Nuclear power is an amazing energy source.
It doesn’t look like we’ll ever get beyond the politics that would make small scale <10MW installations economically feasible.
It’s really a shame.
It doesn’t look like we’ll ever get beyond the politics that would make small scale <10MW installations economically feasible.
It’s really a shame.
Unless you count getting taxpayers to shoulder the cost as politics.
if you count roof installers dying/getting injured on the job. do they count or we can just discount them?
New nuclear is a pipe dream (~10-15 years from breaking ground to first kWh produced), but old nuclear generators should be ran as long as safely possible. Big fail on Germany’s part here, although natural gas price spikes will force their hand on more renewables, transmission (including cross border interconnectors), and battery storage.
Looking forward to you providing us with hard numbers.
Can you find 20 people who have died installing solar panels? I found about 7 examples on google globally (3 in the US).
The rest of the pages were the dubious statistics calculating "deaths per TWh" that both downplay cancer deaths from nuclear power and extrapolate tens of thousands of falling-off-rooftop-deaths if we generated as much electricity from our residential rooftops as we would from nuclear (which we wouldnt, rooftop solar will always be comparatively minor).
This says very little about solar it just says that clambering about on roofs kills people.
According to what number? This WHO article says it is estimated to be about 4000 deaths:
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-09-2005-chernobyl-the-true-...
There were many much higher estimates made in 1986 when the disaster happened, but they turned out to be wrong. Apparently small amounts of radiation spread out over many people doesn't increase cancer rates. There were very noticeable increases in cancer near the disaster area, but most of those cancer patients survived.
> A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
Some of the costs of a nuclear weapons program can be shared. This is probably partly why France invested heavily in it and why countries keen on it coincidentall almos always have nuclear arsenals. It's unlikely it's because they're secretly authoritarian.
Way cheaper than nuclear in USA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#:~:t....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
Edit: in response to the large number of people bringing up BER and other infrastructure failures in Germany: yes, BER and others may have been bad, but a completely different kind (and magnitude) of incompetence than that which led to the Chernobyl meltdown. They really aren’t comparable.
You don't build nuclear power plants in narrow valleys with known flood events though. I mean, you also don't build wind turbines in swamps and hope they don't fall over, or put solar panels on your roof and don't fasten them.
1. https://www.itv.com/news/2016-02-09/a-history-of-german-trai...
Germany has this right: do it now, and deal with it, rather than to continue to kick the can down the road for later generations to solve the problems, a kind of temporeal externalization.
Everybody starts cutting small corners everywhere, assuming it doesn't matter much as all the other people are still doing their job. One day, a corner too many gets cut, and the slack in the system is too small to catch what should be a minor problem.
Don't trust the public facade and official reports, they have been filtered by PR departments and by people not wishing to report bad news to their managers and peers
Are we talking about the same Germany?
Edit: I should probably give some examples: Suttgart 21 train station, BER airport
Hahaha! Haha! Ha. #sad
Are you sure? One example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48527308
>BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".
Yes the incidents are scary and news grabbing but that’s it. The actual data is that it’s safe (look at mortality as a function of megawatt hours produced). Not to mention that in the 60-80 years since those plants were designed (Fukushima and Chernobyl are basically the same design if I recall correctly), we’ve gotten much better at designing plants that withstand natural disasters. This is also ignoring the fact that we can do a better job of locating power plants further away from disaster-prone areas due to advances in power distributions systems (eg HVDC).
The problem with nuclear is that there’s a lot of fear still lingering around it from Cold War era propaganda. Any issues just play into and reinforce those fears. The real problem is that education is the only effective tool we know of to fight fear but it’s slow and not up to the challenge that nuclear fission faces. That’s because on top of the fears are actual opponents who will fight any real evidence-based education efforts by playing up the FUD (very old tactic). Fossil fuel companies don’t want it because nuclear presents an existential threat to their existence. US national security interests are worried about proliferation if we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. It also presents a serious threat to US hegemony if countries are able to establish their own energy independence.
That may very well be true but it's completely irrelevant for future choices. Not building more nuclear plants doesn't mean you'll be building more fossil fuel plants instead.
EDIT: For all the downvoters, see the fourth chart (Gross power production in Germany 1990-2021, by source (non-stacked)) on https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... and explain to me how they're building more fossil fuel power plants over the years while building zero nuclear power plants.
Uhh… Yes it does. The data shows that. An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.
Many people are saying this.
> An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.
What matters is whether increased reliance on renewables slows down the decarbonisation effort. If you have data which shows that, I'd be interested to see it.
In return, let me offer a study from last year which found: "in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy. And in countries with a low GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production clearly associates with CO2 emissions that tend to be higher."
Solar and wind are important parts of the energy mix and.OF COURSE we need them. Nuclear is where the bulk of the focus needs to go though to actually decarbonize because it can handle literally every use case that fossil fuels do but cheaper, safer and less polluting.
We do not have enough batteries in the world, and producing enough of them would take decades, and cost us trillions of dollars. Nuclear power plants are better and cheaper solution.
I just added a source that shows that data tells something completely different. In the past ten years, German renewable generation more than doubled (from annual ~100 TWh to ~250 TWh) while their natural gas consumption for electricity generation today is basically the same as back then (somewhere around 90 TWh annually from gas back then as well as today). Not sure how natural gas stagnation can be described as "large increased reliance".
The Germans import a significant amount (~64%) of their energy from other countries, including France (nuclear) and Poland (coal), but also countries further afield like Norway and Russia.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependen...
Nuclear is proven to be our most safe, clean and renewable source of energy.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Similar with wind turbines, but at least those are so small scale that you can convince closeby towns fast by just letting them participate in the profits. Different story for leaking barrels stored underground.
(And yes, that's how this crap ends up. Just google Asse II and then let's discuss German cleanliness again.)
Anything built after 1972 has not had anywhere near this level of incidents.
Also Chernobyl had severe safety flaws due to its origin as an early model breeder reactor (and my head canon is that the test that caused the disaster was in some way related to surreptitious fuel changing to run breeding experiments. The RBMK reactors were designed for rapid fuel shuffling.... In other words, safety was compromised to keep the door open to the possibility of sneaky weapons grade material production).
Also also, Chernobyl had some other bone-headed flaws, such as a positive void coefficient and positive scram coefficient (read: trying to rapid shutdown during an emergency made the reaction increase). Humanity has learned a ton since then.
IF new generation reactors can prove to be safe and not create waste and decommissioning problems, and if they can be built economically, then they are worthy of consideration.
But power is fungible. If the cheapest next watt-hour is solar or wind, then why spend on anything else?
Not exactly, changes were made to RBMK design after the accident: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
There will have to be a whole new generation of plants designed to be cost effective at that scale.
Ever wondered why solar is exploding? Low price.
Fukushima on other hand is insignificant. Not really having much effect on anything.
WTF?! Are you not aware of the constant amount of waste water being poured into the Pacific? [0] Or the absurdly high amount of Cesium being found in migrating Tuna? The amount of cancers and heart related issues is still unfolding to this day, particularly in the children from the surrounding areas.
And the people who were forced to evacuate and then forced out of the shelters with nothing to go back to would have a huge issue with what you have said.
I cant believe anyone not from TEPCO or the Nuclear Village would say such a blatantly stupid and calloused thing!
0: https://globalvoices.org/2021/12/30/despite-widespread-oppos...
Perhaps evacuating unnecessarily large areas was the problem in the first place. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Academic handwaving after the event has very little bearing on the amount of Human suffering that took place, the displacement and the impoverishment and degrading experiences (Fukushima victims lived in a FEMA camp like situation and were deemed untouchable in Japanese Society like the Hibakusha before them and incurred massive property losses in addition to the Human costs) furthermore it's hard to explain the severity to people who have never experienced a Nuclear incident themselves. The level of scaring you're left with, the PTSD that comes with it is something very few living Humans can relate or truly empathize with and I speak from experience.
You're never the same, you come close with the reality that this technology was not fully thought-out in the 20th century when it was created and built with near headlong fervor with no thought to the repercussions of it going wrong--and in most cases it's at a time your in a life-death situation.
Most plants are built in the coastal area and often only have one way in and one way out because of the cost and practical aspects of building freeways along the coast. You are essentially trapped in when everyone tries to evacuate on their own and you're left with the realization that the energy that was generated was mainly exported at a profit for a private company who will later find ways to absolve themselves of criminal negligence and declare bankruptcy before restitution is ever made to the areas where it was built--look at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Edison, and going back to Bectel in the 70s with SONGS.
And regulators like the NRC will simply acquiesce and allow for the waste material to lay in an actively seismic area that if unsettled could be just as catastrophic to the Ocean and local area as if the plant were still operational. They assumed NV would continue to take it, and were left with no other solution when they refused.
To be clear: I'm more optimistic about 21st Century approaches to Nuclear than I was to 20th, which I would say was a DOA thing for me after having lived through SONGS, due to the effects of climate change (the ongoing Boulder fire being the most recent proving how absurd this has gotten) but that doesn't detract from the fact that Nuclear needs to be far more monitored and regulated in terms of waste management and city planning before a single brick is laid down.
With that said, I'm glad Diablo Canyon was shut down, if fusion is just around the corner than hopefully that will be what takes SONGS and DC place when its ready, but until then solar, wind and other forms of renewable are more suitable alternatives to fossil fuel plants.
Furthermore, it's biggest proponents should be forced to live to next one for the lifetime of the plant. I can't see how that be enforced but the way some of you speak with such hubris like it's the most easiest and practical thing to do speaks volumes of just how ignorant and detached you really are from reality of the drawbacks of nuclear plants and the immense complexity that comes with them.
10 times higher levels than normal of a single radioactive element is still not dangerous, especially since this is temporary. The main dangers with eating tuna still comes from their high mercury content, which is mainly due to coal power plants.
> The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
The number of direct fatalities of those is fortunately low.
once you're up and running, it's cheap as dirt, just takes decades to pay off the initial investment
Excessive resource extraction causes devastation.
A significant population of residents actually moved back there, despite the restrictions. I believe all of the former residents of Chernobyl (which is actually a tiny village) are now dead, the last old babushka passing in October/November 2016. I visited what was left of her house.
There are still plenty of people living in and around the exclusion zone for various reasons (mostly military).
It is common to downplay the effects of the accident, but it is huge.
(I'm originally from that area.)
Coal plants kill millions of people worldwide every year.
How many people died from Chernobyl? About 50, despite over 100,000 people working at the site on cleanup. The adjacent reactors continued to run and provide power for about a decade after the incident.
How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero.
Zero!
I am surprised you're quoting official Soviet numbers. Numbers that weren't updated since the early days of the accident.
> How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero.
At what cost?
Check for yourself: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...
Happy New Year.
All energy sources are dangerous, the toxic waste from making the batteries required for solar + wind only is no joke.