A Nuclear Renaissance Is the Best Path Forward | Hacker News Reader

A Nuclear Renaissance Is the Best Path Forward

realclearenergy.org

50 pointshammock59 comments

I'm just going to re-post this amazing statistic I saw the other day:

In the first nine months of 2023, China built 215 TWh (adjusted for capacity factor!) of solar and wind energy. This exceeds the 206TWh from the entire fleet of 26 nuclear power plants that China has under construction today, and those have completion dates years in the future. It is likely that China will exceed these amounts again in the near future.

It goes without saying that there are still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage. Maybe nuclear will end up having some role. But the idea that nuclear is going to be more than a small fraction of future global energy generation just seems completely obsolete in the face of this manufacturing wave. And articles that argue for building nuclear because "renewables are manufactured overseas" just highlight how desperately we need to get realistic here -- it's like arguing we should keep using sail-power and whale oil rather than industrializing, because we made the decision not to build steam engines domestically.

> still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage

So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know.

But we keep burning gas, oil and coal while arguing how dangerous nuclear is. Meanwhile Climate Change is here and it's real. We could've been 100% nuclear by now. It was fear mongering from greens and environmentalists (heavily financed and brainwashed by oil producers like Russia) that f-d up our climate like it did.

The number of premature deaths caused by coal/oil/gas - both directly due to the pollution and indirectly due to climate change, far exceeds the total deaths by nuclear power. The funny thing is it’s usually the most progressive and green leaning people that oppose nuclear so much.

>We can have both, you know.

TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece.

But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over.

In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China.

The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.

A US government backed SMR just quit their pilot project as they can't compete on cost in the current market. Nuclear is basically obsolete. We need to subsidize it to safely use all the current waste and while extracting energy turn that into safer leftovers.

The problem is that nuclear can't compete on cost with fossil fuels, and we've failed to make those obsolete.

The reason nuclear is so expensive and slow to build is overregulation. It also slowed R&D so much that we haven't created and tested the reactor designs that were safer, smaller and easier to run.

It's like when inventing the airplane we would've stopped because the high number of crashes and never reached today's safety and convenience.

Exxon Valdez, Deep Water Horizon, Three Mile Island, and so on. How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing, play by the book, not cut corners? Especially with the smell of deregulation in the air?

> How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing

Just as much as I trust any giant megacorp to do the right thing?! Which is to say slightly more than my government and slightly less than my neighbors.

Everything around me that I use and enjoy (my phone, my car, my laptop, my clothes, my food, movies, music, internet etc) is created&delivered by a megacorp or other. I hope someday we will each produce our own energy but so far solar mostly works on sunny days and home nuclear is probably illegal - regulated to death.

That's why I wrote "Energy" megacorp. Apple dropping the ball on the iPhone has slightly different externalities than BP's corner cutting causing a blowout on Deep Water Horizon and creating havoc an entire ecosystems, or Met Ed causing a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania with all the fun stuff that came with that. The reason why you don't die of lead poisoning while enjoying your megacorp food is regulation by the way.

So what exactly are you proposing?! Who is supposed to generate all that energy we are using instead of "megacorps" and how?

We made our bed and need to sleep in it, but we should be careful what sort of technology we allow them to handle, especially if/when we push for more deregulation. Corps have a singular goal, making money, everything else is secondary unless imposed externally. Exxon can't mess up wind or solar power in a way that it pollutes entire landscapes, but they can do (and have done) so with fossil fuel production, and heavy heavy regulation is presumably one of the few reasons why we haven't seen more issues with nuclear fission on that front.

If not for that, some Exxon exec will one day get the bright idea on how to cut a lot of corners to boost quarterly profits, and a windmill toppling over has different externalities than a meltdown, or even just inadvertent radioactive gas/particle release.

I'm not saying the likes of Shell, BP and Exxon can't handle it (they certainly can) but it needs to happen in an environment that prioritizes safety above all else, because in the case of fission the fallout is quite severe if they/we mess up (compared to other energy sources).

So... your proposal is to not change anything because something could go wrong? Keep things as they are because corporations wanna make money (who doesn't)?

This mentality is exactly how we sleep-walked into the current Climate Change predicament. "We" did not make this particular bed. Nuclear fear mongering (well financed by oil producing enemy states) and anti-capitalist mentality stopped the switch to nuclear power that would've prevented our carbon problem from happening in the first place. And now we are facing a Civilization Ending Event.

We can't get out of this hole with the same way of thinking that got us in. No thanks. I vote progress. Deregulate. Risk. Try. Test. Build.

The problem is that peak load is when solar (and typically, wind too depending on the geography) is producing its lowest output. So if you fulfill this demand with nuclear, then you've just made your wind and solar irrelevant because nuclear is just as cheap to run around the clock.

This is why proponents of a primarily wind and solar grid are assuming that hydrogen, compressed air, or something else will make storage nearly-free.

> The problem is that peak load is when solar (and typically, wind too depending on the geography) is producing its lowest output

How do you figure that? Residential time of use prices are highest at mid-day. Power use is lower at night, even with higher demand for heating in the winter.[1]

> So if you fulfill this demand with nuclear, then you've just made your wind and solar irrelevant because nuclear is just as cheap to run around the clock.

Given the above, if your nuclear fleet only supplies enough power for nighttime then by definition it lacks the capacity to support peak demand.

1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

Peak electricity demand tends to be in the afternoon, right around sunset. Since this is right as solar is tapering off, this creates the duck curve problem [1].

It does vary by region and season. In hotter climates, during the summer, peak electricity demand does tend to happen around mid-day [2]. The same page you linked, actually. In case you didn't notice, the demand curves for spring, summer, fall, and winter are all overlaid on the same graph. Mid-day electricity use is highest during the summer, but in other seasons it peaks in the evening right around sunset. Furthermore, about half of homes in the US are heated by gas [3], so decarbonization of heating is going to increase night-time energy use.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

2. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

3. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30672#:~:tex....

China are also building more fossil fuel power plants than any other country. Using fossil fuel power plants as reserve energy and renewables as peak/bulk energy has been the most cost effective way to produce energy in the last 50 year and the key strategy for many countries. It is why Germany focused on subsidizing massive amount of wind, solar, and natural gas power plants. It worked great until Russia invaded Ukraine and the pipelines got blown up.

The only difference between the German strategy and the Chinese strategy is that China is also building a few token nuclear plants. China is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) customer of Russian natural gas.

As long we don't want to pay significant more for energy then this strategy will continue to be the dominant strategy. Any other strategy is obsolete. People will try to argue nuclear, green hydrogen, rust batteries, Tesla batteries and so on but for the long foreseeable future all those will just be a footnotes compared to what get built. More renewables, more natural gas, more coal, more oil power plants. Anything else is seen as too costly because any single other technology is just dwarfed by the capacity and cost savings of combining renewables with fossil fuels.

China is building a lot of coal as well. But the interesting thing is that they're setting up a scheme in which the government pays the plants not to generate. Capacity is at 50% and falling quickly. This thread indicates that most plants will be getting the majority of their revenue from these payments by the second half of this decade. Related: latest estimates indicate a structural decline in Chinese CO2 emissions starting next year, almost entirely because of renewable buildouts.

[1] https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/17228860669427430... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...

Available capacity is not falling, production output is. This is the purpose of reserve energy. Cheap renewable energy is produced when the weather allows it, and fossil fuels produce energy when demand exceed supply. In order to keep fossil fueled power plants ready to supply energy, the state steps in and provide a paycheck in order to keep them available (this is the program that the twitter post talks about).

This is the strategy that Germany has. It is also why getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies is close to impossible. The more fossil fuel power plants a country need to have standing by, the more subsidies are needed to keep them staffed and fueled up. In general it did reduce emissions compared to running exclusively on fossil fuels, while reducing costs at the same time since at peak weather the efficiency of renewables are very high.

The difference between China and Germany is that China has an entire continent and the capability to rapidly deploy HVDC lines across all of it. This means that their wind/offshore wind may have a capacity factor of 30-49% but the wind will be blowing at different times. Similarly, they can take advantage of solar generation in Western China that continues well into the evening. And finally, China is building out battery and storage capacity at a pace that rivals their investments into renewables. If you’d started in 2011 and predicted the current renewables cost/buildout rate in China, people would have laughed at you. I would not bet against a similar thing happening with storage over the next dozen years.

TL;DR: China decarbonizing is very good for the world, even if it isn’t perfect yet. We in the west should stop looking for reasons to repeat our earlier (wildly incorrect) pessimism about renewable capacity, and just start trying to catch up.

We can, and must, do both.

Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not dispatchable like nuclear is. They are not available when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We have enough nuclear fuel to power all of human civilization for a very long time and it is completely carbon free. There are vast swaths of land to safely store the small amount of generated waste. If you really care about climate change you should be 100% onboard the nuclear bandwagon.

> We have enough nuclear fuel to power all of human civilization for a very long time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium

> Optimistic predictions

> The OECD estimates that with the world nuclear electricity generating rates of 2002, with LWR, once-through fuel cycle, there are enough conventional resources to last 85 years using known resources and 270 years using known and as yet undiscovered resources. With breeders, this is extended to 8,500 years.[

We shouldn't forget Chernobyl. Yes the statistics say that air pollution is a far worse killer than nuclear power plants but that same statistic applies to nuclear bombs.

I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative and using it to predict something as unpredictable as the stock market. More caution is needed here. Yes, I agree that nuclear is an option here, but it is not an option that is so obviously the best as some people think it is.

Mentioning Chernobyl at all, at least to me, shows a deep lack of understanding about nuclear power infrastructure and capabilities in the 21st century. It cannot be stressed enough that Chernobyl was a fluke on top of a fluke, with bad design and dangerous elemental choices at its core. It is nothing like the nuclear power tech we would choose to use today. Thorium MSR poses literally near-zero risk of meltdown, and the meltdown potential of Thorium can be compared to Chernobyl in parts per million.

Considering all of this, mentioning the threat of another Chernobyl every time nuclear power is positioned as a viable option is like thinking that the Valdez disaster occurs every time we ship gas overseas.

Nobody knows what the risks are of thorium deployment, because no thorium plant has been deployed. Pretending "unknown = zero" is how we got here.

But it is all moot, because thermal generation of any kind has wholly priced itself out of the market. There is hardly even a place remaining for geothermal.

It's true that no large scale Thorium reactor has been built yet. It's also true that its mathematically, chemically, and physically impossible for Thorium to pose the same radiation threat that Uranium poses under load.

I'm a huge nuclear fan, but Thorium reactors are overhyped. Yes, it is chemically, physically and mathematically impossible for Thorium to pose any danger because Thorium is not fissile. Thorium by itself cannot sustain a chain reaction. Whatever Thorium reactor people envision, inevitably you will have Uranium, and sometimes Plutonium, inside that reactor too. Now, you are free to claim that only a small part of the reactor is going to be Uranium or Plutonium, to which I'm going to say that only a small part of a regular Uranium reactor core is the U-235 type, 95% is the somewhat inert U-238.

Now, can Thorium reactors be good, or great? Sure thing, but for the time being all their purported advantages are on paper only, while the PWR reactors are in wide use.

The issue isn’t the U232-33-35. Its the potential for meltdown, which the MSRE systems fully mitigate in situ

MSR stands for Molten Salt Reactor. It's a type of reactor that can use either Thorium or Uranium or Plutonium. For some reason a lot of people equate it with Thorium.

MSRE specifically refers to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment [1], which was a reactor that burned only Uranium, never Thorium.

By the way, the Department of Energy is collaborating with the private industry on a number of advanced reactor designs [2]. There is only one molten salt reactor and that one uses Uranium or Plutonium, not Thorium (see [3], slide 3).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

[2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac...

[3] https://www.nationalacademies.org/documents/embed/link/LF225...

I am aware that MSR/E can refer to multiple reactor fuel types - since we were talking about thorium, I didn't feel the need to specify which I meant.

The current environment of Nuclear Plant technology does not negate the benefits of MSR Thorium reactors

> I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative

I really wish nuclear proponents would take a data driven approach. It would essentially stop the conversation right there. Instead we have to deal with ridiculous scenarios talking about the safety of nuclear power immediately followed by "we just need to remove these regulations which make it too expensive to operate" as if one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. The energy sector in the US is ran for profit. If there were a profit to be made off of nuclear power, energy companies would be all for it. Yet instead they just keep putting up more wind farms that they can realize profit from after 12-18 months instead of spending billions of dollars and decades on a project that may never see completion.

Nuclear is has the lowest number of deaths per unit of energy produced [1], except Solar. At the same time it's also the heaviest regulated. These two, are, of course, connected.

Isn't it logical that we shuld search for a middle ground by reducing regulation while taking care the number of deaths per megawatt doesn't exceed the worst current climate change culprits: gas, oil and coal?!

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

I doubt that solar is so low, just the few deaths from the roof installers will go over the figure given there

We shouldn’t forget BP’s Deepwater Horizon. We shouldn’t forget Exxon’s Valdez. We shouldn’t forget the Moningah disaster…I could go on for a while.

So after listing all of these disasters, the conclusion is to let these companies handle technology that has even worse outcomes in the case of disaster?

No, thorium reactor disasters are way more limited in worst-case scenario harm than any of the disasters I mentioned.

Nope, it isn‘t. Our path forward is renewable energies and reliable energy partnerships only.

And sitting in the dark wearing two jumpers

That‘s nonsense. At least when you only relate this to renewable energies. Ask the French, what they think about this summer, when they had to shut down many nuclear reactors simply because there was no water to cool them. Or us Germans when Russia invaded Ukraine and we were faced with our past decisions to completely rely on cheap Russian gas. Or look at water taps in the US that you can turn into little flame throwers because fracking contaminated drinking water. Also check out the rising numbers of earth quakes in the US due to fracking. But sure. Climate change is great, so that at some point you won‘t have to wear any jumpers anymore, even in winter. Too bad that grandma then died a little before her time, in the last heatwave.

Ask me what I think about the solar panels on my house late at night or when it's winter-dark outside.

So you live somewhere remote without connection to the grid? In that case, nuclear power wouldn‘t help you as well.

For everything else, I recommend googling the following terms to get started with: green hydrogen, biogas, hydropower, pumped hydro storage, smart grid.

Biomass boasts 155 times more deaths per unit of energy produced compared to nuclear, while hydropower only 43 times [0] but at the same time is a methane (potent greenhouse gas) emitter and a general ecosystem wrecker.

The others seem to be a rounding error in today's actual energy industry - maybe someday in the future?! Meanwhile we keep burning gas, oil and coal and spewing CO2 into the atmosphere.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

What about nuclear waste? Is that no problem for us just because it‘ll be a huge problem for hundreds of future generations? Nuclear energy is not clean energy. And the illusion that it is will only postpone the further concentration on renewables - as it did in the past. It‘s also not cheap, it‘s very expensive up to unaffordable if you include permanent disposal into the price per kWh.

Fusion reactors would be the only form that could have a future.

Waste is a non-problem. Just burry it in a mine (that's where it came from anyway), put warning signs around and maintain them. Furthermore current reactor designs use and reuse fuel and irradiated materials.

But it's beyond weird to worry about a problem for a hundred generations in the future when there is a civilisation ending danger straight here in our times: Climate Change. While worrying about some small group in the future stumbling upon and dying because of our buried nuclear waste - mammoth storms, pollution, raised sea level, heat waves, thirst and hunger are already killing or threatening to kill millions right now.

And, BTW, burning coal spews (slightly) radioactive smoke in the air while the resulting ash has to be kept in watered mounds (so the wind doesn't blow them) or covered with dirt because it is also - radioactive. Straight into our lungs!

Stop with all the nuclear astroturfing. The shit is ungodly expensive, results in a real hazard to life and creates perverse incentives operate cheap and long. Neither of which is compatible with safe.

Stop with all the nuclear fear mongering. No industry is perfectly safe. Nuclear has the lowest number of deaths [1] per megawatt produced, other than Solar. It's so expensive because it is ungodly regulated.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

> Nuclear has the lowest number of deaths [1] per megawatt produced > It's so expensive because it is ungodly regulated.

The two are two sides of the same coin.

Which regulations do you have proof of being unjustified?

All regulation! The proof is in the ridiculously low rate of deaths per megawatt. When you have such a complex tech made as safe a solar panels but takes decades to build and costs more than going to Mars - it's clear overregulation is the culprit.

The solution is simple: deregulate slowly and carefully until you reach the safety of the gas, oil and coal plants dooming our planet (while killing us with pollution) right now.

I don’t even know where to being.

All I’ll say is that, justified or not, the PR apocalypse that will accompany the first incident to occur under this deregulation plant will be the end of the nuclear industry. The current opposition to nuclear will look like a bunch of YIMBYs in comparison.

I am willing to take that chance. We already had two nuclear “apocalypses”. The result? Less than a few thousand dead and a bunch on lost land. Nothing compared to the millions of deaths carbon pollution causes every year.

And how about the climate apocalypse? How about the billion potential deaths from that? Maybe our whole human civilization being in danger? How about the millions dying every year from pollution?

We must be brave and try new things. We cannot afford to be conservative and play it safe anymore. Our default on our current path is dire. We need to change course at any cost.

This is simply not a politically viable option, nor should it be on.

I don't know of any non-fringe candiate in any country who is willing to even entertain the idea of "let's deregulate our nuclear power plants. yolo."

The rest of this comment might as well be a parody account. Again, trying this seems like the easiest way ensure no nuclear plant will ever get built again.

Oh, I have no illusion politicians can (or even want to) solve this problem they created, even if the solution is staring them in the face. The current reaction to anything new and optimistic is fear and denial. See how news about AI were received, for example.

The only hope comes, as always, from technologists. Maybe in states/countries more friendly to innovation and not eager to regulate everything into stagnation.

Saw this xkcd today. Just thought I'd leave it here

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Sunlight: 90,000,000,000MJ/kg

Sunlight: 1.6e-6 MJ/m^3

(I do actually think solar will be the most useful energy source going forward)

That is the total energy of a Kg matter according to E=mc2, if I'm not mistaken. How exactly are you planning to convert that matter into energy? Do you have a Kg of antimatter laying around your house?!

Photons are their own antiparticle, so this is not an issue.

Photons are the means for transfer for all energy sources at some level, so using that as a comparison for the actual generation method seems a little pointless.

Written and paid for by a nuclear industry lobbyist

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