So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?
This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up.
I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends on physics to be safe, not human operators.
Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed correctly.
Or, indeed, any at all. Thus, also no Fukushimas, and no TMIs, and no Santa Susanas.
Fukushima's containment exploded in hydrogen detonations, and vented a great deal of radioisotopes. They are today flushing tritium to the ocean, which seems wasteful; we will want the 3He that decays to.
Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg.
In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk.
And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.)
In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality.
If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.
For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably still less than simply breathing the air in a city, though.
> and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl
In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30 years).
> The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.
And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil.
By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over a very large population, you could calculate some number of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about 100mSv are harmless.
In any case, at that level, the risk for any given individual is so small, that it disappears next to any other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into account for your personal behavior.
From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
We seem to have been fine burning coal and not thinking about the radiation that puts into the surrounding environment.
It's also disingenuous to think that there aren't negative environmental externalities from the production and operation of "renewables".
All forms of energy production will have some negative consequences and we need to understand what those are and think of ways to mitigate them, rather than just pointing to what's bad about one form and ignore what's bad about others.
In many places that role is being moved to NG. The immediate hiccup is a short-term setback that will be fixed the way we are doing, building out renewables, later storage.
It's like a kid preferring 5 nickels to 2 quarters because 5 is more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
Even if it's not perfectly accurate, it's probably quite close.
Just because it is well known that vaccines come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not take them. They save a lot more lives than they take.
is the same as
Just because it is well know that nuclear power come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not use it. It saves a lot more lives than it takes.
Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down IMMEDIATELY."
(If you're not familiar with this in the context of renewable energy, then you might want to google for news stories on what the long-term drought in the western U.S. is doing to the "sure thing, forever" supply of hydroelectricity at many of the major dams.)
The environs of Hoover Dam are exactly as safe today as 10,000 years ago, and will reliably be as safe 10,000 years in the future provided no nukes blow up upwind or upstream.
Solar panels floating on the Hoover Dam reservoir will happily produce as much power as the dam at full tilt, with enough left over to pump water back up to it for overnight use, reduce evaporation enough that water drought will be substantially less problematic, and provide power for desalination besides.
Floating, water-chilled panels will last at least 50 years, by which time they will likely not be needed anymore.
Starbase, e.g.
Nuclear is unique in that it's the only geographically independent, and non-intermittent energy source. Hydroelectricity and geothermal are non-intermittent but are geographically dependent. And also fossil fuels, but those emit carbon dioxide.
Repeating your falsehoods here does not make them true.
As per your previous comments, you assume that hydrogen, compressed air, or some other form of energy storage will be this silver bullet. This is a very risky assumption. We have no cost history for these systems being built at scale. There's a massive difference between writing a white-paper promising a super cheap storage cost, and actually building an energy storage facility and looking at the bill.
But you think its easier and risk free to develop from where we are to R&D plus supply chain, operating procedures, and workforce for safe and cost effective nuclear power?
Grid storage has no cost history. Nuclear power has a known cost history of being too expensive, and its had trillions of dollars of investment so theres no low hanging fruit.
Grid storage has existing components used in other industries and applications, nuclear power doesn't.
By comparison, we have 70 years of experience building and operating nuclear plants. We only need to build 4 nuclear plants for each one we currently have to achieve a 100% decarbonized grid. The cost history of nuclear power shows a clear trend that serial production is cheaper than one off builds.
And you are incorrect about nuclear power not sharing components with existing applications. Nuclear power plants use steam generators, turbines, dynamos, and cooling towers. These are used in other heat engine based power plants.
Uhh, mining and uranium enrichment and transportation all require fossil fuels, and more fossil fuel energy than a fueled nuclear produces in electrical energy. Increasing 4x nuclear plants would increase fossil fuel consumption in the nuclear supply chain.
Nuclear isn't some secret technology you've just discovered thats being suppressed by environmentalists. It literally ended the biggest war ever and was pursued for decades afterwards. Unless you know a secret, if its feasible it would have been done.
Incorrect. Nuclear power actually has the second lowest net CO2 emissions per energy source, second only to hydroelectricity. Less than solar and wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Which is why nukes are today uncompetitive, and get less so every day. The cost to build all those nukes would build far more renewable generating capacity and storage, far more than we will need. So, we will instead spend far less and get all the power we need. Existing nukes will shortly be too expensive to continue operating, and will be mothballed. Their eventual dismantling will consume a not insubstantial fraction of our much reduced energy budget.
There is, thus far, little use for storage, because there is not enough renewable generating capacity yet to charge up storage. (Charging it by burning fossil fuels would be stupid.) By the time we need much of it, it will be very, very cheap. In the meantime, building generating capacity and factories is the right use of capital.
Although people insisting there is a problem love to talk about expense of batteries, only a tiny fraction of utility-scale storage will ever be batteries. The cheapest storage is gravity, exemplified by pumped hydro, which represents today almost all utility storage. But there are many variations that all work.
The only uncertainty is which ones will be cheapest. Each is a different mix of build cost, maintenance cost, storage cost, charging cost, and discharging cost, with capex and opex for each. Different users will favor different places on those axes. Best for most uses are those that cost only capex, and store as much energy as you care to, cheaply.
Synthetic ammonia and hydrogen are attractive storage media, despite some higher costs, because they may be sold, and burned in gas turbines.
Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature tech and, like the synthetic fuels, valuable in its own right. Power is extracted by boiling in ambient air to drive a turbine.
Compressing air underground, adiabatically, is another mature method. Compressing to a sea-floor bladder through a hose from a compressor onshore, likewise. Turbines, again.
Buoyancy, drawing a float down toward a pulley on the sea floor, using a winch onshore; and raising a very, very heavy weight up a disused mine shaft are other, very similar examples of gravity storage. Both have startup time of seconds, and are useful for stabilizing grids. Energy is released by running the winch out, driving a generator.
There are various battery chemistries, for cases where batteries are useful at all. All under consideration are much cheaper than lithium. Farthest along may be iron-air, molten-metal, and sodium-bromide, none of which are prone to fires.
Storage costs of all kinds are falling much faster than solar generating capacity. Utilities will build whatever is cheapest when they finally need any. As prices change, the mix will change. There is no value in picking just one, and plentiful value in using the right one for immediate circumstances.
Nobody needs very much storage, because you can always import and burn fuel. The cheapest fuel will be surplus ammonia and hydrogen, although burning aluminum powder for direct process heat has been used in production at local scales. Scrap aluminum is very cheap.
This commenter is also incorrect in the claim that there is not enough renewable capacity to charge up storage. California , Hawaii, and other energy markets often hit days of excess renewable production. Proponents of energy storage promised that companies would swoop in to store and resell this excess energy. But this has not materialized, because energy storage is not nearly so simple or cheap as this commenter claims it is.
If in fact they were exotic and untried, billions of dollars would not already be committed to factories to produce them in industrial volume. The processes involved are used industrially billions of times worldwide every day.
You only wish they were exotic because you imagine it would make nukes more appealing. But nothing can make nukes appealing. They get less so with each passing day.
Yes, for purposes different from energy storage. The massive amounts of ammonia synthesized through the Haber process for fertilizer production does nothing to demonstrate ammonia's viability for electric grid storage.
Likewise the hydrogen used in space rockets has no bearing on the feasibility of electrolyzing water, storing the hydrogen, and converting it back to electricity. If anything, the fact that most hydrogen is produced through steam reformation highlights the difficulties of electrolysis at scale.
We have plenty of experience with flywheels. Almost every car has a flywheel in it. Does that mean it's guaranteed to be extremely cheap and scalable to store electricity by spinning a bunch of giant flywheels? That's the kind of leap you're making here.
When someone actually builds and operates a facility that takes in electricity, produces ammonia, and then taps that stored ammonia to produce electricity later, then we can actually measure real-world cost of such a storage system. Until then, it's just optimistic predictions. And optimistic predictions don't actually store any energy.
We have plenty of experience with flywheels. I bet there's millions of cars built every year that have a flywheel in them. Does that mean energy storage using giant flywheels is guaranteed to be insanely cheap and way cheaper than the existing storage systems?
Just because we have plenty of experience using a given technology in one application doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be a smash hit in a different application.
Now, whether LN2 (or LAir) energy storage is practical is another matter. The efficiency seems poor unless you have a source of waste heat to juice the process.
> It's off the shelf technology for chemical processes. It's not off the shelf technology for energy storage.
The while point I'm making in these last few comments is that just because a certain technology is effective for one application doesn't guarantee it's effectiveness for a different application.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_separation#Applications
But you can't do this for cryogenic air storage. The whole point is to produce liquid nitrogen (or liquid air) that can be stored and then reheated later to drive an engine to generate electricity. If you ran the liquid nitrogen output through the input stream like in typical air separation, you'd warm the output stream and turn it back into a gas. So even though the two systems both involve cooling systems they're actually substantially different processes. One of them is separating air's constituent gases, and mixes the input and output streams to achieve efficiency. The other is essentially a big liquid nitrogen plant.
Unfortunately the only existing cryogenic air storage plant delivered 15 MWh of storage at a cost of 8 million pounds [1]. That's about $650 per KWh, as compared to ~$130 per KWh for battery storage. Like I said, just because a technology is effective in one application, doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be effective in another one.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage#cite_...
We build plenty of flywheels. Does that mean energy storage based on giant flywheels is guaranteed to be efficient at scale because we have experience using flywheels in other applications like automobiles?
Similar deal with ammonia energy storage. We've got plenty of experience with synthesizing ammonia for fertilizer production. We've got very little, if any, experience using synthesized ammonia as a form of energy storage.
It was you, not I, that started this tangent about air separation in this comment [1]. I was, from the beginning, talking about energy storage systems.
Do you imagine the ammonia knows why it is being synthesized, and would balk at being synthesized and tanked for energy storage or fuel? Do you imagine it will object to being burnt in a combined-cycle turbine?
Your credibility is at zero.
Ammonia storage would first require a source of hydrogen. Currently almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation which releases carbon dioxide. So this has to be replaced with electrolysis, which is more energy intensive and has issues with corrosion of electrodes. Then there's the issue of heating up this hydrogen and nitrogen to ~400C and compressing it to fix the nitrogen into ammonia. Currently this is done through combustion of fossil fuels. That too needs to be replaced with an electric source. All these changes drastically increases the cost of producing ammonia over existing processes.
Cryogenic storage is essentially producing liquid nitrogen by refrigerating air, and then hearing the nitrogen to create a pressure gradient to drive a heat engine. Cooling the air is a huge energy sink, and releasing the energy often has to be coupled with a heat source in order transition the liquid nitrogen to a gas. It's actually using the heat gradient of the ambient air and the liquid nitrogen to drive the heat engine, and that ambient air often doesn't have the required energy density to produce more than a few dozen megawatts. Existing prototypes often scavenge waste heat from a fossil fuel power plant. But again, not an option if you plan to eliminate fossil fuels.
Now repeat the same math for global production of new nuclear power plants, in GW/year.
While writing your reply about how this isn't the right way to think about the future of nuclear power, realize that those exact same arguments apply to batteries, too.
Nuclear power plants are mostly steel, concrete, and copper. They need to be manufactured to precise tolerances, but the cost of a nuclear plant isn't driven by the cost of concrete and steel as rae inputs. The nuclear industry accounts for a negligible share of steel, copper, and concrete consumption. The lion's share of the cost is in the design, approval, and construction of the plants. Unlike batteries, these are factors that benefit from building the same repeated design. A serial run of 40 heat exchangers is a lot cheaper than a one-off production of 3 or 4 heat exchangers. This is why nuclear plants were so much cheaper in the 1970s and 80s when the same designs were built repeatedly.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143399/global-cobalt-co...
2. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev...
Then please share what storage mechanism is going to be cheaper.
> Second, natural resources almost always get cheaper to extract as demand increases, especially when they’re not actually scarce (there’s tons of Lithium out there).
Incorrect, as easily accessible reserves get depleted more and more remote reserves must be tapped. This increases cost of extraction.
They've increased more than sixfold since 2000.
All you're doing is repeating the fact that we've been under-investing in lithium (and other energy minerals[0]) for the past decade+. Everyone already knows that.
Nothing indicates lithium mining & refining is at its physical or technology limits. Far from it: we see large low-hanging fruit for process improvements in both.
Ion exchange and/or membrane and/or electrochemical separation vs ponds, lithium carbonate intermediate vs lithium hydroxide, clay vs spodumene, etc. Lots of exciting stuff going on!
Even so, we're on track to produce li on batteries for cars by the twh per year. And most of those will have a second life in grid storage. That's before considering the effects of vehicle to grid storage.
There are no plans for nuclear anywhere close to the same scale. Changing that will require a debate about cost. This article does a great job of avoiding that topic entirely.
Batteries and hyrodelectric storage are the only energy storage mechanisms for which we have any meaningful cost history.
You are already well aware of numerous alternatives. Insisting they are "untested" is not fooling anybody.
Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? Remember the US uses 8GWh of electricity per minute.
I don't know about that, but for comparison, the "world’s biggest battery storage system" opened last year in California[0] at 400MW / 1,600MWh.
[0] https://www.energy-storage.news/expansion-complete-at-worlds...
My point was that GWh-scale thermal battery proposals would be competing with already existing (and possibly cheaper) chemical batteries, and that energy storage on this scale is not unheard of.
Even as a nuclear supporter I would welcome more renewables if we had cheap scalable storage, which no one has it seems. (at least no one pointed out such project in the entire thread)
But for much of the world what doesn't have this option, nuclear remains the most viable energy source.
Btw even the Sweden example uses nuclear for decarbonization of the grid ...
Answer: We import fuel. We will have no reason to give up the ability to import fuel at need. We might even stockpile some.