There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again.
The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected.
And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled:
> Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
Asse isn't a storage for high-level waste. It contain low-level waste that can also come from hospitals and such. Germany has no storage for high-level waste yet.
Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste:
A bigger factor to note is that 95% of radiation is contained within 1% of the waste. I think the problem here is that people don't realize how small this number is. Because 11ktons sounds like a lot. But if you compare it to any other waste in the world it is tiny. Perspective is lost.
I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after decommissioning. You have a lot of shielding material (i.e. the other 99% of reactor waste that is mostly concrete) to protect a very small amount of radiation and keep the material distributed, which has some security benefits. Not having a centralized location doesn't seem like an issue. It isn't like humans are going anywhere anytime soon and we're going to lose information about where waste is stored. We have plenty of time to figure out a long term storage system that is still safe if the entirety of human information is lost. It's a great goal, but if that's our concern we should talk about deep geological repositories for a lot of other waste that we have that doesn't degrade overtime.
asking people to store something for a very long time is very hard. Take the nuclear waste from the US atom bomb tests in the pacific. They capped the thing w/ tons of concrete but sea level rise and cracks are making it inevitable its going to cause a mess. And thats literally less than a century ago. The half life of these things is tens of thousands of years.
I think you underestimate how 'temporary' many seemingly strong structures are and how high the temptations to cut costs are. Its very easy to be like "welll...this'll probably hold. I'm sure of it."
I think you also missed where I'm advocating for DGRs for non-nuclear material too. I think you underestimate how some materials don't have a halflife at all and are still dangerous (e.g. heavy metals never become less dangerous over time).
Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your scenario makes it even more likely.
Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (bombs disperse the radiation quickly, though it does aerosolize it). And then that cancer hits in 20+ years. It just isn't an effective weapon. Sure, it makes for a scary pipe bomb, but at the end of the day it is far more dangerous for the maker and greatly increases the complexity of the terrorist attack (also greatly increasing the likelihood that you get caught before you can deploy).
So a terrorist just gets a slight increase in fear factor, but it doesn't increase deadliness of the weapon, requires a lot more work, greatly increases the chance that they get caught, puts them in more danger, and so they just don't do it. There's too many downsides for only a minor upside. Why do it when you could just make a dozen pipe bombs and put them in trash cans around the city?
Really just think if you were a terrorist and wanted to do damage. There's a lot of things you could do (bunch of rusty nails on the I-5) that just don't happen. They are easy to accomplish, can do a lot of damage, but just don't. Why? Different objectives and just terrorism is extremely rare in the first place. And I'm pretty sure a drilling through feet of concrete and metal in a likely highly monitored site is too big of a hurdle when you can just go to home depot and get some stump remover and some steel pipes.
To add onto this, widespread and cheap is way more effective at generating terror.
The current trend in Kabul are bombs that get stuck onto vehicles by passing motorcyclists using magnets. It’s quite terrifying, since the ease essentially allows terrorists to enact a widespread campaign against civil service and civil society. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/asia/afghanistan-ma...
Exactly, terror is based on perpetuating the idea that anyone could be the victim of a terrorist attack. That they are simple and easy to do so the FBI/CIA has no chance of catching these "rogue" actors. Dirty bombs just don't fit into a typical terrorist's prerogative. Dirty bombs aren't cheap and can't be made by anyone. It takes a lot of time to collect the materials in a way that isn't immediately noticed.
Terrorists are not known to be the most logical people, to be honest. They are going to try anything that can generate terror in large scale and a dirty bomb is a very, very terrorizing thing to general population.
General population thinks anything with radiation is panic worthy, even though there isn't that big of a deal.
You don't have to be pretty smart to realize that it's a hell of a lot more expensive and requires a significant amount more work to create a dirty bomb vs a conventional bomb. Or rather you don't have to have any intelligence because both those things are physical limits.
... so you aren't arguing the premise there (ie, that dirty bombs are inefficient for terrorists). So your argument is distressingly close to "terrorists would be ineffective if they did [this], so we should ban it to stop them making mistakes". I doubt you believe that, I'm just drawing your attention to the fact you have to attack the premise to get anywhere on this issue.
godelski is arguing that terrorists who can be convinced to try and use dirty bombs will be less effective than if they had chosen other, more damaging, options.
Terrorists who try to make dirty bombs are incredibly likely to kill themselves when handling the material. A dirty bomb in general is ineffective, but sitting around next to highly radioactive material will put you down from your GI tract dying within 1 to 2 days.
Even more likely because you're going to need to powderize the nuclear material. Which is super dangerous. (weighted dosage is higher for internal exposure since it is closer to organs and less "shielding") Radioactive dust is something you really do not want to be messing around with, even if the radioactivity is comparatively low.
1 in 5 Islamic terrorists have engineering degrees (that’s nearly 10x the rate of engineers in the general population) and a further 2 out of those 5 have degrees in Islamic studies. That 3/5 of terrorists and doesn’t include those with other degrees. Suicide bombers are probably patsys, but they aren’t anywhere near the majority.
These people are smart, but are still indoctrinated. Despite the “religion of peace” propaganda, a clear reading of the Koran shows certain duties that cannot be avoided if you accept the premise that (unlike most of the Bible) it God’s exact words and also the final truth. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the smarter the reader, the more inescapable those conclusions become.
It’s also not a fringe idea. Imagine if everyone in the US or everyone in the EU suddenly started believing suicide bombings of civilians is at least sometimes justified. That’s around the total number of people who actually believe that across the globe (even more believe in terrorism when targets and/or methods are changed).
More generally though, lots of very smart people get indoctrinated into cults every day. If our life history were just a bit different, you or I probably would have joined one too no matter how smart we are.
One of the biggest hurdles in the manufacturing of dirty bombs is that they are made from highly active sources.
You can more or less safely manipulate a plutonium ball to manufacture a conventional a-bomb. But you just can't do it with highly active sources like cesium-137 without a significant amount of shielding during assembly and transportation.
With this kind of source, acute radiation poisoning is a matter of hours, even minutes.
Look around you at the world stricken by pandemic. What self respecting terrorist isn’t pivoting to bioweapons now instead of keeping Black Sunday or The Sum of All Fears on loop in the headquarters (for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the Tom Clancy book where Iran weaponizes Ebola)
> What self respecting terrorist isn’t pivoting to bioweapons
for some reason I find it funny to imagine a terrorist pondering about his long term career plans and prospects.
do they also have stuff like resume driven development?
the terrorist might find some operation ridiculous but does it anyway to make his resume better, that way he can get hired into the FAANGs of the terrorism sector.
Coal plants are like aerosolized dirty bombs operating 24/7, so the trade-off is still good even with that (irrational, IMO, but for the sake of argument let's consider it probable) factor.
Terrorists are going to break into a government facility, go a mile deep, retrieve massive concrete cylinders, and transport them back to base. Just to get access to low level nuclear material? If they want to poison people en-masse there are way better options. Uranium is a relatively slow killer. And we test our water supply for it because it's a heavy metal like lead. So any real attempt to poison people with it will get detected pretty promptly.
Groups that have the expertise to covertly retrieve spent fuel could probably just buy guns and shoot up a stadium. And that would cause more damage. The relative risk presented by nuclear waste is trivial.
Storing waste in place is also hardly any risk. Are terrorists going to retrieve one of these [1], weaponize it, and then deploy it? If they have this capability, then they almost certainly have the capability of shooting up a mall. And the latter would cause more damage. I see effectively zero additional danger presented by nuclear waste in this regard.
The "highly radio active" material that is dispersed is mainly radioactive by contamination and unsuitable for any bomb. In La Hague, uranium and plutonium are recycled. The part that could be used for a dirty bomb (other fission products) does not leave La Hague. It is called "glass storage" if you do a google search. This storage is the origin of the old logo of cogema.
Pulverised fuel ash seems a much more effective component for a dirty bomb. It mixes good with air, is much more harmful to humans both long term and short term, is also very radiactive, and mixes well with fresh water supplies. It also much easier to find and is likely much less guarded, and if stolen less likely to be tracked.
The only reason I can see why no one has used that already is that chemical weapons designed for the purpose are more effective.
Those chemical weapons are cheaper, easier to obtain (literally a grocery store), easier to produce, easier to obtain higher yields, etc. They also are extremely terrifying.
But even chemical weapons aren't used that often. We rarely hear about anthrax letters and we never hear about terrorist attacks that used bleach and ammonium even though practically everyone knows about this reaction and the materials are cheap, easy to obtain, and don't raise suspicion. (Side note: we do hear about people accidentally creating this mixture fairly frequently. Enough that almost everyone knows someone that did it)
Chemical/biological/nuclear weapons are just not worth it to terrorists. If they were we'd have seen them and if we're being honest the dirty bomb is the hardest out of all of them.
It also just isn't a lot of waste. It sounds like a lot, but consider that the US produces 100 million tons of coal waste per year (2014). Hell, solar has ~30ktons of waste a year (just PV panels). 11ktons over 60 years just is astronomically tiny. That's 138 tons a year, 150x less than solar and 500000x less than coal. They just don't compare.
Depending on location, it could be very radioactive... I studied and worked at lab that did measurements, and it was push for closing a nuclear plant in our city (in Siberia) for coal-based plant, but after evaluation of waste, it was decided to continue to use nuclear-based station.
The problem with coal waste is that most of it is in the atmosphere causing climate change. That might not seem like a storage problem but it is. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.
To me, it's like someone asking where me to choose which part of my house to infect with wood rot:
1. A single scrap of wood, extremely badly affected, stored in a sealed box under the stairs
Natural as in naturally occurring. Coal is formed and burns in nature with no interaction from humans. Plutonium does not occur naturally in detectable quantities. It only does so through human action.
Not sure what you’re trying to say? Asbestos is a natural mineral - not sure where you think that fits into this or how it’s relevant, sorry. We aren’t just listing all things that are naturally occurring!
I usually give the "natural" qualification if it is not immediately obvious there are plenty of naturally occuring sources of radioactivity around us. This has mostly to so with human perception of radioactivity being something unnatural, maybe it was not necessary on HN. It does not matter that much in the end with respect to radioactivity.
Ironically, most waste is radioactive. Obviously not as radioactive or we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but turns out almost everything is at least a bit.
> And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled:
That number is not actually supported by your source, as a matter of fact, your source points out that the US it not recycling any of the fuel at all.
> Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste
Sorry, but I don't see the argument there? Just because there's already toxic waste, does not mean that more toxic waste wouldn't change anything. Or are you suggesting the nuclear waste should just be thrown into Herfa-Neurode with all the chemical waste?
> Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
Germany also has quite a high population density, it doesn't have the luxury of large swats of unpopulated land where it could build it's "nuclear waste storage hall", and that's assuming that "just store it in a hall" is actually a good way to store it.
If it really was as simple as that, then why did Finland spend billions on building their Onkala deep geological repository? Which is the only installation of that kind on the whole planet. Not even in the US a proper storage location has been found yet, as Yucca Mountain was not deemed suitable.
The best answer anybody can currently give to that is "Just store it on site", which isn't a solution, it's the temporary band-aid for a rather permanent problem that's not actually solved.
You can't just hand-wave that away by claiming it ain't a problem and allegedly never was.
I critique that their source does not actually say what they claim it says: Nowhere in there is a 95% number, it doesn't give any percentage at all about how much can be recycled.
All it states is that "it can be recycled" and how "90% of its potential energy still remains", which is about as useful as declaring the plastic problem as solved because "plastic can be recycled".
That makes the 95% number an assertion without evidence, as such, it can be dismissed without evidence.
The big problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the required reprocessing is much worse in terms of safety than the nuclear power plants themselves. Lots of lovely, toxic, highly radioactive solutions which are practically iching to go prompt critical and ruin everyone's day. I think the only reprocessing program which managed not to be a safety train wreck is France's, and I half-suspect they might have just been better at covering up because it's so unusual (and in keeping with other aspects of their nuclear program).
The reality is that the French try hard to put high-level waste deep in under the ground. After more than 50 years of atomic plants and nearly 80 of lab reactors the French haven't a single adequate repository.
La Hague dumps radioactive waste liquids into the North Sea. Reactors currently cannot run 100% on MOX. Separation of Plutonium in the recycling process has proliferation concerns. Other countries have found building similar recycling plants challenging due to cost, with DoE estimating $50+ billion. La Hague was initially designed to extract Plutonium for weapons use, which likely justified its costs at the time.
The Marcoule site where MOX fuel is manufactured had an explosion in 2011, which did result in a fatality.
La Hague used to dump small quantities of radioactive liquid (mainly water used to clean barrels that contained weakly radioactiv waste) in Nort Sea. When I left (in 1999), the project to completely stop this dump was well advanced. The idea was to vaporized the water and collect the remains in a barrel.
You are right that we have a lot of plutonium that we can not use. The intent of superphenix was to use this plutonium. It failed.
Scientific studies show its pollution reaches the North Sea. Simple current maps show current flows through the channel into the North Sea. However, thank you for highlighting it also pollutes the Irish Sea, channel and Atlantic.
There are many ways to do recycling and we have 100s of years to figure it out. What we do now is doable, but its the worst possible thing.
Other forms of recycling are very viable and have much less problems and much less side streams.
The problem is of course that anti-nuclear crowed have stopped practically all technology development so they can claim all problems are solvable and nuclear should be abolished.
As everything with nuclear, we as a society barley got to first generation technology and then halted all development.
Canada is doing some create work with recycling of CANDU fuel, Moltex Energy is in development of a reactor to use that fuel and its a much better process then what the french use.
I believe heat is a problem though. A manageable one, but it requires more space.
Nuclear energy is still a fantastic, dense source of energy. I would much,much prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than a coal or similar one.
If there was a way to generate even cleaner power with such efficiency then great. 25 years ago we had that hope for a few weeks with cold fusion.
Just for everyone to have a picture, uranium doesn’t take much room because it is quite heavy: 19.1g/cm3, denser than lead (11.3) but slightly less than gold (19.3) and plutonium (19.8).
The fun thing is, the units are basically unimportant! A factor of 10^3 or two is peanuts on 10^17. Humans have just as terrible intuitions about 10^14 and 10^11 as they do about 10^17.
When our energy consumption increases by 10000 times where will.we store the waste?
I am not against the nuclear, I am for it but I like to ask hard questions
When our energy consumption increases by 10000 times where will.we store the waste?
I am not against the nuclear, I am for it but I like to ask hard questions
When our energy consumption increases by 10000 times where will.we store the waste?
I am not against the nuclear, I am for it but I like to ask hard questions
If you scale this up you're also having more Area. If that hall contains all the waste from decades of energy for France, I'm sure we can also build 1 in Germany, Italy, and every US state.
When our energy consumption increases by 10000 times where will.we store the waste?
I am not against the nuclear, I am for it but I like to ask hard questions
That's a nonsensical question, there's not enough nuclear or fossil fuel in the world to increase our energy consumption 100.000x for any significant time period. We'd need to build a dyson sphere.
All plastics can be recycled. Does not mean they do.
In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US, but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your problem, someone elses problem.
Most plastics aren't actually recyclable, which is why they aren't recycled. But we say that we can because it shifts the burden. Companies like Coke have been saying that they'll have 50% recycled material in the next 20 years for the last 60. ~~Fusion~~Full recycled product chain is only 20 years away!
Also, 17% of France's energy comes from recycled nuclear (70% from nuclear)[0]
Most plastics can be recycled into energy by burning them, just like "spent" nuclear fuel. The difference is that plastic waste occurs everywhere and collecting it would cost way too much, but nuclear waste collection works very well.
I presume one could, with present technology, incinerate a stream of mixed plastics, collect the CO2, and turn it back into hydrocarbons. I’m not sure this counts as recycling.
"Not recyclable" in the literal sense. You have lower yields when you reform plastics and there's always contaminants which are difficult (read "we don't know how to") remove. This is a complicated technical challenge. In fact, the recent John Oliver episode was on this topic[0]. There's kinda this weird conspiracy about this, which is more about shifting responsibility.
Though the more honest answer is closer to "mostly not recyclable, a bit not economically viable". But that also depends what we mean by "economically viable". If we're using it in the typical sense of "slightly more expensive for producers" then a small percentage increase. But if we're talking about "if producers had infinite resources" then well still no, but we'd be able to recycle a bit more (we're still not talking much more). I'm assuming the former because the latter is an absurd position.
Most plastics are very hard if not impossible to recycle. Especially when different plastics are mixed or a product is made of multiple materials, i.e. nearly all products.
What do you mean by recycled in this case? From my understanding you can pretty much only grind it down to garbage filler and maybe press it into some primitive shape. It’ll never become cling film or whatever again
Polymers can fundamentally be de-polymerized and then you can reuse the monomers, for example see [1]. They call it "chemical recycling". Questionable whether it will ever be price competitive with direct production from crude oil derivatives.
You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the same carbon.
If you convert it to solid carbon, there's no need to recycle it any further because it's already harmless to the environment. So perhaps it could be more cost effective than it seems.
And as expected, 0% of that has been recycled. Yet the parent comment makes the case that nuclear waste is not a problem (or maybe they think it is a trivial one?).
In any case, current facts do not align with the narrative that nuclear waste management is a solved (technically & economically) problem.
Actually some of the hazardous waste at Hanford is from the PUREX "recycling" process to extract Plutonium for weapons research. A lot of people just don't want to admit that nuclear is very dirty, and while we're potentially able to better capture its waste compared to other waste producing energy sources, our track record with nuclear material in general is very poor.
Saying Nuclear waste is not a problem is like saying taking a shit in your neighbors yard is not a problem. Shit can be packed into plastic bags, composted, and eventually stops smelling.
Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without creating waste for future generations, we should go without the power.
However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future.
Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know.
I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.
Can you show me a source for your claim that it has increased? Here's another graph for the energy mix over time, with coal not changing at all. This time from the government energy agency. See page 5.
Unfortunately the Swedish authority wants to look good so their promotional materials show domestic and only pay lip service to imports.
If you follow the flow from: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ you see that most of those countries primarily generate electricity using Oil, Gas and especially coal. (Latvia, Lithuania and to a lesser extent: Estonia)
Page 12, same document. Import, export and net for the year 2019 to all those countries. This isn't some kind of conspiracy.
Some import from Denmark and Norway. Negligible from Poland, Germany, Lithuania. Net is export to all, which means Swedish clean power is actually displacing dirtier sources, except in Norway which is full on hydro.
1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.
2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-capture forest, indefinitely.
3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to continually grow the amount of forested land just to follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil fuels.
But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to allow for population growth, or the large land area needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge surplus of not-yet-forest land — can't grow trees in deserts.
When or a tree dies, or burns, during the decomposition process it releases the carbon back to atmosphere. Maybe you could bury them somewhere where decomposition it's slower or more difficult but hard to imagine doing it at scale.
Lumber isn't a permanent removal from the carbon cycle. Wooden structures have a shelf life, and eventually the wood decomposes and re-enters the carbon cycle. The only way to sequester carbon via lumber would be to bury it in a way that prevents decomposition. I don't think this is an especially efficient method of carbon capture.
By the same measure, CO2 is not a permanent state either, but it's an issue because of the imbalance in dynamic processes - The carbon stored by lumber is the amount of lumber in the world minus decaying lumber.
36 billion tons of CO2 came from industry and fossil fuel combustion in 2019. [1] CO2 is about 27% carbon by mass. Cellulose is about 44% carbon by mass [2]. That means about 22 billion tons of cellulose needed to offset one year's worth of CO2 emissions.
In 2014, use of wood products in all notable categories combined was about 1.25 billion tons [3]. Including just sawnwood and wood paneling, it was 0.827 billion tons. Since there's no plausible way to use 2500% as much lumber for structural purposes as we do now, and just harvesting wood and leaving it outdoors will lead to decomposition on short (decades) time scales, people consider charring it and/or burying it underground. Just building more structures out of wood is barely going to put a dent in the problem.
Likewise, dynamically shifting the equilibrium toward wood from CO2 doesn't help much if the wood persists for only decades. The time scale for CO2 to naturally return to its pre-industrial equilibrium is more like 100,000 years [4]. We need sequestration measures that prevent CO2 from returning to the atmosphere over longer time periods than wood takes to decay naturally.
True, but this proves that wood alone isn't a total solution. Along with reduction in FF dependency and other forms of carbon capture, it could be. "only decades" is enough time to come up with better solutions, including bio masses with a better per $ rate of carbon capture.
> Saying Nuclear waste is not a problem is like saying taking a shit in your neighbors yard is not a problem.
The weird thing is that you're taking a shit in your neighbor's yard. I mean if they do it in their own yard it's weird, but there's nothing wrong with it. I mean this is what we do with dog shit.
The problem is that everyone shits. Sure, nuclear shit smells a lot more than solar shit or coal shit, but there's a hell of a lot less of it. We're talking a cat vs herd of rhinos. If I had to clean up one of the two I honestly don't care how much that cat's shit smells, I'm picking that job every single time. And you know what, the researchers seem to agree
> The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies
Yeah, but because there is a giant hole in the ground, but that's not specific to uranium mining. Luckily 1) uranium is extremely energy dense so we don't have to mine as much of it and 2) people usually don't live where mines open up in the first place. If we're talking about uranium mining you may notice that Canada isn't particularly habitable to begin with. Though in situ mining is pretty popular with uranium because it is cheap and results in less contaminants.
Just because it's energy dense after enrichment, doesn't mean it has high concentrations within mined ore. Most mines operate with only a fraction of a percentage of the ore being uranium, and only a fraction of a percentage of that is U-235, and viable for a nuclear reactor.
Some mines use ISL techniques which is similar to fracking. Canada does have Cigar Lake, the highest grade uranium mine in the world (15%), but due to the dangers of high uranium concentrations and the challenging geology, it has not been the easiest to extract.
This is to say, you don't just dig up some ore and stuff it in a reactor(it takes a lot of ore to power a reactor), nor is uranium mining a clean process.
and are planned to become lakes (but at least in Germany nobody knows where the water is supposed to come from).
The places where coal is mined under ground need to run pumps forever or the surrounding cities are destroyed. The pumps in Germany's Ruhrgebiet consume about 70MW continuously. In a couple of decades the pumps will have consumed more energy than we got out of the coal.
And, of course, if we continue to burn coal in a couple of decades largeish parts of the globe might become uninhabitable to humans.
There is almost no way to generate energy without waste for future generations, CO2 for fossil fuels, nuclear waste, electronic and heavy-metal waste for solar and batteries.
Saying we should only use methods that don't provide waste is saying we should reduce energy consumption to 1-5% of current global and ditch all cars, ships and airplanes. Even if you are 100% morally right you're never going to convince humanity of that.
I'm sorry to say, but the idea that "we don't need energy" is both false and dangerous.
The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards.
The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distribution of that food to where the people are.
Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the fertilizer needed to support the food. You could argue that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the population to die, but that would similarly require some sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there and keep us there.
At this point, we do need the energy. The only way to maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version of Stalin in a position of absolute power.
Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest dangers in our current political debate about what should come next.
I would like to do some more reading about this, do you have any links? The wikipedia page is a little light on detail.
I agree that we should have food security for everybody, and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with power for heating and cooking they will just start burning things again which would create a bigger disaster.
But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste in every sector because electricity is so cheap.
The world population at the beginning of the 20th c (i.e. before the oil age) was ~1B, which was the highest in all of history. We are currently ~8B, on our way to 10-14 by the end of this century.
The best resource I can think of offhand is the book "Overshoot" by William catton. It has a pretty strong political bent to it that I don't agreed with. But despite that, it frames up the problem of energy quite well.
Look at your own body. Half of the nitrogen in your body tissue - in particular, in protein - was clawed from the atmosphere by the Haber process. There is simply no replacement for industrial society.
Sure, but even a grain of sand that I can't build on or walk over is still going to be annoying. It's still just rude no matter how small you think the problem is.
At the same time it's not. Big scary looking symbols plastered over everything compared to just filling the air making it out of sight out of mind. Once that's achieved, the mass populace doesn't care. Try to build a facility with those scary symbols that are visible anytime one chooses to look, and people get all NIMBY very quickly.
We do have long term solutions. Large low oxygen beryllium copper caskets encased in steel. Drop them into a shaft bored into a mountain.
There's other ways, of course, but this was the best one I remember reading about; it's expensive but less so than the incidentals of CO2 and particulate release.
I just don't really see how this is true. Isn't the basic idea to just dig a really deep hole somewhere geologically stable and dump it in? My impression isn't that the problem isn't solvable, but simply that no one has actually made the appropriate investment yet.
That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.
Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast...
Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear.
Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates.
Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons".
Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not).
Etc. Etc.
I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.
The IPCC report on climate change mitigation puts nuclear median cost on par with wind power (cheaper than offshore, slightly more expensive than onshore), cheaper than solar, more expensive than hydro. In total, squarely on par with the usual suspects for green energy. And they include fuel and decommissioning in that cost. See page 71 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... (caution, huge pdf).
An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.
That report is a reasonable snapshot of knowledge at the time, but it was published in 2014 and some of the underlying data dates back to 2000. You can see the data sources that went into the technology-specific metrics in Annex II:
"The data on nuclear power was taken from Lenzen (2008) and Warner and Heath (2012)."
"Photovoltaic power: Ranges are based largely on the reviews of Hsu et al. (2012) and Kim et al. (2012)."
"Wind power: The data is based on the review of Arvesen and Hert-wich (2012) and has been cross-checked with Dolan and Heath (2012) and Hertwich et al. (2013)"
Let's go back to the Hsu review cited for photovoltaic generation.
"Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic Electricity Generation: Systematic Review and Harmonization"
If you look at tables 1 and 2, it's aggregating studies from the years 2000-2009. Most are from 2006 or earlier. Solar manufacturing has improved a lot and costs have fallen dramatically since 2006. At the same time, nuclear projects under development since 2006 in Europe or the USA have cost much more than originally planned.
China continues to build new reactors; it's an existence proof that new reactors can be built. But China also builds wind and solar farms cheaper than Europe or the USA. You can't get a Chinese energy project at Chinese domestic prices in either the USA or Europe.
There was a post/thread about this a few weeks/months ago. The conclusion is always the same. There is not enough plants built to get economies of scale. (Plus modular nuclear is the way to go anyway.)
The EU or the US should announce that it's going to order 100+ plants. Completely different game. There's no point in competing with solar or wind otherwise.
hm interesting the numbers are somewhat different then what I have seen in other places.
I mean don't get me wrong offshore wind power is always expensive but enough sources list solar, on-shore wind power as cheaper. Hydro power as comparable and Geothermal power as much cheaper.
Problem with most sources is, there are always assumptions and caveats: Such as cost-based calculations (maybe or maybe not) including teardown and recycling, storage cost, capital cost, land cost, etc. Others do market-price-based calculations (preferably in those markets that prove their point), so you get renewable prices from Germany (where renewables are hugely subsidized and have to be consumed preferentially) that are sometimes even negative, or you get nuclear prices from France, where the owner of all nuclear power plants is a state owned corp (EDF) that is "rescued" from bancruptcy every few years to keep prices down.
I did pick the IPCC reports because those are usually regarded as being careful amalgamations of the available scientific data. Since there are lots of eyes on those reports, larger mistakes should have been pointed out already.
But you are right that there is contradictory information out there, and I don't really have the perfect authoritative source either.
> the owner of all nuclear power plants is a state owned corp (EDF) that is "rescued" from bancruptcy every few years to keep prices down.
That is as dishonest a take as it gets.
First, the "rescued from bankruptcy every few years" is simply not true. The company has been paying dividends every year for decades, and I can't think of a bailout of company debt in recent years.
Second point: Like most french state-owned companies, EDF is a vessel of "creative" accounting from politicians, but you'll find out that it's not tied to operating nuclear plants specifically. It's just that as a public-owned company, EDF is a tool for public policy. Sometimes it takes on debt to do so.
For instance, EDF is legally forced to buy back green energy at fixed rates as part of a package to help develop green energy. EDF is also forced to sell nuclear power to its competitors (ARENH policy) at fixed price, when they ask it. This means EDF competitors can arbitrage this agreement by buying nuclear power below market at times, and selling green power when market is saturated at other times. From the state's perspective, it's an OK thing to open the market and promote renewables, but from the company perspective it makes no sense. Thus, the company "pays" for a public policy.
This kind of accounting is usual in other former public companies such as SNCF.
That being said, nuclear costs figures should be accurate, since they come from the work of the french finance watchdog, the "cour des comptes", as well as from parlementarian investigations. You're right that these figures would probably not be possible without the scale economies of the initial rollout and without state-backing, but as you cite, this is also true for renewables or any other large industrial policy.
> Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast...
The people involved in these plans aren't idiots, they know what the time scale of nuclear waste is and they look for sites with that in mind [0]. They appear to be considering obvious problems like earthquakes and less obvious problems like ice ages.
I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” and a link to the spiky ground and “this is not a place of honor”. Assuming a future civilization gets to exist considering we keep burning petroleum products and calling them clean while we waste time arguing about tech that’s been proven for fifty years because the right groups of people can’t own it.
> I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever”
It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion?
The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one.
If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.
This is not true. The most sensible place was intentionally overlooked because one of germanys larges political parties (CSU) has all her voters there, and the next best place (Gorleben) was politically and ideologically fought over for decades until we gave up and said fuck you and everyone, lets just store it where it stands.
Nuclear is not an alternative. It has a lot of unwanted side effects and it just does not scale to solve the problem. It's extremely costly, comes with costly unsolved problems and is slow to build up.
> It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.
We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.
What we have achieved so far is a nuclear industry which is hardly able to keep the status quo of installed power generation, sky high rising costs for building nuclear power plants, extremely long build times, very little technological progress in the last decade, unsolved financial and technological problems, ...
If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
All the promised next-gen problem solvers like breeders, thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing industries, ... have been more costly and financially toxic.
> We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.
Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California. Any nuclear development gets constant fierce pushback, and if it does somehow come to life, every last issue with it becomes yet another reason to kill it in the crib.
If we were earnestly trying to achieve energy independence, then Rancho Seco (near where I grew up) would've been done right and still operational, rather than half-assed and doomed to fail.
> If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
Ah yes, the "two economists walking down the street and there's a dollar bill on the sidewalk" argument. Never heard that one before.
> Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California
The US had been one of THE major proponents of nuclear technology. If the country lost interest, there must be a deeper reason than 'we did not try hard enough'. I would guess that the US invested more than a trillion dollar (in todays money) in its nuclear industry.
Instead lately the US invested in fracking with huge climate impact and President Trump was supporting coal mines...
It’s weird that in the post-9/11 years everyone seemed to talk about how the USA waged wars for oil and how oil is what props up USD, but now two decades later there “must be a deeper reason” why nuclear didn’t get to succeed on its own merits.
There is very little electricity generation from oil anywhere. I doubt that oil had or has a huge impact on the electricity energy policy.
What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas, which is used for electricity production in the US. It has a share of roughly 40%. Coal adds roughly another 20%. That makes around 60% gas + coal in the US for electricity production.
For Germany gas + coal has 40% share in electricity production (2020).
> There is very little electricity generation from oil anywhere.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of American transportation gets its power from oil. Anything that could disrupt that - like, say, nuclear power making electricity sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap to make electric vehicles practical - is a threat to the oil industry. Further:
> What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas
Which (as the name "fracking gas" would suggest) derives specifically from fracking as a means to extract oil from deposits otherwise inaccessible. That is: gas and oil come from more or less the same place, sold by more or less the same people with the same reasons to want to suppress alternative energy sources like nuclear (and solar, and wind, and geothermal).
The costs are hard to argue with, yeah. I certainly wouldn’t try with my limited understanding of the world of energy politics. I did enjoy learning more about the history of why nuclear is so expensive though even if it isn’t entirely useful knowledge. It’s pretty dry and I don’t have a PDF link handy to share, but I found the “President’s Report on Three Mile Island” (iirc, prepared for Carter while in office) to be a very very interesting read. Also these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three
Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did.
And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them.
Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths.
I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of which are far more dangerous.
The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people than nuclear ever has.
> Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did.
Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy. That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its electricity landscape goes over many decades.
By investing many many billions into renewables, instead of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to kickstart the renewable energy industry, which will over a long period of time be much more successful replacing fossil fuels, than nuclear ever did or will do.
Just building a nuclear power plant here and there will not solve the CO2 problem. Scaling renewable to make it cheap and able for large scale distributed deployment is the way forward.
Yet looking at energy transfer maps, it seems that a lot of German renewable investment ends up exported elsewhere, so that central and southern germany keeps importing nuclear power from France, and uses lignite from local + imported lignite power from elsewhere.
Anyway, the argument is that instead of panic-closing nuclear power plants requiring more gas and coal plants being run in their place, they could have instead ran them as long as possible while building up the renewables.
Sure electricity gets exported a lot and Germany is a large exporter of electricity. That's a European market now. That's what we (the EU) have been doing for decades now: EU wide markets instead of country markets (or smaller). That's also a large building block fir a new electricity landscape: EU wide connected grids, in many places with high-capacity HVDC lines.
Germany was not 'panic closing' nuclear. The nuclear exit was hotly debated for decades and decided long before Fukushima.
Germany was doing a lot more than just closing 'some' of its nuclear reactors and setting a timeline for closing the rest.
Germany also removed the centralized monopoly business model around the big nuclear&coal-based electricity companies. The electricity production was in the hand of four large companies who had divided Germany into four monopolistic regions. These large companies had zero intention investing into renewable, since that already owned all the market and were free of competition. The government opened up the market and reduced the influence of the companies.
Germany has in sum now not more coal power than in had then. It has less coal capacity.
Turning off the nuclear plants was not in any way a requirement for investing into renewables, so setting them up against each other this way is disingenuous in the extreme.
Nobody here that I can see are saying not to invest in renewables. But the extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering is as harmful to society as anti-vaxxer propaganda. It's causing real harm and real lives lost.
> Turning off the nuclear plants was not in any way a requirement for investing into renewables, so setting them up against each other this way is disingenuous in the extreme.
That's completely ignoring the history. The nuclear industry was started top down by the German government and the big utilities. The WHOLE electricity market (production and distribution) was in the hand of only a tiny few monopolistic companies, with deep ties into politics.
The anti-nuclear movement started as a grassroots movement against this corrupt systems, which forced their energy politics upon the country.
None of these former monopolistic companies had ever invested in renewable energy or had any interest in it. They were sitting on multi-billion Deutsche Mark businesses which were like printing money. The risks for the nuclear technology was even nicely taken up by the state.
Breaking up these monopolistic markets against their will and against the will of many well-earning politicians which after their political career were moving into these big utilities took roughly three decades.
Thus breaking up the market, getting rid of these huge obstacles to a new distributed / decentralized energy landscape was one of the key achievements.
The anti-nuclear movement is not anti-science. The nuclear industry has time over time shown its incompetence. Fukushima has exposed how it worked in Japan: the reactor fleet had multiple technical problems (technical designs, systemic underestimated risks, too expensive to fix problems, ...). Many of these problems were technical and many were political problems. The height of a Anti-Tsunami wall is depending on both a risk calculation and a cost problem. These are not independent in a corrupt industry&politics. Companies and regulation authorities will not cause costs (which were needed to upgrade the site) and thus the risk calculations will be down in a way, that the company will not carry extreme costs, which might have had negative effects on its profitability. The tsunami risk will be calculated as so unlikely that the existing installation looked safe - even though Japan is known for strong earth quakes.
Also: the dismantling of a nuclear installation on an Earth Quake fault line is both a problem of determining the risk and a cost problem. In the end the costs and the hope, that nothing will happen, were the reason that no actions were taken. A single earth quake showed for multiple nuclear installations that the risk calculations were wrong. Thus we have the effect that in Japan the majority of nuclear power plants is still offline and the technical problem of reactors with their meltdown is still for a few decades unsolved.
It's not anti-science to break up corrupt and dis-functional energy monopolies.
Running Fukushima as it was designed (and paid for) was 'anti-science' and politically corrupt. Just before the Fukushima accident happened, there were safety inspections and they found nothing of these problems, which later killed the Fukushima site. After the tsunami there were multiple events which early were described as completely unlikely: loss of outside power, loss of emergency power, reactor meltdowns, hydrogen explosions, heating-up spent fuel pools, completely useless emergency plans, need for additional cooling via pumping sea-water damaging the buildings, fear of additional earthquakes hitting structurally weak buildings, radioactive water exiting the building, ...
The whole scale of the Fukushima ebents exposed the anti-science, design-to-cost philosophy of the nuclear industry and its political proponents.
Renewables seem like a great way to cap the total possible energy usage of humanity and keep us in a lower-evolved state. I want the future promised by unlimited nuclear energy instead.
Don't worry, it won't. At some point a large nation will eventually start using nuclear at scale and the competitive advantage will be clear so then everyone will have to follow suit.
That is, of course, presuming civilization does no collapse because of climate change. Fingers crossed!
China is still steadily increasing it's nuclear power capacity, and it's share of total electricity production in China has kept growing, though still only about 5%-6%.
The 2020 National People's Congress reportedly supported aiming for 6-8 new reactors a year, which would double the existing deployment in 6-8 years, and the aim is to not just increase the number of reactors but doing so at a pace that will increase the overall proportion of electricity from nuclear.
For a while it seemed like it would be Japan since they were experimenting with a breeder reactor way back in the ‘80s. After a bunch of false starts it really seemed to be happening in 2010 but then of course the Fukushima accident happened the next year and put a stop to everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
It’s just frustrating to see energy programs fail due to public opinion shift brought on by random perfectly-timed coincidence since there’s not really anything to blame or at fault. Like how The China Syndrome talks about “an area the size of Pennsylvania” and came out exactly twelve days before the actual Three Mile Island accident lol
The closing of the Japan breeder had nothing to do with public opinion. It was a long list of technical failures and accidents, plus extreme costs which broke its neck.
Like: 'On August 26, 2010, a 3.3-tonne "In‐Vessel Transfer Machine" fell into the reactor vessel when being removed after a scheduled fuel replacement operation.'
Plus the Fukushima earthquake (and the following tsunami) showed that a lot of Nuclear installations in Japan were not safe against heavy earthquakes.
The issue is not finding a place that's geologically stable now. But finding one that's geologically stable in 850.000 years.
And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up.
And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands.
Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities?
East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border.
And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.
Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
>And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up.
This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it.
This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.
We are talking about time frames that are many times longer than the existence of modern humans as a species. We have absolute zero clue what most humans did 200k years ago, we have only little knowledge what humans did 4000 years ago. How can you expect us to communicate with a world in eight hundred thousand years, or 1.6 million years? We don't even manage to get any of the nuclear waste out of our oceans we put there 40 years ago.
What are the odds of having large chunks of learned knowledge wiped out at this point? When the Romans did it, few could read/write and few people had access to the stored information of the day. That made it very easy to sequester knowledge. At this point in time, other than ELE type of events, can knowledge be kept away from all of humanity now? Sure, dictators can make it hard for the parts they control, but the rest of the world keeps on learning.
There is zero chance that we can communicate anything at those timespans. As I already wrote we have trouble to tell what happened 4000 years ago (how were the Pyramids build exactly?) and that is just a blink of an eye when compared to a million years.
Ancient Egypt was a super advanced civilization continuously existing for 4000 years! Yet shortly after the decline nobody could read Hieroglyphs anymore.
We don't know what the future holds. Lets say in 50 years a low intensity Gamma Ray Burst hits earth and destroys all digital information but fries only half of all living creatures. The survivors dig trough the trash of the past to get to the rare earth metals they need to rebuild their civilization and find this really neat bunker with those funny signs...
To dig through the materials these bunkers are made of would require technology advanced enough they would know what radiation is and how to detect it.
Why does it matter if some hypothetical future civilization cannot understand it though? If humanity as we know it is gone then compared to that some random future bad mining accident seems silly to worry about.
Sure but there are other dangers, some of this stuff has to be cooled. It has to be guarded. The place to store it has to be secure from all kinds of influences we can't control etc. To cite wikipedia:
> However, even a storage space hundreds of meters below the ground might not be able to withstand the pressures of one or more future glaciations with thick sheets of ice resting on top of the rock, deforming it and creating internal strains.
We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage, because the timespans involved and the potential dangers are not manageable by humans atm.
The question is do we want to put more on the pile or not? If the alternative is to destroy our planets with coal and co the answer should be clear.
But take Germany for example. We've built up wind energy from 0 to more output than nuclear energy in 15 years. I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.
When we look at global warming there are two nations that need to act. China and the US, producing around 50% of Green House Gases. Both have more wind, way more space and potentially more money than Germany (China announced last year that they are gonna spend 1.5 Trillion USD in the next decades to become greener).
The stuff that needs any active maintenance is not supposed to go into the long term storage. Basically hot stuff just sits in a pool, then sits in a yard somewhere and natural air movement cools it. Then when it gets cool enough it can go into the mountain/formation.
> glaciation
Seems like a very future problem. If humans are around by then, we can move the stuff easily.
> We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage
Agreed.
But this is not exactly a problem for nuclear power. (Even if it has become a talking point.) Nuclear waste storage is a boring and simple problem. (It needs cooling and physical security.) It should be put simply on a big remote boring military base - plenty of them in Nevada - so people don't worry about it being close to where they live.
Long term storage is a long term problem it needs basic research, and simply the continuation of our civilization, which then puts the waste where currently it thinks it should be.
Eg. it's completely possible that 500 years from now we'll finally recycle it, and then dump the rest into the Sun just for the lulz. (Or put it on an inert rock.)
The half life of Plutonium is ~24k years. That's way beyond a time frame we have any grip on. Then its still very, very dangerous. Uranium (nuclear fuel) has a half life of 200k - 4.4 million years. Then its half as dangerous.
CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.
Elements with very long half-lives aren't very radioactive. Something with a half life of millions of years is essentially not radioactive at all.
Nuclear fuel itself isn't radioactively dangerous, it's dangerous because it's a heavy metal (like lead).
After nuclear fuel is reacted, it produces a bunch of nuclear decay products. Some of these decay products have a half-life of 10s of years, which are the problems: they're short enough to be dangerously radioactive, but long enough that they need to be handled carefully for a long time. But not for 10s of thousands of years.
And those things aren't very radioactive. Just as I said.
Most of what you've read about plutonium is patent nonsense. For one, it isn't even close to being the "most toxic substance known". You can pick up a lump of it and hold in in your hand. You'll be fine. Really. It is an alpha emitter, and alpha radiation can be stopped by your skin or even a piece of paper. You'd have to eat it before you saw any ill effects.
Not to mention that plutonium is a useful nuclear fuel. It's not going to be left lying around.
You do know that the ocean has megatons of uranium in it? Why aren't you concerned about that?
For that matter, we could grind up all the nuclear waste ever produced and disperse it in the ocean. It wouldn't change the radioactivity of sea water by any significant degree.
The Soviets used to dump their scrap sub reactors in the Arctic Ocean whole. There are a bunch of them up there.
> CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.
Oh? So we can just wait until things start to get uncomfortably warm, then stop cranking out CO2 for a decade or two and everything will be better?
Yeah, if the dangerous scenario is what if ww3 happens, wipes out all human knowledge, civilization is rebuilt and accidentally digs a kilometer down and finds some nuclear waste then I mean the whole ww3 is probably a bigger deal.
Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity.
Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the energy problems. I think we might need that time to get to full renewables, if we ever get there.
> East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.
East Germany never put any spent fuel into their own soil. They sent the spent fuel back to the USSR. Spent fuel is a resource with a market value. The GDR and the USSR didn't just threw that away.
> Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
It's actually pretty safe and has among the lowest numbers of deaths per TWh:
Germany emits SEVEN(!) times as much as the French for producing electricity and heat. The nuclear phase out is causing 1100 premature death every year in Germany and causes additional costs of $12 billion per year:
It is unfortunate you included the last paragraph in your comment as the rest of the comment seemed legitimate, but the issue in Texas had nothing to do with renewables, they were not scheduled to meet much of the system demand and the cause of the outage was numerous other plants not able to run due to the cold.
Including the last paragraph brings all the other points in to doubt, even though I otherwise agree with those points
>Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths during the Texas blizzard because they couldn't provide enough electricity during the cold.
Please, quit spreading this false/fake BS information. This is not what happened in Texas. You're willing to do the research on the support of your point of nuclear saftey, but then you got very lazy with this statement and did not research this clickbait level comment.
Renewables also cost numerous deaths for other reasons.
Hydro is the cause of the by far most lethal single power plant related failure (the Banqiao dam failures).
Rooftop solar causes more deaths per unit of electricity delivered from installation related accidents alone to be uncompetitive with nuclear.
Generally the more construction that is needed for a given production method, the more deaths, and that tends to go in the favour of nuclear given the sheer amount of power generated once a plant is operational.
Large solar installations may win out over nuclear in terms of safety, but it's hard to get good data.
If Capitalism and greed failed here wait 'till you see what centralised control of an economy can do. Free actor based economies need some regulation and fail pretty spectacularly at times. Centralised economies however, they cause death and destruction at a level only war
and plague can rival. The problem is, greed drives people in both systems.
Just FYI, Grady from Practical Engineering channel who made the video is a civil engineer. I also recommend his entire series about power grid (well, actually all his videos are great).
)
How is that video inconsistent with j-pb's comment?
The video describes what happened, and summarizes the cause as:
> Basically, the entire system was ill-prepared for a storm of this magnitude.
The video addresses only what happened, and (intentionally) does not address why it happened - why the system was ill-prepared. but it's absolutely true that there are "renewables running in far worse weather conditions" (and natural gas). all of these systems can be winterized.
j-pb thinks that the system was unprepared due to "capitalism and greed," which IMO is not an unreasonable idea. Why do you think the various Texas organizations basically ignored the FERC/NERC recommendations for cold weather preparedness from 2011?
If they can dig kilometers deep, they'll be advanced enough to notice the radiation, and take precautions. If they're smarter than us, they'll mine the stuff and use it to power their sky cities.
Your assumption is that every country is guaranteed to have access to underground places that are "geologically stable" over the required time-period, aren't aquifers, or at risk letting water in by some other means.
You could grind it up and intentionally pump it into the air, and it still would likely kill a tiny portion of the number of people killed by coal plants.
I mean a whole lot of coal plants do pump uranium dust into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you'd pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be tiny.
How is that the assumption? There only needs to be one such place on the whole planet (or, shit, shoot it into space). I'm not saying it's easy (in fact, that was kinda my point), but it's absolutely possible and I didn't assume anything about individual groups needing their own storage.
Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.
No. This is not a real problem. If it were NPPs would not store spent fuel on site.
The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway.
Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
If it was an easy problem then it wouldn't have taken 50 years to build a long term storage facility. Most problems are not easy, it just looks easy to outsiders.
It took that long because idiots routinely hold up the process with infinite questions. At some point you need to realize your existing behavior is worse and just move on, do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
It's an easy problem that doesn't really require a solution.
It doesn't really help with costs, so there's no hurry, and it's a political quagmire. So it just did not happen. (WIPP kind of happened, and is happening, but it's for non-commercial nuclear waste.)
Not really. Climate change is an existential problem that nuclear energy is one of few legitimately promising solutions to, so I don't think it's a stretch to compare the vapid and uninformed anti-nuclear arguments that pop up in every HN thread to anti-maskers: harmful rhetoric with no scientific basis.
I am not anti-nuclear though, I don't know where you got that from. Your example isn't even in production use yet so what I said was factually correct and if this is the only country in the entire world then this problem will persist for at least another few decades. It seems like you have very strong feelings about this and that is clouding your rational judgement.
You are spreading factually incorrect nuclear dogma. You're kidding yourself if you think you're not anti-nuclear. You claim this is an unsolved problem, Finland says otherwise. Moreover, deep geological storage is only needed for super long-term storage (like, long after the last humans have kicked the bucket). In the medium-term, storing high-level waste onsite is a perfectly adequate solution. The so-called waste problem is complete bullshit - there was never a problem.
My rational judgement is not in question here, but that of all anti-nuclear proponents should be. And you're right, I do have strong feelings. Can you really blame me? I'm inheriting a broken world that looks existential climate change in the face, shrugs, lights up a spliff and says "well solar is pretty cheap". We've had the technological solution to climate change in hand for 60+ years: rocks so spicy they'll power our entire civilization for millenia. Yet we (the people) got outplayed so hard by the oil lobby that not only is nuclear energy on the decline, threads like these where supposedly technologically literate people espouse greenpeace's old talking points abound. And while this baseless and frustrating 'debate' continues, the water rises.
It also is an issue we have a lot of time to solve. It isn't like humans are going anywhere soon. It also isn't like there's that much waste. Honestly it probably won't happen until there is enough waste that local storage becomes a problem. Which at this rate would take a few hundred more years.
Until then we can figure out a solution. Something that seems crazy now will be trivial by then. For example an electromagnetic cannon to shoot waste into outer space [1].
The challenge with nuclear waste is that you can’t just throw money at it and expect it to work. Radioactivity and chemical toxicity persists for hundreds and thousands of years. What is needed to design, build and maintain such sites is beyond “extreme engineering” and also very expensive.
Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.
> There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again.
The thing is, these are not just straw men, but talking points frequently used by nuclear energy opponents. Along with others, like asserting that nuclear energy is a source of CO², etc.
If nuclear proponents had to focus only on reasonable, grounded talking points, they would probably be happier for it.
> for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
It's an OK point, and it's a shame that Germany seems to skip its environmental responsibilities. However, EU laws apply to all EU countries, including the ones that do a better job.
What I really, really do not get is why the countries that do have long term solution do not start selling nuclear waste disposal services to other countries.
First, you could charge outrageus amounts of money for the service.
Second, you could practically ditch your defence forces simply because absolutely nobody would want anyone else to attack a country with huge amounts of radioactive waste.
Finally, after some time, you could likely sell the waste back as a fuel ingredient to new nuclear technologies.
This only slightly tongue in cheek. Of course I understand that proposing that would be a political suicide, but nevertheless, it would make sense.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
That's not a technical problem, but a political one. Imagine if I said "yeah, solar sucks because people burn down the solar farms" and then you saw me sneaking away with a can of gas...
Deep geological storage, but not in salt beds, is a simple answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting to be inspected and repaired. I've been in deep hard-rock mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste.
The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as well.
It would be interesting to see some examples of EU countries that have solved the long-term storage problem? All I know of are countries that have been researching underground tunnels since the 70s and they're still not in production use.
Sweden is nearly done with the environmental review of final storage of spent nuclear fuel. There is still scientific discussion regarding if the containers will last and remain intact for the 10 000 year goal. They hope to have a facility ready by 2030.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why do the coal & oil plants get a free pass to dump their waste into the air? Its much easier to contain and store nuclear waste because you can keep track of it, whereas the coal and oil waste is just dumped in the air for everyone to breathe.
Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water.
Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will. Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil.
Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I think having to store a lot of nuclear fuel is a much better problem than having to extract carbon out of the atmosphere, or building difficult to recycle chemical batteries out of scarce resources.
> Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water.
Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage because of several incidents of water ingress even during the time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open right there and then.
Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.
It goes even beyond this and comments like yours are important to stress that there is a lot of nuance. If you count carbon emissions related to building the plant, the enrichment facility, the storage facility, the mining, the lonf-term maintenance, the decomissioning, etc you end with quite a carbon footprint as (so far) that all relies on diesel.
The solution to nuclear waste is to use breeder reactors extensively. Breeder reactors both (1) substantially reduce the radioactivity of nuclear waste, and (2) allow you to get up to 100 times the energy out of the same quantity of initial nuclear fuel.
A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a radioactive isotope, often with much shorter half-lives. Some of these are even useful in industry.
There were challenges in the past with breeder reactor design (for example as this article outlines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...), but this is an area that there should be a lot more active research in. The long-term benefits of doing so would be immense.
We should move to breeder reactors. However, there is one unsolved problem: As the fuel is repeatedly refined/recycled, there is a step where it is trivially easy to skim some weapons grade material out of the process.
I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed.
Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal material from the line.
Or, we accept that people will occasionally have access to weapons-grade nuclear material and move on.
"But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet, "That's a terrible idea!"
Yes, it is, but hear me out:
Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants pocket or something.
So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe) someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that: "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO 234-867-5309"
Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now what?
- You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're suddenly near the top of the suspect list.
- Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too. Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured destruction!
- Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times and we might end up with world peace.
All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the alternative right now can range from "millions of people displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my chances, thanks.
Probably a dumb question, but why can’t we just blast nuclear waste out into space with a rocket? Seems like a rather small payload in the grand scheme of things.
I still don't understand why nuclear waste needs long terms storage. With Burner reactors you can produce waste that only needs storage for 100s of years, not 1000s.
Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years.
The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.
The reason why you don't see much of fast-neutron "burners" is that NPT is essentially an empty shell, and you have to be lucky to survive putting up so-called plutonium economy - and the "survive" part might be literal. It all goes back to Indian nuclear program, AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. Now that climate crisis pushes for more solutions to power, you get absurd proposals from USA like reactors with remote disable on them controlled from USA.
>...AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production.
No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada):
>...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes.
>...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India.
It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor
>> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant.
Given that mountains are a result of geological activity, this is for sure the worst place to store it. You'll have a better chance digging out a big hole in the desert - which the EU doesn't have.
- What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build bridges, surely we can build large containers.
Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love to know why its a stupid idea.
What if we made a giant four sided pyramid out of stone, and used the inner 1% of its volume to store your box? We could put it in the middle of the desert, and hope it gets covered in sand.
There is a genuine pyramid theory which posits that the Great Pyramid was, in fact, used for power generation.
It's actually quite fun: the theory goes that the huge mass of the pyramid was used to couple seismic vibrations into the enormous granite blocks above the King's Chamber. Being stuffed with quartz crystals, this generated a varying electric field which excited a hydrogen atmosphere (provided by a chemical reaction in the Queen's Chamber. Or the Subterranean Chamber, can't remember which). The Grand Gallery was apparently filled with Helmholtz resonators which set up a standing wave of some sort, the portcullises at the entrance of the King's Chamber being acoustic baffles to control the resonance. The net effect of all this was apparently that the comparatively thin-walled sarcophagus in the King's Chamber (also granite) would set up an appropriate vibration in the hydrogen to cause a maser-like concentration of microwave energy to be directed up one of the "air passages". Damage in the Grand Gallery is taken as evidence that there was some sort of catastrophic failure that knocked the whole thing out of commission.
It's remarkably complete, and totally, utterly bonkers. I love it.
You can't open and close the box to put new stuff in, so you have to wait till you have enough to fill a big box. The stuff you are collecting waiting to have enough to fill the box needs managing anyhow.
The big boxes still need armed guards and a stable government so that it that they are not dismantled and used as weapons by future generations of extremists.
The problem is in part the anti-nuclear folks don't want the problem to be solved. So you can build a skyscraper 100 feet tall in a high earthquake zone, but you can't build a container. The normal approach (france etc) is to recycle and then vitrify the leftovers and store in a container. You get much shorter half lives, much less waste. So even if it comes out the container, it's still "in" something. Of course, you can build a reasonably secure container as well.
There are a lot of authoritarian and pro-nuclear countries which have not solved the problem. Actually some of them (Russia, ...) have the worst environmental track record when it comes to nuclear technology.
Russia has a lot of uninhabited space, so the contamination does not seem to be a big problem for them. Lots of countries behave this way, UK and US included.
Western countries have spent many billions to secure the nuclear reactors of rotten USSR / Russian submarines which were endangering the baltic sea and also the Soviet RBMK-1000 reactor, which was causing the chernobyl disaster...
> Russia has a lot of uninhabited space
Nuclear installations are not in uninhabited space. For example the still operating (!) RMBK-style reactors are not that far away from major cities.
West had the money and the will, I think that was a dollar well spent.
US irradiated large areas of Pacific Ocean and atmosphere (US) with its testing program, harming people living there and contaminating whole world with radioactive isotopes. UK dumped radioactive waste in barrels into Atlantic ocean, has bad record on nuclear safety (Windscale accidents) and continues to run old nuclear power plant that does not pass old safety tests, so they make the test less and less restrictive [1].
The lax approach to safety has been observed on all sides. It has to improve but it is no reason to stop development of nuclear power.
Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people. Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, not solely due to technology, but mainly due to incompetence and dysfunctional society. Also, the disaster wasn't as bad as people think. Few people died when you compare to other industrial accidents.
The really badly polluted installations in Russia are the military/research ones in restricted areas - Mayak, Lake Karachay.
Not quite, it depend where the carbon forming the CO2 comes from. Carbon extracted from sewage is already in the carbon cycle giving a net 0 carbon when burned. Extracting and burning fossile carbon ADDS carbon to the cycle, hence the problem
Or we could extract it and not burn it, making it "carbon negative".
Though your comment has a problem. It isn't carbon that is the problem, it is carbon in the air. If we did 100% CO2 extraction from coal fire plants they wouldn't be a real climate issue (overly simplified). Similarly we can't consider sewage as a carbon 0 cycle because eating turns a solid carbon source (food) into a gas. Carbon is fine, carbon in the air is not fine. Sewage is only neutral in the respect that we've already converted it to a gas (unless we accelerate this process, which is typically done) but doesn't account for the conversion process that happens.
Yes, thank for this! Not burning are net 0 biofuels is equivalently the cheapest carbon capture we can do.
It's very good to analyze specific flows, but at the end of day, greenhouse gases (appropriately weighted) in the air are a fungible liability, and taking some specific process and sanctifying it's net greenhouse gas emissions in isolation is silly.
If the CO2 was recently extracted from the atmosphere, then burning the gas is carbon neutral.
It might be more thermodynamically favorable to use the gas as input to a carbon capture process. Even if that is the case, bootstrapping a market for biogas will lower the cost of biogas. In turn, that will lower the cost of biogas-based carbon sequestration.
Methane is going to come out of sewage whether we process it or not, and methane itself is a greenhouse gas. It's not going to come out of the ground without help (in the quantities we are using).
... it's incredibly potent as CH4... and then it "breaks down" into CO2 and H2O.
I think enkid's point is agreeing with you: might as well burn that sewage CH4 for energy-- you end up with the same CO2 in the end and less CH4 in the atmosphere in the short term.
And the gas comes from biowaste, which is actually nice, because municipalities which have the most effective ways of collecting and processing biowaste can export the resulting biogas to e.g. surrounding municipalities and in this way generate income to run things for everyone.
This means waste must be sorted somehow, but this is a rational thing to do anyways.
And it pisses me off immensely to see some idiots throw plastic bags or non-food waste to the biowaste bins. There are signs in many languages and even with pictures, but some people still manage. Such biowaste cannot be used for gas generation, so it's kind of hurting all the inhabitants.
According to VafabMiljö [1], who runs the local biogas facility, in the year 2020 they processed 16157 tons of household biowaste, i.e. 66% of entire processing that year. The other stuff was sewage sludge and slurry from packaged/unpackaged food items (total of 8246 tons).
16157 tons of household biowaste turned into gas to run buses with and not dumped into a landfill is a good thing.
In 2012 the municipality collected 60% of overall food waste to turn it into biogas. Back then they hoped to reach 80% eventually. [2]
I didn't find newer collection numbers (they are somewhere, I just stopped iterating), but the number can only be higher today.
[1] https://www.vafabmiljo.se
[2] Naturvårdsverket rapport 6518, September 2012 (ISBN 978-91-620-6518-8).
Not at all. Problem is that gas from fossil sources adds extra carbon to the short term carbon cycle while biogas does not (because the carbon fixated was already in the short term cycle).
After having read Gates’ latest book on climate change, one metaphor that stuck with me was the one on nuclear energy. It’s as if the Wright brothers invented the first airplane, flew off, crashed, lost every passenger, and then we collectively dropped the entire technology and every promise it held. Never to be visited again. Humans are weird.
(and I know the accidents were worse, but we iterated on car and plane safety, so why not energy safety?)
It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous.
The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit in air travel.
Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obvious that it's killing us and in such numbers as it is. Nuclear is a dramatic killer, when we die from radiation it's clear and obvious and horrific.
The comparison of a happening with basically no longterm consequences to future generations like MH17 to nuclear fallout / necessary waste treatment is quite lame imho.
Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.
> Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all
And yet we seem to be doing just that here in Finland. The for profit companies operating and building the plants have been trying to get permits to build more (and very likely are going to get another one soon). Even with the "failure" of Olkiluoto 3 they seem to find a way to do it in a profitable enough way that they (2 companies TVO and Fennovoima) want to build more.
There are no subsidies for nuclear power at all in Finland.
Also our permanent spent fuel storage site is almost finished and should hold around 100 years of spent fuel. Though there have been now some talks to not really use it for most fuel as it makes more sense to build breeder reactors and just burn that fuel into much smaller amount. If that happens it will fit much more then 100 year of spent fuel.
>This month, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland was supposed to start producing power. Instead, the plant is at least three and a half years late and more than 50 percent over-budget. Olkiluoto was to be the “poster child” for the new generation of nuclear power plant designs that would drive the “Nuclear Renaissance” and if any nuclear project was going to go well. Instead, it has become an example of all that can go wrong in economic terms with new reactors. The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default.
> The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default.
With the contract TVO signed with Siemens and Areva for the plant they will never end up having to pay all the cost overruns. It was basically a fixed price contract.
What ended up happening is Siemens got the fuck out of the deal (it was originally a Siemens and Areva joint project) and French government broke up Areva Group into smaller entities and took a hit on the failed project. From the legal fighting Areva agreed to pay TVO 450 million due to failing to deliver on time with some extra money going one way or another based on if it will deliver in the new revised timelines (ended up Areva having to pay TVO another 450 million).
According to TVO at the end of the day the project cost them 5 billion instead of the original 3.2 billion with Areva saying it cost the 8.5 billion so Areva took a huge hit on making a bad contract and/or failing to deliver.
What’s your point other than people generally sell large projects with a low up front number and it ends up being higher. Investors don’t get the 3-4x return they wanted and have to settle for 2x. Or it takes longer to pay itself back.
Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of power.
How can anyone argue against nuclear being part of the solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build?
Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China have the skill and the will to make it happen while everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to pump out co2.
Where is the money coming from for the mentioned reactor? According to the wikipedia page a lot of French money is involved of a company connected to the French state..
edit: A breeder would for sure be a good way to reduce waste as you said..
For Olkiluoto 3 TVO got the original 3.2 billion from its owners and some loans. And it was a fixed price contract but TVO has given into Areva a bit and is now projecting that it will cost them 5 billion. Areva at the moment projects the total price to be 8.5 billion so they will be taking a loss on it (who is going to pay what part of the overruns was in some courts at one point haven't really followed up if there was some verdict and what it was)
Funnily enough most of these loans are from German banks and various export agencies backed by the French government. Even still all these loans were given at market rates so EU would not kill the project (Greenpeace etc did make a complaint to EU and a investigation was done)
This kind of seller arranging some part of the loans is very normal in large infrastructure projects like these.
The other new project I mentioned is Hanhiviki in which Rosatom won the bidding. Areva and Toshiba also left their bids but as I understand it Areva was thrown out due to their failure to deliver Olkiluoto 3 in time/budget and Toshibas bid was not competetive. Though this Hanhikivi plant is still waiting for permits and there has been some obvious issues with it being built by Rosatom and the Russian sanctions going around. It also has some American and UK interests as Rosatom contracted the turbines to some GE subsidiary and Rolls Royce.
In British Columbia Canada we are building a 1000 MW hydro plant called site C for 10-12 billion. We have been doing studies on the site for 30+ years and it will be 10 years construction time by the time it is finished.
> Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all.
FYI, oil & gas industry receives a lot of subsidies (just google it). On top of that, nuclear is extremely regulated compared to oil & gas. For instance, we have to capture and store nuclear waste. That's not the case for oil & gas CO2 waste.
> Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all.
This is nonsense. We are basically using 60s technology that has some of these problems.
A modern reactor facility could be 10-50x smaller for the same output and that makes think like decontamination cheaper as well. Also, these facilities can run 100 years potentially, so the amount of money required for decommissioning is amortized of gigantic amounts of energy.
There is nothing inherent in nuclear that make it super expensive or unsustainable.
Interesting historical perspective since bomb planes transformed human warfare and was critical in the development of first ww1 and then more so during ww2. While not fully unique, the idea of killing the morale of the citizens rather than confronting the military was an insight many leader found from the bomb planes, and the idea of nuclear bombs are almost impossible without the idea of air travel.
> It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous.
well, a lot of people simply refuse to air travel because of perceived safety issues
As far as I know there are also economic problems with nuclear. Nuclear power plants are enormous investments, then take decades to build and eventually decomission. If renewable energy gets efficient enough, nuclear is not worth the effort.
It’s actually pretty easy to build a nuclear reactor, but is as expensive to make it safe today as it is to maintain a Windows NT 4.0 server in 2021 when it comes to making it regulatory compliant.
Also when comparing nuclear to “renewable” energy, you are really comparing distributed low density investments with monolithic ones. Nuclear is 1e6 the energy density of chemical reactions. And wind/solar is basically heat exchangers positioned 8 light minutes from the nuclear reactor. The Sun incidentally, is just as renewable as that Uranium we are discussing.
What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)
> What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)
I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic assumption you could dismantle:
1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for transporting electricity where it's needed. So shouldn't that stitching be quite solid anyway? Also, at a national level, I'd imagine solar and wind probably have rather solid statistical patterns, and those random factors can be abstracted away to a degree (the whole "what happens when the wind is not blowing?" - kind of hard to have the wind stop blowing all over 300k sqkm, all at once :-) ).
2. Once that power grid is solid, does it matter how small and distributed those solar and wind patches are?
3. I don't think Lithium-Ion is the only/main energy storage tech being investigated/invested in for grid purposes. And why couldn't it become a solid alternative for base load? Are base load-capacity energy storage facilities not competitive with gas/nuclear/coal power plants, factoring in pollution or other risks?
Imagine how overbuilt and under utilized a communications network would have to be in order for it to work the same way people imagine solar and wind power can be transported across the country.
Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.
Aren't communication networks also overbuilt and underutilized ? After all that's why retail ISPs oversubscribe so much, and why we had issues at the start of the lockdowns.
If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.
The economic problems are tied directly to policy problems, like the broken regulatory structure. For instance, as I understand it, a nuclear plant that began construction 10 years ago and is ready to go online by the standards when it began construction has to comply with all regulations created since. This makes creating new plants very expensive.
> It turns out that the main reason for spiraling nuclear plant construction bills is soft costs, the indirect expenses related to activities such as engineering design, purchasing, planning, scheduling and — ironically — estimating and cost control.
> These indirect expenses accounted for 72 percent of the increase seen in reactor construction costs between 1976 and 1987, a period in which the amount of money needed for containment buildings rose by almost 118 percent.
It would depend heavily on the reactor design. Smaller more modularized reactors can probably be built much cheaper with economies of scale by widespread installation. Renewables have hard limits as to how efficient they can ever be and they started out expensive too and heavily subsidized by government.
This is the real issue. It's 3x as expensive as other renewables. Every dollar of subsidy producing 1 MWh of nuclear could provide 3 MWh of solar or wind.
Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins).
It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from defense and military.
"Dispatchable plants have varying startup times. The fastest plants to dispatch are hydroelectric power plants and natural gas power plants. For example, the 1,728 MW Dinorwig pumped storage power plant can reach full output in 16 seconds.[4] Although theoretically dispatchable, coal and nuclear thermal plants are designed to run as base load power plants and may take hours or sometimes days to cycle off and then back on again."
"Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators, according to market needs. Dispatchable generators can adjust their power output according to an order.[1] Non-dispatchable renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power cannot be controlled by operators."
"Dispatchable fuel resources include nuclear, coal and natural gas. These fuel sources are highly reliable because each fuel is a constant supply. These are known as baseload resources."
>Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators
Precisely. It's not "on demand" if it takes a day to ramp up production and another day to ramp it down. It's on yesterday's demand, which is f***ing useless.
This contrasts with gas peaker plants which can scale up in seconds. These are known as "dispatchable".
>Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng
Quoting an offhand comment from an idiotic energy minister trying to justify a boondoggle plant on a nuclear propaganda website isn't as convincing as you seem to think it is.
On demand doesn't mean instantly. Even gas peaker plants aren't instant, they can take 15 minutes to warm up and connect to the grid.
If the sun is down no amount of calling up a solar farm will increase output, if the wind isn't blowing or if it's blowing too strongly no amount of pleading will increase the output of an off-shore wind farm. This is because they aren't dispatchable. This is not the case with Nuclear.
Nuclear can do load following, they do it in France. How else do you think they balance a grid which has 70% Nuclear? They use reactors with grey rods which can reduce the reactivity in the reactor without distorting the shape of the reaction.
Actually many countries have developed nuclear technology in various forms over decades. The current latest generation of nuclear power plants (like the French EPR) is simply not cost effective. The Russian technology is nothing which would ever have a change to be deployed in a western country, due to its lower technical standards... Russia can't actually clean up its own nuclear installations.
I think it really comes down to the A-bomb and how large it loomed in the left politics of the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, I think well-meaning greens have majorly contributed to climate change by opposing nuclear. The mistake is understandable, but we need to be reversing it as fast as possible.
An interesting analogy considering the evidence of the airplane’s role in regard to observed changes in atmospheric chemistry.
But all analogies are like that...they need people to squint so details go fuzzy and merge.
The Zeppelin is an equally plausible aircraft analogy. Theoretically it is possible for nothing to go wrong when taking dependencies on a quarter million hand sewn cow intestines.
Considering that the Hindenberg was destroyed by a bomb sneaked on board, the analogy is pretty good. The flames seen in the film were kerosene fuel ignited by the bomb. Humans have a way of causing their own disasters, when technical risks fail to deliver.
And, more than 2/3 aboard at the time survived. Hard to say where this fits into any proposed analogy.
The actual answer is that we did improve on nuclear safety, and that all the regulations required to - for example - make sure that power plant designers didn't route all the redundant monitoring and control wiring down the same cableways and stuff them full of highly flammable foam are part of the reason nuclear power has become increasingly unaffordable. This is not some hypothetical example I'm making up, nuclear power plants in the US really did do that with predictable results and apparently the fire safety regulations really are a major cost. The Trump administration tried to fix this by giving more flexibility to designers, but of course that just made it proportionally harder to show the designs were safe and achieved nothing.
Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable again; it has a lot of cost problems.
Ya, but the challenge, and I say that as a supporter of Nuclear in general, is that you don't sign up for the experiment. If you're in the radius of the plant if it were to fail, you might be wary of it.
It's an emotional response though, like how there are still more people with a parallizing fear of flight that don't have a problem hopping into a car.
Like I said, I'm not justifying being against Nuclear, but explaining the challenge with Nuclear's general acceptance, there is a fear response from people, and it'll need to be curbed and addressed. That fear response is due to the grandiose nature of a Nuclear failure which fossil fuel don't have, even if they kill you slowly and might lead to world ending catastrophies.
How so? Do the particulates and aerosols avoid me breathing them in because I don’t drive a car and use electric heating? How does it work?
Pollution from fossil fuel is unavoidable in quite a lot of places regardless of your life style. Also, much more deadly than anything related to nuclear so far.
It’s far more centralized and prone to overly bloated government contracts, big industry, corruption, accounting shenanigans, excessive taxation to pay for the mistakes, and loss of individual freedom and control over where your energy dollars go to. Especially as compared to solar but it’s even bad compared to fossil fuels in these respects.
After solar and wind take off completely, the reality is that for 99% of people out there, they will be as centralized as nuclear is. Both because of industry consolidation and because of practical realities.
You are confusing centralization of manufacturing, which is possible and not so bad, with centralization of energy production, which is much more insidious.
The only "personal" production of energy is from solar panels. Which still comes with its own problems, as you generally still want to be connected to a grid, in which case utility companies generally attach a lot of strings.
Solar will seem to be less centralized but in reality and over the long term we will have huge solar farms owned by big companies, for the same reason we generally have huge actual farms owned by big companies. And what difference does it really make for the regular user if they get their power from 40 nuclear plants or from 200 solar farms?
Wind is super centralized, big companies are building wind farms and big companies are operating them. You need a ton of capital for wind farms.
None of this stuff is one or the other. It can be centralized, and also it can be on the average Joe’s roof or in the average Joe’s backyard. With or without a grid. Without the grid, you need some extra equipment so people who can, tend to opt for having the grid hooked up. But it’s possible to do it independently and be free of all the centralization.
Curious, I am pro nuclear as well, looking at the technological benefits, but how are we practically going to handle nuclear waste that will be there for thousands of future generations to handle?
If that’s true why would be this obstructionism be there? It does not make any rational sense if we can use nuclear to win us time until we have working fusion and/or wind/sun/etc energy implemented.
> If that’s true why would be this obstructionism be there? It does not make any rational sense if we can use nuclear to win us time until we have working fusion and/or wind/sun/etc energy implemented.
I've been thinking about nuclear this last week and i have some assumptions that i would appreciate if somebody more knowledgeable can quickly filter:
We want more energy per person in the future.
Stable energy is required to make industry sustainable.
Stable 'free' energy allows you to do really cool new things (like melt trash for resources?)
Waste & environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels.
A nation needs to agree to the risk/reward of a nuclear power plant, it must be owned and payed for primarily by the government.
Having a country/state that offers free energy will pay itself back easily.
Cost should not be an issue, 20 % of GDP should be on the table.
( Money is made up, Jules are real ).
Solar and wind are mostly done innovating. Nuclear has a relatively clear path of improvements ahead in terms of $/joule.
Storage based on hydrogen or thermal are too inefficient and don't scale well enough to power homes and industries during the winter.
US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level. That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone.
And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
You could get the price down in a number of ways, but the most obvious one is going to be to skimp on safety.
This isn't Germany's fault. Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has. The only countries that will really want it are those with nuclear weapons and a desire to keep a nuclear industry running to maintain skills and technology.
It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
> It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power. North Korea has nuclear weapons, they don't have nuclear power. South Korea is the opposite.
Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.
Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
When nuclear plants were built in Germany you couldn't get green electricity for $33 / MWh.
>It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power.
This is equally true of everywhere else. It's not about who built them 30 years ago. It's about who still wants to build them.
>Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made. Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
I didn't say that nuclear plants are being built to create plutonium. I said that they were being kept around because of the skills and tech - it's a more or less cost-neutral way of keeping a ready supply of nuclear engineers and a supporting industry.
In the UK it's partly about nuclear submarines, too (which are PWRs).
> I didn't say that nuclear plants are being built to create plutonium. I said that they were being kept around because of the skills and tech - it's a more or less cost-neutral way of keeping a ready supply of nuclear engineers and a supporting industry.
This. Nuclear power doesn't give you nuclear bombs, but it does give you the ability to start building them within months.
> Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.
"Japan was reported in 2012 to have 9 tonnes of plutonium in Japan, enough for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and an additional 35 tonnes stored in Europe.[37][38] It has constructed the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which could produce further plutonium.[37] Japan has a considerable quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU), supplied by the U.S. and UK, for use in its research reactors and fast neutron reactor research programs; approximately 1,200 to 1,400 kg of HEU as of 2014.[39] Japan also possesses an indigenous uranium enrichment plant[32][40] which could hypothetically be used to make highly enriched uranium suitable for weapons use."
> Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has.
Guess which energy source in France receive most subsidies? If the answer was fossil fuels you would be right. If you ask Germany with its massive subsidies for renewable, it is actually renewable followed by fossil fuels. Then its fossil fuels again. The story repeats itself in practically every country in EU. Even Sweden with its very public facing pro-renewable stance spends millions on subsidizes for fossil fuels. In total for 2018, 50 billions euro wast given as subsidies for fossil fuels in EU.
Inquisitive people might ask why all those countries are spending so much subsidizes on fossil fuels, and the answer is pretty simple. Do you want a stable energy grid? You either pay the oil, gas and coal companies to keep the engines warm in case there is a demand spike, or there won't be enough supply when demands go up. Now lets discuss why the need to pay for "reserve energy" has spiked in the last few decades. It has something to do with intermittent energy production.
Here is a suggestion. Lets cut that 50 billions for fossil fuel subsidies to 0. Either pay for nuclear/storage or accept an unstable grid. I am very tired of oil, coal and gas being paid to just keep the engines warm.
And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
I'm very suspicious of these claims. First, there's stuff like this: https://energycentral.com/c/ec/germany-solar-and-wind-triple.... Second, the position of most nuclear opponents is not "solar and wind can provide clean energy for everyone at a fraction of the cost", but rather "everyone needs to radically cut back on energy use and alter their lifestyles". I get the same sense as I do from religious conservatives who oppose STD vaccines because they allow people to continue their sinful ways.
Storing it is extremely expensive, at least with any currently available technology.
This is apparent looking at how much energy prices change throughout the day / month based on usage and cost of production, and how predictable those changes are.
If storing energy were cost effective you could make a killing buying low and selling high on the national grid.
This giant (world's largest!) and very expensive thing provides short term-relief against grid outages. The batteries last for ~1 hour and it can still only provide electricity for something like 50k homes.
(It's used for more economically useful things, like stabilizing the grid in emergencies.)
The periods between high and low/zero wind are in the order of 200-300 hours (at least where I live).
> For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh.
How did you come up with that number? Total cost of the battery divided by its capacity?
Since you do not dispose of the battery upon first discharge, the true cost should be amortized across the thousands of cycles it would go through during its lifetime.
Batteries are still far from economical in many situations, but there are many situations where they now make sense. They are also getting cheaper all the time, and as they do, so will the range of applications increase.
> Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.
Ok, how about you share your numbers on the cost of production for 1kwh.
Your use of "insanely high" leads me to believe you are comparing the capital outlay for batteries, vs operating costs of a power station. It's important to compare like for like.
Texas was 5 minutes away from a total grid failsafe collapse if the grid frequency had continued to drop, and it just happened that pretty much all of North America was undergoing high usage. Uncontrolled energy are not sustainable at scale.
Yup, and everyone says nuclear is safe but that's only technologically speaking. The technology is safe, but it's the human and regulatory aspect that has glaring red flags...
This first link here makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but this succinct excerpt touches on loosening safety tests. It goes into more detail in other parts of the article. The post has numerous example of very concerning issues.
> When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.
> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”
It really didn't help that USA pretty much stopped all work on NPPs by 1980s, and IIRC (don't ask for link, don't have it now) doesn't allow NPPs on brownfield sites - i.e. you can't remove an old reactor, then build a new more modern one in its place, even if you updated everything to new norms. You have to get a new site, new planning, new acceptance, etc.
Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough.
I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow.
I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand.
That link was unsecured radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a drone.
And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products.
The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
And that's only the long term
cost of pulling it out of the ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million literal years is not included.
You could say the same thing about any power source though - humans have created way bigger disasters with fossil fuels than nuclear power.
> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.? Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be good to know.
This is highly debatable. There are places on Earth with natural radiation fields greater than large swaths of the evacuation zone around Fukushima. For Chernobyl, see [1].
I don't think the evidence supports that, and even if it did, we create the same dead-zone conditions using chemical energy and fertilizers, so I'm not sure why it counts against nuclear any more than it would against petrochemicals.
No, thats not true. It is only because people are mis-informed on the actual facts and dangers of nuclear reactors, that we treat them as if they are lost forever.
> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy Germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants).
Base load is just a made up convention though closely related to traditional fixed rate prices, and may become increasingly fictional in the future as demand adapts to more variable supply and dynamic pricing.
People who decided to use directly grid electricity for heating but are not willing or able to pay for it during cold spells will find they have a summer house. Consumers can of course have electricity contracts that have fixed monthly prices as a derivative bought from electricity market actors. As the transition doesn't happen overnight, people and the social safety net will have time to cope and adapt.
In cold climates people have increasingly well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non grid electric heating. And can also shift power usage around the day because it takes a day or so for the house to cool uncomfortably.
Well, it's good that you're transparent. People should abandon their homes because of your policy.
Which energy sources that emit less co2/kWh than nuclear power should be used to heat houses in that case?
> (In cold climates people have well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non electricity heating, like thus far)
What are talking about? What kind of non-electricity heating? Let's burn some coal or what?
I'm in Sweden. It gets cold. Houses are well insulated and typically heated via quite efficient electric air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps. Our electricity has been like 98% co2 neutral since the 70s because of a 50/50 mix of hydro and nuclear as a base load.
Now, ironically, the leftist politicians (including the green party) here are dismantling all of this because they and the journalists don't understand the concept of base power, because they don't understand the difference between power and energy. Their solution is to build lots and lots of wind power plants.
So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with local hydro and nuclear power?
By non electric heating methods I meant CHP and biomass based heating.
But yes, old energy inefficient houses in cold climates should be replaced. There's no need to get dramatic over it, houses are machines for living and it depends on circumstances how far to extend their lifespan. (Except some historical houses of course)
> So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with local hydro and nuclear power?
Umm. This whole thread is about the existence of nuclear power. Is it hard to understand that if nuclear power went away, the baseload would become extremely expensive during cold and wind-free days? That's a substantial part of the year, here.
In a nuclear rampdown scenario, hopefully it would not come as an overnight surprise. Usually there are plans on a 10 year timescale or more. But I'm not arguing against nuclear, just for dynamic electricity pricing.
That's the kind of thing we need to design for and handle using contracts containing hedges or cutoffs and price reactive usage. Texas isn't a cold climate place so relying on grid electricity to cover the exceptional weather is probably not the best plan in the post fossil future. But insulation will help with this and hot weather AC electricity usage both.
So you believe the grid can be said to be working well with occasional dips to 0MWh? Or is some base load in fact an obvious necessity?
You may argue that the current value of the base load is artificially high, but there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.
I'm talking about 0 MWh for the entire grid, which includes all of the distributed generators. So, by definition, shutting down each and every piece of electric equipment connected to the entire grid. You truly believe that is a tenable position?
If not, than you must accept there exists some necessary base load. That can be provided from base production like it is today, or it could theoretically be provided from storage and over-production in a hypothetical renweables-only grid.
It's unlikely to hit 0 even at night, no reason to stop all the windmills and hydro, and there will be stored energy buyers and sellers. But there won't be production guarantees to some level based on anticipated demand.
I know it's unlikely, but the point was that there exists some minimum need of energy, even in the most flexible grid imaginable, some base load necessary.
Ok, bad wording. How about: It emerges from conventional fixed supply. In any case it's no law of nature. So not a concept that is necessarily relevant in the furure.
The relationship of supply and demand in the grid is an equation, if they don't match you get blackouts or other funky things. When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power.
Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand), but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard production quota.
> When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power.
No, thats not really how it works out.
Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum level of electricity, that will always be demanded, almost no matter how high prices go.
Or, in other words, there is some about electricity demand is very inelastic.
So no, you can't just increase electricity costs. Because then electricity costs will massively spike, and cause huge amounts of problems.
You are massively underestimating the amount of problems and costs that it would put in people for demand to be as elastic as you want it to be.
It would be way cheaper and better for everyone, if there was simply enough baseload supply to meet the baseload demand.
Texas illustrated what happens in the current old system if there are unexpected drops due to breakdowns in supply when consumers are relying on affordable supply following consumption. Pricing can't fix a situation like that.
Big problems maybe at first sight, but there are many ways of overcoming them. When automated price following behaviour is implemented in eg AC and heating and car charging systems, the spikes will be greatly lessened. Also, energy storage actors can sell into spikes, which will work to clip the spikes and encourage investment into energy storage.
I was writing a comment on how hard/impossible it is to get politicians to understand the fundamentals of what makes an electric grid work - then I saw the other comments here and despaired.
It's like all the people who didn't understand grade 7-9 physics conspired to make us all miserable.
Is it grade 7-9 physics, though? I learned about power grid structure (base load, etc.) and such at the university.
To the down voters: just because you learn about electricity in secondary school, it doesn't mean that the second or third level effects are obvious and that you immediately understand what their impact on a power grid is. But hey, maybe some people were super interested in power grids or just super gifted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed. I edited my sibling comment. I totally agree that electric grids and base loads are pretty complicated things. It's just that the base knowledge level is infuriatingly low.
I quite often see journalists writing about energy politics confusing power and energy.
You're not wrong, but I honestly think most don't really even understand the difference between power and energy. If you don't understand that, trying to explain base load is an uphill battle.
Either way, in almost every online discussion I see the term base load is used in the wrong context.
Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the producer side since the cheapest power plants were also inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load providers, although it was purely an economical coupling leading to a term existing.
Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are the new base load providers, but it also brings new challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more variability in the supply. This is our current world were the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally. This is unless they can find a way to get their prices below renewables, but that is getting more and more unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.
Base load exists on the consumer side and unless energy storage ramps up 1000-10000x across the world, I don't see how solar and wind could ever cover it until then. Human power usage patterns don't change that much because we don't change much. You need to be able to provide X energy at all times, no ifs and buts.
Actually, there is one thing, we need super capable and reliable super long distance power grid connections, maybe there's some progress on this front?
Because solar and wind absolutely are unreliable on a local front.
With HVDC and UHVDC lines there are progress on the transmission front. The main question though is the economical race between geographically decoupling your renewable power supply versus storage, this is something we will see play out in the next 10-15 years.
China recently finished a 3300 km UHVDC line from Xinjiang to the east coast with an expected loss of 1.5% per 1000 km.
Energy storage is not a problem in the long term. Making sure that polluting power plants only run 10% of the time is a short term problem that has a solution today.
We won’t stop climate change, we’re decades late. What we need is everything we ca have, which includes solar and wind where appropriate, but also nuclear. The fact that people pretending to care about climate change are pushing for gas is absurd.
Modern nuclear power plants such as the German Konvoi or modern Russian VVER survive plane crashes. Some German plants even have military defense systems on site.
Nothing is perfectly safe. Hydro dams fail. Wind turbines throw ice. People fall off roofs installing solar.
But 8 million people per year are killed by particulate emissions from normally-operating fossil and biofuel combustion plants. Nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are all orders of magnitude safer ways, per TWh generated, than the dominant worldwide sources. Therefore we should replace fossil and biofuel with nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro.
Conveniently, those 4 are also very low carbon, so they prevent climate change along the way.
Killing a predictable number of people each year is not danger, it's damage. The danger posed by hydro is real, but entirely negligible compared to nuclear.
But of course we should replace fossils by renewables and phase them out before nuclear. And if nuclear wouldn't take too long to build building new nuclear plants as a stopgap may actually make sense. Unfortunately, they do.
Fukushima was a triple meltdown after total inundation of 1960s-class reactors. The short and long-term death-toll from radiation was quite literally zero, as reaffirmed by UNSCEAR just last month [1]. I don't think the "boundlessly large nuclear accidents make the technology untenable" argument really holds water given this kind of experience.
So... so you must always postulate the worst possible scenario, no matter how unlikely, and judge any technology solely by that? Even in the face of 60 years of worldwide operation providing huge swaths of the world's carbon-free energy while injuring only a vanishing fraction of the people injured by the most common alternate sources?
I cannot see how this view can be justified.
But if you want to take this view, consider this hypothetical worst case. Imagine we push forward with wind, solar, and batteries, but human rights issues related to manufacturing with slave labor, corruption, mineral shortages, grid instabilities, and land usage issues that emerge once these technologies reach world-scale cause enough trouble that we just keep on operating large amounts of fracked fossil gas to the point that climate change hits the bad predicted scenarios and all the bad events of climate change happen anyway. Isn't that hypothesized worst case just as valid as this worse-than-Chernobyl nuclear accident you're holding above our heads?
Since the damage caused by severe nuclear accidents is essentially permanent, we cannot recover from them. So in the long run, we cannot afford even an accident per century, and thus, cannot afford nuclear power.
Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.
> we cannot afford even an accident per century, and thus, cannot afford nuclear power.
This statement has no basis. We've had multiple awful nuclear accidents and the world keeps turning. We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.
You are aware that there are places on earth with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants that have natural radiation dose rates from the geology that are well beyond the dose rates in almost all of the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones?
> Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.
That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years. When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.
Today, we've seen reactors of the Hualong One, ABWRs, VVERs, and ARP-1400 designs built in wholly reasonable times.
And for deep decarbonization, we plan to use factory/shipyard production techniques to serially produce thousands of standardized low-carbon power plants even faster.
> This statement has no basis. We've had multiple awful nuclear accidents and the world keeps turning.
You hadn't forgotten I was writing about severe accidents within half a sentence, hadn't you?
> We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.
I'm quite aware of that. And if I considered stopgap nuclear realistically possible, maybe I'd support it.
> That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years.
Building nuclear is not even the hard part. Deciding to do so is. Changing public opinion to favour nuclear won't happen in time so there's no point. The decision to decarbonize using renewables has been made, there's actually no need to even discuss it further.
> When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.
The available technology and political climate has changed since then.
Nuclear engineer here. I've spent lots of time fighting against persistent myths about thorium. All the things you mention are characteristics of breeder reactors, not just thorium breeders. Uranium-based breeder reactors can do these things as well.
Thorium has only one actual physical advantage, and that is that it can do breeding with slow neutrons rather than fast ones. This is a technicality and has lots of complications.
Yup. This myth is particularly pervasive. Less effort was put into thorium because it was inherently more expensive to get going and didn't offer sufficient advantages to motivate the additional expense.
> a minor mishap in which ″there were no serious injuries or radiological problems, the ship remained fully capable to perform any mission required of it and there was no damage to the reactor.″
> Lt. Cmdr. Craig Quigley, a Navy spokesman, responded: ″We did not try to cover anything up. Everything about this incident was properly reported through Navy channels.
That's neither a cover-up, nor damning evidence that the navy cannot safely operate reactors.
1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1];
2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues;
3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems;
4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue; and
5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
The big problems with nuclear aren't technical they're political but they are no less significant. For me, I just don't trust humans--either government entities or for-profit enterprises--to safely and responsibly build and manage a nuclear power plants as well as all the infrastructure to mine, process, transport, reprocess and store any byproducts.
Counter point. We must learn how to responsibly manage extremely dangerous materials and technologies. It is the only way we can avoid inevitable extinction at our own hands as technology advances. Atomic weapons are no longer the only existential threat we are capable of wielding, we are rapidly approaching the ability to engineer de novo viruses and eventually self replicating cells. We already possess the means to create autonomous weapons systems and are improving upon them daily. As access to space becomes commercialized it will become increasingly trivial to deliver un-interceptable payloads to anywhere on earth and they needn't be explosive since a large enough mass travelling fast enough is more than capable of demolishing any building. Extrapolate further into the future and if we master high enough energy density batteries or capacitors then we start having to worry about directed energy weapons, imagine a hand held device capable of generating an instantaneous lethal dose of X-rays. I'm sure we're also capable of thinking up a long list of even more deadly weapons let alone beneficial technologies that could be mishandled. We can't turn back to a simpler time, we have to take the bull by the horns.
Do you have a source? There's plenty of larger fossil fuel catastrophes that just aren't well known because they are in third world countries, so who gives a fuck, right? [0] (note that this is 1700 square miles) I'm not sure this point if about environmental damage or human not being able to live there damage. If the former, I think climate change is a pretty apparent counter point. If the latter, well the size of that is largely political but you can think of it as an unexpected opening of a national forest. Sure, sucks for humans, but all the trees are great for climate (hell, killing humans is great for climate, but that's not popular).
> 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem.
Reprocessing isn't necessary. There's little reason to with our current industry, and even France's. Storage is easy. You place it on site. We have a few hundred years to figure out deep geological repositories (which I also advocate for plastics, heavy metals, and other non-degradable toxic substances). We just don't have enough and it isn't dangerous enough for this to be a problem. Nuclear waste is hundreds of thousands of times smaller than other energy sources (500,000x less than coal). You all act like this is a problem that only nuclear has. It isn't even close to being the biggest perpetrator. It is a good criticism, but if you are only applying this criticism to one product I'm not convinced it is a concern you actually have but rather you're just holding "enemies" to higher standards.
> 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems
This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons, which my response would be that you clearly do not understand the difference between weapons and reactors. As a side note, understanding this difference is key to understanding the Iran Deal and why no one is concerned that they produced more enriched material than the deal allowed (i.e. it was a political gesture and could only be a political gesture).
> 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue
And? It is stored on site. Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.
> 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
See 4.
And congrats, you hit 5/10 of the common myths[1].
Now if you said that nuclear power plants were too expensive, we could have a real discussion and there would be differing opinions based on different criteria and hopeful/naive projections. But we can't even have that conversation if you aren't willing to just google the opposition's answers to your questions that have been continually asked for decades. I'm just reminded of this Futurama episode (which I just noticed makes a flat earth joke)[2]. We don't need more Dr. Banjos.
Yes, Chernobyl. Unless you can point me to a _single_ non-nuclear power plant accident that has rendered 1,000 square miles uninhabitable for 35 years (and counting) then my point stands.
Pro-nuclear advocates always bring up the health effects of coal. Yes, it’s terrible. But you’ve also picked the worst offender (what about natural gas?) and those health effects are spread across the entire industry, not localized to a single plant failure.
> This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons
No it is not. Many in this thread and elsewhere will selectively talk about nuclear waste in terms of spent fuel processing and storage. This completely ignores the byproducts of enrichment.
And yes uranium for power plants is still enriched, even if it’s not to the degree that weapons-grade uranium is enriched.
> Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.
False equivalency strikes again. You’re trying to deflect to the issue of securing the plant. Compare what can be done with a ton of nuclear fuel or nuclear waste vs a ton of whatever goes into or comes out of a coal plant.
You also call the waste footprints of nuclear fission power “small”. Well it’s partly small because nuclear power is small. To scale it up to the level where could actually displace fossil fuel use would multiply those numbers and problems by 10-100x.
And I’ll not to completely skipped over the biggest problem of all: it requires humans tasked with building, maintaining, operations and monitoring plants in a way that just doesn’t seem realistic or scalable.
> Yes, Chernobyl. Unless you can point me to a _single_ non-nuclear power plant accident that has rendered 1,000 square miles uninhabitable for 35 years (and counting) then my point stands.
So, let's not build shitty soviet designs (which were known to be bad even back then). Got it. If that's all .. can we get back to work now? We have coal power plants to decommission.
We should note that the Russians are the only ones crazy enough to build positive void reactors (i.e. reactors that have a large pressure and can.... explode). No one else uses RBM designs because of safety concerns. Even then they were known.
Sorry, I was asking for a source that supports the claim that "nuclear has _*much worse failure modes*_", not if a disaster exists. That's why I provided a source where I'd argue that the failure mode was worse than Chernobyl. I can point to more if you want, but the question was about a comparison.
> And yes uranium for power plants is still enriched, even if it’s not to the degree that weapons-grade uranium is enriched.
My criticism of this is that you're claim suggests that other energy sources don't have harmful byproducts. I've stated clearly that nuclear has worse, but FAR less. For comparison, a bomb is ~97% enriched uranium where a fuel rod is about 3%. This is exactly why I brought up the Iran deal. There's plenty of byproducts that we have in many common industries that also easily enter aquifers, never degrade (at least radioactive material degrades), and are extremely dangerous to humans. Many of these things are used in sources like solar (PV). The difference in nuclear is that the quantities are far less. Several orders of magnitude. Here's a picture of all of France's radioactive waste[0]. This is decades of waste for an entire country. Here's a video of Russia's equivalent[1]. The numbers are just tiny. Yearly PV waste is 150x that of nuclear. There's just nothing else out there that you can put decades of industry waste in a single building. I won't even bring up that coal does more than this every day. You have to account for the difference in waste levels.
> False equivalency strikes again. You’re trying to deflect to the issue of securing the plant. Compare what can be done with a ton of nuclear fuel or nuclear waste vs a ton of whatever goes into or comes out of a coal plant.
Our worry in both cases is state actors. But you're probably thinking "terrorists could just steal nuclear material and make a bomb". If you're thinking a dirty bomb, I'll refer you to this thread[2]. If you're talking about a warhead, well remember the huge differences in quantities and why Iran is pretty far away from being able to create a warhead. Such an operation would be incredibly difficult. You're much better off stealing from a weapons plant. (I should note that you can also create a dirty bomb out of coal waste)
> You also call the waste footprints of nuclear fission power “small”. Well it’s partly small because nuclear power is small. To scale it up to the level where could actually displace fossil fuel use would multiply those numbers and problems by 10-100x.
France is the obvious counter example to this where they produce 413TWh, which is about half of what the US does. Those pictures are half a century's worth of storage. To get waste sizes equal to coal you'd have to scale up 500,000x, and if you had that much nuclear running you could produce enough energy for the world many times over. Even scaling up the 150x to match solar you'd be producing 6x the world's energy consumption. You'd need 5x to do the US, nowhere near 10x-100x (nuclear is already 20% of US energy production, where are you getting 10x-100x??!?!?!). I'm not even suggesting that. I'm suggesting like 2x and let renewables grow 4x (it isn't nuclear vs renewables, that's a real false equivalence).
> And I’ll not to completely skipped over the biggest problem of all: it requires humans tasked with building, maintaining, operations and monitoring plants in a way that just doesn’t seem realistic or scalable.
Well for one, if it was the biggest problem you should have brought it up if you expect me to respond to it. For the second point, we have a track record of nuclear being far safer than any other energy production to date. So yeah, I'll ignore it. If you can find me a source that says nuclear kills more people I'll bite, but right now this is insane[3]. Having this argument is costing lives. Nuclear, along with renewables, are orders of magnitude safer than gas, biomass, and fossil fuels.
This is insane that we're having this debate. People are dying. The planet is being severely harmed. And while we continue to have this argument the fossil fuel companies win and get to continue to kill people and the planet. So sorry if I'm a bit pissed, but I don't like the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year that don't need to. That millions go without power that could have it. That could have hospitals (which wasn't considered in our deaths above), education, access to the internet, and a modern world.
I'm providing sources, if you're just going to spout hearsay then expect me to treat you like someone who is promoting deadly propaganda (i.e. pissed).
Some solar systems have 2 or even 3 fusion reactors. :)
The answer to your question depends on the characteristics of the technology. There are many proposed variations (eg the traditional H-H including heavier isotopes, He₃, pB).
For fuels, deuterium is abundant in the environment environment so isn't an issue. Tritium decays quickly. This is a fairly common theme with lighter elements. U₂₃₅ on the other hand is extremely problematic for being both a heavy metal, long-lived and radioactive.
But I'm not yet convinced we'll actually have commercial fusion power. Aneutronic variants aside, neutron embrittlement and the energy loss from neutrons are significant unsolved problems. Even with powerful magnets, containing a fluid at 100M Kelvin is a significant problems, inherently so because of turbulence.
I hope relatively cheap fusion power is in our future but there's no clear path forward yet.
None of these have particularly problematic byproducts.
1. Nuclear has always been the most expensive alternative, moreso now than ever before. Its advocates knew this at the time that they were calling it "too cheap to meter". Even continuing to operate an existing plant costs more than building out renewables and switching to those.
2. Nuclear construction projects invariably turn into massive pipelines for corruption and graft, siphoning $billions or tens of $billions from public budgets into well-connected private hands before ever delivering any power. Renewable projects (with the exception of larger dams) have not typically catered to corruption. "Small nuke" has never got traction, despite apparent efficiencies, specifically because it offers so little scope for long-term corruption. (E.g., the US government just granted a measly $10 million to one company to promote it.)
3. Nuclear construction takes so long that any supposed benefit comes far too late to do much good. The same money spent on renewables always starts delivering immediately, in much larger amounts, when it is most needed. The money saved on the much cheaper power can be spent immediately building out more, for even more benefit, compounding.
As an aside, Tokamak fusion will never, ever produce so much as one solitary erg of commercially competitive energy. The current ITER project is not projected to do anything until 2050 (although it will take hundreds of megawatts to fire up, for experiments), and then is not so much as planned to deliver practical power, ever, despite costing tens of $billions. The "practical" plant they imagine building, to turn on at end-of-century (after all of us reading this are dead!), would need to be an order of magnitude larger, and cost $trillions and decades without producing, all the while stealing capital from actually viable projects.
The only rational conclusion is that Tokamak fusion research is and was never intended to produce practical power. The whole program is, rather, purely a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists and contractors, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. Every cent spent on Tokamak fusion is stolen from research on alternatives that could, in principle, be practical.
(The one valuable output of Tokamak research is a generation of physicists now comfortable with plasma fluid-dynamics mathematics.)
David MacKay's book "sustainable energy: without the hot air" has a section that estimates if nuclear fission might work as a large scale long-lived energy source
The failure mode of flying nuclear waste is much, much worse than just leaving it in the ground. It's relatively safe in the ground; the concerns are unfounded.
If you're worried about nuclear waste, why not build small nuclear reactors way out in the desert and encase them in concrete for a couple hundred years once you're done with them?
Lifecycle emissions of wind, solar, and nuclear are well known to be very low carbon. Lifecycle includes the cement used in their production [1]. When you're job isn't to turn immense flows of carbon + oxygen into CO₂ and energy (like fossil and biofuel do), it's easy to be low carbon.
If you are going to use cement to build anything, a nuclear power station is probably the best use for it.
I don’t think anyone is ignoring the problem, having huge amounts of zero carbon power is the starting point for lots of things that will let us solve a lot of the harder problems like cement, or jet fuel etc.
In that case, 200 cubic meters amount to around 80 tonnes of CO2 emissions. That's around 80 MWh worth of coal electricity, which a 2 MW wind turbine running at a 30% CF offsets in around a week. So a complete non-issue.
I don't think the numbers for cement use by nuclear include the cement used for the sarcophagus at the end of the lifetime. But they should, if you want to talk about validity.
The wikpedia source give a breakdown of how the CO2 per kwh is calculated for a Sweden nuclear plant, it take everything in account, the building, nuclear fuel processing and storage, and even the electricity distribution to the grid.
Then, no sarcophagus are built at the end of the nplant timelife, they built ont for chernobyl, that all.
This problem is being worked on. I recently listened to this podcast which outlines two approaches to low carbon concrete - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/923966126
Take away points:
* The first approach is to use a different mix that can nearly half the temperature required to produce the concrete. This can reduce the CO2 emissions to produce the concrete by up to 40%
* The second approach uses pure CO2 to cure the concrete which locks away more CO2 in the concrete
* The concrete produced by these approaches need to be fully tested before the methods can be rolled out and costs reduced
In Europe: That cement (which is used to create concrete) is by far mostly going into the huge foundations needed for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of 150m+ tall wind power plants that only produce power sometimes.
Yes, but compare their CO2 footprints to nuclear. Have you a source that shows Nuclear is better?
I hunted around a while back and got a large range of answers, but nuclear seemed consistent worse. Eg see page 29 of this link.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
In that figure, if you look at the median (the black line), it's quite small.
There is this one very anti-nuclear Stanford professor, who has managed to publish some estimates where the carbon footprint of nuclear power is way larger than in other estimates. These numbers are probably now forever part of the literature, and they make the range of published numbers quite large in every literature survey.
Sometimes this activist professor also sues people for libel, if they publish results disagreeing with his.
Wow.
Have you any idea how much his study pushed up the mean or got a summary of how his study differed? As you say, the estimates vary wildly and I haven’t really got any idea where his sit relative to others
For this thread, your previous uninformed comments sadly made my post three levels up end up at -2, so all of this is kinda hidden. Please post again with this "newfound knowledge" in future threads.
I find ideology-driven scientists to be very dangerous to humanity prosperity and progress. Of course he's insanely active on Twitter. Last post 8 minutes ago.
That’s exactly the point I was trying to make - it isn’t clear that nuclear power has less C02 emissions than wind turbines.
It’s also something that needs a very long view to calculate - nuclear waste needs storing and protecting and wind turbines aren’t being decommissioned all that much.
Lets just ignore the fact that we can't build the required storage period. The energy comes cheap and clean, until you consider the storage and the upkeep of those building for milleniums. Then again, who cares about milleniums if Damocles climatic sword hovers over our heads today
It is not realistic to power current developed societies using only solar and wind power. For simple reason - we can't store energy well.
Stop throwing up and shooting down strawmen. Nuclear energy was never going to replace all energy sources. Only the worst ones, like coal and gas power plants.
Storing energy is a straw man as well. The most realistic scenarios of renewable grids rely on overgeneration and opportunistic consumption. This will continue to be the case as long as storage costs significantly continue to exceed extra generation capacity costs.
No, for the reason that the waste is extremely heavy and more importantly, if the rocket blows ups, you now have a huge problem with radioactive waste spread on a high altitude.
I mentioned this in another thread but this simply is not true. Thorium breeder reactors are indeed sustainable, but so are uranium breeder reactors. [1]
I am obviously talking about the order of magnitude greater abundance of thorium on earth than regular uranium used for fission. In what way do your address the point?
* There are 6.1 million tonnes of uranium in reasonably assured deposits (World Nuclear Uranium)
* There are 6.3 million tonnes of thorium in reasonably assured deposits (World Nuclear Thorium)
* Uranium exists in seawater at an average concentration of 0.003 ppm (also World Nuclear Uranium)
* There are about 332 million cubic miles of water on Earth, 96.5% of it is in the ocean (USGS). At a density of 1 gram/cm3, this comes out to 1.4 yottagrams of water, or 1.4e21 kg)
* At 0.003 ppm, this means there are about 4000 million tonnes of uranium in seawater
There is effectively zero thorium in seawater. Seawater uranium extraction with breeder reactors is likely to be more economical than harvesting low-grade thorium from the crust.
It's both cheaper and more likely to remain isolated from the biosphere in stable geologic formations like crystalline bedrock than going through the trouble of (relatively unreliably) getting into (and out of) orbit.
Current nuclear waste solutions are perfectly sufficient and appropriate [1].
Sending waste to space is a very dumb idea. First, rockets explode quite often. Second, sending things to space is very expensive, much more than storing them in storage facility. Third, nuclear waste will be very valuable in the future, so forward thinking country wants to keep it.
Nuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are crazy.
Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents, supreme leaders and chairmen.
Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with the spent fuel anyways.
Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines?
Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?
Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last about 4 billion years using breeder reactors [1].
Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.
Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.
Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.
Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...
Can you point me to some operating breeding reactors? Especially in western nations? What were the reasons the few operational ones were shut down and not replaced?
* China: CEFR (operating) and CDFR (under construction)
* Japan: Joyo (Monju is shut down)
* Russia: BN-600, BN-800
Shut down ones include:
* US: EBR-1, EBR-2, Fermi-1, FFTF
* France: Phénix, SuperPhénix
* UK: Dounreay, PFR
* Germany: KNK-2, SNR-300
The shut down ones mostly shut down because uranium minerals were found to be sufficient for the world nuclear demand for now. We really only need to go through the complexity of breeding when you have 1000 GW-scale nuclear plants or more. Today we have only about 400.
> Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last about 4 billion years using breeder reactors [1].
Are there safe breeder reactor designs? How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?
> Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.
True. But irradiating large patches of land/streams of water just makes for bad publicity. Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site or similar sites, like the one near my home town Hanau (see comment below).
> Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.
South Korea suffers from massive corruption and the country is practically run by a few ultra-rich families, even Chinese are complaining about that fact. ;)
As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few? It is no wonder that regulatory costs there are lower. A human life is apparently less valuable.
> Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.
This is something to consider. Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert? Would wind turbines reduce peak windspeed and stop or revert desertification?
> Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...
If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries" that would be awesome. Unfortunately shielding combined with the fact that it won't work as a closed system for long (need for "refreshing" spent fuel in a breeder periodically) makes that impractical due to hard physics. As far as I know.
How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled? Normal nuclear fuel transport cost lots of money and require high security. Are you going to put those perfectly safe rods in an Uber? Like that radioactive fracking brine on the back of a small truck without shielding? That model could work in Russia... or maybe the US.
Yup. As shown in data above, current nuclear is about as safe as you can get. On top of that most breeder reactors operate at low coolant pressure, enabling even more robust safety. For example the Experimental Breeder Reaction-2 did two famous demonstrations in 1986 where they turned off the coolant pump without inserting the control rods and the reactor both shut itself off anyway and removed the afterglow heat with passive natural convection.
> How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?
Same way we do today. Inspections and safeguards. You have to remember that it's wayyy easier to just buy natural uranium and enrich it than it is to steal radioactive plutonium from quasi-military guarded facilities. Furthermore, the latter can be done whether or not we have any commercial nuclear power so it's basically a moot point.
> bad publicity
Sure, but we can try to show people statistics to convince them that scary-looking things can sometimes be appropriate and good. Air travel would be a good example here.
> Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site
They absolutely do. Hanford impact is extremely well studied. These are WW2/Cold War era nuclear weapons sites, which are not necessarily comparable in mission to civilian power generation.
> As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few?
Do you say the same regarding current low solar manufacturing prices, driven almost entirely by the Chinese? If you want a more US-focused example, consider that the US Navy regularly constructs 300 MW nuclear power plants to power submarines and aircraft carriers in shipyard environments with excellent cost and schedule performance.
> Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert?
Surely there are, but most people like to take the precautionary principle about such dramatic and vast geoengineering efforts.
> If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries"
The "perfectly safe" standard you're applying to nuclear but not other energy tech is very perplexing to me. Why not 'anything 2 orders of magnitude safer than fossil and biofuel is safe enough'?
> How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled?
...Germany gets its natural gas from mother Russia.
Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes some politicians and companies in two countries happy and shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a will.
> Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?
In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x.
Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...
> In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa.
They are indeed unstable - for reasons that may not be discussed - but buying the required sites and securing them should be possible anyways. If local jobs are created in the process, even better. So much effort has been wasted on partially securing much more dangerous countries like Afghanistan and Irak with questionable lasting benefit and apparently low strategic gain.
> Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with 1000.
A very good point. One pipe obviously isn't enough and one shouldn't push too large objects through it without a capable plumber around.
> Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...
Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming and some mining for now? OK, they may also try to develop some industry, but how well Chinese business culture meshes with the African population's culture remains to be seen.
Also, just because a competitor is doing something one shouldn't do it? If everybody had always followed this rule, the USA would now maybe be called "North Mexico" because the Spanish sailed some ships there, first. I am not saying colonization is a good idea, much better arrangements could be made today.
I think the you should spend your efforts on responding to other comments you got, at least two were quite strong, much stronger than mine.
I'll just reply to the China thing:
> Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming and some mining for now?
No. A large part of their investments are focused is on building and owning ports and roads. This is essential for owning trade, which is how you get to own the governments of Africa.
> No. A large part of their investments are focused is on building and owning ports and roads. This is essential for owning trade, which is how you get to own the governments of Africa.
Good to know. I wasn't aware of that. What does that mean for our supply of blood diamonds, copper and similar? Maybe they are more needed in China, now that manufacturing has and is still being outsourced to that piece of two countries?
I was aware of "debt-trap diplomacy" (IMHO risky tactics without being able to collect the debt using force) and similar tactics, but not that the Chinese state had actually managed to setup a "colonialism-like" foothold in African countries. I assumed their policies were merely aimed at exploiting these countries in the previously "accepted" way.
Considering that our food supply also already critically depends on artificial fertilizer from African mines, why not add energy to the mix? Meaning, we have to stand up for our share of the business in any case and have certainly developed since our imperial past:
Afterall, the African savannahs and jungles do hold a great many tasty species (bats, monkeys, ...), the consumption of some of which are rumored to help with your and your comrade's lacking love life. Some members of African tribes still share these believes, may it actually be a match made in heaven?
I wonder what happens when African communities start noticing that racism and nationalism are concepts that do not exclusively apply to the guests from a century ago.
Buying up required sites is exactly how Suez Canal started - and ended with Suez Crisis.
Of course, there's always an option of not backing down from local population, or going full american and starting an insurgency doing terrorist strikes on all sorts of targets like primary schools - but I'd argue that we do not want that kind of blood energy, do we?
Nuclear power is expensive and complicated, but not inherently so. A lot of the causes of the problem is political decisions and bureaucratic processes.
There are many designs for nuclear reactors that are simpler, safer, and more suitable for smaller communities, but various government nuclear regulation agencies around the world have such a high bar for entry that those designs will never be put into practice.
In the US, if you want to operate a nuclear reactor, the design has to be vetted first. To vet the reactor, you have to convince the agency to let you build a full-scale test reactor and convince them that the design is likely safe before building the test reactor. If anything about the test reactor makes them uncomfortable, the design will be denied and the reactor won't be allowed to operate and cannot work as a template for future reactors.
This creates a very difficult and expensive bar for entry into the market. For a large reactor, a company would have to invest billions of dollars for a decade before they could even begin to hope to operate to pay back the loans, and even then there is no guarantee that they'll be allowed to operate the reactor to sell the electricity.
That is, unless they use one of the existing pre-approved reactor concepts that were designed in the 70's and have known flaws (albeit, with known ways to reduce the risks of those flaws)
Nuclear radiation might be damaging, but it's not really a big deal as long as the design prevents accidents and there are safeguards to prevent the uncontrolled release of radiation.
You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.
Solar is an excellent source of energy, with long life spans of the equipment but it's only functional for anywhere from 6 to 16 hours a day, depending on your latitude and the weather. The ideal places for solar farms are often far from the highest concentrations of consumers.
Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
The problem is that it takes a lot of political will to build a nuclear power plant because everyone is afraid of that. Bigger plants are often desired because plant owners need to invest the decade and tens of millions of dollars getting not just approval from the NRC, but approval from the people and government within 20 miles of the plant.
Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
> You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.
This is interesting. I thought without breeder reactors and continued widespread nuclear use we would run out in ~50 years. Maybe you have more current sources.
> Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Yes and I additionally worry about the fiber material being slowly rubbed off and being spread downstream by the wind (google wind turbine leading edge erosion). Because wind turbines on land are often built on farming land. Thus I put a lot of hope in improved wind "turbine" designs like: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/
> Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
I thought the US grid is pretty old and some parts (Texas?) are on their own. Maybe investments in that area could help, in addition to storage (mechanical or hydrogen connected with solar).
> Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Combine this statement (risk of "real war") with this suggestion...
> The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
...and you get great savings in making that hated opponents main population centers uninhabitable and the irradiated ruins a monument to remember. Even if only by unfortunate "accident". In WW2 cities were burned down using "firestorm" tactics here in Germany. I heard the anniversary bells ring an annoyingly long time a few days back in the rebuilt city of Würzburg... why would humanity change character and suddenly become more civil in the next conflict?
> Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
I agree that this is probably due to the hard lessons learned from the risks in older experimental and larger commercial designs. But are we willing to learn the hard lessons of 10000s (or more) of handy, small reactors spread in everyones backyard?
Better put some solar panels on some roofs and hydrogen metal hydride storage in a few basements. Maybe not under a school or kindergarden or the likes.
A grid like this could be made incredibly resilient and hard to destroy by any opponent.
The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.
The currently identified reserves of Uranium could last us at least 200 years, even longer if you enrich it more or use newer reactor designs. If you extract it from seawater we've got about 60000 years worth
Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Wind and Solar are indeed cheap, but have higher materials throughput than nuclear, and they use orders of magnitude more land. This land use will almost certainly have a larger impact on the environment than Nuclear. There is also new research that is showing wind turbines are a major cause of insect decline as well.
The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
Now lets say you've got solar and wind up the wazoo, and battery banks to load shift. Can you still power society 24/7? Nope. You still need either hydro, natural gas, or nuclear to run the grid in a stable and reliable manner. Batteries to provide base load overnight would require so much money and materials that I don't see this happening any time soon without major breakthroughs in battery tech.
What about pumped hydro? Well... turns out dams need to manage water levels for practical reasons and while some pumped hydro can be useful, the available capacity for this when you take into account electricity production and practical water management issues is minimal.
Why can't we cover the deserts in solar and wind and transmit it? Or move electricity from one area to another when the wind isn't blowing or its cloudy? Well transmission is expensive and incurs energy loss in a major way. transmission and sub-transmission lines today account for about a 30% energy loss. Now you're talking about tripling or quadrupling the transmission infrastructure at a minimum, and moving energy over great distances, which is VERY expensive compared to producing it near where it is consumed.
Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
I grew up in Hanau and was born in that city one year before that happened (you may also refer to the sources if you don't trust the org publishing the English summary):
Children found funny metal pill or drop-like objects in the forests around the plant and played with it. While there were reports of inspectors and interested civilians being blocked from taking measurements.
After this and Chernobyl nobody has a right to complain about me being a retarded monkey... or dying maybe 1-5 years earlier than normal due to earlier onset of cancer.
Humans can not be trusted (at scale) to keep such material secure and even in labs accidents can happen. Same is true for large scale use of dangerous chemicals, too.
> Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?
> The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.
Human operators can never be trusted. And machines built by humans will also fail, but at least risk could be more easily calculated. (Well, at least until machine learning came along and we started to introduce some "human factor" back into the algorithms for better or worse.)
If we were able to avoid using most pesticides we would do so already. Unfortunately our way of producing food for the masses with low manual effort and low technology (large machines, monoculture) forces us to keep using them, for now. We will see what alternatives we can build (robotic farming, indoor farming and maybe a few organic farms) that can do with less or no pesticides. I don't think anyone questions the harm widespread pesticide use has done to our ecosystem. Pesticides are just like chemical weapons. What you really want is the bug not eating your plant, not multiplying in excess and staying mostly out of your bottom-line. Using pesticides is like waging a war against the bug species in question (with collateral damage) instead of finding ways to fix the root-causes. As someone who picked potatoe bugs from a field once, I can relate to the waging a war option, but that doesn't mean it's the right course of action.
> The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
True. I also don't see how lithium based batteries have a long future in large scale energy storage. Too high environmental impact and political risk. (Everyone designs battery cars and China controls most needed rare earths. How is that not a dependency.) I have high hopes in direct hydrogen storage. Efficieny is important, but not the single most important factor. Total cost (over lifetime) and environmental impact - also in countries where the raw materials are mined - should be considered.
This one states that "Transmission Losses is approximate 17% while distribution losses is approximate 50%.". So these 50% loss in the distribution part are shared by any other power generation except distributed local (on your own roof or in your basement). The 17% in the transmission area do not sound so much and are lower than I expected. I do however take from that article that baseload power generation should be as distributed as possible to avoid unnecessary losses in distribution (smaller power lines/transformers of the villages/buildings).
> Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
This one is unfortunately true. Every idea has its merrits and downsides. I'd rather err on the biome uninhabitable by us humans, though.
> At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
Let us use this compact and efficient method for powering the ion engines to travel to some other planets, instead of using them here, with the risk of lowering our homeworld's value.
> Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?
There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea.
The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.
> There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea.
>
> The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.
True, still people - including myself - keep burning their hands on the stove or with hot water occasionally. Humans also sometimes accidentally ignite some fuel and die a fiery death (electrostatic discharge at fuel station for example). But accidentally irradiating your and all your 1000 neighbors properties for centuries or until the next top soil replacement is a whole different matter. Before real accidents actually happened it was probably easier to convince people risk was tollerable. Now eating wild boar and some mushrooms in the forrest here is considered a health hazard, cause of high levels of cesium. Boar meat tastes great. It is a damn shame it can't be eaten in many cases. Same for the mushrooms:
Quote:
"Wer seine persönliche Belastung verringern möchte, sollte in den höher belasteten Gebieten Deutschlands auf den Genuss selbst erlegten Wildes und selbst gesammelter Pilze verzichten." -> "If you want to reduce your personal stress, you should refrain from enjoying game and mushrooms you have hunted yourself in the more polluted areas of Germany."
To summarize, I believe your argument is not unfounded but still doesn't properly account for the difference in scale (time, affected area and severity) of the worst possible effects if something should go wrong. And we know there always remains some risk.
People evaluate not only using analytic thinking, but also from observation and influenced by emotions. And the last two processes seem to disfavour use of nuclear power.
A reactor based on nuclear fission is going to be a hard sell in any region that has been affected by one or multiple accidents before. I hope we can get fusion to work and somehow find a way to shield it properly without causing too much waste. Or concentrate heavily on renewable energy storage (efficiency is a goal that has to be weighed against other factors and may be improved later).
The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.