The idea nuclear plant cutting costs scares me, especially if it comes from the safety budget.
How much extra money should we be spending to keep saving so many millions of lives simply by displacing air pollution?
Obviously we can't be cavalier with radiological hazards, but we don't have to make it as expensive as we've chosen to.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
Nuclear is like a lot like air travel. More people are afraid of it, but it's statistically very safe. Human minds, unfortunately, don't work like this.
I fully understand that saying this doesn't make you or anyone else feel any better about cutting costs at nuclear plants. It just seems weird to have this demonstrably excellent energy source sitting here ready to decarbonize the world rapidly (as done in France in the 1980s), and have everyone be more influenced by pop culture and the media than by simple comparative analysis.
I wish I knew how to change people's minds here but I fear we're up against some evolved human nature, and it's an uphill battle.
Fukushima death rate from radiation? 0 (maybe 1, but highly debated). Deaths from air pollution this year? 4.3 million. Future deaths from climate change? Potentially hundreds of millions.
In this real world, I'll take my low-carbon nuclear energy any day.
Dying from air pollution is not exactly fun either. Chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, having to spend the last years of your life on oxygen, lung cancer... but there is something going on here that is quite separate from people not being good at statistical reasoning [2]. Perhaps dying from air pollution has becoe commonplace, exactly because it happens so often, that it has lost its edge. Perhaps we have all internalised the fact that our cities are full of deadly pollutants that we breathe in daily.
Fear of air travel is similar: it's an ugly way to die, trapped in a giant metal cigar with strangers, and it's also rare. Yet another example is fear of sharks: it's rare that a shark kills a person, but the way they kill you is really not how most people hope to die.
Maybe, if you wanted to change attitudes, you'd have to make death from radiological accidents much more common and death from air pollution less so. But I don't think that really solves your problem.
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[1] I was just now reading the article about Louise Slotin's death. Some choice cuts from his symptoms: "The hand eventually took on a waxy blue appearance and developed large blisters"; "He had internal radiation burns—what one medical expert called a “three-dimensional sunburn.”". That is horrible and also _weird_.
[2] It's more complicated than that:
https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-n...
Your comment is exactly the kind of sentiment that is not backed up by numbers that the person you are replying to is complaining about.
Because so much money is spent on safety. I feel like you are almost saying the safety budget is unnecessary.
Nuclear power is safe because of, not despite, the many millions poured into safety.
For example, the Finns, being a pragmatic people, decided collectively to build and operate a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste called Onkalo. It's mostly complete and has test canisters in place as we speak. [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-waste/wor...
Relatedly, a company in Berkeley called Deep Isolation is now working to commercialize a new waste disposal technique called deep borehole disposal. Rather than mining out something a few hundred meters deep, you use modern oil/gas techniques (ironically, the same tech that allows fracking) to cheaply drill down 5-8 km and put the spent fuel down there where it really has no credible way of making it back up. This particular company is run by a woman and they focus on community outreach first. It looks to be a good approach [2].
[2] https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/
Also worth noting is that once it's out of the reactor, there's no more high pressure coolant or nuclear chain reaction to drive its dispersal. It sits in incredibly robust canisters on parking lots at the plants where it's almost impossible to imagine anything going wrong. See my buddy Jim doing a walk-through in Washington state to get a visual [3].
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g
The comparison of risk between stored nuclear waste vs. things like air pollution and climate change is astronomical: nuclear waste risk is incredibly low. In a high-carbon, high air pollution world, it's hardly a footnote in the world risks.
Yet, for every person I talk to, this is the primary concern. I feel like we've let too many MacGyvers and Captain Planets and Simpsons and HBO's run wild without correction. Nuclear PR people have been hiding under rocks since Three Mile Island. The millennial new nuclear people are much more aggressive because we got into this to cut carbon emissions, and this appears to be pretty urgent.
You mention Onkalo. AFAIK, that uses the same solution as the proposed Swedish nuclear waste storage. Copper canisters embedded in bentonite clay.
Experts NOT employed by the nuclear fission industry tend to disagree with the industry experts: https://www.dw.com/en/sweden-plans-first-ultimate-storage-si...
Also, this SKB company in cahoots with SSM (the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority) had suppressed an internal report made by independent experts saying the same thing (article in Swedish, but with English quotes from the report): http://www.mkg.se/ssm-rapport-avslojar-att-skb-dolt-problem-...
This report about the report only came to light because of a lawsuit by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.
The whole tale is a bit more complicated and sordid (for the Radiation Safety Authority), but I can't find an article in English for you: http://www.sverigesnatur.org/aktuellt/stralsakerhetsmyndighe...
It should also be mentioned that the European radiation limits from nuclear waste storage are much more stringent than in the US. EPA's limit defined for the (fiasco-laden) Yucca Mountain storage for the first 10,000 years is 10 times higher, and then for the remainder, up to 1,000,000 years, 250 times higher, but maybe that's moot since it looks like Yucca Mountain is a dead end.
> Experts NOT employed by the nuclear fission industry tend to disagree with the industry experts
I suspect that may be over stated. The fission industry is relatively small and lots of people are not employed by it. Certainly it's possible to find opposing viewpoints on most topics, as anti-nuclear groups has a rich and powerful history.
The solution in terms of the topic discussed in your link (corrosion) is generally academia. Independent university labs can perform various kinds of corrosion tests and discuss in the open literature. Does this not happen like this in Sweden?
I've been surprised by how low some of the European radiation limits myself, especially given the growing body of science suggesting that biological systems are quite robust against low-dose radiation (perhaps because we evolved with an ever-present natural background of it).
For example: "Integrated Molecular Analysis Indicates Undetectable Change in DNA Damage in Mice after Continuous Irradiation at ~ 400-fold Natural Background Radiation": https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104294
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
At the diffuse extreme, there's nearly infinite uranium in seawater, and lots of research has been done recently to extract it passively with special polymers. In 2016, this special edition journal summarized the progress [2]. It's still more expensive than conventional mining, but not so much that it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to economically get uranium from seawater. Then nuclear is renewable for billions of years, as uranium in seawater replenishes via runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever imagine using it.
[2] https://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15
This is all further complicated by the fact that conventional nuclear reactors burn about 1% of the nuclear fuel pulled out of the ground. More advanced breeder reactors with recycling facilities can get up to 90% of the energy (there are always some process losses). This extends known resources by another factor of 90x.
There's also Thorium, which can be used as nuclear fuel. There's a whole lot of that too [3].
[3] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
Regarding power to enrich, France and some others uses nuclear power plants to power their nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities. In the USA, I believe there's still lots of coal and fracked gas powering enrichment plants. The gas centrifuge enrichment plants are so energy efficient that this matters much less than back in the day when we used gaseous diffusion. In the end game, the plan would be to do as France does and make the whole fuel cycle ultra low carbon.
- is more centralized
- is a better target for terrorists
- favors monopolies
- uses fuel which could be used to build bombs? Just speculating, but I guess nobody will be happy if some of that stuff gets into wrong hands.
- produces waste which we need to keep in mind for thousends of years
- has serious PR issues ( is less accepted by society )
Any form of energy production with decent prices is centralized, that also includes wind and solar. Solar panels on rooftops has to be the most inefficient way of producing electricity right now.
If we banned every technology because which has a potential for destructive misuse, we'd have no technology. Sticks would be banned because you could rub them together to make fire and burn down the village.
Most countries signed it.
"Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy".
There's another similar, but bloggier, link that only includes rooftop solar but excludes grid scale.
So it's basically saying fossil fuels suck, something I'd agree with.
I wouldn't consider myself anti-nuclear, but think it would still get beaten pretty thoroughly on price in a market with carbon priced in.
Yes it's better than coal and fracked gas, and a carbon price would help existing plants compete with those but anyone pushing nuclear because they think renewables are hopeless are likely to be angry right-wingers looking for a convenient scapegoat for the fact that they repeatedly voted for conmen in the pocket of big oil.
If you genuinely want to change minds here, then show how nuclear could be rolled out on a global scale starting today cheaper than renewables.
Which I don't think it can, and don't think I've seen anyone try to make that claim. They usually stop at "it's better than coal" and "baseload!" and "you know who is responsible for climate change? Anti-nuclear hippies" or my favourite "if climate change was real, then the greens would support nuclear".
It’s simple: renewables can’t be rolled out on a global scale to cover our current usage, because of the huge variability in production. Modern economies require very predictable production. Nuclear on the other hand is a proven technology that works.
Solar and wind are fairly predictable, you can find graphs of predicted versus actual production at various times ahead.
Usage is not flat, it has peaks and troughs on daily and seasonal cycles.
If it was perfectly flat then nuclear would have a big advantage. But it's not, so it has the same options as solar or wind that doesn't match demand. You can build more than you need and just throw some away sometimes or you can build roughly what you need on average and store it when you have more than you need for when you have too little.
At the moment the former is cheaper (and getting cheaper for renewables), but the storage options are getting better too.
You need the storage for nuclear anyway, but as it gets rolled out it undermines nuclear's big advantage compared with renewables.
I didn't want to say that, and should have used 'controllable' instead of predictable. Because when you have a week without wind or sun in the middle of winter you are not going to tell people to shut down their heather. There are advance in storage but nowhere the order of magnitude needed for dense cities.
Have a look at how nuclear power can be rapidly adjusted to compensate for changing production in renewables (in french sorry): https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432. There is no way we'll achieve that kind of adjustment with renewables alone in the short term, whereas nuclear + renewables is proved and working at the moment for very low C02 emission electricity production in France[1]. There are interesting things going on like pumping water up into dams with excess peak power from renewables, but that'll cover a few days, not a full winter.
Even if it's inefficient we have, globally, enough capacity for wind, solar, waves, hydro, etc., to power our current needs multiple times without having to deal with construction of nuclear power plants that are always delayed and overrun forecasted costs, be it because of regulations (which I think are REALLY important for safety, very few complain that aviation is too regulated, I'd put nuclear reactors a step above that) or just because it is difficult to build an efficient and safe design.
As safe as it is even a single accident has huge implications and is much more disastrous than almost any other form of energy production.
I'm saying this as someone who always supported nuclear, I just believe that we might be on an inflection point where it might not be so relevant if our renewables technology continue to accelerate its progress as it's been during the past decade.
See other comment, the problem is not production capacity alone, it's also adjusting production to demand.
> I'm saying this as someone who always supported nuclear, I just believe that we might be on an inflection point where it might not be so relevant if our renewables technology continue to accelerate its progress as it's been during the past decade.
Good, I come from the opposite and changed my opinions after seing the numbers, from quantity of material needed for renewables to grid constraints.
Personally I don't care that much which of the two are cheapest. I want the ban on using fossil fuels and any side that want the ban is an ally. There is a perception however that its really only the nuclear advocates that support such extreme action as a complete ban, as even power grids that has basically reached peak usage of either wind or solar has to rely on natural gas to fill in the gap when neither are producing.
One of the few countries that I know which has a power grid that could be independently removed from fossil fueled energy production in favor of renewable is Norway, and that because the output of hydro and nuclear is very similar.
Lets have a law that makes it illegal to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity. Preferably very soon. The market will solve the question if renewable and battery combination is cheaper than nuclear.
I didn't respond as I have no real issue with people that understand rolling out nuclear involves challenges just like rolling out renewables.
It's when it veers into conspiracy land and people act like we're collectively choosing renewables over nuclear in a fit of green luddism that I object. Doubly so if it seems like cover for climate change denial.
For people that believe in climate change and don't think renewables are a scam then they're entitled to their opinions on nuclear even if I think they're wrong. They're not being maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious like a subset of noisy nuclear fans.
Personally, I still maintain that renewables on their current trajectory and a carbon tax are the only tech we need to solve climate change and turn a profit compared with the status quo. All that remains is the hard part, collective global action when some people can profit from screwing everyone else.
Variable renewable prices are excellently low, with solar PV falling from $350/MWh to like $43 in 10 years. The variability and massive land/material use is where I suspect they will eventually run into modest troubles at scale (around 50% of total energy). Already, in San Bernardino county (of all places!), large new solar installations in the desert were banned, largely (from what I can tell) because of NIMBYism. Thus, I personally believe that at scale variable renewables will eventually struggle, as almost all other energy systems have in the past. The exponential curve in the sub-10% range gives way to a plateau in many cases. I think there's sufficient reason to consider this, if not likely, at least imaginable. Many studies, including some from NREL, show costs of solar going absolutely vertical at certain levels of penetration, for intuitive reasons that when you're building that last solar panel that's only needed on December 15th at 1pm for 1 hour, it's pretty darn expensive. Energy storage helps, but has externalities and cost. As usual, there is no free lunch.
So, you want some ideas to make nuclear cheap? Ok! Barring what's been dubbed the Mobile Chernobyl, building large nuclear plants in huge shipyards and floating them to their location where they're either embedded on land and operated terrestrially or (even better) operated 10 km offshore is the kind of idea that can cut costs dramatically while actually improving safety. Sounds crazy, but hear me out!
Shipyards are like assembly lines. It's Henry Ford meets decarbonization. You can pump out massive components and assemble them in a controlled environment with local labor without any temporary structures or shops or roads or anything that makes heavy engineering projects expensive. You get economies of mass production and economies of scale.
When operating at sea, you are intimately coupled to an infinite heat sink that can cool you in all situations. If you're in deep water, tsunamis are long wavelength and non-threatening. Earthquakes don't exist. Weather can hurt, but the Prelude was designed to operate in category 5 cyclones.
For maintenance, you just get relieved by a spare powership and go to the shipyard. All fuel handling equipment is shared across the fleet, not duplicated in each plant. The uptime at the customer site is 100% because of the spare ship.
In case of military attack, you design it to sink safely and coolably, and have a salvage operation built into the design.
Absolutely epic. This could decarbonize the planet extremely rapidly.
Anyone working on this? You bet! This is Thorcon's entire pitch, and they think they can hit $1000/kW capital cost. MIT studied it too. [1].
[1] http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-look-floating-nuclear-power-062...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Honestly just disposing of nuclear waste in deep geologic repositories is a really pragmatic and relatively cheap approach for now.
If we do end up ramping nuclear to 50% of the world energy supply, then breeding will likely become important. With breeders, we can use uranium dissolved in seawater effectively forever (hundreds of millions or even billions of years at 10x world scale consumption, effectively fully renewable).
Or build them in a depression and flood it with water if there’s a major problem. Or build them on a floating platform in the ocean and simply sink it if something goes wrong?
I think the biggest practical concern is that underground construction is more expensive that above-ground construction, and nuclear's active constraint today is cost.
There may be opportunities for step changes if people make fully autonomous, maintenance-free, factory fab reactors that can slide into easily-constructed holes. Unfortunately, all of this is hard, and so far economies of scale have dwarfed gains from economies of mass production. The small reactors of the past have all been crazy expensive. The truck-mounted ML-1 military reactor, for example, was 10x too expensive for the Army back in the early 1960s.
As for floating, this is my single favorite idea ever, as expressed elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817497
[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6332659-process-inherent-ultimat...