Pretty sad that the solar lobby is trying to destroy the credibility of nuclear. I hope we one day see a resurgence of nuclear, the drama and fear around it really shouldn't exist in 2022.
Keep existing nuclear plants running for as long as safely possible, for sure, but stop throwing good money after bad with new generators. Build batteries (including pumped hydro where able), renewables, and transmission. Throw in some demand response or load shifting for loads that can tolerate being scheduled around renewables production (Google does this for compute using ElectricityMap.org, and Nest does demand response in aggregate as a revenue source, when utilities send a signal to shed AC load temporarily on peak consumption days versus firing up gas peakers).
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Edit: (HN throttling, can’t reply)
@mrits: Telling people what they want doesn’t work. If they want cars (they do), you sell them EVs. You use your margin to build out a global EV charging network and battery factories. I don’t live in traffic, that’s a choice for others to make. The world is full of space batteries can be installed out of the way to meet net zero goals. There is no such thing as an ideal world, just nudges of consumers towards more positive macro outcomes.
Safety costs must be balanced against other considerations, but the biggest and most important is profit. There has to be a profit, it can be for the taxpayer, or the energy consumer, or the government, or the investors--hopefully some for all.
Profit is essential, you have to reap two seeds from planting one.
Hanford only ever had one reactor that produced electricity, the N reactor, and that wasn't built until 1963:
So we can address that immediately: without the Hanford site, Japan would not have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Maybe not even then. It was the "new and cruel bomb," as the Emperor of Japan described it while citing it as the reason for surrender in his speech. That "new and cruel" bomb meant an alternative to reenacting the Battle of Iwo Jima (which I would describe as "fucked up" for both sides without question) a thousand times. Battles to the last cartridge. Forgetting completely about the lives of Allied and Axis soldiers, you realize the death toll that would have on the civilians of Japan? They were on the hook for all kinds of atrocities all over Asia and the Pacific, in the context of total war they pissed off the rest of the world way too hard for the Allies to declare a truce. Just in Korea alone, the stories are just...let's not talk about that, let's stick to what is fucked up within nuclear science.
Japanese were subscribed to the idea that their genocide was preferable to surrender. So that's why the bomb, and by extension the Hanford site, were so important. In practice the nukes in Japan explosives second, fireworks first. Napalm was a much better explosive for the money, in terms of the destruction it could produce. The really bad bombings in WWII were in Tokyo and Dresden, a hundred thousand dead per bombing, a new climactic event called a "Firestorm," terrible burns, pavement getting goopy, high winds--I claim those bombings were worse. But they weren't as flamboyant as a star.
But nobody knew about that when Hanford was set up and running, before then.
The firestorms were horrendous for the population, which had no influence on leadership, and were anyway ineffective against industrial production, so were doubly pointless. Blockade was massively underused in the Pacific theater.
Recall the Battle of Carrhae? Recap: Crassus was at the head of a Roman legion inside Parthia (meaning "Persian"; modern-day Iran). Totally flat. Then they started getting shot with arrows. Crassus and his legion would march toward the archers, but as they got close, the archers would stop shooting long enough to take vehicles drawn by horses away from the Roman soldiers, until they were far enough they could resume shooting arrows. The battle is well-known, but the detail I'd like to call attention to is that in Suetonius's "The Twelve Caesars" (IIRC) it says when the soldiers figured out the heavy rain of arrows would never stop, the soldiers ordered Crassus to surrender. Screaming at him and threatening him! So that's what he ended up having to do. Mutiny is no joke.
That is my thesis for the Japanese surrender. Perhaps the military leadership was too nicely tucked into safe bunkers near anti-aircraft turrets (I don't know what Japan had, but Berlin had four of these and they worked great against bombers, really scared the birds away quite nicely, guaranteed Killed-in-Action if you got too close). Whatever, the military leadership could relax if all they had to fear was conventional warfare, whatever the hell that meant by that particular month of 1945.
But nukes changed everything. Wrath of GOD, basically. After one bomb, Japanese leadership I imagine asked their internal Manhattan Project--they were working on the atomic bomb too at the time--what was happening. Presumably they were told it was a one-off thing, because uranium was too difficult to make. What really changed the game was the second bomb, which meant America could mass-produce them--thanks to Hanford, in particular--and then it was like, are we going to get another one of these new and cruel bombs every three days indefinitely? Where are they going to drop them in the future? What are the consequences of the starburns on the survivors, are the ones that lived going to be recover their health...ever? Are they dropping the next one on the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, and killing Hirohito as promised to the people of America? WHY ARE THE GODS SO ANGRY AT US, WERE WE WORSHIPPING SATAN THE WHOLE TIME? WILL THE PEOPLE OF JAPAN MUTINY WHEN THEY SEE A STAR ABOVE TOKYO? WHAT DO JAPANESE PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY MUTINY, IT'S OBVIOUSLY GOING TO HAPPEN EVEN IF IT'S NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, WHAT WILL THE PEOPLE DO TO US? WHY DIDN'T WE CAVE IN TO THAT BEAUTIFUL ULTIMATUM THREATENING TO BRING ABOUT OUR "PROMPT AND UTTER DESTRUCTION," WHAT A BEAUTIFUL GIFT, why didn't we listen and surrender like they asked?
(I claim writing in all caps like this is justified. That is the literary freedom I ask for, and the site allows it in theory. Not doing so does an injustice to the degree of alarm imminent destruction brings about. The inner monologue when that destruction makes itself known sounds something along the lines of "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK!". All caps in your inner monologue. That's just for your personal reference, haven't seen it well-portrayed in movies much. It's not like anything else, maybe someday you'll see for yourself, dear reader. I hope not.)
A blockade eliminating fuel imports would shortly eliminate ability to operate trucks, aircraft, factories, electric power generation systems, and shortly telephones, radio stations, and kitchens.
That really depends on your definition of "fucked-up", but there is a long list of nuclear accidents in the US [0], among the more "fucked-up" ones were attempts to dispose of nearly a ton of left-over fissile material in mere landfills [1] and then ultimately losing track of them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
And if you look at the list of causalities its very small amount.
What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)
That's what I'm smoking. For there to be a fucked-up American accident the accident has to actually happen.
>...A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space. To put that in perspective, you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included).
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate...
Are there countries where the land use for nuclear power is orders of magnitude larger?
Some of this likely stems from a massive gaffe some years ago when California regulators demanded a certain percentage of state generation come from environmentally-friendly sources. PG&E laughed because it already had the largest hydroelectric portfolio in the US and didn't have to change anything. Democrat leadership, angry because they didn't find a way to punish the largest utility in the state, promptly recategorized large hydro as Very Naughty.
Does hydro have an environmental cost? Sure, so does everything. Is it a great way to generate and store electricity? Yes. Does that matter to lawmakers? No.
No municipals, even the biggest like LA's, tackles anything near the scale of even our smallest IOU. Most critics of the IOUs ignore the sheer scale and geographic challenges of running a service area larger than some states across many different types of terrain. Running retail distribution and metering isn't that hard when other people run the grid for you. PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E have lots of issues to be sure, but to compare them to SMUD or Modesto is far from apples to apples.
Good times!
The "evil solar lobby" has been saying for quite some time that solar is much cheaper than nuclear and therefore should play a large role in the post carbon grid. This article seems to reinforce their claims. Do you have a rebuttal, or are you just trying to be contrarian because it makes you feel good?
https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources...
The “massive taxpayer funded bailout” the nuclear industry wants is order of magnitude below what solar/wind/hydro get all the time. No wonder nuclear finds it hard to compete, when government subsidizes its competitors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
And this doesn't even account for the fact that "Renewables" is a bucket that consists of multiple technology types including solar, wind, biomass and storage. So if those were actually broken out into individual categories nuclear would be the biggest receiver of incentives of the bunch.
However, when you look at the R&D column, which is a direct transfer of cash from the government to industry. Nuclear received over 2.5 times as much as renewables (85B vs 32B). This is even more of a travesty considering "Renewables" is a bucket of multiple technology types. So oddly enough, if I was to take away one thing from this report, it looks like we are not investing nearly enough in renewables R&D. Also, why is coal getting 43B, that sucks.