US Congress passes bill to help advanced nuclear power | Hacker News Reader

US Congress passes bill to help advanced nuclear power

arstechnica.com

305 pointsTomte280 comments

Policy will is one obstacle, but high costs are the main factor. Compared to new gas plants, new nuclear plants are extremely expensive. Look at the debacle in South Carolina and you can clearly see: new nuclear is not working (outside China). Old nuclear is still a huge portion of the carbon-free electric grid in parts of the USA and Europe, especially in other countries like France. I do believe that if carbon were taxed based on its negative effects, nuclear would get the much-needed economic re-conception that allows it to proliferate. It can and should be a climate solution, alongside batteries and renewables.

I suspect much of the high costs are largely due to the policy factor. We should be able to build plants much more cheaply than 50 years ago.

Actually plants are much more expensive now. I won't go into the different types of plants that are built today vs. the 1960s, but modern safety features and materials have a price.

Aren’t modern safety features a policy decision?

The old plants were already one of the safest forms of energy available - so by making nuclear safer it’s making us all less safe.

> We should be able to build plants much more cheaply than 50 years ago.

Negatory- access to heavy industry is far more constrained in the US than it used to be. Nuclear plants require huge forges, which are now nearly unavailable in the US. The ones that still exist[1] are used for aircraft and military purposes. In short the increasing size, popularity and profit in large/high performance (fighter jet spars) aircraft has driven the price of the heaviest industry up much higher in the US.

It's a double whammy because heavy industry abroad is also kind of meh, and the complications of shipping cause month or year delays in construction that are incredibly expensive.

IMO the best way to combat this is with small modular reactors, but advanced nuclear is not that. Still, it is better in a number of ways.

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

How does the Navy acquire nuclear powerplants for their vessels? I assume maritime powerplants are much smaller.

Maritime power plants are tiny, but they typically require much more enriched uranium, which is frowned upon for civilian programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Diff...

Which is another policy decision - we could allow civilian plants with richer fuel.

The closer civilian fuel is to weapons grade, the easier it is to convert civilian fuel into bombs.

I like the current policy.

Why not have a branch of the military / DoE run plants for power production? Or at least provide security at the plants and clearances for working at them?

There's a mash of entities involved, including numerous contractors, the Department of Energy, etc. Bettis Atomic Power Labs for example has been run since 2008 by Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corp., under the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. Westinghouse previously ran it for 50 years until 1998.

https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/missions/powering-navy

There are plenty of presses that can make pressure vessels that small. That's why smaller civilian reactors are such a good idea!

The current state of nuclear reactors is largely thanks to one man , Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. A quite interesting character who through his work for building up a nuclear powered fleet had to build up the entire supply chain of suppliers from uranium mining, transportation through reactor development,construction , operation and maintenance. Tasks where he had to fight as much for through internal navy policy and the congress as he had to for the technical and scientific challenges.

Those huge forges are needed for conventional reactors, which operate with at least 90 atmospheres of pressure, and sometimes up to 150 or so.

They're not needed for fast reactors or molten salt reactors, which operate at atmospheric pressure. That's one of many reasons they're expected to be cheaper. The purpose of this law is to support R&D for those types of reactors.

Too be fair the article is discussing 2 separate bills. One is to support R&D for advanced reactors and one is to help subsidize current designs so some of this discussion is a little confusing from the different contexts.

I'm not sure subsidizing our current tech in the US will make a difference, but the amount of money in public and private sectors right now for advanced designs needs to be more collectively focused towards building demostration reactors such as the fast neutron reactor being proposed.

It is also difficult for American companies (despite having designed and built a majority of factors globally) to currently compete against state actors like China or the Russian government. That is another critical reason we should be developing leading technology because we don't necessarily have good reason to trust other countries to design and build these safely globally which could lead to more nuclear disasters. The best example is Chernobyl which was a wildly dangerous avoidable accident that should have never happened.

Why don't we build more heavy forges? Seems like there's plenty of demand and limited competition.

Its not just in China that you can build cost effective nuclear. There are other places as well. South Korea for example has shown itself very effective.

The problem in the US is that there is only so few builds, these large projects can only be effective if you 'mass' produce these buildings so people have done it before.

Actually it was looking good for building many new plants in 2007 but sadly it all collapsed because of cheap gas and the financial crisis.

China has scaled back its plans for nuclear plants, in part perhaps because even in China the cost and risk profile of nuclear vs renewables seems to demand a reexamination.

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

They have scaled it back somewhat but it is still a huge program and they are developing many types of reactors and also buy many types of reactors at the same time.

The difference is that china is totally happy with continuing to use massive amount of coal and other things for baseload power.

While it is true that they are investing massively in renewables, specially in the places it makes sense, they also are building nuclear plants and coal plants.

In the west we aim to reduce the number of coal plants, and that is very much harder with renewables.

> Compared to new gas plants, new nuclear plants are extremely expensive.

This was an explicit policy of the enviros to stop nuclear construction back in the 80's and 90's. The NRC had a separate license to build then operate a plant. The enviros could not stop the licensing but tied up the license to operate in endless lawsuits and killed a number of projects. It was the licensing delays, not actual construction costs, that killed nuclear in the USA. Power utility CEOs stopped ordering plants when the path to licensed operation was blocked and could add 100's of millions of unknown costs in delays and lawsuits.

I think the NRC later revised the process to stream-line licensing and minimize the risks but no private utility is willing to go first. The enviros have threatened to sue the NRC if they use the new license process and tie that up in court. There had been talk of the TVA or some other govt utility going first but I have not heard of that lately.

That might make sense as long as "streamlining" doesn't also involve subsidies for things like catastrophe insurance. Would nuclear be cost-effective without subsidies?

Nuclear power is supported by many climate scientists. I think technically it's a fantastic solution. However, I don't think it's a great socio-economic solution and the costs if we fail to deal with climate change may be too high.

Let me explain. Earlier this year a nuclear power plant in Finland had to reduce capacity because the sea waters got too warm.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-fortum-oy...

This is one example where climate change may make it difficult to operate nuclear power plants. Another is that the seas are rising and storms are getting slower which results in more flooding.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/floren...

These together make operating nuclear power plants difficult.

The last threat is that if we reach the tipping point, we will likely be facing a world where nation states start failing, including our own. Nuclear power plants take decades to decommission and the question is, who will maintain and decommission these things when humanity is faced with much more pressing concerns like maintaining organized human life.

The tipping point is a real concern among scientists. The IPCC recommends policy makers take the real possibility of a tipping point into account and I think questions like "How do we deal with nuclear power plants as nation-states fail" should be taken seriously.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/ch2s2-2...

Prominent members in our field like Alan Kay also wrote about tipping points in a report for the NSF Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems

https://www.nsf.gov/ere/ereweb/ac-ere/nsf6895_ere_report_090...

I'm not a pessimist but a realist. I think it's utopian to not address the concerns of climate scientists and really smart people in our field when making policy decisions, and this includes nuclear.

Thanks for the thought provoking points!

It must be strange to plan for the end of civilisation as we know it when constructing one of the crowning achievements of mankind. Very sobering.

Reducing power due to high sea water temperature is something any power plan, regardless of fuel type, would have to do. The sea water isn't used to cool the reactor, it us used to condense the steam after leaving the turbine. If the cooling water is very warm adequate vacuum in the condenser is not possible to maintain. To alleviate this problem power is reduced to reduce the condensing load and maintain condenser vacuum. The linked article has factual misinformation in it which isn't unusual for technical pieces in newspapers.

Factor in CO2 costs, indeed.

Factor in also nuclear waste disposal costs. It is not fair to leave that to the tax payer.

Taking all that into account, nuclear may not be cost effective.

I think one of major reasons why new nuclear is so hard is NIMBYism and irrational fear of "radiation". People discount known risks and exaggerate new ones, so risks from coal are ignored (even if statistically they are more serious) and risks from very rare nuclear issues may lead whole countries to just ban nuclear energetics altogether. Unfortunately, I don't see a good solution to it - with more environmentally-conscious countries swearing off nuclear, all living nuclear stations remain in less environmentally-conscious ones, which will increase the number of issues, which will reinforce the idea that nuclear energy is too dangerous.

There's almost no reason to think this is accurate. The problem is not that people vote down nuclear proposals or protest them so aggressively that they cause delays. There isn't enough money in it and very few funds are willing to invest in 50 year terms for power plants.

This is, in fact, 100% accurate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/11/nuclear-...

It's not that radiation can't ever be harmful, it's that the safeguards and regulations, when followed, make it way less harmful to either neighbors or the environment than coal, which is disgusting and incredibly unhealthy.

>and irrational fear of "radiation"

Radiation is very harmful, and very real. You don't get nuclear power without it. Nothing irrational about the fear of radiation.

You don't get X-rays without radiation, either. For that matter, you don't get sunshine without radiation.

The problem with fear of radiation is that all radiation gets dumped under that label, without any nuance as to the amount or kind. A properly-operating nuclear plant will emit radiation, but in amounts that should be less than the background levels. A failing nuclear plant can emit catastrophic amounts. The two really need to be in two different categories in peoples' minds, because they are not similar at all.

>You don't get X-rays without radiation

Yeah which is why you don't get X-rays as part of a routine physical exam. They only use them when necessary, because they know that repeated exposure to radiation is bad.

Well, you still get them as part of a routine dental exam. You never did get them as part of a routine non-dental medical exam that I can recall. (And if I understand correctly, the dosage on a dental X-ray is much lower than it used to be, because the machines have improved a great deal.)

I believe most don't actually use film anymore, they use some other capture device that operates electronically.

>Well, you still get them as part of a routine dental exam.

Yeah and they put a lead vest on you, and leave the fucking room. I actually have my dentist take X-rays less frequently than the "recommended" time frames (once a year is "recommended" I think) because of this.

More radioactive material is emitted/released from coal plants than from nuclear plants, even when adjusted for the difference in power production between those two types of plants. It's not irrational to be wary about radiation, it is irrational to respond to that wariness by going all NIMBY on new nuclear plants.

I'm pro nuclear power, but this is the difference between drinking a glass of water and drowning with your head in a bucket. It's weird to apply averages to situations where nuclear disasters release massive amounts of radiation all at once.

That's true, but what I said factors in all of those historic nuclear disasters. Even with all of those, nuclear power still averages out at releasing less radiation per unit of power generated than coal.

Yeah, and perhaps radiation per unit of power isn't a good metric. Suddenly rendering huge areas uninhabitable is qualitatively different than slightly increasing cancer risk over a long period of time. Anything that conflates the first with the second isn't a very good analysis. It's like how more oil seeps out of the floor of the Atlantic each year than was released during the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Doesn't make it not a disaster.

It might not be a good metric, but it's still overly generous to coal, because we're already rushing headlong towards huge areas of coastline being uninhabitable because they'll be underwater.

>Suddenly rendering huge areas uninhabitable

Coal has the that risk as well, it could actually be worse because of the lax regulation. See fly ash spills for reference.

No, it's not weird - that's exactly where the fallacy is. Getting millions of people slowly poisoned by pollution gets less weight than a dozen of people directly hurt by radiation. For example, Three Mile Island incidents had essentially zero casualties (yes, including study of cancer incidence increase, which did not find any significant increase) but everybody has heard about it (and it essentially killed new nuclear development in the US). Try to find out how much morbidity random coal plant is causing, and pretty much nobody knows or cares.

This[1] site claims over 7,500 deaths each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. power plants.

This[2] site claims Coal is responsible for over 800,000 premature deaths per year globally and many millions more serious and minor illnesses. In China alone, around 670,000 people die prematurely per year as a result of coal-related air pollution. The ‘Coal Kills’ report estimates that in India coal contributes to between 80,000 to 115,000 premature deaths annually. In the United States coal kills around 13,000 people annually, and 23,300 in Europe. The economic costs of the health impacts from coal combustion in Europe are valued at about US$70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.

1. http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/

2. https://endcoal.org/health/

Right. So we are comparing (in US) 13000 deaths annually and one major incident with no casualties - and in the coal case, it's "yeah we know it's not ideal, so we are slowly moving away, but really slow because you have to be realistic here" and in the nuclear case it's "OMG OMG OMG radiation no more new stations ever we have to forget the whole thing now, it's too unsafe did I say RADIATION?!".

Oh, right, sorry. Yeah, coming back to this a day later I see that were you wrote "pretty much nobody knows or cares" it was meant in the general sense of stop someone in the street and ask them about coal and their eyes will glaze over vs ask them about nuclear power and radiation-three-eyed-fish-godzilla and they're way more likely to have a seizure right there on the street.

That's under normal operation, though. As Fukushima has shown us recently, sometimes they break.

...and still kills less people than coal kills during its normal operation.

Also (considering the amount of land that will be submerged underwater by 2100) probably makes less amount of land uninhabitable than coal does.

A lot of technology sometimes break. We still use it. We routinely travel in steel boxes whizzing around at breakneck speeds where any serious mechanical malfunction or error leads to a quick death or very painful long term injury - and millions get hurt this way every year - but we take this risk because the rewards are higher. But with radiation somehow no reward is worth the risk - its radiation, how could you dare to rationally calculate risk/rewards if people can die!!!!11one1oen That's what I call "irrational".

Stop repeating this, it's propaganda.

Which part, and do you have a source arguing otherwise?

The whole thing relies on emission of fly ash which contains a few ppm of thorium and uranium.

However a few things never mentioned.

1. Modern coal fired plants collect fly ash and bury it in landfill. So coal fired power plants since the 1970's don't emit fly ash or it's radio-isotopes.

2. As radio-isotopes go neither thorium or uranium are particularly bio-available or subject to bio-magnification.

3. Common dirt contains a few ppm of thorium and uranium. So contamination with fly ash doesn't change anything radio-logically.

Sharks are also real. Yet for an average person, living in fear of sharks is completely irrational, especially if that person never goes where sharks could actually harm them. The fear is rational when the probability of harm is substantial, with most nuclear developments it is not, and less than the alternatives.

It isn't irrational to fear radiation, but what is irrational is the level of fear, and also the fear in context with other dangers that we face that nuclear helps to solve.

I don't think that I'm out of line in suggesting that Global Climate Change is a much larger threat than even several Chernobyl incidents. The constant coverage, even to this day, about the Chernobyl incident has caused an availability heuristic in the collective psyche of man, and exacerbates the largest issues that we actually face.

The fear is a real and large issue that leads to a lack of reasonable discourse when evaluating pros and cons of nuclear against other sources in terms of funding advanced technologies and building current designs. But the fear is not necessarily what drives a cumbersome regulatory infrastructure that hampers new construction and the poor management by Westinghouse of the recent projects that led to massive cost overruns.

I am not an expert on nuclear energy but my understanding is that some designs (like the Molten Salt reactor) are considerably safer. You still have the risk of local contamination but no one should really care if a tiny area on earth is contaminated as a worst case. But they shouldn't expose a whole region to radiations.

My understanding is that development costs are significant as changing the design requires a lot of engineering and testing. But perhaps it is time for an ambitious programme which scale would justify the investment given the age of the current plants in most major countries.

The risks are real (as we have seen) and I think they should be insured accordingly.

The risks are real, but vastly overestimated, especially compared to (also real) risks of coal.

Real, but much lower than coal. Coal causes on the order of 1000 times more deaths per kilowatt of power produced than nuclear power. This is counting nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even if our nuclear track record were much worse, nuclear power would still be safer than coal.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

i think the major risk for nuclear energy isn't about human death but rather economical consequences of having an entire region destroyed for 40 thousands years.

This surprised me too, but apparently it's not as bad as that. Containment and cleanup is dangerous and expensive, but not impossible.

Chernobyl is maybe starting to be re-inhabited? http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Most_Chernobyl_towns_fi...

Here's ground zero at Hiroshima. Open 24/7, in the middle of the city. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hiroshima+Atomic+Bomb+Hypo...

EDIT: And see the nearby Peace Memorial Park. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hiroshima+Peace+Memorial+P...

Yep, I've been to Hiroshima myself and there was no concern about radiation at all... It's been washed away after 73 years

Of course, it's because both Hiroshima and Nagasaki got bit by first generation atomic bomb, and are right next to the sea. A salted nuclear explosion in a deep desert or inside a cave might make a seemingly-forever radioactive fallout. But that's not a concern in nuclear power I'd say.

The risks also have Engineering and Process controls that //modern// designs use. The non-energy products from nuclear reactors are also extremely useful in medicine and other science fields.

Additionally a lot of the current "waste" from older reactors is exactly that, wasted energy that different designs can do a better job of using up and converting to more precisely filtered waste streams (separating out the stuff not useful from reactors, but still quite hot, from the stuff that'll decay so slowly it can be handled differently).

Though I do agree that the cost of cleanup (and also insurance against disasters / errors-omissions) should be assumed to be something paid for and collected as taxes.

Where does spent fuel go? Right next to the reactor, in pools, where it is stored indefinitely because there is no other place for it to go and the proposed mines to store it forever never get built and used.

But modern reactor designs could also use up 99% of fuel 'waste' until the waste products are either so unradioactive that they pose no danger or so quickly deteriorate that even a simple metal drum could contain it for the necessary 100 years if it was somewhere dry. But since we don't have/use modern reactor designs and are sitting on 60 year old designs we don't have anywhere to use that 'waste' fuel yet.

> one of major reasons why new nuclear is so hard is NIMBYism and irrational fear of "radiation"

Consider that nuke plants cost 50% more than coal fired plants and that argument quickly falls apart.

But as the article points out, a lot of that cost is regulation led, having to comply with ever changing regulations in the middle of a project is what creeps up costs, like changing specs in the middle of a weapon program. Give nuclear energy scale and stability of regulation and it may have a chance to be economical.

Yes but the point of this law is to support advanced nuclear R&D, and some of the GenIV designs look very economical; in particular, the simpler molten salt designs. They're really a completely different technology than conventional reactors.

One of the problems is that every time a carbon tax is proposed its a tax on consumers, rather than carbon producers. Any tax should come on those who are pulling the carbon out of the earth and selling it to others, not the end-user. To make matters worse, drillers and other carbon-related corporations are, in many cases, currently receiving tax subsidies (tax holidays on public-land drilling among other things). A good first step would be passing a law that banned subsidies for carbon-producing industries before we propose taxing the end-user, which has a disproportionate impact on those least able to afford it.

I'm pro nuclear if costs are not externalized (insurance, EOL tear down, waste management) but priced in.

Is there anywhere where new nuclear plants are being constructed or even planned under such constraints?

We should also note that signing long-term contracts and guaranteeing minimum prices are other ways to subsidise nuclear power[1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-13413684

In principle I agree with you that in general we should attempt to internalize externalities whenever possible. But, for example, burning coal kills thousands of Americans every year from fine particle pollution. Why not internalize coal costs right now? Shouldn't that be the priority?

You're completely correct! In terms of impact, that should absolutely be the priority.

Some people prefer to incorporate difficulty, time costs, and resources required into their prioritization process rather than being purely impact-based. This may lead some of them to a different set of results.

Definitely, and that has been proposed tons of times in the form of a carbon tax. Whether it will some day implemented or not depends on the voters.

Fine particle pollution is entirely different from CO2 emission and would not be included as part of any carbon tax I've seen.

But it would be incidentally reduced by a carbon tax since that would cause some coal plants to be shut down.

Can we have costs for all forms of power priced in then?

Let them all include EOL costs, pollution and everything else so we can compare like with like.

Right. This would then also include the damage caused by global warming (CO2). Anyone offering insurance against Earth turning into Mars? How high are the premiums?

That’s a bit of a sloppy metaphor, since if anything Mars has the opposite problem. In fact, heightened carbon emissions would be a good first step in terraforming Mars.

Yes it would. That's rather the point.

Pretending pollution and CO2 are externalities is how we got to where we are. I think we're heading in the direction of Venus not Mars though. :)

It's more likely to turn into a Venus. And it'd make nuclear power virtually free compared to fossil fuels.

> It's more likely to turn into a Venus.

I've always had the feeling that there are people out there worrying about this, but you're the first one I've seen actually admit to it.

The idea is much too ridiculous to even mention. The atmosphere of Venus contains roughly four times the amount of nitrogen as the atmosphere of Earth. You may recall that the atmosphere of Earth is ~80% nitrogen.

The atmosphere of Venus is under 4% nitrogen and over 96% carbon dioxide. The total mass of Venus' atmosphere is about 100 times that of Earth's.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus )

No, the Earth cannot turn into a Venus.

Now imagine if all the carbon on our biosphere combines with all the oxygen in what was the ocean before it boiled away and all its hydrogen was lost to solar wind.

I'm not sure it'd be exactly like Venus (we have a magnetosphere, at least) but I am sure it'd be very bad.

You don't think having a ground temperature above the boiling point of water would cause any problems other than the release of oxygen from the ocean? How would you get to that point?

Of course, we'd be long dead before that. There's plenty methane in the ocean to drive up temperatures before it combines with atmospheric oxygen (driving them up a little bit further in the process).

Things like the mass hysteria with CO2 are just surreal to anyone with a basic understanding of atmospheric and climate science. It really messes with your trust in public consensus.

Why? We subsidize solar and wind because we realize it'd be politically impossible to force internalization of the costs of goal and gas. Why put nuclear at an artificial disadvantage?

Because nuclear waste is an unsolved problem, while cheap renewables promotes decentralized energy production using inputs that’s can’t be controlled. Solar panels and wind turbines can also be recycled. They require no expensive trust funds to decommission at end of life, and hazard to life to cut up radioactive components and bury them safely away from life.

If we’re going to subsidize anything, it might as well be solar and wind. It’s fusion energy at a distance.

Why would you decentralize energy production? Centralization brings down the cost by the power of scale, it worked for every industry, I don't see why energy would be any different. And even with renewables, it's far cheaper to make a renewable energy farm than spreading it randomly with massive subsidies.

Centralization creates transmission losses and enables control over the resource by an entity you might not have input into.

My utility can’t do anything about the power I generate with the solar on my roof. Your local community has very little input over for profit generators (versus shareholders).

> My utility can’t do anything about the power I generate with the solar on my roof. Your local community has very little input over for profit generators (versus shareholders).

That's looks more like a problem than anything positive, electricity grid planning is at a country level, not a local one. And personally I don't believe on private electricity generation, it should be public without shareholders for that reason.

> Centralization creates transmission losses and enables control over the resource by an entity you might not have input into.

How exactly? Every industry is like this. Factories came bigger and bigger, farms got bigger, trucks got bigger, cities became more dense, that's just economy of scale. Renewables are not immune to that, it's far cheaper to create a solar grid than spreading them randomly.

> And personally I don't believe on private electricity generation, it should be public without shareholders for that reason.

Then there's nothing for us to argue further. Sorry to hear you don't support energy independence and efforts to be self reliant. I do not want to be beholden to someone else for my energy needs, whenever possible, most especially shareholders of a for profit corporation.

> How exactly? Every industry is like this.

Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist.

I don't really get this libertarian-like argument (no idea if you are libertarian or not, it just sounds like what I would hear from them). You are relying on the society for everything. Do you also make your own car? build your own roads? Go to harvest coffee beans to make your own coffee? Do you get water from the city or from your own means? And what about petrol and gas?

> Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist.

It's not a bug, concentration makes economy of scale possible, that's why everything is like this. Spread-out cities have traffic issues, small factories create more expensive products, small farms struggle to negotiate selling prices, small shops cannot afford to buy in bulk... Concentration is what makes everything cheaper.

I can choose who I buy my car from. I have governance over politicians who manage my roads through voting and the political process. I can pick where I buy my coffee from. With rooftop solar, I can pick clean energy over the natural gas fired generation my city picked for local residents instead of the slightly more expensive clean nuclear the local utility was previously providing (Illinois allows local government to aggregate citizens into a bundle and obtain power from an independent generator, and they typically only care about cost, not externalities).

I agree with you that concentration and scale does drive down costs; but it's myopic to look at only the raw cost alone (similar to how we don't price carbon into fossil generation costs). We subsidize food production in the US. Why? National security of our food supply, not being behold to other countries for our food.

We should never be enabling the creation of monopolies (to your point about the necessity of centralization), but the distribution of power with citizens. In scenarios where centralization is unavoidable, rigorous governance must be implemented (which does not occur with for profit natural monopolies).

"Whenever something is wrong, something is too big." This is superbly explained in Leopold Kohr's book titled "The Breakdown of Nations".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy

I think decentralized energy production is a great idea. I have six solar panels on the roof of my bus and they provide all the power I need. I realize that's not as effective in an urban environment, but I much prefer small batches to huge grids.

Small, resilient, independent, diverse sources of energy are more robust against environmental changes, state violence, and monopolies-at-a-distance.

Additionally, the direct costs of centralization in the form of transmission loss and voltage conversion are non-trivial.

Power as electricity has an inherent high physical cost of transportation, you spend power to transport it. A solar panel is going to generate just as much power by itself as it would among a farm of solar panels, isolating for location and access to sunlight. I'm not sure how enforcing centralization in this case would be beneficial.

Just the cost of installation, maintenance & the necessary batteries for solar make that cheaper in a farm with scale.

maybe the panel does, but that doesn't much matter unless you're happy to make use of variable low voltage DC right there on the spot.

it has to run through an inverter, and likely be stepped up, to go anywhere else. and both of those things will tend to be higher efficiency when you've got more panels in the same place.

Micro-inverters are getting quite cheap now, each of my 20 solar panels have one. Out comes 120 volts, but still variable amperage.

> it worked for every industry

... says the guy commenting on a massively-distributed network that is the poster child for decentralized access to “industry”.

It’s a solved problem actually, it’s just a lack of political will to enact the solutions. Besides, it’s not like pollution (i.e. waste) from fossil fuels does something other than pollute. Compared to that, vitrification and interment represents a solved problem.

And you didn't even mention fuel recycling and MSR's... Recycling is already done and MSRs can burn anything.

Very true, all in all “not a solved problem” is factually incorrect and, like many safety concerns, based on problems of reactors from decades in the past. Meanwhile global warming and pollution are very much present day concerns and we need to do something on a shorter timescale than wind and solar alone will allow.

I only would be careful assuming all the problems are on reactors from decades past - reactors currently in operation use decades old designs and are more often than not, decades old.

But yes, I'd take a dozen Chernobyls over a runaway greenhouse effect.

I don't think it is solved because any solution needs to be very long term, and having politicians or even much of the population care about the long term is not a solved problem.

Nuclear power gives us far too much ability to borrow from tomorrow to pay for today, same as with coal. That's why it is, in practice even if not in theory, not an adequate solution to our energy demands.

Do we consider a problem solved once someone has sketched out an idea, once we've seen a proof of concept, or once we've seen the idea working in production for a suitable time?

Would any of us claim we could keep data safe for 100,000 years? In my book neither that - nor "dealing with nuclear waste" - are anywhere near solved problems.

This is exactly correct. The problem is solved by dozens of paper reactors or waste storage plans that do not exist. We can develop these things and we already invest tons of money into R&D which always gets allocated stopping short of fully developing the technology. We should either quit investing into the technology on a research level or start actually developing it.

If you're assuming cheap renewables, you might as well assume waste free nuclear.

Renewables are already cheaper than all other energy sources. No one can provide a waste free nuclear generation strategy.

> Xcel Resource Planning Executive: We Can Buy New Renewables Cheaper Than Existing Fossil Fuels

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/an-interview-wi...

Nuclear waste is largely a solved problem. The digs in Yucca mountain and in Finland can accommodate nuclear waste with a very high degree of safety. The proposed failure modes for these plans are incredibly far fetched: what if people in the future lose knowledge of the buried waste, decide to dig a mile down in a remote location with no natural resources, uncover the waste caskets, don't heed the warnings because all knowledge of 21st century languages are lost, and never figure out that the stuff in these concrete blocks is poisoning them? Sure, this possibility exists, but it's up there with meteor strikes in terms of how useful it is to try and mitigate it

Those digs may or may not accommodate nuclear waste with a very high degree of safety. What's sure is that nobody will be really responsible if (when?) the sh*t hits the fan, especially because some waste may kill or maim in the distant future (thousands years), or in stealth mode (polluting a phreatic zone).

When the Chernobyl plant was under construction a soviet newspaper claimed that "it will be so safe it could be built on the Red Square". When the disaster happened, the author of this claim was nowhere to be found.

> Because nuclear waste is an unsolved problem

People keep saying that, but it's been solved for years, we just haven't built the reactors that solve it. The new designs use the "waste" from the old ones as fuel.

> cheap renewables promotes decentralized energy production using inputs that’s can’t be controlled

Nobody is preventing you from putting solar panels on your roof. But the person who lives in a studio apartment in a fifty story building has a patch of sunlight exposure that would be lucky to run a hair drier from solar, much less climate control the apartment.

> If we’re going to subsidize anything, it might as well be solar and wind.

If we're going to subsidize anything, it should be nuclear and renewables. They actually work great together -- nuclear for baseload (at night) and solar during the day when the sun is out and the load is higher.

Nuclear plants over their lifetimes pay into trust funds (from their own revenue) to pay for their decommissioning: https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2017/07/14/...

Until 2013 they also paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund, which currently has $46 billion. Since politicians killed Yucca Mountain and didn't come up with an alternative, a federal court in 2013 said they have to stop collecting fees until they come up with a use for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...

Regarding insurance, I'm in favor of internalizing costs if we take a rational approach to actual damage. Specifically, if something happens and causes radiation levels that occur naturally in cities with normal cancer rates, then don't evacuate the city. If cancer rates are unchanged after an accident, throw out claims that particular cancers were caused by the accident. In general, reexamine the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which is looking increasingly shaky. (However, some GenIV plants look so inherently safe that this might not be worth fighting about.)

> In general, reexamine the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which is looking increasingly shaky.

I reckon we'd all be surprised by how many people are killed by a lifetime of shaking hands under a linear no-threshold hypothesis applied to Newtonian force.

I really don't understand how anyone can bring that model up seriously without adding in "and this highly unusual choice of model is justified by ...". It is an extraordinary claim in my book.

Hahaha, amazing. I'm adding this to my repertoire. I just started using the aspirin analogy. If you take 100 aspirins at once you'll die so what are the odds that you'll die if you take 1? Is it 1/100? Or is it 0?

There are reasons to dispute the linear no-threshold model, but there are specific justifications involving ideas about cancer risk that are much more reasonable than your aspirin example.

It's definitely not 0. Taking an aspirin will thin your blood just slightly, and irritate your stomach lining just a little bit. There's a chance (though of course only a small chance) that one of those things will have consequences that kill you.

There's also a chance that it'll have consequences that save your life -- e.g., making congestive heart failure a little bit less likely.

It seems uncontroversial that there may be nonlinear effects at large doses -- after all, if some dose is large enough that it almost certainly kills you then it's simply not possible for twice the dose to be twice as likely to kill you. But surely the estimates you're concerned about are not obtained by linear extrapolation from such large doses; they're the result of extrapolating from known statistics for doses small enough to be unlikely to kill, but not so small that the risk can't be measured because it's overwhelmed by background noise.

Those extrapolations could still be wrong, of course. But comparing against something that's obviously wrong like going from 100 aspirins to 1 aspirin is not a fair comparison, and scores much better on rhetorical effect than on actual evidential force.

linear no-threshold is weird & unusual for most processes, but it meshes perfectly well with what I understand about radioactivity in general- that is, random & cumulative. See half lives for example.

Is there any real evidence showing LNT is wrong?

Yes. The human body has DNA repair mechanisms that work fine if not overwhelmed. There's also lots of data showing low cancer rates despite higher-than-normal radiation exposure; e.g. some cities have quite high naturally occurring radiation, but low cancer rates.

Ok, so LNT may describe the damage but not necessarily the all-cause mortality. I can live with that.

Linear no-threshold actually maps fairly well to skin cancer which is a direct proxy. What differentiates things from a slap is each event is very energetic, and operates independently on each of your 30 trillion cells. Like shooting at random they mostly don't hit anyone, until the one just happens to be in the wrong pace.

At a lower level their are many systems that both cause and reduce the risks of cancer. However, over a lifetime the odds of getting cancer end up being fairly high and most people end up a single mutation away from cancer. At which point every even is just another roll of the dice.

Net result, observed results look rather linear.

There are disconnects in this argument though.

1) A slap on the wrist is highly energetic, and speaking from an understanding of basic materials physics it seems very likely that it damages cells, ligaments and bones. We just heal from it very easily because the damage is completely trivial.

2) Skin cancer can't be reasonable proxy. I live in Australia, and it is well-known here that skin cancer is frequently caused by sunlight.

Now the dose of radiation you get from sunlight is huge. On a typical day, you are exposed to enough radiation that you can detect it as heat (ie, we associate heat with sunlight). I've only ever been exposed to enough artificial radiation to feel heat in dental X-Rays. The LNT model is going to be operating at much lower levels, because the theoretical damage is being done to people who cannot detect it.

That link alone is surely going to overwhelm the effect of tiny doses of radiation and make it impossible to detect low-threshold increases.

> slap on the wrist is highly energetic

1) Cells are elastic and suspended in water which allows them to survive what you might think of as extreme trauma. (Ever seen someone hammer a nail with a glass bottle filled with water?) Combine that with the elastic nature of connective tissue is what allows you to for example jump without killing off of the cells at the bottom of your feet.

2) Sunlight is EM radiation like X-Rays. However, the vast majority of the energy is harmless and and even UVA / UVB is limited to the top layers of skin. But, as far as those top few layers of skin are concerned it's like your constantly getting very weak X-Ray when standing in sunlight making it a great proxy for low level radiation exposure.

The tiny sliver of red UV that reaches past the atmosphere is what you care about. Dead skin cells block even more, but the tiny fraction of a fraction of energy can still kill you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#/media/File:Solar_spe...

> a federal court in 2013 said they have to stop collecting fees until they come up with a use for them

This is fascinating! I didn't realize that killing Yucca Mountain triggered lower taxes for the companies producing the waste. That's pretty poor incentive alignment. It also might help explain the seemingly excessive amount of ad-spend against Yucca mountain when I lived in Nevada.

There are a lot of people who've campaigned against nuclear over the years, including fossil fuel companies. I think it's a stretch to think nuclear companies campaigned against waste storage in hopes that a future court case would eliminate their fees...especially since the consequence is that they have to store the waste locally at the plant site, which isn't free either. It's reasonable that if they're paying for that, they shouldn't also have to pay for a repository that doesn't exist.

Meanwhile, fossil plants dump their waste into the atmosphere and don't pay a dime for it.

> Meanwhile, fossil plants dump their waste into the atmosphere and don't pay a dime for it.

Waste that includes radioactive material, no less.

Campaign against it? While in the short term they certainly don't want to pay for a non-service, they are 100% behind the government taking away their waste problem.

There is a bunch of defense-related politics here. The US doesn't generally reprocess nuclear waste into useful things (ie new fuel). The DOE, who control nuclear weapons, like to have a huge pile of waste lying around because some of it can be reprocessed into weapons-grade material. Yucca would have been more a stockpile than disposal site. That's why more practical means of burial (deep cores) were never really discussed. They didn't want to put it somewhere out of reach.

I don't know, fellow Nevadan here and I didn't feel like I got a lot of ads on Yucca but I did feel like the way it was framed made it such a non-starter for any politician so it became impossible to back.

No one wants to be the Senator who voted to let nuclear plants dump their toxic waste near Las Vegas, especially given the atomic testing history of Nevada already

The waste management fee is not a tax. It is payment for a service that the government declared can only be provided by the government, but that it is too inept to actually provide.

I'm generally in favor of Nuclear, but they need to complete their whole-life planning before opening new plants. Presently, the status quo plan is to store nuclear waste at or near where it is generated in perpetuity. That's a pretty big unfunded liability in terms of risk management, security and maintenance. What is the future present value of managing a nuclear waste site for several hundred thousand years across risks we can't even imagine? That's a pretty big known unknown.

I think the long term nuclear storage problem is at least partially, if not mostly or fully, a problem caused by political opposition.

NIMBY essentially.

They couldn't even get storage done at Yucca Mountain, and that's in the middle of the desert.

That's the status quo only because the government shut down its long-term storage facility, for which nuclear companies have already provided $46 billion.

However, for the fast neutron reactors supported by this new law, long-term waste storage is less of a problem. 99% of our nuclear waste is U238 and transuranics, all of which are fissioned in fast reactors. The remaining 1% is fission products, which have much shorter half-lives. For those, the general idea is to encase them in glass blocks and bury them; they'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years.

Are you saying that 99% of hazardous nuclear material is consumed in its own process? What does 'fissioned' mean in this context? Also can you comment on whether this requires more or less uranium ore inputs than prior generation reactors?

"Fissioned" in any nuclear context means big atoms are split into small atoms.

Natural uranium is 0.7% U235, and the rest U238. Only the U235 is fissionable by the slow neutrons in conventional reactors. For a nuclear plant, we have to enrich the uranium until it's at least 2% U235 (or a little more, depending on reactor design...the top is about 5%).

The U238 in the reactor doesn't fission when hit by a neutron, but may absorb it and turn into plutonium, which is fissionable. About a third of a conventional reactor's energy output comes from fissioning plutonium.

Other transuranics (elements heavier than uranium) are also produced in a conventional reactor as nuclei absorb neutrons without fissioning. The end product is a mixture of U238, unfissioned U235 and plutonium, other transuranics, and fission products. There's some fissionable material left over because some fission products absorb neutrons, poisoning the reaction; some countries, like France, "reprocess" this mixture to pull out the remaining fissionables.

A fast reactor changes all this. In a conventional reactor, neutrons are purposely slowed down by materials like graphite and water. In a fast reactor, the neutrons from fission are left at the high energies they start with. These neutrons can fission U238 and all the transuranics.

So the fast reactor can use all of the uranium, instead of just 1% percent of it (U235 plus some U238 that gets converted to plutonium). That does mean it only needs about 1% as much uranium input.

A 1 GW coal plant uses a 100-car trainload of fuel every three days. A conventional nuclear plant uses an 18-wheeler load of fuel rods every 18 months. But a 1GW fast reactor uses just one ton of fuel per year, about the size of a beach ball. It can supply all the energy you need for your entire life, transportation included, from a piece of fuel the size of a golfball.

>> ...just one ton of fuel per year, about the size of a beach ball.

Well, one hell of a hot beach ball. While the numbers are correct, that is how big one ton of uranium would be, for all practical purposes the fuel would be much bigger. The rods aren't 100% uranium. And they certainly aren't all transported in one spherical mass (boom). It would be moved a few kilos at a time, under escort. So there would still be lots of shipment/trucks transporting fuel to the reactor.

It won't be pallet delivered by fedex ground every other year.

For solid-fueled designs like the Integral Fast Reactor, the fuel is metallic uranium in steel-encased rods. For fast molten salt reactors, it's pretty much just pure fuel, since it gets melted into the liquid reactor fuel.

After startup, the fuel can be unenriched uranium, so there's no concern about an explosion, or any significant security concern. The only part that requires care and high security is the startup fuel, which has to be enriched to about 20% U235. (Bomb-grade is over 90%.)

Even so, the fuel isn't shipped in paper bags. It moves inside containers, insider other containers. If you saw it heading down the road on a truck it would be a much larger/heavier object.

I would still not recommend assembling a beachball-sized mass of any sort of uranium. It may not be critical, but you are heading in that direction. The local criticallity officer will not be happy. Even depleted uranium, the stuff once used in bullets, probably shouldn't be so assembled.

It's such a small amount of material that I don't think it much matters how it's shipped, in terms of energy usage compared to what you get out of it.

However, U238 is simply not fissile in the absence of lots of high-energy neutrons. It's merely fertile, much like thorium. Here's a picture of thorium stored in the U.S.: https://energyfromthorium.com/2006/07/07/how-to-throw-away-e...

Depleted uranium is still used in military large-caliber bullets, and the M1A1 tank uses depleted uranium armor, probably an inch or two thick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chobham_armour#Heavy_metal_mod...

Some large civilian aircraft have used over a ton of depleted uranium as trim weights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Trim_weights_...

Depleted uranium

I read that an awful lot of it was fired into Iraq by the US in the last 'war' there, and will be causing birth defects there for a long time. I don't think someone reading the calm sentence Depleted uranium is still used in military large-caliber bullets would have any idea of the horrifying reality.

(Depleted) Uranium is a pyrophoric material - it spontaneously ignites in the right conditions (e.g. when it's shot at a tank and penetrates it), making a better job of killing said tank's occupants. This causes it to vaporize, and can now be breathed in - the exact set of circumstances where its nature of alpha emitter is dangerous for health.

While this is horrific, and I hope it stops, please keep in mind that any other use case which doesn't involve burning it or aerosolizing it creates no health hazard - you can build glassware with a high U content and drink from it.

any other use case which doesn't involve burning it or aerosolizing it creates no health hazard

That doesn't sound quite right:

"Normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and other systems can be affected by uranium exposure, because, besides being weakly radioactive, uranium is a toxic metal. Uranium is also a reproductive toxicant. ...Uranium metal is commonly handled with gloves..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Human_exposure

It's amazing isn't it, a golfball sized material to power your life. Unfortunately, we again bump up against the problem of a single actor having too much power (literally). Sadly, someone will try to use their golfball to blow up a large city. We might have some amazing batteries otherwise. As is, I imagine we'll have to parcel out energy in small quantities to individuals.

It's not bomb-grade material. In fact, after startup the reactor can be fed by natural uranium, depleted uranium, or nuclear waste.

(And I'm not suggesting that individuals would get their own golfballs. I'm just pointing out the amount of material required to fuel each person's lifetime usage.)

This is very helpful, thank you and I hope you continue to broadcast this message. It is definitely changing my thinking and I don't see major media outlets working to explain the technical advantages of these new technologies. It is, after all, a public outreach problem to get new sites approved.

Small point - we replaced about a third of the fuel each refueling. That is about 70 fuel assemblies. If memory serves me right there were about 10 or so assemblies per truck. The are shipped in large, accident proof, casks and each assembly is individually packed. They take up a lot of room.

UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...

£161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...

£234 billion in 2018 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...

... and counting.

If the linear no-threshold theory (i.e. if 100 people taking 100 aspirins each kills 100 people then 1 person taking 1 aspirin will kill 1 person) was reconsidered then it'd be ok to treat background-level radiation more reasonably. Then I think these costs would be much much less. To get here I believe someone's going to have to convince the public of low-dose hormesis convincingly enough (that is, if it's real) that they'll start making radiation dose appointments at the salon for health reasons.

Yes and nuclear plants in the U.S. already pay for that, and it comes from the money paid by electricity customers.

UK: 15 reactors, ~10300 gross MWe. They analyzed and now think that decommissioning will cost £234 billion (309 billion USD).

USA: 98 reactors, 100350 gross MWe. 46 billion USD (Nuclear Waste Fund) are in provision. One order of magnitude more power produced by the stuff to decommission, and nearly 7 times less money to do so. Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and ENTOMBing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay.

The trust funds for decommissioning are separate from the Nuclear Waste Fund.

Given that

* "Approximately 70 percent of licensees are authorized to accumulate decommissioning funds over the operating life of their plants." ( https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/d... )

* at least some plants will be closed ahead of schedule (it's already starting) => not enough accumulated funds

* the effective decommission cost may be higher than planned (see the UK & Oyster cases)

... the Nuclear Waste Fund may prove useful as waste management is a non-neglectable part of a decommission.

Will all the available funds be sufficient?

There is a nuclear plant decommissioning line item in my So Cal Edison bill that confirms that customers are paying, but invalidates that a sufficient amount was collected during the operating lifetime of the plant.

> Since politicians killed Yucca Mountain and didn't come up with an alternative

Harry Reid. It's important to emphasize that this isn't a complex or bipartisan problem. It's one very powerful individual supporting his states NIMBYism, and a party (the Democratic Party) which is unwilling to stand up to it's leadership amid mixed overall opinions on nuclear.

Perhaps most painful for my sanity: the event that would be best for nuclear power in the United States would be Trump deciding he wanted to stick it to Harry Reid.

> the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which is looking increasingly shaky.

How is it increasingly shaky? In who's opinion?

No technology have everything priced it, just ask yourself what is going to happen when China (which has a near-monopoly on solar panels) stops to artificially subsidize them by their state to destroy the competition.

It should be subsidized until we have a carbon tax.

What I meant is that it's currently subsidized both by the Chinese government and then by the EU country or US after for the installation.

Uh... prices will rise instantaneously by the amount of the subsidy, then gradually drop as competition is restored? You seem to be positing a Giant Solar Crash or something, and that doesn't seem likely. Chinese panels are maybe a bit under cost now, but these are just not expensive devices.

> I'm pro nuclear if costs are not externalized (insurance, EOL tear down, waste management) but priced in.

Then fossil fuels would have to pay a carbon tax, natural gas would have to pay for every ounce of methane they leak into the atmosphere, other plants would also have to factor in decommissioning (a 10GW reactor is equivalent to more than fifty million solar panels, how much does that cost to recycle?), hydro dams, coal mines and oil platforms would have to carry catastrophe insurance, etc.

Pricing in every cost for nuclear but not for anything else is not a level playing field. Come to nuclear after you've actually priced in the costs for fossil fuels.

Would not be competitive with carbon since it currently benefits from this. Yes, that should be changed, but if externalized costs is the price to pay to make nuclear competitive then I would be in favor of paying that price. CO2 has much higher tail risk than nuclear so willing to let the nuclear industry screw us taxpayers a bit if that's what it takes.

Nuclear is an incredibly under utilized option which I believe is due to public fear from misinformation. Most people don't realize how much nuclear power we already have in the USA and how close they live to a nuclear power plant.

Indeed! Nukes provide about 60% of the low-carbon energy in the USA. They emit about 12 gCO2-eq/kWh (vs. 40 for solar PV, 11 for wind, 490 for gas, 820 for coal). They net save millions of lives simply by displacing air polluters. They contain and pay for all their waste (where other energy systems dump their waste right into our lungs where it kills hundreds of thousands per year). Accidents have hurt relatively few people (0 died or will die from Fukushima, while a gas explosion just happened and we already forgot about it).

The operating plants now are struggling because fracked gas pulled out the electricity revenue rug below their operating costs, and post-9/11 upgrades have been expensive for operation and maintenance.

But the capability of atomic energy is just so darn intriguing it's hard to just give up on fission now, even though it advanced fission has struggled through the years.

Chernobyl won’t be habitable for 20,000 years.

While accidents are rare, with their incredibly high cost (in this case: a city of 50,000 people that cannot be inhabited for a time longer than all of human history), they need to be even rarer.

Chernobyl was terrible design, and we’ve come a long way. Fukushima would be a better example of a modern design failing, and even then there are much more fault-tolerant designs.

We certainly aren’t going to be building any more Chernobyls for commercial power generation.

Fukushima uses a 50 years old design.

Japan is somewhat forced to build nuclear plants in a very seismically active zone.

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

chernobyl had known reactor design flaws at the time of the accident. even then, there were designs for fail-safe reactors instead of fail-deadly reactors. those have only improved with time.

I wouldn't consider Fukishima modern either, it began construction in 1967, with the actual design plans being a bit older. That is like 25 years from the first nuclear reactors, we are now 50 years of research and technology beyond fukishima. Yeah it has had some upgrades, but you can only modify an already existent reactor design so much.

False. There are people living many people in that exclusion zone right now and they are actually fine and don't drop dead of cancer like flies.

And lets remember that this was a Soviet design build as a technology to have reactor for nuclear weapons (or at least dual use).

Fukushima is the worst thing ever happened in terms of actual western civilian reactors and not a single person died from radiation.

Not a single person died in the US from civilian nuclear. It is the safest energy technology in terms of actual data.

So yes, it should be saver, but comparatively it is saver then everything else.

Not a single person died in the US or Japan? Quite misinformed.

Care to back that claim up?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/japan-acknowledges-f...

We all know how enthusiastic governments are to admit fault, there are probably many more.

One I'm familiar with in the US:

"The Sodium Reactor Experiment-SRE was an experimental nuclear reactor that operated at the site from 1957 to 1964 and was the first commercial power plant in the world to experience a core meltdown. There was a decades-long cover-up of the incident by the U.S. Department of Energy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...

Many of the workers died in their 40s or earlier, in town most of that generation dead by their 60s of cancer. Appears to still be having an affect: https://www.change.org/p/no-more-kids-with-cancer-clean-up-t...

nickik's claim was that no one has died in the US from civilian nuclear. Your links are for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a military experimental research facility.

If there have been any deaths from civilian nuclear, I would like that information to consider.

“first commercial power plant…”. You also may have missed the first link about fukushima.

From radiation no as far as I know.

In Japan some people died of some of the consequences and government overreaction, not from radiation.

In the US, there is no case that I know of where people died from civilian reactor radiation.

The ars technica link beside you says otherwise. Reuters also ran the story.

I believe that it is true that nobody has died from acute radiation exposure at a civilian US nuclear power facility. There are still fatal industrial accidents at nuclear facilities from more mundane causes, like accidentally falling equipment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One#March_201...

Or being scalded by steam:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Even...

The reason I bring this up is because the "deaths per terawatt hour" comparisons often used by nuclear proponents omit non-radiation fatal accidents in the accounting for nuclear but include those accidents for renewables. See e.g.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

It says that US nuclear has a mortality rate of 0.1 deaths per 1000 terawatt hours. Since US nuclear power generates about 800 TWh per year, that implies a fatality rate of about once every 12 years across the whole US fleet. But as shown above the Surry Nuclear Power Plant alone has had 6 workers die from accidents (though none involved radiation).

Nuclear power is very safe in any case; the real menace is combustion-based energy sources. It's just going too far to say that "not a single person died" from US nuclear power. Job site deaths from crushing, burns, falls from high places, etc. are still deaths. That modest number of accidental deaths would be a rounding error for coal, but it really matters at the low end with nuclear and renewables, precisely because the indirect pollution deaths are so much lower for non-combustion electricity sources.

First of all, the threat we're up against is global warming and air pollution which is currently killing hundreds of thousands of people, right now, per year.

Also, you're assuming a linear no-threshold radiation dose response, which is very hard to find support for at the low dose rates now present at Chernobyl. As someone else in this thread pointed out, that's like assuming hundreds of people would die per year from handshakes due to linear health response to Newton's laws.

Indeed, it appears that human presence was more detrimental to life than radiation [1].

[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...

The engineering cost of dealing with Fukushima and Chernobyl are aboslutely eye watering.

I would agree that the human reaction is sometimes irrational, but that needs to be accepted. Human life is not a lab controlled experiment where people will always behave rationally.

Ok, but would you agree that we should also expect to not overdo cleanup efforts by several orders of magnitude without reasonable evidence that low-dose radiation is dangerous after collecting multiple decades of data. I don't think infinite-duration irrationality in the face of data is necessary.

A focus of the engineering efforts at Chernobyl and Fukushima are to make sure that higher risk contamination is avoided. So the current radiation impact is not the issue. It is the potential impact that is addressed.

I hope that one day Chernobyl and Fukushima can be repopulated, and agree that may be safe. I don't think that makes any difference to the actual cost of the event. Nor, would it be wise to presume that a subsequent event could be safely handled without an evacuation. But that is one for politicians to decide.

The cost of the status quo where we mostly burn dead dinosaurs for electricity costs a lot more and is not getting any less costly.

Given the choice of waiting for wind/solar to become more worthwhile as oil extraction slowly becomes more expensive and prices slowly rise (aka the status quo) or pulling the trigger on nuclear now it shouldn't even be a choice.

I am actually in favour of developing nuclear energy. And I think we should also invest in renewables. And one day I think that another nuclear station is going to fail and will need to be made safe. Those things are not inconsistent.

> Chernobyl won’t be habitable for 20,000 years.

The area around Chernobyl is habitable today. In fact, wildlife is thriving there because humans are staying away.

"habitable" is not the same as survivable. Generally the term habitable means safe for society, so while you may quibble over what exact standard to use the dangers around Chernobyl are MAGNITUDES higher than the dangers of smoking. More like guaranteeing cancer in <20 years.

Reference?

Here's another data point: Even by your definition, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable today, less than 100 years after having been hit by nuclear bombs. Ground zero in those cities are thriving tourist zones. Yes, radiation is dangerous, but the dangers of nuclear power have been VASTLY exaggerated by left-wing propaganda.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima were both air burst explosions for maximal blast, but didn't contaminate the ground as much as a ground explosion would.

Chernobyl was not a ground explosion either. (Well, OK, it was, but it wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was a steam explosion.)

If radiation sickness is your concern, then you're better off replacing coal (which spews radioactive material into the air all day every day) with nuclear (which does not normally, and even with the very few nuclear disasters in Earth's history doesn't do so at anywhere near the scale of coal).

20,000 years is way off. Here's a report by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) [1]. The main radio-isotopes after the Chernobyl disaster were (see p. 2):

"The total release of radioactive substances was about 14 EBq1 (as of 26 April 1986), which included 1.8 EBq of 131I, 0.085 EBq of 137Cs and other caesium radioisotopes, 0.01EBq of 90Sr and 0.003 EBq of plutonium radioisotopes. The noble gases contributed about 50% of the total release of radioactivity."

Iodine-131 has a half-life of only 8 days, and it cleared up long ago. The only going concern is Caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, and needs 300 years to go to 1/1000 of the initial levels and 600 years to all but disappear. The other radioisotopes were contained to the location of the reactor. The only one that will be there for millenia is a decay product of Pu-241, namely Am-241 with a half-life of 430 years. However, as stated before, that is localized to the nuclear reactor itself. It will reach a maximum about 100 years after the event (so about 70 years from now).

[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1239_web.pd...

I don't think it is fair to say that 0 died from Fukushima.

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

You're right. The proper statement is that radiation killed zero people, but fear of radiation did kill.

The first radiation exposure related death was reported a few weeks ago from one of the plant's workers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-45423575

Still, your point that nuclear is significantly safer from a community health perspective is correct.

Well...besides the obvious accidents there is nuclear waste.

But luckily you have places where you can make it disappear: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/06/03/yucca...

Does coal not have accidents? And where do you think the waste byproducts of coal go?

Take a deep breath.

Or eat some tuna. Coal has doubled the amount of mercury in the ocean.

Not sure where you've been the last decade but people who speak against nuclear power are usually also against coal.

Sure does coal also have accidents. A handful people die having it. Even solar plants burn down or a wind mill may fall over.

All of this is ridiculous compared to a nuclear fallout. But it says much that you chose coal. Another energy source that is on the way to be abolished.

PS. I may have taken too many deep breaths when the Tschernobyl cloud moved over me.

> Sure does coal also have accidents. A handful people die having it.

> All of this is ridiculous compared to a nuclear fallout.

Your response gives me the feeling that you're significantly underestimating the number of deaths caused by power generation using coal. It's not a "handful" of people–it's more like a million people, per year.

As I've said before, coal is already on the way to be abolished also. I also never stated that I support coal. Actually you'll probably find not many (if any at all) people who support coal over nuclear power (didn't you know that?). You've set up this straw man to point away from the actual issue and it's quite funny since it's what the industry does. I guess their advertising works ;)

> As I've said before, coal is already on the way to be abolished also.

Not anytime soon.

> I also never stated that I support coal. Actually you'll probably find not many (if any at all) people who support coal over nuclear power (didn't you know that?).

And yet, you're making comments about coal killing a "handful" of people, while nuclear fallout is "ridiculous". Also, I'd rather prefer if you didn't belittle me. I don't particularly care personally, but it's not adding anything to the argument so it's just extra stuff I need to read.

> Not anytime soon.

What is "soon"? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/05/uk-coal-fir... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rwe-coal/germanys-rwe-say... Especially considering nuclear waste. (see how desperately I try to get back to the topic?)

> And yet, you're making comments about coal killing a "handful" of people

Because _accidents_ just do that....

Nothing anymore on the topic? Nuclear power you remember? Waste, accidents?

Many countries, notably India and China, are adding nuclear power to their electrical grids to supply base load. Also, nuclear accidents, while large, are very rare–especially with regards to how much power each plant generates. So per MWh you end up with a much, much lower casualty rate as compared to other power sources–coal, in particular, leads to many deaths in the process of mining it, breathing in its pollution (which many in this thread have mentioned is radioactive), etc.

I have no idea how this "many countries"-argument does make the waste or accident problem go away or is even related to it but actually China has not approved any new nuclear reactors between 2016 and 2017 and only 3 in 2017 which is a huge reduction. All this because of renewables. Solar is expected to become China's cheapest source of electricity, surpassing natural gas by 2020 and coal by 2030. China is ranked first in the world by installed capacity of hydropower, solar and wind. And India slashed plans for new nuclear reactors by two-thirds.

However...back to the actual topic:

> So per MWh you end up with a much, much lower casualty rate as compared to other power sources

I wonder how you get to this. How do you know how many Japanese citizens will die earlier of cancer because of Fukushima? How do you know, I won't die earlier because of Chernobyl? I mean, just comparing the accidents is ridiculous. An nuclear accident leads to dead land. You have to remove huge areas of soil and the impact through contaminated water is not even properly measurable. The costs of nuclear disasters are so far beyond every mine accident that it's not even worth mentioning. All this is a growing problem since we're faced with old nuclear reactors that are being kept alive for the sake of revenues. It's a huge issue for Germany for example being faced with old nuclear power plants leaking and breaking all the time just behind the border. This will happen more often and the poorer the country owning one is, the greater is the risk. We again didn't even touch the WASTE as you seem to avoid it at all costs. And as I've said several times over: I don't want to replace it nuclear with coal. Please stop dragging your straw man into this over and over. We are in the 21st century and there are alternatives.

Saying that you can make nuclear waste disappear is an extremely ignorant (bordering on negligent) thing to say.

The hope that a dead project started 40 years ago might be brought back to life is hardly a "don't need to worry about it" sort of bullet point, especially when you're discussing something that needs to be managed and maintained for thousands of years.

It was meant to sound ironic. I don't consider dumping nuclear waste being a solution at all.

Nuclear waste is just a political issue that anti-nuclear people use to come up with reasons.

Technically it is not a huge problem and consented policy could solve it.

So first of all, current nuclear waste should not be buried as it is fuel for future reactors. It should just stay where it is until somebody wants to use it.

Second, Yucca Mountain is a terrible place for nuclear waste. It was always a terrible idea and this goes back to the very first time this problem got studied. There are far better locations in the US for a repository, but insane political shenanigans prevent Yucca Mountain from going forward and prevent any smart solutions as well.

I strongly believe that Yucca Mountain will never actually be used, but it will probably take another 15-20 years of drama and pointless arguments with false facts to finally resolve it.

Listen:

- https://www.titansofnuclear.com/bradyhanson

- https://www.titansofnuclear.com/davidblee

Before I go in there, can you elaborate on what the "Energy Impact Center" is? It's founding this page and the only info I could come up with is a google books result leading to a page that is not accessible. The result reads:

> Further actions were a $4 billion private sector commitment to scale up innovation in clean energy and the launching of a new Clean Energy Impact Center at the ...

- https://books.google.de/books?id=gVBtDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT242&lpg=P...

The other guy is President, US Nuclear Industry Council...

Don't you have anything credible? I mean, I know it's about the transmutation of waste. There has to be something coming from credible sources out there or...not?

Building a new nuclear plant today costs an incredible amount of money and takes many years. The major reason we are not building more of them is that no one wants to sign up for that investment. Many nuclear plants that were built 20 years ago cannot operate profitably at this moment, so even if you could build a new plant for free, it's not a guarantee that it will be profitable. It's simply a better investment to build wind, solar, and natural gas.

Maybe next gen modular reactors will be cheaper. But, fear is not the main problem for nuclear. It's cost.

A lot of that cost is driven by fear (regulatory requirements, risk of lawsuits/stalling by environmental groups, etc.).

Is there any data for this claim?

It seems more likely that no corporation is willing to spend tens of billions building anything with a lifetime of 50+ years without getting someone to guarantee a return on the investment - see Hinkley Point C:

"The plant, which has a projected lifetime of sixty years, has an estimated construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion. The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) [...] will be £50 billion" [1]

Locking in a pricing regime for decades which means consumers will pay £50bn above the market price for electricity? How far we've come in the last 64 years:

1954: "Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter..." [2]

2018: Here's your shiny new nuclear power plant, you'll be paying for it to the tune of £50bn more than the alternatives.

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

[2] Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Strauss#Electricity_%22t...

Hinkley Point C is an example of high cost because of many of these same reasons. It is legendary in the industry for high cost.

Mainly these cost are because of the complexity and scale of the project. The licencing and regulation make the complexity and scale larger.

To make mega projects like that efficient you need a trained workforce and that only happens if you build multiple plants.

South Korea for example is building these complex plants at very reasonable time and price. They can do this because they have an industry and trained workforce.

There has been a lot of study in nuclear economics and learning effects are hugely important.

However that means that if a state (France, South Korea) adopts nuclear as a matter of policy and deploys in mass, it can be very cheap.

However for other places I think new nuclear is the only hope. Advanced reactor companies are planning to be much smaller and should be build for 1 around billion.

So yes, people were overly optimistic in the 1954 but we also have to recognize that nuclear technology development was very much hindered by a large number of factors and that we are deploying the same type of reactors now as 40 years ago. This is a sad state of affairs that hopefully will change.

Isn't Hinkley Point C using the EPR design[1], which one might think was selected in an attempt to address the issue of economies of scale?

Having said that, EDF themselves don't appear to be particularly positive about the selected design:

"EDF has acknowledged severe difficulties in building the EPR design. In September 2015 EDF stated that the design of a "New Model" EPR was being worked on, which will be easier and cheaper to build"[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/only-china-wants...

A lot of cost is driven by the need to build in a lot of redundant safety features because you are dealing with a fission reaction that can melt down and cause real problems. You also have to deal with and store waste on site. A nuclear plant is a lot more complex than a wind turbine or a photovoltaic plant. Hence it will cost more.

The fact that Illinois and New York had to recently bail out their nuclear plants shows that they are expensive to run (even after they are built!)...

Even assuming we build enough wind/solar to supplant existing coal/gas/oil generation, the unsolved problem is storing that energy for use at night, or on cloudy or windless days. Batteries are the only feasible thing in most places, and they are not available in the quantites needed for such an undertaking, and they are mostly made in Asia.

How much would we need to invest in batteries (mining/refining the raw materials, and actually building them, replacing them as they wear out, dealing with the recycling/waste, etc.) compared to the cost of a standardized modern reactor design.

>public fear from misinformation

Or just a different view on risks.

The risk is much lower, but the worst case is much worse. In my personal view it is far better to use alternatives whose worse case scenario is nowhere near as bad, such as solar, wind, and geothermal.

Curious what your thoughts are on the [lack of] long term storage plan for the worn out and shuttered San Onofre power plant nuclear waste?

I have a different sort of fear from nuclear that's a little more nuanced.

Earlier this year, in Finland, one of the coldest places, a nuclear power plant had to reduce it's output (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-fortum-oy...) because the sea waters got too warm.

It's apparent that the planet is warming and my fear is if we pass the tipping point, nuclear simply won't be an option. Both sea level rise and warming waters may make much of the nuclear power plants unusable.

However, the real danger is even more stark, which is if we pass the tipping point, I expect it will be very hard for humanity to have organized human life at the scale that we have now, and when nation states begin to fail, who will maintain existing power plants? Who will take the many decades to decommission them if they can't be maintained?

Pessimists have had this idea that humanity is on the tipping point of collapse for centuries. Progress has been uneven, but the track record is that we do manage to solve problems, advance, and improve our standard of living over the long term.

I'm not a pessimist, the tipping point from climate change is a real concern among scientists and prominent people in our field. Many believe we are only decades from it but there is uncertainty around it.

It's not that the tipping point isn't a real possibility, it's that there is uncertainty about the scale and speed of changes, and when such a tipping point can happen.

Relevant section from the IPCC. https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/ch2s2-2...

This is also a belief from prominent members of our field like Alan Kay, who helped write Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems(https://www.nsf.gov/ere/ereweb/ac-ere/nsf6895_ere_report_090...)

Are you aware of these arguments? And do you have anything better to counter them than saying "People have been spelling the doom of humanity for centuries!" ?

Some of public fear is rational. It doesn't take a degree in statistics to figure out that nuclear disasters happen more often than official estimates of their probability imply.

I think most people do realize that. And it scares them. This is certainly the case for me. Oh and before you call me ignorant, I am in fact quite knowledgeable on the subject.

This is very much required. Sadly the US nuclear regulatory environment has been an absolute disaster and very much hurt the global evolution of nuclear power.

The worst thing is that it is impossible licence a non LWR reactor in the US. Because a licence requires specific systems to exist, that might not even make sense in most other reactors. Additionally you have to pay the regulator for their feedback and the whole process, adding 10s of millions to your development cost, and that is for a traditional LWR reactor.

Furthermore many regulations and subsidies are built around 'renewables' rather then non-carbon energies. Production tax credit, build requirements and so on.

Furthermore the US government has massive capability and facilities but they are not used well for innovation and there is very little interaction between nuclear startups and these facilities. Having a government that allows stronger sustained cooperation between regulators, companies and government capabilities will be required to change the licencing process and the whole nuclear industry.

Interestingly there seems to be now some amount of bipartisanship about nuclear and bills are passing surprisingly quickly.

The University of Michigan had some great talks and debates that people might find interesting, this video explains some about the bills that have passed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1lkDRX2huM

What about the rest of the world? Does every developed country have similar regulatory burdens, or is there some other factor at play preventing newer designs from being developed and put into production?

I'd really like to see the newer designs built out at least somewhere, but I have a feeling that there is more to it than what I've read in the pop-sci articles.

France is one of the leaders in nuclear tech and they got there by partnership between the state-owned power company and governement research. Private nuclear companies benefited from that and they export nuclear reactors to other countries.

Yet they still have a strong regulatory burden, but the difference with the US is that they have a vested interest in not hampering nuclear tech, whereas here nuclear tech is not high on national priorities. I guess it's another case of #followTheMoney :)

The problem with France is that they had a strongly state driven program based on pretty old technology.

They pushed foreword on that technology but never truly innovated on an industrial scale by having new types of reactors deployed in large numbers.

Its basically a large state industry that is very, very heavy footed.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...

Excerpts:

* Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily, with about 50 reactors under construction.

* Most reactors on order or planned are in the Asian region, though there are major plans for new units in Russia.

* Significant further capacity is being created by plant upgrading.

* Plant lifetime extension programmes are maintaining capacity, particularly in the USA.

About 50 power reactors are currently being constructed in 13 countries (see table below), notably China, India, UAE and Russia.

Also, see World Nuclear Performance Report 2018 http://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/on...

> Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily, with about 50 reactors under construction.

The decommissioning of nuclear reactors is far outpacing the construction of new plants.

https://www.reuters.com/article/energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-...

The report: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-2018-.html

Many countries follow the NRC's lead, but there are exceptions. For example, Canada has regulators who are much friendlier to new reactor development, and Terrestrial Energy, a molten salt reactor company, has spoken highly of them and is making good progress. Moltex recently moved there as well. Russia has two sodium-cooled fast reactors on the grid and is working on more.

But China is the real leader. They're aggressively developing every major GenIV category, including two government-funded molten salt reactors. Terrapower moved their traveling wave reactor to China after giving up on the U.S.

AFAIK nuclear power generation is outright banned in Australia (with the exclusion of the Lucas Heights medical reactor).

Yes. Very sadly so.

One of the create successes of anti-nuclear moment. Its band in a very destructive way where the minster is not even allowed to start a concept plan or anything like it.

The MSR design invented in the 1950s in the U.S. are maturing in the recent decade.

Among major nuclear powers, China is advancing fast on safer and smaller Gen IV reactors, specially the Thorium based Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR). They built and validated the design will commit a huge amount of funding to improvement and build-outs.[1]

[1] https://neutronbytes.com/2018/01/07/recent-developments-in-a...

Here is a HN discussion a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17813614

Well, the western world by and enlarge took the US lead. Some of the European countries have their own programs of course.

But in terms of regulatory and commercial, and integration of government and markets they didn't do much better.

The reality is that in the west power was a matter of state control much of the time, and with nuclear being such a politically decisive policy it was really difficult ever get into a better situation.

China and India are working on new designs. India is kind of slow but they are jugging along. China is doing much better and they are gone be the major builder of nuclear power in the future.

Many companies move to China, for example Bill Gates company.

However in terms of the west, Canada has had the balls to go its own way with the CANDU reactors and now because that program has been privatized and not much further development is gone happen, they have turned to SMR and to improve the regulatory environment.

This means that there are now above 10 nuclear companies trying to build GenIV reactors in Canada. The one leading, because they have cleared the first regulatory hurdle, is Terrestrial Energy a molten salt reactor.

Nuclear is risky. Even if the risk is low, the long tail risk is tremendous.

I wish they would pour more money into Thorium reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Po...

"Liquid fluoride thorium reactors are designed to be meltdown proof."

To all the "where does the spent fuel go" (dump it in the ocean) and "too expensive" (regulatory problem). These things are not a problem. Only the irrational fear of "nucular" is the problem.

Educate yourself http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/

"For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity."

Materials informatics should help with accelerating improved or novel materials discovery (therefore accelerating Gen IV power plants readiness for deployment) but irradiation damage models are complex and probably non generalisable in a bottom-up approach, that is starting from the underlying physical process, up to microstructures and finally to the properties we wish to improve. We will see.

I don't see an economic argument for nuclear. It's already one of, and by some measurements, the most expensive methods of energy production and that's only going to become exasperated over time. Right now nuclear accounts for 10-15% of the world's energy production, yet even at that level we only have known uranium reserves to run these for about 200 years. [1] Bump that up to where nuclear is a major player in energy production and we're suddenly running out imminently. This means we're going to need to turn to things like saltwater extraction and breeder reactors. But these technologies are going to send costs skyrocketing. And as well as scarcity becomes an issue, we can also expect to see the cost of uranium itself start to skyrocket.

And this is before getting into the other issues of nuclear at scale. Decommissioning is a lengthy, expensive, and complex process. Nuclear accidents are rare, but nowhere near as rare as they ought be. There are currently about 450 plants operating worldwide. That's a disconcertingly low number given the number of accidents. And breeder reactors would be absolutely required for longterm uranium perspectives, yet that technology not only greatly increases costs but also complexity and volatility. And another issue that becomes even more critical at scale is disposal.

In my opinion solar is the most logical option for the future. The one and only downside there is the lack of production during the night, yet this can be resolved in a countless number of basic technical ways ranging from batteries to even just mundane things such as shifting objects (or liquids or whatever) to create potential energy that can be harvested during off times. If we take a utopic view of the future, it's even possible to envision worldwide high energy direct current lines transiting power worldwide. All of these things involve losses of energy of course, but as far as our needs are concerned solar can provide a practically infinite amount of energy and so optimal efficiency is not so relevant.

I also think that the decentralization of energy is also desirable. Even something as benign as rooftop solar will end up providing an immense amount of energy. Centralization of energy, let alone when it relies on a scarce resource is something I think we've learned a lot about for the past century. A bit of hindsight would be valuable here.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

People are interested in nuclear because it's zero carbon, because it's mature, and because it's suited to base load. It's the only zero carbon source that plugs right into the hole left by fossil fuels. IMO it's really that simple, and you can be pro-nuclear and also pro-renewables.

Personally, I don't really value solely economic arguments about power generation anymore. The cheapest power would be the best power if all the externalities were priced in. But they just never will be.

I think a mixture of solar, nuclear, and other renewables is probably the best option. Electricity doesn't transport well over long distances, and what's best for one place isn't necessarily good for another. The economics of solar and energy storage vary around the world, depending on factors like clouds, and geography which can support pumped hydro (both lower and upper reservoirs). Solar might make more sense for California, and nuclear for St. Petersberg. I'm sure some combination of decentralised and distributed energy generation will prevail into the future.

Uranium is very cheap now and that's why seawater extraction is not competitive, nor do we have good projections about the size of undiscovered deposits. According to WP "The cost of raw uranium contributes about $0.0015/kWh to the cost of nuclear electricity". This is not a big of the operating expenses, never mind the fact that the cost of nuclear power is dominated by capital expenses.

(Of course we're also projected to run out of many things at current consumption growth rates much sooner than 200 years. Such as oil and lithium and rainforests)

I read where if US reactors replaced their fuel rods with the new design from Lightbridge, that alone would up us electric generation by 2%. Which is about the same as the total share due to solar, although solar is rising quickly.

nonsense

you cannot just increase thermal power and expect steam generators make a lot more steam and turbine to rotate twice as fast

Nuclear power does not play well with renewables. It's a steady baseload source, but solar and wind are highly variable and need something that can switch on or off to fill in the gaps. You can't turn on and off a nuclear plant throughout the day. So even though (ignoring disposal challenges), nuclear is a clean source of energy, it probably has no place in a highly VRE dominated future.

You're approaching it from the wrong angle.

Solar and wind don't need on-demand electricity to cover the gaps, they need better storage solutions.

Then, you have nuclear as the base for large metros / regions, and local wind/solar with good storage solutions for peak demand.

You can do load following fine with nuclear, that's how they run a lot of it in France and to an extent in Germany.

http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp....

do you know where one can find typical frequency or impulse response plots? both for total input control to energy network or partial (control -> heat, heat -> turbine etc) responses would be interesting, for real/typical systems

The headline should be "US Government to subsidize nuclear power".

good, because I will need a nuclear car within 15 years.

May be add more funding to cold fusion research.

cold fusion is psuedo-science hogwash.

For starters do you really think that after 50 years of nuclear weapons program and military spending on a scale never before imagined even by industrial civilization we REALLY missed some way to make better (smaller, lighter, etc.) nuclear weapons? Because when you believe cold fusion exists this is fundamentally what are stating.

Fenymann path integration, and its QCD and QED evolution have been some of the most successful mathematical theories ever developed. We can model fusion interactions incredibly well, this math lets up predict things like the Higgs Boson.

You can't even get papers published as "Cold Fusion" any more (in a respectable journal) because the scientific community gave up on. The math doesn't check out. Now those truly dedicated pants on head tenured professors who continue to feed this non-scientific pursuit publish under the title of "low-energy nuclear reactions" and "condensed matter nuclear science" since some trash-tier journals still accept that.

The problem is nothing cold/low energy to fusion. Over coming the EM "barrier" to hit the nucili to _maybe_ trigger fusion requires MeV of energy. That doesn't come from "cold" objects.

The closest man kind has gotten is Muon-Catalyzed Fusion which required cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere as a source of high-energy particles. And it was already considered nonviable by 1957 [1]

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

Are you saying that research is driven by war? Because that's exactly what it sounds like.

Well, it certainly goes against the trend of de-nuclearization... I would invest in renewable energy instead.

Interesting to see this comment downvoted because I believe it is true. Most European countries are looking for alternatives and nuclear power generation is heavily criticized there.

There are looking, sure, but at the same time investing in projects in fossil fuels like Nord Stream. And fossil fuels are less environment friendly than nuclear power. To me this anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe looks like pure populism.

> Most European countries are looking for alternatives and nuclear power generation is heavily criticized there.

I'm not sure about "most". Germany is certainly phasing out nuclear. France has relied extensively on nuclear for decades, and it's a large export industry for them, so I'm not sure what the general sentiment is (a quick Google search didn't find anything conclusive). Here in the UK there does seem to be a general anti-nuclear sentiment (e.g. the (tiny minority) Green Party want to phase it out). We are building new nuclear, like Hinkley Point C, but they're unpopular mostly due to bureaucracy and financial nonsense (the vested interests and brinkmanship over the contract seems like a test run for the current farce over Brexit negotiations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... !).

France heavily relies on nuclear that's true, but it is trying to find an alternative as old centrals are more expensive to maintain.

France is shutting down most of their plants in the coming decades, and Switzerland is shutting a few down too. Nuclear is genuinely facing a lot of opposition in Europe, particularly due to rising costs. In many cases popular sentiment is a driving force too though. That's probably the case in Switzerland (direct democracy) where there were a couple notable accidents right before a referendum. Bad timing and not really terribly newsworthy, but it really damaged public opinion.

I don't think it's cost. Merkel took the decision to exit nuclear energy after very little thinking following Fukushima.

Building a single nuclear power plant is very expensive. Building 20 in a row is cheap (+ the ever changing regulations).

Because following a trend is your only argument. I can see how restoring good fame to nuclear power can improve our chances to see fusion in our lifespans. And fusion, basically, is the best.

Investment money doesn't come in one discrete unit: it's allocated across many different things, including (for energy, climate change, etc.):

- Nuclear (existing tech, emerging tech, fundamental research, fusion, etc.)

- Renewables (wind, solar, geothermal, current tech, emerging tech, fundamental research, etc.)

- Fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas, existing tech, emerging tech, fundamental research, etc.)

- Carbon capture (reforestation, underground storage, fundamental research, etc.)

- Geoengineering (space shades, reflective aerosols, fundamental research, etc.)

- Economics/sociology (carbon markets, incentives, subsidies, public awareness, fundamental research, etc.)

We should be debating what the total budget is, and how it's divided proportionally among these.

A blanket statement like "invest in renewable energy" only makes sense if we think the proportion of investment allocated to renewables is smaller than it should be. I personally think that's a fair argument to make, so saying "invest in renewable energy" is a statement I agree with.

However, doing so "instead" of nuclear only makes sense if we think that (a) nuclear already has too much investment and (b) it's better to defund nuclear than to defund other investments. I disagree with both of these.

Nuclear is in need of more investment, for example there are many new reactor designs that have not been commercially exploited yet; and the old-tech plants are near retirement (which keeps getting extended). The fact that we're not seeing retired plants replaced with new tech, let alone many brand new plants, is largely due to lack of investment, as well as issues of regulation and public awareness (which affects the investment; but could also be invested in themselves!).

Regarding defunding: investment in fossil fuels can make sense (e.g. replacing coal with natural gas is a "quick win" which buys the climate some time), but as long as so much is over-invested in actively harmful areas (e.g. coal, tree burning like UK's Drax, etc.), then not only is it better to spend that money on renewables rather than taking it from nuclear, in some cases (e.g. marketing climate disinformation in the US) we'd be better off even if we burned that money for fuel, let alone invested it in renewables!

Back in college I researched history of nuclear energy in the US during the 50s and 60s

Thorium reactors were much further ahead and being funded by the government

Then one Naval officer made the case to arm subs with nukes

Funding for thorium dried up and was funneled into less safe breeder style reactors

Unless this is funding thorium reactors, I’ll be hard pressed to see this as anything but a stealthy ploy to reinvent weapons production. What with the Orange Orangutan pissing off the world, championing Space Farce, some paranoids in DC probably think we need to build more nukes to match NK and Iran.

>> Nuclear is considered valuable because it's a zero-emissions energy source (...)

Unless we're planning on using magic to obtain the fuel, build the power stations, reprocess spent fuel, and decommission the power stations when they're done, that claim would appear to be false.

By that same logic, solar and wind aren't zero emission energy sources either...

The article doesn't make any claims about "zero emissions" of solar and wind, yet it does about nuclear.

Maybe a fair comparison of lifetime emissions for each source would be appropriate?

That's right, they aren't. Now, let's have a reasonable dialogue about the consequences of uranium mining vs the supply chain for materials for wind and solar.

All of these technologies are zero-on-site emissions, and that's a useful distinction of course (compared to coal). But of course we still need to consider the externalities of the rest of the process.

Not just supply side. Decom of old wind units is difficult, and they are mostly non-biodegrading fiberglass, carbon fiber, and polyester and epoxy resins, apart from their easily recycled metal bits.

So far, we are trying to repurpose them, but its not a great solution. We can only use so many turbine blade park benches.

Personally, I think we will look back on wind power as a curious mistake, in comparison to solar farms and nuclear.

> So far, we are trying to repurpose them, but its not a great solution. We can only use so many turbine blade park benches.

Very interesting. I didn't realize this - thanks for bringing it to my attention. Do you happen to have a link handy where I can learn more about these sorts of efforts?

Is it weird to note the difficulties of decommissioning windmills, and then advocate for nuclear power plants?

You just shifted the goal posts from power inputs to raw materials, but whatever. Let's have a discussion about production of rare earth elements vs. in-situ leaching of uranium.

Ok. Lets have reasonable idalogue.

The facts are quite simply that nuclear uses the least amount of materials and has the lowest overall resource consumption.

Uranium is mined threw one hole in the ground and is much cleaner and less destractive then virtually all other forms of mining. Furthermore you only need tiny amounts because the the energy density.

The mining required for solar and wind is larger by orders of magnitude.

The same goes for land use. Nuclear has a minuscule land use impact.

On carbon solar, wind and nuclear are all so much better that it hardly matters and calculations become way to specific about what was transported where and so on.

Nuclear pays for the decommissioning and for the waste. The 'waste' is all captures and does not harm anybody (not even animals). Compared to the waste form solar and wind that is not properly accounted for in most of the world.

So nuclear is overall has the smallest environmental impact.

Here are the numbers[1].

TLDR: Wind onshore emits a pinch less than nuclear (11 vs 12 gCO2eq/kWh) but far from the 820 gCO2eq/kWh of Coal.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...

Here are some alternative numbers (apparently with a lot more references):

"The first conclusion is that the mean value of emissions over the course of the lifetime of a nuclear reactor (reported from qualified studies) is 66 g CO2e/kWh, due to reliance on existing fossil-fuel infrastructure for plant construction, decommissioning, and fuel processing along with the energy intensity of uranium mining and enrichment. Thus, nuclear energy is in no way ‘‘carbon free’’ or ‘‘emissions free,’’ even though it is much better (from purely a carbon-equivalent emissions standpoint) than coal, oil, and natural gas electricity generators"

http://www.grid.unep.ch/FP2011/step1/pdf/003_Sovacool_2008.p...

This is an empty argument; obviously nothing can be emission-free for as long as we run our cars, planes and ships on (non-captured-CO2) carbon fuels; but if the source of our energy is net emission-free (i.e. if you used the energy to build and decomission plants and mine and process nuclear fuel, you'd still have energy left over), then we can slowly move the rest of the society over to electricity as well. Without "almost-but-not-really-emission-free" power sources, that's simply something we cannot do.

Nuclear power is actually free of CO2 emissions. It's easy to see: one could use the electricity to make synthetic fuels from air and water. (Capture of CO2 sounds like a difficult problem, but ammonia and hydrazine would definitely work.) If the supply chain uses synfuels, nuclear power is emission free.

However, as long as a coal fired power plant is operating somewhere, you achieve a better result by using fossil fuels for the supply chain, feeding the electricity into the grid and saving more CO2 emissions elsewhere.

By the way, Sovacool's basic argument is that nuclear isn't CO2 free because the grid isn't nuclear enough. Something along the lines of "if we built more nuclear plants, we'd have to build more old enrichment plants and more coal plants to power them". In other words, he's too stupid or too crooked to correctly compute total derivatives.

I am completely content ignoring all those emissions because they're a product of engine-technology (ICE) and not intrinsic to the process.

A nuclear-power plant feeding energy to a grid which powered electrified trains, cars and trucks would be zero emission.

And you can also power fuel extraction, refining and reprocessing.

Why couldn't those processes be electrically powered?

In fact they are, in large part- uranium is shaft mined and electric machinery is massively preferred to combustion for air quality reasons. The dump trucks outside the mine are diesel, but even that is changing[1].

Pretty funny- there are a number of mines where electric dump trucks actually produce energy on net! Anywhere you go down in elevation as you come out of the mine area, the extra weight as you're loaded can power the trip back up.

[1]: https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2017/9/21/worlds-lar...

> Pretty funny- there are a number of mines where electric dump trucks actually produce energy on net! Anywhere you go down in elevation as you come out of the mine area, the extra weight as you're loaded can power the trip back up.

This is pretty wild, but makes perfect sense.

Ah great the most expensive power source to build and we don't even cost in the waste.

EDIT: Capital Cost estimates from the EIA: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...

It's expensive, and doesn't include anything with the end of the fuel life (or fuel costs) [0].

[0] TABLE 2-5 is a nice summary, https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...

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