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Comment by nprecup | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, South Carolina produces most of its energy using nuclear already... It is too bad the broad public perceives nuclear as a 'risky' energy source. It is in fact the safest energy source we have ever developed, in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour. Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which there are sadly many, many more. So, it seems it is hard to get support to invest in newer, safer technologies in the industry. I do understand the short term economic incentives. Nuclear is expensive to build. However it is very cheap to operate, and relatively environmentally friendly. It takes long term planning on timescales of many years, and looking at safety data rather than focusing on the disasters on their own. Neither of which humans are any good at.

The one thing that turns me off nuclear power is how to store nuclear waste. The collapsed storage tunnel at the Hanford site this year is an example of how poorly this can be done. The waste will remain dangerous for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long?

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>Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which there are sadly many, many more.

I don't this explanation really holds true. For example, there is a single failure with a hydroelectric dam [1] that has killed more people than have died as a result of all nuclear-power related deaths, and in more spectacular fashion.

I think it has something to do with the expense and scale of nuclear power, but also something to do with nuclear energy being a thing far outside the natural experience of most people. Nuclear power is also connected to nuclear weapons, which, understandably, has a strong negative connotation to most people.

Better science education might resolve some of the emotional problems connected to nuclear energy.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

All that, and Chernobyl. I was a kid when it happened, but it affected most of Europe, (the radiation ended up going all the way to Sweden and Italy). It is hard to measure the cancer rates due to it, but the numbers are significant.

" (The 95% confidence levels are 27,000 to 108,000 cancers and 12,000 to 57,000 deaths.) In addition, as of 2005, some 6,000 thyroid cancers and 15 thyroid cancer deaths have been attributed to Chernobyl. That number will grow with time."

Nuclear power failure has the power to create a wasteland of its surrounding for millennia, that's why nobody wants them on their backyard.

Nuclear power creates a wasteland of surrounding areas.

Fossil fuels create a wasteland of the world.

The fight is no longer between fossil and nuclear; its nuclear versus renewables. And renewables are winning.

Has there been consensus on whether renewables can power our society and industry on their own? Or for that matter generate more power than we currently need to drive further progress?

It only takes a few hours of sunlight to power humanity for a year. The amount of energy is not the question, it's scaling up collection.

For a while the amount of energy is certainly a question. If it takes 100 gigawatts to produce a solar panel, but that panel only returns 75 gigawatts over its usable lifespan (including maintenance), then that's not a good look.

Even if solar generated 1.25 watts per watt to contruct/transport/install/maintain, it still isn't enough.

Now if solar is at the point where it was generate 5 watts per 1 watt, we're in business.

Google "solar pv eroei". We are past the point of positive energy return.

Wikipedia says: 80.0 for Coal

100.0 for Hydro

75 for Nuclear

18.0 for Wind

6.8 for PV Solar

I saw lower estimates for PV solar elsewhere hovering around 1.0 though, apparently the methods are controversial.

Either way, 6.8 is a still science experiment territory compared to other methods.

Come on, knock out being disingenuous. Science experiment territory? California and Germany have so much solar generation, they're having to take active measures to deal with the supply. And solar PV manufacturing capacity is only growing each year.

The U.K. Is closing the last of its coal plants in less than 5 years: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/19/how-coal-lo...

That article shows a graph indicating that Gas is taking over for the lack of coal plants, and wind/solar are plateaued.

People want a high return on their energy investment to power modern society.

I'm sure solar will get better, and I encourage the fledgling consumer market and small-scale deployments to improve the tech, but it's not ready today, and the longer idealists keep peddling the idea that it IS ready, the longer we accelerate global warming.

If you consider only electrical power generation, in some areas, yes renewable are competitive for some hours of the day.

As a fraction of our total energy consumption, they barely register.

Strange, and here I thought that 93% of our energy output was generated by fossil fuels and nuclear.

No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is the reasonable replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

(Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.)

Natural gas will be cheaper than renewables + utility scale battery storage for only so long; as soon as natural gas spot market prices spike, renewables and storage are deployed, creating a downward price spiral, which natural gas generators can only defend against for so long.

Nuclear will never be commercially viable again.

Natural gas might be as bad in terms of climate change as burning coal due to losses of methane during production/transporting, so it would be great to eliminate its use. Unfortunately we are far, far away from having grid storage that could accommodate only having renewables. Grid storage has been worked on for generations and even so, right now, the U.S. has about 24.6GW of grid storage, 95% of which is pumped storage hydro. That is a very tiny fraction of what would be needed.

You mention Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in human history, today, 30 years later, Chernobyl sits at the heart of a wildlife haven. What is more alive and supports more species, Chernobyl or Manhattan?

"According to the World Health Organization in 2011, urban outdoor air pollution, from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass is estimated to cause 1.3 million deaths worldwide per year and indoor air pollution from biomass and fossil fuel burning is estimated to cause approximately 2 million premature deaths.[14] In 2013 a team of researchers estimated the number of premature deaths caused by particulate matter in outdoor air pollution as 2.1 million, occurring annually"

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

> What is more alive and supports more species, Chernobyl or Manhattan?

Well yes and a decomposing corpse riddled with maggots is clearly supporting a diverse community of organisms as well.

Pity that's not the standard.

No one makes the case burning fossil fuels is better.

Renewables are cheap enough and practical enough to end all this.

"Chernobyl was actually good" is one of the more interesting takes in support of nuclear power, I'll give you that.

That's assuming linear no threshold models which are not supported in this range by epidemiology.

So the 95% confidence level of cancers and deaths is 3x to 4000x the actual measured cancers and deaths? What is going on here?

Where are you sourcing these numbers from? The WHO says "up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl".

I also have a new quote for nuclear talks: > Alongside radiation-induced deaths and diseases, the report labels the mental health impact of Chernobyl as “the largest public health problem created by the accident” and partially attributes this damaging psychological impact to a lack of accurate information.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

> Better science education might resolve some of the emotional problems connected to nuclear energy.

Persuasion is a science that has been perfected by religions/cults, magicians, marketers and sales people. Scientists, mathematicians, economists, and policy makes don't wield that weapon very well.

You can spit accurate + well researched stats that argue your case until you are blue in the face, but not everyone listens to polite, well researched Oxford-style debates. You are competing with entrenched interests like oil and gas lobbies, doubt purveyers who have purchased professors with grants, the wild imaginations of Hollywood, and the association of "nuclear" in the minds of people who lived through the Cold War.

Well, that hydroelectric dam was built in part as a flood control measure, and effectively ended up being rebuilt a few years later to put a stop to the repeated flooding that occurred without it. It simply wasn't the same kind of tradeoff.

Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built. That is why nuclear plants in Illinois and New York have been bailed out recently and why utilities in other starts are looking for similar bailouts. These utilities could not profitably operate existing nuclear plants in the current market. I totally agree that nuclear power has a much better safety record than most would believe and that nuclear power is a great low carbon electricity source, but it is not a cheap power source. Maybe modular reactors can compete sometime in the future, but we really have no idea until some are built and operated.

> Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built

I would argue that the innovations in rival energy sources have made it comparatively expensive, but the cost was largely established when the plant was built (likely in the 1960s - 1970s). In other words, it was cheap, but the fact that nuclear requires such a massive outlay to build the facility means that nuclear is a very long term financial gamble and assumes that a variety of other energy sources don't fundamentally change their cost curve (like oil and natural gas did in recent decades).

It's only "cheap" as long as you can outsource the long-term costs, like for waste storage or in the case of a disaster.

As is, these plants are barely profitable, imagine they'd be forced to set funds aside for clean-up operations in case something goes really wrong, talking about real funds here that would make an actual difference and not some token amount. They don't do that because they know it would totally ruin their bottom line but by any metric they should be doing exactly that because it would be their mess that needs to be cleaned up when something goes wrong.

These costs are very real and in the case of catastrophic failure can be so high that even major economies are struggling to pay them (like Japan has been).

And it's not like we have any good ways to hold anybody responsible when something actually goes wrong. The responsible company can just declare bankruptcy and have somebody else deal with the costs and long-term ramifications of the clean-up efforts aka the tax payer.

Most of nuclear waste should not called that. The more radioactive something is the more energy production capability it still has. Only a lunatic puts that stuff in caskets and digs caves for storage, and doesn't reap that. If the spent fuel was re-used correctly, we could run all the humanity's toys with it for several hundred thousand years without breaking any sweat.

... And that brings us to those costs. There are parties that benefit from causing the costs to ramp up. So they have tried to find out ways to do exactly that, and prevent the good cost reducing innovations from reaching even testing so they could be mass adopted some day.

It is widely known that we have knowledge of vastly safer reactor types, but we haven't been able to even get permits for full scale test runs. We know that there are several things about the fuel cycle we could improve, but we have to stove the best stuff away. We could actually go and fix some of the old installations, and their design features, but we are not allowed to do that either. Probably we could drop the price of nuclear power to a fraction (say, 1/10th?), but it is not politically correct to talk about that publicly. And so on, and so on.

Many people simply want nuclear power to fail.

> If the spent fuel was re-used correctly, we could run all the humanity's toys with it for several hundred thousand years without breaking any sweat.

And here we go, the fabled magical Thorium reactors.

There are many reasons why we don't do this, one of them are engineering constraints because molten salt is very corrosive as such maintaining a reactor like that is a real pita.

You should also be aware that, contrary to popular belief, even Thorium reactors can be used to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, it's not impossible to weaponize U-233, after all this process was used to produce the fuel for Operation Teapot in 1955.

And lastly: The only reason why thorium reactors have such a great "safety track record" is that we barely build any of them, our sample size is way too small to make any useful statements about this.

We have roughly 435 commercial nuclear plants in operation, with another 63 being built [0]. There have been around 20 major nuclear accidents over the years [1]. In contrast to that, there are only around 15 Thorium reactors [2], imho that's not a big enough sample size to make any statements about the actual failure rates, especially when you consider that none of these 15 reactors are run on a commercial basis.

For all purpose and effect, Thorium reactors are just an attempt to "rebrand nuclear" to get rid of the horrible nuclear track record and public reputation. Even if we'd go full Thorium we'd still need some reactors to cycle uranium for the Thorium reactors to actually work. In that regard, it's not really a solution but just another excuse for keeping the problem going.

[0] http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power...

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_tho...

Actually no, he's not talking about Thorium reactors, he's talking about Breeder Reactors I believe, which will allow the fuel to be recycled over and over until it's virtually exhausted of all it's radioactivity.

I think that's what he is talking about. I studied this 30 years ago in primary school, so I might be off, but that's what I remember.

It's actually quite cool what other reactors are capable of and the amount of fuel we waste with existing commercialized types of which were designed to produce weapons grade plutonium as a by product, so efficiency wasn't valued over the byproduct of plutonium.

Anyway I think nuclear is interesting.

thorium and breeders generally go together

I don't know the situations in Illinois or New York, but the fuel costs are obviously very low for nuclear power. PG&E says in regards to the Diablo Canyon power plant:

>...At 2.78 cents per kilowatt-hour, DCPP’s average production costs are lower than all other forms of electricity, but are higher than the national average of 2.19 cents per kilowatt-hour for nuclear power

https://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/shared/edusafety/syst...

France gets a majority of their power through nuclear power and has lower rates for electricity than its neighbors:

>...France enjoys one of the lowest electricity prices in Europe; at 14.72 euro cents per kWh, the average cost of electricity in France is 26.5% cheaper than the EU average (20.02 euro cents per kWh).

https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity-co...

I would apply some scepticism of some of those numbers until the plant gets seriously into the end-of-lifecycle decommissioning. Particularly when one looks at how the San Onofre cleanup cost is being estimated and who is paying. (4.4B.. which doesn't seem like it was set aside from the rates being paid during the lifetime of the plant...)

> Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong.

Not only does it go wrong, we have absolutely no way to stop it. It's literally out of our control.

I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important lesson.

When things went bad there, we literally stood back and said "well, damn. There is nothing we can do" and watched it melt for weeks and weeks. Nobody could go in, and we had no robots that could go in and do a thing. It was lucky it's close enough to just pump endless water into it. Then a few weeks later the experts said "oh, all that highly contaminated water is going straight into the ocean. We wondered where it was going". As it were the Japanese had elderly people volunteering to go in, essentially committing suicide.

It's also worth remembering that at Chernobyl there was also nothing we could do - other than force people to commit suicide by going in where it was deadly. That won't fly today.

While the chances of things going that wrong are very low (it's only happened twice, maybe three times in history) I think the consequences are too great to justify it. We can't even control it when it goes bad!

A bit more than twice, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

This seems like cherry picking and the innate human bias at play. Given a big enough disaster, there isn't anything anyone can do as it unfolds. And spectacular failures stick in our mind. Here's some non-nuclear disasters that happened that people could only watch:

* Taum Sauk hydro pump-storage collapse

* Duke Energy's 30k+ tons of coal Ash spill into the Dan River

* But that was tiny, try Kentucky's 306 million tons of coal Ash spill or Tennessee's 525 million. People can only stand and watch that unfold, no modern robot is going to stop that either.

* Gas pipes in San Bruno, New Jersey, and Colorado exploding, killing families instantly

* Deepwater Horizon and the Valdez. Again, not much to do but stand and watch as it unfurls.

I could keep Googling more but every source of energy has its gigantic catastrophes where no amount of human bodies or robots will save the day (well, I guess a large enough pile of bodies would plug a hole in a collapsing dam).

But those events were temporal and local. Nuclear failures are catastrophic and never ending events in many generations.

You have a strange definition of "local" for Exxon Valdez/Deepwater Horizon. As well as "temporal", too. 20 years later species haven't recovered from the Valdez spill (unless you ask Exxon). Deepwater Horizon was also a very prolonged event, it took "forever" to cap the damn thing. 1 billion+ tons of coal Ash spilled across the USA didn't just disappear over a day either from some small city corner.

The only reason why nuclear sticks so easily is because of the magic word "radiation". It's easier to be scared of it than sit down land learn that it is all a natural physical phenomenon, even if it originated from a man-made isotope. It's difficulty arises from the stochastic (quantum) nature of it's interactions.

Lastly, reactor designs have significantly improved since 50 years ago. New reactor designs I saw coming out of Westinghouse could lose all power and pumps and still use natural convection and reservoirs (elevated pools) within the containment to prevent any sort of critical event leading to meltdown. Imagine if we were stuck with the coal technology of the 70's. I would prefer modernizing the nuclear fleet if possible, which does include decommissioning old reactors, and closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant (some sort of pyroprocessing) unlike UREX.

Look, I'm pro-nuclear but 'if only everyone were as knowledgeable as me' is a losing communications strategy. seriously, why do you expect people to trust the engineering in a nuclear power plant when clever people can't even get the financing to work or the construction ot go smoothly?

My point isn't "be as smart as me" and I do apologise if my tone is coming across that way. My point is "get educated on the issue" which seems reasonable to me (the tone of which I guess can also be misconstrued as negative, but I mean it in a constructive and positive manner).

I know you mean well and I do feel your frustration. But to use a phrase from political scientist Brian Caplan, people are 'rationally irrational' about this (as in public choice theory): it's very hard to really assess the risk factors properly, and given the potential downside risk and the existence of alternatives they decide not to bother.

>closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant

Isn't simply using a non-PUREX reprocessing method sufficient? Realistically, a "nuclear club" nation like the US/France/GB only needs to ensure that the reprocessed fuel contains enough non-Pu239 isotopes that any attempt at a bomb with stolen Pu would necessarily fizzle. The fact that the nation itself could (theoretically) produce Pu239 via the process and cause "proliferation" seems far fetched in the absence of the Cold War level rivalry that was the original proliferation impetus. Warheads are expensive. Nobody who already has a bunch of them already is really interested in making more.

In all of your examples, a few hours or days later people could wander right into "ground zero" and begin cleaning/re-building or whatever.

No so with nuclear. The impact is so much more serious when radiation comes into play.

> Valdez

Actually thousands of people were mobilized to contain the spill then clean up afterwards. It would have been a much better outcome if they didn't try to hide/downplay it for the first couple of days.

Yes, and radiation can be serious. But nature knows how to deal with high levels of radiation (see Chernobyl's flourishing ecosystem) after a period of time, same with any other disaster. You as a human could go into some moderately radioactive areas since the civilian limits are set so extremely low below the non-stochastic effects, and maybe not have much more of an elevated cancer risk than if you went to the hospital and got an MRI or PET scan (which is unregulated in terms of legal dosage limits).

Just because radiation causes different constraints on cleanup than oil on a large ocean or arsenic in the water table or issues in a space rocket means it is morally worse? That's the part I fail to understand, so long as the engineering continues to behave ethically behind all the systems in their design and construction and retrofit.

Adding to this - there seems to be a lack of observable damage from nuclear accidents apart from self-imposed evacuations.

Literally no-one died at Fukushima. It is the only energy disaster I know of where no-one ended up dead.

This is strong circumstantial evidence that we are being too safe, because we implicitly accept a few deaths when things go wrong in, eg, coal (pollution & extraction deaths), solar ( mainly in installations not in operating), hydro (big-time risks).

Going from 1 death to 0 deaths on this scale is a huge marginal cost. It almost certainly outweights the benefits.

EDIT: We haven't had a solar disaster yet, but coal & hydro disasters happen and can be very bad indeed.

I agree. Anywhere there's a dam, people will drown in it. In fact, if it's close enough to a town and people like to drink then we'll see many more deaths in the winter since it looks like you an skate on it---but can't.

>...I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important lesson.

You missed the important lessons from Fukishima.

A major power plant suffered about the worst possible catastrophe that it could have through a combination of incompetence by the plant and its regulators. For all that, the highest estimates of death due to the evacuation are less than the deaths that come from a day of burning coal (when the coal plants don't have an accident). What about other power sources? Coal/gas/hydro all have much worse records than nuclear:

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

(The accident rate is also ignoring the long term, possibly existential, threat from climate changed due to using coal and natural gas.)

Ground based solar is probably the only power source that might be safer than nuclear.

The lesson I got from Fukushima is that, if we have a reactor, we need to take care of it. I think Fukushima was neglected because people didn't like it. I see this as more of a political issue. The lessons learned summary[0] hints at this.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253923/

Well,

You can't really say "it's the safest kind of energy of all - except when you don't do the right thing, then it's scary" because the chance that people are going to do the wrong thing has to be an inherent part of any risk analysis.

Nuclear might be safer than coal and oil but coal and oil are established and nuclear is marginal most places. More people might die falling from roofs installing their solar panel than die from nuclear power "done right" but hey, if they'd installed their solar panels right, they too wouldn't have died either.

But finally, renewable allow relatively incremental development - you can gradually add solar panels and wind-generators and see if the investment pans out. Nuclear requires vast gobs of investment and you only learn if it's a good idea, provides good total positive returns, over a long time frame, just as you're expected to store your pollution over a large time frame.

So nuclear's prospects don't look good, don't seem like they should be good, etc.

The "cheap to operate" myth has long been debunked by all of the 100% depreciated nuclear plants closing, because, they are not cheap to operate.

Although at the current time, low natural gas prices make natural gas plants very attractive, most nuclear plants are closed because of public outcry. A lot of these plants are nearing 50 years old as well.

Per the article, old nuclear plants are being closed because they are not cost-competitive with natural gas. If you're saying they're actually being closed due to public opposition, you should cite a source. Preferably one as non-partisan as the NYT.

You are correct, they are being closed due to financial reasons, not due to public outcry.

However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind.

Right now we subsidize two technologies, rather than taxing the externality. It would be far more economically rational to tax carbon emissions, and for coal to also tax the other costs it imposes in non-carbon emissions.

There's currently a legal battle going on to allow nuclear plants to have Zero Emmisions Credits (ZEC) in several states where nuclear plants can no longer compete in the marketplace:

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/zecs-appeal-illinois-new-yor...

> However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind.

They already have the benefit of not having to pay for their long term waste disposal and being bailed out in the event of a critical failure, which is arguably among the biggest long-term costs for nuclear.

Not too long ago German energy companies paid a flat fee of 24 billion Euros to absolve them from any future responsibility to pay for end storage. The US nuclear industry does pay a tax for disposal but that doesn't cover anywhere near the actual costs of storage.

We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now.

Isn't that a nice vision of the future? We might manage to get our cheap, clean and renewable energy, but we will still be stuck taking care of very dangerous and expensive waste for thousands of years.

>...We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now.

Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. To put it into perspective, no one of the general public has ever been hurt by nuclear waste and you definitely can't say that about coal waste.

Changes in technology have made natural gas cheap. But I think that's temporary - twenty years from now we're probably going to regret shuttering our nuclear plants and will be stuck with coal for at least a decade.

Coal plants would not be cheap to operate either if they had to pay for all the environmental damage they actually cause. Natural gas plants... they seem to be a good compromise for now, but we just cannot depend on fossil fuel to meet the electrical needs of future generations.

It is my sincere hope that we continue having a nuclear power industry to maintain the know-how learned over several generations. This would be useful not just for domestic power generations, but e.g. generating power for space stations, lunar/martian bases etc.

There is always the Navy.

Or at least, I would expect them to continue operating nuclear vessels for quite some time.

Part of the appeal of nuclear operations for the Navy (aside from the prestige) is the lucrative private sector opportunity. You'll see fewer folks going into that field if those private sector jobs dry up.

Has it, though? Keep in mind the difference between "expensive" and "a lot of money". Nuclear costs a ton to build and a ton to decommission, but in between is a very long period of nearly constant very high power production.

New-built nuclear costs around €5.3b (Finland[1] and France[2]) to €9.3b (UK[3]) per installed GW, and France, Germany and UK estimates €300m, €1.4b and €2.7b (respectively) pr GW installed to decommission. That's €6-€13b/GW total + operating costs -- and those costs will come down as (if) we start ramping up construction and learn to avoid the cost overruns and get experience decommissioning plants.

New-built offshore wind costs €3-4.7b/GW[4] -- and these prices are set to go up, as the easy sites for installation are running out. Capacity factors are only around 50%, so already there offshore wind is roughly on par with fully loaded nuclear (which has capacity factors of 90+%), and that's without counting decommissioning, extremely high operating expenses and the extra infrastructure and pollution required to deal with the unreliability of wind (typically, gas plants), and, most severely, the expected lifetime of ~25 years[5] compared to 60+ years for nuclear.

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

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...

5: http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1320109/question-wee...

Thank you for injecting some great numbers!

One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun.

Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind; nuclear has to be run at maximum capacity in order to get to those numbers, just as wind's energy has to be used to get to its numbers, and neither of these follows the demand. So both nuclear and wind require other dispatchable resources.

Though it's gas plants at the moment, it seems very likely that battery storage will take over quite soon from gas plants. In many markets, peaker plants are already more expensive than battery storage. As batteries get cheaper, and more technologies (like flow batteries) mature, gas's days are numbered (except perhaps for combined-cycle gas turbines).

I also can't share your optimism about nuclear construction costs going down. The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US. The promise of the AP1000 reactors which were just abandoned in South Carolina was that it was a modular, consistent design, implemented around the world. The cost savings for that have not materialized. Meanwhile, the tech curves for wind, solar, and storage technologies have had more than a decade of proof of declining costs. Even in "modular and reusable" designs, every nuclear plant seems to be a one-off, due to the massive scale.

You're welcome :)

> One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun.

Offshore construction procedures aren't going to improve by a ton. There is half a century of intense offshore experience in the oil sector, and two decades of experience building a lot of off shore wind. Even with that, prices has stabilised at a very high level. Yes, there is low-hanging fruit in the US, that is correct, but the total potential (miles of coast) is very limited.

> Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind

Strictly speaking, yes, but it's non-dispatchable in the opposite direction, if you will. It's much, much more efficient to have nuclear covering the base load in the grid, and then having some gas to deal with peak loads, whereas for wind or solar, you need alternative sources to cover nearly the whole installed capacity (a cold, cloudy day with little wind). But yes, if you were to get to 100% nuclear, you'd need a good (if smaller) storage solution, as with wind and solar.

> The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects

Both Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point C have famously and massively overrun their initial estimates. Optimistic numbers would be those for, say, South Korea or China.

> without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US.

That's going to be true (or solved) for any large, complex project, whether wind, solar or nuclear.

>Even with that, prices has stabilised at a very high level. Yes, there is low-hanging fruit in the US, that is correct, but the total potential (miles of coast) is very limited.

Not quite, offshore wind construction is improving, perhaps because they are focusing on improving that rather than just repurposing oil tech.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/14/new-record-fo...

>That's going to be true (or solved) for any large, complex project, whether wind, solar or nuclear.

Wind and solar are far far far less complex than nuclear, and do not have similar cost overruns.

Right, but onshore wind is massively cheaper.

Also, renewables can be built out incrementally and start generating very quickly, so your ROI starts almost immediately.

With nuclear you're looking at a ~10 billion upfront investment, that doesn't start generating for at least a decade.

In addition to this, costs for renewables are falling, while costs for nuclear are not.

95% of that cost is due to compliance requirements. 98% of those compliance requirements are 100% bs. If the same requirements were asked of new coal or gas built it would exceed that of a nuclear plant. The average coal plant emits more radiation in a month than the average nuclear plant during its entire operational lifespan. And billions of tons of CO2 for extra planet-killing power.

Where have you got those numbers from?

a) I'm pretty sure you just made those numbers up

b) Yes, Nuclear power is heavily regulated and this affects the cost. But that is the world we live in - and the world we build generating capacity in, so deal with it.

Most of your points about off-shore wind aren't quite right..

> These prices are set to go up, as the easy sites for installation are running out.

This isn't even remotely true... You can measure the number of offshore farms in the dozens, there are something like 1,500 cities with populations of at least 500,000 - and most of these are close enough to the water to make broad use of offshore wind power. For instance, there's 1 operating off-shore farm in the US right now.

> New-built offshore wind costs €3-4.7b/GW

Like pointed out elsewhere, this is true if you only look at off-shore costs. On shore wind is more like $1,250/KW. Importantly though, it's only true today. We're rapidly increasing the size of turbines and the height of towers. Most of the existing installations used 4/5/6-MW turbines. Vestas has already shipped a 9.5MW turbine. We'll likely see 20MW turbines within 5-7 years.

If you're building a 500MW off-shore farm with 5MW turbines, you'll need 100 foundations, towers, turbines, you'll need 300 blades and maintenance will have to service each one individually. Increasing those to 10MW cuts all of those costs in half (more likely, by 30% or so to account for scale). Doubling the size again has the same magnitude of impact. With 20MW turbines, a 500MW farm would only need 25 turbines and 75 blades.

The other benefit from these much larger turbines is that they'd sit much higher. If you increase the hub height from 100M to 150M or 200M, all of the sudden you're looking at sustained annual average winds approaching 20m/s. The wind shapes shift significantly as you increase altitude as well, so you can go from c=12, k=2 to c=20, k=3.5. This should easily move the capacity factors from ~50% to ~70+%.

> and, most severely, the expected lifetime of ~25 years[5] compared to 60+ years for nuclear.

Nobody serious expects that wind farms will only last 25 years. They'll last in perpetuity as long as their servicing costs stay below the marginal revenue from production. The initial lifetime expectations of nuclear reactors was 40 years, which has been extended for many plants. The same will happen with wind resources for many of the same reasons (high decommissioning costs, the challenges of siting a new generator, proven financial success at that location, etc.).

> those costs will come down as (if) we start ramping up construction and learn to avoid the cost overruns and get experience decommissioning plants.

Sorry but that's a rather naive expectation. We have plenty of other technologies, which are far more developed than nuclear, and they still end up going over budget quite often.

How long have we been building nuclear reactors? For decades, yet we are nowhere close to "avoid cost overruns", how many decades more of building overpriced and outdated designs do we need to get to that point? And how many Fukushimas, Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands are we prepared to endure until we actually reach this hypothetical point in human history?

We mostly learn from mistakes, but with nuclear, the mistakes are very pricey, not just in economic terms but especially in environmental terms.

> And how many Fukushimas, Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands are we prepared to endure until we actually reach this hypothetical point in human history?

Why are you listing TMI alongside actual nuclear disasters?

There was a reactor meltdown. Containment worked exactly as expected. Not a single person died. If we held the rest of the energy generation industry to such a standard, we'd be living in caves and banging rocks together for warmth.

> Why are you listing TMI alongside actual nuclear disasters?

Because that's where it belongs, just like Kyshtym.

> Containment worked exactly as expected. Not a single person died.

What a convenient claim to make considering the long term effects of the radiation usually show in the form of cancer and a direct correlation can never be made except when doing massive epidemiological studies on the affected populations, which rarely happens.

It's this very same dynamic which allows people to make outrageous claims along the lines of "Nobody died from Chernobyl radiation, it was all just naturally occurring cancer!"

Meanwhile, people in the US are still wondering how and why cancer clusters happen [0]. Look at that map, look the red spots and with a little bit knowledge of the US nuclear industry you will realize what's around that area. What a coincidence? That's what it probably is, just a coincidence because admitting anything else to the public wouldn't really play that well, so coincidence it has to be [1].

[0] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/24/health/cancer-cluster-disp...

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37517770

Yes, why don't we overlay that map of cancer clusters [0] with a map of nuclear reactors. [1]

This is what we get: http://imgur.com/a/VzgMF

Now, I'm no statistician, but to me, it looks like there is... No correlation between the two. Maybe the mundane, unsexy explanation in the article, citing lifestyle choices, smoking, alcoholism, access to healthcare, and poverty as the main factors influencing cancer death.

Cancer valley running through Kentucky has more to do with bourbon, then its non-existent nuclear reactors (It has an enrichment facility in its western part, but that's not where the cancer deaths are).

In short, this is FUD.

[0] http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170124123712-01-can...

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/images/reading-rm/doc-collections/maps/p...

The new-built nuclear power plants you are mentioning are not finished yet, have huge cost overruns and delays (and that's not finished yet).

The french EPR (Flamanville) for example had many issues (for example, some serious defects on the reactor vessel) and required redesigns while under construction. Quite frankly having seen it from the inside (I worked on a minor sub-system of this plant a few years ago), I even doubt it will ever deliver a significant amount of electricity to the grid. Even if construction is completed, it will be quite unique compared to the other EPRs, so I will not be overly confident about learning and be more efficient at constructing those.

The finish EPR (Olkiluoto) played a huge part in the near bankruptcy of Areva (french company providing various elements of the nuclear life cycle, from uranium mining to nuclear waste "recycling") and lead to its bail-out by EDF (which is mostly state owned, so in the end, the tax payer will pay).

The two Hinkley Points EPRs are a huge gamble, and the decision to go through by EDF (builder and operator of the future plants) on this project lead to much criticism, the EDF workers syndicates are deeply against it and the financial director and a member of the board resigned because of it. Given all the unknowns regarding the EPR, at 20 billion euros, it's a really huge risk taken more for political reasons than economic ones.

Also EDF must face a huge overall of all its nuclear reactors as they are nearly all reaching 40 years old. This "Grand Carénage" will cost ~50 billion euros to gain 10 to 20 years for the 58 existing french reactors.

For the decommissioning part, there are many unknows. The old and small Brennilis plant is being dismantled since 1985 with no definitive solution regarding the handling of the reactor vessel. Also there are tons of criticism regarding the future underground storage facility at Bure.

That the not so bright economic situation of nuclear industry in France (nuclear produces 70% of electricity here).

To finish, I'm personally worried by the implication of nuclear energy. Basically, believing in our capacity to manage highly dangerous wastes for several order of magnitude longer than human civilizations exist (let alone individual states) seems overly confident.

Yes, it has. The UK basically had to agree to pay a substantially above-market price for power for the life of the plant to make it viable: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/23/spending-wat... (and it's not clear that it's viable even then). As I recall, some US states have had to subsidise their existing nuclear power plants just to keep them running thanks to falling electricity generation costs. This is only going to get worse as renewables drive down the cost of electricity further.

As I demonstrated in my comment, Hinkley Point C, even with its massive cost overruns (and true, nobody knows if that's the final cost yet, but that's the current figure), is roughly on par with offshore wind in cost per installed GW after accounting for capacity factors. It's just that Hickley Point C will have as much capacity as the entire north sea offshore wind fleet (all countries, not just UK), and so the concentrated single number gets very big. And wind is massively subsidised, too, so the subsidy is not an argument in itself.

> when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction

The reaction can be completely rational. It depends on your estimate of the probability of a nuclear accident worse than Chernobyl. Officially it's around 10^-9 per reactor-year, but it's clearly an underestimate, if only because of the unknown unknowns.

Get a more realistic probability estimate, multiply by cost of all real estate in a large metro area, and you can get a pretty large expected loss.

> How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long?

This is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

" It is too bad the broad public perceives nuclear as a 'risky' energy source. It is in fact the safest energy source we have ever developed, in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour."

And there goes the misinformation campaign again.

The issues is not 'deaths per kw hour'. The issue is the unpredictable outcome of a single reactor incident. How many more do we need to endure? How many more areas becoming radiated for generations? How much more radioactive waster water? How many more cancer deaths?

And how much more need tax payers pay for cleanup before we realize: Let's stop using this energy source. Let's go renewals. It's the only sane option.

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