Fossil fuels: what are you going to do with the waste?
We don't need nuclear!
You're going to need a lot of batteries. A lot of batteries. The world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. So 12 hours of storage would be 30 TWh, or 30,000 GWh. By comparison global annual lithium ion battery production is about 300 GWh.
Additionally, it's obvious there are many other things we can do besides just match current consumption with renewables. We can and must mandate less wasteful consumption. Anyone who has flown at night in a window seat knows just how much energy is being wasted on completely pointless night time signage and lighting for businesses that are closed, as just one small example.
Regardless, nuclear and its permanent poisoning of the earth is not the answer.
> Regardless, nuclear and its permanent poisoning of the earth is not the answer.
By "poisoning the earth" you mean burying extremely small amounts of uranium half a kilometer under the ground. The entirety of the USA's nuclear waste from power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high. That's 70 years of nuclear waste.
By comparison, renewables + natural gas is poisoning the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. And there's no plan to operate wind and solar without natural gas until a breakthrough storage solution is discovered.
Citation needed, just looking and the temporal storage facilities of a single nuclear power plant is bigger than a football field.
> 5. Nuclear fuel is extremely dense
>Because of this, the amount of used nuclear fuel is not as big as you think.
> All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
btw, in case a football field at a depth of 10 yards sounds small: http://www.ccnr.org/max_plute_aecb.html#1
What's disingenuous about it? I guess there's used concrete that needs to be cleaned up, but used concrete is hardly unique to nuclear plants.
Also, your link about plutonium overdoses seems like a non-sequitur. Most spent fuel is uranium, not plutonium. Furthermore, chances of it contaminating people when that waste is buried 400 meters underground beneath impermeable rock is zero. The only things that would make it get into the ecosystem is deliberate excavation, or maybe a meteor strike kicking.
Low level rad waste still has cumulative health exposure risks, subject to many requirements for proper handling and disposal. there are lots of materials "not unique to nuclear plants" which do become irradiated once used in a nuclear plant.
BTW in hanford washington each year 10% of the DoE's budget goes to preventing plutonium leaking into a river, a lot of hubris to trivialize the geoengineering involved in designing a "zero risk" containment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Both times they've claimed it showed demand is flat, when it very, very clearly shows a daily variation in power usage that correlates with sunlight hours.
Was that you as well or am I missing something obvious that everyone else can see?
Also, you know there's no plan to run a nuclear grid without natural gas and/or storage right? This isn't new information so it feels like your sources are more anti-reneweable than pro-nuclear if they've convinced you this is a reason to prefer nuclear.
Nuclear does not require energy storage, its power output can be modulated by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Plants don't do this because they want to operate at 100% capacity as much as they can, it's not that nuclear plants can't modulate power output as is commonly stated.
But somehow the "nuclear is bad" people are fine with coal plants throwing literal radioactive fumes on the atmosphere and prefer that to nuclear plants
So color me skeptic the worry is legitimate
Solar and lithium batteries are currently forecast to supply a big chunk of the world's power, cheaper and more cleanly than our current options (both nuclear and fossil).
This cheap power will actually be part of the long term carbon reduction steps we'll probably need to do at some point because the transition to carbon fees and renewables was stalled for so long. Theres easier things we can do first though, like building lots of PV and using that power instead of fossil fuels.
EV charging and desalination are both good targets for demand response of renewables.
PV production is not hard to scale or carbon intense, and even if it was you'd be able to offset it against the carbon free output they produce.
Solar is cheap. Nuclear is cheaper than coal and gas, but more expensive than renewables when externalities are included. They're at the point when they're cheaper even without taking externalities into account which is important, as some people will not care about prices they are not directly paying, and other people really don't like government intervention in markets. Nuclear will never achieve this, despite actually being cheaper than fossil fuels.
We dont need nuclear. We'll probably build more globally and end up with about 10% of increased electricity demand coming from nuclear as part of the transition away from fossil fuels but we dont need it.
What we really don't need is people lying about renewables, even if hiding it behind sarcasm to make it harder to call out.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCPOST_BabcockWilcox_Trai...
The unincorporated externalities make nuclear much more expensive in comparison to solar/wind.
Nuclear does not have to cover for the eventualities of an accident, their cost does not include long term storage to name just 2.
It can reasonably offset coal, but needs peaking powerplants to meet customers variable demand. Which means it comes into conflict with much cheaper but less reliable wind and solar.
Solving that isn’t simple a question of solving say construction costs. We need to downsize from a 1,000 person workforce at a large scale power plant, and dramatically reduce insurance costs, and dramatically reduce construction costs, and dramatically reduce refueling costs, and dramatically reduce maintenance costs, and dramatically reduce decomisiniong costs. The less any one of those gets cut the more the others must be.
Consider, scheduled maintenance on a nuclear power plant is several weeks at a time. That’s ok if seasonal demand drops significantly and you have other sources to pick-up the slack but the higher your nuclear percentage the larger problem this becomes. It's issues like that which is why most countries have sub 40% nuclear generation and have been like that for decades.
The way you've phrased this, it sounds like there is some other zero-carbon energy source that is better at offsetting fossil fuels.
Take a look at France's electric grid, and the province of Ontario. They're both majority nuclear (75% and 65% respectively), they're both >90% carbon-free (with much of the remainder, indeed, being gas). Now show me a different grid that has a lower proportion of gas (regardless of whether or not it has any nuclear). Or a different grid that has lower CO2 per MWh. (there aren't any)
The real issue with Frances nuclear reactors: they are all over 20 years old, and 51/58 of them are over 30 years old. If they don't get on building replacements asap, they won't have any functional reactors.
Construction started in 2007, for a delivery scheduled in 2012.
Its total cost is already nearly 6 times its budget, and will not be delivered before 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
Regardless, the big problem here isn't specific to the nuclear plant design, but rather public project management (a field I have pretty deep insight into). The same can be seen in most multi-billion dollar projects with high political input and public visibility, whether it be a highway or a bridge or a transit line or an airport.
12.6 billions € are the construction costs right now (the reactor isn't running: they may raise), not the total cost which includes financial fees. Delayed delivery means that loan reimbursements are late because production didn't begin. The total cost, as established by the French Cour of audit («Cour des comptes») was, mid-2020, 19.1 billion € (additional costs and delays were since announced).
Proof: https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/la-filiere-epr
Pertinent newspaper article: https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2019/06/24/epr-....
Many mega projects indeed have such burdens, however this extent seems pretty rare and such boo-boos showing a lack of understanding of a very dangerous equipment aren't re-insuring.
Here's an article I saw yesterday talking about how most big transit projects in Canada are over budget and over schedule. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/09/world/canada/transit-cons...
> such boo-boos showing a lack of understanding of a very dangerous equipment aren't re-insuring.
On the contrary, I find the fact that all four projects ended up over schedule and over budget rather shows that the design didn't adequately consider constructability. The issues the French project seems to be addressing in the latest delays (weld/pipe issues) seem similar to issues it is also correcting in a number of reactors that have operated for ~twenty years.
As far as I understand the main reasons are that many unplanned difficulties arise because work has to be done in populated areas, creating (sometimes) huge surprises and side-effects (residents fighting against the project), and letting a contractor managing the project reveals that the gov isn't at ease. Building yourself (managing companies: Areva/Framatome then EDF all pertain to the government) a new reactor in a plant you own (without any resident nor tier-infrastructure) is a totally different matter: most burdens threatening Canadian's transit sector simply aren't there.
The French reactor was planned to be delivered form 3.4 billion € and after 5 years. It will cost at least 19.9 billion € and will be at least 11 years late.
I agree with your last paragraph. Delivering then exploiting without any fuss is key (the proof is in the pudding), the industry (Framatome's videos are impressive) made patent progress and the EPR in France may start in 2023: let's wait.
Provisioning enough nuclear to meet peak demand is certainly feasible, assuming you measure in dollars, environmental impact or human deaths.
Of course, building a mix of renewables and nuclear would be even better, but let's not pretend clean, essentially limitless power production hasn't been a solved technical problem for 50+ years.
Nuclear actually kills more peolle as it’s a more dangerous construction job and on top of that has the occasional accident. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
We'd need 1000x more nuclear deaths per watt hour to match coal.
That's multiple Chernobyl's per year. We'd be better off "decommissioning" old plants by yanking out the control rods than we are building more coal plants.
Every other coal project has been canceled, with none being constructed or even planned at this point. Coal’s share of production fell from 51% in 2001 to 20% and it just keeps dropping. In absolute numbers it’s a more modest 40% drop, but still falling.
Nuclear is unfortunately a poor replacement for peaking power plants like natural gas. The technology isn’t at issue just the costs relative to solar/wind backed battery systems.
~90% of new generation in the US is carbon free, that’s changing the landscape not simply having the same 3X% of electricity come from nuclear for 40+ years.
Quite simply nuclear stagnated in 2000 the world produced 2,590 TWh of nuclear, 31.3 of wind, 0.8 from Grid PV. By 2019 that jumped to 2,789 nuclear, 1,427 wind, and 681 Grid PV. In 2020, renuables where 29% of all commercial electricity generation while nuclear was 10%.
PS: Diablo Canyon produced ~12.6 TWh per year at the rate things are going with wind and solar that’s going to be replaced in about 40 days.
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
which tells a different story.
It even shows 2021 numbers as 2,735 nuclear, 1,813 Wind, and 1,023 solar. So counter to your previous point Wind + Solar > Nuclear. With Hydro at 4,206; Wind + hydro + solar > 2.5 times nuclear.
We are at the point where 1 year of solar PV growth (2020 to 2021 = 189 TWh) is more than the last 20 years of nuclear growth (2001 to 2021 = 163 TWh) and solar keeps accelerating.
About 10 years ago I saw a few major installation put in in my area (upstate NY) and also I could see solar roof installers all over the place.
I don't see anywhere near the activity I saw back then, which I'd expect to see if there was a huge solar boom and it was evenly distributed.
Globally: https://solarpower.guide/solar-energy-insights/largest-solar...
In the US it’s largely California, Arizona, Texas, and Nevada. https://list.solar/plants/largest-plants/solar-plants-usa/
There is a plan to put a 13,000 acre solar farm in Indiana, but generally northern areas get what look like large solar farms but are far smaller scale. Even 50 acres looks massive from up close and can significantly offset local consumption but doesn’t represent a big project.