Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking
nature.com
nature.com
"Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
Oh, really? Are you going to do that AFTER phasing out fossil fuel plants or BEFORE? Because if it's before, you're making the case that climate change is a lower priority than retiring the cleanest and one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed. Because you could ALWAYS choose to just replace those fossil power plants with wind and solar and batteries instead, but you're making the decision to keep that fossil fuel plant running longer than it needs to.
Similar argument for getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams.
And I'm talking about long existing plants, here. All those cement emissions (and reservoir emissions for hydro) already happened and were "paid for." We need to protect all near-zero energy sources until the last fossil power plant on the continent is decommissioned. Then go ahead and retire your nuclear or hydro power plant.
(Addressed to no one in particular, but these arguments in favor of premature retiring of functioning clean energy power plants are widespread and it ticks me off. Plus, retiring them early also increases the cost of electricity, which slows electrification. I bet electric cars would be a LOT more popular--and fossil fuel cars less popular--in Germany if their electricity price weren't so insane.)
However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.
Air pollution kills millions of people and costs trillions of dollars, every single year. Much of it is caused by burning fossils.
https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollut...
I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my lungs.
Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the construction and operation of long term storage sites for spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry, disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.
Also...how about oil spills? How much money, adjusted for inflation over time, have we dumped into cleaning that shit up over and over? And speaking of costs, what's the cost of entire cities being underwater in a decade or two?
Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no?
Pound for pound, nuclear seems like the most effective option we have at the moment. If fossil fuels were priced according to how much damage they are actually causing the planet, nuclear would seem pretty cheap too. The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels.
Also production of solar panels is quite far from being "green" as well. Luckily most of solar production is handled by China, a country with quite lax environmental standards, so most of the HN crowd does not feel the environmental impact from it.
Yes, but remember that any nuclear plant whose construction is started now will not be available for about 10 years. So it will be competing with the storage technologies of maybe 8 years from now. Given the rate of improvement in cost, it's very likely IMO that nuclear will be more expensive than just synthesizing the equivalent baseload source from renewables and storage.
Even the oft-cited $200 billion is an exaggeration. Bear in mind these figures from from politicians, nowhere near this amount has actually been spent. As far a figures for the money actually spent, let's go with your own source:
> In 2016, University of Oxford researcher and author Peter Wynn Kirby wrote that the government had allocated the equivalent of US$15 billion for the regional cleanup
Let's see if we can get more recent sources on spending related to Fukushima. Form a 2020 article [1]
> Since fiscal 2014, it has set aside about 35 billion yen annually for the interim storage facilities. The funds come from revenues earmarked for nuclear energy-related projects in the special account.
> But expenditures concerning the storage facilities are running a lot higher than initially envisaged.
> An estimate released in late 2016 by the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry showed that the project will eventually cost 1.6 trillion yen, compared with an initial projection of 1.1 trillion yen.
> The government has allocated an additional 12 billion yen annually for the storage facility project since fiscal 2017.
Okay, so the Japanese government is saying that it'll cost 1.6 trillion yen (about $15 billion dollars) total. They're actually spending 35 + 12 = 47 billion yen annually, which is ~$433 million. $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power.
That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. It has had its share of accidents too. I wouldn’t be betting against more accidents in the next 30 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_inc...
I think it would be worth comparing to the costs of incidents with other energy forms. Deepwater Horizon comes to mind with a cost 2 or 3 times that number (not counting fines). To say nothing of all the spills/incidents we don't hear about with tankers spilling/leaking on the open waters, just far enough away nobody notices.
And that's assuming newer plants don't have any improved safety over Fukushima. We already feature secondary containment, which would have prevent Chernobyl from being nearly as bad as it was, the Soviets just didn't build secondary containment. The reality is that we only have one instance of a meltdown breaching secondary containment in over 70 years of nuclear power operation.
And lastly, all this needs to be viewed relative to the ecological impact of covering several percent of the Earth's land surface in solar panels, and the environmental damage from fossil fuels that will be necessary until effective energy storage is developed.
Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.
Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan.
Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.
"That's how safe nuclear is."
And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.
That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...
https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives.
All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly.
So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation.
There are three more things to keep in mind:
1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year.
2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures.
3. Death is much worse than having to relocate.
Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.
But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
Is it really that big of a problem? Sure, the cost of dealing with these is not negligible but in the end, it is just a matter of digging a hole in a deserted place and putting things there. It is dangerous stuff and is to be handled with care, but we deal with dangerous stuff all the times: explosives, toxic chemicals, weapons, ... and nuclear waste is not that high on the list.
The usual argument is that nuclear waste can stay hot for thousands of years. In fact, while true, the kind of stuff that stays radioactive on these time scales tends to be weak, The most concerning elements are usually those with decades-long half lives. Compare to stable but toxic elements like mercury that last forever.
Also worth noting that coal contains long lived radioactive elements that end up in the atmosphere after being burned. So, coal plants also produce nuclear waste, but instead of having it conveniently stored in a specialized facility, it is released in the atmosphere to be stored into your lungs. As I said, long life elements are weak, so it is not that much of a problem, but it is not a reason to do the worst thing that can possibly be done with these.
And while we keep talking about waste, this is only waste because we don't use it. Radioactive "waste" is made of rare elements that produce energy, and maybe a treasure for future generations.
It's not like we've hit a dead end with nuclear research, people have just seen too much Chernobyl stuff and cast a large net on the whole science.
The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government:
https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200
So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power.
Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper.
>There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware.
Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems.
The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material.
> nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.
I'd rewrite it as
> one of the safest power sources humankind has ever developed[0]
because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons? I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste, etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal, nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless you over allocate).
To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats. If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and other independent studies) even including future deaths are lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0 Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power.
> The order of magnitude of Fukushima ...
> Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5 Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died.
As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body). Letting people move back would still likely result in less deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this, I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference? We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve? Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto.
The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or) pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting against nuclear because it is costly.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
And deaths caused by fossil fuel emissions which is in the tens of thousands per year.
Fukushima and Chernobyl combined are a tiny fraction of FF emissions/deaths/costs.
So that leaves...Nuclear.
So again, why are you fear-mongering about how "dangerous" nuclear is when it's a tiny tiny fraction of the real danger of fossil fuels?
I thought climate change was like an urgent crisis or something....?
But nuclear power has never been the ultra cheap clean power slam dunk you're portraying. I've been hopeful someone will come up with a clever innovation that changes the cost numbers, but so far every attempt has tanked.
With hydroelectric dams, there is an urgent motivation to bring many of them down: ecosystem collapse. It hurts to lose the storage capacity, but there's a growing awareness of just how severe the damage has been. I don't expect Grand Coulee to come down any time soon but talking with someone who does modeling related to this for NOAA made clear a lot of them are going away.
And your comments about hydro dams is just proving my point about climate change just not being a major priority. Local concerns take precedence. It’s not that these local concerns shouldn’t matter, but folks just don’t seem to be willing to replace fossil fuels first. It shows how little most people really care, including (unfortunately) people who ostensibly ought to, like environmental activists and regulators and pro-environmental politicians. I really think Greta Thunberg was right about that.
Now I totally agree that we should keep existing plants running for as long as possible for climate reasons. I am fine with subsidizing them to a certain extent because they produce carbon free power. But even the existing plants are expensive to run and you should acknowledge that instead of saying otherwise...
Having worked in energy (and radiation) I've always been confused by the fact that the activists aren't aligned with the scientists. I have yet to meet a single climate scientist that is anti-nuclear. Most of them are shy about their support and will end up saying things like "but we can't get support for nuclear, so why even try?"
The only real argument against nuclear is cost. Safety it is number 1 (you can see numbers from my other post), emissions (lifetime) it is on par with solar and wind (without batteries), waste isn't as big of an issue as it is made to be (waste is magnitudes smaller than most people think and storing on site is perfectly acceptable), it is clearly environmentally friendly (low footprint, you can recycle fuel, most emissions are from construction). The only argument against it is cost. The only argument is that the cost of climate and human lives is low. I'm really frustrated with the misnomers people are making about this.
Greta is right. There are certain things about climate change that are complex. But the lack of sufficient action is not a complex mystery. It’s just not a priority.
Are the hydro dams literally going to be turned off simultaneously (the same day) with shutting off all connected fossil fuel plants? Because if not, then it isn’t actually simultaneous.
That is very much situational. A big part of why climate change is bad is because it will cause complete ecosystems to collapse. If dams or anything else accelerate that faster than climate change, there is an argument to be made that they should take higher priority. In the case of the Kennebec River that's exactly what happened.
1. Nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, due to the high costs for construction and dismantling. This does not dismiss your argument, because running a nuclear power plant is fairly cheap. The costs therefore speak towards keeping nuclear power plants running as long as they remain safe.
2. Existing nuclear power plants use huge quantities of fresh water for cooling. The required water quantity and temperature make nuclear power plants prone to droughts, which can cause shutdowns, and to flooding events, which can shut down or damage the plant. Both droughts and floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change. This speaks towards closing down power plants that are particularly vulnerable. In any case, grid operators need to be able to mitigate nuclear power plant outages. The cost of nuclear power is even less attractive when overcapacity is needed to accommodate potential outages.
This paper has some nice maps illustrating why Californians need to do some serious modeling before making electrification choices.
My favorites are:
Figure 2 - fixed monthly charge (showing CA undercharges for fixed infrastructure costs)
Figure 3 - marginal cost per residential KWh (showing CA recoups it in very-high rates)
Figure 9 - marginal profit over social cost (showing CA is super expensive, even post-carbon-tax)
https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/wind-and-solar-reliance-would-...
However, it's going to take much longer if we start with phasing out nuclear before fossil, which means spewing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. We can't afford that time.
I hear you, so please don't misinterpret this comment.
Statistically speaking, I'd imagine that it's actually the increases in production via wind and solar that has in fact caused nuclear (as percentage) to fall. Coal, at least in the USA can't be much different than nuclear.
How much nuclear production has come online since 2010 (i.e., the article's reference point)? Now how many solar panels? Given the long lead time of nuclear (i.e., planning, approval, producing) it's hard to imagine it catching solar anytime soon.
Should nuclear press on regardless? Probably. If only because if nuclear can be the last 15% to 20% of steady output (read: not subject to weather and such) that'll be enough to prevent rolling blacksout and other events due to shortages.
If only 20 years ago people realized all our climate and energy problems wouldn't be solved and we should build the safest, cleanest and only technology to prevent climate change caused by energy production...
"Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a reality.
The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is indicative of the desperation of the market reality of solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a LFTR stan.
"Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that want their weapons grade isotopes.
In order to replace fossil fuels using wind and storage you would need significant more than 4 hours, using a much slower charge cycle. If we want to have something like 1 week of storage, with an expected charge cycle of 2 weeks (ie one week where the wind is producing more than the grid, followed by one week where it is producing less), we are talking about 42x in capacity, and the investment will get repaid 14x slower for each dollar invested.
Prices will need to drop and production will need to be heavily increased before batteries is viable for wind, and until then more fossil fueled power plants is being built in order to match the capacity of wind.
If I had to choose between battery and nuclear, my choice is neither. Simply ban fossil fuels while we wait for people to make up their mind.
That's like saying that someone who owns 90% of a publicly traded company is worth $9 billion just because the stock has a market cap of $10 billion. If they'd actually try to cash that stock, they'd run out of buyers and the stock price would go way, way down.
Solar and wind are great now, because we can pick a random spot and build it without needing storage and don't have many people objecting to it. (Yes, the lawsuits are there already, but so far we've only gotten to the low hanging fruit. It'll get much worse before we're anywhere near 50% green energy.) It's cheap if you just look at the cost of the pure panels/turbines.
The earth has a finite amount of habitable land. If you start filling that up with solar panels, land price will increase because you have to buy it from people that wanted to plant crops there or live there. A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
We currently use about 162 PWh worldwide, only 27 of which is electricity[1]. We're barely starting to make a dent in electricity production and what you hear left and right is "not in my backyard" and "not on my the neighbor's roof that I have to look at every day" (--my dad). We'd barely have the space if people wouldn't complain, let alone if we can only build it away from civilization. And that's replacing electricity production alone, we haven't really started on transportation, making things (cement, steel, plastics, ...), growing things (fertilizer, cow farts), and heating/cooling. What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation. For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate). Solar I don't know, but for some reason we're not doing that on the same scale as wind, presumably for a good reason. There just aren't any easy shortcuts here, only compromises.
Let's not dismiss fission energy just yet. It might seem expensive today, but between a known ~2x price increase (iirc going full nuclear would increase the energy price by that much from today's price, though France has me wondering if I might be misremembering) and a larger cost if you do solar/wind+batteries+need-to-win-lots-of-lawsuits-for-space (which works out to be about 3x for just the hardware, using today's technology), I'll have fission reactors please. Until we have better tech, let's get started with the current tech and hope it becomes obsolete and we get cheaper energy with a sunk cost rather than not try because we might sink some cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy
[2] How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need - Bill Gates - 2021
So the objection is that the larger the share of renewable electricity, the higher the electricity price? I'm sure you can see why this is not really a problem? Because the higher the electricity price the more profitable it becomes to invest in renewable electricity. In fact, what currently is stalling the build-out of renewables in many European markets is that electricity prices have plummeted.
> A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
> What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
44.6% of Germany's power production comes from renewables and it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1]. The need for large-scale energy storage may not materialize since fluctuations in power production will be matched by fluctuations in power consumption. In other words, there is no God-given right to mine Bitcoins 24/7 at a constant and minimal electricity price.
> You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation.
Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
> For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate).
According to LAZARD 14.0, offshore wind costs on average $86/MWh to produce compared to $129-$198/MWh for nuclear [2]. And for offshore wind, costs keep falling while they are stagnant or increasing for nuclear.
> I'll have fission reactors please.
Then I hope you and like-minded are willing to finance the costs of new nuclear power yourselves, because I don't want my taxpayer money to be wasted on any more nuclear boondoggles.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... [2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
OP is talking about generation costs. Up is bad.
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
To an extent, yes, but uranium doesn't leak out of your rail car the way that electricity is lost when you try to transport it. The choice is between power lines or converting it (with losses) in order to have a physical thing, like hydrogen, that can be transported.
> it is not seeing any need for large-scale energy storage [1].
Statement not found in citation. Also, they're at 8%, you found a source for electricity (not power). From my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405701 "Germany uses ~3.7PWh of energy only 0.6PWh of which is electricity [...] No large-scale storage needed if 92% of your energy can be generated from fossil fuels on demand."
> Most people don't live near nuclear power plants either.
https://www.powerplantmaps.com/nuclear.html Without checking each individual one, notice how they typically are within regular electricity transportation distance of the next major city (<100km, often <50km). This matches what I'm seeing when looking at the distances of wind built into the sea (mostly <50km off shore, virtually always within 100km).
> nuclear boondoggles
I'm not sure why I bothered replying actually, you've already dug in your heels. When I read this last bit, I figured I might as well stop here and regret spending those 20 minutes checking stuff (and so indeed I didn't bother checking your costs for offshore wind and the argument about me paying for it - in fact I pay for a lot of shit that other people don't, like Climeworks, because yeah I do actually care and we'll need all the tech we can get).
What's your opinion of mask refusers?
How about people who don't actually refuse to wear a mask but who just sabotage all societal effort to encourage mask wearing?
> Most countries don't have large uranium deposits either. Importation and exportation solves such problems.
It's easier to import a few tons of Uranium fuel pellets every year than to export terawatts of energy.
I wish we'd just bill fossil fuel plants for their pollution. We'd quickly need new alternatives and instead of us simply telling you that renewables won't work as foreseen you could just run into the problem yourself.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/g...
Global wind and solar generation increased by 265 TWh in 2019:
https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/global-wind-and-solar-ener...
Nuclear was still well ahead in 2019 with 2657 TWh vs. 2103 TWh for wind and solar (699 solar, 1404 wind). But if these relative growth rates continue it will take only 3.3 years for solar + wind generation to eclipse nuclear generation globally ((2657 - 2103) / 170).
Hydropower is still the far-and-away leader of non-fossil electricity generation at 4306 TWh in 2019 (106 TWh growth over 2018):
https://www.hydropower.org/news/invest-in-hydropower-to-tack...
But it's a lot harder to build new hydro projects than new wind or solar projects.
Electricity generated from nuclear power can follow the load, neither wind nor solar can do that meaning you will _always_ need backup power plants.
Germany has 50% renewable energy in its electricity mix, yet their greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector are seven(!) times as compared to France.
There is a reason why China is nuclear power plants like crazy. They understand that electricity is worthless if it can’t be produced on demand.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216394
China is the world's leader in building new nuclear reactors. And in building new solar farms. And in building new wind farms. China is the world's biggest energy producer, so it is going to lead on a lot of absolute energy measures.
China can build reactors cheaper than the West, but it can also build solar farms cheaper than the West. China is adding output from renewables faster than from nuclear projects.
And yes they are totalitarian, but at least they have some awareness of GHG emissions and are executing on alternative energies and EV and battery production and research.
It looks fine on paper, but France was dependent on other EU countries avoiding nuclear.
The problem of capacity factors of french nuclear reactors is caused by excess generation by renewables (mostly wind from north sea) that cannot be stopped and is sold at quasi negative rates. It's clear when you see the capacity factor has been decreasing for the last decades without much change in the number of reactors online in France.
Looking at 2004 they used 8,204 kWh/Hab but produced 9,203, and thus needed to export an even larger fraction before wind/solar took off.
PS: The graph makes it clear why things are improving, their simply cutting back on nuclear. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/FR_ELEC_...
> Since 1990, each year, France roughly exports 10% of its annual production. Its annual exchange sold has always remained positive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#I...
[1]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit... look at 3 september 2018 for example, min is 36GW, max is 41GW, on one day.
The slow spring melt of mountain snow turns into a sudden post-storm flood, if the temperatures are warm enough...
The large dams on the Columbia and Snake are fairly safe from being eliminated, even if they do cause some habitat loss.
Turning them off while fry are heading downstream ought to help, some.
Everything is interconnected, and it's a really typical technocratic attitude to say that it's fine in isolation. "Who gives a shit? It's just a bunch of fish." Analytical people eschew context. Analysis is about reducing everything to components. And guess what -- it has led us astray here.
It turns out in the PNW that salmon are a major part of the food chain for a lot of animals, and our hydropower efforts are suppressing that food chain. It's also making it really hard to find enough salmon to fish for ourselves.
You'll see similar problems with the Colorado River. The Hoover Dam has basically destroyed all the downstream ecosystems that relied on the water to create their living conditions. It's an ecological disaster in slow motion.
So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.
1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling costs.
2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.
3) Close the fuel cycle.
3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1 seems insurmountable.
Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-essential industrial loads.
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-t...
[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/167090...
[3] https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
Once solar saturates daytime demand, provisioning further solar power doesn't contribute to decarbonization. This is why nuclear is really the only known path to decarbonization. Maybe we'll figure out scalable ways to provision hundreds of terawatt hours of storage, but we might be waiting a long time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/europe-win... ("Europe has space for enough wind turbines to power the entire world, study finds")
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/ee2523dc632c9b01df... ("Australia is the sunniest country in the world and one of the windiest. Australia’s potential for renewable energy generation is 500 times greater than current power generation capacity.")
https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/why-africa-is-the-ne... ("Africa has an almost unlimited potential of solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW). The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that renewable energy capacity in Africa could reach 310 GW by 2030; which would put the continent at the forefront of renewable energy generation globally.")
https://www.evolved.energy/post/2016/02/16/deep-decarbonizat...
So you are saying that there is some business that has always been certain to lose money, and had never had government help, and nobody ever invested on it. And you are using this fact to suggest that in the near future, when that business will become needed and profitable, nobody will invest on it either... what isn't a conclusion one can make.
The reason nuclear costs so much is because we've stopped building plants. There's no industry anymore, let alone economies of scale. It's a fallacious argument to say it costs too much. If we went all in on nuclear to tackle climate change the costs would quickly collapse. After all, they were built in the 70s and dramatically decarbonized the industry at the time.
For example, EnergyAustralia just announced that they're pulling forward the retirement of Yallourn coal powered station by four years [1], and building a 350MW utility scale energy system to absorb and discharge renewable power to offset the coal plant being retired:
"Under the agreement, EnergyAustralia will retire Yallourn in mid-2028 and build new storage capacity through a 350 MW, four-hour, utility-scale battery project that will be completed by 2026. This ensures energy storage is built to firm increased renewable energy in Victoria, before Yallourn exits the system.
EnergyAustralia’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050. Yallourn’s retirement will reduce the company’s emissions profile by 60 per cent, accelerating the pathway towards achieving this ambition."
As we speak (mid day local Victoria time), renewables are providing 48% of total electrical demand in Victoria [2].
[1] https://www.energyaustralia.com.au/about-us/energy-generatio...
[2] https://opennem.org.au/energy/vic1/?range=1d&interval=30m
2. Look at Texas's recent "hiccup" around Feb 15 and compare it to year before. Wind dropped to <10% reliable capacity and it was almost all picked up by gas/coal. The drop wind/solar production starts a week before the cold snap that disrupted everything else.
https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/e...
https://www.wsj.com./articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-1161...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-political-making-of-a-texas...
The power density of a gas turbine is so much greater than that of a steam turbine that a closed-cycle gas turbine powerset for a sodium cooled fast reactor would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an lwr. Running at higher temperatures with liquid metal, molten salt, or gas-cooled reactors poses many practical problems, but means building a machine that processes more energy with less mass thus drastically lower capital cost.
A molten salt reactor is at atmospheric pressure and has nothing to cause a chemical explosion. You still need containment, but you don't need to contain a large empty space.
A supercritical CO2 turbine runs at 1000+ psi but if the pipes broke and the CO2 sprayed out into that salt, you might get an overpressure around 10 psi in a not-too-big confinement because the volume of working fluid is tiny.
Is this doable? What's keeping it up? Is it anything artificial, like a business cartel or something similar? If not, lowering the price would practically mean subsidies.
On the other hand, once they're available, switching to them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by then.
Keeping nuclear power safe is very easy, you just have to decommission old power plants that aren't up to modern standards. That's all it would have taken to prevent Chernobyl and Fukushima. So why on earth do we build nuclear power plants that are difficult to rebuild? Why did we believe that immature technology is going to be enough for the next 50 years? You need to build more, to replace the crappy old power plants, you need to build more, to expand the fleet, you need to build more, to update previously built plants to a new safety standard, you need to build more, just to maintain a workforce.
It's done all the time with solar power and wind. Build it for 20+ years, if new tech comes out you just replace the old tech once it proves uneconomical.
My personal favorite boondoggles are still housing, internet, electric grid and road maintenance. We really need to put pressure on the job market through fiscal stimulus. That pressure will force companies to wake up and actually do something productive.
Renewables are getting better and cheaper fast and if you have you're not convinced by that, I see no reasonable argument for nuclear.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...
Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.
RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.
But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7.
> RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
What physical limit prevents this?
It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
And you are right - the land needed to actually generate the power is much different than that ratio.
The strata report is also counting the land use for transmission lines which is a big part of the land use for any power source and makes the land use for different power sources look much more similar than they are.
From the report:
>...Because nuclear energy accounted for 19.55 percent of the nation’s electricity production in 2015, approximately 938,388 acres of land were used to transmit nuclear energy in 2015, or 10.312 acres per megawatt.
So of the 12 acres they attribute per megawatt for nuclear, 10 acres of that is for transmission lines which are going to be needed no matter the source of power.
The report gives an example later:
>...The Arkansas Nuclear One Station requires only 1,100 acres (1.7 square miles) to produce 1,800 megawatts operating at a 90 percent capacity factor. A study by Entergy Arkansas estimates that for modern wind and solar plants operating at the same capacity, they would require 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and 13,320 acres (21 square miles) of land respectively to produce the same amount of power.
https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
As another data point, in a report on the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, PG&E reported:
>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/hyman1/docs/may...
(Land use isn't the only factor obviously, but it is a factor.)
I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...
However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.
I understand people dislike when nuclear get subsidies, but its nowhere as bad as the amount of subsidies we pay right now to fossil fuels. We need to stop throwing money at fossil fuels. I rather have my tax money go to batteries or nuclear than fossil fuels disguised as "reserve energy".
Solar and wind are ONLY cheap if you ignore the costs for backup power plants and extra landlines.
We have the highest electricity prices in Germany worldwide. I really wished people stopped claiming renewables are cheap, they are not.
Instead what happened is that anti-nuclear activists put up arbitrary regulatory barriers to construction. Three-Mile Island provided the political catalyst for a massive regulatory burden on new construction. Most of these burdens have an at best minor impact on safety, but at the cost of astronomical impact on cost.
Now maybe you can debate about whether loosening nuclear regulations to decrease cost is acceptable or not. But at the very least that's at least a debate we should be having. It's certainly the case that a lot of people will die from unmitigated climate change. Not to mention the enormous economic and environmental toll. Against that, I would gladly trade off a Three-Mile Island incident every decade or so.
So, what was the policy that caused Vogtle 3/4 and the Summer plants to go so wildly over budget? Was there a policy for Westinghouse to screw up badly? And similarly for Flamanville 3, and the new plants they're trying to build in the UK.
The argument for "less regulation" is really the argument "who needs expensive containment and emergency systems, because radiation is no big deal".
Compare.
Percentages.
Stand-up Maths called this out recently and it's good to mention. I think this might be the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8
Give me the output and our total consumption please.
Percentage here is used as a ratio of total output and a decline in that ratio over time is a decline in role. Exactly what the articles headline asserts. It doesn't matter that nuclear may have grown in absolute numbers. The assertion is that its role has declined which is true.
Could we put enough fancy light bulbs and triple glazed windows and heat pumps out there to run everything on nuclear (I am biased against nuclear but I'm also biased against coal externalities) and solar/wind? What's our shortfall? In this case it's not the % of nuclear I care about. It's how much base load it can provide.
Bad budgeting is one of my peeves about software and so I get a little grumpy when I see it happening elsewhere.
Basically you can only compare (or add, or subtract) percentages if the quantities they represent are exactly equal. And since the quantities of power production change from year to year, they're doing the same thing he's complaining about.
So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with:
- Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;
- Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);
- Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities;
- The failure modes are awful; and
- Dealing with the waste.
Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice.
As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet convinced there will be.
Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the "mess".
Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth).
I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).
He says renewable can't provide the level of energy we have without decreasing drastically our consumption. And nuclear fission is the only path we have to reduce our CO2 emissions.
I would love renewable or fusion to cover all our needs, and keep my comfortable life as it is today. But I didn't find any inspiring talks or readings so far to balance his arguments.
I've been reading Jason Hickel's book "Less is More" [1], which talks a bit about energy use, in general, and how it must be reduced, regardless of what technologies we wind up with. And one of his points is examining how much energy is just flat-out wasted. ~50% of food is just wasted, for example—whether because it's ugly, or left in a refrigerator too long, and rots. Think about how most American cities are designed, and how it's just normal for most Americans to own and drive personal vehicles for hours each day. Those resources and the energy needed to extract those resources is largely just unnecessarily wasted.
Consider countries like Costa Rica, Finland, Taiwan, etc., where quality of life is better than in the US. Life expectancy is higher. Infant mortality is lower. Education is better. And they need a tiny fraction of the energy the U.S. does. Clearly there's room for a lot of improvement with how we use energy.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-in...
Also for whatever reason people love to talk about how mining trucks will become EVs, and they always link me to the same Komatsu truck which they claim is an EV, but actually has a diesel engine and uses an electric power transmission.
I just don't see a similar pathway for nuclear? Particularly in less stable parts of the world without an existing industry.
Also, the current generation of EVs will provide a substantial amount of flexibility resulting in £billions of savings for the UK grid and consumers (see https://www.kaluza.com/blog-busting-the-myth-ev-smart-chargi...). The addition of Vehicle-to-Grid chargers will further allow increased renewables.
With the cost of these technologies decreasing, the importance of nuclear power will reduce over time.
https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
This is an outrageous falsehood. Play with the numbers at this model site to see:
Also, why is energy density relevant for stationary storage? The cost of land to site batteries is trivial.
If you want to store power overnight you want kinetic storage, or possibly power to gas. There are lots of technologies available. Some of them are cheaper than nuclear, but none of them are economical yet because there is no market for day-to-week-scale storage until solar/wind start to approach 50% of the power mix.
...neither of which are cheaper than batteries or we'd be doing that
Yes, we are doing pumped hydro, but only in a few convenient locations. I recently watched a video about Ireland's new pumped storage facility[1], it mentions some pretty tight constraints for what we currently consider economical (e.g. hill slope). Bill Gates' new book[2] doesn't go into as much detail but also doesn't sound like we got this figured out any better than batteries, basically saying we need breakthroughs or this is going to simply be a prohibitively expensive undertaking for non-rich countries. Specifically about hydrogen (the "to gas" option that has the most buzz at least) [2] says that there are high losses in conversion (without saying how much) as well as hydrogen leaking from metal tanks and electrolyzers being very expensive. There's hope for breakthroughs but.. they do have to happen in order for it to be better (cheaper) than today's batteries.
At a bare minimum, it's not obvious that what GP wrote is "just wrong". This isn't something we have a definite answer to.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI
[2] "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need" ISBN 978-0-593-21577-7
I agree that we don't have definite answers, but that's why what the GP wrote is just wrong. They're reducing a very complicated set of technologies to the economics of lithium ion batteries. While yes, pumped hydro is something of a cop-out, it's clear there are a variety of techs that are cheaper than lithium ion.
The economics of this are also a little unclear to me. In the presence of sustained negative electricity prices, it seems obvious in principle that lots of storage technologies would suddenly become economical. But it's hard to imagine how that would work given the way we currently finance these things. (And by extension, it's not clear to me that this is actually a technical problem so much as a political one.)
Additionally, fission isn't the only way to get energy out of uranium. Nuclear batteries, such as the ones powering Curiosity and Perseverance, can't melt down like a traditional reactor and will continue working until all the energy stored inside it is gone. This is the type of nuclear power I'd like to see gain prevalence for many reasons, foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid.
Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
While I’m all in favour of each home (or apartment block) being energy independent, I very much do not want widespread access to even RTG material.
Consider: average power use is about 1 kW, 1000 J/s, and that the “dead in 1-2 days with treatment” radiation absorbed dose is merely 30 J/kg, so any domestic power supply is capable of killing an adult in 2-3 seconds of full exposure… or, more likely, a tiny flake imbibed or inhaled due to either malice or incompetence would have the same effect during one night of sleep.
> Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
I’m definitely against beamed power, at least until we get a single planetary government.
Anything which beams with a higher power flux than sunlight is a potential weapon. Anything which isn’t, requires so much more land than PV that it’s always better to use PV even when you have to put the PV in your nearest desert and beam it to you from there using whatever future tech you’re thinking of to get from orbit.
(I assume one world government would mean that government could authorise itself to build a weapon pointed at itself without having to worry it might be secretly planning to shoot itself; I don’t see how either the USA or Russia could ever trust the other if either built one).
I specifically mentioned UF6 (uranium hexaflouride) as a hazardous byproduct of centrifuge enrichment. Now France (and some other countries, including the US up until 2018 at least) do process UF6, but only to put it into a more stable form (eg UF4). That more stable form still requires long term storage.
Who cares about storing fuel and toxic byproducts perpetually? We are destroying our environment right now. It's ridiculous we're even still having these conversations.
It doesn't matter if fission has a future, we could start to build a hundred power plants today, and the first ones would be finished in 5 years, and it would fucking save our planet.
How many people are dying from coal plants? How many are dying from the exhausts of ICE cars. How many more from the rising tides, the swelling storms and the blistering droughts?
We’ve had at least 3 nuclear disasters (Chernobyl, Fukushima and There Mile Island) and Google suggests there are 440 reactors in the world (current; so add a few more for decommissioned).
...and every time there's the same litany of poorly researched talking points repeated ad infinitum.
Almost nobody ever points out the systemic risks of highly centralized power plants in case of war or civil war or terrorism.
Microwaves and lasers are the two options they describe.
In all seriousness, that is a pretty terrifying industrial project. I'm not sure how you'd make the failsafes strong enough to match the risk of cooking thousands of people alive.
Despite the low power density the ground station would still be cheap, since it'd mostly be wire antenna.
(Source: the book The Case for Space Solar Power)
It doesn't look like they mention a specific wavelength in the article, but the reference to "long wavelength" and "long antenna" seems to imply frequencies much lower than what I'd consider microwave.
Generally, the lower the frequency is, the less harm it causes to living things. Though I either way I wouldn't want to live right next to the ground station. I suppose it would be similar to living right next to a radio transmission tower or a radar station.
Pump few gigawatts of microwaves over a country, and revert it to stone age in minutes.
But my point was primarily as a means of producing energy for industries and people that are stationed off Earth. For a space habitat, solar is just ridiculously good compared to the alternatives.
But I agree that fission (and fusion currently) is current noncompetitive and not worth investment (aside from research) until the economies of scale that solar/wind/battery are currently undergoing stabilize or plateau.
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.
There is no waste problem, stop spreading misinformation [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
The only site in the entire world currently intaking waste is WIPP, and it's been dogged by problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
The only two other sites that have ever actively taken in waste, Gorleben and Morsleben in Germany, are now closed and both have severe site stability issues requiring ongoing remediation into the billions of euros to ensure the sites don't fail.
I think it's not that controversial of a statement to say that the main problem with nuclear energy in general is political. As evidenced by the fact that this thread exists and full of people who are trying really hard to find problems with our only extant technology for carbon-free large-scale energy production. And that we keep shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants. There's just no basis on fact here.
Meanwhile, the water is lapping at our feet.
Carbon waste is worse than nuclear waste, yet is given a free pass because it floats and we can’t touch it or see it. But it is very real.
Also, no energy source is environmentally neutral. Building renewables and it's supporting infrastructure en masse will have a huge ecological impact. You can reduce that impact using nuclear energy (that also have it's impact on nature, but elsewhere). For example, nuclear power plants kill fish, wind turbines kill birds. By using both energy sources it's easier to limit building plants only in areas, where the impact will be low. We'll be still killing some birds and fish, but the chances that it's well within the ability of populations to recover will be much greater, than if we decided to focus on one source.
We need nuclear because it saves nature.
Nuclear would be terrible for this. The last 20% of demand not served by renewables is highly intermittent, a market for which nuclear would be a very poor solution. If one is not using nuclear for base load, one should not use nuclear at all.
After Fukushima safety requirements for reactor designs have been revisited and what do you know? Modern VVER reactors satisfies them without any changes! I suspect other modern designs have performed similarly in this regard.
Also when you hear about issues with construction time/cost or about nuclear waste storage, examples are usually US-specific. There is also Olkiluoto plant, but its issues are more about building a new reactor design using an Agile-like methodology. Nuclear waste problem can be more or less solved with "burner" reactors and fuel recycling, the field in which Russia and France have promising advancements.
Should the old reactors be retired? Yes! Should we abandon the nuclear energy for fashionable renewables? Absolutely, no! At the very least until the storage problem will be properly solved.
I thought that was interesting, but I checked and no, Ansel Adams was not president of the Sierra Club.
Is that still important? In the UK we’re spending an INSANE amount of money on a new reactor and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with the government’s motivation.
An overly optimistic statement if every I saw one. China is a case in point,they're bringing more and more fossil-fuelled power stations online by the year.
And at that rate, the rest of the world risks being left behind in energy poverty or becoming dependent on China et al for their energy needs.
Wars have been fought over less.
While it could never be proven, my suspicion is that this law has done more to hinder the adoption of newer, safer nuclear power plant designs over the years, than any other single thing.
[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...
Undercounting casualties of nuke disasters has a long tradition.
Not to dismiss undercounting in general. I may think that nuclear fission is a good option to expand today, but it's not like a religion that I identify with. It's possible I've been using wrong figures and therefore my conclusion is wrong. But then do point out where the missing deaths (or cancer cases, etc.) per produced TWh are or I will continue to believe it's better to expand nuclear fission than to keep using fossil fuels with vague hopes for "let's build solar and wind in undefined locations with magic storage technologies, and hopefully some breakthroughs here and there." (--most climate action plans that look beyond 2025)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy "Eliminating fossil fuels could cut premature deaths from air pollution by around two-thirds. That’s three to four million deaths per year."
Wind is being installed all over the world in multi-use locations, including offshore shared with boats, and onshore shared with farms and ranches. There has been absolutely no shortage of viable sites, and there will not be.
Solar is also compatible with multiple uses, although there has been little need for it. Many locations benefit from solar roofing. I daresay you have seen plenty of parking lots roofed with solar, and a great many more without, yet. Similarly, hydro and municipal reservoirs, and canals, where reduced insolation means reduced evaporation. Anyone suggesting a shortage of sites that would actively welcome solar installations has no globe. Even on farmland, numerous crops benefit from partial shade. I haven't see that yet, because there has been absolutely no shortage of other sites.
Thus, "undefined locations" is not honest. We can easily see exactly where they are being installed, with no need to guess or wonder abstractly.
Multiple storage methods are known, all low-tech, with the only open question being which ones will end up cheapest to deploy. Underground compressed air and gravity storage have been demonstrated. Production of ammonia from air and water may end up, not cheapest, but most valuable.
I trust you will not repeat these canards. They do you no credit.
Nuclear is uncompetitive today, and getting moreso every day, as costs of wind and solar continue their free fall. Geothermal may ultimately come to challenge them, particularly for baseline load.
You can, if you like, think of geothermal as nuclear power without the huge decommissioning cost commitment.
Ah, thanks. I somehow thought they'd be more special than this and required more attention. I think it's because of pop scifi tv show where scientists do some experiments and the building gets dark half the time after that because “of the enormous amount of energy required to teleport this cat in time or behind the wall“.
> During LHC operations, the CERN site draws roughly 200 MW of electrical power from the French electrical grid, which, for comparison, is about one-third the energy consumption of the city of Geneva; the LHC accelerator and detectors draw about 120 MW thereof.[34] Each day of its operation generates 140 terabytes of data.[35]
Alternatively, you can tell the grid operator that you're about to draw more power (probably paying them for the privilege), and they can in turn pay some standby generation to turn on at the same time.
I don't know whether the Large Hadron Collider needs this.
Other than that, electricity is electricity for the most part. It's all run through transformers to have the same voltage and frequency.
Some generation sources are also good because you can turn them on and off quickly (dispatchability), or because they help to keep the grid A.C. frequency and voltage stable. Batteries are also great for both of these. Usually the grid operator pays some generators to provide these services.
Why wouldn’t renewables be able to scale?
Like we need boosters that are really powerful to lift us off from earth's gravity well, that's why we can't hook up our space shuttles to an outlet in the wall because it doesn't deliver enough raw power.
Meanwhile 92% of Germany's energy consumption is still fossil fuels, but at least it won't be nuclear!
I recommend watching this https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM for a pragmatic lense
Fossil fuels, even temporary, kills several magnitudes more people than nuclear
https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-bitcoin-need-more-energy-than...
>Back at the start of 2017, Bitcoin was using 6.6 terawatt-hours of power a year. In October 2020, that was up to 67 terawatt-hours. Now a few months later, it has nearly doubled to 121 terawatt-hours, the Cambridge researchers found, enough to run their entire university for nearly 700 years.
• Only four newcomer countries are currently constructing nuclear power plants and all are plagued by financial difficulties and delays
• An econometric analysis suggests that countries classified as potential newcomers tend to be less democratic
• On the supply side, the dominant driving force is the geopolitical interests of countries that export nuclear power
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
Nothing will get accomplished with this climate 'whataboutism' type of argument. (I'm making a comparison to whataboutism, I recognize the difference)
This is completely comparable. The proper reaction to disaster is to reform, not to retreat.
We have alternatives to nuclear that don't make the state-backed insurance worthwhile, not so much to air travel - where state-backed last resort insurance is available.
I really think we need to ban building heavy industry next to bodies of water or high in critical watersheds. We have enough transit infrastructure now that we should be looking at the precautionary principle when zoning for things that can get a free ride on the wind or waterways and therefore spread over heavily populated or critical nature corridors just due to inability to stop a problem the moment it is detected. It's designed for making a company's biggest mistakes into everybody's problem instead of theirs.
Actually, Wikipedia tells me they've resumed fishing the sea next to Fukushima as of three years ago
> In February 2018, Japan renewed the export of fish caught off Fukushima's nearshore zone. According to prefecture officials, no seafood had been found with radiation levels exceeding Japan safety standards since April 2015.
And looking at a graph, it looks even less bad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Seawater contamination seems to be back to safe levels two months later.
I'm no expert on seawater contamination or anything, perhaps it's the case that the two big nuclear disasters known to mankind had a combined effect on sea life greater than the fossil fuel plants and dams for hydro. But then please do make that argument rather than a vague exclamation about "have you seen how much".
https://whalesandmarinefauna.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/nuc...
https://earthsky.org/earth/tracking-fukushima-radiation-acro...
When your externalities are global I don't think people really care quite so much about what happens to the locals.
Cesium ends up substituting for potassium, which means you ingest it and then have to worry about alpha decay.
[edit: although it seems the two isotopes are beta decay, but it's still being digested]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
Don't get me wrong, it has other problems but EROI ain't one of them.
If they didn't manage to ensure that they were operating their plants safely, I don't know why I should trust my local regulatory bodies to.
I changed my mind on nuclear power so, now I see it as an important stop gap to transform our electricity production to renewables. Existing nuclear power plants would allow us to phase out fossil fuel now. And they would buy us time to figure out storage for renewables. New nuclear plants won't help, so, their construction time is simply too long.
1. It is obviously dangerous, requiring extreme safety measures.
2. It requires large amounts of water.
3. It is unpopular.
4. It is so complex that building plants regularly exceeds budgets (there is little repetition and thus little learning)
5. It requires ridiculous storage/transport protocols for spent fuel. In Fukushima, one of the biggest concern was the spent fuel pool. That stuff is so hot, you cannot safely move it across the country and thus it has to accumulate on-site.
Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
We are not at the point where we can use 100% solar/wind yet but the path is clear. On the other hand, we might be able to do the same with safe and efficient nuclear power, but that path is much less clear. Molten salt? Micro plants? Thorium? There is no one out there doing any of that fancy new stuff in practice, sonny bet is on mass-scale of solar, wind, and batteries.
Let's do the numbers. Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada costed $5B. Nuclear costs something like $6B per installed GW. Gigafactory can produce 35 GWh of storage per year, which is just over one day of storage for a single nuclear reactor.
Now, how much these batteries cost? Let's be generous to Tesla, and assume that unit price will be around $100/kWh. That means that the Gigafactory can produce $3.5B worth of batteries per year.
Suppose you have $6B dollars. What would you rather buy, 2 years worth of entire output of Tesla Gigafactory, that would give you 3 days worth of storage at 1GW output, and which would still require spending additional billions on building primary generation (solar and wind), or one nuclear reactor that would give you the same 1GW for next 50 years, with very low operational costs?
Primary battery storage simply doesn't make economic sense at grid scale at the moment. This is not to say that renewables are stupid, or that batteries are useless. It's just the idea of using wind/solar + batteries as a base load just doesn't make sense at current level of technology, and this is why nobody is actually doing it, or planning to do it. If, or when it starts to make sense, you'll see entrepreneurs invest billions in buying up batteries and setting up battery farms. However, this does not make sense now, and will not make sense for probably at least another decade.
It’s hard to find global statistics, but 14 people were killed by wind turbines in 2011, in England alone:
https://www.quora.com/On-average-how-many-people-do-wind-tur...
Roofing is the second most dangerous profession in the US. I’m sure solar panels have also killed more people than nuclear incidents.
As for pollution? All energy sources pollute. Nuclear is better than coal. I don’t know how it compares to solar + wind + batteries + hydro, but those last two are definitely big sources of pollution, and batteries are obviously creating more waste by volume than nuclear.
No, renewables cannot provide all the power we need even if humanity scales down the energy use, which is not going to happen.
(Batteries, even sodium-sulfur, at these scales are impossibly expensive, same with pumped storage.)
The problem of renewables is not the power they can produce, but how to handle intermittency. Better electricity networks are one part of the solution, batteries can be as well.
Even with 50% renewables Germany has one of the most stable electricity networks in the world.
Also in the traditional base-peaked system you still need peeking power plants and you have problems with weather effects (in summer water in rivers can get too warm to use it or dry up, in winter it can freeze)
Actually, if we're talking about safety, we can. There are some good total cost analyses, since governments also want to know how power can be produced most cheaply. The US and UK both published reports about this with somewhat varying (but ballpark similar) numbers. But anyway, we were talking about safety.
> [...] and negative personal effects
Okay, please bring on the stats then. I agree that this is relevant to the safety discussion and, thus, the discussion whether we should use nuclear fission going forward, but I never see anyone cite comparative stats on displacement, illnesses, etc. All I ever see is that nuclear kills very, very few people per TWh compared to current energy sources, making it seem very attractive to build as a replacement when looking at this metric. You'd have to have a huge number of people falling ill or being displaced (but not dying) due to nuclear disasters or uranium mining to make it better than our current energy sources.
If nuclear were 10x safer but no cheaper, it would still be moribund.
If nuclear were 10x cheaper but no safer, it would be the dominant energy source on the planet.
I think the reality is fossil fuel was damn cheap and nuclear was not.
I imagine they wouldn’t have done so if global warming was well-understood back then.
But they got theirs and in 25 years will be gone.
This is why every cost argument as well as CO2 pricing scheme fails, and why were in the dire straits now.
Solar and wind start producing competitive power immediately. There is much less room there for corruption, but the immediate income from output drives investment.
You can't just put that at number 1 and then ignore it in the rest of the comment. It would be a big revelation and we need to update books if you know something about nuclear fission accidents that others don't.