Two interesting things to see here, of many. They are really planning the sites to be temporary compared to the solar/wind/ and other industrial power plants that have little or no plan for returning their sites to the original virgin soil. And two, they seem to use a molten salt loop like in concentrated solar to meet variable demand without changing the power level of the reactor, which you can't really do because of Xenon poisoning. So it's like a natural gas plant in its ability to deliver power, but clean and holds 20 years of fuel inside the reactor.
And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost.
I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out.
Nuclear is outrageously expensive, though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on that.
Look, I think nuclear is fine. But as a numerate and earnest environmentalist, I don't see where the case for it lies. Right now, we should be building out solar and wind as fast as we can, because they're good and safe and CHEAP. And when we get to that last 5-10% where we need buffering capacity that we're currently getting via gas? Yeah, maybe then we can talk about nuclear.
But even then... meh. What's the case on trying to finish the job on electrical generation vs. putting those same dollars into low hanging fruit in other areas of the energy puzzle?
Nuclear needs to make its case on a balance sheet before it makes sense to talk about.
> Nuclear is outrageously expensive, though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on that.
Nuclear plants are expensive the way GE and Bechtel build them not inherently so. At some point I got to look at the Diablo Canyon cost-to-build breakdown and about 2/3ds of the cost were litigation, licensing, and specialized site and construction prep. Finding people who could do the kinds of welds they needed, build structures in the right way, inspect, inspect, inspect, and litigate dozens of lawsuits asserting on form of harm or another. It was pretty amazing.
This particular company can build the reactor in their factory. All their specialists are in one place, you can have permanent inspection equipment with costs amortized over all the reactors you build, and the safety systems this reactor design purports to have means no additional site prep (no backup generators, no double containment vessels, no borosilicon sandpits under the reactor to slag into glass while "catching" a meltdown.
If I were to guess, while the pitch is all about safety, this design screams that it is all about cost. When you factor in that the design in modular, so making a 100MW power station with 20 of these gets advantages of scale that multiplies the cost advantage.
When I read this I see those cost savings and recognize this could be both cheaper than renewables and way more reliable. A solid base load solution to kill the last of the coal plants.
My guess is that the pitch of safety is to the public (experts already know it is safe enough and that insurance more than covers expenses). And that modularity/size is a pitch to investors over cost.
From my understanding, small reactors haven't been popular in the past because they still have the same insurance premiums as large reactors. If I'm wrong, or this changes, then that's a big reduction in cost alongside the aspects you mentioned.
If this team convinces the insurance folks that their design really is safer, and so their premiums should be low enough to make small reactors competitive, it could be a huge breakthrough.
Nuclear has had 70+ years and untold zillions in government research money and subsidies poured into it[1] - if the same level of investment over time had gone into renewables, imagine where they'd be now.
[1] worldwide - germany, uk, canada, france, russia etc in addition to the us - everyone did build their experimental gas/molten salt/fuel recycling/pebble bed etc reactor research programs and reactors. not to mention all the free experiments and r&d experience from the military applications.
First of, I think you underestimate how much money have gone into developing wind and solar through subsidies.
More importantly, the way solar and wind has been funded has secured competition for lower prices and allowed parallel exploration of multiple technologies. On the other hand, nuclear has been funded like old-school space exploration: heavy on management, low on technical vision, and often with a reward system that favors inefficiency.
In the case of space-exploration, companies like spaceX has come along and shown how innovation can completely change the cost: just compare the crew dragon with the SLS-circus. I believe there is ample space for the same to happen in nuclear power.
And still, storing energy is not solved and renewables are not reliable. Nuclear vs renewable is apples to oranges. Look at California for an example what happens with your system (or course we ha to look at this like a system and not individual power plants).
Germany alone spends ~$1.2 trn (that would be ~4.8trn on a population adjusted basis for the USA) on the Energiewende, and Germany is far away from being 100% renewables.
The EU now plans to invest another trillion € till 2030. A lot of money is poured into renewables.
That's $1400 per capita per year since it passed in 2010, lower than many utility bills, so it would be surprising if it was able to have already transitioned the entire nation's electricity that quickly.
And Germany has the most expensive electricity on the planet (for a firstworld nation and adjusted to cost of living). Funding is drying up because renewable subsidies make power unaffordable and thus politically unviable. Germany should be a big warning to everyone claiming renewables would be cheap or cheaper, the market here is gravely distorted by subsidies and yet, people point to Germany as an example...
Reference? I know there was some push back on their "walk away safe" claim (something that these guys have a better story for) but I had not seen anywhere that Nuscale would not be able to build their reactors in a factory.
They are building in the factory. I heard there is some assembly on site, but it’s just bolting on valves and other appurtenances. There are no large pressure vessel welds in the field. That is what saves costs.
"In answer to a question I posed to Nuscale at the town hall we have learned that the plan to save costs by fabricating the modules at a remote factory and shipping them to the Idaho site has been abandoned. The artful response to my question said that Nuscale engaged with approximately 40 … pressure vessel fabricators worldwide and … determined that Nuscale will use existing factories … in lieu of building its own factory.
The major module subcomponents will be manufactured at multiple manufacturer locations and shipped to a single ___location for assembly prior to installing into the facility.” This signifies the failure of one of the major cost-saving features of the Nuscale project, which was to forestall this exact scenario."
Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than coal. A "coal power plant using different fuel" would produce energy so cheap it couldn't be metered.
No, he's right. Nuclear plants are still just conventional thermal power plants. They "burn" stuff to generate heat and use the heat to drive a turbine. They can't be cheaper because burning coal doesn't have ultra high demands on how the boiler is designed. Meanwhile nuclear reactors can be arbitrarily complex.
That isn't my understanding, would love to learn more about how you come to that conclusion. (Ideally based on an idea like the one in the article vs just your run of the mill designed in 1950 power plant :-))
Are they changing any relevant part of the power generator compared to a 1950 plant? Are they at a minimum heating the steam into a higher temperature than what a modern coal plant do? (Are they using water? Because coal works on the limits of what you can do with water already.)
This article seems to have no detail at all, but all the information there seems to be about the reactor. Guess what, you won't build a nuclear reactor that is cheaper than a coal furnace, thus if you don't change anything on the power generator, you can't get cheaper than coal.
Lots actually, the way it is fueled, completely different (as in you don't re-fuel it you replace it) so all of the re-fueling infrastructure is not needed. They replace water (low pressure or high pressure) with helium which gives them two benefits, one it carries more heat and two it doesn't become a high explosive[1] when exposed to extreme temperature. Another benefit of helium is that if it leaks from the system, it carries no fission byproducts(like Cesium) in solution and has no radioactive isotopes with half lives of more than a second. 6-Helium has a half life of .8 seconds and emits a beta particle.
Most nuclear plants operate at lower steam temperatures than coal, because thermal efficiency isn't so critical and lower temperatures are less wear on the pipes and turbines.
WRT cost: Nuclear plants could be cheaper. Because, for instance, coal plants require scrubbers to meet particulate emissions rules, which are very expensive to install and operate. And coal is expensive: mining, transporation, cleaning.
Of course there are batteries! But factoring them in seems to increase the cost significantly. Power lines and cross-continent smart grids are fine, too — but also not free to build and operate.
So a self-contained unit that does not depend on weather, does not need refueling, and includes its own energy accumulator has some appeal.
Why does electricity at night need to cost the same as electricity during the day? Would Western civilization collapse if it cost twice as much? Three times as much?
How much trouble do we need to go to so aluminum smelters can run at 100% capacity at 2 AM?
If you're going to shut down factories at night, that itself is a cost that should be accounted for. If you're shutting down for eight hours a day, you increase capital costs by a third.
That's worth paying if it's the only option to address climate change, but if the main argument against nuclear is cost, it's not a fair comparison if renewables externalize cost to the customers.
(Also, aluminum smelters in particular take damage if they shut down more than five hours or so.)
its not a property of molten aluminum to freeze in 6 hours, it depends on the thermal insulation.
what I proposed was to have a secondary sealed thermal bath of aluminum which gets molten during cheap power and which returns heat during expensive power to maintain the temperature of the primary (work) batch of aluminum so that the work batch doesn't freeze
the heat can be transfered with an appropriate working fluid.
since the secondary thermal bath aluminum doesn't need to satisfy client demands (specific alloy etc) the alloy can be chosen so as to have a suitable melting point for such a setup
Right. So show me the balance sheet where building out reactors makes sense. Because as of right now it clearly doesn't, and the proof is that no one is building reactors but everyone is building windmills.
This is an incredibly weak argument, as most of the opposition to nuclear power even before widespread renewable deployment was political, not economic. Maybe the economics have changed with renewables, but that needs to be proved rather than can be inferred by the lack of US reactors being built.
Take Germany’s recent denuclearization, the efforts are completely political, there was no mention of balance sheet optimizations or concerns. China, India, Russia, among others are all building reactors - either we must agree they are fiscally irrational, or realize that there is an economic case to be made for nuclear power.
>most of the opposition to nuclear power even before widespread renewable deployment was political, not economic.
Most of the opposition to nuclear power was about a whole lot of things other than politics or economics. Decades of quantifiable failure after failure in the environmental, construction quality, maintenance, radioactive discharge, siting-safety, and waste-handling realms, to name just a few. Everywhere the problems were the same, whether they were covered-up or not. The problems were those of an arrogant energy industry primarily concerned with minimizing expenses. The facts weren't political ... although the many, many cover-ups certainly were.
To overlook all that history and suggest that nuclear is just a political football is absurd. Had it been a quantifiable success, little of the resistance would have evolved. And Karen Silkwood might not have died. There was a lot of money and power at stake, and little tolerance for realistic concerns. The industry earned the disrespect it continues to enjoy.
Remember the widespread promise "Too cheap to meter"? In what year was that promise kept?
I agree the take above was reductive, especially in truncating the historical aspects of nuclear power, so much so that in the general case it is incorrect. Collective amnesia is not a solution to yesterday’s nightmares.
I think there is hope that the new generation of nuclear scientists and companies have learned lessons, and I support giving them regulated room to prove it. America has a lot of bad energy policy (Fracking, mountaintop mining, to name a couple in addition to your comment’s nuclear perspective) - improving on that is important, but making it worse is not acceptable (Nor am I a fan of gambling with such large minimum bets).
Irrespective of my failures, the core of the original critique I think stands insofar as the argument it was responding to was not self-sustaining.
Edit: I don’t mean to age you, but I am honestly too young to remember “Too cheap to meter”. I can see where historical memory, or the lack thereof, has colored our respective perspectives, though, in important ways
Everyone is building heavily subsidized windmill. And nobody is building reactors[1] mostly because it's really unpopular (which it pretty much deserves IMHO after decades of shady practices) but it's not a matter of technical merit (and it's never the case).
I'd suggest looking through Lazard's levelized cost of energy slide decks. The unsubsidized price of renewables is indeed substantially less than nuclear.
Next look at the time scales for building new nuclear. Then look at the trend lines in the cost of storage, particularly utility scale lithium batteries.
You don't have to be a genius to realize this makes new nuclear a bad bet purely on the finances. Even if you waved a magic wand to eliminate any environmental opposition, the only way new nuclear is getting funded is if government picks up the tab. And that's what we see globally.
One of the reasons NuScale and the linked company above are getting investment traction is exactly because they're attempting to reduce the capital costs and timelines. That's a bet investors are more willing to take, even if the technology is unproven yet.
> Then look at the trend lines in the cost of storage, particularly utility scale lithium batteries. You don't have to be a genius to realize this makes new nuclear a bad bet purely on the finances.
You are off by more than one order of magnitude! For non-hydro renewable to be self sufficient, you need between 200h and 600h of storage[1]. So to replace a 1300MW reactor, you need 3000MW of renewable power (assuming 33% load factor, which is a good one for renewable) AND at least 200GWh of storage! The storage cost just dwarfs the cost of everything else (and because it won't last 40 years, you'd need to pay for it at least twice!).
Solar and wind power are financially interesting because: the grid handles the load variations, subsidies, and the financial markets financing short-term projects easily compared to bigger one expected to run for 60 years.
Non-hydro renewable are nice when you want to reduce fossil fuel consumption in a grid where most electricity comes from fossil fuel (and ideally not too much coal), but on a purely technical standpoint, they are no match for nuclear. The thing are never purely technical though, and overall I'm sceptical about the future of nuclear.
> For non-hydro renewable to be self-sufficient, you need [8-25 days] of storage.
If you're adamant on generation following load, low transport, probably no overgeneration, no hydro and absolutely no backup biomass, gas or similar, then yes, you probably need 25 days of storage.
It would be good to have at least a couple of days or weeks of energy buffer in the world's supply chain, but that can take many forms. Electricity and lithium batteries seem a bad choice for the bulk of it.
And NuScale appears to be failing on that, with the UAMPS buuld being delayed one year per year for the last four years, and still only 30% subscribed. In the meantime, costs have escalated 70%.
>it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost
Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable. They are also defuse energy sources, and so require huge surface area and lots of materials for collectors - not great for a growing world, both in population and per capita energy needs. Oh, they are variable across days, seasons and inter-year periods, but there is no battery technology coming that is able to store even enough power to a moderately sized city for a few minutes, much less the weeks it would need.
> Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable.
False. Renewables could get to 100% of the grid. A key is using hydrogen for the last 10% or so. This is not currently competitive with fossil fuel, but then neither is nuclear.
I'm not an expert in this, but isn't this just a really extra lossy type of battery? Hydrogen takes energy to create, so if you're creating hydrogen from renewable energy sources during peak load, you have to go energy -> hydrogen -> energy with efficiency losses both ways. I remain unimpressed by hydrogen, as it seems to only be practical if you don't any other options for existing stores of energy. For instance a large scale battery system, or even some mechanical energy storage systems.
The benefit of power to gas is that most countries already have an existing system that can both store and burn it. The efficiency is low but the necessary infrastructure investments are also incredibly low compared to building battery based energy storage. It is also an unavoidable step if you want to invest into carbon capture in the future. Excess methane can be exported. Suddenly even a resource poor nation like Germany could become an energy exporter.
When you consider that renewable share in % per day in Germany follows a normal distribution then you realize that there are only a few days that actually need to utilize hydrogen or methane to generate power.
Yes. The advantage of hydrogen is the extremely low cost per unit of stored energy. That is the cost you want to minimize for a storage case with few charge-discharge cycles, like rainy day or seasonal storage.
For diurnal storage, batteries or other more efficient storage technologies would make more sense, since there would be more charge-discharge cycles over which to amortize the cost of the system.
>A National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study concludes that by 2050, hydrogen storage lasting for two weeks “is expected to be cost-effective.”
2050!!!
By 2050 we'll also have Fusion and other mythical power sources.
To be fair, hydrogen is one of those "mythical" power sources. It just happens to be the one that is becoming viable in the short-term and is not dependent on some future discovery.
Burn the hydrogen in combustion turbines, just like natural gas.
You repeat an excuse, but nuclear builds have failed, and continue to fail, not because of regulation, but because of the high unforgiving complexity of nuclear power plants. The post mortems at huge cost overruns point to management failures, not new regulations sprung out of nowhere.
>Burn the hydrogen in combustion turbines, just like natural gas.
That simple? Anyone in the world actually using hydrogen in this way?
You can dissmis nuclear all you want, but doesn't change the fact that renewables (outside of hydro/geothermal for which you need special geography) do not work. There is no nation on this planet that is powered by renewables. There is no nation on this planet that is planning to be powered by renewables. Germany believes in renewables so much they are signing multi-decade contracts to ship gas from Russia and building new pipelines!
"Our turbines have nearly 30 years of experience operating on a variety of fuels that contain hydrogen, totaling over 6 million operating hours as hydrogen-fueled turbines using concentrations ranging from 5% to 95% (by volume)."
> You can dissmis nuclear all you want, but doesn't change the fact that renewables (outside of hydro/geothermal for which you need special geography) do not work. There is no nation on this planet that is powered by renewables.
Ah yes, the old "nothing can ever happen for the first time" argument. Mindless reactionary nonsense. No nation is powered by renewables, therefore no nation can ever be powered by renewables, technical arguments be damned.
That hydrogen can be used as fuel is not controversial. Of course it can. What I mean is that nobody is actually using hydrogen as part of a renewable life-cycle (i.e. generating hydrogen from excess renewable energy, and using as energy store).
>Ah yes, the old "nothing can ever happen for the first time" argument. Mindless reactionary nonsense.
The problem for you is that renewables have been around for years so the fact that they aren't powering any economy needs an explanation. Furthermore, even conceptually, you haven't explained HOW they would power an economy. Renewables have well known limitations. They are diffuse power sources, require huge surface areas covered with high-tech collectors, and are highly variable. The only way we can get them to work is by attaching them to a grid with natural gas or coal - because we have no way to store excess energy enough to bridge their variability. You can deny this, but it is an actual fact and the fact that you cannot point me to a region that has solved this should be quite telling.
> The problem for you is that renewables have been around for years so the fact that they aren't powering any economy needs an explanation.
Renewables have only recently become competitive (or more than competitive). This has happened so fast that existing generating capacity is still largely the old technology. Those old technologies will only be ripped out when their OPERATING costs are greater than the full cost of installing renewables to replace them.
That this old technology is still there doesn't mean it's competitive on a clean sheet basis, it just means it's not worth ripping it out yet.
The rapid decline in renewable prices leads to some interesting contrasts. In the UAE, for example, they are now bringing some Korean reactors online that were green lighted about a decade ago. They will produce power for somewhere around $.08/kWh, perhaps a bit higher. At the same time, contracts have been signed for a large PV field there that will sell power for $0.013/kWh. If they had waited on those nuclear plants and just built PV now they would have come out ahead.
What you want to look at is where new money is going, when new generating capacity is needed (and remember, power demand has been flat in the US for a decade). Renewables are taking a large share of that, and would take a larger share (in the US) with nonzero CO2 taxes.
Where is this 10% coming from? Solar doesn't work at all between sundown and sunrise. Similarly wind also doesn't align with energy demand either.
Hydrogen isn't the answer either. It is incredibly inefficient to produce via electrolysis, meaning you would have to massively over-provison your collectors.
>This is not currently competitive with fossil fuel, but then neither is nuclear.
Why are you focusing on price? Renewables don't work. They could be free and you'd still be building natural gas plants. This why no nation is actually powered by renewables. When an article claims a nation has reached 100% renewable energy it's always geothermal or hydro - which require the right geography.
The last 10% comes from rare dark/calm periods. I requires a storage technology beyond mere diurnal storage (for which there are plenty of options and where continued cost decline will almost certainly address your negativity.)
> Why are you focusing on price? Renewables don't work. They could be free and you'd still be building natural gas plants.
If price is no object, then obviously renewables can be made to work anywhere. After all, one could dump heat into underground thermal stores and use that as artificial geothermal. The thermal time constant for a several hundred meter chunk of bedrock is measured in centuries.
Baseload is the last thing renewables need. Baseload displaces renewables because you cannot regulate baseload fast enough. Just take a look at Germany and their coal fueled baseload. It has slowed down the Energiewende and made electricity expensive because consumers have to pay for curtailed renewables via the EEG surcharge. Imagine building a renewable energy infrastructure and then throwing out the electricity it generates because coal buddies get priority treatment. If anything Germany needs to get rid of any legacy baseload plants and take advantage of more flexible power plants like natural gas plants.
> Oh, they are variable across days, seasons and inter-year periods, but there is no battery technology coming that is able to store even enough power to a moderately sized city for a few minutes, much less the weeks it would need.
There is no need for "battery technology". This strawman keeps getting repeated just like crappy quadrocopters being used as killer weapons. It's because docile consumers can't see past their own little bubble and imagine that industrial giants also buy all their stuff at the supermarket.
No, you use an entire mix of different technologies and strategies to solve this problem. I don't want to repeat myself but seasonal differences are usually solved by curtailment. If winter needs more power you build enough plants for winter and then curtail the excess energy in summer. Medium term storage needs are trivially met with power to gas (both hydrogen and methane), short term storage needs can be solved via batteries, compressed air or thermal storage. All of these technologies have been available for a long time. The reality is that renewables can easily reach 80% generation without any storage investments at all so practically no country on earth has bothered to invest into additional storage, not because technologies are missing. It's just not a practical concern for the next 20 years.
>you use an entire mix of different technologies and strategies to solve this problem.
Like what? What's the mix?
And why is nobody doing it?
>It's just not a practical concern for the next 20 years.
Because they use coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro or geothermal ... You know power sources that can actually power a modern economy.
>Medium term storage needs are trivially met with power to gas (both hydrogen and methane), short term storage needs can be solved via batteries, compressed air or thermal storage.
You keep using words like 'trivial' when no nation is actually building this kind of infrastructure. No nation even has plans to build this infrastructure.
>All of these technologies have been available for a long
Yes. Therefore it should make you question why they aren't being used. Perhaps they aren't because they don't work at grid-scale?
I think this is artificially restricting the solution space.
We have fixed price and supply of electricity over the day due to historical reasons, but it's not the future. And we can make the change gradually using variable pricing and speeding up the transition with the tools of regulation.
And of course other developments will help counter the price spikes - manufacturing and cooling systems adapting their power usage patterns, hvdc lines, energy storage, houses getting more energy efficient to cool/heat by using insulation and heat/cold recovery in ventilation etc etc. Energy is currently just so incredibly cheap that most obvious improvements are left on the table or progressing at glacial speeds.
Only residential has fixed prices for electricity over the day. Industrial electricity has always been sold in variable prices, e.g. furnaces and other large consumers run when power is cheap and go into hold mode when it is expensive. There even is a large discount if you allow the power company to switch your consumption on/off. All that is already a reality and has been for decades.
Which goes to show: there still is baseload to consider, and there always will be. There is a green electricity ceiling that can only be circumvented with storage.
But still "base load" is no law of nature. Half the market is on fixed price, and regulation has so far dictated that there has to be a lot of "base load" type power production, and without co2 externalities priced in that's been profitable for producers too. But it's all rules and tech we invented and can be changed.
The amount of supply following the current industrial users are incentivised to do, and the requisite investments, will be much higher once the fixed price system is dismantled from the remaining portion of the market.
It's a term that means we can guarantee a set amount of power regardless of environmental conditions. Renewables are sensitive to environmental conditions, and we don't have a battery technology to bridge renewable variablity and hence the need for 'base-load'. In that context, 'base load' is a law of nature.
"base load" is also a statistical law of nature. Your consumers might want or need to consume your product regardless of the price. I will run my heating before I freeze to death, and I will thaw a meal before I starve. Somebody will switch on their lights in the dead of night. The hospital will run its MRI when an emergency arises.
All these things are rather randomly occuring things, some correlated, some uncorrelated. All these create a "ground noise" of consumption. All these things lead to a need for baseload power, which can only be removed by switching off the grid.
Looking at the multiple data sources at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source, there is several patterns that should be fairly clear. Gas and oil is very cheap to build, and the market price they can get out per generated MWh is higher.
> Look, I think nuclear is fine. But as a numerate and earnest environmentalist, I don't see where the case for it lies
Lets put this is in numerical estimated numbers.
An investor builds a wind farm. On average they produce a MWh that costed $35. For the period which the energy was produced they managed to sell it for $85 netting them a profit of $50.
An other investor builds a natural gas power plant. On average they produce a MWh that costed $45. Since they can choose when to produce it they managed to get an average price of $150, netting them a profit of $105.
As a balance sheet, $35 is a cheaper price than $45 when producing 1 MWh. $50 is however much less than $105, making the more expensive energy source the more profitable choice of investment.
Cost is just half the picture in any commercial venture. The daily energy price for 1 MWh varies heavily based on demand and supply. $50 per MWh one day could be $500 a few days later when supply is low and demands is high.
I would also describe myself as numerate and earnest environmentalist, and my view is similar to your but with a clear distinction. Right now we must stop burning fossil fuels. If it cost $45 to produce and they can earn $150, investors who only care about money will continue to invest in fossil fuels. That must stop. The climate will have won a partial victory when the investment into fossil fueled power plants are a proven poor investment, and then we can move on to the transport sector.
I don't think they're necessarily chasing grid power at first anyway. They seem positioned to tackle mass market electricity last, after addressing smaller higher price markets.
> the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost
But most of the time, the “cost” of renewable is undefined, because you simply can't use it: you need the grid to compensate for the intermittent generation. No battery won't be enough unless you are in a really specific situation:
- hydroelectric source available, in which case, it's a no-brainer, but most of those sites are already exploited (hydroelectric power was historically the first to come).
- if tpu want to go for solar power, you need tropical or subtropical area, where you have the same amount of sun during the whole year. Otherwise you either need to have batteries able to sustain the whole winter, or dimension your system for winter (which dramatically increases the cost and you end up with a lot of unused power during summertimes).
- for wind power, you need a regularly windy area (the top of a hill, the middle of the sea) and batteries because the world best wind power sites still don't produce every days (storms means shutdown for instance).
If you don't have the perfect spot for one of those, the batteries aren't even a solution[1], because you'd need something like two to four weeks of power in terms of storage…
Or, you could go for a mix between fossil fuel and renewable, which is why the oil and gas industry is making a big push towards renewables …
you missed judrogen electrolysis which comes out comparable in expense to nuclear when deployed on top of renewables, amd gives the same level of stability?
Yield is a problem, as well as rhe ability to store hydrogen safely (injecting it in the natural gas grid isn't possible when we're talking about off-the-grid scenarios).
And we where supposed to talk about renewable “3 to 10 times cheaper than nuclear”, so bringing a storage technology with an higher investment per Watt than nuclear pretty much defeats the argument.
Think of smaller nuclear reactors as an option for places where renewables might not make sense, like in mining. Building power generation that costs 10x some renewable source will never make sense. However, building small scale nuclear as replacement for onsite diesel generators could make a whole lot of sense. Illinois Energy Prof has a good video on this => https://youtu.be/7gtog_gOaGQ
> But as a numerate and earnest environmentalist, I don't see where the case for it lies.
There's two main benefits to nuclear:
1) The big case is the lack of good power storage. While areas like the South West US have plenty of sunshine to go around, most other places don't have this luxury. Therefore you need substantially more storage. I'll give you an example, I've been sitting in Oregon for the past week and sun levels have been pretty abysmal, the past week. Dust and ash are covering panels, making things worse, and this is the sunniest time of the year. There's plenty of times I don't see the sun for a few days straight. Same with wind. Because of this we need to mix up our power sources a bit. I mean you also don't want to depend on only two power sources. I think most of us in the nuclear community agree on: wind + solar + hydro + nuclear as the model. Without good enough batteries nuclear is a great option for baseloads. Remember that you need enough battery storage for rare events where there isn't much sun and wind. Current solutions aren't quite there yet without massive footprints, CO2eq costs, and a high price tag. The unfortunate fact is that wind and solar can't stand up by themselves. They need support. People talk about how you can do it with batteries, water storage, whatever, but until it is implemented I'm not holding my breath.
2) Nuclear has a small physical footprint. This means less disruption of local wildlife, homes, etc. This is a big environmental factor to me.
As to what these people are doing, there's a few factors they are banking on (bets). It'll be interesting to see how that pans out and if their bets can pay off.
- With small modular designs they can get the benefits from economies of scale. This hasn't ever really been a thing for nuclear in the past. This has been a big driver for the huge costs.
- Small reactors should be cheaper to insure (this still needs to be resolved from what I'm aware of and has historically made small reactors unattractive).
- Small and modular enables the ability to better fit the local environment and meet the specific needs. Southern California? Probably don't need any. Alaska? Few would be nice. The idea behind these is that you don't have to transmit energy far (lower loss due to transmission), can add independence from the grid (to corporations or universities), and you don't need to put them in areas that can better rely on wind and solar, i.e. better scaling than conventional nuclear plants.
Of course, this is still a bet and has been one people have been talking about for well over a decade, but why dismiss it before they place their chips? If the bets pay off we should welcome them with open arms. If they don't pay off, well we're on a forum hosted by a startup company where we all know most startups fail. Glad someone at least tried. We're not talking about enough investment money that it would sway the scales and it is good to spread out your bets.
Independent of energy production, I support any nuclear program that reduces our stockpiles, on any time scale. Bonus yay if we also manage to get some economic benefit.
To make bombs. And what's changed now is we have enough bombs.
Seriously, even the reactors that aren't expressly breeding fuel were designed with an eye to the technology and as part of programs in the 50's-70's to build out expertise in this critical technology area of national security.
Countries wanted bombs. To make bombs you need a nuclear industry. Ergo, everyone who wanted bombs built civilian reactors, without exception.
This argument doesn’t hold. There are several countries such as Finland that have operated nuclear power plants for decades and do not have ambitions for nuclear bombs.
If you want to go with that argument: cite Japan, not Finland. But it doesn't have to be 100% true to be largely true. The overwhelming majority of nuclear capacity has been built out by nuclear powers or aspiring nuclear powers. And with few exceptions the end of their warhead buildout happens to correlate with the end of their megawatt buildout.
Japan has a stockpile of separated reactor grade plutonium sufficient to make thousands of bombs. This is a deniable kind of proliferation. If push came to shove they could weaponize that material without having to make new plutonium.
(And, yes, reactor grade Pu CAN be used in weapons, with proper design.)
I think a lot of countries built reactors when the economics of Nuclear reactors as well as the economics of renewables were unknown with respect what they would look like in scaled deployment. Modern looks at the operating costs vs time to build, vs modern construction practices from the US, France, China, et al seems say the economics of Nuclear reactors have stalled or increased, while the economics of renewables continue to make accelerating improvements.
Well, you also have to consider that many gas plants emit less CO2 than coal plats. You're going to need them either way because it's the fastest way to reduce the CO2 footprint of your nation's electricity mix.
If it can be combined with desalination, and profitably create medical isotopes, that could help balance the books. But yea, you are right. And solar keeps getting cheaper.
If its gross fusion power were converted to electrical power at 40% efficiency, it will have cost $100/W(e) to build, an order of magnitude more expensive than fission power plants.
(Its net power output would be negative, btw, and there won't be enough tritium to run it for more than a few weeks total, as it's not going to breed its own tritium.)
Things that have long half-lives are not very dangerous, as in order to have a long half-life it must be emitting radiation at correspondingly lower levels.
For example, something with a half-life of 100,000 years is emitting 1/100,000 of the radiation that one with a half-life of a year is.
There's an easy way to remember this with a little knowledge of nuclear. Radiation means the material is losing mass (yes, even gamma emitters. Remember Einstein). If it is putting out a lot of radiation, it is losing a lot of mass. Therefore, logically, it can't last that long.
Essentially it is like having a well. If you attach a firehose to it you'll drain it overnight. If you attach a dripper to it, it'll take centuries to drain.
I actually have no idea how long waste needs to be kept out of the hands of criminals, but I assume it's "a long time". My comment was mostly facetious, but the point I was making was serious. We never really take the full cost of disposing waste and pollution into consideration.
I think, when you buy a new solar panel, you should also pay the full cost to pull it apart and dispose of it as well.
Not just carbon, but plastics and all kinds of pollution. Even the clean up of recyclables like glass and metal should be paid for upfront rather thank asking society to pickup the tab after the fact.
Nuclear waste only lasts "forever" when it is not recycled. And even then it is not dangerous and doesn't need an "armed guard" after a few weeks when all the most radioactive material has decayed away.
let us weigh the damage of secured monitored nuclear waste leaking vs the uncollected nuclear isotopes into the open environment released today by the carbon burning industry.
also we don't need to prevent 100% of the waste from leaking just enough to keep from rising the natural ambient background that would be in the environment naturally before we extracted it. Secondly we have the means disposing of in newer reactor designs that use waste from older reactors as fuel and their waste has a much lower half life (down from 100,000 to 500 years)
I’m okay with costs being 3-10x for something with zero emissions. And the more we build the cheaper it gets. We have to invest in the future technology. Solar is a good 20th century technology but it is poisonous and degrades over time. Wind is useless.
I highly recommend HBO's Chernobyl. Explains a lot this stuff. Basically, as a nuclear reactor operates, it is turning the Uranium into lots of other stuff. One component of this other stuff is Xenon-135, which absorbs neutrons and basically gets in the way of nuclear reactions. This is not an issue if you keep the reactor on because there are enough neutrons to keep things going and overcome the Xenon absorption. But if you turn the reactor off, you now have no neutrons from the fission reactions and lots of neutron absorbers. There is so much absorption that it's impossible to start up the reactor for a couple of days. That's why nuclear reactors operate at constant power and only turn off to refuel. This MMR also operates at constant power, which would also have benefits for cycling issues, and uses the molten salt loop to store heat and then use it when it's needed.
Scott Manley made a more condensed form of the explanation of the nuclear physics involved here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3d3rzFTrLg (~21 minutes). It's an excellent explanation of the processes.
The HBO show is also an excellent drama and worth a watch.
When a reactor is "poisoned" with Xenon, the Xenon absorbs a large fraction of neutrons that otherwise would cause fission.
If you don't want to wait for the Xenon to decay you could construct a reactor that has a larger control swing than you would need otherwise -- for instance you could put in more and denser control rods. In that case, however, you need to have a lot of "excess reactivity" and also a lot of neutrons lost in the control rods under normal use, which in turn means the "neutron efficiency" is worse. (If you're not planning to breed Pu239 or U233 maybe you don't care)
Note the Xenon concentration can vary in different parts of the reactor so you have to manage the "oscillations" in space just as you do in time. Not a catastrophe, but definitely a hassle.
You can't shut it off on a whim, but lots of reactors can drop to half output or one third output without much trouble. It probably doesn't make a big difference on the current grid, but if you have a significant fraction of nuclear power then the ability becomes useful. (I don't know if those mechanisms are applicable to this design.)
My read is that it's somehow the inverse of a flywheel. A flywheel means consistent output for variable input whereas this is consistent input leading to variable output.
That's my understanding as well. Rather than ramping the power output up or down with demand, you keep it at a constant power level and basically use the molten salt loop as a battery -> store energy when you're outputting more than is required, draw energy from it when you need more that you are producing.
The multi-gigawatt nuclear installations are typically supplemented by natural gas "peaker" plants to deal with higher demand than the reactor output, but lose any extra power produced.
If I recall correctly, the naval reactors (submarine and surface vessels) are the only ones that are designed to rapidly shift their power output.
> The multi-gigawatt nuclear installations are typically supplemented by natural gas "peaker" plants to deal with higher demand than the reactor output, but lose any extra power produced.
In France, the load variation is directly handled by the nuclear plants themselves[1], even if there are also some natural gas running (and most of the time their output is more regular than the one of the nuclear plants, so their must be drawbacks to big load variations on a gas plant as well).
In a situation where you want to rapidly ramp a generator's output up or down, Xenon poisoning narrows the window of reactor control system authority. This prevents the reactor from achieving full power on a reasonable time scale.
Xenon is both a fission product and a neutron absorber. So if your reactivity dips too low you won't have enough neutrons buzzing around to sustain the reaction and will have to wait for the xenon to decay before you are able to start up again.
So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with.
>Exposure to radioactive waste may cause health impacts due to ionizing radiation exposure. In humans, a dose of 1 sievert carries a 5.5% risk of developing cancer,[12] and regulatory agencies assume the risk is linearly proportional to dose even for low doses. Ionizing radiation can cause deletions in chromosomes.[13]
Because it's not a problem. There's actually very little of it. It occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Storing it is pretty foolproof: bury it in an area with no aquifer. The main risk of contamination is getting into the groundwater. If there's no groundwater the risk of contamination is eliminated even if the containers decay over time. And lastly, it doesn't make sense to bury our waste right now because some of the latest reactors being built can use this waste as fuel.
We hold nuclear to an incredible double standard with respect to the waste it produces. Fossil fuels release substantially more radioactive waste [2], and that waste is poorly contained. Usually put in an exposed pile next to the plant, which occasionally spills into rivers nearby [3]. Not to mention a whole other host of pollutants like heavy metals, and the carbon dioxide that is th main driver of climate change.
One point that's commonly missed in the lay discussions is that the stuff with a really long half-life (e.g. uranium/plutonium) is not that radioactive/harmful; by definition if it takes you 100k years for 50% of your unstable nuclei to decay, the emission rate per second is very low.
In contrast, the really nasty stuff has a very short half-life, and emits radiation at a very high rate for a very short duration. These can be more like 10s of years half-life. The counterpoint is that they become mostly non-radioactive in 100s of years, not 100s of millenia.
The actual environmental risks from long-half-life radioactive substances are pretty minimal as far as I can see.
The US makes this problem a lot worse than it needs to be by declining to reprocess nuclear fuel (I believe on proliferation concerns). Reprocessing is done in Europe, China, and Russia. You can separate the uranium & plutonium in spent fuel rods from the shorter-lived and much more nasty fission products, reuse the uranium, do something safe with the potentially weapons-grade plutonium, and then handle / store the separated fission products in a shorter-term facility.
The design goals of Yucca Mountain were assuming that you need to keep nuclear fuel safe for 100k years; that's an intensely challenging design constraint. If we just need to keep something safe for 100s of years it becomes much more tractable.
It is claimed that it is possible to make weapons from reprocessed plutonium, but the warheads would need active cooling and exotic pit geometries, making them not so amendable to miniaturization.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that detail. This makes the anti-proliferation position of the US from the '70s to this day even more perplexing.
Do you have any insight/thoughts on why the US made this push to prevent reprocessing, if it's not actually possible to use that process to build a warhead? Is it possible that they discovered a pathway in their nuclear tests that has remained classified? Or could it be an error/overly cautious policy position that just hasn't been updated since the '70s?
Do you have any insight/thoughts on why the US made this push to prevent reprocessing, if it's not actually possible to use that process to build a warhead?
"Additional Information Concerning Underground Nuclear Weapon Test of Reactor-Grade Plutonium"
A successful test was conducted in 1962, which used reactor-grade plutonium in the nuclear explosive in place of weapon-grade plutonium. The yield was less than 20 kilotons.
This test was conducted to obtain nuclear design information concerning the feasibility of using reactor-grade plutonium as the nuclear explosive material. The test confirmed that reactor-grade plutonium could be used to make a nuclear explosive. This fact was declassified in July 1977. The release of additional information was deemed important to enhance public awareness of nuclear proliferation issues associated with reactor-grade plutonium that can be separated during reprocessing of spent commercial reactor fuel.
The Carter reprocessing ban was enacted in April 1977, a few months before this information was released to the public.
There is no evidence that any existing nuclear weapons state has started with plutonium reprocessed from civilian power reactors. Building "production" reactors that produce plutonium without generating electricity is easier and the plutonium quality is higher. However, reprocessing commercial fuel is a potential loophole for nations that want to maintain a latent nuclear weapons capability as a plausibly deniable part of a civilian nuclear power program. There are indications that Japan values its reprocessed plutonium from civilian reactors in this light.
More pointedly, would Saudi Arabia, Israel, or the US trust an ostensibly civilian Iranian nuclear power program that included plutonium separation and reprocessing? Would Iran trust a Saudi program of the same type?
The high Pu-240 content of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors is not a strong enough technical barrier against weapons use to be reassuring in circumstances of low initial trust between parties. That's why it makes at least some sense that the United States did not want reprocessing to be a routine feature of civilian nuclear power programs.
========================
EDIT: everything following this line ^ is very speculative, so take with a shaker of salt. But I think it's an interesting idea that I haven't seen anyone else write about.
There are some exotic chemical reactions that give rise to mass-independent isotope fractionation [1]. For isotopes subject to this effect, enrichment can be more efficient via these mass-independent effects than would be indicated by conventional mass-dependent enrichment mechanisms like gas diffusion or centrifuge enrichment. There is evidence that these effects apply in uranium. The behavior is to separate even and odd isotopes rather than heavy and light isotopes [2].
If a similar mass-independent enrichment process were discovered for plutonium, it would mean a couple of things:
1) It might be industrialized secretly, in the context of weapons, long before it becomes a publicly known process with corresponding anti-proliferation safeguards and targeted inspections.
2) It would mean that aged spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors could become an excellent raw material for making weapons plutonium. The other major contaminant isotope, Pu-241, has a half life of only 14 years. A few decades of cooling largely eliminates it. Then the Pu-240 would be separated from Pu-239 by the mass-independent fractionation process.
The main problem with "nuclear waste" is that it is not waste at all.
If it is sufficiently concentrated in Pu238, then people might want to steal it to make bombs with.
Current LWR(s) use about 1% of the energy in the fuel.
Burying the waste in Yucca Mountain is like buying a gallon of gas, filling your car with a thimble, then carefully trying to store the rest of the gas so it doesn't ever get burned up.
The one reason we were going ahead with Yucca Mountain was a matter of "cutting off our nose to spite our face." That is, if we recycled nuclear fuel, somebody might use the recycling plant to make materials for nuclear weapons. If it wasn't for that policy of kneecapping nobody would have once suggested that we bury perfectly usable nuclear fuel.
People are slowly waking up to notion that burning carbon is slow motion suicide, so maybe policies will change.
Yeah, exactly. Even though it is costly to deal with, per kilogram, there is very little of it when compared to amount of energy produced. An atomic plant might use couple dozen tonnes of fuel which is peanuts compared to the amount of waste from coal power plant.
There are no technical problems with storage that we can't solve. The biggest problem is that nobody wants it around.
Singular or irregular events are easier to comprehend and be afraid of than something like pollution that's somewhat invisible and happening everywhere.
Nuclear disasters reduce the available budget to build more nuclear power plants. Even with the assumption of a $30 billion dollar nuclear plant Japan could have enough money to build dozens of those if it didn't have to clean up Fukushima.
I don't think this is true. Countries do not decide to build or not build nuclear power plants based on budget, because nuclear is the cheapest way to produce power at scale. It has mostly to do with sentiment people have towards nuclear power and trust that the project can be done safely.
1. Forever. Uranium is a heavy metal, it's toxic regardless of it's radioactivity.
2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2]
3. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater.
4. France does recycle it's nuclear waste.
5. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this waste is fuel for some of the reactors currently being built.
The reality is that nuclear waste will have minimal if any impact on the rate of uranium contamination. Naturally occurring uranium is responsible for vastly more contamination than nuclear waste. Streams and rivers flowing down from mountains pick up uranium in the sediment and bring it downstream: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates-drinking-w...
> "2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2]"
France is also developing a deep geological storage facility for nuclear waste, known as "Cigéo":
Most toxic elements last forever. That includes the toxic elements in coal ash. Both coal ash and spent nuclear fuel need indefinite safe storage. It can be cheaper to store spent nuclear fuel because it's so much more compact than fossil fuel waste.
Remember that the status quo already has a large forever-waste cost of its own. Nuclear waste is a trade off vs. other kinds of waste, and it is cheaper than the status quo.
Wanted to leap in here to mention tailings from minings projects. The gold that goes into a circuitboard comes from a mine which likely has a tailiings facility and associated dam, which is essentially an open pit filled with water into which tailings are dumped.
They're incredibly toxic materials. We had an engineer go out to the field and take a sample of some tailings, and after 6 months of being left in a lab, the materials had eaten through the stainless steel tube containing the sample.
It's not just power generation that has a negative externality in the form of waste. ALL resource extraction has associated waste.
Not to mention, industrial chemical processes in general.
Toxic waste requiring indefinite safe storage is the default state. Spent nuclear fuel is actually nice here in a way, because in some cases, it's a self-solving problem (dangerous stuff decaying into less dangerous stuff over time).
I mean, your car probably has a lead acid battery in it. Like uranium, lead is a toxic heavy metal, and it needs to be kept safe; it'll be as toxic in ten thousand years as it is now, and you should definitely avoid getting it in your drinking water (cf, Flint MI). Since your car has parts in it that need to be kept safe, in some form, forever, why is the cost of the car at the dealership not infinite? :)
Many, many industrial processes generate waste, sometimes horrible waste. Much of the waste needs to be stored in various ways, often indefinitely. Nuclear reactors aren't unique; it's more than a decent chunk of the population has noticed nuclear reactors, but is still oblivious to all the other costs of modern industrial lifestyles.
The good news about nuclear waste (and your car battery, come to that), is that dealing with it is actually fairly cheap. Would that we could say the same about the byproducts of burning fossil fuels!
Because there's not very much of it. The whole reason why nuclear is good is that fission of uranium has a much greater energy density than combustion of hydrocarbons.
And crucially this waste is solid and can be buried underground. Unlike carbon dioxide which is more or less impossible to store.
1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity
2. onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone
well no matter the waste is a problem and humans can't handle it, because money is the problem. as long as somebody can make it cheaper the cheapest option is always used which probably can harm people.
nuclear technology was NEVER the problem, people were. even the safest plan is still unsafe, because people and money.
fukushima, failed because of money and people. tschernobyl failed because of money and people.
and money will be even a bigger issue when there are cheaper technologies. also no nuclear plant is emission free, even most construction emissions are already pretty high and lots of studies talk so nicely about that, but undervalue most of that by a high margin.
> 1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity
Where does it say this? Here's the paragraph under earthquakes:
> DOE has stated that seismic and tectonic effects on the natural systems at Yucca Mountain will not significantly affect repository performance. Yucca Mountain lies in a region of ongoing tectonic deformation, but the deformation rates are too slow to significantly affect the mountain during the 10,000-year regulatory compliance period. Rises in the water table caused by seismic activity would be, at most, a few tens of meters and would not reach the repository. The fractured and faulted volcanic tuff that Yucca Mountain comprises reflects the occurrence of many earthquake-faulting and strong ground motion events during the last several million years, and the hydrological characteristics of the rock would not be changed significantly by seismic events that may occur in the next 10,000 years. The engineered barrier system components will reportedly provide substantial protection of the waste from seepage water, even under severe seismic loading.
It sure doesn't seem to conform to what you're saying. Later in the article there is one sentence claiming it's unsafe:
> Nevada National Security Site officials in April 2019 assured the public that the Device Assembly Facility on the Nevada security site was safe from earthquake threats. In contrast, Nevada officials claimed seismic activity in the region made it unsafe for the storage of nuclear waste.
But this is a one-off statement that doesn't seem to be backed by any sort of studies.
> onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone
And when those containers corrode, how does the waste escape the bedrock that's surrounding it?
Nuclear power represents the only way for countries to decarbonize their energy sector. Solar and wind offer cheap bandaids, throw up a few solar panels and you can reduce daytime use of electricity. But they do not offer a real path to decarbonization without spectacular breakthroughs in energy storage. By comparison, France has successfully produced more than 2/3rds of their electricity with nuclear power since the 1980s.
As a Nevadan who is semi-involved in local politics, I can also tell you that Yucca is so contentious and such a career killer for politicians that I have no doubt that any Nevada state or local agencies would be under tremendous pressure to find any and all reasons to make Yucca an unacceptable place to store the used material.
Is it really? Yucca mountain is basically right next to the site where the military conducted over a hundred nuclear weapons above ground, and a few hundred more below ground. Putting nuclear waste in an area that's already contaminated essential presents no change.
In Germany we have a thing called Ewigkeitskosten ("eternal costs"). That's how we call the expenses that still arise as a consequence from the coal mining operations, especially in the west of Germany. That are things like constantly pumping around water. About a fifth of the western coal region would be underwater without it. They're called that way because we already knew that they will never go away. That was accepted because it brought the region and its people prosperity.
I'm german. and yes I know about that.
It's even worse that our politics fought that it is a good idea to keep coal alive that long, worse we keep lignite alive that long, which is probably even worse than anything on the market. (we are the biggest in lignite and it's the worst thing you can do to your environment. Hambacher forst is a eyesore for our country [1])
but as already said it should not be a tradeoff between coal or nuclear. I do not doubt that nuclear is better than coal, I doubt that nuclear OR coal is the solution we should target at the moment.
I didn't want to take any side, just wanted to add some context to the discussion as in: This is not the first time we did accept future costs for energy production.
Because the alternative to the nuclear plants that have shut down has reliably been ramping up fossil fuels. Note that nuclear has the longest of power up/down cycles, so it's mostly practical for providing the base load. I.e. you cannot practically replace nuclear with solar, as its home turf is night time.
I wouldnt necessarily agree. It needs to be stored for a time that is longer than any single civilization has survived. Its pretty arrogant to assume we will still be around for that amount of time.
This source pretty heavily influenced my change of opinion on nuclears efficacy
It's pretty crazy to assume that we wouldn't be around in a millennia, two, or three. No other civilisation has been truly global, no other civilization has achieved so much in terms of mastery of nature and technological advancement.
So unless the carrying capacity of earth suddenly collapses to the point that it's impossible to maintain organised society for several hundred years, then I think we'll be alright. If that does happen, then a few nomads stumbling upon a nuclear waste dump will likely be the least of humanity's problems!
Many times over? I doubt it, if you are talking about nuclear weapons.
There's no way we could punch through all the ice at the poles to get any microscopic life that might live under there, and in a standard nuclear war nothing would touch them anyway. Nuclear winter (if that's still thought to happen in a likely scenario) might not even get all the surface life.
There are also people on this planet that are actively preparing against such a scenario. If anything is going to kill life (as we know it) on the planet it would be humans who just shrug and turn up their AC after a +4°C global temperature change and try their best to go to something ridiculous like +9°C as if destroying the planet was some sort of sport.
I'm pretty optimistic that we can avoid such a scenario but you never know...
A nuclear holocaust would render the problem of some cancer ridden nomadic humanoid type creature stumbling upon a nuclear waste dump fairly moot.
It's still exceptionally unlikely that such an event would take place, given that humanity managed to stagger through the cold war without such an incident occurring. There are no longer any grand ideologies fighting it out for global supremacy. Most countries look fairly similar in terms of economic systems.
A global blight is exceptionally unlikely, the current free trade regime will enable the mitigation of localised shortages as the climate changes and the carrying capacity of the earth reduces precipitously. This will enable humanity to find technological solutions to these challenges as they become more pressing.
The two primary constraints on humanity presently are energy and fresh water abundance. There are a number of promising candidate technologies to address the problems of energy abundances including: advances of hydrogen electrolysis, nuclear power (as mentioned), fusion, wind, and photovoltaics. Increasing energy abundance will partly address the problem of scarcity of fresh water by making desalination cheaper, but there have been a number of advances in material science that have also shown great promise in this area.
If you combine these advances with novel approaches to farming, such as vertical farming, then the carrying capacity of earth could increase by several orders of magnitude!
This is not even to mention the numerous proposals to at least delay the onset of global heating through climate engineering. This delay would give humanity time to adjust to the new conditions. They could even possibly be used to mitigate the problems caused by previous pollution subsequent to a switch to renewable energy while the earth heals as it gradually expels the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
People running around today, panicking over a supposed coming apocalypse, remind me of Malthus. You cannot look at the current technological conditions as a fixed factor when evaluating the carrying capacity of the earth. It completely ignores the fact that the planet is inhabited by the most ingenious creatures in the solar system.
I'm really confused. If our civilization is gone why would we care about nuclear waste? Animals have existed for hundreds of millions of years and they do fine even in Chernobyl. There is enough time left in the universe for this stuff to decay. What we have to make sure is that it doesn't hurt us while we are still alive.
The waste is buried under hundreds of meters of rock. And even if the containers eventually corrode, the waste needs to escape from this bedrock. The only way this is going to happen is either deliberately or through a meteor hitting in just the right spot.
Wait, we're better than this on HN. If you have concerns about an argument being made it's important to articulate the concerns. Pointing out someone's career/reputation is an appeal to authority, and a form of bias.
It's possible that a comedian could be well informed from a staff, for instance, doing research. I am not familiar with John's arguments, but I wanted to address that dismissing him out of hand seems perfunctory.
No were not. We're just more polite and consider it customary to google up someone else who agrees with you that you can cite.
Humans are pretty consistent. The rules of conduct vary between tribes.
And FWIW John Oliver seems to be a pretty decent comedian. His filter bubble certainly informs his work and he's prone to bias but he's an entertainer by trade so I don't count those against him.
Sorry, that was probably too glib of a response. How about this: John Oliver has a history of making ill-informed rants that conveniently skip relevant facts or counter-arguments for the sake of having a pithy little segment that sounds funny and which complements his English mock-outrage. It is not a good argument against nuclear power and in fact it generally only takes a few minutes to point out the rows and rows of strawmen he has set up so that he can knock them down with comedic zingers.
John Oliver does accessible introductions to subject areas for non-experts. I don't recall the segment on nuclear, but in general his pieces are high-level, attempt to be accurate, and like other pop journalism, will inevitably disappoint experts in the field.
> This number may sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite small. In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
A football field of forever death is not a comforting mental image.
> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore?
1. Waste is mentioned every time one of these articles hits HN.
2. Waste is not and was never a real problem. Right now our strategy for radioactive coal waste is to aerosolize it and dump it into the atmosphere. Burying a few dirty cans in the ground has only ever been a barrier due to FUD.
- nuclear waste, once it has decayed, becomes metal in glass
- nuclear waste is _small_, see [1], the nuclear fuel waste is the tiny red cube.
- wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever [2]
- renewables are more CO2 intensive than nuclear, fuel cycle included, see IPCC reports (there is a debate for nuclear vs wind depending on where nuclear is deployed. in France nuclear is 6gCO2eq/kWh, vs 12 for wind)
- mercury however, will be buried in Germany, and will stay there until the end of times (unlike nuclear, which will disapear), and that doesn't seem to bother anybody
Reading the Bloomberg article, it doesn't seem like the blades are a big problem.
> “Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe, unlike the waste from some other energy sources, and represent a small fraction of overall U.S. municipal solid waste,” according to an emailed statement from the group. It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.
- wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever
Nuclear power plants have a lifespan of about 50 years, after which the reactor and other parts will be radioactive. This waste must be buried, will be forgotten and will remain there forever.
Now compare the space taken by the buried reactor facility and produced waste, with equivalent number of buried wind turbine blades for the same amount of energy produced :).
Actually nuclear plant have been designed for a minimal lifespan of 40 years. Most can be run safely 60, 80 or even maybe 100 years.
Renewables don't provide the energy density to power our industrial world. Simple as that.
Fossils emit much more pollution than nuclear in volume, and that will last arguably as long (CO2 we're dumping in the atmosphere will stay up there for millennia; coal ashes will remain toxic forever and we make megatons of them, not mere kilos).
I don't know, and I have been wondering whether much of the evident pro-nuclear lobbying recently (it seems apparent on many threads here related to energy generation) might be due to the nuclear industry being in serious threat of becoming obsolete.
I've harped on about this many times before, but the levelized cost of energy[1] for renewables like solar and wind power is substantially cheaper than nuclear power nowadays.
That, combined with the problems of long construction times, population unease with nuclear, and nuclear waste as you mention, seem like they should limit nuclear power in the near-term, and perhaps eliminate it in the mid-to-long-term.
There seems to be a valid question around how to store energy from renewable sources given that they have a tendency to fluctuate in terms of generation output - but it seems to me that storage is a safer, more tractable problem to solve than the issues surrounding nuclear (fission) energy.
I'll alleviate your concerns: it is not due to a big nuclear conspiracy aiming at making Big Nuclear fill its pockets, but by people who look at what physics dictates and notice that with our energy consumption things just don't add up. So you will see an increasing amount of (1) posts about nuclear, and (2) posts about de-growth or accepting to shrink economies through less consumption and production, not because there's a malevolent lobby but because people are becoming increasingly alarmed at the fantastically huge wave of problems already present due to climate change, and are acknowledging that the biggest mid-term effect is CO2 emissions (short term is water vapour and methane for what it's worth).
Side note: if you pick a conspiracy to get rich or defend "big money" interests or get swindled by, you're way better off continuing to side with oil and coal and denying that climate change is a thing - since nuclear takes gigantic initial investments and is not stock-market friendly but much more about countries' political will (and I got downvoted on previous discussions where I brought that up).
There is absolutely no "physics" that goes into those postings. It's just some gut feelings. I've come across this at least a dozen times, with people just sure that "physics" says something, but there is no physical principle that requires we decrease energy use to power the entire world with renewables and storage and possibly hydrogen or other synthetic carbon fuels.
We can power all of the developing world at Western energy levels with renewable energy. Our GDP is increasing even as the amount of primary energy per person decreases. It's no longer the 1970s and a lot of assumptions from then have been proven to be very very wrong.
I can't help you if you don't even understand the scale of renewability of resources such as oil and gas, the ratio of energy extracted to energy put into the various kinds of machines that produce what we need to keep our energy consumption up, the limits to energy extraction for solar power, the lack of predictability and controllability of energy sources other than gas-oil-coal-nuclear, and the CO2-related effects on the atmosphere for the first three out of those four, the depletion of current controllable energy sources, and the energy available in the various kinds of uranium-plutonium-thorium isotopes which lead to the different kinds of nuclear power plants. Amongst other things which take hours of actually trying to wrap your head around the problem instead of putting your fingers in your ears and screaming bloody murder.
Because apparently you seem to believe that "there is absolutely no 'physics'" in all of this.
edit: as a side-note, take a look at all the countries that have increased their renewables energy consumption and show me that it corresponds to a decrease in production and investments of {oil or gas or coal or nuclear}, i.e. controllable energy sources. You will soon see that the sources that cannot be predicted in a way that ensures your fridge continuously works and you can take a hot shower at all hours of the day are only secondary sources that people are happy to have (and renewables are a great thing to invest in) but that in itself is not enough - unless, again, one accepts that their patterns of behaviour and consumption would change drastically, which is only one of the many possible discussions around the evolution of our societies that you seem to be so anxious to sweep under the rug.
You can't "help" me understand your claim because it is baldly false!
There's an entire field that models different grids and transitioning to carbon free energy. Using fine-grained weather patterns, they optimize for various factors such as cost, by timing out deployments of renewable resources, nuclear, transmission, storage, etc. using projected costs over the next few decades.
There are huge fights in the field, particularly over nuclear, but nobody, literally nobody has said it's impossible. The debate is how much cheaper nuclear energy will make the energy transition.
So if there's some sort of "physics" that precludes the possibility of what people have already made detailed plans for, you should probably publish that result. But it seems unlikely that you have found something they haven't.
Response to your edit: you are shifting the point, without bothering to back up your initial claim. Nonetheless, you are shifting to a new false claim, that "renewables don't decrease carbon output. This is also clearly false:
The term that is used in the industry isn't "controllable," but rather "dispatchable" energy source. Europe is showing that we can get awfully close to 50% renewable, non-dispatchable energy, without really any storage and reduce carbon output. Storage, demand response, and increased transmission will likely close the rest of the gap.
I'm not even sure what fight you're trying to pick here, because I'm all for renewables and energy. It's painfully obvious that no, renewables alone do not have the ability to cover at a low-CO2 footprint and continuous usage the energy needs that we currently have and that are, even with reduction of consumption in richer countries, bound to grow on the whole as population follows the models that indicate about 9 billion people being alive before things potentially slope downwards.
It's also not a bad idea at all to be investing seriously into renewables because despite the CO2 footprint related to the creation and maintenance of those sources, from a climate perspective it's the right bet in the long run.
But the energy density that you can extract from sources that are inherently at the mercy of a climate that changes are consequently limited and unpredictable (reminder that we are not fully able to predict it - unless you have the magical key to tell us with certainty whether we're really seeing a RCP2.6, a RCP4.5, a RCP8.5, or really any better model), the same sources that by the way aren't scale-able to many places on earth. You don't really bet on wind in the same places and ways you bet on solar for example, since population centers will limit the scale of your operations and weather patterns will limit the scope of what you can extract and CLIMATE CHANGE will change those patterns.
You might want to re-assess why is it that you are seemingly so emotionally invested in saying no to the only technique that has an extremely low death count per TWh, can be adapted to most places on Earth, and has an incredibly high and long-lasting ability to power countries.
My "fight" is that you have now made two plainly false claims: 1) physics precudes renewables from providing our energy needs. This is just a silly claim. There are no such "physics" and if you think that "energy density" stops this from happening, you clearly haven't run any numbers.
2) Renewables aren't reducing carbon output. This is also incredibly bizarre.
> You might want to re-assess why is it that you are seemingly so emotionally invested in saying no to the only technique that has an extremely low death count per TWh
I'm not saying no to nuclear. I'm saying "no" to ascientific claims about "physics" and "energy density."
I'm making the claim because it is painfully obvious that unless you're making calculations about spherical cows there's nowhere near enough resources, surface, and specifically predictability to have renewables be more than marginal for a long time. And at all times, due to unpredictability, there is no chance at all that the source is controllable. Therefore, unless and until we have much much MUCH better ways to store energy (which would be absolutely fantastic), we cannot count on renewables alone.
As for the second thing I did not claim that, I said that renewables have a CO2 footprint that isn't negligible due to their construction and maintenance (and again, I'm all for renewables - I'm just not lying to myself about renewables solving all the worlds problems)
And I don't understand what you're on about when it comes to energy density. If you haven't understood the following you're just deluding yourself: the quantity of materials (i.e. what comes into making a solar panel or windmill or a power plant) and the volume of the transformation sources (i.e. how much space you need for your windmills and solar panels and nuclear power plants) AND the possibility to leverage the energy (i.e. where you can put your mills, panels, or plants) are all overwhelmingly in favour of nuclear.
So we should absolutely turn towards renewables, but if you think for one minute that the oil+gas+coal could be dropped for solar panels and mills without actually being carried by the sheer energy output of nuclear, you haven't quite taken a look at the numbers enough.
He's right, and you are grossly overestimating your level of clue. You do not understand the degree to which you do not understand. Dunning-Kruger says hi.
I suggest you try to fully flesh out your supposed argument, with as much self-skepticism as you can muster. Your enemy is your tendency to motivated reasoning, where you stop thinking when you get a conclusion you like. The symptom of this is that you present half-baked nonsense, which as he told you is easily debunked (or so vague as to not even need debunking.)
First, let's get back to the very beginning: my first message gave an explanation to what was pure antagonizing of the "pro-nuclear" people, and I mentioned that it's based on physics (which it is).
You're stating a "he's right you're wrong" with an unsubstantiated singular paragraph while I've been giving dozens of elements of reflection over a half dozen posts. That's a bit rich, isn't it?
You want something to substantiate a decent amount of what I'm saying? Here's one part[1].
Here's a case for why nuclear is the actual bridge for renewables[2]. Here's why renewables can't save the planet[3]. Reasons for environmentalists to look at nuclear[4].
And if you happen to care enough to actually read full reports, the IPCC did a lot of work and it's always good to try to read their reports with an open mind to collate the data[5].
Let's go through go through those links and see if they support your claim that "it is painfully obvious that unless you're making calculations about spherical cows there's nowhere near enough resources, surface, and specifically predictability to have renewables be more than marginal for a long time".
[1] No, that doesn't support your claim (and it's from 2007, an aeon ago in the renewable field). In fact, that abstract says "The negative effects on health of electricity generation from renewable sources have not been assessed as fully as those from conventional sources, but for solar, wind, and wave power, such effects seem to be small"
[2] That states "As a corollary, nuclear energy also occupies significantly less space / land than renewables (several hundred times less in fact)." But that doesn't mean the land area required by renewables makes renewables infeasible. And it also ignores the distribution network needed for nuclear; if that is included, the ratio of land areas needed is much smaller.
He also says "the debate is not about building new nuclear power plants but to retain the remaining ones for as long as possible." So that link doesn't supply justification for building new nuclear plants. I can accept that CO2 taxes (for example) would enable existing nuclear plants to keep operating, at least for a while.
[3,4] Ah, Shellenberger. He was the guy who was claiming PV was dirty because it used rare earth elements from China (spoiler: that's a lie). He fails to make any quantitative argument that land area or other inputs for renewables render it infeasible. And he repeats the tired nonsense about Germany having high energy costs because of renewables (as if that somehow justifies the doublethink that installing much more expensive sources would have led to lower costs.)
[5] And yet more irrelevancy.
Look, if you actually had a cogent argument to support your claim, you could have pointed to a real detailed argument supporting it. But it was bullshit all along, and you know that, so you spewed out a Gish Gallop of irrelevancy. And indeed, how could it have been otherwise? Your claim requires that all possible configurations of renewables, all possible configurations and types of storage, and all possible configurations of energy using activities cannot work. And how could you POSSIBLY establish that? You could have claimed there's a lot of work to be done, and that it's not CERTAIN that renewables could do the job, and for that reason nuclear should be kept alive as an option. But that's not what you were arguing.
[1] Aeons ago means litteraly nothing. You can contemplate gradual improvements to the EROI, but they don't change by an order of magnitude despite the metric truckton of money we've been throwing at the problem. The order of magnitude does not change, the output doesn't really significantly shift either.
[2] Land area occupied by renewables doesn't make it INFEASIBLE, can you stop putting it words into my mouth I did not say? Did you not read the literal dozens of times I've mentioned renewables are worth developing and using? Do you understand that when I compare one with the other, this is not a XOR but an OR and I am talking about orders of magnitude and controllability therefore what actually matters for the bigger immediate changes? Or do you want to wilfully continue to ignore that I've said that about ten times now and dance the same dance again and again?
It's not infeasible, it's merely on average impractical. That is, you need to identify the narrow areas where the installation offsets the CO2 output of the construction + materials + maintenance bill. Yes it does improve, and yes that ROI improves significantly too. Did you read my sentence right now? I don't want you to say again the same damn things, I'm just checking you even read the messages.
But no, the solar output is not what will allow you to keep your fridge running and your shower hot at all times. If you want to sell me the idea of not having power at all time I'm genuinely OPEN to it, but then actually have the sincerity of shifting the debate to something meaningful rather than the same points over and over again.
[3,4] Ad hominem, and you also happen to miss that yes a majority of PV as it stands does not use the awesome research that avoids using involving a decent amount of mining (and that research didn't come for free btw, and that could have paid for next-generation nuclear research for which the current generation already beats by far photovoltaic). So sure, handwave away.
[5 and not 6] So you ignore the IPCC reports? TL;DR am I right? I have nothing more to say to you.
EROI of renewables is just fine, and getting even better. Attempts to argue it's not have been thoroughly debunked.
About land area: you said this "I'm making the claim because it is painfully obvious that unless you're making calculations about spherical cows there's nowhere near enough resources, surface, and specifically predictability to have renewables be more than marginal for a long time." If land area (which I assume is what you meant by "surface" there) isn't a showstopper, why did you list it? But thanks for admitting now that it isn't a showstopper. I consider the point conceded and that part of your claim retracted.
> Ad hominem
Argument from authority can be met by impeaching the credibility of the authority.
> So you ignore the IPCC reports?
Show me in the IPCC report where it supports your claim "it is painfully obvious that unless you're making calculations about spherical cows there's nowhere near enough resources, surface, and specifically predictability to have renewables be more than marginal for a long time." I'll wait.
There is enough surface to put PV panels in many places, and the reason why I don't just say land is because enthusiasts will also consider rooftops (which aren't optimal in terms of tech and output as you surely know - the significant farms do require requisitioning actual land and it isn't insignificant in itself[0]). But there isn't enough surface for PV to preclude the usage of nuclear, which is what I've been saying all along. Reminder for the n-th time that it's not a XOR when it comes to using all the sources alternatives to fossil fuels, it's an OR in many places and an AND in some. I've been saying repeatedly that the OR wins in favour of nuclear for energy throughput, not that the OR precludes from having them and there isn't and AND in other places.
You haven't impeached anything by saying he lied about rare minerals, since earlier generations of PV did require those. You just brushed off the person because it's harder to brush off the argument.
The IPCC reports (btw if you had read the page you'd see the 2020 one is inbound so you've got to use the previous ones) have over decades highlighted the unpredictability of changes regarding habitability of places (i.e. typically related to RCP scenarios) and changes in weather patterns. The very same things that I've been mentioning multiple times as being factors that influence the ability to have steady renewables.
Let's take a look at that one[1] ("aeons ago" to you, as if the world magically changed since).
P5 Changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhousegases (GHGs) and aerosols, land cover and solar radiation al-ter the energy balance of the climate system.
P13 phenomenon and directions of trends, just take the most likely ones and explain to me how your PV panels will handle those better than a nuclear power plant where the power production gives no qualms about rain, cloud cover and temperature (since they're literally built to handle terrorist attacks)
P13 again "Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impactsthat are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rateand magnitude of the climate change.", please do enlighten me about how well you can predict that your PVs are going to give you any steady power output at any given ___location over the duration of their existence
The rest of the IPCC reports tend to indicate shifts in patterns that we can barely predict, yet somehow again you feel entirely comfortable without a proof that PV can stand the changes in {cloud cover, fires (how's it holding up for the PV in California these days huh?), weather patterns, changes in irradiation, maintenance cost[note to not install them in deserts[5]]}.
It also hasn't escaped your mind that in a decent part of the world on the RCP scenarios we're headed towards we will encounter increasing amounts of deadly days - making those lands practically not habitable (and surprise surprise, those places happen to be exactly where sunlight would be most intense)[2]. Side note: climate refugees will go to places where infrastructures are, and those power needs will therefore increase. This is a time where the combination of nuclear and renewables can be a fantastic thing, but once again you're daydreaming if you think that solar (and wind) can carry that without nuclear.
Again, you ought to know that I have not once said that PV shouldn't be developed, but that I have said multiple times that nuclear is what enables steady controllability and necessary power output at metrics comparable to current days energy needs. You've been keen on trying to find a fault in every single sentence I've said without ever trying to refute that, why is it you think? Perhaps because you also acknowledge that very same thing? There's no point in you trying to advocate for solar using that same report because I AM ON BOARD.
However you bring forward literally nothing that shows that PV is controllable (as it is not and that is basically its biggest problem[2] - and yes that's physics and not spherical cows), that PV+storage isn't a smoke screen (quite literally - it reduces the fossil-fuel related emissions by 6 but is about 20 times more than nuclear due to the storage). I'll also stop waiting on a real refutal of [4](yes, again) because apparently anything that upsets you isn't worth proving wrong.
So yes, physics about spherical cows (i.e. imagining you get the solar output you design your farm for at any fraction in steady way without being forced to move, with a magically predictable climate and weather, and without involving more CO2 emissions for both moving the infrastructure - new land usage - as well as the significant waste due to the panels change that comes in within a couple decades), that physics about spherical cows does not hold up.
Solar (and wind) will be formidable sources to support a world that goes without fossil fuels, and in some localized spots it can even be the key element. For the world, it won't be nearly enough.
And if you are happy handwaving it all away, just do your own parallel benefit-to-cost analysis[6] then.
And I'll pre-emptively add that I've mentioned about 3 or 4 times already that there's a scenario that involves the possibility of exclusively banking on renewables, and that scenario is the de-growth mentioned in my very first post too. It is entirely possible to go there (and in fact, it is where we're bound for ultimately from a purely physics-based understanding of fossil fuel depletion, which includes uranium and therefore nuclear ending too).
So the real question actually will be one of consumption (of goods and energy), and if we're willing to ask and answer that question before we reach critically low levels (so at an absolute stretch within about 2 centuries) then we will be in a position to totally live off of energy sources that we can approximate as infinite (much more robustly so than what we did with fossil fuels, since the sun and wind for all intents and purposes would not go before we do).
You don't know how to bloody read. Claiming renewables emit CO2 in their construction and maintenance is not saying that they don't decrease emissions in comparison to gas-oil-coal, only that they do produce emissions. Unless you want to state that for a fact renewables are leading to no emissions for their construction or maintenance, you can't possibly be denying that. And by the way nuclear involves CO2 emissions too in its construction, surprise surprise! But you build it once and run it for a very long time, and the emissions in relationship to the energy output for nuclear completely dwarf anything related to renewables. So stop trying to argue an empty point.
Now, there's no such thing as "dispatchable" without a carbon cost that is non-negligible: the things you build, if you move them you're using trucks that use energy. If you take the windmills down from off the coast where the wind is stronger, you're using boats that use energy. If you need to use tools and to build any kind of structure for things to be installed anywhere new, including extensions to power grids, you're using materials for which the construction requires yet again energy and materials. Oh and now because we don't know on what scenario we are, weather patterns have changed significantly enough over the course of a few decades so you need to start moving your infrastructure to the "right" place, which includes building the damn road there and potentially moving people away too. You can "dispatch" all you want by emitting a ton of unnecessary CO2, or you can go and develop the source that is most reliable, actually controllable, and that only needs those emissions to be made ONCE to become a source of energy.
Stop daydreaming about things that are only marginally doing something, and put your energy into addressing problems at the order of magnitude where you have the real impact. For energy production it's nuclear by a huge margin, and yes that's what the damn physics says. Then move on to the other actual problems that lead to CO2 emissions, and work on those too. Stop trying to fix a problem that already has a solution - especially if your fixes involve a whole lot more repetitive CO2 emissions along the way.
In a world that has transitioned to no fossil fuels, how would renewables be emitting CO2? They wouldn't.
In a world transitioning away from fossil fuels, the metric is not how much CO2 renewables use to build, but how much CO2 they displace per $. Renewables, being cheaper than nuclear, allow more CO2 to be displaced more quickly.
There's not a single metric to take but many, first of all.
The initial cost in CO2 is absolutely part of the measurement, but if you want to look at finer metrics then you can look at the ratio of estimated CO2 costs over the life of the source over the energy produced too, which gives you good hints as to what requires a lot of emissions to get a lot of energy (which is really what we're trying to curb in the first place). From that metric for example, photovoltaic energy is orders of magnitude worse than nuclear and wind (wind without storage: a dozen grams per KWh, nuclear: a dozen grams per KWh, photovoltaic: between 100g and 200g of CO2 emission per KWh, and beyond if you were to count the batteries). The ROI on the other hand definitely got much better for photovoltaic over the years, and AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN this is why I have not been saying once in all those messages that renewables should be dropped and all the research on it dumped. We CAN make things better, and we WILL benefit from having such extra sources - especially as we learn to extract more and more energy from the same sources.
I'll refer to my response to your other message for multiple sources of why that is not enough.
And, actually, in a zero fossil fuel world, solar is going to be better (at CO2 production) than nuclear, since you can build solar fields with no concrete. Concrete manufacture produces CO2 even if entirely non-fossil energy is used.
Renewables are emitting CO2 in their making AND in their maintenance AND when they need to migrate due to climate patterns being unpredictable, and I mentioned that again in another post.
In a world transitioning away from fossil fuels, that world has to transition pretty damn fast from fossil fuels and renewables do not bridge the gap AND do not handle controllability. You never actually mention any solution at all despite the now dozen things I've mentioned about this, and you know full well that (1) your precious means to get energy will cost in their making AND the moving as climate evolves, and (2) the unsteady nature of their output REQUIRES having a controllable source in parallel which DOES NOT make the fossil fuel usage go down UNLESS we use nuclear. And the alternative is that we would simply have de-growth, CONFER the damn original post. I am not taking a stance about that, I am simply stating what AGAIN the damn physics lays out in front of your eyes. It's not my fault if you don't want to read IPCC reports.
I am sick and tired of your unsourced rants that aren't trying to bring any useful argument to the table, and I'll leave it at that. If you want to keep putting your blinders on and think that the sun is almighty, all the power to you. You're lying to yourself and this can cost more than you realize.
"Intermittency angst" is a classic pro nuclear, anti renewable propaganda strategy which is overused to the point it becomes boring. At some point the only reasonable answer is to just roll your eyes. Ok, so lets say renewables was the worst bet all along because storage is impossible. Renewables will only generate 80% of all electricity then. We'll have to use some gas to cover the rest. Would you consider this to be a failure, even if it's cheaper than nuclear? Your fridge isn't going to stop working continuously. It's a strawman. It was never on the negotiation table in the first place.
I would consider it a failure to use a crapton of non-renewables to get to the point where we have unreliable, un-controllable renewables, which continue creating CO2 emissions due to how badly we store energy and in the best of cases still create more risks to lives and the ecosystem through hydro, than nuclear (I'll get to that further down). All that, when you have a perfectly fine self-stopping mechanism that produces orders of magnitude more energy at a controllable rate that could be built in one place rather than "arranged" to be moved (CO2 emissions again) whenever the weather patterns change.
Again this is absolutely bonkers that people would start thinking that being pragmatically for nuclear is being against renewables, because I AM NOT. I am entirely for the investment into research and development around renewables, I am entirely for the replacement of as much of the coal used by renewables, I entirely for a world where we would benefit greatly from renewables. But stop mistaking nuclear for oil on your self-inflicted side of things, because nuclear CAN carry this transition without continuing to wreck the environment, and oil-gas-coal could do that while entirely messing it up, but renewables alone absolutely cannot.
And by the way I have no problem with intermittency of access to power, I am actually open to the idea. But why try to sell that idea to everyone when they don't actually have to compromise on their consumption if nuclear carries the production? Instead of calling it a day by saying that it's an "intermittency angst", have empathy for those who would indeed be worried about it and find SOLID arguments to explain why you seem to know that it's either not a problem or that it is a problem worth living with (or in the case of energy availability, without).
For what it's worth, here's the combined 17-countries European output of wind power at a resolution of about a day on the scale of about a year in 2017[0]. Tell me how that fits nicely with the high constant consumption of any given country, and how you'll install enough of these in places where you get a relative 10-100x more power (i.e. offshore) without having to fight people, and tell me how you'd do that without tremendous energy and material consumption in the making. And then tell me how sea currents aren't likely to change due to climate change and make your efforts moot at an unpredictable rate[1][2] for not just wind but solar too.
AGAIN, as in EVERY response I made, I am pro-renewables. I'm also pragmatic about their role in addressing the immediate issues with CO2 emissions and what physics will pragmatically allow us to reliably extract from them at the level of the world. Local initiatives to develop something around an area that steadily produces renewable energy and is robust against unpredictable weather pattern changes AND doesn't cost an arm and a leg (without the emotional investments of VCs lowering the $$$ needed) AND does not create substantial CO2 emissions during the lifetime of the product, I'm 1000% for that.
For the maintainable, long-term, high-output power, it's called nuclear and it has led to an order of magnitude less deaths of ecosystems and people in the world, even when including the headlines-making Fukushima and Chernobyl, than just about one or two dams failing in Europe the same century. For a power output that is significant enough that it can offset the gigantic energy density that oil and gas offered the world for its development during the last ~200 years, without creating more CO2 after its construction and without having to move every time the wind changes yet again.
Modern societies run on heat engines, and nuclear power is still a heat engine just with a carbon free source of heat. It's possible to run a carbon free modern society without drastic change in energy use, through using nuclear energy - France has done so successfully for decades.
By comparison proposals to use renewables almost invariably involve immense amounts of energy storage which is nowhere near deliverable with current technologies. Either that or they involve massive changes to how society used energy, essentially refactoring the whole economy and infrastructure to work around the intermittency of renewable generation.
There are fundamental physical challenges to using a low density and intermittent source of energy, and nuclear largely offers all of the same benefits as fossil fuels just without the carbon.
I want to add to this because I think it is also something the gp is missing. Decarbonizing the country/world is about much more than cars and electricity. Currently it is only 60% of the problem[0]. That, and we have NO zero carbon power source, if you include lifetime emissions. None. Zip. Nada. So part of the answer is to get some of the other 40% to be included in electricity. That's things like electric stoves, lab grown meat, or electric heaters (also includes electric cars/vehicles).
So there is no way to even get to zero emissions (unless you use extraction methods like CCS). Then you have to consider that the US is 15% of emissions and the EU is 9% and where global emissions aren't heavily dependent upon electricity and transportation like they are in the modernized countries[1].
Truth is that most people are only looking at a small portion of the problem. So when someone naively says that we need to decrease energy usage to power the world with renewables it is naive because power is a small part of the global problem. Unfortunately, we're all in this together. Sadly, you ask an undeveloped country what they want: Hospitals, new homes, and electricity or a clean environment, well... we've done that experiment for a few hundred years with various populations. I think we have enough evidence to conclude an answer.
You're completely right. I replied to the post because it mentioned nuclear but the problem is much bigger and energy consumption is only one aspect of it. We're going to need pretty much every aspect: improvements or changes in how we build and maintain infrastructure, likewise for goods, and changes in consumption patterns for at least some of the things we use and eat. We're going to have to change transportation heavily too (i.e. in Europe we should heavily focus on trains over planes for example). And of course, if we can't do all these things despite having the best research, the biggest and richest universities, the highest quality of life already etc. then why should we expect other countries to be "better" than us? (and they already are better from some angles: China is going from coal to a monstrous nuclear development about 3-4 times faster than any world power in history, and Pakistan is the only country to have exceeded its carbon goals ahead of all schedules when rich European countries like mine have asked for extensions on their failures)
I recently had a Swedish friend mentioning how his parents' country (Bangladesh) is a "mess", from a privileged position. CO2 emissions for Sweden and Bangladesh are within the same order of magnitude, despite one country having about 7 times more people than the other. Because the other one drives its economy on pretty much 7 times more energy&resources consumption. Wind won't offset that anytime soon, and Sweden is already a good player in the world of both renewables and nuclear.
One of the reasons why nuclear should pretty much be a non-debate by now is that we will still very much need oil for things that are not energy-production related until we can do better, and we'd do better than to continuous burn it off to make cars, then make them go vroom on the way to the shop, where we buy our plastic-wrapped fruit delivered from the other side of the world in the middle of winter. Inconvenient truths aren't fun, but if we don't want to have much more inconvenient ones down the road we better get used to the mildly inconvenient ones right now and actually discuss on those terms.
If you look at primary energy you might end up getting the wrong picture because with renewables their primary energy consumption is equal to their output because excess sunlight and excess wind was going to be there regardless of whether you install renewables or not. When you look at transportation many vehicles burn gas but their engines are not 100% efficient. Most of the energy just disappears into waste heat. That waste heat can be useful in winter for heating but during summer it's purely a waste. If you get rid of that waste heat by switching to EVs you need much less energy for an equivalent transportation industry.
You realize solar and wind aren't 100% efficient right? They also generate a lot of heat waste when converting mechanical energy into electrical or in the process of radiation into electricity. It is less heat but I'm confused by the argument because I'm reading it as if you are saying there is none.
But more importantly, my comment was about how there are a lot of emission factors outside energy production that matter a lot in the discussion of climate change and ignoring that makes it difficult to solve the problem.
> have been wondering whether much of the evident pro-nuclear lobbying recently (it seems apparent on many threads here related to energy generation)
I think you are misunderstanding the selection bias. We're on HN, the selection bias here is that people tend to be more tech savvy and more informed. We have nuclear scientists here. You typically see acidburnNSA commenting in all these posts. I myself did radiation shielding research for NASA at a previous job. There's an old saying in the nuclear industry "Those that know the most, fear the least." I do not think it is "big nuclear" but rather that we're on a tech savvy forum. Take this to Reddit. You'll find more generalized forums are pretty anti-nuclear and more scientific forums are pro nuclear[0]. It really seems to come down to more where the conversation is taking place. I've met and worked with many climate scientists. I haven't met one that is anti-nuclear (I've met a few that think we don't need it if things keep progressing). If you press them on the subject most will just say they gave up because there is no support.
[0] I'll add that there's a lot of armchair talk and just ignore people that scream that Thorium is the answer. Easy way to pick out an armchair scientist. (Yes, I get frustrated with the armchair scientists that are even in my camp. Really moreso)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. There's definitely more tech-savvy on HN than many other places, but there's also a certain element of desire to find innovative and exciting solutions, especially when they alter or disrupt some existing industry.
Simultaneously - and partly thanks to that skew - I think this is an influential forum and the likelihood for discussions and radical ideas that are shared here to shape real-world policy is outsized.
I also agree that experts will understand the safety properties of their field better than anyone else.
The risk is the skip-level that HN introduces. Rather than those experts informing policy decision-making directly, we have an easy, accessible, open (all beneficial properties in themselves) forum where decision-makers-and-influers could cherry-pick technology tangents they like the sound of, and likely find rational-sounding support for them.
As someone who is risk-averse (which includes optimism that society can collectively steer away from the worst effects of climate change, and also avoid future populations being left to deal with the problems of long-term nuclear waste under world conditions that we can't yet predict), and someone who believes that cost, simplicity and reduction of negative externalities are positive indicators, renewables seem like the way to go, and so I think it's worth keeping that line of argument present.
You're correct that I shouldn't assume that any of the discussion is industry-led; an assumption that it's genuine technology interest is fair. It can be hard to determine where (and if) the distinction exists when the stakes are high.
To quench your concerns a bit, I should mention that the reason nuclear has such a high safety record is because it is one of the most regulated industries, as it should be. When we consider radiation dosage levels, safe is magnitudes below what we've measured to be dangerous. Most of us that have worked in or adjacent to this technology are actually happy with this. There is real improvement that needs to be made in regulation though, because there is such a thing as too cautious (i.e. making a small reactor have the same insurance liability as a large reactor. Another example I've seen is "Hey, we did all the sims and testing, x method is better and safer and cheaper" and get responds back "x is untested in practice, we will keep doing y because it is proven." So the industry is a bit slow moving). But there are many that aren't in the industry that do not understand the nuances are try to push more. But I assure you that they don't have the ears of regulators. These are the people screaming about Thorium on Reddit that don't know a proton from an alpha particle. Every scientist I know in the field is much more risk adverse than I see in other fields. Quite frankly, for good reason. The reason for the "knows the most, fears the least" comment is because after you've studied this stuff for years, seen safety practices, understand the levels of added safety, you realize that accidents are difficult because so much thought has gone into preventing them. So armchair scientists are saying "why don't we advance like we do in other tech" but actual scientists are saying "Hey, it is time we use the decades of simulation science and knowledge in practice." The difference is subtle, but distinct. You'll find that scientists are different from your average software engineer.
I want to also say that if I see the industry moving away from its high safety principles I will gladly fight against it.
I'm a little disappointed that the Levelized cost of energy link does not include, you know, the levelized cost of various energy sources.
Also, it doesn't include the number of hours needed to find and debate a place where you can actually put down renewables.
Places using the most power (those most densely populated, like the Netherlands where I come from) have enough space for nuclear reactors to keep the country running (if base load was all we needed; it's just for comparison). However, if we need to do it all renewable, we're going to be hard-pressed and perhaps dependent on other countries. It's always someone's back yard or a nature reserve and people are almost always going to protest it. Germany has certainly more space so it's not as if we need to bring it all the way up from Spain or even Africa, but is by no means as sparsely populated as the USA (232/km² in Germany vs 34/km² in the USA). The USA also gets way more sun than most of western Europe. I'm not saying "you have it all easy" but... you're definitely in an easier position to make it work.
Mea culpa; usually I add more references to these comments - it's become a little tedious to look them up and include them each time so I skipped them for that comment, but since you're engaging in good faith, here are a couple:
I hear you regarding regional and national concerns, but if anything I think that reinforces another argument for renewables: they are relatively easy to construct and decommission over shorter timescales if political and local pressure demands it, compared to nuclear power plants which could become long-term causes of disgruntlement if misplaced.
My hope would be that groups of countries see energy provision as a shared problem that they can co-operate on (in the true sense of a shared grid), so that potential reliance on energy import if needed in the Netherlands wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I'd imagine (and would be interested to know if) the Netherlands is relatively advanced in terms of home and business energy efficiency and would have plenty to offer there in return.
I don't agree with everything you wrote, but your comment showed as downvoted and I don't get that. Your comment definitely contributes to the discussion, so at least have an upvote from me.
So what I'm seeing in those tables is (taking the UK 2025 central expectation, converting pounds to USD):
UK US UK US
nuclear 123 75 baseline
wind sea 130 122 0.9x 0.6x
wind land 79 40 1.6x 1.9x
solar 82 33 1.5x 2.3x
hydro n/a 53 n/a 1.4x
I think I read someone else in this thread claiming 10x the cost. Apparently that's not the case, but it's indeed still ~2x the cost of solar and on-shore wind, though actually cheaper than wind in sea (which is what the Netherlands will rely on in large part).
Even if it assumes zero time is spent arguing over where to put each wind and solar farm and that there is no downside to losing the physical space it's built on, 2x the cost is a large difference so I see how it makes financial sense to try going for renewable energy.
> My hope would be that groups of countries see energy provision as a shared problem that they can co-operate on (in the true sense of a shared grid)
> I hear you regarding regional and national concerns, but if anything I think that reinforces another argument for renewables: they are relatively easy to construct and decommission over shorter timescales if political and local pressure demands it
I'm not concerned that my national government will not align with my regional interests. My "regional and national concerns" are that it's nigh impossible to produce enough renewable energy with the physical space we have in the Netherlands. I'm all for nuclear, and I'm also fine importing renewable energy from Germany, Norway, and/or the UK (what are the odds that they all decide to screw us over at the same time? So that should be fine). We just have to realize what the consequences are of phasing out nuclear energy: dependence and delaying the transition by waiting for other countries to do it for us.
We need our neighbours to do a large effort on our behalf in finding places where people are okay with having solar/wind/hydro so that they can export it to us, and most of that effort could be avoided if we weren't antsy about paying more money for our energy for the benefit of making big steps in transitioning away form coal and gas.
It's probably too late by now. Even if tomorrow everyone woke up and decided nuclear is shiny technology to expand, it would take too long. But we're also too late starting on renewable energy, so the question is: which is the better option?
Option 1: mix 50% renewable power with 50% nuclear and be sure that energy production is nearly CO2-neutral when those plants are built in 15 years. Bam, done. From there, we can start to replace the nuclear part with renewable energy (either by helping or kindly asking other countries to build it in their space and sell the resulting power to us, or find more efficient ways to do it locally). Note that we'll still need to do a huge effort to achieve 50% renewable energy in the first place, so this is not the easy way out. It's a hard way, but maybe-realistic way. In 15 years, the earth will have warmed up more than it should have, but what's the alternative? Well:
Option 2: do our best on renewable energy and win thousands of fights with local communities and nature preservation organisations, while asking neighbouring countries to kindly produce a decent chunk of our electricity need in a sustainable fashion (while they're also trying to turn old power plants off, it's not as if they have capacity to spare). Hopefully we'll get to be nearly CO2-neutral at some point, maybe in a few decades? It's hard to say.
> I'd [be] interested to know if the Netherlands is relatively advanced in terms of home and business energy efficiency
I honestly can't say. We're doing better than the USA but that's not difficult. So far as I can tell, it's not more advanced than any other western European country. Having lived about 10% of my life in Belgium and 10% in Germany, and having had long holidays in France, the Netherlands feels five to ten years ahead of those countries in many ways. While the details of that feeling are a topic for another time, I don't think we're doing better in terms of energy efficiency.
> if political and local pressure demands it
Local demands can go screw themselves. East Germany has a higher nazi quota than west Germany but we're not saying "oh that's alright, you go ahead and send the black people in your area back to where they came from, make gay marriage illegal again, etc. Local power for the win!".
Locally, nationally, and internationally we're not doing what's in our own best interest, long-term. I don't mean nuclear power, I mean becoming CO2-neutral in any way. Thirty years ago we were pretty sure what was going on and we did absolutely nothing; ten years ago we were pretty damn sure the climate was already changing and noticed a huge extinction event on our hands and we figured we should get started; today it's absolutely certain that we're facing an existential issue, kids are out on the streets every friday telling us to do something, and what are we doing? Debating whether we really want to pay 38ct/kWh instead of 25ct/kWh by adding 50% nuclear into the mix. Oh yeah, and the USA decided they don't need to participate, it's not profitable in the short term or something. Other countries be like "sure that's fine, you have your own opinions and twice the pollution per capita of the rest of us. That's perfectly fine, this changes absolutely nothing in our relationship."
Huh, where did I give the impression that we can't? I'm saying that we'd be dependent, implying that we can because otherwise we couldn't be dependent.
Today we might import power because it's cheaper, but we can build another coal or nuclear plant and produce that 10% we're currently importing. Building enough solar panels or wind turbines, on the other hand, to produce 1093TWh/year (2014 figure) is going to be difficult. Even if it's only about electricity and we keep on heating with oil and driving oil-powered cars, we need 112TWh/year (2014) of electricity.
Yes, we're building wind turbine farms in sea, but "we're hoping that'll get us from 14% to 16% renewable energy by 2023"[1]. It's more than a rounding error, but not by much.
I guess I think if the Netherlands are at risk of being cut off by the UK, France and Germany, then the situation in the world is much more dire than it should be. Interdependence is the nature of the European project.
Yeah that's fair. I am not very afraid of that happening indeed, it's not as if any of our neighbour's armies could not do whatever they want with us anyway.
The USA is in a good spot to do it themselves, but I did want to make people here think a bit about the decision and realize how they'd feel in this position. If you had to get your power from Mexico, Canada, and/or Russia (those places seem large and have realistic distances for cables off the top of my head), and be dependent on those three countries for your energy needs. Would that be desirable and worth the slightly higher price of fission energy? The situation is not comparable for multiple reasons but it seems like a factor to weigh in, even if it's a small factor and mainly applicable to my small-European-country scenario.
> the levelized cost of energy[1] for renewables like solar and wind power is substantially cheaper than nuclear power nowadays.
The reason for this is that they're backstopped by fossil fuels. You install solar, it generates power when the sun shines and you burn coal or natural gas when it's cloudy or nighttime. The energy they produce is thereby cheaper, but can only satisfy so much of the total demand before requiring energy storage, which dramatically increases the cost. Satisfying the remaining demand with nuclear is better than satisfying it with fossil fuels.
They are backstopped by fossil fuels because that's currently cheapest. But fossil fuels are not NECESSARY to backstop renewables. A combination of short and long term storage technologies could do it, and likely could do it more cheaply (on the time scale of any reactor that we could start building today) than with a system including nuclear. A key is to use hydrogen for long term storage/backup.
You have to weigh the waste disposal and storage costs against the external costs of other fuel sources. What is the "cleanup cost" of carbon emissions from fossil fuels? Even wind power has a waste disposal cost; the blades are often made of toxic material and must be buried when they wear out.
The scary radioactivity of long lived isotopes can be dealt with via geological storage. There is plenty of rock underneath us that can be tunneled into. We can store basically limitless quantities of radioactive waste deep underground, forever.
And then there is reprocessing. France and other countries aggressively reprocess their spent fuel, freeing up new fuel without additional uranium mining. There are highly toxic biproducts from reprocessing that must be stored for a long time; however, these products are small in volume.
Counterpoint: why is environmental impact of solar+batteries often not mentioned? Lithium, silicon tetrachloride, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid isn't exactly nice to produce or put into rivers. My 2c: have an "all of the above" approach towards research, dispassionately understand pros and cons and big-picture complexity, instead of retreating to tribes that ignore the complexity.
Most of the mass of a nuclear power plant is steel and concrete, which are relatively benign.
But the big advantage of nuclear in this case is that the overall amount of materials needed is tiny compared to harvesting more diffuse forms of energy like wind and solar.
Hydrofluoric acid is part of the acidic etch solution used to remove saw damage from and add texture to multicrystalline silicon wafers. Monocrstyalline wafers are treated with alkaline solutions of e.g. potassium hydroxide.
Since the industry is rapidly shifting to monocrystalline silicon, for reasons of cell efficiency, acidic etching too will be much less common in 2025 than it was in 2015.
Of course the use of HF is not a knock against solar. Nuclear fuel production also uses HF as well as elemental fluorine. Petroleum alkylation units use HF too. In all these cases the HF is part of the production process but is not present in the final product.
Nuclear waste is not a problem, but not because it can be recycled. Reprocessing is an economic loser compared to just mining fresh uranium. The separated plutonium has negative value, and in thermal reactors much of it can't be destroyed before going into final disposal.
Indeed, reprocessing with PUREX and only using thermal reactors will most likely never make any economic sense.
Breeder reactors and more economic and proliferation-resistant reprocessing technologies like pyroprocessing might, however. Too early to tell really, as neither have really been developed to the point where one can make precise economic predictions.
But breeders themselves are uncompetitive (and fast breeders are inherently dangerous, since they require much higher concentrations of fissionable material, and could potentially experience fast prompt supercriticality in severe accidents.)
If nuclear is not competitive with cheap uranium and burner reactors, it's not going to be competitive with breeders and reprocessing.
Hard to say. Hasn't really been commercialized to the point one could make any definite conclusion. There's nothing inherent in a breeder reactor that would make it substantially more expensive.
> and fast breeders are inherently dangerous, since they require much higher concentrations of fissionable material, and could potentially experience fast prompt supercriticality in severe accidents.)
No. In a fast reactor the prompt neutron multiplication time is an order or magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, but still several orders of magnitude slower than in a weapon. Further, the enrichment is much lower than in a weapon (recent-ish designs are made to work below the 20% HEU limit for obvious reasons), so it's quite unclear if it's even possible to get all the material into a suitable geometry before it would blow itself apart.
Of course it's possible to have a criticality excursion that would destroy the reactor, but those are possible in thermal reactors as well.
> If nuclear is not competitive with cheap uranium and burner reactors, it's not going to be competitive with breeders and reprocessing.
The fuel cycle costs are basically fuel + enrichment + disposal for a once-through thermal cycle, and fuel + reprocessing + disposal for the breeding cycle. Fuel and disposal costs would be lower for the breeding cycle, although with current prices and maturity level of the technology you're correct that the once-through cycle is cheaper. Not written in the stars that it will remain so forevermore, though, and breeder + reprocessing tech is waiting in the drawer for that day, in case there ever will be a need. No hurry.
All the attempts at building breeders have experienced serious problems, and estimates of their cost are higher than for thermal reactors.
> No. In a fast reactor the prompt neutron multiplication time is an order or magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, but still several orders of magnitude slower than in a weapon.
One could still have prompt supercriticality. So, even if the neutrons are slower than in a weapon, they are still much faster than in a thermal reactor, so the doubling time could be much shorter. There's also the possibility that, because the core contains tons of plutonium, the rearrangement driven by the supercriticality could cause the arrange to become MORE reactive, not less (this may be unlikely, but it's very hard to rule out in any possible accident.) Edward Teller famously warned about this issue back in the 1960s.
For this reason I suspect that nothing but a fast MSR could be licensed in the west.
You will note that the French have now abandoned Astrid, which was to be their next attempt at a prototype fast reactor. It's so distant now that it's not worth keeping the expertise around.
> All the attempts at building breeders have experienced serious problems, and estimates of their cost are higher than for thermal reactors.
Nope. EBR-II back in the day had no big problems over it's lifetime. In Russia there are a couple of relatively big ones producing power, with no big issues.
But crucially, so far all breeder reactors have been one-off things done for R&D purposes. They haven't been optimized for producing low cost power, and there has been no learning curve either since all have been bespoke designs.
Then again, in the west we have failed to build even traditional LWR's on time and budget, as well as other large projects.
> So, even if the neutrons are slower than in a weapon, they are still much faster than in a thermal reactor, so the doubling time could be much shorter.
Yes, but not short enough that a non-trivial fraction of the fuel would fission before the assembly would disintegrate.
> There's also the possibility that, because the core contains tons of plutonium, the rearrangement driven by the supercriticality could cause the arrange to become MORE reactive, not less
Now you're just concern-trolling. If part of the core becomes supercritical due to melting, in the absence of cooling that would vaporize the supercritical part of the fuel, reducing its density and pushing everything else outwards, thus reducing the neutron multiplication. Melted fuel flowing is just a much too slow process to rapidly cause a big bunch of fuel to become prompt supercritical.
Nuclear weapons are very Very VERY carefully engineered so that a substantial fraction of the fuel fissions before the assembly blows apart. Nuclear reactors OTOH, including fast reactors, are very Very VERY carefully engineered so this won't happen even in the most wildly imaginary accident scenario.
> For this reason I suspect that nothing but a fast MSR could be licensed in the west.
Oklo Inc. is in the process of licensing their fast reactor having submitted the application this year. Presumably the believe they have a decent chance of having their license application approved.
There's also the Versatile Test Reactor(?) which the US government is planning to build. Essentially a PRISM reactor (evolved from EBR-II / IFR) modified for materials testing rather than power production.
> You will note that the French have now abandoned Astrid, which was to be their next attempt at a prototype fast reactor.
Yes. I was never a big fan of ASTRID, AFAICS there wasn't anything really innovative there that would have brought any major new insights. Still disappointing though.
No, not concern trolling. Designs where rearrange of the assembly increases k were explored for weapons. They were not pursued because they were large and required lots of fissionable material. But a fast reactor core has orders of magnitude more material than a bomb. The regulators will require proof that this scenario is very unlikely, not just an assumption. And that's going to be difficult to provide.
> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore?
- It still is the number 1 talking point.
- It is a solved problem (you put it in a hole).
- The "problem" is vastly overstated. We're talking about 60 years of waste can sit on a football field 1.5m high. That's tiny. Bringing up (generically) waste on a technical forum is often associated with not knowing much about the subject.
- Economics is a better talking point because it is actually debatable (cases to both sides).
Yup, thorium-based nuclear power does not generate much nuclear waste at all, for example, and nuclear waste can be recycled, called "nuclear recycling"[1].
The thorium fuel cycle produces about the same amount of waste as the equivalent U-Pu cycle. Both are breeding cycles requiring reprocessing. There is nothing magical in Th that gets rid of the waste.
The Th cycle can't really be compared to the once-through enriched uranium cycle, as Th doesn't contain any fissile isotope by itself. It requires breeding and reprocessing.
The industry would prefer it be an unaddressed externality as there is no politically economical solution. So it’s assumed storage will always be local but not priced in.
> get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing
The problems humanity faces are immense. There are no choices that are 'safe'. Even if the US was building Nuclear power plants as fast as we could it still wouldn't be enough.
A problem inherent in renewables is they depend on climate. Doesn't make for reliable or predictable power output. Climatic conditions could suddenly change and wipe out part of your energy capacity. Happened in my country and we ended up with expensive, rationed power:
It's useful to have an alternative that allows burning fuel in order to generate energy, just in case renewables fail. Nuclear energy is the best in this category.
you get very good prices in a 100% renewable system. Mostly solar, with hydrogen backup (although this doesn't take into account Brazil's hydro resources which could make things even cheaper.)
Hydrogen for energy generation? I've never seen that. Does it provide on-demand power generation like fossil fuels? If so then that's pretty awesome, I bet it's even better than stuff like coal. Not really educated about it though.
Also I'm not talking about energy prices. I'm talking about the reliability and predictability of the overall system. Hydroelectric power here in Brazil is constantly threatened by lack of rain. Solar power is threatened by long periods of cloudy weather. Every time it happens it shows up all over the news. I remember it happening a fes years ago.
I'm not saying these energy sources are not good. They're awesome. The problem is they depend on climate so we can't always count on them. Gotta have the ability to burn some kind of fuel to compensate. If hydrogen works as a renewable fuel then it'd be great!
Hydrogen for energy STORAGE. Yes, it could be used in turbines like natural gas currently is. The key observation here is that backing up the grid with turbines is not that expensive. A simple cycle gas turbine power plant is just a few percent of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant of the same output. Combustion turbines are amazing! So, we have stacks of turbines that are needed when there's no sun or wind and the short term storage has run down, burning hydrogen produced with excess renewable power when there's plenty of sun and wind. If the levelized cost of the renewables is sufficiently below that of nuclear then nuclear optimizes out to zero.
The walk away passive safety is a tradeoff with non-proliferation concerns. This design requires 20% enrichment, much higher than traditional reactors. This might be a smart tradeoff, but let's not pretend it's doesn't exist.
The countries in the nuclear club represent a significant fraction of the world's energy consumption. Even if they were the only ones to eliminate the use of carbon-based energy via nuclear, it would be a good start.
We could start with taking anything said by Ed Lyman with a huge grain of salt, considering he's made an entire career out of concern-trolling anything related to nuclear power.
In this case, his argument is basically that HALEU is a proliferation risk because given access to enrichment facilities, it's more effort to produce weapons-usable HEU starting from HALEU than from LEU or natural uranium. Well, duh! As he himself admits in that letter, it's only a modest factor of three difference for HALEU vs LEU. From a non-proliferation perspective, the critical thing is the access to enrichment technology in the first place!
If one wants to make a case against HALEU, compare the economics vs. LEU.
For a more dense read, see the whitepaper[1] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory about FCM fuels, which seems to be one of the key innovations of this reactor type. Instead of using pellets of Uranium oxide directly inside the reactor, this method encapsulates the fuel in a high temperature ceramic material which makes it very unlikely for the reactor to 'melt down' the way that mainstream reactors can.
Seems like their claim to "Ultra Safe" is actually merited based on a first principles look at the power density. They claim 1.24 W/cm^3 versus 20-40 W/cm^3 in normal reactors. The high power densities mean you have to be able to cool the reactor, even when you shut down the reactor because reactors take a long time to actually turn off. With such low power density, it should be no problem to cool down the reactor. It'll just cool down naturally, like a hot pot. In fact the metric to look at would be power per core surface area.
Especially considering the IFR (and it's predecessor EBR II where the experiment the parent refers to was done) are pool type reactors, meaning the reactor sits in a big pool filled with the primary coolant, there are no pipes where the primary coolant leaves the tank.
It has low power density because it's a gas cooled reactor. Gas is a much worse heat conductor than a liquid.
I'm slightly skeptical wrt gas cooled reactors. Due to the low power density, the reactor needs to be physically big. And since the gas is under high pressure, the reactor needs to be a pressure vessel. Big pressure vessel usually means expensive.
One intriguing development is to use the TRISO kind of fuel that Ultra Safe has developed, but instead use molten salt as the coolant. That allows much higher power density, and doesn't need to be pressurized either as the operating temperature is well below the boiling point of the salt at atmospheric pressure. It also avoids the problem of having the fuel and highly radioactive and corrosive fission products dissolved in the salt, as molten salt reactors usually have.
Assuming nuclear truly can be ultra safe, how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board? Particularly when the "competition" (solar, wind, etc) has such a strong tailwind.
Ever heard of Kessennuma [1]? You probably don't remember the name. When the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake hit, an oil tank ruptured, caught fire, and burnt for four days. According to [2], 1,152 people were killed, with additional 214 missing. That's a similar level as Fukushima's expected casualties, probably more.
But nobody talks about Kessennuma, and nobody brings it up as an evidence that fossil fuels are an inherently dangerous technology that must be purged from the earth to protect our children. Because, apparently, dying in an oil fire is not scary enough.
Is the point you're trying to make that nuclear and fossil fuels can both be dangerous during a natural disaster? I don't think anyone will dispute this.
Well, I guess most people don't, but then again, they don't dispute this in the same way folks say "All politicians are bad!" - and when they go to voting booth, they always pick a particular party of their choice. And they come back, and until the next election they keep saying "Bah, politics! All politicians are bad!"
The majority of our energies are generated by fossil fuels, in most industrial countries. This has to stop - I think that's much more urgent than arguing between nuclear and renewables.
First, point out that Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima amount to extremely small numbers of deaths relative to the power these plants generated. For three mile island and Fukushima this figure is zero among the public. Less than two dozen among the plant workers (all of which died due to the hydrogen explosion not radiation). The areas that were evacuated are now safe to return. Chernobyl was worse, but th Soviets didn't even bother with secondary containment. They didn't bother to put a concrete dome over the reactor. Even then, ~200 people died. This is a fairly small death toll for a worst-case failure. Contrast this with hydroelectricity, for example, which has resulted in the deaths of tena of thousands of people and the displacement of millions due to dam collapses [1].
Competition in the form of wind and solar are intermittent, requiring storage on a massive scale to offer a path to decarbonization. With 12 hours of energy storage, the US could reach 80% renewable generation. To get to 100% we need 3 weeks of storage according to estimates [2]. Currently, we have 8 seconds of battery storage compared to our 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. We have 4 minutes of hydroelectric storage, but hydroelectric storage is geographically limited. Increasing this by a factor of 180 is not feasible.
In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar don't actually present real competition.
> the areas that were evacuated are now safe to return.
is this true for Fukushima?
As far as I understand, 8% of the "Difficult-to-Return zones" have been cleared up for access to people, but that is a far cry from "all cleared up, everybody goes back home".
The "difficult to return zones" are exactly that: the subset of zones that are represent the greatest challenge to resettle. Most of the exclusion zones with less severe categories have been lifted [1].
The point is, people assume because of Chernobyl that a nuclear disaster will render land uninhabitable permanently, or at least for decades. That is not the case. Chernobyl remains excluded because there's no real incentive to clean it up and reopen. The city was built to support the power plant, so with the latter gone there's no real reason to put in the effort to decontaminate the former.
> First, point out that Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima amount to extremely small numbers of deaths relative to the power these plants generated.
I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke.
First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
Second: It costs tens of billions of dollars to clean up these messes. Paid for by the cow you can milk forever: tax payers.
In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar are the only game in town.
Add medium and long-term storage to the mix and there's nothing stopping us from a truly green future other than politics.
> I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke. First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
The total number of victims was unknown for Chernobyl. We didn't know what the impact on cancer rates would be. But it isn't the 1980s anymore. We can compare the rates of cancer and other radiation related illnesses among the people who experienced Chernobyl and the general population. The radiation exposure due to Fukushima and 3 Mile Island was insufficient to cause adverse health effects. Yes, we do know the impact of these failures.
3 Mile Island took $1 billion to clean up not 10 billion. The exclusion zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima represent greater economic tolls, but the latter has since been lifted. By comparison, what is your cost estimate to build 3 weeks of energy storage in the US?
Sure, wind and solar could work if there's a scientific breakthrough that makes energy storage extremely cheap and scalable by several orders of magnitude. But until that scientific breakthrough in storage happens, nuclear and renewables aren't even playing the same game.
A number of people did die because of the Fukushima evacuation, though, through things like interruption of medical care. And if there hand't been an evacuation there would have been a few radiation deaths. The total is still only 10x the number of air pollution deaths you'd expect from a coal plant providing the same number of megawatt-years and very few nuclear plants melt down but lets be accurate.
The attribution of deaths as being due to evacuation lies on shaky ground. Many of these deaths are attributed to ambiguous causes like "exhaustion". Many of the counts for deaths supposedly due to evacuation are in fact just presenting deaths due to natural causes that occurred in the evacuation time frame. Remember, out of a population of 300,000 people, 3,000 people will naturally die each year assuming everyone lives to 100.
Certainly, if someone was tied to life support and had to be taken off to evacuate then that's a death attributable to evacuation. But most of the figures I've seen have counted people who died of natural causes during the evacuation time frame and attributed it to evacuation.
Coal plants kill more people each year during normal operation than Chernobyl, 3 Mile, and Fukushima killed over all time.
"In 2008 the World Health Organization (WHO) and other organizations calculated that coal particulates pollution cause approximately one million deaths annually across the world"
"Long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe."
>>” The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.”
- This is false. Total number of victims who can be reliably linked to the disaster is two digit number.
Source: lived there most of my life (grew up there) and still have friends and family working there
> I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke
This kind of justification is _indeed_ a bit cynical and morbid. I suspect it is a way to respond to the sometimes overly emotional argument from nuclear opponents.
I don't think it helps having a cool-headed debate on this complicated topic.
However, I do think mentionning that all form of electricy productions have risk trade-offs, and illustrating it with the insane number of casualties caused by other sources of energy production is relevant. (Eg: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...)
But a bit of "tact" is warranted.
> First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
The total number of victims from the direct events (explosion, short term exposure) is largely "known" (although the Soviet numbers might not be trustworthy, if you want to go this direction.)
The long-term numbers are of course harder to estimate. Again, it's going to sound morbid; but, to know if it's "still rising", you have to determine if someone who dies from a cancer 34 years after the event died because of the event.
I'm in no way qualified to say so.
I have to revert to the same method I use when I don't know stuff: I find scientists to trust.
It is entirely possible not to trust UN on this, but not really helpful.
> Second: It costs tens of billions of dollars to clean up these messes. Paid for by the cow you can milk forever: tax payers.
That's absolutely true. It's also the tax payers who invested money to build the plant, and reap the benefit of having the energy. Again, this is a cost-benefit analysis. It's perfectly possible to not come to the same conclusion depending on your level of risk averseness.
However here, again, it's not irrelevant to mention that all sources have this kind of trade-off.
And, to put it bluntly, I assume it would also be the tax payer would who have to clean-up after a broken dam. Or an hydrogen storage tank that explodes. Or burying the child mining the rare-earths needed for solar panels. Or curing the respiratory diseases caused by fossil fuels as we speak. Not even mentioning the various climate events.
> In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar are the only game in town. Add medium and long-term storage to the mix and there's nothing stopping us from a truly green future other than politics.
I would love the situation to be more simple. The same science that tells us the climate is changing it telling us our energy situation is not easy to solve - yet.
In the meantime, we'll have to use all tools available (including the dangerous but efficient ones.)
I'm in no way an "absolute fan" of current nuclear (Although I'm much more concerned about the long term storage of waste - not so much because it's dangerous, but because no one wants it in their backyard. And proliferation, a bit.)
I'm all for investing in doing nuclear fission differently. If the design presented here does lower the risk of accident, as they claim, that would be for the best.
I don't think you're trusting the claim, and I can say that I'm rather skeptical too - but mostly because I don't know much. If enough scientist tell me this kind of nuclear plant is safer, I can accept that.
----
Off-topic: If I was very cynical and very pro-nuclear, I would fund a massive superproduction about a giant dam collapsing. The super-vilain could be a corrupt entrepreneur helped by an ambitous greenwashing politician.
Both the major incidents (Chernobyl and Fukushima) were reactors designed in the era of slide-rules. Neither is a 3rd or 4th generation design. Chernobyl was a bad design, and the incident resulted from Soviet mismanagement (keeping known RBMK reactor flaws secret) in tandem with local mismanagement (the test protocol was completely fucked).
Fukushima required active cooling and could not cool itself using its own power output. And the backup generators were below sea level and the thing was on a fault line.
Neither caused major loss of life.
Three Mile Island was a scare, and did not cause significant damage or loss of life.
Any newly constructed reactor would not have the design flaws of the Soviet RBMK and would be designed to fail-safe.
It'd help to stop repeating mostly false stories (and leading questions) about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima every time nuclear comes up.
But how to persuade the general public that science and statistics matter when even HN is skeptical? You're right, I don't know how to do that.
Science works because you are able to control most of the variables. It simplifies the world into something that can be modelled. Major decisions like energy policy are just more complicated than that. It is hundreds of overlapping considerations that have no good single answer. Yes science still matters, but there are deeper political questions at play. You just need to accept that if you want to build big complex things in the environment.
Of course these kind of issues can often be ignored with sufficient political support. Which is exactly what wind and solar have done in Europe.
Try using science to prove that a wind turbine isn't ugly. Or that it is worth killing some bird of prey to get clean energy. Try using science to explain why a coal miner should lose their livelihood. Or why you should stop eating so much red meat. It does not work.
At the heart of this debate is not scepticism of science, but scepticism of scientists and engineers. Scepticism that they really are as good as they say they are.
Apples to oranges. Reactor designs are completely different. They are basically set it and forget it designs that then require extremely costly refueling and refurbishment.
Edit: I was wrong, the Ultra Safe Nuclear plan is somewhat similar. My comparison was with typical power grid reactor designs, not disposable reactors like what's being proposed.
You're actually right, in this case it is pretty comparable, so it's closer to apples to apples, which brings up concerns about costs and commercial viability of such a project, but that's not really point of this thread.
In Ukraine, which lived through Chernobyl, public is mostly pro nuclear. Turns out solar and wind isn't actually competitive and nobody likes to pay rich "green energy" investors for no reason, so as long as they have no influence in the government and most mass media, it's pretty hard to convince people of the opposite - that they need to pay a lot more so that a tiny percentage of electricity could come from solar and wind [1].
[1] And even that is misleading and not in any way "greener", since solar and wind can't be used on demand it has to replace some energy, which in this case is nuclear energy, but it can replace only a small part of it, the rest will have to be replaced with something that can be generated on demand, like coal and gas.
Is there a particular reason why solar and wind aren't competitive in Ukraine, while in general it seems like those technologies are some of the cheapest sources of energy available today?
> those technologies are some of the cheapest sources of energy available today?
No they are not. They only work well at small percentage of generation when you have enough hydropower backup (effectively, batteries): generate from solar during day, and generate from hydro at night (or use fossil fuel backup).
> solar
In California large amount of electricity is consumed by air conditioners (4%). And they work very well together: on hot days you need more electricity for air conditioners, and on hot days solar generation works better.
And you need more air conditioners during summer, and solar works better during summer.
The opposite is true in Ukraine. They don't need air conditioners because summers are not too hot, but but they need to heat buildings at winter because winters are very cold (when solar is very poor) especially at nights (when solar does not exist).
> wind
You cannot place wind turbines anywhere. You need a place with a constant high wind (that's why offsore farms work better). I guess there are no such places in Ukraine. And still you need to have a hydro or fossil fuel backup, because wind itself cannot produce electricity constantly.
> cheapest sources of energy available today
They are cheapest because they are subsidised on one hand, and on the other hand, nuclear is penalized by lawsuits and regulartions and inspections (in the US; in Ukraine the economy barely grows, they don't build much new power plants).
> They only work well at small percentage of generation when you have enough hydropower backup
What do you see as a small percentage? A country like The Netherlands is generating between 10% and 50% renewable energy without significant storage capacity (it's summer so a lot of that energy comes from solar, but in winter the yields from wind will be higher), and we are one of the worst countries in the EU when it comes to renewables. I thought the need for storage is mostly a problem if you want to reach a high percentage of generation using renewables. Anyway, energy storage also seems beneficial if you want to build a nuclear infrastructure, so it seems like a problem that has to be tackled regardless.
> They are cheapest because they are subsidised on one hand, and on the other hand, nuclear is penalized by lawsuits and regulartions and inspections
I don't think subsidies are really a problem. Weren't the nuclear power infrastructures of France and Ukraine mostly build using state subsidies? The amount of subsidies needed to build renewables is also decreasing. Some might argue subsidies aren't necessary anymore, but we still need massive infrastructure investments to create a smart grid, more interconnectors, etc. Also, nuclear energy might be regulated too much, but I'm not sure how much can be saved without hurting safety.
> A country like The Netherlands is generating between 10% and 50% renewable energy without significant storage capacity
Quoting wikipedia:
Renewable energy sources, such as biomass, wind power and solar power, produce 12% of the total electricity.
This is a small percentage.
> I thought the need for storage is mostly a problem if you want to reach a high percentage of generation using renewables.
This is correct. If we want to generate only small percentage using renewables, we can simply have excessive fossil power plants and turn them off when renewables work.
> energy storage also seems beneficial if you want to build a nuclear infrastructure
Barely. Nuclear can work at full power constantly, and can be easily slowed down and then sped up any time.
Of course if we had extremely cheap batteries we could make nuclear work full power all the time and save excessive electricity. So far we don't even have moderately expensive batteries.
> I don't think subsidies are really a problem.
It is not a problem. It partially explains why renewables are "cheap" and nuclear is "expensive".
> Weren't the nuclear power infrastructures of France and Ukraine mostly build using state subsidies?
I don't know about France. It seems to be a government monopoly, so there are very different rules when it works this way.
In Ukraine because of very sad state of economy, they seem to not build any nuclear power plants for a long time.
> Also, nuclear energy might be regulated too much, but I'm not sure how much can be saved without hurting safety.
As pointed many times in this thread, historically, including the worst nuclear disaster Chernobyl, nuclear is much safer than any other electricity generation method (including renewables). If something need to be regulated for safety, it is anything except nuclear.
Just ask people if they think climate change is an existential threat. If they answer yes (as will most people who are opposed to nuclear energy) then ask them if they think nuclear energy is an existential threat too or just extremely dangerous.
If the answer is "just extremely dangerous" then the choice is simple. Actually, I can't understand why all those who are predicting doomsday scenarios because of climate change aren't storming the streets with big pro-nuclear energy signs.
> Actually, I can't understand why all those who are predicting doomsday scenarios because of climate change aren't storming the streets with big pro-nuclear energy signs.
Agreed. Without being a primitivist, I don't think you can be both pro-environment and anti-nuclear at this point. Solar and wind just don't have the output to keep up with industry. If we're fine living in mud huts and it taking 6 months to produce a laptop, then fine (and honestly that might be the place we end up in 100 years). But as it is, solar and wind cannot sustain our current economy.
This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.
Which is the problem. This is primarily a managerial issue, not a technological one. And the quality of executive and managerial decision-making of all kinds across the entire industry is nowhere near the standard required for future confidence. Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.
Since deaths from renewables scale linearly with installations I think that nuclear will continue to win that particular argument. Building more wind turbines and solar installations is not going to reduce the deaths from installation and maintenance.
I wonder what the clean-up costs are long-term for the groundwater contamination from solar panel production and for the dismantling and junking of wind turbines when they reach their EOL? Maybe not as much as nuclear but definitely not free -- right now they are a hidden negative externality just like coal plant fly ash, but eventually someone is going to have to pay the bill.
The type of renewable matters though, it seems like retrofitting existing houses with solar panels is relatively more dangerous than building utility scale solar farms (no roof to fall off from, higher yield).
> That's deaths per joule so far. How would nuclear compete if far more renewables were installed, producing far more joules?
I'd expect wind and solar deaths to increase more or less linearly with joules output. These deaths are mostly related to maintenance activities that will scale with deployment.
Whereas: nuclear deaths from reactors built after 1970 are what, zero? That isn't to say that there aren't a lot of very old reactors still online, but nuclear deaths are all outliers rather than modal. And we should expect fewer outlier events per joule with newer designs.
> How about clean-up costs?
All clean-up is relatively inexpensive compared to climate change. That said, wind and solar require expensive cleanup; it isn't clear that this is any less expensive than burying or processing waste.
Fukushima is an outlier, rather than the mode.
> This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.
This is a very big jump from a single incident to a generate characterization of a global industry.
> Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.
Climate change will only get worse as we continue to consume more and more electricity, and avoid building out nuclear power.
Wind and solar require a lot of labor and land per joule compared with other energy generation. They also have relatively short generation lifetimes and generate disposal waste at the end of their operating lifetime. Land isn't something we think of as especially finite in the US, but it is more precious in denser regions like Europe.
To the extent that wind and solar displace existing coal and gas generation; great, I support that. But the emphasis on wind and solar over the past decade has resulted in increased oil and gas energy generation, worsening climate change. Wind/solar and oil/gas are the classic "bootleggers and baptists" combination.
Except... we don't know what the deaths are. It will take tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to know what the death toll is from nuclear power. Because humanity is stuck with the waste for hundreds of thousands of years.
We use only tiny amount of the energy available, then have waste to deal with through the ages.
I'm in favor of nuclear, but wow are we ever terrible at innovating & trying to make a respectful, compelling go at it. Kerry shutting down the Integral Fast Reactor keeps coming back to haunt me as one of those strong indicators that America doesn't want to put itself up to the challenge of doing nuclear responsibly.
Out of curiosity, is there a single death that is directly attributable to nuclear waste from a reactor? (want to add that last clause because I do not think nukes should get blamed for someone improperly dumping medical equipment with cobalt or cesium isotope generators) For some reason I want to assume this happened at some point, maybe back in the 50s or 60s when we were really sloppy with nuclear waste but I can't seem to find any.
Yeah, that was the one that made me add the medical waste clause in my question. There have been a couple of cases of poor handling of these devices, but as far as I can tell there do not seem to be any deaths from actual reactor waste.
We're stuck with the gaseous waste from fossil fuels for millennia. We're stuck with megatons of radioactive coal ashes forever. We're stuck with toxic chemical compounds necessary to build anything industrial at scale (including solar panels, batteries, windmills etc) forever too.
Data and statistics aren't getting through, so maybe the answer is to rebrand it. Drop the word "nuclear". Chernobyl is too powerful of an association. All the data in the world is just no match for that story and imagery.
I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work on Chernobyl power station. You actually don’t have to convince anyone there in the benefits of nuclear.
Renewables are great but can’t meet 100% of demand. And when they can’t we should be using nuclear.
As a CA resident now (who installed solar on my roof) it sickens me when our “leaders” scream “climate change” but close nuclear early and buy coal-generated electricity from Utah instead.
1) I don't think its a zero sum game, nuclear doesn't preclude solar or wind. In-fact, thats how it's working now. Competition will drive improvements and optimization.
2) Accidents do happen with technology and the repercussions of nuclear accidents are serious. That doesn't mean we shouldn't re-think the technology and how it can be applied in a better or safer way, including cold fusion.
> I don't think its a zero sum game, nuclear doesn't preclude solar or wind.
That's what I'd like to think, but it doesn't seem to be a good match.
Nuclear plants want constant power output, they are ideal for base load.
Solar and wind production vary during the day, and they don't always meet demand. That problem is called the "duck curve": too much is produced during the day and too little just after sunset.
That's the reason why the best plants to complement solar and wind are those that can vary their output on demand. And unfortunately, that's typically coal (see Germany).
Hydro would be ideal but its capacity depends is limited by the terrain.
> Nuclear plants want constant power output, they are ideal for base load. Solar and wind production vary during the day, and they don't always meet demand. That problem is called the "duck curve": too much is produced during the day and too little just after sunset. That's the reason why the best plants to complement solar and wind are those that can vary their output on demand. And unfortunately, that's typically coal (see Germany). Hydro would be ideal but its capacity depends is limited by the terrain.
Modeling suggests there is a place for nuclear, or more generally, dispatchable (firm) low-carbon resources in deep decarbonized electricity grids. See e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006
As for the duck curve, you can flatten it with solar panels that are angled to the south-west rather than straight to the south, and some moderate amount of battery storage. That still leaves the problem of how to deal with the baseload. Nuclear could be a good candidate for that.
This is the key question. Even if nuclear is made ultra safe, a single bad event (which is likely if we build hundreds of thousands of reactors world wide) can raise so much paranoia that future investments in nuclear can be affected.
I have no idea how you could solve a problem like this.
With the size constraint of that reactor (in volume), what's to say it would be used for the public? It could instead be the source of energy for a factory, or a data center for instance. I don't think we have to keep thinking about public use for these at all.
Do they? I love renewables but for some reason the masses still just don't think you can get enough energy out of sky farts and hippy sun rays. The fact that ALL energy in our solar system comes from the sun is irrelevant the sun just doesn't feel very powerful. The public knows that nuclear is super powerful.
> how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board?
The same way we convinced people to build them after Hiroshima. The same way we currently convince people to build coal plants when there are better alternatives. People want energy and they don't really care about the environmental / human cost.
The fuel in fact doesn't come from the Sun, but from other stars that went super nova before the solar system was formed. Normal fusion in stars in not hot enough to produce such heavy elements.
I'd love to know more about how heavy elements got from the sun into the interior of our planet and then back out to near the surface again. Where can I learn about this process?
People are afraid of having no energy, they think the sun is too weak to provide that energy and so we must burn things like coal, gas, oil, uranium whatever, see detritus reply as an example.
How many people with increased cancer rates from solar? Stop quoting deaths from nuclear accidents - the harm from nuclear incidents goes far beyond killing people outright.
How many people die from loosing power during winters and freezing to death? How many more would that be if everyone was using solar which can't provide enough power in winter?
Oh? I’m in Southern Saskatchewan, about two hours away from the US border. It reliably drops to -40 here in the winter. The vast majority of us heat our homes with natural gas furnaces, driven by electric fans. Long power outages in the winter are a very very big deal, and luckily are quite rare. A few years ago we had one that lasted about 12 hours, and the indoor temperature had dropped to about 7C. If it had continued to drop, the first thing would be damaged plumbing/flooding... followed by people who don’t have a large cache of warm clothes starting to have trouble.
> During 2006-2010, about 2,000 U.S. residents died each year from weather-related causes of death. About 31% of these deaths were attributed to exposure to excessive natural heat, heat stroke, sun stroke, or all; 63% were attributed to exposure to excessive natural cold, hypothermia, or both;
Random renewable energy-related question that I've been thinking about:
Specifically wrt solar, a big argument against is that it can't provide power during the night and we don't have a good way to store energy. What I'm wondering is why it's so imperative that residential/commercial properties are able to get full power from the grid 24/7? What if prices for power go way up during the night (because it can't come from solar), and people could just learn to get most of their power from the grid during the day? And have a relatively small per-house battery that charges during the day and can be used at night.
Consumers would be better served to direct that investment toward utility scale storage, with advantages including economy of scale.
This assumes quality utility management, which may be doubtful. But if we as a society cannot get our collective act together to run modern electrical utilities, distributed storage is a poor band-aid.
It's worth noting that a feature of life on unreliable third world utility grids is that people with money spend a lot on redundant generation and storage.
One of the fun things I notice whenever the topic of renewables comes up is the assumption that the world around you is hospitable :). We have human populations living in areas where turning off the energy is a miserable experience, in both directions.
It’s autumn in Saskatchewan right now. The nights are getting cool enough that we’ve, sadly, had to start the furnace. Within a few months, we’re likely to start getting temperatures that drop to -40 for sustained periods, and drop to around 8h of daylight per day. Power outages in the winter are a very big deal.
Far as I can tell that argument isn't a technical argument. It's more of a lawyer type argument where you toss out objections and hope one of them sticks.
One of my memories was my dad taking me to work after dinner. They were running a wind tunnel. They were scheduled to run it at 9pm but the power company didn't give them the go ahead till 11pm. Which meant they weren't done to 2am. The reason, thing draws close to 200 MW. They ran it at night because it's cheaper. Not because they particularly loved blowing their evening into the late morning.
Lot of industrial users are chasing price.
Friend of mine has solar panels and lives in Arizona. She and her husband run the air conditioner full tilt in the afternoon off the panels and then turn it off when the sun goes down.
Much as I poop on the idea that free market pixie dust is the and only the solution to all of our problems. I would assume this is one it'll solve just fine. Seriously if running your air conditioner costs $1/hr in the afternoon and $5/hr after 8pm, you know what people will do.
Battery costs are falling rapidly, and will likely be much lower in ten years when any nuclear power plant started today might come online.
Hydrogen electrolyser costs are also falling rapidly, and hydrogen can be stored underground for a per-energy cost two orders of magnitude cheaper than the per-energy cost of batteries.
In many parts of the world there are so-called deregulated electricity markets, where a market operator takes bids for producers and the marginal price then determines the wholesale price for that time period (usually the period being something between 15 minutes and 1 hour). So yes, if the marginal unit that sets the wholesale price is a low marginal cost producer like wind, solar or nuclear, the wholesale price for that period will be very low. Conversely, if demand is very high and the marginal producer is a peaker gas plant, the price will be very high.
This is basically the business model behind grid batteries as well. Buy power and charge the batteries when power is cheap, sell the power when it's expensive.
One big problem here is that despite wholesale markets working like this for a long time, customer uptake of electricity contracts with time-varying prices tied to the wholesale price has been very poor. In general it seems most customers rather pay a higher fixed electricity price than check the current price before starting their laundry (or something else that takes a decent amount of power).
The simple solution to that problem is indeed batteries. Currently battery production is growing exponentially. Factories are crossing into the TWH per year territory. That's right now.
Batteries are going to be absolutely everywhere. There are going to be millions of EVs on the road and plugged into the grid technically capable to absorb from and deliver energy to the grid. And that's just cars.
For reference, one mid size EV with about 50KWH of battery is the equivalent of about 4-5 days of electricity usage for a normal household. 2 million such EVs would provide about 1 TWH of battery capacity, enough to power up to 10 million houses for a day.
Now add wind, solar, domestic solar (on your roof, windows) and grid cables to the mix and we are talking about a massive distributed network of periodically (over) producing sites and hundreds of millions of EVs, trucks, grid batteries, and other energy storage solutions capable of either delivering or soaking up or delivering in the order of PWH energy. That's basically happening in the next two decades.
So, we won't need gas plants or nuclear plants on the grid long term. Or rather, we might use them if they get much cheaper than they are currently are or are expected to be.
Of course, any kind of planning involving today's price levels of battery or electricity cost are probably off by orders of magnitude as clean energy solutions and batteries are still dropping in cost.
A 10x drop in price is entirely feasible with improvements in efficiency, mass production, use of cheaper materials, etc. For both solar and battery. There are so many companies working on a wide variety of this kind of improvements that I'd go as far as saying that that 10x drop in price is more a question of when than if. 'When' here is about 2 decades or less. It's the 100x mark that interests me because I believe that's feasible as well but obviously a bit further out.
A 100x drop in the price of electricity (measured in $ per KWH) completely and utterly destroys the business case for any form of nuclear currently being planned, considered, or dreamed of. Or rather it reduces it to a niche market for places where it is desirable to have lots of power but impractical to be connected to the grid, lots of batteries, and wind/solar solutions. These places exist of course. But they are far from populated areas. Think remote sites in the arctic, large ships, etc. Small reactors would be awesome for cleaning up the shipping sector.
One little snag here is of course that while small reactors are going to be safe, they can be made unsafe rather easily by slapping some explosives to them. You say small reactor, I say dirty bomb waiting to happen. They're kind of hopeless from a safety point of view unless you keep them in a maximum security facility. That makes using them rather expensive.
> What if prices for power go way up during the night
Individual energy providers do not control prices. The market does.
If there is market demand for energy at night, then people will fill in the gap to provide it. Anyone pushing up prices at night will have competition from someone else who will undercut them. They'll be forced to drop prices or lose customers.
Batteries are inefficient, expensive, and do not provide an adequate amount of electricity for most purposes. Consider a UPS, they're about 90% efficient at most, and for all that 10% of wasted energy, you get to power your computer for about 15-60 minutes if the power is lost. The batteries only last a few years.
Also, a bigger argument against solar (at least, photovoltaics) is that they use up rare earth metals, have limited lifetimes (<25 years), and then become non-recyclable toxic waste.
Concentrating solar energy is more promising as a sustainable solution, but requires large infrastructure and the right climate to be cost effective.
As stated, that is "at most". A usual UPS is 80-89% efficient.
Even still, assuming they were 90% efficient, is it worth the extra 10% energy consumption just so you can run your computer for 1 hour at night when the solar energy provider ups their rate? You still need to consume the additional energy in the day to charge the battery.
For me to label it efficient, I'd be looking for 95%+, but 99% would be preferable.
Remember, this efficiency declines as the battery ages. You only get a few years of efficient use before it declines significantly. Then you have a disposal problem. A typical UPS uses lead-acid batteries, the same type used in cars. They're not environmentally friendly.
Of course it's worth it. Losing 10% of the energy in storage is close to trivial, particularly if that energy is otherwise curtailed excess production. It would be worthwhile to use far less efficient storage for long term load leveling, if the capital cost were low enough. Hydrogen with cheap electrolysers and combined cycle turbines might have a round trip efficiency of 33% -- and that would be GREAT as a last component for getting to a fossil-fuel free grid, particularly at high latitude.
But this is missing the elephant in the living room (this thread), which is nuclear.
One of the main issues with nuclear is that it isn't cost effective to turn on/off to meet demand changes in day and night. Nuclear power stations usually only generate energy for the baseload. If we were to cut energy consumption down at night (by increasing costs), the baseload would also drop, and leave an even larger gap to meet for peak, which must be met by other means like solar or fossil fuels.
If anything, we want to shift some energy consumption to off-peak times like early hours, so that the baseload is higher and can be met by cheaper nuclear, along with other solutions like tidal. If this happens, the gap between peak and baseload during the day/evening will be smaller, and can be met with solutions like (concentrating) solar which are more environmentally friendly than photovoltaics + batteries.
No, it's not missing nuclear. Hydrogen is the stake through the heart that kills the last argument for nuclear (that batteries can't handle long term load leveling). With reasonable projections of where the costs of renewables and storage are going, nuclear gets optimized right out of the picture.
Yeah, I can't take you seriously. GL with your blackouts and energy quotas, oh, and reliance of fossil fuels. Where do you think the energy is going to come from to perform electrolysis for hydrogen? solar? You are nowhere near meeting basic needs yet with solar, wind, tidal, geothermal combined. (3 out of the 4 can be intermittent/dependant on environmental conditions and are not reliable). Remember, energy demand is going to continue increasing. By the time your renewable utopia exists, you're going to need to double or triple its capacity.
Perhaps I'm unaware of some technological breakthrough which can produce hydrogen using little energy?
Nuclear is great once up-front costs are paid. Most future energy demand will be met by nuclear. Cleaner renewables will be there to provide additional capacity above baseload, but I wouldn't depend on them to meet basic needs.
I have pondered whether it would be possible to generate hydrogen more cheaply via concentrating solar or geothermal. The hotter you can get water before performing electrolysis, the less electricity will be required. Above 3k Celsius, the atoms in water will dissociate without electricity. You might have a reasonable argument against nuclear if you don't need to spend 3x the electricity creating the hydrogen than you'll get back from it.
> You are nowhere near meeting basic needs yet with solar, wind, tidal, geothermal combined.
Ah, the old "it hasn't happened yet, therefore it can't happen" argument. I'm sure if you honestly think about it you can realize why that argument is nonsense.
> (3 out of the 4 can be intermittent/dependant on environmental conditions and are not reliable).
We're talking here about power for hydrogen production. Intermittency doesn't matter much for that (it requires the electrolysers be cheap, but their costs have plummeted recently, so that's no longer an obstacle.)
> Perhaps I'm unaware of some technological breakthrough which can produce hydrogen using little energy?
Perhaps you could stop using strawman arguments? Hydrogen doesn't have to be produced with little energy in order for hydrogen storage to be viable. The energy that is used just needs to be sufficiently cheap. You know, like that $0.013/kWh power from large scale PV in the UAE? And that's only the latest in a constant string of record low bids.
> Nuclear is great once up-front costs are paid.
Yes, if you can get the Nuclear Fairy to wave a magic wand and make the power plant appear for free, it's much less expensive (but even then, the operating costs will be much higher than renewables). In the real world where real money has to be paid to build nuclear power plants, not so much.
> I have pondered whether it would be possible to generate hydrogen more cheaply via concentrating solar or geothermal.
Neither of these are competitive with PV now. Hell, it's now cheaper to make domestic solar hot water with PV and a resistive heater than it would be to use solar thermal collectors (although a heat pump water heater would be cheaper still). PV has gotten THAT cheap.
> 1% of commercial reactors Have failed catastrophically.
That seems a bit high to me. There have been a lot of commercial reactors.
> Seems like terrible track record.
Even if true, everything fails sometimes. Rooftop solar has a surprisingly high death rate from people falling off of roofs while installing it.
Ultimately it's a question how safe nuclear is relative to other power methods, probably in terms of deaths per terawatt hour. And even counting those catastrophic failures, it turns out it's actually extremely safe. (...which really underscores just how horribly dangerous some of the alternatives are...)
Statista claims there are 440 nuclear power plants in operation today, and most of them probably have several reactors. So unless you're using some technical meaning of "commercial" that precludes things like Chinese SOE, I think the claim is just false.
Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it.
The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!
The wind -- caused by solar heating -- also generates free power.
The cost of harvesting it is now so low, and will always continue to decline as any technology will, that any fuel-based generation mechanism is going to be rendered uneconomic with time alone. They depreciate faster as time goes on!
Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity.
There was a comment here about cleanup costs of nuclear vs. solar, that was deleted while I was typing my response to that. I'm just gonna copy in my response here, because I think it's an interesting topic:
Are we really sure solar panels are much easier to dismantle on a euro-per-kWh basis though? That is, if you divide the total cost of dismantling and recycling a solar power plant, divided by the total amount of energy produced over the lifetime, does solar power do much better than nuclear?
Nuclear power in Germany (17 powerplants) has produced well over 5 million gigawatthours over the lifetime so far. It's hard to put good numbers on the cleanup costs, but somewhere in the ballpark of 50 billion euros is probably correct. (Keep in mind that some cost is the government paying the powerplant owners compensation because they are forcing them to shut down long before end-of-life).
So that gives you around 0.01 euros per kWh. A solar panel with 20% efficiency placed close to the equator produces 500 kWh/m2/yr. Over 30 years of lifetime that would produce 15 000 kWh/m2.
Are you sure you would spend significantly less than 150 euros per square meter of panel to dismantle, transport and recycle the solar panels?
Solar panels aren't the only way to generate energy using the sun. You can build a concentrated solar farm (see: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-solar-...) which uses mirrors and salt to produce up to 580mw of power, with a cost of just under $1bil.
My neighbor heats their pool using solar, it's just a bunch of tubes that cycle water over their roof. They got rid of their gas heater. Given that most backyard pools are used in the summer, why can't we swap these to using solar?
From what I can find, Saudi Arabia is one of the best locations for solar power globally, and they have a total solar influx of 2300 kWh/m2/yr. Commercially available solar panels have efficiencies of 22% at best.
For the second point: I'm not saying people aren't recycling solar panels in a good way. I'm saying it doesn't look like the cost of that is significantly lower than for cleaning up after nuclear power.
And, by pairing your comment with parent, a nuclear power company would have a competitive advantage over solar, but for the head start that solar go due to gov incentives, massive investment, and lack of a scare movie like Chernobyl.
Installing a solar panel can be done today, for a $100. Tomorrow it will be $50, and it’ll keep going down until the market dictates the price.
Nuclear takes years to build and generate output, and the price is going up. It would be foolish to build a nuclear plant today unless you have a specific need for it (small ___location, little sunlight/wind).
Personally I think that in 20-40 years time most people will get the bulk of their energy from local solar panels, with the grid, backed by a mix of renewables and existing non-renewable sources filling in all the gaps.
The whole point of this system is that its also quick to install, and cheap. Its not a custom designed for each mega site type of setup like traditional reactors.
People who make solar panels for a living say yes, the curve has been astronomical and beyond predictions, but, we're closer to a wall than we are halving costs again
The sun and wind are both very low energy density, and are intermittent sources. The sun is only available for part of the day, and wind is highly variable in a short term time frame.
The real cost of using renewables for a primary source of energy is the cost of storage. Using renewables for 80% of our energy demand would require 12 weeks of storage - to get to 100% it would take 3 weeks of storage [1]. These are staggering amounts of storage. Most countries have energy storage that is measured in the seconds or minutes, not in hours let alone weeks.
Solar and wind would be great if we had a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. But until that happens, we're going to be burning fossil fuels. There's a reason why Germany, which invested heavily in wind and solar, still emits 10x the carbon emissions from electricity generation as compared to France, which invested in nuclear.
what about cultural changes ? serious question. less living at night, less energy consumption, making sun randomness a bit less of an issue. Just asking.
Cultural changes don't fix the duck curve. Around 4-7 PM is when virtually everyone is running their HVAC the most. This is also where you are starting to lose most of your solar generation capacity. There is a solid 4-5 hours of thermal momentum that needs to be compensated for before everyone hits set point temperatures and units cycle off on the hottest days.
Unless you are proposing that we do away with basic comfort in many regions, or spend hundreds of billions of dollars tearing down every structure and re-engineering them for passive comfort, I do not think there is much choice other than to bring in more peak generation capacity or employ currently-infeasible grid scale storage.
By "cultural changes" you mean energy shortages. Realistically, this would most likely result in leaders getting elected out of office and resuming the use of fossil fuels. Regular blackouts are immensely unpopular.
Those of us who lived through the oil shock in the 70s are having a laugh at the 'just cut the energy supply' path. Would love to hear from people who endured the UK at the height of their 3-day week to see how keen people were about this forced change...
The expensive bit about nuclear is not the fuel. It's making sure that the fuel stays where it is supposed to be. A different design might change the cost of that dramatically.
Not really. It's rather expensive (billions of dollars) to setup a nuclear plant in the first place, even before a single fuel rod shows up. Meanwhile solar is so cheap and easy that you can install panels on your roof yourself.
I agree that traditional nuclear makes little economic sense. But I disagree that this is inherent to nuclear power, because there might be a different reactor design that doesn't cost billions of dollars to set up. We just haven't found it yet.
One of the specific targets of the modular reactors that are now getting approval are these cost issues. If you build one reactor a year it will be big, bespoke, and incredibly overpriced. If you build a hundred modular reactors every year the cost will drop significantly.
> The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!
Are going to clean solar panels/mirrors for free?
> Bahawalpur is desert terrain , having high dust count, therefore, the efficiency of panels were reduced by 40%. It required 30 people to clean panels with 15 days to restore the panels back to their full capacity, which reduced production of installed 100MW plant to below 18 MW
30 workers isn't a lot for a power plant. According to this article[0] (ignore the coal stuff) a decent gas turbine plant takes ~25 workers to keep it running, and that's for a system whose energy source can just be piped in rather than having to be constantly babysat so it doesn't irradiate the tri-county area. That's kinda the flaw of a steam turbine based system; it doesn't matter if the heat comes from coal, uranium, concentrated solar, whatever, you still need people around to make sure the system with superheated steam and a big heavy turbine spinning really, really fast doesn't go wrong.
Do you get out of your car to wipe your windscreen when its raining? This cleaning problem seems like something that would be super easy to automate, I dunno why they would higher 30 people to do this when you could higher one engineer.
Nuclear power provides enough megawatts for creating sustainable, electricity based heavy industry. If we're going to become zero carbon, that means we also need a system to fuel steel foundries, chemical manufacuring, and cement mixers without coal.
Nuclear is the only way we’re going to be able to get ahead of climate change. Renewables do not have the energy density required at this point. In the 70s? Sure, we might have been able to get ahead of it. At this point, we’re going to need nuclear whether we like it or not. Nuclear is the only option that will provide enough power to both scrub out existing carbon from the atmosphere and reduce our output of carbon while we do it.
50m2 Solar on the roof top of every household would power An average western country. That is not a lot. And that is is an upper band as we have wind power, biomass, hydro power geothermal and many other sources of clean energy.
Offshore wind is getting really cheap and offers vast amount of unused space.
As I mentioned we got tons of other options besides solar power.
EVs are now increasingly beating gasoline cars on cost of ownership and these often have batteries large enough to store the power required for 4 days of a regular western household.
I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight.
Repeating myself for the 3rd time: There are other options beside solar power, so why keep harping on this?
In fact Denmark gets about 65% of their power from wind. The UK also gets a lot of their power form wind. For many norther countries, wind power has quite a lot of potential.
> In fact Denmark gets about 65% of their power from wind.
Not true. Just 47% [1], and Denmark is a country with the most favorable conditions for wind generation. Statistics are easy to manipulate if you allow yourself to add 15 percent here, subtract 15% there..
Also, Denmark relies on Sweden (who utilize nuclear power a lot) and Norway to provide power when renewables are not providing enough power
You refer to 2019 when renewables gave 50% of Danish power.
> Also, Denmark relies on Sweden (who utilize nuclear power a lot) and Norway to provide power when renewables are not providing enough power
Yes, but the capacity for import and export is limited. Despite these limitations Denmark has managed to run on 65% wind power in 2020 without breaking the grid.
Thanks to COVID19 we get a look at the future in terms of how much of electricity production renewables can handle.
This is a nonsense argument. How does the energy density of renewables prevent them from providing all the energy we need? Show us the quantitative argument (spoiler: you will not be able to do so.)
It’s not about total capacity they can provide, it’s how quickly and efficiently they can provide a unit of energy capacity, and how much carbon those materials themselves produce during manufacturing. Nuclear is, across the board, more efficient. Solar simply isn’t efficient enough, strictly speaking in terms of output per unit of input, to generate the energy we will need to reverse climate change and reduce current emissions enough.
Carbon produced during manufacturing is a bad metric right now. If producing a MW of levelized capacity for solar (say) causes emission of twice the CO2 of a MW of nuclear, but displaces much more CO2 of fossil emission per $ invested than nuclear, then going with solar displaces more CO2 than going with nuclear, for a given investment budget.
Also, the CO2 emission is a function of the level of fossil fuel use remaining in the rest of the economy. Transporting materials to the site depends on whether those vehicles are burning fossil fuels or not, for example. The focus on current CO2 from manufacturing is implicitly assuming that we will always need fossil fuels to build these things, that the processes and materials can never be performed/made with non-fossil inputs. With that assumption, we're doomed, so the difference is irrelevant anyway.
The glaring problem (pun intended) with solar and wind is that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow and we don't have a good way to store energy for those sunless and windless intervals.
We do have a good way to store energy. It's called batteries, they are already cost effective in several use cases, and their cost is going down about 5% per year.
The US has about 8 seconds worth of battery storage. By comparison, to use renewables for 80% of our electricity we would need 12 hours of energy storage. For 100%, 3 weeks of storage [1]. 1 hour of energy storage in the US is 500 GWh. This amounts to more than the sum total of global lithium iron battery production (currently about 300 GWh) [2].
Critically, batteries aren't cost effective for the use case in question: storing solar and wind energy in a world where these are the primary energy sources. They're going down 5% per year, but who knows how long that trend will hold, especially if we're talking about a wide-scale switch to unreliable power sources (driving up the demand for batteries).
I want to live in a world powered by solar and wind, but we can't just wish away the reliability issues. And I don't think we should keep burning fossil fuels while we chip away at the storage problem. And we don't have to--we can build nuclear plants while we work on the storage problem.
As an aside, I think it would be really cool if something like Energy Vault (https://energyvault.com/) could be the solution (at least for the majority of use cases); however, I have no idea how feasible it is.
I have played around with a simulator for this. Wind and solar is so much cheaper than nuclear power that you can simple build a lot of overcapacity to deal with much of the storage issue. Wind almost never go to zero during a year.
For the rest of the time you just use gas power plants. According to my calculations I could get lower kWh price than with nuclear and only provide 10-20% of the power from natural gas.
We can run on 10-20% natural gas for a while until we develop better storage.
That is not an extraordinary claim. This is well know. Look up levelized cost of energy on Wikipedia e.g. or lookup the latest British Government report on current and projected Energy cost.
> I looked, and what I've found tells me that you make a false claim. Your lack of sources is just as telling.
God... so frustrating dealing with dumbasses that don't know even the most basic shit about energy production and cost. Not sure if you are just trolling. But here goes. Here are costs by different sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Costs will vary between country. But here is cost e.g. for France. Nuclear EPR is 100 euro/MWh. Solar farms is 43.24 euro/MWh.
Next, the UK. Nuclear PWR is 93-121 pounds/MWh. Onshore wind 47-76 pounds/MWh. Solar 71-94 pounds/MWh.
How about the US. Advanced Nuclear 71-92 dollars/MWh. Onshore Wind 28 to 62 dollars/MWh. Solar 29 to 48 dollars/MWh.
> Solar and wind power have their merits, but they are not the ultimate solution to clean power problem.
Said nobody ever. Solar and wind are dirty cheap hence any clean energy system will have to try to use as much of these as possible to save money where possible. We can supplement with geothermal, hydropower, biomass, power-to-gas, compress air storage, flow batteries, metal powder combustion, and even SMR with molten salt thermal energy storage.
Your own sources, if you dig into them, conveniently split generation costs (of which Lazard's cited report says that wind and solar generation is competitive only when subsidized by the US government) with storage costs. If you factor storage costs into the equation, your economy would look way different. Lazard has a report on storage costs too.
I'm withdrawing from further discussion due to your petty manner to use insults instead of arguments.
Insults are there because you said I made false claims and lacked sources. That is basically calling me a liar.
The sources was easy to look up. Claiming storage costs must be included is moving the goalpost.
Gas power plant plus wind is e.g. a perfectly valid choice which cause significant CO2 reductions, and which is entirely cost competitive. Biomass is another viable choice.
Many places hydro plus wind and solar is a viable choice.
For many using you EV will provide you with storage for a very low cost. With Tesla’s million mile battery, there is minimal cost to using EV battery cycles to power your house when the sun doesn’t shine.
Point is, there are tons options and choices and so claiming wind and solar must be paired with storage is disingenuous.
Don't oversell them. Batteries as they are today are much too expensive to cover all needs. You need a way to store weeks of power consumption for large areas. Batteries are too capital intensive for that. They can take the role of peaker plants, but they are currently unsuited for storing energy for dark, windstill winter weeks. For that other technology, for example Power-to-Gas is needed currently.
When people talk about the cost of solar they ignore the price of batteries and underestimate the amount of batteries required. Watch this video about renewables in California[0]. The video mentions a study that would put the cost of energy storage required for California to be 100% on renewables would be over $3.6 trillion which is equivalent to an entire year's GDP for the state. The video author explained that study's methodology got that number by assuming enough to store excess capacity during the summer to provide power in winter when not enough would be generated on most days. This isn't great because li-on batteries are not great for long term storage and would lose power over time.
A Tesla model 3 can power a regular house for around 4 days. It comes with bidirectional charging and so does plenty of other modern EVs. Tesla is soon coming with their million miles battery which makes this even more feasible.
You charge the car to the max while the sun shines and drain it when the sun does not shine.
> Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity.
Or maybe time constraints ? Because we can't accommodate our growing energy needs fast enough with renewable only and we need fossil to sustain our civilization until renewable output is high enough to phase out non-renewable ?
Does that make sense ? (I don't know the first thing about the economy and the engineering behind it at all)
The problem with these renewables over time is that their energy density is fundamentally limited compared to nuclear by physics. We need sustainable _ecologically_ friendly energy sources and at scale unfortunately density becomes all important. People can and will quickly point out the ecological nuclear disasters that have occurred. I only say this - be intellectually honest with yourself about those disaster zones _now_. Compare them to the alternatives and think about it. You will also point out - renewables are becoming much more efficient over time! This is true, but there is an enormous asymmetry in investment between renewables and nuclear, so to compare recent efficiency gains of renewables with the current status of nuclear seems unfair. From a purely theoretical level the energy density of nuclear gives many potential environmental benefits:
1. Less raw material: this has a huge impact on society as a whole. Solar panels and wind turbines require a lot of raw materials that must be mined, refined, transported and built on site. Nuclear requires these things too of course, but it is more energy dense - requiring less given similar levels of technological innovation.
2. Less space: I've seen solar panels go up in various institutions around where I live. They're awesome! But many times they replace what once were fields, forests or pasture land. Wind turbines are even worse, always altering the natural landscape. Do _not_ get me wrong - I fully support these renewables, but once again they are not as space efficient as nuclear at scale.
3. Less workers: purely an economic efficiency principle. At scale density matters with respect to cost effectiveness. Given the same innovation and investment as renewables, nuclear can bottom out in a cost effective way that could really reshape our current energy landscape. Renewables have a much higher threshold requiring a higher percentage of our overall economic output to be dedicated to them. This means many other initiatives (like - for example - many other innovations sorely needed to mitigate carbon emissions) simply won't have resources because our society has taken those resources up building less efficient renewables.
The distributed nature of renewables is actually a huge advantage. It means the renewable system is extremely fault tolerant. Not only does that help in operation, but it means installation is much more forgiving of low quality work (so you can use cheap labor that's easy to train). Screw up 1% of the modules in a PV field and output is down 1%. Screw up 1% of the welds in a nuclear power plant and you have a world of pain.
This is a very weak argument for renewables. You have to make the case that nuclear is fundamentally not able to work in a similar way. The very article we're commenting on is demonstrating the more 'distributed' nature a new generation of nuclear power plants can offer.
Your other argument about cheap labor is completely ignoring principle 3. above. Saying cheap labor for an industry is _inherently_ good is basically saying we should go back to the dark ages. This is probably the only principle both capitalists and socialists agree on (at least our 21st century brand of socialists that hope for a UBI utopia)!
Anti-nuclear has almost taken on a religious fervor that I don't understand. Safety is a property of an implementation, not a fundamental law of nature. Please! We're arguing for the same ultimate goal!
It's not a weak argument at all. The units in renewables are small (for PV, very very small), compared to the units in SMRs. What's more, the consequences of failure of the units in renewables are minor, compared to the consequences in a reactor.
It has not been demonstrated that the diseconomy of scale in SMRs is actually tolerable. The experience at NuScale is not providing much comfort there.
Of course the lower demand for skilled labor is good. "Civilization advances by increasing the number of things that can be done without thinking about them." The simpler the task, the less training is required, and the faster workers can be brought up to speed. The high skills needed for nuclear work are one of the reasons nuclear builds are in trouble.
(You might object to that if you are a skilled laborer feeding off this trough. Well, too bad, the purpose of energy isn't to employ you. You are a cost, not a goal.)
Nuclear has taken on an religious fervor that's not based anywhere in reality. Nuclear is demonstrably a failure, yet the proponents are blinded by their dogma.
> Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it
Why "no longer"? I did some reading on Fukushima the other week (I think it was an anniversary of the accident?) and was surprised to learn that multiple studies predicted the disaster years before it happened, only to be ignored. Even as engineering advances, if people keep choosing to take shortcuts and ignore glaring concerns, does it really matter? Is there a reason to believe that nuclear (or the energy industry in general) is acting more prudently than in the past?
All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI:
"...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show:
• The average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero.
• Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk events that could lead to a reactor-core damage.
• The average number of times safety systems have had to be activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.
• Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and are well below national limits.
• The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52 shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985."
No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available.
Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could've let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would they have covered it if 200 thousand were evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
>The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!
From the surface of the Earth we can capture 1/100000000000000000000000000th of its output per square meter, for $100.
That's because it's not really in the sky, as a bird or plane might be. It's 93 million miles away.
As a result hardly any light makes it to Earth over a small area. You need like $1000+ of paneling and many square meters to capture enough of it to operate a hairdrier electrically. Which makes sense because a hairdrier uses a lot more energy than drying your hair by standing in daylight. On a cool morning you'd start sniffling from cold before the sun dried your hair. No animal gets its energy from photosynthesis, they wait for stationary plants to do it over months and years and then eat them. The sun is just not that energetic seen from Earth.
So yes it is a 384.6 yottawatt nuclear power plant. But we're so far away we can get a hundred watts of it for $100, on a good day.
Could be cool to send something there to collect and ship us electricity in bundled form though.
Land usage is a big factor. Most people are interested in solar because they care about the environment so taken up vast swathes of land for all the solar panels, destroying habits, is counter productive. Another downside of solar or wind is that it is intermittent and thus will require massive battery systems or alternative conventional power plants to provide energy the rest of the time.
If you are short on space for your solar panels put them on your roof, problem solved. There are cheaper better ways of storing electricity like water stores, and this is what they use not batteries, they have never used batteries thats just a Tesla thing.
This is why solar kills more people every year than nuclear, and your hydro storage and batteries are not even a drop in the ocean compared to total load or daily capacity of even a small grid.
Roofing is dangerous, but using a product such as Tesla or GB Sol solar tiles means that installing solar is no more dangerous than roofing without solar.
Wha? Becuase stuff falls off your roof and kills them? How does that compare to tiles falling off your roof and killing people? This doesn't sound like a real thing.
Hydro storage is quite literaly a drop in the ocean, get it.
No, because people installing solar routinely fall and die. Because of the low power density of renewables like wind and solar you need a lot of installation sites and constant maintenance of same, which means a lot of opportunities for people to have fatal accidents. Nuclear has the lowest death rate per joule of energy provided of any available power source.
It's kinda silly, but that's also the point. People who think nuclear power is dangerous are silly. Solar power is more dangerous simply from the number of people falling off of roofs!
It is dangerous but in an entirely different way. Saying nuclear isn’t dangerous is like saying terrorism isn’t dangerous because more people die fitting roof tiles.
Like a terrorist attack, a nuclear accident, especially a meltdown is a concentrated dramatic event with serious psychological trauma.
One of the really profound effects of Chernobyl was the mental health problems it induced on a large portion on the population.
You got areas in Ukraine such as Rivne where 1/3 of babies born have deformations.
What does that psychological do to people living there you think?
There was hundreds of thousands of cleanup workers and they have 3x the cancer rate of the rest of the population. Yet the UN claims Chernobyl caused no more cancer because they look at the whole Ukrainian population and its cancer numbers which is really hard to do for a country which went through an economic collapse.
In short a lot of official statistics on the impact of nuclear power is highly misleading. Putting such statistics together with statistics of people falling of rooftops is utter nonsense.
That is such a ridiculous and disingenuous argument. The numbers are minuscule compared to fossil fuels it is replacing. You make it sound like solar power is dangerous. That is total BS.
And nuclear numbers are totally unreliable so this is just an apples to orange comparison anyway.
You have made a lot of claims about solar power that have been completely unsourced and are easily shown to be false. For all of the scary noises made by anti-nuclear activists it is actually a power source with an extremely good safety record. Solar and wind power kill more people every year, but the deaths are spread out and appear to be routine so no one really notices. This is why ignorant people are afraid to fly but have no problem driving hundreds of miles -- the incredibly rare airplane crashes kill hundreds and make headlines around the world while driving kills thousands every day and no one notices.
It captures part of the story hidden by your "statistics" about nuclear power.
Chernobyl was so full of lies and coverups that it is hard to know the full truth. What we know is that this accident has enormous cost and psychological impact all over the world.
In my home country Norway 37 municipalities still struggle with radioactive fallout from Chernobyl 33 years later. It is affecting the agricultural sector. That is just my home country. This kind of issues exist all over Europe. I remember what this was like in the aftermath because I lived through it.
But there is always some young punk who thinks he is a smart ass and knows everything, but never actually lived through it. You read some statistics years later, which doesn't capture of fraction of what it was like.
Fukushima is the same lie. People are like, nobody died so it was all cool... yeah.... except the cleanup is a crazy complicated an massive job which by some estimates could cost up to 660 billion dollars.
A smaller country experiencing such a disaster would have their whole economy destroyed by such an expense.
I am a reasonable guy. I say we can keep the safest reactors. The rest we close down. Perhaps we build new reactors if they can prove the design sufficiently safe. This guys might be okay: https://usnc.com
But really I don't see the point. It is a risky power source, we don't really need more of given that we have excellent alternatives.
Land usage is not as big problem as it seems. E.g. wind turbines must be spaced out far from each other but most of the land between them is perfectly usable for farming and animals.
As for solar. For an average western country 50m2 of solar panels on top of each household covers all electricity needs of a country.
Obviously this power is not delivered exactly when you want it but it is to give some perspective on the space required.
And you don’t need massive batteries. Many countries are building pumped hydro to store power.
You can use biomass, geothermal power. MMR and SMR reactors with molten salt thermal storage as a way of storing energy.
Thanks for bringing up these two points. I have heard people saying lets put solar plats in deserts. They don't realize the deserts also have an Ecosystem.
As populations move north to escape climate change those areas will also become more adaptable to solar. Plus the areas they left will be well suited for solar as long as there is adequate infrastructure to move the electricity north.
Wind and solar are very diffuse forms of energy, so harvesting them is hard and costly both in money, and most importantly for the biosphere. For instance, the universe radiates 3K of heat, which we could harvest and use. We don't because it's too diffuse.
And I'm not talking about the intermittency problem.
And yet, the cost of a kWh from renewables is less than from nuclear, for all the supposed advantage of nuclear's energy density. This should tell you that energy density is not actually a good metric.
Comparing a source controllable uninterrupted source of energy with an unreliable intermittent one doesn't make sense. Having power when you need it is very valuable. And in the case of renewables, you'd need to account for storage, after which the prices explode.
What would you say if you could only turn on AC in the 3 months of winter?
But there is another ugly side with regards to price (which are heavily subsidised): it is mostly cheap because offer far exceeds demand when power is available, because when it's sunny, it's sunny everywhere nearby so there's nobody wants to buy. Peak demand are at 7-8pm on during week days in winter. Good luck with solar or wind.
On a bigger scale, see Denmark (invested heavily on wind) vs Norway (almost entirely hydro). When wind is up, Denmark, which _has_ to sell this energy, sells it to Norway, which will buy it at the effective operating cost of hydro, which is ~$0. And when there is demand, Norway will happily sell it to Denmark at a normal price. In effect, Denmark pays twice.
Intermittency and power density are two entirely different things. I was addressing the former there. But elsewhere in this thread, I address the intermittency issue. Constancy is an advantage, but not an unlimited one. If renewables have a sufficiently large levelized cost advantage they can push nuclear entirely out of the picture, even though they are intermittent.
There will be a moment in the human evolution that even the total power of the sun is not enough. We need to explore alternatives to escape our planet, otherwise we are doomed.
There is actually an apparent upper limit on energy usage once countries reach a certain level of development. See for example [1] and [2]. Total energy consumption in Western countries has been level or dropping for years as devices that use energy become more efficient.
Yeah, that's until the price of solar reaches a point where desalination becomes economic. The fact that today is not a day when it's profitable to cover the world in solar panels means as little as the fact that today oil can be more profitable.
Using present-day numbers to say that solar deforestation will not be a problem is just as fallacious as using today's temperature to say that global warming is not a problem.
Present day worldwide energy usage is a real metric which allows us to calculate the present day 200,000 sq mile figure. Today's temperature doesn't allow calculating anything relevant to global warming.
I assumed you were being hyperbolic and thought some readers might be curious about the hypothetical area of panels required to meet the entire world's energy demand. It's an interesting figure to put things in perspective.
But a claim that widespread solar power will be a leading cause of deforestation is entirely devoid of evidence and fails the basic napkin-math test.
Energy usage will increase over time. Interestingly, so does solar panel efficiency. And most solar panels won't be built in forests. And the Earth will never be 100% powered by solar.
But most compellingly, even if you did have to build solar farms only in forests, and even if you did need to provide 100% of the Earth's demand for energy through those farms, you could do it today with only 40% of the deforestation that's already occurred over the last 25 years.
It's also nice to consider that solar panels built in deserts can even be beneficial to local flora and fauna (although not universally). [1]
Existing deforestation is already done to collect solar energy, to power crop growth.
>Today's temperature doesn't allow calculating anything relevant to global warming.
Yes it does, it allows us to calculate the extent to which global warming has progressed... to date. Just like the current global energy usage lets us calculate the progress of energy use growth, to date.
Where there is forest there is rain. Where there is rain there are clouds. Where there are clouds there is less sun. Any large scale Oil replacing energy production with solar will be more efficient in places where there is no forest or crop production. Hence the threat for the forest due to solar is not that high. Also where human settle there is no forest afterwards but there are roofs, where they can put PV on. By the way there is a dicusion to make that mandatory.
That is extremely unlikely. You need to cover single digit percentages of the world with solar panels (depending on latitude) to cover all our energy needs.
I once wondered if it would be possible to have a nuclear power station which operated subcritically with extra neutrons injected from an outside source. The advantage I saw was that turning off the outside source would instantly stop the reaction, no worrying about articulating fuel rods and poison injectors. Unfortunately decay heat is still an issue.
Turns out it's potentially a thing but has some technical challenges.
As far as I know its not cost effective until the chain reaction starts so I don't think its possible to operate subcritically.
Thorium reactors can essentially do this safe shutdown as the fuel is a liquid rather than a solid so you can just dump the fuel and stop the reaction.
The problem is less about preventing criticality and more about handling the decay heat from all the isotopes produced when it was critical. That's going to give you 10% of the heat you had been producing with the reactor on for a little while after you stop the chain reaction.
Yes, that has been the common factor in most incidents. Chernobyl being the exception, they didn't manage even manage to get the control rods fully inserted before the shit hit the fan (poor reactor and control rod design).
Still, the British AGCRs were recently fitted with articulating control rods because if the reactor core was damaged they might not be able to insert them normally.
The Wikipedia page is a lot more detailed than I could hope to be, presumably you just turn off the power to the particle accelerator.
Existing safety measures rely on some degree of integrity in the reactor at the time they are triggered. If it gets too damaged before the control rods are inserted it may not be possible to insert them.
Nice animation but but...
I think nuclear is bad because the technology to make it is in the hands of a few big corps. That's the major downside, and of course, toxic waste.
At 5 MW, these MMR (Micro Modular Reactor) look like a specialized alternative to diesel generators servicing remote locations unserviced by the regular power grid. 20 year lifetime without refuelling is an attractive proposition if the capital costs are competitive.
It would be great to know the capital and ongoing maintenance cost per MWe of load, and the lifecycle cost per gWh. This product is pitched at remote sites, so presumably the costs aren't low enough (yet?) for places where power grid connection is an option.
In the page it isn't explained how it shuts down passively in a loss of coolant event? Since the coolant is not doing moderation, removing it doesn't reduce reactivity at all.
You have a 30 bar helium pressure vessel and heat exchangers etc. I wonder how much it's going to leak.
Not saying it's bad, just interested in these questions. Some other designs have these issues in focus.
Serious question: what happens when you take one of these fuel pellets and blow it up and disperse it in the atmosphere / water supply, either accidentally or on purpose?
Have they actually designed a solution or is this a fundamental safety risk with all nuclear fuels? All I see addressed is proliferation / reprocessing which is a different thing.
> Serious question: what happens when you take one of these fuel pellets and blow it up and disperse it in the atmosphere / water supply, either accidentally or on purpose?
Hmm, nothing? There are already billions of tons of uranium dissolved in seawater (there are actually efforts to try to "mine" uranium from seawater), why would a few grams more matter?
As for fission products, humanity has made hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests, as well as the Chernobyl disaster that spewed lots of fission products into the atmoshpere. Unfortunate and stupid, yes, but not the end of humanity either. And fortunately, fission products decay away relatively quickly. So yes, a few grams of fission products from a spent fuel pellet will not make any impact if it's dispersed enough.
Chernobyl caused the near permanent evacuation of a nearby city, and nearly poisoned the water supply for millions. Not a good example if you’re trying to argue a release of fission products is no big deal.
I would like to understand exactly if/how this reactor design gets around the risks inherent to explosions of radioactive fuel. If it’s not a problem then why does the marketing take pains to say it will never leave its capsule?
The question of you asked and which I answered was what if we take one fuel pellet and disperse it.
I never said Chernobyl wasn't bad (heck, I called it a disaster for a reason!). But that was tons of spent fuel (rather than the few grams being contained in one fuel pellet) being blown out of the reactor building due to the steam explosion, or going up in smoke during the subsequent fires, and even that was far from the end of the world.
In this case, I guess marketing takes pains, because one of the main ideas of this fuel type is to make them even safer, even during severe accident scenarios. Is it absolutely fool proof? Of course not; you shouldn't grind up the spent fuel and inhale the dust, for instance.
Seems like they used a sodium coolant - great thermal properties as it allows for atmospheric pressure loop. But sodium introduces the chemical hazard and all the associated maintenance and materials woes and accident scenarios. Also, the power density on the 4S was relatively high.
I find it a little odd that a site called Hacker News is so bullish on nuclear power. Could there be anything less hacker than a centralized, exclusively government owned and operated source of power?
No thanks. I’d rather put more resources into solar, wind, and other sources of power that don’t depend on the government to not explode and irradiate the immediate area for hundreds of years.
Centralisation is more efficient. Centralisation is good. Because of centralisation and interconnection (power grid is a network) we only need to have power generation capacity equivalent to less than a third of the total power of all electrically powered machinery.
If every household had to produce its own power, we would need either to carefully plan our usage, or to have as much production capacity as our peak usage, so globally we'd have 3 times as much production capacity as we have nowadays. That would amount to a tremendous waste or resources, an awful misallocation... It would be absolutely anti-ecological.
The more you're using unpredictable energy sources such as wind and solar, the more you need backup power (batteries, gas, coal, nuclear, etc). Case in point: in the EU, there has been virtually no wind at all for two weeks (except in Denmark). So we burn coal and gas, massively.
Germany has a power generation capacity 68% larger than France for roughly the same number of TWh produced annually, because it needs backup production capacity for all its windmills and PV solar. What's the result? Electricity is 58% more expensive in Germany than in France.
You seem to harbor an assumption that decentralized = hacker, centralized = not hacker. It's only true to a limited extent.
Hackers tend to like things they can get their hands on individually, and decentralized stuff is usually much easier to get into and do something interesting with. But a part of being a hacker is also thinking rationally. That leads one to recognize the drawbacks of decentralization and benefits of centralization. And not all hackers are anarchists.
On top of that, education and rational thought leads one to look at the math and physics behind the energy and climate problems, and that's a straight path to becoming a nuclear supporter.
This is a weird take in a thread about a "micro modular reactor", which generates 5MW, and is designed to run for twenty years with minimal maintenance, on the order of a few day's work per year.
Odd that it's the exact opposite of what you're fulminating about.
Note that the comment you're replying to is not talking about the dangers of nuclear power, but about the spirit of centralization vs diy hacking. I don't think the amount of vitriol in your comment is appropriate.
These sort of strawman accusations of parroting propaganda are so bizarre. I don’t think I’ve read a single article or book by Greenpeace in my life. I genuinely have no idea what you are referring to.
Your original comment also commits some logical fallacies.
You’re focusing on the label applied to the supposed users of HN, which is ad hominem. Then you employ a no true scotsman to tell them that they aren’t really hackers because they espouse a position that you deem non-hacker.
So North Korea getting nuclear weapons is a big deal and using every text book measure to prevent Iran from building these things is quite an effort. But providing the whole world with material which can be used to build these damn things is not a problem?
Also there is big security problems all around the world due to terrorist. So how do we manage security with this small scale things?
I want to see how safe is this underground graveyard in case of a volcanic eruption... I'm sorry but I don't believe in nuclear, I think at the pace renewable and batteries are evolving now, they will be better alternative before a new nuclear plant is planned and constructed which takes many years.
