Japan, US to step up cooperation in developing next-generation nuclear reactors
asianews.network
asianews.network
Japan is the perfect use-case for nuclear. Even when disaster strikes, they're extremely safe. Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.
I understand that cancer can be caused by radiation, but that is actually treatable and not always fatal, whereas radiation poisoning is afaik fatal.
It was not acute radiation poisoning.
For reference:
Chernobyl did 85 PBq
Global nuclear weapons testing: 400 PBq
Natural Uranium-238: 37,000 PBq
Natural Potassium-40: 15,000,000 PBq
https://www.whoi.edu/multimedia/source-of-radioactivity-in-t...
Vastly oversimplifying: two versus three dimensions.
E: "Cesium dissolves easily in water."[1]
[1] https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclide-basics-cesium-137
This is also why mass expansion of reprocessing facilities is completely untenable.
Liquid / molten salts can be reprocessed "online" and the fission products extracted (yeah, handwaves a LOT of chemistry), so you don't get these partially transmuted solid rods.
Even if you have solid rods or solid pebbles doing the primary power, maybe you can have a secondary on-site molten processor to take care of the waste without it shipping.
One of the annoying aspects of arguing with pro-nuclear people is their blind spot for reprocessing/waste. It just gets shrugged/handwaved away, but to the voting public, having a reactor that produces no waste in the traditional solid fuel sense would be a political boon.
The real issue is that nuclear simply isn't price competitive, it barely beats coal. I would like it to be otherwise.
It would be nice, but the list of reasons which are sufficient to stop it happening is very long.
I'm genuinely asking
Not to downplay the risks or consequences, people need to decide that for themselves and the dynamics of how this material ends up dispersed in the environment are complicated, but talking in terms of mass helps put things into perspective.
Wiki has a good writeup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...
While I tend to agree with your point, there's also the couple hundred square miles and 165k people worth of exclusion zone as a side-effect. That's not small, but it's potentially something you can mitigate by picking sites carefully.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund#/media/File:Superfun...
Most of the "measures" were completely irrational.
Nobody bothered to clean up Chernobyl because the whole town's existence was to support the plant and plant workers. With no plant, the city had no value and thus no incentive to spend money on remediation. By comparison, Japan showed us what occurs when places with value are contaminated: effort is made to clean them up. Half of the exclusion zone was reopened within 5 years, and the most intensely irradiated locations were cleaned up in just over a decade.
19,759 according to the sources cited by the wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
"Because of the plant’s location along the coast, much of the water washed into the Pacific, resulting in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history. Additional airborne radioactive material from the explosions and fires at the plant fell onto the sea surface, where it too mixed into the water, as did subsequent leaks from tanks on the site holding treated water."
This is from Woods Hole, you probably do not know or recognize their expertise.
"the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history."
Even the worst case just isn't very bad.
It may be a local, time-bounded problem in the first few years after the accident in that certain isotopes may bio-concentrate and affect fishing and agriculture in that region.
So far as the ocean as a whole goes I'd be more concerned about chunks of styrofoam.
https://emerging-europe.com/news/ukraine-joins-europes-list-...
India: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Pakistan: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
China: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Russia: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Finland: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Belarus: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
From the announcement one can guess that the Japanese side will contribute with the Mitsubishi SRZ-1200 reactor [1], while the US with several SMR designs, of which NuScale will clearly be one [2].
But other than that, how exactly will they cooperate? Will the US build any large reactors using the SRZ-1200 design? Will Japan build any small reactors with the NuScale design? Or this is just some meaningless expression of common interest in the same stuff but not much else?
[1] https://www.mhi.com/news/220929.html
[2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Further-cost-ref...
In your professional nuclear engineer opinion, what is the future of nuclear in the energy mix? Not in the political sense, but I keep hearing these claims that solar/wind will just destroy nuclear due to lower costs. Does that make sense to you, or do you think nuclear has something to offer?
But when you start looking at costs of the entire future decarbonized electricity system, including all the stuff needed to level out the weather-dependence of wind and solar, and you start comparing e.g. a 100% wind + solar + batteries grid vs. a wind + solar + hydro + nuclear grid, you start seeing dramatic differences. There's a metric being developed called Levelized Full system Cost of Electricity to handle this.
Anyway it turns out that having a 24/7 zero-carbon miniscule-footprint energy source like nuclear fission in the mix is a huge help to the overall system.
Also, nuclear can use its 'waste' heat as district heat and pump warm water up to 100 km to fully decarbonize local building heat without going through an electrical conversion.
Also nuclear works great in deep space.
So yeah, I see a great future for nuclear in the near, medium, and extremely distance future.
Seems to me like a case of wishful myopia, where they hone in on that one metric that gives them the illusion that This Is Working.
I really liked this book covering a lot of this: https://www.amazon.com/Shorting-Grid-Hidden-Fragility-Electr...
Well, 4g/kWh.
Although the government has planned to construct 6 reactors, the historical "ecological" movement still makes fighting nuclear electricity their 1st priority.
(And, yes, this kind of geopolitically-motivated propaganda works in all directions.)
https://www.nord-stream.com/press-info/press-releases/conser...
Many countries & people fund those NGOs, either thinking they are helping the environment, or they have ulterior motives (promoting their investments).
The NGOs are tricking people, they want to reduce nuclear to further solar/wind because they have investments in it.
Russia is playing into the NGOs because they have the same end goal, wanting to reduce nuclear, but for their nat. gas. investments.
https://www.nord-stream.com/press-info/press-releases/conser...
That looks more like greenwashing than having a hand in promoting misinformation.
What do you mean by Russiagate exactly? (As in, which one?)
I honestly did not think it was debatable at this point that Putin's and Trump's interests were very vocally aligned. It's like you and I live in different multi-verses yet are somehow communicating. How truly bizarre.
This has to be one of the most blatant moments: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44852812
He also criticised Europeans for not meeting NATO defence obligations, although whether he would have been fine with them just increasing their expenditures or if this was just a rhetorical point to find support for leaving NATO is perhaps only known to him.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/russian-funded-en...
China is doing similar to prevent mines for rare earth minerals being built in the United States
"He declined to give details of those operations, saying: “That is my interpretation.”" LMAO
Firstly, it's incredibly difficult to track funding for entities like these, so when someone like the NATO chief isn't citing sources, it's probably because the sources aren't for the public to know.
Second, this is something that Russia has done dozens of times. It should be shocking to you if they aren't funding this sort of narrative in the countries they want to be dependent on them.
You have a powerful misinformation team that can sway global opinion.
Out of all objectives that further Russian power, you have decided on the squashing new nuclear plants.
Why this and not some other objective? Why can't they sway the global opinion on Ukraine? Surely they are trying.
The Overton window is a thing, right? "Nuclear power might be really unsafe" is a much easier sell in the public discourse than "it's OK to invade your peaceful neighbors".
I mean, there is a sizeable minority who have been convinced by Russian propaganda on this; typically they refer to Euromaidan as a coup, blame the invasion on Ukraine for not implementing Minsk, claim Ukraine is banning the Russian language, and so forth.
If propaganda can bump this from zero to twenty percent, why not from 40 to 60?
Russia buying a politician would hopefully be a huge story. Russia buying advertising in the US to push for dis-unity or their abhorrent propaganda about Ukraine being full of nazis or that 1 billion dollars is a lot to pay (in old, out of date, expensive to decommission hardware) to absolutely defang the largest rival we had last century is derogatorily labeled as "Russiagate" and "conspiracy theory" and "liberal brainworms".
it's not like it's a team of five guys slogging away in the propaganda mines with pick axes. they can pursue a number of goals simultaneously, limited mostly by budget and probably other geopolitical concerns, rather than video game-esque restrictions on the total number of things they can propagandize about simultaneously.
> Why this and not some other objective? Why can't they sway the global opinion on Ukraine? Surely they are trying.
they've had a lot longer to work on nuclear than the current invasion.
they've also had plenty of success in the past with ukraine-related misinformation, see walter duranty.
You do both. Europeans are much more easily convinced that nuclear energy is scary.
2. Russia has long planned on a 'pivot to Asia' in the event Europe does ween itself off of natural gas. Not that that has panned out very well so far; the Power of Siberia pipeline has reportedly been quite unprofitable, allegedly because of the nepotism on the project regarding the contractors. Which brings me on to the next point...
3. It is a mistake to assume that leaders of countries are competent or their interests are inherently linked to 'national interests' or 'geopolitical strategy' (principal-agent problem).
3a. Even if Russia is out of money in 50 or 100 years because of some green energy revolution, nobody running the show today will be alive enough to care about it.
3b. Natural resources are easier and more profitable to exploit than human resources. If you want to build a technology-intensive industry, you need to keep the talent happy (or otherwise prevent them from leaving as the Soviets did) and keep up on innovation against competitors. E.g., Roscosmos has been coasting for decades off of the reliability of Soyuz, but have they designed anything good lately? SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and several other startups present a real risk to their business.
If you have something in the ground you can dig up, you don't have to keep anybody happy, you might have competition, but changes in the market won't come as any surprise. You don't even have to have local expertise in resource extraction - just hire Exxon to do it for you, like they did in Sakhalin. Whereas if you want to extract money from people, you're going to have to tax them, and if you do that too much, they'll get upset or leave.
If you're running a country and want to personally enrich yourself, the best way to do so is to prioritise resource extraction and exploitation.
On-shore wind: 11 g/kWh
Hydropower: 24 g/kWh
Utility solar PV: 48 g/kWh
Biomass: 230 g/kWh
Natural gas: 490 g/kWh
Of course this is from the World Nuclear Association but they link a source at the IPCC, and after doing a little googling it looks like other sources agree.
You can use electricitymaps[1] to quickly compare sources of energy.
Please cite one of those 'credible sources' that verifiably refers to something current like a 160 micron bifacial PERC cell based panel at median capacity factor of 18% (or a realistic near future value like 16%) using up to date processes for polysilicon processes and an up to date energy mix from the place of production (even xinjiang or lower mongolia is significantly lower than it was in 2014) and concludes that emissions are higher than a nuclear reactor based on new mining (rather than a combination of ranger and cigar lake).
There is probably a good chance a new ISL mine with solar powered pumps, leeching solution, and electric vehicles followed by centrifuge enrichment then burnt in an APR could come in under wind, but no chance it will come in under new solar -- especially if that solar is produced in new facilities outside of north-western China.
It also doesn't matter because the magnitude is so much lower than delaying decarbonization by 6 months and they all close the loop via electrification.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/photov...
https://www.vestas.com/en/sustainability/reports-and-ratings...
Uranium mining has dropped too which is what brings it over 4g (largely due to using solar rather than diesel for electricity).
"both hard and lignite [coal usage] decreased from 251.9 TWh to 146.5 TWh for a reduction of 109.4 TWh. So Germany reduced both coal and nuclear at the same time, coal did not grow, and the coal reduction was actually larger than the nuclear reduction."
[0] https://chadvesting.substack.com/p/common-misconceptions-abo...
> The Energiewende made Germany less dependent on Russia than if it had never taken place!
This is moronic, a total apples to oranges comparison. First, coal is much cheaper than gas, so whatever they were paying for Russian coal doesn't necessarily cancel out the gas increase. Second, coal is way easier to transport than gas. The latter needs a pipeline or liquefaction, both of which require extensive capital outlays that make it much more difficult to switch from one supplier to another. Third, coal and nuclear are both base load, while natural gas is used as peakers. The entire argument for nuclear over renewables was that renewables would require more peakers (i.e., gas).
2. In 19 years, they could have moved most of their power generation to nuclear, like France did, *checks notes*, 40 years ago.
I also don't find paying (currently) over half a billion dollars a year in storage costs efficient. Usually not even factored into the costs of this "clean" energy.
https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us
Half a billion per year is nothing compared to the damage we're preventing with climate change, is it?
It's only inexpensive compared to the reactor.
We don't have a totally nontoxic power source. We do have ones which offer better options for containment. Coal ash is radioactive and toxic [1]. Solar panels are also toxic [2]. But we don't grind them into a fine powder before sprinkling them over communities. On this scale, nuclear is toxic, but in small, contained and manageable masses.
> paying (currently) over half a billion dollars a year in storage costs
Your link fingers "the United States' failure to implement a permanent solution for nuclear waste storage" as the cause for the "half-a-billion dollars a year [paid] to the utilities for their simply keeping the fuel" [3]. The current solution passably inefficient. The efficient solutions are blocked by activists.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
[2] https://scdhec.gov/sites/default/files/Library/OR-1695.pdf
[3] https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us
Keep in mind, most of the reactors we are used to are basically 1960s designs. Part of the appeal of building new reactors is that they are so much more efficient that they can actually burn up more of the spent fuel than they themselves create.
This is an outright lie with regard to Gen III+ reactors. MOX is filthy.
It's just turning almost-inert U238 and relatively low activity Pu239 into Pu240, Pu241 and Cs-137. This is after a reprocessing step that vastly increases the volumne of contaminated material and leaks a bunch of it into the environment.
The volume of inert material in the spent fuel is a red herring.
And nuclear power is most of the time more expensiv than some renewables.
I do not see benefit in this development.
A 747 when flying straight at you, is only a tiny tiny spec, until the very last second, and then it gets really really big, and then you are dead.
I heard Randy Shilts say this "Give me a number. How may people have to die?"
I live in an area with lots of granite, so just existing I likely experience more radiation than the average japanese person after fukishima.
It only takes Areva or Rosatom having an oops with one reactor load of fuel because they bribed the geologist for the waste dump and it turns out it was actually unstable and linked to the aquifer or papers were forged on the parts for the transport cask or they buried it in a shallow dump in nigeria where it corrodes open in 2150 and you turn a country into the red forest for the next millenium.
This is 100% guaranteed to happen the second there's too much of it for mass protests to cover every fucked up thing the industry tries.