Can Nuclear Power Offer a Way Out of the Climate Crisis?
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
I've always liked this win win way of disposing of nuclear waste. What isn't apparent in the article is the size of the 'mini' reactors and what the worst case scenario is for failures, and ways to lessen failure states.
But earlier in the article, the author said:
"There is one thing almost all model calculations do agree on: Moving forward, the majority of electricity will be supplied by a mix of solar, biomass, wind and hydro power."
So if the majority of power will be non-nuclear, how is nuclear supposed to prevent inevitable global climate change? And why aren't we just pushing to go for 100% non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel energy? Why is that not an option?
In another part of the article, they say "Qvist believes the lower costs are the primary advantage offered by the smaller nuclear power plants."
So even according to this pro-nuclear consultant, the primary advantage of nuclear is not its ability to prevent inevitable global climate change.
There are some other important things this article does not touch on, one of them being the gross mismanagement of Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the record of nuclear power companies and corrupt regulators not taking safety seriously enough, leading to accidents.
You can have the best technology in the world, but when the companies managing these plants cut corners and don't prioritize safety the ostensibly wonderful technology might be broken, missing, inactive, or inadequate when its needed most. Fukushima and Chernobyl were cases in point.
I'd also take authoritative-sounding pronouncements on the safety of nuclear power in threads like these with a couple of grains of salt.
I remember paying close attention on HN when the Fukushima accident was under way, and there were plenty of people on HN and elsewhere swearing that the Fukushima reactor would never melt down, that it was designed to prevent just such a meltdown. It melted down nevertheless.
First off, they have "biomass" as one of the options, which happens to be a bad one in almost all cases.
Second, it's very hard to have reliable grid power once more than 50% of your power is coming from unreliable sources. Even storage isn't a great answer, due to 10/100/1000 year events.
As the article points out, less than 2% of current power comes from wind/solar. It's very difficult to scale that to even 50%. Nuclear, on the other hand, can easily be scaled beyond 50%. In France, it was 80% at one point.
To have a great future, the human race needs clean, abundant, cheap energy. Nuclear is a win!
Yep, there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet. That said, the Fukushima reactors would have been fine if the backup generators to power cooling had been available. However, they weren't in a watertight compartment (as recommended), and were flooded by the tsunami. Even then other backup generators would have worked, but were delivered with the wrong connector and time ran out.
Many Gen-IV designs are, on the other hand, inherently or "walk away" safe. They literally can't melt down or explode due to basic physics.
When it comes to safety, part of the deal with anything nuclear is going to be security measures needed to prevent somebody from depopulating an area with a dirty bomb using the nuclear material inside the reactor. That alone can prevent this type of solution from ever reaching a point where it is actually cheaper to use than simple & safe wind/solar deployments. People are putting solar on their roofs, batteries in their car, and windmills on their farms. Security is not a cost factor for this. It is for nuclear.
This doesn't have to be a show stopper but it does limit the applications and contexts where this is going to be useful. Fundamentally solar + batteries is going to be pretty reliable, predictable, and cheap given enough mass production capacity. Also most of the timelines nuclear is supposed to happen on (measured in decades) give us plenty of room to vastly improve output, price, and efficiency. Therefore, I doubt that nuclear will be very relevant significant short term but it may help us get rid of the few remaining gas/coal plants in 2-3 decades.
Longer term that and fusion will be great in supplementing power needs anywhere solar/wind are just not practical.
https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374
> Summary
> Arguments that renewable energy isn't up to the task because "the Sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow all the time" are overly simplistic.
> There are a number of renewable energy technologies which can supply baseload power. The intermittency of other sources such as wind and solar photovoltaic can be addressed by interconnecting power plants which are widely geographically distributed, and by coupling them with peak-load plants such as gas turbines fueled by biofuels or natural gas which can quickly be switched on to fill in gaps of low wind or solar production. Numerous regional and global case studies – some incorporating modeling to demonstrate their feasibility – have provided plausible plans to meet 100% of energy demand with renewable sources.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...
This source only has "rooftop solar" which is more deadly than nuclear power.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
I don't have numbers for non-rooftop solar.
The other 2202 deaths were all related to evacuation. The cause of these early deaths were due to the disruption of hospital operations, exacerbation of pre-existing health problems and the stress of dramatic changes in life. It is stated that the vast majority of people who died during their evacuation were elderly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
1) You don't know the true numbers of deaths around Chernobyl and we'll probably never know.
2) People are still dying, their children are and their children will probably die early too.
Here: http://www.hilfe-tschernobyl.de/tschernobyl-katastrophe/ you can help. I'm sure they could use some Bill Gates attention too...
The health issues connected to Fukushima will show themselves in due time, just like they do with Chernobyl up to today and for many years to come.
Your ignorance of those facts clearly presented to you show how disgusting the discussion is being lead on the side of the nuclear supporters.
There are quite a few resources on energy safety. Key terms to search for: energy production safety https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...
Nuclear power is really safe.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
There's very little of it? Really?
Even the Spiegel article says:
"the amount of highly radioactive waste that Germany will have to store indefinitely - a total of around 10,000 tons - would fit inside a largish furniture store"
10,000 tons doesn't sound like very little to me. And that's just Germany.
I don't know the numbers, but I would be shocked if other countries like the US and Russia didn't have way, way, way more.
Waste from decommission is not even included there.
http://papers.nber.org/tmp/26395-w26598.pdf
This paper examines the impact of the shutdown of roughly half of the nuclear production capacity in Germany after the Fukushima accident in 2011. We use hourly data on power plant operations and a novel machine learning framework to estimate how plants would have operated differently if the phase-out had not occurred. We find that the lost nuclear electricity production due to the phase-out was replaced primarily by coal- fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately 12 billion dollars per year. Over 70% of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels. Even the largest estimates of the reduction in the costs associated with nuclear accident risk and waste disposal due to the phase-out are far smaller than 12 billion dollars.
The is a huge coal lobby and coal in underdeveloped regions being the only employer are right now the main reasons why coal is being kept alive while support for renewables is being kept low.
Not a single coal reactor or mine would have been shut down if nuclear would have still be there.
The EU Commission reports that in Germany 583 kilograms of waste is produced per person annually. So it takes only ~17,000 Germans to produce 10,000 tonnes of normal waste per year.
Contractors doing lots of small jobs end up cutting corners including foregoing safety gear (“how much is a fall from a roof going to hurt anyway”) and the inevitable death-per-thousand-installs basically blows the deaths-per-MW-capacity figure out of the water.
Nuclear plants tend to be large, tightly regulated work sites where things like fences and safety rails can be installed for little cost of time and money relative to the overall cost of the project.
Solar farms have deaths too, the usual fatalities expected from humans working around forklifts, cranes, and other heavy equipment.
Nuclear plants have all the extra joys of falls from heights (ref fences and cutting corners), asphyxiation in confined spaces, concrete injuries (skin burns, lung damage), etc.
This is all highly simplified, the pedants will argue the decimal points but I am only talking hand-wavy numbers.
Hold a bunch of special rocks close together. They get hot and make water hot. And turns into hot, wet air, which turns a big fan. Hook a magnet to that fan, and spin it in some hoops and you get electricity. Oh, and always, always, always keep the rocks from getting too hot.
Compare that to solar cells, which are semiconductors doped with cleverly designed impurities, and layered to exploit quantum effects to deliver electrical power simply by pointing it at the sun. You can make it more useful by hooking it to a rechargeable battery, which also exploits clever quantum chemical effects to store that electricity. And the combo of these two wonderful quantum-technological devices is cheaper than the reactor.
Both technologies require understanding of modern physics, but it's pretty telling that you can do enough math to make a fission reactor with a hand calculator, and not a high-powered computer.
Solar cells in space are a great idea. Much more efficient than nuclear power when you're closer than the orbit of Venus. A lot less so when you're at the bottom of an atmosphere with dust and clouds.
Because coal and nuclear are in so many cave paintins
It takes a long time and a lot of money to start earning on a nuclear plant. Given the risks involved it's not that easy to build one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
I don't think firing nuclear waste into space would be wise either. The risk of that blowing up on launch is high and the fall out from that would be a disaster.
All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards.
The vast majority of land is eternally safe
Ideally we'd use renewables but there are limits to the current tech that need to be solved before we can go 100%.
In this paper the authors model renewables in Artic isolated settlements. It's only a model but looks promising.
Edit : apparently the answer to this question is "downvote" :)
That's an illusory number. Wind requires backup power, or lots of storage. Wind turbines have a ~20 year lifespan, compared with ~60 years for coal/nuclear plants. Once the safety and economies of mass-produced Gen IV SMRs are accounted for, nuclear is MUCH cheaper than wind.
What would be really bad would be the first time thousands of people die when the wind/solar powered grid goes down during a cold snap.
I know someone who actually did heat their home through some pretty brutal winters using just solar heat.. and a pretty simple setup he jury-rigged himself, at that.
So it can be done.
There are also energy storage technologies like ordinary batteries to more exotic technology like molten salt storage for energy generated by solar panels.
In comparison, the 2011 Tsunami in Japan killed 15,000, yet people are still allowed to live near the ocean...
Obviously it was not a good thing, and could have been even worse, but I’d be curious to see a scientific explanation of whether a civilian reactor accident or meteor strike could make half a continent unlivable.
It may be the case that nuclear energy is required to stave off climate disaster, but given the political instability that’s also likely to engender, I’d like to see anyone speak to this with anything like a historical perspective.
With proper management (reprocessing), we're talking a hundred years or so. That seems like a reasonable time frame to me.
As for how nuclear power will fare in the event of war or state collapse, really badly, like everything else. Any state capable of running a nuclear reactor built by someone else, never mind building their own, has the capacity for modern industrial warfare, which is insanely expensive in lives and capital. A doubling or trebling of cancer rates due to a Chernobyl level disaster would be background noise compared to war.
I wouldn’t worry excessively about state collapse. There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation. If North Korea can keep going and there hasn’t been an instance of non-war induced state collapse in Europe since Rome’s withdrawal from Britain I wouldn’t worry. Think of Libya, Yugoslavia or Somalia. The first fell to outside aggression, the second was a civil war massively prolonged by outside interference and the third had state capacity too low to be relevant in this context.
Zero. There simply isn't enough radioactive material in a reactor to contaminate half a continent, even if it were dispersed that widely by an extraordinary event like a meteorite strike. And the smaller you make the reactor, the less radioactive material there is inside it.
As has already been remarked, Chernobyl is a good benchmark for a worst case scenario of a catastrophic event with a reactor dispersing radioactive material over a wide area. And even counting Chernobyl (and Fukushima), the number of deaths caused by nuclear power per unit of energy generated is orders of magnitude smaller than the corresponding number for any other energy source. So I simply don't see black swan events as a valid concern that should stop the widespread deployment of nuclear power, particularly given the advantages to be gained.
I think Gates is right again on this one. Nuclear power is efficient and reliable, day and night, windy or not, rain or shine.
As an asset, much like coal power stations, they require huge Government subsidies to be profitable to run.
Renewables are the only way forward - they've proven to be far more efficient, stable, and infinitely cheaper when mixed across multiple mediums.
> Renewables are the only way forward
How do you reconcile the article that Germany is already failing their goals before they shut nuclear down in 2022?
[0] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
Edit: well, I guess that is how polarizing Nuclear is, HN is ready to ignore reality as poised in the article, and a nasa link.
Right now reliable baseload can be provided by renewables plus gas fired turbines for intermittent supply much cheaper than nuclear.
http://www.energyscience.org.au/BP16%20BaseLoad.pdf
If the argument is that we want nuclear power on Mars, then sure, that seems a reasonable position to take.
Why would you compare nuclear, which is 100% green, to 'renewables + gas + batteries' which is far from green energy?
It's much better than coal, and can be migrated to incrementally (which is much easier than the huge up front investment in nuclear).
> (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline
Because traditional baseload isn't a concept in a fully renewable grid - distributed storage and production naturally evens out demand and production, and also makes the grid more resilient to freak weather events (the kind we see more and more thanks to climate change)
> You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar.
You're not doing them with anything at the moment so whats the point of conjecture. You really think that energy is the biggest concern over, you know, the colonisation of space?
So when do we turn off the giant nuclear reactor in the sky we don't understand and might evaporate the planet if something goes wrong?
There is no such thing as 'no harmful side effects'. We can put our head in the sand and pretend that the universe is a friendly place for life and go extinct in the next 100k years or so. Or we can acknowledge that there is no such thing as 'nature' and make the universe fit for us.
Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point.
Construction of new nuclear plants takes on average 7.5 years, and are extremely prone to cost overruns and delays. Renewables are a much faster and cheaper option to come online, be profitable and allow for shutdown of legacy infrastructure in the same period of time.
And they are viable now - several countries have run for days and weeks on renewables alone. Several regions of Germany are also fully renewable powered.
The slow ramp rate, and lower reliability means the power they output is less economically attractive, and the other factors makes the price higher. Combined, they mean that nuclear plans sit around idle a decent amount of the time, so much so that some locations just flat-out subsidize them (like Illinois).
I used to work in power markets.
Nuclear gets thrown about because it's an easy pivot for mining companies - especially in Australia which has a powerful mining lobby and large amounts of both coal and uranium.
The thing about most renewables is still that you can schedule and control output easily to meet demand so you have a storage problem unless you can pair it with another production method to cover the gaps. Maybe nuclear is a good option to lean on for that.