The world needs nuclear power and we shouldn’t be afraid of it

As for cost, you are contradicting yourself when you say it's cheap (it's not), and when you say that it's expensive because of anti-nuclear activists. See, for example, France, whose new nuclear projects are not cost competitive despite having a strongly pro-nuclear regulatory situation.

As for the "efficiency" of hydrogen, the only efficiency that matters is economic efficiency, and all indications point to hydrogen storage of wind/solar to be more economically efficient than nuclear. (And for the record, for energy efficiency both nuclear and hydrogen are about 50% efficient, but like I said the only efficiency that matters for deployment is cost efficiency.

This isn't true. Pump solar/wind is cheaper than gas plants.

Gaseous, sure. It also emits radioactivity.

Renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. $15/MWh vs $112/MWh. So what you do is overprovision your renewables. In other words, build more than you need. The major reason to do this is so that when the wind is barely blowing and/or it's a cloudy day you still get enough power to supply your needs without peakers. Then on the days when you're producing excess power (ie, most of them), you use that excess energy to produce methane from CO2. Use that methane to run your natural gas peakers, making them carbon neutral. This is likely much cheaper than batteries, certainly if you already have the gas peakers.

You'll have to overprovision to cover the very unlikely time that both the wind and sun disappear for a long stretch, so you'll be overprovisioned all other times. Methane production takes Hydrogen as an input, so you can use some of that excess energy to create extra Hydrogen. Or you can turn methane into plastic for use or storage. Or just sell the extra electricity, there are several industries that can soak up cheap electricity (please not to bitcoin miners though).

> Nuclear energy is more cost effective than alternatives. The main issue is that antinuclear activists, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have lobbied to make it cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation and prolonged legal battles.

Even in China, nuclear is incredibly expensive and takes a long time. So I don't think regulation is the main problem.

> Why? Producing hydrogen is inefficient and unnecessary

Clean steel & cement.

Renewables + short term storage + hydrogen will likely be cheaper than a grid based on nuclear, even with the inefficiency of hydrogen. One contributing reason for that (for the hydrogen) is that a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is 1/20th the capital cost per MW of a nuclear power plant.

You can check this out with some plausible assumptions for 2030 technologies and real climate data at

https://model.energy/

Is more a mushroom shape than a zero shape.

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-nuclear-won-t-cut-it...

The UK's first nuclear power plant cost half a billion in today's money. The current (and only) one being built in the UK is up to 23Bn for construction, plus ~50Bn in electricity subsidies, and is overbudget and delayed.

> cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation

> It is cheaper

You can't have it both ways. Everything is cheap if you exclude the costs which are annoying. Where, and how, is this regulation going to be removed, and how cheaply and how quickly? The fossil fuel lobbyists aren't going to roll over cheaply and let it happen. Nor are they going to agree to disallow lobbying for the greater good. They should, but they won't. Then what?

Nuclear and offshore wind are equivalent (median: 12 gCO2eq/kWh)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

> Alternative renewables (e.g. wind, solar) require fossil fuels to power the electrical grid when they are not able to generate

Overprovision is part of a solution. Storage may tackle part of the challenge ( https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/declining-renewable-... ).

On a large geographic scale renewables are able to continuously generate enough energy. We know how to transport energy (and nuke plants also need it), and interconnecting grid is considered a win whatever the type of source used (nuclear, wind...).

See https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-... , which doesn't seem to me more ambitious than hoping to quickly multiply by 10+ the existing nuclear power generation capacity, and hoping that there will be enough practically available combustible for them.

> The amount of energy they output, relative to the energy input to construct

The net outcome is positive.

Moreover renewables don't need fuel, and therefore there is no need to worry about cost/reserves/geopolitical turmoil/terrorist actions/waste.

> amount of land they consume

For solar there are many adequate deserts and unused surfaces. For offshore wind there are huge pertinent areas.

> Nuclear energy is safe, causing fewer deaths and adverse health impacts

There are many ways to consider this. Here is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

> If it is a dinosaur, then so are the transistors

Transistors sci/tech made and makes huge progress. The nuke promises/dreams (fusion, no-waste...), albeit massively subsidized for decades, are stuck.

Hmm, did you ever consider that ... nuclear power involves storing a huge amount of energy! Those huge cement walls and vassals require huge investments of money, energy, and materials. Just as much, that is energy invested in a particular location and assuming that location will continue to require energy. That's energy that's wasted if something goes wrong the construction or operation of the plant and that's energy that's gone at the end of life of the plant.

If you just require energy storage, it may be expensive but there are a number of flexible methods, some of which scale very easily (and others are cheaper but only at large scale, etc).

That's not exactly true, apart from mining for example the construction of a reactor building requires huge amounts of concrete. Also, mined uranium needs to enriched by centrifuges before it becomes usable, which is a process that requires a lot of energy.

Without a 2 order magnitudes improvements in cost, any plans towards building anything nuclear are probably futile over the course of a 5 decade run time of the facility starting about 2-3 decades from now given current and likely improvements with alternatives in terms of cost reductions in the same time span. Sub 1 $ct /kwh energy plants are very close (there have been a few solar bids in the 1-1.5 $ct range recently). I expect prices to routinely start dipping below that as early as next year.

If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc. That's not feasible just yet but there are plenty of researchers playing with prototypes for this right now. So, that has the potential to deliver some order of magnitude cost advantage over the already dirt cheap current state of the art for clean energy. That's what I call a feasible path to delivering orders of magnitudes cost improvements. We have similar things in the works for energy storage. And off shore wind is also delivering nice improvements still. Hell, at with that kind of improvement, even producing synthetic fuel at ludicrously low inefficiencies could still be worth the trouble from a cost perspective over anything nuclear. And there's research chipping away at that problem as well (i.e. doing it more efficiently and cheaper).

IMHO there's actually nothing stopping people coming up with dirt cheap nuclear in theory but lots of non trivial obstacles preventing us from getting there on a timescale where it matters. And then once we do get there; there's still the notion that mass producing material for dirty bombs poses some non trivial security challenges. E.g. mass deploying micro reactors all over the world massively increases the possibility that some of them end up in the wrong hands. All it takes to create a dirty bomb is some cheap explosives and some radioactive material. All it takes to depopulate e.g. downtown Manhattan is one such bomb. Nuclear safety not just about reactor failure but also ensuring the nuclear waste is properly secured for however many millennia it takes for it to degrade.

Another issue is the lack of ambition on growing the energy market. A lot of projections are based on our current energy consumption patterns and seem to assume that ballpark what we currently consume globally does not need to grow by orders of magnitude. The reality is that throughout history, our ability to deliver cost improvements for energy production has always resulted in increased demand together with economic growth. There's no shortage of useful things we could do with a supply of dirt cheap peta watt hours. Unlocking that potential would create something similar to the industrial revolution in terms of economic growth. IMHO that's exactly what this century is going to be about. A few orders magnitude improvement in cost would go hand in hand with a few orders magnitude increase in energy produced.

The premise that we need to get nuclear done is based on the notion that we can somehow break that pattern of it being too expensive by orders of magnitudes. However, I don't see how this could happen. Most articles I read about nuclear seem to ignore the security aspect and tend to gloss over the cost aspect or just generally even lack the ambition to do better than even current approaches in the market.

So, I'll just put a stake in the ground and spell it out: anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete from a cost perspective before it is ready for the market I.e. shipping in volume and at a relevant price point for the state of the art for other technologies at that point. That's decades from now at the earliest IMHO.

And that's only a 10X improvement over today, which is arguably not good enough. To play it safe, you really need to be thinking closer to 0.0001$ per kwh or better. That would be at least a 100x improvement. I can see fusion delivering this potentially towards the end of the second half of this century (earliest) but not nuclear in any of its current imagined incarnations. Certainly not in under 2 decades like this article seems to suggest: too little, too late and for too much $. It just doesn't add up.

Offshore wind will have removed most gas/coal plants from the equation around that time in any case. China is currently talking about 2060. The UK is talking 2030. Nuclear does not really factor into those intentions. Wind and solar are outstripping everything else in terms of growth currently. If you break down new capacity coming online, coal and nuclear are mere footnotes (production with that is actually shrinking in lot of markets). New nuclear coming online is not keeping pace with old nuclear going offline. And there's a lot of that happening currently as a lot of 1960s/1970s reactors are basically at the end of their useful life.

Beyond the unknowns of ecological damage, the increases in forest fire and storm event damages we're already seeing are also hitting us now, not in decades. Further, from everything I have read thus far since that report was released , most of the models have underestimated the release of methane, which could mean we're already accelerating faster than previously thought. All of this also assumes that there will be a massive effort to cut emissions to 0 in a reasonable time - a big assumption in the time of Trump's America.

It's like pointing out that solar runs on photons, and therefore it's "fuel" has infinite energy density. It doesn't really impact its use by humans.

In places where new nuclear has been built, it has not proven to be a spectacularly desirable energy source. The entire Western world has failed at building new reactors, causing bankruptcies and state acquisitions and restructurings. Even nuclear darling France is pulling back from new nuclear, instead looking to renewables and storage, including hydrogen. China tried valiantly but is pulling back from very large scale deployment. South Korea has had some success, but that's because quality control turned out to be a scam, so who knows about the quality of the reactors they built.

Russia's Rosatom has had some success, probably, but nobody trusts them.

The remaining market for nuclear are where there are corrupt bureaucracies where the prospect of a massive single project makes the potential for massive bribes possible. This is why coal succeeds in India, for example.

As for "doing no harm" with solar, I have yet to see any concrete examples of solar causing definitive harm. A solar failure doesn't cause massive environmental harm. The mining issues are similar to uranium mining. If solar is causing harm, I'd love to know how, but having searched for this and come up empty, and having people claim that solar causes harm and never follow through with specifics, I'm extremely skeptical of the claim. At least until there's some evidence to look into.

Until we can reliably contradict nuclear and also see that it actually seems like a good financial deal (taking into account all the costs of failed builds), nobody will really want to put up money for nuclear unless it's for ulterior reasons: corruption or nuclear proliferation or subsidizing a nuclear submarine fleet or something like that.

The only question is how to deal with intermittency of renewables. For which we have tons of options, with nuclear being a poor contender, IMHO. There are certainly some models of zero carbon energy grids that say nuclear is the cheapest way to achieve zero carbon, but I think those models have not adequately accounted for several key observations about the world, namely: 1) how storage technologies are getting cheaper far faster than anyone anticipated, by an order of magnitude, 2) how we will build a lot of hydrogen infrastructure anyway to decarbonize industrial processes that we can't electrify, and 3) how nuclear is getting more expensive every year because it relies on industrial techniques that have been optimized in the past, and where we are now losing skills. Even if we correct 3), I don't think it could outweigh 1 & 2.

That's not to say that nobody should invest in nuclear, just that nobody should bother with gen 3 or 4 designs, as they are already obsolete. Look to the tiny startups, and forget about the giant conglomerates of yesteryear like EDF, Toshiba/Westinghouse, and Hitachi.

Some of the CFCs and HFCs get collected, mostly at industrial sites. Car and residential mostly leaks.

At least xFCs don't acidify oceans.

The only serious Corona virus pandemic is today, in 2020, not in 2003. Unsurprisingly, the people leading the charge to stifle measures aimed at preventing climate change also happen to be the very ones who stated that COVID 19 is a hoax, a conspiracy (first the US Democratic Party was blamed responsible for the hoax) – but soon it became the Chinese virus, and now they have no solution other than to encourage people from stop testing altogether and to stop wearing masks altogether.

Mind boggling.

I am a big fan of nuclear but, I'm wondering, is this true? Do we have enough fuel for current nuclear reactors to run for....how long? Someone, also on HN, said we have enough fuel for maybe 150 years if we relie solely on it. So what is the truth?

To you and I perhaps it is 'just money' because your standard of living is sufficiently high that a 10%, 20% or even 50% reduction is a sacrifice of comfort, and not existential. But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty.

This idea that money is some morally lesser concern just fundamentally misunderstands what money is. Aggregate wealth is just all the stuff we have. Less money means less stuff. Less stuff means more poverty. That may be worth while, if we think climate change is severe. But it's always extremely important to keep this in perspective.

Climate change is primarily going to hurt the world's poor, and so are the cuts we'll have to make to combat it. But if you don't keep that in perspective, the cure may end up worse than the disease.

Nuclear is an excuse to do absolutely nothing.

It is clear that climate change is an emergency. However, the amount of resources, including money, to address that emergency is finite, so it would be illogical (or even unethical) not to use resources in the most economical way possible.

New nuclear power plants have a cost of, for example, over 90 £ / MWh. New solar and wind energy can deliver at less than half that price:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

There is also another motication to build nuclear power plants - they subsidize military use of nuclear weapons. To cite from the article above: "On 12 October 2017, The Guardian reported that researchers informed MPs that the UK government was using the expensive Hinkley Point C project to cross-subsidise the UK military's nuclear-related activity by maintaining nuclear skills. The researchers from the University of Sussex, Prof. Andy Stirling and Dr. Phil Johnstone, stated that the costs of the Trident nuclear submarine programme would be prohibitive without "an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure".[97]"

(The linked reference [97] is https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...)

On top of that, such plants, even with very conventional nuclear technology, take more than a decade to build. To address climate change, we need big and radical changes in energy production in the next twenty years. Building new nuclear energy is very clearly too slow to achieve that.

So, at that point, using nuclear to address climate change is merely a distraction. There are much better ways to address this problem.

Whilst I agree with your broad point, climate change is a systems problem and requires systems thinking and systemic change.

If you make nuclear available, but it is not competitive with fossil fuel energy, then we will continue to use fossil fuel energy. A relatively small number of oil company executives with a profit motive are going to make this decision for everyone, directly and indirectly.

'Doing stuff', as you say, involves governments of the people heavily regulating the most powerful corporations on the planet to ensure they can't make this decision in the wrong direction.

Government action in this direction hasn't happened for the last 30 years, and doesn't look close to happening in the present.

As such, it's reasonable for climate change activists to make plans to meet the market where it's at and prioritise competitive renewable products above nuclear.

The issue raised by GP comment is how you allocate that insane expense. As I read it, they are only suggesting we spend on the most affordable technologies available to lessen the impact of climate change, not the most expensive.

Nuclear is not on the critical path, as we have several alternative paths that reach the same carbon neutral end result. They will do this so with less cost than nuclear, by nearly all accounts (but not all accounts. However it seems quite likely to me that climate scientists will change their opinion as they revise the costs of nuclear to incorporate modern construction attempts.)

Why are we to choose the more expensive option? Simply because we like nuclear and want to subsidize it more than other clean energy sources? What good comes from nuclear's extra expense?

People who say this aren't thinking clearly.

There are different storage use cases. For diurnal storage (daily charge/discharge cycles), hydrogen is indeed inferior to other technologies.

But this is not the only storage use case.

Other use cases are seasonal storage (particularly important at high latitudes) and backup storage (especially for rare events when it's both cloudy and windless over large areas for extended periods). For those use cases, hydrogen can be much better than things like batteries or compressed air (or flow batteries, or storage in synthetic hydrocarbons).

No, that wasn't what happened at Fukushima. There was no "boom" from a nuclear chain reaction there.

And if low operating expenses is a good thing, then solar and wind and battery storage are far better than nuclear on that front.

Digging into why utility-scale solar is currently an exception, one potentially relevant factor is that utility-scale solar is working through some regulatory and infrastructure obstacles[1] as it scales up.

[outdated] That said, I couldn't see any indication that manufacturing solar panels themselves is an issue. If residential solar has lower lifecycle emissions, then I wonder why the panel manufacturing would be a problem. Do you have any more information on that?

Edit: noting that first and third paragraphs are outdated following edits to parent comment

[1] - https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/Chapter-3-Di...

We'll run out of nuclear fission fuel roughly when we run out of nuclear fusion fuel in the sun (i.e. when the sun burns out).

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

[3] https://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15

Opining that energy density isn't a useful metric is silly to the point of disingenuousness.

You can get a scoop of sunlight from where, exactly?

If you put down a square meter of solar panel, weigh it and run it for an hour to get an equivalent wh/kg and compare to almost any other energy source (except maybe wind?) you will find it to be complete garbage.

The only thing solar has going for it is it's free, basically no waste products and you can find it literally anywhere on the surface of the earth.

One better than fusion not impossible option is carefully feeding small black holes and extracting their huge output of energy. The feedstock for the black hole might even be lifted from the sun. In the meantime, fission is a productive and practical option to add to the energy mix that will more than serve until we've worked out fusion.

One place I think I agree with you is that phrasing it as energy density, rather than focusing on efficiency of a given unit of mass or fuel at yielding energy can be a bit obscuring. That is, it's better to focus on sustainability of fuel source. Energy density (J/m^3 and J/kg, specific energy) are units more appropriate for talking about energy storage and bombs.

1. Sunlight isn't on the list he's citing.

2. Sunlight can't be measured by kilos, so it can't be compared against.

3. Sunlight is the consequence of the sun's nuclear reactions. So fusion nuclear energy might be comparable, but until then, fission is as close as we get.

Given a large enough number of chances, people will fuck up. The fallout from nuclear fuckups is just too big to risk it.

Nuclear plants are in this category.

The nuclear industry, just like every other industry on this planet, is run by flawed and corruptible humans. The problem is that their flaws and corruption can do damage for many generations to come, so being a bit careful and skeptical is only due diligence.

[0] https://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pl...

And that sums up most opposition to nuclear right there. Fear of what maybe might could happen.

But what do we do in the meanwhile? What do we do if storage technology isn't able to match energy demand when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing? What do we do in areas that don't get as much renewable energy? Many questions. Probably more than one sensible answer.

Renewables might not be a magic bullet. We need a plan B. Nuclear as a long term base load power source? Not as crazy as it sounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...

Had that liner perforated, high pressure fluid from the core would have jetted straight up into the control rod mechanisms.

(and that was just the fifth most serious event at the time since 1979, the first being the TMI accident in 1979.)

Hanford is basically the same thing except that the US actually cares enough to do something about it, just not enough to do it quickly.

The cleanup for Fukushima is likely to be completed before either of them because it's a location that people actually care about cleaning up.

It’s like people want to introduce more black swan possibilities in a world already inundated with them.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Because from what I know, the fallout from it literally exploding is not making anything nearly that large "uninhabitable", even if we literally stand around and did nothing against it. Deaths would go up, but so did they from the coal plants that were subsequently built (we're at 3 million deaths a year, if memory serves; that's the number you have to beat to make nuclear less attractive than the technology we did build. Every year. Millions of people.).

Edit: a quick search suggests 4 million now, or another source says 10k/day which works out to 3.7 million per year (from results' summaries shown on DDG) but feel free to find reliable sources.

Just because it’s not safe everywhere doesn’t mean it’s not safe anywhere.

> Japan to release treated Fukushima water into the sea

It's not my choice, I already vote for parties that want to take more action, my energy provider is one that actively builds out renewables, and I don't own an amount of land where even a single solar panel would fit. We can't do this on an individual level so I guess governments will have to decide what goes where. It's up to them, but we can't choose it do neither solution.

And you'd probably accelerate climate change because of all the carbon released in building those reactors.

But realistically speaking, I take your point. I just don't want to dismiss nuclear for the wrong reason. We need to make a choice of how much energy to build where, using which technology, and by when.

Let's make it.

Realistically people are going to hate on nuclear for stupid reasons? Fine, then please let us find an energy mix that works where we reach our climate goals. And we can still adjust those projects whose start-by date hasn't passed if, say, fusion is looking good. We just shouldn't wait and pray, as we're currently doing for the most part, because that mistake will catch up to us. Rather, let's make the plan and only adjust parts with other parts that work rather than leave huge, huge blanks.

Additionally, the TGV has been a rousing success (they closed down their domestic airline because it couldn't compete in price) in part because they had access to such cheap, consistent power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide...

Climate change is a global problem and if nuclear is going to be a part of the solution the proliferation issue is central.

Geiger counters were illegal to own, by the way.

I tried to find some data on it and discovered this[1] IPCC report which indicates that renewables generally have lower lifetime emissions than nuclear, with the exception of utility-scale photovoltaic solar.

(I was surprised that any type of renewable has a larger lifetime emission estimate, so I'm puzzling over the reasons behind that now)

Edit: follow-up - also discovered a second report[2] published by the IPCC, which references two separate emissions estimates - one by the IPCC themselves as part of an 'AR5' report, and one published by SSRN (a separate organization).

The SSRN estimate indicates that solar photovoltaic (unspecified utility vs residential) is on an equal lifecycle emissions footing with nuclear.

[1] - https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

[2] - https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

Those "weren't that bad", but it'll be hard to convince the public the next one can't be worse, larger scale, longer lasting, and with more cancer. Even if the science is there, the trust isn't.

We can achieve fusion already, so presumably we already have control of it? Check out lppfusion. https://lppfusion.com/technology/focus-fusion/

I think if we discarded the failed attempts we could consolidate something here.

Seems to be happening https://lppfusion.com/international-focus-fusion-research/

You tell me how wind energy danger is compared to nuclear?

How is nuclear energy a sustainable energy source in unstable world?

The 737MAX implies that we can't be trusted with following sound technical processes to ensure safety of complicated machinery where there's a financial incentive to cut corners.

Bear in mind that this was a pretty routine earthquake that is still causing issues almost a decade later.

Global Nuclear: 2,500 TWh Global Geothermal: 12.8 GWh