Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Let me counter that story with observation that there's something on the order of 500 000 tons of high-level nuclear waste currently stored by countries worldwide, and so far they manage. Point being that it can be handled responsibly. It probably wouldn't be the best idea in a perfect world, but we are kind of in a hurry right now, with every year of still being on fossil fuels adding to severity of future consequences.

My push to "minimize" this problem is a push towards recognizing that the problem is manageable in practice. The image of "single city made of high-level waste" was meant to picture just how little there is to manage, by volume, and once again - most of that we already know how to use as fuel; we just can't, because appropriate reactors aren't being built, primarily because people are afraid of the waste.

We may be technically drowning in energy from the Sun, but we're still not fast enough with making use of it. In the meantime, we have the closest thing after fusion to an energetic magic bullet - very high density, clean energy source with manageable waste - and we've been mostly sitting on it for decades now.

But maybe at this point it's really too late, maybe by the time enough reactors could come on-line, there really would be enough renewables to take over. It's unclear to me at this point whether the recent growth of solar and wind capacity is sustainable.

> so far they manage

Yes, by doing not much of anything and only across a very very short span of time compared to how long it will have to work eventually. That's a bit like saying that the landmine you are sitting on hasn't gone off yet. True, it hasn't. And it may never go off. But it is still a landmine and it is still quite dangerous. If you had the choice between not having a landmine to sit on in the first place vs sitting on one to keep it safe which would you take?

Of course "no landmine". But I'm not convinced yet we have that choice - that renewables really are growing fast enough and sustainably enough for there to be no point in building up nuclear capacity.

We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables. The major reason why so many countries wanted to have nuclear reactors was mostly because it was convenient cover for weapons research, and a way to make fissile material for weapons (Plutonium, for instance), not because it made clean or commercially viable energy.

France is a perfect example of this. When the oil crisis hit in the 70's they then used this knowledge to rapidly expand their use of nuclear power, which is now the highest in the world. But the reactors are aging, the waste is piling up and new construction has been delayed or halted indefinitely (and is already over budget).

Whether renewables are growing fast enough is something we control in a very direct way, and cranking out windmills and solar panels is really a mere matter of engineering. The latest iteration windmills make impressive power (8 to 12 MW design power is now a reality, something I did not expect to see in my lifetime), and can be mass produced economically.

They also tie into the grid at many locations, something aging grid infrastructure appreciates (the variability is another problem, but there are fortunately some solutions for that now).

> We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables.

Out of curiosity, is there a good estimate for how much money the world has spent on nuclear/renewable energy research? You'd think this information should be easy to find given the importance of the nuclear vs renewables debate, but it's not obvious to me how to find it.

Most of the money spent on nuclear research is spent on fusion projects and things like pebble bed reactors, most of this is in the proof-of-concept or early production stage and funded by governments.

Most of the money spent on renewables (solar, wind) is spent on scaling up and (boring, but necessary) production. Some (tidal, geothermal) has gone into proof of concept level projects. The amounts specified vary greatly based on the source.

ITER alone (originally projected to cost $5B) already clocks in at $20B and doesn't seem to be much closer to something resembling a working prototype than it was several years ago.

>We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables.

It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.

>Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources

From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11...

There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.

> It’s the other way around. If the money poured into renewables had gone to nuclear there would be no climate crisis.

That's a very bold statement for which I have seen absolutely no proof. Solar and wind do not have the long term waste issues associated with nuclear and cost a small fraction of nuclear per installed Watt of power generation.

There is no significant difference in CO2 output of nuclear vs solar or wind so you'd have a climate crisis just the same. If you're looking to displace fossil fuel with nuclear you're going to have to look much further than just electricity, and solar and wind are just as good or even better at that as nuclear power is. Working fusion would be better than all of these options, but unfortunately we don't have it.

> There are 9 countries with nukes and 31 with nuclear power. The idea that nuclear power plants were build to acquire nukes seems unlikely.

It may seem unlikely to you but it is a well established fact. France, China the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, some of the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material. The power generated was a by-product. Countries that got into the game later and that did not have access to nuclear technology were licensed 'safe' tech that could not be used for enrichment.

Iran and North Korea are only interested in nuclear power for weapons purposes, everything else is just a fig leaf.

> the earliest nuclear powers all got into the nuclear plant game to make weapons grade material

You got that exactly backwards. These five states all used production reactors to make their weapons Pu, which didn't produce useful power. Only later did they build power reactors, which don't produce weapons grade Pu.

Do you honestly think, Germany, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Finland, S Korea, Czechoslovakia etc. are/were also only interested in nuclear power as a cover for their weapons program?

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