Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it | Hacker News Reader

Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

136 pointsvoydik273 comments

While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear.

Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?

By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from the article?

> At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and Westinghouse spurred the industry onward by becoming loss leaders (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the race was on.18 A herd mentality soon developed as utilities lined up to take advantage of government benefits to build new reactors. So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”19

> What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?

Nuclear plants are massive, complex, tightly regulated capital projects. These require strong project management capacity. Most Western democracies have spent decades systematically outsourcing project management to various consultants (who are great for reducing cost on small projects with short timelines, but not good for major projects with a lot of schedule and budget uncertainty). Couple that with the fact that the US and France haven't built a nuclear plant in decades (France started two in the 1984-2007 gap), causing the loss of most institutional knowledge. I think these are the root cause of price and schedule escalations.

Same problems have caused cost and schedule escalations in the Site C dam and the Lower Churchill hydro project in Canada. High speed rail in California has similar issues. Similar causes have affected the Berlin airport, and the Stuttgart railway station reconstruction.

> Stuttgart railway station reconstruction

I lived there for some time so I know a lot of details about this; and I have to disagree with your statement.

This wasn't a lack of knowledge - quite the contrary. "Stuttgart 21" (the core in Stuttgart itself, not the smaller sub-projects in the surroundings) is nothing more than a prestige project and most of the local politicians and a lot of the business folks wanted it, e.g. to have some new area for buildings and to have something special in Stuttgart to attract people, tourists, plus more advertising for the city.

But they ignored _all_ warnings about the unsuitable rock layers for an underground rail station, the shortcomings of the rescue system in the tunnels itself, the too steep slope of the platforms, the decreased amount of trains, the accessibility problems, the water problems, and so on - which all became clear in very early discussions, as some folks (including railway enthusiasts, as well as scientists such as structural engineers and geologists) formed a small club against the project and also did a lot of lectures to inform the public. This all was years before it even was announced widely.

Later all of these warnings came to be true, hence the multiple cost explosions.

I agree, and think that this is one of the primary causes of nuclear failing.

Advanced economies have higher labor costs, but far lower manufacturing costs. Nuclear construction requires massive amounts of highly skilled labor, not only because of the miles upon miles of piping that require super-high precision welding that will last in extreme conditions for decades but even down to things like concrete pours.

My hypothesis on nuclear is that it only makes sense for a very very narrow window of economic advancement, where labor costs are still low, but there is still enough technological capacity to design and build a hugely complex beast of a project. But I don't have any numbers to back my hunch yet...

The US Navy has been training 20 year old kids to operate the things for almost 70 years. I was one of them. Westinghouse and GE build and refuel, and decommission the existing nuclear reactors in the fleet today.

It’s hard work, but we have the knowledge and workers to run these things and build them today. We still build nuclear reactors in the states, they’re just on submarines and aircraft carriers.

There’s a lack of political will to devote MIC dollars to power production, but it’s not like nobody knows how to do it.

Military reactors are different from civilian reactors in at least two ways: 1) military fuel would not be allowed in civilian hands, and 2) military reactors have essentially an infinite budget, and have few economic constraints.

The challenges of using military reactors in other settings go far beyond questions of "political will"

I've also heard anecdotal accounts that military reactors are still maintenance nightmares, and their lack of public nuclear accidents is less due to doctrine and more to the fact that these reactors spend their life in a classified military environment floating in international water; AKA easy to cover up

The lack of accidents is due to a lack of accidents. Part of it is training, part of it safety interlocks. There are near misses but nothing that would really scare anyone who knew how these things work.

The Russian reactors on the other hand… let’s just say a lot of those guys die of cancer.

They aren’t maintenance nightmares for technical reasons. More for regulatory reasons. Still, they always manage to get underway on time.

The unlimited budget and the fuel comes from political will so I don’t understand your point.

The economic concerns and weapons concerns may have political aspects, but the bigger part are the material differences.

Usually when people say "political will" it's about making a choice without serious other constraints. There are incredible constraints on pricing and danger that go beyond politics when it comes to military style reactors.

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all.

Sure, nuclear is CapEx heavy, with low OpEx. But storage and wind and solar have lower CapEx and OpEx. And they also scale much better, and are falling in cost, so when they need to be replaced, they will be replaced at even lower costs than their initial builds. And investing in the technology now only drives down future costs even more.

We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.

None of the advocates for nuclear seem to ever run the numbers on what it would take to actually build nuclear. They don't model the needs of the grid, they don't look at where nuclear has failed during construction and do a root cause analysis, they don't try to change specific regulations, they don't try to figure out what could actually make nuclear work in the US. Instead we get vague wishes and hand waving, and we are missing any of the hustle that would be required to actually make positive change in the world.

And I have a feeling that the reason for this lack of practical attention to detail, and this lack of this entrepreneurial hustle, if because when you start paying attention to details and the maze of action needed to get nuclear built, nuclear is not compelling compared to the alternatives.

> Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all.

There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.

Renewable energy has their problem, and the problem is that not all country are like the US, i.e. a lot of space that is unused and can be used to put solar panels, wind turbines, or make dams, without anyone complaining. If you look at the European territory, it's mostly used, there is not a square centimeter of land unused. This is a problem.

Another problem of renewable energy is storage. How do you store all that amount of power to use it when the renewable energy production (that is depended on the weather that you can't control) is not available? It's a big deal. And you will likely always need fossil fuel power station ready to operate in case of necessity.

> We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.

I don't know if you are up to date, but we have also a semiconductor shortage. Guess what solar panel are made of? Semiconductors. How do you even imagine getting the material to produce all that panels in a short time? Not only that, but solar panel alone don't do anything, since they produce DC power: you also need inverters, that are other piece of electronics. Again an enormous quantity of electronic that this day is not available. And do you talk about storage, do you think that getting lithium is much simpler? And in the context of a probable (if not already in progress) commercial war with China, where do you produce them? How many years do you take to open up a plant to make semiconductors in the US or Europe? And where do you even get the raw material?

Yes, a nuclear reactor take a lot of materials to build, but with a few reactors you can make all the energy that you need. That is overall the materials that you need to produce the same amount of power are order of magnitude lower. Also, a nuclear reactor has a greater life expectancy than other renewable sources (except hydroelectric).

> There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.

According to whom? I don't know if any carbon free grid models that say nuclear is absolutely necessary. There are some models that show that it may be cheaper to have 10%-20% nuclear generation along with other renewable generation, but I'm not sure if they have updated their models for a word where we don't have any constructible nuclear designs in the US, or accounted for current nuclear costs.

As far as shortages: 1) the current semiconductor shortage is a chip fab shortage, the semiconductor process for solar only shares the input of silicon.

That's not to say that there aren't supply chains issues, but the solar PV market is orders of magnitude larger than nuclear production capacity, and growing exponentially. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices, and the solar PV history is a history of overcoming shortages and using ever less materials to relentlessly reduce costs.

And as far as "materials" that's only part of the cost of any product, there's also labor, and also different materials have vastly different costs.

So instead of being concerned about "materials" we should be concerned with costs. And that's where nuclear has not shown any ability to compete, any ability to learn and reduce costs, or really any ability to behave like a proper and good technology. Nuclear gets more expensive the more advanced an economy we have, which is not a tech that we want to continue to use.

This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself before the nuclear plant delivers its first electron.

I am 100% in support of nuclear where it make sense. But there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-nuclear zealots. Some of this is coming from pro oil and gas groups looking to spread uncertainty and doubt to disrupt decarbonization efforts. But it is also getting picked up by a certain subset of "contrarians" that think they know better than everybody else, but are clearly not doing their research.

[1]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-...

From the article you quoted:

> In order to replace the two nuclear plants while the sun is down, the batteries would need to replicate two 1.117 GW power sources for 16 hours. The total energy storage capacity would be 39.3 GWh, after we add an extra 10% for safe measure.

Sorry, but no. This is a brittle system proposed. A 16 hour battery backup doesn't account for bad weather events like hurricanes, let alone more severe ones like the Texas power crisis.

Take a look at this diagram of power production during said Texas power crisis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

Compare the area of the solar curve at the start and end of this 11 day window to what it is in the middle. There's a huge difference between how much solar was produced between good days and bad.

Now look at the nuclear production for this same time and tell me these two can be used equally well for base load power production.

A major cause of Texas's power outage was nuclear tripping off.

Meanwhile, massive amounts of batteries are far less brittle than the single point of failure like a nuclear reactor. Same with solar. It's the difference between building one massive mainframe and having a data center. In the data center you plan for failure, plan for individual nodes to go down, and the whole system becomes incredibly reliable because of the elimination of SPOF.

Solar and batteries distributed over a wide geographic area work fantastically, and this is a primary way that Texans will plan for their own energy security in the future, when they don't want to use fossil fuel based generators.

I request a citation that it was a major cause of Texas' power outage, because looking at this graph, there is a step-down in nuclear generation on Feb 15th from 5 to 4 gw, but that's smaller than the step-downs in natural gas (-15 gw), coal (-5 gw) and wind (-5 gw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

I believe those numbers are correct. Perhaps "major" is a subjective position, but an unexpected drop of 20% is quite major, IMHO.

Whereas wind was expected to drop in output, because wind is intermittent, and any primarily renewables based grid will have large overages of generation capacity to account for that. (Just as we currently have large overages in capacity for traditional generators).

As expected, the pro-nuclear comment is cherry-picking the details of the argument to make a poor attempt at a rebuttal. Did you miss the part where the proposed system was almost half the cost of the nuclear plant? That leaves quite a bit of money left over to address the long tail risks. A few nat gas peaker plants that rarely if ever get run could be more than sufficient. Maybe include a carbon capture system if you are so inclined. I am more than happy to entertain counter arguments, but please make a more comprehensive evaluation of the original argument before responding.

Nuclear is crazy expensive. Our current renewable technologies, at current prices are capable of providing solutions that in aggregate largely deliver the generation profile of what nuclear can provide at a cheaper cost. This is true for most regions of the world with the exception of the extreme latitudes. And renewables for the most part are continuing to get cheaper, whereas nuclear for the most part has only gotten more expensive. Also, the renewable solution, by incorporating multiple technologies will have greater reliability than the single point of failure that is the nuclear solution. And the renewable solutions can be built out in a few years, very likely paying for themselves before the nuclear solution is even producing its first electron. This is an issue that the pro-nuclear likes to ignore entirely because it is so damning. If you were a free market energy investor, would you rather invest in a capital project that pays for itself in 7-8 years, or a project that doesn't even start making revenue until 10+ years down the road, and has enormous amounts of uncertainty around ongoing maintenance costs to the point where it is not even certain the project would produce enough revenue to offset those? There is a reason renewable projects are getting built left and right, and nuclear projects are few and far between. It is because investors and project developers are running the numbers, and they know which technologies will make them money and which ones won't.

These are all essentially facts. They should be your starting point when attempting to make a pro-nuclear argument. If you fail to address these facts in your counter argument, you will not be taken seriously.

The main problem right now, is that when an energy developer goes to build a project, they are not seeking to build a robust renewable solution that mimics the generation profile of a nuclear plant, they are incentivized to build for the thinnest slice of the generation market as possible to keep costs down. There is some movement in the direction of these more robust renewable projects, we are starting to see more and more solar and wind projects with on-site storage for example. But what we really need is utilities and their regulators to step up and start shaping the energy market to incentivize these more robust renewable packages. Until then we will continue to see incidents like the Texas outage. And FWIW, nuclear will need a fairly large helping hand from those same regulators as well if it is to every be viable, so the need for regulatory changes isn't unique to renewables.

But part of the point of the article is that nuclear is unnecessarily expensive. And I would guess if we had put as many resources into R&D for nuclear fission as we had into wind and solar, nuclear would be a lot more economical today.

Nuclear has had many decades of research.

> But there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-nuclear zealots

It's certainly not true of all renewable advocates, but such anti-nuclear zealots do exist, and cause resistance to nuclear. Although I don't think environmentalists and renewables advocares are the only source of resistance, and cold war fear of all things nuclear/atomic/radioactive also shares some blame.

> And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build.

Also other form of renewable are expensive. Unfortunately we are not so good at doing calculation on large scale. Just because installing a few solar panels is cheap, it doesn't mean that if we start installing a lot of them will maintain the same price.

Especially these days there is a shortage (they said due to COVID, but it's obvious that we are in a commercial war with China) of electronic components and semiconductors, guess what solar panels are made of? Where do you produce them, of course you can't rely on importing them from China, because China in a couple of years will not sell you anything, but if you start producing them in the US good luck making them cheap. And where do you even get the raw materials to start with?

Sure, a nuclear reactor does use a lot of materials, but are mostly steel and concrete, something that is produced in every industrialized country.

Do we even talk about energy storage? How do we realize that? Batteries? Lithium ones, good luck finding them at a cheap price.

Overall nuclear power is cheap, is just that we focus on the initial price that is obviously high and don't think that all the cost of transitioning to renewable energy added up are even higher. I don't say that a private investor will ever construct a nuclear power plant, the upfront cost is too high, but it's something that a government should build.

Nuclear energy stays a bad fit when you factor in that it needs to combine:

- sustained political will and capital

- high morale (contractors and controllers need to not collude to hide flaws/cut corners/inflate prices)

- excelent design and on par execution

- excelent risk assesment and long term vision

- stable geopolitical situation

No country currently has a combination of all the above, all the nuclear plants we build are basically a failure waiting to happen. e.g. France has a set of plants that should have been decommissioned and replaced long ago, yet it didn’t due to the first point. Japan hit the second and fourth point. We’re seeing Ukraine hit by the last. The US could be the only country that fails at less than half the point.

It fails at less than half the points? I’ll give you geopolitcal stability, but all the other things suck too.

The US has all of those things for nuclear submarines.

That model works because there is no question of scale or mass production, no external client, not enough civilians involved to put a strong political aspect on it, so virtually no external pressure to do anything about it.

Basically we’d need volunteer based self-sustained communities living in the middle of nowhere to replicate that in a non military setting.

The US nuclear naval fleet isn’t a set of islands. The fuel must be mined and delivered.

The nuclear reactor have to be maintained and kept in dry dock, sometimes for years on end.

Nobody is afraid of aircraft carriers, even though they are powered by nuclear reactors.

There aren’t that many naval submarine bases, and they’re not particularly close to most of the population.

Unfortunately, nuclear reactors need transmission lines to population centers, and we can’t just concentrate reactors into less than a dozen massive stations for the entire country.

Aircraft carriers also have nuclear reactors - and they are much less discreet than submarines.

The alternative is not fossil fuels, that's arguing a strawman, it is renewables.

Good. Are you willing to renounce to your current lifestyle? Because renewable energy alone can't, even considering the most optimistic prediction, and even ignoring costs and production scale problem, substitute fossil fuels. That means that we need to reduce the amount of energy that we use, if we don't want to substitute fossil fuel with nuclear, so are you willing to do so?

I think that nuclear is the best compromise, the argument that it costs a lot of money, it doesn't make sense, I live in Europe and we are losing billions of euros each day, most of energy intensive companies have shut down, they are not producing, because energy cost is 10 times higher than usual, there are companies that got millions euros energy bill, they go bankrupt. Now how many nuclear reactors would you have built with this amount of money that is lost every day?

Now let's talk about renewable energy, the same renewable energy that in 50 years that we talk about didn't do mostly anything to reduce the dependency from Russian gas. To the point that the inevitable happened, the thing that everyone knew will someday happen but didn't want to admit that there was that possibility...

A future of renewables means a future of energy abundance, of electricity far far cheaper than it is today.

A future with nuclear means extremely pricy electricity. Now, as California shows, high electricity prices don't spell doom for the economy, it means that people simply use electricity far more effectively. So if we had the logistical capability to build expensive nuclear, it wouldn't spell the end of our lifestyles, but it would be a bit harder and require that we shift around a bit how we do it.

Something has to cover renewable’s shortfalls when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

In Texas and Germany now, it has shown that over reliance on them have led to more instability in the grid, leading to higher fossil fuels use.

Basically you can’t really have renewables without nuclear to back it. They’re a package deal. I don’t know where this renewable purity comes from, but it’s not helpful.

> B. Dealing With Variability and Stability

> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage [40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Yes, it’s fairly obvious that one would have to oversize capacity, etc. to get to renewable purity.

But note this is all hand-wavy future talk, whereas in the here and now, the over reliance has led to higher fossil fuel use.

It’s like language design, where language features could be thought of free with a ‘sufficiently smart compiler’.

In theory, yes 100% renewable is possible. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice… not so much.

abandoning (or at least ignoring) an energy dense and emission free energy source as nuclear is a setup for failure, as has already been seen twice in the past couple years.

> But note this is all hand-wavy future talk, whereas in the here and now, the over reliance has led to higher fossil fuel use.

I don't see how this claim could make any sense. Are you saying that if we didn't have renewables, we'd be using less fossil fuels? How could that be? In the US, nuclear construction flatlined long before wind and solar came along. Were renewables not coming on now, the alternative would be fossil fuels, and in particular natural gas. Elsewhere, coal would have been the alternative.

Perhaps you're saying that IF CO2 charges were added, nuclear would have been favored. But with CO2 charges, renewables are also favored, and likely dominate at a lower CO2 charge level than would be required for nuclear. Getting the last bit of generation fully defossilized on a nuclear grid would require truly enormous CO2 taxes, perhaps as much as $1000/tonne.

It’s not a straw man, it’s the whole point, and no one is saying not to push as hard as possible on renewables too. Porque no los dos? The best part of nuclear is that it slots in for coal as base load with no other changes. If we can do that until solar+wind+storage catch up we can get to net zero faster.

"Nuclear" and "faster" don't belong in the same sentence. Renewables can be brought online, and start displacing CO2 emissions, far faster than nuclear can. Any expenditure on new nuclear is a move away from the optimal path to reducing CO2 emission.

Renewable sources, yes. But not storage, and it’s that base load where nuclear can help.

Storage can be brought on very quickly as well. And more importantly, we don't need storage for renewables to displace CO2 right now.

As long as we have fossil fuel power plants, adding nuclear plants makes it possible to close them.

That makes them alternatives!

We need to stop looking at coal/gas, etc. as fuel. They're not. They are part of an atmosphere/carbon-sink battery.

When we get energy from carbon emitting sources we're discharging the atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. Eventually we're going to have to charge it again, and to do so it will take substantially more energy than we got from discharging it.

Beyond CO2, coal in particular produces a large amount of radioactive and particulate atmospheric pollution. We expect nuclear to capture most of its externalities but we ignore those of most other ways we obtain energy.

Yes we don't factor the long term effects because we don't know what might happen in a thousand years when some madman digs out our nuclear waste to do some madman stuff for example.

This is not about nuclear vs. fossil. Both are from the past. It is nuclear vs. fast improving and cheap technologies around renewable energy sources. It loses that battle and will keep on losing it because everything around renewables is getting better and cheaper while everything around nuclear is getting more and more expensive and takes much longer than expected.

It's time to face the future.

You know that we can launch nuclear waste into space right? The thing that's infinitely large. As for renewables the issue is scale and renewables have limitations that investments in fusion and existing fission do not.

> You know that we can launch nuclear waste into space right?

Sure we can. That's why it's so popular eh?

> As for renewables the issue is scale and renewables have limitations

What "scale" is supposed to be the problem there? https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/wind-power-in-europe-...

And yeah...investment into fusion is limitless. The results however are quite disappointing. Meanwhile investments into renewables actually do something. They produce actual products which actually produce energy. In the real world. And they even get better. Imagine that.

Fundamentally, nuclear needs to be subsidized, just like other green energy projects.

> What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?

There is no scientific failure but economic war by the US; on people, parties, presidents.

- https://cyprus-mail.com/2015/06/24/us-agency-spied-on-french... - The CIA files on France 1981-2010: In the secret of the presidents - https://www.amazon.com/Dans-Secret-Presidents-Dossiers-1981-... - CIA files on France 1958-1981 - https://livre.fnac.com/a2917645/Vincent-Nouzille-Les-dossier...

I think blaming it on a single cause is naive. The culture war is probably one of several contributing factors. And it synergized with other problems. For example resistance to nuclear results in stricter regulation, which results in higher costs.

Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor.

(Neither Three Mile Island [0] nor Chernobyl [1] would have been so disastrous had it not been for cascading sequences of human error.)

Expecting nominal performance by people or machinery is ... unwise; as Admiral Rickover famously said, "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect."

All that adds to costs.

Source: Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-...

[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs

Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible. (Whether those designs can support the requirements for military use, which are quite different from those for civilian power generation, is a different question.)

That said, civilian nuclear power, at least in the US, was never operated with the same attention to detail and the same intolerance for f[oul]ups as Navy nuclear power; the kinds of mistakes that operators made at TMI (don't even start about Chernobyl, that's a whole other level of insanity) would have gotten Navy nuclear trainees kicked out of the program long before they were allowed to do anything with an actual reactor. (When I was an Engineering Duty Officer working at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, I saw a reactor officer get fired for an administrative error that probably would not even have been on the radar in a civilian plant.) So that can't be a significant part of the explanation of why civilian nuclear power is so costly in the US.

The high cost of civilian nuclear power in the US has always been primarily due to politics: things like unreasonable waste storage requirements imposed by the government (you don't need to store waste for 10,000 years if you reprocess it, like every other nuclear energy using country does) and endless lawsuits delaying plant construction being allowed to proceed even though they were based on no valid technical data whatever.

> Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible.

That would be excellent — although color me doubtful; people always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up ....

> people always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up

That's why the passive safety features I referred to don't depend on people at all; they depend on the laws of physics, which are certainly more reliable than people. :-)

I assume people are still building [those things](edit: these new reactors), and I also bet they require some regular amount of maintenance.

> I assume people are still building those things

If you mean older reactor designs without the passive safety features I mentioned, I don't think the US is building much of anything.

> and I also bet they require some regular amount of maintenance.

Nuclear reactors of course require regular maintenance, like any large industrial plant, but those costs alone are not a significant impact. To the extent there are increased maintenance costs for nuclear, they are more than offset by lower fuel costs.

Operating costs in general for nuclear reactors are a significantly smaller fraction of total life cycle costs than for fossil fuels. The largest ongoing cost for a nuclear plant is usually the amortization of the initial capital investment, which is larger for nuclear because the plant has extra requirements like secondary containment and radiation shielding that aren't present in fossil fuel plants.

>> I assume people are still building those things

> If you mean older reactor designs without the passive safety features I mentioned, I don't think the US is building much of anything.

No, I mean the new ones you mention, people will make mistakes building the new ones, including the failsafes, regardless of the physics.

> Nuclear reactors of course require regular maintenance, like any large industrial plant, but those costs alone are not a significant impact.

It's not the cost I'm responding to, but more the idea that human error will be entirely removed. People will be responsible for that maintenance, they will screw it up.

> people will make mistakes building the new ones, including the failsafes

Mistakes during building can be caught and corrected by appropriate quality assurance procedures before the plant is put into operation. That is standard procedure on any construction job. That's very different from human error during the actual operation of the plant.

> People will be responsible for that maintenance, they will screw it up.

And such mistakes can also be caught and corrected by appropriate checking procedures before they cause a problem in actual operation. That is standard procedure for maintenance on any industrial plant.

> the idea that human error will be entirely removed

Nobody is claiming that human error can be entirely removed. But it is certainly possible to design systems so that the unavoidable human errors can be caught and corrected before they cause more serious problems.

Digressing, perhaps… do you know anything about why the passive designs weren't built? There are something like 500 nuclear reactors, of which approximately zero use entirely passive safety features. Not 250, not even 50.

> do you know anything about why the passive designs weren't built?

Because they're too recent. By the time these designs were developed, the nuclear industry in the US was basically dead, so there has been no real opportunity for them to be commercially deployed.

I seem to recall reading about them in the earlyish nineties. Specifically a fine article about a Swedish gravity-based design, which used electric power to keep things running and many, many failures should result in things being pulled down by gravity and failing safely.

Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas.

Yet all these materials are cheap.

The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 milligrams/kg: http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl...

The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895

Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19680020487), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or 3 times as deadly as the chemical warfare agent sarin. A commercial power reactor of 1000 MWe output can have an inventory of tens of kilograms of strontium 90 in the core [1] along with even more acutely dangerous shorter-lived fission products.

Nuclear reactors are safe because of careful defense-in-depth in their engineering and operation. They need deeper, more stringent safety systems than steel plants or ammonia plants because they contain substances much more toxic than those found in steel plants or ammonia plants. You also see extreme safety practices in facilities that handle non-radioactive poisons, if the poisons are potent enough:

"Inside Fort Botox"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-fo...

[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6822946 See table 2.2 "Fission product inventories"

This is an excellent explanation and it captures why the regulation around nuclear energy is so strict.

Thanks for this insight and explanation.

Add semiconductor foundries. They have tons of nasty materials there. Enough to make inhabitants of the next bigger city not alive anymore.

In all those cases if something goes wrong workers can be sent in afterwards to rebuild things. If something goes seriously wrong in a nuclear power plant the owner is out one nuclear power plant.

> Yet all these materials are cheap.

Yes, in large part because the safeguards are not nearly as strong. (And a lot of the rest is because the safeguards impede research on how to make nuclear cheaper.)

Arguable, but I won't. The strength of the safeguards is not the problem.

The surface problem is that the rules keep changing. That's part of the expense: repeated redesign, over and over.

The underlying problem that causes that, is that western societies do not want nuclear power. More: they actively dislike it.

It's all academic now anyway, at least as far as stationary electric power generation is concerned. PV power and storage is far cheaper, and the growth of the gap is accelerating.

Yeah, I don't know how to convince myself that it will ever be truly safe.

It isn't if it fails, it is when it fails.

Seems highly risky compared to simpler alternatives.

> Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

I imagine there's tons of stuff you're not allowed to talk about, but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that? I would love to learn more about your career, what you learned, saw, etc. etc. Thanks!

> I imagine there's tons of stuff you're not allowed to talk about

Yep.

> but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that?

Nope.

But thanks for asking — I appreciate the interest!

haha, thanks.

Please do know that if you ever decide to write a book, or a blog, or a YT series, or honestly anything at all I'm very sure you'd have a huge audience!

I wonder what you think of these

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

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

Not competitive.

The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well...

The French futures market is almost at 2000 Euros per MWh for the next two quarters [1]. You'd think the market is not anticipating those nuclear plants are coming back online any time soon.

Can we not talk about this as a success story please?

[1] https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...

Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators [1] is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get better deals on input materials by guaranteeing a stable demand.

France's nuclear program in the 70s was much more effective than current nuclear projects because of that economy of scale. They build ~50 reactors of only a few types. The US is similar: many of its plants built in the late 1960 and 1970s delivered power at $2-3 billon USD per GW (adjusted for inflation), and some of them under $2 billion per GW. And these aren't equal to other forms of generation: nuclear power's capacity factor is among the highest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...

> Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get better deals on input materials by guaranteeing a stable demand.

Unintuitively though, this is incorrect - both for France[1] and the US[2]. Building subsequent versions of the same reactor design increases the cost - instead of it staying the same or going down.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

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

Not coincidentally, that study only decided on 1976 for its analysis. If I order 6 plants of the same design, then drop the next batch down to 4 plants for the next run, then 2 plants for the third run, then I should expect the cost to go up as scale goes down.

Here's a publication that points this out. In fact, it calls out the article you linked specifically: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

See that cluster in the late 60s and early 70s: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...

That's the benefits of scale. The slower pace of construction after that is accompanied by higher costs.

I have worked on large infrastructure projects and this doesn't surprise me at all.

* Repeat projects bring a new set of biases. People see it as an opportunity to "get it right this time".

* People are excited about the new project (more bias).

* The presence of expertise and experience will make contractors want to charge more rather than less.

* New contractors may bid for the project at a low price but lack that hard won experience.

* Efficient manufacturing is a difficult and expensive field in its own right. It will be more complex than building the initial run. And the scale of production may never justify that.

* Many contractors will bring expertise and experience from other fields. But you will also compete for their time with other projects. The guys doing the massive civils contract are sought after by the tunnelling project or the roads project.

* Civil engineering is very dependant on the site and can be very expensive even if it is technically trivial.

* You work in an economy with a high cost of living. Salaries grow.

Saw this interesting chart recently on the French case. Shows generally decreasing costs between first to last of a generation but then stepwise cost increases when moving to the next generation.

https://twitter.com/autommen/status/1559097869940006916?s=21...

From the article:

So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”

Plants built in the 1960s and 1970s did exceptionally well on a cost to energy ratio. They were also built in greater numbers than in the 1980s and onwards: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...

The source given for that sentence is: Steve Isser, Electricity Restructuring in the United States: Markets and Policy from the 1978 Energy Act to the Present. So whatever that sentence is talking about, it happened after the period of rapid construction and cheap costs.

France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.

Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.

It's not a question of enough cooling water. It's a problem of how much the plant is allowed to heat the river. Because apparently keeping a stretch of river below 28*C is more important than climate change.

Not killing all the fish in a river is also generally something that should be aimed for, since that can have knock on effects on ecosystems. We’d rather not find out what happens and accidentally instigate some kind of environmental disaster that might lead to farm failures or something unexpected.

The limit on the temperature is as low as 26C or 79F. It's not like the river is boiling. Furthermore this heat dissipates downstream, it's not affecting the entire waterway. This heat has the potential to harm fish in a segment of a few rivers. By comparison, throttling carbon-free energy production has the certain impact of producing more greenhouse gases, which will contribute to global climate change. I seriously don't see how someone makes this kind of tradeoff - it's like the same mentality that held up a solar farm to relocate tortoises.

* many rivers have some kind of migratory fish integral to ecosystems in both the river and whatever the outlet is, so you can’t just mark rivers as discrete segments and say the effect is isolated

* the oceans haven’t warmed by all that much and we are already seeing the impacts, it’s not really that much of a stretch to say rivers would see similar effects

* given humanity’s track record with the question “how bad could this be?” and unintended consequences, erring on the side of caution seems warranted. In particular, humanity has a bad track record with river management

Remember, though, the consequence of shutting the reactors down is an increase in global climate change. The consequence of running the reactors are increased river temperatures in a handful of rivers - which as you point out are also impacted by climate change!

They are by building power plants without cooling towers. Problem is not enough water, but because water discharged back to river is too hot.

I always liked simple answers to comokex questions like, e.g, nuclear power plant cooling. Especially when they come with pre defined scape goats.

It's not a complex question, and river temperature is not a scapegoat. It's the the explicit reason why the plants aren't operating at full capacity: https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-power-production-curtailed-....

That's a stretch considering how many of them are out currently. Things either work or they don't. There are always growing pains, but nuclear has had way over 50 years and it hasn't worked.

I listened to parts of the recent John Carmack interview, and he touched on nuclear and it was the first time I heard somebody pro nuclear say something sensible on the topic. He said, based on everything he knows, it shouldn't be as expensive as it is and there just needs to be someone like Musk with SpaceX to make a business case. I neither agree not disagree because I don't know, but at least the faith in it is based on something, it acknowledges it doesn't work right now, but here is what needs to happen. All the rest are pretty much like this article, nuclear is the only option because it is, and that's it, move along. That doesn't cut it.

Nuclear works and has worked just fine where and when there has been a sane government/regulatory environment.

Political incompetency should really be baked in any discussion about pushing more nuclear.

You can have miracle new reactor designs, but do you have a society that matches it and will properly manage the technology for the next 50 years ?

You could have stopped after the word "discussion".

I’m pretty optimistic a bout a lot of other things. I think political issues can be overcome, and we can achieve pretty incredible things on case by case basis, as long as it’s not expected to be a permanent state.

Flying rockets requires a lot, and we can manage it. But also the earth won’t be a burning hell if tomorrow some new guy comes in and decides to scrap all human flight plans.

Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit:

1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels

2. nuclear plants for base load power

and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces.

Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...

The climate efforts of the past 20 years refute both of these claims decisively.

First, carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not been effective. And there are massive barriers to enacting them, because there is no constituency that advocates for them. The progress we have made with reducing emissions has been through industrial policy of various sorts, rather than through single taxes. For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong. And I think that the history of carbon taxes has shown them to be this obvious and unfortunately wrong solution.

Similarly, baseload, or more properly firm energy supply, can come from all sorts of carbon free sources. From storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades. We have a rich portfolio of solutions, and most of them are reducing in cost quickly. However nuclear is not reducing in cost, and it's not clear that it will ever be able to compete again. Attach 12 hours of storage to a solar array and you'll get a "baseload" source, and it will be cheaper than new nuclear.

> carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not been effective

You're arguing that fuel use is inelastic. This is obviously false, and there's plenty of evidence of that. When gas is cheap, people buy gas guzzlers. When gas is expensive, they buy gas sippers. The latest evidence is the news stories about people cutting back when gas prices spiked a couple months ago.

If the carbon tax had no effect, then the tax wasn't large enough. There is most definitely a tax level where you are going to reduce your driving, a tax level where you will buy a more efficient car, and a tax level where you will get an EV.

> can come ... who knows what will be developed

Refuting today's reality with "who knows what will be developed" is not a compelling argument.

Let's take hydro:

1. no more hydro dams will be built because they ruin the rivers

2. there aren't many good sites for hydro dams anyway

3. current hydro dams are always being targeted for destruction by environmentalists. In Washington State, a hydro dam was demolished recently for that reason.

4. droughts are drying up the hydro power in the American west and even in Norway.

The cost of nuclear is the cost of endless lawsuits. Government can clear that away with the legislative wand.

> Attach 12 hours of storage to a solar array

I encourage you to do that for your house. Let us know how it works out.

At least in countries like here in Finland, you get almost no energy from solar panels during winter months. 12 hours of storage to a solar array is not going to work at least here.

Finland is one of the worst places in the world for renewables. This means that any industry using significant amounts of energy is going to move away from Finland, once fossil fuels are no longer used.

The viability of renewables depends more on population density than location. There are always some natural processes you can take advantage of to generate power. And if the density is low enough, like in Finland but probably not in the US, existing hydro should be enough to cover most energy storage needs.

Most of the electricity in Finland is not produced by using fossil fuels. For example during year 2020 14 % of the electricity in Finland was produced by fossil fuels.

I was talking about energy intensive industries, not electricity production. If Finland has to compete with other countries that have cheap renewables, it will lose these industries. As an example of something like that today, look at primary aluminum production.

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

There are 31 countries on that list, from China to Venezuela. Finland is nowhere on there.

In the all-electric economy of the future, every energy intensive manufacturing activity will start to look like aluminum production.

Here is what I suggested in my comment:

> storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades

With storage on solar thrown in as only one option at the end. And though it will probably be a dominant solution because it will be by far the cheapest most locations, it won't work everywhere. So look to other tech.

I desperately hope Olkiluoto comes online soon, but it's also a pretty clear indication that nuclear is not a spectacular option for Finland either. But it may be your best option!

At least battery storage seems to be unrealistic solution. The needed amount of energy storage for several months is enormous and in addition to that problem, batteries tend to self-discharge.

Geothermal energy and hydro storage are not without problems either. I am not sure about ammonia storage, but it would be interesting to see some calculations about the feasibility of storing so much energy by using hydro or ammonia.

Thanks to the local green party we are behind schedule in nuclear energy. They have dragged the process by years and also in practice forced us to have a new reactor type. In reality much better solution would have been at least two smaller and more traditional reactors (which would provide also more redundancy) than more experimental reactor which is also uncomfortably large. However the older nuclear reactors we have, have worked pretty well and are still producing energy cheaply and reliably unlike renewal energy.

I don't understand how the Green Party could have influenced the choice of using France's EPR versus other tech. Areva designed the large EPR because larger reactors are supposed to be more cost effective than smaller reactors.

How has the Green Party dragged on the process of construction? What delays did they cause? I ask because I don't know the specific causes of all the delays, even the latest since it was first powered on. It's hard to get this info, which makes me suspicious that it's actually a third party causing the delay, because then those doing the building would be able to clearly state a great reason for the delay. Instead we are mostly left guessing st what is going on with construction.

Green party managed to stop the process of getting new reactors many times with different political tricks. And when they finally reluctantly agreed to build more nuclear energy, they demanded that only one (or was it two, I cannot remember the exact details anymore) reactor should be build. And because of this limitation on the number of new reactors, we then needed to have a higher power reactor instead of several lower power reactors.

And because of the foot dragging by greens the other new reactor project failed. They managed to slow the process long enough that the German reactor was of the table (thanks to the foolish politics of Merkel in Germany) and then only Russian reactor was available. And after Russia started war on Ukraine that Russian reactor project was canceled.

Can't (isn't?) Finland's grid be connected to places where there is solar?

Perhaps in theory, although transmission losses would be large. But I wouldn't want to be on the mercy of distant countries, perhaps on different continent, for getting energy, especially during winter. And as there are other possibilities than solar energy, I don't see why to go for solar energy instead of the other alternatives.

I am not familiar with the winder conditions in Southern Europe. Is there enough sunlight during winter that it would be feasible to provide a lot of solar energy during wintertime - not just for local use, but to northern Europe as well? It might be that even there is too little sunlight and the solar power would have to come from different continent.

Indeed; though I thought EU had a lot of inter-country grid connections (perhaps more as backups). The distances don't seem outrageous compared to other grids.

Edit: looks like Finland does indeed have international grid connections and imports about 20% of its electricity

It's literally natural market forces that are "killing" nuclear energy. It's simply too expensive compared to modern, emission-free alternatives.

Have you solved the problem of intermittent power production by solar and wind energy and included the costs of it to the calculation? It seems to me that the solar and wind energy are causing problem in the energy market with their unreliable production and not paying the cost of solving this problem.

Market forces heavily influenced by politics, so not "literally".

Political considerations push nuclear more than the market by itself would. There has not been a single merchant nuclear power plant (that sells into a competitive power market) built anywhere in the world.

That is an opinion piece from a conservative talking head. Maybe try linking to primary sources next time.

Just do the first one. No need to force the issue. If nuclear is amazing as claimed it will be adopted. If the claims are the same empty ones we've heard for 70 years then we'll get some electrolyzers and gas turbines running green ammonia

Building nuclear plants requires that the government remove legal and regulatory hurdles that stifle them, like endless lawsuits.

How about we do that after we do the same for trains, and LEVs and bikeways and local insulation regulation and the local bans on solar and wind facilities and the property taxes that are 1000x for a solar plant compared to a coal plant and the taxes on rooftop solar and the free security for nuclear and the government funded price guarantees for nuclear and the free insurance for nuclear in the form of an upper limit for liability.

Thank you. This is a dirt simple and obvious track that would create a wealth of jobs and potential for everyone. It's the ultimate pro-humanity solution to our concerns around energy/pollution.

Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other.

Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create.

The other source is entrenched players in the power industry hate nuclear power because it works, and can credibly produce post scarcity levels of power production.

It is unfortunate that the green energy movement has been lied to and co-opted against this genuinely fantastic energy source.

> Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other.

Is it fearmongering when incidents actually happened and right now we have a country that could potentially have a reactor get destroyed by act of war ?

You seem to focus purely on the technical part, and swiping away the margin for human error, unpredicted issues, political incompetence, and straight hostility. Those are also part of the discussion.

Nuclear power is not without risk. Those risks are far more attractive compared to the risks of not using it.

Nuclear power is far simpler than people would intuitively believe. The nuclear reactor boils water at scale, the steam spins an electric generator via a steam turbine. The steam plant side of things is well understood technology, almost 170 years old at this point, nuclear power itself is about 70 years old. As technologies go, it's incredibly simple, and thus far less prone to error.

It is fearmongering to suggest or imply that there's catastrophe right around the corner of every nuclear reactor. This is just not so. It's not possible to have the kinds of nuclear disasters people are afraid of. Fatalities from nuclear power measure around 100 per thousand terawatt hours, far lower than any other power production source by orders of magnitude.

There is simply no evidence that nuclear power is dangerous, and a lot of evidence to suggest it is the safest, most effective power source we have created.

> There is simply no evidence that nuclear power is dangerous

Wait, what? You even started your own reply with “Nuclear power is not without risk.”

> a lot of evidence to suggest it is the safest, most effective power source we have created.

A lot of evidence also suggest the opposite. Again, you took the time to explain how technically nuclear was simple, without engaging with the context it is used in.

PS: Fatalities per thousand terawatt hours is an interesting metric, except it completely ignores non lethal effects (cancers can be survived, and might also not be attributed to exposure officially, same way low dose exposure don’t have obvious consequences that feed the numbers), and environmental issues that don’t lead to standard air pollution, like soil and water contamination for instance. Basically that’s looks like a feel good number to discredit coal, but isn’t that relevant in any other context.

Its a full footprint measurement. Coal miner deaths for instance count against it. A study attempted to aggregate fatalities from atmospheric effects from emissions.

It does make nuclear look particularly good, but this is also because it is so energy dense that effort is efficiently allocated. It makes everything except oil and coal look good on a chart.

Most of the deaths attributed to nuclear are more steam plant accidents that also happen in coal plants. Operators are far more likely to die from steam, rotating equipment, or hydraulics than radiation doses. But the energy density of nuclear more efficiently allocates fatalities.

Nuclear power is not dangerous in the same sense that parachuting or commercial flight is not dangerous. You are exposing yourself to lethal forces, but with proper procedures, engineering, and training these activities are safe, even at scale.

> Its a full footprint measurement.

Nope, I was interested and looked at a few publications compiling it, and as its name says it only takes directly attributed deaths into account. Albeit it will count air pollution and particles from coal operation as leading to deaths. An example of that: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

Of course that number also relies on governments providing the stats, and no gov wants to give accurate numbers on what’s happening with nuclear waste for instance, or water pollution. Even now the JP gov. is in half denial as it would be a further economical catastrophe to fully own it.

A way better number would be the maintenance, healthcare and environmental cost per energy produced, which would put nuclear way behind anything but fossil energy.

Wind and solar numbers should also include amortization for deaths during power outages and deaths caused by peaker plants.

To me that whole notion of “# of deaths by xxxx” is starting to look so absurd. Would we compare fry pans by looking at the number of death per meals cooked ? Even going for a pure lead sprinkled with Teflon flakes pan wouldn’t give us any interesting number by that metrics, and I feel energy production is basically the same.

There needs to be more granularity than “death”, and the numbers need to come from somewhere else than the government also involved in running the plants.

Nuclear had decades to become affordable, safer and sustainable. Instead plants have remained hugely expensive and slow to commission, intrinsically safe reactors are still a pipe dream, the environmental impact of building plants and mining and refining uranium is still large when only 1% of it is used, thorium reactors are a rarity and there is only one dependable, permanent waste depot in operation.

Economics is nuclear's enemy, not environmentalists. Solving the energy storage issue is a hell of a lot easier than solving all the above. The greenies got it right, the future is in renewable sources.

I'm sorry but let me just drop this reality check here real quick:

Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades.

Everytime you listen to environmentalists talk you'd think we're already there, that countries are already covered with batteries for long term energy conservation, that a continental-wide energy grid has already been deployed (or will in the incoming week) so Finland can get electricity from solar pannels in Spain, that solar panels or wind turbines are great for our sovereignity when they're being produced in China, that they are infallible ecologically when they require rare materials and aren't systematically recycled.

No, green energy is not there yet, and it definitely won't before quite a bit of time. People failing to realize that and fighting teeth and nails against nuclear are gonna cause our demise if they keep at it.

> Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France

This is outright false. Look at any current data on the cost of running nuclear power. These plants are being shut down en-mass because they are too expensive to operate. I live in Iowa. The nuclear plant here was shut down early because buying out the rest of the contract and switching to other sources was cheaper than leaving the plant up and running. Nuclear proponents completely ignore the economic realities of these systems.

https://www.pveurope.eu/markets/energy-policy-fairy-tale-che...

"Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades."

Its ability to supply France in the past is irrelevant to its ability to power global demand in future. The fuel is too limited and the technology too immature to turn this around. Nuclear is uneconomical as it is, fancy future designs even more so, if they ever arrive on scale. Nuclear has a limited future.

The Germany talking point is deliberately misleading. It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight. But it could reasonably be expected to predict the serious consequences of runaway global warming. The risk of the former was lower than the risk of the latter and while it was unlucky, it was a reasonable bet as a good global citizen that's done more than almost any country in trying to address a problem that affects literally everyone. So you don't get to knock it for doing what most countries weren't brave enough to even try.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail. No serious environmentalist said green energy is already there. They have been arguing for decades for more R&D, expansion of sustainable power infrastructure, local jobs for installers etc. We should have listened. And you might have heard them if lazy, right wing, straw man talking points weren't drowning them out.

I'm sorry but that's just a quick reality check for you.

> Nuclear has a limited future.

Nuclear power is such a dead end China plans to build a hundred of them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli.... Russia, over 20 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil.... Japan, probably concerned about what's brewing over the Japanese sea, is going back at it as well https://www.ft.com/content/b380cb74-7b2e-493f-be99-281bd0dd4..., despite Fukushima's disaster.

> It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight

Except maybe for the war in Dombas plaging us since 2014?

> No one credible called renewables the holy grail.

You are correct.

They're building new coal plants as well, does that mean coal is also the way of the future, or maybe just a stopgap?

Germany has been working on the demand side so that growth is decoupled from carbon. This is the hard problem and will take decades to achieve. So even if it didn't predict a Russian invasion, the international response and Russia's counter, it made a reasonable bet and deserves credit, even if the dice came up short.

It will be an uncomfortable winter, and tragically some old people might even die. But not more than coal power kills with respiratory problems in the short term. And heatwaves, floods, hurricanes and resource wars kill in the long term.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail, not in their current form. But they're on the right path.

tell that to france and their inability to generate power with many reactors because either the rivers are dry or too hot. How is that a sustainable solution

Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is:

> After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.

And also...

> Since 2000, production losses due to high river temperatures and low river flows have represented an average of 0.3% of annual production. However, half of EDF’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic, just as Europe faces an energy crunch following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So, in essence the inability to use the water appears to be a regulatory/timing issue, not a technical one, as far as I can gather.

While I wouldn't advocate for harming wildlife, I'd say the answer to your question is "locate nuclear plant developments in areas that will have the least impact on wildlife (or, where wildlife can easily be relocated and protected from potential harm)."

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...

... as if the alternative energy solutions don't harm wildlife (including solar and wind). Is this again an example of expecting nuclear to mitigate its externalities while ignoring them for everything else?

This is a very important point. The externalities of nuclear are actually containable because they are so small. Hundreds of kilos of waste product compared to billions in spent fuel products.

The heavy industry footprints of logistics to create the plant and equipment also are more efficient.

How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to produce to generate a nuclear reactor’s worth of power? How expensive would that process be comparatively? These factors weigh heavily in nuclear power’s favor because it is so energy dense.

> How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to produce to generate a nuclear reactor’s worth of power? How expensive would that process be comparatively? These factors weigh heavily in nuclear power’s favor because it is so energy dense.

And yet literally every single for-profit energy production company in the world is heavily investing in renewables and avoiding nuclear despite government incentives and subsidies for nuclear. Surely if the cost of nuclear was worth while, the folks looking to maximize profits would be investing more in these technologies. Economic reality doesn't support nuclear power. It's unfortunate that the people pushing for nuclear power are also the people who generally push for private ownership of everything, because public ownership and investment is the only time we see anything close to successful nuclear programs.

Nuclear is forced to eat phenomenally more of its externalities than alternatives, this changes the economics entirely.

Responding to people highlighting this by pointing out that nuclear is uneconomic under the current policies is either making their point for them or saying nothing at all. :)

Ah yes, the strawman argument... possibility to kill the entire planet vs killing some birds.

In this specific case (regulations on the cooling water temperature) it's killing some fishes vs killing some birds. That seems very comparable to me.

Why wouldn't we require wind turbines to stop when birds are migrating to reduce their environmental externalities?

kill the entire planet? From exceeding a delta-t of 2 degree C in their discharge water?

Desert tortoise has entered the chat

I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.

Exactly. Regulation has led to larger plants, and longer construction times.

https://i.redd.it/djub5auudfj91.png

I really hope pre-approved, pre-built modular reactors lower costs, delays, and regulatory overhead.

https://www.nuscalepower.com/

I'm also hopefully that molten salt reactors, once viable, are different enough to not be hampered by the full breath of traditional reactor regulations.

That seems to conflict with the low operating expenses of nuclear reactors. Once they are built, what is the crippling aspect?

low operating expenses over the whole lifetime of the plant including deconstruction or just the fun part?

Typically decommissioning costs are collected throughout the lifetime of operation, and to my knowledge these costs do not significantly raise the operating expenses. But I'm not familiar in detail with many examples, so if I'm wrong on the general trend, I would like to know!

Typically the energy corps gets rid of their assets before decommissioning puts them in a "bad bank corp" and lets us pay for it.

Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.

And the absurd cost to maintain nuclear power plants. Also, they have other bad effects on the environment like heating up rivers. It's a real problem this year in Europe at least. It's really hot this summer and there's not much rain, so there is not enough water in rivers for cooling, so more and more plants need to be shut down.

This technology definitely isn't flawless.

Yes, it’s interesting to watch consensus switch over to pro-nuclear again. I’m not only referring to power generation by the way.

In terms of global warming I’m still conflicted myself. It’s a complex topic. Going nuclear probably would be a pragmatic last minute band-aid if it had been applied 20 years ago. Now I’m not so sure anymore. Future plants will also likely meet more wars and other shocks to the system. You only have to read about current fears surrounding Zaporizhzhia.

Green energy and changing consumption patterns might be the safest solution at this point.

My thinking boils down to this question. What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? Batteries may reach some practical limits and not end up being feasible for global grid scale storage.

Would we rather live in a world where we grind out building more nuclear capacity, one with rolling blackouts in the OECD, or runaway climate change?

> What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out?

The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all.

So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised (for example, in the estimates used to compare renewables and nuclear). This risk historically has been very real.

> The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all.

Smart grid tech could easily fail to be able to deal with the complexity of balancing lots of dynamic demand and output. It could simply be too hard to do that with software in real time needing to react to signals over a great distance in real time.

As for batteries, they could be too expensive, clusters large enough for over night power could be dangerously fire prone, or we could have problems with lithium supply/recycling/disposal.

>If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised

Yes, of course it might be. But it may turn out to be much cheaper if we settle on a few well understood designs and stamp them out largely in factories. I'm not advocating for going all in, just getting the ball rolling as a contingency.

If renewables live up to their promise and batteries deliver in the next 10 years then I'll be celebrating along with everyone else. However I think it makes some sense to build some new nuclear plant designs now just in case renewables and batteries take longer to mature than expected.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Nuclear can't even walk and chew gum, though. The recent attempts to build new reactors (or finish old mothballed partially completed ones) in the US have been fiascos. In France, the efforts have gone from bad to worse. Hypothetical potential problems of renewables pale in comparison to actual failures of nuclear.

At this point, nuclear is very sick, and is going to require very large infusions of resources just to stop the industry from decaying away, never mind improve. All this isn't helped by the clear perception of this situation. Why would the best young people go to work in the nuclear industry now?

The consensus is not switching over to pro-nuclear again. There's a PR effort to make it seem like that might be happening, but follow the money.

It's not so much consensus as what will keep the fossil fuel players in business as long as possible. Both in delaying renewables and finding a new monopoly to fuck everyone with.

Except they aren't cheaper than nuclear in any way. Nuclear power has a big cost to get started, it's a fact, but then a reactor, especially a modern one, can continue to function for nearly a century. If you factor that, the cost is risible given the benefit that nuclear power gives you.

Talking about renewable, how much does it cost to remain without energy? We take it for granted, but it's not, especially these day. Without energy we cannot work, the whole economy stops. I live in Italy and it's becoming pretty much a disaster. Companies close because the energy price is not sustainable and they will lose money if they operate. Does still nuclear seem expensive? We are talking about loosing hundreds of millions of euros every day, something that will pay the construction of a nuclear plant in a week. All of that because people voted against nuclear power plants, and we are in this situation. Now this winter when we will not have enough gas to heat our houses we well thank them for saving us from the enormous risk of nuclear power.

It turns out this is not the case. Many nuclear reactors in the US have been shut down because they couldn't even make an operating profit. The remaining reactor at Three Mile Island was cash flow negative for the last six years it was in operation.

As I see (but I'm not from the US) you also have energy shortage problems. Granted, not as we have in Europe, but the problem still is starting to appear. How much does it cost a company that doesn't produce because it has no energy or the energy is too expensive to be economical?

Also the main alternative to nuclear are fossil fuels, that have order of magnitude of cost higher than nuclear, only that it's not payed now but it will be payed by future generation: the cost of climate change, that cannot even be quantified (while the cost of nuclear, even if high, can!).

Lastly, fossil fuels are not only bad for the environment, but for the fact that oil companies are involved, and with their power they control the economy. Usually nuclear power plants are run by government own companies (and thus the country doesn't depend on others for the energy)

Electricity demand in the US has been flat for the last decade. There's no shortage. We are seeing increases in the price of natural gas though. The solution to that is add more renewables.

Except it's not an absurd cost to build. In South Korea LCOE of nuclear is less than half that of solar, at approximately $0.05/kwh. In most of the world, the cost of nuclear power has remained constant or decreased adjusted for inflation since the 60s, only in the US has the cost skyrocketed. This suggests a political issue, not a technological one.

Hinkley Point C, £23 billion for a measly ~3.000 MW. you could literally build ten+ times the capacity using modern, emission-free alternatives.

Wind and solar aren't baseload

They can be made so for similar cost to nuclear in at least two distinct ways.

An aluminium rod with a cross section of a few square metres is enough for global power needs, PV is cheap enough that the resistance loses don't alter that equation even antipodally. Take a while to mine that much aluminium, but it also takes a while to make even one reactor.

The batteries we need to build anyway for the electric cars (or the hydrogen production, storage, and fuel cells if we decide to go back to those) are the same scale we need for grid storage, and it makes sense to repurpose car batteries as grid batteries before full refurbishment. Last I checked the cost for batteries was close to, IIRC slightly better than, equivalent nuclear.

Wind and solar, combined with various kinds of storage, can be used to supply "synthetic baseload", and likely at a cost less than doing so with new nuclear.

https://model.energy/

Shhh, don't disturb the pro-nuke narrative with 'facts'. Elsewhere in this thread they try to blame regulations. US regulations don't apply in China and Russia, but they can't make it economic either.

Pro-nuke here.

I'm happy with NRC. I think they are doing their job. I'd rather NRC be too conservative than have a Fukushima or Chernobyl event.

But nuclear is just technology. There is no fundamental reason for nuclear technology to not be 10 times or 100 times cheaper. In particular the naval nuclear reactors appear to be quite inexpensive. And keep in mind, they are designed to be able to work in conditions of combat (hopefully they won't need to). If someone were to just build them on land, they could be cheaper still.

I (along with almost all pro-nuke guys) am not pro-expensive-nukes. I'm pro-cheap-nukes. But refusing to even consider nukes is a perfect way to never get cheap nukes.

Oh, and by the way, I'm really happy that solar and wind are cheap and getting cheaper. Solar energy generation has increased by about 20% or more every year for the last decade (except for one year). I really think the trend will continue.

The idea that investing in nuclear technology is taking away money from renewables is just silly. In 2021 more than $100 billion were invested in renewables in the US. The investments in nuclear are simply insignificant compared to that.

China is planning to build 150 reactors by 2035, and has not then doubled the nuclear share in a decade, so economic or not, there's evidently some appeal there.

Yeah and a multiple of that in renewables

To put it in numbers (actual production per year, not capacity) [1] [2]:

  China nuclear 2010: 75 TW/h
  China nuclear 2021: 408 TW/h (+333 TW/h)
  Worldwide nuclear: 2768 => 2800 (+32 TW/h)

  China solar 2010: 0.7 TW/h
  China solar 2021: 327 TW/h (+326 TW/h)
  Worldwide solar: 34 => 1033 (+999 TW/h)

Luckily, nuclear doesn't really care about solar, since they complement each other perfectly (wind is a different story and it is already much bigger than nuclear).

However, China is a country that is pretty much perfect for nuclear: Little unnecessary regulation, no green party, expertise in nuclear technology, and excellence in constructing large scale construction projects.

So if nuclear is getting overtaken by solar even in China, then I don't see how it will be able to compete in the west against wind and solar.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#nuclear-energy-gen... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy#solar-energy-gen...

The annual increase in renewable generation in China is now many times that of the annual increase in nuclear generation. Starting at 2010 leads to an underestimate of the renewables' current velocity advantage over nuclear there.

Exactly.

The article suggested that the west should "compete with the two leaders in global nuclear construction: Russia and China" to "not only decarbonize, but bring greater prosperity to the world".

So I wanted to show that even if the west emulated China by slashing regulation, outlawing the greens, and dramatically increased our skill at huge construction projects, we still would focus far more on renewables than on nuclear.

(I ignored Russia, because they produce most of their electricity with fossil fuels, and only 18% with nuclear, which is probably not something the west wants to emulate [1]).

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/electricity/russia-electricity...).

There should be a meme for not very serious articles about nuclear issues.

“We need fewer, clearer, and more sensible regulations.”

And not a single example of which regulations to drop. How about redlining the appropriate docs and posting those? If they’re all so bad it should be a trivial excercise.

One regulation mentioned is “ linear no-threshold standard (LNT) for measuring doses of radiation.”

That’s not a regulation per se, but likely the source of many unnecessary regulations.

LNT is a godsend for the nuclear industry.

The alternative is not "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is zero"; it's "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is the largest not ruled out by evidence." And that would make estimates of the effects of radiation in nuclear accidents far worse.

The accident at Three Mile Island and the film "China Syndrome" turned the public against it in America. The prejudice still lingers. I was working as a reactor tech on a nuclear submarine shortly after and decide before I got out that there was no future in nuclear. I became a computer programmer instead. Alvin Toffler's book "The Third Wave" convinced me to do this.

The saddest part of the TMI accident is that the entire thing could have been avoided if TMI had modified its cooling system with the lessons learned from an identical series of events that happened two years earlier at an identical Babcock&Wilcox BWR in Ohio, except Davis-Besse was operating at 9% power instead of at 100% like TMI in Pennsylvania in 1979: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1920/ML19208C067.pdf#page=4

"On September 24, 1977, Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station Unit No. 1 experienced a depressurization when a pressurizer power relief valve failed in the open position. The Reactor Coolant System (RCS) pressure was reduced from 2255 psig to 875 psig in approximately twenty-one (21) minutes. At the beginning of this event, steam was being bypassed to the condenser and the reactor thermal power was at 263 MW, or 9.5%. Electricity was not being generated. The following systems malfunctioned during the transient:

a. Steam and Feedwater Rupture Control System (SFRCS).

b. Pressurizer Pilot Actuated Relief Valve.

c. No. 2 Steam Generator Auxiliary Feed Pump Turbine Governor"

"At approximately 21 minutes into the transient, the operators discovered that the pressurizer power relief valve was stuck open. Blowdown via this valve was stopped by closing the block valve, thus terminating the reactor vessel depressurization. The RCS pressure recovered to normal and cooldown of the system followed."

"The reason for the spurious 'half-trip' of the SFRCS has not yet been determined. An extensive investigation revealed several loose connections at terminal boards, but nothing conclusive. Investigation into the failure of the pressurizer pilot actuated relief valve revealed that a 'close' relay was missing from the control circuit. This missing relay would normally provide a 'seal-in' circuit which would hold the valve open until the pressure dropped to 2205 psig. Without the relay the power relief valve cycled open and closed each time the pressure of the RCS went above or below 2255 psig. The rapid cycling of the valve caused a failure of the pilot valve stem, and this failure caused the power relief valve to remain open."

Another ex-nuke here — when I got out and went to law school, coincidentally right after Three Mile Island, my dad (neither a lawyer nor an engineer) tried to convince me that I should specialize in nuclear-energy law because I'd have a built-in advantage. I politely explained why I thought that would be a dead end, and that turned out to be correct.

Working in nuclear under normal operations is boring anyway and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators. At least on the submarine we'd scram the reactor and run drills. I'm sure civilian nuclear is less exciting than this. I had one buddy who did it for a career, but just one that I know of.

> and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators

And logs. You forgot taking logs* — or is that done automatically these days? It's been decades since I've been in a nuclear plant, so I have no idea.

* That is, recording readings of various indicators.

They're probably recorded automatically but logs are still taken as way to ensure human eyes are on the indicators, like security guards have to scan a waystation point to prove they were there. I haven't been in a plant for over three decades so I don't know either.

One thing I carried with me through life was to "always trust your indicators." It's too easy to look at an anomaly and conclude the gauge is broken.

"today’s so-called environmentalists"

The nuclear industry had decades to fix its economic, safety and environmental issues but sat on its hands instead. If half of the subsidies they received over that time when into research we would have fixed the renewable storage problem a decade ago.

There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. Fission was only ever a temporary measure. Turns out "today’s so-called environmentalists" as the author disparagingly calls them, and not arrogant industrialist cheerleaders, had it right all along.

> There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades.

This source says up to 4 billion years. Nuclear power is sustainable.

https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

It is not sustainable. But it can be more so, under some optimistic, unrealistic scenarios.

This info is based on some projects for tech that hasn't yet proven to be economical at scale. In theory we could replace all reactors with breeders, develop a zero-carbon thorium fuel supply chain etc. but we haven't because it's expensive like hell, slow to commission and still not environmentally sustainable.

What's easier and cheaper to fix, all that or battery/storage technology?

Batteries and storage haven’t proven to be economical at scale. And also aren’t infinitely sustainable either (renewables and their storage don’t grow on trees, they use more resources and valuable minerals than nuclear). So by your measure we shouldn’t do that either.

Oh, so you concede that nuclear power actually isn't sustainable then? Okay.

So if you want to pivot to batteries... look at how much secondary batteries have evolved in the last 70 years. Genuinely novel nuclear power plant designs have barely left the drawing board over the same time. It's pretty hard to conclude batteries have proven uneconomical at scale when the term 'battery' is such a fast moving target.

No one claims infinite sustainability is a requirement, or even a possibility, but I see you dropped that in anyway. First, the paper in a paper battery, literally grows on trees. Unlike Uranium, which is relatively scarce and the cost of which, in $ and kg of carbon, after mining and enriching to 5% LEU is considerable. Enrichment techniques are unchanged after 70 years. About 100 times more common, and much much less valuable, is Lithium, the efficient sourcing of which (and its alternatives) is an area of active development. Lithium extraction is also damaging, but it is more deserving of research funding than a process for a fuel source that didn't advance for decades.

In 20 years this won't be a discussion because renewables research will have solved these simpler problems.

No, I was reflecting your argument back to you but it goes straight over your head apparently.

> Unlike Uranium, which is relatively scarce and the cost of which, in $ and kg of carbon, after mining and enriching to 5% LEU is considerable.

Simply not true. Nuclear power when considering all lifecycle emissions is lower than wind and solar: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

You earlier in the thread: "Nuclear power is sustainable."

You a few posts later: "[Battery and storage] also aren’t infinitely sustainable either" (also meaning in addition to nuclear).

Me: "Oh, so you concede that nuclear power actually isn't sustainable then? Okay."

Just read back. Is it sustainable or also not sustainable? You contradicted yourself and I think my comment went over your head.

The carbon cost of the construction and decommissioning a nuclear plant as well as producing and disposing of nuclear fuel is significant, and unlikely to become less so. Wind turbines and solar panels have a carbon footprint almost purely at the construction phase. It's significant too but manufacturing techniques are improving yearly while nuclear has been stagnant.

But according to to your source the difference between renewable and nuclear is marginal anyway and it only considers CO2 and air pollution as it affects human lives. It ignores water pollution from uranium mine tailings, radon or leaks of spent fuel are considered and so is a poor source for considering environmental damage in general.

Finally, your link doesn't mention batteries or storage, so is not an especially relevant source to the discussion either.

No because no one defines sustainability on the infinite terms you do. If people did then your batteries, wind, and solar would not qualify either.

You then proceed to ignore the facts on CO2 emissions because you don’t like them. Adding batteries and storage isn’t going to lower your embedded emissions or minerals use is it. And you go on to invent more claims about uranium mining while ignoring the mining for materials that go into renewables and batteries, which is much larger. Your reasoning here is motivated by the outcome you want to believe and you aren’t willing to do research or accept anything else.

You said infinitely! I never used sustainability that way. Nuclear is not sustainable because there isn't enough uranium available to extract, certainly not in an environmentally friendly way, in order to meet an expanded demand for more than a few decades https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365

There is, however, more than enough minerals available to make machines that, once built, will continue to produce and store emission free power for their lifetimes. They are being increasingly made out of recyclable materials and there is other research into lowering their footprint further. In other words, actually sustainable - as in for thousands of years. Renewables aren't there yet, but they will be sooner if a fraction of the cost of new nuclear plants is diverted to the very promising R&D that already exists.

Nuclear doesn't have nearly the same interest or rate of advancement into mitigating the serious environmental problems associated with producing and disposing of fuel, something your sources don't consider at all.

You write like you've just discovered the life cycle 'true cost' of renewables while holding the unrevealed wisdom that nuclear isn't that dangerous. These things are obvious to anyone who follows this, people who would never make the mistake of calling nuclear sustainable.

And I used to be a proponent of nuclear until around 6 months ago when I learned that there aren't enough resources available, and that nuclear won't be able to ramp up in time to lower the atmospheric carbon level increased by fossil fuelled power plants. It's the opposite of dogmatism to be able to follow where the data takes you.

No you’re not being consistent. Your argument is no reprocessing, breeder, or seawater farming technology is allowable in calculations about the sustainability of fission. But all kids of similar recycling, or new chemistries, or not yet proven technologies are allowable for calculating the sustainability of wind/solar/batteries.

Technology for reprocessing has existed since the 40s, carries nuclear proliferation concerns but it still hasn't gone commercial 20 years after bans were lifted. And it's stupidly expensive.

Breeders have been around since the 50s. Again expensive and concerns around sodium coolant were never mitigated. After 70 years 3 are in operation, not due to environmentalists but because they didn't live up to their promise.

Seawater extraction has been around since the 60s and has still hasn't significantly expanded uranium supply (and seriously, filtering the sea? I thought we were talking about minimising environmental damage).

I'm saying nuclear has had its chance. It's too expensive, too expensive to allow fast development reitteration, too slow to address climate change, carries too many risks and hidden costs and just isn't competitive with the promise of renewables which, while needing improvement, are developing much quicker.

Again, I used to be in the pro-nuclear camp but its history has shown its problems are just too complex to solve. It doesn't have a bright future.

Oh, wow. That link is some horribly bad and unrealistic math. Hint: Filtering all oceans in the world might require just a little effort. Also no comment on where uranium is mined?

I saw some merit to the pro-nuclear argument before, but with such "arguments" ....

In particular, supplying a 1 GW(e) burner reactor would require a U absorber field over 170 km^2 of continental shelf (in a strong current). This is roughly an order of magnitude lower average power/area than solar.

Note that there's not enough uranium to use at 3% burnup. At 90% there's plenty for baseload providing we end growth immediately, but breeder reactors and reprocessing are even less likely to happen than an affordable LWR

Got a citation for your claim about the U supply? And there are reactor designs that burn much more of the U in the fuel...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...

Or Sabine Hossenfelder's explanation https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365

Current reactors use U235 which is less than 1% of all Uranium on the planet. Don't know about reactors that use other uranium isotopes, but if after 70 years they are still at the design stage, it kind of makes my point. It's just too late to turn that around. The article just overlooks this fundamental problem.

Thanks for the links!

Advocating for a lower population is not "eugenics." People who beat this drum are lazy and stupid. There are only so many resources to go around, and our productive externalities can cross limited thresholds before becoming lethal. The common factor is the scale of our consumption and production which is, by some incredibly odd coincidence, linked to our population. Who knew...

I'm pro-nuclear, but trying to paint the anti-nuclear environmental movement as eugenicists is grasping.

I am curious, was there ever a time were insurance companies did offer risk insurance for nuclear power plants? If not, then nuclear has been killed by it's risk profile.

Nuclear plants tend to be underinsured; the bulk of the financial burden of a cleanup after a potential accident will be carried by tax payers. I am not sure if that is true everywhere, but at least in the US (the federal government takes over after the first $15 bn) and parts of Europe. Japan technically not, but practically yes. [0][1][2]

It gets even trickier with plants bordering other countries.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... [1]: https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51672335&itype=CMS... [2]: https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-there... | https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/08/national/fukush...

Working for an insurance company, I feel really uncomfortable with that.

Insurance prefers short policy durations: a year long, preferably.

Anything longer and the level of uncertainty becomes massive.

For an oil well, a year long policy is fine. Nuclear requires decades.

"During the 2021 Uri storm, Texas’s $66 billion in renewable energy investments failed to perform in a time of crisis" So did nuclear. A nuclear reactor in texas went offline for two days during the crisis due to cold weather taking 1.3 GW of capacity with it. The linked article the author cites mentions that the outage was primarily caused by the failure of thermal plants which hadn't been winterized rather than lack of wind power.

[0]https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

This is borderline misinformation. It's well known that the Texas grid suffers because of budget conscious corner cutting that the choice of technologies powering the state. It was actually natural gas power generation which failed due to the cold because Texas decided to save some money during construction.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history; ... In North America, the mantle belongs to Ontario, whose nuclear plants replaced its coal fleet.1

I am dubious of this claim, but it probably depends on exactly how you define it. But switching from a country to a province immediately sends up red flags.

> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history

I thought it was hydro in Quebec, or perhaps Norway.

Doesn't decarbonation imply replacing something? Lots of places with the right distributions of water use hydroelectric, because it was cheaper to build out. Ontario has craploads of water (hello, great lakes) but not much elevation, at least not in the right places.

Funny enough, "electricity" and "hydro" were synonymous in Toronto when I lived there in the early 90's because of Ontario Hydro. It was named for the electricity coming from Niagara Falls, but then yeah... like you said.

Oh I forgot about Niagara ! Well one fortunately placed drop :)

Canada has 3 out of 4 currently operating nuclear plants in Ontario. France has them scattered throughout the country. I believe that’s why Ontario is specifically mentioned.

Ontario is also twice the size of France and 1/4 the population; they're at least in the same order of magnitude. I'd call it a reasonable comparison.

> Ontario is also twice the size of France

You certainly mean Metropolitan France*. France is at least 10 times the size of Ontario.

He means geographic size. Ontario has twice the land area of France.

Ontario and France are not that dissimilar in surface area, though in population they are quite different.

I think the author tried to focus on the former when of course it is the latter that should have been primary.

Also the electricity sector is organized around provinces in Canada. So it makes a sensible comparison.

The Washington Public Power Supply System was the biggest municipal default in US history.

I blame Naked Gun 2½

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSJZjBC-Dd8

who killed nuclear energy? Nobody did. The decline in nuclear energy utilization with very few exceptions is secular and global[1]. Two very mundane reasons, the high, largely stagnant cost of generating nuclear energy combined with the rapidly falling cost of renewables.

It's amazing to me how everything in the United States can be turned into some weird culture war debate, ignoring the most material explanations, the article straight up ventures into conspiracy theory territory at the end

"The all-renewables dream was never about reducing greenhouse gasses, but about entrenching energy poverty to halt population growth, so as to spare the environment."

[1]https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...

Some counterintuitive “cheery thoughts”.

The “safety” aspect of nuclear power is usually discussed in the most narrow sense. The regulatory burdens may be excessive but no other power source is a thermonuclear weapon in a “close to critical state” as its normal condition.

Yes, one could fly a small plane into one and maybe nothing will happen but as the Ukraine war points out military grade attacks are not counted in safety calculations. Nor are the impacts of natural disasters especially earthquakes. Cyberattacks are not counted either.

Therefore one needs to secure a nuclear power station to the same level of physical and cyber security as a military stockpile of nuclear weapons. With the added risk of direct takeover by live cyberattack or malware. Personnel hiring needs to be at the same level of background checks and security as a military nuclear reactor.

All this in a practical sense, and counterintuitively, means that the construction and operation of a nuclear power station with fissile Uranium needs more burdensome protocols not less.

Finally the calculations often talk in the language of probability but what is needed is to calculate or estimate Expectation. This sort of “it won’t happen because p ~= 0” thinking is also the kind of thinking that led to the 2008 stock market crash ie “house prices will never go down”. The Expectation calculation of what happens if/when they do was never really thought through. That tends to happen when humongous amounts of money are involved as is the case with energy.

We owe it to future generations to not create another multigenerational problem because we short circuited safety considerations trying to save the planet in the medium term.

Other than that - stay happy :-).

> thermonuclear weapon

Unless they've installed fusion reactors while I wasn't looking, no nuclear power plant is "thermonuclear".

The industry told themselves and the community a lie .. that nuclear was cheap (“too cheap to meter”) and that it was perfectly safe.

But, there were always and continue to be cheaper sources of energy, and when incidents did inevitably occur they had an outsized impact on community perceptions.

The present day shelling of Zaporizhzhya is a sufficient argument alone to invest no further resources in the development of this technology and to remove it from the face of the earth.

Ukraine disagrees with you. They’ll be building more nuclear power after the war. There are much easier ways to terrorize people than trying to cause a radiological release from a plant like this. And that is already happening! Witness the constant shelling, bombing and missiles strikes a of civilians. Of the friends that go missing in occupied areas and are found tortured weeks later. Of the children that are being abducted and filtered into Russia.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Ukraine-planning...

And replace it with burning of wood, dumping glass panels full of cadmium and burying spent fiberglass in desert.

The Simpsons 3 eyed fish was the closer.

I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example:

> The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement.

and

> Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eugenics returned with gusto under the banner of “population control” after the war.

The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl, which has created an absolute exclusion zone of (literally) 1,000 square miles nearly 40 years later with no end in sight, other than to simply ignore it as an outlier that isn't relevant because the USSR doesn't exist anymore.

Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off:

> No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of radiation.

All the same arguments against nuclear power still apply: nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting of fuel and waste, trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately build and maintain such plants and the very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help (which is why the pro-nuclear lobby will focus on operational costs rather than capital or total costs).

>The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl~

We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021.

There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably are already accounted for to a far greater extent than the normal operation of fossil fuel plants.

After Chernobyl clouds containing radioactive material where blown westwards by the wind and eventually those clouds rained down over parts of Germany. To this day if you go out hunting for example wild boards in those areas they have to be tested for radioactivity before they can be processed further, since their diet mostly consists of mushrooms and plants that contain a lot of Caesium-137 from that rainfall back in 1986.

Hundreds of thousands of people dying per year vs mild inconvenience for wild boar hunters is hardly a difficult choice.

my point obviously being that this still affects plants, animals and humans in a much larger area than just the surrounding area - which makes the argument "We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years" not very compelling

And my point is that the alternative also affects plants, animals, and humans in a much larger area (infact worldwide) and too such a significantly greater degree that the comparison is laughable. If there was a button that would cause us to have a chernobyl every day and eliminate fossil fuels immediately, every minute that button went unpressed would kill 15 people. The actual breakeven point is a chernobyl every 3 hours.

Nobody died in Germany from this. Yet tens of thousands have died in Germany and neighboring countries from the pollution form its coal plants that is delayed shutting down so it could shutdown nuclear sooner, and now tens of thousands more will die as Germany starts burning more of that that dirty coal again because it shut those NPPs down and even now in this crisis is hellbent on shutting down the remaining ones. But nobody cares about those deaths in Germany, nobody seems to look at those statistics when they think about their anti-nuclear legacy.

> ... irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for

In the US at least it's "accounted for" by shifting those costs onto the public [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Yes, tell that those chernobyl children who still suffer visibly today?

Not every country has that much square meters for landfills or nuclear wastelands, too.

Nuclear won't save us from not realizing we cannot grow forever and resources are finite.

> arguably are already accounted

wtf?

I believe you missed the point. They acknowledged the terrible cost of Chernobyl but the point is it can happen every year for a long time before causing the same amount of harm and suffering that fossil burning did just last year.

> The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl

> Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off

So let's not ignore Chernobyl. Let's say hypothetically that we build our entire power grid out of nuclear power plants that use the exact same design as the reactors at Chernobyl. Still better than using fossil fuels. And it's a stupid comparison because nuclear is only needed for base load, not the whole grid, and we have much better designs.

Fukushima, I absolutely do write off for the exact reason you quote "No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of radiation."

> nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting of fuel and waste

Don't care about the waste issue, because current power sources are dumping the waste into the atmosphere continuously. Don't care that it lasts 100K years. Don't care that someone in 10K years could be killed. I don't care because the alternative carbon based power is killing people right now, so nuclear is better than that.

> trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately build and maintain such plants

Don't care because of the aforementioned fact that nuclear meltdowns are much less harmful than global warming, which is the side effect of our current power generation system.

> not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help

Don't care that it's more expensive and needs govt subsidies. Don't care because it's better than using fossil fuels and causing more global warming. Happy to have my taxes go up for this purpose.

But what about solar/wind/storage?

Don't care because doesn't exist (yet). Show me one reasonably sized area where this powers 100% of the grid (areas w/ hydro don't count), and then I'll care. Using existing tech now is the lower risk option. Don't care about predictions that large scale storage will be ready in X years because predicting when new tech will be ready is basically impossible.

> Don't care because doesn't exist (yet).

A nuclear powered world economy also doesn't exist yet (it couldn't use today's burner reactors unless we have massively larger uranium supplies, such as seawater uranium extraction that doesn't exist yet; it could use breeder reactors but they also don't exist yet in a form even competitive with burner reactors.)

The "it doesn't exist yet" argument condemns nuclear even more than it does renewables.

> Fukushima, I absolutely do write off

The only thing that prevented Fukushima from having a Chernobyl like impact was that the radiation leakage was into the ocean [1]. The ocean ironically is being treated as a dumping ground that can be ignored by the pro-nuclear lobby just as they claim the pro-fossial fuel lobby os treating the atmosphere.

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fukushima-radiation-con...

Your source contains no number for the amount of radiation released into the ocean in absolute terms or relative to Chernobyl. It only says that a higher percentage made it to the ocean, which is meaningless because Chernobyl is inland. It also doesn't say what tangible effects the radiation release had on the ocean.

Chernobyl happened because the Soviet Union did insane things with an insane reactor design never used anywhere else. Nuclear reactors built and operated by organizations that are not as murderous and psychotic as the USSR literally cannot fail in the same way. We ignore it as an irrelevant outlier because it is one.

And even if we do not ignore Chernobyl, nuclear power is still by far the safest way to produce energy. Fossil fuels release deadly smog, dams can break, solar panels leach nasty chemicals. Every option has some risk, but nuclear has the least by far.

Yeah it is ridiculous, and this still completely ignores that e.g. France's plants age quicker than they can renew them, that nuclear will never be safe (not talking the ""normal safe"" but what's the threat in Ukraine right now), that Europe just learns that also nuclear is of not much help during heat and drought (lol, nuclear for base power load), and that whatever will need to happen that going nuclear fully is just not feasible, time-left-wise, economical-wise, supply-wise..

Boggles my mind how people can witness Russia taking Europe hostage by occupying a nuclear power plant and making vague threats that accidents just happen sometimes and think "you know, the world really needs more of those looming threats". Let alone that extreme weather events are potentially dangerous for nuclear power plants -- and extreme weather events are, thanks to climate change, happening more and more often.

I don't have a real opinion on this subject, but wanted to point out that 1,000 square miles is not really as big as it sounds: a square 31.6 miles on each side. About the size of Rhode Island's land area.

That depends on where the 1,000 suqare miles is. If it's in the Nevada desert, I might agree (although the fallout from Chernobyl did fall over Europe so the initial impact is well beyond the long-term 1,000 square miles) but that's not where you need to build nuclear power plants [1]:

> To obtain the best value from nuclear power stations, they should be built close to the cities

[1]: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...

> the very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help

I'm curious. Which grid-scale renewable energy project was built without massive government subsidy? Any? I don't know of any.

The argument against Chernobyl is Deepwater Horizon.

Who really killed nuclear power? I bet if you traced all the financial donations to all the environmental groups and people who have opposed nuclear power, you will find a lot of oil dictatorships and oil companies.

Follow the money...

This is discussed in the article.

>Instead of reexamining their energy vision, the greens have committed themselves to promoting energy poverty. In part, they’ve stayed the course because doing so has made them lots of money. The Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC have a combined budget of nearly $384 million, for example... A recent study found that “tax-motivated investors in today’s renewable energy deals are typically a highly restricted set of the US’s largest banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions” who “have been joined more recently by a handful of giant corporations like Google and Amazon.” Those who reap the rewards of the tax breaks are also some of the biggest donors to climate change causes that back renewables-only policies.

no. I don't think that is what he is talking about...I was a young nuclear reactor operator for the navy back in the seventies, and I was there to witness the massive propaganda campaign that effectively killed off nuclear power...granted, that campaign used as ammo all those old nuclear scare movies from the fifties, back when the MIC scared the population regarding the Soviet 'menace' so as to manufacture consent for spending more money on the military, but even so, something new was definitely going on...there was some force behind the anti nuclear movement in the seventies, almost certainly fossil fuels industry...

"There were propaganda campaigns" and "nuclear died off" doesn't mean the former caused the latter. Classic correlation/causation fallacy.

Just as a predator is more successful against a dying prey animal, so are activist groups more successful against an industry that is suffering from grave self-induced problems. Nuclear would be in fine shape today, activists or not, if there were money to be made, as there would be if it really were competitive.

iirc that's one of Michael Shellenberger's points in Apocalypse Never.

i feel like he has a specific agenda so it's hard to take everything he says at face value but that point seems reasonable.

As regulated utilities the operators of nuclear power plants sold electricity to the grid on a cost plus basis. The larger their costs, the more their profit. So a lot of it was these operators rather than oil companies pushing for ALARA standards. Normally regulators would prevent huge, useless expenditures on their parts but now they weren't able to.

Implicit in that paranoia is the assumption that environmental groups are what stopped nuclear. But that's really just a dubious right wing talking point. Nuclear appears to have shot itself in the foot all on its own.

Environmental groups fought it tooth and nail.

So what? That doesn't show they actually affected anything.

Thanks for your service.

Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.

Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag...

There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind

This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling requirements which require continuous power and water.

Spent waste today won't be ready for storage here for about 120 years - mid 22nd century.

All for something you could get with some windmills or solar panels

The blind nuclear boosterism on Hn is absurd. We are well on our way to fully decentralized renewable electricity that's so cheap it won't be metered and instead there's this fetish for centralized plants that take 10 years to construct, have waste that takes 120 years to process, and lead to multi-continent ecosystem disasters when predictable natural events happen. Cool tech...

Existing and deployed solar is 1/7th the cost of not yet deployed hypothetical advanced nuclear btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

Their best claimed future efforts make it 7x the cost. This is just about keeping power generation privatized metered monopolized centralized and boosted by the government while claiming it's a free market. Typical mindless libertarian drivel.

> Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste.

That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And it's the financial failure that stopped it.

So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

The depiction of it as a "failure" is the industry whining like the defense industry whines about not having 50,000 more airplanes

Despite being at scale and having 70 years to bring down costs, it's still prohibitively expensive in the full lifecycle analysis of the LCOE and it gets heavily subsidized to keep plants open.

People's energy prices have gone up because governments are Interfering With The Market in favor of nuclear: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-...

Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities.

Now on to the last point. Yes! The back end is a trivial cost because it Has Not Been Dealt With.

Yucca Mountain 35 years in still has not been built and the only US site that currently exists is only for 10,000 years (1% of what's required), only does nuclear weapons, cost $19,000,000,000, took 29 years to build, and had a sealing schedule of 75 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

Currently the only US option is dry casks which have a shelf life between 30 and 100 years assuming no natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, or shoddy craftsmanship. We're leaving this problem for future generations.

In the same way people used to hunt animals to extinction so they could sell them as culinary delicacies, future civilizations will look back on us and curse us for being so stupid when we had far more reasonable options readily available that didn't require literally centuries of management.

Onkalo is going to get breached in the next ice age btw so let's just hope we figure out how to secure it against that in the next few generations

I don't care what your sci-fi shows say, it's a shit technology. And I haven't even touched upon the insane corruption behind plants such as Diablo canyon.

But hey call me an uninformed moron, I'm down

The point is that lack of a very long term solution to nuclear waste in the US has not been an obstacle that has impeded adoption of nuclear. It's a talking point, but if nuclear had otherwise made sense it would not have prevented it from going forward.

If anything, the causation is in the other direction: we don't have Yucca Mountain because there are no stakeholders who really wanted it. The utilities don't need it. Dry casks work just fine for them, and are pretty darn cheap. The real problem with nuclear has been its overall poor economics, and a geological repository would not help with that.

> Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities.

By the same token, no energy production technology is "green". Solar panels use rare earth metals (and require clearing land in many cases), batteries use lithium, and wind farms have to have replacement fan blades every decade or so (which are not recyclable, so much so that the current state of the art is to burn them[1]) and kill larger birds of prey as well.

> The back end is a trivial cost because it Has Not Been Dealt With.

There are viable solutions for this[2] and given how natural deposits of uranium fare (even without containment they move very little on geological timescales), it seems deep geological storage really is an incredibly simple solution to this problem.

[1]: https://youtu.be/knX7NkJILhs [2]: https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k

> Solar panels use rare earth metals

This is a falsehood, one that Shellenberger was notorious for spreading.

No, solar panels do not use rare earth metals. That you repeat this well-debunked lie suggests you're getting your talking points from an echo chamber, not reliable sources.

Sorry, you're quite right that they don't use rare earth metals -- I was thinking of the Cadmium telluride and CIGS combinations used in some thin-film solar panels (which aren't rare earth metals -- it's been a while since I've done chemistry), but looking at it some more it seems like they aren't toxic (even though the constituent elements are). My bad (though I don't know who Shellenberger is.)

However, since the currently proposed solution for renewables is to pair them with large battery banks to solve the reliability issue, the greenness issues with batteries still stand.

> However, since the currently proposed solution for renewables is to pair them with large battery banks to solve the reliability issue, the greenness issues with batteries still stand.

Incorrect. First of all, utility scale power storage can be done many ways, such as pumping water up a hill in the daytime and then letting it flow back down the hill at night.

These are called "kinetic battery towers" or more generically "gravity batteries" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

As far as classical batteries go there's many chemistries coming online soon that are far less hazardous such as sodium ion batteries

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery

There's also saltwater chemistries, sugar based, paper nanotube, it's a long list.

When considering nuclear we're always told to look at the currently nonexistent small scale next gen advanced nuclear of the future. Then it gets compared to renewable energy technology from 15 years ago.

It's either intellectually sloppy or dishonest. Either way it's bad engineering. We can do better than nuclear - cheaper, safer, quicker to build, less management required, more scalable, etc. We don't have to worry about secret weapons programs or have international treaties to build them, no tsunami or earthquake risks, and best of all, the alternatives actually exists today

> Incorrect. First of all, utility scale power storage can be done many ways, such as pumping water up a hill in the daytime and then letting it flow back down the hill at night.

This requires specific geography (natural elevation and water reservoirs that can be used for this purpose without affecting the local environment and without creating a flood risk for local residents) which is not available everywhere in the world where we would need to generate power (and if we're playing the game where every negative externality is an issue with the technology, there's also the general environmental concerns with dams). I think it's disingenuous to argue that the primary plan at the moment is not batteries -- that is where an enormous amount of time and resources are being invested, and the entire conversation about the reliability issue with renewables is usually hand-waved away with "batteries".

> These are called "kinetic battery towers" or more generically "gravity batteries" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

These sound reasonable when you first hear the idea, but they're unworkable for a few reasons (wind, you don't get that much storage from each block, and if the blocks are concrete you're probably going to be net-negative when it comes to CO2 for a long time). Pumped-storage hydro is a far better solution where you can use it (with the caveats above).

> When considering nuclear we're always told to look at the currently nonexistent small scale next gen advanced nuclear of the future. Then it gets compared to renewable energy technology from 15 years ago.

Maybe that is what other people argue, I am not arguing that. But I do find it funny you go out of your way to talk about a technology (sodium-ion batteries) which the Wikipedia article you linked explicitly says has basically no market share and has very significant drawbacks (limited energy density and very limited recharge cycles) -- if we can't talk about non-existing nuclear technology then we also shouldn't talk about currently-non-viable battery technology.

> It's either intellectually sloppy or dishonest. Either way it's bad engineering.

I don't understand why you're arguing against things I am not saying. The original criticism I was responding to argued that nuclear power has many negative externalities that nobody talks about (the list even included the usage of concrete) -- my point was simply that if that is the metric you wish to use, then no form of renewable energy can be considered green (any power station immediately becomes non-green purely because it uses concrete!). My point was simply that's a ludicrous metric to use.

CIGS has close to zero market share. CdTe is around 5%, last I checked.

The vast majority of PV sold is crystalline silicon. The only toxic element used there is lead in backing sheets, but even that is being phased out (in part for environmental reasons, and in part because higher efficiency versions of Si cells can't tolerate the heating needed to bond to the lead; in any case there is nothing essential about the lead.) The only rare element used is silver for front contacts, but that could be replaced by copper with the use of a very thin layer of nickel or molybdenum to prevent reaction of the copper with the silicon.

The environmental impact from PV is largely from the mundane components, like steel, aluminum, and glass. PV to power the world would use these materials in small quantities compared to that used for global industrial society as a whole (global annual production of steel is 2 billion tonnes, for example). If that society deals with the impact of its overall non-energy activities, it could deal with the impact of building and maintaining a PV energy source to power it.

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