Why has nuclear power been a flop?
rootsofprogress.org
rootsofprogress.org
Probably read a propaganda book and is still buzzing with the anecdote-based arguments and "why can't we just play around with cool reactors??" rethorics.
Afaik reactors are only really built with national backing due to risk and externalized costs of decommissioning and long term waste disposal.
We stopped dumping nuclear waste into the coastal ocean and now it became a lot more expensive.
We can't even deal with fricking plastic in the ocean and phtalates in drinking water, I have real trouble taking someone seriously who swats away any sort of concern, wishing back thr good old 60s way of doing things.
"Cool" anecdotes about strict regulation seeming rediculous, superficially mind you.
I really struggle with the nuclear propaganda as of late, especially with this anti-renewable stance mixed in.
Meh, even if I like the technology from a nerd-perspective, fuck nuclear power. We can't even get mainstream software buffer-overflow free. The techno-progress enthusiasm of our grandparents era has long lost it's shine.
For a nuclear power plant where focus is on safety first and the code in the critical paths would be limited and the spec defined then and there for verifiability, the system could probably even be proven correct.
Today's governments wouldn't have the state capacity and ambition to achieve what those of the 1940s-1980s were capable of. We've regressed; we're incompetent and moat of our effort is directed at virtue signalling rather than progress.
Nuclear power is just one aspect of this.
It's hard to have hope for the future of our country when you can drive around and literally see it fall apart on a daily basis. I drive around on crumbling roads and see countless shanty towns and addicts 50 feet from $2 million dollar homes. I see median apartments priced where the median worker has to give half of their pay to their landlord. What's the plan? Pass the buck to the next guy in office forever, seemingly.
Is nuclear power special? I don't think so. I think it's just more sensitive to the various pathologies that have crept into the US political system over the past 5 decades.
If I wrote a history of modern technology since 1960, my first guess at a theme would be "the government led the development of many major new technologies then people decided it wasn't good at this, and it passed all the profits on to private companies--who then stopped working on big breakthroughs (mostly)"
Again, maybe I'm wrong, but that's my hypothesis.
The book review doesn't mention New Public Management which I think is odd. Nuclear construction costs started to skyrocket at precisely the time NPM became vogue. NPM states that governments are bad at doing stuff and should do as little as possible. Everything governments need should be acquired from private companies who bid for contracts. Lowest bidders win.
This almost never works because companies' motives are different from governments'. The government wants the nuclear plant built on time. The company who won the contract doesn't mind if it takes twice as long because that could mean twice the profit. So governments respond by adding more stipulations and regulations to the contracts which only makes it easier for companies to find exploitable loopholes in them to extract more tax-payer money.
Rather, they are the whole point of the projects. They provide a steady, voluminous, years-long, indictment-proof flow of public money to select private pockets under control of select politicians. Initial cost estimates are always entirely fictional, with no intention ever to deliver anything at the promised price.
This is a reason why "small modular nuke" has never gained traction in the US: there is just not enough scope for massive wholly-legal corruption.
It has taken many decades, but the US has achieved world domination in high-level legalized corruption. It is largely impossible for honest, legitimate projects to compete for backers, except, lately, solar and wind power farms, which can be built very quickly and start delivering power before they are even finished.
Almost as important, a nuclear power plant represents one big lump of power supply that takes years and years to complete. Whereas wind and solar can be built to completion incrementally in a year or two which is a much more budget friendly way to finance future energy supply. And of course wind and solar benefit from the cost reductions year by year.
The only positive for nuclear is that governments would like to keep a stock of nuclear trained scientists on hand just in case they are needed for a weapons initiative.
The nuclear industry is aware of all of the above and will engage in a protracted propaganda campaign to try and right the sinking ship. Though at this point it really looks hopeless.
I know I'm simplifying here, but essentially, nuclear power is generated using the heat generated by the decay of radioactive material to boil water, to generate steam to spin a turbine.
This creates many challenges and hazards and generally, costs a lot of money.
There's a lot less extreme ways to generate motion and capture said motion into electricity.
Motion is everywhere. All the time. As we get better at capturing and harnessing the natural motion around us, which is the basic idea behind actual renewable energy, there's going to be less and less need for such extreme things as generating motion through radioactive decay.
Again, it's an ingenious idea and provides a lot of power in places that would otherwise be powered by fossil fuel, but it's still a short sighted solution with long term consequences that on the scale of centuries is not sustainable.
All the hard engineering and tradeoffs in thermal/mechanical power generation, be it coal, natural gas, biofuels, hydro, or nuclear, are in dealing with the fuel/moving mass. Enormous amounts of engineering go into finding coal, digging it out of the ground, and dealing with the resulting combustion gasses and ash. The boilers and turbines - while impressive - are just one small part of that effort. Natural gas is no different: the turbines are pretty simple compared to the huge effort that goes into getting it out of the ground. Hydroelectricity again uses turbines. And again, they're relatively trivial devices compared to the huge engineering challenges of building and maintaining the dams themselves. Not to mention the complex tradeoffs around when and where to use them.
If reliable high-energy motion really was everywhere, yes, this would be easy. But that simply isn't the case. The closest we have to that is hydroelectricity, and in most countries dams have already been built on most of the available sites.
Essentially we want to make energy capture and efficient, clean, and safe as possible. Nuclear is clean until it isn't, and safe until it isn't.
It makes sense though, because solar has only recently become efficient enough to become the next big move.
I feel like the reputation with nuclear power is a lot like the reputation with airline crashes: very few and far between events that are emblazoned in the public eye with the media spectacle. You have people today who have anxiety about flying, and no issues taking an uber to the airport for this reason, despite you being much more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash. People don't understand nuclear power that well, nor do they understand what risk means statistically, so they lean into what they've heard or sentiment among their peers which comes from media coverage designed to engage viewers rather than dry research papers.
That's a bit of an odd turn in a narrative that begins with a global perspective, including developing nations. USA-only from that point on.
It's well-known that the USA has general problems with infrastructure costs, far from limited to nuclear power plants.
Nuclear plants opening on time and on budget are pretty rare.
No, not the cost of construction, though that's fairly pricey.
No, not the cost of production. That's actually the best part about nuclear energy. It's remarkably cheap and safe for energy production.
The biggest, costliest and most horrific thing about nuclear energy is what you do after you have finished using that nuclear power station.
You have, quite often, thousands or even millions of tons of radioactive waste to dispose of. Where do you put that? How do you dismantle the construction without causing contamination of the site and the surroundings for miles around? What about the medical costs of looking after the demolition workers as they develop cancers later in life?
But don't take my word for it. Look at Chernobyl and Fukushima. If the task wasn't so difficult, why are those disaster areas still existing? Chernobyl was nearly forty years ago. Fukushima was ten years ago. Still causing problems.
In the US, nuclear power plant projects live or die based on i) regulatory approval (social and technical approval) and ii) insurance. Insurance makes or breaks the project, and currently, there is essentially no way to move forward but in a limited number of circumstances.
"The official model guiding US government policy, both at the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), is the Linear No Threshold model (LNT). LNT says that cancer risk is directly proportional to dose, that doses are cumulative over time (rate doesn‘t matter), and that there is no threshold or safe dose.?
The author points out that the danger of long term low level radiation is much smaller than what is commonly believed, which means that cleanup does not need to be as thorough and expensive.
Cleanup may not need to be as expensive as we thought, but isn't the only way to tell for sure.. loss of human life / cancer?
Coincidentally, my brother was a PhD in Zoology and his doctorate thesis back in the 1960s was whether or not there is a threshold for radiation damage on fruit-flies. His results indicated that there was no threshold. Radiation damage is proportional to the dosage.
Nature, 1961 "Radiosensitive Stages in the Spermatogenesis of Drosophila melanogaster" - Strangio, V. A.
The actual thesis is a bit too technical for my complete understanding.
People do dumb things when they read stuff like this.
These construction costs alone could be what finally kills nuclear power in the West.
Is that true? Does it take into account all the nuclear waste that takes millions of years to fade out?
Wouldn't it be fair to calculate "waste produced" as "amount x (duration to be fully recycled)"?
Example calculation based on my amateurish guestimates give us then: residual waste takes maybe 500 years until it's organic earth for planting again. Nuclear waste takes 5 million years, so does a nuclear plant really produce 500 years / 5.000.000 years = 1/50.000th of waste than comparable powerplants?
> (1) The U.S. generates about 2,000 metric tons of used fuel each year. This number may sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite small. In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-....
When compared to coal, the a single coal plant produces nearly as much toxic (and radioactive) ash in an hour http://energyforhumanity.org/en/nuclear/what-do-we-do-with-a...
And this ignores recycling (that the U.S. doesn't have, but the French are notorious for (modern reactor technology) that reduces waste to 10%.
While I largely agree with the author, this misunderstands what is being cleaned up at Hanford. Hundreds of millions of gallons of nitric acid containing hundreds of tons of Plutonium are sitting in huge 70+ year old tanks that are slowly leaking. Stabilizing this waste is not throwing money away. Obviously the background radiation is no higher than anywhere else.
Cost and regulation, but even if it was cheaper and unregulated it`s a terrible technology for electrical generation. It`s an over-hyped steam turbine. You heat shit up real hot and then turn a wheel. That`s it! It`s laughable and with the addition of being massively dangerous to human health and then all those other additions such as cost, etc. Nikola Tesla was producing electricity with metal plates and hand built capacitors in the 20th century for cheap and people think we need a nuclear plant to produce electricity for a nation? Give me a break. Ridiculous, just ridiculous.
This kind of revisionist statement is why people are suspect of people saying "it's bad, but not all that bad". They are usually lying about lots of things, when they supposedly have the facts on their side.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste... https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect... etc
Many of the barriers are due to simple game theory. If a project mischaracterizes or has an unlikely event that results in a leak, you cannot take it back. The damage is done and likely is out of the project's control, to some degree.
On the other hand, it's not that far from the truth: Wikipedia states one(!) confirmed death from radiation and 2,202 from evacuation. In terms of objectivity, it's less terrible than anything we get from Greenpeace.
It's all conjecture. The only direct cause of harm is the 1600 that died in the evacuation.
That's incorrect. It's about timing and managing public opinion. Saying they haven't died yet (or deaths not being attributeed), is a matter of PR. Splitting hairs is hand wringing of the highest order. I hand you a pellet that emits 30rads and you throw it away, but have blood disorders and hemorrhages in 6 months that ultimately kill you...was that not an attributable death?
The radiation has had a measurable effect, eg http://www2.ans.org/misc/FukushimaSpecialSession-Caracappa.p... which will not be attributed because of a lack of ability to directly correlate individuals and cancer sources via modern methods (most importantly, for liability purposes), not because there is an uncertainty about the result of such exposure in a population. It's not 0-1 deaths.