To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

Except for the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, the dot-com bubble, the housing bouble followed a crash, the tulip mania, ... Markets are not always rational.

We now have some of the cheapest electricity in the world (~$0.055 per kwh residential off peak vs. something crazy like $0.30 in Berlin) and haven't had a single smog day in Toronto for nearly two years.

https://opendata.rte-france.com/chart/embed/?dataChart=eyJ0a...

My point is that it's an artificial problem, not a technical problem.

I agree that it is a temporary solution, but it's the best we got until we figure out how to store energy efficiently, and generate truly renewable energy.

I'm sceptical of wind, because it produce a large amount of waste (rotorblade composite) that is only recently started to be recycled, and the question of what to do with the recycled material have to my knowledge not been answered yet.

Solar is still dependend on a few rare earth minerals, but some promesing alternatives are actively being researched.

"Even at Tesla’s low wholesale price, a 500-cycle battery just doesn’t pencil out against the alternatives, especially once the inverter and other system costs are included. "

1. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Tesla-Discontin...

Yes. Compared to nuclear.

"That very few nations recycle or reprocesses?"

Way wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...

I count ten countries on that list.

" And where all the waste ends up in cooling pools forever?"

No country keeps waste "in cooling pools forever".

"The technical solutions are ready to be implemented when the political will reasserts itself"

There is no technical reason not to move forward, the issues are all ignorant political stances based on FUD much like the stuff you are espousing here.

I would really like to see investment in other types of reactors such as pebblebed, molten salt etc. If we don't build the stations to create nuclear missiles, we can make them much more 'friendly'.

A "transformer substation explosion" scenario is a good base for a comparison, since we have a lot of experience with them, and the scenario (within a city, near other buildings, with high-voltage wiring) is similar.

http://phasenpruefer.info/deutschlands-stromexporte-bricht-r...

English title courtesy of Google Translate: "Germany's electricity exports are constantly growing (updated)".

Context matters, a lot.

(Hint: Tethering)

If nuclear power plants have an accident like in Fukushima. then tens of thousands have lost their home for decades or forever and ten thousand workers will fight for three decades to clean up the mess under the worst possible circumstances with costs going into the hundred billion dollars.

In middle Europe easily a few million people can be affected.

Imagine if 'TWAT' had been ignored, and the same money had been spent on obesity, or poverty. In fact, the US could have given all 45 million Americans, who live below the poverty line, 20k each.

Actually, put that way, it makes 'TWAT' pretty cheap, especially when compared to the GFC.

http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla...

> The discovery of widespread carbon segregation problems in critical nuclear plant components has crippled the French power industry—20 of the country’s 58 reactors are currently offline and under heavy scrutiny. France’s nuclear safety chairman said more anomalies “will likely be found,” as the extent of the contagion is still being uncovered.

Electricity price in France:

http://www.reuters.com/article/europe-electricity-idUSL5N1CD...

> EUROPE POWER-French spot power prices jump to four-year high on nuclear outage worries

Generally the prices in France are kept low, because the tax payer pays for the expensive nuclear industry monopoly.

Yes, but even those are monitored. And the expected increase in cancer deaths over the next several decades due to Fukushima is still modeled to be fewer than 100 people.

For that reason, decentralized technologies like solar are a better choice for where to spend money on energy.

Things happen. For example planes fall out of the sky and kill everyone on board. Sometimes they kill people on the ground too.

You can be emotionally afraid of flying (and many are) and of airplanes flying overhead. If you are, then no understanding of the why of a plane crash can re-assure you of its general safety and utility because all you can think about is the aftermath of being in a plane crash.

If enough of the population was emotionally afraid of flying today then we would neither be able to build airports in useful places, nor would we be able to make an economically successful airline. So we would have only very few airlines and airports. Even though the utility of flying and the positive economic impact it makes would still exist, we just wouldn't be taking advantage of those positive features.

For those of us who look at air travel rationally, on a statistical basis it is safer than any other form of travel that allows us to transition from one part of the world to another. We don't spend too much of our time in transit, we get where we are going, and we can get more done in our lives so airplanes are a "good" thing.

For someone trapped in their emotional response, the mere existence of a set of circumstances that would allow an otherwise normally functioning plane to crash, makes airplanes a "bad" thing.

So two things characterize the emotional argument, ignoring probabilities and disbelieving actual examples.

When someone says "<nuclear plant> wasn't supposed to have an issue until <x> happened." and they ignore the probability or likelyhood of <x> happening, you know they are approaching it from an emotional state not a rational state. Fukishima is an excellent example of this type of argument. It takes the form, "Such an event was never supposed to happen, but it did! And look what happened."

Rationally you have to except that anything "can" happen, but some events are less likely than other events. So rationally it was extremely unlikely that a 9.0 magnitude earthquake would strike just off the coast from this plant. That is because 9.0 quakes are themselves exceptionally rare, and earthquakes can happen anywhere along a fault line. So three very improbable things came together, first the fault didn't release any stress until it did all at once (its rare that faults can keep back that much energy), when it did the epicenter was just off the shore of the power plants (it had hundreds of miles up and down the coast which could have relieved the same pressure build up), and the sea mount of the coast dropped literally tones of material into the canyon features of the coast causing a huge water displacement and tsunami (different transitions such as slipping or uplifting cause different amounts of earth movement). If any of those things are different you don't have the issue, multiple quakes instead of one? Not enough energy for a giant tsunami. Too far away? Tsunami's impact is insufficient to wipe out back up power. Fault fails to trigger massive earth movement, no tsunami and no meltdown. So from a rational point of view, this was an extremely low probability event and as such was not explicitly designed for, although as records have shown people have continually suggested adding additional layers of defense to the plant.

From an emotional point of view the argument goes "You said this plant was safe in the event of earthquake or tsunami and yet look, this earthquake and tsunami caused it to melt down!" That argument doesn't care about probabilities it is all black and white, the event "can" happen so you should be prepared for it or you lied.

There are, in fact, a number of things that can cause a nuclear accident that are exceptionally rare. For example, no existing nuclear plant can safely shut down and contain its fuel when it is within the vaporization radius of a nuclear weapon. Nuclear plants cannot withstand the direct impact of meteor with more than 10kg of mass. Nuclear plants cannot withstand the effects of having a magma plume rise up underneath them and breach the surface. From a non-emotion driven point of view, people call these things "impossible" when they recognize that they are actually just very very very unlikely. And they are okay with that. The benefit of the non-polluting, low carbon footprint power is "worth" risking that it would become a mess if it were hit by a meteor.

So an emotional argument puts forth the possible, no matter how improbable, as the evidence for discounting the benefits. This form of emotional argument takes the form, "It's not safe because <x> could happen, and the even if that is rare the cost of an accident is so huge."

And that leads us to the second part of the emotional argument, the perceived cost of failure. The low probability of failure is argued against the huge cost of failure. There actually is a calculus for computing risks and costs, actuaries use it all the time to price out insurance rates, but for nuclear power the potential cost of failure is perceived, by an emotionally framed argument, to be infinite. Both in property and loss of life.

The rational argument is that accidents have a cost and we accept that cost in exchange for a greater good. For air travel we accept that the plane we're getting on might kill us because 99.999% of the time it will deliver us safely to our destination. We know that a catastrophic failure of the airplane at altitude generally means we're dead (and we may find ourselves having many seconds or even minutes to contemplate our impending demise). An emotional argument would frame it as even though an airplane probably won't crash, when it does it kills everyone and so why would you ever take that risk?

But what is the actual cost of failure for nuclear power plants? Nuclear power plants are doubly "safe." That is to say that when they are built they are designed in such a way that only very unusual events or cascades of multiple failures (which from a probability perspective puts them into the rare or unusual category) can cause the plant to fail. That is the first part, the second part is that once they are in "failure" mode, another set of systems are in place to mitigate the cost of that failure. If airplanes were designed this way (and some are) then they are engineered with redundant systems to be highly reliable (safe) and they are equipped with a parachute that can safely lower a non-functioning plane to the ground which deploys in the event of failure (so doubly safe).

The only health threat from nuclear power is exposure to radiation. We know that in a high enough dose, radiation will kill you. It surprises most people but we don't really know what the minimum harmful dose is. That is because we haven't had enough times where people were exposed to ascertain this although Chernobyl has helped in that regard, it provides three interesting cohorts; people who were exposed at the time of the accident and were evacuated, people who continue to live in the area post accident, and people who were not near the event but are otherwise similar (control group). From those groups there is data to support the conclusion that people are a lot more tolerant of radiation than we give them credit for and that in every case when a nuclear accident occurred, when people were notified and evacuated they suffered no ill effects. We also know that people living in Cs137 contaminated environments are affected by the radiation but it is not clear that those effects negatively affect their health, or if they are simply the body's response to living in a higher than normal radiation environment.

As a result, we know that if you live in a country that both has nuclear power and reasonable government that will disclose to you immediately if an accident occurs, then even if you live right next to the power plant and evacuate if you are notified of an accident, then all of our experience tells us that you will not suffer any ill effects. Even if all systems have failed and the reactors are in the process of "melting down" you will have time to leave and be out of the area before anything hurts you. That is a better deal than living in an earthquake prone area like the Bay Area, where, when the Hayward fault shifts (and it will), thousands of people will likely die, unable to evacuate before the event threatened their lives.

So objectively, the cost of a nuclear power accident is not measured in lives (nuclear power accidents have yet to kill anyone who wasn't on the site of the reactor when it failed or trying to clean it up or control it) it is measured in property damage and possibly property availability. Given the probability of things that can cause an accident, it is not as costly as floods along the Mississippi river or Tornadoes in the midwest, or floods wildfires in the west, or oil spills.

But emotionally, its cost is perceived to be much much higher.

Bottom line is that objectively Nuclear Power is solidly a good thing, and as the Times and others like Greenpeace point out could be a big part of attacking the problem of negative human impact on the climate. Climate change being a problem that has the potential to wipe out the entire species. It makes it difficult for someone who understands what is at stake, to understand why anyone would argue against a strategy that could be helping to save the entire planet.

Understanding that argument against, comes from recognizing when it is being made on an emotional basis rather than a rational basis.

http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-...

Last spring, at the Plant Vogtle construction site near Waynesboro, Ga., executives representing Georgia Power, its lead contractors and trades groups gathered to commit publicly to turning around the $16-billion nuclear power plant expansion. At least three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over its original budget, the massive effort—the first U.S. project of its kind in decades—is a closely watched bellwether of the country’s nuclear plans, which could fizzle if this project fails to deliver, many believe.

Executives with Westinghouse and Fluor, which represent the contracting team that took over on Jan. 1, publicly vowed to do what they already had contractually agreed to do: deliver the project according to schedule by achieving the in-service target dates of June 2019 and June 2020 for Vogtle Units 3 and 4, respectively.

Now, nearly a year into Westinghouse and Fluor’s Vogtle project takeover from former contractor CB&I, the site’s workforce has swelled, but productivity and schedule have actually slipped, say state construction monitors. In joint testimony, PSC analyst Stephen Roetger and construction monitor William Jacobs noted, “The contractor has failed to achieve the project’s critical milestones in accordance with the January 2016 Integrated Project Schedule, which reconfirmed the June 2019 and June 2020 Commercial Operation Dates.” Jacobs, the state’s construction monitor, holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering and has more than 12 years of nuclear-plant construction and start-up experience.

AP1000s are also behind schedule in China. Whatever problems are causing the schedule/budget misses, they seem to be coming from inside the nuclear industry itself.

Why were those plants cheap? First a) they probably actually weren't, thanks to hidden costs, and b) they probably weren't nearly as safe.

This also means you need 5-6 times the amount of transmission infrastructure compared to if you have centralised power generation that can be rapidly scaled up and down. Burning coal is one such solution (obviously a terrible one given climate change). Gas is good for intermittent 'peaker' plants, but it's not exactly cheap nor co2 free.

Contrary to what's being said above, I think fission absolutely must be explored to avoid a climate catastrophe. Our current fission reactor tech is basically the same tech we had in the 50s and 60s, which manages about 3% fuel efficiency (mostly due to the use of solid fuels). Despite this, it's still at least 'in the ballpark' cost-wise, and also the second safest form of power generation, according to the IPCC, over its entire life-cycle (from mining to waste disposal and remediation). Incidentally, hydro is the first.

If we could invest even just a little bit of money into furthering fission research, we could very well end up with an abundant, cheap and safe method of generating baseload power. Or we could yammer on about the cost of 'political capital' and accept a much higher probability of extinction because a section of the population are either misinformed or just flat out ignorant. Yeah, let's do that.

Regarding storage and distribution the video reports on a current project in Utrecht/Netherlands where they are combining the untapped storage capacity of electrical cars. As a Tesla owner you can set the amount of milage you will need the next day and the rest of the capacity can/will be used for storage and distribution.

Imagine that, if demand is high and your Tesla is charged you can take the bike and sell the electricity for profit. So the Tesla might pay for itself over time.

Regarding potential over capacity by solar generation I think the electric car revolition is just about to start. There will be huge demand for electricity in the near future.

On the contrary to the costs of storage and distribution, which are often cited and remarked upon in discussions about renewables, the cost of enviromental damage is also not included in the power generation costs. If you factor in the value of the land that became virtually unusable by fukushima, I guess the power generation costs will unlikely be as low as the are presented to be. I vaguely remember figures from someone who did the math for nuclear, this person also subtracted the nuclear industry subsidies, and I think it was 69$/kWh. Yes, sixty nine dollars per kilowatt hour. I wish I had saved that reference. I can not vouch or this value, it is only from the back of my head.

In the worst case scenario, all of the nuclear reactors simultaneously explode (because more earthquakes), raining down a radioactive armageddon on the hordes of screaming peasants below.

Renewables being tested at scale isn't really a concern. There are now multiple cases of islands being 100% renewable, with energy storage in the form of pumped hydro, or as is becoming increasingly common, lithium-ion battery storage. I live on a college campus that's in the middle of a massive wind-farm, and is almost entirely renewable most days. And this isn't some small wind-farm; it has a peak output of over a GW.

Scale, isn't the problem with renewables - it's storage. However, with the current cost reductions that we're seeing with batteries, I think it'll be a solved conundrum within the decade. It won't be too long before solar with batteries is cost-competitive, as both technologies are getting cheaper exponentially.

Most people aren't experts in nuclear plant design and regulations. They rely on authorities, but when accidents that aren't supposed to happen end up happening, they (rightfully) start to distrust the ability of the authorities to provide them with proper risk assessment. If you tell someone that one Fukushima type disaster will happen every 30 years and that occurs, then they can at least judge the risk and decide whether or not it's worth it. If you tell someone there's little chance of that kind of disaster and then it happens, they're naturally going to be skeptical of your later pronouncements that "Of course that happened to THAT plant, but now there's REALLY little chance of that happening."

People might make a bad decision because of this, but the concern isn't irrational.

Rather than nuclear, which lends itself to big government, corruption, corporate projects, bond issues, and taxes, I'd prefer to see money instead poured into acceleration of the spread of solar, which is less centralized and easier to spread to all kinds of places. Sure, not everywhere, but the potential is pretty untapped.

Getting people live in a work camp, transport them to and fro, and otherwise compensate them for their strange living conditions takes money, too.

This may be a significant fraction of operation cost, even if the power at the generator's output connectors is produced cheaply. More expensive -> less competitive.

On waste storage, MSRs product much much less waste. A solid fuel, light water reactor achieves maybe 3% fuel efficiency, whereas it's somewhere north of 90% for the thorium MSR. In addition, the byproducts it does produce are mostly useless for nuclear weapons. Dr Carlo Rubbia (former director of CERN and 2016 Nobel Laureate) has stated one of the reasons funding for MSRs was cut by the US in the 70s was precisely because it's difficult to use them to produce nuclear weapons. There are even proposals for MSRs that are fuelled specifically by nuclear waste transuranics (e.g. http://www.transatomicpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/N...).

Honestly, I'm not so sure the ROI for renewables is anywhere close to 'winning', unless you ignore stuff like renewable intermittancy (meaning you need to build a crapload more highly expensive transmission infrastructure, or attach highly cost-effective batteries to the grid i.e. lead-acid batteries atm).

As for German nuclear, I suppose that won't be a problem once they've completely shut down all their nuclear reactors. Pity that the government official estimated cost of this is 55 billion Euros over the next decade. Although the (frankly more credible) 'unofficial' estimate puts the cost at 250 billion euros over the next decade. Not to mention the fact it's resulted in their co2 emissions increasing in both 2015 and 2016 (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhou...). Their own environment ministry now predicts they will probably not make their 2020 co2 reductions targets.

So other than the enormous cost and increase in co2 emissions, good policy.

I don't have the numbers, but I would also have to imagine that the government-owned reactors are the most expensive on paper because there will always be political powers that will want to make it appear more expensive than it is.

No, we want to sell them access to our grid and cheap power.

It's the same problem when people propose building giant solar arrays in the desert. Unfortunately, our large population centres tend to be concentrated in coastal areas, and transmission infrastructure isn't free (it's actually super expensive).

EDIT: Just to be clear, I have nothing against renewable energy (I suspect I'm coming off as a little negative here). I just hope that people aren't misled when costs aren't properly factored in (or overstated, in other cases). I actually think there's something rather special about solar PV: it's one of the few forms of electricity generation that isn't just another method of making heat to spin a turbine. Hell, despite its sophistication, fission is just a fancy way of boiling water...

They claim that their solar roof costs less than a traditional roof, and lasts longer. And produces sufficient power for the house.

This approach nicely works around a lot of the very real problems associated with the traditional, more centralized solar generation methodologies.

Carbon pricing always seemed like the elegant, 'neutral' solution to me, but it doesn't seem very popular. Also people seem to have trouble understanding that it makes perfect sense to cycle the revenue back to individuals (e.g. tax cuts), as the point is to make co2 emission intensive activity relatively more expensive (meaning people efficiently substitute away).

On the solar costs, it sounds like you've made a fair calculation (although I'm by no means an expert either, so not really qualified to make any kind of judgement). Although one other factor (which you might have already built in to your unit price) is the cost of transmission infrastructure: renewables (particularly wind) need to be geographically distributed to ameliorate their intermittancy issues (i.e. the wind only blows in some parts or the country at any given time, the sun is only visible from some perspectives etc.). Either that or, as you pointed out, you need quite a lot of energy storage capacity. Most likely there's some optimal mixture of both.

There's two other bits of fission tech that could be real game-changers: small modular reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor) and sub-critical reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier). Although I get the sense the latter is a bit more speculative (even though we have all the bits of technology to make it work in theory).

And I should probably correct something that I think I (mistakenly) said earlier as well: nuke plants, although they can scale up and down to try and match demand, it apparently is not a fast process (meaning at least some energy storage or 'peaking'/'energy sinking' capacity is required, somewhat mitigated by good predictive models of demand).

I think you're missing the connection. Sex is fun because evolution selects for things that improve reproduction. People that have fun having sex are going to reproduce a lot more than people who don't have fun having sex.

A flippant counter-example: eat only carbohydrates with a 1000 calorie deficit, drink 5 liters of water daily- 0 additional calories. How would you not gain water weight? Doesn't that count also?

The body is not a closed system.

The laws of thermodynamics tell you your caloric equations have to be balanced, but the internal state of the body can alter behaviors such as feeding and moving, so appealing to the laws of thermodynamics is pretty much off-topic. It's a common fallacy, and you're not alone in committing it. Obesity is increasingly seen as a metabolic disease with behavioral consequences rather than the other way around.

Here are two arbitrary papers I've blindly pulled out of the google-scholar hat, both of which discuss aspects of the issue at hand. Much has been written on the subject, and I respectfully urge you to investigate further.

1. http://www.nature.com/nrendo/journal/v2/n8/abs/ncpendmet0220...

2. https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2...

Also, if you're going to be sardonic, you really should make sure you're not missing anything...

I left unstated that you can also reject the hypothesis, but that's implied from what I've said--you can only reject, not prove, any particular theory of causation.

But we now live in bizarro world, where people who don't actually understand science or logic rationalize their conclusions by redefining the very methodologies modern society has used to pull itself out of the swamp.

In bizarro world there's "real" science that unveils the "truth", like Moses coming down from the mountain. And then there's all this messy business, dependent on process, contingent on qualitative and quantitative factors, that can be dismissed out of the hand. No matter that the former never existed, that everything we know comes from the latter. No matter that science is fundamentally a _process_, not a product.

"Troll", "Racist", "Creationist", "Climate change denier".

So much easier than just engaging with the substance and proving people wrong with facts, answering questions, admitting when we don't know and being intellectually honest.

Reasonable people are open to being proven wrong. But throwing an epithet while providing inadequate answers does the opposite. "Oh, I'm a troll? Ok I changed my mind I am convinced! Thanks!" That's not how it works. You're covering up your own lack of knowledge with emotion.