Ask HN: Nuclear plants in war zones: A valid reason not to build more
The media has frequently been screaming about the dangers of one of the nuclear powerplants in Ukraine being targeted and damaged in the war.
A dirty nuke, radiation over Europe the scenarios being discussed are plentiful.
To me this seems to be the best argument to not invest and rely on nuclear powerplants going forward.
Ukraine has several other types of power generators / plants that are not featured much in the media. The exception being hydropower when a dam was damaged.
The argument “There will never be a war here” seems foolish to me.
151 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadUnfortunately, we don't have other reliable clean alternatives. At the moment nuclear energy is the cleanest reliable energy we have. This is why China is building 150 reactors at the moment:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
Also it is not in anyone's interest to have a nuclear accident. What if there is a nuclear accident in Ukraine and the wind starts blowing east?
There are other more likely things that scare me more like chemical/biological warfare and military drones that can fit in a backpack.
I'd not bet against solar power with all these things considered. If anything, I'd start building additional HVDC power lines to geographically smooth out local variation of available power.
You list installed capacity, solar available capacity rarely ever reach installed capacity in Europe.
That ratio is called "capacity factor" which I actually mentioned to be around 10-25%. There's a Wikipedia article on it if you want to know more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
This would still be cheaper than nuclear.
Source needed. Germany electricity price is one of the highest price in europe while having invested heavily in renewables.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy_prices...
> Europe could use hydrogen for seasonal load leveling
You propose to use an unproven tech, never made at scale, instead of an existing, working one ?
Germany already have industrial scale Power2Gaz, which is a way to store energy, but they are still relying heavily on coal, and have one of the highest electricity price.
Germany's residental rates are irrelevant; what matters is the cost at the wholesale level of providing the input energy to the grid. Germany soaks its citizens to subsidize power for its industry.
It's not, the ultimate demonstration being it deployed at scale.
> sufficient CO2 taxes
Which will reduce solar competitiveness to nuclear, since solar have 4x the CO2 per kwh of nuclear electricity. It also doesn't solve the big problem solar have in Europe, since it produce less than 10% of it's installed capacity right now (last 30 days average for Germany), it's not even winter yet. &
> Germany's residental rates are irrelevant
Except being directly tied to energy production price.
> Germany soaks its citizens to subsidize power for its industry.
Which should make household price cheaper, not costlier.
About the only thing that might not scale is storage capacity underground, but there are plenty of salt formations and spent gas fields to store hydrogen in. We already store a seasons' worth of natural gas underground in such formations.
If you want to see a GOOD example of "cannot scale", look at today's nuclear reactors. LWRs cannot scale to power the world because uranium runs out. This was the motivation for building breeder reactors. Unlike hydrogen burning turbines, hydrogen storage in underground caverns, and electrolysers, breeder reactors are still a technology under development, with serious issues (safety, economics, reliability, proliferation.)
It's been 40 years we know how to build breeder reactors. And there are already been multiple commercial fast breeder reactor.
But like regular nuclear reactors, yes it is a technology under development. But we also have more than 100 years to figure out the rest.
> The "at scale" argument is flaccid. It's feckless unless you can give a reason why the technology would not scale.
Cost, and cost.
Power2Gaz already exists, you never showed how it was inferior to your tech.
But in both case, there is an enormous problem you never mentioned: the efficiency of power2gas is currently of 60% at most, hydrogen included.
Without including the equipement cost needed, stored solar electricity is suddendly costlier than nuclear.
Fast breeders have grave safety issues inherent in their physics. The delayed neutron fraction of plutonium (or U-233) is about half that of U-235. This means any breeder is skating closer to prompt supercriticality. If a fast reactor goes prompt supercritical, it will explode more violently than Chernobyl, since the time for the neutron population to double (for a given value of k) will be orders of magnitude shorter. Worst case, it would be an actual nuclear explosion.
Fast breeders also present proliferation concerns. To get a good breeding ratio, a blanket of fertile material is placed around the fissioning core, so the neutrons escaping the core are efficiently utilized. If this is U-238, the Pu produced in the blanket will be "superweapon grade", with very low concentrations of higher Pu isotopes. Thorium breeders also have proliferation concerns, from the need to separate Pa-231 and allow it to decay before. This produces essentially pure U-233 outside the core.
> cost and cost
Let's look at a simple model to see how using hydrogen affects cost.
https://model.energy/
Try Germany using 2011 or 2012 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions (note the cost of electrolysers in China is already half the number assumed there.) The overall cost of providing a steady 100 MW output is not bad, lower than what one would pay from a newly constructed nuclear plant including the cost of construction and financing. Hydrogen helps reduce the cost here, not increase it. Even very slight amounts of hydrogen noticeably help, covering for rare prolonged dark/calm periods.
Yes due to public pressure/antinuclear lobby.
> Fast breeders have grave safety issues inherent in their physics.
Yet there has been a dozen of fast breeders reactors, and somes are still operating today.
I trust way more the IPCC forecast on the subjects, than yours. The fully renewable path was rated "very uncertain, very risky" for the exact point I told you.
The fully nuclear path for France was also uncertain and risky, but for another reason, they are uncertain we can build nuclear plant fast enough, which is understandable because they recommand a 2x increase in electricity production.
BTW, this shows that for all the talk, France doesn't see nuclear as the global solution to CO2 emissions. Nor does Japan (whose fast breeder program was even more a fiasco) or the US (where we abandoned fast breeders even earlier, after massive cost overruns.) Fast reactors are like ordinary nuclear, only with even more ludicrousness.
As for safety, the person to listen to is Edward Teller. He famously and publicly (in 1967) brought up the safety issue I mentioned. Because of that safety issue, I seriously doubt if any heterogenous fast reactor (with conventional fuel elements) would be licensed in the West today. That leaves molten salt fast reactors, but no one has ever built on of those, and they'd have serious problems with neutron damage to reactor structural materials.
This is incredibly disingenuous. Current gen PV produces less CO2 than nuclear, and even a $1/kg a CO2 tax would only add a fraction of a cent per kWh to either.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
Nuclear is 12g eqCO2/kwh (median)
The levelized cost of electricity is also listed as cheaper for nuclear.
As is comparing electricity that costs $100/MWh after publicly guaranteed loans and after the public takes on any accident liability in excess of the cost of a quarter of one reactor to unsubsidized electricity actually sold for $15/MWh
Oh look. The more up to date version of that report:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
Which doesn't include mining from ores that are 1/10th concentration that would be required to expand nuclear enough to solve the problem. But it does show you intentionally picking out of date information to lie about LCOE.
When proponents of the nuclear consistently lie about everything, it makes it very hard to believe the industry hasn't done things like forge the paperwork on essential safety parts.
Luckily people like you are most likely just lying to prolong the transition from fossil fuels, and aren't part of the industry.
You are saying "with CO2 taxes it will be profitable"
The thing is, nuclear don't need CO2 taxes to be profitable, and is low carbon, if your solution was that cheap and safe, it would be more invested than nuclear is.
> You are saying "with CO2 taxes it will be profitable"
Nowhere did I say this. There are entirely private PV installations that sell their energy for under $15/MWh, less than a tenth of recent nuclear plants like Vogtle even including massive subsidy
A CC power plant costs maybe $1/W; a nuclear plant costs 10x that. With cheap gas and no CO2 charges nuclear doesn't have a prayer of a chance to compete with that.
This is why the so-called "nuclear renaissance" in the US collapsed even before renewables got cheap.
It may produce more right now, with the existing supply chain for materials. But in a fossil-fuel free economy, there is no CO2 from fossil fuel combustion. Where are the CO2 emissions coming from? They could only be from manufacture of cement for concrete (calcination of limestone to calcium oxide and CO2.) PV doesn't have to use any concrete -- it can be mounted to the ground with steel earth anchors. Nuclear uses a lot of concrete.
The near term emissions of CO2 in construction of solar or nuclear are irrelevant, since they are swamped by the CO2 emission avoided as fossil fuels are displaced. Here, what matters is how rapidly the non-fossil alternatives can be rolled out, not what dribble of CO2 they produce directly.
As for levelized cost, the table lists the min/median/max cost of installed utility scale PV as 1700/3200/4300 $/kW. But the cost of utility scale PV in the US is already well below that minimum number. The footnotes give their sources as no later than 2013. PV prices have fallen greatly since that time (module prices per W down by about a factor of 4 in constant dollars.)
The min value for nuclear given is also absurd vs. actual experience with recent nuclear builds. The footnote says the data was from no later than 2013, before the EPR and APR1400 efforts went so disastrously wrong, when the "nuclear renaissance" had not fallen so flatly on its face. It also says (about nuclear):
"Limited recent data and/or original data are available in the published literature. More recent, (grey literature) sources provide investment cost and LCOE estimates that are considerably higher than the ones shown here (Brandão et al., 2012)."
This hasn't been true for some time. There's simply not enough money. The solar module in a good location costs 0.7 cents per kWh installed. Although that can buy you a couple hundred grams of coal, doing literally anything with it uses up all the money.
A 450W monocrystalline panel is under a kg of silicon, 50g of copper an a gram or so of silver.
The neat thing about solar panel factories is they have a bunch of solar panels, and so tend to produce 30-90% of their own electricity, so the carbon footprint is almost entirely racking, shipping 20kg, and the 11kg or so per panel from the raw silicon (which uses 70% of the money).
Meanwhile Uranium ore concentration is decreasing slightly faster than mining is getting more efficient.
BTW, last I checked, reduction of silica to silicon is done with charcoal as the carbon source. Something about the porous nature of charcoal leading to better reaction with silicon monoxide vapor.
Look up Chernobyl. Ukraine already had a meltdown disaster. Spoiler: Europe survived.
The exclusion zone which can't be inhabited for more than 3000 years to come is still 1,000 sq mi large. You can also still measure higher rates of radioactivity in mushrooms and game.
There's places where there's almost no radiation, then you walk into a random building and the exposure is too high to stay for a longer time.
Not sure that's a place you really want to live in, easy to say from a comfortable chair behind a screen somewhere far away.
He'll, they're growing food there that gets sold to Europe, cos it has below the standard level of contamination.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydnum_repandum#Constituents
[1] https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blek_piggsopp#Radioaktiv_forur...
They also absorb lead for instance. That's why you don't wanna pick shrooms near roads.
Europe survived because has paid for very expensive and very urgent fixings. Oh, yes, you always forget that.
And we are again in the starting point, looking at our blankets
That sounds like a bare minimum but not really a good argument for or against nuclear power plants. And if you do some research about the Chernobyl disaster, you might also want to look into the consequences that can still be observed today.
The officially acknowledged death toll is fairly questionable, primarily because of the "liquidators" and their extrem radiation exposure. The exclusion zone is still uninhabitable without facing serious health risks and the consequences can still be seen in countries other than Ukraine. In Germany in some areas the Caesium-137 exposure is still measurably higher than normal.
I totally understand the skepticism around nuclear power, especially in countries directly affected by the fallout in 1986.
Of course, statistically speaking nuclear power is fairly save (but still not without some major issues). But completely dismissing the emotional fear that has been directly shaped by personal experiences for many does a disservice to the whole debate.
it's 35 years on and there is a preponderance of evidence that nuclear is safe. it may feel like dismissal because people on the pro- side have known and argued the facts for decades. at a certain point you realize the fear is trauma-based for some and cultural for most, and that accommodating it gets you nowhere. holding someone's hand doesn't make stumbling down the energy ladder any more comfortable
Low yield nuclear ore has lower usable energy density than coal, and being beaten by french and chinese mine owners then poisoned by heavy metal laden sulfuric acid isn't safe.
Edit: On reflection, if you use a modern reactor and modern centrifuges, then the ore from Rossing produces 28MJ/kg of electricity. This is double that of coal. So this is slight hyperbole -- but not by much.
So we're good for 1 year or so of primary energy via PWRs?
After that the fuel runs out for reactors that aren't made of 100s of tonnes of liquid sodium each (and have no evidence of working reliably or not catching fire and being shut down for a year every few months), or (assuming they actually ever work) contain 0.5% of the entire world reserves of beryllium each.
Fast breeder reactor catch fire constantly.
LFTR is scifi made of incredibly toxic unobtanium.
Nuclear just way of moving power and money into hands of 5 companies while achieving nothing.
Happy?
if you're gonna stoop to that level the only other thing i'll say is "battery get cold go offline. battery get hot go offline. knife go in galaxy note 8 make go boom. armor piercing shell like same."
We are capable to focus on more than one thing at a time. Of course it doesn't make sense to instantly shut down all of nuclear power stations, just like it doesn't make sense to retire every fossil fuel powered engine at the same time or shut down coal from one day to the next. It's a long and slow process.
"The incidence of thyroid cancer in children, ordinarily very rare, had begun to increase markedly following the accident. Scientists have estimated up to 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer among residents who were children at the time of the accident"
"Plus an statistical excess of 9,000 cancer cases (leukemia + all solid tumors combined excluding thyroid) in the areas affected, and 5,000 people killed in this category".
"The study demonstrated increases in breast cancer incidence in all areas following the Chernobyl accident"
"the morbidity rate in Belarus for cervix cancer is as high as 36%, compared with 21% in Germany"
(Several sources, ten seconds search in ddg)
NRC denial of petition on LNT: https://www.regulations.gov/document/NRC-2015-0057-0671
(q) No adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the FDNPS accident. The Committee’s revised estimates of dose are such that future radiation-associated health effects are unlikely to be discernible. The Committee believes that, on the balance of available evidence, the large increase, relative to that expected, in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure. Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously recognized. An increase in the incidence of cancers is unlikely to be discernible in workers for leukaemia, total solid cancers or thyroid cancer. The Committee has insufficient information to reach an informed judgement on the risk of cataracts;
i would also say that unscear is a more credible organization than the nrc when it comes to measuring and predicting effects of radiation, and that their conclusion ought to be the canonical one, as should be their position on lnt
> Also, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) has recently published a review of cancer risk due to low dose rate radiation from environmental sources. (116) UNSCEAR concluded that “the results of the studies of cancer risk due to radiation exposure at low dose rates from environmental radiation do not provide strong evidence for materially lower risks per unit exposure than in studies of high radiation doses and dose rates.” (117)
So, no, UNSCEAR has not rejected LNT. UNSCEAR is in fact asserting that the evidence does not support rejection of LNT.
unscear as an organization have rejected lnt. it was resolved in assembly about a decade ago that it's just plain unreliable for extrapolating to low and even medium doses. if you look in reports you'll find that conclusions are never based on lnt, and when sources using lnt are incorporated they're always reevaluated against other models and often specifically discredited as overestimating low dose health effects, like this little bit from the 2019 report:
472. Due to the limited statistical power, it is generally difficult to detect a departure from linearity in the dose–response relationship for circulatory diseases. As an alternative to the standard approach based on a single preferred model, Schöllnberger et al. [S2] applied a multi-model inference approach to the dose–response analysis for mortality from cardiovascular disease in the LSS cohort. A combined set of plausible models fitted equally well. With this combined set of models, they found a dose response that was about one third weaker than that with the LNT model at doses below 0.6 Gy. The dose response at higher doses was stronger. More recently, the multi-model inference approach was applied to mortality in the LSS cohort from cerebrovascular and heart disease [S3]. For cerebrovascular disease, the dose–response curve estimated by multi-model inference was below the LNT model at low to medium doses (0–1.4 Gy) while at higher doses, a higher risk was estimated compared to the LNT fit. Similarly, a sublinear dose response was found for heart disease at doses of 0 to 3 Gy. The estimated confidence bounds indicated no conclusive answer for an increased risk below 0.75 Gy for cerebrovascular disease and 2.6 Gy for heart disease.
UNSCEAR did not say LNT was wrong at low doses. They said LNT was not confirmed (vs. other models) at low doses. This should not be surprising at all, since at low doses the signal becomes very weak.
There's a difference between "we don't know if LNT is correct" and "we know LNT is incorrect". You are improperly concluding they are saying the latter. They are not.
But yeah, people did return in the end.
You know the same country that is invading Ukraine that may target a nuclear power plant could just as easily just drop its own nuclear weapons right?
“Real” dirty bombs aren’t really any more deadly than a conventional bomb; they’re not WMDs. They just happen to make continued inhabitation of an area more risky or impossible for some time. Keep in mind that radiological dangers are very easy and cheap to measure, especially compared to chemical or biological contamination.
I really don't understand why nuclear power is still being taken seriously. It's expensive and slow to build, expensive and slow to decommission, dirty, unsafe, and strategically risky - not just because of the dirty bomb issue, but because it's not a distributed technology and operates from a small number of critical locations.
Renewables have none of these issues.
but you're right, you can't run paxos on an AP1000
Russia has literal nuclear weapons that are made specifically for that purpose. They've threatened to use them. Why would they bomb a nuclear power plant to get an uncontrollable release instead of simply dropping a nuclear bomb if they want a nuclear war? Because obviously, that will happen if they're blowing up nuclear power plants.
An "accident" at a nuclear energy facility can be very easily made to look like it was the work of your enemy, or the work of third parties, or ... who knows? The ambiguity and confusion works in your favour and you can lie at will.
This is a state that most likely just blew up its own undersea natural gas pipelines to send a message and make it clear that it is capable and willing to perform such actions when cornered.
Now, I don't think irradiating Ukrainian territory makes a whole lot of sense, tactically. But I fear what this regime can and will do in desperation.
Why are you afraid what they will do in desperation?
First, their desperation is self-imposed. There is no outside force that warrants their desperation. Russian desperation is Russia's alone to deal with. They behave like the mad dog in the room to get what they want. Their apparent desperation is a tactic to frighten the easily frightened.
More importantly, are you in Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland or rural northern Norway? Because the people who live in these areas will suffer in a nuclear war, but they fear nuclear war far less than a Russian victory. They support Ukraine despite Russian threats. Ask yourself why that is.
Unrelated, nuclear power is the Earth's best chance to avert climate change from carbon emissions, war notwithstanding. Modern reactor design will ameliorate even missile attacks.
Ignoring the obviously devastation to Ukraine, isn't there a scenario where Russia winning is the safest outcome for Europe and the rest of the world? Especially now that they've been worn down so much by the conflict.
No. Hell no. Russia is run by a mafia. The safest for the world is Russia to lose decisively and then to remain a pariah until they demilitarize and denuclearize.
They will take a victory, or even an armistice, as an opportunity to retool and try again.
From my perspective (in the US), it seems to me that our government has an interest in extending the conflict. We're providing just enough weapons and support to help Ukraine not lose, but not enough support to end this already. Maybe this is so Russia doesn't decisively win or lose, and their military and standing pays a large price.
However, I can't help but to worry that we're ultimately making the end state worse for Ukraine and possibly Europe if nukes come into play.
Russia entirely out of Ukraine including Crimea, at least.
> Or what Russia, Ukraine, and Europe look like after the smoke clears.
Hard to predict the future. Ideally, Europe with a more sober energy policy, but otherwise its trend of peace and prosperity continuing upwards.
Ukraine getting a handle on its corruption in order to enter the European Union. In an ideal world, Russia would pay for reconstruction in exchange for normalization.
Russia either remaining a pariah, or wanting normalization, willing to do the social introspection and transformation necessary to become a member-in-good-standing of the global community. Like Germany and Japan did. Speculation is that Putin would not be able to withstand a loss to Ukraine, but that Navalny is not better. Further speculation is that such social transformation is literally not possible in Russian society given that it has been run by all-powerful Tsars for centuries. I remain hopeful that this just anti-Russian animus given the war, and not actually true.
> it seems to me that our government has an interest in extending the conflict. We're providing just enough weapons and support to help Ukraine not lose, but not enough support to end this already.
Personally I don't think this is an intentional choice, so much as concerns with political fallout. Midterm elections are soon. Biden's opposition already get a lot of traction criticizing the aid so far. Hopefully for global peace, the incoming faction will also understand the need for supporting Ukraine.
Russia is on the back foot, though.
> I can't help but to worry that we're ultimately making the end state worse for Ukraine and possibly Europe if nukes come into play.
Europe and Ukraine have agency, here. It's not entirely up to the United States, and not the United States' responsibility for the outcome. The mood of the people where I sit, about 100km from the Russian border, which includes Ukrainian refugees, is immense gratitude and thankfulness to the US for helping Ukraine. As an American, I feel pretty proud of my homeland! I cannot imagine any scenario where serious people would blame the US for Russia's using nuclear weapons.
As for what that would look like. Well, from my understanding, nuclear weapon use in two forms, strategic and tactical. Strategic nukes are the classic city-leveling bombs everyone thinks about. There is no advantage for Russia using these bombs at all, so their deployment would be purely for terrorism. I strongly suspect without any evidence that NATO knows where every single one of them is and is well prepared for a conventional pre-emptive strike.
The more realistic concern is tactical nukes, smaller bombs and missiles. But again, from my understanding, they do not hold advantages over conventional weapons, and their use would be a shit-storm for Russia.
So, the outcome for Europe depends on the scale, but their use is unlikely. Assuming something reasonably likely, I think it would be nuclear use limited to small yield, by Russia, on Ukrainian territory; leading immediately to humiliating defeat of Russia by NATO and generations of hatred of Russians that will make the distrust of Germans after WW2 look positively like love. But, hard to predict.
> It's not entirely up to the United States
For sure, and I realize we're not the only ones helping. Just noticing this sortof equilibrium "tug of war" state that our colletive help is maybe supporting.
> Personally I don't think this is an intentional choice, so much as concerns with political fallout. Midterm elections are soon.
I tend to view these blue vs red political games as a form of public distraction while the real stuff happens in private. I would also guess that Ukraine is not a top issue for voters when compared to domestic issues, and any signaling by republicans to reduce aid is mainly a cheap way to gain votes when they don't really mean it. We'll see I guess.
1. Russia is a powerful petro-energy exporter state. Energy industry remains the cornerstone and engine of the global capitalist market. Worldwide profits are underwritten by it.
2. Major limitation or inaccessibility of Russian energy undermines profitability worldwide. The American energy sector might see Russia as competition, but it's also not that clear. There's fear of the regulation and disruption of the energy economy that this war (and climate change policies as well) have brought.
3. Russia is a conservative, effectively far right state whose ideological foundations accord with GOP foundations: Little separation between church and state & conservative social values. In Russia, as in the United State, feminism/abortion rights, gay rights, trans rights etc are framed as "western decadence/western decay" by Putinists. A similar focus is taking by Trumpists, Bolsanaro, etc.
TLDR there's harmony in interests between the GOP and forces in Russia; on both cultural / ideological issues and on economic interests. It's complicated, certainly, but there are strong forces in the Republican party and in the far right in Europe that are implicity, if not explicitly, either pro-Putin, or very interested in "settling" this conflict in a way that gives Putin most of what he wants.
(Mr. Wanna-be Howard Roark - Tony Stark or whatever Musk is mouthing the latter line now)
I agree there is much more going on under the table that actually determines our foreign policy implementation. I'm not so sure that D vs R matters much at all, though. Your points #1 and #2 (energy strategy) are probably important to both teams, not just Rs. And I'm not sure #3 (ideology) is truly a motivating factor for either team when it comes down to it. If it really mattered then we'd have a much different relationship with Saudi Arabia and many others right now.
They shot down MH17 and only the hardcore believers are pretending to believe them, and those folks would say it wasn't them if Putin personally pushed the button while on live TV and narrating what he's doing the whole time. The difference is that we don't care enough about MH17 to go to war over it. Put Nancy Pelosi on that plane, and see what happens and how far they'd come with "it totally wasn't us, I swear on Stalin's grave".
My point being that Russian disinformation campaigns generally work. They never paid the consequences for that action. Or for polonium poisonings on foreign territory etc. They're targeting civilians in the war and still there's a significant % of people in the west openly supporting them.
And in large part this same phenomenon seems like it would happen if they were to blow the dam on the Dnieper, or, as discussed here, perform terrorist actions involving a nuclear power plant.
It's much much harder to do the same with an actual nuclear weapon attack. That would bring immediate NATO involvement of some form.
The broader point isn't about nuclear power per se but about the wisdom of building any infrastructure that has clear long term safety and vulnerability issues. The problem with most forms of nuclear power generation is that they require many lifetimes worth of maintenance and continuous high quality engineering and monitoring. I simply am too pessimistic about human beings to feel this is wise.
You're right, there are lots of people who "believe" them, but I think that's a somewhat different story. There's a group of people we've left behind in the West that will believe whatever you tell them, as long as it vaguely resonates with their world view. They dislike their country's government because of their personal situation, so if you start your tale by "your government is lying to you", you have their attention. I don't know how to win them back, but I don't think they actually 'believe' it, it's more of a tribal thing, and they've switched tribes because they didn't feel like they were treated as part of their original tribe (which I can understand to some degree).
It's important to say though: these people 'believe' those tales precisely because they're powerless; what they believe or don't believe does not matter. It's not like the Russian military would blow up a nuclear power plant to irradiate the area and have radioactive clouds drift westwards and we'd hold a plebiscite on how to respond (thank god!).
At reasonable cost projections, renewables + batteries + hydrogen will give a 100% renewable grid at a cost less than one including new nuclear plants.
Additional strategies (transmission, demand dispatch, other storage technologies) can only improve the case for renewables vs. nuclear.
They failed to roll out enough renewables ? How much do you want them to install ?
Right now they have: - 55GW of installed solar, outputing 0% because it's the night. - 65GW of installed wind power, at 22% because not enough wind.
Except, they need 60GW right now.
They would need 390W of installed wind power to handle this totally regular evening.
That's more wind energy than what both USA, and China have currently installed.
I am asking because you only cared to mention the down sides of nuclear.
EDIT: this is not meant to be a provocation, I am genuinely interested to understand if you agree that up AND down sides need to be considered.
I would also think from a defense point of view, this is good, as if you have a strategical asset, defending could be easier to defend a set of wind power sources or solar, which are distributed. From an attacker point of view, if they want to smash a country's power sources to gain an advantage it could be easier to send few missiles around low protected wind / solar sources, than put off a well defended nuclear plant
The short-term alternatives to nuclear power amount to either further exacerbating climate change (by burning coal and lignite, for example) or to accepting regular blackouts.
It's sad to have to think about this way, but to me it's much more acceptable to have a Chernobyl or a Fukushima every 50 years than permanently f*king up our ecosystems and threatening the continued survival of hundreds of millions of people due to climate change.
Consider that both disasters were caused by plants with outdated designs that were kept running for way longer than reasonable. On top of that, they were handled not only somewhat negligently, but outright hazardously. The Fukushima plant was hit by a freaking tsunami and was not completely set up to mitigate the risks posed by natural hazards (this was known since the '90s)
Newer plants generally have safety features that completely prevent or at least help contain the hazards of the older designs. And many of them are built like fortresses. Especially Soviet designs are impregnable to all but dedicated attacks with bunker busters or thermobaric weapons.
50+ years on from the aerial minelaying of the Vietnam War people there and in surrounding countries are still being maimed and killed by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO).
War is a dirty business with generational consequences.
Many non-nuclear industrial processing operations could also be targeted in a war and leave a deadly footprint for decades.
Existing nuclear plants were built at large scale, future nuclear power plants could be made smaller and more widely distributed.
So does being the target of a sustained artillery barrage, among other things. Unexploded ordinance, after all.
and since nuclear weapons exist, this is a ridiculous reason to not build nuclear power plants. if russia wanted to do area denial with a radiological weapon they would just set off a dirty bomb.
I am really positive/hopeful for battery tech and solar panels getting better AND deployed more within the decade, and if we were replacing nuclear for that (or wind, or hydro) I'd be happy, but right now we are not doing that and there's just no comparison of the dangers IMHO.
Nuclear is the "big and scary" airplane accident where lots of people die at once so it's in the news around the world, coal is the thousands of people quietly dying every year on car accidents.
Edit: it seems I was wrong and coal itself has not meaningfully increased in EU, it's other non-renewable (gas mainly) that are less dangerous. I believe my point stands though for 2 reasons: they are still a lot more dangerous than nuclear, AND closing/not building more nuclear probably has delayed the closure of many coal plants.
In Germany, coal use declined as nuclear declined. Is there some other country that counterbalanced this trend?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#...
Admittedly, coal use could have declined even faster if nuclear had not been phased out, but that's not what you were arguing.
In EU it's coal+gas+oil+etc as a "non-renewable" group that has been increasing (specially gas), while coal itself seems to have decreased slightly as well. As a combination, the non-renewable is less dangerous than coal itself, but still a lot worse than nuclear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan
France: nuclear power
Sweden: nuclear power and some hydro, limited by the transfer capacity between the middle and north (where the hydro plants are) and south (where the interconnects are)
Poland: coal
Russia: coal, natural gas and nuclear
The Netherlands: natural gas and coal
In other words Germany did not "get rid" of nuclear and coal, they just moved it outside of their borders. The "green" politicos slept well in their dreams of a virtuous future, dreams which they were rudely awaken from when the gas stopped following.
If you had looked at the link I provided, you would have seen that the largest replacement of energy to the grid was by wind, not by natural gas.
Batteries can be used as peak buffers, their capacity is measured in hours. So-called "green" hydrogen has not really made it off the drawing boards yet so it remains to be seen whether this can be a real solution. Most natural gas infrastructure - storage as well as transport - is not directly useable for hydrogen but parts of it can be adapted. As of now this is mostly a pipe dream so Germany has to rely on the mentioned sources for their base load: coal, natural gas and nuclear - imported as well as generated locally.
Yes, really. It will be winter in a few months so, really.
Start by re-opening the ones closed by the "green" politicos, where possible. Some of them will be too far gone but others can be re-opened.
It looks like the increase in renewable energy production in Europe in 2022 will exceed the increase in coal energy production. 2022 isn't over yet and it will be a close race with both clocking in at an increase of about 60TWh, but it does appear that renewables will increase the most.
Of course for every other year between 2011 and 2030 renewables will definitely have the biggest increase in energy production.
Maybe other counter argument would be thinking about meteor strikes - don't build nuclear reactors because meteor can hit it.
Why aren't you asking "Dams in war zones: A valid reason not to build more?". I'll tell you why: 1) because that would be stupid; 2) because dams don't invoke irrational fears like "Nuclear" does. Just stop it.
Or because water in dams runs in predictable ways following gravity
Or maybe is because 5 years after a dam disaster all had returned to normal, but 5 years after a nuclear disaster... nope, still is happening.
In any case it seems that for some reason there is a wide consensus in the planet to tag dam accidents as safer than nuclear accidents
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63341251
Also historically, the largest dam accident in history has an estimated 20 000 to 200 000 death toll. This one data point is (almost) never included in comparisons of safety and death tolls of different energy sources, as it would skew hydropower and renewables look much worse in statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
In other words:
- no hydroelectric power plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... );
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st... );
- no chemical plants ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chemical_disasters );
- no refineries, petroleum processing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills );
IMHO, nuclear plans are a good option to solve current energy needs and modern nuclear plans are safe even in worst case scenario in Ukraine I don't think a new Chernobyl disaster will be possible because that event was generated by events related to a chain of factors impossible to exist there.
I think the better way to avoid the risk of nuclear disaster in case of war is to renounce to atomic bombs and working to avoid proliferation of that kind of weapons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqu_l29WioM
Putin would be basically gassing all Russia and his allies; he does not have a lot of friendly faces around those days. And Russians and his allies would stop pretending that they don't care about the war and would tear him alive. A miscalculation in Zaporizhzhia would be the same as Putin trowing himself from a window.
I haven't seen a single expert be worried about ZPP.
Also, some gas plants were hit. Now those exploded in a scary way. That's what I'd be worried about.
My experience tells me that no lobbyist will be able to fend off something intrinsically better in the long term.
I looked into this in 2017 and at the time there was no realistic design, they all relied on Gas powered plants to provide on demand production. Because at the time battery technology was not at the point it could provide reliable baseload. Did this change?
From my research at the time, all the articles claiming renewables where improving to the point of being the most cost-effective where just taking the average production output of a solarpanel/windturbine, dividing that by cost and then extrapolating. Obviously this does not work beyond a certain percentage of production.
- solar and wind electricity generation: drastic cost reduction, massive scale-up
- interconnects: lower cost, strong growth, especially in the EU
- green hydrogen ecosystem: incredible cost reduction, massive scale-up
- battery storage: drastic cost reduction, massive scale-up
- pumped hydro storage: eking out the last bits
- other storage tech: liquid metal, compressed CO2, ...
- heat pumps: massive scale-up, incremental efficiency improvements, also large scale sea source like Helsinki
I'm especially hopeful when it comes to green hydrogen derivatives as energy carriers.
One of the more popular studies in this regard is https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2021.11.067 .
Renewable cannot provide a base load (except hydro which require specific geography not everyone has), thus cannot work in practice. Germany use coal and natural gas to provide their baseload, but in doing so, emit so much polution they indirectly kill thousands of peoples each year: https://env-health.org/IMG/pdf/dark_cloud-full_report_final....
No, you cannot store enormous quantity of energy a fully renewable grid would need, it has never been done, and we need a solution right now.
Since the 1980 France do low carbon electricity with it's nuclear, every days, whether there is sun or not, wether there is wind or not.
It's an existing tech, that is known to work, and work at scale.
Good thing electrolysers tend to be roughly on time and on budget.
> It's an existing tech, that is known to work, and work at scale.
Scale enough to fully exhaust the available U235 in one year if we move all energy generation on to it?