Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.
We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.
The large scale, the monopolistic businesses and the government centric energy politics made it ideal for corruption. Remember, Fukushima was claimed to be fully save after inspections, just before the accident happened, which destroyed several reactors.
The investment into nuclear energy was a political decision. Every further investment into nuclear is a political decision. The 'small modern reactors' are mostly funded by government and the users are mostly military. The military is already mostly the only user of small reactors: nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Now we see other players which favor other energy politics (like the current US President who favors fossil fuels like coal, because his voters want jobs in the coal industry).
The point is: energy is always politics.
That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.
I suggest people check out part six of Adam Curtis' Pandora's Box, that cover this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#...
On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout.
And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly.
* we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
* every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
> * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel. Different types of reactors can use that 'waste' and produce energy. Some reactor types produce far less, easier to deal with 'waste'. Much of that waste again can be used for different application.
The Nuclear waste issue is one of the most successful fear mongering campaigns ever.
The necessary science is done, early version of the technology were developed and are proven to work.
The problem is that no more work is put in developing and improving nuclear power but renewable energy gets money for research and subsidies like crazy. Coal also gets subsidies in many places.
> * every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
This is again manly a problem because of the lack of improvement over time. Different types of reacts would make this far easier. Sadly however we are still using the type of reactors designed for submarines.
Everybody agrees with that. The question is whether we choose nuclear or coal during the transition to 100% renewable (if it ever happens).
> we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
> you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
I don't know if it's that bad. But again, is this worse than coal?
It's more or less ensured that we won't be in any shape to record histories sooner rather than later.
You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the risks of global warming and greenhouse gasses back in the heyday of nuclear power, i.e. the 1970's. The last nuclear power plant in the US was built in the 1970s, which was when the last major accident that happened in the US (3 mile Island). That's not even considering Chernobyl.
If Th-based processes were chosen, that cannot easily generate Pu, nuclear proliferation won't be such a hazard. It would have far-reaching political consequences. E.g. USA is strictly against the Iran's nuclear program specifically because it might help produce bomb-grade fissile material.
235U-based processes are also pretty inefficient: about 1% of the nuclear material is burned when the (very active) fuel needs another cycle of refinement. Known Th-bases processes produce somehow less-active waste, and can burn more of the fuel before refinement is necessary.
A number of new, quite a bit safer, nuclear projects aimed to burn 235U and the current stockpiles of nuclear waste exist. But due to the fear-mongering, and likely due to relatively low coal and oil prices, they have little chance to be implemented, at least, in a reasonably short term.
No, I won't mind living near a well-maintained nuclear plant. In fact, I lived ~90km from one for 20+ years. I would be much less happy to live next to a major coal-burning plant, since it produces rather noticeable levels of radioactive contamination during normal operation [1].
Yeah, I'm surprised by how little attention this gets. A significant accident occurred that wasn't supposed to, and subsequent investigations showed that there were significant lapses, including from regulators. People can't be experts in nuclear plant design, construct, regulation, inspections, etc., so they need to be able to rely on the authorities in charge. When that trust is betrayed, it naturally has consequences. You can't just say to people, "Well, yeah, last time we told you to trust us we were completely wrong, but this time will be different!"
When problems happen that aren't supposed to happen, people are naturally going to be overly cautious and skeptical of future assurances. That's not an entirely unreasonable reaction.
Nuclear power plants are good neighbors: quiet and they pay a lot of taxes. Most of my neighbors when asked where the nuclear plant was pointed to the smokestacks on the coal power plant miles away.
Actually, yes! Statistically it's safer than living next to a coal-fired plant.
You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment. Further, the sole large power plant in an area is automatically a military target, whereas if the same capacity were split across many facilities it becomes impractical to attack or control them all.
I'd love to see each municipality in the US above a certain population own and operate its own small reactor, using it to power the municipal utilities. But I do have a bit of a problem with a federal agency operating the only nuclear reactor in a 100-mile radius. It just ends up managed differently, becoming a political power center in addition to an electrical power center.
Using logic instead of emotion, yes I would. Hopefully the electricity costs would be cheaper.
The typical answers from nuclear proponents never cover what to do with the waste product.
Also new reactor types have solved all these problems. They can create very little waste that only has to be stored a far shorter time.
The problem is that anti-nuclear people have created a environment where no more research happens and old technology just limps along.
The science is clear, the needed technology is understood, we just need somebody to build it. There are startups who try, but its very difficult.
I agree, inability to properly advance nuclear energy will will be regarded as a big blunder in the future. The great irony that Greenpeace, which supposedly wants to save environment, dealt so much damage to it, by protesting nuclear energy.
Very low risk of something happening is not the same is the damaged caused if that risk becomes a reality.
While it was an okay plant, they'd actually been warned about the emergency cooling system as early as 1967. Also, they ignored a 2008 study saying that their plant was vulnerable to tsunamis. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found that all the causes of the accident were foreseeable prior to 2011.
> The best designs cannot account for everything.
The common factor in nuclear accidents so far has been operator error, and it's true the best designs cannot completely account for that.
Thankfully, at least China has picked up the slack with LFTR research and hope to have something going within the next 5-10 years. Maybe then the rest of the world will wake up.
Some commercial reactors are secretly used for this purpose even today.
Nuclear may have a bright future but it's extremely difficult to cleave energy from the state interest in weapons. And I'm not just talking about the US, this is an issue with nuclear power worldwide.
The biggest blunder was using nuclear technology for bombs first. I'm afraid the word is forever tainted by history.
Also, I need to some source for the claims that Atoms for Peace was meant as a cover to transfer nuclear technology. I believe the program was created as a way to provide civilian nuclear generation capabilities to friendly nations, in return for a guarantee that nations would not use the technology for making nuclear weapons (India was probably the most famous "rogue": they used the know-how from the research reactors to build an actual nuclear weapon).
Having said that, it takes 30 years to online a new nuke plant. They have to be maintained over centuries. It's easier to make wind farms, geothermal and photovoltaics today, right now. We can't wait 30+ years for nukes to help our clean energy future happen.
Both sides hear the talking points. The talking points target our most passionate and overriding fears, instead of real world concerns. This is because these false fears are more effective than real ones for changing minds.
Having run for office on a few occasions, the most important factor about winning seems to be having a good narrative-- one which seems consistent with voters' personal experiences.
No work on new better designed as continued, we just stopped building many of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
Advocacy of nuclear has a bad tendency to think of "the world" as the US, Europe, Japan, and China. Any solution that aggravates the haves/have-nots divide is going to cause problems.
Chernobyl was an outdated design known to be dangerous at the time it was made, and something like the Chernobyl incident can't happen on anything newer. A study found statistically insignificant rises in cancer rates from the 3 Mile incident.
I recommend the book Atomic Accidents, it's very informative and I believe it went over specifically why a nuclear plant can't just explode like an atom bomb or even really help you make one.
The fact that you would reference TMI in reference to dirty bombs is extremely telling in that you have no idea what you're talking about. The average radiation exposure outside TMI compound was less that an airplane flight or x-ray. Bananas are literally more dangerous.
Really? How many people were killed at 3 Mile Island when it allegedly "accidentally turned into a dirty nuke"?
In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go extremely wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions seem manageable.
Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.
I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.
In particular I genuinely do not understand why most ecologists seem to be staunchly anti-nuclear. I can understand asking for better funding in renewable R&D and planning for a transition but, at least in Europe, ecologists seem to favor dropping nuclear immediately, no matter the cost. For instance they applauded when Germany decided to completely stop producing nuclear energy, even if it meant more pollution in the short term. I find that hard to justify.
I could not agree more, but unfortunately global warming suffers from the exact opposite effect. The perceived risk appears very low to most people, because it is not very spectacular on human time scales. Even though it is by far the greatest existential risk we face.
Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.
I suggest watching the video on this page, it gives a good perspective:
I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.
Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.
Be careful with your language.
China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.
b) It's not so much that designs can't be safe, but the trick is realizing real systems based on the design, that actually are safe. Over time.
Never underestimate the power of human mis-management when it comes to corrupting perfectly sound pieces of engineering, especially when you need to plan for a 50, 100 or 250 year horizon.
The last time I really looked into it, it seemed like nuclear energy was a pretty way to combat global warming. It has numerous issues like cost, construction time, production bottlenecks, etc. Renewables seemed a lot better (particularly when you factor things in like the cost reduction as production ramps up), but it would be a mistake to simply think about energy production. From what I recall, things like improving energy efficiency were at least as important.
1) When a plane fails catastrophically, the impact is limited to a smaller geographical area.
2) Pollution from the failure of a plane doesn't involve what is estimated to be a century-long endeavor to cleanup.
3) The toxicity from plane failures do not invade nearly every facet of life, making entire areas unlivable.
I am not a proponent of nuclear energy because we do not have a way to handle the full lifecycle, including failures. We will have this someday, but the idea of "well throw this waste into a rock formation somewhere and hope it doesn't cause a problem because it takes hundreds of years to handle" is just not reasonable. Even today, the Hanford site in Washington is leaking radioactive shit into the Columbia River and there is no estimated date to complete this cleanup.
But that's not the world we live in. Today we have renewable energy, which is promising but not yet ready to be our sole source of energy. Then we have fossil energy which wrecks our climate at an alarming pace. Then we have nuclear which has its own set of problems but at least won't contribute to global warming.
Sure it's a tragedy that Pripyat and Fukushima are now unlivable and will remain so for a long, long time. But global warming will probably make entire continent-sized stretches of land effectively unlivable. That's what you should be pitting nuclear reactors against.
Major reactor disasters so far:
- SL-1. Steam explosion due to control rod lifted too far during maintenance. Small experimental reactor, built in the middle of nowhere (Idaho Reactor Test Station) for good reason. Inherently unsafe design.
- Three Mile Island. Meltdown due to cooling water failure due to instrument confusion. Contained by good containment vessel. No casualties. That's what should have happened at Fukushima.
- AVR pebble bed reactor. Pebble jam, radiation leak into ground. Contained, but too much of a mess to decommission.
- Chernobyl. Meltdown and fire due to operational error during testing. Totally inadequate containment. Entire region evacuated and contaminated for decades.
- Fukushima. Loss of coolant and meltdown. Containment vessel too small, reactor cores melted through in three reactors. Containment problem well known in advance; Peach Bottom PA has same design.
A big, strong, containment vessel can keep a meltdown from becoming a major disaster and has done so at least twice. Size matters; a large containment vessel faces lower pressures when all the water boils to become steam. But a good worst-case containment vessel can cost as much as the rest of the plant.
Some of the recently-touted small reactor designs try to omit a containment vessel on the grounds that their design couldn't possibly melt down. That's probably not a good approach.
I can only see two cases of this. Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl was early on and they pushed it well past what their safety ratings were. Fukushima, they messed up on the calculations on the 1000 year tsunami. The latter is definitely a more reasonable case to point to "things can go wrong". Because that was definitely human error.
My issue though, is we're stuck with tech that is half a century old. This would be insane to do in any other industry. Technology has progressed, but it hasn't gone into industry. PBRs can be a lot safer, and there are a lot more fail safe reactor designs. We can do small reactors with high efficiency, leading to easier containment IF there is a disaster. I love nuclear, but I do agree that building these gen II reactors is unsafe. But the new ones? I think that's the only way we're going to tackle climate change within the time frame we're aiming for.
Agreed, but, fail-safe and walkaway-safe designs coupled with moderate containment vessels seem like a good medium. It is all about mitigating risk. I don't think we should ever accept that a design has actual 0 risk for meltdown, but, if you design with a goal of having 0 risk of uncontained failures and then design containment for a moderate level of failure, that seems like you have a robust overall solution.
What on earth does this mean? When would an (as of yet) uncontained failure be considered moderate?
The latest reports seem to indicate that primary containment is intact at all three reactors. As usual, you have to read between the lines - these editors always seem to hate nuclear power, or love fear and chaos, or both:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Nuclear-fuel-likely-mel...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/melted-fu...
An example which is pretty far along is Terrestrial Energy's IMSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR#Containment
Isn't decades a bit generous? Do we expect to move back in 2080? Does seem right AFAIK wrt the fallout in Norway contaminating reindeer (by way of lichen) - there's still measurable increase in radioactivity, but within presumably safe levels.
"The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process: this includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts."
It's not that much better with Throrium either.
> Regarding bare plant costs, some recent figures apparently for overnight capital cost (or engineering, procurement and construction – EPC – cost) quoted from reputable sources but not necessarily comparable are:
* EdF Flamanville EPR: €4 billion/$5.6 billion, so €2434/kW or $3400/kW
* Bruce Power Alberta 2x1100 MWe ACR, $6.2 billion, so $2800/kW
* CGNPC Hongyanhe 4x1080 CPR-1000 $6.6 billion, so $1530/kW
I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses.
Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or beat nuclear, with lower setup costs and other barriers to entry. A wide variety of storage are being actively developed (with real investor support) to cache cheap surplus production from solar/wind, making a mostly-solar grid viable. What will our solar/wind/storage grid look like in 30 years?
Nuclear as a stepping-stone to solar won't matter. It's faster and easier to just to straight to solar.
You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead.
Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.)
From here: http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear... (and you can google tons more sources):
Deathprint:
Wind ……………… 0.15 deaths / TWh
CSP ………………… 0.44 deaths / TWh
Nuclear ……… 0.04 deaths / TWh
What matters is that solar is generally perceived to be safer, easier, and cleaner than nuclear at any scale. I feel confident that I could set up my own solar installation safely, and that makes me more likely to do so, regardless of the fatality rates of using ladders or driving to the hardware store.
Because it's easier for clean energy adopters to take small steps towards solar than large steps towards nuclear, I think that's what they will do.
If it really is more along the lines of nuclear is safe, but once every five years a worker at the plant might slip up and be exposed to dangerous levels by accident, then I guess I think the comparison makes more sense.
You can literally mass produce the reactor and send it to standardized facilities all over the place, on or of the grid.
This would not even be very costly, a robust reactor development program to start with and some commercialization of the tech and regulatory change to allow it. No Manhatten projected needed.
I think doing what you suggest and replacing all coal and natural gas plants with reliable energy is pretty insane in comparison. Not to mention that that is only the easy part of the problem. I don't know a reliable way to solve the availability issue. The only close to viable approach is Musk-Style mass production of batteries. Even that is only viable if we continue to make leap and bounds improvements to batteries.
This is about solving the energy needs of 10 Billion people in this century. A Manhattan style mass production of solar cells and wind turbines will not get it done.
Thorium has the highest energy density and its practically unlimited, both in the ground and we already mine it. It simply is not that hart do build a modular reactor that can be mass produced. We know it works, and we know that it solved all the problem we have, including availability, pollution and global warming.
If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment.
The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.
Our current energy production has hazards and costs that we do not currently account for while we place far too much burden on the alternatives to justify themselves.
When Chernobyl blew up, it was obviously a stupid Soviet design, with stupid operating personnel. But now we've got new reactors, they are safe! Nothing could ever happen!
Then Fukushima blew up. That was obviously okay, because it was a Tsunami in conjunction with a few other improbable acts, and we obviously can't expect the nuclear industry to plan for that!
So we're now in the next round. Again, we're totally safe. We've got passive reactors. Really disruptive (g) tech!
I'm sorry, I said it before and I said it again: proponents of nuclear energy have either been lying to us every single time over the last decades, or they can't really manage nuclear energy.
I don't care which one it is, and I don't care whether they believe nuclear energy is safe now. They have been playing with catastrophes of a magnitude we can't really comprehend, and the best they manage to do is "it could have been even worse" and "we promise this was the last time".
As far as I'm concerned, I'm all for making sure it was the last time.
Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal - the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic.
Of course no matter how well you design it, people will fuck up and use it the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safety margins. And this only accounts extreme stupidity and dysfunctional management - it does not even consider deliberate attempts to blow the damn thing up (actually the Chernobyl tests could be considered that, but i mean an absolute nightmare scenario like a takeover by technically competent terrorists)
Which is why you need to take all these chances into account, add a level 9 tsunami, a comet, a once in 100000 years quake, Godzilla, a zombie apocalypse, Stuxnet, wanacry, the second coming of Christ, the Rapture, North Korea, Dr Strangelove and a dangerously bored Trump, and you engineer everything to be still impossible to blow up.
Which is what we have actually been doing. They're not getting built because certifying a new design is horribly expensive, and the anti-nuclear opposition would limit their deployment, making them anti economical, but no, we haven't stopped improving them.
Unfortunately we still run the old ones, which, like a car built in the 60s, would be so much less safe to not even be legal nowadays, but you need to take into account that they're on the road.
China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).
We badly need something to bridge the gap between now and when renewables+batteries can completely fulfill demand, because meanwhile fossile fuel plants get deployed instead, and we are really fucking up the planet with those.
We know that using fossil fuels will kill a few people every day, eventually adding up to a large number, as well as causing widespread, low-grade damage to the environment. On the other hand, nuclear has the potential to kill a moderate number of people at once if something goes horribly wrong, and cause severe damage to the environment of a small area.
It seems to me that a preference for more deaths and environmental damage overall because they happen a little at a time instead of in a catastrophic event is not rational.
You mention Chernobyl and Fukushima - but those only stand out because the effects were concentrated in time and space (happened all at once and afflicted specific geographical regions).
The deleterious health effects of coal, oil, and natural gas are more diffuse. They don't make such good news stories and there's really no way to build an interested narrative around them. The effects evolve over time, the geographic impact is not as concentrated, and importantly there is a much stronger probabilistic element - the human brain has a hard time processing this, but it has an easy time processing nuclear dangers.
Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima never "blew up". There are myths that many still believe today that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb (it can't). You seem to be attempting to stroke that fear with your wording whereas what you really mean is "melted down" or "failed".
Regardless, each generation of nuclear power plant is safer than the last. Some of the newest designs require reactions to be explicitly maintained and when that stops or fails it stops the reaction. What you seem to be suggesting is that, because there were past failures that have caused damage to surrounding areas and people, that we should never try to make further progress.
Did you even read the article? Statistics show you that nuclear is safer. Coal/oil/etc actually kill about 1000× more people than nuclear per TWh generated.
The US Navy has operated hundreds of reactors for decades 24/7.
We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet support for actually building one has been tepid at best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
The issue is nuclear energy is so risky that only nation-states are willing to underwrite the creation of plants. As a result regulations on plant design tend to be extremely conservative, so innovation is brought to a crawl. On top of that the origins of nuclear energy is weapons research, the waste was the original objective. So the most proven model of reactor is the one that produces the most waste. Put the two together and we're left with the simplest, least efficient design: light-water reactors.
Nuclear can be viable, but the government will have to grow some balls and take some extra risk. We could really use another Musk or Bezos to take on Nuclear Power the same way the former two are taking on space.
We could do like we do with coal, and just release the radioactivity into the atmosphere. That industry disposes of a lot of radioactive material that way.
To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years. That would basically mean revisiting all the waste that is currently stored and freeze it in glass or whatever. If the industry did that for all existing waste and proved their expertise in that area, then I think more people would entertain the notion of more reactors.
Another myth. Of course we do: breeder reactors.
Hint: why is nuclear waste dangerous? because there is still loads of energy in it.
Since the containers would be very dense, they'd embed deep into the sediment, many thousands of feet underwater. Over geologic time, subduction would draw them deeper and deeper, eventually into the Earth's mantle.
Problem solved, if permanent disposal is truly the goal.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Not in the sense that people are being irrational, but in the sense that we don't have a good framework for dealing with liabilities -- like nuclear waste -- for extremely long periods of time. We could probably store it pretty well if anybody was motivated in paying the direct and indirect costs of doing so properly.
1) Energy investment is primarily driven by cost, not perceived/actual safety. Safety regulations do affect cost, but not enough to significantly change investment (at least in the US, with the current conditions).
2) Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable. The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.
Nuclear fear mongering has resulted in high levels of regulations around nuclear power, but even without that natural gas has an edge in $/kWh. There just hasn't been demand to build nuclear. On top of that, nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize high capital costs. With solar/wind, there is high variability in grid supply, so nuclear is significantly less cost effective, and is getting phased out in favor of low-capex plants (i.e. natural gas).
Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
(source: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group)
Sure, this comes up a lot in these discussions. We don't need to rely 100% on any one type of plant, and we don't even have to eliminate coal plants completely. In the end, we're going to have to use a variety of options to fight climate change, and some of the major ones (like increased efficiency) aren't even going to deal with energy production.
Before, we had low variability in demand, so things like nuclear, hydro, and geothermal ("clean" methods of producing base load power) had a chance to compete.
Now, we have high variability in demand, so all of those solutions are out (though hydro is a special case), unless externalities like future-cost of CO2 is priced into production cost via taxes or cap&trade.
Wind/Solar + Storage is too expensive, so the market will shift to wind/solar + natural gas. We'll end up burning possibly more fossil fuel, or roughly the same.
>Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
Does this scenario look any more promising with a massive government project to build HVDC? That reduces the intermittent aspect of solar/wind (weather comes in band and sun and wind are somewhat anti-correlated, more true over larger distance). Could we push that renewable percentage up higher and use gas more for peaking?
Without HVDC, renewables will probably peak lower (15%) than the 35% I mentioned.
HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
You can amortized wind really well with interconnect (unlike solar, which is strictly diurnal), so we'll see a trend back to wind in the renewable space.
However, I don't think we'll get beyond 50% renewable/hydro. Wind is built in areas where it is cost effective, which are the areas already taken. As you get HVDC, that area expands slightly, but I don't see us getting to 300GW of average wind capacity.
The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas.
This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar blips). This massively increases the capex of CCGT plants, as you're only producing rarely. This would get more and more extreme with more solar+wind penetration.
Another massive problem is solar+wind overproduction, which is really hard to solve and is starting to really hit the German, UK and California grids. On very sunny AND windy days you get massive energy overproduction. You then have to either:
a) Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out) b) Pay other (natgas, coal, nuclear, etc) operators to shut down, which can be very expensive c) Hope that negative electricity prices make more demand. This is unlikely to happen as industrial users can't switch on extra production quick enough to respond to this.
This is made worse by feed in tariffs being paid at any energy price, incentivizing solar+wind to continue generating even if electricity price is negative (say it is -€0.05kWh spot, but your FIT is €0.20/kWh, you are still going to produce as you will net 0.15euro per kWh.
The two 'solutions' which are often mentioned are battery storage and HVDC long distance transmission.
Battery storage is still horrendously expensive on a kWh basis. It may come down, but this is an enormous problem. I am personally not sure there is enough lithium left that is easily extracted to make this viable at the scale (billions of kWh) required.
HVDC connections I also am suspicious of - if it's sunny and windy in Germany, it is likely to also be the same 1000km away more or less.
The lion's share of the costs are upfront and the break even period is measured in decades. What is the energy landscape going to look like in 30 years? That's a question that you need to be able to answer with high confidence if you want to correctly price bonds that will be used to construct a nuclear power plant to be paid off from the revenue of the plant. If the potential bond buyers can't answer that question with high confidence then they don't know what interest rate is appropriate for the bonds and they probably won't want to buy them.
Grid-scale storage is one possibility, but more work needs to be done to make it viable. For technologies that exist today, nuclear looks the best for base load capacity.
While natural gas is better than coal, it's still not good from an emissions perspective compares to nuclear.
Nuclear power has extreme tail risk that is hard to quantify based on the few examples of it happening. For the thee major events we can reference how do we know we didn't simply get lucky?
With fukushima for example, "Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people." [1]
Clearly the lack of deaths directly attributable to nuclear accidents does not accurately capture the risks.
So what exactly is the risk of a catastrophic event that has thankfully never happened but could? Its not clear but rather than rolling dice with those risks we can actually make better systems without those unquantifiable risks in the first place. That takes us to the tradeoff calculus.
Just in the realm of nuclear power there are far better approaches we should be investing in as opposed to traditional plants such as LFTR [2] which does not have proliferation, waste or meltdown risk.
Picking on coal is a little unfair at this time because coal is being supplanted by much cleaner natural gas purely on market forces and solar and wind are growing dramatically. Of course there are issues with these as well, scaling issues and their own kind of impacts but they do not harbor the same kind of unquantifiable massive tail risk of traditional nuclear.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1218411...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
1. Nuclear is really safe. The best. 2. Someone brings up an incident that actually happened. 3. Apologists excuse the incidents that happened because a. It wasnt designed right b. It was due to corruption c. It was bad planning. etc.
We live in the real world here. You dont prove nuclear is safe by excusing every accident and actually using the disaster to prove how safe it is.
Generally an "incident that actually happened" in which no one was actually, you know, killed.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-...
Unless of course all that wildlife is getting crazy amounts of cancer that I don't know about and I am wrong.
How do you warn next generation after 10 000 years, that some particular site is dangerous/radiaoctive? How do we keep something safe for 100 000 years? Is our Earth look same after 20 000 years, 50 000 years, 70 000 years? Will there be new volcano or shift of tectonic plates? Ice age? How do you keep such waste safe?
Even as of today, there is no final storage solution for spent nuclear fuel. There is one know being built in Finland, and it is just for waste produces in Finland. BTW, there is very nice movie about it: Into Eternity. You should look it!
Consider Fukushima. In some ways Japan got lucky, it was entirely possible that an additional reactor on the site could have melted down and the holding pond could have breached. Because of this they were having to consider evacuating areas on the outskirts of Tokyo. Obviously, if that had happened we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
I don't claim that we have considered the risks appropriately, have a sensible nuclear policy, or are considering nuclear correctly wrt climate change. But to claim nuclear is the safest because direct deaths to date are lower is not the full story.
Fukushima? I'd say ignoring the known geological situation and dangers (no excuse for that IMHO) and the design of the backup cooling system that fails on a flood is also not unlucky.
It's compromises to save cost and ignore dangers both times.
We also have rotting reactors here in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station
The point is that the error bars around nuclear power operation are so large that perceptions of risk are not the same as for conventional power.
Its interesting to think about the role of luck for Chernobyl. A grossly unsafe design combined with a bunch of incompetents performing live tests with multiple safety systems disabled, not much luck there. Was there luck in consequences of what followed? Possibly.
1. What about wind and solar?
2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
this seems extremely hard to quantify.
I'd like you to consider if nuclear material is useful for something apart from generating energy. It may be useful for other things we don't even know right now, and in the future we may have consumed all the resources.
It's not a too dangerous place, when the people who set these up are professionals who are following a security guideline. I see lots of people working on their roof, so, at least for me, this is a nonsense argument to discredit solar energy.
Ah, they didn't include renewables. Colour me surprised.
* The grid itself would need a dramatic rework. It needs renovation for renewables in the first place, but introducing a hydro base load solution increases pressures on existing infrastructure.
* You need enough solar / wind volume to justify a sizable centralized investment in such a power solution. But broad wind/solar causes problems involving peak grid load well before you even start building these things, along with the aforementioned grid updates, make a real chicken and egg problem.
Hydro storage facilities are also vulnerable to extreme climate, take a long time to build (especially in countries where bureaucracy makes building anything take 10x longer than it should) and aren't expandable.
But they would work, easily, to solve the power storage problem. Hail potential energy!
Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.
I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.
Also, why did they leave away hydro, water and wind power in those "deaths per x" charts?
This is a bad analogy. A good analogy would be: if you had to travel 1000 miles, it would be safer to do it by car than on foot because car is safer per mile travelled.
Erm, wtf? The world's energy requirements are a more-or-less fixed number of tWh, no? Like, if 1 nuclear reactor produces as much energy as 10000 wind turbines, comparing the deaths that would be caused by 1 reactor to the deaths that would be caused by 10000 turbines seems like the obviously correct comparison to make.
People are overwhelmingly bad at risk assessment, which is why one can be anti-nuclear and afraid of terrorist attacks (both lower risk), while happily driving to work at a coal mine (both higher risk).
You car analogy is on the other hand completely wrong: the death/HP is a meaningless indicator. How about deaths per mile travelled? Check out the values at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which has a section for traveling (named Additional)
If you replace nuclear with renewable (or the other way around) you'll have to produce the same amount of power, all other things being equal.
Anyway, although it is a serious issue, to this day no cities had to be evacuated permanently because of air pollution.
Regretfully, nuclear energy has an aura of doom, and investment in nuclear power plants wrongfully reek of hubris.
Even if it isn't a renewable source, fission power is one of our best allies in tackling CO2 emissions. At least it may buy us some time before fusion power and the dissemination of renewables.
- They talk about ideal power plants, but not actual power plants. Are they assuming that when the world switches to nuclear, that every country will build these ideal types of plants and maintain them well?
- Pro-nuclear arguments don't talk about inevitable wars. When nuclear power plants are scattered across the world in countries that will eventually become unstable, the potential outcomes look different. We are living through an amazing time for peace in many countries, but it isn't a given that things will remain peaceful like this.
- Radiation has a cultural effect as well, and those plants and storage facilities make likely targets, since radiation disasters tend to cause people to panic.
- After there is no more power from given plants or fuel, there is less incentive to take care of the waste and cleanup.
I'm not entirely against nuclear power, but I think that it's more complicated of an issue than most nuclear proponents claim.
Energy efficiency and use reduction are two other areas to consider. If it's possible to change behavior and opinions around nuclear energy then it should be possible to change behavior and opinions about efficiency.
The two plants under construction, Summer and Vogtle, have been plagued by construction difficulties and cost overruns. The Summer plant was just finally cancelled today. It seems that the Vogtle plant is going to follow the same route.
The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared. The time for nuclear in the US is done. Other options are cheaper, faster, and more responsive. And that's ignoring the political aspect of it all.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/breaking-santee-cooper-scana...
And whose fault is that? Not the fault of nuclear-power supporters and advocates! Nuclear didn't die, it was killed.
Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy and lies to Toshiba [1] weren't caused by nuclear's opponents. That's all on the heads of Westinghouse's management. And if management was competent, perhaps Summer would have been closer to being on budget.
It's not as though the AP1000 is impossible to build, other countries are doing it just fine. It's just impossible for US contractors to pull through, apparently. That's not the fault of nuclear's detractors.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/westinghouse...
That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list?
Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off.
Most solar installation these days however are utility scale deployments in empty fields. It's pretty low risk, plus the same pollution and AGW benefits that nuclear benefits from.
As an aside, I wonder if anyone has done the math on storing high-level nuclear waste on the Moon, now that a fully reusable SpaceX Falcon Heavy is almost here. That might be cheaper than the financial and political costs of places like Yucca Mountain.
You can't count all of those injuries against solar itself, though, as roofing injuries will happen regardless, and putting up solar panels greatly extends the life of a roof, so the amortized total injury to installers doesn't go up as much.
However this article did not of that - it just pretended that they did not exist. I believe the publisher of this article has an ulterior motive, something related to supporting the nuclear industry. So in oder to make its point it needed to leave it out. The title of this article is not just 'misleading' it is completely and deliberately dishonest.
Of course it cuts both ways. A better headline would have been "Nuclear: sure it's dirty but are you really trying to tell us coal is safer".
It really is time that we start looking at cutting back mindless generation and consumption of energy and that mostly means a big shift in lifestyle for North American and European consumers.
Either that or else you can all explain to your children and grandchildren (whom you love very much and would do anything for etc.) that you decided that living an hour's drive or more from work and commuting in every day while eating fresh dragonfruit and shrimp flown from the other side of the world was just fine.
Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Time to start actually working on the first of those.
That leaves the problem of the mining and manufacture, which is still centralized. This problem can be solved with GM organisms. We engineer fungi and bacteria to grow on roofs and generate electricity. They'd use CO2 in the growing process too. We can grow batteries in a similar way. Bacteria, yeast and viruses can do anything. They're the ultimate nanotech, we just need to learn how to program them.
"Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are the safest modern weapon"
Arguments that nuclear power are safe need to prove that while assuming the worst-case scenario, since the probability of such a scenario is a-priori unknown despite what much of this comment section seems to be claiming.
Solar is knowingly much safer because it is much easier to reason about.
>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/china-s-n...
As they develop and improve their reactor technology their plan is to export safer, more efficient fission reactors to the rest of the world.
I cannot find the source right now, but a talk given by non-proliferation experts outlined how accounting for fissile material in a reactor is about 99% accurate. But even 1% of nuclear fuel, on a nuclear-powered-world scale, is equivalent to hundreds of SQs per year, assuming current genration and next-generation reactor technologies.
A nuclear conflict, even if regional (only a few dozen discharges) can potentially have dire, world-wide consequences. The article should have at least touched on those.
[1]: http://nsspi.tamu.edu/nssep/reference/technical-safeguards-t...
> Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy; in 2014 these sources accounted for about 96% of global energy production. While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored.
For anyone still being in disbelief of nuclear being made obsolete: Why has not a single (!) private insurer been willing to fully insure a nuclear facility without government backing?! The reason is simple: the risk is too high, even for insurance companies worth billions.
TLDR: nuclear has, as yet, not worked using private financing.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/09/new-ener...
Maybe there is some reactor design which can fix this but the reactors which are currently being build are not those designs. Also they are build for 60+ years. A lot can happen in 60 years.
Discussing an energy source just by pointing about future developments is not the answer. The EPR reactors in Finland and France are several times over budget and took much longer than planed to build. In the time you could have build wind turbines and solar cells all over the country with an equivalent or higher amount of power output. And according to the current statistics every added kilowatt would have been cheaper than the last one.
Also you might now say, but solar and wind are not always available. But at the same time you think that all problems with nuclear can be overcome but not the storage of electricity?
IMO Natural Gas/BioGas powered turbine generators are better option to augment wind and solar power generation. The GE LM6000 [1] gas turbine (based on a 747 GE CF6 engine) can produce 40MW+ of electricity. They could even recycle a surplus CF6 engine to reduce manufacturing resources required.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_recor...
Discussions of nuclear power somehow ignore the fact that, like any other technology, current reactor designs are not the final iteration. They can be improved upon.
Look the Chinese Pebble Bed reactor: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a...
If everyone aside from the Chinese ignore nuclear power, then the Chinese may be the ones making a fortune selling their advanced reactor designs to everyone else.
The externalities of the production and disposal of solar panels cannot be ignored in this kind of assessment.
>The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process:
A lot of people here may know what mortality and morbidity mean straight off, but I want to share this article as much as possible, and it does a great job reaching out to laymen. I also like how it starts right off with "more energy is good, here's a link demonstrating why, let's move on."
The issue I have with Nuclear is that we have not managed to fix the waste issue, and nobody seems to want to talk about it.
I'm not a huge fan of "salting the earth" for 10,000 years.
And when you say "it's safe", you're inherently ignoring that you basically have this toxic waste that is too costly to shoot into space and too dangerous to keep anywhere on earth for 10,000 years where it wont eventually harm the ecosystem.
"Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy;"
I studied operations research during college in the hopes of working on India's nuclear supply chain.
The west choked us out of Uranium and Plutonium, similar to how the British choked us out of Rice during the Bengal Famine of 1943.
http://engineersf.com/people-against-nuclear-energy/
http://engineersf.com/nasa-needs-plutonium%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8...
http://engineersf.com/2500-10000-indians-die-every-day-from-...
http://engineersf.com/why-is-india-so-behind-the-question-i-...
http://engineersf.com/4000-kilometers-through-my-own-country...
More than anything, the brown/black people of the world need the west to give in to our demands for the approval of our uranium desires to help us get to progress driven escape velocity Nitrogen + Steel economies.
You might consider writing for (or publishing to) a venue which makes its works generally available.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=radium+water+filter+ads+from...
Nuclear power will look a lot prettier when it's competing on price with socially and environmentally ethical solar cells and fossil fuels.
Three years ago the D.O.E. sent the local tribes a letter to say they shouldn’t eat the fish they caught in the river more than once a week.
[...]
Hanford turns out to be a good example of an American impulse: to avoid knowledge that conflicts with whatever your narrow, short-term interests might be. What we know about Hanford we know mainly from whistle-blowers who worked inside the nuclear facility—and who have been ostracized by their community for threatening the industry in a one-industry town. (“Resistance to understanding a threat grows with proximity,” writes Brown.) One hundred and forty-nine of the tanks in the Hanford farms are made of a single shell of a steel ill-designed to contain highly acidic nuclear waste. Sixty-seven of them have failed in some way and allowed waste or vapors to seep out. Each tank contains its own particular stew of chemicals, so no two tanks can be managed in the same way. At the top of many tanks accumulates a hydrogen gas, which, if not vented, might cause the tank to explode. “There are Fukushima-level events that could happen at any moment,” says Carpenter. “You’d be releasing millions of curies of strontium 90 and cesium. And once it’s out there it doesn’t go away—not for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
The people who created the plutonium for the first bombs, in the 1940s and early 1950s, were understandably in too much of a rush to worry about what might happen afterward. They simply dumped 120 million gallons of high-level waste, and another 444 billion gallons of contaminated liquid, into the ground. They piled uranium (half-life: 4.5 billion years) into unlined pits near the Columbia River. They dug 42 miles of trenches to dispose of solid radioactive waste—and left no good records of what’s in the trenches. In early May of this year a tunnel at Hanford, built in the 1950s to bury low-level waste, collapsed. In response, the workers dumped truckloads of dirt into the hole. That dirt is now classified as low-level radioactive waste and needs to be disposed of. “The reason the Hanford cleanup sucks—in a word—is shortcuts,” said Carpenter. “Too many goddamn shortcuts.”
[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-...
Looking at the chart, I'd take gas over nuclear in a heartbeat thinking of what nuclear has done to Japan. Nuclear can both power and destroy a country. Gas and other options do not. Neither does solar or wind which are not even in that chart.
Say we have a new technology that is safer than nuclear, but had a one in a million chance to destroy Earth. It would be safest on paper, for however long paper and researchers still existed.
"But Fukushima was a horrible place for a nuclear power plant and it was run by incompetent people," you say. But that's exactly the point. If we make a list of all the plants in the world and the safety measures they undermined and their staffing situation, how many would be stellar? How many would even admit anything?
Fukushima made a few hundred square kilometers briefly unsafe, and some tens of square kilometers temporarily uninhabitable. (Or really, inhabitable but slightly unhealthy.) Fossil fuels are wrecking the entire planet.
It's interesting that Fukushima seems to be all people remember about the Tohoku earthquake. 16,000 people died (for comparison the worst natural disaster in the US, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, killed 6,000-12,000), hundreds of thousands were displaced, and many towns were destroyed, but nobody remembers that. A dam failure triggered by the earthquake killed 12 people but nobody uses this to argue against dams.
The worst disasters, in 1975 (which is to say, exceptionally deindustrialised) China, and in India, the deaths were amplified greatly by inadequate preparation, planning, communications, and response.
Hubris has played a tremendous role in numerous dam failures (the above, Teton Dam, Johnstown). Which ... is pretty much amplified if you look to nuclear power.
Plus that long tail.
And there's the fact that there simply aren't many good natural hydro sites left, which means that the upside potential for creating additional risks is small. A decidely mixed blessing, if you call it that, but so it is.
The article says safest, not safe. And if we compare nuclear waste to carbon dioxide emissions, which actually pollutes more worldwide?
Combined with carbon tax type modelling of coal's emmissions which would massivel raise it's cost if accounted for, I'm not sure it's that unexpected.
Likewise for nuclear power accidents.
Please elaborate. How can nuclear power plants make our species extinct?
US as of 2012 buys about 25% of it from Canada and the rest from a variety of places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_S...
Source: https://www.eia.gov/uranium/marketing/pdf/umartable3figure5....
It's the enrichment which is the tricky part.
The most egregious example is Chernobyl, where the official Soviet position was that only a single person died from the disaster. But studies from other nations say the death toll may be close to one million. Well believe it or not a lot of these studies that show how safe nuclear is actually take the official Soviet data about chernobyl as truth. (I am not sure whether this is the case for this particular study because their source is behind a paywall).
But similar (if not as outrageous) lies have also been said about accidents in the west. The official story about three mile island for example is that it caused no deaths, yet studies find drastic increases of all kinds of cancers in the affected area. See, for example, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-mo...
I usually believe that we should be guided by science and data in our public decisions, but the data surrounding nuclear is so distorted by governments that it is just not to be trusted. And now that we have truly safe alternatives like solar and wind, we can finally put that nightmare behind us.
Yes you do. The WHO has been following the Chernobyl consequences, and come out with a new report about every decade. Each report dramatically lowers the estimate of deaths and other health consequences.
As a matter of fact, the largest health effects now are psychosocial effects. That is, fear of and (over-)reaction to the radiation effects is causing more actual harm than the radiation itself. So potentially one of the easiest ways to mitigate the harmful effects of nuclear accidents (best of course: let's not have any!) is to (over-)react less.
Of course not reacting at all would also be wrong, but it looks like the balance today is out of whack.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Ndd82xj3j1o-3KcyvBkLTB1mR...
In 1975, it was the site, or perhaps more accurately, region, of the worst power plant disaster in all history: the Banqiao dam failure. News of this only fully emerged after over two decades.[1] You can spot the reservoir itself at the far left of the images, at mid-height.
In the disaster, a confluence of events lead to the deaths of approximately 171,000 people, with 11 million displaced. There's considerable uncertainty in those numbers.
The causes were multiple: siting, improper engineering, unheeded warnings, a (literal) perfect storm (tropical typhoon striking a cold front and lingering over the region for a full day, dropping over 1 meter of rain), improper emergency plans, failed communications, situational confusion, nightfall, and a hopelessly inadequate response and recovery. Of the deaths, "only" -- a term used advisedly -- 25,000 or so were due to direct flooding. The remaining 150,000 or so succumbed to starvation or disease in the weeks following the events.
And yet: the book as been closed. The cities in the floodplain are rebuilt. The dam itself has been rebuilt. Over 7 million people live in Zhumadian City, 95 millions in Henan Province total.
There is no disaster exclusion zone.
There is no disaster exclusion zone which will persist for the next three centuries.
There is no molten reactor core.
There is no coreium.
There is no radioactive waste which will persist for 10,000 to 1 million years.
The book is closed.
Proponents of nuclear power assume that we can assess risks with tails not of the decade or so of Banqiao, but of 100, 1,000, 1 million years. Utterly outside the scope of any human institutions, or of the human species itself.
Our models of risks and of costs fail us.
(They've failed us as well in the case of fossil fuels, and, quite possibly, for hydro power -- I'm not giving this example as endorsements of either, but to give the story of risk and closure, or its lack. Those are other stories, for other posts.)
The problems with nuclear power are massive, long-tailed, systemic and potentially existential. The same cannot be said of a wind farm or solar array. There is no significant 10,000 year threat from wind power, or solar power. We're not risking 30 - 60 km exclusion zones, on an unplanned basis, of which we've created at least four in the half-decade of significant nuclear energy applications: Hanford, Washington, Three Mile Island, Pennsyvania, Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Fukushima, Japan. And this is with a global plant of some 450 operating nuclear power plants as of 2017[2]
(This compares with over 7,600 power plants in the United States alone.[3])
None of these sites has been fully remediated. In the specific case of Hanford, the current management plan is budgeted at $2 billion, and there is no final management plan in place. This eighty years after the facility first opened.
If the total experience has been, say, 500 reactors, over 50 years, or 25,000 reactor-years of experience, and we've experienced at least four major disasters, then our failure rate is 0.016%.
The global share of nuclear power generation in 2012 was about 10%.[4] Which means that without allowing for increased electrical consumption within existing or extending to developing nations, the plant count would have to increase tenfold.
Holding the reactor-year failure rate constant would mean 80 core meltdowns per century.
Reducing that to the present rate of four meltdowns/century would require reducing the failure rate to 0.0008%. That's five nines, if anyone's counting.
Five nines on a process involving weather, politics, business, social upheaval, terrorism, sabotage, individual psychology, group psychology, climate, communications, response, preparedness....
And ... the involvement of the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuzi, in the management of TEPCO, who operated the Fukushima nuclear power plant.[5]
All of which played a tremendous role in how badly the Banqiao disaster itself played out -- everything which happened at Banqiao by dynamics could just as well have happened in a nuclear plant.
But it wasn't a nuke, it was a dam. And after a few hours, the waters receded, and after a few weeks, the land dried, and after a few months, recovery could start, and after a couple of decades ... even in what was still a poor country ... the recovery was complete.
Banqiao was a disaster, no doubt.
But what it wasn't was a nuclear disaster.
________________________________
Notes:
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian
1. http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm
2. https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/Worl...
3. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=65&t=3
5. http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...
4. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/ya...
Everybody is scared to death of Sharks, yet sharks killed only 1 person in the US last year. Cows killed 20, 75% of which were deliberate attacks, but almost no one is afraid of a Cow.
Meanwhile 17,775 people died in traffic accidents, yet people jump in cars like it's routine. You're literally 17,000% more likely to die in your own car than you are by a shark, but again, brains don't understand that.
People understanding of stats is fine. They understand that the pre-requisite to being attacked by a shark is super-extremely low. That does not make sharks safe. I'll put my hand on the hood of a car any day instead of on a shark.
Your reasoning about Fukushima shows the same kind of problem: it's because of all the urgent actions after the accident that there's not been more consequences. Your argument would show that a house on fire is not dangerous because after people were evacuated, no one died of burning. It's the evacualtion of of a fire that saves life, it's not the lack of danger of a blazing inferno.
[1] "The image of cows as placid, gentle creatures is a city slicker’s fantasy, judging from an article published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States." -- https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/dangerous-co...
[2] "A total of 21 deaths met the case definition for 2003--2008 (Table 1). Four fatalities occurred in 2003, two in 2004, six in 2005, and three each year during 2006--2008." -- https://www.cdc.gov/mmWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5829a2.htm
[3] https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/fish/isaf/contributing-fac...
Where are you getting these numbers? Particularly the cow one (deliberate killings only).
Generally intrigued.
> yet people jump in cars like it's routine. It is routine. Time spent driving is much, much, much higher than time spent swimming near sharks. So...
My brain understands that if I refused to go skydiving, then I can not die from a skydiving accident. Which is about as likely as going for a swim instead of a drive to get to work.
People don't handle statistics well, but statistics are also easily manipulated and therefore potentially completely unreliable (Mark Twain quote here). It's not quite as simple as "people need to listen to the statistics".
Also, people go to the beach way less often than they go near roads. If most people only go to the beach 1 day a year and go on roads every day, then it's more like "you're 50x more likely to die by car than by shark". That's a far cry from 17000x.
That said, I've always thought that stat could be abused to push car safety - "Imagine you're attacked by a shark - now, cars are like that but TIMES FIFTY! Drive safe, look both ways, etc".
Nothing is scarier than birth-defects. Radiation causes very visible birth defects.
Hence people are very, very scared of radiation. And rightly so.
A windpark will not cause disfigured babies. Hence wind is better.
And: Nuclear is the most expensive energy source, by FAR. safety, waste, clean-up - super, super expensive. dismantle a wind park and it is gone, poof. dismantle a reactor and now you have a new problem.
Also very hard to weaponize wind or solar. Blow up a wind park and well, the wind park is gone. Steal a rotor and now you have a rotor.
etc etc etc.
What is sooo hard to understand about this?
1.http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...
The problems with nuclear are waste and that we use vastly outdated designs and fuel sources.
Nuclear is not perfect, but we should not buy into a perfection fallacy when looking to get away from fossil fuels.
Solar is a better long term bet but a good progressive nuclear strategy that added a handful of small modern reactors could be massively complementary to it.
The only reason waste is an issue in the United States is that the Congress decided that nuclear waste repositories have to last for 10,000 years uninterrupted. As far as we know this is just about impossible. 10 millenia ago we were in the caves.
Placed at the bottom of a pool, it's perfectly safe. This is a solved problem. The issue is political (especially from uneducated NIMBYs) rather than technical.
Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?
Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.