Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
scanalyst.fourmilab.ch
scanalyst.fourmilab.ch
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.
Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an updated chart for this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E...
A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph:
- Wind and solar grew a lot.
- Nuclear declined.
- Gas grew a little.
- Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up.
- Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy.
- fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less.
- Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted.
- Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years.
- We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less.
Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance.
Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.
Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage declined.
Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons...
I’d say it’s ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45 years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the problem.
Also, the United States is 15% of global emissions, not 28%.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
My point is the USA should fix its own problem before lecturing others. Other countries are far more advanced in renewables, time to catch up.
In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years.
Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)
This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too.
[1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...
This is not what a boom looks like: https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/18acef23-4f61-4e14-b66e-7...
and it won't be better if you have a closer look. Take Europe, for example. Nuclear plants over budget and overdue (France, UK), projects which are highly unlikely to be ever build (Poland), a rotting nuclear fleet (France) and a final exit in Germany.
Then there are all those plants in poor countries which depend on Russia.
And then there is China with their magically fast build reactors but also with massive coal and renewable construction.
Nuclear peaked years ago, and it's going to be a decline in the future since it is money in the end deciding the fate and nuclear isn't worth it.
New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw per year. Same with battery.
I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start delivering on their promises. I still think they are expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost front, that will remain a minority of useful output.
The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy.
Nuclear is ran in between 250C-350C, which is rather inefficient, and requires very big turbines.
Plutonium 239 is also 83,610,000 MJ/kg vs coal at 35 MJ/kg so the difference in thermal efficiency is nearly meaningless given how much specific energy density advantage nuclear has.
(Although an old piece of anti-nuclear rhetoric that annoys me was asking if you'd prefer a bucket of coal or bucket of nuclear waste under your bed, and one half of my annoyance was indeed the relative energy densities…)
Thermal-spectrum (slow neutron) nuclear reactors are much easier to control than fast reactors because they have much slower reaction times. But this isn't particularly relevant because thermal-spectrum supercritical water reactors are possible; supercritical water reactor doesn't implies fast reactor. Let's put fast reactors aside.
In thermal-spectrum reactors, the moderator is not in itself a safety feature. The moderator is necessary to slow the neutrons down into the thermal-spectrum. Thermal-spectrum neutrons are far more likely to be absorbed by the fuel than fast neutrons, so if you lose the moderator the reaction stops (and decay heat continues...) Fast reactors don't use a moderator and don't need one because they use a higher grade of fuel which can sustain a chain reaction with fast neutrons, not needing thermal neutrons.
In some thermal-spectrum reactors (particularly BWRs and PWRs), the moderator plays double duty as a coolant. In these reactors the moderator is a safety feature insofar as it's the coolant, not because it's a moderator. In other kinds of thermal-spectrum reactors, the coolant and moderator may be different; for instance RBMKs use graphite as the moderator and water as the coolant. Modern CANDU reactors use heavy water as a moderator (which is less efficient as a moderator, but captures fewer neutrons and therefore allows for a lower grade of fuel), but this moderator is unpressurized in the calandria and remains cool; the water in the coolant loop is hot, pressurized, and doesn't provide sufficient moderation to keep the reaction going. If you drained the moderator but kept the coolant loop running, the reactor would stop. If you kept the moderator but drained the coolant loop, it would eventually melt down (probably after the water in the calandria boils off). The coolant is what removes heat from the reactor and the moderator is what slows the neutrons so they're more likely to cause fission.
tl;dr: The moderator increases reactivity. Coolant removes heat.
In principle you could make a thermal-spectrum supercritical water reactor using any of these, but the research is aimed towards making a supercritical reactor with the PWR or CANDU designs. The reason supercritical water reactors aren't used yet is because metallurgy isn't up to the task. Supercritical water is already used in traditional power plants, but those don't have to deal with neutron radiation which structurally degrades anything it runs into (some alloys/materials more than others.) Finding alloys which can hold up to both supercritical water and neutron radiation is the major hurdle to clear.
We are DOOOMED! ;)
As for refueling, in some designs like CANDU refueling can be done 'online', refueling one tube while the others are running.
> Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat, or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all the energy is just lost?
Light ends up as heat, but LEDs are more efficient cause they don’t produce extra heat. Electric motors are more efficient than combustion ones so electric cars end up going farther for same input.
This doesn't solve the problem, because the final machined part is not moving, and thus has no kinetic energy.
In order to get an efficiency number, we would have to know what 100% means. Maybe it's possible to calculate the minimum energy required to break the chemical bonds spanning a given cross sectional area of solid aluminum?
I imagine that you could (very theoretically) recover this energy by cold welding the aluminum back together a vacuum.
I mean, not all of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for example, many would argue that the systems durably recording how much money you own provide a useful service.
Until it's winter, the ground is frozen, and they have no reserves to burn. Then there's a panic to get the same nonrenewables they would normally flare off when the weather is sunny and breezy.
> That's why Texas has so much renewable power.
It has tons of underdeveloped land in a region with good wind and favorable sunlight. That's it.
Texas, like Germany's lignite (shit coal) renaissance, is a terrible example of good energy policy. Keep in mind Texas is also on its own grid and struggles to pay people to burn the excess energy they can't use since they also can't easily send it outside their grid and have almost no means to store the excess.
I'm also surprised at the mention of a coal renaissance in germany. While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over the last years.
I never said renewables were a problem in Texas, I said the general energy policy is stupid.
>While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over the last years.
Until Ukraine war banned them buying coal and gas from Russia, now they need to produce it domestically. https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-energy-u-turn-coal-instead-of... and https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu...
This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction.
The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation!
Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs.
My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.
Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly.
If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.
This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.
It's probably worth it to reprocess if only to shorten half life.
Vitrifying the waste and putting it in a cave would be fine if people weren't terrified of the stuff, but they are so it isn't.
In the near term, the clear answer is dry casks. They are simple, cheap, and foreclose no other future option. In about 300 years the waste ceases to be self-protecting against amateur diversion, but that's plenty of time for (for example) launch vehicles to space to become very cheap and reliable.
As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.
We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.
Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes.
Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.
That’s not how things work. It’s tempting to view money in such simple term but also very wrong. In effect, the state has a lot of leeway in how it decides to invest and a lot of conservative positions are taken to preserve the overall status quo when it comes to who has power and who hasn’t.
National scale investment like the power grid are not subject to the same kind of rules that classical investment because the state can and do print money. For all the bad things I have to say about the Inflation Reduction Act for exemple, it will result in significant investment in renewable with money which for all intent and purpose appeared out of thin air (with all the impact this will have on the overall equilibrium of the economy).
You could have at the same time have a comprehensive investment plan for nuclear and renewable without one significantly impacting the funding of the other. The US would be labour and knowledge limited long before it is capital starved.
Also, because it's a global problem, the solution has to be something that everyone wants to have, and that everyone wants everyone else to have too, which means we have to care that what powers Iran is green and also Iran will care about not triggering another airstrike from Israel fearing it's a secret atomic bomb project.
PV in particular is also useful for being a continuous roll-out, so even if it worked out at exactly the same cost/joule as nuclear and taking exactly as long to reach the same final total average power output, getting the first joules sooner displaces more of the existing CO2 emissions.
Far more compact than batteries, wouldn't compete with other large scale transitions that need batteries like electric cars, and would work even during either a week-long blizzard, tornado, or hurricane.
Batteries offset the power needs from dusk to dawn, but most solar farms do not build capacity for extended (multi-day to week) outages. A single tornado let alone a hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind capacity. Containment domes on nuclear reactors by contrast wouldn't even blink at these kinds of natural disasters.
We need solar. We need wind. We need geothermal. We need hydro. And we need nuclear to completely eliminate most fossil fuels from our energy cycle. We need some of all. Diversification in energy sources is a good thing.
I strongly disagree that everyone needs the same solution. Some nations are extremely rich in wind while others are mostly devoid of it. Nations like Iceland have a ridiculous surplus of energy due to geothermal resources. Some nations have easy access to hydro while most don't. New Zealand could probably power twenty New Zealands on wind alone. Even in the US we see this in play. The South/Southeast have little to no wind resources at all but are VERY sensitive to severe weather events that would tear apart large solar arrays leaving millions without power for fall too long. In the North and center of the US, wind power is almost a no-brainer. High, consistent winds across the plains could offset many other forms of electricity generation, especially away from large bodies of water. Geography strongly guides which solutions are available.
The US produces over 37 billion metric tons of CO₂, making the U.S. responsible for 14% of global emissions on its own. Regardless of what other nations do (and I hope they continue toward de-carbonization), the US must take an aggressive role in reducing its own fossil fuel emissions within its borders, since those are the only emissions we can directly control. Diplomacy and economic incentives can only go so far across international borders, but building an maintaining ties overseas is obviously of great importance for that reason. None of this "America First" crap.
As for domestic production of electricity, we are already out of sync with countries like Iran, regardless of what Israel does or does not do. We have 93 nuclear power plants. Iran has 1. The nuclear power (and weapon) genie is already out of the lamp. Everyone knows how to make a nuclear plant today. That said, Israel (and Iran) have other options like PV and especially solar thermal. They exist in a region where thermal masses could be used to great effect without concern of Plutonium proliferation.
We absolutely, positively do NOT need every nation to get their power from the same sources. We only need them to get that power from sources other than fossil fuels.
Yes I know.
Counterintuitively, this makes it politically worse, as people can imagine a football field much more easily than approximately the mass of Mt. Everest in CO2 every 5 years.
People :P
> Far more compact than batteries,
Yes but irrelevant; assuming 20% efficient cells at 10% capacity factor, you can store 36 hours of output in a (~10cm~ edit: 1mm)[0] thick layer of battery under each cell (not that one should put the cells there, this is just for a sense of scale).
> wouldn't compete with other large scale transitions that need batteries like electric cars
True in some senses, false in others; they're both competing for the same investment money.
> and would work even during either a week-long blizzard, tornado, or hurricane.
Kinda, depending on the details. There are weather conditions that interfere with safe running of nuclear plants, and in the other direction if you have a large power grid (so all of North America except Texas), the blizzards and hurricanes don't affect the whole zone anyway.
> Batteries offset the power needs from dusk to dawn, but most solar farms do not build capacity for extended (multi-day to week) outages.
For now, sure; but that's a choice to go for low-hanging fruit first rather than an obligation.
> A single tornado let alone a hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind capacity.
That sounds like a problem with planning permission or construction if the plants can't cope with wherever they happen to be installed.
> Diversification in energy sources is a good thing. […] I strongly disagree that everyone needs the same solution.
Absolutely agree. Even the fact that the average combined price of PV+LiIon being comparable to nuclear hides the variation in both (and those are just two options).
> the US must take an aggressive role in reducing its own fossil fuel emissions within its borders, since those are the only emissions we can directly control. Diplomacy and economic incentives can only go so far across international borders, but building an maintaining ties overseas is obviously of great importance for that reason. None of this "America First" crap.
Yes indeed.
Thing is, I'm not American, so my perspective here is "appealing to American politicians only works if you can tell them what's in it for them", and a big part of that is jobs for people in their state, and that is something I can't map on to any particular power source…
but I'll leave that to others, politics is so not my thing.
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=20+watts+*+36+hours+%2F...
> That sounds like a problem with planning permission or construction if the plants can't cope with wherever they happen to be installed.
It appears you do not live somewhere with extreme weather. How do you plan to protect hundreds or thousands of square meters during events? Is there some kind of new glass? Panels made of unobtainium?
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-...
As the Earth heats up, weather events like this will become more common, not less. It's not just a matter of the world's thermostat going up or down, truly destructive natural events already happen in these areas and are poised to become worse.
> There are weather conditions that interfere with safe running of nuclear plants
Yes, BUT those weather conditions will not substantially damage the plant itself, and soon after the extreme weather event is over, it can start delivering power again in short order (provided the power lines were buried and not on poles, but that's indeed a planning issue).
If 80% of the panels in a solar farm have been rendered inoperable due to hail, even after the event is over, you're looking at a long-term outage with the erosion of public goodwill that goes along with that it in regions of the country that are already skeptical of the government's ability to get stuff done.
No, thank you. I want something that can provide base load no matter what.
The good experience effects of renewables and storage implies we should go full speed ahead installing them. The side effect of pushing down their prices makes this the most cost effective approach overall. Nuclear, which doesn't have good experience effects, is a different story entirely.
> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks
> Why won't anyone think of the GRUBS!!
And for some reason, mainstream social media loves nuclear, so I do question if there is a bias for a technology that every spacefaring state, except for india and china (AFAICT?), has botched at some catastrophic event so far.
What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal.
Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.
No. I have seen the effects of this "goal" at scale in my personal life. Semi-non-effective HVAC systems that I now have to run 24/7/365, LED lights with weird flicker that perpetually antagonize me everywhere, vehicles with obnoxious start/stop mechanisms that absolutely induce premature wear (causing much more serious waste than otherwise). Oh yeah - my washing machine doesn't really fill up with water all the way, so I run FOUR cycles just to make sure everything is properly rinsed. This one isn't even directly about energy (someone was trying to save water), but it consumes more energy as a consequence. Is this what the environmentalists were going for with the fake "deep fill" selector knob on my ultra-high "efficiency" machine?
The people pushing "efficiency at any cost" are either completely blind to the idea of 2nd order+ consequences or are evil/anti-human. I cannot fathom a different set of options. Do you realize that you have to live on this damn planet with all these side-effects too?
I am completely over it. Let's figure out how to make energy carbon free and infinite. Let's stop fucking over the user experience in every possible way just so we can feel like we are doing something to "help".
Moen already has a "smart" shower.
Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don’t exist. In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by physics.
It's closer to 2% efficient:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency#Plan...
If your measure of efficiency of photosynthesis is how much sunlight is turned into chemical energy, its in the low single digit percentages. C4 photosynthesis is something like ~4% efficient, C3 is lower still.
We can use it for alot of useful stuff. For example to:
- Recycle waste products. Most (not all) things are recyclable you just need the energy.
- Grow food vertically so more land can be nature.
- Siphon greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.
- Desalinate Water
The result is that don’t need seasonal storage only daily storage. It is likely better to build more capacity than long-term storage. Although, generated fuels like hydrogen might work well for long-term storage.
If you find a way to explain how nuclear reactors will get more people riding buses and bicycles in cities, then you'll have their attention.
This is a forum where a few people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle, and say so very vocally. Don't mistake that for a consensus. It's not. You can find a lot of other viewpoints here as well.
I think the style of argument rayiner is employing is essentially preaching to the choir; it won't land with people who derive their anti-nuclear stance from a pro-urbanization goal. And this seems to be the primary motivation of anti-nuclear people on HN specifically. In the general public, earnest if misguided concern for safety is more common than a pro-urbanization motive, but HN isn't representative of the general public.
Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose
Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data
The choice of quads as a unit was not made by the post author (John Walker), it was made by a US government agency (the EIA) and a US government-funded research lab (LLNL). Walker appears to have only chosen quads because of the use of quads by the convenient graphics those agencies have produced. The idea that they are using quads due to a “temporary alignment in the data” seems like a post hoc rationalisation - what unit were they using before this temporary alignment? Probably quads; and if not quads, then likely something else equally non-metric. It is unlikely the US government would have already been using SI units (or even a non-SI metric unit), then suddenly switch to a non-metric unit just because of a temporary alignment in the data; much more likely they use quads because that is the US government’s standard unit for this purpose, and already was long before this.
And to be clear, I’m not criticising Walker for choosing a convenient freely-usable graphic to illustrate his point, even if it is in weird units; I’m criticising the US government for its continued clinging to weird units like “quads” that almost nobody else in the world uses, when there is no good reason for them to do so.
Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."
Same goes for various battery & solar techs. If they can't prevent solar panels from becoming common, at least they can make sure that solar panels and batteties rely on at least some key ingredients or processes they can own & control access to.
Somehow, one way or another, through safety regulation if not through artificial scarcity or patents, there will be no cooking up good batteries or solar panels in garages, and I bet it will never be down to actual physical impracticality.
A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.
https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6...
We have never added energy from matter at this scale before.
Same for fusion.
The vast majority of daily solar energy is radiated away already and it dwarfs human energy consumption.
Climate change is a result of human activity adding more insulation (via C02, methane, increased water vapor) to the atmosphere and trapping more of the energy from the sun that would previously have radiated away.
The increasing global average tempreture is caused by humans adding more blankets .. not by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.
> daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight
... which is exactly the same as the amount of energy radiating off, in a state of equilibrium. But here comes the problem, if we add heat, e.g. from fission, we are not in an equilibrium anymore, are we?
Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change make that claim all the time: Absolute numbers are huge, so they do comparisons like
- 99.998% if Carbon does not take part in Carbon Cycle, or
- heat radiation from the sun is more than X by a scale of Y.
But in balance, so any addition without compensation can compound to be fatal to human life on earth.
After increasing the temperature by storing energy, then radiation off the surface and air layers will increase. But the heat build up is strongest at ground level, yet radiating to space is hardest from that layer. So the effectiveness of heat dispersal in a layered, in-vacuum geoid is not ideal.
> Not only[addition by me] by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.
Volker Quaschning hat an article, in german, on that. A comparable, unfavourable look on heat introduction instead for a post-co2 energy generation, was also cited in minkorrekt podcast (german, too).
But that that is a small factor, too. I did back of the envelope calculation, and - if every of the 8 billion humans increases their consumption to western standards, - their energy from unlimited fusion or unlimited fission, earth still boils.
It might be 2-5 % of the effect of greenhouse gases, by heat introduction is real and at scale deadly, too.
With water, wind and solar, we have no added heat, since moving gases and fluids evoke heat anyway, which just is not converted to electricity in between. And solar changes the albedo of the place where the panel was placed to a reflectivity of that of a green meadow, which might be worse than some kinds of coating, but usually is better then other roof tiling [citing needed, do IR/VIS-white-painted roofs exist?].
TL;DR: Smaller problem by a few orders of magnitude, but unless dangerous geoengineering takes place[1], still unsustainably cooks mankind.
[1]: Please don't. IPCC report says "keep the idea of geoengineering out of media, for it is not a solution but pandora's jar"
There are panels that can radiate heat directly to space though. So it has made me wonder if the nuclear power plants of the future could use such panels to radiate their heat directly to space. Essentially they’d be like reverse solar power plants, that also work at night. Wonder if it’s feasible and economical.
Personally, I think the future will mainly just be solar, hydro, geothermal and energy storage. As world population decline we’ll end up having more than enough materials if we recycle them. Energy use will go drastically down.
Question is if we need nuclear in the transition.
And we should have nuclear R&D anyway as we need it for space exploration.
Global energy from the sun per day: 430 x 10^18 J
(Of course my figure would only increase the difference you're pointing out.)
Any source of free, unlimited "clean" energy would be an environmental catastrophe because energy used is released into the atmosphere as heat.
We need sources that *capture* energy already in the environment, like solar, wind and similar.
The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all.
The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons. If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different.
Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones.
Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis.
One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control.
Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use. EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes).
The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)
The residual ash from coal plants are called coal tailings. They basically contain everything in the coal that didn't burn. Currently this is all piled up near the coal power plant. So you have chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, as well as a smattering of radioactives like uranium sitting in a pile. Occasionally weather washes out these "piles" and they find their way into streams or leach through the underlayment to hit the ground water. When a coal plant is decommissioned the owner files for bankruptcy and the pile of coal tailings becomes another Superfund site.
Yet somehow nuclear is different. Even though if nothing is done, in a thousand years the coal tailings will still be just as toxic as today. While the radioactive waste will be near a background.
This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure, it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow", or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from now, a tribe of stone age explorers breaks into the concrete and reinforced steel facility buried under a mountain in the remote desert, and then goes 700 meters down, uses their lithic tools to bust down a few more steel doors, and gets irradiated? Those hypothetical 10-20 people in the distant future might die, thus we can conclude there is no definitively safe storage solution".
Definitive means it is 100% certain this is not happening with any radioactive waste as there's no lower limit where radiation isn't dangerous. "Definitely safe against human stupidity and error" seems fine to me for radioactive waste when there's zero need to produce any. Again, is that timescale up until stone age man in the future? I can't say but the producers of radioactive waste need to know the answer before they can built a storage facility or they'll have to make it safe enough for anything less than the earth going pooof.
Nature does that for us. It's why burying is a perfectly acceptable means of disposal.
No definitive solution exist even for plastic/polymers, there substances discarded are spreading the world, and the effect are still unclear.
> storage of the waste is non-issue.. To me, is not a volumetric problem, but for time ad long term safety. At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big problem now, imagine the big part of plants, and there is a 90km avoidence zone for many years.
Make nuclear really safe maybe can be done, at witch cost? Will stay still in market? I doubt. Probably some nuclear technology will remain and can be used and developed for research and bootstrap, not for supply the whole.
> solar and wind are just impractical toys These toys are in lowering cost, rising efficiency and world wide spread and deployment, more than any others technology, and 10 yrs. ago was difficult to think, now is reality, and investing resources on solar/wind/others will make a difference -now-, can be widespread, create more workplaces, where building more nuclear will make some effect to 10 years, and can be done only by few big companies (apart environment issues).
That tritium is a huge nothingburger. They could dump it into the ocean now or store it for a century then dump it; either way it causes no real harm. The amount of tritium they're wringing themselves into knots over is a nonissue.
Storage technology evolve, there are many battery technology, even better than li-ion if fully developed, and storage can be chemical, capturing co2 and making fuels with net zero CO2 pollution, can be thermal, can be even gravitational, hydrogen local storage, and energy can move in grids, to go where is need from where is available, engineering can do this now it there is a true will.
If there is a system finely distributed (many systems) for production, transport and storage, in a mix on low to high tecnology, this will make global energy really available and independent of uncertains and variable conditions.
Many examples of good offgrid appication exist, done by some guys, Imagine what can be done with true development/investment just tomorrow.
And Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for long periods everywhere..
> Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for long periods everywhere..
Sun disappears for half of the day, every day. Strong wind is not that common at all, except in few selected areas, like the seaside.
if i have 1$ to invest, i think is wise to invest in tech available, deployable today, scalable, adaptable, and fine grained on territory. just an opinion.
At night use storage and transfer energy with grids, this tech is available now. When windy, store in battery, and if needed transfert with grids, tech available now. No sun, no wind, no sea/tides, no grid, neiter a generator? well.. placing a fission plant here seems the right case, but suspect no one will live in a such place..
The whole statement is designed to mislead.
But at practical level (economic/politics) decommissioning is left to the posterity (cost rising years after years, shifting of milestone, more taxes.. and so on)
Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-expert outsider?
My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.) and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or later will be fine.
[1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John LaMarsh.
It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.
The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant.
Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding process scheduling and I/O.
The French did this totally unprecedented novel thing where they manufacture more than one identical part at a time in a line of assembly stations, and the parts of the plants are interchangeable. I doubt such things transfer to other countries or industries though.
As a french Engineer, I can confirm this. For work inquiries, please reach me at pyrale@oversized.ego
> The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design
In fact, we don't keep building them. The last N4 reactor was delivered in 2003. Since then, aside from the failed joint-venture with Germany that is the EPR, France essentially delivered nothing. That's not really an engineering issue so much as a political one.
Also France didn't "keep building the same reactor", and didn't build "obsolete" reactors. From the initial reactors (the CP generation) to the N4, the buildings got larger, late reactors produced 60% more energy than the original ones, and significant safety improvements were made. Safety changes were also backported on previous installations. In fact, the major reason why Framatome freed itself from the Westinghouse license is that it provided significant independent contribution to the original design.
In France, many factors were involved:
* France over-producing power for decades around y2k, which meant it was hard to commit the country to build more nuclear reactors.
* The EPR being an over-engineered fiasco due to it being designed in a Franco-German partnership which quickly folded, but the design was kept.
* The privatization of the energy sector involved a lot of restructuring for EDF, and the creation of Areva. This had a lot of involvement, but the main one is that the state took a hands-off stance, and EDF and Areva started competing with each other rather than collaborating.
* Areva got mismanaged quite heavily. People like to point out the Olkiluoto fiasco, but what really killed the company was the Uramin scandal.
* Politicians since 2007 started asking hefty dividends from public companies, involving EDF, in order to prop up the government's budget. That created an investment deficit, and significant debt for EDF.
So yeah, lots of things, but the underlying issue seems to be that France used to have a culture of the state coordinating huge projects, which was lost with the new generation of politicians. There seems to be an appetite for new reactors, but the industry is significantly harmed by 20 years of political mixed signals, and whether the current politicians and the industry can deliver remains unclear.
Wikipedia has a list of nuclear reactors in France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran...
According to the list, most power plants came online in the 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly stated as having came online in 2020. Clicking the link, you see that its 2 reactors came online in 1986 and 1987, and as for the third one -- "as of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to the end of 2022. In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023, and again in December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024."
All of the nuclear reactors in France were built by previous generations.
As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements. My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. I think nuclear proponents who say that nuclear is so cheap and so easy should prove it by building their own nuclear reactors and make tons of money. Go ahead, just do it. Stop talking and do it.
I think many of the people who aren't anti-nuclear, would agree with all that.
>However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables.
I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people who don't like the idea of nuclear power making misleading or false statements about nuclear power. (Like in the original message of this thread where the claim is made "After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.")
>My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc.
This statement is true in one small sense and misleading in another. You are likely providing excess power during a sunny day in the summer and less power than you are using when it rains and you are providing no power at other times (like at 2:00 AM.). While at the end of the year you might produce more kilowatts than you in total used, that isn't going to help your neighbors when it is raining. The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created and consequently has to be heavily subsidized by your neighbors who don't have rooftop solar.
FWIW, the IPCC advocates for a diversified portfolio which includes nuclear, and this is the general stance of most climate and energy researchers as the simplified version of reasoning (I know, ironic) is "don't take it off the table." When to use it, how much, and where is more controversial, but this gets extremely complicated quite quickly. It's rather problematic when the people disseminating information (i.e. science communicators; both on youtube as well as news) are not actively aligned with scientific consensus.
This seems like the most reasonable approach - if someone disagrees with this, it would be interesting to hear their reasoning.
I think it's just easier to notice "misleading or false statements" when they contradict what we like to think rather than when they are going in the same direction.
For example, are you 200% sure of your sentence "The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created"? Is that true everywhere, all the time? Because if not, how is that not as much as "misleading or false statements" than the original sentence you quote? But of course, this sentence of yours does not strike you as misleading, because you truly believe it's not misleading.
Also, while I don't think the anti-nuclear are less numerous or less idiot, the pro-nuclear usually are also very very prone to think they are smarter when they are not, and start using bullying method to "fight the infidels", which, at least in my circle which are neutral, is really starting to make that side looks bad.
That is likely true, but what is your point? The statement I said was false and misleading was in the message that started this thread:
>After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.
Are you saying that was a true statement?
>For example, are you 200% sure of your sentence "The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created"? Is that true everywhere, all the time? Because if not, how is that not as much as "misleading or false statements" than the original sentence you quote? But of course, this sentence of yours does not strike you as misleading, because you truly believe it's not misleading.
This sort of incessant questioning is a form of sealioning. I guess I could have been more clear I meant that the obvious energy policy issue with consumer rooftop solar is that it is the most expensive form of power thus it has been given huge subsidies. (The money used for such subsidies is not unlimited and this money is fungible - obviously a dollar going to subsidize an extremely expensive rooftop solar installation could have gone much, much farther if it had gone to support a utility grade solar installation.) I think a charitable reading of my sentence would have understood what I meant.
> Are you saying that was a true statement?
As the op, yes. See:
The limited liability vs Fukushima cost of at least $150B.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
And this review of the economics by DIW berlin.
> According to “numerous scientific studies,” none of the world’s more than 600 nuclear power stations have ever been economically viable, and the plants could only be operated for years due to government subsidies, the institute claims.
https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/-nuclear-has-never-b...
You realize the part I was quoting started with "I rarely see that here".
Obviously, my sentence was not "the element that you say is incorrect is in fact correct" but rather "that is not a surprise that you notice incorrect element when they are saying something you don't like". This second part recognizes that the element may be incorrect. The point is when you say "I rarely see that here": your impressions have no value, they do not correspond to any reality.
> Are you saying that was a true statement?
I am saying that it is not a worst statement as the one of yours I've quoted. The problem of the statement you quoted is that it is open to interpretation: what is "built", what is "economic", what is "traditional".
Of course, you will pretend it is "false" because you will find one exception, or you will say "it's economic without the artificial extra costs that I have arbitrarily decided are the results of baddies because I don't like them"
I personally think this sentence is bad because it's way too imprecise and generalist. I think only idiots will think it is "false", and only idiots will think it is "true", the reality is that this sentence cannot be called "true" or "false" as it is true to some extend and false to some extend.
> This sort of incessant questioning is a form of sealioning.
Once again you miss the point. I don't care if your statement is true or not, or precise or not. My point is that you are blaming someone for not doing what you don't do yourself.
Your sentence was, according to your own standard (not mine, YOURS), objectively pretty bad (which is not the same as "incorrect"):
1) "the ONLY issue" is obviously highly debatable, as what is an issue for someone may not be an issue for someone else (or be a "small issue"), and it highly depends of the objective and what people care about
2) "the most expensive form of power EVER CREATED". This is technically 100% incorrect: it is totally unreasonable to pretend that modern solar is a more expensive form of power than the form of power used one or two centuries ago. Of course, you can answer "it's obviously not what I mean", but I know that and I don't say you have made a mistake, what I'm saying is that you are the one reacting to such approximations if they are "anti-nuclear".
3) "the MOST EXPENSIVE". Again, while it can be true, it is not at all trivial and even "decidable". In a parallel thread, you admit yourself that you take the "average", which is a very very bad reasoning: if a country decided to build a series of crap nuclear plant with turbines of sub-par efficiency, according to you, it would objectively mean that the nuclear power will intrinsically be worse. A better metric instead of the average would be to take the minimum: it corresponds to the real potential of the technology, probably ignoring old technology (so it is also a good thing to do for nuclear) (sure, there may be circumstantial effect, but at first order, they exist in all the forms, so it's fair. While it is not perfect, it is anyway already way better than taking the average). If we do that, solar power is better than nuclear power. And this is only with the US numbers, but you can easily decompose by state and cherry-pick the ones going in one way or another, or add other countries in the world. It scientifically does not make sense, the numbers that you use cannot answer the question of knowing if the form of power is "more expensive" or not in a debate about future decision, especially when they are all so close.
4) the fact that the sentence is a very naive generalization.
Again, let's be clear: I'm not criticizing you for your statement, or saying your statement is incorrect.
What I'm saying is that someone would have behave exactly like you, would have written exactly the same kind of statement, would have been as clear and precise, but it would have been anti-nuclear and you would have said "yet another example of anti-nuclear being lying or misleading".
> I think a charitable reading of my sentence would have understood what I meant.
This is a good summary: you are asking people to be charitable when reading your sentence and try to understand what you mean by refitting the terms to make sure the sentence is true, but you don't do that to others.
As I've said, the statement that you are saying is a lie is true "in some extend", and, if you really believe in what you've said to me, you should just be charitable and understand what they mean in order to refit the terms so that this sentence is true.
Care to show the basis of your personal assertion? It's an extraordinary and unbelievable claim.
>Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 147 and 221 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
The latest report from Lazard on LCOE also gives similar numbers:
https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
It would be extraordinary if these one-off rooftop solar photovoltaic installations would be low cost. They are more dangerous to install than ground based solar farms and much more costly - the real question is why are they so heavily subsidized? It really is sort of a reverse Robinhood scenario where less well off consumers subsidize their wealthier neighbors.
I'm not convinced you read the doc you cited.
In it, it clearly states that the levelized cost of energy for solar PV rooftop residential ranges from $115/MWH while gas peaking is $114/MWH and nuclear is $141.
Your source also states quite clearly that these costs depend on the circumstances (i.e., each case is a case) and it points to unsubsidized costs.
If I get a quote from a rooftop vendor that sells gold plated PV panels to install in a cave, that does not mean that residential PV panels have an expensive energy cost.
I guess I should point out these kind of insults are against the site guidelines.
>In it, it clearly states that the levelized cost of energy for solar PV rooftop residential ranges from $115/MWH while gas peaking is $114/MWH and nuclear is $141.
You are quoting the lowest value in each range, you need to consider the entire range:
$117 to $282 Rooftop residential $115 to $221 Gas Peaking $141 to $221 Nuclear
If you take the average from the range, the most expensive is rooftop solar. As the Statista web site states:
>Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States.
The LCOE of course also undercounts some of the costs associated with consumer rooftop solar. There is real value in having an energy source that isn’t so intermittent. With a low capacity factor, you need to spend money to deal with that. This might be through adding new power lines to bring in power from somewhere else, over building, adding gas peakers, adding energy storage etc. Obviously none of this is free and none of these extra costs are included as part of the LCOE of solar. You can see some estimates of this on page 11 of the report.
>Your source also states quite clearly that these costs depend on the circumstances (i.e., each case is a case)
Yes that is why there is a range. But if your point is that sometimes rooftop solar won’t be the most expensive form of power, that seems like moving the goal posts from your original response:
>>Care to show the basis of your personal assertion? It's an extraordinary and unbelievable claim.
>...and it points to unsubsidized costs.
Yes, that was actually my point. The real question is why is consumer rooftop solar so heavily subsidized? It really is sort of a reverse Robinhood scenario where less well off consumers subsidize their wealthier neighbors. The money available for energy subsidies is not unlimited and this money is fungible. A dollar going to subsidize an extremely expensive rooftop solar installation could have gone much, much farther if it had gone to support a utility grade solar installation.
>If I get a quote from a rooftop vendor that sells gold plated PV panels to install in a cave, that does not mean that residential PV panels have an expensive energy cost.
That isn’t the right way to look at LCOE. Here is some background info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
The reverse is pretty much true too. It seems like both renewables and nuclear proponents should be taking turns bashing fossil fuels, but since both see each other as a competitor for "the future of power", that's where the banter goes.
> And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements.
You don't have to go further than this thread to find false statements about nuclear.
> "The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial government subsidies. Without such support they would never have come about."
To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no regulations, and that just anyone should be able to build any kind of reactor they want anywhere they want with no concerns for safety etc. But I do _very much think_ that when you are considering a technology that increases safety and also increases cost, you have to consider what the alternatives are. Are _they_ safer than whatever the current thing is? If you force it to be more expensive and more safe, are you going to get less of it and instead get the other, cheaper, more dangerous thing?
That calculation has never been done (in the US at least) and the result is thousands to millions dead over the past 80ish years a result of continuing to burn coal instead of nuclear.
The US nuclear safety regime (which is what makes it so expensive and so impractical) has no concept of tradeoffs. It imagines a hypothetical perfect power generation that never kills anyone to which nuclear should be held. That standard is ridiculous now and was ridiculous 50 years ago when nuclear was _already safer than coal_.
The problem with nuclear is that it's much more difficult to regulate effectively than most other industries, because the consequences of mistakes can be so much higher. E.g. Chernobyl contaminated food throughout much of Europe for months. The natural organizational reaction in that situation is to overcompensate.
Nuclear is likely to always be expensive for that reason, because you're never going to get economy of scale as long as companies can't e.g. mass produce nuclear plants and set them up all over the place. I also generally agree with the other reply to your comment by three14.
I consider this to be a pragmatic observation, not a judgment on whether nuclear might make sense in some hypothetical perfectly rational world.
In fact it's easy to see that a large proportion of a the construction cost is the same as any other (e.g. gas, coal) thermal power plant, because they all need the same steam turbine. Now nuclear power plants have additional costs, also due to safety (and I would argue that we should expect that, a nuclear power plant has more challenges to a coal plant).
Moreover if you look at the cost increases for nuclear power plant projects, they are pretty much inline with the cost increases we have seen for most large infrastructure projects. They all have become significantly more expensive (recently build coal plant also went significantly over budget). Even the world nuclear forum says (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...): > Nuclear power plant construction is typical of large infrastructure projects around the world, whose costs and delivery challenges tend to be under-estimated.
The reality is that nuclear power is just not cost-competitive (see also this analysis somebody else (in a counter solar argument) posted https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april...). Especially considering that renewables are on an exponential curve and nuclear is not (and doesn't show any indication of how to get onto one). Because so much of the cost (and energy) is in the construction of a nuclear power plant, it is actually counter-productive to invest into nuclear power plants, because we will increase CO2 compared to an investment into renewables.
And unsafe nuclear is really unsafe in a politically terrible way. You are doomed to either have Chernobyls or a lot of non-optimal regulation, or excellent regulation in the world of spherical cows and frictionless planes.
Perhaps one of the new nuclear startups can find a solution to this, but it'll have to be by finding a way to mass produce nuclear within the existing heavy red tape regime. And in the real world, that's not a bad thing.
It is a bad thing if the increased cost / pollution kills more people either directly or indirectly.
Why do you think it's not true? Just look at the existing statistics that includes old designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant#/media/Fil...
I don't think we as humans know how to create a regulatory structure for nuclear that would keep away people who are willing to sacrifice principles for money, and at the same time allows new designs to easily be built.
The article I linked ends as follows:
> "For all these reasons, nuclear energy, even though nuclear power is emission-free, is not a relevant solution for profitable, climate-friendly and sustainable energy in the future." According to the researchers, nuclear energy as a solution for climate protection is "an old narrative that is still as inaccurate as in the 1970s."
It's not about subsidies for nuclear vs. fossil.
It's about nuclear vs. renewables, and renewables look like a much better investment these days (and years) considering the budget explosions of recent nuclear projects.
The anti-nuclear crusade in the West is a bit worrisome given that if we had been better at dealing with nuclear as a whole there would be less coal and gas power plants all over the West now. As much as I can sympathize with the concerns about nuclear power related supply chain issues and risks of meltdowns + radiation almost all the problems I've seen in nuclear across countries and cultures don't come down to technical issues as much as structural ones due 90%+ to politics causing massive over-regulation of nuclear to become unviable both financially and politically. This seems silly because I strongly believe such efforts should be directed at the much greater, immediate, far more supportable threat to humanity's IMO of fossil fuels. Of course we kind of depend upon them now but given the problems we had from the 1980s into the 2000s with fossil fuels all the way to now the kind of resources we could have spent on renewables may have had better results simply stepping away from lobbying constantly against nuclear power and letting engineers do their best work in all areas of energy research.
Seriously, almost all the "but nuclear costs too much" arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad faith where people pile on more and more requirements like it's a really bad DoD project when it's much more complicated honestly. US DoD has operated tons and tons of nuclear reactors, for example, quite successfully with a pretty darn good safety record last I saw despite all sorts of other failures within the US Jobs Program - they're used in submarines!
Also, France stopped producing military-grade radioactive fuel since 1996, when the Pierrelatte military factory closed [1].
[1], in french: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_militaire_de_Pierrelatte
This tells me the French don't believe nuclear will power the world any time soon. If they believed that, they'd understand breeders would be needed, and would be working on them.
Oh, so low? I heard it was 102%, and we had to activate the hamster wheels in order to make up for the deficit?
Hint: Nuclear isn't even 80% of France's nuclear production when every reactor is up.
[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
If you want another link: [2] states that about half of the reactors were down. I don't know what news sites you use, but "almost all" or "all" reactors being down is simply false news.
[2]: https://www.grs.de/en/news/situation-nuclear-power-plants-fr...
I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources.
Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for longer than expected.
[1], in french: https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rappor...
Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109‒250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors.
That's about 6X less than Germany, per reactor. When is the last time that kind of project came in under budget?
If you focus on dismantling costs, the example of Maine Yankee [1]: is way less dramatic: "In January 2002 Maine Yankee put the total decommissioning cost at $635 million."
The number provided for UK reactors is ludicrous compared to existing dismantling costs, and simply factors in 150 years of dry cask storage, whereas France has a deep storage facility on the way.
Also the author, Paul Dorfman, is an anti-nuclear proponent, it's not surprising to see this kind of numbers from him.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dismantling-nucle...
That has been "on the way" for how many years exactly? The reality is that after almost > 50 years of nuclear power we have exactly one long-term storage facility world-wide which has been commissioned last year (Finland). And somehow that was hailed as a success.
Also what do you think the storage cost for deep storage facilities are?
Also, as of 2019, the ongoing cost of securing spent fuel at Maine Yankee is about $10M per year. At what point does the spent fuel storage there age out and need replacement?
We know for a fact that France nationalized EDF last year and the debt is at currently 65 bn euros and growing. Since the company has been nationalized, the taxpayers are on the hook.
I wouldn't personally go so far as to say they're "screwed" but it's a documented economic fact that nuclear power in France has been sold at a loss, and still is.
Note that this debt is already real, whereas the cost of decommissioning and storing waste for hundreds of years is guesswork no matter which source you use. Operations in France are proven not to cover costs even before we get to that!
This debt is already a reality - and growing with interest rates if nothing else - and we haven't even gotten to the many billions more that have to be invested in the beat-up old plants to keep them running.
We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet.
Nuclear power has always been a strategic choice, with extensive international treaties and special conditions in place to make it a reality despite it not being financially viable in the traditional sense. The costs have been socialised and pushed to future generations, deliberately.
Now that several decades have passed, we are the generations that have to start paying.
That by itself isn't an issue. Plenty of companies take on debt to invest, for instance. My company intends to take €40bn of new debt in the next decade or so, and our investors don't see it as an issue.
That's why unit costs are important, that's what dictates whether the activity is reasonable, and how much debt can be supported by it.
> We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet.
Plants have been decomissioned in the past already. Because of that, we have pretty reasonable estimates of how much dismantling costs. If you have specific points about why past dismantled structures are different from future ones, feel free to expose them. Otherwise, the "we don't know" discourse is basically FUD.
I would prefer to keep the red tape, thank you very much.
Sure, nuclear is an expensive industry, but it's also a very safe industry, and I believe we should keep this part of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias
and
Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in different locations online. Some indicate they build at half the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So, if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please indicate.
(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05/17/h...
All the more reason for them to build nuclear plants. Every barrel of oil that their own economy doesn't need (because they have plenty of nuclear plants) is another barrel they can make money exporting. And if or when using oil becomes unfashionable, or their oil reserved start running low...then being recognized experts on how to build & run lots of safe, economical nuclear plants sounds pretty good, eh?
Beyond powering the grid, there are myriad uses for oil that nuclear cannot substitute directly for- asphalt, plastic, nylon, even Aspirin (synthesized from benzene).
People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it.
Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.
One death from cancer, 2313 from relocating: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
This does actually matter despite the deaths from coal etc. being massively higher by the same measures.
Also of the handful of breeder reactors we have (i think the only 2 running are in Russia) they are incredibly far from economical and have a really annoying tendency to catch fire...
Thermodynamics would like to have a word:
> […] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
Insignificant today, but not a few centuries back.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307705601_Heat_Emis... [2] https://www.vitalstrategies.org/tobacco-atlas-global-tobacco...
Perhaps that promise was empty?
Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the safest mode on transportation by a wide margin.
China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic obstacles like in the west.
Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get energy.
Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power plant to happen.
Planes still crash from time to time. The regulations on the aviation industry are the ant version of regulations compared to the elephants that the nuclear industry has to put up with. planes are only 600x safer than driving by death toll [0]. That would be a shut-the-industry-down safety stat for nuclear plants.
That is why people are pointing out the nuclear safety rules are stupid. There is no comparable regulation on any industry. If nuclear plants were regulated to airline safety levels I would just be saying "meh, too expensive" in HN debates on the subject. The fact that it is still in the running despite crazy regulatory requirements is why there is reason to think it'd be a new age of energy if the technology was regulated sensibly.
[0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
If you calculate radioactive materials released per energy produced - nuclear is below coal, even including all the accidents.
It's irrational to avoid nuclear powerplants.
nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.
You are forced to build massive battery farms. Batteries require mining chemicals. For the scale we are talking about, you would be strip-mining the earth.
You are forced to make incredibly costly upgrades to electric grids–some of which are nearly a century old. Because the current grids can't handle the unreliable, wax-and-wane nature of solar and wind power.
You are forced to build gigantic solar panel and wind farms, destroying vast swathes of natural ecology and displacing and destroying many species.
You are forced to deal with solar panels and wind turbines at the end of life problem, especially solar panels which contain toxic chemicals which are at risk of leaching into the environment (think 'water table') unless they are properly disposed of. No one has a viable plan for proper disposal of solar panels at the scale we would have to be talking about.
And finally–the elephant in the room. The giant energy corporations just won't transition to renewable energy if they don't get a high-enough return on their investments. They want something like 12% ROI. This is extremely unlikely. They've left all their commitments to go renewable conditional so they can weasel out by saying it's not cost-effective for them. Just look at what's happening in reality: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/23/siemens-energy-scraps-profit...
How big will the exclusion zones of Climate Change be if we keep burning fossil fuels?
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.
The US has (according to https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...) 102.9GWe of solar capacity covering an area of 965 square miles - or 0.1GW/mi^2.
Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).
However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.
If land cost rules out solar, it also rules out agriculture. I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
This effects people too.
Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted for cost of nuclear?
1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000 per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal conditions.
2) I don't know if it is controversial; although if the people demanding the cleanup are the same lunatics who regulate the industry in the west I want to see what the justification is for spending $100s of billions of dollars.
3) The cleanup cost should be considered. When we multiply probability by cost it will be a short consideration. There is no way it is as bad as what everyone is currently already doing with coal. It is likely that it will also be better than renewables once waste is factored in, just because the volumes of material involved.
Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massive portions of these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima exclusion zone, that's for sure.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-metaverse-...
And that's just around sea level rise. The Central Valley's water issues are another probable symptom of global climate change, and just because the Valley lucked out with a wet winter this year doesn't mean that luck will persist. If push comes to shove, I'm sure California's agricultural sector would much rather invest the billions necessary for desalination and upgraded levees to address those symptoms than abandon California entirely - but those are still costs being thrust upon California due to a continued reliance on fossil fuels.
$60B in refugee compensation.
And $200B because they stopped using nuclear for a while as an overreaction.
Oh, and the tsunami+earthquake cost over $250B independent of the nuclear accident.
Your number is FUD.
I’m just stating that the cleanups are expensive, stupidly expensive and the more nuclear we have the more chance of this happening again, or worse, there will be.
Look at coal seam gas jn the US, sole plants are leaking untold levels of methane. The US can’t regulate anything properly when it comes to energy.
People don’t realise that Fukushima wasn’t caused by a tsunami, it was caused by negligence.
That we haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for a unclear accident does not mean those are impossible.
Another exciting option: unnoticed containment failure of waste storage, which contaminates huge amounts of groundwater over weeks and months before the contaminated water starts reaching a densely populated area.
And don't tell me these things can't happen outside the Soviet Union. Greed and complacenty can always find a way.
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant doesn't really factor in to that picture.
Three Mile Island was close to worst possible in a Western design, and those aspects that led to that accident were fixed 45 years ago.
Worst case isn't a nuclear accident at this point; it's continued reliance on fossil fuels and the accelerating effects from warming the planet. Huge swaths of land near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable for large scale human habitation due to extreme heat events.
We have already seen 129 degrees in those areas with a real heat index (due to humidity) of 142. These areas are already at their absolute limit. That's your continent-wide Red Forest.
Covering too much land in solar panels could have dire long-term effects that we don't even know. Sucking too much energy out of the air with windmills could too. All energy sources have risks.
But we know exactly how badly nuclear reactors can fail, we know exactly how widely nuclear contamination can spread, and we know exactly what it can do to people. The results if those things happened on a large scale in a densely populated area are not speculative at all.
Also a big chemical plant failure has potential to kill more people than all nuclear failures combined - See Bhopal disaster
> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction, management, and operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”.
For me that turned the whole piece from a level-headed well-reasoned argument from domain experts to a Facebook political rant. That isn’t to say I agree or disagree with DEI initiatives, that sentence simply undermines the credibility of all that came before.
Nice for the next generation of Daesh.
The only thing that matters is cost.
But every generation of nuclear plant has promised "power too cheap to meter". The last 3 generations all failed to deliver (and have been ruinously expensive). Gen 4 isn't expected to start commercial operations until 2035 I think?
This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality.
I am open to some of the SME concepts (mass manufacturing, large numbers of small units) because they seem to deal with at least some of the economic issues nuclear has.
But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is.
I actually think that being small, simple, short term, politically unimportant with commodity parts is to other renewables (wind, solar etc) what reliability is for nuclear.
> This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality.
> But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is.
I don't think we're operating from the same base set of facts. Fission is a reality now. Entire countries rely on it for their entire grid, safely and reliably. TFA was just saying everyone could, and I agree. It's not a transition of kind, but of degree, which is much easier.
This is not to say solar and wind have to place (which triggers a different kind of antibodies), just that fission does too.
The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is whether it's worth the price.
Renewables = a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geo, and wave, backed up by storage and a more efficient grid, supplement by various local - down to household - generation options. Supported by smarter and larger grids.
The absolute criminality of the last few decades means that renewable tech is decades behind where it could have been with a no-compromise crash development program starting in the 90s.
The real problem with renewable has always been political. Renewables are inherently diverse and distributed. They're not limited to a very small number of critical supply chains and economic choke points. And some people are really unhappy about that.
Now it fits nuclear too.
On paper, it looks like it.
On practice, my mother pays 30€ a month of electricity in France, where nuclear energy is everywhere. She asked for a quote to get panels on her house, and they got back to her with 20000€.
Sure you can move the needle by noting I drain way more power than her, than she heats her house using fossil fuel and that the quotes could be have been reduced in many ways.
You can also note that solar panels have to be replaced several times, take much more space, don't have to including wiring in their ROI calculation (while nuclear does for some weird reason) and are created by electricity generated by fossil or nuclear fuel, so their building price is already cheap.
I wouldn't say the answer is that clear cut.
Which is logical.
For some reason I don't know, nuclear reactors cost evaluation must include the wiring.