What a great series! Especially impressive to see all the installations and facilities required to process the spent fuel from one temporary facility to the other. And the huge amount of steel and concrete required to do so, for now and decades to come, for a facility that produced it's last usable power how many years ago? Note that this is not related to the disaster, but "happy path" as far as I understand.
From wikipedia:
The three other reactors remained operational after the accident but were eventually shut down by 2000, although the plant remains in the process of decommissioning as of 2021. Nuclear waste clean-up is scheduled for completion in 2065
Before the first few dozen nuclear reactors have been properly decommissioned, within a reasonable timeframe and for a reasonable budget, I think we have absolutely no business building more of them and burdening future generations with them.
Nuclear power has its issues, but I think burdening future generations with old nuclear plants is better than burdening them with a catastrophic climate change. I would much rather see developing countries building nuclear than building coal.
Reducing emissions of energy production as fast as possible should be the first priority now, and nuclear can be helpful there. After this problem has been dealt with, then we have plenty of time to switch completely to better alternatives, like renewables.
Even a worst-case scenario like Chernobyl is still way, way less bad for nature than the consequences of climate change. Thanks to lack of humans, the area around Chernobyl is actually doing better biodiversity-wise than before the disaster.
You’ve set up a false dichotomy. It isn’t either nuclear or coal. It’s other renewables like solar and wind and they are eating nuclear’s lunch because they are just better in every way. The answer is neither nuclear or coal.
I agree that wind and solar are the better power sources, but Nuclear is good at baseload in a way that renewables can't reproduce quite so easily. We also need to build sufficient storage eventually, probably when renewables have >60% or so marketshare for electricity.
But what if it is a dichotomy? Right now, the “answer” seems like it’s going to be coal and oil and natural gas and screw the planet, so I think we need every tool we can get.
I don't think it's an either-or scenario. There are other options and other factors at play. The assumption of global peace for thousands of years in a world dotted with world-ending bomb material is a big gamble.
The current politics of energy production and consumption, the state-by-state compartmentalization and lack of wider cooperation hampers cleaner options (spoiled-views NIMBYism and regional politics).
Wind, solar, and hydro coupled with transcontinental UHV power transmission could solve it with much simpler technologies.
> Wind, solar, and hydro coupled with transcontinental UHV power transmission could solve it with much simpler technologies.
Belarus just built a single nuclear power plant that reduces their natural gas consumption in the energy sector by 25% and saves 7 million tons of CO2 annually:
That nuclear power plant cost roughly $10 billion and took thirty years from planning to commissioning. Wind turbines cost around $1.5M per MWp and have a capacity factor of about 0.3 or so, so those same ten billion could have bought roughly an equal amount of wind power which could've most likely been built a bit faster than 30 years time. Of course you need to add some storage for baseload capacity which will increase cost a bit, but then again you don't need to save money for decommissioning a radioactive hunk of steel and concrete when the plant reaches EOL, you don't have risks of nuclear proliferation, and no radioactive waste, and you don't lose 2GW of generation at once for ten days when a couple of turbines need some repairs, like when that power plant's transformers exploded.
Southern Belarus seems to be pretty well suited for solar power too, which might even be a little bit cheaper than wind turbines.
Nuclear is not terrible for saving CO2, but the benefits are not as dramatic as you make them seem.
Baseload is the demand side of the equation. Sure, no single wind or solar farm can meet localized baseloads over a 24 hour period, like a single nuclear or hydro station can. However, given distributed solar and wind turbines at sites across 1000s of kilometres, working in conjunction with high voltage 700+ kV transmission, it is possible. Hence my assertion that the problem is social/political, and not a technical/physical limitation.
Yeah the clean up operation is rarely factored in. In my own country they don't even have a long term storage site yet.
Nuclear reactors will run on tax €$ and I wonder how the government will respond when nuclear energy ends up more expensive than renewables.
Yeah, you begin to see why nuclear is so capital intensive seeing detailed photos of the infrastructure like this. Even a task as simple as moving a metal rod between two buildings involves purpose built remote controlled machinery. And the soviets built these RMBK reactors as cheap as they could, cutting a lot of corners.
I've been hopeful someone would work around this with a clever design, production line style manufacturing, etc. But so far every attempt has floundered. The latest serious one, NuScale, is still going forward, but they've slipped on schedule, price, and have lost a few backers already, so it's not looking great.
> Before the first few dozen nuclear reactors have been properly decommissioned, within a reasonable timeframe and for a reasonable budget, I think we have absolutely no business building more of them and burdening future generations with them.
Yes, because climate change does not pose a threat to mankind at all, we should waive for the most efficient weapon we have against it.
When we have an answer to the waste, we can talk about efficiency.
On nuclear build up timelines, and remember we cannot be rushing it, because we do not have answers to the fuckups and risks and waste, a build out effort like we did for fossil fuels would combat the problem as well and would have the benefits delivering for us a very long time.
Besides, tons of people need work. So we put that work out there, many families see higher standards of living and mere mortals can do the vast majority of that work too.
Yes, because we have plenty of other options that are cheaper and don't burden future generations with a huge radioactive mess.
Of course we might have to reconsider if everyone should commute to some pointlesss office job in an F150 every day... And pergaps having as much electricity available as you need at a fixed low price is also something that we might just not be able to provide without ruining the entire planet.
>we have absolutely no business building more of them and burdening future generations with them.
I arrive at the same conclusion each time I visit the topic.
And I do not blame advocates of this form of power. Advancement is hard, the rewards compelling.
However, I would rather live less, longer, and look over to my young 5 year old granddaughter and know she has a chance at experiencing something like I did, a clean, beautiful world, more harmonious than we know.
We have excluded ourselves from some of it. The coming decades may see us excluded from much more as climate temp rises.
Read about the wet bulb limit. 135F, I believe it is? At or above that temp, we cannot endure, will die a heat death without tech running. Like "Total Recall" and those people needing air, when the fans stop...
I feel we may know enough to be super dangerous, and our skill, resolve to get what we know as right as we can just does not appear to be enough.
Fukushima may melt its way into the water cycle, and is already polluting the oceans. Being real here, the increase is not much, but the timeline on our exposure to changes and risks is so long. Hard to say what it all means, could mean.
It all makes me want to support and be a part of the mother of all clean, renewable energy build outs!
Just switch us over.
We did what it took for fossil fuels. And that work meant income for so many, new tech, opportunities of all kinds, and the returns have been amazeballs!
And we did well, but here we are warming the place. Costs and risks on that are amplifying same as rewards did.
Nuclear happened, and we got to work on that. The returns have been great, but the misalignment between our nature, cost and risk exposure are more severe.
Here we are excluded from parts of our world and we do not really know the longer term outlook for either of these things.
All that effort got us great tech!
And we have an opportunity to build out again, and thr ability to do it, and it appears green energy, renewables can be aligned fairly well to our nature, cost and risk exposure lower, and we just need to find the will to do the work!
Unlike oil and nukes, renewables are more of a grind than loot box, but doing it could mitigate some of what is to come for us, as well as deliver great jobs, good opportunity and all that good stuff.
It will, or is likely to mean we live a bit differently, but so what! We did that before, can again, and it is not like we have to give the others up, so we do have what we made and can use it where we really must.
Lots of work to be done, tons of families raising kids, living lives, planet standing a much better chance at remaining healthy...
And throughout that time, we can continue to improve on that basic misalignment that comes with nuclear and end what is now well understood harm associated with fossil fuels.
Seems like a step backwards. I see it as a pause, step to the side.
A regroup and big push toward a lower cost and risk future.
Future people will thank us. And we will have done well by our world and ourselves along the way.
The pictures from the author's website are amazing. Here, for example is the DUGA over-the-horizon radar located in Chernobyl. The author says the radar stopped working as a result of the radiation from the Chernobyl plant and was closed soon after.
The way the structure rises above the clouds is an amazing sight:
I will spend some non trivial time reading, looking and thinking.
The externalities involved with nuclear energy are off the charts huge!
And the containment efforts! Stones and chisels, for the most part. Thankfully, we are able to automate enough to allow work to proceed. He showed efforts to execute on a 100 year plan.
Enough to contain the grief, leaving it for others, and ideally we do not exclude ourselves from more of our world or pollute it beyond our ability to cope with the hazard.
I was very curious about the "tainted" photo as my education is in imaging technology. I couldn't tell if he meant the radiation was changing the light, or was changing the camera (tbh I kinda didn't believe him), from the picture, looks like the image sensor did indeed arc a lot and even more weird is the amount and colour of them in relational to the other standard ISO issues in the image. In years of studying digital images and image sensors, I've never seen one act like that, at all.
The interiors are reminiscent of the Black Mesa Research Facility. Undoubtedly a resonance cascade is less preferable to a meltdown, though neither are good for human lifespans.
A little sobering to see the note at the end and then go back and gaze closer at the last few photographs they took inside the sarcophagus. Those dosimeters weren't wrong! You can basically "see" the radiation since so many pixels in the final image are oversaturated, presumably even more looked like that before they were cleaned up in photo processing.
Quote: "Storage room in BK-2" (shows picture of old electronics and cables on different shelves.
I drooled at that picture, I want those. I need those. Can you imagine how many breadboard tests I can achieve with them old resistors and non-electrolytic capacitors that stood the test of time from 80's? And the cables! I. must. have. them. all!!
I guess I haven't been following along very closely because I was only vaguely aware of the New Safe Confinement. It's quite the project:
> The New Safe Confinement was constructed 180 metres (590 ft) west of reactor 4, and slid into place. Sliding of the structure along foundation rails was a difficult process. It was pushed on Teflon pads by hydraulic pistons, and guided by lasers. As of 2018, the New Safe Confinement is the world's largest movable land-based structure.
Fukushima and Chernobyl pics remind me so much why we need to move past the old style nuclear reactors. Those reactors and future plans to build more of them need to be abandoned. The future of nuclear should be small modular reactors with alternatives besides light water reactors. Thorium cycle or Molten salt reactors. That’s the future.
Fukushima was built in 1968 and Chernobyl was built in 1972. We learned a lot from these incidents, and I think those lessons are valuable for building reactors of all sizes 50 years later.
I do think we should be quicker to decommission and maintain existing reactors. Fukushima was painfully predictable, but the people who should have fixed several issues and/or closed the plant were also in charge of making it profitable. That seems bad.
How should I feel about living less than six miles from a Westinghouse 3-loop that's been in operation since 1987? It's never far from my mind that it's there, especially since they test the warning sirens every few months.
Better than living six miles from a coal plant, I suppose.
Hey I don’t know much about this model, but a lot of the safety records are public in the U.S. on nrc.gov so you might be able to see if there’s any cause for concern (which I doubt!).
Personally I would feel safe living near a plant. The u.s. has a very good safety record. And yeah, no toxic fumes and clean energy!
Transport risks, storage risks are a big deal. Fuck up, and it gets into our system or excludes us from part of the world.
As for storage, I was hired to help with data systems support for 100 to 1000 year engineering.
Rooms get made, people never go into them again. Machine rooms get made to hold the machines, that service the machines... storage rooms get made to hold stuff, and on and on it goes. Once things get hot, they stay hot basically permanently. Space requirements continue to grow as the waste from handling waste grows.
The costs are high. The risks are high. The space requirements are high, so much more than that nice football field package mentioned in the fluff piece.
Human requirements are high. Generations of people will service that waste, and reserve space requirements are high, because nobody has been able to think the problem all the way through and insure success.
It is a big scale problem. Any error makes it bigger. It will outlive generations of people.
From that perspective, nuclear energy is like a high interest loan. The money is good, but servicing it is brutal as is the timeline relentless.
And this is a closed system we live in. Containment is temporary no matter what gets said. And the service is ongoing, no matter what gets said.
On a cost / return basis, investing in green energy is a much better deal. And servicing that means more energy, not so much paying for energy already developed and long gone.
Recycling green energy gear is meaningful today and will improve.
Most importantly, mere mortals can work the problem and not make 100k year toxic problems along the way.
We can do that work now, should have been doing it two decades if not more ago. And as we do it, we improve just like we did for fossil fuels.
First off, I don’t mean to argue against renewable sources of energy!
Second, you could google recycling if you wanted to. It generates electricity which is cool! We generally don’t do it in the US, but we could if storage became unsafe or expensive.
When I asked what it means, there is more to it than the currently high risk, high labor, high energy input, high cost process.
All of which should be a temporary measure at most!
What does it mean?
A few things:
Major investment in recycling means major investments in nuclear, and that cycle means having to make green energy a priority and that being a lot more difficult than it needs to, and should be.
It also means continuing to produce toxic elements, containment and all that I just discussed.
What it does not mean or lead to is an acceptable end game.
All this talk avoids the fact that we end up with high concentrations of very toxic elements that can be kilo-decade time scales.
What we should do is make the investments in energy and storage we are now getting really good at, and that do not come with the crazy burdens we are just not very well equipped to deal with.
You know smoking generates a buzz, which is cool! Never mind the cancer and other impacts to follow.
You know, a big spoonful of sugar and a shot of caffeine is a big hit, so is adrenaline. Hell of a crash afterword.
We are in a place where we need to get off the fossil fuels.
No matter what we do, we are late, and there is a ramp up time.
Nuclear is a quick hit with high start costs, high risks and a very long burden that will be with us for so long we don't even have the ability to manage the problem with confidence. Hope and cope is where we are at.
Green energy is not as quick, but it will not come with all the downsides, and if we put people to work on a scale like we did for fossil fuels, we can get where we need to be, without that high burden, and in a clean, sustainable way.
High energy, healthy food takes a bit longer to ramp up, but there is no crash and overall labor output is higher, more consistent.
Generating nuclear power also generates major league problems that must be managed for an extremely long time and none of it is sustainable.
I just wrote part of why above.
Green energy is sustainable. And is improving rapidly, will continue to as well. And it comes with tech mortals can use, build, manage, etc...
TL;DR: Advancing nuclear comes at the expense of advancing green, renewable energy.
It prolongs a crutch we need to be rid of and that is highly toxic, high density energy.
Chernobyl was still operating despite of what happened in 1986 (bloc no 1 was shut down in 2000), so perhaps this workshop was also in use and Xerox paper pack is new.
https://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/the-sarcophaguss-labyrint...