Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia?
You do realize that you can't actually guarantee what will happen in 10, 20... 50 years time. Earthquakes, Tsunamis, tornados, terrorist attacks, wars, neglect, malfunction, human error...
How can you guarantee that a certain place is safe to store millions of tons of radioactive waste for thousands of years if we can't even guarantee what will happen tomorrow? We need to stop this nuclear madness!
Well, damming rivers turned out to be a bad idea in cases so (Washington State)[https://relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/publ...] is undoing them. Wind turbines require surmounting large technical hurdles with storing energy. Solar takes a lot of resources/space. Heck, in 50 years we might be in a dust bowl and solar doesn't even work.
Why would you suggest we prevent using all appropriate options at our disposal? Why not push for using a different type of fuel instead?
I didn't grow up during the nuclear scare times. Fukushima wasn't great, but it wasn't so horrific either. If it gets us off coal and natural gas then I'm down.
Estimates of excess deaths due to nuclear, counting chernobyl, are the lowest of any energy technology. This isn't even counting the part where no new nuclear reactor could possibly be as unsafe as Chernobyl or Fukushima in the same way that no modern car could be as unsafe as as a car from the 1960s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U
My grandfather's dad died in the coal mines. They dropped his body off on the sidewalk infron of the house. His mother married two more times and the other husbands also died in the mine. My grandfather then worked from age 7 to 21 in the mines. He died at 88 from Black Lung induced Lung Cancer.
A dangerous plant design like Chernobyl would have been illegal to build in any western country, so not sure why you think it is relevant to any other country. Accidents from hydroelectric plants have killed orders of magnitude more people than even the largest estimates of deaths from Fukushima (or even Chernobyl) - are you also opposed to hydroelectric power?
Um. This isn't something where you can just run your reactor in different configurations at test time and run time. The technology has come a long way since the 1960s and the math and science have advanced transformatively. Building an unsafely non-compliant nuclear plant would be like building a diesel car and then trying to tell the regulators that it's electric. You can do some fudging, sure, but things like the sign of the void coefficient are effectively impossible to lie about.
>Um. This isn't something where you can just run your reactor in different configurations at test time and run time.
No, but lying and having experts being, ahem flexible, about the expected safety is very easy, and par for the course when selling multi-billion dollar projects...
It's also very easy to ignore "black swan" event cases, and the potential impact to millions of lives, just because you think you've covered everything there is to cover.
Chernobyl was just about the worst possible outcome of a nuclear disaster: The majority of the radiological material was swept up in a cloud of graphite dust and lofted into the upper atmosphere by a fire that burned, uncontrolled, for over a week. Fukushima happened in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. And yet, even counting those, Nuclear is still the safest energy source we have. We can talk about black swans and fudging the estimates, and I'll admit that your line of argument would be stronger if we were talking about the very first reactors to be built, when they were still just blueprints.
But that's not the case. We have real-world evidence that we can use to calibrate our expectations against reality. The fact is that, even if you count Chernobyl and Fukushima, our existing reactors are safer than fossil fuels. And I think that you would have an exceedingly difficult time arguing that newly-built reactors would be less safe than existing reactors.
And it is different. Cars still crash, but for any given crash speed ťhe survivability of any given class of car is two orders or magnitude better than its 1950s counterpart.
The recipe for the catastrophe is design + time, so it's not like "new designs have fewer failures" offers much comfort. Of course they would.
Plus, previous installations had fewer potential non-design-related issues, such as terrorism, which (in today's nihilistic "more possible damage, including innocents and even myself" way) wasn't as much a thing in the 60s and 70s.
At least damns damage only the area relatively near them. The implications of a nuclear catastrophe can impact thousands of miles around, including major cities.
Dams are built on large rivers. Inundations resulting from dam failures tend to follow the path of the river. Cities are also built near large rivers. The Banqiao Dam failure displaced fifteen times as many people as the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi disasters combined. The impending failure of the Mosul Dam is projected to do the same.
>Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia?
No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. This comic illustrates the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity
>... How can you guarantee that a certain place is safe to store millions of tons of radioactive waste for thousands of years if we can't even guarantee what will happen tomorrow?
Millions of tons? Where are you getting that number from? Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
>> Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia?
> No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. This comic illustrates the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity
The comic is a bit disingenious as it implies that all renewables are intermittent.
But many renewable energy sources are base load as well, e.g. hydro or wind. Yes, they have variations, but so does the load -- from the perspective of power grid management there's nothing new.
In fact this is part of the problem: renewables and nuclear (or coal) are competing for base load. If we build a nuclear plant, we need to run it for 50 years for the investment to make sense. This means that it will economically and politically impede the installation of e.g. wind power for 50 years.
Wind most certainly isn't base load. It's highly weather dependent. Occasionally, Ireland's wind infrastructure produces the country's entire electricity demand, and they actually have to start shutting down wind turbines. Also occasionally the whole system only produces a couple of hundred megawatts for a period of about a week.
There are some locations with very reliable constant wind (though usually only for part of the year) but that's not the norm. Offshore wind does better, but is still far from base load.
Do you have a link to an article on this? My impression was that Germany was trying to move away from base load as a concept entirely, using unreliable renewables plus highly responsive fossil plants instead.
Which is surprising as I remember reading that France has tremendous difficulties satisfying their electricity demand, especially in winter (lots of electric heating apparently).
>...The comic is a bit disingenious as it implies that all renewables are intermittent.
No, I don't think it does that.
>...But many renewable energy sources are base load as well, e.g. hydro or wind.
As user rsynnott said "Wind most certainly isn't base load." While hydro is base load power, only a few countries like China are considering building more hydro plants. We aren't going to be able to use hydro as a means to get off of burning fossil fuels.
"The budget for Hanford alone is about $2.3 billion in the current fiscal year, about $1.5 billion of that going to the management and treatment of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored in underground storage tanks."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/0...
Ultimately, however, the core problem may be that such new reactors don't eliminate the nuclear waste that has piled up so much as transmute it. Even with a fleet of such fast reactors, nations would nonetheless require an ultimate home for radioactive waste, one reason that a 2010 M.I.T. report on spent nuclear fuel dismissed such fast reactors. Or, as Cochran puts it: "If you want to get rid of milk, don't feed it to cows."
"Do the math! 1.1 additional GT out of 36 GT emitted is only a 3% difference. This 3% value is not a typographical error. Worldwide, all those nukes made only a 3% dent in yearly CO2 production. Put another way, each of the 438 individual nuclear plants contribute less than seven thousandths of one percent to CO2 reduction[18]. That’s hardly enough to justify claims that keeping your old local nuke running is necessary to prevent the sea from rising."
>The budget for Hanford alone is about $2.3 billion in...
Hanford was started in the Manhattan project to produce plutonium and during the cold war produced plutonium for tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. All of these government weapons plants were quickly started with inadequate policies for handling the material.
>...Ultimately, however, the core problem may be that such new reactors don't eliminate the nuclear waste that has piled up so much as transmute it.
A 4th gen design like the IFR would allow you to end with a much smaller volume of waste that would only be dangerous for a few centuries.
In terms of natural gas, the numbers given are probably out of date - CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are lower than a coal plant, but that doesn't account for the methane emissions that come with fracking and distributing the methane.
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
