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Comment by afterburner | Hacker News Reader

Don't even bother talking about political capital. Nuclear is a worse option because it is overpriced, period. It's not just the downsides that are subsidized by the government, the actual running cost is hidden behind reams of bureaucracy, hidden program budgets, optimistic amortizations, and underestimated decommissioning costs. And even then the reactors still manage to go massively over budget with the initial construction.

People like to feel superior to others by citing fear as the reason nuclear is being avoided, but the real reason anyone should oppose it is straight up costs, without even any disasters factored in. Any other choice with the current and next-3-decades technology is just pissing money away, when it could be spent continuing renewables' rapid decline in cost.

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First, there can be little doubt that a substantial fraction of the high cost of nuclear is down to almost the entire west being scared stiff of the stuff for thirty years. If we gave actual scientists and engineers a real mandate to come up with a pragmatic, realistic (ie accepting a small amount of risk as acceptable, perhaps something on the scale of a single Fukushima every 30 years, just like we accept a small amount of risk everywhere else - driving, living in hurricane country, even flying isn't perfectly safe) regulatory regime, costs would surely come back down.

Second, funny how costs suddenly matter when it's about nuclear. Barely a month goes by without some new unimaginable mind numbing (wholly impractical) 'solution' to climate change that we're being implored to consider, because it's about saving the planet for our children. Nuclear is a perfectly practical, much cheaper (if still very expensive), 80% solution to climate change that we can actually start implementing today, but somehow it's not on the table. Somehow it doesn't seem all that plausible that cost is really the issue.

In short, climate change is the biggest issue facing the world (except nuclear and fracking). I'm very excited that the NYT is being practical here.

In 30 years, solar will have taken over. Using safe existing nuclear power plants is OK for me, building new ones seems stupid. For some countries, replacing an old unsafe one with a good new one seems plausible, but more seems a bad choice.

Perhaps the train has indeed left the platform, but the inflection point for solar only happened this year. If the parties to Kyoto had gone home back then and created said regulatory environment for nuclear and gotten on with it, we'd be looking at a 80-90% carbon emissions free electrical grid across the entire western hemisphere today. Climate change would have been more or less solved, and yes, we knew that then, this is not benefit-of-hindsight stuff.

There's a lot of histrionics around putting oil companies in the dock for crimes against humanity, but anyone who's campaigned against nuclear in the last 30 years can go right up and sit next to them.

I prefer not having fukushima events and I'm happy to wait and use coal in the meantime

The Fukushima reactor was old and outdated. Modern reactors are built with passive safety systems that essentially make it impossible for a Fukushima style meltdown to occur.

Ignorance and coal are not the answer.

There's still the centralization problem. Nuclear power is centralized and lends itself to government or corporate control of the energy system, in contrast with solar which gives each property owner individual control.

I'm not saying we can't have both, it's just that the problems with nuclear are not only (perceived or real) safety problems and the fact that it yields byproducts the most tempting use of which is to make nuclear weapons.

I agree with you. There are undoubtedly issues with nuclear power but the possibility of a Fukushima/Chernobyl meltdown happening in your backyard is not one of them. The main downside is that this understandable but unfounded fear get in the way of politicians having a meaningful discussions about the real issues of nuclear, such as the one you mentioned.

> Nuclear power is centralized and lends itself to government or corporate control of the energy system As opposed to what we have now?

As opposed to alternatives like solar.

Admittedly solar does not work everywhere, but there are transport mechanisms, and batteries, and it does work in some places. And we have to decide where to spend our money. Spending on solar is a choice that leads to more local control and less centralized control, as compared to spending on nuclear.

And it's not necessarily totally one or the other in every situation. I'm just saying I have a preference for things that favor local control.

If you are talking about grid-scale transport and storage mechanisms that move power in from "someplace [else]" we are back to a centralized power system.

Moreover, you still have yet to make a case for why a decentralized system is inherently good.

There's a strong argument for centralized systems where they are feasible, and that's that centralized systems are easy and decentralized systems are hard. We all know this from our own experience - it's easiest to use a Single Big Server if you can get away with it, it's tougher to use a cluster of systems coherently (CAP theorem comes into play), and as you continue to decentralize further and further you eventually need something like a blockchain to have any hope of consistency, latency becomes measured in minutes, etc.

Distributed systems are hard and we don't want to make the power grid any more complex than it needs to be. A few big centralized power sources are greatly preferable to many decentralized power sources from an engineering perspective, although perhaps not from your political perspective.

I guess the flipside on centralisation is it allows you to build much simpler (and much less) transmission infrastructure (unless we're talking about a scenario where everyone is 'energy independent' at the household level).

I do somewhat agree with you though: the sheer scale of current nuclear power plants (and the technical complexity) means the market is fairly uncompetitive. From what I understand, companies like Westinghouse will practically sell you the plant 'at cost' and then gouge you on the fuel supply contract.

Then again, some of the gen4 designs can work as small, modular fission reactors that might power a small town or community. I know the molten-salt reactor's initial intended applications were: (a) powering army bases and (b) powering a nuclear-powered strategic bombers (which seems rather insane to me).

That's another problem with Nuclear. After investing a large capital stake into a nuclear plant, the operators are unwilling to make hard decisions on safety because of how deeply they're invested. The Fukushima reactor design was "safe" for the time it was built, and flaws were found afterwards, yet the plant wasn't taken offline.

Modern passive safety systems are safe as far as the designers can anticipate, just like Fukushima, and there is a lot which can go wrong.

You have to think about the trade-offs... even Chernobyl only caused 56 direct deaths and a five-fold increase in the incidence of normal rate of thyroid cancer (a fairly treatable form of cancer) amongst the 18m children exposed.

I say "only" there not to diminish their suffering (it's a terrible thing happening to a huge number of people) but because the consequences of continuing to rely on coal are orders of magnitude worse.

And I'd prefer my eventual children grow up on a planet capable of supporting complex life indefinitely.

A coal power plant that is operating normally kills and injures more people, and releases vastly more radioactive particulates into the air, than the Fukushima disaster did.

"In 30 years" lol, at least the amount of time claimed for the solution is becoming more realistic. 20 years ago, people claimed solar was going to take over in "10 years".

You completely misunderstood me. I'm saying nuclear isn't going to get much better on the next thirty years, while solar has been and is already better, and is getting even better every year. Nuclear costs have been understated since they came out.

This is all predicated on fusion not panning out, correct? I'd also be very surprised to see that there have been no advances that made nuclear more efficient or safe in the last 30 years.

Existing nuclear power plants are old designs, much less safe than a new one would be.

New ones will be just as centralized as old ones. Less democratic, more control of your energy in the hands of a big player, as compared to solar.

Every design will be old after a few decades. If, when these old designs were being built, people were saying "they're not so safe, but in a few decades we'll have a much safer design" and are now saying that we have a safer design, then, it seems reliable. However, if people were saying a few decades ago, "These new designs are much safer than the old ones" and are now saying "Well, THESE new designs are much safer than the old ones" and in a few decades when these designs are old will be saying, "But really, THESE NEW designs are much safer than those old ones" than it's not surprising that there's so much fear and uncertainty from the general public.

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.

I'm not talking about frequency of disasters but rather their severity. It's not that one Fukushima-type disaster every 30 years is much better than one every 50 years, but that one Fukushima-type disaster is a lot better than one Chernobyl-type disaster.

Fukushima type plants have Chernobyl type disasters approximately never. That part was not a lie.

Supposedly new plant designs never have Fukushima type disasters.

> Every design will be old after a few decades.

Time passes. A truly stunning insight.

You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago.

Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life is simply a matter of weighing risks and benefits. The car you drive to work is not perfectly safe, and in fact all Americans have an extraordinarily high risk of dying in an auto accident compared to most other causes of death. But you decide that having a job is worth the risk of driving to work, and the cars today are certainly far safer than cars engineered in the 50s or even the 70s.

The risk of a modern nuclear plant is far lower than one engineered during the 50s (as most current reactors are). And truthfully, even those present a much lower health/safety risk than coal plants do.

The biggest problem at this point is that NIMBYs who don't want any upgrades or modernization to take place have stifled replacement of older reactors with safer and more modern ones, and prevented proper reprocessing and disposal of the waste in safe repositories. Instead we just run the older reactors far past their design lifespans and allow the waste to pile up on-site. If you want to bring up Fukushima - most of the contamination was caused by discharging water from the spent fuel pools that are needed to hold all that waste that piles up due to lack of proper disposal.

In other words - NIMBYs literally caused the vast majority of the contamination from the Fukushima accident.

> Time passes. A truly stunning insight.

completely unnecessary sarcasm.

On the other hand, you didn't offer any rebuttal to the arguments I offered, either. You just found fault with a single line and decided to go with it.

A tone argument is a logical fallacy, and I made a substantive post. Do you care to offer anything else in response?

It is interesting how you say that nuclear might be cheaper and at the same time accept an incident like fukushima every 30 years like you pay 1000 peanuts and that it alright again. Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power. This has nothing to do with fear about the technology itself but about the decrease in property value in vicinity of the plant. So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows.

So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one? And while I agree that we need some back up plan to stabilize the net load, that also wont be nuclear power as those plants are not fast in start up managment either.

Any such decrease in property value is precisely because of the irrational fear of nuclear power.

> So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows.

Government should not fund or provide any guarantees to such projects; we should tax carbon and let people decide what to do (in which case, we wouldn't even need to argue which is cheaper and we can just let power companies figure it out).

> So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one?

Isn't solar more expensive when you factor in the cost of batteries (which would be required if solar scales up; i.e. a diseconomy of scale)? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It's completely rational to reduce property values when there is a risk you will be forced to move and lose all your possessions. If the risk is say 0.3% over the next hundred years paying every homeowner ~20,000$ within 40 miles when the plant is built to offset that risk is completely rational, but would make nuclear Even less viable.

>there is a risk you will be forced to move and lose all your possessions.

Can you give me a street address for somewhere that this isn't a possibility?

My house is heated by natural gas - it could literally explode while I'm at work today.

Risk X exists has nothing to do with risk Y. Nuclear powerplants increase risks so the local population should be compensated.

Hard to assess that risk. No modern plant has had catastrophic failure like that. Essentially there's no data to extrapolate from.

Fukushima exclusion zone disagrees with you. Sure, if we limited reactors to 'safe' locations that reduces risks, but we still put them in stupid areas such as near fault lines.

"No modern plant"

"No true Scotsman." There are recent powerplants built with similar designs that would have had similar failure modes.

The core issue was the sea wall not the powerplant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant was closer to the quake but it's giant sea wall made a huge difference.

Foul! The Fukushima plants were among the oldest in service. They were indeed not modern in design by any definition.

The two direct deaths where from an insufficient sea wall not the reactor design. Saying future reactor designs fix the problem is a mistake. Because again it was not the reactor design that caused their deaths.

So again, saying some hypothetical perfect design exists and it would obviously have a large enough see wall, and that is what your defending is a true Scotsman argument.

PS: Remember, future designs also have future defects.

When people think of the Fukushima disaster the two direct and unfortunate deaths caused by the insufficient sea wall are not what come to mind. The meltdown of the reactor is the primary concern. If a meltdown had never occurred the Fukushima incident would have never been mentioned on this thread or in any other conversation about the safety issues with nuclear power. So I'm sorry but bringing up the inadequate sea wall is a complete straw man argument when talking about safety issues from nuclear power.

Now, back on topic, the nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima was caused by a faulty reactor design. Really it was a poorly designed safety system. The Tsunami that came after the initial earthquake took out the backup power generators at the plant. These backup generators were responsible for powering the cooling pumps that are supposed to prevent a meltdown. This is the main fault in the design and one that is not present in modern reactor designs. Modern reactors now have passive safety systems, i.e. if the power fails the safety measures will be triggered automatically and will not depend on outside power to complete their task. One example of this is using an elevated water tower to store the cooling water with a valve that is kept shut electronically. In the case of a power failure the valve would automatically open (since that is where it's in a stable equilibrium) and gravity would 'pump' the cooling water onto the reactor preventing a meltdown.

Without the damage from the tidal wave Fukushima would have been far less of an issue. With a proper wall there would not have been significant issues with the Tsunami, thus making that wall a critical safety feature that failed.

As to passive safety systems, many modern designs can't be left unattended for a month. Because they are not passively safe only being able to go longer without issues.

Anyway this is all abstract pick a design that would have been safe without a sea wall or direct intervention after the fact. While being both proven and cost effective.

PS: On second thought as you said modern design, the worst plant built in the last 10 years is still a 'modern design' and close to where many people live.

I will admit that had there been a better sea wall the Fukushima incident would have much less severe. But I still think it's beside the point.

As to your point about passive safety systems only working for a finite period of time before causing issues, would you mind providing some sources for this claim? As far as I know this is completely false. The very nature of 'passive' safety system is that the laws of physics provide a negative feedback loop that stop a chain reaction and dissipate heat away from the core. This isn't the case for every reactor design of the past few decades, but that's not my argument, I'm simply stating that there are reactor designs out there that are completely passively safe (in terms of preventing a meltdown). You will still be left with the radioactive remnants of the (non-active) core but this can be easily shielded by water for an indefinite period of time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety goes through the a list, but basically you have active vs passive designs based on a range of features. Generally, passive safety refers to the primary loop.

A nuclear battery can be 100% passively safe for decades but they don't produce a lot of power. A pure passive system that's producing 1GW of electric power is producing 2.5GW worth of heat. Which is really hard to dump into the environment passively without connections to external systems. In the event of a tidal wave your pipes to and from the sea are likely blocked which means there is some pool that is going to boil.

Even cooling tower designs often actively cool the tower through the use of water curtains. It's not needed but significantly reduces costs. Now, that that is building up the internal passive designs starts to reduce power. But thus only operates over a range. Further it is going to produce as close to 2.5 GW of heat as it can.

So, now there is no external pool or connection to the sea and here is where you see problems.

PS: Which all comes back to passive designs costing more and being less efficient. Sure, it 100% passive is possible physically just not economically viable.

TEPCO had a modern plan to fix the issue before it happened. They decided not to act. Nuclear power takes the decision out of your hands, and puts it in the hands of organizations like that. I prefer something like solar which keeps power in my own control, local, decentralized, not decided by some huge behemoth that is driven by money and actuarial charts.

Yet the topic is, will future nuclear plants be needed to slow global warming? Future plants (indeed all current plants) will include safety plans and devices. Such plants have not had catastrophic events.

Sure, but I live underneath an air traffic corridor. I want to be compensated for the chance that a plane crashes into my house.

I doubt the odds of that are anywhere close to the ~2/1,000 odds of a significant nuclear accident over 50 years of operation.

Granted, it's hard to get real numbers and future designs may be safer. But, if you include military reactors there have been more than 2 significant accidents per 1,000 reactors. So while some people say they are very safe, people also said that about the Titanic.

If your house explodes due to natural gas, your property and that of all your neighbors and their neighbors and the surrounding community isn't contaminated for a period of time exceeding your natural lifespan. If you have a radiation accident instead, it very well may be. The two scenarios are quite different.

They are identical scenarios. The only difference is the scale.

In both scenarios I am "rolling the dice" on a catastrophic failure in exchange for energy - and if I am home when it happens it will shorten my lifespan significantly.

Saying the scenarios are identical doesn't make them so. And scale matters.

But... I'd say with truly modern nuclear power, safety is less of an issue. Perception of safety is still an issue. So your home value will go down. No biggie; you may be ok with that.

The issue that really bugs me though is that with nuclear, a large government or corporate entity has decided to roll the dice for you on your behalf. With something like solar, there is more possibility for local and individual control. So instead of bond issues, taxes, state-mandated insurance fees, contracts, and control by faceless entities with names like TEPCO who make decisions like "no let's not do the safety retrofit" you get to decide for yourself.

And, no gas explosions either! So, the best of both worlds.

I prefer local control. Nuclear is too centralized.

The scenarios are the same.

Gas explosion: house destroyed, possessions gone, death if I am home, move to a new home.

Nuclear incident: house is uninhabitable, possessions gone, possibility of shortened lifespan if I receive excessive radiation, move to a new home.

Actually you are right: they aren't the same because the nuclear incident has a better outcome.

>I prefer local control. Nuclear is too centralized.

I'm willing to bet that you don't actually believe this about any other type of government.

In the first case you can sell the land in some cases for more than 1/2 the value of the house, thus making them different.

Not to mention the number of homes destroyed in a gas explosion world wide is tiny by comparison.

You're comparing two different things.

If your house explodes, fix the source and rebuild the house. Maybe it's time for a major remodel anyway.

If there's a nuclear incident, what are you going to do?

The scenarios are the same.

Gas explosion: house destroyed, possessions gone, death if I am home, move to a new home.

Nuclear incident: house is uninhabitable, possessions gone, possibility of shortened lifespan if I receive excessive radiation, move to a new home

Gas explosion: House destroyed, you still own the land, you can rebuild on the land. Even if you move to a new home, you can sell the land for the going rate in the are (which will likely drop because more land is coming on the market, but perhaps not too much).

Nuclear incident: You own irradiated land. Good luck, maybe the government will buy it off you, or the power company if stipulated as some penalty.

One destroys some of your local property, the other destroys the value of all your local property.

Assuming each homeowner near the power plant has a $1M cost to move, that works out to a $3,000/person cost ($1,900 after time discounting at a 1% discount rate). Assuming there are 100,000 people within 40 miles of the plant, that's $190M, or 5-20% of the cost of a plant.

This hardly seems like an insurmountable barrier.

100,000 homes within 40 miles is probably on the low side. Also, a reasonable penalty for unwanted risk bumps up the costs. Further the value of property and possessions likely increases faster than inflation making the time value equation tricky.

More importantly Nuclear is already to expencive before this cost, increasing things further and it's really not worth it.

Also the average American home price is $189k, not $1M. Round up to $200k for cost to move, and we're down to $380/person.

Add in the fact that the worst disaster (Chernobyl) has an exclusion zone of 1004 miles^2 (equivalent to a 17 mile circle, rather than your 40 miles) and we discover that my initial estimate was about 25x too pessimistic.

I'm beginning to think your concerns about cost are FUD. Out of curiosity, since cost is such a big concern for you, do you hold similar concerns about our bloated infrastructure costs? For example, given the bloated costs of the 2nd ave subway in NYC (1 mile of track there costs as much as the entire Delhi Metro), should we also curtail this project? Or is cost only an issue for nuclear energy?

Cost to move is only part of the problem, you need to move while losing all your stuff which may or may not include your car etc. Further, this is not limited to housing but includes farms / offices / schools / factory's and infrastructure like highways and water pipes etc.

As to area, nobody lives in the ocean and houses next to an exclusion zone also have huge drops in property values. So, yes some sort of decreasing metric, as a sanity check the property value drop from being within sight of a nuclear power plant is going to be more than 300$. Further, actual exclusion zones may depend on wind so risk really does extend out to 40 miles.

Edit: As an upside, if you included these costs then there would be a push to place reactors in the middle of nowhere to lower costs which IMO is a very good thing.

PS: As a sanity check fukushima is estimated to cost tax payers ~188 billion$ and many people are worse off after the disaster so real costs are higher than that. If the odds are 0.2% that's ~400 million vs your estimate of 300 * 100,0000 = 30 million.

What if you do the same calculation for Indian Point? I suspect the cost of relocating everyone in New York City and boroughs would be pretty substantial.

>100,000 homes within 40 miles is probably on the low side.

Homes, not people. 100k would be a very high number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center for example is close to and up river of NYC.

So, as an average 100,000 seems low even if the median might be below that.

The costs of solar are decreasing over time. And solar is more decentralized, so you're not stuck with huge government boondoggles, corruption, and corporate overlords.

Source for corruption in private electricity firms? I don't think it's particularly high.

Who are corporate overlords?

Ever heard of Enron? Also just google for "nuclear corruption" and you'll get a lot of reading material. For example this article http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/nuclear-cor... which has links out to sources including the US DOJ about corruption cases in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the US, and more. It's a huge problem. And the key players would like to keep it all hidden, so your being in the dark about it is no surprise.

Corporate overlords (can't tell if you are trolling, but I'll answer) is just a shorthand for corporate decision makers who prioritize corporate profits over other considerations like consumer benefit, care of the environment, freedom of consumer choice, fair dealing, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Cheaper compared to every other suggested solution to climate change. If climate change wasn't a thing, sure, I'd probably be on board with writing off nuclear and waiting for some combination of solar and wind and storage to take over.

Also, regardless of who pays, a Fukushima-event every few decades is several orders of magnitude cheaper than flood-securing New York City alone (and there are a lot more places in the world that will need flood securing).

I doubt the flood-securing work is avoidable. But maybe it could be less bad.

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.

I would prefer to live near a nuclear plant than within sight of a wind farm.

As long as we're exploring hypothetical choices, would you prefer to live near a nuclear plant over living in a house with energy provided by solar tiles on the roof?

Yes, because I like to have power at night ;)

Smooth out power delivery with energy storage such as batteries?

Since you seem not to have thought of it, you can also get power from the grid at night. Or from batteries. The grid gets its power from diverse sources.

So your logic doesn't quite hold up.

Your logic doesn't hold up. You cannot ignore externalities when... arguing against them to begin with.

I'd much rather live with a nuclear power station in my backyard, than install solar knowing I'm robbing those who can't afford it for my usage of the free grid battery.

Rooftop solar as implemented today is not sustainable, and is a regressive tax.

So the only honest way to do this is with your own energy storage - e.g. batteries. I do agree the allure of being completely off-grid sounds great, until you price it out. So I choose nuclear reactor in my backyard until energy storage tech catches up.

> Rooftop solar as implemented today is not sustainable, and is a regressive tax.

So are electric cars. Both are solvable problems, and will be solved as adoption increases.

Works well in e.g. California. May work less well in Maine. Especially when it snows.

Much of Europe and US is situated too far north for trouble-free solar operation. Other power sources do make sense there (or, for me, "here").

I keep hearing that several hundred thousand square miles of solar panels in Sahara could power the entire hemisphere. They could if transportation was 100% efficient. Even if we pretend that we can build humongous power lines out of superconducting material, maintaining them is going to cost us a lot still.

Still nuclear. And it would be easier to take the solar advocate more seriously if they weren't also opposed to mining for the very materials they made from.

What's wrong with a wind farm, out of curiosity? I personally love driving by a windmill farm that's near a local highway.

Driving by it to see a novelty is different from living next to an eyesore.

I don't understand why a large structure is automatically an eyesore. It doesn't emit smoke. It's mostly pretty quiet. Are windfarms uglier than, say... a nicely constructed bridge like the SF Bay Bridge?

>"Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power."

I don't understand. Why can't we put these things in the absolute middle of nowhere? Workers live on-site and you don't turn the camp into some sort of "work town". Problem solved, unless I'm missing something?

Transmission of electricity is not free, you have to build and maintain a high-power transmission line, and also waste some of the power for transmission inefficiency.

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.

> Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power.

In fact, I do have a nuclear power plant in my backyard (relatively speaking). Per Wikipedia, it's the largest power plant in the US by net generation. I'd be happy to see them add 3 more reactors to the site and double operating capacity to ~8GW.

"It is interesting how you say that nuclear might be cheaper and at the same time accept an incident like fukushima every 30 years like you pay 1000 peanuts and that it alright again. Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power. This has nothing to do with fear about the technology itself but about the decrease in property value in vicinity of the plant. So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows."

Nuclear done right will be a great solution going forward. We need a SpaceX of nuclear to out-compete the dinosaur companies like GE. Thorcon Power (thorconpower.com) is one good candidate.

With molten salt technology, there is zero chance of a meltdown or explosive distribution of material. Thorcon's plan is to site the reactors 30 m underground.

"So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one? And while I agree that we need some back up plan to stabilize the net load, that also wont be nuclear power as those plants are not fast in start up managment either."

Thorcon's estimate is that power cost $.02-$.05 per KWH. The ramp up or down for a nuclear plant is a non-issue because fuel costs are negligible.

Indeed. Production and use of solar and wind cause more deaths for GW/H than current nuclear fission (which is responsible for around 19.5% of the US' energy generation [0]). The problem is that deaths from nuclear generation are concentrated in very short, dramatic events. I mean, if you're looking for the biggest killer (by at least an order of magnitude), it's fossil fuels: boringly due to the reduction in air quality, leading to higher incidence of asthma/respiratory related deaths.

And although this guy is clearly keen on nuclear fission (MSRs specifically), he's actually gone to the trouble or running the numbers on cost, which you are free to critique (http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear...). Here are his four conclusions:

- It would cost over $29 Trillion to generate America’s baseload electric power with a 50 / 50 mix of wind and solar farms, on parcels of land totalling the area of Indiana.

- It would cost over $18 Trillion with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) farms in the southwest deserts, on parcels of land totalling the area of West Virginia.

- We could do it for less than $3 Trillion with AP-1000 Light Water Reactors, on parcels totalling a few square miles.

- We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel.

As for those arguing against nuclear power because of well publicised nuclear accidents, it's worth considering the facts:

- Three Mile Island: no direct fatalities, average exposure dose equivalent to a chest x-ray. Some academic dispute about whether it increased cancer-related deaths, in many cases because the numbers being argued over are incredibly small.[1]

- Fukushima: WHO 2013 report concluded health impacts likely to be below detectable levels, although slight increase in cancer probability if linear no-threshold hypothesis applied. More people were killed because of the (probably unnecessary) evacuation of the surrounding areas.[2]

- Chernobyl - UN estimates final total of premature deaths from disaster will be around 4000 (49 of these were immediate). Also made a sizeable area of land uninhabitable for some time.[3]

A 2012 estimate of 'deaths per trillion kWh' [4] from various energy sources has it at:

- Coal (global): 100,000

- Natural gas: 4,000

- Solar (rooftop only): 440

- Wind: 150

- Nuclear (global): 90

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident_hea...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

Except, he's missing quite a few facts.

Like, that there's still unsolved engineering problems with finding naterials that survive the corrosive environment within of molten salt reactors.

Like, that he didn't inckude waste storage at all.

Like, that he calculated prices for renewables based on buying the most expensive panels, but for nuclear, based on the lowest estimates.

In reality, the ROI level of renewables has already won against nuclear.

And then there's the problem that also plagued plants in Germany, massive corruption and bribing of investigators because it's cheaper than actually building safe plants. It's no coincidence that the only success story for nuclear is a country where all reactors are government-owned and don't have to turn a profit necessarily.

And this brings us to the last problem:

Most new CO2 will soon be produced in developing countries, with unstable governments and unreliable public systems.

And you want to give those governments nuclear reactors? Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc?

Your point about the materials challenge for MSRs is very true: for the designs I've seen the 'solution' is super corrosive. However, I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge, and its more a question of durability over time (and then subsequent maintenance costs). Our water plumbing systems will eventually succumb to the rigours of time; it will just be a very long time...

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.

Yeah the:

- We could do it for less than $3 Trillion ...

- We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors

Seems very dubious. The first successful MSRs were built over 60 years ago. The reason none are in commercial use is probably because the costs would work out higher than conventional reactors.

Yeah it's possible he's overstating the case, although he seems to have gone in to quite a bit of detail estimating the costs. But you'll see from some of the comments above those might be distorted.

My own very crude back of the envelope, for replacing all worldwide coal generation with AP-1000s (at $7bn a pop) puts the cost somewhere in the $6T range. This is assuming I got the unit conversions correct...

As for MSRs, there's some very interesting history there. There is, of course, the fact that MSRs weren't as good at producing the necessary byproducts for making nuclear bombs (remember this was during during the cold war). But the other accident of history was simply that Oak Ridge National Labs (who ran a prototype MSR for a few years) just happened to be in the wrong part of the country: the story goes that Nixon apparently wanted to shore up political support in (California?...) and so pushed money more in the direction of the LMFBR.

Nixon also fired the director of ORNL too, apparently because his support for MSRs and advocacy for increased nuclear safety didn't gel too well with that administration. At that point MSRs were kind of forgotten about...

I didn't know the Nixon stuff. Nick Touran has a good summary of the practical difficulties if you haven't seen it https://whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html#problems

Thanks for the link, it's an interesting read.

It definitely seems like the big challenge for MSRs is of the materials/chemical engineering variety. I guess some of these could be designed around: for instance I've heard Kirk Sorensen (LFTR advocate) suggest situating the entire reactor and plumbing complex in a drain/basin of sorts. In the case of a pipe break the fuel(s) simply drains in to a passively cooled storage tank (deep underground).

Also some of the chemical handling would require great care. Fluorine, for instance, is not something I'd want to mess around with...

My experience with development cost estimates suggests the easy parts are easy and the interesting parts might as well be splatter-paint.

> It's no coincidence that the only success story for nuclear is a country where all reactors are government-owned and don't have to turn a profit necessarily.

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.

Well, France has no reason to do that – they (with > 80% nuclear) have every reason to make them seem as good and effective as possible.

> And you want to give those governments nuclear reactors? Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc?

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

Apparently the "source" (a Forbes blogpost) of the number of deaths stretched quite far to find people who died from wind power:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/27/forbes-reaches-to-fi...

> parcels of land totalling the area of Indiana

This to me is one of the biggest issue with solar (and wind) is you need huge amounts of land if you want to really try to replace what is being generated by fossil fuels. Sunlight just doesn't provide all that much energy per square foot. When we stand in the sun on a clear day, we feel comfortable warmth not searing heat.

Do all the cost estimates showing Solar is competitive include the land acquisition costs?

This is a good question. I suspect the answer is no, given most of the exuberant headlines about renewable costs don't even factor in the renewable intermittancy problem (which massively increases the total cost of generation and transmission/storage).

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...

One reasonable approach is, for example, Tesla's solar powered roofs along with its home integrated power wall for storage.

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.

Yes, that is a huge amount of space if you concentrate it, but think about all the idle space out there -- the many many acres of rooftops of a city, for example, or the acreage of interstate highways. There are a number of places where solar can be placed where it can be ubiquitous, but at the same time, invisible. Nuclear needs a significant amount of dedicated space, whereas solar can coexist with a significant amount of uses.

The fully-baked lifetime costs of nuclear power are quite vigorously debated; it's hard to get accurate numbers, since in general there are unpriced government insurance policies backing the plants (i.e. the government will step in to pay the $10B cleanup costs in the unlikely event that something goes wrong).

One way of attempting to answer this question is to look at France, where 75% of their power is nuclear; their price per KWh for consumers up to 2015 was lower than the average for Europe (12th-cheapest in Europe according to Wikipedia, and 2nd-lowest for commercial), but that almost certainly doesn't price the government insurance mentioned above [2].

Note that due to a lot of electric heating in residential stock, France is very susceptible to increased demand in cold winters; in such situations they have to import from the rest of Europe, sometimes at peak hours. And as of 2016, a bunch of French reactors were shut down over safety concerns, so the prices there are spiking dramatically [3].

Another approach; let's look at cost per installed MW of power for current projects. For solar, that's now beating wind (and half the price of coal) for the newest installs, at $1.65M/MW [4]. According to the World Nuclear Association (who I'm going to assume will give the best possible numbers that can be said with a straight face), nuclear installs are ranging from ~$2.5M/MW to $7M/MW of capacity, with most cases closer to the high end of that range [5].

Now, load factor appears to be around 20% for US desert installs [6], so you need 4.5x more installed capacity to meet nuclear's load factor of 90%. Load-factor-adjusted costs: solar $8.25M/MW, nuclear $2.8M/MW - $7.8M/MW. That makes it look a lot closer than your numbers suggest. A deeper analysis would include pricing energy storage (which increases the cost of solar more than nuclear, but does need to be considered for an all-nuclear mix) and subsidies (which predominantly increases the cost of nuclear).

I haven't done more than skim your link, which seems interesting reading, and I'll dig into that later. But the from-first-principles analysis doesn't seem to be using the right costs for solar; it has `Cost: $12.3 Billion` for a 500MW CSP installation, or $24.6M/MW. That's a factor of 15 above the observed cost of installing a modern solar plant. It might be accurate for a CSP plant, but that's not the cheapest solar available.

In summary, I'm somewhat agnostic on this issue, but the energy storage issues with solar/wind seem like they could push the cost up substantially as we start to get towards majority-renewable on our grid, so I tentatively support building some new nuclear as a short-to-medium-term hedge. But we should be sure to do so with as little subsidies as possible, so that the installation price reflects the true cost, rather than kicking the can down the road on billions of dollars of decommissioning costs. And entirely new reactor designs (e.g. fast breeders) could change the calculus entirely.

Caveat emptor; I'm not in the energy business, so there's probably some missing steps here. Please let me know if you spot one.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-ene... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Manage... [3]: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-27/french-shocked-powe... [4]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-ene... [5]: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as... [6]: http://euanmearns.com/estimating-global-solar-pv-load-factor...

My thinking is pretty similar to yours. Especially the point on subsidies, although I would modify it slightly: if subsidies are employed (explicitly, or implicitly in the case of 'nuclear insurance'), governments should aim to keep them as technologically neutral as possible. I'm not arguing against subsidies (especially at this point): if it's a choice between climate catastrophe or handing out subsidies I'd definitely go with the subsidies. However, I think it's counter-productive (and more costly in the long-run) for governments to distort alternative energy markets by 'picking winners' (as they always seem to do). In other words, subsidise equally.

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).

Fukushima was a failure of risk engineering. It's sad that you seem to think that we need to "accept" man-made disasters.

>>It's sad that you seem to think that we need to "accept" man-made disasters.

There will never be a completely safe man-made system.

For example, when designing a system for Functional Safety[0], none of the applicable standards (IEC 61508, ISO 13849, etc.) require that the product eliminate risk completely, because that is literally impossible in any complex system.

Instead, you reduce the risk based on the expected harm according to the function "[likelihood of dangerous incident / time unit] * [amount of harm caused if dangerous incident occurs]" until that expected harm is below a certain threshold.

Even accounting for Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, etc., nuclear already outperforms other sources of centralized power generation when you measure the deaths per unit energy produced[1]. Politically, the public may never accept this simple truth, because we are afraid of "big" things far out of proportion to their average actual danger to us. But it is a simple truth nonetheless.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_safety

[1]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energ...

1 Fukushima/30yrs? You remember that places linke Fukushima and chernobyl are contminated for the next couple hundred years, right? Not to mention nuclear fallout, endangered species in those regions, groundwater being poisoned, etc

I agree. Nuclear fission power seems to be associated with a negative learning curve [1][2]. This means that as the newly installed capacity goes up, price per unit actually increases. As solar is already becoming competitive and is experiencing a positive learning curve (costs going down rapidly as production expands) it would be pretty silly to invest in nuclear at this point.

[1] https://thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

Except people also forget that renewables' are also highly subsidized. You can't use a double standard here.

And cost should anyway be the least of concern as global warming costs will be higher no matter what if we fail to control it.

"renewables' are also highly subsidized"

Only this not true any more. Over the last decade Solar has become price competitive sans subsidies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU

Even before that the subsidies for solar have been dwarfed by the subsidies that are in place for nuclear power. Recently in Germany the nuclear companies' lobbyists managed to get rif of the problem of end storage of nuclear waste by shifting that burden to the general public. Great job!

> Over the last decade Solar has become price competitive sans subsidies (...)

// I haven't watched the video. Would love to see a text version thereof if it exists.

Is it per unit of power that can be produced under optimal conditions or per unit of power averaged over a year? Note that half of the time in a year it's dark, so in order to produce the same amount of energy in a year you need a solar power plant with at least 2x power rating of a power plant that can operate continuously.

Does this include the cost (monetary (capital) and in additional energy that has to be generated due to storage losses) of storing the energy over periods of darkness and inclement weather?

It gets worse. Unless we develop viable (and affordable) grid-level battery technology, the intermittency problem of renewables makes most of them a non-starter from a cost perspective. To cover 'always on' baseload demand, you need about 5-6 time that amount of maximum generating capacity, optimally geographically dispersed to ensure at least one or a few are producing sufficient power while the others are essentially 'off'.

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.

Unless we develop viable (and affordable) grid-level battery technology

Do you think grid-level energy storage needs to be batteries, as opposed to other forms? If so, why?

There is only so much pumped hydro storage you can make...

Pumped hydro seems simplest, and we often have the power plant already in place.

But temperature differential storage, pressure differential storage, and creating hydrogen all seems to scale better to me.

I've read some things about pumped hydro. The losses reduce efficiency and the amount of water you need to pump is pretty unbelievably large.

Not at all, and sorry I guess I misspoke. Whatever works: pumping water up hill, spinning flywheels etc. all sound fine to me. It's simply a question of whether it meets current energy demand, environmental impact, and cost.

Come to think of it, I've only ever looked at the per KW hour cost of batteries (lead-acid seems to be the clear winner). You wouldn't happen to have references for other energy storage methods?

Other than Wikipedia, no; I was hoping you would. That's why I asked. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage

I think it's an interesting field though.

Me too. I recently read about these hybrid battery-capacitor thingies that sounded pretty promising. I'll see if I can dig up the link.

EDIT: here we go - http://www.nature.com/articles/srep04315 . Lithium iron phosphate batteries (LiFePO).

Although I'm assuming this particular combination doesn't provide favourable enough economics (or it would probably be a household name already), I can definitely see how this approach in general could. You could have the best of both worlds: cheap, but slow charge/discharge storage combined with the ability to very quickly scale up to meet peak daily demand for a limited (but sufficient) period of time.

David Mackay's "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" has good numbers comparing many different forms of energy storage:

http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/.

It's a "hard-headed" engineering look at our energy options written by a physicist. It might be a bit outdated (published in 2008), but when it came out it was the best compendium I'd seen.

Note that some of the statements there (e.g. estimates of areas needed to provide power from solar energy) are not technology-dependent (ie. are about physical limitations).

MacKay's estimate of areas needed to provide power from solar energy are technology-dependent. See for example:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_41....

"If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have 10% × 100 W/m^2 × 200 m^2 per person ≈ 50 kWh/day/person.

I assumed only 10%-efficient panels, by the way, because I imagine that solar panels would be mass-produced on such a scale only if they were very cheap, and it’s the lower efficiency panels that will get cheap first."

This assumption was invalidated by the actual trajectory of solar power since 2008. Nobody is building solar farms with 10% efficiency panels any more. Low efficiency is too expensive -- because it requires more glass and aluminum for the panels, more cabling, racking, and labor for installation. Low cost, low efficiency Chinese panels, like the GCL Poly ones used at India's giant new solar farm that HN just had an article about, are now in the mid-teens. (I looked up the data sheet after getting a glimpse of the GCL shipping crates on that Indian project site):

http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/PV-Specials/GCL%20245.pdf

If they used the middle-of-the-road GCL‐P6‐60‐240 that's a 14.7% module; 47% better than MacKay estimated as the best one could hope for from large scale solar projects. And the minimum competitive efficiency for even low-price panels is still creeping up. (Though large scale storage sufficiently affordable to get UK energy primarily from PV is still but a dream.)

MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-afﬂuent person" and then multiplying that value by the whole population of the UK: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c2/page_22....

This leads to large over-estimates relative to actual measured UK energy consumption, particularly from air travel and automobile travel.

Fair point. He says that the 20% estimate is unlikely to be revised upward, but it's "unlikely because you can't get more than 30% using reasonable approaches to PV" and not "unlikely because you can't get more than 30% due to thermodynamics" (I can't find what's _that_ limit quickly).

> MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-afﬂuent person" and then multiplying that value by the whole population of the UK (...)

Here I'd agree with him: we need to find energy sources that will deal with projected future demands.

Projected future demands for energy per capita in the UK and other developed countries grow very slowly, or even decline. Primary energy consumption per capita in the UK has actually declined since 2008 when MacKay wrote his book (you'll need to select countries yourself to see the data):

http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Energy-Consumption-per-Capita...

You might think that's just because the UK doesn't do manufacturing any more, but look at manufacturing powerhouses Japan and Germany: they also have seen per-capita declines since 2008.

Ecologists and economists alike seem to have a default assumption that human resource consumption is insatiable; they just have different attitudes about that assumption. I don't know how many years of trends like the one I just linked it will take before they reassess resource satiety.

Thanks. This has been recommended to me in the past, though I haven't yet taken the time to read it.

A company called ARES is working on a system that basically consists of automated electric trains carrying bricks uphill to store and then coasting back downhill with them to retrieve power. Basically pumped hydro but without a need for large quantities of water (and really ideal for installation in the desert, where there's a lot of open land with gentle slopes). They say efficiency near 80% with a first installation going in in Nevada in 2017.

This is comparable efficiency to batteries but less expensive and with significant reuse of well-established technologies and industries (e.g. most of the construction work can be done by existing rail contractors).

Although battery technology continues to advance, my suspicion is that large-scale electricity storage is going to tend to be mechanical for cost reasons.

Huh. That's some pretty impressive efficiency. I don't know why, but the thought of a train carrying a brick uphill only to bring it back down again strikes me as a little bit comical :)

Very interesting though. I wonder how far those trains travel, and if there's some way to use them simultaneously as energy storage and transmission infrastructure. I guess it depends on how the energy is recaptured. I'm just wondering because that could solve some of the cost issues associated with putting big solar arrays out in the middle of the desert...

Something like a linear alternator maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_alternator

Is this the ARES you mean? http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

Love that they call it the ‘Sisyphus Railroad’.

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.

I'm surprised that hydro could be considered safer than nuclear. That seems incorrect based on past experience.

Hydro dam failures have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths during the past 50 years or so. That's far more than Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters, even accounting for later deaths due to radiation-related diseases.

The Banqiao Dam failure alone in 1973 killed 171,000 and displaced more than 11 million people.

I've studied and written on the Banquiao Dam Failure, (1975, by the way) several times. It's an interesting failure, particularly as compared with nuclear disasters.

First and foremost, it was an administration, planning and design failure, compounded by weather, enineering, response, and other factors.

The background was adminstrative pride, ignored engineering warnings, insufficient spillways, poor communications, and no disaster planning.

The immediate trigger was an unprecedented "perfect storm" -- the collision of a tropical typhoon and a cold front -- unleashing 1,000+ mm of rain in 24 hours, completely overwhelming the dam.

The area was densely populated, what communications there were were down on account of the storm, and rougly 20,000 people were killed in the immediate flooding. The remaining 100,000 deaths occurred due to disease and starvation in the area as a result of no effective disaster and recovery response.

The most telling characteristics of Banqiao though are these:

1. Some 40 years after the incident, the region is not a nondiscretionary multi-centennary wildlife preserve and exclusion zone, but home to some 17 million inhabitants. That is, once a flood zone stops being a flood zone, it returns to its previous state relatively quickly.

2. Banqiao itself is far and away the most extreme accident of its type. There have been other major dam-related incidents, in India and Italy (Vajont Dam tsunami), but each was some two orders of magnitude lower in deaths than Banqiao.

The common elements in virtually all dam disasters are 1) poor understanding of risks, 2) suppression of criticisms, and 3) poor or no warning systems.

Keep in mind that dams are simple systems from an engineering standpoint: a large mass of material which regulates water flows. And yet these do fail with some regularity most especially in less-developed areas. The premise that the complexity of nuclear power plants will somehow pose fewer risks lacks credibility.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

https://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/the-forgotten-...

The german term "Stromgestehungskosten" is a well defined standing term for the price you have to pay for power generation. This price has come down to 5ct/kWh and the estimation is that these costs will be undercut in the upcoming solar projects. So the "Stromgestehungskosten" for solar going to go down even more.

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.

I couldn't agree more with your point about electricity car take-up. I've made the same point in the past but it's always gotten a lukewarm reception. In my mind, it's probably our best chance of achieving sufficient scale grid energy storage. It's also kinda brilliant on Elon Musk's part: he's selling people these 'mobile grid batteries' while also being super long solar.

And the cars are anything but boring golf carts. A stigma electric cars have had for a long time. These might even get you laid.

For the price they better not be anything close to a golf cart.

More like a gold cart.

I think the problem is that it would create a new form of range anxiety: what if you want to take a spontaneous trip and your car is at 20%? The other problem is fear of degrading battery capacity through lots of cycles. In time, both of these could be solved, but for now, they're valid concerns that haven't been disproven.

Thanks for the ressource I'll definitely have a look. However the fact that it's price competitive still don't imply that it's enough to counter climate change.

In a worst case scenario, if we go full solar, but are unable to slow a climat change that induce more cloudy weather (because more global evaporation) we are actually solving nothing.

Nuclear have a lots of cons, but the one of the pro is that we know them, while renewables are mostly untested at scale that approach current global electricity demand. (PS: Indeed lowering electric need is also a safe way to to reach the goal and should be the top priority)

> In a worst case scenario, if we go full solar, but are unable to slow a climat change that induce more cloudy weather (because more global evaporation) we are actually solving nothing.

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.

There was a thread about nuclear power on here during the year, and some commenter had crunched the numbers on how many nuclear power plants we'd need to fully power the planet. It was in the tens of thousands. Even in the best case scenario, at this density we'd be looking at a Fukushima style disasters occurring regularly, not just every 30 years. That's best case scenario.

Worst case scenario is that it gets more cloudy and our solar doesn't work as well. But lets not forget solar power still works on a cloudy day, just not as well

Depending on the type of cell and on the type/severity of overcast, power generation might even be better than that of bright unhindered sunshine.

What's wrong with regular Fukushima scale disasters? They're not very deadly. We already have frequent mining disasters in the coal industry and don't care about that. If anything, nuclear power needs less safety to reduce costs and become competitive.

For some reason people are still scared of radiation even after seeing how harmless Chernobyl turned out to be compared to predictions.

> Fukushima scale disasters? They're not very deadly.

except for the people that literally had to give up their lives in order to save the situation and not let it grow many times worse. knowing they were stepping into the radiation that would kill them in a few hours (if they were lucky).

hey if it's not very deadly, why don't you volunteer for being one of those heroes the next disaster

also Fukushima is not yet done doing damage, not by a long shot.

let's evaluate the "once every 30 years is no biggie, really" thing once we spent 30 years trying to clean it up.

> how harmless Chernobyl turned out to be

because all those malformed children being born must've been a hoax, or something.

btw I wasn't against nuclear energy at all (except by now it's kinda too late really, and once we realize the next plan B will be too late, but at least we'll keep on making new humans to witness the carnage) but it was because I thought we could actually do better than Chernobyl and Fukushima, not to take it as a calculated risk. That is horrible. I'd easily give up "air-conditioning and data centres" to prevent that shit (easy to say, I don't have AC, and data ... well we could really do with a little bit less of those, take a moment and think about what is stored in those because it's so ridiculously cheap, at best it's worthless data).

> now it's kinda too late

I know we've passed the 400ppm threshold, it's too late to prevent that, but its not "too late" to switch the planet to renewable energy. It can never be too late for that. We can't stop the catastrophic effects of climate change that we'll likely see in our lifetimes, but we can hopefully stop it from being even worse

thanks for saying that. I can get real gloomy about this sort of thing.

I'm not an engineer so I've probably got this wrong (would appreciate a correction). The Westinghouse AP-1000 (a Gen3+ reactor) produces 1,117 MWe of power. Say we want to replace all coal plants with nuclear.

2013 world electrical energy generation was 23,322 TWh, with 41.3% being coal (so, 9,632TWh from coal). Presumably consumption was somewhat less (overproduction, transmission losses etc.), but let's just use this figure as it's probably grown anyway in the last few years. So:

(a) Coal generation in MWh: 9,632 * 1,000,000 = 9,632,000,000MWh

(b) 1 AP-1000 running full-time: (365 * 24) * 1,117MWe = 9,784,920MWh

Number of AP-1000s needed to replace all coal plants = (a) / (b)

Total plants to replace coal = 984.4

That seems absurdly small, so I assume I've gotten a unit conversion wrong. Any engineers able to help me out here?

EDIT: If 984.4 is indeed correct, if an AP-1000 costs $7bn to build on average (using the expected cost of the two US Vogtle plants), this works out to $6.89 trillion. That doesn't seem too bad, particularly given US safety standards appear to be a fair bit better than the world average...

Ok, I was definitely wrong about how many it would take, but you can't argue the risk, however managed by safety standards, is orders of magnitude higher than any risk from solar.

Nuclear plants require appreciable scheduled downtime for refueling and other maintenance operations. Not an order of magnitude difference or anything, but I would bump up your required nuclear plant count by at least 15% to account for this.

On the other hand, I would expect repeated installation of the same AP-1000 model to reduce in cost over time, so that will help out a bit - although R&D into more interesting plant designs may bring prices up as well.

Except that Clouds are the actual big unknown in climat change equation. You can found a lot of articles about that I'll quote this one but you should look and document by yourself.

http://m.nautil.us/issue/25/water/the-hidden-importance-of-c...

Increasing of earthquake on the other hand is a far as I know a scenario you just made up, but feel free to elaborate.

Nuclear reactors cannot explode. Even in the case of a core meltdown you wouldn't see a chain reaction leading to any kind of explosion.

What might happen in disaster situations is the backup generators that power the cooling systems explode. But that wouldn't cause radioactive material to rain down either since these generators would be running off a petroleum (or similar) fuel.

Clouds are not the disaster that you might think them to be. Yes, they have a fantastically effective greenhouse effect, but they are also very good at reflecting sunlight. I'm not sure about the net result of both phenomena, but that should be kept in mind.

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.

I don't even want to know what nuclear waste disposal projects like "Onkalo" cost us over their corresponding lifetimes...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

Where there are renewable subsidies, they are out in the open. Nuclear subsidies are hidden, so when people do the math, they make huge mistakes.

Most estimates are inflated. From 2002 to 2008 UCS's estimate for a nuclear plant went from $2 to $8 million, for no real reason.

Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation).

I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s, and I would wonder how costs were hidden back then, and how much subsequent safety overhauls cost.

> I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s

Me neither. Unfortunately, that's all we have, since we're not building any more :(

There are 4 new AP1000 reactors under construction in the United States. Unfortunately, they're over budget and behind schedule. UCS is if anything charitable to estimate $8 billion for a new reactor.

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.

Meanwhile in Finland the cost overruns are several billion and the contractors are suing each other for billions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

That design seemed so promising. The first plant, in China, was supposed to come on line in 2013. Current date is mid-2017. The original structural design was revised for better earthquake resistance. Then there was some big problem with the coolant pump manufacturer.

I am a tradesman in the metal fabrication industry, and all these cost overruns and missed milestones makes me wonder...

Have we lost something? Have tradespeople lost the ability to deliver these massive projects on time and on budget? Their managers? Which layer(s) is/are dropping the ball.

The structural steel fabrication has become increasingly complex. Our workshop has become dependant on robots (a laser cutter and a 20 meter drill-line machine, and a small fleet of button clicking humans to do all the CAD modelling) that a breakdown can bring fabrication to a rapid grinding halt.

It makes me shudder a bit to imagine the technical complexity of the design and fabrication of a modern mega-project.

At least wind turbines are relatively simple in comparison.

I think the tolerance for imperfection has gone down considerably since, for instance, the 1930s and 40s, when we were throwing up skyscrapers in a few years and churning out entire Liberty ships in a week. We've traded some safety for an enormous increase in complexity of construction. Meanwhile, those old steel-frame skyscrapers are still standing...

I worked a few summers in a small, wood-burning power plant. A couple times a year, they would shut down for one or two weeks, and do some heavy maintenance on different systems. One of the times I was there, they replaced all of the tubes for making steam in the boiler. Every single weld joining together the panels of tubes had to be inspected, and xrayed to ensure that there were no gaps and sufficient penetration. Finding people that can weld to that standard is a more difficult task, because it's not easy, and takes skill, and training, and experience. Moreover, those people who have those skills can command higher rates.

With nuclear plants, the tolerance for imperfection is very low. You usually can't fix anything inside the radioactive zone for the life of the plant. Everything in the reactor vessel has to last for many decades in a very hostile environment. Minor problems can cause billions of dollars in costs.

Ft. St. Vrain was a sad example. That was a nice gas-cooled reactor. But they had some leakage in the helium circulator, which was supposed to keep water and helium separate. This resulted in corrosion and eventual reactor shutdown and decommissioning.

The Three Mile Island meltdown was due to a valve problem. Nobody was hurt, but cleaning up the mess cost billions.

That's part of the problem with all these new reactor designs. A good design with 20 years of operating experience is preferable to a new design, where you don't know what's going to give trouble.

Hyman Rickover on reactor design: "An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."

Realistically, even 60s-era plants are expensive enough to construct that the existing plants are going to continue to operate for as long as possible.

That's exactly how Fukushima happened: "these plants will be so expensive to decommission, we can't afford NOT to keep extending their lifetime!"

Or, "We planned to decommission these plants, but construction on the replacement plants was blocked."

Either way, a major safety decision basically came down to a political decision over finances. And because nuclear power was involved, the downside became huge. Even when nuclear power is designed to be safer, it comes down to the whims of human politics. Why risk making the downside of a poor political decision so massive?

I feel like you're missing why I said this. I was responding to this sentence in the message above mine: "Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation)."

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.

And "not safe" = "increased likelihood of some really big unexpected hidden costs".

This matches observed data, eg. Areva EPR plant cost estimates have (amid major media controversy) risen from ~3 to ~9 billion € as construction has progressed.

There's one ongoing nuclear power plant construction project in Finland, and the current estimate is at around €8.5 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

I'd be OK with nuclear power if they could get adequate insurance on the open market, accepting all risk. It's my understanding that nuclear power plants are not insurable, unless government assumes risk, agrees to handle waste, etc.

Most of us would not be willing put a price on the lives or health of, say, our children. Any price.

I'm not so ok with it, but not just for safety reasons. New designs may be safer but they are still part of a globally destructive system of dirty mining, byproducts that go to weapons, and still non-zero risk of inflicting lifelong and community-wide damage in catastrophic situations.

Also it bugs me that nuclear is perpetuating the interests of large players who would prefer to control all the energy. I'd like to see energy democratized more, meaning instead of having contracts or bills from a power company, you make your own energy at home. That's an ideal, and we will probably end up with a mix, but I'd rather see money put into trying to tip that mix toward the decentralized side of things, which means toward locally installable technology like solar.

I'm sympathetic to all of that, and agree fully with most of it. But my point is that nuclear power plants, in order to be insurable on the open market, with no government involvement, would necessarily be safe enough to address your safety concerns. Regarding decentralization, we'll need some substantial breakthroughs in fabbing. Either that, or some substantial reduction in technology level.

Honest question: I thought the big problem with solar and wind is what to do on windless nights. AFAIK battery technology is nowhere near good or cheap enough.

Nuclear seems like a solution to that gap. What are others?

You don't necessarily need batteries to store energy. For instance, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit....

Except that you can't replace fossil fuels completely with diffuse energy sources like wind and solar.

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