Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable
whatisnuclear.com
whatisnuclear.com
This seems like a HUGE understatement. The calculations for the billion-year sustainability basically assume we have extracted every single bit of uranium from seawater. We have demonstrated extracting uranium from seawater [0] using plastic fibers with a compound that attracts the uranium+oxygen ions. But this would basically require pumping all of the worlds oceans through these fibers and continually extracting.
[0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac....
Yes, and? What’s the problem here? Billion years is a plenty of time to pump all ocean water through filters. The crucial fact here is that you only need to pump through and filter as much as you need, which is much less than millions of tons of total uranium in seawater.
Now consider that only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of seawater is easily accessible.
There's a reason why we don't do this for gold. There is about 1/50th the amount of gold in the ocean, but it's also more than a thousand times more valuable, but it's nowhere near econimcal.
The scope of this product also dwarfs all proposed solutions for climate change.
Not saying it’s an economically realistic idea, but on the topic of availability of seawater it seems like you’d just need to set up your pumping station in a location with a persistent oceanic current, filter upstream and discharge downstream, and you’d be set for thousands of years. The Straight of Gibraltar seems like a good candidate, since the large surface evaporation of the Mediterranean Sea and the comparatively small amount of water it receives from rivers means that there is a permanent current through the straight. (The Mediterranean Sea would evaporate away in about a thousand years without the Straight.)
This also makes me wonder if seawater uranium concentration in the Mediterranean Sea is much higher than elsewhere. The current has been in place bringing in seawater and evaporating off the water, leaving behind all non-evaporable minerals, for over 5 million years, and the Mediterranean Sea is much saltier than the ocean in general, suggesting that uranium concentration would also be substantially elevated.
>'All you have to do is strap a chemical rocket to an asteroid or comet and fire it at just the right time,' added Laughlin. 'It is basic rocket science.' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...
At least we could if we last that long and didn’t mess up the process, neither of which I would count on.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...
Nuclear proponents instead love to emphasize how safe nuclear can be and how great of a safety track record it has. And with some caveats (e.g. the Fukushima mess was pretty bad) they are not wrong for modern nuclear reactor designs. However, nuclear is expensive and that combined with safety (which costs money to mitigate) is the real reason for the impopularity.
It always was expensive but historically, a lot of that was paid for out of tax payer money. Most new plants are still very expensive compared to almost everything else in the market. And they still involve a lot of taxpayer money.
Nuclear is not economically sustainable currently and those cost are either not payed (many countries don't have permanent waste storage solutions) or basically payed for out of tax money instead of revenue. If you add it all up it makes an already bad cost picture worse. Even without that accounted for it is easily the most expensive form of power. With all that accounted for, it only gets worse.
To be economically sustainable, it needs to become vastly cheaper and account for the full cost.
Will it always be that expensive? There are definitely ways to lower cost and there is of course a learning effect. But it seems we have a lot to learn. About an order of magnitude's worth of cost. And that would just be catching up to the status quo.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223761273_The_costs...
Still more expensive than renewables though, so only the best option if they didn't exist.
However. but the best power is the power you have. While renewables are cheaper, we don't yet have enough renewable capacity. And while fixing that is happening at an enormous pace, it's going to take a bit of time. A few decades should help.
E.g. China has more than a TW of coal plants and more under construction. The global rollout of renewables is in the order of a bit over 100 GW. At that pace, it would take a decade to roll out enough (globally) just to get rid of China's coal plants.
That's why they are investing in expensive Nuclear plants. 150 plants adds up to about a TW pretty much. Assuming these are pretty big ones doing 6GW each. That's not because they are so cheap but because it is the only way to get China on a path where they can shut down most of their coal this half of the century. Doing that is becoming more urgent.
Long term, they might shut down those nuclear plants as soon as they can get away with it to save money. That will require a massive increase in production for renewable generation and storage. These plants have a lifetime of around 60 years. They might not actually be online that long.
I have good news:
Why not have it as a government service?
So you have other side of the coin where renewable buildup ends up with fossil fuel burning to cover the inevitable shortages, while peak renewable low costs are used to badger dispatchable tech into non-existence
Despite attempts on HN to help me, I still don't see a good way to deal with nuclear waste, which would be well explained.
I've cited this quote before: "Despite a long-standing agreement among many experts that geological disposal can be safe, technologically feasible and environmentally sound, a large part of the general public in many countries remains skeptical as result of anti-nuclear campaigns and lack of knowledge."
It's unfortunately the case that large parts of the public (in some countries at least) prefer banning a reliable and sustainable energy source rather than risking that some guy in 10'000 years gets cancer because he recklessly trespassed into an old fuel depot.
The way I see it is that if human civilization degenerates so much that it loses track of where and what are nuclear waste deposits, there will be much bigger sources of death and misery than occasional radiation induced cancer.
Growth of storage is more of an open question, but not inconceivable, and even a partial improvement gives more time to do the rest.
(And the timescale sounds more like the timescale for actually taking this seriously than the timescale for fully solving it, though I definitely hope that isn’t just me listening to what I want to be true).
There are a good half dozen viable methods of extracting lithium. Some are substantially cleaner than others, which are the ones we should use.
Modern engineering, siting, and construction is tied up with regulatory approval processes, safety protocols, diversity and inclusion quotas, and NIMBYism that occupy the vast majority of timelines.
A prior civilization would have looked at a literal existential threat and been willing to risk a few desert turtles, a few extra construction workers' lives, and ignored some Karens to get the job done.
But we don't have that kind of civilization anymore. Regulation and safety protocols are great for societies not sitting at the edge of the Seneca Cliff, but they're pretty terrible when the ELE meteorite is en route.
But is it, actually? The amount of nuclear waste in interim storage speaks against it.
> It's a solved problem
It is certainly not. For example in Germany there's only one terminal storage facility, and it's already showing problems, less than half a century in. And we thought/hoped it could last for tens of thousands of years.
Maybe a case could be made that in ideal conditions, technical solutions exist, but I'm not aware of any actually viable solutions. (Note that a solution isn't viable from a public relations POV, it's NOT an actually viable solution).
No, there aren't a lot of breeder reactors running. But that's just because there hasn't been any pressure to develop them commercially.
> but I'm not aware of any actually viable solutions.
Check out the Onkalo fuel repository: https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Some coal power plants filter and collect their waste product. They then have to manage the waste. It either end up in landfills for toxic waste, bury it in the ground, or they dump it in the ocean. Hundred of tons of coal ash is created every year in the US alone.
Nuclear plants don't have the luxury to just dump it in the air, ocean, or bury it in the ground. The law require them to collect and store it, and so in contrast to fossil fuels it builds up and is visible. Nuclear plants create less total waste, and they don't contribute to climate change, and yet people are worried about nuclear waste while consuming enormous amount of fossil fuel energy.
The nuclear industry need better PR, while governments need to stop playing favorites. Force fossil fueled power plants to have the same requirements that we put on nuclear plants, and make both pay for waste management.
Source: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-states-split-on-classifying-nuclear...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/...
It's 30 years later and countries which push renewables heavily like Germany still have over 40% of their electricity produced from carbon producing sources. [2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
That said, that assumes we only use USA-style LWR/PWRs that depend on natural U-235 to operate, I think, given that the numbers I've seen for reactors operating on unenriched uranium point to more like 50 years as super low-end estimate.
[1] "France uses some 12,400 tonnes of uranium oxide concentrate (10,500 tonnes of U) per year for its electricity generation. Much of this comes from Areva in Canada (4500 tU/yr) and Niger (3200 tU/yr) together with other imports, principally from Australia, Kazakhstan and Russia, mostly under long-term contracts. Areva perceives the front end of the French fuel cycle as strategic, and invests accordingly." https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hundreds of billions of tons of sea water every year, even if we disregard the fact that most seawater isn't easily accesible.
But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late. Even if we managed to build nuclear reactors faster than at any other time in history, we would be far too late to stop climate change.
More on this: https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV
Nuclear had its chance, and it failed to deliver. It's a failed technology. It didn't work out, and it was never as cheap or as reliable as people wish it was.
Take away gas turbines and other fossil sources, and without magic pie-in-the-sky, renewables leave you with rolling blackouts and broken grid.
Sadly I see no other viable alternative. Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources, have a massive footprint, and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather.
>"All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades."
No risk of accidents is an impossible standard. I know this will sound snarky, but, if you agree with the idea that the danger of climate change is existential, affordability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Especially when you consider that a big factor as to why Nuclear is so expensive today is because we don't build them anymore, outside of places like China and India, which already have nuclear weapons.
No, you can't just pave desert with panels and magically solve power generation without ugly environmental consequences, that doesn't work even in computer games.
Why would putting all the panels in a desert do that to a rainforest on a different continent?
And how much of the Sahara do you think we’d need to cover in PV if for some strange reason we didn’t put any on rooftops, brownfield land, parking lots, car bodies, and (for most of the world) closer deserts?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area%20sahara%20%2F%20%...
(And the other person was actually saying electricity, which is what WA is inferring in that calculation)
Putting solar farms in a desert is an attractive idea and way less impactful than covering hillsides in green and temperate areas. My understanding, though, is that the transmission of all that energy is the real issue. You can build a giant solar farm in the Mojave desert but distributing it to farther parts of the U.S. is a problem.
I also believe the amount of land we would need to convert to solar would be mostly be newly developed land. We probably wouldn't be converting already productive and utilized land.
A pessimistic scenario for Germany requires about 2.5% of the area for 100% renewable energy with today's technology. In a very densely populated country not exactly blessed with loads of sunshine hours. Taking into account the possibility of dual use (PV on buildings, wind turbines on farmland etc) we'll probably use about two times as much land for renewables than we use for cemeteries. It's very manageable.
We pull 700 million tonnes of oil out of the ground every year. The resources required to build a clean energy infrastructure is significantly less than that.
> have a massive footprint,
Powering the US with solar requires a smaller footprint than footprint of parking lots in the US. Wind is even less because while a wind farm is massive, it doesn't prevent the land from being used for other things.
> and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather.
Hitting 99% renewables is straight forward. You get above 90% if each solar plant is overbuilt enough to handle a cloudy day and has enough batteries to handle a single day/night cycle. This isn't expensive, it only roughly doubles the cost of your plant.[1] Interconnect a bunch of those plants along with some wind will get you the next 9%. Then use a gas peaker for the last 1%.
1: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
Overground storage quickly goes more expensive than nuclear.
So, like storage for renewables?
Seems to me, we're not concerned on R&D budgets, so we should pursue all relevant methods of decarbonisation, of which nuclear is a very promising one.
Just curious, why do you think so? I do think this should be the case, but I just don't see it happening.
In the planetary scale, paying a few $10bns or $100bns is nothing, especially against the backdrop of global warming damage. I don't think we should skimp on researching nuclear in this context, "because renewables are cooler".
I think we need a new "nuclear Trinity project" (only this time for energy generation!) or a SpaceX-type enterprise. Iterate, build a simple, single, safe design, and deploy it widely. Or fail, but not without trying.
Oh, and while we have lots and lots of people and know-how in renewables, battery tech and transmission technology. We don't have that many people who can build reactors, due to the anti-nuclear trend of the last three decades. You can bemoan that, and maybe building up nuclear during that time would have been a solution to climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that even if we wanted to build hundreds of nukes today, we would lack the specialists.
Meanwhile c) we are working on getting paper designs for storage that might or might not work to get renewables good enough.
The starting point is vastly different.
Stuff tends not to work out in practise. It costs more, it's unreliable etc.
If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?
Because naysayers have had a dominant influence over nuclear policy since Chernobyl.
> why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?
You may be inclined to wonder why there is so much nuclear waste at all. After all, we could just melt it, dilute it into a slag with a bunch of silicon, cart it off to a boat and dump it into a deep ocean trench if we wanted to be safely rid of it. But we don’t want to be rid of it. It’s extremely expensive to produce and extremely valuable, and any permanent solution for storing nuclear waste needs to be reversible in case we ever want it back for reprocessing.
https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
And yes, solar farms are bigger than nuclear plants. That might be a problem in Singapore, but a few hundred square miles of solar farms is not a big deal in a country with 3.5 million square miles.
Now consider that Boston is on similar distance from North pole as Spain, and not everywhere has huge swaths of unused land conveniently stripped of natives.
Until we first agree to shut fossil fuels down, talk about fossil fuels alternatives being "too late" is advocacy to continue burning fossil fuel.
While we would indeed need to process seawater at an enormous scale, that becomes necessary after roughly 24 times longer into the future than the first nuclear power plant is into the past, which is when the non-seawater fuel runs out. This is too far into the future to make realistic predictions about technology or industry.
As for it being too late to stop global warming: well yes, but because that ship sailed some time ago. As is said of various things and time periods, the best time to do it was a few decades ago, the second best time is today.
The bigger problem is the political viability, both internally and internationally. How does Iran ever use nuclear power when every reactor is destroyed by an Israel afraid that Iran wants the atom bomb?
But, instead of thinking of it as all or nothing, think of the reactors than can be built as storage or intercontinental power grid capacity that doesn’t need to be built, or at least that we don’t need on the same time frame.
Right now, solar is doing what nuclear promised and failed to deliver for costs; batteries, while cheap enough to make electric cars interesting, are still more expensive for shifting day production to night load than just using nuclear to start with, and my preference of a global power grid needs a few decades to build even with (unrealistic) zero political concerns. All of this can probably be helped with nuclear.
EDIT: Title on the article is currently 'Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years'. I recall that that was also the HN title when I wrote this comment, but I could have got mixed up.
In practice, most things that look exponential end up as S-shaped / sigmoid curves
And much of the sun's output is yet untapped.
The relationship between living standards and energy use/carbon emissions is not exactly 1:1, but it's pretty close (net of offshoring one's personal emissions to China, India, etc). Get ready for about a 4x increase in carbon emissions if our suicidal empathy trend continues.
What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.
― Pentti Linkola
Nuclear has a massive capital cost issue, you need to invest a very large sum of money up-front and recoup it over decades; and you can start to recoup it only after at least 5 years of construction that can be bogged in regulatory and construction delays, political and civil opposition can stretch construction to more than a decade, all the while the investor is billions in the red.
This makes nuclear very very risky from a financial perspective, slow to adopt innovation, hard to attract private investors that can't accommodate projects that take such a long time to become profitable. Basically, they are too expensive and slow compared to the business risk they entail, especially compared to renewables, which are quick to market and have very clear risk profiles.
If and when this changes, for example by SMRs or advanced, low cost designs, then nuclear will have a place in the clean energy market. Up to now, attempts to bring the cost down have failed, for example NuScale's battery of small reactors is estimated to cost the same as a clasic reactor.
Lean into private/public ventures to change the economics. We just make the private risk profile look reasonable. via direct investment.
Plutonium has a half-life of 24110 years – it will take about ten of them until it's gone.
Just imagine the provision for 1 security guard's toilet paper for a quarter of a million of years.
It's always pipe-dreams like 'somebody will eventually have a genius idea about it'.
Compared with combustion waste from fossil and biofuel which kills ~8 million people every year and causes climate change, I have to say that the nuclear waste is dramatically better for the present and for the future.
By definition.
You're just trying to move the goal posts now.
You were clearly using "long half-life" to imply "super bad!" when in actuality "long half-life" means "not very radioactive at all".
And yes, I consider plutonium super bad. And I consider keeping that safe longer than our species exists to date as ambitious.
I may err and plutonium may be a kinda decaying lead as you imply.
It's remarkable that the former temperament is very conservation oriented, and therefore conservative, but more a feature of the Left than the Right.
The depressing truth is this shows that current uranium oxide reserves and nuclear tech could supply global energy needs for only 6 years.
2) Not in any way that is irreducible.
3) wrong. https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/ura...
“Oh, that’s just proof of concept.” Yes, and even 5 grams is enough to disprove your claim it doesn’t exist. Reality is we won’t need it for an extremely long time, so why would anyone do more than proof of concept?
4) still on-net easily pays for itself energy-wise. Thinking otherwise usually shows you do not appreciate just how energy dense uranium is.
Belly aching that existing reserves are small, well duh. Demand is small. No one pays massive amounts of money to “prove” reserves when demand is small just to win an Internet argument. But uranium and thorium themselves are super common and in fact there’s more energy in fissionables in a random chunk of the Earth’s crust than there is thermal energy in a chunk of coal. The only thing depressing about what you said is that so many people buy into such poor logic.
Look, I’m not a nuclear bro. We will primarily decarbonize with renewables. But so many of these anti-nuclear arguments are terrible.
[1] There is the issue that thorium by itself is not fissile, so it's a breeding fuel cycle similar to the U-Pu breeding cycle with reprocessing etc. Which, again, hasn't been developed as quickly as hoped many decades ago, as the simple once-through uranium cycle has been cheaper and good enough.
I generally discount arguments that are in the form of: “we cannot commercialize this because it has not yet been commercialized.” But do thorium fueled reactors exist? Absolutely.
Everything I said can change. But let's not fool ourselves about the current state of tech. Part of the frustration is the "fake it til you make it" culture in tech being a terrible fit for nuclear, which requires thinking in centuries for site placement, staffing, and waste management.
"My problem" is that there is a physical cap on this with fuel extraction: EROI. A trillion dollars a pound for ore will not matter if it takes more energy to recovery a resource than it takes to produce it. The seawater recovery part of this story is dubious at best at the recovery factors used in their calculations.
This will likely soon change.
> 2) breeder reactors are hazardous
France seems to use them safely.
> 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist
It will once we use breeder reactors. The reason seawater extraction doesn't exist is that it isn't economical. With breeder reactors, the calculus would change.
> 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this.
It would produce significantly more than it consumes.
It's almost like nuclear fusion, just with much smaller numbers. Thorium reactors are always just a few years away - since the late 1980s.
It is kind of the same.
Scientists say that we can make fusion work in ten years given X amount of money. Government says, here's 5% of that amount, how long will it take then? Well, maybe two hundred years. Fifty years later people say, why no fusion?
(2) is true for current generation uranium breeders that use ill-tempered working reagents like liquid sodium. The phrase "liquid sodium" combined with "power reactor" makes me want to buy a good pair of running shoes, as Derek Lowe of "Things I Won't Work With" fame might say. Thorium is a better idea. Those molten salts are nasty but they tend to stay in one place and do not spontaneously ignite when exposed to oxygen or water.
(3) true, but rendered less important due to (1). Thorium is much more abundant than uranium.
(4) also true, but probably not relevant. I think the seawater thing is a canard. Lithium for batteries from brine on the other hand is feasible, though maybe not economical given that there are vast easier to get reserves of lithium.
That being said, I think the renewables + batteries path looks much easier to deploy given other issues such as politics, up front capital requirements, and gradual scalability.
Also AFAIK a fully nuclear grid (with no fossil peakers) would require grid scale power storage to load level since nuclear is slow at load following, but not as much storage capacity as a fully renewable grid since you don't have to bridge long periods with no sun or wind.
Thing is, we don't need to use either in breeder reactors - SVBR is a proof, although Bismuth production is a problem - but that's what pure lead version is for.
2) Untrue. There are even breeder reactors with passive safety and very nice safety records, waylaid only by funding and partially by geopolitics (ok, coolant is expensive as hell, but that's because we don't mine enough bismuth)
3 & 4) Won't cover, not my area
The thing is, where are you picking up ridiculous 6 years amount? Because it sounds like very, very cherry-picked value.
That's directly from the linked article, except I rounded 5.7 years up to 6.
Reactors cooled with lead-bismuth eutectic have a somewhat nasty problem of polonium production. To the extent we'll see lead-cooled reactors I'm more hopeful about plain lead. It has a higher melting temperature yes, but it seems workable. There are a couple of promising efforts in this direction.
Large nations have about one milion tons of depleted Uranium, in oxide or hexaflouride form, that's about 1 trillion megawatt-days, enough for 150 years of current energy consumption, or decades of geometric increases of energy use. Only then we need to go after existing proven mineral reserves, and only after that, maybe at the turn of the 22nd century, we would need to ponder sea water extraction.
The deployed system is fully passive - basically fake floating kelp beds, anchored to the sea floor, deployed in high current areas. They would be hauled in every 3 months or so, rinsed off on the boat, and then redeployed. Everything could be done using standard bivalve farming methods, but with lower impact on the environment.
They are now looking at a way to use the same material to post-filter desalination brine.
We still have no solution a) where to put nuclear waste, and b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is.
In Germany, the ongoing search for a permanent waste repository is going on for decades now. Funnily enough, this taxpayer's money is never calculated into the total cost of operating nuclear plants. It only makes sense if you subsidize cost by taxes of current and future generations.
2. you can't convert ALL of the waste into short-lived isotopes, just a fraction of it.
Sure, we can invest time and money into researching these topics, why not. But why not put the same energy into researching renewables?
Like if we had no medium half life isotopes, we may only need to keep waste safe for a few hundred years, perhaps 1000 at most, before remaining short lived isotopes contribute negligible radiation, leaving just the long half life isotopes. If those are long enough we have waste not meaningfully more dangerous than the original uranium ore, and can simply bury it.
A lot of this does depend on the specifics of input fuel and breeding cycles used, but there have been designs that would be able to reprocess any medium lived half-life outputs, leaving only reasonably short lived, and very long lived outputs.
The real question is what is the overall effect of such reprocessing on the cost efficiency. Presumably, breeder reprocessing entails some level of cost (additional equipment, additional monitoring, etc), and we may end up with some not completely optimal components in the fuel after reprocessing, which would mean lower operating efficiency. But by how much? How much less cost efficient doing the right thing here makes the plants is a critically important concern.
https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
> b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is.
I would solve the climate change problem first, otherwise all problems appearing in 25000 years are moot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
People care about this way more than it actually matters. If going near a certain area kills you, people are going to learn that after the first few deaths. The casualties are never going to anywhere near the stakes of global warming.
And besides that, the whole worry only applies in the narrow range of futures where humanity neither drives itself extinct nor retains advanced technology. It occurs to me that in that kind of future, society might actually be helped overall by the scientific advancement driven by having access to radioactive sources.
Nuclear had its run and we blew it. Literally.
Is it really political kryptonite or is that the oil lobby owns all of the politicians
Regarding the comparison with other power production methods, you are most certainly right about fossil fuels causes more harm than nuclear. Facing climate disaster it's hard to argue otherwise.
Unfortunately nuclear hazards in the form of accidents are much more ominous. Invisible, immediate and easily measured. It's just a scary technology.
He's since changed his tune for the same reason I have -- nuclear is too expensive and too slow.
Anyway, I'm totally a believer in nuclear power for a greener future (yay Michael Schellenberger), but we need to keep these discussions honest: the path forward is to right now be building hundreds of copy-paste instances of existing, proven designs, not making the discussion about what might be possible with technology that's in development or not really in use at scale.
Japan and India also have them.
The problem seems to be that at least the Sodium type are more expensive to operate than traditional nuclear plants, so even though the technology has been around for a while, no countries are building very many of them.
The problem is that since 1995 or so there was never enough funding to go to production.
So imagine 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green and change to an energy source for "4 billion years."
That's so cool, and puts alot of conversation about environmentalism into prospective.
And we as of yet have not changed to 100% nuclear and/or recyclable and don't have the technology yet to achieve that goal of nuclear energy for "4 billion years"
In any case, I agree! None of these fuel systems were going to be long term sustainable, thought the economics involved have created an enormous incentive for certain firms and individuals to pretend so for as long as absolutely possible. Anyway, hopefully they have been enough of a technology bootstrap to enable the jump to ones that would be. Certainly no one in 1892 was going to be inventing a commercially viable nuclear reactor or solar panel with what was available at the time.
Oil washing, interesting.
It's not like we decided 150 year ago for a clear path from coal to oil to nuclear, thinking "let us bootstrap nuclear with oil until we either run out of oil or alter the planet too much".
I'm interpreting this sentence as meaning "think about how we've far we've come in 150 years: from inventing gasoline, to being in a position to consider an environmentally sustainable energy source on the time scale of 4 billion years".
Anything nuclear-related is ridiculously expensive, if all those wasted resources went to solar we would be carbon neutral by now.
Seems a really weird thing for nuclear enthusiasts to mention.
It's like you're just passing on fossil fuel talking points without even reflecting on whether they make sense for nuclear.
You need huge storage amounts for renewables just to make sure you don't have rolling blackouts (undersupply vs. nuclear's oversupply) or, what happens in reality, fossil fuel backup.
There is an equivalent of small village with fully renewable power grid (ok, maybe 99%, I think they had an oil generator or two). You have to deal with low limits of power you can draw, react in time to alerts to curtail your usage (or face disconnection), etc. etc. Forget about things like electric heating or charging BEVs, you have to worry if you can run the washing machine.
The typical "village invests $30k in renewables" hides a ton of externalities taken up elsewhere due to how random the introduced supply power is.
So, clearly you're not going to use gas, because you don't sound at all pleased by renewebles relying on "fossil fuel backup" to fill in the gaps, so what's left?
Are you thinking about Pink Hydrogen? i mean that's a good plan but it's also basically storage, the same as green Hydrogen would be, no?
Thing is, if you do have option for new pumped hydro, go for it. It's usually less problematic than normal hydrogeneration, and it's great storage system. I'm all for it where possible. For smoothing lead-following reactors, the storage tech we have is pretty good. More can be gained by moving inelastic but high inertia sinks to nuclear power - various material processing (steel, aluminum, etc.) as well as making green hydrogen (necessary not just for storage, but also for smelting - renewables really don't look good on green hydrogen without nuclear) and so on.
My imaginary best option is switching the financials of power generation to benefit any fully dispatchable sources - This is easier to do with nuclear or classic hydropower, but such categorisation would also allow for renewable Virtual Power Plants (i.e. mixed renewables and storage, possibly with some demand control). At the same time this would cut down on instability caused by peak renewable production cratering prices for everyone else.
At the same time, let's target for grid that has oversupply and switchable sinks like green hydrogen, climate-neutral fuels for things that can't be easily powered by grid, etc.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-power/Prolifer...
It is no coincidence that nuclear reactor PR has ramped up during the COP conference. It's last call.