> I think you've got that a bit reversed, trying to fix climate change with nuclear is a bit impossible at this point. We can't build it!
Can't or won't?
Can't or won't?
In the UK, at Wylfa, it's more "won't", Hitachi just refused to go forward with a new build, since it couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54158091
At least, it appears to be "won't", because who knows if a construction project that was started would ever be finished.
If the new nuclear startups come through, everything has changed. But the new small ones they are designing are not really anything like the nuclear reactors of yore, so we have to wait and see if they pan out on costs. And in the decades they need to come online, storage and solar and wind keep halving in price every few years.
But at the moment, pretend you're Jeff Bezos and want to buy $50B of nuclear reactors, however much that ends up in practice. Who do you go to? Toshiba, Hitachi? No. EDF? Hell no. Maybe South Korea? But they had their recent corruption scandal for inspections of nuclear plants. Rosatom? Feel like getting into bed with Putin? What's left of the industry?
But the answer is won't.
I submit to you that the economics and historical precedent are utterly irrelevant.
It's a simple choice: build more nuclear power plants..... or face extinction
https://spectra.mhi.com/hydrogen-and-salt-domes-are-winning-...
A single cavity in that salt dome can store 150 GWh of energy, and there's room for 100 cavities.
I think we will be making lots of hydrogen for decarbonization of industrial processes, and maybe even for aviation or shipping, so as long as we can dump electrons to Utah and find the water, this sounds great.
There are lots and lots of other salt formations, both in the US and in the world. Also, aquifers and exhausted oil and gas fields can be used to store hydrogen.
The political environment being such that nobody wants to build them is the definition of won't not can't.
One NPP replaces millions of solar panels with a 90% capacity factor while solar has a 10-20% capacity factor.
How is that “obsolete”?
When building something new that lasts decades, and the current examples that have already paid off their capital costs are shutting down because fuel and maintenance alone is more expensive than newer tech, that is pretty much the definition of obsolete.
In India, the reason for coal and nuclear is that it's easier for local officials to take bribes. Not sure what the story is in China, as they are far more strict with the corruption penalties there. I suspect that it's mostly that there are old long term plans that haven't been updated for today's reality, a reality where renewables and storage got cheaper than even the most optimistic predictions.
UK is a world leader in finding particularly sadomasochistic ways of financing critical infrastructure. This is like the PFI debacle all over again. Interest rates are at zero, the government should take out the cheque book and finance the plant directly. You can absolutely just buy a reactor and they are being built in China at record pace.
Private investment contributes nothing of value to this type of project, because spesification, location, and everything else was already decided
It only accrues extra cost because of higher interest rates avaliable to private investors and risk hedging. All the current government is trying to do, is keep the cost of the powerplants off the book, and hiding it from the national debt.
The reason, of course, is that nuclear is not very buildable, and nobody is willing to make a bet, even with very high returns.
If private investors would rather invest in offshore wind, or storage, why should the UK government be less wise with its money?
If the UK is going to take on billion debt for energy infrastructure (an excellent idea in my opinion that would benefit the UK greatly!) it should invest in more sound and reliable sources of energy like renewables, that have a proven track record of being built on time and in budget. And technologies where we learn when we build so that next year's project is even cheaper.
Look at electricitymap.org and compare the emissions of Germany (50% renewables) with France (70% nuclear). Germany is 7 times dirtier in its electricity sector.
I don’t understand why people keep repeating that non-sense that renewables reduce emissions at large scale, they don’t.
And building NPPs fast is no problem, look at China and Russia. Heck, Japan used to build new plants in just about three years.
We’d need less “dirty” backups if we invested more in batteries.
Yes, most grids still rely on non renewable resources. But that is simply a relic of the fact that they were built that way. The existing examples prove it's possible.
There are no countries running on wind/solar, which is the only renewable technology that can actually run everywhere.
Certainly the examples I have given are those that have the easiest path to renewables. It is entirely logical that they would be the first to transition. But it proves that it's possible.
>We estimate that GHG emissions from reservoir water surfaces account for 0.8 (0.5–1.2) Pg CO2 equivalents per year, with the majority of this forcing due to CH4.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/275427...
That's between 2% and 3% of our global greenhouse gas emissions. About three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production and about 15% of all energy production is hydro power if I recall correctly.
It's much better than fossil fuels, but not quite clean.
Germany emissions don't come from the 50% renewables, they come from burning 50% coal. I'm not sure why you are blaming renewables for those coal emissions.
France is currently at 23% renewables:
https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Will you blame their current emissions on renewables? No because if you click on the "emissions" tab you'll see that it's almost all coming from gas, and second highest source of emissions are nuclear.
Does nuclear always require a fossil fuel backup? No, of course not, so there's no need to make up false rules about other sources. Wind reserves can come from hydro, geographically distant wind (offshore is running at insanely high capacity factors these day), batteries as we start to deploy them, and yes even from existing nuclear plants.
But having built nuclear many years ago, and Russia and China building some now, doesn't mean that France or Germany or the US will be successful when they try to build. However, the one thing they have been successful at is building more wind. I hope they lean into their strengths, instead of betting everything on something they have repeatedly failed at.
Germany coal percentage in electricity production in 2020 is 21% and 66% of electricity generation is 0 carbon (renewable + nuclear). Coal part in total production is decreasing year over year.
Of course Germany is using other country to import when wind is not blowing, but at the scale of a continent we can see that most west European countries can go soon to an almost 0% carbon electricity production.
I will say this: Europe has been decreasing its carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Renewables reduce carbon emissions everywhere that they replace fossil fuels. This is just physics.
If the backup is run infrequently enough then that becomes a non-issue. I can definitely forsee a future where the fossil backup is only used once a decade in particularly abnormal weather conditions.
There has been some research into this topic, but we're not there yet. First, the connectedness of e.g. EU grid is not that high. Second, it's a very political subject in a way (everyone wants to be energy independent on its own, without needing to import too much). Finally, IMO Europe is not that big to be sustainable on its own regardless of weather (which is often similar on large part of continent).
They should contract EDF to build it for a fixed price, job done.
In the US most contested have been for a fixed price, it's just that nobody meets that fixed price nor the schedule. And since nuclear front-loads 50 years of generation prices into the construction, Amy delay at all I'm starting service is a financial disaster.
It's not actually the cost - it's the politics of it, and all the very ugly surrounding externalities.
The tech, research and regulations are '40 years old' stuck in an old era.
The 'existential risks' from Nuclear are partly fallout but that can mostly be managed.
It's really 1) waste and 2) proliferation.
The waste ... might possible to be dealt with. We can re-process and turn waste into something that can reasonably sit somewhere safe for '100K years' - that sounds like a challenge but I think it's possible.
Proliferation is the real problem. Nuclear requires 'very responsible systems' from top to bottom. Advanced nations, with transparency and oversight and scrutiny, can handle it.
But as soon as US, Canada, France starts building reactors, then Chile, Ecuador, Afghanistan will want to as well, and who is going to stop them?
Then it's only a 'small bribe' from 'very bad actors' getting a hold of nuclear material, enough to build a bomb, or much easier, just a dirty bomb, enough to very easily do some very bad damaage.
I can see contamination being released in NYC, which maybe only makes a few people ill, another few thousands with 'somewhat unsafe exposure' - but which requires evacuation of Manhatten and 200 years of 'no go zone'. This is the real risk.
So the UN, West, China, Russia would have to all perfectly align on 'the rules' and be very serious about enforcing them.
Because it's political, I don't see it happening. Russia has tons of Fuel they want to sell to Kazhakstan, a civil war breaks out there, baddies get ahold of a reactor, and 'somewhere someone takes a bribe' and some bad materials slip out the back.
We can definitely save the world with nuclear, we just have to act responsibly on a collective level. Not sure if we can, sadly.
It could definitely be used for a dirty bomb, which could, if nothing else, cause significant economic damage from the fear of radiation.
This is purely a debt to the future generations, and as such we are very easily blue to take them, because we will not be around when it needs to be payed. If we ever realistically counted that stuff in nuclear would be completely and utterly unaffordable.
Sure thing, we could develope ways of reducing the half life time of the waste, building better and greater storage facilities that manage to stay functional 25 times longer than the pyramides, find newer cleaner ways of using the limited nuclear resources we have, etc.
This factor alone makes me unsure this really is the best way to generate energy. One thing many don't realise is that reducing production emissions alone doesn't cut it. We have to use less as well. Eat less meat, based on the methane the cows fart alone. All in all buy and produce less stuff. Which in turn would break capitalism, which we realistically won't carry through even if it would mean extinction.
Let's play with the sliders: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org Most people are way to optimistic about this. Technology alone will not safe us here.
Deforestation to make way for livestock, along with methane emissions from cows and fertilizer use, creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the world’s cars, trucks and airplanes combined.
The fertilizer has to be used for the life stocks food. If you eat 1 kJ of meat vs 1 kJ of the soy that is produced to feed it, there is less water usage [1], less CO2 emissions [2], less land usage etc.
If anything a move away from meat would help earth to accommodate more people. And that is only meat. What if you are able to buy one product that lasts a decade vs 10 that last a year?
This kind of "use the resources more efficiently"-stuff is what I mean when I say reduce consumption.
And that should by the way not be the task for individuals to tackle, we need higher standards when it comes to efficient resource usage, quality and lifetime of products, etc. This is not something that will be solved fast enough by consumers and their wallets.
Of course energy and transportation is a factor as well in all of this. If we don't want to move our planet into " lol maybe we go extinct"-territory, we will have to reduce individual transport and expand public transport and use renewable or otherwise more efficient means of converting energy.
The thing is: doing it later means we would have to do even harder changes. If we all started tackling this 4 decades ago we could have gone with a smooth, gradual change. Now even instantaneous change would be only amount to damage limitation.
The Greenlandic ice is over the tipping point. We cannot unmelt it. And heating 0°C ice to 0°C water takes the same amount of energy as it takes to heat 0°C water to 80°C water. This means thermally speaking our breaks are still working, but they will stop working any moment and we cannot stop them from loosing their function anymore.
The last year of reading up on climate science really made me realize that things are far worse than I thought they were.
[1] The waterfootprint of beef vs soy is nearly 15 times bigger: https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-water-footpr...
[2] For CO2 it might be even worse: https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
France currently recycles their spent fuel. They put the remaining good nuclear fuel back in their reactors in the form of MOX fuel and immobilize the remaining waste in vitrified borosilicate glass.
The US had a recycling program featuring the use of advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) that was shut down because it created Plutonium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the (now stalled) GNEP [wikipedia], where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist. Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.
If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).
If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear."
Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
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Interesting: "2018 Nobel Prize for Physics-winner Gérard Mourou has proposed using Chirped pulse amplification to generate high-energy and low-duration laser pulses to transmute highly radioactive material (contained in a target) to significantly reduce its half-life, from thousands of years to only a few minutes."
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I do not think nuclear waste and proliferation are a problem. Consider ITER, for example:
"Fusion reactors, unlike fission reactors, produce no high activity/long life radioactive waste. The "burnt" fuel in a fusion reactor is helium, an inert gas. Activation produced in the material surfaces by the fast neutrons will produce waste that is classified as very low, low, or medium activity waste. All waste materials (such as components removed by remote handling during operation) will be treated, packaged, and stored on site."
"Because the half-life of most radioisotopes contained in this waste is lower than ten years, within 100 years the radioactivity of the materials will have diminished in such a significant way that the materials can be recycled for use in other fusion plants. This timetable of 100 years could possibly be reduced for future devices through the continued development of 'low activation' materials, which is an important part of fusion research and development today."
Or to put it briefly: "No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years.".
Proliferation: "Limited risk of proliferation: Fusion doesn't employ fissile materials like uranium and plutonium. (Radioactive tritium is neither a fissile nor a fissionable material.) There are no enriched materials in a fusion reactor like ITER that could be exploited to make nuclear weapons."
Source: https://www.iter.org/mach/safety and https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion
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To repeat: waste is not much of an issue CURRENTLY, and in the future we will have ITER and the like, i.e. fusion reactors instead of fission reactors that solve the nuclear waste and the proliferation problem. It is sad how many people are misinformed about nuclear (other comments). There is no higher electricity consumption without nuclear, like... just forget about it. But then again, the future, that is fusion reactors, are pretty damn great. Just check out the last link in this comment.
See my recent comment here where you'll find 50 power reactors currently under construction in 15 countries.
Though I'll grant whether any of it turns out to be money wisely invested, either financially or environmentally, is a different matter.
Firstly, the evidence is that the Chinese are excellent at manufacturing and will likely be churning out high quality nuclear reactors.
Secondly, high quality energy production is a bad topic for nationalism. The West decided not to pursue nuclear decades ago. But it remains the most technically excellent form of energy production and we should be grateful that there are still nations in the world pushing technology and engineering forward. It isn't like there are a lot of choices; the obvious options the world has right now are either Chinese nuclear or Chinese solar.
Unless there is strong support from government, Nuclear Plants can’t happen.
I’m really putting a lot of hope in the next generation of mini self contained nuclear plants. I think Bill Gate is also looking into that. These have the potential to be successful both for the planet (get rid of gas turbines for peak demand when renewables fail) but also economically (easier cheaper to build).
And that culture needed to change not now, but a while ago. If the whole world fully stopped emitting CO2 today, the latency till we could measure the first effect on climate would be roughly 13 years.
Most people I know are way too optimistic about what it takes to deal with this. A good way to get a feeling is to play with the sliders of this model here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org
Edit: this is btw. not something that I am happy with. Like at all. It stresses me out to think about it. People down voting a post that simply states the scientific consensus on that topic doesn't make it any better to be honest.
I was doing some research and practically all the sites in use today were built in the 1970s...