EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document
reuters.com
reuters.com
The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.
The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway.
Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
It doesn't really help with costs, so there's no hurry, and it's a political quagmire. So it just did not happen. (WIPP kind of happened, and is happening, but it's for non-commercial nuclear waste.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
My rational judgement is not in question here, but that of all anti-nuclear proponents should be. And you're right, I do have strong feelings. Can you really blame me? I'm inheriting a broken world that looks existential climate change in the face, shrugs, lights up a spliff and says "well solar is pretty cheap". We've had the technological solution to climate change in hand for 60+ years: rocks so spicy they'll power our entire civilization for millenia. Yet we (the people) got outplayed so hard by the oil lobby that not only is nuclear energy on the decline, threads like these where supposedly technologically literate people espouse greenpeace's old talking points abound. And while this baseless and frustrating 'debate' continues, the water rises.
The assumption is simply wrong.
I mean a whole lot of coal plants do pump uranium dust into the air. If you did it with the nuclear waste you'd pump worse isotopes into the air, but the volume would be tiny.
It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion?
The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one.
If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.
Can you define who gets to decide whether a place is "most sensible"?
Subject-matter experts? National politicians? Regional politicians?
Or maybe it's more like: voters (nationally)? voters (regionally)? voters (locally)?
So does literally every other power source. Nuclear is, if anything, among the least bad options in this regard.
> and it just does not scale to solve the problem.
It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.
Evidently, we'd rather just keep killing ourselves with coal.
We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.
What we have achieved so far is a nuclear industry which is hardly able to keep the status quo of installed power generation, sky high rising costs for building nuclear power plants, extremely long build times, very little technological progress in the last decade, unsolved financial and technological problems, ...
If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
All the promised next-gen problem solvers like breeders, thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing industries, ... have been more costly and financially toxic.
Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California. Any nuclear development gets constant fierce pushback, and if it does somehow come to life, every last issue with it becomes yet another reason to kill it in the crib.
If we were earnestly trying to achieve energy independence, then Rancho Seco (near where I grew up) would've been done right and still operational, rather than half-assed and doomed to fail.
> If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
Ah yes, the "two economists walking down the street and there's a dollar bill on the sidewalk" argument. Never heard that one before.
The US had been one of THE major proponents of nuclear technology. If the country lost interest, there must be a deeper reason than 'we did not try hard enough'. I would guess that the US invested more than a trillion dollar (in todays money) in its nuclear industry.
Instead lately the US invested in fracking with huge climate impact and President Trump was supporting coal mines...
We are literally ruled by oilmen so this should not be a surprise lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRG_Group#Early_business_histo...
What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas, which is used for electricity production in the US. It has a share of roughly 40%. Coal adds roughly another 20%. That makes around 60% gas + coal in the US for electricity production.
For Germany gas + coal has 40% share in electricity production (2020).
The overwhelmingly vast majority of American transportation gets its power from oil. Anything that could disrupt that - like, say, nuclear power making electricity sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap to make electric vehicles practical - is a threat to the oil industry. Further:
> What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas
Which (as the name "fracking gas" would suggest) derives specifically from fracking as a means to extract oil from deposits otherwise inaccessible. That is: gas and oil come from more or less the same place, sold by more or less the same people with the same reasons to want to suppress alternative energy sources like nuclear (and solar, and wind, and geothermal).
And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them.
Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths.
I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of which are far more dangerous.
The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people than nuclear ever has.
Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy. That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its electricity landscape goes over many decades.
By investing many many billions into renewables, instead of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to kickstart the renewable energy industry, which will over a long period of time be much more successful replacing fossil fuels, than nuclear ever did or will do.
Just building a nuclear power plant here and there will not solve the CO2 problem. Scaling renewable to make it cheap and able for large scale distributed deployment is the way forward.
Anyway, the argument is that instead of panic-closing nuclear power plants requiring more gas and coal plants being run in their place, they could have instead ran them as long as possible while building up the renewables.
Germany was not 'panic closing' nuclear. The nuclear exit was hotly debated for decades and decided long before Fukushima.
Germany was doing a lot more than just closing 'some' of its nuclear reactors and setting a timeline for closing the rest. Germany also removed the centralized monopoly business model around the big nuclear&coal-based electricity companies. The electricity production was in the hand of four large companies who had divided Germany into four monopolistic regions. These large companies had zero intention investing into renewable, since that already owned all the market and were free of competition. The government opened up the market and reduced the influence of the companies.
Germany has in sum now not more coal power than in had then. It has less coal capacity.
That is, of course, presuming civilization does no collapse because of climate change. Fingers crossed!
It’s just frustrating to see energy programs fail due to public opinion shift brought on by random perfectly-timed coincidence since there’s not really anything to blame or at fault. Like how The China Syndrome talks about “an area the size of Pennsylvania” and came out exactly twelve days before the actual Three Mile Island accident lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Deta...
Like: 'On August 26, 2010, a 3.3-tonne "In‐Vessel Transfer Machine" fell into the reactor vessel when being removed after a scheduled fuel replacement operation.'
Plus the Fukushima earthquake (and the following tsunami) showed that a lot of Nuclear installations in Japan were not safe against heavy earthquakes.
The 2020 National People's Congress reportedly supported aiming for 6-8 new reactors a year, which would double the existing deployment in 6-8 years, and the aim is to not just increase the number of reactors but doing so at a pace that will increase the overall proportion of electricity from nuclear.
Nobody here that I can see are saying not to invest in renewables. But the extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering is as harmful to society as anti-vaxxer propaganda. It's causing real harm and real lives lost.
That's completely ignoring the history. The nuclear industry was started top down by the German government and the big utilities. The WHOLE electricity market (production and distribution) was in the hand of only a tiny few monopolistic companies, with deep ties into politics.
The anti-nuclear movement started as a grassroots movement against this corrupt systems, which forced their energy politics upon the country.
None of these former monopolistic companies had ever invested in renewable energy or had any interest in it. They were sitting on multi-billion Deutsche Mark businesses which were like printing money. The risks for the nuclear technology was even nicely taken up by the state.
Breaking up these monopolistic markets against their will and against the will of many well-earning politicians which after their political career were moving into these big utilities took roughly three decades.
Thus breaking up the market, getting rid of these huge obstacles to a new distributed / decentralized energy landscape was one of the key achievements.
> extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering
The anti-nuclear movement is not anti-science. The nuclear industry has time over time shown its incompetence. Fukushima has exposed how it worked in Japan: the reactor fleet had multiple technical problems (technical designs, systemic underestimated risks, too expensive to fix problems, ...). Many of these problems were technical and many were political problems. The height of a Anti-Tsunami wall is depending on both a risk calculation and a cost problem. These are not independent in a corrupt industry&politics. Companies and regulation authorities will not cause costs (which were needed to upgrade the site) and thus the risk calculations will be down in a way, that the company will not carry extreme costs, which might have had negative effects on its profitability. The tsunami risk will be calculated as so unlikely that the existing installation looked safe - even though Japan is known for strong earth quakes.
Also: the dismantling of a nuclear installation on an Earth Quake fault line is both a problem of determining the risk and a cost problem. In the end the costs and the hope, that nothing will happen, were the reason that no actions were taken. A single earth quake showed for multiple nuclear installations that the risk calculations were wrong. Thus we have the effect that in Japan the majority of nuclear power plants is still offline and the technical problem of reactors with their meltdown is still for a few decades unsolved.
It's not anti-science to break up corrupt and dis-functional energy monopolies.
Running Fukushima as it was designed (and paid for) was 'anti-science' and politically corrupt. Just before the Fukushima accident happened, there were safety inspections and they found nothing of these problems, which later killed the Fukushima site. After the tsunami there were multiple events which early were described as completely unlikely: loss of outside power, loss of emergency power, reactor meltdowns, hydrogen explosions, heating-up spent fuel pools, completely useless emergency plans, need for additional cooling via pumping sea-water damaging the buildings, fear of additional earthquakes hitting structurally weak buildings, radioactive water exiting the building, ...
The whole scale of the Fukushima ebents exposed the anti-science, design-to-cost philosophy of the nuclear industry and its political proponents.
And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up.
And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands.
Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities?
East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.
Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
Also continents can moving in 800.00 years, sure but we can also move the nuclear deposits. It's not like they have to stay in that exact spot for all eternity.
Nuclear is all about buying humanity time to solve the energy problems. I think we might need that time to get to full renewables, if we ever get there.
This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it.
This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.
No, we absolutely are not.
"Long half-life" = "less radioactive". By definition.
Do you know what the half life of CO2 is? Infinity.
CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.
Nuclear fuel itself isn't radioactively dangerous, it's dangerous because it's a heavy metal (like lead).
After nuclear fuel is reacted, it produces a bunch of nuclear decay products. Some of these decay products have a half-life of 10s of years, which are the problems: they're short enough to be dangerously radioactive, but long enough that they need to be handled carefully for a long time. But not for 10s of thousands of years.
Most of what you've read about plutonium is patent nonsense. For one, it isn't even close to being the "most toxic substance known". You can pick up a lump of it and hold in in your hand. You'll be fine. Really. It is an alpha emitter, and alpha radiation can be stopped by your skin or even a piece of paper. You'd have to eat it before you saw any ill effects.
Not to mention that plutonium is a useful nuclear fuel. It's not going to be left lying around.
You do know that the ocean has megatons of uranium in it? Why aren't you concerned about that?
For that matter, we could grind up all the nuclear waste ever produced and disperse it in the ocean. It wouldn't change the radioactivity of sea water by any significant degree.
The Soviets used to dump their scrap sub reactors in the Arctic Ocean whole. There are a bunch of them up there.
> CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.
Oh? So we can just wait until things start to get uncomfortably warm, then stop cranking out CO2 for a decade or two and everything will be better?
Good to know.
Ancient Egypt was a super advanced civilization continuously existing for 4000 years! Yet shortly after the decline nobody could read Hieroglyphs anymore.
We don't know what the future holds. Lets say in 50 years a low intensity Gamma Ray Burst hits earth and destroys all digital information but fries only half of all living creatures. The survivors dig trough the trash of the past to get to the rare earth metals they need to rebuild their civilization and find this really neat bunker with those funny signs...
That is a ridiculously strong statement.
> However, even a storage space hundreds of meters below the ground might not be able to withstand the pressures of one or more future glaciations with thick sheets of ice resting on top of the rock, deforming it and creating internal strains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage, because the timespans involved and the potential dangers are not manageable by humans atm.
The question is do we want to put more on the pile or not? If the alternative is to destroy our planets with coal and co the answer should be clear.
But take Germany for example. We've built up wind energy from 0 to more output than nuclear energy in 15 years. I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.
When we look at global warming there are two nations that need to act. China and the US, producing around 50% of Green House Gases. Both have more wind, way more space and potentially more money than Germany (China announced last year that they are gonna spend 1.5 Trillion USD in the next decades to become greener).
> glaciation
Seems like a very future problem. If humans are around by then, we can move the stuff easily.
> We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage
Agreed.
But this is not exactly a problem for nuclear power. (Even if it has become a talking point.) Nuclear waste storage is a boring and simple problem. (It needs cooling and physical security.) It should be put simply on a big remote boring military base - plenty of them in Nevada - so people don't worry about it being close to where they live.
Long term storage is a long term problem it needs basic research, and simply the continuation of our civilization, which then puts the waste where currently it thinks it should be.
Eg. it's completely possible that 500 years from now we'll finally recycle it, and then dump the rest into the Sun just for the lulz. (Or put it on an inert rock.)
Though I think we should build the amazing big spikes someone proposed to mark the site as "bad": https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/temple-of-doom-...
> I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.
Agreed!
Something that takes several hundred thousand years for decay isn't actually dangerous.
Short half-life: High radioactivity.
Long half-life: Low radioactivity.
Furthermore, spent nuclear fuel can be recycled up to 95%:
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE
> https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial...
> East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.
East Germany never put any spent fuel into their own soil. They sent the spent fuel back to the USSR. Spent fuel is a resource with a market value. The GDR and the USSR didn't just threw that away.
> Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
It's actually pretty safe and has among the lowest numbers of deaths per TWh:
> https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
> So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
Actually, the worst thing is that it causes Germany to build new gas power plants and stop shutting down coal plants:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_bef...
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Nord_Stream_2
> https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizitae...
> https://www.wa.de/hamm/kraftwerk-westfalen-in-hamm-uentrop-i...
> https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.grosskraftwerk-man...
> https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-...
> https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-kohleausstieg-...
> https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht...
Compare Germany's and France's emissions in the energy sector:
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
Germany emits SEVEN(!) times as much as the French for producing electricity and heat. The nuclear phase out is causing 1100 premature death every year in Germany and causes additional costs of $12 billion per year:
> https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
And Germany has the highest electricity prices - worldwide:
> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths during the Texas blizzard because they couldn't provide enough electricity during the cold.
Texas failed to secure their electrical grid, that has nothing to do with renewables. We got renewables running in far worse weather conditions.
Capitalism and greed killed those texans.
You're making my case that people can't be trusted with nuclear, even though the tech in and of itself could be safe.
Hydro is the cause of the by far most lethal single power plant related failure (the Banqiao dam failures).
Rooftop solar causes more deaths per unit of electricity delivered from installation related accidents alone to be uncompetitive with nuclear.
Generally the more construction that is needed for a given production method, the more deaths, and that tends to go in the favour of nuclear given the sheer amount of power generated once a plant is operational.
Large solar installations may win out over nuclear in terms of safety, but it's hard to get good data.
Here is a good video explaining what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
Just FYI, Grady from Practical Engineering channel who made the video is a civil engineer. I also recommend his entire series about power grid (well, actually all his videos are great). )
The video describes what happened, and summarizes the cause as:
> Basically, the entire system was ill-prepared for a storm of this magnitude.
The video addresses only what happened, and (intentionally) does not address why it happened - why the system was ill-prepared. but it's absolutely true that there are "renewables running in far worse weather conditions" (and natural gas). all of these systems can be winterized.
j-pb thinks that the system was unprepared due to "capitalism and greed," which IMO is not an unreasonable idea. Why do you think the various Texas organizations basically ignored the FERC/NERC recommendations for cold weather preparedness from 2011?
Question: in which sectors do we currently optimise for minimum deaths (above anything else)?
Including the last paragraph brings all the other points in to doubt, even though I otherwise agree with those points
Please, quit spreading this false/fake BS information. This is not what happened in Texas. You're willing to do the research on the support of your point of nuclear saftey, but then you got very lazy with this statement and did not research this clickbait level comment.
https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1...
Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.
Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are high.
Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast...
Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear.
Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates.
Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons".
Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not).
Etc. Etc.
I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.
it is.
drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.
An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.
I mean don't get me wrong offshore wind power is always expensive but enough sources list solar, on-shore wind power as cheaper. Hydro power as comparable and Geothermal power as much cheaper.
I did pick the IPCC reports because those are usually regarded as being careful amalgamations of the available scientific data. Since there are lots of eyes on those reports, larger mistakes should have been pointed out already.
But you are right that there is contradictory information out there, and I don't really have the perfect authoritative source either.
That is as dishonest a take as it gets.
First, the "rescued from bankruptcy every few years" is simply not true. The company has been paying dividends every year for decades, and I can't think of a bailout of company debt in recent years.
Second point: Like most french state-owned companies, EDF is a vessel of "creative" accounting from politicians, but you'll find out that it's not tied to operating nuclear plants specifically. It's just that as a public-owned company, EDF is a tool for public policy. Sometimes it takes on debt to do so.
For instance, EDF is legally forced to buy back green energy at fixed rates as part of a package to help develop green energy. EDF is also forced to sell nuclear power to its competitors (ARENH policy) at fixed price, when they ask it. This means EDF competitors can arbitrage this agreement by buying nuclear power below market at times, and selling green power when market is saturated at other times. From the state's perspective, it's an OK thing to open the market and promote renewables, but from the company perspective it makes no sense. Thus, the company "pays" for a public policy.
This kind of accounting is usual in other former public companies such as SNCF.
That being said, nuclear costs figures should be accurate, since they come from the work of the french finance watchdog, the "cour des comptes", as well as from parlementarian investigations. You're right that these figures would probably not be possible without the scale economies of the initial rollout and without state-backing, but as you cite, this is also true for renewables or any other large industrial policy.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
"The data on nuclear power was taken from Lenzen (2008) and Warner and Heath (2012)."
"Photovoltaic power: Ranges are based largely on the reviews of Hsu et al. (2012) and Kim et al. (2012)."
"Wind power: The data is based on the review of Arvesen and Hert-wich (2012) and has been cross-checked with Dolan and Heath (2012) and Hertwich et al. (2013)"
Let's go back to the Hsu review cited for photovoltaic generation.
"Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic Electricity Generation: Systematic Review and Harmonization"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1530-9290....
If you look at tables 1 and 2, it's aggregating studies from the years 2000-2009. Most are from 2006 or earlier. Solar manufacturing has improved a lot and costs have fallen dramatically since 2006. At the same time, nuclear projects under development since 2006 in Europe or the USA have cost much more than originally planned.
China continues to build new reactors; it's an existence proof that new reactors can be built. But China also builds wind and solar farms cheaper than Europe or the USA. You can't get a Chinese energy project at Chinese domestic prices in either the USA or Europe.
The EU or the US should announce that it's going to order 100+ plants. Completely different game. There's no point in competing with solar or wind otherwise.
Sure, this is politically untenable. :|
The people involved in these plans aren't idiots, they know what the time scale of nuclear waste is and they look for sites with that in mind [0]. They appear to be considering obvious problems like earthquakes and less obvious problems like ice ages.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
[1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth
Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.
Please no. A launch failure with several tons of radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected.
And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled:
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
> Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
Asse isn't a storage for high-level waste. It contain low-level waste that can also come from hospitals and such. Germany has no storage for high-level waste yet.
Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
Just look at this photograph, it shows all of the French nuclear waste accumulated in decades:
> https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was.
> https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio...
It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie factory.
The Marcoule site where MOX fuel is manufactured had an explosion in 2011, which did result in a fatality.
You are right that we have a lot of plutonium that we can not use. The intent of superphenix was to use this plutonium. It failed.
Pity that it got closed, I hope technical issues are fixed and a new device based on better understanding replaces it.
That would be a long pipeline, because La Hague is facing the channel, not the north sea.
The reality is that the French try hard to put high-level waste deep in under the ground. After more than 50 years of atomic plants and nearly 80 of lab reactors the French haven't a single adequate repository.
The most advanced project may open in 2025. An English concise description is already amusing, please read it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_...
A more complete version, in French: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o
Other forms of recycling are very viable and have much less problems and much less side streams.
The problem is of course that anti-nuclear crowed have stopped practically all technology development so they can claim all problems are solvable and nuclear should be abolished.
As everything with nuclear, we as a society barley got to first generation technology and then halted all development.
Canada is doing some create work with recycling of CANDU fuel, Moltex Energy is in development of a reactor to use that fuel and its a much better process then what the french use.
Are you kidding? What kind of nuclear waste has even the remote possibility to go critical that is produced by a VVER reactor that is pretty common?
All possible thanks to Nuclear!
The main pertinent local project is an utter disaster, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_3
Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just extremely dense.
The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel reprocessing on site:
That c² factor in E = m c² is huge (9 * 10¹⁶).
It is really hard for humans to intuit about factors of ten to the power of 16 or 17.
In this case the units (for speed²) you want are m²/s² = J/kg
Your face #2 when people realise that this nuclear waste goes to the environment unfiltered.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...
I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after decommissioning. You have a lot of shielding material (i.e. the other 99% of reactor waste that is mostly concrete) to protect a very small amount of radiation and keep the material distributed, which has some security benefits. Not having a centralized location doesn't seem like an issue. It isn't like humans are going anywhere anytime soon and we're going to lose information about where waste is stored. We have plenty of time to figure out a long term storage system that is still safe if the entirety of human information is lost. It's a great goal, but if that's our concern we should talk about deep geological repositories for a lot of other waste that we have that doesn't degrade overtime.
So a terrorist just gets a slight increase in fear factor, but it doesn't increase deadliness of the weapon, requires a lot more work, greatly increases the chance that they get caught, puts them in more danger, and so they just don't do it. There's too many downsides for only a minor upside. Why do it when you could just make a dozen pipe bombs and put them in trash cans around the city?
Really just think if you were a terrorist and wanted to do damage. There's a lot of things you could do (bunch of rusty nails on the I-5) that just don't happen. They are easy to accomplish, can do a lot of damage, but just don't. Why? Different objectives and just terrorism is extremely rare in the first place. And I'm pretty sure a drilling through feet of concrete and metal in a likely highly monitored site is too big of a hurdle when you can just go to home depot and get some stump remover and some steel pipes.
The current trend in Kabul are bombs that get stuck onto vehicles by passing motorcyclists using magnets. It’s quite terrifying, since the ease essentially allows terrorists to enact a widespread campaign against civil service and civil society. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/asia/afghanistan-ma...
General population thinks anything with radiation is panic worthy, even though there isn't that big of a deal.
Terrorists want blood and guts on national TV, not a statistical raise in cancer over 30 years.
for some reason I find it funny to imagine a terrorist pondering about his long term career plans and prospects.
do they also have stuff like resume driven development?
the terrorist might find some operation ridiculous but does it anyway to make his resume better, that way he can get hired into the FAANGs of the terrorism sector.
Executive Orders.
IilIRC his last actual book.
Sounds they better write blog posts about google and facebook tracking
godelski is arguing that terrorists who can be convinced to try and use dirty bombs will be less effective than if they had chosen other, more damaging, options.
These people are smart, but are still indoctrinated. Despite the “religion of peace” propaganda, a clear reading of the Koran shows certain duties that cannot be avoided if you accept the premise that (unlike most of the Bible) it God’s exact words and also the final truth. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the smarter the reader, the more inescapable those conclusions become.
It’s also not a fringe idea. Imagine if everyone in the US or everyone in the EU suddenly started believing suicide bombings of civilians is at least sometimes justified. That’s around the total number of people who actually believe that across the globe (even more believe in terrorism when targets and/or methods are changed).
More generally though, lots of very smart people get indoctrinated into cults every day. If our life history were just a bit different, you or I probably would have joined one too no matter how smart we are.
The only reason I can see why no one has used that already is that chemical weapons designed for the purpose are more effective.
But even chemical weapons aren't used that often. We rarely hear about anthrax letters and we never hear about terrorist attacks that used bleach and ammonium even though practically everyone knows about this reaction and the materials are cheap, easy to obtain, and don't raise suspicion. (Side note: we do hear about people accidentally creating this mixture fairly frequently. Enough that almost everyone knows someone that did it)
Chemical/biological/nuclear weapons are just not worth it to terrorists. If they were we'd have seen them and if we're being honest the dirty bomb is the hardest out of all of them.
Groups that have the expertise to covertly retrieve spent fuel could probably just buy guns and shoot up a stadium. And that would cause more damage. The relative risk presented by nuclear waste is trivial.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File...
Asbestos is naturally occurring and incredibly dangerous. "natural" has nothing to do with risk to human life.
Not sure who you think you're disagreeing with? Nobody said otherwise if you read the thread.
To me, it's like someone asking where me to choose which part of my house to infect with wood rot:
1. A single scrap of wood, extremely badly affected, stored in a sealed box under the stairs
2. My entire roof mildly affected by rot.
I'd take the box under the stairs.
I think you underestimate how 'temporary' many seemingly strong structures are and how high the temptations to cut costs are. Its very easy to be like "welll...this'll probably hold. I'm sure of it."
In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US, but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your problem, someone elses problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Han....
I can play the environmentalist on the backs of other people as well. Super easy.
You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the same carbon.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-ch...
Also, 17% of France's energy comes from recycled nuclear (70% from nuclear)[0]
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
Though the more honest answer is closer to "mostly not recyclable, a bit not economically viable". But that also depends what we mean by "economically viable". If we're using it in the typical sense of "slightly more expensive for producers" then a small percentage increase. But if we're talking about "if producers had infinite resources" then well still no, but we'd be able to recycle a bit more (we're still not talking much more). I'm assuming the former because the latter is an absurd position.
In any case, current facts do not align with the narrative that nuclear waste management is a solved (technically & economically) problem.
Also x-ray technicians stand behind a shield, because x-rays are still dangerous.
Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without creating waste for future generations, we should go without the power.
Seriously, we don't need it.
And nuclear is the safest power source (measured in deaths/twh) which humans have been using for decades.
However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future.
Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know.
I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.
1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.
2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-capture forest, indefinitely.
3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to continually grow the amount of forested land just to follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil fuels.
But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to allow for population growth, or the large land area needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge surplus of not-yet-forest land — can't grow trees in deserts.
Is wood not a carbon store?
In 2014, use of wood products in all notable categories combined was about 1.25 billion tons [3]. Including just sawnwood and wood paneling, it was 0.827 billion tons. Since there's no plausible way to use 2500% as much lumber for structural purposes as we do now, and just harvesting wood and leaving it outdoors will lead to decomposition on short (decades) time scales, people consider charring it and/or burying it underground. Just building more structures out of wood is barely going to put a dent in the problem.
Likewise, dynamically shifting the equilibrium toward wood from CO2 doesn't help much if the wood persists for only decades. The time scale for CO2 to naturally return to its pre-industrial equilibrium is more like 100,000 years [4]. We need sequestration measures that prevent CO2 from returning to the atmosphere over longer time periods than wood takes to decay naturally.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose
[3] https://www.forest2market.com/blog/fao-report-highlights-res...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Princeton/...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
That claim is simply plain misinformation.
For the import vs export of energy you find that here:
http://media.matochklimat.nu/2021/02/image1.jpg
Sweden import much more coal energy when Barsebäck and Ringhals was up and running.
Source for graph: http://matochklimat.nu/analys-svensk-el-fortsatter-att-trang...
The Swedish ethos is “we are green. It was the other guys!”
http://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downloa...
If you follow the flow from: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ you see that most of those countries primarily generate electricity using Oil, Gas and especially coal. (Latvia, Lithuania and to a lesser extent: Estonia)
Some import from Denmark and Norway. Negligible from Poland, Germany, Lithuania. Net is export to all, which means Swedish clean power is actually displacing dirtier sources, except in Norway which is full on hydro.
The weird thing is that you're taking a shit in your neighbor's yard. I mean if they do it in their own yard it's weird, but there's nothing wrong with it. I mean this is what we do with dog shit.
The problem is that everyone shits. Sure, nuclear shit smells a lot more than solar shit or coal shit, but there's a hell of a lot less of it. We're talking a cat vs herd of rhinos. If I had to clean up one of the two I honestly don't care how much that cat's shit smells, I'm picking that job every single time. And you know what, the researchers seem to agree
> The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies
Some mines use ISL techniques which is similar to fracking. Canada does have Cigar Lake, the highest grade uranium mine in the world (15%), but due to the dangers of high uranium concentrations and the challenging geology, it has not been the easiest to extract.
This is to say, you don't just dig up some ore and stuff it in a reactor(it takes a lot of ore to power a reactor), nor is uranium mining a clean process.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Garzweiler#/media/Date...
and are planned to become lakes (but at least in Germany nobody knows where the water is supposed to come from).
The places where coal is mined under ground need to run pumps forever or the surrounding cities are destroyed. The pumps in Germany's Ruhrgebiet consume about 70MW continuously. In a couple of decades the pumps will have consumed more energy than we got out of the coal.
And, of course, if we continue to burn coal in a couple of decades largeish parts of the globe might become uninhabitable to humans.
The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards.
The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distribution of that food to where the people are.
Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the fertilizer needed to support the food. You could argue that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the population to die, but that would similarly require some sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there and keep us there.
At this point, we do need the energy. The only way to maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version of Stalin in a position of absolute power.
Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest dangers in our current political debate about what should come next.
I agree that we should have food security for everybody, and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with power for heating and cooking they will just start burning things again which would create a bigger disaster.
But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste in every sector because electricity is so cheap.
Update: Thankfully, it looks like it has started to slow. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Saying we should only use methods that don't provide waste is saying we should reduce energy consumption to 1-5% of current global and ditch all cars, ships and airplanes. Even if you are 100% morally right you're never going to convince humanity of that.
That number is not actually supported by your source, as a matter of fact, your source points out that the US it not recycling any of the fuel at all.
> Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste
Sorry, but I don't see the argument there? Just because there's already toxic waste, does not mean that more toxic waste wouldn't change anything. Or are you suggesting the nuclear waste should just be thrown into Herfa-Neurode with all the chemical waste?
> Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
Germany also has quite a high population density, it doesn't have the luxury of large swats of unpopulated land where it could build it's "nuclear waste storage hall", and that's assuming that "just store it in a hall" is actually a good way to store it.
If it really was as simple as that, then why did Finland spend billions on building their Onkala deep geological repository? Which is the only installation of that kind on the whole planet. Not even in the US a proper storage location has been found yet, as Yucca Mountain was not deemed suitable.
The best answer anybody can currently give to that is "Just store it on site", which isn't a solution, it's the temporary band-aid for a rather permanent problem that's not actually solved.
You can't just hand-wave that away by claiming it ain't a problem and allegedly never was.
> That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
All it states is that "it can be recycled" and how "90% of its potential energy still remains", which is about as useful as declaring the plastic problem as solved because "plastic can be recycled".
That makes the 95% number an assertion without evidence, as such, it can be dismissed without evidence.
Nuclear energy is still a fantastic, dense source of energy. I would much,much prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than a coal or similar one.
If there was a way to generate even cleaner power with such efficiency then great. 25 years ago we had that hope for a few weeks with cold fusion.
If its so easy as you say, why doesn't every country have a small room to keep all the waster?
Why do we often "just" throw it in the ocean instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
Why do these "so easy to maintain rooms" leak?
https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-st....
Why do managers of nuclear reactos "loose" all the waste?
https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/missing-german-nuclear-mater...
Etc.
They are now stored in the "yard" at the different nuclear powerplant
Decades of fighting has eventually killed every attempt because people do not want it.
I am always curious about people who say not to mind the waste, if it would be ok to store them in their yard?
- What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build bridges, surely we can build large containers.
Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love to know why its a stupid idea.
> Russia has a lot of uninhabited space
Nuclear installations are not in uninhabited space. For example the still operating (!) RMBK-style reactors are not that far away from major cities.
US irradiated large areas of Pacific Ocean and atmosphere (US) with its testing program, harming people living there and contaminating whole world with radioactive isotopes. UK dumped radioactive waste in barrels into Atlantic ocean, has bad record on nuclear safety (Windscale accidents) and continues to run old nuclear power plant that does not pass old safety tests, so they make the test less and less restrictive [1].
The lax approach to safety has been observed on all sides. It has to improve but it is no reason to stop development of nuclear power.
Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people. Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, not solely due to technology, but mainly due to incompetence and dysfunctional society. Also, the disaster wasn't as bad as people think. Few people died when you compare to other industrial accidents.
The really badly polluted installations in Russia are the military/research ones in restricted areas - Mayak, Lake Karachay.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hunterston_B_nucl...
And the need, since the baltic sea has a lot of countries which would be effected by leaking nuclear reactors.
mining, processing and 'storing' of nuclear material isn't any better in Russia.
> Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people
I think there is not much reason pretending that the russian nuclear industry is especially competent.
Yeah, except for the decades upon decades of research they've been doing on the topic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's actually quite fun: the theory goes that the huge mass of the pyramid was used to couple seismic vibrations into the enormous granite blocks above the King's Chamber. Being stuffed with quartz crystals, this generated a varying electric field which excited a hydrogen atmosphere (provided by a chemical reaction in the Queen's Chamber. Or the Subterranean Chamber, can't remember which). The Grand Gallery was apparently filled with Helmholtz resonators which set up a standing wave of some sort, the portcullises at the entrance of the King's Chamber being acoustic baffles to control the resonance. The net effect of all this was apparently that the comparatively thin-walled sarcophagus in the King's Chamber (also granite) would set up an appropriate vibration in the hydrogen to cause a maser-like concentration of microwave energy to be directed up one of the "air passages". Damage in the Grand Gallery is taken as evidence that there was some sort of catastrophic failure that knocked the whole thing out of commission.
It's remarkably complete, and totally, utterly bonkers. I love it.
So now that your appeal to emotion has failed, do you have any actual points?
The big boxes still need armed guards and a stable government so that it that they are not dismantled and used as weapons by future generations of extremists.
A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a radioactive isotope, often with much shorter half-lives. Some of these are even useful in industry.
There are new kinds of reactors, like the Traveling Wave Reactor (TVR) which efficiently use fuel like breeder reactors as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
There were challenges in the past with breeder reactor design (for example as this article outlines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...), but this is an area that there should be a lot more active research in. The long-term benefits of doing so would be immense.
I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed.
Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal material from the line.
"But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet, "That's a terrible idea!"
Yes, it is, but hear me out:
Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants pocket or something.
So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe) someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that: "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO 234-867-5309"
Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now what?
- You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're suddenly near the top of the suspect list.
- Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too. Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured destruction!
- Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times and we might end up with world peace.
All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the alternative right now can range from "millions of people displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my chances, thanks.
Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water.
Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will. Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil.
Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I think having to store a lot of nuclear fuel is a much better problem than having to extract carbon out of the atmosphere, or building difficult to recycle chemical batteries out of scarce resources.
Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage because of several incidents of water ingress even during the time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open right there and then.
Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.
The thing is, we don't have a long term solution for storing CO2 either.
The thing I like about nuclear waste is is it's obvious, its tangle and it sits around in sinister looking containers.
As opposed to CO2.
There's other ways, of course, but this was the best one I remember reading about; it's expensive but less so than the incidentals of CO2 and particulate release.
Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years.
The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.
No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada):
>...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...
>...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India. It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor
First, you could charge outrageus amounts of money for the service.
Second, you could practically ditch your defence forces simply because absolutely nobody would want anyone else to attack a country with huge amounts of radioactive waste.
Finally, after some time, you could likely sell the waste back as a fuel ingredient to new nuclear technologies.
This only slightly tongue in cheek. Of course I understand that proposing that would be a political suicide, but nevertheless, it would make sense.
Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant.
Yes we can. Case closed.
Because that scenario is very common.
The thing is, these are not just straw men, but talking points frequently used by nuclear energy opponents. Along with others, like asserting that nuclear energy is a source of CO², etc.
If nuclear proponents had to focus only on reasonable, grounded talking points, they would probably be happier for it.
> for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
It's an OK point, and it's a shame that Germany seems to skip its environmental responsibilities. However, EU laws apply to all EU countries, including the ones that do a better job.
Deep geological storage, but not in salt beds, is a simple answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting to be inspected and repaired. I've been in deep hard-rock mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste.
The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as well.
Why would you think that?
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
Like I said in a sibling post, the big advantage is that biogas is Net 0 carbon wise as you’re reusing carbon already in the carbon cycle
I think enkid's point is agreeing with you: might as well burn that sewage CH4 for energy-- you end up with the same CO2 in the end and less CH4 in the atmosphere in the short term.
This means waste must be sorted somehow, but this is a rational thing to do anyways.
And it pisses me off immensely to see some idiots throw plastic bags or non-food waste to the biowaste bins. There are signs in many languages and even with pictures, but some people still manage. Such biowaste cannot be used for gas generation, so it's kind of hurting all the inhabitants.
Source: my wife used to work at a biogas plant
According to VafabMiljö [1], who runs the local biogas facility, in the year 2020 they processed 16157 tons of household biowaste, i.e. 66% of entire processing that year. The other stuff was sewage sludge and slurry from packaged/unpackaged food items (total of 8246 tons).
16157 tons of household biowaste turned into gas to run buses with and not dumped into a landfill is a good thing.
In 2012 the municipality collected 60% of overall food waste to turn it into biogas. Back then they hoped to reach 80% eventually. [2]
I didn't find newer collection numbers (they are somewhere, I just stopped iterating), but the number can only be higher today.
[1] https://www.vafabmiljo.se [2] Naturvårdsverket rapport 6518, September 2012 (ISBN 978-91-620-6518-8).
Though your comment has a problem. It isn't carbon that is the problem, it is carbon in the air. If we did 100% CO2 extraction from coal fire plants they wouldn't be a real climate issue (overly simplified). Similarly we can't consider sewage as a carbon 0 cycle because eating turns a solid carbon source (food) into a gas. Carbon is fine, carbon in the air is not fine. Sewage is only neutral in the respect that we've already converted it to a gas (unless we accelerate this process, which is typically done) but doesn't account for the conversion process that happens.
It's very good to analyze specific flows, but at the end of day, greenhouse gases (appropriately weighted) in the air are a fungible liability, and taking some specific process and sanctifying it's net greenhouse gas emissions in isolation is silly.
It might be more thermodynamically favorable to use the gas as input to a carbon capture process. Even if that is the case, bootstrapping a market for biogas will lower the cost of biogas. In turn, that will lower the cost of biogas-based carbon sequestration.
The problem comes when one introduce fossil fuels into the production chain because it makes economical sense to do so.
Nuclear power is poorly understood and easily stigmatised but on balance is far less harmful than burning fossil fuels.
(and I know the accidents were worse, but we iterated on car and plane safety, so why not energy safety?)
It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous.
The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit in air travel.
Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obvious that it's killing us and in such numbers as it is. Nuclear is a dramatic killer, when we die from radiation it's clear and obvious and horrific.
Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.
And yet we seem to be doing just that here in Finland. The for profit companies operating and building the plants have been trying to get permits to build more (and very likely are going to get another one soon). Even with the "failure" of Olkiluoto 3 they seem to find a way to do it in a profitable enough way that they (2 companies TVO and Fennovoima) want to build more.
There are no subsidies for nuclear power at all in Finland.
Also our permanent spent fuel storage site is almost finished and should hold around 100 years of spent fuel. Though there have been now some talks to not really use it for most fuel as it makes more sense to build breeder reactors and just burn that fuel into much smaller amount. If that happens it will fit much more then 100 year of spent fuel.
>This month, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland was supposed to start producing power. Instead, the plant is at least three and a half years late and more than 50 percent over-budget. Olkiluoto was to be the “poster child” for the new generation of nuclear power plant designs that would drive the “Nuclear Renaissance” and if any nuclear project was going to go well. Instead, it has become an example of all that can go wrong in economic terms with new reactors. The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130728115821/http://www.psr.or...
There does seem to be another reactor being built in Finland, but it's being built by Russia.
Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of power.
How can anyone argue against nuclear being part of the solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build?
Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China have the skill and the will to make it happen while everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to pump out co2.
With the contract TVO signed with Siemens and Areva for the plant they will never end up having to pay all the cost overruns. It was basically a fixed price contract.
What ended up happening is Siemens got the fuck out of the deal (it was originally a Siemens and Areva joint project) and French government broke up Areva Group into smaller entities and took a hit on the failed project. From the legal fighting Areva agreed to pay TVO 450 million due to failing to deliver on time with some extra money going one way or another based on if it will deliver in the new revised timelines (ended up Areva having to pay TVO another 450 million).
According to TVO at the end of the day the project cost them 5 billion instead of the original 3.2 billion with Areva saying it cost the 8.5 billion so Areva took a huge hit on making a bad contract and/or failing to deliver.
However, also 50% over budget.
Funnily enough most of these loans are from German banks and various export agencies backed by the French government. Even still all these loans were given at market rates so EU would not kill the project (Greenpeace etc did make a complaint to EU and a investigation was done)
This kind of seller arranging some part of the loans is very normal in large infrastructure projects like these.
The other new project I mentioned is Hanhiviki in which Rosatom won the bidding. Areva and Toshiba also left their bids but as I understand it Areva was thrown out due to their failure to deliver Olkiluoto 3 in time/budget and Toshibas bid was not competetive. Though this Hanhikivi plant is still waiting for permits and there has been some obvious issues with it being built by Rosatom and the Russian sanctions going around. It also has some American and UK interests as Rosatom contracted the turbines to some GE subsidiary and Rolls Royce.
Nuclear looks pretty good in comparison.
This is nonsense. We are basically using 60s technology that has some of these problems.
A modern reactor facility could be 10-50x smaller for the same output and that makes think like decontamination cheaper as well. Also, these facilities can run 100 years potentially, so the amount of money required for decommissioning is amortized of gigantic amounts of energy.
There is nothing inherent in nuclear that make it super expensive or unsustainable.
FYI, oil & gas industry receives a lot of subsidies (just google it). On top of that, nuclear is extremely regulated compared to oil & gas. For instance, we have to capture and store nuclear waste. That's not the case for oil & gas CO2 waste.
well, a lot of people simply refuse to air travel because of perceived safety issues
I don't smoke but until they started banning smoking everywhere, plenty of people would sign me up for passive smoking without asking me anything.
Pollution from fossil fuel is unavoidable in quite a lot of places regardless of your life style. Also, much more deadly than anything related to nuclear so far.
Like I said, I'm not justifying being against Nuclear, but explaining the challenge with Nuclear's general acceptance, there is a fear response from people, and it'll need to be curbed and addressed. That fear response is due to the grandiose nature of a Nuclear failure which fossil fuel don't have, even if they kill you slowly and might lead to world ending catastrophies.
Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins).
It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from defense and military.
"Dispatchable plants have varying startup times. The fastest plants to dispatch are hydroelectric power plants and natural gas power plants. For example, the 1,728 MW Dinorwig pumped storage power plant can reach full output in 16 seconds.[4] Although theoretically dispatchable, coal and nuclear thermal plants are designed to run as base load power plants and may take hours or sometimes days to cycle off and then back on again."
"Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators, according to market needs. Dispatchable generators can adjust their power output according to an order.[1] Non-dispatchable renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power cannot be controlled by operators."
https://www.nmppenergy.org/feature/dispatchable%20resources
"Dispatchable fuel resources include nuclear, coal and natural gas. These fuel sources are highly reliable because each fuel is a constant supply. These are known as baseload resources."
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nuclear-stands-out-a...
"Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng"
You are confusing dispatchable with flexible.
Precisely. It's not "on demand" if it takes a day to ramp up production and another day to ramp it down. It's on yesterday's demand, which is f***ing useless.
This contrasts with gas peaker plants which can scale up in seconds. These are known as "dispatchable".
>Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng
Quoting an offhand comment from an idiotic energy minister trying to justify a boondoggle plant on a nuclear propaganda website isn't as convincing as you seem to think it is.
>You are confusing dispatchable with flexible.
You are confusing baseload with dispatchable.
If the sun is down no amount of calling up a solar farm will increase output, if the wind isn't blowing or if it's blowing too strongly no amount of pleading will increase the output of an off-shore wind farm. This is because they aren't dispatchable. This is not the case with Nuclear.
Nuclear can do load following, they do it in France. How else do you think they balance a grid which has 70% Nuclear? They use reactors with grey rods which can reduce the reactivity in the reactor without distorting the shape of the reaction.
Doubt it. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-...
> It turns out that the main reason for spiraling nuclear plant construction bills is soft costs, the indirect expenses related to activities such as engineering design, purchasing, planning, scheduling and — ironically — estimating and cost control.
> These indirect expenses accounted for 72 percent of the increase seen in reactor construction costs between 1976 and 1987, a period in which the amount of money needed for containment buildings rose by almost 118 percent.
Also when comparing nuclear to “renewable” energy, you are really comparing distributed low density investments with monolithic ones. Nuclear is 1e6 the energy density of chemical reactions. And wind/solar is basically heat exchangers positioned 8 light minutes from the nuclear reactor. The Sun incidentally, is just as renewable as that Uranium we are discussing.
What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)
I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic assumption you could dismantle:
1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for transporting electricity where it's needed. So shouldn't that stitching be quite solid anyway? Also, at a national level, I'd imagine solar and wind probably have rather solid statistical patterns, and those random factors can be abstracted away to a degree (the whole "what happens when the wind is not blowing?" - kind of hard to have the wind stop blowing all over 300k sqkm, all at once :-) ).
2. Once that power grid is solid, does it matter how small and distributed those solar and wind patches are?
3. I don't think Lithium-Ion is the only/main energy storage tech being investigated/invested in for grid purposes. And why couldn't it become a solid alternative for base load? Are base load-capacity energy storage facilities not competitive with gas/nuclear/coal power plants, factoring in pollution or other risks?
Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.
If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.
But all analogies are like that...they need people to squint so details go fuzzy and merge.
The Zeppelin is an equally plausible aircraft analogy. Theoretically it is possible for nothing to go wrong when taking dependencies on a quarter million hand sewn cow intestines.
And, more than 2/3 aboard at the time survived. Hard to say where this fits into any proposed analogy.
Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable again; it has a lot of cost problems.
The only "personal" production of energy is from solar panels. Which still comes with its own problems, as you generally still want to be connected to a grid, in which case utility companies generally attach a lot of strings.
Solar will seem to be less centralized but in reality and over the long term we will have huge solar farms owned by big companies, for the same reason we generally have huge actual farms owned by big companies. And what difference does it really make for the regular user if they get their power from 40 nuclear plants or from 200 solar farms?
Wind is super centralized, big companies are building wind farms and big companies are operating them. You need a ton of capital for wind farms.
Oh, wait. Not true for nuclear.
You said it — it's irrational.
The short answer is the oil lobby.
It does not make any rational sense.
We want more energy per person in the future.
Stable energy is required to make industry sustainable.
Stable 'free' energy allows you to do really cool new things (like melt trash for resources?)
Waste & environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels.
A nation needs to agree to the risk/reward of a nuclear power plant, it must be owned and payed for primarily by the government.
Having a country/state that offers free energy will pay itself back easily. Cost should not be an issue, 20 % of GDP should be on the table. ( Money is made up, Jules are real ).
Solar and wind are mostly done innovating. Nuclear has a relatively clear path of improvements ahead in terms of $/joule.
Storage based on hydrogen or thermal are too inefficient and don't scale well enough to power homes and industries during the winter.
Any comments are welcome.
We have petawatt-hours worth of storage capacity.
I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow.
I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand. That link was unsecured radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a drone.
And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products.
The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
And that's only the long term cost of pulling it out of the ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million literal years is not included.
But 8 million people per year are killed by particulate emissions from normally-operating fossil and biofuel combustion plants. Nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are all orders of magnitude safer ways, per TWh generated, than the dominant worldwide sources. Therefore we should replace fossil and biofuel with nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro.
Conveniently, those 4 are also very low carbon, so they prevent climate change along the way.
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
But of course we should replace fossils by renewables and phase them out before nuclear. And if nuclear wouldn't take too long to build building new nuclear plants as a stopgap may actually make sense. Unfortunately, they do.
[1] https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419....
I cannot see how this view can be justified.
But if you want to take this view, consider this hypothetical worst case. Imagine we push forward with wind, solar, and batteries, but human rights issues related to manufacturing with slave labor, corruption, mineral shortages, grid instabilities, and land usage issues that emerge once these technologies reach world-scale cause enough trouble that we just keep on operating large amounts of fracked fossil gas to the point that climate change hits the bad predicted scenarios and all the bad events of climate change happen anyway. Isn't that hypothesized worst case just as valid as this worse-than-Chernobyl nuclear accident you're holding above our heads?
Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.
This statement has no basis. We've had multiple awful nuclear accidents and the world keeps turning. We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.
You are aware that there are places on earth with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants that have natural radiation dose rates from the geology that are well beyond the dose rates in almost all of the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones?
> Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.
That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years. When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.
Today, we've seen reactors of the Hualong One, ABWRs, VVERs, and ARP-1400 designs built in wholly reasonable times.
And for deep decarbonization, we plan to use factory/shipyard production techniques to serially produce thousands of standardized low-carbon power plants even faster.
You hadn't forgotten I was writing about severe accidents within half a sentence, hadn't you?
> We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.
I'm quite aware of that. And if I considered stopgap nuclear realistically possible, maybe I'd support it.
> That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years.
Building nuclear is not even the hard part. Deciding to do so is. Changing public opinion to favour nuclear won't happen in time so there's no point. The decision to decarbonize using renewables has been made, there's actually no need to even discuss it further.
> When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.
The available technology and political climate has changed since then.
Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants).
Solar can't be used for base load at the moment.
A nuclear power plant that's finished in 10 years is not gonna provide you with the baseload to stop climate change.
That's only possible with expanding the existing tech we have.
We won’t stop climate change, we’re decades late. What we need is everything we ca have, which includes solar and wind where appropriate, but also nuclear. The fact that people pretending to care about climate change are pushing for gas is absurd.
It's like all the people who didn't understand grade 7-9 physics conspired to make us all miserable.
To the down voters: just because you learn about electricity in secondary school, it doesn't mean that the second or third level effects are obvious and that you immediately understand what their impact on a power grid is. But hey, maybe some people were super interested in power grids or just super gifted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the producer side since the cheapest power plants were also inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load providers, although it was purely an economical coupling leading to a term existing.
Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are the new base load providers, but it also brings new challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more variability in the supply. This is our current world were the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally. This is unless they can find a way to get their prices below renewables, but that is getting more and more unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.
Actually, there is one thing, we need super capable and reliable super long distance power grid connections, maybe there's some progress on this front?
Because solar and wind absolutely are unreliable on a local front.
China recently finished a 3300 km UHVDC line from Xinjiang to the east coast with an expected loss of 1.5% per 1000 km.
I quite often see journalists writing about energy politics confusing power and energy.
Seriously.
> In any case it's no law of nature.
Yes it is. It's a law of human nature :-)
Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand), but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard production quota.
No, thats not really how it works out.
Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum level of electricity, that will always be demanded, almost no matter how high prices go.
Or, in other words, there is some about electricity demand is very inelastic.
So no, you can't just increase electricity costs. Because then electricity costs will massively spike, and cause huge amounts of problems.
You are massively underestimating the amount of problems and costs that it would put in people for demand to be as elastic as you want it to be.
It would be way cheaper and better for everyone, if there was simply enough baseload supply to meet the baseload demand.
You want demand to adapt? I'm supposed to turn the lights out when the wind's not blowing, or what?
Demand shouldn't adapt, supply should adapt. Connect more and bigger power grids, add energy storage to the grid in large enough quantities.
Your "solution" is like telling people to give up cars. They won't.
In cold climates people have increasingly well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non grid electric heating. And can also shift power usage around the day because it takes a day or so for the house to cool uncomfortably.
Which energy sources that emit less co2/kWh than nuclear power should be used to heat houses in that case?
> (In cold climates people have well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non electricity heating, like thus far)
What are talking about? What kind of non-electricity heating? Let's burn some coal or what?
I'm in Sweden. It gets cold. Houses are well insulated and typically heated via quite efficient electric air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps. Our electricity has been like 98% co2 neutral since the 70s because of a 50/50 mix of hydro and nuclear as a base load.
Now, ironically, the leftist politicians (including the green party) here are dismantling all of this because they and the journalists don't understand the concept of base power, because they don't understand the difference between power and energy. Their solution is to build lots and lots of wind power plants.
By non electric heating methods I meant CHP and biomass based heating.
But yes, old energy inefficient houses in cold climates should be replaced. There's no need to get dramatic over it, houses are machines for living and it depends on circumstances how far to extend their lifespan. (Except some historical houses of course)
Umm. This whole thread is about the existence of nuclear power. Is it hard to understand that if nuclear power went away, the baseload would become extremely expensive during cold and wind-free days? That's a substantial part of the year, here.
You may argue that the current value of the base load is artificially high, but there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.
With distributed generation and storage, yes, it's plausible to have periods of 0MW grid demand.
> there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.
The kinds of consumers you have are not a fixed quantity; particularly their on-site use, generation, and storage patterns all vary over time.
If not, than you must accept there exists some necessary base load. That can be provided from base production like it is today, or it could theoretically be provided from storage and over-production in a hypothetical renweables-only grid.
> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.? Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be good to know.
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
The Fukushima plant was hit by:
1) Magnitude 9 (!) earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Massive fire 4) Total loss of all power to control circuitry.
Even after that, it still didn't kill anybody from radioactivity (some firefighters were killed fighting the fire, not from radiation).
What do you suppose would happen if a similar series of catastrophes struck a hydroelectric dam? Say, the Three Gorges Dam in China?
Hint: nothing good.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level. That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone.
And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
You could get the price down in a number of ways, but the most obvious one is going to be to skimp on safety.
This isn't Germany's fault. Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has. The only countries that will really want it are those with nuclear weapons and a desire to keep a nuclear industry running to maintain skills and technology.
It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
Germany's nuclear phase out costs the country $12 billion per year plus 1100 additional deaths due to air pollution:
> https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
> And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
Except you are comparing levelized costs of electrity with the total system costs. Wind and solar need backup and/or storage, nuclear doesn't.
> Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has.
Nuclear was *never* subsidized in Germany:
> http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf (p. 16, answer 27)
> It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power. North Korea has nuclear weapons, they don't have nuclear power. South Korea is the opposite.
Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.
Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
When nuclear plants were built in Germany you couldn't get green electricity for $33 / MWh.
>It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power.
This is equally true of everywhere else. It's not about who built them 30 years ago. It's about who still wants to build them.
>Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made. Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
I didn't say that nuclear plants are being built to create plutonium. I said that they were being kept around because of the skills and tech - it's a more or less cost-neutral way of keeping a ready supply of nuclear engineers and a supporting industry.
In the UK it's partly about nuclear submarines, too (which are PWRs).
This. Nuclear power doesn't give you nuclear bombs, but it does give you the ability to start building them within months.
You don't really believe that, don't you?
> Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra...
"Japan was reported in 2012 to have 9 tonnes of plutonium in Japan, enough for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and an additional 35 tonnes stored in Europe.[37][38] It has constructed the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which could produce further plutonium.[37] Japan has a considerable quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU), supplied by the U.S. and UK, for use in its research reactors and fast neutron reactor research programs; approximately 1,200 to 1,400 kg of HEU as of 2014.[39] Japan also possesses an indigenous uranium enrichment plant[32][40] which could hypothetically be used to make highly enriched uranium suitable for weapons use."
This first link here makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but this succinct excerpt touches on loosening safety tests. It goes into more detail in other parts of the article. The post has numerous example of very concerning issues.
> When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859
> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...
> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...
Where can I find a source confirming that ?
Wind $26-$54 Nuclear $129-$198
Wind power producers should be required to buy some kind of base load generation credits.
We are still far from the point where we have enough wind that any of it goes unused.
Also what is the cost of storing that energy? It's so much cheaper to generate it might still come out cheaper.
Doubt. Weather systems/patterns are often extremely large.
> Also what is the cost of storing that energy?
Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.
For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh.
How did you come up with that number? Total cost of the battery divided by its capacity?
Since you do not dispose of the battery upon first discharge, the true cost should be amortized across the thousands of cycles it would go through during its lifetime.
Batteries are still far from economical in many situations, but there are many situations where they now make sense. They are also getting cheaper all the time, and as they do, so will the range of applications increase.
The context here is storing energy for the days when it's not windy or when it's cloudy.
> Batteries are still far from economical in many situations, but there are many situations where they now make sense.
This a not about your Tesla, or what you feel about Tesla and batteries in general.
> Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.
Ok, how about you share your numbers on the cost of production for 1kwh.
Your use of "insanely high" leads me to believe you are comparing the capital outlay for batteries, vs operating costs of a power station. It's important to compare like for like.
This is apparent looking at how much energy prices change throughout the day / month based on usage and cost of production, and how predictable those changes are.
If storing energy were cost effective you could make a killing buying low and selling high on the national grid.
>If storing energy were cost effective you could make a killing buying low and selling high on the national grid.
Maybe not a killing but you could make $$$ yes. This is starting to happen.
This giant (world's largest!) and very expensive thing provides short term-relief against grid outages. The batteries last for ~1 hour and it can still only provide electricity for something like 50k homes.
(It's used for more economically useful things, like stabilizing the grid in emergencies.)
The periods between high and low/zero wind are in the order of 200-300 hours (at least where I live).
I'm very suspicious of these claims. First, there's stuff like this: https://energycentral.com/c/ec/germany-solar-and-wind-triple.... Second, the position of most nuclear opponents is not "solar and wind can provide clean energy for everyone at a fraction of the cost", but rather "everyone needs to radically cut back on energy use and alter their lifestyles". I get the same sense as I do from religious conservatives who oppose STD vaccines because they allow people to continue their sinful ways.
Guess which energy source in France receive most subsidies? If the answer was fossil fuels you would be right. If you ask Germany with its massive subsidies for renewable, it is actually renewable followed by fossil fuels. Then its fossil fuels again. The story repeats itself in practically every country in EU. Even Sweden with its very public facing pro-renewable stance spends millions on subsidizes for fossil fuels. In total for 2018, 50 billions euro wast given as subsidies for fossil fuels in EU.
Inquisitive people might ask why all those countries are spending so much subsidizes on fossil fuels, and the answer is pretty simple. Do you want a stable energy grid? You either pay the oil, gas and coal companies to keep the engines warm in case there is a demand spike, or there won't be enough supply when demands go up. Now lets discuss why the need to pay for "reserve energy" has spiked in the last few decades. It has something to do with intermittent energy production.
Here is a suggestion. Lets cut that 50 billions for fossil fuel subsidies to 0. Either pay for nuclear/storage or accept an unstable grid. I am very tired of oil, coal and gas being paid to just keep the engines warm.
Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium:
- produces significantly more energy per ton
- produces significantly less waste
- the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)
[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_battery
I'll let you do that first. Please do it somewhere remote kay? :D
They produce very little power (W).
> By 2003 the U.S. Navy had accumulated over 5,400 "reactor years" of accident-free experience, and operated more than 80 nuclear-powered ships.
They've been sailing nuclear subs since the 1950s without major safety incident. The big carriers supply grid power when they're docked in Hawaii.
> Lt. Cmdr. Craig Quigley, a Navy spokesman, responded: ″We did not try to cover anything up. Everything about this incident was properly reported through Navy channels.
That's neither a cover-up, nor damning evidence that the navy cannot safely operate reactors.
Thorium has only one actual physical advantage, and that is that it can do breeding with slow neutrons rather than fast ones. This is a technicality and has lots of complications.
If you are not doing a breeder, uranium is just fine.
1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1];
2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues;
3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems;
4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue; and
5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
The big problems with nuclear aren't technical they're political but they are no less significant. For me, I just don't trust humans--either government entities or for-profit enterprises--to safely and responsibly build and manage a nuclear power plants as well as all the infrastructure to mine, process, transport, reprocess and store any byproducts.
The answer to your question depends on the characteristics of the technology. There are many proposed variations (eg the traditional H-H including heavier isotopes, He₃, pB).
For fuels, deuterium is abundant in the environment environment so isn't an issue. Tritium decays quickly. This is a fairly common theme with lighter elements. U₂₃₅ on the other hand is extremely problematic for being both a heavy metal, long-lived and radioactive.
But I'm not yet convinced we'll actually have commercial fusion power. Aneutronic variants aside, neutron embrittlement and the energy loss from neutrons are significant unsolved problems. Even with powerful magnets, containing a fluid at 100M Kelvin is a significant problems, inherently so because of turbulence.
I hope relatively cheap fusion power is in our future but there's no clear path forward yet.
None of these have particularly problematic byproducts.
Furthermore:
1. Nuclear has always been the most expensive alternative, moreso now than ever before. Its advocates knew this at the time that they were calling it "too cheap to meter". Even continuing to operate an existing plant costs more than building out renewables and switching to those.
2. Nuclear construction projects invariably turn into massive pipelines for corruption and graft, siphoning $billions or tens of $billions from public budgets into well-connected private hands before ever delivering any power. Renewable projects (with the exception of larger dams) have not typically catered to corruption. "Small nuke" has never got traction, despite apparent efficiencies, specifically because it offers so little scope for long-term corruption. (E.g., the US government just granted a measly $10 million to one company to promote it.)
3. Nuclear construction takes so long that any supposed benefit comes far too late to do much good. The same money spent on renewables always starts delivering immediately, in much larger amounts, when it is most needed. The money saved on the much cheaper power can be spent immediately building out more, for even more benefit, compounding.
As an aside, Tokamak fusion will never, ever produce so much as one solitary erg of commercially competitive energy. The current ITER project is not projected to do anything until 2050 (although it will take hundreds of megawatts to fire up, for experiments), and then is not so much as planned to deliver practical power, ever, despite costing tens of $billions. The "practical" plant they imagine building, to turn on at end-of-century (after all of us reading this are dead!), would need to be an order of magnitude larger, and cost $trillions and decades without producing, all the while stealing capital from actually viable projects.
The only rational conclusion is that Tokamak fusion research is and was never intended to produce practical power. The whole program is, rather, purely a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists and contractors, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. Every cent spent on Tokamak fusion is stolen from research on alternatives that could, in principle, be practical.
(The one valuable output of Tokamak research is a generation of physicists now comfortable with plasma fluid-dynamics mathematics.)
Do you have a source? There's plenty of larger fossil fuel catastrophes that just aren't well known because they are in third world countries, so who gives a fuck, right? [0] (note that this is 1700 square miles) I'm not sure this point if about environmental damage or human not being able to live there damage. If the former, I think climate change is a pretty apparent counter point. If the latter, well the size of that is largely political but you can think of it as an unexpected opening of a national forest. Sure, sucks for humans, but all the trees are great for climate (hell, killing humans is great for climate, but that's not popular).
> 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem.
Reprocessing isn't necessary. There's little reason to with our current industry, and even France's. Storage is easy. You place it on site. We have a few hundred years to figure out deep geological repositories (which I also advocate for plastics, heavy metals, and other non-degradable toxic substances). We just don't have enough and it isn't dangerous enough for this to be a problem. Nuclear waste is hundreds of thousands of times smaller than other energy sources (500,000x less than coal). You all act like this is a problem that only nuclear has. It isn't even close to being the biggest perpetrator. It is a good criticism, but if you are only applying this criticism to one product I'm not convinced it is a concern you actually have but rather you're just holding "enemies" to higher standards.
> 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems
This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons, which my response would be that you clearly do not understand the difference between weapons and reactors. As a side note, understanding this difference is key to understanding the Iran Deal and why no one is concerned that they produced more enriched material than the deal allowed (i.e. it was a political gesture and could only be a political gesture).
> 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue
And? It is stored on site. Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.
> 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
See 4.
And congrats, you hit 5/10 of the common myths[1].
Now if you said that nuclear power plants were too expensive, we could have a real discussion and there would be differing opinions based on different criteria and hopeful/naive projections. But we can't even have that conversation if you aren't willing to just google the opposition's answers to your questions that have been continually asked for decades. I'm just reminded of this Futurama episode (which I just noticed makes a flat earth joke)[2]. We don't need more Dr. Banjos.
[0] https://medium.com/@renegadeinc/the-amazon-chernobyl-6309a19... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikneKQAeUp0
[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
Yes, Chernobyl. Unless you can point me to a _single_ non-nuclear power plant accident that has rendered 1,000 square miles uninhabitable for 35 years (and counting) then my point stands.
Pro-nuclear advocates always bring up the health effects of coal. Yes, it’s terrible. But you’ve also picked the worst offender (what about natural gas?) and those health effects are spread across the entire industry, not localized to a single plant failure.
> This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons
No it is not. Many in this thread and elsewhere will selectively talk about nuclear waste in terms of spent fuel processing and storage. This completely ignores the byproducts of enrichment.
And yes uranium for power plants is still enriched, even if it’s not to the degree that weapons-grade uranium is enriched.
> Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.
False equivalency strikes again. You’re trying to deflect to the issue of securing the plant. Compare what can be done with a ton of nuclear fuel or nuclear waste vs a ton of whatever goes into or comes out of a coal plant.
You also call the waste footprints of nuclear fission power “small”. Well it’s partly small because nuclear power is small. To scale it up to the level where could actually displace fossil fuel use would multiply those numbers and problems by 10-100x.
And I’ll not to completely skipped over the biggest problem of all: it requires humans tasked with building, maintaining, operations and monitoring plants in a way that just doesn’t seem realistic or scalable.
Sorry, I was asking for a source that supports the claim that "nuclear has _*much worse failure modes*_", not if a disaster exists. That's why I provided a source where I'd argue that the failure mode was worse than Chernobyl. I can point to more if you want, but the question was about a comparison.
> And yes uranium for power plants is still enriched, even if it’s not to the degree that weapons-grade uranium is enriched.
My criticism of this is that you're claim suggests that other energy sources don't have harmful byproducts. I've stated clearly that nuclear has worse, but FAR less. For comparison, a bomb is ~97% enriched uranium where a fuel rod is about 3%. This is exactly why I brought up the Iran deal. There's plenty of byproducts that we have in many common industries that also easily enter aquifers, never degrade (at least radioactive material degrades), and are extremely dangerous to humans. Many of these things are used in sources like solar (PV). The difference in nuclear is that the quantities are far less. Several orders of magnitude. Here's a picture of all of France's radioactive waste[0]. This is decades of waste for an entire country. Here's a video of Russia's equivalent[1]. The numbers are just tiny. Yearly PV waste is 150x that of nuclear. There's just nothing else out there that you can put decades of industry waste in a single building. I won't even bring up that coal does more than this every day. You have to account for the difference in waste levels.
> False equivalency strikes again. You’re trying to deflect to the issue of securing the plant. Compare what can be done with a ton of nuclear fuel or nuclear waste vs a ton of whatever goes into or comes out of a coal plant.
Our worry in both cases is state actors. But you're probably thinking "terrorists could just steal nuclear material and make a bomb". If you're thinking a dirty bomb, I'll refer you to this thread[2]. If you're talking about a warhead, well remember the huge differences in quantities and why Iran is pretty far away from being able to create a warhead. Such an operation would be incredibly difficult. You're much better off stealing from a weapons plant. (I should note that you can also create a dirty bomb out of coal waste)
> You also call the waste footprints of nuclear fission power “small”. Well it’s partly small because nuclear power is small. To scale it up to the level where could actually displace fossil fuel use would multiply those numbers and problems by 10-100x.
France is the obvious counter example to this where they produce 413TWh, which is about half of what the US does. Those pictures are half a century's worth of storage. To get waste sizes equal to coal you'd have to scale up 500,000x, and if you had that much nuclear running you could produce enough energy for the world many times over. Even scaling up the 150x to match solar you'd be producing 6x the world's energy consumption. You'd need 5x to do the US, nowhere near 10x-100x (nuclear is already 20% of US energy production, where are you getting 10x-100x??!?!?!). I'm not even suggesting that. I'm suggesting like 2x and let renewables grow 4x (it isn't nuclear vs renewables, that's a real false equivalence).
> And I’ll not to completely skipped over the biggest problem of all: it requires humans tasked with building, maintaining, operations and monitoring plants in a way that just doesn’t seem realistic or scalable.
Well for one, if it was the biggest problem you should have brought it up if you expect me to respond to it. For the second point, we have a track record of nuclear being far safer than any other energy production to date. So yeah, I'll ignore it. If you can find me a source that says nuclear kills more people I'll bite, but right now this is insane[3]. Having this argument is costing lives. Nuclear, along with renewables, are orders of magnitude safer than gas, biomass, and fossil fuels.
This is insane that we're having this debate. People are dying. The planet is being severely harmed. And while we continue to have this argument the fossil fuel companies win and get to continue to kill people and the planet. So sorry if I'm a bit pissed, but I don't like the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year that don't need to. That millions go without power that could have it. That could have hospitals (which wasn't considered in our deaths above), education, access to the internet, and a modern world.
I'm providing sources, if you're just going to spout hearsay then expect me to treat you like someone who is promoting deadly propaganda (i.e. pissed).
[0] https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
So, let's not build shitty soviet designs (which were known to be bad even back then). Got it. If that's all .. can we get back to work now? We have coal power plants to decommission.
I believe that HVDC conduits going to solar farms in Spain, even under the Mediterranean to Africa could be built faster than nuclear plants.
I also believe that most people would prefer a compressed gas storage system built in a old coal or salt mine built nearby over a nuclear plant.
With all recent developments in space technology, I'd expect it to be extremely safe and reliable in the next decades.
We could also go way up. But there is the sun already, why build another?
There is this one very anti-nuclear Stanford professor, who has managed to publish some estimates where the carbon footprint of nuclear power is way larger than in other estimates. These numbers are probably now forever part of the literature, and they make the range of published numbers quite large in every literature survey.
Sometimes this activist professor also sues people for libel, if they publish results disagreeing with his.
"Turbines in the 1 to 2 MW range typically use 130 to 240 m3 of concrete for the foundations". https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/...
Yes my bad, in my native language windmill and wind turbine are the same word.
I was talking about wind turbines, as you can see in the video.
They do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
The wikpedia source give a breakdown of how the CO2 per kwh is calculated for a Sweden nuclear plant, it take everything in account, the building, nuclear fuel processing and storage, and even the electricity distribution to the grid.
Then, no sarcophagus are built at the end of the nplant timelife, they built ont for chernobyl, that all.
Take away points:
* The first approach is to use a different mix that can nearly half the temperature required to produce the concrete. This can reduce the CO2 emissions to produce the concrete by up to 40%
* The second approach uses pure CO2 to cure the concrete which locks away more CO2 in the concrete
* The concrete produced by these approaches need to be fully tested before the methods can be rolled out and costs reduced
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low...
I don’t think anyone is ignoring the problem, having huge amounts of zero carbon power is the starting point for lots of things that will let us solve a lot of the harder problems like cement, or jet fuel etc.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...
Nuclear is just too slow to fix our CO2 problems
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems? In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems".
Renewables
> Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems?
It's the main claim of the Nuclear AstroTurf campaign.
> In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems".
As I've shown: it is not the appropriate tool to do that in an efficient way.
Stop throwing up and shooting down strawmen. Nuclear energy was never going to replace all energy sources. Only the worst ones, like coal and gas power plants.
* There are 6.3 million tonnes of thorium in reasonably assured deposits (World Nuclear Thorium)
* Uranium exists in seawater at an average concentration of 0.003 ppm (also World Nuclear Uranium)
* There are about 332 million cubic miles of water on Earth, 96.5% of it is in the ocean (USGS). At a density of 1 gram/cm3, this comes out to 1.4 yottagrams of water, or 1.4e21 kg)
* At 0.003 ppm, this means there are about 4000 million tonnes of uranium in seawater
There is effectively zero thorium in seawater. Seawater uranium extraction with breeder reactors is likely to be more economical than harvesting low-grade thorium from the crust.
Can somebody tell me why this won't be a viable option? Seems simple enough, and it's not like we've not done worse.
Current nuclear waste solutions are perfectly sufficient and appropriate [1].
Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents, supreme leaders and chairmen.
Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with the spent fuel anyways.
Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines?
Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?
Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes some politicians and companies in two countries happy and shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a will.
So it's a start I guess.
> Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?
In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x.
Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...
They are indeed unstable - for reasons that may not be discussed - but buying the required sites and securing them should be possible anyways. If local jobs are created in the process, even better. So much effort has been wasted on partially securing much more dangerous countries like Afghanistan and Irak with questionable lasting benefit and apparently low strategic gain.
> Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with 1000.
A very good point. One pipe obviously isn't enough and one shouldn't push too large objects through it without a capable plumber around.
> Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...
Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming and some mining for now? OK, they may also try to develop some industry, but how well Chinese business culture meshes with the African population's culture remains to be seen.
Also, just because a competitor is doing something one shouldn't do it? If everybody had always followed this rule, the USA would now maybe be called "North Mexico" because the Spanish sailed some ships there, first. I am not saying colonization is a good idea, much better arrangements could be made today.
I'll just reply to the China thing:
> Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming and some mining for now?
No. A large part of their investments are focused is on building and owning ports and roads. This is essential for owning trade, which is how you get to own the governments of Africa.
Good to know. I wasn't aware of that. What does that mean for our supply of blood diamonds, copper and similar? Maybe they are more needed in China, now that manufacturing has and is still being outsourced to that piece of two countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa%E2%80%93China_economic_...
Considering that our food supply also already critically depends on artificial fertilizer from African mines, why not add energy to the mix? Meaning, we have to stand up for our share of the business in any case and have certainly developed since our imperial past:
Afterall, the African savannahs and jungles do hold a great many tasty species (bats, monkeys, ...), the consumption of some of which are rumored to help with your and your comrade's lacking love life. Some members of African tribes still share these believes, may it actually be a match made in heaven?
I wonder what happens when African communities start noticing that racism and nationalism are concepts that do not exclusively apply to the guests from a century ago.
Of course, there's always an option of not backing down from local population, or going full american and starting an insurgency doing terrorist strikes on all sorts of targets like primary schools - but I'd argue that we do not want that kind of blood energy, do we?
Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.
Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.
Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.
Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
[2] https://thenextweb.com/science/2021/03/02/solar-panels-in-th...
Are there safe breeder reactor designs? How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?
> Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.
True. But irradiating large patches of land/streams of water just makes for bad publicity. Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site or similar sites, like the one near my home town Hanau (see comment below).
> Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.
South Korea suffers from massive corruption and the country is practically run by a few ultra-rich families, even Chinese are complaining about that fact. ;)
As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few? It is no wonder that regulatory costs there are lower. A human life is apparently less valuable.
> Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.
This is something to consider. Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert? Would wind turbines reduce peak windspeed and stop or revert desertification?
> Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...
If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries" that would be awesome. Unfortunately shielding combined with the fact that it won't work as a closed system for long (need for "refreshing" spent fuel in a breeder periodically) makes that impractical due to hard physics. As far as I know.
How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled? Normal nuclear fuel transport cost lots of money and require high security. Are you going to put those perfectly safe rods in an Uber? Like that radioactive fracking brine on the back of a small truck without shielding? That model could work in Russia... or maybe the US.
Yup. As shown in data above, current nuclear is about as safe as you can get. On top of that most breeder reactors operate at low coolant pressure, enabling even more robust safety. For example the Experimental Breeder Reaction-2 did two famous demonstrations in 1986 where they turned off the coolant pump without inserting the control rods and the reactor both shut itself off anyway and removed the afterglow heat with passive natural convection.
> How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?
Same way we do today. Inspections and safeguards. You have to remember that it's wayyy easier to just buy natural uranium and enrich it than it is to steal radioactive plutonium from quasi-military guarded facilities. Furthermore, the latter can be done whether or not we have any commercial nuclear power so it's basically a moot point.
> bad publicity
Sure, but we can try to show people statistics to convince them that scary-looking things can sometimes be appropriate and good. Air travel would be a good example here.
> Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site
They absolutely do. Hanford impact is extremely well studied. These are WW2/Cold War era nuclear weapons sites, which are not necessarily comparable in mission to civilian power generation.
> As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few?
Do you say the same regarding current low solar manufacturing prices, driven almost entirely by the Chinese? If you want a more US-focused example, consider that the US Navy regularly constructs 300 MW nuclear power plants to power submarines and aircraft carriers in shipyard environments with excellent cost and schedule performance.
> Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert?
Surely there are, but most people like to take the precautionary principle about such dramatic and vast geoengineering efforts.
> If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries"
The "perfectly safe" standard you're applying to nuclear but not other energy tech is very perplexing to me. Why not 'anything 2 orders of magnitude safer than fossil and biofuel is safe enough'?
> How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled?
Like this [1] ;)
* India: FBTR (operating)and PFBR (under construction)
* China: CEFR (operating) and CDFR (under construction)
* Japan: Joyo (Monju is shut down)
* Russia: BN-600, BN-800
Shut down ones include:
* US: EBR-1, EBR-2, Fermi-1, FFTF
* France: Phénix, SuperPhénix
* UK: Dounreay, PFR
* Germany: KNK-2, SNR-300
The shut down ones mostly shut down because uranium minerals were found to be sufficient for the world nuclear demand for now. We really only need to go through the complexity of breeding when you have 1000 GW-scale nuclear plants or more. Today we have only about 400.
The currently identified reserves of Uranium could last us at least 200 years, even longer if you enrich it more or use newer reactor designs. If you extract it from seawater we've got about 60000 years worth
Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Wind and Solar are indeed cheap, but have higher materials throughput than nuclear, and they use orders of magnitude more land. This land use will almost certainly have a larger impact on the environment than Nuclear. There is also new research that is showing wind turbines are a major cause of insect decline as well.
The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
Now lets say you've got solar and wind up the wazoo, and battery banks to load shift. Can you still power society 24/7? Nope. You still need either hydro, natural gas, or nuclear to run the grid in a stable and reliable manner. Batteries to provide base load overnight would require so much money and materials that I don't see this happening any time soon without major breakthroughs in battery tech.
What about pumped hydro? Well... turns out dams need to manage water levels for practical reasons and while some pumped hydro can be useful, the available capacity for this when you take into account electricity production and practical water management issues is minimal.
Why can't we cover the deserts in solar and wind and transmit it? Or move electricity from one area to another when the wind isn't blowing or its cloudy? Well transmission is expensive and incurs energy loss in a major way. transmission and sub-transmission lines today account for about a 30% energy loss. Now you're talking about tripling or quadrupling the transmission infrastructure at a minimum, and moving energy over great distances, which is VERY expensive compared to producing it near where it is consumed.
There is a good article here on the technical challenges: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...
Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/493-494/ex...
Children found funny metal pill or drop-like objects in the forests around the plant and played with it. While there were reports of inspectors and interested civilians being blocked from taking measurements.
After this and Chernobyl nobody has a right to complain about me being a retarded monkey... or dying maybe 1-5 years earlier than normal due to earlier onset of cancer.
Humans can not be trusted (at scale) to keep such material secure and even in labs accidents can happen. Same is true for large scale use of dangerous chemicals, too.
> Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?
> The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.
Human operators can never be trusted. And machines built by humans will also fail, but at least risk could be more easily calculated. (Well, at least until machine learning came along and we started to introduce some "human factor" back into the algorithms for better or worse.) If we were able to avoid using most pesticides we would do so already. Unfortunately our way of producing food for the masses with low manual effort and low technology (large machines, monoculture) forces us to keep using them, for now. We will see what alternatives we can build (robotic farming, indoor farming and maybe a few organic farms) that can do with less or no pesticides. I don't think anyone questions the harm widespread pesticide use has done to our ecosystem. Pesticides are just like chemical weapons. What you really want is the bug not eating your plant, not multiplying in excess and staying mostly out of your bottom-line. Using pesticides is like waging a war against the bug species in question (with collateral damage) instead of finding ways to fix the root-causes. As someone who picked potatoe bugs from a field once, I can relate to the waging a war option, but that doesn't mean it's the right course of action.
> The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
True. I also don't see how lithium based batteries have a long future in large scale energy storage. Too high environmental impact and political risk. (Everyone designs battery cars and China controls most needed rare earths. How is that not a dependency.) I have high hopes in direct hydrogen storage. Efficieny is important, but not the single most important factor. Total cost (over lifetime) and environmental impact - also in countries where the raw materials are mined - should be considered.
> There is a good article here on the technical challenges: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...
This one states that "Transmission Losses is approximate 17% while distribution losses is approximate 50%.". So these 50% loss in the distribution part are shared by any other power generation except distributed local (on your own roof or in your basement). The 17% in the transmission area do not sound so much and are lower than I expected. I do however take from that article that baseload power generation should be as distributed as possible to avoid unnecessary losses in distribution (smaller power lines/transformers of the villages/buildings).
> Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
This one is unfortunately true. Every idea has its merrits and downsides. I'd rather err on the biome uninhabitable by us humans, though.
> At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
Let us use this compact and efficient method for powering the ion engines to travel to some other planets, instead of using them here, with the risk of lowering our homeworld's value.
There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea.
The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.
True, still people - including myself - keep burning their hands on the stove or with hot water occasionally. Humans also sometimes accidentally ignite some fuel and die a fiery death (electrostatic discharge at fuel station for example). But accidentally irradiating your and all your 1000 neighbors properties for centuries or until the next top soil replacement is a whole different matter. Before real accidents actually happened it was probably easier to convince people risk was tollerable. Now eating wild boar and some mushrooms in the forrest here is considered a health hazard, cause of high levels of cesium. Boar meat tastes great. It is a damn shame it can't be eaten in many cases. Same for the mushrooms:
https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w...
Quote: "Wer seine persönliche Belastung verringern möchte, sollte in den höher belasteten Gebieten Deutschlands auf den Genuss selbst erlegten Wildes und selbst gesammelter Pilze verzichten." -> "If you want to reduce your personal stress, you should refrain from enjoying game and mushrooms you have hunted yourself in the more polluted areas of Germany."
To summarize, I believe your argument is not unfounded but still doesn't properly account for the difference in scale (time, affected area and severity) of the worst possible effects if something should go wrong. And we know there always remains some risk.
People evaluate not only using analytic thinking, but also from observation and influenced by emotions. And the last two processes seem to disfavour use of nuclear power.
A reactor based on nuclear fission is going to be a hard sell in any region that has been affected by one or multiple accidents before. I hope we can get fusion to work and somehow find a way to shield it properly without causing too much waste. Or concentrate heavily on renewable energy storage (efficiency is a goal that has to be weighed against other factors and may be improved later).
There are many designs for nuclear reactors that are simpler, safer, and more suitable for smaller communities, but various government nuclear regulation agencies around the world have such a high bar for entry that those designs will never be put into practice.
In the US, if you want to operate a nuclear reactor, the design has to be vetted first. To vet the reactor, you have to convince the agency to let you build a full-scale test reactor and convince them that the design is likely safe before building the test reactor. If anything about the test reactor makes them uncomfortable, the design will be denied and the reactor won't be allowed to operate and cannot work as a template for future reactors.
This creates a very difficult and expensive bar for entry into the market. For a large reactor, a company would have to invest billions of dollars for a decade before they could even begin to hope to operate to pay back the loans, and even then there is no guarantee that they'll be allowed to operate the reactor to sell the electricity.
That is, unless they use one of the existing pre-approved reactor concepts that were designed in the 70's and have known flaws (albeit, with known ways to reduce the risks of those flaws)
Nuclear radiation might be damaging, but it's not really a big deal as long as the design prevents accidents and there are safeguards to prevent the uncontrolled release of radiation.
You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.
Solar is an excellent source of energy, with long life spans of the equipment but it's only functional for anywhere from 6 to 16 hours a day, depending on your latitude and the weather. The ideal places for solar farms are often far from the highest concentrations of consumers.
Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
The problem is that it takes a lot of political will to build a nuclear power plant because everyone is afraid of that. Bigger plants are often desired because plant owners need to invest the decade and tens of millions of dollars getting not just approval from the NRC, but approval from the people and government within 20 miles of the plant.
Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
This is interesting. I thought without breeder reactors and continued widespread nuclear use we would run out in ~50 years. Maybe you have more current sources.
> Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Yes and I additionally worry about the fiber material being slowly rubbed off and being spread downstream by the wind (google wind turbine leading edge erosion). Because wind turbines on land are often built on farming land. Thus I put a lot of hope in improved wind "turbine" designs like: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/
> Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
I thought the US grid is pretty old and some parts (Texas?) are on their own. Maybe investments in that area could help, in addition to storage (mechanical or hydrogen connected with solar).
> Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Combine this statement (risk of "real war") with this suggestion...
> The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
...and you get great savings in making that hated opponents main population centers uninhabitable and the irradiated ruins a monument to remember. Even if only by unfortunate "accident". In WW2 cities were burned down using "firestorm" tactics here in Germany. I heard the anniversary bells ring an annoyingly long time a few days back in the rebuilt city of Würzburg... why would humanity change character and suddenly become more civil in the next conflict?
> Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
I agree that this is probably due to the hard lessons learned from the risks in older experimental and larger commercial designs. But are we willing to learn the hard lessons of 10000s (or more) of handy, small reactors spread in everyones backyard?
Better put some solar panels on some roofs and hydrogen metal hydride storage in a few basements. Maybe not under a school or kindergarden or the likes.
A grid like this could be made incredibly resilient and hard to destroy by any opponent.