The article is incredibly pessimistic from the start, to the point of being FUD. The fact is, BN-800 is trying to get further than "other nuclear heavyweights" could go. Why not just cheer up together instead of whining?
In general - plutonium breeder reactors don't move our civilization forward. Nobody would be allowed to have them except the already nuke having countries, and for them it is just a minor improvement, if any, in nuclear energy production.
Specifically for Russia - i'm Russian and i know how inherently careless Russian mentality is. Any of such objects is just a disaster waiting to happen (people outside don't understand that Chernobyl wasn't really "accidental accident", instead it was just like Russian roulette accident ; for illustration of current Russian technological degradation look at the recent space launches history). Additional issue - in particular with Russian corruption (and rise of Islamic powers, specifically Chechnya, inside Russia) it is just a matter of time before somebody will sell 10kg of plutonium to somebody else :)
I basically agree with you, but the following paper makes a good case to keep some research going. Basically we already have at least one long-term (5 billion years!) non-solar energy source should all else be depleted.
That is also the promise of nuclear breeder reactors, an ability to turn natural uranium into nuclear fuel, which will increase the availability of fuel by over 100 times. If you also consider thorium cycles, multiply by 4.
Nuclear is a huge and yet untapped energy source, which is unlikely to be depleted even with constant annual increased demand. Nuclear is more feasible at least up to the point we start to cover non-trivial percentages of the planet in solar panels.
Well, you would split it up a bit, rather than bulldozing an ecology the size of Spain. Would probably be quicker to roll out than the space based version and there are grid scale storage technologies available which might be relatively expensive, but are still orders of magnitude cheaper than solving the same problem by going into orbit. In the long run I think orbital solar looks promising, but there is a lot more work left to do there than with implementing it at ground level.
Orbital solar starts to make sense when you need a collection area that's larger than what's feasible for Earth and currently Earth is not scarce as far as available surface area :)
It is, near cities where the energy has to be generated. And its hard to procure because of eminent domain fights, environmental impact statements and high costs.
Given we are in a world of 500 km underwater interconnects and synchronous grids that span up to eight time zones, I am not sure why you think electricity needs to be generated right next to cities.
Though, that said, existing urban rooftops are over a third of the required area to power the world, so you might as well stick some there while you are at it.
Transmitting electricity is quite a bit different from transmitting bytes. That's the main reason we are using Alternating Current rather than Direct Current to power virtually everything.
And I believe the opposite. Remember power generation also has to be delivered, so solar farms will want to be near cities. There's not a lot of room, it will take more land that the freeway system! And that took decades to seize the land through eminent domain.
Bellona is a Norwegian environmental organization. They have worked quite a lot with nuclear safety in former Soviet union from the early nineties and onward, that got very problematic after the fall of the Soviet union (and really was before that too). In addition to their general anti nuclear stance, they distrust the Russians ability to do this safely in the first place as well. Given the safety record of russion nuclear power, that may not be taken out of thin air.
There are several fundamental reasons why it's incredibly difficult to optimize a Plutonium breeding reactor for anything other than Plutonium production. Which makes it an incredibly poor choice for safe, cost-effective power generation, and increases the proliferation risks immensely.
They've started making PU238 again, they've actually almost ran out of it and getting it from the Russians is becoming harder and harder due to tensions between the countries...
So after pretty much running out of PU238 after spending most of it on New Horizons and Curiosity NASA has finally managed to get funding for the DOE to start making it again...
Then you need to do more research. Fukushima was not part of the modern nuclear industry. Its technology and hardware and culture were fifty years old, every single part of them. If you go back fifty years in literally any other major technology it's all mind-blowingly unsafe. Fifty-year-old cars are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old houses are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old elevators are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old chemistry sets are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old airplanes are barely not deathtraps. And even though fifty-year-old technologies are pants-shittingly unsafe, you're perfectly fine using modern cars, and modern chemistry sets, and modern elevators, and modern airplanes. Because they're all safe. And you should be perfectly fine using modern nuclear power, because it's perfectly safe.
Besides, you know what? Even if nuclear power plants were as dangerous as the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima I'd still be agitating for their adoption. Do you have any idea how minor and infrequent nuclear incidents really are compared to the alternatives? Chernobyl is so far out into the worst case column that it's not even reasonable. It's like badmouthing cars today because a tanker full of hydrofluoric acid crashed in downtown Seattle circa 1934. There are two major nuclear incidents in history. Two. Neither of them was as bad as an average dam burst. One of them wasn't even as bad as an average coal mine collapse. And the worst dam-bursts in history outweigh the worst nuclear disasters in history by four orders of magnitude. Go look up Banqiao Dam. Even the "green" alternatives are pretty awful; more people have died falling off wind turbines than will ever die to nuclear power. Compared to the alternatives, nuke plants are rainbows and sunshine.
Most other accidents have casualties which are easily traceable. Comparing deaths to those that fall from wind turbines is not a fair comparison.
Nuclear accidents happen in slow motion and the effects are not as easily traceable. It will be decades before we know the impact and it will only be due to statistics. Just because you don't die today, doesn't mean you will not die earlier than you normally would have.
OK, then, let's go tease out every iota of causality we possibly can from the statistics for various energy technologies. Let's start at the top. Hmm. "Global climate change resulting primarily from fossil fuel use has already caused tens of millions of deaths via famine, flooding, and extreme weather and stands a reasonable chance of killing every single human on earth over the course of the next hundred years". Well, that's not going to work.
Burning Coal releases more radiation into the atmosphere than all human nuclear activity. The particulates are the major killer though. I believe like 100 000 people die from the effects every year. And that's discounting the atrocious toll on the environment.
This is true compared to normal nuclear facilities operating normally. However, it is not a comparison to nuclear activity as due to nuclear accidents.
http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410
And what he said above is also true of fossil fuel industry facilities operating normally. He doesn't consider pollution due to spills, oil well fires, or refinery explosions. If wells or refineries failed at the rate you're implying nuclear plants do, our entire planet would be an inch deep in crude. And, yes, I understand that there physically isn't enough oil on earth to do that. That's part of my point. The alternatives to nuclear are strictly worse. There are no tradeoffs. They are just worse in every way, whether they're operating as designed or not.
I'm not arguing in favor of any energy source that damages the environment; nonetheless, I would prefer we acknowledge risks where they exist. To not do so, would be to send us down the path of possibly less safe nuclear facilities.
I feel like you're not getting his point. The coal industry in its steady state reliably kills more people every year than every nuclear accident put together, even when you include imputed civilian cancer fatalities from Chernobyl.
I think you are going to have a difficult time coming up with an evidence-based argument that (a) supplies electricity to everyone in the world currently depending on it, (b) doesn't use nuclear, and (c) kills fewer people as a result of (b). I am ready to be surprised, though.
Coal and petroleum are responsible for raising the population of earth from the 800 millon or so in 1800 to over 7.3 billion alive today. Nuclear alone wouldn't be capable of that.
Nuclear at the scale of present fossil fuel energy provision would be on the order of 15,000 plants, simultaneously, with a lifetime of about 40 years. There are fewer than 400 nuclear power plants operating today. We'd be looking at commissioning nearly as many per year (15,00 plants, 40 year life, 1.03 per day, or 375 per year).
Each of which would be creating at least some long-term waste.
There's the prospect of advanced reactor designs, with thorium being the darling of some, despite little actual experience and significant technical challenges (glowing hot highly corrosive radioactive salts, one test reactor run briefly 50 years ago for which cleanup is still not complete).
For uranium or plutonium fuel cycles, there's a very real concern over total fuel availability.
And even with nuclear you don't have liquid fuels without a heck of a lot of trouble. Some form of synfuel seems too be the best bet, with hydrogen from electrolysis combined with carbon from... Well, that's tough, limestone would still be carbon-positive, carbon recovery from the atmosphere or seawater is posssible but one heck of a challenge at scale. Ships and planes have few options other than hydrocarbons, and a lot of ground uses favour it.
Solar, wind, hydro, and some form of storage pencil out for raw scale, though my general sense between energy and other resource constraints is that a high-energy, abundant future on Earth will require a vastly smaller population. Likely achieved relatively quickly.
Or you could go the low-energy, non-abundant lifestyle. Which would likely see a similar population reduction.
Bit of a Hobson's choice there, in terms of misery.
Now this is interesting. The really good power sources really cant be achieved unless you already have a bunch of power. Nuclear, for example, absolutely requires purification industry, which both directly requires energy and indirectly requires a large industrial base. About the simplest you can get is concentrating solar, and getting useful quantities of power out of those still requires industrial-scale fabrication.
Fossil fuels, in contrast, need almost literally nothing. You can build a decent coal-fired steam engine on an anvil and evolutions of that same coal-fired steam engine stay relevant well into the information age. Fossil fuels are a spectacular boostrap technology.
But! Fossil fuels are only good at bootstrapping. We're on a forum for startups and venture capitalists - we know better than anybody about the prototype-MVP-refactor cycle. Once you've launched your MVP, you need to turn around and deal with all the technical debt you've built up before it overwhelms you. There are a ton of products out there that share zero common code with their MVP. Bootstrapping technologies tend to be awful options for long-term use and you want to get away from them as soon as you've finished bootstrapping.
So here's what I say: build a prototype. Fossil fuels. MVP: build fast, lean on the cheap easy fossil fuels. And, finally, stabilize on your Once you've got enough basic infrastructure, use it to figure out a better long-term option and switch as fast as you can. Even if it's not as good immediately, it'll improve with time, and in the worst case (alien invasion?) you can bring the coal plants out of mothballs for a few years while you industrialize again. I won't say that it's easy, but I can easily imagine a less-intellectually-crippled species pulling it off.
Fossil fuels are seed capital, yes. Modern civilisation has quite the burn rate.
I like to consider the technological stack height for various energy systems. For nuclear, as you note, it's quite high. One thing this creates is systemic risk of sheer system failure and inability to reboot. One of the consequences of the Fukushima disaster and following shutdown of much of Japan's nuclear power sector was that the entire nation faced a shortfall of electrical capacity. Not helped, incidentally, by its dual incompatible power grids, one operating at 60hz, the other at 50hz, limiting inter-tie capabilities.
While fossil fuels have a fairly low tech stack requirement, it's not zero. For a long time, plant-based sources of equivalents: olive oil and fuelwood, principally, were preferable. They could be obtained locally, processed readily, and renewed themselves.
For local use, all you need is a coal face or oil seep. Gas, without industrial means to capture, transport, and contain it is quite problematic, though the Chinese actually did just this, nearly 2,000 years ago, using bamboo pipes and hide bladders[1]. I hate to ask what the fire incidence was....
Oil didn't take off until an existing coal-based industry provided iron, and later, steel, for drilling, storage, pipes, railroads, and ships. This industry developed incrementally from roughly 1860 to 1900, though even _quite_ early in the process, oil equipment took on much of its modern appearance.
The other thing oil wanted for was a practical application: the internal combustion engine, which required: roads, tires, rubber, steel, electricity....
Another challenge is that fossil fuels hugely distort prices. We price fossil fuels at extraction effort, but the long-term cost is the replacement cost. Since replacing fossil fuels with more fossil fuels isn't viable (we don't have 100-500 million years to wait), that generally means existing biomass. Humans appropriate roughly 40% of that now, and it produces at net efficiencies of 1-3% of incident sunlight converted to fuel (algae might boost that to 10%), which has highly specific land, nutrient, (generally fresh) water, and climate requirements.
Nuclear seems to offer a possible out, but for any fission-based process is also* a nonrenewable option. Estimates of fuel abundance range from 80 years to a few thousand, at present rates of consumption. Relying on uranium for all present human energy needs would exhaust reserves in 6 years. Breeders offer a 100x improvement in fuel utilisation, but that pushes us from 6 years to 600 (without growth), or 80 to 8,000 at present rates -- a goodly interval, but only slightly longer than our current history. Suggestions of recovery of uranium from seawater might extend lifetimes further, but with another expansion of the the tech stack requirement. And there's the near-term immediacy of the problem to boot.
I'm leaning to the side that says that reducing our overall throughput (smaller population, decrreased per-capita affluence, possibly both) is going to have to be part of the solution. That's going to be unpopular. Possibly thermodynamically improbable without massive systemic changes, possibly catastrophic.
No, I do get it. I will restate my point again.
"My point is about the disregard of the significance of the Fukishima accident".
Why is that important. Because nuclear is not a panacea of risk free energy. The public should demand technology and safety to be continually improved and outdated reactors to be revamped or decommissioned.
This is not a plea to abandon nuclear, it is that in order to prevent future disasters there has to be an honest assessment of potential risk impact so that there is incentive to make better designs.
Otherwise, all of these counter arguments could be interpreted as saying "Coal kills 1 million, so what if nuclear only kills 100k every once and a while".
> Otherwise, all of these counter arguments could be interpreted as saying "Coal kills 1 million, so what if nuclear only kills 100k every once and a while".
Well, yes. We are, unfortunately, stuck in a pretty awful region of the configuration space of possible existences. We can't be perfect. And that, unfortunately, means that perfect is the enemy of good enough. Right now we only have a few choices either we stick with coal or oil and kill a lot of people and maybe everybody, or we switch to nuclear/solar/whatever and only kill a few people. I acknowledge that nuclear kills people. I fully understand that Chernobyl and Fukushima were catastrophes. And I'm not going to disregard them. I've thought about them carefullyh, and considered the options, and even if I accept the most pessimistic evaluations I come to a single conclusion: We need to switch. Now.
I can give you credit for wanting to be sure. But there's a point where you have to stop wanting to be sure and start making choices. And it's well past the point where we needed to make that choice, and as a result the conversation needs to be different. Right now our biggest obstacle is the public, and that means we need to present a united front. We can't tolerate dissenting opinions on a topic where the decision is so critical and the public is so pathetic. When you say "don't disregard Fukushima", people hear "radioactive scientist-men will eat your babies". So stop fearmongering.
Also, stop bullshitting about Chernobyl. "The total global collective dose from Chernobyl was earlier estimated by UNSCEAR in 1988 to be "600,000 man Sv, equivalent on average to 21 additional days of world exposure to natural background radiation."". And that's an early, pessimistic estimate that's since been revised to half that. Maybe half a million people total were exposed in any measurable way. The few thousand people who worked on the reactor itself lost maybe ten years each. Everybody else lost... a few hours? Fukushima, similarly, is estimated based on data from Chernobyl (which, remember, happened thirty years ago! we have data from it! lots of data!) to kill a few hundred people. Pessimistically, a few thousand. Indirectly, ten years before they'd have died of old age anyway, and with a relatively treatable cancer. Seriously, thyroid cancer? Five-year survival rate 98%, and that's if you aren't watching for it already and you catch it late.
And, really, greenpeace? They haven't been reasonable about nuclear since ever. If they ever realized how radioactive their bananas were their heads would explode.
> it is not a comparison to nuclear activity as due to nuclear accidents.
But nuclear accidents are rare, and are not a necessary consequence of nuclear power. Coal ash is not rare, and it is a necessary consequence of burning coal.
> "Global climate change resulting primarily from fossil fuel use has already caused tens of millions of deaths via famine, flooding, and extreme weather and stands a reasonable chance of killing every single human on earth over the course of the next hundred years"
You said statistics, not unproven speculation. (Which is not to say that there aren't statistics showing harms from fossil fuel use. Just that you should focus on actual data.)
I agree. I'm just pointing out that, since we're talking about unproven speculation, any statement that fits "Chernobyl killed >3e4 people" is also not statistics.
Global climate change doesn't have a definable and agreeable source and/or event that can be confined to definite set of parameters. The cause and effect chain is nebulous in comparison.
But damage caused by radiation is well known, definable criteria which is well studied as part of health studies. What would be more comparable would be studies of heart disease for example based on consumption of certain foods. We readily accept such studies as advice on what is health, what is not, and also what drugs work and which do not. The principle is the same.
Even if you ignore climate change (which is, frankly, irresponsible at this point), coal pollution alone kills something like a million people per year worldwide.
The worst power plant accident of time, not a nuclear power plant failure, but a hydro station in China, Banqiao Dam. It's instructive several ways:
Any number of fairly simple methods would have hugely alleviated the impact of the disaster. Much as with major nuclear disasters, it was a cascade of failures, starting with poor management and a dysfunctional culture, amplified through poor design, adverse conditions, poor communications, delayed or absent warnings, and little or no disaster response. Many of the deaths were attributed to starvation and disease, not drowning or other physical impacts.
A useful thing to keep in mind, though, is that after a dam break is done being a a massive disaster area, which typically resolves in a few hours to a few weeks, the land is no longer a glowing radioactive mess. It can be re-settled and populated as structures and infrasctructure are rebuilt. Zhumadian City, the region surrounding Banqiao, has a present population of over 7 million.
The disaster area is also contained. Chernobyl threatened vast regions of Asia and Europe, putting a population of over 400 million at risk, and certainly ill at ease.
Or look up the story of the Johnstown Flood, worst dam break in US history (by deaths), which saw the emergence of the Red Cross, of national response to disasters, and changes in liability laws.
(Excepting Johnstown and Banqiao, dam failure mortality falls off rapidly, with another 8 disasters of 1,000+ lives. Wikipedia gives some 908 notable dams, and 137 hydroelectric facilities of 1GW+ net capcity.)
There are other questions, notably whether or not "deaths per GWh generation" is the most appropriate measure of risk. Particularly for a technology whose risk tail spans not years, decades, or even centuries, but millennia. Or longer.
Last I checked, there were few human institutions with lifespans of similar scale. Technical or otherwise.
And that's why you base decisions on facts rather than emotions. Nuclear power is safe, and only getting safer as time goes on. The Fukushima plant was 40 years old, not state of the art (even when it was built). It does not reflect the nuclear industry as a whole, just some very bad decisions from people who knew better.
All the deaths at Fukushima (18,500) were from the tsunami itself. Nobody got radiation poisoning, and there is only a modest increase in cancer risks [1].
But experts said the overall risk was small. The radiation exposure means about 1.25 out of every 100 girls in the area could develop thyroid cancer over their lifetime, instead of the natural rate of about 0.75 percent.
edit: Nobody vote this up anymore, I'm at 1337 points and I'd like to keep it there
Did the massive explosion in Tianjin convince you that the petroleum fuel industry cannot be safe?
Did the New Horizons spill convince you that the oil drilling industry cannot be safe?
Did the tens of thousands of vehicular deaths every year convince you that cars cannot be safe?
I share with you the concerns that nuclear power requires strong regulation and current technology desperately needs to be updated.
But the simple fact is that, if we want to get off of carbon, nuclear is going to play a role. So let's figure out how to do it properly instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Meanwhile, holding nuclear power up to a safety standard that virtually no other energy generation method could live up to demonstrates the lack of rationality present in this debate. The very electricity we're trying to produce has, itself, killed more people than nuclear power ever has.
Yes, nuclear power does have a safety problem, but not a imminent one. The real problem does not come from operations, but from the waste these operations leave behind.
Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants.
Another problem is the question, who is going to pay for all that waste in the end? Well first off, most likely future generations and when we look at the current time frame, that's actually not as clear as one might think. For example, the German government has long struggled - and still is - to actually get the power plant operators to pay for the waste disposal. Before that is was pretty much "We get to make the money basically for free, and you pay for the waste." Which of course is also an issue with the argument that nuclear power is cheap, because in most cases the cost of waste disposal and final storage are not included in the calculation, because these things can just "happen later".
Waste disposal was way too long under the radar, so there was no pressure to develop new, better alternatives to the current reactor technologies for a very long time, since "state of the art" was just good enough, and cheap.
Lots of other human activities generate toxic waste in far greater volumes than nuclear reactors do. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, but lots of other toxic waste remains dangerous forever. Toxic waste is a problem in general, but not a particularly severe one. Why so worried about nuclear waste specifically?
Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants.
Weird you should say that. It seems Colorado has the same problem simply due to gold mining.
And don't get me started on the tailings ponds in Northern Alberta.
Given the choice between millions and millions of gallons of toxic water poisoning endangered waterfowl, and the challenge of disposing of a fraction of the amount of nuclear waste, I'll take the latter, no question.
The long-term waste is the transuranics, which reactors like the BN-800 can use for fuel. What's left is fission products, which go back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.
Transuranics are 99% of conventional nuclear waste so we'd reduce the waste volume by that much, too.
> Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants.
Yes, but they are political challenges, not engineering challenges. It's well-known how to keep nuclear waste secure for the length of time one should reasonably care about. Keeping, say, Congress from killing the storage facility due to anti-nuclear ignorance is what needs to be overcome here.
But that being said, "ignorant people are preventing this problem from being solved" is not an argument against solving the problem, it's an argument in favor of educating and convincing the people.
A challenge which persists for tens of thousands to millions of years is well beyond merely "political". You're going to need to come up with a different term for that.
Keep in mind that for a long-term nuclear regime, you're also dealing with the extreme likelihood that large amounts of not-yet-vitrified wastes in "temporary" storage may face a sudden change in operational procedure and personnel. Say, during the Widespread Global Disagreement of 2639-2645, in which team Allied and team Axis butt heads once again under stars and bars and revived flags of Indian auspiciousness.
What's your technical solution for that? Or any number of comparable scenarios?
What are the comparable failure modes for widespread renewables infrastructures?
> A challenge which persists for tens of thousands to millions of years is well beyond merely "political".
This is absurd, and it's absurd for two reasons.
a) The amount of waste which is still dangerous after that time is meaningless, compared to the amount of other dangerous waste we create (including in the process of constructing batteries and solar panels!) which will still remain dangerous indefinitely, and which is far less well secured and understood.
b) For what other endeavor of man are we required to address its consequences literally millions of years in the future? A renewables infrastructure will consume a large amount of rare earth metals, you know: are you prepared to address the awful consequences of the great neodymium shortage of 11,152 AD? If not, then where do you get off asking for similar future-proofing where nuclear is concerned?
For what other endeavor of man are we required to address its consequences literally millions of years in the future?
Tu quoque fallacy.
Several. Just to be clear, I'm not simply holding nuclear to this standard.
Population, energy systems, resource utilisation, topsoil and water use, environmental contamination.
How long you want to consider "long term" is also an open question, though I'll note:
The modern computer age is roughly 50 years old.
The modern age of mass-industrialisation: electricity, automobiles, mass media, roughly a century old.
The Industrial Age itself, 200 years.
Western Civilisation, about 2,500 years.
Civilisation itself, and history, 6,000 years.
Anatomically modern man, about 200,000 years.
Divergence from common ancestors with chimps, 2 million.
Emergence of mammals, very roughly, 150mya.
Looking forward, there's perhaps 500m to 1 billion years in which life resembling that we know can survive on Earth.
Meantime, on the present "business as usual" track, there are numerous challenges which present on the timescale of years to decades -- shorter if you consider the prospect of nuclear annihilation (minutes to hours), somewhat longer for some more-abundant mineral resources. But numerous challenges seem likely to converge between 2020 and 2100 or so, with the implications of several of those including challenges to running long-lived complex systems with profound implications. Such as creating large quantities of nuclear waste and/or facilities which are not likely to be properly decommissioned and remediated. Hell, there's ample existing problems with this ranging from the former USSR/Russia, US, and elsewhere, with only modest amounts of political and economic disruption.
But I'd suggest that:
1. Avoiding making near-term circumstances more complex than they are (10-200 years or so).
2. Considering just what problems it is that nuclear power does and does not address, directly.
3. A view to a 200 year (industrialisation), 6,000 year (history), to 200k-1m year (evolutionary drift) would likely be somewhat useful to keep in considering pretty much all future paths and decisions.
Along with questions like "why are we here", in a thermodynamic/systems sense, and "what are the implications of this", for both us and the systems with which we interact.
Maximising throughput without limit strikes me as potentially problematic.
"Several. Just to be clear, I'm not simply holding nuclear to this standard.
Population, energy systems, resource utilisation, topsoil and water use, environmental contamination."
Okay, I apologize for being a bit unfair. That being said...
You can't optimize all those things at the same time. If you're concerned about carbon dioxide emissions from power generation leading to the most catastrophic possible greenhouse effect, that's far more damaging than a small amount of nuclear waste buried in a mountain somewhere, and the possibility that some small number of people in a nation or culture that doesn't even exist today may be foolish enough to dig it up a thousand years from now. Such a tradeoff would be well worth it -- even to those folks a thousand years from now, because a modern-day Earth that doesn't have to deal with an environmental catastrophe is going to be wealthier and better-ordered a thousand years from now than one that does.
You can't optimize all those things at the same time.
Also to be clear: I see total throughput, itself a function of population and affluence, as the fundamental challenge. It's not a question of optimisation, but of living within the possibility envelope.
And the harder you push up against that envelope the greater your systemic risk.
There are also nonsystemic risks: asteroid impact, nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst, etc. But as I see it now, the biggest risks humans face are systemic and self-induced.
As my earlier nuclear comments have made clear: I'm not anti nuke, but I see substantial problems, enough to wonder if they're worth the trouble.
It's possible to make a nuclear reactor fail-safe. It's only poor engineering that lead to Fukushima being fail-dangerous.
From here it moves from being a technical question (how to do this) to being a political question (who does it and why). How do we convince non-technical bureaucrats to convince reactor architects to make these be fail-safe?
> It's only poor engineering that lead to Fukushima being fail-dangerous.
Poor engineering (more precisely, site selection) of the backup diesel generators, yes.
Poor engineering of the reactor itself? Absolutely not. The reactor was engineered extremely well; if it hadn't been, the radiation release due to the extended loss of backup power would have been much worse.
Yes, it's true that today we know how to design reactors that don't need backup power in the event of an emergency shutdown. But we didn't know how to do that when the Fukushima reactor was built. You can't fault the engineers who designed and built it for not doing something that nobody knew how to do at the time.
> How do we convince non-technical bureaucrats to convince reactor architects to make these be fail-safe?
I would say it's more a question of how do you stop non-technical bureaucrats from preventing reactor architects from making them fail-safe. From what I've seen of the decision-making processes that were at work at Fukushima, I strongly suspect that it wasn't technical people that made the decision to put backup diesel generators where they could be flooded by a tsunami. It was bureaucrats who were too ignorant to understand the issues involved.
> Poor engineering of the reactor itself? Absolutely not. The reactor was engineered extremely well; if it hadn't been, the radiation release due to the extended loss of backup power would have been much worse.
I've always had trouble understanding why the nuclear reactors weren't powering their own pumps. What sort of engineering situation led to them requiring yet another generator? Were they powered from the power grid instead of directly from the reactors?
> It was bureaucrats who were too ignorant to understand the issues involved.
This is so frustrating. But we can't expect elected officials to be experts on every subject matter.
> I've always had trouble understanding why the nuclear reactors weren't powering their own pumps.
They do in normal operation, but they can't (obviously) if they're shut down. That's what the backup generators are for, to power the pumps so coolant flow is maintained for decay heat removal if the reactor has to shut down. Newer reactor designs don't require pumps to keep running after shutdown for decay heat removal; but those designs didn't exist when the Fukushima reactor was built.
GE reactor plans called for the batteries and generators to be in the basement, and TEPCO decided not to deviate from the plans because they were worried any changes could introduce subtle failure modes.
You make a great point. In retrospect, I think this is in the same state as remote work policies - techies can't see any reason it wouldn't work in theory, but practical implementation eludes us today.
Conceptually, Thorium reactors are an answer known to be workable. To put it simply the reactor is like a bowl of radioactive soup with a plug at the bottom made of ice and self refrigerated using the power produced by the reactor. If it stops working, plug melts, soup flows out of the bowl and reactor stops. The soup is not too radioactive, and thorium is more Common.
This design is not without challenges, but certainly not bigger than fast reactors and nuclear reprocessing. There was even working prototypes in the USA very early in the atomic age. However, Thorium reactors do not produce plutonium, and so, cannot be the technology selected in a cold war context where you need to build atomic weapons by the score.
So, no such reactors are in service today, but they are being studied, especially in India if I recall properly.
The reactors you see today were designed to produce bombs primarily. They only produce energy as an happy side effect. Safety was important, but not the main design goal.
To fix this, you need to overcome two problems.
1: you must convince governments to pile billions on developing this technology, with no military goal or economical incentive in sight.
2: you must overcome resistence to change of existing industry, who basically must turn their known design upside down. Good luck with that. See what AREVA has done with its stupid EPR...
So not a simple problem, but maybe complexity is not where you thought ^^
That's a working Liquid Metal or Liquid Metal Salt reactor not necessary a Thorium Reactor.
The US prototype "Nuclear Jet Engine" used a similar design to prevent a run off.
Reactors today also weren't designed to produce bombs, this was true for the 50's, the US isn't running breeding reactors any more, the US for the most part doesn't produce much if any fissile material any longer, the Netherlands actually produces more enriched Uranium per year than the states.
ATM there are pretty much 2 countries which use breeder reactors exclusively that's India and Russia, Japan and France still operate some but they are also phased out.
As for the Thorium crap, does a thorium reactor works? yes, is it better than other LM/LMS reactor designs no. Is it safer than other WAS reactor designs no. Is it less radioactive than other reactor fuels, thorium yes, the actual LM/LMS fuel for a thorium reactor nope, for both slow and fast thorium cycles you are going to mix in some really nasty isotopes with the salts to kick off and control the reaction and the burn-off rate. Thorium reactors will still require breeder reactors to produce fuel elements for the actual fuel.
While I also like to believe that some YouTube video can solve all of the problems in the world and that everything is a government conspiracy the world doesn't really work that way.
Yes in principle you can design a safer "Thorium" liquid metal salt reactor than a 1950's fast breeder reactor but they aren't necessarily safer than modern 4 generation reactors like BN-1200 (BN-800 can be considered a gen 3.9 since it's a faster breeder liquid metal cooled reactor which is kinda of a prototype for the Gen 4 BN-1200 one) which is a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor, unlike the (classical Shippingport) Thorium design the BN-1200 (and the 800) design can be safety used with (since the coolant can reach 500c+ in the heat exchanger without being under any pressure) modern high efficiency gas-steam turbines, competing designs which use Fluoride Slats and Helium as coolants also offer WAS operations in many cases with coupled with high efficiency.
Also an important thing to remember is that while that pipe-dream Thorium reactor might be safer on paper we have 70 years of experience with dealing with Uranium fuel cycles and reactor design.
Those 70 years of experience, procedures, known and understood risks and issues are quite important when designing things that might kill 100000 people when they go boom, saying well i found this old design from a US project to irradiate the upper atmosphere with nuclear jets doesn't really inspire much confidence in anyone who ever handled even a simple risk assessment.
Let me sum it up, removing the usual layer of intimidation and mockery:
- This is crap but humf yeah it can work on principles
- Reactors are not designed to make bomb but humf yeah a couple of country have these around. Oh you know, details on the map like India, Russia, France,...
- And anyway, we have 70 years of experience doing this, trust us.
I have witnessed this attitude all too much as I grew up in the heart of French Nuclear industry. Arrogance is the reason why after 70 years, despite superb technological feats, Nuclear industry has failed to convince anyone that it is safe.
Probably you will not care, but your last statement is frightening and wrong. If your Tech can kill 100000 people, then 70 years of procedures and experiences will not be sufficient to convince any assessor applying recent safety certification standards. If you have learned so much about the dangers of using this technology, then design one machine that is fail safe under very adverse Human behavior. And demonstrate why in understandable words. Gen 4 reactors so far have failed to do that and they are not even working yet.
And again what does this has to do with Thorium?
On one hand you propose a liquid metal salt reactor which doesn't have to be using thorium, on the other hand you insist on using older designs with slower burn rates which require the use of water as coolants and cannot be coupled with super-critical boilers to run gas-turbines.
No nuclear technology is perfect, no nuclear technology is intrinsically safe even if you have a WAS (Walkaway Safe) reactor design.
The idea of reactors like the BN-800, BN-1200 and other ->/= Gen 4 reactors is to couple efficient electricity production, multiple fuel cycles to reduce waste, a walkaway safe design paradigms to reduce the likelihood and the impact of a run away reaction while building on top of 70 years of experience.
I'm not an expert on the French nuclear industry and considering that the French pretty much proliferated nuclear tech to half the planet i would say their reactor designs is the least of their sins.
But picking up some competing design from the 50's and saying that it's the answer for all of our problems is just criminally naive there are tons of competing designs for 4 Gen reactors and reactors that cannot be even tied to a specific evolutionary generation some of them are safer than the "proposed" Thorium reactor, some of them give better answer to nuclear waste, some of propose to build the reactor as a nuclear waste containment vessel and pretty much have like a roman candle like design that can be then left in the ground after all 3 fuel cycles have been depleted, some offer very high thermal to electrical wattage ratios so saying X is the best is just scientifically wrong.
I never wrote Thorium was the one final solution but "a" solution. And I also wrote that there would be challenges. I replied to a question about whether such design existed. If other fuels can be used than Thorium, that is fine with me. My main points are not about Thorium at all. I know there are other avenues (though certainly not as well as you do).
So then let's not use words like "criminal" when people just consider alternate designs, new or ancient, maybe?
No but you make it sound like the BN-800 is a traditional water cooled reactor from the 50's designed to produce bombs which it's not.
It's a liquid metal fast breeder reactor with a triple fuel cycle, Russian reactor design is quite advanced, pretty much most common Gen 4 designs are based on mid 1980's Russian reactor designs like the BN series.
The BN-800 uses Sodium as it's primary coolant and like the LMS design it's quite walk away safe if there is a run away reaction in the core there will be no pressure jump since sodium boils at 881c (The coolant's boiling point will be over 1000'c since it's not pure sodium).
Since Sodium can undergo neutron activation it also serves a secondary role of being a neutron absorber which slows the run away reaction naturally.
The BN-800 is also the 1st commercial reactor to actually use a mixed uranium-plutonium fuel which is intended to safely repurpose the stockpile of weapons grade plutonium. And while it's is classified as a breeder reactor it's not a military reactor (It is also Russia's first reactor to be classified as a pure civilian installation), it breed's it's own fuel for the secondary fuel cycles and most importantly generates PU-238 and most medical isotopes which we are in quite a desperate shortage off (especially PU-238 which NASA now has ran out of pretty much).
The problem with most people who are crying about nuclear technology is that they really haven't got a clue on what's being built, what is being designed, and what we've already experienced with and learnt from.
While i would not want to live near a nuclear reactor since well it give me the hibbie jibbies no matter if it's a liquid molten salt thorium reactor or a 1950's smokey bear that can go boom at any moment.
Nuclear energy compared to coal, oil and gas has far less environmental implications even if we experience a Chernobyl every 2-3 decades.
Give less weight to relative hours of previous service in the safety assessment. The reason crap old designs are still built today is because they score higher on the risk assessment than safer designs due to the accumulated hours of service.
Fukushima was a half-century old design that was hit with a record breaking natural disaster and yet despite all that the disaster has resulted in a remarkable lack of death and catastrophe. Meanwhile, other methods of power generation continue to kill people by the wagon load every day and nobody seems to care much because we're comfortable with those ways of dying whereas we're creeped out about the spookiness of radiation.
Indeed it was on the other hand if you ask anyone if given the choice would they live within the meltdown blast radius from a nuclear reactor you'll pretty much hear a resounding no.
The Integral Fast Reactor in the U.S. was tested against the exact scenario that damaged Fukushima: loss of electrical power. The IFR shut down quietly with no damage, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant.
