"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago."
Thankfully thorium research has become so attractive that it's now attracting private money but we've lost a couple of decades.
If I build an IKEA bookcase, do I time the build from when I throw the instructions away, or when my significant other decides to buy it between mouthfuls of meatballs?
This is probably a place where nuclear and renewable advocates could come together and fight back against the NIMBYs who would rather you just built more coal plants next to the poors. Because NIMBYism is just lower-case c conservatism with extra steps.
It can also be reduced or solved by telling people outside "the area" they don't get a say.
The hypothetical radioactive cloud could travel a few hundred miles in the wind...
>It can also be reduced or solved by telling people outside "the area" they don't get a say.
The area that gets a say, should surely be the area impacted by it.
Further. Whataboutism, comparing it to a rapidly obsoleting technology doesn't seem reasonable.
Intermittent electricity produced now is worth more than baseload in 14 years later.
The solution is non-intermittent energy generation. Hydro and geothermal are great for places that have the right geography and geology. But nuclear is the only other non-intermittent form of decarbonized energy we have*.
* Some would point to biomass, but I don't consider them decarbonized: the biomass could have been a carbon sink if it wasn't burned. It's emissions by virtue of opportunity cost. An it's not a very scalable form of energy anyway.
IMO, gas is going to be around for quite a while as a peaker for renewables - and the more renewables come online, the less necessary it is as a peaker, but it will still be needed.
The cost effective way would be with wind farms, pumped/battery storage and demand shifting.
(this would be a nice problem to have, by the way, but we are STILL churning through terawatt hours of gas while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing all over).
Nuclear power isnt dispatchable. It's not just 5x more expensive. It would overproduce during times when we don't need electricity and underproduce when we do.
Also your SA example is cherry picking a time when a bunch of transmission infrastructure has been destroyed because it was built to sub par standards and hit by a storm. When this happened last time there was only large centralised fossil fuel generation and there were weeks of blackouts and other problems. Seems like a pretty good case for more rooftop solar.
Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point. Sweden also gets 40% of it's electricity from nuclear and 40% from hydropower, too. It's hardly a poster child for the success of wind and solar over nuclear power. Intermittent sources need to be backed by a dispatchable source. For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.
They're viable even without storage as evidenced by installing new capacity at a rate of net generation of about 20% of the entire cumulative nuclear fleet per year. And getting enough storage is well understood, it is just not a priority in most places until around 70% penetration and progress towards decarbonizing transport is met.
> Australia is not a big success story: Fossil fuels still comprise over 60% of electricity sources for Australia - it's no better than the USA. They are not using renewables for chemical and metallurgy industries. And this is despite Australia having some of the best weather and geography for solar power.
Australia has languished under a government that was openly hostile to renewables for years. South Australia has been operating at over 90% gross renewables for a week and this is after only a few years of large scale effort with insignificant storage and limited ability for interstate transmission due to storm damage.
> Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point.
https://gh2.org/countries/sweden
https://gh2.org/countries/australia
Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies?
> For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.
Yes. 90% for a week right near the beginning of the transition is a 'suppliment'. Very sound conclusion from the evidence at hand.
This constant lying must be exhausting. Just sell your coal shares.
> Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies?
As per your links, Australia merely has targets while Sweden has actually produced and delivered green steel. In fact, again as per the link, Sweden has made the world's first delivery of steel produced without fossil fuels. I'm struggling to see how you conclude this is a lie when your own sources explain how Australia has no plants or production, while Sweden has actually produced green steel.
1. https://www.energy.gov.au/data/australian-electricity-genera....
It would be much better in both ways to feed that energy into the electric grid to replace fossil fueled power.
Norway has a similar initiative to produce carbon free ammonium, but that, too, depends on dirt cheap electricity supply to be rational.
https://www.horisontenergi.no/blue-ammonia/
In both cases, Hydrogen is used, and I suppose if large amounts of hydrogen becomes available and very cheap (for instance due to excess wind power supply), it _could_ be good to already have this tech available.
But based on what I can see from electricity flows from Denmark and Germany to Norway, it is still very rare for the European grid to have excess power due to good wind conditions.
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Power-system-d...
Norway can still absorb a lot more wind power on such days by temporary pausing hydro production. (Max hydroelectric electricity production in Norway is around 20GW, or about 4KW per capita).
For now, that makes a lot more sense economically AND it replaces more carbon emissions per kWh.
You're still making the point for me here. After only 5 years or so of actually supporting renewables and meaningful growth, and around two years of solar being the cheapest option, they're meeting 65% of the total electricity.
> As per your links, Australia merely has targets while Sweden has actually produced and delivered green steel. In fact, again as per the link, Sweden has made the world's first delivery of steel produced without fossil fuels. I'm struggling to see how you conclude this is a lie when your own sources explain how Australia has no plants or production, while Sweden has actually produced green steel.
Ah, so you're back to claiming that things that aren't already finished are impossible and irrelevant. Really working hard to find somewhere you can put those goalposts.
Also Lulea is in Sweden's north so your pathetic attempt at a gotchya of a single load from a demo plant was powered with hydro and wind, not Nuclear.
The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Global battery production is only ~400 GWh of batteries per year. A day's energy storage amounts to over a century of battery production. Storage is nowhere near as simple as "buy a battery".
This is 8 hours storage for every W of nuclear added in the largest historical year of generation.
> And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work
Because moving water around using wind power is far future scifi tech and not something done for centuries.
And again, the question is how do you move the water around when the wind isn't blowing? Or do you think citizens are just going to be okay with plumbing that only works on windy days. The point is that household energy use is hardly the only kind of thing that needs to be backed up by a storage system. Energy demand cannot easily be cut without making significant sacrifices in standards of living and industrial output.
Yes, people have used wind pumps to pump wells in villages and homesteads. But that's because they didn't need that water on demand, it's just a labor saving device used opportunistically. But it's a lot harder to pump water to the top of a skyscraper, and to a city of millions of people. This kind of pump [1] is not a drop in replacement for this [2] kind of pump.
In conclusion, we'd need a way to provision massive amounts of storage to get renewables and o become a reliable source of primary energy. It's costs are being measured in the context of opportunistically replacing fossil fuel power. But in a context where fossil fuel use is not permitted, it would be highly impractical without an incredibly performant form of storage. Perhaps heated sand, compressed air, electrolysis, etc. will deliver that. But thus far they haven't, and in the absence of such a storage system nuclear power would be a more reliable path of decarbonization.
1. http://www.historyofwindmills.com/images/historyofwindmills/...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Wood_Scr...
Oh no, storage might only be buildable at a consistent 4x the peak rate of nuclear additions instead of 8x. Guess we better give up and use fossil fuels for 20 years while the nuclear industry starts up.
Not only are there a host of ways of covering constant energy demand with VRE, but you still don't seem to be able to comprehend the idea that water can go downhill. Why would we listen to energy advice from someone who doesn't understand ideas that are millenia old like a water tower or that bricks can stay hot for a day or two?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/realestate/how-new-york-w...
https://www.hkywater.org/education/i-didnt-know-that/why-wat...
For the handfull of situations where the buildings are too tall for more than firefighting water then batteries are more than sufficient.
And oh look, now there is enough overprovision to increase grid penetration to 90%
Now with the leftover time and resources a little bit of storage still leaves us with change.
Renewables look great if you just look at generation. But the goal isn't simply to generate clean energy, the goal is to displace fossil fuels. This is why non-intermittent sources like nuclear and hydroelectricity are, contrary to your assertion, far more valuable for decarbonization.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:Califor...
But NYC has a few gas-fired peaker plants, and during summer they are fired at the hottest time of the day, when AC load soars.
More solar power would certainly help this specific problem. I suppose that somewhere farther from ocean, where day and night temperatures vary more, a solar plant should have an even bigger effect in the summer.
(In the winter though the picture changes.)
I still see some (tall, multifamily / office) houses in Brooklyn and even on Manhattan adorning their roofs with solar panels. I know only one house that incorporated them right from the start though, it's on Coney Island, facing the ocean.
I think when someone comes up with translucent solar panels which can work as window shades on a skyscraper while looking good from the outside and not requiring a fortune to deploy, that will change the face of metropolises around the globe.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
3. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
All of which is not to say solar won't be more important than gas, coal or nuclear in central europe going forward. Just that wind will take the front seat.
In case you aren't aware latitudes reduce solar energy collected per square meter of land. This can be motivated by tracking solar panels. But what can't be mitigated are shorter days in winter that get more extreme the further your are from the equator. In Helsinki right now the sun rises at 9:30 and sets just after 3pm.
I don't doubt your critical reasoning ability, but I do doubt the wisdom of treating the challenge of provisioning and operating massive seasonal storage on the order of terawatts as a solved problem because of a few district heating projects.
Yes. Huge problem. Very nice and good faith objection to something that can be done incredibly simply with a few dollars per kWh. What if some hot water or sand leaks out and contaminates an entire country?
In Europe many household solar installations are connected to batteries, and don't feed directly into the grid. You won't see such use in production statistics, only indirectly as a reduction in demand.
Some of those also don't produce electricity, but use solar for heating.
Maybe I'm wrong (either the numbers encompass that, or the difference isn't substantial). But it seems to me that you'd get a bias against solar if that's correct. Wind installations are usually more centralized, and feed into the grid.
The last two years were weird, especially regarding batteries due to prices increasing, but I'd put that on Covid and the resulting mess.
Especially as solar & wind is already cheaper than everything else by far, so the critical part is batteries which is a broad field with a huge increase in relevance & research over the past few years.
The chances are pretty good, but of course a slowdown could still happen.
What's happened is they're now cheap enough that for fast dispatch load levelling applications, you can install them where instead you'd have to consider bringing a whole powerplant online inefficiently.
In the next 100 years, I predict no overnight load is going to be handled by installed grid batteries as part of a major energy grid: it'll only ever be backup capacity to make smooth the small scale variations of renewables (i.e. a cloud blowing over a solar farm briefly).
It won't be needed because renewables can provide 70-95% of hours just by adding dispatchable loads even without adding more PHES or CSP, but it's not because batteries will be exorbitant compared to non-renewable generation options.
I'm saying this as a definite proponent of nuclear power and of renewables.
With that cheap solar, it would be better to just heat up a big pile of rocks with resistive heat and use that to drive steam turbines, instead of using nuclear fission to make the steam. Artificial geothermal.
But the second best time is now.
Everyone's saying "we should've started building nuclear 20 years ago" but the thing we really should've started 20 years ago is heavy investments in our education system
Compared to purely imaginary renewables that do not actually exist at grid scale, you mean.
How many net GW of new nuclear were added in the year with the highest addition?
There were six (6) new reactors > 1 Gw connected to the grid this year, totaling 7.4 Gw capacity, and eight (8) new reactor construction starts, totaling 9.7 Gw capacity.
There were zero (0) new solar plants > 4 Gw (which you realistically need to be equivalent to a 1 Gw nuke) brought online in this year. In fact, there weren't even any > 1 Gw (equivalent to a 250 Mw nuke) brought online.
And no, putting a few solar panels on your roof isn't going to replace grid scale generation stations when it comes to running an industrial civilization. It's a fantasy akin to Mao's idea that people were going to be smelting iron in small furnaces in their back yard.
You're really hunting for somewhere to move those goalposts to now.
Are you going to answer the question or are you going to cry victim?
You tried to change the subject to something else. Sorry, you don't get to do that. I don't owe you any of my time to discuss a different topic of your choosing, especially not when (based on our previous encounter) you:
1) don't understand the difference between power and energy
2) don't understand the difference between energy storage and energy production
and
3) are rude and abusive.
If you want people to treat you with respect, you could try making a single good faith comment, rather than a ridiculous stretch using tortured definitions and then cry bullying when people point out how ridiculous it is.
I'm just not letting you waste any more of my time.
Deal.
The second best time is now.
In fact, they built several experimental setups and were just short of testing fissile material before the program was canceled.
If anyone would like a starting point for research instead of lobotomized rhetoric like "this is magical thinking", request this paper: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19750027209
Read the papers, they explain it all and characterize the tests.
Implying that nuclear lightbulbs for terrestrial generation would have been in this elite group of winning technologies is just ludicrous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Centrifuge_te...
That is like peak oil stories. Increase price twice or thrice and suddenly there is enough place where it is worth mining. Nobody even talks about peak oil anymore. It's not like U is significant part of a cost/kWh. We could get U even from seawater.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30648847/
https://www.ornl.gov/publication/investigations-reusability-...
Also (from second reference): "The predicted cost to extract uranium from seawater ranged from $610/kg U to $830/kg U." Ouch.
It also requires a constant supply of polymer that caps the EROI around 10.
That's a very silly way to frame it because there's only like 3 commercial breeder reactors today. Why is that the case? Because energy has been cheap, we know how to do PWRs so there's little reason to do the work necessary to use Uranium more efficiently. It's only in the last 3 or 4 years that the world has collectively realized the extent of our problems.
> Scaling up renewables and storage is a much smaller multiplier, in comparison.
I feel that you don't appreciate the sheer number of machines we'd have to build to accomplish a renewable only primary energy design. How much mining and refining we'd have to do. Things that we cannot do at scale today without fossil fuels. Nuclear energy's main advantages are the sheer energy density you get, on demand. 6000 power plants to replace global primary energy is a bargain compared to the hundreds of millions of machines we'd have to build to do that with solar/wind. If solar/wind weren't intermittent, it might be doable. But we really suck at storing energy today.
Let's look at a large scale off shore wind farm in the US. We use offshore wind because they get the highest capacity factors and therefore the most bang for the buck. The Dominion offshore wind farm is a 112,000 acre 2.6 GW (peak) project planning to utilize 180 state-of-the-art Siemens Gamesa 15 MW turbines for a cost of 10 Billion USD. Let's say it gets an amazing 50% capacity factor because it is 27 miles off the Virginia coast. That means, it will produce 1.3 GW on average. But wait, we need battery storage because the output can randomly go from 0 to 100% in several minutes. Let's eyeball it and say we want to be able to provide an hour of buffer. So 2.6 GWh of battery storage. That is the same as the combined capacity of all the grid batteries that existed in the US in 2020. Source: https://sandia.gov/ess-ssl/gesdb/public/statistics.html
Or we could build a single APR-1400 nuclear plant for 1.35 GW on demand. The UAE just built 4 of them in 10 years, for 6B each. And each of them will last at least 2 times as long as the turbines.
There are zero commercial breeders today. There are zero demonstration breeders that use Pu239 or U233 as their fissile fuel. There is one reactor doing something approximating breeding by playing a shell game with MOX and has made no public claim of producing more Pu239 than it consumses under normal operation.
Your argument about not being needed does, however, apply to pumped hydro which has geography for thousands of >50GWh sites all around the world. Only a tiny handful of them are needed.
> I feel that you don't appreciate the sheer number of machines we'd have to build to accomplish a renewable only primary energy design. How much mining and refining we'd have to do. Things that we cannot do at scale today without fossil fuels. Nuclear energy's main advantages are the sheer energy density you get, on demand. 6000 power plants to replace global primary energy is a bargain compared to the hundreds of millions of machines we'd have to build to do that with solar/wind. If solar/wind weren't intermittent, it might be doable. But we really suck at storing energy today.
"Big number scary" is not an argument. What matters is raw materials and cost. These both favor monocrystalline solar by such a large margin that there's no contest. A mix with onshore wind using modular foundations has reached concrete parity with Gen III reactors or an EPR and offshore is not far behind. Nuclear reactors require less iron, but far more chromium. Only the latter is in anything approximating short supply and iron mining for either pales in comparison to the tens of billions of tonnes of ore that need to be mined (or leached where geography or apathy towards the locals allows) to fuel the reactors.
The overwhelming majority of Uranium ore is an absolutely terrible fuel barely more energy dense than coal if used in a PWR (but requiring much more processing), and its only redeeming features are low carbon emissions and portability once you mill and refine it.
> Or we could build a single APR-1400 nuclear plant for 1.35 GW on demand. The UAE just built 4 of them in 10 years, for 6B each. And each of them will last at least 2 times as long as the turbines.
You forgot the mandatory service contract to KEPCO for another $20 billion, that its net power is 1.1GW per reactor even when nothing goes wrong (Korea's reactors historically have about a 7% unplanned outage rate on top of the 15% planned) and that O&M which is on top of the service contract costs as much as replacing the entire wind turbine (rather than just repowering which is commensurable with normal maintenance on a thermal generator assuming there isn't a massive upgrade available for lower than the original price).
Nuclear has been a no show during the Ukraine crisis. People talk about it. But it's all a bit academic. A whole lot of could have, would have, should have, but not a whole lot of actual new capacity coming online. What little there is under construction tends to have eye watering budgets and lots of delays. This crisis will be ancient history by the time any new nuclear planned this year actually comes online. Solar and wind on the other hand are outstripping nuclear in terms of growth by no small margin.
It's the cheat code we have and we're using it to make hundreds of GW of new power generation happen in the next few years.
Solar and wind are outstripping nuclear in growth because their contribution is laughably small, and there's plenty low hanging fruit that can be achieved with small investments.
If we'd invested in nuclear power plants in 2010, like we said we needed to and then we didn't then we wouldn't have been dependent on Russian oil in 2022 during a fucking war while playing with windmills and solar panels like toddlers in a fucking sandbox.
Look what all that supposed growth in windmills has given us. Ask the layed off employees from aluminium power plants if wind energy was cheap enough for them. You want to know how you can tell windmills are a joke the energy industry is playing on you? They're in every fucking Shell "we've changed" TV commercial, that's how.
The article is neglecting a few critical details, to say the least.
What does the 1% represent?
Three Mile Island wrecked the plant due to government idiots keeping the operators from handling it right. There was basically zero radiation release (if you lived at the reactor fence it was more dangerous to walk across one street in evacuating than it was to stay put), it shouldn't really be counted.
Chernobyl was a major disaster caused by blatant disregard for safety protocols that never would have happened in a country with a functioning regulatory commission. The plant operators knew what the boss was doing was insane but there was nothing they could do about it.
Fukushima should have had a death toll of approximately zero (because a fraction of a person can't die--the expected death toll was well under 1) but hundreds died due to the politically motivated evacuation of the area. It probably wouldn't be a good idea to eat things grown locally for some time but the threat from simply living there was minuscule. (Not to mention that there seems to be no relationship between background radiation rates and cancer.)
If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.
Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east and Russia for fossil fuels.
> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year!
And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle:
> Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
The other article on the front page is about the decommissioning of Sellafield, predicted to take over a century.
It grows extraordinarily slowly, so neither the problem not the solution changes on human timescales
> "Where to keep it"
On site. That's what we're doing and that's what works really well. Honestly, it is only the high level stuff that will outlive the powerplant. I know this might not be the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that we probably won't do any significant huge waste repositories (like Yucca Mountain. Though we do have smaller ones) until the waste reaches a significant volume and it actually becomes a problem. Human nature and the inability to do long term planning or something. The good news is that even if we increased our nuclear output, globally, by say 10x or something, we'd still have many decades to resolve that problem because so little waste is actually produced that it can be stored on site relatively easily. Maybe we put things off because in the future we're usually more knowledgeable and have better technology so things are cheaper. Maybe we're just dumb. Either way, it doesn't seem like a huge worry.
The worst American nuclear disaster, TMI, exposed some people to a radiation dose equivalent to a single trans-Atlantic flight. What do you think the radiation dose from structural equipment is? One of the worst examples from structural irradiation was when recycled rebar was used to build 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan, the highest annual dose received from that was 910 mSv, or 2.5 mSv / day, significantly less than the threshold dose of 25 mSv / day. The occupants of those apartments had fewer cancers than the average population.
Check out the authors article on this: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...
Mining accidents kill some ~10,000 people every year. Mining coal is a large portion of that. The worst damn failure killed 170,000 people.
If you don't like deaths from mining accidents then an energy source with millions of times the energy density is far superior. If you don't like deaths from dam failures then maybe putting a dam on every river isn't the greatest idea either.
That's actually the VAST majority of what needs to be contained. But these don't need to be contained for thousands or even hundreds of years. We're talking a few years (<=5). This waste also does not require shielding nor cooling and is mostly a precautionary factor ensuring that there is no cross contamination. Low level waste accounts for ~90-95% of waste, intermediate is ~5%-7% (shielding but no cooling. Short lived ILW -- <30 yrs -- is often stored on site and disposed normally. Long lived ILW is just thrown in with HLW in geological depositories for convenience) and high level/trans-uranic waste (<1%-3%) is what needs to be stored in a geological depository (several of which exist btw).
Just want to make sure you have the facts before you start forming big opinions. Things like concrete and steel are typically stored on site and later disposed of normally. It's not really the concern of nuclear waste.
Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
> Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?
Even though that shit is dumped next to where people live on the regular, with increases to cancer rates as you would expect.
This is scifi. MOX has the fuel reused once to provide a small boost in efficiency after being reprocessed in an incredibly polluting weapons facility that needs an excuse to stay open and then the Pu240 still needs dealing with. And the "leftover uranium" is U238 not U235. There is no closed or "mostly closed" fuel cycle, it's just a shell game.
And your 40 grams doesn't include the 400 grams of non-radioactive heavy metal enrichment tailings, the 4kg of low level and non-radioactive waste and the 40kg of milling or leaching slurry that would come out of any new mine or half of the existing mines.
Then multiply that all by 5 for full decarbonization rather than just electricity.
Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense. Small nuclear could go near where power is used. Waste should be somewhere with inexpensive land and in a convenient location for putting the waste there.
If there were container-sized reactors that produced a few tens of MW, they could go all over the place. Fancy neighborhoods could pay a premium to put them in fake houses. But the waste would probably be much more economical to handle by moving the entire container to a service facility, refueling at the facility, and handling the waste at or near the facility. This would be in an industrial area, just like other large warehouses or factories.
Like Bodega Head where you can actually visit the never-finished reactor pit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
At Fukushima, the reactor SCRAMed successfully and it was the seawater that took out the generators powering the decay-heat cooling system. If California experienced a wave that could crest Bodega Head's yuge natural seawall then we have bigger problems lol https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93...
I have and it is not pretty at all. I would take a correctly stored nuclear waste right away.
Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid, you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue signalling over a gas grid is killing people, people I know, and I don't like people who support that. No "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free tech forty years ago. If you frustrated that you too are responsible for the destruction I now see everywhere.
Unfortunately advancing the technology is beyond us. Like going to the moon, the costs are too high. Nuclear can and is commercialized, but the technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous given how relatively primitive it is.
Maybe go global scale with 10th gen nuclear, but what we have is barely better than 50 years ago still.
Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe, as in an emergency once their backup generators fail the core will meltdown.
Edit: I would go on to argue that our technology has actually regressed. The technology has not kept up with regulations which means the time to build is getting longer. The answer is not rolling back regulations - you really want to live near a plant built with less regulations? The answer is actually improving the base technology - which is much much harder, but necessary to achieve a design that is both cheap to build and inherently safe.
That's a common fallacy.
If you look at mortality rate by terawatt-hour for each energy source, nuclear is going to be orders of magnitude below coal/gas/oil.
Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.
And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy, release orders of magnitude more radiation, let alone other carcinogenic gases.
> And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy
I once heard the circus of Congressional, reactionary policies described as thus:
"Something has to be done. This is something, so we will do it."
Yes, that's all perfectly true, and something absolutely has to be done. Many things actually. We're making good progress on a number of them. And turning off coal fired plants at a steady clip. It matters what you replace it with.
One of the things missing here is that when humans are involved, choices and the illusion of choice apply a multiplier on the risks. People volunteer for risks all the time, and they are happy to do so. Which is effectively what this is saying:
> Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.
If we only cared about traffic numbers we'd ban automobiles and force everyone to take public transit and airplanes to go anywhere. We'd save more people than we would by replacing coal with nuclear, and banning the cars would also reduce death by pollution by something like 10%.
Re your car example: And that’s why everything should be talked about in context. Cars are essential for our modern lives and it would be close to impossible the negative impact of its disappearance. And the relevant such context for energetics is the deaths per unit energy.
I didn’t make an accusation to win the argument. I made the accusation to make the accusation.
You need more redundancy, higher quality materials, better QA, more pro-active maintenance, more security, etc. And many of your staff will need to be very highly trained and expensive. This all adds up in terms of expense and timescales. Flying may be cheaper but we all still drive!
Driving has more deaths than flying because we hold flying to higher standards than driving. If both were held to the same standard, there would be more deaths flying. That's because flying is inherently less forgiving: the energy involved is higher (both kinetic and potential energy), and you cannot "just stop" like a land vehicle can.
The same applies to nuclear: if we built nuclear power plants the same way we build coal power plants, the health consequences would be worse than coal.
I think an interesting part of this question is consent. People have a reasonable understanding of the road and are implicitly consenting to that risk. And as a society we make a conscious choice to balance safety and convenience. But that is just not true with flying, nuclear or even coal power. People don't understand and they absolutely don't consent to the risk. As professionals and scientists that does change things. As a hypothetical example imagine a lab testing the cold virus. It needs expensive safety equipment and an ethics review board. A scientist who just has a cold just needs a box of tissues. It is ethically different.
I think a problem we have is that some historical things have managed to escape the ethics review board because people are used to them. Cars cause cancer and yet people are presumed to consent to that. A solar farm with no real impact has to spend years getting consent. It is unbalanced.
Maybe the biggets problem with nuclear is that it is mostly driven by careful responsible professional people. In renewables society can cut corners (relative to nuclear) and get away with it because risk is just so much lower.
Besides, Fukushima shouldn't have been evacuated.
Only now are we going back and looking at solutions that don't create ingredients for fission and fission-fusion warheads, and the lack of progress there means that countries who we don't want to join the nuclear arm's race are in a prickly position because the nuclear plants they can build leave them with ingredients the UN doesn't really want to proliferate.
Commercialization is the commoditization of an established technology. Many technological leaps are far beyond what any company is capable due to the amount of investment and risk required.
Biotech for example is so far behind compared to our advancements in computers.
This is a weird history of nuclear fission.
The Manhattan project developed nuclear fission to make bombs
The weapons programs were extended to generate power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
Most reactors today are older or based on older designs, but this is largely for regulatory reasons, not because we don’t have the technology.
(And even these older reactors are among our safest energy sources: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
Oh and it’s ridiculously dangerous to the point everything around it must be super protected and over engineered.
That's just plain ignorance.
> Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe
Most reactors in use today sure, but we've already established that we haven't been building new reactors for a while now. Any new reactor built today would be failsafe.
Nuclear is pretty high end technology, it needs real investment to move forward. The government has shown little interest. Few reactors are built, what we have is aging, the number of people doing R&D is next to nothing.
Small, self contained, fail safe, sealed reactors that can be build centrally on an assembly line and shipped to destination.
I've seen several different announcements over the last few years of different SMR type reactors.
But they are being built.
https://www.power-technology.com/features/where-will-the-fir...
Look at this project in Canada
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/research-reactors/o...
The application was submitted almost 3 years ago and we're barely halfway through the approval process.
So sure rollout has been mega slow but that doesn't mean the technology has not advanced it 30 years. Only that our deployment of it has been slow.