The debate about nuclear power and climate change
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
For decades we’ve been kicking the can down the road by ignoring the toll of fossil fuel waste. That bill is coming due both for our climate and our bodies.
Enough is enough. We will leave nuclear waste for another day as we try to pull ourselves out from underneath a century of fossil fuel addiction.
For a long time, nuclear supporters just ignored the cost issue, since they felt they were the only real non-fossil alternative. Yes, they'd be expensive, but society had no choice. In the last decade this changed. Renewables are now far cheaper on a levelized basis, cheap enough that even with the cost of dealing with intermittency they are likely to come out cheaper than nuclear.
This is why so much new capacity in the world (and in the US) is renewables. It's not because of green mind control, it's because of brute economics. Nuclear is in dire shape competitively, in comparison.
But what are the costs of unstable supply and behavior of whole grid?
The real issue is that, at least in the US, nukes cost overwhelmingly more than any other energy source, take 10+ years to build with no power output in the meantime, frequently consume billions of dollars without ever being completed, and (if ever put into production) develop leaks. They just don't make sense when considering the current alternatives.
Solar and wind installations start producing power almost immediately, and can be continuously added onto while operating, with only the most minimal of site preparation.
This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. """ from: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
For perspective, one person's lifetime nuclear waste would fit in a Coke can.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125740...
Most physical waste from renewables is simple stuff like steel, aluminum, and glass. These are all recyclable, and (more to the point) they will be a small fraction of the same materials produced in the rest of industrial society. If we can deal with the non-energy-related waste from industrial society (and we must, if we are to have an industrial society at all, even a nuclear-powered one), we can deal with the waste from a renewable system to power that society.
You don't need to equate it per unit weight for GP's point to be relevant: there are several orders of magnitude less fission waste than waste from PV or Wind. The entire volume of the dangerous wastes produced by the French nuclear park during its whole life (40 years) can fit in an Olympic swimming pool! (3 200m³).
Of course there are other wastes (up to 4 million cubic meters by the French definition of a nuclear waste, which includes every piece of gravel from a nuclear plant: the walls of my wife's office will one day be considered as “Nuclear waste” by the French authority), but the most dangerous of those isn't specific to nuclear: it's asbestos!
The number to look at is "water dilution volume" -- how much water would some waste need to be diluted in to bring it down to regulatory limits. For spent fuel 1 year out of a reactor, the waste from 1 GW(e)-year would need to be diluted in something like 3 trillion tonnes of water to reach regulatory limits. This is dominated by soluble species like Cs and Sr.
[1] As a reminder there are 4 “kinds” of nuclear wastes:
- Minor actinides: the scary ones. Their volume is ultra small, but they live practically forever if you leave them that way and are harmful even at low concentration because they are alpha emitters. They are mostly produced when neutrons are captured by U238 (the non-fissile part of the fuel). Plutonium makes the majority of it, and it's not by accident: the nuclear process was designed this way in order to get plutonium to build atomic bombs.
- Fission products: they are produced when a U235 nucleus is split. They are really radioactive (well it depends, but some are) but they don't live that long. They are the dangerous thing when a nuclear incident happens.
- Activation products: they are produced when neutrons hit something in the reactor (the structure, the water or water additives). They are radioactive but don't live that long, and they are often pretty diluted in the structure. It's dangerous for people working on the decommissioning though, because they can accumulate in specific places.
- Legal products: in some jurisdiction (for instance France), everything in a nuclear plant is a nuclear waste, including the walls of the offices, the pavement, the turbine, etc.
This is a lot of the issue with nuclear that I don't think ycombinator or technical people get: you're not bring offered the ideal, well managed, properly funded nuclear you think. You're getting short sighted, lowest bidder, incompetent management nuclear. Because that's how we do everything around here...
In a US context it is even more silly considering built a place to store it costing billions of dollars and then decided not to use it. If the US doesn't want to commit to long term storage then they at least need to start reprocessing it to reduce the amount of waste.
A 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
I’m 100% in favor of lots of renewable use, but it’s not always a great use of land, prevents rewilding (with solar), and in the case of solar uses a ton of water. The latter being a major concern in arid regions.
A lot of nuclear’s cost comes from shifting/overly tight regulation, legal prohibition of reprocessing, legal prohibition for long term storage, and graft. The latter will be a problem with large scale renewables once they’re large enough.
And the overbuilding necessary is usually more in range of 10x assuming favourable storage conditions (which aren't necessarily available).
Mind you, the model misses things like "Bavaria is NIMBYing all necessary transit work" etc. which is why you have weird situation of Germany paying Netherlands to curtail wind farms while buying nuclear from France, because they have to route around NIMBYs.
Only slightly related - I'd love if the cost comparisons in general discourse stopped avoiding the issue of intermittency (that's how you always get such low prices on wind and solar) and used costs that include capacity factor and dispatchability (which https://model.energy/ does). Having funding (and purchasing priority) decided on dispatchable green sources (whether hydro, wind/solar/battery/hydrogen mixes, or nuclear) would probably help a lot in stabilisation of grid and long term decarbonisation, even if it would reduce some frankly pathological incentives for renewable build out (pathological because of linked carbon-producing plant build out to stabilise the setup, while simultaneously using cheap peak production prices to push out stable setups)
The site's model also does not include pumped hydro, or intermediate term thermal storage.
All these extra options can only help reduce the cost of integrating renewables, and make renewables more competitive vs. nuclear.
As for curtailment-reducing tricks, that's a good argument but IMO not changing the base calculus much - the model is about replacing the base demand power sources, so that we can push the extra into peak. Bigger problem is that scaling down demand is problematic for dealing with underproduction, and also simply missing on power (Thus my preference for billing for dispatchable power generation, then extra peak could be funneled easier into bonus things like green hydrogen for non-storage etc.)
On-river pumped hydro is not easily expanded. But there is enormous potential for off-river pumped hydro.
Isn't the problem that electrolyzers mostly have to run 24/7 because they would otherwise not be profitable? Then all these processes that rely on hydrogen wouldn't actually belong to the dispatchable demand category.
Dispatchable demand could be found in heat pumps (in combination with buffer tanks) for heating homes. (As long as there's sufficient grid capacity)
But using curtailed intermittent power is different: here, the electricity is cheap, and capital cost of the electrolyzer becomes more important than efficiency. Under these different design tradeoffs, one might use a different technology (alkaline electrolyzers without platinium group catalysts, say, rather than PEM cells with expensive Nafion membranes and platinum.)
I have seen claims that alkaline electrolyzers are available for < $200/kW in China.
My other concern is that such a complex and interconnected system is likely to be fragile in unexpected ways.
And none of this addresses the land area required for base load solar.
I second that.
The robustness of the current global energy supply system based largely upon solid, liquid and gaseous fuels stems from its flexibility and inherent buffering capability and the fact that lots of the connections/links are loose/weak/interchangeable. (Supplier of fuel xy can be chosen relatively spontaneously, completely unlike some cable which invariably connects two fixed geographic locations.)
An intercontinental electrical grid is in comparison dramatically less flexible. I'd call it grossly negligent to even attempt to implement a world spanning grid exceeding lets say 15 % of total power transmission.
Land use of required solar is only a few hundred square miles in the US. Not a big deal.
Nuclear's biggest cost is just that the US is very bad at doing big projects. Just the steam turbine in a nuclear plant is enough to make nuclear uneconomical, that's why coal plants are so much more expensive than natural gas.
Nuclear’s problem is badly written regulation and insane environmental review policies. That and the one off nature of their construction. We need to standardize and rewrite regulation based on probabilistic risk rather than worst case scenario planning and the linear non-threshold model.
PLUS 3 hours battery scattered everywhere in the country (to be renewed every few years).
PLUS a full continental electricity grid (basically admitting that not every country can be sovereign of their own energy).
Was this post supposed to make solar and wind look good?
$13.5 for solar in Abu Dhabi could be set as the current lower limit in optimal conditions.
https://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/uae-solar-deal-brings-l...
Solar power is now less than $10/MWh in Spain and Arizona: https://qz.com/1995355/the-era-of-subsidies-for-wind-and-sol...
We can't let nuclear distract us from the goal, which is preventing more serious warming.
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[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/09/humans-have-...
Also, USA might take 30 years, but then USA is infamous for having trouble building any infrastructure these days. Global warming and energy scarcity is a global problem.
Yes, and I also didn't say that. Again, do not put words in my mouth. I'm getting really tired of your disingenuous, bad faith non-arguments.
We could store hydrogen in those caverns instead.
Should we avoid particularly large climate changes? Well, yes, mostly for Chesterton's Fence reasons. But I'm far from panic.
Time will tell who wins out.
Then you haven't read much.
I suggest looking into the North Atlantic current, ENSO, ocean acidification, and long term forecasts of glacier formation, drought, fire, flooding, tropical storms, heat waves, and other extreme weather phenomena. Just skimming through the first few pages of the -- extremely conservative -- IPCC report should upend your current notion that global warming "may well end up being a net benefit".
Global warming does not simply mean the world uniformly heats up a degree. It means more energy is injected into the atmosphere, adding additional chaos and instability to an already chaotic and unpredictable system. This will mean more extreme weather, steep reduction in fish stocks and agricultural productivity that will shock the food system, and mass migrations of people unlucky enough to be born in those regions most badly affected.
To believe that global warming -- literally a global problem -- isn't "a particularly large problem" is akin to saying covid is "a bit of a cold". That statement spectacularly underestimates the scope and scale of the threat, and ignores the chorus of experts who have spent the last half-century being depressingly accurate (or even conservative) in all their forecasts.
You are "ok with 1.5C" because you don't understand what it means.
There are quite a lot "pretty bad" things out there.
Now consider that almost every previous cycle of the IPCC report has missed its forecasted marks because it was too conservative.
The IPCC report is the toned down, let's-not-rock-the-boat version of the scientific community's view regarding the unfolding climate disaster. It is an optimistic set of forecasts, with loads of hedging.
One thing particularly strange about climate change alarmists is that they are just so damn sure of all these horrible outcomes that are absolutely sure to happen.
You're forecasting, dude. You don't have a crystal ball. Yet your statements, and those of all the alarmists, are those of the totally cocksure.
I live near Glacier National Park. In the early 2000s, some climate change model predicted the glaciers would be gone by 2020. All the entrance signs were modified to state this to every single visitor: Enjoy 'em while they last, friends, but climate change will render these glaciers puddles by just 2020!
Well, come 2020, the glaciers are still right there. A bit smaller. But also nowhere near gone.
Failed predictions and shrill screeching forecasting failures stack up over and over from all the alarmists and yet still they, as you do here, fail to have any humility, any sense that, hey, maybe you don't know it's the end of the world for sure.
It's a shame you didn't quote more of my first sentence there. Let me help: "This will mean more extreme weather..."
Guess what 2021 featured? A 1000 year heat wave in the oh-so-temperate Pacific Northwest, at temperatures previously considered physically impossible in that region. And a few months prior? Record-setting cold wiped out the grid in Houston and plunged a big chunk of Texas into survival mode.
If you're looking for an all-at-once calamity to herald the coming of Climate Doom, you're gonna have to watch the movies. Because what all the science clearly indicates is a gradual, inexorable increase in extreme phenomena.
> You're forecasting, dude. You don't have a crystal ball. Yet your statements, and those of all the alarmists, are those of the totally cocksure.
I mean, we're having an informal discussion on the internet, where scientific jargon and careful discussion of error bars gets in the way of clear communication. But I can still be pretty damn confident of those predictions because climate change isn't some far-off future possibility. It's unfolding all around us, as we speak. The increase in extreme weather? It's been going on for 50 years.
Rising temperatures? Droughts? Floods? Fires? They're all on the upswing and have been for long enough that it's impossible at this point to attribute them all to some statistical anomaly.
Let's put it another way. If you catch me playing with matches on the couch and exclaim, "You'll burn the house down!", I probably have some cause to accuse you of being overly dramatic. If, on the other hand, the house is already on fire, my protestations that "You can't be so cocksure it'll be uncomfortable to live in the house" sound pretty ridiculous.
> I live near Glacier National Park.
Cool. That's an anecdote. Not data. Do you have any actual data to support your stance that climate scientists -- climatologists, meteorologists, geologists, etc -- the world over are "alarmists"?
> Failed predictions and shrill screeching forecasting failures stack up over and over from all the alarmists and yet still they, as you do here, fail to have any humility, any sense that, hey, maybe you don't know it's the end of the world for sure.
Straw man. Nobody's claiming it'll be the end of the world. The planet will be just fine. Humans will simply find it a more inhospitable place in which to live. Which is what I said. And all those "shrill screeching forecasting failures" from the last 30 years have, on average, been too conservative, forecasting slower warming.
You just haven't noticed because you don't want to believe it might be true. I understand the emotional reaction. It's the same thing that compels people to refuse to believe that covid exists or vaccines work. Doesn't mean it's a logical or accurate stance, though.
First, the time it takes to build a nuclear plant is not an unalterable law of nature. Second, when people were saying that we should build more plants 20 years ago, a common objection was that it would be useless because it would take 20 years and by then everything would be powered by clean renewables. I'm similarly unconvinced that wind and solar will provide everything we need by 2040.
Have you actually looked at the numbers for renewable energy installations, or is this just based on personal incredulity?
While the nuclear industry has been shouting about how we need nuclear, the US has installed about 20GW worth of renewable generation in one year. That is equivalent to about ten nuclear power plants (in the US, most plants are 1-2GW; a few are 3-3.5.)
40% of our installed capacity over the last 2 years has been renewable energy sources, and both wind and solar installed capacity is growing at a nearly logarithmic scale. The only thing cheaper than wind is solar, and both are continuing to get cheaper.
Those figures, by the way, are for utility/grid scale projects and do not include residential systems.
Utilities already consider this a solved problem and have now shifted focus to storage technology.
There is a strong online PR effort by the nuclear industry because they are desperate to stay in business I'm not exaggerating when I say that the blog of a guy who runs such a PR consulting firm has been featured more than once here on HN.
The nuclear waste problem is solvable but has not yet been solved in the US. Nuclear power plants are decade-scale projects and even once they sync up to the grid, it takes them another decade just to offset the carbon impact of their construction.
Nuclear power plants have very high OPEX and very deep/complex/exacting supply chains when we're seeing lots of supply chain issues due to climate change.
Reactor vessels require very high grade metal and specialized firms, and those firms have years if not decades long waiting lists. We can't just snap our fingers and create more reactor vessel manufacturers.
No wind farm or solar farm has caused a catastrophe of any sort, much less one that renders thousands of square miles of land uninhabitable for a century.
Wind and solar do not generate material that is extremely lethal and weaponizable.
The list goes on and on.
Boy, that sure sounds promising
The historical lag time comes from the period of rapid technological improvement and regulatory change where projects had to be redesigned multiple times mid project.
If you think grid scale solar and wind are just as susceptible to bad regulation, NIMBYs, graft, and bureaucratic nonsense then you may not be paying attention. Note the lack of offshore wind in the US.
Existing nuclear power tech could displace natural gas and coal without the need for storage or much land. We also wouldn’t need to overhaul the grid.
My personal opinion is that we should look much more into reducing our energy needs and also into load management (e.g. using energy when the sun shines etc.) than into new nuclear plants. [1]https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-07-08/nuclear-e... [2]https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-climate-mycle-schneider-renewa...
Why not? Why wasn't there a nuclear module (SMR) 20 years ago that can be installed in banks of multiple modules, just like a solar array made of multiple solar cells? Why should every single nuclear plant be semi-bespoke for that particular area?
reducing our energy needs
In some sense, human development can be measured in energy available per capita. We definitely want to make each activity we do as efficient as is reasonable (e.g. a washing machine that uses 0.5gal less water per cycle, but costs $3000 more is unreasonable), but the goal really ought to be to maximize energy used per capita, while minimizing energy used per activity.
It all boils down to will.
Because the idea was instead a larger standardized reactor to rule them all. Spread the fixed costs per reactor core as thin as possible. This has evidently failed and thus the nuclear industries new thing is "SMR" because lets do opposite and hope we get another 20 years of funding.
Thus far photovoltaic solar and wind turbines have been proof against official corruption. It is just too quick and easy to field a competing system not subject to corruption tax.
> And if we're talking about the construction of new power plants, then nuclear power is simply excluded. Not just because it is the most expensive form of electricity generation today, but, above all, because it takes a long time to build reactors. In other words, every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options.
You're literally investing that euro into climate protection... but it's not climate protection because you can't invest it in something else? If you start with this mindset of course you'll end up with nuclear energy being bad. You either postulated it's bad, or you wrote the specifications to make sure it ends up bad.
It makes sense if present value of reduced carbon is high, the value of your future nuclear plant gets discounted by a large "carbon interest".
I ran across the statement that the entire output of the world's battery factories wouldn't hold an hour's worth of electrical usage in the US. I have no idea if this is true.
But I'd rather side on the side of caution and start building more reactors now just in case the Totally Renewable Plus Storage future does not scale.
If the billions spent on nuclear turns out being a sunk cost because renewables+storage does work out I would not consider it "wasted". It's simply the cost of a backup plan to help ensure we humans don't cook ourselves to death.
At the very least we should stop retiring current nuclear plants. Any added renewable capacity should be used to offset shutting down fossil fuel generator plants. Once those are taken care of we can then perhaps talk about nuclear.
And talking about the problems of storing nuclear waste for 10,000 years is a moot point if civilization doesn't survive the next 100.
I don't know why we don't put reactors on large barges that sat offshore where there is plenty of cooling water and transmissions line wouldn't be too much of a problem. Navy ships don't worry about dumping slightly radioactive water overboard, but fortunately there isn't much of it from the closed circulation systems. Of course the spent fuel is disposed of properly once every 15 years or so.
it is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
Moreover a Chernobyl like accident couldn’t happen again. Outside of the USSR no one was building graphite pile reactors after maybe 1955, and no reactors without containment buildings.
from a nuclear engineer who's also an ecologist.
I recently grabbed it and was surprised to read he was the one who coined the concept of “bilan carbone”. When that guy says nuclear is an option, green parties should really listen.
Consider the counterfactual: Would you like to have a lightly regulated nuclear power plant near you and your family?
Nimbyism? Or caring for your family. It all depends on your POV.
The ban on reprocessing is stupid, and results in more waste. The ban on long term storage outside of Yucca Mountain is dumb. Prehistoric salt deposits are far better and cheaper to maintain. Requiring waste storage that won’t expose a hypothetical persons 10k years in the future to more than 15mrem per year is also stupid.
It’s all based on the linear no-threshold model which isn’t supported by evidence. We know from experience that 35 mrem dental x-rays and 70mrem chest x-rays don’t pose any risk to the average person over their lifetimes, for example.
Adhering to the 15mrem standard is insanely costly. Especially since it can be super difficult to separate from background radiation that’s at times 2 orders of magnitude higher. You’d get 600mrem standing in Grand Central In NYC all year, and more on a flight to Europe.
We aren't reprocessing in the US not because of some "ban", but because reprocessing is economically senseless. It literally costs more than it saves. The separated plutonium has negative value -- it costs more to convince someone to put it into MOX fuel than it saves in enriched uranium.
I’m willing to concede that this isn’t my strongest point. What I’m aiming at though, is that it strongly mitigates the waste issue.
BTW, your comment about LNT is also misguided. There is no good evidence that LNT is wrong, and without LNT you might instead get a "precautionary" approach: assume radiation has the worst damage not ruled out by evidence. This would be much WORSE for nuclear than LNT, as it would increase the presumed damage from low doses. LNT is nuclear's friend; it is looked askance at by some of the anti-nuclear people for that reason.
I think the issue with LNT is that is ISN'T supported by evidence and observationally in real life it seems to be wrong. I would prefer a PRA based approach that is focused on minimizing probable real world risks.
I also wonder why you think this approach would be a good thing for nuclear. There's an assumption in these pro-nuclear LNT arguments that LNT would be replaced by something (hormesis or whatever) that would make radiation less dangerous. But there's no reason to think that would happen. Radiation is not a criminal defendant that will be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
BTW, the NRC recently denied petitions to reconsider LNT. Their responses to the arguments are worth reading.
I don't buy into hormesis, as the evidence isn't well established. The main issue to me is that ALARA seems overly strict compared to the way small radation exposure is treated across other industries and aspects of daily life.
I need to read more about the recent Hiroshima study they mentioned.
Didn't bother me a bit.
And I still even have the regulation number of heads and other appendages.
From what i have read these last years, experts usually advocate rather for an energy mix (some regions might be more adapted to others for some modality) rather than a single solution.
I used to be rather against nuclear energy, for one main reason: this sector is always managed in full secrecy, mostly by military or ppl close to those circles. It is also a sector with heavy subcontracting, i have seen a documentary where ppl in France were entering into a reactor while fearing for their lives (the dose they said) and being paid minimal wages.
This is usually and most economically a large body of water, which is sucked in, heated by a few degrees and dumped back out, left to cool of back into the environment. Water is not "consumed" and remains available for any other use.
Powerplants that don't have access to significant water reservoirs can use cooling towers where a much smaller quantity of water is forced to evaporate, providing the same cooling but with a somewhat lower efficiency. Using this principle, nuclear plants have been constructed in the desert, see Palo Verde nuclear generating station.
[0] https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/02/25/palo-verde-nuclear...
When the reactor is SCRAM-ed in an emergency, the power output drops instantly to 6% of the operating value, 0.5% in 24h, and 0.1% in 10 days.
Assuming worse come to worst, you need to SCRAM all 3 reactors simultaneously, and the pond is completely dry after the first week or so, you can still cool the cores using trucks, it's just 3l per second boil-off, about 10 semi tankers per day.
There are many problems with nuclear power, but this issue of water is completely blown out of proportion.
Instead regulations should be revamped to allow speedier development of small modular reactors based on molten salt or gas cooling.
Molten Salt Reactors in particular can burn current nuclear waste which make them an attractive solution to many of our waste problems. They are also inherently safer.
Our insistence to keep building large nuclear reactors is akin to NASA building an enormously expensive SLS rocket which cannot even be reused while SpaceX has demonstrated years ago that reusable rockets is the way to go.
Ariane kept developing single use rockets while it was clear , reusable rockets was the future. In few years it will look really foolish that we continue to push old over-engineered monster reactors.
The problem with the Nuclear industry is the same as the rocket industry. It is dominated by companies stuck in the past while those with new fresh visions are lacking resources and political support.
This does not make sense. Uranium-233 and Plutonium do not exist in nature. They are created anew each time we use them, the first from Thorium, the second from Uranium.
Separately, it is incorrect that nuclear power depends on fissile materials. It can be (and is) done with fertile materials, like U-238. It can also be done with Thorium (another fertile material), and China just started such a Thorium plant [1]. The total reserves of Uranium and Thorium together could be enough for thousands of years.
The US Navy has never had a major nuclear accident for a reason.
The Air Force, on the other hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
Jokes and gentle jabs apart I am all for exploring the option of SMR and set things up with the Navy's assistance or the government's military forces (also through knowledge transfer if needed and/or career paths, etc.). À la Star Trek.
Surprise, they never went away! They just hype other things now.
That doesn’t really matter much though. Uranium isn’t dangerous by itself, and has the highest energy density of any existing source.
Well.. it's not a huge deal but don't eat it. I have a bit of uranium ore on my bookshelf, but I avoid handling it and wash my hands after I do. Besides the alpha radiation, which isn't good for your insides, it's also toxic.
Nuclear is more expensive than renewable alternatives, even with the cost of necessary storage taken into account. Moreover, renewables and storage have strong experience effects, while nuclear has shown negative experience effects, so this cost gap should only widen.
The fact that no merchant nuclear plant (privately financed, selling into a competitive market) has ever been built anywhere in the world should be a clue.