I never understood the argument nuclear power is so "dangerous". The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl. Almost the entire fleet is nuclear-powered, including all aircraft carriers, subs, and battleships.
Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. EVs would be a no brainer Natural gas would be obsolete. Nuclear desalination would completely solve the water crisis in the US West. I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. Really the possibilities are incredible. It would be the equivalent of humanity going from horse and buggy to using fossil fuels, but another order of magnitude.
In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables.
EDIT: I feel like people are focusing on the wrong point here. I was apparently—and unintentionally—disingenuous by touting Germany’s success in replacing coal power with renewables, as compared to France. However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear.
Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that was one helluva waiting cost.
It's not as though Germany could have 'decided' in the 1970s to have 2022 technology. Sure, increased investment at the time may have sped up the development of renewables, but it still wouldn't be fast. Science doesn't quite work that way.
But here we are, instead. Thank Reagan. And Bush. And Bush, again.
US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy. That regime lasted until the 90s and by then any memory of the oil crises in the 70s was long gone.
The panels installed on the White House were not photovoltaic solar panels - they were solar water heater panels. (After they damaged the roof, they weren't replaced after the repairs were done.) It wouldn't have been possible to run the economy on solar water heater panels.
I’m not the biggest fan of arguing about alternate history, but this thread originally spun out after an ancestor poster claimed we would have a rosy present if only we had invested more in nuclear energy. I claim I find way more wishful then claiming the same about renewables.
On the other we have a technology that still doesn't exist in the 2020s and would also need to be build out.
Cockroach archeologists will be puzzled why we chose to go extinct.
You keep saying this, but I'm not sure where it's coming from. Reading upthread, my interpretation is that we are specifically talking about the technology that exists today, in 2022.
I think it's entirely reasonable that, if investments into renewables were made in the 70s and 80s at a level comparable to investments in fossil fuels or nuclear, we would have seen, in the 90s, renewables technology comparable to what we have today. No, it wouldn't be the same technology, but I could see efficiency numbers being similar, though perhaps at a bit higher cost.
This seems to be implying that basically all the research was done between the 2000's and now, and that scientists had been twiddling their thumbs between 1970 and 2000. Actually, scientific advances between 1970 and 2000 were critical to enable the renewables boom that we experienced since 2000.
Could it have gone faster if more funds had been made available? Maybe. But claiming that we "lost" 30 years in research on that topic simply shows ignorance about the way research works.
> US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
Yeah, and if the Romans hadn't spent so much time fighting with their neighbours, we would all be eating free lunches now.
There's reports around about what actually drove the price drops in renewable, and while research plays it's part, market support and scale are big factors, we definately squandered multiple opportunities to nip climate change in the bud.
I shudder to think what failure looks like to you.
Operating the wind farms is much cheaper than operating the nukes and mining the extra coal would have been. That opex savings goes to more capex wind generation capacity, further reducing costs by each GW displaced.
So, yes, success. Not being off coal already is not failure. Replacing an entire country's energy infrastructure takes time, no matter what.
Looks at France
Sure.
France uses 20x less coal than Germany to begin with (https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...) so I'm not sure about the comparison of reducing consumption
Also, during the recent conflict with Russia, Germany is turning coal plants back online and France is not.
Domestic coal consumption figures are meaningless.
That's wrong. France is a net exporter of power, by over 50%. So even on aggregate it is a net benefit to the world since 90% of the power generated is CO2 free.
That sounds a less impressive when you rephrase it as saying they went from 15x more coal use than france to 9x as much. Percentage wise the decrease seems similar in the last few years.
source: https://www.iea.org/countries/france https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger.
On the other hand, the costs grew because the standards for risk grew to tremendous levels that are way, way above those applied for the coal and gas industries, or wind and solar for that matter.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
The wiki article you linked says the plant was unfinished. This would indicate the attack was a protest against the construction of the plant, not an attempt to induce a nuclear meltdown. You are perhaps unintentionally twisting the facts.
Historically the countries that invested in nuclear and hydro have been most successful in lowering the carbon intensity of their energy sector. Looking at the data, Germany does not appear to be nearly as successful as France. In 2021 France's electricity averaged 68 gCO2/kWh, and Germany averaged 364 gCO2/kWh.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?t...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Germany is like 40% coal, and France is maybe 5%. It's easier to reduce at a faster rate when your use is still massive.
> In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
Rarely have I seen reality mistreated so blatantly.
France has barely used coal in the last 4 decades, and so it seems to be enough to claim that, by slowly reducing their coal use, Germany does much better.
That reminds me of the popular definition of chutzpah: the person that asks for mercy after murdering his parents, since, afterall, he's now an orphan.
> However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
Your main point is wrong. [1] shows that each model has experienced faster build time as new units were built. What is true is that new, more advanced designs can take more time to build than older, less advanced designs.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%...
CP0: first reactor 6.5y, last reactor 5y
CP1: first reactor 6y, last reactor 5y
CP2: first reactor 5y, last reactor 6y
P4 : first reactor 7y, last reactor 6y
P'4: first reactor 7y, last reactor 6.5y
N4 : first reactor 12y, last reactor 7.5y
> it conveniently excludes
Honestly, I suspect you're just namedroping here. But let's adress the point: Olkiluoto and Flamanville are the first 2 reactors of their generation, I'm not sure what you want to compare them to in terms of build time. My guess is that Hinkley point will get built much faster, and that we may see further improvements if more are built.
Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale and with full support of the state. I don't trust promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all.
But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing their electricity production. It's a pretty notable success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could afford it.
I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well. The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by comparison.
failing plants due to their age and maintenance resulting in less nuclear power in the long run say otherwise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Germ...
Economies of scale were applied from the inception of commercial nuclear power, yet the promise of electricity too cheap to meter has never materialized. Quite the opposite. In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive method of generating electricity, and the anti-nukes don't enter into it. Even if every individual on the planet was pro-nuke, it would still be too expensive. If it was otherwise, nothing whatsoever could prevent investors from coming out of the woodwork to fulfill your dream of nuclear power plants everywhere. Make nuclear energy economical and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, as well as being absurdly wealthy. But when you fail, try to avoid blaming anything other than nuclear energy itself.
https://energypost.eu/how-profitable-is-an-investment-in-nuc...
And France, with many Nuclear plants, has recently had issues keeping the plants up. Many of the most problematic plants are newer ones.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-3939/frances-energy-woes-wo...
The reality is economies of scale have kicked in for solar and wind energy in a way they never can for nuclear. We are at the point where it makes sense, at times, to overprovision renewals to ensure enough supply.
The issue with renewables is storage, of course. But that problem looks to be more solvable than cost effective nuclear, a problem which we have not solved in over 50 years. One can say if we were only smarter we could make nuclear more cost effective, which is probably true. But we built a nuclear power plant where a tsunami occurred in the past, only to find it occurred again, so we aren't that smart. The issue with nuclear is everything has to be right for it to be cost effective and safe, and nuclear is too complex for humans to consistently do this.
Safe nuclear power that is also cost effective is not a problem we have solved.
My vote is to rapidly install renewables while we have the natural gas backstop, and give the storage startups a few years to make it happen. Energy Dome, Hydrostor, and Form Energy all look promising.
And if new nuclear turns out to be less expensive than expected, great.
Many more than that.
That said, I am not super bullish on nuclear, and agree with your position. Solar and wind are just getting too cheap for nuclear to get the investment needed to catch-up. If we see someone crack the code on cheap storage of electiciy, solar and wind will runaway with the prize. Not coincidentally, storage is has vastly more investment of money and brains on looking for ways to scale vs nuclear.
*Safety concerns with nuclear will make iterative design difficult to pull off!
So do oil and coal [0]:
> Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP, and are expected to rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025
[0]: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...
It’s really hard to invest billions of capital dollars that won’t produce any return for a decade while you can realize immediate return on solar with costs that drop every year.
Accountants are the worst enemy of nuclear, not activists.
The short version is, you need to have enough generations of reactor building to allow later projects to benefit from previous learnings. Because of various outside effects (this is a euphemism for the anti-nuke lobby) that type of iterative improvement and workforce skilling didn’t happen in other countries.
The same will be true of fusion. Set a target level of service and make electric generation a government service. The government is better at capital projects anyway and if energy were a taxpayer funded service it would transform society in many ways.
Comparative costs to other OECD countries for similar infrastructure - there really isn't one, as the US is way out of line in terms of cost and quality.
My family member communicated with counterparts in other countries, impressed with what they were doing. When asked what the research was that they based their projects on, they all said it was the US funded research (which the US doesn't take advantage of).
I’m sure the interstate highway system is the best the 1950s has to offer.
- Alaskan Way Viaduct
- Tappan Zee bridge replacement
- Billions in highway projects.
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/mario-cuomo-bridge-s...
I mean, these people basically gain popularity when government is shown to be inefficient, but at the same time, they're the ones tasked with running the government.
It doesn't work because nuclear is the only power where all the externalities are accounted for. The average coal plant kills more people with radiation released from burning coal every year than all nuclear accidents combined.
But because it's nicely diffuse no one cares.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...
The link you provided indicates the level of radiation is negligible, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Amazing.
When people said we'd be using renewables I somehow didn't think dinosaur farts would be the largest slice of the pie.
Even in France, which has a very supportive population, and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they build more of the same reactor model.
Construction productivity doesn't increase like manufacturing productivity does. Nuclear's failures are, as far as I can tell, entirely the responsibility of those tasked with building it. And it's quite possible that nuclear only makes sense at a certain level of economic development, with the right level of technology, but not too much technological development such that manufacturing has completely eclipsed construction.
Go to any investor that would build nuclear, and they won't cite public opposition as the reason not to build, they will cite the construction risk.
And that's why this SMR design is being tried rather than large reactors.
I'd be curious to learn where you got your data for this, because I have never been able to find such data. Best I could get was average cost of a plant in a "pallier".
What I can provide is building duration, which definitely goes down as more of the same model are built, but there's no guarantee that building duration and cost are equal here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
There's another paper somewhere in my bookmarks that shows this for reactors of the same model built in the US, and maybe also France, but I'm having trouble locating it right now...
As with any single publication, it can't be taken as the revealed truth, but it's the best I have at hand.
Edit: how could I have forgotten about the infamous Loveringe, Yip, Nordgard paper! This is impressive because it does the analysis across many countries, and finds a few with cost decreases, but a dominant trend towards more expensive construction:
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0301421516300106?...
My personal, untested, hypothesis is that these variations have mostly to do with the general cost of labor in a country, and in particular their level of economic advancement, which establishes a floor on the value of an hour of a person's labor. Specifically, my guess is that construction is only feasible for nuclear when a country is in a magic sweet spot where labor is cheap, and technological advancement is moderate, like 1950s-70s US level. But not so advanced that labor has gotten so expensive that skilled labor like welders have more productive uses of their time.
If my theory is correct, future costs for South Korea should rise from where they were before stopping their program (in a flurry of corruption scandals, I would note. Nobody brings up South Korea as an example of successful construction anymore, instead having to resort to suggesting Rosatom should embark on a massive building spree across the globe.)
Just wonder if we're pricing in those externalities from coal, like hundreds of thousands of deaths per year due to air pollution and the fact that it is completely fucking up the atmosphere, leading to a global catastrophe. Because...we're not.
Some of the costs/risks with nuclear are a bit black swannish though which complicates matters.
Energy efficiency, pollution controls and carbon taxes are the real magical tech we've not exploited.
Because cheaper in the long run means more expensive right now, which is a vulnerable political soft spot that psycopaths can easily exploit.
Do you have any actual numbers at hand?
"...is cheaper..." is a bit vague.
This uses real weather data for various countries and optimize solar + wind + batteries + hydrogen to provide a constant output at minimum cost. The results are interesting. You can tweak the cost assumptions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-id...
'Former President Jimmy Carter halted reprocessing in 1977, citing proliferation concerns.'
it doesn't matter they were USSR. might as well have been PG&E. soviet people and usa people were both just people and still are.
Truly glad we prevented a few assholes corporations from making a mess of things. I get grossed out just thinking about the clean air and normal climate.
1 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calibratio...
I'm absolutely certain of it. In regards to nuclear rocketry, it wasn't even the anti-nuclear crowd that killed one of the most promising technologies but they certainly guaranteed it would die in the dustbins of JPL's archive.
NASA and the United Aircraft Corporation came up with a reactor design called the nuclear lightbulb [1] that used tens of kilograms of uranium instead of thousands by heating uranium hexaflouride [^1] to a plasma and using an irrotational vortex [^2] of neon gas to compress it until it became a self sustaining [^3] black body radiator [^4]. They were just about to test the reactor with real fuel when it was canceled (during Nixon's administration as part of the Mars program) but they managed to experimentally identify the remaining production challenges like the computational power needed to keep the core stable and the material science necessary to separate the vortex from the fluid economically. There has been so much progress in fields that address those challenges that many of the problems are considered solved and the remainder are surmountable engineering problems.
I really hope with this renewed interest in nuclear someone eventually revives the design and tries to bring it to its conclusion. Just based off of the declassified publications from the 60s and early 70s [2][3][4][5] it is obvious how much potential this design had: it's safe [^5], useful for rocketry and terrestrial power generation, and self breeding by nature of its design [^6]. Who knows where we could be in space exploration and the battle against climate change had the design been fully explored.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850
[3] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851
[4] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820
[5] and many more in the JPL archives! Search for "gas core reactor"
[^1] UF6 is the most common intermediate in the enrichment process and depleted UF6 is how most of our nuclear waste is stored... and this reactor is a perfect breeding reactor for the waste (see [^5]). All of the infrastructure for dealing with the materials have existed since the Manhattan project.
[^2] the opposite of a rotational vortex like a tornado, which have calm centers. In an irrotational vortex the particles in the center have the highest velocity and in the reactor it acts like a centrifuge, forcing the uraninum to the center and compressing it to tens or hundreds of atmospheres. This part was tested experimentally.
[^3] the energy of the plasma and compression from the vortex increase the neutron cross section to the point where the nuclear reaction becomes self heating with only 20kg of fuel. They stopped just short of testing the full cycle but this is the same concept behind nuclear weapons, which use precise explosives to compress nuclear fuel until it reaches criticality, except the vortex can't generate the kind of pressures necessary for a nuclear explosion.
[^4] the NASA/UAC design heats the UF6 till it radiates most of its energy away as UV. Classical steam turbines or hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles (in the case of a rocket engine) allow the system to extract power.
[^5] since it's an active design, tons of power is required to pump the vortex and keep the core in a fissile regime. If any part of the system fails, the core loses pressure and becomes a really expensive gas canister until the chamber is cleaned up and the core restarted. With a plasma window separating the core from a vacuum, the entire system can be designed to depressurize safetly.
[^6] anything injected into the core gets bombarded by neutrons and the vortex system constantly wicks away small amounts of the core. The system forms a closed loop that recycles unused fuel via centrifuge and it can also separate out transmuted waste [*]. The NASA/UAC team tested this with a neutron gun to simulate fission in the core.
[*] we could have had honest-to-god alchemy!
One of the things making this possible is 90+ percent enrichment of U235 in the fuel. That's weapons grade and won't fly in a civilian reactor. I haven't read NuScale's application in great detail but I'd be surprised if they used anything above 5 percent.
Oil companies paid to form that opinion in the public.
>no Chernobyl
Chernobyl was the result of a HIGHLY unauthorized, and stupid experiment... phenomenally stupid. So many red flags were driven past at high speed.
The reality is to cause the issue, the operators had to drive the reactor well into a dangerous and hard to control regime which it would not get into under any normal operation circumstance.
So while yes, it shouldn't have been physically possible to do it, even with that design it took substantial, deliberate malfeasance to get that result (you can also only get that result with that design - a meltdown is not normally an explosion).
Every nuke, ever, has been massively subsidized.
NuScale has been and is still being massively subsidized by the USDoE. It would be wholly uncompetitive with renewables if not so propped up.
Given the longstanding cozy relationship between the NRC, the DOE and industry it's hard to feel confident in this approval being sufficiently stringent, e.g. on worst-case scenarios, waste disposal and the like.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-ur...
material specific energy w*h/kg
----------- ----------------------
uranium 22,394,000,000
...
diesel fuel 12,666The Bikini Atoll in the Marshall islands is one of the most polluted places in the pacific ocean. The US military conducted nuclear testing around there and simply swept the pollution in one place. There are dozens of reports of cancer from both former military personnel an nearby local population. And concerns are rising with elevated sea level that pollution will be leaking at greater pace then currently.
These are just two examples of the US military neglecting safety concerns with their nuclear technology. There is no single spectacular event like the Chernobyl disaster. But rather decades of neglect and disregard to public safety which polluted many areas leaving potentially an overall damage on par—and potentially greater—then the Chernobyl disaster.
But that is despite the point. Their safety record with nuclear is horrendous. Full of examples of neglect and pollution. I’m not an expert in the nuclear history of the US military, but I wouldn’t be surprised that many of their smaller reactors have similar stories as Hanford. It is just not as spectacular—and therefor not as much in the public consciousness—as Chernobyl.
And yet we're still cleaning it up :)
> In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department of Energy and 7–9% of all nuclear waste in the United States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US, with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.
Your supposition that reactor accidents smaller than Chernobyl might be hidden from the public doesn't seem well grounded either; we know the US Army fucked up the operation of the SL-1 reactor, resulting in 3 deaths. Here's a big list of nuclear fuckups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid... Some of those severe, some minor. I don't see much reason to believe that substantial naval reactor incidents have been omitted from that list. Such accidents are hard to hide from long, particularly if it means a bunch of sailors got irradiated or a ship had to be taken out of service for decontamination / repair. The incidents on that list bracket the sort of mystery accident you're supposing; it lists accidents much less severe and much more severe.
I supposed no such thing. You don’t need an accident to leave a mess (as evidenced by our current climate crisis). You just need to be negligent of the environment and surrounding population center. The US military (including the Navy) has a terrible track record when it comes to environmental issues around its military bases around the world. My supposition is that they are simply equally inconsiderate with their nuclear logistics as they are with their other operations. And Bikini Atoll is my ground for thinking so.
Incidentally, VLS allows for much faster deployment of missiles, and doesn't require deck space for different launchers for different missiles, and a ship with a modern VLS have a huge rate-of-fire advantage on older rail launcher equipped ships.
* Cost of procurement.
* Role of the ship: why have an expensive ship that turns into a radioactive reef in a role when one of its missions is to "take a bullet" for a carrier?
* No competition. The Soviets were gone.
Whether this is true, it shows that the obsolescence of battleships (since aircraft carriers came on line) was recognized well before WWII.
We did get five of the eight battleships back (although some were basically cored out like a rotten tooth and rebuilt almost from scratch.) Two ships were left there (Utah and Arizona). Oklahoma was raised mostly to free up its slot in the harbor, but sank in 1947 while being towed to San Francisco Bay to be scrapped.
The BB's role in the Pacific War was as AA platforms and for shore bombardment.
But if you include "amphibious assault ships" like the Wasp class, which can carry a lot of helicopters and STOVL airplanes like the F-35B and Harrier, then US Navy still has a lot of conventional powered carriers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_cruisers_of_th...
Really? I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone call a frigate a cruiser or a littoral combat ship a destroyer or an amphibious assault ship a carrier but everyone knows battleships are the biggest big-gun ships out there.
I try not to judge, I'm probably equally wrong without knowing it about things as far outside my area of interest.
I would also not be surprised if there were many people who'd never heard the terms "destroyer" or "cruiser".
I thought they were obsolete.
despite lower standards, they've had no incidents
https://www.google.com/search?q=air+force+lost+hydrogen+bomb...
> The DOE later found water intruding into at least 14 single-shell tanks and that one of them had been leaking about 640 US gallons (2,400 l; 530 imp gal) per year into the ground since about 2010. In 2012, the DOE also discovered a leak from a double-shell tank caused by construction flaws and corrosion in the tank's bottom, and that 12 other double-shell tanks had similar construction flaws. ... Intermittent discoveries of undocumented contamination have slowed the pace and raised the cost of cleanup.
> In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department of Energy[7] and 7–9% of all nuclear waste in the United States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US, with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.
I collected a list of publicly known ones in response to someone claiming the same previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376137
The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is quite literally 1000 square miles. Nuclear advocates try to treat Chernobyl (and Fukushima and [insert nuclear disaster here]) as an irrelevant outlier rather than what it is: tangible evidence of the impact of inevitable human failure.
A plant has to be well-maintained and competently run. Waste products have to be safely stored and transported. As soon as you add corporations to the mix, you've now created a profit motive to neglect safety and maintenance because the risk of disaster is low but the failure modes are incredibly large. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at managing low-probability high-impact failures.
> The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl.
Military use of nuclear reactors is quite limited, being largely limited to a handful of submarines and aircraft carriers using highly enriched fuel. It's not done out of economic merit either. Having a nuclear missile submarine that can stay deployed for months can literally be done no other way.
All that has very little to do with commercial power generation.
Coal power kills 1000x as many people per unit as nuclear. Natural gas kills 40x as many. Solar kills 4x as many. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at comparing chronic and acute risks at scale. 1: https://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArt...
I dispute this number. Are you considering roof mounted residential solar? Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.
>Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.
It is probably more accurate to say that most solar in a solar-powered world should be on the ground. The reality is that roof-top solar is the most expensive form of power in the world and yet it continues to be heavily subsidized. These subsidies are in the form of direct tax breaks and usually higher electricity prices paid by those who can't install it. A dollar wasted on roof-top solar would be MUCH better spent on solar panels installed on the ground by the utility.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
This is a poor metric to use. The official death count from Chernobyl was 31. It may be as high as 50. There are probably more deaths attributable through long-term effects, etc but you start getting into subjective modeling to figure out a number for that.
It's almost 40 years later and the absolute exclusion zone is still 1,000 square miles. Treating this as only 31 (or 50) deaths grossly under-represents the magnitude of the disaster.
The comment I was replying to was arguing nuclear power caused the least deaths and I was explaining how that's a bad metric because it doesn't capture the impact and damage of the absolute exclusion zone.
So if the actual death count is 27,000 instead of 31 or 50 that's actually much worse, which further undermines that commenter's argument.
1: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
I would add:There are none so blind as those who will not see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
Very long list. Impossible to clean many up in any sort of human scale.
When are we outlawing hydroelectric dams? Accidents with those have killed far far more people.
1. Using deaths as a metric;
2. Focusing on operational cost of a nuclear power plant rather than total cost (ie including capital cost). The total cost is borne out in the relatively high cost of nuclear power to users. If that point is even acknowledged, let alone conceded, it's just dismissed as the fault of government regulation or that scale will somehow magically solve the problem; and
3. Writing off disasters as irrelevant outliers because they're inconvenient to the argument. Less than 700 nuclear power plants have been built and we've had multiple huge disasters.
So are deaths a bad metric? And by "deaths" here I mean any form of the metric (eg absolute, per-kWh generated, etc). Because deaths doesn't capture the negative externalities and consequences of nuclear power. Chernobyl killed less than 100 directly. Who knows how many contracted various cancers in a wide area. But 1,000 suqare miles of land remains uninhabitable nearly four decades later with no real end in sight.
Deaths as a metric doesn't capture that, which is precisely why pro-nuclear advocates focus on it. Nuclear power has its own propaganda just like the oil and gas industry does.
The way to account for the cost of deaths is by the "statical value of a human life", a finite quantity that is considered what would be reasonable to spend to avoid one death. The NRC uses a figure of $9 million when evaluating reactor safety systems.
Using that figure, deaths in normal operation contribute negligibly to the cost of energy from nuclear or renewables (but not for coal; there deaths contribute greatly to the real cost.) Because of this, if nuclear stans are focusing on deaths, what they're doing is implying that the $9 M figure is much too low. And that would imply that the NRC is not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants. I doubt this last point is one they'd be happy with.
So if you’re that worried about it, find the least populated place in western Kansas or Nevada or Maine and build the biggest plant you can. Worst case scenario it turns into Chernobyl and you fence it off and call it a day.
Alternatively, we can keep using slave labor in China to build solar panels fabricated with toxic compounds obtained via strip mining that require natural gas and coal power plants to actually function on hot days.
Either you care about climate change or you just hate nuclear power. Discussions like these are great at revealing where folks stand on the issue when push comes to shove.
A serious question I don't have an answer to: is Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know.
Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt weird when we're talking about market-based economies. Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else would we not build these supposed money printers?
A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.
According to a google search:
> American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to $0.80 per watt (W) – about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt than imported panels. The highest quality, ‘premium’ American panels may even come in around $1.00/W.
I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though really I would like to see working conditions improve across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus is perhaps different from yours.
I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%.
And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot simply be handwaved away in our current economic models. But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for it. It's not an either/or!
And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be a lot of things that we could do differently that would also have great effects.