TIL There is a nuclear power plant named Diablo Canyon. I thought it was a reference to some game in the Diablo franchise and I was wondering why politicians would vote to keep a multiplayer video game's servers online.
Now if only we could get more reactors built. According to the New York Times, Diablo Canyon provides 9% of California's electricity[1]. It astounds me that a single generating station like that can provide a whopping 9% of California's electricity.
Assuming the same capacity, four more stations would take it to 45%. That's nearly half of your electricity for a state as large as California from a stable, reliable, and clean(-er than fossil fuels) source that drops into the existing grid. I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors.
Diablo Canyon was supposed to be far larger then it ended up being. Would have been amazing.
> I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors.
I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar.
Do you just want your power supply to be less reliable and have a massive dependency of storage?
If you have nuclear, why would you ever go of it? There is no reason what so ever to do so.
Even fusion will not replace fission. Nuclear fission is the cheapest possible energy by in a first principles analysis (except maybe some Aneutronic fusion maybe but we can't really even analyise what that would be).
Well we can only speculated, but if you really think threw it, there is no reason what so ever that fusion should be cheaper. Maybe Aneutronic fusion but we are not even close enough to that do an even estimation.
Lets go threw the major costs of a power plant.
- Building the primary plant
- Operations in form of maintenance and salary.
- Fuel cost (including transportation and so on)
Now lets start with fuel cost. If we are talking about an advanced breeder fission reactor, thorium or natural uranium is basically free. Thorium is a waste product of Rare Earth mining, we have far more then we could ever use already. This material needs to be devolved into some salt.
Fusion on the other hand will need to breed its fuel. That would basically require to mine lithium and then circulate it around an already existing fusion reactor. That possible but doesn't sound exactly cheap, it would be an incredibly complex process.
So on fuel cost, fission wins pretty clearly.
In terms of building the plant, if you look at some basic assumptions about a bill of materials, its pretty clear as well. Many advanced fission reactors are not much more then a big bucket of some sort of steel alloy (stainless steal or some sort of nickel alloy). Not more complex then many advanced materials used in airplane or rocket construction. Its more of an issue with qualification then production. Inside of that bucket you are gone have some graphite tubes or some other metal tubes. That bucket is likely filled with some molten salt, not so much different from molten toothpaste.
Now compare this to a containment facility that needs to literally contain the heat a small sun. Not only do you need a magnetic containment that consists of large of highly advanced materials but you also need a physical material that can be blasted by a small sun.
What's cheaper to build, a bucket full of hot toothpaste or a complex shaped object that contains a small sun?
In terms of operations, a modern load following breeder needs very little refueling. Depending on the exact design you might even just continuously refuel and all you would have to do is dump some additional thorium into the salt. In some designs you need a crane to shuffle around fuel tubes every so often.
Not sure how commercial operation of a fusion reactor would exactly work and how automated you could do all of that. I don't think we have enough information to really estimate that. However its hart to see how much easier it would be then a fission reactor.
So I think in all major cost aspects, fission looks better. The real advantage of fusion is 3 order of magnitude higher density. But fission fuel is essentially free and dense enough that transporting it is absolute non issue, so not sure how increase density really helps fusion.
So I'm not against fusion research, I think its great. But we need to do research, not obsess about trying to build commercial fusion power.
> I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar.
A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background), there are only ~230 years of uranium available.[1] And that's at today's consumption rates; build the amount of reactors we need and it's even less. Maybe we'd find more or maybe there's some other fissile material to use (thorium?). I'm not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to be honest, but it is finite on some timeline. Whereas wind and solar will last as long as the sun lasts.
Aside from that, there's always the small risk of malfunctions and nuclear proliferation. Even with newer tech that could greatly limit the possibility of accidents to near zero (it's already absurdly low) there's still the constant need of water for cooling and geopolitical issues causing problems like what is happening right now with the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine.
That's why I say it's not perfect but that it does serve an incredibly important purpose in the near term to dramatically lower CO2 emissions and buy time to either deploy more wind & solar, extend the life of nuclear, or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg. Exactly how that looks would likely be a question for our children to answer.
Today's nuclear reactors only extract about 2% of the energy in natural uranium, fast reactors could extract many times more by producing Pu239 and other fissile actinides from relatively abundant U238.
Since uranium is water soluble there are large amounts in the ocean and if fast reactors were made economical it would be practical to extract from seawater, seawater uranium is a renewable resource because uranium is always eroding from rocks and making its way to the ocean by rivers.
Thorium breeders do the same thing as plutonium breeders by converting Th232 to U233 except they can do it with a thermal spectrum. It's not so clear if terrestrial Th or U is really more abundant but Th is not in seawater because, like Pu it is not water soluble.
> A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background), there are only ~230 years of uranium available.
The idea of natural resources running out is always pushed about everything and is always wrong.
However, in this case its wrong on an even more fundamental level. There is a gigantic amount of fertile (i.e. you need to hit it with one neutron to make it fissile) nuclear material around. Literally enough for 1000s of years. And volcanic activity is bringing up new such material from deeper in the earth.
Any non insane nuclear strategy will eventually switch to breeder reactors and if you do, the amount of fissile material is essentially infinite.
We already have gigantic amounts of fissile material in the form of spent fuel that we can use to start breeder reactors.
There is both a huge amount of fertile material, both in the form of thorium (T-232) and what is usually called natural uranium (U-238).
The things consider limited is Uranium-235 if I'm not mistaken. This is the only surviving naturally fissile material. But should it get down to it, I'm sure we could extend the amount of known reserves, just as we did for almost everything else.
There is a pretty interesting story here about 3 different strains of nuclear that exists and of these the naturally fissile material of 2 of them is 'extinct'. Only U-235 is still sticking around. If not for that, it would have been much harder to start nuclear age.
In the beginning there was a lot of effort put into breeder reactors because the amount of known U-235 was considered really small. So breeders had to be developed however as usually happens more U-235 was discovered once people started looking. And this sadly lead to way less emphasis being put on breeders.
> there's still the constant need of water for cooling
This is wrong. Almost any GenIV reactor is perfectly fine with being air cooled. In fact most reactors are perfectly fine in the icy tundra and the hottest desert on the planet.
Consider that for a reactor that runs on 600C even a desert feels like being in an ice bath.
As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we stopped progressing in the early 1970s and are still using blown up submarine reactors.
The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues.
> nuclear proliferation
An over estimate problem. Depending on the design you can make it practically impossible to do anything. And if you can do anything it would be about 100x more effort then just developing the bomb the same way everybody else has.
There are absolutely nuclear designs that you can deploy in most places in the world.
> the small risk of malfunctions
While true, the same can be said for wind and solar. Even current nuclear doesn't kill people.
Future GenIV reactors potential for harm is very local. You could potentially imagine some accident that kills some people inside of the power plant.
But unless you combine the story of 3 evil bond villains its hard to see how with such reactors you could seriously harm people outside of the plant boundary.
So I would say in terms of risk, building 1000s of large towers to harness the wind, this is much less dangerous.
> or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg
Practically it makes no sense and will not be cheaper then fission for a whole host of reasons.
Also, it still has proliferation concerns and still has the potential of accidents that could leak radiation.
Fusion might make sense for a few space application, but practically for earth is mostly irrelevant.
>>>
As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we stopped progressing in the
early 1970s and are still using blown up submarine reactors.
The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues.
<<<
About this, I wonder if the number of new works mean that we are getting over the bump of stagnation. Do you think enough is getting done on that end?
Also, I wonder what type of work can have the most impact on this side. My Government (Quebec, Canada) closed our last nuclear reactor years ago, but there's still some knowledge base around smaller reactors in Universities.
There's also plan to expand investment into private-held reactor development (https://www.cnl.ca/clean-energy/canadian-nuclear-research-in...).
Is this an avenue, considering the legislative/regulation overhead, that will ever be sustainable or it should be spearheaded by governments like it was in the 50s?
Canada is actually the globally leading country in terms of commercial GenIV nuclear. Many nuclear companies are moving to Canada from the US and Britain because Canada has a sane legislator, utilities that want nuclear. Ontario is really at the core of global nuclear innovation.
The CNSC is at the very lead in terms of GenIV (hate that term) reactor designs. They created an innovate new way of going threw licensing. See:
Canada is also finally investing some amount of money into next generation fuel reprocessing. Canada might actually be the first country to really solve fuel reprocessing. Together with Moltex Energy they have a real plan of turning their CANDU fuel waste in fuel for next generation reactors. This kind of reprocessing is much better then the process used in France for example. It could be a model for the world.
All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US.
The US really did a horrible thing regulation, NRC is a terrible agency in a number of ways, specially when it comes to next generation reactors. The AEC had been far more active, since the NRC took over, almost nothing has been done.
Thankfully the US DoE finally started to realize how bad they were doing in some aspects. They made some fantastic changes like the GAIN program.
However turning the DoE is like turning a ship 100x the size of the titanic.
So the real hope is that the DoE will look into the process of the CNSC and do a co-licensing. Meaning that if a plant gets a license in Canada. It will be very easy to do the same in the US. That would be the best outcome. Nuclear safety should have one globally process, at least for the west.
There are also some interesting things happening in the US. NuScale is a interesting company and their efforts while still being focused on PWRs does actually have number of things in its license that other companies will be able to use and build on.
In addition to that, Kairos Power is doing some pretty interesting things trying to 'hack' the traditional licensing process. They are trying to do fast iteration with nuclear the same way SpaceX does in space. And have the regulator follow along so when they are ready to build a full plant, the regulator already knows a huge amount about the design.
There is also some hope that some countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Estonia ...) might start buying advanced nuclear plants, giving these plants more of a market. Since these countries don't have the very high level regulators, they might just mostly reuse the Canadian process. So a single GenIV plant built in Canada could be globally transformative.
So yeah good things are finally happening again. A lot of credit goes to ground up nuclear movements kicked of partly by Kirk Soronson. He rediscovered a lot of the molten salt work and published. And many of the nuclear companies, like Terrestrial Power, actually met at these early events about molten salt and thorium. He himself has Flibe Energy, their vision is somewhat more complex and longer term but very interesting and fundamental.
Its hard to see what happening in China. India has every intensive to do nuclear and they have some of the right ideas, but India is pretty slow moving.
Europe is just highly divided and every country is cooking its own soup. So its hard for Europe to serve as market. That is why the US is so fundamental. Its the only market driven state where you don't necessarily need focused central government driven push for next generation nuclear.
> All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US.
I don't know enough about the politics of that, I'm European. I guess the nuclear part of Canada is pretty close to a lot of the North Eastern Cities so technically I think so.
Wind and solar have their benefits. I think it's always good to have a diverse supply.
It's a common misconception that you have to run nuclear power plants at 100% output all the time. That was true in 1970 but newer plants can adjust their output to meet demand, some even do so on a continuous basis to stabilize the frequency of the electric grid.
The resulting changes in temperature put some stress on the parts of the reactor because of thermal expansion but it is something the reactor can be built to tolerate.
I don't know where the idea of nuclear being cheap comes from. Yes, the fuel is miniscule and relatively cheap, but all it does is get far hotter than any type of coal or gas boiler would. You still need a heat engine on the higher tech end of material science to turn that heat into usable energy. And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling system to cover the difference between the dynamic grid load and a reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days.
That doesn't mean nuclear is a bad thing, especially when you consider the externalities and production costs of other systems. It's just not a miracle electricity device. Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination
If you do a first principles analysis of the amount of material required and the complexity of the plant, nuclear looks really good.
The turbine you use to turn heat into power can be the same as the one uses for commercial gas. Nuclear is not actually hotter. Current PWR are actually cooler then Gas/Coal plant (and that's part of why they are so expensive).
Most high temperature nuclear reactors will run at comparable temperatures to gas plants, around 600C. I don't know much about gas plants so correct me if they run at lower temps.
> higher tech end of material science
High temperature doesn't necessary use high tech. Depending on the design, the main containment vessel can be pretty ordinary stainless steal.
And the same can be said for airplanes, cars or rockets. They use high tech, but if you do it correctly and you build more then 1, it can still be cheap for the end user.
> And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling system
High temperature reactors don't need huge cooling systems. The huge size of PWR is mostly related to its absurdly large steam cooling systems, but all of that wouldn't exist in a modern reactor.
> reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days.
Again, you are drawing conclusions from current reactor designs that were fundamentally designed in the 1960s to power submarines.
Modern reactor designs can have very good load following capability. Specially if you make that a goal of the reactor design.
A good reactor design is fundamentally load following, if you pull more energy it will produce more.
> It's just not a miracle electricity device.
I would sort-of disagree. I would suggest that most miracles (walking on water) are not as amazing as the discovery of a material that has many orders of magnitude higher energy density and the a device that has the ability to harness that.
Of course its not a divine miracle but given a world that is powered by coal, finding uranium/thorium is basically a miracle.
A nuclear reactor like we could build it if we do 5-10 more design iteration would be one of the closes things to a miracle device that we use.
> Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination
Yes, very much so. If you look at the live of Alvin Weinberg one of pioneers of the nuclear age and the inventor of both the PWR and the Molten Salt reactor. His vision was far beyond just power generation.
He had a whole vision of society driven by nuclear plants, nuclear desalination was on of them. I not sure if he talked about synthetic fuel or not.
You could even imagine having a nuclear reactor per city super-block and then using solar salt to circulate the heating rather then using electrical heaters.
But to get to these applications we need to build on the currently existing market.
Nuclear is way more expensive than other renewables and even gas. It takes a long time to build too. What no one seems to be exploring is creating a world wide array of solar panels so that everyone has power when they need it. Atleast US, Africa, India and Europe could do it together.
That is drawing short side conclusions from limited data drawn from a world that has per-selected against nuclear.
If you look at the energy need of the whole world, and from first principle try to figure out what is the best way to generate enough power for the whole world to live a first world live-style, nuclear is by far the winner.
And the result will be system far more reliable and robust compared to one built with solar/wind/storage and long distance transportation.
It seems to me to be peak shortsightedness to argue in favor of connecting energy grids in that manner, when we're seeing the failure modes of doing so right now in Europe as a result of the Ukraine war.
Although I am wary of nuclear's sustainability due to usage of fresh water (another limited resource in our climate crisis days)... I mean look at France nuclear + dry rivers...
I think Nuclear should be part of our basket of energy sources (as it's baseload) to combat climate change.
> I am wary of nuclear's sustainability due to usage of fresh water
I feel like there should be ways to engineer around this especially for reactors near the coast. Use some of the power from the plant to desalinate sea water or engineer to use sea water?
I seem to recall Jackie Srouji (a navy intelligence agent who got busted when she talked big to a reporter after Karen Silkwood died under mysterious circumstances) also got busted by Navy Seals when she went for a swim to check out the water intakes for the San Onofre power station near San Diego.
> The plant's once-through cooling system (OTC) draws water from the Pacific Ocean to condense steam driving its turbines [0]
Wikipedia seems to say that Diablo canyon is cooled by salt water, not fresh water. The Wikipedia page also outlines how they attempt to protect marine wildlife in the region. Do most nuclear power plants require fresh water? Is it a big problem?
The problem with nuclear's use of water is that the water released is heated and causes problems with the ecosystem (ie, waste heat).
In fact, Diablo runs at a lower power to prevent dumping too much waste heat back into the ocean ecosystem.
From the wikipedia page:
" and power is limited during operation so that water returned to the ocean is no more than 20 °F (11 °C) warmer than ambient temperature. "
There is no requirement that reactors use fresh water. And there is nothing that says fresh water can't be used after being used to cool a nuclear reactor. It's not like the fresh water is consumed.
Diablo Canyon is in an absolutely beautiful part of the central coast of California. Definitely visit the greater San Luis Obispo area. Californians want it all (green and plentiful), but lack the basics to make that happen (coalfire supplemented with wind and solar plus overloaded grids -- see what happens this weekend with FlexAlerts already called).
Nuclear should be considered. I don't know how to make them perfectly safe and their have been incidents where unfortunate accidents occur, but newer technology and designs might make our society able to have their cake and eat it too.
> I don't know how to make them perfectly safe and their have been incidents where unfortunate accidents occur
The issue I have with this argument is that if we don't dramatically reduce CO2 emissions far, far more people are going to die from climate change than nuclear might kill.
Plus, as another commenter already mentioned, the amount of deaths coal is responsible for is 470x higher than nuclear from air pollution alone. We accept these deaths for coal but somehow have a problem with a much smaller number of deaths from nuclear in the theoretical case of a massive incident. I'm not saying there's an acceptable number of deaths to just live with but pragmatically speaking I'll gladly take the proven option that kills orders of magnitudes fewer people than the status quo is already doing.
> Compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to a study of the health effects of electricity generation in Europe.
In a vast country like ours I'd expect the government to be able to find cheap secluded places (in states such as NV?) where new reactors can be built. And then rich states such as CA buy the electricity from them. And probably invest into building them too.
This is a pragmatic decision as California, like many other regions, tries to make a transition away from fossil fuels while also dealing with the persistent disinformation from the anti-nuclear lobby.
Where would you rank US-west in terms of "industrialised places where its easiest to phase out fossils or nuclear for renewables"?
Because for my money, it may be the best-suited place in the world.
- Lowish latitude, so winter nights are never that long, and usage peaks are in summer;
- Fair amount of land - even in CA, especially if we cheat a bit and assume NV is playing ball;
- Lots of money.
And even there, nuclear or gas are still necessary. Maybe Australia beats it.
I can say this, Europe - including the UK - has over the last two decades made the worst energy decisions, probably ever. Winter peaking with 16 hour nights, and last year we had week-long periods with generation of, to all intents and purposes, zero useful power from wind during that period. For what its worth, this year Germany restarted 8 GW of coal, and I'm sorry but no other country in the world should be listening to European lectures on climate ever again after that. Wholesale costs have exceeded $500 per MWh, they briefly peaked in London at $9000, and the same amount of battery storage costs $100,000. I have talked to investors on the latter figure and none expect that figure to decrease significantly. Raw materials will not humour your optimism.
Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?
The more relevant question is, how easy would it be to power the whole country with nuclear.
The US has a long history of research, still has a huge amount of knowlage of nuclear inside the country. And the US has the scale that if they select 1-2 plant designs, the same plant can be built, over and over and over again. A luxury small countries don't have.
If the US simple decided to invest money in transition away from coal and gas, you simple plan a nuclear plant next to every existing coal plant and use your currently existing grid.
In terms of transitioning to renewables, the US is highly variable, and each regions need to do very complex analysis on what exactly it needs. How much wind and solar it has, what the current grid is and how to adjust it. And then also how much storage you need to keep reliability.
If you are going to transport energy over long distances (something traditional grid designs tried to avoid) you need to then interlink all these complex island of renewable+storage. You make your region depended on wind energy from another state.
> Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?
Look at how NASA did the COST and CommercialCrew program. Pick 2-6 nuclear plant designs, grantee that each on of the winners gets to build at least 4 plants and and then build a sales pipeline in cooperation with all utilizes to plan form more.
Then just build as many as you can, as fast as you can. Likely within a decade you will be finishing many reactors every year and you easily build enough electricity to power the grid, plus transportation, heating and even aviation.
If France could mostly do this in 1970s with sub-optimal technology from the 1960s, why would it be harder now.
I didn't follow the case of Europe, but I did follow a bit the US.
Take a look at the first graph in [1]. Roughly speaking at this point the US gets 20% electricity from each of coal, renewable and nuclear and 40% from natural gas. In 1990 gas and renewables were standing both at around 10% (renewables in those times were just hydro). Gas went up exponentially to get to 4 times as high now. Renewables double, but that is deceiving. Hydro stayed constant, and wind and solar went from 0 to 10%. Nuclear was roughly constant for the last 20 years.
How do we get from here to net zero? It's quite simple actually: keep replacing coal with natural gas and renewables. In about 5 years coal should get to essentially zero. Then start keep growing renewables, and start replacing natural gas. Keep nuclear constant if possible. 2050 for net zero is easily achievable.
But that's maybe because, as you said, the US is in a nearly ideal position.
In EU, start by replacing all coal by nat gas. That's the best bang for the buck in terms of reducing emissions. Keep growing solar and wind. When the sun doesn't shine, and the wind doesn't blow, run the nat gas stations. In one decade or at most 15 years, we'll start shipping liquefied hydrogen. Most likely we'll convert the current LNG carriers to LH2 carriers. We should be able to convert nat gas power plants to hydrogen power plants. The EU is investing more than $100 BN into the hydrogen economy. It will work. 2050 will be doable. Not as doable as in the US, but still doable.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadhttps://comb.io/H7qsWh (for some reason there's no English version on youtube)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(series)#Development
http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=592
Assuming the same capacity, four more stations would take it to 45%. That's nearly half of your electricity for a state as large as California from a stable, reliable, and clean(-er than fossil fuels) source that drops into the existing grid. I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/climate/california-lawmak...
> I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors.
I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar.
Do you just want your power supply to be less reliable and have a massive dependency of storage?
If you have nuclear, why would you ever go of it? There is no reason what so ever to do so.
Even fusion will not replace fission. Nuclear fission is the cheapest possible energy by in a first principles analysis (except maybe some Aneutronic fusion maybe but we can't really even analyise what that would be).
Lets go threw the major costs of a power plant.
- Building the primary plant
- Operations in form of maintenance and salary.
- Fuel cost (including transportation and so on)
Now lets start with fuel cost. If we are talking about an advanced breeder fission reactor, thorium or natural uranium is basically free. Thorium is a waste product of Rare Earth mining, we have far more then we could ever use already. This material needs to be devolved into some salt.
Fusion on the other hand will need to breed its fuel. That would basically require to mine lithium and then circulate it around an already existing fusion reactor. That possible but doesn't sound exactly cheap, it would be an incredibly complex process.
So on fuel cost, fission wins pretty clearly.
In terms of building the plant, if you look at some basic assumptions about a bill of materials, its pretty clear as well. Many advanced fission reactors are not much more then a big bucket of some sort of steel alloy (stainless steal or some sort of nickel alloy). Not more complex then many advanced materials used in airplane or rocket construction. Its more of an issue with qualification then production. Inside of that bucket you are gone have some graphite tubes or some other metal tubes. That bucket is likely filled with some molten salt, not so much different from molten toothpaste.
Now compare this to a containment facility that needs to literally contain the heat a small sun. Not only do you need a magnetic containment that consists of large of highly advanced materials but you also need a physical material that can be blasted by a small sun.
What's cheaper to build, a bucket full of hot toothpaste or a complex shaped object that contains a small sun?
In terms of operations, a modern load following breeder needs very little refueling. Depending on the exact design you might even just continuously refuel and all you would have to do is dump some additional thorium into the salt. In some designs you need a crane to shuffle around fuel tubes every so often.
Not sure how commercial operation of a fusion reactor would exactly work and how automated you could do all of that. I don't think we have enough information to really estimate that. However its hart to see how much easier it would be then a fission reactor.
So I think in all major cost aspects, fission looks better. The real advantage of fusion is 3 order of magnitude higher density. But fission fuel is essentially free and dense enough that transporting it is absolute non issue, so not sure how increase density really helps fusion.
So I'm not against fusion research, I think its great. But we need to do research, not obsess about trying to build commercial fusion power.
A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background), there are only ~230 years of uranium available.[1] And that's at today's consumption rates; build the amount of reactors we need and it's even less. Maybe we'd find more or maybe there's some other fissile material to use (thorium?). I'm not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to be honest, but it is finite on some timeline. Whereas wind and solar will last as long as the sun lasts.
Aside from that, there's always the small risk of malfunctions and nuclear proliferation. Even with newer tech that could greatly limit the possibility of accidents to near zero (it's already absurdly low) there's still the constant need of water for cooling and geopolitical issues causing problems like what is happening right now with the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine.
That's why I say it's not perfect but that it does serve an incredibly important purpose in the near term to dramatically lower CO2 emissions and buy time to either deploy more wind & solar, extend the life of nuclear, or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg. Exactly how that looks would likely be a question for our children to answer.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
Since uranium is water soluble there are large amounts in the ocean and if fast reactors were made economical it would be practical to extract from seawater, seawater uranium is a renewable resource because uranium is always eroding from rocks and making its way to the ocean by rivers.
Thorium breeders do the same thing as plutonium breeders by converting Th232 to U233 except they can do it with a thermal spectrum. It's not so clear if terrestrial Th or U is really more abundant but Th is not in seawater because, like Pu it is not water soluble.
The idea of natural resources running out is always pushed about everything and is always wrong.
However, in this case its wrong on an even more fundamental level. There is a gigantic amount of fertile (i.e. you need to hit it with one neutron to make it fissile) nuclear material around. Literally enough for 1000s of years. And volcanic activity is bringing up new such material from deeper in the earth.
Any non insane nuclear strategy will eventually switch to breeder reactors and if you do, the amount of fissile material is essentially infinite.
We already have gigantic amounts of fissile material in the form of spent fuel that we can use to start breeder reactors.
This video goes threw how you can do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkZ0ZBAVDu4
> other fissile material to use (thorium?)
There is both a huge amount of fertile material, both in the form of thorium (T-232) and what is usually called natural uranium (U-238).
The things consider limited is Uranium-235 if I'm not mistaken. This is the only surviving naturally fissile material. But should it get down to it, I'm sure we could extend the amount of known reserves, just as we did for almost everything else.
There is a pretty interesting story here about 3 different strains of nuclear that exists and of these the naturally fissile material of 2 of them is 'extinct'. Only U-235 is still sticking around. If not for that, it would have been much harder to start nuclear age.
In the beginning there was a lot of effort put into breeder reactors because the amount of known U-235 was considered really small. So breeders had to be developed however as usually happens more U-235 was discovered once people started looking. And this sadly lead to way less emphasis being put on breeders.
> there's still the constant need of water for cooling
This is wrong. Almost any GenIV reactor is perfectly fine with being air cooled. In fact most reactors are perfectly fine in the icy tundra and the hottest desert on the planet.
Consider that for a reactor that runs on 600C even a desert feels like being in an ice bath.
As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we stopped progressing in the early 1970s and are still using blown up submarine reactors.
The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues.
> nuclear proliferation
An over estimate problem. Depending on the design you can make it practically impossible to do anything. And if you can do anything it would be about 100x more effort then just developing the bomb the same way everybody else has.
There are absolutely nuclear designs that you can deploy in most places in the world.
> the small risk of malfunctions
While true, the same can be said for wind and solar. Even current nuclear doesn't kill people.
Future GenIV reactors potential for harm is very local. You could potentially imagine some accident that kills some people inside of the power plant.
But unless you combine the story of 3 evil bond villains its hard to see how with such reactors you could seriously harm people outside of the plant boundary.
So I would say in terms of risk, building 1000s of large towers to harness the wind, this is much less dangerous.
> or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg
Practically it makes no sense and will not be cheaper then fission for a whole host of reasons.
Also, it still has proliferation concerns and still has the potential of accidents that could leak radiation.
Fusion might make sense for a few space application, but practically for earth is mostly irrelevant.
The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues.
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About this, I wonder if the number of new works mean that we are getting over the bump of stagnation. Do you think enough is getting done on that end? Also, I wonder what type of work can have the most impact on this side. My Government (Quebec, Canada) closed our last nuclear reactor years ago, but there's still some knowledge base around smaller reactors in Universities.
There's also plan to expand investment into private-held reactor development (https://www.cnl.ca/clean-energy/canadian-nuclear-research-in...). Is this an avenue, considering the legislative/regulation overhead, that will ever be sustainable or it should be spearheaded by governments like it was in the 50s?
The CNSC is at the very lead in terms of GenIV (hate that term) reactor designs. They created an innovate new way of going threw licensing. See:
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
Canada is also finally investing some amount of money into next generation fuel reprocessing. Canada might actually be the first country to really solve fuel reprocessing. Together with Moltex Energy they have a real plan of turning their CANDU fuel waste in fuel for next generation reactors. This kind of reprocessing is much better then the process used in France for example. It could be a model for the world.
All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US.
The US really did a horrible thing regulation, NRC is a terrible agency in a number of ways, specially when it comes to next generation reactors. The AEC had been far more active, since the NRC took over, almost nothing has been done.
Thankfully the US DoE finally started to realize how bad they were doing in some aspects. They made some fantastic changes like the GAIN program.
https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx
However turning the DoE is like turning a ship 100x the size of the titanic.
So the real hope is that the DoE will look into the process of the CNSC and do a co-licensing. Meaning that if a plant gets a license in Canada. It will be very easy to do the same in the US. That would be the best outcome. Nuclear safety should have one globally process, at least for the west.
There are also some interesting things happening in the US. NuScale is a interesting company and their efforts while still being focused on PWRs does actually have number of things in its license that other companies will be able to use and build on.
In addition to that, Kairos Power is doing some pretty interesting things trying to 'hack' the traditional licensing process. They are trying to do fast iteration with nuclear the same way SpaceX does in space. And have the regulator follow along so when they are ready to build a full plant, the regulator already knows a huge amount about the design.
There is also some hope that some countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Estonia ...) might start buying advanced nuclear plants, giving these plants more of a market. Since these countries don't have the very high level regulators, they might just mostly reuse the Canadian process. So a single GenIV plant built in Canada could be globally transformative.
So yeah good things are finally happening again. A lot of credit goes to ground up nuclear movements kicked of partly by Kirk Soronson. He rediscovered a lot of the molten salt work and published. And many of the nuclear companies, like Terrestrial Power, actually met at these early events about molten salt and thorium. He himself has Flibe Energy, their vision is somewhat more complex and longer term but very interesting and fundamental.
Its hard to see what happening in China. India has every intensive to do nuclear and they have some of the right ideas, but India is pretty slow moving.
Europe is just highly divided and every country is cooking its own soup. So its hard for Europe to serve as market. That is why the US is so fundamental. Its the only market driven state where you don't necessarily need focused central government driven push for next generation nuclear.
You will never have some Canadian...
Could they export electricity to the US? The grids are already intertied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
It's a common misconception that you have to run nuclear power plants at 100% output all the time. That was true in 1970 but newer plants can adjust their output to meet demand, some even do so on a continuous basis to stabilize the frequency of the electric grid.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
The resulting changes in temperature put some stress on the parts of the reactor because of thermal expansion but it is something the reactor can be built to tolerate.
That doesn't mean nuclear is a bad thing, especially when you consider the externalities and production costs of other systems. It's just not a miracle electricity device. Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination
The turbine you use to turn heat into power can be the same as the one uses for commercial gas. Nuclear is not actually hotter. Current PWR are actually cooler then Gas/Coal plant (and that's part of why they are so expensive).
Most high temperature nuclear reactors will run at comparable temperatures to gas plants, around 600C. I don't know much about gas plants so correct me if they run at lower temps.
> higher tech end of material science
High temperature doesn't necessary use high tech. Depending on the design, the main containment vessel can be pretty ordinary stainless steal.
And the same can be said for airplanes, cars or rockets. They use high tech, but if you do it correctly and you build more then 1, it can still be cheap for the end user.
> And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling system
High temperature reactors don't need huge cooling systems. The huge size of PWR is mostly related to its absurdly large steam cooling systems, but all of that wouldn't exist in a modern reactor.
> reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days.
Again, you are drawing conclusions from current reactor designs that were fundamentally designed in the 1960s to power submarines.
Modern reactor designs can have very good load following capability. Specially if you make that a goal of the reactor design.
A good reactor design is fundamentally load following, if you pull more energy it will produce more.
> It's just not a miracle electricity device.
I would sort-of disagree. I would suggest that most miracles (walking on water) are not as amazing as the discovery of a material that has many orders of magnitude higher energy density and the a device that has the ability to harness that.
Of course its not a divine miracle but given a world that is powered by coal, finding uranium/thorium is basically a miracle.
A nuclear reactor like we could build it if we do 5-10 more design iteration would be one of the closes things to a miracle device that we use.
> Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination
Yes, very much so. If you look at the live of Alvin Weinberg one of pioneers of the nuclear age and the inventor of both the PWR and the Molten Salt reactor. His vision was far beyond just power generation.
He had a whole vision of society driven by nuclear plants, nuclear desalination was on of them. I not sure if he talked about synthetic fuel or not.
You could even imagine having a nuclear reactor per city super-block and then using solar salt to circulate the heating rather then using electrical heaters.
But to get to these applications we need to build on the currently existing market.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...
Edit: Hell, US alone could do and get over peak demand in the evenings by having panel array spread all over the country.
If you look at the energy need of the whole world, and from first principle try to figure out what is the best way to generate enough power for the whole world to live a first world live-style, nuclear is by far the winner.
And the result will be system far more reliable and robust compared to one built with solar/wind/storage and long distance transportation.
Although I am wary of nuclear's sustainability due to usage of fresh water (another limited resource in our climate crisis days)... I mean look at France nuclear + dry rivers...
I think Nuclear should be part of our basket of energy sources (as it's baseload) to combat climate change.
The solution is to finally evolve the technology.
I feel like there should be ways to engineer around this especially for reactors near the coast. Use some of the power from the plant to desalinate sea water or engineer to use sea water?
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6367683
I seem to recall Jackie Srouji (a navy intelligence agent who got busted when she talked big to a reporter after Karen Silkwood died under mysterious circumstances) also got busted by Navy Seals when she went for a swim to check out the water intakes for the San Onofre power station near San Diego.
Wikipedia seems to say that Diablo canyon is cooled by salt water, not fresh water. The Wikipedia page also outlines how they attempt to protect marine wildlife in the region. Do most nuclear power plants require fresh water? Is it a big problem?
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
In fact, Diablo runs at a lower power to prevent dumping too much waste heat back into the ocean ecosystem.
From the wikipedia page: " and power is limited during operation so that water returned to the ocean is no more than 20 °F (11 °C) warmer than ambient temperature. "
Nuclear should be considered. I don't know how to make them perfectly safe and their have been incidents where unfortunate accidents occur, but newer technology and designs might make our society able to have their cake and eat it too.
The issue I have with this argument is that if we don't dramatically reduce CO2 emissions far, far more people are going to die from climate change than nuclear might kill.
Plus, as another commenter already mentioned, the amount of deaths coal is responsible for is 470x higher than nuclear from air pollution alone. We accept these deaths for coal but somehow have a problem with a much smaller number of deaths from nuclear in the theoretical case of a massive incident. I'm not saying there's an acceptable number of deaths to just live with but pragmatically speaking I'll gladly take the proven option that kills orders of magnitudes fewer people than the status quo is already doing.
> Compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to a study of the health effects of electricity generation in Europe.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-saf...
Where would you rank US-west in terms of "industrialised places where its easiest to phase out fossils or nuclear for renewables"?
Because for my money, it may be the best-suited place in the world.
- Lowish latitude, so winter nights are never that long, and usage peaks are in summer; - Fair amount of land - even in CA, especially if we cheat a bit and assume NV is playing ball; - Lots of money.
And even there, nuclear or gas are still necessary. Maybe Australia beats it.
I can say this, Europe - including the UK - has over the last two decades made the worst energy decisions, probably ever. Winter peaking with 16 hour nights, and last year we had week-long periods with generation of, to all intents and purposes, zero useful power from wind during that period. For what its worth, this year Germany restarted 8 GW of coal, and I'm sorry but no other country in the world should be listening to European lectures on climate ever again after that. Wholesale costs have exceeded $500 per MWh, they briefly peaked in London at $9000, and the same amount of battery storage costs $100,000. I have talked to investors on the latter figure and none expect that figure to decrease significantly. Raw materials will not humour your optimism.
Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?
The US has a long history of research, still has a huge amount of knowlage of nuclear inside the country. And the US has the scale that if they select 1-2 plant designs, the same plant can be built, over and over and over again. A luxury small countries don't have.
If the US simple decided to invest money in transition away from coal and gas, you simple plan a nuclear plant next to every existing coal plant and use your currently existing grid.
In terms of transitioning to renewables, the US is highly variable, and each regions need to do very complex analysis on what exactly it needs. How much wind and solar it has, what the current grid is and how to adjust it. And then also how much storage you need to keep reliability.
If you are going to transport energy over long distances (something traditional grid designs tried to avoid) you need to then interlink all these complex island of renewable+storage. You make your region depended on wind energy from another state.
> Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?
Look at how NASA did the COST and CommercialCrew program. Pick 2-6 nuclear plant designs, grantee that each on of the winners gets to build at least 4 plants and and then build a sales pipeline in cooperation with all utilizes to plan form more.
Then just build as many as you can, as fast as you can. Likely within a decade you will be finishing many reactors every year and you easily build enough electricity to power the grid, plus transportation, heating and even aviation.
If France could mostly do this in 1970s with sub-optimal technology from the 1960s, why would it be harder now.
Take a look at the first graph in [1]. Roughly speaking at this point the US gets 20% electricity from each of coal, renewable and nuclear and 40% from natural gas. In 1990 gas and renewables were standing both at around 10% (renewables in those times were just hydro). Gas went up exponentially to get to 4 times as high now. Renewables double, but that is deceiving. Hydro stayed constant, and wind and solar went from 0 to 10%. Nuclear was roughly constant for the last 20 years.
How do we get from here to net zero? It's quite simple actually: keep replacing coal with natural gas and renewables. In about 5 years coal should get to essentially zero. Then start keep growing renewables, and start replacing natural gas. Keep nuclear constant if possible. 2050 for net zero is easily achievable.
But that's maybe because, as you said, the US is in a nearly ideal position.
In EU, start by replacing all coal by nat gas. That's the best bang for the buck in terms of reducing emissions. Keep growing solar and wind. When the sun doesn't shine, and the wind doesn't blow, run the nat gas stations. In one decade or at most 15 years, we'll start shipping liquefied hydrogen. Most likely we'll convert the current LNG carriers to LH2 carriers. We should be able to convert nat gas power plants to hydrogen power plants. The EU is investing more than $100 BN into the hydrogen economy. It will work. 2050 will be doable. Not as doable as in the US, but still doable.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896