America's newest nuclear plant shows why nuclear power is dying in the U.S
latimes.com
latimes.com
Interestingly I came away from a book about atomic disasters being pretty pro nuclear, at least more so than I was before reading the book. Here are my main take aways:
- The US needs to start back up the waste reprocessing program. Jimmy Carter banned this in the hopes of setting a good example for other countries (one of the byproducts being plutonium). But everyone else continues to process nuclear waste except for the US and it just makes the waste storage problem that much harder. 95% of the fuel that comes out of a rector is harmless U-238. We should only be burying a tiny fraction of what we currently bury.
- We need to start innovating beyond PWR and BWR reactors. Things like liquid metal fuel reactors have the nice property of not having to worry about them melting down because they are already melted.
I was 1, living in Pittsburgh. My father was called in among many others to help determine how to recover.
If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built.
I have talked to people in the coal power industry. There are plenty of cases of accidents.
In one case they started up the generator with the oil pumps turned off - the multi-tonne rotor ripped off the bearing then rolled through the hall crushing everything in its path. What if that had been a nuclear power station?
A manager without a clue asked for a chute to be opened, the worker tried to explain why that was a bad idea, the manager insisted and a few kilograms of coal dropped down on them.
It can take minutes for the mulit-tonne generator to synchronise with the 50Hz supply frequency. There are special electric motors that retard or advance the generator until it is in sync, then keep it in sync. Normally there are resistors to allow the sync to happen slowly. However in one case it was thrown to full power before the sync was complete. There was a momentary blackout through the southern UK while a huge amount of power was used to sync the generator in a fraction of a second. Strangely the fuses didn't blow.
Like the article discussed, what we want is the government to be smart about nuclear power. There 7 million deaths annually due to air pollution. How many American lives are lost due to terrorism? And yet we wasted $4 trillion in the Middle East after 911. Imagine if we spent that on new reactor designs and fusion research?
Global warming is the biggest threat facing our species. It's time we stopped worrying about our neighborhood and starting thinking about our planet.
Chernobyl happened the next year, we lived 250km north of it. Luckily for us, most of the fallout precipitated on heads of other people some 100km south. Yet the radiation levels were a part of daily weather forecast for the next decade. We didn't have a toaster, a microwave, a dishwasher or a VCR home then, but we owned a radiometer.
We were instructed to hide from the rain in the weeks after the accident. I remember hiding with a friend under concrete slabs at a construction site on our way from school. The habit kind of stuck in the unconscious: in Belarus, people still scramble for cover at the slightest hint of rain, even though the accident was a full generation ago. I only realized it after living abroad for some years.
Anyway, whenever someone on Reddit or here rediscovers that Nuclear is Safe when Done Right, I always remember that novel.
The best modern designs have a strong negative feedback: as the fuel gets hotter, the reaction rate slows down, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. Chernobyl did the opposite: as the fuel got hotter the nuclear reactions happened faster. It relied on human operation of control rods to keep it from blowing up. And on top of that it skipped the containment shell.
I would also remark there was a deserved stream of criticism from the West both for the reactor design and the containment effort that followed. The overwhelming opinion throughout the 1990s-2000s was that the Western designs are safe and catastrophic scenarios like Chernobyl are implausible. Then Fukushima happens, the three reactors blow up and the only saving grace for Japan was the wind blowing oceanside. And the containment is done by low wage workers in sneakers, while Asimo and its advanced robot colleagues play robosoccer in Tokyo.
The narrative is now changed to other designs being "inherently safe", although it's not very plausible how any concentrated, massive release of energy can be made inherently safe. Yes you can reduce probabilities and exclude some catastrophic scenarios, but this is a thing with crises: they always come unexpected. I'm sure when the plug in a molten salt reactor fails for some reason (say tectonic shift from a quake), there will no doubt be another design touted as safe.
Now consider that fission power atm is what, 10-15% of compound world power generation? As of now it's focused in a handful of nations, most of whom are known for safety culture. As it proliferates worldwide, the average quality of maintenance will decline and the number of stations would naturally multiply, so perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades. And we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here.
I'd really really rather wait for fusion.
Which was nowhere close to as bad as Chernobyl. There is a lot of fear-mongering going around that tries to imply they were somehow similar, but most of that relies on people not understanding the difference between a steam explosion in Chernobyl's reactor core (which had no containment building) blowing finely pulverized radioactive graphite and fission products across the landscape, and Fukushima's hydrogen explosions outside the containment chamber, which caused far less damage and left most of the fuel still contained in the reactor cores.
Nobody has died from radiation at Fukushima Daiichi, and there is a good chance any future cancer risk is extremely low. In fact, the way the reactor survived the worse earthquake and tsunami on record without causing a radiation hazard like some places around Chernobyl shows how safe nuclear power is, even in old designs. This was confirmed at the nearby Fukushima Daini reactor, which survived the earthquake and tsunami.
> perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades
Extrapolating from two incidents isn't useful. Since one of those data points wasn't significant nuclear accident, you're now trying to extrapolate form a single data point, which is not the kind of math we should base policy on.
The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly. Even if you count every single nuclear associated disaster (including Chernobyl), there number of people injured/killed and the land impact of those disasters is insignificant noise compared to what the coal (or chemical) industry has done.
> we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here
So you haven't looked at any of the advances in nuclear power that have been made over the last sever decades? Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem. Most technologies advanced a lot over the last 40+ years - why would you assume that nuclear never advanced past the 60s?
Both were Level 7 accidents on INES scale. Fukushima release was about 1/6th of Chernobyl, but ended up blowing 4/5ths of its contents over the ocean. At some point, evacuation of Tokyo metro area was considered. Yeah no, both were pretty bad and the same magnitude events.
> The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly.
Fair point, but there's not much coal use in Belarus (mostly natural gas), nor in Norway where I am now (clean energy from the dam to my car's plug). For Belarus, the impact, in health, land and culture was incomparable to that of other energy accidents.
> Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem.
Right, they have the weapon proliferation problem that you can't design away.
Thorium breeders are another possibility, as long as you're not isolating protactinium.
Another route is Transatomic's design. It's not actually a breeder, and runs on uranium enriched as low as 1.6%, but burns up almost all the transuranics because it leaves them in the fuel mix for a long time, removes fission products, and has really good neutron economy.
Even if you use breeders with potential proliferation issues, one way to go would be to keep those reactors in weapons states, and use them to dispose of the waste from non-weapons states.
More than that, had the reactors been gravity-shutdown capable ones and gravity fed cooling (rather than pump driven) and the seawalls been higher as originally proposed, none of us would be talking about Fukushima. So like you said, safety isn't unattainable. Just the opposite, it's usually sabotaged by people who have no place making such calls.
And also if coal were not killing many thousands of people every year, and we didn't have so many large dams past their designed lifespan.
With a solid-fueled reactor, you need enough fuel for 18 months (the normal refueling cycle). With liquid fuel you can add a little bit of fissionable material as often as you want, so your fuel has barely enough reactivity to keep your plant operating.
With solid fuel, the fission products build up over that 18 months. With liquid fuel, three things happen:
- Noble gases bubble right out of the fuel to an outgas system. You get a tank of xenon and krypton. You can take that away to secure storage as often as you like.
- Some metallic fission products plate onto collectors.
- The major fission products we worry about are cesium, strontium, and iodine. In conventional reactors they're gases, but in MSRs they bond very strongly into fluoride salts. Optionally we can remove them as we go.
So in our imaginary catastrophe there's not enough reactivity for a big excursion, there's less decay heat than in a conventional reactor, and most of the radioactive stuff is liquid that quickly cools to solid rock. There's nothing to drive any kind of explosion, since it's all chemically stable and at atmospheric pressure.
It's worth noting that Fukushima's reactor survived a 9.0 earthquake without significant physical damage. It was the loss of electric power that took it out, and that's a problem molten salt reactors don't have at all.
Nothing is safe from malicious action, absolutely nothing. You can cut someone with a piece of paper, drown them with a glass of water, or stab them in the throat with a pencil. You can even simply punch someone with your hand in the back of the neck and kill them. We simply make malicious action difficult and unlikely through design and rules, exactly how we manage cars and coal plants and nuclear weapons.
Over 40 years ago, when I was checking out colleges to attend, the tour at one school took us thru a fusion research lab that iirc had a Tokomak (or some similar contraption).
IMO no way that practical fusion happens even 40 years from now. I won't be around to see it.
Maybe the Chicago Cubs win another World Series before we see practical fusion? Could that happen? :)
This is like the computer company that loses business after announcing the date for its next model, except worse, because there's no date for fusion. The threat of fusion is sucking the air out of fission.
And, as I mentioned, we have designs that can be run safely by fallible humans, we just need to keep penny pinchers from breaking the design during design/construction. And extra $1,000,000 here and there for a safety margin is a far better investment than hundreds of millions in cleanup.
* It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.
* Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.
* The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.
* Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.
There's really not a lot to like about the nuclear power industry. Can anyone explain why we shouldn't just leave this method of power generation behind as a tragic mistake?
You're probably looking at best-case vs. worst-case here. The expense of getting sufficient wind power in areas without wind or solar power in low-light areas can get pretty crazy. And a large portion of the expense of nuclear power is regulatory hurdles we impose on it.
> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic than the alternatives.
The success mode of the current most popular alternative (fossil fuels) has proven much more catastrophic. As for other things like wind and solar power, I think a lot of people are unconvinced that it's fair to call them "alternatives" yet. Nuclear has proven itself as a good general-purpose solution and they have not, and nuclear seems to be a lot better than what we are doing now.
Hydro power is responsible for the most fatal electricity generation incident ever: Banqiao Dam. It catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.
Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison.
> According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine.
Video with computer simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPLXim9WG8
It's also not particularly environmentally friendly to dam rivers everywhere.
Some of the wave-action stuff is interesting, but you've obviously got to be near a large body of water for that to work.
Technically, no. Artificial hydro (more commonly known as pumped storage) means you can essentially store energy in gravity, anywhere. i.e. build a container at an elevated position, pump water into it using intermittent energy (e.g. wind at night, excess solar etc), drop water down through a turbine to generate electricity again to provide a low baseload.
The reality is that 1) this is hugely expensive and so generally pumped storage is restricted to exploit existing natural resources with lots of elevated mountains between which one can store ridiculous volumes of water rather than build your own giant water container.
So generally hydro is limited to existing water resources (e.g. large rivers), or storage resources (e.g. mountains) which are quite limited.
Costa Rica uses its large amount of rainfall and dams to use generate hydro power, and this article discusses a drought they had in the last year that meant they had to fire up the old fossil fuel plants: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/truth-b...
So I'd still consider having some base load capacity available fairly important.
[citation needed]
Your metrics for "success" are interesting:
> It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.
According to [0] only onshore wind beats nuclear in terms of cost. However, that does not include the scaling issues wind has if you want to produce as much total MWe as a nuclear reactor (ex: there is only so much high quality wind onshore land).
> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.
This is the same logic for many anti-terrorism bills, but I will ignore that for now. This is also why they are regulated to such lengthy extremes, such as having backup power both onsite and offsite. It is also required to withstand winds that occur only once in 10,000 years.
> The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.
Sources? Much of it I know of is stored on site in giant pools because the waste belongs to the DoE, and the DoE still cannot find a compromise on how it should be handled.
> Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.
Replace "nuclear" with anything else and it is just as true. For example, structural engineering has had millenia lengths of time over nuclear to rack up disasters.
Ultimately, nuclear accidents amplify human error to a magnitude that many people find uncomfortable. Which is why the industry is regulated to a magnitude more than any other. It is not like they hand out reactor operator licenses to just anybody, either. 1 out of my undergraduate peers of ~7 got licensed to operate NCSU's PULSTAR research reactor, which has much simpler systems than a commercial power-producing reactor. It is also easy to forget that the nuclear industry in the USA has been near-paralyzed at the 1950's and 1960's level of technology, which is only about 20 years into the commercial reactor field. Unfortunately, there really is not any other industry I know of that, at 20 years into its growth, was paralyzed and allowed to operate for an additional 60-70 years. In that context, I think the US has done well given the little wiggle room regulation has allowed growth in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal – world average 161
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36
Natural Gas 4
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44
Wind 0.15
Hydro 0.10
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4
Nuclear 0.04
Coal mining is extremely hazardous, it would top this chart even just looking at production. Folding in air pollution deaths from burning coal and you add thousands of deaths per day.[2]
Each year coal and oil kill more people than the entire 60 year history of nuclear, including every nuclear disaster.
Even if we focus on worst case scenarios, nuclear is safer. The impact of Chernobyl is wildly overestimated by the public.[3]
For hydro, let's just note that a dam failure in Banqiao killed 171,000. The highest death estimates for Chernobyl (and this is including expected early deaths from radiation exposure that still haven't appeared a few decades after the incident) and you're looking at maybe 4,000.
You could add a Chernobyl every year, even take the most aggressive estimates for early deaths caused by that accident, then ignore all air pollution deaths, and coal and oil would still be more dangerous. They're just that insanely deadly an industry. Nuclear's worst case is safer than coal and oil's average.
On cost I think you're mistaken too, nuclear remaining an incredibly cheap source of power per watt, but power economics are complicated and that'd take another discussion. All I can say is that this was the standard wisdom of everyone I knew who worked in the energy industry, despite occasional scare stories in magazines about how the "true" cost of nuclear is disguised by subsidies - the math doesn't quite add up.[4]
[0] Energy deathprints: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
[1] http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf
[2] Studies on air pollution deaths (spoiler: among the leading contributing factors to mortality worldwide): http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... ; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature1...
[3] An overview of the actual mortality impact of Chernobyl found it responsible for a few dozen deaths in emergency workers (fewer than 50, and some of those dying 20 years after the accident). It might be possible to eventually tie a few thousand early deaths to the incident, but we're still waiting, decades after it happened. In general, radiation hazards were widely exaggerated. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
[4] Admittedly biased source, but it runs a few publically available numbers, even nuclear projects with cost overruns look better than some renewable projects: http://nuclearradiophobia.blogspot.com/p/cost-of-nuclear-pow... I mean, ideally you get a mix of both sources, because they serve different purposes on the grid, but your bursty diurnal power isn't meant to serve as your cheap main source of power.
The WHO gives the number as "up to 4000 could eventually die" [2].
And some researchers give the number as "985,000, mostly from cancer" [3].
Since it's so hard to tally long term harm from such a hard to pin down source such stats are very hard to accurately quantify.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
[2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
[3] http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-de...
The 985,000 figure comes from an interesting source. It originated in a book that peer reviewers savaged, for, among other things, making up numbers without providing any justification whatsoever and ignoring the scientific method.
M. I. Balonov decried the book, claiming "it has very little scientific merit while being highly misleading to the lay reader." He called it science fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
While you're right that there are hard problems in long term forecasts, but there are entire fields of study, dosimetry and epidemiology, that have had smart people toiling away on those problems for their entire career, and this is maybe the most widely studied industrial disaster in history. We have made enormous strides in how to measure environmental radiation, doses received, and the correlation between those and increases in mortality. Individuals are hard, but population estimates are actually easier to calibrate over time. So if you write a book containing a sensationalist number to get some headlines, researchers will be able to tell you're pulling their leg.
As rtpg says though, this is a bit of a moot point, because, sure, let's call it 985,000, then nuclear remains still the safest form of power by an enormous margin.
Even more than that, a nuke plant generates, amortized, several tons of waste per year. A few flasks. Which can get shoved into a volume the size of your garage. And then you basically forget about it. Unlike, say, a coal plant, which generates a reservoir worth of awful ash a year. Containment isn't even an option there.
Even more than that, even if our nuke plants vented directly into the atmosphere every now and then they'd still put out less radioactive waste than coal plants. Seriously, the only reason nuclear waste is dangerous is because it's concentrated. If we held nuclear plants to the same standards we do coal plants, "safe, permanent disposal" would be as simple as dumping it into the ocean and making sure it mixed up.
After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the ore from which it came.
Anyone who pulls the "long half-life" ploy doesn't know what they're talking about.
Long half-life = less radioactive. By definition.
I mean, you do know that "half-life of infinity" is the same thing as "not radioactive at all", right?
Somewhere out of the way then would be like the Sahara, which not coincidentally, is still out of the way; and desert regions are also where it's usually proposed to store waste.
Today we could be reducing the volume of HLW if the US deployed pyroprocessing and cadmium distillation. Unfortunately for the USA, those technologies are more mature in Korea.
At current energy rates & waste production rates etc, if you used only nuclear power, your consumption would result in roughly 7 lbs of nuclear waste over an 80 year lifespan.
I say that as someone positively predisposed toward nuclear. People can also be stupid with other sources of energy, of course, but that kind of stupidity is the kind that kills people slowly and unglamorously.
To say that the plants construction in an earthquake prone environment, solely, would inevitably lead to the incident is false. Just like with most incidents (e.g aircraft) it is a compound of faults but most importantly obtuse human error and/or mishandling.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/11/...
accidents happen all the time, see the massive blasts in china recently. but, with other tech, the effects are limits to proximity.
tchernobyl's fallout cloud swept over europe. no other failure of tech comes close. learning from mistakes in nuclear is very expensive, we might run out of planet until it is perfected.
Chernobyl killed 56 people directly. The full lifespan of the radioactive leak is statistically estimated to result in shortening the lifespan of roughly 4,000 people through cancer[0].
If you can't think of a more deadly technology failure incident, then you're horribly undereducated. You don't even need to go beyond the scope of electricity production to find incidents that were orders of magnitude more deadly. The Banqiao Dam hydro power station catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
"The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.[5] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[6] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[7] A disputed Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 premature cancer deaths occurred worldwide between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl.[8]"
after the dam in china broke, the area became habitable. tchernobyl's surroundings not so much.
the nice thing about radiation is the long term effects that make it so hard to measure. genetic issues in newborns are kind of hard to stomach.
and right now the waste figures worldwide do not include the reactors and buildings themselves. what exactly are you proposing there? using the nuclear reactor in the center of our solar system seems like a better bet.
Put your prejudices aside for a moment and consider it objectively. Nuclear power is demonstrably the safest form of energy generation per kilowatt with the sole exception of thermal solar. Wind turbines and photovoltaic solar are more deadly. I won't cite any specific source because there are literally hundreds.[0]
They said their main problem was the NRC. It has regulations designed for large light-water reactors. If you're attempting, say, a small modular molten-salt reactor, you have to pay several hundred million dollars up front for an extensive, detailed design and regulations to fit. Then the NRC makes one binary decision: if you're lucky they approve you, in which case all you have so far is a piece of paper that allows you to build something. If you're unlucky they deny and leave you with nothing.
Not surprisingly, it's hard to find investors in this environment. They said if we at least had a phased approach, so they can get some assurance for investors, it'd be an improvement. Even better would be a more flexible regime similar to Canada's.
They are tweaking the process. I wonder if that has anything to do with the NRC?
Many of these reactors are small-scale designs, well within the range of funded startups. In fact, YCombinator invested in a nuclear fission startup: http://blog.samaltman.com/energy
But Terrestrial Energy is Canadian, and Terrapower is a U.S. company that just signed a deal to build their prototype in China, which is aggressively developing advanced nuclear.
If Canada's system is better, then there must be another problem here that's shared with the US and Canada. Since neither is actively expanding nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Canada#Curren...
Meanwhile Terrapower is building their prototype in China, which is developing half a dozen advanced reactor types and currently building a couple dozen conventional reactors.
One exception is hardly a vibrant industry that the US needs to copy.
Disgustingly enough, the US taxpayer is going to be on the hook for cleanup costs for each and every one of these sites.
In any case, if wind and solar outcompete nuclear on a level playing field, fine. The nuclear startups just want the opportunity to try.
Even in the areas where solar can be used, are you going make sure that industry pays (at least party in advance, for the same insurance) for not only their manufacturing costs, but also the cleanup and disposal of all those PV cells that necessarily would be distributed over a wide area?
Are you also going make sure the wind and/or solar industry takes responsibility for all of the batteries t hat would be necessary to use their schemes? When you're talking keeping a national grid active on variable sources of power like wind or solar, those battery costs will easily surpass the generation costs. Since we are talking about cheap batteries that can supply decent amounts of current, that means lead acid[2]. Do you really want to distribute that much lead? Did you include the costs of the insurance to clean that up, too, including enforcement to make sure the lead doesn't simply end up in the landfill (or worse)?
The only expensive part about nuclear is the initial development cost. Running the plant isn't particularly expensive, and the fuel and waste costs are practically nothing and those costs are isolated to only a few locations. Everybody else tends to get away with socializing their long-term cleanup and disaster costs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
[2] future technologies could change that, but until we can buy it commercially its just vaporware and wishful thinking
Or maybe both of us should quit bickering, support each other's favorite technologies, and remember that it's fossil fuels destroying the climate, while benefiting from far larger subsidies than either nuclear or renewables have ever seen.
Far from dead they do however show that we aren't even trying to be at the forefront of the technology anymore. While the AP1000 reactors are more modern they are still old school in many senses.
We still need a good solid base power source, renewable sources tend to be highly weather dependent and cover a large area to generate power. It is not reasonable to claim we can store it through batteries to replace the power currently provided by coal, gas, and nuclear. Unless some breakthrough storage means comes out its not going to happen
Unfortunately as is universally the case with nuclear construction (see the debacle in the UK as well), both reactors recently announced significant delays of ~18 months and at least an additional billion in cost overruns. There may be an economical way to build nuclear but we clearly don't have it.
http://www.power-eng.com/articles/2015/05/delays-at-vogtle-v...
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/energy/2015/03/uti...
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...
Not only that, batteries aren't the only way to store renewable energy. There's dams, thermal salts, and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Renewable_energ...
Renewable energy is an area that is constantly at the forefront of technology, unlike nuclear. That is one of the reasons it is so much more promising.
Nuclear and coal are starting to fade, with vastly more retirements than new construction, outside of the deep south for nuclear (because let's do the opposite of the liberals) and coal producing states (because jobs).
Damn hippies
So it is the war-mongers and not the hippies to blame for whatever happened to nucular power.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the dozens of nuke plants that were canceled in the 70s, at the height of the Cold War, and the virtual (and in some countries, legal) moratorium on new construction that was pushed by anti-nuclear activists. Well-intentioned people dedicated to saving the world made things worse us and held back technological progress at the same time.
Is not even wrong, but I don't expect the author to do any research about the costs of nuclear power, nor to track down cost inflators (regulatory delay, post start regulation changes) or disposal methods (reprocessing, vitrification, incineration) or cost per megawatt.
TL;DR Probably China, in a couple years. Projects in Japan, India, Europe, US, Canada.
[Edit: "couple years"]
We used to see difficulties like that as a challenge we could overcome, instead of running away in fear of risk.
Why build a reactor on earth that isn't cost competitive when you can better use the one in the sky?
It is a challenge. Train Americans to install solar and wind across the country. Install it. Problem solved.
Why build a reactor? Because it's safer than solar, and cheaer in the long run. Why do you want a power source that kills more people per kWh?
Nuclear has very low running costs (practically no fuel) and a lot of the startup costs are temporary (new design approval). Intermittent technologies like solar and wind need expensive extra redundency and battery storage. Show me the batteries you are going to use, at a price cheaper than both coal and nuclear, Not some vaporware future technology, something we can buy right now. (the grid isn't a battery, even though most people using solar right now use the grid as if it was).
Nuclear isn't easy or cheap, but it's the least worst method we have for generating power. Other technologies will always have niche uses, of course, but choosing to wait for some mythical future technology to become available is choosing to let coal plants continue polluting the world.
I'm not. I'm picking natural gas, which while still a fossil fuel, is much cleaner and releases far less CO2 per kwh generated.
Nuclear still takes a decade to build. A decade. I don't have to show you the batteries today, as long as they're built and in production in the next 10 years, which they will be. The Tesla Gigafactory will produce 50GWh of battery capacity per year: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office-mar...
Nuclear isn't the least worst method. Solar, wind, and batteries are the least worst method.
> but choosing to wait for some mythical future technology to become available is choosing to let coal plants continue polluting the world.
Safe nuclear is this mythical future technology you speak of.
That's not a small amount. Nuclear releases 0 CO2.
> 50GWh of battery capacity per year:
Thank you for making my point for me. At that rate, we might have enough battery power (assuming no replacements) in a century or two. We need TWh capacity, not GWh, to change the world over to intermittent generation sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
> Safe nuclear is this mythical future technology you speak of.
Of course not. Nothing is without risk. Do I need to remind you of the problems natural gas can cause?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_San_Bruno_pipeline_explos...
http://www.news.com.au/world/cctv-footage-shows-natural-gas-...
You have a strange sense of "least worst", given incidentsw like these happen fairly regularly in the oil and gas industries. Nuclear hasn't killed anywhere near this many people.
Coal has been replaced by a combination of natural gas and renewables in every state. As more renewables come online, natural gas plants will run even less.
I'm tired of humanity throwing money down the well that is the nuclear power industry. Pay for the damn turbines and panels already and be done with it (the US alone has enough wind energy potential for 10x its current energy use).
Note: Wind is already so cheap, Exelon's CEO (who manages the largest commercial fleet of nuclear generators in the US) is threatening plant closings if they don't get a bailout.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-08/business/ct-bi...
The former Exelon CEO? Says that shutting down struggling nuclear power plants is the right thing to do.
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060022403
Do I care that natural gas is going to pick up the slack? Of course not. The natural gas boom won't last forever, prices will rise, and with coal no longer meeting EPA emissions requirements and nuclear plants decommissioned, there will only be one power source to pick up the slack: renewables.
Am I missing something? I don't see anything about a bailout in that article. Unless I overlooked something, it sounds like he's just saying that government subsidies on wind power are excessive, which is the opposite of asking for a bailout.
"Exelon, which operates six nuclear power plants in Illinois, says it needs help because — although it made more than $2 billion last year — it has lost about $1 billion in the past five years on three of its plants: Clinton, Quad Cities and Byron. The nuclear plants are having a hard time competing in the marketplace partly because plentiful supplies have driven down the price of natural gas.
The utility says it is unwilling to run any nuclear plant at a loss, though its nuclear fleet is profitable overall. It says Illinois needs all of its nuclear plants for reliability and low-carbon power generation. It also warns that 8,000 jobs in Illinois would be lost if the plants were shuttered."
http://wqad.com/2015/08/04/quad-city-wind-energy-farms-on-th...
"This really is a critical time in the 41-years at the Quad Cities station where we have never been in a position where me may have premature shutdown," said Bill Stoermer, Senior Communications Manager at Exelon in Cordova. "We really need the state legislature to act. They of course are focused on the budget and to try to get some budget resolved. We certainly understand that, however we're going to be forced to make some decisions by the end of the year regarding our plans here in Illinois."
http://midwestenergynews.com/2015/05/01/exelon-we-have-to-ha...
"Exelon was happy to embrace risk when wholesale power prices were on the rise and profits from its generation business were flowing, Hendrickson said. Only now, in a market where nuclear power is under pressure from relatively inexpensive natural gas and wind, is the company asking for help in the form of a $300-million-a-year subsidy."