Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw...
Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP.
Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not survive the tsunami because said tsunami overcame the tidal wall in front of it, and then the backup generators got flooded. But for that one event, if the generators were placed up on higher ground, the outcome would have been so much different.
I have first-hand knowledge, due to..
1) Knowing the area. I lived in my Japanese father-in-law's mountain house, situated 1.5km out of Miyakoji-machi, Tamura-shi. That town was just inside the 20km evacuation zone from the power plant, the mountain house was just outside at 21km - myself and my family lived in our own house in the outskirts of Koriyama city.
2) My (now deceased) Japanese father-in-law was president of the Hitachi subsiduary company which built Fukushima Dai-ich No.4 reactor, which wasn't operating at the time of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami but did suffer an explosion thought due to hydrogen gas from the spent fuel situated in the Spent Fuel Pool in its upper level.
3) Mentioned in point (1) above, I owned a house in Tobu New Town on the Eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, and I was working at Flextronics in Koriyama at the time the M9 quake occurred - things got a tad 'exciting' at the time. I should write a book.
My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account - in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job, and at some point in time it was decided that placing backup generators underneath the buildings was sufficient - that unfortunately did not turn out to be the case :/
And lastly, I still fully support the idea of nuclear power.
There were other design flaws, too, like venting hydrogen inside the building rather than outside.
To give you an example. Did you know that CNPP was profitably working until 2000 while the disaster was in 1986?
Or another, fact - CNPP is an almost exact copy of an older nuclear plant which still profitably produces clean energy near St. Petersburg in Russia
You should watch the "A is for Atom" episode from Adam Curtis "Pandora's Box" series. It also talks about US designs and how they upscaled the naval PWRs to utility level which was not deemed safe by nuclear scientists of the time.
However, even those older designes are statistically much safer than coal - how many people died just in coal mines colapses?
I disagree, what you read isn't obvious and still doesn't qualify you to speak on the matter unless it was legitimate and vetted information. Reading a bunch of infowars doesn't make me a legitimate political commentator.
Sure that doesn’t qualify as expert opinion, but that also only gets you so far. In a debate that gets emotional it can’t hurt to have someone stand up and say “yes, bad things can happen. It happened to me and my family, but I still support it because it makes sense overall”
As someone who grew up near a Lockheed factory and a father that worked for NASA, you are qualified to speak about the community impacts of building and operating flying machines.
how do you define "safer"?
This ignores the point of above comments which is to educate people about which energy is safer per kWh generated.
It's not like solar/wind installations are done w/out safety precautions already.
Per kWh generated, nuclear is safer.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/recycling-atomic-...
I think that's a big problem.
Situated in an earthquake/tsunami-prone land? Situate backup generators on higher ground, build tidal walls sufficiently high.
The human race is built upon hindsight. Who was the first human who unfortunately tried eating a poisonous plant? We subsequently learned which plants were safely edible and which were not, for example.
So don't go dissing those who speak with hindsight - we humans stand on the shoulders of those who, unfortunately, lost their lives for everyone else to have the knowledge to progress :/
The point being that the human race's total knowledge and subsequent forward movement is based entirely on "that <event> happened therefore <these lessons have been learned and subsequent actions shall be enacted>."
most reactors fail because of humans and money, how can you learn about that? just look at fukushima, some problems were known, but the management have found that such a event cant happen and saved some money here and there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...
It's honestly nuts that they use carbon-emitting fossil fuels at all given their nuclear, solar, and wind potential.
There may be differing perspectives about how much of it is unusable, but the debate is between "most of the continent" and "even more than that". A nuclear waste storage facility in an unvisited portion of the outback would rank rather low on the list of bad things happening to the indigenous people of Australia, wouldn't you say?
Yes, observant reader, parts of the ocean floor are some of the best candidate areas.
By humans.
On the other hand, not getting nuclear power deployed ASAP everywhere essentially means the long term destruction of our planet.
So all in all, I don't think it's nearly as clear cut a decision on nuclear vs. democracy, and if forced to choose I may pick the former.
Not sure I'd take that definition of success. China seems like an absolute failure in the face of almost certain success. The CCP seems to ruin every good thing about the Chinese culture, suppress every positive instinct, and punish every decent behaviour. They absolutely do not care about your silly environmental causes, and if you got in the way of any one of their state-sponsored ecological disasters, you would be crushed like roadkill.
I think nuclear power generation is an excellent idea, but if it is somehow incompatible with representative democracy, there just isn't an option, I guess we have to find some other good way to generate power. Though I think the idea that the two are incompatible is nonsense.
Tell that to the millions of people in concentrations camps because they practice the wrong religion or were born into the wrong ethnic group.
China also produces more carbon dioxide emissions than the US and Europe combined and it's growing at a faster rate, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese model is offering up a better solution for climate change.
Longer half-lives = less radioactivity.
The waste from conventional reactors is the fission products plus lots of U238, a fair amount of plutonium, some U235, and various transuranics. The transuranics and plutonium are the really long-lived radioactive waste.
To be clear there is no "safe" option. But this 60+ year old nuclear facility survived the 4th largest earthquake in record history, a tsunami, and only failed because the placements of the back, back up generators. Other plants (e.g. the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plan) that were closer to the epicenter survived just fine.
Old outdate plants aren't perfect, but even still its better than the guaranteed best case scenario for fossil fuels.
You make it sound like this is unbelievably improbable. Like "multiply the probabilities of an earthquake and a tsunami".
In fact, this is a prime example for a common cause failure.
15,896 people died that day, and no one (outside Japan) gives a shit because there was some radiation leakage and property damage.
To be honest, you could probably make that argument for anything under question in any scenario. But even if we were to skip the logical loopholes ("We took it into account, but we decided the benefits outweighed the costs because of <fill in any reason>"), let's just look at the raw numbers or simply just historical facts. Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries? OK, take one step back. Would those disasters have occurred if "all disaster scenarios [were] taken into account"?
The reality is that we have no one good and practical energy solution for the world. And even though I believe that there's no practical solution that can beat a tried and tested solution like nuclear in terms of efficiency, I also believe that there's been no tried and tested solution that's been worse in terms of failure.
My point is that failure of nuclear energy provision is demonstrably worse than the failure of any other options we've tried. Does this mean it's better/worse? Who knows.
But you simply cannot say that something is safe if <xyz>, especially when history says otherwise.
I'm flabbergasted at the number of people talking unironically about "human error" as if it's historically insignificant...
No it isn't; when dams fail villages get swept away and everyone dies. Bad mining disasters can wipe out ~50 people too.
When Fukushima failed, basically nobody got hurt, and there is a lot of inconvenience and resources have to go to cleaning the thing up.
Obviously it is still awful for the people involved, but I'd personally rather go through a nuclear accident than a dam failure or have a mine fall on me, because I'd still be basically ok after a nuclear accident. The argument might be that it is uneconomic after accounting for the costs, but it is demonstrably safe and so a far better failure mode than anything else we've tried.
I mean, Fukushima has basically proven that the only question is economic cost/benefit.
Do you have a source behind this? From what I can tell this statement seems wrong. E.g.:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-and-changing-en...
Coal is a huge source of energy. And the dirtiest available. And if electricity+heat production accounts for 25% of global greenhouse gasses, and transportation 14%, there's a decent chance coal power plants contribute just as much to global warming as all of transportation does, and basically zero chance that it plays a "very minor part" when compared to ships, planes, and cars.
I'm not saying that coal is good or nuclear is bad or vice versa. As I said in my original comment, there is no one practical (in terms of safety, efficiency, cost etc) global energy solution right now. I don't believe any coal-powered plants should be built. Should existing ones be replaced by nuclear? Depends on the actual area, geo-political situation (which changes over time) etc.
The failure scenario is demonstrably better than everything we’ve tried. More people have died installing solar and wind than have from nuclear.
Not a coal plant per se, but there's the Centralia mine fire [1] in PA, which is expected to burn for over 250 years, resulting in the entire town being abandoned.
Yes, the very use of fossil fuels at the extent we use them is causing an extinction level event for the entire planet. Does the gravity of that really sink in?
Miyakoji-machi itself is situated in a valley surrounded by hundreds of square kilometers of mountainous terrain. To blithley claim it would somehow be easy to decontaminate thousansd of square kilometers of mountainous area is naive folly.
It is an extremely diffcult problem to solve.
Especially goven that tepco didnt even ADMIT to the other reactir failure, nor the acale of the catastrophy for a really really long time. They down played the whole thing feom day one and failed to even seek out external help immediately. Thats why thousands of kilometers and trillions of galllons of sea wer contaiminted
Plate tectonics was not understood or scientifically described until 65-67. It was not a widely accepted theory until later, at least the 70s. By that point, Fukushima had already been permitted and built.
Without plate tectonics to create the plate shift earthquake which resulted in the tsunami which caused the disaster, the only mechanism to create tsunamis known was underground rockfalls from steep slopes. Afaik the builders of the plant studied the bathymetry around the area, and saw limited risk of tsunamis.
The primitive science of the time ruled out the possibility of a tsunami overcoming a tsunami wall that was X feet tall. So they built a tsunami wall that was X+k feet tall, and called it a day. When later scientific theory showed that larger tsunamis were not just possible, but inevitable, the plant was not retrofitted to deal with the new reality. Oops.
And so goes hindsight.
And we (the human race) have learned.
yet, this is specific to this one incident, one specific threat.
The issue is more likely to be systemic. Once a production system is up and running, it is not consistantly being improved and iterated upon, but instead left to stagnate technologically (and in this case, in safety in light of new research etc).
But the argument is that such level of continuous improvement/iteration is costly, and the owners would not recouperate the costs! And so hence the economics goes, and so does the human condition continues to revolve around profit and loss.
You are saying the process of risk assessment and mitigation was not regularly actualized with new scientific knowledge. How is that possible ? Is there communication issue between different fields ?
For our information, does someone know : As soon as the engineers / executives were informed of this new risk, what was their decision at the time ? (Maybe this was asked during a court hearing)
That style of hazard, where existing controls passed through a rigorous system but become insufficient with time, are really insidious. It is certainly easy to understand why they would have missed it; even though it isn't an acceptable outcome. Especially given that communication in the 70s/80s involved a lot more talking to people and reading the right journals.
Not all tsunamis are caused by earthquakes though. On July 9th, 1958, there was a rockfall in Lituya Bay, Alaska. A cliff face broke off, and fell 3000 feet into the ocean. This resulting in a tsunami which stripped vegetation at up to 1720 feet in the surrounding areas.
It is impossible for us to take all disaster scenarios into account. Our knowledge is very limited.
I don't know if you are old enough to remember it, but that's exactly what nuclear energy proponents said in the 70s.
Since then, actual experience showed that about every 20 years, there has been a big incident with global impact, and it will take decades if not centuries until the affected area is usable again. And the latter is something that might be tolerable in less densely populated countries or locations (Chernobyl), but in very densely populated ones it would be a major catastrophe.
And so far we've only seen disaster scenarios caused by human error and force of nature, and there's a third one (human malice), which thankfully hasn't happened yet, but which is impossible to guard against.
So my conclusion from reality is that no, we can't make nuclear power completely safe: The consequences of a disaster are too great, the monetary incentives are all wrong (it's not the nuclear companies which pay in case of the disaster, the state takes over; and the costs of the risk are not factored in into the actual running costs; and safety measures are expensive, so economics will always lead to, say, putting the backup generators NOT on the hill, because that would have cost more).
And then there's the problem that in some countries using nuclear energy and producing nuclear waste, the problem of actually storing that waste safely for the next few centuries is still not solved. Even after 50 years of producing it. And that is just insane.
I wish we could make nuclear safe. It would be a great way to reduce carbon emissions. Looking at reality, I can only conclude that we can't, and it's wishful thinking. (Yes, I know, that opinion is not popular, and the nuclear fanboys will be all over me, but so be it).
And how many plants failed that were built after the 70s?
>The consequences of a disaster are too great
Even with the disasters, it kills fewer people than coal even without taking into account the damage from global warming.
It’s like refusing to fly because plane crashes stick out in memory and then choosing to drive instead, despite how much more unsafe it is.
Of course it wouldn't. Designing a carbon-neutral economy is a much bigger problem that requires much broader strategic thinking.
The levelized cost of renewables is already cheaper than the equivalent for nuclear power, with much smaller capital costs, much faster start-up and build costs, and no concerns about long-lived waste.
And the trend lines are clear.
There is simply no case for nuclear power now - economic, political, or environmental.
Not if you want electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. If renewables were competitive for providing constant load, nobody would be having this fucking conversation.
AFAIK there are no high energy producers that are end-to-end carbon neutral (or negative). Doing so needs some type of sequestration.
Of course it wouldn't
nope
If you know of a baseload power source with similar carbon emissions to nuclear, I'm listening.
First, any coal analogy is out of date. Only the coal lobby wants to continue burning coal. Everyone else is like "No, that's stupid and self-harming, let's just not."
Secondly, plane crashes don't make entire areas uninhabitable for long periods.
Third, the problem with nuclear isn't the engineering, it's the management. The nuclear industry has proven time and time again that it can't be trusted with nuclear technology. The long list of smaller accidents, cover-ups, and outright lies make it clear that trust has not been earned.
Four, the waste problem still hasn't been solved. I'm not sure how a technology that creates waste that remains toxic for thousands of years can be considered "clean", but the very curious pretence that is somehow clean - or that it can always be buried under a "Keep Out" sign that will somehow remain in place for many centuries - is a handy example of the toxic rhetorical pollution the nuke industry generates.
Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
Apart from that, it's a great idea.
How I wish that was true.
What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
As an example, when the choice is between being cold in Stockholm (Sweden) or burning coal, the citizen of Stockholm rather burn the coal until the water heating plant has been replaced sometimes 2022 (to be burning other fuels). It is only used in the exceptional cases when the other systems are not enough, and yet it stands for 20% of the total pollution of the city.
> Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic
If we include the use of burning fossil fuel when renewable energy is not delivering, then the cost of renewable is uneconomic and very polluting.
We have not solved the continuously supply problem for renewable energy. Hydro is not enough, large scale battery technology is not a reality yet, adaptive energy policy has never been attempted at a global scale. People want continuously energy 24/7. They will pay for clean and cheap energy when they can, and burn coal when it is not available. The only current clean alternative is to have nuclear when solar and wind is not producing, but the marginal cost of running the nuclear plant is low enough so it will most likely also run when wind and solar is running. A little more environmental friend strategy is to lift up the rods to save fuel and reduce waste, but that means the whole cost need to be recouped during low production periods.
> Apart from that, it's a great idea.
The great idea is to have a full ban on burning fossil fuels for electricity and heat. A full stop. How people then want to solve the problem of continuous power is road full of issues. It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
>What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
It is true.
Germany has already built its last coal fired power plant and has already mandated the closure of all 84 plants by 2020.
Germany is already shifting to generating by renewables, demand shifting to deal with fluctuations in the cost of power, overproduction and pumped water / batteries to make up the rest of the difference.
>It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
>It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
Renewables are not competitive with nuclear for base load, at all. That’s why “environmentalists” conveniently allow the burning of coal and gas for the base load while they sit around waiting on a miracle for storage. Nuclear is a solution that works now. Hoping for storage tech 50 years from now is just stoking the fossil fuel burn.
[0] example being that meltdowns make a place inhospitable for centuries. Fukushima's exclusion zone is shrinking fast. And only Chernobyl and Fukushima have exclusion zones. Plus, those ares have thriving wildlife and vegetation.
You can count these events on your hands. The same can’t be said for aviation accidents caused by incompetence. Thousands of deaths have been caused by bad management/bad engineering/bad operations/bad pilots and yet we still fly more and more every day.
>Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
Only if you make up arbitrary numbers for cleanup costs. See what happens to solar if you remove all of the subsidies for the panels as well as the required storage batteries as well as the cleanup costs for the mines providing all of the materials and it won’t be “economic” either.
You need to consume orders of magnitude more coal than atomic fuel to get the same amount of energy; so the trace elements in coal become a big deal.
The radiation from coal isn't even the worst contaminant, you get all sorts of trace elements. Sulphur (causes acid rain around the power plant) leaps to mind, and there are other really nasty impurities. It is hard to understate the tiny, tiny nature of the nuclear waste 'problem'. Storm in a teacup stuff. It is barely an industrial quantity of dangerous material, and the energetic bits are Very Likely to be recyclable as diluted fuel for a more advanced reactor.
We produce tiny amounts of waste, I can't find a great source but the numbers seem to be of the order of 10,000 to 100,000 m^3 of material that needs special handling and a much larger quantity that can be scientifically measured to have come from a nuclear plant if you have the right equipment. Those are tiny numbers compared to what industrial processes working with waste have to deal with (for scale, 1 small mine open pit coal mine would move that much material a week).
People are trying to protect the world from smaller risks than the environment already faces. It isn't rational, and it isn't very clever either. The volume of the problem is truly tiny compared to stuff we just walk on by as a society.
[1] compares solid waste from different power sources. Little info for solar/wind. Both nuclear and coal seem bad. But none of us wants to build coal plants anyway. But i sure as hell also don't want lots of public resources spend for new nuclear that is decommissioned a few years later once more environmentally friendly alternatives go online. Especially if those resources could accelerate renewables in the first place. I have no problem with keeping existing nuclear plants running as long as they are safe.
I'd love read better concise summaries from official sources, if you can recommend some.
[0] https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... [1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/Environm...
From a volumetric perspective compared to what we know how to handle industrially the numbers are tiny. I strongly suspect the only reason we treat the waste with such care is because there is so little of it that that sort of care is feasible.
I've seen a big lead mine in operation. I wouldn't live anywhere near to one of them, containing the waste is basically impossible. With nuclear waste, there is so little we could literally ship worldwide waste production to the middle of the Sahara and just dump it there. 100,000m³ just isn't that big a number - I mean, we wouldn't because it is a silly idea, not because we can't. It isn't a very responsible approach, but in practice it would work. The volumes are small enough that in my view world-wide nuclear waste storage crosses the boundary from a technical issue to an economic and political issue.
There are lots of uninhabitable wastelands that have been created here and there by industrial processes. One more in a location chosen to be remote would make literally no difference given the scale of the benefits. There are a lot of deserts out there.
Be careful about how you know what you think you know. How informed are you about these matters? Have you taken a good look at the numbers? I know I haven't. How trustworthy are your sources? Why do you trust your sources? Are they expert or something, or do they happen to appeal to you emotionally?
This is a problem at the global scale we're talking about. We need good solid numbers. The number of articles in the newspaper for instance is not a good solid number. Emotion is not a good number.
~17% of France's electricity comes from recycled nuclear[0]. Just the recycled part (75% is from total nuclear).
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
Of course, most Germans would deny that. But the fact is, reducing nuke power leave us only two alternatives: increase the consumption of coal/oil etc, or decrease energy consumption period. Solar and wind are all the rage, but they're still very little compared to nuke.
And good luck with significantly reducing energy consumption: energy is more or less the limiting factor in our economy, so decreasing it decreases the GDP. So it would mean a big fat, long term recession. Now it doesn't have to be bad, but it sure needs a significant overhaul of our societies.
[0] https://energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&perio...
I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly believe global warming is as bad as they say. We have a history of solving problems in the past, so we'll solve this one too. There's no need to panic.
Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"
We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.
Again, the only reason we're not all nuclear today is because of politics.
That's probably the wrong choice.
It's a way to drastically reduce the waste from the process.
Understand where reprocessing came from. Way back then, the story was that nuclear was going to be dirt cheap, but would ultimately be limited by the cost of uranium. The solution was breeding, to provide all the expensive fuel those thousands of cheap reactors would need. Reprocessing was needed to close this fuel cycle.
But this story bears no resemblance to reality. Reactors turned out to be expensive, the number of installed reactors was far below projections, and uranium is not in short supply.
One still hears echoes of this old narrative from people who don't really understand where it came from, and why it doesn't apply.
But let's stipulate that they want to destroy the waste. What's the cheapest way to do that? If they wait to reprocess the fuel, and destroy the actinides in the future, it comes out cheaper than if they reprocess now. That's because reprocessing, and developing and building fast reactors, is quite expensive, and the net present value of that cost is minimized by moving it off into the future. Moreover, reprocessing becomes easier as the fuel cools off.
So, reprocessing NOW is a pointless waste of money, even if ultimately you want to do it. The ONLY reason you'd want to reprocess now was if you needed the actinides now for use in energy generation. And no one needs them for that.
The point is to deal with the waste. The whole argument is that we can't go to nuclear power because "waste". So deal with it.
No one cares about the cost of it -- it's far cheaper to deal with it now than to manage it for a thousand years anyway -- especially in political capital with a bunch of nimbys who think nuclear power is scary.
We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.
For the most part nuclear falls victim to the same human reasoning flaws that make us more worried about flying on a plane than driving even though driving is way riskier.
For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
And no, the comparison to plane vs. car is not appropriate: In both kinds of accidents, a number of people get injured or killed. In case of a nuclear accident, a sizeable area becomes inhabitable for centuries. That's on a completely different scale.
(And just for the record, I'm neither worried about flying in a plane, nor I am worried about driving a car. I am also not worried that the nuclear power plant near me will explode next.)
If we can agree that nuclear is not safe in the long run, and should eventually be abandoned, then we've made progress in the discussion.
It's also not "nuclear or coal". That's another thing in those discussions that bugs me. Fossil fuels (not only coal) are not the answer, either: they'll eventually run out, and they contribute to global warming.
And comparing them by "counting deaths" and "how many lives can be saved" is completely missing the point. Neither nuclear accidents nor coal usage immediately kill people. And it gets totally ridiculous when people try to argue that "there are accidents during wind power constructions; people have fallen to death. So wind power is mucher more dangerous than both nuclear and coal (if you only count the deaths)."
So in the long run, we need alternatives to both nuclear and fossil fuels. If those who say "nuclear is the only solution, it's so great" get the upper hand, we'll never develop those alternatives. And that's the point.
As for the short run, I don't really care. If we can efficiently stop global warming by shutting down all coal plantes and keeping the nuclear plants for a few decades, I'm all for it. Though I doubt that will be enough to stop global warming; we must also drastically reduce energy usage; up usage of renewables, redesign the electric grid, and efficient means of storage to it, restart projects like Desertec, etc., etc.
There's enough we can do. but arguing "let's just bet everything on nuclear, it's totally safe" is the wrong thing to do.
Well no, reactors in chernobyl remained operative until 2000 ,and chernobyl is not inhabitable look at all the animals that live there , the level of radiation is low.Regarding fukushima people are already returning in evacuated zones
And they broke ground at Fukushima in the 60s. We've come a long way in reactor design in 50 years.
I think it’s inevitable you will have bad disasters. The human race is not smart nor mature enough.
That's not really a good metric. What you need to do is a time varying analysis and consider the total number of reactors (globally).
Eg. if we hold danger of reactors constant but we increase the number of reactors over time then you'd see disasters being more frequent (but the opposite is true).
Alternatively if we hold the number of reactors constant and pretend that all new reactors replace old reactors you can determine if new reactors are more, the same, or less dangerous.
But to do a real analysis you have to combine both of these (and some more stuff). Otherwise you're pretty much just saying that the average of the set {1,2,3} is 2. That 20 year thing is a bit contrived and I'm surprised it has popped up a few times.
The second why is "why does the reactor require an uninterrupted supply of electrical power in order to not melt down? Gen 2 nuclear power is inherently dangerous, and is only made safe through active safety systems. If the reactor trips, the cooling pumps must run or decay heat will cause a meltdown. Gen 3 reactors tend to incorporate a lot more passive safety systems or at least ones that don't require electricity.
When it comes to risk management, the human brain that is bound by evolution to dangers close in time and location, is not capable of assessing the consequences of losing a piece of the planet earth's habitat for millions of years.
I'm not sure that there is a 'risk' that the human brain can't process. Risk of what, exactly? Huge cost to the generation that has to move, massive risk if it hits farmland, sure. But even assuming that the 'millions of years' figure is factual - which I doubt - we are certainly going to run out of human race before we run out of land. The risks are all fairly short-term things.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...
My knowledge is from another industry that relies heavily on backup generators.
The other design flaw is diesel or no they require cooling water during shutdown. What bothers me for instance is during the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes the Mississippi ran backwards for a while. During other earthquakes you see significant uplift. If the intakes run dry because the local hydrology suddenly changes you're just fucked.
The physical&power infrastructure side of big data centers is really quite interesting, by the way. Not something we all get exposed to regularly but I can only encourage anyone who has a chance to learn about it to take that opportunity.
It's still not solved. As long as that is the case, I think nuclear energy is not an option.
Germany wants (and the whole world should):
* enough energy
* carbon-free
* nuclear-waste-free
On order to do that, you need massive investments in renewable energy and storage.
Instead, they found a way to have:
* large investment in solar energy, without protectionist measures, leading to the German solar industry dying an creating demand that lead to cheap China solar (overly simplified - feel free to elaborate in your answers)
* laws that limit the building of wind power significantly
* failure to build a power line from the north (offshore windparks) to the south (high power demands, less power resources) which currently leads to insane situations with the neighbors
* first extending the nuclear power plants permits, shortly afterwards deciding to shut down, which lead to Germany having to pay compensations to the companies (in addition to a completely botched nuclear fuel tax, that they had to pay back after it was found invalid in court)
* subsidies for dirty coal plants over decades (300 billion was a number floating around) and another I think 50 billions to help the regions which rely on the coal business after the coal shutdown
Politicians deal in compromise. They see different interests and they try to find a middle ground between those two. They do that with a pretty heavy disregard of science. Scientist are just another interest group.
Scientists: If we don't cut CO2 but this much until this date, the effects of climate change will become this nasty.
Industry: If we do that, that will cost us X moneys and endanger Y jobs and we will make Z less profit.
Government: OK. let's meet halfway.
Earth: LOL
yes they cut the main source of green energy
There is still no final depot for that waste, and the depots they have now are currently running full of water.
I get the argument of nuclear being zero-emission and maybe nuclear can be the solution - but not in its current form. If they wanna play, they need the new kind of reactors, which are actually safe and minimize nuclear waste. Also maybe figure out what to do with the waste before you produce it.
* building reactors in areas with severe earthquakes and tsunamis was the main design flaw
* flood protection too low, even though this was known
* backup-generators not safe against flooding
* loss of outside electricity over a long period of time -> powerlines were not working, other sources of electricity on the grid were offline due to earthquake
* too long time to restore electricity, we are talking about many MWs for cooling and other purposes -> generators were difficult to bring in with further problems making them work
* various damage due to earthquake on reactors, buildings and infrastructure around the plant
* too much spent fuel in pools, required large amount of electricity for cooling
* spent fuel pools high in the buildings, hard to reach
* no cooling capability in case of days-long loss of electricity -> then needs to be cooled with seawater pumped with vehicles with concrete pumps (which were flown in from remote places, even from the US) -> caused structural damages to buildings and spread radiation
* no idea what to do with the contaminated cooling water
* no protection in main buildings against the explosions that happened
* no technology existed for a decade or more to deal with molten cores
* ineffective security/safety process -> the plant had checks a few months before the accident with no consequences
* unwillingness to invest major amounts of money into upgrades
* life extension for outdated reactors, due to economical pressure
* no independent controlling instances for the nuclear industry
All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe".
And all the time bad things happen and they have to admit "well, not when X happens". Or "not when A and then B happens".
Just as you did here. It's nice that Fukushima could have survived an earthquake, but the tsunami isn't a freak accident, it's actually a common cause thing.
It's nice that Fukushima could have survived both the earthquake and the tsunami, had it been built differently.
But it hadn't. And that's why all this "This time everything is safe" is just as unbelievable as over the last decades.
Now, you can certainly say that decarbonization is worth the risk, and I might even be on the fence about it.
But please don't insult the general public's intelligence by ever telling us again that nuclear power is safe and it was only those stupid Russians who totally mismanaged their power plant.
How does what you are saying not apply to any other technology? Cars are “save” but kill more people than all nuclear power plants and accidents combined. Still we say to ourselves we can deal with the risk, which is obviously the case for lot’s of cases but might not be in some exceptions.
I think your reaction seems a little bit too emotional to an interesting and seemingly informative (haven’t fact checked his claims) personal perspective. The problem with discussions about nuclear energy is that there is a strong dogma towards openly thinking about the costs/risk/benefits in the political sphere. In Germany postponing our nuclear exit could buy us some time to get coal offline earlier and provide some stability to the grid. Ironically, the green party would never consider such a move due to ideological (and historical) reasons.
But that's no reason not to point out the obvious flaws in the comment I replied to.
And re: emotionality: you can wish it away, but it is real. Nuclear fans always act as if they only had to show this one scientific study to citizens, and everyone would immediately fall in line. That's hilarious.
Nuclear is done. It may be irrational, but the nuclear community has richly earned that. A little bit of humility and risk-weighing instead of grandiose claims of "perfect safety" would have helped.
But these lies of "perfect safety" were useful back then. They were a shortcut. A cheat. They could get their reactors much quicker if they made false claims.
Now they get the long-term results to their short-term thinking.
However, I am still a staunch defender of differentiated learning from the past and rational planning of the future. Given the information we have right now, nuclear might actually be an important (probably temporary) piece of a rational plan for a good future. Moving forward means setting the stage and right incentives for people to learn from mistakes, improve and grow.
This is a strawman argument. No one is claiming that old reactors are getting safer as we come up with better designs. None of the newer designs that people are claiming are safer have had issues. Fukushima was literally constructed before Chernobyl.
And that's setting aside the other problem which is that many of the countries that are still growing, and will need new, clean sources of power are countries that don't have as much nuclear expertise to begin with. And some of them are countries that the West has tried to actively keep from having nuclear capability.
Better solar, wind, etc., has fewer risks than better nuclear tech in the long run.
no https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
- coal produce radioactive waste too
- it kills a lot more persons (without taking into account global warning) due to air pollution
- the economic cost of nuclear may be underestimated, but this is nothing compared to the economic cost of global warming.
Renewable (wind and solar) are extremely important, but nuclear replace coal and gas. Renewable alone are not enough, especially since we will need a lot more electric energy for transport and to decarbonise the atmosphere; so both are needed.
It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan.
People's priority are wrongly aligned: first close coals and gas plants using renewable, and then think about reducing nuclear plants once we have good storage technology.
Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents). Taking global warming into account, this is way worse; if nothing is done we are talking about billions of death to total collapse of human civilisation.
Compared to that, the human and economic cost of nuclear waste and a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice is trivial.
Nuclear energy is a vital tool against global warming, and I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that.
Perhaps it's not very convincing to claim that "a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice" aren't as bad as an average temperature increase of 1 degree or so. Certainly seems borderline insane to me.
The environmental impact of nuclear power vs. fossil fuels or even renewables is just a negligible number no matter how you spin it.
I too am confused like the GP poster as to how otherwise intelligent people just break down into baseless fearmongering about imaginary disaster scenarios while ignoring that today's conventional energy industry is literally thousands of times worse.
If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
I'm sure that Germany can find a more suited location if they wanted...
Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them.
That's why we would like to see some of them being closed immediately.
How can you write such a ridiculous sentence? We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. It's a permanent subject of dispute here in Europe.
> If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart
One single accident in Europe would dwarf these inflated WHO numbers.
Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.
If you're imagining some kind of super coordinated military unit taking control of a powerplant yeah sure maybe? They'd be much better used just poisoning the water supply.
This is exactly the kind of baseless fear driven hypothetical sentiment that I'd like to understand.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3072967/ns/business-check_point/t/...
For example, in 2014, rebels in Donetsk had attempt to create "dirty bomb" using radioactive waste from abandoned chemical plant. Fortunately, they were spotted and stopped.
I believe graphite rods are used as the safety to capture the neutrons in a nuclear fission reactor and effectively kill off the reaction.
Explosion as in Chernobyl level? That was basically water pressure.
Of course these were prompt supercritical reactions in a moderated system, so they are not explosions in the sense of bombs, which are fast systems with neutron doubling times measured in fractions of a microsecond.
The closing of germany's reactor, which amount to around 60GWh, if it had been used instead to close coal based plants would have saved around 6000 lives per year. So over 10 years would have saved 60000 lives.
An average temperature increase of 1 degree would not be so bad, it would probably amount for a few million deaths and a few trillion dollar (don't forget the economic cost of displacement due to increased water level, this will concern a lot more km^2 than nuclear exclusion zone). Still worse than nuclear but not orders of magnitude more.
But the Paris agreement is about 2°C more and we are not headed to respect that, we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done.
And I live near a nuclear plant in France which almost had an accident similar to Fukushima during the 1999 tempest. So it's not like a Nuclear accident would not affect me...
It's beyond borderline insane how people make up these "billions of deaths" numbers with a straight face.
Billions of deaths at three degrees is probably overstating things, but three degrees does bring massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees. At four degrees, billions of deaths doesn't look that unlikely, and it starts getting hard to imagine how modern civilization could survive. More than that is unthinkable.
The book is a decade old but more recent work hasn't improved the outlook at all.
No thanks. He's a journalist and political activist, reading his foregone conclusions from selected papers he claims to have read is a waste of time.
But of course, sticking with your own forgone conclusions is clearly better.
Instead, it would be gradual, over 20-25 years. But you are right that I am overstating things, when I write billions I think 'between 100 Millions and 1 Billion'. (Recalling that over 25 years, air pollution alone is responsible for around 100 millions deaths). It would depend on the exact temperature change: 3°C or 3.5C.
And total civilisation collapse in unlikely (I hope!), except if there is a feedback factor in global warming and we head for 4°C or more.
https://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en/
Ten fold increase over the next century seems believable given that the projected effect has hardly started yet.
Good example for how these numbers are pulled out of thin air: take an old WHO estimate (which includes Malaria deaths), multiply by 10 for the heck of it and sum over 100 years...
If you want accurate numbers, could you first give accurate numbers of future dangers of nuclear? I want precise calculations based on reality. My hunch is that the number is zero, can you prove otherwise?
I would also appreciate numbers on things like why we have the time to dabble with renewables? Why it's going to be cost effective? How the power storage is solved? And how much land and natural resources are going to be used?
'a vital tool agains global warming'? What does that mean in numbers? How many nuclear power plants of what types for what amount of effort would be built in what timeframe for to make any sizeable contribution? How would it work?
A single reactor in the west is >10bn $ and takes a decade or more to build, while not being able to be financed on the market (see the UK).
Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.
Just replacing eol reactors in the west will be hard.
"A vital tool agains global warming" means that it's our only possibility. It's not about cost, it's about what is physically possible.
If nuclear proponents want to be taken serious, they need to answer those kinds of questions. Currently nuclear is stagnating on a global scale.
>How many?
As many as you can build. You run out of engineers and carpenters before you make too many reactors in time.
>What timeframe?
Now.
>Costs?
Doesn't matter that much. Easily cheaper than climate change.
>Who builds them?
Whoever can.
>Which models?
Hardly matters, any model is safer than burning coal.
>Where do we build them?
Doesn't matter. Any location is safer than burning coal.
>What effects does it have when?
Hope that we might have climate change to stop below 3 degrees.
This will convince nobody.
If you don't believe the IPCC storyline, nuclear is still best power source right now. But there is no hurry. We can safely dabble with renewables and batteries and such until oil, gas and coal run out. No political hard decisions are needed, because prices of fossil fuels will increase well in advance to any catastrophe. So it will become economically sound to produce energy in some other way. Maybe it won't be nuclear then, I don't really care.
- Will you volunteer to live by the nuclear plant or waste storage facilities?
- Will you work at or advise your friends & family to work there?
they assume ~1,3 Billion per 1 GW nuclear capacity[0], but right now it looks like 3-5 Billion per 1 GW is more whats happening. [0] http://withouthotair.com/c28/page_216.shtml [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant.
During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done.
Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource spent or per unit climate change impact, and that fact will increasingly override dollar costs or public perception as the the climate gets increasingly hostile.
Until the crisis becomes apparent, I am sure nuclear will continue to be a mostly ignored option across europe and the west while political forces dominate the issue. China on the other hand isn't bothered by public sentiment[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-lik...
You'll need to answer real practical questions like the UK currently faces: who will build the proposed reactors and who will pay how much for it. It's not like this is an easy question, just check the news the UK from the past few years, with Hitachi and Toshiba giving up.
France's state owned nuclear industry builds another plant in the UK - with a proposed cost of 20bn pounds... The decision for this reactor took almost ten years.
1: It's not actually cheaper than nuclear. The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China). Discounting this cost makes nuclear the dominant option. Factoring for lifecycle costs pushes it much further ahead. Fun fact: there is currently no way to recycle photovoltaics whose useful lifespan is 20 years.
2: Use of landmass. Deploying wind or solar consumes landmass which must be cleared of flora/fauna. The landmass required to power a nation via these means is not at all negligible. This is contrary to managing climate change for obvious reasons.
Geothermal power stands as an exception here and should absolutely be deployed over nuclear where permissible.
3: Excess capacity. The climate debate is converging on the fact that we are past the point of no return and we need to actively sequester carbon out of the atmosphere to get back to a healthy scenario. Ignoring the specifics, this basically means that we need to 'un-spend' all the energy that we have consumed over the last 50 years via fossil fuels. While still meeting the growing energy demands of civilisaion. We need to be producing a huge excess of energy for this strategy to be viable.
Renewables are nice, but pragmatically they are not nearly enough to dig us out of the hole where we have found ourselves.
An engineer in Shanghai costs $20K/year. You can't point to the cost of nuclear in China and pretend it will reflect the cost in the west.
Any opposition to the the energy policy in China will see themselves in a labor camp. That's a cheap way to deal with it.
If you think that nuclear is cheaper in China than in the West, then part of the reason is that it has other hidden costs.
As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.
One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.
If you take single fuck up, that's been shown in court to be fuck up and then deduct from there that nuclear power is all over as expensive Olkiluoto 3, then umm.
Do you also smoke because your granny smoked and lived to her nineties?
Germany has been taking both nuclear and coal offline and renewables have been plugging the gap for both for some years now and will likely continue to do so.
It boggles my mind that the nuclear industry itself demands that all disaster cleanup costs over $300 million be shouldered by the government yet it is trying to project an image of how it is the "safe" option. If they don't have enough faith in their own safety to raise the cap why should we?
They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.
In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world, and we don't know the time frame to get to it (there are huge technological challenges, while the challenge for nuclear reactor are solved since 50 years. Of course they are still RD to be done on the nuclear side too, like molten salt reactors).
Given the economic and human cost of global warming, investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet. Again, I am not saying that nuclear is a miracle energy that will solve all our problem (fusion would be). Nuclear energy does have a lot of problems. But these problems are trivial which respect to global warming, and we should solve global warming first (which again will involve even more electricity than we produce right now).
Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!) is like worrying about a leak under the sink while the whole house is on fire.
Germany's Energiewende is a many decade long plan with going beyond 80+ renewable energy for electricity in 2050.
The Energiewende is not just about CO2 reductions, it is about making renewable energy viable in an industrialized country. This has impact for all of us. Not just in Germany.
If the US had a forward looking government and population, we would much further along the way. The energy consumption in the US is twice as high per capita as in Germany and there is no credible energy policy beyond fracking gas. The current US president is a coal lover and he was voted for that into his office. Imagine the amount of research money and infrastructure money the US COULD invest into a new energy systems - instead it wastes money on wars, consumption and trillion dollar deficits.
> investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet
That's why it has to go and somebody has to invest to make that viable. Germany is doing exactly that.
> Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!)
Germany did focus on renewable energy and the most incompatible industry had to go first.
Renewable energy is not about nuclear and renewable side by side - this won't work.
Nuclear is a huge state owned monopolistic system. Renewable is market oriented, decentralized, non-monopolistic. The break-up of the old system was inevitable to jump-start the new energy system.
It's a complete paradigm shift like going from Mainframe computing to a distributed Internet.
Nuclear can be made smaller (molten salt reactor, but I do admit that there are huge challenges for that too), and more flexible. Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's, but France's can be quite flexible: for those of you who can read French <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1102620969808658432.html> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.
will have zero impact in the next three decades. There is no market offering and no buyer.
No one is investing in yet another fuel cycle and nuclear technology. There are no reactors of scale and there is no industry surrounding it.
> Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's
Germany had a few flexible nuclear plants. But all old.
> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.
The result is that France has invested very little in renewable energy in the last decades and created a very inefficient and state owned energy system.
France's centralized nuclear state owned energy system and distributed multi-producer/owner renewable energy are largely incompatible systems. Proof: the lack of investments into renewable in the last decades in France.
The main question is this: where are CURRENT investments going. Not nuclear, but renewable. This future had been made possible by investments like the German Energiewende, while other countries did invest in mostly nothing. They even failed to bring nuclear forward (-> US). The US sits on a bunch of outdated reactors and not much idea how to replace them economically with newer and better ones.
Natural gas had the big advantage of being burned in combustion turbines, which are cheaper than other thermal cycles. Heat exchangers are costly, but a simple cycle turbine doesn't need any (if it doesn't have a regenerator).
The biggest nuclear operator here (Exelon) is shit talking new nuclear, putting their investment into CO2 capture, renewables, and storage.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
>They produce 3x the CO2 of France, despite their commitment against global warming.
That's because France started replacing fossil fuels with nuclear in the 80s. That was the only sensible approach to reducing CO2 in the 80s. This isn't the 80s though.
>In an ideal world, renewable would replace everything. We are not yet in this ideal world
I mean, it's half the cost of nuclear and it doesn't include the risks (however small) of catastrophe.
In an ideal world we could swap out fossil fuels for something clean overnight - obviously it takes about 30 years. The question isn't "what can we replace fossil fuels with overnight", it's "what can take over from fossil fuels?"
If I look at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany Germany went from 60% fossil, 23% nuclear, 17% renewable to 49%/13%/38% respectively.
How much further down do you expect fossil to go in ten years? I am pretty sure that by investing both on nuclear and renewable germany could have been at close to 0% right now or in a few years.
Look at France, they have zillions Euros to invest to get ONE EPR reactor online. They are losing huge amounts of money on another one they are building in Finland. Germany lost a lot of money on the EPR, too. The EPR France builds in the UK will be the most expensive power plant on the planet with >20bn pounds costs.
> How much further down do you expect fossil to go in ten years?
The projections for 2030 are around 65% electricity from renewable energy.
Why didn't Germany close its coal plants first? This would have saved several Metric Tons of CO2 and saved the life of a few thousands people (due to air pollution).
When is Germany going to reach no CO2 emissions? (Expanding nuclear along renewable would have meant it could have reached this goal right now). You talk about the costs of EPR (which exploded I agree), but this is nothing compared to the cost of climate change, which Germany contribute three times more than France. This cost is shared across the world, but this is hypocritical to not take it into account.
I don't miss your point, I just don't think nuclear is a viable complement to renewable in Germany.
> Why didn't Germany close its coal plants first?
Because it wanted to get rid of nuclear first and as fast as possible. The reasons for that is all known and a little research can explain it to you - beyond the believe that it was 'irrational'. It's not that you need to agree with it, but people here had other priorities than you have.
Still CO2 emissions were reduced by 27% from 1990 to 2016.
The next two decades will bring the end of coal-based electricity.
> When is Germany going to reach no CO2 emissions?
When do you stop going to vacations via airplanes? Stop eating meat? Stop driving a car?
> Expanding nuclear along renewable would have meant it could have reached this goal right now
No, nuclear and renewable are not compatible. Nuclear is centralized monopolistic, mostly state-owned form of energy. I sucks up huge amounts of investments and corrupts everything around it.
> This cost is shared across the world
Germany invested into renewable energy and jump-started the PV business. That's equally important.
And this killed a few thousand persons and rejected MegaTons of CO2 in the atmosphere that could have been avoided.
> The next two decades will bring the end of coal-based electricity.
This is 30 years later than could have been, and gas instead of coal is not the solution either. Will Germany have 100% renewable in 20 years?
> When do you stop going to vacations via airplanes? Stop eating meat? Stop driving a car?
I changed my way of living already. I could still do more yes, but the most efficient way would be to convince policy makers to close coals/gas before nuclear.
> No, nuclear and renewable are not compatible. Nuclear is centralized monopolistic, mostly state-owned form of energy. I sucks up huge amounts of investments and corrupts everything around it.
Again, the drawbacks of nuclear power are nothing compared to the drawback of climate change, and gas corrupts too.
Probably yes. They seem to be poised to get there quicker than anybody else.
The inhibition to us achieving this goal earlier wasn't a lack of faith in nuclear power - it was a lack of belief in the importance of dealing with climate change at all.
Moreover (and this is the critical part), it's not like nuclear power is going to get us to 100% renewables any quicker than solar/wind will at this point - not since they broke the cost barrier in 2014.
In the 1980s nuclear was the only way to go zero carbon. 10 years it would have helped us get there quicker. Since 2014, there's no real point to building out nuclear capacity any more - new nuclear can't compete on cost only rickety old plants can.
One Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event in a densely populated country like Germany on a densely populated continent like Europe? Having reactors with molten cores near my home town with a 5 mill people metro area?
Japan had massive luck that the wind wasn't blowing in the direction of Tokyo.
Fukushima: how many deaths? Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?
But sure, let's close the nuclear reactor who killed nobody in Germany, and keep open the coal plants which still accounted for 228TWh in 2018, meaning they killed around 22800 persons per year. And let's only close them in 2038, 30 years later, having wasted 350 Million Tons of CO2 by year and killed hundreds of thousands of people in total.
We are lucky that the gas lobby is way less evil than the nuclear lobby <https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110278976654794753>
> Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?
Millions of people trying to escape...
However, from this point onward it makes little difference. It makes little economic sense to build new nuclear plants given that they are more expensive and no sense to build coal. Renewables are more than capable of taking over as old nuclear and coal plants are phased out.
The issue now is how fast to phase out rickety old nuclear plants and rickety old coal plants.
it's not https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...
so ?
>Given how rapidly PV costs have continued to decline (and how major nuclear efforts collapsed with cost explosions since then), that's useless.
you say so, but the one with evidence is me not you
Compare 2015 prices to current prices.
Anyone with even cursory knowledge of this area would have know how fast PV prices have fallen.
not an argument , bring proofs he's wrong
Then, take into account the goal of making of vehicles electric in the next 20 years.
There is no viable alternative to nuclear as of today even if renewables should of course be pushed as much as possible.
Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons. (wood fired plants are counted as renewables in the EU, by the way)
The absolute priority should be to get rid of emissions, i.e. fossil fuels. Germany decided to get rid of nuclear energy first.
They are not a good example to follow.
Hinkley Point = 3200 MW Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW
That's about 1,100 wind turbines at current tech. GE is working on a 12 MW wind turbine - it would take 270 of them would replace Hinkley point.
* The wind is always blowing somewhere.
* At current prices it makes sense just to overproduce and figure out ways to time shift demand (e.g. start using electric storage heaters again)
Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...
Quite right, my mistake.
GE's new turbine has a 63% capacity apparently. So, 428 of them are needed, apparently.
Either way, I don't see what is so intrinsically unrealistic about setting up 500 of these things offshore as compared to a hinkley point.
Gansu Wind farm in China is 8,000MW - already 2.5x onen Hinkley.
Why is that?
I'm sure we're all broadly in favour of free markets. Do electricity consumers buy nuclear because it's good value?[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
It's not 100% because you need to do maintenance at times.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, I was alluding to the lively debate about how the selling price for electricity is set, and how it should vary depending on market conditions.
I see no reason to lock-in minimum pricing for any kind of electricity generation many decades in advance. Why is that necessary for new nuclear plants?
In other words: do we need to guarantee a minimum market price 30 years in advance in order to make it look like building a nuclear plant makes economic sense?
it doesn't work like that , capacity factor of wind is almost half of the capacity factor of nuclear
(Source: http://www.ewea.org/wind-energy-basics/faq/)
That's an actual average of 685 kW, so 4,700 turbines for Hinkley Point. But that's still the _average_ production. If, or rather when, there's no wind during a high demand period you get a nice blackout.
Also:
> So a 2-megawatt wind turbine would require a total area of about half a square kilometer
(Source: https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-1230463...
So for those 4,700 turbines you need more than 2,350 km^2, so the whole of Dorset covered and as said, you'd still need a backup.
It does because it is a relatively industrialized country. CO2 emissions fell last year by 4.5%.
These are actual numbers for electricity production in Germany: from 2017 to 2018:
5.6% more wind electricity, 6.3% more solar electricity.
2.7% less coal/lignite, 6% less hard coal, 9% less gas.
The share of renewable energy of electricity production is 40%.
In 2030 it is projected to be at around 65%.
This is going to be a revolution. We now have working days in 2019 where >60% of the electricity are coming from renewables. There was a week this year with 64.8% renewable energy for electricity, with wind providing 48.4%. Two decades ago this was thought to be impossible.
No, it does because its electricity comes from fossil fuels.
You are completely avoiding the point of my comment. Germany could have much, much lower emissions with nuclear but it has decided to continue emitting for political reasons, while trying to claim that they are 'green'...
It's not helpful to try to kill the discussion by stroking irrational fears.
No, we really don't. We know how to make all sorts of things reasonably safe. Yet planes still fall out of the sky, refineries catch on fire, dams fail, etc. In essence: Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident.
Much about accidents in complex high risk technologies has been said in "Normal Accidents" by Perrow in the 80s. The reasons he identified why complex systems fail will always be with us. Especially the notion that it is more often than not the organizations and not the technology which enables major accidents.
A coal fired power plant will also have a probability different from zero for producing nuclear waste.
In fact, AFAIK the radiation risk from living near a coal powered power plant is significantly larger than living next to a nuclear reactor.
I guess if this was taken into account coal powered power plants would also require incredibly expensive cleanup.
That said as long as renewable is cheaper we should go with that going forward.
This is again spreading irrational fears.
proof? beacuse using solar and wind bring a rise in the cost of energy https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...
Gee. They have a bunch of nuclear reactors whose cost has already been paid for. That cost is not reflected in current electric rates. When they try to build new ones, the cost is ridiculous, and they find building renewables sources would be cheaper.
"Replacing nuclear with renewables would save France $44.5 billion"
https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...
nope ''In fact, the carbon-intensity of French electricity has increased. After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016.
The reason? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption. And now, the high cost of renewable electricity is showing up in French household electricity bills.
According to Eurostat, although French households pay 41% less than German households, electricity in France has, over the past decade, been increasing in price much faster than electricity in Germany.''
Because they don't pay the real price. The whole show is government owned (EDF, Areva (or what they are called today)). and thus a lot of money is coming from the government - like financing for acquiring Areva parts. The government keeps nuclear power afloat with huge amounts of money.
Example: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Europe-checks-Fre...
EDF is 56bn€ in debt and can't pay for the maintenance/replacement of its aging reactors. The new Flamanville reactor is now at 11bn€ cost...
Sure, we can build nuclear power plants, but let's make sure that we have used our potential for wind-, water- and solar power generation first (besides other stuff, like having good insulation on buildings, LEDs, etc).
I also feel like people are pro- or contra nuclear power to show their alliance to their political parties more than for rational reasons. We should stop that.
I think because it's way more expensive than having a mixed source of energy. The issue is what are we able to give up for having energy? Air pollution? Security that I don't get blown in a nuclear plant explosion (the fear is always there it seems...) ? Money? I think that nuclear energy is not bad, it's just a transition, as the parent comment said. And it's a better transition than coal.
Renewables like solar and wind are decent for offsetting peaks and maybe generate some household electricity, but you're delusional if you think they can be used to replace coal or nuclear in the next decade. Or even quarter century.
Until we make giant leaps in energy storage technology, we NEED something that can provide a steady base flow of electricity 24/7/365.
And currently nuclear power is our best option for that. Burning fossil fuels (coal, wood, etc) is shit, we have only a limited number of places for water power.
The US has a fancy water pumping station in the scale we'd need (3000MW)[0], but it relies heavily on the local geography and wouldn't be economically feasible in the Netherlands for example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
Ah, the Argument from Bad Engineering. If you stop and think real hard I'm sure you could imagine many ways to do this. And they'd be cheaper than trying to run steel mills off nuclear reactors.
Also, adapt iron/steel production to use direct electrolytic methods, although that's going to require more R&D. The potential for dispatchability of demand is enormous.
Also Canada is complaining that they have a massive surplus of hydroelectricity, that they would like to sell us, but it’s apparently very complicated to get anyone to agree on anything, even if the total infrastructure cost and the energy would be cheaper than a nuclear plant.
Remember that we will need a lot more electric energy if we want electric cars and use energy for decarbonisation; so we should use nuclear until renewable completely fill the gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Even just recently in the United States the Oroville dam came pretty close to catastrophe and required the evacuation of 188,000 people. Repairing the Oroville dam cost $1.1 billion, even back in the 70s the Teton Dam collapse cost over $300 million.
I'm all in favor of using hydroelectric power in places where we need to build a dam to control flooding but building a dam for power alone is ecologically damaging, floods tons of land, and even if you wanted to try to build more, there's not a lot of suitable locations.
As for the complexity of keeping a nuclear reactor under control, this isn't the 50s, we have reactor designs that are dramatically safer than older reactors, we aren't building them. I think you're wrong about trying to conserve energy as well. I'm not saying that we should waste it, but real conservation of energy isn't going to happen without significantly changing our current lifestyles. We don't need to do that if we just invest in sustainable clean energy in the form of nuclear power in the first place.
Yes, that twisted logic annoys me as well. But beeing a german, I probably know more of the context.
Anti-Nuclear movement in germany is strong for historic reasons. Top-down politics who praised nuclear power and bombs for the people, which the people disagreed and then there were clashes with police, not only from extremists, but also the very normal people who got upset [0]
Also there was tschernobyl. The radioactive cloud from then went down in my area. Even today it is advised against eating mushrooms and meat from boars must be tested for radiation before it can be selled and they don't tell, how much meat is too contaminated, but probably much, as the hunters are still angry.
Also there were rumors that childs born shortly after tschernobyl had a much higher chance of missformed feet for example, but I never checked for truth. A friend of mine had, and the doctors made inofficial remarks, but officially nothing bad happened, because ukraine was a brother socialist state. (but this did was not the case for western germany, so again, I never fact checked that, but the rumors are there).
So there is a lot of fear.
And now we come to the twisted part: most of the anti-nuclear movement is indeed also against coal. And their solution (like mine, long-term) is renewable and they don't like the fact, that renewables are not 100% ready today or tomorrow, so they say, just reduce. So basically wishful thinking and rather doing something than nothing. (even if it is not the smartest move)
And btw. there is massive activism going on against coal at the moment, there is for example a forest occupied[1], which was supposed to get shoveld down for coal. And even though quite some of the protesters are lunatics, I wish them the best, as we really, really don't need more coal. But, and here comes the other important reason: money. There are still many companys and workers and unions deeply tied to coal mining and processing. So also a strong motivator for politics ... to still use coal, despite all climate change blabla.
If not, nuclear is still the safest source of power, even including disasters like Chernoble and Fukushima. The major disasters come to mind more readily because they receive heavy media coverage, but this is in part because they're so rare, unlike the utterly routine problem of coal ash ponds spilling. Outside of major disasters, nuclear power produces so much energy that it's safer than wind power, which only kills people via construction and maintenance accidents.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
A nuclear power plant failure (however minor) is global news for weeks and weeks.
Unfortunately, it happened. It really happened. And "only those stupid Russians could have done it" doesn't comfort me.
Chornobyl operated till 2000s because cheap atom blasted huge hole in budget of Ukraine. They stopped when Ukraine received financial help to close these reactors. Tax payers and international aid covered these expenses and will continue to cover them for next few centuries at least. Closure of single reactor costs significant part of budget of small country. Closure of bunch of reactors can eat whole budget or two.
If one stupid can devastate whole continent, then better to switch to something else, because it doesn't look like we will breed out stupid people in near future.
Today Germany is still affected by the radioactive fallout (Chernobyl). For example many wild boars in Thuringia are radioactively contaminated with caesium-137. It will still take about 300 years until the radioactive caesium-137 vanishes.
If BED was a thing, banana plantation workers would all radiation poisoning.
Similarly, pointing out that there is a measurable amount of Cs-137 in wildlife in Germany is not a statement about safety. More context and more quantification is required to make it anything other than sensationalism.
That’s what it may have been created for, but it’s not what it’s used for.
> Similarly, pointing out that there is a measurable amount of Cs-137 in wildlife in Germany is not a statement about safety.
It’s been quantified and researched and the recommendation is still that one should control its intake of game meat and especially mushrooms from these regions because the CS-137 concentration can (depending on the kind) have multiples of the legal maximum (1) It’s perfectly safe to occasionally eat normal amounts’ but dismissing it as bananas is not appropriate.
(1) https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w...
I'm not seeing anyone here trying to imply that it's as safe as bananas, but I do see a comment that tries to imply that the degree of Cs-137 contamination is about a thousand times higher than safe levels (300 years, ~30 year half-life). As your citation shows, the worst measurements of bioaccumulated Cs-137 in recent years have been merely 2-3x safe levels, with older outliers having been 10x safe levels.
That’s not what the comment says. It says that it will take 300 years for all the CS to vanish. But even by your interpretation, a response along the lines “This is a perfectly safe amount of radiation by all standards (or, as my comment: This is perfectly safe for limited consumption) would have been substantially better than pulling out the BED and trying to shut the discussion down with it. Note that the line you quote from my comment includes a wordplay on the BED (“bananas”)
Yeah, and that's an obviously wrong statement when taken literally. So which is the more reasonable interpretation: that he was trying to say that the danger from the Cs-137 would take 300 years to vanish, or that he was providing a number that's not just wrong, but also irrelevant and misleading?
This is not something I trust our government can do.
Other then that, nuclear is very clean and safe.
But in any case, thorium is very plentiful, and there has been good progress on extracting uranium from seawater. Plus, experience with other minerals would lead one to believe that there is probably more uranium that could be mined if there were a motive to find it.
This eliminates the need to have nuclear plants in close proximity to densely populated areas.
Plants can then be built in remote areas where the negative externalities will be drastically reduced, while still receiving the benefit of green, reliable energy.
No reason to be flabbergasted.
That's quite a statement. Do you have references?
I mean the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants is ridiculously difficult to handle because of its high temperature. It has to be wrapped in layers of containers - after cooling off for months (years?) in a water bath.
> It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan.
Fukushima lead to closing of Nuclear power plants, obviously, and not coal plants. The share of renewables in Germany increased a lot. To my knowledge the only coal power plants that were set up in the recent years were really modern ones. Therefore I cannot follow the argument, could you elaborate?
> Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents).
Recall also that there is no insurance that covers nuclear power plants but driving a car without insurance is not allowed in most countries.
The difference between coal and nuclear energy is that the latter is very close to the limits of what we can control.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
> Coal is largely composed of organic matter, but it is the inorganic matter in coal—minerals and trace elements— that have been cited as possible causes of health, environmental, and technological problems associated with the use of coal. Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn). Although these elements are less chemically toxic than other coal constituents such as arsenic, selenium, or mercury, questions have been raised concerning possible risk from radiation. In order to accurately address these questions and to predict the mobility of radioactive elements during the coal fuel-cycle, it is important to determine the concentration, distribution, and form of radioactive elements in coal and fly ash.
But I'm quite sure this is still a completely different radioactivity problem one needs to cope with: hot, long living and very active material vs. cold, rather inactive material with short range radiation.
We're better off making solar, wind, etc. viable than pouring tons of money into a single area that we can't safely export to other places in the world.
And electrical energy is still only one part of the problem since we still need to replace the internal combusion enginees, and jet engines or at least find an alternative fuel source. Nuclear power isn't a panacea.
Proponents of nuclear tend to ignore the long-run costs associated with nuclear (eg. waste transport and storage), and the potential for cost blowouts due to acute disasters like Fukushima (estimated cost to taxpayers: USD $100 Billion).
The fact tax money is going towards Fukushima highlights another problem with nuclear power: the agency problem. The individuals and organizations that planned and built Fukushima are not directly shouldering the full cost of the problem it created. You can extrapolate from this to many other problems and risks associated with nuclear power, because the timeframe is long relative to the life of a human. If the average human lifespan was 200 years or more, maybe this would be less of an issue, but as it is now, profits now will inevitably trump responsibility tomorrow (and by tomorrow, I mean 30+ years from now).
There's also the risk of weaponization, which increases as the number of plants increase, particularly if those plants are built in countries which currently do not possess much technical nous. It's not a technology that should be disseminated, because the risks are real, and catastrophic in their consequences. If this sounds paranoid, Warren Buffett had this to say about the threat of cyber, biological, nuclear, or chemical attack on in the US:
"“What’s a small probability in a short period approaches certainty in the longer run. (If there is only one chance in thirty of an event occurring in a given year, the likelihood of it occurring at least once in a century is 96.6%.) The added bad news is that there will forever be people and organizations and perhaps even nations that would like to inflict maximum damage on our country. Their means of doing so have increased exponentially during my lifetime. “Innovation” has its dark side.
There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk. If an event occurs in the U.S. that leads to mass devastation, the value of all equity investments will almost certainly be decimated.
No one knows what “the day after” will look like. I think, however, that Einstein’s 1949 appraisal remains apt: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”"
[Source: 2016 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders]
Renewable energy at that scale is still theoretical and hasn't shown its downsides yet.
Nuclear has shown all its downsides, and they have been 95% corrected. It's a mature, known technology.
As for plant capacity, the largest power plant in the world is renewable (Hydropower):22.5 GW. Compare that with the largest nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (currently closed due to safety concerns): 8GW.
If you limit "renewables" to only solar and wind, there are already 1GW+ wind and solar PV projects operating, and more in the planning and construction phase. There's no theoretical obstacle to building 8GW solar PV projects, though it might be unnecessary, as they can be deployed in a modular fashion. There are several 500MW solar thermal projects operating and more planned.
The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster of 2011 may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
Hydro works well and is the best solution if our country has capacity for it, unfortunately, it's not available everywhere.
> The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of Fukushima may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
The downsides are completely understood and the consequences of Fukushima (please specify in your message the nuclear plant) are well studied, the result is that there's not much impact.
Hydropower is also an example of one of my points. It is a mature technology, and we now know of its big environmental costs as well as it's benefits. We could technically probably double the hydroelectric power of the world, but the natural devastation would be too large, so we mostly chose not to.
We have yet to see what those downside are for solar and wind. For nuclear we know, and also know how to handle them.
It's already hard to find a safe solution for waste that'll survive for millennia. Simply because predicting what might happen over those time scales is hard.
Now factor in that it'll be paid for by humans with a lifespan left of 50 years, and usually a decision horizon of 4 years (i.e. politicians).
The chances off getting it wrong technically are non zero. The chances of getting it wrong for budgetary reasons are even bigger. Incentives do not line up.
This means:
1. no mega projects that attract similarly sized public opposition
2. 1-2 year construction timelines instead of 10+
3. much, much less financial and regulatory risk
4. if an individual project goes off the rails because of bad management, it just gets cancelled instead of being pushed forward with endless public dollars because of sunk cost fallacies
The private sector is well able to stomach the risk level of wind and solar and finance and build it on their own, whereas nuclear and mega hydro essentially require government financial backing, which again contributes to the agency problem.
We know we can build 1,000s of MW of wind and solar per year in a safe and cost-effective way because we're already doing that. Every single nuclear or dam project in North America right now is a delayed, over-budget financial and project management boondoggle.
They interfere with fish migration. For some species, this means disrupting their reproductive cycle.
They gradually accumulate sediment, so their reservoir slowly fills up and turns into land. This is one of the issues with the Aswan Dam, which is projected to have a much shorter lifespan than was initially projected due to high sediment accumulation.
The Aswan met all of its goals, but it's a disaster. The sediment rapidly accumulating behind the dam used to provide free fertilizer for farmers. Use of commercial fertilizer skyrocketed.
It's also the cause of a serious health crisis. Schistosomiasis cases have also skyrocketed.
The annual floods used to keep snail populations in check. The snails are the vector for this gruesome parasitic infection.
Unlike coal or nuclear, renewables are easily scaled down without creating a huge risk: for coal, you want to go large for efficiency reasons and to ensure that the right set of filters are installed and maintained. For nuclear, there were ideas of building a nuclear power plant in every basement, but given how the power plants we have look like military bases, that seems rather unfeasible.
Once you go big, you have the issues mentioned elsewhere in the thread (sunk cost fallacy, NIMBY, ...) but also corruption and that these big sites become single points of failure.
Dams are in the same space: NIMBY, once started you can't stop, large scale construction (which is rife with corruption).
Create financially reasonable basement/rooftop level nuclear or coal systems that can be safely installed by any random electrician and operated by the home owner and the entire discussion may shift.
beacuse they stop working
Even if the US was totally committed, and decided to build a brand new reactor right now, how long would it take? A decade?
We can slap up renewables in a fraction of that time, and spend the next decade reaping the rewards, not sitting around waiting for the magical payoff of a reactor that will cost billions to build and operate, and doesn't do us a lick of good for an entire decade!
Totally committed? You sure? Ok.
The US could bring at least two dozen new nuclear power plants online per year. It could do that with only modest impact on its massive economy.
National security declaration (probably numerous). Bypass all environmental building concerns and impact reviews. Pull most of the US military out of Europe and all of it out of the Middle East. Mobilize at least 100,000 soldiers in support of the mission (ideally twice that number; clearing land, hauling materials, dealing with protestors, providing area security, restricting access including by drones). Whatever needs to be done, will be done. Redirect several agencies (DARPA, DOE, etc) to almost exclusively working on this mission for ten years. Have Congress declare a draft on the back of the national security declarations, pull relevant scientists and engineers out of the private economy via draft. Suspend all emigration. Federalize the control of all national guard troops, draft them all formally under the command of the US Military and remove them from their states to avoid potential state resistance (numerous states would attempt to resist this very strong-armed Federal plan). Nuclear plants would be reasonably distributed across the country, some states would attempt to resist any plants being built inside their borders, which is another reason you remove their national guard troops. This is serious, so we'll do what is necessary. It's life or death after all, right? If the Supreme Court attempts to block it, expand the size of the Supreme Court and stuff the bench until your votes win.
Use eminent domain where necessary. Limit taking private land as much as reasonably possible; doing so just gives the resistance groups an issue to play up. Fortunately in this case the Federal Government owns a ridiculous amount of land (particularly in the western states).
The US has an epic scale labor force, and millions of healthy people doing nothing that could be drafted into various basic positions in support of this large national project. Jobs! (there's that sound bite) Another plus: absolute secrecy would not be particularly paramount, unlike with the Manhattan Project. You wouldn't need a bunch of Oak Ridges. There isn't anything that special about a modern nuclear power plant, and the US wouldn't be using any radically new technology in these plants anyway.
Initially getting up to speed would take several years (standardizing and getting new workers enough experience, etc), after which you could get to a rate of bringing a new plant or two online in a given month.
Fund it with a trivial Federal Reserve Nuclear QE program. $20-$30 billion per month in 'printing.' The dollar wouldn't even notice, and it'd keep the budget from getting further stretched (which would keep the general population more calm than if you spiked their taxes or took from their social programs).
Task the major banks - all of which are realistically under direct supervisory control of the Federal Reserve and Treasury these days - with helping to keep the US financial system stable (there might initially be some panic), including where interest rates are concerned. The US has the most powerful banking and financial system by a considerable margin, it would be told to accomodate and assist, or else (look what they did for funding the shale build-out, a spigot of hundreds of billions of dollars; private loans involved in the program would largely be back-stopped by the Fed; thousands of companies in the private economy would need loans to ramp up early on; the banks making some money on this would remove a potential resistance point). Put the talking heads on TV to work pushing the agenda favorably, to calm the population; spin how positive this will be for the economy, jobs jobs jobs (just keep repeating that). Do the exact same thing for the business & financial media to soothe Wall Street, talk up how good it'll be for corporate profits, manufacturing, construction, et al. Throw billions of printed magic dollars at the military industrial complex and their partners, to remove (bribe) a potential adversary to the plan. There's a line for everyone: jobs, green, do it for the children, manufacturing & blue collar, energy independence, tell them how great it will make America, etc.
By necessity we'd build and improve a lot of grid along the way as well. There would be several hundred billion dollars spent on that over more than a decade.
15-20 total years for the program (a dozen or so prime building years in there, during which most of the plants would come online). Once the early years of hard work of ramping up, standardizing and getting it all rolling was done, you could relax some of the initial political policies that it took to get underway. The program would also include a considerable investment into the aging 60 plant fleet the US has now. In the end, this would wipe out most of the US fossil fuel economy. It would cost several trillion 2019 dollars, spread out over two decades. The ~20 year program span would give us time to gradually retrain labor away from the fossil fuel economy. As the plants are brought online, you'd start by eliminating existing coal plants and coal jobs first (there aren't actually that many workers in coal these days anyway), with the displaced workers getting jobs and job training to participate in the new nuclear power economy.
How committed do you want to get? How dire is the situation?
If the fate of the world is in question then Ted Kaczynski is a rational individual who reacted with restraint.
For now, space is just a good training ground. It is not necessary to build isolated eco systems / livable environments on earth and doing so makes no sense financially. Space enthusiasm is a good tool to push R&D.
On an even longer scale it would certainly provide a diverse range of evolutionary benefits, but that would probably go a far bit off topic.
There is limited global capacity to do the very heavy forgings required for reactor pressure vessels (and no capacity at all for that in the US).
It makes absolutely no sense to start building nuclear now. Even if you could guarantee 10 year build time at a fixed cost today (which you can't), by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today. The cost curves are simply too favorable for any private market to favor nuclear over solar currently. Everyone in this thread keeps talking about the technology, but it's purely about the economics. Solar+storage at grid-scale will be cheaper than basically all other forms of power generation within 5 years based on current cost curves. Within 10 years the cost of new solar+battery will be cheaper than the operational cost of nuclear, not even accounting for the billions in construction costs over decades.
If the billions spent on nuclear plants now was instantly diverted to solar, we'd have way more clean energy in the grid on a way shorter timeline. That's the reality today. It's time to stop arguing and stop wasting money. Nuclear is dead.
Imagine if the developed world invested in nuclear to the extent that France did in the 60s and 70s - how many trillions of tons of CO2 would NOT have been emitted into the atmosphere? You can talk about Republican denialism, but it is anti-nuke lobby that will be held responsible for climate change.
>by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today.
Will it? Will the sun shine at night? when it's cloudy? No? Then it doesn't matter how cheap solar and wind are. You're not going to use either as a cornerstone of modern energy generation. So if not solar and wind, then what else is left? Germany knows - they are signing multi-decade deals for natural gas and coal-based power (from Russia and neighbors), as they are shutting down their nuclear plants.
I think OPs point is essentially that, even if nuclear would have helped in the 70s, it is now too late.
As for the intermittent issues of power. I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
If we have a week of that weather Mad Max will be a become a documentary.
This is the solution, but currently only operating at a small scale. This is something that can be scaled up insanely quickly for a fraction the cost of alternatives. The success of this relatively small installation has already resulted in many more battery projects coming online this year.
This being my day job, it would add $8k to the electricity bill of the two child household in Australia if we used your solution to store the wind and solar power.
I ask because a 40C day sounds like a problem due to AC usage, but would probably come with pretty effective solar, and decent wind near the sea.
No country will do it with nuclear in the future, because nuclear won't be competitive.
I get that. But it's worth going through the exercise how bad well-intentioned policies can be. It's worth to consider that anti-nuke activism is much worse than Conservative denialism.
And if nuclear is too late now, then there's nothing we can do to replace carbon-based power.
>I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
Oh come on. Hydro is great if you can get it. Places that can get hydro, already get hydro. Most places can't get hydro. Ditto for geothermal.
So what's the solution to replacing carbon emitting power sources? I want someone to explain that to me. Because all I hear is how solar and wind one day will be cheap and prices are falling every day - even though price is not the problem with solar and wind. Variability is. We need power when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, and power requirements keep growing. People want electric cars and trains, those need huge amount of energy. I hear how batteries will save the day, except that we are not anywhere close to having battery technology capable of storing city-sized power requirements for a few minutes, much less hours or days. It may not even be physically possible to create a battery like that. So what's left? Coal and Gas - and this is exactly what EVERY nation is doing if they are not investing in (or divesting from) nuclear.
I thought batteries just weren't there yet. Especially if you take wear cycles into account.
How much lithium is there, actually?
One should add wind and solar, both at around 0.5MJ/h per m2.
$/MWh is the only real metric that matters.
Edit: http://solarcellcentral.com/images/avg_cost_of_energy.jpg
Given this statement and the chart that shows solar and wind already being the cheapest energy sources this must mean we can just switch to solar and wind ... right?
Except we know we can't. We know that the variablity of solar and wind makes those impossible replacements for coal and gas. I guess price isn't the only metric that matters.
This is why the most important number is $/MWh for "solar/wind + storage". Storage has to be included in the equation. At current prices that puts "solar/wind + storage" about equal with natural gas, but those prices are dropping rapidly.
Installation times are also very significant factors in reaching emission reduction targets. Waiting 10+ years for nuclear to come online just isn't viable. Solar+storage can be operational at the same scale as a nuclear plant within 2-3 years.
So basically one would need a lot of overcapacity to be able to produce and store enough power during the summer to last over the winter. But in places like California sure go full solar as it actually works all year around.
You realize this is like the US saying "lets give money to Mexico to build all of our solar power there (it is closer to the equator and thus would provide more even output throughout the year and would make more econimical sense) and just rely on them selling it to us forever at a nice price as they are a friendly country at this very moment". Or even better would be the countries further south and build a sea cable on international waters so anyone with a sub can go and cut it to fuck with you,
From a national security perspective relying on such a vital resource as electricity on someone else is just plain stupid. I realize most countries are in such a relationship with oil/gas countries at the very moment but I think the goal should be to lessen this kind of relationships not increase them.
Solar and wind are plenty cheap. That's not their problem. The problem, as the article stated, is that "they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon."
So now what do you do?
Design cities for pedestrians, bicycles and public transit. This will help reduce heat island effect, thereby reducing the need for AC.
I slept in a tent for nearly six years. I plugged in at the library during the day. I got by on battery power in the evening until I fell asleep.
I'm currently in a hundred year old building with radiant heat and no AC. It has good design that helps keep the building comfortable without a lot of modern amenities we think are required.
I spend a lot of time online. I don't own a TV.
You can have a very modern life on a lot less electricity than many people use.
It's really not a given that we must use high levels of electricity to maintain a high quality of life. The first thing we should do is question such assumptions. The second is start actively challenging them.
This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
Igloos:
On the outside, temperatures may be as low as −45 °C (−49 °F), but on the inside the temperature may range from −7 °C (19 °F) to 16 °C (61 °F) when warmed by body heat alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igloo
I can't readily find a source with details, but traditional desert cities were located on high ground and the streets oriented to catch the winds such that daytime street temperatures were pleasant.
We used to design buildings and cityscapes to work with the local climate. Now, we slap up cardboard boxes, inject insulation and add HVAC systems, counting on technology to keep things comfortable in place of good design. In reality, well designed buildings are more comfortable and probably less likely to suffer from sick building syndrome.
Let me get this straight, The only way to curb emissions is to severely reduce our energy use?
>This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
No. This is a problem of people not wanting a subsistence-based lifestyle. Your suggested policies are insane. They are not reasonable, at all. You're talking about replacing all roads and buildings (and cities)? Use non-existent battery technology to power a modern economy?
Internalize the fact that power requirements will keep growing and that expecting people to live in tents is not a reasonable policy.
this is just an intellectual dishonest excuse to ignore nuclear energy
I'm an environmental studies major whose dream job would be urban planning or similar. I've been looking for real solutions to such problems for a lot of years.
One conclusion I've drawn is that passive solar really needs a lot more attention than it gets. It's an elegant solution with no real downside.
Nuclear has a couple of big downsides. 1. When things go wrong, it's really bad, a la Chernobyl. 2. Even if nothing goes wrong, safely storing the spent fuel is a significant issue and goes on "forevy."
Everyone knows about those two issues. It's precisely why nuclear is controversial.
It's also possible for someone to be pro nuclear power and also pro conservation. There is no need to set this up as an either-or thing. People could be pro passive solar while being pro nuclear power.
I'm not pro nuclear power. I'm also not strongly against it. I'm just trying to let people know that passive solar exists and can play a role in solving these issues.
This is simply untrue.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pges-recording-...
The batteries have already materialized, and once they start installations at scale this will be taking over the energy market. This makes solar/wind viable as a base load power source virtually everywhere in the world. Even in places that get heavy cloud cover such as Northern Europe will start using these solutions at scale within the next few years.
No. That's the entire problem. There are no batteries that can scale to city needs.
What you're citing is a completely different use case. There is very good case to be made that battery farms can replace gas-burning power ONLY when they are used as a way to quickly scale power production. Battery farms also make sense to even out supply and demand (i.e. serve as a place to dump excess power, or provide stored energy when supply temporarily drops).
ALL new battery projects are around those two use cases. And that's great!! It isn't nothing, and it's a great technology solution for a very real need.
HOWEVER, it's one thing for a battery farm to supply power for seconds or minutes in specific cases, it's another for a battery farm to provide hours or days of constant supply ... every day. Not only is it expensive because you need to over-provision your generation and storage capacity (i.e. in order to provide power for 1 hour at night, you actually need solar to produce 1.5-2 hours of surplus energy). Worse, because wind/solar power generation output is affected by seasons, you'll actually have to over-provision just to match peak seasonal output, meaning that in-season, you invested in infrastructure that's sitting around doing nothing. Then there are also major durability issues. Current battery tech is simply not durable enough and will never be durable enough to solely backup wind and solar in a cost effective way. We're talking about batteries needing to operate for days and weeks when wind and solar output dips (or drops to nothing) at huge scale.
This article goes into some details:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...
This is why no nation is actually replacing any nuclear or fossil-fuel-based power with SOLELY wind/solar+battery solution.
There are other issues that are typically glossed over, such as the fact that solar, wind and battery tech are typically environmentally destructive to make (requiring mining, and complex refining processes), and are very hard and expensive to recycle.
It's possible that some battery-tech breakthrough occurs and changes this (and the article references tech like using surplus power to create molten-salt to use as a storage medium), but the reality is that today, we don't have the technology that is anywhere close to cost-effective, and it isn't clear if there will be one in the next X years.
If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now.
That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers...
Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time.
If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propose a solution for irrational community fears. You’ll also be able to solve the SF housing and homelessness crisis at one go then.
[1] https://www.eti.co.uk/library/the-eti-nuclear-cost-drivers-p...
New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition.
...
Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open- ended, all‑or‑nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon.
...
[I]n 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.
Sure it has. They're just getting used by the Navy, not by civilians. There's no reason why the same methods that have been successfully used to control cost and schedule for those reactors couldn't be used for civilian reactors.
Even when comparing to oil, Nuclear is still more expensive. “Specifically, total life-cycle costs would be 19 percent higher for a fleet of nuclear destroyers.” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454
As to your "physically near impossible": people said about the titanic that it was unsinkable. This only led to a major shortage of lifeboats once it sank because why would a unsinkable ship need so many lifeboats.
If this bullshit cloud over nuclear got dissolved they'd be replaced with much more safe design. Instead they are forced to continue operation because nothing new can be built. Because of unfounded fears.
That's what caused the Fukushima disaster. No new plants - no decommisioning of old plants - old plants blow up.
I've outlined above why this doesn't happen. Japan has been severely pro-nuclear in the 80s and 90s, and built tons of reactors, yet they only decommisioned a single old reactor in the 80s and 90s, according to this list [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#Japan
No, you didn't.
If anything, you supported my line of reasoning - if the insane push against nuclear didn't happen, then the plants would have been modernised or rebuilt and there would not have been a Fukushima.
You need to accept that all trust is lost. You cannot take backsies every few decades and expect people to trust you that this time you really know what you#re talking about.
No, it wasn't. Please back it up if you have any proof, but this is not true IMO.
Meanwhile, coal emission kills ~1M every year, or ~100k every month. (I guess the numbers are just an order-of-magnitude estimate, so take them with a grain of salt.)
So, during the month of Fukushima disaster (the second worst nuclear power disaster in history) it displaced a few times more people than coal killed in that month.
Yes coal is terrible and the sooner the world stopa using it the better, but the answer isn't 'if we can't have nuclear then we can only have coal' is a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
There have been a fair number of other serious hydro accidents as well. In the U.S., Teton Dam wiped out two towns, and Oroville Dam just recently prompted the evacuation of 180,000 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
Electricity isn't some luxury we can get rid of if there are a few thousand deaths here and there associated with the production.
To be a viable alternative beating coal is irrelevant, nuclear would have to be at least better than natural gas. And with natural gas burning much cleaner than coal I'm not so sure nuclear has the advantage
Exelon is focusing on NG w. CO2 capture and renewables/storage for new capacity.
The short version is, that mushrooms accumulate cesium-137 which contaminates the soil in Bavarian forests. Equally affected are animals eating the mushrooms, mainly wild boar.
If this is 8 microsieverts... what's the timescale? 8 microsieverts is quite small compared to everyday things like cosmic rays [1].
Pulling from __ph__'s link (and a google translate).
> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms containing 3,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram results in a load of 0.008 millisieverts. This corresponds to the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria.
> In Germany, it is not permitted to market foods with a radio cesium content of more than 600 becquerels per kilogram. For self-consumption, this restriction does not apply.
(may notice here how overly cautious we tend to be with radioactive dosages.)
> If venison or wild mushrooms are consumed in normal amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low, but avoidable.
To summarize the article:
Wild mushrooms and some wild life may have higher than normal radiation levels. Take caution if you intend to consume vast amounts of quantities. You'll probably be fine, but why risk? If you are only taking "normal" amounts then there is no concern.
Depends entirely what you mean by "dangerous levels". It is contaminated enough, that mushrooms from the forests are not allowed to be sold as food. Yes, a single serving won't have a significant impact on your health, but it is recommended not to eat much of them. The situation is worse with some wild boar, which eat a lot of those mushrooms and accumulate cesioum over many years.
And perhaps a relevant information: the Bavarian forests are about 600 miles from the Chernobyl site.
Those levels that acidburn was talking about, mentioned in the article, are REALLY low. The reason government is overly cautious with radiation is 1) fear 2) you can't control sources so you say "if we set this threshold we'll never put anyone in danger even if they take in large amounts from other sources that we can't control."
Remember, each of those 200g of mushrooms (which looks like an upper limit of measurement, not average nor lower) is like a 5hr plane ride in a non-northern route (8uSv). People take plane rides worse than that several times a week and are safe. (see below for ridiculousness of this "danger")
You also realize that over time these things degrade, right? Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test).
Side note:
200g mushrooms = 0.008mSv (upper limit)
20mSv/(0.008mSv)*200g = 500kg of mushrooms.
That's how many you would need to eat in a year to get to the legal limit. Let's be real here, this is just a ridiculous amount of mushrooms that you have to consume within a year. That's over a kilo a day.
Note that this limit used to also be 50mSv for radiation workers. Astronauts are allowed much more.
tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet.
>Not just by radioactive decay, but because organisms and chemical reactions break down the radioactive materials. We are talking about radioactive isotopes. Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions
>You seem to be implying that over the many years it is getting worse. Which is just untrue (and frankly should not pass a smell test). No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.
>tldr: Trust the domain expert over some article you read on the internet. It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.
> Yes, with a half-time of 30 years.
Biological half lives tend to be A LOT shorter. It is something like 90 days in humans (for Cesium). There's also the uptake rate, which IIRC is about 10%.
> Nothing short of a nuclear reaction is going to "break them down", certainly not organisms or chemical reactions
Oh, sorry. I didn't realize that radiation means that electrons will no longer form bonds. That's really interesting. But I have a question. This being true, can you tell me how we get solids? Or are you saying that radioactive materials can only bind to other materials with similar radioactive properties? I can tell you that I never learned this in any of many physics classes nor while I was working as a radiation researcher. If this is a new study done by you I'm excited to see you win the Nobel. Really groundbreaking work.
> No, I did no such thing. I said that wild boar is contaminated worse as they keep eating mushrooms for years while each mushroom only has a couple of days to aggregate radioactive isotopes.
10% uptake, shorter biological half life. This isn't a system with positive feedback. The more degrees the more dilution. The Cs is in the ground, mushrooms eat that (1 degree), boars eat that (2 degrees), humans eat that (3 degrees). Minimum. We are assuming that the Cs is just laying nicely and not being diluted by worms and bugs before it is absorbed by the mushrooms.
> It wasn't "some article" I quoted, but the official information of the federal office for nuclear safety.
You're pulling from much more than that article. Your domain experts in this thread are breaking down that official information and explaining what things mean (note, neither of us have disputed it). For example, what is a Sievert? How dangerous is it? How much is safe? Can this be explained in a way without years of studying atomic physics and nuclear medicine?
What you're doing is reading that and saying "Look how dangerous this stuff is!" We're looking at it and saying "Ah cool, so as long as I don't eat 500 kilos of wild mushrooms in a year I'll be good". There's a big difference between these two points of view. But again, I'm not disputing what is in that documentation. I am drawing from it to demonstrate how safe things are.
I think Windscale would count amongst such accidents, too.
Can I remind you that that's almost 60 years ago and we're not talking about military?
1: France is 75% nuclear and has some of the cheapest electricity.
2: there are a ton of small reactor designs that would be substantially cheaper and quicker to build. Problem is that you can't get them out of research labs.
Uranium is not very expensive right now, so a lot of mines have closed or mothballed. That doesn't mean there's any shortage of the stuff. Australia's known reserves are enormous. Throw a dart at a map of northern Australia and you'll probably hit an orebody.
Its only new NPP under construction, Flammanville, is 9 years over schedule and over 300% over budget. It is still not certain when it will open due to safety defects that are still being evaluated.
New build nuclear is not cost competitive with new build wind and solar (even when you account for firming costs), and the cost of wind and solar is still falling at an astonishing rate.
The future will tell, as it is now, Germany already spent more on renewable than the total French nuclear industry, even when you add decommissioning and with the bad results we know. Maybe countries should learn on the German mistakes? Also the renewables built to replace the nuclear plants in France are pointed out for being far over-budget as well.
The cost studies for renewable tend to remove a lot of external costs in order to make them appear cheaper than they are.
Source? What does that even mean? Where'd you find an honest assessment of the regulatory and construction costs for France's nuclear power plants, much less a sensible estimate for decommissioning plants that are still running? Does it include research and development in either case? Does it include maintenance, personnel, fuel, cleanup, storage of spent fuel both temporarily and long term?
[1] CPI - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303286860_Policy_an... - page 6 in pdf pages or 1 with their numbers.
[2] Cour des comptes - http://cpdp.debatpublic.fr/cpdp-cigeo/docs/docs-complementai... - page 265 pdf / page 270 with their page numbers
I can't tell from a quick glance how the French number comes to be, what's included and what isn't and who is the ultimate source.
Given the fraught nature of the subject, I'm taking any number with a grain of salt, especially if it purports to assign a single price tag to things.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
I’m in favor of nuclear research and improvements, but let’s be honest.
You have to compare nuclear against the best alternative, not the worst. This is just kindergarten-level debate.
In the meantime, we can put out an RFP for a new wind project today and have it online in a year.
Something that depends on hypothetical political developments in a country that shuts down its government because of political gridlock a couple of times a year cannot reasonably be described as the fastest way to do anything.
Hopefully US figures that our rampent cost diesese on sll the things is just embarrassing, and we need a "time out", a throwing away of the actuarial pessimism, and a command economy "probation" in these important matters. Get the costs under control, and then we earn the right to do capitalism for essential goods again.
As things currently stand, no group of politicians could survive the political fallout of getting a reactor build in their district. How can anything get done if doing so buys you unemployment from the ultimate cushy job of being an elected representative?
Also, no one, not even the most ardent supporters, really wants a reactor built anywhere near them or their kids playgrounds. The anti-nuke-power crowd has just done too good a job on the older generation to ever hope things can change for them.
Let's hope the Millennials can do a better job getting these things built.
But, if nat gas, wind, and solar are cheaper and faster to bring online, and can be build at pretty much any scale we want from single household to freaking huge, why would we build nuclear?
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppo...
Nuclear has some amazing lobbying going for it, amazing backers that will throw away billions of tens of billions of dollars into black pits of construction hell, despite knowing the rate of so many construction projects before it. And they take this massive risk without the possibility of VC like upsides; the financial upside of nuclear is minesxule compared to the massive risk of building. It makes no financial sense to any rational person.
No, the problem is certainly not a lack of will. The problem is that those pushing nuclear don't know how to build it. They like the idea, but don't have the skills and can't hire people with the skills. Nuclear construction is all a game of raking in some contracting cash and making sure that when the inevitable lawsuit comes due to failed construction, your side doesn't lose.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppo...
I don’t know much about how things work in other nations, but in the US, the government is not as readily liberal with the necessary subsidies. When you consider the slow motion train crash that is Vogtie, you can see the issue. Government doesn’t want to out and out pay for everything, so they set up structures that actually turn out to be more problematic than simply handing over 50 billion would be.
"The estimated cost of the remaining border wall segments are between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million." [1]
"The total investment for the stellarator itself over 1997–2014 amounted to €370 million, while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (personnel and material resources) amounted to [$1.2 billion USD] for that 18-year period." [2]
It's more a matter of funding than cost, IMO.
[1]: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cost-of-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Financing
Part of the reason for this is just how massive ITER is. The power density of the reactor is 0.05 MW/m^3, some 400 times lower than the power density of the reactor vessel of a commercial PWR.
Some countries are able to do nuclear at much lower cost, e.g. South Korea.
What is the fastest, new renewable power capacity any country has at any time build, in added W/year/capita? In both nominal and actual power generation? Or the fastest you can see or hope will happen in near future?
Sweden built 10850MW nuclear in 20 years from 1965 to 1985. This means about 68W per year per capita. How do the already existing, and potential future endeavors in building renewal capacity compare to this number?
The number is nominal, but for nuclear I'd guess the actual long term power output is about 90% of the nominal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_S...
But two other things against them ... 1. They take a long time to build 2. They provide a large base power and are costly to stop and start.
Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.
I think the insurers have a good point. And that's why I don't think we should subject our civilian population to risks which the experts in risk (actuaries) have decided are so bad that they refused to touch them.
Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but something like slightly increasing the rate of cancer doesn't get any punishment because the damage is so spread out and not worthwhile to prosecute/sue. Given this, I would argue that coal power plants also have their liabilities "artificially limited".
Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear.
In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in the lifetime of the plant compared to things like wind.
Pennsylvania had a bill recently to keep some nuclear plants open... It would involve an increase in the cost of electricity because it's more expensive.
That's why investors have run away from it. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are increasingly cheaper and easier to deploy and scale and the future trajectories heavily favor them.
The only thing nuclear has is a centralization of power, capital, control, and ownership. You have one robber baron waving his scepter over the entire energy consuming public because nuclear is extraordinarily centralized. It keeps energy being run as feudal monarchies and that's a power the industry doesn't want to cede.
I used to work on design of onshore wind farms. Protecting the public was as simple as measuring the distance to the closest road or building. So that if the turbine failed catastrophically it would not hurt anyone. Add a big red flashing light and aviation is safe. Compare this to nuclear where you need to understand an incredibly complex machine and how it interacts with an unpredictable environment and people. And you need to employ expensive nuclear engineers and scientists to do the work, and then check the work repeatedly. Sounds expensive!
I would love it if nuclear energy could be a success. But why not do wind/solar/battery as well in the meantime.
I certainly agree that large power companies can be unfair to the public. Particularly when renewables has such big upfront costs. It's like renting a house, paying off someone else's mortgage, and never getting to own anything. However, there is a huge benefit in connecting large generators because they are connected to the high voltage transmission system. Power can be exported to where it is needed. In comparison generation that is attached to low voltage networks are more limited in how much can be exported longer distance. Battery storage in particular is much more versatile when used at the grid level.
What about those molten salt thorium reactors from a few years ago that promised we could basically burn dirt to power our cities for forever?
Over $89 billion has been dumped in to it. That's like 20 companies the size of Lyft or Airbnb and it still performs and delivers poorly. How much more do you want?
Maybe, just maybe, it's a fundamentally bad technology and we can do better than nuclear.
https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/nuclear-su...
The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.
Early reactors were hailed as paragons of safety too. Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops.
I mean, look. It's... fine. Go nuclear. I agree with you, that these are probably safe designs and are probably not going to poison anyone due to misanalyzed failure modes. Nuclear is carbon free power and preferable to coal and gas for sure.
But in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants and handle the grid buffering with batteries, I just don't care much anymore. If we run out of ridgeline real estate and still need more power, we'll call you.
The US doesn't "need" to do anything with nuclear, at all. The nuclear industry (and its geek proponents here on HN) needs to find a way to make itself worthwhile on a balance sheet.
It might be that your world is Arizona desert.
Please do not dive into latitudianizm.
I notice you left the batteries out of your cost comparison with natural gas. Building enough battery for a carbon-free grid without fossil backup is not so cheap.
Yeah, and then they installed the backups below where the main plant was, rendering them completely useless. Oops.
This was a human failure. Not a technological one.
And nobody wants to build lots of them because in most countries nuclear is extremely unpopular and there are issues with disposal of waste.
Further, it appears (at least to me) that proponents of nuclear underestimate the degree to which we (as a species) underpredict the likelihood of catastrophic events. In general, we're pretty bad at assessing the risk of so-called "black swans," but when the downside is so high, I understand why people are skeptical.
I personally am pro-nuclear, for many of the reasons described in the article, though I don't think the case is as clear cut as most nuclear proponents. On a rational level, I can understand that the likelihood of disaster is vanishingly small. I still don't want to live anywhere close to a nuclear power plant.
Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy but I feel when convincing other people of this you need to portray the good and the bad.
Politicians bowing to the wishes of an ill-informed public.
There were a bunch of failed nuclear projects like the pebble bed reactor, the fast breeder or the storage sites. Watching them made the decision to get out of that type of industry much easier. Germany had the same level of corrupt nuclear industry, which is known from Japan and which has been exposed there.
It does, although it doesn't draw the connection directly.
> I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's.
The con's (both for Germany, and the US) are (quotes below from the article):
> irrational dread among the public and many activists
> ...
> people estimate risk according to how readily anecdotes like well-publicized nuclear accidents pop into mind.
For Germany in particular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...
Tl;dr, Germany politic interest in nuclear phase-out began around 2000 as misdirected "green" activism and was escalated by irrational public fears in response to Fukushima in 2011.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/17/hitachi-set...
But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors. More modern design do not present those risks [1]. Judging nuclear energy based on 1960s design is like judging aviation based on the safety records of 1930s planes.
With "early generation reactors" you mean all the ones that exist. The whole "next generation reactor" / "generation 4 reactor" thing is at this point nothing more than vague plans for what could be.
Chernobyl, of course, was a horrific design that didn't even have a containment dome. Nobody builds reactors like that anymore.
And GenIV is a little more than vague plans; e.g. Terrestrial Energy's molten salt reactor has already gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process, which puts them on track for a demo reactor by 2025 or so.
If your country is the size of the USA and nobody bothers if you let it disappear somewhere in the desert. Which is not the case in Germany and most of the countries. People just don't want to have a nuclear waste dump near by and Germany needs to spend a hell lot of money to clean up the last mine they used as a dump already.
The tech is dead and the lobby won't be able to ride that current artificial hype for ever...
In particular Fukushima case, the evacuation caused more harm than fallout would do, so, in retrospective, it would be better to not evacuate.
There is no "huge areas devastated and unlivable for generations".
Long story short, phasing out nuclear energy has been a long term goal and has broad support in Germany.
Chronologically was the other way around, and her "Our party now consider nuclear harmful" stance didn't change the outcome post-Fukushima. But it's typical Merkel of the time, changing her tune to whatever's politically advantageous.
Didn't you say the same as OP, with a lot more words?
> Germany, which went all-in for renewables…
This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible.
> From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy
Not really,
* It's expensive as hell, it just might seem cheap because a lot of the cost is offloaded to the tax payer in the long run
* Even western first world countries operate nuclear power plants which have known safety issues (look at e.g. France or Belgium) so even if we could technically do it safely, our societies are not politically mature enough to implement it.
* Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster so it's not even as clean as often advertised
[citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels.
Remember E=MC2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. There are 2 million times more Joules in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal/gas/diesel/lithium. Thus you don't have to mine all that much of it to power the planet.
In fact, with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story), you could power the entire US for a few hundred years off the depleted uranium sitting in the yard of an enrichment plant in Kentucky.
Till and Chang argue in their book about the IFR that if we start building IFR style plants for production usage it's entirely possible that costs drop to about LWR levels.
So far fast breeders have been expensive, but that's largely because they've all been one-off designs largely for R&D purposes without much effort to reduce costs.
For reprocessing, their argument is that electrorefining (pyroprocessing) would be much cheaper than PUREX. To the point that the lower fuel acquisition cost and cheaper waste disposal could make it roughly comparable to once-through LWR costs, even with relatively cheap uranium.
Such a shame IFR was shut down.. sigh
Therefore it is simply not possible to build up the share of nuclear in the power generation mix, except with extending the operation time of light water reactors (from a design lifetime of 30 years), or build reactors without a pressure vessel, that is something akin to an RMBK.
Right now, over the next 20 years the clean alternatives are solar, wind and hydro. Nuclear power can at the earliest be expanded in the late 2030, at which point it has to compete with fusion, and hopefully orbiting solar.
[0] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-f... (has actually just the total electricity number,
[1] http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power...
Renewables like solar and wind can be local, scaled down to the needs of a single family property, and kept under the sole control, if desired, of an individual owner. Nuclear is fundamentally not that way.
If this article isn't it already, expect to see in the near future that the powerful elite subset of climate deniers will pivot to accept climate change while advocating for nuclear as a solution, all because their cronies stand to benefit from massive construction projects and associated safety, security, and control projects.
Humanity's inability to understand basic math will be our downfall -- perhaps already has sealed our fate.
1. The grandparent's source quotes the coal death rate of ~100k/PWh.
2. Global coal processing is at ~50 PWh/year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
3. This means ~5M people die to coal each year.
Then move the plant farther away?
Germans made attempt to increase renewables only but ended up increasing coal use because rationing electricity was not an politically feasible option when renewable electricity production was low.
Without nuclear energy you can increase renewable usage up to 50% economically if you build better grid and add some overcapacity and recharge car batteries at night, but you must fire up coal or natural gas electricity plants for the nighttimes and exceptionally cold or hot time periods.
If you build nuclear plants they will not throttle down for days or when renewable energy is plenty and electricity price goes negative. This decreases the profitability of both renewables and nuclear.
In some time in future, it's possible to go full renewables but you need very robust smart grid, large scale energy storage (not lithium-ion) etc. That's possible but it's not the fastest way. Building more nuclear power is the fastest way to drive down CO2 in addition with renewables.
Also, I see in some comments people think impacts of nuclear accidents and wastes can be limited and localized. In Japan, as of 18/08, 60000 people still live in temporary housing due to Fukushima incident. We still struggle to remove debris out of nuclear power plants, and it's said it will take around 30-40 years.
For me, the impact of this disaster is anything but "trivial".
*edit: grammer
The lightbulb wasn't the real invention - it was the lightbulb making machine that had the real impact on the world.
The same way, we need a way to safely, quickly and cheaply build and operate nuclear power plants. The way might be small modular reactors, something like 200 megawatt sized. They can be built in well controlled circumstances in a factory. Installation on site should be fast. Currently, a nuclear power plant construction requires lots of welding and concrete casting. In these projects it is slow and expensive because of extra safety needs and regulations. On site construction should be minimized instead.
One could run multiple smaller reactors in one site so safety areas would not be greatly increased. Emergency and maintenance shutdowns would have smaller impact on the grid than currently with multiple gigawatt sizes.
With smaller reactors, innovation and experimentation should also be a lot faster. If you build one reactor every 20 years, you don't get a lot of incremental innovation.
The politics seem kind of similar to pipeline projects, but the ultimate goal would be to save the earth rather than burn it down so maybe there would be less opposition. Maybe you could even generate enough energy and wealth to convert some legacy fossil fuel businesses (and the politicians they own).
You mean California? California is mostly empty, unused space.
How are you proposing to cool them? Remember, 2/3rd of the fission energy in an LWR goes out as low temperature waste heat.
Nuclear reactors, much like other kinds of industrial power stations, require enormous amounts of water for cooling towers. They don't put them next to rivers because it looks cool.
I suspect someone could figure out some kind of a heat sink that works without lots of fresh water.
But water is much better at carrying waste heat and the population centres demanding electricity tend to be close to rivers and lakes anyhow.
About deaths: The author says nuclear causes fewer deaths than the rest. Maybe that's true, but he (voluntarily?) omits to take into consideration long term health issues related to incidents. The Tchernobyl accident released radioactve cloud that affected many people that died of cancer or are having health issues related to it. Worse than that, it's almost impossible to track who got sick because of those clouds. So yeah, maybe just a "small set" of people died DIRECTLY following nuclear incidents, but long term effects cannot be ignored just for the sake of the argument.
Next, the waste. "stored in a walmart, that degrade over time". Again, the author omits to say the duration ... over time is an understatement here, you will be long gone before that "waste" is not dangerous for environment.
I stopped reading after that. The post is written in a way to force you to accept his arguments by omiting half of the true story. That's not journalism.
Hydro power is the most efficient way of storing the extra energy right now. So people talking about batteries would be talking on a much smaller scale, or don't know what they are talking about.
A large portion of the energy currently consumed is by oil tankers that burn crude directly during transport of goods across the ocean. The benefit is for transportation of the energy and fueling costs. I suspect that we will need to make energy so cheap on land and for cities that it is more cost effective to create burnable fuel for ships than to extract the oil from the ground.
We are currently struggling to get our cities even at parity with renewable, but maybe with the surplus renewable energy on good days, we could convert that energy to some kind of liquid fuel that could eventually be used on these tanker ships and in planes.
The only counter argument that I've seen that seems to make any sense is that we could use up too many resources trying to reach parity with the current energy consumption. Think like we run out of neodymium for all of the electric engines for both our cars and wind turbines, or run out of materials that go into making all of the solar panels. If that's actually a problem, then it seems like we would need more resource efficient ways to generate more power. So it might take a combination of renewables to power our cities, then a nuclear process heat from maybe one of the next generation reactors to efficiently create the liquid fuel for ships and planes.
A 1% failure rate is not acceptable.
We don't need nuclear power. Renewables are cheaper, storage solutions are available and there are whole countries on close to 100% renewable power.
There are still radioactive boars running around in Bavaria as a result of the Chernobyl incident.
It is still unclear how many billions of dollars of cleanup costs for Fukushima the Japanese tax payer has to spend. And how many will die of the aftereffects.
Why would anyone sane invest in a power technology with such a destructive potential? Especially if the alternative are far safer, easier to produce and easier to decommission. (another dirty secret of the nuclear industry: Who is going to pay for the decommissioning of old power plants and the cleanup: Yup, it's you, because the funds allocated for it are not sufficient). The $500m spent on decommissioning the Brennilis Nuclear Reactore in France could buy how many wind turbines and solar cells?
Keep it in the ground. Not just the oil, but also the uranium.
TL;DR: Molten salt reactors are safer (can't have a meltdown if it's already melted), smaller (could fit on the back of a truck), able to run on more abundant materials like Thorium (which in turn come from more politically stable regions), and to top it all off: not only do they leave much less nuclear waste, they can actually use up current nuclear waste, turning it into much less harmful and shorter lived stuff in the process!
Also, Mike Shellenberger [1] is a great proponent of nuclear power and has some great points on why the current focus on renewables is damaging. Well worth the follow on Twitter.
[0] https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2019/nuc...
The point about meltdowns is cute, but probably wrong; the insurance against meltdown is a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity, if I understand correctly. In other words, the thermal expansion drives the fuel out into the piping as the reaction heats up, away from the compact reacting core, and also reduces the density in the core, allowing more neutrons to escape.
The containment of a LWR has to be large because it fills with radioactive steam in an accident. It has to be able to contain this steam, which means at least a certain amount of structure to withstand its pressure.
But MSRs don't use water as a coolant. They circulate salt in and out of the building. They can be designed to remain at low pressure even in a bad accident, just from heat transfer that occurs from thermal radiation at elevated temperature. As a result, the cost of the containment could be as much as 1/5th that of a LWR.
Unfortunately, MSRs are not available today, and likely will not be for decades (especially if new materials must be qualified; no one will buy an MSR if there is any question about the materials not lasting their projected lifespans.) By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable.
You're posting this and statements like it all over this thread without a lot of supporting evidence that indicates very strong probability of it happening. Hacker News currently has a highly-ranked article on the main page regarding how there are massive battery and energy storage problems, and this particular issue is raised weekly here and in the news.
Why are you so optimistic that seemingly significant blockers will be for sure eliminated in the short decades to come?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#The_e...
Solar has declined in price by 20% (or perhaps a bit more) for each doubling of cumulative production. This empirical observation has been sustained over a history during which solar's cost has declined by more than two orders of magnitude. Wind has showed similar learning effects.
Nuclear, on the other hand, has not shown consistent experience effects (or, arguably, any, if one discard as unreliable the numbers from South Korea).
Talk is cheap, but renewables have actually demonstrated, in the real world, that they get cheaper as they are built out (and, if anything, the learning rate has increased recently). Nuclear proponents are hanging the future of their technology on the assumption, unsupported by much of anything, that these real world trends will suddenly switch places.
Molten salt reactors are interesting but more in the context of funding research than how we should put together the energy mix of a country. Especially considering how much funding fusion power have gotten, which is still in the basic physics stage and things like materials breakdown and heat transport is largely not even a known problem yet.
To answer your question more practically though, our nuclear waste would fit into a building the size of a football field. There's even a proposal to put it in some mine/cave in the western United States.
CO2 emissions are a globally-uncontainable problem that we don’t know how to solve.
Nuclear is strictly better on the scale of waste problems.
The more I look I see there are two types of industries out there... those that profit by creating value, and those that profit by shifting the cost onto someone else.
Maybe the content was written by some folks, and media selection was made by others against nuclear?
There is no way you are going to convince voters that they need to cut their energy usage, especially before the worst of the climate change effects are felt. You need to provide steady, stable carbon free power. Nuclear power is the only current technology that can provide it. If you really care about slowing down climate change, you need to be all in on nuclear power.
and the opposite is happening...
Indeed. Thus the question is what undemocratic institutions, can we use? Can we put in treaties that reduce national sovereignty like the TPP? Can we make it a second order or third order effect of regulations on how insurance works so that most people can't follow the chain back to the source?
"Living With a Nuclear Question Mark in the Backyard" https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/nyregion/17towns.html
The New York Times, like most newspapers, is not a single, unified voice it its articles, and much less in editorials published under Opinion sections, such as this submission.
Only answer I get is : more money will solve it or one day...
I excepted more from hackernews... I'm disappointed.
France has FIFTY THREE (53) nuclear reactors, how many incidents have they had? Without googling, name one?
The problem isn't nuclear reactors, it is the superstitious levels of fear people have of them. Somehow people believe that a reactor produces mountains and mountains of "toxic waste" every year. When in reality it's nowhere near that.
i mean, we could go all renewable at this very moment, and NYC will still be submerged, along with most of humanity.
at least that's my understanding from this paper:
Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change
https://www2.bc.edu/jeremy-shakun/Clark-2016-NCC.pdf
so what's the point of these discussions? shouldn't we start building-out Mars or something?
The entire article is written as a polemic (which is fine) but it argues against various straw-men and obfuscates the problems with nuclear power today. Some examples include:
Caiming it is "fantasy" that renewables alone can power the transition to a carbon free economy. Their argument? "Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks". This confused statement doesn't actually address the best argument of renewable energy advocates - that renewables could power entire cities if given sufficient generation and storage capacity. An argument indicating the limits of renewable power generation and battery production is required, but the article makes no such argument because it would not hold water. Also, if there is no daylight for weeks (nuclear winter?) there may be bigger problems to address than carbon emissions.
Also, the article does itself no favors by comparing itself to coal. This is a dying energy source (especially in the US) - the fact that nuclear is better than coal impresses no one.
Another trick used is sentences like this "By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm". It is quite likely that most nuclear incidents raised no alarm because they weren't reported. The public incidents cited were simply too large to go unnoticed. Does anybody believe the only lethal accident or cancer causing radioactive lease in the Soviet Union was Chernobyl?
Another crazy claim is "Nuclear waste is compact — America’s total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart — and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools, becoming less radioactive over time.". This is simply not correct as written. If America's waste was well managed it might fit into a Walmart (I didn't do the math), but it is isn't. It is a poorly manged mess, even leaking into groundwater like at Hanford. Hanford's cleanup wouldn't cost $113+ billion to clean up if nuclear waste sat in well organized casks in a Walmart sized warehouse. And Hanford is is just one (large) site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site).
Finally, the article deals with nuclear proliferation with this paragraph: "Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs, and they have not contributed to weapons proliferation, thanks to robust international controls: 24 countries have nuclear power but not weapons, while Israel and North Korea have nuclear weapons but not power." Again, no one is claiming that that nuclear plants explode like nuclear bombs (straw man). However, claiming they have no contributed to weapons proliferation requires a special reading of the paragraph where proliferation counts only as documented cases of nuclear material migrating across borders to be incorporated in nuclear weapons. The fact that nuclear plants produce material for nuclear weapons (whether it crosses a border or not) means nuclear power can (and does) contribute to weapon development. Israel may not have nuclear power plants, but it has "research" nuclear plants (Dimona) that probably produced the material for its bombs.
It's unclear to me if this is a good faith opinion piece.
Nuclear cannot do this so it is useless. Batteries and gas power plants can which is why they are being rolled out.
Wind, Solar, Gas, Batteries and Electric Vehicles are existing solutions to the climate problem. The market will implement them slowly, since they are cheaper and superior to legacy solutions, but we need political effort to do it more quickly.
It's also interesting to see the volatility of solar and wind be used as an argument against baseline generation, as this has traditionally been an argument against renewables.
It's likely that a cost optimized grid will have little or no nuclear in it.
But if we're going to build a lot of wind, that still doesn't necessarily doom nuclear, if we can lower the capital cost of nuclear. The article describes some fairly simple ways to go about that; a recent study at MIT had the same recommendations.
Down the road a decade or so, molten salt reactors will start to be available, and those look to have much lower capital costs and good load-balancing.
Using nuclear instead of solar when solar was available would increase the cost of that power by a factor of 3 or more. That would also be insane.
Nuclear just doesn't have a place on a grid with a large renewable supply.
EDIT: You wrote:
"I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day."
This is case #2, using nuclear power during the day when you could have used cheap solar. It makes no sense economically at current nuclear costs.
Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage.
Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.
Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in a position to deliver now; the one that is closest, NuScale, is not promising the kind of cost reductions that would be needed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/10/01/3-reason...
Maybe the U.S. will keep dragging its feet, but that doesn't mean the technology is inherently expensive, it just means we're bad at it in the U.S.
(And you're still ignoring storage savings in the solar/nuke scenario.)
There actually is a simple solution: follow UAE and let Koreans build standardized APR-1400.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-united-arab-emi...
At the same time, solar PPAs in the US are falling so fast it's hard to keep track of the record holder. Here's one from last year for $0.023/kWh.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nevada-beat-ari...
* Couple the nuke to a large thermal storage system and load follow with that
* Use steam bypass to switch energy from the turbogenerator to desalination, direct decarbonization, liquid fuel synthesis, district heating, industrial processes, and so on.
Unlike sunny or windy days, nuclear power is consistent 24/7 and output can be modulated (albeit, with delay) by raising and lowering control rods. Batteries (electrical or mechanical) can store extra nuclear-produced energy and use it to power the grid while output increases to match demand, and vice versa.
The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity by 3-6x to cover all other energy requirements (including sucking carbon from the air to counter chemical processes we can't decarbonize).
Nuclear has to be part of the solution.
The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe.
I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.
[1] http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-...
> as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there
And that's kind of the other problem. How much land is that?
Per this perhaps dated 2013 report[0],
It takes "3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year." Unclear on if that's only in sunny desert locales like California/Nevada, or average over the US, or whatever.
Anyway, if my math isn't radically incorrect, that comes out to 114 kW of capacity on average, in whatever these test conditions were.
Just 10 TW of capacity would require, uh, 1.2e12 m², or 13k "survey townships" (US land units get weird), or 466k "sections" (weird US land unit that equals mi²) or 298 million acres.
For some comparison, California is 164k mi². Texas is 269k. You could (hypothetically) cover the entirety of California and Texas with solar panels (433 mi²) and you still would not reach 10 TW of average production.
Admittedly, your scope is global and these examples are US states. But it is still a ton of land. Perhaps efficiency has increased slightly since 2013, but by a factor of 2 or more? 10? And how much space will we need in landfills for EOL panels?
Global demand was about 22,100 TWh/yr in 2011 (random figure), so say it's doubled since then; we'd still need something like 233k mi² of these panels to supply the world, assuming perfect capture from season to season and overnight. That's most of Texas in (2013) solar panels...
And no, an experience curve never reaches zero. It's a power law in cumulative production.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a22011471/c...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/09/frances-nuclear-clean-...
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-elect...
If you are going to make bets, take as many bets as you can.
Why is there not a singular global body that includes all nations to build out, manage and secure ALL nuclear power plants. Basically a single body, comprised of all the top minds and efforts of every nation's nuclear SMEs - which will create a grid of nuclear power all over the world and every country contributes based on their draw from the system?
There are unspoken and unpopular things that could really work - limiting consumerism, and decreasing population.
If you solve this problem, you'll solve a problem much greater than energy consumption. This is not unspoken and unpopular, it is thought to be impossible given the human condition.
> decreasing population
Good luck with that one.
A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that)
Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you realize that once we double or triple the number of reactors, accidents will be so frequent, that the public wont stand for additional expansion within the time it takes to build more reactors.
We need 10x nuclear to solve global warming. Thats a major accident every 3 years or so. Yes, Nuclear can be made safer, but probably not by as much as needed. Even a country like Japan, who has high safety standards, and a historical heritage of nuclear fallout, has had an accident, and most new reactors are likely to be built by China who has less then stellar safety record.
Advanced low-pressure reactors can do this, and eliminating loss-of-decay-heat-removal accidents takes the probability of a large early release well into the 10^-7 or even 10^-8 range according to probabilistic risk assessments.
So even though nuclear is, by the actuarial tables, almost as safe as you can get in energy systems, you're right that the public opinion is a big hurdle and that Fukushimas are not acceptable. These low-pressure designs get us there, and it's been demonstrated.
Molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, and some gas cooled reactors all have this capability. It's basically the main event of what the nuclear industry called Gen IV reactors [2].
Which is true, until it isn't.
Relying on diesel generators is not a passive solution. That is basically the part where I wonder why not a passive solution was picked.
Fast forward to the 1950s. Admiral Rickover wants nuclear powered submarines to effectively fight the Russians in the Cold War. Submarines are small but want high power, on the order of a few hundred megawatts. This puts them beyond natural circ decay heat removal regime for air and water. So he builds them, and installs appropriate redundant backup systems.
Now Eisenhower has given the Atoms for Peace speech and the commercial industry is starting. They can build a compact high power reactor or large low power reactor (recall it's a heat removal issue). They choose compact, high-power one modeled after the Naval reactors. They were running great and had a whole supply chain. The low-power ones would be orders of magnitude more expensive per kWh.
Meanwhile, starting in the late 1940s and continuing for a few decades, exotic-coolant reactors were developed, with things like Mercury, liquid sodium metal, molten salt, organics, aqueous homogeneous slurry, etc. These reactors can do high power compact cores with passive natural circ. Many were built and operated. But they remained exotic and underdeveloped. The Navy and commercial nukes had built up an infrastructure and experience base. Exotic reactors were more expensive and the LWRs were fine instead of passively-cooled ones.
Today, dozens of startup companies have dug up the paperwork on these exotic reactors and are rushing to try to develop them and associated supply chains to build them cheaply.
So that's how we ended up with the reactors we have.
Reading about TEPCO’s management of their facilities and people both before and after the Fukushima accident doesn’t really mesh with this claim.
These guys had the right idea: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...
So why even bother with that old, dangerous and radioactive tech?
I really hope the lobby runs out of money soon...this artificial hype is terrible.
Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few people e.g. from ice throw and falling off roofs).
Radioactive? Ok, fission products are radioactive. Can't argue with that.
Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
No, he's just safely away from any fallout, hugely optimistic, naive about government competence and private sector morality (e.g. in cutting corners), and perfectly fine to rush technology and just wait and see the consequences and let the second order effects and externalities be suffered by others (which has nothing to do with science per se)...
Old as in "outdated".
> hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident
Yeah flooding are surely more dramatic than a slow death through cancer, I give you that...and it's such a good selling point isn't it? You just can't see it or put a finger on it. Some numbers are far less dramatic then a flood. Too bad Netflix comes with that documentary on Chernobyl now. Need to pay for some more op-eds to cover that up.
> Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
Do you have to be part of the lobby if you take the money? And I doubt it came from Goldstein or his publishers just to promote his book. The timing of the whole nuclear hype is just too coincidental.
Anti-nuclear media is also status quo. The industry has been dealing with it for decades. I don't think the HBO thing is going to tip the scale too much. There are documentaries about plane crashes too, yet we still fly.
The key point I don't think you granted me is that the numbers are in, and nuclear is definitively and quantitatively a very safe form of energy. Certainly the perception is not in line with this, but if you look at the numbers it's clear.
Thus we have a public education issue.
The only timeless thing about nuclear is the the waste. Something many future generations can have to be pissed about us.
Nobody was talking about nuclear for years before that new hype started a few months ago and suddenly it's allover the place. Come on...
> Thus we have a public education issue.
No we don't and painting the opposition to the hype as stupid or uneducated only hurts nuclear. It's been a constant mistake by the nuclear lobby throughout their history and it's one more reason why the hype will fail in the end. The lobby can scream as loud as they want it won't be louder as the rapid development in renewables and the unwillingness of the whole world to invest into a dead technology nobody outside the hype wants. The investors jumped off already years ago. Get over it.
https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/keeping-up-with-the-advance...
I am not painting opposition as stupid. I'm painting the general public as unaware that nuclear is statistically quite safe compared with almost all other energy sources.
There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.
Meanwhile at the construction sites: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/03/fate-of-...
> There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.
You have to be kidding me. Even if you somehow missed the recent hype driven by people like Michael Shellenberger, you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".
You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear. I suspect you'll hear something about how nuclear can produce low-footprint 24/7 carbon-free energy in sites all over the world.
Certainly I wouldn't expect a traditional investor to invest in nuclear to make a buck. It's mostly people who are trying to build a safe and prosperous world and believe nuclear can help us get there.
> you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".
Sure I can. This industry has no pure-nuclear stakeholders. All the owner/operators are utilities, which have vast fossil, wind, solar resources to operate. The utility executives don't give two shoots about nuclear, they only see bottom lines in current markets. Among the vendors, GE is largely divesting from nuclear to make gas and wind turbines. I've seen pro-nuclear advertising, but only in France. I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA. You see wind and natural gas ads all over the damn place. If there were a functional nuclear lobby, you could probably point me to at least one pro-nuclear advertisement on TV. Can you?
I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:
* https://mothersfornuclear.org/ -- a bunch of moms who worked at nuclear plants and wanted to tell people that they were actually good
* Seattle Friends of Fission: https://seattlefof.org/ -- a couple local grandparents who heard about nuclear wanted to spread the news of its low-carbon capabilities to other Seattle environmentalists.
* https://whatisnuclear.com -- a bunch of ~2006-era nuclear graduates who were trying to spread information about nuclear to help with climate change. Disclaimer: I founded this one so I know the story very well.
* https://www.generationatomic.org/ -- a few Minnesota folks who learned about nuclear and dedicated their efforts to it
* https://energyfromthorium.com/ -- a NASA tech named Kirk in Alabama who read an old book, got crazy excited, single-handedly rallied thousands of people with excitement about thorium, started a company, and recently got awarded a DOE voucher to develop his tech. If you've heard of Thorium, it's because of this guy, and it's about as grassroots as it gets.
The actual nuclear lobby group (NEI) is funded almost entirely by utilities who will rarely allow them to explain nuclear advantages over either fossil or renewables (because all the stakeholders have interests in those). They do good work, but it's not as targeted or hard-hitting as you might expect from a typical lobby group.
I would but they are probably not likely to talk about it anymore. Because...you know...it went so well ;)
> I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA.
Sure you did. You comment underneath it. People like Michael Shellenberger need to be payed too.
Btw, thanks for giving even more arguments to why nuclear is on the away out in this paragraph.
> I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:
Omg lol. The first two look like this John Oliver episode about fake grassroots pages. I mean what is this?
whatisnuclear is a guy who works for TerraPower.
> a few Minnesota folks who learned about nuclear and dedicated their efforts to it
I'm sure they are making nationwide impact paying for NYT and WP op-eds no wait...they probably are just like you and those fan boys here and not even relevant to the topic.
And last but not least THE NASA (uhuuuu!) guy with his "just around the corner" Thorium Reactor touring tedX talks I'm sure he has absolutely no money left to pay for this hype too.
So I don't know what you point was with this hilarious list but you seem to have missed mine and as I'm on cool down here for my contribution against this circle jerk, please consider reading my posts slowly so your answers make it worth being regarded.
There are plenty of viable sites for nuclear in the US where the local population is eager and willing, usually where there's already a nuclear power plant and it forms a strong economic force for the area. The NRC can't wait to approve more reactors and is doing its best to come up with new ways to certify safety.
So why wasn't nuclear built? Project management failures in the 1970s, combined with utility management far overestimating demand, led to a glut of reactors that were gigantic losses for those trying to build them. This was happening before TMI and Chernobyl turned more public opinion against nuclear. There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment, but the massive financial losses taught the money guys to stay the hell away from nuclear.
Fast forward to the 2000s, there's a renewed push to build more reactors, especially as the current fleet ages and will need to be retired. Nobody wants to do it, because of massive financial risk for little gain. Finally, regulatory capture of the Georgia and North Carolina state legislatures enables bills so that the utitlties socialize all risks of construction failure into their ratepayers, while keeping the profits privatized. Only in that remarkable situation would any utility be willing to take on the insane risk of trying to build a reactor. Four were attempted, two have been abandoned, and North Carolina electricity customers pay something like an average of $20/month on their bill for reactors that will never get completed. Georgia is behind schedule, 2x-3x over budget at the moment, with no end in sight of the cost overruns.
So it's not public opinion that kills nuclear, it's nuclear construction that kills nuclear, at least in the US. We do not build massive projects well, and it blows out any sort of competitive nature for nuclear.
Even if nuclear costs 5x renewables stored in energy, there may still be a financial case for it being a part of a grid, just as peaker plants right now cost much more than, say, combined cycle gas turbines. But it seems unlikely that the massive GW+ reactors of yore will be attempted again any time soon. "Small" modular reactors in the 50MW range will be attempted next, even though in the past these were disregarded as too small to be cost effective. We shall see what their costs end up being, but the best I've been able to glean from news articles is that it's about the cost of Vogtle's new construction in Georgia, I.e. not going to be price competitive with batters and renewables in 10-15 years.
Building nuclear right now is a massively expensive bet on a technology that gets more expensive the more experience we have with it. Meanwhile it's competitors are getting cheaper every day. There may be a spot for it in the future grid, but only if it's boosters focus on nuclear's true problems rather than wasting effort on excuses that are not truly blocking the tech.
But bigger plants take longer, overall. That means you need more capacity in the development pipeline, because you're forecasting that the market is growing. Soon you're needing to have finance and regulatory movement for multiple gigawatts of capacity at all times to keep up with what you think is coming.
If you then find you've overshot demand, you are in an ugly position.
Utilities that did the "dumb" thing and prioritised smaller plants, which are ostensibly more expensive per kwh, tended to do better because they didn't need to tie up so much capital at any given time. Bringing a gigawatt online in five years as a single plant is very different from bringing 200MW a year online. Especially if it turns out in the third year that 600MW was as much as the market wanted to buy.
The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were just unable to execute.
This failure should not have been a surprise, as it mirrored what happened in the last big nuclear construction boom. That didn't stop because of accidents; it stopped because the nuclear plants in that boom experienced substantial cost overruns (i.e., the nuclear vendors were not honest about what the technology would actually cost.)
There's a really awesome way of getting all this: build nuclear reactors in shipyards.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
With all the overruns, it has certainly proved to be an expensive build. However, it's all been done with private money, unlike the so called cheap renewables that cost the public hundreds of millions in subsidies.
There was some internet hype for a while that Thorium was a end-all/be-all but those were slightly misguided in the sense that all Gen-IV reactors are end-all/be-alls. The Thorium itself had very little to do with it. It was an attempt at rebranding nuclear. As a nuclear engineer I prefer precision and promote all Gen-IV stuff including Th-fueled ones. Maybe I should have gone with the rebrand.
Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic.
Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need to be managed for thousands of years.
This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change.
As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.
In Europe, Finland has one under construction, not in operation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
You'd be surprised:
By October several thousand shipments were illegally dumped at the landfill in north St. Louis County, in violation of federal standards; they contained an estimated 43,000 tons of radioactive uranium processing wastes and contaminated soil. (...) No strangers to advanced statistical tools, within two years, Wright, an accountant, and Schanzenbach, an economics professor at Northwestern University, documented 700 cases of cancers and immune system diseases within a four-square-mile area. Some of these cancers have a one-in-a-million chance of occurring. (...) Wright and Schanzenbach updated their survey and reported in August 2015 that the number of diseases, including rare cancers, had increased to 2,725 cases.
Or how about:
A few days before I visited the rather scruffy Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, southern Italy, a boy aged 11 arrived complaining of headaches. Doctors feared the worst – and sure enough, he was rapidly diagnosed as another child with brain cancer. Some of these young patients arrive in agonising pain, others mystified by falling over all the time; they do not know that lethal tumours are swelling up inside their heads. Yet more turn up with cancer in their blood, their bones, their bladders. There are so many cases that not all can be treated in the hospitals of Campania, a largely rural region. (...) Tosti explained that the Mafia dumped huge quantities of contaminated industrial waste there, then obtained backdated permission for their actions. (...) A criminal investigation was launched 18 months ago, but local people do not expect convictions. This was far from an isolated incident. (...) There are thousands of similar dumps all over this once-paradisiacal slice of Italy: in canals and caves, in quarries and wells, under fields and hills, beneath roads and properties.
Or worse:
Fonti said he had been involved in sinking three vessels, and that the 'Ndrangheta made millions of pounds illegally dumping radioactive and other toxic waste from businesses in Italy and other parts of Europe. A regional prosecutor, Bruno Giordano, said that if the exploration of the wreck does produce evidence of toxic waste, authorities will start a hunt for more sunken vessels. They believe there could be up to 32 in Italian waters. The introduction of more stringent environmental legislation in the 1980s made illegal waste disposal a lucrative business for organised crime groups in Italy. "The problem of ships loaded with radioactive waste and sunk deliberately is an Italian mystery that should have been resolved years ago," said Ermete Realacci, an opposition MP.
However, lots of people have gone around into low radiation zones and found really sick people with horrible diseases, and claimed it was linked to the radiation. What they haven't done is linked those diseases to low-dose radiation with anything near scientific rigor. It's very often just confirmation bias. "There's low-dose radiation here, and cancer, therefore low-dose radiation caused this cancer."
I'm not saying we have enough data to show that low-dose radiation causes no cancer. It just doesn't cause an easily-measurable amount, if any. A counterexample is places like Ramsar, Iran, where the natural background radiation is 80x higher than average. Would you guess that the cancer rate is higher than average?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Mazandaran#Radioactivi...
Plus the ones we had were happy accidents thus far. We could have much worse, and they also involve terrorism and other such motives.
Plus disposing toxic byproducts that last almost forever (and which we regularly dump on the lowest bidder to take care off).
Lastly, to do nuclear properly costs too much. If it weren't for huge subsidies it wouldn't be viable...
The technology change would also need to be drastic because we cannot rely on cold ocean waters to cool the plants.
In other words, we should have done it 30 years ago when the risk of societal collapse wasn't so great and we had the confidence that we can maintain this technology.
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Reaching good power output with renewable energies is laughable. I keep hearing that germany generated a lot of power with wind, like 80%, but it lasted one week, and it makes me really wonder about the accuracy of that news. Wikipedia is moot about germany wind energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
The amount of solar panels, dams and wind turbine you need to reach the power output of a nuclear plant is ridiculous. I wish we would consider the cost of kWh for each non carbonized energy.
A french consultant showing cost graphs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuzGG9W7obs
Also the problem with renewables is the power output curve, which are unpredictable because of sunlight and wind fluctuations, which will be compensated with coal/gas energy. Less of a problem with nuclear.
The intermittency of renewables renders nuclear unable to coexist with them. Nuclear is inflexible and wants to be able to sell all the time, but can't do that when renewables crash the price on the power market. You might say this is a renewable problem, but it's just as much a problem of nuclear being too inflexible to adapt to a dynamic power market.