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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

I like the strategy proposed (linked in the article).

In increased production capacity: 4x electric vehicles, 16x batteries, 12x wind turbines, 10x solar modules. 2x the nuclear capacity. 25% of the energy grid converted into communal/consumer owned renewable production.

Basically full production in every technology that result in zero air pollution for the energy grid. Full production in all technologies also allow us to see which clean technology is cheaper in practice without people sitting still while arguing over which strategy they should use.

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I've spent a lot of my life opposed to nuclear power - but I'm slowly feeling that even with the currently unsolved long term storage issues - that it is better than the alternatives (carrying on burning fossil fuel until some point in the future when storage is good enough.)

I'd love to be wrong and I'd love to see renewable energy and storage solved in the next 10 years (though likely take longer than that to scale up nuclear).

There are many types of nuclear power, with thorium salt reactors being one of the most effective possible components to an overall solution. These could be scaled up quickly. The problem is public opinion and the lack of nuanced understanding of the differences.

Nuclear does have a huge PR problem.

Caused by huge safety problems and huge lying about safety problems.

Modern fission reactors are far, far simpler and safer than what exists in most places today.

No, the problem with molten salt reactors is that except for a few test reactors in the 1960'ies, nobody has built and ran them. There is little knowledge how well they'd actually work as power production reactors running at high power for years. E.g. how do you do maintenance?

And on top of that, the Th fuel cycle requires reprocessing and breeding, again technology that looks feasible on paper but little knowledge how it would work out in practice.

I'm not saying this as a negative, I think MSR's are cool and potentially very useful technology. We should definitely research them with the goal of taking them into use for large-scale power production. But this won't be ready in 10 years.

Now, I hope I'm wrong, and maybe IMSR proves me wrong by deploying at scale sooner. Though that is the traditional once-through LEU cycle, no Th, but still a MSR design.

You know who has picked up all the research on molten salt we abandoned?

China.

The utter hysteria around Nuclear is the biggest threat to climate change and if you really want to diminish the use of fossil fuels nuclear is the most economically viable path. The majority of costs are either cultural or obtuse regulations that have layered up over time. Micro reactors, molten salt and other really innovative designs don't get traction because of irrational fears radiation spawns in people.

Similar to a lot of hysteria we are seeing around COVID-19. Even if the majority of the population gets infected, it's only a real threat to a small portion of the population - so rather than managing that specific threat we are acting like it affects everyone the same - with disastrous results that are still unfolding.

Thorium reactors can't be scaled up quickly because none exist. We could put more money into R&D but saying they can be scaled up is premature.

Molten salt reactors have HUGE technological issues with corrosion. You have to design a material which would contain essentially almost all of Mendeleev's Table at high temperatures and under really powerful neutron flux. And we don't even touch problem of online processing of this salt. Even for BN reactors fuel processing plant is arguably more complex than the reactor design, and for salt reactors this problem even more nightmarish.

This is where I'm at as well. I'm not crazy about Nuclear, but when I sat down and did a hard look at a lot of alternatives, there isn't really anything that can provide power that dramatically, at least not without some sort of magic leap forward in battery technology.

Why are you so opposed? It seems like most of the problems have been entirely man-made through poor regulations, stupid choices, or lack of budget - all of which are surmountable. The technology itself is proven, and produces reams of clean energy. It could even be cheap, if we stopped gutting the nuclear industry and built up towards smaller-scale, commodity modular reactors.

all of which are surmountable

Yes but it would be nice to actually surmount them before making more of the stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU

The CANDU reactor seems to have surmounted that stuff decades ago.

many designs have, but few want to have discussions because of the decades of hysterical ranting about how evil radiation is. Radioactivity is neither good nor evil; it's a tool. Yup, it can be used for evil but it can also be used for good.

AFAIK modern reactor designs do a lot to solve the long-term storage issues; from what I remember France uses a series of different reactor designs, combined with reprocessing, that result in a small amount of waste that's only a problem for 60-70 years.

The kind of reactor most people think of (again, AFAIK) are breeder reactors, or otherwise derived from breeder reactors, which were about making weapons-grade material rather than power, which is part of the reason those designs have the issues everyone (largely legitimately) has with them.

No, France uses light water reactors, just like the rest of the world.

They also reprocess their spent fuel, but due to complicated sciency reasons you can only do that a few times when you're burning it in thermal reactors.

France had plans to move to a closed cycle, which would improve fuel utilization by a couple of orders of magnitude, but their breeder reactor program (required for the closed cycle) has largely stalled (see Phenix, SuperPhenix, and ASTRID which was recently cancelled before it even got off the drawing board).

And no, breeder reactors per se aren't about making weapons-grade material except in the feverish dreams of Greenpeace.

SuperPhénix was cool on paper but I'm actually surprised that they built it and after that it took so long to stop it. It used sodium, a lot of it, which explodes violently in contact of water.

That's an issue for most people. The political pressure was huge to stop the project. The CEA wasn't even that good at manipulating sodium, they got two known major incidents in Cadarache. One quite spectacular with a huge cloud of fire.

I think nuclear power is great to research and the risk is sometimes worth it, but SuperPhénix was too risky.

The issues with sodium are manageable, as seen in other sodium-cooled reactors like the Russian BN-XXX or the US EBR-II. Sodium has other good properties which make up for the downsides, which is why most fast reactor designs have chosen sodium has the coolant.

Cool, thanks for the corrections. I learned a bit about this for a single semester a decade ago, so I'm not surprised my knowledge is incomplete and warped by time.

What is the state of the world with these modern reactor types? Are they in use anywhere, or still limited to research experiments?

The Russians have a couple of them in production (BN-600 & Bn-800) and another being planned (BN-1200). They work fine, but with current uranium prices there's not much reason to do breeding and reprocessing.

It's good that we research these, but there is no pressing need to take them into use soon.

IIRC the idea behind BN reactors is that single such reactor would "burn" waste from 2-3 VVER reactors and recycled by BN fuel would be loaded back to them.

So you would install a number of BNs in Russia and supply recycled fuel back to exported reactors. Not only you will save money on fuel (well, assuming nuclear fuel will cost more than it does today), but also will reduce amount of nuclear waste for long-term storage (today most of waste from exported reactors has to come back to Russia).

If it makes you feel any better, many types of reactors produce helpful medical isotopes as a side effect of operation. So when looking at lives-per-megajoule nuclear is one of the absolute best, even accounting for some of the accidents.

When you compare Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Wind, Solar, and Hydro, Nuclear comes out by far as the safest technology [1].

Coal is incredibly dangerous directly - mining and operation are generally unsafe. Hydro has had some terrible accidents like the Chinese Banqiao dam rupture in 1975 which killed tens or hundreds of thousands. Solar and wind I'm not too sure about, but nuclear power has tens of deaths total attributed to it.

The nuclear-relate deaths that occurred have been from using light-water reactors, which are essentially very-high pressure high-temperature radioactive containers. Modern designs like molten salt reactors (like LFTR) have the potential to be safer, but don't have regulatory support and are mired in the process [2].

I made a whole infographic about the safety of nuclear power, but I'm not an engineer or journalist [3]

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

[2]: https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.c...

[3]: https://create.piktochart.com/output/37686680-safe-nuclear-p...

Per IPCC, wind and solar are very nearly on par with (possibly better) than nuclear. It's coal that really drags down the average, and yes, we need to stop using that.

Hydro's mortality is largey attributable to a single, though immensely bad incident, the Chinese Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975. That itself was a consequence of poor engineering, planning, management, response, and an unanticipated weather event (parked typhoon/cold-front dumping > 1,000mm rain in 24h), with most issues being common to any high-profile technical engineering project.

Hydro otherwise is largely safe (there are a few other exceptions, again higghligghting planning, management, response, and institutional integrity, especially in developing regions or periods), problems not specific to the energy-harnessing mechanism) and the Banqiao site is presently home to > 15 millions, rather than being a multi-century technically-induced wildlife park as is the case with other technologies.

>That itself was a consequence of poor engineering, planning, management, response, and an unanticipated weather event

Absolutely the same can be said about Chernobyl (well, apart from the weather) and Fukusima.

Precisely my point.

Though to clarify: as non-engineering failures, there is no technical engineering fix to this problem.

A similar case happened in Italy, and again, because of corruption that led to bad engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

Banqiao, China (~170k mort, almost all to disease and starvation, planning/response was abysmal); Machchu2, India (5k, 1979), Johnstown, US (2.2k, 1889, birthed Red Cross and reformed liability law), Vaijont, Italy (2.5k, 1963 landslide-triggered tsunami overtopped dam). Seven topped 1,000 fatalities, of which one was an act of war. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure)
There are literally tens of thousand of dams, if not > 100k, worldwide (over 22k in China alone), with well over a century of major utilisation. Granted 100 or fewer major (2+GWe) installations.

There are fewer than 400 nuclear power stations worldwide (3911 by my count from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations...), the bulk in operation for less than 50 years. We've had three major disasters and numerous close calls, all with massive long-term consequences. Building out infrastructure to the scale of present or future (industrialised-world electric provisioning to 8-12 billion inhabitants) would see even at much better safety records* a major accident every few years. And that's only one disadvantage.

Notably, once floodwaters recede, even a catastrophic dam failure returns to livable condition rapidly: weeks to years, rather than centuries.

And, as noted, it's human, social, business, and organisational factor common to any major high-value asset technical project generally to blame.

s/3911/391/

(This was not a large value of 400.)

> Hydro's mortality is largey attributable to a single, though immensely bad incident,

This is very similar to nuclear.

> Per IPCC, wind and solar are very nearly on par with (possibly better) than nuclear.

Mind sourcing this? every place I've looked shows nuclear beating solar by 5x and wind by 2x.

Gah! One of their reports within the past 5+ years. It was in an analysis of risks by major energy modalities. Unfortunately IPCC's content organisation is a disaster.

Analysis unit was deaths per GWh or similar.

I'll see if I can find it though I'm not optimistic.

Our World In Data posts similar stats, premature deaths/yr at 1 TWe/yr generation:

    Coal: 25
    Oil:  18
    Gas: 3

For the safer options, statement is inverted, as years for 1 death:

    Nuclear: 14--100
    Wind: 29 years
    Hydropower or solar: 42 years
    Solar: 53

Note w/h/s are all within the range of error for nuclear. (And why hydro isn't broken out separately I don't know.)

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> but nuclear power has tens of deaths total attributed to it.

I'm skeptical of this figure - Chernobyl alone is expected to cause ~4k+ deaths due to radiation exposure.

I'm sure nuclear is still significantly lower than combustion fuels, but I'd expect solar is somewhat safer.

Not to mention, while it needs a solution, long term storage doesn't have to be solved today. Or tomorrow, or even fifty years from now. Climate change on the other hand will not wait fifty years for us to get around to facing it.

I'd much rather my children face the narrow technical challenge of long term storage, as opposed to global migration crises, drought, and famine.

Dry cask storage will not be without issues on the 100 year time frame. However, I am relatively well convinced that this will be a problem in the billions in cost. That is a lot, but not $10s of billions or $100s of billions. A single national reprocessing facility is >$10 billion.

The simple truth is that radioisotopes decay. When you split Uranium, you dig up the nuclear dust. The more years you give it, the more it settles.

Don't get me wrong, fuel cladding is going to be popping, leaking, and breaking all over those racks of fuel in dry Helium atmosphere or whatever it is.

Also, companies who want to do US reprocessing (but will not anytime soon b/c of $$) are ready to cherry-pick the living daylights out of the fuel inventory. In another 50 years, the best fuel candidates will be vastly more economically attractive. You have the burn history of each fuel assembly, and you know which has the most good stuff and the least bad stuff. Time tends to shift that ratio in the right direction.

I'm not convinced nuclear is safe enough. Say new nuclear it is 2x safer than previous designs on average, and we spin up 4x more nuclear plants, well you can see where this goes.

Plus, such a concentrated power source is going to invite a terrorist attack by something like drones, which can't be effectively defended against. An attack that looks like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at....

I think that modern designs are at least an order of magnitude safer than reactors from early generations. Chernobyl's RBMK and Fukusima's BWR/1 were both designed in 60s. Note that containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand direct airplane hit, so without a bunker-buster grade munition such attack would not result in radiation release.

No energy source [that we've discovered so far] is perfect. All have downsides. Sadly, living in denial of that fact is more popular than ever, but that's a separate topic.

Here are a couple TED talks showing the downside of renewable energy - such as the enormous land usage and reliable energy storage needed to compete with nuclear or fossil.

Why renewables can’t save the planet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w

A reality check on renewables https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o

I've been skeptical that we can make nuclear power safe, too, given the human elements, but global warming has me asking myself which is worse: a Chernobyl every ten years, or a 2ºC rise in global temperatures?

Chernobyl was billed as proof of just how bad nuclear disasters can be, but looking back, we didn't know how good we had it when that was all we had to be afraid of.

I suspect you're imagining the Chernobyl happening to someone else, but the 2 degrees rise happening to you (and everyone you know).

Or I could be thinking of death tolls in the thousands versus in the millions, hundreds of thousands of displaced people versus hundreds of millions.

New nuclear power in the west is currently very expensive with rising prices and and extremely slow to build (see for example hinkley point c).

I‘m not sure if battery storage, which has predictably falling prices, isn’t already cheaper than that, but you can at least already calculate when it is going to be.

A sensible strategy is to keep old nuclear plants running and invest heavily in renewables and energy storage.

If you increase production, wouldn’t that produce more air pollution?

If we scale up this mind set and suddenly produce 100x Increase in electric cars and nuclear plants, wouldn’t we see a massive spike in air pollution much more than if we simply had 0 production of these?

I’ve been very skeptical of “produce more green energy” solution because they seem to pile on more problems under the guise that it is better in the long run.

Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less? Fewer cars, fewer things.

The best solution is to consume less, and consume things that are made sustainably. Green energy is important to make things sustainably.

> Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less?

How can we do that when overall population is still growing (even if the rate of growth is slowing). I mean, even if I cut my consumption by 25%, there are so many new people that it doesn’t seem like it would matter much?

Consuming less is definitely a big part of climate plans I've seen. Consuming less doesn't have to mean a reduced standard of living. This article mentions heat pumps for example, which consume much less energy. Other plans I've seen also include supporting dense development (=consuming less land/resources for housing), supporting public transit (=consuming less energy for transportation), and upgrading efficiency in homes (=consuming less energy for housing). I think longer term, the cuts will have to be deeper due to population growth, but there is so much low-hanging fruit.

I think in general the environmental movement has been hurt by the association with austerity. Most people don't like being told their lives have to get worse for a benefit that's difficult to see. It needs to paint a positive vision of the future that people can get excited about.

Consuming less does not fix the bulk of energy demand, and this particulates in air. It helps with the trash side of the problem mostly.

Traveling less would do more, or using more public transport. Bulk transit of non-food goods is very energy efficient, the last mile is not.

See website Without Hot Air as a rough but thorough analysis.

I think anyone supportive of consuming less is including less individual travel and proximity trade/consumption as a fundamental part of the decrease. Other popular issues nowadays seem to be meat consumption and human breeding, but the key importance of transportation seems to be still more generally acknowledged by everyone I know with an outspoken opinion on the matter or a corporate agenda.

Air conditioning as a luxury to rethink, OTOH, rarely if ever comes into discussion around here (I'm writing from a Mediterranean perspective, obviously AC can quickly become a necessity elsewhere).

It actually costs way less energy to cool a house than it does to heat one so the net migration to the south from the US northeast has and will continue to actually lower US per capita use and as the US uses circa 24% of the worlds energy this will have an effect.

Counterintuitive though.

In dollar terms, heating is less than half the cost of cooling in my experience.

Air conditioning will become much less of a luxury as the climate warms. Even in the past decade, summer temperatures high enough (especially indoors) to pose a health threat have become an increasingly regular occurrence in many parts of the world. Worse, some places are approaching the point where the confluence of air temperature, humidity, wind, and sun intensity will raise temperatures above the 35 degrees C wet bulb limit for human survival. In these conditions, air conditioning will not be a luxury but rather an essential life support system. Plans for climate-compatible energy use will need to take increasing needs for AC into account.

Sourcing: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-deadly-extreme-t...

I think in general the environmental movement has been hurt by the association with austerity.

This exactly. Most people respond better to carrots than sticks. We can consume less energy and material and still live more, through innovation.

Almost all of our problems are energy-cost constrained. If power were 100x+ less costly per kWh, for example, we'd be able to pull all the uranium, lithium, or any of a dozen other metals we need straight from the ocean, without having to run polluting, damaging mines. There are significant benefits to increases in production, if reasonably possible.

We're already consuming less. In California for example despite the growing population our electricity demand peaked in 2006. But we still need to replace our fossil inputs. After we have abundant peak generating capacity, we can use the excess to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which needs a large energy input.

Well sure, production of anything takes energy. Question is if 5% of the cars need replaced a year (20 years average age seems about right) are you better off replacing 5% of cars with electric or gas? The studies I've seen show that gas cars are so inefficient (often 15-20%) that even natural gas produced electricity is better in an electric car than a gas car.

The story gets even better if any solar, wind, or hydro is used. Sure nuclear helps as well. Seems obvious to me that we should push on all green energies.

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