I'm pro nuclear if costs are not externalized (insurance, EOL tear down, waste management) but priced in.
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.)
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.
Meanwhile, fossil plants dump their waste into the atmosphere and don't pay a dime for it.
Waste that includes radioactive material, no less.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
Is there any real evidence showing LNT is wrong?
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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%.)
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.
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_...
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.
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.
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..."
NIMBY essentially.
They couldn't even get storage done at Yucca Mountain, and that's in the middle of the desert.
£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.
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.
* "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?
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.
How is it increasingly shaky? In who's opinion?
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.
If we’re going to subsidize anything, it might as well be solar and wind. It’s fusion energy at a distance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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).
... says the guy commenting on a massively-distributed network that is the poster child for decentralized access to “industry”.
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.
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.
But yes, I'd take a dozen Chernobyls over a runaway greenhouse effect.
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.
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.
> Xcel Resource Planning Executive: We Can Buy New Renewables Cheaper Than Existing Fossil Fuels
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/an-interview-wi...
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.
Let them all include EOL costs, pollution and everything else so we can compare like with like.
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.
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.
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. :)
We should also note that signing long-term contracts and guaranteeing minimum prices are other ways to subsidise nuclear power[1]