Nuclear waste is a solved problem | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear waste is a solved problem

marginalrevolution.com

130 pointsjohndcook192 comments

Not a fan of nuclear power, but changed my opinion because climate change is a bigger and harder to handle problem.

"Solved Problem" however isn't a thing I like to hear in this context. Solvable problem, sure, managable risk, yes. But solved problem is strong wording for waste, which you have to keep safe for roughly 4 times the age of the oldest democratic country.

Nuclear powers biggest problem is the price in the one hand, and bombs on the other hand. Nuclear bombs are bad halo product for a technology, nobody associates good stuff with doomsday machines.

At least it can be stored, unlike the gasses that escape into the atmosphere.

We can convert CO2 into coal and then store it underground, just like nuclear waste.

Surely you understand that this is likely to cost a similar amount in energy terms as was released in burning the hydrocarbon in the first place?

No problem, we just burn more coal then, oh wait ..

There's a slight variation of what the GP is proposing, called methane pyrolysis [1]. In that, you separate the hydrogen and the carbon from methane, and then you can burn the hydrogen to get energy, and store the carbon in a landfill. Burning hydrogen creates more energy than it takes to split the methane, so overall the process is exothermic. Right now that process is not economical yet (you need some catalysts, and the carbon doesn't just come out, it sticks to something, you need to wash it with some acids, then retrieve the acids, etc). But active research is ongoing, so there's a chance this will become viable in the next few years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis#Methane_pyrolysis_fo...

That is for methane only, which you can just as well simply burn, because the resulting CO2 has less green house effect.

Or burn and capture the CO2 before it has been dispersed into the atmosphere (where at a concentration of 0.04% you have to pump a lot of inert gases around your system to remove a small amount of CO2.

So we agree that nuclear energy make waste that is easier and safer to dispose of, as you don't need the extra step?

Easier, but not safer. Pure carbon (mixed with something inert, to prevent burning) doesn't need armed guard for the next 500 years at least.

IMHO, the easiest and cheapest way to store carbon is to grow algae to make hydrocarbons (oils), separate them mechanically, then spread them over a soil as fertilizer, or pump them underground, or burn part of the algae to make a kind of charcoal (to prevent biodegradation).

It's good to keep in mind that nuclear power is a (arguably beneficial and good) "halo product" of nuclear bombs, not the other way around.

Szilard proposed the possibility of a self-sustaining fission reaction in 1933. In a hypothetical universe where WWII never occurred and the Manhattan Project never existed, it seems likely that we would still have had nuclear power plants at some point in the twentieth century. And of course, bombs too.

That's a really interesting hypothetical universe, and I think it could have played out in various ways. For example, without the Manhattan Project, perhaps fossil fuel companies would have become even more powerful and prevented any commercial research into "dangerous" nuclear energy.

Also, without nuclear power, climate change would have become a problem much sooner, when nuclear technology was more experimental and costly. Perhaps the money that went into nuclear weapons would have gone into space programs instead, and we'd have the option of beaming energy down from orbiting solar panels.

> Szilard proposed the possibility of a self-sustaining fission reaction in 1933. In a hypothetical universe where WWII never occurred and the Manhattan Project never existed […]

For a good history on this see The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

It doesn't just look at the MP, but the first third (?) is about how nuclear physics developed in the early 1900s (Rutherford, the Curies, Fermi, etc) as well.

Szilard was actually 'inspired' by H. G. Wells' (sci-fi?) novel The World Set Free:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free

Nuclear energy is expensive. Nuclear reactors are dangerous, if not handled properly (which they won‘t). If we build nuclear power plants now, the will be ready in 15 to 25 years, which is too late, because we need green energy now.

Just invest in renewable energies, which are better overall

This is a false dichotomy. It's not nuclear OR renewables. It's (nuclear OR gas/oil/coal) AND renewables

Why should we use nuclear power at all, when renewables already have a far lower levelized cost of energy[1]? Is there any reason why only using renewable energy sources would be impossible?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy

Sun isn't shining at night and it's not always windy, hence other sources, mainly natural gas is used to balance the grid, but it's deepening our dependance on fossil fuels. Nuclear is the only power source at the moment that is clean and stable.

Don't forget hydro-power. In my area, the word "hydro" is synonymous to "electricity" (in the sense of the utility, ie "hyrdo bill").

Don’t forget hydro =/= green. Its ecological impact is significant and it’s producing greenhouse gases.

How does hydro produce greenhouse gases?

Is it because of the massive amount of concrete needed or because of something else?

Massive amount of concrete, fossil fuels used to rapidly cool the concrete, methane released in the areas that get drowned during the process. Not to mention all of the best dam sites in the US were tapped in the 30s and 40s. That well is dry in terms of net new power.

Interesting. Did not know about that !

One more question, by fuels used to cool the concrete, I'm thinking you are referring to powering the pumps that circulate the cool water in the tubes inside the concrete slabs, right? Or is it cooled differently?

Yes, you seem to have it. I believe they also have to supercool the water before running it through the cooling pipes.

Any particular reason why you couldn't adapt energy consumption to match disponibility? 99.999% availability is a nice perk to have, but you have to overprovision to get to it or otherwise have big costs and complicated problems. OTOH making factories more lowtech, simple/robust/small-scale surely they're gonna have lower peak efficiency, but they'll cost less and be start/stoppable far easier. Scaling has limits.

Changing the structure of our distribution network and the pattern of our energy consumption will cost much, much more (in both time and money) than building additional production into our current system.

A couple nitpicks before contradicting your claim:

Time and money are both cheap in the face of climate crisis ;)

> than building additional production into our current system

Not sure how this is can lower energy consumption and emissions.

You say "our" distribution network. I'm quite positive the level of electricity availability most people in the world have access to is not the kind of thing we're seeing here (france). Even in us/eu/"highly-developped" countries, there is lots of variance between city and countryside. So there's a big part of us not making them build things like us that make them depend on us. Which would be quite revolutionary on it's own.

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This is not something i'm making up, some detailed projections of such low-tech scenari have been done (eg "the age of lowtech" by bihouix, part 2). Most infrastructures are readily overprovided (network infrastructures generally like roads, electricity distribution, telco) and could be left as-is for long time if we lower the requirements. Ponctual plants can be either selectively shut down and working intermitently (stuff where scale is really enabling like some chemistry plants, primary industry or semiconductors) or scaled down and relocated (everything household, everything clothing, everything construction, everything food).

I fully agree that there is a very big inertia, as in infrastructures aren't fluid. But that not a fatality. Globalisation has benefits for some stuff (again semiconductors, petro chemistry), but for most of the volume (consumption goods) there's no material benefit (i'm not talking financial things, i mean from an engineering perspective) to globalize food, textile, consumer good manufacturing. For these stuff there are marginal process efficiency benefits at the (externalized) cost of maintaining very highly available network infrastructure (and obv making parts of the world less gifted by history dependent on the other).

In particular for consumer goods, not only does it not make any sense outside of wealth-extraction to globalize, but we're building too much and too cheap. There's no economic incentive to do it, but we know since long how to build stuff that last. They cost more to produce (bulkier/more material, less (more crude) plastic and more wood/metal), are less efficient on a small scale (thus require shared ownership) and have several order of magnitude longer lifetimes, etc. But we could literally flick a switch, stop production, repurpose/scrape the newly available high-tech plants and no one will be any wiser. And not only plants: we'd free up maritime transport, manpower, etc. We'd pay with reduced capitalistic output and trend-based lifestyle, but materialistic well-being would actually be better: we could all get access to what we call "professional" gear.

edit: your claim also seem to get contradicted by proponents of the smart-{city,grid}, right? All there needs to be is some more coordination. Which would also be easier to do with less and bigger things which live longer.

edit2: let's dream for a moment and imagine what could happen if we just took control of some big industrial infra with capital, domain knowledge and all and gave it 5 years to come up with public and durable goods for concrete tasks, sharing all the details and teaming up with the f/loss engineering world.

Sun and wind aren't the only renewable energy sources. There is also geothermal and hydroelectric power for example. Countries like Iceland and Norway already do or are close to meeting all their energy needs with 100% renewable energy sources.

Studies like [1] seem to suggest that the problem of grid stability can be solved through decentralizing and interconnecting power grids and energy storage. I'm not saying such a transition isn't a challenge, but I have yet to find a source claiming a stable grid would be impossible without nuclear energy of fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

Iceland is basically a city-state of ~350,000 people that live next to volcanoes. Norway is 99% hydropower, likewise owing to its unique geography of rivers and mountains. Are we really trying to extrapolate energy generation policies to continent-spanning nations (US, China, Russia, India, Brazil) from such outliers?

> Sun isn't shining at night and it's not always windy,

The sun is always shining somewhere and the wind is always blowing somewhere.

We should be investing in better transmission systems and grid interconnects. Doing this will enable places that momentarily have more solar and wind than they need to sell that energy to their neighbours. Add vehicle to grid and a lot of the intermittency problems are eminently soluble.

You want to transmit power from the other side of the world?

Not necessarily. Just from three hours away would probably do with a little bit of storage.

Not for solar close to the equator, and definitely not for solar farther from the equator.

I don't see "the sun isn't shining at night" as a good argument, yet it always comes up in these discussions.

We have a lot of ways to store energy. Molten salt, pumped storage, hydrogen gas from water just to name some. All of these are possible in some places and impossible in other places, but there is no place where nothing is possible.

Since the "fuel" for wind and solar is "free" it doesn't matter that you spend more energy saving energy than you get back later. Anything you can save is a plus. And then you get to use it whenever you want.

In short - when the sun isn't shining you spend the energy that you saved when it WAS shining.

Renewables aren't ready to take over from fossil fuels yet as baseload power, aside from hydroelectric, which isn't able to be built everywhere and can come with its own significant environmental and social costs. The dangers of nuclear power are about on par with that of renewables, and orders of magnitude below that of fossil fuels. It's competitive cost-wise with other energy sources, with greater initial capital investment in the plants but low costs over the lifetime of a plant.

I'm not saying don't invest in renewables, renewables are great. But they're not going to be a panacea.

We make nuclear expensive in the west by shutting down storage facilities and mounting endless legal challenges to every construction project.

Other nations build nuclear plants for one-tenth the cost.

I am a fan of nuclear, though I do find some truth in the arguement that it's simply too expensive. Until there are GW scale batteries in operation (that aren't highly topography dependant) it's definitely worth gambling on some new investment in Nuclear, at least maintaining the current nuclear component of our power generation mix for the midterm.

Back of the napkin calculation says that if theoretically the US diverted 2 years of its military budget to nuclear power plants it could make enough modern nuclear power plants to get 70% of its needed power from those nuclear plants. But it seems to that maintaining 800 bases around the world and dropping bombs far away is less expensive judging by priorities where the money is spent.

The cost is high due to ancient regulatory requirements and political opposition to storage facilities.

If political will existed, reactors could be build at one tenth the current cost.

We need to re-open the Nevada storage facility and pass a law banning excessive court cases against plant building.

How much of that cost is associated with the extreme safety measures that have to be put in place? The green movement has instilled the idea that nuclear power is dangerous, which means the general public won't accept anything but the extreme safety measures.

If you act like the dangers or nuclear power are made up and safety measures not needed you are really, really hurting the cause.

I can't answer for the parent, but the fallacy I often hear is that it is too expensive *and* dangerous. But it is just taking the same argument twice. Nuclear in Japan before Fukushima was in fact quite cheap if I'm not mistaken. New reactor are expensive but shouldn't be dangerous anymore.

I suppose I should have stressed "risk compared to other forms of power generation with similar outputs". All forms of power generation come with risk.

Ask the people of Fukushima if they think the safety measures for nuclear power stations are "extreme".

Also the people formerly of Fukushima. Many, perhaps most, of those who had to leave will never return.

Also ask the countless dead from the hydrocarbon burning pollution if they think this alternative is so much safer.

122K / 200K have returned per this 2019 article:

> Radiation from the fuming plant spread over tile-roofed towns and rice paddies across an area the size of Connecticut. The meltdown 150 miles north of Tokyo drove more than 200,000 people out of the region. Most believed they were fleeing for their lives. Now, almost eight years after the accident, the government has lifted most evacuation orders. Nearly 122,000 people have been allowed to return to communities where weeds have overtaken parking lots.

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fukushima-residen...

You mean the same Fukushima nuclear disaster whereby there's 1 confirmed death (from cancer)? Sounds like a good advert for nuclear IMHO.

There is no need to move the goal post. He and you were talking about 'safety measures'.

Every time Fukushima is brought up, I am baffled how everyone remembers the nuclear incident, but not the many thousands of people that died from the tsunami. And ye, people are always "Let's not build nuclear" not "let's not build stuff next to the shore" - one is deemed an acceptable risk, the other is not. Why?

If you build something (non-nuclear) next to the shore, that doesn't increase my risk of dying from a tsunami. Also, if I choose to live in a certain location, the risk of a tsunami affecting that location doesn't change very much over time, whereas it's harder to predict whether a nuclear power station will be well managed and maintained decades into the future (and there's also uncertainty about where new nuclear power stations may be built).

> The green movement has instilled the idea

I do not think this narrative is reasonable because almost no one ever cared about 'green movement'.

>But solved problem is strong wording for waste, which you have to keep safe for roughly 4 times the age of the oldest democratic country.

The problem with this argument is we're ignoring that cost of carbon because we don't physically bury it in the ground. We need to compare like for like here.

cost of carbon which is there as much/little with renewables as it is with nuclear

Only as long as you ignore CO2/methane emissions from the gas plants and supply chain required to provide backup to the renewables

you simply convert renewables to methane

If you forego storage and peak plants, and you need at least one.

> the age of the oldest democratic country.

Which one? Depending on your definition of democratic and country, and if you meant continuous or not, this is between a few hundred and few thousand years, quite a delta.

IMO nuclear power won't help us in the climate crisis. The inertia to change our technologies, behaviour... is already extremely large, with nuclear energy (which is very limited) there will be less incentive to change anything at all. Hence, we will just prolong the party and not make use of this tiny thread of hope.

This argument is so odd given that the alternatives of green energy require often and even greater shift in political will and consumer behavior.

I would have changed my opinion too, were it not for the seemingly gollumic enchantment that nuclear proponents display, as if straight out of dr. Strangelove. An enchantment that constantly twists facts, which becomes understandable once one learns that it is an industry built on lies and deception, from its inception.

As always, you cannot judge a movement or idea based upon its most radical proponents.

>Nuclear bombs are bad halo product for a technology

So are Biological/Chemical Weapons to Medicine..but no one makes that connection

Viruses are easier to ignore. Just look at how the pandemic goes...

Haha true! Compared to that i never seen a glowing person ;)

I find nuclear to be extremely cool but I'm unsure of it's long term viability due to the human factor. We already have a few major nuclear incidents that could have gone way worse which suggest that our designs are not as resilient as claimed, be it due to poor design or poor maintenance and human interaction. When things go bad, we need heroism to fix it, it's not simply like losing electricity or money but people are required to do extraordinary things to save the rest and I don't believe we can keep doing it successfully each time.

Also, the responsibility it creates stretches for far beyond human life and even generations. I will call it a solved problem if we can get rid of the waste somehow in less than a human life.

I don't trust our species to do the reasonable thing every time and even if we want to do it right, we tend to forget or downplay the consequences of a failure. It's not just that we keep doing the same shockingly stupid or brutal things but at the same time we can have very dark side of self harm and delusions. For example, there are groups of people who believe that after a cataclysmic event, we all will go to heaven where everything is perfect, therefore the logical action to do is to force god for the rapture day by starting one. These days that kind of groups are managed but I don't think that it's impossible of them gaining power to do horrible things like nuclear annihilation.

Just look at the Middle East, the place used to be technological and cultural powerhouse not that long ago in nuclear waste time scale. Places that are complete shitholes today used to be nice places just two cesium-137 half life cycles ago.

Chernobyl's plant was built in 1972. Fukushima's in 1971. One would hope the technology improved a bit in 40 years...

Of course it did but do you think that people in the 70's were promised anything less than perfect safety?

Was the deal something like “now you get electricity and a salary but there’s a chance that you will die or lose everything you worked for your entire life overnight if an experiment goes wrong or earthquake hits”.

This is a silly argument. The passive safety of recent designs is demonstrated. And even if there was a promise of perfect safety, it doesn't mean anything, because just as we know now people knew back then, that there are risks. That's why there were and there are safety systems. And we can reason about them, we have a lot more data, we have better models, hence better predictions.

There are many big dangerous engineering installations and systems around the world. Dams, bridges, high rises, tunnels, mines, cable cars, high speed rail, airplanes, chemical plants, furnaces.

Nuclear's risk profile seems scary because of the long tail (high level waste for thousands of years). Which is not something we have expertise with, but again, not something that we can't make at least reasonable predictions about.

There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The problem with these safety systems is that they are assumed to be built flawlessly, which is not always the case.

And "There are other dangerous machinery in the world" is just whatabaoutism. People smoke tobacco, should we bring back asbestos too because of that? The world lost such a great insulator. If you are looking for a silly argument, I suggest enjoy some whataboutism.

Anyway, the rectors do have a similar problem with the planes: To make it safe after each incident we are making it more expensive or inconvenient too because we cannot afford having fast developing catastrophic incidents of those. A nutjob crashes a plane into a building and now the boarding takes 2 hours extra and involves a cavity search.

IMHO, we should definitely use fusion nuclear energy but it better be a temporary fix until we deploy the renewables.

Oh BTW, the prediction about the nuclear waste so far is that it's going to stay with us for the foreseeable future and we don't know what to do with it. The best we can do is to put it in caves together with scary looking signs and drawings and hope for the best for the next thousands of years. That's not even implemented yet as most of the waste sits next to the reactors because when these were built they also had no idea what to do with the waste. Kicking the can down is not a sustainable solution.

Just take a look at this: https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1435949837158060033

This is a photo of the new head of Afghanistan Central Bank. If Afghanistan had a nuclear plant, we could have s similar photo from the reactor control room.

> There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The problem with these safety systems is that they are assumed to be built flawlessly, which is not always the case.

This is plain wrong - nobody ever was stupid enough to assume things to be built flawlessly. In fact, the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a mishandled safety test.

> IMHO, we should definitely use fusion nuclear energy but it better be a temporary fix until we deploy the renewables.

You mean we should deploy a temporary fix in the 22nd century? ;) (Fusion is unlikely to become practical in the next couple decades, fission is the one that we can do now.)

> That's not even implemented yet as most of the waste sits next to the reactors because when these were built they also had no idea what to do with the waste. Kicking the can down is not a sustainable solution.

Well, since it can stay in the plants after decades of accumulating waste, without clogging said plants, is it that much of a problem?

I meant to type fission somehow typed fusion, my apologies. I'm all in for fusion, the one in the sky is my favourite and I would love to have an artificial one too.

>There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too.

The Chernobyl plant was such a dangerous enough design that it would have been illegal to build it anywhere except the Soviet Union.

There were many screwups at Fukushima but I think there might have been one worker who died from exposure to radiation. As a comparison thousands of people have died from hydroelectric dam failures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...

>...Oh BTW, the prediction about the nuclear waste so far is that it's going to stay with us for the foreseeable future and we don't know what to do with it.

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. (To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)

There was an international engineering letter of protest that the Soviet RBNK reactor in Chernobyl was an unsafe design. The reactor was too large to have a containment dome, which as a standard feature of all western reactors would have prevented the accident.

Launch the waste into space.

We sure as hell will never use the rockets for human panspermia if we keep expecting to power all this crap we throw out

And then drop it into the sun. CO2 in space doesn't count toward global warming.

It's actually pretty hard to drop something into the sun. You have to slow down quite a bit, which in turn needs a lot of fuel

It would be prohibitively expensive just to launch a bit of it into orbit, much less to enough of it far enough into space that it won't just get recaptured and dumped back on us eventually. Plus, the process of creating the spacecraft alone (with near physics-defying fuel efficiency and carrying capacity, and more rockets than we have the physical capacity to launch, to boot) would create more pollution than gets carried off, per simple thermodynamics.

Also become sometimes rockets explode, and you don't want to be anywhere around the exploding rocket full of nuclear waste.

https://astronomy.com/news/2016/07/heres-why-we-cant-just-ro...

>"Solved Problem" however isn't a thing I like to hear in this context. Solvable problem, sure, managable risk, yes.

The guy is engaging in a bit of hyperbole. If you reduce the size of a problem by 90%, and the problem was not that bad to begin with, you are not exaggerating too much by saying "solved problem".

First, how bad is the problem right now? A 1GW nuclear power plant produces 3 cubic meters of high level waste per year, while a similar coal power plant produces 300000 tons of ash per year (plus a lot of CO2)[1]. Now, for those 3 cubic meters, the radioactivity is reduced by 99.9% after 40 years [2] (without any reprocessing). If you add reprocessing, you can extract the very long half-life elements, especially Plutonium, and make use of them, by "burning" them in other nuclear reactors. Not everything can be disposed off, but the problem can be reduced by at least a factor of 10.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#Economics

This may be a valid argument, but it's an irrelevant argument. 10-20 years ago we should have been building hundreds of nuclear plants world-wide. But we didn't and now the economics have shifted. Nuclear has gotten more expensive due to the loss of expertise and solar/wind/batteries have gotten crazy cheap.

Why build nuclear for $200/MWh after a 20 year build delay when you can get solar+batteries for $40/MWh in 6 months? (https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-...)

Because we need a lot of energy and soon - to scrub all that CO2 gas, coal&oil threw and are still throwing into the atmosphere.

Also because we need baseline power for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shinning.

> Because we need a lot of energy and fast to scrub all that CO2 gas, coal&oil threw and are still throwing into the atmosphere.

Nuclear power plants have lead times of about 10 years or more, so if we need more now (as in this or next year) nuclear power plants are not the answer.

There are wind turbines with 10 to 15 MW from Siemens-Ganesha, Vestas and some other corporations, available now. Those do not need a lead time of ten+ years with huge initial investment and permanent high security and waste management overhead like new nuclear power plant do. 75 of those replace one nuclear plant block, as most of those output ~1 GW.

> Also because we need baseline power for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shinning.

Wind turbine towers have heights of 100 to 250 m, there wind is not as restricted as at ground level, at least if not in very mountainous regions and rather steady.

No wind is just not a thing in the atmosphere at that level, albeit too much wind can happen in storms.

For the theoretical no wind and the more real, but not frequent, too much wind you can use power storage and load management, which needs to be (and is already) implemented anyway. Same for sun, albeit not shining can be a real problem there.

Now, Lithium or soon also NaCl batteries, to Pumped-storage hydroelectricity to storing energy mechanically are all great but just help for very short to a day or so, what do for the rest? Well, the problem for too much wind (or the hypothetical no wind) is always local to a few 100 km radius, continental Europe (for example) has huge in-sync grids with a bunch of 360 kV AC or 10+ kV DC interconnects to move around 100s of GW for a reason, so just take it from somewhere else (often things even cancel out).

Can some of the downvoters actually comment on why they did so? Would be honestly interesting to see if/where I wrote something wrong or if I was misinformed, or if it's just out of spite..

I for one didn't. I think both your and your sibling's comments add a lot of interesting info to the discussion. I am still going through them.

> Because we need a lot of energy and soon - to scrub all that CO2 gas, coal&oil threw and are still throwing into the atmosphere.

I'm not sure how nuclear plants that take 20 years to build count as "soon".

> Also because we need baseline power

"Baseline" is a useless word regarding supply. (It still has utility when regarding demand). There are two types of supply -- cheap and peak. It used to be that the cheapest power was that generated by running a plant at 100% 24/7, so people used the word "base" to describe cheap power.

Many small utilities have 0 baseline power, they run purely on dispatchable power. They use natgas or diesel generators that they can throttle up or down to match demand.

IOW, baseline power is only useful if it is cheap. Otherwise, you might as well use dispatchable power.

Baseline nuclear is far from cheap, and dispatchable nuclear is even more expensive.

> for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shinning.

Ways to do demand matching that are (a lot) cheaper than using dispatchable nuclear:

- using a mix of renewable sources (aka wind & solar is more reliable than wind or solar)

- geographic diversity, HVDC lines between grids (the wind is always blowing somewhere)

- overprovisioning (IOW, size your solar plants for cloudy days rather than sunny ones. 3*$10 is still a lot less than $200.

- load shifting, AKA time of use pricing

- batteries

- pumped hydro

- hydrogen as storage

- other storage

- fossil plants with capture

What's the price/MWh ratio at night?

$40/MWh. That price includes batteries. Without the batteries, the price has dipped below $10.

If you aren't missing something, wouldn't this happen naturally? They claim it's cheaper and scalable, what's stopping them from doing this everywhere and putting everything else out of business? There is plenty of money floating around lately if it's viable they should be able to get capital.

They are doing it like crazy in Texas, where regulatory delays and incumbent opposition are negligible.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-renewabl...

Look at the graph, there are about a TW of green energy projects stalled in the regulatory queue. And that graph is 2019, it's gotten way worse since.

Thanks for that. That gave me a new perspective. I always sort of assumed that these solar projects were just over optimistic, because if the unit costs were true they would eventually just win the market. Having spent some time looking at atomic energy it seemed that a lot of the issue was regulation, that 20 year build delay seems to be 17 years of lawsuits and lobbying and 3 years of construction. I see now that isn't unique to nuclear. The reasons we aren't building out cleaner energy all that fast are human reasons not technical ones.

Remember that those unit costs only recently came true. 5 years ago nuclear was still cheaper than renewables. Large utilities do not switch strategies very quickly.

Because infrastructure is not sexy.

Ignoring dollar amounts, are we even able to mine raw materials fast enough to get the required battery capacity in place? Or would the plan be to burn fuel at night and sequester the carbon during the day? That sounds inefficient :/

Yes. LFP batteries use lithium, iron and phosphorous, all extremely common elements world wide.

Hmmm, that's the kind of battery that electric cars use? There are some worries about availability of the rare earth metals for them... Are they used for the engines only?

Electric cars usually use nickel and cobalt in their cathodes, which are rarer and less geographically diverse. Cheap electric cars are switching to LFP though.

Rare earths are used in permanent magnets. Most, but not all, motors use those.

Today I learned. Thanks!

Because solar plus storage involves needing to build 10x as much capacity, and that's making dangerous assumption about storage that might not pan out.

So instead building out solar/wind also causes build up of at least gas power plants, if not coal.

Maybe the old guard, and its commitment to PWR, had to die off before society could try alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Reactor_types

The advocates of PWR (and adjacent) actively suppressed all the alternatives. For their own reasons. Like military and civilian dual use technologies.

We have new reasons. Like finance, flexibility, and tech. We can and should do what we want, unbeholden to the founders of nuclear age.

The article says "The first, and easiest way to address it is to reprocess spent fuel as France does." but France has a long-term nuclear waste storage project (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o) so that seems to paint an incomplete picture?

I don't know much about the subject to be fair.

Long term storage represents less than 1% of total waste, the rest is reprocessed. I can’t remember the exact figure, but the “dangerous” waste for the whole of France is something like 10 tons a year - not a big logistical issue

Reprocessing contaminates air and water to some extent. The most difficult product to control is Kr 85 which is an inert gas that usually gets vented to the air but could be stored cryogenically.

Waste products include Cs 137 and some other fission products that decay in 500 years or so. If these are concentrated they generate heat that must be managed. You also get some isotopes of uranium that are not good for fission like U 236, the plutonium goes back into reactors and so can some other transuranics, but others pose challenges. Np 237 is probably the isotope that would be most desirable to steal from a reprocessing plant to make a gun-type bomb, put it back into the reactor and it will fission but also breed Pu 238 which will make huge amounts of decay heat. This complicates the handling of the fuel but it might be a good thing because there is no way anybody is making a bomb out of Pu that is so contaminated…

To put the number into context: a 1 cubic meter block of uranium weighs 19 tons.

You could probably fit that under a king size bed. The bed would need about 25 cm of clearance from the floor though (203x193x25 cm ~ 1 cubic meter).

I love the comparison! :D It conjures the image of someone answering concerns about storage with “don’t worry we can just hide it under my bed!”

Many countries have reprocessed waste, but only France has really closed the fuel cycle.

Doing that requires fabricating new fuel elements and with oxide fuels that means making ‘mixed oxide’ of plutonium and uranium oxides.

The established process for that involves grinding the two oxides in a ‘high energy ball mill’ which makes nano particles. The HEBM can turn a harmless material like silica into deadly (wreck your lungs) dust and just imagine what it can do with plutonium.

I think in France they have the workers wear respirators 100% of the time at the fuel fab, but in most countries that is not acceptable —- the dust is easy to detect so whatever real danger there is or isn’t people are going to worry about it. The factory that Karen Silkwood worked at had that problem, the U.S. recently failed to build a MOX plant, the U.K. built one that failed because the fuel was not homogenous enough to be usable.

There are other ways you can make fuel, so as coprecipitation, metal fuel, molten salt fuel, but for most of the world it is not a solved problem.

>only France has really closed the fuel cycle

No. Fuel reprocessing close to the France's technological level is also performed routinely in Russia and Japan. And "closed fuel cycle" usually means using uranium-238 for energy generation at the level of not needing to mine new uranium and instead being able to use existing dumps of depleted uranium.

The closest country to properly closing fuel cycle is Russia with its BN [0] and BREST [1] reactors. But the biggest problem is economic feasibility. Cost of uranium is relatively low and ocean extraction puts relatively low cap on it. Unfortunately the ability to "burn" waste has low economic appeal in the economic system which hardly can think several decades ahead.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)

> Fuel reprocessing close to the France's technological level is also performed routinely in Russia and Japan.

...at a rate much smaller than what France is doing. Maybe that's what was meant by GP's statement? (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... -- also notice that this page claims that Japan is yet to start its reprocessing plant, so according to that, it's not being "performed routinely in Japan" just yet.)

>at a rate much smaller than what France is doing

No wonders since La Hague handles waste from a bigger number of reactors. In France only they have 58 reactors vs 39 in Russia and they also handle waste from other countries as well. Considering this factor, the capacities (1700 vs 400) look comparable.

>notice that this page claims that Japan is yet to start its reprocessing plant, so according to that, it's not being "performed routinely in Japan" just yet

It's weird that your link does not mention the Tokai plant which works since 80s.

> No wonders since it handles waste from a bigger number of reactors. In France only they have 58 reactors vs 39 in Russia and they also handle waste from other countries as well.

Which might mean that they don't reprocess all of Russian waste, unlike the French facility processing French waste? Not sure about the exact current numbers, though.

> It's weird that your link does not mention the Tokai plant which works since 80s.

The link mentions the plant. It also implies that plant doesn't operate anymore today, having ceased commercial operations in 2006. (See also https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Tokai-reprocessing-pla...: "The plant [...] has stood idle since 2006 when a contract for reprocessing used fuel from commercial power reactors came to an end")

>Which might mean that they don't reprocess all of Russian waste, unlike the French facility processing French waste

I don't know if France indeed processes all its waste, but in the Russian case it certainly not the case today. This is why Russia builds the RT-2 plant in Zheleznogorsk with 800 t/y capacity specialized for processing VVER waste (Russia has several reactor designs in operation, including RBMK, which complicates full reprocessing).

Reprocessing just reduces the amount of waste. As far as I know, France is not doing the next step, "use modern reactor designs that actually clean up old fuel from light water reactors."

Conventional nuclear reactors are limited in "burnup," the amount of fissile fuel they manage to fission before neutron poisons shut down the reaction. Reprocessing removes the neutron poisons so you can fission more of the fuel. (Some of the waste products of fission are neutron poisons, meaning they soak up neutrons so they can't trigger fission reactions.)

Even after reprocessing, the bulk of the long-term radioactivity comes from plutonium and other transuranics (elements heavier than uranium). Those are made when uranium (or heavier) atoms absorb neutrons without fissioning. Reprocessing doesn't help remove those, but advanced reactors can fission those just fine. They can also fission U238, which is the bulk of nuclear waste (though not really radioactive by itself).

What's left after all that is just the fission products, which is about 1% of conventional reactor waste. Encase them in glass, bury them, and they'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in about 300 years.

I'm a bit surprised by this as well because currently, the only practical way to deal with nuclear waste is to burry it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Undergroun...

It's pessimistic to think that we won't figure out some solution to reprocess nuclear waste efficiently in the next 50 years, to say nothing of the next 30,000 years.

And I don't hear people talking much about the problem of "solar waste" and "wind waste", i.e. what are we going to do with all the obsolete solar panels and wind turbine blades in the next 20 years?

Yeah, it is interesting how the bar is so high for nuclear, yet for renewables everyone counts on magical energy storage that makes their intermittency practical just appearing out of nowhere.

Of course, this in itself is a propaganda tactic. The truth is that nuclear waste has never actually been a problem to solve outside certain technical circles. There just isn't enough of it to matter.

There has been a lot of theatre, nobody bothered actually doing anything, and it turned out not to matter that nobody did anything.

So how exactly was it not a problem at Fukushima?

Clarify the problem that Fukushima faced with regards to nuclear waste. Because as far as I know, the main issue was that the backup generators running the cooling pumps for some of the cores were inundated as a result of the tsunami that the outdated facility was not designed to handle.. it had nothing to do with waste storage.

The waste was stored in the reactor room and greatly complicated cleanup as far as I know.

I don't follow, Fukushima was commissioned in 1971. Are you suggesting they were keeping 50 years worth of waste in the reactor room?

That seems a bit extreme even for me.

Not 50 years worth, but some. I remember it being criticised as bad practice, but also common.

But this is from memory, you'll have to look it up if we want to dig deeper.

> Clarify the problem that Fukushima faced with regards to nuclear waste.

I don't feel it's honest to try to discuss the pros and cons of a technology by cherry picking the cons that we can strawman out of the equation while purposely ignoring real-world examples of major cons.

If anyone wants to argue in favour of nuclear power them they need to face the questions presented by Chernobyl, Fukushima, and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

This whole thread is clearly and explicitly about nuclear waste. If you want to discuss some other aspect of nuclear power you're welcome to do so, but please don't accuse people of being dishonest just because they are sticking to the subject of conversation.

> I don't feel it's honest to try to discuss the pros and cons of a technology by cherry picking the cons that we can strawman out of the equation while purposely ignoring real-world examples of major cons

Breaking down a problem and looking at its parts is in fact the only way to get any sort of honest and meaningful exchange about an even semi complicated problem going.

The topic was nuclear waste, specifically, and it's complicated and contested enough. Nobody argued that it's the only problem with nuclear. Adding confusion to the topic in support of some agenda is simply bad form.

Fukushima, and the other two nuclear accidents to ever happen in the entire history of nuclear power, is not such a big problem as we are lead to think.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

Don't eat much tuna?

Cost, not safety, is the reason that nuclear is not really going to be part of getting to a carbon neutral energy sector. We need to shift a few PWH of electricity production away from (mostly) fossil fuel based energy generation world wide. That's going to take a few decades. Most of the planned new capacity is solar and wind based at a cost that basically is an order of magnitude lower than the typical nuclear setup (just to even build them).

The total global nuclear capacity is about 400GW. Or about 3.5PWH/year. The total electricity production is around 25PWH/year. We'd need about 7x more to come close to what we need (discounting market growth). 10x to play it safe. Probably more long term. The cumulative investment for that existing capacity is trillions of dollars spread out over many decades.

Off shore wind on the other hand is basically very scalable. A couple of million per turbine (4-5). There are some turbines coming to the market with a 20MW capacity. Let say they cost 5M each (nice round number). 50 of those is basically a GW. And would cost about 250M. Most modern nuclear plants manage a few GW at best and the tend to cost tens of billions of dollars.

About 20000 turbines would match existing nuclear capacity. Of course they don't operate at peak performance all the time. So lets call it 30000 turbines. Times 10 is about 300000 turbines. Or about 1,500,000,000,000 $. 1.5 Trillion $ would be the cost of getting to 25PWH production. They last about 25 years. So we'd need to spend about 60 billion per year on adding new capacity to replace the existing capacity. Sounds doable to me. Just last year, about 260GW of wind power was added. The amount of new nuclear capacity was probably closer to 5GW. Do the math. Nuclear is not going to matter. The cost just does not add up.

Nuclear waste is not a solved problem. Reprocessing is uneconomical and does not solve the nuclear storage problem, because it creates lots of low- to mid- radioactive waste products. Admittedly, they are not so highly radioactive, but because of that the half-lifetime is often longer.

I find it interesting, that the same people who used to critisize renewables as being uneconomical, relying on future developments in storage/better grids etc. are now the ones pushing nuclear. Nuclear is significantly more expensive, and people always talk about the problems being solved in the future through research somehow.

Don't even get me started on those small modular reactors, there are so many problems about them. For example, current generation nuclear reactors allow for significant security around them due to economy of scale. If we suddenly put many small modular reactors in (or close to) cities, are we keeping the same security? We don't have economies of scale anymore to afford this.

There's no reason you can't put lots of SMRs at a central site. The main point is to fix the expense and construction time by churning them out in factories or shipyards.

You think there would not be significant regulations around placing lots of SMRs on some central site? Apart from the fact that the whole business of SMRs is still just pie in the sky stuff so far, why would we do it if solar&wind is cheaper and less dangerous?

Reprocessing is uneconomical for the sole purpose of energy generation. But is it uneconomical as part of the disposal chain? For example, if you had to send a whole lot of waste to another country, and pay their cost of reprocessing, it may be viable.

With modular reactors, you could store them as an array, in a single easily-secured location. It should not be necessary for most of your skilled staff to be present - run them like datacentres.

Yes security is a key challenge. And not only do the reactors need security. Also the nuclear waste needs to be carefully protected. Any form of explosive plus even a tiny amount of radioactive waste is basically a dirty bomb waiting to happen. So, there is simply no way that you could feasibly deploy small reactors anywhere else than basically highly secure places. Likewise for the storage. Likewise for transport of waste and reactors.

That's one of the things that makes nuclear expensive. A thousand years of security cost for a few decades of not particularly cheap energy (before you consider centuries/milennia of storing the waste). Or 30000 if unlike this person seems to want we might not opt to build some more expensive nuclear plants to consume the waste of other ones that are already costing us too much per GWH.

> f we suddenly put many small modular reactors in (or close to) cities, are we keeping the same security?

Security, fuel cycle management, maintenance, etc. Distributing the reactors would make every problem explode.

But the industry real goal with them seems to be to keep them centralized, just instead of one large reactor, you use a lot of small ones. That brings its own share of problems, and destroys the energy density that nuclear proponents like to argue so much about (mostly because renewables don't get a lot of it). But I believe it could indeed lead to large gains in cost and safety. It just can't lead to as much gains from scale as solar can get (even compared with our current scale). It maybe can get on a similar curve as wind power (but at a highest constant).

France has dropped a shitton of nuclear waste in the oceans (preferably closer to neighboring countries' shores than her own) and ever since they've stopped doing so all temporary storage sites have been filling up more and more, with significant political problems to open up new permanent storage sites.

I'd hardly call that "solved problem".

I was curious and found this: https://inventaire.andra.fr/sites/default/files/documents/pd...

Seems the UK has also dumped some... of course this document is partial to France.

France stopped disposing of nuclear waste in the ocean in 1969[1], at the time it was not a solved problem, but now it is. The reason why it is "filling up" is because the waste need too cool down at the surface for a few decades before being buried. But that's not a problem because there is not so much of it in volume

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactiv...

> The reason why it is "filling up" is because the waste need too cool down at the surface for a few decades before being buried.

The reason it is filling up is because no one has the political capital to build or develop any of the longer term storage sites. Otherwise, for just storing during cool down periods, it would not be filling up, since they would be at exactly the capacity they were designed for (the overflow being dumped to the ocean^W^W^W being moved to long-term storage).

> But that's not a problem because there is not so much of it in volume

I'm tired of this argument. It doesn't matter if it is "not so much of it in volume" as long as literally a couple grams of leak within the next 10k+ years will lead to big $$$ in damages (think: permeability and water supply), and therefore no village wants to hear about it.

It is still quite premature to claim it is a solved problem when the mess due to the long-term storage (e.g. Cigéo) sites is still regularly on TV.

Honestly, what does this guy think is the problem? As I understand the problem, the difficulty is that there’s literally nowhere on earth that people want nuclear waste to be stored. Saying “It’s okay, rather than slow radioactivity over 30,000 years it’s going to much more radioactive over 1000 years” isn’t the solution he things it is.

The plutonium left in the 30,000 year nuclear waste represents a proliferation risk. By burning the plutonium and remaining uranium you are left with shorter lived isotopes that cannot be used in a bomb.

Further the number of sites which can promise 30k year storage is quite small. Only Requiring geologic and hydrologic stability for 1k years opens additional options.

Finland does, they have very long term storage they propose others to use.

Nuclear waste is little different from other toxic waste, the only difference is the potential to poison at some proximity without direct contact and even that is mitigated by encasing radioactive matter in non-radioactive matter. Yet we see nuclear waste singled out, for ideological and political reasons.

> Maintaining waste for hundreds of years is feasible, and on a whole different scale than a 30,000 year storage plan.

Maintining nuclear waste for 500 years is not feasible. I agree that it's on a different level than 30.000 year, but we cannot predict what happens in the next 50 years, let alone the next 500 or 1000 years. The thought experiment is real simple. Look back 500 years - there is no comparison. I'm still afraid that there will be some kind of destruction of society, and who is going to take care of this stuff?

Nuclear waste is buried in underground rock formations with geological ages in the millions of years.

It's not a perfect solution, but if we don't start building out nuclear, we're going to flood most cities on Earth in 50 years.

All these renewable green energy solutions have failed to provide BASELINE reliable power. Nuclear is literally the only near-zero-carbon solution that works.

Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't have taken Cowen's and Thiel's money as part of the Emergent Ventures grant. I'm not at all aligned with this "American" liberal way of thinking.

Let me make the argument against nuclear in terms "they" (and many here on HN also, like it seems) might understand: Costs. Nuclear is and will increasingly be more expensive and complex to build and run than wind and solar.

The costs of energy storage, solar and wind are dropping with every watt of capacity installed. The cost of nuclear is not.

Here's the source: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Let me address some arguments I read in this thread: Yes, I know that the sun is not shining at night and there's not always wind blowing, but we will soon have cheap enough batteries to store the energy and solve the intermediacy problem. Yes, one (but by far not the only) driver of nuclear cost is regulation - but guess what - it's fucking necessary to regulate it. No, nuclear is not the only way out of this climate mess (consider 15+ year building times for nuclear power plants). Yes, there might be some interesting small scale applications of nuclear, especially in space exploration, but we all know that this is not the point here.

The costs are high because noone is building. It's because of all the building that solar is low. If you started building npps the costs would go down a lot.

France built out nuclear and the costs kept rising.

Not every learning curve is positive.

Wrong according the parent comments' source.

> Not every learning curve is positive.

It should be, if it's not then someone is fucking up and that fuck up needs to be fixed, rather than giving up on the entire project.

If you look at the data in the link I posted above, it shows exactly the opposite. Nuclear gets more expensive per capacity built.

From your source, it's not as simple as you state:

> One reason for rising prices is increased regulation for nuclear power, which has the important benefit of increased safety. A second reason is that the world has not built many nuclear power plants in recent years so that supply chains are small, uncompetitive, and are not benefiting from economies of scale.35

> Both of these reasons explain why the global average LCOE price has gone up. But for nuclear there are large differences in price trends between countries: Prices and construction times have increased significantly in the US and the UK, while France and South Korea were at least able to keep prices and construction times constant.36

> Michel Berthélemy and Lina Escobar Rangel (2015) explain that those countries that were able to avoid price surges are countries that do not stand out in regulating nuclear power less, but in standardizing the construction of reactors more.37 Learning, after all, means transferring the knowledge gathered in one instance to another. No repetition, no learning.

> This is in sharp contrast with renewables in particular. While nuclear technology is not very standardized and gets build very rarely, solar PV modules and wind plants are the exact opposite, very standardized and extremely often built.

Nuclear should be used for desalination as much as power generation. Leftover power from desalination should be used to backup wind/solar. There needs to be a hybrid approach not a one or nothing.

Use desalinated water to make arid places habitable, perhaps extract economic benefit from that.

I think transmitting power from a distant and isolated nuclear powerplant is a big problem (power loss). Does anyone here know why power plants can't transmit power using laser beams (line of sight..or reflected) to downstream substations for power conversion? Also, why aren't sea waves used for power generation more? They're very reliable.

I thought this would be referencing work by Nathan Myhrvold using a new type of reactor that supposedly runs on "spent" nuclear waste and in the event of power failure just stops running safely. Not sure of the other logistic issues involved. The one thing I remember about transitioning to this approach is that Nathan said the US isn't very good about building new things, so they were going to build in China. But then it got shut down right as the anti-China trade policies started a few years ago. Not sure if there are big problems with this approach, but it sounded promising ...

Redefining the term "nuclear waste" as "spent fuel residue" then declaring there is a process to reprocess that, DOES NOT solve the nuclear waste problem.

Why? Intuitively it does feel like the "nuclear waste" part is some radioactive elements that we could re-use for nuclear fissions. If we found a way to re-use the left-overs multiple times until we used all the radioactive parts, that would suggest that it solves the waste problem.

I will try to explain it, but it is probably better to link wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nuclear_waste

TLDR: nuclear waste also includes things like the reactor casing, uranium mining tools and similar contaminated equipment. Power wash them and you get slightly less contaminated tools and lots of contaminated water. Many people argue that the stuff coming out of la hagues chimney and waste water pipes also qualifies as nuclear waste, even if it is only "slightly radioactive" per cubic meter air/water pumped through them and "just within legal thresholds". Frances reprocessing plant, which is named as "the solution" in the comment, is by many critics seen as a greenwashing plant that for decades failed to hold its proclaimed commercial quotas while irradiating ocean and atmosphere. And we are still taking fuel rod cycle, there is no repurposing a decades old used reactor casing, or a highly contaminated repurposing plant chimney.

The thing with "until we used all the radioactive parts" is, that it is a spherical cow, an idealised mathematical solution that doesn't happen in the real world. Yes la hague reduces spent nuclear fuel, but it produces large amounts of mid level and low level nuclear waste.

I'm a fan of Nuclear too, just the reactor is ~1 AU away.

And in addition, it’s been ten years since anybody has had to abandon a city because of an accident, so that’s good.

Fukushima was hardly an accident, it was a tsunami that killed a thousand times more people than the ensuing nuclear power plant leak ever did

Not very deadly, luckily yes. But cleaning up the accident has been expensive.

It IS expensive. And will take another 30 years to complete.

Apparently every accident that has happened will never happen again and is a once off. So they don’t count.

It's not that they don't count. They count just as much as air pollution, heat stroke or hypothermia, from fossil fuels and expensive or unreliable energy.

Nuclear has costs, yes. Weigh them up against the costs of every other alternative, rather than singling them out.

The tsunami alone killed 10000 people, displaced many more. The nuclear accident that followed killed 1 (one). So nuclear made the disaster 0.01% worse.

But nuclear is also the reason why it's still an ongoing expensive issue 10 years later.

How much nuclear waste is produced annually? Can reasonable number of Starships take it to the space?

The problem is not the weight, but the dangers of launching. Space rockets have a comparatively bad crash record and one full with nuclear fuel breaking down in the atmosphere would wreck havoc on anything nearby (as in countries). Storing it on earth is much easier and safer.

High level waste is a serious issue in case of an accident, low-level radioactive waste is regularly disposed of already. https://www.nrc.gov/waste/llw-disposal/licensing/locations.h...

I think the standard answer to this is you really don't want to take the chance of a rocket loaded with nuclear waste crashing back down or catching fire in midair.

People can accept the occasional plane debris crashing on their house. Less so with radioactive waste.

Launching it is idiotic. If you want to put it away, you could just drill a deep bore hole 2 km down. At that depth, it won't interact with anything and won't come back up except at geological time scale (millions of years). It would be very expensive, but less so than launching it.

The spent-fuel waste is roughly one barrel per reactor per year - not a lot and easily managed.

There is a lot of very-low risk waste (ie of the same radioactivity as bananas) which really doesn't not need to be treated like life threatening material as it is today - and is much more voluminous. The amount of that stuff depends on what the local regulations are making plants dispose of (eg some places force plant employees to throw out their uniforms every week).

> its own spent fuel is only dangerous for on the order of a thousand years

"only".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long-term_ma...

Having dangerous waste for a thousand years is not a solved problem. Fukushima is exactly why we shouldn't go down that path. We now have better, safer, and cheaper alternatives.

Solved problem or not, the important thing to realize is that it is a problem with zero marginal cost. That is, we don't make the storage problem harder by continuing.

I find anti-nuclear "green" activists just as dangerous as anti-vaxxers. They are often the same too, easy to categorize under the larger umbrella of "anti-progress" (which funny enough means conservative).

I don’t think it’s due to conservatism or liberalism really, more that the roots of the Green movement (at least in Europe) are in the anti-nuclear weapon movements of the 70s. They were never able to shake off the general aversion to anything nuclear

While I'm personally pro-nuclear, I think grouping them up with anti-vaxxers is kind of absurd. There are proven historical risks to commercialized nuclear power that aren't just fantasies made up by Wakefield.

> There are proven historical risks to commercialized nuclear power that aren't just fantasies made up by Wakefield.

There are proven risks to vaccines too. How many people die each year because anti-nuclear people slowed or stopped the adoption of nuclear power? Air pollution kills, a lot. These people have blood on their hands.

Ah come on, the reason there is not more nuclear in most countries has nothing to do with the anti-nuclear lobby, but is simple economics. It's hilarious that somehow anti-nuclear groups are supposed to have so much more lobbying power than some of the largest corporations in the world, that's almost on the same level as anti-climate change conspiracy theory groups who say that this is all made up because some scientists want to get grant money.

I see your comment and raise you with Germany.

> It's hilarious that somehow anti-nuclear groups are supposed to have so much more lobbying power than some of the largest corporations in the world

It turns out that anti nuke means pro gas ... now let me get the abacus out and see which lobbying group is bigger - pro nuke vs gas+oil+coal+greens+nimbys.

Answers on the back of a postcard please.

So what Germany, even in Germany the nuclear reactors were extended way beyond their original expected lifetimes.

You might want to explain why France is not building nuclear reactors left right and center. There's hardly any country that is more pro-nuclear, and their nuclear energy production is highly subsidized and they are replacing nuclear with renewable (look at the chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France)

Also the assertion behind the OP was that nuclear is replaced with coal/fossil, that is not the case in Germany see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#...

It's renewables which have taken over from both fossil and nuclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

And left beautiful clean coal the far and away leading source of energy in germany with a nice uptrend in gas, presumably replacing the removed nuclear and diminishing coal capacity.

Why are france not building any more? Why would they need to? 70% comes from nuclear they dont need to get that to 100%, especially as you point out, renewables are really coming of age. They did the hard work, didnt just lean into setting stuff on fire for their energy needs and are rightly yielding the rewards from this.

That's not even the full picture, as Germany burns lots of lignite, which is even worse.

Perhaps. Or, further proliferation of nuclear energy would have lead to more Chernobyl style accidents. Not to mention the weapons aspect. Nuclear is also expensive, it could never have significantly outcompeted coal in India and China anyway even if it had faced less resistance.

Nuclear is in large part so expensive due to overregulation lobbied by anti-nuclear groups and NIMBY sentiment generated by anti-nuclear fear mongering.

All tech is expensive and dangerous initially, becoming cheap and safe with increased availability and competition in the market place. See aeronautics. In the case of nuclear this process was abruptly halted by green activism.

Chernobyl killed less people than air pollution due to coal does in Europe in a year. The difference is that Chernobyl is a big, visible event, while coal plants in Germany and Poland are a slow poison, and people don't notice slow poisons.

I don't think it's an absurd comparison. Nuclear is so safe and always get replaced with fossil fuels when a plant is decommissioned. The anti-nuclear sentiment is therefore detached from the reality of how safe it is relative to how damaging the inevitable alternative is, in the same way that anti-vaxxers are detached from the reality of the vaccine/virus trade-off.

It is the same mindset: certain historical mishaps (which existed for vaccines too) when the technology was in its infancy justifying a complete rejection of its benefits even though said benefits would overwhelmingly win in any cost-benefit analysis.

But this mindset is fueled by an underlying deeper fear of progress, a fear which only searches for excuses but it exists even without them, like in the case of anti-GMO fears, another dear cause of the "green" activists.

Nuclear has killed people and caused havoc in (to be fair, a small number) of people's neighborhoods, it's not unreasonable for those people to be traumatized by it and campaign against it, even if at scale they are wrong. Vaccines simply haven't done anything like that, it's a fantasy. I think it does a real disservice to those people with genuine concerns to cluster them in with conspiracy theorists and it's bad for society to do that.

Availability bias. If you actually look at the data on nuclear safety relative to other power sources, you'll see that what you're doing is the same thing as quibbling over the safety differences of AstraZeneca versus Moderna. I am not making a false analogy here. The anti-nuclear perspective really is detached from the reality of how safe it is.

Tyler Cowen has separately observed that progress has stagnated and nukes have been stuck with 1950s era designs, without connecting the dots.

Explain: Why don't we have liquid sodium, thorium, or traveling wave reactors? Why don't we refine like the French? Why did we stop experimenting?

Often, tree huggers are blamed for nuke's decline.

Also true: nukes got stuck in amber. Suffered from their own goals. Early success locked in those early choices.

Enviros didn't shut down my state's nuclear power plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5

Enviros didn't renege on cleaning up Hanford Nuclear Reservation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

Something else happened. Something financial, bureaucratic, political, psychological, or whatever.

Both public capitalism (USSR) and hybrid private capitalism (USA) favored massive top-down initiatives. Too big to fail.

We should acknowledge this tendency towards winner-takes-all, in all systems, and then adapt.

One great recent contrasting example is NASA & SpaceX.

Musk makes great points about SpaceX's progress: NASA had plenty of smart people and could have done a lot more. However, NASA stopped innovating because they weren't allowed to fail. So these massive projects, like the Space Shuttle, have to succeed, no matter the cost, and are not allowed to revisit bygone choices and assumptions, not allowed to adopt state of the art.

Another great example is Operation Warp Speed wrt vaccines.

One critical success factor was the US Govt's portfolio strategy of placing multiple bets, increasing the likelihood of success. (Leveraging the math of NPV, as detailed in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity.) Versus other nations placed single big bets. With very mixed outcomes, sadly.

Also true: Easy wins are easily won.

Per Wright's Law, innovation and productivity progress may be proportional to investment.

But scholarship, our understanding of the world, seems to be punctuated equilibrium. Theories, ideas, metaphors, insights. This progress seems cyclic. Maybe because of Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions, aka "science progresses one funeral at time".

Sometimes I wonder if we would have had feasible solar power sooner if Reagan had continued Carter's energy self-reliance efforts. (I don't even know how to factor in obstruction, like Big Oil lobbying against alteratives.)

Surely, the economics of solar panels would have slowly improved. But it seems the path towards today's boom relied on advances in material science. Maybe there were other paths we could have explored, I dunno.

I'm weirdly optimistic about our current times. Because of maths. Society is on the cusp of knowingly adopting risk management strategies. But unlike FDR's (necessary) New Deal strategy of trying everything, we have better tools for right sizing our bets.

Thanks for reading this far. I really don't know how to talk about this stuff, am struggling to gather and articulate my thoughts.

It is a solved problem: https://www.deepisolation.com/

"its own spent fuel is only dangerous for on the order of a thousand years (600-1200), instead of the 30,000 from current US designs", hmmm, I get it, by reducing the dangerous period of nuclear waste from 30000 year to 600~1200 years resolves the problem per the author... Hopefully there was a typo, it was really meant to be 600 days instead of 600 years, or vent it was really meant 600 months, I just cannot see how that could be deemed as a solution.

Global warming will make most of the planet uninhabitable forever. Is that much better than to have a few well defined spots on Earth dangerous to visit for a mere thousand years?

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