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demondemidi

We have 93 nuclear reactors? I'm on Team Greta: go nukes.

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Yes, and they make roughly 20% of our electricity, and about 50% of our low-carbon electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

I'm on team Generation 4 Nuclear. I think the distinction is important.

Eg: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-advanced-reactor-system...

Generation doesn't matter, the weakest link will always be human greef, changing the spec to save cost, changing safety tests to extend the lifetime past when it should be shut down, poor maintenance, etc

Those are all just money. We could spend more for energy.

I would build 100 3 mile islands instead of using fossil fuels.

Mmmm, I think that would be a mistake. The former residents of Fukushima prefecture and Chernobyl would probably agree.

But the millions killed each year by pollution created burning gas, oil and coal would strongly disagree - if they were still alive.

- 20.000 died because of the Tsunami. - 2.000 died in the evacuation attempt. - ONE person died because of actual radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

Then we can discount all people being hurt from falls when building solar plants because the panels themselves did not kill them, they just did not follow OSHA regulations!

Solar = 0.0!

Why don't we abolish the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act and see how far nuclear gets when having to pay the true cost for their insurance?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Are you implying that if there was no Nuclear plant in Fukushima, the Tsunami would not have happened, or the people living there wouldn't have been needed to be evacuated?

Tsunami? Yes. Evacuatiom due a nuclear melt down of a non-existing nuclear power plant? I don't know, but maybe not.

Show me a general solar or wind solution that works just about anywhere that is guaranteed to have at least 1 week of back up power when the power takes a nose dive during extreme weather or even just when the wind/solar dips, even 1 day would be a great improvement over what we have now. I would be onboard with solar/wind all day if this was true.

The solution is clear. Ban tsunamis.

"In 2012, ex-prime minister Naoto Kan was interviewed about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and has said that at one point Japan faced a situation where there was a chance that people might not be able to live in the capital zone including Tokyo and would have to evacuate ((...)) If things had reached that level, not only would the public have had to face hardships but Japan's very existence would have been in peril"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_reaction_to_Fukushima...

An absurd counterfactual. This was assuming a scenario in which Fukushima released a ridiculously high level of radiation, which it didn't, that would necessitate other nuclear power plants to be immediately evacuated with nothing done to shut down their reactors resulting in a "chain reaction" of other plants releasing radiation presumably from the engineers just running away and letting a meltdown take place. Absolute FUD and bullshit since this would be an incredibly irresponsible thing to do and the Japanese people are far too competent and conscientious to enact such a hare brained evacuation.

Stop spreading disinformation please.

At the time of the Fukushima disaster no one could assess in real-time, and therefore according to the then-prime minister the worst case scenario was worked on. You can call it 'disinformation' (in other words: 'he is a liar'!) without any source all day, those are hard facts.

Mortality rate in deaths per thousand terawatt hour[1]:

  - Brown coal:  32.72
  - Coal:        24.62
  - Oil:         18.43
  - Biomass:      4.63
  - Natural gas:  2.82
  - Hydro:        1.30
  - Wind:         0.04
  - Nuclear:      0.03
  - Solar:        0.02

Again, these are adjusted per 1000TWh, and includes nuclear catastrophes like Chernobyl and Fukushima

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

Nominally it includes Chernobyl. Caveat, noby, not in the USSR, the successor states nor the West ever really counted the Chernobyl victims, hence the official.number of what, 30-ish victims.

The hydro stats are mainly due to the Banqiao case, which is a fluke: in similar conditions anything would go boom with way less latency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521090

do you know if the solar ratio includes falling off roofs?

Here's the thing: you wouldn't have to, there's no need for compromise. We can build a safe nuclear energy infrastructure, go 100% carbon emission free, etc.

But there's still no solution for safely storing or disposing of nuclear waste, so all those power plants currently have a stockpile of spent fuel rods, which is a huge risk imo. But everyone's like "not in my backyard", even though the backyard is a deep cave in a mountain or down in the earth where the stuff will be put in lead and reinforced concrete, the cave sealed off or collapsed, forgotten by time and where it will remain dormant and slowly go inert over the next geological era.

"Backyard" in this case is the entire transit route to get the spent fuel to a storage location, not just the final destination.

Fear mongering tbh, the containers can survive a direct train hit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4

Of course there is a technical solution already and there has been one for decades. You Yanks could have a deep geological repository by now, but NIMBYs in Nevada blocked it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

>>But there's still no solution for safely storing or disposing of nuclear waste, so all those power plants currently have a stockpile of spent fuel rods,

There is, we know what it is, but no one wants to pay for it - it's called deep borehole storage. You basically put your fuel in cylinders, dig boreholes few miles deep, put all the waste at the bottom, done. It's not coming back ever, it doesn't pose any danger to anything or anyone on anything other than geological timescales(and if the geology starts pushing stuff buried 5 miles deep to the surface you have other bigger problems to worry about).

It's estimated that "just" 800 boreholes would be enough to store all nuclear waste ever produced.

But yeah, cost is one thing, but the other is that this material then becomes truly and irreversibly irretrievable - which actually might not be desirable since we know that even spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed to make more fuel or weapons, which is not something that countries like US would want to dismiss as a possibility.

And also - storage of spent nuclear fuel is actually a lot safer and less scary than most people think. In Netherlands they literally made a museum out of their spent fuel storage facility, you can walk in between the casks that hold material radioactive enough to kill you in minutes, it's that safe.

It needs to be recoverable if it's the actual fuel rods that you're storing. Only a tiny fraction of the total usable energy in those is used in the currently deployed fission reactors and the "spent" fuel rods can be reprocessed and used in other reactor designs. Putting them somewhere we can't get them is just throwing away usable uranium.

it really doesn't, those would be nice to have but to get rid of the "where are we gonna store it" crowd for a while then this doesn't sound like a bad idea if it's even remotely economically feasible. I reckon after drilling a couple hundres of these bore holes we'd get pretty good at working out the kinks

The difference is that if you recycle it you effectively get 30% more energy from the same amount of fuel. It also reduces the volume and radioactivity of waste so it's an all around good thing to do. Newer thorium reactors can also utilize the waste to be even more efficient.

You are right, but there is no realistic scenario in the next 100 years where it will be more economical for a power plant to reprocess spent fuel than to use freshly mined uranium.

To put this in perspective, though, much of the problem being discussed is about the pitfalls of short-term thinking.

Here's the long term thinking though: if you can't make nuclear power plants economical in the short term, there is no long term.

Nah. That’s just talking in circles to rationalize bad choices. The whole point of long term thinking is being able to acknowledge short term losses so that you arrive at a better position in the more distant future.

If you talk in general about bad choices, you are right.

On the specific topic of reprocessing though. Reprocessing achieves 2 things: 1. it can extract usable fissile fuel from spent fuel, and 2. it can reduce the amount of long lived radioactive waste, by a factor of 30. Point 1 can be further split in 1.a. usable fuel for the current generation reactors and 1.b. usable fuel for future, fast reactors (U-238).

1.a. Per wikipedia [1]

  Reprocessing the plutonium into usable fuel increases the energy derived from the original uranium by some 12%, and if the uranium-235 is also recycled by re-enrichment, this becomes about 20%

In other words, all this reprocessing can reduce overall the total volume of uranium mined and spent fuel by 20%. That's not a game changer, and it certainly does not come for free.

1.b. reprocessing in order to extract U-238 for fast reactors. That's a nice concept, but if we ever build fast reactors that can burn U-238 (fingers crossed), we already have a huge stockpile of depleted uranium. The US alone has more than half a million tons, and the rest of the world at least as much. That's enough to keep the lights on in the entire world for hundreds of years.

2. reprocessing in order to reduce the waste. That makes sense. But burying the waste is probably cheaper. We have already buried hundreds of thousands of tons of waste at WIPP. We know it works and it is safe. We know we will need to eventually bury some waste, even if its 30 times lower. If we, as a society, agree to open some deep geological repositories for nuclear waste, then it doesn't make all that much of a difference if we bury 10000 tons or a million tons.

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

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

Do you think the bulk of scientific progress has been made waiting for a “game changer” or through smaller, progressive iterative improvements?

Most of the waste can be recycled in a breeder reactor for more energy than the original reactor got out of it.

This is the one no one understands. And the only reason breeders are not operated is because of proliferation risks. Breeders will make material that could be used to make weapons, which can also be used as fuel, but it has to be tracked even better. It's a solvable problem.

yeah we do, but no one wants to build breeder reactors so it's a no go.

Breeders are also not operated because they cost more to build and operate than conventional light water reactors. Conventional light water reactors already cost too much to attract robust private sector investment. There are only two breeder power reactors operating currently: the BN-600 and BN-800, both in Russia. The successor BN-1200 design that was supposed to be commercially competitive is now extremely delayed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor

In early 2012, Rosatom's Science and Technology Council approved the construction of a BN-1200 reactor at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station. Technical design was scheduled for completion by 2013, and manufacture of equipment would start in 2014. Construction would begin in 2015 with first fuel loads in 2017 and full commercial operation as early as 2020.

...

In 2015, after several minor delays, problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign of the fuel was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold", and Rosenergoatom stated that no decision to continue would be made before 2019. In January 2022, Rosatom announced that a pilot BN-1200M would be built by 2035.

> But there's still no solution for safely storing or disposing of nuclear waste, so all those power plants currently have a stockpile of spent fuel rods, which is a huge risk imo

It isn't a huge risk. The really hot stuff decays quickly and that can happen next to the power plants no problem. What you end up left with is far less energetic and is self-contained – look up dry casks. You can stand next to them no problem and they are incredibly sturdy.

That's ignoring reprocessing. If it is radioactive enough to cause serious harm long term, it is radioactive enough to still use as fuel. There are reactor designs that can re-use them.

Honestly, I would rather have some dry casks stored at Yucca Mountain than breathing coal dust (that's often radioactive).

yep, I've been saying this for a couple decades

Greta is not pro-nukes. Most of the environment activists are not.

To the surprise of no one that has looked behind the curtain to see “the only solution” is always you need to pay us more taxes and keep us in power.

That comment is hilarious considering that nuclear has recent several multiples of the subsidies that renewables received and is still much more expensive. And we are not even counting the military (the nuclear industry would likely be in a much worse state if it wasn't for the militaries demand for nuclear engineers and scientists and financing much of the R&D).

Ok, so the argument is that we know we went nuts regulating it to oblivion, and this is a fault in the technology and not ourselves - then you go to admit that it is a massive tactical and technological advantage we need?

Ok, strange flex but this about what I have come to expect from this “debate”.

Nuclear is not so expensive because of regulation that's another myth. Considering the scale and possible impact wind and solar often have much more regulations (just look at Bavaria where the ruling party essentially blocked all new wind installations by creating requirements that reduced potential sites to nearly 0). A nuclear power plant is essentially a thermal plant plus the nuclear part so how would it be cheaper than a coal plant?

I'm not disputing your claims, but as a suggestion:

> A nuclear power plant is essentially a thermal plant plus the nuclear part so how would it be cheaper than a coal plant?

Fuel costs?

I was talking capital costs, not operational costs. My point is, to build a nuclear power plant you essentially need to build a thermal power plant first and then add things for the nuclear part (which is arguably more complicated/safety critical than for e.g. a coal plant).

So the whole argument for economics of scale doesn't work, thermal power plants have not reduced dramatically in price over the last decades despite lots of them being build. Half of your plant not really reducing much in price, will limit the benefits you can get even if the other half sees massive cost reductions.

> I was talking capital costs, not operational costs.

Ok, but surely the only cost that matters is the lifetime cost? (Including whatever cleanup is needed for both nuclear and whichever fossil and/or renewable+storage combination it is compared against).

> Half of your plant not really reducing much in price, will limit the benefits you can get even if the other half sees massive cost reductions.

Sure, absolutely. But coal is pretty expensive over the course of a year, so it can look like a good opportunity (if only for the reality hadn't turned out so fragile and, when it goes wrong, severe).

Nuclear is arguably only safe due to those regulations. The case of falsified certificates in Korea shows that you need plenty of margins to account for some of the regulations not being followed properly, even in a first world country.

Maybe there is 20% too many regulations. That could be the case. But having 20% too many regulations is far preferable than 20% too few.

Even if you are staunchly pro-nuclear you should want regulations that reduces the chance for even a minor accident to almost exactly 0%, because even a minor accident will cause fear that’ll set nuclear back by two decades. Maybe that fear is irrational. Tough luck. Humans are irrational. Most of them would rather be slowly poisoned by coal and die a couple years early, than living with the thought of maybe having to suddenly have to abandon their home and established life like in Fukushima.

> But having 20% too many regulations is far preferable than 20% too few.

The problem is when that extra 20% regulation makes the technology so expensive the world chooses to keep burning coal, oil and gas thus poisoning and killing millions through pollution and endangering life on the entire planet through Climate Change.

Right now nuclear is so frozen and so useful that I'd take the change of a (PR) disaster and (slowly, carefully, partially) deregulate: it can't get much worse than already is.

seems that wind isn't profitable without massive subsidies either

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/14/wind-farm-or...

Do you want to know a fun fact? Nuclear is even more sensitive to material prices, inflation and interest rates than off-shore wind.

If off-shore wind companies are struggling then nuclear projects are deep deep in the red.

Energy subsidizes in Europe looks different. Wind/Solar are the single biggest recipient of subsidies and receive about as much as the combined total of all other subsidies in the energy sector. They get far more per watt produced than anything else, mostly going to grid connections, building, deconstruction, and price guaranties. (The yearly report is produced and published by the European commission at ec.europa.eu)

Nuclear get subsidies in term of research, building, deconstruction, waste storage and price guaranties. Around 70% goes to the single fusion research project called ITER (international research, non-military).

Hydro receives an increasing amount of subsidies for repair and modernization. Dam repair and flooding protection is expensive and with climate change there is even bigger need for fixing Europe old hydro power dams. They are also in general non-compliant with the European environmental regulations (several species are going extinct), but that is not a subsidies issues directly. Fixing the dams so they allow for fish to pass is however a subsidies issue, but as far the budget to fix that has yet to be allocated and the costs are estimated to be exceedingly high.

And last we have fossil fuel subsidies. A large portion of the "reserve energy" plan in eu in order to address increased gird variability is based on keeping a large number of fossil fuel plants on stand-by, paid through subsidies. Then there is subsidies on extracting the fuel itself, subsidies on trading fuel, and subsidies on storage of the fuel, and transportation of the fuel. This is not accounting for the environmental cost from burning fossil fuels, which some see as a form of subsidies.

Subsidies-like part not included are insurance against nuclear accidents, insurance against floods from dam failures, and insurance against forest fires. It is also not accounting for land usage nor damage to wildlife.

> Energy subsidizes in Europe looks different. Wind/Solar are the single biggest recipient of subsidies and receive about as much as the combined total of all other subsidies in the energy sector. They get far more per watt produced than anything else, mostly going to grid connections, building, deconstruction, and price guaranties. (The yearly report is produced and published by the European commission at ec.europa.eu)

So we should cut off subsidies agreed on 10 years ago during renewables learning curve to make it even? The renewable subsidies for new builds today are miniscule in Europe, which is what we are making the decisions based on.

How many Hinkley Point Cs costing ~€0.15/kWh to the consumers, very similar to energy crisis prices, should we fund just so you can stop complaining about past history for renewables?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

There is no single solution to reduce the massive amount of energy subsidizes. We could however start to demand a bit more efficiency and targeted approach that more align with political will of the citizens that pays the taxes.

To put down to facts, Europe paid 172 billions in 2021 on energy subsidies. This is 54% increase since 2015. 76 billions went to renewables. Between 2019 and 2020 the amount going to renewables increased by 7%, while between 2020 and 2021 it decreased by 3%. The second largest recipient of subsidies was fossil fuel energy with 50 billions. Subsidies for nuclear has remain mostly stable since 2015, sitting at around 4 billions, but with Germany closing several plants last year it has now increased to 7 billions. (The report do not consider R&D to be subsidies, so ITER is not included).

We should not try to make things "even". We should cut fossil fuel subsidies and decommission the fossil fuel plants that operate as reserve energy. The cost of high variability in the grid should not be carried through tax money. Market forces can't be applied correctly when taxes are being funneled to fix a problem caused by using high variability energy production.

Subsidies to renewables are slowly being reduced. It is no longer a given that grid connections will be given out for free and paid by taxes. Both nuclear and renewables should also carry their own weight and not have price guaranties. Companies that need those should have the cost baked into the energy price.

A solution that is acknowledged by the European report but often overlooked is energy usage reduction and increased efficiencies.

The report for those wanted to read it: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

Do you have any idea by how much installed renewable capacity increased during the periods you mentioned? Hint, way, way more than the subsidies...

"Firmed" renewables are cheaper than nuclear today. [1] Any nuclear project started today will finish ~2040 and then not recoup the investment until ~2070. If nuclear is uncompetitive today, how do you think it will fare against 30 years of renewable development?

Lets also remove the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act [2] with equivalents across the world so the nuclear industry has to bear the true insurance cost.

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

> so the nuclear industry has to bear the true insurance cost

How expensive is a resounding "No" by insurers?

What exactly is made better by paying more to insurance cos? Beyond a point insurance is just a drain on productivity.

Nuclear accidents, flooding and forest fires are three areas where insurance do not cover the cost. Fossil fuel usage are also exempted from paying insurance regarding climate change and health costs associated with pollution. Wind power are mostly exempted from paying damages when hurting endangered wildlife.

I would not be completely against demanding that all commercial activity in the energy sector must cover every negative effect on society and the environment. It would in effect ban all fossil fuel, nuclear, and hydro. Would be a fair price to pay for getting rid of fossil fuels.

> Wind/Solar are the single biggest recipient of subsidies

According to the IEA: "EU electricity consumers are expected to save an estimated EUR 100 billion during 2021-2023 thanks to additional electricity generation from newly installed solar PV and wind capacity"

https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...

She said the Atomausstieg was a mistake: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Closing-nuclear-in-G...

Danish TV had a documentary about the nuclear opposition in the country in the 60s and 70s. One of the most interesting lines is pretty much a throwaway line by one of the former activists. The interviewer remarks that it's a little strange to be anti-nuclear, when the alternative is burning fossil fuel and the activist interjects with "But we didn't believe/understand that the alternative was coal and oil, we thought it would be solar and wind". That was never going to work, nuclear power was available as an option, wind turbines and solar cells where never going to be able to fulfill the energy requirement at the time, certainly not at a price the country could afford.

To me that really highlighted the naivety of many environmental activists. They mean well and we need them, but they so often fail to look at the problems holistically and zooms in on single issues.

That's very fair. I think it extends to people who care about energy in general though, not just environmentalists. For example on the Internet, there is always a highly vocal pro-nuclear camp to be found. Some of them -- but not all by all means -- will often claim that nuclear is the "One True Solution" to clean energy.

I think at the end of the day it comes down to tribalism, sadly. People choose their "side" and pitch in to defend its merits and attack the other "side"'s deficiencies. As with many things, there isn't a whole lot of room left for holistic approaches.

I'm personally not a huge fan of nuclear because I'm a pragmatist, and I think most people are pragmatists at the end of the day, being human. And pragmatists don't make good operators of nuclear power plants. But I definitely don't think any existing nuclear plants should be closed. They should be (safely) continued to run as long as possible to provide the clean energy we desperately need while other safer (and often cheaper) renewables+storages ramp up.

Keeping existing plants running is the sensible approach in my mind. We can't build new nuclear power to reduce CO2 emission, it's much to late for that. We want drastic reductions in 5 - 6 years, the first nuclear power plant won't be ready for another 10, 15, 20 years. If we wanted to go nuclear we should have started in 2000. Right now we start reducing consumption, build wind turbines like crazy and close the coal and oil fired power plants first, then gas and nuclear last.

Speak for your own country because others have built huge numbers of nuclear plants with an average of 4 years for completion. The anti-nuke sentiment from the environmental movement is the only reason the U.S. isn't entirely energy independent. That attitude has probably done more to contribute to climate change than anything else, ironically.

This might become a discussion about the definition of pragmatism, but I find the most pragmatic solution is to simply ban the use of fossil fuel in the energy grid. Remove the easy, cheap and extremely harmful substance, and people will be forced to find a working solution. If that happen to be nuclear then that is that. If that happen to be renewables + some yet to be developed technology to address grid variability, then lets do that. I have no horse in that race except that hydropower need to get their very old infrastructure fixed so that we don't make eels and other species extinct, and water constructions on the ocean need to be a bit careful around nature reserves and places like the baltic ocean. Ocean based wind farms like to build on shallows for economical reasons, and those places have a tendency to be nurseries for fish and other animals.

What I really can't stand is the use of fossil fuels in the grid when there is known and effective alternatives, and it gives a bad taste in the mouth that tax money intended for grid stability is used on fossil fuels.

> nuclear is the "One True Solution" to clean energy

Not to be that guy but it sort of is. Comparing nuclear power to renewables is a lot like comparing a truck to an electric scooter. Sure, both can transport you to your destination and both work equally well in many scenarios, maybe the scooter even has advantages in some places but when it comes to handling the entirety of possible scenarios the truck is the clear choice. That doesn't mean you can't have a truck and a scooter and use each where appropriate, it's just that you'll probably use the truck a lot more.

Countries like France went all-in on nuclear - didn't change much really. Theoretical nuclear is risk free and low carbon but actual nuclear (that was available in the 60s/70s) is neither.

Well, nuclear power is literally the reason why in this map: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map France is almost constantly green, while Germany, Poland, and most of the US, are just different shades of brown...

In France about 63% of the final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel.

A new nuclear reactor is being built since 2007, it should have launched a new set of reactors, and this WIP is a disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

> In France about 63% of the final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel

have you go a source for that? the parent comment seems to contradict that fact

Dude is bringing petrol and heating oil/gas into the discussion in addition to electricity - while ignoring that the EV transition is also greener for France than for the rest of Europe/US which runs their EVs with fossil-generated electricity.

Emissions are to be reduced. All of them, not only those related to gridpower generation.

To do so electrifying usages is key.

This in turn imply that more electricity has to be generated.

Each and every nation in the EU27 moves towards this, and France (while chanting 'my electricity is low-carbon, yay!' and neglecting that doesn't do anything about the remaining 63% of final energy consumed in France obtained by burning fossil fuels) is the red lantern: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/11/25/ren...

Final energy in France, by source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89nergie_en_France#%C3%89n...

And that 63% is far lower than any country/region at that latitude that doesn't have lucky geography for hydro power. And that 63% can be easily reduced in France by introducing heatpumps and EVs, but the same is not true in the UK/Germany/Poland without building metric arseloads of zero-carbon power plants.

> 63% is far lower

Nope. We have to take into account consumption-based CO₂ emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita?...

> that 63% can be easily reduced in France by introducing heatpumps and EVs

Nope, as it is only possible by generating more gridpower, and France tries to do so using nuclear since 2007... in vain as the sole and only nuclear reactor being built in France (which should have started a new batch in 2012) is the 'Flamanville-3' EPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

> the same is not true in the UK/Germany/Poland without building metric arseloads of zero-carbon power plants.

There is no 'zero-carbon plants', only 'low-carbon plants'.

They all do so, much more efficiently than France (where electricity is already low-carbon but where the plan to pump up more nuclear is stuck) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-low-car...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-renewables?...

> Greta is not pro-nukes. Most of the environment activists are not.

And we're reaping the "benefits" of the same people in the 70s campaigning against all forms of nuclear back then. So we built oil, gas, and coal power stations to meet our energy needs instead. slow applause for the activists

The road to hell and all that...

The biggest issue with nuke power is it takes forever to build and we just stopped for 30+ years in the US so we're behind the curve and it wouldn't come online fast enough to hit climate goals so we need to do other faster stuff and nukes to build a baseline power support.

we aren't going to meet "climate goals" anyway, lets opt for the sure thing. We should have done what France did, maybe even poached half their nuclear engineers.

Even if we aren't going all in on nuclear and not other renewable energy sources just means we'll blow past it. You can see this happening on the US right these days where there's some admission that something needs to change but it's pushed towards longer timeline changes like nuclear because it pushes out the date that existing interests like coal plants (and by extension coal mines, hello West Virginia) would be pushed out of the market.

I'd love to see tons more nuclear including fuel reprocessing which the US was very resistant to for a long time due I think to proliferation concerns.

Where are you going to get the uranium ore from to run this project? Where are the high-grade uranium ores that can be economically processed into the required ~200 tons of rods that each 1 GW nuclear power plant requires each year? Let's say we have 0.1% uranium ore, that means we need 1000 tons of ore for each ton of uranium. Huge energy costs, huge waste stream to get that one ton of uranium, by the way. And each 1 GW reactor needs 200 tons - per year. So that's 200,000 tons of ore per year.

Now, in comparison, a 1 GW coal-fired power plant needs to be fed with 3-4 million tons of coal per year (energy content of coal varies a bit, in relation to oxygen-based combustion at least).

And, a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year? (OK battery replacement is an issue... work it out yourself).

Pebble bed reactors are thing. Thorium reactors are a thing. The tech has improved even if the active reactors have not.

Tbf, I think the commenter was responding in the context of the 93 existing reactors previously mentioned.

The highest yield current mining and enriching processes beat that by about a factor of 10; there are a few sites globally that achieve that, Canada would be the most relevant.

Don't forget that only the high density fuel needs to be shipped long distance as well...

For a fully reliable 1gw of wind, that's something like 600 turbines (to simply), each turbine lasts about 20 years, and weighs about 200 tonnes. So about 5000 tonnes of finished wind turbine a year, with an equivalent waste stream.

It's funny you'd assume they haven't done simple math of where to get the fuel for billion dollar investments.

It's a bit disappointing how the solar/wind folks neglect to consider the fact that such a storage system does not exist. Before one goes to the "but muh batteries" rebuttal, it's a useful exercise to see how much Lithium would need to be mined to provide reliable baseload power.

Simon Michaux has already done this. It's worth a read through his reports [0].

Also, it's quite possible to reprocess spent fuel. France has been doing it for decades. [1] The price has not been enough to justify it, but eventually it will (or if other costs are imposed, like a tax on the mineral rights that would favor reprocessing fuel).

[0] https://www.simonmichaux.com/gtk-reports [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...

If you're not limited by the need to move around, then lithium doesn't make as much sense for power arbitrage technologies. There are literally dozens of such technologies capabale of storing intermittent solar/wind inputs in physical or chemical forms that can be pumped back out onto the grid as needed.

It's so ridiculous to think that human civilization would collapse just because we will eventually run out of stuff to dig out of the ground and burn, when the biosphere has been humming along on sunlight for about three billion years. Why is this so hard to explain to people?

I agree, but we also need a storage system that can move around, and the aggregate scale of that is inherently more than enough for grid storage. This is why I'm not going to rule out hydrogen despite it having not worked out even back during the 1973 OPEC fuel crisis when alternatives were desperately needed and nuclear power (which is useful for among other things electrolysis) was The Future.

(Also, on paper one doesn't need any grid storage, if only we could get governments to cope rates on a planetary grid. Texas doing it's own thing and Japan having two frequency zones shows how hard this would be in practice, but in principle it can work just fine).

How much energy does all of humanity use compared to the rest of the biosphere? Genuine question not intended to be leading, it's a very interesting point.

It doesn't matter, the energy provided by the sun is mind numbingly insane.

The total sunlight that hits the Earth in 2 minutes is more than whats needed to power the entire world for a year.

>Also, it's quite possible to reprocess spent fuel. France has been doing it for decades.

Wasn't that the SuperPhoenix and Astrid reactors? I thought both had been cancelled because of politics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superphénix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASTRID_(reactor)

Those are breeder reactors. In breeders, less fissile materials are transformed into more fissile ones. That's interesting technology and very nice on paper, but there are practical challenges.

Reprocessing is another thing entirely. It relies on the fact that used nuclear fuel is mainly not reusable due to accumulation of neutron poisons. In reprocessing, these poisons are removed so that the rest of the fuel can be reused. This too has many practical challenges as you end up with liquid radioactive materials and a lot of it is waste. So far it has proven more practical than breeders, though. Perhaps that is because the same processes can be used to extract materials for nuclear weapons.

Very informative, thank you. What about the MOX fuel they use, is this the product of that reprocessing technology?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel

Yes, I believe MOX is one option of what you can make from what's left from reprocessing. I think it's possible to make more conventional fuel there too, but then what are you going to do with the plutonium.

> "but muh batteries"

Thanks for arguing in such bad faith by default. But let's just say there are other ways of storing energy that don't need huge amounts of processed lithium.

Have you perhaps heard of "muh pumped hydro", "muh flow batteries", "muh hydrogen", and the myriad of other less mature storage technologies currently being developed?

When those solutions don't wreak environmental havoc (dams [0]) or are out of the experimental stage, I'll be interested. I'm actually following Ambri for this reason [1].

Even if you go with "muh flow batteries" or "muh hydrogen", we would require far more land with wind/solar to fill up those storage technologies than just use nuclear plants.

Even if I were to concede that covering every last surface with solar cells is a good idea (or what to do when recycling them), this doesn't take into account the enormous amount of energy currently used to make process heat. Neither wind nor solar are able to generate the hundreds of degrees necessary for so many chemical and manufacturing processes.

Don't let yourself get bamboozled by shiny futuristic graphics of storage or generation solutions without at least doing some basic napkin math about feasibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... [1] https://ambri.com/

Assuming you're asking a literal question and want an answer, the current global total of "reasonably assured resource" uranium (known, tested to a degree of certainty by sampling, modelled for economic recovery costs) that can be extracted at less than $130 US / kg usable uranium is 3.8 million tonnes, roughly 28% of which is in Australia, 10% in Canada, ~1% in the USofA, etc.

You can find a full table, distribution maps, guesstimates for known but as yet untested deposits, etc in the big Red Book of Uranium stuff (free to download):

https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28569/uranium-resources-pro...

> a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year?

Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20 - replacement | recovery is an ongoing process and that currently requires raw materials that come with a cost - including slave labour.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-f...

There are no magic problem free resources.

Monocrystalline silicon panels last >30 years at near-initial production unless subjected to physical damage.

Yes, investors in the uranium fuel rod production pipeline will feel a lot of pain as a result of what's going on right now, but it's not like they weren't warned. Like Theranos investors, they failed to do their due diligence.

[edit] Just to add, the metric you want is ENERGY not $US, because what really matters is the amount of energy you have to put into mining the ore, extracting the uranium from the ore, enriching the uranium-235 in the ore to the point where it's useful in a nuclear reactor, and then packaging that refined product into highly expensive fuel rods made of fairly expensive materials. By the time you do that energy calculation, per-year, for the reactor (on top of ridiculously high initial construction costs), the whole thing looks like a massive long-term liability.

Monocrystalline is the most expensive one to produce, the process of manufacturing monocrystalline solar cells is very energy-intensive and produces a big amount of silicon waste.

They're not especially robust in cold weather and while they do last longer, they do also degrade in output over time just as the poly versions do.

To maintain a 1 GW farm requires ongoing upkeep, etc.

Again, there are no magic problem free resources, just like low volume uranium mining, large volume mining and production processing to sustain solar power has toxic side effects and impacts people.

I think that the overall cost of producing 1 GW of monocrystalline solar PV (a technique China has apparently mastered) is very comparable to the cost of producing a single year's worth of enriched uranium fuel rods, at that's from comparing the costs of acquiring the raw materials, putting them through the requisite processing stages, and producing the finished product.

It's not even close, with some limited exceptions, like Finland and other Artic Circle zones.

> Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20

Oh come on. This is an absurd claim with no evidence. Don't be ridiculous.

In the case of GW scale solar farms that's essentially true.

Polycrystalline panels last 20 years, sometimes longer (the sales pitch is "up to 25 years") but the 20% fall off in deliverable power after 10 years is real.

Monocrystalline last longer, they also gradually fall off and they cost more.

Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs, where's the optimal sweet spot for buying new and rotating out on a schedule | reacting to failure.

I'm not opposed to solar, I'm in Australia in one of the states with large amounts of residential solar and heavy mining industries that dwarf anything in the US currently going electric - we're costing out massive farms to run solar power to asia via HVDC cable.

The supply side of all that is sourcing the copper, the lithium, the aluminium framing, the long list of other raw material inputs, the processing to get from concentrate ores to usable elements, etc.

> the 20% fall off in deliverable power after 10 years is real

If it's real, why don't you provide evidence?

It's a wildly exaggerated figure. Maxeon cells are rated for 0.25% degradation per year which works out to about 8% in 30 years. An inferior cell might be rated for 0.75% which works out to 20% in 30 years rather than 10 years. I believe a lot of the panels rated for 0.75% are seeing around half that actual rate of degradation.

Yup that's what I found with a cursory google, I kind of hoped OP would at least have the courage to post some reference even if it wasn't accurate, but no.

Unfortunately this is par for the course in discussions with nuclear power cultists. It honestly is that bad.

> If it's real, why don't you provide evidence?

Because I went to bed, it was late in my time zone.

> nuclear power cultists.

Say what now? Are you an idiot?

The vast bulk of PV performance studies are dominated by relatively short term studies in temperate climates - the latitudes of California and Germany eg:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf

references Australia and links to papers from Perth and Melbourne which are cooler climates.

See my comment above re: my region of interest - equatorial tropical regions with harhser temperature cycling and probable requirements for cooling to maximise returns (still part of an open study).

I'd be happy to provide more details but I'm afraid your comment above doesn't warrent engagement.

Calling someone a cultist because they went to bed and didn't reply in a timeframe you considered proper is not suitable discussion for HN.

> Polycrystalline panels last 20 years, sometimes longer (the sales pitch is "up to 25 years") but the 20% fal

Your numbers seem off by atleast a facotor of 2. Average degradation is .5% per year so panels are guarantees are usually that you'll have 90% capacity after 10 years and 80% after 20 years.

> Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs,

The failure mode for solar is unlike traditional spinning hard drives. There isn't a "data loss" downside to waiting to replace. There won't be any risk mitigation, just calculations of when the opportunity costs become high enough to warrant replacement. I suspect in areas with cheap land, it'll be easier to build additional capacity than to replace existing degraded panels.

As I mentioned in a peer comment I'm more interested in tropical | equatorial performance and the vast majority of PV performance studies are in temperate climates - it's not currently clear whether monocrsytalline deliver peak power in such climates .. quoting a study I have here:

     His work has shown that in this tropical climate, with high ambient temperatures and high humidity during the wet season, the a-Si array produces up to 20% more energy than ...

(It's an ongoing bit of work ATM)

The optimisation issues include other factors, the cost of panel cooling techniques Vs their benefits for one.

Your average degradation figures are the figures from big meta studies such as the US Dept of Energy NREL lab Photovoltaic Degradation Rates https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf which you'll notice is dominated by temperate climate studies at the latitudes of Perth | Melbourne | Germany | Arcata, California etc.

> As I mentioned in a peer comment I'm more interested in tropical | equatorial performance

Perhaps you should qualify your statements, because this:

> Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20

This is an unqualified factual statement and is simply not true.

> Your average degradation figures are the figures from big meta studies

The big meta studies do show that degradation is a bit faster in higher temp environments for some kinds of panels. There is however zero evidence that solar panels will be "door stops in 20".

> There is however zero evidence that solar panels will be "door stops in 20".

If you're building a large area solar farm to ship power to Singapore would you keep a panel after 20 years or door stop it?

What if the peak power output for particular climatic conditions comes from lesser used cheaper PV types that degrade faster than common ones at temperate latitudes?

The people studying this are coming at this with mindset of those that move 800 million tonne of iron ore per annum.

My original comment was framed to indicate the interest was hyper efficient at scale deployment in specific environments .. not running a beer fridge in Melbourne.

> My original comment was framed to indicate the interest was hyper efficient at scale deployment in specific environments

No, it wasn't. If that was your intent, you should go reread it to see why everyone else sees you making a clearly false claim that does not contribute to the discussion.

> If you're building a large area solar farm to ship power to Singapore would you keep a panel after 20 years or door stop it?

That's gonna depend on land value, non-panel infrastructure costs and replacement costs. If replacement costs are high then and land value and other infrastructure costs are low, then solar farms will be expanded and replacement will be delayed. If the opposite then you'll see existing panels replaced sooner.

I do expect that in a couple of decades we will see solar panel reconditioning and recycling becoming increasingly important.

PV panels are rather easy to recycle, or reuse.

Regarding slave labour, I might have bad news for you: Not a single product you use in your lofe is free of exploitation, child labor or slave labor. Not a single one, from the clothes you wear to the food you eat.

"Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20"

This wasn't true when I manufactured them almost a decade ago. We were offering 30 year warranties with only 15% drop after 30 years - polycrystalline 20% efficiency.

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