Nuclear energy is clean

Yes, we have to store it somewhere. But all US plants combined make ~5k cubic meters of nuclear waste a year. To put that in perspective, the strategic oil reserve is 100 million cubic meters. A single aircraft carrier is 2 million cubic meters.

Political will aside, finding a place to store this stuff doesn’t seem like a massive problem.

Context: They are responding to a complaint that isn't explicit here. That complaint usually comes in the form of: "we have nowhere to put the waste" or "Yucca Mountain was canceled and we'll never have such a facility because of NIMBY." So the response is more "We can store on site and don't need deep geological depositories, here's others who have done it. But if you really want a geological depository, here's Onkalo." We can already do on sight, and this is already being done, so it makes sense to argue about this. If we want to do some smaller scale DGDs then we can do things substantially smaller than Yucca Mountain and have decades to build it.

I think without this context, it comes off as extremely hand-wavy. I'll admit that there is some hand-wavyness, but without something in place all you can argue is "this problem isn't as hard as people think. We can do it, here's real world examples elsewhere." I'm not sure what other argument they are supposed to make.

If you add batteries to the mix, nuclear is better.

Not to mention the quantity of power produced. Nuclear is expensive because it's long term investment.

Renewables also cost more in resources (concrete, steel, copper), there are sourced charts about this.

Renewables are better than coal and gaz, but not better than nuclear.

There's nothing wrong with renewables, but it's not enough to offset co2 emissions.

Plasma disposal is also feasable for reducing the waste even further. RE : https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

Fossil fuels release about 33 billion tonnes annually in co2 release. And that's not even possible to contain. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...

So the `~5k cubic meters of nuclear waste a year` mentioned elsewhere really is a grain of sand in comparison.

And now we are looking of some development in the future. The usual argument I keep seeing is that with the exponential cost reduction in solar and green hydrogen we will have in the future a combination that will be cheaper than the nuclear costs of today. A comparison of the current state of nuclear to some future potential solar + storage solution. Maybe we should use the same description for this and call that dishonest comparison?

The current state in northern Europe are wind and some solar in combination with large capacity gas (and some coal/oil). This is why Russian gas, oil and coal has such a huge impact of the electricity price in Europe, and why countries are currently setting up plans to disconnect part of the grid if the threat of limited gas supply continues to next winter. The grid is built on renewables when they are available, running around 50% on average in some countries, and for the remaining we burn a lot of fossil fuels. All the waste of those burned fossil fuels are put into the environment for society to address at a later date.

Maybe it is time for honesty in energy discussions, and also make intention clears. We should ban fossil fuels from being used in the energy grid, and we should set an date for that ban which corresponds to the common scientific understanding of global warming. We should also take in the data from doctors and health scientists that have first hand experience with fossil fuel pollution. With that, we need to build an energy grid that operates without having fossil fuels to fall back on.

First they are practical - unlike all renewables nuclear energy plant provides stable influx of energy to the electric grid, regardless of the weather condition. As long as we don't have good and, again, practical energy storage, renewables usability will be always limited. And so far we don't see any true innovation in the long term, large scale batteries tech - ritual monthly "at last, new battery tech invented in X" article in popular magazines is not enough since those "new" batteries either has to work in 10 Kelvin temperature or would need to have size of the Moon. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is, unfortunately, not practical as it requires very specific terrain and water sources. It is great we can build them here and there, but that's not the solution for the problem.

Secondly, nuclear energy plants does not produce CO2 and this is what we want to get rid off, as I understand.

Nuclear wastes are different story, unfortunately for the past 50 years there was almost no innovation in nuclear plants sector as well since everyone who would like to work on this was treated by the Academia like Holocaust deniers and anti-vaccination activists. Nuclear wastes are radiating, which means there is energy there, let's try to find the way how to use is, maybe it is easier than the search for the battery Holy Grail.

Nuclear has several problems. The main one of which is simply its cost. It is complex technology that involves dangerous materials that need protective measures against both technical failures and security measures against people doing things like building dirty bombs with these materials. You don't need a lot of nuclear waste to make a really effective dirty bomb.

All solvable, but it adds to the cost. Security generally involves babysitting reactors for their operational life as well as securing any sites where the waste is stored.

Solar is about an order of magnitude cheaper and faster to deploy. That's conservative. It's hard to not emphasize just how simple solar panels are in comparison. Mass producing them seems to lead to all sorts improvements in production processes and cost reductions. So they are an order of magnitude cheaper now. It might be two or three in some decades.

A solar panel just works for a few decades. You put it wherever and at the end of it's life you either recycle it or not. That's mostly a cost driven decision. We're talking perfectly inert material that you can have on your roof for decades without being exposed to anything harmful. Really, landfills of the stuff would not pose that many challenges. Certainly not compared to the other stuff we dump there like household electronics, old phones, depleted non rechargeable batteries, etc.

However, landfills of this stuff seem wasteful and probably the trace elements of various minerals and precious metals will be too tempting for recycling companies for that not to not happen. It will be some decades before we know because most panels in use today just got installed fairly recently and will be operating for some decades to come. Same with lithium ion car batteries. We already recycle lead acid batteries for decades. The value of lead is comparatively low to nickel and lithium. This might be a multi billion dollar industry. Nuclear waste is not very profitable at all. Just cost. People might get smart about lowering that cost is the best you can say about it.

I doubt the math will ever add up for nuclear to matter much. When your competition is orders of magnitudes cheaper, it doesn't matter how rosy a picture you paint for dealing with terrorists, nuclear waste, and the potential for area depopulating disasters. It's still too expensive. Mitigating those things will never be free. That's the problem.

The reality is nobody uses power reactor for making bombs. The desired reaction is U-238 + n -> U-239, decay to Np-239, decay to Pu-239. However, if you leave the fuel in for too long you get an increasing amount of Pu-239 + n -> Pu-240. Pu-240 is a neutron emitter that gives bombmakers big headaches. If someone were to make off with a load of plutonium from a reprocessor they're going to have a hard time turning it into a working bomb.

However, there's another approach to avoiding theft: Most of these isotopes don't matter. The fuel is "spent" because of a few neutron absorbers. Remove those, don't clean up the rest of it. Leave stuff like that Ba-133. The resulting fuel works just as well but unlike fresh fuel it's very nasty to deal with. The industry will have no problem with it--it's no nastier than the rods were when they came out, they have the machinery to handle it safely. The thief doesn't. You're not walking out with a gamma emitter in your pocket without setting off a bunch of alarms and if you try to steal much it will kill you before you manage to make off with it.

There still is one political headache, though--a reprocessor plant + a reactor built for quick fuel changes is the heart of a plutonium bomb program. It's hard to say we can have such plants but places like Iran can't.

What do you mean? 50+ reactors are under construction as we write [1], and almost twice as much are planned [2] (with even more proposed).

Furthermore:

> A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped

Marine nuclear reactors (of which 200-ish are in active service) and Chukotka's floating nuclear power plants are notable counter-examples. Especially with marine reactors being the baseline for the philosophy behind SMRs.

[1] https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstruction...

[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

The caveat is indeed incredibly large CAPEX and very long time, but what is the alternative? At least then you are secured partially for 20-40 years depending on needed capacity.

EDIT: typos

The difference is that oil goes onto open markets and it is thus possible for oil refiners to get a return on their investment.

We don’t need innovation in nuclear. The nuclear technology we have today is already a miracle technology.

Can’t speak to Europe but in the US the issue absolutely is regulation. The exact regulations vary by state, but energy grids are not open markets and the regulations universally disadvantage nuclear and benefit other sources. Safety focused regulations do impose a cost, but the primary issue is that we don’t let nuclear power operators turn a profit.

Let's spend the money on the better alternative sources wherever we can. If nothing else, we will see the benefits faster, which is now an even more critical factor than ever as feet have been dragged for decades.

This is the problem that needs to be solved. And it’s not clear to me how it gets resolved in a much higher cost of borrowing environment than what we’ve had for a decade.

Does it? This is the premise behind NuScale's modular SMRs. https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/fabrication-and-asse...

In the US, nuclear capacity is being replaced by wind and solar at six times the rate it's being "lost"; the hysterics you read here on HN and reddit are just that. And the rate of solar and wind deployment is skyrocketing. The people building grids and investing in generation are putting their money into wind and solar, because it's the cheapest and easiest.

"Several years" is an understatement; it takes years just to go from "everything is completely constructed and wired and plumbed" to "we are connected to the grid." This happened in Canada, where a reactor at an existing plant was brought back into use. The process took years.

You can't just drop a nuke anywhere. In order to be cost-effective, they have to be enormous and run at full capacity as continuously as possible. You can't just drop gigawatts of power generation anywhere you want in the grid,so the grid might have to get reworked or a plant might only be feasible in a handful of geographic locations. The plant needs access to massive quantities of cooling water, and a geologically stable area. They also need to be able to suck down enormous amounts of power, because even when a reactor is shut down and not "generating power", it requires many megawatts of electricity to run all the cooling systems; a reactor takes weeks to stop generating significant amounts of heat. Ditto for startup (this is true of many plants, but especially nuclear.)

They take many hours to adjust power levels. That's not what the grid needs; the grid needs highly reactive power, on the scale of seconds to minutes. Pumped hydro has been doing that in the UK for decades, helping the national grid meet the famous grid surge where everyone flips on their electric kettles when the BBC goes to break during a programming. The pumped hydro facilities in the UK and EU can react within seconds to changing grid demand. The US has pumped hydro as well, but battery systems are getting so cheap, they're competitive and don't have the risks hydro dams do.

Reactor vessels aren't built on-site. The majority are built by Japan Steel Works, one of the few companies in the world that makes reactor vessels. They have fixed capacity, require very high grade metal, and so on. One cannot just snap fingers, throw money at the problem under a "green" funding bill, and get more reactors.

There's also the massive carbon footprint of construction and commissioning, which takes another decade of operation to break even on, if nuclear reactors ever break even. The industry almost completely ignores the carbon impact of mining and refining uranium as well as the carbon footprint of the massive supply chain and workforce it takes to keep a plant running. Meanwhile, solar and wind pay back their carbon footprint in a matter of months to a year or two at most.

We need the very fastest ways to reduce carbon generation, and that will only come from conservation, a radical shift in transportation policy (namely discontinuing subsidizing low occupancy vehicle use), and large-scale conversion to electricity as an energy source.

So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage? I've probably seen 20 people say this exact same thing and have never been able to find an actual cost breakdown that supports it.

My guess is that utilities are not happy with the decentralization of PV. They like fossils, hydro and nuclear because you can't run them in you backyard at competitive prices. But you can buy PV and thermosolar on friday at Home Depot, slap it to the roof, and have a better ROI than any utility starting sunday. Get a Powerball or something similar, and they would never see another dollar from your pocket.

They, nuclear lobby, are known to be maneuvering to get more nuclear reactors installed quickly before is too late, but on conditions like: 1) government subsidizes the costs, 2) they assume possible overbudgets, 3) insures the plants for 100 years or so, and 4) guarantee an income for 50 years, in concept of "backup". For that they need a favorable public opinion, begging for more nuclear plants, and the politics would abide.

That isn't really the case.

It doesn't matter how much money you have when the climate burns to the ground around you, while energy sources that work when they want to fail to provide for your needs.

Of course people are going to overweight the outcome and underweight the probability when estimating the EV of something - that’s how we work! That’s why Powerball exists!

The problem with nuclear is the very large initial investment required, which delays the time to profit.

In other words, there is no problem with nuclear energy. The problem is with our economic system that demands short-term profits.

Why can't we have nuclear sub technology for civilian use?

Have you ever heard of nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines?

There does exist an exception to this. Russia built a floating nuclear power plant. There is a lot of controversy around it.

However the main claim that economy is the center of the argument is true. Fossil fuels are exceptional cheap as a battery solution to be combined with solar and wind, especially wind which don't have 365 days of charge cycles. Natural gas in Europe play the central role of filling in when wind/solar production goes down, with oil and coal coming in next. Since fossil fuels aren't burned all the time, a much higher cost per kw/h is tolerated, even when the spot price reaches upwards to 10x higher than the average cost. This winter they are expecting prices to exceed that by twice or more, and the average this year is already looking to be twice of last year.

The economics right now is a bit funky. Nuclear has most of their cost attached to the constructions, so with energy prices being almost doubled compared to last year, nuclear is looking quite economical. If inflation continues as it has been then a nuclear plant built 30 years will start to look really cheap compared to a wind + gas turbine. The biggest winners in term of profit however are the gas power plant owners, seeing record profits as a result of being able to charge record prices.

Yes but the economy is not free of consideration of these other factors.

> The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially

They are no longer dropping exponentially and insofar they do its because of mass production. Something not unique to renewable. If all world governments had invested the same in nuclear we could see the same kind of price reductions.

> 2. A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped, it has to be build on site.

This is not universally true. Some reactors can be ships and others can be shipped in a small number of parts.

> A change in regulation might lower the costs, but it's not going to improve much the innovation dynamics.

You are missing how good current regulation are at destroying innovation. Its literally impossible to build an small example reactor to do research. Its basically either is a very tiny university research reactor, or alternatively you need a full operational license but guess what, currently in the US its not even remotely possible to get an operational license for a non-PWR. So why would anybody even do research?

This is beyond a whole bunch of other issues with nuclear regulation.

> In conclusion, all this talking is mostly irrelevant: nuclear reactors are simply not going to be built because they are not competitive.

So in conclusion, we destroyed the nuclear industry and nuclear research for the most part and they are not competitive, therefore lets never do anything to fix that.

Yes, nuclear innovation cycle will always be slower, but the same can be said for trains, or many other things that are very useful.

Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.

On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.

Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants.

The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could.

If we could use only wind and solar power to fully replace fossil fuels and hydro, that could be a reasonable argument...

But it seems unrealistic to get enough energy without using some higher-density sources of energy, whether that's hydro or nuclear or oil, and if we're picking based on which one causes the least death, even accounting for wars and failures, nuclear seems to be a head and shoulder above the rest.

The primary thing that seems to be driving using coal plants and not using nuclear is purely monetary cost: nuclear plants take a huge up-front investment, coal plants already exist, and wind/solar can be transitioned to gradually with less up-front cost. The talk about nuclear's "danger" to me seems, quite plausibly, to be a post-facto justification based on not wanting to put up the money.

On the surface this is very true. However, types of solar have caveats that do not manifest until you have a certain amount of utilization in the grid. Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions. The more inertia you have, the more work it takes to speed up or slow down the grid.

Hypothetically, a grid that is 50% PV solar and 50% others would experience severe stability issues if the other class of generation were to be substantially impacted (i.e. your big-bang-for-buck military targets).

You cannot run a power grid on PV solar alone. It just won't work at scale.

Here, I'll do the same thing: "Nuclear produces power 24/7, while solar can only usefully produce power for ~8 hours a day, or 1/3 of the day".

Sure, for that 1/3 of the day, solar does not have political problems like being shut down for danger. However, for 2/3 of the day, nuclear does not have the physics problem of being useless.

Each solution has pros and cons and I want my power to come from both.

But another takeaway from the current conflict is how incredible nuclear is at shoring up energy security. A nuclear plant can easily keep 18 months of fuel onsite as required storage space is trivial. A 2 or 3 year strategic reserve of uranium would likewise be a trivial project.

Meanwhile other base load sources like coal need dozens of rail cars worth of coal every single day. Gas needs a pipeline or again daily shipments of LNG.

So now Russia has cut off the gas and energy costs in Europe are exploding and they are having to build out tons of new LNG infrastructure.

Russia can basically turn the heat off in Europe because they under invested in nuclear power.

A hydro plant can be attacked in a war situation just as much as a nuclear plant, so I don't see how that should be weighted as highly as you seem to imply. In fact, I'd argue that energy dependence on nations such as Russia are a much higher risk to geopolitical stability than nuclear power.

If a solar facility gets carpet bombed during a war, you think it's more likely it will all just get somewhat cleaned up, and lots of it will be left in-situ and plowed over, or someone will actually remove every little dust particle? I think the lazy way out is what is most likely.

We should start nuclear construction now, but for supply in 8+ years time. And therefore we should start increasing construction of wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery now, to supply lower watts, but useful watts inside the 8 year window. As supply matches demand we can remove coal and gas, and when the nuclear comes on line, increase the pace of their removal and repurpose surplus wind and solar to hydrogen production for ammonia, and hydrogen fuel cells, and domestic gas replacement.

I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There are numerous startups working to bring down cost.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

There are multiple nuclear (fission) startups in the last decade or so. My understanding is that financial backing is not their problem; outdated regulations are. And fear stokes outdated regulations.

You may not like it, but nuclear power is having a comeback.

How leathal? Roughly 6.8 trillionths of a gram [1].

Luckily Po-210 isn't a huge danger because of the short half life and it's really only produced by governments in very small quantities. But the point is that any alpha particle emitter ingested is potentially a massive health risk.

And what happens at an accident like Chernobyl? It scatters a ton of dust over a huge area that consists of many radioactive isotopes, some of which are just toxic by themselves (eg Caesium) but also some of them are alpha particle emitters. That dust gets into the food chain.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/palestinians-arafat-swiss-po...

There is no cadmium in solar panels. There was a small amount in thin film panels briefly favored by utility-scale solar plants but thin film is economically dead and nobody is buying those.

Antimony is used in the glass, not the panel. The glass contains ~1g/kg of antimony, and PV panels contain about 50 tonnes of glass per MW (most of the panel mass is the glass). That works out to 50kg of antimony per MW, i.e. basically none. If you took all the antimony out of a 1GW solar plant and somehow dissolved it in water - which can't happen because antimony trioxide isn't even soluble in water, and dissolving metals out of glass with water is practically impossible - and if you dumped all that into Lake Shasta, it would still be within drinking water standards. And again, nobody will dump this into the environment because fifty million kilos of high-grade glass is going to get recycled, not dumped.

I think it's sad that the nuclear boosters are being duped into spreading these lies about solar panels.

You speak of a Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I don't see anyone living where they've put up large scale solar farms or next to wind turbines.

You're right about humans not managing long term consequences well. From lead poisoning 40 years ago to 20 years from now when we have to deal with the waste of solar left behind (perhaps toxic waste if not dealt with right now).

We need nuclear now. No nonsense blockers. Build more plants and replace the coal, oil and gas base load stations we're running now to try slow the rate of carbon we're throwing into the sky.

And yes, we need more investment into solar and wind. It's a solution that is solved by multiple alternatives, not dummies getting behind one alternative and saying no to the rest.

There are not many data points in terms of number of countries using nuclear nor do I think it’s a panacea or anything for our problems, but from a realistic standpoint we need as many solutions other than fossil fuels on the table right now as a species if we’re to tackle the climate crisis with the gravity it deserves, and nuclear can buy some more options especially if we start deploying small modular reactors that can quickly shutdown fossil fuel power plants. As it stands, aging nuclear power plants tend to be replaced not with another, modern plant but with fossil fuel based plants to meet similar performance and logistical characteristics.

If we had invested in actual advanced breeder reactors this is a non issue.

As an example, a modern molten salt thorium breeder only requires dissolved thorium.

But of course if we stop innovation at the first generation and then do nothing for 50 years we are not gone have optimal technology.

If it’s radioactive it’s dangerous. The article points out that radioactive waste doesn’t stay radioactive for very long, contrary to what is commonly believed.

This is really what the whole argument boils down to: nuclear, or global warming. There's really not real, feasible renewable answer. It takes over 1300 wind turbines to match the power output of a single reactor. Solar? 1-3 Million panels. Most civilian facilities operate 3-6 reactors. Fission is the only technology that can make a dent in co2 emissions quickly. The only viable argument against nuclear is "cost" and that is only because of the ridiculous level of regulation and litigation surrounding nuclear power.

This phrase sounds weird to me, given that US explored nuclear power more than 50 years ago, and is also exploring other viable alternatives now (wind and solar).

(There's another form of pollution from nuclear power plants, which is heat pollution from discharged cooling water, but most people aren't talking about that.)

If storage is cheap enough then solar will be an important part of the mix. But unless you have the right geography for geothermal or hydro (which probably means flooding a bigger area than the chernobyl exclusion zone before you've even started, but leaving that aside), nuclear is still the only viable option for clean, reliable baseline power. It's not an either/or, we should be building both.

In your example: when there's clouds and the wind doesn't blow, what happens? Currently we burn coal, gas and petrol. This means that in order to accept hydro and solar as the main source of energy, we have to take fossil fuels along, as a backup. Unless we find a different backup.

And nuclear is right there.

If you consider the global electricity and energy demand and wanted to meet it, what you produce the least amount of green house gases, use the least amount of land, require the least amount of mining.

If you actually do that nuclear wins easily witch suggest there is some other process at work that makes sure this is not translated into reality.

And about the why, here's the reason.

https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti...

This is so much nonsense. Even the CIA has long said that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. This is just a myth propagated by people who hate Iran. According to Isreali politicans, Iran is '1 year a away from the bomb' since literally 1998. There has never been real evidence presented and many intelligence services have said so.

What Iran in fact needs, is civilian nuclear power. Their power generation was mostly gas/oil and they realized in the 1990s that this was a huge issue. And in fact, Iran asked France to provide that for them. They made a deal with France and France would provide all that is needed and take back all the nuclear waste to France. All of this would be totally monitored by the IAEA.

Now of course the US used their power to prevent this. Then Iran said, well I guess we have to make our own civilian nuclear program. Once they started that the US and Isreal started to publish huge amounts of PR about how Iran was building the bombs and used that as an excuse to make the whole nation suffer.

If you want to build nuclear weapons, civilian nuclear power are not really very useful, there are far better proven methods to do this.

The Earth has 150 MILLION km2 of land. We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 km2 unlivable patches of ground and still be perfectly fine.

Prioritize your fear.

That can't actually happen. And if you believe it can, you are wrong.

Please explain the mechanics of how that would happen to me! Ill wait.

The problem is dealing with the waste at that point, because it's so radiologically cold an amateur terrorist group could extract the plutonium, which is almost entirely still there.

Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.

Just pass on all mentions of it. They've got absolutely zero interest in material reality here. It's completely fantasy driven. It's not worth it. They're way too ideologically committed

2. The continuous emission of this gas poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.

3. There are many compounds more dangerous than plutonium, which we happily use in day-to-day life: botulinum, ricin, hydrazine.

4. A runaway greenhouse effect is hazardous for tens of thousands of years, if not permanent. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations.

5. Many known geological repositories of carbon-based compounds (permafrost, bogs) are unstable; given the right triggers, the captured methane might emerge and threaten future generations.

6. Nobody knows the true cost of climate change. The costs are so high that fossil fuel use can never be economic.

Yet we make fossil fuel use economic to the tune of 6 trillion dollar in subsidies per year. So please, stop using your "facts" to delay action against fossil fuel use.