magickal energy density results in lower-cost electrical output, in quantity, it is just a load of guff.
What we know is that every use of uranium for civil power generation, ever, delivered only extremely expensive power. There has never been a single reactor, worldwide, that was not heavily subsidized by taxpayers, coerced above-market rates, or both. Nukes get even less competitive with each passing year, as the cost for renewables continues plummeting with no bottom in sight.
So, the compelling evidence is that energy density is of extremely limited value for civil power generation. If it has any practical value at all, its copious orders of magnitude are yet insufficient to overcome its extremely poor cost effectiveness.
And, places in the US where uranium was mined are marked by poisoned groundwater and early death. Those poisoned are not impressed with its magick. Nor am I.
The battery production capacity is currently in a rapid growth phase. I'm not sure what timescales you think are "for some time longer", but I think 10 (optimistic) to 20 years (pessimistic) would be enough to see the global electricity market almost totally (95% or more) transformed to renewables.
While I personally am relaxed about nuclear power if it's done right, the political realities are that it terrifies people and that corners get cut just often enough to make the terror not entirely unjustified, so it's not going to happen on a significant scale unless there's a reason for the government to ignore the will of the people.
That feels like saying "a woman who's not allowed to carry pepper spray is less likely to dress provocatively enough to lead to getting raped".
But another takeaway from the current conflict is how incredible nuclear is at shoring up energy security. A nuclear plant can easily keep 18 months of fuel onsite as required storage space is trivial. A 2 or 3 year strategic reserve of uranium would likewise be a trivial project.
Meanwhile other base load sources like coal need dozens of rail cars worth of coal every single day. Gas needs a pipeline or again daily shipments of LNG.
So now Russia has cut off the gas and energy costs in Europe are exploding and they are having to build out tons of new LNG infrastructure.
Russia can basically turn the heat off in Europe because they under invested in nuclear power.
A hydro plant can be attacked in a war situation just as much as a nuclear plant, so I don't see how that should be weighted as highly as you seem to imply. In fact, I'd argue that energy dependence on nations such as Russia are a much higher risk to geopolitical stability than nuclear power.
Some new fast reactor designs don't even need water for cooling. Also, China has built an experimental thorium reactor in Gobi desert which also doesn't need water for cooling.
I believe a lot if interesting stuff is coming in a few years.
If a solar facility gets carpet bombed during a war, you think it's more likely it will all just get somewhat cleaned up, and lots of it will be left in-situ and plowed over, or someone will actually remove every little dust particle? I think the lazy way out is what is most likely.
If you have to make shit up to support your argument, why even bother?
https://scdhec.gov/sites/default/files/Library/OR-1695.pdf
"Solar panel waste can include heavy metals such as silver, lead, arsenic and cadmium that – at certain levels – may be classified as hazardous waste"
I think living in the stone age is better than taking the risk.
The Earth has 150 MILLION km2 of land. We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 km2 unlivable patches of ground and still be perfectly fine.
Prioritize your fear.
> I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle.
I think we should prioritize the continuance of civilization over the planet.
The planet and life on it will be perfectly fine after we're gone. It's been through drastically worse.
Your numbers are off by orders of magnitude. The exclusion zone for Chernobyl alone is 2600 km2, the areas immediately affected in the 3 neighboring countries is 130 000 km2, food and livestock in areas over 3000 km from the site have to be fed special food supplements in order to pass regulation for human consumption to this day.
And this was despite the fire in Chernobyl being handled, limiting the actual amount of fallout released into the atmosphere.
IMO, correctly prioritizing our fears means we should put all efforts towards solar and energy storage solutions. That's the optimal solution after all, aiming for anything else is like playing not to win.
That can't actually happen. And if you believe it can, you are wrong.
Please explain the mechanics of how that would happen to me! Ill wait.
Sure in theory enough radio active materials exists that if you somehow blew it up and vaporized the whole spend fuel pool it would require a significant exclusion zone. To put such amount of explosives into that pool to vaporize the spent fuel roads would require an absurd amount of explosives.
And the exclusion zone for these things is way to big anyway, many people live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and they are not actually negatively impacted.
But of course if you assume terrorist of unlimited capabilities there lots of technologies that are not viable and we use them anyway.
Nuclear energy is a subsidised energy source, lobbied by powers that be on the corridors of power in the EU and everywhere else. Solar is cheaper.
Humanity is out of it's depth with this stuff. Could cause massive extinction event eventually even if we stopped now by killing and mutating sperm cells and all that. Go have a holiday in Fukushima. Go visit the deformed children still born in Uzbekistan near these places.
.. unless it gets inside you, in which case it can be extremely damaging.
Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different processes.
So U-235 and U-238 are chemically identical. So how do you enrich a sample? Centrifuges. You make a Uranium gas. The U-238 molecules will be heavier. Spin them in a centrifuge and you can extract them at a greater percentage and then pass on the gas to the next centrifuge. You do this repeatedly until you get the enrichment level you want and then extract the metal from the gas.
The gas of choice is UF6 (Uranium Hexaflouride). That itself is a toxic byproduct that needs to be stored or otherwise dealt with. We don't really have a good solution for this either. There is some reprocessing that basically turns UF6 into less toxic UF4 but it's not really economic.
As always, pro-nuclear propaganda focuses on deaths because deaths doesn't capture the negative impact of nuclear. Why? Because the Chernobyl disaster directly killed less than 100 (it also probably killed tens of thousands through cancers in the following years but that's harder to attribute and easier for people to collectively ignore).
But still the Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone, from one incident, is quite literally 1,000 square miles even now, almost 40 years later.
Deaths or deaths per TWh just doesn't capture that impact and those failure modes, which is precisely why such propaganda focuses on deaths.
But none of that is the big problem with commercial nuclear power. It's the fallibility of humans to manage, maintain, build and transport and store (fuel and waste) to a sufficient level to avoid disasters. The profit motive provides an incentive to skimp on some or all of these. Corruption is an issue with both corporations and governments.
Humans are just incredibly bad at managing long-term consequences, which is why we have the climate crisis to begin with.
You speak of a Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I don't see anyone living where they've put up large scale solar farms or next to wind turbines.
You're right about humans not managing long term consequences well. From lead poisoning 40 years ago to 20 years from now when we have to deal with the waste of solar left behind (perhaps toxic waste if not dealt with right now).
We need nuclear now. No nonsense blockers. Build more plants and replace the coal, oil and gas base load stations we're running now to try slow the rate of carbon we're throwing into the sky.
And yes, we need more investment into solar and wind. It's a solution that is solved by multiple alternatives, not dummies getting behind one alternative and saying no to the rest.
you can't get it now. You have to wait at least 10 years to get a plant up & running.
solar and wind - doesnt take even a year
then you need to look more carefully:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/krughutt... https://cached.imagescaler.hbpl.co.uk/resize/scaleWidth/882/...
There are not many data points in terms of number of countries using nuclear nor do I think it’s a panacea or anything for our problems, but from a realistic standpoint we need as many solutions other than fossil fuels on the table right now as a species if we’re to tackle the climate crisis with the gravity it deserves, and nuclear can buy some more options especially if we start deploying small modular reactors that can quickly shutdown fossil fuel power plants. As it stands, aging nuclear power plants tend to be replaced not with another, modern plant but with fossil fuel based plants to meet similar performance and logistical characteristics.
If we had invested in actual advanced breeder reactors this is a non issue.
As an example, a modern molten salt thorium breeder only requires dissolved thorium.
But of course if we stop innovation at the first generation and then do nothing for 50 years we are not gone have optimal technology.
were talking small amounts, sure, but contamination of groundwater and surrounding soil isn't something we in the US have a stellar track record with. camp lejunes benzene contaminated drinking water happened in only a 29 year span, and the only real remedy is a class action lawsuit. no one admitted fault.
most of our reactors are elderly, and most of the regulatory capture means they leak like a sieve and rarely face any consequences or shutdowns. until we reform the edifice that controls this waste I fear nuclear will just be another headline crisis event.
The problem is dealing with the waste at that point, because it's so radiologically cold an amateur terrorist group could extract the plutonium, which is almost entirely still there.
Similarly, recycling may be a problem for solar panels, but is that better for nuclear? I have never heard / read about how to recycle the (radioactive) non-fuel parts of a nuclear reactor.
I'm not against nuclear per se, but articles such as this one don't help. I think there's a genuine case for nuclear to be made; this isn't it.
There is no cadmium in solar panels. There was a small amount in thin film panels briefly favored by utility-scale solar plants but thin film is economically dead and nobody is buying those.
Antimony is used in the glass, not the panel. The glass contains ~1g/kg of antimony, and PV panels contain about 50 tonnes of glass per MW (most of the panel mass is the glass). That works out to 50kg of antimony per MW, i.e. basically none. If you took all the antimony out of a 1GW solar plant and somehow dissolved it in water - which can't happen because antimony trioxide isn't even soluble in water, and dissolving metals out of glass with water is practically impossible - and if you dumped all that into Lake Shasta, it would still be within drinking water standards. And again, nobody will dump this into the environment because fifty million kilos of high-grade glass is going to get recycled, not dumped.
I think it's sad that the nuclear boosters are being duped into spreading these lies about solar panels.
First, you find a hard-rock mountain where geology shows nothing much happening in the last few million years, and there's nothing worth mining. Worldwide, there are many mountain ranges like that. Then tunnel way down, but preferably above the water table. Drill holes in the tunnel floor. Put waste in suitable containers. There are a few approaches. Mixing the waste with molten glass and pouring it into big stainless steel thimbles is one approach. Put containers in holes. Fill with bentonite. Seal off with concrete. Eventually, seal off the whole installation and forget about it.
Because we appear to have no sense of proportion, or trade-offs.
The more dangerous stuff burns itself out quickly (short half-life), and the longer-lasting stuff is not very dangerous given the type of radiation it is and can be blocked quite easily
So, probably bury it deep enough with little external sign that it's actually there, and if it is actually discovered it won't be that big of a deal:
> The main concern associated with spent nuclear fuel – radioactivity – diminishes with time.
> About 40 years after it's done making power, the heat and radioactivity of the fuel bundle will have fallen by over 99%.
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148416881180674
> About three containers are needed to store the quantity of fuel that is removed each 12-24 months; the space taken up by even a 60 year plant life is less than is needed for a Wal-Mart even without any efforts to efficiently stack the containers.
* https://atomicinsights.com/time-for-plan-b-yucca-mountain-pr...
Long term thinking > Short term thinking > Extreme long term thinking.
1) has lost all records of current generations
2) doesn't know about nuclear waste disposal sites and radioactivity
3) is still advanced enough to dig several hundred meters into hard rock
4) for no discernible reason digs up the entire waste disposal site and then what? contaminates their excavation crew?
Doesn't seem impossible. Just see how much trouble we have understanding writing systems from 8000 BCE.
You only need a few generation of lost ability to read/write for solid documentation of nuclear waste and radioactivity to turn into myth at best. This does not seem unlikely over a duration of 10000y. Such a myth may be just enough for people to seek out a dangerous place without understanding the danger.
Yes.
See The art of the 10,000-year warning[1] and the full Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory Across Generations report[2].
Other proposed solutions include: the breeding of so-called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.[3]
[1] https://www.ans.org/news/article-416/the-art-of-the-10000yea...
[2] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_15088
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Besides, nuclear fuel dumps are few and far between, and easily avoided once identified. I'm touched that you care so much about a few individual lives 10,000 years from now, but we've got millions if not billions of lives to worry about in this century.
Please, let us know your plan.
P.S. This is not a hypothetical problem, like the demands you are making of nuclear. This is a current and ongoing one. Your green energy isn't as green as you claim it is, please tell us your solution.
But they will learn eventually after a couple of deaths, as we did every single time. We are trying to solve the wrong problem here; Is the population what counts.
It depends on where you live. In my country (which is a huge country), the backup is hydroelectric dams. Burning fossil fuels (and nuclear) is mostly kept constant during the day, it's the hydroelectric dams which follow both the load and the changes in solar and wind.
Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.
And even then, you now need to overbuild not just for replacement of local plants, but also for replacement of plants on the other end of the continent.
Great if you're selling gas or gas power plants, I guess, not so great if you want zero CO2 emissions especially with how powerhungry the replacement techs can be.
Personally I'm of the opinion that we should have nuclear+renewables with less focus on storage and more on opportunistic production of, for example, green hydrogen - not for grid storage but for all other uses like steel production, off-grid power systems (including cars/trains that have needs beyond battery capability) etc.
Current approach with renewables always being graded on their lowest possible price point and silently ignoring the growing gas generation required to smooth them and larger and larger grid instability is not great.
You don't need 15-25x overbuilding. That is nonsense. Perhaps you're assuming no storage whatsoever, and are oversizing the renewables to deliver sufficient power instantaneously? What terrible and foolish engineering.
The round trip efficiency of power -> hydrogen -> power is maybe 40%, so if you sent the entire renewable output through hydrogen the overbuilding (in the sense of how much energy you'd have to produce / how much energy was delivered to the grid) would be 2.5. And of course you'd send only a bit of energy through hydrogen; most would be delivered either directly to the grid or through diurnal storage at higher round trip efficiency.
If I go to https://model.energy/, click on the US, and solve for 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 historical weather data, I find the renewable + storage system to provide a synthetic baseload output to the US involves 0.1% solar curtailment, 23.8% wind curtailment, and delivers nearly 3/4 of the renewable power directly to the grid. If I narrow it down to just, let's say, Texas, the wind curtailment goes up to 32.1%. All this is a far, far cry from 15-25x overbuilding.
The 15-25x numbers I get from model.energy, in fact - lowest I get is 15x assuming way too optimistic ideas about availability of salt caverns in Poland, 25x is with mainly battery power, the numbers for no storage are too hilarious too discuss.
Are there luckier locations that can get better numbers? Sure. I'm not against building renewables and storage, far from it. I am, however, against building new fossil fuel plants, including gas backup for renewables, and would rather we take the minimum average power use, fill it with nuclear, then get renewable/storage Virtual Power Plants to fill in the peaks (with some load following from reactors if necessary). If necessary, we can find new power sinks to make it more economical, in fact I'd love if we had large scale green hydrogen and synthetic fuel production backed by hydrogen electrolysers taking in overproduction.
The real problem isn't cost of nuclear, it's that we still leave profit as the main guiding principle (to the point that building new solar might crash in some states) and not optimizing for 0 emissions.
OF COURSE it's much higher if you turn off hydrogen and try to use batteries and curtailment to deal with high seasonality environments. This is Dumb Engineering. Don't do that. You multiply the cost in Poland by more than a factor of 2 when you turn off hydrogen.
Poland, as I've said elsewhere in these comments, is also close to the worst place in the world for renewables. That's hardly a condemnation of renewables in the entire world. Maybe industry will just leave Poland to somewhere it makes more sense to operate.
I bet your 15-25x also is looking at the nameplate capacity on the renewables, before adjusting for the expected capacity factor. But LCOE already takes that into account. Just looking at raw peak output, wind and solar are massively cheaper than nuclear.
As for overbuilding including capacity factor - the size of renewable powerplant tends to be reported in nameplate capacity, not the adjusted for capacity factor, so I'm just trying to keep within common units. And I'm all for building more renewables anyway, I'm just against building fossil backup for them. Which means also not greenwashing things by "we will add storage in the future". We need it now, not in some murky future.
There are many places that are "bad for renewables" - that doesn't mean people who live there have to be forcefully resettled or removed to support religious combination of laissez-faire with german green philosophy.
If a place that's a renewable energy ghetto tries to compete with sun-soaked places by using nuclear, it won't go well. When solar is being pumped out at $0.013/kWh in UAE, trying to drive internationally competitive heavy industry with nuclear that's an order of magnitude more expensive just won't work. This is a disconcerting new reality for places that have been competitive in a fossil fuel era. They are competing with the best case renewables in a global market.
As we need to replace as much fossil-fueled power plants as possible and as quickly as possible, wasting ressources into building nuclear power plants sounds stupid. Other interesting factors:
* Heating climate is a risk for nuclear https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...
* Maintenance cost is hard to predict https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-up-c...
* 30 planned + 60 unplanned days shutdown on average https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252
If storage is cheap enough then solar will be an important part of the mix. But unless you have the right geography for geothermal or hydro (which probably means flooding a bigger area than the chernobyl exclusion zone before you've even started, but leaving that aside), nuclear is still the only viable option for clean, reliable baseline power. It's not an either/or, we should be building both.
So no, we are not going to be needing an absurd amount of any one mineral (except maybe silicon) as they all have alternatives which quite often are even better then lithium and cobalt.
Firstly, you talk about $ per capacity in MW, however solar capacity factor is 20%. Only use a levelized cost per MWh.
Secondly, solar needs storage which you think is trivial, but which turns out to be wayyyy more expensive than the solar panels. Some reports[1] only compare short-term (peaker generation) for storage. Nuclear is expensive, but battery storage is far more expensive to cover daily or longer load variation (non-peaker). That report mentions in a footnote a levelized cost of storage of crazy high $1613/MWh to $3034/MWh.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
You used MW in that comment - your new comment is not clarifying whether you made a mistake or what your actual point is.
LCOE is an averaged cost/MWh, which is absolutely inappropriate to use when discussing whether nuclear is expensive or not, because LCOE ignores usage patterns (which you obviously know, but are hand-waving away as “money left over”). From your Wikipedia link: “One of the most important potential limitations of LCOE is that it may not control for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand” and “To ensure enough electricity is always available to meet demand, storage or backup generation may be required, which adds costs that are not included in the LCOE”.
Finally, almost any plot that uses “installed capacity” is deceptive by design: because capacity factors make solar/wind appear 5x better, which is not a trivial difference on a graph. Instantaneous capacity is usually not relevant (except during “peaker” loads).
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
For all that article's efforts to quibble with definitions, the fact is that a grid that is all or mostly renewables (except for hydro and geothermal, which are great for the places that are suitable for them, but not available everywhere) will have blackouts. Lots of things can be demand-managed but lots of things can't. If you want electricity to be available 24/7 then the grid absolutely does need to "overpay" for generators that are available 24/7 (and sure, nuclear plants have unexpected shutdowns like anything else, but those outages are going to be uncorrelated with each other), and whether you call that "baseload" or some other term is neither here nor there.
I’m even hopeful of a future where these natural gas plants will have carbon capture employed. But you are right, as it stands natural gas power plant is not a solution to the climate crisis.
In your example: when there's clouds and the wind doesn't blow, what happens? Currently we burn coal, gas and petrol. This means that in order to accept hydro and solar as the main source of energy, we have to take fossil fuels along, as a backup. Unless we find a different backup.
And nuclear is right there.
Or you use some even cheaper (but more complex) combination of various storage solutions, transmission, and demand dispatch.
If you consider the global electricity and energy demand and wanted to meet it, what you produce the least amount of green house gases, use the least amount of land, require the least amount of mining.
If you actually do that nuclear wins easily witch suggest there is some other process at work that makes sure this is not translated into reality.
There is this thing called nature, and not building building on it or in a very dirty way dig gigantic holes into it is preferable.
Land use is a cost. Mining is a cost. We minimize overall cost, not one specific thing that has a cost.
I will add that society is clearly happy with using land for that very low payoff activity we call "farming". The $/acre from PV is much higher than that from farming, you know.
I don't get the impression you've thought very clearly about all this.
Sources:
https://www.ompe.org/en/france-doesnt-know-what-to-do-with-i...
The La Manche facility had 527 000m3 of waste in 1994:
https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredisposal-of-shor...
It is indeed harmless outside of your body, but it is devastating inside of your body.
The reason is that outside of your body, it is blocked by your layer of dead skin, if it gets to it, your dead skin ends up pretty messed up as it absorbs all the energy of the alpha particle. But no big deal, it is dead, doesn't take part of your biology, can't turn cancerous. But now, if that alpha emitter ends up inside of your body, maybe in your lungs as you breathe in radioactive dust, it will end up dumping all of its energy inside of your live cells, damaging DNA and doing everything bad ionizing radiation can do.
Gamma radiation, the unstoppable one is actually less dangerous if it finds its way inside your body, that's because it will go right through it, it will mess up a few cells on its way out, but most of its energy will be dumped outside of you.
I think you're mixing up the Litvinenko murder, which used polonium in a beverage, and Makenko, who got injected with poision with the tip of an umbrella.
How leathal? Roughly 6.8 trillionths of a gram [1].
Luckily Po-210 isn't a huge danger because of the short half life and it's really only produced by governments in very small quantities. But the point is that any alpha particle emitter ingested is potentially a massive health risk.
And what happens at an accident like Chernobyl? It scatters a ton of dust over a huge area that consists of many radioactive isotopes, some of which are just toxic by themselves (eg Caesium) but also some of them are alpha particle emitters. That dust gets into the food chain.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-po...
It’s some magic invisible thing, radiation will kill everyone, and an accident will wipe away half the planet.
The public should be educated how reactors work, and what the risks are, and what the limits of those risks are.
I get that there are issues and unknowns, but it’s better than the current death march, isn’t it?
This is really what the whole argument boils down to: nuclear, or global warming. There's really not real, feasible renewable answer. It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors. Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power.
But there is, and it's likely cheaper than the nuclear answer.
At least for solar, that comparison is specious. It would be like separately counting each rod or even each pellet of nuclear fuel in a reactor's core, and using that as an argument against nuclear power. It makes more sense to compare whole solar power plants, not individual panels. From a quick look at the data for my country, most solar power plants have over 20 MW output each, and they are in facilities with 3-10 solar power plants. Looking at the same data source, wind also seems to use a similar grouping here (power plants containing several turbines with a total output over 20MW, then grouped into facilities with 3-10 power plants).
> Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power.
Cost is not the only argument. If you want to make it quickly, construction time is just as important, and nuclear loses badly here (though I might be a bit biased on that, since the latest reactor being built near where I live has been under construction for decades, with no end in sight). Solar and to a lesser extent wind have the advantage of simplicity and modularity, which tend to not only reduce the cost, but also enable them to be built quicker and in parallel, and make them much less risky to build; if one out of ten 20 MW solar power plants being built hits a problem, you still have the other nine, but if your single 1350 MW reactor being built since the 1980s hits some unexpected problem, you have nothing.
As for the level of regulation, it's an unavoidable consequence of how dangerous nuclear fuel (and the materials and fluids irradiated by it in the reactor core) is; you have to make sure it stays contained, so that a nuclear power plant is as safe as (or even safer than) other kinds of power plant. But that's not the whole reason for the high cost; there's the complexity of the reactor itself (including materials which can resist the radiation), and nuclear power plants tend to use things like a single hydrogen-cooled gigawatt-power turbine for each reactor core. Just the electrical infrastructure (transformers, circuit breakers, etc) which can deal with gigawatt levels of power at once is already costly.
This phrase sounds weird to me, given that US explored nuclear power more than 50 years ago, and is also exploring other viable alternatives now (wind and solar).
FACTS [0]:
1. The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'.
2. The transport of this waste poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.
3. Plutonium is the most dangerous material in the world.
4. Nuclear waste is hazardous for tens of thousands of years. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations.
5. Even if put into a geological repository, the waste might emerge and threaten future generations.
6. Nobody knows the true costs of waste management. The costs are so high that nuclear power can never be economic.
IMO, nuclear power does not represent what's best about the US but highlights its weaknesses. Americans love their quarterly reports, but are not good so good at 100 year plans, let alone 100,000 year plans.
Nuclear waste lasts for a very long time. The amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at US nuclear power plants continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year [1].
The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. Federal funding for the Repository ened amidst widespread national, state, regional and tribal opposition. [2]. Meanwhile the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades. So yeah you the US taxpayer are paying for it, whether your utility use nuclear generated electricity or not. => The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'.
Without a permanent national storage solution, the government pays the utilities to store the waste on site. Over time utilities move some of the older spent fuel into "dry cask" storage. These casks are stainless steel canisters surrounded by concrete. Fuel is typically cooled at least five years in the pool before transfer to cask. NRC has authorized transfer as early as three years; the industry norm is about 10 years. The NRC certifies cask designs and licenses dry cask storage facilities for up to 40 years. [3] Not thousands of years!
Assuming idealistically that generation of nuclear power stops today, then the EXISTING nuclear waste will have to be stored not for hundreds of years, not for thousands of years, not for tens of thousands of years, but for hundreds of thousands of years. That is the existing waste, which will continue to cost "tens of billions of dollars per decades", with a lifetime storage cost that makes the cost of the original nuclear power plant (typically with only a 30-year life anyway) negligible by comparison. Again that is the exsiting waste. So assuming we continue to generate nuclear power, the nuclear waste continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year, each ton with its own lifetime storage cost. And we're talking about GROWING that nuclear capacity. Let's grow the already exponential lifetime storage cost. Not even the Federal Reserve of the United States of America will be able to create enough money to pay for the total cost of ownership of nuclear power.
There are different types of nuclear waste - high-level waste, transuranic waste, Uranium or thorium mill tailings, Low-level waste, Technologically enhanced naturally-occurring radioactive material (TENORM) [4]. Like most things, these too follow the 80/20 rule - 80% of the waste is lower level waste and 20% is higher level waste. Make sure you know which waste is being discussed. Each type must be disposed of according to its risk to human health and the environment. Plutonium Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years! That is the time it takes for the radioactive level to become half of what it is...
2. The continuous emission of this gas poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.
3. There are many compounds more dangerous than plutonium, which we happily use in day-to-day life: botulinum, ricin, hydrazine.
4. A runaway greenhouse effect is hazardous for tens of thousands of years, if not permanent. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations.
5. Many known geological repositories of carbon-based compounds (permafrost, bogs) are unstable; given the right triggers, the captured methane might emerge and threaten future generations.
6. Nobody knows the true cost of climate change. The costs are so high that fossil fuel use can never be economic.
Yet we make fossil fuel use economic to the tune of 6 trillion dollar in subsidies per year. So please, stop using your "facts" to delay action against fossil fuel use.
EDITED: for clarity