I appreciate Californians fighting PG&Es haphazard attempts to go nuclear, but on larger scale, how exactly are we supposed to ditch coal, natural gas, and oil without nuclear power? No renewable source is reliable enough for sustained, reliable energy over long periods and batteries are no where near ready for the challenge (nor are they environmentally friendly.)
While for 40 years California may have opposed nuclear power, it might be time for people to figure out how to make it work.
The reality is that lots of places are actively shutting down coal & nuclear already and are replacing them with wind, solar, and batteries without blackouts being a thing. All that takes is money. And even that is changing as wind and solar bids now routinely undercut everything else on the market. That's basically driving the transition in the most unlikely places (like oil and gas producing Texas or coal producing Virginia).
Many places elsewhere have all but completed the transition to renewables and are well on their way to 100% renewable grids early next decade. That's not some fantasy, it's basically largely past tense in a lot of places not plagued by blackouts with any kind of frequency.
The biggest case against nuclear actually isn’t environmental, but economic: they still take a lot of money to build and rebuild after their useful life is over. The reason no one is fighting too hard to keep nuclear around as an option is because it simply isn’t feasible without the government subsidies handed out in the 60s and 70s.
But nuclear with its really cheap fuel and the new ability to store power in batteries when demand is lower might be feasible if the capital and insurance costs can be tamed more.
> The reason no one is fighting too hard to keep nuclear around as an option is because it simply isn’t feasible without the government subsidies handed out in the 60s and 70s.
I still find this argument hard to believe. The physics involved is pretty simple, immerse the rods in water, bring them together, water boils, water turns turbine. It's the polar opposite of fusion.
What makes fission reactors cost money is the Government being involved from the first pen on paper, to the cutting of the ribbon and all the steps in between.
Seven decades of financials around nuclear are pretty brutal too. Even keeping existing plants running is not cheap. E.g. France imports cheap wind at times when it has nuclear surplus that is just more expensive. They are actively planning to gradually replace nuclear with other options as plants reach their end date.
IMHO the potential for fusion long term is amazing but unlikely to happen first half of this century. Nuclear options short term makes sense for some niche use cases but it is a hard sell on the grid given prices for wind, solar, and battery continue to trend down from already being vastly cheaper. Anyone looking to sell nuclear probably should be planning for 1-2 order of magnitude in cost reduction just to keep up.
France import "cheap wind" (free wind essentially since the price is just high enough to match green energy tax) because the european power grid needs to match production with consumption. And it also helps Germany to reduce the cost of their energy transition. There is a reason why Germans electrical engineers are so cross with Denmark and their eastern neighbors.
Iceland, Norway come to mind as the obvious poster childs for hydro and geothermal and probably there already. If you count nuclear (and why not), France is another big one and even they are replacing nuclear with renewables.
Countries like Denmark, Sweden the UK, , come to mind as places that are closing in on (or over) 50% at this point and have ambitious targets of getting pretty much to 100% by next decade or so.
In many other markets (e.g. Germany, China, the US) renewables are either or both the fastest growing form of energy or the largest (by kwh) form of energy (typically displacing coal recently or in the near future). These will take longer but are probably going to close in on the 50% mark by the end of the decade nevertheless.
Clean energy absorbed most of the growth and shrinkage of coal & nuclear in the years the transition happened. About 2/3rd of the nuclear capacity disappeared around 2010 and the combined growth of coal, gas, and brown coal is a fraction of that in that period. Rewewable growth around the same time on the other hand took most of that. And it didn't stop growing. At this point that dwarfs nuclear, coal, gas, browncoal combined (<40% together). Of those gas is pretty much the only thing that had some growth (beyond 2010 numbers); from the looks of it partially at the cost of black coal.
Brown coal has been more or less the same in recent history thanks to the CSU (mainly) lobbying hard for keeping that around for a few decades). But they might have to negotiate with the green party soonish and I doubt they'd agree to continue backing that.
If there was a problem it was PG&E, not nuclear energy, which there was never a rational argument against it. Big oil has been playing us like fiddles.
I'm inheriting a broken world. Didn't have to be that way.
I'm agreeing with you. If you read the article, most of the opposition arose from PG&E botching nuclear. Especially given their track record over the last few years, I am /immensely/ appreciative that PG&E never had the chance to rollout nuclear in California.
There are rational arguments against nuclear when the stewards are incompetent. :) It's high time we get the right engineers and companies in place to make the switch.
I agree as well. Given the San Bruno gas explosion and the myriad fires started by unmaintained equipment, I'm glad PG&E didn't go wild with the "spicy rocks" way of making electricity.
That said, I think most of the people who actually do the work (e.g. linemen, reactor operators) are definitely ready to do the work. A lot of my family works for PG&E in various capacities and everyone from the civil engineer to my lineman uncle love their job. What they all complain about is the pressure to run it like the profit-motivated "business" that it is, i.e. screw everyone but the C-suite including the rate payers.
As much as people complain about the overreach of California's politics and how bloated it can be, I'd much rather have someone who is publicly accountable and can be removed by the voters as the head of PG&E. It's high time California eminent domain them to not serve up shoddy service to their constituents.
I just hope more lives aren't lost due to PG&E inaction in the future, only to have them issue some "we're vewy sowy" half-assed apology while barely admitting any wrongdoing (if at all).
But PG&E successfully operated a handful of nuclear plants in California for decades and still operates Diablo Canyon...
The stewards of our current energy sources aren't very responsible, their have been a number of rather catastrophic and avoidable accidents. Seems like a pick your poison kind of situation. I pick nuclear. Radiation is just not that big of a deal
Botching their public relations, sure. Bodega NGS was killed by scaring people about the fault, but they failed to convince people that a generating station being subject to "significant shaking" doesn't automatically equate to a dangerous situation. After all, a reactor can be brought sub-critical within 3 seconds: https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-rea...
"A reactor trip causes all the control rods to insert into the reactor core, and shut down the plant in a very short time (about three seconds)."
I'm not sure how much this had to do with it, but the proposed site of Bodega NGS (Bodega Head) is one of the most beautiful and unique recreation areas on the California coast. I wasn't alive at the time, but I can't imagine their choice of site was helped by that when there's plenty of less unique coastline they could have built on.
I’ve been there many times, and I agree the overhead wires would detract from the look especially of the inner coast, and I’m sure boaters would grumble some times when passing it, but the Head itself is a whole lot of scrub plants and nothing. Even the information placards celebrating the defeat of clean energy are unreadably weathered and the entire site obviously not cared for:
https://i.imgur.com/TocVZoG.jpeg
> While for 40 years California may have opposed nuclear power, it might be time for people to figure out how to make it work.
Let me know when you figure out how to make the operator pay the insurance, cleanup and decommissioning costs. HN nuclear fanbois keep evading this question.
It will take the entire nation of Japan to clean up Fukushima.
> It will take the entire nation of Japan to clean up Fukushima.
Citation needed. Why don't people understand that the GIEC and UNSCEAR are essentially the same, except that the GIEC have one of their group focused on making politic statements (not the group i like the most, obviously). But if you trust the GIEC documentation and agregation, why not trust UNSCEAR's? I mean, you don't get to cherry pick science. If you're not a climate/radionuclear scientist, you should either distrust both UNSCEAR or GIEC, or trust both.
Not GIEC Group3, they mostly heed scientific advice hopefully, but they are different.
It seems like the only way for carbon sequestration projects to succeed is to leverage cheap nuclear power. The winner of the XPrize competition [1] should just go to whoever figures out how to build a few gigawatts of nuclear capacity, and power "whoever comes in second place".
I feel a lot of people think of this as pro or anti, but for me, most of the concern seems to be about nuclear waste and meltdown, and the half life of nuclear waste is changing, and we have tech where switching the power off stops meltdown.
What was true in 1960 isn't true in 2020.
I think we'd be better served by asking people what their concerns about nuclear energy are:
- Nuclear waste
- What is an acceptable half life for nuclear waste?
- 10,000 years
- 1000 years
- 100 years
- 10 years
- 1 year
- No waste is acceptable
- Nuclear meltdown
- Do you support Nuclear technologies that do not have a risk of meltdown?
I have hope that we can work out what people are concerned about and address it. Sometimes that may require further scientific development, but sometimes it may require more dispersal of knowledge.
* 100 (or less) year waste is something we could feasibly deal with. The cost of that needs to be built into the operating costs of the plant. Here in the UK nuclear plants have generally been allowed to take all the profit out and then declare bankruptcy. This dumps billion pound waste problems on the tax payer.
* I'm not convinced there really is such a thing as a meltdown proof reactor. This is my primary objection to nuclear. We've had at least 4 generations of reactor that were all 110% safe, impossible to break, triple failure proof until suddenly they weren't. Partly that's because it's really hard to design one. Partly its because operators focused on meeting targets and maximising productivity/bonuses quickly find ways to break them (eg Chernobyl).
* You should also consider cost. Nuclear is horrendously expensive even with the big costs (insurance and waste) being borne by government. I think we could spend the same money decarbonising other sectors and get a lot more decarbonisation for the $/€/¥ spent.
Personally I think the biggest thing we need are new human social structures that actually value safety and ultra long term management. That would make nuclear safe and viable long term. Its not an engineering problem to me, it's a sociology/economic/political issue. I have zero idea how to solve that. It's probably not possible as current economic and political models tend to seep though any barrier we create...
Chernobyl was really different than Fukushima. The design was really poor, and dangerous, it would have been hell to decommission (still is). Yes the human factor was important in the incident, but with a better design, this wouldn't have been such a disaster.
Fukushima is a way better example of "what can go wrong will go wrong", and only a perfect team could've prevented the disaster [0].
EPRs are meltdown proof BTW. I still think its useless design, Fukushima meltdown showed us the risk of an unmitigated meltdown, and those risks were predicted in 1980s by french engineers during the second construction wave (that's why they have a third water circuit, and the secondary water circuit is in a loop).
I think in both cases we took designs that promised to be totally impossible to meltdown and then through either incompetence or bad luck melted them down. So how can we KNOW that today's "totally impossible to meltdown" design is not just safe, but safe when run incompetently and during an external disaster?
This is the core issue with nuclear: I don't really care about the factory or power station 1km from my house because if it burns down, it will be a small inconvenience to me. But a nuclear plant, even one 50km away, has the potential to kill me.
How do you manage that risk?
I worry that right now a lot of the push is basically an appeal to authority ("engineers know how to design reactors"). But those same authorieis are undermined by both their source of funding and their historic record. That's the real issue here: we used up our credibility and don't have any left and can't work without it.
Isn’t that holding the nuclear industry to an impossible standard, though? Nuclear plants did become much safer, they just didn’t become perfectly safe. But neither did the oil&gas, aviation or automobile industries. Should we also deem the authority of engineers in those industries to be undermined, because planes and automobiles still crash?
They don't have to be perfectly safe. We can accept risks that are possible but contained. Risks that are uncontained (a meltdown leading to evacuating a huge area) have to impossible I'm afraid. Or much much less likely than they currently seem to be...
Nuclear waste is nonexistent issue. Earth has plenty of inhabitable space where that “waste” can be stored cheaply until it is ready to be processed by the next generation reactors.
Take any dry deserts, stockpile it in the middle of it, problem solved.
The problem with nuclear waste is not engineering or economic problem, it is voters and commenters ignorance problem.
In any case, can you comment on the impact to the essential desert biomes you propose to dig up? What about the cost of safe transport from the power plants to the more remote areas where you say it's safe? How about security to keep out the curious or malicious? What sort of protections would you propose to prevent problems like those at Hanford?
While for 40 years California may have opposed nuclear power, it might be time for people to figure out how to make it work.