Why Nuclear Must Be Part Of The Energy Solution (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why Nuclear Must Be Part Of The Energy Solution (2018)

e360.yale.edu

159 pointsyaa_minu242 comments

The article does not explain why nuclear must be part of the energy solution. In fact, the argument seem to be that nuclear has been the target of fear mongering from environmentalists and therefore nuclear must be a part of the energy solution which is a fallacy.

Germany has decommissioned numerous nuclear plants (Energiewende) and yet its GDP is up and its coal consumption down. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... Critics said it couldn't be done, except it was done. Critics claim that Energiewende isn't popular, except surveys show that it is supported by a super majority of Germans.

The main issue nuclear power's supporters ignore is that nuclear is much more expensive than renewables. According to LAZARD 14.0, the cost for wind is $26 to $54 per MWh and $129 to $198 for nuclear. https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o... Furthermore a nuclear plant costs billions to construct and is an investment that takes decades before reaching its break-even point. That's not something the market is interested in, despite record-low capital costs around the world. Should the tax-payer subsidize an energy source that is already at least four times as expensive as wind which may, in a decade or two, be ten times as expensive?

"four times as expensive as wind"

This isn't a valid comparison, since wind isn't capable of base load supply.

You would need to factor in storage costs to make the comparison valid.

Batteries are also getting cheaper and improving in capacity at immense rates too no? It seems like a double whammy against nuclear, unless there’s something I’m missing?

Just curious where we are we at in terms of the environmental aspects of mass scale heavy duty battery production?

We just spent 2 decades saying this.

I suppose we’re going to say it for another.

that’s 30 years of emissions that could have been avoided.

We've also spent 30+ years trying to build nuclear plants on time and on budget and we've been unable to do that.

Even with that, 20% of US electricity is still from nuclear.

We managed to build these before the industry became expensive.

Now Germany and the United States are rushing to close the operating plants.

I’m not sure why we can’t figure out how to build a standard design and replicate it

Because we can't build anything larger than an office building on time and on budget.

Perhaps because that standard design didn't work out?

Even Switzerland is shutting down nuclear plants and they managed to build the longest railroad tunnel of the world without budget overruns and half a year before due date.

In Switzerland it's a political decision same as Germany it has nothing todo with cost or the ability to run the plants.

That's not so clear cut. Mühleberg near Berne has said that 2019 they didn't make profit, however the operator company BKW never published gains with that plant.

https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/kanton-bern/das-akw-mueh... (paywalled)

And we've failed doing that with software for longer, yet we still keep building software.

That is if, not only can we keep making them, we produce them at massive scales without inciting coups around the world for Lithium [1]. Because let us be honest with ourselves, the CIA has staged coups around the world many-a-times [2], and iirc but can't locate that some of said instances were done to support private entities.

[1] https://www.indepthnews.net/index.php/opinion/3735-we-will-c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Lithium for energy storage is not the only option. Pumped water already has been a thing for decades. Additionally other avenues are being explored like [1] pumped air and [2] lifting concrete weights.

[1] https://www.planete-energies.com/en/medias/close/what-compre...

[2] https://profittrends.com/energy-investing/renewable-energy/s...

Interesting solutions, especially the latter, absolutely brilliant, despite the reduction in efficiency, it probably trumps batteries wrt to first materials used.

There’s no prospect of batteries acting as base load supply anytime in the foreseeable future. Batteries aren’t even great for peak supply yet. Those big grid-scale battery farms installed by Tesla (et al) are used primarily for grid stabilisation and a limited amount of useful arbitrage.

That's fine, but show your work. Nuclear gives us 24/7 reliable power. What is the cost comparison for renewables for the same product?

It's obvious that energy sources based on local meteo conditions don't have 24/7 reliability. The question is: how much of that reliability do we need? What would be possible if we did forgo some? Most of our industrial processes are optimized for pure efficiency (optimizing asymptotic behavior with no regard to constants), which is biased towards high-energy, constantly running chains and immense infrastructure. These need reliability. If we optimize for more smaller workloads, which can start/stop depending on local conditions (and power source), then we loose some efficiency in the process but gain a lot in the simplicity of the energy supply chain (which may in the end translate in lower/comparable overall energy consumption).

Electricity production in the U.S. is only about 2% of GDP, but basically every economic activity relies on electricity to function. Having very much of the electric supply be truly intermittent would create enormous costs elsewhere in the economy. If you're going to power the U.S. on renewables, you're going to need a lot of storage to get the needed reliability, so if you're comparing costs, you need to compare an equivalent end product.

> how much of that reliability do we need?

There are two guiding clues for that. One is to look at https://www.electricitymap.org/ranking and see how Germany is doing. One can derive the weather based on how brown the color is.

The second clue is energy prices swings more heavier as a country replaces nuclear with renewable. Heavy energy using industries can't double production when prices shrink by 50%, but they will stop production when costs exceed profits. This is already happening in Sweden when prices jumped by +70% this winter. It will be interesting to see what happens when the steel industry is becoming even more dependent on energy prices and will have to stop for weeks during the winter, and the effect that will have on employment contracts.

Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.

Everyone also seems to clearly ignore how detrimental they are to the environment. There's huge swathes of toxic wastelands created from mining the materials needed.

So cost, lifecycle and externalised environmental damage is what I would say is missing here.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-tr...

Late edit: Batteries certainly have their place in smoothing out the grid inputs, I don't want to come across as saying they are not useful when they certainly are. In South Australia the newly installed grid scale batteries have paid themselves off within a few years.

The article linked makes clear the engineering tradeoffs involved, and as a society we should always base these decisions on the numbers over emotion. Think there is a bright future for small modular reactors in remote and rural areas if communities are willing to accept them.

> Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.

The significance of this is a function of our ability to recycle them.

I happened to read an article a few weeks back regarding Aluminum-Air batteries, and a potential use in EVs, yet while they might not be ideal for EVs, a potential ability for use in the grid might be convenient.

> Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.

Based on what?

> Everyone also seems to clearly ignore how detrimental they are to the environment. There's huge swathes of toxic wastelands created from mining the materials needed.

Ah, you're one of those people.

Never mind, carry on.

Triple whammy if you include the larger and larger capacity factor of ever growing wind turbines (and offshore). Even if you're overprovisioning 2x and fill in with battery capacity for some of the shrinking holes inbetween, you'll end up cheaper than nuclear.

Which, on the other hand also still does not factor in the externalities of the still-not-solved issues of final deposition of nuclear waste (some quote 38 billion still outstanding for just getting rid of the current ones that haven't been factored into historic electricity prices), defending against proliferation and antitrust issues due to the massive capital investment and minimum size of nuclear power plants.

I used to be pro-nuclear at some point, but just looking at the current wholesale prices and trends, it's basically game over for nuclear.

> improving in capacity at immense rates There is almost no increase in capacity at least not without making the batteries bigger.

It also needs to factor the cost of producing batteries and manufacturing the storage.

"Base load" doesn't really exist any more. Yes, there's a minimum below which demand almost never dips, but the implication of base load is that this should be produced by the type of power plants that provide a continuous supply, like nuclear or coal. But these are extremely inflexible and can't react quickly to changes in demand or supply by other means. As the share of renewables grows, the position nuclear is in becomes worse, not better. More flexible solutions are needed that don't need demand scheduling days or weeks ahead.

Nuclear isn't as inflexible as you think. A usual change rate in power output is around 10%/min, so you can go from half to full in 5 minutes. Far away from days or weeks. Here is a nice comparison: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lastfolgebetrieb

On a synchronous grid? Unless the capacity of the nuclear plant is tiny (which means the economy of scale is lost - who is building a nuclear plant in the area of 10s of MW?), you instantly have voltage instability if you lose supply, and yes, bringing the network back to synchronicity can take days or weeks. This is the same issue we have with coal, which is part of the reason we are trying to diversify the grid (large synchronous machines are not all bad because they do maintain inertia in the network, which means it is easier to maintain voltage stability, but machines like synchronous condensers can provide this without needing to pin our energy requirements on it).

Yes, on a synchronous grid. Yes, everyone does it. Yes, it works.

You seem to be thinking in a binary manner, the plant is either on or off and there is some big central regulator doing the switching. But that isn't how it works.

Plants, through their grid connection, 'see' the grid frequency of 50.00Hz. If the frequency now deviated to 49.99Hz because consumption increased, the generators will be slowed down a little. Not a lot, because they intentionally do have some momentum reserve for very fast variations. Now that out generator has slowed, your nuclear power plant (say a BWR) reacts to this: a slower generator slows the coolant flow to the reactor. The load following will turn up the coolant pumps, cooling down the reactor a little more, leading to less steam bubbles, more moderation, more fission, higher power output. This higher power output leads to higher steam throughput, speeding up the generator.

If grid load decreases and frequency goes up to 50.01Hz, the reverse happens. Faster generator means higher coolant flow. Load following control slows down the coolant pumps a bit, steam bubbles increase through higher temperature, less moderation, lower fission, lower power and steam production, slows down the generator. Things are designed to stabilize at 50.00Hz. The exact amount of power the reactor produces is dynamically scaled up and down to keep the grid frequency stable.

For a PWR, there is some more control logic involved because steam bubbles aren't normally present in a PWR. So load following works by changing control rod positions depending on the grid frequency, which isn't quite as fast, but still in the order of minutes.

So load following is very gradual and non-binary. The myth that you can only on/off power plants is just a myth for almost any kind of plant.

That's really interesting.

I am against nuclear power but upvoted your comment anyway.

> wind isn't capable of base load supply.

I'm sorry, but really: Citation required on that claim.

There's plenty of counter positions[1][2][3] which say that if you assume 'base load' is a genuine thing, that renewables, including wind, are capable of meeting all our power generation needs - through a mix of energy sources, and also energy storage.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-10-12/renewable-ene...

[2] https://theconversation.com/renewable-energy-can-provide-bas...

[3] https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/baseload-ene...

> and also energy storage.

Precisely, that's my point. The costings of the OP ignore that part.

Base load generation is unnecessary, the only type of power that's needed is dispatchable or peak power. If you can meet demand at peak, you can meet demand in the trough too. All other power types are added to the grid to increase affordability, reliability or green credentials.

Neither wind nor nuclear are suitable to use for peak power.

This assumes that you're power generation always matches demand through time. If you had a sudden spike at night that you don't usually have (like in Texas where people kicked on their heat unexpectedly) and you were using solar, the mismatch would exist and you wouldn't be able to meet the load.

Exactly. You need natgas peakers (that aren't frozen) or charged batteries to deal with this. Nuclear, wind and solar are all unsuitable for this situation.

Or turbines burning hydrogen.

What do you think of the claims of user "corty" elsewhere in this thread, who seems to say that nuclear isn't unsuitable for this situation?

The primary problem with nuclear is the fact that it's insanely expensive. If you're not running it flat out 24/7, then the cost per MWh goes up dramatically.

Of all the other energy sources, it's the only one where we have to put serious consideration into warning people not to dig up the waste, and how to keep them from doing it thousands of years from now.

Here's a project that's supplying energy at $40/MWh *including storage costs*

https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-...

That project is a great step forward to cutting the dependency on using fossil fuels as "reserve energy" for when demand exceeds what the grid of renewables can create. There are however some details to that design. The linked project storage is 75% capacity for 4 hours, and it usage is for solar and storage which has a daily charge and discharge cycle (customers will be daily buying the stored energy and thus repaying the storage investment on a predictable and daily basis).

In order for Germany to abandon the dependency of using fossil fuels for reserve energy the storage would need to have the capacity of the full grid, it would need to be able to last weeks, and the capacity of wind would need to be able to fill both the storage and grid demands at the same time.

If and people are willing to invest into wind power plants which overcapacity won't have a buyer but will simply be there in case the batteries need to be recharged, and people also investments into batteries which won't be discharged and generating revenue unless the weather makes wind production go below demand, then there exist a chance we can replace the fossil fueled based reserve energy with wind + storage.

Currently there does not seem to exist a single wind + storage project out there. I suspect the above economics is the reason for that.

The issue is that solar/wind can only provide so much of your country’s energy supply, due to storage issues.

So you’re then left with a choice. Go with nuclear, or use fossil fuels, to make up the remainder of your energy consumption.

For example, Germany is still under 50% renewable despite their recent pushes. But instead of getting the other 50% from a relatively clean source (nuclear), they choose instead to use fossil fuels.

> "But instead of getting the other 50% from a relatively clean source (nuclear), they choose instead to use fossil fuels."

Unless you're saying that Germany is choosing to build new fossil fuel plants instead of building more renewables (which it largely isn't), what you're describing is a transition that isn't finished yet, not a choice.

This transition can _never_ be finished. There is no reality in which, in 2025, or 2030, or 2040, Germany is running 100% on renewables. Let's have a quick look at the german energy mix:

https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

As I write this:

* Germany has 68GW of wind capacity. Only 3GW are currently producing, because there's no wind.

* Solar is doing just as bad, with 9.11GW active out of 53GW

* Even worse, in the last 24 hours, wind has basically been at 5% capacity the entire time. Solar picked up quite a bit, but the base production is guaranteed by coal plants. This gets immensely worse at night where this rises to over half of their energy output

* Each kWh has cost the world the emission of 400g of CO2.

* Even in the best possible conditions, their green mix still ejects 210g of carbon per kWh.

The green energy ayatollahs, with their there-is-no-alternative policy are making things worse by refusing a temporary, controlled, safe source of energy. Is nuclear ideal ? No. Should it be a temporary (~100 years or so) source of energy while we transition to better options ? Yes. Is it the best solution that we have to fight climate change as it stands ? Absolutely.

And yes, they are building new coal plants to make up for their decisions. Datteln 4 just started up last year.

Your use of "green energy ayatollahs" tells me you're more interested in ranting than debate. Yet even in the current low-wind, low-sun scenario, 37% of German electricity is from renewable sources according to your link. Your conclusions don't match your own data.

Right now, the southern half of Germany has clear skies and thus a bright, sunny day approaching noon. These are optimal conditions for solar energy. This is why renewables get to approx. 40% of the energy mix right now. Let's have another look at those numbers around sunset (approx. 6 hours from now) and see where that goes.

"Utilizing 28.36% of installed capacity" is what the linked map says about solar right now.

I just rewound the slider to 8pm yesterday and it says "35% renewable".

I am not sure how much of these 28% are due to the distribution of solar panels in Germany and how much is due to seasonal effects. Solar irradiation varies a lot over the year. I vaguely remember that it goes down to about 300W/m^2 at noon in winter and peaks at around 1kW/m^2 at noon in summer, but I don't have time to verify that right now. The exact numbers vary by location, of course.

But I can confirm that the sun is shining because it's shining directly on my roof and satellite images show a clear sky for anything south of Frankfurt.

>Yet even in the current low-wind, low-sun scenario, 37% of German electricity is from renewable sources according to your link. Your conclusions don't match your own data.

France, which doesn't really invest heavily in renewables is at 30% right now. Spain is at 60%, and most of Europe is around 40%. It's not exactly hard. Sure, Germany doesn't have some sources (hydro is an amazing source of power), but let's not pretend that Germany is doing something amazing here. Additionally, looking only at renewable does not tell the whole story. Would you like to have 100% renewable through solar panels ? The rare earths required to build them, and the mining methods are absolutely horrendous for the environment. Not to mention changing them regularly, the sheer amount of space required for them, and potentially the batteries :since Germany doesn't exactly have lakes it can pump full of water to store energy, its options are good old chemical batteries, or Power to gas to power with its absolutely HORRENDOUS 15% efficiency.

Our primary focus should not be renewable. We legitimately have enough resources to burn uranium for thousands of years. The sun will not stop shining on us, nor will the wind stop blowing, nor the water stop moving. We have time to develop these technologies further and make them truly a solution. As it stands, they are not. The current priority should be low carbon.

Your attack, pretending I'm just looking for a rant is unjustified, but once again, I'm not surprised. Ideology does this. I'm looking for a better planet, for us to be able to electrify as much as possible so that we can be rid of fossil fuels. Germany isn't exactly helping with this.

France is investing heavily: "By 2028, the European Union’s second-largest economy wants to double installed renewable electricity capacity to up to 113 GW, compared to 2017." https://ieefa.org/france-boosts-renewable-energy-spending-to... which btw also says "Meanwhile, 14 nuclear reactors in the country will be closed by 2035, two of which have already been shuttered at Electricité de France SA’s Fessenheim plant in eastern France this year."

100% solar is a strawman you constructed. Nobody is suggesting anything close to that. And don't pretend that uranium mining is a clean business.

Power to gas technology is still in its infancy, efficiency rates will improve as it is scaled up. Every technology starts out small.

Any nuclear project we start now won't be producing power for at least a decade, more likely two. We don't have that time. You might have had an argument twenty years ago, but arguing that we can defer renewable investment if we just build enough nuclear now doesn't make sense to me. By the time your proposed plants start to come online, the transition needs to be complete.

And if you're truly interested in debate, maybe you shouldn't compare your opponents to a murderous regime?

Rare earths are not required to build solar panels. Please stop repeating this canard.

Well, Germany until very recently, comissioned new lignite plants and is still actively mining lignite in areas that are still being expanded. There is some political turmoil about that, but at best, fossil fuels have plateaued. Also, for coal plants there are periods of "readiness" where the plants are nominally shut down already, but kept in readiness when power demand is high and renewables are nil, such as the cold period at the start of february this year. And we are comissioning gas power plants as a readiness reserve, those are kept in permanent readiness right after comissioning. Costs an arm and a leg, but energy storage investment doesn't exist in Germany aside from some very minor projects.

Oh, and renewables are at a standstill as well, for the last few years there was very much stagnating growth in capacity. Since older renewable investments are reaching the end of their component lifetimes and subsidy periods, we will soon be at net negative growth in renewable capacity.

I'm not sure where politics will proceed from here, depends on the election(s) this fall. Appetite for more renewables with ever-rising prices isn't as high as it used to be, at least in my subset of the population.

The idea that in a few years germany could be opening multiple lignite coal mines to replace falling renewable output makes me incredibly anxious about our chances of transitioning away from fossil fuels at all.

I've argued it in other places in this thread, but I really think the only solution we have right now for clean baseline power is nuclear energy.

Fully agree but this will not happen and it's also too late building nuclear plants takes decades and the know how to construct them is also gone in Germany. We will try to shut off coal plants until we get a huge blackout then we go back to coal.

Are those costs calculated in the current energy markets?

Once intermittent renewables (solar, wind) reach their saturation point, nuclear revenue changes.

This is also highly dependent on how much storage (and flex) capacity is installed alongside these renewables...

This is a very important point. With load-following natural gas (and some coal) plants available, the returns on renewable energy are excellent, and the cost per kW "average" output is quite low. These values cannot be linearly extrapolated out to 100% capacity without energy storage which, even if a viable solution is invented, will not be free.

Bear in mind also that current wind and solar installs are being built in the most economical locations to build wind and solar: places that get good amounts of average wind and average light, and which are close enough to populated areas to avoid lots of transmission loss.

Future wind and solar installations (albeit with some benefit from hypothetical improvements in PV efficiency) will not be as efficient on a per-unit basis, and utilities will increasingly have to build not to the average power output (made possible only because of load-following natural gas, as well as coal) but rather to some low percentile.

An example: if a 100% renewable grid must service an area with a flat average demand of 500 GW, then if renewable output is greater than 500 GW 95% of the time, the other 5% of the time will require firing up a fossil source or turning off customers' power. And this assumes demand is constant, which it isn't-- demand peaking is just as much of a problem as supply dipping.

> Once intermittent renewables (solar, wind) reach their saturation point, nuclear revenue changes.

Yes, once that happens, nuclear revenue gets worse, while flexible power sources (natural gas) get the lion share of the profits.

Regarding the decommission of the nuclear plants in Germany: I don't understand why they are shutdown early, because the major CO2 investment happens during construction. So wouldn't it make sense to leave the active nuclear plants running until their original retirement date, and rather shutdown the coal plants early?

Germany did not go out of nuclear for CO2 emissions reasons

That's more or less what they are doing. Most of the reactors that have been shut down were built in the 1970s when safety standards weren't as strict as they are today. https://cnpp.iaea.org/countryprofiles/Germany/Germany.htm That is, the reactors were over 40 years old and were reaching their end-of-life dates anyway. Upgrading them to conform to modern safety standards isn't cost-effective.

Essentially, this is what the nuclear phaseout entails; old plants are decommissioned and governments refrain from subsidizing the construction of new ones.

>Upgrading them to conform to modern safety standards isn't cost-effective.

Why that? In France nuclear power plants are kept to the newest safety standards. Everything in a nuclear power plant can be replaced apart from the reactor vessel and the containment building.

Because many of them were built before TMI and Chernobyl, in the 70's using designs from the 60's. It's similar to how maintenance on a car from the 70's probably isn't worth it.

Nuclear isn't working very well in France either. The reactor in Flamanville had an initial projected cost of 3.5 billion euros which has now ballooned to 12.4 billion euros and the project is over a decade late. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclear-idUSKBN24A... The French are also preparing to transition away from nuclear as more plants are being decommissioned.

You're arguing in bad faith. Yes the new reactors are expensive and late but also a new class EPR. There is also no plan from France to transation away from nuclear.

Ok, so the delays and cost overruns at Flamanville were caused by a new reactor type (and this wasn't factored into the original budget estimates I presume?). What were the cause for the delays and cost overruns at Hinkley Point, Olkiluoto, and Vogtle? France aims to reduce nuclear's share of its electricity output from 75% to 50% by 2035. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-edf-idUSKBN1ZK0RL We will see what happens, but given the record-low electricity prices and the Flamanville fiasco, France's nuclear phaseout may go even quicker.

> despite record-low capital costs around the world

No [1] it seems like the costs are licensing and beaurocracy due to design re-iteration.

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

Okay, so let's dig in:

1: Electricity is roughly 25% of a country energy expense. If we want to fight climate drift, electricity should become 80% of the total energy expense at the very least. That mean multiplying the number of power plants by 3.5 roughly, if we want to keep the same level of comfort (and by two if we accept to loose 40% of our GDP).

2: here are the cost of a 100% renewable mix: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...

The land usage cost is ignored, but as 80% of the agricultural surface in the EU is used by animal or for animal feed, let's say we all divide our consumption by 7 (eat meat once a week), and the fred agricultural land can be used for biomass and solar.

The need in rare earth and how much of the worldwide production europe would take in this scenario isn't sustainable, but let's believe in an infinite earth with infinite ressources, so the extraction rate isn't an issue and is done solely with renewable. Europe still need more than 40% of the world future production.

3. So now, using the information you got with 1/, in a scenario with merely doubling the electricity output and reducing GDP by 40%, expand the data on 2/ (still without nuclear plant).

Draw your own conclusions, look at the data yourself, i only did order of magnitude calculations and it seems obvious to me. If one of my point is wrong, please explain why.

Okay, now in the price category: EDF is forced by France to sell its electricity to its competitor at a low price, and basically give it for free for some institution. Also, it is forced to cover the cost of an industrial failure it did neither start nor want, and to bear the cost of political choice (fessenhein closure). Despite that, i'm pretty sure electricity is cheaper in France than in most other European countries with no access with cheap hydro. Oh, and EDF bear the full cost of future nuclear plant decommission, so the "ït will cost more in the future" shit is wrong and already accounted for.

Your source "LAZARD" on page 3 shows wind as $29 to 54 and Nuclear as $121 to 198. Is there a reason for you using different numbers?

> The article does not explain why nuclear must be part of the energy solution.

1. "it generates baseload electricity with no output of carbon,"

2. "nuclear power plants operate at much higher capacity factors than renewable energy sources or fossil fuels."

3. "Third, nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source. "

Now you might not agree with the explanations, but to say it doesn't explain seems...incorrect.

Non sequiturs are not explanations. None of those claims imply nuclear must be part of the energy solution.

Coal consumption is may be down in Germany but it is still huge (the 4th in the world). Of course GDP is up since coal is very cheap!

Germany is the elephant in the room of Europe. Because of it, it is impossible for Europe to pressure India and China to lower their coal consumption. And EU could pressure them: it is China's largest customer and outsources quite a bit to India. Overall coal is the major factor leading to a climatic overrun.

Europe and US would still not have an ideological high ground even if they fully decommissioned coal. They built their wealth on coal, so from the perspective of BRIC and other still-industrializing countries they would (and in fact already do) appear like they are just trying to pull up the drawbridge. Pressuring developing countries to stop using coal is a lost cause, and will only increase enmity.

What we really have to do is to make alternatives so cheap and reliable, that coal looks like the stupid choice. Renewables can even be sold to certain poor areas (like deserts) as a great chance for an economic leap.

It's not a fair comparison, coal was pretty much the only game in town and at a time when understanding of pollution only related to local level.

Yes its unfair but at the end of the day its the developing countries that will be hit hardest by climate change, not the west. I do agree we should subsidise clean energy around the world though.

wind energy is so cheap why are india and china still building new coal plants?

The wind resource in India is poor. Solar is likely the answer there, with batteries and hydrogen.

Nope

https://qz.com/224275/heres-how-indias-least-windy-places-ar...

India and China have a much larger population than Europe and the US. So the situation is not comparable to the time when Europe and the US did their industrial revolution. BRICs cannot act as if it is. There are many ways to apply pressure that are not necessarily adversarial. But of course if Europe does not lead the way in de-carbonating electricity it will automatically be perceived as adversarial.

I think nuclear definitely has a role to play, at least in the short term. I'm not sure about expanding its usage, but definitely maintain what we have until it can be replaced with renewables, and definitely replace nuclear only after coal/gas/other fossil fuels are no longer being used anywhere.

Don't be fooled by disastrous events, nuclear is statistically the safest energy source we have[1], so don't fear it senselessly. This is a whole topic on it's own and I won't delve deeper into it here.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

> Don't be fooled by disastrous events, nuclear is statistically the safest energy source we have[1], so don't fear it senselessly.

The fear of operation should not be put forward as the one problematic thing of nuclear energy.

Another big problem is how we deal with the toxic waste for the next millennia? Especially looking at the volatility of sensible politics in the US, how can you be sure that the next Trump will not just suppress information about leaking nuclear waste and straight up not deal with it because it is “fake news”?

The problem with nuclear power plants is that: You have to deal with very dangerous material and guarantee that this waste, which could very well outlive humanity, will not hurt your population. How can you guarantee that? Don’t use the straw-man argument of “Oh ya’ll are just against nuclear because of safety in operation”.

> The problem with nuclear power plants is that: You have to deal with very dangerous material and guarantee that this waste, which could very well outlive humanity, will not hurt your population?

It is worth noting when considering this question that fossil fuels also leave dangerous and radioactive waste, but instead of being confined to a dense waste we understand how to contain, it is emitted as particulates into the air that we breath.

It's well known that coal exhaust isn't fairy dust, but it doesn't pose a storage problem [edit: on the scale of millenia], so your argument amounts to whataboutism.

It isn't whataboutism if people write off an energy source because it creates visible and containable waste and as a result a much more dangerous energy source wins out that emits much more of an invisible and uncontainable waste.

Coal exhaust may not, but coal itself does, just google/ddg " coal slurry disasters" to see the impact when it goes wrong.

In the context of trump being stupid, I can't guarantee anything. Assuming sane leadership there are established methods that appear to work well.

In response to trump being stupid my only response is that waste management isn't the nuclear problem in worried about when it comes to trump...

I agree with you on most of your comment, apart from:

> maintain what we have until it can be replaced with renewables

We cannot be sure renewables will ever be able to replace nuclear/fossil/hydroelectric, thus we should be a bit more conservatives in our plans for the future.

Why don't you think we can use renewables to reach 100%? People have done calculations on it using existing tech?

For my country, those calculations were done by a government body in 2014, and they estimated that the total cost would be somewhat higher, but not astronomical. But since then, the prices have fallen much faster than they anticipated.

Unless there’s a massive breakthrough in battery tech, the manufacturing of sufficient batteries would be a guaranteed environmental disaster.

Lithium mining has an impact similar to oil extraction. (On average -- oil sands and fracking are worse, conventional oil production is better).

But since batteries can be used a few thousand times and then can be recycled efficiently, the volume required is a tiny fraction of the petroleum requirements.

Other materials are used in even smaller quantities. Cobalt is a disaster, but grid batteries don't use cobalt, they generally use nickel & iron.

It is a large environmental impact. But compared to the alternative, it's very green.

I was speaking in absolute terms.

When speaking in relative terms to a newly built fossil fuel plant you are most likely correct. You'd be hard pressed to find a plausible source of energy that's worse for the environment (immediate AND long term) than burning dirty sequestered carbon sources like coal and oil.

When speaking in relative terms to a newly built nuclear plant—the context of my response—batteries would be significantly worse per KWh of baseload energy supplied.

Because it need to be 350%, not 100%.

> Why don't you think ...

It's not what I think: it's what we can be sure of!

If we ever get to the point where we can keep the same living standards as of today, with no fossil and no nuclear, well: let it be!

Should we push for it? Yes, we should!

Should we pay more taxes in order to push for it? Yes, we should!

Should we bet on it and risk our living standards? No, thank you!

> Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide

It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies.

This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die. Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people. Contamination from Chernobyl to this day is a problem in Germany for instance.

We're comparing two neighbourhoods. One has less deaths and less robberies. It is the one with nuclear power.

Chernobyl has done less damage and had less impact on those millions of people than the totally routine burning of coal. I grew up in a coal mining region; I fully expect more people suffer negative health outcomes when coal works as expected than in a Class 7 nuclear catastrophe. We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect.

The overwhelming safety of the nuclear process makes the failures look bad, because we aren't used to nuclear plants producing detectable levels of ambient pollution.

> We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect.

This also goes for nuclear.

The "too hard to prove cause" is for attributing individual cases. In any particularly case - just like with the link of smoking and lung cancer - it is impossible to say if lung problems were caused by coal plants.

Statistical estimates of the amounts of deaths and lung problems coal power plants cause, however, can be much more accurate. And they bespeak hundreds of thousands gruesome deaths from coal every year.

Accidents are bad but left-overs are even worse. I wish people would think more about long-term problems with spent fuel rods. I don't think that burying them is a viable solution as the Asse mine in Germany shows.

https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-l...

The salt mine was deemed to be safe for thousands of years. But then people discovered ingress of water. And salt water is corrosive.

I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with nuclear storage the next few thousand years.

We should never have used nuclear power in large scale.

Edit: And we should shut down coal, too. It's not about nuclear vs coal but nuclear vs renewables.

but, if coal burning continues to pump out carbon dioxide into our atmosphere and eventually completely upend any semblance of stable environment... wouldn’t it be preferred to make not doing that a priority?

It's not about nuclear vs coal but about nuclear vs renewables.

Just shut down both coal and nuclear!

And what happens when there's a storm? Renewables alone can't provide all the power needed over extended periods of time without very significant storage, for which there is no large scale cost effective solution actually implemented.

Nuclear power also shuts down when there's significant disruption from nature. Nuclear power even might do something even worse than shutting down.

It took a tsunami on an unmaintained nuclear power plant to cause Fukushima.

It took the russians lifting off _every single security mechanism_ to cause Chernobyl.

The ojer major incidents like Three Mile Island are just "well, security measures have failed, we didn't have enough fallbacks. It's broken now. Light irradiation around but nothing major".

So, no, nuclear power doesn't stop for anything but the absolute worst conditions. As for the "doing even worse" part, two can play that game: hydro is renewable and yet killed hundreds of thousands. Oh no, stop hydro!

The problem are the future accidents with the left-overs of nuclear. They are simply uncountable because these are in the future.

Advanced radio chemistry will produce meta-materials which will enable time travel. Problem solved! Wheeee!

All the nuclear waste the US has ever produced fits in a football field at a height of around 30 feet.

The Asse is a people problem, caused by incompetence. Look who is responsible for it, if you like to ;)

Furthermore, to my knowledge there is no higly radioactive stuff stored down there, just some recklessly offloaded cans with cleaning clothes, and such. Again, incompetence and recklessness.

As of now, anything highly radioactive is stored above ground in 'Castor' either under clear skies, or light halls there, or as 'Zwischenlager' on the grounds of NPPs, maybe sometimes exported to make it a problem of other people, as usual...

Anyways, we could possibly transmutate it, like it is researched in Mol, Belgium, 'burn' its full potential in liquid-salt reactors, whatever. This whole longterm storage concept is shizophrenic thinking, because we didn't really research nuclear further, after we had working reactors based on (upscaled)military applications for economic, political, whatever reasons.

I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with renewable energy in the next few dozen years.

edit: Another thing regarding long term storage in 'geologic times'. If some group in 100.000 years. or later comes across this, and doesn't know how to handle it, why should I care about those stupid morons?

For all I care they discovered the curse of the atomic pharaos, and deserve it! Degraded bitches!

F-U-C-K-I-N-G-D-E-A-L-W-I-T-H-I-T!

The WHO estimates that 4,200,000 people die every year from ambient air pollution. That’s one death every 7.5 seconds. That’s one Chernobyl death toll every 18 to 125 hours (depending on which estimate you’re looking at).

The argument about land being uninhabitable is equally silly, because land permanently submerged in the ocean tends to be uninhabitable as well.

The perception of the risks associated with nuclear is so dramatically misaligned with reality. The only conclusion I can possibly draw is that anybody who is anti-nuclear can’t possibly be taking climate change seriously.

I’m not saying that nuclear is worse than coal (I don’t think so), but only that there are negative effects beyond death and that we should take them into account.

The things we compare are nuclear and renewables. The consensus is already pretty clear that coal is on its way out. Which I think we all can agree on is a good thing.

> It’s not a market decision, but a government decision

Yes, the government must include CO2 tax into the price making nuclear much more viable.

> That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die.

So you prefer to kill the whole neighborhood and claim that it’s safe, because there are no robbers anymore.

Yes, there were a lot of deaths from these nuclear disasters, they were horrible, we should have avoided them. But nuclear energy is still much less deadly than fossil fuels. Air pollution-caused diseases are lung cancer and stroke for example. I think nuclear plants have become much safer and there is more international regulation to maintain their safety. I recommend this excellent video on this topic from Kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM

Not only is nuclear safer than coal, it's safer than solar! (in terms of deaths per Gwh produced)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

One of the points of the toplevel comment is exactly

> This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths.

So adding a statistic that only focuses on that seems not helpful to me. Are there some available that give a broader analysis (that might not be as catchy for social media)?

What other metric would you use though? It seems to me the top-level comment is arguing "I think nuclear is scary so therefore statistical risk analysis is invalid"

I disagree.

Impact on eco systems and economy, injuries, and maybe other effects that are not easily compressed into a single number. I don't disagree that Deaths/GWh is one of the most important statistics on the safety of energy production. But while we often quantify safety of roads/vehicles by deaths/billion length units driven, one assumption is it is highly correlated to other safety indicators such as injuries. Coal will probably be even worse considering these statistics and nuclear will probably still fare well.

One example I am aware of: Germany still monitors contamination of mushrooms and other wildlife in bavarian soil [1]

[1] http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/bitstream/urn:nbn:de:0221-20191007...

Chernobyl and Fukushima are not the best arguments against nuclear imo.

Chernobyl was underbudgetted in terms of safety. For instance no protective dome was places around the reactor housing as done in other countries. Add that to a suboptimal design to start with and sheer bad luck...

Fukushima on the other hand is a better comparison. But on larger scales, such as Europe or the US, surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?

> hernobyl was underbudgetted in terms of safety.

I think that is something we should expect to be the default and is a problem in maintenance as well. Leaky pipes and more are common problems for nuclear power plants. e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/radioactive-leaks-found-at-75-o...

> Fukushima on the other hand is a better comparison. But on larger scales, such as Europe or the US, surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?

In the end it matters to massively overscale the safety for the location it is in, no matter where you put it. Including rigurous maintenance and checks of all of this. But those things will make it much more expensive.

The article you reference is a bit of a scare job, and you're conflating here on-site storage facilities with the actual operating reactor. Note that levels of tritium do not exceed limits in drinking water.

Because of nuclear physics (gamma energy levels, isotope half-life), it's very easy to identify when any contamination, even amounts that have no effect on human health, escape from a nuclear plant. Meanwhile, fossil fuel emissions (not just carbon-- soot and other particulates cause near-term health problems for humans) continue.

You still have to remember that the Fukushima reactors were also old and crappy designs. That TMI was as harmless as it was came from the things we learned, Fukushima predates that. Tepco also refused to upgrade or improve several safety measures.

And the Czernobyl design not only ignored a lot of safety knowledge the Sowjets had at that time, but took intentional shortcuts to be cheaper and make the fuel more accessible (supposedly for bomb production).

> You still have to remember that the Fukushima reactors were also old and crappy designs.

This is only comforting if we stopped operating "old and crappy" reactors. But overall, your comment seems to agree with my point, as you wrote:

> Tepco also refused to upgrade or improve several safety measures.

> ignored a lot of safety knowledge the Sowjets had at that time, but took intentional shortcuts to be cheaper and make the fuel more accessible

This the point I tried(, but not neccesarily succeded) to make: We should expect this kind of corner cutting and underfunding.

Yes, I agree completely. Nuclear can be safe and sensible, but we do need to get rid of a bunch of old crap first.

> surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?

Reactors need lots of water for cooling, so they're regularly placed at rivers. Rivers flood during melting season and storms. Storms also interrupt the grid occasionally. Due to climate change, these events are getting more common.

As a result, anywhere you can place reactors, you'll have to deal with situations where you have no grid connection, no backup power, no generators, and flooding, at unexpected times.

A nuclear reactor needs always, 24/7, forever power due to cooling. This isn't really compatible.

One point the article could have made but curiously didn't is that even in the case of a catastrophic aftermath like Chernobyl or Fukushima the end result is primarily human moving away from the zone because of cancer risk and nature claiming back control of the exclusion zone.

So at one point maybe we should start considering that nuclear is mostly dangerous to human society. As human society is responsible for climate change maybe that is some form of karma. Should nuclear be part of the solution this is the risk we might need to take because we will be the most impacted by consequences.

Life, Uh, Finds a Way...

Radiation doesn’t only affect humans

Yes but the deep question is the following:

Being an animal would you rather unknowingly have you lifespan reduced by an invisible force or being killed by humans or the artificial infrastructures they build by grinding more and more natural space each year?

Unfortunately animals can't advocate for themselves so we'll have to try figure out the best answer.

And yet the exclusion zone around Chernobyl has biodiversity higher than anywhere else in Europe.

So even if nuclear power is as bad as hippies say it's still better for the environment than human civilization.

You don't need to blow a nuclear reactor for improve biodiversity, just make the place a natural park.

I admit that it's not so spectacular, but it works too, and I suspect it's cheaper.

It seems that this is debatable, as a simple google search turns up completely opposite conclusions, such as this: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-10819027

Why not cite an actual paper instead of an interview with someone who 'feels their duty' is to tell us about the dangers of nuclear accidents?

>In contrast, our long-term empirical data showed no evidence of a negative influence of radiation on mammal abundance. Relative abundances of elk, roe deer, red deer and wild boar within the Chernobyl exclusion zone are similar to those in four (uncontaminated) nature reserves in the region and wolf abundance is more than 7 times higher. Additionally, our earlier helicopter survey data show rising trends in elk, roe deer and wild boar abundances from one to ten years post-accident. These results demonstrate for the first time that, regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals, the Chernobyl exclusion zone supports an abundant mammal community after nearly three decades of chronic radiation exposures.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

> Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people.

Chernobyl yes. Fukushima, you are stretching things a bit. Unless you are talking about mass hysteria related to Nuclear Power.

> This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die.

The 1952 Great Smog of London [0] caused 4000 deaths due to coal burning over FIVE DAYS. Not quite like for like, but the Chernobyl Exclusion zone is about 1000 sq. miles, which is approximate the same size as (modern) London.

The UN predicts that possibly 4000 people may die from Chernobyl over a 50 YEAR period. [1]

> Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people. Contamination from Chernobyl to this day is a problem in Germany for instance.

I'd like to see references for this.

Fossil fuel mining causes far more deaths than nuclear. Fossil fuel burning causes even more deaths from respitory diseases.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London 1. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

"As a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident, certain species of mushrooms and wild game are still highly contaminated with caesium-137 in some areas of Germany." https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush..., from the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.

Ultimately it says this:

> If wild game or wild growing mushrooms are consumed in usual amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low but it can be avoided. Those who wish to reduce their personal exposure should not eat wild game self-hunted or mushrooms self-picked in the most affected areas of Germany.

and

> In Germany it is not permitted to market food with a radiocaesium content of more than 600 becquerel per kilogram.

and

> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms.

So isn't this is just cautionary, rather than a significant health risk?

It's mostly cautionary but a problem for forest management because it means that the radioactivity of game has to be checked and it often can't be sold. I've eaten the mushrooms in question (self-picked) and would do it again. They're delicious. But my region also wasn't particularly hard-hit by the Chernobyl fallout.

> It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies.

No energy source can survive without government subsidies at the moment, one way or another.

I think you're mistaking Fukushima for the tsunami that caused the incident at the nuclear plant.

Let's not forget the sheer magnitude of the earthquake/tsunami: most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, tsunami waves up to 40.5 meters

This fact sheet [1] from UNSCEAR (united nations agency) shows the impact of the nuclear incident itself:

* Cancer rates to remain stable

* Theoretical increased risk of thyroid cancers among most exposed children

* No impact on birth

* No discernible increase in cancer rates for workers

* Temporary impact on wildlife

It's a short fact sheet so I encourage you to read it completely

In comparison, the tsunami itself [2] killed over 15,000 people and still 200,000+ live away from their home

[1] https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2016/factsheet_en_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

It might have been the biggest tsunami ever recorded, but it's nothing new that tsunamis do occur in Japan, and still the plant was allowed to be built and operated directly at the seaside at a height of only 10 meters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). And why? Because the nuclear lobby had a lot of influence in Japan.

I'm not sure where you get the 200,000 evacuated people from, but the only mention of 200,000 people being evacuated in the article you are quoting is in fact in the "Nuclear power plants" section...

Nuclear energy, for generations now, always has a stronger theoretical case than a practical one.

Going on first principles, nuclear is amazing. Abundant. Clean. Cheap. Constant. When we build cities along the kuiper belt, they're obviously going to be nuclear powered.

Practically... Nuclear energy has been around for 60+ years. There have been massive investments. Many plants in many countries trying different things. It's rarely been a notable success. It rarely been especially cheap. Not that nuclear energy projects always fail, but...

To riff on the author's own analogy: nuclear never had a coal_vs_wood moment. It didn't ultimately matter that the clergy hated coal. Coal was better than wood by a big enough margin that it would win regardless. Nuclear was never practically superior enough to replace coal, and many countries that invested in nuclear divested later.

Renewables OTOH, despite their first principles problems are on an economic trajectory that nuclear never had in practice.

Long term, nuclear is a good bet. Practically, it's that bet rarely never paid off to date... and many bets have been made.

What counts as notable success? The entire base energy load for Ontario, Canada comes from nuclear (see: live.gridwatch.ca) and the provinces high energy costs (such as they were) were directly caused by investment in renewables through guaranteed high rates paid to producers. This is not a political point, I supported those mostly-now-abandoned investments. They took down just-erected windmills near my house in recent years (Prince Edward County, Ontario).

Seems like you are seizing defeat here.

Notable success would be what was promised in the 50s. Energy so abundant that it's not metered. Doing to coal what coal did to wood. I don't think you should judge renewables on the same terms. These are much younger projects, at scale.

Seizing defeat is fair, perhaps. Nuclear has been on the cusp for too long. "Marginally better than coal/gas" is not the notable success we were promised. I'm willing to cut losses, if that's all that is at risk.

I'm not saying that nuclear's first principles advantages will never materialize. They will eventually. I just wouldn't be betting on nuclear now.

You’re definitely right by that measure. There’s a famous hydro energy deal between the provinces of Newfoundland and Quebec in Canada where in the 1960s Newfoundland agreed to provide hydro power in a long term contract (80 years?) for what is now a fraction of its value. It’s viewed as an enormous boondoggle (“Churchill Falls”) but what most don’t realize is it was signed under the expectation that the coming wave of cheap, abundant nuclear would make hydro power uncompetitive.

That's a really demonstrative example. I love trying to see the present from the viewpoint of the past. I feel like it sharpens the quality of my subjective judgement more than anything else.

I was quite obsessed with Keynes' famous 15 hr workweek prediction as a student.

"a Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources"

Since when are Pulitzer prize winners experts on nuclear energy?

A sentence like this is shows he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about:

"Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem in the U.S., is not any longer a technological problem."

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU

"A final complaint against nuclear power is that it costs too much. Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide, but there is no question that a full accounting of the external costs of different energy systems would find nuclear cheaper than coal or natural gas. "

Ok, see here https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper... Nuclear is already the most expensive solution to produce electricity.

Also we don't need artificial nuclear energy here on Earth. There is plenty of nuclear energy available for free from the sun.

The pricing analysis assumes that costs for renewables scale linearly as they approach 100% of grid capacity, but they do not. Other comments in this thread speak to this phenomenon well. Without viable energy storage, operating in parallel with something like load-following nuclear is necessary for wind and solar to remain as cheap as currently quoted. If viable scale energy storage is invented, it will not be free.

Batteries for energy storage is already viable.

Batteries are already cheaper than high voltage power lines.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...

In some markets. The author of this short essay makes many assumptions that trends will remain linear.

It doesn't matter. Both HVDC and batteries are cheaper than nuclear, by a lot.

The cost of solar, *including storage* is $40/MWh in Arizona *today*. Running that $40/MWh power to NY over HVDC is cheaper than a nuclear power plant. And according to the author, generating and storing the power in New York via solar or wind would be even cheaper.

This essay's math literally relies on linear continuation of current price trends for over a decade with no justification of the linear assumption in order to reach this conclusion.

My main issue with Nuclear power is my lack of trust in regulators over time.

Nuclear done well is safe, clean and has an extremely low carbon footprint.

But, where profit incentives exist, lobby groups exist. And the US government has shown itself incredibly pliable with enough donations and time given.

So for me, give it 10-15 years, or less, and the safety margins will erode over time as people get too comfy with the new normal, and like always happens, be it Boeing, Texas power systems or the like, I have a nasty suspicion bad events will start happening at a scale previously unseen, with companies not doing their due diligence and lobbying for concessions and bending regulation around expensive but necessary precautions.

You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.

They kill less people than coal if you make a very gross average of total deaths per kWh.

30 years after the Chernobyl disaster there are two uninhabitable subdivisions of Ukraine that will require control for the rest of human history. "Average deaths" doesn't matter when the people living near nuclear power plants have to be in constant preparation for total evacuation.

I agree with the parent comment in that I wouldn't trust Western countries in maintaining nuclear plants for 40 years and safely disassembling them afterwards. Luckily for us, renewables exist so we don't have to.

> when the people living near nuclear power plants have to be in constant preparation for total evacuation

What are you talking about? Is there any serious unpredictable danger for people living near Chernobyl?

> Is there any serious unpredictable danger for people living near Chernobyl?

The towns surrounding Chernobyl were completely evacuated. This can happen again.

In Germany, the government of Aachen is giving iodine tablets and asked its people to prepare for an eventual nuclear catastrophe because of the nearby nuclear power plant behind the border with Belgium [1]. The nuclear power station was designed to run 30 years, but 15 years after its expiration date there's no sign the Belgian government will close it.

I wouldn't trust any western government to not fall for the same "already built plant = free energy" trap the Belgian government fell into. We are better off admitting that and focusing on renewables instead of risking nuclear.

https://m.dw.com/en/german-city-of-aachen-offers-iodine-tabl...

> The towns surrounding Chernobyl were completely evacuated. This can happen again.

This is just FUD. There is no reasonable possibility of that.

I might be missing some information, but why not?

The Chernobyl disaster happened on a world power with strong scientific and engineering capabilities. I don't see how a power plant that's 15 years over expiration date like Tihange couldn't be a couple of serious mistakes away from a similar catastrophic meltdown.

This is not "Tihange will definitely melt down". This is "there's a small chance Tihange might melt down and render a significant part of Belgium and Germany uninhabitable like parts of Ukraine and Belarus are uninhabitable now" which to me is unacceptable.

We know pretty well what happened with Cehrnobyl and why and the current state of the reactor. There is no magic there, just science.

Did they do that when they played with the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_(J%C3%BClich) ?

Along those same lines, can modern America even handle major infrastructure projects such as new nuclear power plants, without those initiatives collapsing into a mass of red tape, contractor corruption, dueling interest groups, endless studies, political showmanship, and cost and time overruns? The time for nuclear was decades ago, when the country's systems were more functional.

Relevant Kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

> Elizabethan preachers railed against a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement.

1. So it seems, 500 years later, as we struggling with all the issues this resource has caused and still causing they were not wrong...

> For too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is today’s Devil’s excrement

Read (1)

--- It is only a question who will suffer along the lines, after we are long gone from the existence.

When you consider any public infrastructure - roads, telecommunications, electricity grids - the bottleneck is always how much can be supplied during peak periods.

When we add capacity, its always to address the peak demand.

The solution is to get smarter about shifting demand, particularly as we build out a massive fleet of EVs.

Here's an example of hourly electricity use in Florida: https://energymag.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/daily-demand-f...

We need appliances that can take into account grid pricing, and any local power supply that the owner has (solar, EV battery), and adjust accordingly. eg. heating or cooling a house an hour earlier than when the owner would typically manually request it.

Secondly for EVs that can charge offpeak at night (eg. at 9pm, not simply when the owner gets home at 6pm and plugs it in - contributing to peak demand) and then upload some power back into the grid in the morning, and then during the day again if necessary.

Its going to be hard to integrate this into appliances, but power upload and smart charging/discharging should be mandated for new EVs.

While we're at it we should also begin charging for time of use for roads - to reduce congestion, and replace the revenue from gas taxes. This UI and charging mechanism could be built into the infotainment system.

The article discusses only nuclear fission power if that helps to decide whether you actually want read it. The arguments presented are pretty much the same as always.

There are many videos of Jean-Marc Jancovici on this subject. Some of them are in English. It gives documented pragmatic analysis. One conclusion is clear: Current nuclear plants shall be preserved to smooth the energetic transition (fossil free). What has been done in Germany was not wise.

It is less obvious whether we shall build new nuclear plants or focus on new energy sources. In France, we struggle to recover our aptitude to build new plants.

The article's actual title does not senselessly elide the word "power." Also, it's from 2018.

I'm waiting for those Thorium reactors to start popping up

Here is one being hatched: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1

Perhaps some form of nuclear power can be part of a sustainable energy solution, but that doesn't mean expanding nuclear power is a good idea right now. Building, running, and maintaining a nuclear power plant is a formidable engineering challenge. So is dealing with its waste. The biggest fallacy is that just because we've been able to get by with temporary waste storage and haven't had a disaster so far we'd be able to deal with much more over much longer periods of time. Nobody who's serious about this or any other topic just assumes infinite scalability. Show proof or GTFO.

With newer plant designs and better waste handling we can come back to considering expansion of nuclear. AFAIK there are just too many problems still unsolved, so that would be premature. In the here and now solar and wind seem vastly preferable. Also, the remaining problems with wave/tidal power, while far from trivial, seem likely to be solved before the remaining problems with nuclear. If that happens, there's no reason to take any risk with nuclear.

I am in no way or shape against nuclear power per se. I know its technology, I have studied the engineering behind it etc. Still, any argument against nuclear is immediately categorized as "fearmongering" no matter how much it isn't based on the technology itself. Facts and an interest in truly bringing your country forward don't matter. Money and lobbyism is what rules the discussions.

No matter how many subversive nuclear shills keep posting on reddit and other forums. Reddit drowns in fake marketing/PR accounts, you can buy them by the thousands. In the past, I have seen templates for responses written in the weekly pro-nuclear threads. But whatever - just one simple statement that remains true in 2021 is this:

Nuclear fission power is entirely uneconomical and already replaced by safer, better alternatives.

And on top of the insane cost - plants will never be profitable without lifelong government subsidies - the insane length of construction and planning to build new modern generation plants is completely out of what's reasonable because we have to tackle climate change NOW. You're looking at $20bn and 10-15 years of construction at least.

Finland is currently struggling to finish their new reactor and it costs them dearly. Just invest in renewables and be done with it far sooner at much lower cost and factor 1000 less problems (aside from lobbyism and shilling). Just look at this mess of cost and lost time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c... All that jazz for a measly 1600 MW.

Less than 1500 off-shore wind power turbines deliver a whooping 7.5 Gigawatt for Germany [1]. If you can build 300 wind turbines in 20 years at a fraction of the cost of a single nuclear plant you will have the same output and no possible nuclear incidents or nuclear waste to take care of. Mix it with other renewables and you get the power consistency you need. Nuclear in 2021 is so incredibly unreasonable it bothers me to no end.

In Germany, we still have no reasonable way to dispose of 1900 CASTOR containers containing dangerous plutonium with a half-life of 24,000 fucking years. The containers are rated for 40 year protection btw.

We have a super majority that rejects nuclear power. Do we struggle sometimes to make the shift away from fossil fuels AND nuclear at the same time? Yes. Do we have to buy power from France or other neighbors in times of high demand? Has happened before. But we are making progress and are able to sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY.

If we had this discussion in 1990, my opinion would have been different. But it's too late and too expensive now to shift back into nuclear. By 2042, when a plant planned TODAY would go online, our renewable infrastructure will far outdo what any nuclear plant is capable of in terms of risk-reward.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-offshore-w...

Yes, you are right, but part of the reason that nuclear power is so costly and we don't have a good solution to handle wastes is that we didn't have much scientific and engineering progress in that are for a very long time. Nobody wanted to work on this as such people were treated by academia, media and eco organizations like Holocaust deniers.

That plutonium is that dangerous since it emits energy that probably could be used with the right tech.

"struggle to make the shift away from fossil fuel AND nuclear (...) have to buy power from France (...) are able to sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY."

Let's say 40% of Germany's electricity consumption comes from renewables and 60% from the other sources. If I cut the other sources, will renewables still be able to provide their 40% shares? The answer is no, because people and the economy need a stable electricity. Providing Watts at random times is absolutely not the same value as providing them consistently in a predictable manner

When you say "sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY" you're missing "with the unavoidable baseload provided by non intermittent sources"

Folks, this is the exact kind of post I am talking about. Uninformed or shilling, who knows.

Germany is already providing stable base load power using renewables, and increasingly so, but here we are, some random account is taking quotes out of context "(...)" and spouts some bullshit about "people needing stable electricity".

Yes, they need it. And guess what. German electricity outages per household amount to somewhere around 15-18mins per year over the last years. As renewable shares grow, coal declines and nuclear is basically wiped out the average interruptions continue to shrink. [1]

The US is at 8 hours per household per year, what are your nuclear plants doing? The answer is obvious: it's a mundane question. It's not just the type of energy generation that matters when providing a stable network and therefore this argument is pure and utter rubbish.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electric...

It's all nice, but where does the base load come in? From what I know Germany is decomissioning their reactors, and is replacing them with NEW coal power plants + importing energy from other countries (which is just sidestepping the problem)

What's the real solution here? If all countries did what Germany does, we'll have a lot of coal power plants, why not instead have nuclear ones? I don't know a lot about this topic, but it seems to me there isn't any viable solution here, even if nuclear costs a lot.

> What's the real solution here?

I haven't spotted this in this entire thread: managing energy consumption and more efficient distribution. There's a massive demand for energy. Why? What's causing this? And is that demand really justified?

Vox did a really great piece about how managing consumption and distribution is a major part of the equation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfAXbGInwno

The controversial part is this: how do you do this? There are two totally naive approaches: either rely completely on free market dynamics, or heavily regulate how energy is consumed and conserved. Reality sits somewhere in between.

Then there's also a hard reality: optimization of consumption has a hard lower bound before the consequences become too painful. As a thought experiment, you could imagine a world with no electrical power plants whatsoever: but then you'd turn back the clock to how things were before the late 19th century. That's when you realize how electricity has shaped modern society over the past 150 years, but also how dependent modern society is on its availability.

Electricity is also a tradable commodity. It's a political and economical strategic asset. Part of why a radical shift isn't possible is because of existing interests who oppose anything that might cause a shift in power balances. I think it's important to recognize this as well. Especially in a discussion that promotes particular types of energy production over one another.

One potential scenario might be this:

Electricity has become superfluous. Nobody ever questions the intricacies of energy production and transport when they plug their smartphone charger in a socket. The vast majority of consumers are conditioned with the idea that a socket will always provide an infinite flow of power. It's only when power is cut off for whatever reason - brown outs, black outs, power is too expensive,... - that one starts to understand that this isn't always true. Having access to electricity isn't a human right after all.

The future might be painful in a sense that more and more people will be confronted with this painful truth. If not pro-actively and softly pushed through public debate; the circumstances - raising energy prices, availability,... - will force people to confront their own power consumption, the lifestyle they have build based on the assumption that power will always be available. It will also confront them with the inequities caused by all of this.

That's why I think it's a fallacy to perceive both nuclear and renewables as "silver bullet" solutions to avert such scenario's. Reality is far more complex.

Yeah, let's compare the market cap of nuclear companies and the market cap of Total and other "renewable + gaz!!!!11".

> Facts and an interest in truly bringing your country forward don't matter. Money and lobbyism is what rules the discussions.

Well said! But i'm pretty sure not all greenpeace workers are shills for Total, some are genuine, accusing them of being shills is uncalled for and wrong.

Some questions though: electricity is 25% of our energy usage right now, we need to elimitate 80% carbon emission before 2050, so we need to use Co2-free electricity for 80% of our usages, right?

here is the cost to replace only our current electricity generation by only renewable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191... The price does not account for land destruction and material rarefication btw, but let's consider those negligeable, and do some order of magnitude calculations. energy generationcapacity: 1.9TW needed, * 3.5 let's say 6TW. 200 GW of power transmission: 700 GW of power transmission. Biomass 8.5 EJ => ???? well, this is harder since biomass in those scenarii would be used as heating mostly, so not really helping a 80% electricity energy mix. Let's say 28 EJ but with the energy loss in carnot machines, i think it would rather be close to 40 EJ. Do we even have enough land to get to 16 EJ every year? I'm not sure, especially if we have to clear the land with electric tools.

It seems reasonable to say that this won't happen. Ever.

>Do we have to buy power from France or other neighbors in times of high demand? //

We don't need nuclear energy, except we need neighbours to use it for times of high demand??

Why is France selling us (UK and other nearby countries) all this nuclear generated electricity if, as you contend, it's entirely uneconomical and already replaced?

The article doesn’t even discuss the annual deaths from coal mining accidents, specially in China.

I saw this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrT3m89Y3M

I hope they get adopted and maybe even replace the old ones plus coal/gas powered ones.

I can't recommend you spend your time reading this nebulous essay, which doesn't in any way address the time and cost blowouts for the latest generation of reactors, instead choosing to blame woke liberals. Tiresome.

Blaming hippies is kinda like the Solarwinds CEO blaming an intern.

If nuclear power was all that it's boosters claim it is, the objections of woke liberals would be a long forgotten road kill squirrel. Seriously the hippies don't have that much political power.

No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear, no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365.

Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek.

Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems. But because it's unfashinable to be pro-science in liberal cities no one has the guts to stand up and say "You're not only wrong but delusional" to the hippies who have as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography.

It's ridiculous that the people who say they want to save the earth are the reason why we've locked in a 6th mass extinction already.

Renewables are based on the hope that one day we [...] get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek.

You're right that we aren't there yet, but Star Trek level technology is hyperbole. Just to give one example, the German gas grid can store several hundreds TWh of energy, and there are lab results that indicate we might be able to improve power-to-gas-to-power efficiencies to make this viable[1].

[1] https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2018_009_power-to-gas-wit...

[1] is really interesting, but it is literally burning natural gas with extra steps. How is it better than normal gas generation?

Because you synthesize the gas, there's no net CO2 production.

The issue with burning natural gas (i.e. from fossil sources) is that it increases the amount of carbon in circulation.

"Science for me and not for thee!"

I can't understand the downvotes you got.

You pushed may be a bit on political stereotypes, but other than that you just stated the facts.

That's where we are at right now, just stating the energy facts are considered political...

There's no realistic scenario at the moment where renewables can be used alone to build a grid for a full country unless you are betting on future tech which doesn't (and might never) exist.

Because it's overstating the facts ("no other source", "seen only in Star Trek", "as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography", "ridiculous"), contradicting any study on the topic I've seen (which, to be fair, might have been a biased sample).

This was my take-away when I looked into it a couple of years ago:

Going 60% renewable is not much of a problem.

80% needs investment into infrastructure, but still viable.

100% would need better storage technology - or the political will to make cuts:

You first need to build enough off-shore windparks, storage and smarter grids to get you through the 'Dunkelflaute' (simultaneous reduced energy production from solar and on-shore wind due to weather conditions, sometimes for weeks!).

There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to adjust to uneven levels of power generation, eg by shutting down some industries when production is low, and dumping excess power somewhere when it's high (smelting, scientific experiments, bitcoin mining, whatever).

We don't need 100% renewable, we need 350% renewable. Electricity is at best 25% of our energy usage. 20% of the energy i'm consumming everyday come from nuclear and i'm living in France, where 80% of our power grid is nuclear.

And we need the grid investment in copper that comme with it if we want a distributed grid. And a secondary grid to serve hospital and emergency buildings.

Oh, and we need Veolia's solar panel recycling plant: its economical, recylce 91 to 95% of the product (granted, the less important part) and it only cost 8 time the raw materials, making it the most efficient solar panel recycling plant (and the only one in the world of its size). It also cost 5 time the energy of raw material extraction and transformation, and weirdly, this is never taken into account when the cost of solar PV is on the table, as if everyone think we can just put lead and cadmium in a landfill. Oh yeah, that's right, we can and we did, nice job us.

> There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to ...

We are not prepared to, neither do we want to.

There's a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment on HN. Anyone that's in favour of it seems to always get downvoted.

Is that due to a high prevalence of anti-nuclear sentiment, or due to a high prevalence of enthusiastic, dismissive, and possibly inauthentic pro-nuclear sentiment? Either could explain the observed effect. There are plenty of pro-nuclear comments that aren't being downvoted. I suggest you consider that others are for reasons beyond their basic premise.

It's probably nothing more than "science don't care what you believe".

There's a lot of nuance lost in writing plain text on the Internet vs. having a physical conversation with one. Few people, if any, have ever been convinced to change their view point based on Internet discussion.

People mostly choose their beliefs regardless of facts or science.

There's a lot of aggressively clueless pro-nuclear sentiment. It gets downvoted because of the cluelessness, not because it's pro-nuclear.

One does wonder why the pro-nuclear arguments are so often so egregiously flawed. It's almost as if good arguments for nuclear are difficult to find.

Are the downvotes really hard to understand?

Claiming that renewables are untenable without unavailable fantasy technology is clearly ill-informed. Renewables are already contributing a significant proportion of generated electricity globally - even in the US it's over 20% versus 8% for nuclear. In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. Renewables are already a big part of electricity generation globally despite the lack of star-trek type batteries.

Then the poster turns to politics, suggesting it's just hippies and liberals who have prevented the triumph of nuclear. This is also clearly untrue - the main reason nuclear has all but been abandoned as a source of electricity was decided by the markets - it's just too expensive - without massive government backing nuclear is not economically feasible. Until the 80s, government support was justified because nuclear expertise and materials had military uses but without government support, there hasn't been a single privately financed/build nuclear plant anywhere.

> In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. Renewables are already a big part of electricity generation globally despite the lack of star-trek type batteries.

Getting to a fraction of total power demand requires no batteries at all, but that doesn't disprove the OPs point.

> In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity.

That fraction is not very important, unless you can name at least a country who is ready to devote all its renewable enrgy to 30% of their people/services/industries and permanently disconnect them from traditional energy sources.

> Until the 80s

You mean until Chernobyl?

You can have a big part of your energy generation come from renewables easily (as you pointed out). The hard/impossible part is making renewables the main or only source of power.

That requires an insane amount of energy storage capacity, or an amazing electric grid or some combination of these. The US uses 11 Terawatt hours of electric energy every day. Studies project that 80% renewable generation would require 12 hours of battery storage, so 5.5 TWHrs of battery storage. 100% renewable energy needs 3 weeks of storage. Current global production of battery capacity is 300 GWHrs per year. Production is expected to quadruple in 10 years. By these numbers producing enough batteries for the world is not feasible. Also consider that these batteries will need to be recycled and this is a pretty dirty process (currently).

Personally, I think the best plan for now is a mix of base load nuclear power(maybe like 20 to 30% of peak demand) and the rest being solar/wind. In the US we'd need to build out thousands of miles of HVDC transmission lines and build lots of battery banks.

Ever noticed how liberals say "do you believe in global warming?" and not "do you understand global warming?" it's not about knowing science, it's about using "science" to defend whatever your group happens to believe.

This is not science, this is dogma masquerading as science. For some reason liberals have been allowed to think they are pro-science for the last 20 years when in the most important cases of our time they are not.

They need to have it bashed into their skulls that they are not pro-science and that they are responsible for the coming apocalypse.

> No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear

Irrelevant, unless you want to have a mobile power generator.

> no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365.

First, not true: Geothermal and hydro both can generate power 24/7/365. Yes, that is location dependent, but you set yourself up there with using absolutes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Iceland.)

Second, we do not need a single source to deliver 24/7/365, we need "just" a power-mix capable of delivering the changing power-demand over the day. Yes, that is a technical challenge. But nuclear is facing technical challenges too.

> Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek.

Hydro-power can act as energy storage, and it has been here since practical forever: Yes, not an universal solution. And yes, it puts more strain on the grid and requires more management. But I consider your point rather hyperbolical than factual considering the progress made there.

> Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems.

Sure, and the only reason we aren't there is because of those hippies. It isn't like half of the research budget since the 50s went to nuclear research, and only 11% to renewables (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/09/nuclear-...), most of it after the 70s.

It isn't like there are technical and nuclear anti-proliferation reasons why a new nuclear reactor require huge budgets to build and operate. Or that no insurance company in the world will cover the worst-case scenario, and there is always a limited liability of the operator of such plant.

I would suggest looking at the amount of resources (money and time) invested in both nuclear power and renewables and how the costs developed respectively over time, when doing your bet on either technology.

I strongly doubt there's that many places where you can build some hydro plants which haven't been used yet. At least there's approximately none in Europe.

That's fine as a philosophical thought but in reality, all the hydro capacity is already used.

I merely wanted to disprove the hypothesis "no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365" by example.

I am not making an argument that we should go all-in on hydro power instead. Quite the contrary, I am arguing against a single source of power, but a diversification.

Are you interested in my hamster wheel solution?

I'm not arguing that we should go 100% hamster, but not having it be part of the energy mix going forward is dangerous since we need the diversification of energy sources.

> Sure, and the only reason we aren't there is because of those hippies. It isn't like half of the research budget since the 50s went to nuclear research, and only 11% to renewables.

That funding only went to variants of nuclear power that synergized with the military applications that drove that funding in the first place. Molten Salt Reactors have none of the characteristics that enabled Fukushima and yet research was abandoned on them.

Regardless, we need to start acting now, and that means choosing solutions that are proven or at least exist today.

> Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek.

That's absolutely ridiculous. Even with nuclear power, we'll need to produce MASSIVE amounts of hydrogen to cut all carbon emissions. If we have enough renewable hydrogen production plants to make all the hydrogen we need for ships, planes, steel production, farming and fertilizers, we'll have all the energy regulation and storage capability we'll ever need.

Seasonal variations in cold climates can be handled better by trash burning facilities. Yeah, recycle/reuse first, but eventually you'll need to get rid of a lot of non-recyclable mixed waste regardless.

I feel like people claiming nuclear is essential has never truly thought about the big picture.

In my opinion it's a benefit that renewables stimulate more R&D into energy storage. It's a positive synergy, since those solutions are absolutely essential to solving the climate crisis anyway. Unless we invent nuclear reactors we can put on planes and trucks. Now there's a Star Trek level invention!

> Seasonal variations in cold climates can be handled better by trash burning facilities. Yeah, recycle/reuse first, but eventually you'll need to get rid of a lot of non-recyclable mixed waste regardless.

Do you have any numbers or sources to provide for this claim?

> If we have enough renewable hydrogen production plants to make all the hydrogen we need for ships, planes, steel production, farming and fertilizers, we'll have all the energy regulation and storage capability we'll ever need.

So your argument is predicated on a future breakthrough in hydrogen production and storage that is so impressive it solves both transportation problems and renewable energy intermittancy? And you argue this is better than using a proven source of baseline energy today?

nuclear doesnt run 24/7/365

It is pretty close to that and very good compared to other sources of power:

>...Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable, carbon-free power more than 92% of the time in 2016. That’s nearly twice as reliable as a coal (48%) or natural gas (57%) plant and almost 3 times more often than wind (35%) and solar (25%) plants.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity

What do you do in 30 years when another incident like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happens?

Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.

Nothing because the incident killed fewer people than a coal plant does during regular operation in the same time period.

We could do just as badly and still have nowhere near as many deaths (including evacuation related deaths) as a single coal plant causes due to pollution.

I'm not a fan of having cancer rates rise either. I've stated this before, and I'll repeat it here:

Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world. They're cheaper too.

What about the resources needed to build the solar and wind infrastructures ? Metal, extraction of that metal, rare earths,... ?

I'm all for solar and wind and whatever, but at some point there are some maths to do...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o

Isn’t nuclear power really expensive? Solar and wind I think are just materially cheaper than anything else even including construction.

I’m looking at the Lazard 2020 Levelized Cost of Energy report here: https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

Nuclear is expensive in the short term and remarkably cheap in the long run. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

That said the more intermittent ambient energy is on the grid the more difficult it is for nuclear to operate 24/7, which makes it take longer for nuclear to go from expensive to cheap.

I checked the prices in your document. But I'm more after the actual resources consumption. For ex. if solar is cheap, but in the end, solar panels production releases more CO2 than nuclear, then it's of no use for CO2 emissions.

So, what would rise cancer rates? Coal or nuclear? IMO, the answer is counter-intuitive.

Coal is replaced by the renewables as mentioned above. If you replace coal with nuclear, nothing changes.

> Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world

Cool story. My city of 7M people has ~50 days of sunny days per yer, is located on a plane (as the most part of large cities), doesn't have active underground volcano nearby (as 99% of Earth's cities) and requires indoor heating at least 7 months/year. The city consumes an equivalent of two nuclear power plants output in electricity alone (half of that is from an actual nuclear plant). Heating probably consumes even more energy, but it's direct heat from CHPs so I can't google direct MW numbers straight away. I'd like to see calculations on powering that from solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro.

Then how come we're still burning coal?

> Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.

Viable baseload battery storage is science fiction. Nuclear works now, in this century.

AFAIK gravity storage is in the works now. Nuclear works, with large risks, but so does hydro, solar, wind, without the risks of nuclear. And as we're approaching effective fusion, starting to phase out construction of new nuclears makes complete sense.

Like all issues with climate change and energy, you can't stop at whether it exists or not. Gravity storage just does not scale to the point we want.

Solar and wind do not "work" in the same sense that nuclear works. Nuclear does not go to zero when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn't shining. Solar and wind cannot meet baseload needs in most places. They may perhaps be able to decades or centuries in the future when we get our long-awaited flying cars, but they cannot do so now.

> gravity storage is in the works now

To cover the electricity needs created by using solar as base load for the US, you would need on the order of 10 TWh of sotorage -- that means basically using all of the Great Lakes as water storage, filling them up with 300 feet of extra water every day and pumping that out every night. Theoretically possible, but an unimaginable feat of engineering and prone to nimbys in Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland, far more so than creating a few dozen extra nuclear plants...

"Effective fusion" will always be that perpetual "20 years away" we've been hearing about for the last 60 years.

Nuclear's "large risks" are considerably more mitigatable with the new generation IV reactors. They fail cold/safe, use far less fissile material, in some of the models can consume the waste from other facilities, and in other cases, the waste they generate remains radioactive for less time.

Hydro has significant and lasting impact on ecosystems downstream from wherever they're damming up, to the detriment of biodiversity, fish species, watersheds, etc.

Solar is great, when the sun is shining, though, you know, we're running out of sand, and they take up a ton of land. (Though I do think a bigger push for more rooftop makes a lot of sense, and have a system on my house.)

And wind also takes up an insane amount of space, is fairly limited in terms of where it can be utilized, kills birds by the truckload (though apparently making one blade a different color can solve for that), and the blades themselves are impossible to properly dispose of or recycle. (Not actually impossible, just impossible in the way that our capacity is super limited, it's super difficult, and no one wants 120 ft aged out fiberglass paperweights which are super difficult to cut.)

My point is while it's easy to suggest the hydro/solar/wind triumvirate as a stand-in replacement for nuclear, we're _still_ grappling with those technologies' significant shortcomings, as you can witness by watching Germany transition away from nuclear and more on to... wait for it... NG, because they can't consistently meet demand or manage peaker events with renewables and decommed way too much capacity with nuclear.

A single waste site the size of two football fields is enough to store ALL waste generated by Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station: the largest nuke in the US, which has a capacity of 3,930MW -- enough to serve more than 4 million people. That's a hell of an efficient means of generating carbon free power, with very little footprint. (Worth noting that PV needs a large on-site reservoir for cooling since it's in a desert.) Still, compared to the largest solar farm in the US, Solar Star, which clocks in at 579MW from a system spread out over 3,200 acres (142 football fields), it's a decent compromise.

My point here is that instead of imagining nuclear as a point-in-time from tech decades ago and comparing it to new and current solar/wind tech, exploring nuclear's newer options could be huge if we could get out of our own way, and with limited risk.

> Viable base load battery storage is science fiction.

That's a huge exaggeration. There are several solutions building commercial plants right now that should be good enough. Ambri is one example that was designed from the ground up for grid energy storage.

The other thing is that even with nuclear, if we want to solve emissions from transportation, steel production farming and fertilizers, we need to produce a HUGE amount of hydrogen. If you have hundreds or even thousands of renewable hydrogen production plants, you have all the energy regulation capability you'll ever need.

I feel like most nuclear proponents really aren't looking at the big picture. Not that I'm against nuclear btw. It'd be tragic if we didn't continue the R&D we're doing. But it's not as essential as you'd think, if you keep in mind the fact that we have to solve the energy storage problem anyway to get electricity into places where you don't have a grid connection.

I actually think the main benefit of renewables is that they stimulate even more R&D in energy storage. There's huge synergy benefits.

>That's a huge exaggeration. There are several solutions building commercial plants right now that should be good enough. Ambri is one example that was designed from the ground up for grid energy storage.

The largest such example cost $100 million and can run the state grid it's connected to for 7 minutes.

The consequences of a Fukushima Daiichi every 5 years would be preferable to accelerating climate change while waiting for the arrival of a battery technology orders of magnitude more dense then what we currently have.

That said, we could also make a transition to molten salt reactors and avoid both of those outcomes.

We aren't even responsible enough with the nuclear assets and waste we already have, and we're going to have to actively look after that lot for millennia to come. You can't just walk away from a spent fuel waste facility - you have to run it, or it will eventually leak radioactive isotopes into the environment. We aren't even doing that right now, so how do we expect our decendents to have the will and knowledge to do that in 2200? If we're still around at all.

We regularly build mines 4km deep with no water for several km around. Where are these radioactive isotopes supposed to leak to and why should we care?

If you have suddenly contact with rock from 4km depth there are not many scenarios where it would matter if it's radioactive.

That is simply untrue. The deepest operational facilities - e.g. Morsleben and Schact Asse II in Germany, WIPP in the US - are less than 1000m. There are a handful of others under construction, even more under consideration, but even if those all became operational today "regularly" at 4km would be a drastic overstatement.

Even with the facilities that exist, there have been incidents and concerns about groundwater contamination over the truly long term that many of these isotopes require. You present it as a solved problem but in fact it's anything but.

....."ultimately be a matter for markets to decide".

done.

Yeah, they decided really well in Texas at $ 9,000 / MWh.

Do you think that the organizations that couldn't bother to take into account a 1 in 20 winter would build safe and secure nuclear?

Also consider the amount of battery storage arriving onto the Texas grid in the next few years. If that would have been commissioned already, reconnecting neighbourhoods would have been much easier.

I don't need to think. Somebody provided several PWh - PWh - of energy with, in the US, simply no accidents worth worrying about, and on global scale still none that compare to the damage fossils have done.

That's not a hypothetical. It already happened.

I really, really aggressively don't care what grid storage salesmen claim. Put up a plan for the TWhs needed to cover a cold windless snap and we'll talk.

The best argument: more people died in Bhopal. As if going nuclear will make that stop. Please, the only argument to make to such a question is "because we can't reduce CO2 emissions without, and that's because ...".

But what do you expect from an article that tries to tarnish opponents of nuclear energy by comparing them to "Elizabethan preachers [who] railed against [coal], a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement."

Where going to see the end of civilization if we don't make a decision soon?

I feel like this is a prime example of someone failing to update their beliefs with new information.

For decades it would have been a reasonable position that governments should override political objections, embark upon mass nuclear power programs, and try to drive costs down through economies of scale and process improvements over time.

20 years ago it was arguably a correct and very strong position to take?

10 years ago, still a reasonable-seeming one?

By 5 years ago, nuclear had probably missed its chance. Most of us had probably not quite grasped that yet.

Today, anyone arguing this just needs to redo their sums with up-to-date numbers and they'll see the impossiblity of their argument. Nuclear is done. Baseload business models are done. The market has chosen a winner, which is mass deployment of wind and solar.

It would be better to provide sources for some of those.

Also what do you mean by "baseload business models"?

Exactly, people are repeating decades old argument without incorporating what has happened with technology over the last 10 or 20 years.

In the last decade, grid scale battery costs have declined by 75%. Wind turbines and solar panels have declined by 80% and 90% respectively. These declines are actually accelerating at the moment - grid scale battery storage has halved in price over the last two years. In contrast, the LCOE of nuclear has increased by 20%.

The industry is moving so fast that arguments become stale very quickly but people are slower, it seems, to update their opinions.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/04/30/solar-and-...

"The industry is moving so fast that arguments become stale very quickly but people are slower, it seems, to update their opinions."

How fast is it moving? "For the first time in nearly a decade, annual installations of energy storage technologies fell year-on-year in 2019. Grid-scale storage installations dropped 20%" [1]

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage

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