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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
[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.