I want to believe that the mainstream could accept nuclear again but I don't have huge hopes. I'm French, we've been getting cheaper and cleaner electricity than our neighbors for a long time. Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down.
And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. I find it depressing personally. We're at 75% now, apparently we're on track to hit 50% by 2035. There's nuclear waste and there's a waste of nuclear.
One of the things I find amazing about France is that out of all the energy they produce about 17% if from recycled nuclear[0]. Not 17% of the total nuclear power is from recycled, 17% of TOTAL power is from recycled nuclear. That's pretty neat!
And with regards to greenhouse gasses, hard to argue with this [1].
That being said, I don't mind the the reduction to 50% by 2035. Renewables are a good thing. I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...). If slack can be picked up by renewables and that lessens the requirement for nuclear, that's a good thing. As long as this reduction doesn't involve building coal or natural gas plants in place of nuclear, I'm all in support of it (i.e. nuclear is being replaced purely by renewables). Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first.
Not sure why you were downvoted, but this is correct. Outages are super expensive for a nuclear power plant, and plants take days to start and stop. Not only that, but capital costs are so large, you need to run it as much as possible to have any hope of just keeping up with interest payments.
People think waste is the biggest problem with nuclear, but I think it is huge capital costs and lack of flexibility are even larger problems (not to mention insurance for accidents, but only the government can provide that). Coupling nuclear with some kind of large scale battery would work to even out load requirements, but the only thing that might work is pumped storage, which would require a huge reservoir at a decent elevation, not to mention being pretty inefficient.
Nuclear is mostly so expensive because of the huge capital costs, and lots of (political..) delays when building a new reactor.
Operating costs aren't so bad.
Capital costs for building nuclear reactors have gone up over time. That's partially to pay for necessary improvements to safety. But mostly down to double standards that require much higher standards in nuclear than other sources of power.
For example, coal plants release orders of magnitude more radiation than nuclear plants.
> The paper itself states that this result is only valid not considering nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, nor it considers non-radiological effects
Well yeah, nuclear plants don't release much radiation when there are no accidents and the waste is safely contained. But very often the waste isn't contained properly, and sometimes there are accidents. These events release a lot more radiation than coal plants.
> These events release a lot more radiation than coal plants.
Unless you have data that supports this statement, I'd state the opposite. It's easy to think nuclear accidents release a lot of radiation, but the actual accumulated dose from nuclear power (including accidents) for the average individual over time is very low. Coal, on the other hand, continuously spews out radioactive ash in large quantities.
Granted, other sources of radiation (radon, cosmic rays, medical x-rays, etc.) are a lot larger, but if comparing the two I'd guess coal is the larger culprit even when including nuclear accidents.
> the actual accumulated dose from nuclear power (including accidents) for the average individual over time is very low.
This is only because nobody's living in nuclear disaster zones. If people were carrying on their daily lives in the Chernobyl or Fukushima then their accumulated dose would be much much higher.
As you say, the levels from coal are small enough that other naturally occurring sources are more significant, and thus it has little practical effect on people's lives. On the other hand, nuclear accidents take large areas of land out of use for time scales long enough that they effect several generations.
Yes. Though that only shows that they can afford it, not necessarily that it's more economic than other forms of energy. Power production is highly regulated after all.
(It might very well be economically the best for them. But making that judgement requires more context.)
The first is that it gets you out of needing ordinary batteries, because instead of converting heat to electricity to batteries and back, you can take the heat generated by the reactor during the day, store it in an insulated vat of molten salt and then use that to drive turbines at night. This should be much cheaper than ordinary batteries because expanding storage capacity only requires having more salt in more vats, and salt is much less expensive than lithium batteries.
The second is that if you have a nuclear reactor for generating at night when solar doesn't, the incremental cost of also operating it during the day is lower than the solar generating cost. It can't recover its full fixed costs at the price of daytime solar, but as long as it can recover its incremental cost you still operate the reactor 24/7.
The problem with that approach is you need to scale the surprisingly expensive non-nuclear side of a nuclear plant for the peak load, not the average load. It's not just the salt, it's the turbines and generators and cooling towers. It also increases the number of heat exchangers, and also means you are not building a PWR, but rather a higher temperature reactor. These higher temperature reactors are either unproven (molten salt) or have disappointing track records (helium gas cooled).
Moltex claims that interposing a salt store would allow these components to be made to non-nuclear standards, but as far as I know no regulator has agreed with that.
I feel like you're just arguing in favor of building them.
"Unproven" is a synonym for we haven't done it yet, so the only way to prove it is to build them, so building them is the solution to that rather than a problem that should prevent building them.
And if the only problem is regulatory but there isn't actually any reason not to allow it, this too has an obvious solution.
The justification for treating the cooling system as part of the reactor presumably comes from older designs where the active cooling is necessary for safe operation. For newer passively-safe designs, what happens to the heat once it's removed from the reactor wouldn't matter any more than what happens to the electricity once it's removed from the reactor.
Unproven means exactly that. It means customers will not plop down billions to buy them. They will wait until it's demonstrated that the reactors will almost certainly work for their projected lifespans, that all the new parts aren't going to fail early, from all the unknown unknowns that new technology is subject to.
And all that means that new reactor technologies are not going to be really available for decades, and will be competing not with renewables and storage now, but the renewables and storage that will be available for purchase decades hence.
True except nuclear is basically a renewable itself given that we have enough fuel in reserve for 70k years or so. If we could get the capital and operating (including waste storage) costs down, it would basically be free energy. Barring achieving that, it is a problem that we should keep working on, it would be a pity to see nuclear plant development completely stopped (well, unless someone figures out profitable fusion).
For a long-term nuclear strategy you need breeder reactors which extract nearly 100 times more energy from the same fuel (and at the same time help a lot with the nuclear waste problem), or a way of getting Uranium out of sea water.
The 200 years number is for the most inefficient (and producing most radioactive waste) types of reactors, but those reactors are also the only ones USA wants you to have, so...
Most fast/breeder reactors get a knee-jerk reaction from so-called "nuclear haves". I think only France (a nuclear state) and Japan got close to so-called "plutonium economy" when it comes to reprocessing spent fuel, and even they don't use fast reactors on mass scale.
Most high fuel efficiency designs are fast reactors, or they employ extra radiation source to "burn down" the fissile material.
Because the price per kWh for renewable sources is artificially low. To give you some examples: Renewables still have various subsidies (e.g. in construction) while non-renewables are taxed, wind power plants in particular have shorter life spans that predicted, and the wings cannot be recycled but the landfill costs are generally not included.
Tax subsidies for renewables, at least in the US, are small compared to the levelized cost difference with nuclear.
If you look at Lazard's levelized cost of energy report, where wind is far cheaper than nuclear, they assume a 20 year lifespan for wind turbines. This is not unreasonable.
I countered this in another reply to you, but the levelized cost of energy is not a good way of comparing intermittent and baseload power sources since it completely ignores the costs associated with intermittency. Nuclear in particular is penalized heavily here. Since wind and solar are very intermittent, they look very cheap when you look at LCOE, but are very expensive in reality.
Of course LCoE is a simplification, but it cannot be ignored if the differences are large enough, as nuclear advocates wish to do. More detailed analysis has to be specific to particular situations. However, as I have also pointed out elsewhere, when optimizations are performed of the best way to produce output for "real" grids with real weather data, using realistic cost projections for 2030, new nuclear is left at 0%. The LCoE advantages of renewables are so great that the cost of dealing with the intermittency, even to 100% renewables, is less than the cost of using nuclear instead.
Ability to load follow depends on the type of the reactor.
We have a vicious cycle involved here, where old (if made safer) designs that can't load-follow are the only option, due to lack of funding for newer tech (like, late 1970s tech). At the same time the limits we put on nuclear mean that not only regulation-related costs are huge, reactors are made pretty much on one-off or very limited series basis, meaning we don't benefit from any kind of benefits of serial production, including better QA.
There are load-following small, modular reactors (adapted from nuclear submarines) that will even self-seal in case of rupture and that promise the option of just transporting them on trailer car. They languish in design bureau due to issues in getting funding to start even a demo plant in present political climate. China is helping move the tech a bit forward, but that's not enough.
> (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...).
While nuclear certainty can adopt to grid demand quite well, if you have a good reactor.
However it leads to bad utilization of your plant.
For that reason, many of the next generation nuclear companies are designing their system to produce hot solar salt, like a Concentrated Solar Power Plant would.
Moltex Energy for example, hopes to deploy a 1GW reactor that heats up solar salt (ie heat battery), and then us that to drive 3 CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbines) that are mass produced for coal and gas plants to produce 3GW of electricity when prices are high. This is a major improvement over traditional PWR have much less heat and have to use insanely expensive bespoke steam turbines (that are also insanely huge).
This is a good idea not just because it you can sell when prices are high and sell a lot, but also the nuclear island would only make a much smaller part of your total project cost, thus reducing the overall cost risk.
Its by far my favorite design of all advanced reactors designs out there.
Their solution for dealing with the 'pumping' problem is brilliant and their idea to make the liquid salt reducing is an incredibly neat way to avoid corrosion issues.
Moltex looks really interesting. Although does it have a significant financial advantage over using renewable electricity to heat the salt? Because naively a grid connected molten salt battery would be more useful than one that is coupled to a nuclear reactor.
> I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads
Well in France the goal of reducing the nuclear share is to increase the intermittent share (Solar and Wind), so it's definitely a Nuclear vs Intermittent
Intermittent sources need a stable source to produce electricity when they can't and they also need changes in a network that is not built for withstanding a production this variable. The end result is that intermittent ends up being more expensive and, because it needs gas, to supplement it, emits more CO2 per kWh. France is the last country where intermittent sources should be propped up (if propped up at all)
> Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first.
Coal is pretty much nonexistent in France, however gas can never go away because even though nuclear plants have amazing flexibility, it's still not as flexible as gas, which is used for very high very sudden demands. Unfortunately there aren't many ways to do this particular job (hydro still isn't as flexible)
There's no good ecological, economical or safety-related reason to reduce nuclear to 50%, especially if it is intended to be replaced by Solar and Wind
There's no good ecological, economical or safety-related reason to reduce nuclear to 50%, especially if it is intended to be replaced by Solar and Wind
There is a very simple and fundamental reason to "reduce nuclear": France has a fleet (roughly 60) of aging nuclear power plants. Many of them already reached their planned life time and are kept working by extending their life time. But nuclear reactors definitely age, so this extension can keep them operating only so long before it becomes a real safety hazard. But France isn't building enough new reactors to keep the numbers up. Currently they have one or two in construction, with construction times over 10 years, the numbers game is obvious. They don't "want" to reduce the nuclear production, they have to.
At the same time, France has ideal conditions for renewables. A very sunny south, lots of wind on the west and north coasts. Add to that a big supply of water power, this should cover most storage needs. The European electrical grid already plays a large role in the energy balance - France is usually selling surplus nuclear energy across Europe - and could do so even more with renewables.
> Many of them already reached their planned life time
That's a misunderstanding of how nuclear plants are built. They don't have a "planned life time"; they have a "safe window" of 10 years, and it is reexamined every 10 years. The age of a reactor doesn't have an incidence on whether it should be stopped or not, only this decennial visit can say if it is safe to continue or not, and if it isn't, what needs to be done to make it safe again. The organ in charge of that (ASN, Agence de Sûreté Nationale) is an independent entity and has the know-how to do their work diligently. If they say it's safe, it's safe.
> At the same time, France has ideal conditions for renewables. A very sunny south, lots of wind on the west and north coasts. Add to that a big supply of water power, this should cover most storage needs
For every kW of installed intermittent energy you need a kW of gas to still have electricity when the intermittent doesn't run. Propping up intermittent is propping up gas and that's the sadness of it.
Also, pretty much all developed countries in the world are at capacity in terms of hydro. We can't build more dams at large scales, unless there's a magic way of creating mountains.
The rate of nuclear reactor production being low isn't a force we of nature, its a choice. They choose to produce reactors slowly, and hence they choose to transition away from nuclear and to renewable and imported coal in whatever ratios.
But the choice how many new reactors are getting built happens for a reason: in France it is clearly the price, not political resistance. If a nation like France, which runs to 75% on nuclear, doesn't build new reactors, who else would be doing it?
And of course, their currently sole attempt to build a new reactor confirms this: late and way over budget. The new reactor in Flammaville already costs 12 billion, but it isn't operating yet. And that is only the building costs. Do the math what this means for the renewal of the whole fleet of French reactors.
The administration of this new reactor's construction was a farce from the beginning: they expected to be able to build this reactor in half the time and half the price it took when France was building 10 reactors in parallel, ie when it still had experience. There is no doubt that the estimation was not just optimistic, but unrealistic (not my word, the word of the rapport on the overblown budget of this reactor)
That said, it's still going to be a good amount. The danger that too many people do is that they don't understand the amount of power a nuclear plant produces, especially when they compare it to wind turbines or photovoltaic panels.
The construction of the entire French fleet of reactors was done for 100 billion current euros, and you can clearly see the effects in terms of CO2 (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FRA/france/carbon-co2-..., starting in 1980). If you consider the changes in safety thresholds, rebuilding it anew is in the order of 300 billion euros. 300 billion euros is the amount Germany spent between 1996 and 2014 to build renewable capacity, and yet their emissions of CO2 barely dropped (https://www.statista.com/statistics/449701/co2-emissions-ger...).
A wind turbine or a solar panel is cute if you're talking about powering your own home (even though you'll need more than one) but if we're talking about an entire country with its industry, it's far from being a viable solution. It's always been a problem of scale.
It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy though. As we build fewer reactors we lose economies of scales, we lose sub-contractors, we lose the knowledge to build these reactors efficiently and without incurring huge financial penalties due to delays and sub-standard deliveries by contractors. This in turn is used to justify building fewer reactors which creates this feedback loop.
You can always expect the first type of a new reactor (like this EPR design we've been working on) is going to face challenges, missed deadlines and cost inflation. If in the long run you plan to build a hundred of those it doesn't matter as much as if you only have 4-ish reactors in the pipeline.
You will never get economies of scale with nuclear. There is just not enough of them being build and wouldn't be even if we'd go full nuclear. You need to build to local conditions etc..
Also for those of you who say it's a problem of too much regulation. That's a hilarious proposition: yes sure let's remove regulatory control over technology which could yield large areas of densely inhabited aras no go zones for 100s of years (even if it's 10s it would be unacceptable). It's not like it has been shown over and over again that if you remove regulatory control companies will start taking shortcuts to maximize profits
There might not be huge economies of scale but there seems to be a baseline under which we basically lose our capacity to build more power plants. At this point we have additional delays and costs (and loss of trust) because of manufacturing errors. That seems to be a real problem for Areva nowadays.
The prospects are poor. Cost improvement comes from iteration and learning, and demand for new reactors is low. Even when they are built, the time span is so long that learning is balanced by forgetting.
No, intermittent sources need an affordably dispatchable source to produce when they can't. A steady, fixed cost source like nuclear, that must be producing most of the time to minimize the cost of its output, is unsuitable for acting as a backup to intermittent sources.
That's assuming you're using the steady source to cover for the intermittent source when it isn't generating. If you're using the steady source to replace the intermittent source entirely (as France had been doing) then it is producing most of the time and you don't have that problem.
This is probably the largest impediment to a 100% renewable grid. You might be able to get over the solar day-night thing with batteries if you had to because you can justify a lot of batteries if they're getting used every night, but the thing where sometimes it's cloudy for a straight month is a serious issue.
Right, it's an either-or situation. And now, with renewables crashed in cost and continuing to fall, it look's like renewables are winning.
You bring up batteries, but they would not be used for long term load leveling. The optimal solution is some combination of overcapacity w. curtailment, batteries for short term leveling, and hydrogen for long term leveling. Simple cycle turbine power plants can have a construction cost maybe ~5% of the cost/kW of a nuclear power plant (CC, around 10%), so building them and letting them sit idle most of the time is not a big deal.
Not exactly, they're still complementary, just not in that specific way.
Suppose you have 100% solar generation with enough batteries to survive the night, and then it's cloudy for a month and they generate half as much power. You can suppress demand some by raising prices, but suppressing it by 50% is unreasonable. Suppose you can suppress demand by 20%. Well then you still need enough long-term storage to cover 30% of your total demand for a month, which is really expensive for something you only use once every two years.
Now suppose you have 50% nuclear and 50% solar. Immediately this gets you out of needing the day/night batteries because nuclear generates at night. Then it's cloudy for a month and you lose half the solar generating capacity, but now you're only down 25% instead of 50%. Suppress demand by 20% through pricing and you only need enough long-term storage to cover 5% of the load.
This also makes the leveling a lot less precarious. If two weeks into the cloudy month it turns out you've already burned up all your long-term storage fuel and it's still cloudy, you can lean a little harder on pricing and get to a 25% reduction even if people gripe about it some. If that happens with pure solar, pricing high enough to cut demand by the full 50% would have people rioting in the streets.
Long term storage of the kind I'm talking about has two parts: a capacity part, and a consumable part. The capacity part is the same whether you need it for an hour or a month, and would be MUCH cheaper than nuclear plants of the same capacity. The consumable part (in my example, hydrogen) would be expensive, if needed for a month. But that doesn't happen very often, so on average the cost is quite reasonable.
It's gas because CO2 is not taxed. Don't tax gas and renewables will prop it up, but also nuclear doesn't stand a chance of competing. Tax CO2, and renewables will displace gas. The CO2 tax for renewables to take over will be lower than the CO2 tax needed for nuclear to take over. So the point you make there doesn't help new nuclear.
What CO2 taxes would do is keep existing nuclear plants operating a bit longer.
You _can't_ replace gas with intermittent. All sources aren't freely interchangeable. Intermittent doesn't work when the sun doesn't shine or when the wind doesn't blow, so you _need_ something to compensate it, and that's always gas.
Don't look at the system as "this source emits X kW when it's running". Look at the system as "the total demand _right now_ is Y xW, how can it be met ?". Because that's what drives the viability of sources of electricity, and whether they can be replaced with another one. Intermittent, by its very nature, isn't enough for producing electricity, it always needs an additional source.
It's always gas right now, because gas is the cheapest.
But if CO2 is taxed, hydrogen (from water electrolysis with surplus renewable electricity) becomes cheaper. And with cheap renewables, renewables + batteries + hydrogen would be cheaper than a system including nuclear.
> And with cheap renewables, renewables + batteries + hydrogen would be cheaper than a system including nuclear
* Definitely not. Looking at France, Solar and Wind are "cheap" because producers can sell on the grid, and the national operator _must_ buy it, at a higher cost than its own electricity, in a move to prop it up.
* Water electrolysis + electricity generation from hydrogen hasn't been proven to work cheaply at scale, what's the biggest project in existence ?
* Batteries are already not cost-effective at high scales
* All of those imply that storage will be on the same site as production; if not, the grid needs to be overhauled (it is built for few stable sources, not for numerous variable sources) and that cost is never taken into account by those who root for this kind of solutions
When I say renewables are cheap, I mean in comparison to NEW nuclear plants. Of course nuclear plants that already exist, where the sunk costs of construction can be ignored, will be more competitive. But France would spend less money building solar and wind instead of building new nuclear plants.
There is little electrolytic hydrogen today because hydrogen is mostly produced from chemical reforming of natural gas and other fossil fuels. Of course, this ignores the cost of CO2 emission from that process.
Batteries are already being installed in the real world, at very large scale. What exactly prevents them from being installed at even larger scale? And their costs are dropping rapidly, just as the cost of wind turbines and PV modules did.
Why hydro is not as flexible? A cable from Germany to Norway is being built to use hydro plants in Norway as energy batteries. This is despite Germany having natural gas plants.
A hydro power plant can't be used as a battery, it must be purposely built as a pumped storage plant. The cable in question allows Norway to sell hydro power to Germany (and if Germany has a surplus, they can sell electricity back). There's no storage solution in it, though.
It's sort of a battery, you just can't charge it with electricity. If you oversize the generators, you then can discharge the battery when renewable generation is low, and let it charge when renewable generation is high.
Yes, but by using that definition all baseload power generation (coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, etc.) are "energy batteries", which makes the term meaningless. By "energy batteries" when talking about the electric grid, people normally mean different kinds of large scale rechargeable energy storage solutions, such as pumped storage, molten salt, etc.
With oversized generators hydro provides an extra storage that can last weeks and even months at the pick usage depending on reservoir capacity. This is the battery effect that cannot be matched with molten salt.
As I just stated, yes, that's called baseload power. It applies equally to hydro power, nuclear, coal, gas and all other baseload types. If you make them larger they can produce more. "Energy batteries" when talking about the electric grid are generally rechargeable, because as I stated otherwise the term is meaningless and just means "baseload power" in general.
Increasing capacity at hydro power stations or other baseload stations isn't as easy as just "putting a larger generator in". Everything needs to be considered and sized up: turbines, piping, outlets, new environmental assessments, etc., just as in any other type of power plant.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because production in a gas power plant is simply regulated by burning more or less gas. If you need more gas, you can likely buy more. While production in a hydro power plant can be brought up and down by draining the reservoir faster or slower, a hydro plant has a lot of external factors that a gas power plant hasn't.
The current water level in the reservoir, expected drainage and rainfall over the year, environmental regulations concerning water discharge and intake levels, fish, etc. all play into it. Note that a hydroelectric power plant doesn't just generate electricity, it also regulates water levels pretty far up- and downstream from the plant.
Large battery storage I feel in the future can offset the sudden demand giving enough time for nuclear or less carbon producing power to ramp up. We are not there yet but I feel as batteries keep getting cheaper and hopefully smaller we will reach a point where homes and business have enough battery power for few hours of their peak use. This could flatten the demand spikes on the networks as well as maybe allow to use solar power when the sun is not out.
"Storage" is a big word. Methods of storage are not interchangeable with one another.
Think about food storage: your shelf doesn't have the same properties as your fridge, which is not the same as your freezer, which is not the same as jars in your basement. It's the same for batteries: they're good for very short periodicity, but fail at anything beyond the week. So you can't store your energy from the summer to use it during the winter, for instance.
Your point of view is one of a cornucopian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian), hoping that it is fine to wait for better days because "surely" progress will arrive. The situation is that we don't have some time to think and wait for innovation, we're already a number of decades late. Why wait for something that might or might not happen, in 5, 10, or 50 years, instead of doing what already works today ?
What is good about recycling nuclear? I believe the whole "recycling" in nuclear was a similar ploy like for recycling plastic, in other words mainly greenwashing. The other reason for it being military.
Nuclear recycling is a uneconomical, multiplies (by a significant factor) the amount of waste. Admittedly, less radioactive, but still as toxic and importantly much longer lifetimes, so still needs to be stored for insane length of time.
Recycling of nuclear fuel, outside of helping remove the waste problem, greatly increases your energy reserves.
However, it got essentially scuttled in the name of war as control over access to nuclear technology, even for purely peaceful uses became the dominant doctrine.
No, it was scuttled because it made no economic sense. In the US, Carter's executive order was lifted a few years later by Reagan, but no civilian reprocessing occurred. Separated plutonium has negative value -- it adds more cost to fuel element manufacture than it saves in enriched uranium cost.
Nuclear will forever be shunned, not because it's inherently unsafe, but rather because WE are unsafe.
Every nuclear disaster so far has exposed incompetence, negligence, corruption, or unsafe practices at some level, and has usually been accompanied by delays, denials, and attempts to bury the evidence. When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable.
Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).
> Every nuclear disaster so far has exposed incompetence, negligence, corruption, or unsafe practices at some level, and has usually been accompanied by delays, denials, and attempts to bury the evidence.
Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
> When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable.
This is factually not what we are dealing with. The radioactivity of a substance is inversely proportional to its half life. In other words, the more radioactive something is, the faster it disappears.
The most problematic nuclear contaminants are therefore the ones with medium half lives (i.e. decades), because they're radioactive enough to be harmful but long-lived enough to still be there a week later.
This is nasty stuff, but not in any way "forever" and not particularly any nastier than a lot of the chemical substances industries deal with on a large scale all over the place, which are chemically rather than radiologically hazardous and therefore don't even have a half life, i.e. they really are there forever. How is a nuclear reactor worse than a chemical plant?
> Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).
Considering that coal is responsible for more radioactive emissions than nuclear per TWh produced including Chernobyl and Fukushima, that is a totally irresponsible and dangerous course of action.
> nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
Irrelevant. The issue here isn't the expected value but the magnitude of the failure modes.
Hundreds of thousands of people die every year in or because of automobiles, way more than in commercial airplanes, By any measure you can planes are safer. Yet, you will find more prevalence of the fear of flying than driving. Why? Because incidents are catastrophic often killing hundreds of people at once. There's only so much damage a single car can do even though cars collectively do way more damage than planes.
Caol has obvious issues but the failure modes aren't catastrophic. Nuclear failure modes are. Nuclear has the power to make thousands of square miles uninhabitable for centuries (the last time I mentioned this I was accused at exaggerating so I'll preempt that by pointing out the absolute Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is, currently, 1000 square miles).
> The most problematic nuclear contaminants are therefore the ones with medium half lives
Yeah, no sale. There are two factors you're ignoring here:
1. Not just the strength but the type of radioactive decay. For example, a piece of paper will stop alpha emissions but alpha emissions are highly energetic and this is what makes Polonium-210 (as an extreme example) so deadly;
2. The chemical toxicity of the byproducts. Even U-238 (with a 4.5B year half life) is quite toxic; and
3. What an element decays into and the properties it (and all subsequent elements) has.
> How is a nuclear reactor worse than a chemical plant?
And what "chemical substances" are you referring to in particular here?
I'll reverse your own argument here and say that any process is capable of producing toxic byproducts, nuclear waste has the additional property of being radioactive too. How is that better?
> Why? Because incidents are catastrophic often killing hundreds of people at once.
You're rationalising something that isn't a rational or reasonable response. Exactly the same argument could be applied to trains; but I havn't met anyone who is scared of traveling by train.
People are scared of heights and having no plausible escape routes if something goes wrong is also pretty scary. The statistics are overwhelming that this instinctive response is wrong.
You have to take education into account. Nuclear isn't the kind of thing many people easily understand. They know "nuclear" makes for those amazingly destructive bombs, they know Chernobyl, and Fukushima. They know those results and explaining "but a new reactor would make that impossible" doesn't make a difference because they can't understand why, so it sounds like empty promises.
Also I remember reading a survey (can't find it now) where smokers were put in a hypothetical situation: they live in a parallel universe where smoking is completely harmless except 1 in 18.000.000 cigarettes would be laced with explosives and kill the smoker the moment they light it up. Every person asked said they would find that risk unacceptable. Needless to say it was exactly the same as smoking in our reality. The perception of risk is different in the 2 cases. It doesn't matter that a new nuclear reactor design would make this kind of catastrophe impossible, it's not how people perceive the risk. They still see bombs and Chernobyl. "Better safe than sorry".
Having no plausible escape (or counter measures) is also a big factor for nuclear scare. If there's a fire or flood, a few weeks/months later everything will be back to normal. If radiation leaks contamination remains for generations (even if it's not that bad as news make it sound) and that freaks out people. That and the general fear of unknown and invisible (just look at the 5G panic for that)
I don't think this is a "fear" or a "feeling" thing. Accidents do have a non-negligible probability. Then it can kill people, can make land completely unhabitable. I don't have an _unsubstantiated_ "bad feeling", "fear" or "panic" about it, because accidents pose a real, even proven problem.
Furthermore, there might come a time when the knowledge about radioactivity is diminished so far that people call it a "believe" thing. And then it will cause even further problems.
Irrational part of this fear is ignoring the very low probability of it ever happening. People have this strong, but from mathematical perspective irrational preference for 100% safety, compared to say 99.99999% safety, even when the 2nd offers many benefits.
I think it is rather irresponsible to make up such a number.
With Chernobyl 1986 and Fukushima 2011, two ultimate MCA's happened in my past lifetime. Does your number include them? And, even if it is a small percentage: if it does happen, the costs involved are so much more than one would be ready to set aside (e.g., if you just measure the monetary effect, Fukushima costs $750 billion, and the US insurances would max. payout $13 billion)
I would be very happy if the world does experience the next 50 years without no more of these events. But I honestly consider that as quite unlikely. Especially from a mathematical perspective.
The number was just to illustrate the point (but I'm pretty sure the actual probability, if modern technology taken into the account, is lower than that). Also take into the account that neither of those events, no matter how much media coverage they've got, in the end didn't affect that many people outside those locations. Chernobyl did scare us in Eastern Europe, but those effects would be way smaller if it wasn't for the dysfunctional Soviet political system that first tried to hide it, so it was a very unique event unlikely to happen ever again. US had the 3 miles island accident, which was a huge thing when I was a kid, and now it's almost forgotten.
Before accounting for 40 years of technology improvements in reactor design (the 40 years with the most stunning safety improvement in humanities' history) that suggests a probability of ~0.004%.
40 years of tech improvements could feasibly have reduced the risk by 2 orders of magnitude. ivanhoe's made up number is in fact defensible. It has big error bars on it but it is not unreasonable.
> Caol has obvious issues but the failure modes aren't catastrophic.
If we don't recognize global warming as a catastrophic failure mode then people are going to disagree on a fundamental level with no space for agreement or understanding of the other persons view.
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is pretty large. Add a few order of magnitude and you get the desert that global warming is causing to grow. It would take quite a few nuclear accident to cause global starvation, but with global warming we are on track for just that future.
> Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
There may be fewer deaths, but it's the only energy source to create effectively permanent no-go zones.
In areas with heavy coal mining activity the water and the soil is poisoned from erosion and runoff and people that live in these places come in enough contact with the toxins (mostly heavy metals) that they develop medical problems later in life. In practice the effect is about the same that you'd get if you lived in a radioactive area.
This is a non argument. Nobody is seriously proposing coal as an alternative to nuclear. Sure in some countries (e.g. Germany) they phased out nuclear before coal, but there are very different reasons for this, for example they are favoring brown over black coal. That is for different reasons though, largely the political lobby and associated jobs in economically weak regions (note I'm not saying this is right).
However, nobody is proposing coal as a long term solution. Yes one might make the argument that nuclear is safer than coal (however that argument is by no means as clear cut as you make it out too be), but the competition are renewables and neither nuclear or coal come close.
Not the parent, but if you look at what's currently replacing nuclear power world-wide it seems to be gas. Gas extraction is also not very environmentally friendly and releases a lot of nasty toxins into the air and surrounding areas, just not as much as coal mining does. I think the point still stands.
> Considering that coal is responsible for more radioactive emissions than nuclear per TWh produced including Chernobyl and Fukushima, that is a totally irresponsible and dangerous course of action.
Don't concentration and distribution matter? I mean in Serhii Plokhii's book on Chernobyl he several times repeats the claim that a significant leak into the river/sea would have rendered large parts of Europe uninhabitable. Now either that's a gross lie or your point is ignoring a hugely significant difference between coal production and nuclear. Which is it?
Concentration absolutely matters, and based on the figures I've seen coal fly ash - which is what the claims about radiation released from coal power plants are based on - is about as radioactive, kg for kg, as granite is. Which isn't nothing, but it's also not exactly nuclear waste. (Speaking of nuclear waste, the comparisons with coal often also get their numbers by ignoring it and only counting radiation intentionally released to the environment from a properly-working plant. Which is basically just a way of saying that if we could solve the nuclear waste disposal problem and the humans are too incompetent to build and run nuclear power plants problem it'd be a really clean form of power. That's probsbly true, but not realistic. Also, the comparison is generally based on really old and polluting coal power plants that mostly don't exist anymore.)
Nuclear waste can basically be safely solved by dumping sealed containers into the sea. We're talking about extremely small amounts of waste. A swimming pool can contain a year's supply of waste, and 20 ft of water is extremely effective radiation shielding. The ocean is so large that this would be totally negligible even if the worst happened.
It wouldn't be negligible. Dumping all our HWL waste (250,000 tons) would increase background radiation of the oceans by 10% if completely mixed, but of course oceans are not. We would simply end up with highly radioactive areas of ocean if and when the containment failed.
Just a throwaway idea, but instead of radiating the whole ocean evenly, why not dump it in the already highly radiated nuclear weapon test zone? The US blow around 100 nukes and I wonder if a few thousands of tons would actually do much worse compared to what already down there.
> I mean in Serhii Plokhii's book on Chernobyl he several times repeats the claim that a significant leak into the river/sea would have rendered large parts of Europe uninhabitable.
The grandparent's claim is about what did happen, not what might have happened in some hypothetical, but the claim you're quoting sounds utterly implausible to me; there simply isn't enough nuclear material anywhere to render a significant area uninhabitable for any significant length of time.
A lie or just wrong? I haven't read the book (but probably will now I've been reminded) but Plokhii is a historian not a scientist, right? Is this a peer reviewed projection or hypothetical scenario a la nuclear bombs igniting the atmosphere?
Fair comment, but these claims form a very major portion of his argument on the ramifications of an accident like Chernobyl and therefore what it really means. So I think if these claims are lacking in substance then he would be guilty of a significant misrepresentation.
>Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
Such an argument still undermines the pain and suffering such an accident can create, especially because nuclear can create suffering that doesn't necessarily end in a death caused by it.
>This is factually not what we are dealing with. The radioactivity of a substance is inversely proportional to its half life. In other words, the more radioactive something is, the faster it disappears.
Long-lived Radioactive materials have other problems if they are farther up in the atomic charts. Uranium and Plutonium are simply toxic to life (with few exceptions), other materials produced in a nuclear reactor behave similarly.
Large amounts of uranium can still produce lethal amounts of radiation if they're on a long halflife. If it leaks into the ground water, you have much bigger problems because radioactivity from inside the body is even more troublesome.
And it doesn't detract from the fact that the short and medium lived isotopes still need to be isolated for quite some time.
It's estimated that the zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant will be uninhabitable for 20,000 years.
The Fukushima area (especially the sea surrounding it) suffers a similar fate.
Once the Bikini Atoll containment fails within the next decade or so due to neglect, it will be uninhabitable for thousands of years as well.
The world is awash in secret-but-not-really nuclear dumps with failing containment systems built too close to groundwater sources, which cannot be fixed due to the radiation hazard from the failed (due to neglect, improper design, and seismic activity) containment.
> Nuclear will forever be shunned, not because it's inherently unsafe, but rather because WE are unsafe.
This position is self contradictory. If it weren't inherently unsafe, our treatment of it, incompetent or otherwise, could not lead to global catastrophe. The problem is simultaneously that Nuclear is inherently unsafe and people cannot be trusted.
Can nuclear energy lead to a global disaster? The Chernobyl disaster was local and it's pretty much worst case scenario. Global warming is a global disaster and if using nuclear energy is a way of avoiding it then we must use it.
Depends on what you call 'local'.
Up until now, eating wild mushrooms and boars in the south of Germany is not considered healthy due to Caesium-137 emitted by the Chernobyl-accident decades ago [0].
Each shot wild boar needs to be tested before you are actually allowed to eat it.
Isn't it more due to radiophobia than to the actual danger of radiation? Here's a really good lecture about the dangers of radiation and why it's not as bad as people think it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOvHxX5wMa8.
Same in Sweden, UK, parts of central Europe and large parts of eastern Europe. This includes everything from wild mushroom and berries to wild game. In the years right after even milk had increased radiation levels sometimes going beyond acceptable standards.
> Same in Sweden, UK, parts of central Europe and large parts of eastern Europe
Exactly.
Locally.
I live in Italy, it affected us in 1986, then everything went back to normal.
And the laws in place are there only for precautions, nobody wants to lift them and be held responsible in case something happens, but the death toll of Chernobyl wasn't that scary as people like to imagine.
From where I live to Berlin is ~= 850kms (~525 miles)
From where I live to Warsaw is ~= 1,100kms (~715 miles)
From where I live to Pryp'yat' (where the Chernobyl plant is) is just 1,665 km (1,000 miles)
But, from where I live to Catania (Sicily, Southern Italy) is about 1,050kms (~630 miles)
So yeah, it was far from global.
It was global locally to continental Europe.
Global means that if the temperature goes up one degree celsius in the North Pole, the sea level rises in Australia.
BTW from the map you posted it's clear that Northern Italy, where I live, was hit harder than most of Sweden, Germany or Poland.
We eat mushrooms and vegetables without any particular concern.
Despite that, the global cancer rate ranking is (every 100,000)
1 Australia 468
7 France (metropolitan) 344.1
8 Denmark 340.4
9 Norway 337.8
13 UK 319.2
15 Germany 313.1
23 Sweden 294.7
24 Italy 290.6
Totally agree, a system is only as safe as it's operators, so it's totally reasonable to compare worst case scenarios.
But if you run the numbers on those terms, that still doesn't fully explain why nuclear is treated so differently.
Extending your point, WE are the ones responsible for coal and hydro safety related deaths too. An unsafe hydro project in China killed somewhere between 80,000 and 240,000 people in 1975 after a whistleblower was ignored.
With coal mining, we don't even have to look at "worst" cases to get to serious issues. Coal production leads US industries in fatal injuries, often leading to litigation alleging unsafe conditions. Miners often suffer permanent scarring of the lung tissues. Coal's output, not unlike radiation, is a silent killer. The fine particulates from coal pollution can cross the blood brain barrier, and lead to 10,000 early deaths in the US from coal's "fallout" each year.[0] Coal ash is also, perhaps unintuitively, MORE radioactive than nuclear waste.[1]
Chernobyl directly killed around 50 people, with higher indirect deaths. The Soviet government compounded the failures by keeping contaminated food in the supply chain, leading to a lot of new thyroid cancers. Even taking that into account, and expelled radiation into the atmosphere, UN estimates of early deaths projected all the way out to 2065 are only around 9,000. Some people put that a bit higher. 15,000 would be a fair estimate.[2]
The UN projection means we could have a Chernobyl disaster every year and it would still be safer than coal. Maybe the estimates wrong and we cut them in half in coal's favor, and should just talk about a Chernobyl disaster every other year comparing more favorably. At that rate, it would take 30 years to equal the deaths due to equal the damage done by one hydro disaster.
Now, I don't think we should judge hydro harshly based on its worst accident in a poorly run communist country. You can choose to do that for nuclear, and it still comes out remarkably safe, even under the worst possible cases.
I absolutely think its fair to judge coal harshly based on its continuing track record, and have no idea why someone would move from nuclear to coal after running the numbers.
> Nuclear will forever be shunned
I fear you might be right. But it definitely feels like some sort of cognitive bias, the availability heuristic or something making nuclear deaths more scary than coal deaths, but I don't know, can't figure it out.
I already droned on long enough, but superfund sites related to coal tar are good reading here. They usually have to entomb the whole site in a giant concrete barrier to never be opened again. We treat radiation like it's the only hazardous thing we need to seal off forever, it's not really accurate, other forms of power generate similar hazards as or more frequently.
Of course not, humans doing such complex and dangerous things are a bit smarter than your average Homer’s situation comedy. Your scathing opinion is perfect for the oil and gas industry, though.
Alright. Call me when those bright candles have found a permanent long term solution to radioactive waste disposal.
So far, I’ve noticed we’re still leaving several cores’ worth of highly radioactive spent fuel sitting in a pool next to the core containment vessel. Just a SNAFU away from blowing into everyone’s living room...
But that’s only temporarily, of course! They’re smart enough to know it’s not a permanent solution; just a lifetime long.
Sure. But all of that, even projected centuries into the future, still kills fewer people than die by falling from a height while installing wind turbines. Accidents happen in every industry in which humans are involved, we shouldn't apply a double standard (just as, if equally radioactive coal ash is considered safe to just dump, we should probably dump a lot of our nuclear waste in the same way).
Note that even if you stop nuclear power completely, the "nuclear waste" problem still exists. There's still a bunch of radioactive Uranium naturally occurring in various parts of the world. Is that an urgent problem?
Mind, I am not saying that you are wrong, nuclear today is not a commercially viable option in the West anymore. The point is that digging holes is easier and dirtier than nuclear fission, which is why candles had to be bright to make nuclear happen in first instance. That said, the trade-off seems unfavorable right now, even without considering waste.
>When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable.
That sounds subjective.
I think we need some kind of measures to judge the pros and cons of different solutions. Whether that means money, potential human lives loss, health issues.
If we consider health issues alone, the money loss from using much more expensive alternatives can mean less people will have access to health care and that might mean alternative solutions can be more damaging than nuclear power.
I am not saying that nuclear is better, but that we have to be careful and do a trough analysis before declaring something bad and declare something good.
By "we" I mean "we as society". Such analysis should be done solely through technical specialists, not through activists, business interests or through any subjective party.
My personal opinion is that in large part, the reason people have such an aversion to nuclear power is the imagery that is associated with the word "nuclear". Bring up the word, and there is an immediate association with nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, irradiated wastelands. Just think of how many entertainment properties use the trope of a nuclear wasteland or things glowing green, mutants and radiation beasts..etc.
We know that media significantly affects culture, so it's not that surprising to me that if how we picture nuclear anything in entertainment leaks into how people think of it in the real world.
We're also not very good about perceiving continued effects. The radiation that a coal plant spits out is in effect diffuse. Yes there's a lot, but its a lot over a time scale instead of immediately. Whereas a nuclear meltdown, well, that's quick and extremely potent. We're far more likely to react to the latter viscerally. For a parallel, consider air travel vs car travel. Air travel is far safer per miles traveled, but we still get our collective panties in a bunch over airplane accidents, despite there being far more car accidents in any given span of time.
I think nuclear power's biggest issue is image. It has far too many negative associations in most people's minds. Until that image is changed, I don't know if nuclear power is viable culturally. Maybe once we start going further out in space and nuclear becomes the only viable power source, that might change. Right now, a few RTG-powered probes aren't going to do it.
Nuclear power has a horrible image for very good reason. There are devastating consequences when something goes wrong (nobody will insure your plant), horrible economics relying on large subsidies, storage requirements that exceed the lifetimes of any previous civilisation, operators having a history of shady practices like not reporting incidents, requirement for strong centralised (large corporations) control (that's why authoritarian states like it so much).
People always point that this is all not inherent and could be fixed by enough research (and new regulations), but why would you? Renewables have none of these issues and are much cheaper. If baseload is an issue, we know how to fix this, modernize your electricity grid to be smarter (there is always wind/sun somewhere) and invest in research into storage (that would also be needed for nuclear.
I don't get the obsession with nuclear, it does not make sense on an economical, political and environmental level.
> I don't get the obsession with nuclear, it does not make sense on an economical, political and environmental level.
I have a rather simple suggestion to resolve that. Ban fossil fuels for large scale power plants and heating plants.
Under those conditions, if nuclear is more expensive, political nightmare and economical worse than the alternative then don't use nuclear. If on the other hand people just want to use renewable when its in optimal weather conditions and then use fossil fuels because a stable energy grid is more important than the ban on burning fossil fuels, then no. At that point I rather people build that expensive, political nightmare, and waste producing nuclear plant.
As the old green movement slogan went. Keep the coal in the ground. Stop the pipeline. The sun is setting on the oil industry. It time to Get out of the Combustion Engine.
The obsession with fossil fuels has run its course. Nuclear has problems but if that is the cost we have to pay in order to ban fossil fuels than I will happily pay it. I don't demand anything more than that, but I won't settle for less either. It is criminal that enlighten countries who talk large about the current climate crisis also build fresh new fossil fueled power plants as energy demands goes up. Just like nations created a treaty against blowing up nukes in the atmosphere, there need to be one against turning the planet into a desert just because its cheap and can be done with minimum political consequences.
You do have a point, but it is also what makes that particular fear not completely without merit. Over the past few decades, the number of nuclear arsenal wielding countries increased. It is genuinely hard to keep the two separated when having a nuclear power plant can easily lead to a weapon.
People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story.
Germany is sitting on decades of dirty waste and has no hole to make it disappear. It creates ridiculous costs that have been shifted to the tax payer and they will pay for it for hundreds of years. Again: no sane person wants to do that or would blame them.
Meanwhile there is renewable energy getting better and better with every year and decade.
> People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story.
The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution, caused the destruction due to coal mining of big swathes of land and increases the risk of a resource war or other difficult geopolitical situation arising.
They are also causing tens of thousands of people to waste their lives working unproductively in energy-producing industries when they could have been doing something useful instead.
Sane or otherwise, they are just people who don't understand statistics or how energy works. They are symptoms of the general problem that society has with implementing evidence-based policies.
> The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution
Considering that the research suggests 7,500 and 52,000 people in the US each year[0], I think you could safely say "hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost due to this argument" (considering that less than 30k lives have been lost to nuclear, including future deaths from disasters).
I want to make this abundantly clear. We're pro-nuclear because we want to save lives. Because we want to save the environment. And because we are listening to the scientists. No one is saying "nuclear vs renewables", but rather "keep nuclear on the table". We're on the same team as those that advocate for renewables (I myself strongly advocate for renewables!).
In many situations people prefer choices with worse expected value when they also have a lower variance. That's the whole point of insurances for example. Choosing more expected deaths from air pollution over lower expected deaths from nuclear accidents (but with a very large variance compared to pollution) can be rational. It just depends on your valuation function.
It can be rational. However, in this context, it is not. It is pretty clearly people who just don't understand what 6 orders of magnitude improvement of fuel density implies for pollution and efficiency. Or how rare a 1 in 30 disaster is on a global scale.
COVID-19 just dropped on us one day and everything shut down. That is a pretty good example of how scary the world is. The tiny odds of a nuclear disaster (that can still be walked away from!) is nothing compared to the baseline risks of being alive.
We'd be a lot better off right now if the anti-nuclear protests in the 80s had been anti-aeroplane-travel instead; because disease from having fast transport links has done a lot more damage than nuclear power could. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
Yeah it's funny how it goes with those "tiny odds" eh? Today nuclear technicians need to sleep and life in their plants because of one of these tiny odds actually happening. I don't see any solar panel technicians having to sleep at their solar panel fields.
And how about those odds of a salt mine that was perfectly good a few decades ago to store the tons of waste suddenly getting a nasty groundwater inflow and becoming a risk for groundwater? It's happening right now in Germany and has been for a few years now. All that money wasted for pumping out and clearing out this mine could be invested into REALLY clean energy but it's not. It's dumped into radioactive waste "management".
In reality A SINGLE overdue French reactor could wipe out a whole country (Luxembourg) leaving us with a nuclear wasteland right in the middle of Europe. A beautiful picture you can't draw with numbers. To make my point even clearer and because I have the feeling like I'm talking to Americans who have never even took a look at an European map. This is it: https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg Yes, there are people all over the place.
This stuff is being kept alive for political reasons (hey here is your favourite reason for nuclear "mistakes": human error again) while it rots from within. So how it may be surprising that people do not trust the energy and those who are responsible for it politically and technically, is beyond me.
All that money wasted for this technology could have been invested into renewables which would have brought us much farther than we are today but it didn't happen because: hey nuclear lobby. Throwing even more money on it now is beyond stupid (https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...) and I really hope the lobby money for this artificially kept alive propaganda train finally runs out just like the technology did.
The only INES 7 disaster in the last 30 years involved Fukushima being hit by an earthquake that was out of design spec and then a literal 14 meter high tsunami. I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event. Even then they had to be negligent on their safety standards for it to cause a bad meltdown.
That was what it took to fail a 1970s designed (pre-Chernobyl, pre-computer-aided-design) nuclear reactor with upgrades. Standards haven't gotten lower since then. Luxembourg will be fine. Don't panic.
Unless they migrate to the coast with global warming. Which can be mitigated by more nuclear use!
> I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event.
Nice how those numbers worked out eh? It looks so good on paper almost like "we're safe for 600 years" but we weren't. IT HAPPENED. So how about the chances for that reactor near Luxembourg and some satellite falling on it or something like that? What is the big number for that and how much will it be worth if it happens to the people there losing their country when it happens again?
Yeah global warming can be mitigated by technologies which have astronomically higher numbers you can wave around because nobody gives a damn if a satellite falls on a field of solar collectors. No technician has to sleep in a wind turbine because of some pandemic virus.
Face it: nuclear is dead. It's a energy source from the last century.
It was hit by tsunami because it was built in a tsunami-prone, seismically vulnerable area. A "1 in 1000 year" tsunami hitting it in first 40 years of operation sounds like a planning and engineering failure, and is why people tend to be super sceptical about safe nuclear.
How many nuclear plants are there in the world? About 500 [0]. Years between Chernobyl and Fukushima? ~30.
I expect a 1 in 1500 year event to have happened to a nuclear reactor somewhere in the world in that time.
People are skeptical because they don't have a very good grasp of statistics. I may have mentioned something about that a few posts up. Somewhere in the world something is going horribly wrong. The world is a big place.
That being said; I think there were design decisions made around Fukushima. The engineers in the 70s didn't have the capabilities we enjoy now.
Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years. That's before you account for wars and low safety culture plaguing significant part of the world which does not operate nuclear currently.
Engineering in 1970s was overall solid and not that much behind on material science and control systems theory than today: they could get people to the Moon and back after all. Dismissing the catastrophes to that is a dangerous hubris.
> Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years.
Well, no. It would probably be 0 INES 7 catastrophes because none of the new reactors would be built using pre-1980s designs.
> Engineering in 1970s was overall solid...
There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering. Was 1970s engineering good? Yes. That is your clue at how jaw-dropping modern engineering is in terms of capabilities.
There would be fewer old failure modes in new reactor designs. There would be other failure modes (some unknown at design stage) in the new designs. Concentrated energy gradient in nuclear power generation suggests any claim of inherent safety is wishful thinking.
> There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering.
There absolutely is, and tech people simply don't appreciate how slow the pace of progress was outside semiconductors. Outside the CAD based process flow the differences in mechanical and civil engineering to what they were are minimal. There are hardly any materials (outside of some niche exotics like PEEK) used today that were unknown in 1970s.
I'm a mining engineer. I assure you that there is no comparison between modern and 1970s capabilities. The discipline lives right next to civil engineering. Nothing to do with semiconductors.
I like how you wrote "solves that" when the product is not there, never was and probably never will be. Your article was from 2011 and the company which should have made this thing real now invests in:
Ocean thermal energy conversion and Floating wind turbines
It's where the subsidies are, flexblue took a hit from Fukushima as did other efforst but the concept does resolve the issue of availability of land and addresses a lot of cost issues via serial factory production.
Rn the most promising efforts to watch concept wise IMO are nuscale and russia/china's floating concepts.
1) There's no equivalence between a bomb and nuclear waste.
2) The waste is actually REALLY REALLY small. We're talking about a coke can per person per year. That's total waste, which only 3% of that is high level waste and needs to be buried. There's a deep misconception about the amount of waste we're talking about here. And this is before we talk about recycling, like France does (see above comment), or using waste in medicine.
3) The cost for nuclear is more similar to why the postal service costs so much/isn't profitable. This cost is manufactured.
4) No pro nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs renewables". They may say "nuclear vs fossil fuels" or "let's not remove it from the options because there's places where nuclear is a better alternative". (e.g. renewables work great in southern california and the southwest. Not always in areas where it is cloudy like the northern coasts). All pro nuclear people want is nuclear to not be removed from the portfolio of technologies.
No one is denying renewables are the way to go. The argument is "are renewables enough to kill coal and gas?" There's significant evidence to suggest no. Even if you don't believe that, that's not a good reason to remove nuclear from the table (mind you, just being on the table doesn't mean you have to use it). I'll even note that a significant number of climate researchers advocate for expansion of nuclear, including the IPCC.
4) No anti-nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs. coal" it's still such a prominent argument. Weird eh? And it's not even real. It's a huge straw man set up by the lobbyists of a dead technology picked up by some misguided fans. Here is a read up for the baseload theory that comes up at this moment in a discussion so you can save yourself a few useless lines: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374
> 1) Yeah, the bomb is the reactor. Waste is waste.
Citation needed. Reactors don't explode. Chernobyl is an exception to the rule. The USSR is the only country to build positive void reactors.
> 2) Posts in German
Unfortunately I don't read German. But I'll mention that again, high level waste and low level waste is treated differently.
> 3) Another post in German
Again, I don't read German. I'll just link you to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852228 and encourage you to read more of AcidBurn's posts, as he is a reactor scientist.
> 4) No anti-nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs. coal" it's still such a prominent argument.
I'm claiming anti-nuclear people are saying "nuclear vs renewables" In fact, it is the first sentence of this item.
But who wants to listen to scientists anyways... Not when we have our feelgood politics on our side! https://i.imgflip.com/1pk2po.jpg
1) Yeah they do not "explode" which doesn't make any difference at all for the disaster and playing the word game won't change a single thing about the problem itself.
2/3) I changed the link to english but besides that: you are here on a board for technically capable people and you can't paste that into google translate? You got the picture at least?
4) No you didn't say that, but you implied it. Just like OP and oh look it's a funny picture from The Simpsons. Guess you reached the end of your arguments. Good bye.
Chernobyl is probably the most damaging thing to come out of the Soviet Union long-term. The design of Chernobyl was crazy. I dug fairly deep into the many, many issues the reactor had when that HBO mini series aired, if anything it only made me massively more confident in our modern designs.
Chernobyl's design was deeply flawed and they knew it yet did nothing, not even tell the people operating the reactor. Then it took these operators doing everything wrong, including consciously putting the reactor in an unstable state (removing nearly all control rods way beyond regulation) and keep pushing the reactor for absolutely no rational reason to create the explosion.
And even then, had the reactor had a proper concrete enclosure like western reactors do, the fallout of the explosion would probably have been severely dimnished and mostly contained on-premise. It still would've been the worst catastrophe in the history of nuclear power generation but only a fraction of what we've had to deal with. It would've been Fukushima-like, probably (i.e. pretty damn bad, but not apocalyptic).
There is always something and that time, it was in some remote area in the Ukraine. Now imagine that something happening in one of those overdue rotting reactors in Frace. Right in the middle of Europe. What sane person would want that to happen?
And you just don't know what might happen. A few months ago you wouldn't dream of coming up with the idea that nuclear technicians need to life there now because of some pandemic. Some Chinese satellite may fall down on one of those things tomorrow.
Why bother with the risk when the alternatives are there, get better, are cheaper and won't leave you with their waste to pay for for the next hundreds and hundreds of years?
> Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down
When nuclear is shut down, it's often replaced by coal. See also Japan, with a lot of coal plants coming up:
"It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming."
Maybe depends on how you define safest. Where I live in Sweden, there are parts of the country where it's still not safe to hunt and eat wild boar because of a nuclear accident over 30 years ago 3000 kilometers away.
If you just divide the number of meltdowns (5) with the number of active power reactors in the world (449) we learn that statistically 1% of reactors will have a core meltdown.
That's preposterous. Wild boar is hunted, eaten and sold everywhere here in Sweden. The radioactivity (among other things) is measured and there are about a handful of animals above the limits for cesium-137 each year. It's important to note the limits are set very, very low.
The term "meltdown" means the core has melted. I don't know where you got the number "5" from, because it's not the number of meltdowns globally (there have been a lot, almost all of them contained) nor the number of accidents with widespread consequences (2: Chernobyl and Fukushima).
It's not entirely accurate, but it's not preposterous and you're whitewashing the whole thing.
During tests of felled wild boar in early 2019[0][1] showed that around 70% of the ones from Gästrikland (the region in Sweden that was hit hardest from the Chernobyl fallout) contained caesium-137 concentrations way above the 1500 Bq/kg guidelines, above which the animal is considered unsellable, ungiftable, and meat from such animals, for private use, should only be consumed at most a few times a month (up to 3000 Bq/kg), or not at all (>10 000 Bq/kg).
Several animals (unclear how many) had caesium concentrations of over 40 000 Bq/kg, so there's a huge variation. Cannot find more exact figures than that.
There's a debate[2][3] about who should pay for testing these animals, because any animal above 1500 Bq/kg should be destroyed, and radioactivity tests are really expensive. Hunters want the government to pay. The government wants none of it. As it looks right now, wild boar hunting in these regions for the purpose of selling the meat is not economically feasible.
This might change [4] (taxpayers will foot the bill).
Sorry, yes, "a handful" was stretching it, but it's not a big issue. Wild boar meat is hunted and sold all over Sweden and the radioactivity is measured.
If you look at the sources more closely, you'll see the "70%" figure was the number of wild boars that have measurably higher levels of radioactivity. Not the number above the limit.
This has been a big thing for the Hunters association since the limits are very low and fallout was very localized, hunters in some areas are very much affected since they could not sell the meat.
It's a pity, since even Livsmedelsverket themselves say 1.5 kBq/kg is safe to eat several times a month[1]. The limits are set very low. Granted, they state above 10 kBq/kg should not be eaten, but there were very few animals above that value.
That link was in my sources. And no, 70% were over 1500 Bq/kg.
100% of animals (only 8, because of limited funding for testing) tested in 2020 by the Southern Hunter's Circle in Gävle (that embedded link in my post) in were over 1500 Bq/kg, with an average of 6263 Bq/kg.
SSI/Livsmedelsverkets's irradiation limits are "low" (your opinion) for a reason, because we just don't really know much about the long-term effects. These limits have not been changed since 1986 in Sweden, but what I do know is that they're 3 times higher than, for instance, in Germany, which sets the limit at 600 Bq/kg. The US: 370 Bq/kg. Japan (implemented in 2012 after the Fukushima incident, because there were no prior legal binding limits): 100 Bq/kg. Yeah, what a "pity", as you say.
I know that this is a big issue for some people, and I understand that. However, the limits are set way below the level considered dangerous and are political. Countries with lower problems or that want to be seen as taking the problem seriously set lower limits.
To put some perspective into it, an average banana contains about 150 Bq/kg from radioactive K-40[1]. K-40 is pretty comparable to Cs-137 biologically but nobody even considers limiting the amount of banana eaten. Bananas are regularly given to infants (which are the population most vulnerable to radiation damage) from six months of age, but nobody bats an eye, because 150 Bq/kg gives you such an extremely low dose.
Wild boar is safe to hunt and eat in the entire country, so yes I'd say your original statement was preposterous. If I was a very prolific hunter and my staple food was boar, I'd be concerned if I lived in one of those areas, but not otherwise.
But then again, in Sweden we live in houses built on granite bedrock with walls made from radioactive lightweight concrete. The radon gas emitted from them gives you a dose magnitudes larger than eating wild boar, mushrooms and berries your entire life.
That's such a short-sighted argument. Same as with "more deaths through flu" we heard so often in February.
Think about fat tails and asymmetric risk. If you read in the newspaper next year: "Hundred thousand people dead/displaced due to power plant accident" - more likely to be coal or nuclear?
No, it's likely due to hydro power. Hydro has had several large scale accidents killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, such as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam in China.
Coal kills slowly but is the power source that's killed most people over time. Nuclear has killed the fewest by far.
Please understand that no electricity generation technology has no risk.
> Think about fat tails and asymmetric risk. If you read in the newspaper next year: "Hundred thousand people dead/displaced due to power plant accident" - more likely to be coal or nuclear?
What's your evaluation of the probability of this event ? Without putting figures in the equation, I could also ask you in the same way to think about this event : if you read in the newspaper next year: "Billions of people dead/displaced due to one in a thousands year drought, leading to global famine" - more likely to be coal or nuclear?
Nuclear. Naive probability matters relatively little here. The risk of coal plants due to CO2 is a thin-tailed long term risk. No single coal plant will ever cause a headline (or an event) like this. Thin-tailed long-term risks can be mitigated and planned for and the result is always a sum of many smaller choices (albeit global warming is an existential risk for sure!).
Nuclear is different. 99,999% of time it's cheaper and cleaner than coal. Doesn't matter. The tail-risk is what matters and that's also, why (conventional) nuclear can't ever be economically competitive against any other power source without direct or indirect subsidies (there is no insurance that will insure a nuclear power plant).
Highly recommend Taleb`s paper on fat-tailedness [1].
To my knowledge, this depends on the dam in question
For large dams in developed countries it's relatively easy to contain that risk (move people a few kilometers away from thedanger zone) in contrast to a nuclear plant.
Large chemical industries have no problems getting insurance as far as I know -or do you have credible sources stating otherwise?
I've never heard of countries considering the entire danger zone from a large hydroelectric dam uninhabitable. They're so large that it's simply not feasible. Take the largest hydro station in Sweden for example, Harsprånget[1]. The government assessment for what happens when that dam breaks assumes it takes out a very large geographical area, among other things the entire city of Luleå (which is near the coastline).
No large chemical industry handlng dangerous chemicals, in developed countries or otherwise, has an insurance large enough to pay for huge expensive spills. That's why the company usually defaults when it happens and leaves the cleanup for the government later on. This has happened on numerous occations in the US, Europe, and over here in Sweden.
Ugh, if the US had just kept up the pace of nuclear construction in the 80s instead of shutting it down, we would be approaching 100% CO2-free electricity today. Not 50 years from now, today. But we threw it all away!
I'm not sure this is true. Simply because I'm not aware of a technology that has a 0 CO2eq lifetime emission. Production, yes (nuclear, renewables), but lifetime, no. It would be a HUGE step in the right direction and have dramatically reduced our load (20% of global) on the climate problem (probably influenced other countries too). But I want to be accurate here. (I know I'm splitting hairs here)
Nuclear energy actually had the most extreme growth adoption curve of every energy source ever. Even faster then the adoption of coal or oil in the centuries before.
It was totally crazy, but then form basically one year to the next, it totally flat lined. You can guess when that was.
The problem with nuclear power is that it's a hard decision to reverse. Once we make it, we have to stand by it to the end. We can't reduce funding on nuclear power and expect it to end well.
While this is true, the regulatory chances after Three Mile Island and the general changing attitude towards nuclear made it impossible for the industry to adjust to the changing market.
Nuclear growth was so incredibly fast at first that it was maybe a bit unsustainable, but going from the fastest ever growing energy to total stagnation for 40 years is a difficult thing to explain.
The regulatory change with the biggest impact on nuclear occurred before TMI. It was the Calvert Cliffs decision, a SCOTUS case that nuclear power plants were not exempt from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act.
While this had the largest short term impact, I would argue the larger cultural, organisational, regulatory approches had the more fundamental long-term effect.
Imagine a crazy tycoon on a gigantic barge in the middle of the ocean using gigantic nuclear reactors to direct-carbon-capture CO2 into fuel and then selling it to become a 21st century petro power.
You’re technically right (the best kind of right!) but so is he when he says nuclear approaches 100% CO2.
Maybe solar+storage could get even closer close?
Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse.
The rationale behind it is simple physics. Enriched nuclear fuel is the most energy-dense material we can access, so unless a new fundamental law is discovered, nuclear energy will have the best EROI, e.g. require the least energy overall to be produced (also note that most of the energy deployed is for security reasons).
EDIT: another option for solar+storage to tend towards 0 residual carbon footprint is a life duration 10 or 100 times longer. Something to consider.
> Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse.
I'm going to add some nuance. As far as I'm aware, this is only true for photovoltaic solar. My understanding is that concentrated solar (mirrors heat up water tank and you have a steam turbine) has lower lifetime emissions than nuclear.
That being said, storage does have a heavy footprint that many ignore. This is a harder number to accurately measure the impact, but if we're talking about a sane fully renewable system you have to have a lot of storage. Places like Southern California can get away with a day or two's worth of storage because there is little variation in conditions. But if you travel up the coast 500 miles things get drastically different. Even more so as you get into Washington. You're going to have to have at least a week's worth of storage. Same thing for the east coast.
That said, these options are still better than coal. It is debatable if we're talking about coal + CCS though and likely doesn't beat gas + CCS. Though the counter argument to this is CCS in the manufacturing of your solar and batteries. Again, gets tricky and there's factors to include like tearing down existing coal and gas plants.
TLDR: this problem is unsurprisingly extremely complicated even though we make it out to not be.
Could a highly efficient grid solve the "local weather" problem? While it might be cloudy in Washington, at the same time it's likely sunny in Nevada, or Texas, (or Mexico if you had cross border production), etc..
The broader the area you can depend on, the less you need "bad weather backup" systems.
Potentially. But there's a big if and quite a few drawbacks. If our power is dependent on such long range travel there is a lot more opportunity for failure. Since we're talking about power, this does mean both lives and millions to billions of dollars worth of economic activity. There's various reasons things could go down. A bird. Russia hacking our grid. Joe Schmoe crashes his truck. You name it. The only way to reduce two of these events is to build a large and complex network with many fail-safes, but that makes the second possibility easier. But if it goes down in Texas we're talking about Northern California, Oregon, and Washington potentially losing power.
Having local sources of power is highly reliable and contains disasters to only be local. While I do believe we should have smarter grids there is much wanting in using this as a solution to the regional issues of renewable efficiencies and storage requirements.
nit: while this is true you cannot pick up enriched nuclear fuel off the ground. You have to process many tons of ore. Overall it's still better but this is not guaranteed by simply the energy density of fuel rods.
Absolutely, and uranium mining will require more energy over time, as the best sources get depleted.
Still, AFAIU,
1) the mining is not the largest energy requirement (security enforcement measures and refining require much more energy and infrastructure)
2) In the golden age of nuclear, it was commonly thought that we would have breeder reactors by now, that would make the fuel processing hundreds of times more efficient, and thus the question would be obsolete... Unfortunately, only India and Russia are still actively working on that technology.
I'm aware I'm splitting hairs. But I bring this up because there are a lot of misconceptions about climate, including the energy sub-problem. I.E. people think if we go renewables (or nuclear) we've solved the climate issue, let alone just the energy problem. Or rather, I think people think all we need is renewables and electric cars. Where in reality even after implementing these two (important) parts we still have a long way to go. And that the idea of this is so prevalent that it is actually hindering progress.
So I'm being nuanced. But HN is a place for nuance.
Transportation and energy account for a little under 60% of the problem.[0] (There's a lot more to those than electricity and cars) Another more mainstream issue is agriculture, but people pretty much talk exclusively about water usage and emissions from animal byproducts. This has a political motive. It is the majority of that sector though, to be fair to the vegans. If cows were a country they would be the third worst polluter (please support lab grown meat and reduce your meat intake. Even just eating red meat once a month and chicken the rest of the time has a significant impact on your personal emissions. And please don't bring up cows eating algae).
But there's a lot of less sexy parts that we're nowhere even near close to solving. Concrete and steel production is one of them. These are the largest contributor to emissions in construction, and pretty much the only way to solve this issue is with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) or new materials that we don't yet know about. [1] The same is for plastics. Frankly, we don't have a good way around steel, concrete, or plastics without making some extremely hard compromises. These materials MAKE the modern world and literally save lives.
Another less sexy issue is air-conditioning/refrigeration and heating. These systems are almost pure emitters yet we never discuss them. Again, we're nowhere near solving these issues. Again, these technologies save lives and enable the modern world. They are extremely difficult problems and even harder to scale.
I'd suggest reading some of Gate's Notes, since they do provide a good high level introduction to the material and I think he is pretty informed on the subject (unfortunately much more than any politician that I'm aware of). I'd start with: A Question To Ask About Every Climate Plan[2]. And then: Climate change and the 75% problem[3]. For another perspective I'll suggest Rees's blog post: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist[4] (article includes link to part 2).
I work with some climate scientists and these blogs reflect a lot of their concerns (in much more approachable ways). I'm actually deeply upset that the topic has become so politicized. I personally do not feel that either side is taking the issue seriously (though one side is at least acknowledging the problem and partly addressing less than half the problem but also encouraging the infighting. Better than nothing I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
But if you're wondering why climate scientists outright say: "We're fucked" are are extremely pessimistic, this is a short introduction to why. We don't have the technology to fix the problems, we aren't willing to admit many things are problems, a significant part of the political elite won't acknowledge that the problem even exists, and even if we solved all of this in America that only accounts for 20% of global emissions and how can we ask developing nations to either go without modern technology and let their people die or emit greenhouse gasses? I'm pretty on board with the "we're fucked" sentiment. But I hope we're wrong and I hope people can learn the facts and the non-sexy parts can become of great concern (i.e. get a shit ton of funding). And for the love of god, I hope CCS stops becoming a political topic...
[1] I personally get upset about the people that don't want to use CCS in gas and coal facilities partly because of this. It is a great way to force mass adoption of these technologies. Plus, it isn't like we can just dump coal at this point. Pretty much for the same reason a heroin addict can't cut cold turkey. We're in too deep /minirant
More than half the concrete used in the world is in China, and the main reason for that is they use building infrastructure as a jobs program and consequently build a large amount of unnecessary structures. They could stop doing this and cut world concrete use nearly in half.
Meanwhile about 40% of CO2 emissions from concrete are as a result of fuel combustion for the kiln. There is no obvious reason this couldn't be done using a more sustainable fuel (wood/biomass) or some alternative heat-generation method.
> Another less sexy issue is air-conditioning/refrigeration and heating.
Air conditioning is almost entirely powered by electricity already, so if you solve generation you solve that. In theory heat can be the same -- electric heat pumps are very efficient. The biggest problem there is the economic cost of replacing everyone's oil and gas furnaces with electric heating, but it's not as though it's a technological problem. The solution is known. Impose a carbon tax and people would do it.
A carbon tax is really the best thing we could do, because it hacks at the problem from every angle. If you can make cement with less CO2, now it's more cost effective to do it that way. If you can't then it's more cost effective to use less cement. One way or another CO2 emissions go down. If you want them to go down more, make the tax higher. Right now the cost of emitting CO2 is effectively zero, which is not ideal.
Maybe it would.
Or maybe one of them would have blown up (lets say e.g. on 9.11.2001) and due to bad luck (winds not blowing onto the pacific, but towards densely populated areas during crucial hours) have rendered some major cities inhabitable for years or decades.
We will never know.
That said:
I agree that replacing nuclear power with coal power is insane.
I am for continuing nuclear research and for using nuclear power with designs which are inherently safe if it's cheaper than renewable alternatives at a given ___location.
Nuclear already provides 20% of our energy, and that with old dangerous plant designs, so we've already seen a healthy slice of that risk. Was avoiding the risks of building new reactors worth pumping our atmosphere full of carbon?
After 40 years of stubbornly refusing to use the green energy at our feet, solar and wind tech finally advanced enough to become practical, and they'll gain marketshare faster than people will give nuclear a fair shake, so they're pretty clearly the way forward.
The carbon-free atmosphere that nuclear could have delivered is just a historic could-have-been at this point, and we'll just have to live with the consequences of our bad decision.
That's right! Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown due to flooding. Or somewhere in the midwest where one suffered a Fukishima type disaster from a tornado. Or if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed and irradiated a massive area.
The fact is that nuclear energy carries real and tangible risks along with its benefits. Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks which only serves to increase skepticism among an already skeptical public.
> Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown
If the nuclear industry were a person, when it built Fukushima it wouldn't have been old enough to drive a car. Today, it would be retired. It learned a thing or two in the intervening years. If Fukushima had been built a mere 2 years later it wouldn't have had its fatal flaw. There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic.
> if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed
> Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks
The people who don't take the risks seriously are the people who refuse to perform numerical comparisons and instead make snap judgements on the basis of meltdowns being scary.
Other energy sources have risks too. The Banqiao dam makes Chernobyl look tame, but hydroelectric has a squeaky clean rep. Even solar and wind do worse per kWh, because their density is so low that they require (comparatively) tons of install work and upkeep, so the severe slip & fall accidents add up.
So yeah, we do care about the tangible and serious risks. We should pay more attention to them. I don't think that calculus points in the direction you think it does.
>There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic
Pretending that the only potential danger posed by nuclear power and its toxic byproducts come from older plants is exactly the attitude my post addressed. No system is perfect, even under "ideal" circumstances. Natural disasters, negligence, greed, incompetence and human error are only a few of the everpresent factors that lead to inevitable system breakdowns - no matter what sort of system it is. Its disheartening but not at all surprising that those who worship blindly at the altar of technology exhibit many of the same delusional tendencies that those who worship at other religious altars do.
>Other energy sources have risks too.
Every endeavor comes with potential risks and rewards - which should be dispassionately scrutinized and quantified. The fact is that nuclear power is uniformly touted as a risk free panacea by the overwhelming majority of its advocates and any discussion of the very real risks is ridiculed or dismissed.
Did you even bother to google where these plants are located? One of my colleagues' wives is an operator at Waterford. It shut down during the 2011 floods in good time.
Nuclear isn't failing because of safety or waste or political negativity. It's failing because it's too expensive. France is giving up on new nuclear plants because the can't build them sufficiently cheaply.
Ultimately, this comes back to the unforgiving complexity of nuclear technology. The plants have to be big to get economies of scale, but then they have so many critical parts that the economies of scale are illusory. A truly scalable technology is made of large numbers of mostly independent pieces that don't have to be so expensively reliable.
> France is giving up on new nuclear plants because the can't build them sufficiently cheaply.
No. France aiming at 50% of nuclear electricity (down from 75%) is a purely political move, to please some people that fear nuclear more than they fear climate change.
> Have you seen that I've used the word "some" in my sentence ?
You don't make politics for "some" people. You make politics for the majority. Focusing on some minor group interest doesn't give you votes especially if their viewpoints contradict those of the majority. So what's your point there? It does not make any sense.
> You obviously know that the costs you refer to through this article do not include storage. Nor do not talk about the lifecycle carbon emissions.
Of course they do. This is the way decisions fall if you decide between several energy sources. You take everything in account and in the end you make a decision. The decision is: less nuclear.
Not the parent, but I don't think you can seriously argue that all political decisions are for the good of the many. Most decisions have a vocal minority and the majority doesn't care left or right, which means the minority has sway.
And, it's generally accepted that carbon life cycle studies show nuclear has the least carbon footprint, including everything from uranium mining to waste disposal. Wind and (especially) solar has a larger footprint than nuclear, but wind can come close in some studies. The biggest reason for this is because the energy in nuclear fuel is so enormously concentrated that so little is required, that it offsets the carbon footprint from construction, waste management and everything else, while wind and solar power consume quite a bit of energy during construction (and mining for raw materials).
> Not the parent, but I don't think you can seriously argue that all political decisions are for the good of the many.
If anybody comes here with the argument that it's a political decision without bringing any proof, he can't expect that others will assume an exceptional case. Especially not in a topic like this where it's about serious money and a very clear opinion of the majority.
> And, it's generally accepted that carbon life cycle studies show nuclear has the least carbon footprint
Just as it is generally accepted that we've drowned too much money into this, that this money invested into renewables decades ago would have made coal unnecessary by now, that the technology is very dangerous, that the overdue reactors should have been gone by now, that we don't know what to do with the thousands of tons of radioactive waste, that all that artificial hype around nuclear even though there is nobody in the civilized western world who wants to pay for a reactor these days which may be there in a decade and eat up ridiculous amounts of money producing expansive power is purely an lobbyist effort by a industry which can't face the fact that their technology is dead.
So please...please...spare me the phrases you copied elsewhere. I've read them before you guys are repeating them on and on without thinking one step further into the reality out there and it even stopped being amusing. You make me sad.
I've never seen that anyone has been able to document this claim. Meanwhile it's pretty easy to show that nuclear today is too expensive. LCoE studies shows wind power being cheaper, and attempts at building nuclear reactors in Europe has repeatedly led to economic disasters.
You could argue that you could get the cost down if you make a huge push for nuclear. But the last time we did that it was a combined push for nuclear weapons and energy, which made it easier to get support and funding for education and research. Now the only major application is energy.
And though you could probably get the cost down to where it was before, the cost of renewables and storage is dropping very rapidly. It seems likely that renewables will reach a price point that nuclear could never catch up to, way before the cost of nuclear will be reasonable again. And since renewables will be so cheap, most countries will want at least 50% of energy to be renewable. And that will make covering the remaining 50% with nuclear more expensive, since you'd need more advanced and expensive load balancing power plants to support the renewables.
I also think that the fact that renewables give us an increasing amount of days with overproduction, i.e. extremely cheap electricity, might be a very good thing when we'll want to create more hydrogen and synthetic fuels.
> I've never seen that anyone has been able to document this claim.
Are you aware that the French ministry of environment justifies closing Fessenheim because nuclear emits too much greenhouse gases ?
And that some heads of EELV, the "green" french party, don't know what a life-cycle analysis is (or purposedly pretends not to know ) and asks for closing nuclear plants to be in line with the Paris 2015 climate deal ?
This helps figure out how rational the current moves against nuclear are.
> And though you could probably get the cost down to where it was before, the cost of renewables and storage is dropping very rapidly. It seems likely that renewables will reach a price point that nuclear could never catch up to, way before the cost of nuclear will be reasonable again. And since renewables will be so cheap, most countries will want at least 50% of energy to be renewable. And that will make covering the remaining 50% with nuclear more expensive, since you'd need more advanced and expensive load balancing power plants to support the renewables.
Without nuclear, with what life-cycle kgCO2e/kWh result, and when ?
In a post fossil fuel economy, and assuming CO2 from concrete manufacture is captured, CO2 emissions are zero.
The question of CO2 emission before then, as fossil fuels are being phased out, is less important. During that process the better question is how much CO2 emission can be avoided per $ invested. By that metric, renewables will be much better than new nuclear.
It's the 50% that's the political statement. It's not realistic, given the state of the French nuclear industry, and their recent experience at building reactors. And I'm pretty sure their politician know this. There are no commitments there, real commitments with real money, to stay nuclear.
Nuclear power hasn't become magically more expensive in the last decade or so, it's because it's been hit with taxes and fees in a lot of countries while renewables haven't (or, in some countries, renewables are still even subsidised). Nuclear power is cheaper if politics stay out of it.
All large power plant installations are given such loan guarantees, including wind power and solar power farms. It's a pretty good way for the government to make sure they are built.
A lot of countries, such as here in Sweden, have a separate nuclear power tax, and a large thermal power tax. Oil and coal, for example, only pay the latter here. These are in addition to the nuclear waste management fees. Nuclear power is the only power source that pays for proper waste disposal (coal, oil and gas just spews it into the atmosphere and wind power installations are simply buried after they expire).
So no, I'm not making it up. Nuclear power is heavily taxed which is the largest reason why it's suddenly turned uneconomical in the last decade.
Interesting, I had never heard of a country that subsidizes solar or wind by providing loan guarantees... Why would Sweden do it that way? It doesn't seem particularly helpful for a tech with such short loan terms and lower risk than nuclear.
That sounds surprising to me since different kinds of loan guarantees are common for large industrial installations and not unique to any trade. There are no specific ones for renewables that I'm aware of, so perhaps I gave that undue weight.
Over here, renewables are most heavily subsidised through elcertifikat[1], which is basically a tax per kWh on electricity brokers, given to producers of renewable energy. This cost is then passed on to the consumer. However, it's not a straight tax and it's a bit complicated, but a renewable source gets on average around 40% extra on top of the sale price[2]. We don't build new hydro power plants, and our climate isn't very suitable for large scale solar, so "building renewable energy" here basically means building a lot of wind power.
Nuclear power is then levied additional tax on top of this, which was raised quite substantially a few years ago by the Greens when in government. Note the nuclear waste disposal fee is separate to this tax.
Traditionally, our energy mix has been about 50/50 nuclear and hydro power, and some wind and others thrown in. Wind power is now increasing[3]. Nuclear power has historically been very profitable for us and our electricity prices have been very low by international standards, but there's an ongoing phase-out for wind power and the cost of electricity is steadily increasing.
That should give you some insight how and why renewables are heavily subsidied here and nuclear power heavily taxed. I'm sorry sources are in Swedish, a lot of the data seems to be unavailable in English.
I'm a brit and would be in favour of nuclear if it was cheap and safe but the progress of our Hinkley C reactor has not been promising on the 'cheap' bit.
>construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion,
Economics of nuclear will only be found with serial mass production, as in Korean APR-1400s, Japanese ABWRs, Russian VVERs, etc. One-off builds with inexperienced construction/management teams are guaranteed to be expensive.
We can still build many tens of GW of carbon-free nuclear per year if we ramp up a serial production capability, e.g. in a shipyard.
Batteries, wind, solar have high costs at deep decarbonization. The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining. Intermittency adds $30-$50/MWh at deep decarb, according to numerous EIA, NREL, OECD/NEA studies.
It's hard to see how nuclear, especially large nuclear, can compete with wind, solar and batteries into the future. All three of these technologies benefit from continuing cost reduction combined with incremental deployment. The "solar at night" problem is elegantly solved by recruiting electric vehicle batteries to pitch in at night and the dominance of EV's is pretty much assured at this point. So in a sense the batteries will come for free.
Further more, the wider the geographical spread of the wind/solar network the more the "lumps and bumps" of generation are averaged out. And making such large networks is also becoming cheaper and cheaper due to improvements in DC high voltage networks. Again these can be deployed incrementally.
Nuclear on the other hand is deployed in large and hugely expensive lumps of one nuclear plant at a time. Also the technology tends to be "frozen in time" at the point the design is made and there is a strong tendency of then keeping that design for decades at a time.
I'm not against nuclear per se. If wind/solar was not such a viable option nuclear would be good enough. Wind/solar from both a technological and financial perspective is just a much better choice. It's not a coincidence that we see Berkshire Hathaway up to their armpits in wind/solar these days, they know which side their bread is buttered on.
> The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining.
Yes and don't forget all the different subsidies and government grants renewable sources still get. All other sources of power, including nuclear, are generally hit with extra tax in a lot of countries.
Removing all the subsidies and pricing in the external factors shows why nuclear is not even a consideration today. Comparing LCOE (Levelized cost of energy), solar $32-42, wind $28-54, nuclear 118$-192.[0]
New construction of renewables are even competitive compared to the marginal cost of running already existing nuclear plants.
Try to make a business calculation based on that with both renewables and storage trending even lower, solar averaging 13% and on shore wind 7%. Every year.
Get the LCOE for nuclear down to $20-30 while maintaining the same, or presumably even better safety, and I'm all for building nuclear.
Those numbers simply don't make sense for several reasons. They are with subsidies (not without) as the web page itself states. The numbers for nuclear are likely based on the failed European projects as China and Russia are building a lot of new nuclear power plants cheaper than that.
The biggest issue, though, is LCOE completely ignores the costs associated with the intermittency of wind and solar power. The LCOE is artifically low for intermittent sources and vice-versa for baseload power sources (coal, nuclear, hydro, etc.). When the conditions are right, wind and solar produce a lot of power, but this is not correlated with power demand, and the market price per kWh goes down so much during that time that baseload power is not profitable. Baseload power production is reduced, but the total installed base must remain the same (because you need power when the sun doesn't shine), so LCOE goes up.
LCOE is, conversely, too low for intermittent sources because it only cares about total accumulated production, not if the power was produced when it was actually needed.
I don't know what you're reading but it clearly states unsubsidized wind in the second graph (which has the same value as the first graph).
Regarding subsididies while it does not receive the most subsidies now nuclear has received 66% of the R&D and demonstration subsidies from 1974-2007 in the EU. It still receives about half of what solar receives [1]. So despite it having received much more subsidies previously its still not viable.
I'm sorry, I have misread your source. It clearly states "unsubsidized". My bad.
I think my points about the LCOE still stand, though. The LCOE is not a good measurement for comparing intermittent and baseload power sources. Nuclear in particular suffers here since the capital costs are very high compared to operating costs. A nuclear power plant needs to run close to maximum power all the time for maximum profitability. This artifically inflates the numbers for nuclear while lowering the apparent cost for intermittent sources.
Regarding your second paragraph, I'm not sure if you're arguing that the EU spends half the amount on nuclear power R&D as solar power R&D, or if you're talking about subsidies for the plants themselves. I'd argue grants for R&D projects would be very hard to count in a meaningful way, and I don't think e.g. a research grant that results in more efficient solar voltaic cells should count as a subsidy towards solar power, nor nuclear fission research as a subsidy towards nuclear power.
The EU provides grants for constructing e.g. wind power farms. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with every country, but in Sweden, renewables are given a large cashback grant per kWh generated ("elcertifikat"). Nuclear power here has been profitable since the 70s, and didn't turn unprofitable until taxes on nuclear power were increased substantially a few years ago.
Thank you. This is why I think the real debate is 'nuclear vs renewables' instead of 'nuclear vs coal'. Because renewables and nuclear are both chasing the same limited subsidies to compete with technology that doesn't price in negative externalities.
Mainstream acceptance is like third or maybe fourth on the list of biggest roadblocks to nuclear power. The simple truth is that nuclear electricity is outrageously expensive relative not just to gas but to renewables. The plants represent huge investments, and waste storage remains a problem that has literally never been solved by the market (i.e. nuclear waste processing has always been a government subsidy in some form or another).
Nuclear needs to make sense on a balance sheet first before you'll see uptake from environmentalists like me. But it'll happen. Make it a cheap carbon-free energy source and I guarantee you we'll advocate for it. Right now it mostly looks like another boondoggle.
I work in environmental impact assessment and most of our major projects have substantial opposition, usually on environmental grounds. That is true of schemes that are usually seen favourable by environmentalists. But government's can and do ignore that opposition if they want something built.
Also, these kind of comment threads talk about "environmentalists" or even "ecologists" as a single homogeneous group. That is simply not true. Most people in rich countries care about the environment to some degree but differ hugely in what they prioritize. The environment is a big topic that is more complex than just yes/no questions.
It emits much less greenhouse gasses per MWh than "green" energies. Plus you admit yourself that you didn't research the numbers, that's patently ridiculous. Shame on you, too.
That us simply not true, I will dig out the study later when not on mobile, but wind has an energy (which is closely related to co2) ROI of 18 month or less, that is in about 19 month you have recouped the energy you put into building it. For nuclear this is around 40 years (I'm not sure if the numbers included decommissioning). Considering that both produce relatively little to no co2 during operation it's clear that relative wind wins by quite a margin. For solar the time was quite a bit longer IIRC (not 40 years however)
I believe anti-vaccine advocates are there for the sole reason of getting the votes of the anti-vaccine-minded people (and for pushing some into this category just to get their votes). It's improbable real politicians are suicidal enough to actually risk facing a pandemia once they get to power.
The only way I can understand it is incredible shortsightedness. In other words, it's not "close the nuclear plant and open a coal plant". They see it as "close the nuclear plant" and don't think about it any further than that.
Coal is on the way out also. It won't be "close nuclear and replace with coal". It's "close nuclear and replace with things much cleaner than coal (gas or, increasingly, renewables.)
I'm going to need a few citations because this is an ongoing and highly controversial debate within the climate community. Considering that, it isn't a smart decision to remove nuclear from the conversation all together. I'd go as far as saying removing it from the conversation is anti-scientific.
I want you to look up how many new coal plants have been built in the US in the last five years. Answer: just one, a tiny oneat the University of Alaska. During that time, many nuclear plants were retired here. Shutting down nuclear did not lead to a resurgence of coal. Instead, coal is collapsing. Large steam thermal baseload plants are increasingly uncompetitive, coal or nuclear.
Not the parent poster, but you should add what's actually being built: a lot of gas plants. They're cleaner than coal, but lets be honest, still not particularly good for the environment.
To be fair, that statement was in the grandparent and not the post I replied to. However, I'd argue
> Large steam thermal baseload plants are increasingly uncompetitive, coal or nuclear.
is generally wrong, since gas power plants are "large steam thermal baseload plants" and they're very much competitive. Large baseload plants are just as necessary now as they used to be since we'll still need power when the wind doesn't blow. The problem is nuclear needs to run at max power all the time to be profitable.
There's ways that you can not run at max power with nuclear reactors. Especially if you include advances from modern reactors (i.e. reactors that weren't designed 50 years ago).
You can also use that energy to charge batteries or pump water uphill the same way you would with excess solar and wind power. Doing so means you need a lower baseload.
Also, another idea, why not use that excess energy to sequester carbon? We do need to be carbon negative.
Technically, there are ways to run nuclear reactors at below full power. But economically, it's ruinous to do so. Almost all the costs of a nuclear plant are fixed. The already poor levelized cost of the plant's output becomes even worse.
You could charge batteries with nuclear output, but why do so, when other sources are cheaper? And the battery charging can be moved around in time, so the intermittency of those sources is less of a problem.
Similarly, why use expensive energy to sequester carbon when cheap energy could be used instead?
No, you are mistaken. CC plants have a steam bottoming cycle, but 2/3rds of the power comes from the combustion turbine front end. This gives them a very large advantage over systems where all the power has to go through the steam. And simple cycle plants require no heat exchangers, steam cycle, or cooling water at all.
That is not quite correct. There was a lot of discussion about the coal plant in question (Datteln 4). It is ready built, but might not have gotten into the operation at all. In the end, it seems it goes into production replacing some very old east german coal plants which get shut down early. Supposedly, the new plant is cleaner and more efficient than the aged cold plants it replaces. Usage of coal in Germany is in a strong decline, as CO2 certificates and the carbon tax are making it less and less attractive for the power companies.
Closing the nuclear power plants certainly increases the challenges in becinung CO2 neutral, but we are talking about aging power plants which would have to be closed pretty soon anyway.
Which is an even bigger problem for France, its fleet of reactors is approaching the end of the life time and there are not enough new reactors being built to replace the aging reactors. So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that, independant of ecological concerns.
> So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that
Not for now, Fessenheim wasn't closed because of its age evaluated by the French ASN, but because of the assessment of the risks of its age by the French EELV party, politicians.
Not sure what you mean by "not of its age" when it was the oldest operating reactor in France and the one with the worst security precautions. There was also a significant amount of pressure from the German side (main affected by a possible large accident) about its safety.
But yes, I was mostly speaking about the future - as the ramp up of renewables is rather slow in France, of course they try to keep their reactors running as long as possible. But this only delays the inevitable.
Yes, but they could probably be safely delaid by decades.
You don't close a reactor because it is the oldest or the worst security, you close if its security doesn't or can't meet some criterias.
> There was also a significant amount of pressure from the German side (main affected by a possible large accident) about its safety.
Well another accident, not highly hypothetical, is happening right now : German coal plants polute our air, leading to thounsands of deaths yearly, and contributes to climate change with certainty.
My understanding is, that there are some big safety concerns with that power plant. As are with others still operating (Tihange).
Yes, I am very unhappy with the amount of coal being burnt in Germany and I fully support a quicker exit from that. Fortunately, it is strongly declining, but it could be faster.
If we can just get some carbon tax, I think these projects will be be forced into existence whether people like it or not, which in turn will allow a higher carbon tax.
Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off.
Forget the word tax then. Every instance of releasing carbon must pay for recapturing said carbon given current infrastructure and technology to bring us to carbon 0. It doesn't particularly matter who this money flows through, as long as the real costs are paid by polluters to clean up their mess.
What is mainstream? Western world? I think that many countries are building nuclear plants and will build more, for example China where real world production concentrates nowadays.
The great majority of countries are not building nuclear plants. There are only 19 countries in which reactors are currently under construction, and some of those reactors would not have been started had it been understood what the economics would turn out to be.
I wonder what will happen when people realize there are other sources of radioactive waste [1] ... they may either seek to reduce those as well or lose interest in eliminating nuclear energy.
I have a possibly rude but serious question. Do you think French culture, which stereotypically at least is more at home with a centralized, top-down control, might be more suited for nuclear development than Angloamerican which tends to be more ad hoc?
I tend to believe technocracy should be encouraged. I wish science could have an important place in politics, and hold some form of power. Maybe the word scio-cracy should be invented.
> And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more.
The problem with nuclear is that they don't have the lobby and the political backing that oil and gas does.
> Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down.
"Partially" while we fight with the russians over who gets to supply germany with natural gas.
Much of the geopolitical issues today results from the fight over who gets sell gas where and who buys gas from whom. When you supply energy to a country, you have leverage over a country. It's why we limit how much energy russia supplies to japan, korea, etc. It's why we got upset when russia built a major pipeline from siberia to china. It's also why russia wants to build more pipelines to germany/europe. It's also why iran is such a major issue ( guess who has the largest gas reserves in the world? ).
"Clean gas" isn't winning because they are "cleaner" than anything, it's because the players backing gas are much more powerful than those backing nuclear. In the near term, it will be "clean" oil and gas dominating the energy sector. Unless Trump is successful with his "clean" coal.
Many players backing U.S. shale gas are just naive and greedy investors who are getting their haircut as I write it. European countries, which counted on long term U.S. LNG imports and invested in required infrastructure, e.g. Poland, are in for a rude awakening.
Don't forget Russian gas. Eastern Europe is still heavily reliant on Russia for gas supplies, and Germany is heavily expanding its use (look at the Nord Stream pipelines). Nuclear power phase-out means more reliance on Russian gas and Russia extending its sphere of influence. As a European, I really don't like that scenario.
Oh please, you make it look like it wasn't Germany jumping in when your old and already long overdue reactors fell apart again and need to be shut down for repairs or when your rivers were too hot because...summer and they couldn't provide cooling anymore.
Germany is moving away from coal. They have a plan, a timeline and everything that was slowing them down was politics. There are voters to be lost around coal. Especially in the east where right wing populists are getting strong.
It was not about power requirements (https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374) and the only reason this one coal plant is being opened is because they got the allowance for it before the whole political process started and buying them out of it would cost even more than the industry is getting through massive lobbying.
Which brings us back to costs: those astronomical amounts of money Germany drowned into nuclear energy just to sit on it's remains for hundreds and hundreds of years costing the taxpayer while they get nothing back for it.
There is absolutely no need for more of the same when there are alternative energies which get better from year to year and decade to decade and do not leave radioactive was behind them.
The whole article reads like a punchline for a joke involving Admiral Rickover's famous letter. (We just had a thread on it here not two weeks ago!)
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
I appreciate Rickover's quote more and more every year in I spend in the nuclear industry. My hope for some of these reactors, especially the very small ones, is that they will provide a way for new reactor designers to get some practical experience while risking less than a few billion dollars.
We should have built more nuclear 20 years ago, but it seems it's too late now. The design of reactors that are actually built is extremely conservative, it still takes forever to plan them and get appropriate permissions, and then they take nearly a decade to build. Meanwhile the price of wind+storage is dropping. If you were to start planning a new reactor now, by the time it's operational it might be uneconomical to even turn on. And even if it isn't, it's extremely unlikely that you make your investment back over the lifespan of the plant, especially once you add the decommissioning (which is more expensive than the construction of the plant, because a lot of the structure turns slightly radioactive).
We had our chance, we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs. Now the economics of those designs no longer make sense for new plants, and nobody is going to risk a fortune on building unproven large-scale reactor designs. There's some opportunity with reactors sized like those on ships, but that's it.
> we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs
There's this popular idea that the reason nuclear never moved beyond 60s tech is because some evil conspiracy, too stupid populace, or both.
In reality, billions were poured in research especially during the 80s for more advanced designs, but it is a classic hard problem. It is both a physics and an engineering problem, with plenty of unknown unknowns.
Breeder reactors were already built 30 years ago and they spent more time under repair than delivering energy, after building costs have already been overrun many times over. To make the case that we should build more of the same, better arguments are needed.
We were unable to build more nuclear power twenty years ago for the same reason we can't do it now, and it's never too late: it's only against someone's interests
And the interests are purely financial, at least in the US. We can achieve carbon free electricity far cheaper by using renewables and storage. Nuclear construction is suuuuuuuper expensive, and perhaps more importantly, incredibly financially risky. The chances of completing a build are very low, and the chance of spending billions of dollars and having nothing to show are unacceptably high.
If nuclear were our only option, we would have to go for it. But we now have better, cheaper, faster, more economically efficient carbon free energy sources.
Many parts of the world will not be serviceable by solar. Too much darkness over extended periods. Storage is also still a huge issue that has its own particular environmental consequences. If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable? I doubt there is anything that raises standards of living quicker than abundant energy.
Old style reactors are "suuuuuuuper expensive", but several modern designs may be much less expensive. Older designs were inherently unstable and needed many layers of safety systems to "guarantee" safety. This of course also needed many layers of regulation and validation to make sure it would actually work. The rest of your concerns about completing builds hinge on these same factors.
A modern design that is inherently stable and safe should require a much simpler overall system design. We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
> If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable?
We have tried, and we have failed to make it affordable. And I think that it's unlikely that it will ever be affordable, because no matter how advanced the nuclear side of it is, it's still going to be used to boil water and drive a steam turbine for the business end of making electricity.
The thing about renewables and storage is that they cut our the Carnot cycle. All those steam turbines have been super optimized over the past centuries, and our materials science isn't making that process any cheaper any more.
Renewables and storage cut out that thermal process, and therefor have the ability to severely undercut the costs of all thermal process electricity generation. And from the way that cost curves are still falling like a rock, it really looks like they will be cheaper than just the thermal turbines and cooling systems that are required for thermal electricity generation. Which means that no matter how cheap and affordable nuclear becomes (lets say it's absolutely free), the 20th century tech of using steam to make electricity will be too expensive to compete with renewables and storage.
There are very few areas that won't be serviceable by some mixture of renewables, and those that aren't will liked be serviceable by fuels that are generated from renewables (hydrogen, methanol, methane, whatever ends up having the best properties.)
> We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
It's funny, because I 100% agree with the words in the sentence, but in the sense that nuclear is only advocated for because of emotional, tribal, and political connections to it (not necessarily all at the same time). When looking at our current technological capabilities, and construction abilities, nuclear is just not a very desirable technology due to its high degree of complexity. It requires high levels of skills that we no longer are very good at: managing extremely
complex construction and physical design of large structures, extremely skilled welding, concrete pours, etc. Stuff that we were good at in the 20th century, but no longer.
But we all grew up with the idea that nuclear was the "next" technology on a hierarchy of progression. And then we'd have fusion. And then space travel likely powered by fusion. But when reevaluating that "hierarchy" with actual technological development, I think that the futurists is the past got it wrong, and that all the sci-fi and video games we grew up on missed this one particular aspect of which technologies would win out.
I agree with you that renewables are cheaper and getting cheaper still in the future. As an example, in California there's 27 GW installed solar power right now with an additional 16 GW to be installed in the next 5 years [1].
However, while nuclear power is super expensive, it doesn't have to be that way. The problem is that nuclear power costs are not linear with the output. If the only thing you build is 1GW reactors, they will essentially all be one-of-a-kind. They will all run into production issues, the construction will happen so rarely that you won't build an experienced workforce, you will never enter a virtuous cycle to allow for ever decreasing costs.
Contrast that with the naval nuclear reactors. They are being built in New York State [2], at a pace of about 2 per year, using a very static design. The whole thing is so uneventful that most people in New York State are not even aware of that. Each of these reactors produces 210 MW [3]. The cost is classified, but it appears to be of the order of $100MM [4].
So, how can you enter the virtuous cycle? By reducing scale. And this is exactly what this project is about. I for one am rooting for it.
The types of reactors in this article may work out economically, and for the health of the world, having more carbon free options would be fantastic. However I'm extremely skeptical on this actually working out in practice; only time will tell!
As for naval reactors in particular, that's the first analysis that I have ever seen that puts them at such a low cost, so that's very valuable info, thank! Most of the time people say that nuclear reactors are far more expensive than civilian reactors, but I've never seen numbers out to it. (I'm not a nuclear expert, but try to listen to as many as I can, and naval reactors are most often referred to as super expensive). The other challenges with the naval design is that it uses highly enriched uranium which is 1) extremely expensive, and 2) not likely to ever be in civilian hands. I think that the highly enriched fuel also shifts some of the cost from construction to fuel costs, in that the higher energy density has benefits. Also, I think that the cooling system could potentially be far cheaper for these systems, as they are sitting in coolant, and don't need to worry about overheating local ecosystems. The high cost of modernizing the cooling system for Diablo Canyon is what stopped its owner from pursuing a license extension.
I found a more reliable source for the cost of naval nuclear reactors: the Congressional Budget Office [1]. They investigated what it would cost to switch some surface ships from conventional to nuclear power. The main result:
"CBO estimated that the acquisition-cost premium for a nuclear ship would be about $1.1 billion per destroyer, $0.8 billion per LSD(X), and $0.9 billion per LH(X)".
In particular for the last class LH(X) (helicopter carriers, similar to the Wasp class), the reactors would be two A1B used in the Gerald Ford class of aircraft carriers, which generate about 700 MW.
Carbon free renewables will always be a partial solution. People aren't willing to endure rolling brownouts because of low winds or long stretches of overcast weather, and the storage required to solve those issues are never baked into the cost estimates under which these technologies are considered competitive.
People have been saying we would have rolling brownouts once we got to 5% renewables. Then when that happened without any ill effects, they said it would happen at 10%. Then 15%. It doesn't matter, because it has always been a false talking point, without any basis in fact. It simply doesn't make sense unless one can only imagine large thermally driven plants and you don't want to have to change grid management from what you were doing in the 1960.
We can do 90% renewable energy, and even 100%, with storage and curtailment. How much we need of each is simply a cost trade off. If we could build nuclear now for less than $100/MWh, it may have a place in this cost optimization problem, but we can't, so it doesn't have a place until nuclear technology catches up to the 21st century.
>...People have been saying we would have rolling brownouts once we got to 5% renewables.
Who ever claimed that?
>...We can do 90% renewable energy, and even 100%, with storage and curtailment.
That would not be very difficult with current technology. Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.
For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity:
>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.
I disagree. Renewables will be able to supply 100% of the world's energy needs, more cheaply than nuclear ever could. A nd yes, this includes the cost of storage.
Claims that renewables cannot handle things typically make the stupid assumption that long term variations in demand/supply are to be covered with batteries.
When one studies renewable energy, inevitably one will come across people who think that Tesla's (or someone more obscure's) greatest invention had been 'suppressed' by monied interests that don't want us to have nice things. Of course, it's invariably the same story, it might have worked but wasn't profitable to build.
It's peculiar how similar a sentiment the pro-nuclear crowd expresses. I wonder whether there's an overlap in patterns of thought between the communities.
> If nuclear were our only option, we would have to go for it. But we now have better, cheaper, faster, more economically efficient carbon free energy sources.
Based on first principle analysis nuclear fuel is basically free, and the actual materials contained in a nuclear reactor is very small and cheap compared to wind or solar of equal power output.
Eventually it will be too late, and arguably it is already too late. Once climate change hits critical points like permafrost thawing or the loss of substantial parts of the Greenland ice sheet it doesn't matter anymore what we do. I doubt that we can build a sufficient number of nuclear plants in the next twenty years or so to prevent that from happening.
Your pessimism now is not helpful in the future. I also expect irreversible climate change and I certainly don't welcome it but to paraphrase: I'd rather die on my feet than surrender and die on my knees.
It is possible we need to emerge into a lower power intensity world.
I think that renewable energy has a much larger chance of effecting change: It requires a much lower up front investment and has almost immediate benefits. A couple of solar cells and batteries can be financed by every middle class person. And additionally the construction doesn't take 10+ years, a small renewable installation delivers power basically immediately. In contrast nuclear power plants take years just for planning and have mind boggling up front costs.
A steady buildup of renewables is much more likely to be sustainable politically than a crash program of building nuclear that costs a fortune today and only shows its benefits in more than a decade.
You're ignoring one of the largest problems with renewables: they're not actually replacing fossil fuels, they're replacing nuclear power which was almost carbon neutral to begin with. The intermittency of wind and solar means the profitability of nuclear plants goes down (because the capital costs are enormous, they should be run close to max capacity 24/7).
Baseload power is still needed, just as before, but the new source replacing nuclear seems to be gas. This means, unfortunately, that the current trend prioritizing wind and solar power will mean a larger net carbon footprint when we need to reduce it. This is really bad for the future.
The whole way the regulatory system was changed basically made making new designs impossible.
In the 60s literally 100s of nuclear reactors were build and tested. Many with pretty small budget, and amazing innovation were achieved. But then the government started to turn against nuclear, defended all but a few projects, made access to nuclear material basically impossible, put in a regulatory system that made it 99.9999999% impossible for any new reactor to be ever licensed.
I do not think it is to late, nuclear is still the most efficient method based on a first principle analysis. The question is just can we develop a commercial product.
Fukushima was a big influence in the most recent hate on nuclear energy. In laymans views, the fact that a (perceived to be) secure, organized country such as Japan had such a terrible nuclear incident, meant that every nuclear plant on the planet was dangerous and we were being lied about.
Politicians simply moved along that line. It doesn't matter that coal is worse for the environment. A nuclear incident can cost your head. Climate change? Clearly nobody cares.
This is the saddest misconception that keeps getting trotted out in opposition to nuclear power. People use Fukushima as an example that nuclear power isn't improving in safety, when Fukushima was an old plant around even before Chernobyl. They didn't redesign the plant or substantially alter anything in the wake of Chernobyl. It was built to withstand loss of power, a massive earthquake, and a tsunami all at the same time. The fatal flaw was that when the plant was sited and built, scientific consensus was that a tsunami that large in that area was flat out impossible. As the science improved, no one went back and understood the implications on the design of the seawall that was now known to be inadequate.
Fukushima was a failure, and an expensive one at that, but in terms of the death toll almost all of it is solely from evacuation of the surrounding area and only one case of lung cancer that was likely caused by the accident. There were zero cases of acute radiation poisoning.
"...it will run out of space by 2022, and then they will have to dump radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. It is not known yet how much water would need to be put into the ocean."
If all the stored water was dumped in a single year, the population's estimated radiation dose is around 0.02% of yearly background radiation. It's really not a problem.
Not to mention that the tiny increase is almost a decade of stored water (but not a decade of Tritium coming out of the reactor due to the relatively short half life of tritium). If it was just releasing enough stored water to make room for more untreated water to be processed the level would be even lower. Also unless something has changed wasn't there a plan for injecting the treated water into some stable geologic structure? In which case no radioactive tritium would be released to the environment and by the time the water could possibly permeate out and up to aquifers the tritium would have already decayed. The "dump it in the sea" plan is only on the table because it would be pretty inconsequential, especially in comparison to the standards the fossil fuel industry is held to in regards to naturally occuring radioactive material.
Yes, due to radon gas from the ground which is really a big problem in Scandinavia. Just making sure nobody thinks a big part of the accumulated dose when living here is due to Chernobyl.
We've got the same problem over here in Sweden, granite in a lot of places. We also, just for good measure, constructed a lot of buildings in the 50s and 60s from radioactive autoclaved aerated concrete made from alum shale containing high concentrations of uranium. Fun days. Apparently there's still half a million homes here exceeding the radon limit of 200 Bq/m3 indoors.
Even using the No-Threshold model the numbers are tiny (130 globally). And as Wikipedia notes in the opening paragraphs the December 2012 UNSCEAR statement uses polite language to remind everyone that No-Threshold linear is a really stupid model.
For me, I don't think the huge impact to the lives of the people displaced from the lands that was home to their culture and communities for generations should be overlooked in any discussion of what is acceptable costs of a power generation accident.
No-Threshold linear may actually underestimate the number of cancers produced. Looking at the amount of skin cancer in Australia it’s best modeled as different people have different prior exposure which shifts the individual odds around quite a bit.
The sun is dosing us with so much energy I can feel my skin getting warm and collect the energy to get useful work out of a small solar panel. It'll burn skin in as few as 15 minutes (ie, skin starts to redden and die) in the Australian summer.
I'm unconvinced that is a low dose. Exposure to direct sunlight would be an unacceptable risk in a work environment except we can't figure out how to ban it while still being taken seriously. NTLM is dealing with doses that are far below OH&S limits.
It’s a question of received dose. Sitting in an cave you’re getting a lot of thermal energy, but that’s harmless. Where if you’re receiving that same energy in day x-ray’s it’s quickly lethal.
It bemuses me that some pro-nuclear people want to do away with the LNT assumption, not realizing that a replacement could be even harder on nuclear. If the actual dose/response curve has a steeper slope at very low radiation levels (too low to directly measure the effects) then the health consequences of nuclear accidents could become much worse. And ruling this out would be very difficult.
Wait, how did you arrive at that conclusion? All nuclear accidents so far have resulted in very low doses to the average individual. Of course this doesn't apply to plant workers in the direct vicinity of e.g. the Chernobyl accident, but since those are very few compared to the population of a country, the number of estimated cancer cases should go down.
Let's consider the risk of cancer from radiation as a function of the radiation dose. This is some function, call it f. If I am receiving a dose r, and then get an additional does dr, then the additional risk is f(r+dr)-f(r). Or, this is f'(r)dr, where f' is the slope of f at r.
This is simple calculus. For LNT, f(r) is assumed to be a linear function of r, so the slope is the same everywhere. In this case, we don't need to know the actual dose someone gets, just the increment; an increment of dr in the dose causes the same risk of cancer. This allows the risk to a population to just be computed from the total population incremental dose.
But if f is NOT linear, the slope will be higher in some places than LNT would imply (this again is a simple theorem from calculus). For example, suppose f'(r) is higher at very low dose, but less than LNT above some threshold dose level (that is, the curve us concave downward). In this case, the risk of cancer from some extra dose dr will be higher down in that low dose area.
Is this plausible? I don't think it's ruled out. Radiation apologists would have us believe in radiation hormesis, in which radiation induces repair mechanisms. Under that hypothesis, the slope of the curve below a threshold at which this induction occurs could be steeper than LNT would imply.
> But if f is NOT linear, the slope will be higher in some places than LNT would imply (this again is a simple theorem from calculus).
What does that even mean? That is junk maths, I don't believe there is such a theory. A line can have any gradient and I can always come up with an arbitrary curve that has a lower or equal gradient at every point that matches the line.
A model that matches LNT exactly to some threshold then the risk drops to 0, for example. Not higher than the LNT anywhere in any negative sense.
It's a consequence of the Mean Value Theorem. Suppose a differentiable function f has f(0) = 0 and f(1) = 1. Then, either f is linear (f(x) = x), or there is some point y for which f(y) != y. If f(y) > y, then by the MVT there must be some point z betwenn 0 and y for which f'(z) >= f(y)/y > 1. If f(y) < y, then again by the MVT there is some point z between y and 1 for which f'(z) > (1 - f(y))/(1 - y) > 1.
That isn't making a sensible point. f(x) is the risk at dose x. If f(x) = x under the LNT and g(x) = {0: x<0.5, x: x>0.5} then the Mean Value Theorum is satisfied and the non-linear g() is equal to or less risky than the LNT for any dose.
g(x) is a linear-with-threshold model by the way. The steeper slope (infinte, in fact) found in the model would be a huge theoretical positive for nuclear.
OF course it's making a sensible point. If the dose response function is not linear (and is a differentiable function, as any physically real function must be) then it will have a point where the derivative is greater than for LNT.
Your example is discontinuous. This is not physically realistic. Any "real" function, describing the response of a population with random individual exposures and differences, will be smoothed, and so be better behaved.
It also misses the point that when you abandon LNT, you don't also get to say "and now we'll assume the function is even more favorable to my political agenda". Sure, it's possible the actual function makes it better for nuclear advocates. But it's also possible it makes it worse. Are the policy makers going to be on your side just because?
> Your example is discontinuous. This is not physically realistic. Any "real" function, describing the response of a population with random individual exposures and differences, will be smoothed, and so be better behaved.
Eh. If you like. If you use a continuous analogue the argument doesn't change at all.
> It also misses the point that when you abandon LNT, you don't also get to say "and now we'll assume the function is even more favorable to my political agenda". Sure, it's possible the actual function makes it better for nuclear advocates. But it's also possible it makes it worse. Are the policy makers going to be on your side just because?
I actually do get to say that. There is no evidence that insignificant doses of radiation do any damage. In the absence of evidence of harm after 40 years of study, we can safely assume that the harm is undetectably small and can be ignored.
People can wave around numbers from a model, but the model is stupid and there is no reason to believe it. In the absence of a good model, I get to assume that we should make decisions based on the observed evidence.
> OF course it's making a sensible point.
As far as I've been able to determine, your mathematical argument is the gradient of a non-linear function is not constant. There is room for improvement in your explanation; unless that is your point in which case it is not a sensible point. The argument is that we should abandon the LNT model in favour of empirical evidence, ie, no harm done.
> There is no evidence that insignificant doses of radiation do any damage.
A single high energy photon causes DNA damage which is easy to replicate. The theory you are supporting refers to rates of cancer, but has zero direct evidence from cancer rates to support it. And that’s the problem, science defaults to the older theory which in this case is the linear model.
> A single high energy photon causes DNA damage which is easy to replicate.
Which is relevant but unpersuasive; for me to agree +-1 photon to make any difference to getting cancer I'd have to suspend everything I know about statistics. We get hit by an ungodly number of high energy photons. If one cases cancer, there are probably others.
At some point, the doses become to small to matter.
> science defaults to the older theory
No it doesn't. Science defaults to the simplest/most likely theory and chooses the balance between those two things based on evidence. Age of the theory has nothing to do with it.
We have evidence that the flat earth theory is wrong, for example. Nobody can claim it is a serious contender despite being an ancient theory.
Similarly, there is evidence that the LNT is stupid. So while people can claim it is a contender because the evidence is weaker than for the globe it shouldn't be a default. The default should have a threshold below which we admit we've seen no evidence of any harm and people have been looking for decades. There is a lot of cancer out there naturally.
And even then the most likely truth of the matter is that nuclear accidents are good for cancer outcomes because it makes people actually screen for cancer. Then they catch all the non-nuclear related stuff.
It’s a default specifically when you have no evidence to replace the existing theory. Flat earth fails on evidence, radiation threshold fails for lack of evidence to support it over an older theory. It’s a very different situation.
It’s known that it takes multiple mutations to get cancer, but people are constantly getting cancer thus there must exist people that have almost gotten cancer and will get it from a single unlucky photon in a specific ___location. And other people who will get every other mutation eventually.
Thus from all known evidence we have the minimum threshold for extra radiation causing cancer and everything else being equal is exactly one photon. Calculating specific odds is much more difficult, but any theory that has some radiation level as absolutely safe is wrong.
That’s not to say it’s a pure linear relationship, but the slope can’t be zero.
Note, I am not saying a linear model is accurate and I doubt it is. But the threshold has both massive theoretical issues and zero direct support. Putting it next to string theory as an interesting theory, but completely untested science.
> Flat earth fails on evidence, radiation threshold fails for lack of evidence to support it over an older theory.
We've got oodles of evidence. People have been looking to black-eye the nuclear proponents for 40 years after Chernobyl and nobody has turned up any evidence. At some point, maybe 20 years, maybe 30 years or even 40 years the overwhelming lack of any evidence of harm becomes evidence that none was done.
> That’s not to say it’s a pure linear relationship, but the slope can’t be zero.
Well no that isn't true. Stepping out of the nuclear realm, this is very similar to arguing that a railgun will blast a hole in a building, a wrecking ball will knock a smaller hole in a building and therefore enough youths punching buildings will statistically knock one over.
That isn't going to happen. If that logic works out we are talking a seriously troubled building. A building that a stiff breeze could knock over, and a building that is almost surely knocked over before the youths get to it to punch it. The slope becomes indistinguishable from zero - in fact, it probably is zero. I doubt you'll want to contest that but if you do I would encourage some reflection on what a feeble hill that is to fight on vs real-life policies that actually matter for bringing energy to millions of humans and saving a measurable number of lives vs coal power or even solar installation.
This argument that thresholds are impossible is taking no cues from all the other forces, where there are clear thresholds below which no damage is done. An equivalent number of spaced out flicks deals nowhere near the damage of a punch, and there is a threshold below which force does no practical harm. Your argument we shouldn't take cues from the other forces is the first people to look at the problem drew a straight line through the data and therefore you don't want to accept that vanishingly small forces are probably irrelevant. An opinion held in an unscientific defiance of the preponderance of evidence, I cheerfully add.
There is zero direct evidence for departure from the LNT at the doses that would be relevant for the larger population in a nuclear accident. The reason is simple: for any individual, the extra chance of cancer would be so small that it could not be detected in the very large background of cancer from all sources.
Suppose a vending machine gives 20 soda for 20$. If someone walks up and inserts 1$ and can get 0 soda, but if they insert an extra 19$ they get 20 soda.
If that’s true then for some amount between 1$ and 20$ inserting an extra 1$ must let you get more than 1 soda in order for it to be handing out 20 soda at 20$.
PS: Back to cancer, if it’s 19 cancer at 20x then you can keep a 1:1 relationship at 2+x and 0 cancer at 1x. Then again if you can’t tell if it’s 19 cancer or 20 cancer then it might just be 21 cancer.
It’s the linear model which suggests those low doses are mostly safe, it may be a more accurate model means average adults are at say 1/2 the risk of linear models. But, say children are at 10x risk, babies are at 100x risk, and Fedus are at 1,000x higher risk than those linear models suggest. Thus because of a high risk to a significant population it’s even more dangerous.
It’s very easy to find some way a specific model is wrong in one direction, but hard to say if that’s the only adjustment you need to make. Ex: Counting better cancer treatments making nuclear safer while ignoring longer lifespans making it more dangerous.
That's true, but I think most other models assume there's a lowest dosage which is totally safe? For very low doses, even if LNT predicts a very low rate, it still a lot of cancer cases for a population of several million. Even if there would be very vulnerable groups, it's hard to imagine a model that predicts more cases than LNT for very low doses.
There are a huge range of models, it’s not clear which ones are correct. Nuclear proponents tend to push threshold models suggesting there are safe doses.
On the other hand: “Approximately 38.4% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2013–2015 data).“
That makes it very hard to validate small changes and any reasonable study size is going to fall below the noise floor. In other words people pushing those models lack any direct evidence to support them.
The Fukushima earthquake was the biggest in over 1000 years of known Japanese history, and it hit in the exact area to overwhelm the considerable tsunami walls.
Given that no security system can prevent 100% of accidents, that one seems like it's in the allowable error margin to me.
The construction flaw where some important machinery ended up under water is less forgivable, sure.
Coal and nuclear are already on life support at this point.
Nuclear and coal needs a 50 year lifespan to hit current cost estimates. Meanwhile power plants are being shut down early because operating costs are already to high let alone construction costs.
This is a worldwide economic situation, with many players hedging their bets but that’s about it.
IQ2 had a debate on nuclear power. One of the arguments against expansion was that nuclear reactor design is basically bespoke for every installation and that the promise of rapid, cheap deployment has not been realized in many years (decades).
> nuclear reactor design is basically bespoke for every installation
Which is exactly what new modular designs like the one described in this article are trying to change: get away from the custom-built mentality and build nuclear reactors out of standardized, modular components. In other words, the way we already build lots of other things in order to make them cheaper and more reliable (since most of the assembly is done in factories in controlled environments).
20 years ago it was just around the corner. In fact, they said the Russians were about to deploy them: container-sized nuclear power plants that were basically maintenance-free and just ran on their own until they shut themselves down. Made by the hundreds from standard pieces. Safe if messed with. Safe after retirement. There were websites and nice diagrams and mock-ups and everything. Tell me how we're in a different phase now.
Without funding it's not going to get moved anywhere. The main design work on them was upscaling them and lowering enrichment + work on reducing any possibility of reusing breed plutonium from them.
If they kept to high enrichment, they could pretty start making and packing container-sized powerplants, but the old designs were designed for 50MW, while the uprated, civilian ones were for min. 100MWe
While reading the article, I repeatedly thought "wow this reads like a big ad for nuclear power".
Almost all passages of the very long text pointed out how great it is. It gives only a hand-wavey comment to the problem of what do we do with the waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years to come. Its not a technical but a political problem. Uhm, okay. And the other problem that uranium is much scarcer than previously thought is not even mentioned.
Atomic energy is way cleaner when it comes to immediate CO2 generation - true. But the long term problem of waste is not solved at all.
This is a wildly oversimplified and inaccurate picture of nuclear waste, that I've seen all too often.
Nuclear waste is problematic because it emits radiation. It emits radiation because the atoms are unstable, and are decaying into other, more stable atoms. The rate of this decay is normally measured by the half-life - which is the time by which 50% of the element has changed into another, more stable element. The by-product of this decay is that it emits radiation, which is harmful to life. However, it emerges from this that the rate of the decay is directly proportional to the amount of harmful radiation that is emitted. Many things encountered in ordinary life are unstable to some degree or another, but ordinarily either the quantity is so low, or the rate of decay is so slow, that the amount of radiation we recieve under normal conditions isn't particularly harmful.
Now, nuclear waste. This falls into three broad categories. First is those with a half life of less than 50 years, like strontium-90 and cesium-137. These are horribly, horribly dangerous isotopes, and will do horrible things to you if you get near large quantities of them. However the fact that they are so very dangerous means that they are by turn, not going to be a threat for very long. After a short period of time (~30 years for the two I mentioned), they are half decayed already. Devising a storage system to store these sin't very challenging - the quantities are small, and they don't need to be stored for terribly long.
The second category is the one that the anti-nuclear lobby loves to blur with the first. These are isotopes like plutonium-239, with half lives in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years timelines (~24000 years for Pu-239). However what the anti-nuclear lobby fails to mention is that by the very fact that these elements have such a long half life, they are by definition not emitting all that much harmful radiation - many of the waste products in this category similar radiation per kg than coal ash. If we're happy storing coal ash behind nothing more than a chain-link fence, objecting to these waste products is sheer fear mongering, nothing else.
The third category is the problematic one. Here we have things like radium-226, which have half-lives in the thousand-year range (1300 years for ra-226), but are still radioactive enough you want a bit more safety than just piling them up behind a fence. However the good news here is that the quantities of radioactive products in this range are tiny. So tiny the entire non-military waste of these isotopes we, as a species, have ever produced would probably fit onto a single train. I think getting rid of one of the most effective ways of power production we've discovered to date for this amount of waste might, just maybe, be described as a colossal overreaction.
Well said. We also need to remember that all of these are 50 to 100 year problems rather than thousand year problems simply because there is no reason to expect that we won't come up with ways to reprocess that fuel within 50 to 100 years. Just consider how our knowledge of these processes has changed over the last 100 years. Do we have so little confidence in our ability to innovate that we really think we will have to deal with this stuff for a few thousand years? So, this is likely a problem of a few decades for the reasons given above and because we will get better at this stuff.
This is assuming that our level of technology keeps advancing. Given the level of political instability in our world I would take that far from granted.
Except the coal ash isn't pyrophoric, so doesn't spontaneously ignite. Then there is the little problem with simple heavy metal toxicity, apart from being radioactive.
So i think it is misleading trying to reduce the problem to long half life is good for you.
I suspect you're referring to the widely debunked claims of Ralph Neder here?
Plutonium is, in itself, not all that toxic - it is significantly less toxic than many other heavy metals, and can be handled safely. I wouldn't suggest going out of your way to inhale plutonium dust - but that holds true for such large swathes of the periodic table such that it seems somewhat silly to base a power generation strategy on that alone.
It is of course radioactive, but that then falls into the problems I described above (the tradeoff between not-that-dangerous and not-that-long-lived). However the main reason people complaining about plutonium dust sound rather silly to me is this: plutonium is extremely dense - almost double the density of lead - and thus encouraging it to float around the atmosphere isn't all that easy. Unless you have someone machining doorknobs out of Pu-238 in your bedroom (in which case I would strongly urge you to find different housemates) then inhaling plutonium dust seems rather low on the list of things to worry about.
There is sufficient evidence in humans that inhalation of plutonium-239 aerosols causes lung cancer, liver cancer and bone sarcoma. Exposure to plutonium-239 also entails exposure to plutonium-240 and other isotopes. /Plutonium-239/
Yeah this is why I'm still against it. I know it can be run safely. But disposing of stuff that can be extremely dangerous for 20.000 years is not as easy.
It already eats through the containers it's in and up to date storage facilities are meant to last 100 years at most. They're just storing it now "until we find a safe method for long term storage". Which is really worrying.
"... What if we could produce more power—and do it affordably, with minimal environmental impact? That’s the almost utopian vision that some backers see for the next generation of nuclear power. ..."
Utopian?! We are adding gigawatts of wind and solar this year, and modulo coronavirus we'll add more next year. New geothermal plants are measured in dozens of megawatts:
"According to Ted Nordhaus, founder of the “eco-modernist” Breakthrough Institute, SMRs could offer a more decentralized, entrepreneurial approach to reducing CO2 emissions without hobbling the economy."
Wind and solar are extremely de-centralized and competitive. The economies that install them at scale—China, California—are doing as well as any.
“Will any of them ultimately be a success in the marketplace? You can’t say for sure,” he said. “But I think a bunch of them will get licenses to build test plants.”"
While we are waiting, offshore wind farms will continue to be installed at hundred-megawatt scale:
Please continue promoting new nuclear; we could really use it. But please stop with the anti-variable-renewable BS, and FFS stop giving Nordhaus airtime when he insist on talking like this.
"The US Energy Information Administration has recommended that levelized costs of non-dispatchable sources such as wind or solar may be better compared to the avoided energy cost rather than to the LCOE of dispatchable sources such as fossil fuels or geothermal. This is because introduction of fluctuating power sources may or may not avoid capital and maintenance costs of backup dispatchable sources. Levelized avoided cost of energy (LACE) is the avoided costs from other sources divided by the annual yearly output of the non-dispatchable source."
1. That source is a mess; three of us spent a couple years trying to update it only to be foiled by classic alpha Wikipedians who are happy to see an article rely on 10 year old price estimates, but not to see standard industry terms used. Note the age of the LACE sources.
2. The LACE frame is an important complement to LCOE, but also imperfect. Take California's recent decision to require solar PV on new homes. Really high LACE, right?: California is already being forced to pair marginal PV additions with gigawatts of rapid response gas to handle the "neck of the duck curve" when the sun goes down but LA is still using gigawatts of electricity to power AC. Well, the LACE of that low-marginal-value PV is dependent on how many batteries we add, how much offshore wind appears, etc.
3. The people who promote LACE won't let you include the social cost of carbon as part of the discussion. They'd rather see the page wither.
Wind and solar still don't scale as well as a nuclear plant. It is the the most compact way to generate a few gigawatts of energy in one place without re-routing a huge river. Likewise, the big problem with wind and solar is that the areas where they are economical to install (e.g. Western China) are often far away from where the energy is needed (e.g. Eastern China), and transmission over long distances still hasn't been worked out.
Again, I am rooting for nuclear to take off. The best realistic plans are that low gigawatts will start to arrive towards the end of this decade. Meanwhile, wind and solar will be added at that scale every year in between, and more and more of it will be used to create liquid fuel:
Advocating for clean power is good. Failing to update the priors that Stewart Brand et alia formed 15 years ago when wind and solar were an order of magnitude more expensive and three orders of magnitude less deployed is not good.
Advanced nuclear reactor designer here. It is tough times in the industry. The large traditional reactors in the West (US, France, UK) are really struggling. Existing reactors have operations costs that were fine until fracked natural gas pulled the floor out on electricity prices. Now they're struggling. New builds have been boondoggles because contracts went to lowest bidders, who had no idea how to build nuclear plants. The people are focused on intermittent clean sources like wind and solar, with due cause as solar PV prices fell by a factor of 10x since 2009 (as long as the sun is shining).
Meanwhile there has been a bunch of hype about "new" reactors (quoted because they were all initially conceived of and tested in the 1950s). Thorium. Molten Salt. Small Modular. Traveling Wave. Microreactors. These will have less waste and be safer! But will it matter? As I've grown in experience and expertise, I've started looking at the numbers more. Nuclear waste has great solutions in crystalline bedrock (Onkalo), massive salt (WIPP), and deep boreholes (Deep Isolation). If a reactor makes a little bit less, will that move the needle for the public? In terms of safety, current reactors are statistically extraordinarily safe because they don't participate in causing the 4.2 million deaths/year from air pollution (a Chernobyl of death every 2.5 days from the fossil industry). So if a new reactor is slightly safer, will all the anti-nuclear institutions roll over begging for one? I highly doubt it.
Besides, with tech development in nuclear, it's fleet experience that matters. Many MSR designs make vast amounts of tritium and require remote maintenance. Will this be doable? Will releases be acceptable? Only fleet experience can tell. Never believe someone who's never built a nuclear plant on what their design will cost.
These smaller reactors will absolutely struggle economically, especially at first.
More and more I think it's really public communication/PR/education that matters most for nuclear.
Chinese and Russian reactors, on the other hand, are doing better, with Russia seemingly selling VVERs like hotcakes, and moving into markets like Nigeria soon.
I recently wrote up an elaborate page about early reactor development history [1] and about more modern nuclear economics [2] if anyone wants a deep dive. I've been thinking of turning these into a book.
> Never believe someone who's never built a nuclear plant on what their design will cost.
> More and more I think it's really public communication/PR/education that matters most for nuclear.
I'm almost 30 years old and I live in France. While I see nuclear science as very cool and futuristic, I also just dont want to see anymore nuclear reactors. Especially since we showed that batteries and renewable energies have room for improvements.
Even people who are supposed to know how to build nuclear reactors don't know how to do it :
Flamanville's reactor has 10 years of lag and costs tripled to billions of euros. Guess where does the money come from ? Our taxes.
All this money (and UK money) could have been invested in consuming less (smarter consumption, more efficiency), improve battery technologies and improve renewable energies.
To me, the goal of 50% of nuclear energy should even be lowered to 30%.
Everywhere I've lived in the US that has nuclear power in the mix (Pittsburgh and Georgia) has a surcharge on rates because of the cost of the plant, and we end up paying a higher rate than other areas that don't have nuclear. Are there localities in the US where nuclear has beaten the cost-benefit curve?
> Are there localities in the US where nuclear has beaten the cost-benefit curve?
Technically, pretty much everywhere. The health detriment from fossil air pollution (which is not in the markets at all) and the value of low-carbon energy (also not in the markets) means nuclear plants are providing great benefits pretty much everywhere! :)
But that's not what you're asking. Coal vs. nuclear have traded off through the years. They both got a lot more regulations and more expensive in the 1970s. Komanoff's book really treats this extremely well.
The US plants were not standardized. Places that standardize the plants have a much better time economically. South Korea. France. Russia.
Still, I would argue that while nuclear is indeed more expensive than fossil, the fact that it is nearly carbon free and air-pollution free while being 24/7 make it a good deal. All 100% decarbonized sources have extra fees.
Agreed. Utility execs only care about the bottom line.
If we can get markets to value low-carbon or low air pollution nuclear will compete today. Sadly, it doesn't look like this will happen anytime soon. Seems so obvious though.
1. Offshore nuclear power may be a wonderful solution to public fears. It also allows us to build in shipyard conditions, which are basically a giant Henry Ford assembly line of gigawatt-class 24/7 power plants. We built such a thing in Florida back in the 1970s but it didn't quite work out. [1]
2. Coal is absolutely getting crushed by fracked natural gas, especially in the USA. All the news about coal shutting down and also about carbon emissions getting (everso slightly) better are because of this swapping of coal for gas. Check out the EIA charts of energy sources vs. time. Coal is in free-fall, gas is covering almost all of it. In Japan, where gas is more expensive, they just announced that they're building 22 more coal plants to replace their unpopular nuclear plants. [2]
It's such a b.s. article and is likely written by the nuclear industry. There are many factual problems but I'll just point out one: the idea that wind and solar will never be enough. Here's a study that includes wind, solar & storage and gets 100% coverage:
That's NuScale again. They're building a reactor at the Idaho reactor test station, where, if something goes wrong, it's not too bad.
It's not a technical breakthrough. It's an argument that full containment isn't necessary. While the design is supposed to be immune to loss of cooling power, it still has other potential problems. Multiple reactors share the same cooling pool, so if one has a leak, the whole group gets contaminated. If the cooling pool leaks into the ground and you can't refill, as might happen in an earthquake, you could have a meltdown.
It's not really small, either. Each unit is 60 megawatts, and a plant is 12 units, at 0.72GW. Almost 3/4 of an AP 1000.
> If the cooling pool leaks into the ground and you can't refill, as might happen in an earthquake, you could have a meltdown.
The article claims that these reactors don’t not have that problem. They didn’t describe why or how, but they say the heat would simply dissipate into the atmosphere even if the cooling pool dries out.
The article may claim that, but NuScale itself does not.[1]
NuScale says they do not need additional water during cool-down. Not that they can shut down dry.
NuScale is interesting, but it's really just a medium-sized (60MW) pressurized-water reactor. Same size as Shippingport (1957), interestingly.
It probably has happened. I don't think we've had a post-1980s designed nuclear reactor fail miserably yet.
Nuclear remains the safest and cleanest form of power we know about. It was competitive on cheapness last time I checked but the trend favours renewables AFAIK.
Today's nuclear is actually already competitive with all clean energy futures. Yes, wind and solar LCOE is dirt cheap today, but only when the wind is blowing or sun is shining. They're riding on the back of the fossil-dominated grid. As we deeploy decarbonize, all studies I've seen show costs rising 30-50 $/MWh to deal with intermittency. At those prices, current nuclear is already in the game.
Yes. Costs of power sources have frequently increased as a function of penetration due to regulations, NIMBY, realities of technology, etc. You're assuming renewables will do the opposite. While popular, this is unconventional. Japan building 22 coal plants right now proves the point.
Serious studies I've seen say 30-50 $/MWh delta is required to deal with reconductoring, storage, recycling, load management, etc.
Nuclear has to standardize and serialize to play. If they don't do that they're out. But if they pull off another France of Korea or Japanese ABWRs its game on. You're also assuming that will not happen.
If you assume nuclear will never improve and other sources will, sure nuclear looks bad.
Nuclear power plants have a 60 year history now. We can see they have not come down in cost, and we can see why. They are complex and difficult to build. Mistakes in design or construction can be disastrously expensive. Avoiding those mistakes is also very expensive.
The refrain of "this time it will be different" is looking like just wishful thinking.
Now we know how to do it right. See Shika 2 abwr build in 2006. It was amazing. Problem is, we keep choosing to do it wrong. South Texas has a full-on license to build a ABWR there right now. Hitachi could show up and deliver it. But we choose to not allow it due to corporate turf issues with GE.
This is a big management and coordination challenge. But with climate change looming, what better time to choose the path we know works.
VVERs are also fully serialized.
While looking at Vogtle and Hinckley C and Finland, we must not forget VVERs and ABWRs and APR-1400s.
What reasonable assumptions? I'm not saying you are wrong, but the energy problem is a quantitive problem. There are many energy sources that are great in certain circumstances and certain regions, but do things actually add up when we create a plan? Without plans and numbers we are stuck with hypothetical ideas that feel kinda right, but you can't solve quantitive problems this way.
That site lets you compute the optimal energy mix under various assumptions for various locations using real historical weather data.
If that Without Hot Air site is the one I think it is, it was from ten years ago, and also assumed large biomass inputs. The latter greatly increases the land area needed, leading to the incorrect conclusion that the UK could not get by just on local renewables.
The issues is partly political. We could overcome that.
Partly technological: risk of fallout, and more ugly - long term storage.
But really, the issue nobody thinks about is proliferation.
If the West started pumping out 5 cent/mmh electricity and booming, you can be darn sure every tin pot fool everywhere in the world would be as well. After all, why shouldn't they?
But Canada will manage it's boring, hardened facilities extremely well. The entire economy of Canada is not based on anything really intelligent - just 'boring, consistent responsibility and stability' - which is exactly what you want for such things.
But how long will stability remain around Nigeria's 20 new reactors? Hey - they convinced us that 'everything was fine' and that it was 'Colonialist and Evil to require external, rigorous inspection'. But now there's a regime change, a civil war breaking out. A rebel group has nabbed a reactor. A second reactor the staff are fleeing because Boko Haram is in the area. The US president wants to send in Marines to lock down the facilities immediately, but wary it will just erupt in more violence immediately.
Obviously that's hugely speculative, but if/when nuclear power breaks up with 100's of reactors popping up everywhere - something like this will happen - somewhere.
I think we can conquor public opinion and figure out 'long term' issues with enough focus and innovation.
But this requires 'highly responsible civilisation' almost universally so that something doesn't blow up somewhere in the long tail.
Since most of the world actually isn't ready for that responsibility, what do we do? Controls? How? Can we tell them 'no'? We could block Somalia from getting nuke power ... but probably not most other places.
I’m sorry but this article sounds like some pretty egregious reactionary astroturfing. Harping on and on about the cost of the Green New Deal as a given is suspicious in itself. Of course infrastructure investment programs have costs. It just happens that the public would see dividends from it, not just a handful of industrialists.
No body seems to have address the cost of Nuclear. There are solar farms in Portugal and Abu Dhabi that cost below $0.02 / kWh non-subsidise. And it seems Sub 1 cents / kWh, what was previously thought to be impossible are now within reach in this decade. How is Nuclear going to compete?
I think right now the race is for utility scale Battery. And this goal seems to be a lot easier to achieve than having a cost competitive Nuclear reactor.
Note: I am not pro Solar or Anti Nuclear, in fact I pretty much want Nuclear to succeed in the long term since I dont like the idea massive land area being used for solar, not every country has the luxury of doing so especially those with limited sunlight hours. But looking at the cost alone it seems solar is hard to compete against.
I just watched the Chernobyl HBO series, and I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between that disaster and COVID-19, at least in the US.
Those who lead governments are inherently motivated by self-preservation first and foremost, meaning that when something really bad happens, the inclination is to minimize the perception of a problem without considering the cost.
That inclination cost thousands of lives in Ukraine in 1986, and will cost thousands of lives around the world now because leaders didn’t listen to the experts early on. Not to mention the constant war on science and intellectualism that has been permeating American politics for years.
This is the price we pay to live in the political environment we have.
That statement about thousands of lives is not substantiated.
“The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident caused the deaths, within a few days or weeks, of 30 workers and radiation injuries to hundreds of others. The accident caused the immediate evacuation of about 116 000 people and the permanent relocation of about 220 000 people. The accident caused social and psychological disruption, but apart from the 1800 thyroid cancers that have been reported in inidividuals exposed in childhood, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 14 years after the accident. No increase in overall cancer incidence or mortality has been observed that could be attributed to radiation exposure. The risk of leukaemia does not appear to be raised, even among the hundreds of thousands of recovery workers sent to clean up the environmental contamination. Neither is there any scientific evidence of other non-malignant disorders associated with radiation exposure“ from the Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
> “I estimate that 10 000 people have already perished as a result of Chernobyl, and that is only about a third of the eventual death toll”, says Grodzinsky. “But, we are dealing with a very prolonged process which is spread through several generations and it's far too early to start saying we have worked it all out and now we can move on.”
That statement was made by Dmytro Grodzinsky, chairman of the National Commission on Radiological Protection of the Population of Ukraine. That sounds like a relevant expert opinion to me.
Regardless, when I combine "10 000" and "a very prolonged process which is spread through several generations" we are talking small change. We face extremely tolerable threats that kill more than 10 000 people spread through several generations; like ladders.
That’s my bad, that quote from this Lancet article[0].
Is it a small change, though? That expert estimated 30k total deaths, which is almost half the American death toll in Vietnam, and where the US COVID will be around Wednesday or Thursday.
When you’re talking tens of thousands of deaths over a completely preventable nuclear accident, which by the way, has created a permanent exclusion zone that is deemed uninhabitable.
> like ladders
300 people die per year due to ladders in the US[1]. If you accept the Ukrainian expert’s estimation as at least plausible, then it would take 100 years for ladder deaths to equal his estimated Chernobyl death toll. All because one power-hungry chief engineer decided not to follow safety protocols, hardly seems like a fair comparison. One human was directly responsible for as many deaths that we’re comparing to 100 years worth of random ladder accidents? Regardless of the time-scale that is incredibly significant.
> If you accept the Ukrainian expert’s estimation as at least plausible, then it would take 100 years for ladder deaths to equal his estimated Chernobyl death toll
How many years do you hear when someone says "several generations"? I hear 120 years, 40 years a generation after overlaps. I suppose he might mean several generations all alive at the time of the accident, but we're talking timespans of 20-40 years.
Maybe we can agree Chernobyl was much worse than I thought, and is potentially 2-10x more deadly than persistent use of ladders?
It doesn't make as much sense to talk about it being one incident when it is in context of what would happen if, eg, they had used coal for those 40 years. Coal is much worse than ladders too.
Uninhabited by humans, not uninhabitable. Natural radiation in natural hot spots like Ramsar Iran are hotter than most parts of Chernobyl today, and no one there shows any increased cancer. Fear of low-dose radiation is the only reason why Chernobyl is still pretty empty today. The animals are doing just fine. They are no more radiation resistant than you or I.
I had a similar take, but most around me didn't. Most around me took away that nuclear is dangerous and shouldn't be used. Never mind that every country (USSR included) knew that a positive void reactor was a dumb idea.
But as to the fear, most people I know thought the three men that went into the reactor died of horrible deaths. Despite the show even mentioning that they survived (I believe only one is dead now and died of a heart attack at old age. Could be radiation related, could be old, probably both, but it wasn't an abnormal death IIRC).
There's even a lot of misinformation about how many people Chernobyl killed. We say "thousands of deaths" but it is hard to put that in perspective. If we say a thousand people dead in front of us, that's a lot. But if we're talking <30k deaths from 1986 - 2065, that's not that many people[0]. That total number is less than the average flu kills in just the US PER YEAR. It is about 380 people/year. A lot, but this pales in comparison to what our usage of coal does in a single country per year. As in some estimates of coal pollution kill more people in the US per year than all will from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind ever will [1].
It is hard to compare our energy sources because we do not do them one to one. Nuclear's deaths have been caused from 3 disasters, one of which killed nobody, and one of which accounts for 99%[2] of those deaths. I think the thing about nuclear is that when things go wrong it is temporally and geographically localized. This is easy to see the damage. But it is hard to say that coal in the US kills more a year than all the world's nuclear power plants combined. If you bring stats in you generally get called inhumane, even if you are trying to use stats to save lives. It is a complicated and tricky subject. It is just hard to compare because the coal deaths are not temporally and geographically localized. Our brains weren't designed to easily reason about information like that, whereas they were designed to reason about the former.
You're definitely right about a lot of what you've said. But my inclination is that while people did take a political message from the Chernobyl show (which I did love), they also took away an anti-nuclear sentiment. I think this is unfortunate because I believe there is overwhelming evidence that the technology directly saves hundreds of thousands of human lives and significantly help our environment.
The Oroville Dam near-failure necessitated the evacuation of more people than the Fukushima failure.
In actual fact, hydroelectric power has been far deadlier and more destructive than nuclear power (especially when scaled to a per-MW basis), yet it's the latter that's seen as too dangerous.
A very interesting concept and I am looking forward to see how it works out. Industrial production of small reactors has the potential to improve the economics a bit and I hope their safety is as good as promised. However the article doesn't talk about a few key points: what are the costs per kWh being produced they are aiming for? The article talks about the reactors being "clean", but doesn't mention what happens with the nuclear waster. What other costs for longterm operations (many decades) have to be calculated? Can the whole reactors be returned to the manufacturer for recycling? The viability of any new concept depends on answering these questions.
Meanwhile, especially these small reactor units are under strong competiton from renewables. Solar plus battery becomes very cost-competitive, especially for small units. If we look towards Africa, solar is ideal there. Not only because the output level is high, but also because the seasonal variation is minimal. Storage mostly would have to last only over night.
And lets not forget about wind energy, which doesn't care about day or night and works very far up north.
They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. I wish we just were not wasting so much money and effort on this. Solar and wind are already far cheaper, we need to be researching energy storage solutions to make the already cheap solar and wind energy more reliable and not looking for another dangerous boondoggle to make energy for, if we are lucky, ten times the price of solar. Even before the corona-virus hit, this past summer solar cell prices were 15 cents per watt. This is about half of what it was last year. Offshore wind prices are difficult to pin down in a per watt metric, but power companies are saying they are even cheaper than solar and the cheapest option. This is where our efforts should be pointed. We already have the cheap and safe energy we just need to make it more usable and reliable on the grid.
This is all institutional inertia. I know there are a lot of very smart people that studied fission and wanted to dedicate their careers to it and now they are really pissed off that the field is declining rapidly. I know they will all write angry posts in response and down vote me rapidly. I am sorry, I feel bad for you all but I do not wish to risk my life just so you have careers doing something unnecessary and dangerous. You are all very smart I am sure you can re-target your expertise towards power electronics, solid state physics or many of the other fields of physics that are hot right now.
And there is a lot of institutional inertia as well. During the cold war there was an endless stream of tax payer money pointed at anything and everything nuclear and now a lot of the institutions that benefited from it are fighting tooth and nail for relevance. I have the same thing to say to them -- there are other very needed and useful fields where you can direct your efforts.
> They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't.
What is "it" here? Fukushima for example was built in the 70s with a design which was even older. That seem like a very strange bar for "always promise it will be safe".
What nuclear plant designed in this century has ever been shown to not be safe? Are we always going to stay stuck on false promises made half a century ago?
It's already safer than almost all forms of electricity generation (and probably cheaper in bulk than solar and wind). However, it doesn't matter, because market forces favor small incremental additions, changes, and there is not enough inertia to properly do a 50+ plant megaproject.
I question whether it is ultimately cheaper, if all subsidies were taken away, the natural resource extraction and transportation costs are considered, the relatively short lifespan, e-waste and intermittent generation all taken into an account. I don’t know but I think what we see as “cheap solar/wind” is about as illusory as “cheap gas”. I’m not saying nuclear is “cheap” but relative to its reliability, productivity, lifespan balanced against its footprint, waste, etc, I’d believe that it were cheaper and more beneficial for all in the long run that wind/solar/tidal solutions. There’s a place for renewables, but replacement of fossil fuels seems like too big of an ask.
It's been only in last two years that a wind power plant was built in Poland without direct subsidy, and there's still "green certificate" trading scheme that is an effective subsidy.
Spain switched from direct subsidies to big beefy "guaranteed purchase" 10 year contract... in 2017.
Many of us want to believe this. The problem is the general public doesn't have an appetite for it.
The HBO series Chernobyl is helping/not-helping that cause, but mostly not helping. It is really important not to forget history, not repeat, of course, but the series is bringing nuclear fears to the forefront. For better or worse, we're teaching a whole new generation to interalize those fears about a design that is still very much active [0].
As much as I want to believe the gen 4 reactors are safe and worth attempting, getting this to fly in the public minds is going to take more effort than it's probably worth. For the public, fission power has been poisoned. Single disasters that ruin 20+ years and whole regions of countries are valid/non-ignorable fears.
Large parts of me simply want to dump the money into chasing fusion. Even if it costs 1000x to get there, today money is not the problem - it's sentiment.
Corporations and governments use ad campaigns effectively all the time. I'm convinced that if you took a fraction of that fusion money and bombarded people with "nuclear is fine" ads for a year or two, public opinion would change. If a TV show can swing opinion one way, why can't something else swing it back?
'Nuclear is fine' ads would work until the next misstep, which the negative proponents will be looking for.
Generally, it was looking good until the Fukushima disaster. It resets the clock and that clock takes 20-30 years to play out.
On the 30 year timescale, all the gen 1, 2, 3 designs have flaws which make them potentials for issues. It doesn't even have to be a big issue, just enough for the press to catch it and push "See, they said it was safe... it's not!".
That flaw makes me want to just skip fission all together =/
In addition to "nuclear is fine", I would add that fusion is not as clean as the public imagines. It is being promoted as power generation without nuclear waste, but in reality you are going to get at least mildly radioactive fusion chamber cladding, which will have to be replaced yearly or so. So there will be a huge pile of radioactive waste generated over the lifetime of fusion power plant. This is in addition to a little problem of fusion power being 25 years away for the last 60 years or so.
The reason we don't have fusion is that we keep looking for above break-even (and for proper fusion power plant we need ratios way above 10:1, afaik) in aneutronic fusion.
If we accepted neutron radiation in the process, which is what would lead to radioactive fusion chamber cladding you mention, we could have broken even already - the experiment JET reactor had the design capacity to run at above 1:1, but wasn't equipped for the damage from neutron radiation.
Breaking even in fusion puts you where fission was in 1942. And that's just a step. The engineering obstacles to practical fusion are enormous, far greater than those facing any advanced fission reactor scheme. I very seriously doubt fusion will ever be practical.
1. The quantity of activated material in a magnetic continent fusion reactor would be orders of magnitude less than what is produced (the exhaust is not radioactive).
2. We get to close the radioactive components. It is much more manageable to put up a sign that says “No entry until 2100” than it is to put up a sign that says “No entry until 30000”. The public at large cares about this.
The "quantity" is less in the sense of amount of radioactivity. But the MASS of activated material can be very large. It's not nicely bundled up in easily removed sealed fuel elements.
The biggest problem with this radioactivity is that it renders the reactor inaccessible to hands on maintenance. Everything would have to be handled by robots. I'm reminded of how they handled that at Hanford in WW2: they demonstrated the reprocessing equipment could be maintained remotely by first assembling it remotely. I'll believe a fusion reactor can be maintained if they do the same thing and build it with robots.
Yes, fear is in the mind, but despite the fear, the danger is real.
Fear prevents progress but blindness to real danger can cause tragedy. You need to remember that although the HBO series brought nuclear fears to the forefront it is a series that is telling a relatively True story.
Be concerned with the truth, not what a truth can promote.
I think we should move forward with nuclear. But let's say I took away all the fear in the world right now and we started building nuclear power plants near every city, village and town where we and our children live.
I think even an optimist will hesitate before moving forward with such a proposition. Move forward, but move with caution.
What's strikes me is that the cost of operating a nuclear plant during its lifetime is actually unknown, making it the expensivest energy source. Why it is still in use : obviously because it serves as base technology and knowledge to build weapons.
Some example of hidden costs not included in nuclear kwh price :
- Cost of managing waste: How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes ?
- Risk prime to insure huge damage that could arise from accident or future leaks in storage area : Again this amount is so big, that this externality has to be socialized.
- Cost of dismantling a plant : Beside one or two exceptions, no plant has been successfully dismantled. All the planning and costs for the currently plan in dismantling are exploding and will take years and tons of capital ... leaving more unmanageable wastes and unusable lands.
All those aspects will become increasingly difficult to manage in countries that made the (bad) choice of going full nuclear a few years ago, like France.
>How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes?
I think we need to be optimists. Not 'glass is half full' optimists, or 'humans are perfect' optimists but 'progress is possible if we keep trying' optimists.
If we decide to be optimists then our wealth, technological capability and sense of responsibility will all continue to increase. Handling historical waste will become safer and cheaper. An exciting future university project, perhaps, with documentaries, museums and spin-offs abounding.
What it isn't possible to do is to prophesy the precise means by which it will happen.
We may build reactors that produce less and less waste or no waste at all. Nuclear engineers and physicists may figure out how to transmute harmful elements into safe ones. We may end up launching material directly into the Sun. Or we might just dig a better hole. Or something else. Or something else again.
The fact that we don't know in advance is not grounds for pessimism.
“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.” (Howard Zinn)
Just because the cost is diffucult (or impossible) to calculate doesn’t mean it’s expensive.
Also, you have to compare the cost of Nuclear to the cost of coal/gas, which is currently the only alternative. Our co2 footprint will kill the planet in 50-100 years - unless you can somehow show that nuclear will kill it sooner, I’d say alternative cost is way higher.
Finally, the cost of doing simething forever (managing nuclear waste) is not infinite. Read up on NPV.
People are scared of it, and don't understand fission. Popular docudrama shows, like Chernobyl, propagate myths that reactors can explode with "2-4 megaton power".[1]
Politicians won't back it because no one wants it in their back yard. And carbon gives them new revenue they can leverage and borrow against to balance the budget.[2]
I list more reasons at [3], which I link every time this comes up.
I ROFL'd so hard when the HBO miniseries said 2-4 megatons from a steam explosion. Like, what!? We engineers did a similar bounding calc as the one in your link and got about the same conclusion. So ridiculous.
I do a lot of nuclear outreach in seattle. Audiences are skeptical but open. If we can scale the facts and education, I still think nuclear can and will play a major role in decarbonizing. Especially as intermittent renewable fleets get bigger and the intermittency issue becomes more serious.
No. I read this right when it came out with much interest. Why would I ROFL? It's not physically impossible like a 2-4 MT stream explosion postulated to happen days after the nuclear excursion when decay-heat melted fuel was dipped in the suppression pool. The best statement I heard in that regard was: "If that was true, then Hawaii would be wiped off the map multiple times per day as lava falls into the ocean"
Related to this paper, nuclear chain reactor excursions are limited in energy by the vaporization and dispersal of fuel.
What we need it a viable battery to make wind and solar viable for 24 power delivery. How about a rechargeable nuclear battery?
What if during times when there is an excess of power being generated, the excess is used to accelerate protons into a block of some material that (a) captures the protons well and (b) has a half life on the order of 24 hours. Generate the isotopes, when then decay and generate heat over the course of a day or two. Obviously, the isotopes don't wait for night to decay, so it would be generating heat continuously. In effect, it would be a big capacitor.
Just how inefficient would it be?
(Yes, I know very little about nuclear, and I expect it is terribly inefficient, but I'm curious to hear just how bad)
Extraordinarily inefficient. The energy in nuclear fission comes not from when a proton is accelerated, but when a neutron splits a large nuclear fuel atom. To store energy in nuclear reactions, you'd have to fuse the fission products back into uranium. This process can only be done at scale in very large supernovas.
But what we can do is store heat. You can have a nuclear plant storing heat in a thermal storage system (e.g. a huge vat of molten salt). As the sun sets, this tank can fill in the extra energy while the (constant power) nuclear reactor keeps the pace. Effectively, the nuclear plant can now ramp rapidly from 50% to 100% full capacity since the salt tank can be sized to double the reactor capacity.
Lots of reactor companies are talking about doing this thermal energy storage thing to best help out in an increasingly intermittent energy world.
You can also steam bypass the nuclear reactor to make hydrogen, desalinated water, etc.
The Simpsons painted a horrific picture of nuclear safety - greedy billionaire owner, incompetent safety inspector, three eyed fish, glowing green waste flowing into rivers...
Two decades of TV viewers where indoctrinated with that as a worldview of Nuclear Power.
The fun thing about that series is how shifting expectations have impacted our perception of Homer.
Here's a barely-graduated-fron-high schooler, with no special training and skills, yet he enjoys a secure, unionized job, home ownership, and is a single-income earner for a family of five plus supporting a parent in a care home.
In 1988 he was a cautionary tale for our kids.
In 2020 he's an unattainable aspiration for our kids' kids.
I wonder if there's room for a "this isn't Homer's time, and it's not Homer's plant" messaging pivot.
It's more than Homer. Nuclear and radiation being scary is absolutely pervasive in pop culture, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to MacGyver to Spiderman to HBO miniseries.
Part of the problem is that nuclear PR wing is run by utility companies that have a bunch of fossil assets that they don't want to make look bad by pointing out what's good about nuclear (no air pollution, no carbon emissions)
The simpsons were generous. Despite all the high jinks that reactor has not yet made springfield an unlivable ghost town, yet that has already happened to several towns around nuclear reactors.
And the simpsons were funny because they reflected what happened in the real world. People knew about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl when the simpsons were on.
I feel like I've read this article every three years or so for the past 30 years.
According to my calendar this means we're due for another wave of "the singularity is right around the corner, uh, for reals this time! again!" articles.
I'm concerned about safety not from the engineering side (although not dismissing it), but from the standpoint of an easy access to sufficiently large amount of radioactive material to build a dirty nuke. As the nuclear plants get smaller, the security is going to become a larger percentage of the operating costs and operators will be tempted to skimp in this area.
I don't believe in PWR SMR (Pressurized Water Reactor, Small Modular Reactor) will actually solve the problem with nuclear. The only reason to do it, is because the whole regulation is expecting PWRs and to have LITERALLY ANY chance to get a new reactor threw regulation it needs to be a PWR (in the US).
However, while PWR SMR can help you with modular construction and factory mass production, you lose the economics of scale of a larger reactor. I wish NuScale success, but I do not think the technology is very promising to actually reduce cost by the required amount. You need to be competitive with cheap gas prices.
PWR in general are a technological deadend that should never made it past the 70s. Even the inventor of PWR said so in the 60s and that is why he worked on Molten Salt Reactors.
However if you want to know about the future of nuclear, the only place where we see serious development in the Western world, look at Canada. They had a strong program of CANDU reactors and a globally respected regulatory agency. CANDU has now been privatized and the Canadians started to look more into Generation IV reactors (even while I totally dislike this terminology).
This has lead to Canada becoming a hub for nuclear innovation, as the Canadian regulatory system 'only' requires you to prove a safety case that is technology independent. In the US they just say 'show us the secondary pump for the steam', 'my reactor does not have any steam inside of it', 'PLEASE SHOW US THE SECONDARY STEAM PUMP'. facepalm
The company that is most advanced in the regulatory process is Terrestrial Energy (www.terrestrialenergy.com) and another one that is a couple years behind is Moltex Enery (www.moltexenergy.com) an originally British company who moved to Canada because the British regulatory agency is possibly even more disfunctional then the US one.
Both of these reactors are based on the Molten Salt reactors and really nice designs. The are both Fast Burners in their first iteration, while Moltex initially focuses more using Canadian CANDU Waste as fuel, Terrestrial Energy has opted to take the most commercially available fuel, 5% enriched Uranium.
However, both hope to eventually develop a Molten Salt Thorium Breeder design, long consider the holy grail among nuclear fans.
Terrestrial Energy is already working on a project to deploy their first US reactor in Idaho. The hope is that the US Regulatory Agency (who have realized how nonsensical their regulation are) are ready with a improved framework and that much of the work done for Canada will be accepted in the US.
The Moltex Ractor is special because it combines Molten Salt with a more traditional fuel assembly design (reusing well tested materials from Sodium Reactors). Listen here if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvXcoSdXYlk
Terrestrial Energy is building a more traditional Molten Salt reactor but instead of switching out fuel assemblies, they just replace the whole core. See here for more on their design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgTgV3Kq49U
One thing that is often missed with this discussion is how irrelevant fusion really is in some ways. Fission has an energy density of 10^12 over chemical, Fusion is much better at 10^15, but really if we are not willing to switch to Fission, a technology we already have, why would be do it for Fusion.
> but really if we are not willing to switch to Fission, a technology we already have, why would be do it for Fusion.
I thought the extremely compelling rationale for Fusion was (assuming it can be done) not just orders of magnitude more energy, but also extremely little safety risk and on top of that, your "waste" is pure helium. Am I misinformed? This seems like of course we'd be willing to put the effort into that.
No. The cladding of fusion chamber is bombarded with neutrons and has to be replaced frequently, producing radioactive waste. This a drawback of all experimental designs today, AFAIK.
Weinberg also promoted passively safe PWRs like the PIUS late in his life. He thought MSRs would be economical only when fuel costs were high enough to justify the extra complexity of dealing with a radioactive fuel salt and maintenance of radioactive primary equipment.
The MSR designs in work today are at a very early stage of development. We cannot and will not know their economics until we have a fleet operating and see what regulations show up as a result of operating history. Just like LWRs experienced in the 1970s. 1965s Oyster Creek was extremely cheap. 1980s reactors, not so much.
I have not read Weinberg opinions late in live, could you please link me the sources?
Molten Salt Fuel has a number of advantages over solid fuel pellets. I specially like the solution of the SSR where they copy the same assembly type setup and the whole process works very similarly to a PWR or Sodium reactor, but at the same time they retain the inherent advantage of liquid fuel.
> The MSR designs in work today are at a very early stage of development.
They are in advanced talks with the Canadian regulator and are planning deployment this decade.
> We cannot and will not know their economics until we have a fleet operating and see what regulations show up as a result of operating history. Just like LWRs experienced in the 1970s. 1965s Oyster Creek was extremely cheap. 1980s reactors, not so much.
We know now that building the nuclear station and financing of that build is the absolute cost killer for new nuclear, so having designs that are smaller by at least an order of magnitude for the same power output is gone be the huge advantage.
I don't really see how the situation now compares to 1965 where over the next 15 years the regulatory environment changed 100%.
The companies going threw regulatory approval are building to a known set of regulation for the design and the operation of their plants. The are building passively save systems with advanced operations that are designed for much fewer human operation (as any new design reactor design would).
If they get licensed, it is hart to see what possible change in operation could impact the cost to such a huge degree.
Primary loop of a MSR is equivalent to a cladding of a solid fuel assembly. You get a REACTOR at the same cost/MWe of solid fuel assembly. Ni alloys are cheaper than Zr alloy. So, early MSR designers will not opt for maintenance of the primary loop.
Oyster Creek was extremely cheap because the price was set not by what it would cost to build, but to beat coal. It was a fixed price loss leader.
The nuclear industry abandoned such turnkey contracts, and for good reason. They made a desperate return recently, with even sadder result: the bankruptcy of Westinghouse.
Other uses: failsafe generators for critical city infrastructure (communications, fire and police, hospitals). Rural self-sufficient towns far from the grid. City-center car-charging capacity (the grid is most places woefully inadequate to run massive car-charging needs).
I was thinking that if you could shrink them down a bit further it would be a great back up generator for cell sites or hub sites. But then, that would really make the 5G conspiracy theorists heads explode.
If we ever come up with a cheap and safe energy solution, people will find more creative ways to waste energy, instead of doing more useful things with it. I.e. mining bitcoins.
Seems unlikely. Maybe with reduced precision, so they can use lower maintenance meters. They do have to account for crazy usage still surely. But while you get a bill for the connection, they've still got a billing overhead.
NuScale’s small modular reactor is proven technology and seems now good enough to be approved, up and running in the US quite soon indeed. It also seems an acceptable answer to many of the current nuclear problems (shameless plug: https://www.tenproblems.com/2020/04/12/ten-problems-for-nucl...), so good luck!
And cheap. Don't forget that "promise" also. Never mind that turbines and generators and cooling towers all have serious cost problems when scaled down, the Hail Mary Reactors will save the day!
There are a number of factual errors and misunderstanding in this article.
"New research suggests that wind and solar will never fully replace today’s electricity sources. We will always need more reliable sources of energy—ones that don’t fluctuate with the weather."
Why no proper reference to this "new research"? Especially since it looks like conventional wisdom which new research has shown is not the case:
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-...
That paper shows that for continent sized grids (the US is a continent sized country), electrification of heat and transport creates a demand profile that can be matched by a renewable portfolio in every 30 second time period in a year.
Not to mention that the perfect complement to high capex intermittent generation with no marginal production cost is not a steady-producing technology with high capital costs but low to no marginal production cost like nuclear. The perfect complement is low capital cost, high marginal cost gas reciprocal engines. No surprise that this is a fast growing area of generation and that gas turbine manufacturers are hard at work adapting their designs to deal with greater intermittency.
"Joe Biden puts the cost of his plan at $1.7 trillion over ten years. Some analysts estimate the total cost of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal at over $50 trillion."
Conveniently not looking at the cost per year explicitly in the Biden proposal or giving a timescale at all for (one interpretation of) the AOC plan. 1.7 trillion over 10 years is 170bn/yr. That's 8% of US GDP. Quite a lot of money, but it just doesn't seem reasonable to only look at the cost of something which is a set of long life capital investments that way. That's because:
1) The lifetime of renewable generation and transmission infrastructure (and nuclear generation of course) is measured in decades and the operating costs are <<< capital costs.
2) We don't treat capital investments the way we treat recurring expenditures. I "spent" several times my income buying a house. You need to look at the annualised cost over the lifetime of the investment not at the capital cost.
3) Looking at the total upfront cost is only relevant to the degree that in-year budgets or borrowing are constrained. Those constraints are effectively set by the capital markets and by monetary policy for countries borrowing in their own currencies. In government decision making, this distinction is expressed by calculating economic value for money separately from affordability.
4) Only stating the total capital cost doesn't take into account the capital and operating costs in the alternative nor does the author make any attempt to quantify the cost of the nuclear option.
"Moreover, these plans call for unprecedented regulation of the energy sector, something closer to a command economy than a free market."
Dumb as a rock. The energy sector is second only to healthcare in the amount of regulation that applies to it already. The most regulated part of the energy sector is... nuclear.
"But what if there were sources of zero-carbon electricity that didn’t require heavy-handed regulation to make them viable in the marketplace?"
I'm glad to hear that nuclear SMR's will be able to buy private insurance rather than relying on the government to backstop them. Again, the size and complexity of the "regulatory surface" is much bigger for nuclear than for renewables.
Not only that, but basically all the expensive basic research and prototyping for GenIV nuclear has been done by governments. That's true for renewable generation as well of course, but it does seem strange to see descriptions of private sector start-ups as being basically scrappy entrepreneurs when in most cases they are attempting to commercialise ideas that were tested at great expensive and sometime substantial scale using government money in the 1980s.
And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. I find it depressing personally. We're at 75% now, apparently we're on track to hit 50% by 2035. There's nuclear waste and there's a waste of nuclear.