Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
But it got canceled, and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone thinks its better to truck in heavy fuel oil for generators vs having a small reactor buried in the ground for 30 years.
I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of coal and natural gas plants because they scream "green energy" and end up with a few MW of wind (ignoring the hydro built 50 years ago which to this day is still the majority "green energy" source) and a bunch of natural gas or in the past coal plants.
If they said yes to fission 40 years ago we wouldn't be having the climate crisis discussion today. We don't have 40 more years to overbuild wind/solar and perfect battery technology at 2-5x the current price for natural gas. Because if people don't start saying "yes" for carbon free power sources like this we _WILL_ be trying to figure out how to built them in 50 years to recapture all the carbon we burned into the atmosphere while trying to avoid more and more of the forests/etc from burning.
The war between nuclear weapons and environmentalists went "hot" when the French DGSE sank the Rainbow Warrior and murdered a photographer in retaliation for trying to stop their nuclear testing.
If you think the question is solved, ask yourself this: would you prefer that Iran solve its energy needs from a fleet of nuclear reactors or a fleet of solar panels?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyongbyon_Nuclear_Scientific_R...
[1] https://www.history.com/news/north-korea-nuclear-deal-bill-c...
I’m not sure what choice of power source has to do with weapon proliferation.
A 'breeder reactor' is a type of nuclear reactor that makes more efficient use of uranium than 'light water reactors' and with less left-over radioactive waste.
Sounds great, so why do we build anything else? Well, once you've got a breeder reactor it's a very short step to making weapons-grade plutonium. Whereas with light water reactors, this isn't the case.
So the choice of breeder vs light water reactor has pretty big impact on weapon proliferation.
Fast breeders create Pu, yes, but the isotopic composition is poorly suited for weapons.
Actually, no. The reactor designs in use generate very little waste, just spent fuel rods that have to be kept in safe storage until their radioactivity level goes down to something reasonable. That doesn't take decades, either. The big problem with nuclear waste is the waste from weapons production, and people don't differentiate just like they don't for reactors vs. bombs.
However, long term interment isn't what's planned anyway... the fuel rods can be reprocessed into new fuel, and they aren't much of a storage concern anyway... they can actually be stuck on a truck and hauled away in their casks down the highway.
We need somewhere to store the fuel assemblies that's safe and secure (or better than putting them in casks in the open) but we're not looking for a dump site. More like a warehouse facility, where they can sit until reprocessed or dismantled.
Coal : Effect/Pros - Energy/Cheap. Residue/Cons - C02/GlobalWarming
Nuclear : Effect/Pros - Energy/Clean. Residue/Cons - RadioactiveWaste/Contamination.
Where do the nuclear byproducts go currently ? Into the earth? Rivers? Oceans?
30 years ago, we switched from paper based products to plastic, to save trees. Today, we want to switch from plastic based products to paper, to avoid pollution.
Every 'switch' will come with side-effects that the current generation is fine with, because they're not going to be ones dealing with it.
No where, because there aren't any. If you meant spent fuel if it's not reprocessed it's stored as long as needed to be less dangerously radioactive. If it's reprocessed, any radioactive elements in it that aren't useful are stored and left to decay. Present storage of things like this is on-site as mentioned above, because reprocessing mostly doesn't happen.
The amount of unusable material from reprocessed fuel is tiny, by the way.... even less trouble than storing the spent fuel rods, on the order of a handful of material from a whole fuel rod assembly.
Power generating reactors don't give off anything but electricity, heat, and spent fuel, they are zero emissions.
Obviously, capitalism isn't very good at accounting for externalities, whether they are measured in birth defects, or in degrees centigrade - but I think global warming is a bit more extreme in scale than your typical pollution issue.
Gen III/III+ conventional reactors were also claimed to be cheaper to build. Look how that turned out.
The fact the nuclear reactor hasn't been miniaturized to the size of a coin and included in every $15 childrens toy to power lights is in large part because of public perception and government regulation rather than real safety/health concerns - there exist plenty of typical household materials that are more dangerous than the safest nuclear materials.
RTGs can be made small, but they also completely sacrifice the power density of nuclear due to their abysmal efficiency. Their main advantage is maintenance-free longevity more so than compactness or anything.
Either way, I can totally imagine someone saying "punch cards and relays scale down horribly - you could never make a small computer".
A small steam turbine is an apparatus with about the size and complexity of a car engine. But if it has to be licensed and inspected by the NRC then you can forget about it.
And you could make a little RTG that could power a phone for a decade. Even with the terrible efficiency of thermoelectric generators it would still be much smaller than a lithium battery that could store the same number of kWh, because it's ~10% of the efficiency multiplied by much more than 10 times the power density. The main limit you hit on size is practicality -- why make a tiny, tiny, tiny one that lasts for a month when you can make an only marginally larger one that lasts for ten years?
Also the potential damage is a lot higher e.g. if you're in a car accident and the RTG gets punctured vs. just a Li-ion battery catching fire. In terms of cleanup and containment.
The point is that it's not a scaling problem. It's practical to make an RTG that small as a technical matter.
But it has, or at least close to:
RTGs[1] weighting a couple dozen kilograms are used in space exploration and in rare cases in cold climates. Their main problem is low power density.
Nuclear pacemakers[2] of just a few centimeters across used to be a thing - long lasting and reliable. Also used thermoelectric generators. Replaced by cheaper lithium-based batteries due to high costs of making the nuclear capsule resilient against various possible sources of damage - like body cremation, car accidents, etc.
Nonetheless we have reached certain natural limit of nuclear fission, and only use of nuclear fusion[3] (or major scientific and engineering break-throughs) could change the status quo. The three main unsolved problems for wide scale commercial deployment of fission power:
1) radiation shielding - right now we only have passive shielding via use of structural materials, weights a lot
2) critical mass for active chain reaction (heavy and requires active management) vs passive generation via spontaneous fission (low power density)
3) operational safety and non-proliferation issues: a fission device requires radioactive material, and radioactive material is by its nature dangerous
Notably all three issues are either minimized or entirely absent for nuclear fusion.
Lastly, in typical nuclear power plant, the power generation facilities are usually of comparable size to, or even larger than, the nuclear reactor building itself - so miniaturizing the reactor would yield only diminishing results. High-temperature superconductors ought to be of some help here.
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
[2] https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/medtech-memoirs-...
[3] "Typical fuel pellets are about the size of a pinhead and contain around 10 milligrams of fuel." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion
Can be dramatically reduced with a neutron reflector [1]. Bare Sphere's [2] can be as small as 6.9cm diameter, and use of a neutron reflector could perhaps reduce that by half or more. 3.5cm is pretty small. Research is still ongoing into reflecting neutrons, and it's possible that some clever arrangement of neutron 'lenses' might allow criticality with almost no mass.[3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_reflector
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of...
[3]: https://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/neutron-reflectivity---int...
Not to mention that those toys would end in a few days in the garbage, ready to be shipped by volume to be burnt ("recycled") in some other country.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/79078-fGfEfw/webviewable/
Key quote from the weapons folks is: "If the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium."
See also Kang and von Hippel's famous report (pdf) on Thorium weapons potential: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/79078-fGfEfw/webviewable/
Wikipedia:
It is difficult to make a practical nuclear bomb from a thorium reactor's byproducts. According to Alvin Radkowsky, designer of the world's first full-scale atomic electric power plant, "a thorium reactor's plutonium production rate would be less than 2 percent of that of a standard reactor, and the plutonium's isotopic content would make it unsuitable for a nuclear detonation."[13]:11[19] Several uranium-233 bombs have been tested, but the presence of uranium-232 tended to "poison" the uranium-233 in two ways: intense radiation from the uranium-232 made the material difficult to handle, and the uranium-232 led to possible pre-detonation. Separating the uranium-232 from the uranium-233 proved very difficult, although newer laser techniques could facilitate that process.
Summarizing some of the potential benefits, Martin offers his general opinion: "Thorium could provide a clean and effectively limitless source of power while allaying all public concern—weapons proliferation, radioactive pollution, toxic waste, and fuel that is both costly and complicated to process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
We should stop going after the potentially cleanest source of energy because a single US government study claims it is possible to produce weapons out of it. Coincidentally the same entity that owns the most nuclear weapons on Earth. Luckily non of the world leading Thorium researchers that stupid the stop the progress, hopefully this way of energy production becomes a reality in our lifetime.
There are 2 true benefits to thorium over thorium: less long-lived transuranics (but more deeply-penetrating 2.6 MeV gammas from Tl-208) and the ability to have a breeder with slow neutrons (less specific fissile inventory, but more problematic graphite).
The major health threat from any nuclear reactor is large early release dose, which is proportional to power level and power level alone (Watts is proportional to number of atoms fissioning per second). In this, Thorium fuel is very similar to Uranium fuel. Long-term waste ends up in a deep geologic repository in any case. Uranium-Plutonium cycle can breed as well or better than the Thorium-Uranium cycle.
I like thorium a lot. I just don't want people relying on stuff that is factually incorrect to promote it. It's easy to promote without being wrong.
In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics.
But the green energy people are an easy punching bag for the nuclear advocates who are simply unwilling to face up to the reality of why nuclear keeps failing to take off.
Instead we get a bunch of political tricks. If we export more green energy than we import coal energy then we can pretend that that the coal did not actually get released into the air as pollution. We plant trees and talk about carbon capture, and then we discretely cut it down and turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral. Somehow that turn into negative carbon, while at the same time the old coal power plants can be reused to burn biomass and natural gas.
In the latest political debate the green party representative came with this great comeback. People who want to reduce global warming with nuclear are wrong because that side want to lower taxes on gasoline. Thus nuclear is bad.
I would like to think that this is isolated to the Swedish green party but somehow I doubt it. No one want to talk about a complete ban on burning fossil fuels for power. I don't have much hope with nuclear advocates, but the current data is hard to dismiss. Looking at EU the lowest gCO2eq/kWh emitting energy grids are Norway, Sweden, Iceland and France. Norway has more hydro than they need. Iceland got plenty of hydro and geothermal. Sweden got nuclear and hydro. France got nuclear. Every other energy grid in EU, regardless of political alignment, is dirtier. Even Denmark with it amazing investment into wind is at this moment (https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...) 400% more polluting than Sweden.
Source: Norway’s department of energy. https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-...
This isn’t just accounting pedantry: the countries they sell their renewables to use those, to (rightfully) claim green energy consumption. Norway then does the same, but based on their production.
Reminiscent of the expression “success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.”
It means that countries who actually use non-renewables to power their grid effectively subsidize the Norwegian energy market and pay a fine for their own use.
It's amazing how common the misconception that this is somehow nefarious is. I encourage you to read up on some of the published material about energy certificates, certificates of origin etc.
Energy is fungible, meaning they only sell the credits and use the green power internally. Now suddenly they use originally “green” power, never mind that the credits have been sold and someone else is doing the same.
Google “Norway green energy” to get a feel for what it looks like in the media.
There is no need for them to sell many of those credits, as evidenced by the fact that they don’t even transfer much of that power. Don’t forget that they lower that penalty by increasing supply. If they went off the market, other, domestic players would get more money for their own production. And Norwegians are lulled into a false sense of green compliance, thereby being less incentivised to root for reduction of fossil fuel consumption.
It’s a great example for the expression “having your cake and eating it, too.” If you ever need to explain that one :)
There isn't double-counting, that's the entire point of the system where "green" producers end up with "dirty" credits, because a "dirty" pays that "green" provider to take its credits in exchange, to prevent double counting.
But the notion of which sort of credit you buy and what sort of energy you actually produce are two separate things.
As an example Iceland is exempt from certain EU/EEA energy efficiency regulation because of its near-100% use of green energy, even though its power companies have something like >80% "dirty" energy credits on hand.
This is because the regulators can distinguish between a "dirty" power plant with 100% green credits on hand (i.e. they've subsidized a "green" power plant) v.s. a "green" power plant with 100% green credits on hand.
> There is no need for them to sell
> many of those credits, as evidenced
> by the fact that they don’t even transfer
> much of that power.
The electron that comes through your socket doesn't need to be generated by a "green" power plant for you to consume "green" energy, this is because electrons are fungible.
Of course we also want to shift to 100% green energy power plants, but in the meantime energy demand is also elastic. The point of the energy credit system is to shift electricity demand from areas that supply real "dirty" energy to those that supply "real" green energy.
This happens because a "green" power plant in Norway might sell its energy for 20 cents/kWh, which would be the same as a "dirty" power plant in Denmark. But if the "dirty" plant needs to buy "green" credits from the Norwegian one it might have to raise its prices to 25 cents/kWh, and the Norwegian one can lower them to 15 cents/kWh.
This would then have the effect that an energy consumer (say a factory) might move its operation to Norway to benefit from cheaper energy, or consumers would buy the subsidized Norwegian product over the Danish one.
Except for the small detail that it doesn't actually have much of an effect from a macro-economic point of view, but that's because we collectively think this whole climate change thing isn't really all that important, and thus the energy credits are relatively cheap and add almost nothing to the end-user price.
But that's the fault of political priorities, the system itself is relatively elegant and would have more of an effect if its designed was backed up by larger political commitments.
If you dig out coal and burn it in a power plant then you are producing pollution and contributing to global warming. No amount of exporting green energy changes that fact.
You are trying to dodge the question why there is a big whole in the ground where the coal once where. Someone mined it. Someone burned it. Someone bought it. Each and everyone involved are partly responsible for the harm this act caused to the environment. It is a bit like thief stealing, a fence reselling it and a customer buying it without asking questions of why it is so cheap. It is not an elegant system because in the end a crime occurred and real harm has happened.
If you want to produce green energy or run a nuclear plant then do what ever feels best, but the coal stays in the ground. No amount of misleading can hide the fact that digging it out is harmful to the planet, both on a macro and micro level, and if you fund coal mining by buying their energy then you are part of the problem.
Of course burning coal sucks, and we should replace those power plants.
But until then we can also discourage their use by subsidising clean energy at their expense. That's what this system is meant to accomplish.
It's beyond me how someone can look at what's effectively a tax on non-renewables as whitewashing those energy sources. You tax behavior you want to discourage.
A carbon tax in the energy sector helps but it is a rather inefficient method compared to simply keeping the coal in the ground. People keep finding ways to make profits from digging the coal out and burning it, and Sweden is currently a customer to those people.
The system has not been successful in keeping the coal in the ground. What it currently accomplishing in Sweden is the opposite, as Swedish use of coal energy has increased. A simple law would fix that, and it doesn't require a discussion about what energy should be subsidized. The only thing required is a stroke of the law writers pen. It is the easiest, simplest and most efficient solution in keeping the coal in the ground and the only reason people are not doing it is that people want to keep buying the energy produced by burning coal.
It's not realistic to make burning coal and other non-renewables illegal in Europe, less than 20% of the grid has been transitioned[1]. You can't just shut off 80% of the grid without European civilization as we know it coming to an end for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime there's plenty of uses of energy that can be built in one EU/EEA country or the other, or shifted between countries, and which will respond to price incentives.
E.g. a data center that's not ping-time sensitive or bulk bandwidth sensitive is probably better placed in Iceland than The Netherlands from an ecological perspective.
The impact of the energy credit system is to shift that sort of use between countries and energy providers, to the extent that their use will respond to price incentives.
It is relatively ineffective in the larger scheme of things, just like our buildup of renewable energy is proceeding at a relatively slow pace. But that's not an argument against the systems in place per-se, just like some country setting their VAT at 1% isn't an argument against VAT structurally.
The EU/EEA agreement doesn't have explicit tax-raising powers, so it's really not the case that a simple law could do the same thing. This system is effectively a way to create a new EEA-wide tax through a back-door mechanism.
Any national tax policy wouldn't be as effective, because individual countries in the EEA market can't or aren't going to enact law that mandates that some of their companies move abroad because their own energy market isn't renewable enough.
It also gives individual consumers a way to vote with their money to increase the buildup of renewables.
As an example, I live in Amsterdam where (as far as I know) I have no choice but to consume electrons sourced by burning fossil fuels[2].
However, I have opted to pay extra to buy "green" (wind and solar) energy, but the energy that comes out of my power plugs as I type this comment is still sourced from burning coal/gas.
Am I just participating in a gigantic sham? No, because what I'm doing is buying the production of energy capacity corresponding to my own use for use elsewhere on the power grid. So I'm taking part in reducing the overall demand for fossil fuels, and thus doing my own small part in reducing pollution.
By the way, from a cursory glance the current Swedish carbon tax is at best around 1/4 per-ton of the cost of sequestering that CO^2 back into the ground.
If that's the case of course it's not really all that effective, but just like in the case of the energy credit system the problem there isn't with the very concept of the system of a carbon tax (which is probably the single best way to deal with the overall problem), but with the value that tax is set at.
1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Good thing the Swedish energy grid is not made out of 80% coal and other fossil fuels. It is a strawman argument to talk about shutting down 80% of the whole European energy grid in the context of the Swedish energy grid.
> As an example, I live in Amsterdam
Netherlands power grid only utilize 5% nuclear power. It has no hydro. If you made fossil fuels illegal than that would indeed make civilization as you know it coming to an end. Your power grid is wholly depended on fossil fuels for keeping the light on. Even if more wind farms and solar plants was built the coal would continue to burn during still nights.
It would not however be very hard to change that. A nuclear plant, or if you prefer an experimental battery dam would solve the issue quite fast. Just a simple matter of money and political will. Given the knowledge and experience in flood control it would even be quite suitable placement batteries, pumping in water when wind production are high and the price is cheap, and producing energy when the wind is still. At most 10-20 years, and faster if the incentives were right.
Putting pollution in the sky is not morally defenseable just because you paid a higher markup on the power bill. The markup should only exist to incentivize people to invest, and the cost should be increased until it accomplish this. Since people like to claim that nuclear is currently unprofitable, the solution then is pretty simple. Raise the tax on coal energy so that even just buying coal energy during still winter nights is still more expensive than building the nuclear plant. At that point it is no longer unprofitable to run the nuclear plant. If wind+solar+battery is cheaper then go with that, just as long as the coal stay in the ground.
But for Sweden it would just be easier to ban fossil fueled energy as we have enough hydro and nuclear to get us through still winter nights. It would however force a choice between wind+solar+battery vs nuclear, rather than the current wind+solar+coal vs nuclear. The later is unacceptable from an environmental perspective.
(I will note that a law banning fossil fuel is indistinguishable from a carbon tax that is high enough to make it more profitable to build non-polluting alternative to burning fossil fuels. The fact that people still burn fossil fuel is thus a proof that the tax is not high enough).
Yeah, it would be if we were discussing Sweden's energy grid. You're commenting in a subthread about the EEA-wide energy credit system in general. You're the one who brought up Sweden in the context of an unrelated point.
But even if we were only discussing Sweden the same point would apply, there's that 20% of the grid that's still being transitioned. The energy credit system is a way to shift power demand to the other 80%, to the extent that such demand is say location and not capacity-limited within Sweden.
> A nuclear plant, or if you prefer an experimental battery dam would solve the issue quite fast. Just a simple matter of money and political will.
Sure, and if someone made me emperor of Europe that's one of the things we'd be running a Manhattan-level project to accomplish.
But to present that as a counterargument to energy credits is to miss the point, these are different issues. Even in such a scenario it's still going to take some years to transition the grid due to manufacturing and logistical issues.
In that time period you'd want to give consumers in the EEA-market a price incentive to build their factory next to a solar plant instead of a coal plant. The energy credit market is a way to work towards that.
To say we should do away with energy credits entirely because, and I'm really not sure I understand your argument, but you seem to be saying that they're they're morally indefensible or not an elegant solution?
Anyway, that's going to result in needless pollution while we build up renewables. Now who's taking a morally indefensible position?
I'm not claiming sainthood by electing to pay a slightly higher energy price. Could I do more? Yes. I am saying that you're fundamentally misunderstanding how price incentives and elastic demand factor into the equation.
It's not the case that my local coal plant is running at 100% capacity all the time, and by electing to buy "green" energy I'm making the coal product more expensive than the renewable product.
Thus while I keep the lights on with coal, me and a bunch of other people in the are area doing our part to shift new demand for energy out of the area. There's going to be a price point where e.g. someone thinking of installing a server rack that consumes as much energy as me and all my neighbors elects to install it near a "green" plant, not near a coal plant.
Do you feel similarly about other harm mitigation that's part of public policy? E.g. do you think because we should switch to near-100% electric vehicles the EU's increasingly strict regulations on catalytic converters is pointless? That's what the energy credit system is, it's a transition and harm reduction mechanism.
> I will note that a law banning fossil fuel is indistinguishable from a carbon tax that is high enough to make it more profitable to build non-polluting alternative to burning fossil fuels.
No it's not. Even if fossil fuels were prohibitively expensive for energy production we'd still have things like airplanes that are going to be paying for the energy density in fossil fuels way past the price point where a proposed CO^2 tax matches the cost of cleaning up the pollution involved.
That exchange is plainly not carbon neutral. Exporting green energy does usually contribute to reducing fossil fuel usage at destination - that cant reasonably be denied. It sounds like you believe the figures are being officially "double counted". But I'm quite doubtful that international agreements really allow for such plain mis-accounting , the idea more likely comes from the kind of confused climate skeptic literature, which imagines that climate science and whole green energy movement is a scam.
> We plant trees and talk about carbon capture, and then we discretely cut it down and turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral.
That is plainly carbon neutral. If you plant and grow trees sustainably, cut them down and burn them, it is absolutely carbon neutral. It can even be carbon negative as rootmass is left to build soil, and benefit wildlife too - depends on how intelligently its done.
If you phrase your statement more succinctly its easier to see the plain sense in it:
> We plant trees ... and then we ... turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral.
In a bit more detail:
Grow trees and turn them into fuel - that's carbon negative.
Burn the fuel - that's carbon positive.
Do both together - that's carbon neutral.
https://www.svtplay.se/video/23437510/agenda/agenda-18-nov-2...
Political debate from 2 weeks ago. Green party spoke person vs moderate party leader. It beings at 35m. The moderate describe multiple times that Sweden buys dirty coal energy when the wind is now blowing, and the green party spoke person repeats the argument of being net exporter of green energy in response.
> It can even be carbon negative as rootmass is left to build soil
Areas where we plant tree and don't cut them down has a name: nature sanctuary. There has been plenty of initiatives to plant trees in order to create official carbon sinks on the books, so how many of those are nature sanctuary?
> It can even be carbon negative as rootmass is left to build soil, and benefit wildlife too
https://www.forskning.se/2019/09/20/tradplantering-ingen-uni... https://www.svd.se/plantera-trad-loser-inte-klimatproblemen
Counting tree planting initiatives as carbon sinks when there is no planning for what happens afterward is simply wishful thinking (quote from the study).
Criticism of the green movement is not automatically climate skepticism. How many climate skeptics want a complete ban of power generated from fossil fuels in the energy grid? If the green movement just would adapt that stance then I would not care. If people want to use other technologies in a non-fossil fueled world then good, just as priority one is a non-fossil fueled world. Sweden could adapt a ban on fossil fuel produced energy tomorrow and it would mostly only be a bit more expensive (some infrastructure to Norway might be needed in order handle still winter nights).
I think its a valid argument or caveat to the undesirable coal burning. That's a spoken debate, open to interpretation and misunderstanding, not evidence of carbon trading actually being gamed.
> where we plant tree and don't cut them down has a name: nature sanctuary. Sure, or let the trees seed themselves but I said cut the tree and leave the roots (they have considerable mass and hard to harvest) Then you got a partial natural habitat, carbon sink and fuel source, you've got a mix - that's an option. Plant more trees than you need - never sure how many you'll need anyhow, call it headroom. The object is to reduce net carbon emissions as fast as possible and improve habitats as much as possible, the objectives conflict a bit and can compliment a bit, ecology is complex like that.
> Counting tree planting initiatives as carbon sinks when there is no planning for what happens afterward is simply wishful thinking (quote from the study).
So get planning - because it can work, and it could be done to some extent if you want to decarbonise -according to the IPCC at least. Whatever renewable power your country is generating, if its traded and used then it is cutting carbon, either within your country or another destination - thats not imaginative accounting, its situational awareness.
You are talking like this is all a sham, like your greens are saying they don't need to do anything more about carbon reduction because they're exporting some renewable generation - I dont believe that and expect they're actually just arguing their progress so they can make more progress. Then you say it wouldn't be too hard to just ban fossil fuels tomorrow, so are you annoyed with greens holding things up then ? That sounds like a "super green" policy, do many people believe in it? Because it wont be able to happen till then. Maybe you've got low quality green politicians carrying the banner, that can sure happen.
If I was doing some tit-for-tat argument I would ask what kind of confused climate skeptic literature says that its a valid argument for importing coal energy in 2019.
The green party used to say that the coal belong in the ground. It was one of their slogans. Being a net exporter of green energy does not make it suddenly valid to dig up the coal and burn it. The coal belong in the ground and should stay there.
> So get planning - because it can work
Claiming something to be a carbon offset in the books and telling the public misleading information is not acceptable. If they want to put things that "can work" then they can put down "could be a carbon offset" in the book rather than "is a carbon offset". Then the "could be" calculations could be compared to the factual climate change data.
> That sounds like a "super green" policy, do many people believe in it?
And there we have it. Not burning fossil fuel for power is apparently a fantasy?
But that is not true. There are countries today which operate with no or close to zero fossil fueled energy grids. Places like France does it without even calling it "super green". They just did it because they didn't want to be dependent on other nations after the second world war. Iceland just use geothermal and hydro because it was cheapest and available. Norway and Sweden could do it but doesn't for political and economical reasons.
It also a bit silly to argue that it must be done tomorrow. They could set up a goal like they did for 2020, 2030 and 2040 and so on. A lot of green politics is about putting down goals and focusing the political discussion. Banning fossil fuels in energy production has yet to be part of any such discussion, and the green party just dodges the question when ever the issue of still winter nights comes up.
It is also a bit funny that we are defining nuclear as a super green policy. Its a label that sounds like a insult but really, is it? Personally I don't care much either way as my goal is that the coal and oil stay in the ground, the natural gas don't get fracked, and the biofuel production don't get double counted and presented as a carbon offset. I just wish that the green movement would be behind that.
> it wouldn't be too hard to just ban fossil fuels tomorrow
That sounded a "super green" idea to me - with no idea myself how you thought that could be done. Nuclear ?! How can I tell to what degree your writing is to be understood as exaggeration - affordable nuclear supply by tomorrow? by next year? by next decade? When you have a rational case, you should be able to promote it with accurate rational language. Sorry but I cant tell what you are really intending or concerned about, because your case has not been coherent. Perhaps examine whether you have a prejudice towards the idea of "green" policy (sounds like an insult?) and prejudice allows one to be hyper critical while inattentive to the coherence of ones own convictions.
The green movement has harbored some prejudice towards nuclear power, but nuclear power is not more expensive now than renewable options because of green prejudice. Its just an excessively complex, resource and high level human attention demanding industrial process to safely generate large amounts of heat from radioactive materials, besides the normal expense of cooling and extracting power from concentrated heat. Sure nuclear might have not been the monster which many greens have pictured it as, also consider whether it is the affordable suppressed magic which nuclear has promoted itself as in the preceding decades while spending many billions on undercosted projects which where delayed to the point of never producing any power. That doesnt happen with wind and solar so even if they foist "misregulation" and fear on nuclear - at least they have shown that they deliver !
In the second quote the op is clearly complaining that schemes growing trees and burning them for fuel cant be carbon neutral, which is plainly false.
The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.
> The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.
NIMBYism is a large reason why the risks are so uncertain and the costs so high. When dozens of judges at several levels have jurisdiction to require expensive and time consuming state/federal EPA, zoning, air quality, shading, etc. reviews and plaintiffs can use delay tactics to block appeals to those rulings, you get lots of uncertainty and expense.
Dont get me wrong, i am not anti- nuclear. It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. When factoring in the cost of waste management and decommissioning the power plants after the end of its lifetime, they are absurdly expensive. All this not to mention the absurd follow-up costs of having to dig out collapsed long time storage yet again. I dont see how nuclear today is not just another technology that offers a unsustainable, quick and cheap energy source that externalized the costs to the next generations. The running costs of all those waste management failures is starting to add up, and when looking at Germany, who set an exit date for nuclear power, the cost of decommissioning the power plants themselves is going to be a massive loss for the tax payer, even if everything would work as planed. Which, when looking at the history, we can be sure it wont.
I am not convinced yet that nuclear doesnt just look good on paper. Get me a realistic calculation for the actual energy price without externalizing the cleanup costs to the tax payer and we can talk. Dont factor in waste management at a fixed price the state offers and dont just assume that no meltdown cleanup will ever be necessary. But i have yet to see anyone make the argument that way, which lets me assume, that nuclear is a wonderful technology to research until someone finds out how to run plants economically viable without just externalizing costs.
I'm not saying it's not problematic, but it's minuscule compared to all forms of power. Even wind power have a serious waste problem when the blades need to be decommissioned. It's not radioactive, but it needs to be stored, and there is a lot of it.
So the question whether we should go full nuclear is, what is the real price on nuclear per kwh with what liabilities? How does it scale? I think the post i responded to first was on an excellent path if it hadnt ignored the waste management problematic. I think research into bringing down cost of power plants is a field worth researching, as well as how to drive down the price of long term storage. But first we have to actually decide on the basis of realistic data and not just hope the future will figure it out for us.
edit: My comment is coming across a bit to hostile, just so there are no misunderstandings, i dont think this societal discussion can be approached by convincing individuals on the internet who are to lazy to google themselves(meaning me), but in parliament. I wasnt really trying to start a discussion but giving my 2cents of where i think the problem in the discourse we currently have lie. And thats more the lacking factual basis in arguments on the topic then the actual costs.
When a nuclear plant releases radiation into the atmosphere we call it a major fuck up. When a coal plant releases dangerous pollutants (including radiation) into the atmosphere we call it normal operation.
> A typical dry-storage cask holds 10 tons of spent fuel and costs about $1 million–$2 million each. (The CASTOR is at the upper end of that range.) This translates to a cost of less than one-twentieth of a penny per kilowatt-hour—about 1 percent of the cost of generating nuclear power.
They last for anywhere between 30-100 years and I assume to be be processed and put into new casks after that. So "less than one-twentieth of a penny per kilowatt-hour" every 30-100 year.
Note this is for the worst of the waste. There is still low level waste and long lived waste that need not be stored in dry casks. It still doesn't sound as problematic. I think the main issue is finding a site and protecting the casks/waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...
As far as I know, nuclear is the only energy source that pre-pays for waste disposal.
And we are far from just storing that stuff cheaply in a safe and secure storehouse we have moronic ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine where we have to dig out old longterm storage.
What are you comparing it to? Are you factoring in economic costs of continuing to release carbon into the atmosphere?
(I don’t want to excuse lazy/bad accounting... but traditional power plants don’t factor in the cost of the carbon they release, so basically everyone is ignoring long-term costs.)
We are currently looking for a replacement that doesnt externalize costs through environmental damages. I dont think nuclear is an alternative here today from a price point, and looking at the few times pro nuclear people talk about waste management costs, they dont seem to think so either. They mostly tend to give the same answer you did, which isnt an answer. Even if we were to decide today that nuclear would be the lesser evil, we cant do that without a cost overview. We have to at least understand what follow up costs we are leaving the generations after us and look what alternatives we have at that price point. And i dont think many taxpayers understood that Fukushima was an actual liability of more then half a trillion dollars and to how much that adds up to for nuclear all together.
And again, we are in an emergency situation with fossil fuels, and sure, we can talk about how much it would cost in liabilities and actual damages to switch completely to nuclear. It might be worth it for all i know. But if you arent even gonna give me an approximate cost to the taxpayer i will assume you are trying to scam me out of money. Unless we can have an honest discussion on a societal level about the realistic costs on taxpayers its an absolutely horrible idea to build even one more nuclear power plant. While i would love for the German nuclear power plants to run till the end of their planed lifetime to not waste the initial investment into relatively safe reactors, not allowing the building of new ones is the right decision as long as the costs are not transparent. If we should have learned anything from fossil fuel and all the other horrible side effects of technological development, we should at least have learned to make a proper technology (consequences) assessment (Technikfolgenabschätzung) and deliberately act on actual data instead of doing stuff that seems without alternative.
Because they don't need to. Power generation plants of any reasonably modern design don't generate lots of waste, just spent fuel rods that can be reprocessed and a tiny amount of non reusable radioactive material that needs to be stored until it's less radioactive.
All the mess regarding storage sites like Yucca Mountain relates to waste from bomb production, not from power plants.
Even if we had a storage facility like that operating in the US, spent fuel assemblies from power plants wouldn't be permanently interred there, that would be a waste.
The point is that your house or car would be outrageously expensive too if the engineering cost of the design was amortized over very few units.
The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant. This Canadian effort may find a way to build more smaller units, which will be great if they succeed.
Solar and wind are disruptive because the cost to add a marginal unit of generation is near zero. A marginal add of a natural gas power plant in my US state is nearly $100M and several years. Nuclear is probably 10x that.
I understand why nuclear is an appealing technology. Its magical in a way, but it doesn't make sense when engineering a power grid today. It is an awful business with high fixed costs getting disrupted by smaller, cheaper, lower friction alternatives. Again, in my state, New York, despite higher than average rates, nuclear operators like Excelon claim to be losing money operating old plants, and NY ratepayers will be providing $7-10B in subsidy over the next 10-12 years.
This is easily false. When you look at historical nuclear powerplant construction via the NRC, you see a flatline of new reactors starting 1979: Three Mile Island accident year.
In fact, Ford and Carter (a nuclear engineer himself) banned reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels even before that! Due to nonproliferation concerns (NPT had been around since 1970).
The USA kept building nuclear weapons through the 80's, so where were those "subsidies" for civilian powerplants?
The answer is the strong anti-nuclear movement in the 80's society that was the culmination of several different political, disaster, and cultural events. Not because we stopped building nukes in the 80's (we didn't stop).
Edit: One of the defining features of the US's civilian power fleet of reactors is exactly because of its adherence to non-proliferation, independence of military, and economic viability of "standing on its own two legs". Contrast the PWR designs with the power+breeder designs of the RBMK, the Soviet design to accidentally produce power while also producing weapons grade materials. This is why, in contrast, in the USA the reactors at national labs and military sites are so secure and secretive, and why the fuel used in US civilian powerplants are very tame in comparison: only the military is subsidizing it's own reactors for its own weapons grade fuel.
A: US Government enrichment facilities built to support nuclear weapons programs. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
One could argue that the mines were subsidized by the federal government (so they could enrich and breed nuclear-grade materials), but that is a far cry from GP's claim that "Once the direct subsidy of nuclear via the military's nuclear weapons buildout went away, new plant construction... went way", which is incomparable to the degree of subsidization as the USSR and their dual-use for RBMK reactors (why else design a reactor with a positive void coefficient).
EDIT: I'm not sure whether you're really concerned about the buildout of nuclear powerplants or the evolution of the USA's policy with regards to the nuclear fuel cycle, but I hope I addressed both.
EDIT2: Also: The "big 3" enrichment locations that the military used would also sell to civilian nuclear powerplants. But that's a far cry reason to "subsidize" the construction of nuclear powerplants. This "fuel subsidization" goes on today (MOX fuels) and the American monopoly of uranium enrichment has been broken since 1970 with the formation of Urenco, so the commercial civilian powerplants have always had other places to purchase from (if a regulatory hassle). There's really not a lot of strong evidence that the mining and enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons somehow subsidized the construction of civilian nuclear powerplants.
Can you elaborate here? Solar and wind are relatively cheap, and falling, but a long way from a near zero marginal cost. According to a quick Google, the capital-weighted costs of solar, hydro, wind, geothermal and some newer natural gas plants are similar.
I don't think there was ever a direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power for weapons production. The ways in which military reactors are run to produce fuel for weapons is different than that of power plants. There are dual use technologies involved, shared R&D costs, and so on, but there is no direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power the way you are implying.
> The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant.
I'm pretty sure you are in fact missing the point. The costs of building a modern nuclear plant include a huge amount of one-off engineering because we build so few of them. If we swapped the numbers of units built of coal and nuclear power plants, the cost structures would (probably close to) swap as well, which was the original parent of this thread's point.
Look, I'm not here to advocate for nuclear power. I think renewables + batteries are likely to win on economics in the near future, but with some major challenges (building enough batteries for the long tail of intermittent production lapses seems really difficult to me).
But that doesn't argue against the fact that we shot ourselves in the climate change foot by not prioritizing nuclear over coal power for decades, and I think a big part of that is based on a mistake ("nuclear is expensive") is because of this inability to amortize costs over more units.
edit to add: I think your singling out of capital costs is a strawman of the original comment ("Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost."). It's unclear whether you are including certification and engineering costs in "capital costs", but the intention of the original point was to include those costs.
Most subsidies are not direct and called "subsidy". But as long as nuclear weapons production was a priority, the US had an more of an incentive to research decommissioning, funding final disposing sites, have more people study nuclear engineering, creating job opportunities for nuclear engineers to build up an ecosystem, funding basic research in the area, researching and providing the logistics for transporting waste to disposal sites etc.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7201-costs-decom-npp....
A lot of this report seems to indicate that estimating future decommissioning costs is hard. The costs are estimates, often created by those with a financial incentive to keep the estimate low. In 50 or so years time the reality of decommissioning might be very difficult.
On the waste aspect: "The cost of managing spent nuclear fuel ... is not always included in the cost of decommissioning, but is often treated separately. This is even more the case for the final disposal of fuel or related waste, which is a major source of costs in waste management, particularly for high-level waste."
Our failure to invest in nuclear the past several decades was a huge mistake that future generations will rightfully scorn us for.
It justifies fear.
Moreover the waste management problem is not solved.
During the last decades more and more citizen are less and less willing to pay for nuke plants.
In democracies imposing is pretty difficult, and IMHO it's a good thing.
In the same timeframe wind, and even more during the last decade, solar plants costs quickly declined, and even more so nowadays.
Meanwhile nuke specialists experienced in building and running plants retire.
https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/May/Renewable-power-...
Nobody can pretend that nuclear plants aren't dangerous. The argument is that a Fukushima somewhere in the world once every 20 years would be substantially less dangerous than a coal fired plant in every country operating for 20 years. And it doesn't seem to be likely that we get a Fukushima every 20 years. So why is Fukushima used as a reason to use coal plants??? The logic is barely coherent, and even then only assuming that someone has no understanding of the background risk they face every day.
I've lived in a coal mining region. I would have statistically better health outcomes if I had lived next to Fukushima.
EDIT And you linked the Fukushima outcomes page - it says that even only considering Japan the lives saved from not using coal probably outweighed hypothetical maybe-deaths from Fukushima that cannot be detected. Footnote 75.
> Moreover the waste management problem is not solved.
It is kinda difficult to describe a scenario where nuclear waste causes much more damage than say a tailings dam failure at a heavy metals mine. Or a gas leak in a built up area. Or a bad wildfire. There is not a lot of nuclear waste and there is a lot of desert out there if it comes to it.
People have largely been ignoring the waste for 40 years and that strategy is working pretty well.
Wind might be a solid par technically. It does kill more people than nuclear though; that is a big negative. Better displaced than dead.
There isn't an option here that is obviously better. It would be pretty sensible to loosen the environmental restrictions on new nuclear plants, protect them from NIMBYs and then leave it to the market to go with whatever is cheapest. Could be anything, I have no particular horse to back as long as the race is fair; although I would like to see more nuclear because it just looks to me like the technically best option.
As for Fukushima, more died as a result from it being shut down than in the disaster: https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan...
Furthermore, it lead to a surge in imports of dirty fuels. More coal and oil.
As for Fukushima there are many hypothesis about the real impact until now, and even more for the future. Believing the effects are already fully known is at best 'weird'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Thinking that we can only replace fossil fuel with nuke is not even funny, as solar and wind soar. In Europe solar and wind already produce as much electricity than nuke plants, and sail around while nuke plants are shutting down.
Storage is indeed a challenge, and the real choice is between our capacity to lower nuke-induced risk (waste, disasters...), which seems low after decades of efforts, and on the other hand our capacity to further enhance existing other energy 'sources', which are progressing at a very fast pace.
You highlight that storage is a challenge, but it’s the entire blocker at this point. Until storage is solved, solar/wind do nothing more than displace some peaker plants.
I dont think so. We may have a common competitor yet also be in competition. Solar and wind have very complimentary output patterns (combining two variable sources produces a less variable source even without the modest degree of anti correlation which is present between wind and solar). Nuclears output pattern really begs to be constant, it never wants to ramp down because there is almost no savings, whereas solar and wind can clash but also leave each other demand windows.
You have no "base load" once such competitors are involved because half the time they are bidding for all of the load. Separating off a base load deal is then an artificial arrangement. Your supplier who can only economically supply a certain level is no help when your renewables fall short, and they are an expense when your renewables surge and offer cheaper power. Once renewables are in the mix you want economical dispatch-able supply. That means batteries for frequent sub-daily power deficits, and existing fossil moving to carbon neutral fuels for less frequent deficits.
There is no effective nuclear construction industry today that can stop renewables getting big in the mix, and the bigger renewables get into it, the less attractive "base load" power purchasing contracts become for buyers. There is talk about making nuclear competitively dispatchable with molten salt reserviors - that's just a nuclear plant and molten salt battery. The battery is the economical part. Nuclear will continue to be an expensive side project for many governments which can afford it, sometimes completing a project, sometimes giving up as they do after multiple cost increases and delays, but it is practically finished in competitive industry by the arrival of advanced solar and wind.
Even in 'all-nuke' France 7 to 11% of the powergrid is produced by fossil-fuel plants.
This could be alleviated thanks to decentralized production (small units). Granted, this is theoretically true for nuclear and solar/wind alike, however civilian practical small solar/wind units do exist, nuclear units don't.
Many write just as if nuclear plants may really solve our climate-related problem. They neglect that gridpower is a small portion of the total energy (about 17%), therefore a fully 'cleanly'-produced gridpower (by whatever method, nuclear and/or other) lets us, on the sole 'energy' side of the matter (there are other ones), with at the very least 60% of the climate-related problem at hands.
Yeah, they're not 100% nuclear. In any case, their results are far better than countries who eschewed nuclear.
France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity [compared to Germany].
French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. As such, according to the prevailing economic wisdom, French electricity should be far more carbon intensive than German's. And yet the opposite is the case.[1]
So it seems France made a good decision. Their electricity is both cleaner and cheaper...
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...
The French public financial auditing institution (la Cour des Comptes) published in 2012 that public nuke investments are opaque, and that it costed around 228 10e9 euros, plus nowadays 3.4 10e9 euros per year for the sole maintenance. Nuke risk is what it is, and even financially it is not sound. Read there, starting folio 269: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rappor...
It is so expensive it cannot be hidden anymore. Electricity in France is absolutely not cheap, its price there is average in Europe. Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Germany now pays in order to solve the problem.
France isn't completely dumb and a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.
However those are only words, until now.
Meanwhile... Germany solves its problem.
Comparing France and Germany when it comes to industrial and technical problems is not fair, as Germany is so far ahead we don't see them anymore (and yep, I'm French, but facts are facts).
So 228B€ for 50 years of 85% of the electricity consumption, and decarbonised. When with the push for renewable, it will cost 121B€ for currently 5,1% of wind and 1.9% for solar. Currently nuclear electricity is bought 42€/MWh by the useless competitor thanks to the ARENH, when wind cost us 89.4€/MWh and solar 294€/MWh and are not dispatchable, uncorrelated with consumption, intermittent, and will also add 30B€ to the grid because of the decentralised organisation. Also renewable made us build a gaz plan in Landivisiau because Brittany opposed the Plogoff nuclear plant and renewable are unreliable.
Also you failed to mention, that what droved the rise in French electricity is solely because of the renewable.
Germany didn't solve it's problem its electricity is still heavily carbonated.
https://i.imgur.com/zatyuXX.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EK2NouwWkAERV5V?format=jpg&name=...
https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2018-04/20180418...
https://www.cre.fr/content/download/19506/file/Annexe%201_CS...
https://www.cre.fr/content/download/19600/file/Calculs%20Tar...
Nope. Nuke plant did not provide 85% during those 50 years. It even doesn't today (only about 71%). In 1971 approximatively approx 5% of the French gridpower was produced by nuke plants. Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrie_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fr... How exactly do you think it may have produced 85% of the gridpower for 50 years? This is inept and misleading.
Moreover 228B€ is an estimation, the report states (folio 270) that the information is not available, mixed up with all other activities of EDF. The real cost may be superior. Everyone is free to interpret such opacity as good or bad sign.
Even worse, the report explicitly states that it completely neglects the first batch of R&D, when civilian and military domains where not clearly separated, which was a major effort. Source: (folio 36) https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rappor...
Therefore a fair part of fundamental research isn't accounted in those 228B€.
Also: nuke energy is not (completely) decarbonised. Fuel extraction, transport... aren't.
> When with the push for renewable, it will cost 121B€ for currently 5,1% of wind and 1.9% for solar.
This 121B€ budget is not spent, as it starts in... 2018, ending in 2047! Putting it in front of the production right now is at best 'disingenuous', it is in fact a huge lie. You can't read the future, you can't know what renewables will produce in the 2019 to 2047 timeframe and afterwards, therefore there is no conclusion to draw, no way to consider this investment as a bad one.
> Currently nuclear electricity is bought 42€/MWh by the useless competitor thanks to the ARENH
Only 100TW (about 1/4 of the production), sold by specification at a price equal to the nuke official production price. Given the credits nuke engulfed and the decades of monopoly, this is a very low-key counterbalancing measure.
> when wind cost us 89.4€/MWh and solar 294€/MWh and are not dispatchable, uncorrelated with consumption, intermittent, and will also add 30B€ to the grid because of the decentralised organisation.
Germany chose this horrible wind/solar/biomass path. Poor Germans, they don't know that those challenges have no solution, that they are doomed to fail. You should inform them. An EPR or two may save them!
> Also renewable made us build a gaz plan in Landivisiau because Brittany opposed the Plogoff nuclear plant and renewable are unreliable.
A transition costs. At its very beginning nuke was engulfing huge amounts of money without producing anything significant during the 1950-1970 period.
After 70 years, right now, nuke isn't a newborn, however new projects are very (very!) overbudget and late (Olkiluoto, Flamanville).
> Also you failed to mention, that what droved the rise in French electricity is solely because of the renewable.
Source?
> Germany didn't solve it's problem its electricity is still heavily carbonated.
This is a work in progress. At least do they really search for an elegant (non polluting but also not risk-inducing) solution, instead of raising the risk by letting aging plant run after their planned end-of-life date.
French vs. Germany, on an industrial challenge. Lemme try to guess who will win...
The huge powergrid it implies isn't very different from the one nuke powerplants already need (given that many cannot sit nearby huge cities), that both wind and solar in such a wide area not producing enough is a rare occurrence.
Transporting energy far away causes losses, but we already do it, and who cares if its TCO is very low (solar and wind are progressing quickly), and its production not dangerous?
Add geothermal, hydroelectric, and biomass, then better global efficiency and energy savings.
Then a pinch of very small complementary units (already available).
... and we are better set for so many more scenarios, at a globally lower cost and without any serious risk.
Also nuclear is 20% of the marginal electricity (the one that varies).
http://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/aen-infos-suivi-c...
https://www.tmrow.com/static/c90a14e6fe7e73b4c60963818f9041e...
https://www.tmrow.com/blog/marginal-carbon-intensity-of-elec...
"Not enough flexibility" isn't specific to renewables.
If we put the money we put into building nuclear plants into energy storage, then that would likely change pretty quickly.
The nukes and communists share the No True Scotman's defense: the prior failures weren't true communism, err, nuke power. If only we had clapped louder, Tinkerbell would fly.
Maybe only Tennessee was more pro nuclear than Washington. Alas. Incompetence, corruption, delays, and cost overruns aborted the nukes under construction, which then killed all hopes of building more nukes.
For decades, WPPSS (pronounced "Whoops!") was the punchline for local jokes about government, waste, bureaucracy. My favorite was a two-billed baseball hat that said "WPPSS", kinda like this: https://www.villagehatshop.com/photos/product-alternate/gian...
--
https://www.historylink.org/File/5482
"Several factors combined to ruin construction schedules and to drive costs to three and four times the original estimates. Inflation and design changes constantly plagued all the projects. Builders often got ahead of designers who modified their drawings to conform to what had been built. Safety changes imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission increased costs too,
but the biggest cause of delays and overruns was mismanagement of the process by the WPPSS.
The directors and the managers of the system had no experience in nuclear engineering or in projects of this scale. System managers were unable to develop a unified and comprehensive means of choosing, directing, and supervising contractors. One contractor, already shown to be incompetent, was retained for more work. In a well-publicized example, a pipe hanger was built and rebuilt 17 times. Quality control inspectors complained of inadequate work that went unaddressed."
(Attempted emphasis mine.)
> In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics.
This is a huge misunderstanding.
It was the "green energy" people who first fought nuclear power. Go look throughout the country where nuke plants have been taken down. It's because they were leaking and polluting and were ticking time bombs.
The greens have been fighting against nuclear power since day one.
There is an underground current of manipulation in online conversations trying to make nuclear power look green. It has only one element of green, that is low carbon, everything else about it is the absolute worst of all power sources.
I hope to never see anything but fusion nuclear power come back, and all fission power fade away.
Pretty blatantly false. Nuclear kills fewer people most, if not all other sources of power, per unit of energy generated.
There are significant pollution issues from mining and burning coal and from manufacturing solar panels. Hydro produces ecological disruption on par with non other. Wind power has significant and downplayed effects of wildlife.
The comparison of these factors is complicated and 'best' depends on what you specific environmental agenda is, but your rhetoric is flat out false.
The nuclear waste is so tragic and horrific and the effects so egregious I can only imagine you are grossly misinformed or a paid troll.
More horrific than the millions killed by air pollution?
This is not to say that nuclear waste isn't a significant problem and one we can do a much better job dealing with, but spreading blatant misinformation does not do anything to help anyone.
Gulf war syndrome is another example of head-in-the-sand behavior of the public regarding nuclear waste caused diseases.
Indeed, while I don't have specific numbers to prove this, I highly suspect that the health risks of non-nuclear toxic waste (by products from chemical plants and manufacturing) outweigh those of toxic nuclear waste and the release of these chemicals are often far less regulated than nuclear waste.
In terms of nuclear waste disasters, the Marshall Islands is the most significant example (that I know of) of a nuclear waste problem that the US needs to step up and address. [0]
[0] https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-te...
I not saying that nuclear is the future, but it is a important amd relativly safe source that we can use as stop gap to limit our use of more dangerous power sources while we fight global warming and find safer and cleaner sources of energy. We need to consider all of the risks of our power sources and not spread misinformation and fear.
I would argue that the effects on US soil, the leaks into the Columbia river from Washington are incomparable to the Marshall Islands. But I feel we may be moving the goal posts in our discussion.
I think you mean "terribly inflexible regulations".
In the US a Democrat at the federal level who doesn’t support green energy will be sentenced to the gas chambers. That’s more than half of the House of Representatives and nearly half of the Senate. It has a strong chance of being the next presidency as well. If nuclear were actually supported by green energy people there would be a new plant going up in every state.
About emissions, coal is responsible for a huge share of emissions on electricity generation. If you replace half of it with a 0 emissions source, and the other half a source 4 times more carbon efficient, it does go a long way to help. If we are luck, this will give us enough time to develop batteries, because that is very likely what will happen.
[citation needed]
This was discussed recently and I really down understand the immense skepticism exhibited on HN (and in general) towards nuclear energy. Sure it's expensive now, but it's been misregulated into a pulp and all extant nuclear reactors are using decades old designs. AND you need to compare the cost of nuclear to renewables PLUS storage.
Don't kick a gift horse in the mouse. We had a great shot at getting off oil in the form of fission 60 years ago. Probably time to stop kicking it in the mouth and stop spreading misinformation.
Many potential units are purely and simply cancelled because they are too financially risky (notwithstanding other risks) given the falling costs of solar and wind.
The hot nuclear waste disposal challenge is not solved, wherever you check (France and the US, experts both are "in the process of solving it"... for the last 50 years!). Check the Yucca Mountain waste repo, a non-solution since 1978.
Decommissioning costs are everywhere very probably largely underestimated because they explode as soon as a project begins. Check the UK case:
UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...
Then £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...
Then £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...
Until now the taxpayer covers it, but our impoverished nations just cannot cope anymore.
Moreover a small-scale reactor is difficult to protect (theft, terrorism, nuke (especially dirty weapons) proliferation...)
Fukushima politically put the last nail in this coffin.
I don't buy that waste is a serious problem. The US treats all secondary waste as if it's red hot. And as I said above, all extant reactor designs are decades old.
If your only point of comparison is 60 year old computers using 10s of kilowatts, you might argue that computers will never be economical to use. Yet smartphone CPUs have a TDP of what, one watt?
> Until now the taxpayer covers it, but our impoverished nations just cannot cope anymore.
Our nations have plenty of money it's just all concentrated at the very top. We used to fund advanced reactor projects [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
Good, than nuclear is nothing we have to think about because it's construction times are ridiculously long while renewable energy is getting better and cheaper rapidly.
> Our nations have plenty of money it's just all concentrated at the very top. We used to fund advanced reactor projects [1]
We've been throwing ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money on that for decades. Show is over. Time to give the money to technologies of the future not ones of the past.
Even France sees this: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclearpower-astri...
A law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.
2 years later the government (lacking funds and unable to cope) reported it to 2025, then 2 years later to 2035 ("programmation pluriannuelle de l'énergie").
However the political and strategical orientation is perfectly clear, just don't believe France is on the nuke camp.
Fukushima killed up to 1 person from radiation. Meanwhile fossil is killing 4.3 million people per year via air pollution. If fossil had to pay for that health externality (not to mention climate change), then nuclear economics would look exceedingly more fantastic. Though it's true that nuclear builds need to get their act together to maintain relevance.
Small reactors have less radioactive source in them and are proportionally less radiologically impactful than larger higher power reactors in the event of military/terrorist attack.
Wind and solar are doing amazing. There is some serious worry that the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) will go below the level needed to sustain industrialized civilization once variable renewables are deployed at significant enough scale to require massive energy investment in "non-productive" equipment like batteries. For example, see this Nov 2019 paper on the topic [1]. EROI on solar PV is like 3-8. With massive storage it can dip below 3. Nuclear is like 50.
I think a low-carbon future will have a whole lot of wind/solar and a whole lot of nuclear. Both industries can scale by 10x happily and we still will struggle with our climate issues.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...
> France and most of Europe use Urenco.
I'm French, and can see the result: waste is piling up nearby the plants. Deep geological repositories are given as the ultimate solution since the 1970's at least, and there is _NO_ exploited site. Cigéo/Bure (in France) is only a project. Yucca Mountain never ran and is halted.
On a similar vein see the Superphenix financial and industrial disaster. It was a french project, aiming at (there were other objectives) reusing waste and enriched uranium, and the French know about nuclear power. Net result: 60 billion French Francs lost.
There is NO currently exploited solution for all the waste. No real breeder, no repository, nothing. This is Huge Establishment mismanagement at its best.
> The integral molten salt reactor has these advantages and > should be comercialy available wothin 10 years.
Molten-salt reactor R&D started in the 1960's, and stopped 30 years later. AFAIK with some complication and no industrial application(?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment...
I'm sorry to repeat myself, but there is no present and current solution.
Promises are fun, and the nuke sector is prone to them, see the waste management farce resumed above. See also the nuclear fusion joke, periodically presented as the ultimate solution nearly every year... since 1940... and counting (mainly taxpayer's money for costly research).
> I don't buy that waste is a serious problem
Central administrations (in France, the US...) consider them to be a problem, even if most of them are pro-nuke. There must be something here.
A tiny amount of hot waste reaching a phreatic zone, for example, is a very, very serious concern.
> If your only point of comparison is 60 year old computers > you might argue that computers will never be economical to use.
The quest for perfectly sure nuke plant, and for a sure way to manage waste (especially hot) started at the very least 50 years ago.
> The waste disposal problem has been solved at the Onkalo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland.
It is "the first such repository in the world for high level waste, and currently under construction". It may start in 2023. This means that it is the most advanced project (it began in 1983, building began in 2004), but not yet in operation, and already under scientific criticism (copper capsules corrosion).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Concise version: nuke plants are vomiting hot stuff for decades and a potential and very local solution (AFAIK it is not intended to store US, French or other waste) may start in 4 years.
Who thinks that this is adequately managed?
> Fukushima killed up to 1 person from radiation.
This is some official thesis, there huge scandals tied to many official theories about this disaster, and also much more stern counter-theories.
AFAIK nobody knows for sure because the amount of dead/sick persons or animals, and various cleanup costs, may only be known when the last contaminated particle which escaped will be inert. No expert judges that we can neglect those particles, therefore they probably aren't innocuous and huge efforts are made trying to clean up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup
Many are now in the ocean. Some of it inducing solid cancers, which develops after 10+ years.
> Meanwhile fossil is killing 4.3 million people per year via air pollution.
Indeed, however tt doesn't imply nuke plants are a necessity, we have ways (solar, wind...), we may save energy, research to be able to obtain better ways to store it... Nuke distracts resources from those less dangerous and more realistic approaches which, moreover, are progressing impressively (efficiency up, total cost down, more and more effective deployments...)
> Small reactors have less radioactive source in them and are proportionally less radiologically impactful than larger higher power reactors in the event of military/terrorist attack.
Most of the existing ones use highly enriched uranium, and such material falling in the wrong hands will have effects quickly leading you to radically change your mind about this.
> Wind and solar are doing amazing. ((...)) require massive energy investment in"non-productive" equipment like batteries
Indeed, and this is a reason to invest into R&D on energy-saving, efficiency, energy storage... instead of pouring even more billions into already-explored dead-ends.
The number of people who have been injured or killed by stored commercial nuclear waste is very near zero, and we know how to store it safely in the long term. Again, meanwhile 84% of our energy generation kills 4.3 million people per year. The nuclear waste issue is no longer a good reason to oppose nuclear energy. Nuclear is unique in its ability to fully contain and store all of its waste in the long term. This is thanks to E=MC2 where the mass of the hazardous waste is extraordinarily small compared to other energy system waste.
There are counter-theories to death counts in Chernobyl and Fukushima. But there is a UN/WHO group of true experts who are the authorities on these items. Think of them like the IPCC for climate change, but for radiation. It's called UNSCEAR, and they are clear in their analysis. Up to 4000 dead at Chernobyl, up to 1 dead at Fukushima. There's always wild counter-theories in these big science questions: just like some people claim millions died at Chernobyl (looking at Greenpeace), some claim that climate change doesn't exist.
[1] http://www.posiva.fi/en/media/image_gallery?gfid_2061=94#gal...
I think you're replying to multiple people above as I only said half of that stuff.
When all waste will be inert we may evaluate the sanitary consequences. Meanwhile the dangerous hot waste may or may not harm.
Well-known scientists who worked in situ have a somewhat different opinion about the consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
UN agencies aren't BS and lies-free.
> When all waste will be inert we may evaluate the sanitary consequences. Meanwhile the dangerous hot waste may or may not harm.
I don't understand how you can justify this statement. Again, commercial nuclear waste in dry casks has never hurt anyone and probably never will, yet nuclear power has produced ~5% of the world's energy over the past several decades, and it does so without emitting carbon dioxide, and it does so 24/7, and it does so with very little raw material and land impact. Meanwhile, fossil actually kills 4.3 million people every single year. How can you justify a nearly fantastical fear of nuclear waste future harm while 4.3 million people are dying every year from air pollution from the alternative? This is like Germany, who phased out nuclear plants while keeping brown coal plants on, thereby choosing literally to kill about 1000 extra people per year because of their fear of radiation. This feels wild to me, and borderline inhumane given the statistics.
You play the usual card of nuke proponent, which is to describe things just as if not emitting carbon during energy production implies nukes. This is not true. Many renewables, mainly wind and solar, are pertinent. This is absolutely not a "coal or nuke, there is no other option" challenge.
Nuke proponents also tend to imply that a 100% nuke-generated gridpower will solve the carbon problem. This is not realistic, as gridpower-related CO2 emission are at max 25%, and more realistically about 17%, of the total emissions.
France gridpower production is way more decarbonized than Germany's, Germany is a more heavy player on many fuel-consuming industries (chemical, mechanics, material...), Germany climate implies more heating and France is the leader when it comes to electric heating systems... therefore one may think that Germany's carbon dioxide emissions per capita are way, way superior to France's.
They aren't!
For 2018: France 5, Germany 9.6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Wind is very low carbon, about 11 gCO2-eq/kWh. Solar PV is a bit higher, around 40. Hydro varies dramatically from excellent to terrible based on biogenic methane emissions (region dependent). Fracked natural gas is abhorrent with >400 gCO2/kWh, and even worse (in some cases worse than coal) when the short term warming effects of methane are factored in. Nuclear clocks in at 12, beat out only by wind. These are the IPCC full lifecycle numbers, of course.
Here's another good (and live) view of worldwide carbon emissions, in CO2-eq/kWh generated [1]. You'll note that a lot of very low carbon countries are very high in nuclear.
I am a pragmatist. I see a climate challenge and I want all low-carbon energy sources. Everyone cheers for wind and solar, including me. They're doing phenomenally. We need 10x or more of them. No one disagrees with this. Nuclear is far more controversial, and is the topic at hand in this subthread. Don't tell me I'm anti wind and solar just because I point out challenges with them. All energy sources have challenges. I just refuse to tie my hands and not support nuclear because of irrational and unscientific fear. I want all low-carbon hands on deck. It's much more interesting for me to explain the basis behind why nuclear is actually less dangerous and scary than the vast majority of people think than it is for me to say we need more wind and solar.
Regarding electricity's share of total emissions, the only non-combustion solution that I'm aware of for transportation (40% of emissions) is electrification. As buses, cars, trains, and even short-run airplanes electrify, we can decarbonize the transportation sector by using decarbonized electricity. Hydrogen is another option, and nuclear reactors are one of the most excellent ways to make hydrogen without lots of carbon emission. As for process heat, it's difficult for anything to reach fossil-fuel temperatures, but there are lots of interesting efforts with hydrogen blast furnaces and electric arc furnaces that may get us there. Electrification as a means to reduce total emissions is a need shared by all low-carbon energy sources that I'm aware of, including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Advanced nuclear and solar thermal are unique in their abilities to reach process heat temperatures.
My goal and value system is all about decarbonizing the world effectively and justly. I want to base my decisions on data and rationale. I'm looking for people to help in this goal, which I consider noble.
[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=map&solar=false&remote=...
The total impact on health (and therefore the real costs) of the nuclear industry will only be known when the last site will be completely decommissioned and the last waste innocuous.
Low carbon countries are high in nuclear because none of them really invested into renewables. Concluding that nuclear must be part of the mix is at best weird. Especially given that there are very few new nuclear powerplants projects, many of them failures (very over-schedule and over-budget), and that the capital intensity induced by a fair proportion of the few new potential projects condemns them, given that the TCO of renewables is quickly getting lower and lower.
The political side is also grim for nuclear plants, probably mainly because of the NIMBY effect. Most ongoing nuclear powerplants building in progress were ordered by nondemocratic countries (France and Finland being among the rare exceptions, however many in France argue that the democratic process ("débat public") is not really applied upon nuclear matters). This may reflect an 'undue failure', i.e. public opinion may be wrong about this and maybe should forget about NIMBY, however this is at least a failure to communicate as in many countries the official lenient message isn't in favor, and many people just don't want any nuke powerplant. This is not absurd, as the "everything is under control, the risk is infinitesimal" message is seriously shattered by disasters.
As for transport electrification and fuel cells are indeed potential solutions, however even more remote in time than an infrastructure-oriented approach. Generalizing new types of powerplants nationwide cannot be done quickly, costs large amounts of money, and implies trade-offs (see Germany at work, and this nation was lucky because the decision to effectively switch wasn't totally out of the scheduled cycle of nuclear powerplants decomissions, reducing the losses). Modifying the energy architecture underlying a significant proportion of transport means is an even (much) more difficult target.
I hope that thermal solar can be sufficient to provide to fuel cell (no nuclear powerplants necessary), and see no sign of being wrong.
The WP article states it clearly: it "was a nuclear power station prototype", it means that there was hope to decline it, not that it was a lab. It was a "1,242 MWe" reactor, which sort of lab uses such a monster?
It was meant to be "an economical generator of power on its own."
As for its success: "Construction began in 1974 but suffered from a series of cost overruns, delays and enormous public protests.", and it "demonstrated very poor reliability and had a historical capacity factor of less than 7%." (after being connected to the grid for 20+ years).
The nuke industry claims that it was dumped for political reasons, completely ignoring its industrial and technical failures.
The integral molten salt reactor has these advantages and should be comercialy available wothin 10 years.
You don't need a citation for a personal doubt, wtf. Maybe someone will do it. Maybe they won't. But a person is reasonably able to doubt something when there's no evidence one way or another. Nobody's done this before.
Adding emphasis to the "no evidence" part, because apparently that's not evident enough.
You personally may have no idea what these things might cost but the people designing them certainly do. Moreover such baseless skepticism is extremely harmful to the 'public dialogue' when we are in the midst of a climate emergency.
What does it bring to the conversation to say something baseless like that?
Permit’s and regulation are real and significant costs. In an ideal world they would be lower, but realistically you need to consider them
Next, load following is critical as renewable energy regulatory reduces the spot price of electricity near zero. Breakeven right now is an average around 12c/kWh 24/7 if you’re capacity factor is cut in half then you need to be selling near 24c/kWh for that half. This is more or less still true even if you get to run 24/7 as the value of energy produced still drops. A ~50% price drop clearly helps, but the core issue remains.
As to the design, it’s inherently more complex than a gas turbine due to the need for shielding etc. Next, the fuel assembly is surprisingly expensive $1390 per kg up front which provides about 40kw for a year or 0.4c/kWh. And then you need to deal with 1kg of high level Nuclear Waste. Eventually you need to decommission things and that’s even more inherent costs.
Sure, some costs can come down like the current 500 to 1,000 workers per GW of capacity. But, Nuclear is already reviving subsidies in the west so it needs to be vastly less expensive to become viable.
PS: Yes compared to coal fuel is cheap, but compared to 2c/kWh solar that’s eating up significant budget for something considered cheap in the Nuclear world.
Nuclear companies are trying to deal with load following by coupling to energy storage systems like thermal storage (molten salts), pumped hydro, and batteries. In an increasingly variable-renewable world, more energy storage is required. The nukes can be used to charge batteries in the daytime while the solar PV runs the grid, and then for the evening peak while solar ramps down, the nukes and batteries carry the evening, and then the nukes do the baseload at night.
The one thing that nuclear reactors can do that no other energy source can do is provide hugely-deployable 24/7 low-carbon energy for over a year (e.g. through the seasons). Hydro can do it in some places but it's mostly maxed out in the proper geography.
Finally, EROI on wind/solar with massive battery systems gets dangerously low.
Thus it’s really storage that Nuclear needs to compete with not generation. Further, as nuclear takes years to build it’s competing with future battery prices 5-55 years from now. Using conservative total system costs of say 200$ per kWh of storage every day for 10 years (200/10/365) ~= 5.5c/kWh. So, Nuclear needs to compete with load following at (3+5.5) = 8.5c/kWh for part of the day or mass generation at 3c/kWh. Assuming it’s ~50/50 of each your 24/7 Nuclear is facing 6c/kWh average electricity prices.
Also, EROI can’t actually get low when you’re talking electricity at those prices.
PS: My comparison to turbines was simply a minimal calculation of capital costs. It’s an argument that any design will have higher capital costs and thus you can safely use that as your theoretical perfect design’s capital cost. Then add other costs on top of that to try and find Nuclear’s minimum theoretical cost.
EROI is just energy system output/manufacturing energy in. How is that a function of price?
EROI is a function of price in that you need to pay for more than just energy when building something, interest payments for example. If your infrastructure costs X$ to build it must use far less than X$ worth of energy. And, if you’re building the cheapest energy source possible it must therefore have a high EROI.
> And, if you’re building the cheapest energy source possible it must therefore have a high EROI.
That's only true to the degree that the energy cost of building an energy system is directly proportional to the dollar cost, which is often very not true.
This is simply pure NIMBI issue which also hits nuclear power.
“That's only true to the degree that the energy cost of building an energy system is directly proportional to the dollar cost, which is often very not true.”
This is an economic argument if X$ buys you K energy from the cheapest energy source it buys some number less than K from more expensive energy sources. Thus the least expensive energy source must have positive EROI. As solar is capital intensive interest payments representing zero energy are a significant cost, which pushes up the minimum possible EROI.
From your link:
"They came from high desert communities such as Daggett, Joshua Tree and Lucerne Valley, where existing solar projects are seen by many as eyesores that destroy desert ecosystems and fuel larger dust storms."
Besides, did you get to the next phrase? Nuclear won't beat the research investment on renewables on the next decades, because our society is starting to organize around the later. Your handful of institutions will not be able to produce more than literally everybody else.
As much as small reactors can improve, renewables will improve faster, and the floor for solar costs is very, very low.
Put another way, adding 60% renewable to NG only 1/2's the CO2 output. At the rate of consumption growth your still increasing the total C02 footprint year over year. Plus, that solution is literally 2x-3x the CO2 footprint vs the french solution put in place 40 years ago.
Explained another way, going to renewable+NG only buys you about a decade in CO2 emission reduction. If everyone magically fit that formula today, it would be the equivalent of 2009, a far cry from where we need to be. Worse, you still have the problem that you need to convert all the automobile/planes/tractors/etc somehow. Without super cheap electricity that process is going to be much slower than it needs to be. What you need is electricity so cheap that it can compensate for the inefficiencies producing hydro-carbon sources for planes and other applications where the battery technology isn't even possible with infinite economic solutions. The _ONLY_ solution we have today is fission and a reduction in the build price forced in place by COTs and precerification.
Except in areas where you don't have much sunlight or much wind exposure, and both of these sources of energies require huge land occupation which is not ideal either. Energy-density wise you can't really beat nuclear.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/abandone...
I don't understand it either. My best guess is that nuclear is scary, and most "green energy" advocates would prefer to believe that panacea eco-friendly alternatives exist.
I live in northern Canada. I've witnessed a plenty of FUD surrounding nuclear, and the concomitant excessive unrealistic optimism around wind and solar. Every year the power outages become a little more frequent, and every other year brings some new story of power projects cancelled due to "environmental concerns" and "lack of consultation".
So many people seem convinced that the lack of wind and solar projects is strictly due to government bungling or never-specified interference from oil-industry incumbents. Green gets used as a kind of security blanket. You can't escape the fact that you have a carbon footprint running a car and heating your home and workplace through six months of winter. Many green energy advocates are less than serious, and are just looking to feel better. They're content to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something. Preferably without having to think too hard or entertain compromise positions.
If you want a baseload source in Alaska I'd look at geothermal. Even moderate temperature (below boiling) hot water there can be used, due to the moderate or low ambient temperature. And Alaska has many areas with good geothermal resources.
Your answer right there. The nuclear power industry just doesn't lobby hard enough.
The pace wasn't however particularly impressive back then already as technology, safety and waste management limitations became clear.
Coal : Effect/Pros - Energy/Cheap. Residue/Cons - C02/GlobalWarming
Nuclear : Effect/Pros - Energy/Clean. Residue/Cons - RadioactiveWaste/Contamination.
Where do the nuclear byproducts go currently ? Into the earth? Rivers? Oceans?
30 years ago, we switched from paper based products to plastic, to save trees. Today, we want to switch from plastic based products to paper, to avoid pollution.
Every 'switch' will come with side-effects that the current generation is fine with, because they're not going to be ones dealing with it.
I'm all for safety but if you read some of the regulation stories we would be banning CT scanners from hospitals..
Regulations are not inherently bad, but they can be used in negative ways by those in power.
The devil is in the details, and we'll written and though out regulations are a great thing and are absolutely necessary for society to function. It's easy for the public to lose track and conflate good regulations with regulations that are poorly written, have intentional loopholes, or are mean to stifle an industry or technology by protecting the entrenched players.
As if the Japanese nuclear market was deregulated? Japan is a developed country that loves bureaucracy so don't be afraid, there is plenty of regulation in every sector here.
As for the impact on health we will only be able to assess it when the last dangerous waste dispersed by the Fukushima disaster will be innocuous, the last induced-cancer known...
For comparison with other energy sources, Banqiao dam failure killed 100,000 [1] and fossil fuels (84% of the world's total energy) kill about 4.3 million people every single year [2]. This is why hydro and fossil emissions are regulated too. The regulations are necessary and useful. The Clean Air Act of 1970 has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and counting (from fossil air pollution deaths).
Just looking at numbers, we find that nuclear is ridiculously safe. The perception is way different though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#1975_Banqiao_Dam_f...
This one, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
The social/economic plane is known:
According to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union spent ((...)) $35.7 billion in today's dollars) on containment and decontamination, virtually bankrupting itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Social_econ...
Chernobyl disaster was detected when a radioactive detector suddenly got ballistic in a restroom at 150 Km of Stockholm. This happened in the first 24 hours of an event triggered 1260 Km far away. Is the same distance than lies between Warsaw and Brussels and this is just the radius in a circunference dictated by chance by the dominant winds. Germany has still some parts closed to boar hunting by it.
It can cover large areas of Earth, and will do it really fast.
Take a look at what it's like in the Chernobyl exclusion zone today: https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
Nuclear power, if it was used and solved climate change, wouldn't help with the other aspects of that goal. And, in fact, it would weaken the attempts to dismantle those aspects by taking away a strong source of panic and power.
The strategy is to use climate change to spike fear and thus convince people to give up thier political power to multinational undemocratic entities and expanding bureaucracies of advocates and evironmental commissars who they ordinarily would reject.
They don't want to solve the problem, they want to exploit the problem.
Here's an example: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-strikes...
"That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities."
But green communists are a real thing, so while I would prefer to say "some of the extreme left is anti nuclear" or some such. Or perhaps more relevantly for the OP's point, "many greens".
Because not all greens are left, and not all leftists are green. Indeed, many contemporary Green voters in Australia are positively mainstream in terms of their economics. I think in Germany they can even trend right. And in east Europe, they're outright right.
What an understatement. Let's quote one of the sources there:
> But the project never began the mandatory, lengthy and extremely costly process of gaining approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
> This would include a site license, which takes tens of millions of dollars and several years, as well as a design permit. No design of this type has ever been approved, though one other has made it through the first step of the process, which took about six years.
So they were far away from "going to build" there.
> I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of coal and natural gas plants
Yeah we heard you. It's a quite popular tactic in this "last scream of nuclear" advertisement. In the same generalistic way the evil green energy only advocates could say that you are an ignorant shill.
There is nobody on the side of coal who wants green energy and natural gas or gas as battery for renewables is not the same thing as coal...
Fission has been in development for many decades. Eating up money and not coming up with a solution. So please...tone it down. Nuclear is expensive, dangerous and most of the countries on this planet have no space or (economic) means to make the waste disappear.
You're thinking of fusion.
Reading the comments here from France where 80% production is nuclear with a nuclear waste reprocessing site it feels like the USA problem has more to do with local regulations than technology.
PS. Winter is coming. Time to buy some energy from Germany again...
Fun fact, my father used to buy drugs in Doug Ford’s house when he was a teenager.
My only concern is the scalability of this technology - mciro plants sound fine for powering far off native settlements in the far north. But for providing grid power to the urbanized south of the country, wouldn't it make more sense to build bigger plants in fewer numbers? Chernobyl, for example, was 4 reactors all hooked up to the same electrical generation equipment to save money (high quality turbines are expensive).
Volume is the key to price - we need an internationally-vetted medium-sized design, with a supply chain that can crank out hundreds of complete "just add concrete" systems per year.
As well as improving up-front costs, a ubiquitous design makes training and maintenance easier. This should improve the operation of these systems safer and cheaper.
BTW, CO2 taxes would have to exceed $300/ton for new nuclear construction in the US to be competitive with natural gas. Do you support that high a CO2 tax?
That said, I've got no problem with it in principle. Pricing externalities properly seems the simplest way to solve the tragedy of the commons, but it's complicated in this case by the fact that climate is a _global_ commons.
A revenue-neutral carbon tax would make it a more manageable political lift. AFAIK the US is the only country to have "solved" the bigger political problem of long-term nuclear waste storage?
One might criticize this for foisting the problem on future generations, but I suggest this is a truly minor problem compared to others we're foisting on them, and they'll be in a better position to deal with it that we are. It would be a poor solution compared to immediate reprocessing if we lived in a High Nuclear scenario where uranium was running low, but we don't live in that world.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Stati...
There are a couple that have larger installed capacity, but some of it is shutdown:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations
Interestingly, Bruce Power has a 'special forces' / SWAT team that seems to fairly well-regarded in skill:
* https://www.brucepower.com/bruce-power-team-wins-u-s-nationa...
The Voyager RTGs generate "a few hundred watts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...).
The Virginia class submarines use a GE S9G, which produces 150 MWt. Power output is a mix of electric and shaft torque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor)
The Los Angeles class submarines use a GE S6G, which produces 165 MWt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S6G_reactor), power output is a mix of electric and shaft torque.
The Ohio class submarine uses an S6G, rated at 220 MWt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S8G_reactor).
The Nimitz class aircraft carrier use two Westinghouse A4Ws, which produce 550 MWt each (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor). Power output is a mix of electric and shaft torque.
Chernobyl had 4 RBMK-1000 reactors which produced 3200 MWt each producing 1000 MWe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK)
Hinkley Point B has 2 reactors at 2 x 1494 MWt, 2 x 655 MWe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_B_Nuclear_Power_...)
Fukushima has multiple reactors, mainly four 784 MWe GE BWRs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...).
So, you're looking pretty solidly at things on the scale of a fast attack submarine after shielding, turbine, management and maintenance systems, etc.
These are of course not on Wikipedia's list of SMR designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_...
France runs on 7%, Russia apparently 30-40% enriched.
But yes, there are certainly other reasons too why submarine reactors wouldn't be a sensible choice for civilian use.
Today pro-small nuclear people are thinking economies of mass production can beat out economies of scale. Having read a lot of the history on this topic I don't think we quite know how to make this happen yet.
What we know works is economies of scale + economies of mass production, like when France decarbonized their entire electric grid by standardizing on large PWRs and building 58 of them in 15 years.
Very long refueling cycles make sense for stuff like remote areas etc., but for "normal" stuff where the thing is connected to a grid with a lot of other generators there's not that much value in it.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/nrgsstmprfls/sk-en...
That says we're at around 4500MW right now, the majority of it coming from coal and natural gas (16% renewable). With a 300MW capacity per SMR, it wouldn't take too many of these to cover our base load. That page also suggests that we have 890MW worth of hydroelectric capacity, but I suspect that it only works when things are frozen? (I'm not sure why that capacity, which would be 19.6% on its own, isn't counted in the 16% renewable...)
One other way of thinking about it though is that this is evidence we can have a program to make specialized small modular reactors fairly economically. So we shouldn’t be so skeptical about proposals we do it for civilian use.
It is? I would imagine that the advantages of nuclear power for submarines are so great that militaries would gladly pay 100 times more than would be acceptable for civilian power without blinking.
(I do think SMR's are promising for civilian applications, I just don't think that nuclear submarines are a good argument for the potential economic benefits.)
Wikipedia claims the latest generation US attack submarines come in at $2.8 billion each. If the reactor is 20%, and the entire propulsion system 30% (to make a comparison to a power plant), shaft power is 30 MW, we get $28000/kW. For comparison, civilian nuclear power plant capital cost is around $1500-$6000/kW, depending on where it's built, the cost of capital etc.
So yes, not 100 times more expensive than civilian power, but still way too expensive to be economically viable. (And to be pedantic, I didn't say it was 100 times more expensive either, just that the advantage of nuclear propulsion for submarines are so great that navies are prepared to pay whatever it costs (and cost minimization is certainly not such a high priority for sub reactors as for civilian ones))
> And permission to use the higher enrichment uranium.
No. Just no. Look, I'm a huge proponent of civilian nuclear power, but HEU for civilian use flies in the face of decades of non-proliferation work (see e.g. the US RERTR program which has been running since 1978). And for good reasons too; given access to high grade HEU, even a relatively unsophisticated actor (such as a decently funded terrorist group) could make a gun-type nuclear weapon. In contrast, an implosion device using Pu is significantly more challenging, and is probably out of reach for non-state actors.
In fact, there is pressure to direct the US Navy to switch to LEU (that is, less than 20% enrichment), precisely for non-proliferation reasons. For example, French submarines run on 7% enriched fuel, and they refuel every 10 years. So with 20% fuel, US submarines could probably make do with a single mid-life refueling.
See e.g. http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr15.pdf for a report detailing various efforts to get rid of non-weapon uses of HEU worldwide.
Not sure how shaft power is what we are considering here as this would be converted to purely electricity generation. These plants are estimated 210MW thermal, say a 35% conversion factor that’s more in the ballpark of 70MW electric. So $560m for 70MWe that doesn’t need refueling for 20 years. So more like $8,000 /KW. For a system that can be largely self contained, shipped to site, and not need refueling for its 20 year life span.
We could replace over 200GW of fossil generation sources in this country with 3000 of these at a price of $1.68t. Amortized over that 20 years fuel life span. That’s crude ballpark $84 billion a year.
US electricity production at the moment (11am EST) is about 490GW. With 99GW coal and 166gW of gas.
So we could effectively turn the country’s electricity system fossil free for a cost of $84 billion per year.
That’s seems dirt cheap. It’s less than this years military budget increase. For that we clean our grid. The more I think about it the more it seems it’s something we could totally do without breaking a sweat if we actually took climate change seriously.
No, I just added a bit on top to get an estimate for the entire power conversion system, assuming your estimate of 20% for the nuclear parts were in the right ballpark.
> Not sure how shaft power is what we are considering here as this would be converted to purely electricity generation
The power to turn the prop shaft would roughly be what's available for turning the generator if the thing is used to produce electricity rather than propulsion.
Sure, there's the "hotel load" to run the rest of the sub, but then again a generator isn't 100% efficient either so I think roughly 30 MW electrical output is about right.
Details are classified, but from publicly available sources my understanding is that naval reactors tend to work at lower pressure and temperature than civilian land based PWR's, so efficiency takes a (substantial) hit. So I do think my estimate of 30 MWe is closer to the mark than your 70.
> doesn’t need refueling for 20 years
So it's a life of ship core which is supposedly 33 years. But, that's 33 years of average use. AFAIU subs spend most of their time creeping along pretty slowly in order to stay silent, so on average they'll be using a small fraction of max power. Civilian power reactors otoh want to run at full power as much as possible to amortize capital costs.
Not to mention that HEU just won't fly for civilian use, as I tried to explain my previous message.
As for economics, yes I think that decarbonizing the electric grid with series produced reactors would, in the end, be pretty cheap. France did that some decades ago, for about $1500/kW in today's money. AFAICT that would require the government to handle it (like in France), both to decide on one reactor model (to get on the learning curve by series producing it) and to have access to cheap capital.
If one wanted to do it with SMR's rather than large reactors like France, I suggest e.g. Nuscale would be a better starting point than submarine reactors.
In Australia we occasionally have a discussion about our submarines. I think we have the largest and longest range conventionally powered subs. Should we get nukes? The argument against is we have no industry. (Although, I think, ex prime ministers are significantly more likely to argue for nuclear subs than current prime ministers. That means something.)
I guess they both play off each other. Life works best with nuclear subs and nuclear plants, or without either.
If you're building a new power plant why not just install a bunch of A4W reactors that have been well proven instead of designing and building bigger reactors?
The naval reactors are not built to be refueled, as I understand it.
And then reject it.
Thorium has quite a lot of engineering problems that it has yet to demonstrate that it can overcome.
Look at San Onofre--an improvement to the engineering process (more accurate anti-vibration bars) caused water cooling tubes to have a resonance and wear out prematurely.
And that happened in a relatively well-understood technology.
Thorium isn't even close to that level of maturity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
Sorry about the confusion.
Still like the idea.
Knowing their policies it makes this out-of-the-blue project seem suspicious. I'm all for nuclear power especially if it's using CANDU reactors and thorium. But these guys ream the carbon tax or anything remotely environmental or socially progressive.
In Canada only Ontario (Ford) and New Brunswick (Higgs) have nuclear reactors generating electricity. Saskatchewan (Moe) doesn't have any reactors but they do have oil from the tar sands sharing it with Alberta on their border. Saskatchewan also has an abundance of uranium.
So colour me surprised and a bit suspicious these guys would push for this. Imagine if Trump suddenly swore off coal and wanted to build more solar and wind farms. Saskatchewan has more to gain than the other two premiers.
This is sadly most likely an attempt to change the channel and muddy the conversation by creating the illusion that there exists a viable alternative to deal with climate change other than the carbon tax and other demand side measures.
It's the "Technology will save us" non-solution that is mostly about kicking the can down the road and excusing doing nothing in the short term because a wondrous solution is 'just around the corner'.
The primary beneficiaries of these MRDs would be isolated northern communities (eg. Kashechewan) that currently use diesel generators. It's incredibly expensive to ship in diesel, it's widely acknowledged as polluting, and there are political problems associated with relegating indigenous communities to cast-offs from the south. Most of Canada is not on the grid and with the sun gone six months of the year, solar is a non-starter. Wind requires high maintenance and incredibly high construction costs so it's not really viable in remote communities.
MRDs look like a god-send for conservative premiers: be seen to be proactive for indigenous communities, be seen to be pro-active on the green front (but without carbon taxes or targeting the fossil fuel producers), pour money into tech research in Saskatoon and Toronto (two areas that don't traditionally vote Conservative), and one-up the federal government. What's for a conservative premier not to like?
Conservatives aren't evil bogeymen who want to destroy the environment wholesale, they want to find a realistic solution to the problem. Add to the fact that Ontario has a history of failed green projects in wind power that have eaten billions of dollars. If these conservative premiers can throw some money together, cut some red tape and get projects moving in the right direction, we should all be applauding.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/joi-scientific-...
Summary: New Brunswick's energy utility NB Power (a crown corp) spent $12M to license a nonexistent tech that violates the second law of thermodynamics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power [2] https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-p...
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4109510
The MSR saw some of the fluorine react with UF4 to make UF6, which is volatile. There is the potential for fuel to be volatilized and transported elsewhere in the reactor system, causing possible concern for criticality accidents.
First, the free fluorine will cause corrosion of the structure in which the spent salt is stored.
Second, this UF6 will be enriched, possibly mostly 233U if this is a thorium cycle reactor. If that condenses out somewhere you can achieve a critical mass. Unintentional nuclear chain reactions in spent fuel are a total no-no.
Furthermore the IMSR isn't a thorium cycle reactor.
Transmission capacity to SK is a 150MW. See here: https://www.gov.mb.ca/sd/environment_and_biodiversity/energy...
Out west, the provinces are not heavily interconnected, all prefer to sell to the US. Alberta is easiest to look at. Here is their real-time supply/demand report:
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle...
Interchange is at right. Couldn't find a source for interchange capacity in Alberta as transmission is not outright owned by the government like in MB.
OTOH, some newer designs (eg LFTR) are walk-away safe: Nuclear explosions/meltdowns are physically impossible short of deliberate sabotage.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/27/china-readies-nu...