Why America abandoned nuclear power, and what we can learn from South Korea
vox.com
vox.com
One is how absolutely catastrophic coal fired plants are. People often talk about hypothetical scenarios with nuclear, but tens of thousands of people are dying every year as a direct result of coal power and that doesn't even take into account the long term effects of climate change. We need to be aggressively pursuing _any_ and _all_ alternatives to coal, in my opinion. This might sound a little crazy, but I almost feel the situation is urgent enough to justify the president declaring a national emergency and using the national guard to unilaterally shut down these facilities. I realize that's completely unrealistic, but I hope it conveys my sense of urgency.
Another thing I'd like to touch on is the handling of nuclear waste. It's absolutely problematic, but I'm curious about the marginal cost/risk of additional waste now that we already have to deal with it. We already have to devise a solution to the problem, so it seems like that offsets the cost of dealing with the additional waste of more reactors. Even if we didn't use nuclear power, we would be generating waste from research reactors, nuclear medicine, etc, that we would have to deal with. If you have to figure out how to safely store a ton of material for ten thousand years, does it really cost twice as much to store twice as much material?
The US flasks are required to withstand similar catastrophic accidents.
[1]http://www.railmagazine.com/trains/heritage/it-s-a-lovely-da...
Though many people think the used fuel will get dug up before then to be reprocessed into fuel...
Capitalism is the culprit.
In case of breeders, the 2nd argument that makes them expensive is that they're an "proliferation risk".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Edit: Just wanted to mention that disposing of nuclear material by trying to launch it into space is absurd, but the orbital mechanics of the problem are pretty interesting.
Global production last year:
Arsenic (arsenic trioxide): 44,000 metric tons
Mercury: 1,900 metric tons
Selenium: ~3,000 metric tons
Beryllium: 400 metric tons
Lead: 4,000,000 metric tons
Cadmium: 23,000 metric tons
All of this stuff will last literally forever, and is more-or-less impossible to destroy. This doesn't include all the fun chemicals (eg. cyanide) which are possible to destroy, but get dumped into the environment before disposal and so are floating around anyway.
List of ways of getting rid of nuclear waste:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
If protons don't decay (proton decay is predicted by some theories but has never been observed), then it's even more speculative. Wikipedia's "timeline of the far future" (a fun article to read for many reasons) gives an estimate of 10^46 to 10^200 years for all atoms in the observable universe to decay through other means. I'll leave converting that to a half life up to the reader.
Incidentally, this means that the popular "launch it into the sun" disposal process actually kicks in automatically, before any appreciable decay occurs. Some billions of years in the future, the sun will expand into a red giant and swallow the Earth, and everything on it. Wikipedia says this happens at 7.59 billion years from now, which is a suspiciously accurate number, but I think for the purposes of this discussion, "billions" is sufficiently precise.
The comment you replied to said "more mundane sorts of toxic waste". That would usually be molecules, i.e. built from multiple atoms, probably multiple elements. And every chemical transformation works both ways, and while the probability for a molecule to fall apart or recombine with other molecules might be low, it will never be zero. So to the best of my understanding there's no such thing as a completely stable molecule, the question is simply how long of a time that you consider. Which leads me back to the question what references you have for (toxic, nonetheless, thus probably somewhat reactive) molecules that have a molecular (not radioactive) half life longer than those for the radioactive decay you compare them to.
To restate my point: molecules may be less stable than the atoms they are made of, and less stable than the radioactive elements you compare them to.
Actual nuclear waste is a 10,000+ year problem, not hundreds of years. But the 100s of years problem is more about where long-term storage should be (Yucca Mtn. etc.).
When you tour Hanford, what do you see (free tours for US citizens, BTW)? You see many ancient reactors - all disabled now except the preserved first reactor. You see -every single decommissioned nuclear submarine-'s reactor in long lines. And they remind you: based on ice ages, in 15,000 years or so, it won't matter... the entire plateau around Hanford will be under water. So it's going to need to be somewhere else.
Wild stuff.
Do the (projected) costs of storing it for 10k+ years exceed the costs of leaving Earths orbit?
For that matter, with the number of launches required, at least one of them would fail badly enough to spread radioactive material.
In addition to cost of launching such huge mass, and the risks of catastrophic failure (blowing up mid-launch would probably end up being worse than the chernobyl-distaster -- think a really, really big dirty bomb with areal detonation) -- there's also the risk of missing the sun, and ending up with a man-made comet.
The sun is far away in terms of delta-V. Getting to low-Earth orbit requires something like 9.4 km/s of delta-V. Getting from LEO to the Sun requires another 21.3 km/s of delta-V.
There are probably transfer orbits that could use gravity assist to make this figure lower, but those orbits spend a lot of time looping around planets and generally hanging out in the solar system, which is probably not the best thing to do with our waste.
It's actually cheaper to escape the solar system than to shoot for the Sun - around 18.15 km/s delta-V from ground to escape.
A lot of the waste that remains should be used in breeder reactors, such as the LFTR. The amount of actual waste left over if we actually use the entire fuel is tiny compared to what we currently call "waste".
Just one obvious example -- you can put lead into metal blocks and store it virtually anywhere (well away from drinking water).
Nuclear waste irradiates stuff around it, generates heat, and causes everything you put it in to rust and deteriorate very quickly. Some nuclear waste generates so much heat that it has to be continually actively cooled so that it does not set itself on fire and spew clouds of radioactive gases.
If there was a warehouse full of blocks of lead in fukushima, the tsunami would not cause much of a disaster. Nothing worth mentioning on TV. But instead there was nuclear waste storage, which had to be actively cooled. So when the tsunami knocked out the cooling systems, it caught on fire and there were the clouds of radioactive gasses.
Already there is mounting evidence that these chemicals are having an extreme effect on the top layer of ocean life (which is estimated to produce the majority of our oxygen) and if we continue on the path of indiscriminately dumping toxic waste the resulting effects could be significantly more dire than if we powered the entire world with fission. Properly regulating nuclear waste from reactors and disposing it might be more practical than regulating all of the other uses of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. If we further manage to develop technologies that can pump waste back into reactors as fuel or to convert them to more unstable isotopes (which decay to stable ones faster than hundreds of years) the entire problem can become much more manageable. Unfortunately we seemed to have written off nuclear almost completely and will never get there.
These are two drastically different industries (power generation vs manufacturing) but the comparison is still worth keeping in mind.
* Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant
* Pripyat, Ukraine - near the Chernobyl power plant
* Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India - near the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant
* Bullitt County, Kentucky - near the "Valley of the Drums"
--
You choose lead as your example for chemical waste, but lead is only a moderate risk compared to the nastier chemical pollutants. The real hazards are things like the PCBs (among hundreds of other nasty chemicals) in the 100,000+ leaking drums at the "Valley of the Drums", or the 42 tons of methyl isocyanate sprayed over Bhopal. These incidents have already had significant costs in human lives and ongoing health problems for the local population.
In comparison, Chernobyl killed only handful of people and Fukushima hasn't killed anybody yet. We are still waiting to see the costs of extra cancer cases from these disasters, but it won't be anything close to the damage from the chemical industries or coal power industries.
In a country like France, you can't normally sue to stop a nuclear plant being built. Once the government decides to build it, they have sovereign immunity from suits in their own courts. So if you don't want it, you can agitate for the government to stop it, but you can't sue the project to stop it (or at least, there are many fewer ways to do so). The U.S. by contrast has waived its own sovereign immunity in a lot of cases, setting up a more decentralized decision-making process where the legislature passes general laws, agencies like the DOE and EPA are delegated rule-making authority, and courts then adjudicate disputes. The multiple levels of government (federal agencies, state agencies, federal courts, state courts) add another complication.
If utilities were made liable for harm for nuclear disasters, how long do you suppose it would be before every last one was decommissioned? I suspect all the cost savings TFA hopefully imagines vanish in comparison to the cost of liability.
I also note TFA makes no attempt to express the South Korean costs in USD terms. It wouldn't surprise me, given the state of South Korea's economic development in 1971, if what the graph depicts is not a miraculous decline in costs, but a predictable trend toward the global norm.
Even if we're now experienced-enough to develop good socio-regulatory systems for day-to-day generation safety and standards, is the same really true for the waste? Our collective record is still a sad tale of fraying "temporary" solutions, leaks, NIMBY reactions, and playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato.
Yes, but the solution isn't to store it. The solution is to reprocess it. That's what all the other major nuclear-using countries do. The only reason the US doesn't is politics.
We have a political problem now, not a technical one... and yeah that's going to be a tough one. I wonder how long until someone figures out ways to let a 3rd world country be the deep bore storage place and allow export?
I very much doubt that'll happen. Political stability for a waste repository is going to be just as much a concern as geological stability.
Not a problem for an accountant. It's easy to value an indefinite stream of future dollars in present value terms.
The UK even has government debt like that, and they trade for finite amounts of money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetuity
Also, different people have different discounting rates they use for planning the future. When I talked about `interest rates' in general, I meant the prevailing interest rates on the market.
If your own discounting rate is lower than that, it totally makes sense to save. If your own rate is lower, borrowing is good. (All other things being equal, of course, which they never are.)
Anyway, my point is that accounting calculations tend to justify screwing the future. And that people, when thinking about themselves and their families, typically don't rely solely on accounting calculations.
If that seems a little extreme then consider using 1816's technology to plow a field, travel to Europe, send a message around the world, or treat a cancer patient, and consider whether or not it's 500x better or cheaper or faster. Remember that the hot new technology of the day is the steamboat but transatlantic voyages, Ireland to New York, still run on sail and might take around, say, ~25 days.
Sure, it's a starting point, but it's hardly a full plan, a good plan, or the answers we seek.
For starters, maintenance is not an annuity: How exactly did you estimate the number of real-dollars spent on repairing leaky barriers for the year of 2245?
In some years you'll spend less than your estimate, in some more. Accountants use reserves to deal with these fluctuations.
India is getting ready to turn on a fast reactor that they can use to produce more fuel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor
But I don't think it will be able to consume as much waste products as the Gen IV stuff, it focuses on making more fuel.
Elon uses high PITA factor when talking about why SpaceX isn't pursuing hydrogen as a rocket fuel. It similarly looks awesome on paper but results in higher TCO and higher complexity in practice. It's cheaper (according to SpaceX) to use kerosene or methane and build a bigger rocket.
For nukes vs. renewables it's likely overall cheaper to just over-build renewables and storage than to handle the long tail of pain from current-type nuclear. Spend a few billion dealing with nuclear waste, or spend a few billion on more generation and storage capacity. The former is sticky and complicated, while the latter is just straightforward commodity scaling of stuff everyone already knows how to build and handle. It's stupid and simple and scalable and if it's not enough just do more of it. In other words: just build a bigger rocket.
What I say applies to conventional and near-term fission. Fusion and other exotics might be a different ballgame. Fusion would likely be complex and high capital cost but it doesn't have the waste and "black swan failure" issues that pee in the pool for fission.
I also think PITA factor is kind of a death by a thousand cuts -- a "long tail" as I said.
Also, complexity in and of itself can be handled. The issue is that handling it requires discipline, and for civilian nuclear power in the US, the discipline has often not been there. (By contrast, military nuclear power in the US has always had strong discipline, and as a result relatively complex reactors are run safely.)
No, they thought they could site the backup diesel generators and switchgear behind a seawall that turned out not to be high enough when a tsunami came through. None of the issues at Fukushima had anything to do with the design of the reactor itself; in fact, the reactor was obviously significantly over-engineered given how well it withstood an extended loss of backup cooling.
Not if the public's reaction is "Aah, nuclear bad, no more nuclear!" instead of "hey, idiots, you need to change your specs for seawalls".
> I'm sure they thought the seawall was high enough when they built it.
The problem was that their definition of "high enough" was wrong. That's not a matter of reactor design, or even an issue that's specific to reactor design; it comes up in any issue involving cities or facilities near seacoasts (for example, specs for levee heights). But in every other area that's affected by this issue, the response is "you need to change the specs for how severe an event the facility needs to withstand", not "stop building this facility altogether". Nobody argues for abandonment of all coastal cities because some levees aren't high enough.
> Why are we now so sure we couldn't make a similar miscalculation?
Who said we were? There is no such thing as zero risk.
That's true of a lot more than nuclear fission...
What we can learn from the past is that advanced technologies become much safer over time. I don't have the numbers here, but air travel is maybe 1000 times safer than when it started.
So I'd be very confident assuming the accident rate in the future to be vastly less than during the first few decades of nuclear energy.
Given this potential threat anything that will be discovered to increase its probability will increase operation cost of reactors in the future. This is just not the case with planes. There minimizing the risk beyond a certain threshold is sufficient especially since it is known that an error in estimation of that threshold is bounded.
Can it really? That would be an order of magnitude worse than the Hiroshima bomb.
It is just the article talks about operation costs of nuclear completely ignoring future costs increases.
You can make a lot of PV's in the 14 years it takes to make a fission plant. I'm all for Thorium research, but fission as it is now has a lot of downsides.
First, uranium is not some mythic dark magic demon that we conjure from a hellish fairy land in another dimension. It's a naturally-occurring rock that we intentionally dig up because it's useful. Another comment mentions lead, mercury, etc. as being even more terrifying, but again, these are natural elements that we mine for various uses. They're not new. They've always been here. Most of the fear is just superstition.
Secondly, fear seems to be predicated on the idea that we need to dump all the stuff, we need to find a single place to concentrate it all when we dump it, and we need to leave it there for thousands of years. Of course no one wants that next door. But why try to find a place to dump all this lead/mercury/uranium while we're still digging up and refining more? Why not find ways to use it?
We used to take just the kerosene and dump most of the rest of the oil because we just didn't know what to do with it. Turns out gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel did have uses after all. We also didn't know what to do with heavy oils, oil sands, etc., but we've found ways to process them into something useful.
If we do need to dump some (perhaps because we don't yet have the technology to filter out impurities), why not just put it back where we got it, or scatter it around the way that it is found naturally, or better still just tuck it away for a few decades until it becomes useful? Because it won't be a problem for a million years or 10,000 years or hundreds of years. It will soon be a valuable resource.
With nuclear waste it's especially odd. That is by definition mass that naturally produces energy, and we're most worried about how to get rid of the stuff that will produce energy for a long time...while we are simultaneously worried about how we're going to produce enough energy to meet the demands of the future. Yet people are suggesting that we launch it all into space! How different would our world be if we had launched all the gasoline and diesel into space before we knew what to do with it?
It is hard to prove something like that, that future technology can't do something, but the author doesn't even try.
The writer starts the article with the assumption stated explicitly. He punts on that question to discuss cost. Whether or not Nuclear is a requirement can be (and has been) discussed elsewhere. I think that's fine, because it was still an interesting article.
It seems like the Molten Salt Refactor is much safer than a Liquid reactor will ever be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195554
Dunno how that will go.
In January 2016, the United States Department of Energy announced a $80m award fund to develop Generation IV reactor designs.[19] One of the two beneficiaries, Southern Company will use the funding to develop a Molten Chloride Fast Reactor (MCFR), a type of MSR developed earlier by British scientists.[16]
However, Thorium breeder reactors are considered more proliferation resistant, because the weaponizable isotope U-233 contains also some U-232 and U-234 which are hard to separate, and U-232 is really nasty stuff to work with, meaning most would-be terrorists are likely to die of radiation poisoning before they could set a bomb off in Manhattan.
The fact is, we're creating tremendous amounts of potentially dangerous waste and we have no long-term plan, much less the technology to pull it off. We don't know what the political situation will be in a country 500 years from now. If we put 1/100th of the money that we put into dangerous technologies and subsidizing fossil fuels and put them into renewables, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Germany is on track to be 100% renewable by 2020. Including solar. And they are not exactly known for their excess of sun.
Do you have a source for this? It seems completely unbelievable.
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-powe...
"New Study: 95% Renewable Power-Mix Cheaper Than Nuclear And Gas"
Applies to both France and Germany.
"With wind and PV growing to 80 % of total power production in 2050, the study gives a lot of attention to how – and at what cost – the different regions can fill the gap when neither the wind nor the sun can meet the demand."
100% renewable is the eventual goal, but the short-term goal is merely to get rid of nuclear.