U.S. reenters the nuclear fuel game
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Centrus, the company cited in the ieee article, was the US based side of that exchange, then under the name of the US Enrichment Corporation. [1]
While the program was successful at nuclear disarmament ( to the tune of 20,008 warheads [wiki] ) it tanked the market by effectively 'dumping' the fuel, driving centrifuge operators out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
[1] https://www.centrusenergy.com/who-we-are/history/megatons-to...
That really set the tone for where US was willing to go and even if it's overall a better solution people weren't willing to back it while it was too easy to kill politically. Jack Welch's book "Straight from the Gut" talks about how they shifted their entire business to nuclear servicing from development because they saw the changing winds - the correct bet.
I'm super excited by this latest development as we accept that we need to learn how to tame the beast that is nuclear fission because the benefits really do outweigh the drawbacks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
And everyone got very scared, and the gov’t lost a lot of credibility.
It was no Chernobyl, but it made it clear the US wasn’t perfect either.
I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy.
And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish.
Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.
In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism.
Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians.
Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.
I could tell you so much about our history and relations with Russia. From my own experience before '90, from my parents' during communism horror years and from my grandparents' during the War and the soviet occupation after.
But all that info is freely available in books and online - for naught. You can't change the mind of the Western leftists who never had to live through an actual implementation of their pet ideology. They dream about Norway, Sweden and Denmark while never even visiting Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
There is a very important difference between communism and socialism, because the latter has been tried multiple times and worked comparatively well. You even named some of the poster child countries yourself. As I said, it is a truely US thing to equate socialism with communism, followed by touting Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea as negative examples of it.
I care, if they are responsible for overseeing the safety of the nuclear reactors.
And oversight is different from strangulation. If we could dial back the regulations to mere oversight I'd go find something else to talk about.
That report, which includes official translations of two USR incident reports, is all about safety and technical aspectsbof RBMK reactors, nowhere do they talk about the future use and deploymant of nuclear power plants. After all, all those reports were written by the people being as pro-nuclear as you could be in the late 80s... Granted, people back then wrote long form documents not published on social media.
I linoed to the report elsewhere, ypu honestly should read it. Including the truely damning ones the Soviets wrote regarding safety, regulation and oversight at, and around, the Chernobyl power plant, especially affecting the extension units incl. rwaczor No. 4 which ultimately exploded.
I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target. Nobody is advocating ignoring 50 years of improvements in safety tech and understanding, we just shouldn't be bankrupting nuclear companies in pursuit of impossible goals.
The standard for damage should be similar to coal.
If anything, Chernobyl shows us that, regardless of how low regulatory and safety standards are, economic and career interests always push people and organizations to violate them. Hence, the point would be to put even stricter regulations in place.
On the other hand, you took official incident reports as, to qupte, economic recommendations. And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.
Generally so, HN has a really problem with quantifying risks. In FMEAs, the detectability, propability and severity of a failure mode are combined to calculate a risk value. If a risk is potentially disastrous, and if nuclear accidents are disastrous they really and truely are, the underlying failure modes have to be mitigated rigirously. There is no thought of "some accidents have to be accepted for the greater good" in developing systems that can, and have, killed people. This attitude shows in each and every discussion around aerospace accidents as well... And it is the main rwason I have a hard time accepting software devs as part of the greater engineering community.
1980s standards of safety aren't really an acceptable option in the modern era, and you are the person laying down 1980s and 1990s reports as something to be referred to. That isn't a very good strategy IMO, we should be aiming for higher standards than they could achieve then. We have much better tech and science now. The issue is that the regulations have gone waaay overboard, we're pushing huge costs onto the nuclear industry for next to no benefit to anyone.
> And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.
I still am, the amount of oversight the nuclear industry has been subjected to is silly.
However, and this is a point I thought was going to be obvious to everyone, 1980s USSR standards are also silly. Not as silly as the modern standard, in principle, but nevertheless I think we can do better.
I'm thinking that society can maybe be talked down off the ledge and accept airline-industry levels of safety. Then we can have cheap power and historically outstanding safety and an order of magnitude less environmental damage than coal, and cheaper power prices. It'd be a great equilibrium. Regressing to the 80s is not really something I'm tabling as an option here. If the plan was to do that then the anti-nuclear people would have some respectable points.
And you know why the Chernobyl reports are so significant? Because to date it is the worst nuclear accident, also the most thoroughly investigated one. And specifically because of all the fuck ups, it allows us to see a lot of risks and issues in one single report, not spread across a half dozen or so. Added bonus, everyone knows about Chernobyl.
After all, I read it, multiple times actually. I also read some of the public reports on the 737 Max, and the basic parallels in behaviour of people and organizations are astonishing.
Just im case so, I am not saying coal is better, we absolutely should leave existing nuclear plants online as long as sofely possible. Building new ones is just not economically feasible anymore, for almost a decade so. Wind and solar are simply cheaper, and hence more profitable fprninvestors, and the environment. And until tue transition is complete, nuclear and some gas plants for covering peak demand short notice, is a viable way to go.
By the way, regarding 80s and 90s safety regulations, you do know from when most of the current nuclear fleet dates, right? And there is so much retrofitting you can do...
Humans, in general have a real problem quantifying risks, especially risks involving low probability events. I don't think this is unique to HN (although, it seems like there may be a disproportionate amount of confidence discussing these risks).
The problem is: what are you willing to tolerate? Here in Bavaria, many decades after Chernobyl, you still have to scan wild game meat and shrooms for radioactivity. You can't even assume that a dead zone around a disaster site will be kept secure - the Ukraine war proved that, with uneducated Russian troops disturbing the radioactive dust layer as they moved around and entrenched themselves around Chernobyl. The only place where it's really feasible to have a nuclear accident site contained reasonably well is the continental United States, everything else is way too much at risk for third-party interference.
Nuclear radiation is among the worst issues you can have... you can't see it, people aren't aware of how radiation sources look like, and it's way WAY too easy to cause serious incidents the more widespread its use is - the "orphan sources" wikipedia article is pretty damning, and a lot of that is the relatively small amounts that are used in radiotherapy devices. As a species, we can't even have these secured and protected from theft and incompetent idiots - how anyone can ask for even more usage of nuclear energy is beyond me.
Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.
Anyway, as with EVs, capitalism has decided: wind and solar it is, that's where the money goes and not nuclear. For mostly the same reasons come 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. Profits and money.
The problem is we spent last 100 years spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instead of switching to nuclear due to the nuclear fear-mongering from environmentalists. Now we are facing Climate Change, a civilization-ending danger. And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.
The rational strategy would thus be a (slow, controlled, careful) cost-reducing deregulation and nuclear buildup in parallel with renewables and closing down of legacy plants.
But we are facing the same resistance and fear mongering from the exact same politicians and ideologues that got us into this predicament in the first place. I am pretty sure no solution can come from the same people and way of thinking that created the problem.
It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs.
Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).
Morw of that, some storage, bio gas and hydrogen peaker plants, geo thermal and renewables and we are good to go.
JFC. I get why this is profitable, these machines have been written off financially a century ago and have been money printers ever since for that reason, but this kind of behavior should be seriously penalized - it makes competition for new companies really hard (because they have to pay down the value for new machines), and it's bad for the environment as a whole because if they're still running the same motors and control units from back then, then they are wasting a lot of electricity, most likely also emit a lot more toxic effluents than a plant with modern emission controls and mitigations would, and most likely run at lower yield rates than modern processes so they're wasting more raw materials.
I root for them to succeed. I do love renewables. But I know that in my country at least the waiting time today for panel purchase, installation and grid connection is over a year. However they are subsidized by the state so that adds time and bureaucracy.
The rest… I have my doubts: it’s all ideas but little reality. We’ll see in about 5 years time, I guess.
Nobody, I repeat nobody, is financing new nuclear reactors in the developed world (except specialized and military applications). The money goes, for quote a while now, into renewables and, sadly, some coal plants (which is mainly due to CO2 certificates being too dirt cheap, and making coal plants financially viable). The free market and financials decided against nuclear, as did politics in a lot of countries.
One thing you do ignore so, getting new nuclear reactors up and running takes decades in Europe, there is no such thing as a fast built out. Not even if the public and political will would be there, which it isn't. All we do achieve with argueing for new nuclear capacity is slowing the build out of wind and solar down and slow development of grid scale storage tech.
The technology used to make solar panels is the same used for semiconductors. It evolved al Moore's law speed thanks to an unregulated free market for the tech industry. Same reason we enjoy a cheap supercomputer in every pocket in 2023 instead of the city’s Eniac. That’s what lack of regulation does.
What German guvernamental subsidies did was to build a lot of Solar capacity in a country with relatively little sun. I hope it works out for them, but I remember earlier this year importing nuclear electricity from France.
And I remember france hat to partially shut down their reactors in the summer, because the rivers were too warm to cool them.
I'm just trying to fully understand the position here. How do you mean "free market"? Because it seems a disproportionate amount of nuclear cost is driven by regulation. I'm not even saying that unwarranted, but it certainly seems to be very different from the colloquial definition of a "free market".
Regulation, I might remind you, that was written by staunchly pro-nuclear organizations.
Also, just necause you have regulations doesn't mean you don't have a free market. Hence, there is a free market for nuclear electricity. Thing is, nobody wants to finance new projects (with the exception of developing countries, but those have a lot of catching up to do).
One cost nuclear power plants do not have to carry is insurance against large accidents. No insurance comoany would take on said risk, hence the state is carrying that risk. Soubds to me like a huge cost factor is taken off from nuclear power plant operators here (just to pick one example).
As said elsewhere, I'm all for keeping existing NPPs running as long as safely possible (which was the reason Germany had to shut down a couple), and shut down coal plants instead. Building new NPPs takes too long to be a viable solution, and is too expensive (and hence the lack of fubding for new ones).
So while there's a lot to discuss about the relative costs of nuclear, claiming they are the result of a free market doesn't really hold water.
I'm not convinced.
I'm expecting the automotive industry will just start producing vehicles that aren't effected by that requirement and those will be marketed in much the same way as SUVs have become pretty much the only vehicle type available because they're permitted to emmit more CO2.
We have a ton of these people in Germany. "Technologieoffen" they call themselves - the reality is that they want to keep the old structure of big utilities and massive profits for shareholders alive.
> Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.
That's what a grid is for. Build a national grid with serious transfer capacities (China can do it over 1000s of km's, so the US can just as well if it wanted), and suddenly you can use East Coast solar to power the West Coast. Or here in Europe, with French and Portuguese offshore wind and solar from Northern Africa. On top of that, incentivise large consumers (data centers, heavy industry) to upgrade their processes to be able to handle dynamic load shedding, and invest into powerful gas and hydrogen fuel cell based peaker plants to cover for the very small amount in a year where neither solar, wind nor dammed hydro is enough to supply the entire country.
The serious issue with nuclear is that they cost billions of dollars to build. At the moment, in Germany 44% of the total power is generated using renewables [1], in peak times (i.e. summer) renewables account for up to 70% of the month's load [2]. The investment for NPPs can't ever be recouped at that point, which is why even small scale projects such as NuScale got the boot [3]. No matter what the pro-nuclear crowd hopes, the free market has decided against it.
[1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimasch...
[2] https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-f...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...
I know about your suggestions and while they are all good ideas I just don’t see them widely implemented in reality for some reason. Maybe because they all require government intervention which is slow, expensive and prone to corruption from the fossil fuel lobby.
Meanwhile the non-renewable part of energy generation is made burning coal, gas and oil and spewing pollution and even radioactive particles in the air, pollution that kills millions every year. Also spewing CO2 causing climate change, e civilization-ending danger getting closer and harder to avoid.
Maybe nuclear deserves a second chance?
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
On electricity markets, which in Europe only take variable coats into account, the ranking, cheapest to most expensive, is: wind and solar, hydro, coal, nuclear and oil followed by gas. So even there, in hard cold numbers, nuclear looses. Even without taking the huge fix costs of nuclear plants into account, or the long term coats like waste storage.
Why do you think even small, and potentially cheaper, reactor projects get axed?
And for good reason. There is no power generation that has a potential for serious damage compared to nuclear. The cost of Chernobyl was at least 235 billion dollars [1], Fukushima is estimated to end up at around 200 billion dollars [2]. The only other kind of power generation that can destroy entire swaths of land in a single strike is dammed hydro, but even the largest catastrophe to date, the Kakhovka dam destruction in Ukraine, cost only 14 billion dollars [3] - and it didn't render the affected land permanently uninhabitable and only cost the lives of about 50 people, compared to Chernobyl's death toll.
It's utter madness to risk this much money and this much destruction when there are so many different ways of getting power. Nuclear power may be the cheapest per kWh on paper, but that is only because the worst-case risk is implicitly assumed by the government without accounting for it in insurance premiums - at least the major Western countries limit operator exposure to liability claims to a fraction of the potential cost [4]. This is beyond unsustainable, it's financial russian roulette.
We will not be able to live entirely without NPPs, I agree on that one, as we need them to create Co-60 for radiotherapy sources and the nuclear weapon powers to get new feedstock to maintain the warheads, but we should try as a species to get rid of nuclear weapons anyway and only keep the minimum we need for radiotherapy and fundamental research.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/chernobyl...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253929/
[3] https://www.voanews.com/a/un-reports-staggering-14-billion-c...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
Of course there is. Good old oil, coal and gas burning. Since we’re fear-mongering on potentials here, would you like to estimate the cost of a runaway green house effect that turns the whole Earth into Venus? Climate scientists are warning we may already be beyond that point of no return. And we are still putting CO2 into the atmosphere while arguing the “potential” dangers of nuclear!
We're building renewable generation capacity at a far greater speed (as said, Germany alone > 1GW a month...) than we ever could using nuclear power. This in turn enables us to shift residential and commercial heating to heat pumps - even assuming a gas power plant, 1 kWh of electric power replaces 4 kWh of heat power.
Till then - you’re selling pretty dreams, while in reality killing people and dooming the planet.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-approves-bri...
1) the public cannot see
2) lacks the skills to properly independently evaluate the scope of (99% of the public doesn’t own a Geiger counter, and 99.9% would be unable to quantify risks even if they did)
3) is potentially lethal
And the authorities the are supposed to be able to do #1 and #2 are caught repeatedly and obviously lying about the hazard.
It’s perfectly rational for people to get ‘irrationally’ scared. All they know is the folks who are supposed to be protecting them from this actual threat are not credible! And there is an actual threat (probably)!
Yes, I spent some time today reading official reports on Chernobyl, again. Hell, even the Soviet reports are damning for their own nuclear industry, calling out organizations, people and structural defficiencies. As is the IAEA. And none of those groups can even remotely be accussed of being anti-nuclear.
Maybe there needs to be another criteria. Something like, "when the hazard comes with a scary label"?
Coal fires are pretty obvious.
Acid rain is pretty obvious (and easy to measure with ph strips, which are easy to find).
Nasty smog is pretty obvious.
Plumes of gunk from smoke stacks are obvious.
Now, co2 and fine particulate contamination (like say radioactive contamination from ash), yes. Those take decades to be noticable (if at all). There have been big issues because of it, statistically. But those are not well known/accepted either by the public. And certainly not the most common 'acute' problems.
Something like a release of radiation from a nuclear power plant can (and usually is), completely invisible. As is things like ingesting fallout. It usually kills years or decades later.
If you can see radiation, you're pretty much a dead man walking already.
A reactor melting down is a sudden acute incident that can release massive amounts of completely invisible radioactive elements that won't kill anyone for decades - or in weeks/months, if really bad.
By the time something has obviously gone wrong from the outside (like the core blowing up in Chernobyl, or the reactor building blowing up due to Hydrogen explosion in Fukushima), massive releases are essentially guaranteed. But still usually invisible. Cherenkov radiation 'sky beam' from chernobyl excepted. [https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-dis...]
And with a little avoidance, a lethal dose might be easy to not have! If you have good data. Without good data, it's a crap shoot though.
And the idea that there is a risk we can't detect is silly, we radiation is easy to detect. The issue is we can't detect a threat because there appears not to be one. The risks aren't quantified because the threshold for a paniced response has been set far too low, so there is panic without a problem. And the population doesn't own Geiger counters because they are canny with their money and they don't have a reason to own one. If there was a risk, it'd be easy to make measuring devices generally available. You can buy one for less than $100.
My ‘yes’ was for long term, persistent exposure. Not an acute accident.
Panic tends to happen in acute accidents because people don’t have time to prepare or do any of those things you’re talking about.
When the folks who are in charge during a crisis are clearly either incompetent or lying, and it’s one of those acute situations where people don’t have time to get all those things, that’s when it’s perfectly rational to be ‘irrationally worried’.
When there is a history of that kind of thing happening, that’s when it’s perfectly rational to be ‘irrationally worried’ long term.
The health effects on the population at large are also significant, but largely invisible. Radiation? Also measurable, but largely invisible.
But often the same people who are fine with coal will tell me how terrible three mile island was and that it is evidence that we shouldn't expand nuclear.
Radiation is somehow scarier.
No one who mined coal - ever - was unclear on how bad for them it was. Even long before we had x-rays or modern medical anything.
Mining uranium kills people in ways that aren’t so obvious, and in proportions that didn’t make any sense even based on radiation models.
It turns out radon gets easily carried in on dust, and miners were getting 300x the radiation exposure that their Geiger counters or dosimeters showed was possible.
They also were ingesting/breathing in trace amounts of things like Polonium, which also weren’t showing up.
Radiation is scarier because it’s not obvious when it’s there, or how bad it’s going to be for someone until way after it’s too late. And it’s hard to figure out - like you really need a solid physics degree AND a medical degree to understand becquerels (or curies) vs rads vs rem, and what that actually means for a random human somewhere in a mine.
The unknown is always scarier.
Coal dust is not confusing anyone, and requires zero degrees to understand how shitty it is to breath.
While the precise mechanism by which the #4 reactor in Chernobyl was destroyed in 1986 was rooted in the flawed design combined with unsafe operation, this does not mean that other reactor designs cannot fail catastrophically with loss of containment and release of radioactive material. Particularly when operated outside of their specification through operator error, accidents or a combination thereof.
Any reactor can fail and any can be operated safely. The reactivity coefficients of RBMK made it harder to control, perhaps, than a PWR. Modifications made after the Chernobyl accident have improved this.
The main issue with Chernobyl 4 was its lack of a containment building. Even so, the response was an over-reaction that made the situation worse.
Not sure which response to the accident was an over-reaction in your opinion so.
Edit: That should be the one https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...
You also have this one: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0716/ML071690245.pdf
Edit 2:
What with regards to the effect of graphite tipped control rods was, IMHO, as bad as having a dramatic KGB effort to keep it secret: it was forgotten. In 1983, there was an incident in an other RBMK reactor, the HBO series claims the KGB kept it secret, in reality this happened (from the INSAG-7 report and the cited USSR investigative reports):
>> The SCSSINP Commission (Annex I, Section 1-3.8) reports that, after discov- ery of the positive scram effect at Ignalina in 1983, the chief engineering organiza- tion informed other organizations and all nuclear power plants with RBMK reactors that it intended to impose restrictions on the complete withdrawal of control and safety rods from the core. Such restrictions were never imposed and apparently the matter was forgotten.
That means in the fact it coupd explode was known, but ignored. Ignored by everyone in the Soviet scientific establishment and nuclear authorities. I don't what's worse, a secret police intervention or a whole science and industry community ignoring safety concerns until it is too late.
“Whole .. community” is a stretch here.
Keep in mind that information spread is different in ussr. Kgb had people recruited from all over the place (from factory workers to politicians; 0.1% of population were in kgb). Also, lot of institutions had party representative present (officially, not hidden).
Press did not report accidents or significantly under-report casualties, and of course various good metrics were inflated a lot, even to comical levels.
In this environment, somebody using his influence in kgb or party to stop certain restrictions (because they would point to design flaw and would delay stuff) is very believable, and probably common.
Conspiracy in ussr != conspiracy in us.
The KGB blocking the refit of the RBMK fleet is a myth from HBOs Chernobyl series. Truth is rather different, Legasov was seen by the younger generation as part of the establishment that held back modifications, while he simultaniously managed to piss off said establishment. And without support from the rank and file, and some enemies with the higher ups, his career was shot. Compounded by serious health issues following the Chernobyl clean up. Less dramatic than a KBG conspiracy for sure, but still bad enough.
In the end the operators of Chernobyl No. 4 were the fucked ones, their procedures were incomplete, sometimes dangerously wrong. Leadership, incl. Dyatlov, failed to put a safety culture in place. The reactor design was not well understood, operating characteristics at below 50% capacity were never even analyzed or modelled, and inheretly unsafe (missing sensors, bad control rod design and operating procedures...). And the night shift wasn't even briefed on the test to be conducted.
One of the conclusions of INSAG-7 was, that the accident could even have happened with properly designed control rods, coolant failure could have led to the same accident. If your equipment is so inherently unstable and fragile, operating procedure, training and operators have to compensate. None of those measures was taken.
Heck, in some circunstances RBMK operators had to conduct up to 1,000 manual operations per hour (!) to keep the reactor stable. And by the way, the RBMK design didn't even meet Soviet design and safety requirements applicable in 70s when those reactors were designed.
A complete clusterfuck. The circumstances allowing said clusterfuck still exist everywhere, in all countries, industries and organisations to this day.
It took years to find that out though.
The containment vessel held, and most of the radiation released was in the form of xenon and krypton gas vented from the reactor.
“ It was later found that about half the core had melted, and the cladding around 90% of the fuel rods had failed,[21][76] with 5 ft (1.5 m) of the core gone, and around 20 short tons (18 t) of uranium flowing to the bottom head of the pressure vessel, forming a mass of corium.[77] The reactor vessel—the second level of containment after the cladding—maintained integrity and contained the damaged fuel with nearly all of the radioactive isotopes in the core.”
Definitely not Chernobyl, but it was a significant amount of damage to the reactor. It was totaled.
Many of the "small modular reactor" schemes say they don't need a big, strong, expensive containment vessel because, reasons. You can read those arguments for NuScale in NRC documents. The prototype was going to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory, formerly the National Reactor Testing Station, which is in outer nowhere, just in case.
[https://www.newequipment.com/plant-operations/article/219218...]
No, sadly.
PWR's sure can explode (due to hydrogen, vapor...).
The root causes will not be identical to Chernobyl's causes, and the containment will probably limit leaks for a while (theoretically at least a few days), but they sure can explode.
It also happened at Fukushima.
Some protective measures are PACs and containment, however nothing can guarantee that an explosion won't happen, nor that dangerous radionuclides won't leak outside the plant.
PAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_autocatalytic_recombin...
Containment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building
So if it had killed ~6000 people it would be within the accepted norms of the energy industry for anything that isn't nuclear.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
While it harmed the public perception of nuclear, it was really the cost that slowed down investments in US nuclear which then had knock on effects long term. The best way to think about it is power companies had other investments they could make that had less risks even if they had lower returns. Thus the cost is balanced not vs 0 returns but in comparison to the added benefit from nuclear.
Fewer investments meant losing knowledge of how to build the things which further reduced nuclear’s advantages. Until today when nuclear just can’t compete successfully and anyone that tries sees vast cost overruns.
Any enterprise needs to be sufficiently safe as a complete shit show, because it will happen.
His overall strategy at GE was to shift it from it's traditional roles in heavy industry to instead focus on finance and real estate. This worked temporarily as the company rode the real estate bubble. When the bubble pop'd the company lost half its value.
In other words, don't evaluate his statements on nuclear without context or critical thought.
They had a relatively larger fall from grace in the recession than the rest of the index.
In any case, even if he was a terrible executive what does that have to do with whether he was correct about general trends in the nuclear industry?
I'm saying he had a larger agenda at the time that comment was made, one that had him divesting not just from nuclear but many other of GE's historic heavy industry and power related business lines.
How so? Don't you agree with it?
DUBNER: Let me ask you this: in 1999, not long before you retired from G.E., you said that your ultimate success would be determined by how well your successor grows the company over the next 20 years. When you said that, G.E.’s market cap was up north of $450 billion. Now it’s almost 20 years later, it’s just north of $200 billion. So talk to me about that. I know that you —
WELCH: I don’t talk about that.
Now maybe Welch doesn't want to seem like he's bad-mouthing the performance of those who came after him, but he does have at least some responsibility for ensuring a good continuity of leadership.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/extra-jack-welch-full-inter...
You’re super excited and all I see is super excited for poor people who can’t move towns getting cancer, while misdirecting toward 3-Mile.
There’s no reason we can’t have safe nuclear power but we won’t get there if past wrongs aren’t fixed, and it seems like everyone is focusing on the wrong things.
If you are talking about Rocky Flats, wasn't that related to nuclear weapons production? It's plutonium, not uranium.
We have safe nuclear reactors, today. What we need to do is build more, with newer designs, and retire those that are past the end of their lifetime.
Most importantly, this discussion doesn't even make sense when we have coal plants spewing all sorts of terrible stuff in the atmosphere, including radiation.
One of the contentions of the movie is that nuclear weapons and nuclear energy production are inextricably linked in the US. I felt it made a decent argument that "there is no clean coal" but for nuclear energy as well, because of this historical link.
When did Chernobyl break ground? 1972, operated by lying soviet bureaucrats.
When Fukushima Daiichi break ground? 1967
When did Three Mile island break ground? 1968
There have been a half-dozen whole generations of nuclear reactor developed since then, drastic reductions in the amount of waste they generate through advancements in nuclear chemistry, and now a whole new paradigm of SMRs.
All in pursuit of greater safety from a bogyman that is nothing but an echo of the past. It's like the Mill architecture people, still trying to design a CPU to beat the itanic when the rest of processor design has moved on.
A lot of Germany's gas storage facilities were owned by Russian companies, or rather Germans subsidiaries of Russian companies. As soon as the war in Ukraine hit, those have been quickly nationalized. What makes you think US uranium mines would be any different? Or that there are now export restrictions forburanium in the first place?
If any. NuScale was going to use this stuff. But that project was cancelled a few weeks ago. Costs too much. There are advanced reactors being talked about. Does anyone know of any that actually need this fuel right now? Maybe outside the US there are some.
(NRC: "Natural uranium is made of about 0.7 % U-235 and traditional reactor fuel is enriched to between 3% and 5% U-235." High-assay, low-enriched uranium is, per the NRC, 5% - 20% u-235. Weapons grade is around 90%.)
TerraPower (the one where Bill Gates is one of the co-founders) is also planning to use HALEU in this decade to fuel their Natrium reactor.
Not really. Most reactors in the US produce power about 90% of the time. Reducing the refueling time can increase that to 95%, but that's not going to make a big difference in the profitability of the plant.
No, NuScale's reactor will use 4.95% enriched Uranium [1].
[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/-/media/nuscale/pdf/fact-sheets...
> Centrus and the Russian state-owned company Tenex, which are the only two outfits that can produce HALEU in the world
> For now, the DOE intends to purchase about 25 tonnes of HALEU per year to kick-start the industry and give HALEU producers secure contracts from which they can expand production
So in 2024 the DoE will buy 0.9T from the only American producer, and the remaining 24.1T from Russia?
The existing reactors don't use this fuel. This fuel is being ramped up for new reactors that haven't been built yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
Now, in comparison, a 1 GW coal-fired power plant needs to be fed with 3-4 million tons of coal per year (energy content of coal varies a bit, in relation to oxygen-based combustion at least).
And, a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year? (OK battery replacement is an issue... work it out yourself).
Don't forget that only the high density fuel needs to be shipped long distance as well...
For a fully reliable 1gw of wind, that's something like 600 turbines (to simply), each turbine lasts about 20 years, and weighs about 200 tonnes. So about 5000 tonnes of finished wind turbine a year, with an equivalent waste stream.
Simon Michaux has already done this. It's worth a read through his reports [0].
Also, it's quite possible to reprocess spent fuel. France has been doing it for decades. [1] The price has not been enough to justify it, but eventually it will (or if other costs are imposed, like a tax on the mineral rights that would favor reprocessing fuel).
[0] https://www.simonmichaux.com/gtk-reports [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
It's so ridiculous to think that human civilization would collapse just because we will eventually run out of stuff to dig out of the ground and burn, when the biosphere has been humming along on sunlight for about three billion years. Why is this so hard to explain to people?
(Also, on paper one doesn't need any grid storage, if only we could get governments to cope rates on a planetary grid. Texas doing it's own thing and Japan having two frequency zones shows how hard this would be in practice, but in principle it can work just fine).
The total sunlight that hits the Earth in 2 minutes is more than whats needed to power the entire world for a year.
Wasn't that the SuperPhoenix and Astrid reactors? I thought both had been cancelled because of politics?
Reprocessing is another thing entirely. It relies on the fact that used nuclear fuel is mainly not reusable due to accumulation of neutron poisons. In reprocessing, these poisons are removed so that the rest of the fuel can be reused. This too has many practical challenges as you end up with liquid radioactive materials and a lot of it is waste. So far it has proven more practical than breeders, though. Perhaps that is because the same processes can be used to extract materials for nuclear weapons.
Thanks for arguing in such bad faith by default. But let's just say there are other ways of storing energy that don't need huge amounts of processed lithium.
Have you perhaps heard of "muh pumped hydro", "muh flow batteries", "muh hydrogen", and the myriad of other less mature storage technologies currently being developed?
Even if you go with "muh flow batteries" or "muh hydrogen", we would require far more land with wind/solar to fill up those storage technologies than just use nuclear plants.
Even if I were to concede that covering every last surface with solar cells is a good idea (or what to do when recycling them), this doesn't take into account the enormous amount of energy currently used to make process heat. Neither wind nor solar are able to generate the hundreds of degrees necessary for so many chemical and manufacturing processes.
Don't let yourself get bamboozled by shiny futuristic graphics of storage or generation solutions without at least doing some basic napkin math about feasibility.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... [1] https://ambri.com/
You can find a full table, distribution maps, guesstimates for known but as yet untested deposits, etc in the big Red Book of Uranium stuff (free to download):
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28569/uranium-resources-pro...
> a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year?
Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20 - replacement | recovery is an ongoing process and that currently requires raw materials that come with a cost - including slave labour.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-f...
There are no magic problem free resources.
Yes, investors in the uranium fuel rod production pipeline will feel a lot of pain as a result of what's going on right now, but it's not like they weren't warned. Like Theranos investors, they failed to do their due diligence.
[edit] Just to add, the metric you want is ENERGY not $US, because what really matters is the amount of energy you have to put into mining the ore, extracting the uranium from the ore, enriching the uranium-235 in the ore to the point where it's useful in a nuclear reactor, and then packaging that refined product into highly expensive fuel rods made of fairly expensive materials. By the time you do that energy calculation, per-year, for the reactor (on top of ridiculously high initial construction costs), the whole thing looks like a massive long-term liability.
They're not especially robust in cold weather and while they do last longer, they do also degrade in output over time just as the poly versions do.
To maintain a 1 GW farm requires ongoing upkeep, etc.
Again, there are no magic problem free resources, just like low volume uranium mining, large volume mining and production processing to sustain solar power has toxic side effects and impacts people.
It's not even close, with some limited exceptions, like Finland and other Artic Circle zones.
Oh come on. This is an absurd claim with no evidence. Don't be ridiculous.
Polycrystalline panels last 20 years, sometimes longer (the sales pitch is "up to 25 years") but the 20% fall off in deliverable power after 10 years is real.
Monocrystalline last longer, they also gradually fall off and they cost more.
Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs, where's the optimal sweet spot for buying new and rotating out on a schedule | reacting to failure.
I'm not opposed to solar, I'm in Australia in one of the states with large amounts of residential solar and heavy mining industries that dwarf anything in the US currently going electric - we're costing out massive farms to run solar power to asia via HVDC cable.
The supply side of all that is sourcing the copper, the lithium, the aluminium framing, the long list of other raw material inputs, the processing to get from concentrate ores to usable elements, etc.
If it's real, why don't you provide evidence?
Unfortunately this is par for the course in discussions with nuclear power cultists. It honestly is that bad.
Because I went to bed, it was late in my time zone.
> nuclear power cultists.
Say what now? Are you an idiot?
The vast bulk of PV performance studies are dominated by relatively short term studies in temperate climates - the latitudes of California and Germany eg:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
references Australia and links to papers from Perth and Melbourne which are cooler climates.
See my comment above re: my region of interest - equatorial tropical regions with harhser temperature cycling and probable requirements for cooling to maximise returns (still part of an open study).
I'd be happy to provide more details but I'm afraid your comment above doesn't warrent engagement.
Your numbers seem off by atleast a facotor of 2. Average degradation is .5% per year so panels are guarantees are usually that you'll have 90% capacity after 10 years and 80% after 20 years.
> Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs,
The failure mode for solar is unlike traditional spinning hard drives. There isn't a "data loss" downside to waiting to replace. There won't be any risk mitigation, just calculations of when the opportunity costs become high enough to warrant replacement. I suspect in areas with cheap land, it'll be easier to build additional capacity than to replace existing degraded panels.
His work has shown that in this tropical climate, with high ambient temperatures and high humidity during the wet season, the a-Si array produces up to 20% more energy than ...
The optimisation issues include other factors, the cost of panel cooling techniques Vs their benefits for one.
Your average degradation figures are the figures from big meta studies such as the US Dept of Energy NREL lab Photovoltaic Degradation Rates https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf which you'll notice is dominated by temperate climate studies at the latitudes of Perth | Melbourne | Germany | Arcata, California etc.
Perhaps you should qualify your statements, because this:
> Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20
This is an unqualified factual statement and is simply not true.
> Your average degradation figures are the figures from big meta studies
The big meta studies do show that degradation is a bit faster in higher temp environments for some kinds of panels. There is however zero evidence that solar panels will be "door stops in 20".
If you're building a large area solar farm to ship power to Singapore would you keep a panel after 20 years or door stop it?
What if the peak power output for particular climatic conditions comes from lesser used cheaper PV types that degrade faster than common ones at temperate latitudes?
The people studying this are coming at this with mindset of those that move 800 million tonne of iron ore per annum.
My original comment was framed to indicate the interest was hyper efficient at scale deployment in specific environments .. not running a beer fridge in Melbourne.
No, it wasn't. If that was your intent, you should go reread it to see why everyone else sees you making a clearly false claim that does not contribute to the discussion.
> If you're building a large area solar farm to ship power to Singapore would you keep a panel after 20 years or door stop it?
That's gonna depend on land value, non-panel infrastructure costs and replacement costs. If replacement costs are high then and land value and other infrastructure costs are low, then solar farms will be expanded and replacement will be delayed. If the opposite then you'll see existing panels replaced sooner.
I do expect that in a couple of decades we will see solar panel reconditioning and recycling becoming increasingly important.
Regarding slave labour, I might have bad news for you: Not a single product you use in your lofe is free of exploitation, child labor or slave labor. Not a single one, from the clothes you wear to the food you eat.
This wasn't true when I manufactured them almost a decade ago. We were offering 30 year warranties with only 15% drop after 30 years - polycrystalline 20% efficiency.
Eg: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-advanced-reactor-system...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Solar = 0.0!
Why don't we abolish the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act and see how far nuclear gets when having to pay the true cost for their insurance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_reaction_to_Fukushima...
Stop spreading disinformation please.
- Brown coal: 32.72
- Coal: 24.62
- Oil: 18.43
- Biomass: 4.63
- Natural gas: 2.82
- Hydro: 1.30
- Wind: 0.04
- Nuclear: 0.03
- Solar: 0.02
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
But there's still no solution for safely storing or disposing of nuclear waste, so all those power plants currently have a stockpile of spent fuel rods, which is a huge risk imo. But everyone's like "not in my backyard", even though the backyard is a deep cave in a mountain or down in the earth where the stuff will be put in lead and reinforced concrete, the cave sealed off or collapsed, forgotten by time and where it will remain dormant and slowly go inert over the next geological era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
There is, we know what it is, but no one wants to pay for it - it's called deep borehole storage. You basically put your fuel in cylinders, dig boreholes few miles deep, put all the waste at the bottom, done. It's not coming back ever, it doesn't pose any danger to anything or anyone on anything other than geological timescales(and if the geology starts pushing stuff buried 5 miles deep to the surface you have other bigger problems to worry about).
It's estimated that "just" 800 boreholes would be enough to store all nuclear waste ever produced.
But yeah, cost is one thing, but the other is that this material then becomes truly and irreversibly irretrievable - which actually might not be desirable since we know that even spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed to make more fuel or weapons, which is not something that countries like US would want to dismiss as a possibility.
And also - storage of spent nuclear fuel is actually a lot safer and less scary than most people think. In Netherlands they literally made a museum out of their spent fuel storage facility, you can walk in between the casks that hold material radioactive enough to kill you in minutes, it's that safe.
On the specific topic of reprocessing though. Reprocessing achieves 2 things: 1. it can extract usable fissile fuel from spent fuel, and 2. it can reduce the amount of long lived radioactive waste, by a factor of 30. Point 1 can be further split in 1.a. usable fuel for the current generation reactors and 1.b. usable fuel for future, fast reactors (U-238).
1.a. Per wikipedia [1]
Reprocessing the plutonium into usable fuel increases the energy derived from the original uranium by some 12%, and if the uranium-235 is also recycled by re-enrichment, this becomes about 20%
1.b. reprocessing in order to extract U-238 for fast reactors. That's a nice concept, but if we ever build fast reactors that can burn U-238 (fingers crossed), we already have a huge stockpile of depleted uranium. The US alone has more than half a million tons, and the rest of the world at least as much. That's enough to keep the lights on in the entire world for hundreds of years.
2. reprocessing in order to reduce the waste. That makes sense. But burying the waste is probably cheaper. We have already buried hundreds of thousands of tons of waste at WIPP. We know it works and it is safe. We know we will need to eventually bury some waste, even if its 30 times lower. If we, as a society, agree to open some deep geological repositories for nuclear waste, then it doesn't make all that much of a difference if we bury 10000 tons or a million tons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor
In early 2012, Rosatom's Science and Technology Council approved the construction of a BN-1200 reactor at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station. Technical design was scheduled for completion by 2013, and manufacture of equipment would start in 2014. Construction would begin in 2015 with first fuel loads in 2017 and full commercial operation as early as 2020.
...
In 2015, after several minor delays, problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign of the fuel was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold", and Rosenergoatom stated that no decision to continue would be made before 2019. In January 2022, Rosatom announced that a pilot BN-1200M would be built by 2035.
It isn't a huge risk. The really hot stuff decays quickly and that can happen next to the power plants no problem. What you end up left with is far less energetic and is self-contained – look up dry casks. You can stand next to them no problem and they are incredibly sturdy.
That's ignoring reprocessing. If it is radioactive enough to cause serious harm long term, it is radioactive enough to still use as fuel. There are reactor designs that can re-use them.
Honestly, I would rather have some dry casks stored at Yucca Mountain than breathing coal dust (that's often radioactive).
Ok, strange flex but this about what I have come to expect from this “debate”.
> A nuclear power plant is essentially a thermal plant plus the nuclear part so how would it be cheaper than a coal plant?
Fuel costs?
So the whole argument for economics of scale doesn't work, thermal power plants have not reduced dramatically in price over the last decades despite lots of them being build. Half of your plant not really reducing much in price, will limit the benefits you can get even if the other half sees massive cost reductions.
Ok, but surely the only cost that matters is the lifetime cost? (Including whatever cleanup is needed for both nuclear and whichever fossil and/or renewable+storage combination it is compared against).
> Half of your plant not really reducing much in price, will limit the benefits you can get even if the other half sees massive cost reductions.
Sure, absolutely. But coal is pretty expensive over the course of a year, so it can look like a good opportunity (if only for the reality hadn't turned out so fragile and, when it goes wrong, severe).
Maybe there is 20% too many regulations. That could be the case. But having 20% too many regulations is far preferable than 20% too few.
Even if you are staunchly pro-nuclear you should want regulations that reduces the chance for even a minor accident to almost exactly 0%, because even a minor accident will cause fear that’ll set nuclear back by two decades. Maybe that fear is irrational. Tough luck. Humans are irrational. Most of them would rather be slowly poisoned by coal and die a couple years early, than living with the thought of maybe having to suddenly have to abandon their home and established life like in Fukushima.
The problem is when that extra 20% regulation makes the technology so expensive the world chooses to keep burning coal, oil and gas thus poisoning and killing millions through pollution and endangering life on the entire planet through Climate Change.
Right now nuclear is so frozen and so useful that I'd take the change of a (PR) disaster and (slowly, carefully, partially) deregulate: it can't get much worse than already is.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/14/wind-farm-or...
If off-shore wind companies are struggling then nuclear projects are deep deep in the red.
Nuclear get subsidies in term of research, building, deconstruction, waste storage and price guaranties. Around 70% goes to the single fusion research project called ITER (international research, non-military).
Hydro receives an increasing amount of subsidies for repair and modernization. Dam repair and flooding protection is expensive and with climate change there is even bigger need for fixing Europe old hydro power dams. They are also in general non-compliant with the European environmental regulations (several species are going extinct), but that is not a subsidies issues directly. Fixing the dams so they allow for fish to pass is however a subsidies issue, but as far the budget to fix that has yet to be allocated and the costs are estimated to be exceedingly high.
And last we have fossil fuel subsidies. A large portion of the "reserve energy" plan in eu in order to address increased gird variability is based on keeping a large number of fossil fuel plants on stand-by, paid through subsidies. Then there is subsidies on extracting the fuel itself, subsidies on trading fuel, and subsidies on storage of the fuel, and transportation of the fuel. This is not accounting for the environmental cost from burning fossil fuels, which some see as a form of subsidies.
Subsidies-like part not included are insurance against nuclear accidents, insurance against floods from dam failures, and insurance against forest fires. It is also not accounting for land usage nor damage to wildlife.
So we should cut off subsidies agreed on 10 years ago during renewables learning curve to make it even? The renewable subsidies for new builds today are miniscule in Europe, which is what we are making the decisions based on.
How many Hinkley Point Cs costing ~€0.15/kWh to the consumers, very similar to energy crisis prices, should we fund just so you can stop complaining about past history for renewables?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
To put down to facts, Europe paid 172 billions in 2021 on energy subsidies. This is 54% increase since 2015. 76 billions went to renewables. Between 2019 and 2020 the amount going to renewables increased by 7%, while between 2020 and 2021 it decreased by 3%. The second largest recipient of subsidies was fossil fuel energy with 50 billions. Subsidies for nuclear has remain mostly stable since 2015, sitting at around 4 billions, but with Germany closing several plants last year it has now increased to 7 billions. (The report do not consider R&D to be subsidies, so ITER is not included).
We should not try to make things "even". We should cut fossil fuel subsidies and decommission the fossil fuel plants that operate as reserve energy. The cost of high variability in the grid should not be carried through tax money. Market forces can't be applied correctly when taxes are being funneled to fix a problem caused by using high variability energy production.
Subsidies to renewables are slowly being reduced. It is no longer a given that grid connections will be given out for free and paid by taxes. Both nuclear and renewables should also carry their own weight and not have price guaranties. Companies that need those should have the cost baked into the energy price.
A solution that is acknowledged by the European report but often overlooked is energy usage reduction and increased efficiencies.
The report for those wanted to read it: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
Lets also remove the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act [2] with equivalents across the world so the nuclear industry has to bear the true insurance cost.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
How expensive is a resounding "No" by insurers?
I would not be completely against demanding that all commercial activity in the energy sector must cover every negative effect on society and the environment. It would in effect ban all fossil fuel, nuclear, and hydro. Would be a fair price to pay for getting rid of fossil fuels.
According to the IEA: "EU electricity consumers are expected to save an estimated EUR 100 billion during 2021-2023 thanks to additional electricity generation from newly installed solar PV and wind capacity"
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...
To me that really highlighted the naivety of many environmental activists. They mean well and we need them, but they so often fail to look at the problems holistically and zooms in on single issues.
I think at the end of the day it comes down to tribalism, sadly. People choose their "side" and pitch in to defend its merits and attack the other "side"'s deficiencies. As with many things, there isn't a whole lot of room left for holistic approaches.
I'm personally not a huge fan of nuclear because I'm a pragmatist, and I think most people are pragmatists at the end of the day, being human. And pragmatists don't make good operators of nuclear power plants. But I definitely don't think any existing nuclear plants should be closed. They should be (safely) continued to run as long as possible to provide the clean energy we desperately need while other safer (and often cheaper) renewables+storages ramp up.
What I really can't stand is the use of fossil fuels in the grid when there is known and effective alternatives, and it gives a bad taste in the mouth that tax money intended for grid stability is used on fossil fuels.
Not to be that guy but it sort of is. Comparing nuclear power to renewables is a lot like comparing a truck to an electric scooter. Sure, both can transport you to your destination and both work equally well in many scenarios, maybe the scooter even has advantages in some places but when it comes to handling the entirety of possible scenarios the truck is the clear choice. That doesn't mean you can't have a truck and a scooter and use each where appropriate, it's just that you'll probably use the truck a lot more.
A new nuclear reactor is being built since 2007, it should have launched a new set of reactors, and this WIP is a disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
have you go a source for that? the parent comment seems to contradict that fact
To do so electrifying usages is key.
This in turn imply that more electricity has to be generated.
Each and every nation in the EU27 moves towards this, and France (while chanting 'my electricity is low-carbon, yay!' and neglecting that doesn't do anything about the remaining 63% of final energy consumed in France obtained by burning fossil fuels) is the red lantern: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/11/25/ren...
Final energy in France, by source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89nergie_en_France#%C3%89n...
Nope. We have to take into account consumption-based CO₂ emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita?...
> that 63% can be easily reduced in France by introducing heatpumps and EVs
Nope, as it is only possible by generating more gridpower, and France tries to do so using nuclear since 2007... in vain as the sole and only nuclear reactor being built in France (which should have started a new batch in 2012) is the 'Flamanville-3' EPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
> the same is not true in the UK/Germany/Poland without building metric arseloads of zero-carbon power plants.
There is no 'zero-carbon plants', only 'low-carbon plants'.
They all do so, much more efficiently than France (where electricity is already low-carbon but where the plan to pump up more nuclear is stuck) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-low-car...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-renewables?...
And we're reaping the "benefits" of the same people in the 70s campaigning against all forms of nuclear back then. So we built oil, gas, and coal power stations to meet our energy needs instead. slow applause for the activists
The road to hell and all that...
I'd love to see tons more nuclear including fuel reprocessing which the US was very resistant to for a long time due I think to proliferation concerns.
If you're like me, you read this sentence and thought: "hey, wasn't that canceled last week?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199061
But apparently that was NuScale's reactor that was canceled, while TerraPower is still going, which may have something to do with the exceptional wealth of its founder:
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/bill-gates-future-nuclear-...
And they seem to have found a way to get even more billionaire bucks:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/bill-gates-w...
There's a "hero we deserve" meme hiding in here somewhere...
> 3 tablespoons of HALEU can supply a lifetime’s worth of power for the average U.S. consumer
So if I did my math right[1], 20 kg is enough for 1867 U.S. consumers for one year, and 900 kg is enough for 84,000 U.S. consumers? It's a start, I guess.
1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=20+kg+%2F+%28%283+table...
That’s 6,700,000 for one year. There only 16 states with populations greater than that.
IDK. Seems decent. If we wanted better we should have started 50 years ago. Although now is good too.
3 tbsp of Uranium is about 0.85 kg.
900 kg / 0.85 kg = 1060 US consumer lifetimes worth of energy.
Multiply by 79 (average lifespan) and you get 83,740 US consumer years worth of energy.
I'm also personally still concerned about transportation accidents resulting in permanently contaminated areas.
[1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html
As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers.
There's only a tiny amount of high level nuclear waste.
Yucca mountain has been designated as the long term storage site since 1987 by Congress. Every change of party majority since then has either stopped or restarted work on it.
The bottom line is the nastiest stuff in spent nuclear fuel are the actinides. They're all naturally radioactive and most of the stuff with long (10,000+ year) half lives that requires long-term storage. You need Yucca Mountain mostly for the actinides. If instead you smash them with fast neutrons you can get them to fission, releasing some energy (though sub-critical) and transmuting them into either much more stable isotopes (little radioactive decay) or really unstable ones (nasty but they decay so fast you only need to hold onto them for a few days/months/years).
The short version is besides reprocessing spent fuel we should be putting the nasty stuff through the sausage grinder again to turn it into much less nasty stuff instead of fighting over where to keep the nasty stuff safe for 100,000 years.
And it's true that the sun shines about 100 PW, or 5000x humanity's total energy usage (≈20 TW) on the surface of earth on a nice day.
Even if you assume that the fusion part is cheap, you still have to convert the energy to electricity or at a minimum mechanical work (unless you're using the process heat, which is admittedly a possibility for a fair bit of current demand).
Steam turbines aren't exactly cheap to build.
Yes, there are alternative energy conversion possibilities for some possible fusion fuel cycles, but as I understand it those fuel cycles are much more difficult than D-T fusion and therefore are even further away from being a practical power source.
Renewables already figured it out. They're already cheaper. Nuclear already lost.
Until next-gen nuclear is developed, it's over. They're welcome to keep researching it though. Meanwhile, renewables are also getting better, and much faster. And they're already better than nuclear.
Nuclear has a niche, but it got steamrolled by the S curve of solar, wind, and batteries.
Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century.
But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there.
If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
> The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.
> The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.
Edit: I found the 2022 numbers on Wikipedia and got curious what the 2023 outlook is going to be. It is shocking: https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-sur... Their 2023 numbers are double the 2022.
Shoeboxes are dead.
But a practical issue here is that there hasn't really been much motivation to develop this industry, because there's been relatively little critical necessity for high capacity at-scale energy storage.
> Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future.
I say this as someone who bikes their kid around most of the time; I love biking but it is way of life that only a minority of people can make work.
It’s taken that long for renewables to get marginally cheaper without solving the base load problem one bit. Meanwhile natural gas has dominated both.
"By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
Also, "marginally cheaper" can't help but sound like sour grapes; the cost-per-watt of solar has fallen by 500x in the past 50 years (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...). How many hundreds of times cheaper per-watt is nuclear since then?
Higher interest rates make everything more difficult of course - ask the auto or mortgage industries.
The debate at this point isn’t about whether renewables will scale: China has already answered that question. There is a very real question about whether the West will be able to keep up. There seem to be a lot of people who want to sit around and fantasize about 1970s-era nuclear tech while our neighbors undergo what is effectively a second Industrial Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_Ch...
440 people die for every 1000TW of solar, compared to 90 for nuclear: https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...
Solar panel disposal impact: https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
Renewables have a place in our energy future. Fanaticism about them does not.
"The number of deaths for every 1000TWh of energy generated by rooftop solar panels is 440. Put simply, this means that for every 1000TWh of energy produced via rooftop solar power, 440 people lose their lives. Other estimates [obfuscated hyperlink to a Forbes page] place this number to be around 150. These deaths are mostly the result of electrocution and other hazards that occur during rooftop solar panel installation (such as falling)."
So they're not happy with the official statistics bureau that is Forbes and chose to stick with their uncited 440. It sounds made up to me. Searching for that exact datum actually yielded the original source [1], and yeah - it's made up. It's from a 2008 article where some guy just started hand-waving hard in a not entirely coherent fashion.
A quick search for something more reasonable turns up this. [2] The data comes from multiple studies and the UN Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Wind/Nuclear/Solar all have pretty much the same mortality rate: 0.04/0.03/0.02 per unit of electricity, respectively. If I want to be disingenuous I can claim [accurately] that nuclear is 50% deadlier than solar (and obviously many many magnitudes deadlier per installation), but the numbers in terms of energy/watt are low enough to be irrelevant.
[1] - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
If solar profitability is affected by higher interest rates (I'm not arguing this point) nuclear would be much more effected. Nuclear power is the most capital intensive form of power, they are a huge up front investment with very long ROI (incidentally they almost always require significant price guarantees over for decades and backed by the government to derisk the investment).
If you just plant a single wind turbine in some unused space of an otherwise productive piece of land you can obviously derive value from it. That's not what I was talking about though. I was talking about massive wind farm power generation operations. There's better uses for that area. Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area. Better to put them on everyone's roofs.
You seem to have a funny definition of "empty space" when the post you're replying to explicitly called out the uses for land in between wind turbines or leveraging wind turbines in areas where much of the land isn't usable for much else. If your argument requires completely ignoring points made by someone else, you probably don't have very strong of an argument.
Which are almost universally placed in said farm fields, unproductive hillsides, and open ocean. No one's clearing city blocks to place a wind turbine. These "massive wind farm power generation operations" already exist in the middle of Indiana's cornfields. Drive from Chicago to Cincinnati and you'll quickly see how little land they can eat up.
Concrete example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B035'55.2%22N+87%C2%...
> Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area.
Same response; they only make financial sense to place on low-value land. A solar farm will be very happy on shitty land that's not particularly suitable for farming, grazing, or habitation. They can even benefit farmland in some climates; https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/03/made-shade-growing-....
Putting them on peoples roofs is actually a terrible option from a GW/$ equation due to install costs, and lack of operational scale.
However in practice it has never turned out to be that great. There's little to recommend it: it requires massive amounts of labor, double checking high skill welds, documentation, and nobody in the industry seems the least bit interested in making this an efficiency process.
Nuclear rockets sound cool. Nuclear electricity plants are pretty awful in practice.
Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, it will greatly enhance reliability as they are super scalable and have the potential to massively increase the efficiency of grid transmission and distribution, the most expensive part of electricity for most. Nuclear has none of those benefits.
Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to. Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it.
Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries.
> Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to.
That's a nice way of saying that nuclear power is much too expensive to not run plants at maximum capacity all the time.
>Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it.
Citation needed. Considering the price of wind or solar, investors are much mor elikley to over provision using those technologies. Nuscale just had to axe their SMR (supposedly the future of nuclear) project in Idaho, because they couldn't find subscribers and their cost of overrunning massively.
> Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries.
Except you don't need to store the power to run all of the US for a night, you're just making a strawman.
Nope. It means that the variable costs are low. The fuel costs for a nuclear plant are so low that it’s essentially free.
Which is also the primary reason we throw away 95% of the fuel unused: given the low cost of fuel, recycling just isn’t viable. And again, not because recycling is so expensive, but because new fuel is so cheap.
If you bought a nuclear power plant for $10 billion and your calculation to get an ROI requires that you make $100 per MWh running at 80% load factor, you will not be willing to run your plant only at 50% of the time, because it does not make economic sense. Variable costs are irrelevant in this case.
The variable costs are not low because the fixed costs are too expensive, which was what you wrote before and what you imply here.
The variable costs are low because fuel is incredibly cheap for the amount of power you get out of it.
So you get the ratio correct, but miss on the cause for that ratio.
How often can they repeatedly ramp without getting into trouble with reactor poisoning?
To load follow with nuclear France devised an entire scheme where their monopoly owner would let reactors take turns reducing their output.
Then on top of that the fueling schedule is synced since the later a reactor is in the fuel lifecycle the less it can ramp.
Try that on a free market.
Every day, several times a day. That is literally the requirement for modern reactors (where modern means any reactor in the past 30 years, or more, and most retrofitted reactors from previous years)
Graph and text on page 8: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
It's not that it's one of the safest energy sources in existence that works in all weather conditions?
Didn't France very recently have to shut down or limit a bunch of reactors due to <checks notes> the river water being too warm.
It's one of the safest when compared to coal. How exactly do you accurately calculate the "safety" of something that produces toxic waste with a lifespan in the thousands of years?
Because of environmental limits to protect the river ecosystems, not because of any safety or operational constraints. Many of these limits were set years ago, when the water temperature in rivers was lower, and haven't been increased since - leading to very tight margins. When the grid is stretched, the plant operators usually get a temporary authorization to exceed the environmental limits.
Every year this is big news for some reason, even though it amounts to a roughly 0.3% reduction of yearly electricity generation. It only impacts river cooled plants, and only those that don't also have a cooling tower.
So what you're saying is, nuke plants can operate in any weather if you give zero fucks about how they affect nature..?
(And this goes for hydro especially, and somewhat for solar and wind as well, all have environmental impacts, which must be taken into account and sensible compromises need to be made).
This affects all thermal plants, it has nothing to do with nuclear.
And as the parent pointed out, it only affects plants where you cheap out and skip building the otherwise required cooling towers.
So it’s trivially solvable: build cooling towers.
No, no they didn't. Most reactors that were shut down that summer were shut down for maintenance after a decade or more of neglect.
I mean, if that claim of negligance would be true which I doubt it is of course...those things grow old and France failed to diversify it's power generation in the last decades but hey...new ones are planned...maybe in a decade one will even be finished...
More details on the problems: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredealing-with-cra...
No. It would be an argument against anti-nuclear
> those things grow old and France failed to diversify it's power generation in the last decades
"Decades" implies 20 years or more. Even now France's nuclear provides more energy than anything it has, and France routinely exports energy to Germany who have shattered their nuclear power plants and are now busy burning coal and importing electricity to cover the needs.
Even the countries who "diversified" depend on those with stable electricity production all the time. See example from just today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274335
> No. It would be an argument against anti-nuclear
How? Proper maintenance would increase the price of electricity produced by nuclear.
> "Decades" implies 20 years or more. Even now France's nuclear provides more energy than anything it has, and France routinely exports energy to Germany who have shattered their nuclear power plants and are now busy burning coal and importing electricity to cover the needs.
Their nuclear reactors are 37 years old on average (they were originally only commissioned to run for 40 years, until an extension in 2012) [1]. They don't have a reactor younger than 21 years old [2]. So I would argue they did not just not diversify, they also neglected to keep up with building nuclear reactors.
Their flagship EPR reactor (Flamanville 3) has been been delayed and delayed. Work started in 2007, in 2020 when it was already significantly delayed it was 5 times over budget and it is still not in operation. The current date is early 2024, but that's almost a running gag now. [3]
They are also planning to build new reactors which are supposed to come online earliest 2035, but based on what happened with Flamanville, that's completely unrealistic.
So in summary decades is very justified.
I encourage everyone to read the wikipedia article on Flamanville. You can't make this up. Construction started in 2007 with estimated costs of 3.3 billion euro and completion date of 2012. The last estimate was in 2020 with costs at 19.1 billion and a commissioning date at the end of 2022. Well that didn't happen yet. And somehow we are supposed to throw more money at this completely incompetent industry?
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351839/age-of-nuclear-p... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Yup. Thanks to anti-nuclear lobby.
Please show us some sources.
1. France isn't an isolated country.
2. That "lobby" is decades of various actvists fear-mongering and politicians afraid of unpopular decisions.
And so you have:
--- start quote ---
In May 2001, an Ipsos poll found that nearly 70% of the population had a 'good opinion' of nuclear power, however 56% also preferred not to live near a nuclear plant.
In 2006, BBC/GlobeScan poll found 57% of the French opposed to nuclear energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France?wprov=...
--- end quote ---
Follow the link above for a description of anti-nuclear activism
What is this supposed to mean? Do you want to imply that the German Green party for example, dictates the politics in France??
> 2. That "lobby" is decades of various actvists fear-mongering and politicians afraid of unpopular decisions.
Nuclear is popular in France...your own quote says it.
Not wanting to live near a nuclear plant is hardly an argument against nuclear power itself. You are twisting the facts.
> Follow the link above for a description of anti-nuclear activism
I did. The newest info on this powerful lobby:
> In March 2014, police arrested 57 Greenpeace protesters who used a truck to break through security barriers and enter the Fessenheim nuclear in eastern France.
This is hilarious. THIS is supposed to be that powerful anti-nuclear lobby in France? 57 Greenpeace protesters? Are you joking?
Adding to what cycomanic wrote already:
Germany has replaced what it lost on the nuclear shutdown with renewables years ago. They also reduced coal and even have a law to phase it out completely. The fact that Germany imported nuclear power doesn't say anything about the fact that they HAD to import it. Just like anyone connected to the grid, they buy when it's cheap and sell when it's expensive. Due to Germany's mix they're flexible there while France has to keep on running and selling as much as they can since they're losing money. See EDF.
Funny how today they were burning 20GW of coal because they replaced 20GW of nuclear power with renewables.
> The fact that Germany imported nuclear power doesn't say anything about the fact that they HAD to import it.
Of course they had to. Because they don't have enough energy generation of their own when the day is like today: cloudy and quiet.
This is a lie.
Germany has been reducing coal and will keep on doing so until there is none. It's a law.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156695/umfrag...
> Of course they had to. Because they don't have enough energy generation of their own when the day is like today: cloudy and quiet.
This is a lie also.
Germany is an energy export nation since 2002 even with the EEX trading you probably never heard of. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...
Funny indeed...
They were literally burning 20GW of coal yesterday because the 200% overprovisioned renewables were producing only 15% of their maximum output
As I have said: the transformation is not finished yet. Germany did almost nothing during Merkels time and renewables have still generated more than they lost due to the shutdown of nuclear.
Meaning: Germany would STILL burn coal even if they'd have kept nuclear.
It's not that hard to understand if you know the facts and the facts are that Germany has a law to phase out coal completely while expanding renewables. A law which few (no other?) countries even have. Even France will keep on burning coal when the last plant is closed in Germany.
Though honestly, they just heat some pieces of metal, instead of heating water.
Photovoltaic heats a bunch of hydrogen ions until they glow. (But those ions are in the sun.) Wind power mostly comes from air and water being heated unevenly.
Tidal power is perhaps the coolest here: no heat involved, the energy comes from the motion of the earth and the moon.
The PV/turbines are intermittent and will suffer more in extreme climate conditions (winds forcing shutdown and PV getting caught in dust storms), than nuclear (which are more vulnerable to droughts).
> Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear
Even if I agree batteries are the answer, how do you intend to charge this batteries?!
Solar is great, wind is great, Hydro is great - what happens when these don't work? What will you use?
The chances of a simultaneous and extensive wind, solar, and hydro outage on a national grid scale is... fairly low.
Solar drops to zero every night.
For hydro, there's already seasonal variation with rain/snow melt. Beyond that, it looks like the majority of hydro in the US is on the west coast, which has been experiencing a drought for years and is projected to get worse. The west coast is big on removing dams for habitat restoration, too.
Wind: Admittedly I have no idea what sort of consistency wind has. But it does seem reasonable to assume the overall reliability of wind power will decrease as installed capacity increases, assuming we started with the most productive geographies first and then move to increasingly marginal areas.
In the same way that storm fronts travel through an area and bring high speed winds perhaps there is the opposite, where relatively sudden, large-scale lulls form?
To minimize the likelihood of blackouts we'd need to either:
1) Build sufficient excess capacity of wind/solar/hydro to overcome variance in output. This may not be feasible, if even possible, considering the points above.
2) Maintain fossil fuel peaker plants.
3) More nuclear for base load.
Having written these thoughts out I now realize your statement presumes we can ever (and always) meet 100% of electricity demand with wind/solar/hydro in the first place.
Yes.
There's enough countries out there that have been using renewables consistently for years (esp. EU countries). I don't understand how this is still a talking point. Daily variance in supply is equalized by trading energy with your neighbors which uses the phenomenon described above: The sun is always shining somewhere.
For Germany in particular it was a mistake to move away from nuclear before coal (imo lobbying is mostly at fault here) but they've been building renewables since the late nineties. It took them the time it takes to build a single nuclear reactor to move to more than 50% renewables and those are much easier (= cheaper) to maintain for the years to come.
And there are great savings by packing batteries behind the inverters along with the DC panels. Inverters can be a shared cost between the panels and batteries. Already, falling panel prices make the inverters an be increasing cost. Second, because panels are so cheap relative to the full install cost, most installations already have undersized inverters compared to maximum solar output. This lets all that "wasted" energy get stored and delivered later when it has much more value and a higher grid price.
Honestly, in the year 2023, batteries are a much more capable and scalable and realistic grid asset than a nuclear reactor.
Solar definitely does drop to zero every night and no, we don't have the connectivity, or the land-mass, to have sunshine somewhere all the time. Russia does...but well, Russia.
There is not "literally always wind". And we've had several days of "Dunkelflaute" in Germany per year now, much higher than anyone predicted.
Renewable advocates like to average over time, so having too much energy at some point in time (which makes the energy worthless and prices go negative, as in "please stop feeding energy into the grid, it's harmful!!") and having too little at other times averages out. As my statistics professor used to joke: if your left leg is standing in liquid nitrogen and your right leg in boiling fat, you are enjoying a nearly perfect mean temperature. Variance matters.
And so the real world does not work the way renewable advocates would like, and no, we don't have nearly the storage to make that work, nor a credible way to create such storage at remotely affordable prices, never mind the horrific environmental impact of that much battery production.
> There's enough countries out there that have been using renewables consistently for years
Nope. One example that is frequently cited is Denmark, but they themselves say that this is only possible because they are a tiny country with lots of neighbours with reliable electricity supply from whom they can purchase when they need it. They also have more interconnect with those neighbouring countries than typical total demand. This is not a model for other countries, particularly not for larger countries.
> The sun is always shining somewhere.
This is simply not true.
> For Germany in particular it was a mistake to move away from nuclear
Absolutely. Probably the biggest political mistake of the after-war period.
If you don't believe that we can meet our needs with wind/solar/hydro/batteries, then you haven't bothered to study the problem at all.
There's soooo much literature out there on how to do this.
And even without 100%, getting to 90% wind/solar is super cheap and deployable today, and by the time we spend the 15+ years deploying that, we will have tons of new tech to deal with the remains few percent.
Even France never got to 100% nuclear carbon free power, why not do the cheap thing to get to better than France levels of low carbon energy?
If you have any literature to recommend, I'm happy to read it.
As I write it right now Denmark is producing 0 solar, and only 12.5% of its wind production. Because its cloudy and there's little wind.
So they have to import almost 40% of electricity from Norway and Sweden where electricity generation is propped up by nuclear
When I wrote this it was even worse in Germany. 30% of total electricity coming from coal. Because:
- The total installed capacity of wind covers Germany's needs. Only 28% of installed capacity is produced
- The total installed capacity of solar exceeds Germany's needs. Only 2.7% of installed capacity is produced
That is, currently Germany needs 65 GW of electricity. Solar + wind have a total installed capacity of 134 GW, double what Germany needs. And together they still barely produce 30% of what Germany requires.
So Germany supplements that by burning coal, biomass and gas, and importing electricity.
The lesson learned is not “green power bad”, it’s “don’t rely on gas from dictators”.
Ah yes. This war is the reason why 134 GW of renewable energy only produce ~20GW, and why Germany burns 20 GW of coal (by pure coincidence that's about as much as the capacity of all decommissioned reactors since 2011)
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu...
The long term plan was always EU-wide energy projects to account for “its cloudy in Germany” scenarios. That plan isn’t complete.
Again:
- is it war that makes renewables produce 15% of their installed capacity?
- is it war that made Germany shut down 20GW of nuclear power plants?
> That plan isn’t complete.
And it never will be complete. Because when it's cloudy in Germany, those clouds don't stop at Germany's borders. Literally see the comment above about Denmark.
No form of power meets its theoretical "installed capacity". No one runs their nuclear, gas, coal, or oil plants at 100% 24/7/365 either. Yes, some days it's less windy; some days it's more cloudy. The dramatic fall in cost for new solar and wind capacity makes the solution pretty obvious; you build more to account.
> is it war that made Germany shut down 20GW of nuclear power plants?
It's war that makes Germany temporarily wish they hadn't.
> Because when it's cloudy in Germany, those clouds don't stop at Germany's borders.
They're unlikely to cover the entire EU's interconnected grid (and there's talk of generation in Morocco; https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/04/13/...). When the entire EU is covered in clouds, it's especially unlikely that there's no wind at the same time.
Given Germany's plan is 60% renewable generation by 2050, not 100%, they clearly understand the need for some flexible options for the tail ends of things.
And yet unlike renewables nuclear (and coal and gas etc.) are very close to that. And nuclear routinely runs close to its capacity, predictably.
> When the entire EU is covered in clouds, it's especially unlikely that there's no wind at the same time.
So each EU country has to overprovision enough solar and wind to potentially generate power for the rest of the EU countries? Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38276778
Sure. Apples to oranges; they're not the same thing. Theoretical perfect-day max generation isn't how you provision solar/wind, that'd be stupid; the folks building out Germany's renewable efforts aren't stupid.
If you need a certain baseline of a certain renewable, you overprovision (and trade capacity with other areas and generation methods). Given the cost of new solar/wind capacity these days, that still makes perfect economic sense. Any long-term renewables plan is going to include energy storage and peaker plants of some kind to ensure a reliable grid on a national/continental scale.
How much? Is 200% of required generation enough? Is 500%?
Germany - and the rest of their interconnected EU grid - will continue to build out cheap, clean power for the forseeable future.
Indeed. And what's your point?
> By building more renewable sources, we will need less and less fossil capacity.
How many more renewables?
The installed capacity of renewables in Germany is double its needs for power.
The installed capacity of renewables in Denmark is 1.5 times its needs for power.
Do we need 10 times more? 100 times more?
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the peak production makes German electricity cheap enough to make everyone around them use it when it's available. If all the neighbors used this approach too, over the course of a day it would be everybody's turn to provide energy for the neighbors as renewables production will never be zero globally.
I'm not.
What I'm pointing out is that renewables in Germany are significantly overprovisioned. And still produce just 15% of their installed capacity because it's a quiet cloudy day.
> the peak production makes German electricity cheap enough to make everyone around them use it when it's available.
Ah yes. When they are available. That's the point, isn't it?
> If all the neighbors used this approach
Denmark is at 150% of its needs, was importing 40% of its energy from neighbors, and, ironically, from Germany which was burning coal.
So. How much each of the neighbors, and each of those neighbors' neighbors etc. need to overprovision renewables?
And we get it, Germany burn coal for electricity. And we all know that is bad. Point taken and not objected.
To be clear, Norway has no nuclear. 99% of generation there is hydro. Low wind in Denmark likely means they release more water for a bit; system works as intended.
See my addendum comment about Germany for example. They had to burn coal to keep up with the demand while their 200% overprovisioned renewables could only generate 20% of required electricity.
Today the only countries were renewables worked at close to 50% installed capacity were UK (wind) and Greece (solar). Everywhere else at best wind and solar were at 30% production. The entire Europe was busy burning gas, coal, or hoping that neighbours have enough nuclear and hydro installed.
> Norway has no nuclear. 99% of generation there is hydro.
Yes, this was my mistake. I should've said: propped up by stable energy sources: nuclear (Sweden) and hydro (Norway and Sweden)
Which is up from pretty close to 0% just a few decades ago (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany#/media/F...). We're just getting started; this is a multi-generational megaproject.
You seem to think people are declaring the shift to renewables to be finished. I'm not sure where you obtained that misunderstanding.
Germany already overprovisioned. 200% of electricity requirements. And yet...
When I point out that even overprovisioning doesn't seem to work, people deflect, deny, stop responding, or reply in non-sequiturs.
So. Given that yesterday renewables in only two countries (Greece) managed to reach 50% of their installed capacity (not all renewables, but different types of renewables), how many renewables need to built to make sure that all of EU needs are met?
You keep saying this, and then you keep saying they don't have enough. These both cannot be true, and Germany's continuing to expand their wind/solar efforts indicate they don't believe they've "overprovisioned" yet.
Germany's plan goes out to the 2050s. Your complaint that they haven't provisioned enough yet is not in good faith.
They are not.
With the cheapest, most scalable, safe, and environmentally sustainable methods we have, which are wind and solar.
Batteries have the potential to make transmission and distribution far far cheaper than they are today, because without batteries, the grid has to be able to respond to the maximum demand at any given time, meaning that all parts of the grid are sized for maximum capacity, even if that maximum capacity is used less than 0.1% of the time.
With storage on the grid, we can now delay transmission and distribution upgrades far into the future, which decreases the biggest chunk of most electricity bills: transmission and distribution.
Christopher Clack's grid modeling on this shows a route to by far the cheapest energy models which includes massive amounts of highly distributed solar and beefing up the distribution system to match.
Too many people optimize energy costs without even considering that most expensive part of electricity: the grid.
This is ironic. I recommend you read How Big Things Get Done[1], by Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's foremost expert on megaprojects. The book discusses an analysis of about 10,000 projects of over a billion dollars each.
Which projects were most likely to come in on time and on budget, and deliver the promised returns? PV solar.
Which projects were third most likely to overrun by 100% or more, be 100% late or more, and deliver only a fraction of the promised returns? Nuclear power plants.
Edit: The book's ratings are based on construction phase only, after all the permitting and other planning work has been completed.
(Third worst? What could be worse? Answer: nuclear waste storage sites, and Olympic Games hosting.)
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-thin...
[1] https://atomicinsights.com/anti-nuclear-movement-strategy-ci...
In contrast solar PV and wind have now grown to the point where they are overtaking the growth in demand, meaning that fossil plants can soon start to be be retired.
In China and Russia they don't have as much clout, so they use lots of coal, if it's cheaper.
I mean the myth of the supposedly all powerful anti-nuclear lobby is actually hilarious. I mean took fukushima to get Germany (arguably on of the most nuclear sceptical countries) to decide on stopping nuclear (despite the majority of the population being against nuclear power for years prior) and under quite favourable conditions for the nuclear industry.
The planners know exactly how long it takes to build a nuclear plant, and they learn just as quickly as everyone watching from the sidelines. Their assumptions are being thrown by something - almost certainly anti-nuclear campaigners in government or regulatory forces warping incentives. Those are the only things that can consistently diver overruns. Otherwise it is hard for overruns of a nuclear plant to be different from any other project.
ICYMI: https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/Antinuclear-st...
Given the absolutely massive popularity of the antinuclear movement, the fringe belief is actually to think the legal intervenors that came out of it had negligible impact.
Germany for example had a 100% complete fast breeder reactor called SNR-300, designed to provide sustainable low carbon 24/7 energy for decades. Before it could turn on for the first time, protestors rioted. They never turned it on. Today it's an amusement park. Now that is impact.
You both imply a conspiracy resulting from this document. You have no proof for any connection to anything relevant going from that.
The SNR-300 story is also completely unrelated. You just stacked it upon the conspiracy theory.
I never said there were no anti-nuclear movement.
There are many and in every country they have their own reasons and are more or less influential. For example: there hasn't been a anti-nuclear movement as influential as it was in Germany. This is why Germany was able to replace nuclear with renewables and push it's development for the whole planet. However, no German politician participated in your conspiracy.
Your pitiful attempt at derailing only say something about yourself.
You are correct that the obvious solution is standard production of modular designs are the solution to that.
This has all be true and obvious for several decades. Yet the realisation of this approach seems to still be far away.
It also doesn't factor in the non-technical hurdles, costs, and delays that are involved here. Environmental impacts, and local-population-resistance are significant, often terminal, factors in plant construction.
Put another way, nobody cares if I have solar panels on my roof. But if I have a tiny modular reactor in the garden the neighbours will (not surprisingly) object.
I say this as a nuclear supporter.
Yes, though your neighbours will probably also object to you putting up one of those big wind turbines in your backyard. Or a coal fired power plant.
Clearly a coal-fired plant would be an issue, to the degree to which they pollute the neighbours. There are diesel generators here attached to factories etc, and nobody really cares.
Objection to nuclear though is more visceral. With diesel I can hear the noise and decide if I don't like it. With coal I might notice the smell. But I don't think either would silently kill me. Nuclear leaks are invisible, and accumulative, so it can be (disproportionately) scary. Certainly those who are opposed to it will use fear to rally other people to their side. Fear is a strong motivating emotion that is easily manipulated.
You'd be surprised. There was a protest in my area against putting up five new wind turbines at an industrial site as the existing buildings are take down. People object that it would ruin their view... The current buildings is part of a massive coal fired power plant which is slowly being decommissioned and there are already three existing turbines.
A nation made a bet on "let's do all nuclear". It basically worked, but there was no magical cost decrease. They have an immense amount of institutional knowledge, huge educational system, massive amounts of resources. Their nukes are big and expensive and not really on time. There is no magic at the end of the tunnel if Greenpeace disappears.
The world isn't Sim City, power plants need water access and have location concerns, and it's not a question of just dropping a bunch of truck-sized plants across the world and magically solving everything.
Having said that, France is a success story of course. It's cool that it's all set up. But even after building it up, running these plants are expensive, there's often load issues meaning they are not fully utilized... "nuclear is free easy energy" is science fiction. That's fine, though! It's normal that we have to do stuff to power society.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm cool with nuclear, but I am not picky about where my watts come from.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...
Oof, talk about a nasty abstract. Will need to find a way to look at this paper later.
https://www.tf1info.fr/economie/crise-de-l-energie-nucleaire...
The neglect was because maintenance costs money and as usual people (+governments, corporations ...) want to save money/increase earnings/profit, so upkeep gets neglected.
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Following the 2011 Fukushima I nuclear accidents, an OpinionWay poll at the end of March found that 57% of the French population were opposed to nuclear energy in France.[119] A TNS-Sofres poll in the days following the accident found 55% in favour of nuclear power.[119] In 2006, BBC/GlobeScan poll found 57% of the French opposed to nuclear energy.[120]
In May 2001, an Ipsos poll found that nearly 70% of the population had a 'good opinion' of nuclear power, however 56% also preferred not to live near a nuclear plant and the same proportion thought that a 'Chernobyl-like accident' could occur in France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Public...
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It's also one of the major reasons why no new nuclear reactors appeared in France after 2000, and why the government would neglect the existing reactors.
China built as much solar as the US has entirely last year alone, it can be done
We have the money to afford it, ergo we have enough of a workforce to do it.
Isn't not 'burnt' by any reasonable interpretation of the word, what happens is that the fuel becomes too hot to handle in any of today's working reactors because of the buildup of radioactive fission products as well as transuranic species. If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell and eventually block circulation of the primary coolant, and the high radioactive flux would have other negative effects on the reactor core material itself (as well as on any workers that had to fix the mess).
This is well known and many proposals have been made to recover this energy from the 'spent' 'burnt' fuel rods, but it's mostly been an expensive mess. Reprocessing to recover the transuranics for use in MOX (plutonium-based fuel, basically) is really expensive as well as generating large amounts of highly toxic waste as well as raising the plutonium-nuclear-weapon proliferation issue.
Instead, this 2000 tons per year represents an ever-increasing long-term headache that generally has to be stored onsight for about a decade at the nuclear power plant before it can be transferred to long-term dry cask storage, all at considerable expense and with high security costs.
With costs for solar/wind/storage dropping every year, isn't it time to give up on this pipe dream?
Compare to the approx 1 billion tons of oil consumption per year, or 4 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year that the rest of the economy burns through, to get a sense of relative scale.
Not great, not terrible :)
It is super radioactive for centuries though. We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out.
We did.
And there's $52+ billion in the Nuclear Waste Fund.
Nevada is just really good at complaining.
Finland might do it? (They are also sophisticated and stable enough, that you don't need to worry about the fuel being mishandled. At least not any more than for the US.)
Longer half-life -> less radioactive, by definition. Infinite half-life -> not radioactive at all.
Also containers that don't break down under centuries of ionising radiation bombardment haven't been invented yet.
The notion of it being INSTANT!!! DEATH!!!! FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS!!!! is just plain wrong.
A similar mix, yes.
A similar concentration, absolutely not. The concentration in ore is extremely low. The Soviets ruined the landscape of half the Czech Republic for a few warheads.
You're separating out the "depleted" uranium and using it to breed more fuel (potentially orders of magnitude cheaper than extracting fresh uranium from ore and enriching it).
Fun fact: nuclear waste becomes less radioactive than the original uranium in about 300-500 years. The problem with the waste is that it's concentrated in a tiny amount of space that will stay dangerous for geological periods.
https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...
Edit: I'm a nuclear engineer.
I'll try to re-do calculations and see what I get.
The publication above shows the graph vs. time in terms of radiotoxicity, which is widely considered to be the key metric.
What'd you use for the calculations? Generally you need to use something like ORIGEN to get it right.
But in aggregate, it will be less radioactive than the uranium (and its natural daughter products in secular equilibrium) that was expended to produce the waste.
I guess that specific metric would make heavy water infinitely radioactive?
This has been an ongoing debate though. Scientists have developed more sophisticated reprocessing processes that keep all the actinides together rather than pulling out Plutonium on its own. And in any case, the plutonium is reactor-grade rather than weapons grade, (but super-sophisticated weapons designers can make bombs out of any-grade plutonium).
George Bush Jr. tried something called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, where existing weapons states would run a bunch of reprocessing plants and contribute fuel to an international fuel bank. Non-weapons countries could reliably get fuel from it and give the spent fuel (aka nuclear waste) back for further recycling/reprocessing/treatment. It wasn't super popular among the 'have not' countries, who didn't want to be beholden to some random fuel bank.
https://atomicinsights.com/jimmy-carter-never-served-nuclear...
I suppose a lot of this is still embedded in top secret red tape :(
It doesn't have to be that way. With nuclear fuel reprocessing you can burn all the highly radioactive stuff completely, and what's left either decays quickly or isn't very radioactive.
When will we give up the pipedream that it's always going to be sunny and windy, especially as climate change continues to exacerbate destructive weather patterns.
And when will we give up the pipedream that everywhere in the world is sunny and windy all the time to.
Also worth pointing out that a large fraction of the world’s population lives in places where seasonal storage is not nearly as much of a problem. Seasonal storage is much more of an issue for cool temperate and subarctic zones in the northern hemisphere, where maximum energy demand and minimum solar energy supply occur at the same time. Several billion people across South Asia, south-east Asia, most of South America, Oceania, and most of Africa don’t have this unfortunate misalignment.
So not much opportunity to expand there.
Nuclear proponents really need to give up these tired arguments. Wake up to reality. Your favored technology lost. It has zero economic benefits and you have to face reality. We live in a profit driven world, and no sane profit driven enterprise would bet on nuclear power because it's been proven to be such a loser decade after decade. The evidence is plain to see for anyone willing to take a look.
By the way, even accounting for China's recent investment in nuclear they are only projecting to have 10% of their power generated by nuclear by 2050. The US is already close to 20%, or twice as much as China as a percentage of power generated. But sure, let's just keep pretending these situations are the same.
Storage remains a big barrier to wide-scale deployment of intermittent power sources in a manner truly independent of a fossil fuel grid. While costs may be dropping, scale and competition with electric vehicles means grid storage isn't growing all that quickly. Many solar plants that are employing storage are only installing 2-4 hours worth of storage, which isn't sufficient to even out the duck curve let alone seasonal variations. Wind also has big swings in seasonal production. Even with significant overproduction, most grids are still looking at several days worth of storage to account for a string a cloudy or less-windy days.
Another factor is that wind and solar have significantly different output depending on geography and weather. Nuclear's only geographic requirement is a source of water for cooling - and that doesn't have to be potable water, it can be salt water or wastewater. And since human beings need water, too, this is rarely an impediment to deploying nuclear power plants near the population centers that use the most power. By contrast, wind and solar often need to be produced hundreds of miles away from population centers. This tends to overload the transmission capacity of rural power infrastructure [1], sometimes halting wind and solar projects.
1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
It's just yet another example of how the nuclear industry tries to spin its activies as safe and harmless. They probably spend as much money on PR these days as they do on R & D.
The IEAA says so -> https://www.iaea.org/publications/10959/high-burnup-fuel-imp...
Nuclear physics says so -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-burning_process
The term gets used in rocketry, and not all rockets use combustion (doing a burn with a cold gas thruster)
Hey, might as well get into CD's -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_disc_authoring
Why is it that the entire industry uses the term just fine, but not you? Because you're wrong.
Now, the fission fragments are highly radioactive and unstable isotopes of lighter elements. These fragments undergo beta and gamma decay, emitting high-energy particles and photons, transforming into stable isotopes over time. Furthermore, some neutrons, instead of inducing fission in uranium-235, are absorbed by uranium-238 nuclei, typically actinides, like plutonium and neptunium.
So this ridiculously toxic brew of rather random radioactive heavy elements is what we call a 'spent fuel rod'. If you were to pack a few kilos of high explosive around one of these 'spent' fuel rods and detonate it in a city center, it would probably cost at least a billion dollars to clean up, if that.
It sounds kind of ridiculous when you can build 1 GW of reliable 24/7 wind/solar/storage power generation for the same cost as a 1 GW nuclear power plant, and then you never have to buy fuel or deal with the waste stream ever, doesn't it?
Using spent nuclear fuel as a terror weapon would be vastly less deadly than more conventional means. Think about the immense effort of planning and manpower to steal nuclear waste, weaponize it, and then deliver that weapon to a population center. Now think about all that planning and manpower going towards a more conventional attack, like flying a plane into a building or detonating a normal explosive bomb.
Nuclear waste can be deadly, but it's a slow killer. We regularly test our water supply for uranium not out of any fear of a dirty bomb, but because naturally occurring uranium is common enough that it's a problem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC359425/
In short, fears over nuclear waste are incredibly contrived.
... and if properly distributed, is enough to kill every human being on the planet.
Which proves the ridiculousness of such comparisons, i.e. enough bullets were produced in World War Two to wipe out the global human population too.
Stars "burn" their fuel. This usage is deeply precedented in astrophysics.
Direct link here: https://doomberg.substack.com/p/angels-on-a-pin
It actually is. Spent nuclear fuel goes from 3-5% of U-235 at the start to 0.3% at the end of the fuel campaign. There will also be some fissile plutonium, but not much.
Having just 1/10-th of initial fuel left definitely qualifies as "burnt".
That's also why reprocessing isn't economical right now. You just won't get that much new fuel.
> If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell
That can't physically happen. Nuclear fuel is made of tablets of sintered oxide powders, and they are permeable to gases (helium is the main one produced as a result of fission).
FYI, this is a pretty typical industry term. Even to the point where "burn up" is a unit of measure tracked at operation and within model predictions.
There is no beating the energy density of uranium.
Anyway, too bad we have too few breeding reactors
Why would Hungary invade Slovakia ? Because the Little War happened in 1939 ?
They are not Turkey or Russia.
> Orban's Hungary is the same as Putin's Russia
yeah except 15 times smaller and with a military that does not compare.
So it seems the only way to make Hungary invade Slovakia is to make Slovakia leave NATO. We'll see.