As a French not expert in the matter but living near nuclear plants:
- one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
- rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly
- nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
- the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants
(References are easy to find if you want confirmation)
I am not against nuclear power, but it has to be done properly and safely, which is certainly not the case around here.
Edit: it seems the fusion (no pun) of regulation organisms has been rejected by the senate. Still annoying to see this law discreetly pass, with no parliament debate outside of the senate, during a political crisis
That's also wrong. Please share numbers. Nuclear has a load factor of 95% and its down time can be scheduled (maintenance). Wind has a load factor of 30-40% (and output is unpredictable), solar has a load factor of 20%, hydro requires mountains.
> the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants
When controls are too tight, nuclear is too slow ; when controls are too loose, nuclear is dangerous. Face je gagne, pile tu perds.
The goal is less CO2, and for that any low carbon energy source is good.
By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that couldn't be scheduled).
Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans. As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them. As soon as you say "ok, build them reactors if they are so perfect", nuclear advocates want the state to jump in and asume the costs, the consumers to pay an extra price, the safety regulations back to 1960 and the future people to deal with the residues.
The (botched) green energy transformation has given the country I live in top 3 highest electricity prices in the world and it's not even particularly green at all. Literally cannot get worse. And it seems to me that one half doesn't understand how incredibly bad high energy prices are both for people and industry, while the other half cheers at the prices because it causes deindustrialization and pushes towards degrowth - mainstream talking points of the current generation of climate activists here.
No, this has everything to do with nuclear(and energy politics in general). Since at least the 80s, nuclear power has carried a huge political risk in Northern Europe including Germany. Reactors have been shut down prematurely - instead coal and oil power plants have been kept operational.
Do you have a source for these claims? A peer-reviewed study would be best? All statistics of the last years indicate that Germany has replaced reactor capacity with renewables. And at the same time, it has cut back on coal. The current negative development has to do with the war and the gas supply stop and not with the dismantling of nuclear power plants.
If you are going to ask for a source, would you mind providing sources for your assertions as well? As an outsider, I would be interested in seeing numbers/evidence for both view points. (Although looking at the parent comment, I'm not exactly sure what you would like a peer-reviewed study of.)
Also, would you please not copy-and-paste the same response multiple times as you've done in the thread? It comes across less as thoughtful discussion and more as spam. (I'm not trying to be rude, but that's how it came across to me.)
I will agree with the sibling comment -- as an anecdotal opinion I guess. It has everything to do with nuclear.
Since a few days ago, Germany's policy to reduce or keep energy prices and meet demand depends inextricably to France's building more nuclear reactors. (I am talking about the last industrial nuclear reactors going offline, and the future energy budget planning related to that.)
Do you have a source for these claims? A peer-reviewed study would be best? All statistics of the last years show that Germany has replaced reactor capacity with renewables. And at the same time it has cut back on coal. The current negative development has to do with the war and the gas supply stop and not with the dismantling of nuclear power plants.
> By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that couldn't be scheduled).
That's not quite correct. France deferred maintenance during COVID and scheduled the downtime in advance. The inspections then found potential problems, so other reactors did additional maintenance and checks.
They could have been deferred further if needed, but politicians were not willing to make the call.
> Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans.
Nuclear energy is the one that is actually proven to work and be reliable enough to completely displace fossil generation. Nothing else is coming close to that, including solar and wind.
> As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them.
Russia is busy exporting nuclear power plants. A nuclear reactor can be built within 6 years, two reactors within ~9 years (they're built in parallel).
Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at least not the installed capacity. Some are technically capable but load-following seems to be quite taxing on the equipment due to pressure and temperature cycling.
However it is very suitable for base load generation, there's a reason why oil and coal companies lost their marbles in the 50s and astroturfed anti-nuclear into existence.
I'm not sure if that's their most-effective campaign ever or if it's a tie with BP's popularization of the carbon footprint, which atomizes responsibility for climate change and has successfully delayed systematic action for decades. And even managed to get greens and climate change activists to do their work for them. Just like with nuclear. It's actually, genuinely incredible.
> Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at least not the installed capacity.
That's not quite the case. You can load-follow with nuclear, but it requires reactors to be designed for that. France does this, for example.
You also can simply keep reactors working at a constant level and just dump excess power into their cooling system. This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy.
Most nuclear power plants do not do this because they don't need to do it.
>This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy.
Therein lies the problem. Capital costs dominate nuclear plant costs and they are high.
If you load followed such that you kept the reactor at an average of, say, 50% nameplate capacity that would lead to a levelized cost per MWh of about 2x$168 = $336.
For reference, Bhadla solar park sells a MWh for roughly $30, so even if you charged $300 to store and retrieve it you could still provide cheaper electricity than a load following nuclear power plant running at 50% of nameplate.
I question your estimation of the capital cost. LCOE for most nuclear power plants is way below that: https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/
For the US it's $33 per MWh, so doubling it still gives reasonable cost.
As for wind, it simply can not compete right now for guaranteed capacity. The adequacy rating for most wind power plants is around 10%, so you need 10x overbuild to even compete.
And so what? Modern nuclear reactors are licensed for 60 years and are expected to last 80-100 years with maintenance (reactor vessel annealing, mainly).
So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?"
One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety.
If I had to make long term bets, radioactive materials will continue to be radioactive, green capture, storage and transmission will get cheaper and more reliable.
Speaking of transmission, that's another huge problem. You can't go plopping powerplants just anywhere, and power generation needs to be somewhat close to those consuming it.
Distributed collection and storage helps reduce challenges around transmission infrastructure in low density or hard to travel areas.
Consider Puerto Rico, their investments in solar have skyrocketed, especially with the need to rebuild so much infrastructure. They had nuclear, and they were cleaning up contamination for decades after shutting it down. Also part of the issue with power there is transmission. You don't get the efficiency out of tiny boilers to make them cost effective for these folks.
I think you're pushing a bit hard for a tech that has a lot of problems and while it could play a role in our future, it's unlikely to be a dominant force.
> So where's the "solar spills" or "wind contamination?"
At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades.
> One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety.
So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing.
> Distributed collection and storage helps reduce challenges around transmission infrastructure in low density or hard to travel areas.
If we're talking about Europe, they are facing the problem of Dunkelflaute - long periods of no wind, no sun, and low temperatures in the middle of the winter. A worst-case once-in-century scenario would require around a _month_ of storage.
Dunkelflaute can be dealt with by burning hydrogen, not fossil fuels. You need backup turbines, but a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is about 20x as cheap to build as a nuclear power plant, per unit of power output. So backing up the entire grid with these "Dunkelflaute turbines" is not expensive compared to the nuclear solution.
Europe has many petawatt hours of potential hydrogen storage capacity in its salt formations.
> At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades.
And if we compared these factories and their environmental impacts we would see a net increase from the production of solar and wind products? That's the point, and you ducked it hard.
> So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing.
Who said that we had to hit 100%? There is a place for burning stuff for fuels in our society for long to come, the point is not having it the default way we power larger systems.
> If we're talking about Europe, they are facing the problem of Dunkelflaute - long periods of no wind, no sun, and low temperatures in the middle of the winter. A worst-case once-in-century scenario would require around a _month_ of storage.
> So far no technology is even close to that.
Okay, that's a great argument to not continue investing in storage solutions, but let's be real, a new nuclear steam turbine isn't coming online _tomorrow_ either.
Let's do both, and not pretend like the more risky one is less dangerous than it is, when things go wrong.
If we are trying to determibe the cost of power from new nuclear plants, looking at the marginal cost of upgrading/refurbishing existing plants makes no sense, as that is much cheaper.
It's been proven to work and the only able to displace fossil fuels, yet it's existed for 70 years and not even reduced the amount of fossil fuels used in electricity production. Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.
I don't want you to feel gaslighted, but you are objectively very lazy and have an opinion without checking any data. This Reuters article doesn't deal with it, but with a short term situation in the summer. You probably didn't even read past the headline. If you had, you probably would've noticed this quote: "Since Destatis started compiling statistics in 1990, 2022 will likely be the first that Germany will be a net exporter of electricity to France, not the other way round, it said.". Thus it's easy to figure out the uptick in coal in the summer of last year in Germany has very much to do with the fact that half of France's nuclear plants were offline at that point, half of those because of unplanned maintenance. The dirty coal uptick was used to keep the lights on in France. Oops.
Nuclear shutdowns started in Germany in 2011. It should be easy to see that coal went down significantly since then and is at a historic low. Which brings me back to my original point:
Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.
And then we will look into Germany's CO2 per kWh and it is one of the dirtiest in Europe. That's probably because they have so much renewables. Or so little.
Germany went up last two years, but have otherwise been on a steady decline along with the rest of the continent. In 2011 Germany was at 473 g CO2 per kWh of electricity. In 2022 this was down to 386 g CO2/kWh but went down to 333 g CO2 / kWh in 2020.
I will leave it to you to figure out if there was any world event going on in 2020 which would have made it particularly low (i.e. allowed renewables to take up a greater portion of the electricity production), as well as in 2022 which could make it particularly high.
Using this news source to claim that coal consumption is going up reminds me of climate deniers who point to one climate graph from one region in Canada and show the temperature was actually cooling down, while not mentioning that the slice they showed was from March 1997 to October 2005, while the whole graph (including parts they hid) was from 1960 to 2020 and showed massive heating.
From your news source:
> "Only in Germany, with 10 gigawatts (GW), is the reversal at a significant scale. This has increased coal power generation in the European Union, which is expected to remain at these higher levels for some time," the IEA's annual coal market report said.
So your news source only mentions Germany, and only during an energy crisis caused be a war. If you only look at this one country, and only from February 2022 to April 2023 you may find coal consumption going up, but if you look over any other period, or include any other European country, you will see the opposite effect.
To be fair the french have had some massive problems with their fleet recently. There were issues discovered where (IIRC) a supplier that made pressure vessels used steel that was not of sufficient quality and covered it up for decades, only to be discovered recently- this required major downtime and expense. Other issues have resulted in lots of nuclear plant downtime in france as well recently.
I heard almost exactly the same thing about Japanese reactors, are you sure you're remembering right, that it is definitely the French because it seems a bit of a coincidence
Nope, he's got that right. It's been a pretty major recurring story in the news in France through this autumn. I haven't really followed through the details, but the idea was that several reactors were down for a planned overhaul/maintenance for something like this (material defects) through the summer. As the delays ("nuclear projects are never on time") piled up story was "will they make it in time for winter". Pretty nail biting actually, specially if You add up to it the halt on Russian gas
The details: one tube on a safety backup system, so with a 0.1% chance of needing to be used, was shown to have the potential to corrode under strain ("corrosion sous contrainte") this led to all plants using that kind of tube being shut down for months because of extreme care. The irony being that this extreme care is keeping things extremely safe, but somehow in the news it comes out as "nuclear is unsafe". The reality is there are many chemicals plants with much more damaging issues, but much less regulations, and significant accidents over the yeras, often not as bad as Bhopal, but still toxic to neighbours, that somehow don't get to newsworthy...
While I personally share the opinion that the standard that nuclear is held to is higher than it needs to be — on the basis of the old "deaths per TWh" chart — this standard leads to them being both expensive to build and run, and also to it being shut down for months making it unreliable.
I've noticed by trying that one cannot simply win a political argument by waving the banner of utilitarian ethics. (I'm hoping fusion can circumvent this, if anyone can even commercialise it; we shall see). Likewise, best to compare with other power plants rather than other industrial accidents, and not just because what happened in Bohpal (and its less newsworthy cousins) should not have happened.
Current $/MWh prices are high enough that, given current LiIon prices (and that LiIon is what we get even if we don't put in any effort to get cheaper alternatives given its widespread usage), I recommend people stop trying to make it happen and put their efforts elsewhere.
But my claim is, if Chernobyl hadn't Chernobyled, the $/MWh price would probably be lower.
I'm not making a specific claim that it would be cheap enough, though; I don't have enough relevant background to guess the magnitude.
You seemed to be saying that the standards nuclear is held to is higher than is necessary. Compared to what? Was my question. I asked about the cost of Chernobyl, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost
$790 billion at 2021 cost
so my point was perhaps it is being held to a higher standard for a very good reason.
(NB. I'm not automatically against nuclear power, but I seriously question their potential cost against their very definite benefits. We had one Chernobyl, I guarantee we'll have another in time. Question is, how hard are we prepared to work to push that possibility, statistically speaking, as far into the future as possible)
Sure, it's a perfectly reasonable question and I ought to have justified it better.
Ok, so, total energy produced to by all nuclear reactors in the world in 2021 was apparently 2,653,344 GWh[0]; if there was a Chernobyl-scale disaster every year, that would add just under $0.30/kWh to the cost of electricity[1]. As reactors didn't have such a poor MTBF even then, I think a decade is a less unreasonable guess for rate of exploding, which is 3¢/kWh.
This may seem too concerned with dollars and not enough with lives, but similar things can be said in favour of lives cost per unit of energy produced, and again that's in favour of a yearly Chrenobly over all the fossil fuels, though not the renewables: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... (I remember an older version that had much worse PV death rate, justified on the grounds installing stuff on rooftops is dangerous).
Like most arguments in favour of nuclear, it's more about the world we used to live in than the one we now live in; if you'd asked me 10-15 years ago, I'd have been all-in on nuclear to save the planet, but now, I think we have better options. But these were my reasons for being pro-nuclear at the time.
A commendable answer, thanks. The issue of lives I skipped as the deaths from chernobyl were counted in wiki as 60 to 60,000. Can't really conclude much from an error bar of 3 orders of magnitude.
That’s very optimistic. Perhaps an ideal nuclear plant with a perfect operating record might approach 95%, but real-world load factors are lower as most plants end up requiring extended outages for repairs as some point in their lifetime.
France’s lifetime load factors for its nuclear plants are around 77%, but that declined sharply in recent years to 72% in 2020-21 and even lower in 2022 due to many plants being taken offline for repairs. In the UK, load factors are even lower: 67% during 1970-2017.
That's the same as saying nuclear can hit 95% while the real-world average is more like 80%. For wind that number seems to be around 40% (both land and offshore from a quick search). Guess the jury is out on how more extensive maintenance will affect these projects(?), but down time for wind turbines are probably a lot less than for nuclear plants.
Capacity factors for wind projects surely are highly dependent on location, not just technology. Remains to be seen how many premium locations are suitable?
I don't know in what parallel reality you live, but France is having massive energy problems due to their reliance on nuclear right now. And it's only getting worse with rivers drying up more and more and power plants needing more and more maintance as they age. Building new plants is hugely expensive unless you lower standards, and security is already worse in reality than in the books as of now, you don't want to go lower than that and cut more corners.
You are making good points, however about the leaks, we obviously shouldn't wait for them to be dangerous to worry. It's hard to prove risks, it's also hard to prove the lack of risks if only for the living ecosystem around the plant. The leaks show issues in the alert system, it's not the first time it happened, and an engineer sued the plant for dangerous mismanagement.
Doesn't mean we should drop nuclear energy either.
Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy in Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s - 1990s.
Activated water with tritium in it has been released accidentally a number of times, and small amounts of tritium and other gasses are released by any reactor, but no unapproved leaking besides that has ever been made public.
There are of course ecological problems with the heat, but all the reactors use one of the Great Lakes as a heat sink and water supply itself isn't a problem.
The CANDU design can be fuelled online and most of the reactors have been online over 80% of the time, including refuelling, maintenance and refurbishment projects. The later designs hover around 90%.
They were expensive to build, and the last plant was really expensive. This was due to various reasons, including post-Chernobyl reviews, and pausing construction for over a year due to a labour dispute, and high interest rates.
Still, amortized over more than half a century they've ended up being the second-cheapest source of power in the province, after hydroelectric. Government is casting around for replacement options as the reactors are retired over the coming decades, but nothing concrete in the short term.
That’s an accurate but misleading description of what’s going on because Ontario is part of a much larger grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss... It’s like saying a town next to a nuclear power plant is 90% nuclear, that’s “true” but only works because other areas don’t rely on 90% nuclear.
Just like the town, Ontario exports power to other areas and imports non nuclear power. If everyone used 50-60% nuclear there wouldn’t be anyone to export that power to on low demand weekends etc which would drive up prices. The area also has a great deal of hydroelectric power which reduces the need for peaking power plants.
Nuclear has already played a significant role in reducing climate change, but it just can’t economically scale to supply nearly as much power as wind and solar. And much worse when you have a high percentage of Wind and Solar adding Nuclear to the mix just doesn’t work very well because base load power becomes less valuable.
It's not just about the cost. The mix of nuclear and locally-available gas and hydroelectric makes for a self-sufficient energy strategy, and that has always been a major concern. Yes, Ontario is synchronized with the US grid but it could disconnect if necessary. Electricity is a valuable but not critical export economically.
As with France, a substantial influence on historic policy was to build surplus generation for economic security reasons. Could have just imported coal and oil. But Ontario does not have much coal or oil. Same with Quebec and hydroelectric.
Renewables provide the same sort of decentralized benefit, of course.
At the scale of the worldwide electricity grid cost is a major concern.
If the difference was a few billion globally then that’s trivial compared to the issues from climate change, but you can’t hand wave things once the difference starts crossing into the trillions.
France was able to heavily subsidize Nuclear and while their economy took a real hit it wasn’t such a big deal. Bangladesh and other developing countries simply aren’t capable of making those kinds of trade offs and nobody is going to subsidize nuclear power in the 3rd world on the scale they would need.
Yep, and that looks great wind, hydro, and nuclear providing 100% of power at 3pm on a Friday at 2.5c/kWh. But what happens on the weekend when demand for power drops even more?
Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.
Low electricity costs are a problem for all electricity plans, not only nuclear.
Renewables are even more susceptible to this because the weather affects all renewable plants of the same type similarly across wide geographic areas, so there will be times when they all generate more than is needed and nothing can be done about it. What's worse, the output is unpredictable, so there's little opportunity for some business to base its operation on renewable electricity generation patterns.
At least the weekend demand drop is predictable, so businesses can use this predictable opportunity to reduce their costs and thus reduce the impact the weekends have on the profitability of nuclear and similar dispatchable plants.
Low is relative, in most areas a 3c/kWh wholesale price is wildly profitable for solar and a massive loss for nuclear.
Renewables very much provide surplus power at scale, but they don’t always provide that massive surplus. So, Solar could provide 3/4 of its power when wholesale prices are below 1c/kWh and the economics still end up working out over the year. Meanwhile every other source of power needs to deal with electricity being increasingly cheap for most of the day.
> At least the weekend demand drop is predictable, so businesses can use this predictable opportunity to reduce their costs and thus reduce the impact the weekends have on the profitability of nuclear and similar dispatchable plants.
There’s almost nothing nuclear can do to reduce its costs when demand is low for a few days. They still need to pay interest, still need security guards, the reinforced concrete is still aging etc. They do major maintenance when seasonal demand drops normally in the spring or fall, but they don’t have any way to make use of downtown over weekends because weekends are so frequent. In a world with cheap electricity for 1/3 the day and cheap electricity 2/7 days a week and cheap electricity for 3-6 months out of the year, they need very high prices the rest of the time to break even.
Batteries fed cheap solar power can provide relatively cheap peaking power whenever you want. That’s going to effectively be the maximum daily wholesale price per kWh long term.
Wind/Hydro and possibly some Nuclear might survive in that kind of an environment, but most industry insiders think Nuclear is basically doomed outside the far north without truly massive subsidies.
While it would be nice if all the required nuclear or storage was installed decades ago, (1) we don't need to do this transition overnight, (2) a decade is on the optimistic side for rolling out new nuclear on this scale so it's not much of an improvement in that regard, and (3) most of the existing power infrastructure can be kept running until the batteries are available, and we get to keep looking at storage supply in the supply is still growing appropriately for the targets.
>Low electricity costs are a problem for all electricity plans, not only nuclear.
No, it's worst for the more expensive, capital intense sources.
Gas is expensive but not capital intense. An idled plant doesnt lose too much because fuel costs dominate. Solar/wind is capital intense but not expensive - idling is cheap if the whole thing is cheap.
Nuclear power is capital intense and expensive. Idling burns through a lot of cash.
> Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.
Note that Ontario Power Generation, who owns all the nuclear plants in Ontario, has a positive net income of roughly 20% of gross, and is building Canada's first new nuclear plant in a couple decades. Your generalization is incorrect.
Sure they own nuclear but they also own a great deal of hydroelectric. Their finances are very healthy because they essentially got 50 billion in assets from privatization of public assets including a great deal of very low maintenance hydroelectric generation and significant nuclear again without any upfront cost.
Things don’t look nearly as rosy when you consider they’re generating $1.20 billion in net profits off of 60 billion in assets - 10 billion in debt. Essentially without that massive initial subsidy they would be losing money hand over fist.
Yes, debt financing is awful, and something that has guaranteed long term revenue but large up front capital costs is something that should be publicly owned (i.e. a crown corporation like OPG), not financed by private debt.
It’s not just that power is taken offline but wholesale prices drop at the same time. In extreme cases the grid will charge you money for every kWh you’re dumping on it. That’s obviously not a profitable time to be generating electricity.
Nuclear isn’t the only type of power that has low marginal costs. Curtailing wind for nuclear is just as much an economic loss as curtailing nuclear for wind.
>Still, amortized over more than half a century they've ended up being the second-cheapest source of power in the province
Even after 50 years you have accumulated only a small percentage of the total costs related to the plant. They will most likely cost more money after they have been decommissioned than they did during operation.
This is a straightforward lie. Decommissioning a nuclear power plant down to a "brown field" can cost about 10% of its construction cost. Even grossly mismanaged decommissioning projects are at about 25%.
It's not a lie, I am obviously not talking about the cost of decommissioning but the costs that keep ticking after the decommissioning has been done.
Rancho seco is an interesting example, it was closed in 1989 and is still costing millions today. "SMUD estimates that it spends roughly $5 million each year to essentially "babysit" the waste, which requires tight security and a small crew to oversee its proper storage”
Also worth noting is that the DoE has paid SMUD over 100 million dollars to date for contract violations (failing to present a storage site for the waste).
The funny thing is that operators book this money as _income_ related to the nuclear plant, when it is in fact costs to the taxpayers.
Also keep in mind of course that if and when SMUD finally gets rid of the waste, that only stops the costs ticking for SMUD, not for the taxpayers.
Nuclear decommissioning costs in the UK are estimated to reach £260 billion[1]. It would be interesting to compare that to the inflation-adjusted construction costs for the plants. My suspicion is that it’s significantly higher.
This is mostly because of the Sellafield site, which was used for nuclear weapons production. It's also the site of the infamous Windscale nuclear reactor fire.
The US has the same problems with Hanford.
But I don't think this is fair to ascribe these costs to modern civilian nuclear power programs.
I base it on common sense and several known examples. The common sense part is that we know that we have to keep managing the waste after the plants no longer produce any energy, or money. Managing the waste costs money, and since we can't make estimates for even a decade into the future it's self-evident that we don't know what 500 years of storage will cost.
Secondly from known examples where the logic has already proven itself in practice.
One example is France, where the taxpayers have recently had to pay over 50 bn euros in costs that were never planned or paid for by the operator.
Another example is the cleanup costs for the German Asse II storage site. Several billion Euros for the cleanup alone, and the things you extract from that site will have to be stored someplace else at high cost as well, so the costs will keep ticking. Operators don't pay that either, taxpayers do.
Another example is Sweden, where they have a storage facility for second-rate waste, (i.e. low-intensity waste), which is mandated to operate for at least 500 years. It is currently employing over 100 highly qualified people and is going to grow over the next few decades.
This facility is currently underfunded for its planned operations, and please note that this is not even accounting for the costs of handling high-intensity waste. This site will only manage secondary waste, like contaminated pipes, pumps, filters and such - so the actual total costs are severely underestimated. Taxpayers in Sweden will have to pay these costs in the years to come.
Take the UK as an example. It’s estimated that to decommission our former nuclear sites (built between the 1950s and 1980s) will cost around £260 billion[1] and take 120 years to complete.
This includes the cost of decommissioning closed nuclear plants, disposing of waste, and cleaning up contaminated sites.
The UK is very much an outlier in the nuclear sector as they went with impossible to refurbish gas cooled reactors. Their experience is unlikely to resemble other countries.
In the US at least, the cost for all decommissioning and fuel handling are built into the cost of electricity sold by law.
>In the US at least, the cost for all decommissioning and fuel handling are built into the cost of electricity sold by law.
That was the plan, but it has failed. The mechanism varies but the end result is the same - the operator doesn't pay the actual costs, so they don't charge the actual costs from the customers. The actual costs are paid by taxpayers from some anonymized bucket of money, like a government entity.
As an example, the DOE has so far paid over 100 million USD to SMUD for the decommissioned Rancho Seco plant and will continue to pay for decades more. The operator doesn't pay - the government does.
This has been proven to be true in best-case scenarios like the US, France, Germany and Sweden, and of course once anything deviates from best-case the costs become astronomical almost immediately (Japan).
Without doing a lick of research into the particulars of this plant the statement scans based on storage requirements for high level radioactive waste alone. Some of this shit has to be stored for several multiples of recorded civilization before it becomes anything like safe. We're talking borderline geologic time scales.
Fortunately that's not true. The fission products that are actually dangerous only stick around for 300 to 600 years [1]. After that, you'd have to ingest what is left to be harmed. We have existing facilities [2] in the US where we can bury waste in such a way that it essentially becomes crystalized in salt after 100 years. Water moves centimeters per billion years in this salt. This one facility could easily service the entire country in perpetuity, even with 100x increase in nuclear energy.
Despite what the antis will tell you, the waste aspect of nuclear energy is overwhelmingly positive. And the crazy thing is, spent nuclear fuel isn't even waste. 90% of the energy is still in there. So why on earth would you bury it?
Except it is true because Pu-239 and other transuranic isotopes absolutely are a thing. In the case of Pu-239 it's half-life is ~20,000 years. Given the 10 half-life minimum storage requirements for high level radioactive waste, we're at 200,000 years, which is 40 times the length of recorded human history or if you prefer 2/3 of the time our species has provably existed on the planet.
Nope, half life is inversely proportional to danger. The longer the half life, the less dangerous it is to handle an isotope. You can hold Plutonium and Uranium in your hand without issue.
You'd have to eat lots of Pu-239 to get sick and we know this for a fact unfortunately because of the insane story of Albert Stevens [1] who got the highest radiation dose of any known human and lived to be 79. He was one of 18 people injected with plutonium. None of the patients died from the injections. Why injection instead of ingestion? Because the body is actually very bad at absorbing Pu when it is eaten.
Let me just emphasize again that we INJECTED A MAN WITH PURE PLUTONIUM and he was fine. Nuclear waste is not the problem you think it is.
You can hold these isotopes in your hand for how long without issue? I've got known alpha and gamma emitters in the house as we speak (side effect of fossil hunting in the Morrison formation) so I'm not exactly harboring some delusion that radioactive == WERE ALL GOING TO DIE. You don't get to use short-term exposure non-effects to sweep long term exposure effects under the rug, and given the only institution in recorded history that has maintained it's existence long enough to even start considering them viable to manage a nuclear waste containment project is the Catholic Church I'd say yeah it absolutely is the problem I think it is.
Indefinitely since they are alpha emitters. This kind of radiation is stopped by almost anything like paper and the dead outer layer of skin and so is harmless unless you ingest the source.
Fact is, the waste that everyone is worried about (used nuclear rods) is not actually waste. 90%+ of the energy is still in there. It's just that the dominant reactor technology isn't designed to extract it. It would be dumb to bury this energy. It would be better to reprocess it like France does or even better, build the kinds of reactors that can directly use it as fuel.
Then you're left with fission products that you can bury it several kilometers underground in a deep borehole using oil/gas technology. It will naturally decay away in 300 to 600 years. Remember, most industrial toxins are toxic forever. There is no amount of time that will render it safe, and we don't even particularly try to isolate it because there's so much. It is only for nuclear waste that we try so hard. And it's only feasible because there's so little of it. All the spent nuclear rods (civilian) the US has EVER produced in 70 years fits in a football field at 30 feet high. Meanwhile a single coal plant produces 1100 tons of just ash a DAY. Not to mention all the air pollution and greenhouse gases. A single plant.
The waste aspect of nuclear energy is amazingly convenient in comparison.
Nah. You ignore the fact that alpha emitters (like literally anything else) can crap up their surroundings with micro-particles, and while you might be perfectly happy to hold an alpha emitting isotope in your hand you're gonna feel a lot different once you start ingesting them. As stated above your 600 year timescale is off by close to three orders of magnitude, and you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move. End of the day you're dead-ass wrong, as is evidenced by the fact that longterm stable storage of high level nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem despite the technology you're proposing having existed in some capacity for roughly a century before the first functional nuclear power plant went online.
> you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move
That's why you bury it in rock where it doesn't move and we know it doesn't. Like the Permian Basin or where the Oklo natural reactors occurred in Gabon.
Oh yes, did you know nature formed fission reactors billions of years before we did ever existed? This always pisses off the hippies when I tell them. And guess what? The fission products from this natural process moved mere centimeters over 2 billion years.
This is a solved problem. It's just that some people desperately want it not to be.
Nuclear waste contains a lot more than plutonium (and also a lot more plutonium than was injected into Albert Stevens).
The sad fact is that nobody has correctly estimated how big a problem nuclear waste is. We keep having to pay more for it than any previous estimate predicted.
France has been mismanaging its fleet and signally for years that they want to move away from it, under-investing in it, etc. It's not the technology's fault.
Germany had some of the best managed plants in the world -- until they decided to shut them down, leading to more coal being burned and more dependence on other countries like Russia...
Germany is exiting both nuclear and coal. In the time from 2010 to 2022 where 14/17 of nuclear plants were shut down generation from coal was reduced from 263 TWh per year to 181 TWh. Renewables increased from 105 TWh to 254 TWh. I also would have preferred to leave the nuclear plants running longer and exit coal faster, but in the overall scheme of things it does not matter too much. Nuclear is basically irrelevant. It is too expensive and slow to build. In reality, renewables will take over everything very quickly.
Gas and coal imports from Russia stopped completely. But guess what still depends on Russia: The nuclear industry in Europe and the US.
Also, the reason this is only possible at all is that Germany uses the rest of Europe as a giant battery to manage the non-dispatchability of renewables. The import-export balance often changes by as much as one third of Germany consumption in 12 hours [1].
The electricity prices are also becoming zero[2] in Germany during parts of the day, which is a great outcome only on the surface. As this progresses, the consequence will be that renewable electricity producers aren't getting paid during their prime generating hours. This means even more subsidies will be required going forward to bring additional production. It will become more apparent once the reserve of easily dispatchable electricity sources is fully tapped to balance renewables across Europe. We will see very high prices during mornings and evenings and whenever it's cold and dark. The fossil fuel plants that are turned on during these periods will need to earn enough to address the additional wear due to quick power cycling and to keep being maintained for the rest of the time when they are unused.
The grid is for trade, so I am not sure what sense this complaint makes. Also France relies on imports sometimes. Electricity prices changing with production and demand is also exactly what market is for. As long as the market is working, this is beneficial to buyer and seller and changing prices are signals that allow the market to optimize production and consumption. Even when the price becomes zero sometimes, that does not mean than renewables need more subsidies if they earn money at other times where the price is higher. Also Germany still has enough of conventional generation capacity to ramp up production if needed, so the "is possible at all because" comment is wrong. If there is trade, then because this is cheaper overall (and in general this helps buyer and seller).
> As long as the market is working, this is beneficial to buyer and seller and changing prices are signals that allow the market to optimize production and consumption.
The market will always look to extract the highest possible price from the consumer.
> If there is trade, then because this is cheaper overall (and in general this helps buyer and seller).
Strange how "cheaper overall" fantasy is "consumer energy prices have quintupled in the past few years" in reality
> dispatchable electricity sources is fully tapped to balance renewables across Europe. We will see very high prices during mornings and evenings and whenever it's cold and dark
The prices in summer were so high mainly because half of France nuclear plants were offline. Look, even the article you cite mentions this: "The largest Nordic nation became the region’s top exporter in the first half after France suffered problems at its aging reactors"
Again: total numbers mean absolutely nothing on a night when there's zero production from renewables.
That "shill" is showing data. Just the fact that you don't like this data doesn't make it invalid.
Right now it's night in Germany, and even though the wind is blowing, it's only at 40% generation. And look, there's coal, supplying 22%, and gas supplying another 9%: https://imgur.com/a/3bYudyd
So what? You are complaining that Germany still uses coal. This is a fair complaint (and one should complain about this), but Germany is in the middle of the transition to renewables and that in the middle of the transition you still use coal does not tell you that the transition is not working. In fact, there are plenty of simulation studies which show that it will work. We also know that nuclear will have no meaningful impact in fighting climate change because it is too expensive and too slow to build.
> but Germany is in the middle of the transition to renewables and that in the middle of the transition you still use coal does not tell you that the transition is not working.
No, it shows that people believe in bullshit and actively hurt their own clean power generation capabilities due to decades of FUD.
And yes, however many renewables you build, you still have no answer for intermittent power generation.
> We also know that nuclear will have no meaningful impact in fighting climate change because it is too expensive and too slow to build.
Strange how some countries build them relatively fast (China can builds 1 reactor in 6 years, building several reactors in parallel, see Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant) while e.g. in Europe after three decades of FUD, scremongering and underinvestment, we not only believe they can't be built fast enough, but can't build them either.
I don't get this bogus argument. Germany is using the least coal in its history for electricity. The data is very easy to find, but it's a knee jerk reaction that they got rid of nuclear and so they must've replaced it with coal. Not true at all, and it's getting tiring reading this nonsense.
50% of the German electricity are now renewable, wind, solar, biomass, water. In 2022, Germany was creating and exporting a considerable chunk of electricity to help plugging the holes left by the switched off French reactors.
So it matters when wind is providing 20%, but it doesn't matter when it's providing 100%. Thus, even though coal use is at a historic low, it's actually increasing, and in other news water is dry and grass is red.
> So it matters when wind is providing 20%, but it doesn't matter when it's providing 100%.
Of course. Because when there's no electricity, there's no electricity.
> even though coal use is at a historic low, it's actually increasing
You pretend this is a contradiction when it's not. Germany has just shut down its last reactors. So yes, the usage of coal will increase because when renewable generation is low you still need to provide electricity. Guess what provides that electricity.
> Your claim was that Germany replaced nuclear with coal. Here are the hard numbers:
Funny how these hard numbers don't answer a simple question: where does Germany get its power on a quiet night like April 15th (answer is simple: buring coal, gas, and biofuels).
> BTW with what did France replace its failing reactors last year?
Last year it's "failing" generators were taken of for planned maintenance. The actual failures accounted for 0.18% loss in power.
Did you had a look at what Europe didn't stop importing from Russia due to lacking alternatives... cough cough.
I also don't get how an article can claim a global solution if nuclear currently is at 10% and we cannot keep up with supply and plants and and and.. this wont scale to 100%, not even 50 or even 20% of future global needs, would deplete cheap enough enable resources too quick... and what also is always forgotten: our world will likely have more, not less conflicts, unfortunately. Have fun managing this plants with wars all around and rivers going empty.
Yeah yeah all the issues happening and brought up again is just stupid people, mismanagement, etcetc.. But that unfortunately is humanity :/
Just no :/ especially as there are good enough and more sustainable other alternatives.
> Germany had some of the best managed plant
Better than France, likely agrees.. but still awful and that sentence is a joke. If that is your bar, good night. German infrastructure is currently rotting at record pace, happy we got those plants out there.
I am cautious on technology vs management. It's like the people who thinks death penalty is great in theory but the justice system is imperfect in practice: maybe, but you can't have one without the other. Nuclear plants have to be managed and that's an issue too.
- one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
In quantities not relevant to safety. We can detect extremely small amounts of radiation, down to 1.0001% higher than backrgound levels.
- rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly
Not quite: the flow of rivers was low enough that they would exceed the 28C temperature limit (ostensibly to protect fish, but no adverse impact from higher temperatures has been observed). It was entirely possible to cool the plants, if this restriction were not in place. Perhaps the solution here is to ask for better evidence on the supposed adverse ecological impact of higher river temperatures, and examine whether it outweighs the global catastrophe of greenhouse gas emissions.
- nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
Quite the contrary: Nuclear plants have some of the highest capacity factors [1] of any energy source. France's reactors were taken down for maintenance, much of it actually scheduled in advance. This is, intentionally or not, cherry picking a year with a particularly low capacity factor.
- the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants
Correct, and since nuclear thus far as proven to be one of the safest power sources [2] it's a reasonable change to accelerate the fight against climate change.
Nuclear is one of the few sources of decarbonized energy that is both non-intermittent, and geographically independent. Solar, wind, and hydro, are all either geographically dependent, intermittent, or both. Plans for a grid based on solar and wind almost invariably assume that a nearly-free form of energy storage will be invented in order to make these generation systems feasible. Unfortunately, such as system has yet to be produced. The heat engine made modern industrialized society possible, and it's easier to switch to a different source of heat than to restructure all of society around intermittent energy sources.
They are referring to the leaking of tritium, which, while "technically" radioactive, regular water contains some tiny amount of tritium and deuterium naturally. They are barely radioactive, and you can actually buy them on Amazon - they are not regulated.
To say that the reactor is "leaking radioactive material" because of tritium is extremely dishonest.
The problem is that some people are categorically denying the leaks for decades until eventually admitting that "yes of course it leaks but only a little"
And later "yep, it leaks routinely but it does not matter because tritium is safe"
And then "of course we knew from the start that is not totally, totally safe for environment, but fuck nature"
Ending with "as long as we can keep the stream of smoke curtains and cheap excuses so can't be linked with us is not a problem". Hey, maybe is not a real french!
"I am not against nuclear power" - this is litterally the calling card of a tactical hit, forum-wise. It very obviously means the opposite of what it says.
I generally look at how people perceive things like this as an IQ test. At the moment the HN visitors upvoting/downvoting things in this thread have failed my baseline IQ test.
How I wish all presumably well-intentioned but badly informed and ill-educated people who very often seem to have.. let's say, bad luck when thinking would just stop trying to spread their gospel via forums in this destructive way. Looking at you, vaguely-informed "friends of the planet".
It is difficult to be well informed about these issues. Even without nuclear you need to think about the grid, environmental impact, economics, supply chains, financing. And nuclear adds complex science and engineering that would take several lifetimes to learn. People want to reduce the problem to one or two easily understood dimensions. We are all insufficently educated.
:( no really I try to stay open-minded and found contradictory answers interesting, if only because they are well documented. My reply is also to the initial article, which is on the contrary way too optimistic. Nuclear energy is not black or white, I think sharing personal experience as someone living near a plant, in a country relying mostly on nuclear energy, is relevant.
My first 18 years: I lived 45 km from a nuclear power plant.
It helped me getting interested in physics because of some in hindsight exceptionally well performed guest lectures from a physicist working there, in grades 7-8.
> - one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
You need to quantify whenever talking about radiation, otherwise it's meaningless. Granite countertops also leak radiation, same as bananas.
Also, coal powered plants leak radiation every time they burn coal...because coal is radioactive too. They also release mercury, which is why we can't eat too much tuna fish.
You'd hate to be anywhere near a coal plant then. They absolutely spew radiation and don't even really try to contain it.
Fact is, every kind of energy is dirty in some way. Nuclear energy is one of the cleanest kinds of energy we have by far. It's just people have been taught to have an irrational fear of radiation. They don't realize they are constantly surrounded by it already.
Regarding the government response the article omits the plan to simplify legislation around building new plants. This law might not even be debated in parliament, only senate.
> - nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
Why we don't talk like that about renewables though? While the nuclear production was down to 65% capacity, renewables were down in the same time to ... 8%.
To be fair, the renewable production was lacking even more than the nuclear one at that time, despite being the worst maintainance event during the past 40 years.
Agreed, there are many concerns. But there are many concerns with every kind of energy generation, and for any of them, problems have to be solved and the system maintained. We, the people, have to take our own responsibility to hold our governments and companies accountable, if we care about the consequences.
....we could also choose to just use less energy and become more efficient. but my guess is nobody would accept it :D
Very true, and important to understand. Any energy transformation would result in production of stuff we do not like (trash). The Sun generates tons of trash (luckily for us for most localized on the Sun). Nothing is magically 100% clean.
Reducing the energy consumption could be done, but few government would like it, as there is a direct relationship between energy consumption and GDP.
If you want to produce anything (even services) you need energy. Cheap and abundant energy will make your economy thrive. If we want to power the next GPT and our current life style, we would need lots of cheap energy. I can see how nuclear could be tempting to use to boost the GDP with a minimal environmental impact.
Nuclear waste isn’t even trash, it’s a resource. Anything that’s energetic enough to be radioactive is also a massive source of untapped energy when processed and burned. In fact a hundred years from now we might be digging up the “trash” as a cheap source of fuel.
> one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
Probably just Tritiated water which is essentially harmless. Basically water with extra neutrons and it is very weakly radioactive. So weak that you can't detect it with a Geiger counter. Since it is water it does not accumulate in organisms. Tritium is also naturally created in the atmosphere by cosmic radiation.
> That's exactly what it is - which is why the comment above is so profoundly dishonest.
Please, could you explain why US, EU and Canada governments have set narrow legal upper limits for Tritium presence on drinking water if is soo totally harmless?
And why is recommended "extended strong medical/therapeutic intervention" [1] in some cases of accidental exposure to Tritium if is not dangerous?
If you define the qualities of a chemical by the stuff sold on Amazon prepare yourself for a nasty surprise when meeting the real deal. Leaking Tritium in some obscure dose is a problem just because 1. the dose is unknown and 2. we are mostly made of water.
There's been so few serious Tritium exposures in humans so we don't know how much it would take to cause serious harm in humans. There have been some limited studies done on things like yeast and mice which suggest you'd have to ingest an extreme concentration of it to see increases in cancer rates.
> As an example, drinking water for a year from a well with 1,600 picocuries per liter of tritium (comparable to levels identified in a drinking water well after a significant tritiated water spill at a nuclear facility) would lead to a radiation dose (using EPA assumptions) of 0.3 millirem (mrem). That dose is:
- at least 2,000 to 5,000 times lower than the dose from a medical procedure involving a full-body CT scan (e.g., 500 to 1,500 mrem from a CT scan)
- 1,000 times lower than the approximate 300 mrem dose from natural background radiation
- 50 times lower than the dose from natural radioactivity (potassium) in your body (e.g., 15 mrem from potassium)
- 12 times lower than the dose from a round-trip cross-country airplane flight (e.g., 4 mrem from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and back)
Répondre en anglais serait impossible pour un tel niveau de mauvaise foi et de malhonnetteté intellectuelle.
> one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
Je suppose qu'il s'agit du Tricastin, ou il y a de temps en temps des petits rejets de Tritium détectés, parce qu'il n'y a pas vraiment d'autres centrales proches de Montpellier qui ont des emmerdes. "Regularly" est un mensonge, et omet aussi les quantités qui fuient. Oui, c'est un problème qu'il y ait une fuite, et le CRIIRAD bosse dessus des que ca arrive, mais on parle de radioactivité non seulement très minimes, mais extrèmement diluées aussi.
>rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly
Non. On décide de ne pas rejeter de l'eau chaude dans les rivières parce qu'elles sont déjà très chaudes et qu'on a des normes pour éviter d'endommager la vie aquatique qui sont extrèmement basses, et basées sur une moyenne de temperature annuelle. Dans la pratique, on pourrait faire monter largement les temperatures des cours d'eau sans danger encore, mais on ne le fait pas justement pour éviter des surprises. Et c'est oublier que ce problème n'existe que pour les centrales n'ayant de pas de tours aerorefrigerantes, auquel cas _il n'y a aucun probleme de refroidissement_
>nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
Jean-José Mauvaise Foi frappe fort la. 60 ans de production sans aucun incident majeur, il aura fallu trois vagues de covid + des conditions météorologiques défavorables + un problème structurel relativement mineur (mais corrigé du coup) qui a causé un alignement des arrêts de centrales.
>the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants
Fallait pas donner une majorité relative aux tarés.
Bref, comme d'hab, finir sur un "je suis pas contre le nucléaire hein" tout en donnant des arguments dignes du pire article de Reporterre.
> He is now co-founder of fission energy company ThorCon, which is developing liquid fuel fission power plants to generate electricity cheaper than coal, to solve the world climate/energy/poverty crises.
I think nuclear will have an important part of dealing with climate change but he has a massive financial stake in this. I wouldn’t trust that more than I’d trust the Exxon guys who told us climate change was a liberal myth for half a century.
I can't think of a worse way to make money than a thorium energy start up. The people that are into Thorium are zealots, they're not in it for the money. The author of that article founded and sold a software company, worked as a VP for Boston Scientific, and is a professor at Dartmouth. He has easier ways of making money.
The problem is that in government, you are rarely if ever punished for being top strict with your regulation. You are only ever chastised if you are too lenient (or the appearance of it). People like scapegoats and will use lax regulations anytime they can.
The problem is, a regulator never gets in trouble for being top strict. The incentives are totally wrong here and lead to bad regulations.
I trust this guy more than the bureaucrat covering their butt.
Do you know we could keep people safer if we set car speed limits to 10 mph everywhere. We can make everybody wear safety helmets all the time. Maybe we could just prevent everyone from interacting with others, and we can just shut down all public spaces, and then disease would not spread.
Guess what, there's risk to everything we do. The science for radiation seems to contradict with the US government has dictated. But keeping the policy strict and in contradiction to what we know about radiation doesn't get people fired.
Yes, I am familiar with the concept but confabulating more analogies isn’t useful. What you’ve failed to establish is that this is in fact an unnecessary overreaction. I do find your mention of speed limits and helmets interesting, however, because I remember people using your argument against antilock brakes, seatbelts, and airbags to claim they were unnecessary and government overreach, but nobody looking at the data now would be able to say they didn’t have a substantial benefit.
Somebody I know who works for an emergy company talked to me about Thorium reactors that sounded very promising. I'm too dumb to explain it but it seemed cleaner and more efficient.
Thorium based reactors have largely the same benefits and risks as uranium fueled reactors. See this page written by reactor physicist and HN poster acidburnNSA:
It’d be great but … when does it go online? I’m not going any more and it’s been “real soon now” for my entire life. We no longer have decades to wait, especially when we can cover the vast majority of needs with renewables for less money.
That isn't much of an issue unless the river is extremely small. The huge amount of water traveling on most rivers with nuclear plants is orders of magnitude more than what's used in to do the heat transfer in the reactor.
Are you sure about this ? Not heat is produced ?
Cold fusion has been controversial in the 80's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion) and never really escape the lab.
They're likely referring to p+B11 fusion which is a potentially viable reaction that emits all its energy as accelerated charged particles (a current), which can, in theory, be slowed down by inducing a current in a coil (direct conversion). This skips the thermal cycle of electricity generation. There would still be heat, but it would be contained to the plasma with some amount of leak/waste.
There are a great number of asterisks on this. We are not close to making a p+B11 reactor.
Interesting. But I suspect it would take quite some time to get something like that in production. Nonetheless, we should keep do research, it could be the next generation of fusion reactors.
No, coal is barely radioactive at all. The small traces of Thorium and Uranium are completely negligible. An old study from 1978 has estimated that nuclear reactors emit somewhat more radiation than coal power plants, but the levels are overall insignificant [1].
This is only about emissions though. The radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants has many many orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.
> This is only about emissions though. The radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants has many many orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.
yes I should have probably said "emission" not waste
> No, coal is barely radioactive at all.
but you need to burn orders of magnitude more of it, producing literal mountains of coal ash and exhaust emissions
whereas for nuclear the waste is an extremely small volume, of which almost 100% of is captured
scrubbing technologies have also improved since 1978, and scrubbing not-very-much thoroughly is a much easier than scrubbing vast amounts not-very-well
The radioactivity mobilized by U mining for LWRs is about an order of magnitude more than that mobilized by coal combustion, per unit of work produced.
Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time to install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or safety.
That's why grid operators are shutting down both coal and nuclear in the US, and replacing it with solar and wind (the US has in recent years installed 6x more renewables-based capacity than nuclear capacity that has been shut down)
those articles are pretty anti-scientific (especially the second one)
1.5 million litres of radioactive water (tritiated water) sounds scary, but they don't report the concentration, so it's meaningless
if it was 1.5 billion litres with the same radiological content it would be less dangerous
a load of coal ash getting into a river is likely worse radiologically and chemically than some tritiated water escaping
> Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time to install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or safety.
reliability
if you want the lights to stay on at night when the wind drops then you need nuclear
Look for the Tricastin plant
I don't know enough to answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium, but other byproducts, which not a sign of a well managed plant.
Some were stopped not just maintenance but the discovery of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago.
That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-argument to reliability.
Even the old PWRs can be operationally unproblematic if you do it right. The German Pre-Konvoi and Konvoi fleet had pretty good stats. I'm not sure if Grohnde (shut down in 2021) is still the NPP block with the highest total production (500 TWhr) or if another block managed to lap it. Overall capacity factor of these was around 90 %. The US fleet is similar iirc.
The French fleet has been running around 65-70 % CF for years, pretty bad, but clearly not root caused by the tech branch.
- "one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material"
- "Look for the Tricastin plant I don't know enough to answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium"
So, your original statement was an untruth. Or "alternative facts"
> of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago. That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-argument to reliability.
So you mean microbreaches were made decades ago, the plant has operated for decades with no issues, and you call that unreliable?
This thread is a great example of how the meanings of words can be taken differently by different people. "Unreliable" is less of a description and more of a flag. Either it is or isn't. But the original commenter's threshold for unreliable = true is much much lower than most people's as illuminated in this discussion.
It seems like this is a daily occurrence online and in person.
I'm guessing "micro breaches" refers to hydrogen-induced cracks. Media likes to talk about it in bigly, threatening terms such as "THOUSANDS OF CRACKS FOUND IN REACTOR VESSEL" - of course anyone with half a brain starts to wonder "aren't these PWRs?". Much like people like to write headlines such as "HUNDREDS OF NUCLEAR INCIDENTS AT NPP XYZ", where "nuclear incident" means "reported event", which includes such dramatic incidents as "a backup valve in some secondary circuit had to be replaced because it was stuck" or "a bird flew into the transformer, tripping protection and taking a block offline".
Reminds me of the hysteria surrounding microplastics. I saw an article that once that said there are X many thousands of microplastic particles in a cubic meter of seawater at certain locations. They were actually counting individual particles! Why? because expressing plastics as a % of total mass or volume makes it so negligible as to not be a headline.
France had to stop some reactors after detecting defected pipes. This was not due to age, but manufacturing issue.
Plants are constantly being monitored and pieces are replaced. After 50 years, very few pieces are original. That is why US and France keep pushing the retirement age of their plants as they function fine.
Solar + battery doesn’t bother anyone. Wind turbines have mild resistance from people who think they are an eyesore or people worried about migratory birds.
Solar on roof has no resistance, but solar plants takes a lot of space and it starts being a source of conflict in some places of France. It's important to take everyone opinion into account to avoid doing stupid things like putting wind turbines way too close to people houses or farms.
Coal power plants, wind turbines and mostly anything else. They can end up catastrophic in a sense, but not to the same degree nuclear fission plants can end up.
Coal has killed tens of millions from air pollution alone. Civilian nuclear power has probably killed on the order of a few thousand, at most. The studies that say millions have died as a result from Chernobyl is propaganda funded by Greenpeace and friends.
> Coal has killed tens of millions from air pollution alone.
That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after the fact. Air pollution is one metric of am extremely complex system, and coal or any other energy source is one of countless inputs impacting the environment simultaneously. At best we can design and run models to help get clues on what impact any one input has, but those models will always be rough hints at correlation with results that are heavily influenced by the assumptions used when designing the model.
You are correct that any studies claiming to put a number on how many deaths should be attributed to Chernobyl is propaganda. That holds true for the rest as well though, including any claims of exactly how many have died due to coal or cow farts for example.
> That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after the fact
Sure, but given how long we've been burning coal and how dirty it is I'm positive that tens of millions is a gross undercount. It's not about getting an exact number. We're looking for orders of magnitudes here.
Orders of magnitude really don't gloss over huge confidence intervals though, that's just attempting to game the stats.
I get what you're going for and anecdotally that number doesn't even seem crazy if you're going back through our entire history of coal. At the end of the day that number simply didn't exist though, and any time someone uses a start like that to bank up an argument it's just propaganda. Having a bunch that number should be accurate is very different from being able to use it as part of a larger discussion of what the biggest problems are and how to improve it.
No but some are more resilient than others. It is much easier politically to shut a nuclear power station down than remove dirty wood burners from people's houses.
> It's just as easy to find confirmation that all the problems you listed are the result of neglect and politics of the past 20-30 years.
This is always my objection to Nuclear. Nuclear's biggest drawback is that it requires proper maintenance and a stable regulatory environment to be safe.
Our world is too political and tumultuous. You have to manage too many externalities. This is only going to get worse as our climate continues to change.
I just don't see decades long nuclear projects helping us in the short term, and the disruptions on the horizon make long term governance of them problematic.
Nuclear proponents when trying to sell nuclear love to shout about how successful France is.
Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great...and now France's nuclear program is terrible and the result of 20-30 years of neglect and politics? Also, which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to environmental changes" didn't you get? If there's no cooling water, or the water is too hot, the plant can't run.
How many times do people need to be told that with all the renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more base load? We need storage. Also, wind keeps working just fine when the sun goes down.
Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a lot more difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of gigawatts of highly distributed generation and storage across a large region?Guess where utility companies are spending their money? Hint: not on nuclear.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical generation while wind and solar are the cheapest.
Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like 20, to come online and then takes decades longer to go carbon-neutral.
Solar and wind take months to deploy and are carbon neutral within a few years.
Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive, complicated supply chain and hundreds of people supervising and maintaining it.
Solar farms require maintenance that just about any asshole with an electrician's license can handle, the panels last for decades, and can be recycled. Wind turbines require more maintenance but it's standard industrial electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall stick.
> Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical generation while wind and solar are the cheapest.
Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to solar it's massively more expensive. You can't just compare an intermittent source and a non-intermittent source, without factoring in the cost of storage.
>Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to solar it's massively more expensive.
Nobody knows what nuclear costs, because nobody knows what it will cost to handle the waste 10 years from now, let alone 100 or 1000 years from now. The solution to this for most nuclear operators has been to pay a symbolic fee and let the taxpayers cover the rest "in blanco".
When accidents happen, costs also arrive very suddenly. Nuclear power in Japan is quite expensive already, for example.
We know exactly how to store nuclear waste: bury it underground in impermeable bedrock. We already have several of these [1]. Furthermore, the figures for the costs of nuclear power already include waste disposal [2].
Also, since most countries don't reprocess nuclear waste, it's actually good to hold onto it since it's a future source of fissile material.
Sure but we don't know how much it will cost. Yucca mountain has been debated for decades already, all those experts, contractors, scientists, politicians have already cost millions. The nuclear industry doesn't pay for that, of course.
> Furthermore, the figures for the costs of nuclear power already include waste disposal
They really don't. They only include a token sum that is nowhere near the actual costs of dealing with the waste. In France they didn't even pay enough to handle actual operations, so the government had to bail them out.
Your source explicitly explains that the cost of a plant is only calculated from the lifetime of the plant, which means it ignores the long tail of costs appearing after the plant has closed.
It also makes the argument that fossil fuel plants should bear part of the cost of global warming (despite transportation actually being a bigger culprit than fossil power plants), yet it doesn't even mention the several hundreds of billions of dollars and counting that the world has paid and is paying only for Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Why does the site not suggest that nuclear operators should pay secondary costs for nuclear, such as Fukushima and Chernobyl, when they do argue that fossil fuel operators should pay the costs for global warming? That seems dishonest.
The source is explicitly the "international organization that represents the global nuclear industry" which does of course explain it. The nuclear industry never mentions costs that are contractually assigned to governments, since such costs never appear in their own books.
> Nobody knows what nuclear costs, because nobody knows what it will cost to handle the waste 10 years from now, let alone 100 or 1000 years from now. The solution to this for most nuclear operators has been to pay a symbolic fee and let the taxpayers cover the rest "in blanco".
We have a fairly good idea, Finland built a nuclear waste storage facility deep in bedrock for €818M:
> Last month, the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimated the cost to decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would be $4.5 trillion, about half of which would go to installing 900 billion watts, or 900 gigawatts (GW), of batteries and other energy storage technologies. (Today, the world's battery storage capacity is just 5.5 GW.) But as other cities follow the example of Los Angeles, that figure is sure to fall.
The US was able to build nuclear at plants at ~$1B per GW of capacity when nuclear was built at scale during the 60s and 70s [1]. $4.5 Trillion is considerably more expensive even if we assume that serial production would still be 5x more expensive than historical trends.
$1 billion per GW is fantasy. Right now it's more like 8 or 9. Building out enough nuclear power for the whole country would easily blow through that $4.5 trillion mark - even if the price halved.
Moreover, $6 billion is buying a 6GW "pumped storage" battery in Australia. It's not theoretical it's happening right now. There is a huge amount of potential for this that is just starting to be tapped - mostly coz even at max capacity our solar/wind installations don't yet max out grid demand.
Furthermore, 1960s reactors were not safe.
Nuclear power can reduce costs by reducing safety and may well do so to compete. At the moment this cost is hidden, as plant owners' liability is capped at a very low level.
Sorry I don't believe in the existence of country-wide psyches. Also not claiming things are great when we think they aren't is how we bring progress.
I am sharing an opinion, which I didn't claim to be a fact either, but is based on my understanding the local and national news of the last decade.
Yes, intermittent (sun/wind) only could work with enough storage. Do you know if/when we could get enough safe storage ? My understanding is batteries is not possible at the scale we would need. Pumping water where it is possible would be nice, but not sure if it would be enough. Do we know the storage capacity than US for instance would need, if only using solar and wind ?
Note that the cooling argument would be the same for coal or gas power plant. They work the same way. So, until enough storage is in place, we might need some base production, and it would require access to cold source (river or ocean). France had to reduce the activity of some nuclear power plants last summer because they have rules when it comes to river temperature. The next 8 reactors that France is planning to build would likely be build on the ocean's shore for that reason.
The cost of nuclear electricity is mostly impacted by the cost of money. That is why the cost of electricity from a UK nuclear power plant is more expensive than from France nuclear power plant. The UK used private capital (higher interest) when France use gov funds (lower interest). It is correct that it takes time to build a plant, and it requires expertise. But it is also true that a power plant can run for decades (US and France pushing to 80 years) as anything in a plant can be upgraded over time (except the pool).
Until there is an efficient storage technology that can be deployed at large scale, we might need to run some nuclear power plants. No idea for how long ?
A counterintuitive alternative is to invest a fraction of the costs of nuclear in cleaning up emissions from coal plants. We seem to have swung too far by shutting down a reliable source of energy when mitigating technologies to filter emissions [1] and next generation cleaner extraction technologies [2] are coming online to massively improve coal driven electric power generation.
These technologies are DoE funded and patented the former has been deployed in production at a 100 Mw plant the latter is at a pilot stage in a 30Mw research generator at a university.
In any case coal is not going away and there is no single “answer” to the planet’s energy needs.
A resilient grid requires a portfolio of energy sources including nuclear but it’s by no means the single answer as the title of the post suggests.
Uranium is “carbon free” but “radioactive waste full”
and creates multigenerational environmental debt in the form of waste - nuke proponents usually hand wave and talk in generalities when it comes to this topic. Note the comment that “90% of materials in a nuclear reactor can be recycled” deftly sidestepping the 10% that will live on in deadly form for thousands of years with no solution in sight.
The radioactive waste is fairly small. US is the country in the world with the most nuclear power plants. US produces yearly: " The amount is roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool" source: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
"More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in the fuel, even after five years of operation in a reactor.
The United States does not currently recycle spent nuclear fuel but foreign countries, such as France, do."
But even if like US does (i.e. does not re-use the waste), less than half of olympic pool is pretty small given the amount of energy produced. Ideally US would re-use the waste, and vitrified the final waste, and then producing even less volume of waste.
Then store it. Properly packed it is not "in deadly form for thousands of years with no solution in sight". Most countries store it deep for 50 years, and then it is safe to dispose on near-surface disposal at ground level, or in caverns below ground level.
One alternative is that you overbuild and connect very widely. China has 3000+km power connections. If you do that you can connect to remote wind, which is never not blowing somewhere within 3000km of you. During the day, solar nearer the equator could power areas further away. That’s not the full answer but definitely a useful addition to storage.
There are also battery tech like liquid metal that is being more widely tested and suits grid storage. That scales like crazy if it works.
Sure, France has it's own issues but they are not really related to the tech itself.
Point me any other energy company which could have survived basically 20 years without proper investments and forced to sell back electricity to their competitors.
I would even say that the tech is what made the grid still standing against all odds.
> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great.
Relative to...what? Is there any major country that has a great power grid, objectively better than France? Certainly we have plenty of problems here in the US.
I'm a big nuclear power advocate but of course NP has problems, like any human project. It has dangers, like any scalable power supply. I support NP because it is better than all the rest.
I do agree with that and some replies in favour of nuclear energy were totally sensical. The initial article is not and should be balanced with issues and yes, sometimes irrational fears, we do face as a country relying mostly on this energy source. The risk of electricity cut was a big deal this winter, might be next winter too.
"The phasing out of the three large, baseload nuclear power plants will increase Germany's need to import electricity from its neighbors. At the same time, all available scenarios show that as a result of the (almost) simultaneous phasing out of the coal units, Germany will transform itself from an exporter to a net importer of energy as early as the mid-2020s. Adding spice to the matter is the fact that the country is particularly dependent on importing energy from France, which obtains three-quarters of its energy from nuclear power plants. Without the widespread availability of electricity from France, Germany's Atomausstieg would not be possible."[0]
Europe needs stable, centralized and long-term source of energy. Neither solar nor wind power fulfills these requirements.
The main goal should be to abandon coal and gas power plants as quickly as possible, and Germany showed that it is very hard / impossible without nuclear power.
> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great
Yet is amazing that even with the poor management of the French government, it is still a beacon of hope the rest of the world looks to for our energy future.
> Also, which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to environmental changes" didn't you get? If there's no cooling water, or the water is too hot, the plant can't run.
You grossly misunderstand what passive cooling means. It doesn't mean they don't need water for cooling in normal operation. Air cooled thermal cycles are inherently more costly and less efficient
> How many times do people need to be told that with all the renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more base load?
Of course we do
> We need storage.
Yes. And it's non-existent. There are literally no grid-scale strage solutions in existence.
> Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a lot more difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of gigawatts of highly distributed generation and storage across a large region?
Neither are particularly true statements. Also, what do you think grid-scale storage would do if not inject gigawatts of power into a grid when needed?
> Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like 20,
Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in China: 6.1 GW nameplate capacity. Built over 14 years at 1 reactor per 6 years. Operational.
Meanwhile the very distributed Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project was founded in 2018, and is promised to start powering Britain in 2030.
--- start quote ---
Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budget.
> Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive, complicated supply chain and hundreds of people supervising and maintaining it.
> The panels last for decades, and can be recycled. Wind turbines require more maintenance but it's standard industrial electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall stick.
Of course it's not just a tal stick. It's a rather complicated machine that you can't even safely get to since it's so tall. And that's before we start talking about offshore wind farms like Hornsea 2. Yo need a lot of specialist equipment to maintain those.
There are 500 to 800 people working on a nuclear power plant.
--- start quote ---
Each windfarm tends to have between 7 and 11 employees per 100 MW
So while fewer than per a nuclear plant, you still have to keep in mind that you need to massively overbuild renewables because their generation fluctuates.
Not the parent. But grid scale battery storage does exist. The UK has around 30GW in the pipeline and deployed around 1GW last year.
Projects like xlinks are not directly comparable to other mega projects as they are far less monolithic. They can scale out rather than having to scale up.
In terms of staffing a nuclear station needs many different professions who are relatively expensive, specialised, and need to be heavily monitored for safety. Renewables requires talent obviously but probably less so.
I'll believe it when I see it. It's a lot of could should would. A lot of tech "revolutions" sizzled away into nothingness after initial round of celebratory press.
Except in the real world where wind + solar account for the vast majority of GW added. Nuclear just doesn't matter. It's 2023, there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not even a little bit. It didn't matter. Too little (well barely anything at all), too late.
There's this pesky thing called cost that nuclear proponents just refuse to address. They are all scientific about how nuclear works. How great it is. Etc. But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out, go hand wavy, and generally refuse to talk numbers. You could do this, you could do that. But nobody really likes being put on the spot about what exactly to do for how much.
Not a single dollar sign in this article nor the string "dollar". Or other common currency such as "Euro". There's nothing else to be said about this article. It just completely ignores cost. It's all hand wavy and devoid of facts about cost. Very typical. Must be deeply embarrassing to read such drivel for an actual nuclear physicist with a clue. Guilty by association and it's not a good look. If these are your biggest fans, you are royally screwed.
The whole argument for nuclear evaporates as soon as you bring up cost. Then it's suddenly about such pesky things as $/mwh and delays, budget overruns, etc. And the fact that there are things you can buy and install that have very well known $/mwh cost that work as advertised.
The cost of nuclear today has more to do with the fact that we aren’t building nuclear plants. There are minimum companies with small operations making nuclear reactor technologies for just maintenance of existing ones and military contracts. If we were building new nuclear plants with modern reactors, the costs wouldn’t be a big deal anymore because the production of them would have scaled better.
But instead we’re spending tens of billions on windmills and solar panels that won’t last 15 years or operate well in many regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This is why Germany is now reliant on France’s nuclear power to handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.
So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences of solar and wind.
The argument that costs will come down if we build more nuclear worked in the 1950s, but we know now where that goes now. Build
More nuclear and costs come down. With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents, the public realizes these things can make entire nations uninhabitable if they fail, and then they demand a halt to nuclear, pushing prices back up.
Nuclear prices have baked in the public sentiment on the risk of meltdowns. The prices are efficient.
> With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents
Can we stop making this argument? It is an extremely bad faith argument. There have only been two accidents of commercial reactors in the history of nuclear power that led to the loss of lives. The likely value is well under 10k (<100 directly attributed to Chernobyl). The first was orders of magnitude more dangerous than the second, was early into the development of nuclear power, and was caused by experimentation using a nuclear reactor that the rest of the world refused to use due to the potential for the reactor to fail in exactly the way Chernobyl did. The second, killed a single person, was caused by the largest natural disaster in the region (in all of recorded history), where the science of the day did not think such an event could even happen.
Yes, there's more nuance to this, but we also need to recognize the actual level of danger. These arguments pretend that scientific knowledge has not changed over 80 years. These arguments pretend that there are no deaths and/or environmental concerns with other energy sources (literally every one has these concerns). They ignore the cost of carbon and other environmental damage of the source's lifetime. Most importantly, these arguments pretend that all incidents are equally as dangerous.
Can we please just stop? There are a lot of valid criticisms of nuclear power, but making lazy arguments just results in fighting. Talk about costs, reliance on fuel, the possibility of not even needing them, or any other points (argue with nuance). The public is (sadly) not well informed about nuclear nor most scientific concepts in general, although many members have high confidence in their cursory understanding. (The thesis here applies to a lot of other scientific domains btw, including: climate, health, and even evolution) We need to have real conversations about these issues as there is a lot on the line. Complex issues require complex discussions.
It is quite misleading to only focus on deaths due to nuclear accidents. Fukushima may not have (directly) killed anyone, but the cleanup is hideously expensive (estimates say many hundred billion dollars). Containing Chernobyl costed a few percent of Ukraine's pre-war annual budget. So far, roughly one in a hundred power reactors have blown up. If this is priced in, the economics get even less favorable.
I'm quite sure, but not 100% that the above number does *not* include research reactors. If it makes sense to include those into the statistics is less clear.
Fukushima had three meltdowns (reactors 1-3), and a hydrogen gas explosion that damaged the spent fuel pool of reactor 4. Together with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, this corresponds to roughly 1% of all commissioned reactors suffering catastrophic failure with significant radiation release.
You both are making statistical errors. You've aggregated the data improperly. As I mentioned in the original rant, this calculation throws out the temporal component and thus 80 years of development and research. Safety has greatly increased over the last 20 years, let alone 80.
Yes, and these death-based analysis' also ignore the fact that both Fukishima and Chernobyl could have been much, much worse if major interventions were not made at the right moment. I always think about the Fukishima engineers who got the instruments in the control room to turn on by wiring them up to car batteries. If the team on duty that day was just a little less resourceful, the story gets much worse. Those incidents should be seen as a lower-bound to the danger not an upper bound.
No, we cannot stop talking about the danger of meltdowns, because it is a proven danger, and a uniquely catastrophic one. Approximately once per decade, a nuclear reactor melts down and either does (Chernobyl) or nearly does (Fukishima) make a nation-sized area of earth uninhabitable. Asking people to ignore this fact when they consider building nuclear plants in their region is silly.
Well said. You can browse through the replies in the threads on this post, and see where all the cost questions go unanswered. Cost and the basic economics of trying to run a really expensive power source at a fixed high price over 40+ years when the competition gets cheaper every day. That’s the major why virtually none get built anymore. And it’s not going to change.
Wind and solar are only possible because they use the rest of the grid as effectively a giant battery. When the sun shines and/or the wind blows, someone else needs to reduce the electricity generation. The end result will be that during good weather the price of electricity is zero, and during any other time the price of electricity is high to pay for unused capacity and additional wear and tear on the equipment due to additional power cycling.
We are already seeing this in Germany[1], where electricity prices are also becoming zero[2] during parts of the day. The problem with renewables will become apparent only once the reserves of easily dispatchable electricity generation is used up across Europe to balance renewable generation.
Cost is not independent of the perception around nuclear though, and its influence on regulatory burdens, insurance, legislation, nimbyism, etc. So it kind of makes sense to focus on other factors. Changing the perception could bring down the cost as well.
Nuclear is the only type of energy that can guarantee a low variability in production.
> But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out,
Nuclear is expensive because of 2 reasons. First, because we didn't build any, we have zero momentum savings. Second, it is expensive because we make it expensive. Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer than any other form of energy. If raw material mining for solar had the same kind of limitations (per human-year lost), then solar would be prohibitively expensive too. If disposal of waste (pollution) for coal/natural gas was as stringent (adjusted to human years lost), then they too would be prohibitively expensive. Nuclear costs are technically quite low. We have scared ourselves into making it so expensive that it is impossible to build.
> wind + solar
You conveniently mention the 2 form of electric production that nuclear does not compete with. Consistent-electricity comes in the form of petroleum, hydro-power and nuclear energy. We need consistent energy. Nuclear replaces petroleum and hydro-power, both of which are significantly worse for the environment and cause much higher median and worst-case loss of life than nuclear energy. If we could build nuclear power plants with the sort of carelessness that coal and hydro-power plants are, then nuclear would've been the dominant form of consistent energy production.
_______
My suspicion is that the lack of nuclear powerplants is because of perverse economic incentives for countries with uranium supplies. The nations with the largest uranium reserves [1] are either already oil/coal producing countries and do not need uranium disrupting their own economy (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa) or do not have the technological knowhow to execute on a nuclear power plant (Namibia, Niger).
The exceptions are China and India, both of which therefore pushing for more nuclear power. [2] [3] "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome".
> It's 2023, there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not even a little bit. It didn't matter.
I think this is a rather inaccurate characterization and we need to be a bit more nuanced here. I'm going to address this out of order, and first with the power shortage.
Power shortage:
I'd actually argue that nuclear power played an extremely important role since the invasion of Ukraine. Remember that France is the second largest exporter of electricity in Europe[0], just a hair behind Germany (#3 (Sweden) is half of #2, number 4 is half of #3) (it is also worth considering that France's electricity is almost an order of magnitude lower in emissions[1]). It is also worth considering which countries were reliant upon Russian gas, and France had low reliance whereas Germany had a high dependency[2,3] and remember that Europe would still be importing gas from Russia if they could[4]. Germany also had increased reliance on Russian gas over the last 20 years, and had a sharp increase in gas intake post 2011 (Fukushima)[5].
So let's put it this way: Europe hit a energy crisis where Russian gas played a major role[6] (but to be clear, not the only). Who picks up the slack? What what does that country use to generate most of its electricity?
Lack of plants:
A problem here is that in Europe only a handful of plants have gone into operation in the last 20 years. Ukraine got two (2005 and 2006), Romania got one in 2007, Belarus got one in '21, Finland got one a week ago, and that's it. 5 reactors in 20 years[7]. The majority of the existing reactors came online in the 80s. Yes, there's been several proposals but nuclear power has long been politically contentious, especially in Europe. See Germany who only even considered stopping their shutdowns (which were politically motivated) due to the power crisis. You'll notice that most environmental scientists suggest shutting down all fossil fuels before nuclear, but this was not the path taken. While yes, this does technically mean that you're right in that nuclear didn't come to the rescue but I'd argue that this is akin to saying that a hammer isn't useful in woodworking because you never took it out of the toolbox. This is not the same as (properly) using the hammer and it failing to meet the demands of the task. Or maybe a different analogy we can say is that it is unfair to claim a consumable resource (plants need to be replaced, including renewables) is useless when you do not replace that resource for decades. We're not going to talk about costs of plants because I expect everyone on HN to understand scale, momentum, and working knowledge are all significant factors.
Now there is another factor that plays an important role, and this conversation can't happen in good faith without mentioning it: France's "nuclear crisis"[8]. This was an unfortunate event and a "perfect storm" if you will. So we know most of these reactors have been operating since the 80's, it is only natural to expect repairs. Unfortunately in early 2020 there was a global pandemic and in response many planned outages were delayed or reduced in 2021[9], with the expectation that a lot of the slack could be picked up in 2022. Unfortunately, a certain country invaded another country and the invading country had an control over one of the major power sources of that Europe.
Conversations about nuclear power are often terrible online. Neither the nuclear bros nor the anti-nuclear bros are arguing from a scientific perspective. Both climate and nuclear energy are incredibly complex and nuanced issues. First order approximations are not "good enough" and what many claim is "common sense" or "obvious" isn't (and obvious post hoc isn't obvious in situ). To be clear, the scientific consensus has been to focus on renewables but not take nuclear off the table (note that this is not the position you find either camp arguing for online). While nuclear bros often advocate for high levels of nuclear power, no reasonable energy/climate scientist would suggest this. Similarly, no reasonable energy/climate scientist will say that nuclear should be rejected while we're still using fossil fuels (the argument is if we need nuclear or not for a future world of zero carbon energy production, but this is highly nuanced). Nuclear bros argue for thorium breeder reactors due to their lower waste levels and proliferation risk, not knowing that these are not major concerns in the community and can be solved in other ways. Anti-nuclear bros argue about cost but ignore the build-out issue, history, progression of nuclear technology, and the polarizing political sphere surrounding the issue. While I am certain that most, if not all, these comments are well intentioned and people are trying to make the world a better place, that does not mean that the arguments are being done in good faith (high confidence + low domain knowledge = bad faith).
I frequently argue (including here on HN) that this over confidence and tribalism prevents actually resolving these issues. I've provided a lot of resources here and I think everyone should be careful in how they discuss complex subjects online. I understand that many of you are passionate, but make sure that this passion isn't tribal. If you're really passionate about something then you'll invest a proportional amount of energy to learn about the subject. Are you passionate about fixing problems or expressing you opinion? Are your opinions able to be changed or are you just "educating" others? We live in a highly specialized world, it is not a demerit on your intelligence to not be knowledgeable in a specific domain, but it is to speak confidently about domains you have no expertise in. Let's all try to encourage this behavior and hold ourselves to high standards. This happens in every nuclear thread and I hope we can learn to be better than Reddit.
It is generally not cool to call something astroturfing here on HN. But googling the author of this article Todd Royal you can see he is a consultant for a lobby group called E4 Carolinas which is heavily funded by big energy companies who have big investments in the fossil fuel industry. In the past he has written articles with titles such as “Why Climate Panic Is Unfounded Hysteria” where he accuses advocates for renewables of astroturfing, while advocating for the continued use of fossil fuels:
> What the entire climate change, global warming, renewables over fossil fuels and electrify society movement is really about is one thing—money—clean energy is now worth trillions of taxpayer dollars. Government-sponsored science and economic growth at its worst picking clean energy over fossil fuels and internal combustion engine vehicles. These are disastrous energy policies.
> The existential threat narrative of global warming only solved by destroying global economies by switching to intermittent, expensive renewables over reliable fossil fuels is foolish according to Dr. Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as Undersecretary for Energy during President Barack Obama’s first term.
All the while pushing a conspiracy narrative and climate change denial:
> It’s particularly painful because climate doomsday scenarios are all historically wrong. Climate panic is simply unfounded hysteria. The weather and climate are dynamic and ever-changing. Seemingly, it’s a giant ploy to deprive people of their freedom and liberty.
> Blackouts are the future for the United States, European Union, Great Britain, and Australia if they continue on this clean energy transition.
thank you. I as well was interested to read something new interesting on the energy future. This, however, was not it. The author is "working on a three-year grant for the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration focusing on a value chain study for the advanced nuclear technology sector"? Seems like a waste of money if this is the kind of output we're seeing.
You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies this piece as disingenuous at best, more likely though propaganda.
The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free". Uranium extraction, transport and processing produce emissions. Building the plants and maintaining them does. Eventually demolishing does. Transporting the used fuel as well as building and maintaining storage facilities does.
All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count them for nuclear power.
All of that can be true and yet still trivial in comparison to the emissions that would be eliminated by replacing all fossil-fuel electrical generation with nuclear.
Nuclear works at night and in locations that aren't good for solar or wind generation. Nuclear with a relatively small number of generating sites feeding a large distributiion network fits in with our existing electricial infrastrucure better than the widely dispersed generation that solar and wind provide.
We need leadership that will just clear the way for liquid metal, fast neutron reactors that don't need refined fuel and produce less waste. If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival, it's time to stop fretting about nuclear proliferation and waste disposal. The challenges of those issues are tiny compared to global climate change.
Well, you didn't actually address my comment, which had nothing to do with solar working at night or similar. It's useful to keep separate arguments separate since jumping around if something doesn't suit your liking is not a sincere discussion style.
> If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival
FWIW, I don't believe that. Humans will survive, unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon, but that's not because of climate change. Not directly at least. Those of us in privileged will have an easier time adapting to a changing climate, the rest of our species won't have it so easy. And later generations will need to live with the consequences as well. But they will adapt too. If they've never seen a frozen north pole, it will not be odd to them.
Even if it was an existential threat to human survival, I wouldn't care. Why would I? It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other species survival. Did you recently check how many species we have brought to extinction? Over 90% of large predatory fish are gone (shark, tuna, ...). Buffalos almost went extinct. Gorillas, sea turtles, .. I don't think the human species has much moral ground to argue it should survive and I won't move a finger to help.
> At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That’s nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out as we are).
Directly? Probably not. But the contamination from fallout is more than sufficient to poison a significant fraction of humans over a not-too-long time horizon and provide everybody else with a significant cancer risk. The ensuing chaos and resulting breakdown of civilization will do the rest. Don't believe it? Ever seen the panic when toilet paper is at risk to run out at Walmart?
Those who still remember the Chernobyl disaster are aware what that meant for Europe. A single plant, and everybody got warned and could take precautions.
I suggest you look into the decay rate of fallout and the relative amount of nuclear material in bombs vs power plants.
There’s just not that much nuclear material in a given bomb (and the whole point is to release as much energy as possible as quickly as possible), whereas Chernobyl is dangerous because the elephants foot is gigantic and still uranium.
Modern crisis research [1] shows that a sudden loss of just 10% of a population (that is, essentially over night) would have devastating consequences. Basically, breakdown of society as we know it.
Now combine that with nuclear winter and resulting consequences for crops and lifestock. We don't all need to die directly from bombs. Just a minor disruption in stability and hunger and civil unrest do the rest.
[1] It's pretty fascinating how vulnerable our societies are. Other results are things like .. 3 days power outage and you'd also be on the verge of civil war if government doesn't immediately pour in enormous resources in crisis management.
Your argument is "Why care about a selfish species that kills other species indiscriminately while pursuing its own ends?"
But that is every species. So why care about any of them? Why even care that we are killing off the gorillas or fish? They are equally selfish -- only less powerful.
And if your answer is that you don't, then you're just arguing for nihilism. If you do, then again: what do you think is so specially evil about humans?
I appreciate that you elaborated your thoughts. That makes for a much nicer discussion!
I'd turn your argument around. We seem to not care about any of the N-1 species. Why treat the remaining one specially? Because we belong to it? I don't find that convincing. Maybe we're focusing too much on individual freedom that suddenly caring about the species as a whole seems is odd. The population around me, as a whole, is giving pretty few f*ks about me. I basically just return that attitude.
Or, to formulate it differently, I'd get on board caring about not just the survival but flourishing of our species, if we'd extend that courtesy to all the other species around us.
Correct, but transport, steel manufacturing, etc. are also required for solar, wind, hydro, and whatnot. The real question you're asking is, "what is the net carbon emissions of nuclear power?".
_All_ powerplants have those problems, not _just_ nuclear. I agree it's a bit sensationalist of them to not consider the whole picture and declare nuclear "carbon free".
What are the total carbon emissions over the life time of usage including construction, operation, maintenance, and destruction of a nuclear plant vs a fossil plant?
I wouldn't be surprised if a nuclear plant emits far less carbon overall than a fossil-powered plant while operational for the same power generation and lifetime of use when considering those factors.
This is why we look at the actual amount of carbon released, not just a binary yes/no. I mean even if you had a magic power source that did not emit one single molecule of C02, a FUD spreader like you could use that exact same argument the first time a worker sparks a cigarette.
So tell me, how much C02 does mining uranium emit as compared to a coal station on a kg/Watt basis? six orders of magnitude less? seven?
No, I don't need to. I refuted a claim. You can move the goal posts, but I won't participate in that game.
Obviously a coal plant emits more CO2 than a nuclear fission plant. But the criticized sentence contained the words "carbon free". Which is just not true. I don't see how pointing that out is FUD.
I think if the original poster had mentioned in a balanced way and as kind of a footnote that, sure nuclear isn’t 100% carbon free but has some emissions, then people wouldn’t have reacted so harshly.
As it stands, the poster said that this (a bit exaggerated) claim somehow negates anything else there and that’s just wrong.
For practical purposes, nuclear power is as green as it gets so attacking it in this way is rather cheeky.
> You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies this piece as disingenuous at best
Or you can keep reading it and see that it literally says "It is a misnomer to say renewables are carbon-free compared to nuclear power." And discusses the very things you stated was disingenuously discounted.
These articles never answer the question: if the suggested cost of nuclear power investment instead went to batteries and renewables, what’s the Gigawatt difference?
We know nuclear is clean. But Solar and batteries are cleaner AND recyclable.
I think it's more disingenuous not to have quoted the rest that qualifies this statement compared to renewables:"...and able to meet growing U.S. calls for electrification and global needs for basic economic growth". The rest of the article goes into details about what you get for the amount of resources put into renewables vs nuclear and why nuclear outperforms once an investment is made.
Almost nothing about civilization is emissions free. In the context of comparing energy sources, it's a totally reasonable statement. It's only when you present it cut-off like you did that it sounds wrong. You're criticizing half of the tagline of the article, of course it won't contain all the nuances.
Probably a good idea to read the rest of the article. They explain why.
> Whereas nuclear power accounts for all materials through the decommissioning phase—and surprisingly, 90 percent of all materials from a nuclear power plant can be recycled—compared to old wind and solar platforms, which generate millions of tons of waste
Again measuring with different standards. Depending on the design of a typical wind turbine, you can recycle 90-95% of those as well. And that's without a prime design criterion of maximizing recyclability, which could be mandated by law and then you'd achieve close to 100%.
The sentence is just as disingenuous as the initial sentence that I criticized.
How can we contain or dispose of some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced? How to we ensure it lasts well beyond the possibility of our civilization currently and mark it in such a way that its clear to others its dangerous. Without those answers I am not sure how we can argue its better/safer.
The story gets better here when you consider that most "waste" can actually be reused (93% of uranium fuel rods used in LWRs could be recycled). Also consider, more radioactive materials (the parts we can't currently recycle, outside of some exotic hypothetical reactor designs) have shorter half lives, and so aren't a problem for as long.
The best containment proposal I've seen is deep geological disposal.
Also consider, making fuel rods removes some radioactivity from the environment, so if you change the requirements from "keep all byproducts contained forever" to "keep all byproducts contained until radiation levels are no worse than where we got it from" the problem becomes more tractable.
No, I'm talking about recycling fuel rods for use in our current nuclear reactors. I'm fuzzy on the details, but a fuel rod becomes unusable way before all the uranium is used up because of a build up of "nuclear poisons" which interfere with fission in the reactor. You can also get some plutonium when recycling, which can also be used in a LWR.
I'm not talking about exotic breeder reactor designs, or molten salt reactors. France has been recycling fuel rods for some time now. The U.S. just prohibits this due to proliferation concerns.
Edit: breeder reactors are usually more about being able to use other less rare elements for fuel, like thorium, or being able to use more common isotopes of uranium. Yes, they often propose using recycled waste to "kick start" the breeding process, but they're not needed to recycle fuel rods.
Actually you can reprocess fuel rods. Typical rods are ~5% U235 at start with the rest U238, and over time most of the U235 gets burned up and turned into fission products. But you still often end up with ~1% U235 and some other stuff like plutonium or other actinides that could get burned up if it weren't for the fission products poisoning the reactor.
Japan and France reprocess the fuel, stripping out all the fission products but keeping the actinides (U235 and U238 and other fertile/fissile isotopes) then adding back in U235 and U238 to fill it out to ~5% fissile and 95% fertile material again. Then you put the rod back in a reactor.
This isn't as efficient a use of natural uranium as a breeder but it does make it the case that the only actual radioactive material you have to deal with waste-wise is the fission products. Everything else keeps going back into a reactor until it's burned up, or is U238 which is harmless (it's 99.3% of what we pull out of the ground and so could just get put back into the ground).
The fission products are nasty but that also means they decay very fast and become totally harmless (ie less radioactive than the original uranium ore) in ~300 years. We can embed them in a glass block, which renders them inert chemically and pretty impervious to leaching if exposed to water, etc. It's then easy to manage them until they're harmless (you can do whatever you want with them; the volume of material is not very high, and it's quite easy to shield against it).
France, for instance, can store the fission products from 1 tonne of spent fuel in 110L of glass, (see https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...) which corresponds in modern reactors (45GWd/tonne of spent fuel) to ~10GWh of thermal energy produced per liter of vitrified glass. By comparison, gasoline has an energy density of ~8.5kWh/L, so ~1.2 million times higher for the glass waste than unburned gasoline (coal etc is similar).
If the US ran 100% on nuclear for all energy (needing maybe 3TWe, 10TWh-th) and reprocessed our spent fuel, we'd produce around 24m^3 of vitrified glass per day, and its maximal volume would be ~2.7e6 m^3, or roughly 1 square mile one meter deep, to run the entirety of the US forever with nuclear power (that's 300 years of production, by the end of which the fission products are less radioactive than the original ore, so we can just dump any 300-year-old glass in the ocean or something and it's totally fine, can't harm anything).
Is that a lot of waste? I guess. But we burn that much gasoline in the US every 2 days, and the products of that just get dumped straight into the air. This stuff is solid and just sits there not doing much of anything except make some heat, then becomes harmless glass we can dump wherever. Pretty good deal imo.
While I agree about your conclusion (propaganda) I disagree about your metrics.
First, there are no sources of energy that are carbon free, only those who's energy production does not result in carbon emissions. This is why we say zero "net" emissions and why so many are working on sequestration methods (reforestation, soil management, natural sequestration, artificial sequestration). All your arguments are universal and not unique to nuclear, renewables, nor fossil fuels.
Second, the "and" in the thesis is important. The line did not make the claim that renewables are not carbon-free, but rather that of zero-emission generators, renewables are insufficient to power the grid alone.
Reading the article, it isn't too bad. There's a clear bias and ignores some aspects, it isn't too different from any other opinion piece. It at least isn't making the absurd argument that nuclear should be even the dominant producer of energy. I think the author would agree that renewables play an important role in our future of energy but they are making the argument to not take nuclear off the table and trying to convince others (aka propaganda) with an exaggerated and incomplete argument.
I agree that the article is deserving of criticism but I think we need to be a bit more specific. I also agree that the article is propaganda, but I do not agree that just because something is propaganda that it can be trivially dismissed. The word is too vague and encompasses all discussions where politics is part of the discussion. The word is like "conspiracy", common usage does not reflect the actual definition and is often used to dismiss a claim rather than address it.
Propaganda:
> information, ̶e̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶i̶a̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶i̶s̶l̶e̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶n̶a̶t̶u̶r̶e̶, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
The same thing can be said of solar panels and wind turbines.
The truth is that the once the power plant is built it generates clean power for decades. That power can then be used to power things like building new power plants.
> The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free".
How do you think those windmill parts and solar panels get from the manufacturers to the end users?
I personally don’t see solar and wind able to provide enough energy to electrify an entire nation’s fleet of freight haulers. Nuclear, maybe — assuming they build a bunch of little plants so a truck can “refuel” in the middle Wyoming away from large populations.
Maybe Wyoming isn’t the best example as it’s always windy there but the point stands.
I did address your first remark in the end of my comment:
> All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count them for nuclear power.
I did not talk about how much energy is provided or what to do about freight haulers.
I honestly believe that most of the carbon calculations come from the pro-renewable folks to promote whatever pet project they’re on about. Nobody seriously considering building a nuclear power plant is going to care about some “externalities” amortized over its 50-75 year lifetime.
Google the author, who he works for, and some of the stuff he has written in the past, I think describing this a propaganda is actually giving this an easy way out.
> Solar power requires even more metals, cement, steel, and glass.
Why do they always use the same outdated data sources? Cement? Yes 35 years ago they thought you needed to put a slab of cement under your panels to support them, but we moved on from that. Please update to newer, more relevant data sources.
This is objectively false and I always have a hard time believing that this is an organic opinion free of industry influence.
Nuclear power is the power industry's answer to "clean" energy because it preserves the centralized delivery system in place. It does not disrupt the current distribution model.
No matter what you think of the safety of nuclear power, what I said is a fact and the industry spends billions on PR, lobbying, and even online trolls, trying to get people to agree.
Nuclear power is objectively not safe, with the one caveat that we are talking about long term. In the long term even one accident is absolutely devastating to entire regions of the planet. This risk is simply NOT acceptible.
In other words, even if wind and solar are more expensive or less profitable, they are simply better alternatives from the standpoint of humanity's continued existence on the planet.
There is no effective argument about this. I always get hit with the safety argument when I say this, but it's just all fully false. There is no safety argument because even an outlying and unlikely scenario is too devastating. And these scenarios, given enough time, simply will occur.
> Nuclear power is the power industry's answer to "clean" energy because it preserves the centralized delivery system in place. It does not disrupt the current distribution model.
Which is a good thing. Energy demand is centralized in big population centers, so centralized production is easier to deploy.
One of the big issues with renewables is that due to the low energy density and geographic variations in power output, they often need to be built far away from where energy is in demand. This puts more strain on transmission networks: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/178686...
> Nuclear power is objectively not safe, with the one caveat that we are talking about long term. In the long term even one accident is absolutely devastating to entire regions of the planet. This risk is simply NOT acceptible.
Incorrect. People seem to forget that we detonated hundreds of nuclear warheads in the atmosphere. Chernobyl was exposed to the atmosphere and burned for weeks. Chernobyl really was the worst-case scenario: an explosive meltdown in a reactor with no secondary storage. It really doesn't get any worse than that. We already have good data on the adverse impact of nuclear incidents, and while bad they're not nearly as devastating as you make them out to be.
Seriously though, I just want some reactor construction to spin up with non ancient reactor designs, to replace some fossil fuel plants. PBR[1] sounds good to me... but what do I know? There are experts who can decide this.
These are the kinds of anwsers that makes me think you haven't thought through this much.
There are very clear plans for going 100% renewable. See Marc Z Jacobsens studies for instance. I wouldn't mind some nuclear power myself. But there just doesn't seem to be a clear plan about what approach to take. We don't have time to just dabble in various new reactor technologies.
To me it seems we could either build old simple reactors that we don't really trust anymore. I wouldn't mind, but it's not realistic. Or try to get Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors down in cost. But will it help? Will it be worth the investments? I guess we should at least keep existing nuclear engineers employed.
Seems to me that the only barrier now to just going all-in on renewables is energy storage. The next next few decades will be aaaaall about energy storage and transformation technologies anyway.. so there's an argument to be had that it's a good thing to just go all in on energy storage R&D. That kind of expertise will be critical to decarbonizing transportation, fertilizer and metal production anyway. Better energy storage makes it easier to decarbonize across all sectors. There's excellent network effects. Better nuclear only helps decarbonizing the grid, but that's just a part of our challenge.
Nuclear is not going to power every country anyway. That ship has basically already sailed with solar+energy storage. It's just the simplest way to get up and running with electricity if you don't have a grid, and as technologies improve, developing areas will just continue to scale that up.
The big X factor is advanced geothermal energy. I think once the fossil fuel industry sees the writing on the wall, a lot of engineers from that sector will go into geothermal. If just one of them manages to succeed getting the cost down, and drill deeper, what's the point of nuclear fission?
And then there's the fact that nuclear directly contributes to global warming by directly heating up the planet. Much less than greenhouse gases, but surprisingly much. That's extra heat we can't really afford in the coming decades. Rivers are going to end up being at the edge of ecologoical collapse due to global warming... and we're going to dump MORE heat into them?
It doesn't seem like pure renewable is the minimal cost, maximum speed solution. Storage is expensive however you cut it, and there is already infrastructure in place to operate nuclear plants that would be wasted if they were slowly retired.
What do you do with old fusion research and the oil drilling industry? Maser drill holes under coal plants, and pipe it to their turbine! Oh and you run the maser with the existing infrastructure at the coal plant. Its almost too good to be true.
In the US we're replacing nuclear plants with renewables at a 6:1 ratio.
The only people who think we need more nuclear power plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.
> The only people who think we need more nuclear power plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.
And also quite a few energy experts and the people who listen to them. The US nuclear industry's major players are bloated cronies satisfied with ALARA and other idiotic policies that keep them alive by preventing competition.
If ALARA weren't in place, nuclear would be thriving and competitive (and still safe!).
CAISO penned a series of increasingly urgent press releases on how catastrophic closing diablo canyon would be for grid stability when it's closure was imminent.
1)Global. Proliferation risks aren’t as relevant to me as solving the reliance on fossil fuels. West+China probably needs to prove out wide scale usage of it first though.
2) However much is necessary to create a stable grid with as minimal an amount of electricity coming from fossil fuel usage possible. I do prefer renewable to nuclear, but I think society scale energy storage isn’t going to be a solved problem in a reasonable time frame. If we only need 20% nuclear to phase out most fossil fuel plants, great. I don’t know the exact point where experts expect that renewables without storage would stop being able to create a stable grid without the existing plants.
3)Ideally MSRs, but given they’re still not completely proven out it’s probably best to start building traditional immediately and switch if the currently in production MSR plants do in fact work out.
4)Start nationalized at least, since they’re more expensive than private ownership allows but necessary for the public good (also, yeah, don’t really want private ownership of traditional reactors). If MSRs work out and economies of scale kick in a little as we build out more plants, maybe private ownership will be viable at some point.
2) 200% of current demand, to account for the rise in demand caused by climate change
3) whatever we can build now
4) Only governments genuinely have the ability to build nuclear reactors without any outside intervention or help. Even when they are built supposedly privately there's government involvement to make sure radioactive material isn't diverted or dumped. I can't imagine anyone but the most extreme libertarian wants private unregulated nuclear reactors.
Most of them don't really want nuclear, they just push it as an excuse to do nothing right now (at least here in Norway). Yes, more nuclear is probably good. But planning, permissions, building and getting a reactor up and running probably is 15+ years most places. We need power before then. So we can't stop building wind farms, solar etc. in the meantime. Which is really what they want to achieve where I live: avoid wind farms, so grasping at everything.
Yeah, while the fossil fuel lobby used to fight against nuclear, I'm pretty sure they're indirectly using nuclear to fight renewables right now.
For them, either renewables will cut into their business right now.. or they can argue we should build nuclear instead.. which could either lead to nothing getting built, or that nuclear gets built in 10-15 years. Either way, they delay the threat to their business. So it's a win for them either way. I don't think they have high hopes to fight off renewables or nuclear forever. So whichever is slower is better.
Pure speculation on my part, I'll admit. But I see so many arguing for nuclear who doesn't seem to care AT ALL about climate change or preserving nature when you press them on their arguments. So I can't help think that way.
Nuclear power can be an answer, but it's not flexible enough to be the answer.
The demand for power is variable, and the difference between base demand and peak demand can be 2x or even 2.5x. While nuclear power can be viable for satisfying the base demand, it's viability for the variable part is another question.
Then there are cheap renewables. If you don't constrain the market artificially, it tends to build solar and wind until nobody knows what to do with the excess electricity. That makes power cheap on the average but potentially very expensive when the demand is high and the generation is low. Nuclear power, with its high capital costs but low operating costs, does not seem to be the right answer to this variable demand / variable generation problem.
That only makes sense if the idle capital of GPUs is cheaper than the energy powering them.
There are very few applications like this, and even fewer that are easily distributed to that you don't have to use expensive transmission lines to power them.
For example, most new hydrogen electrolysis facilities are planning to build direct-connected solar without even connecting to the grid, and using the energy directly, because letting electrolyzes sit idle for a week is not cost effective. And the grid cost would be expensive too. So building utility-scale solar without a grid connection makes the most financial sense.
I mean, certainly. Well, maybe not the answer, but whatever.
However, are we actually capable of building new reactors and managing their operation in the private sector? I’m not talking about possibly maybe here. Are we actually ready, today, to build a new reactor within reasonable time at reasonable cost? I don’t know, but my gut feeling says no. We cannot even build roads like that.
Furthermore, is operating these reactors economical? Current reactors are not. They externalize lots of cost factors.
Chernobyl happened largely because plant admins wanted to please (or were afraid of) their higher-ups. Russia has had numerous secretive incidents in their southern military nuclear production sites, and more recently? Mysterious things like "high winds"...
No, China can not build nuclear economically. That's why they're drastically reducing their nuclear goal while they continue to scale up coal and solar.
PRC is currently building indigenous nuclear relatively economically which appear to be performing around expectations. What happened / what PRC can't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically. Rollout past decade has been delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues & US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy) forcing PRC to switch to domestic tech. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. What is also happening is PRC scaling up coal and solar, due to geopolitics of rushing energy security and lower renewable costs, but not at the expense of nuclear rollout.
Actually the secret ingredient might be more "central planning". Mostly used in socialist/communist countries, but US/UK know how to do it, when the stake is high enough (e.g. war).
One could argue that climate change is sort of a war, threatening the national security.
Current renewables also externalise a lot of factors. Any production at scale externalises a lot of factors.
Unfortunately, the discussion is so emotionally and politically charged, that I'm afraid no one is actually properly calculating all the costs, and risks etc.
the article mentions that 2 billion tons of coal would be needed to manufacture solar panels to meet half of today's global energy needs with renewables. That is about 3 months of global coal consumption at current rates. If we decide to go all in on nuclear instead, we can turn off the coal plants in a mere 15 years or so.
France has been using nuclear power plants for more than 50 years, producing up to 75% of all electricity and exporting to other countries, and did not suffer any disaster.
There has been natural nuclear power plants that has been running for few hundred thousand years (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine)... so nature did it before us, and nature did not really care and left all the waste on the site. We have found more efficient ways to produce, reuse the waste and properly dispose it.
Cue the atomic fanatics vs the renewable cult discussion.
Has been discussed a thousand times on HN recently and it always seems both are just shouting how the other side can not see the obvious superiority of their fav energy source.
why cant we have a bit of both?
renewable seems very good long term and nuclear is also nice for transition.
but I wouldnt want to live next to one of those crappy leaky french reactors.
No, we can't have a bit of both, because despite heroic efforts with tens of billions of dollars being dumped into nuclear since 2008, it hasn't produced.
We tried four reactors back then, using a new regulatory process that was supposed to speed construction and reduce costs. Instead, costs and timelines ballooned 3x. Two of the four reactors were abandoned half-way through construction, resulting in rate payers holding the bag for billions of dollars and no Wh delivered to the grid. Executives are being criminally prosecuted for fraud.
The other two reactors are supposed to complete late this year, but I don't think any honest person should rely on such timelines when they inevitably slip every single time.
Nuclear is not something we can realiably build. We are bad at big construction jobs to begin with. But when you add in training up massive new workforces for extremely specialized welding or concrete pour skills, it's hugely inefficient because we don't know how to utilize this labor effectively. People sit idle for months, waiting for their chance to work. Just a gigantic clusterfuck of logistical (mis)management.
And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s, while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. We should use our limited construction capacity to build factories to manufacture things, not spend it on nuclear reactors. $15B spent on solar or battery production facilities will churn out many many GW year after year of additional capacity, whereas it only buys a single GW of nuclear. And that's in the best case scenario where we actually finish the damn reactor...
>We tried four reactors back then, using a new regulatory process that was supposed to speed construction and reduce costs. Instead, costs and timelines ballooned 3x. Two of the four reactors were abandoned half-way through construction, resulting in rate payers holding the bag for billions of dollars and no Wh delivered to the grid.
These were the Westinghouse AP1000 units to be installed in Georgia and South Carolina, contract beginning in 2008. It's worth noting that four other AP1000 units also from Westinghouse were built and installed in China, beginning construction in 2009 and entering into operation in 2018. The total cost of both systems was slightly more than half the cost of the failed project in South Carolina.
>And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s, while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof.
You seem to be arguing that we shouldn't bother building major projects, but I think this implies the opposite: we need to find ways to fix the construction industry. The US is currently facing a situation where cities can't grow like they used to; growing cities quickly become unaffordable, where by contrast Chicago sustained rapid growth for decades before the Great Depression.
We go into the energy transition with the economy and construction capacity we have, not the construction capacity we wish we had.
The time to transition is now, and making that transition with the ample tools we have right now is a good thing. It's not an argument that we shouldnt improve construction. It's an argument that we should at a minimum do what we know how to do.
If you have ideas on how to improve construction efficiency in the US, it's an absolutely massive addressable market that gets too little attention, and should definitely be addressed. I would love to go work for somebody that is fixing construction, if I had the right skills. I would love even more to do it myself, but I have zero experience or ideas.
I guess you think the Koreans and Chinese are just fundamentally different from everyone else then because they're pumping out reactors just fine, today.
The French, Americans, Russians, and Japanese have all had periods of time where they built them quickly and cost effectively too. But then various institutional rot sets in. We're going to have to keep building big things anyways so it's not like having that capability is wasted.
There definitely are fundamental differences in our capabilities here, and you seem to believe the same too.
Look, for example, at the challenges that are being experienced as we try to build chip fabs in the US.
Instintutional knowledge and capability are real things. And I definitely think that construction capability is an important thing to build.
But let's improve our construction capability on building real things that get built and improve our capabilities, such as battery factories or solar panel factories or transmission lines or other things that get build closer to on-time, and then use those contractors that succeed to try more ambitious projects.
Let's not piss away billions of dollars with no sustained knowledge growth or construction capacity improvement. Trying to build even, say, 10GW of new nuclear right now would be posing away 90% of the capital. We don't even know who we would really hire for this!
Until we have a track record that's strong enough to attract investment, I don't see the rush to burn money on nuclear builds. It won't help the climate, and it doesn't even help the nuclear industry.
Reached the thread length limit. With regard to your last comment:
> It's most definitely not the case that successive reactors are cheaper or faster, that's a myth that gets told but the data says otherwise both in the US and France and many other countries (but not all).
Maybe, but Votgle is a massive outlier and successive plants of the same design are all but guaranteed to be faster and cheaper. You don't make those kinds of mistakes twice.
The giant explosion in costs for the US starts right when the disastrous ALARA regulation is adopted in 1971. Entirely self-inflicted wound. France and South Korea largely don't experience a cost increase in the time periods shown.
You're going to have trouble convincing me that we can't pull off a Messmer plan because it has literally been done before. Yes, the government should be in charge of and finance it. That's the only realistic option and that is what has worked before. Hire the Koreans if we have to. Build us 3 or 4 Barakahs. It's been done. It's being done. It can be done again.
Vogtlr is the norm for advanced developed countries. Look at France's attempt at Flamanville. Or the EPR at Olkiluoto. Look at Summer in South Carolina.
Look at all the Us construction projects from the 70's, before Three Mile Island.
2-4x the budget and 2-4x the timeline should be the expectation.
Just because something was done in a particular time and place doesn't mean that the same thing can be achieved again, or even that we would want it. We have different people in different positions of power, completely different technological capabilities, completely different regulations. I haven't heard anyone suggest that we should get rid of ALARA that works in the field. And I certainly don't know anybody who works in the field who would ever want to build the same designs from the past.
We have new and better tech, different costs of labor, everything is different. We need to operate on our best knowledge and tech today, not that from 50-60 years ago. You'll never convince me that's a sane way to make massive capital allocations.
> Vogtlr is the norm for advanced developed countries.
It is for countries that only build a few reactors. Again, China and Korea don't have this problem because they build lots of reactors. They aren't aliens. China doesn't even have cheap labor these days. The South Koreans are an advanced economy like us. They got good at it by doing it. There is no reason why we couldn't do that. We just don't want to and then we say it's not possible because we aren't good at it. It's circular logic. We've been saying it takes too long for decades when that is plenty of time to rebuild those skills and then build reactors quickly. We could've been done by now.
> Look at all the Us construction projects from the 70's, before Three Mile Island.
> I haven't heard anyone suggest that we should get rid of ALARA that works in the field
Why is that surprising? They are trained and educated that this is the correct and lawful standard to which they must operate. It's baked in to the institutions.
> You'll never convince me that's a sane way to make massive capital allocations.
The alternative will be even more capital intensive and it's completely unproven. You need to build out thousands of miles of high voltage transmission and TWhs of battery/hydrogen/hydro storage. It's unproven. No nation has a majority wind/solar grid without fossil fuel backup. Some places are blessed with enough hydro resources but that won't work in the US. We already know you can mostly decarbonize a grid with nuclear because France did it 40 years ago.
We already paid the first of a kind cost at Votgle, ordering several more AP1000s is exactly what we should do at this point. We now have a workforce that has made the mistakes and knows what not to do.
If you don't want to do that, you can do what the UAE did and hire the Koreans to teach you how to build plants. They went from no nuclear program to 5.4 GW of clean energy in 10 ish years.
I find it baffling that you can know about the disaster at Vogtle and think that it's something that should be tried again right away.
What utility would do this? It is financial suicide. There's no allocator of capital whos going to look at Vogue and think "yes this is worth another shot". None. What investor?
There's two half-built reactors in South Carolina. Who would be foolish to even try to complete them now?
There is literally no one with the expertise to execute on more reactors that thinks we should order more AP1000, because now in 2023 we know much more than we did in 2008 and we know that nobody in the US can build them competitively.
I guess you should tell Poland because they've just ordered several.
The first reactor is always the slowest and most expensive because you're going to make mistakes. Building just one is always a mistake. We've paid the deposit, so now we should reap the benefits of having the experience. We know what not to do now. With your attitude, we'd never build anything big.
It's most definitely not the case that successive reactors are cheaper or faster, that's a myth that gets told but the data says otherwise both in the US and France and many other countries (but not all).
Poland might need to use expensive nuclear, but it's not the case in the continental US. Poland is not the US, has far cheaper labor, and I don't know the status of their construction industry or their funding sources, but they are different from the US's.
Again, if you think that this is a good idea for the US, how are you going to convince a utility to do this? And if it's an investor operated power gen facility, what investor would risk this?
If it's a government-funded and owned facility, then that would solve thee funding source. It's another question if it's a wise use of capital, and yet another of who does the EPC. Perhaps Bechtel? Definitely the most likely to succeed.
My attitude is not to avoid big projects. I think we need to build massive big projects. HVDC. High speed rail. Subways in all major cities. Massive factories, mines, etc. Advanced geothermal. New hydro in select locations. All of these projects will have better pay off, less risk, and increase the construction capacity of the US. Nuclear is not a wise choice for any of this. If we can increase our productivity on large projects, then it's time to try projects with less payoff, like nuclear.
Nuclear is very expensive to build, and wants to run 24/7 to offset costs. They also want to run continuously.
The problem is that renewables are cheap, but intermittent.
So take an economically rational marketplace. I can either buy the same amount of power for $1, or for $2, what do you think I'd choose? $1 of course. Power is power, I don't want to pay more than I must.
So any time I can buy renewables for $1, nuclear makes no revenue. This pushes off its payoff into the future. This isn't a good situation to be in. Time goes by, components get older, people get impatient, more renewables keep getting built.
Now you're a bank considering a loan for nuclear you think might be paid off in 20 years. Or if renewables keep growing, maybe in 40. Or if they really take off, maybe never. Risking billions that way doesn't sound enticing, now does it?
If nuclear made money we wouldn't be seeing these blog posts show up over and over. Money solves many problems and greases many palms. If nuclear was profitable, every other problem would be solvable. Not enough safety? Money can buy that. Too close to people? Money can put a plant further away. Legal problems? Money pays for lawyers.
The logical end state of all this seems to be that renewables kill off the profitability of nuclear badly enough that nobody builds it (relatively speaking). Eventually the grid destabilizes and this forces urgent measures to shore things up. The final state I imagine is a very renewable-heavy grid, after a period of chaos in the middle.
> I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable.
I can.
First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. That costs money. Renewables skip this completely.
Second, renewables also benefit from progress, but a lot more. Solar and wind are mass industry production. Each iteration is cheap. Experimentation is cheap and safe and done all over the world. Production is highly amenable towards automation. Nuclear isn't.
So we have factories pumping out millions of solar cells, but we don't have factories pumping out millions of nuclear vessels, because nuclear plants are rare, one off projects that don't justify mass production, and are too rare to have a robust industry and lots of competition.
> Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources.
Yeah, but there are other options that can be used. Eg, yeah, we can spend decades building nuclear and waiting until it starts to work, or we can do things like improving the grid transmission which works out to simple tasks that are doable much faster and amenable to mass production.
Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.
> First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money.
Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor.
> Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans.
Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes, so no such plans are needed.
Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Building a nuclear power plant involves constructing things like pressure vessels and steam generators that have no market outside of nuclear power construction. The price history of nuclear plants demonstrates this: The plants built during the nuclear boom during the late 60s and early 70s were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy production [1]. Producing a run of 40 steam generators [2] is a lot cheaper than a run of 4 steam generators. Same with pressure vessels, and other costly components. Serialized production of the same design yields cost savings.
> Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.
No, we can't. This is just hand-waving away the biggest obstacle to widespread deployment of intermittent sources. Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you essentially need to be able to create an artificial alpine lake, and it needs to be close to an existing lake or river in order to fill it.
Battery storage remains prohibitively expensive. The actual cost of battery storage is much higher than the raw cost of lithium batteries [3]. Labor, installation, and DC to AC conversion equipment leads to net costs of ~$500/KWh.
This is why plans for a grid primarily powered intermittent sources assume that some other battery chemistry or hydrogen storage will make energy storage essentially free.
> Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor.
The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point.
Mass production in general is made cheaper by simplifying and cutting corners. Nuclear isn't terribly friendly towards this, you can't just go "How about we use 30% less concrete?"
> Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale.
Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky.
> No, we can't.
You're missing the point. Here's what I envision:
1. Renewables continue to eat nuclear's lunch
2. Nuclear keeps not getting built
3. Eventually grid destabilizes
4. People want solutions, right now
At point 4, nobody is going to sit there and wait 5-10 years for nuclear to be built. Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days?
So that's how I see things going. Once the shit hits the fan, urgent solutions will be needed. And pretty much everything is much faster than nuclear.
I'm not envisioning some utopic future, but one where problems will be ignored until something goes quite wrong, that's going to suck for a while, then things get hurriedly rectified in a huge rush and at great expense, but that will still favor non-nuclear solutions.
> Mass production in general is made cheaper by simplifying and cutting corners
This is painfully wrong. Go shopping for pretty much any industrial part, and you'll pay through the nose for a few. Order a few dozen, and you get massive discounts in price for identical products.
It takes time and effort to configure machines and tooling to produce something. Those are fixed costs- the more you order, the per-unit price of those fixed costs drops.
> Once the shit hits the fan
That's not gonna happen. No climate model is predicting a doomsday event. It's going to continue to be a slow, gradually worsening crisis at worst. From a political perspective, it'll never need an urgent solution, because next year isn't going to be significantly different from this year- just a little bit. Even for those people who finally realize they're going to be displaced, no urgent solution could possibly turn back the clock, short of a massive deployment of C02 removal from the atmosphere.
> That's not gonna happen. No climate model is predicting a doomsday event.
I'm not talking about the climate. I'm talking about the grid.
My prediction is that we'll keep on building renewables until renewables break the grid, then patch it up in a hurry, and nuclear will still not be built in the end.
If renewables start straining the grid, they'll just face economically infeasible grid connect fees, reduced or negative rates. That's already the case in California.
Power companies don't get to just start supplying electricity to the grid at will; rather than the grid breaking, operators will simply say "no more". At that point, the only urgency will be an artificial, political one.
Everyone is assuming/hoping that a majority renewables national energy system is possible/economical. I don't think it is, but even if you do it's a gamble. No one is sure because it's not been done before. At a minimum you'll have to build several thousands of miles of new transmission and millions of panels/turbines. Those panels/turbines will last maybe 30 years. Batteries aren't going to cut it, you'll need underground hydrogen storage. That's never been done for energy storage before. And hydrogen is a lousy battery, you'll get half your energy back out at best. There's too much uncertainty.
Nuclear fits our existing grid paradigm, and it can be built quickly if we let ourselves. Japan's median reactor build time was under 4 years. France built out their nuclear fleet in 15 to 20 years. It's literally been done before.
A bit pedantic here, but majority renewable national energy systems have been built but only with hydroelectricity. Norway and some other countries generate >95% of their electricity from dams.
But of course, dams can't be built everywhere, so it's not a scalable solution.
Fair, I meant 'intermittent' when I said 'renewable'. Geothermal and hydro are very different since they can be relied upon for the most part. Hydro sometimes has issues with water levels, which may be exacerbated by climate change.
That's the other baffling part about advocating for solar/wind grids. We're anticipating major disruptions. Why would we want to be MORE exposed to climate change?
> The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point.
Er, no it is the point. We've always been using the safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to affect costs because those safety features have always been there.
> Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky.
Quite the contrary, it makes it benefit vastly more from economies of scale. For example, one of the central components in a wind turbine is an alternator or dynamo. We make alternators for all kinds of products, so doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely double the market for alternators because wind turbines are only a small segment of the market for alternators.
By comparison, nuclear pressure vessels are only used for nuclear power plants. Thus doubling the production of nuclear pressure vessels doubles the market for pressure vessels. Serialized production of nuclear power at scale would easily expand the market for nuclear power components by an order of magnitude. The same cannot be said of wind turbines and alternators.
You're missing the context that renewables are currently being used to supplement a primarily fossil fuel grid. This means we don't actually have to accommodate the intermittent nature of renewable production. Once renewables saturate the energy market during peak production, things become a lot harder for renewables. You're comparing apples to oranges when you compare an intermittent source to a non-intermittent source.
People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy storage is invented. Which it hasn't. We have geographically-limited options like hydro which are good for the regions that have access to it. But for everywhere else, it's either continue to use fossil fuels or nuclear power.
> Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days?
How much does it store? Media reports this as "2,000 megawatt seconds" [1]. In other words, 0.55 megawatt hours. This is less electricity than a small nuclear plant produces every minute. To put this in perspective the US alone consumes about 12 TWh (or 12,000,000 MWh) of electricity every day. We'd need tens of millions of these battery facilities.
Again, there's a reason why plans for a primary renewable grid assume hydrogen storage, or some new battery chemistry will be a silver bullet for storage.
> Er, no it is the point. We've always been using the safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to affect costs because those safety features have always been there.
Again, the point is a generic one. When we find a problem with nuclear, we add extra safety systems. Those cost money. This is something much rarer with say, solar or wind because there's less that can go wrong, less backups needed, and breakage is much more acceptable.
> We make alternators for all kinds of products, so doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely double the market for alternators because wind turbines are only a small segment of the market for alternators.
But it does mean there's factories already pumping them out, plentiful production capacity, competition, and cheap prices.
> People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy storage is invented.
I don't think you're still quite getting what I'm getting at.
Consideration on the level you speak of doesn't exist. Nobody is in charge of the whole system, so a full functional system doesn't matter.
People will build intermittent sources because they're cheap to build, and because intermittency isn't the provider's problem.
Then things break, and people will seek solutions. There will be a rush and various patchwork solutions being implemented in a panic.
You're thinking like a sane person, trying to transition to a different stable system and ensuring it will work properly from the start. I think that won't be the case. We will keep pushing until things break, everyone will blame everyone else, and we'll need to fix things in a hurry.
> Again, the point is a generic one. When we find a problem with nuclear, we add extra safety systems. Those cost money.
And again, we already added that safety system. There is no "extra safety systems" because it's already there.
> But it does mean there's factories already pumping them out, plentiful production capacity, competition, and cheap prices.
Exactly: production is already at scale so making a large order for a bunch of alternators for wind turbines isn't going to lead to further saving because it's a drop in the total market for alternators. As a contrast to nuclear power components - where nuclear plants are the only market - so a tenfold increase in the production of nuclear plants leads to a tenfold increase in the production of pressure vessels.
> People will build intermittent sources because they're cheap to build, and because intermittency isn't the provider's problem. Then things break, and people will seek solutions. There will be a rush and various patchwork solutions being implemented in a panic.
Correct, and the solution to intermittency that we've found is to burn fossil fuels. The battery storage facilities being provisioned are nowhere near large enough to be significant. Hydroelectric storage requires specific geographic features, and isn't widely available. You're right: when we have shortages of electricity people will implement solutions. And the solution grid operators have found to the intermittency problem is to continue burning fossil fuels.
> There is no "extra safety systems" because it's already there.
No. Every time we have an accident we think of what could have prevented it, and invent more safety systems.
Eg, Fukushima wasn't just "account for tsunamis", which is a local problem. One resulting requirement is "Ensure that the required parts to keep the reactor said can be made available and brought in by helicopter within 24 hours even if the terrain is impassable".
So that added a nigh universal requirement to store various replacement parts and to ensure some way to deliver water, as well as the availability of helicopters to bring that in. That increases the price of every nuclear plant out there. Maybe not by a huge amount, but it does.
And renewables escape that because nobody cares if something knocks down a wind turbine, so long it doesn't fall on somebody's head.
> As a contrast to nuclear power components - where nuclear plants are the only market - so a tenfold increase in the production of nuclear plants leads to a tenfold increase in the production of pressure vessels.
10X of approximately nothing might still not be enough to bother automating anything, and you'd have to convince those companies that demand is going to stay and make the investment worthwhile. Meanwhile we're not about to stop needing gearboxes and generators.
> Correct, and the solution to intermittency that we've found is to burn fossil fuels.
Fair, but again backs up my view that nuclear isn't going to happen.
> No. Every time we have an accident we think of what could have prevented it, and invent more safety systems.
And for the third time, the safety systems that would have prevented Chernobyl are already present in western reactors:
* Western reactors have secondary containment
* Western reactors also use dedicated control and moderator rods
We don't need to spend the money to invent more safety systems if we already have them.
> 10X of approximately nothing might still not be enough to bother automating anything, and you'd have to convince those companies that demand is going to stay and make the investment worthwhile. Meanwhile we're not about to stop needing gearboxes and generators.
It's not a question of automation, it's more of a factor of institutional knowledge and overhead cost of design. When building something unique like a steam generator a new manufacturer typically builds a broken first model and has to iterate a couple times before nailing down the manufacturing process. That overhead cost can be amortized over a larger production run.
> And for the third time, the safety systems that would have prevented Chernobyl are already present in western reactors
You're stuck on Chernobyl. I repeat, it was an example of a trend. The specific example wasn't intended to be of any particular importance. The trend of accident -> extra security is.
So yeah, Chernobyl was a bad example, but that does nothing to change that when something on a nuclear plant goes wrong, we look at how to stop future accidents, and add extra tech for monitoring/backups/etc, making nuclear more expensive, which is one of the reasons why price hasn't gone down over time. Because we've added extra stuff on top to patch up both big and smaller problems that cropped up.
Though I think that without Chernobyl it's well possible somebody would have eventually suggested maybe a containment building isn't quite necessary. Because it sure isn't free.
Meanwhile, if a wind turbine falls apart somewhere, for the most part we just ignore it. It's a problem for the operator. We're not trying to ensure no wind turbine anywhere doesn't fall apart ever.
>Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor.
You can't build a building that contains a steam explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the reactor could be made indestructible in the first place.
Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima.
Such costs could appear at any time, anywhere in the world that has a nuclear reactor. For example due to negligence, acts of war or terrorism. No earthquake required.
>Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you essentially need to be able to create an artificial alpine lake
True if you want to create it from scratch, but many countries already have lots of hydro that could be increased by adding pumps to existing dams. Other countries can use other methods, like store heat, for example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants generate power even during the night.
Or you can generate Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries.
There are a number of options, and they all have the benefit of being safe enough and cheap enough that they can be made by anyone anywhere, even at small scale.
I personally think that the ease of deployment will be the killer feature for storage, as it was for solar.
> You can't build a building that contains a steam explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the reactor could be made indestructible in the first place.
Wrong: we can, and do, build concrete domes that contain a potential steam explosion. The pressure vessel has to connect to steam generators, control rods, and more whereas the secondary containment does not. Furthermore, once the pressure vessel explodes, the water boils off and is no longer being heated by the core.
> Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima.
Got a source for these claims? Especially the "billions per year still" for Chernobyl? Even the more extreme estimates claim $200B for Fukushima, and much of that is speculative (nowhere near that much has actually been spent).
> Other countries can use other methods, like store heat, for example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants generate power even during the night. Or you can generate Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries.
Except for solar thermal (which was never cost competitive, and still suffers from intermittency due to weather), all of these things are experimental. Like I said: in order to make intermit energy sources feasible, we need some new form of energy storage that yields order-of-magnitude improvements over existing storage systems. Maybe some of these will be our silver bullet for storage. Maybe not. Most don't want to gamble the future of civilization on the guess that some silver bullet will be found.
Sure! If you are honestly interested in the truth, it's quite easy to find information about all things nuclear. The veneer of falsehoods causing people to believe that nuclear is cheap and safe when it clearly isn't is very thin and will only affect those who don't really want to know.
Here's an estimate from 2016 for Chernobyl, the total back then was estimated to be around 700 bn USD but with some uncertainty. It's probably safe to say at least 600bn now, and it's ongoing.
The yearly costs for handling Chernobyl (before the recent war) were over 5% of the national budget of Ukraine, and countries as far away as scandinavia still have ongoing costs.
The 200 bn estimate is very clearly extremely _optimistic_. It's frankly unreasonable to think that another 15 years will see the end of expenses related to Fukushima.
Now imagine if we could spend all this money on energy storage instead. I think it could go a long way, we just need to do it.
Unsurprisingly, as per your source the figures for 600 billion for Chernobyl are not in the form of actual spending: this figure comes in the form of estimated economic impact. This is a drastically different figure, one that encompasses things far beyond actual spending. Fossil fuels have an estimated economic impact of over a trillion dollars every year. Figures for estimated economic impact are also hugely variable since study authors can apply analysis that includes more and more layers of indirection.
The costs for Fukushima are also not bearing out as you seem to claim: the bulk of that 82 billion came in the form of disaster relief (more than half), land remediation. and decommissioning the plant. Storage of the waste water from continued maintenance of the failed reactor is a slim minority less than 3%. So I'm not sure why you seem to be under the impression that there will be so much more expense, when the most expensive steps - namely resettlement and cleanup - have already been completed. 10 trillion yen out of the 12 trillion are for disaster relief payments and decontamination - both of which are already done. You have demonstrated the ability to perform division when you calculate that 82 billion over 11 years works out to about 7.5 billion per year - but you're missing the fact that this spending was heavily frontloaded during the immediate disaster response.
> Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes, so no such plans are needed.
I've seen this argument repeated a lot lately, and it's annoying, because it focuses entirely on the wrong thing. What went wrong with Fukushima was not the earthquake itself, but the flooding caused by it. A lot more places in the world are vulnerable to flooding than they are to earthquakes (I myself live in one of these: zero noticeable earthquakes, a lot of rain-caused flooding and landslides, and next to a nuclear power complex). And AFAIK, all or nearly all nuclear power plants in the world reviewed their backup power systems after Fukushima, to make sure their generators and power switches are not in an area of the plant which could be flooded.
To be more specific, the tsunami caused by it. And without the massive 9.1 earthquake there would have been no tsunami. Flooding from rain or snowmelt is far more gradual.
There has been more near misses in the nuclear industry than tsunamis. After Fukushima about all plants in the west had to install independent core cooling because the regulators realized the risk was systemic, even though the cause was special in the case of Fukushima.
A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
And there are plenty of real disasters that were several times deadlier than Chernobyl, yet I doubt most readers have heard of them since they don't involve the term "nuclear"
Nuclear is one of the safest form of electricity generation, even though plants built before 1980 account for most electricity production. Safety is not an issue with nuclear, when doing a good-faith comparison with other forms of energy production and the continued damage of climate change.
I am indeed engaging with the point: Nuclear power's safety record is very good, and better than most other energy sources. Providing examples of other industrial disasters that don't have nearly the same recognition of nuclear accidents that harmed much fewer people serves to demonstrate just how strong of a double standard people apply to nuclear technology.
Why would you expect modern nuclear plants to be more profitable? Most of the costs of a nuclear plant are capital costs, which have been increasing faster than the increases in what the generated electricity can be sold for.
I did see a more recent and very comprehensive paper that found a few countries where costs haven't ballooned, or even fallen by very tiny amounts. Whether those situations can be replicated is unclear.
But even if we get to the best case scenario of small cost drops, nuclear will never compete with the tech cruces of storage and solar. It does not have the characteristics of a tech with falling costs, without a complete revolution in its operation, the likes of which I have not seen imagined by anyone. Thorium and SMRs are minor tweaks that who not reach the type of tech revolution needed to make nuclear into a tech with falling costs.
There might be a few niche locations for which nuclear is the cheapest option, such as maybe Finland who was able to finally get their new single reactor online, a year delayed from the first time they declared it online. But these are the exceptions. Unclear is it a general purpose technology, it should be viewed as useful only in special circumstances where traditional tech fails.
Nuclear plants aren't used for grid stabilization, because they can't be. They take hours to days to change power levels.
Fast-responding natural gas plants are used for rapid response to changing load. Hydro (storage or regular) as well. More recently, energy storage systems like the huge system Tesla deployed in Australia.
If I had a dollar for every HN commenter that doesn't understand the basics of grids and generation but considers themselves an expert in how awesome nuclear is...
I feel like most people I know who push Nuclear are already arguing for the use of both, and it’s the renewable side that argues that Nuclear is too dangerous to use or not necessary. Or have you come across a lot of Nuclear proponents arguing that we shouldn’t be using solar energy at all?
I was very pro nuclear a few years ago, at this point solar is so far up the learning curve and experiences so many economy of scale benefits, it's really hard imagining what kind of regulatory framework would be able to make it economically competitive.
We collectively in the form of consumers and governments decide how expensive a thing is, and for 50 years, thanks in part to a lot of coal lobby money, decided nuclear should be more expensive than coal, so we got all the radiation /and/ all the CO2 associated with coal power plants, we can't change that history at this point.
The thing missing from your conclusion is simply combined cycle gas plants. Take an airplane engine, benifiting from that huge industry and add a tiny steam side and you have something way smaller, cheaper and more efficient than any coal plant.
Nuclear is a super complicated coal plant regarding how the thermal engine works. Pure steam plants have simply been obsolete the last 30 years, and renewables are making it even worse by outcompeting gas plants.
The only people I meet who argue in favor of nuclear also spend a ton of time arguing against solar, wind, and storage. They also actively promote outdated incorrect knowledge of these technologies.
I do find it pretty crazy that anyone would argue against solar (and wind where it’s viable) at this point, it’s just way too cost efficient. (The feasibility and cost of grid scale storage is where my concerns lie)
The author of this article for one is someone who does not believe renewables should coexist with anything. Preferring continued use of coal over expanding renewables:
> Possibly, wind, solar, and utility-scale batteries can play some role in consistent electricity. Until that takes place coal, natural gas, and nuclear are the only sources of energy to electricity that provide this benefit for grid stabilization and human longevity.
I feel like the oil industry has astroturfed nuclear energy, and NIMBYs love it because they know there can not be any significant nuclear capacity that will come online until 2030 at the earliest. Which is my biggest problem with pro nuclear arguments.
I don’t think you are wrong. This article in particular is written by a consultant that works for a lobby group who’s largest funders include energy companies with large fossil fuel portfolio, looking at the author’s twitter profile and writing history revels he’s only real concern with coal seems to be that China is doing it but not USA (there is also a bunch of FUD spreading around renewables, climate denialism, and conspiracy theories, including the great reset).
Because our for-profit energy sector has decided not to invest in nuclear, even with government subsidies. This is basic business. Are you as the CEO of an energy company going to invest tens of billions of dollars into a plant that won't be operational for decades or are you just going to stand up more wind farms where you can start realizing a profit the next year? If you want nuclear, you simply cannot have an energy grid dependent on companies who's goal is profit. This is why all of the talk about how great nuclear is simply doesn't matter. The market doesn't support it and we're ruled by the markets.
The issue is that nuclear largely makes renewables redundant. Nuclear is just as cheap to run 24/7 as it is to run half the time, unlike fossil fuels.
Right now, the way we're using intermittent sources is to shut fossil fuel plants off when renewables are producing and turn them back on when they are not producing. Intermittent sources are essentially supplementing a grid based in fossil fuels.
If we use nuclear plants to fill in the gaps in intermittent sources' production curves, then we'd have already built enough nuclear capacity to run the grid without intermittent sources so we'd just run nuclear plants at full capacity and eliminate the need for intermittent sources.
The difference is its not easy to turn a nuclear plant 'off', quickly, and even then it still needs power to keep the spent fuel cool. If the plant loses backup power (which is finite) then you'll get a disaster with the spent fuel pool boiling off and the fuel itself igniting spreading radioactive ash for miles.
The point is it's very dangerous to have a nuclear power plant in the middle of a warzone.
Yes, but the consequences are different. If Russia destroys an Ukrainian nuclear reactor, there are grave, long lasting consequences for the Ukraine and possible larger parts of Europe, we still have enough contamination from Chernobyl still.
Russia did destroy large parts of the rest of the Ukrainian power infrastructure, as they targetted it, when they weren't shooting at hospitals.
But the power infrastructure is mostly back up, at least partial repairs were achieved. So quite a difference.
If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, that also doesn't actually let you address realistic power consumption patterns.
If we're talking about not-yet-extant technology that would allow solar to meet 24/7 demand at grid scale (like power storage that costs 1% as much as it does now), we might as well be talking about small-scale-fusion power, which is also resistant to being bombed and is generally better than solar+batteries for other reasons.
No? How many ovens, washing machines and dryers usually run at 2am when it's dark?
Sure people don't charge their Tesla at noon when solar production peaks, but saving that until the evening when the 15 miles use of the car battery need to refill is not a significant engineering challenge. Running a nuclear power plant is magnitudes harder.
I think this is the least of the problems that nuclear has.
The problem isn't convincing J Random Person off the street, the problem is convincing somebody who has control of billions of dollars that there's any chance the investment will make financial sense.
Until there's a halfway compelling financial argument, until there's a way to reliably build a reactor on a realistic timeline, nuclear is a pipe dream.
Once there is a way that nuclear can be built and makes financial sense, there are tons of locations that would welcome a new large source of employment nearby. For example, nearly all of the current nuclear reactors that are aging out across the US are in cities that don't want to lose the jobs and don't mind having nuclear nearby.
Incandescent lights have been banned for years in most European countries to speed up the adoption of led-lighting. Street lights are being replaces by leds. Tax cuts and subsidies are given for energy efficient housing.
I knew someone would say "but light globes!". Yes of course all appliances are now energy rated etc.
In some countries inefficient lightglobes are banned.
But I'm not talking about that - I'm talking about systematic change in behaviour of homes and business to try to use less energy, perhaps encouraged through tax or other incentives.
What you describe seems exactly that to me. When building a new home and it’s energy neutral or very efficient, you get a large tax benefit. All home builders I know off take this into account.
Do you have an example or idea of what you are thinking about?
Plenty of homes are now switching to heat pumps and they’ve added solar in the last decade so more and more homes have become “energy-neutral” to a degree.
Add in electric vehicles and residential batteries and we should start seeing some families be self-sufficient
It’s probably too little and maybe too late, but there are plenty of changes
> The United States under a Biden administration, similar to the British, would move towards an unsustainable, and national security risk by eliminating fossil fuels, and killing people who need electricity and global security the West provides.
And weirdly, for someone so excited about nuclear power, he has no idea where we could generate the electricity needed by EVs, so we should just stick to fossil fuels there too.
renewables are not cheap when you factor in decommissioning which nuclear power does. FTFA: "The International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that old solar panel disposal to meet 2050 Paris Accords 'will more than double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste.'"
Nuclear waste decommissioned from nuclear plants is very compact, almost completely safe at our current levels of handling it, and a lot of bruhaha around it is strictly political.
I don't know "compact" makes anything better about it. Germany has been searching for a hole safe and deep enough for it for years. It costs taxpayer money and they still haven't found one. Meanwhile, the stuff is stored near the plants. Which is not safe. Also stuff which has been considered "safely stored" years ago needs to be dug out again. Which again costs taxpayer money.
Dry cask storage on site is absolutely safe. It's dry waste, there's nothing to leak. It sits in reinforced concrete casks that are rated to last over a hundred years. After that, you can just put it in a new cask and repeat. There's not very much of it so you can just keep it at the site.
Germany alone has 120.000m³ low and mid waste which needs to be stored. However only a small part of it is ready to be stored (in the safe and deep hole Germany still couldn't find).
2016 they had 15.000t of spend fuel.
When all the plants are gone, Germany will have 300.000m³ of waste which needs to disappear for a long time in hope that nobody will ever get the idea of digging it out again.
No nuclear company will want to have to do with anything of that. They paid some ridiculous amount of money for their subsidized profits, and the taxpayers will have to deal with it for the next thousands of years.
Nuclear technology is overdue.
There are better, cheaper and cleaner alternatives already out there.
Low/mid waste is mostly just normal trash after it sits for a year or two. Going through the trouble and expense of burying all of it like it's spent nuclear fuel is just wasted money. We spend billions of dollars pretending lightly radioactive material is going to kill someone. Not one person has ever died from handling nuclear waste.
Well I guess the German government should have just asked evilos on the internets and not bother with all those scientists and regulations. Crazy them.
It's not only high level long-live which has to be stored deep and safe. Your source shows it pretty good, and therefore it's not "just" 0,2% but 9% + an unknown amount of VLLW.
However, the best thing about this "report" is what's not in there: DECOMISSIONING :D
France will be so full of nuclear waste at the end of this ridiculous era, they're going to protests about that over and over. Mo matter where anybody decides to put the waste.
But who knows, maybe by then the war with Russia is over and they can make it disappear there again....I'm sure that's the best solution for humanity.
> It's not only high level long-live which has to be stored deep and safe. Your source shows it pretty good, and therefore it's not "just" 0,2% but 9% + an unknown amount of VLLW.
See, again you're bunching very different types of waste together as if they were the same thing.
VLLW is "Very Low Level Waste". Disposal: Existing surface disposal. And yet, you're bunching it up with high-level waste.
So, to correct my calculations. Deep geological disposal is required for: High-Level Waste (HLW) and Intermediate-Level Long-Lived waste. Combined they are 3.1% of all waste.
Disposal for Low Level Long Lived Waste (LLW-LL) is in development, will be near-sruface disposal, 5.9% of waste.
Literally everything else, that is 91% of all waste, can be safely disposed of using existing surface disposal. 5.9% will be near-surface disposal. Only 3% will be buried deep.
But sure, do keep on spreadin FUD on how OMG THERE'S HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF TONS OF HAZARDOUS WASTE WE DON'T HOW TO DEAL WITH.
What was that original FUD you were talking about? Oh, right: "Germany will have 300.000m³ of waste which needs to disappear for a long time in hope that nobody will ever get the idea of digging it out again."
Reality check: (conidering that the scary volume isn't made up) 9 000 cubic meters of that is something to be stored deep in the ground (and even if we don't have that storage, nuclear waste as it's stored is very safe, and can be stored for about a hundred years above ground).
> However, the best thing about this "report" is what's not in there: DECOMISSIONING
You didn't. You clumped together different types of waste and pretended they are all the same.
> We have HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF TONS OF HAZARDOUS WASTE WE DON'T HOW TO DEAL WITH in Germany alone.
And as it has been repeatedly shown to you, 97% of that waste poses no problem, and we know how to safely dispose of it. And the High Level waste we also know how to safely dispose of, and how to safely store until disposal facilities become available.
This is literally in the document I showed, you pretended you read, and couldn't be bothered top make an effort to understand it.
What you're doing is spreading FUD, pure and simple. And yes, politicians are just as susceptible to FUD and populism.
what does that even mean? Nuclear factors in decommissioning to the cost of running it. Wind and solar have even more limited lifespans than nuclear plus there's the millions of tonnes of waste generated when you decommission them.
Renewables are absolutely not less risk-prone. Per kw generated, nuclear energy is the safest and it's not even kinda close. Renewables also cannot output a steady amount of energy. Maybe there's a massive drought upstream. Maybe there's no wind today. Maybe it's a cloudy day.
Nuclear is THE ONLY SOLUTION. We would need such a hilarious, painful amount of renewable energy sources just to survive, let alone thrive. Or, we could just build a few thousand reactors around the world.
Renewables aren't going to fail in a way that makes an entire city uninhabitable for decades.
If you want proof that renewables are the solution, look at California's power supply for yesterday. Just 2x the wind/solar/batteries of what's installed now could easily replace all fossil fuel and nuclear.
Risk isn't only measured in physical danger, but also financial risk. Which is exactly why for-profit energy companies aren't investing in nuclear. It's economically the worst possible approach when your concern is profit.
Well no, it's because the upstart cost is insane. I could build a bunch of wind turbines for a few million, or drop BILLIONS into an already-existing reactor design, or even more money into getting a new design approved.
If SMRs were more of a thing, a town could build their own power plant for a few million bucks, removing the natural monopoly that exists.
> The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requests a pilot program to construct a microreactor for energy resilience by 2027. Also, the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office is seeking proposals for a mobile microreactor demonstration
> A recent report ... estimates the cost to generate electricity from the first microreactor will be between $0.14/kWh and $0.41/kWh. [...] Future costs are estimated to decrease to between $0.09/kWh and $0.33/kWh. Costs are expected to decrease after demonstration, licensing and initial deployment and will depend on the location and type of owner, whether private or public
You are talking about an amount of money that exceeds the easily available resources of the developer. That is true of nuclear but it is also completely normal in renewables. Projects if all types need financing. That could be a $200k anaerobic digester on a farm or a $7b offshore wind farm. But at every level the investor or bank will need to do due diligence and understand the risk.
Different types of project require different levels of expertise to do that.
A battery storage site is relatively simple and within the scope of smaller investors. An offshore wind farm might need large banks and energy companies. A nuclear power plant is in a completely different league in terms of expertise required. A bank will find it difficult to even understand the risk.
Geothermal and tidal are both as reliable as it gets.
A global HVDC grid with PV in the deserts will get you 100% renewable all by itself (probably not the cheapest and it would take a decade of current global metal production, but it would work and the resistance losses aren't bad enough to veto that idea).
Nuclear is safest though; or at least it was when most PV was rooftop, I don't know if the assumption used in the "deaths per TWh" chart are still valid.
Also:
> Maybe there's a massive drought upstream.
You're not wrong, but when that happens, lots of people will starve because the farms don't get the water that the hydro dam would normally store but in this hypothetical never received in the first place.
Nuclear is dense, comes with months worth of storage built-in, and lets smaller countries be self-sufficient for a while without having to rely on other countries.
We live in a world where all work goes to the lowest bidder and people will always cut corners if they believe the liability won't fall on them.
The entire world could be safely powered off nuclear energy if it wasn't for pesky humans that will always lie, cheat, and steal from each other. Given that human greed is unavoidable and a nuclear accident can pollute an area for 10,000 years it's probably best to recognize our own flaws as we consider what to do with it.
I mean, here in the US we have a hard time operating trains without catastrophic failure.
When you actually look at the statistics around large infrastructure projects the results are not comforting. Corners are always cut. Maintenance delayed. Just the "cost of doing business". Trust in both governments and large corporations is not exactly at an all time high. People know that companies will throw radioactive waste and scrap materials into the rivers if they can get away with it.
Conversely, the emotional argument is the only one that brings nuclear power back. You must convince people that these projects can be done safely. You must convince people that, "This time will be different."
Or, you can simply educate people -- this time doesn't need to be very different (though it certainly can be), because already-existing nuclear is very safe. Liability prevents companies dumping radioactive material, and radioactive material is very cheap to store! There's no benefit from dumping it. Yes, mildly irradiated water sometimes gets into rivers, and if you look at the amounts and risks it turns out to be quite reasonable relative even to solar and wind.
What happened in Germany was not rational, and it was not by any means good for the environment, or a net positive for German health and well-being.
That argument is not emotional, it is rational: assessment highlights risks.
The quantification of those risks is another matter.
The parallel fact, for example, that nuclear weapons require maintenance, and that maintenance requires budget, may make some shiver - not because of an "emotional" idea. It is because you look.
Whether astroturfers or free thinkers, I think the baseline requirement for any pro discussion should be prefaced with a redlined doc of the NRC reactor construction code citing all the oppressive regulations whose deletion will lead to our nuclear utopia.
Stop factifantisizing and show us all the ways to move fast and break all things nuclear.
I really thought HN was smarter than that french anti-nuclear college kid trying so very hard to appear super vague/undecided... but still clearly anti. Guess not.
What is the problem with current disposal plans? My understanding is that there's rough consensus around just encasing and burying it as being safe enough.
Nuclear power is the way. If you have something to refute from the article, please do so. Otherwise I'll just lump you in with the rest of the green-party fanatics who think solar and wind will solve our energy needs.
LOL, no hurt feelings here. I support nuclear power along with renewables which have their niche places to contribute. But to completely ignore nuclear in favor of just wind and solar is idiotic and misguided.
He also doesn't seem to have much of an educational nor career grounding to be making such proclamations. Not saying he's wrong, but he doesn't seem to be an authority on the subject per-se.
> The United States under a Biden administration, similar to the British, would move towards an unsustainable, and national security risk by eliminating fossil fuels, and killing people who need electricity and global security the West provides.
> The weather and climate are dynamic and ever-changing. Thus, this hysteria is a giant ploy to deprive people of freedom and liberty instead of providing them with affordable and flexible energy.
Googling the author you can see he works for a lobby group called E4 Carolinas whos biggest funders include Duke Energy and Dominion Energy both massive energy companies with a massive fossil fuel portfolio.
I think we can conclude the author has some obvious biases which benefit his employer.
> Todd Royal is the Senior Project Analyst for E4 Carolinas, a non-profit energy advocacy firm located in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he is working on a three-year grant for the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration focusing on a value chain study for the advanced nuclear technology sector (Generation IV reactors, SMRs, and advanced reactors). Todd lives outside of Dallas, Texas
Nuclear proliferation is the big unsolved issue with nuclear.
My preference is to have US DoD set up plants all around the world on its airbases and sell subsidised electricity to the national grid of the host country.
I've had an evolution in thinking over the last few years. I did a deep dive on both atmospheric CO2 reduction and energy requirements for full electrification of transportation, homes and industry.
At the time (5 to 10 years ago) it seemed like a very large deployment of nuclear power generation had to be a significant part of the solution. That isn't at all what I think in today's context.
At grid scale, today, I think wind plus storage seems to be the most logical answer at many levels:
Energy production per installed GW:
Solar: 1.33 TWh/GW (solar is reliably off half the time)
Wind: 3.07 TWh/GW
Land use per GW:
Solar: 3,900 acres/GW
Wind: 750 acres/GW
Land use to provide all Tesla Master Plan solar + wind:
Solar: 12 Hawaii's
Wind: 1 Hawaii (area of all islands)
or,
Solar: 30% of California
Wind: 2.5% of California
Annual Operations and Maintenance costs :
Solar: 1.33 times wind O&M
Wind: 1.00
Initial investment in factories:
Solar: $ 11 billion
Wind: $212 billion
Storage required for 95% reliability:
Solar: >12 hours
Wind: 3 hours
Wind requires 4x less batteries, with all the cost,
recycling and ecological advantages this delivers.
Build supply chain origin:
Solar: Heavy reliance on China
Wind: Diverse
Long term supply chain (maintenance, parts, etc.) origin:
Solar: Heavy reliance on China (forever)
Wind: Diverse
The above numbers come from parsing through Tesla's Master Plan Part 3 (MPP3) and several of their references. Of course, this is US-centric, yet, I think it scales well to other parts of the globe.
It isn't a case that combining solar and wind can't provide a good solution. It's that idea that wind has enough advantages that it can provide reliable clean power generation all by itself (with storage). In other words, grid-scale solar would not be necessary at the kind of scale proposed by MPP3.
I need to emphasize the above because there's a tendency to point out that the combination of wind and solar works very well. And, yes, it does. However, that misses the point entirely. The point is that geographically distributed grid-scale wind with storage does not need any solar to reach 95% reliability (power availability) [0] Table 2.
In short, it seems wind would have lower land utilization, operation and maintenance costs, startup investment, 1/4 the storage requirement, ecological impact (based on only needing 1/4 of the batteries) and, finally, the potential for a more favorable supply chain, both for construction and long-term maintenance.
Home-scale solar and storage has nothing to do with my comment (after all, we are talking about nuclear power). I am only referring to grid scale. Home-scale solar makes sense on many fronts.
NOTE: This is the only document outside of MPP3 I used to generate some of the above:
The article doesn't even mention words fusion or fission. Like all nuclear power is the same. Be assured the author is a shill for the trad fission industry. We don't need that.
Fission plants are the only plants we have that are actually useable at this point in time, so of course there’s no reason to clarify. While we should definitely be putting more money into fusion research, if you’re worried about an environmental catastrophe you don’t have time to hope fusion actually works sometime in the next 50 years. You have to make plans based on what technology you know functions, not a moonshot.
Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy generation sources or battery backup, none of which are cheap.
It's rare to see flaute all over Europe at the same time. You just need some ways to transport energy as well as supplement that with storage and you can compensate most of this.
If this sounds too complicated an engineering challenge then let's not even start to talk about the engineering challenges that would make nuclear safer than it is today. That's a whole different ballpark.
What if Europe is at war and some infrastructure gets destroyed. Don’t we need extra buffer capacity in case we’re experience what Ukraine had where power stations are actively targeted. Or undersea windmill park power cables are threatened to be cut.
Unlikely but there is someone with aspirations somewhere in Russia.
Good example with Ukraines power station that's actively targeted. What type is that one? It's a nuclear plant as I'm sure you know. Which basically the whole country depends on. I think if anything then that's a counter argument. The more centralized your infra is, the more vulnerable it is. Nuclear is the most centralized of all power sources.
That doesn't matter because it's not like you can double renewables to increase redundancy (no wind is no wind no matter how many turbines you have)- you need another more expensive energy source as well.
To cover the drop in generation for the night of April 15, even 400% wind capacity would not be enough.
It was a rather regular, quiet, night in a nation of 80 million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that it was a quiet night across much of Europe.
As if there would be just one way to compensate this.
- More renewables can be added
- Storage can compensate for this
- Power can be distributed across large areas
- The amount needed at night is not fixed. It only appears fixed because we don‘t care so much. It can be reduced significantly by using devices and processes in a smarter way depending on the availability of power.
Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this almost never happens because in a system that expects many 9s of availability almost never is just not acceptable.
Storage can provide base load and for anything non-critical you have flexible pricing that automatically lets people stop doing things that can be done later the week, like charging your Tesla. Markets work. Use them.
Indeed, on all counts; it's just that the easy-obvious-and-suboptimal solution (LiIon batteries which are the worst solution you don't have to explain to anyone) are on-par with the cost of nuclear.
Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables. Plus renewables are extremely intermittent power sources. Nuclear solves both the land-use and consistency problems.
Plus, from the article: "...to build enough wind turbines and solar panels to supply at least half the electricity needed for global consumption 'would require two billions tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. [And] more than 90% of the world’s solar panels are built in Asia on coal-heavy electrical grids.'"
> Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables. Plus renewables are extremely intermittent power sources. Nuclear solves both the land-use and consistency problems.
I take no issue with people such as yourself advocating for nuclear power, but this particular argument is nonsense. You could generate all the energy used over a year in the US (100 quads or so) on roughly the amount of land that is currently used to produce corn for ethanol. Yeah, that's a lot of solar panels, and it may not be the way to get all our energy, but running out of land is NOT the issue.
If you push for renewables instead of wasting money on over due and over budget nuclear reactors, you can create an industry at home. Create massive amounts of jobs and improve on the technology.
It's already happening and those improvements are way faster than everything we've seen with nuclear in the recent decades.
The world burns that much coal — which is apparently enough to make enough renewables for 50% of global electricity needs — every three months, and we don't, not even accidentally, set fire to wind turbines or solar cells at anything like that rate.
> If you push for renewables instead of wasting money on over due and over budget nuclear reactors
--- start quote ---
Ernst & Young (EY) has found that an average power and utility megaproject is delivered 35% over budget and two years behind schedule
Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budge. Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,
"Data shows the avg. 50MW PV construction project delays cost $2M. The average solar construction project is delayed by about 20% with the consequences hovering around $2M in costs."
Even ignoring all those words you used meaning to me what I said they mean (and hence unavoidably "implying" even if you now wish to say you were misunderstood, which is totally a thing I get and have experienced in reverse):
> Ad hominem is not as good an argument as you think it is.
Makes this:
> is totally a thing I get and have experienced in reverse
A case in point.
I'm not even going to bother now with the rest; the abrasiveness you approach this topic with is uninteresting to me, and does not help me learn new things.
That's also not an ad hominem, by the way; it's a critique, sure, but not even intended as a response to the attempted argument.
> Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables.
No, you won't.
> 'would require two billions tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. [And] more than 90% of the world’s solar panels are built in Asia on coal-heavy electrical grids.'
Fantastic! The world burns that much coal every three months, so after 6 months we could close all the mines and coal power plants, and thereafter all the future PV will be made by renewable powered grids.
Except you won't have enough solar and wind alone to generate the needs of the world's power demands. I don't get why some people like yourself are so against nuclear when combined with solar and wind its the best of both worlds? We're all in agreement that coal needs to go, but switching to just solar and wind is not the sole answer and never will be. You will run out of land at some point. No one wants to look at fields of spinning turbines and solar panel arrays when you can get the same effect in a much smaller footprint.
Thing is, the best time to build it was the 60s. Now? There's a few cases where I think it's still the best option — ignoring politics, it would be great for shipping, and I'd be really happy if that somehow becomes a standard outside the military — but for most cases, it's just the most expensive solution to greenhouse gases, or joint-worst if you use LiIon as the storage solution.
And if you do want to ignore the political dimension, for example but not limited to the way that Israel will bomb any Iranian reactor just in case the latter might be weaponised, then to compare like-for-like you have to ask the same about a global HVDC grid — my fantasy-football solution, in that it's technically possible but still extremely unlikely.
> You will run out of land at some point
Ah, no. Not at present power use per person. Even England, which is not at all well-placed for solar, has enough land to be (electrically) powered by solar alone. Remember, civil infrastructure — buildings, rail lines, car parks, etc. — already has a huge footprint and PV can fit on almost any roof and between almost any gap.
(Also the wind can be offshore, apparently that's great for people who don't like the look of them on hilltops, less so for radar).
we'd already be there if Bavaria and similar states hadn't blocked building wind farms in Bavaria, because of the bad looks, or myth busted infrasound, or myth busted bird mass extinctions, or very real existential angst of Munich's Siemens...
nuclear transforms mining rights into money, so does coal or oil or gas.
wind transforms the decentralized location of the plant into energy, so does solar. wind and solar transfer the heart of the profits from mining to decentralized, local communities.
in that context Siemens is publicly traded, and does what the board wants it to do. they had fig leave wind investments.
Germany has divested from solar production, battery production and wind plant production. _di_-vested.
> Nuclear produced only half of that in recent years.
It would have produced a lot more if German didn't shut down it's nuclear reactors. Plus, France produces over 70% of it's electricity from nuclear, sometimes over 80%.
We can import electricity from the European grids we are connected to.
For example my region has recently brought up a 1.4 GW HVDC underwater cable, which can be used in both directions. It connects North Germany to Hydro power in Norway.
We - in Sweden - noticed this when we saw our electricity prices go through the roof due to those interconnects enabling German prices to trickle back up the lines. Thanks to the boneheaded "green" politicos in Germany shutting down nuclear power plants we'll be paying more for our electricity in the coming years. Please, German neighbours, vote out those watermelons and put some sense back in to the Bundestag.
Just to avoid any misunderstandings, the schedule to close all nuclear reactors in Germany by the end of 2022 was set by CDU/CSU together with the FDP. Which then went on to curb the buildup of renewables.
Back? Are you even aware that no party besides a small fascist party want nuclear back or did anything in recent years to stop the exit? The previous Government (today's largest opposition) had 16 years to stop the nuclear exit. They didn't. Even before Fukushima.
I wonder where you got this approach from since you've obviously not come up with it by yourself through research.
> Are you even aware that no party besides a small fascist party want nuclear back
A poll [1] done in 2008 found that 46% of the German population wanted to keep nuclear power online.
A poll [2] done in 2021 found that 53% of respondents saw a role for nuclear power in the "energiewende" (changeover from fossil to other power sources), 22% of them wanted nuclear to play a major role, 31% a smaller role.
In a poll done [3] in 2022 72% of the respondents wanted to postpone the shutdown of the remaining nuclear plants.
If your claim about that small fascist party holds truth the next Bundeskanzler will come from AfD. I guess this is not the case so either those other parties are not in line with their potential constituents or your claim of only AfD - which I assume is the small fascist party you're referring to - wanting nuclear power "back" (which is true by now, it used to be "wants to keep") is in error. Time will tell but in the meanwhile it is to be hoped that the next winter is a mild one.
Due to the same "green" politicos having been in power the last 8 years [1]. The power plants they closed could have been kept in service - they had been recertified up to 2035 - but they closed them anyway. This was a political decision, not one based on demand - support for nuclear power has surged in Sweden - or technological deficiencies.
Nuclear power in Sweden was expensive due to the "effektskatt" [1] (power output tax) which was levied specifically on nuclear power, ostensibly to pay for dismantling nuclear power plants after they were shut down. This tax made up about 25% of the production costs in the end [2].
The taxes and additional payments into the special fund established for this purpose [1] already cover the prospected costs of dismantling all nuclear power stations and treating/storing the waste (spent fuel as well as materials from dismantled reactors). While the additional "effektskatt" has been abolished in 2018 the payments to SKB continue. The total costs are estimated to end up at 171 billion kr allowing for a safety margin and taking price increases into account. Remaining costs as of 2024 are estimated to be 124 billion kr. The fund currently holds 80 billion kr, the additional 'effektskatt' brought in 38.5 billion kr, securities posted by the companies which run the nuclear power stations stand for another 59 billion kr. Payments into the fund continue, the proceeds of which are invested in state bonds and on the stock market. Even without these continuing payments and investments and disregarding compound interest the costs for dismantling current reactors and treating all waste has been paid already. As it stands the plan is for the remaining reactors to run until ~2045 [2]. Payments into the SKB fund will continue so by the time the last reactor is shut down the costs will have been paid several times over.
And yet power plant closures were entirely due to politics, not the cost.
Now the price of energy in Sweden quintuples depending on demand: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271491/sweden-monthly-w... I am just so glad that the expensive energy is out of the picture. (That was sarcasm, I chose to pay for electricity coming from nuclear, and it's not meanigfully more expensive than other types)
> We can import electricity from the European grids we are connected to.
Ah yes. The magical grid that will surely have the capacity to supply all of Germany's power if suddenly there's night and no wind just in Germany (and nowhere else in Europe, stopping at the border, apparently).
This is rare and currently we have a diverse mix of electricity production. When wind gets more dominant, it will be offshore and connected to a larger North Sea grid. Then storage will be more important and also more viable.
I'd guess that in ten years the max capacity for wind electrical energy in my region (Northern Germany) is around 2 to 3 times larger than the max demand. Thus large scale storage will be build up.
> we have a diverse mix of electricity production.
Yes, yes we do: coal and biofuel (so more burning), and corn for biofuel is taking up 6% of Germany's land area.
> When wind gets more dominant, it will be offshore and connected to a larger North Sea grid
So, some magical future
> I'd guess that in ten years the max capacity for wind electrical energy in my region (Northern Germany) is around 2 to 3 times larger than the max demand.
Max capacity means nothing when production is low.
> Thus large scale storage will be build up.
More magical thinking (there are currently no grid-scale storage solutions that would've survived just one night from the link I provided)
On what day it happened is independent of how often this happens, for how long, with what demand and the amount of other electricity supplies..
> So, some magical future
A nice slogan you have here. It sounds cute, but essentially it is pessimistic and anti-technology.
We heard this twenty years ago. This year the share of renewable energy for electricity production is 50%. In a decade it will be much higher. The prices for deployment are going down. The cost for nuclear is going up, nuclear projects often have huge cost overruns and are slow to deploy. Example: The 'new' Finnish EPR reactor is 8 billion Euros more expensive than planned (up from 3 billion to 11 billion Euros) and 13 years late. Without government invention the building company from France (Areva) would have been killed - it had to take a 5 billion Euro loss from building the power plant with a fixed-price contract.
> Max capacity means nothing when production is low.
A high max capacity means that it makes sense to invest in storage and backup technology.
> More magical thinking (there are currently no grid-scale storage solutions that would've survived just one night from the link I provided)
We also currently have not the wind dependence. In the future this will change with more offshore wind farms.
That has nothing to do with 'magical thinking', it has to do with investments into technology and the created market conditions. Grid scale in the future means that there will be a large amount of storage options, backup supplies and diverse forms of demand steering.
> On what day it happened is independent of how often this happens, for how long, with what demand and the amount of other electricity supplies..
This was a regular sping night in a nation of 80 million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that for a lot of the rest of Europe it was also a quite night.
> It sounds cute, but essentially it is pessimistic and anti-technology.
No. It's realistic. Every time you show problems with intermittent generation by renewables, the answer is "sometime in unknown future we will surely build enough, and enough grid storage to boot".
> The 'new' finnish reactor is 8 billion Euros more expensive than planned
--- start quote ---
Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,
Cost overruns are not unique to nuclear. Especially considering how underinvested nuclera has been for the past 20-30 people who keep spreading FUD.
When there's political will, there are results. Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in China: 6.1 GW nameplate capacity. Built over 14 years at 1 reactor per 6 years. Operational. Estimated cost 16 bln USD.
> We also currently have not the wind dependence. In the future this will change.
I shudder to think about the future where we depend on whether or not the wind will blow at night.
> This was a regular sping night in a nation of 80 million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that for a lot of the rest of Europe it was also a quite night.
Nothing happened. In ten years we have 80% renewable. Again, nothing will happen.
> the answer is "sometime in unknown future we will surely build enough, and enough grid storage to boot".
Look at a nuclear power plant. If one starts building today, the reactor could be ready in 5, 10 or twenty years. In Finnland the EPR was 13 years late.
Renewable can be deployed much faster and more reliable.
> Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,
The new Finnish reactor was 3.6 times more expensive than planned. That's a much larger price increase.
> When there's political will,
of a dictatorship
> there are results. Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in China: 6.1 GW nameplate capacity. Built over 14 years at 1 reactor per 6 years. Operational. Estimated cost 16 bln USD.
Try to do the same in Western Europe...
Btw, China deploys two large coal power plant blocks every week. -> to quote you: "When there's political will, there are results."
Europe has a large dependence on Russia for nuclear technology. There are also Russian reactors in Europe. The countries who currently lead the deployment of nuclear technology are China and Russia, two authoritarian countries.
Where else are you going to go though? Germany threw in the towel, nuclear has been stagnant in France and USA for decades. Maybe Sweden/Finland? They do it but slowly, expensively and are a whole generation behind.
That leaves you with China. Which from an objective/technical standpoint is actually excellent because their current designs are extremely good.
However it's probably not tenable for the West to procure nuclear technology from China. Not that China wouldn't sell them plants, they almost certainly would, China has no qualms sharing civilian tech but the West couldn't stomach it geopolitically.
Which sadly is going to be the state of affairs for all cutting edge green energy tech. While the rest of the world was sucking off special interests in the fossil fuels industry China was taking it's pledge to be carbon neutral by 2060 extremely seriously.
This means China is now leading across the board in solar, wind, batteries, hydro, EVs, high speed rail and importantly nuclear.
Sad state of affairs for the West all things considered. We had first mover advantage in all of those fields and pissed it away for a few decades of investors profits and executive bonuses.
Sure but -also- all the other things. The fact they are still building coal because they literally can't build everything else fast enough doesn't invalidate their leadership in all the more advanced technology.
Is it leadership or just lower requirements, no rule of law and suppression of any opposition (political or technological)?
It's easier to build reactors when there are no environmental/safety/security concerns voiced, because those voice end up in prisons. China also builds up its coal power plants with high speed, while knowing that its air is already extremely polluted. Environmental concerns generally don't seem to be a priority. Each reactor built inside the country will heat up or dry the rivers, due to cooling requirements. Such a number of thermal power plants (coal and nuclear) will kill life in these rivers, when they return warm water into the rivers.
Is safety of these reactors also on this level of environmental neglect?
First of all you seem to be confusing their designs with the more common LWR design which is commonly used in Europe/US. Instead most of their new fleet is planned based on HTG pebble bed designs. These have much different cooling requirements and are actually being built at smaller size and being deployed into remote desert areas like Xinjiang. This design was selected specifically because it's low water and cooling requirements - also it's proliferation resistance as Xinjiang has historical instability and proximity to Afghanistan. The rest will likely be based on the Hualong One design which is an EPR reactor that has 5x the output of the HTG SMR designs but does require more extensive cooling and isn't proliferation resistant so will likely only be built in stable area with ample cooling.
Nuclear reactors are just one area I highlighted they are dominating in.
Are you saying the reason they are doing so well in solar, wind, batteries and coal is all just down to ignoring environmental concerns?
I know it's fashionable to pretend the Chinese are cheating or something but the data simply doesn't support that assertion.
I spent quite a lot of time in China over the last 10 years and everything has changed drastically. There was a time where I used to think "Hey China is basically caught up to the West". That time has long since past, on my recent visits it feels like going to the future instead and the slow realisation they completely passed us by has set in.
Right, it's planned. So far they have a demonstrator with 200MWe output. It supposed to be scaled up to 600MWe.
Small designs are generally not cost efficient.
These reactors are not that new, since they are in part based on old designs, for example from the AVR in Germany. A larger attempt was this 300MWe pebble bed reactor, which failed spectacularly in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
> my recent visits it feels like going to the future instead and the slow realisation they completely passed us by has set
That authoritarian countries are the main deployers and providers of nuclear is no surprise. The central government decides and there is no opposition. In most democratic countries nuclear is not competitive in the market anymore. For a country like Russia it's much easier to sell nuclear cheap into the market: they want to make European countries dependent on their energy delivery. Western countries have much higher technology standards and with market prices they are not competitive.
It can be competitive, it's not politically tenable. Because it's not politically tenable it can't be allowed to be commercially competitive, the forces raising the prices will simply increase until it's priced out - such is the way of politics.
Not without market intervention of the government. In France the nuclear industry (EDF) is state owned.
> it's not politically tenable.
France. Pro nuclear country with a large fleet of aging reactors. -> huge costs of maintaining the reactors, large parts of the fleet is offline in the last months, building reactors is extremely costly and takes a long time, industry had to be rescued by the government.
If they were 'not stupid' they wouldn't have invaded Ukraine and caused a massive reaction in Europe for independence of Russian energy.
If they were 'not stupid' and 'not evil', they wouldn't attack a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. Russia is both stupid and evil with its current invasion of its neighbor country. The amount of environmental damage caused by this war is extremely high.
Russian nuclear technology also does not take care of the environment and the population. Problematic reactors are being built near large cities.
you are making a stupid mistake 99% of Westerners make when dealing with Russia. You are projecting your values and rationality on them.
I am actually from Ukraine, my family is still there and I now leave in USA. I hate russian gov just as much or more as any normal human being.
The Western view is that West and Ukraine are winning because of costs russian people and army are suffering. But another view, closer to ru gov values is that ru gained significant territory while Ukraine lost it since Feb 22. You make think it is stupid and is definitely below their original goal, but it is non-trivial “gain” towards what they care about.
I don't talk about winning. Russia lost almost all political influence in Europe. In exchange for small parts of the Ukraine which are now minefields.
> their original goal
Their original goal was to conquer the whole of the Ukraine in a few days.
What happened was that the parts they have conquered are destroyed. They lost >100k soldiers (dead or wounded). They exposed their military capabilities to be way worse than claimed. They exposed their intelligence service, the military and the government to be even more incompetent than thought. They gave NATO a welcome boost with lots of investments, new members, a common enemy. They lost large parts of the European market for import and export.
Russia beamed itself twenty years backwards. How stupid is that?
again, you think it is stupid and I think it is stupid.
But from their perspective (and their perspective guides their actions) they are the only ones gaining territory in the world, restoring what they think is historically just for them.
Again, projecting “common sense” values on putin’s government failed so many Western politicians.
> But from their perspective (and their perspective guides their actions) they are the only ones gaining territory in the world, restoring what they think is historically just for them.
The territory they got is tiny and far from what Putin wanted. Putin destroyed the territory he got, its full of mines, its infrastructure is destroyed and its people were traumatized / driven out.
Additionally they lost way much more than they got. Russia is now a political outcast in Europe and its direct influence zone is imploded to now only consisting of very few countries in Europe (Serbia, Hungary, ...).
> Again, projecting “common sense” values on putin’s government failed so many Western politicians.
This has nothing to do with "common sense". Politicians were bought or tricked into believing that Russia is a reliable partner, while Putin worked on his dictatorship and his imperialistic goals. For Putin a democratic Ukraine, integrated into European/international systems, like the EU or NATO, is a threat to his politics of increasing authoritarianism.
People who were not in this influence zone, could easily see the future trajectory of Putin's policy: from Crimea, Syria, using refuges and energy as weapons, silencing his opposition, up to the attack on the Ukraine.
Energy is a multi-billion business and a crucial resource for each country. This makes people blind.
It seems Uranium has varied sources: Kazakhstan (dominantly), then Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Niger, China, India. The USA also have it.
Wind goes well with gas turbine generators, since they can match their output to demand and the supply of wind. Every watt-hour of wind energy you capture, is a watt-hour of gas you don't burn. Worst case scenario is no wind and you're burning gas -- which is already a main electric source.
Taken too far you would get into this weird situation of over-spending for capacity, and having surplus wind energy when it's windy, while still burning gas when it's not. But as a moderate contribution to a grid, 10 - 30% of supply perhaps, especially where gas is a primary source already, it makes a lot of sense, in some places.
I hope no one expects to actually run everything on 100% wind power.
Yeah, though it's not crazy for a short term while building up storage, which we need anyway for transport (be that batteries or whichever cute name is now used for hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water).
Or Sabatier process methane, depending on if Mars is the real point of Starship or merely an excuse for Starship.
The answer is tech from the 2000s, not 1900s tech.
Power industry folks are used to a field where tech hasn't changed for decades. It's time to get over that and use the new things that have been developed that will reduce the cost of energy, increase energy abundance, and advance society. We need to let go of the obsolete.
Import electricity, for example. We have here a 1.4 GW line to Norway for hydro power. Generally Germany is surrounded by many countries which share electricity. There are many wind farms in and around the North Sea.
Yes, Germany is a large net exporter of electricity.
3. Wind isn't the only renewable, though it can be really cheap
At this point, I'm having to remind myself of the xkcd lucky 10,000, because it feels disingenuous to even need to ask.
And I'm saying that as someone who really hopes the new fusion companies succeed, and that nuclear should have been used to move the world away from coal (and ship fuel) in the 60s onwards, and lament the risks and accidents were handled so poorly by the politicians.
It's clear that nuclear power is superior to gas, coal, wind, solar, etc. However... nuclear power plants are expensive build, they take a very long time to build, and many countries are in the process of retiring their infrastructure [0].
The vast majority of active nuclear power plants in the USA were built in the late 60s to late 70s and typically took 10 years from the initial construction before they became operational [1]. Which means that almost all of our nuclear power infrastructure in the United States is ~35 to 50 years old. Optimistically, we can only hope that most of these plants will operate until ~2040.
Given how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant we really should have been building them all throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s- but we stopped building them in the late 70s. The only nuclear power plant that I'm aware that's been built since 1978 is Plant Vogtle which started in 2013 and is expected to be finished sometime this year.
Still, there is some hope for nuclear energy into the future with the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) [2] and the recent advancements in fusion power [3].
A power generation system that can't lose power itself without resulting in a major disaster is far from 'superior'.
What I mean is the spent nuclear fuel must be kept cool at all costs, backups are finite. There's already been a few accidents and many close calls, none as bad as they could of been. Scale up nuclear to find how to bad it can get.
I think fear-mongering about nuclear power risks is really unfortunate. The rewards far outweigh the risks. Sure, we could live in a world where we could tell everyone to stop using so much damn energy- but that's not our reality. There's some really good data and charts here (especially the "What is the safest and cleanest source of energy?" diagram at the top) - https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
In the USA we've poured an incredible amount of money into wind energy and it simply hasn't been very effective relative to the cost.
- one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
- rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly
- nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
- the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants
(References are easy to find if you want confirmation)
I am not against nuclear power, but it has to be done properly and safely, which is certainly not the case around here.
Edit: it seems the fusion (no pun) of regulation organisms has been rejected by the senate. Still annoying to see this law discreetly pass, with no parliament debate outside of the senate, during a political crisis