Hydropower has, thus far, proven far more dangerous. The collapse of the Banqiao dam in China led to between 26,000 to 240,000 estimated fatalities that impacted 30 cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Coal, of course, exceeds this by orders of magnitude.
Not downplaying those deaths, but at least you can rebuild on the land right after. Seems way different than having some part of the world off limit for 10,000 years.
Thirty cities were hit by flood waters that were moving at 50 km/hr. This likely involved many, many industrial chemicals, solvents, waste, and other harmful elements that were generally disbursed.
[T]he failures largely accrued from institutional hubris, engineering insufficiency, lack of relevant domain knowledge (often deliberate ignorance or denial, see especially Vajont, also St. Francis), poor overall management, lack of disaster preparation, drilling, or readiness, limited resurces or capabilities (especially in developing countries), communications breakdown (see Banqiao's comms loss), and inadequate response in light of imminent or present threat.
None of these are domain-specific to hydraulic civil engineering or absent from nuclear engineering projects.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553>
And:
The specific failings at Banqiao were virtually all managerial and political, not technical; poor engineering, inadequate safety provisions, underestimated environmental and operational risks, poor contingency planning, unforeseen perfect storm (literally), severed communications, insufficient warnings, no community disaster preparation, inadequate rescue and recovery. None of these failures are specific to hydro, all apply to nuclear power, and as non-engineering problems there is no technical fix that makes them go away.
In Banqiao, about 25,000 people died in the immediate inundation. Another 150,000 died in the following weeks of starvation and disease. There's no great mystery as to how such deaths are avoided: floodwaters are mitigated by high ground and evacuation centres; starvation and disease by food, water, and medical stocks; and rescue & recovery by trained teams and equipment. Reestablishment of communications, transport, and utilities is critical.
China at the time was desperately poor, politically dysfunctional, and gambled hugely on risk and lost. Other major hydro disasters tend to share these traits.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327114>
The risks from Banqiao were short-term (acute), though profound. They could have been mitigated by planning, preparation, warnings, evacuation, and response. China at the time lacked the safety and civil defence maturity and mindsets, the political will, the engineering culture, and simply the capacity to respond appropriately given the magnitude of the disaster. The deaths were avoidable, and similar threats, say the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure. The engineering failure resulted in costs, but no loss of life, nor any significant damage to property other than the dam itself.
The U.S. still does see occasional dam failures, as with the Edenville and Sanford Dam failures of 19 May 2020. Here again poor engineering, construction, and operation created the risk, though again, preparedness and response prevented deaths, though in this case there was significant property damage.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenville_Dam>
Today, Chernobyl and Fukushima are exclusion zones, and they will be for centuries. The reactor cores themselves, for tens of thousands of years. This is far longer than the companies, countries, cultures, and even languages extant at the time of the disasters --- our capacity to address risks and management at this scale is utterly nonexistent. Banqiao is home to 17 million people who face no ongoing concerns from the incident.
Dam failures are short-lastting disasters, occurring over hours, days, or perhaps weeks.
Nuclear failures are long-lasting disasters, occurring over decades, centuries, and perhaps millennia.
Nuclear weapon is not equal to nuclear reactor. If Russians will blow up Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant, most of the people will be evacuated, but radiation will poison land and sea for hundreds or thousands of year.
What are you talking about exactly: the destroyed reactor #4 won't be rebuilt but I don't think it's relevant, but the other reactors were still functional a decade after the accident, and people have been working there since then.
And Pripyat won't ever be rebuilt mostly because it was never destroyed in the first place. In fact if Ukraine wasn't facing a chronic population shrinkage due to low natality, Pripyat could have been resettled long ago with only minor restrictions (and since the area is mostly a swamp, it's not like it had a big agricultural value before anyway).
> but radiation will poison land and sea for hundreds or thousands of year.
This is Nuclear risk misunderstanding number 1: “radiation” poison nothing except living thing receiving them in very high doses, radiation don't stay. What stays is the “radioactive material” which (unless at the epicenter of the accident) do emit a limited amount of radiations. What's harmful is eating or inhaling such material like any pollutants, and unlike other pollutants, radioactive material decays and only a fraction of it remains after a decade.
People are routinely exposed to environmental pollution that are as dangerous: if you had lived in Pripyat for the past 20 years, your risk of cancer would probably be lower than someone having lived in Kyiv, just because there's no car and the related air pollution in Pripyat.
Hanford. Simi Valley. USSR.
[edit] > Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas. [1]
Waste from nuclear plants is nice and contained in neat little bundles that are monitored, safe and if you're worried, can be put into Yucca Mountain.
[edit] btw, Yucca Mountain is conveniently located next to the Nevada Test Site, where the US tested many nuclear weapons, mostly underground, from 1957 to 1992. NTS contains some of the most radioactive land areas in the world. So at least you can be confident knowing you're putting the new spicy rocks in with the rest of them. [2]
However, nuclear waste is very much a non-issue.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
[2] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nevada-test-site-down...
Cool. Now explain what happens in the ground water around Kadapa or Rossing or Kakadu. Nuclear waste is very much an issue, you're just trying to focus on the stuff you have a vague plan for rather than no plan.
Noone is suggesting more coal. They're suggesting renewables which are faster, cheaper, less centralized, less dependent on oligopolies and hostile foreign actors, more able to be deployed in unstable regions, just as safe, less polluting, produce less non-radioactive waste, and use fewer materials.
Cheaper is a non-goal for me. Better is the goal. And nuclear delivers consistent stable baseload that supplements renewables while having a lower carbon footprint than both wind and solar.
> less dependent on oligopolies and hostile foreign actors
Not sure what you mean. Plenty in Canada.
> more able to be deployed in unstable regions
Existing designs are already not a proliferation risk.
> less polluting
Nuclear is not polluting.
> produce less non-radioactive waste
A non-goal if appropriately sequestered.
> use fewer materials
Also, IMO, a non-goal.
> Nuclear waste is very much an issue....
[citation needed]
Renewables have to factor in the impact and cost of storage. That means today pumped hydro, and also battery storage. Batteries are not environmentally friendly, cheap or easy to make. Renewables require base load. Nuclear provides base load.
Prove it. Show me an LCA for mass expansion of nuclear, including the new mines in lower concentration deposits that comes out at lower carbon than new renewables with hydrogen (or even gas) backup for the 5% needed to cover the gaps using current technology. Then after you exhaust known reserves in 10 years include whatever scifi scheme you have for getting more.
Here's a mix for somewhere in the arctic to get you started before you start concern trolling about winter:
https://model.energy/?results=822cd1d042dfd31d9faf011150ee2d...
> Nuclear is not polluting.
Serpent river, Rossing, Kakadu, Kadapa, Church Hill, La Hague
Every other stage of the supply chain spews heavy metals and radiation into the environment.
Then there's the fact that there simply isn't enough uranium.
Nuclear accidents are polluting, but steady state certainly is not.
But what makes you think that this will be an issue elsewhere going forward? There's no evidence to think so.
On the other hand, wind power requires rare earth metals that are mined in open pit hellscapes in Mongolia. [1] That doesn't look very environmentally friendly. And of course solar panels are for now just acres and acres of e-waste that gets buried in poor countries. Battery storage requires huge quantities of lithium. A single Tesla battery pack generates as much CO2 in production as an entire ICE car does in manufacture.
There is of course more than enough uranium. There's billions of tons dissolved in seawater, enough for 100,000 years of current electric capacity. In fact a new gel was just discovered to make extraction much more efficient. [2] That 4 billion tons is actually replenished as it's extracted from geological processes. There is plenty of Uranium for conventional fission reactors. By most measures, existing nuclear power schemes are renewable.
Then, breeder reactors require some 100x less uranium, and CANDU reactors can already operate on thorium cycle.
There is no perfect solution, and meeting our energy needs at minimum CO2 requires a variety of energy sources. I'm not opposed to renewables at all. By all means, build away.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
[2] https://bigthink.com/hard-science/extract-uranium-seawater/
Rare-earth metals are now being mined (mainly for fractional-horsepower motors) in other places.
Fun fact: copper is frequently co-located with uranium, radium and thorium. In-situ leaching can transport uranium and thorium into groundwater or surface water at the processing site. [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm-copper-mining-and-produ...
Additionally trying to scare about the effects of copper ISL when nuclear needs the copper and then also leaching (in situ or above) vastly higher quantities of ore which transports far more of those doesn't really help your point.
The fact that it's an issue right now? The fact that it's not an accident but standard operating procedure?
> On the other hand, wind power requires rare earth metals that are mined in open pit hellscapes in Mongolia. [1] That doesn't look very environmentally friendly.
More lies.
https://www.vestas.com/content/dam/vestas-com/global/en/sust...
Where are the rare earths? Enercon even got rid of the copper.
> And of course solar panels are for now just acres and acres of e-waste that gets buried in poor countries.
It's made of sand with traces of silver and lead all encased in glass. It has mandatory recycling laws in civilised countries, you're welcome to implement them (or just wait until the recycling supply chains make used panels valuable enough that it happens anyway). And there and an order of magnitude less of it than the uranium leaching fluid that gets left in unsealed dams in kadapa, or dams with no flood mitigation in Husab, or pumped directly into the ground water in Inkai or Kakadu.
With your sea mining scifi you know you need to make 1-2kg of polymer and put it in the ocean for 6 months per MWh all to get around the same amount of energy per unit of water as lifting it 70 metres, right?
So not a lie, but thank you for new information. Don't worry mining in general, but copper in particular, is an environmental nightmare too. [1] Copper mining can actually contaminate groundwater with uranium and thorium. I believe this came up in an Odd Lots episode on the copper market recently.
> Where are the rare earths?
In every other turbine?
> It's made of sand with traces of silver and lead all encased in glass.
Don't worry we're running out of the sand to make glass too, and it's also an environmental nightmare. [2]
Basically any extractive industry is. That's why we have to do a bunch of different things, each according to what they're good at, and weigh the pros and cons.
That's why I'm in favor of solar, wind and nuclear, in spite of the fact each has their own drawbacks.
> And there and an order of magnitude less of it than the uranium leaching fluid that gets left in unsealed dams in kadapa, or dams with no flood mitigation in Husab, or pumped directly into the ground water in Inkai or Kakadu.
[citation needed].
> With your sea mining scifi you know you need to make 1-2kg of polymer and put it in the ocean for 6 months per MWh all to get around the same amount of energy per unit of water as lifting it 70 metres, right?
It's not my sea mining, I was responding to your false statement that we're anywhere close to running out of uranium. There's plenty on shore for hundreds of years, and by then I'm sure we'll have a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem, either removing it from the sea, or moving to breeder reactors, or the thorium cycle. Put on your problem solving hat my friend.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...
[2] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a398808...
You were presenting it as necessary. It's neither necessary nor particularly prevalent for onshore wind. Enercon use none, Vestas' smaller turbines use none. Other DFIG and EESG turbines use none. Smaller offshore turbines overlapwith onshore ones. The larger offshore turbines are experimenting with iron nitride which is better but unproven. Some designs (like the e126 and family) already use negligible copper. The rest of the industry is reducing it.
> Don't worry we're running out of the sand to make glass too, and it's also an environmental nightmare. [2]
That's the kind of sand you need in much larger quantities for the concrete in a nuclear reactor. It doesn't matter if glass sand is smooth so you can get it from a desert.
For Uranium leaching of low grade ore (the only kind available in a mass expansion scenario) you need 40-200kg of sulfuric acid mixed with >3000kg of ore per kg of Uranium https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
1kg of natural uranium produces about 1kW for 3-6 years.
1kg of PV including glass but not the frame produces about 5W net for 30-50 years.
The sulfuric acid quantity is larger in an ISL mine, and the crushed ore slurry quantity is orders of magnitude larger.
> It's not my sea mining, I was responding to your false statement that we're anywhere close to running out of uranium. There's plenty on shore for hundreds of years, and by then I'm sure we'll have a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem, either removing it from the sea, or moving to breeder reactors, or the thorium cycle. Put on your problem solving hat my friend.
It's your scifi scenario. There is only enough for the current fleet (about 2% of world primary energy) for 100 or so years. Expanding it enough to make a difference reduces this to a couple of decades. Sea mining for a burner reactor is a ridiculous proposition if you look at the actual numbers.
Breeder reactors don't exist. No power generating reactor has ever run on fissile fuel bred using an equal or smaller amount of fissile fuel. Even if a commercial design is made, most of the world will never be allowed to operate one, and it won't be developed on any timescale to make a difference.
The problem solving hat is on, and the solution doesn't involve nuclear. It can't solve more than a tiny fraction of the problem, and it can't even do that well or quickly. There's no reason to deal with the downsides.
A lie is defined as an intentionally false statement. You were accusing me of intentionally misleading. I was doing no such thing. You taught me something, which I found interesting but ultimately not super relevant. Consider alternatives to avoid inflammatory language.
> It's your scifi scenario. There is only enough for the current fleet (about 2% of world primary energy) for 100 or so years.
One hundred years is more than enough time to figure out how to extract it practically from sea water, which is recognized as a viable solution [0]. In fact it's already only 2x as expensive as mining - and the cost of uranium is today is $0.0015/kWh. The reason we haven't done it is because we don't need to.
> Breeder reactors don't exist.
Yes they do. However, we didn't pursue commercialization because we don't need to - because there's a ton of fissile material for conventional reactors. To quote wikipedia "interest declined after the 1960s as more uranium reserves were found."
And further, thorium is also super abundant (2 million tons of reserves as of 2011, and the USA has the largest) and again, CANDU reactors can already operate on natural uranium, thorium - or on plutonium - without enrichment, mitigating the proliferation risk you identified earlier. [1] Note that thorium is about 3X as abundant as uranium, and spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed and used as fuel for other reactors, albeit in a process with its own trade-offs.
There is no shortage of fissile material. Objectively. Move on.
> The problem solving hat is on, and the solution doesn't involve nuclear.
Agree to disagree. I'm ending this conversation here.
[0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac...
Expansion of nuclear power to more than an insignificant amount will reduce those 100 years to a decade or two.
Nuclear is irrelevant to decarbonization on a world scale, any effort spent building burner reactors is a waste of resources that could do twice as much elsewhere.
Quote from someone you probably don't like: a previous french High Commissioner for Atomic Energy.
I'm not saying this won't work this time, but again, I ask you how sanely can you propose a fully renewable model when countries with a lot more sun struggle to do the same ?
I wonder how can you be so sure of the solution you are "selling".
Ironically, on my own bus line, hydrogen bus doesn't have the best carbon footprint: https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2018-03...
No, the battery powered bus, charged with low carbon, nuclear energy has the lowest carbon footprint: https://imgur.com/a/fx5MiMp , because here, next to the Air Liquide Innovation pole, hydrogen is still made from hydrocarbons. Also these one were not paid with europe money, but the region.
Disclaimer: I own 14 shares of Air Liquide SA.
That definitely convinced me. Good job, champ.
Isn't your miracle solution to storing energy, electrolysers ? I don't see how that unrelated.
> So germany massively scaled back their renewable rollout and this is bad because they built renewables?
Ah yes, of course the issue is they have gone fully with your idea it would had worked for sure! Or maybe their issue is a lack of cheap magical energy storage?
Also, where do the energy come from, in your magical energy mix, for this month, for Germany? How many installed capacity do they need ?
Using gas for 500 hours a year while storage matures is definitely worse than using coal and sitting on your thumbs for 20 years while an EPR is built. Very nice non-cherry-picked example.
> Also, where do the energy come from, in your magical energy mix, for this month, for Germany? How many installed capacity do they need ?
To bring the locally consumed fossil fuels down to the same level as france's local fossil fuels + those imported from germany in this cherry picked unrepresentative month? About another 200-400GW nameplate at current calacity factors with a few hundred GWh of thermal storage, or roughly where they'd be if they hadn't had their rollout torpedoed in the early 2010s.
You should be the last one speaking about cherry picking, or bad faith. Germany is ramping up coal while their renewable struggle to meet demand, currently running at 31GW of coal. France have less than 2GW of coal ?!?
> Using gas for 500 hours a year
This one is straight up a lie. Less than 50% of germany energy mix come from renewable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#/m... 500h of gaz is so far from what is happening.
> 200-400GW nameplate at current calacity factors
Today at midday, solar+wind load factor is about 6%. Your 400GW of installed solar+wind doesn't cover half of what coal+gas currently produce, which is 42GW. Again there is a basic math issues in the solution you are proposing.
Then there's room for at least another 30% with no added storage.
A fifth of that coal and gas is being exported to france. And you carefully avoided mentioning their gas.
Very nice good faith discussion. You're definitely living in reality.
It was midday, the added capacity you proposed doesn't cover half of what coal provide in the middle of the day, you wouldn't have spare energy to store. And the carbon footprint is still higher.
> A fifth of that coal and gas is being exported to france.
A tenth, see you speak about good faith and double numbers in your favor.
> And you carefully avoided mentioning their gas
You mentioned coal usage that was a lie, so I replied the real coal usage in France, which didn't have even the installed capacity to use the coal as you said. About 10GW was used when I wrote my comment, which make the carbon intensity at 165 egCO2 per kWh. It's 696 egCO2 per kWh for Germany.
You seems to endorse using fossil as a backup source for renewable.
Congratulations, that's exactly what want fossil fuel firms ! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/22/fossil-f...
> Very nice good faith discussion. You're definitely living in reality.
> Using gas for 500 hours a year while storage matures is definitely worse than using coal and sitting on your thumbs for 20 years while an EPR is built.
I don't know if you can make such statement when the reality you spew out is so far from what you even admit in your later comments. You keep saying I don't live in reality, have bad faith, or lie, but you are the one who double numbers, or even invent them in this conversation. You also are the one who have brough exactly 0 external sources through this conversation to backup your claims, well I understand it's complicated to do when you invent numbers as you go, but at least, show where your "reality" come from if it's not only in your head.
No I'm not getting paid. I'm just a software engineer working in logistics unrelated to the energy sector. I just showed that renewable is more important to you than reducing carbon emissions which shows who cares more about the future here in the conversation.
It was the time I wrote the comment, but it looks like it was "an exceptional month", and "cherrypicked". Of course, today is also cherry picked.
You could take today, load factors of renewables are about 8%. Ah sorry, it's an exceptional month ? What about last year ? Well, solar load factor had even lower load factor than this month, with a load factor of 1.5% over the month of december. Wind energy was, opposingly, great and worked with a 50% load factor. The solution you proposed, 400GW of solar, would not have helped.
> it proves you're using anything you can find to attack renewables and aren't remotely interested in truth.
Arent you bored to take my argument, ignoring it, and repeating it back to me ? At least you could have proposed less stupid solution than 400GW of solar, like 400GW of wind energy, which at least produce useful output in winter. But that would mean you would be informed and we wouldn't had this sad looking discussion.
Cya in another thread where you will spew your poison there once again.
What's the scope of noone? To my knowledge, new coal plants are still being built all over the world?
Chernobyl was the worst case disaster. Even before Chernobyl happened nuclear power plants outside of the USSR were already using much much safer designs. Ultimately Chernobyl has killed more people due to fears around nuclear power than even the highest realistic death toll from the accident itself.
I finding it amusing how wind and solar proponents cite this as a postive. It's actually a liability: energy demand is centralized in population centers but low density energy sources muse be decentralized by necessity. This means more transmission infrastructure needs to be built and maintained. This explains more: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ScJ_FwaZk
Political centralisation, not physical. You can build a 1GW renewable plant and connect it to a transmission line just fine, but much more importantly anyone can build one.
There's no way 50% of the world will be allowed their own enrichment or reprocessing facilities. And even in the ones that are allowed, the process is necessarily under extreme regulatory capture and is controlled by a cartel that makes oil look like a free market.
Rosatom had to be exempted from sanctions because the fuel and waste processing supply chains are so centralised that over half of Europe's nuclear fleet would have shut down if they didn't do businessnwith Russia.
Regardless, plenty of smaller countries manage to get along with nuclear power just fine. Slovakia, Korea, Canada, the Czech republic, Argentina. Nuclear power has spread to every content, and dozens of countries. Centralizing reprocessing may help with nuclear weapons proliferation, but most countries have a regional hegemon that already have nuclear weapons that they're fine importing from.
How big was the business with Rosatom compared with Germany importing gas from Gazprom because they invested in an intermittent power source? China accounts for nearly 80% of the world's battery supply chain [1]. And over 80% for solar panels [2]. There's a strong case to be made that renewable are more centralized: besides wind it's just one country dominating the whole market. The enriched uranium supply is actually much more diverse: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1147358/leading-enriched...
1. https://www.onecharge.biz/blog/how-china-came-to-dominate-th...
2. https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...
As to China, the barriers to developing a renewable industry are vastly smaller than building a nuclear industry (as evidenced by Europe not sanctioning Rosatom but building new solar production, wind, and battery capacity).
Whether or not it's necessary, it remains true that when some countries try building their own infrastructure, they get it blown up by state sponsored terrorists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
"Among the residents of Belarus, Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades. Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated."
https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
Note that thyroid cancers rarely lead to fatality.