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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
>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]