Will the climate crisis force America to reconsider nuclear power?

On the other hand, can we afford not doing it? We don't yet have clean and efficient energy storage technologies that would allow us to switch to renewables completely. So if the alternative is to burn coal and worsen our already bad situation, the nuclear risk seems much smaller.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

As of 2021, nuclear powerplant accidents killed less than 2 people per year since 1970s. As of 2018, nuclear powerplants produced 10% of energy.

WHO estimates that climate change causes 150000 deaths per year.

I actually had this in mind for storage.

My point is we don't have them at a competitive price, and yet the renewables people insist we definitely well. We might, we might not.

For whatever reason, energy production seems to be about meeting demand, rather than finding use for surpluses.

I agree storage is a problem, maybe not as big as it is generally made out, but even then, would I rather struggle with nuclear waste, or millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? The latter will lead to a planetary-scale disaster, the former at worst to minor regional ones.

Also, the dangerous isotopes are also the ones which decay most quickly. Let the waste sit for 300 years and it will be no more radioactive than the uranium ore it was originally mined from. At that point you can dump it back into the uranium mine, or else keep it anywhere else you think would be safer than an abandoned uranium mine, the risks are miniscule either way.

The fallacy is believing that because it has historically been so far away that is still that far away.

E.g. Helion, a y combinator backed company (our beloved HN overlords), just raised half a billion from investors for a series E round that include Peter Thiel and a few others with well earned reputations for making lucrative investments. I think there's a good chance that we'll have operational fusion plants next decade already. It's not money in the bank yet but clearly enough of a chance for the likes of Peter Thiel to commit some serious money to this.

Helion is pitching 1 cent per khw. That completely kills the business case for new nuclear plants. The payoff on those investments is going to be insanely good if this works as advertised.

Whether or not the nuclear plant survives intact is a bit of a minor issue. It just has to fail without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake.

Citing Fukushima - Fukushima was bad. Bud the mounds of corpses caused by the natural disaster that also caused Fukushima are a far more important thing to spend resources preventing than Fukushima itself was.

With per megawatt waste for nuclear per 20 years being exponentially smaller in volume.

And where the alternative is coal /natural gas (rather than wind or solar) where these produce more volume of waste in a month/year than nuclear does in a decade. (And in the case of coal, we store worse waste in ways it often enters our fresh water supplies.

Globally building nuclear power plants will be too slow to solve climate change. We still should keep it to solve future problems. Like conquering the universe and stuff.

People are afraid of it, I have spoken with multiple people which are fundamentally/seriously afraid of nuclear power.

Also most idk. 5 50+ years old people (i.e. majority of people with power) in the Green German party (and other parties) have spend their "Jung political years" by being obsessed with stopping Nuclear power, try convincing them that maybe we need it. (Or try make them accept that their movement had been partially financed and instrumentalized by eastern Germany, or that most problems of nuclear wast storage in the area which once was western Germany are 100% fault of the Politician of the time choosing a known to be bad mine for petty reasons).

There was always a fear of contamination, and the Three-Mile-Island accident in the US didn't help. This was before Chernobyl. But of course it's worth remembering why everyone thought that might be such a big problem: there was a siren each Wednesday reminding people that we're in a Cold War, and if it turns hot there's a nuke somewhere with "Copenhagen" written in Cyrillic. So people understood that nuclear fallout is not nice. Plus Denmark ain't big, so basically if something were to happen the whole country could be radioactive. For the same reason, many Danes took issue with the Swedes building a nuclear plant that you can still see from Copenhagen.

The OOA (the organization that led the anti-nuclear movement) made a nice logo with a smiling sun and a "Nuclear Power? No Thanks" message that got thousands of people on the street to protest. Some of the people maintained that if we only could solve what to do about the waste, they'd be fine with it. Often the debate has been "if the tech were better I'd be for it".

I'm not sure this is a reasonable decision. Tech gets better with experience, and you don't build experience by not engaging. Much like mini-mills from Clayton Christensen, often the tech that wins looks crappy and niche when it starts.

Look at cars. People used to get run over all the time, they'd hurt themselves in crashes, etc. But so much effort has been spent investing in them that things like seat belts became a thing, we made laws about driving, and so on.

You also have to look at the tradeoffs. Putting carbon in the air is basically a bad idea, and we need to reduce it. Here's a replacement for doing that, we should put some of our chips on that. Perfectly fine to have windmills as well, not saying there aren't other bets.

Did it happen again? We haven't had anything close to another Chernobyl, and that was 35 years ago (more than 50% of the entire history of the nuclear power industry.)

But again, a simple question of expressing the requirement in $/kwh. It's a good measure of cost for batteries too. You pay for MWH of storage and GW delivery capacity. Lithium Ion hits the sweet spot of lots of capacity (GW) with modest amounts of storage (GWH). Other storage options store more but are less able to deliver quickly. There's a nice tradeoff here. Combining the different options gives you the best of both worlds. E.g. thermal mass is dirt cheap, because it can literally be made of dirt (well sand or rocks). Takes relatively long to charge but it can deliver power for weeks or months. Lithium ION is the opposite but it only lasts a few hours.

The dirty little secret with base load is that a few hours is all that is needed mostly to deal with, again, the typically unspecified intermittency.

It's a simple matter of how much GWH you need to mitigate against e.g. a few clouds or windless days. There are many solutions and it all boils down to $/kwh. I'd say long term fractions of a penny is exactly what this will be. And by long term I mean less than the lifetime of the nuclear plants that we're debating here that have yet to be planned and built; and possibly even their construction phase (this could take decades).

We definitely need to start including dispatchability into price calculations.

The reason the Chinese are investing in nuclear is actually really interesting.

This is just speculation but I believe that the reason is not that it they believe it is cheaper but simply because they want to replace a lot of dirty coal (well over 1000 GW) and are willing to pay the price for that. So far, the plan was to build more coal plants, and then get rid of it as early as they can in a few decades once they have enough renewables. Not a bad plan but coal has become an embarrassing problem for them (smog, lots of finger pointing internationally, etc).

They've been floating 2065 as a deadline for going fully carbon neutral. So, those new coal plants they have been building would only be in operation for less than 50 years. To go fully carbon neutral, they'll need more than just that 1000GW; a couple of thousands minimum; possibly more. It's not just current energy consumption but also transport, heavy industry, etc. that are currently powered by fossil fuels. To power all of that with clean electricity or hydrogen created using clean electricity, they would need a lot of power. Many TW of capacity.

The issue is that renewable capacity is only deploying world wide at a rate of 100-200GW. That is globally and it's happening as fast as we can do and we're getting better at it. And while that is a lot, it's not nearly enough.

Over a few decades it of course adds up to plenty of capacity; especially as production processes improve over time and scale up. But for the Chinese to be able to start shutting down coal plants in the near future they need an alternative. Even if that is more expensive. So, they just announced well over a TW of nuclear power capacity in the form of 150 nuclear plants. Problem solved but it won't be cheap.

To me it looks like their plan is to ramp up nuclear at great cost so they can commit to shutting down coal sooner than the second half of this century; which is increasingly becoming a hard to defend position. A few decades in, they'll have quite a bit of nuclear capacity, much more renewable capacity, and a vanishingly small minority of fossil fuel based production; which they will pull the plug on at some point. Once that is done, they'll shift attention at reducing cost.

A lot of those nuclear plants might not even reach their planned end of life. They'll have served their purpose long before that. Once there is enough renewable capacity producing energy cheaper, they'll start doing to those plants what is happening to many expensive coal plants all over the world right now: shut them down. They'll cut their losses.

However the design is safe and based on battle-tested submarine reactors from Alfa class attack subs.

1. What type of storage is able to provide for, say, Northern Europe, where there may be weeks without wind and months without any significant sunlight? Keep in mind that the answer must be realistic, and not, for example, require that we suddenly increase global battery production by several orders of magnitude.

2. Renewable energy is already vastly insufficient to meet demand, even at moments when it is producing at full capacity. When will you actually fill those batteries?

Oh, and while we are at it, which part of the already densely populated landscape of Northern Europe should be sacrificed to put all this equipment?