Assuming nuclear truly can be ultra safe, how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board? Particularly when the "competition" (solar, wind, etc) has such a strong tailwind.
But nobody talks about Kessennuma, and nobody brings it up as an evidence that fossil fuels are an inherently dangerous technology that must be purged from the earth to protect our children. Because, apparently, dying in an oil fire is not scary enough.
The majority of our energies are generated by fossil fuels, in most industrial countries. This has to stop - I think that's much more urgent than arguing between nuclear and renewables.
Competition in the form of wind and solar are intermittent, requiring storage on a massive scale to offer a path to decarbonization. With 12 hours of energy storage, the US could reach 80% renewable generation. To get to 100% we need 3 weeks of storage according to estimates [2]. Currently, we have 8 seconds of battery storage compared to our 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. We have 4 minutes of hydroelectric storage, but hydroelectric storage is geographically limited. Increasing this by a factor of 180 is not feasible.
In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar don't actually present real competition.
1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke. First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
Second: It costs tens of billions of dollars to clean up these messes. Paid for by the cow you can milk forever: tax payers.
In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar are the only game in town. Add medium and long-term storage to the mix and there's nothing stopping us from a truly green future other than politics.
"In 2008 the World Health Organization (WHO) and other organizations calculated that coal particulates pollution cause approximately one million deaths annually across the world"
"Long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_environmental_impac... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
The total number of victims was unknown for Chernobyl. We didn't know what the impact on cancer rates would be. But it isn't the 1980s anymore. We can compare the rates of cancer and other radiation related illnesses among the people who experienced Chernobyl and the general population. The radiation exposure due to Fukushima and 3 Mile Island was insufficient to cause adverse health effects. Yes, we do know the impact of these failures.
3 Mile Island took $1 billion to clean up not 10 billion. The exclusion zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima represent greater economic tolls, but the latter has since been lifted. By comparison, what is your cost estimate to build 3 weeks of energy storage in the US?
Sure, wind and solar could work if there's a scientific breakthrough that makes energy storage extremely cheap and scalable by several orders of magnitude. But until that scientific breakthrough in storage happens, nuclear and renewables aren't even playing the same game.
Certainly, if someone was tied to life support and had to be taken off to evacuate then that's a death attributable to evacuation. But most of the figures I've seen have counted people who died of natural causes during the evacuation time frame and attributed it to evacuation.
This kind of justification is _indeed_ a bit cynical and morbid. I suspect it is a way to respond to the sometimes overly emotional argument from nuclear opponents.
I don't think it helps having a cool-headed debate on this complicated topic.
However, I do think mentionning that all form of electricy productions have risk trade-offs, and illustrating it with the insane number of casualties caused by other sources of energy production is relevant. (Eg: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...)
But a bit of "tact" is warranted.
> First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
The total number of victims from the direct events (explosion, short term exposure) is largely "known" (although the Soviet numbers might not be trustworthy, if you want to go this direction.)
The long-term numbers are of course harder to estimate. Again, it's going to sound morbid; but, to know if it's "still rising", you have to determine if someone who dies from a cancer 34 years after the event died because of the event.
I'm in no way qualified to say so.
I have to revert to the same method I use when I don't know stuff: I find scientists to trust.
In this case, the UN organization that has to investigate such things does not see a massive hidden mortality, as I understand it. (https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html#Exposure .)
It is entirely possible not to trust UN on this, but not really helpful.
> Second: It costs tens of billions of dollars to clean up these messes. Paid for by the cow you can milk forever: tax payers.
That's absolutely true. It's also the tax payers who invested money to build the plant, and reap the benefit of having the energy. Again, this is a cost-benefit analysis. It's perfectly possible to not come to the same conclusion depending on your level of risk averseness.
However here, again, it's not irrelevant to mention that all sources have this kind of trade-off.
And, to put it bluntly, I assume it would also be the tax payer would who have to clean-up after a broken dam. Or an hydrogen storage tank that explodes. Or burying the child mining the rare-earths needed for solar panels. Or curing the respiratory diseases caused by fossil fuels as we speak. Not even mentioning the various climate events.
> In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar are the only game in town. Add medium and long-term storage to the mix and there's nothing stopping us from a truly green future other than politics.
Unfortunately, the `medium` and `long-term` storage does not seem to exist yet at the scale required to sustain modern world grids - at least according to scientists who would like to decarbonize just a much as you and I. (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man... , https://jancovici.com/transition-energetique/renouvelables/1...)
I would love the situation to be more simple. The same science that tells us the climate is changing it telling us our energy situation is not easy to solve - yet.
In the meantime, we'll have to use all tools available (including the dangerous but efficient ones.)
I'm in no way an "absolute fan" of current nuclear (Although I'm much more concerned about the long term storage of waste - not so much because it's dangerous, but because no one wants it in their backyard. And proliferation, a bit.)
I'm all for investing in doing nuclear fission differently. If the design presented here does lower the risk of accident, as they claim, that would be for the best.
I don't think you're trusting the claim, and I can say that I'm rather skeptical too - but mostly because I don't know much. If enough scientist tell me this kind of nuclear plant is safer, I can accept that.
----
Off-topic: If I was very cynical and very pro-nuclear, I would fund a massive superproduction about a giant dam collapsing. The super-vilain could be a corrupt entrepreneur helped by an ambitous greenwashing politician.
- This is false. Total number of victims who can be reliably linked to the disaster is two digit number. Source: lived there most of my life (grew up there) and still have friends and family working there
is this true for Fukushima? As far as I understand, 8% of the "Difficult-to-Return zones" have been cleared up for access to people, but that is a far cry from "all cleared up, everybody goes back home".
[0] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200916/p2a/00m/0na/01...
The point is, people assume because of Chernobyl that a nuclear disaster will render land uninhabitable permanently, or at least for decades. That is not the case. Chernobyl remains excluded because there's no real incentive to clean it up and reopen. The city was built to support the power plant, so with the latter gone there's no real reason to put in the effort to decontaminate the former.
1. https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en03-08....
Less dramatically so do Solar and Wind just by increased rate of people falling off roofs and towers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Fukushima required active cooling and could not cool itself using its own power output. And the backup generators were below sea level and the thing was on a fault line.
Neither caused major loss of life.
Three Mile Island was a scare, and did not cause significant damage or loss of life.
Any newly constructed reactor would not have the design flaws of the Soviet RBMK and would be designed to fail-safe.
But how to persuade the general public that science and statistics matter when even HN is skeptical? You're right, I don't know how to do that.
Of course these kind of issues can often be ignored with sufficient political support. Which is exactly what wind and solar have done in Europe.
Try using science to prove that a wind turbine isn't ugly. Or that it is worth killing some bird of prey to get clean energy. Try using science to explain why a coal miner should lose their livelihood. Or why you should stop eating so much red meat. It does not work.
At the heart of this debate is not scepticism of science, but scepticism of scientists and engineers. Scepticism that they really are as good as they say they are.
It can be done safely.
https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604...
Edit: I was wrong, the Ultra Safe Nuclear plan is somewhat similar. My comparison was with typical power grid reactor designs, not disposable reactors like what's being proposed.
[1] And even that is misleading and not in any way "greener", since solar and wind can't be used on demand it has to replace some energy, which in this case is nuclear energy, but it can replace only a small part of it, the rest will have to be replaced with something that can be generated on demand, like coal and gas.
No they are not. They only work well at small percentage of generation when you have enough hydropower backup (effectively, batteries): generate from solar during day, and generate from hydro at night (or use fossil fuel backup).
> solar
In California large amount of electricity is consumed by air conditioners (4%). And they work very well together: on hot days you need more electricity for air conditioners, and on hot days solar generation works better.
And you need more air conditioners during summer, and solar works better during summer.
The opposite is true in Ukraine. They don't need air conditioners because summers are not too hot, but but they need to heat buildings at winter because winters are very cold (when solar is very poor) especially at nights (when solar does not exist).
> wind
You cannot place wind turbines anywhere. You need a place with a constant high wind (that's why offsore farms work better). I guess there are no such places in Ukraine. And still you need to have a hydro or fossil fuel backup, because wind itself cannot produce electricity constantly.
> cheapest sources of energy available today
They are cheapest because they are subsidised on one hand, and on the other hand, nuclear is penalized by lawsuits and regulartions and inspections (in the US; in Ukraine the economy barely grows, they don't build much new power plants).
What do you see as a small percentage? A country like The Netherlands is generating between 10% and 50% renewable energy without significant storage capacity (it's summer so a lot of that energy comes from solar, but in winter the yields from wind will be higher), and we are one of the worst countries in the EU when it comes to renewables. I thought the need for storage is mostly a problem if you want to reach a high percentage of generation using renewables. Anyway, energy storage also seems beneficial if you want to build a nuclear infrastructure, so it seems like a problem that has to be tackled regardless.
> They are cheapest because they are subsidised on one hand, and on the other hand, nuclear is penalized by lawsuits and regulartions and inspections
I don't think subsidies are really a problem. Weren't the nuclear power infrastructures of France and Ukraine mostly build using state subsidies? The amount of subsidies needed to build renewables is also decreasing. Some might argue subsidies aren't necessary anymore, but we still need massive infrastructure investments to create a smart grid, more interconnectors, etc. Also, nuclear energy might be regulated too much, but I'm not sure how much can be saved without hurting safety.
Quoting wikipedia:
Renewable energy sources, such as biomass, wind power and solar power, produce 12% of the total electricity.
This is a small percentage.
> I thought the need for storage is mostly a problem if you want to reach a high percentage of generation using renewables.
This is correct. If we want to generate only small percentage using renewables, we can simply have excessive fossil power plants and turn them off when renewables work.
> energy storage also seems beneficial if you want to build a nuclear infrastructure
Barely. Nuclear can work at full power constantly, and can be easily slowed down and then sped up any time.
Of course if we had extremely cheap batteries we could make nuclear work full power all the time and save excessive electricity. So far we don't even have moderately expensive batteries.
> I don't think subsidies are really a problem.
It is not a problem. It partially explains why renewables are "cheap" and nuclear is "expensive".
> Weren't the nuclear power infrastructures of France and Ukraine mostly build using state subsidies?
I don't know about France. It seems to be a government monopoly, so there are very different rules when it works this way.
In Ukraine because of very sad state of economy, they seem to not build any nuclear power plants for a long time.
> Also, nuclear energy might be regulated too much, but I'm not sure how much can be saved without hurting safety.
As pointed many times in this thread, historically, including the worst nuclear disaster Chernobyl, nuclear is much safer than any other electricity generation method (including renewables). If something need to be regulated for safety, it is anything except nuclear.
If the answer is "just extremely dangerous" then the choice is simple. Actually, I can't understand why all those who are predicting doomsday scenarios because of climate change aren't storming the streets with big pro-nuclear energy signs.
Agreed. Without being a primitivist, I don't think you can be both pro-environment and anti-nuclear at this point. Solar and wind just don't have the output to keep up with industry. If we're fine living in mud huts and it taking 6 months to produce a laptop, then fine (and honestly that might be the place we end up in 100 years). But as it is, solar and wind cannot sustain our current economy.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
https://energycentral.com/c/ec/deaths-nuclear-energy-compare...
We use only tiny amount of the energy available, then have waste to deal with through the ages.
I'm in favor of nuclear, but wow are we ever terrible at innovating & trying to make a respectful, compelling go at it. Kerry shutting down the Integral Fast Reactor keeps coming back to haunt me as one of those strong indicators that America doesn't want to put itself up to the challenge of doing nuclear responsibly.
That's the one you're thinking of. Brazil, 1987.
How about clean-up costs? Estimates for Fukushima vary from $76bn to $660bn depending who you ask.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
How about general carelessness?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-weapons-s...
This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.
Which is the problem. This is primarily a managerial issue, not a technological one. And the quality of executive and managerial decision-making of all kinds across the entire industry is nowhere near the standard required for future confidence. Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.
I wonder what the clean-up costs are long-term for the groundwater contamination from solar panel production and for the dismantling and junking of wind turbines when they reach their EOL? Maybe not as much as nuclear but definitely not free -- right now they are a hidden negative externality just like coal plant fly ash, but eventually someone is going to have to pay the bill.
I'd expect wind and solar deaths to increase more or less linearly with joules output. These deaths are mostly related to maintenance activities that will scale with deployment.
Whereas: nuclear deaths from reactors built after 1970 are what, zero? That isn't to say that there aren't a lot of very old reactors still online, but nuclear deaths are all outliers rather than modal. And we should expect fewer outlier events per joule with newer designs.
> How about clean-up costs?
All clean-up is relatively inexpensive compared to climate change. That said, wind and solar require expensive cleanup; it isn't clear that this is any less expensive than burying or processing waste.
Fukushima is an outlier, rather than the mode.
> This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.
This is a very big jump from a single incident to a generate characterization of a global industry.
> Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.
Climate change will only get worse as we continue to consume more and more electricity, and avoid building out nuclear power.
Wind and solar require a lot of labor and land per joule compared with other energy generation. They also have relatively short generation lifetimes and generate disposal waste at the end of their operating lifetime. Land isn't something we think of as especially finite in the US, but it is more precious in denser regions like Europe.
To the extent that wind and solar displace existing coal and gas generation; great, I support that. But the emphasis on wind and solar over the past decade has resulted in increased oil and gas energy generation, worsening climate change. Wind/solar and oil/gas are the classic "bootleggers and baptists" combination.
I laughed at the thought of A/B testing new names of fundamental forces across different demographics.
Renewables are great but can’t meet 100% of demand. And when they can’t we should be using nuclear.
As a CA resident now (who installed solar on my roof) it sickens me when our “leaders” scream “climate change” but close nuclear early and buy coal-generated electricity from Utah instead.
2) Accidents do happen with technology and the repercussions of nuclear accidents are serious. That doesn't mean we shouldn't re-think the technology and how it can be applied in a better or safer way, including cold fusion.
That's what I'd like to think, but it doesn't seem to be a good match.
Nuclear plants want constant power output, they are ideal for base load. Solar and wind production vary during the day, and they don't always meet demand. That problem is called the "duck curve": too much is produced during the day and too little just after sunset. That's the reason why the best plants to complement solar and wind are those that can vary their output on demand. And unfortunately, that's typically coal (see Germany). Hydro would be ideal but its capacity depends is limited by the terrain.
Modeling suggests there is a place for nuclear, or more generally, dispatchable (firm) low-carbon resources in deep decarbonized electricity grids. See e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006
As for the duck curve, you can flatten it with solar panels that are angled to the south-west rather than straight to the south, and some moderate amount of battery storage. That still leaves the problem of how to deal with the baseload. Nuclear could be a good candidate for that.
I have no idea how you could solve a problem like this.
Do they? I love renewables but for some reason the masses still just don't think you can get enough energy out of sky farts and hippy sun rays. The fact that ALL energy in our solar system comes from the sun is irrelevant the sun just doesn't feel very powerful. The public knows that nuclear is super powerful.
> how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board?
The same way we convinced people to build them after Hiroshima. The same way we currently convince people to build coal plants when there are better alternatives. People want energy and they don't really care about the environmental / human cost.
Except human-made nuclear fission energy on Earth, somewhat ironically, given the thread.
Oh? I’m in Southern Saskatchewan, about two hours away from the US border. It reliably drops to -40 here in the winter. The vast majority of us heat our homes with natural gas furnaces, driven by electric fans. Long power outages in the winter are a very very big deal, and luckily are quite rare. A few years ago we had one that lasted about 12 hours, and the indoor temperature had dropped to about 7C. If it had continued to drop, the first thing would be damaged plumbing/flooding... followed by people who don’t have a large cache of warm clothes starting to have trouble.
Edit: oh, yeah... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...