Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout nuclear fission's history.
In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.
The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.
Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph:
- Wind and solar grew a lot.
- Nuclear declined.
- Gas grew a little.
- Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up.
- Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy.
- fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less.
- Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted.
- Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years.
- We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less.
Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance.
Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.
> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline.
In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years.
Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)
This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too.
and it won't be better if you have a closer look. Take Europe, for example. Nuclear plants over budget and overdue (France, UK), projects which are highly unlikely to be ever build (Poland), a rotting nuclear fleet (France) and a final exit in Germany.
Then there are all those plants in poor countries which depend on Russia.
And then there is China with their magically fast build reactors but also with massive coal and renewable construction.
Nuclear peaked years ago, and it's going to be a decline in the future since it is money in the end deciding the fate and nuclear isn't worth it.
Well according to the two graphgs for 2018 and 2019, nuclear declined a bit in the US. Not surprising because there were some plant closures and not a whole lot of plant openings. And nothing is on track to be added any time soon. Maybe one or two plants.
New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw per year. Same with battery.
I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start delivering on their promises. I still think they are expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost front, that will remain a minority of useful output.
The pressure on the NRC to lighten up a bit is immense. I suspect we might see some significant acceleration, especially with the various electrification drives, coupled with the multitude of safe nuclear designs, and a general sense that “why is this so broken?” permeating everywhere that cares.
Congress is free to change the law that NRC must operate under. Until that happens, the NRC cannot "lighten up" (if they did so in violation of law, they'd be taken to court.)
They certainly can under executive privilege, and stuff is taken to court quite often. Waiting for congress to act is futile in this age sadly. In this age it’s a game of executive action with judicial review.
I suppose we're going to see the nuclear debate play out as an A/B test with the US vs. the countries mentioned. Should be some interesting data eventually.
That chart overemphasizes waste heat. 1 MJ of heat at 50°C is a lot less valuable than 1 MJ of electricity. They are not interchangable. The 1 MJ of electricity could pump much more than 1 MJ of low-grade heat, and it would take a lot of low-grade heat to generate 1 MJ of electrical energy.
The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy.
Nuclear does not emit carbon when used, the waste heat means very little, emissions are what matters when discussing efficiency.
Plutonium 239 is also 83,610,000 MJ/kg vs coal at 35 MJ/kg so the difference in thermal efficiency is nearly meaningless given how much specific energy density advantage nuclear has.
The energy mass density is hugely relevant for spacecraft, not that important for most power stations.
(Although an old piece of anti-nuclear rhetoric that annoys me was asking if you'd prefer a bucket of coal or bucket of nuclear waste under your bed, and one half of my annoyance was indeed the relative energy densities…)
Isn't that a safety thing? To shutdown a natural gas plant you just close some valves feeding the facility, or at worse introduce something into the combustion path that halts combustion. Nuclear fission obviously can be moderated, but not in such a sharp and safe manner.
Thermal-spectrum (slow neutron) nuclear reactors are much easier to control than fast reactors because they have much slower reaction times. But this isn't particularly relevant because thermal-spectrum supercritical water reactors are possible; supercritical water reactor doesn't implies fast reactor. Let's put fast reactors aside.
In thermal-spectrum reactors, the moderator is not in itself a safety feature. The moderator is necessary to slow the neutrons down into the thermal-spectrum. Thermal-spectrum neutrons are far more likely to be absorbed by the fuel than fast neutrons, so if you lose the moderator the reaction stops (and decay heat continues...) Fast reactors don't use a moderator and don't need one because they use a higher grade of fuel which can sustain a chain reaction with fast neutrons, not needing thermal neutrons.
In some thermal-spectrum reactors (particularly BWRs and PWRs), the moderator plays double duty as a coolant. In these reactors the moderator is a safety feature insofar as it's the coolant, not because it's a moderator. In other kinds of thermal-spectrum reactors, the coolant and moderator may be different; for instance RBMKs use graphite as the moderator and water as the coolant. Modern CANDU reactors use heavy water as a moderator (which is less efficient as a moderator, but captures fewer neutrons and therefore allows for a lower grade of fuel), but this moderator is unpressurized in the calandria and remains cool; the water in the coolant loop is hot, pressurized, and doesn't provide sufficient moderation to keep the reaction going. If you drained the moderator but kept the coolant loop running, the reactor would stop. If you kept the moderator but drained the coolant loop, it would eventually melt down (probably after the water in the calandria boils off). The coolant is what removes heat from the reactor and the moderator is what slows the neutrons so they're more likely to cause fission.
tl;dr: The moderator increases reactivity. Coolant removes heat.
In principle you could make a thermal-spectrum supercritical water reactor using any of these, but the research is aimed towards making a supercritical reactor with the PWR or CANDU designs. The reason supercritical water reactors aren't used yet is because metallurgy isn't up to the task. Supercritical water is already used in traditional power plants, but those don't have to deal with neutron radiation which structurally degrades anything it runs into (some alloys/materials more than others.) Finding alloys which can hold up to both supercritical water and neutron radiation is the major hurdle to clear.
Ahh right... The neutron corrosion. Same problem with fussion reactors.
The problem is, there is no material that can survive this imo.
The only one we know that can, exists in neutron stars and its ultra dense.
Its unusable by us (different structural scale).
I think what I was trying to convey was you can always undergo the scram action on a nuclear reactor to halt it. The problem with this is in some cases, this mean restarting the reactor costs more than the value of the electricity it will generate before refueling.
Well, you could scram a supercritical water reactor too. If there's an emergency that warrants scramming the reactor, the time it will need to restart should be low on your list of priorities.
As for refueling, in some designs like CANDU refueling can be done 'online', refueling one tube while the others are running.
> The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.
> Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat, or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all the energy is just lost?
"Lost" means spent towards nobody's useful purpose. Nobody used the output in any way. In transportation, you used your car to get from point A to point B. You don't care about the heat or noise or whatever that you generated. That energy was "lost." If somebody harvested that same energy directly from your vehicle for some purpose, like making fried eggs on your engine block, then the portion used to fry your egg would no longer be "lost"
That just seems either an impossible, or just useless measurement. I guess for industries like aluminum smelting you can say the product captures significant part of the energy put into the process, but most human activities are not like that. For example machining/casting that raw aluminum stock into some intricate product, all the energy ends up as waste because from physics point of view that intricate object doesn't contain any more energy than the raw stock material. If that is how its considered, then I struggle to understand how the rejected energy is not closer to 100%
The important question is how much energy do they need to put in to get the result. The goal can be machined aluminum or car at destination. For lots of processes, the output energy, like moving car or shining light, is important and the goal. Higher efficiency means can put in less energy and get the same result.
Light ends up as heat, but LEDs are more efficient cause they don’t produce extra heat. Electric motors are more efficient than combustion ones so electric cars end up going farther for same input.
Sure, it is reasoably easy to say that A is more efficient than B, and even quantify how much energy A saves in comparison to B. But that is only a relative measure; it is far less obvious how you'd quantify the waste in absolute terms like the chart in question here seems to do? To do so you'd need to know some theoretical ideal minimum energy process that would get some equivalent end result as a reference point, but that seems wildly infeasible to estimate
In your example of machining the useful energy consumed was in the kinetic energy transferred by the motor into the bit. The noise and heat and other forms of energy dissipation that didn’t go directly into machining the object were wasted or lost. If your goal is the machined part, any energy that wasn’t directly necessary or if it’s expenditure were zero and the part would have been machined identically, is considered a waste or lost energy. The “lost” doesn’t mean the rest of the energy were somehow captured or retained, but that it was captured productively towards some goal. Perhaps the term is confusing or misleading, but that’s what it’s intended meaning is.
> the useful energy consumed was in the kinetic energy transferred by the motor into the bit.
This doesn't solve the problem, because the final machined part is not moving, and thus has no kinetic energy.
In order to get an efficiency number, we would have to know what 100% means. Maybe it's possible to calculate the minimum energy required to break the chemical bonds spanning a given cross sectional area of solid aluminum?
I imagine that you could (very theoretically) recover this energy by cold welding the aluminum back together a vacuum.
Right but it’s not a maximizing theoretical loss function, it’s picking a specific expenditure of energy as the goal - kinetic energy of the bit. Particularly you don’t know the goal of the bits motion, and the work the energy does could translate into the machined parts final configuration or something else. The goal isn’t specially to account for energy in some full final system but to give an optimization function for the tool itself to maximize. You’re looking at it from a physics point of view rather than an engineering point of view, the engineering view is practical - how much energy is expended to get a certain amount of work done by the bit and not doing other stuff like heating the environment, making noises, inducing vibration. The metric is a practical one, and it’s never meant to capture the entire energy transfer dynamic in a physics sense.
It's not about energy capture. It's about energy being used to accomplish useful work vs energy expelled towards non-productive ends. And I fail to see how this is a useless measurement of energy consumption when it's the entire reason we harness energy beyond what we can consume by eating.
The text line under it tries to explain the concept, but fails due to brevity. I believe (by looking at the numbers there) it counts as "loses" everything that happens due to energy conversion, and "useful work" everything that happens with the final form of the energy. If that's the case, friction inside an internal combustion engine counts as loses, but at the wheels of a car counts as useful work.
> Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat
I mean, not all of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for example, many would argue that the systems durably recording how much money you own provide a useful service.
Another aspect is the power it costs to make the power. Oil is a huge industry with enormous transport fuel usage. Nowadays about a 6th of the energy goes into collection. The more we electrify the more that will be saved too coming off the total power we need. Solar, Wind, Hydro and Nuclear are all vastly better in this aspect on production costs and little ongoing transport.
Good point. Oil tankers by themselves put out a measurable percentage of CO2. Also oil refining is an energy intensive industry. Ironically, a lot of that has been cleaned up. It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. That's why Texas has so much renewable power.
> It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product.
Until it's winter, the ground is frozen, and they have no reserves to burn. Then there's a panic to get the same nonrenewables they would normally flare off when the weather is sunny and breezy.
> That's why Texas has so much renewable power.
It has tons of underdeveloped land in a region with good wind and favorable sunlight. That's it.
Texas, like Germany's lignite (shit coal) renaissance, is a terrible example of good energy policy. Keep in mind Texas is also on its own grid and struggles to pay people to burn the excess energy they can't use since they also can't easily send it outside their grid and have almost no means to store the excess.
Wasn't the issue with Texas that renewables were behaving as expected (unfortunately not producing a lot of electricity), but fossil fuel power sources were failing unexpectedly due to the freezes? Thus the issue not being renwables.
I'm also surprised at the mention of a coal renaissance in germany. While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over the last years.
> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven.
This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction.
The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation!
Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs.
My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.
This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit in the legend.
That's the 2018 one by 2021, it hit 1.5. And you forget this is the entire US energy economy; not just electricity.
Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly.
If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.
You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the plot easier to read. Hanlon’s razor applies here.
> We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output.
This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1
Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India exploded its first device. Carter's statement:
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf
Considering that Reagan reversed this policy by unbanning reprocessing in 1981, this isn't the only reason we don't do it today. Other reasons include that reprocessing is expensive and that we found a lot more uranium ore than originally expected.
A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.
This is a common nuke bro story, but it's nonsense. The actual reason is that plutonium has negative value. It costs more to incorporate it in new fuel rods than it would cost to make fuel rods with freshly enriched uranium.
That seems to not account for societal and storage costs. I see too many people extrapolate stuff into "it's not the absolute cheapest we can diversify into pushing the cost off to future generations rather than being responsible for our own creations".
"Explody" can be dealt with by armoring the waste. If the rocket explodes, retrieve the waste and try again.
In the near term, the clear answer is dry casks. They are simple, cheap, and foreclose no other future option. In about 300 years the waste ceases to be self-protecting against amateur diversion, but that's plenty of time for (for example) launch vehicles to space to become very cheap and reliable.
The thing is, thanks to the magic of nonzero interest rates, it's cheaper to wait and reprocess later. The more you wait, the cheaper it is, even including the cost of temporary storage in dry casks while you wait.
If the assumption fails and interest rates go to zero and stay there, we can reprocess then. In the meantime, if we can invest the money elsewhere and delay reprocessing we come out ahead.
If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same line of thinking applies to other fields where things are expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are spread out also.
As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
> Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.
We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.
Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes.
Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
> Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.
> It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else.
That’s not how things work. It’s tempting to view money in such simple term but also very wrong. In effect, the state has a lot of leeway in how it decides to invest and a lot of conservative positions are taken to preserve the overall status quo when it comes to who has power and who hasn’t.
This is exactly how capital works. You don't buy the machine that takes 10X as long to deliver, costs more, has unending waste storage liabilities, and is uninsurable.
National scale investment like the power grid are not subject to the same kind of rules that classical investment because the state can and do print money. For all the bad things I have to say about the Inflation Reduction Act for exemple, it will result in significant investment in renewable with money which for all intent and purpose appeared out of thin air (with all the impact this will have on the overall equilibrium of the economy).
You could have at the same time have a comprehensive investment plan for nuclear and renewable without one significantly impacting the funding of the other. The US would be labour and knowledge limited long before it is capital starved.
The money represents real resources. Printing more of it doesn't make more resources, it just moves some power over the allocation of those resources to the government printing it.
How about every dollar put into the social and economic fallout of large swaths of Florida and Louisiana falling underwater? That sounds like a pretty significant opportunity cost to me.
False dichotomy; nuclear currently costs about the same as the combination of PV with enough Li-Ion batteries that it kinda looks the same from a "baseload?" perspective, and Li-Ion is the most expensive of the various options currently vaguely near the right scale for storage in that kind of timeframe. From the "everything else except baseload?" perspective, PV can also be one of the cheapest power sources around.
Also, because it's a global problem, the solution has to be something that everyone wants to have, and that everyone wants everyone else to have too, which means we have to care that what powers Iran is green and also Iran will care about not triggering another airstrike from Israel fearing it's a secret atomic bomb project.
PV in particular is also useful for being a continuous roll-out, so even if it worked out at exactly the same cost/joule as nuclear and taking exactly as long to reach the same final total average power output, getting the first joules sooner displaces more of the existing CO2 emissions.
Yes, we are talking about base load. We have about a football field's worth of spent fuel sitting in casks and pools. That's not per reactor; that's in total in the US since we started running nuclear power stations. In fast neutron reactors, this could power all of the US electrical needs for 150 years without requiring any new sources of uranium (no mines, no seawater extraction, nothing!) AND would eliminate the need for 100,000+ year geological storage.
Far more compact than batteries, wouldn't compete with other large scale transitions that need batteries like electric cars, and would work even during either a week-long blizzard, tornado, or hurricane.
Batteries offset the power needs from dusk to dawn, but most solar farms do not build capacity for extended (multi-day to week) outages. A single tornado let alone a hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind capacity. Containment domes on nuclear reactors by contrast wouldn't even blink at these kinds of natural disasters.
We need solar. We need wind. We need geothermal. We need hydro. And we need nuclear to completely eliminate most fossil fuels from our energy cycle. We need some of all. Diversification in energy sources is a good thing.
I strongly disagree that everyone needs the same solution. Some nations are extremely rich in wind while others are mostly devoid of it. Nations like Iceland have a ridiculous surplus of energy due to geothermal resources. Some nations have easy access to hydro while most don't. New Zealand could probably power twenty New Zealands on wind alone. Even in the US we see this in play. The South/Southeast have little to no wind resources at all but are VERY sensitive to severe weather events that would tear apart large solar arrays leaving millions without power for fall too long. In the North and center of the US, wind power is almost a no-brainer. High, consistent winds across the plains could offset many other forms of electricity generation, especially away from large bodies of water. Geography strongly guides which solutions are available.
The US produces over 37 billion metric tons of CO₂, making the U.S. responsible for 14% of global emissions on its own. Regardless of what other nations do (and I hope they continue toward de-carbonization), the US must take an aggressive role in reducing its own fossil fuel emissions within its borders, since those are the only emissions we can directly control. Diplomacy and economic incentives can only go so far across international borders, but building an maintaining ties overseas is obviously of great importance for that reason. None of this "America First" crap.
As for domestic production of electricity, we are already out of sync with countries like Iran, regardless of what Israel does or does not do. We have 93 nuclear power plants. Iran has 1. The nuclear power (and weapon) genie is already out of the lamp. Everyone knows how to make a nuclear plant today. That said, Israel (and Iran) have other options like PV and especially solar thermal. They exist in a region where thermal masses could be used to great effect without concern of Plutonium proliferation.
We absolutely, positively do NOT need every nation to get their power from the same sources. We only need them to get that power from sources other than fossil fuels.
> We have about a football field's worth of spent fuel sitting in casks and pools. That's not per reactor; that's in total in the US since we started running nuclear power stations
Yes I know.
Counterintuitively, this makes it politically worse, as people can imagine a football field much more easily than approximately the mass of Mt. Everest in CO2 every 5 years.
People :P
> Far more compact than batteries,
Yes but irrelevant; assuming 20% efficient cells at 10% capacity factor, you can store 36 hours of output in a (~10cm~ edit: 1mm)[0] thick layer of battery under each cell (not that one should put the cells there, this is just for a sense of scale).
> wouldn't compete with other large scale transitions that need batteries like electric cars
True in some senses, false in others; they're both competing for the same investment money.
> and would work even during either a week-long blizzard, tornado, or hurricane.
Kinda, depending on the details. There are weather conditions that interfere with safe running of nuclear plants, and in the other direction if you have a large power grid (so all of North America except Texas), the blizzards and hurricanes don't affect the whole zone anyway.
> Batteries offset the power needs from dusk to dawn, but most solar farms do not build capacity for extended (multi-day to week) outages.
For now, sure; but that's a choice to go for low-hanging fruit first rather than an obligation.
> A single tornado let alone a hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind capacity.
That sounds like a problem with planning permission or construction if the plants can't cope with wherever they happen to be installed.
> Diversification in energy sources is a good thing. […] I strongly disagree that everyone needs the same solution.
Absolutely agree. Even the fact that the average combined price of PV+LiIon being comparable to nuclear hides the variation in both (and those are just two options).
> the US must take an aggressive role in reducing its own fossil fuel emissions within its borders, since those are the only emissions we can directly control. Diplomacy and economic incentives can only go so far across international borders, but building an maintaining ties overseas is obviously of great importance for that reason. None of this "America First" crap.
Yes indeed.
Thing is, I'm not American, so my perspective here is "appealing to American politicians only works if you can tell them what's in it for them", and a big part of that is jobs for people in their state, and that is something I can't map on to any particular power source…
but I'll leave that to others, politics is so not my thing.
>> A single tornado let alone a hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind capacity.
> That sounds like a problem with planning permission or construction if the plants can't cope with wherever they happen to be installed.
It appears you do not live somewhere with extreme weather. How do you plan to protect hundreds or thousands of square meters during events? Is there some kind of new glass? Panels made of unobtainium?
As the Earth heats up, weather events like this will become more common, not less. It's not just a matter of the world's thermostat going up or down, truly destructive natural events already happen in these areas and are poised to become worse.
> There are weather conditions that interfere with safe running of nuclear plants
Yes, BUT those weather conditions will not substantially damage the plant itself, and soon after the extreme weather event is over, it can start delivering power again in short order (provided the power lines were buried and not on poles, but that's indeed a planning issue).
If 80% of the panels in a solar farm have been rendered inoperable due to hail, even after the event is over, you're looking at a long-term outage with the erosion of public goodwill that goes along with that it in regions of the country that are already skeptical of the government's ability to get stuff done.
No, thank you. I want something that can provide base load no matter what.
We also have transparent aluminium (oxynitride) now.
Not there this should be a particularly hard challenge relative to "people live in these places, do their roofs and windows survive?" (even if you have to use shutters, NDB, do that for the PV also).
> Yes, every other year thanks to the phone market.
Whew! That's a relief. Too bad about those phone repair outlets though that are basically out of a job due to these unbreakable screens.
> There's also the option to have transmission lines and can put the panels elsewhere in the places without whatever… and they already exist and are in place
That hailstorm that destroyed the solar farm in Nebraska? Yea, that was just last month. You have a very odd impression of the state of the US power grid and its current power production let alone most places in the world. I wish I had your optimism.
> That hailstorm that destroyed the solar farm in Nebraska
I had to look that one up, because Nebraska has about x3 as much capacity in HVDC converter stations from the 70s and 80s as it does total statewide grid-connected PV (which is one of my points, the one I can rephrase as "put it elsewhere if it's really that bad").
> The Scottsbluff project features […] hail stow capabilities from Array Technologies. While it's unclear if the asset's hail stow program was activated during the weather event, damage to the face of the modules indicates it was not.
Germany disproves this being a good idea. Incredible amounts invested in solar yet still wholly dependent on coal and natural gas to survive the winter.
Germany pumped a lot into solar a decade or so ago in order to drive solar down its experience curve. This was expensive, but it was a tremendous gift to the world. You can thank much of the game-changing decline in renewable prices on this sacrifice. If they wanted to buy that same capacity again it would be much cheaper now.
The good experience effects of renewables and storage implies we should go full speed ahead installing them. The side effect of pushing down their prices makes this the most cost effective approach overall. Nuclear, which doesn't have good experience effects, is a different story entirely.
If you apply this logic universally then we basically can't have a modern human civilization, because airplanes, steelmaking, chemical manufacturing, and many other heavy industrial applications will also be considered too dangerous. This is exactly tackled in the post:
> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks
Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather than windmills or solar.
After having read the IPCC report, no. A mix of energy is a very viable solution. And if states would not cater to the needs of the nuclear industry, we would have zero plants right now because the price of electricity was never high enough to get the plants insured. Which might change if the price for power climbs, but with renewables on the rise, a limit to that rise or even decline is to be expected.
And for some reason, mainstream social media loves nuclear, so I do question if there is a bias for a technology that every spacefaring state, except for india and china (AFAICT?), has botched at some catastrophic event so far.
>What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available?
What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal.
Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable.
This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.
No. I have seen the effects of this "goal" at scale in my personal life. Semi-non-effective HVAC systems that I now have to run 24/7/365, LED lights with weird flicker that perpetually antagonize me everywhere, vehicles with obnoxious start/stop mechanisms that absolutely induce premature wear (causing much more serious waste than otherwise). Oh yeah - my washing machine doesn't really fill up with water all the way, so I run FOUR cycles just to make sure everything is properly rinsed. This one isn't even directly about energy (someone was trying to save water), but it consumes more energy as a consequence. Is this what the environmentalists were going for with the fake "deep fill" selector knob on my ultra-high "efficiency" machine?
The people pushing "efficiency at any cost" are either completely blind to the idea of 2nd order+ consequences or are evil/anti-human. I cannot fathom a different set of options. Do you realize that you have to live on this damn planet with all these side-effects too?
I am completely over it. Let's figure out how to make energy carbon free and infinite. Let's stop fucking over the user experience in every possible way just so we can feel like we are doing something to "help".
The water saving thing is truly obnoxious because water is a very regional issue. Why are people in regions with more than ample fresh water made to use inferior toilets designed to use little fresh water? Because activists from dry places think their regional water problems are universal and try to foist their water-saving nonsense onto everybody else. They're coming for high-flow shower-heads too; it takes me three times as long to rinse out my hair with those shower-heads so the water savings don't even exist. I think it's probably only a matter of time before they start making shower heads with built-in timers that force everybody to take navy showers.
i solidarize with you about the madnees of this "over-everything", but maybe marketing department at the higher floors are to blame, more than environmentalist, usually they are not sitting in the executive boards...
> What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use
Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don’t exist. In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by physics.
True, an overall 10% improvement is a big number, one order of magnitude is SF now.
But for single technologies, more than 10% is possible, internal combustion engines vs electric, incandescent light vs led..
So reasoning on the global efficiency (resource and energy use, recycling of materials, capture of wasted energy, ) is the mainline to go.
IN nature photosynthesis is around 100% efficient.
> IN nature photosynthesis is around 100% efficient.
If your measure of efficiency of photosynthesis is how much sunlight is turned into chemical energy, its in the low single digit percentages. C4 photosynthesis is something like ~4% efficient, C3 is lower still.
Ops, true, overall photosynthesis is low, i remembered some higher capture eff. at some wavelenghts..
(just retina photon conversion is about 50% IIRC)
Many of those extra things can be intermittent and shut down when excess power isn’t available. Which means can overbuild solar and wind to satisfy everything but the worst case, and use the excess most of the time.
The result is that don’t need seasonal storage only daily storage. It is likely better to build more capacity than long-term storage. Although, generated fuels like hydrogen might work well for long-term storage.
Production facilities idleing is not free. Intermittent production means the equipment isn't generating any money while costing the owner money. Wheter this is significant depends on the cost of the facility, economic yield from production and if costs are energy dominant or not.
I fear this sort of argument will fall on deaf ears here. This is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle. It works for them, so it should work for everybody else.. Getting people to live in dense urban housing and be dependent on public transit is considered a desirable outcome, not a regrettable but necessary consequence of reducing emissions. Talk of reducing emissions is used as a justification, but isn't the root motivation for these urbanization advocates. Offering up technical solutions that reduce the environmental toll of the present social order isn't met with enthusiasm because it misses the point, which is to change up the social order.
If you find a way to explain how nuclear reactors will get more people riding buses and bicycles in cities, then you'll have their attention.
> This is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle.
This is a forum where a few people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle, and say so very vocally. Don't mistake that for a consensus. It's not. You can find a lot of other viewpoints here as well.
Okay fair, but they make sure to over-represent themselves in every HN conversation concerning power generation, cities, cars or bicycles.
I think the style of argument rayiner is employing is essentially preaching to the choir; it won't land with people who derive their anti-nuclear stance from a pro-urbanization goal. And this seems to be the primary motivation of anti-nuclear people on HN specifically. In the general public, earnest if misguided concern for safety is more common than a pro-urbanization motive, but HN isn't representative of the general public.
> Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ),
Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose
It's explained in the post. It makes the total amount be roughly 100 quads, which makes it easy to estimate all the numbers in the graphic as percentages.
Given an exajoule and a quad are close in value, you’d get roughly the same result with exajoules instead.
Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data
> The post is about a specific point in time, not for all time. So there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of a temporary alignment in the data
The choice of quads as a unit was not made by the post author (John Walker), it was made by a US government agency (the EIA) and a US government-funded research lab (LLNL). Walker appears to have only chosen quads because of the use of quads by the convenient graphics those agencies have produced. The idea that they are using quads due to a “temporary alignment in the data” seems like a post hoc rationalisation - what unit were they using before this temporary alignment? Probably quads; and if not quads, then likely something else equally non-metric. It is unlikely the US government would have already been using SI units (or even a non-SI metric unit), then suddenly switch to a non-metric unit just because of a temporary alignment in the data; much more likely they use quads because that is the US government’s standard unit for this purpose, and already was long before this.
And to be clear, I’m not criticising Walker for choosing a convenient freely-usable graphic to illustrate his point, even if it is in weird units; I’m criticising the US government for its continued clinging to weird units like “quads” that almost nobody else in the world uses, when there is no good reason for them to do so.
Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."
I would think that nuclear is popular with the money class because you can own & control the means of prodution. It requires things that only the existing big boys can afford.
Same goes for various battery & solar techs. If they can't prevent solar panels from becoming common, at least they can make sure that solar panels and batteties rely on at least some key ingredients or processes they can own & control access to.
Somehow, one way or another, through safety regulation if not through artificial scarcity or patents, there will be no cooking up good batteries or solar panels in garages, and I bet it will never be down to actual physical impracticality.
> Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century
A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.
Interesting (maybe?) background info, this is John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD, an o.g. software entrepreneur. Also the author of The Hacker's Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.
You really should look up the daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight and compare that to annual total energy use by humans.
The vast majority of daily solar energy is radiated away already and it dwarfs human energy consumption.
Climate change is a result of human activity adding more insulation (via C02, methane, increased water vapor) to the atmosphere and trapping more of the energy from the sun that would previously have radiated away.
The increasing global average tempreture is caused by humans adding more blankets .. not by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.
AFAICT, you are probably wrong. Here is some points as to why:
> daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight
... which is exactly the same as the amount of energy radiating off, in a state of equilibrium. But here comes the problem, if we add heat, e.g. from fission, we are not in an equilibrium anymore, are we?
Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change make that claim all the time: Absolute numbers are huge, so they do comparisons like
- 99.998% if Carbon does not take part in Carbon Cycle, or
- heat radiation from the sun is more than X by a scale of Y.
But in balance, so any addition without compensation can compound to be fatal to human life on earth.
After increasing the temperature by storing energy, then radiation off the surface and air layers will increase. But the heat build up is strongest at ground level, yet radiating to space is hardest from that layer. So the effectiveness of heat dispersal in a layered, in-vacuum geoid is not ideal.
> Not only[addition by me] by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.
Volker Quaschning hat an article, in german, on that. A comparable, unfavourable look on heat introduction instead for a post-co2 energy generation, was also cited in minkorrekt podcast (german, too).
But that that is a small factor, too. I did back of the envelope calculation, and
- if every of the 8 billion humans increases their consumption to western standards,
- their energy from unlimited fusion or unlimited fission, earth still boils.
It might be 2-5 % of the effect of greenhouse gases, by heat introduction is real and at scale deadly, too.
With water, wind and solar, we have no added heat, since moving gases and fluids evoke heat anyway, which just is not converted to electricity in between.
And solar changes the albedo of the place where the panel was placed to a reflectivity of that of a green meadow, which might be worse than some kinds of coating, but usually is better then other roof tiling [citing needed, do IR/VIS-white-painted roofs exist?].
TL;DR: Smaller problem by a few orders of magnitude, but unless dangerous geoengineering takes place[1], still unsustainably cooks mankind.
[1]: Please don't. IPCC report says "keep the idea of geoengineering out of media, for it is not a solution but pandora's jar"
I was surprised to learn how significant the heat added from thermal power plants can be for global warming. Without technological improvements a massive scale up of nuclear energy would probably be a bad idea.
There are panels that can radiate heat directly to space though. So it has made me wonder if the nuclear power plants of the future could use such panels to radiate their heat directly to space. Essentially they’d be like reverse solar power plants, that also work at night. Wonder if it’s feasible and economical.
Personally, I think the future will mainly just be solar, hydro, geothermal and energy storage. As world population decline we’ll end up having more than enough materials if we recycle them. Energy use will go drastically down.
Question is if we need nuclear in the transition.
And we should have nuclear R&D anyway as we need it for space exploration.
Seriously? Everything on earth's surface is radiating thermal energy into space. In such a massive amount that you'll feel a distinct temperature drop in a cloudless night. If you want to radiate more heat into space (at a global level), you'd have to start by removing the clouds, or the greenhouse gasses.
The total energy consumption of humanity is still very tiny compared to the total solar irradiation that earth receives. Maybe at some point that might become a concern, but not anytime soon.
Curious: for the latter I get 7e21 J, using Wikipedia's normal-insolation figure of 947 W and its Earth albedo of 0.3. That's an order of magnitude greater. I'm probably missing something, do you have a source?
(Of course my figure would only increase the difference you're pointing out.)
Indeed we are 2–3 orders of magnitude away from the point where our energy output itself non-negligibly, globally heats the earth. And if we kept growing, an incandescent Earth would not be too far off. There are hard limits.
This does not take into account that the planet was in balance before human activities has started impacting it. Plus earth reflectivity is decreasing due to human intervention e.g. deforestation.
See other replies above. Thermal energy emissions pale in utter insignificance compared to the solar heat flux. What matters is things that control what happens with that solar heat flux, aka greenhouse gasses.
All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels.
Cost for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both payed by -public-.
The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all.
The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons.
If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different.
Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones.
Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis.
One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control.
Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use.
EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes).
The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)
I'm not sure they forget about cleanup for nuclear so much as it just isn't included for any power generation method.
The residual ash from coal plants are called coal tailings. They basically contain everything in the coal that didn't burn. Currently this is all piled up near the coal power plant. So you have chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, as well as a smattering of radioactives like uranium sitting in a pile. Occasionally weather washes out these "piles" and they find their way into streams or leach through the underlayment to hit the ground water. When a coal plant is decommissioned the owner files for bankruptcy and the pile of coal tailings becomes another Superfund site.
Yet somehow nuclear is different. Even though if nothing is done, in a thousand years the coal tailings will still be just as toxic as today. While the radioactive waste will be near a background.
This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure, it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow", or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from now, a tribe of stone age explorers breaks into the concrete and reinforced steel facility buried under a mountain in the remote desert, and then goes 700 meters down, uses their lithic tools to bust down a few more steel doors, and gets irradiated? Those hypothetical 10-20 people in the distant future might die, thus we can conclude there is no definitively safe storage solution".
At a minimum definitive must mean from today and until we can and will make any radioactive waste not radioactive waste anymore. If that requires safety against stone age explores or not I can't say. History has an abundance of tales of how we store things safe enough and then decades (or a few years) later we learn that dumping thousands of barrels of radioactive waste in the ocean was stupid, that slapping some concrete on top of a nuclear bomb test site didn't really contain it, that mixing chemical waste with earth and letting it sit near a river was pretty stupid, etc. etc.
Definitive means it is 100% certain this is not happening with any radioactive waste as there's no lower limit where radiation isn't dangerous. "Definitely safe against human stupidity and error" seems fine to me for radioactive waste when there's zero need to produce any. Again, is that timescale up until stone age man in the future? I can't say but the producers of radioactive waste need to know the answer before they can built a storage facility or they'll have to make it safe enough for anything less than the earth going pooof.
Nuclear technology is safe enough, and the storage of the waste is non-issue: the amount of waste produced thorough last 80 years since we first split atom would fit in a single storage facility of the size of the football stadium. If we want to move away from fossil fuels then the nuclear is our best bet, solar and wind are just impractical toys.
> Nuclear technology is safe enough
"enough" is a point of view, is your, so ok for you, not enough for me.
Fukushima was not enough safe, but again, for me. And there are many others "not enough" situations others than 3 famous.
> storage of the waste is non-issue..
To me, is not a volumetric problem, but for time ad long term safety.
At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big problem now, imagine the big part of plants, and there is a 90km avoidence zone for many years.
Make nuclear really safe maybe can be done, at witch cost? Will stay still in market? I doubt. Probably some nuclear technology will remain and can be used and developed for research and bootstrap, not for supply the whole.
> solar and wind are just impractical toys
These toys are in lowering cost, rising efficiency and world wide spread and deployment, more than any others technology, and 10 yrs. ago was difficult to think, now is reality, and investing resources on solar/wind/others will make a difference -now-, can be widespread, create more workplaces, where building more nuclear will make some effect to 10 years, and can be done only by few big companies (apart environment issues).
> At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big problem now,
That tritium is a huge nothingburger. They could dump it into the ocean now or store it for a century then dump it; either way it causes no real harm. The amount of tritium they're wringing themselves into knots over is a nonissue.
Efficiency of solar and wind isn't the real issue. The problem is: solar only works during a day, and wind farms only work when there's wind. Which makes both of them irregular, unpredictable. It could be mitigated if we had a cheap mass energy storage technology, but we don't (Li-Ion batteries are way too expensive, and hydroelectric storage requires very specific conditions, it cannot be built just anywhere). What we need is a stable supply of energy which is independent of the time of day and the weather. Nuclear can be that.
Yes, efficiency is not an issue, but is improving.
Storage technology evolve, there are many battery technology, even better than li-ion if fully developed, and storage can be chemical, capturing co2 and making fuels with net zero CO2 pollution, can be thermal, can be even gravitational, hydrogen local storage, and energy can move in grids, to go where is need from where is available, engineering can do this now it there is a true will.
If there is a system finely distributed (many systems) for production, transport and storage, in a mix on low to high tecnology, this will make global energy really available and independent of uncertains and variable conditions.
Many examples of good offgrid appication exist, done by some guys, Imagine what can be done with true development/investment just tomorrow.
And Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for long periods everywhere..
You make a lot of assumptions here, about the directions in which future technologies can possibly develop. The thing is: if we are making decisions right now, we should make it based on what we know for sure, not based on our hopes and dreams, which might never materialize. In 20 years time, if the technologies you mention do indeed appear, we can re-evaluate our approach.
> Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for long periods everywhere..
Sun disappears for half of the day, every day. Strong wind is not that common at all, except in few selected areas, like the seaside.
Much of the technology i mention are here now, concrete and available, storage/battery for sure, driven dy automotive conversion to electric, synthetic fuels are way more close than 20years, all the fossil fuel infrastructure will benefit, and here are big$$, and will work with CO2 capture tech, i suspect we will need this very very soon. In the future are fusion (hope), ad real -safe- fission.
if i have 1$ to invest, i think is wise to invest in tech available, deployable today, scalable, adaptable, and fine grained on territory. just an opinion.
At night use storage and transfer energy with grids, this tech is available now.
When windy, store in battery, and if needed transfert with grids, tech available now.
No sun, no wind, no sea/tides, no grid, neiter a generator? well.. placing a fission plant here seems the right case, but suspect no one will live in a such place..
Current mass deployment of solar could prove to be very beneficial in the long run though, as 1. it leads to advances in the mass-manufucturing of solar panels which in turn produce reductions in per unit costs, and 2. it encourages research into energy storage, like methane production from CO2 and solar energy.
well, sure, nothing is free, but costs are (sometimes) investment, and this is more an issue of politics/economy planning than tech.
And with the perspective of such a big development, investment everywhere, of planetary size, who will stay out of a businnes at this scale? i don't understand..
About Minesota, i will read the report, after a brief look i understant that in a state with 25%coal, 20%nuclear, 17%gas, talking of such big increase of green will cause panic to someone.
About Grid, the infrastrucure is here, is necessary, and is independent from the pool of sources (green, fossil, etc..) so it's cost is not related to nature of sources, it's a long term investment to be mantained, so is unavoidable.
The Storage is the open problem, here the investment are necessary and, as you say, in the long run.
But to have a real long run, maybe some classic rules of the market need to be relaxed? to let the techs develop..
>>About Minesota, i will read the report, after a brief look i understant that in a state with 25%coal, 20%nuclear, 17%gas, talking of such big increase of green will cause panic to someone.
The authors of the report advocate getting to zero carbon via nuclear and hydro. The advantage is they are both concentrated baseline power sources, so don't require extensive storage and transmission infra.
guarding a single storage facility is easy: just put a thousand men with machine guns between it and anyone who could possibly try to raid it. Guarding against nature is even easier: we have at least a century worth of climate data, it's not that hard to select one place that is safe from earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters.
This is such a rubbish argument I wondered where it came from and it's even the DOE who writes this (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...). It is completely misleading, so yes the volume of the spend fuel if packed together would fit a football field to a height of 10 yards. However, you could (and hopefully never would) store your nuclear waste like that, you need containment vessels, cooling (air circulation) etc. and this number also completely ignores the amount of "non-fuel" nuclear waste that you have as well.
Decomissioning is factored into all nuclear lifecycle analyses. Long term waste solutions are in operation today (see WIPP) and expanding soon (see Onkalo).
On the technical level, i think yes, there are analysis and solution.
But at practical level (economic/politics) decommissioning is left to the posterity (cost rising years after years, shifting of milestone, more taxes.. and so on)
This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for understanding nuclear power. What’s outdated, what’s just old, what’s new and promising, what’s just nonsense, and what are the ways we expect to deploy nuclear energy?
Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-expert outsider?
The vast majority of new reactors built each year are still light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel. There's a smaller but notable fleet of power reactors of the pressurized heavy water type. Everything else is a rounding error.
My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.) and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or later will be fine.
[1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John LaMarsh.
After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder.
It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.
The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess.
The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant.
Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding process scheduling and I/O.
The French did this totally unprecedented novel thing where they manufacture more than one identical part at a time in a line of assembly stations, and the parts of the plants are interchangeable. I doubt such things transfer to other countries or industries though.
> The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess.
As a french Engineer, I can confirm this. For work inquiries, please reach me at pyrale@oversized.ego
> The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design
In fact, we don't keep building them. The last N4 reactor was delivered in 2003. Since then, aside from the failed joint-venture with Germany that is the EPR, France essentially delivered nothing. That's not really an engineering issue so much as a political one.
Also France didn't "keep building the same reactor", and didn't build "obsolete" reactors. From the initial reactors (the CP generation) to the N4, the buildings got larger, late reactors produced 60% more energy than the original ones, and significant safety improvements were made. Safety changes were also backported on previous installations. In fact, the major reason why Framatome freed itself from the Westinghouse license is that it provided significant independent contribution to the original design.
The French and the US reasons are, from what I understand, quite different. I don't know the US situation that well.
In France, many factors were involved:
* France over-producing power for decades around y2k, which meant it was hard to commit the country to build more nuclear reactors.
* The EPR being an over-engineered fiasco due to it being designed in a Franco-German partnership which quickly folded, but the design was kept.
* The privatization of the energy sector involved a lot of restructuring for EDF, and the creation of Areva. This had a lot of involvement, but the main one is that the state took a hands-off stance, and EDF and Areva started competing with each other rather than collaborating.
* Areva got mismanaged quite heavily. People like to point out the Olkiluoto fiasco, but what really killed the company was the Uramin scandal.
* Politicians since 2007 started asking hefty dividends from public companies, involving EDF, in order to prop up the government's budget. That created an investment deficit, and significant debt for EDF.
So yeah, lots of things, but the underlying issue seems to be that France used to have a culture of the state coordinating huge projects, which was lost with the new generation of politicians. There seems to be an appetite for new reactors, but the industry is significantly harmed by 20 years of political mixed signals, and whether the current politicians and the industry can deliver remains unclear.
According to the list, most power plants came online in the 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly stated as having came online in 2020. Clicking the link, you see that its 2 reactors came online in 1986 and 1987, and as for the third one -- "as of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to the end of 2022. In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023, and again in December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024."
All of the nuclear reactors in France were built by previous generations.
As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements. My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. I think nuclear proponents who say that nuclear is so cheap and so easy should prove it by building their own nuclear reactors and make tons of money. Go ahead, just do it. Stop talking and do it.
>As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.)
I think many of the people who aren't anti-nuclear, would agree with all that.
>However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables.
I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people who don't like the idea of nuclear power making misleading or false statements about nuclear power. (Like in the original message of this thread where the claim is made "After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.")
>My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc.
This statement is true in one small sense and misleading in another. You are likely providing excess power during a sunny day in the summer and less power than you are using when it rains and you are providing no power at other times (like at 2:00 AM.). While at the end of the year you might produce more kilowatts than you in total used, that isn't going to help your neighbors when it is raining. The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created and consequently has to be heavily subsidized by your neighbors who don't have rooftop solar.
A problem with both nuclear-bros as well as anti-nuclear folks is that they tend to get their information through armchair experts who oversimplify extremely complex topics. Neither group tends to understand the real reasons for costs, the risks and dangers of technologies (including other than nuclear, for proper comparisons), or even the complexities of simply emissions which is far more than electricity and transportation and includes daily and seasonal fluxuations across an extremely non-homogeneous landscape.
FWIW, the IPCC advocates for a diversified portfolio which includes nuclear, and this is the general stance of most climate and energy researchers as the simplified version of reasoning (I know, ironic) is "don't take it off the table." When to use it, how much, and where is more controversial, but this gets extremely complicated quite quickly. It's rather problematic when the people disseminating information (i.e. science communicators; both on youtube as well as news) are not actively aligned with scientific consensus.
>FWIW, the IPCC advocates for a diversified portfolio which includes nuclear, and this is the general stance of most climate and energy researchers as the simplified version of reasoning (I know, ironic) is "don't take it off the table." When to use it, how much, and where is more controversial, but this gets extremely complicated quite quickly.
This seems like the most reasonable approach - if someone disagrees with this, it would be interesting to hear their reasoning.
> I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people who don't like the idea of nuclear power making misleading or false statements about nuclear power. (Like in the original message of this thread where the claim is made "After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.")
I think it's just easier to notice "misleading or false statements" when they contradict what we like to think rather than when they are going in the same direction.
For example, are you 200% sure of your sentence "The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created"?
Is that true everywhere, all the time? Because if not, how is that not as much as "misleading or false statements" than the original sentence you quote? But of course, this sentence of yours does not strike you as misleading, because you truly believe it's not misleading.
Also, while I don't think the anti-nuclear are less numerous or less idiot, the pro-nuclear usually are also very very prone to think they are smarter when they are not, and start using bullying method to "fight the infidels", which, at least in my circle which are neutral, is really starting to make that side looks bad.
>I think it's just easier to notice "misleading or false statements" when they contradict what we like to think rather than when they are going in the same direction.
That is likely true, but what is your point? The statement I said was false and misleading was in the message that started this thread:
>After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.
Are you saying that was a true statement?
>For example, are you 200% sure of your sentence "The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created"? Is that true everywhere, all the time? Because if not, how is that not as much as "misleading or false statements" than the original sentence you quote? But of course, this sentence of yours does not strike you as misleading, because you truly believe it's not misleading.
This sort of incessant questioning is a form of sealioning. I guess I could have been more clear I meant that the obvious energy policy issue with consumer rooftop solar is that it is the most expensive form of power thus it has been given huge subsidies. (The money used for such subsidies is not unlimited and this money is fungible - obviously a dollar going to subsidize an extremely expensive rooftop solar installation could have gone much, much farther if it had gone to support a utility grade solar installation.) I think a charitable reading of my sentence would have understood what I meant.
> According to “numerous scientific studies,” none of the world’s more than 600 nuclear power stations have ever been economically viable, and the plants could only be operated for years due to government subsidies, the institute claims.
> That is likely true, but what is your point? The statement I said was false and misleading was in the message that started this thread
You realize the part I was quoting started with "I rarely see that here".
Obviously, my sentence was not "the element that you say is incorrect is in fact correct" but rather "that is not a surprise that you notice incorrect element when they are saying something you don't like". This second part recognizes that the element may be incorrect. The point is when you say "I rarely see that here": your impressions have no value, they do not correspond to any reality.
> Are you saying that was a true statement?
I am saying that it is not a worst statement as the one of yours I've quoted. The problem of the statement you quoted is that it is open to interpretation: what is "built", what is "economic", what is "traditional".
Of course, you will pretend it is "false" because you will find one exception, or you will say "it's economic without the artificial extra costs that I have arbitrarily decided are the results of baddies because I don't like them"
I personally think this sentence is bad because it's way too imprecise and generalist. I think only idiots will think it is "false", and only idiots will think it is "true", the reality is that this sentence cannot be called "true" or "false" as it is true to some extend and false to some extend.
> This sort of incessant questioning is a form of sealioning.
Once again you miss the point. I don't care if your statement is true or not, or precise or not. My point is that you are blaming someone for not doing what you don't do yourself.
Your sentence was, according to your own standard (not mine, YOURS), objectively pretty bad (which is not the same as "incorrect"):
1) "the ONLY issue" is obviously highly debatable, as what is an issue for someone may not be an issue for someone else (or be a "small issue"), and it highly depends of the objective and what people care about
2) "the most expensive form of power EVER CREATED". This is technically 100% incorrect: it is totally unreasonable to pretend that modern solar is a more expensive form of power than the form of power used one or two centuries ago. Of course, you can answer "it's obviously not what I mean", but I know that and I don't say you have made a mistake, what I'm saying is that you are the one reacting to such approximations if they are "anti-nuclear".
3) "the MOST EXPENSIVE". Again, while it can be true, it is not at all trivial and even "decidable". In a parallel thread, you admit yourself that you take the "average", which is a very very bad reasoning: if a country decided to build a series of crap nuclear plant with turbines of sub-par efficiency, according to you, it would objectively mean that the nuclear power will intrinsically be worse. A better metric instead of the average would be to take the minimum: it corresponds to the real potential of the technology, probably ignoring old technology (so it is also a good thing to do for nuclear) (sure, there may be circumstantial effect, but at first order, they exist in all the forms, so it's fair. While it is not perfect, it is anyway already way better than taking the average). If we do that, solar power is better than nuclear power. And this is only with the US numbers, but you can easily decompose by state and cherry-pick the ones going in one way or another, or add other countries in the world. It scientifically does not make sense, the numbers that you use cannot answer the question of knowing if the form of power is "more expensive" or not in a debate about future decision, especially when they are all so close.
4) the fact that the sentence is a very naive generalization.
Again, let's be clear: I'm not criticizing you for your statement, or saying your statement is incorrect.
What I'm saying is that someone would have behave exactly like you, would have written exactly the same kind of statement, would have been as clear and precise, but it would have been anti-nuclear and you would have said "yet another example of anti-nuclear being lying or misleading".
> I think a charitable reading of my sentence would have understood what I meant.
This is a good summary: you are asking people to be charitable when reading your sentence and try to understand what you mean by refitting the terms to make sure the sentence is true, but you don't do that to others.
As I've said, the statement that you are saying is a lie is true "in some extend", and, if you really believe in what you've said to me, you should just be charitable and understand what they mean in order to refit the terms so that this sentence is true.
This is not my assertion and has been covered in discussions on this web site for a long time.
>Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 147 and 221 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
It would be extraordinary if these one-off rooftop solar photovoltaic installations would be low cost. They are more dangerous to install than ground based solar farms and much more costly - the real question is why are they so heavily subsidized? It really is sort of a reverse Robinhood scenario where less well off consumers subsidize their wealthier neighbors.
> The latest report from Lazard on LCOE also gives similar numbers:
I'm not convinced you read the doc you cited.
In it, it clearly states that the levelized cost of energy for solar PV rooftop residential ranges from $115/MWH while gas peaking is $114/MWH and nuclear is $141.
Your source also states quite clearly that these costs depend on the circumstances (i.e., each case is a case) and it points to unsubsidized costs.
If I get a quote from a rooftop vendor that sells gold plated PV panels to install in a cave, that does not mean that residential PV panels have an expensive energy cost.
I guess I should point out these kind of insults are against the site guidelines.
>In it, it clearly states that the levelized cost of energy for solar PV rooftop residential ranges from $115/MWH while gas peaking is $114/MWH and nuclear is $141.
You are quoting the lowest value in each range, you need to consider the entire range:
$117 to $282 Rooftop residential
$115 to $221 Gas Peaking
$141 to $221 Nuclear
If you take the average from the range, the most expensive is rooftop solar. As the Statista web site states:
>Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States.
The LCOE of course also undercounts some of the costs associated with consumer rooftop solar. There is real value in having an energy source that isn’t so intermittent. With a low capacity factor, you need to spend money to deal with that. This might be through adding new power lines to bring in power from somewhere else, over building, adding gas peakers, adding energy storage etc. Obviously none of this is free and none of these extra costs are included as part of the LCOE of solar. You can see some estimates of this on page 11 of the report.
>Your source also states quite clearly that these costs depend on the circumstances (i.e., each case is a case)
Yes that is why there is a range. But if your point is that sometimes rooftop solar won’t be the most expensive form of power, that seems like moving the goal posts from your original response:
>>Care to show the basis of your personal assertion? It's an extraordinary and unbelievable claim.
>...and it points to unsubsidized costs.
Yes, that was actually my point. The real question is why is consumer rooftop solar so heavily subsidized? It really is sort of a reverse Robinhood scenario where less well off consumers subsidize their wealthier neighbors. The money available for energy subsidies is not unlimited and this money is fungible. A dollar going to subsidize an extremely expensive rooftop solar installation could have gone much, much farther if it had gone to support a utility grade solar installation.
>If I get a quote from a rooftop vendor that sells gold plated PV panels to install in a cave, that does not mean that residential PV panels have an expensive energy cost.
> I guess I should point out these kind of insults are against the site guidelines.
It's not an insult. It's a clear reference to the fact that your source does not support your claim, and it actually rejects it.
> You are quoting the lowest value in each range, you need to consider the entire range:
I'm actually not. If you read the source you cited, you'll notice that they provide a range of values for their estimates of what would be the levelized cost for energy from multiple sources.
The observed real world cases fall within the whole range. This means that they report real world examples of residential rooftop PV panels costing well below alternatives such as Nuclear.
If your thesis was that residential rooftop PV panels were the most expensive source of energy, your own reference refutes your baseless claim. You have to intentionally ignore all the cheapest real world examples of PV installations to proceed to argue they are the most expensive.
If you insist in arguing about statistical nonsense such as "I can find a PV panel that is both terribly expensive and generates no energy at all" then go right ahead, but cherrypicking that as your absolute reference would be disingenuous.
> Yes that is why there is a range.
The range does not exist so that people could lie and misrepresent the data. If the range covers examples of residential PV panels generating cheaper energy than nuclear or even gas, you should not discard them either because you either failed to read the data or tried to misrepresent it.
In particular, check the section on commenting - for example:
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
>>> You are quoting the lowest value in each range, you need to consider the entire range:
>I'm actually not. If you read the source you cited, you'll notice that they provide a range of values for their estimates of what would be the levelized cost for energy from multiple sources.
The observed real world cases fall within the whole range. This means that they report real world examples of residential rooftop PV panels costing well below alternatives such as Nuclear.
If your thesis was that residential rooftop PV panels were the most expensive source of energy, your own reference refutes your baseless claim. You have to intentionally ignore all the cheapest real world examples of PV installations to proceed to argue they are the most expensive.
There would be no reason to estimate a range if we only consider the lowest possible LCOE.
As the Statista.com article states:
>>Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 147 and 221 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
At any rate, the LCOE comparison between residential rooftop solar and nuclear is irrelevant to the main issue. The main issue is that if we want to subsidize a renewable energy source, why should we subsidize rooftop solar when we could subsidize utility grade solar or wind? Look at those costs - literally the highest cost estimates for both utility grade solar and wind are lower than the lowest cost estimate for residential rooftop solar. Money is fungible and not unlimited - a dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind. These residential rooftop solar subsidies are also unusual in that much of the subsidy is often paid by less well-off households to subsidize their wealthier neighbors.
> However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables.
The reverse is pretty much true too. It seems like both renewables and nuclear proponents should be taking turns bashing fossil fuels, but since both see each other as a competitor for "the future of power", that's where the banter goes.
> And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements.
You don't have to go further than this thread to find false statements about nuclear.
> "The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial government subsidies. Without such support they would never have come about."
Do those cost estimates include the absolutely insane over-engineering for safety that has been forced on the nuclear power industry and _only_ the nuclear power industry? I'd be shocked if a single other power generation method didn't double in price if it was forced to meet the same standards as nuclear. I guarantee you that the coal plants in Germany are killing more people every year than every single one of their Nuclear plants has combined over it's lifetime. And likely more than every single nuclear plant on the planet with the possible exception of Chernobyl
To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no regulations, and that just anyone should be able to build any kind of reactor they want anywhere they want with no concerns for safety etc. But I do _very much think_ that when you are considering a technology that increases safety and also increases cost, you have to consider what the alternatives are. Are _they_ safer than whatever the current thing is? If you force it to be more expensive and more safe, are you going to get less of it and instead get the other, cheaper, more dangerous thing?
That calculation has never been done (in the US at least) and the result is thousands to millions dead over the past 80ish years a result of continuing to burn coal instead of nuclear.
The US nuclear safety regime (which is what makes it so expensive and so impractical) has no concept of tradeoffs. It imagines a hypothetical perfect power generation that never kills anyone to which nuclear should be held. That standard is ridiculous now and was ridiculous 50 years ago when nuclear was _already safer than coal_.
The comparison being discussed in the article I linked is with clean energy alternatives. In that respect, nuclear does need significantly more safety measures than wind or solar, for example.
The problem with nuclear is that it's much more difficult to regulate effectively than most other industries, because the consequences of mistakes can be so much higher. E.g. Chernobyl contaminated food throughout much of Europe for months. The natural organizational reaction in that situation is to overcompensate.
Nuclear is likely to always be expensive for that reason, because you're never going to get economy of scale as long as companies can't e.g. mass produce nuclear plants and set them up all over the place. I also generally agree with the other reply to your comment by three14.
I consider this to be a pragmatic observation, not a judgment on whether nuclear might make sense in some hypothetical perfectly rational world.
The argument that the nuclear power industry suffers from "insane" over-engineering for safety and that this is the reason for the cost is brought up again and again, except there is no real evidence for this.
In fact it's easy to see that a large proportion of a the construction cost is the same as any other (e.g. gas, coal) thermal power plant, because they all need the same steam turbine. Now nuclear power plants have additional costs, also due to safety (and I would argue that we should expect that, a nuclear power plant has more challenges to a coal plant).
Moreover if you look at the cost increases for nuclear power plant projects, they are pretty much inline with the cost increases we have seen for most large infrastructure projects. They all have become significantly more expensive (recently build coal plant also went significantly over budget). Even the world nuclear forum says (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...):
> Nuclear power plant construction is typical of large infrastructure projects around the world, whose costs and delivery challenges tend to be under-estimated.
The reality is that nuclear power is just not cost-competitive (see also this analysis somebody else (in a counter solar argument) posted https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april...).
Especially considering that renewables are on an exponential curve and nuclear is not (and doesn't show any indication of how to get onto one). Because so much of the cost (and energy) is in the construction of a nuclear power plant, it is actually counter-productive to invest into nuclear power plants, because we will increase CO2 compared to an investment into renewables.
Not to pick on you, but every time this discussion happens on HN, someone argues that the nuclear power industry is burdened by far more red tape than other industries (probably true) and that if we simply reduce the red tape, we could profitably build new nuclear plants (probably true) and they would still be safe (probably not true). This isn't an engineering problem. This is a social problem. Suppose you offer to let people build with minimal regulation - the most profitable plants are going to be the ones that cut the most corners on safety. The great engineering team that made a safe but slightly more expensive reactor than the minimum allowed by regulation will be out of the market.
And unsafe nuclear is really unsafe in a politically terrible way. You are doomed to either have Chernobyls or a lot of non-optimal regulation, or excellent regulation in the world of spherical cows and frictionless planes.
Perhaps one of the new nuclear startups can find a solution to this, but it'll have to be by finding a way to mass produce nuclear within the existing heavy red tape regime. And in the real world, that's not a bad thing.
I am sure that new designs would be better on paper. I am also sure that a regulatory regime in which nuclear plants are allowed to be exactly as unsafe as fossil fuel power plants would somehow turn out in the real world of money and politics to actually be worse than fossil fuel plants.
I don't think we as humans know how to create a regulatory structure for nuclear that would keep away people who are willing to sacrifice principles for money, and at the same time allows new designs to easily be built.
Of all the things the government can and does subsidize, cheap electricity seems like a pretty good one, especially if it's clean. I suppose that does lead to sillyness like bitcoin farms though.
The goal, alluded to in the quote I provided, is to compare it to cleaner alternatives.
The article I linked ends as follows:
> "For all these reasons, nuclear energy, even though nuclear power is emission-free, is not a relevant solution for profitable, climate-friendly and sustainable energy in the future." According to the researchers, nuclear energy as a solution for climate protection is "an old narrative that is still as inaccurate as in the 1970s."
It's about nuclear vs. renewables, and renewables look like a much better investment these days (and years) considering the budget explosions of recent nuclear projects.
You'd be better using South Korea as an example rather than France these days. To add more context, South Korea is an incredibly, incredibly corrupt country that sends its exiting president to prison to the extent that I joke that we need a special prison just for presidents. Yet there are basically no nuclear accidents at the kind of scale that we saw from Japan. 100% speculating but it's almost as if the nuclear power plants are used as a deterrent and part of the national security apparatus perhaps similar to the logic that Ukraine may have had in the past.
The anti-nuclear crusade in the West is a bit worrisome given that if we had been better at dealing with nuclear as a whole there would be less coal and gas power plants all over the West now. As much as I can sympathize with the concerns about nuclear power related supply chain issues and risks of meltdowns + radiation almost all the problems I've seen in nuclear across countries and cultures don't come down to technical issues as much as structural ones due 90%+ to politics causing massive over-regulation of nuclear to become unviable both financially and politically. This seems silly because I strongly believe such efforts should be directed at the much greater, immediate, far more supportable threat to humanity's IMO of fossil fuels. Of course we kind of depend upon them now but given the problems we had from the 1980s into the 2000s with fossil fuels all the way to now the kind of resources we could have spent on renewables may have had better results simply stepping away from lobbying constantly against nuclear power and letting engineers do their best work in all areas of energy research.
Seriously, almost all the "but nuclear costs too much" arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad faith where people pile on more and more requirements like it's a really bad DoD project when it's much more complicated honestly. US DoD has operated tons and tons of nuclear reactors, for example, quite successfully with a pretty darn good safety record last I saw despite all sorts of other failures within the US Jobs Program - they're used in submarines!
It is my understanding that the French massively subsidize nuclear power because they essentially run it as a job program to keep nuclear engineers employed so that they can build nuclear bombs.
The French breeder program was such a "success" that it's been mothballed. They've put the work on a shelf and terminated any follow on reactor.
This tells me the French don't believe nuclear will power the world any time soon. If they believed that, they'd understand breeders would be needed, and would be working on them.
Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").
That link doesn't contradict what I said? I said in summer last year (almost?, at the time I saw 2 different sources, one French said all, one German said almost all) all nuclear power plants were offline. Macron even went on TV arguing that they pulled forward maintenance to "prepare for the winter to support the German's lack of Gas" (seems not to happened according to your link, they were on record low output at the turn of the year).
The link shows ~25 reactors were up in the summer at the low point, out of 58.
If you want another link: [2] states that about half of the reactors were down. I don't know what news sites you use, but "almost all" or "all" reactors being down is simply false news.
Every time the fact nuclear power is subsidized is being brought up, I can't help but think of how much energy, in general, is highly subsidized, like other fossils and renewables. What makes it special in the case of nuclear?
Moving a technology down an experience curve is a positive externality. Technologies with good experience curves (like renewables) justify subsidy because of this. Nuclear, unfortunately, has not shown good experience effects.
The French have discovered that they vastly underestimated end-of-life costs. And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.
> And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.
I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources.
Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for longer than expected.
Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109‒250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors.
That's about 6X less than Germany, per reactor. When is the last time that kind of project came in under budget?
The article is from 2017, yet reports number from 2013. In 2017, the total provisioning was 28~Bn€. Also French reactor are still working (and producing returns), as opposed to German reactors.
If you focus on dismantling costs, the example of Maine Yankee [1]: is way less dramatic: "In January 2002 Maine Yankee put the total decommissioning cost at $635 million."
The number provided for UK reactors is ludicrous compared to existing dismantling costs, and simply factors in 150 years of dry cask storage, whereas France has a deep storage facility on the way.
Also the author, Paul Dorfman, is an anti-nuclear proponent, it's not surprising to see this kind of numbers from him.
> whereas France has a deep storage facility on the way.
That has been "on the way" for how many years exactly? The reality is that after almost > 50 years of nuclear power we have exactly one long-term storage facility world-wide which has been commissioned last year (Finland). And somehow that was hailed as a success.
Also what do you think the storage cost for deep storage facilities are?
> That has been "on the way" for how many years exactly?
Research is completed, we're currently in the process of anti-nuclear groups using their legal recourse options. This project is not time-critical, so there is no reason to speed that up.
> Also what do you think the storage cost for deep storage facilities are?
Initial investment estimates are between €8bn and €16bn [1].
The numbers are from the respective national nuclear authorities.
Also, as of 2019, the ongoing cost of securing spent fuel at Maine Yankee is about $10M per year. At what point does the spent fuel storage there age out and need replacement?
>>> And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.
>I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources.
We know for a fact that France nationalized EDF last year and the debt is at currently 65 bn euros and growing. Since the company has been nationalized, the taxpayers are on the hook.
I wouldn't personally go so far as to say they're "screwed" but it's a documented economic fact that nuclear power in France has been sold at a loss, and still is.
Note that this debt is already real, whereas the cost of decommissioning and storing waste for hundreds of years is guesswork no matter which source you use. Operations in France are proven not to cover costs even before we get to that!
65 billions in debt and having to be saved by the state means you are not profitable. It doesn't matter where the costs come from in this case, they are not covered by the money EDF has accumulated from selling power, which was the point.
This debt is already a reality - and growing with interest rates if nothing else - and we haven't even gotten to the many billions more that have to be invested in the beat-up old plants to keep them running.
We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet.
Nuclear power has always been a strategic choice, with extensive international treaties and special conditions in place to make it a reality despite it not being financially viable in the traditional sense. The costs have been socialised and pushed to future generations, deliberately.
Now that several decades have passed, we are the generations that have to start paying.
> It doesn't matter where the costs come from in this case, they are not covered by the money EDF has accumulated from selling power, which was the point.
That by itself isn't an issue. Plenty of companies take on debt to invest, for instance. My company intends to take €40bn of new debt in the next decade or so, and our investors don't see it as an issue.
That's why unit costs are important, that's what dictates whether the activity is reasonable, and how much debt can be supported by it.
> We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet.
Plants have been decomissioned in the past already. Because of that, we have pretty reasonable estimates of how much dismantling costs. If you have specific points about why past dismantled structures are different from future ones, feel free to expose them. Otherwise, the "we don't know" discourse is basically FUD.
>That by itself isn't an issue. Plenty of companies take on debt to invest, for instance. My company intends to take €40bn of new debt in the next decade or so, and our investors don't see it as an issue.
But that isn't the case here. When the debt causes you to be bailed out by the government, is is an issue, wouldn't you agree?
EDF isn't a car maker that has to invest in a transition to electric cars (or whatever), they are basically bankrupt. EDF needs _additional_ billions in order to invest in the future, separate from the billions of debt it already accumulated. Since the organisation is nationalised, that money will come from the taxpayers.
>Plants have been decomissioned in the past already. Because of that, we have pretty reasonable estimates of how much dismantling costs.
Which decommissioned reactor are you thinking of?
Most decommissioned reactors are part of plants that have other active reactors, so they are not actually dismantled. EDF has postponed final decommissioning for several of its closed reactors by 50 years, Berkeley in the UK is still ongoing, Vandellos 1 in Spain (closed since 1990) will commence final phase in 2028, Rancho Seco in California, closed in '89 still costs money today, and so on.
Apart from that, the "end result" for decommissioning projects are always "and then the federal government takes over from here". Meaning that the true costs are unknown even when the projects are actually completed.
This is not FUD, it's reasonable concerns based on observed realities. A discussion can be had about nuclear power anyway - it has merits too of course - but the concerns can't simply be brushed aside and ignored. They are based on reality.
> But that isn't the case here. When the debt causes you to be bailed out by the government, is is an issue, wouldn't you agree?
EDF's current situation is an issue. My point, however, is that this is not related to electricity pricing, nuclear or not.
> Since the organisation is nationalised, that money will come from the taxpayers.
Yes, so what? France's general budget received tens of billions in dividends from EDF in recent years, would you say EDF saved as much for the taxpayer?
> Which decommissioned reactor are you thinking of?
maine Yankee, for instance.
> Apart from that, the "end result" for decommissioning projects are always "and then the federal government takes over from here".
That's unrelated to dismantling. This issue is about waste storage in the US.
>France's general budget received tens of billions in dividends from EDF in recent years, would you say EDF saved as much for the taxpayer?
Of course, my point is only that it's true to say that EDF sold the power too cheaply, otherwise they would have been profitable and debt-free.
The question that has to be answered is whether nuclear can provide power at a competitive price once all the costs are counted. Currently all the costs are not counted, and we keep discovering that the costs are way higher than any estimates have previously shown.
>> Which decommissioned reactor are you thinking of?
>maine Yankee, for instance.
Yankee costs 10 million USD per year still to this day with no end in sight.
"Securing these remnants of nuclear energy generation is an ongoing task that requires armed guards around the clock and costs Maine Yankee’s owners some $10 million per year, which is being paid for with money from the government."
This means that every year, at least 10 million USD has to retroactively be added to the actual cost of electricity generated by that plant.
Then some day the spent fuel has to be moved, and the current container structure has to be dismantled. Why doesn't that count as being part of the decommissioning costs?
To say that nobody knows what it actually costs is quite fair IMO.
> Of course, my point is only that it's true to say that EDF sold the power too cheaply, otherwise they would have been profitable and debt-free.
They have been profitable for decades.
As for the debt, part of the debt is logical for such a group to have (i.e. amortizing the expense that was or is being made to extend the plants' lifetime).
Part of it is due to being required by the government to make bad decisions (e.g. buying and recapitalizing Areva, giving 8 billions worth of electricity to their competitors this winter, ...). This debt is unrelated to EDF's operations.
> Yankee costs 10 million USD per year still to this day with no end in sight.
That is related to long term storage, not dismantling. There's no reason for that to cost billions in France, where a storage site is on the rails.
> Why doesn't that count as being part of the decommissioning costs?
Decomissioning a plant has two parts: dismantling, which is a one-time cost, and long-term storage, which is an ongoing cost. The specific issue with the US govt. is that, when the plants were being built, it guaranted that a storage solution would be built, but didn't deliver. That's why the government currently pays for storage. There is no technical reason for this to happen.
> This means that every year, at least 10 million USD has to retroactively be added to the actual cost of electricity generated by that plant. [...] To say that nobody knows what it actually costs is quite fair IMO
By that same logic, it's impossible to know the cost of anything. Maybe future politicians will force people to recycle their solar panels at outrageous cost?
The only logical decision is to separate the cost of decomissioning (dismantling, a reasonable duration of dry-cask storage and the cost of a long-term storage site) and the cost of political decisions.
How can you know if they were profitable or not before you know the final costs?
>> Why doesn't that count as being part of the decommissioning costs?
>Decomissioning a plant has two parts: dismantling, which is a one-time cost, and long-term storage,
Certainly, but the yankee plant is currently housing the fuel in a short-term storage container on-site. So the dismantling part is not completed yet, and the costs are ongoing. It's not yet in the "long-term-storage" phase of operations, which btw also cost money.
>Maybe future politicians will force people to recycle their solar panels at outrageous cost?
The difference with nuclear compared to other sources is that the costs of nuclear __have__ to be handled. If an operator of a solar panel plant goes bankrupt, the state doesn't have to pay a cent since the plant simply stops costing money when it is shut down. That makes it much easier to estimate the costs.
If an operator of a nuclear plant goes bankrupt however, the state simply has to cover all the costs to ensure proper handling of the fuel and waste.
We have to date not managed to do so reliably anywhere in the world, so how can we claim to know the costs?
> but the yankee plant is currently housing the fuel in a short-term storage container on-site.
It's hardly short term if it's been there for 26 years.
> It's not yet in the "long-term-storage" phase of operations
And, judging by the ongoing process, it's not close to be. For no technical reason, it's just politicians doing politician things.
So, the logical conclusion is that no one can predict what politicians could do. If they do this, what makes you think that they wouldn't pass a law forcing people to recycle current solar panels at an outrageous cost? You've been claiming that it's impossible to know anything about anything related to nuclear, but the same claims also hold for any other production source, since this kind of political decision is, essentially, arbitrary.
Welcome to the FUD, if you can do it, others can do it too.
>It's hardly short term if it's been there for 26 years.
It certainly is short-term storage. Short-term simply means that it is not intended for permanent final storage. All nuclear waste in the world is currently in short-term storage.
The costs of nuclear are not invented by politicians, as I have shown they are instead largely hidden by politicians.
So far you have compared nuclear waste to recycling solar panels, you have insinuated that having to manage it carefully is just a political decision, and now you think 26 years is "long term storage". I can just assure you that all of these things are completely wrong and encourage you to investigate it further on your own.
It's not about it being 26 years, it's about it being longer than the time needed to actually build the long-term solution, and no solution being planned because of political games.
Dry cask storage is the long-term prospect of US waste, but it's unrelated to producing electricity or the actual cost of anything. It's a political decision and paid for by government money, as it should be. Once politicians tire of wasting money, they can build the actual thing.
And if you believe this kind of stuff couldn't happen to your favorite technology, you're delusional.
Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste
China and Russia do not build and run nuclear power plants at dramatically lower costs, despite having none of those handicaps.
Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in different locations online. Some indicate they build at half the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So, if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please indicate.
Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports, so there may at least be some incentive there to suppress it. China on the other hand, had quadrupled its nuclear power generation in the past 10 years (1).
> Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports...
All the more reason for them to build nuclear plants. Every barrel of oil that their own economy doesn't need (because they have plenty of nuclear plants) is another barrel they can make money exporting. And if or when using oil becomes unfashionable, or their oil reserved start running low...then being recognized experts on how to build & run lots of safe, economical nuclear plants sounds pretty good, eh?
Nuclear competes with natural gas and coal, not oil.
Beyond powering the grid, there are myriad uses for oil that nuclear cannot substitute directly for- asphalt, plastic, nylon, even Aspirin (synthesized from benzene).
And yet the biggest use of petroleum by far is for transportation. Worldwide demand for petroleum would plunge 90+% if all cars were electric and nuclear was fully deployed.
Uh, no. Only two thirds of petroleum used in America is used for transportation, and that includes all transportation. You cannot possibly get a 90+% reduction in petroleum use by electrifying all cars.
So by that chart, a barrel of oil is basically 89% used to generate gasoline, distillate fuel oil (diesel), hydrocarbon gas, and jet fuel. That is to say, 89% is used for energy and 11% or less is used for plastic, asphault, and materials. That 27% industrial figure on the right chart includes things like propane production, which is mainly used as a heat source (nuclear could absolutely replace this).
Either way, if your economy is dependent on oil exports, whether you were to lose 2/3 of that or 9/10 of that business, you're going to be hurting, and you might not rush to refactor your economy around nuclear.
You've got an interesting way of reading charts... are you classifying trains, trucks and boats all as cars? And classifying all process heat used in industry as "energy" is certainly true but you're abstracting away way too many details if you just suppose all of that can be replaced with electrical heating. A lot of process heat could be provided by very small nuclear reactors on site, but honestly that seems like a pipe dream.
From what I understand, Lazard's LCOE, which are quoted everywhere, mainly rely on US numbers. That means they probably are reliable for US situations.
Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid.
People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
The reason people demand higher standards is history.
An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it.
Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.
One person identified as having gotten cancer from Fukushima. Most of the cancers would be in a larger population and could not be distinguished from the large background of cancers. That doesn't mean they didn't (or won't) happen, or that regulation must assume they didn't/won't happen. Regulation is not like criminal law; radiation is not presumed innocent until proven guilty.
I agree that fossil fuel use should be aggressively reduced. In the past, that would have meant more nuclear. It does not mean more nuclear now. Reducing fossil fuel use has ceased to be an argument for nuclear construction.
People also dont like to mention that even the current, far from 'green', extraction is because we currently only mine the easiest to access deposits of uranium. There are not many of these and we would shortly need to start accessing much more challenging (read: dirty) deposits were we to scale nuclear.
Also of the handful of breeder reactors we have (i think the only 2 running are in Russia) they are incredibly far from economical and have a really annoying tendency to catch fire...
> Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago.
Thermodynamics would like to have a word:
> […] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.
Interesting read.
I once wondered what would be the contribution to atmospheric heat of the combustion of cigarettes, and waved it as probably insignificant.
A quick googling suggests burning a cigarette releases 7.8 J/mg of tobacco[1], that a cigarette weighs around 1 g, and that about 5 trillions (5e12) cigarettes are smoked annually [2].
This amounts to 3.9e16 J, or, averaged over one year, 1.2e9 W; corresponding to the total US energy consumption around 1730, according to the figure in parent's link.
Insignificant today, but not a few centuries back.
> But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise.
Perhaps that promise was empty?
Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the safest mode on transportation by a wide margin.
China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic obstacles like in the west.
Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get energy.
Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power plant to happen.
Planes still crash from time to time. The regulations on the aviation industry are the ant version of regulations compared to the elephants that the nuclear industry has to put up with. planes are only 600x safer than driving by death toll [0]. That would be a shut-the-industry-down safety stat for nuclear plants.
That is why people are pointing out the nuclear safety rules are stupid. There is no comparable regulation on any industry. If nuclear plants were regulated to airline safety levels I would just be saying "meh, too expensive" in HN debates on the subject. The fact that it is still in the running despite crazy regulatory requirements is why there is reason to think it'd be a new age of energy if the technology was regulated sensibly.
the exclusion zone of fukushima hasn't changed since the beginning even after 10+ years. same for pripyat and chernobyl, those already close to 40 years. UK had to test sheep for radioactivity in certain domestic areas up until 2012.
nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.
This is an interesting argument and let's stipulate it is correct. In that case, take all the oil capex and spend it on power sources that are least costly, least risky, and come on line fastest. Who thinks nuclear is least costly, least risky, and arrives soonest? Anyone? Bueller?
The problem with those power sources–and this has been pointed out many, many times–is they don't make reliable base load power. The sun doesn't shine at night–no solar power. Winds don't blow on calm days–no wind power.
You are forced to build massive battery farms. Batteries require mining chemicals. For the scale we are talking about, you would be strip-mining the earth.
You are forced to make incredibly costly upgrades to electric grids–some of which are nearly a century old. Because the current grids can't handle the unreliable, wax-and-wane nature of solar and wind power.
You are forced to build gigantic solar panel and wind farms, destroying vast swathes of natural ecology and displacing and destroying many species.
You are forced to deal with solar panels and wind turbines at the end of life problem, especially solar panels which contain toxic chemicals which are at risk of leaching into the environment (think 'water table') unless they are properly disposed of. No one has a viable plan for proper disposal of solar panels at the scale we would have to be talking about.
And finally–the elephant in the room. The giant energy corporations just won't transition to renewable energy if they don't get a high-enough return on their investments. They want something like 12% ROI. This is extremely unlikely. They've left all their commitments to go renewable conditional so they can weasel out by saying it's not cost-effective for them. Just look at what's happening in reality: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/23/siemens-energy-scraps-profit...
The intermittency of renewables adds costs, but these costs are finite and declining. At this point it's likely that going with renewables will be cheaper than going with nuclear, especially as one projects these declines into the next couple of decades (when any nuclear plant started now will have to compete with improved renewable and storage technologies.)
"On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research"
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels."
The plan by RE people is 'Let's hope that a hundred different unlikely events all line up exactly right, and we'll be able to go fully RE'. This is not a realistic plan. If you did software engineering like this, you would be laughed out of the room (and then fired).
Fossil fuel companies would have no special advantage in most renewable and storage technologies, so it's rational they'd try to stick with what they're good at for as long as possible, perhaps even going down with the ship and returning value to the shareholders as they collapse.
Nothing about renewables is speculative. Renewables build-out is the largest share of energy capex. If renewables were "destroying many species" it would be all over the news. The 1980s called and wants their "solar will never..." argument back.
Out of curiosity, I decided to do some napkin math on this.
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.
Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).
However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.
If you look at the value delivered per acre by a solar field, it's massively (orders of magnitude) higher than the value delivered by a farm.
If land cost rules out solar, it also rules out agriculture. I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
> If land cost rules out solar, it also rules out agriculture.
Land cost rules out solar because there are alternatives which do not cost nearly as much in land (barring, per above, preventable and rare disasters). The same can't be said about agriculture; there ain't (to my knowledge) some agricultural equivalent of a nuclear power plant. Vertical farming might be it someday, but so far that hasn't panned out at scale.
> I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
We "nuke bros" ain't saying we shouldn't use PV at all, either. Solar panels:
- Are much more portable than nuclear plants
- Can be deployed in a wider range of locations than nuclear plants (Have you tried putting a molten-salt reactor on a rooftop? Solar's great for that!)
- Are great at providing energy for peak loads, energy to be stored later, and energy for things that don't typically need to be powered when there's no sunlight (e.g. air conditioning)
Solar panels have their place even in a world powered primarily by nuclear.
Likewise, livestock animals:
- Are much more portable than crop fields
- Can be raised in a wider range of locations than most crops (Have you tried growing corn on a mountain? Chickens and goats are great for that!)
- Taste good, produce byproducts that taste good (like eggs and milk), and provide nutrients that are harder to come by in vegan diets without either supplements or additional planning (e.g. multiple different crops).
Animal products have their place even in a world fed primarily by plant products.
Given this: yeah, by all means work toward reducing agriculture's land footprint - but that effort's independent from the effort to reduce the energy sector's land footprint, so it really shouldn't be surprising that people advocating for the power-per-land effort won't automatically start talking about the food-per-land effort in a conversation about power.
What are you talking about? It’s not all dollar cost. You can’t eat what a solar farm produces. A solar farm does not replaced the carbon sequestration of a forest. Endangered species displaced by solar farms (desert tortoises, for example), do not benefit from the “value” produced by a solar farm, quite the opposite! This is what the “nuke bros” are talking about!
We can assign monetary value to things and then compare them. Food, for example, has value mostly because of enjoyment, not because we absolutely have to eat (the elasticity of demand for beef is an example of this.) The value of the ecosystems displaced by farming, PV, or other land using activities can also be assigned a monetary value (since it's clearly seen as tradeable against economic benefits.)
Given that, we can ask what's the ratio of the value of the output of a farm to the value of the displaced natural ecosystem, and do the same for PV. And if we do that, we will find the ratio is MUCH higher for PV than it is for farming.
So, if the goal is to maximize utility for a given displacement of natural ecosystems, we come out ahead (on the margin) if we use land for PV instead of farming. If we want to return land to nature at lowest cost we would do that by returning farmland to nature, not PV land.
Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear plants or renewables, but going to nowhere.
This effects people too.
Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted for cost of nuclear?
> Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion?
1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000 per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal conditions.
2) I don't know if it is controversial; although if the people demanding the cleanup are the same lunatics who regulate the industry in the west I want to see what the justification is for spending $100s of billions of dollars.
3) The cleanup cost should be considered. When we multiply probability by cost it will be a short consideration. There is no way it is as bad as what everyone is currently already doing with coal. It is likely that it will also be better than renewables once waste is factored in, just because the volumes of material involved.
Pretty sure the cleanup costs for continued use of coal, oil, and natural gas due to global climate change far exceed any from nuclear, including even Chernobyl.
Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massive portions of these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima exclusion zone, that's for sure.
Also worth pointing out that there are plenty of low-lying inland areas both critical to the global economy and vulnerable to damage from climate change. Relevant to my own background: California's Central Valley sits pretty darn close to sea level, and is already dependent on rather elaborate levee systems to keep floodwaters and delta seawaters at bay. Said region produces large swaths of the world's entire supply of various fruits and vegetables; that farmland turning into ocean (a very real risk per various climate models) would be catastrophic for the global supply of said produce.
And that's just around sea level rise. The Central Valley's water issues are another probable symptom of global climate change, and just because the Valley lucked out with a wet winter this year doesn't mean that luck will persist. If push comes to shove, I'm sure California's agricultural sector would much rather invest the billions necessary for desalination and upgraded levees to address those symptoms than abandon California entirely - but those are still costs being thrust upon California due to a continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Not until fossil fuels are eliminated for all practical purposes. The only real competition we have today is against global climate change. Once we get past that hump, we can quibble about non-carbon-emitting details.
As long as coal, oil, and natural gas are burned and released into the atmosphere, the economic "competition" going forward is illusory. We're just buying the mitigation and cleanup efforts on credit.
If we tried to clean up the radioactive materials that coal powerplants pump into air - the cost would be even more ridiculous. But somehow we don't care.
I had suffered the downvoting on reddit before: write something backed with data against nuclear (specially if your source is a pro-nuclear report), and in less than 5 minutes you get -10 and no replies.
People think I’m being anti-nuclear, which I not what I said. It’s just an emotional response.
I’m just stating that the cleanups are expensive, stupidly expensive and the more nuclear we have the more chance of this happening again, or worse, there will be.
Look at coal seam gas jn the US, sole plants are leaking untold levels of methane. The US can’t regulate anything properly when it comes to energy.
People don’t realise that Fukushima wasn’t caused by a tsunami, it was caused by negligence.
Sure, it's Reddit. Point out that Europe and EU isn't the same and you get 50-100 downvotes in a discussion where the difference matters followed by a boatload of snarky responses. But this isn't Reddit. Here the same snark and opinions are put in pretty packages to avoid mods, but it's still there. Look at any mention of China or Socialism for example.
Kill is anyway a very bad metric for something that (if at all) will only manifest in some dice rolls of many dice probabilities involved in the cancer and other illnesses rolling game. In that sense, always surprised that deaths by coal exhaust get fully overattributed, but that this is completely ignored (e.g. when also claiming that Tschernobyl caused only few deaths, while we see a lot of young people still suffering today). Hard to take it serious then :/
Core meltdown and containment failure in (or near and upwind of) a megacity would be the obvious one.
Another exciting option: unnoticed containment failure of waste storage, which contaminates huge amounts of groundwater over weeks and months before the contaminated water starts reaching a densely populated area.
And don't tell me these things can't happen outside the Soviet Union. Greed and complacenty can always find a way.
This whole thread is about breeder reactors. The worst case (for a fast reactor) is the reactor rearranging in a meltdown and going prompt fast supercritical, resulting in a honest-to-god nuclear explosion. And remember a fast breeder is going to have tonnes of plutonium in that core, not the kilograms of a fission weapon.
If Russia will blow up Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant in Ukraine, then huge area of productive land and sea can be heavily contaminated, which can lead to global famine, which can kill millions.
This might be news to you, but Russia has the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and can kill billions of people, if it wanted to. They get to pick the amount of damage that they want to cause and then do that much damage. Anything from no damage to possible end of humanity. Similarly then can contaminate whatever area they want to.
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant doesn't really factor in to that picture.
Chernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, political corruption, and reckless behavior. No Western nuclear plant has ever run without a containment dome, has excluded basic plant design info from its operators, or put in incentives to run a reckless spin down experiment while also cutting all cooling and raising all control rods.
Three Mile Island was close to worst possible in a Western design, and those aspects that led to that accident were fixed 45 years ago.
Worst case isn't a nuclear accident at this point; it's continued reliance on fossil fuels and the accelerating effects from warming the planet. Huge swaths of land near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable for large scale human habitation due to extreme heat events.
We have already seen 129 degrees in those areas with a real heat index (due to humidity) of 142. These areas are already at their absolute limit. That's your continent-wide Red Forest.
Renewables capex already outstrips fossil fuels. Complete that transition and get all the power we need for less money, sooner, and you can buy private insurance at low rates to cover any risks.
How well do solar and wind infrastructures handle tornados and hurricanes? Also, consistent wind resources are notably absent in the South/Southeast. There are no Hoover Dam-like sites available there. Do you honestly expect to tell tens of millions of people that they should just be content with a single hurricane knocking out their electricity grid for a month? That's not realistic.
You cannot plan an electrical future on the hope that the weather is always pleasant and consistent. This is one of the reasons why fossil fuel dominance continues in those regions. Go ahead and draw a map of those places where hurricanes and tornados are most prevalent and their large scale adoption of solar and wind. They're not stupid. They're not just political. There are real concerns you are handwaving away because you (likely) like in a region that does not have these same concerns.
What works for California will not work for Georgia, Florida, or Nebraska as-is. Baseball-size hail destroys huge solar arrays let alone softball-size [0]. Nuclear plants laugh at hail and would handle and have(!) weathered tornados and hurricanes just fine.
Check the numbers. Even accounting for nuclear disasters outside the US like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the number of deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of electricity is lower than any fossil fuel, lower than wind, and about equal to solar. Just imagine if we put the same R&D force behind nuclear that we've done for solar. You think solar's cheap? It wasn't ten years ago. It was intense investment that made it so. We have the same potential for nuclear.
At the very least, we should be aggressively working toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the entire current need for US electrical production for the next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of uranium [1].
Renewable power sources have risks. Renewable power operators can buy insurance against those risks. Can nuclear plant operators buy insurance against nuclear risks? Or are taxpayers on the hook for that?
You seem to believe I am against renewable power. This is not so. This isn't anything against solar or wind. We need to be in this together against CO2-producing power generation. And yes, that should include nuclear for the reasons I gave earlier. I'm an not an insurance underwriter, but I am in favor of the grid staying up during and immediately after natural disasters. If advancements in solar can do that, sounds good, but so far, solar is susceptible to hail, tornados, and hurricanes whereas nuclear is not. So if my tax dollars help keep the lights on, the hospitals running, and the air conditioning flowing, so be it.
> At the very least, we should be aggressively working toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the entire current need for US electrical production for the next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of uranium
So, you propose to increase number of regulations and total cost of the nuclear energy, right?
We haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for [insert any energy source here]. So?
Covering too much land in solar panels could have dire long-term effects that we don't even know. Sucking too much energy out of the air with windmills could too. All energy sources have risks.
We absolutely have seen worst case failures for everything except perhaps dam failures. Your solar and windmill speculations are completely implausible, relying on nebulous things "we don't know".
But we know exactly how badly nuclear reactors can fail, we know exactly how widely nuclear contamination can spread, and we know exactly what it can do to people. The results if those things happened on a large scale in a densely populated area are not speculative at all.
If nuclear safety rules would be applied to dams, we would need to tear them all down, because those devilish things killed thousand times more people than nuclear ever did.
Also a big chemical plant failure has potential to kill more people than all nuclear failures combined - See Bhopal disaster
> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction, management, and operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”.
For me that turned the whole piece from a level-headed well-reasoned argument from domain experts to a Facebook political rant. That isn’t to say I agree or disagree with DEI initiatives, that sentence simply undermines the credibility of all that came before.
Absolutely false premise from the first sentence. It is NOT possible for the world to live like the first world did in the 20th century. And nuclear energy is an apocalypically short-sited solution, mostly favored by the current energy industry for maintaining the current model of distribution.
It's quite a lot less space than you think. There's a giant dump outside Denver international airport that is orders of magnitude larger than we'd need. There are of course other factors, but space is not one of them.
One of the great parts of using a breeder reactor is it burns up all the harmful fuel. What's left decays very quickly, so there just isn't much to store.
Nu-cu-lar is scary. And it's much cheaper to just tell the working class they can't heat/cool their homes any more, the little people have just got to stop using energy...
The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste disposal set up, I am all ears. Really.
But every generation of nuclear plant has promised "power too cheap to meter". The last 3 generations all failed to deliver (and have been ruinously expensive). Gen 4 isn't expected to start commercial operations until 2035 I think?
This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality.
I am open to some of the SME concepts (mass manufacturing, large numbers of small units) because they seem to deal with at least some of the economic issues nuclear has.
But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is.
I actually think that being small, simple, short term, politically unimportant with commodity parts is to other renewables (wind, solar etc) what reliability is for nuclear.
> The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste disposal set up, I am all ears. Really.
> This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality.
> But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is.
I don't think we're operating from the same base set of facts. Fission is a reality now. Entire countries rely on it for their entire grid, safely and reliably. TFA was just saying everyone could, and I agree. It's not a transition of kind, but of degree, which is much easier.
This is not to say solar and wind have to place (which triggers a different kind of antibodies), just that fission does too.
That there exist countries with lots of fission does not mean there's a place for construction of new fission power plants. Existing capital can continue to be operated long after it no longer makes sense to replace it, due to sunk costs.
You're right in principle, but I disagree on the particulars. Not to attempt to convince you, just to explain my rationale: we have proven it works. It is carbon zero (ish). It slots into the grid. The fuel source is not a problem. The byproducts are containable. It can serve as baseload for distributed solar and I guess wind (though wind is a capital disaster for other reasons). And nuclear waste is ugly for 500 years, but can serve other uses in that time, and is not large, in that it could be geographically localized. There are risks to all technology transitions, but the logistics of nuclear seem as easy as or easier than the logistics of massive solar and battery storage. And neither have the potentially catastrophic side effects of climate change so it's a necessity to choose one, the other, or a mix of both. Just let fission play.
I can stipulate all your claims there and still argue that it doesn't make sense to build more nuclear power plants. You have not made the case for that.
Just pointing out that your rationale is not something that should have convinced even you. So ask yourself: if you cannot construct an argument that can convince someone else of your position, did you really arrive at that position by rational means?
You're arguing from a non-foundation, just a quip against my comments, but I wish to politely decline further discussion. My point in commenting was to point out that the comment further up the chain was ... quite against the evidence at hand.
> That there exist countries with lots of fission does not mean there's a place for construction of new fission power plants. Existing capital can continue to be operated long after it no longer makes sense to replace it, due to sunk costs.
I guess this is an assumption that they have outlived their usefulness and soldier on like zombies? There's no evidence given there, so it doesn't matter.
If you are in fact a policy maker giving me the exclusive chance to redirect funding and regulations to support nuclear energy as outlined in this article, then please let me know and I'll compile a survey and fully justify my opinion.
Renewables = a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geo, and wave, backed up by storage and a more efficient grid, supplement by various local - down to household - generation options. Supported by smarter and larger grids.
The absolute criminality of the last few decades means that renewable tech is decades behind where it could have been with a no-compromise crash development program starting in the 90s.
The real problem with renewable has always been political. Renewables are inherently diverse and distributed. They're not limited to a very small number of critical supply chains and economic choke points. And some people are really unhappy about that.
Renewables are popular with most demos. What's even more popular is low LCOE. The technical challenges of energy storage can be hand waved away, but not if you want to actually solve the problems.
On practice, my mother pays 30€ a month of electricity in France, where nuclear energy is everywhere. She asked for a quote to get panels on her house, and they got back to her with 20000€.
Sure you can move the needle by noting I drain way more power than her, than she heats her house using fossil fuel and that the quotes could be have been reduced in many ways.
You can also note that solar panels have to be replaced several times, take much more space, don't have to including wiring in their ROI calculation (while nuclear does for some weird reason) and are created by electricity generated by fossil or nuclear fuel, so their building price is already cheap.
I mean that in France, the reports assessing the cost of the energy produced by wind turbines and solar panels don't include the wiring from the source of energy to where the energy is distributed.
Which is logical.
For some reason I don't know, nuclear reactors cost evaluation must include the wiring.
We're close to, or even at, the point where hydrogen made with solar, then burned in combined cycle power plants, produces power more cheaply than nuclear. Of course, in a renewable energy system, only a fraction of the energy has to go through hydrogen; much will be consumed directly from the grid (or through short term storage.)
When I first saw it in Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, it followed with the quote "You need to take good care of your star or it gets all dark and icky." I suspect it was parodying some ad that must've gone like "...good care of your hair..."
A star is just a giant fusion reactor. We just need to add more fusion material (hydrogen) and remove the waste material, which gathers in the core and makes it more difficult for the fusion reaction to continue. It would be possible to prolong the life of the Sun for a while by adding more hydrogen to it, and ideally taking out the heavier elements at the center, which might also be valuable on their own. This seems pretty impossible today, but given we survive enough time until this becomes a problem, then we might find ways to also fix it.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
My apologies, this was not intended to be inflammatory but the quotes out of the article and the comments were raised to point out that these kinds of baseless and biased comments from the author detract from the objective quality of the information previously presented in the article and lower the credibility of the author and even the information that the author presents.
I know. But from an HN point of view, the thing to do is to simply ignore the "baseless and biased" aspect and focus on the "objective quality" aspect instead. That's the way to end up having interesting conversations instead of getting stuck in annoying loops.
> operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”
Indeed a gem. Or do you want a nuclear power plant in your neighbourhood managed by people who happen to be the pet-minority-du-jour on Twitter?
If you continue to post unsubstantive comments and/or take HN threads further into flamewar, we are going to have to ban you. Your account has been doing a ton of this, and that's seriously not ok. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Hellish flamewar is not ok on this site, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. Your comments stand out in this flamewar as being distinctly the most hellish. Not only that, you've broken the site guidelines so egregiously elsewhere (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36744128) that I think we have to ban this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: I changed my mind and unbanned you because your recent comments before these two threads don't look this egregious, although you've still been breaking the site guidelines and that's not ok. Please fix this going forward.
I appreciate your eternal level-headedness and poise. I need checks as much as anyone. I won't disparage HN's community; I have become sour to the image of tech-oriented rationalists vs the reality and am projecting expectations onto Toms, Dicks, and Nancys. My weight to bear of course.
They ended up hiring 25-30yo white males. It wasn't about color. They just didn't want to pay full wages and didn't want to be told a hard "no" because of obvious safety problems.
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https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.