It's very expensive but also free insurance, basically.
Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity).
Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste disposal, liability insurance).
We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category.
We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018.
Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.
What I remember of his explanation was the point that if you launch a payload of material into space, you have essentially placed that payload in an elliptical orbital path, one that intersects earth's elliptical path. And since orbits are periodic, that payload is going to be intersecting earth's orbit regularly, meaning that in this instance, the chance of the material coming right back into the atmosphere is quite high.
So to me the "let's get it off the planet" idea is an overreaction. Radioactive material just need to be handled with common sense.
You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust...
As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster?
Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?
Short answer: No. Definitely not in a Volcano.
Long Answer:
Decay rates are ultimately determined by the subatomic structure of the nucleus. This is why different chemicals, and different isotopes of said chemicals, will decay differently. A lone neutron will decay after about 15 minutes (which is a long time in subatomic scales), however, the two neutrons in (4/2)He will happily stick around forever.
So melting a material won't have any impact on the structure of the nucleus, you're just disassociating the intramolecular bonds; same goes for turning said material into a gas.
If you were to raise the temperature high enough, and we're talking sun-like (not the measly 5000k that you get on the surface, I mean like 27-million degrees you find in the core), then you'll actually start stripping and fusing nuclei, which will at that point change (but not necessarily decrease) the radioactive rates of whatever material you started with.
A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons.
I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think it would "contaminate the oceans".
Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone.
Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone.
[0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast... [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-t... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...
Otherwise here's a good discussion on the viability of space guns: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2370/what-technolo....
Because of the extremely high energy density of nuclear fuel, the amount of waste produced per Gigawatt-year of electricity generated is very small.
A Saturn V has a payload of 140 Mt to low earth orbit. Total high-level waste is 22,000 cubic meters, possibly 220,000 Mt, assuming a density 10 times as great as water. 1,572 Saturn V launches would carry away all of that. All the high-level waste ever produced that has not been recycled. Most of it can be recycled in breeder reactors, so there is no need to carry it away!
For comparison, lead has a density of 11.34 g/cm^3.
It's heavy.
But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution.
One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.
Its not too expensive its very cheap, its the regulation around that makes it expensive which can be solved too.
It’s already cheaper to build new solar plants and wind farms than continue to run an existing coal plant (which itself is cheaper to run than nuclear).
90-95% of all new generation coming online each year are renewables in the US. Renewables cost continues to decline year over year, speeding its uptake. I cannot fathom how one would think nuclear can compete at all in such an environment.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31192
“Nearly all nuclear plants now in use began operation between 1970 and 1990. These plants would require a subsequent license renewal before 2050 to operate beyond the 60-year period covered by their original 40-year operating license and the 20-year license extension that nearly 90% of plants currently operating have either already received or have applied for. The AEO2017 Reference case projections do not envision a large amount of new nuclear capacity additions. By 2050, only four reactors currently under construction and some uprates at existing plants are projected to come online.”
Again it doesent matter how much come online it matters if it replaces fossile or nuclear in any significant way, it doesent, its unreliable.
Super-expensive safety regulations are often based on the linear no-threshold model of biological dose response. There is more and more data showing that this is illogical at very low doses. Changing that is highly political.
The large 3-shift security staff at nuclear power plants is based on political concerns.
The contractor and financing models in play in the US to build nukes causes lots of misalignment, and contracts end up suing each other over trivialities rather than building the plant like the Koreans do or French did (in the 1970s). That's nearly political.
Anti-nuclear intervenors watch over plant plans and try to delay at all costs. Totally political.
Whether the race is rigged is irrelevant; the race is over.
Just to put things in perspective. Solar can do roughly 50W per m2 at best and I am being generous.
Nuclear does 1000W per m2.
Solar is not even close to being able to deliver stable energy so you would have to factor either coal, nuclear or oil into the mix too to provide stable delivery.
Renewable can't deliver the needed energy not even close. Less than 1% right now and not even close with anything like fuel cell technologies or distributed grid systems which would be very very very expensive.
Nuclear whether you like it or not is cleaner, more stable, cheaper and more scaleable.
You will realize this soon enough.
Apples and oranges. We have plenty of desert land and /or roof space for solar. Granted solar is not with its enviro issues but nuclear stands apart. Also costs. A Nuclear power plants costs $20+billion to be built. But then solar by definition is only during the day
The end goal is a lowest cost deep decarbonized grid. We should design policies to give us that ASAP. In many cases, nuclear has a robust role to play in such grids.
There is no reason why a grid needs any baseload sources whatsoever.
The nature of a nuclear plant is that it is incredibly capital intensive, and needs to operate at capacity to work financially.
Solar is interesting because it’s peak output aligns with peak demand. Your solar farm isn’t going to do much for you st night, but that’s ok because you don’t need the power!
Depending on where you live, many of the on-demand power generators like gas and solar farms are idle.
No it can’t. Any given atom stops being uranium after it fissions. Some of the waste can be reprocessed because not all is fissioned, but even then there is a lot of literally untouchable waste left over — well, literally untouchable if you want to live: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Furthermore, the price of uranium is so cheap that it's financially feasible right now. It will be over time but that should also show you just how abundant and available it is as a resource.
If we actually got politicians to sit down and go through the requirements with engineers and scientists they would realize how cheap and still safe it can be.
Well, if that "counts", then solar power will become totally free and have a net positive environmental impact, we'll just plant some nanobots that grow and repair solar panels inside a marked area, and can be scooped up should we need them elsewhere, hence "100% free once we perfected them". They'll smell like vanilla, and change color according to the moods of people using the energy.
Latter on we make nanobots and send them to the sun to hang out there for a few thousand years and grow a scaffolding from, uhh, space dust or something, and then we shoot nanobots at it that grow solar panels on it, and we have our Dyson sphere. Add some nanostuff that creates material from energy and flings that at Earth, then convert material back to energy.
This didn't even take me 5 minutes, so I really don't get what the problem is :P
Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.
This is why you're not seeing new nuclear plants much in the west. The decision makers know they face huge risk from future cost declines of renewables which, combined with gas, would leave those reactors unable to amortize their construction, financing, and fixed operating costs.
There are other solutions for long term storage of renewable energy to make it dispatchable. For example, making hydrogen, then burn it in turbines. The efficiency of this is lousy, but the capital cost can be quite low.
This is nothing new. As the Forbes cover story on Feb. 11, 1985 said: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale… only the blind or the biased can now think that the money has been well spent.”
In recent years, they gave nuclear another chance. And it failed again. You are unlikely to get a third chance anytime soon.
You can't both have your cake and eat it.
The difference is that we KNOW that nuclear can deliver way more energy per m2 than wind and solar can. We know how to get it to work and we know that the primary cost of nuclear is political NOT technical completely opposite wind and solar which have technical issues to provide as much as nuclear or coal or oil can.
Yes, nuclear can deliver more energy per m2. But this is irrelevant, since we have no shortage of m2. What we have limits on is $$$. On the metric of energy/$, nuclear fails. And no, we do not know that the problem with nuclear is political. You can keep repeating that, but it doesn't make you any less wrong.
The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.
This year PV alone is forecast to reach half a terrawatt. I’m not sure if that’s peak or average but at 30% per year growth, it doesn’t really matter. World electric use is only 2.7 TW, after that point we want to start electrolysing hydrogen out of water even if only to replace jet fuel.
Solar and wind have shown impressive and sustained improvement along so-called "experience curves". The cost of each has declined as a power law in cumulative installed capacity. This decline has been sustained while they've declined in cost by orders of magnitude (PV has improved in cost by more than a factor of 200 since the 1970s.)
Nuclear, in contrast, has been largely free of such sustained improvement. If anything, costs have increased with experience -- negative learning. The complexity and scale of nuclear appears to be such that learning effects are cancelled out.
And no, regulations are NOT the reason. That's the increasingly lame excuse nuclear fans confabulate to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their precious technology not actually living up to their fantasies about it. And as I've said elsewhere, if your complaint is that government doesn't let reactors meltdown enough, you might as well hang it up and go home. You are not going to win that one.
This is pretty much entirely because PV keep getting cheaper faster than everyone expected — even as recently as five years ago, pessimism like yours wouldn’t have been unreasonable, and yet the problem is now essentially solved and all we need to do is build the stuff at the prices we can already afford.
{1} https://web.archive.org/web/20120322204531/http://www.grid-s...
{2} https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/14/new-us-solar-record-2-1...
Solar is less then 1% and that's with 300% increase it's not even close to being able to deliver baseline anything regardless of how cheap it gets. It's a dream that's not even close to be realistic and frankly highly naive.
Again 47w per m2 vs. 1000w per m2 and with solar panels needing continous repeairs and no grid or fuel cells in sight plus reliance on coal, nuclear and oil for when the sun doesn't shine.
Good luck.
I have no idea what you’re referring to with “47w per m2”, can you elaborate?
Ditto “needing continuous replairs“. There’s a rover on Mars that’s been running for about 15 years continuously on solar with no human maintenance.
From an engineering point of view (though not political), you don’t even need to worry about night time, because the earth is round and even planet sized grids don’t lose enough power to raise my example of 2.155¢/kWh to even as high as coal. And that’s if you refuse to use the fuel cell tech that already exists.
I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively. The risk of an uncontained explosion of a reactor is a more legitimate concern. But I understand many modern designs like molten salt reactors reduce this risk to pretty much zero.
How much time do you have? This article isn't just long, it has many, many interesting links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
> There is a debate over what should constitute an acceptable scientific and engineering foundation for proceeding with radioactive waste disposal strategies. There are those who have argued, on the basis of complex geochemical simulation models, that relinquishing control over radioactive materials to geohydrologic processes at repository closure is an acceptable risk. They maintain that so-called "natural analogues" inhibit subterranean movement of radionuclides, making disposal of radioactive wastes in stable geologic formations unnecessary. However, existing models of these processes are empirically underdetermined: due to the subterranean nature of such processes in solid geologic formations, the accuracy of computer simulation models has not been verified by empirical observation, certainly not over periods of time equivalent to the lethal half-lives of high-level radioactive waste. On the other hand, some insist deep geologic repositories in stable geologic formations are necessary. National management plans of various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.
So, various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.
That's all we have for now.
> I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively.
Yeah, but so far we have no way of doing that, so it's a legitimate concern. I might as well say "we can just turn off all nuclear reactors now, we just need other means oto generate the energy and do the shutdown responsibly". Leave it allll up to the reader, or in this case, future generations, why not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
https://grist.org/article/stang/
> At Hanford, a rough rule of thumb for planners is to look ahead 1,000 years. That’s like a Viking trying to conceive of an astronaut, then trying to pass a note to him.
> Experts inside and outside of DOE have pondered this communication conundrum. The agency has assembled panels of scientists, historians, artists, and others to tackle from all angles the question of how a 21st century sign should look to a 31st century person. From symbols to colors to materials to size, everything’s up for grabs — and nothing’s been decided.
We don't have solutions. Pretending we have solutions will not help us get solutions, either.
I’m only “somewhat” in agreement because humans are terrible at reading warning signs, especially from long-dead people. “Oh,” they say, “that was ages ago. It’s just a primitive superstition. Anyway, we’re special.”
Absent scenarios which Isaac Arthur has already made YouTube videos about, I’m more worried about atomic analogs of antivaxxers or homeopaths. Or “Traditional Chinese Medicine”. Or… well, you get the idea.