I really recommend watching this short video which gives a really excellent overview of the dangers of nuclear power in the context of the alternatives.
The TLDW is even if a very pessimistic estimate of the dangers of nuclear power is still much better than a very optimistic take on the dangers of fossil fuels once you combine the effects of air pollution and climate change. That includes both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
That's an interesting research problem to work on the next decades. By the time that happens or not, there won't be any coal plants remaining and most gas will be on the way out as well (considering that is already barely competitive today).
Long term storage isn't too bad of an issue either, but there's two camps. One is to do smaller sites where we can just bury local material in the ground. The other is having a large mass site (think Yucca Mountain), which means higher scrutiny because there's more chances of something going wrong (standard failure analysis) and you're packing more material together which increases total radiation levels. Either one will work, but both are bureaucratic nightmares. The result of which has been constantly changing plans, which drives up costs very quickly as you change gears (e.g. spend tons to survey the US for good sites, more to verify Yucca Mountain is good, start digging, cancel because NIMBY, start again, cancel, survey other areas, repeat).
But one factor I want to mention is that by the nature of the physical processes materials can't be both extremely dangerous and long living. The danger literally comes from mass being expelled from the atoms. High level radioactive materials have and always will be stored on site, as this is the safest place for them (where they can be monitored).
There are still technical challenges, don't get me wrong, but the whole process is also a bureaucratic nightmare on top of that and we know what that does to costs.
For some better facts I'll refer you to an article written by a HN user that is a reactor scientist: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]. Which is an order of magnitude less than a nuclear plant. And the repository can accommodate the fuel produced by several plants.
In short, waste disposal accounts for a single-digit percentage of nuclear power operating costs.
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Decommissioning adds $0.80 per MWh of electricity generated, assuming a capacity factor of 90% and a lifetime of 80 years. By comparison, the cost of natural gas power is $40 to $80 per MWh.
You and I seem to have very different ideas of what is a "staggering" cost.
1.https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu....
Decommission costs are low... when planned. When a project at scale starts, however, things are usually less fun. Take a look at the UK. The UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...
£161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...
£234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nucl...
Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and entombing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay and the real cost will be hidden.
US: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup...
Moreover if there is a serious glitch during decommission or at a waste repository site, are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no-one covers major nuke risk (reimbursements have a hard limit).
Back here in reality, there are several operating nuclear waste facilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Nuc...
> £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...
> £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...
Do you realize that these figures include cleanup from nuclear weapons development?
> Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and entombing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay and the real cost will be hidden. US: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup...
Even if the pessimistic figures pan out and the existing nuclear fleet costs $70 billion to clean up, that's still within the $.4B to $.7B per GW range I provided.
22 sites.
Theoretically "actives" ones are:
- Olkiluoto which is in fact Onkalo (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... ) which is "expected to be operational in 2023." (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... )
- Loviisa which is AFAIK a site dedicated to the local reactors(?), and only for "low- and intermediate-level operational wastes". Onkalo is the planned site, and is NOT active ( see https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... )
- Wolseon (Korea) is for Low and Intermediate Level waste only (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolseong_Low_and_Intermediate_... ). Its total capacity (800k drums) is far away, as for now it only contains 100k drums (see https://www.korad.or.kr/korad-eng/html.do?menu_idx=37 )
- the "Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" (New Mexico) is, well, a "Pilot Plant" (doesn't come as a surprise). Moreover "The waste is from the research and production of United States nuclear weapons only", and only for 10k years. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant ). In some dream one may deposit powerplant waste there, however back in reality...
"Back here in reality" (uh, uh) there is no active site in any huge nation which nuke-produces power for decades (US, France, Germany, Japan...) It will become more and more difficult for the public to believe that all this is perfectly managed, back here in reality.
> Do you realize that these figures include cleanup from nuclear weapons development?
Do you realize that the civil and military were so intimately tied during those phases that no one (even, in France, the supreme public finance audit authority, namely la 'Cour des comptes') can untangle the mess?
> Even if the pessimistic figures pan out
The UK had less than 20 nuclear powerplants and upon starting serious decommission they think that decommission costs will amount to at least £234b Even if (at best) only ~1/3 (?) will be necessary for purely civil reactors and sites that's ~£78b (~110bUSD)
The US have 58 active nuclear power plants (96 reactors) (see https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-pl... ), approximately 3 times more.
If this repository is planed for 100 000 years (in germany it's 1 mio years) that are 8000€ a year. That doesn't sound like a realistic number to me. And it's by no way europes waste repository, it's for the 2 finnish nuclear plants.
Nuclear is also eye-poppingly expensive to decommission.
Finally, note that operating cost doesn't include the sort of re-engineering and upgrades that are routinely required, and have doomed plants like San Onofre.
On the other hand, estimates of wind and solar do not include the cost of storage to actually make intermittent sources viable. Which is understandable, because there's really no plan to provision this much storage without a massive breakthrough in storage solutions. Almost all plans for a predominantly wind and solar grid assume that something like hydrogen, synthetic natural gas, or something else will provide massive amounts of cheap storage. Until then, it's fossil fuels to fulfill off-peak demand.
E.g. the Australians vastly reduced their need for gas plants just by installing a few hundred MW of battery and saved a lot of cash in the process. ROI on those batteries has been quite high very early on. Not having turn on their peaker plants is a big deal.
The Chinese hedged their bets a few decades ago and wind + solar won there as well. China is breaking records in terms of growth of their renewable capacity and are a key technology supplier in that space and also a big part of why it got so cheap.
Even though I'm generally pro nuclear, I've come to the conclusion that absent some innovation that changes the cost structure, it's an increasingly dead option. I was hopeful NuScale's approach would do that, but it's pretty clear now they're missing their needed numbers.
The problem with renewables (for nuclear) is that it reduces the potential revenue for a nuclear plant over its 6-7 decade lifespan to well below any level where it makes sense to build them. If you budget for 1960s era grid pricing it all looks beautiful. Then fast forward 6 decades and you have solar bids trending towards 0.01$/kwh when most nuclear plants in operation are basically closer to 0.15$/kwh.
That's the whole problem. It's the most expensive option in the market by far. a 10X improvement would make it competitive with current solutions. Except that will take a few decades. So, realistically, you'd need a second order of magnitude improvement at that point. Yes, I believe renewables can do another 10x cost reduction over the next decades; possibly more. Ballpark 0.005$/kwh is probably worth investing in for a plant that comes online around 2045 or so. That's a modest 3x cheaper than the lowest solar/wind bids right now. 25 years is a long time. In any case, last time I checked, such plants are not being planned anywhere and most nuclear bids are 10x or more expensive than that. Out of the gate they are 2-3x more expensive than solutions in the market right now. That's for a plant that has not been built yet and will take decades to get built.
What I think needs to happen is that these technologies need to be put on even playing fields. Nuclear has most of its costs built in: decommissioning, health, storage, etc. But a carbon tax and environmental health tax would largely put technologies on at least an even playing ground. These issues are essentially a tragedy of the commons issue, where we share resources. There's an economic cost to polluting a lake and if that is not built in to the market then it isn't fair or helpful to the population. We can argue about free markets and stuff, but this makes it more free as certain sectors can't skirt by this and it is unreasonable to expect the population to be well informed (nobody can be an expert in nuclear physics, coal, oil, solar, electrodynamics, mechanical engineering, hydrology, etc, the burden is too high). A major problem is that many sectors are getting major discounts because their costs are much harder to see. It isn't only "first order" costs that matter, especially when second and third order are so expensive (i.e. climate and health). I'm not saying we should reduce scrutiny of nuclear, but rather that the other technologies deserve the same level.
This keeps beeing peddled by the pro-nuclear fraction, but you are comparing apples and oranges: the "large number of people die" is based on "if you burn coal without any filters, in particular if you do it in a little hut in a third world country with no proper chimney, it's really really bad for your health".
Nuclear power plants require modern technology for high safety standards. Coal power plants on anything than a very basic technology level all have filters that scrub the sulphur etc. Outside of third world countries, nobody dies from coal. It's not even a health problem.
The problem with coal and other fossil fuels is that they use up limited resources, and they put back the CO2 into the atmosphere that has been extracted by plans over millions of years, causing global warming.
The problem with nuclear is that when it goes boom (and it has done so about once every 20 years since we have nuclear), it leaves a large area inhabitable for a long time. Which is a big problem in a densely populated country like mine. Also, at least in my country, even though we are using nuclear for about 60 years now, nobody has figured out a safe way to store the nuclear waste - it just gets moved around from one failed attempt to the next.
The "lots of people die from coal" vs. "nobody dies from nuclear" story (which are both distortions, conveniently in different directions to match the ideology of those bringing it up) is a red herring.
There a thing I note about maintaining a solar plant, you can trust couple of rednecks in a F150 pickup truck to do what's needed.
This adds about 25 points to the AQI if you live in the red zone, data is from 2016.
Even if it doesn't kill you through cardiac effects, how much asthma and QALYs are you losing from that?
That is the US. That is just air pollution. It is reasonable to conclude that there are other sources of pollution, such as water (which no matter how you cut it, air is in contact with).
> it [goes boom] about once every 20 years
This keeps beeing peddled by the anti-nuclear fraction, but you are comparing apples and oranges: the "large number of explosions" is based on "if you include 3 Mile Island and use bad statistics because now that number is 26 and ignore that we can't do this type of analysis will small sampling, and naively act like no progress has been made and that the probability isn't dependent on this". I mean seriously... 1st reactor: 1942, 3 Mile (not an explosion and isn't comparable to Chernobyl or Fukushima): 1979, Chernobyl: 1986, Fukushima: 2011. If we drop 3-Mile we get 40 years (39.5) btw. And you think no one is learning from this? That technology hasn't advanced in that time? This argument is ridiculous. It is bad faith. And I don't know how anyone can make this argument with a straight face.
> The "lots of people die from coal" vs. "nobody dies from nuclear" story
It is literally 39k Americans per year (mean of above) to 81[1] EVER (31 Chernobyl immediate, 50 Chernobyl after, 0 3 Mile Island, 0 Fukushima). You might want to retort about cancer and/or future deaths (which is still smaller than the lowest US YEARLY deaths), but we've already recognized that we're not doing that with coal either. If you get cancer from coal and survive you don't get counted, just like our nuclear numbers.
There's better arguments to make but this one is just absurd and is trivial to prove so.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
> According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure.
[2] Side note: the highest estimates use 60k for potential Chernobyl deaths, which is still 8 years at coal's best case scenario. Again, only counting the US for coal and world for nuclear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Nuclear, because of its energy density, has a big edge against solar and wind as well. AFAIK, building NPPs not only uses less resources and land footprint than wind and solar, they also last longer and are non-intermittent.
In this graph, notice how safe Nuclear is, and also notice that it is cleaner than wind and solar.
I'm going to nit pick
> nuclear should be part of how we replace coal.
There's no energy source that is a "one size fits all." Renewables and storage will better replace coal in some areas and nuclear will better in others. The point is that nuclear is not off the table and that experts can use said tool. It is about not tying peoples' hands behind their backs.
Honestly, had we put the stupid amounts of money that we subsidize fossil fuels with (think about how much government funding went into the specialized drilling that became fracking) into fusion research, we'd likely have it by now.
Fusion is unfortunately not going to help here.
My dad studied physics in the 60ies when fusion was just 20 years away.
Current government-funded fusion research is a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. It actually steals all the funding from what could be viable projects.