According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.
The standard concerns apply:
1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;
2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;
3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and
4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
> Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone
From the linked post [2]:
Also worth noting:
> The study shows that more than 8 million people around the globe die each year as a result of breathing in air containing particles from burning fuels like coal, petrol and diesel, ...
So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power generation and that part wouldn't change. The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone, terrible as it is, doesn’t hold a candle to the realities of climate change.
Geological repositories are the solution for long term storage. They are not only technologically feasible, but actually constructed and waiting for use.
Ignoring the solution is not the same as there being no solution.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone as terrible as it is, is very far from a worst case. It's what you get from a moderately bad meltdown with heroic mitigation efforts as a follow up. The risks are far greater than that. Holding it up and saying "this isn't bad" is missing that that's the point, this is what happens in a "good" meltdown.
It's also what you get from a reactor with no containment dome, unlike every modern reactor.
On top of that, the Chernobyl reactor had a strong positive feedback: as the temperature went up, the reaction sped up. Modern reactors do the opposite.
Only up to a point. Modern designs tend to be short term passively safe, but shut off the pumps and radioactive decay alone can be enough to eventually cause a melt down in many modern designs. Which is the core issue, there’s a huge cost trade off for protection vs every possible issue no matter how remote.
Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
The Soviets were the only ones that built reactors that way. As in, having the ability to blow up.
> Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
I think you're also over estimating the danger here. We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.
Edit2: Blowing up isn’t the only risk from a melt down, a major meltdown on a river could contaminate millions of people’s drinking water without any boom.
First pools are shared between reactors so there’s probably only around 200 that have ever been built.
Also, the risk isn’t simply in year X for pool Y, it’s for every pool and every year. At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year. The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on. At least in terms of real world data ir could be 0.05% or 50% and we just don’t have enough real world data to validate.
> At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year
How are you getting this number?
> The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on
What are you talking about? We have plenty of data. We literally have decades of physical testing and hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars worth of simulation testing. What do you think Sierra[0] (#3 super computer in the world) is doing all day? It is a classified machine at a DOE lab. Even a substantial portion of Summit does this same research (it also does a lot of climate research). But come on, 3 of the top 10 super computers are at US DOE labs, and the 3 exascale machines being built are also targeted for DOE labs (Aurora, Frontier, El Capitan (classified)). LLNL and ORNL spend significant resources on nuclear research.
“We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.”
I was correcting the statistical power comment. People estimate their quite safe, but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything. 70 years ago there weren’t 500 reactors even today theirs less than 450 at probably under 200 sites. Thus the odds of any specific one having a problem next year is low, but the odds of any one having a problem next year is 200x as high and the odds of anyone having a problem in the next 50 years is ~50 * 200 times that. Or to put it another way they could be more dangerous than nuclear reactors but we just don’t have enough data to get signal from random noise.
As to why these estimates might not be meaningful, they ignore things like active sabotage which is why real world data is more meaningful.
> but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything.
No, we ran the test over a thousand times (including research reactors). We have been running tests for over 70 years.
Honestly, it just sounds like you don't know very much about nuclear physics let alone nuclear reactors physics. Nor does it sound like you know much about statistics. You are being extremely confident while demonstrating a lack of knowledge.
Honestly, why talk with such confidence about a field you haven't worked in (even adjacent to) nor studied?
Suppose you want to know how soon a CPU will fail. You can’t just test 1 CPU for 1 month and say well each of it’s 1 billion transistors lasted 1 month so the CPU also last a long time. That logic obviously doesn’t work because the part fails when any component fails.
Your trying to apply that same logic to say all spent fuel pools are safe over their lifetime because each individual spent fuel pools is unlikely to fail in a given year.
It’s the same thing with nuclear reactors, each individual reactor is low risk but build 1,000 of them and some will likely fail over their collective 50 year lifespan.
No, we are sampling a thousand different CPUs of about 30 varieties over 70 years. That's enough data to know on average how long a random CPU will last, to know how long any particular CPU will last, and to find trends about the longevity trends of newer CPUs over time.
You are using bad statistics. You are using bad science. And it is clear you don't know anything about nuclear fuel pools, reactors, nor nuclear waste management. Get off your high horse. If you want some books on these subjects I'm happy to recommend some but you got a lot of catching up to do before you have the right to act so cocky.
What’s the the odds that any spent nuclear fuel pool will fail in the next 50 years? That is exactly the number I referred to here and you seem to think we know. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898610.
Now you might want to use estimates of existing designs, but we don’t have them because new designs will be used over the next 50 years. So what exactly are your hard numbers based on? Effectively one test of roughly that length.
After getting hit by a tsunami. And it was a 1970s design; modern designs would not have blown up, and in fact some other reactors in the area built ten years later faced the same challenges and did fine.
And even the one that blew up released very little radiation to the surrounding area. You'd get more of a dosage living in Denver than Fukushima.
Fukushima didn't blow up. There was no explosion. Taking a bulldozer to a building is very different than using explosives (especially nuclear explosives).
The reactor didn't blow up. The building around it, outside of the containment structure, did blow up because of a hydrogen leak. It wasn't actually a big problem by itself, but it looked pretty dramatic on TV, so it probably contributed to people's overreaction afterwards.
> Fukushima weathered the worst earthquake AND tsunami in decades at the same time.
To also elaborate, all the reactors at Fukushima were designed to be able to handle any earthquake and tsunami that they thought could possibly happen in the region. Problem is that there was an earthquake larger than any in recorded history and larger than they thought the fault was capable of making. Some people are surprised that we've learned a lot about earthquakes and faults within the last 40 years.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That bigger earthquakes can happen? Yeah. That's known. But there's also a maximum quake that a particular fault can generate. The Liquiñe-Ofqui fault is not the same fault line that caused the Tōhoku earthquake. You're comparing apples and oranges. It's like saying that Pompeii could happen in Arizona.
>shut off the pumps and radioactive decay alone can be enough to eventually cause a melt down in many modern designs
The newest designs being built worldwide use natural circulation cooling and do not need cooling pumps in emergencies. Eventually the cooling pool needs to be refilled, but it's external to the containment pressure boundary, so you could refill it with a fire truck.
Note you might need a lot of fire trucks, though. If decay heat is 0.2% of nominal power after a week, we need .8mL per nameplate MW (thermal) per second... which doesn't sound bad, but a 2GW reactor needs 5000L firetrucks showing up every 50 minutes, 24/7, after a week. This could be challenging depending upon the underlying emergency.
((0.002 megawatt) / ((2260 + 250) * (kilojoules / kg))) / (997 (kg / (m^3))) = 0.00079921038 liters per second
Assumption is that you're raising the temperature of the water 60C and then evaporating it, and that all the heat energy goes into the water. In the real world it can be expected to be slightly better than this, but not much...
You're off in your calculation by 3 orders of magnitude, you meant to write 0.002 gigawatt, not megawatt. Then yes, you get 0.7 liters/second, and 5000 L/hour for 2 GW plant. However, in actual reality, the firetruck would just park there, put one end of the hose into the plentiful source of water that surely must be available next to a power plant, and the other one into the entrance for coolant, and start its pump. Pumping 1 liter/second is quite in range of firetruck pumps abilities.
> You're off in your calculation by 3 orders of magnitude, you meant to write 0.002 gigawatt, not megawatt.
No... decay heat is about .2% of nameplate power after a week. So for each megawatt of nameplate thermal power, you need to get rid of 2 kilowatts of heat-- or 0.8mL/second of water boiling off. "If decay heat is 0.2% of nominal power after a week, we need .8mL per nameplate MW (thermal) per second..." Was quite clearly said.
> put one end of the hose into the plentiful source of water that surely must be available next to a power plant, and the other one into the entrance for coolant, and start its pump. Pumping 1 liter/second is quite in range of firetruck pumps abilities.
This is pretty optimistic in many disaster scenarios and doesn't apply to all plants.
Natural circulation gets heat from a reactor to X, but now your dependent on X. This often seems like a trivial detail, but Fukushima failed 3 days after the earthquake.
The issue is you want several things from a passive system at the same time, don’t lose heat in normal operation, quickly lose multiple GW of heat in an emergency and as much as 200+MW of heat for days after a shutdown. The obvious solution is to have a tank of water that boils if the reactor temperature gets to high, but now you need to keep that tank full.
Thus many designs result in a reactor that is passively safe for some number of hours and at risk after that. They describe this as a passively safe reactor even if it’s got external dependencies.
I can't figure out what you're saying here. You're assuming that the control rods aren't in, days later, for the purpose of calculating heat days after shutdown?
If you're going to apply "passive safety" globally, sure.
But what we're talking about here is passive cooling system safety, not that the entire reactor is passively safe. The multiply-redundant shutdown systems suffice to end the chain reaction.
If the chain reaction ends, you're pretty much immediately at 7% of decay heat -- so sure, a 1.5GW reactor will put out 100MW of decay heat, still. But this will rapidly fall off. After about an hour, it's more like 15MW; after a day, 6MW.
Your statement of "200MW of decay heat" days later assumes either a ridiculous initial condition (an implausibly large reactor) or assumes you still have an operating reactor, which... isn't decay heat anymore.
There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely. Assuming a scram will 100% work every time in an emergency simply isn’t appropriate or realistic.
Also, Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station has 3 different 4000MW thermal reactors, 7% of that is 280MW, though sure if everything shuts down properly it should hit ~15MW. Mitsubishi APWR is aiming for 4.5GW thermal in normal operation though some safety margin needs to be considered on top of that.
> There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely
There's Chernobyl, and a few cases where a scram was delayed by 15 minutes or less. How can this produce hundreds of megawatts days later?
> There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely. Assuming a scram will 100% work every time in an emergency simply isn’t appropriate or realistic.
Assuming that every system fully fails is unrealistic, too.
> 7% of that is 280MW,
You said hundreds of megawatts days later.
> Mitsubishi APWR is aiming for 4.5GW thermal in normal operation though some safety margin needs to be considered on top of that.
What, they're going to run it over nameplate for days straight? A small excursion over 4.5GW won't appreciably change the amount of power output days later. Now you're just being silly.
Your boiling a fixed pool of water. 15 minutes of nameplate capacity is boiling over 5 days of reserve at an expected 0.2% thermal output. The margins are often measure in minutes not days which is a long way from anything that could be called passively safe.
> Assuming that every system fully fails is unrealistic, too.
Not if you want to say your system is passively safe. I fully believe nuclear can be operated safety, but a huge part of that is acknowledging every possible failure mode rather than just saying unlikely means impossible.
I think you're trying really hard to salvage a point talking about hundreds of megawatts of "decay heat" days later.
An operating reactor isn't making "decay heat".
The claim made is that the cooling system is passively safe in shutdown. Fudging the amount of decay heat by a couple orders of magnitude, and then arguing about "what if it doesn't shut down" is a bogus argument.
Obviously if you cannot reduce a reactor below nameplate power indefinitely, you have a big problem. Thankfully, we have multiply-redundant protections against this in modern designs: redundant control rod assemblies, neutron poisoning, positive stability, etc. Other than Chernobyl (a clearly bad design), all cases of delayed shutdown experienced so far have been innocuous and we've learned a lot from them.
I can only assume my original point wasn’t clear. The normal amount of decay heat is the best case possibility and should be handed just fine by any reasonable design. I don’t think there’s any reason to assume a design has that kind of fatal flaws. “quickly lose multiple GW of heat in an emergency and as much as 200+MW of heat for days after a shutdown.” Was in reference to something compounding the issue of which their’s two main issues either it didn’t shutdown quickly or it didn’t shutdown completely.
I am objecting to is the assumption that safety systems should assume things are fine in an emergency. Chernobyl had multiple compounding issues, many other accidents where less serious because X and Y happened but Z didn’t happen. Depending on such trends continuing results in a false sense of security.
A passively safe system doesn’t mean there isn’t damage. It’s perfectly reasonable for a design to say in the event of X, Y, and Z stuffs going to break. Causing a billion dollars in damage is a perfectly reasonable trade off, losing containment isn’t.
PS: Part of that is acknowledging bad designs are going to happen, we engineers are going to make mistakes. Which means not all assumptions hold.
This would be the only possible explanation, and it is directly contradicted by calling it "decay heat".
It's pretty tricky to think of a scenario where you'd have 5-10% of nameplate days after attempted shutdown.
The worst incident where there was a failed shutdown-- other than Chernobyl-- that I'm aware of was a 1980 BWR incident.
* The reactor was at nearly no power except decay power for the entire duration of the incident: half the rods fully inserted.
* Manual remediation got all the rods in within 15 minutes.
* Last-ditch shutdown procedures, e.g. SLCS, were unnecessary because there was still sufficient control and rapid rampdown of reactor output.
* This is an old BWR design and...
* Procedures were updated and improved, and even with these old BWR designs we've had no subsequent incidents in 40 years.
Failure to shut down is indeed something really, really bad-- but insisting that cooling be designed to withstand this is a bit silly. Instead, we'd best design to be sure to avoid failures to shutdown, excursions in power far over nameplate, etc... rather than insist cooling systems survive fundamentally unsurvivable events without any intervention. E.g. we don't criticize SL-1's cooling design for not surviving the excursion to 10,000x nameplate.
One could use pumps for increased efficiency during normal operation but the idea is that natural circulation should be able to remove all the heat if the reactor is SCRAMed. NuScale's design for instance only uses pumps for the steam generator, the rest is handled by natural circulation and the reactor sits in a water pool that needs to be replenished after two weeks in case of a major accident.
I know that molten salt reactors have a "salt plug" at the bottom of the tank that will melt if the temperature is too high, dumping the liquid fuel into a boron bath.
I think this kind of reactor is safe in a way that no modern reactor is - operators can remove all power and walk away in this shutdown state. This isn't possible with modern reactors, where 6% of the heat that they produce comes from daughter nuclei, and this decay heat requires cooling power for months after a controlled shutdown.
I do agree, we have to build these safely, with every conceivable scenario, such that walking away is possible.
Converting to thorium fuel would also be far better, as there is only one stable isotope in nature, so no refing is necessary (beyond high-purity smelting), and no centrifuges.
If they would’ve used water as a moderator, built a containment building, and not allowed manual override like every other reactor ever, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s absolutely a worst case scenario.
I'm pretty sure every reactor ever designed was designed to fail safely. Including Chernobyl...
I don't trust humans to design and maintain things that actually always fail safely though. Eventually someone is going to do something dumb and cut the wrong corner or, just do something dumb like disable the emergency core cooling system as part of a test of another system (what caused Chernobyl...)
In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now".
> In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now".
This isn’t a criticism of nuclear power; it’s a criticism of industrial civilization and technological progress. You can make the exact same point about coal mining, lithium mining, power grids, hell, even campfires if you wanted to.
If I went and dug up horror stories about what happened before we had an electrical code and used those horror stories to argue that we shouldn’t have electricity inside our homes, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, “that’s why we have electrical codes”. And I don’t think it would be a strong counter for me to say, “but the electrical code isn’t perfect”.
It's not a criticism of all technological progress, it's a criticism of technology where you cannot accept a single worst case failure, as is the case with nuclear power plants and very little else.
If an electrical fault in your house meant killings 10s or hundreds of millions of people, instead of costing you a home (and if you're really unlucky single digit numbers of lives) we'd be foolish to allow it. As it turns out, electrical faults in a house only burns down the house, not the continent.
A nuclear accident isn’t going to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people. Nuclear bombs—and fusion bombs at that—deployed in large numbers, would do that. But a single nuclear accident isn’t anywhere near the same scale as a full scale nuclear strike.
Chernobyl killed tens of people. And Chernobyl was the “shitty construction with no electrical codes” of nuclear power plants. Fukushima killed like one person.
Chernobyl by all accounts killed thousands of people, and by some (dubious) accounts may have killed many more than that.
Chernobyl was capable of killing millions of people, again I refer you to the article that I started this whole subthread with. What actually happened in Chernobyl was very very far from the worst case nuclear disaster: https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...
> Chernobyl by all accounts killed thousands of people
Fewer than 100 deaths have been directly attributed to Chernobyl. All of the numbers in the thousands are estimates based on assumptions and statistical models around radiation exposure. But if you’re bringing that into the question, it’s only fair to calculate the number of excess deaths that would have been caused by the extra amount of coal mining and air pollution that would have occurred if the Soviet Union did not operate nuclear power plants. And when you work that out, you’ll see it’s likely that the Soviet nuclear power system—which was catastrophically mis-managed not just by 21st century standards but by the standards of the USSR’s contemporaries—still saved many more lives than it cost.
Failsafe fission is a myth, it depends on accidents happening according to the design when everything is built and maintained perfectly. Fukushima was failsafe until a tsunami flooded the backup generators. The danger of tsunami was dully noted of course but as it turns out electricity supply to the reactor cooling wasn't all that failsafe.
The passive systems? They all depend on large groups of people doing their job perfectly during the manufacturing and another group of people doing their jobs perfectly at maintaining these systems and not disabling them when inconvenient. I don't trust people doing everything right every single time.
The fission reaction is a kind of a reaction that can go out of control very fast spontaneously.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against nuclear energy but I think it must be treated as something we can do until we switch to something sustainable.
I tried to find marketing material for Chernobyl and Fukushima but I did not find anything, I wanted to see if they explained the risks or did they described these plants as perfectly safe. People now claim that those designs were flawed and that everyone knew about it but I don't believe it, I will be shocked if people were promised anything less than perfect safety.
As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2(actually more as fukushima lost multiple reactors) of those went bust with significant damage to the communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard to pinpoint but large communities had their lives uprooted and everything could have went worse if we lacked heroes.
With currently %10 of our electricity is coming from Nuclear, in 60 years we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse. If our track record remains in line, with %100 nuclear we can expect to have 20 more places ruined within the lifetime of a junior developer who just started today.
I don't know, maybe we can have nuclear power plants close to photovoltaic production facilities to offset the energy need when building those far away from densely populated places and ramp up our efforts to switch to the fusion reactor in the sky? Turn off the last nuclear power plant when we have enough solar energy equipment?
> we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse.
are they really uninhabitable forever? The nature seems to have returned to Chernobyl, there are still people living there who defied the evacuation order. Sure, as a precaution the exclusion zone makes sense, but to call it uninhabitable practically forever is a stretch.
No, it's flatly false unless "region" is being used in a highly misleading way. There are about 2500 people living right now in the town of Okuma where the Fukushima Daiichi reactor was located.
Lots of things depend on everyone doing their job mostly perfectly, and then inspections and tests, etc. to make sure. Chemical plants, oil platforms, airplanes, etc. We should expect the occasional accident, which there have been for all power generation technologies. Nuclear is one of the very safest, by far, if you account for all of the accidents to date.
> As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2 of those went bust with significant damage to the communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard to pinpoint but large communities had their lives uprooted and everything could have went worse if we lacked heroes.
You could very easily make the same argument about climate change. What about the Amazon fires, Australia fires, California fires? The floods in Germany? Countless people had their lives uprooted from climate change (which was caused by many things, including CO2 emitting electricity generation)
I don't think any of the people who are sceptic about fission are pro-fossil-fuels.
I, for example, see the future in renewables plus storage, distributed and optimized for the local situation.
I accept fission as something necessary right now to buy time.
Maybe I'm wrong and fission is the better answer than renewables, but long term I feel like it's the same can of worms that fossil fuel was all over again.
I just hope we can make smart decisions that help us fight climate change short, mid and long-term.
Realistically, it was the worst case as modern designs are much safer. What are you imagining would be the very-far worse case and how would that arise?
I'd argue Fukushima was a worst-case scenario with a Gen-3 commercial plant.
It's not a question of engineering improvement. The comment at the top of this thread said it fairly well:
> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
I'd add "design" and "construct" to that list as well.
I have pretty much no doubt that it's theoretically possible to design, construct, maintain and operate a safe reactor, I don't believe for an instant though that the decision making authorities are capable of actually requiring in perpetuity that those things and only those things are done despite the huge financial incentives to cut corners and play the 1-in-a-million catastrophic failure lottery.
I quite agree with the dubious government skill levels in general, but considering the task I'd say they made a decent run for a first era so far. 3 big catastrophes (not good not terrible).
Question would be, can we raise the safety levels one order up ?
Also in a way, we will face that soon because the current fleet will have to be replaced by something one way or another.
The amount of coal necessary to replace nuclear fuel is about a million times greater. Do you trust those governments to handle 1000000x as much fossil fuel as nuclear? Especially consider the fact that such a large amount of coal has roughly equally as much natural radioactive contaminants as the amount of nuclear fuel that could replace it.
This is a poor argument, you're comparing nuclear to literally the worst alternative you can think of.
The alternative to building new nuclear plants is not building new coal plants, or keeping existing coal plants in use for longer. It's to take the same money that you could have spent on new nuclear power plants, and to spend them on new power plants of other types. If it's a fossil fuel form in the modern era, that probably means gas (16% of new power generation in the US), not coal (0% of new capacity I believe, rather quickly being retired/converted to natural gas). More likely it means solar (39%) or wind (31%).
But yes, I trust our society to handle coal (and other fossil fuels) more than I trust it to handle nuclear plants, because you can't hide the effects of fossil fuels, but you can hide (and deny) the negative effects of a unsafe nuclear plant until it fails catastrophically.
> you can't hide the effects of fossil fuels, but you can hide (and deny) the negative effects of a unsafe nuclear plant until it fails catastrophically.
What? The subtopic of the thread is climate change. That was hidden from the public eye for over 30 years. We're literally in the situation where fossil fuels have failed catastrophically and now everyone knows about it. Which I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate because a large portion of the population is still denying it.
I'll take the risk of some nuclear reactor accidents compared to the inevitability of world wide calamity and wars that will happen because of climate changes and resource limits. It's going to be some risk vs inevitability because the world is not going to change from fossil fuels until it's too late.I don't live some magic reality where the hippies win and we all will embrace each other and be responsible rather than be the tribal apes that we really all are.
World wide calamity is inevitable at this point. It doesn't really matter if we build nuclear or renewables or both, we cannot stop it, because the root cause is capitalism and we cannot replace that. So given that a calamity is coming I would rather build stuff that cannot melt down when unmaintaned.
What is your idea of a catastrophic failure? A nuclear detonation? Because that actually can't happen. Not because there is some gizmo preventing it that might one day fail, but because it actually, physically can not happen.
Is it a meltdown? That has already happened at Fukushima, and didn't end up being catastrophic. At least not compared to catastrophes like tsunamis and earthquakes.
It's described in the article I linked in the comment two above, I'll link it again here. A steam explosion spreading orders of magnitude more radiation than Chernobyl had already (which was prevented by people entering the reactor in the days immediately after the first explosion).
Incidentally, nuclear detonations can happen, and there is some belief that very small ones did happen in Chernobyl, but the type of the explosion is really besides the point.
>Incidentally, nuclear detonations can happen, and there is some belief that very small ones did happen in Chernobyl, but the type of the explosion is really besides the point.
If you're going to make the claim that this is possible, we need a source.
Lol, I just dug up the first article I could find, admittedly didn't check the news source.
But that source isn't for the claim you're quoting... that's for the (well known) claim that Chernobyl could have gone much worse if not for remdiation efforts, it shouldn't be hard to find alternate sources for that claim.
For the claim you're quoting, see the paper cited in the sibling comment to mine.
>> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
If this is the coup d'etat then there's no argument. Because if you don't trust them for this then how can you trust them for anything? That's fair, not having trust. But at least be consistent.
the op seems to be missing the fact that the waste from fossil fuels is the thing that is causing the climate change. we definitely don't have a good long term waste solution for that.
Honestly I think a lot of people miss this. Similarly people will look at full cycle for nuclear but not for renewables. Nor include batteries or other storage systems. First order approximations aren't good enough to let us even approximate an understanding of what is arguably the most difficult problem in human history.
ok, well I hear that a lot but does anyone have the figures of how many Chernobyl zones would be expected if all of the fossil fuel usage was replaced with nuclear?
but then questions become - does increasing power generation via nuclear improve or make the systems worse - because maybe the sites we have now are the best of the best and we get more we no longer have the best of the best.
Final question - is there perhaps any sort of interplay from multiple Chernobyl like incidents possible? In the same way that the increase of fossil fuel usage went beyond just local pollution to climate change.
But yeah, fossil fuel usage providing almost all of humanity's energy needs over a century has damaged the environment much more than a much shorter period and much more limited nuclear power usage has.
on edit: I am in fact a proponent of increasing nuclear power usage - just these arguments I see about Chernobyl not being that bad in comparison to climate change are not that impressive without some extrapolation and hard science.
> how many Chernobyl zones would be expected if all of the fossil fuel usage was replaced with nuclear?
Honestly? Roughly 1. The reason Chernobyl blew up is difficult to explain to people that don't have a lot of background in nuclear physics. In addition to this, no western country built reactors that even had the ability to explode.
So a better question would be about Fukushima like zones (yeah, there is a bit of a difference. Their exclusion zone is smaller and won't last as long). This is also pretty unlikely and very difficult to calculate. Some people over estimate the damage from Fukushima, some under. Again, it is hard to explain to non-experts. It's not only nuclear physics, a tough enough subject as is, but also a lot of geology, medicine, and more. The simplest way to put the Fukushima accident is that it was caused by a never before seen earthquake (and subsequent tsunami) and one that was not predicted possible. Now, science did advance and this possibility was learned about, but it was a little too late. A typical response to this is that we also don't know what can happen in the future, but this is also naive because we've clearly gotten better.
There's been close to 700 reactors built and only 2 had major accidents. That's less than half a percent. Supposing we had 10k reactors that would put us at 30. But this is naive for the reasons given/implied to above. The honest answer is probably less than 10. But it is again hard to calculate because that estimate is based on current climate conditions and assuming events like Katrina are common. But I think this is still a high estimate because even the Indian ocean earthquake didn't cause such a disaster at India's Chennai reactor. My more honest guess is 3. But this is even hard because it's based on black swan events and in addition to that climate wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is today if we had continued to build reactors in the 80's. We also have assumed that such production wouldn't have increased safety measures like we see in Gen IV and Gen V reactors. Which if those were around, then I don't think we would have an additional one and I don't think Fukushima would have happened. So 1.
The truth is that asking this question is impossible to answer and not really that fruitful. It is abundantly clear that the 2 accidents that have happened were black swan events. Only Chernobyl was (somewhat meaningfully) predictable. We still don't know how to predict black swan events because by definition they are rare. We can't give a meaningful answer to your question.
And yeah, I agree. It is very clear that Chernobyl is less bad than climate change. Nature is still thriving in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Just humans aren't. And that might not be such a bad thing (though obviously it is bad for all the people that were displaced).
The long-term storage solution we're using now for CO2, is to put it into the atmosphere. Putting that there is much worse than putting radioactive waste deep underground in a stable salt formation. It's even worse than letting the nuclear plant waste sit around in open water tanks, as we do now.
The effects of Chernobyl are not limited to the exclusion zone. In the 100km radius zone, my family had to test all our food with a Geiger counter because anything grown in the area was poisoned.
(The government made Geiger counters illegal to own, btw.)
There are still lots of boars in southern Germany that are far above the official threshold for consumption (which is quite high already), like, almost glow-in-the-dark.
Southern Germany is a long way from Chernobyl, but a substantial amount of the fallout rained down here. Pretty much nothing grown in the areas that got contaminated precipitation was safe to eat, sometimes for years. Milk was way too contaminated even after dilution with milk from other areas, and pretty high amounts of radionuclides accumulated in the bottom layers of sandboxes on playgrounds and other unexpected places.
No one knew at first though, the West German government kept playing down the incident even though they knew that fallout reaching Germany was a big possibility, and thus lots and lots of people got rained on who could have protected themselves (my mom for one, on the way to work, metallic taste and all)
That's a pretty important part of the anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, by the way. That's why a lot of people simply won't trust the parties involved in running nuclear power plants to do so safely – because the system failed already in an incident that wasn't even a domestic one, and also because of the rampant corruption surrounding those plants and high-level politics in general.
Last time I ran through the numbers I was remembering that you'd have to eat a ridiculous amount of wild boar and/or wild mushrooms (assuming all were irradiated) on a daily basis to even approach dangerous levels.[0]
These stories make the rounds and constantly sound dangerous but the fact is that people just don't understand nuclear physics. I mean why would they? Everyone isn't taking college level physics classes, let alone ones on medical physics. If I wrote an article about how radiation levels in tuna doubled after the Fukushima disaster then people would stop eating tuna. This literally happened even though that doubling was to 5Bq/kg and Japanese limits are 100Bq/kg (US is 1.2kBq/kg). The fact is that our instruments for detecting radiation are extremely sensitive. You can measure radiation in everything. Yeah, the tuna got more radioactive after Fukushima, but that doesn't mean they got more dangerous. That's not how it works. And I'm tired of people that know absolutely nothing about nuclear physics talking as if they are experts on radiation. Both people in the pro and anti-nuclear camps do this and neither are helping.
[0] Cs137 has a dose factor of 0.014mSv/kBq and the high radiation had 600Bq/kg. So that's 0.0084mSv/kg of boar. European rose limit is 20mSv/yr, so that's 6.5kg of boar a day. And we need to note that 20mSv is well within the safety limit. 1 Sv is a 5.5% chance increase of cancer within your lifetime (LNT model which over estimates), so that's 6.5kg (14.3lbs) of boar a day to raise your lifetime risk of cancer by 1% (body shows to actually deal with these low levels of radiation fine).
Edit: If you're eating 14lbs of wild meat every single day, you probably have larger health issue than a 5% increased risk of cancer in your lifetime (the meat is probably giving you a higher chance of cancer).
I think it is really arrogant to assume that you know what the dangerous levels are, and to claim that under a certain level is not dangerous or harmful.
Time and time again, this type of thinking has been proven naive at best, and often criminally misleading: synthetic food additives, tobacco, opiate painkillers, radiation, leaded gasoline, and many, many more.
When it comes to the health of myself and those close to me, I'm going to err on the side of caution, and disregard what the "official numbers" say.
> I think it is really arrogant to assume that you know what the dangerous levels are, and to claim that under a certain level is not dangerous or harmful.
Really? Because I have a degree in physics, studied radiation, and worked for years on radiation transport simulations and shielding. I think I have an above average knowledge of radiation physics and the effects on the human body.
> synthetic food additives, tobacco, opiate painkillers, radiation, leaded gasoline, and many, many more.
I mean yeah, don't trust Shell, Marlboro, or Purdue about their own products. Listen to the actual scientists. Because each of these examples has cases like these where there were other scientists demonstrating how these things were harmful. And each of these cases got political and a bunch of non-experts fought referencing papers they didn't even know how to read. Spoiler, there's no "big nuclear."
> I'm going to err on the side of caution, and disregard what the "official numbers" say.
Cool. But eating 3kg (6.6lbs) of wild boar a day is an absurd amount and under half of what I said was the "official numbers." Even 1kg/day (2.2lbs) is ludicrous. You're going to have way more health problems if you're eating that much boar every day. Be cautious. I'm not saying don't. I'm saying that you could be stuffing your face all day and you wouldn't come anywhere near "official numbers". You're going to kill yourself if you're eating 15lbs of meat every day.
> Really? Because I have a degree in physics, studied radiation, and worked for years on radiation transport simulations and shielding. I think I have an above average knowledge of radiation physics and the effects on the human body.
That is exactly what makes you an unrealiable source in my eyes, because you are biased towards the "we know what we're doing" perspective.
You know a little more than others, but you think you know a lot, enough to make others' decisions and opinions for them.
> There are still lots of boars in southern Germany that are far above the official threshold for consumption (which is quite high already), like, almost glow-in-the-dark.
Citation needed. A wild boar doesn't live more than 10-15 years, so that's three generations removed from 1986. Bioaccumulation doesn't work like that. And glow-in-the-dark is pure nonsense obviously.
The "atomkraft nine donkey" movement has a lot of similar horror stories, few of which have a factual basis. They even made their bad fiction stories about the dangers of nuclear powerplants compulsory reading for grade school kids. No wonder a good chunk of otherwise level headed Germans are brain washed with these lies.
Boars consume lots of mushrooms, which accumulate Cesium very well, hence these boars may end up with lots of Cesium in their systems. This is covered in German media pretty much every year, but I can't find much in English on the topic. [1] is the best I could unearth quickly:
> For example, it is also possible to have 2020 samples of wild boar from the same hunting ground simultaneously below 100 Bq Cs 137 per kg but also of several thousand Bq/kg. In addition, large seasonal variations in contamination can also occur in an area.
You may be interested in my comment above where I calculate the dosage you'd get. Your source shows something different than the source I used (which said 600Bq). But the high of your source is 16,704 Bq/kg, which means you need to eat 85.5kg (188.5lbs) of boar in a year to reach European dose limits (20mSv). That's a 0.234kg/day (over half a pound). That's a lot of meat to be eating a day. And that is the highest reading they found. But the median they found in that same area was 2,857 Bq/kg. That equates to needing to eat 1.37kg/day (3 lbs) to reach limits.
Note that this is also assuming that you receive a full dosage from your consumption, which isn't how it'd work in practice, so these numbers are conservative.
I'm not saying that you should go out and eat a bunch of wild boar, but that you have to be eating pretty much a high protein diet and almost exclusively on wild boar to even get close to yearly radiation limits (US limits are 50 Sv/yr btw, and even that level is not linked to increased rates of cancer). Though eating that much red meat every day is probably going to have other health problems (including likelihood of cancer) unrelated to radiation. It is recommended that you have less than 70g of red meat a day. I mean if you eat a hamburger every day (1/4 lb / 113g) no one would question you getting health problems and you're still under half the EU limits even when eating the most radioactive boar (16,704 Bq/kg) measured (less than a tenth if you're eating a medium boar (2,857 Bq/kg) from the most radioactive area (Bodenmais)).
You kinda have to actively try to get radiation sickness through boar consumption. The same is true for mushrooms.
The Sachsenwald near Hamburg has (had?) elevated levels too.
Though that could have other reasons, because the GKSS is near. Where when some questions because of leucemy clusters in children and allegiations of nuclear experiments arose, the government downplayed, too. Including a file cabinet of the local fire brigade burnt down, by guess what, a fire in the local fire station!
If you're talking about boars and mushrooms, then I'm guessing not. You'd have to eat an absurd amount of meat and mushrooms every day to accumulate enough dose to go over your yearly limits, and you still wouldn't get anywhere near radiation worker limits. We're talking at least a hamburger every single day in the worst case scenario, and let's be real, that much red meat is going to cause other serious health problems.
Yucca Mountain is sort of ready but the state doesn't want waste to be moved there and more and a few places don't want the waste transferred through them to get there.
I think if nuclear energy is to be part of the solution here, as things are we have to plan for indefinite storage of waste on site with the energy production. And ideally we could minimize waste or process it in to such a state as it could conceivably be transported somewhere else but those costs undermine the profitability of energy production as it is.
I wonder if there is a political solution to the storage problem. What if GHG externalities are taxed in a way that can be shuttled to those areas, like NV and NM, that can provide part of the nuclear solution? That might make the Yucca Mountains and WIPPs more palatable while also incentivizing more, better storage solutions.
In the case of Yucca Mountain, a number of proposals were floated to give concessions to the State of Nevada in return for cooperation. There was a proposal put forward a couple decades ago to allow storage in exchange for returning unused Federal land to State control. ~85% of Nevada (and increasing) is Federally controlled. This creates significant economic problems for Nevada due to the practical restrictions on growth and land use. Most of this land has no Federal purpose and is not actively managed, it is simply under Federal control and subject to their whims that change with each administration, creating a sparse patchwork of private property the use of which effectively requires Federal permission.
This proposal was flatly rejected by the Federal government, even though it would have come at no cost (indeed, it would have saved money by reducing administration costs of land they have no purpose for in any case). Generally speaking, the Federal government has been unwilling to grant any concessions to States for taking the nuclear waste.
Massive investments in renewables, capping your personal energy budget to something reasonable rather than what you can afford from a financial perspective, aiming for energy neutrality in buildings (doable, I've seen demonstration setups in the early 2000's).
And even then: we can no longer avoid climate change, you can take that to the bank. The very best we can do is limit the impact of the climate change that is inevitable now.
"capping your energy budget" is a non-starter. I oppose it, the majority opposes it, and this is a good way of getting kicked out of power and then having even your realistic policies rolled back. Unless you're the type of person who enjoys being right rather than being effective, you'll make reasonable proposals that have a chance of being enacted, rather than unreasonable proposals that lose elections.
The future is one of cheap, abundant energy, that is growing in use. It is one of increasing industrialization and output. Increasing consumption and production. If you can't find a way to get there, then you'll be left behind as the rest of the world chooses a different path.
Yes, god forbid we would enact realistic policies. No, instead, let's stick our heads in the sand and kick the bucket down the road a generation. That's worked so well so far.
Elections are great, right up to the point where you are going to have to make very harsh decisions affecting the majority. I predict our democratic institutions will be a casualty of climate change long before we will allow ourselves to become overwhelmed by climate change itself.
Capping total energy usage is not realistic. It's never happened in human history. It's not going to happen in the future. No one in any position of power has even proposed it.
You are putting your head in the sand if you think that this is what will happen.
GDP will grow. Energy usage per capita will grow. Technology will increase. Output and consumption will increase. That is what we do, as a species, as we try to improve our condition. Trying to say that "oh, we'll just stop and cap energy use" is not only unrealistic, but it's impossible to achieve, because any nation that does that will just be outcompeted by rival nations that don't. Then people will flee to the sane nation while the insane nation collapses.
I get that some people on the green fringe don't like industrialization, but opposing rising living standards, rising output, all of which require rising energy usage, is always a losing proposition.
> Capping total energy usage is not realistic. It's never happened in human history.
In a sense, it has happened, but not in the form of an explicit mandate but just due to pre-existing technological and economic trends. Here is a graph of "Primary Energy Consumption per capita" for various countries, showing that the EU, US, and Canada have all passed their peak:
I've done alright. But capital markets are usually much more sane than internet message boards, so it's not like there is a lot of financial opportunity by saying obvious things, it's only when you meet someone steeped in irreality that telling the truth becomes a radical act.
Offloading the problem to the consumer. If you want power continuity then you will have to provide it yourself. If you want reliable power that will be available but a significant premium over the unreliable version, and there will be a limited supply of that reliable power.
Pumped storage where available will help a lot, grid scale battery systems are nowhere near powerful enough to take on a significant fraction of the worlds powersupply so we'll have to make do.
Rationing of critical resources has many historical precedents, it's time we realized that power is not infinitely available at will, even though we would very much like it to be that way.
> If you want reliable power that will be available but a significant premium over the unreliable version, and there will be a limited supply of that reliable power.
Ah yes. What a libertarian view of the world. The rich will get the power while the unfortunate ones won't even be able to refrigerate their food. Medical equipment will fail. People will freeze in winter. Trains will not run. etc.
Also. How do you propose to separate reliable and non-reliable energy sources? By building a parallel energy grid?
How is this a realistic policy?
> Rationing of critical resources has many historical precedents, it's time we realized that power is not infinitely available at will
It's not unlimited. However, it's not as scarce and limited as you want to make it.
It's not libertarian at all, it is simply realistic. Keep in mind that the power grid as it is today is already unreliable, it's just that we've started to think about it as 100% available. But there are many reasons why it can - and often does - fail and we have build our processes around that.
Just like we do not need a separate grid for green energy we do not need one for reliable and unreliable sources, case in point: we already use reliable and unreliable sources right now, it's just that we do not bill differently for them.
As for medical equipment, refrigeration and trains: it is clear that some consumption will need to be sourced from reliable sources or at least sources with sufficient overlap during generation that their chance of failure is small.
Power is not as scarce and unlimited as I believe it well may become in the near future, and if you look at this through a slightly wider lens (developing world vs developed world) then you'll see that in many countries this situation is a reality today, but instead of being billed differently and given a choice the power will simply fail.
> Just like we do not need a separate grid for green energy we do not need one for reliable and unreliable sources, case in point: we already use reliable and unreliable sources right now
That really doesn't answer how you would solve your own proposal. Let me quote it again: "If you want power continuity then you will have to provide it yourself. If you want reliable power that will be available but a significant premium over the unreliable version, and there will be a limited supply of that reliable power."
So. How are you going to solve that? You either make the entire grid reliable, or you make the entire grid unreliable. There's no "both".
The most simple scenario: two neighboring houses on the same grid. One "is paying premium for reliable power continuity". The other is paying cheaply. HOw are you going to provide one with reliable power, and the other one with unreliable on the same grid?
> it is clear that some consumption will need to be sourced from reliable sources or at least sources with sufficient overlap during generation that their chance of failure is small.
They are on the same grid as everybody else. So you are proposing to build a parallel electrical grid?
> you'll see that in many countries this situation is a reality today, but instead of being billed differently and given a choice the power will simply fail.
I come from Moldova. It's been reliably the poorest country in Europe for the past 30 years. For the past 20 years it hasn't had any rolling blackouts. The US had rolling blackouts in California in 2000-2001 and in Texas in 2021.
Power availability and reliability in the modern world is first and foremost the function of corruption and political will.
- it is a parallel grid for all intents and purposes. Because you will have to supply literally every apartment, every house, every building (and parts of buildings) with smart meters.
It's also funny how you don't see beyond this already weird decision. Example from actual reality: TV Pickup [1]. "A phenomenon in the United Kingdom that involves surges in demand on the electrical grid, occurring when a large number of people simultaneously watch the same television programme. TV pickup occurs when viewers take advantage of commercial breaks in programming to operate electrical appliances at the same time, causing large synchronised surges in national electricity consumption"
That's just kettles and microwaves.
Now, with smart meters you've powered down "cheapskates". When we have more power, we now... bring entire households back online. Good luck handling that
- it is a libertarian view: The rich will get the power while the unfortunate ones won't even be able to refrigerate their food. Medical equipment will fail. People will freeze in winter. Trains will not run. etc.
I don't know where you live, but where I'm living they seem to be standard now. By law. With few exceptions. Though the ones in the House I'm living in are continously blinking "E-21", so I'd guess their uplink is down, and they can't do FTP.
I'm just telling how it is. Not what I like, or support.
> I don't know where you live, but where I'm living
Exactly. There's a lot you don't know.
> I'm just telling how it is.
You're not telling it "how it is". You're telling a fantasy and calling it "realistic policies".
You didn't even know about things like TV Pickup, did you? And you can't even imagine how your "realistic policies" would affect the grid.
You didn't even know that smart meters are not everywhere.
You didn't think how selling "good power" only to the rich would affect everyone. (Oh, right, anyone who won't be able to afford it are just cheapskates).
Yup. "Just how it is".
> so I'd guess their uplink is down, and they can't do FTP.
Ah yes. Great smart meters that should be installed in the millions and people should rely on them to properly turn off and turn on gigawatts of power in the blink of an eye.
Dude...chill! Did I get you on the wrong foot somehow?
Of course I know about effects like TV-Pickup, though I don't have TV since 1996.
Maybe I should have marked it as sarcasm?
Furthermore I also know that smart meters aren't everywhere, but I've been aware of them for a long time, and also of regions where they've been installed before they got installed here.
What can I say? I'm living the fucking cyberpunk dystopy where corporations make the rules, politicians are fools, but most people are too, so it actually IS some form of democracy, because it represents the majority, otherwise they wouldn't have elected the fools.
So. How it is... I know about blinking E-21 because I had to walk into the cellar to read the meter and email the counter value to my utility a few days ago.
Anything else? Do you want to have fries with that?
> Dude...chill! Did I get you on the wrong foot somehow?
Sorry, I should've looked at the nickname, but it's been a long thread. I thought it was jacquesm answering me :)
> Of course I know about effects like TV-Pickup
So imagine how you turn off entire households and then bring them online in one sweep as soon as "reliable power" comes on. How do you propose to handle that?
> So. How it is... I know about blinking E-21 because I had to walk into the cellar to read the meter and email the counter value to my utility a few days ago.
So:
- a smart meter that cannot upload something to a remote FTP server
- and a system that's supposed to turn off "cheapskates" if there isn't "reliable power"
Ah, this will work just wonderfully, and reliably.
> Ah yes, disaster thrillers are the source of knowledge and truth we should turn to. Because, as you put it, "it's telling as it is"?
It was actually a suggestion, to have with the fries, but not fully jokingly, because it reads in good way and does need NO suspension of disbelief. Not that it would be my source of knowledge of the subject, k?
By telling as it is I referred to what is here, what I'm aware of elsewhere, not that it would be unconditionally and universally so. Just that it is a trend and a desire of the involved governments, industries, bizniks and utilities.
> a smart meter that cannot upload something to a remote FTP server
In this case YOU don't know why that is. Maybe someone who is wary of such systems spoke with his lawyers and protested? So smart meters are installed but not linked, pending on judgement of several things, the principle as such, because 'the smarts' are wasting energy, the reliability and security of the things, and their accuracy. As long as my insurance pays, or it is decided against. Which is likely.
It's already like that if you look at it on a country-by-country basis, and rolling blackouts have been a thing for a long time even in developed countries, even if their use is for a different reason.
And in combination with an energy budget it's more a matter of whether you need continuity or if you can get by and save some money. I've lived in places where energy delivery was flaky an intermittent and everybody gets by, the only problem is with industrial processes that are hard or even impossible to restart, for everybody else continuity can be optional, especially if there is some possible prediction of when it will be available and when it will not.
It seems a bit peculiar to respond to the question "how can we avoid climate change without nuclear energy?" by advocating renewables and then following that with "we can no longer avoid climate change." Maybe we can avoid climate change with nuclear energy even though we can't without it. And even if we can't avoid it under any circumstances, maybe we can mitigate the net negative consequences more effectively with nuclear than without.
We can't avoid it. We will be able to mitigate, and nuclear will help with mitigation, but it's a means to an end, and not 'our best bet', just one of many bets, and hopefully one that will pay off in time. But weighing the alternatives of investing every $ into renewables rather than into nuclear for a much more immediate pay-off is a difficult matter, hence the all-out push of the nuclear lobby. And as for the 'solar and wind' lobby, it exists, but is far less powerful.
I can just as easily ask: “how do we accomplish it with nuclear?”
The answer—off course—is the same in either case. We build the infrastructure. Renewables and nuclear both require a tremendous amount of infrastructure. Much of this infrastructure would even be the same in either case since we need to move from fossil fuel power to electricity (e.g. electrify rail lines, build high speed train, etc.)
There is off course difference in the electricity generation. Nuclear relies on building really big and expensive plants in locations far away from the consumption. Each design is unique and will take a while from plan to delivery. Renewables on the other hand, have the benefits of diversity of design. It can be distributed and centralized, build far away or close to consumption.
It seems to me that if you want to avoid the climate disaster, doing it without nuclear is actually the easier/more realistic option.
We know nuclear provides baseline power, but we don’t know how renewables can do so. Therefore, it makes sense to go with what is already known than to hope investments in renewable will work for baseline power.
But what we need is not baseline power, it’s load following power. And both nuclear and renewables struggle with this.
Nuclear can solve this by overbuilding and reducing power output at non-peak times. Renewables by overbuilding by and augmenting with storage. Both are proven technologies, both are expensive. I don’t really see that nuclear has an advantage here.
> Overbuilding renewables doesn't help with baseline either.
Yes it does. It means that at times when production is reduced (e.g. cloudy days or not-very-windy or only-windy-in-some-places days) then you can still generate enough power to cover baseline load.
> What storage? There's no storage that can hold enough power to offset times when renewables are not working.
What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here. Especially if we could be more aggressive about scheduling load around times with abundant generation. We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all (every few years) so we could look to solutions like biofuels here, or simply adding extra storage for critical use cases and shutting everything else down.
> What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here.
Ah yes, the good old "640 k should be enough for everyone".
From November 2020 to January 2021 Stockholm region had less than one hour of sunlight. Yes. This is on top of the fact that in mid-December there's a total of 4 hours of daylight per day.
So, let's pretend Stockholm is 100% powered by renewables. So, to live through that Stockholm would need? Triple the amount of wind farms just in case? Or triple the amount of solar panels to "still generate baseload"? Or to hope that neighbors have excess power they can spare, and import that?
And don't forget: solar and wind are extremely ineffecient compared to almost anything else. It takes 630 square kilometers in an open sea to produce less power than the smallest operational nuclear plant in France (Hornsea Project One vs. Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Station).
> We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all
This happens literally all the time. There are both daily and seasonal fluctuations. And on top of that there is anything from storms and bad weather to maintenance and human errors.
That flaw is by no means inescapable. Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently. If you loose 75% of the energy by storage you can just make 4 times the amount to compensate. So the answer here is still the same: Infrastructure. Note we also have unexplored battery technology which might make storing more efficient in the future so really the answer here is primarily infrastructure (but also research and technology).
And the same goes for the lack of baseline. A flaw yes, but not so inescapable. You can diversify the grid with distributed, stored, and centralized power, each can compensate for the flaws in the other. You can capture wind off shore, dam for hydro in the mountains, and build whole bunch of solar in the desert. You can connect different climates with high voltage power lines such that if one area experiences low solar and low wind at the same time for weeks at a time, excess power generated from adjacent regions could compensate.
> Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently.
What does being cheap have to do with availability?
If there's no wind, you won't have that cheap energy from wind turbines. If there's no sun, you won't have that cheap energy from solar. When you have neither, there goes your energy grid.
> You can connect different climates with high voltage power lines such that if one area experiences low solar and low wind at the same time for weeks at a time, excess power generated from adjacent regions could compensate
Ah, yes. Because "neighboring regions" are immediately adjacent, and have immediate power availability and enough of it to cover any levels of power consumption for weeks on end.
Sorry, you are conflating my arguments. Being cheap doesn’t solve the availability problem, I never claimed that. Being cheap means that you can solve the issue with poor storage efficiency with more infrastructure. I.e. compensating for the inefficiency of storage is not an inescapable flaw of renewables.
Your other point still stands though, renewables are not as robust as nuclear. But the answer is still infrastructure. It just needs to be more diverse then nuclear. With nuclear you still have a problem of demand above baseline, so you need infrastructure to deal with that. Renewables have the same problem except sometimes the baseline it self drops. The answer is the same you build infrastructure that can handle such drops. And that infrastructure is the same as for the problem of demand over baseline in nuclear, storage and more power production elsewhere with a robust grid.
> Sorry, you are conflating my arguments. Being cheap doesn’t solve the availability problem, I never claimed that.
I mean, you kinda did. Quote: "Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently."
Yes, it does. It does matter that you can't store it efficiently.
> With nuclear you still have a problem of demand above baseline, so you need infrastructure to deal with that.
With renewables you already have the problem with the baseline. I love how you just dismiss this as not being a problem.
> Renewables have the same problem except sometimes the baseline it self drops.
Exactly. In addition to having the problem of demand above baseline, they also have a problem that their baseline is zero.
> The answer is the same you build infrastructure that can handle such drops.
You can't solve a baseline of zero with more infrastructure. What you're basically saying is "every country has to have enough renewables to always be able to cover any amount of demand for any of their neighbours for any length of time." This simply doesn't work, and is not scalable in any shape or form.
Additionally, renewable energy is unbelievably inefficient in comparison, and it's extremely hard to "just" build more infrastructure for it.
The largest offshore windfarm that provides 1.2TW of energy covers an area of 630 square kilometers in the North Sea. That's less than Frances smallest operational nuclear reactor (1.8 TW).
And all of those 630 kilometers? Their baseline is exactly zero (if there's no wind). That nuclear reactor? Its baseline is effectively 1.8 TW 24/7.
Um. I'm not so sure that's accurate. Chernobyl and Fukushima are uninhabitable, and will be as such for many years to come. As we increase fission reactors, risk will increase as well. Ironically, perhaps due to climate change.
The question is: if we commit to fission, are we simply trading one problem disaster for another? Put another way, given our collective (lack of) response to CC, should our track record on decision making be trusted?
What area are we taking about here, and is it truly inhabitable or is it just the same flawed logic that caused the Japanese government to evacuate the area when there was no sense in doing so?
Climate disaster? To who? Humans? Mother Nature, on average isn't concerned. She adjusts. She evolves. History is clear on this. Radiation on the other hand is all but permanent. Climate disaster is a self-inflicted death blow by humans to humans.
No it isn't. The purpose of a nuclear reactor is to take highly radioactive material found in nature, cook off a bunch of its radioactive energy (producing power in the process), and create less-radioactive material as a by-product. The waste that comes out at the end is less radioactive than the material we started with, albeit much more concentrated. But that makes it easier to handle and store, compared to the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that are spewed out all over the place.
If we dumped all that radioactive waste into the ocean (BAD IDEA), mother nature would dilute it for us and spread it out until it disappears into the natural background radiation. The drawback is that it'll be dangerous to everything that encounters it before it's diluted, so we can't do that.
> The waste that comes out at the end is less radioactive than the material we started with, albeit much more concentrated.
This is not true. Nuclear fuel not highly radioactive. Their use in nuclear reactors stems from the fact that they emit two neutrons when hit with one, producing a chain reaction. Their byproducts are much more radioactive than the original fuel.
It’s also a bad idea because the “waste” might end up being useful/valuable to future generations. It’s only considered waste right now because we currently have no purpose for it.
As opposed to the raw uranium that we dug out of the ground? I don’t recall nature storing that inside radiation-proof barrels.
Also there’s the pesky fact of half-life. Ignorant anti-nuclear activists seem to think that nuclear waste is extremely dangerous and lasts for centuries. Nope. Nuclear material can either be imminently dangerous or have a centuries long half-life. It can’t be both.
That's fair. I can emphasize :) But this idea of "we need to save the planet..." is a false narrative. It might even be distracted and overwhelming. The Truth is, we need to save ourselves from us. And in that context it's important not to overlook that context and continue with our hubris-based mindset. So yeah, nuclear may or may not be a wise choice. Furthermore, if it isn't enough and we come up short on CC then we'll have at least two high priority lonlong term problems to deal with.
People choose not to live there, but plenty of wildlife does. Which is different from saying it's uninhabitable. People could live there. People haven't because an increased risk for cancer and birth defects. Which is a far cry from saying it's not livable. Chernobyl is basically a wild life sanctuary now. Nature is doing better off because of the lack of human presence.
> I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be balanced against the alternative, which is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.
A reality check tells us:
1. Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this is about to change.
2. Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal.
> Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately
This is something that's both true and untrue. On the face of it, it's absolutely true. But what are governments, really? They're a reflection of the people they govern. So governments haven't responded because it simply isn't a priority for most people.
I've long held the view that we'll only have a solution to climate change when it becomes economic to do so. The pandemic has only strengthened that view. We have millions of people who won't even mildly inconvenience themselves to help stop others (and themselves) from getting seriously ill or dying.
And you want those same people to do something about climate change?
By "economic" I mean we simply need cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels. That could be because something else gets cheaper, fossil fuels due to scarcity simply get more expensive or some combination of the two.
The biggest hope for that currently seems to be solar, which has seen its price plummet in the last 20 years.
We already have the technology to make fuel from the air but there's no point burning fossil fuels to do that. If however your energy came from a cheaper source there is a price point where that would make sense. At that point, gas-guzzling vehicles become carbon-neutral.
> This is something that's both true and untrue. On the face of it, it's absolutely true. But what are governments, really? They're a reflection of the people they govern.
This is a pretty naive assumption. There's a pretty huge divergence in what the voting public wants and what governments actually do. For example, the US voting public overwhelmingly wants cannabis legalization, and that is not even remotely a legislative priority. It's delusional to think the government is going to act on the desires of the voting public for something as economically significant as carbon emissions.
> I've long held the view that we'll only have a solution to climate change when it becomes economic to do so.
It'll only be obviously economic to act long after the damage is done, this is the problem. We had enough trouble rallying the government for something as short-term and obvious as covid, good luck showing those with huge political power and vested interests in the status quo that their short term interests are going to be a disaster in a few decades.
Solar can't provide district heating. When temperatures reach -10, -20 celcius, a heat pump's COP is near 1.0, at which point its basically just a space heater.
Small Modular Nuclear Reactors are the perfect solution for Europe: there's plenty of water, typically cold temperatures, intelligent and stable populations, and high densities. Already nuclear plants around the continent provide heat for district heating systems.
Every major town and city in Europe should have a small modular nuclear power plant. We need to begin manufacturing these units in the dozens each year, ideally the hundreds for installation around the OECD.
In places like Australia the plant can also be used to directly power desalinisation and the water will also provide cooling. Otherwise, the major unsolvable issue for Nuclear is the need to provide a direct water source.
> This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be balanced against the alternative, which is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.
Isn't the alternative actually looking into renewable energy sources?
Portraying things as either Nuclear or nothing is a false dillema, specially as we're seeing highly developed and industrialized countries such as Germany where renewables already cover close to half it's energy demands.
France, Sweden, Switzerland and parts of Canada had essentially green electricity for decades. Nuclear did that for the most part.
Germany has spent a long time, a huge amount of money and political will driving into renewables and they are not even close to done.
France in comparison was far, far faster in transition to nuclear any they did it in the 70/80s with basically 60s technology.
Had Germany started building as many nuclear reactors as they can as fast as they can and build them next to coal plants, they would be as Green as France in the next couple years easy.
However they decided to go to renewables and they are literally decades away from being able to run the country 100% on renewables reliability.
Any country that has actually decided to seriously and heavily transition to nuclear was able to do it very quickly.
> That is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.
Again, that's a false dillema.
At best, Nuclear is being pushed as one of many possible alternative to fossil fuels, and one which has been discarded entailing both high costs (direct and externalities) and high risk.
> You can keep saying it’s a false dilemma, but that doesn’t make it so.
How exactly is the attempt to frame the problem as either adopting Nuclear or else climate change happens not a false dilemma? Are there no other energy sources? Should we intentionally turn a blind eye to real-world example of countries which are both phasing out Nuclear and lowering emissions towards zero?
> If you are satisfied with the alternatives and think they are on track without nuclear, that is a happy belief to hold.
Again with the false dilemma angle? You might have strong opinions regarding how fast the current phase-out is going, but you can't ignore the fact that some nations, like Germany, are managing to meet their targets while phasing out Nuclear. Even so, Nuclear is obviously not the only option to ramp up energy production to phase out fossil fuels.
> 2. Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal.
...can "we", do it, though? AFAIR (this is based on an internal study for a policy proposal done in 2015 by a minor Polish party, so take it with a grain of salt) one major issue is the lack of expertise. To build a nuclear power plant safely you need specialized and experienced engineers, and after a long lull in construction, most states don't have that many of those. And we would need _a lot_.
And Chernobyl is an interesting example here, because one of the reasons for its (and many other Soviet and Russian projects) low quality is that Soviet Union/Russia have been stuck in emergency mode since the Tsars. You just needed that many flats and that much power like two decades ago - so you winged it. Thus I am wary of industrial facilities handling hazardous materials that are built in emergency mode, and the only way I see EU building enough reactors in 10 years to handle our energy needs without _major_ cuts is by winging it quite a bit.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't - if we don't build reactors, nobody will go into engineering those, and the issue will persist. But I don't think we can stake our near-term future on them. That fight was lost a while ago.
France didn't have these engineers either, and 10-20 years later they were finishing 5 plants a year.
The US didn't have these people and build reactors incredibly fast as well.
With modern reactors, and not gigantic PWR. You actually build most of the nuclear components in factories. The actual CAPX part is mostly the same as a gas plant.
What you need is not technical engineers but many experiments people who have done it before.
So you start to build one reactors before its half finished move some people start a second and a third and so on. Its basic scaling.
France was able to it with terrible PWR designs from 60s, we have the opportunity to do it with amazingly small and save GenIV designs.
> And Chernobyl is an interesting example here, because one of the reasons for its (and many other Soviet and Russian projects) low quality is that Soviet Union/Russia have been stuck in emergency mode since the Tsars.
No sorry, that is nonsense. The reason for low quality was their political system.
> You just needed that many flats and that much power like two decades ago - so you winged it.
Äh no. Chernobyl was actually partly a design that allowed them to make materials for weapons. That is what their political system cared far more about then providing power to civilians.
> and the only way I see EU building enough reactors in 10 years to handle our energy needs without _major_ cuts is by winging it quite a bit.
No that wouldn't be how you do it. There are perfectly reasonable ways to do this without just having no standard.
> near-term future on them.
If near term future is 10-20 years we absolutely could.
Then I guess we're effed then. After all, if we can't trust non-government entities like Equifax with private records, why even go as far as trusting some other non-government entities to handle nuclear reactors?
We're all to die then, if we're to believe that letting climate change take its course is better than the occasional nuclear meltdown.
> Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this is about to change.
How else are they to fill their pockets with wealth taxed via inflation if there are no crises? There must always be a crisis looming to get people to part with their wealth.
> Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal.
Leadership knows full well that this is a fact. Think about that.
> Then I guess we're effed then. After all, if we can't trust non-government entities like Equifax with private records, why even go as far as trusting some other non-government entities to handle nuclear reactors?
The point is that the drawbacks of Nuclear far out weight it's benefits, and it's simply better all around to invest into energy sources which aren't as reliant on flawless management or execution to avoid catastrophic failure modes.
It's like with cars vs. airplanes. Most people learned to live with the comparatively high risk of driving a car, yet often have a (silent) fear of flying Boeing/Airbus even though they are much safer. Psychological effect of high-profile airplane accidents vs. small scale (but much more numerous) car deaths.
The list of e.g. hydroelectric accidents is very long and deadly, but they are not as "spectacular". How many people are aware of Banqiao Dam failure, which killed 250 000 people and with that single-handedly exceeded the death toll of all nuclear accidents combined?
There's actually several studies of energy sources and their "deaths per TWh" and nuclear usually comes out as the safest.
> It's like with cars vs. airplanes. Most people learned to live with the comparatively high risk of driving a car, yet often have a (silent) fear of flying Boeing/Airbus even though they are much safer.
I don't feel this is a serious comparison, let alone conveys the tradeoffs that need to be considered.
The risk on the table is pretty much the NIMBY rationale: if you're arguing about risks and given that it's unthinkable to presume that there is zero chance of experiencing problems on any type of power plant, do you prefer to deal with a technology whose failure mode does not have any significant impact or do you wish to deal with a technology whose failure modes involve the need to create and manage exclusion zones with a radius of dozens of km which persist for decades on end? This is particularly relevant as we consider that the bulk of energy demands come from densely occupied urban regions.
And regarding safety, this sort of risk assessment stats used to push Nuclear as a safe alternative fails to take into account the strategic importance of a power plant and how they are automatically targets in any national security scenario. Thus extrapolating peace time statistics, which are already quite bad, also fails to adequately classify the full risks of relying on nuclear.
Let me spell it out: more people will die and suffer if we don't support nuclear. There is no way to fix it with renewables. It would just waste the time and amplify the damages.
Thereby no one should rightfully speculate or disagree? That's pretty fallacious.
Also, that Wikipedia page you just looked up doesn't really make a good case for your assertion.
> [...] although nobody has died or is expected to die from radiation effects [of Fukishima].
The number of deaths related to Nuclear accidents doesn't even exceed the single-digit thousands, and after Chernobyl the number of deaths related to other accidents doesn't even exceed 20.
On the other hand, virtually every globalist governmental entity (if we're gonna go by appeals to authority and majority here) believes that climate change will soon be related to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year.
> Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.
So no, the migration away from nuclear doesn't close the case on why places like California moved away from nuclear.
There could be a Chernobyl every year and, if we are to believe the likes of the WHO and the UN, it still wouldn't approach the number of deaths resulting from climate change.
> Thereby no one should rightfully speculate or disagree? That's pretty fallacious.
It's one thing to state that you personally believe in something. It's an entirely different thing to try to pass off a personal opinion and baseless assertions as some kind of established consensus, particluarly as they fly in the face of reality.
> Also, that Wikipedia page you just looked up doesn't really make a good case for your assertion.
It presents solid enough cases to motivate the current global phase-out of Nuclear power.
And, unlike the GP's personal assertion, it does provide a rationale based on facts and real-world experience assessed and considered by decision-makers.
If you have a genuine curiosity about the subject and you're interested in getting up to speed on the topic, you may start by reading up on this as well.
> It's one thing to state that you personally believe in something. It's an entirely different thing to try to pass off a personal opinion and baseless assertions as some kind of established consensus, particluarly as they fly in the face of reality.
That's exactly what you are doing. To be honest, I can't tell if you're serious because all you are doing is making statements and then just linking to pages without citing any particular fact.
> If you have a genuine curiosity about the subject and you're interested in getting up to speed on the topic, you may start by reading up on this as well.
If you had a point to make, it wouldn't take someone reading a whole page to compare what is essentially two arguments around quantitative figures. You'd be able to state a counterargument with some form of rationale. Just linking to a page and telling me to "get started" by "reading up" doesn't cut it. This is a discussion forum, and it's really not polite to just tell people they are wrong and not explain why. Nobody has time to read an entire encyclopedia entry to figure out why you are right and everyone else is wrong.
> That's exactly what you are doing. To be honest, I can't tell if you're serious because all you are doing is making statements and then just linking to pages without citing any particular fact.
No, not really. You might feel the need to ignore any of the sources I've cited, or even try to refute anything mentioned in them, but you can't pretend that the facts I've pointed out are baseless or even personal assertions.
This sort of position is particularly undefendable considering that you're purposely turning a blind eye to the baseless and completely unrealistic assertion that sparked this thread.
So,if you have any intention of actually discussing the topic, please stick to the facts instead of playing games trying to shift burdens away from your claims.
> If you had a point to make, it wouldn't take someone reading a whole page (...)
Please don't try to pretend that well-supported and referenced facts are free to be ignored just because you either don't like them or prefer to ignore them.
The summation of what you are saying is that I am wrong because lots of people with power made an opposing decision and that I should just read a Wikipedia page because reasons.
That's asinine. I could just as easily give you an Amazon listing for an entire book making a case for nuclear energy, tell you to just read that without giving an explanation of why, and that really wouldn't be much different from what you are telling me. It proves nothing.
Why are you even on HN if you want to avoid real discussion? Do you know why I and nearly everyone else here includes snippets from the pages they link to? It's because no one has time to read that shit if they have no context.
Can you even make a single point to back up your position? What you've shared is barely even a citation; a citation is usually in tandem with a piece of information or an abstract of the source being cited. You shared a hyperlink. Goodie for you.
You know what, I don't even really care if you are right because you wrote as if I'm a dunce who should "get started" learning about the facts around the subject. Are you kidding me? You turned a blind eye to my points and then have the gall to say imply I'm ignorant because you have a Wikipedia page? You're being a total jerk.
Instead of reducing what I said to a "personal opinion" that I am trying to "pass off" that is "baseless", you could have respectfully disagreed even without a reason and included that Wikipedia page, and there was a chance I might have read it. But you had to be a jerk. If you still don't get this, then you're on the wrong website.
That page simply describes how the environmental case against nuclear power was made before climate change began to be taken seriously.
If we didn’t have to worry about the impacts of climate change, I’d agree with phasing out nuclear.
But we do.
“These pieces of criticism have however largely been quelled by the IPCC which indicated in 2014 that nuclear energy was a low carbon energy production technology, comparable to wind and lower than solar in that regard.[135]”
At the point in time I think I am really ambivalent about nuclear Energy. Its not just Chernobyl but Fukushima incident that illustrates how minuscule error in our calculation can create a debacle. As more countries starts to enjoy nuclear energy the risk will further increas. And Imo the main problem is we can't even control the nuclear meltdown waste and whole world might have to suffer the consequence which can be problematic (One example I can remember is how China was complaining when Japan decided to release those waste nuclear water).
Is there guarantee way to construct safe nuclear plant? I am asking because I don't know the state of arts regarding nuclear power plant (I have started to hear about Thorium and don't know about safety and google is not the friend here unfortunately). If there are natural disasters etc., is nuclear plant robust against meltdown? Can we calculate the risk before hand?
A blanket assertion that "drawbacks far outweigh benefits" with no rational argument behind it is not helpful in this discussion. The article you are replying to makes the case that it is, and while you have a right to disagree, and are even welcome to go ahead and make your case, you are not adding any value to this discussion by saying "clearly this is wrong" and just leaving it at that.
Is that really worse then the current geopolitical situation where you are indirectly trusting 3rd party governments (e.g north korea) not to start a nuclear war?
You say the Chernobyl failure mode is "huge", but I would argue the opposite. If you compare the number of deaths across types of energy, nuclear is only slightly higher than solar/wind (about 2x) but when compared to deaths due to fossil fuel it's effectively zero. The big picture must be kept in mind. The other thing to note is that nuclear reactor design has improved a lot since Chernobyl, so it's not honest to say that the probability of that incident occurring again hasn't declined substantially. You can also build the plant far away from cities and send the power via lines fairly efficiently, if you must reduce an extremely small risk to a zero risk situation.
I agree with you in general, but I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans.
I also agree the probability is way lower now, but the failure mode is huge nonetheless.
> I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans.
Are you talking about the land required by solar/wind generation? I wouldn't say it makes it uninhabitable by humans, but I wouldn't want to live under a big turbine.
I'm talking about the failure mode of a nuclear plant exploding.
Windmills and solar farms can be dismantled and moved. Nuclear plants, once a catastrophic failure happens, infect all the land around them for many miles and there is ~nothing you an do about it. See: Chernobyl.
That said, this is extremely unlikely given everything we know now and how technology has progressed. But the 'uninhabitable wasteland' is the failure mode people are worried about.
In fear of making small area's of land uninhabitable by humans for a short period of time, we are making the entire planet uninhabitable by humans permanently.
don't have the numbers on hand, but if you compare energy output per acres, wind/solar farms are no competition to nuclear. I wonder what those numbers look like once you amortize those failure modes.
Many people live in the exclusion zone just fine. Their rates of cancer are not higher then anywhere else. Much of that area could be inhabited just fine.
And again, that's like saying 'Early Zepplins destroyed to much stuff we can never use airplanes again' as if the reactors there are in any way comparable to modern reactors.
This would be news to me! Sources please? I'd love to learn more about that.
Also, your analogy doesn't hold; the failure mode of 'early zeppelins' or pretty much any other technology is very temporary. Nuclear fallout is very long.
I agree technology has gotten better. To be clear, I think we should build more nuclear plants.
But it is false to state that the failure modes of wind/solar and nuclear failures are ~equivalent.
Actually look into modern GenIV reactors and try to come up with scenarios where a large numbers of people die. Its basically impossible. Maybe if you use multiple terrorists and multiple natural catastrophes in a coordinated you might get somewhere.
Any practical failure mode would not leave the exclusion zone of the plant. And even those are incredibly unlikely.
The thing is there is simply nothing that convince you otherwise. If you believe the only relevant argument is the very maximum damage possible no matter the circumstance then I lost the debate. The question to me is what is the practical danger and how many people would die if you powered a whole country of 300 million people with a technology.
With GenIV nuclear plants you could power 300 million people for 100 years and the expect times you would have a Chernobyl style event would still be far below 1. The expect number of people to die would be far smaller then wind as well. If you include home solar, it would be less as well. Maybe centralized solar is comparable.
Edit: You can lots of articles and reporting on them. Its mostly people who just never left. The area is depopulating as people die of old age and there is no migration to the area.
I think a more accurate comparison would be number of deaths per unit of electricity generated. Yes, in absolute numbers, there have been more deaths due to fossil fuel burning, but we've also generated a hell of a lot more electricity by burning fossil fuels then we have anything else.
I suspect nuclear will still come out as being safer, but I think we should be a bit more rigorous with how we do comparisons.
I don't believe an honest person can look at that chart and think nuclear safety is a a real problem, especially since the majority of those nuclear deaths were with old reactor designs. It seems like one of those misplaced, irrational fears like fear of flying.
There is that, but we KNOW what is going to happen with climate change. People are not going to change their ways before it's too late. We LOVE energy, and upcoming countries are only going to use more fossil fuel and it's going to get worse. Unless there is a 10x increase in our capabilities in renewables in the next 10 years we're done.
A fair point, but I feel that we are making good progress towards being able to solve the energy supply without nuclear.
If we develop solar and wind (and other things such as battery banks, pumped storage etc) to a point where installations are cheap, well known and reliable enough, then developing nations might choose to use those before investing heavily in fossils.
Your point is that there is a long tail risk which exists which might not show up in the historical data. I think this is wrong because Chernobyl is that tail risk and it is already inside the data, and moreover the odds of that tail risk happening again have declined and so it's exaggerated.
A better analogy is the stock market, where the GFC and the great depression are tail risks that are already inside the data. Or data on pedestrian fatalities across an entire country, where tail risks are represented due to law of large numbers across many people.
If you think building modern reactor designs away from cities presents a bigger tail risk than Chernobyl, you're going to have to outline how that is a plausible situation rather than going for analogies.
I understand your argument but disagree about Chernobyl being the tall risk.
This is basically the the same logical errer again, Chernobyl is only the worst incident that has happened /so far/.
It is well documented that Chernobyl itself could easily have been much worse, and the real tall risk is something like a ”dirty” bomb made possible by negligent handling of radioactive materials.
There are several known incidents where discarded radioactive materials have killed people and contaminated buildings, this happens regularly even without malicious intent.
> This is basically the the same logical errer again
It's not necessarily a logical error. Extreme value theory should be the default tool for understanding tail risks (e.g. earthquake magnitude), unless we have good theoretical/logical reasons to depart from an understanding that's mostly informed by historical data.
Nuclear weapons are where I agree with your perspective. The tail risk is significantly larger than what is present in historical data, and attempts to understand this risk by looking at historical data are flawed.
Nuclear energy, like earthquake magnitude, is where I disagree with your perspective, unless you can present a coherent rationale about why nuclear power tail risk is drastically underestimated by the historical data, especially after taking into consideration modern plant designs which are safer than Chernobyl + the possibility of building them in the desert with nobody nearby.
Hey first of all thanks for the constructive replies, much appreciated!
"Attempts to understand this risk by looking at historical data are flawed" is a good summary of my main point, you got it. Basically I think we can't ignore the possibility of large incidents just because they haven't happened yet.
We can extrapolate from known small incidents, some of which are listed on wikipedia:
Other incidents mentioned without separate stories include radioactive waste finding its way into road pavement, apartment building materials (hundreds of contaminated flats, nobody found out for years).
Incidents such as these have killed many people over several decades in many countries, and that's just through sheer negligence. What if someone adds malice to the mix?
That's actually my main concern about nuclear power, not the safety of the reactors.
But since you mentioned building them in a desert in order to be safe I feel the need to mention my perspective there too. First of all, Chernobyl had 4 reactors and only one exploded, thanks to heroic effort. (Meaning it could at the very least have been 4x worse than it was).
The event was actually discovered in the west by sensors in Sweden, which is very far away. Fallout from Chernobyl made certain grazing animals surpass legal radiation levels for over 30 years (and counting) in areas as remote as Lapland and Bavaria.
To put the distances in perspective if you are American, it means that a similar event as Chernobyl taking place in Florida would make pigs from Texas and Caribou from Ontario be unsuitable for human consumption, for many decades.
So distance does not really help. In order to be safe by putting power plants in a desert, the USA would basically need to put it's reactors in the Sahara.
The safest place for a reactor would be inside a very stable and peaceful country with a very high level of mental health in the entire population. Maybe Switzerland?
I'm not saying we shouldn't even consider it under any circumstance, but if there's any other option (which I believe) then that option is probably preferable.
Let's take a step back. What about molten salt reactors? I feel like it is a mistake to think future nuclear reactors have the same safety profile as old ones when thinking about tail risks.
Better reactor designs that can’t basically self-combust through accidents or operational errors are an improvement of course, but I’m not aware of any design that eliminates the need to produce relatively large quantities of waste. That in itself poses a large risk.
Ok but what is the tail risk here. Can you outline a series of causal steps where a molten salt reactor will cause more than 100,000 to 500,000 deaths? If you're just saying that perhaps maybe there will be 2,000 deaths, well that's still an incredible safety profile compared to the number of deaths caused by other energy sources.
Sure - Creating the fuel for molten salt reactors requires a series of steps where highly radioactive materials will have to be handled, stored, transported and controlled by humans.
As shown with the examples given earlier (which are just a few of many), such situations will inevitably provide opportunity for the materials to be lost or stolen. (IAEA has documented 18 cases of stolen radioactive elements from various sites that handle radioactive materials).
One of the elements needed for molten salt reactor fuels is plutonium. 500 grams of plutonium is estimated to be enough to kill up to 2 million people by conservative estimates.
Presumably you will need more than 500 grams regularly to run a salt reactor, so any number of malicious methods can kill 100 000 to 500 000 people, if someone gets their hands on even small amounts of plutonium.
I think that when people reach the conclusion that the benefits of nuclear outweigh the downsides it is usually because they haven't really considered the real downsides fully. The benefits are huge, to be sure, and tempting.
Now that being said - if a reactor design appears that would significantly /reduce/ the amount of dangerous materials that have already been created, and not require any more of it to be created, I think it would be a good idea to build such a reactor to get rid of the waste we already have.
Speaking of molten salt, I find it more interesting as a concept for energy storage. Solar power can superheat salt and use it to genereate energy even at night. A solar power plant in Spain has generated electricity continously (day and night) for over a month using this technology.
I believe that we have an abundance of very promising - sometimes already proven - technologies that will let us generate stable electricity from intermittent, clean sources with comparatively insignificant risk to human lives.
> 1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;
2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;
Why do we even consider this a problem? For more than 50 years nuclear waste has been sitting above ground in warehouses. Nothing happened. Seems to me there is no problem and we should just keep doing what we're doing. Why even bother with expensive underground storage at this point.
I think its an insidious remnant of 70s era anti-nuke propaganda that refuses to die. Nuclear waste is spooky, especially when you don't have a concept of scale, and don't realize that the risk from spent fuel is orders of magnitude lower than what's allegedly at stake.
I'm surprised by how long this myth has persisted.
> 1 We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;
We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of coal mining waste.
> 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;
We don't even have a short term solution to the storage and disposal of combustion waste products.
> 3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and
The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge. Most notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at 197,000,000 square miles.
> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
The US government and corporations have managed all of the nuclear reactors in the US so far without any significant failures (3 Mile Island is not significant).
> The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge. Most notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at 197,000,000 square miles.
It's a good thing then that hydrocarbon-based power is being phased out as well. For example, the EU just announced their target to eliminate emissions by 2050.
yeah, if we don't have blackouts this year i'll be pleasently surprised. As this "plans" roll out w/o nuclear, we will become more dependant on gas from Russia. And as the blackouts roll out, we will have a portion of the electorate that will vote to get back to fossil fuels.
"The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact"
We can also talk about all the tragedies and catastrophic events related to commercial aviation. But no one in their right mind would propose that we stop or slow down the airline industry because of the 'failure modes'.
I may not be in my right mind, but there is a #nofly tag on twitter.
Edit: tourism is a low productivity, low value, environmentally harmful industry. Fiji's coral reefs, for example, were beautiful, diverse, and productive, according to old National Geographics. Now they are gone.
We could do better with VR, as in the film "Soylent Green".
Edit. I agree with your point, which is that all technology choices have costs. There are no Disney miracles.
Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil wells/mines. Use the resulting power to charge electric vehicles. Use excess power to capture CO2 into artificial gas/diesel/methane to power vehicles that cannot be electricised (planes, rockets, cars far away from civilization).
The solution is right there. People just refuse to take it.
As my Zen teacher used to say: The best time to invest in nuclear is 50 years ago. The second best time to invest in nuclear is today.
>Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil wells/mines.
I believe completely that nuclear power is the way forward for us, but your assumptions here are just bonkers.
Breeder reactors of any kind are a proliferation risk. We also don't need them. Thorium fueled reactors are a better choice, both for the availability of fuel and the lowered risk.
Storing nuclear waste in any location not designed to store waste is just stupid. Oil wells aren't big holes where nothing exists once the oil is gone, putting anything in them probably affects aquifers locally (see fracking). Plus to store waste in a well we'd have to liquify it, making it more likely to leak. We also would have no way to really determine if it's leaking or if it's not, plus no way to deal with it if it does leak.
Mines are about as bad... even placing waste in a very stable, dry mine could leave it prone to escaping and travelling elsewhere.
The problem isn't finding a place to put the stuff that's out of the way, it's building a place to put it that will not allow it to leak/migrate for a significant amount of time. Yucca mountain would have been good, but the NIMBY crowd is too afraid of waste to store it there.
Fortunately, newer reactor designs produce less waste. It's still a concern, though, and not anywhere near as easy to deal with as you're making it.
> Breeder reactors of any kind are a proliferation risk. We also don't need them. Thorium fueled reactors are a better choice, both for the availability of fuel and the lowered risk.
The Thorium fuel cycle is, by definition, a breeding fuel cycle because Th doesn't naturally contain any fissile isotopes. U-233, which is the fissile isotope that is the actual fuel in the Th cycle, is perfectly fine as a bomb material, so you have similar proliferation worries as with a U-Pu fuel cycle.
It’s a lot of mass to lift; current rocket fuel (RP-1 is kerosene) produces CO2; and rockets occasionally explode and distribute their contents over a wide area. Also, what, you want to leave a bunch of radioactive waste in orbit? Lifting it out of the earth’s gravity well takes a lot of fuel, and then it’s still in a near-earth solar orbit. No thanks.
1/ UF6 is not a necessary byproduct (only if you go through gaseous diffusion or centrifugal separation). Laser-based enrichment methods are, while not industry ready yet, very efficient. If we had more research and weren't forced to sleep on it for years, we could have made more progress.
2. We do. It's called breeder reactors (The Phenix and Superphenix projects in France for example, were used for research, produced energy, and were closed because of political maneuvres). As for the rest... Burying is legitimately the best option. 150 years of nuclear waste (planning for future use) can easily be buried in underground complexes, with the ability to pull things out should research advance.
3. Modern reactors designs need active energy input to keep the reaction going. Said input it decoupled from the reactor itself, preventing things from going wild. Your only example is Chernobyl 40 years ago, as the USSR were swaying their dicks around and trying to show who has the biggest. And before anything, no, Fukushima is not a disaster. Yes, people were evacuated (as a matter of safety), but as it stands, you get more radiation taking a flight than being next to it.
4. Cool, that's why countries don't give that up to governments. Taking France as example, the ASN is a fully independent entity. They have the ability to unilaterally shut down reactors at the most minimal event, and every single event is listed for everyone to see. They are the very reason our EPR is taking a super long time to build, because of the insane security requirements.
4/ This is either justified, or not. If it is, as we probably both think it is(?), this adds complexity (delays and costs), calling for margins (delays, costs), even w/o knowing the requirements in advance. Every EPR project (in France, Finland or China) largely blowed-up both its schedule and budget.
What about the long-term solution for the storage and disposal of combustion by-products? Do we just keep dumping them into the atmosphere?
This argument against nuclear waste is an emotional one: the fact that we can see, store, and move nuclear by-products is an advantage. We completely lose control of combustion by-products that we dump into the atmosphere; they are simply perceived as less dangerous to our monkey brains.
> 3
The failure mode of coal power plants is continuous, and the damage caused by the sum of all fission disasters is nothing compared to the damage caused (including radioactive) by burning coal under normal circumstances, each year.
There is obviously no contest compared to wind/solar.
There is also the fact that the "small, cheap" nuclear reactor has never really happened in a commercial context. I have literally heard about those since my childhood and one has actually yet to happen.
The current very large nuclear plants are expensive to build (the ones that have opened on time and on budget are the exception, not the rule).
Most of the recent construction of large nuclear plants is in China, and they're actually doing quite well at building them on time. The ones that are super late and over budget are the exception worldwide; they just make the news more often.
Nuclear plants in SK are on time as well, which is quite impressive since they did not have as much training. I guess just having a good plan is enough.
The regulatory system makes them ESSENTALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Seriously, if people only knew how fucked up the regulatory system is.
Unless you are NASA or DoD you can fuck right of with that stuff.
The regulatory system is HARD LOCKED to one technology. No sane person would invest money in an alternative (unless you are planning on selling it to DoD). The regulatory system had to be changed a huge amount, just for NuScale PWR in a module reactors.
If you wanted for example to build a Molten Salt reactor there is no established regulatory path. Or a small reactor either. There is only tiny research reactors, or fully operational reactors. So you can't even build a small version of your reactor to prove things out. No prototyping for you.
You would basically have to show up with a full design (literally invest 100s of million) then go to the regulator and hand it in. You would also pay them to review and you would literally have to wait years, and potentially decades for them to tell you if your design is good. You would get no early feed-back on what they might consider problems or issues. And there is no criteria what exactly the application needs to look like or how much detail they want and so on. There is no established software that they accept as valid for modeling something like uranium in molten salt. If you are not providing real data its very hard convince them on anything, but of course, you can not actually get real data from anywhere.
That is why essentially no progress has been made. Thankfully in the last 5 years or so, actual progress has been happening and the regulator has admired that there is a problem. The don't have actual solution yet but they are apparently working on improving the situation. That is why, almost all GenIV nuclear startups have converged on Canada. The Canadian regulator after its privatization of CANDU was looking for something to do and they were very open to next generation technology. Their regulatory process is a multi-step process that is technology independent.
It looks like US regulator and the Canada regulator are working together so hopefully Canada can lead the US out of its idiocy.
What you must realize is that the turn against nuclear was hard, on all fronts. Population, Politics, Regulation went totally anti-nuclear and specially for anything that wasn't established. Since Nuclear Commission was abolished, progress has been glacial.
I think the main objection, which is mentioned briefly in the article, is that the infrastructure for nuclear energy generation is largely identical with that required for nuclear weapons production and maintenance. It is difficult to envision nuclear energy as a global solution without also envisioning new nuclear weapons proliferation problems.
One position that seems attractive is keeping some nuclear plants online where they exist, but not building any new capacity. On a long enough time scale, we can engineer around base load requirements.
> infrastructure for nuclear energy generation is largely identical with that required for nuclear weapons production and maintenance
Total nonsense.
> It is difficult to envision nuclear energy as a global solution without also envisioning new nuclear weapons proliferation problems.
Totally false. In fact to opposite is true. Many nations with civilian nuclear power don't have nuclear weapons. While many countries with nuclear weapons don't have civilian power.
Very different technology.
> One position that seems attractive is keeping some nuclear plants online where they exist, but not building any new capacity.
Very attractive if you are pro climate change I guess.
> On a long enough time scale, we can engineer around base load requirements.
Yeah ok, so we are faced with climate change and we have a 100% proven technology, both in scale AND in terms of being green.
But you would rather wait for some hopeful future technology that might happen as some point and then might be able to scale.
I honestly don't buy into the nuclear proliferation objection to fission power for several reasons:
1. Uranium is abundant. There are parts of the US you can walk around and pick up rocks that contain Uranium compounds that can be extracted without anything complicated;
2. Enriching uranium is relatively trivial. You basically need the ability to make UF6 and to make and operate centrifuges. That's it. This is 80+ year old tech; and
3. The design of an atomic bomb as was dropped on Hiroshima is likewise "primitive" and easily reproducible.
There is really no substantial barrier-to-entry to nuclear weapons. The only thing that's missing now is the political will.
The biggest factor in nuclear proliferation is nation-states seeking to guarantee their future existence (ie North Korea, Iran). Foreign policy by the dominant developed powers is far more significant than any imagined or real technological or industrial barrier.
Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program, not 20 years ago and not now. This has been proven again and again. Even the CIA confirmed as much and told this to Bush and every other president since.
Iran has the best monitored nuclear industry in the world by a large margin. Iran is a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty (unlike US or Israel) and always had the proper monitoring.
The Iran nuclear-weapons is pure political thing power play by the US. It has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and everything with Iran not wanting to accept US power.
Iran literally didn't even want to do this infrastrucutre. They had a deal with France to provide them with low enriched nuclear fuel, and France would then take the spent fuel back. All this monitored by the IAEA according to international non-proliferation standards. The US got involved and prevented any such deal.
Only then Iran then started trying to make its own fuel instead. They literally had zero infrastructure to do any of that stuff. The US basically forced them to develop the infrastructure themselves. As soon as they did this, US started claiming they were building nuclear weapons.
> Iran is a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty (unlike US or Israel)
The US, contrary to your claim, is a party to the NPT, but as one of the five recognized nuclear powers under the treaty it applies somewhat differently to the US.
I think nuclear energy is the solution to climate change, but this post is trivializing the issue. Yes, the steps to make the first atomic bombs are simple in concept, but in practice requires an enormous amount of resources (money and time).
Some of those resources overlap with nuclear power plants, hence the proliferation concern. Existing nuclear power infrastructure reduces the resources required to build a bomb.
Can't wait for the nuclear version of Western Europe facing gas shortages because of Russian disputes with Eastern European states their gas pipelines run through, then.
Our biggest issue right now is climate change, full stop. Nuclear power basically solves that. Currently renewables do not. You other points are in the noise of what global warming is going to do to us if we don't use the solutions that are available to us now. We literally need a Manhattan style project on even better nuclear than we currently have. We have plenty places where nuke waste can be stored. It takes up a very very small area compared to the problem that gets solved.
A large share of the other GHG emitting sectors could also shift to electricity. For example various heating processes in industry and commercial sectors burn fuels such as natural gas and could switch to electricity.
And the externalities of providing energy to electric transportation is very much what we are talking about: where are we getting the power from.
That's exactly it. All of our decarbonization plans rest on electrifying everything. Even many chemical feedstocks, like hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer, will be produced through electricity.
> Clean electricity is the plate at the decarbonization BBQ. Everything else gets loaded onto it. Without clean electricity, things get messy.
Good luck transmitting it to where you need it, though...
The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for nuclear, currently. In the US, we only have a limited amount of water heat sinks that we can use to dissipate waste heat, and there's limited heating allowed before we destroy those ecosystems. The figure that I heard recently was about ~500GW across the nation. After that, we will need to find other solutions, which bar often more expensive that using natural water. There's a nuclear plant in Arizona that uses water water from Phoenix, for example. But after that we will need some innovation in water heat management to overcome the natural limitations of thermal generators like nuclear, at least while on planet earth.
>Good luck transmitting it to where you need it, though...
True, but the scale of the problem we're dealing with makes it worthwhile to consider locating certain industries near nuclear plants to take advantage of low cost/free energy. Locating industries there means they can close elsewhere, freeing space and lowering consumption of electricity.
>The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for nuclear,
It is, but the above also helps with that, consuming the waste heat to some degree as it simultaneously makes industry cheaper to operate.
Another possibility is to use the waste heat from a reactor to heat indoor farms/greenhouses. A vertical farm uses a fraction of the water an outdoor farm does, it produces food in a very small area of land relative to an outdoor farm, it produces high quality food that usually needs no pesticides to produce good yields.
One final advantage of vertical farms is that they free up land to allow it to be reforested or at least planted with non food crops that will absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.
So many people's thinking about how to adapt our power generation to climate change is limited by the assumption that whatever we do must be a drop in replacement for what we have now. That's not the case, and in fact it's likely we'll have to change far more than just how we generate power to survive.
Any reason not to use ocean water? The Diablo Canyon reactor in California has tech that limits ocean water temperature increase to 20°F, to avoid harm to sea life.
You can also spend excess energy on desalination, which is helpful for water-starved places like CA.
And yes, this is CA's only nuclear reactor, which politicians are actively pushing to shut down without a replacement.
It's funny that you mention Diablo Canyon's ocean intake, but then say it's politicians pushing for shutdown.
Diablo Canyon is being shutdown, not by politicians, but by the utility PG&E. The wikipedia page for DC now stays that PG&E is shutting it down because they don't want to operate it half time when there are cheaper renewable resources, but in the past I think a bigger impact was that water cooling system. DC uses once through cooling currently, and would need to convert away from that in order to meet modern environmental regulations.
So though I suppose you could blame "politicians" for pushing for the closure, that omits some really important facts about why PG&E is closing, and it all comes down to costs and environmental regulations that affect all plants, not just nuclear.
Maybe it's funny but yes, I blame politicians. Who do you think defines rules for PG&E? Is the energy density of nuclear not high enough? We can't afford it? There too many CO2 emissions?
California produces ~40% of our electricity with fossil fuels, and if we switch to electric vehicles, demand will dramatically grow. Plus we need to replace the 9% of power that Diablo Canyon provides until 2024. The situation is dire for CA, a state that is supposedly a leader on climate action, and who is blessed with good weather and economy. Good luck deploying solar+storage in places that have winter and worse economic constraints.
Look at France if you really think politics is not the problem. The vast majority of their power is nuclear. Zero carbon emissions from those reactors. France is the largest exporter of electricity in the world.
Do you think France has some secret nuclear technology, or do they have different physical constraints? I don't think so. I do applaud French politicians for mobilizing against climate change.
> France has some secret nuclear technology, or do they have different physical constraints
France's new nuclear is exactly as outrageously expensive as the US's. Flamanville unit 3. Expected to be built in 4.5 years, €3.1B. Now at 14 years of construction, €19.1B, could be more.
We have a vastly different and better set of technology in 2020 than we did in 1970. The tech for pouring concrete and welding miles upon miles of rebar and precision piping have not improved. Solar and wind and storage are in the process of leapfrogging all power generation by steam turbines.
Without any subsidies at all, nuclear can not compete with solar + storage in costs.
If we want nuclear to survive on the grid, we need to figure out how essential is actually is, and then work out market structures or subsidies that will keep nuclear around.
It's too late for Diablo Canyon, the decision to close was made five years ago, and the only reason to extend its life now is for an emergency but if extra generation capacity on the grid. If DC's life is extended 10 years or so that way, it may provide a bridge to a new generation of SMRs, but I am extremely skeptical that SMRs will be any cheaper than other large thermal generators of electricity, and those cants compete on costs now.
No, he's right, nuclear is held back by red tape. The energy density of nuclear is so high it beats literally everything. Sans pointless laws or subsidies there is no reason to believe nuclear is less useful than renewables.
>The energy density of nuclear is so high it beats literally everything.
Exactly. Look at the tonnage that needs to be moved around for X GW generated for Y yr. Unless you make X and Y really, really small nuclear wins handily.
The cost of dicking around with uranium ore is not apreciably different in cost than the resource extraction needed for solar panels. The amount of concrete you need to pour for a nuclear power plant isn't that different than you need for windmill footings.
The difference is that any idiot can weld up the anchoring structure for your wind turbine or wire up your solar panels whereas everyone loses their shit if the f-ing employee kitchen sink in a nuclear facility isn't assembled by someone with a special certification and checked by two more.
Nuclear contamination potential is no different than any other industrial activity humans engage in with poisonous materials at that scale and when we spill it it has the nice side effect of being and going away over time. You can't say that about heavy metal laced mine tailings leeching into a watershed or the various chemicals humanity has cooked up over the years and then dumped in the ocean. People just get their panties in a knot over nuclear contamination because "omg invisible" or something like that.
>Pray tell, how long do you expect to live, and many centuries is your definition of "going away over time"?
Anything that's "death soon or guaranteed cancer later" levels of energetic won't be lasting centuries because physics.
Centuries is infinitely faster than the myriad of substances that don't go anywhere unless we pick them up and move them. Browse the EPA's national priority list for examples.
Nuclear is no more of a environmental contamination hazard than any other similar scale human activity involving nasty stuff.
>Anything that's "death soon or guaranteed cancer later" levels of energetic won't be lasting centuries because physics.
I don't know which "physics" you're referring to, but here are the half-lives of just the most common isotopes (out of OVER 100) released in Chernobyl.
iodine-131:
8.04 days
caesium-137:
30 years
strontium-90:
29.12 years
plutonium-241 (decays into Americium-241):
14.4 years
Americium-241:
430 years
Remember, these are HALF-LIFE numbers, meaning half the isotopes will still be radioactive after these time intervals.
Having shit magically go away by itself is such a massive plus.
Imagine how contaminated that part of the world would be if Chernobyl released equally dangerous (like remediation workers dying in the same amount of time) levels of thallium.
Ocean water is indeed an excellent source of cooling water.
Many thermal power plants (nuclear and others) are situated along rivers not because people were stupid and didn't realize the ocean exists, but because those power plants are sited to serve nearby communities and industries.
Sure, long distance electricity transmission is one solution (HVDC or traditional AC). Using ambient air as the final heat sink is another. Both have costs in terms of energy loss and higher capital costs, but are doable.
Dry cooling is a possible solution (that is, using ambient air as the final heat sink rather than some body of water). It does slightly decrease the thermal efficiency of the plant, as well as increase capital cost, but is a workable solution.
Your point 1 and 2 are simply untrue, and I wish people would stop repeating them.
Breeder reactors will consume all of those waste products leaving only short term waste. Right now we use barely 1% of the energy in Uranium - all the rest is that terrible waste.
With a breeder reactors we can consume substantially all of it.
It's not exactly wasted as it's safely kept around and could be reused should the need and will arise. Compare and contrast with hydrocarbon waste, those are truly wasted.
> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
I trust private corporations even less when it comes to fixing the current problem with carbon pollution. It's going to cost money, and they aren't going to do it.
> I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
I think this is a big point. This would be expensive and there will be a temptation for politicians to underfund the operations and give the difference back as tax cuts.
> We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive
Depleted uranium is a useful and valuable material and not just a “byproduct” to be “disposed” of.
> We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products
Long-lived fission waste products can be fed into breeder reactors to produce new fuel. We don’t do this because we haven’t chosen to grow the deployment of nuclear power. The need for long term storage of long-lived fission waste products is a consequence of self-inflicted decline that the advocates of self-inflicted decline can turn around and use as an argument in favor of self-inflicted decline.
The most serious incident is probably the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. While it wasn't as serious as Chernobyl or Fukushima, "without incident" seems at best a stretch.
I think parent was referencing the nuke ships in the US Navy fleet, which have been without any known incident. I have no idea, however, if their production is comparable. OTOH, it seems harder to keep a mobile plant operating safely versus a stationary one.
> The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact…
The fossil fuel inclusion zone is 197 million square miles.
Many of the current problems of nuclear come from its small volume (small unit count). Of course, as with fossil fuels, many new problems will emerge if volume comes up (waste storage is already an unsolved problem). But they may be resolvable if there is determination and incentive to do so,
> I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
What can they be trusted with then?
National defense. Social programs, healthcare systems, tax collection, regulation, various infrastructure & safety matters.
You'd have to abolish nearly all governments on the planet if you applied the standard across the board to their responsibilities and the innumerable ways they can - potentially - severely harm the people of a nation.
Whether Europe, the US, Asia, Latin America, Africa, corporations already provide nearly all of the world's food from start to finish, and are (typically) overseen / regulated by the governments of the world. But they can't be trusted to operate nuclear power plants? That doesn't make sense.
So who else is going to manage the global food supply if not people? (small businesses, large businesses, governments, whatever the case)
They're also charged with overseeing drug regulations around the world, which can easily kill large numbers of people if it's not done correctly. Who should regulate and manufacture drugs if not people? (small businesses, large businesses, governments, whatever the case)
Besides, nuclear power plants as a risk have nothing on good 'ol fashioned war. Would the plan be to take all national defense and all military control responsibilities away from governments? The point being, applied fairly, the actual replacement standard you're suggesting at is anarchy.
Well we have no solution for the byproducts of fossil fuels except to spew them into the atmosphere. So I'd say that nuclear fuel is superior.
We're not going to solve climate change while maintaining the same level of energy consumption without making some tradeoffs.
I feel like the environmentalist movement's sentimentalism is what helped to get us here. We change Earth - it's what humans do. We at least need it to be habitable.
Nuclear energy's risks are known and have solutions that exist today.
Actually we have solutions for All those byproducts. Just as with NO2,SO2 capture was enabled after we found those are bad. We can scrub CO2 too. It is just a matter of cost.
And desire.
> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
The US navy has been operating mobile nuclear power plants on water for decades with not a single issue. Why don’t you trust them? The people guarding the freedom in this country have no problem sleeping right next to one that has a high chance of being shot at and destroyed.
My own take on this state of affair is that I would trade a localized, visible and accountable (in all meanings of the term) pollution with our current globalized, amorphous and invisible (for now and still...) pollution that will lead to terrifying effects down the line (given some are already there).
Nuclear is not clean per se, but in scale, it is much, much more preferable.
> According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Yes, but realistic plans for addressing climate change generally entail converting a lot of other activities to electric power; this is on the table for everything from transportation, to heating + cooking, to steel manufacturing. Not to mention carbon capture; many of the options there require a lot of energy. Even if some modes of transportation continue to require chemical fuels, we may be using electricity to produce some of those fuels.
It's reasonable to quibble at the margins, but in the big picture, we are going to need a LOT of carbon-neutral electricity and that is going to drive a lot (the solid majority?) of greenhouse gas mitigation.
> The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.
What point are you making with regard to externalities? Everything has externalities, you just need to add them into your calculus. Are you suggesting the externalities of electric vehicles imply that we should stick to fossil fuels for transportation?
As for higher cost: cost should continue to come down as we continue to climb the learning curve. I don't know if / when the lines cross (and of course it will be different for different use cases and locations), but again - if we're going to address climate change, we don't have a lot of choices; we will have to find a way to bring costs down and/or subsidize the higher cost.
"Limited utility" is absolutely going to be an ongoing challenge, but again it's not like we're helpless to do anything about it. More charging stations, longer range, possibly adjustments to usage patterns. In some cases, yes, we might need to stick to chemical fuels and find carbon-neutral sources, but this is not ideal and my expectation+hope is that it will eventually be very much a minority of usage.
I should note, I'm not advocating for nuclear power as the source of all this electricity we'll need; the feasibility of scaling nuclear power is a complicated topic and personally, I honestly don't know what to think or expect. The point I am trying to make is that a BIG part of "how to stop emitting GHGs" is going to boil down to "how to generate a stupendous amount of carbon-neutral electricity".
1000 square miles is the area of a square 33 miles on a side. Assuming it's in a remote place, it's nothing relative to a aworldwide climate disaster. (If it were in a highly populated area, that would be a tragedy -- but surely nobody is going to put a nuclear plant next to a city.)
> While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Replacing fossil fuels outside electricity generation will require large amounts of electricity. Hydrogen production using electrolysis, electric arc furnaces, battery charging, etc.
And to add: there is another huge negative to nuclear. The hidden and forgotten costs of uranium mining and waste are almost always glossed over and forgotten.
The only solution for secure disposal of mines, and mining waste, is flooding. So now you have massive (50-5000 acres) ponds or lakes, to manage in perpetuity. We often hear of regular mining tailings ponds failing. Now imagine acidic, toxic and radioactive, water and sludge flooding down stream.
Example:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-min...
I think the concern about long term storage is somewhat overemphasized. In theory it should be possible to choose a fairly remote, geologically stable area and make it the storage site. The problems are more political than technical.
If it turns out that finding such a site isn't possible why don't we just grind the waste into a very fine powder and disperse it into the atmosphere? Coal ash is radioactive too and that's what we do with it. That was originally meant to be tongue in cheek but now I'm legitimately curious about how big an area you'd need to disperse a nuclear reactor's waste to get radiation levels no higher than you'd see from waste from a coal plant.
1) Electricity could replace most carbon usage, the amount generated now from carbon is almost besides the point.
"So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power generation and that part wouldn't change."
? We're going to electric cars. Cars currently run on fossil fuels because it was cheap and convenient, that will change.
2) We have at least mid-term storage and there are plenty of options on the table for long-term we just have to make up our minds.
3) The 'failure modes' are not that bad - nobody died in Fukishima - and - we can limit them. Neither Fukishima nor Chernobyl plants should have ever been running.
At this point, the only thing stopping us is ourselves.
To the extend we are organized and competent we can do it just as well.
Nitpick: in the Fukushima incident, one worker died of radiation poisoning and 273 (elderly) people died of evacuation-related stress.
Still negligible compared to the deaths from coal burning. And as you say, the Fukushima reactors are much worse than current designs like Hualong One.
Long distance (1000 km) transmission, wind AND solar, short term storage, load shedding agreements, and long duration storage.
Iron-air looks economically viable already for timescales of two days to two weeks. Hot rock storage, the same.
It's rare to get cloudy calm periods lasting longer than two weeks over 1000 km distances, but there are readily available seasonal storage choices.
Electrolysed hydrogen, either stored directly or as ammonia. Just need PV prices to fall a bit, which is expected, and the cost of electrolysis to fall, which is happening.
I have only hit the universals here. Depending on geography and mining history, there are a bunch of other storage options available in many places. Mechanical (gravity) storag other than pumped hydro is another possible technology. So is methane synthesised from CO2.
Edit. I'm in favour of nuclear, if the numbers work. The LNT theory should be exposed as the bull** that it is and ALARA abandoned in favour of specified limits. Then let nuclear compete with renewables.
This just sounds so crazy complex. It requires completely changing existing infrastructure. A lot more energy moving around (and that is not efficient).
If actually cared about efficiently transferring to fight climate change, and not build a utopia. We would simply create a list of all coal power stations, order them by age and then start building a nuclear plant right next to one after the other as fast as possible.
If you did it that way, you could in less then 20 years basically make your grid green. Most people wouldn't notice anything what so ever. No new infrastructure would need to be build. It would be reliable in basically all situations. And it would give you a very large base of highly educated engineers and technicians.
Compare that to just importing tons of PV from China and putting up tons of new transition lines.
> but there are readily available seasonal storage choices
Are there? Non have been deployed and if you look at modeling these need to be essentially free to actually happen.
> Iron-air looks economically viable
One startup claims this, they have not shown a prototype or given specs, it will not be commercially deployed for a few years. Its a bit early to claim its viable.
Fact is, storage beyond 2h is totally unproven. Most companies that have worked in this direction have failed.
> Electrolysed hydrogen, either stored directly or as ammonia. Just need PV prices to fall a bit, which is expected, and the cost of electrolysis to fall, which is happening.
Using direct heat is simply a better option then electrolysis on large scale. With advanced nuclear you can use nuclear heat to crack steam. Far better option.
It sounds like the market. Hayek was right: we don't need to plan this, we just need to let lots of people try to seize opportunities, and we'll get fairly close to an optimum.
And as I have said elsewhere, the costs are inevitable. Existing plant is wearing out and has to be replaced, one way or another.
What we're arguing about is who gets the money: fossil fuel miners, or entrepreneurs. Let the market sort it out.
You have government guided utilities and fake markets with fake pricing plus lots of intensives.
There are externalizes all over the place and there is strange mix between public and private that is hard to understand. Solar still gets incentives when they produce energy at negative prices for example. Fossil fuel has a huge negative externalize, and while I believe free market often produces good solutions for externalizes, it doesn't work on a global scale.
So you have issues on the traditional prices, you have the subsidies renewables that are pushed by mandates (ie you have to deploy 30% renewables) and in addition to that, renewable just use the grid as storage and let the grid provider worry about the problem and you have nuclear that is essentially blocked from developing.
Dispatch-able power is vastly under-priced in most markets.
Markets work if price intensifies carry real information, and in electricity markets have to many structural problems.
What should be done is what NASA did for space station supply. Select 5-10 competitors for next generation nuclear let them develop different concepts and go threw a multi round process where the company and the regulator learn, you end up building 3 and then promise at that you are gone order min. 3 more reactors from two of them. That would actually get nuclear in the market in a real way.
The crazy thing is that the government actually HAS the money to run this competition. Nuclear reactor providers have paying into an account for a long, long time. There are billions and billions available but its just a political issue that its not happening.
For better or for worse, energy is something government has been deeply and fundamentally involved with, 'the market' will not converge on the right solution in this situation.
The free market approach would probably work because nuclear has incredible energy density. And during the day, solar is crazy cheap.
The polluting energy sources are more expensive. How fucking lucky is that!
But I don't think nuclear deregulation will motivate the rapid change we require to avoid climate disaster. Carbon tax would help, I think, but there is zero chance it will be implemented on the global scale. (Fuck our lives, right?)
I actually think that if one country can seriously prove out modern GenIV reactors everybody will adopt them.
There is a serious chance you can power most of the global population by building reactors and putting them on ships. Most people live on the coast.
The most scary place is actually Indonesia, they literally have 100s of coal plants in development. Gigantic population and nothing other then coal. Thankfully the government there is actually aware of the problem and they are working with a nuclear reactor company called Thorcon.
This is a bit fishy because Indonesia doesn't actually have a regulator that is internationally accepted, but they are trying to build that at the same time. I am skeptical but its a great effort.
In Canada you have Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy doing amazing things. Terrestrial Energy is furthest along.
In the US you Kairos Power that seems active, and thankfully the regulator is starting to open up.
yes, and i get the feeling that like global communications, our power grids will have to be internationally (and continentally?) linked up so that different regions can augment lower generation elsewhere...
Also, a huge percentage of industrial emissions is due to fossil fuels being used for direct heating (e.g. natural gas used to fire a boiler or furnace). These loads can be electrified, they must be electrified, but electrifying them will take an unbelievable amount of power even compared to what we produce today.
Our grid will probably need to produce 3-4x what it currently does to get us electrified fully. A rapid paced plan to build a standard reactor design en masse is the only reasonable way to do that in a short period of time.
I don’t think this is being fully fair to the EV case.
You’re implying that the externalities of getting electricity to power a car (i.e. fossil fuel burning) would be a barrier but the thread is explicitly about having that electricity come from nuclear generation.
In terms of storage, I’m actually significantly less worried about this and would go as far to suggest it won’t even be an issue once we have EV’s at scale. V2G exists now for current EVs and essentially converts every car into a large battery for grid storage.
So, the worst nuclear plant ever occupies about twice as much land as the comparable solar installation would need.
Except they're not comparable are they? A decent chunk of that 75% is winter heating. Which, weirdly, lots of Russian districts have pretty much solved, somehow, without gas. Wonder how?
"you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them."
Presumably that would be power from nuclear power plants, making electric vehicles that much more carbon free. So the vehicle part could change, and dramatically as electric vehicles replace fossil-fueled vehicles.
>We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts
Currently fossil fuel plants vent all waste into the atmosphere, including radioactive byproducts. At least in this case, the waste is in solid form and can be contained somewhere.
Well, it's not ideal but what is the alternative? To me it is either nuclear or watch how the next generations are going to be the last ones, because there is no other solution (or improvement at least) at sight right now.
Dealing with nuclear waste is a can we can kick down the road for quite a long time. Climate change will kill many of us off by the end of the century.
Like what? And have you researched new generation reactor designs, like molten salt reactors? They address most of the problems with existing reactors, which are for the most part 50 year old technology.
It is always easy to say that unbuilt designs lack problems.
What we can be certain of is that, by the time construction of such a plant is completed, wind+solar+storage will be overwhelmingly cheaper. Building out solar is right now the best use of every climate-disaster prevention dollar. In the near future, storage will compete, as iron-air batteries come online, and long-distance transmission. Each dollar spent elsewhere, whether on building or patching nuke plants, or patching or fueling coal plants, brings climate disaster nearer.
I'm not saying the designs lack problems. Rather, I'm saying that they have addressed the problems you're talking about and are potentially considerably safer than old reactor tech.
>In the near future, storage will compete, as iron-air batteries come online, and long-distance transmission.
and if this doesn't happen? You're willing to risk our survival?
>Each dollar spent elsewhere, whether on building or patching nuke plants, or patching or fueling coal plants, brings climate disaster nearer.
You're equating coal plants with nuclear? Wow, you have quite a cognitive bias there. Nuclear plants have 0 carbon emissions, they don't contribute to global warming once constructed, and construction doesn't generate enough carbon to nullify that advantage.
Renewables can't meet our needs unless new technologies are developed. Nuclear CAN in its present state, and can do so even better if technological progress is made. Both must be pursued.
There are numerous viable storage technologies, just competing for which will be cheapest. Until that is settled and the variable share reaches a practical limit, the money is better spent on panels.
Iron-air battery tech is proven. Now it just needs industrial-scale build-out, which takes time: the factories need to be built before the battery farms.
Renewables can, in fact, meet our needs with already mature technology. All that is uncertain is which choices will turn out cheapest. If it were not those batteries, it would be others, or underground compressed air, or molten salt, or liquified air.
Nonetheless, refining aluminum at industrial scale using renewable energy has been demonstrated successfully for many decades. That somebody uses coal does not negate the fact.
Nukes and coal share the property that they are overwhelmingly more expensive, just to continue operating, than solar. Each dollar spent on a nuke, or on mining coal, is a dollar not spent building out the solar we need. A dollar spent building a nuke is a dollar that displaces exactly zero coal watts for ten or more years, vs solar that begins to displace coal almost immediately.
Solar and wind are displacing coal right now, watt-hour for watt-hour. Each additional panel and wind turbine wired in means less coal burned, right now.
Nobody but you is talking about coal and nukes being interchangeable. But it is a fact that both boil huge amounts of water for steam to drive through huge turbines that need frequent, expensive maintenance, and need elaborate cooling apparatus to turn the steam back into water. Both have large, unavoidable operating costs that make them uncompetitive vs. tech that does not.
Coal has the extra cost of mining and transporting coal, and environmental catastrophe. Nukes have huge corruption overhead and life-cycle costs, and long, long delay between spending money and getting any power at all out, with a strong likelihood of never, instead, plus risk of regional disaster.
It is not a fact that both renewables and nukes are needed. We already know that nukes are not needed. (Rather, you wish that nukes were needed.) With every nuke project that collapses, it gets better that it was not anyway needed. What is tragic about the failures is that so much was wasted that could have been used to build out non-dead-end generating capacity.
Chernobyl was the literal worst case scenario, the thing exploded. I'm big on nuclear but I also worry when humans are involved. There is a town near mine where the groundwater is polluted from a chemical company a long time ago. I've often wondered how long until all ground water everywhere is ruined given enough time. Then I think of nuclear power and it scares me.
Nuclear is dangerous, just like flying is dangerous. Yet we can manage that danger so well that flying is literally the safest form of transport around, thanks to a culture of safety, strong oversight and regulation.
There is a fundamental difference: flying isn't really dangerous (statistically) for those deciding not to fly.
Nuclear is dangerous for everyone ('indiscriminately'), even for many generations to come (hot long-lived waste).
I wrote 'statistically', meaning that this risk is extremely low. Moreover one can even considerably reduce it by not living or working nearby any airport.
During and after a nuclear disaster vast areas may become dangerous zones, and dangerous particles reach (thanks to wind or water) remote areas. Dangerous waste in a water table is also an ordeal.
Statistically, no civilian has died from nuclear power accidents in the last 30 years. None.
Hundreds have died due to airplanes falling onto them. See for example El AL cargo plane falling onto a residential building in the Netherlands in 1992, I believe it's the worst event but several lesser accidents have happened since then.
Oh wait. There was 9/11. More victims than Chernobyl, even taking the most pessimistic estimates.
This was intentional. Such an intentional action against a plant or a waste depot would be very, very serious. That's the reason why they are seriously guarded.
Chernobyl incident would be way more worst if those 3 people whose name I can't remember had not sacrificed their life. Those 3 people died within a week and if they were not there I guess Europe would probably be suffering for millenniums.
It’s just electrifying processes that use fuel today. Electric cars. Electric heating. Etc. That means we need more generation than we have today, especially in poor countries.
> According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.
We need all heating and all driving replaced with power, so an ever increasing amount of stuff falls into electricity. In France, where they had green nuclear power for 40+ years electrical heating is the norm.
All driving and heating should move to nuclear.
Modern nuclear can also be used to drive many industrial process including making potentially hydrogen and other chemicals that can then be used as feedstock for chemical industries.
> 1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;
If we switch to breaders we basically never need to actually do that.
> 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;
Most of the bad stuff can be burned up in advanced reactors. We even have the money to design such reactors already but sadly idiot politicians have deadlocked themselves on this idiotic Yucca Montain plan.
There is still some very little real waste left, but even if you power all of the US, you can literally store it all on a single parking lot for next couple hundred years without any issues. If we really use this technology it totally reasonable not to have a solution for the next 300 years. The amount is so limited that in 100 years you might as well be able to shot it into space or drop it deep into the earths core.
In the absolute worst possible case, you have a parking lot full of stuff that needs to be monitored and in very, very few scenarios it has to be moved or repackaged. But that is very unlikely. And if we are at a point where we can not even monitor a few inert boxes on a parking lot our society has way bigger problems then slightly radioactive inert boxes.
I literally mind-blowing that people believe this is a show stopper.
> 3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and
Tons of people live in the Exclusion Zone and they are perfectly fine. And comparing Cheernobyl to a modern Gen4 reactor is like comparing a first generation Zeppelin to a modern airliner.
And btw the Cheernobyl reactors were designed to make nuclear weapons, not civilian nuclear power.
> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
I have bad news for you buddy. The government already build and maintains and inspects NUCLEAR WEAPONS. That are literally 100000x more dangerous.
The US Navy has been using nuclear power for 50+ years and had very few issues.
And we HAD nuclear reactors running for a long time. France has literally had green energy for 40+ years and seem to be doing reasonably ok.
> The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.
Electric vehicles actually have MORE utility, not less. They are far quicker, more comfortable, have more interior space, less noise, better handling, safer and more reliable.
The lift-time cost of an EV is already beating ICE. The initial cost is higher so that is not fully felt, but even that is dropping fast.
> you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them
Chernobyl, famously, did not have a containment building around it. We don't build reactors like that. In addition today you can build reactors which simply do not have the failure modes that led to either Chernobyl or Fukushima.
> Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone
This is a pet peeve of mine. They always use flimsiest of statistics to "attribute it" so, but never mention how many people would die if it _wasn't_ for fossil fuels. The number would be in the billions. Much of Canada, and all of Russia's north would freeze to death. People in Africa, India and China would starve. Industry (and with it livelihoods of billions of people worldwide) would collapse. Europe would erupt in a war. And so on. Hardly a wortwhile tradeoff. And no, it is not possible to replace all uses of fossil fuels with electricity. Not now, not in the foreseeable future.
How often do you drive over a bridge? Or get a in a building that could collapse on you? Or fly in a plane?
That's not really so different than nuclear energy is except some of us have lost our collective minds and come to the erroneous conclusion that nuclear energy is _scary_.
The climate change potential of nuclear energy goes far behind the direct greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production. With cheap abundant electricity (as could be produced from nuclear energy in a sane world), industrial processes that burn fossil fuels could be switched to electricity and carbon skimmers could be run.
Not to mention your other concerns which I think can be aptly dismissed with a nice tech brain metaphor: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame"
Adapt or die. The water's lapping at your feet and you're looking at the spec sheet for a nuclear first-gen ipod and concluding there's nothing there.
And don't even get me started on your electric vehicle hot take. Battery vehicles are not the answer. We here in the Us practice a particularly perverted form of urbanism. Gimme a fucking train. Gimme more trolleybuses. Gimme walkable neighborhoods and dense design.
I am so sick of all of this bullshit, the answers are obvious
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Your comment here is a noticeable step in that direction, and we're trying to go the opposite way here. I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.
Edit: unfortunately, you've been doing this a ton lately, and we've had to ask you to stop before. That's not cool. We ban accounts that behave like this, regardless of how right they are or feel they are. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful.
You're not wrong, I've been a salty little bitch boy lately. Sorry. Not going to change any minds like that.
I do think that y'all admins have some moral complicity to wrestle with here in platforming folks making demonstrably false statements. Which wouldn't be a problem if there weren't such a vast asymmetry in the energy required to make such a statement and to dispute it.
Sometimes there are productive threads in this forum. But I'm not sure I've ever seen one about nuclear energy.
Y'all don't platform politics, presumably because the discussions turn into unproductive flamewars. Nuclear energy is in the same boat but with... somewhat higher stakes. So maybe y'all should consider not platforming discussions about nuclear energy...
Comparing a bridge or a plane to a nuclear meltdown seems pretty disingenuous. If a plane crashes at an airport that does not prevent the airport from being accessible by humans for 50+ years. If a bridge collapses that does not prevent you from building a new one at that location for 50+ years.
I don't think anything they described applies only to 1st generation plants. They all still hold true today. The thing with coal and fossil fuel power is that there was not enough planning of the entire system. The end result was the production of gases directly into the environment.
If we want to go down the nuclear route we need to design a well oiled closed looped system that can completely handle poking without any easily recoverable problems. There are many ideas in the pipeline such as molten-salt reactors. These take time to test, validate, and integrate into a cohesive system.
The biggest worry for me is shortcuts and penny-saving. How many parts of this system will be skipped do to being "to costly", "not financially feasible", etc...
I made the comparison because you are trusting your life to the government or corporation when you drive over a bridge or fly in a plane. Which is something most people do daily without thinking about it even though the death toll from collapsed bridges and plane crashes far outweighs that of nuclear energy.
Safety of later reactor designs is far improved from the earlier pressurized water reactors, although even those relatively dangerous reactors have been used widely in the navy without incident for decades. There are reactors already in use that are stable to perturbations, TRIGA reactors have negative temperature coefficients which make meltdown type accidents impossible. They are so safe, students are entrusted to operate one at Reed college. I would need to do more research to comment on perturbative stability of later reactor designs in use for power generation.
I share your concerns on the deleterious effects of economic pressure. Although my primary concern is that we will stop building them and decommission existing reactors, citing the high capital cost and cheap nameplate cost of solar.
There is a fundamental difference: flying isn't really dangerous (statistically) for those deciding not to fly. Nuclear is dangerous for everyone ('indiscriminately'), even for many generations to come (hot long-lived waste).
That is not supported by the statistics. Even including chernobyl and friends nuclear is the safest method of electricity production by a mile... And it's not like we only started collecting data recently
As for the future: no specialist denies that a running nuclear reactor (using any now-available architecture) is dangerous, and the industry accepts very strict (and more and more strict) security-related requirements. According to some the probability of a disaster is very tiny, however it just cannot be 0.
Who is entitled to coerce others into accepting a risk? Especially when the maximal impact is beyond all insurance cover, and with a risk extending to future generations?
Even taking the high estimate for chernobyl at value, deaths from nuclear still pale in comparison to deaths from fossil fuels... The WHO puts at 4.2M deaths/year from air pollution [0] and there are other studies putting it at twice that.
Coal also emits far more radiation than nuclear... this study puts it at 100x [1]
Who indeed is entitled to coerce others into accepting a risk. Except I would flip that the other way... the risk I am being coerced into running face first into catastrophic climate change instead of investing in nuclear energy.....
renewables simply can't meet base load requirements, grid scale energy storage doesn't exist... which means to phase out fossil fuels we need nuclear. there's no two ways about it
plus we could have done all of this decades ago if greenpeace/the oil lobby hadn't pulled off their incredible anti-nuclear stunt.
also renewables pose significant enviromental problems. going to kill a lot of birds and pave a lot of deserts (which are useful ecology not wastelands) to make ends meet. OTOH nuclear has spectacular power density
Ivanpah puts out like 400MW using 3500 acres. It also uses a shitload of natural gas and fries birds. Oops.
Diablo Canyon puts out 2.25GW using 12 acres. And doesn't fry any birds.
> renewables simply can't meet base load requirements
We read this since the 1990's. Meanwhile the share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption in Europe reached 19.7% in 2019, up from 9.6% in 2004.
A grid-scale storage exists and is already useful: dams (pumped-storage hydroelectricity). Others appear (electric vehicle batteries, hydrogen...). The need for storage is proportional to renewable sources variability, which can be tamed (sources mix, geographic dispersion...).
The main anti-nuclear stunts are the nuclear boo-boos, interpreted as warnings (mainly TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima).
Renewable are deployed a system (many units, just as nuclear plants) and a mix (many types: wind, solar, biomass...). Analyzing Ivanpah alone isn't sound, as variability is at its max.
There are contraptions reducing the impact (bird...) of wind turbines.
Off-shore (especially windfarms) and desert relieve a fair part of the low-power density effects, and local small systems (for example on rooftops...) also are part of the solution. This leads to a quite respectable density (in terms of useful land waster), while building a nuclear powerplant in a densely populated area becomes more and more difficult (Diablo Canyon's implantation site, Avila Beach, has 1600 inhabitants... on 16.15 km2!).
Even neglecting any direct accident, Diablo Canyons's warm waste may, in case of a new boo-boo, fry many things for many years.
Dense neighborhoods kinda suck everywhere Ive seen it tho? I like having a backyard and not sharing walls with my neighbors, and having some quiet, and low crime, and not having to hunt for seats on buses and trains, etc.
Do you like having to drive everywhere, to shops with massive parking lots? Or having stroads not safe for your kids to play on where cars blast past at 40mph?
Have you been to places where they do density right? Paris comes to mind, as does the urban centers of the Netherlands.
Not everyone wants to live in the city, that's cool. But even inherently low density suburbs in the US suck. We used to have walkable streetcar suburbs [0], then the car came along and fucked everything up.
Yes, and I really really hate dense places like Paris and Netherlands. Fun to visit but can't stand living there. I want my yard, and my individual walls, and my quiet neighborhood. I'm pretty much fine driving and don't care much about parking lots. I don't have kids so thats not really a factor, I remember going to parks all the time when I was small for this reason.
Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible solution. The local resources available dictate just too much what is the "best" solution but even then one should not put all the eggs in one basket.
But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse gasses being released from cars, construction (concrete), farming and various industrial processes. But the electricity seems to be the easiest problem to solve and once we have that on track to being fixed we can move more resources into the other issues.
> Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible solution. The local resources available dictate just too much what is the "best" solution but even then one should not put all the eggs in one basket.
It aggravates me to no end that people are fighting this pointless nuclear vs. renewables war, all the while fossil fuels are laughing all the way to the bank.
Should be invest in building nuclear? YES! Should we invest in wind and solar? YES! Should we invest in grid-scale storage? YES! Should we invest in transmission capacity? YES!
> But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse gasses being released from cars, construction (concrete), farming and various industrial processes. But the electricity seems to be the easiest problem to solve and once we have that on track to being fixed we can move more resources into the other issues.
Electricity is in some ways the easiest problem, yes, but also once we have clean electricity we can use that to decarbonize many other sectors. Transportation, to a large extent. Heating, yes. Many important industrial processes can use hydrogen, like steel production. Etc.
> But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse gasses being released from cars, construction (concrete), farming and various industrial processes. But the electricity seems to be the easiest problem to solve and once we have that on track to being fixed we can move more resources into the other issues.
With the exception of concrete and farming, the answer to the rest of these is "produce a shit load of power cheaply". A lot of industrial uses of fossil fuels are merely using them to heat something directly, like a boiler or a furnace. These kinds of work loads can be electrified, but the demand on our grid will go up massively.
Ditto with transit. We can make EVs now that are superior to ICE vehicles for 98-99% of use cases. We can make electrified rail transit a reality again if we want to. The issue is that we currently don't make enough electricity to meet current demands, industrial demands, and transit demands. We need a lot of electricity to do that, and we're currently nowhere close.
Not true: solar is the clear winner. Thus far, storage hasn't been important, but will become so soon. Very cheap iron-air batteries will roll out in 2023. Wind will remain important, as will long-distance power transmission.
Spending on other methods is not just wasted; it means not spending those dollars on solar.
But replacing Portland cement with one of the numerous carbon-neutral alternatives is urgent, as is building out all-electric ammonia and hydrogen synthesis: hydrogen for steel production, and ammonia to fuel retrofitted container ships.
Ok how do you use solar in Northern Europe during the winter? For 3 months you get less than 1% of the normal summer output (in most cases you will spend more energy just to melt the ice and snow off the panel)
Also hand waving the storage problem away with “just buy it from someone else using transmission lines” is naive. Basically that just makes you ultra reliant on those other countries that the line goes through of and whoever is on the other end of it. At least with coal and gas you can just ship it from some other party if politics block you from getting it from your current provider.
Where in Northern Europe? Norway, e.g., has lots of hydro. Iceland has geo. Different places will need different solutions. Wind is viable in many places. Tides, in some. Ships full of ammonia synthesized elsewhere will be right for some places, at times. (Norway is right now building a major industrial-scale ammonia synthesis plant.) And transmission lines will be important and unproblematic in many places (e.g. Sweden), even if not all.
The "storage problem" is solved by building out storage. Some places will need more storage than others; where you need a lot, underground or deep-water compressed air might be best. Transmission lines are a backup plan. You need to use everything. Cost matters.
Every unproven battery technology is "right around the corner." I would love cheap, scalable iron-air batteries to be available in 2023, but I am not holding my breath. We need to plan around technologies that exist, because we need to act now rather than wait 5 years before acting.
What we need to do now is build out solar panels. Until their share of generating capacity approaches a stability limit, spending on other tech is counterproductive.
Iron-air is not, in fact, unproven. Factories big enough to build what will be needed are right now under construction. We will need a lot. We will also need hundreds of ammonia and hydrogen production plants.
Just FYI, hydrogen fuel cells are hydrogen-air batteries. There's no rational reason to reinvent the wheel for what is basically an inferior version of hydrogen fuel cells.
Hydrogen fuel cells are not especially efficient, and are quite expensive. Efficient electrolysis is also expensive. Hydrogen storage is quite expensive. And, mitigating explosion risks around hydrogen is complicated. So, there are sound reasons to prefer other non-problematic storage.
If panels get cheap enough, overprovisioning to account for even a large round-trip loss may become a thing. Then, the cost of the storage and conversion equipment dominates. So, it seems like even after you have other reasons to make hydrogen anyway, a better storage medium seems worth using, too.
Nobody is quoting round-trip efficiency for the iron-air battery, so I would guess that is not very close to as good as lithium tech. Their descriptions of battery installations say they include a fraction of lithium cells; probably the lithium cells are used to smooth off the peaks, falling back to iron when the lithium cells get low. We have lots of other reasons to overprovision panels.
It is possible that, as hydrogen gets more integrated into the energy system, starting with steel production and later aviation, its use for primary storage will increase. That probably depends on developing cheap, volume production of aerogels for LH2 tankage. Cost will always be important.
The round-trip efficiency for iron-air is going to be worse or the same as hydrogen-air. They are both the same idea but iron-air is much less mature.
The other point is that hydrogen electrolysis and storage is cheap and in fact extremely so. In large facilities it is <$1/kWh and is basically unrivallable by anything else.
With iron-air, you charge by splitting rust to iron and oxygen, vent the oxygen, keep the iron in the battery; discharge by oxidizing the iron with oxygen from air. How do you get the iron to rust fast enough? How do you get the oxygen through the membrane and into the electrolyte fast enough? High pressure? Maybe you need thousands of cells in parallel to get much current flowing?
With hydrogen-air, you charge by separating water into hydrogen and oxygen, venting the oxygen, refrigerating and condensing the hydrogen into insulated tanks underground. (It slowly boils off, according as how good your tank insulation is; underground insulation can be very good.) Bank the removed heat? Discharge by boiling and then oxidizing the hydrogen to water vapor, condensing that to a tank for later, maybe using heat from condensation to help boil the LH2?
So, for iron you need to pump air to high pressure, and probably heat the iron. For hydrogen, you have to liquify it after it is hydrolysed, and move heat around a fair bit, and capture both H2 and (probably) H2O.
The Chileans are building a liquified-air (O2, N2) storage system. That charges by refrigerating and condensing air into insulated tanks, and pumping the removed heat into a heat reservoir. Discharge by boiling, using banked heat and latent atmospheric heat, venting through a turbine. The turbine needs much less maintenance than a steam turbine, because nothing gets hot.
I also heard that iron-air batteries are just another kind of metal-air batteries. The problem is that hydrogen-air batteries already exist, and are basically the same thing. Iron-air is therefore just reinventing of the wheel.
They vent the oxygen, and draw it back from the atmosphere as needed. Hydrogen would need to be stored, and probably liquified first. It is similar to the difference between a rocket and a turbojet: for efficiency, jets always win (except where you get to cruise through vacuum).
Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible solution.
This seems like a "fallacy of the option spectrum". Of course we don't try cold fusion or discredited options. Trying options based on how credit they seem is a reasonable approach but "try it 'cause it's a thing" isn't argument.
I agree, but would point out that "Try every option based on how credible it seems" is also an insufficient or under-specified answer, because the viability of each option depends on how much resources are invested in that option.
For example, if a trillion dollars were invested in nuclear reactors, it would probably be possible to build them fast enough and safely enough to satisfy most people, whereas spending just ten dollars on nuclear energy would not be enough to solve climate change. Similarly, over-building renewables and researching batteries with a trillion dollars might be enough to start reversing CO2 levels, but ten dollars won't make a difference.
Given limited resources, determining how to allocate them to maximise the probability of success is really the essence of the problem, rather than just identifying that there are several approaches that could be tried simultaneously.
I agree, but would point out that "Try every option based on how credible it seems" is also an insufficient or under-specified answer, because the viability of each option depends on how much resources are invested in that option.
I could say that how many resources an option has is a part of how credible it seems. But I didn't really specify an algorithm for choosing options, I just wanted to point out that "try it because it's an option" isn't argument in a world where one generally has unlimited hypothetical options.
Edit: all that said, different energy production methods have different capital intensity levels. You get zero for a ten dollar or even a ten million dollar investment in nukes today. Solar has lower capital intensity but can still can scale to meet needs.
The more money there is on offer for nukes, the bigger the corruption problem becomes. There is literally no upper limit on how much money corruption is willing to absorb.
But there is a lower limit, below which corruption will look elsewhere.
> We’d been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.
More importantly, people would be terrified of fossil fuel production. Spills, mining accidents, radioactive pollution (yes, coal puts out more radioactive pollution than does a nuclear power plant), particulate-related respiratory diseases, and so forth.
To think that people are afraid of nuclear energy is just crazy, I cannot comprehend how nuclear is perceived dangerous yet fossil fuels are somehow not.
People are more afraid of clearly defined risks (local nuclear plant goes boom) than more abstract risks (slowly developing health issues due to air pollution). (Can’t find citation, this was likely mentioned in book Freakonomics)
This is likely built into us through evolution. Natural selection has rewarded quick choices over analyzing and thinking probabilities.
I think it has to do with how humans are wired; slow burning dangers don’t seem to be registered the same way that nuclear fallout and the dread of meltdowns as one big catastrophe are.
A nuclear plant failure, I'm faced with something I can do nothing about. Coal .. well unless our case of whole-plane-pollution .. you can mitigate.
Same for cars vs planes. In a plane, I delegate my life to stats. Anything happens, I can do nothing about. My car.. I can always use slower, lighter roads, keep larger safety distance. Even if the odds of car crash are higher. (also if I were to drive alone in the midwest, my crash stats would probably be as high as planes.. density is a factor it seems)
I think it’s more of an illusion of control… you can control your car to some extent like choosing flights that might have better weather that day or something but ultimately nobody thinks they’ll be a statistic until they are. Plenty of people die choosing lower traffic roads too.
The parachute won't help you during the dangerous part of flight.
Do you know what the most fatal portion of the sport of skydiving is? Statistically, the most deaths occur during the drive to or from the airport. Now just think of how safe _commercial_ air travel is.
> A nuclear plant failure, I'm faced with something I can do nothing about.
You can evacuate.
> Coal .. well unless our case of whole-plane-pollution .. you can mitigate.
What can you mitigate with regards to the dangers of fossil fuels? If an oil tanker spills, or a mine collapses, or the Earth warms to the point that crops no longer grow in areas where agriculture is comfortable, or your children must breathe carcinogen particulates, then what can you do?
The first issues are local in space and time, the filthy air is an issue but I could see wearing masks, having filters, it's still humanly tangible, nuclear hazard requires more efforts and a small contact means critical disease. For the climate collapse yeah I agree. But still, this is 100+ years of planet wide accumulated foolishness, not a few plant failures.
China did adopt nuclear. They are building 15 nuclear power plants right now, more than anyone else in the world, and almost a third of all the plants under construction. It's just their needs grow very, very fast, so they make it up with coal.
From what I can tell from a quick google search, China has over 1000 coal plants, and is building almost 200 more [2]. The fact that China is building 15 nuclear plants instead of 150 feels like they're only dipping their toes into nuclear, not fully adopting it.
And it looks like the US has about 50 nuclear plants, with only 2 more under construction [3], so they're doing better than us, but that's a low bar.
They are however also designing and building their own molten salt reactors and are building next gen reactors on the pebble bed design.
So I think that somewhat excuses their lack of scale for now as they probably want to get operating experience with these technologies before scaling much harder than that.
Meanwhile Californians will tell us to manage power and power cuts.
I can’t get behind this agenda. It’s infuriating to see the west considering itself done. It’s in the name “Developed”, past tense. No need to develop anymore. We’ve thrown in the towel, large swaths of people are against population growth and against progress.
> large swaths of people are against population growth and against progress
Population growth is largely irrelevant unless you're really facing an extinction path (which we're very far from). The standard of living that can be delivered for people is what matters.
Modestly fewer people with increased standards of living is a very nice outcome for most nations. Some nations are drastically overpopulated in terms of density for their available space and resources (eg India, China). If you're in a more affluent context, having four or more children is not a blessing for most people. Raising two children well is a quite difficult and life-consuming task, even if one parent stays home full-time. It makes perfect sense that affluent populations would choose to reproduce at a lower rate. It's rational.
That said it's certainly disheartening to see the lack of spirit of seeking progress that used to widely exist in the West. It's still there, faintly, diminished.
Most economists think that population decline is tightly coupled with the economy. It may be rational in individual sense, but as a society, it is pretty much a bad idea.
> Most economists think that population decline is tightly coupled with the economy
To be fair, what “mosts economists think” tends to have fairly weak empirical support on purely matters that are purely internal to the narrow sense of the economy, and it only gets worse on economic connections to broader social phenomena. (And that's not even counting overtly ideological schools of economics like Austrian economics, where beliefs aren't even in principal empirically grounded.)
OTOH, there's a reasonably strong case to be made that reduced incentive for population growth is an effect of strong social saftey nets.
Oil Buddhists will have have allowed that. The dangers of greenhouse gases was already there, and it did not matter. It has caused wars and the rise of authoritarian governments, and it did not matter. When money is the main motivator for a country it's impossible to do what is good for the long term.
Couldn’t you just build nuclear powered container ships?
The biggest reason nuclear powered shipping isn’t mainstream is because many countries have local policies to prohibit nuclear vessels from docking.
If the major powers coordinated they could force the minor powers into cooperation. If a country like New Zealand refuses to let nuclear ships dock at their local ports, then simply throw them out of the WTO. They’d have no other option but to change their irrational anti-nuclear policies.
Ships sink at the rate of about 10 per year, and there are on the order of 80,000 large commercial cargo vessels in the world's trade fleets.
About 1/3 of that is dedicated to the movement of hydrocarbons themselves (mostly bulk crude oil, but also natural gas, coal, and refined products).
The total military nuclear fleet is on the order of 500 vessels, and actually accounts for the overwhelming majority of nuclear reactors in operation.
Sea lanes are not distributed evenly over the oceans, but are concentrated along a limited number of high-traffic routes, notably between China, the Straits of Malaca, Gulf of Aden, Suez, and Mediterranian, between western Europe and the Americas, and from the west coast of the US to Japan and China, by way of the Aleutian Islands (great circle route).
Odds of hull losses in coastal waters near fishing grounds and shore habitation are high. Piracy and other activities are another risk.
I'm wondering how the headlines following a decrepit nuclear-powered bulk carrier discovered to be carrying a cargo of poorly-loaded ammonium nitrate, blowing up somewhere in the Medierannian, South China Sea, or Singapore, and dirty-bombing the hell out of a few thousand square kilometres will read.
To be fair, there are a lot of countries that I would not trust to build safe nuclear ships. There'd need to be a shitload of regulation around the building of these ships.
Container shipping is pretty efficient. I found this quote:
> A big ship will emit about 0.4 ounces of carbon dioxide to transport 2 tons of cargo 1 mile. That’s roughly half as much as a train, one-fifth as much as a truck and nearly a fiftieth of what an airplane would emit to accomplish the same task.
For CO2 emissions, container shipping from Shenzhen to Long Beach by ship is about the same as Bloomington, IL to Long Beach by truck.
Good point! Just because there is a concentration of some activity in one part of the flow of commodities doesn't mean that the activity is inefficient.
I count 12 deaths in the US from nuclear related accidents in the US since 1955. [1].
Chernobyl, the worst recorded nuclear disaster, was directly responsible for 33 deaths and estimates on total attributable deaths due to health complications from radiation range from 4,000 to 60,000 [2].
In 2018, it is estimated that fossil fuel air pollution was responsible for over 8m deaths worldwide. [3]
Mortality rate by tWH isn't even close [4]. Fossil fuels are significantly more damaging both in terms of loss-of-life and habitability on this planet.
During and immediately following the Chernobyl incident, all of Europe and large portions of Asia were under warnings or restrictions due to radiation hazard concerns. Lives of some 450,000,000 people were disrupted for at least weeks, and in cases years and centuries.
Around the former site extending 50 km (30 mi) (a bureaucratic rather than scientific determination) is an exclusion zone which must be maintained for 300+ years.
Duration for which the former core and reactor itself will remain lethally radioactive extends to tens of thousands of years.
Both intervals greatly exceed the span of virtually all human institutions, as well as modern languages, writing systems, let alone civilisation itself.
Our measures and senses of risk are very poorly suited to such timeframes. (A problem also in addressing fossil fuel hazards.)
The difference in deaths and severe effects on health and ecology is incomparable. Coal absolutely dwarfs nuclear. Like hundreds or thousands to one. Even if a Chernobyl happened twice a year, like it or not, the resulting pollution and death would be less than what coal mining and coal power plants do. THAT is the reality people don't want to admit because the anti-nuclear propaganda and scaremongering has worked so well.
(All of which gets kinda exposed when there's opposition also to fusion, so many nay sayers, and it won't work this, and it takes 40 years that... also, I swear, if I'm going to see one more "fusion reactor in the sky" tweet from Elon, my head's gonna explode. Dirtbag manipulator.)
Quantities of radiation released by coal plants under normal operations are not a health concern. Coal has plenty of other health, and environmental, concerns.
Quanities of radiation released by a coal plant are unlikely to vary much at all, no matter how critically mismanaged the plant might be.
Quantities of radiation emitted by a badly-mismanaged, sabotaged, or attacked nuclear power plant, on the other hand, become a health concern for people across continents and beyond, as with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
(Note that "concern" need not mean "realised risk", but given that one of the characteristics of nuclear incidents to date has been inaccurate or misleading information on precisely the levels of risk presented, prudence and caution strongly recommends presuming a worst case until otherwise conclusively demonstrated.)
Of course, coal kills a lot of people. But instead of investing the money in nuclear power plants, one could also build wind/hydro power plants and solar plants...
Regarding reserves, the article makes the usual mistake of taking currently known and cheap sources as definite. But consider how Mad Max came out in the late 1970s, when the fear of completely running out of oil was evident to everyone. And yet, we have now found so much more oil that we have to force ourselves to stop using it.
We haven't been looking for more uranium simply because there is no need for it. The known _cheap_ reserves are barely tapped. And there are many known sites that are simply not tapped yet because the aforementioned ones are just so cheap. If there was a need for more, prospecting would be profitable and would be done.
(As an aside, taking uranium out of sea water is almost certainly never going to be worth it.)
And the same applies to thorium or fast breeder reactors. They're just not worth the effort at this time. But again, if the demand was there, it would take just 10 years to build them.
Last I calculated all USA energy need can be fullfilled by about ~800 ( + 150% to cover all kind of storage and transmission ) Billion USD investment in solar.
On the other hand, do we have any idea about how long Nuclear power will last, If we produce lets say, 50 percent of all our energy needs from it ?
> do we have any idea about how long Nuclear power will last, If we produce lets say, 50 percent of all our energy needs from it ?
This is hard to estimate precisely, since we don't know how much uranium is yet to be discovered. At the low-end, using current estimates for mineable Uranium, and today's light water reactors, about 460 years. At the high end, using newer breeder reactors and extracting uranium from seawater, as much as 240,000 years. Using a reasonable estimate for mineable uranium, and newer breeder reactors, about 120,000 years.
Let's be conservative and say "at least a few thousand years".
Personally, I'd say if we can't get off Earth and find some new fuel sources in a few thousand years, we deserve whatever happens. And frankly, if it takes us more than 200 years to get useful fusion reactors, something has probably gone wrong, and we're back to burning wood in caves anyway.
Your source directly contradicts the "460 years" figure.
There they estimate a 230-year supply at today's consumption rate. Nuclear energy currently supplies 4.0% of the global primary energy production [1]. According to that estimate, producing 50% of the primary energy using currently available reactors would exhaust the world Uranium supply in around 18 years.
A follow up question: If $800 Billion investment in solar will provide USA with iŧs current energy needs, why bother with the slower and more polluting process of building nuclear reactors and mine for uranium at all?
The sun will keep shining 10.000 years from now, there is no need to move of the planet to find new fuel sources if we just keep letting the sun shine on us.
A coal plant costs about $ 2 billion, and there are 241 of them in the US. So that's $481 billion. They provide 23% of US generation capacity. So if we assume a similar cost, that's $2.1 trillion for the total US generating capacity. But you say solar can do it for $800 billion. So now you have to explain why, if solar is really that cheap, the power companies like to throw away trillions of dollars on more expensive tech.
The answer is pretty obvious: those plants aren't new and solar wasn't an option when they were built. There haven't been new coal plants built in the US in some years, and the reasons are purely economic. Wind and solar made up 76% of the generation added last year for that reason[1]. The companies have sunk costs in their existing coal plants, but the economics of solar/wind have become so favorably they've been prematurely retiring them in droves.
Does that take into account battery costs and the costs of building up our manufacturing capabilities to build all that? What about the fact that the average lifespan of a panel is about 20 years and solar panels contain very toxic chemicals. There's already a solar waste crisis that's about to grow exponentially and we still don't have a solution for recycling them
That means we only get electricity, when the sun is shining. Yes, solar can be good. But it’s got to be mixed with other tech such as battery, and perhaps even nuclear.
The comment you are replying to mentions storage and transmission.
It doesn't take much storage to operate solar in a "baseload" manner. Already, most new utility scale deployments are shipping with storage.
For a long long time, the DC electricity side of a solar installation has been cheap enough that the design of a system will have an 20% extra DC over the capacity of the inverters change the DC to AC electricity for the grid. As panels have gotten cheaper, this loading factor has creeped up to 1.5 and 1.6 in many installations.
Since battery storage is also on the DC side of the installation, adding storage of the doesn't even require adding more panels, it can just use the existing clipped solar energy. And when we start adding more panels to get the loading factor up to 2 or 3, the solar power installation becomes nearly completed dispatchable to meet grid needs. This is simple and straightforward changes of parameters in existing designs.
Right now, usually 2-6hours of nameplate capacity. This is all that's really needed to meet the evening and morning parts of the duck curve, particularly since most grids have hydro and wind as well.
However, if there's need for more, then the storage side could be expanded. Personally, I'd like to see a ton more expansion of solar and storage behind the meter, at people's homes and at industrial and commercial sites, so that we can reduce the need for transmission and distribution. The US stats for electricity costs are something like $0.13/kWh on average, with $0.05 of that from generation costs and $0.08 from T&D. Even if installation costs are slightly higher at smaller, more distributed sites, T&D isn't cheap either. And having more distributed generation and storage as the potential to greatly increase reliability, particularly after natural disasters.
That's not really true. More so than just covering for night you have weather, and seasons which have significant swings in solar productivity. It not a baseload.
Distribute your solar across multiple geographic locations
> seasons which have significant swings in solar productivity.
Install enough panels so that in the seasonal lull you still have enough power. Panels are super cheap these days.
Solar panels and storage are on learning curves just like integrated circuits are for Moore's law. We are seeing absolutely astounding drops in cost every year, and innovation is happening continuously.
The future world of renewables energy is one of extreme energy abundance. We will size our generation so that in the seasonal lulls we have enough energy, which means that in the rest of the year we are going to have absolutely massive amounts of energy available that's near to zero-margin cost (assuming you can move your electricity consuming application to be close to the generation site, since transmission will still be expensive). And this curtailed electricity has far more potential uses than the waste heat that comes out of a nuclear plant or a coal plant.
Your wishy-washy handwaving style of argument is all fine and good for the internet but show me a country (or even a reasonably sized city) that's actually self-sufficient from solar and wind renewables (backed by storage).
Why do you think Germany is signing multi-billion/multi-decade contracts to ship Russian gas if solar/wind+storage is a solved problem?
Do you have any estimates for the amount of coal that would be required to burn in order to manufacture the required solar photovoltaic cells to cover US energy needs? Does that include the increased energy requirements from shifting transportation to electric? Also, considering that energy consumption increases from year to year, how is that factored into your calculations?
Solar's return-on-energy is quite large - on the order of 10x, so you could bootstrap the process of creating all the solar panels you would ever need with a trivially small investment of non solar energy. In practice, it will be higher, but given those economics, every solar panel you manufacture deters 10x the same amount of non-solar electrical consumption.
You need to be precise with how you talk about the shift in energy demand due to EVs. It's not a net energy increase. EVs are far more efficient than gas vehicles. I assume what you mean is increased electricity demand. You can back this out based on typical driving metrics - 250wh/mile is a typical efficiency for electric vehicles. If each driver does 10k miles/year and there are 200M drivers in the US, then this equates to a 13% increase in electrical demand for full adoption[1]. You could probably add on 2% more for efficiency losses in transmission and charging, so call it an additional 15%. That's effectively worst case as it assumes no reduction from the removal of the current infrastructure(ie pumps for gas pipelines, heating for refining, trucking, etc). Those are huge users of energy (though much in forms other than electricity). Oil refinement alone accounts for ~4% of all energy use(not just electricity) in the US.
EVs are so efficient, transitioning to them will probably consume less energy than just the energy we currently spend producing and distributing gasoline. We'll probably need to add to electrical infrastructure, but compared to the savings that is easily justifiable.
How many tons of coal do we need to burn to convert everything to renewables? How many mountains / forests / bodies of water do we need to destroy to get the raw materials to complete the shift to renewables?
My question is: When the shift has been completed, how many of today's natural habitats will still be standing? I'm not asking how about solar's efficiency.
Why not use solar panels to produce more solar panels, as they are produced?
Nuclear has the same bootstrapping problem as any other power source, but it also has the problem that we don't yet have a way to produce concrete without emissions, and our carbon-free steel methods are still in their infancy, and those are serious inputs to any new nuclear build.
>Last I calculated all USA energy need can be fullfilled by about ~800 ( + 150% to cover all kind of storage and transmission ) Billion USD investment in solar.
I've been doing some research into cryogenic energy storage and it seems like a universal solution to the grid scale energy storage problem. It uses off the shelf industrial components, can be located almost anywhere, doesn't use any rare or expensive elements, and there is no pollution in the cycle. The general idea is you cool air until it liquifies and store that in large storage tanks when you have an excess supply of energy. Then when you need to discharge the battery you boil the air and run the resulting gas through a turbine. It's also fairly cost competitive with a LCOS of $140/MWh, which is less than the cost of generating a MWh with new nuclear power plants.
You can't ship solar power to remote places that need power in the way you would a barrel of oil, or coal. We also don't have batteries that are up to the job of storing power.
I know exactly one family that lives off the grid. I also know exactly one family that lives entirely on solar panels and batteries.
It shouldn't be a surprise that they are the same family, solar is really the only electricity generation solution that scales down nicely for remote places.
Solar fails at high power density applications, like airplanes, not remote ones. I suppose it also fails at "remote and north of the arctic circle/south of the antarctic circle" ones, but that's a pretty tiny rounding error of energy usage.
> I suppose it also fails at "remote and north of the arctic circle/south of the antarctic circle" ones, but that's a pretty tiny rounding error of energy usage.
On the contrary. Shipping diesel to remote Alaskan villages is so incredibly expensive, even with subsidies, that they're seeing a boom in solar power even that far north.
What tiny fraction of world energy use is that, however? And of existing world use of energy like that, most of it is used to extract fossil fuels. There's not much reason to be out in remote areas except for resource extraction.
This forbes article from 2 years ago (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...) explains that, to replace the world's fossil fuel consumption with nuclear power consumption by 2050, a new nuclear power station would have to be brought online every day between now and then.
I intuit (perhaps wrongly) that even one per 10 days is extremely far fetched.
So, if 2050 is the deadline by which we must become carbon neutral in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change, I guess nuclear power cannot amount to as much as 10% of the solution.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a truism that, in the 20th century st least, civilian nuclear power plants were simply a wheeze for the actual grand plan: weapons manufacturing? The two are coupled in a way that doesn’t feel comfortable.
Imagine a different timeline in which something called an Apricot bomb became the ultimate must-have weapon of mass destruction to ensure a seat at the big boys diplomatic table. E.g. you smash apricot stones together to produce annihilation.
Suddenly we have government programmes researching the health benefits of apricot juice, a system of distribution of apricot juice to all elementary schools, university departments funded specifically to produce generation after generation or stone fruit experts, oh and sure, a bomb or two, but trust our top men: that’s not the main focus, silly citizen!
The most enduring product of any nuclear power project is not radioactive waste, but corruption. Nuclear power construction projects, at least in the western world, invariably become conduits for wholly legal, long-term corruption, making nukes about the most expensive kind of power (ignoring externalities from coal). This is a common feature of big-ticket public-works projects, particularly also including tunnel projects and military procurement.
Nukes take so long to build not because it is so hard to do -- it is mostly just concrete and plumbing -- but because nobody actually involved wants the construction money ever to stop flowing. No output is even promised for years, which is easily stretched out, often beyond a decade. Sunk-cost fallacy helps this process: once a few $B are burned, it is easy to unlock more against the prospect of admitting what was already spent bought nothing.
As bad as is the corruption around fission, fusion has been and must be much worse. A fission plant is expected to produce power eventually, or the plug will finally be pulled. One recent fission failure has cost $30B, so far, which seems like a lot, but fusion has burned more already without even breaking ground on a plant. ITER, even if 100% successful, will generate zero watts: no turbines are in the site plan. A plant built after it would cost, conservatively, >$50B and take decades to finish. (The most likely outcome would be that it is never finished.) Meanwhile, the costs of solar, wind, and storage are still plummeting, with no hint of a lower limit.
Thus far wind and solar have mostly avoided becoming conduits for corruption, probably because it is easy to see how the money is spent, and maybe because of the high fraction of idealists involved. (The exception is solar thermal.) Power can begin flowing almost immediately, after a small fraction of the whole installation is done, which can then fund further construction. Thus, the up-front capital needed is small, and costs are constrained by immediate revenue.
Thus, every penny diverted to fission and fusion (not to mention feeding and maintaining coal) from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe ever nearer.
ITER isn't a commercial project. It's a multinational research project.
You're basically saying "research is corruption because it isn't guaranteed to produce a result", well, if it was, it wouldn't be research.
The plan for fusion: First, prove it can work. Then, worry about commercialization and cost reduction after we know it works.
You're also glossing over the fact that if fusion works, it solves a lot of problems other renewables don't: density, reliability (at night, on a still day, etc), possibly cost overall. Probably more, I'm no expert.
ITER is a research project that is costing more just to build, before any research happens, than a full-scale commercial production fission plant. (The scientists are not getting much of that. But somebody is.)
There is much that nobody knows about getting fusion working. What we can be confident about is that if ever made to work, it will cost way more than a fission plant of equal capacity. Fission is itself not competitive today, and gets less so every day.
A>B>C => A>C
Is this logic hard to follow? Cost of fusion is unknown, but already very large. Cost of renewables is known, small, and reliably decreasing.
50 years ago, you'd have told us to avoid developing weather satellites because we already have proven cheap anemometers. Obviously, that would have been a poor idea in hindsight, nevermind the tangential benefits of other space tech (satphones, GPS, etc).
Who is to say that fusion plants are necessarily going to remain as expensive as you claim them to be in the midst of another industrial revolution? This isn't a Wikipedia article for no reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Industrial_Revolution
You have to do research if you want the benefits thereof. Sure it can be expensive and time consuming... but investments have cost and risk. We're trying to get a big payoff, not save every possible cent in the now.
Also, I would argue that the building of it (and design of it) is of course part of the research, not "something that happens before any research can happen" as you said.
50 years ago, I was 100% in favor of making weather satellites. I was right, then, too.
What they are building at ITER lacks any apparatus needed for actually getting usable power out of the system. All of that is still completely theoretical, and needs, just for itself, decades of development work not even begun. Likewise, any of the apparatus needed to swap out parts of the reactor as they get destroyed by hot-neutron flux. That, too, has not even been started on, and will not be for decades. When ITER destroys itself, there will be nothing to do but bury it. They are not even prepared for that; is built above ground.
Read up on what capturing hot neutrons involves. The short answer is that it is all, necessarily, monstrously more expensive to build and operate than a fission reactor needs.
Fission reactors are not competitive today, and get less so every day. A reactor that costs 10x the equivalent fission plant will be even less competitive in 50 years, which is the earliest one could even conceivably be completed.
There is no plausible scenario in which Tokamak fusion ever becomes an attractive power generating option. Even orbiting solar-power satellites make more economic sense, and they are bonkers.
There are other, more plausible fusion alternatives, but there is no money for them. Tokamak eats all the fusion money.
The Tokamak research program makes sense only as a jobs program to keep hot-neutron physicists employed so there remains a pool to draw on for weapons work. It has no plausible product.
This seems pretty naive to me. Big public works projects are big so they take a lot of time and money. Of course there's political overhead and graft, etc. However, I'd argue that doesn't really matter.
Let's say it costs $10 billion to build a nuclear plant producing ~2 GWatts (something about what has costed historically). This includes all the graft and corruption of which you speak.
We need around 500 of them (need ~1 TWatt) to replace all existing electric power generation for a total cost of $5 trillion. Financed over 15 years that's $50 billion a year (~8% increase in federal spending).
So really who cares if public works projects are inefficient? For a modest tax increase (or modest debt increase) we're done with primary energy-production related emissions.
Added benefit is we can almost certainly export our now resurgent and world-leading fission power plants around the world. This would (a) solve a big part of the climate change problem (b) make America look good, particularly if we provide fission technology at-cost (c) position us as a technology leader in the sustainable/renewable energy sector.
As a sidenote, it's also VERY likely that building 500 hopefully identical power plants would drive costs down significantly. Numbers given are worst-case.
I estimate 3/4 the cost of a nuke plant (when it gets finished at all) is graft. Besides the waste, it enriches crooks who go on to poison public decision making. That is how we got where we are now.
It costs more just to operate and maintain an existing nuke than to build out new solar. That is why they are being retired, and new projects are cancelled. Their power gets less competitive with every day that passes.
> That price is at least 5x solar+wind+storage.
Do you have a source? This seems.. unlikely to be true.
As for your point on graft, you seem to have a very black/white view of government. I find, in general, that black/white views are usually wrong quite often, since very few things are black/white. While I'm sure we can point to many examples of big public works projects that were debacles, certainly there are many examples which have turned out quite well. An immediate assumption that any large public works project will turn out badly is, I think, naive.
We have many decades of experience with, specifically, nukes. If any were not debacles, we would be hearing about them. (They have, though, enriched certain people.)
I do indeed have a black/white view on graft: I am against it. Your argument in its favor, and for nukes on the back of that, is not persuasive.
The US especially needs to solve the construction generates corruption problem before it can have sane nuclear power.
It needs to do this for public transit as well. But the thing with solar is you can ramp it up and then worry about how to store the cyclical excess and this means you can make the storage mechanism competitive.
No waste disposal is wrong. For both solar cells and wind power. The panels are hazardous waste, and the carbon fiber blades are so far not economically recycleable, thus land fill material. Both last no longer than about 10 years, after that they are degraded too much, blades of wind turbines sometimes degrade even faster. Furthermore you can't put a wind turbine into the ground like a toothpick, especially not one about 200 meters high. They need massive concrete foundations, and if in a forest, broad ways to deliver and maintain the stuff. Guess what producing all that shit at scale means? More emission of the stuff you want to counteract the atmospheric effects of.
Never mind, shit happens.
Also stuff at sea degrades faster, and usually needs a shitload of continous maintenance to counteract that degrading. There is no cheap and clean storage at the scale needed, at least if you don't play stupid externalization games.
The needed stuff does not grow on trees and needs to be produced in energy-, material- and transport-intensive ways, emitting even more of the stuff whose atmospheric effects it is supposed to counteract.
I think we are past the point of being so picky that we think we can afford to ignore all non “perfect” solutions. We have to recognize that to engineer our way out of climate disaster we will have to employ solutions that create new problems (e.g., nuclear waste) that we will have to solve in the future. As long as these problems can be solved later (which to an extent is true with nuclear waste), then we must proceed.
It's a bit cheeky but I like to point out that the Sun is nuclear power. It's a maintenance-free fusion reactor so powerful that it can blind you from 150 million km away.
Nuclear in the short term, Fusion or Thorium reactors long term should be the goal. Get MIT's Spark reactor funded and built and lets hurry up and finish ITER, while we prototype Thorium in some medium sized cities.
High density power generation is the key. Look at all the problems that come with wind and solar: land usage, transmission lines, loss of energy when weather becomes unfavorable, the amount of battery storage you need to manufacture.
Put simply: Yes. Nuclear Power is (part of) our Best Bet Against Climate Change.
I don't even think this requires further arguments, in 2021. This fact has been known for like 20 years, by anyone having a clue about orders of magnitude and energy.
The first part of this piece seems weird because this is not anymore about developing "nuclear vs fossil" but about developing "renewable sources or/xor nuclear".
I guess there are two types: 1) those who oppose nuclear because they fear science and don’t grasp the logistics involved in solar, 2) those who might have been able to prevent climate change if they had more political sway many decades ago.
I think the first group will win, because it will always be the larger group. It will always be a smaller group that have greater intelligence and foresight. For this reason I think discussion and public debate about climate change is counter productive. Trying to involve more people in a solution will just bring more mediocre minds to the discussion and hinder our best attempts to solve the problem with their innumeracy, ego and lack of scientific understanding.
My biggest concern comes from waste storage, of which my information came from a congressman who had to directly manage the waste in a particular state.
To store this waste you must trust many moving parts, including greedy politicians, greedy corporations and more.
None of which have ever proven to be trustworthy indefinitely.
I'd rather have less electricity and peace of mind than nuclear and be forced to trust the untrustworthy to protect our lands forever.
I feel like saying "discussion is bad because it brings mediocre minds" to a discussion is a bit gatekeep-y. That applies to every discussion.
That being said though, I do agree somewhat with the premise that "democracy is great because anyone can vote, but it is terrible because anyone can vote."
It sucks when some field becomes political, because the attitude around it changes from "lets listen to the experts" to "it is my God-given right to have an opinion on it regardless if I understand the issue."
The problem with "listening to the experts" is that at some point people figure out that the experts are very easy to bribe/intimidate/silence. So if we hand over the reigns of the nation to experts, then that's basically ceding our decision making to whoever can best organize to control the most experts. Don't think that academia and the tenure process aren't rife with groupthink, forbidden thoughts and positions, etc. And it's hard to find a group of people with less integrity than researchers chasing grants or academics trying to get tenure. Today, universities are the places where freedom of thought and expression are most suppressed, and groupthink runs rampant. Academics are under the thumbs of administrators and terrified of angry student groups. Researchers are sometimes afraid of being physically attacked if they espouse the wrong opinion. This is not who you want to hand control of society over to.
So there is really no substitute for wisdom and intelligence. A foolish population is going to make foolish choices and a wise population will make wise choices. Both science and politics are downstream of culture.
It does nothing to reduce the consumption frenzy, and it does nothing to remove CO2 / CH4 from the atmosphere, and it does nothing to reduce insolation.
Something like the MEER:ReflEction project[1] seems to be more appropriate to me.
It can cleanly (zero excess carbon) provide vast amounts of energy for direct air capture of CO2 (energy is the biggest barrier for that).
The efforts proposed in the site you linked require huge geological-scale engineering efforts never before attempted. Nuclear is really here and it works well the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time.
Don't get me wrong, changing mindsets and reducing consumptive behavior are at the root of the problem as well, just remember that 'perfect' is the enemy of 'good'.
Also by virtue that nuclear plants are too expensive, take far too long to plan, authorize and build, only make sense in stable developed countries where the dirtiest and fastest growing carbon emissions are generally in more unstable third-world countries. Oh and they aren't fairing well against solar and wind plus storage in terms of price: It will probably be less than a decade before wind and solar + storage are cheaper than nuclear.
You're being downvoted, but I think there is some truth to what you are saying:
1. Humans have shown time and again that they simply aren't capable of the global wide self-sacrifice that would be required now to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Just look at a chart for global greenhouse gas emissions over time. The only time you even see a slight reduction is when there is a massive global recession or pandemic. We basically need about "2 or 3 pandemics-worth" of reductions annually to hit our goals. This just isn't going to happen.
2. That said, I think it will be possible to transition over to primarily renewables, but the main driver for this will be economic (solar and batteries are continuing to plummet in price). It will just take a long time (or, at least, longer than we really have) before this increase in renewables really starts to dent CO2 emissions. Thus, I think maintaining a focus on emissions is a good thing, because it will still help that transition to renewables happen faster.
3. Your second sentence is absolutely true though. I think at least a 3 meter sea level rise by 2100 is pretty unavoidable by now, and that will have a massive impact on coastal cities. Significant impacts from climate change are unavoidable at this point, so we should start planning for this.
Well for the last 50 years we haven't had the budget/motivation to do meaningful emissions cuts. So the idea that now it's urgent that we do mitigation, we can split that budget/motivation seems... Hopeful.
There is a very finite supply of uranium.
The same as with coal, natural gas, oil etc.
If we build a substantial number of nuclear power plants
all across the world, that resource may run out within
200 years.
We have then left our future generations with several hundred new sites that cant be used for anything productive for 100s of years or a lot more.
A ton of nuclear waste nobody knows what to do with.
Transporting highly dangerous uranium from where they dig it up, to the power plants and then from there to somewhere safe is risky.
It would be the top mission of terrorist groups to capture.
They dont have to make a bomb, or anything very advanced.
Just spreading it over a city like NYC would be bad.
Some say we reached peak uranium in the 80s, some say in 30 years ahead. All agree that it is going to happen.
The usual retort from nuclear lobbyists is that we will have nuclear power that is new and advanced so there won't be any nuclear waste left that we must worry about.
And that new nuclear powerplants will not have the errors the hold ones did, so Fukushima, Chernobyl could never happen.
These new advanced nuclear reactors do not exist in any numbers and a lot of them do not exist period. They are ideas on a drawing board.
Thorium reactors would have access to fuel that is a lot more plentiful and easier to extract. Nobody has yet built a proper Thorium reactor that is reproducible and affordable. Waste would also be less dangerous. Yet some of the transitions the thorium reactor process would have would be extremely dangerous. Hopefully, they would not stay in that state awfully long.
Breeder reactors would extend the uranium supply for an extremely long time. There are two reactors that are in part based on this concept.
If we were to start investing in nuclear power, then we need to finance building one these new reactors and observe it over 10 to 30 years.
That should be enough time to learn about most bugs, dangers, faults, and problems.
If it looks good, we build a few more and see what happens.
Over several hundred years we could have enough new reactors running.
Planning to construct a lot of untested reactors in parallel around the world is to me an exceptionally bad idea. We need to test learn, fail and learn in an iterative process
IMHO Focus of financing and building sources for electricity should be focused on renewable energy that can keep going for a long time.
Uranium is very common element. From your linked article :
> If one is willing to pay $300/kg for uranium, there is a vast quantity available in the ocean.[63] It is worth noting that since fuel cost only amounts to a small fraction of nuclear energy total cost per kWh, and raw uranium price also constitutes a small fraction of total fuel costs, such an increase on uranium prices wouldn't involve a very significant increase in the total cost per kWh produced.
So countries could build known
and will tested reactor types to decarbonize world electricity production.
Further, given weather calamities due to global warming are detected, having dispatchable power less dependent on weather conditions is super important.
Eventually we would need to remove co2 from atmosphere as well, which is requires additional energy
Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced anthropogenic climate change is a thing, or that if it is a thing that it is more significant than natural variations of climate. The economic and political consequences of the proposed solutions to this alleged crisis (enrich these corporations and these nations at the expense of these corporations and these nations) are too glaringly one sided to suggest empirical impartiality.
It also continues to astound me that proponents of the “climate crisis” narrative never make any mention whatsoever of the fact that the most valuable energy company/car company in the world makes solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. Instead climate crisis actors demonize Tesla for not being unionized (eg, Tesla excluded from the White House American Electric Car Summit) and are lining up at the piggie trough for exclusive Biden bucks that will fund infrastructure investments that will help Ford and GM catch up to Tesla.
To wit: our best bet to speed the transition to sustainable energy is to get out of the way of the capitalists who have already solved this problem with superior transportation and energy products.
>Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced anthropogenic climate change is
Are you amused how some idiots are convinced Earth is flat where is so easy to prove is a sphere or some round shape?
Similarly it trivial to show that if you put CO2 from the ground in the atmosphere stuff happens, so if you have the brain to do some math, if you believe that coal burning releases CO2 in the atmosphere and if you trust the physics laws then you should be convinced that climate change exists exactly the same as you could be convinced that the planet os round and it rotates, but you need to be 14+ years intellectually AND not a conspiractionist that don't belive in physics laws.
I have a degree in physics. There are more significant periods of climate change in recorded history that predate the Industrial Revolution. Just because we put more carbon in the air doesn’t mean that subsequent “changes in climate” are caused by that additional carbon.
> Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced anthropogenic climate change is a thing, or that if it is a thing that it is more significant than natural variations of climate.
Facts are true whether you believe them or not. Sure, there are wide error bars on some of the margins, and the feedback loops in the climate system are difficult to tease out. But if you look at a graph like this, https://www.co2levels.org/ , and are still attempting to argue that you're not "convinced" that doubling the primary greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn't going to have huge effects, well, can't do much for you there.
There are more significant changes of climate in recorded history that predate the Industrial Revolution. If I learned anything in the many science classes I took to get my physics degree, any prediction based on a single controlling variable is usually wrong.
Just going to be the guy that says that not only is human caused climate change a massive threat to humanity's economic future, but also that even if it were not, it would be far cheaper to switch to carbon-free tech than continue on our current path. Carbon free electricity is cheaper than fossil fuel, and as we electrify things like home heating and transport, we typically see efficiency increases of 200%-600%, meaning we need far less primary power to begin with.
Any objection to the scientific basis of anthropogenic climate change is based on political ideology and false propaganda. We need to stop having allegiances to politicians and bad news sources, and maintain allegiance to truth and the unbiased pursuit of it. Far too many in our country are tools of fossil fuel interests. So while I agree that some environmentalists are tools of weird political ideologies, they are staying closer to the truth than those who oppose climate change. Unless most of your wealth is tied up directly in fossil fuel assets that you can't sell, you are also shortchanging your own economic future by not embracing newer and better technology.
The humanity that lives in Siberia is very much looking forward to the climate change you fear so don’t act like you speak for the entire world. Rising oceans might make Central Africa look more like North America. My original point is that this problem (if real) has already been solved by Tesla, and that the progressives who still think it is a problem are suddenly more concerned with supporting the unionized competitors of Tesla than acknowledging the supremacy of solar + batteries + EV transport.
I admire your comments. Of course everyone jumps on you, ignoring the valuable summary of actions that truly need discussion, and of what one person has accomplished, to move us forward with a real answer to our dependence on fossil fuels.
Significantly reducing population (to, say, 3 billion or less) is probably our best bet against climate change. However, to do so in any remotely ethical way takes a lot of time.
The next step is energy use: both reduction of consumption and reduction of wasted energy, ie. less energy, more effectively used. Things like insulation fall under this category.
Because we're simply using too many resources for the world to remain unchanged in the medium term. We need to change.
Changing the energy mix without addressing this just postpones the consequences of our actions - and not even that much.
Basically: massive, world-wide societal changes are our best bet against climate change. Nuclear energy is our best bet to push the hot potato to (at best) the next generation.
People who claim the world is overpopulated probably live in a big city and never really travelled the world. Because there are vast remote places thousands of miles across without anyone living. I believe the world can easily hold 100 billion people without issues.
And besides, downscaling the world is not an option. Every organic structure needs to expand indefinitely. The only reason you would have decrease in population is world scale war. Sure we don't need that.
Not really, not all land can be used to host people. We need space to grow food, produce energy, have factories and offices, infrastructures...
We're already using more than what the entire emerged land can provide us each year (with the help of massive supplies of fossil fuel and derived products, which will eventually run out).
If we want to offer everyone a western lifestyle while being sustainable on the long run, the optimal world population is indeed estimated at around 1.5-2 billions (world population of 1950), and definitely under 3 billions.
Currently 60% of landmass is being used by humans directly (human habitat, pastures, crops). Of remaining 40% about a half is still being continuously influenced by humans (residential forests, patches of land between roads, etc.). And the land is being used unsustainably and almost all unused land is beyond the polar circle. So no, the Earth can not hold 100B people with current level of consumption.
And generally you don't want current consumption level, you want much higher standards, because majority of world's population is living in poverty. Which means that Earth can't hold 8B people either unless humans improve their land use efficiency significantly, which is unlikely.
You know, it's possible to convert ground dedicated to cattle or agriculture and develop that into cities. That's historically how we always do it. It's not like housing developments can only happen on land that no one owns and that isn't being used for anything at all.
What we do is change what the land is used for. So I don't think this argument holds any water, TBH.
By the time the frontier was closed -- say late 1800s, pretty much all US land was owned by someone and ostensibly dedicated to some use. Yet we managed to increase our population quite a bit since then.
All European land was spoken for by the early middle ages. Yet they managed to grow their population too.
For most of the Western United States --- points west of the 100th latitude --- the limiting factor is not land but water.
The city of Los Angeles has a watershed which extends 1,500 miles eastward, to the western extent of the Rocky Mountains. The reason much of the Western US appears more as an island archipellago than a continuously inhabited terrain is because there simply isn't enough water to fill taps, flush toilets, and run showers, let alone grow food or provide range for livestock on an unirrigated "dry-land" basis. Even attempting that proved a major environmenal disaster, the Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 1930s.
Sorry if it wasn't clear, but the problem of land use is not legal. Indeed you can build your city whenever you have enough will to and it has never been a problem. The problem is that humans destroy the ecosystem of the place they live in. And if humans use 100% of landmass then 100% of planet ecosystems are destroyed.
> it's possible to convert ground dedicated to cattle or agriculture and develop that into cities
Unless you find a way to generate food out of thin air, it's not possible. People living in the cities need to eat something.
In many cases the very reason why some places aren't populated is that living there is difficult (lack of water/arable land, weather conditions...), and in many cases they are useful (as forests, grasslands...) for living beings thriving elsewhere.
Joel E. Cohen is the Earth's leading authority on the question, and lives and works in New York City, which I strongly hope is not too rural for your taste. He's the first to say that the question and answer are complicated, but that does not mean that there are no limits.
He makes a much more complete exploration in his 1995 book, How many people can the earth support?, Cohen visits many estimates and/or claims regarding carrying capacity and explores the assumptions or logic behind many of these, which range from a low of about 100 million to highs over 12 trillion. Most such estimates cluster around 1--10 billion, and seem more credible than outliers, especially of the high-end group.
There are also a few articles discussing the question, though not with the detail of the book. Most are either paywalled or in PDF formats (which seems to strongly discourage online readers). Their quality and expertise strongly reward expended effort, do please read these if you're genuinely interested in the question.
Nobody asked to delete population. The challenge is to allow people to access familial planning, make contraception and abortions more widespread in developing countries, and stop or at least reduce pro-natal fiscal policies in the West.
> Wealth can be created. There's no limit to how much wealth can be created.
Traditionally wealth means stuff or ability to acquire stuff, which inherently consumes resources. I'm assuming you are referring to a reinterpretation of the term "wealth" to mean "a number in a computer system"?
Wealth is things that people value. Wealth creation is finished when individuals freely, and willingly exchange what they currently have (money) for valuables and continue to do that happily.
That can be software so yes, given that software can be created without limits and that software wealth creation is a subset of total wealth creation that alone is proof that wealth creation is unlimited.
However if you think material resources is the limiting factor then you're going to have to explain exactly what is going to stop scientists from developing new materials that can be used in new products or in existing products.
Why is inmoral? It's just population orderly control, and it will at some point just get constant so wealth will be limited to that constant and it will not grow anymore, economy doesn't need to grow to improve human welfare.
It's completely sane to think and discuss how we can in someway "delete" population.
It is immoral to think the world would be better with fewer people because what you're really saying is, 3 Billion people or whatever number shouldn't exist. If you think not existing is a good thing then we wouldn't be having this conversation would we?
I don't think anyone is saying those 3 billion people doesn't need to exists, no one. It's just give education teach people to have healthy families, the constant is a balance of population given by health, nature and economics.
If you're saying the world is overpopulated by X then you're saying X amount of people who exist shouldn't exist.
No matter how you paint it, you think it is a good thing for you to exist but not others.
"Balance of health, nature and economics" nice words for basically "I want fewer poor people in the world so let's help them sterilize themselves" instead of creating wealth which isn't inherently immoral and would actually have a positive impact if done rightly
There are too many people on the planet as it is. Earth Overshoot Day, the day by which we've collectively used up whatever the Earth can generate in a year, is moving earlier in the year. In 2021, it was July 29th.
From there on out, we're depleting the Earth's reserves - some of which can never come back.
This is, in my view, immoral. That's how I view things without giving back.
Your comments seem to try to twist the arguments into some sort of Thanos-snap, as if certain currently living people do not have a right to live. That is a strawman, no one is arguing that.
If you think X amount of poor people should not exist in the future then you must also think X amount of poor people should not exist in any other time period. Or do you think somehow it was a good thing to be poor in the past but now is bad?
The reality is that if you go back far enough your ancestors were poor by modern standards, and if someone have done what you want to do to the poor today you wouldn't exist.
It is immoral to want for others what you don't want for yourself
If you're saying the world is overpopulated by X then you're saying X amount of people who exist shouldn't exist.
The observation is that a given population and affluence level cannot sustainably exist. Not as a matter of morality or prescription, but as a simple matter of fact. The concept of overshoot, well established in ecology, is one that specifically notes that populations can for a finite period of time, exceed long-term carrying capacity, but will in time collapse. Overshoot itself --- population in excess of sustainable capacity --- occurs because of lag effects. Consequences of actions follow those actions, but not necessarily immediately.
Population dynamics, like diseases, don't distinguish on ethnicity, religioun, ancestry, or ideology. It is true that the poor tend to bear the brunt more heavily. I ascribe no moral justification to this, though theological and ideological doctrines of the past and present very frequently do, to their discredit.
Respondind that a fact may be legitimately rejected simply because its implications are too painful to consider is wishful thinking, the informal fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam appeal to consequences.
Adding to that error, you then invent the utterly unsupported claim that those making the case for overpopulation mean for any reduction measures to only apply to others. This is in fact entirely a fiction of your own creation in this discussion. It does of course make answering the claim all the more difficult. I point out that as a fabulous claim there is no need to do so.
As I've noted before in this thread, you seem bent on repeatedly dragging this discussion into moral territory, in a manner which makes substantial and productive discussion difficult. It would benefit the discussion, and you might learn something, were you to not do so.
I have asked repeatedly for what exactly are the limiting factors that will make population unsustainable and there hasn't been satisfactory answers that could defend your position or make me rethink.
You should be able to defend a position that other people think is immoral specially if you think is morally good.
The Wikipedia link and theory is based on a computer model. No model can predict future innovation because part of future innovation is non linear and hence unpredictable utilizing current trends.
So you have something you can't predict (future innovation and how that will affect energy and new materials).
The burden of proof is on you given that you want to do something unnatural and immoral: make sterile millions of people.
If you want to sterilize yourself I don't agree with it but I cant stop you but that's not enough for you folks, you presume you have the right to promote mass sterilization so yes I'm going to say it for what it is: immoral.
You're also showing a pattern of deflecting and projecting rather than addressing the specific issues addressed by others.
On Wikipedia: I link to it as a general reference. Again, there is a long and large literature, the article is just one of numerous jumping-off points. There are others, such as Google Scholar:
Arguing based on unknowables ("future innovation is non linear and hence unpredictable utilizing current trends") is literally an appeal to ignorance. Arguing from the point that a premise is unknown and unknowable does not prove conclusions premised on that premise being true:
You are putting words in my mouth regarding what you're again fabricating as another's argument. I said no such thing, that is again your fiction. I'll merely respond that in advocating unsustainable population overshoot that you are committing many billions to lives of poverty and misery. And committing the fallacy of composition to boot.
Burden of proof relates to factual claims, not moral ones. Those are ultimately goverened by the is-ought relation.
And if you'll read elsewhere in this thread, I've actually already addressed your specious and repeated question:
Again, I await your answer to my first question, though with low expectations.
Serious question: Are you commenting to try to better understand a question and viewpoints about it, or only to promote your own views and cast aspersions? Because your comments strongly suggest the latter.
There's no limit to how much wealth can be created.
Citation requested.
That, and other statements of your comment, are articles of ideology and belief, not scientific statements. You're attempting to moralise what is a factual matter. That is as effective as a moral theory of disease, which is to say, not at all.
Ask the pro-depopulation who should not be allowed to have X+ children. I not those people, how many they maybe, pollute less all together than those blaming population growth.
The issue is not with the population but the few who ruin everything for everyone.
I agree we should help curb down our fertility rate worldwide. However this would take at least 50 years before it starts showing effect. It's too long a time when facing an environmental emergency.
That is obviously the only answer (unless cold fusion comes out soon) but it's also the only answer that can't make anyone money. (Except maybe Pfizer, if the tinhat crowd is right.)
The obvious answer is no, because we likely cannot stop climate change. We’re exiting an ice age (the natural state of the world is no massive ice sheets), we don’t know the actual causes of climate change, and even if we believe we know what causes climate change (say, carbon), most of the green house gas emissions aren’t from energy production.
That said, nuclear is likely better for the environment. I’m very bullish on nuclear.
There is an endless stream of pro-nuclear articles ever since the nuclear lobby figured out that their best bet to get re-instated as a viable source of power is to hitch their wagon to climate change. But it doesn't change a thing about the underlying issues: non-proliferation, radio active waste, potential for accidents, very bad economy over the total operational life-span.
It seems like you assume that other sources of energy are without waste and accidents. Nuclear power has by far the lowest number of deaths / produced energy and the total volume of waste is not that much. During all time of nuclear, the total volume of waste is about the annual waste produced by solar cells.
Have you even looked at the statistics? The point kinda is that injury and death tolls tell you precisely how often it doesn't go well for different types of energy production (including the mining of resources, storage/dumping of waste, etc.). I can't imagine you wrote that comment knowing how much less risky fission is.
If a solar panel has a catastrophic incident, you replace it. If a windmill has a catastrophic accident, you replace it. If a gas plant has a catastrophic accident, you replace it and have five funerals.
If a nuclear plant has a catastrophic accident, Western Europe could be uninhabitable for generations. Likely? No. But completely possible.
This is pure fear mongering. There is no way for currently running nuclear power plant to make Western Europe (!) uninhabitable. Worst meltdown is that - meltdown. It stays where it happens.
Waste has never been a problem and especially isn't a problem with modern reactors. They're safer than coal burning plants. Their economies are much better than alternatives when you account for the cost of environment, life, and pollution for things like coal burning plants. I feel like I've had to debunk all of these points literally a dozen times on HN and I'm really tired of putting in the effort.
Sure, pull the other one. You can't credibly debunk any of these because they've been a problem with every reactor built to date. You can pretend that they won't be a problem for any of the 'new and untried designs', however, I'm pretty sure that by the time that we build them and operate them for a couple of decades they'll turn out much the same as the previous lot, which were also supposed to be cheap, non-polluting, reliable and absolutely never subject to anything remotely like an accident.
Why people keep falling for this is a mystery to me.
Comparing with coal burning plants is nonsense, compare to wind/hydro/solar on a long enough timescale rather than to compare with the most polluting fossil fuel. That's stacking the deck in favor of nuclear.
I'm sure nuclear has its place in this whole story, but let's not pretend that it is without problems, at best it will be a stepping stone.
> Comparing with coal burning plants is nonsense, compare to wind/hydro/solar on a long enough timescale rather than to compare with the most polluting fossil fuel.
Well Germany is replacimg part of nuclear energy with natural gas plants so it is a really important debate indeed.
Oh, ok. I must be following different news sources than you do then. According to the most recent push for nuclear it is all a-ok, safe, clean, infinite supply and even 'green' for whatever that means. If there are problems they certainly aren't given much airtime, if any, and if there are alternatives they are much less well funded from a PR perspective, because nuclear is 'big business' and solar and wind much less so.
All this is is a way to sway public opinion, nothing actually gets solved in the short term.
Whereas solar panels and wind energy of course have no lobby whatsoever and are only being promoted by idealistic, well meaning activists that can be trusted 100%.
Why not? I mean, maybe not, but what makes you so sure? The solar and wind lobby stands to make trillions of dollars from government spending, but we are supposed to think they don't do any lobbying? Only the nuclear industry is in it for the money?
Maybe it is the decade-and-a-half that I've been studying the energy situation in some detail?
The nuclear industry has a typical installed unit cost of $25B or thereabouts (that's usually not the original estimate or even close to that). A typical windpark is a fraction of that and solar deployments are much smaller as well.
Besides that the market for solar and windpower is much more fragmented, with nuclear there are only very few parties on the supply side.
"Maybe it is the decade-and-a-half that I've been studying the energy situation in some detail?"
OK but you can not expect everybody else to take your personal experience at face value.
The average windpark may be smaller, but companies producing panels and rotators presumably are quite big.
A lot of money has already been invested by governments, and much, much more is to come. I don't think the individual costs of nuclear power plants proves anything one way or another.
Interesting to consider how much that lobby has quietly funded CO2 research projects, to prove anthropogenic effects. Also interesting that the big push to consider CO2 and it's impacts, started about the time a 30 year moratorium on nuclear power was coming to an end.
The standard concerns apply:
1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;
2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;
3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and
4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
> Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone
From the linked post [2]:
Also worth noting:
> The study shows that more than 8 million people around the globe die each year as a result of breathing in air containing particles from burning fuels like coal, petrol and diesel, ...
So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power generation and that part wouldn't change. The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[2]: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/fossil-fuel-air-pollutio...