Why build nuclear when solar and wind is cheaper and at worst the turbine catches on fire? There’s no waste to worry about for thousands of years. Did I mention it’s cheaper?
Costs are lower in the long run, especially when considering lower system costs - the power grid has to be much more capable and more complex with variable generation from solar and wind, plus these energy sources always need a stable backup (like nuclear)
> There’s no waste to worry about for thousands of years.
The waste from solar and wind never decays. It is permanent. That is worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
What waste from solar and wind is not recyclable?
Solar, wind, batteries etc are growing but as yet are only a small percentage of the energy produced by coal - as coal is phased out and replaced the waste from renewables will grow.
To be absolutely clear, I am not anti renewable energy .. but there are some serious waste issues associated with all forms of rare earth and other concentrate pocessing. Pretending there isn't would be just head in the sand greenwashing of recycling issues.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) did a 100 page report 8 years ago on the need to harvest solar panels to recover materials to form a closed cycle. To date we're still dominated by end-of-life e-waste going to landfill to be recoved "later".
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
That's one form of waste. The associated and often overlooked other form of waste is the byproducts from first creation, the processing of mined concentrates into useful materials comes with a slew of nasty by products that have yet to be comprehensibly dealt with.
These are material forms of renewable debt.
> Of the top of my head, cadmium and lead,
Lead isn't recyclable?
Mining waste from copper, rare earth concentrates, minesite rehabilitation, safe tailing dams, etc are all things that in theory can be dealt with.
It's not Mission Accomplished!! until they are actually dealt with though .. until then it's just toxic lead free to leach into water.
This is 1 lead mining region. This report would be enough to shut down uranium mining across an entire country if it was doing an equivalent amount of damage. And that is just the mining, not the dumping, where there will be further damage done.
But fortunately the damage lead does is done by chemical reactions rather than radiation so it is cool and we can handle it rationally.
People are crazy if they think any industrial process can be run without damaging the environment. The nuclear production chain may literally be the only place where we try.
I’m not so sure I buy this argument. Nuclear waste is effectively permanent as it needs to be safely stored in large containers for as long as civilization has existed.
Solar panels are made of what? Silicon and aluminum mostly? The aluminum can be recycled. I wonder if old silicon can be reused somehow. We will certainly find out.
And with nuclear a risk of cancer sees people believing that this stuff needs to be locked in containers for all of time while with solar panels if a few people get silicosis over that time frame you're going to do the rational thing, shrug and say "oh well". Over all of human history, the risk of solar panel waste killing a bunch of people indirectly is basically a certainty. It is a big world and, I repeat, this waste is with us forever. Or if we admit that it will be recycled as an argument ... so will the nuclear waste, in all likelihood. The stuff is an energy source. It'll be like when they figured out that oil was good for fuel back when it used to be a toxic waste product.
We don't need to isolate nuclear waste forever. We can cordon off a dump somewhere for the nasty stuff and make plans to deal with it for 300 years. Then move on with life. Odds are good it will be feedstock for a nuclear plant at some point in that timeframe.
To be clear, I don't mind that we're ignoring the negligible costs in solar. But they aren't a problem in nuclear either. If we agree to ignore negligible risks (like we do for literally every other industrial process), all of these objections start looking a bit silly. The opponents of nuclear are correct that the risks can't be reduced from where they are, but the risks are already lower than comparable sources of energy.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-solar-...
No it would be much more expensive. Chernobyl and Fukushima are estimated to cost over 1000 billion usd each, and your suggestion would cause similar accidents every 4-6 years.
I'm not entirely happy with the premise that nobody has learned anything about plant design since 1970 when Fukushima & friends were designed. And it seems quite likely that this 1 trillion figure is not actually an amount of money that got spent. But what I'd really like to know is what exactly were the consequences if we just ignored the situation? Because with coal we more or less ignored the pollution from 1800 -> 2023 and that turned out well [0] for everyone involved for centuries. Is this money actually worth spending? What is it buying? The nuclear debate seems to be largely detached from what actually happens as routine. Lots of people just don't exercise and that is bad for all sorts of health outcomes - there is a level of risk that people ignore in favour of more comfort.
These arguments are like 1800s peasants deciding to kill off the industrial revolution because they were worried about global warming. I don't think people are looking at the multiple orders of magnitude improvement in fuel energy density and thinking logically about what the upside is. It might be high enough that a trillion every couple of years is chump change.
And, when I hear "trillion", we note that the US wasted that much in Afghanistan. It isn't like these sums are prohibitive - Japan is slowly restarting their nuclear programs as they work out that energy is required to live a comfortable life.
[0] Like, really well. As in, any attempt to deal with the pollution would have left the whole world a lot worse off. Our entire lifestyle in the present is built on the back of infrastructure built while ignoring pollution in the industrial revolution and follow up era.
Here is just one of many actually documented stories about nuclear contamination, none of them are particularly funny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
>I'm not entirely happy with the premise that nobody has learned anything about plant design since 1970
The problem isn't plant design. The problem is that the fuel and waste from any nuclear plant is very dangerous and humans are often very sloppy, ignorant and greedy. This problem remains even if a plant would be entirely fault tolerant.
>But what I'd really like to know is what exactly were the consequences if we just ignored the situation?
If we ignored Chernobyl and nobody sacrificed their lives to stop the fire, my understanding is that it would still be burning and Europe would be mostly a uninhabitable hellhole today, with millions dead, immense numbers of birth defects and and a large percentage of the population would get cancers before age 30.
Since it was stopped relatively quickly we have only had to deal with sanitation for 40+ years, in areas as remote as Lapland and Bavaria. If the fallout areas were untreated, food from those areas would be classified as carcinogenic for decades.
Some might think that Wyoming is far away, but a Chernobyl accident in Wyoming could devastate agriculture in Kansas, California, Canada - this can't be ignored.
Surely it would be better for Wyoming to build hydrogen plants, photovoltaic panels and such. It will deliver as stable energy as nuclear but cheaper and with comparably no risk.
You've linked one of worlds worst nuclear disasters there. Nothing to do with nuclear power though, and it certainly didn't cause anywhere near a trillion dollars in damage.
> The problem is that the fuel and waste from any nuclear plant is very dangerous
It isn't that dangerous. We've been at this for 50 years. If anything interesting had happened regarding waste we'd have the regressives up in arms about it and never hear the end of it. I'm not saying no risk, but I am saying negligible. Plenty of nasty stuff out there, and one more heap doesn't need serious attention.
> If we ignored Chernobyl ...
(1) Ok, so put the fire out. That isn't a half-trillion dollars in costs though. Where is this trillion dollars coming from, and what is it protecting against?
(2) Everything causes cancer. Including, famously, a suit to have Starbucks coffee in California labelled as carcinogenic [0]. And coal dust causes cancer, which we've put up with for literal centuries. What are the actual risks are here? Carcinogens aren't a rare thing, a lot of people already die of cancer, because we're surrounded by them. A few more in exchange for the sort of upside nuclear promises is, observing the actual state of things, a good trade. So what are the real numbers you're talking?
At any time from 1970 to today, reducing standards to allow more nuclear development would cause a net reduction in carcinogens because coal dust is deadly. Probably nat gas too.
(3) Nobody is building plants like Chernobyl in this century. That design was from last century.
(4) Bonus points, where are you getting this from? Because a lot of the scary post-Chernobyl modelling was done on a Linear-No-Threshold model that is a good case study in people applying excessive safety to nuclear, assuming that it is much more hazardous than we have any evidence for.
> It will deliver as stable energy as nuclear but cheaper and with comparably no risk.
Nuclear would be cheaper if it was held to sane safety standards that are comparable to what we're putting up with literally right now. I've lived next to coal plants. That is worse for my health than if I had been living in Fukushima when the plant melted down. Nobody in my town was particularly worried about the risk though because that would be remarkably stupid.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/heres-why-everything-gives-you-canc...
Not at all, it was a mere 93 grams of misplaced material and just one of many many examples of this happening all over the world. The US generates 20 000 000 times as much high level waste every year, and luckily they spend the money required to keep it safe and not end up in the wrong places.
>It isn't that dangerous.
Think about it for a second - a nuclear fire during a few weeks in Ukraine has caused reindeer over 1000 miles away to be deemed unsuitable for human consumption for over 35 years. It really is mindboggling how far-reaching in both time and space that accident has been, and it wasn't even a worst-case scenario!
Ignoring the facts and just stating out of the blue that "It's not that dangerous" might be a good coping mechanism but it's not factual.
So, it's dangerous - and the danger should be weighed against the benefits compared to the options.
As of at least now in 2024 we get cheaper electricity from solar panels even after converting solar electricity to hydrogen gas and back to electricity. So nuclear is not cost-competitive even when we ignore the trillion dollar risks it carries (No estimates for the cost of nuclear includes the cost of a disaster, governments take that risk from the operators).
As we have seen the past few years in Europe it's also not very reliable. Plants in France, Finland and Sweden have gone offline several times during the year, taking with them a large percentage of the total electricity production of the countries they are in. Nuclear means many eggs in each basket so to speak.
Why should we aim to build electricity sources that are expensive and vulnerable in addition to carrying a proven risk to food production for decades in a 1000 mile radius, when we already have cheaper options in the form of renewables and storage?
If nuclear was 1/10th the cost of the safer options, I could see a point in debating the risks. But when it is actually MORE expensive? It makes absolutely no sense IMO.
It's not a debate about coal vs nuclear. Nuclear is better than coal, but worse than renewables.
Nuclear is uncompetitive but still in the conversation at the current absurdist standard. It'd be an easy winner on a realistic standard. The harm of nuclear and solar is similar (on average, about 0) but nuclear can deliver a lot more bang for buck.
There is a two pronged argument against nuclear, one prong the somewhat ignorant argument that the risk is excessive and the other argument that it costs too much. If we use evidence and handle the risk to a sane standard, it is reasonable to expect it'll be dirt cheap and the other argument falls away.
People say solar is cheaper but they seem to by lying. All the places that have heavily invested in solar have gut-wrenchingly high electricity prices. If nuclear was given a fair shot it's got a great chance of winning the fight for the power source with the best cost-benifit ratio.
You believe that nuclear is paying too much, but the truth is that it's paying too little. In France, the US and Sweden the money set aside to handle waste and decommissioning or restitution of old plants is underfinanced by as much as 50%, meaning half the money is missing.
In all countries operating nuclear power, there is a growing hidden debt. France recently paid over 50 billion euros on their debt when they nationalized EDF, but it's not enough.
These costs, and a myriad of other costs, are never included in estimates for nuclear power, because it's regulated in the contract for the operator that they don't have to pay it. Taxpayers pay it.
So when you are looking at the cost of nuclear power, you are often looking at the contracted price that the operator is liable for, but not the true, full cost of actually operating nuclear power.
Recently this arrangement has been reconsidered in many countries, so when you look at any estimates of what new nuclear will cost it has almost doubled in the past few years. This is entirely because a little bit more of the actual cost of nuclear has to be paid by the operators instead of the governments.
>People say solar is cheaper but they seem to by lying.
IEA has recently stated that Solar is the cheapest electricity ever: https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...
Here is a list of solar plants selling power for as little as 1 cent per kwh, 2 cents being common:
https://commercialsolarguy.com/lowest-solar-power-prices-in-...
So, no lies here.
One thing that needs to be kept in mind is that solar has fallen in price so fast that if you are looking at data from 5-6 years ago you're looking at bad data.
Also worth noting is that the average price of electricity in Germany, who has invested heavily in Solar, was lower than in France for all of 2023. Do you have an example of a place with lots of solar that has high electricity prices?
That seems like somewhat absurd speculation. Both of those events made future incidents significantly less likely. Also Chernobyl was totally avoidable and only happened because of extreme incompetence prevalent in the USSR.
A speculation for sure but I think it's realistic given the premise. Same safety standards as the Boeing 737 Max for nuclear power plants, same standards as coal power for storing the waste? If anything my speculation is optimistic!
Not really though.