I wonder why nuclear gets so much hate and fearmongering. Its a marvel of engineering and long term energy solutions lie just within our grasp.
I don't get the fear. Any anti-nuclear POV, however casual, is welcome.
I don't get the fear. Any anti-nuclear POV, however casual, is welcome.
The baseline is that the probability of failure is so low, but the effects are devastating, which gives a company (or a state, for that matter) all the incentive to focus on short-term savings, while increasing the tiny probabilities, because in all likelihood, the people taking the decisions today will never see the effects of it.
Yes, from a technological standpoint, we could build safe nuclear, but we haven't found a political system to do it yet.
We all get that Fukushima was preventable... but it wasn't prevented.
A lot of pro-nuclear people just blow off Fukushima, which tells me you just aren't really engaging seriously.
(BTW, I lean pro-nuclear... but a lot of the pro-nuclear comments here on the risks amount to "don't worry about it" and whaddaboutism. This is not remotely compelling.)
I think the disconnect here is that the "whaddaboutism" type arguments are actually relevant for once. Arguing against nuclear (or anything else) is implicitly an argument to use alternative sources of power, as society isn't generally leaving people in the dark with no electricity. If the Fukushima reactor hadn't been there, then it would have bean a coal or natural gas plant. Both would have killed far more people over the lifetime of the plant.
I think people have an allergic reaction to nuclear power that goes beyond rational, given the underlying statistics deaths/TWh. Having a single terrifying moment certainly imprints a lot more heavily on people's minds, though, than distributed deaths.
Replacing nuclear with coal is obviously a bad idea. But replacing it with hydro, wind, solar power is so much better.
Not saying hydro is bad, but I'm not sure that nuclear is worse.
Solar and wind are the best as they seem to have few downsides providing the conditions are right .
Maybe approach it from the other direction: what was the impact of Fukushima?
(You wouldn't really argue the sum total impact was one human life, right?)
To your point, the primary impact was the large scale evacuation. Horrible for anyone living immediately nearby. On the scale of terrible power-plants, maybe worse than living next to an active coal plant, but better than living downstream of a collapsed hydro-dam.
They know coal is doomed. But each nuke start guarantees a decade's extension on the coal contract. It furthermore burns capital that could build out several times as much wind and solar generating capacity, that would start displacing all that coal almost immediately.
Big coal loves nukes.
They love solar and wind because both result in a grid that for the forseeable future requires peaker plants. Usually LNG which they see as their greenwashed future.
They hate hydro for the same reason they hate nukes, they are too damn stable, entirely removing the possible need for fossil fuel based plants in base load generation or grid stability.
Lets build solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. If you can't build hydro though nukes really are the best alternative and the sooner people come around to that idea the sooner fossil fuels die.
Hydro is moot. There is noplace left to build hydro generation (storage is completely different), so there is no reason to mention it, except to note that an existing reservoir is an excellent place to float a solar farm.
Demand for NG will fall off relentlessly as it is displaced by renewables and storage, and finally be pinched off by synthetics generated from renewables' surpluses.
This is just pure speculation based on nothing.
Probably you should read up a bit.
1) You have to handle the spent fuel (either by storage or recycling, neither of which is easy). 2) When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.
1) There is no handling of spent fuel. The atmosphere handles it. At least nuclear lets us capture and store it for handling it later.
2) Oil drilling and coal mining both go wrong constantly, with enough deaths and environmental impact to swallow nuclears' very short list of disasters
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_and_oil_pr...
3) Even when things aren't going wrong, people still die working on oil rigs.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6420a4.htmt
I'll add that these numbers are likely deflated due to me mostly focusing on US stats. Dare I say that the problem is even worse than these articles portray.
2. The total death toll from the Fukushima incident is 1 (so far). For comparision, the tsunami & earthquake that caused Fukushima to meltdown killed 20000 and injured 6000 more.
And Chernobyl doesn't really count, as no reactor worldwide is capable of Chernobyling, and hasn't been for the past 25 years at least.
Chernobyl is a horror story that can be told to childen about Soviet/Russian incompetence, not as a valid example about the dangers of nuclear energy.
Likewise, Fukushima can be used as an example about how safe a worst case scenario actually is.
Some of the design flaws of RBMK were retroactively addressed in existing reactors post-Chornobyl. In particular, the flawed control rod mechanism was addressed. It would cause power excursions/criticality when the rods were inserted. However, neither the high positive void coefficient nor the lack of containment buildings was addressed in RBMK. These unsafe features of the reactors led to the shutdown of the only two RBMKs that were ever in the EU (in Ignalina NPP).
While it is difficult to argue the idea that no reactor is capable of "Chernobyling", as "Chernobyling" is a very particular scenario, RBMKs are generally considered unsafe. The lack of containment buildings is particularly concerning because, without containment failure, we would not have had either the Chornobyl or the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.
While RBMKs are not built anymore, and the new Russian VVER reactors are much safer, they still don't meet EU safety requirements. A future evolution of VVER-1200 called MIR-1200 should, although it is difficult to find much information about this.
Overall, I am saying that "Chernobyling" can mean different things as several design and operation faults needed to align for that disaster to happen. Some design faults in Russian NPP reactors have been addressed, some not. Overall, VVERs look very safe as they address all major RBMK design faults, but for some reason still don't meet EU safety requirements. So I wonder what design faults persist. I do agree that Gen 3+ reactor designs look very safe.
Not saying its a bad idea overall, just noting an example. Other issues could be getting enough cooling in and out & avoiding ground water/aquifer contamination if it does indeed melt down.
If you are willing to spend that much money, just built a huge water tank above the plant, problem solved.
Or even smarter, design a passive save nuclear plant with that money.
Except the 8 RBMKs still in service perhaps? Their problems were only partially fixed.
The alternative is renewable energy.
More people died simply because of the evacuation than from the effects of the Fukushima accident.
I don't actually think recycling is hard. Its hard in a society that wants to kill of nuclear reactors.
A society that has a large amount of nuclear and intends to go to 90% nuclear its just flat out logical to go to fast reactors at some point.
This was planned in all nations that were on the nuclear path. The US planned it, but this was prevented by the anti-nuclear people.
French planned it, but it was prevented by anti-nuclear people.
I think if you really have a society that relieas on nuclear and want it for the long term, eventually building some fast reactor and burning up that 'waste' isn't really that hard, I think its actually beneficial.
You can make interesting things like medical isotopes, nuclear batteries and many other things from this 'waste'.
> 2) When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I mean, Fukushima the only one relevant for this discussion isn't really that bad. Damns have caused devastation on a much larger scale. So have coal plants. So have gas plants and even worse gas infrastructure.
Even most hard core renewables people believe gas as a back up need to remain, that means, gas pipelines remain for decades. A failure in a gas pipeline can easily be as bad and kill more people then Fukushima.
So really, I think going 100% nuclear is not a huge risk reduction for society and even in case of an accident the consequences are not that unreasonable for what you are getting.
Lets assume a nation like Germany, lets say the need 70 modern PWRs to power their nations. Assume every 50 years you get one Fukushima. I would easily take that deal. And I think reality is that in a nation not prone tsunamis that once per 50 year number is aggressive.
This is a very weak argument. It's akin to comparing driving vs flying in terms of safety. Flying also goes WRONG when it goes wrong. But how would a comparison based on energy output vs material/human damage look like? I mean coal also goes WRONG, see the Aberfan disaster.
https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/cloud-of-ra...
But the main problem is that it's not localized in time. Chernobyl is a problem for several countries still to this day, and the actual site itself will continue to be a problem for generations to come.
This is easy to solve. Just launch the waste into Space. A typical large reactor produces 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year. That’ll take one space trip for Falcon 9 to launch it into Space on a trajectory to nowhere. It’ll destroy itself over millions of years or immediately. Either I make no sense at all or why else has no one tried it yet?
Falcon 9 carries that to Low Earth Orbit. You do not want the waste hanging around there. To get it out of earth's orbit, F9 can do 8 tons.
That's 3 - 4 flights per year per reactor, so about $250m per year. Plus Falcon 9 did 60 flights this year, so this even capacity-wise this would only be enough for 20 reactors worldwide.
Plus like other commenters mentioned, a launch failure would be catastrophic.
1) Because storing spent nuclear fuel on earth isn't actually hard, it is just brought up anytime people talk about nuclear because it's the obvious thing to talk about.
2) Rocket fleets have a ~97% success rate (e.g. see Vega C this week). Spreading 3% of the radioactive material globally isn't a great idea.
Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy, and it still makes a loss.
Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants get around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale.
Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.
I don't understand what this means. Are you suggesting there are utilities not funded by taxes?
Power generation will always be expensive and heavily subsidized by the state along with Water and agriculture.
Coal is the next best thing. Plentiful, cheap, super polluting.
I'm not sure a grid can rely on solar and wind. They are getting cheaper ofcourse but they need a lot of land, high maintenance, and not exactly the most reliable. We wil figure it out eventually.
> Also the world is about 82% fossil and biofuel.
Primary energy usage, so an utterly irrelevant metric. With a completely electrified society, the primary energy use decreases heavily. As we all know, heat engines throw away 65-80% of the incoming energy as heat leading to that number.
I've seen the LCoE numbers [1] everyone uses to argue that solar + storage is cheaper than nuclear. It does show a price premium for nuclear. But it is not "enormous" (it's maybe 2-3x more expensive). It's also plausible that nuclear, being an older technology, is less likely to run into unexpected costs, particularly those associated with the rate of implementation — production bottlenecks, increased land prices, etc.
1: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-nuclear-reactor-smr...
The scale-up issues I mentioned would not be applicable until you actually have very high construction volume, which currently does not exist anywhere. For example, the US built some 20 GW of PV in 2021, which is worth about 40 TWh/year assuming a typical capacity factor. But at that rate it would take some 90 years to build enough for the whole country, ignoring a likely increase in electricity consumption for heating and transportation (displacing gas), and ignoring any replacement. So the actually needed rate of solar installation is probably around five to ten times the current rate. Certainly, there is plenty of land and silicon in the long run. But there is still the question of whether it will be bought and produced at similar prices when the market pressures are that much larger. And the US still beat e.g. Germany in PV installs per capita in 2021.
The goal is not only to get off fossil fuels, but to do it fast.
Electricity (and water, school, roads, etc...) is a requirement to live a decent life. The fact that is unthinkable for you that it could be done without profit is saying a lot.
Pretty much all modern electricity has been subsidized massively.
As for nuclear being expensive. France built its initial fleet in 15 years, the debt of those programs was commercially financed and was paid of over the next 30-50 years. During that time virtually all French people also paid a very low amount of avg cost for their electricity.
Modern coal can actually use modern turbines and those would certainty not be un-competitive with free fuel.
Modern nuclear can do the same.
And PWR nuclear over long term, as it can exist for 60-100 years actually delivers stable energy, if that was currently priced in to current market, it would actually make sense.
If you had to rebuild a huge grid today, from 0 to say 1000TWh. Nuclear is the nobrainer solution still, even with PWR.
Do you have any reference regarding this claim?
Like the ROI for each kind of energy source, or the payback time for the investment to build the energy plant.
My low opinion was solidified when in the same year I overheard a nuclear proponent criticizing Japanese 'housewives' who had the temerity to get their own Geiger counters after Fukishima and note when radiation levels passed the official guidelines in their area. I'm sorry, but if you're against a citizenry informing itself you're against democracy, and the industry you advocate for is going to take a hit by association with you. You might say that these two examples aren't representative of the industry as a whole, but they're the representatives I met and I've yet to see a good counterexample.
A couple other criticisms:
-Refining nuclear material for peaceful purposes does make it easier to refine it for less peaceful ones. This is probably the source of the 'fear' you're referring to.
-Nuclear is nonrenewable, fissionable material will run out in time like fossil fuels
-focusing on EROI hides the cost of capital, which is substantial. Investing in nuclear requires a huge concentration of capital and risk. Capital isn't free, something the economic arguments for Nuclear tend to gloss over.
-I don't see how that much concentration of capital and hence payback can avoid increasing wealth inequality. With solar there's a plausible and peaceful way for the poorest people to eventually own the means of production - not a share where their votes don't count but the physical tool that creates energy. That can't happen with a nuclear economy, it will always be owned by an elite, managed by an elite, and leave most people as unimportant economic actors.
-Pro-nuclear arguments frequently insult the opposition. It gives a bad impression.
To say that Trump was a bad president because he's a misogynistic egoist would be an ad hominem, no matter how true it is.
This part reminds me of how NASA's calculations for crashes/failures were very low, like 1 in a million officially, but when casually asked most engineers estimated it at 1 in a few/one hundred (my memory is fuzzy) - which was about the actual rate of crashes.
Humans, even smart ones, have biases unfortunately. (I personally still think nuclear is the best, even if we end up with ~3 more medium accidents in the 21st century.)
There are enough raw materials to run breeder-style reactors for literally billions of years
This is mostly a non issue as nations who want to make nuclear weapons have far better pathways to getting to what they want.
In fact, you can as a nation build nuclear reactors from the ground up and never develop the technology to make weapons grade material.
> -Nuclear is nonrenewable, fissionable material will run out in time like fossil fuels
By that logic, solar is also of that material, you realize that?
The reality is uranium and thorium are incredibly common. We could use it for 1000s of years and we would not even remotly run out.
In addition, if you want to talk 'renewable', volcanic activity is constantly circulating new thorium out of the earth and thorium is part of why the internal of our earth is hot.
So basically, running out of thorium and uranium is about as likely as running out of sunlight. If we ever run out of either, we are basically fucked.
> -focusing on EROI hides the cost of capital, which is substantial. Investing in nuclear requires a huge concentration of capital and risk. Capital isn't free, something the economic arguments for Nuclear tend to gloss over.
Governments can get capital on 30+ year bonds for 2% yield. Modern nuclear plants can operate for 80 years. So you could likely issue special bonds that pay for 80 years.
Given how long these plants stick around, its actually really low capital, specially if you are building many plants.
And even more so if you are building next generation plants that have far lower capital cost.
> -I don't see how that much concentration of capital and hence payback can avoid increasing wealth inequality.
Not sure how that makes sense. Nuclear reactors own by the government provide quite a few high paying jobs (in France all union) that give jobs and whole generation of families a good income.
> With solar there's a plausible and peaceful way for the poorest people to eventually own the means of production
I think this is fantasy illusion. Poor people don't own enough land to put up solar. How will they own their own solar. Solar requires own or renting of land.
In reality poor people will have access to some kind of place they can plug into and get power for money. And solar or nuclear makes no difference.
> That can't happen with a nuclear economy, it will always be owned by an elite, managed by an elite, and leave most people as unimportant economic actors.
So French nuclear reactor owned by the government that have given people a long term contract for really cheap access to electricity 'are owned by elites'?
> -Pro-nuclear arguments frequently insult the opposition. It gives a bad impression.
Sounds like confirmation bias. If you argue with people you will get insults. I have been insulted often by people who don't like nuclear.
Online discourse is not representative of the real world. I can link you to some debates between 'experts' where the renewable guy was incredibly rude and the nuclear guy was incredibly accommodating.
Generally actual nuclear people are incredibly technocratic in their speech.
>Poor people don't own enough land to put up solar. How will they own their own solar. Solar requires own or renting of land. In reality poor people will have access to some kind of place they can plug into and get power for money. And solar or nuclear makes no difference.
There are farmers in Afghanistan and India right now that find pumping water with solar panels more economical than diesel pumps. Nobody is going to build an access point for these kinds of places to plug into electricity from a nuclear plant, they're that poor. And yet, solar technology is allowing them to increase their production today. Nuclear is too large and unwieldy to do much in marginal cases like that. At best it would provide cheap energy so subsistence farmers can get more handouts from an industrial center, but there's no way of increasing margins/ownership of the poorest.
The optimistic Nuclear vision sees to be one of industrialism perfected, an age of Big Everything. But the world isn't moving to better industrialism, it's moving to postindustrialism. Solar is postindustrial, it's proven in rural Afghanistan because it's cheap and distributed and empowering. Even in a place where a $100 for a panel is a huge investment, it's often worth it when locals have small electricity requirements like charging mobile phones. That's the kind of poverty where solar is a technology that can help today, no central planning needed. Which IMNSHO is a very good good thing if the planning would be done based on models off by factors of 50 000.
TL;DR: Good Postindustrialism > Better Industrialism.
Unban living will continue to exist and industralism will not simply go away as long as
> industrialism perfected, an age of Big Everything
No, nuclear plants are not actually that big. They serve a gigantic community and the building themselves are tiny and almost inadvisable compared to how much energy they make.
When you are driving threw Germany, you are always aware of the wind power, of the solar and in some region of the coal. In France you barley ever see a nuclear reactor.
Economically speaking it's too expensive to build. It doesn't compete well with renewables and is a very long term plan, which is bad news if you're on shaky ground to start with. It may never pay off if you build it today. So nobody is rushing to build them on their own. Now maybe with government help, but...
Politically, it takes way too long to build. So even if you expend the political effort on making it happen, you likely won't be around to reap the benefits, which makes it a bad political project. It also tends to be late, and more expensive than planned.