Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
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We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.
We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.
It's more or less ensured that we won't be in any shape to record histories sooner rather than later.
The large scale, the monopolistic businesses and the government centric energy politics made it ideal for corruption. Remember, Fukushima was claimed to be fully save after inspections, just before the accident happened, which destroyed several reactors.
The investment into nuclear energy was a political decision. Every further investment into nuclear is a political decision. The 'small modern reactors' are mostly funded by government and the users are mostly military. The military is already mostly the only user of small reactors: nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Now we see other players which favor other energy politics (like the current US President who favors fossil fuels like coal, because his voters want jobs in the coal industry).
The point is: energy is always politics.
Do you mean "even"?
> In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres respectively, both induced by magnitude 7.7 earthquakes. The June 1896 earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.3 produced a tsunami with run-up height of 38 metres in Tohoku region, killing more than 27,000 people.
This risk needs to be addressed. That many people were killed by a tsunami is a catastrophe. But one would also like to have a stable energy system that does not go down like that and creates a huge problem (financial, technological, human, ...) for several decades.
The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Reactors were claimed save, which in a single event were totally wrecked. We are not talking about a single problem, but multiple problems (failing electricity backups, failing outside electricity, exploding buildings, ...), design mistakes (fuel is difficult to reach) and problems generated by running these reactors (like the amount of spent fuel on-site which needs lots of electricity for cooling).
Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen.
These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed [0]. The solution? Just "regulate" that in the case of emergency cooling the cooling water needs to be pre-heated, so the temperature shock doesn't break the pressure vessel.
Whatever could go wrong with that approach? I guess nobody can imagine a scenario in which the reactor would need massive cooling but the surrounding infrastructure is destroyed and the water can't be pre-heated, what happens then?
Nobody knows and I'd be really surprised if anybody, in a position of responsibility, has even thought that far about this whole mess. It rather feels like they are operating on the principle of "Let's just hope this never happens instead of planning for what we gonna do when it happens and set resources aside".
[0] http://www.fanc.fgov.be/nl/page/doel-3-tihange-2-flaw-indica...
To me this just shows that the security is taken seriously. Why is the public opinion so scared about such an exemplary event?
Sorry but that's plain and simply wrong, you are vastly misrepresenting the situation and chain of events.
These micro-fractures are not part of the design and they are evolving [0], documentation of the manufacturing can't be found and it's assumed the manufacturer made them vanish on purpose to hide the fact that cheaper materials had been used to build, leading to the fractures.
These reactors have been controversial for years, they've been taken offline and online many times to look for new fractures and they keep finding new ones, fractures which shouldn't even be there in the first place.
It's amazing how you try to turn this into an "everything is safe, there's no reason to be worried, it was always broken!" even tho everything about this screams "you better be worried" and the neighboring German states (and the Dutch) are already hoarding Iodine tablets [1].
Even the Belgians themselves handed them out to their population, tho they used ISIS as a scapegoat at that time [2]
We are talking about the pressure vessel here, not some unimportant plumping part on some auxiliary system, and they just keep on watching as more fractures build up in there. Where do you think this is gonna lead? The warning signs can't get any worse than this considering these reactors are also running past their original life time.
[0] http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/06/new-crac...
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/north-rhine-westphalia-prepares-for-bel...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/28/all-belgian-resid...
Large scale disasters almost always present as a conglomerate of smaller problems; multiple failures during 100-500 year disasters once again do not indicate poor safety standards and/or corruption.
Safety design is expensive, and there is always a balance between cost and risk, in literally everything that we as humans do, individually and collectively. Hindsight alone is not enough to bill this reactor as unsafe. There are thousands of BWRs operating globally without incident, and they have been for decades. It is ignorant to presume that they are all time bombs.
Edit: I'd like to kindly remind the community that down votes are not for communicating disagreement.
If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens. Some vehicles have such safety precautions, but only when the situation seems to warrant it (a Jeep, for example).
The nuclear plant was the same. It was safe when it was built, only it wasn't designed to handle that magnitude of earthquake because that strength is rare, especially for that area. This is despite designing it to withstand stronger than ever recorded earthquakes. Sure, afterwards the plant was unsafe, but so are many cars after accidents.
Agree or not, as a society we have accepted that traffic accident is a problem we don't want to pay the price to solve.
A "safe" car is just a mildly safer death trap.
In comparison, people haven't accepted that reactors would go shit and somewhat kill hundreds of people and trash whole regions for hundreds of years.
That's a risk that developpers have included in their plans to some point, but that the general public has not fundamentaly accepted.
Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds. The region got so small radiation dose it is already basically harmless ... Decontamination efforts will make it pass even irrational radiation safety levels within 10-20 years. "hundreds" of years is therefore stupid hyperbole.
Public has not accepted nuclear risks because it is ridiculously misinformed. Don't spread pointless fearmongering, please.
By official counts, 34 killed directly in the evacuation, 573 total, including indirectly, due to the disaster,and estimates are even with the evacuation, additional long-term cancer deaths due to the release could be in the 100+ range as well.
Except that cars now days do undergo rollover tests and are required to support 3x their weight when upside down.
> Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
I just read that some experts believe the standard should be increased to 4x. My previous assumption about my safety was a bit off, I am safe, but I could be safer.
Sadly enough, the increased rollover standards have created huge A pillars that impede visibility. Citation: http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance-safet...
So in this case, illogical worry about rollovers causes an actual measurable increase in pedestrian accidents.
Kinda like our worries about nuclear safety ended up causing even more radioactive pollution from burning coal.
I'd argue it's more like saying your car is safe when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
It is safe. The safest minivan is fantastically safe. Then it smashes into a semi truck at 80 mph and everyone dies. It was still a safe car, when compared to other cars.
Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be.
You have it exactly backwards. Manually operated nuclear plants will evolve into fully automated, completely safe designs. A very similar approach to self-driving cars.
It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok.
Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis.
Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generators brought by trucks due to some electrical incompatibility.
Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
There's no safety, only luck and irrationality.
That's really where you want to put the blame? Don't you think that's a bit dishonest? Nobody is stopping the operators of plants from modernizing plants, nobody except the realities of economics.
Don't kid yourself: If they can keep on running reactors with the least possible effort they will do so because everything related to nuclear involves massive investment costs.
If you had the choice between spending several billion of dollars on modernizing a plant, which you've already amortized, or NOT spending several billion dollars while still making massive profits from the plant, which of these two is the more likely thing to happen? Greed always wins out.
It's not like plant operators want to modernize their plants and are being stopped by protests, nobody is stopping them from modernizing except for their own economic bottom line.
This is what parent meant - scaremongering (and resulting ridiculous hyperbole) destroys progress.
I think the answers are clearly, no, no, no, and fuck no. We should be spending money on better solar, wind, having a distributed energy grid, and fusion. Not on a technology that is equivalent to diesel at this point, and something that will kill us.
That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.
PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.
Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
Early commercial nuclear reactors, here the British Calder Hall Power Station, were producing plutionium and electricity.
The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
The US has almost 7,000.
The US has never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium, because they simply aren't well-suited for the purpose.
That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj...
2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.
It's a dual-use reactor: plutonium and electricity production (200 MWe).
> Any reactor produces some amount of energy
But not electricity. For that a power plant has also turbines, generators, etc., ...
The US for example had no electricity production in the early reactors for Plutonium production.
But the US Hanford N produced both Plutonium and electricity for the commercial grid for 21 years...
Yes,but if you don't do that, you're just wasting energy. The US realized that, which is why they added electricity generation to the N Reactor. Both were still designed to create plutonium, and would not be built without the aim of nuclear weapons.
It's like saying we grow the same corn for the edible part and for biomass. While technically true, the edible part is driving the production.
However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach.
Further, there was an actual attempt to extract plutonium from civilian reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj... was really a legacy of this failure as it only produced 4,373 lb of plutonium vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site which produced most of the US's plutonium for nuclear weapons. Which is why I feel this is a little more nuanced than your suggesting.
ARPANET was designed, built, and operated to enable the exchange of information in the face of nuclear annihilation of cities.
The big famous radio dish on top of the hill behind Stanford and the signals research that went into it was placed there to look for anti-ICBM radar signals bouncing off of the moon from Russia.
We are standing on a mountain of tech based on research driven by the cold war. Nuclear energy is no different.
It will take some guys to figure out MSR designs if possible, and then they'll be small and safe enough to access the private market.
I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.
I don't think alternate-history fables is much of a defense for war crimes, however.
You might hold that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done to speed up Japan's surrender, and/or that they did speed up Japan's surrender by a meaningful amount. Further, you might argue that somehow two bombs was meaningfully better than one for this purpose.
From historical record, I'd say it's more likely Japan would've surrendered quickly either way - and that the motivation was more on establishing the USA as a superpower for the post-war era.
Either way, I think it's hard to argue that dropping of nuclear bombs on cities was done "for the sake of their people". After all, no-one was forcing the US to continue the war in the Pacific - or to capture Japan. The US could have sought a cease-fire and withdrawn to Hawaii or similar earlier borders. If the goal was to "save lives".
But the political reality is that Japan is a client state of the US empire and the base of its operations in SE Asia. It's not functionally a democracy. The people who made money off of it were the alliance of conservative politicians and organized crime, backed by the CIA, who brought it to the country in the first place.
http://www.japansubculture.com/how-the-cia-helped-put-the-ya...
I suggest people check out part six of Adam Curtis' Pandora's Box, that cover this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#...
On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout.
And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly.
As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared.
This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.
I said that fear was justified - not that we should or should not use those things.
Similarly we should indeed be afraid of CO for those very same reasons. I know I certainly have a healthy respect for, and fear of, CO.
If you use fire, the "invisible" risks are oxygen deprivation or monoxide poisoning. You will be quite aware that something is wrong when there is too much CO2.
No work on new better designed as continued, we just stopped building many of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...
Very low risk of something happening is not the same is the damaged caused if that risk becomes a reality.
Their superior safety has been known for a long time as well, which is why all 58 French reactors active today are PWRs (and most of those in the US are as well).
That being said, it is still probably a bad idea to put a power plant in a place which is known to be exposed to tsunami...
...Especially in the country which originated the word tsunami
I believe they achieved relatively high standards despite the lack of funds anyway. (By the way, molten salt is coming back, but mostly lack the funding necessary to prototype bigger reactors.)
There is not 'enough money'. If a reactor shows cracks in the steel in critical places, preventing this upfront might not be technologically possible and afterwards repairing might also be so expensive, that it economically makes no sense.
The big problem: if there is a technical problem, it is politically a very tough decision to close it, because of the costs involved (loss of profits from selling electricity, costs of decommissioning, costs of replacement, ...). Thus a more or less clear need to shutdown the reactor because of technical unfitness will conflict with financial interests and the scale of the money involved makes it worse.
One optimizes for longevity during design, as well as other factors which cost money. It may have, for example, been cheaper to construct, with a strict lifetime after which it would be taken down."Good design" is almost always subjective.
That politics drive nuclear operators to maintain plants past their lifetimes does not indicate poor engineering.
While it was an okay plant, they'd actually been warned about the emergency cooling system as early as 1967. Also, they ignored a 2008 study saying that their plant was vulnerable to tsunamis. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found that all the causes of the accident were foreseeable prior to 2011.
> The best designs cannot account for everything.
The common factor in nuclear accidents so far has been operator error, and it's true the best designs cannot completely account for that.
You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the risks of global warming and greenhouse gasses back in the heyday of nuclear power, i.e. the 1970's. The last nuclear power plant in the US was built in the 1970s, which was when the last major accident that happened in the US (3 mile Island). That's not even considering Chernobyl.
Wind and solar can not even cover all the required growth, specially not outside of the developed world.
Natural gas is a good option, specially to replace coal.
Modern nuclear plants however would be even better.
Actually, yes! Statistically it's safer than living next to a coal-fired plant.
If Th-based processes were chosen, that cannot easily generate Pu, nuclear proliferation won't be such a hazard. It would have far-reaching political consequences. E.g. USA is strictly against the Iran's nuclear program specifically because it might help produce bomb-grade fissile material.
235U-based processes are also pretty inefficient: about 1% of the nuclear material is burned when the (very active) fuel needs another cycle of refinement. Known Th-bases processes produce somehow less-active waste, and can burn more of the fuel before refinement is necessary.
A number of new, quite a bit safer, nuclear projects aimed to burn 235U and the current stockpiles of nuclear waste exist. But due to the fear-mongering, and likely due to relatively low coal and oil prices, they have little chance to be implemented, at least, in a reasonably short term.
No, I won't mind living near a well-maintained nuclear plant. In fact, I lived ~90km from one for 20+ years. I would be much less happy to live next to a major coal-burning plant, since it produces rather noticeable levels of radioactive contamination during normal operation [1].
You see, that higher number implies a greater infrastructural and economic investment. Further, the sole large power plant in an area is automatically a military target, whereas if the same capacity were split across many facilities it becomes impractical to attack or control them all.
I'd love to see each municipality in the US above a certain population own and operate its own small reactor, using it to power the municipal utilities. But I do have a bit of a problem with a federal agency operating the only nuclear reactor in a 100-mile radius. It just ends up managed differently, becoming a political power center in addition to an electrical power center.
A higher number of reactors also means more chances that one of them fails because reactors that don't exist can't fail but those that do most certainly can.
As such the security gains, from infrastructure synergies, would have to be massive to actually be able to offset that.
Also, do you know of any reasons why the 1000th instance of a design might be less prone to failure than the 1st, or 10th?
Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles? There are many thousands of car door handles in use daily, such that all common failure modes have been seen, and then addressed in later manufactured models. The handle that fails can make the next handle made better able to avoid that specific failure mode.
You want things to fail just a little bit, but not enough to hurt anyone or cost too much money. If something fails, that means it isn't over-engineered for its intended purpose. And the failure point may then be examined to make the next design better, and improve upon existing maintenance strategies.
That's a non-sequitur, there are alternatives besides coal just like there are more solutions to the problem than merely increasing energy production.
> Can you think of any reasons why a car door handle might be more reliable (for the same cost) as dirigible door handles?
A car handle is only one piece of a bigger machine, one could argue it's actually rather unimportant because if your car handle fails your car still drives, as such I'm not sure that's actually a good example.
How many iterations did we have on cars, as a whole system, so far? Over a century of designing cars and how close are we to a car that never fails? Which should be a way easier task than trying to make nuclear reactor safe, we had more time for it and even way more need for it, yet we are still nowhere close to having our "perfect cars", as such I just don't see how "perfect nuclear" is anywhere in our reach.
Yeah, I'm surprised by how little attention this gets. A significant accident occurred that wasn't supposed to, and subsequent investigations showed that there were significant lapses, including from regulators. People can't be experts in nuclear plant design, construct, regulation, inspections, etc., so they need to be able to rely on the authorities in charge. When that trust is betrayed, it naturally has consequences. You can't just say to people, "Well, yeah, last time we told you to trust us we were completely wrong, but this time will be different!"
When problems happen that aren't supposed to happen, people are naturally going to be overly cautious and skeptical of future assurances. That's not an entirely unreasonable reaction.
Compare it to the damage of coal and it would not even show statistically.
Nuclear power plants are good neighbors: quiet and they pay a lot of taxes. Most of my neighbors when asked where the nuclear plant was pointed to the smokestacks on the coal power plant miles away.
Using logic instead of emotion, yes I would. Hopefully the electricity costs would be cheaper.
Chernobyl was an outdated design known to be dangerous at the time it was made, and something like the Chernobyl incident can't happen on anything newer. A study found statistically insignificant rises in cancer rates from the 3 Mile incident.
I recommend the book Atomic Accidents, it's very informative and I believe it went over specifically why a nuclear plant can't just explode like an atom bomb or even really help you make one.
No, your average nuclear plant doesn't have the makings of an atom bomb. But countries that are running nuclear power plants have an obvious incentive to create enrichment facilities for their nuclear power. These facilities are similar to those that enrich further for a nuclear bomb. Several countries have achieved nuclear bombs this way.
Furthermore nuclear plants do not all work the same way. There are advocates of thorium nuclear plants, because thorium is a much more abundant fuel source that should be able to operate more cleanly than uranium. However those plants generate uranium-233 which can be potentially separated through chemical processes in plants that are a lot easier to hide than centrifuges used for enrichment.
Both ways, nuclear power can be a step on the way to nuclear proliferation.
The fact that you would reference TMI in reference to dirty bombs is extremely telling in that you have no idea what you're talking about. The average radiation exposure outside TMI compound was less that an airplane flight or x-ray. Bananas are literally more dangerous.
Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable, the public was scared witless of the possibility that there was an exposure. As a result millions of people were left with the concern that they could get cancer decades down the road. This public fear is also the most important impact of a dirty nuclear bomb used as a terrorist weapon. Very few of people will get sick, and fewer still will die. But lots will be scared.
> Regardless of which version of the facts you consider more believable,
Believable has nothing to do with it. An average dose of worst case 1000 times higher, 1.4 REM, doesn't even violate the US federal annual dose limits. Attempting to equivocate this with dirty bombs is either ignorant or a malicious, inflammatory lie to generate fear for an ulterior motive. If you're trying to insinuate some kind of cover-up, the did a pretty terrible job because no new reactors came online after TMI for like 50 years.
Really? How many people were killed at 3 Mile Island when it allegedly "accidentally turned into a dirty nuke"?
Having said that, it takes 30 years to online a new nuke plant. They have to be maintained over centuries. It's easier to make wind farms, geothermal and photovoltaics today, right now. We can't wait 30+ years for nukes to help our clean energy future happen.
Some commercial reactors are secretly used for this purpose even today.
Nuclear may have a bright future but it's extremely difficult to cleave energy from the state interest in weapons. And I'm not just talking about the US, this is an issue with nuclear power worldwide.
The biggest blunder was using nuclear technology for bombs first. I'm afraid the word is forever tainted by history.
Also, I need to some source for the claims that Atoms for Peace was meant as a cover to transfer nuclear technology. I believe the program was created as a way to provide civilian nuclear generation capabilities to friendly nations, in return for a guarantee that nations would not use the technology for making nuclear weapons (India was probably the most famous "rogue": they used the know-how from the research reactors to build an actual nuclear weapon).
Same with Sandia Z Pinch machine and NIF. It's all dual purpose tech to simulate bombs since actual testing isn't done anymore.
You won't find anyone that says it outright but the government interest in pulsed power is awful suspect.
* we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
* every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
Everybody agrees with that. The question is whether we choose nuclear or coal during the transition to 100% renewable (if it ever happens).
> we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
> you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
I don't know if it's that bad. But again, is this worse than coal?
But the article kind of make me raise an eyebrow when they say that for highly radioactive wastes, we just have to find deep burial sites that will know no geological activity for one million year. Certainly doesn't sound as easy as implied, especially if all earth starts using nuclear power as main energy source.
That being said, I remember reading a few months ago about a breakthrough in Germany in nuclear field, where no rare material (like plutonium) was needed, and wastes were greatly reduced. This could be a global way (and then, we may not even need renewable).
For the cost of building significant new nuclear, we could build the new storage mechanisms, and all the solar/wind needed. Faster.
> * we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel. Different types of reactors can use that 'waste' and produce energy. Some reactor types produce far less, easier to deal with 'waste'. Much of that waste again can be used for different application.
The Nuclear waste issue is one of the most successful fear mongering campaigns ever.
The necessary science is done, early version of the technology were developed and are proven to work.
The problem is that no more work is put in developing and improving nuclear power but renewable energy gets money for research and subsidies like crazy. Coal also gets subsidies in many places.
> * every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
This is again manly a problem because of the lack of improvement over time. Different types of reacts would make this far easier. Sadly however we are still using the type of reactors designed for submarines.
The typical answers from nuclear proponents never cover what to do with the waste product.
Also new reactor types have solved all these problems. They can create very little waste that only has to be stored a far shorter time.
The problem is that anti-nuclear people have created a environment where no more research happens and old technology just limps along.
The science is clear, the needed technology is understood, we just need somebody to build it. There are startups who try, but its very difficult.
I agree, inability to properly advance nuclear energy will will be regarded as a big blunder in the future. The great irony that Greenpeace, which supposedly wants to save environment, dealt so much damage to it, by protesting nuclear energy.
Both sides hear the talking points. The talking points target our most passionate and overriding fears, instead of real world concerns. This is because these false fears are more effective than real ones for changing minds.
Having run for office on a few occasions, the most important factor about winning seems to be having a good narrative-- one which seems consistent with voters' personal experiences.
Advocacy of nuclear has a bad tendency to think of "the world" as the US, Europe, Japan, and China. Any solution that aggravates the haves/have-nots divide is going to cause problems.
Thankfully, at least China has picked up the slack with LFTR research and hope to have something going within the next 5-10 years. Maybe then the rest of the world will wake up.
In particular in both cases when something goes wrong it tends to go extremely wrong and you're completely helpless to stop it. In contrast getting in a car accident or slowly suffocating in coal power plant emissions seem manageable.
Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.
I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.
In particular I genuinely do not understand why most ecologists seem to be staunchly anti-nuclear. I can understand asking for better funding in renewable R&D and planning for a transition but, at least in Europe, ecologists seem to favor dropping nuclear immediately, no matter the cost. For instance they applauded when Germany decided to completely stop producing nuclear energy, even if it meant more pollution in the short term. I find that hard to justify.
I could not agree more, but unfortunately global warming suffers from the exact opposite effect. The perceived risk appears very low to most people, because it is not very spectacular on human time scales. Even though it is by far the greatest existential risk we face.
Fossil fuel powered technology has changed that, but we are psychologically and socially ill-equipped to deal with its transformative power.
One class (meta-)examples are all mechanism actually promoting mutation, or other methods of genetic variation: Horizontal gene transfer is interesting in this regard. It's the ability to incorporate snippets of DNA the organism comes across.
These mechanisms are an adaptation to the "known unknowns": what if a new pathogen appears, or the environment (temperature, radiation, salinity etc) suddenly changes? To achieve some flexibility, these mechanisms make trade-offs, usually sacrificing short-term reproductive success.
My dog may well have better apex predator instincts than I.
Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.
I suggest watching the video on this page, it gives a good perspective:
I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.
Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.
Be careful with your language.
That's because you reply with things like this.
>sounds like something a supervillain would say.
Look, I'm actually pro-nuclear. But I think the arguments made for nuclear power are mostly awful, driven by techno-fetishism and wishful thinking rather than real logic. The "But I'm logical and you're just emotional!" argument is itself an emotional argument, a rush to claim a moral high ground (you'll see the exact same style and phrasing used in any political argument where privileged white guys are dismissing the points of women and minorities).
As others wisely pointed out in this thread, nuclear power suffers from a problem of feeling dangerous even when it's safe - and likewise, global warming feels safe even when it's an existential threat to civilization. If you want to make progress rather than score points, you need to take the emotional nature of the argument into account.
I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.
No.
Modern reactor designs are actually designed in a way that makes it difficult to maintain the reaction. If you are not actively maintaining it, then it will stop on its own. This is opposed to the most common existing designs, where you need to expend effort to _stop_ the reaction.
This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.
So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.
I didn't say anything about "completely eliminating the possibility of failure". I said "completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown" which is in fact correct.
ThorCon plans on operating the plants about 100 feet underground, which will even mitigate a deliberate attack with an airliner. There is no way to make anything absolutely, 100% safe, but this approach is mighty close.
That is in contrast with fossil fuel pollution, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.
> New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown.
not necessarily of any failure, to which they were willing to accept that things can fail in novel ways, just not meltdowns in their view.
Not my argument, but the point is that comparing something to "what a supervillain" would say is an emotional, not logical, response. What supervillain introduces technologies that are immune to whole classes of failures?
>When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.
If someone proposes switching from coal powered plants to natural gas powered plants with the argument that it completely eliminates the possibility of coal dust as a byproduct, would you deride them as well?
A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.
A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.
Renewable are all nice and good, but currently we're still building fossil fuel power plants all over the world. It would be better if we instead built nuclear plants. Expanding renewables and nuclear are not opposites of each other.
Is that a rhetorical question? Because night time usage largely relies on battery storage for which economies of scale are also reducing the cost in a similar predictable fashion.
However I will say there are newer solar panels that I've read about being tested which can theoretically produce power by moon light. Granted it won't be anywhere near the amount during the day but generating energy via solar at night time isn't entirely impossible it just won't be generating the same amount by orders of magnitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux
It would be cheaper to do any number of things(battery storage, Nuclear, world power grid) than to build out more solar capacity to capture the pitiful full moon light once a month.
https://www.thenational.ae/business/dubai-set-for-world-s-ch...
China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.
With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.
Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.
The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.
So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.
b) It's not so much that designs can't be safe, but the trick is realizing real systems based on the design, that actually are safe. Over time.
Never underestimate the power of human mis-management when it comes to corrupting perfectly sound pieces of engineering, especially when you need to plan for a 50, 100 or 250 year horizon.
1) When a plane fails catastrophically, the impact is limited to a smaller geographical area.
2) Pollution from the failure of a plane doesn't involve what is estimated to be a century-long endeavor to cleanup.
3) The toxicity from plane failures do not invade nearly every facet of life, making entire areas unlivable.
I am not a proponent of nuclear energy because we do not have a way to handle the full lifecycle, including failures. We will have this someday, but the idea of "well throw this waste into a rock formation somewhere and hope it doesn't cause a problem because it takes hundreds of years to handle" is just not reasonable. Even today, the Hanford site in Washington is leaking radioactive shit into the Columbia River and there is no estimated date to complete this cleanup.
But that's not the world we live in. Today we have renewable energy, which is promising but not yet ready to be our sole source of energy. Then we have fossil energy which wrecks our climate at an alarming pace. Then we have nuclear which has its own set of problems but at least won't contribute to global warming.
Sure it's a tragedy that Pripyat and Fukushima are now unlivable and will remain so for a long, long time. But global warming will probably make entire continent-sized stretches of land effectively unlivable. That's what you should be pitting nuclear reactors against.
The last time I really looked into it, it seemed like nuclear energy was a pretty way to combat global warming. It has numerous issues like cost, construction time, production bottlenecks, etc. Renewables seemed a lot better (particularly when you factor things in like the cost reduction as production ramps up), but it would be a mistake to simply think about energy production. From what I recall, things like improving energy efficiency were at least as important.
Major reactor disasters so far:
- SL-1. Steam explosion due to control rod lifted too far during maintenance. Small experimental reactor, built in the middle of nowhere (Idaho Reactor Test Station) for good reason. Inherently unsafe design.
- Three Mile Island. Meltdown due to cooling water failure due to instrument confusion. Contained by good containment vessel. No casualties. That's what should have happened at Fukushima.
- AVR pebble bed reactor. Pebble jam, radiation leak into ground. Contained, but too much of a mess to decommission.
- Chernobyl. Meltdown and fire due to operational error during testing. Totally inadequate containment. Entire region evacuated and contaminated for decades.
- Fukushima. Loss of coolant and meltdown. Containment vessel too small, reactor cores melted through in three reactors. Containment problem well known in advance; Peach Bottom PA has same design.
A big, strong, containment vessel can keep a meltdown from becoming a major disaster and has done so at least twice. Size matters; a large containment vessel faces lower pressures when all the water boils to become steam. But a good worst-case containment vessel can cost as much as the rest of the plant.
Some of the recently-touted small reactor designs try to omit a containment vessel on the grounds that their design couldn't possibly melt down. That's probably not a good approach.
Agreed, but, fail-safe and walkaway-safe designs coupled with moderate containment vessels seem like a good medium. It is all about mitigating risk. I don't think we should ever accept that a design has actual 0 risk for meltdown, but, if you design with a goal of having 0 risk of uncontained failures and then design containment for a moderate level of failure, that seems like you have a robust overall solution.
What on earth does this mean? When would an (as of yet) uncontained failure be considered moderate?
I can only see two cases of this. Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl was early on and they pushed it well past what their safety ratings were. Fukushima, they messed up on the calculations on the 1000 year tsunami. The latter is definitely a more reasonable case to point to "things can go wrong". Because that was definitely human error.
My issue though, is we're stuck with tech that is half a century old. This would be insane to do in any other industry. Technology has progressed, but it hasn't gone into industry. PBRs can be a lot safer, and there are a lot more fail safe reactor designs. We can do small reactors with high efficiency, leading to easier containment IF there is a disaster. I love nuclear, but I do agree that building these gen II reactors is unsafe. But the new ones? I think that's the only way we're going to tackle climate change within the time frame we're aiming for.
Cutting edge tech tends to be unproven and unreliable tech. When you can lose an entire city if things go wrong, worrying about having the latest tech is the wrong priority.
They have a lot of research reactors, but honestly, the only way you're going to get bigger and safer reactors is if you scale up those research reactors. There is literally no other way. And we WANT to improve safety. Don't we? I'm not saying to use cutting edge. I'm saying use what has been proven at smaller scale and is well tested. Not two generation old technology.
> When you can lose an entire city if things go wrong
This is EXTREMELY unlikely. Even when things go wrong.
It may currently be extremely unlikely -- due to the very regulations and processes you are decrying. But, if people like you get their way, the odds go up of seriously bad things happening.
I work in a related industry, part of which is in space radiation mitigation. If you have any real questions about disasters I'll be happy to answer the best that I can. But forgive me if it appears to me that you are the one who is jumping to conclusions, preventing real progress, and harming lives.
I occasionally see that same pattern play out on Hacker News. It would behoove you to check your ego at the door and assume that most of the people you speak with here are also well informed. In the mean time, I see no real reason to try to engage you further. Meaty discussion is never founded on chest-beating and condescension.
I am also in favor of more small reactors, vs fewer large reactors. I think this provides a higher safety level and ease of upgrading. Plus you can just bury these entire reactors in the ground.
As for regulation, I agree that it should be strict. But the process needs to be streamlined so it doesn't take too long. That time is prohibitive to the technology (see the new reactor construction and it bankrupting Westinghouse). I don't have the answers to how you would optimize the system, but I think think we need to open the discussion up. Start asking questions like "Is covering the first $12b of damage reasonable for all reactor types and sizes?" "How do we ensure that a reactor type is ready to move from research to production?" And such. I don't think "let China test them" is a reasonable response either. The questions get brushed off because most of the public is still afraid of the technology (see this thread. I doubt many of HN users has worked anywhere related to this field, but look at how many have strong opinions). But the people that work in it have less fear. It is like working with anything dangerous, you have to always be aware of it, but that doesn't make it too dangerous to even handle.
The questions get brushed off because most of the public is still afraid of the technology (see this thread. I doubt many of HN users has worked anywhere related to this field, but look at how many have strong opinions).
This is not a good basis from which to make an argument and it actively undermines the process of effective public discourse.
I am trying to be helpful here. I am sure you won't see it that way because it is public and it is critical of your remarks and that won't feel very good. But, maybe you could be the one in a million people who decides to use that fact as evidence of the truth in my statements that attacking other people doesn't strengthen your argument instead of being one of the other 999,999 people who just insist what I say is irrelevant because it hurt your feelings, while failing to see the irony there.
Best.
That also accounts for much of the delays, they are using the tech for so many naughty things they need to wait for staff turnover on the project so no one knows too much about what they are doing.
So while I agree we need to "open the discussion up", I dont believe that discussion will be allowed because of the war politics involved.
This was definitely a big part, but there's a lot that goes into it. Things like enrichment plants. The proportions of 235 vs 238 is substantially different in a bomb vs power plant. This is how we can tell what the Iranians are doing. So using big uranium plants is an excuse to make a lot of 235 and 239Pu.
But just because the past was focused on war efforts, doesn't mean the future needs to be. Many technologies transition from the military to public sectors. And I'm happy to see that talk about nuclear in the news more often, because I think this is the way to open up the discussion. Unfortunately, more people currently oppose nuclear[1]. And one of the most harmful things I see is that there is this idea that the tech isn't green. Because we don't have a battle of green vs nuke vs fossil fuels. It is really green vs fossil.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppose...
People will oppose/support whatever they are told to as a general rule.
if facts mattered, we would never of had a majority of people supporting the dropping of white phosphorus on the kids of Iraq (at the time)
It wasnt that long ago people were being told wind and solar "would never be green" due to the manufacturing costs.
But none of that changes the basic question. how would you balance the over design v speed trade off. Especially when every change to the initial design adds a few mill $'s to the bill.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro...
I would argue that this prevents total human progress though. But we won't get into that because it is a huge discussion.
Again, I'm only in a related field, so take my answers with a grain of salt (pun intended). I also don't have the answers to regulations. That is an extremely complicated topic. But I can bring up problems that I'm aware of.
I also don't know how to speed up the bureaucracy. I'm a scientist, not a politician. We have some reactors in the US that were built in <5 years. This is true in other countries too. <5 year construction time is reasonable to me. Just not 10. When you're operating for 25 years that is too large of a percentage. My simple answer would be "look at what has been effective in the past and emulate it. Improve upon it." But I think there is little drive to do this given the public opinion. And I think it would take a large study to figure this out, though I'm sure someone has but I'm not aware of it.
The most important thing I think that needs to be changed is that there needs to be a smoother path from research reactors to commercial reactors. I know a major problem is that no one will insure new reactors. There is this idea that if it hasn't been done commercially then it is unproven. I'm sure part of this is fear and part is bureaucracy. Unfortunately we always have to take a leap at some point. We can't just wait for China to build reactors and say "Oh, well it works there, so it is proven." China wouldn't be building them if they weren't confident in the designs.
I am also in favor of smaller reactors. Many of these newer generation reactors can be created quite small. Their outputs are lower than the large reactors, but you gain a significant level of safety. This is on top of the benefits from new generation reactors (less waste, significantly higher efficiency, and passive meltdown mitigation solutions). I think a way to encourage the use of smaller reactors is to reduce the max pay for cleanup in event of disaster. Currently plant owners must cover the first $12b (which is significantly more expensive than the average cleanup cost in the US). If you have smaller reactors they literally cannot contaminate as much.
> NYT article
Here we're running into the problem where things are cheaper when they are mass produced. When you don't build reactors for quite some time you have to reinvent processes. Now I will also say that the AP1000 is a gen III+ reactor (and has passive protection), but the Watts-Bar is gen II. Also remember that the first gen III was built in 1985 (commissioned in 1980). We've been slow to implement new technology in this field. The average of tech is around 20 years since invention to mass production, we're nowhere near that. This may be just personal frustration because I work in an area where two industries are extremely slow to implement progressive designs, space and nuclear.
Why I, and many others, think nuclear is essential for the future (you can find a lot about this in the most recent Paris talks): It is the only significant energy source that can provide constant power (and a lot of it). Wind and solar do not operate continuously, and are highly dependent upon environmental conditions. Hydro and geothermal also don't have these limitations. We currently don't have the battery storage technology to utilize a power system based upon only wind, solar, hydro, and geo thermal. Adding nuclear to this suite of technologies helps fill that gap, while being extremely environmentally friendly. The waste isn't nearly the problem that the public thinks it is, mainly because there isn't much total waste.
It has significant federal R&D and liability-related subsidies, as well as other federal and, in several states, state-level subsidies. Nuclear is by no means deprived of subsidies.
It's like complaining that space probes and satellites use outdated processors and other computer technology. The Deep Space Climate Observatory was launched in 2015 with a 17 year old processor.
That's a feature. It's why Harrisburg, PA is still populated.
Isn't decades a bit generous? Do we expect to move back in 2080? Does seem right AFAIK wrt the fallout in Norway contaminating reindeer (by way of lichen) - there's still measurable increase in radioactivity, but within presumably safe levels.
An example which is pretty far along is Terrestrial Energy's IMSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR#Containment
The latest reports seem to indicate that primary containment is intact at all three reactors. As usual, you have to read between the lines - these editors always seem to hate nuclear power, or love fear and chaos, or both:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Nuclear-fuel-likely-mel...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/melted-fu...
Moderately detailed description: [1]
More detail: [2]
[1] https://www.livescience.com/13271-containment-breach-fukushi...
[2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...
This is not how it works. Containment structures prevent the actual core materials from exiting the reactor, since those are heavy metals with high radioactivity and long half lives. The latest reports suggest that the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) in Unit 2 is likely breached, but this is inside the primary containment vessel (PCV).
In both the Three Mile Island and Fukushima incidents, radioactive steam was vented to the atmosphere. Additionally at Fukushima a breached pressure vessel probably leaked radioactive water into the primary containment vessel. This water was pumped out (into spent fuel storage, I think). I've also heard concerns that the spent fuel pools were feared to be leaking into the ocean, but so far as I know that hasn't happened enough to cause alarm.
The radiation inside the containment structure where the Unit 2 RPV breached is really high, "dead in a couple hours" levels. Outside the reactor buildings (the red dots on the map in your second link) background radiation levels didn't rise any higher than the natural background radiation in parts of Kerala, India, and in several other places around the world. Much higher than normal for Japan, sure, but nothing dangerous. Those levels can be explained by the Iodine and Cesium isotopes in the vented steam.
Calling these happenings a "containment failure" is disingenuous at best. The 50-year-old containment structures at Fukushima appear to have done exactly the job they were designed to do, after a magnitude 9 earthquake no less.
Confinement of radioactive material and control of radioactive releases
As a result of the damage to the reactor cores in Units 1–3, large amounts of steam and hydrogen escaped the reactor pressure vessels. This, in turn, pressurized and heated the primary containment vessels. These vessels were breached and steam, hydrogen and other gases, together with radioactive material, were released into the reactor buildings and eventually to the environment. The primary containment vessels of the reactors had not been designed to withstand the pressure that could be generated in a severe accident; because of this, venting systems had been installed in the 1990s [22, 23] to limit the pressure in the containment vessels in the event of an accident. There are indications that the primary containment vessels for Units 1–3 failed at various stages in the progression of the accident. This was the result of the pressure and temperature in the primary containment vessel rising to levels that were far in excess of their designed capability before venting could be implemented (see Section 2.1). The leakage of radioactive material from the reactor cores was partially mitigated by the suppression pools, which retained some of the radionuclides released from the reactor pressure vessels.
That should be clear enough.
The radioactive water problem is huge. It was not "pumped into spent fuel storage". Several large tank farms were built to store it, along with a processing plant to remove radioactive solids. Some of it did leak into the Pacific Ocean.
[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1710-Report...
Exactly what I described in less alarming words. Steam, hydrogen, other gases, and "radioactive material" (Iodine and Cesium in the steam) are not the same thing or anywhere near as dangerous as actual melted fuel and corium escaping containment. Conflating this with the idea of molten core materials breaching containment is extremely irresponsible.
I'm not entirely sure about the radioactive water situation, and it sucks to hear that it may be worse than I thought. Do you have a source confirming the extent of contaminated water that ended up in the ground or ocean? It's really hard to find anything unambiguous here, tons of stories about "leaks" but many of those reports are actually about leaks into the reactor buildings. As far as I can tell a very large number (trillions?) of becquerels went into the Pacific Ocean right around the time of the tsunami, and since then no water outside the reactor complex has been measured with radiation levels outside regulatory limits (although they've been pumping groundwater collecting in the basements into big tank farms, like you said). It does look like the large volume of water pumped into the ocean initially (to make room for contaminated core water in the spent fuel pools, like I said) may have accumulated in bottom-feeding fish near the site. And it looks like there may be water from the site leaking into the ocean at some rate (although not enough to make any ocean water unsafe to drink). Other than that all I can find is an enormous volume of noise and fearmongering.
It's not that much better with Throrium either.
Nuclear is oddly politicized, both pro- and anti-, whereas I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's not the worst power source but it's also not the best. It's not worth continuing to invest in for the future because better sources are already coming online that don't have the associated fallout risk, hazardous materials disposal issue, and intensive mining/refining processes.
For example, solar panel production requires a lot of electricity. That electricity is mostly generated from fossil fuels. But if you supplied that electricity with solar panels instead, it would be way cleaner. Which is correct? We should probably present both numbers, if possible.
It starts to sounds complicated, and to be a lot of information to digest for a decision, but another way of looking at it is that correctly assessing and planning for energy needs in the future is so important that ignoring information like that when making an assessment is irresponsible. We need more nytimes.com style widgets that allow you to tweak the values to easily digest data like this, and that clearly reference where the data and assumptions come from.
Alas, if we really compare to solar, then keep in mind that for a solar cell you can use 100% of the refined silicon, whereas with uranium you end up throwing away a large fraction (over 95%) with low enriched fuel, and an even larger fraction (over 99%) with high enriched fuel.
Add to that that uranium is not among the most abundant elements on Earth (about 1ppm), whereas silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust (about 27%). That alone gives silicon a huge advantage in energy/chemical impact on the environment compared to uranium.
Oh, and maybe I should point out that the chemistry to work with uranium is also a lot more nastier than with silicon. Uranium is a heavy metal, so it all happens through complexes and acidic chemistry, which limits the options on chemical pathways. Silicon OTOH is very similar to carbon in its chemistry, so there are vastly more options to process silicon, and that alone allows for far more efficient processes.
How is that even a problem? Nuclear power plants do not require much fissionable material at all. Compare that with any fossil fueled power plant.
For making solar cells you don't have to be picky in which isotope you make them from.
Also there's only about 1ppm of uranium in the Earth's crust, whereas silicon is the second most abundant material (27%). So you don't even have to spend a that much energy just to separate the non-silicon stuff from the silicon-stuff, whereas a huge amount of energy in uranium production is preoccupied with doing just that.
If you go outside and take any rock, you're holding in your hands mostly silicon and oxygen. Strip away the oxygen and you get pure silicon.
> Regarding bare plant costs, some recent figures apparently for overnight capital cost (or engineering, procurement and construction – EPC – cost) quoted from reputable sources but not necessarily comparable are:
* EdF Flamanville EPR: €4 billion/$5.6 billion, so €2434/kW or $3400/kW
* Bruce Power Alberta 2x1100 MWe ACR, $6.2 billion, so $2800/kW
* CGNPC Hongyanhe 4x1080 CPR-1000 $6.6 billion, so $1530/kW
"The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process: this includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts."
I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses.
Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or beat nuclear, with lower setup costs and other barriers to entry. A wide variety of storage are being actively developed (with real investor support) to cache cheap surplus production from solar/wind, making a mostly-solar grid viable. What will our solar/wind/storage grid look like in 30 years?
Nuclear as a stepping-stone to solar won't matter. It's faster and easier to just to straight to solar.
If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment.
The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.
They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower.
It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage.
> Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?
Last I checked, it still is. Solar can't get anywhere near baseline production that we need currently due to lack of storage options. And solar is the only thing which currently has even the possibility of scaling.
But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that.
This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest.
So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.
For on-grid solar, the panels are already the cheapest form of energy available, when paired with a heat pump instead of natural gas. (When paired with using a giant resistor they cost equivalent to natural gas.)
1) 2/3 of electricity generated is directly wasted
2) 2/3 of electricity not wasted goes to industrial and commercial sectors, only 1/3 goes to residential.
3) That's wonderful until you get a string of overcast days and your batteries discharge. Then you need grid backup.
See: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/...
Our current energy production has hazards and costs that we do not currently account for while we place far too much burden on the alternatives to justify themselves.
I've argued elsewhere for a flat-out ban on new domestic coal-fired plants. Coal is by far the worst safety and environmental offender. If we forced power companies onto a renewable-or-nothing path, we might see faster progress.
Guess why so many people like nuclear when observing such stupidity.
What's the lifespan of an solar farm with equal output to a nuclear plant? We're about to approve nukes for 80 year life spans.
Nuclear has super low operating cost and a long lifespan. The only real economic downside is how flipping expense they are to build and a major reason for that is we don't have much experience building them (because they've lasted so many decades).
You're also assuming that solar/wind will be faster when we don't have any real solutions for using those sources as a baseload. Storage and distribution is nowhere near being able to handle such demand. The cost of revamping our grid once those technologies do reach maturity is going to be staggering aswell.
Solar and wind are promising but they are still a __long__ way from being proven enough to gamble an entire energy plan on.
And that scaling renewables is largely unexplored, and very likely similarly expensive problem.
You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead.
Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.)
From here: http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear... (and you can google tons more sources):
Deathprint:
Wind ……………… 0.15 deaths / TWh
CSP ………………… 0.44 deaths / TWh
Nuclear ……… 0.04 deaths / TWh
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...
> The paper’s investigation, published in March 2008, profiled a Chinese polysilicon facility owned by Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., located near the Yellow River in the country’s Henan province. This facility supplied polysilicon to Suntech Power Holdings, at the time the world’s largest solar-cell manufacturer, as well as to several other high-profile photovoltaics companies.
> The reporters found that the company was dumping silicon tetrachloride waste on neighboring fields instead of investing in equipment that could reprocess it, rendering those fields useless for growing crops and inflaming the eyes and throats of nearby residents. And the article suggested that the company was not alone in this practice.
Are companies manufacturing nuclear power components with exotic materials not breaking environmental laws to cut costs? Um.
What matters is that solar is generally perceived to be safer, easier, and cleaner than nuclear at any scale. I feel confident that I could set up my own solar installation safely, and that makes me more likely to do so, regardless of the fatality rates of using ladders or driving to the hardware store.
Because it's easier for clean energy adopters to take small steps towards solar than large steps towards nuclear, I think that's what they will do.
If it really is more along the lines of nuclear is safe, but once every five years a worker at the plant might slip up and be exposed to dangerous levels by accident, then I guess I think the comparison makes more sense.
We just haven't built it yet. We will.
It reminds me of this onion article [1]. Its obviously hyperbole, there are actual real issues to resolve but compared with building nuclear weapons and going to the moon?
[1] http://www.theonion.com/article/scientists-politely-remind-w...
Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet.
Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.
You can literally mass produce the reactor and send it to standardized facilities all over the place, on or of the grid.
This would not even be very costly, a robust reactor development program to start with and some commercialization of the tech and regulatory change to allow it. No Manhatten projected needed.
I think doing what you suggest and replacing all coal and natural gas plants with reliable energy is pretty insane in comparison. Not to mention that that is only the easy part of the problem. I don't know a reliable way to solve the availability issue. The only close to viable approach is Musk-Style mass production of batteries. Even that is only viable if we continue to make leap and bounds improvements to batteries.
This is about solving the energy needs of 10 Billion people in this century. A Manhattan style mass production of solar cells and wind turbines will not get it done.
Thorium has the highest energy density and its practically unlimited, both in the ground and we already mine it. It simply is not that hart do build a modular reactor that can be mass produced. We know it works, and we know that it solved all the problem we have, including availability, pollution and global warming.
When Chernobyl blew up, it was obviously a stupid Soviet design, with stupid operating personnel. But now we've got new reactors, they are safe! Nothing could ever happen!
Then Fukushima blew up. That was obviously okay, because it was a Tsunami in conjunction with a few other improbable acts, and we obviously can't expect the nuclear industry to plan for that!
So we're now in the next round. Again, we're totally safe. We've got passive reactors. Really disruptive (g) tech!
I'm sorry, I said it before and I said it again: proponents of nuclear energy have either been lying to us every single time over the last decades, or they can't really manage nuclear energy.
I don't care which one it is, and I don't care whether they believe nuclear energy is safe now. They have been playing with catastrophes of a magnitude we can't really comprehend, and the best they manage to do is "it could have been even worse" and "we promise this was the last time".
As far as I'm concerned, I'm all for making sure it was the last time.
The US Navy has operated hundreds of reactors for decades 24/7.
But this is irrelevant. I'm just saying that you do a comparison, you need to take into consideration risks, too. Otherwise buying any kind of insurance looks pretty irrational.
Some of the areas within 30 km exclusion zone still have levels of radiation too high for people to live there, and will remain high for hundreds of years.
It matters what the worst-case outcome is. I don't downplay it with some statistic about how rare it would be.
Did you even read the article? Statistics show you that nuclear is safer. Coal/oil/etc actually kill about 1000× more people than nuclear per TWh generated.
The last part has been proven untrue time and again. Every single time nuclear proponents said "that cannot happen" and after it happened they found a new fallback position "okay, that could happen, but it cannot ever get worse".
Not to mention these are 50yo plants, and new ones are just better (whether or not you believe the tests/physics behind that).
It is disingenuous to claim nuclear plant safety is getting worse.
You mention Chernobyl and Fukushima - but those only stand out because the effects were concentrated in time and space (happened all at once and afflicted specific geographical regions).
The deleterious health effects of coal, oil, and natural gas are more diffuse. They don't make such good news stories and there's really no way to build an interested narrative around them. The effects evolve over time, the geographic impact is not as concentrated, and importantly there is a much stronger probabilistic element - the human brain has a hard time processing this, but it has an easy time processing nuclear dangers.
Nuclear power is always sold on the best case or average case calculation. Because the worst case is probably so bad that it dominates the whole calculation.
We know that using fossil fuels will kill a few people every day, eventually adding up to a large number, as well as causing widespread, low-grade damage to the environment. On the other hand, nuclear has the potential to kill a moderate number of people at once if something goes horribly wrong, and cause severe damage to the environment of a small area.
It seems to me that a preference for more deaths and environmental damage overall because they happen a little at a time instead of in a catastrophic event is not rational.
Many people are afraid of terrorism and plane crashes and sex crimes, but are still driving to work in a car.
That said, this kind of risk response might be an evolutionary adaption. Better have a threat that slowly kills individual members of the tribe (allows escape or replacement of losses) than something that is outside your control to respond to and wipes the whole tribe.
Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima never "blew up". There are myths that many still believe today that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb (it can't). You seem to be attempting to stroke that fear with your wording whereas what you really mean is "melted down" or "failed".
Regardless, each generation of nuclear power plant is safer than the last. Some of the newest designs require reactions to be explicitly maintained and when that stops or fails it stops the reaction. What you seem to be suggesting is that, because there were past failures that have caused damage to surrounding areas and people, that we should never try to make further progress.
A failed nuclear power plant can indeed explode like a nuclear bomb and it is generally believed that explosion #2 (there were two major explosions) at chernobyl was the result of a criticality and analogous to "the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon.":
"The force of the second explosion, and the ratio of xenon radioisotopes released during the event, indicate that the second explosion could have been a nuclear power transient; the result of the melting core material, in the absence of its cladding, water coolant and moderator, undergoing runaway prompt criticality similar to the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon.[63] This nuclear excursion released 40 billion joules of energy, the equivalent of about ten tons of TNT. The analysis indicates that the nuclear excursion was limited to a small portion of the core.[63]"
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_...)
Consider: in a meltdown, which you refer to, the fissile material could accumulate in arbitrary dimensions, many of which could achieve criticality. At that time it becomes a (very crude) atomic weapon. If that criticality is not interrupted it will indeed explode.
Your statement seems to oppose itself. Fizzled would not be like a nuclear bomb so I don't quite understand what you're trying to refer to here. There is a reason the paper uses the word "fizzled". A nuclear power plant does not contain the necessary materials or force to create a nuclear fission explosion.
Remember, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 13,000t to 18,000t TNT but the explosion at Chernobyl released some radiation and exploded with 10t TNT.
There are a few orders of magnitude between "fizzled nuclear weapon" and a "nuclear bomb".
In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same.
Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have) and that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect.
I am not categorically opposed to nuclear power. I just think it's worth getting these things right - especially when the well known details of the highest profile nuclear accident are in opposition to your claim(s).
No, this is not true. The uranium isn't enriched enough to do this in a nuclear power plant. Check out your own citation above it's a great read.
> Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have)
I never stated this. In fact we talked about the explosions at chernobyl above in this comment chain.
> that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect.
Define similar.
The explosions were not similar in that they were not explosions using uncontrolled fission material to cause a reaction in enriched uranium.
They were similar in that an explosion occurred that tossed up lots of fission material, similar to what a nuclear weapon would do when exploded but uranium did not itself explode.
> especially when the well known details of the highest profile nuclear accident are in opposition to your claim(s).
The two well known disasters, chernobyl and fukushima, were very, very old power plants. Fukushima, as far as I can tell, was not fully updated to any of the standard designs in the past 2-3 decades (only retrofitting here and there).
Given that I'm not sure what you are referring to or how those two accidents are in opposition to any of my claims.
Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal - the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic.
Of course no matter how well you design it, people will fuck up and use it the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safety margins. And this only accounts extreme stupidity and dysfunctional management - it does not even consider deliberate attempts to blow the damn thing up (actually the Chernobyl tests could be considered that, but i mean an absolute nightmare scenario like a takeover by technically competent terrorists)
Which is why you need to take all these chances into account, add a level 9 tsunami, a comet, a once in 100000 years quake, Godzilla, a zombie apocalypse, Stuxnet, wanacry, the second coming of Christ, the Rapture, North Korea, Dr Strangelove and a dangerously bored Trump, and you engineer everything to be still impossible to blow up.
Which is what we have actually been doing. They're not getting built because certifying a new design is horribly expensive, and the anti-nuclear opposition would limit their deployment, making them anti economical, but no, we haven't stopped improving them.
Unfortunately we still run the old ones, which, like a car built in the 60s, would be so much less safe to not even be legal nowadays, but you need to take into account that they're on the road.
China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).
We badly need something to bridge the gap between now and when renewables+batteries can completely fulfill demand, because meanwhile fossile fuel plants get deployed instead, and we are really fucking up the planet with those.
Good thing that companies in the US never do anything that's borderline criminal.
Here's an old comment backing this up with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13349940
> China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).
If the Chinese end up leading the way to a fission-powered future, it will be a great thing for the world. Don't forget the safety features!
We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do.
So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
Another myth. Of course we do: breeder reactors.
Hint: why is nuclear waste dangerous? because there is still loads of energy in it.
Breeders aren't the solution, they have waste products too, and those waste products are also radioactive.
I'd be totally for "Yucca Mountain OHV park"
It's likely that planned reactors would work, but they are also likely to be really expensive.
I though it was because of γ-radiation and long half lives? Are those properties unique to matter with high energy potential?
Radioactive material decays as particles are emitted. If it has a long half-life, that pretty much means that the energy is being released rather slowly. In other words, just don't go poking at it and you'll be fine.
On the othe hand, stuff with a short half-life means that atoms are decaying rapidly. Particles are being knocked off with great rapidity. That stuff is much more dangerous, in the now. It is transferring energy, in a harmful form, quickly.
A long half-life means don't go poking at it for a while. A short half-life means you probably should consider containing it really well. We store both safely because we know people like to poke stuff, and it is harmful. It's just that the scary long half-lives only tell part of the story and many people seem to think those are the more problematic.
Disclaimer, I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. However, I've taken a whole lot of physics courses. Someone can probably explain this better than I.
From what I remember, the energy released by γ-radiation is quite low. I'm still not convinced that just because something emits γ-radiation, short or long half life, it has an inherently meaningful energy potential. α- and β-radiation: sure. But γ? It's harmful to humans for very different reasons than fissile material is a useful energy source, isn't it?
Or am I completely misremembering this all?
(Pure fission and Teller-Ulam bombs are about releasing said energy as fast and as completely as possible)
i'm sure that its safe to dump small amounts of radioactive material into the oceans, but if you start to build more reactors and dispose of all the waste into the ocean, the dilution will soon cease to be enough to offset a global ... disaster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
(Earth orbits the sun at 30 km/s [1]. That means you need -30 km/s of ∆v to kill the energy we're born with. The escape velocity for our solar system from Earth's orbit, meanwhile, is about 42 km/s [2]. So you just need 12 km/s of ∆v to skip town.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_orbit
[2] sqrt((2 * 6.7E-11 * 2E30) / (150 * 10^6)) given G~6.7E11 [a], mass of the sun is about 2E30 kg [b] and the Earth orbiting the Sun from about 150 million km [b]; for escape velocity [c]
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant
Once you're out in the Oort cloud on the way out, you can't exactly deploy a solar sail to get another push (unless you make it impractically large).
It's much cheaper to fling things out of the Solar System than into the Sun.
Thrust available to a spacecraft using a solar sail is a function of distance to the sun. The sail is a fixed cost, but it may be presumed to degrade over time. It has no propellant that costs additional money to launch.
If you go in, the ever decreasing efficiency of the sail is offset by the greater available energy from the solar wind, and you may still be able to complete the mission (more slowly) with a damaged sail. Your available thrust increases with every kilometer closer to the sun.
If you go out, the decreasing efficiency of the sail compounds with the lesser total energy available to the sail, and if the sail is damaged, you may never reach escape velocity at all. You will never have more thrust than the instant the sail deploys.
We could do like we do with coal, and just release the radioactivity into the atmosphere. That industry disposes of a lot of radioactive material that way.
Not in the sense that people are being irrational, but in the sense that we don't have a good framework for dealing with liabilities -- like nuclear waste -- for extremely long periods of time. We could probably store it pretty well if anybody was motivated in paying the direct and indirect costs of doing so properly.
To me, nuclear power is not good or bad (it just is), but I have a very low level of confidence that humans can manage it over the long term. Power companies don't seem to be willing to spend the money needed to encapsulate waste for thousands of years. That would basically mean revisiting all the waste that is currently stored and freeze it in glass or whatever. If the industry did that for all existing waste and proved their expertise in that area, then I think more people would entertain the notion of more reactors.
The "Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982" charged utilities a 0.1 cent/kwh fee for disposal of nuclear waste, and the DOE was supposed to take receipt of that waste. There is $31 billion in reserve for waste disposal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet support for actually building one has been tepid at best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
The issue is nuclear energy is so risky that only nation-states are willing to underwrite the creation of plants. As a result regulations on plant design tend to be extremely conservative, so innovation is brought to a crawl. On top of that the origins of nuclear energy is weapons research, the waste was the original objective. So the most proven model of reactor is the one that produces the most waste. Put the two together and we're left with the simplest, least efficient design: light-water reactors.
Nuclear can be viable, but the government will have to grow some balls and take some extra risk. We could really use another Musk or Bezos to take on Nuclear Power the same way the former two are taking on space.
The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on. On paper, it seems ideal. So why has nobody built one? Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either. Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
The problem isn't "grow some balls". The problem is taking an honest look at the situation and ditching the wishful thinking.
There are materials that can handle it, but they are expensive and IIRC they still need to be replaced regularly. Imagine having to replace most of the plumbing in a reactor every decade or whatever number of years.
The engineering challenges don't stop there, but that was the one that made me go, "Oh, ok, I get why they aren't being taken seriously yet." Our materials science just isn't advanced enough yet.
On the plus side, China may be pursuing them more seriously: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...
A Thorium or Uranium based liquid fuel molten salt reactor is incredibly save and highly viable for civilian power generation.
> The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on.
You massively underestimate the political and economical problems of these things. There are many different types of reactors and other ideas that have never managed to get to market.
Until very shorty it was basically impossible to develop one in the US. The Department of Energy would not grant anything, not even use of labs to anybody who wanted to research it. Much of the research itself was basically lost for a long time.
> Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either.
China is massively investing molten salt reactors, including liquid fuel thorium. They plans are pretty big.
Also, there are simple not that many people who do this kind of stuff. The early research was done in the US and most other piggyback of that and have continued to make marginal improvements.
> Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
India has tried earlier but failed. The reason was that they did not have the advanced science, not some fundamental problem. The went in another direction because they felt it was easier. The same problem did not apply to the US.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But in the industrial meaning nuclear waste also includes various stuff that can not (or could not at the time) be economically separated from the waste althought it is either not dangerous at all or useful as nuclear fuel. And also stuff that is simply radioactive and has nothing to do with nuclear reactors per se.
A lot of the generated waste is not the used up fuel itself, but contaminated construction materials etc. So lower radiation, but still not something you have to bury somewhere. In the region I live in an old nuclear plant gets deconstructed for over two decades now because its tricky to seperate uncontaminated from contanimated material. The whole deconstruction costs an estimated €5 billion by the way.
Since the containers would be very dense, they'd embed deep into the sediment, many thousands of feet underwater. Over geologic time, subduction would draw them deeper and deeper, eventually into the Earth's mantle.
Problem solved, if permanent disposal is truly the goal.
1) Energy investment is primarily driven by cost, not perceived/actual safety. Safety regulations do affect cost, but not enough to significantly change investment (at least in the US, with the current conditions).
2) Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable. The concept that "solar and wind will save us all" by themselves is fundamentally incorrect, and actually they make things worse in many ways.
Nuclear fear mongering has resulted in high levels of regulations around nuclear power, but even without that natural gas has an edge in $/kWh. There just hasn't been demand to build nuclear. On top of that, nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize high capital costs. With solar/wind, there is high variability in grid supply, so nuclear is significantly less cost effective, and is getting phased out in favor of low-capex plants (i.e. natural gas).
Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
(source: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group)
Sure, this comes up a lot in these discussions. We don't need to rely 100% on any one type of plant, and we don't even have to eliminate coal plants completely. In the end, we're going to have to use a variety of options to fight climate change, and some of the major ones (like increased efficiency) aren't even going to deal with energy production.
Before, we had low variability in demand, so things like nuclear, hydro, and geothermal ("clean" methods of producing base load power) had a chance to compete.
Now, we have high variability in demand, so all of those solutions are out (though hydro is a special case), unless externalities like future-cost of CO2 is priced into production cost via taxes or cap&trade.
Wind/Solar + Storage is too expensive, so the market will shift to wind/solar + natural gas. We'll end up burning possibly more fossil fuel, or roughly the same.
>Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
Does this scenario look any more promising with a massive government project to build HVDC? That reduces the intermittent aspect of solar/wind (weather comes in band and sun and wind are somewhat anti-correlated, more true over larger distance). Could we push that renewable percentage up higher and use gas more for peaking?
Without HVDC, renewables will probably peak lower (15%) than the 35% I mentioned.
HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
You can amortized wind really well with interconnect (unlike solar, which is strictly diurnal), so we'll see a trend back to wind in the renewable space.
However, I don't think we'll get beyond 50% renewable/hydro. Wind is built in areas where it is cost effective, which are the areas already taken. As you get HVDC, that area expands slightly, but I don't see us getting to 300GW of average wind capacity.
I've been told by people trying to build these things that there are some pretty terrible incentives discouraging HVDC.
States without access to good wind sites may still oppose HVDC because they would prefer to build either different power sources or less efficient windmills in their own state to capture the tax revenue (or to use federal subsidies that might go unused), so they prefer not to be able to buy power form a farther away state.
And even the reverse can be true. Localities with extremely cheap energy prices can sometimes oppose a HVDC market expansion because if local sources were able to sell to more consumers it would raise their local prices (the market changed over time or was estimated incorrectly, etc).
The lion's share of the costs are upfront and the break even period is measured in decades. What is the energy landscape going to look like in 30 years? That's a question that you need to be able to answer with high confidence if you want to correctly price bonds that will be used to construct a nuclear power plant to be paid off from the revenue of the plant. If the potential bond buyers can't answer that question with high confidence then they don't know what interest rate is appropriate for the bonds and they probably won't want to buy them.
The problem is that solar and wind requires backup generation, usually CCGT natural gas.
This is ok until you scale higher and higher. You end up having CCGT only producing 20-40% of the time (to fill in for wind and solar blips). This massively increases the capex of CCGT plants, as you're only producing rarely. This would get more and more extreme with more solar+wind penetration.
Another massive problem is solar+wind overproduction, which is really hard to solve and is starting to really hit the German, UK and California grids. On very sunny AND windy days you get massive energy overproduction. You then have to either:
a) Turn off solar+wind remotely (often very expensive to retrofit to existing installations as the Germans found out) b) Pay other (natgas, coal, nuclear, etc) operators to shut down, which can be very expensive c) Hope that negative electricity prices make more demand. This is unlikely to happen as industrial users can't switch on extra production quick enough to respond to this.
This is made worse by feed in tariffs being paid at any energy price, incentivizing solar+wind to continue generating even if electricity price is negative (say it is -€0.05kWh spot, but your FIT is €0.20/kWh, you are still going to produce as you will net 0.15euro per kWh.
The two 'solutions' which are often mentioned are battery storage and HVDC long distance transmission.
Battery storage is still horrendously expensive on a kWh basis. It may come down, but this is an enormous problem. I am personally not sure there is enough lithium left that is easily extracted to make this viable at the scale (billions of kWh) required.
HVDC connections I also am suspicious of - if it's sunny and windy in Germany, it is likely to also be the same 1000km away more or less.
If we're talking about problems that show up when wind/solar becomes an order of magnitude more prevalent than it is now, why would you care about the cost of retrofitting anything?
Even in your entirely hypothetical example you say they're having to pay natgas and coal to stop production.
Is it just me or is that really weird?
I mean turning off coal and gas is kind of the point, isn't it?
If you could turn gas and coal up and down in a few minutes, then perhaps you would have a point. But coal can take 6-24hrs and natgas 1-4hrs. It won't suddenly stop when you have a massive gust of wind.
More realistic excuses I've heard are long term contracts, potentially with minimum run times for fossil plants. Which are therefore the actual problem at the moment.
While natural gas is better than coal, it's still not good from an emissions perspective compares to nuclear.
Grid-scale storage is one possibility, but more work needs to be done to make it viable. For technologies that exist today, nuclear looks the best for base load capacity.
Nuclear power has extreme tail risk that is hard to quantify based on the few examples of it happening. For the thee major events we can reference how do we know we didn't simply get lucky?
With fukushima for example, "Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people." [1]
Clearly the lack of deaths directly attributable to nuclear accidents does not accurately capture the risks.
So what exactly is the risk of a catastrophic event that has thankfully never happened but could? Its not clear but rather than rolling dice with those risks we can actually make better systems without those unquantifiable risks in the first place. That takes us to the tradeoff calculus.
Just in the realm of nuclear power there are far better approaches we should be investing in as opposed to traditional plants such as LFTR [2] which does not have proliferation, waste or meltdown risk.
Picking on coal is a little unfair at this time because coal is being supplanted by much cleaner natural gas purely on market forces and solar and wind are growing dramatically. Of course there are issues with these as well, scaling issues and their own kind of impacts but they do not harbor the same kind of unquantifiable massive tail risk of traditional nuclear.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1218411...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
1. Nuclear is really safe. The best. 2. Someone brings up an incident that actually happened. 3. Apologists excuse the incidents that happened because a. It wasnt designed right b. It was due to corruption c. It was bad planning. etc.
We live in the real world here. You dont prove nuclear is safe by excusing every accident and actually using the disaster to prove how safe it is.
Generally an "incident that actually happened" in which no one was actually, you know, killed.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-...
Unless of course all that wildlife is getting crazy amounts of cancer that I don't know about and I am wrong.
How do you warn next generation after 10 000 years, that some particular site is dangerous/radiaoctive? How do we keep something safe for 100 000 years? Is our Earth look same after 20 000 years, 50 000 years, 70 000 years? Will there be new volcano or shift of tectonic plates? Ice age? How do you keep such waste safe?
Even as of today, there is no final storage solution for spent nuclear fuel. There is one know being built in Finland, and it is just for waste produces in Finland. BTW, there is very nice movie about it: Into Eternity. You should look it!
Consider Fukushima. In some ways Japan got lucky, it was entirely possible that an additional reactor on the site could have melted down and the holding pond could have breached. Because of this they were having to consider evacuating areas on the outskirts of Tokyo. Obviously, if that had happened we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
I don't claim that we have considered the risks appropriately, have a sensible nuclear policy, or are considering nuclear correctly wrt climate change. But to claim nuclear is the safest because direct deaths to date are lower is not the full story.
The point is that the error bars around nuclear power operation are so large that perceptions of risk are not the same as for conventional power.
Its interesting to think about the role of luck for Chernobyl. A grossly unsafe design combined with a bunch of incompetents performing live tests with multiple safety systems disabled, not much luck there. Was there luck in consequences of what followed? Possibly.
Fukushima? I'd say ignoring the known geological situation and dangers (no excuse for that IMHO) and the design of the backup cooling system that fails on a flood is also not unlucky.
It's compromises to save cost and ignore dangers both times.
We also have rotting reactors here in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station
1. What about wind and solar?
2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
this seems extremely hard to quantify.
I'd like you to consider if nuclear material is useful for something apart from generating energy. It may be useful for other things we don't even know right now, and in the future we may have consumed all the resources.
It's not a too dangerous place, when the people who set these up are professionals who are following a security guideline. I see lots of people working on their roof, so, at least for me, this is a nonsense argument to discredit solar energy.
Yes, building power plants is dangerous too. The question is, how do they compare?
Wikipedia has some stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
Rooftop solar is vastly better than anything fossil fuels, but worse than nuclear, wind, and first-world hydropower.
Ah, they didn't include renewables. Colour me surprised.
* The grid itself would need a dramatic rework. It needs renovation for renewables in the first place, but introducing a hydro base load solution increases pressures on existing infrastructure.
* You need enough solar / wind volume to justify a sizable centralized investment in such a power solution. But broad wind/solar causes problems involving peak grid load well before you even start building these things, along with the aforementioned grid updates, make a real chicken and egg problem.
Hydro storage facilities are also vulnerable to extreme climate, take a long time to build (especially in countries where bureaucracy makes building anything take 10x longer than it should) and aren't expandable.
But they would work, easily, to solve the power storage problem. Hail potential energy!
Of course nuclear energy has one of the highest Wh outputs, no-one is disputing that. However, what does that have to do with the risk of use? That seems like a measure very skewed to make arguments in favour of nuclear power.
I might as well argue that car drivers are safer than pedestrians because the average deaths/horse power is vastly lower.
Also, why did they leave away hydro, water and wind power in those "deaths per x" charts?
If you replace nuclear with renewable (or the other way around) you'll have to produce the same amount of power, all other things being equal.
e.g. if I built n times more wind turbines to match the energy output of nuclear energy then, according to this measure, I would also get n times the number of wind-power-related deaths.
I see no basis for that assumption, especially as nuclear energy has known risks that e.g. wind power doesn't.
But why do the risks matter? One would expect that two turbines or nuclear power plants would kill twice as many people, on average…
* Square miles of uninhabitable land produced/tWh
* Fishing industries destroyed/tWh
* Agricultural land destroyed/tWh
* Peoples displaced/tWh
* Lethal toxic waste produced/tWh
* Clean up cost/tWh
This is of course excluding coal, which I'm 92% sure makes even hydroelectric (let alone nuclear) look like a peaceful meadow full of fairies and butterflies by comparison.
Wikipedia's stats on energy production fatalities have wind being pretty decent, at 150 deaths per PWh (rooftop solar is 440, US hydro is 5, US nuclear is 0.01, and fossil fuels are in the thousands), but if the number is negligible it's only because wind power itself is negligible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
This is a bad analogy. A good analogy would be: if you had to travel 1000 miles, it would be safer to do it by car than on foot because car is safer per mile travelled.
People are overwhelmingly bad at risk assessment, which is why one can be anti-nuclear and afraid of terrorist attacks (both lower risk), while happily driving to work at a coal mine (both higher risk).
Erm, wtf? The world's energy requirements are a more-or-less fixed number of tWh, no? Like, if 1 nuclear reactor produces as much energy as 10000 wind turbines, comparing the deaths that would be caused by 1 reactor to the deaths that would be caused by 10000 turbines seems like the obviously correct comparison to make.
You car analogy is on the other hand completely wrong: the death/HP is a meaningless indicator. How about deaths per mile travelled? Check out the values at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which has a section for traveling (named Additional)
Anyway, although it is a serious issue, to this day no cities had to be evacuated permanently because of air pollution.
Regretfully, nuclear energy has an aura of doom, and investment in nuclear power plants wrongfully reek of hubris.
Even if it isn't a renewable source, fission power is one of our best allies in tackling CO2 emissions. At least it may buy us some time before fusion power and the dissemination of renewables.
- They talk about ideal power plants, but not actual power plants. Are they assuming that when the world switches to nuclear, that every country will build these ideal types of plants and maintain them well?
- Pro-nuclear arguments don't talk about inevitable wars. When nuclear power plants are scattered across the world in countries that will eventually become unstable, the potential outcomes look different. We are living through an amazing time for peace in many countries, but it isn't a given that things will remain peaceful like this.
- Radiation has a cultural effect as well, and those plants and storage facilities make likely targets, since radiation disasters tend to cause people to panic.
- After there is no more power from given plants or fuel, there is less incentive to take care of the waste and cleanup.
I'm not entirely against nuclear power, but I think that it's more complicated of an issue than most nuclear proponents claim.
Energy efficiency and use reduction are two other areas to consider. If it's possible to change behavior and opinions around nuclear energy then it should be possible to change behavior and opinions about efficiency.
The two plants under construction, Summer and Vogtle, have been plagued by construction difficulties and cost overruns. The Summer plant was just finally cancelled today. It seems that the Vogtle plant is going to follow the same route.
The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared. The time for nuclear in the US is done. Other options are cheaper, faster, and more responsive. And that's ignoring the political aspect of it all.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/breaking-santee-cooper-scana...
And whose fault is that? Not the fault of nuclear-power supporters and advocates! Nuclear didn't die, it was killed.
Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy and lies to Toshiba [1] weren't caused by nuclear's opponents. That's all on the heads of Westinghouse's management. And if management was competent, perhaps Summer would have been closer to being on budget.
It's not as though the AP1000 is impossible to build, other countries are doing it just fine. It's just impossible for US contractors to pull through, apparently. That's not the fault of nuclear's detractors.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/westinghouse...
It sounds like the best course of action is to bring in foreign firms to construct reactors in the US; but that'll probably have to wait for the 2020 election... if it happens at all, that is.
If it takes 10 years to plan and build a new reactor, I simply can't see the point of trying it in 2020. Sizing our solar and wind resources to cover our needs during seasonal lows, building HVDC, and adding storage at 2030 prices seems like a far smarter move economically.
Unless there are improvements that halve the cost of nuclear, and make it so that it's only a $1B gamble instead of a $10B gamble, I simply can't see why anybody would put up capital. There are lots of government backed loans on these things, but even then it's going to be a hard sell to investors. Everybody has been burned by these projects.
That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list?
Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off.
Most solar installation these days however are utility scale deployments in empty fields. It's pretty low risk, plus the same pollution and AGW benefits that nuclear benefits from.
As an aside, I wonder if anyone has done the math on storing high-level nuclear waste on the Moon, now that a fully reusable SpaceX Falcon Heavy is almost here. That might be cheaper than the financial and political costs of places like Yucca Mountain.
You can't count all of those injuries against solar itself, though, as roofing injuries will happen regardless, and putting up solar panels greatly extends the life of a roof, so the amortized total injury to installers doesn't go up as much.
[1] https://player.fm/series/eevblog/eevblog-844-solar-panel-rep...
RE: Grandparent - the production of solar panels isn't as "green" as you may think. See: IEEE[3].
RE: Wind - The standard horizontal-axis blade design (i.e. what Siemens and other major commercial institutions offer) have ecological impacts on wildlife[4].
====
[0] Forgive the US centric analysis.
[1] I.e., cell-tower deaths are notorious for these sorts of violations -- both due to the endemic sub-sub-sub-contracting strategy that Verizon, et al, uses to distance themselves from the bad PR and litigation, as well as the employee these jobs tend to attract (risk takers/adrenaline junkies) who, even if given the proper gear will neglect to use it often due to machismo. Following full protocol, the injury risk decreases quite notably.
[2] https://www.osha.gov/Publications/OSHA3755.pdf
[3] http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-... Rare earth metals, processing with hydrofluoric acid, all the usual suspects one would expect. And this isn't a Koch-brothers funded gas/oil funded piece of propaganda. For goodness sakes, this is the IEEE -- about as pro-green (while keeping the science legitimate) as you can get.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... - Just playing devils advocate here, offshore wind is basically the closest to a panacea IMO. There are events where 100% of the Dutch utility grid is powered entirely by their offshore wind. Their trains are 100% 'green' too (see: https://futurism.com/all-dutch-trains-now-run-on-100-wind-po...)
However this article did not of that - it just pretended that they did not exist. I believe the publisher of this article has an ulterior motive, something related to supporting the nuclear industry. So in oder to make its point it needed to leave it out. The title of this article is not just 'misleading' it is completely and deliberately dishonest.
Unfortunately a few years later they had to issue a correction, because older (more experienced) engineered stepped in and showed them where the mistakes in their work were, and they couldn't eliminate nearly as much HLW as they thought with existing technology.
In other words, a closed nuclear fuel cycle doesn't exist. We could be better than we are currently with investments in molten salt and fast reactors, but I don't think we know how to get to zero HLW using fission.
Considering that HLW lasts for a million years, that's imposing too high a cost on too many of our descendants, IMO.
My personal belief is that solar and wind are the best way to go for now, and if we ever get zero-HLW fission or aneutronic fusion working, cool.
However, that their whimsical concept didn't live up to its hype is no reason to claim that the closed nuclear fuel cycle doesn't exist. Breeding more fuel than you consume in an advanced reactor was proven in the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 near Arco Idaho in the early 1950s. The physical concept of breeding and closing the cycle is well-proven and 100% proven possible. No one debates this.
People do debate how much it costs vs. the status quo of just mining uranium. Uranium is cheaper than recycling spent fuel, so we mine uranium. It's that simple. If we decided uranium was running low and drove prices up, reprocessing waste would become more economical and more people would do it.
Of course it cuts both ways. A better headline would have been "Nuclear: sure it's dirty but are you really trying to tell us coal is safer".
It really is time that we start looking at cutting back mindless generation and consumption of energy and that mostly means a big shift in lifestyle for North American and European consumers.
Either that or else you can all explain to your children and grandchildren (whom you love very much and would do anything for etc.) that you decided that living an hour's drive or more from work and commuting in every day while eating fresh dragonfruit and shrimp flown from the other side of the world was just fine.
Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Time to start actually working on the first of those.
That leaves the problem of the mining and manufacture, which is still centralized. This problem can be solved with GM organisms. We engineer fungi and bacteria to grow on roofs and generate electricity. They'd use CO2 in the growing process too. We can grow batteries in a similar way. Bacteria, yeast and viruses can do anything. They're the ultimate nanotech, we just need to learn how to program them.
"Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are the safest modern weapon"
Arguments that nuclear power are safe need to prove that while assuming the worst-case scenario, since the probability of such a scenario is a-priori unknown despite what much of this comment section seems to be claiming.
Solar is knowingly much safer because it is much easier to reason about.
>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/china-s-n...
As they develop and improve their reactor technology their plan is to export safer, more efficient fission reactors to the rest of the world.
I cannot find the source right now, but a talk given by non-proliferation experts outlined how accounting for fissile material in a reactor is about 99% accurate. But even 1% of nuclear fuel, on a nuclear-powered-world scale, is equivalent to hundreds of SQs per year, assuming current genration and next-generation reactor technologies.
A nuclear conflict, even if regional (only a few dozen discharges) can potentially have dire, world-wide consequences. The article should have at least touched on those.
[1]: http://nsspi.tamu.edu/nssep/reference/technical-safeguards-t...
> Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy; in 2014 these sources accounted for about 96% of global energy production. While the negative health impacts of modern renewable energy technologies are so far thought to be small, they have been less fully explored.
For anyone still being in disbelief of nuclear being made obsolete: Why has not a single (!) private insurer been willing to fully insure a nuclear facility without government backing?! The reason is simple: the risk is too high, even for insurance companies worth billions.
TLDR: nuclear has, as yet, not worked using private financing.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/09/new-ener...
Maybe there is some reactor design which can fix this but the reactors which are currently being build are not those designs. Also they are build for 60+ years. A lot can happen in 60 years.
Discussing an energy source just by pointing about future developments is not the answer. The EPR reactors in Finland and France are several times over budget and took much longer than planed to build. In the time you could have build wind turbines and solar cells all over the country with an equivalent or higher amount of power output. And according to the current statistics every added kilowatt would have been cheaper than the last one.
Also you might now say, but solar and wind are not always available. But at the same time you think that all problems with nuclear can be overcome but not the storage of electricity?
IMO Natural Gas/BioGas powered turbine generators are better option to augment wind and solar power generation. The GE LM6000 [1] gas turbine (based on a 747 GE CF6 engine) can produce 40MW+ of electricity. They could even recycle a surplus CF6 engine to reduce manufacturing resources required.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_recor...
Discussions of nuclear power somehow ignore the fact that, like any other technology, current reactor designs are not the final iteration. They can be improved upon.
Look the Chinese Pebble Bed reactor: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a...
If everyone aside from the Chinese ignore nuclear power, then the Chinese may be the ones making a fortune selling their advanced reactor designs to everyone else.
The externalities of the production and disposal of solar panels cannot be ignored in this kind of assessment.
>The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process:
A lot of people here may know what mortality and morbidity mean straight off, but I want to share this article as much as possible, and it does a great job reaching out to laymen. I also like how it starts right off with "more energy is good, here's a link demonstrating why, let's move on."
The issue I have with Nuclear is that we have not managed to fix the waste issue, and nobody seems to want to talk about it.
I'm not a huge fan of "salting the earth" for 10,000 years.
And when you say "it's safe", you're inherently ignoring that you basically have this toxic waste that is too costly to shoot into space and too dangerous to keep anywhere on earth for 10,000 years where it wont eventually harm the ecosystem.
"Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy;"
I studied operations research during college in the hopes of working on India's nuclear supply chain.
The west choked us out of Uranium and Plutonium, similar to how the British choked us out of Rice during the Bengal Famine of 1943.
http://engineersf.com/people-against-nuclear-energy/
http://engineersf.com/nasa-needs-plutonium%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8...
http://engineersf.com/2500-10000-indians-die-every-day-from-...
http://engineersf.com/why-is-india-so-behind-the-question-i-...
http://engineersf.com/4000-kilometers-through-my-own-country...
More than anything, the brown/black people of the world need the west to give in to our demands for the approval of our uranium desires to help us get to progress driven escape velocity Nitrogen + Steel economies.
You might consider writing for (or publishing to) a venue which makes its works generally available.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=radium+water+filter+ads+from...
Nuclear power will look a lot prettier when it's competing on price with socially and environmentally ethical solar cells and fossil fuels.
Three years ago the D.O.E. sent the local tribes a letter to say they shouldn’t eat the fish they caught in the river more than once a week.
[...]
Hanford turns out to be a good example of an American impulse: to avoid knowledge that conflicts with whatever your narrow, short-term interests might be. What we know about Hanford we know mainly from whistle-blowers who worked inside the nuclear facility—and who have been ostracized by their community for threatening the industry in a one-industry town. (“Resistance to understanding a threat grows with proximity,” writes Brown.) One hundred and forty-nine of the tanks in the Hanford farms are made of a single shell of a steel ill-designed to contain highly acidic nuclear waste. Sixty-seven of them have failed in some way and allowed waste or vapors to seep out. Each tank contains its own particular stew of chemicals, so no two tanks can be managed in the same way. At the top of many tanks accumulates a hydrogen gas, which, if not vented, might cause the tank to explode. “There are Fukushima-level events that could happen at any moment,” says Carpenter. “You’d be releasing millions of curies of strontium 90 and cesium. And once it’s out there it doesn’t go away—not for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
The people who created the plutonium for the first bombs, in the 1940s and early 1950s, were understandably in too much of a rush to worry about what might happen afterward. They simply dumped 120 million gallons of high-level waste, and another 444 billion gallons of contaminated liquid, into the ground. They piled uranium (half-life: 4.5 billion years) into unlined pits near the Columbia River. They dug 42 miles of trenches to dispose of solid radioactive waste—and left no good records of what’s in the trenches. In early May of this year a tunnel at Hanford, built in the 1950s to bury low-level waste, collapsed. In response, the workers dumped truckloads of dirt into the hole. That dirt is now classified as low-level radioactive waste and needs to be disposed of. “The reason the Hanford cleanup sucks—in a word—is shortcuts,” said Carpenter. “Too many goddamn shortcuts.”
[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-...
Looking at the chart, I'd take gas over nuclear in a heartbeat thinking of what nuclear has done to Japan. Nuclear can both power and destroy a country. Gas and other options do not. Neither does solar or wind which are not even in that chart.
Say we have a new technology that is safer than nuclear, but had a one in a million chance to destroy Earth. It would be safest on paper, for however long paper and researchers still existed.
"But Fukushima was a horrible place for a nuclear power plant and it was run by incompetent people," you say. But that's exactly the point. If we make a list of all the plants in the world and the safety measures they undermined and their staffing situation, how many would be stellar? How many would even admit anything?
Fukushima made a few hundred square kilometers briefly unsafe, and some tens of square kilometers temporarily uninhabitable. (Or really, inhabitable but slightly unhealthy.) Fossil fuels are wrecking the entire planet.
It's interesting that Fukushima seems to be all people remember about the Tohoku earthquake. 16,000 people died (for comparison the worst natural disaster in the US, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, killed 6,000-12,000), hundreds of thousands were displaced, and many towns were destroyed, but nobody remembers that. A dam failure triggered by the earthquake killed 12 people but nobody uses this to argue against dams.
The public's rejection of nuclear is about terror. With terrorists, we're willing to turn foreign policy on its head and wage war and go as far as travel bans. And with the terror of nuclear, Germany has shut down all of it's plants. The consequence? Germans feel safer.
And no, no one has forgotten the Tsunami. That's blatantly offensive. I'm talking about nuclear to stay on topic.
You're worried about contamination of fish? Coal power has contaminated fish throughout all the world's oceans with dangerous levels of mercury. You've probably seen warnings for children and pregnant women to be careful about the fish they eat and not to eat fish more than a couple of times a week. Coal is responsible for about half of that. Compare this to fears about potential contamination of some fish near Fukushima, and I'll take nuclear any day of the week and twice on Sunday if that's the choice.
I constantly hear about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. I don't recall hearing anything about the non-nuclear consequences of the earthquake after a few months. Is it offensive to state what I see?
You're constantly reminded of Fukushima because the disaster is still ongoing. An earthquake happens, people die, and we get over it. It's the ugly side of mother nature, and we get over it. A nuclear disaster happens, and it's a shit storm. Stories of incompetence, greed, shame, conspiracy, tragedy, and betrayal. It's the ugly side of human nature. And we can't get over it. Like the several radioactive isotopes that have a half-life of 30 years and remains in the environment for decades, it continues to be a problem, and a reminder of the worst of ourselves.
You don't get to decide who gets offended. Justifying offending people based on what you did or didn't see, just shows you lack empathy. If you don't, I would choose my words more carefully.
The worst disasters, in 1975 (which is to say, exceptionally deindustrialised) China, and in India, the deaths were amplified greatly by inadequate preparation, planning, communications, and response.
Hubris has played a tremendous role in numerous dam failures (the above, Teton Dam, Johnstown). Which ... is pretty much amplified if you look to nuclear power.
Plus that long tail.
And there's the fact that there simply aren't many good natural hydro sites left, which means that the upside potential for creating additional risks is small. A decidely mixed blessing, if you call it that, but so it is.
The article says safest, not safe. And if we compare nuclear waste to carbon dioxide emissions, which actually pollutes more worldwide?
Combined with carbon tax type modelling of coal's emmissions which would massivel raise it's cost if accounted for, I'm not sure it's that unexpected.
Likewise for nuclear power accidents.
Please elaborate. How can nuclear power plants make our species extinct?
A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary protein.)
A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a devastating effect on human health as well.
Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.
Sure, people will fall off their roof, but that is a distributed set of events, not a concentrated one like a nuclear accident.
I don't think this is anywhere near remotely possible. Radiation has terrible penetration into water as it is so water is a fantastic radiation shield but even so if you wanted to poison the water with enough radiation to kill off even a tiny amount of the food supply you'd...well I don't know the calculations or even how to do them, honestly, but I'm pretty sure you'd need orders of magnitude more uranium than we've ever mined (and it would have to be enriched, too).
> A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a devastating effect on human health as well.
Hmm, I think to cover enough of the atmosphere you'd need a really, really huge nuclear explosion. I'm not sure how else you'd do it and even then most estimate of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons wouldn't be able to kill off all humans (though it's a considerable chunk if I remember correctly).
> Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.
Yeah, it's riskier than Solar. Everything is, honestly. Even wind. But we also have a high chance of dying in a car crash and that doesn't stop people and the risk of a nuclear failure, especially in a modern plant, is almost zero. It's far less risky than coal mining especially if you extract the uranium from sea water (though I don't know how easily it is to enrich without mining but then again I'm not a nuclear expert at all).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_S...
US as of 2012 buys about 25% of it from Canada and the rest from a variety of places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Source: https://www.eia.gov/uranium/marketing/pdf/umartable3figure5....
It's the enrichment which is the tricky part.
The most egregious example is Chernobyl, where the official Soviet position was that only a single person died from the disaster. But studies from other nations say the death toll may be close to one million. Well believe it or not a lot of these studies that show how safe nuclear is actually take the official Soviet data about chernobyl as truth. (I am not sure whether this is the case for this particular study because their source is behind a paywall).
But similar (if not as outrageous) lies have also been said about accidents in the west. The official story about three mile island for example is that it caused no deaths, yet studies find drastic increases of all kinds of cancers in the affected area. See, for example, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-mo...
I usually believe that we should be guided by science and data in our public decisions, but the data surrounding nuclear is so distorted by governments that it is just not to be trusted. And now that we have truly safe alternatives like solar and wind, we can finally put that nightmare behind us.
Yes you do. The WHO has been following the Chernobyl consequences, and come out with a new report about every decade. Each report dramatically lowers the estimate of deaths and other health consequences.
As a matter of fact, the largest health effects now are psychosocial effects. That is, fear of and (over-)reaction to the radiation effects is causing more actual harm than the radiation itself. So potentially one of the easiest ways to mitigate the harmful effects of nuclear accidents (best of course: let's not have any!) is to (over-)react less.
Of course not reacting at all would also be wrong, but it looks like the balance today is out of whack.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Ndd82xj3j1o-3KcyvBkLTB1mR...
In 1975, it was the site, or perhaps more accurately, region, of the worst power plant disaster in all history: the Banqiao dam failure. News of this only fully emerged after over two decades.[1] You can spot the reservoir itself at the far left of the images, at mid-height.
In the disaster, a confluence of events lead to the deaths of approximately 171,000 people, with 11 million displaced. There's considerable uncertainty in those numbers.
The causes were multiple: siting, improper engineering, unheeded warnings, a (literal) perfect storm (tropical typhoon striking a cold front and lingering over the region for a full day, dropping over 1 meter of rain), improper emergency plans, failed communications, situational confusion, nightfall, and a hopelessly inadequate response and recovery. Of the deaths, "only" -- a term used advisedly -- 25,000 or so were due to direct flooding. The remaining 150,000 or so succumbed to starvation or disease in the weeks following the events.
And yet: the book as been closed. The cities in the floodplain are rebuilt. The dam itself has been rebuilt. Over 7 million people live in Zhumadian City, 95 millions in Henan Province total.
There is no disaster exclusion zone.
There is no disaster exclusion zone which will persist for the next three centuries.
There is no molten reactor core.
There is no coreium.
There is no radioactive waste which will persist for 10,000 to 1 million years.
The book is closed.
Proponents of nuclear power assume that we can assess risks with tails not of the decade or so of Banqiao, but of 100, 1,000, 1 million years. Utterly outside the scope of any human institutions, or of the human species itself.
Our models of risks and of costs fail us.
(They've failed us as well in the case of fossil fuels, and, quite possibly, for hydro power -- I'm not giving this example as endorsements of either, but to give the story of risk and closure, or its lack. Those are other stories, for other posts.)
The problems with nuclear power are massive, long-tailed, systemic and potentially existential. The same cannot be said of a wind farm or solar array. There is no significant 10,000 year threat from wind power, or solar power. We're not risking 30 - 60 km exclusion zones, on an unplanned basis, of which we've created at least four in the half-decade of significant nuclear energy applications: Hanford, Washington, Three Mile Island, Pennsyvania, Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Fukushima, Japan. And this is with a global plant of some 450 operating nuclear power plants as of 2017[2]
(This compares with over 7,600 power plants in the United States alone.[3])
None of these sites has been fully remediated. In the specific case of Hanford, the current management plan is budgeted at $2 billion, and there is no final management plan in place. This eighty years after the facility first opened.
If the total experience has been, say, 500 reactors, over 50 years, or 25,000 reactor-years of experience, and we've experienced at least four major disasters, then our failure rate is 0.016%.
The global share of nuclear power generation in 2012 was about 10%.[4] Which means that without allowing for increased electrical consumption within existing or extending to developing nations, the plant count would have to increase tenfold.
Holding the reactor-year failure rate constant would mean 80 core meltdowns per century.
Reducing that to the present rate of four meltdowns/century would require reducing the failure rate to 0.0008%. That's five nines, if anyone's counting.
Five nines on a process involving weather, politics, business, social upheaval, terrorism, sabotage, individual psychology, group psychology, climate, communications, response, preparedness....
And ... the involvement of the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuzi, in the management of TEPCO, who operated the Fukushima nuclear power plant.[5]
All of which played a tremendous role in how badly the Banqiao disaster itself played out -- everything which happened at Banqiao by dynamics could just as well have happened in a nuclear plant.
But it wasn't a nuke, it was a dam. And after a few hours, the waters receded, and after a few weeks, the land dried, and after a few months, recovery could start, and after a couple of decades ... even in what was still a poor country ... the recovery was complete.
Banqiao was a disaster, no doubt.
But what it wasn't was a nuclear disaster.
________________________________
Notes:
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian
1. http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm
2. https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/Worl...
3. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=65&t=3
5. http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...
4. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/ya...
Everybody is scared to death of Sharks, yet sharks killed only 1 person in the US last year. Cows killed 20, 75% of which were deliberate attacks, but almost no one is afraid of a Cow.
Meanwhile 17,775 people died in traffic accidents, yet people jump in cars like it's routine. You're literally 17,000% more likely to die in your own car than you are by a shark, but again, brains don't understand that.
And not to mention, the much wider used coal plants and natural gas plants kill way more people in a lot less theatrical ways, largely through disease of the lungs and skin. Again though watching someone die of black lung isn't nearly as interesting as watching someone die of radiation sickness, so we don't hear about it.
Where are you getting these numbers? Particularly the cow one (deliberate killings only).
Generally intrigued.
> yet people jump in cars like it's routine. It is routine. Time spent driving is much, much, much higher than time spent swimming near sharks. So...
My brain understands that if I refused to go skydiving, then I can not die from a skydiving accident. Which is about as likely as going for a swim instead of a drive to get to work.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0613_050613_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal,_unprovoked_shar...
Also, closer to 30k+ traffic fatalities (last reported year is 2015, so far it seems) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
Still can't find cow numbers.
British cows are apparently similarly deadly: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cows-official...
Whoa, now I'm very concerned about snails.
People understanding of stats is fine. They understand that the pre-requisite to being attacked by a shark is super-extremely low. That does not make sharks safe. I'll put my hand on the hood of a car any day instead of on a shark.
Your reasoning about Fukushima shows the same kind of problem: it's because of all the urgent actions after the accident that there's not been more consequences. Your argument would show that a house on fire is not dangerous because after people were evacuated, no one died of burning. It's the evacualtion of of a fire that saves life, it's not the lack of danger of a blazing inferno.
[1] "The image of cows as placid, gentle creatures is a city slicker’s fantasy, judging from an article published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States." -- https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/dangerous-co...
[2] "A total of 21 deaths met the case definition for 2003--2008 (Table 1). Four fatalities occurred in 2003, two in 2004, six in 2005, and three each year during 2006--2008." -- https://www.cdc.gov/mmWR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5829a2.htm
[3] https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/fish/isaf/contributing-fac...
People don't handle statistics well, but statistics are also easily manipulated and therefore potentially completely unreliable (Mark Twain quote here). It's not quite as simple as "people need to listen to the statistics".
Also, people go to the beach way less often than they go near roads. If most people only go to the beach 1 day a year and go on roads every day, then it's more like "you're 50x more likely to die by car than by shark". That's a far cry from 17000x.
That said, I've always thought that stat could be abused to push car safety - "Imagine you're attacked by a shark - now, cars are like that but TIMES FIFTY! Drive safe, look both ways, etc".
Nothing is scarier than birth-defects. Radiation causes very visible birth defects.
Hence people are very, very scared of radiation. And rightly so.
A windpark will not cause disfigured babies. Hence wind is better.
And: Nuclear is the most expensive energy source, by FAR. safety, waste, clean-up - super, super expensive. dismantle a wind park and it is gone, poof. dismantle a reactor and now you have a new problem.
Also very hard to weaponize wind or solar. Blow up a wind park and well, the wind park is gone. Steal a rotor and now you have a rotor.
etc etc etc.
What is sooo hard to understand about this?
1.http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...
The problems with nuclear are waste and that we use vastly outdated designs and fuel sources.
Nuclear is not perfect, but we should not buy into a perfection fallacy when looking to get away from fossil fuels.
Solar is a better long term bet but a good progressive nuclear strategy that added a handful of small modern reactors could be massively complementary to it.
The only reason waste is an issue in the United States is that the Congress decided that nuclear waste repositories have to last for 10,000 years uninterrupted. As far as we know this is just about impossible. 10 millenia ago we were in the caves.
Placed at the bottom of a pool, it's perfectly safe. This is a solved problem. The issue is political (especially from uneducated NIMBYs) rather than technical.
Solar is not a reliable source to begin with so you can't use it to power anything critical. It has to be combined with something like nuclear or fossil fuels to have reliable power. But if we go nuclear, we will have 1000s of years worth of power. So, where exactly does Solar fit in?
Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
At the risk of being even more pedantic, solar is fusion power, whereas "nuclear" in the common parlance refers specifically to fission.
You're right that at large scales (neighborhood-wide, city-wide, nation-wide, etc.) we don't really have the battery infrastructure in place quite yet. I'd guess that said lack of infrastructure could be resolved well before 2025, though.
Flywheel energy storage is useful as a substitute for spinning reserve (that is, the inertial mass of extand thermal generation turbines), but other than serving to dampen grid fluctuations, it's not good for more than a few minutes', perhaps at the outside a few hours', storage.
That's not true. Let's say you build your system with enough solar panels to fully charge batteries that lasts 3 days. And lets say sun doesn't shine for 4 days, which is not uncommon. Where is your reliability? Lets say you are designing a system to have reliable power. How many days worth of power backup would you design it to support?
>Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
Yeah, and fossil fuels is solar. I don't see how it's worth mentioning.