I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history.
We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.
We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.
Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market®ulations for nuclear were set up.
Government largely financed it and insures it.
The large scale, the monopolistic businesses and the government centric energy politics made it ideal for corruption. Remember, Fukushima was claimed to be fully save after inspections, just before the accident happened, which destroyed several reactors.
The investment into nuclear energy was a political decision. Every further investment into nuclear is a political decision. The 'small modern reactors' are mostly funded by government and the users are mostly military. The military is already mostly the only user of small reactors: nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Now we see other players which favor other energy politics (like the current US President who favors fossil fuels like coal, because his voters want jobs in the coal industry).
>It was developed out of government driven military technology
That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.
Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet.
PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.
"Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons."
Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
In terms of manufacture, I agree. Further, Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years so we don't currently need anything in the way of production. So, yes direct production was mostly from dedicated reactors.
However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach.
The UK had 26 of these Magnox reactors for electricity production. These nuclear reactors were coming out of military technology and some of them were built and operated for dual use: Plutonium production and energy production.
The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
That was essentially a demonstration plant. Note that it only ran for six years, only produced 1,926 kg of plutonium over its entire lifespan, and was shut down because producing plutonium from spent fuel from commercial power reactors proved to be uneconomic.
2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.
It's another example of a reactor designed to produce electricity and plutionium. North Korea a;so operated a smaller 5 MWe reactor creating electricity for a town and plutonium for their weapons program.
It's a reactor designed to produce large amounts of plutonium. Any reactor produces some amount of energy, nuclear reactions are famous for their energy creation.
>But not electricity. For that a power plant has also turbines, generators, etc., ...
Yes,but if you don't do that, you're just wasting energy. The US realized that, which is why they added electricity generation to the N Reactor. Both were still designed to create plutonium, and would not be built without the aim of nuclear weapons.
It's like saying we grow the same corn for the edible part and for biomass. While technically true, the edible part is driving the production.
>Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons.
ARPANET was designed, built, and operated to enable the exchange of information in the face of nuclear annihilation of cities.
The big famous radio dish on top of the hill behind Stanford and the signals research that went into it was placed there to look for anti-ICBM radar signals bouncing off of the moon from Russia.
We are standing on a mountain of tech based on research driven by the cold war. Nuclear energy is no different.
My favorite bit is, the first customer & funding grant of the transistor was for a particular application that needed something far more resilient to vibration, temperature, etc than vacuum tubes - ICBM's.
It's a bit different when you use it for terrorbombing not one, but two cities - to make sure the design works.
I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.
That is assuming Hiroshima and Nagasaki sped up the process of surrender (and probably assuming that most of that million of lives would have been lost to firebombing civilian targets). I don't think the point is unclear - but it could very well be wrong.
I don't think alternate-history fables is much of a defense for war crimes, however.
You might hold that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done to speed up Japan's surrender, and/or that they did speed up Japan's surrender by a meaningful amount. Further, you might argue that somehow two bombs was meaningfully better than one for this purpose.
From historical record, I'd say it's more likely Japan would've surrendered quickly either way - and that the motivation was more on establishing the USA as a superpower for the post-war era.
Either way, I think it's hard to argue that dropping of nuclear bombs on cities was done "for the sake of their people". After all, no-one was forcing the US to continue the war in the Pacific - or to capture Japan. The US could have sought a cease-fire and withdrawn to Hawaii or similar earlier borders. If the goal was to "save lives".
Well most of the internet and internet companies continue to exist because of military tech, and military strategy. It turns out the internet is a wonderful tool for psy-ops, and social influence, a la Arab Springs. Even Tor, and decentralization technologies are/were military tools.
Come on, network communication and nuclear energy are different planets. I kinda agree that without national plants things might have been better, but these kinds of efforts and risks cannot exist outside of govt for a while.
It will take some guys to figure out MSR designs if possible, and then they'll be small and safe enough to access the private market.
On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout.
And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly.
"And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly."
As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared.
This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.
Humans can detect CO2. An elevated level of CO2 makes you feel out of breath. Reducing O2 has no impact other than you pass out.
If you use fire, the "invisible" risks are oxygen deprivation or monoxide poisoning. You will be quite aware that something is wrong when there is too much CO2.
That has nothing to do with the nonsense that we should avoid using something powerful or dangerous simply because our human senses are not equipped to detect it. You are literally surrounded by toxicity in modern materials, power transmission, and machinery. 110 volts is enough to arc and create ozone. Basements can accumulate radon. Cooking can release toxic gasses. These are not reasons alone to avoid modern conveniences.
Yet the Japanese use/used the crap out of nuclear. You'd think they of all people would want nothing to do with it. At the end of the day it's all about dollars.
The Japanese people do largely want nothing to do with nuclear energy. Opposition to it still triggers some of their largest scale protests in a country that does everything to shy away from this kind of unrest.
But the political reality is that Japan is a client state of the US empire and the base of its operations in SE Asia. It's not functionally a democracy. The people who made money off of it were the alliance of conservative politicians and organized crime, backed by the CIA, who brought it to the country in the first place.
Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
> In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres respectively, both induced by magnitude 7.7 earthquakes. The June 1896 earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.3 produced a tsunami with run-up height of 38 metres in Tohoku region, killing more than 27,000 people.
This risk needs to be addressed. That many people were killed by a tsunami is a catastrophe. But one would also like to have a stable energy system that does not go down like that and creates a huge problem (financial, technological, human, ...) for several decades.
The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Reactors were claimed save, which in a single event were totally wrecked. We are not talking about a single problem, but multiple problems (failing electricity backups, failing outside electricity, exploding buildings, ...), design mistakes (fuel is difficult to reach) and problems generated by running these reactors (like the amount of spent fuel on-site which needs lots of electricity for cooling).
> The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption.
Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen.
These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed [0].
The solution? Just "regulate" that in the case of emergency cooling the cooling water needs to be pre-heated, so the temperature shock doesn't break the pressure vessel.
Whatever could go wrong with that approach? I guess nobody can imagine a scenario in which the reactor would need massive cooling but the surrounding infrastructure is destroyed and the water can't be pre-heated, what happens then?
Nobody knows and I'd be really surprised if anybody, in a position of responsibility, has even thought that far about this whole mess. It rather feels like they are operating on the principle of "Let's just hope this never happens instead of planning for what we gonna do when it happens and set resources aside".
New inspection tools showed micro fissures. The power plant was stopped as a precaution.
Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted. Still extra security measures are set, just in case.
To me this just shows that the security is taken seriously. Why is the public opinion so scared about such an exemplary event?
> Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted.
Sorry but that's plain and simply wrong, you are vastly misrepresenting the situation and chain of events.
These micro-fractures are not part of the design and they are evolving [0], documentation of the manufacturing can't be found and it's assumed the manufacturer made them vanish on purpose to hide the fact that cheaper materials had been used to build, leading to the fractures.
These reactors have been controversial for years, they've been taken offline and online many times to look for new fractures and they keep finding new ones, fractures which shouldn't even be there in the first place.
It's amazing how you try to turn this into an "everything is safe, there's no reason to be worried, it was always broken!" even tho everything about this screams "you better be worried" and the neighboring German states (and the Dutch) are already hoarding Iodine tablets [1].
Even the Belgians themselves handed them out to their population, tho they used ISIS as a scapegoat at that time [2]
We are talking about the pressure vessel here, not some unimportant plumping part on some auxiliary system, and they just keep on watching as more fractures build up in there. Where do you think this is gonna lead? The warning signs can't get any worse than this considering these reactors are also running past their original life time.
Your own post confirms my assertion that the magnitude 9 earthquake was an exceedingly rare event and did not necessarily need to be designed for. It had been at least one hundred years since the last earthquake of that magnitude. Same for a >10 meter tsunami.
Large scale disasters almost always present as a conglomerate of smaller problems; multiple failures during 100-500 year disasters once again do not indicate poor safety standards and/or corruption.
Safety design is expensive, and there is always a balance between cost and risk, in literally everything that we as humans do, individually and collectively. Hindsight alone is not enough to bill this reactor as unsafe. There are thousands of BWRs operating globally without incident, and they have been for decades. It is ignorant to presume that they are all time bombs.
Edit: I'd like to kindly remind the community that down votes are not for communicating disagreement.
How can you say it was safe with a straight face when it clearly wasn't? That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
>That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
I'd argue it's more like saying your car is safe when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
It is safe. The safest minivan is fantastically safe. Then it smashes into a semi truck at 80 mph and everyone dies. It was still a safe car, when compared to other cars.
That's a perfectly valid and logical conclusion, and indeed there are many big companies you've heard of (including Waymo, Tesla, Uber, and many conventional auto manufacturers) who are working on precisely that.
Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be.
"Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be."
You have it exactly backwards. Manually operated nuclear plants will evolve into fully automated, completely safe designs. A very similar approach to self-driving cars.
Lets take your car that is smashed, upside-down in a ditch.
When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens. Some vehicles have such safety precautions, but only when the situation seems to warrant it (a Jeep, for example).
The nuclear plant was the same. It was safe when it was built, only it wasn't designed to handle that magnitude of earthquake because that strength is rare, especially for that area. This is despite designing it to withstand stronger than ever recorded earthquakes. Sure, afterwards the plant was unsafe, but so are many cars after accidents.
> In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens.
Except that cars now days do undergo rollover tests and are required to support 3x their weight when upside down.
> Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
I just read that some experts believe the standard should be increased to 4x. My previous assumption about my safety was a bit off, I am safe, but I could be safer.
Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds.
The region got so small radiation dose it is already basically harmless ... Decontamination efforts will make it pass even irrational radiation safety levels within 10-20 years. "hundreds" of years is therefore stupid hyperbole.
Public has not accepted nuclear risks because it is ridiculously misinformed. Don't spread pointless fearmongering, please.
> Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds.
By official counts, 34 killed directly in the evacuation, 573 total, including indirectly, due to the disaster,and estimates are even with the evacuation, additional long-term cancer deaths due to the release could be in the 100+ range as well.
Well, I guess it's because I would consider my car extremely safe, with something stupid like 12 airbags, active brake assist, active collision prevention, it will even call for help automatically after an accident, without any input from me. Yet obviously it's not safe if it gets hit by a truck going 80mph, and it's not an impossible scenario. If they made fukishima stronger to withstand larger tsunamis, it could still be destroyed by an even larger one. It was "safe" within certain parameters.
We can argue that those parameters were wrong, but that's a different discussion.
Well, would be sufficiently safe. Just not in Fukushima.
It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok.
Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis.
Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generators brought by trucks due to some electrical incompatibility.
Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
> Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
That's really where you want to put the blame? Don't you think that's a bit dishonest?
Nobody is stopping the operators of plants from modernizing plants, nobody except the realities of economics.
Don't kid yourself: If they can keep on running reactors with the least possible effort they will do so because everything related to nuclear involves massive investment costs.
If you had the choice between spending several billion of dollars on modernizing a plant, which you've already amortized, or NOT spending several billion dollars while still making massive profits from the plant, which of these two is the more likely thing to happen? Greed always wins out.
It's not like plant operators want to modernize their plants and are being stopped by protests, nobody is stopping them from modernizing except for their own economic bottom line.
And how do you argue about the Diablo "safety" then? It's 6m above sea level, near a major fault line, in fact the only fault in the ring of fire which didn't go off yet in the last decade, and it's critical near to a major technical hub which will be destroyed for hundreds of years if the fault goes off, on land or at sea.
Your standard of safety does not sound appropriate for nuclear reactors. And, the decision not to spend the money to make Fukushima safer may well have been a craven, if not corrupt, one. TEPCO has been pretty sleazy ever since the accident.
So is it really economically at that point? Is developing, prototyping and building a next gen reactor worth the money? Do we even know how much it would take to account for other 1-in-100 year risks? Is it worth it over better solar/wind? Even this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-...
I think the answers are clearly, no, no, no, and fuck no. We should be spending money on better solar, wind, having a distributed energy grid, and fusion. Not on a technology that is equivalent to diesel at this point, and something that will kill us.
This is a debate we have all the time, here in France, where we chose nuclear energy as main source of energy for several decades. Nowadays, everybody but lobbyists (because for those reasons, nuclear industry is strong, here) seems to agree renewable is the way to go (but we're far to be able to replace nuclear with renewable), mainly because:
* we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
* every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
Why do you need renewable when there is practically unlimited nuclear fuel available.
> * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel. Different types of reactors can use that 'waste' and produce energy. Some reactor types produce far less, easier to deal with 'waste'. Much of that waste again can be used for different application.
The Nuclear waste issue is one of the most successful fear mongering campaigns ever.
The necessary science is done, early version of the technology were developed and are proven to work.
The problem is that no more work is put in developing and improving nuclear power but renewable energy gets money for research and subsidies like crazy. Coal also gets subsidies in many places.
> * every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
This is again manly a problem because of the lack of improvement over time. Different types of reacts would make this far easier. Sadly however we are still using the type of reactors designed for submarines.
Why do you need a transitional solution? Why not Manhattan-Project the heck out of a purely renewable replacement? Coal is, for a variety of reasons, a terrible stopgap. And nuclear buildout is too slow and expensive.
For the cost of building significant new nuclear, we could build the new storage mechanisms, and all the solar/wind needed. Faster.
That's a hard question. I certainly would not support replacing our nuclear plants with coal plants, I would prefer everyone stay with their current system and we go as fast as possible to replace them with something worth it : trying to replace a bad source with an other bad one, but a bit better, costs time, money and human resources.
But the article kind of make me raise an eyebrow when they say that for highly radioactive wastes, we just have to find deep burial sites that will know no geological activity for one million year. Certainly doesn't sound as easy as implied, especially if all earth starts using nuclear power as main energy source.
That being said, I remember reading a few months ago about a breakthrough in Germany in nuclear field, where no rare material (like plutonium) was needed, and wastes were greatly reduced. This could be a global way (and then, we may not even need renewable).
>I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history.
It's more or less ensured that we won't be in any shape to record histories sooner rather than later.
What do you mean "politicization"? Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened. Then people were very afraid. These were real possibilities. Does anyone want to live near a nuclear power plant? Do you? I sure as hell would not. How can you twist fear of a disaster in "politicization"?
You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the risks of global warming and greenhouse gasses back in the heyday of nuclear power, i.e. the 1970's. The last nuclear power plant in the US was built in the 1970s, which was when the last major accident that happened in the US (3 mile Island). That's not even considering Chernobyl.
It was a conscious decision of a particular US military official (an admiral, IIRC) to use 235U / Pu based process in atomic power generation projects, specifically to be able to generate Pu in large quantities should a need arise.
If Th-based processes were chosen, that cannot easily generate Pu, nuclear proliferation won't be such a hazard. It would have far-reaching political consequences. E.g. USA is strictly against the Iran's nuclear program specifically because it might help produce bomb-grade fissile material.
235U-based processes are also pretty inefficient: about 1% of the nuclear material is burned when the (very active) fuel needs another cycle of refinement. Known Th-bases processes produce somehow less-active waste, and can burn more of the fuel before refinement is necessary.
A number of new, quite a bit safer, nuclear projects aimed to burn 235U and the current stockpiles of nuclear waste exist. But due to the fear-mongering, and likely due to relatively low coal and oil prices, they have little chance to be implemented, at least, in a reasonably short term.
No, I won't mind living near a well-maintained nuclear plant. In fact, I lived ~90km from one for 20+ years. I would be much less happy to live next to a major coal-burning plant, since it produces rather noticeable levels of radioactive contamination during normal operation [1].
> Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened.
Yeah, I'm surprised by how little attention this gets. A significant accident occurred that wasn't supposed to, and subsequent investigations showed that there were significant lapses, including from regulators. People can't be experts in nuclear plant design, construct, regulation, inspections, etc., so they need to be able to rely on the authorities in charge. When that trust is betrayed, it naturally has consequences. You can't just say to people, "Well, yeah, last time we told you to trust us we were completely wrong, but this time will be different!"
When problems happen that aren't supposed to happen, people are naturally going to be overly cautious and skeptical of future assurances. That's not an entirely unreasonable reaction.
Yes I do want to live next to a nuclear power plant. I miss my last house where I did, but I now work in a different state: it would be several hours every day of driving to live next to one.
Nuclear power plants are good neighbors: quiet and they pay a lot of taxes. Most of my neighbors when asked where the nuclear plant was pointed to the smokestacks on the coal power plant miles away.
I don't want to live next to a nuclear power plant, but I would be fine with living near a dozen of them.
You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment. Further, the sole large power plant in an area is automatically a military target, whereas if the same capacity were split across many facilities it becomes impractical to attack or control them all.
I'd love to see each municipality in the US above a certain population own and operate its own small reactor, using it to power the municipal utilities. But I do have a bit of a problem with a federal agency operating the only nuclear reactor in a 100-mile radius. It just ends up managed differently, becoming a political power center in addition to an electrical power center.
> You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment.
A higher number of reactors also means more chances that one of them fails because reactors that don't exist can't fail but those that do most certainly can.
As such the security gains, from infrastructure synergies, would have to be massive to actually be able to offset that.
The reactor that does not exist fails by releasing radioactive fly ash from the coal plant that was never shut down, because nothing was ever built to replace it. Don't discount substitution effects. Your argument would not put safety belts in cars, because the belt that was never installed cannot strangle or entrap its passenger.
Also, do you know of any reasons why the 1000th instance of a design might be less prone to failure than the 1st, or 10th?
Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles? There are many thousands of car door handles in use daily, such that all common failure modes have been seen, and then addressed in later manufactured models. The handle that fails can make the next handle made better able to avoid that specific failure mode.
You want things to fail just a little bit, but not enough to hurt anyone or cost too much money. If something fails, that means it isn't over-engineered for its intended purpose. And the failure point may then be examined to make the next design better, and improve upon existing maintenance strategies.
> The reactor that does not exist fails by releasing radioactive fly ash from the coal plant that was never shut down, because nothing was ever built to replace it. Don't discount substitution effects. Your argument would not put safety belts in cars, because the belt that was never installed cannot strangle or entrap its passenger.
That's a non-sequitur, there are alternatives besides coal just like there are more solutions to the problem than merely increasing energy production.
> Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles?
A car handle is only one piece of a bigger machine, one could argue it's actually rather unimportant because if your car handle fails your car still drives, as such I'm not sure that's actually a good example.
How many iterations did we have on cars, as a whole system, so far? Over a century of designing cars and how close are we to a car that never fails? Which should be a way easier task than trying to make nuclear reactor safe, we had more time for it and even way more need for it, yet we are still nowhere close to having our "perfect cars", as such I just don't see how "perfect nuclear" is anywhere in our reach.
so what is the alternative in the meantime? Everyone breathing coal particles and many people dying of lung cancer before their time? How is the current energy production safe by anY standards? did you even read the article ?
We would be in a better place with respect to greenhouse gasses. But we're also subject to long term disposal of waste products and high risk of pollution of groundwater, and other water sources. Some of those risks will be risks for thousands of years.
The typical answers from nuclear proponents never cover what to do with the waste product.
> will go down as one of the major blunders in human history.
I agree, inability to properly advance nuclear energy will will be regarded as a big blunder in the future.
The great irony that Greenpeace, which supposedly wants to save environment, dealt so much damage to it, by protesting nuclear energy.
I bet Fukushima was pretty damn safe, maybe one of the best nuclear power plants designed. The best designs cannot account for everything. There is always a risk of an accident, and you need consider not just accidental but intentional mishaps (dirty bombs).
Very low risk of something happening is not the same is the damaged caused if that risk becomes a reality.
The best designs can remove hole categories of errors. Different reactor types can be passively save and carry virtually zero risk catastrophic failure.
Fukushima was a boiling water reactor, which is not a good design. A good design would be passively safe, which more or less means that you can turn off the plant and walk away without a disaster occurring.
Yes. Pressurized water reactors are very old, they were developed around the same time as boiling water reactors, in the 50s.
Their superior safety has been known for a long time as well, which is why all 58 French reactors active today are PWRs (and most of those in the US are as well).
That being said, it is still probably a bad idea to put a power plant in a place which is known to be exposed to tsunami...
I believe we had molten salt prototypes already at that time. If that design were favoured, instead of pressurised water, I bet it would have been pretty damn safe.
I believe they achieved relatively high standards despite the lack of funds anyway. (By the way, molten salt is coming back, but mostly lack the funding necessary to prototype bigger reactors.)
"Good" design is ill defined. The fact that a design is riskier than an alternative does not immediately make it worse. Especially when safety can be engineered to arbitrary standards with enough money.
> Especially when safety can be engineered to arbitrary standards with enough money.
There is not 'enough money'. If a reactor shows cracks in the steel in critical places, preventing this upfront might not be technologically possible and afterwards repairing might also be so expensive, that it economically makes no sense.
The big problem: if there is a technical problem, it is politically a very tough decision to close it, because of the costs involved (loss of profits from selling electricity, costs of decommissioning, costs of replacement, ...). Thus a more or less clear need to shutdown the reactor because of technical unfitness will conflict with financial interests and the scale of the money involved makes it worse.
I live pretty close to the San Onofre Nuclear station. They made some upgrades planned for 20 years of operation in 2010, and ended up shutting down the reactor due to premature wear in 2012, and are now planning to decommission the station. I'd be more worried about the financial concerns as an excuse to continue operating an unsafe station if I wasn't seeing the opposite happening in my own back yard right now.
The fact that a reactor may be failing after decades of use does not make it a poor design.
One optimizes for longevity during design, as well as other factors which cost money. It may have, for example, been cheaper to construct, with a strict lifetime after which it would be taken down."Good design" is almost always subjective.
That politics drive nuclear operators to maintain plants past their lifetimes does not indicate poor engineering.
> I bet Fukushima was pretty damn safe, maybe one of the best nuclear power plants designed.
While it was an okay plant, they'd actually been warned about the emergency cooling system as early as 1967. Also, they ignored a 2008 study saying that their plant was vulnerable to tsunamis. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found that all the causes of the accident were foreseeable prior to 2011.
> The best designs cannot account for everything.
The common factor in nuclear accidents so far has been operator error, and it's true the best designs cannot completely account for that.
Seriously, there's zero reason that we don't have small portable safe nuclear reactors to power neighbourhoods and large oceangoing vessels by now. Since ocean freight liners and oil tankers produce a large portion if not the largest portion of the current air pollution, it just makes sense to get them completely off of diesel and bunker fuel and equip them with small nuclear reactions, something like a LFTR would be perfect... had we spent the last 40-50 years researching them.
Thankfully, at least China has picked up the slack with LFTR research and hope to have something going within the next 5-10 years. Maybe then the rest of the world will wake up.
The problem with nuclear goes back to the beginning. The original reason for nuclear research, and even the first reactors, was to breed bomb material. Nuclear power was an extension of "atoms for peace" which was originally political cover to continue weapons programs.
Some commercial reactors are secretly used for this purpose even today.
Nuclear may have a bright future but it's extremely difficult to cleave energy from the state interest in weapons. And I'm not just talking about the US, this is an issue with nuclear power worldwide.
The biggest blunder was using nuclear technology for bombs first. I'm afraid the word is forever tainted by history.
I don't understand why this would have any effect on domestic nuclear power production in the nations that already have nuclear weapons. Probably the most important question: why don't the US and China get more of their domestic power from Nuclear?
Also, I need to some source for the claims that Atoms for Peace was meant as a cover to transfer nuclear technology. I believe the program was created as a way to provide civilian nuclear generation capabilities to friendly nations, in return for a guarantee that nations would not use the technology for making nuclear weapons (India was probably the most famous "rogue": they used the know-how from the research reactors to build an actual nuclear weapon).
TRIGA type research reactors, probably the most popular model, are specifically designed to be "pulse reactors" that can produce rapid power spikes of 20,000+MW. I don't see how you could argue that the main purpose isn't simulating nuclear detonations.
Same with Sandia Z Pinch machine and NIF. It's all dual purpose tech to simulate bombs since actual testing isn't done anymore.
You won't find anyone that says it outright but the government interest in pulsed power is awful suspect.
I believe the focus on CO2 will go down as a pretty big blunder. As for nuclear, it seems pretty expensive when you account for the total lifecycle of the plants (see sibling comment from France).
The recalcitrant problem of nuclear waste storage is now a permanent part of human history going forward even if not one single nuke plant is ever onlined again. So the dangers of nukes are here to stay no matter what. Making a new nuke plant or not will not change this problem. One could even argue that if we continue developing nuke plants we'll get better at dealing with the waste. If we don't we'll get worse.
Having said that, it takes 30 years to online a new nuke plant. They have to be maintained over centuries. It's easier to make wind farms, geothermal and photovoltaics today, right now. We can't wait 30+ years for nukes to help our clean energy future happen.
Breeder reactors mostly fix the waste problem. Even without breeders, you should think hard about the tradeoff of having a fairly limited amount of solid stuff that you have to take care of for a very long time versus altering the climate of the whole planet and potentially messing up phytoplankton for a very long time, all while also causing all kinds of pollution.
Seems like a "grass is greener" case. The people of Fukushima Prefecture wish they could trade their nuke waste problem for a few dozen feet of sea level. I know I would if I were them.
Nuclear suffers from the same problems as many political issues. The greatest risks of nuclear energy is not "safety," but rather cost, insurance, and financing. As humans our brains are attuned to avoid worst case scenarios instead of fearing more likely, but less scary situations.
Both sides hear the talking points. The talking points target our most passionate and overriding fears, instead of real world concerns. This is because these false fears are more effective than real ones for changing minds.
Having run for office on a few occasions, the most important factor about winning seems to be having a good narrative-- one which seems consistent with voters' personal experiences.
I'm more afraid of having nuclear power plants now that we no longer have a thriving industry to support innovation and technological progress in the field. From my understanding, we stopped innovating in fission power plant design decades ago.
We'd be in a far better GHG situation if we had poured all that r&d into renewables, would have gotten solar cost below fossil 20-30 years earlier and probably left fracking and tar sands hydrocarbons forever in the ground.
One key problem... much of the world's population lives in nations socially incapable of supporting nuclear power, or with governments that cannot be trusted with significant quantities of nuclear materials due to proliferation, or both.
Advocacy of nuclear has a bad tendency to think of "the world" as the US, Europe, Japan, and China. Any solution that aggravates the haves/have-nots divide is going to cause problems.
The problem with nuclear energy is that a nuclear power plant isn't very different in concept from a nuclear bomb. Getting the latter from the former is a serious concern. Having the former accidentally turn into a dirty nuke (not a lot of force, but lots of fallout), is scarily easy. Just see 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl.
It is very different. You can't just make an atom bomb out of what's available at a nuclear plant. They're entirely different concepts requiting diffrrent materials.
Chernobyl was an outdated design known to be dangerous at the time it was made, and something like the Chernobyl incident can't happen on anything newer. A study found statistically insignificant rises in cancer rates from the 3 Mile incident.
I recommend the book Atomic Accidents, it's very informative and I believe it went over specifically why a nuclear plant can't just explode like an atom bomb or even really help you make one.
I think it's worthwhile to differentiate between a critical mass fission/fusion bomb and a dirty bomb. A dirty bomb can be made from anything radioactive coupled with a conventional explosive, since the goal is just to spread the radioactive material as widely as possible. Fission/fusion bombs (what we typically would consider as "atomic bombs") are, as you said, way harder to pull off. The general public definitely likes to conflate the two.
No, your average nuclear plant doesn't have the makings of an atom bomb. But countries that are running nuclear power plants have an obvious incentive to create enrichment facilities for their nuclear power. These facilities are similar to those that enrich further for a nuclear bomb. Several countries have achieved nuclear bombs this way.
Furthermore nuclear plants do not all work the same way. There are advocates of thorium nuclear plants, because thorium is a much more abundant fuel source that should be able to operate more cleanly than uranium. However those plants generate uranium-233 which can be potentially separated through chemical processes in plants that are a lot easier to hide than centrifuges used for enrichment.
Both ways, nuclear power can be a step on the way to nuclear proliferation.
The fact that you would reference TMI in reference to dirty bombs is extremely telling in that you have no idea what you're talking about. The average radiation exposure outside TMI compound was less that an airplane flight or x-ray. Bananas are literally more dangerous.
Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable, the public was scared witless of the possibility that there was an exposure. As a result millions of people were left with the concern that they could get cancer decades down the road. This public fear is also the most important impact of a dirty nuclear bomb used as a terrorist weapon. Very few of people will get sick, and fewer still will die. But lots will be scared.
> Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable,
Believable has nothing to do with it. An average dose of worst case 1000 times higher, 1.4 REM, doesn't even violate the US federal annual dose limits. Attempting to equivocate this with dirty bombs is either ignorant or a malicious, inflammatory lie to generate fear for an ulterior motive.
If you're trying to insinuate some kind of cover-up, the did a pretty terrible job because no new reactors came online after TMI for like 50 years.
Perhaps someone dropped a banana. The average exposure was 8 millirem (equivalent to a chest X-ray), and the peak outside the facility was 100 millirem (average annual exposure).
People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater.
In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go extremely wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions seem manageable.
Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.
I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.
In particular I genuinely do not understand why most ecologists seem to be staunchly anti-nuclear. I can understand asking for better funding in renewable R&D and planning for a transition but, at least in Europe, ecologists seem to favor dropping nuclear immediately, no matter the cost. For instance they applauded when Germany decided to completely stop producing nuclear energy, even if it meant more pollution in the short term. I find that hard to justify.
> People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater. [...] I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.
I could not agree more, but unfortunately global warming suffers from the exact opposite effect. The perceived risk appears very low to most people, because it is not very spectacular on human time scales. Even though it is by far the greatest existential risk we face.
I'm no biologist or scientist of any sort, but it seems this is a problem with all apex predators to some degree. You get to the top of the food chain by adapting to and being highly reactive to short term and catastrophic risk. Once you get there you have to do a 180 and suddenly be highly attuned to subtle and long term issues to stay there. It's simply a different skill set and frame of mind.
It's probably not very informative to think of humans as apex predators. Yuval Harari in "Sapien" puts forth the interesting point that we were catapulted suddenly from cautious foragers to extreme lethality by our harnessing of fire and other technologies. We likely never had the chance to grow into the role of most dangerous animal. Thinking along those lines, our cautious forager ancestors probably did a lot of responding to short-term and catastrophic risk.
My dog may well have better apex predator instincts than I.
You are right, there is pretty much nothing in biology that is. Humans are no exception, but until recently it was not a big problem because we did not have the power to significantly damage the climate and the biosphere (though the megafauna would probably disagree).
Fossil fuel powered technology has changed that, but we are psychologically and socially ill-equipped to deal with its transformative power.
Yes, of course. Long-term issues aren't any different than others; they only need longer (more generations) to manifest.
One class (meta-)examples are all mechanism actually promoting mutation, or other methods of genetic variation: Horizontal gene transfer is interesting in this regard. It's the ability to incorporate snippets of DNA the organism comes across.
These mechanisms are an adaptation to the "known unknowns": what if a new pathogen appears, or the environment (temperature, radiation, salinity etc) suddenly changes? To achieve some flexibility, these mechanisms make trade-offs, usually sacrificing short-term reproductive success.
The way humans tend to overvalue short term gain and underplay long term consequences is well covered. This line of thinking bleeds heavily into politics and how our societies organize. Would like to know if it is actually an apex predator thing, it might just be part of being a mortal animal.
New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown. LFRs include an electrically cooled salt plug that seals a holding tank. If power fails, the molten salt melts the plug, and the fuel safely drains into the tank. I particularly like ThorCon's concept, where the reactor is underground. Another plus of this reactor type is that water cooling isn't needed, so siting is much more flexible.
Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.
"Completely eliminates the possibility" sounds like something a supervillain would say.
I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.
Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.
The senior engineer at my company was from Duke Energy. At the beginning of the Fukushima incident he loudly proclaimed that the safety mechanisms would kick in, preventing a disaster. He held educational session during lunch so he could explain the engineering. We all know the rest of the story.
That just means he was an idiot. The problems of the design were well known. The potential failure points were well known and are part of the design. This is nothing new and has been understood for a long time.
A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.
A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.
When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
Look, I'm actually pro-nuclear. But I think the arguments made for nuclear power are mostly awful, driven by techno-fetishism and wishful thinking rather than real logic. The "But I'm logical and you're just emotional!" argument is itself an emotional argument, a rush to claim a moral high ground (you'll see the exact same style and phrasing used in any political argument where privileged white guys are dismissing the points of women and minorities).
As others wisely pointed out in this thread, nuclear power suffers from a problem of feeling dangerous even when it's safe - and likewise, global warming feels safe even when it's an existential threat to civilization. If you want to make progress rather than score points, you need to take the emotional nature of the argument into account.
I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.
> When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
No.
Modern reactor designs are actually designed in a way that makes it difficult to maintain the reaction. If you are not actively maintaining it, then it will stop on its own. This is opposed to the most common existing designs, where you need to expend effort to _stop_ the reaction.
This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.
> This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.
So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.
> So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.
I didn't say anything about "completely eliminating the possibility of failure". I said "completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown" which is in fact correct.
ThorCon plans on operating the plants about 100 feet underground, which will even mitigate a deliberate attack with an airliner. There is no way to make anything absolutely, 100% safe, but this approach is mighty close.
That is in contrast with fossil fuel pollution, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.
>I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.
Not my argument, but the point is that comparing something to "what a supervillain" would say is an emotional, not logical, response. What supervillain introduces technologies that are immune to whole classes of failures?
>When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
If someone proposes switching from coal powered plants to natural gas powered plants with the argument that it completely eliminates the possibility of coal dust as a byproduct, would you deride them as well?
Solar prices in the sunniest regions have already dipped below 3c unsubsidized, and are projected to keep falling for decades to come, even without any major technological breakthroughs. So aiming for that price 10 years out, with a new design isn't a very good sign
Renewable are all nice and good, but currently we're still building fossil fuel power plants all over the world. It would be better if we instead built nuclear plants. Expanding renewables and nuclear are not opposites of each other.
Is that a rhetorical question? Because night time usage largely relies on battery storage for which economies of scale are also reducing the cost in a similar predictable fashion.
However I will say there are newer solar panels that I've read about being tested which can theoretically produce power by moon light. Granted it won't be anywhere near the amount during the day but generating energy via solar at night time isn't entirely impossible it just won't be generating the same amount by orders of magnitude.
It would be cheaper to do any number of things(battery storage, Nuclear, world power grid) than to build out more solar capacity to capture the pitiful full moon light once a month.
It really comes down to storage. Solar is just now passing coal costs. when it falls another order of magnitue, most of the effort will go to pumping water up hills or batteries or whatever.
Solar at night is currently 10c (again it seems to be falling in price as more roll out), at least in places that have strong enough sunlight for concentrating solar:
I feel like when a company says 10 years away it generally means that the company is still looking for funding... and 5 years away generally means they finally got the funding and are now building and experimenting.
China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.
Its hard to compete in the nuclear business when literally everything else, including useless stuff like ethanol get subsidies like crazy. Also, existing regulation made much of this research impossible.
With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.
Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.
The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.
So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.
Do these designs also completely eliminate the possibility that human error or outright negligence could cause a catastrophic failure? Because those were almost always major factors in nuclear accidents.
a) New designs are good, but something that's "10 years away" is more an idea, than it is a product.
b) It's not so much that designs can't be safe, but the trick is realizing real systems based on the design, that actually are safe. Over time.
Never underestimate the power of human mis-management when it comes to corrupting perfectly sound pieces of engineering, especially when you need to plan for a 50, 100 or 250 year horizon.
Ecologists against nuclear baffles me too. You'd think they'd be booster #1. Worst-case, Chernobyl still worked out pretty darn well for the local ecosystem.
> Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.
The last time I really looked into it, it seemed like nuclear energy was a pretty way to combat global warming. It has numerous issues like cost, construction time, production bottlenecks, etc. Renewables seemed a lot better (particularly when you factor things in like the cost reduction as production ramps up), but it would be a mistake to simply think about energy production. From what I recall, things like improving energy efficiency were at least as important.
Some differences between the airplane analogy and the nuclear plant analogy:
1) When a plane fails catastrophically, the impact is limited to a smaller geographical area.
2) Pollution from the failure of a plane doesn't involve what is estimated to be a century-long endeavor to cleanup.
3) The toxicity from plane failures do not invade nearly every facet of life, making entire areas unlivable.
I am not a proponent of nuclear energy because we do not have a way to handle the full lifecycle, including failures. We will have this someday, but the idea of "well throw this waste into a rock formation somewhere and hope it doesn't cause a problem because it takes hundreds of years to handle" is just not reasonable. Even today, the Hanford site in Washington is leaking radioactive shit into the Columbia River and there is no estimated date to complete this cleanup.
I completely understand where you're coming from but you can't just take nuclear energy in a vacuum. Of course if the alternative was between nuclear power plants and the miracle energy drive which runs on dreams and produces terrawatts without any risks and any pollution then there's no question.
But that's not the world we live in. Today we have renewable energy, which is promising but not yet ready to be our sole source of energy. Then we have fossil energy which wrecks our climate at an alarming pace. Then we have nuclear which has its own set of problems but at least won't contribute to global warming.
Sure it's a tragedy that Pripyat and Fukushima are now unlivable and will remain so for a long, long time. But global warming will probably make entire continent-sized stretches of land effectively unlivable. That's what you should be pitting nuclear reactors against.
It doesn't kill many people, because even when there's a disaster, there's time to evacuate. But you lose an entire city once in a while.
Major reactor disasters so far:
- SL-1. Steam explosion due to control rod lifted too far during maintenance. Small experimental reactor, built in the middle of nowhere (Idaho Reactor Test Station) for good reason. Inherently unsafe design.
- Three Mile Island. Meltdown due to cooling water failure due to instrument confusion. Contained by good containment vessel. No casualties. That's what should have happened at Fukushima.
- AVR pebble bed reactor. Pebble jam, radiation leak into ground. Contained, but too much of a mess to decommission.
- Chernobyl. Meltdown and fire due to operational error during testing. Totally inadequate containment. Entire region evacuated and contaminated for decades.
- Fukushima. Loss of coolant and meltdown. Containment vessel too small, reactor cores melted through in three reactors. Containment problem well known in advance; Peach Bottom PA has same design.
A big, strong, containment vessel can keep a meltdown from becoming a major disaster and has done so at least twice.
Size matters; a large containment vessel faces lower pressures when all the water boils to become steam. But a good worst-case containment vessel can cost as much as the rest of the plant.
Some of the recently-touted small reactor designs try to omit a containment vessel on the grounds that their design couldn't possibly melt down. That's probably not a good approach.
I can only see two cases of this. Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl was early on and they pushed it well past what their safety ratings were. Fukushima, they messed up on the calculations on the 1000 year tsunami. The latter is definitely a more reasonable case to point to "things can go wrong". Because that was definitely human error.
My issue though, is we're stuck with tech that is half a century old. This would be insane to do in any other industry. Technology has progressed, but it hasn't gone into industry. PBRs can be a lot safer, and there are a lot more fail safe reactor designs. We can do small reactors with high efficiency, leading to easier containment IF there is a disaster. I love nuclear, but I do agree that building these gen II reactors is unsafe. But the new ones? I think that's the only way we're going to tackle climate change within the time frame we're aiming for.
From what I've heard (through two or three levels of separation), the regulatory agency on Nuclear power is stiflingly draconian. Getting any kind of new technology implemented is prohibitively difficult and expensive, which just adds to the list of disincentives in venturing into nuclear power.
Average time from final designs to shovel in the ground is about 10 years. So already your tech is obsolete by the time you start building. I do agree there should be TIGHT regulations, but there certainly is a limit. Also, it has a lack of subsidies, compared to the other sectors.
So already your tech is obsolete by the time you start building.
Cutting edge tech tends to be unproven and unreliable tech. When you can lose an entire city if things go wrong, worrying about having the latest tech is the wrong priority.
Who said anything about cutting edge? I don't care what you're building, but 10-20 years between when you start to design and have a finished product is too much time.
They have a lot of research reactors, but honestly, the only way you're going to get bigger and safer reactors is if you scale up those research reactors. There is literally no other way. And we WANT to improve safety. Don't we? I'm not saying to use cutting edge. I'm saying use what has been proven at smaller scale and is well tested. Not two generation old technology.
> When you can lose an entire city if things go wrong
This is EXTREMELY unlikely. Even when things go wrong.
This is EXTREMELY unlikely. Even when things go wrong.
It may currently be extremely unlikely -- due to the very regulations and processes you are decrying. But, if people like you get their way, the odds go up of seriously bad things happening.
This is actually how the industry as a whole thinks. I like to think expert advice, especially on difficult to understand concepts (hey, we're talking atomic physics here), should be held with more credibility than the layman.
I work in a related industry, part of which is in space radiation mitigation. If you have any real questions about disasters I'll be happy to answer the best that I can. But forgive me if it appears to me that you are the one who is jumping to conclusions, preventing real progress, and harming lives.
I used to moderate a gifted list. It was around 300 people, all of whom were used to being the smartest person in the room. So they tended to default to assuming that if you disagreed with them, you were merely uninformed and stupid. It took a while to convince people to talk to each other respectfully and from an assumption that both people are smart and informed and their different points of view are not merely evidence of stupidity.
I occasionally see that same pattern play out on Hacker News. It would behoove you to check your ego at the door and assume that most of the people you speak with here are also well informed. In the mean time, I see no real reason to try to engage you further. Meaty discussion is never founded on chest-beating and condescension.
How would you balance the two?
From my experience "most" industry is ~10-20 years behind research. That's how long it takes to work out the kinks, be that mobile phones, cloud computing or AI.
So while the US and Europe mess around spending stupid money on ITER the Chinese will be rolling out molton salt reactors leaving the west behind, and that 'sucks'.
But these are big projects, running them like a Turkish ticket website would be a catastrophe.
How exactly would do you re-balance the checks and balances?
So there are certain aspects that can be be iterated upon faster than others. Something like shielding is going to be faster, and can be iterated upon, compared to something like the main reactor. That may also be because that's what I'm more familiar with.
I am also in favor of more small reactors, vs fewer large reactors. I think this provides a higher safety level and ease of upgrading. Plus you can just bury these entire reactors in the ground.
As for regulation, I agree that it should be strict. But the process needs to be streamlined so it doesn't take too long. That time is prohibitive to the technology (see the new reactor construction and it bankrupting Westinghouse). I don't have the answers to how you would optimize the system, but I think think we need to open the discussion up. Start asking questions like "Is covering the first $12b of damage reasonable for all reactor types and sizes?" "How do we ensure that a reactor type is ready to move from research to production?" And such. I don't think "let China test them" is a reasonable response either. The questions get brushed off because most of the public is still afraid of the technology (see this thread. I doubt many of HN users has worked anywhere related to this field, but look at how many have strong opinions). But the people that work in it have less fear. It is like working with anything dangerous, you have to always be aware of it, but that doesn't make it too dangerous to even handle.
From what ive read about nuclear technology, the reason the west has big non salt reactors is that they wanted them for making nuclear bombs. providing energy was a by product of making nuclear weapons.
That also accounts for much of the delays, they are using the tech for so many naughty things they need to wait for staff turnover on the project so no one knows too much about what they are doing.
So while I agree we need to "open the discussion up", I dont believe that discussion will be allowed because of the war politics involved.
This was definitely a big part, but there's a lot that goes into it. Things like enrichment plants. The proportions of 235 vs 238 is substantially different in a bomb vs power plant. This is how we can tell what the Iranians are doing. So using big uranium plants is an excuse to make a lot of 235 and 239Pu.
But just because the past was focused on war efforts, doesn't mean the future needs to be. Many technologies transition from the military to public sectors. And I'm happy to see that talk about nuclear in the news more often, because I think this is the way to open up the discussion. Unfortunately, more people currently oppose nuclear[1]. And one of the most harmful things I see is that there is this idea that the tech isn't green. Because we don't have a battle of green vs nuke vs fossil fuels. It is really green vs fossil.
People will oppose/support whatever they are told to as a general rule.
if facts mattered, we would never of had a majority of people supporting the dropping of white phosphorus on the kids of Iraq (at the time)
It wasnt that long ago people were being told wind and solar "would never be green" due to the manufacturing costs.
But none of that changes the basic question. how would you balance the over design v speed trade off. Especially when every change to the initial design adds a few mill $'s to the bill.
> People will oppose/support whatever they are told to as a general rule.
I would argue that this prevents total human progress though. But we won't get into that because it is a huge discussion.
Again, I'm only in a related field, so take my answers with a grain of salt (pun intended). I also don't have the answers to regulations. That is an extremely complicated topic. But I can bring up problems that I'm aware of.
I also don't know how to speed up the bureaucracy. I'm a scientist, not a politician. We have some reactors in the US that were built in <5 years. This is true in other countries too. <5 year construction time is reasonable to me. Just not 10. When you're operating for 25 years that is too large of a percentage. My simple answer would be "look at what has been effective in the past and emulate it. Improve upon it." But I think there is little drive to do this given the public opinion. And I think it would take a large study to figure this out, though I'm sure someone has but I'm not aware of it.
The most important thing I think that needs to be changed is that there needs to be a smoother path from research reactors to commercial reactors. I know a major problem is that no one will insure new reactors. There is this idea that if it hasn't been done commercially then it is unproven. I'm sure part of this is fear and part is bureaucracy. Unfortunately we always have to take a leap at some point. We can't just wait for China to build reactors and say "Oh, well it works there, so it is proven." China wouldn't be building them if they weren't confident in the designs.
I am also in favor of smaller reactors. Many of these newer generation reactors can be created quite small. Their outputs are lower than the large reactors, but you gain a significant level of safety. This is on top of the benefits from new generation reactors (less waste, significantly higher efficiency, and passive meltdown mitigation solutions). I think a way to encourage the use of smaller reactors is to reduce the max pay for cleanup in event of disaster. Currently plant owners must cover the first $12b (which is significantly more expensive than the average cleanup cost in the US). If you have smaller reactors they literally cannot contaminate as much.
> NYT article
Here we're running into the problem where things are cheaper when they are mass produced. When you don't build reactors for quite some time you have to reinvent processes. Now I will also say that the AP1000 is a gen III+ reactor (and has passive protection), but the Watts-Bar is gen II. Also remember that the first gen III was built in 1985 (commissioned in 1980). We've been slow to implement new technology in this field. The average of tech is around 20 years since invention to mass production, we're nowhere near that. This may be just personal frustration because I work in an area where two industries are extremely slow to implement progressive designs, space and nuclear.
Why I, and many others, think nuclear is essential for the future (you can find a lot about this in the most recent Paris talks): It is the only significant energy source that can provide constant power (and a lot of it). Wind and solar do not operate continuously, and are highly dependent upon environmental conditions. Hydro and geothermal also don't have these limitations. We currently don't have the battery storage technology to utilize a power system based upon only wind, solar, hydro, and geo thermal. Adding nuclear to this suite of technologies helps fill that gap, while being extremely environmentally friendly. The waste isn't nearly the problem that the public thinks it is, mainly because there isn't much total waste.
So, I was with you right up until you got back on your hobby horse of insisting that other people on HN are merely stupid idiots with unfounded opinions and this is the only reason they might disagree with you:
The questions get brushed off because most of the public is still afraid of the technology (see this thread. I doubt many of HN users has worked anywhere related to this field, but look at how many have strong opinions).
This is not a good basis from which to make an argument and it actively undermines the process of effective public discourse.
I am trying to be helpful here. I am sure you won't see it that way because it is public and it is critical of your remarks and that won't feel very good. But, maybe you could be the one in a million people who decides to use that fact as evidence of the truth in my statements that attacking other people doesn't strengthen your argument instead of being one of the other 999,999 people who just insist what I say is irrelevant because it hurt your feelings, while failing to see the irony there.
A nuclear power plant has a lifetime of over 50 years, so it pays to make sure you're doing it right.
It's like complaining that space probes and satellites use outdated processors and other computer technology. The Deep Space Climate Observatory was launched in 2015 with a 17 year old processor.
And now you're seeing a shift to smaller satellites with shorter operation lifetimes, and in lower orbits. This allows for use of off the shelf hardware and faster iteration. The barrier for this was brought down because it is cheaper to send hardware to space and the idea of a cluster of small sats isn't crazy anymore (because you need many satellites to provide continuous service to a specific ground location when using LEO).
> Also, it has a lack of subsidies, compared to the other sectors.
It has significant federal R&D and liability-related subsidies, as well as other federal and, in several states, state-level subsidies. Nuclear is by no means deprived of subsidies.
Owners of plants are responsible for the first $12b. 3 mile cleanup was well under this. So I'm going to have to disagree. But I'll give a caveat, it is a sample size of 1. A major accident would cost much more, but they are extremely unlikely.
> Some of the recently-touted small reactor designs try to omit a containment vessel on the grounds that their design couldn't possibly melt down. That's probably not a good approach.
Agreed, but, fail-safe and walkaway-safe designs coupled with moderate containment vessels seem like a good medium. It is all about mitigating risk. I don't think we should ever accept that a design has actual 0 risk for meltdown, but, if you design with a goal of having 0 risk of uncontained failures and then design containment for a moderate level of failure, that seems like you have a robust overall solution.
Even if there is a meltdown it will have localized environmental impact. Which will self correct in few centuries. Greenhouse gases are affecting the whole planet, same with minerals for batteries.
Coal occasionally destroys entire cities too. Ever heard of Centralia? I'd honestly rather move to Fukushima or Pripyat than there. And that's ignoring the economic devistation coal left behind.
Do you have a source about Fukushima containment failures? I've not heard any confirmation that primary or secondary containment structures failed at any point during or after the meltdown.
The latest reports seem to indicate that primary containment is intact at all three reactors. As usual, you have to read between the lines - these editors always seem to hate nuclear power, or love fear and chaos, or both:
> If the containment had held, there would have been no radiation release outside the plant.
This is not how it works. Containment structures prevent the actual core materials from exiting the reactor, since those are heavy metals with high radioactivity and long half lives. The latest reports suggest that the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) in Unit 2 is likely breached, but this is inside the primary containment vessel (PCV).
In both the Three Mile Island and Fukushima incidents, radioactive steam was vented to the atmosphere. Additionally at Fukushima a breached pressure vessel probably leaked radioactive water into the primary containment vessel. This water was pumped out (into spent fuel storage, I think). I've also heard concerns that the spent fuel pools were feared to be leaking into the ocean, but so far as I know that hasn't happened enough to cause alarm.
The radiation inside the containment structure where the Unit 2 RPV breached is really high, "dead in a couple hours" levels. Outside the reactor buildings (the red dots on the map in your second link) background radiation levels didn't rise any higher than the natural background radiation in parts of Kerala, India, and in several other places around the world. Much higher than normal for Japan, sure, but nothing dangerous. Those levels can be explained by the Iodine and Cesium isotopes in the vented steam.
Calling these happenings a "containment failure" is disingenuous at best. The 50-year-old containment structures at Fukushima appear to have done exactly the job they were designed to do, after a magnitude 9 earthquake no less.
From "Report by the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Association":[1]
Confinement of radioactive material and control of radioactive releases
As a result of the damage to the reactor cores in Units 1–3, large amounts of steam and hydrogen escaped the reactor pressure vessels. This, in turn, pressurized and heated the primary containment vessels. These vessels were breached and steam, hydrogen and other gases, together with radioactive material, were released into the reactor buildings and eventually to the environment. The primary containment vessels of the reactors had not been designed to withstand the pressure that could be generated in a severe accident; because of this, venting systems had been installed in the 1990s [22, 23] to limit the pressure in the containment vessels in the event of an accident. There are indications that the primary containment vessels for Units 1–3 failed at various stages in the progression of the accident. This was the result of the pressure and temperature in the primary containment vessel rising to levels that were far in excess of their designed capability before venting could be implemented (see Section 2.1). The leakage of radioactive material from the reactor cores was partially mitigated by the suppression pools, which retained some of the radionuclides released from the reactor pressure vessels.
That should be clear enough.
The radioactive water problem is huge. It was not "pumped into spent fuel storage". Several large tank farms were built to store it, along with a processing plant to remove radioactive solids. Some of it did leak into the Pacific Ocean.
> These vessels were breached and steam, hydrogen and other gases, together with radioactive material, were released into the reactor buildings and eventually to the environment.
Exactly what I described in less alarming words. Steam, hydrogen, other gases, and "radioactive material" (Iodine and Cesium in the steam) are not the same thing or anywhere near as dangerous as actual melted fuel and corium escaping containment. Conflating this with the idea of molten core materials breaching containment is extremely irresponsible.
I'm not entirely sure about the radioactive water situation, and it sucks to hear that it may be worse than I thought. Do you have a source confirming the extent of contaminated water that ended up in the ground or ocean? It's really hard to find anything unambiguous here, tons of stories about "leaks" but many of those reports are actually about leaks into the reactor buildings. As far as I can tell a very large number (trillions?) of becquerels went into the Pacific Ocean right around the time of the tsunami, and since then no water outside the reactor complex has been measured with radiation levels outside regulatory limits (although they've been pumping groundwater collecting in the basements into big tank farms, like you said). It does look like the large volume of water pumped into the ocean initially (to make room for contaminated core water in the spent fuel pools, like I said) may have accumulated in bottom-feeding fish near the site. And it looks like there may be water from the site leaking into the ocean at some rate (although not enough to make any ocean water unsafe to drink). Other than that all I can find is an enormous volume of noise and fearmongering.
Some of the small reactor designs use other coolants, like molten salt, which stay liquid over a wide temperature range at atmospheric pressure. If a pipe breaks it just drips out and solidifies. You still want containment but it can be much more compact.
> Chernobyl. Meltdown and fire due to operational error during testing. Totally inadequate containment. Entire region evacuated and contaminated for decades.
Isn't decades a bit generous? Do we expect to move back in 2080? Does seem right AFAIK wrt the fallout in Norway contaminating reindeer (by way of lichen) - there's still measurable increase in radioactivity, but within presumably safe levels.
While not a reactor, there's also the criticality accidents with the so-called Demon Core, aka the core for what would have been the third bomb to be dropped on Japan.
It appears that these figures take into account _just_ energy production. They don't seem include the mining, enriching, construction of reactors, disposal of waste, decommissioning reactors, etc. When mining low-grade ore (which isn't uncommon, and is becoming more command as high-grade ore becomes more scarce), nuclear plants are as inefficient as coal-fired plants [1]. Nuclear advocates tend to ignore the full system, and focus on where nuclear shines: power production. The setup to get to that point is extremely costly.
"The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process: this includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts."
What are the sources of CO2 for mining and all the rest? If it's electricity production then you're basically blaming nuclear for emissions from fossil fuel generation, since those would be much lower in an all-nuclear world. If it's transport then it's more justified, but when looking at how it could be in the future, transport can be electrified to close that loop.
It's mostly due to the chemistry required to liberate the Uranium from the ore. What you have in the ore is mostly Uranium oxides. You have to strip away those pesky oxygen atoms in order to further process the Uranium. And in that process quite the amount of CO2 is produced. Now keep in mind that this must be done to all the Uranium, before it undergoes enrichtment. So for every atom of U235 you get about 200 (give or take) atoms of U238 and you have to account for all of them on the chemical side of things.
What part of that process produces CO2? I'm reading up on it but everything I find gives a fairly simplified view of things. The chemical reactions discussed on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_hexafluoride) don't involve any carbon, but maybe it's from some secondary aspect?
How is that compared to mining for battery and solar material? It's a double standard to hold nuclear accountable for manufacturing when the same is not applied to solar/wind.
I didn't compare it to battery/solar at all. I just wanted to point out one source for the chemical environmental impact of Uranium refinement.
Alas, if we really compare to solar, then keep in mind that for a solar cell you can use 100% of the refined silicon, whereas with uranium you end up throwing away a large fraction (over 95%) with low enriched fuel, and an even larger fraction (over 99%) with high enriched fuel.
Add to that that uranium is not among the most abundant elements on Earth (about 1ppm), whereas silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust (about 27%). That alone gives silicon a huge advantage in energy/chemical impact on the environment compared to uranium.
Oh, and maybe I should point out that the chemistry to work with uranium is also a lot more nastier than with silicon. Uranium is a heavy metal, so it all happens through complexes and acidic chemistry, which limits the options on chemical pathways. Silicon OTOH is very similar to carbon in its chemistry, so there are vastly more options to process silicon, and that alone allows for far more efficient processes.
batteries and solar components need numerous extracts of minerals and a bunch of chemistry as well but as.you pointed out the solar lobby is happy to ignore all that when claiming they are a clean source of energy.
No source of energy is clean, in that respect. The best you can do is separate one time production and continuing operating pollution, and account for both. Using that to show pollution per Mhh at 5, 10 and 20 year intervals should be sufficient.
Reiterating my original comment, it would also be good to distinguish between the whole-lifecycle pollution generated now, with current electrical and transportation infrastructure, and the whole-lifecycle pollution you could achieve if you applied the "clean" technology to the whole lifecycle.
For example, solar panel production requires a lot of electricity. That electricity is mostly generated from fossil fuels. But if you supplied that electricity with solar panels instead, it would be way cleaner. Which is correct? We should probably present both numbers, if possible.
An optimistic upper bound (unlikely but possible renewable adoption for material production energy), and pessimistic lower bound (current mix of evnergy for material production), and a best guess. That might convey enough information to give someone a good guess as to how things might turn out.
It starts to sounds complicated, and to be a lot of information to digest for a decision, but another way of looking at it is that correctly assessing and planning for energy needs in the future is so important that ignoring information like that when making an assessment is irresponsible. We need more nytimes.com style widgets that allow you to tweak the values to easily digest data like this, and that clearly reference where the data and assumptions come from.
I agree that the full environmental cost should be known in all cases, but I hope you expect that the bias is somewhat justified by the fact that uranium functions as a fuel while solar and battery materials are multiple-use.
One can compare, but the nuclear industry pointedly ignores those areas, so I sort of assume it doesn't win on those points. Also solar/wind materials I would think are fairly recyclable.
Of course you also need to count that. But accounting for extraction and refining adds something like 20% to fossil fuel emissions, whereas it's claimed to vastly increase total nuclear emissions.
Sure, but this is a percents vs quantities problem. If nuclear has almost zero emissions in power production even the smallest increase will look like a massive increase percentage wise. It still may compare very favorably to fossil fuels for lifecycle emissions.
The original comment linked to https://www.stormsmith.nl/i05.html which claims that, when you account for the full lifecycle, CO2 emissions from nuclear are comparable to CO2 emissions from coal. If true, then no, it's not a percents vs quantities problem, it's just a quantities problem.
It means that you have to invest a lot of energy in extracting material that's thrown away later without going to extract one bit of energy at all.
For making solar cells you don't have to be picky in which isotope you make them from.
Also there's only about 1ppm of uranium in the Earth's crust, whereas silicon is the second most abundant material (27%). So you don't even have to spend a that much energy just to separate the non-silicon stuff from the silicon-stuff, whereas a huge amount of energy in uranium production is preoccupied with doing just that.
If you go outside and take any rock, you're holding in your hands mostly silicon and oxygen. Strip away the oxygen and you get pure silicon.
Thanks for the info. It's seeming that solar and wind are better from a full-lifecycle perspective, and if we can just solve that pesky energy storage issue then it's done.
Nuclear is oddly politicized, both pro- and anti-, whereas I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's not the worst power source but it's also not the best. It's not worth continuing to invest in for the future because better sources are already coming online that don't have the associated fallout risk, hazardous materials disposal issue, and intensive mining/refining processes.
your link didn't provide any numbers as far as i can see, so i'll add another one. This one is very long though, my quoted numbers are from the appendix and are merely estimates. Read the article if you want to know more about it.
> Regarding bare plant costs, some recent figures apparently for overnight capital cost (or engineering, procurement and construction – EPC – cost) quoted from reputable sources but not necessarily comparable are:
* EdF Flamanville EPR: €4 billion/$5.6 billion, so €2434/kW or $3400/kW
* Bruce Power Alberta 2x1100 MWe ACR, $6.2 billion, so $2800/kW
* CGNPC Hongyanhe 4x1080 CPR-1000 $6.6 billion, so $1530/kW
Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass).
I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses.
Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or beat nuclear, with lower setup costs and other barriers to entry. A wide variety of storage are being actively developed (with real investor support) to cache cheap surplus production from solar/wind, making a mostly-solar grid viable. What will our solar/wind/storage grid look like in 30 years?
Nuclear as a stepping-stone to solar won't matter. It's faster and easier to just to straight to solar.
> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass).
You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead.
Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.)
What matters is that solar is generally perceived to be safer, easier, and cleaner than nuclear at any scale. I feel confident that I could set up my own solar installation safely, and that makes me more likely to do so, regardless of the fatality rates of using ladders or driving to the hardware store.
Because it's easier for clean energy adopters to take small steps towards solar than large steps towards nuclear, I think that's what they will do.
The risk of injury or death while installing solar may be greater than nuclear by the numbers, but if a guy falls off his roof installing a solar panel it doesn't poison the land around him for hundreds of years
If a guy falls off a roof building a nuclear plant, it doesn't poison the land for hundreds of years either. A more fair comparison would be if a PV manufacturing plant had an industrial accident and hundreds of thousands of gallons of nasty chemicals o to the land.
Yes I suppose it would. But if I had to choose (and I really hope I never do) I'd rather have silicon tetrachloride spilled in my town than nuclear waste.
> The paper’s investigation, published in March 2008, profiled a Chinese polysilicon facility owned by Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., located near the Yellow River in the country’s Henan province. This facility supplied polysilicon to Suntech Power Holdings, at the time the world’s largest solar-cell manufacturer, as well as to several other high-profile photovoltaics companies.
> The reporters found that the company was dumping silicon tetrachloride waste on neighboring fields instead of investing in equipment that could reprocess it, rendering those fields useless for growing crops and inflaming the eyes and throats of nearby residents. And the article suggested that the company was not alone in this practice.
Moving manufacturing/construction out of China and into the US increases regulatory oversight. It's very likely that nuclear manufacturing done in the US is cleaner than solar manufacturing done in China.
But where do those 0.04/TWh deaths in nuclear come from? Are they mostly from a low-probability high-death count event? Is it 1 person per year over a thousand years from solar, or maybe the whole village at once in a thousand years, from nuclear?
If it really is more along the lines of nuclear is safe, but once every five years a worker at the plant might slip up and be exposed to dangerous levels by accident, then I guess I think the comparison makes more sense.
This is the thing I don't get about nuclear proponents. While I'm not an opponent, we can scale sustainable energy sources now, we could have a Manhattan project type of program that, while costly, could replace the majority of our energy sources as fast as we can manufacture the panels and turbines. There is so much lead time in building a nuclear plant, it costs so much and then continues to be pretty costly in maintenance.
With a couple of years of development effort we could build a medium sized nuclear reactor that would be extremely save, extremely fuel, cheap fuel (essentially free), extremely reliable and it would solve availability issues.
You can literally mass produce the reactor and send it to standardized facilities all over the place, on or of the grid.
This would not even be very costly, a robust reactor development program to start with and some commercialization of the tech and regulatory change to allow it. No Manhatten projected needed.
I think doing what you suggest and replacing all coal and natural gas plants with reliable energy is pretty insane in comparison. Not to mention that that is only the easy part of the problem. I don't know a reliable way to solve the availability issue. The only close to viable approach is Musk-Style mass production of batteries. Even that is only viable if we continue to make leap and bounds improvements to batteries.
This is about solving the energy needs of 10 Billion people in this century. A Manhattan style mass production of solar cells and wind turbines will not get it done.
Thorium has the highest energy density and its practically unlimited, both in the ground and we already mine it. It simply is not that hart do build a modular reactor that can be mass produced. We know it works, and we know that it solved all the problem we have, including availability, pollution and global warming.
I think a lot of the love for nuclear is technophilia, not reason. We love nuclear because it's hard, requiring exotic engineering and, yes, risk. There's a bigger sense of triumph in it.
I think people love it because you can get an average American's lifetime supply of energy from 1.5 soda cans of fuel and produce 3 soda cans of waste. And it's 24/7 reliable and emission free. That astounding energy density and associated tiny footprint is exciting all on its own.
Solar and wind don't provide predictable power. Even places with high reliance on these tend to have an ongoing dependency on coal (or nuclear) to handle times when supply from renewables drops.
This has been discussed ad nauseam, we need 1) storage, 2) smarter grids (which we need anyways). Of course there will have to be investment but what better investment could there be? We get 1) jobs, 2) cleaner air, 3) to keep living and have future generations able to live as well or better than we did.
Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet.
Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.
But we can't really scale nuclear, not in any kind of reasonable time frame. Take this for example [1], billions of dollars and decades to finish. Nobody thinks there won't be a transition period where we have to use existing coal, natural gas and nuclear but in terms of what we should be investing in right now, sustainable should be the focus I think. I have no issue with new nuclear plants where it makes sense, but it doesn't seem economically like it is actually that great of a choice given how expensive they are and how long they take to build.
I think we'll be able to solve the storage-grid engineering problems and scale solar faster than we would be able to scale nuclear. Nuclear is expensive to build.
I don't think storage is really the ideal long term solution either, storage is more short term and is more like a buffer I think. The ideal is having large interconnected grids with a great diversity of sources. We essentially have the technology right now, its just a matter of building the infrastructure which nobody is really willing to foot the bill for even though its needed for everyone.
Only until we provide energy storage as part of the power grid - which is coming. Capture surplus from solar/wind when the sun shines and the wind blows, dump it back into the grid when demand exceeds generation. This is doable with technology that's a century old.
As well as larger more interconnected grids (probably utilizing HVDC).
It reminds me of this onion article [1]. Its obviously hyperbole, there are actual real issues to resolve but compared with building nuclear weapons and going to the moon?
Nuclear being safer than other major sources just means we shouldn't demonize it and stop everything right now out of panic. it means it's just an important asset while waiting for renewables to take off.
See my argument above, though... it's going to be faster and cheaper to replace a standard deviation's worth of fossil electricity with solar/wind than it would be to replace it with nuclear. So the "transitional power" argument doesn't really hold.
What's the lifespan of an solar farm with equal output to a nuclear plant? We're about to approve nukes for 80 year life spans.
Nuclear has super low operating cost and a long lifespan. The only real economic downside is how flipping expense they are to build and a major reason for that is we don't have much experience building them (because they've lasted so many decades).
You're also assuming that solar/wind will be faster when we don't have any real solutions for using those sources as a baseload. Storage and distribution is nowhere near being able to handle such demand. The cost of revamping our grid once those technologies do reach maturity is going to be staggering aswell.
Solar and wind are promising but they are still a __long__ way from being proven enough to gamble an entire energy plan on.
That ignores another factor- we've been decommissioning nuclear and replacing it with natural gas & coal capacity while we wait for the eventual renewable ramp.
Yes, but that's not an effective argument for building new plants in the face of my critique. It's possibly an argument for delaying the decommissioning of older nuclear plants, but those decommissions are probably due to age-related safety concerns - the owners would likely prefer to keep the old plant running, if possible.
I've argued elsewhere for a flat-out ban on new domestic coal-fired plants. Coal is by far the worst safety and environmental offender. If we forced power companies onto a renewable-or-nothing path, we might see faster progress.
It IS an effective argument when public accepts solutions like Energiewende - ignore age of nuclear plants and decomisdion them all while building coal capacity.
Guess why so many people like nuclear when observing such stupidity.
Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation.
They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
The Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 on what is now the Idaho National Lab was the first reactor to demonstrate full passive safety in 2 related tests in 1986. In the first, they turned off all primary pumps and did not insert the control rods. The reactor shut itself down and established natural circulation decay-heat removal. This class of event (unprotected loss of flow) would melt the core of almost any other kind of reactor. Then they did a unprotected loss of heat sink to the same result. My dissertation advisor was there, and said that it was glorious. They knew that they had finally achieved truly safe, socially acceptable nuclear energy. Less than a month later Chernobyl happened and the advanced breeder reactors with their inherent safety have still not been developed commercially.
Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels.
Breeder reactors are as noted by acidburnNSA extremely safe.
And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower.
It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage.
> Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?
Fracking sludge isn't a thing? Coal tar sands waste isn't a thing? Mines that leak sulfuric acid aren't a thing? Black lung isn't a thing? Radioactive coal dust isn't a thing?
Our current energy production has hazards and costs that we do not currently account for while we place far too much burden on the alternatives to justify themselves.
Yes, it's much better to burn up the fuel and spread it into the atmosphere where it will cause a massive climate change. Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
> Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
Last I checked, it still is. Solar can't get anywhere near baseline production that we need currently due to lack of storage options. And solar is the only thing which currently has even the possibility of scaling.
Careful how you phrase that. There are lots of storage options that are viable - batteries, gravity, thermal, compressed air, etc - but none that have become major commercial products or installed on the grid at scale. Yet.
But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that.
This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest.
So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.
I can build a house today in the Northeastern US that's completely solar powered and off-grid. It adds about 15% to the cost to build. (2500 square foot home, 68k for panels, 18k for batteries, an extra 5k for a heat pump instead of a gas or propane heater.) The price of the panels and batteries is only going to drop.
For on-grid solar, the panels are already the cheapest form of energy available, when paired with a heat pump instead of natural gas. (When paired with using a giant resistor they cost equivalent to natural gas.)
Before Chernobyl blew up, nuclear energy proponents promised us, nuclear energy was safe.
When Chernobyl blew up, it was obviously a stupid Soviet design, with stupid operating personnel. But now we've got new reactors, they are safe! Nothing could ever happen!
Then Fukushima blew up. That was obviously okay, because it was a Tsunami in conjunction with a few other improbable acts, and we obviously can't expect the nuclear industry to plan for that!
So we're now in the next round. Again, we're totally safe. We've got passive reactors. Really disruptive (g) tech!
I'm sorry, I said it before and I said it again: proponents of nuclear energy have either been lying to us every single time over the last decades, or they can't really manage nuclear energy.
I don't care which one it is, and I don't care whether they believe nuclear energy is safe now. They have been playing with catastrophes of a magnitude we can't really comprehend, and the best they manage to do is "it could have been even worse" and "we promise this was the last time".
As far as I'm concerned, I'm all for making sure it was the last time.
Are you aware that the Fukushima reactor was actually 6 years older than Chernobyl?
Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal - the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic.
Of course no matter how well you design it, people will fuck up and use it the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safety margins. And this only accounts extreme stupidity and dysfunctional management - it does not even consider deliberate attempts to blow the damn thing up (actually the Chernobyl tests could be considered that, but i mean an absolute nightmare scenario like a takeover by technically competent terrorists)
Which is why you need to take all these chances into account, add a level 9 tsunami, a comet, a once in 100000 years quake, Godzilla, a zombie apocalypse, Stuxnet, wanacry, the second coming of Christ, the Rapture, North Korea, Dr Strangelove and a dangerously bored Trump, and you engineer everything to be still impossible to blow up.
Which is what we have actually been doing. They're not getting built because certifying a new design is horribly expensive, and the anti-nuclear opposition would limit their deployment, making them anti economical, but no, we haven't stopped improving them.
Unfortunately we still run the old ones, which, like a car built in the 60s, would be so much less safe to not even be legal nowadays, but you need to take into account that they're on the road.
China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).
We badly need something to bridge the gap between now and when renewables+batteries can completely fulfill demand, because meanwhile fossile fuel plants get deployed instead, and we are really fucking up the planet with those.
The default alternative to using more nuclear energy is to use more fossil fuels. Maybe we'd like to use less energy, or switch to wind, solar or similar, but that isn't a viable option in the short term in a lot of cases.
We know that using fossil fuels will kill a few people every day, eventually adding up to a large number, as well as causing widespread, low-grade damage to the environment. On the other hand, nuclear has the potential to kill a moderate number of people at once if something goes horribly wrong, and cause severe damage to the environment of a small area.
It seems to me that a preference for more deaths and environmental damage overall because they happen a little at a time instead of in a catastrophic event is not rational.
People seeing it differently does not mean they are rational actors.
That said, this kind of risk response might be an evolutionary adaption. Better have a threat that slowly kills individual members of the tribe (allows escape or replacement of losses) than something that is outside your control to respond to and wipes the whole tribe.
Yes, and those same people who drive to work in a car are willing to do so even though there's a tiny chance that they'll suddenly have an epileptic seizure and plow into a crowd of pedestrians on the sidewalk. So it's clearly not true that people only care about worst-case possibilities, without regard to the level of risk.
I do think that for someone living in the US, Canada, western Europe, Japan or other stable, low-violence parts of the world it is irrational to devote significant mental energy to concerns about terrorism or rape by strangers. It is more irrational to give up time, money or civil rights to assuage such fears.
To be fair this article doesn't say nuclear energy is safe - rather that it is the safest relative to other sources.
You mention Chernobyl and Fukushima - but those only stand out because the effects were concentrated in time and space (happened all at once and afflicted specific geographical regions).
The deleterious health effects of coal, oil, and natural gas are more diffuse. They don't make such good news stories and there's really no way to build an interested narrative around them. The effects evolve over time, the geographic impact is not as concentrated, and importantly there is a much stronger probabilistic element - the human brain has a hard time processing this, but it has an easy time processing nuclear dangers.
no, but the impact of something like, reducing coal by 10% and increasing nuclear by 10% is. the advantage is a slight reduction in emmisions and a slight increase in the possibility of a severe nuclear disaster. that's certainly a debate to be had, but one side isn't "more rational" than the other.
This reasoning is really closed minded and nonsensical. I've never seen the literature where people said "they are safe! Nothing could ever happen!". In fact melt downs are in many hollywood movies so I'm not sure how anyone could ever get this narrative.
Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima never "blew up". There are myths that many still believe today that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb (it can't). You seem to be attempting to stroke that fear with your wording whereas what you really mean is "melted down" or "failed".
Regardless, each generation of nuclear power plant is safer than the last. Some of the newest designs require reactions to be explicitly maintained and when that stops or fails it stops the reaction. What you seem to be suggesting is that, because there were past failures that have caused damage to surrounding areas and people, that we should never try to make further progress.
"Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima never "blew up". There are myths that many still believe today that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb (it can't)."
A failed nuclear power plant can indeed explode like a nuclear bomb and it is generally believed that explosion #2 (there were two major explosions) at chernobyl was the result of a criticality and analogous to "the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon.":
"The force of the second explosion, and the ratio of xenon radioisotopes released during the event, indicate that the second explosion could have been a nuclear power transient; the result of the melting core material, in the absence of its cladding, water coolant and moderator, undergoing runaway prompt criticality similar to the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon.[63] This nuclear excursion released 40 billion joules of energy, the equivalent of about ten tons of TNT. The analysis indicates that the nuclear excursion was limited to a small portion of the core.[63]"
Consider: in a meltdown, which you refer to, the fissile material could accumulate in arbitrary dimensions, many of which could achieve criticality. At that time it becomes a (very crude) atomic weapon. If that criticality is not interrupted it will indeed explode.
> A failed nuclear power plant can indeed explode like a nuclear bomb and it is generally believed that explosion #2 (there were two major explosions) at chernobyl was the result of a criticality and analogous to "the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon."
Your statement seems to oppose itself. Fizzled would not be like a nuclear bomb so I don't quite understand what you're trying to refer to here. There is a reason the paper uses the word "fizzled". A nuclear power plant does not contain the necessary materials or force to create a nuclear fission explosion.
Remember, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 13,000t to 18,000t TNT but the explosion at Chernobyl released some radiation and exploded with 10t TNT.
There are a few orders of magnitude between "fizzled nuclear weapon" and a "nuclear bomb".
"There are a few orders of magnitude between "fizzled nuclear weapon" and a "nuclear bomb"."
In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same.
Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have) and that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect.
I am not categorically opposed to nuclear power. I just think it's worth getting these things right - especially when the well known details of the highest profile nuclear accident are in opposition to your claim(s).
There's actually a big difference between coolant-based explosions caused by runaway reactor heat and a nuclear weapon. The process is not the same, even when they are both driven by criticality. And where the difference lies in terms of time-scales and pressures involved, and thus our ability to contain and protect against them, equating the two in this context is not honest. You may as well be comparing grenades and firecrackers.
> In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same.
No, this is not true. The uranium isn't enriched enough to do this in a nuclear power plant. Check out your own citation above it's a great read.
> Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have)
I never stated this. In fact we talked about the explosions at chernobyl above in this comment chain.
> that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect.
Define similar.
The explosions were not similar in that they were not explosions using uncontrolled fission material to cause a reaction in enriched uranium.
They were similar in that an explosion occurred that tossed up lots of fission material, similar to what a nuclear weapon would do when exploded but uranium did not itself explode.
> especially when the well known details of the highest profile nuclear accident are in opposition to your claim(s).
The two well known disasters, chernobyl and fukushima, were very, very old power plants. Fukushima, as far as I can tell, was not fully updated to any of the standard designs in the past 2-3 decades (only retrofitting here and there).
Given that I'm not sure what you are referring to or how those two accidents are in opposition to any of my claims.
"They have been playing with catastrophes of a magnitude we can't really comprehend"
Did you even read the article? Statistics show you that nuclear is safer. Coal/oil/etc actually kill about 1000× more people than nuclear per TWh generated.
No, you're wrong. The statistics are based on "what happened so far" and "what we think could happen if things got really bad".
The last part has been proven untrue time and again. Every single time nuclear proponents said "that cannot happen" and after it happened they found a new fallback position "okay, that could happen, but it cannot ever get worse".
You do realize it actually is not getting worse? Fukushima barely killed any people, while Chernobyl has ~100 casualties. The radiation of areas around Chernobyl is bigger and more lasting than those of Fukushima.
Not to mention these are 50yo plants, and new ones are just better (whether or not you believe the tests/physics behind that).
It is disingenuous to claim nuclear plant safety is getting worse.
So if you played Russian roulette a couple of times and lived, it must be safe, right? Probability is events over trials, zero events in two trials means probability of dying is 0/2=0%.
How many people died in all of those? Now compare to the particulate pollution coal releases, which would force evacuation of neighborhoods if we treated them as nuclear plants.
The US Navy has operated hundreds of reactors for decades 24/7.
The point is not how many people have died, but how bad the impact can be. Even if nobody dies, the need to evacuate a large city like New York or Tokyo because a nuclear power plant nearby underwent rapid unplanned deconstruction might easily wipe off all economic gains from the nuclear energy, and then some.
Solar, wind, hydro do not affect the entire planet. Even burning fossil fuels might be ok, if combined with CO2 sequestration.
But this is irrelevant. I'm just saying that you do a comparison, you need to take into consideration risks, too. Otherwise buying any kind of insurance looks pretty irrational.
What's a worse accident then Chernobyl in terms of release? Evacuation is frequently not necessary as people willingly live in places with quite high natural radioactivity.
Only about 3.5% of radioactive material from one reactor was released (there were four reactors). Also no large city happened to be close enough downwind.
Some of the areas within 30 km exclusion zone still have levels of radiation too high for people to live there, and will remain high for hundreds of years.
Doesn't this go both ways, though? You've discussed the worst-case outcome of using nuclear power at length. But I've yet to see you address, anywhere in this thread, the worst-case outcome of not using nuclear power and using greenhouse gas-emitting power sources instead.
"X power generation method isn't safe" just isn't a legit form of argument unless you can meaningfully compare it to 1)other power generation methods or 2)not generating that power. Climate change really is a catastrophe of a magnitude we can't really comprehend, and is what nuclear plants are most often replaced with. Nuclear accidents are really bad and really scary, but they've happened before and we at least understand (more or less) the worst case scenarios.
Efficiency and conservation is actually always overlooked, negawatts are basically always the cheapest/safest option, but both the free market and government intervention underinvestment in them.
In my view, most of the environmental disaster that was caused by Fukushima has nothing to do with the tsunami itself but with complete disregard for safety during the incident response.
Exactly, we cannot believe all those pretty statistics about how safe nuclear power is, because (inter alia) precisely this disregard for safety is never factored in.
Nuclear power is always sold on the best case or average case calculation. Because the worst case is probably so bad that it dominates the whole calculation.
Your argument doesn't make sense to me. Nuclear proponents have argued that nuclear power is safe for decades, and the statistics that show they've been right so far are somehow proof that they've been lying this entire time?
We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
Breeder reactors have been around since the dawn of nuclear energy and are extremely efficient, re-using the bulk of harmful waste material as fuel. If we built more of those waste would be far less of a problem.
Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet support for actually building one has been tepid at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
The issue is nuclear energy is so risky that only nation-states are willing to underwrite the creation of plants. As a result regulations on plant design tend to be extremely conservative, so innovation is brought to a crawl. On top of that the origins of nuclear energy is weapons research, the waste was the original objective. So the most proven model of reactor is the one that produces the most waste. Put the two together and we're left with the simplest, least efficient design: light-water reactors.
Nuclear can be viable, but the government will have to grow some balls and take some extra risk. We could really use another Musk or Bezos to take on Nuclear Power the same way the former two are taking on space.
Nobody builds breeder reactors (except for generating weapons-grade materials) because they are seriously unsafe. I'm not anti-nuclear, but the idea of using breeders for civilian power generation is lunacy. There's a very good reason no one does that.
The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on. On paper, it seems ideal. So why has nobody built one? Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either. Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
The problem isn't "grow some balls". The problem is taking an honest look at the situation and ditching the wishful thinking.
That breeders are unsafe is simply wrong as a general statement.
A Thorium or Uranium based liquid fuel molten salt reactor is incredibly save and highly viable for civilian power generation.
> The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on.
You massively underestimate the political and economical problems of these things. There are many different types of reactors and other ideas that have never managed to get to market.
Until very shorty it was basically impossible to develop one in the US. The Department of Energy would not grant anything, not even use of labs to anybody who wanted to research it. Much of the research itself was basically lost for a long time.
> Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either.
China is massively investing molten salt reactors, including liquid fuel thorium. They plans are pretty big.
Also, there are simple not that many people who do this kind of stuff. The early research was done in the US and most other piggyback of that and have continued to make marginal improvements.
> Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
India has tried earlier but failed. The reason was that they did not have the advanced science, not some fundamental problem. The went in another direction because they felt it was easier. The same problem did not apply to the US.
I was a big fan of the idea of Thorium reactors years ago, until I found one of the reasons they aren't being actively pursued. I don't see it mentioned but briefly on Wikipedia, but there are really serious engineering challenges around the corrosiveness of the fuel. Take all the properties of normal salt, add fluoride, make it radioactive, and then make it really hot.
There are materials that can handle it, but they are expensive and IIRC they still need to be replaced regularly. Imagine having to replace most of the plumbing in a reactor every decade or whatever number of years.
The engineering challenges don't stop there, but that was the one that made me go, "Oh, ok, I get why they aren't being taken seriously yet." Our materials science just isn't advanced enough yet.
Ah, that makes sense. I've always assumed there's some powerful technical limitation, and it didn't seem to be in the reaction itself or the availability of fuel.
Exactly - at which point I love to mention Thorcon Power and the amount of obstacles that they faced in the US only to have to go abroad and start building their absolutely incredible design and test reactor in Indonesia. Sad.
Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
We could do like we do with coal, and just release the radioactivity into the atmosphere. That industry disposes of a lot of radioactive material that way.
I live in Idaho, and something that comes up fairly regularly is whether to accept more nuclear waste shipments to be stored at the https://www.inl.gov indefinitely.
To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years. That would basically mean revisiting all the waste that is currently stored and freeze it in glass or whatever. If the industry did that for all existing waste and proved their expertise in that area, then I think more people would entertain the notion of more reactors.
> Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years.
The "Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982" charged utilities a 0.1 cent/kwh fee for disposal of nuclear waste, and the DOE was supposed to take receipt of that waste. There is $31 billion in reserve for waste disposal...
Meanwhile we have people fighting for coal power plants even though their waste disposal plan for things like mercury and arsenic is basically "dump it into the air and hope it doesn't kill too many people." And that stuff stays dangerous until the heat death of the universe, not merely thousands of years.
The good news is breeder waste is a mix of very short half lives and very long half lives. The very short ones decay to safe levels quickly, and the very long ones have a low level of activity.
This. Conservation of energy/matter applies. If there's a lot of energy output and a fixed amount of input the duration must be small. You can visit the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You just can't spend a good chunk of your life there there.
Radioactive material decays as particles are emitted. If it has a long half-life, that pretty much means that the energy is being released rather slowly. In other words, just don't go poking at it and you'll be fine.
On the othe hand, stuff with a short half-life means that atoms are decaying rapidly. Particles are being knocked off with great rapidity. That stuff is much more dangerous, in the now. It is transferring energy, in a harmful form, quickly.
A long half-life means don't go poking at it for a while. A short half-life means you probably should consider containing it really well. We store both safely because we know people like to poke stuff, and it is harmful. It's just that the scary long half-lives only tell part of the story and many people seem to think those are the more problematic.
Disclaimer, I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. However, I've taken a whole lot of physics courses. Someone can probably explain this better than I.
From what I remember, the energy released by γ-radiation is quite low. I'm still not convinced that just because something emits γ-radiation, short or long half life, it has an inherently meaningful energy potential. α- and β-radiation: sure. But γ? It's harmful to humans for very different reasons than fissile material is a useful energy source, isn't it?
The energy of the radiated γ-photons has to come from somewhere. In the first approximation the fission reactor is device for releasing this energy faster while converting it into more mamageable form.
(Pure fission and Teller-Ulam bombs are about releasing said energy as fast and as completely as possible)
Even if the waste starts to leak, it will be just local problem and not big catastrophe. Compared to global warming, burying nuclear waste is more responsible solution for the future generations sake.
Not necessarily. Ocean disposal of nuclear waste used to be an option, but was banned in 1993. Studies of disposal sites in use before then seem to indicate that any problems found were very local[0].
i'm sure that its safe to dump small amounts of radioactive material into the oceans, but if you start to build more reactors and dispose of all the waste into the ocean, the dilution will soon cease to be enough to offset a global ... disaster.
What does significantly radioactive mean? If I am a single individual, a single particle of Cesium or whatever could give me cancer. It's not an averages game when you're talking about real lives.
There's natural amounts of radiation that people are exposed to. Taking a commercial airline flight or handling a banana are good comparable measures - if it's less than those, it's not really worth worrying about.
If safe storage is really the goal (I think part of the thinking is that we might someday have a use for the "waste") it seems highly technically feasible to encase it suitably, and drop it on the subducting side of the Mid-Pacific Subduction Zone.
Since the containers would be very dense, they'd embed deep into the sediment, many thousands of feet underwater. Over geologic time, subduction would draw them deeper and deeper, eventually into the Earth's mantle.
Problem solved, if permanent disposal is truly the goal.
Lots of industrial processes create dangerous chemical wastes which remain dangerous forever. Why are you so worried about nuclear waste which is only dangerous for 10,000 years?
One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced? When I was reading about this IIRC all of the nuclear waste we have produced in the US over the life of our nuclear programs could be stored in an area the size of a football field.
> One thing to look at is, how much waste is actually produced?
A lot of the generated waste is not the used up fuel itself, but contaminated construction materials etc. So lower radiation, but still not something you have to bury somewhere. In the region I live in an old nuclear plant gets deconstructed for over two decades now because its tricky to seperate uncontaminated from contanimated material. The whole deconstruction costs an estimated €5 billion by the way.
That depends on what you qualify as waste. As for the actual otherwise unuseful radioactive reaction byproducts this might very well be true.
But in the industrial meaning nuclear waste also includes various stuff that can not (or could not at the time) be economically separated from the waste althought it is either not dangerous at all or useful as nuclear fuel. And also stuff that is simply radioactive and has nothing to do with nuclear reactors per se.
You could argue that it's actually our social and legal system which is causing problems, rather than a deficiency of technology.
Not in the sense that people are being irrational, but in the sense that we don't have a good framework for dealing with liabilities -- like nuclear waste -- for extremely long periods of time. We could probably store it pretty well if anybody was motivated in paying the direct and indirect costs of doing so properly.
Not in the same state and not in the same concentration. I'm not anti-nuclear in the least but let's not spread disinformation (or "fake news" in modern parlance).
It's actually easier to leave the solar system than it is to hit the sun.
(Earth orbits the sun at 30 km/s [1]. That means you need -30 km/s of ∆v to kill the energy we're born with. The escape velocity for our solar system from Earth's orbit, meanwhile, is about 42 km/s [2]. So you just need 12 km/s of ∆v to skip town.)
[2] sqrt((2 * 6.7E-11 * 2E30) / (150 * 10^6)) given G~6.7E11 [a], mass of the sun is about 2E30 kg [b] and the Earth orbiting the Sun from about 150 million km [b]; for escape velocity [c]
That's good calculation there, but the number we're concerned with is the amount of ∆v that the spacecraft has to generate itself. If you just get close enough to the sun, a spacecraft could use the solar wind and solar magnetic field to shed more velocity, until it is close enough to aerobrake in the sun's atmosphere.
Once you're out in the Oort cloud on the way out, you can't exactly deploy a solar sail to get another push (unless you make it impractically large).
The outermost layer of the Sun ends at 0.1 AU [1]. To put that in perspective, Mercury orbits at between 0.3 and 0.5 AU [2]. (It costs about 13 km / s to get to Mercury exiting from LEO.)
It's much cheaper to fling things out of the Solar System than into the Sun.
Again, you are thinking in terms of propellant carried up from Earth.
Thrust available to a spacecraft using a solar sail is a function of distance to the sun. The sail is a fixed cost, but it may be presumed to degrade over time. It has no propellant that costs additional money to launch.
If you go in, the ever decreasing efficiency of the sail is offset by the greater available energy from the solar wind, and you may still be able to complete the mission (more slowly) with a damaged sail. Your available thrust increases with every kilometer closer to the sun.
If you go out, the decreasing efficiency of the sail compounds with the lesser total energy available to the sail, and if the sail is damaged, you may never reach escape velocity at all. You will never have more thrust than the instant the sail deploys.
That is hard (there was an article on HN about exactly this a while ago). You need a large amount of energy to cancel out our orbit or you just end up sending it into its own solar orbit (which will intersect with ours, to boot).
I don't think you understand how much energy would actually be required to launch the waste into the sun. Costs would have to be reduced by a couple orders of magnitude to make launching any significant amount of material into the sun viable.
There are a couple of things everyone should know when it comes to energy production:
1) Energy investment is primarily driven by cost, not perceived/actual safety. Safety regulations do affect cost, but not enough to significantly change investment (at least in the US, with the current conditions).
2) Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable. The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.
Nuclear fear mongering has resulted in high levels of regulations around nuclear power, but even without that natural gas has an edge in $/kWh. There just hasn't been demand to build nuclear. On top of that, nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize high capital costs. With solar/wind, there is high variability in grid supply, so nuclear is significantly less cost effective, and is getting phased out in favor of low-capex plants (i.e. natural gas).
Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
(source: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group)
> The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.
Sure, this comes up a lot in these discussions. We don't need to rely 100% on any one type of plant, and we don't even have to eliminate coal plants completely. In the end, we're going to have to use a variety of options to fight climate change, and some of the major ones (like increased efficiency) aren't even going to deal with energy production.
I agree that we'll likely have a mix, but the point I was trying to make was:
Before, we had low variability in demand, so things like nuclear, hydro, and geothermal ("clean" methods of producing base load power) had a chance to compete.
Now, we have high variability in demand, so all of those solutions are out (though hydro is a special case), unless externalities like future-cost of CO2 is priced into production cost via taxes or cap&trade.
Wind/Solar + Storage is too expensive, so the market will shift to wind/solar + natural gas. We'll end up burning possibly more fossil fuel, or roughly the same.
>Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable.
>Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
Does this scenario look any more promising with a massive government project to build HVDC? That reduces the intermittent aspect of solar/wind (weather comes in band and sun and wind are somewhat anti-correlated, more true over larger distance). Could we push that renewable percentage up higher and use gas more for peaking?
Without HVDC, renewables will probably peak lower (15%) than the 35% I mentioned.
HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
You can amortized wind really well with interconnect (unlike solar, which is strictly diurnal), so we'll see a trend back to wind in the renewable space.
However, I don't think we'll get beyond 50% renewable/hydro. Wind is built in areas where it is cost effective, which are the areas already taken. As you get HVDC, that area expands slightly, but I don't see us getting to 300GW of average wind capacity.
>HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
I've been told by people trying to build these things that there are some pretty terrible incentives discouraging HVDC.
States without access to good wind sites may still oppose HVDC because they would prefer to build either different power sources or less efficient windmills in their own state to capture the tax revenue (or to use federal subsidies that might go unused), so they prefer not to be able to buy power form a farther away state.
And even the reverse can be true. Localities with extremely cheap energy prices can sometimes oppose a HVDC market expansion because if local sources were able to sell to more consumers it would raise their local prices (the market changed over time or was estimated incorrectly, etc).
My understanding, which is admittedly drawn from HN "napkin math" , is that at current prices for solar and wind, nuclear is a non-starter. That trend is only intensifying. It seems to me that nuclear could have been a good option, but because we've neglected it for so long, squashed innovation with regulations (not necessarily complaining that it didn't need the regulations!) it is uncompetitive economically and will likely stay that way for the near future. Amazingly enough even coal is uncompetitive in many parts of the world now too. The future is starting to turn green under the invisible hand of market economics.
Solar and wind has a lot of 'negative externalities' though that are generally borne by the grid or other operators. I think the economics really work against it at high% penetration (30-40%+).
The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas.
This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar blips). This massively increases the capex of CCGT plants, as you're only producing rarely. This would get more and more extreme with more solar+wind penetration.
Another massive problem is solar+wind overproduction, which is really hard to solve and is starting to really hit the German, UK and California grids. On very sunny AND windy days you get massive energy overproduction. You then have to either:
a) Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out)
b) Pay other (natgas, coal, nuclear, etc) operators to shut down, which can be very expensive
c) Hope that negative electricity prices make more demand. This is unlikely to happen as industrial users can't switch on extra production quick enough to respond to this.
This is made worse by feed in tariffs being paid at any energy price, incentivizing solar+wind to continue generating even if electricity price is negative (say it is -€0.05kWh spot, but your FIT is €0.20/kWh, you are still going to produce as you will net 0.15euro per kWh.
The two 'solutions' which are often mentioned are battery storage and HVDC long distance transmission.
Battery storage is still horrendously expensive on a kWh basis. It may come down, but this is an enormous problem. I am personally not sure there is enough lithium left that is easily extracted to make this viable at the scale (billions of kWh) required.
HVDC connections I also am suspicious of - if it's sunny and windy in Germany, it is likely to also be the same 1000km away more or less.
Weirdly, every story I read about this as it starts to happen on windy/sunny weekends and holidays is headlined "Excess solar/wind blah blah" and when you read the story, there's still coal and gas powered electricity production happening at the same time.
Even in your entirely hypothetical example you say they're having to pay natgas and coal to stop production.
Is it just me or is that really weird?
I mean turning off coal and gas is kind of the point, isn't it?
Coal can't be shut down easily, it's incredibly expensive and inefficient to dial it up and down. Natgas is easier but still quite a slow process.
If you could turn gas and coal up and down in a few minutes, then perhaps you would have a point. But coal can take 6-24hrs and natgas 1-4hrs. It won't suddenly stop when you have a massive gust of wind.
Wind and solar generation are highly predictable on those timescales, you can find predicted and actual generation graphs from various sources. They're certainly more predictable than demand.
More realistic excuses I've heard are long term contracts, potentially with minimum run times for fossil plants. Which are therefore the actual problem at the moment.
> Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out)
If we're talking about problems that show up when wind/solar becomes an order of magnitude more prevalent than it is now, why would you care about the cost of retrofitting anything?
I would assume that all-DC grid would happen before that (and solve the issues with grid stability). Extrapolating from the rate at which Europe migrated from 110V AC to 230V AC you are looking at at least 50 years for that to happen.
Yes but little to no new stuff is getting fitted with this when installed outside of Germany. It significantly puts the price of installs up. You have to dump the power somewhere and it's not cheap/easy to.
Even leaving aside the question of how much insurance should be required and how to underwrite that, as well as what kind of reserve should be mandated for cleanup and long term waste storage, the economics of nuclear are very rough.
The lion's share of the costs are upfront and the break even period is measured in decades. What is the energy landscape going to look like in 30 years? That's a question that you need to be able to answer with high confidence if you want to correctly price bonds that will be used to construct a nuclear power plant to be paid off from the revenue of the plant. If the potential bond buyers can't answer that question with high confidence then they don't know what interest rate is appropriate for the bonds and they probably won't want to buy them.
You still need to provide base load capacity. Wind and Solar can't do that. Hydroelectric can, but can't be put everywhere and has its own environmental impact story.
Grid-scale storage is one possibility, but more work needs to be done to make it viable. For technologies that exist today, nuclear looks the best for base load capacity.
Keep in mind that coal is uncompetitive because of natural gas being so cheap, not because of renewables. Renewables are not supplanting natural gas at a reasonable rate.
While natural gas is better than coal, it's still not good from an emissions perspective compares to nuclear.
This report seems to discount the tail risks involved with potential future nuclear accidents. Lets ignore the very complicated question of risk tradeoffs vs other sources for the moment.
Nuclear power has extreme tail risk that is hard to quantify based on the few examples of it happening. For the thee major events we can reference how do we know we didn't simply get lucky?
With fukushima for example, "Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people." [1]
Clearly the lack of deaths directly attributable to nuclear accidents does not accurately capture the risks.
So what exactly is the risk of a catastrophic event that has thankfully never happened but could? Its not clear but rather than rolling dice with those risks we can actually make better systems without those unquantifiable risks in the first place. That takes us to the tradeoff calculus.
Just in the realm of nuclear power there are far better approaches we should be investing in as opposed to traditional plants such as LFTR [2] which does not have proliferation, waste or meltdown risk.
Picking on coal is a little unfair at this time because coal is being supplanted by much cleaner natural gas purely on market forces and solar and wind are growing dramatically. Of course there are issues with these as well, scaling issues and their own kind of impacts but they do not harbor the same kind of unquantifiable massive tail risk of traditional nuclear.
The discussion I have seen so far on this thread go something like this:
1. Nuclear is really safe. The best.
2. Someone brings up an incident that actually happened.
3. Apologists excuse the incidents that happened because
a. It wasnt designed right
b. It was due to corruption
c. It was bad planning.
etc.
We live in the real world here.
You dont prove nuclear is safe by excusing every accident
and actually using the disaster to prove how safe it is.
The ironic thing is, and I'll probably be downvoted for even positing this, but Chernobyl was the best thing that ever happened to that local environment, at least when you look how local wildlife has bounced back since it's been cordoned off as an exclusion zone.
I get your point, but I think it should be clarified. What is good for "the environment" and what is good for mankind are very different things. Wild boar in Bavaria have less reasons to be eaten by humans, now that they are radioactive. For us humans it is of course less beneficial to live in a regions where we should not eat game and mushrooms.
Been talking about this for years. Yes nuclear has some scary dangerous factors. But in the real world example of things going horribly wrong the long term damage just isn't as bad as what people talk about.
Unless of course all that wildlife is getting crazy amounts of cancer that I don't know about and I am wrong.
Let's cut a crap, shell we? We can't solve climate change problem which might be acute for last 20 years, yet we believe somehow that we are able to solve storage issue of nuclear waste for next 100 000. Egyptian pyramids are ONLY 5000 years old! And we are not 100% sure what is written in there.
How do you warn next generation after 10 000 years, that some particular site is dangerous/radiaoctive? How do we keep something safe for 100 000 years? Is our Earth look same after 20 000 years, 50 000 years, 70 000 years? Will there be new volcano or shift of tectonic plates? Ice age? How do you keep such waste safe?
Even as of today, there is no final storage solution for spent nuclear fuel. There is one know being built in Finland, and it is just for waste produces in Finland. BTW, there is very nice movie about it: Into Eternity. You should look it!
I find this line of reasoning a little misleading. Looking at nuclear's safety record isn't entirely the correct measure, its that the potential consequences are so extreme.
Consider Fukushima. In some ways Japan got lucky, it was entirely possible that an additional reactor on the site could have melted down and the holding pond could have breached. Because of this they were having to consider evacuating areas on the outskirts of Tokyo. Obviously, if that had happened we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
I don't claim that we have considered the risks appropriately, have a sensible nuclear policy, or are considering nuclear correctly wrt climate change. But to claim nuclear is the safest because direct deaths to date are lower is not the full story.
Chernobyl was not unlucky. This was organisational failure and technical failure - few to none knew about xenon pit and that positive void coefficient was a compromise at the time to fulfill the demands.
Fukushima? I'd say ignoring the known geological situation and dangers (no excuse for that IMHO) and the design of the backup cooling system that fails on a flood is also not unlucky.
It's compromises to save cost and ignore dangers both times.
Imagine you were behind the scenes of the Fukushima crisis. You have to begin planning for the evacuation of the outskirts of Tokyo because you have been told that the situation on the plant site is uncontrolled, there have been multiple meltdowns and explosions and there's the possibility for things to get worse. At that point the game has changed around the calculation of risk. A few days later the situation is declared under control. How do you feel? I can think of no appropriate feeling aside from "lucky".
The point is that the error bars around nuclear power operation are so large that perceptions of risk are not the same as for conventional power.
Its interesting to think about the role of luck for Chernobyl. A grossly unsafe design combined with a bunch of incompetents performing live tests with multiple safety systems disabled, not much luck there. Was there luck in consequences of what followed? Possibly.
2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
Indeed, it also fails to mention hydroelectric. Nor is there any mention of how much it costs per TW/h, especially when you factor in the insane cost from just a single accident or the fact that the waste has to be safely and securely stored for a very long time.
Hydroelectric depends too much on orography. Not all countries have waterfalls, and if they have, they could be in inaccessible regions where it is very costly to build, let alone transport.
> 2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
How can nuclear (fision) energy be safer than wind/solar/hydro? New efficient solar cells should be enough, environment friendly, and safer than other alternatives as long as the manufacturing of these are environment friendly as well. Also, everyone can setup their own solar plant at home, I almost did so, but the price of the materials and the setup are too high for me.
I'd like you to consider if nuclear material is useful for something apart from generating energy. It may be useful for other things we don't even know right now, and in the future we may have consumed all the resources.
The manufacture of solar panels is not as safe or as environmentally friendly as you might hope, just like how buying a new Prius to replace your car is probably a net loss for the environment unless your existing one is already near the end of its useful life.
You have to look at the whole market. When you buy a new car the old one gets resold to someone else, which causes yet another even older car to be resold and so on through the market until the oldest, broken-est car actually exits the market (assuming the total market size is static, if it's growing then you need to compare the Prius against the other new cars that would enter the market) so as long as you're replacing existing usage then you're probably doing good.
Yes, that's what I'm afraid of. Building solar cells might not be as environment friendly as I'd like, but hey, we can optimize these processes later on.
Building a nuclear plant would also be very unfriendly when it comes to ecology.
I believe it us due to the installation deaths. Typically solar cells are installed on rooftops, which are non-trivially dangerous places to work. Multiply the risk by tens of thousands of installations and we get fatalities due to solar power.
You serious?
And building an hydroelectric/atomic/coal plant is not dangerous?
It's not a too dangerous place, when the people who set these up are professionals who are following a security guideline.
I see lots of people working on their roof, so, at least for me, this is a nonsense argument to discredit solar energy.
The number should fall as solar becomes something that you add when a roof is constructed, rather than retro-fitted, since that roof work is already being done.
Renewables solve a different problem though. There aren't great ways of storing energy on a large scale. So you end up needed two components to a grid - a baseline that you can scale up whenever (coal, natural gas, nuclear), and a renewable component. Saying that nuclear is the safest in regards to a baseline energy load is a valid argument to make.
Mechanically we have the perfect solution to storing power - reverse hydro. Pump up into a reservoir while the grid is full of renewables that you drain through turbines when the renewables drop off. All the logistics are solved problems, it is mostly a matter of just paying to transition to it:
* The grid itself would need a dramatic rework. It needs renovation for renewables in the first place, but introducing a hydro base load solution increases pressures on existing infrastructure.
* You need enough solar / wind volume to justify a sizable centralized investment in such a power solution. But broad wind/solar causes problems involving peak grid load well before you even start building these things, along with the aforementioned grid updates, make a real chicken and egg problem.
Hydro storage facilities are also vulnerable to extreme climate, take a long time to build (especially in countries where bureaucracy makes building anything take 10x longer than it should) and aren't expandable.
But they would work, easily, to solve the power storage problem. Hail potential energy!
Is it the safest when projecting for increased usage? While also taking into account modern threat vectors to a nuclear plant? I have no idea, just thinking out loud.
Can anyone explain to me why "deaths/tWh" is even a meaningful measure?
Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.
I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.
Also, why did they leave away hydro, water and wind power in those "deaths per x" charts?
How is it skewed? It's a cost-benefit analysis. tWh is the benefit, deaths are the safety cost. In other words, if your country needs X amount of power, and you know the deaths/tWh for each energy source, then you can figure out how many people would die if your country used that energy source to produce its power.
> I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.
This is a bad analogy. A good analogy would be: if you had to travel 1000 miles, it would be safer to do it by car than on foot because car is safer per mile travelled.
> Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.
Erm, wtf? The world's energy requirements are a more-or-less fixed number of tWh, no? Like, if 1 nuclear reactor produces as much energy as 10000 wind turbines, comparing the deaths that would be caused by 1 reactor to the deaths that would be caused by 10000 turbines seems like the obviously correct comparison to make.
Relevantly, some nuclear plants are paired with hydro schemes, in order to make the flat output of nuclear plants economically match the bumpy daytime peak of consumer demand.
The reason why many nuclear plants are colocated with hydroelectric dams is that the dam is good source for cooling water in 3rd cooling loop and that it is good backup power source for black start of the nuclear plant. Ability of nuclear plant to scale its output power according to demand is usually significantly higher than of hydro.
It's meaningful because it provides a rational basis for comparing the risk of various power sources. It's the same as comparing deaths/mile to evaluate self-driving cars.
People are overwhelmingly bad at risk assessment, which is why one can be anti-nuclear and afraid of terrorist attacks (both lower risk), while happily driving to work at a coal mine (both higher risk).
Terawatt-hours are a direct measurement of what we want from an energy source, namely, energy. The equivalent for transportation would be deaths/mile, which is indeed a commonly used metric of transportation safety. Deaths/TWh is very meaningful.
It's not a perfect measurement, as Nuclear is similar to solar in that it provides power to it's own schedule. Normally this will mean gas or coal being throttled below their capacity. It's possible that this affects their deaths/TWh negatively, though perhaps not as maybe the sourcing of the fuel is the big problem with those plants, but e.g. if it's 5 people who die building the nuclear and gas plant, and then the gas plant throttles down overnight because the nuclear plant can't, then the nuclear plant wins unfairly.
It's the absolute opposite of skewed. It's fair and representative. If a country needs XX TWh/year, this is exactly how many deaths will be caused by the various production methods.
You car analogy is on the other hand completely wrong: the death/HP is a meaningless indicator. How about deaths per mile travelled? Check out the values at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which has a section for traveling (named Additional)
I'm only aware of two deaths specifically caused by wind power, when two engineers were caught on top of one when it caught fire. It's likely such a negligible number that it wouldn't even show up on the graph.
Wikipedia's stats on energy production fatalities have wind being pretty decent, at 150 deaths per PWh (rooftop solar is 440, US hydro is 5, US nuclear is 0.01, and fossil fuels are in the thousands), but if the number is negligible it's only because wind power itself is negligible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
I'm pretty sure hydroelectric would actually win statistics 1, 3, and 4 "hands down". It'd also be a serious contender for 2 and 6.
This is of course excluding coal, which I'm 92% sure makes even hydroelectric (let alone nuclear) look like a peaceful meadow full of fairies and butterflies by comparison.
"Win" was (I'm guessing) used in a negative context to mean "worse", so I used it in a similar way. Kind of like how Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot tend to "win" competitions for murdering the most people.
All I can say is I'd rather be spending time catching fish on a lake created by a hydroelectric system, then cooking those fish at night in the camp site by the lake, than doing the same anywhere inside the Chernobyl 30 km Exclusion Zone or the Fukushima 20 km Exclusion Zone.
If it's fishing you want, the water reservoirs for nuclear power plants make for good spots. I used to live over by the Rancho Seco plant, and its backup water reservoir (and the surrounding land) is still maintained as a public park even decades after the plant shut down (and was maintained as such even when the plant was operational, from what I understand). Good trout over there.
The Chernobyl 30 km Exclusion Zone is actually not that bad, apart from the slight radioactivity. Since there's no human interference, it's essentially a sanctuary for local wildlife.
Do you think coal mining deaths should not be counted if they occur 200 miles away from the power station the mine supplies? What about if the deaths occurred a continent away?
Yes, however this assumes that number of deaths of any technology would linearly scale with its energy output.
e.g. if I built n times more wind turbines to match the energy output of nuclear energy then, according to this measure, I would also get n times the number of wind-power-related deaths.
I see no basis for that assumption, especially as nuclear energy has known risks that e.g. wind power doesn't.
Fission power's bad rep is bad for fusion power, the latter being way more safe in any respect.
Anyway, although it is a serious issue, to this day no cities had to be evacuated permanently because of air pollution.
Regretfully, nuclear energy has an aura of doom, and investment in nuclear power plants wrongfully reek of hubris.
Even if it isn't a renewable source, fission power is one of our best allies in tackling CO2 emissions. At least it may buy us some time before fusion power and the dissemination of renewables.
Arguments for nuclear power tend to ignore a few things:
- They talk about ideal power plants, but not actual power plants. Are they assuming that when the world switches to nuclear, that every country will build these ideal types of plants and maintain them well?
- Pro-nuclear arguments don't talk about inevitable wars. When nuclear power plants are scattered across the world in countries that will eventually become unstable, the potential outcomes look different. We are living through an amazing time for peace in many countries, but it isn't a given that things will remain peaceful like this.
- Radiation has a cultural effect as well, and those plants and storage facilities make likely targets, since radiation disasters tend to cause people to panic.
- After there is no more power from given plants or fuel, there is less incentive to take care of the waste and cleanup.
I'm not entirely against nuclear power, but I think that it's more complicated of an issue than most nuclear proponents claim.
Energy efficiency and use reduction are two other areas to consider. If it's possible to change behavior and opinions around nuclear energy then it should be possible to change behavior and opinions about efficiency.
Before we even get to the safety, and the disposal of the nuclear waste, we have huge difficulties with the basic economics and construction of nuclear in the US.
The two plants under construction, Summer and Vogtle, have been plagued by construction difficulties and cost overruns. The Summer plant was just finally cancelled today. It seems that the Vogtle plant is going to follow the same route.
The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared. The time for nuclear in the US is done. Other options are cheaper, faster, and more responsive. And that's ignoring the political aspect of it all.
Hold on, there's more than enough blame to go around.
Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy and lies to Toshiba [1] weren't caused by nuclear's opponents. That's all on the heads of Westinghouse's management. And if management was competent, perhaps Summer would have been closer to being on budget.
It's not as though the AP1000 is impossible to build, other countries are doing it just fine. It's just impossible for US contractors to pull through, apparently. That's not the fault of nuclear's detractors.
I'm not surprised that Westinghouse behaved idiotically; they've always struck me as the Ford of washing machines, and I can only imagine what they're like at utility scale...
It sounds like the best course of action is to bring in foreign firms to construct reactors in the US; but that'll probably have to wait for the 2020 election... if it happens at all, that is.
Westinghouse built something like 25% of all nuclear reactors worldwide. That they are failing for just 4 more reactors is a bit shocking to me, honestly, and I would not have expected it.
If it takes 10 years to plan and build a new reactor, I simply can't see the point of trying it in 2020. Sizing our solar and wind resources to cover our needs during seasonal lows, building HVDC, and adding storage at 2030 prices seems like a far smarter move economically.
Unless there are improvements that halve the cost of nuclear, and make it so that it's only a $1B gamble instead of a $10B gamble, I simply can't see why anybody would put up capital. There are lots of government backed loans on these things, but even then it's going to be a hard sell to investors. Everybody has been burned by these projects.
That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list?
Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off.
Most solar installation these days however are utility scale deployments in empty fields. It's pretty low risk, plus the same pollution and AGW benefits that nuclear benefits from.
As an aside, I wonder if anyone has done the math on storing high-level nuclear waste on the Moon, now that a fully reusable SpaceX Falcon Heavy is almost here. That might be cheaper than the financial and political costs of places like Yucca Mountain.
I'd be surprised if the biggest source of injury from solar wasn't from installers falling off roofs.
You can't count all of those injuries against solar itself, though, as roofing injuries will happen regardless, and putting up solar panels greatly extends the life of a roof, so the amortized total injury to installers doesn't go up as much.
Plus with Tesla's solar roof, you might say that the additional risk of solar is zero, since it's (probably, I'm guessing) no more dangerous to install than any other roof.
We'd need long term statistics to fully develop a model of risk. I.e., (admittedly, anecdotally) within the first year or two of having his monocrystalline setup, Dave[1] suffered damage to one panel (aerial debris) requiring a service call to replace the unit. If this happens on a semi-frequent basis (i.e. one panel per ~3 years per install) the risk profile changes not insignificantly.
I've had workmen on my roof for damaged slates due to high wind, so again, with a Tesla roof this could conceivably be a negative death rate of the solar tiles are stronger than standard tiles, which they claim they are.
Probably true, though for what its worth OSHA[0] (yeah yeah "nanny state" and all) dictates pretty clearly the federal obligations on training and equipping roof workers with full body harnesses, lanyards, and proper anchorage points to effectively eliminate fall related injuries. Whether or not the employe(e|r) adheres to these regulations[1] is another issue, but the risk can effectively be mitigated almost entirely (the "total fall distance" is to be no more than 6 feet with a safety factor to the ground of no less than 3 feet)[2].
RE: Grandparent - the production of solar panels isn't as "green" as you may think. See: IEEE[3].
RE: Wind - The standard horizontal-axis blade design (i.e. what Siemens and other major commercial institutions offer) have ecological impacts on wildlife[4].
====
[0] Forgive the US centric analysis.
[1] I.e., cell-tower deaths are notorious for these sorts of violations -- both due to the endemic sub-sub-sub-contracting strategy that Verizon, et al, uses to distance themselves from the bad PR and litigation, as well as the employee these jobs tend to attract (risk takers/adrenaline junkies) who, even if given the proper gear will neglect to use it often due to machismo. Following full protocol, the injury risk decreases quite notably.
[3] http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-... Rare earth metals, processing with hydrofluoric acid, all the usual suspects one would expect. And this isn't a Koch-brothers funded gas/oil funded piece of propaganda. For goodness sakes, this is the IEEE -- about as pro-green (while keeping the science legitimate) as you can get.
One factor in Tesla's favor then is their stated objective of handling the solar roof installation in house. Unless they resort to the same shady practices that Verizon uses for tower installation, direct control (and responsibility for) their installers should lend itself to mandating best practices on the safety angle.
Everything has risks. Yes solar panel installers can fall off roofs. I'm sure there have been fatalities in the mining for the elements required for solar panels or making turbines for wind. Those are honest concerns that should be taken into account when comparing different energy sources.
However this article did not of that - it just pretended that they did not exist. I believe the publisher of this article has an ulterior motive, something related to supporting the nuclear industry. So in oder to make its point it needed to leave it out. The title of this article is not just 'misleading' it is completely and deliberately dishonest.
Nuclear "waste" can actually be used as fuel again, we just need to research that technology.
You still need a lot more plastic and rare earths for solar and wind compared with nuclear (per watt).
I think solar and wind are a good intermediate step but not for long-term.
Maybe. I saw a Google X talk a couple years ago from some grad students at MIT that wanted to build a nuclear power plant that closed the fuel cycle loop. (which is what you're talking about). They made some very grand promises about how this would solve the HLW problem.
Unfortunately a few years later they had to issue a correction, because older (more experienced) engineered stepped in and showed them where the mistakes in their work were, and they couldn't eliminate nearly as much HLW as they thought with existing technology.
In other words, a closed nuclear fuel cycle doesn't exist. We could be better than we are currently with investments in molten salt and fast reactors, but I don't think we know how to get to zero HLW using fission.
Considering that HLW lasts for a million years, that's imposing too high a cost on too many of our descendants, IMO.
My personal belief is that solar and wind are the best way to go for now, and if we ever get zero-HLW fission or aneutronic fusion working, cool.
You're referring to the Transatomic 2-student company's claims that their epithermal-neutron molten salt reactor could burn nuclear waste as fuel without additional fissile feed stock. Professor Kord Smith and others pointed out their error.
However, that their whimsical concept didn't live up to its hype is no reason to claim that the closed nuclear fuel cycle doesn't exist. Breeding more fuel than you consume in an advanced reactor was proven in the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 near Arco Idaho in the early 1950s. The physical concept of breeding and closing the cycle is well-proven and 100% proven possible. No one debates this.
People do debate how much it costs vs. the status quo of just mining uranium. Uranium is cheaper than recycling spent fuel, so we mine uranium. It's that simple. If we decided uranium was running low and drove prices up, reprocessing waste would become more economical and more people would do it.
It's almost as if you can frame a 'data-driven' argument and limit the universe of what people imagine to be possible, while pretending to be 'rational' and 'scientific' the whole time!
Of course it cuts both ways. A better headline would have been "Nuclear: sure it's dirty but are you really trying to tell us coal is safer".
As the article makes clear, this another technology that might be useful in the future, but is currently unusable thanks to the problem of the waste generated from it. There are no safe options for storing nuclear waste right now.
It really is time that we start looking at cutting back mindless generation and consumption of energy and that mostly means a big shift in lifestyle for North American and European consumers.
Either that or else you can all explain to your children and grandchildren (whom you love very much and would do anything for etc.) that you decided that living an hour's drive or more from work and commuting in every day while eating fresh dragonfruit and shrimp flown from the other side of the world was just fine.
Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Time to start actually working on the first of those.
I'm against centralized power generation of any kind. Make a household fusion generator that's safe and maybe I'll consider it, but until then I'm for solar because it can be deployed in a decentralized network (with batteries), and it's clean.
That leaves the problem of the mining and manufacture, which is still centralized. This problem can be solved with GM organisms. We engineer fungi and bacteria to grow on roofs and generate electricity. They'd use CO2 in the growing process too. We can grow batteries in a similar way. Bacteria, yeast and viruses can do anything. They're the ultimate nanotech, we just need to learn how to program them.
Came here to say more or less this. A centralized power grid was perhaps unavoidable, but now that decentralization is a possibility, the sooner the better. Nuclear is a good option when compared to big gas or oil plants, but what we really need is an energy paradigm shift, and there is little room for fission power in a decentralized grid.
Trying to understand risk by looking at historic data alone is wrong when you're talking about catastrophic ruin and uncertain tiny probabilities. Add the word weapon in the headline quote to see what I mean,
"Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are the safest modern weapon"
Arguments that nuclear power are safe need to prove that while assuming the worst-case scenario, since the probability of such a scenario is a-priori unknown despite what much of this comment section seems to be claiming.
Solar is knowingly much safer because it is much easier to reason about.
While I mostly agree with the article's risk assessments, it unfortunately leaves out one major risk factor: Nuclear proliferation. If more and more countries have access to nuclear power plants, then they also have the possibility to divert significant quantities (SQ) [1] of fissile materials towards nuclear weapons.
I cannot find the source right now, but a talk given by non-proliferation experts outlined how accounting for fissile material in a reactor is about 99% accurate. But even 1% of nuclear fuel, on a nuclear-powered-world scale, is equivalent to hundreds of SQs per year, assuming current genration and next-generation reactor technologies.
A nuclear conflict, even if regional (only a few dozen discharges) can potentially have dire, world-wide consequences. The article should have at least touched on those.
> Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy; in 2014 these sources accounted for about 96% of global energy production. While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored.
Renewables aren't as reliable or powerful as fossil fuels or nuclear reactors; one simply cannot power a grid with only renewables. And the one exception, hydroelectric dams, are geography-dependent and can cause massive floods during any rapid unplanned deconstructions.
Most people who I've talked to about their fears over nuclear energy say they wouldn't want to be in the blast zone in case of a meltdown or near a potential terrorist target. Then I pull up the map of existing nuclear plants and more often than not they already live close to one. I've found its a fear thing for most people.
The quoted statistics are interesting, but irrelevant when it comes to the actual use of nuclear. Furthermore, why are solar and wind energy missing from these stats? They account for 90% of new power in Europe in 2016 [1], and I'd assume similar for the major world economies. I'd like to know who funded this study. It screams of nuclear industry backing...
For anyone still being in disbelief of nuclear being made obsolete:
Why has not a single (!) private insurer been willing to fully insure a nuclear facility without government backing?! The reason is simple: the risk is too high, even for insurance companies worth billions.
TLDR: nuclear has, as yet, not worked using private financing.
The linked article just screams "last decade's energy mindset". Its conclusion may have been true then but it's certainly not true now in the age of cheap and widespread solar/wind.
There needs to be more awareness of this. If nuclear power was so amazingly safe, private insurance companies should have no problems insuring it. But they won't.
One thing is simply missing from the piece. You can't really distinguish between the civil use of nuclear power and the military use.
Maybe there is some reactor design which can fix this but the reactors which are currently being build are not those designs. Also they are build for 60+ years. A lot can happen in 60 years.
Discussing an energy source just by pointing about future developments is not the answer. The EPR reactors in Finland and France are several times over budget and took much longer than planed to build. In the time you could have build wind turbines and solar cells all over the country with an equivalent or higher amount of power output. And according to the current statistics every added kilowatt would have been cheaper than the last one.
Also you might now say, but solar and wind are not always available. But at the same time you think that all problems with nuclear can be overcome but not the storage of electricity?
While the threats from coal and gas are regularly distributed through time (near constant rate of pollutants) the threat from nuclear energy are sporadic (ie meltdown, terror) and are thus harder to model and assess. Also agree with others that wind and solar are being discounted unfairly despite their growth factors.
I've come to the conclusion that nuclear energy is a good thing when done correctly, sadly we seem to be plagued by 60 year old power plants with severe safety problems still running because the power companies don't care about safety, they just want to run them as long as possible until they fail.
Nuclear energy is only as safe as the people operating it. Admiral Rickover demanded a high personal standard for reactor personnel, and there was ZERO reactor accidents[0] because of those standards.
IMO Natural Gas/BioGas powered turbine generators are better option to augment wind and solar power generation. The GE LM6000 [1] gas turbine (based on a 747 GE CF6 engine) can produce 40MW+ of electricity. They could even recycle a surplus CF6 engine to reduce manufacturing resources required.
I wonder how much nuclear suffers from PR. Clearly statistics are not really effective at changing opinions. But what would happen if popular Elon Musk/Steve Jobs type of public figure get into the lobby game with a nuclear company? Could that swing perception either way?
It suffers a lot from bad PR since the start. In public view, nuclear anything is usually related to atomic bomb and mushroom clouds and such stuff, although most reactor designs are inherently incapable of sustaining uncontrolled supercritical fission (excluding for example Chernobyl's RBMK).
Flying used to much more dangerous than it is now. But we improved the technology and now it's safe enough that most don't think twice before getting on a plane.
Discussions of nuclear power somehow ignore the fact that, like any other technology, current reactor designs are not the final iteration. They can be improved upon.
If everyone aside from the Chinese ignore nuclear power, then the Chinese may be the ones making a fortune selling their advanced reactor designs to everyone else.
Not true. In the short run, solar is the safest. A massive spill of solar energy is just called a nice day. In the long run, it's the most dangerous. The sun may eventually consume the Earth and much later, go nova.
Logical arguments do not apply in that scenario. Other energy forms might kill people a slow, invisible death. But when a nuclear reactor melts down the pictures of death and drama will go around the world.
>The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process:
A lot of people here may know what mortality and morbidity mean straight off, but I want to share this article as much as possible, and it does a great job reaching out to laymen. I also like how it starts right off with "more energy is good, here's a link demonstrating why, let's move on."
The issue I have with Nuclear is that we have not managed to fix the waste issue, and nobody seems to want to talk about it.
I'm not a huge fan of "salting the earth" for 10,000 years.
And when you say "it's safe", you're inherently ignoring that you basically have this toxic waste that is too costly to shoot into space and too dangerous to keep anywhere on earth for 10,000 years where it wont eventually harm the ecosystem.
I don't have much knowledge of the issue, but couldn't it be that big investments in nuclear energy would propagate and facilitate the process of isotope separation for enriching Uranium, which would mean more countries having the technology to build nuclear weapons, and thus increase the risk of nuclear war, and ultimately human extinction? This stuff sounds scary to me, not the energy part
A great documentary about this is "Pandora's Promise". In it quite a few previous sustainable energy (wind, solar) advocates lay out the problem: sustainable has too far to catch up and in order to get the developing world to high quality of life they need high energy consumption per capita fast. Only solution to this is a safe version of nuclear.
We should try to use as much as possible renewable resources and save precious, expensive, rare elements to be used only for scientific research purposes and space missions (propulsion and power plants).
We have many alternatives on earth but we don't have energetic alternatives on other planets and outer space.
We are just wasting the opportunity to go far.
We don't have to choose between energy abundance and good stewardship of the environment. Why do green activists and a majority of Western governments want us to? Attempts to force Western countries to cut emissions, without a corresponding transition to nuclear power, are unacceptable and represent a wealth transfer from rich countries to poor countries.
Wind works so well in places like Santa Monica the utilities were able to make it illegal to use wind power for your home. Fortunately they were not able to do the same to solar. We have home owners in california generating more energy than they use with their home solar panels, like my parents they generate more than they use even at the height of the summer.
More than anything, the brown/black people of the world need the west to give in to our demands for the approval of our uranium desires to help us get to progress driven escape velocity Nitrogen + Steel economies.
It's going to be politicized no matter what. Stop spanking humans for having human nature and lecturing them about being more rational. Politicians have to consider perception or they get voted out. It's just a technology that freaks people out on an emotional level and you can't stop that.
You underestimate the power of propaganda. It's what made people like radioactive materials half a century ago [1] and what makes them fear nuclear power now.
I find it amusing that HN is so divided on this issue yet quite unanimous distaste for how the middle east treats people and how the far east treats the environment.
Nuclear power will look a lot prettier when it's competing on price with socially and environmentally ethical solar cells and fossil fuels.
Comparison is incomplete without taking into consideration BDBA (beyond design basis accidents). Probability of an accident worse than Chernobyl is low, but not zero. Multiply it by economic loss from large densely populated area becoming uninhabitable, and it can easily flip the conclusion.
This article severely underestimates the number of deaths by nuclear power by not considering the deaths caused by leakage of radioactive materials over the course of the next 10,000 years. In fact, there really isn't any way to know that number for another 500 years at least.
With a potential reduction in the Department of Energy's budget, this might not hold. There may not be enough funding to properly dispose of the waste. Not to mention that some of the effects of past storage aren't well-catalogued [0]:
Three years ago the D.O.E. sent the local tribes a letter to say they shouldn’t eat the fish they caught in the river more than once a week.
[...]
Hanford turns out to be a good example of an American impulse: to avoid knowledge that conflicts with whatever your narrow, short-term interests might be. What we know about Hanford we know mainly from whistle-blowers who worked inside the nuclear facility—and who have been ostracized by their community for threatening the industry in a one-industry town. (“Resistance to understanding a threat grows with proximity,” writes Brown.) One hundred and forty-nine of the tanks in the Hanford farms are made of a single shell of a steel ill-designed to contain highly acidic nuclear waste. Sixty-seven of them have failed in some way and allowed waste or vapors to seep out. Each tank contains its own particular stew of chemicals, so no two tanks can be managed in the same way. At the top of many tanks accumulates a hydrogen gas, which, if not vented, might cause the tank to explode. “There are Fukushima-level events that could happen at any moment,” says Carpenter. “You’d be releasing millions of curies of strontium 90 and cesium. And once it’s out there it doesn’t go away—not for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
The people who created the plutonium for the first bombs, in the 1940s and early 1950s, were understandably in too much of a rush to worry about what might happen afterward. They simply dumped 120 million gallons of high-level waste, and another 444 billion gallons of contaminated liquid, into the ground. They piled uranium (half-life: 4.5 billion years) into unlined pits near the Columbia River. They dug 42 miles of trenches to dispose of solid radioactive waste—and left no good records of what’s in the trenches. In early May of this year a tunnel at Hanford, built in the 1950s to bury low-level waste, collapsed. In response, the workers dumped truckloads of dirt into the hole. That dirt is now classified as low-level radioactive waste and needs to be disposed of. “The reason the Hanford cleanup sucks—in a word—is shortcuts,” said Carpenter. “Too many goddamn shortcuts.”
A French engineer, Jean-Marc Jancovici, has been claiming this for a decade, with many talks and documents. I'm only 80% fan of his reflection because he doesn't account much for human change and new technological reconfiguration.
The public's nuclear acceptance is not about day to day death toll. It's about broken promises and Armageddon.
Looking at the chart, I'd take gas over nuclear in a heartbeat thinking of what nuclear has done to Japan. Nuclear can both power and destroy a country. Gas and other options do not. Neither does solar or wind which are not even in that chart.
Say we have a new technology that is safer than nuclear, but had a one in a million chance to destroy Earth. It would be safest on paper, for however long paper and researchers still existed.
"But Fukushima was a horrible place for a nuclear power plant and it was run by incompetent people," you say. But that's exactly the point. If we make a list of all the plants in the world and the safety measures they undermined and their staffing situation, how many would be stellar? How many would even admit anything?
Natural gas kills 4,000 people per PWh generated. Fukushima killed zero immediately, and might kill 100-200 eventually through increased cancer incidences.
Fukushima made a few hundred square kilometers briefly unsafe, and some tens of square kilometers temporarily uninhabitable. (Or really, inhabitable but slightly unhealthy.) Fossil fuels are wrecking the entire planet.
It's interesting that Fukushima seems to be all people remember about the Tohoku earthquake. 16,000 people died (for comparison the worst natural disaster in the US, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, killed 6,000-12,000), hundreds of thousands were displaced, and many towns were destroyed, but nobody remembers that. A dam failure triggered by the earthquake killed 12 people but nobody uses this to argue against dams.
You're ignoring the suicide missions, the betrayed promises of the electric company, the endless coverage on the news, the anxiety and fear, and the government blatently lying about the health consequences. You're ignoring the long term consequences of habitability, of raw fish being a vital food source and the nuclear core having melt straight into the ocean. You're ignoring the media censorship. And that many of the "few" victims of cancer were children.
The public's rejection of nuclear is about terror. With terrorists, we're willing to turn foreign policy on its head and wage war and go as far as travel bans. And with the terror of nuclear, Germany has shut down all of it's plants. The consequence? Germans feel safer.
And no, no one has forgotten the Tsunami. That's blatantly offensive. I'm talking about nuclear to stay on topic.
What suicide missions? The only people who have died at the reactor were killed by the tsunami.
You're worried about contamination of fish? Coal power has contaminated fish throughout all the world's oceans with dangerous levels of mercury. You've probably seen warnings for children and pregnant women to be careful about the fish they eat and not to eat fish more than a couple of times a week. Coal is responsible for about half of that. Compare this to fears about potential contamination of some fish near Fukushima, and I'll take nuclear any day of the week and twice on Sunday if that's the choice.
I constantly hear about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. I don't recall hearing anything about the non-nuclear consequences of the earthquake after a few months. Is it offensive to state what I see?
Humans went back into the plant not knowing if it was going to explode. Whether they survived is not the issue. It's that they had to do it. Think 9/11 firefighters.
You're constantly reminded of Fukushima because the disaster is still ongoing. An earthquake happens, people die, and we get over it. It's the ugly side of mother nature, and we get over it. A nuclear disaster happens, and it's a shit storm. Stories of incompetence, greed, shame, conspiracy, tragedy, and betrayal. It's the ugly side of human nature. And we can't get over it. Like the several radioactive isotopes that have a half-life of 30 years and remains in the environment for decades, it continues to be a problem, and a reminder of the worst of ourselves.
You don't get to decide who gets offended. Justifying offending people based on what you did or didn't see, just shows you lack empathy. If you don't, I would choose my words more carefully.
I"m not saying this is the main factor for not choosing nuclear but this should be considered: the one difference with Nuclear is that when a system fails, you can't use that area of land for a few thousand years.
The question is how can we do nuclear right? From outward appearances it looks like have been doing it wrong, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima for example. French nuclear systems appear to get it more right.
Not shown in the graph: Hydroelectric, which conjures up images of beautiful dams, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people who die at once when it fails.
Since I specifically highlighted the failure of Banqiao, and could give you Vajont and ... an Indian dam disaster of about 5,000 souls: what hydropower represents is a systemic risk, but not a long-tailed one.
The worst disasters, in 1975 (which is to say, exceptionally deindustrialised) China, and in India, the deaths were amplified greatly by inadequate preparation, planning, communications, and response.
Hubris has played a tremendous role in numerous dam failures (the above, Teton Dam, Johnstown). Which ... is pretty much amplified if you look to nuclear power.
Plus that long tail.
And there's the fact that there simply aren't many good natural hydro sites left, which means that the upside potential for creating additional risks is small. A decidely mixed blessing, if you call it that, but so it is.
Sure its safe when you dump all your waste in another state. If your state that created the nuclear waste had to keep it, it would be a different story.
>Sure its safe when you dump all your waste in another state. If your state that created the nuclear waste had to keep it, it would be a different story.
The article says safest, not safe. And if we compare nuclear waste to carbon dioxide emissions, which actually pollutes more worldwide?
Can we just stop with this nonsense? If you have a byproduct that has be buried in special containers in the desert, and that land can't be used, and there are people actually trying to come up with symbols that indicate danger that could span all language and culture in case a meteor hits the earth and civilization slowly rebuilds then finds the site, then it isn't "safe" be any stretch of the imagination.
I've seen claims that the price decline has been predicted since the 1970s, since almost all products get better when built at scale and that Germany and China have both put government action into place based on these long term trends.
Combined with carbon tax type modelling of coal's emmissions which would massivel raise it's cost if accounted for, I'm not sure it's that unexpected.
This is laughable. It's almost like saying that nuclear weapons are safer than sticks and stones because nuclear weapons have killed less people. Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct.
A better phrasing would have been, "In a similar fashion", but I've answered it below as well.
A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary protein.)
A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a devastating effect on human health as well.
Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.
Sure, people will fall off their roof, but that is a distributed set of events, not a concentrated one like a nuclear accident.
> A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary protein.)
I don't think this is anywhere near remotely possible. Radiation has terrible penetration into water as it is so water is a fantastic radiation shield but even so if you wanted to poison the water with enough radiation to kill off even a tiny amount of the food supply you'd...well I don't know the calculations or even how to do them, honestly, but I'm pretty sure you'd need orders of magnitude more uranium than we've ever mined (and it would have to be enriched, too).
> A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a devastating effect on human health as well.
Hmm, I think to cover enough of the atmosphere you'd need a really, really huge nuclear explosion. I'm not sure how else you'd do it and even then most estimate of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons wouldn't be able to kill off all humans (though it's a considerable chunk if I remember correctly).
> Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.
Yeah, it's riskier than Solar. Everything is, honestly. Even wind. But we also have a high chance of dying in a car crash and that doesn't stop people and the risk of a nuclear failure, especially in a modern plant, is almost zero. It's far less risky than coal mining especially if you extract the uranium from sea water (though I don't know how easily it is to enrich without mining but then again I'm not a nuclear expert at all).
tl;dr: if we assume deleterious effects from CO2-driven global warming and discount effects from long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste, nuclear is safer.
"In 2011 the United States mined 9% of the uranium consumed by its nuclear power plants.[7] The remainder was imported, principally from Russia and Kazakhstan (38%), Canada, and Australia.[8][9][10] Although uranium production has declined to low levels, the United States has the fourth-largest uranium resource in the world, behind Australia, Canada, and Kazakhstan.[9]"
Major imports into the US come from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, and Russia. Namibia used to be a bigger import source country, but it's apparently dropped off in recent years.
You have to be very careful about these studies, because most official government studies flat out lie about the effects of nuclear disasters.
The most egregious example is Chernobyl, where the official Soviet position was that only a single person died from the disaster. But studies from other nations say the death toll may be close to one million. Well believe it or not a lot of these studies that show how safe nuclear is actually take the official Soviet data about chernobyl as truth. (I am not sure whether this is the case for this particular study because their source is behind a paywall).
But similar (if not as outrageous) lies have also been said about accidents in the west. The official story about three mile island for example is that it caused no deaths, yet studies find drastic increases of all kinds of cancers in the affected area. See, for example, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-mo...
I usually believe that we should be guided by science and data in our public decisions, but the data surrounding nuclear is so distorted by governments that it is just not to be trusted. And now that we have truly safe alternatives like solar and wind, we can finally put that nightmare behind us.
Yes you do. The WHO has been following the Chernobyl consequences, and come out with a new report about every decade. Each report dramatically lowers the estimate of deaths and other health consequences.
As a matter of fact, the largest health effects now are psychosocial effects. That is, fear of and (over-)reaction to the radiation effects is causing more actual harm than the radiation itself. So potentially one of the easiest ways to mitigate the harmful effects of nuclear accidents (best of course: let's not have any!) is to (over-)react less.
Of course not reacting at all would also be wrong, but it looks like the balance today is out of whack.
The maps below correspond roughly to Zhumadian City, Henan Province, China. The region spans about 100 km east-west. It is presently home to over 7 million people.[0]
In 1975, it was the site, or perhaps more accurately, region, of the worst power plant disaster in all history: the Banqiao dam failure. News of this only fully emerged after over two decades.[1] You can spot the reservoir itself at the far left of the images, at mid-height.
In the disaster, a confluence of events lead to the deaths of approximately 171,000 people, with 11 million displaced. There's considerable uncertainty in those numbers.
The causes were multiple: siting, improper engineering, unheeded warnings, a (literal) perfect storm (tropical typhoon striking a cold front and lingering over the region for a full day, dropping over 1 meter of rain), improper emergency plans, failed communications, situational confusion, nightfall, and a hopelessly inadequate response and recovery. Of the deaths, "only" -- a term used advisedly -- 25,000 or so were due to direct flooding. The remaining 150,000 or so succumbed to starvation or disease in the weeks following the events.
And yet: the book as been closed. The cities in the floodplain are rebuilt. The dam itself has been rebuilt. Over 7 million people live in Zhumadian City, 95 millions in Henan Province total.
There is no disaster exclusion zone.
There is no disaster exclusion zone which will persist for the next three centuries.
There is no molten reactor core.
There is no coreium.
There is no radioactive waste which will persist for 10,000 to 1 million years.
The book is closed.
Proponents of nuclear power assume that we can assess risks with tails not of the decade or so of Banqiao, but of 100, 1,000, 1 million years. Utterly outside the scope of any human institutions, or of the human species itself.
Our models of risks and of costs fail us.
(They've failed us as well in the case of fossil fuels, and, quite possibly, for hydro power -- I'm not giving this example as endorsements of either, but to give the story of risk and closure, or its lack. Those are other stories, for other posts.)
The problems with nuclear power are massive, long-tailed, systemic and potentially existential. The same cannot be said of a wind farm or solar array. There is no significant 10,000 year threat from wind power, or solar power. We're not risking 30 - 60 km exclusion zones, on an unplanned basis, of which we've created at least four in the half-decade of significant nuclear energy applications: Hanford, Washington, Three Mile Island, Pennsyvania, Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Fukushima, Japan. And this is with a global plant of some 450 operating nuclear power plants as of 2017[2]
(This compares with over 7,600 power plants in the United States alone.[3])
None of these sites has been fully remediated. In the specific case of Hanford, the current management plan is budgeted at $2 billion, and there is no final management plan in place. This eighty years after the facility first opened.
If the total experience has been, say, 500 reactors, over 50 years, or 25,000 reactor-years of experience, and we've experienced at least four major disasters, then our failure rate is 0.016%.
The global share of nuclear power generation in 2012 was about 10%.[4] Which means that without allowing for increased electrical consumption within existing or extending to developing nations, the plant count would have to increase tenfold.
Holding the reactor-year failure rate constant would mean 80 core meltdowns per century.
Reducing that to the present rate of four meltdowns/century would require reducing the failure rate to 0.0008%. That's five nines, if anyone's counting.
Five nines on a process involving weather, politics, business, social upheaval, terrorism, sabotage, individual psychology, group psychology, climate, communications, response, preparedness....
And ... the involvement of the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuzi, in the management of TEPCO, who operated the Fukushima nuclear power plant.[5]
All of which played a tremendous role in how badly the Banqiao disaster itself played out -- everything which happened at Banqiao by dynamics could just as well have happened in a nuclear plant.
But it wasn't a nuke, it was a dam. And after a few hours, the waters receded, and after a few weeks, the land dried, and after a few months, recovery could start, and after a couple of decades ... even in what was still a poor country ... the recovery was complete.
The brain is not designed to understand statistics. Nuclear accidents are theatrical and fun, and therefore get a lot of play on the media when they happen. Look no further than the media circus surrounding Fukushima to confirm.
Everybody is scared to death of Sharks, yet sharks killed only 1 person in the US last year. Cows killed 20, 75% of which were deliberate attacks, but almost no one is afraid of a Cow.
Meanwhile 17,775 people died in traffic accidents, yet people jump in cars like it's routine. You're literally 17,000% more likely to die in your own car than you are by a shark, but again, brains don't understand that.
I've encountered thousands of cars today. I've yet to encounter a single shark in decades. I'd expect very high danger in the presence of a shark. I've not yet been injured by all the cars I've seen in my life.
People understanding of stats is fine. They understand that the pre-requisite to being attacked by a shark is super-extremely low. That does not make sharks safe. I'll put my hand on the hood of a car any day instead of on a shark.
Your reasoning about Fukushima shows the same kind of problem: it's because of all the urgent actions after the accident that there's not been more consequences. Your argument would show that a house on fire is not dangerous because after people were evacuated, no one died of burning. It's the evacualtion of of a fire that saves life, it's not the lack of danger of a blazing inferno.
Oh I love that analogy, I thought I would figure out where it came from. Most people reference the times story [1] which talks about 20 cows a year, however that story references a CDC study [2] which talks about 21 cows over 5 years. Which makes it actually about 4 people a year (average) being killed by cows. Which is still more than death by Sharks at about 1 every other year on average according to [3].
[1] "The image of cows as placid, gentle creatures is a city slicker’s fantasy, judging from an article published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States." --
https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/dangerous-co...
[2] "A total of 21 deaths met the case definition for 2003--2008 (Table 1). Four fatalities occurred in 2003, two in 2004, six in 2005, and three each year during 2006--2008." -- https://www.cdc.gov/mmWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5829a2.htm
People and their egos crave control. With something like driving, you feel at least somewhat in control of your own destiny. Coming face to face with a shark does not afford the same sense, same with an unstoppable chain reaction occurring deep in a nuclear reactor and the ensuing fallout.
You're correct, but there's only been a few failures like that in the entire history of Nuclear energy, one of which was a ridiculous test far beyond the scope of logic and reason (Chernobyl), one of which was a completely safe and designed failure that killed no one and did nearly nothing in terms of actual damage (3 Mile Island) and one that was the result of a plant being hit in the exact wrong spot by a natural event that it had not been designed to withstand in the first place, and despite that, still failed in a largely predictable and contained way.
And not to mention, the much wider used coal plants and natural gas plants kill way more people in a lot less theatrical ways, largely through disease of the lungs and skin. Again though watching someone die of black lung isn't nearly as interesting as watching someone die of radiation sickness, so we don't hear about it.
Plus, our reptile brains has deeply ingrained fear of wild animals, cars are too new invention to be able to affect our instinct the same way sharks do.
Where are you getting these numbers? Particularly the cow one (deliberate killings only).
Generally intrigued.
> yet people jump in cars like it's routine.
It is routine. Time spent driving is much, much, much higher than time spent swimming near sharks. So...
My brain understands that if I refused to go skydiving, then I can not die from a skydiving accident. Which is about as likely as going for a swim instead of a drive to get to work.
On the other hand, IIRC nuclear has a reverse bell curve, where it's most dangerous at the very start and end of its' lifetime. And if you take nuclear plants that are not quite at the end of their lifetime, then average the deaths over their last 40 years, and compare that average to solar (the majority of which are 3 years old or less - at the start of their lifetime), then you can make nuclear appear an order of magnitude safer than they actually are.
People don't handle statistics well, but statistics are also easily manipulated and therefore potentially completely unreliable (Mark Twain quote here). It's not quite as simple as "people need to listen to the statistics".
Also, people go to the beach way less often than they go near roads. If most people only go to the beach 1 day a year and go on roads every day, then it's more like "you're 50x more likely to die by car than by shark". That's a far cry from 17000x.
That said, I've always thought that stat could be abused to push car safety - "Imagine you're attacked by a shark - now, cars are like that but TIMES FIFTY! Drive safe, look both ways, etc".
Nothing is scarier than birth-defects. Radiation causes very visible birth defects.
Hence people are very, very scared of radiation. And rightly so.
A windpark will not cause disfigured babies. Hence wind is better.
And: Nuclear is the most expensive energy source, by FAR. safety, waste, clean-up - super, super expensive. dismantle a wind park and it is gone, poof. dismantle a reactor and now you have a new problem.
Also very hard to weaponize wind or solar. Blow up a wind park and well, the wind park is gone. Steal a rotor and now you have a rotor.
People are using Fukushima to rationalize their fear of nuclear, just like we did after Three Mile Island and and Chernobyl. As someone else confirmed by posting [1], the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami have not happened for at least 100 years. We can tear the plant down in hindsight, but it was designed to withstand probable events, just like any safety standards. It may not be pleasant to speak of human life in this manner, but there is always a cost/risk balance in any human endeavor, and this failure does not necessarily indicate recklessness.
This has been known for a long time in informed circles.
The problems with nuclear are waste and that we use vastly outdated designs and fuel sources.
Nuclear is not perfect, but we should not buy into a perfection fallacy when looking to get away from fossil fuels.
Solar is a better long term bet but a good progressive nuclear strategy that added a handful of small modern reactors could be massively complementary to it.
Waste is a miniscule problem. Put it in the ground. Or, perhaps, in the side of a mountain...
The only reason waste is an issue in the United States is that the Congress decided that nuclear waste repositories have to last for 10,000 years uninterrupted. As far as we know this is just about impossible. 10 millenia ago we were in the caves.
Placed at the bottom of a pool, it's perfectly safe. This is a solved problem. The issue is political (especially from uneducated NIMBYs) rather than technical.
What a flawed comparison. Take the water from the pool and drink it and give it your livestock to drink and water your plants with it and see how that works out over the span of a few decades.
Isn't nuclear hysteria created mostly by American CleanTech industry?
Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?
Even that's not necessarily true; your run-of-the-mill lead-acid car battery works fine for this at small scales, and a collection of them can be good enough for household-wide use. Not the most environmentally-friendly option, but such batteries are cheap and abundant.
You're right that at large scales (neighborhood-wide, city-wide, nation-wide, etc.) we don't really have the battery infrastructure in place quite yet. I'd guess that said lack of infrastructure could be resolved well before 2025, though.
Modelling energy densities and costs tends to suggest that's not a viable option.
Flywheel energy storage is useful as a substitute for spinning reserve (that is, the inertial mass of extand thermal generation turbines), but other than serving to dampen grid fluctuations, it's not good for more than a few minutes', perhaps at the outside a few hours', storage.
There's so much lithium in the earth's oceans that if you manufactured batteries out of it would be enough to store 50 years worth of the world's electricity consumption.
>it just has to charge a battery (or some other means of energy storage) which is reliable.
That's not true. Let's say you build your system with enough solar panels to fully charge batteries that lasts 3 days. And lets say sun doesn't shine for 4 days, which is not uncommon. Where is your reliability? Lets say you are designing a system to have reliable power. How many days worth of power backup would you design it to support?
>Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
Yeah, and fossil fuels is solar. I don't see how it's worth mentioning.
Comments with "bullshit" in all caps aren't a very good fit for HN. In the first two paragraphs you insinuate that they deliberately skip wind and solar (when wind and solar can't generate the kind of power that nuclear can), that this is a submarine article from the nuclear industry, that you didn't read it, and that nobody else should read it either. These elements combined are toxic to HN's culture of intellectual gratification.
Wind and solar are interesting sources of energy, but in the grand scheme of things, they still represent a tiny fraction of power production, and the article noted that on the onset.
BUT should you account for them, nuclear is still the safest, as according to this list†, solar, wind and hydro still carry higher deaths per quantity of energy produced.
What were the epic consequences of Fukushima? No one died of radiation poisoning, and the actuarial deaths from cancer in the future are going to be minuscule compared to the natural disaster the precipitated it, and in any case much smaller than from fossil fuels. Under any cost-benefit analysis, the primary negative impact of Fukushima was the absurd amount of money being spent on decommissioning, but this is an argument for more pragmatism, not historical evidence for the danger of nuclear power.
Lawsuits from people who don't want to lose their government housing subsidies because they have an irrational fear of negligible radiation are the epic consequences?
You can't have a informed conclusion without reading the entire article. That said, it clearly states in the 2nd paragraph that the assessment is for energy types with the lowest negative health impact, with comparison limited to currently dominant sources including nuclear and not renewable types like wind or solar.
I only read the first 3 paragraphs because when you deliberately leave out a significant portion of the energy industry and make a statement that "Nuclear is safest compared to everything else" and then you don't include everything then you are lying. This article has already established up front it is trying to manipulate people.
No, you are projecting your irrational beliefs on the article.
It clearly states the parameters of discussion and titled the report according to the conclusion. They found that nuclear is safest major energy source They never blankly stated that "Nuclear is safest compared to everything else" and to claim that, especially without even reading the entire thing is ludicrous.
They're playing games with "major" in the title. Hydro and wind are ~5% of the US generation pool each, which I guess can be argued make them "minor". But then "biomass" appears in the chart too, and it's much smaller still, so no idea.
Biomass, according to IEA [1], is 10% of global primary energy production. It might not contribute lot in the US, but for example here in Finland, wood biomass accounts for one quarter of all the primary energy production.
They are TOTALLY playing games. Solar and Wind are relatively young, but power generated by Water based dams have been around for decades, yet only biomass is mentioned. The omission is deliberate.
Those are all valid points. But why were they skipped over? Why was solar and wind skipped over? It barely mentions them, pretends that they don't exist.
Solar, wind and hydro are energy sources that depend on weather and cannot be regulated except by throwing the generated energy away, thus with today's energy grids cannot be used as majority of the generating capacity. On the other hand biomass can be stored and used according to demand.
Pumped storage is in the grand scheme of things horrendously inefficient in essentially any metric one cares about (energy efficiency, capacity per size, capacity for cost...).
> This is the year 2017 - This article deliberately skips over any consideration to Wind, Solar, etc. What kind of BULLSHIT excuse for journalism and scientific study is this? Who in the nuclear industry paid for this?
Wind is hanging rapidly rotating turbines on thin shafts 100-200 meter off the ground. Are you seriously going to claim installing and maintaining those things is a safe occupation ? They are referred to as grinders, which relates to what happens to a technician who trips while inside the machine room (which is tiny and suspended 100m off of the ground, the gears are exposed, so you can imagine exactly what happened to get the name grinders).
Likewise, most solar is rooftop solar. Rooftop solar ? That is essentially placing large and heavy glass slabs high up in the air on sloping surfaces. Likewise, if I had that job, I might neglect to mention it to my life insurance, as this is not a particularly safe occupation either.
> "While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored."
Installations for both power sources are demanding a steady stream of human life, as is extracting the materials needed for construction of either wind or solar power. Construction of them is powered by coal (in the case of wind turbines by necessity, as coking is still how we produce steel). Also: China's mines are deathtraps, this is a LOT of human lives.
> Maybe in the short term nuclear does kill fewer people, in the short term compared to recent history. If nuclear plants are maintained safely - thats a pretty big if - and no other disasters befall a plant, maybe there current status is true.
As can be seen, even if you count Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear is still safer than most other forms of power. But that's a bit like chalking kills by a soldier that takes a nightlight powered by solar battery up to solar power.
For obvious reasons, any power source can easily be turned into a weapon.
Not to detract from your larger point, but rooftop solar is not most of the solar market. Utility scale solar panels (the fields of solar panels on 10' poles) is a lot bigger, and has lower risk.
Another thing to think about is that with solar roofs becoming a thing (there are more companies in this market than just Tesla), the additional risk associated with rooftop solar could be seen as "zero", since houses need to install a roof anyway.
But yes, your larger point that renewables aren't risk free is valid and correct.
Taleb would say all this statistics are bullshit, cause they ignore the long tails. I doubt a gas or coal power station can destroy a nation. A nuclear plant has the potential to do so.
I believe wind and solar are the best solutions for our future. But many concerns mentioned in this thread are becoming irrelevant in the face of emerging nuclear storage technology.
For example, the pebble bed reactor system eliminates the risk of a meltdown by no longer storing spent fuel in rods; it also makes the process for extracting fuel significantly more efficient. Presently we can only extract about 4% of energy contained in nuclear materials, with a PBR system the "pebbles" stay in circulation for longer, meaning we can extract more energy and pursue new designs that could ingratiate these systems into our cities without the catastrophic risks we face today.
The more people focus on this technology, the better it will get. But we can't improve if we don't try.
Are you seriously being that callous about Chernobyl? Several dozen people died from it. Many more statistically died from radiation exposure over the ensuing decades. Three hundred thousand people were forced to abandon their homes and relocate.
Chernobyl was a huge fucking disaster that killed people and had a huge negative impact on many people's lives. You don't get to minimize that just because a nearby reactor kept running.
Even if we ignore the black swan events (which each time they happen we hear how it could never happen again, etc), nuclear has a long, sordid history of massive schedule, cost and operational expense overruns. Energy companies stopped building nuclear not because of those damn eco warriors, but because they had been jaded by project after project that cost multiples (or magnitudes) of estimates. It just isn't cost effective.
There are some places where nuclear makes more sense -- on a spacecraft, for instance -- but in most worldly cases it is no longer a competitive option.
How many people have died from the Fukushima accident? How many people died mining coal for your local power plant?
And solar and wind need nearly as much power generating capacity in natgas plants (or in Germany, dirty coal plants), driving up costs and even more deaths through fossil fuel mining.
All the energy sources in this article except for nuclear are horrible for our environment and for our health. The important question is what do we replace them with. And if that is the important question, what good is this article if it shows only one solution, explicitly not comparing it with the other solutions?
We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.
We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.