Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

nationalinterest.org

396 pointsmdp2021556 comments

As a French not expert in the matter but living near nuclear plants:

- one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material

- rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly

- nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)

- the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants

(References are easy to find if you want confirmation)

I am not against nuclear power, but it has to be done properly and safely, which is certainly not the case around here.

Edit: it seems the fusion (no pun) of regulation organisms has been rejected by the senate. Still annoying to see this law discreetly pass, with no parliament debate outside of the senate, during a political crisis

> one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material

Please share numbers demonstration health hazards. For ex, bananas are radioactive. Should we outlaw bananas?

> rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly

That's wrong. In 2022, the power output had to be reduced by 0.18% (not a typo) (https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1645696906327388160). In addition, Nuclear plants can work even in the desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

> nuclear plants are very unreliable

That's also wrong. Please share numbers. Nuclear has a load factor of 95% and its down time can be scheduled (maintenance). Wind has a load factor of 30-40% (and output is unpredictable), solar has a load factor of 20%, hydro requires mountains.

> the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants

When controls are too tight, nuclear is too slow ; when controls are too loose, nuclear is dangerous. Face je gagne, pile tu perds.

The goal is less CO2, and for that any low carbon energy source is good.

By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that couldn't be scheduled).

Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans. As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them. As soon as you say "ok, build them reactors if they are so perfect", nuclear advocates want the state to jump in and asume the costs, the consumers to pay an extra price, the safety regulations back to 1960 and the future people to deal with the residues.

> the consumers to pay an extra price

The (botched) green energy transformation has given the country I live in top 3 highest electricity prices in the world and it's not even particularly green at all. Literally cannot get worse. And it seems to me that one half doesn't understand how incredibly bad high energy prices are both for people and industry, while the other half cheers at the prices because it causes deindustrialization and pushes towards degrowth - mainstream talking points of the current generation of climate activists here.

> By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that couldn't be scheduled).

That's not quite correct. France deferred maintenance during COVID and scheduled the downtime in advance. The inspections then found potential problems, so other reactors did additional maintenance and checks.

They could have been deferred further if needed, but politicians were not willing to make the call.

> Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans.

Nuclear energy is the one that is actually proven to work and be reliable enough to completely displace fossil generation. Nothing else is coming close to that, including solar and wind.

> As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them.

Russia is busy exporting nuclear power plants. A nuclear reactor can be built within 6 years, two reactors within ~9 years (they're built in parallel).

To be fair the french have had some massive problems with their fleet recently. There were issues discovered where (IIRC) a supplier that made pressure vessels used steel that was not of sufficient quality and covered it up for decades, only to be discovered recently- this required major downtime and expense. Other issues have resulted in lots of nuclear plant downtime in france as well recently.

Stuff like this should yield criminal charges.

I heard almost exactly the same thing about Japanese reactors, are you sure you're remembering right, that it is definitely the French because it seems a bit of a coincidence

> ”Nuclear has a load factor of 95%”

That’s very optimistic. Perhaps an ideal nuclear plant with a perfect operating record might approach 95%, but real-world load factors are lower as most plants end up requiring extended outages for repairs as some point in their lifetime.

France’s lifetime load factors for its nuclear plants are around 77%, but that declined sharply in recent years to 72% in 2020-21 and even lower in 2022 due to many plants being taken offline for repairs. In the UK, load factors are even lower: 67% during 1970-2017.

I didn't realize it went as low as that.

Some wind farms can hit 65%

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/worlds-first-fl...

I don't know in what parallel reality you live, but France is having massive energy problems due to their reliance on nuclear right now. And it's only getting worse with rivers drying up more and more and power plants needing more and more maintance as they age. Building new plants is hugely expensive unless you lower standards, and security is already worse in reality than in the books as of now, you don't want to go lower than that and cut more corners.

You are making good points, however about the leaks, we obviously shouldn't wait for them to be dangerous to worry. It's hard to prove risks, it's also hard to prove the lack of risks if only for the living ecosystem around the plant. The leaks show issues in the alert system, it's not the first time it happened, and an engineer sued the plant for dangerous mismanagement. Doesn't mean we should drop nuclear energy either.

And of course all risks should be weighed against the known risks and downsides of the alternatives.

Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy in Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s - 1990s.

Activated water with tritium in it has been released accidentally a number of times, and small amounts of tritium and other gasses are released by any reactor, but no unapproved leaking besides that has ever been made public.

There are of course ecological problems with the heat, but all the reactors use one of the Great Lakes as a heat sink and water supply itself isn't a problem.

The CANDU design can be fuelled online and most of the reactors have been online over 80% of the time, including refuelling, maintenance and refurbishment projects. The later designs hover around 90%.

They were expensive to build, and the last plant was really expensive. This was due to various reasons, including post-Chernobyl reviews, and pausing construction for over a year due to a labour dispute, and high interest rates.

Still, amortized over more than half a century they've ended up being the second-cheapest source of power in the province, after hydroelectric. Government is casting around for replacement options as the reactors are retired over the coming decades, but nothing concrete in the short term.

That’s an accurate but misleading description of what’s going on because Ontario is part of a much larger grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss... It’s like saying a town next to a nuclear power plant is 90% nuclear, that’s “true” but only works because other areas don’t rely on 90% nuclear.

Just like the town, Ontario exports power to other areas and imports non nuclear power. If everyone used 50-60% nuclear there wouldn’t be anyone to export that power to on low demand weekends etc which would drive up prices. The area also has a great deal of hydroelectric power which reduces the need for peaking power plants.

Nuclear has already played a significant role in reducing climate change, but it just can’t economically scale to supply nearly as much power as wind and solar. And much worse when you have a high percentage of Wind and Solar adding Nuclear to the mix just doesn’t work very well because base load power becomes less valuable.

It's not just about the cost. The mix of nuclear and locally-available gas and hydroelectric makes for a self-sufficient energy strategy, and that has always been a major concern. Yes, Ontario is synchronized with the US grid but it could disconnect if necessary. Electricity is a valuable but not critical export economically.

As with France, a substantial influence on historic policy was to build surplus generation for economic security reasons. Could have just imported coal and oil. But Ontario does not have much coal or oil. Same with Quebec and hydroelectric.

Renewables provide the same sort of decentralized benefit, of course.

> Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy in Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s - 1990s.

Cf, "Supply" tab:

* https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

Yep, and that looks great wind, hydro, and nuclear providing 100% of power at 3pm on a Friday at 2.5c/kWh. But what happens on the weekend when demand for power drops even more?

Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.

>Still, amortized over more than half a century they've ended up being the second-cheapest source of power in the province

Even after 50 years you have accumulated only a small percentage of the total costs related to the plant. They will most likely cost more money after they have been decommissioned than they did during operation.

This is a straightforward lie. Decommissioning a nuclear power plant down to a "brown field" can cost about 10% of its construction cost. Even grossly mismanaged decommissioning projects are at about 25%.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco_Nuclear_Generating...

What are you basing these statements on?

This is only if you demolish them, which makes as much sense as demolishing the Hover Dam.

There is nothing intrinsic that requires the plant to be ripped apart. It can be run indefinitely like any large concrete structure.

France has been mismanaging its fleet and signally for years that they want to move away from it, under-investing in it, etc. It's not the technology's fault.

Germany had some of the best managed plants in the world -- until they decided to shut them down, leading to more coal being burned and more dependence on other countries like Russia...

Germany is exiting both nuclear and coal. In the time from 2010 to 2022 where 14/17 of nuclear plants were shut down generation from coal was reduced from 263 TWh per year to 181 TWh. Renewables increased from 105 TWh to 254 TWh. I also would have preferred to leave the nuclear plants running longer and exit coal faster, but in the overall scheme of things it does not matter too much. Nuclear is basically irrelevant. It is too expensive and slow to build. In reality, renewables will take over everything very quickly.

Gas and coal imports from Russia stopped completely. But guess what still depends on Russia: The nuclear industry in Europe and the US.

Too bad numbers don't work when it's a quiet night, and you have to burn gas, caol, and biomass to make up for those nuclear reactors you've shut down: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396

I don't get this bogus argument. Germany is using the least coal in its history for electricity. The data is very easy to find, but it's a knee jerk reaction that they got rid of nuclear and so they must've replaced it with coal. Not true at all, and it's getting tiring reading this nonsense.

50% of the German electricity are now renewable, wind, solar, biomass, water. In 2022, Germany was creating and exporting a considerable chunk of electricity to help plugging the holes left by the switched off French reactors.

They replaced it with coal, gas and biofuel (that is, burning more stuff): https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396

Did you had a look at what Europe didn't stop importing from Russia due to lacking alternatives... cough cough.

I also don't get how an article can claim a global solution if nuclear currently is at 10% and we cannot keep up with supply and plants and and and.. this wont scale to 100%, not even 50 or even 20% of future global needs, would deplete cheap enough enable resources too quick... and what also is always forgotten: our world will likely have more, not less conflicts, unfortunately. Have fun managing this plants with wars all around and rivers going empty.

Yeah yeah all the issues happening and brought up again is just stupid people, mismanagement, etcetc.. But that unfortunately is humanity :/

Just no :/ especially as there are good enough and more sustainable other alternatives.

> Germany had some of the best managed plant

Better than France, likely agrees.. but still awful and that sentence is a joke. If that is your bar, good night. German infrastructure is currently rotting at record pace, happy we got those plants out there.

I am cautious on technology vs management. It's like the people who thinks death penalty is great in theory but the justice system is imperfect in practice: maybe, but you can't have one without the other. Nuclear plants have to be managed and that's an issue too.

- one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material

In quantities not relevant to safety. We can detect extremely small amounts of radiation, down to 1.0001% higher than backrgound levels.

- rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly

Not quite: the flow of rivers was low enough that they would exceed the 28C temperature limit (ostensibly to protect fish, but no adverse impact from higher temperatures has been observed). It was entirely possible to cool the plants, if this restriction were not in place. Perhaps the solution here is to ask for better evidence on the supposed adverse ecological impact of higher river temperatures, and examine whether it outweighs the global catastrophe of greenhouse gas emissions.

- nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)

Quite the contrary: Nuclear plants have some of the highest capacity factors [1] of any energy source. France's reactors were taken down for maintenance, much of it actually scheduled in advance. This is, intentionally or not, cherry picking a year with a particularly low capacity factor.

- the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants

Correct, and since nuclear thus far as proven to be one of the safest power sources [2] it's a reasonable change to accelerate the fight against climate change.

Nuclear is one of the few sources of decarbonized energy that is both non-intermittent, and geographically independent. Solar, wind, and hydro, are all either geographically dependent, intermittent, or both. Plans for a grid based on solar and wind almost invariably assume that a nearly-free form of energy storage will be invented in order to make these generation systems feasible. Unfortunately, such as system has yet to be produced. The heat engine made modern industrialized society possible, and it's easier to switch to a different source of heat than to restructure all of society around intermittent energy sources.

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

They are referring to the leaking of tritium, which, while "technically" radioactive, regular water contains some tiny amount of tritium and deuterium naturally. They are barely radioactive, and you can actually buy them on Amazon - they are not regulated.

To say that the reactor is "leaking radioactive material" because of tritium is extremely dishonest.

The problem is that some people are categorically denying the leaks for decades until eventually admitting that "yes of course it leaks but only a little"

And later "yep, it leaks routinely but it does not matter because tritium is safe"

And then "of course we knew from the start that is not totally, totally safe for environment, but fuck nature"

Ending with "as long as we can keep the stream of smoke curtains and cheap excuses so can't be linked with us is not a problem". Hey, maybe is not a real french!

This creates a big lack of credibility problem.

"I am not against nuclear power" - this is litterally the calling card of a tactical hit, forum-wise. It very obviously means the opposite of what it says.

I generally look at how people perceive things like this as an IQ test. At the moment the HN visitors upvoting/downvoting things in this thread have failed my baseline IQ test.

How I wish all presumably well-intentioned but badly informed and ill-educated people who very often seem to have.. let's say, bad luck when thinking would just stop trying to spread their gospel via forums in this destructive way. Looking at you, vaguely-informed "friends of the planet".

It is difficult to be well informed about these issues. Even without nuclear you need to think about the grid, environmental impact, economics, supply chains, financing. And nuclear adds complex science and engineering that would take several lifetimes to learn. People want to reduce the problem to one or two easily understood dimensions. We are all insufficently educated.

:( no really I try to stay open-minded and found contradictory answers interesting, if only because they are well documented. My reply is also to the initial article, which is on the contrary way too optimistic. Nuclear energy is not black or white, I think sharing personal experience as someone living near a plant, in a country relying mostly on nuclear energy, is relevant.

Oh no!

"as someone living near a plant"

My first 18 years: I lived 45 km from a nuclear power plant.

It helped me getting interested in physics because of some in hindsight exceptionally well performed guest lectures from a physicist working there, in grades 7-8.

You misrepresent tritium coming from a plant as a "radioactive leak". That's just dishonest nonsense.

> - one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material

You need to quantify whenever talking about radiation, otherwise it's meaningless. Granite countertops also leak radiation, same as bananas.

Also, coal powered plants leak radiation every time they burn coal...because coal is radioactive too. They also release mercury, which is why we can't eat too much tuna fish.

I mean, accidental leak and nuclear plants are not my fav word combination, even when it's limited quantities of tritium

You'd hate to be anywhere near a coal plant then. They absolutely spew radiation and don't even really try to contain it.

Fact is, every kind of energy is dirty in some way. Nuclear energy is one of the cleanest kinds of energy we have by far. It's just people have been taught to have an irrational fear of radiation. They don't realize they are constantly surrounded by it already.

I wasn’t aware of the nuclear problems in France. Here is some explanation of the problems.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/why-nuclear-powered-...

Regarding the government response the article omits the plan to simplify legislation around building new plants. This law might not even be debated in parliament, only senate.

> - nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)

Why we don't talk like that about renewables though? While the nuclear production was down to 65% capacity, renewables were down in the same time to ... 8%.

To be fair, the renewable production was lacking even more than the nuclear one at that time, despite being the worst maintainance event during the past 40 years.

Agreed, there are many concerns. But there are many concerns with every kind of energy generation, and for any of them, problems have to be solved and the system maintained. We, the people, have to take our own responsibility to hold our governments and companies accountable, if we care about the consequences.

....we could also choose to just use less energy and become more efficient. but my guess is nobody would accept it :D

Very true, and important to understand. Any energy transformation would result in production of stuff we do not like (trash). The Sun generates tons of trash (luckily for us for most localized on the Sun). Nothing is magically 100% clean.

Reducing the energy consumption could be done, but few government would like it, as there is a direct relationship between energy consumption and GDP.

If you want to produce anything (even services) you need energy. Cheap and abundant energy will make your economy thrive. If we want to power the next GPT and our current life style, we would need lots of cheap energy. I can see how nuclear could be tempting to use to boost the GDP with a minimal environmental impact.

Nuclear waste isn’t even trash, it’s a resource. Anything that’s energetic enough to be radioactive is also a massive source of untapped energy when processed and burned. In fact a hundred years from now we might be digging up the “trash” as a cheap source of fuel.

> one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material

Probably just Tritiated water which is essentially harmless. Basically water with extra neutrons and it is very weakly radioactive. So weak that you can't detect it with a Geiger counter. Since it is water it does not accumulate in organisms. Tritium is also naturally created in the atmosphere by cosmic radiation.

That's exactly what it is - which is why the comment above is so profoundly dishonest.

You can buy tritium on Amazon - it's harmless.

> That's exactly what it is - which is why the comment above is so profoundly dishonest.

Please, could you explain why US, EU and Canada governments have set narrow legal upper limits for Tritium presence on drinking water if is soo totally harmless?

And why is recommended "extended strong medical/therapeutic intervention" [1] in some cases of accidental exposure to Tritium if is not dangerous?

If you define the qualities of a chemical by the stuff sold on Amazon prepare yourself for a nasty surprise when meeting the real deal. Leaking Tritium in some obscure dose is a problem just because 1. the dose is unknown and 2. we are mostly made of water.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22349318/

Répondre en anglais serait impossible pour un tel niveau de mauvaise foi et de malhonnetteté intellectuelle.

> one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material

Je suppose qu'il s'agit du Tricastin, ou il y a de temps en temps des petits rejets de Tritium détectés, parce qu'il n'y a pas vraiment d'autres centrales proches de Montpellier qui ont des emmerdes. "Regularly" est un mensonge, et omet aussi les quantités qui fuient. Oui, c'est un problème qu'il y ait une fuite, et le CRIIRAD bosse dessus des que ca arrive, mais on parle de radioactivité non seulement très minimes, mais extrèmement diluées aussi.

>rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants correctly

Non. On décide de ne pas rejeter de l'eau chaude dans les rivières parce qu'elles sont déjà très chaudes et qu'on a des normes pour éviter d'endommager la vie aquatique qui sont extrèmement basses, et basées sur une moyenne de temperature annuelle. Dans la pratique, on pourrait faire monter largement les temperatures des cours d'eau sans danger encore, mais on ne le fait pas justement pour éviter des surprises. Et c'est oublier que ce problème n'existe que pour les centrales n'ayant de pas de tours aerorefrigerantes, auquel cas _il n'y a aucun probleme de refroidissement_

>nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)

Jean-José Mauvaise Foi frappe fort la. 60 ans de production sans aucun incident majeur, il aura fallu trois vagues de covid + des conditions météorologiques défavorables + un problème structurel relativement mineur (mais corrigé du coup) qui a causé un alignement des arrêts de centrales.

>the government wants to simplify control organism and laws around building new plants

Fallait pas donner une majorité relative aux tarés.

Bref, comme d'hab, finir sur un "je suis pas contre le nucléaire hein" tout en donnant des arguments dignes du pire article de Reporterre.

For too much radtion, I recommend reading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... (https://archive.is/LITQT).

I'm not sure how France treats radiation levels, but in the US, the guidelines we have set are non-nonsensical.

> He is now co-founder of fission energy company ThorCon, which is developing liquid fuel fission power plants to generate electricity cheaper than coal, to solve the world climate/energy/poverty crises.

I think nuclear will have an important part of dealing with climate change but he has a massive financial stake in this. I wouldn’t trust that more than I’d trust the Exxon guys who told us climate change was a liberal myth for half a century.

I can't think of a worse way to make money than a thorium energy start up. The people that are into Thorium are zealots, they're not in it for the money. The author of that article founded and sold a software company, worked as a VP for Boston Scientific, and is a professor at Dartmouth. He has easier ways of making money.

That said, Thorcon has one of the more practical Th reactor designs and has government backing already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi7lzbiq5k

The problem is that in government, you are rarely if ever punished for being top strict with your regulation. You are only ever chastised if you are too lenient (or the appearance of it). People like scapegoats and will use lax regulations anytime they can.

The problem is, a regulator never gets in trouble for being top strict. The incentives are totally wrong here and lead to bad regulations.

I trust this guy more than the bureaucrat covering their butt.

in Germany more than 40% of the total water consumption is cooling water evaporation.

btw how does France deal with nuclear waste?

Somebody I know who works for an emergy company talked to me about Thorium reactors that sounded very promising. I'm too dumb to explain it but it seemed cleaner and more efficient.

Thorium based reactors have largely the same benefits and risks as uranium fueled reactors. See this page written by reactor physicist and HN poster acidburnNSA:

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

Nuclear fusion will be the answer to baseload energy requirements without the need to worry over meltdown concerns.

There will be no need to do city or urban planning around radioactive fallout or leaks because fusion simply doesn't have those problems.

It’d be great but … when does it go online? I’m not going any more and it’s been “real soon now” for my entire life. We no longer have decades to wait, especially when we can cover the vast majority of needs with renewables for less money.

How does nuclear fusion solve the issue of rivers getting too hot, such that the plant has to shut down?

That isn't much of an issue unless the river is extremely small. The huge amount of water traveling on most rivers with nuclear plants is orders of magnitude more than what's used in to do the heat transfer in the reactor.

There are fusion reactor designs that don't use water. They directly convert to electricity with magnetic fields.

"Not expert in the metter"

So why are you talking? Seriously, why? Lol

How can it leaks? Do you have any source? Well you had some of them turned off for maintanance, that happens.

all nuclear power stations emit small amounts of liquid and gas radwaste as part of normal operation

mostly tritium and tritiated water that has been activated in the coolant circuits (practically impossible to separate)

but some other isotopes (carbon-14, caesium-137)

here's the environmental permit for the UK's most modern power station: https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/nuclear/consultati...

solid radwaste is kept under lock and key though

and the total volume of radioactive waste produced is WAY WAY WAY less than that produced burning fossil fuels

(turns out coal is reasonably radioactive)

No, coal is barely radioactive at all. The small traces of Thorium and Uranium are completely negligible. An old study from 1978 has estimated that nuclear reactors emit somewhat more radiation than coal power plants, but the levels are overall insignificant [1].

This is only about emissions though. The radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants has many many orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.202.4372.104...

"Small amounts"?

https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tri...

45 out of 65 sites had significant tritium leaks, some were migrating off site, some were starting to contaminate public drinking water.

The nuclear industry is so loosely regulated that a half million gallon leak of radioactive water recently apparently didn't require them to notify anyone https://apnews.com/article/xcel-energy-nuclear-leak-tritium-...

Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time to install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or safety.

That's why grid operators are shutting down both coal and nuclear in the US, and replacing it with solar and wind (the US has in recent years installed 6x more renewables-based capacity than nuclear capacity that has been shut down)

Look for the Tricastin plant I don't know enough to answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium, but other byproducts, which not a sign of a well managed plant. Some were stopped not just maintenance but the discovery of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago. That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-argument to reliability.

Yep, a 1980 PWR... sounds about right.

Modern reactor designs are so much better. They are also basically nonexistent because everyone stopped building reactors :(

- "one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material"

- "Look for the Tricastin plant I don't know enough to answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium"

So, your original statement was an untruth. Or "alternative facts"

> of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago. That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-argument to reliability.

So you mean microbreaches were made decades ago, the plant has operated for decades with no issues, and you call that unreliable?

Aren’t the reactors there too old and being operated above the original build age? Not sure so was wondering

That's mainly in Belgium. Most of France's reactors are from the 1980s, so they are nearing end-of-life but are not past their designed lifetime.

France had to stop some reactors after detecting defected pipes. This was not due to age, but manufacturing issue. Plants are constantly being monitored and pieces are replaced. After 50 years, very few pieces are original. That is why US and France keep pushing the retirement age of their plants as they function fine.

> nuclear plants are very unreliable

You mean, they are the most reliable base load and load-following power sources we know.

> References are easy to find if you want confirmation

It's just as easy to find confirmation that all the problems you listed are the result of neglect and politics of the past 20-30 years.

> it has to be done properly and safely, which is certainly not the case around here.

As in: France has 56 operable reactors that provide 75% of France's electricity... And you call that neither safe, nor reliable, nor...

Blaming things on neglect or politics just isn't useful. We need power sources that have some resilience to those things.

Can you give an example of a power source that is resilient to politics? I struggle to imagine what that would even look like.

Exactly. Humans are part of the system, so human factors matter to reliability.

Name a thing that is resilient to both neglect and human politics. We'll wait.

No power source is resilient to politics unfortunately.

Politics can fuck up everything.

> We need power sources that have some resilience to those things.

None of the power sources have resilience to politics.

> It's just as easy to find confirmation that all the problems you listed are the result of neglect and politics of the past 20-30 years.

This is always my objection to Nuclear. Nuclear's biggest drawback is that it requires proper maintenance and a stable regulatory environment to be safe.

Our world is too political and tumultuous. You have to manage too many externalities. This is only going to get worse as our climate continues to change.

I just don't see decades long nuclear projects helping us in the short term, and the disruptions on the horizon make long term governance of them problematic.

Nuclear proponents when trying to sell nuclear love to shout about how successful France is.

Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great...and now France's nuclear program is terrible and the result of 20-30 years of neglect and politics? Also, which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to environmental changes" didn't you get? If there's no cooling water, or the water is too hot, the plant can't run.

How many times do people need to be told that with all the renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more base load? We need storage. Also, wind keeps working just fine when the sun goes down.

Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a lot more difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of gigawatts of highly distributed generation and storage across a large region?Guess where utility companies are spending their money? Hint: not on nuclear.

Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical generation while wind and solar are the cheapest.

Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like 20, to come online and then takes decades longer to go carbon-neutral.

Solar and wind take months to deploy and are carbon neutral within a few years.

Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive, complicated supply chain and hundreds of people supervising and maintaining it.

Solar farms require maintenance that just about any asshole with an electrician's license can handle, the panels last for decades, and can be recycled. Wind turbines require more maintenance but it's standard industrial electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall stick.

> Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical generation while wind and solar are the cheapest.

Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to solar it's massively more expensive. You can't just compare an intermittent source and a non-intermittent source, without factoring in the cost of storage.

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great...

If there is one immutable truth about the French psyche, it’s that things are always “really not that great”.

Source: I am French, and left France because of that state of mind.

Yes, intermittent (sun/wind) only could work with enough storage. Do you know if/when we could get enough safe storage ? My understanding is batteries is not possible at the scale we would need. Pumping water where it is possible would be nice, but not sure if it would be enough. Do we know the storage capacity than US for instance would need, if only using solar and wind ?

Note that the cooling argument would be the same for coal or gas power plant. They work the same way. So, until enough storage is in place, we might need some base production, and it would require access to cold source (river or ocean). France had to reduce the activity of some nuclear power plants last summer because they have rules when it comes to river temperature. The next 8 reactors that France is planning to build would likely be build on the ocean's shore for that reason.

The cost of nuclear electricity is mostly impacted by the cost of money. That is why the cost of electricity from a UK nuclear power plant is more expensive than from France nuclear power plant. The UK used private capital (higher interest) when France use gov funds (lower interest). It is correct that it takes time to build a plant, and it requires expertise. But it is also true that a power plant can run for decades (US and France pushing to 80 years) as anything in a plant can be upgraded over time (except the pool).

Until there is an efficient storage technology that can be deployed at large scale, we might need to run some nuclear power plants. No idea for how long ?

Sure, France has it's own issues but they are not really related to the tech itself.

Point me any other energy company which could have survived basically 20 years without proper investments and forced to sell back electricity to their competitors.

I would even say that the tech is what made the grid still standing against all odds.

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great.

Relative to...what? Is there any major country that has a great power grid, objectively better than France? Certainly we have plenty of problems here in the US.

I'm a big nuclear power advocate but of course NP has problems, like any human project. It has dangers, like any scalable power supply. I support NP because it is better than all the rest.

"The phasing out of the three large, baseload nuclear power plants will increase Germany's need to import electricity from its neighbors. At the same time, all available scenarios show that as a result of the (almost) simultaneous phasing out of the coal units, Germany will transform itself from an exporter to a net importer of energy as early as the mid-2020s. Adding spice to the matter is the fact that the country is particularly dependent on importing energy from France, which obtains three-quarters of its energy from nuclear power plants. Without the widespread availability of electricity from France, Germany's Atomausstieg would not be possible."[0]

Europe needs stable, centralized and long-term source of energy. Neither solar nor wind power fulfills these requirements. The main goal should be to abandon coal and gas power plants as quickly as possible, and Germany showed that it is very hard / impossible without nuclear power.

[0] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/node/31458 (in polish, sorry, there is no english version of the article)

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great

Yet is amazing that even with the poor management of the French government, it is still a beacon of hope the rest of the world looks to for our energy future.

> Also, which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to environmental changes" didn't you get? If there's no cooling water, or the water is too hot, the plant can't run.

That is completely false. Most Gen4 reactors are passively cooled. And even older ones, not all require 'once through' water cooling. there are other options: https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/techn...

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great...

That person is really just spreading FUD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35659262

> How many times do people need to be told that with all the renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more base load?

Of course we do

> We need storage.

Yes. And it's non-existent. There are literally no grid-scale strage solutions in existence.

> Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a lot more difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of gigawatts of highly distributed generation and storage across a large region?

Neither are particularly true statements. Also, what do you think grid-scale storage would do if not inject gigawatts of power into a grid when needed?

> Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like 20,

Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in China: 6.1 GW nameplate capacity. Built over 14 years at 1 reactor per 6 years. Operational.

Meanwhile the very distributed Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project was founded in 2018, and is promised to start powering Britain in 2030.

--- start quote ---

Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budget.

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-projec... --- end quote ---

So we know how that will go.

> Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive, complicated supply chain and hundreds of people supervising and maintaining it.

> The panels last for decades, and can be recycled. Wind turbines require more maintenance but it's standard industrial electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall stick.

Of course it's not just a tal stick. It's a rather complicated machine that you can't even safely get to since it's so tall. And that's before we start talking about offshore wind farms like Hornsea 2. Yo need a lot of specialist equipment to maintain those.

There are 500 to 800 people working on a nuclear power plant.

--- start quote ---

Each windfarm tends to have between 7 and 11 employees per 100 MW

https://graham.umich.edu/media/pubs/Wind-Turbine-Economic-Im...

--- end quote ---

So while fewer than per a nuclear plant, you still have to keep in mind that you need to massively overbuild renewables because their generation fluctuates.

Someone on the internet is saying they are French, making claims that aren't backed up with sources or data.

Except in the real world where wind + solar account for the vast majority of GW added. Nuclear just doesn't matter. It's 2023, there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not even a little bit. It didn't matter. Too little (well barely anything at all), too late.

There's this pesky thing called cost that nuclear proponents just refuse to address. They are all scientific about how nuclear works. How great it is. Etc. But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out, go hand wavy, and generally refuse to talk numbers. You could do this, you could do that. But nobody really likes being put on the spot about what exactly to do for how much.

Not a single dollar sign in this article nor the string "dollar". Or other common currency such as "Euro". There's nothing else to be said about this article. It just completely ignores cost. It's all hand wavy and devoid of facts about cost. Very typical. Must be deeply embarrassing to read such drivel for an actual nuclear physicist with a clue. Guilty by association and it's not a good look. If these are your biggest fans, you are royally screwed.

The whole argument for nuclear evaporates as soon as you bring up cost. Then it's suddenly about such pesky things as $/mwh and delays, budget overruns, etc. And the fact that there are things you can buy and install that have very well known $/mwh cost that work as advertised.

The cost of nuclear today has more to do with the fact that we aren’t building nuclear plants. There are minimum companies with small operations making nuclear reactor technologies for just maintenance of existing ones and military contracts. If we were building new nuclear plants with modern reactors, the costs wouldn’t be a big deal anymore because the production of them would have scaled better.

But instead we’re spending tens of billions on windmills and solar panels that won’t last 15 years or operate well in many regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This is why Germany is now reliant on France’s nuclear power to handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.

So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences of solar and wind.

The argument that costs will come down if we build more nuclear worked in the 1950s, but we know now where that goes now. Build More nuclear and costs come down. With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents, the public realizes these things can make entire nations uninhabitable if they fail, and then they demand a halt to nuclear, pushing prices back up.

Nuclear prices have baked in the public sentiment on the risk of meltdowns. The prices are efficient.

> With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents

Can we stop making this argument? It is an extremely bad faith argument. There have only been two accidents of commercial reactors in the history of nuclear power that led to the loss of lives. The likely value is well under 10k (<100 directly attributed to Chernobyl). The first was orders of magnitude more dangerous than the second, was early into the development of nuclear power, and was caused by experimentation using a nuclear reactor that the rest of the world refused to use due to the potential for the reactor to fail in exactly the way Chernobyl did. The second, killed a single person, was caused by the largest natural disaster in the region (in all of recorded history), where the science of the day did not think such an event could even happen.

Yes, there's more nuance to this, but we also need to recognize the actual level of danger. These arguments pretend that scientific knowledge has not changed over 80 years. These arguments pretend that there are no deaths and/or environmental concerns with other energy sources (literally every one has these concerns). They ignore the cost of carbon and other environmental damage of the source's lifetime. Most importantly, these arguments pretend that all incidents are equally as dangerous.

Can we please just stop? There are a lot of valid criticisms of nuclear power, but making lazy arguments just results in fighting. Talk about costs, reliance on fuel, the possibility of not even needing them, or any other points (argue with nuance). The public is (sadly) not well informed about nuclear nor most scientific concepts in general, although many members have high confidence in their cursory understanding. (The thesis here applies to a lot of other scientific domains btw, including: climate, health, and even evolution) We need to have real conversations about these issues as there is a lot on the line. Complex issues require complex discussions.

It is quite misleading to only focus on deaths due to nuclear accidents. Fukushima may not have (directly) killed anyone, but the cleanup is hideously expensive (estimates say many hundred billion dollars). Containing Chernobyl costed a few percent of Ukraine's pre-war annual budget. So far, roughly one in a hundred power reactors have blown up. If this is priced in, the economics get even less favorable.

From https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=duratio... there has been 649 reactors operating giving 0.3% "blown up" (calling fukushima blown up is misleading IMO, but ok). Still quite high when looked at from this angle, but not 1/100.

I'm quite sure, but not 100% that the above number does *not* include research reactors. If it makes sense to include those into the statistics is less clear.

Fukushima had three meltdowns (reactors 1-3), and a hydrogen gas explosion that damaged the spent fuel pool of reactor 4. Together with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, this corresponds to roughly 1% of all commissioned reactors suffering catastrophic failure with significant radiation release.

Yes, and these death-based analysis' also ignore the fact that both Fukishima and Chernobyl could have been much, much worse if major interventions were not made at the right moment. I always think about the Fukishima engineers who got the instruments in the control room to turn on by wiring them up to car batteries. If the team on duty that day was just a little less resourceful, the story gets much worse. Those incidents should be seen as a lower-bound to the danger not an upper bound.

No, we cannot stop talking about the danger of meltdowns, because it is a proven danger, and a uniquely catastrophic one. Approximately once per decade, a nuclear reactor melts down and either does (Chernobyl) or nearly does (Fukishima) make a nation-sized area of earth uninhabitable. Asking people to ignore this fact when they consider building nuclear plants in their region is silly.

Those were old reactors, we haven't tried the newer safer reactors these past decades.

Well said. You can browse through the replies in the threads on this post, and see where all the cost questions go unanswered. Cost and the basic economics of trying to run a really expensive power source at a fixed high price over 40+ years when the competition gets cheaper every day. That’s the major why virtually none get built anymore. And it’s not going to change.

Wind and solar are only possible because they use the rest of the grid as effectively a giant battery. When the sun shines and/or the wind blows, someone else needs to reduce the electricity generation. The end result will be that during good weather the price of electricity is zero, and during any other time the price of electricity is high to pay for unused capacity and additional wear and tear on the equipment due to additional power cycling.

We are already seeing this in Germany[1], where electricity prices are also becoming zero[2] during parts of the day. The problem with renewables will become apparent only once the reserves of easily dispatchable electricity generation is used up across Europe to balance renewable generation.

[1] - https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...

Also because of the natural gas boom. Better than coal sure but worse than nuclear.

Cost is not independent of the perception around nuclear though, and its influence on regulatory burdens, insurance, legislation, nimbyism, etc. So it kind of makes sense to focus on other factors. Changing the perception could bring down the cost as well.

Nuclear is the only type of energy that can guarantee a low variability in production.

> But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out,

Nuclear is expensive because of 2 reasons. First, because we didn't build any, we have zero momentum savings. Second, it is expensive because we make it expensive. Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer than any other form of energy. If raw material mining for solar had the same kind of limitations (per human-year lost), then solar would be prohibitively expensive too. If disposal of waste (pollution) for coal/natural gas was as stringent (adjusted to human years lost), then they too would be prohibitively expensive. Nuclear costs are technically quite low. We have scared ourselves into making it so expensive that it is impossible to build.

> wind + solar

You conveniently mention the 2 form of electric production that nuclear does not compete with. Consistent-electricity comes in the form of petroleum, hydro-power and nuclear energy. We need consistent energy. Nuclear replaces petroleum and hydro-power, both of which are significantly worse for the environment and cause much higher median and worst-case loss of life than nuclear energy. If we could build nuclear power plants with the sort of carelessness that coal and hydro-power plants are, then nuclear would've been the dominant form of consistent energy production.

_______

My suspicion is that the lack of nuclear powerplants is because of perverse economic incentives for countries with uranium supplies. The nations with the largest uranium reserves [1] are either already oil/coal producing countries and do not need uranium disrupting their own economy (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa) or do not have the technological knowhow to execute on a nuclear power plant (Namibia, Niger).

The exceptions are China and India, both of which therefore pushing for more nuclear power. [2] [3] "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_India#:~:text....

> It's 2023, there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not even a little bit. It didn't matter.

I think this is a rather inaccurate characterization and we need to be a bit more nuanced here. I'm going to address this out of order, and first with the power shortage.

Power shortage:

I'd actually argue that nuclear power played an extremely important role since the invasion of Ukraine. Remember that France is the second largest exporter of electricity in Europe[0], just a hair behind Germany (#3 (Sweden) is half of #2, number 4 is half of #3) (it is also worth considering that France's electricity is almost an order of magnitude lower in emissions[1]). It is also worth considering which countries were reliant upon Russian gas, and France had low reliance whereas Germany had a high dependency[2,3] and remember that Europe would still be importing gas from Russia if they could[4]. Germany also had increased reliance on Russian gas over the last 20 years, and had a sharp increase in gas intake post 2011 (Fukushima)[5].

So let's put it this way: Europe hit a energy crisis where Russian gas played a major role[6] (but to be clear, not the only). Who picks up the slack? What what does that country use to generate most of its electricity?

Lack of plants:

A problem here is that in Europe only a handful of plants have gone into operation in the last 20 years. Ukraine got two (2005 and 2006), Romania got one in 2007, Belarus got one in '21, Finland got one a week ago, and that's it. 5 reactors in 20 years[7]. The majority of the existing reactors came online in the 80s. Yes, there's been several proposals but nuclear power has long been politically contentious, especially in Europe. See Germany who only even considered stopping their shutdowns (which were politically motivated) due to the power crisis. You'll notice that most environmental scientists suggest shutting down all fossil fuels before nuclear, but this was not the path taken. While yes, this does technically mean that you're right in that nuclear didn't come to the rescue but I'd argue that this is akin to saying that a hammer isn't useful in woodworking because you never took it out of the toolbox. This is not the same as (properly) using the hammer and it failing to meet the demands of the task. Or maybe a different analogy we can say is that it is unfair to claim a consumable resource (plants need to be replaced, including renewables) is useless when you do not replace that resource for decades. We're not going to talk about costs of plants because I expect everyone on HN to understand scale, momentum, and working knowledge are all significant factors.

Now there is another factor that plays an important role, and this conversation can't happen in good faith without mentioning it: France's "nuclear crisis"[8]. This was an unfortunate event and a "perfect storm" if you will. So we know most of these reactors have been operating since the 80's, it is only natural to expect repairs. Unfortunately in early 2020 there was a global pandemic and in response many planned outages were delayed or reduced in 2021[9], with the expectation that a lot of the slack could be picked up in 2022. Unfortunately, a certain country invaded another country and the invading country had an control over one of the major power sources of that Europe.

Conversations about nuclear power are often terrible online. Neither the nuclear bros nor the anti-nuclear bros are arguing from a scientific perspective. Both climate and nuclear energy are incredibly complex and nuanced issues. First order approximations are not "good enough" and what many claim is "common sense" or "obvious" isn't (and obvious post hoc isn't obvious in situ). To be clear, the scientific consensus has been to focus on renewables but not take nuclear off the table (note that this is not the position you find either camp arguing for online). While nuclear bros often advocate for high levels of nuclear power, no reasonable energy/climate scientist would suggest this. Similarly, no reasonable energy/climate scientist will say that nuclear should be rejected while we're still using fossil fuels (the argument is if we need nuclear or not for a future world of zero carbon energy production, but this is highly nuanced). Nuclear bros argue for thorium breeder reactors due to their lower waste levels and proliferation risk, not knowing that these are not major concerns in the community and can be solved in other ways. Anti-nuclear bros argue about cost but ignore the build-out issue, history, progression of nuclear technology, and the polarizing political sphere surrounding the issue. While I am certain that most, if not all, these comments are well intentioned and people are trying to make the world a better place, that does not mean that the arguments are being done in good faith (high confidence + low domain knowledge = bad faith).

I frequently argue (including here on HN) that this over confidence and tribalism prevents actually resolving these issues. I've provided a lot of resources here and I think everyone should be careful in how they discuss complex subjects online. I understand that many of you are passionate, but make sure that this passion isn't tribal. If you're really passionate about something then you'll invest a proportional amount of energy to learn about the subject. Are you passionate about fixing problems or expressing you opinion? Are your opinions able to be changed or are you just "educating" others? We live in a highly specialized world, it is not a demerit on your intelligence to not be knowledgeable in a specific domain, but it is to speak confidently about domains you have no expertise in. Let's all try to encourage this behavior and hold ourselves to high standards. This happens in every nuclear thread and I hope we can learn to be better than Reddit.

[0] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/electricity_export...

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR

[2] https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/07/19/blog-how-a-...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-much-does-germany-n...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...

[5] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/key-challenges-ha...

[6] https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/research/europe-energy-cri...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reactors_in_Euro...

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20230307020200/https://www.nytim...

[9] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

France has been importing energy and driven the energy crisis in Europe because over half the fleet has been offline.

You also talk a lot without addressing the central point: the energy market in Europe is based on marginal price.

Please, frame nuclear as a profitable investment in a marginal price energy market. I dare you.

The central point is addressed, you just have to read the whole thing.

> Please, frame nuclear as a profitable investment in a marginal price energy market.

This is a whole different conversation and if you don't want to engage in good faith then there's no point to this.

That's a lot of text. It does not mention dollars, euros, etc. or cost. You are making my point for me.

It is generally not cool to call something astroturfing here on HN. But googling the author of this article Todd Royal you can see he is a consultant for a lobby group called E4 Carolinas which is heavily funded by big energy companies who have big investments in the fossil fuel industry. In the past he has written articles with titles such as “Why Climate Panic Is Unfounded Hysteria” where he accuses advocates for renewables of astroturfing, while advocating for the continued use of fossil fuels:

> What the entire climate change, global warming, renewables over fossil fuels and electrify society movement is really about is one thing—money—clean energy is now worth trillions of taxpayer dollars. Government-sponsored science and economic growth at its worst picking clean energy over fossil fuels and internal combustion engine vehicles. These are disastrous energy policies.

> The existential threat narrative of global warming only solved by destroying global economies by switching to intermittent, expensive renewables over reliable fossil fuels is foolish according to Dr. Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as Undersecretary for Energy during President Barack Obama’s first term.

All the while pushing a conspiracy narrative and climate change denial:

> It’s particularly painful because climate doomsday scenarios are all historically wrong. Climate panic is simply unfounded hysteria. The weather and climate are dynamic and ever-changing. Seemingly, it’s a giant ploy to deprive people of their freedom and liberty.

> Blackouts are the future for the United States, European Union, Great Britain, and Australia if they continue on this clean energy transition.

thank you. I as well was interested to read something new interesting on the energy future. This, however, was not it. The author is "working on a three-year grant for the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration focusing on a value chain study for the advanced nuclear technology sector"? Seems like a waste of money if this is the kind of output we're seeing.

> Only nuclear power is carbon-free [...]

You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies this piece as disingenuous at best, more likely though propaganda.

The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free". Uranium extraction, transport and processing produce emissions. Building the plants and maintaining them does. Eventually demolishing does. Transporting the used fuel as well as building and maintaining storage facilities does.

All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count them for nuclear power.

All of that can be true and yet still trivial in comparison to the emissions that would be eliminated by replacing all fossil-fuel electrical generation with nuclear.

Nuclear works at night and in locations that aren't good for solar or wind generation. Nuclear with a relatively small number of generating sites feeding a large distributiion network fits in with our existing electricial infrastrucure better than the widely dispersed generation that solar and wind provide.

We need leadership that will just clear the way for liquid metal, fast neutron reactors that don't need refined fuel and produce less waste. If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival, it's time to stop fretting about nuclear proliferation and waste disposal. The challenges of those issues are tiny compared to global climate change.

Well, you didn't actually address my comment, which had nothing to do with solar working at night or similar. It's useful to keep separate arguments separate since jumping around if something doesn't suit your liking is not a sincere discussion style.

> If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival

FWIW, I don't believe that. Humans will survive, unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon, but that's not because of climate change. Not directly at least. Those of us in privileged will have an easier time adapting to a changing climate, the rest of our species won't have it so easy. And later generations will need to live with the consequences as well. But they will adapt too. If they've never seen a frozen north pole, it will not be odd to them.

Even if it was an existential threat to human survival, I wouldn't care. Why would I? It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other species survival. Did you recently check how many species we have brought to extinction? Over 90% of large predatory fish are gone (shark, tuna, ...). Buffalos almost went extinct. Gorillas, sea turtles, .. I don't think the human species has much moral ground to argue it should survive and I won't move a finger to help.

> unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon

FWIW, the only way nuclear weapons wipe out all of humanity is if they start unprecedentedly large fires that change the climate.

At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That’s nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out as we are).

The way nukes end humanity is blacking out the sun and reducing plant/food output.

> At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That’s nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out as we are).

Directly? Probably not. But the contamination from fallout is more than sufficient to poison a significant fraction of humans over a not-too-long time horizon and provide everybody else with a significant cancer risk. The ensuing chaos and resulting breakdown of civilization will do the rest. Don't believe it? Ever seen the panic when toilet paper is at risk to run out at Walmart?

Those who still remember the Chernobyl disaster are aware what that meant for Europe. A single plant, and everybody got warned and could take precautions.

> It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other species survival.

As opposed to which species that do?

Geez, I'm really worried about discussion styles here.

Nobody claimed that other species do. That has little to do with the question of why I should care about our's surviving.

Correct, but transport, steel manufacturing, etc. are also required for solar, wind, hydro, and whatnot. The real question you're asking is, "what is the net carbon emissions of nuclear power?".

And the answer is that it's lower than most renewables: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...

_All_ powerplants have those problems, not _just_ nuclear. I agree it's a bit sensationalist of them to not consider the whole picture and declare nuclear "carbon free".

What are the total carbon emissions over the life time of usage including construction, operation, maintenance, and destruction of a nuclear plant vs a fossil plant?

I wouldn't be surprised if a nuclear plant emits far less carbon overall than a fossil-powered plant while operational for the same power generation and lifetime of use when considering those factors.

"X is the only foo that doesn't suffer from Y!"

"But it does!"

"Well so does every other foo!"

You see that this is not a good argument, don't you?

This is why we look at the actual amount of carbon released, not just a binary yes/no. I mean even if you had a magic power source that did not emit one single molecule of C02, a FUD spreader like you could use that exact same argument the first time a worker sparks a cigarette.

So tell me, how much C02 does mining uranium emit as compared to a coal station on a kg/Watt basis? six orders of magnitude less? seven?

> a FUD spreader like you

Eh, what? That's not a very nice thing to say.

> So tell me

No, I don't need to. I refuted a claim. You can move the goal posts, but I won't participate in that game.

Obviously a coal plant emits more CO2 than a nuclear fission plant. But the criticized sentence contained the words "carbon free". Which is just not true. I don't see how pointing that out is FUD.

> You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies this piece as disingenuous at best

Or you can keep reading it and see that it literally says "It is a misnomer to say renewables are carbon-free compared to nuclear power." And discusses the very things you stated was disingenuously discounted.

One tanker could supply the worlds uranium needs. Zero required to transport sun and wind. Beats the thousands used for oil and gas.

These articles never answer the question: if the suggested cost of nuclear power investment instead went to batteries and renewables, what’s the Gigawatt difference?

We know nuclear is clean. But Solar and batteries are cleaner AND recyclable.

I think it's more disingenuous not to have quoted the rest that qualifies this statement compared to renewables:"...and able to meet growing U.S. calls for electrification and global needs for basic economic growth". The rest of the article goes into details about what you get for the amount of resources put into renewables vs nuclear and why nuclear outperforms once an investment is made.

Almost nothing about civilization is emissions free. In the context of comparing energy sources, it's a totally reasonable statement. It's only when you present it cut-off like you did that it sounds wrong. You're criticizing half of the tagline of the article, of course it won't contain all the nuances.

Probably a good idea to read the rest of the article. They explain why.

> Whereas nuclear power accounts for all materials through the decommissioning phase—and surprisingly, 90 percent of all materials from a nuclear power plant can be recycled—compared to old wind and solar platforms, which generate millions of tons of waste

Again measuring with different standards. Depending on the design of a typical wind turbine, you can recycle 90-95% of those as well. And that's without a prime design criterion of maximizing recyclability, which could be mandated by law and then you'd achieve close to 100%.

The sentence is just as disingenuous as the initial sentence that I criticized.

My biggest issue with these proposals is one that is at the heart of the documentary here and put pretty succinctly:

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/containmen...

How can we contain or dispose of some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced? How to we ensure it lasts well beyond the possibility of our civilization currently and mark it in such a way that its clear to others its dangerous. Without those answers I am not sure how we can argue its better/safer.

The story gets better here when you consider that most "waste" can actually be reused (93% of uranium fuel rods used in LWRs could be recycled). Also consider, more radioactive materials (the parts we can't currently recycle, outside of some exotic hypothetical reactor designs) have shorter half lives, and so aren't a problem for as long.

The best containment proposal I've seen is deep geological disposal.

Also consider, making fuel rods removes some radioactivity from the environment, so if you change the requirements from "keep all byproducts contained forever" to "keep all byproducts contained until radiation levels are no worse than where we got it from" the problem becomes more tractable.

In mythical breeder reactors that, which all the built ones have been even less economical than regular PWRs.

No, I'm talking about recycling fuel rods for use in our current nuclear reactors. I'm fuzzy on the details, but a fuel rod becomes unusable way before all the uranium is used up because of a build up of "nuclear poisons" which interfere with fission in the reactor. You can also get some plutonium when recycling, which can also be used in a LWR.

I'm not talking about exotic breeder reactor designs, or molten salt reactors. France has been recycling fuel rods for some time now. The U.S. just prohibits this due to proliferation concerns.

Edit: breeder reactors are usually more about being able to use other less rare elements for fuel, like thorium, or being able to use more common isotopes of uranium. Yes, they often propose using recycled waste to "kick start" the breeding process, but they're not needed to recycle fuel rods.

Actually you can reprocess fuel rods. Typical rods are ~5% U235 at start with the rest U238, and over time most of the U235 gets burned up and turned into fission products. But you still often end up with ~1% U235 and some other stuff like plutonium or other actinides that could get burned up if it weren't for the fission products poisoning the reactor.

Japan and France reprocess the fuel, stripping out all the fission products but keeping the actinides (U235 and U238 and other fertile/fissile isotopes) then adding back in U235 and U238 to fill it out to ~5% fissile and 95% fertile material again. Then you put the rod back in a reactor.

This isn't as efficient a use of natural uranium as a breeder but it does make it the case that the only actual radioactive material you have to deal with waste-wise is the fission products. Everything else keeps going back into a reactor until it's burned up, or is U238 which is harmless (it's 99.3% of what we pull out of the ground and so could just get put back into the ground).

The fission products are nasty but that also means they decay very fast and become totally harmless (ie less radioactive than the original uranium ore) in ~300 years. We can embed them in a glass block, which renders them inert chemically and pretty impervious to leaching if exposed to water, etc. It's then easy to manage them until they're harmless (you can do whatever you want with them; the volume of material is not very high, and it's quite easy to shield against it).

France, for instance, can store the fission products from 1 tonne of spent fuel in 110L of glass, (see https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...) which corresponds in modern reactors (45GWd/tonne of spent fuel) to ~10GWh of thermal energy produced per liter of vitrified glass. By comparison, gasoline has an energy density of ~8.5kWh/L, so ~1.2 million times higher for the glass waste than unburned gasoline (coal etc is similar).

If the US ran 100% on nuclear for all energy (needing maybe 3TWe, 10TWh-th) and reprocessed our spent fuel, we'd produce around 24m^3 of vitrified glass per day, and its maximal volume would be ~2.7e6 m^3, or roughly 1 square mile one meter deep, to run the entirety of the US forever with nuclear power (that's 300 years of production, by the end of which the fission products are less radioactive than the original ore, so we can just dump any 300-year-old glass in the ocean or something and it's totally fine, can't harm anything).

Is that a lot of waste? I guess. But we burn that much gasoline in the US every 2 days, and the products of that just get dumped straight into the air. This stuff is solid and just sits there not doing much of anything except make some heat, then becomes harmless glass we can dump wherever. Pretty good deal imo.

While I agree about your conclusion (propaganda) I disagree about your metrics.

First, there are no sources of energy that are carbon free, only those who's energy production does not result in carbon emissions. This is why we say zero "net" emissions and why so many are working on sequestration methods (reforestation, soil management, natural sequestration, artificial sequestration). All your arguments are universal and not unique to nuclear, renewables, nor fossil fuels.

Second, the "and" in the thesis is important. The line did not make the claim that renewables are not carbon-free, but rather that of zero-emission generators, renewables are insufficient to power the grid alone.

Reading the article, it isn't too bad. There's a clear bias and ignores some aspects, it isn't too different from any other opinion piece. It at least isn't making the absurd argument that nuclear should be even the dominant producer of energy. I think the author would agree that renewables play an important role in our future of energy but they are making the argument to not take nuclear off the table and trying to convince others (aka propaganda) with an exaggerated and incomplete argument.

I agree that the article is deserving of criticism but I think we need to be a bit more specific. I also agree that the article is propaganda, but I do not agree that just because something is propaganda that it can be trivially dismissed. The word is too vague and encompasses all discussions where politics is part of the discussion. The word is like "conspiracy", common usage does not reflect the actual definition and is often used to dismiss a claim rather than address it.

Propaganda:

> information, ̶e̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶i̶a̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶i̶s̶l̶e̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶n̶a̶t̶u̶r̶e̶, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

The same thing can be said of solar panels and wind turbines.

The truth is that the once the power plant is built it generates clean power for decades. That power can then be used to power things like building new power plants.

> The truth is that the once the power plant is built it generates clean power for decades.

That is not the truth. The typical fuel cycle in fission plants is 3-6 years.

> The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free".

How do you think those windmill parts and solar panels get from the manufacturers to the end users?

I personally don’t see solar and wind able to provide enough energy to electrify an entire nation’s fleet of freight haulers. Nuclear, maybe — assuming they build a bunch of little plants so a truck can “refuel” in the middle Wyoming away from large populations.

Maybe Wyoming isn’t the best example as it’s always windy there but the point stands.

I did address your first remark in the end of my comment:

> All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count them for nuclear power.

I did not talk about how much energy is provided or what to do about freight haulers.

I honestly believe that most of the carbon calculations come from the pro-renewable folks to promote whatever pet project they’re on about. Nobody seriously considering building a nuclear power plant is going to care about some “externalities” amortized over its 50-75 year lifetime.

> I honestly believe that most of the carbon calculations come from the pro-renewable folks to promote whatever pet project they’re on about.

Sounds like reflection to me, if anything.

Google the author, who he works for, and some of the stuff he has written in the past, I think describing this a propaganda is actually giving this an easy way out.

Right, conflict of interest is more like it.

Uranium extraction can be electrified. You're the one spreading an obviously mistaken view.

Most pro-renewables news articles are disingenuous at best, or propaganda.

Even if that's true, it's hard to criticize while doing the same thing.

> Solar power requires even more metals, cement, steel, and glass.

Why do they always use the same outdated data sources? Cement? Yes 35 years ago they thought you needed to put a slab of cement under your panels to support them, but we moved on from that. Please update to newer, more relevant data sources.

This is objectively false and I always have a hard time believing that this is an organic opinion free of industry influence.

Nuclear power is the power industry's answer to "clean" energy because it preserves the centralized delivery system in place. It does not disrupt the current distribution model.

No matter what you think of the safety of nuclear power, what I said is a fact and the industry spends billions on PR, lobbying, and even online trolls, trying to get people to agree.

Nuclear power is objectively not safe, with the one caveat that we are talking about long term. In the long term even one accident is absolutely devastating to entire regions of the planet. This risk is simply NOT acceptible.

In other words, even if wind and solar are more expensive or less profitable, they are simply better alternatives from the standpoint of humanity's continued existence on the planet.

There is no effective argument about this. I always get hit with the safety argument when I say this, but it's just all fully false. There is no safety argument because even an outlying and unlikely scenario is too devastating. And these scenarios, given enough time, simply will occur.

> Nuclear power is the power industry's answer to "clean" energy because it preserves the centralized delivery system in place. It does not disrupt the current distribution model.

Which is a good thing. Energy demand is centralized in big population centers, so centralized production is easier to deploy.

One of the big issues with renewables is that due to the low energy density and geographic variations in power output, they often need to be built far away from where energy is in demand. This puts more strain on transmission networks: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/178686...

> Nuclear power is objectively not safe, with the one caveat that we are talking about long term. In the long term even one accident is absolutely devastating to entire regions of the planet. This risk is simply NOT acceptible.

Incorrect. People seem to forget that we detonated hundreds of nuclear warheads in the atmosphere. Chernobyl was exposed to the atmosphere and burned for weeks. Chernobyl really was the worst-case scenario: an explosive meltdown in a reactor with no secondary storage. It really doesn't get any worse than that. We already have good data on the adverse impact of nuclear incidents, and while bad they're not nearly as devastating as you make them out to be.

Question(s) to the nuclear supporters here:

1. Are you talking about global electricity? Or just the West?

2. How much nuclear power do you want? 20%, 50%, 70%, or 100%? Or something else?

3. What nuclear technology? Traditional, Molten Salt, SMRs, or something else?

4. What institutional setting do you image for your nuclear power plants? Private ownership, or nationalized plants like in France?

Just curious...

1. Yes!

2. Just some more than we have now.

3. Yes!

4. Yes!

Seriously though, I just want some reactor construction to spin up with non ancient reactor designs, to replace some fossil fuel plants. PBR[1] sounds good to me... but what do I know? There are experts who can decide this.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

These are the kinds of anwsers that makes me think you haven't thought through this much.

There are very clear plans for going 100% renewable. See Marc Z Jacobsens studies for instance. I wouldn't mind some nuclear power myself. But there just doesn't seem to be a clear plan about what approach to take. We don't have time to just dabble in various new reactor technologies.

To me it seems we could either build old simple reactors that we don't really trust anymore. I wouldn't mind, but it's not realistic. Or try to get Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors down in cost. But will it help? Will it be worth the investments? I guess we should at least keep existing nuclear engineers employed.

Seems to me that the only barrier now to just going all-in on renewables is energy storage. The next next few decades will be aaaaall about energy storage and transformation technologies anyway.. so there's an argument to be had that it's a good thing to just go all in on energy storage R&D. That kind of expertise will be critical to decarbonizing transportation, fertilizer and metal production anyway. Better energy storage makes it easier to decarbonize across all sectors. There's excellent network effects. Better nuclear only helps decarbonizing the grid, but that's just a part of our challenge.

Nuclear is not going to power every country anyway. That ship has basically already sailed with solar+energy storage. It's just the simplest way to get up and running with electricity if you don't have a grid, and as technologies improve, developing areas will just continue to scale that up.

The big X factor is advanced geothermal energy. I think once the fossil fuel industry sees the writing on the wall, a lot of engineers from that sector will go into geothermal. If just one of them manages to succeed getting the cost down, and drill deeper, what's the point of nuclear fission?

And then there's the fact that nuclear directly contributes to global warming by directly heating up the planet. Much less than greenhouse gases, but surprisingly much. That's extra heat we can't really afford in the coming decades. Rivers are going to end up being at the edge of ecologoical collapse due to global warming... and we're going to dump MORE heat into them?

It doesn't seem like pure renewable is the minimal cost, maximum speed solution. Storage is expensive however you cut it, and there is already infrastructure in place to operate nuclear plants that would be wasted if they were slowly retired.

Geothermal is indeed a dark horse/wildcard. I dunno if you have read this, but it is extremely promising: https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-drilling-...

What do you do with old fusion research and the oil drilling industry? Maser drill holes under coal plants, and pipe it to their turbine! Oh and you run the maser with the existing infrastructure at the coal plant. Its almost too good to be true.

In the US we're replacing nuclear plants with renewables at a 6:1 ratio.

The only people who think we need more nuclear power plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.

> The only people who think we need more nuclear power plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.

And also quite a few energy experts and the people who listen to them. The US nuclear industry's major players are bloated cronies satisfied with ALARA and other idiotic policies that keep them alive by preventing competition.

If ALARA weren't in place, nuclear would be thriving and competitive (and still safe!).

CAISO penned a series of increasingly urgent press releases on how catastrophic closing diablo canyon would be for grid stability when it's closure was imminent.

1)Global. Proliferation risks aren’t as relevant to me as solving the reliance on fossil fuels. West+China probably needs to prove out wide scale usage of it first though.

2) However much is necessary to create a stable grid with as minimal an amount of electricity coming from fossil fuel usage possible. I do prefer renewable to nuclear, but I think society scale energy storage isn’t going to be a solved problem in a reasonable time frame. If we only need 20% nuclear to phase out most fossil fuel plants, great. I don’t know the exact point where experts expect that renewables without storage would stop being able to create a stable grid without the existing plants.

3)Ideally MSRs, but given they’re still not completely proven out it’s probably best to start building traditional immediately and switch if the currently in production MSR plants do in fact work out.

4)Start nationalized at least, since they’re more expensive than private ownership allows but necessary for the public good (also, yeah, don’t really want private ownership of traditional reactors). If MSRs work out and economies of scale kick in a little as we build out more plants, maybe private ownership will be viable at some point.

1) both

2) 200% of current demand, to account for the rise in demand caused by climate change

3) whatever we can build now

4) Only governments genuinely have the ability to build nuclear reactors without any outside intervention or help. Even when they are built supposedly privately there's government involvement to make sure radioactive material isn't diverted or dumped. I can't imagine anyone but the most extreme libertarian wants private unregulated nuclear reactors.

Most of them don't really want nuclear, they just push it as an excuse to do nothing right now (at least here in Norway). Yes, more nuclear is probably good. But planning, permissions, building and getting a reactor up and running probably is 15+ years most places. We need power before then. So we can't stop building wind farms, solar etc. in the meantime. Which is really what they want to achieve where I live: avoid wind farms, so grasping at everything.

Yeah, while the fossil fuel lobby used to fight against nuclear, I'm pretty sure they're indirectly using nuclear to fight renewables right now.

For them, either renewables will cut into their business right now.. or they can argue we should build nuclear instead.. which could either lead to nothing getting built, or that nuclear gets built in 10-15 years. Either way, they delay the threat to their business. So it's a win for them either way. I don't think they have high hopes to fight off renewables or nuclear forever. So whichever is slower is better.

Pure speculation on my part, I'll admit. But I see so many arguing for nuclear who doesn't seem to care AT ALL about climate change or preserving nature when you press them on their arguments. So I can't help think that way.

Nuclear power can be an answer, but it's not flexible enough to be the answer.

The demand for power is variable, and the difference between base demand and peak demand can be 2x or even 2.5x. While nuclear power can be viable for satisfying the base demand, it's viability for the variable part is another question.

Then there are cheap renewables. If you don't constrain the market artificially, it tends to build solar and wind until nobody knows what to do with the excess electricity. That makes power cheap on the average but potentially very expensive when the demand is high and the generation is low. Nuclear power, with its high capital costs but low operating costs, does not seem to be the right answer to this variable demand / variable generation problem.

There are many, many industries that could benefit from electricity being “too cheap to meter” that could suck up the excess production.

Maybe they train GPT-25 only when the demand is low enough the power producers basically give it away?

That only makes sense if the idle capital of GPUs is cheaper than the energy powering them.

There are very few applications like this, and even fewer that are easily distributed to that you don't have to use expensive transmission lines to power them.

For example, most new hydrogen electrolysis facilities are planning to build direct-connected solar without even connecting to the grid, and using the energy directly, because letting electrolyzes sit idle for a week is not cost effective. And the grid cost would be expensive too. So building utility-scale solar without a grid connection makes the most financial sense.

That is already happening. One particularly promising scheme is using electricity to make hydrogen and then using that hydrogen in steel production.

But those industries also have other expenses. Even if you assume that energy is free, the investment may not be viable.

I heard the other day that many Saudi's leave their AC running when they leave SA for the summer months. Power is THAT cheap.

I mean, certainly. Well, maybe not the answer, but whatever.

However, are we actually capable of building new reactors and managing their operation in the private sector? I’m not talking about possibly maybe here. Are we actually ready, today, to build a new reactor within reasonable time at reasonable cost? I don’t know, but my gut feeling says no. We cannot even build roads like that.

Furthermore, is operating these reactors economical? Current reactors are not. They externalize lots of cost factors.

China can. Russia as well. It appears that the secret ingredient is totalitarianism.

Chernobyl happened largely because plant admins wanted to please (or were afraid of) their higher-ups. Russia has had numerous secretive incidents in their southern military nuclear production sites, and more recently? Mysterious things like "high winds"...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/russia-suspected...

In China? Taishan has been plagued with problems.

No, China can not build nuclear economically. That's why they're drastically reducing their nuclear goal while they continue to scale up coal and solar.

PRC is currently building indigenous nuclear relatively economically which appear to be performing around expectations. What happened / what PRC can't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically. Rollout past decade has been delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues & US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy) forcing PRC to switch to domestic tech. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. What is also happening is PRC scaling up coal and solar, due to geopolitics of rushing energy security and lower renewable costs, but not at the expense of nuclear rollout.

Actually the secret ingredient might be more "central planning". Mostly used in socialist/communist countries, but US/UK know how to do it, when the stake is high enough (e.g. war). One could argue that climate change is sort of a war, threatening the national security.

Current renewables also externalise a lot of factors. Any production at scale externalises a lot of factors.

Unfortunately, the discussion is so emotionally and politically charged, that I'm afraid no one is actually properly calculating all the costs, and risks etc.

the article mentions that 2 billion tons of coal would be needed to manufacture solar panels to meet half of today's global energy needs with renewables. That is about 3 months of global coal consumption at current rates. If we decide to go all in on nuclear instead, we can turn off the coal plants in a mere 15 years or so.

Think of all the new disasters we'll get to experience with thousands of new nuclear power plants.

France has been using nuclear power plants for more than 50 years, producing up to 75% of all electricity and exporting to other countries, and did not suffer any disaster. There has been natural nuclear power plants that has been running for few hundred thousand years (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine)... so nature did it before us, and nature did not really care and left all the waste on the site. We have found more efficient ways to produce, reuse the waste and properly dispose it.

Cue the atomic fanatics vs the renewable cult discussion. Has been discussed a thousand times on HN recently and it always seems both are just shouting how the other side can not see the obvious superiority of their fav energy source.

why cant we have a bit of both? renewable seems very good long term and nuclear is also nice for transition. but I wouldnt want to live next to one of those crappy leaky french reactors.

No, we can't have a bit of both, because despite heroic efforts with tens of billions of dollars being dumped into nuclear since 2008, it hasn't produced.

We tried four reactors back then, using a new regulatory process that was supposed to speed construction and reduce costs. Instead, costs and timelines ballooned 3x. Two of the four reactors were abandoned half-way through construction, resulting in rate payers holding the bag for billions of dollars and no Wh delivered to the grid. Executives are being criminally prosecuted for fraud.

The other two reactors are supposed to complete late this year, but I don't think any honest person should rely on such timelines when they inevitably slip every single time.

Nuclear is not something we can realiably build. We are bad at big construction jobs to begin with. But when you add in training up massive new workforces for extremely specialized welding or concrete pour skills, it's hugely inefficient because we don't know how to utilize this labor effectively. People sit idle for months, waiting for their chance to work. Just a gigantic clusterfuck of logistical (mis)management.

And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s, while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. We should use our limited construction capacity to build factories to manufacture things, not spend it on nuclear reactors. $15B spent on solar or battery production facilities will churn out many many GW year after year of additional capacity, whereas it only buys a single GW of nuclear. And that's in the best case scenario where we actually finish the damn reactor...

>We tried four reactors back then, using a new regulatory process that was supposed to speed construction and reduce costs. Instead, costs and timelines ballooned 3x. Two of the four reactors were abandoned half-way through construction, resulting in rate payers holding the bag for billions of dollars and no Wh delivered to the grid.

These were the Westinghouse AP1000 units to be installed in Georgia and South Carolina, contract beginning in 2008. It's worth noting that four other AP1000 units also from Westinghouse were built and installed in China, beginning construction in 2009 and entering into operation in 2018. The total cost of both systems was slightly more than half the cost of the failed project in South Carolina.

>And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s, while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof.

You seem to be arguing that we shouldn't bother building major projects, but I think this implies the opposite: we need to find ways to fix the construction industry. The US is currently facing a situation where cities can't grow like they used to; growing cities quickly become unaffordable, where by contrast Chicago sustained rapid growth for decades before the Great Depression.

We go into the energy transition with the economy and construction capacity we have, not the construction capacity we wish we had.

The time to transition is now, and making that transition with the ample tools we have right now is a good thing. It's not an argument that we shouldnt improve construction. It's an argument that we should at a minimum do what we know how to do.

If you have ideas on how to improve construction efficiency in the US, it's an absolutely massive addressable market that gets too little attention, and should definitely be addressed. I would love to go work for somebody that is fixing construction, if I had the right skills. I would love even more to do it myself, but I have zero experience or ideas.

I guess you think the Koreans and Chinese are just fundamentally different from everyone else then because they're pumping out reactors just fine, today.

The French, Americans, Russians, and Japanese have all had periods of time where they built them quickly and cost effectively too. But then various institutional rot sets in. We're going to have to keep building big things anyways so it's not like having that capability is wasted.

There definitely are fundamental differences in our capabilities here, and you seem to believe the same too.

Look, for example, at the challenges that are being experienced as we try to build chip fabs in the US.

Instintutional knowledge and capability are real things. And I definitely think that construction capability is an important thing to build.

But let's improve our construction capability on building real things that get built and improve our capabilities, such as battery factories or solar panel factories or transmission lines or other things that get build closer to on-time, and then use those contractors that succeed to try more ambitious projects.

Let's not piss away billions of dollars with no sustained knowledge growth or construction capacity improvement. Trying to build even, say, 10GW of new nuclear right now would be posing away 90% of the capital. We don't even know who we would really hire for this!

Until we have a track record that's strong enough to attract investment, I don't see the rush to burn money on nuclear builds. It won't help the climate, and it doesn't even help the nuclear industry.

> why cant we have a bit of both?

Because they're economically incompatible.

Nuclear is very expensive to build, and wants to run 24/7 to offset costs. They also want to run continuously.

The problem is that renewables are cheap, but intermittent.

So take an economically rational marketplace. I can either buy the same amount of power for $1, or for $2, what do you think I'd choose? $1 of course. Power is power, I don't want to pay more than I must.

So any time I can buy renewables for $1, nuclear makes no revenue. This pushes off its payoff into the future. This isn't a good situation to be in. Time goes by, components get older, people get impatient, more renewables keep getting built.

Now you're a bank considering a loan for nuclear you think might be paid off in 20 years. Or if renewables keep growing, maybe in 40. Or if they really take off, maybe never. Risking billions that way doesn't sound enticing, now does it?

If nuclear made money we wouldn't be seeing these blog posts show up over and over. Money solves many problems and greases many palms. If nuclear was profitable, every other problem would be solvable. Not enough safety? Money can buy that. Too close to people? Money can put a plant further away. Legal problems? Money pays for lawyers.

The logical end state of all this seems to be that renewables kill off the profitability of nuclear badly enough that nobody builds it (relatively speaking). Eventually the grid destabilizes and this forces urgent measures to shore things up. The final state I imagine is a very renewable-heavy grid, after a period of chaos in the middle.

The average age of nuclear plants in the US is 40 years old.

I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable.

Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources.

> I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable.

I can.

First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. That costs money. Renewables skip this completely.

Second, renewables also benefit from progress, but a lot more. Solar and wind are mass industry production. Each iteration is cheap. Experimentation is cheap and safe and done all over the world. Production is highly amenable towards automation. Nuclear isn't.

So we have factories pumping out millions of solar cells, but we don't have factories pumping out millions of nuclear vessels, because nuclear plants are rare, one off projects that don't justify mass production, and are too rare to have a robust industry and lots of competition.

> Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources.

Yeah, but there are other options that can be used. Eg, yeah, we can spend decades building nuclear and waiting until it starts to work, or we can do things like improving the grid transmission which works out to simple tasks that are doable much faster and amenable to mass production.

Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.

Why would you expect modern nuclear plants to be more profitable? Most of the costs of a nuclear plant are capital costs, which have been increasing faster than the increases in what the generated electricity can be sold for.

Nuclear has only ever gotten more expensive, never cheaper. SMRs seem interesting, but at this point they're more science fiction than reality.

Nuclear plants aren't used for grid stabilization, because they can't be. They take hours to days to change power levels.

Fast-responding natural gas plants are used for rapid response to changing load. Hydro (storage or regular) as well. More recently, energy storage systems like the huge system Tesla deployed in Australia.

If I had a dollar for every HN commenter that doesn't understand the basics of grids and generation but considers themselves an expert in how awesome nuclear is...

I feel like most people I know who push Nuclear are already arguing for the use of both, and it’s the renewable side that argues that Nuclear is too dangerous to use or not necessary. Or have you come across a lot of Nuclear proponents arguing that we shouldn’t be using solar energy at all?

I was very pro nuclear a few years ago, at this point solar is so far up the learning curve and experiences so many economy of scale benefits, it's really hard imagining what kind of regulatory framework would be able to make it economically competitive.

We collectively in the form of consumers and governments decide how expensive a thing is, and for 50 years, thanks in part to a lot of coal lobby money, decided nuclear should be more expensive than coal, so we got all the radiation /and/ all the CO2 associated with coal power plants, we can't change that history at this point.

The thing missing from your conclusion is simply combined cycle gas plants. Take an airplane engine, benifiting from that huge industry and add a tiny steam side and you have something way smaller, cheaper and more efficient than any coal plant.

Nuclear is a super complicated coal plant regarding how the thermal engine works. Pure steam plants have simply been obsolete the last 30 years, and renewables are making it even worse by outcompeting gas plants.

The only people I meet who argue in favor of nuclear also spend a ton of time arguing against solar, wind, and storage. They also actively promote outdated incorrect knowledge of these technologies.

YMMV, of course!

For an example in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658964

I do find it pretty crazy that anyone would argue against solar (and wind where it’s viable) at this point, it’s just way too cost efficient. (The feasibility and cost of grid scale storage is where my concerns lie)

The author of this article for one is someone who does not believe renewables should coexist with anything. Preferring continued use of coal over expanding renewables:

> Possibly, wind, solar, and utility-scale batteries can play some role in consistent electricity. Until that takes place coal, natural gas, and nuclear are the only sources of energy to electricity that provide this benefit for grid stabilization and human longevity.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/coal-versus-wind-rene...

I feel like the oil industry has astroturfed nuclear energy, and NIMBYs love it because they know there can not be any significant nuclear capacity that will come online until 2030 at the earliest. Which is my biggest problem with pro nuclear arguments.

I don’t think you are wrong. This article in particular is written by a consultant that works for a lobby group who’s largest funders include energy companies with large fossil fuel portfolio, looking at the author’s twitter profile and writing history revels he’s only real concern with coal seems to be that China is doing it but not USA (there is also a bunch of FUD spreading around renewables, climate denialism, and conspiracy theories, including the great reset).

Because our for-profit energy sector has decided not to invest in nuclear, even with government subsidies. This is basic business. Are you as the CEO of an energy company going to invest tens of billions of dollars into a plant that won't be operational for decades or are you just going to stand up more wind farms where you can start realizing a profit the next year? If you want nuclear, you simply cannot have an energy grid dependent on companies who's goal is profit. This is why all of the talk about how great nuclear is simply doesn't matter. The market doesn't support it and we're ruled by the markets.

Isnt this "argument to moderation"?

> but I wouldnt want to live next to one of those crappy leaky french reactors.

Well both side complain about truth and disinformation, and this affirmation is far from reality.

The issue is that nuclear largely makes renewables redundant. Nuclear is just as cheap to run 24/7 as it is to run half the time, unlike fossil fuels.

Right now, the way we're using intermittent sources is to shut fossil fuel plants off when renewables are producing and turn them back on when they are not producing. Intermittent sources are essentially supplementing a grid based in fossil fuels.

If we use nuclear plants to fill in the gaps in intermittent sources' production curves, then we'd have already built enough nuclear capacity to run the grid without intermittent sources so we'd just run nuclear plants at full capacity and eliminate the need for intermittent sources.

Nuclear reactors are desirable targets for hostile forces, like Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which was targeted by Russia. [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-ukraine-she...

Any electrical infrastructure is a strategic target. If it's not a power plant, it's a substation.

The difference is its not easy to turn a nuclear plant 'off', quickly, and even then it still needs power to keep the spent fuel cool. If the plant loses backup power (which is finite) then you'll get a disaster with the spent fuel pool boiling off and the fuel itself igniting spreading radioactive ash for miles.

The point is it's very dangerous to have a nuclear power plant in the middle of a warzone.

Yes, but the consequences are different. If Russia destroys an Ukrainian nuclear reactor, there are grave, long lasting consequences for the Ukraine and possible larger parts of Europe, we still have enough contamination from Chernobyl still. Russia did destroy large parts of the rest of the Ukrainian power infrastructure, as they targetted it, when they weren't shooting at hospitals. But the power infrastructure is mostly back up, at least partial repairs were achieved. So quite a difference.

If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, you can't bomb all of them.

I mean, you can try, but then energy shortage is not on top of the list of problems that the population has.

If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, that also doesn't actually let you address realistic power consumption patterns.

If we're talking about not-yet-extant technology that would allow solar to meet 24/7 demand at grid scale (like power storage that costs 1% as much as it does now), we might as well be talking about small-scale-fusion power, which is also resistant to being bombed and is generally better than solar+batteries for other reasons.

please lets avoid binary discussions 100% nuclear vs 100% renewables.

I think all reasonable people agree that it should be a mix with multi-faceted goals of zero emissions, reliability, low cost, stability, etc.

Biggest problem is that people don't understand.

It's black magic, with "radiation". While in reality, it's basically just a big steam turbine generator.

Unknown things are scary. Turn on the light.

I think this is the least of the problems that nuclear has.

The problem isn't convincing J Random Person off the street, the problem is convincing somebody who has control of billions of dollars that there's any chance the investment will make financial sense.

Until there's a halfway compelling financial argument, until there's a way to reliably build a reactor on a realistic timeline, nuclear is a pipe dream.

Once there is a way that nuclear can be built and makes financial sense, there are tons of locations that would welcome a new large source of employment nearby. For example, nearly all of the current nuclear reactors that are aging out across the US are in cities that don't want to lose the jobs and don't mind having nuclear nearby.

Renewable energy is the answer, on a scale large enough to solve the energy requirements.

The other part of the equation completely ignored by everyone is energy saving.

There's really no systematic effort at all to reduce the amount of energy society consumes.

Of course there is.

Incandescent lights have been banned for years in most European countries to speed up the adoption of led-lighting. Street lights are being replaces by leds. Tax cuts and subsidies are given for energy efficient housing.

I knew someone would say "but light globes!". Yes of course all appliances are now energy rated etc.

In some countries inefficient lightglobes are banned.

But I'm not talking about that - I'm talking about systematic change in behaviour of homes and business to try to use less energy, perhaps encouraged through tax or other incentives.

What you describe seems exactly that to me. When building a new home and it’s energy neutral or very efficient, you get a large tax benefit. All home builders I know off take this into account.

Do you have an example or idea of what you are thinking about?

Plenty of homes are now switching to heat pumps and they’ve added solar in the last decade so more and more homes have become “energy-neutral” to a degree.

Add in electric vehicles and residential batteries and we should start seeing some families be self-sufficient

It’s probably too little and maybe too late, but there are plenty of changes

The author's previous article is slightly less guarded in his support for fossil fuels:

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/joe-bidens-little-known...

> The United States under a Biden administration, similar to the British, would move towards an unsustainable, and national security risk by eliminating fossil fuels, and killing people who need electricity and global security the West provides.

And weirdly, for someone so excited about nuclear power, he has no idea where we could generate the electricity needed by EVs, so we should just stick to fossil fuels there too.

Does anyone else begin to see a pattern emerge?

Renewables are cheap and far less risk-prone. Not going all in on renewables is a footgun for industrial societies.

renewables are not cheap when you factor in decommissioning which nuclear power does. FTFA: "The International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that old solar panel disposal to meet 2050 Paris Accords 'will more than double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste.'"

Nuclear only factors in decommissioning in the way that it gives the responsibility away to future generations...

Renewables are absolutely not less risk-prone. Per kw generated, nuclear energy is the safest and it's not even kinda close. Renewables also cannot output a steady amount of energy. Maybe there's a massive drought upstream. Maybe there's no wind today. Maybe it's a cloudy day.

Nuclear is THE ONLY SOLUTION. We would need such a hilarious, painful amount of renewable energy sources just to survive, let alone thrive. Or, we could just build a few thousand reactors around the world.

Renewables aren't going to fail in a way that makes an entire city uninhabitable for decades.

If you want proof that renewables are the solution, look at California's power supply for yesterday. Just 2x the wind/solar/batteries of what's installed now could easily replace all fossil fuel and nuclear.

https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

Risk isn't only measured in physical danger, but also financial risk. Which is exactly why for-profit energy companies aren't investing in nuclear. It's economically the worst possible approach when your concern is profit.

"Only" is much too strong a word.

Geothermal and tidal are both as reliable as it gets.

A global HVDC grid with PV in the deserts will get you 100% renewable all by itself (probably not the cheapest and it would take a decade of current global metal production, but it would work and the resistance losses aren't bad enough to veto that idea).

Nuclear is safest though; or at least it was when most PV was rooftop, I don't know if the assumption used in the "deaths per TWh" chart are still valid.

Also:

> Maybe there's a massive drought upstream.

You're not wrong, but when that happens, lots of people will starve because the farms don't get the water that the hydro dam would normally store but in this hypothetical never received in the first place.

Nuclear is dense, comes with months worth of storage built-in, and lets smaller countries be self-sufficient for a while without having to rely on other countries.

We need to to both, at least until we develop economical energy storage at appropriate scale. That may not ever happen.

My 2¢:

We live in a world where all work goes to the lowest bidder and people will always cut corners if they believe the liability won't fall on them.

The entire world could be safely powered off nuclear energy if it wasn't for pesky humans that will always lie, cheat, and steal from each other. Given that human greed is unavoidable and a nuclear accident can pollute an area for 10,000 years it's probably best to recognize our own flaws as we consider what to do with it.

I mean, here in the US we have a hard time operating trains without catastrophic failure.

An alternative to emotional arguments is to look at the statistics.

When you actually look at the statistics around large infrastructure projects the results are not comforting. Corners are always cut. Maintenance delayed. Just the "cost of doing business". Trust in both governments and large corporations is not exactly at an all time high. People know that companies will throw radioactive waste and scrap materials into the rivers if they can get away with it.

Conversely, the emotional argument is the only one that brings nuclear power back. You must convince people that these projects can be done safely. You must convince people that, "This time will be different."

Look at what just happened in Germany. Or don't.

Or, you can simply educate people -- this time doesn't need to be very different (though it certainly can be), because already-existing nuclear is very safe. Liability prevents companies dumping radioactive material, and radioactive material is very cheap to store! There's no benefit from dumping it. Yes, mildly irradiated water sometimes gets into rivers, and if you look at the amounts and risks it turns out to be quite reasonable relative even to solar and wind.

What happened in Germany was not rational, and it was not by any means good for the environment, or a net positive for German health and well-being.

The statistics confirm, people are greedy and while quickly cut corners when given the opportunity to enrich themselves in the short term.

That argument is not emotional, it is rational: assessment highlights risks.

The quantification of those risks is another matter.

The parallel fact, for example, that nuclear weapons require maintenance, and that maintenance requires budget, may make some shiver - not because of an "emotional" idea. It is because you look.

Update: children behave.

Whether astroturfers or free thinkers, I think the baseline requirement for any pro discussion should be prefaced with a redlined doc of the NRC reactor construction code citing all the oppressive regulations whose deletion will lead to our nuclear utopia.

Stop factifantisizing and show us all the ways to move fast and break all things nuclear.

The comment quality in this thread is comparable to the average reddit thread. My lack of faith in humanity is restored.

If having any faith in humanity was justified we wouldn't be in this climate mess in the first place.

I really thought HN was smarter than that french anti-nuclear college kid trying so very hard to appear super vague/undecided... but still clearly anti. Guess not.

Or the pro nuclear egos who knows nothing about the poor state of almost every nuclear waste disposal plan

This would be a game changer for global energy and transport if it got in front of the right people https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...

This feels like a balanced piece: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-nuclear-power-g...

Spoiler: It depends.

The authors profile is even more hilarious than the article: https://nationalinterest.org/profile/todd-royal

Nuclear power is the way. If you have something to refute from the article, please do so. Otherwise I'll just lump you in with the rest of the green-party fanatics who think solar and wind will solve our energy needs.

It is the way of wasting money while facing the reality of cheap and truly clean alternatives. It's the way backwards.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amorylovins/2019/11/18/does-nuc...

And I'm sorry I hurt your feelings by pointing the obvious bias of the author.

This was not intended.

LOL, no hurt feelings here. I support nuclear power along with renewables which have their niche places to contribute. But to completely ignore nuclear in favor of just wind and solar is idiotic and misguided.

He also doesn't seem to have much of an educational nor career grounding to be making such proclamations. Not saying he's wrong, but he doesn't seem to be an authority on the subject per-se.

It looks like he keeps writing the same article over and over again.

It looks like he has someone's agenda and is getting paid to push it.

Some relevant quotes from the same author:

> The weather and climate are dynamic and ever-changing. Thus, this hysteria is a giant ploy to deprive people of freedom and liberty instead of providing them with affordable and flexible energy.

Googling the author you can see he works for a lobby group called E4 Carolinas whos biggest funders include Duke Energy and Dominion Energy both massive energy companies with a massive fossil fuel portfolio.

I think we can conclude the author has some obvious biases which benefit his employer.

> Googling the author

It is at the bottom of the page, explicit.

> Todd Royal is the Senior Project Analyst for E4 Carolinas, a non-profit energy advocacy firm located in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he is working on a three-year grant for the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration focusing on a value chain study for the advanced nuclear technology sector (Generation IV reactors, SMRs, and advanced reactors). Todd lives outside of Dallas, Texas

Nuclear proliferation is the big unsolved issue with nuclear.

My preference is to have US DoD set up plants all around the world on its airbases and sell subsidised electricity to the national grid of the host country.

DoD needs something to do.

I've had an evolution in thinking over the last few years. I did a deep dive on both atmospheric CO2 reduction and energy requirements for full electrification of transportation, homes and industry.

At the time (5 to 10 years ago) it seemed like a very large deployment of nuclear power generation had to be a significant part of the solution. That isn't at all what I think in today's context.

At grid scale, today, I think wind plus storage seems to be the most logical answer at many levels:

    Energy production per installed GW:  
        Solar: 1.33 TWh/GW (solar is reliably off half the time)
        Wind:  3.07 TWh/GW

    Land use per GW:
        Solar: 3,900 acres/GW
        Wind:    750 acres/GW

    Land use to provide all Tesla Master Plan solar + wind:
        Solar: 12 Hawaii's
        Wind:   1 Hawaii (area of all islands)
    
        or,
    
        Solar: 30% of California
        Wind:   2.5% of California

    Annual Operations and Maintenance costs :
        Solar: 1.33 times wind O&M
        Wind:  1.00

    Initial investment in factories:
        Solar: $ 11 billion
        Wind:  $212 billion

    Storage required for 95% reliability:
        Solar: >12 hours
        Wind:    3 hours

    Wind requires 4x less batteries, with all the cost, 
    recycling and ecological advantages this delivers.

    Build supply chain origin:
        Solar: Heavy reliance on China
        Wind:  Diverse

    Long term supply chain (maintenance, parts, etc.) origin:
        Solar: Heavy reliance on China (forever)
        Wind:  Diverse

The above numbers come from parsing through Tesla's Master Plan Part 3 (MPP3) and several of their references. Of course, this is US-centric, yet, I think it scales well to other parts of the globe.

It isn't a case that combining solar and wind can't provide a good solution. It's that idea that wind has enough advantages that it can provide reliable clean power generation all by itself (with storage). In other words, grid-scale solar would not be necessary at the kind of scale proposed by MPP3.

I need to emphasize the above because there's a tendency to point out that the combination of wind and solar works very well. And, yes, it does. However, that misses the point entirely. The point is that geographically distributed grid-scale wind with storage does not need any solar to reach 95% reliability (power availability) [0] Table 2.

In short, it seems wind would have lower land utilization, operation and maintenance costs, startup investment, 1/4 the storage requirement, ecological impact (based on only needing 1/4 of the batteries) and, finally, the potential for a more favorable supply chain, both for construction and long-term maintenance.

Home-scale solar and storage has nothing to do with my comment (after all, we are talking about nuclear power). I am only referring to grid scale. Home-scale solar makes sense on many fronts.

NOTE: This is the only document outside of MPP3 I used to generate some of the above:

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Made a mistake, these two numbers are reversed:

    Initial investment in factories:
        Solar: $ 11 billion
        Wind:  $212 billion

The correct version is:

    Initial investment in factories:
        Solar: $212 billion
        Wind:  $ 11 billion

Source: Tesla Master Plan Part 3

The National Interest had a Russian spy write for it. Go figure.

The article doesn't even mention words fusion or fission. Like all nuclear power is the same. Be assured the author is a shill for the trad fission industry. We don't need that.

Fission plants are the only plants we have that are actually useable at this point in time, so of course there’s no reason to clarify. While we should definitely be putting more money into fusion research, if you’re worried about an environmental catastrophe you don’t have time to hope fusion actually works sometime in the next 50 years. You have to make plans based on what technology you know functions, not a moonshot.

The author is a shill for not discussing a technology which is still speculative and has no realistic commercial roadmap?

What about geothermal?

It would be, it not for the realities of dealing with human politicking.

Relevant: "Germany's 66.5 GW of installed wind is only producing as much as the 3 reactors that turned off last night used to produce." https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396

On a night when wind output was particularly low.

Another way to put this is that variable sources of energy are variable.

Particularly low output can happen for a whole month. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-29/dearth-of...

Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy generation sources or battery backup, none of which are cheap.

It's rare to see flaute all over Europe at the same time. You just need some ways to transport energy as well as supplement that with storage and you can compensate most of this.

If this sounds too complicated an engineering challenge then let's not even start to talk about the engineering challenges that would make nuclear safer than it is today. That's a whole different ballpark.

>Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost.

It is and it does but being 5x cheaper means even a massive increase in cost still doesnt put it in the same league as nuclear power.

Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this almost never happens because in a system that expects many 9s of availability almost never is just not acceptable.

Indeed, on all counts; it's just that the easy-obvious-and-suboptimal solution (LiIon batteries which are the worst solution you don't have to explain to anyone) are on-par with the cost of nuclear.

Until we have energy storage orders of magnitude cheaper than we do now, a power source is only as good as its minimum output.

And variability is very bad. What are you going to do, stop using electricity because it's not windy?

Nah, the solution is to start burning coal, oil and gas, or leech off your neighbors who hopefully use something cleaner.

Wind alone produces ~20% of the recent years electricity in Germany.

Nuclear produced only half of that in recent years.

The whole renewable energy production covers ~40% of all the energy produced. Despite 16 years of almost full stop of expansion.

https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...

Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables. Plus renewables are extremely intermittent power sources. Nuclear solves both the land-use and consistency problems.

Plus, from the article: "...to build enough wind turbines and solar panels to supply at least half the electricity needed for global consumption 'would require two billions tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. [And] more than 90% of the world’s solar panels are built in Asia on coal-heavy electrical grids.'"

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/if-you-want-renewable-en...

> Nuclear produced only half of that in recent years.

It would have produced a lot more if German didn't shut down it's nuclear reactors. Plus, France produces over 70% of it's electricity from nuclear, sometimes over 80%.

> Wind alone produces ~20% of the recent years electricity in Germany.

Yearly production means nothing on the night when it produces single-digit percentages of its installed capacity, does it?

Relevant, for when you are a simpleton that believes in cherry-picked data.

and is a way to significantly reduce dependence on fundamentally authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, etc.

One of the reasons France is like 75% nuclear generation was response to arab oil crisis in 70ies

Europe has a large dependence on Russia for nuclear technology. There are also Russian reactors in Europe. The countries who currently lead the deployment of nuclear technology are China and Russia, two authoritarian countries.

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-just-cant-quit-russia...

> Europe has a large dependence on Russia for nuclear technology. There are also Russian reactors in Europe

That seems to be a legacy, not a necessary constraint.

Where else are you going to go though? Germany threw in the towel, nuclear has been stagnant in France and USA for decades. Maybe Sweden/Finland? They do it but slowly, expensively and are a whole generation behind.

That leaves you with China. Which from an objective/technical standpoint is actually excellent because their current designs are extremely good.

However it's probably not tenable for the West to procure nuclear technology from China. Not that China wouldn't sell them plants, they almost certainly would, China has no qualms sharing civilian tech but the West couldn't stomach it geopolitically.

Which sadly is going to be the state of affairs for all cutting edge green energy tech. While the rest of the world was sucking off special interests in the fossil fuels industry China was taking it's pledge to be carbon neutral by 2060 extremely seriously.

This means China is now leading across the board in solar, wind, batteries, hydro, EVs, high speed rail and importantly nuclear.

Sad state of affairs for the West all things considered. We had first mover advantage in all of those fields and pissed it away for a few decades of investors profits and executive bonuses.

That authoritarian countries are the main deployers and providers of nuclear is no surprise. The central government decides and there is no opposition. In most democratic countries nuclear is not competitive in the market anymore. For a country like Russia it's much easier to sell nuclear cheap into the market: they want to make European countries dependent on their energy delivery. Western countries have much higher technology standards and with market prices they are not competitive.

Finland seems to have no issues launching nuclear without russians.

But you are right, Russia is big on nuclear. They are authoritarian but are not stupid.

If they were 'not stupid' they wouldn't have invaded Ukraine and caused a massive reaction in Europe for independence of Russian energy.

If they were 'not stupid' and 'not evil', they wouldn't attack a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. Russia is both stupid and evil with its current invasion of its neighbor country. The amount of environmental damage caused by this war is extremely high.

Russian nuclear technology also does not take care of the environment and the population. Problematic reactors are being built near large cities.

It seems Uranium has varied sources: Kazakhstan (dominantly), then Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Niger, China, India. The USA also have it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Prod...

I am not sure what other "consumables" are involved.

To every windpower fanatic in the comments. What is the plan for days when there is little wind? I guess coal?

Wind goes well with gas turbine generators, since they can match their output to demand and the supply of wind. Every watt-hour of wind energy you capture, is a watt-hour of gas you don't burn. Worst case scenario is no wind and you're burning gas -- which is already a main electric source.

Taken too far you would get into this weird situation of over-spending for capacity, and having surplus wind energy when it's windy, while still burning gas when it's not. But as a moderate contribution to a grid, 10 - 30% of supply perhaps, especially where gas is a primary source already, it makes a lot of sense, in some places.

I hope no one expects to actually run everything on 100% wind power.

Hanging your hat on fossil fuel base load generation seems unwise.

Yeah, though it's not crazy for a short term while building up storage, which we need anyway for transport (be that batteries or whichever cute name is now used for hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water).

Or Sabatier process methane, depending on if Mars is the real point of Starship or merely an excuse for Starship.

Battery storage, solar, stored hydrogen, demand response, long distance HVDC, advanced geothermal.

The answer is tech from the 2000s, not 1900s tech.

Power industry folks are used to a field where tech hasn't changed for decades. It's time to get over that and use the new things that have been developed that will reduce the cost of energy, increase energy abundance, and advance society. We need to let go of the obsolete.

Import electricity, for example. We have here a 1.4 GW line to Norway for hydro power. Generally Germany is surrounded by many countries which share electricity. There are many wind farms in and around the North Sea.

Yes, Germany is a large net exporter of electricity.

1. There's a lot of ways to store energy

2. There's a few ways to transport power

3. Wind isn't the only renewable, though it can be really cheap

At this point, I'm having to remind myself of the xkcd lucky 10,000, because it feels disingenuous to even need to ask.

And I'm saying that as someone who really hopes the new fusion companies succeed, and that nuclear should have been used to move the world away from coal (and ship fuel) in the 60s onwards, and lament the risks and accidents were handled so poorly by the politicians.

But now? Meh.

Fusion - yes, fission - no.

Edit: the cost evolution of fission already points against it, any nuclear bet should therefore be on fusion, not fission.

Fusion is perpetually 50 years away. We don't have that long to wait when we're already crossing points of no return.

Does the world end in 50 years?

We should bet on the technology that always 20 years in the future?

It's clear that nuclear power is superior to gas, coal, wind, solar, etc. However... nuclear power plants are expensive build, they take a very long time to build, and many countries are in the process of retiring their infrastructure [0].

The vast majority of active nuclear power plants in the USA were built in the late 60s to late 70s and typically took 10 years from the initial construction before they became operational [1]. Which means that almost all of our nuclear power infrastructure in the United States is ~35 to 50 years old. Optimistically, we can only hope that most of these plants will operate until ~2040.

Given how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant we really should have been building them all throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s- but we stopped building them in the late 70s. The only nuclear power plant that I'm aware that's been built since 1978 is Plant Vogtle which started in 2013 and is expected to be finished sometime this year.

Still, there is some hope for nuclear energy into the future with the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) [2] and the recent advancements in fusion power [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

[2] https://www.cfppllc.com/

[3] https://twitter.com/ENERGY/status/1602679966163906561

A power generation system that can't lose power itself without resulting in a major disaster is far from 'superior'.

What I mean is the spent nuclear fuel must be kept cool at all costs, backups are finite. There's already been a few accidents and many close calls, none as bad as they could of been. Scale up nuclear to find how to bad it can get.

The NRC said so itself - https://www.science.org/content/article/spent-fuel-fire-us-s...

I think fear-mongering about nuclear power risks is really unfortunate. The rewards far outweigh the risks. Sure, we could live in a world where we could tell everyone to stop using so much damn energy- but that's not our reality. There's some really good data and charts here (especially the "What is the safest and cleanest source of energy?" diagram at the top) - https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

In the USA we've poured an incredible amount of money into wind energy and it simply hasn't been very effective relative to the cost.

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