Why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change | Hacker News Reader

Why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change

leonardodicaprio.org

40 pointsblue147 comments

> Nuclear, though, doesn’t just have one problem. It has seven.

My main gripe with this article is that it limits the problems with nuclear to 7, I can think of at least a few more:

8. Centralized source of energy: nuclear requires that a few plants supply a vast network of energy consumers: this is one of the inherent problems of the current setup which makes it highly sensitive to disruptions. Many renewables on the other hand enables resilient local grids that can operate independently if the central grid fails for any reason, and thus keep extend the availability of such basic things as food supply during times of blackout. The need for such a setup is starting to dawn on decision makers.

9. Terrorist or wartime targets: Nuclear power plants scattered round your landscape is the equivalent of offering adversaries free access to your self destruction, not to mention the irreparable harm to the environment it invites.

To name a few.

The first argument (Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation) is hard to argue against. To my surprise even in China it takes rather long. And in countries with a nuclear critical public is is a fantasy to think that going with "just the facts" for a year or two will sway enough opponents, and then go all-in with nuclear (as would be the case in an Ideal World).

The Cost argument [$151 (112 to 189)/MWh vs $43 (29 to 56)/MWh / $41 (36 to 46)/MWh for wind / solar PV] is also convincing, assuming the numbers are correct. If it is really a factor of > 2 then this would even be enough to bridge shortfalls of renewable energy due to lack of wind or sun, i.e. building rather inefficient (40%?) long term thermal or battery storage.

Weapons Proliferation Risk, Meltdown Risk, Mining Lung Cancer Risk, Waste Risk are tolerable when the alternative is a catastrophically warmer planet.

The "Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution" point counts the time it takes for a nuclear plant to come online?

So ideally going full nuclear would have started 10 years or so ago, but in the muddy real world this pure nuclear fantasy does not work. Time to bury it and stop wasting time and energy fighting for it, just get solar panels and build a wind farm already.

How much coal does get burnt to produce your happy panel? How much oil to transport it from China? How sustainable would solar and wind really be were it to be produced only with solar and wind energy, what would the end to end EROEI be? My guess: 0.8

How can you get to 100% renewables using solar and wind? We don't have the capability to store enough energy to get through a few days without wind, especially during the winter months in northern countries where solar doesn't produce much energy.

Nuclear energy may take longer and may be more expensive (not sure that's still the case when you build a few hundred plants), but it least it provides reliable energy all year.

That is a shockingly biased and simplistic comparison. Sort of like deciding on the answer and picking a few “facts” to support it.

So what is missing/wrong in the article?

(btw, I submitted not because I agree with it – I am not knowledgeable enough on the matter – but because I thought HN could add some interesting comment on it)

Even if we presume all points are true, they fail to bring up any of the positive points of nuclear power and they don't have anything to compare it to. How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm?

A proper comparison needs to take a look at positive and negative of all possible solutions. For example that "clean" hydropower has massive consequences for the nearby environment. Or that we cannot be 100% reliant on wind and solar power, since they are unreliable (there might not be any wind for example). Which means we need to have other alternatives (hint: not use coal as a fallback!).

> How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm?

From the article: "Utility-scale wind and solar farms, on the other hand, take on average only 2 to 5 years, from the planning phase to operation. Rooftop solar PV projects are down to only a 6-month timeline"

That's hardly equivalent.

1. Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation

I guess we should stop doing everything that takes long based on this. How do you define long? Compare to what?

2. Cost

Nuclear energy is the cheapest source of energy once you take into consideration all the aspects of an energy grid. This is why Germany is buying energy from France instead of building renewables only.

3. Weapons Proliferation Risk

Most nuclear power plants do not consume or produce plutonium.

4. Meltdown Risk

Passive safety systems are the norm. The safety requirement to any new nuclear power plant is to have a potentially life threatening accident with 10^-6 probability. Meltdown is not a realistic scenario of non-Chernobyl type power plants (90% of power plants).

5. Mining Lung Cancer Risk

So does mining coal. We can make mining much more safe.

6. Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution

I guess producing a wing mill does not need to use any energy and the production does not have the same impact as producing a nuclear power plant. Not sure if the author understand that this applies to anything produced. In fact producing renewable power plants probably produces much more CO2 than a nuclear power plant because of energy density. He fails to mention that.

7. Waste Risk

This is actually a solved issue, there are special nuclear power plants that sole purpose is to "burn away" nuclear waste by producing elements with less half time.

"To recap, new nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh (between 2.3 to 7.4 times depending upon location and integration issues)."

This is extremely stupid observation. Leaving out crucial facts (like having base and peak power plants) and comparing apples to oranges.

It is actually full of lies. Cost as the problem of nuclear energy? 1 KWH produced by nuclear power is roughly 3-4 times cheaper than produced by renewables. This is excluding the impact of renewables on the grid. Weapons Proliferation Risk??? Most of the nuclear power plants do not use or produce plutonium at all. Nuclear weapons are produced in very specific facilities that have a huge energy consumption. This article is a classical propaganda to avoid the unavoidable use nuclear power for clear energy.

Humanity needs these energy sources that we can use in space and on Earth to have a relatively small plant that produces a lot of energy without CO2. Yes there are challenges but we did not stop using fire because it produces smoke. We made burning safe over the last 400.000 years now we should make nuclear energy safe.

In the UK the contract for hinkley c nuclear station was signed at something like £90/GWh, which everyone seems unhappy with (CFO of edf resigned saying it would bankrupt them, while opponents are saying it's too expensive).

Meanwhile we have new offshore wind going in at £50/GWh

If cost of nuclear isn't a problem can you contextualize those figures? Is it a fair comparison, net of subsidies etc? I'd like to know.

You cannot talk about energy like that. What is the chance that 1 GWH is going to be produced? With a nuclear power plant you can have guaranteed energy, with renewables there is a chance that you get energy. You continously need to balance consumption and production. You can only control non-renewables. This is why building wind farms require the same amount of production is built using gas turbines for the worst case scenario. The £50/GWh vs £90/GWh is for the happy path best case scenario. I hope it makes sense.

is the £50 not based on annual average days with sufficient wind to generate (which I presume has fairly low uncertainty, though if it's not generating when you want then either storage or transport is needed)

update: the £50/MWh and £90/MWh are both commercial bids that will have factored in probability of generation to the best of the bidders ability. the companies making them will fail if they go hugely wrong. (though in the nuclear case taxpayer might be left with cleanup)

You are correct that the non-constant nature of wind means you need to cost in some storage, or transport via the grid (generally it'll be windy someplace or other). But probability of generation is not the issue.

Correction: parent post quotes £/MWh not £/GWh :)

The article provides a source for the estimation and you don't. And the reasoning why the source is underestimating the true costs sounds plausible to me. Given the harm meltdowns can cause, why is there no mandatory insurance?

The article provides sources to support his claims and leaving out 60% of the whole picture.

Key questions:

- what is providing base load coverage?

- what happens when it is cloudy or the wind does not blow?

- what do we use to balance out consumption and production?

- where does this cost counts towards?

- how much land do we need to cover with solar and wind to produce enough energy for the whole country?

- what happens in a blackout situation?

I can go on and on. This article is a super simplistic one sided propaganda piece to make people feel great about renewables.

Base load is an outdated concept that will become less and less relevant. Nuclear energy is unsuitable as a complement to renewable energy because it takes on the order of days to start or shut down a nuclear power plant. The key requirement is dispatchable generation, which in the short term means natural gas, and in the long term various forms of energy storage.

Nuclear is acceptable as a stop-gap technology until generation is fully switched to renewables, but its days are numbered.

What scientific breakthrough made it outadated? You do not require to have a base load production?

Nuclear is the only energy type that works in space. If humanity wants to go to the stars instead of going on Facebook we need that technology. Ironically solar power is actually collecting energy produced by nuclear fusion.

But what does "safe" really mean? Systems fail in unexpected ways; Chernobyl was operated in an improper way, which feels somehow "unfair" wrt risk assessment, but so it goes. Nassim Taleb suggests that we should minimize the maximum possible damage instead of trying to make precise risk assessments; looking at things this way, nuclear energy does not seem a very wise bet, because of the consequences of the worst-case scenarios. Burning things is not harmless either, but has a different risk profile.

The risk profile of climate change is sadly getting more and more clear.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

> Estimates of reduced life expectancy as a result of radiation released are highly uncertain and vary from 4,000 people in a United Nations study up to 200,000 in a Greenpeace study.

Worst hydro disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

> According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. [...] Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people.[...]

Best candidate for next hydro disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam (Apparently, it's stable now, but ...)

> In February 2016, the United States Embassy in Iraq warned of a "serious and unprecedented" danger of the dam collapsing and suggested that plans for evacuation should be made, as the cities Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra, and Baghdad could be at risk in the event of collapse, and that up to 1.5 million people could be killed due to the ensuing flash floods.[...]

What a biased article, pretty much every point is cherry picking.

Edit: Everything here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson actually tells you the objectivity of this guy on nuclear energy.

Don't know how the rest of facts check out, but Chernobyl is in Ukraine not in Russia.

In reason six the author talks about emissions and air pollution related to nuclear power. Then shows an image of a nuclear plant releasing water vapour into the air.

Water vapor is the #1 greenhouse gas, so it's obviously a pollutant.

article says "Chernobyl, Russia 1986", Pre 1991, [wiki] known as Soviet Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from the Union's inception in 1922 to its breakup in 1991.

So probably why he mentions the date after saying Russia

The correct term would still be USSR.

Oh, come on. And the correct term for Great Britain would still be UK. And for Germany it would still be BRD, and for America would be USA...

Note to my private journal about the hilarious history of the destruction of our planet: "In June 2019, an article about "Nuclear Power possibly not being the answer to solve climate change", lead to a public discussion, whether the author got a geographic term historically right or not (with the suspicion, that if he didn't, probably everything else in the article was wrong as well).

No, seriously. Russia did not exist back in 1986. It has nothing to do with the correctness of the opinions expressed in the article. If we were to talk about Germany in 1987, I think, it would be very important to distinguish between east and west, no? Also, hilarious or not, if you make a slip on correct historical terms (as a nuclear catastrophe happening in a country that did not even exist at the time, and even managing to get current geographical term wrong), it does reflect poorly on the quality and/or perceived quality of the whole piece. Come on!

I'm pretty sure Russia existed in 1986. You must be talking about the Russian Federation?

no, I am talking about either

USSR (if we're talking about country)

Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), if we're talking about countries' administrative unit.

> Great Britain would still be UK

No, it wouldn't. The term "UK" includes Northern Ireland while "GB" doesn't.

> Germany it would still be BRD

Before 1990 that would've been the common usage, simply because there were two "Germanies" at the time. Today, while technically still the correct denomination, "BRD" / "FRG" is equivalent to "Germany", which is why these terms can be used interchangeably (with the non-technical country name being much more common these days).

> America would be USA

Using "America" instead of "USA" is highly inaccurate, perhaps even offensive to people from other countries on that continent.

These distinctions are relevant. This is not some casual pub conversation but rather it's supposed to be a serious article on scientific and political issues. Therefore, diligence, getting the facts straight and using accurate terminology is important.

An interesting comment on nuclear by senior vice president, development, NextEra Energy Resources. Starts at 1h18m - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SXxJWUv-x4

Bottom line, at least in the U.S it's just uneconomical.

Important along with the current costs of the renewable competition is that renewables keep getting cheaper every year. If lead time is 15 years, that's a long time in incremental improvement on the wind/pv side.

This is stupid. Once you divide those costs by the power generated, they become almost negligible.

To replace a nuclear power plant the size of an office building you need a solar or wind farm the size of a decent village. And it's exponential. To replace a large nuclear power plant, you need a solar farm that would rival the average state capital in size. That makes those costs look very different.

Area in obviously linear vs PV power, not exponential. Yes, the difference vs nuclear gets exponential because nuclear reactors are 3D, but in practice the reactor core size is always so small that it takes trivial space in the land use sense.

There is no dearth of space in most countries to fit village / farm sized solar arrays. 1 hectare per 1 MWH approx works out to good numbers considering you can use the non arable land. You can google around about how land owners bargain about leasing land to pv farms, it's pretty obviosu that even at the current artificially low energy prices[1] it's working out well.

[1] meaning fossil plants mostly don't pay for externalities so electricity price is largely determined by just fossil plant fuel / equipment costs.

Sorry to say, but that doesn't work. 1 hectare/Mwh, abstract over any issues. What happens when renewables actually achieve what they set out to do: what happens when PV gets used for 50% of power ? What happens when it's at 80% ?

1 hectare/Mwh = 1e-5 km2/kwh

1e-5 km2/kwh * 450 billion kwh / 650000 km2 = 7 times the area of France

Obviously this is not practical. At 10% you'd have to destroy significant amounts of the remaining nature in France. God help Belgium and the Netherlands should they try this, so France is definitely not a worst case scenario. You'd have to get the power from Africa. Yes, the US could (just barely, and only with a much bigger electricity grid). Russia could. China is actually dicey (at 7% growth per year it won't stay dicey for long and dive into "not happening" soon). Not many others.

Also: at any scale solar PV will displace so much nature it will be worse for the planet than fossil fuels. At 1% ? No problem. But at 1%, fossil fuels aren't a problem either. At 1%, coal would be tolerable. At 100% ? Nuclear works. Alternatives ... uh ... None (I mean, there's fusion when it starts working)

Simcity was right.

https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption....

https://www.google.com/search?q=france+area

I mixed the units, obviously it's per MW and not MWh.

Anyway, many people have done this calculation and the lamd required in an 100 % pv scenario seems pretty reasonable:

https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

https://energy-age.blogspot.com/2017/04/how-much-land-area-d...

Doing my own napkin calc for 100% PV globally: using 2.5e6 MW world consumption, and 150 e6 sq km of land i get 60 km2 (6000 hectares) existing land for each MW consumed. So panels would take 1/6000 of land, or maybe 1/1000 if the 1 MW was for rated max power and we actually average 1/6 of that

"The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for a new nuclear plant in 2018, based on Lazard, is $151 (112 to 189)/MWh. This compares with $43 (29 to 56)/MWh for onshore wind and $41 (36 to 46)/MWh for utility-scale solar PV from the same source. "

"The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is a measure of a power source that allows comparison of different methods of electricity generation on a consistent basis. It is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total energy output of the asset over that lifetime. The LCOE can also be regarded as the average minimum price at which electricity must be sold in order to break-even over the lifetime of the project."

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

So why is nuclear deemed uneconomical in countries like Sweden? They have not banned it, but decided the industry should carry its own costs - with the result that the industry is not building any new reactors, and not even refurbishing existing reactors. It is a dying technology.

Thorium MSR?

Aren't they a thing of future?

One day science may discover who it was that argued "constant climate".

Arguments in favor of improving environmrntal stewardship are welcome.

Fear mongering invites a "Newton's Third Law" reaction against the messenger.

most of these reasons are hogwash. the real issue with depending on nuclear is peak uranium, regardless on where you put the date nuclear is not renewable, could be part of an integrated strategy to move out of coal a fossil fuel but cannot be the only answer to long term energy needs, which doesn't mean we should not invest in it but that we are going to need an exit strategy.

Let’s just be honest - the whole point of NP is weapons capability. NP isn’t going away no matter how much it costs.

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