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).
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.
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.
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.
It's good that we research these, but there is no pressing need to take them into use soon.
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).
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...
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.
Absolutely the same can be said about Chernobyl (well, apart from the weather) and Fukusima.
Though to clarify: as non-engineering failures, there is no technical engineering fix to this problem.
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.
(This was not a large value of 400.)
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.
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
Nuclear: 14--100
Wind: 29 years
Hydropower or solar: 42 years
Solar: 53
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.
I'd much rather my children face the narrow technical challenge of long term storage, as opposed to global migration crises, drought, and famine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes but it would be nice to actually surmount them before making more of the stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
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....