Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)
blog.rootsofprogress.org
blog.rootsofprogress.org
After all, to decarbonise the economy we need to replace petrol cars with EVs, and gas-fired central heating with heat pumps - which will mean a big increase in demand for electricity. A lot of that heat demand will be in winter, when solar output is at its lowest. And a lot of our existing power plants are past the end of their designed life.
The problem is we're trying to build one nuclear power plant, and it's going pretty badly.
It's an extra reactor on an existing site - that should make things easy, right? And it's being built by the French who operate loads of nuclear power plants - should be experienced specialists building a cookie-cutter replica of a proven design, right? And it's using private-sector finance with the government just guaranteeing an electricity purchase price - should remove the incentive for delays and cost over-runs that plague cost-plus contracts used in things like defence procurement, right?
But it turns out none of these tricks was able to overcome the curse of large infrastructure projects, and it's going to be delayed and expensive. And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling.
I can understand the argument for building fewer and larger nuclear power plants - you only have to get one set of locals to support you, do all the impact assessment paperwork once and so on - but I can't help but wonder what would have happened if we'd instead set out to build ten nuclear power plants, each one tenth the size, so there weren't so many things being done for the first time in a generation.
This is the #1 reason why I'm a bit more pessimistic on nuclear than I used to be.
I still think it has a place in a modern power grid and probably increasingly so as available sites for renewables go down. However, we simply aren't there yet. Both renewables and batteries have seen precipitous drops in pricing which ultimately means they make more sense as they are both cheaper and faster to deploy.
Look at what’s happened in Ukraine regarding the Zaporizhzhia power plant. The IAEA has been crapping itself the entire time while both Ukraine and Russia have haphazardly been shooting and bombing around it. If Russia were forced out of their position, they could adopt a scorched earth policy and destroy it, potentially irradiating the area.
Whether Russia would actually do that doesn't even matter - just being a possibility allows them to take the area hostage much more easily.
I am well aware that it would not detonate like a nuclear bomb or like Chernobyl. It doesn’t have to, it could still contaminate a huge area and harm a lot of people.
.. in Germany of all places
https://cyberconflicts.cyberpeaceinstitute.org/law-and-polic...
There isn't going to just be "a war" in Germany - there never was. A war in germany is a war with NATO, which is a nuclear war, and thus "what if the nuclear powerplant is hit" is rather mundane compared to "our cities and citizens have been incinerated".
Nuclear war is only one option of many, and the last one among all of them. It's a skewed perspective to think that NATO involvement would end up in a nuclear war.
Also, a nuclear war does not automatically mean the end of humankind, as some like to portray it. Most will still be alive, even lead a healthy, unaffected life. The negative effects of a broken internet and broken supply chains would be the bigger problems.
of course it would end up in a nuclear war. NATO is encircling Russia and if Russia feels cornered you should expect them to use anything available to them.
1 - Nato was formed as a defence block against the "second Russian Empire" i.e. the Soviet Union and is still around to counter the budding "third Russian Empire".
2 - even since being conquered by the Mongol Empire Russia has been paranoid about the possibility of some conquering entity crossing its long border to rush into its vast territory. They want mountain ranges, sea or some other barrier between them and that potential enemy. If none of the sort can be had they want a buffer zone - they call it neutral states but in reality they mean vassal states, e.g. Belarus - between them and "the others". Those vassal states were gathered into a "counter-NATO" in the form of the Warsaw Pact.
3 - after the dissolution of the "second Russian Empire" and with that of the Warsaw Pact the former vassal states, fed up with being subservient to their oppressive neighbour bully took their chances and ran with it by joining NATO.
4 - Meanwhile Russia depopulated, was taken over by a new (old) gang of kleptocrats under first Yeltsin, then Putin while "the West" was busily "spreading democracy" by bombing and invading countries which were deemed to be essential for their economies by virtue of them being rich in natural resources. Some people and companies got richer, many people died and democracy was far to be found. This provided the Russian kleptocrats with a credible excuse for creating a new version of the old "us versus them" narrative: NATO is just like the Mongol Empire out on conquering our land to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. The recent flurry of "gender" and "alfabet soup" propaganda pushed by the current US regime just adds fuel to this fire and has given Putin a plausible (if false) cover of being the one who "defends traditional Christian values", going so far as to offer "asylum" to those who want to "flee corrupted Western values" [1].
5 - This gives the kleptocrats in "the East" the excuse they needed to make a push for creating the "third Russian Empire" to keep out the "new Mongol Empire" while their counterparts in "the West" have all the excuse they need to expand NATO to keep the "Russian bear" at bay.
6 - rinse and repeat
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-russia-safe-haven-for-...
>Making your plans around existential crises happening to your nation is foolish
Foolish is not being prepared for the worst.
(I'm sure there are 500 reasons why that’s a bad idea)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant
If anything, Germany's reliance on Russian gas did a lot more to put the country in danger of war.
In certain geographic areas, it could be said that nuclear energy presupposes stable peace.-
A nuclear plant getting bombed would result in some nuclear contamination but not _that_ much, and accidental bombing of a nuclear power plant won't result in a mushroom cloud. Taking a nuclear plant out of commission with bombs is easy, re-creating Chernobyl is very hard even if you bomb it intentionally.
Nuclear plants are not weapons of war and they serve no military purpose. The press has written repeatedly -- completely without basis in reality -- about Russia going to turn Ukrainian nuclear power plants into bombs. Nuclear feels scary to people, and that's why those narratives gain traction.
Nuclear weapons are barely relevant to the conversation other than that they also use fissile material.
>accidental bombing of a nuclear power plant won't result in a mushroom cloud
Yes... as I stated.
>Nuclear plants are not weapons of war and they serve no military purpose
That's incorrect. Once again, the Zaporizhzhia NPP has played quite a large role in the war in that region. Whether Russia intends to do anything is irrelevant, the threat implicitly limits Ukraine's military response. The plant itself can, and has been used as a military outpost, shielded from intense bombing.
Not only all this, but the loss of the power plant to Russia meant Ukraine lost 20% of it's total electricity generation at all once[0]. From an energy security POV this is a disaster. This would not be possible with distributed wind turbines or solar arrays.
[0]: https://www.gem.wiki/Zaporizhzhia_nuclear_power_plant#Backgr...
Ukraine's military response is limited because the power plant is extremely valuable (monetarily as well as energy it produces) and they don't want to break it. But that's not what you argued.
I get the impression your argument changed from radiation risk to risk of electricity shortage. But if that is your concern you presumably would be fine with a country having many small nuclear reactors instead of a handful of large ones. But I suspect you'll change your argument again to make the case that small nuclear reactors are somehow bad, too.
thats not how nuclear power plants work. bombing them dont magically turn them into nuclear bombs or something.
The problem is fear. Fear generated by individual incidents that have terrible local harmful effects. And the (perhaps inaccurate) perception that plants may still have issues. Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem.
Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe.
When will we know that the new nuclear power plants are safe enough? Not for a decade or more.
Pretending that the industry isn't taking a rationale line based on the same tired stats about radiation is pointless. Humans are bad at judging risk, but your job as a power plant operator is to deal with the risk people perceive as well as the risk that actually exists.
(And the fact he links to LessWrong which is a site that overemphasises rational thinking to the extent it ignores the human condition says a lot to me).
Fro the record I am pro-hydroelectric, pro-nuclear and pro-wind (I am a bit more skeptical towards solar but that is probably just me being from Sweden where solar isn't really an option). None of these are perfect but nuclear is by far the safest. The issues with nuclear do not relate to safety.
To add, I agree about your point about hydro in general. It's a complicated comparison, though.
Why do you think it's "by far the safest"?
Is it more or less solved than the waste storage problem of fossil fuel generation?
I don't think it is unsolved, is it?
> Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe.
I don't think Fukushima made nuclear feel less safe. The terrible reporting and existing mindsets might have, but how could a single death when a tsunami hits a reactor make people feel unsafe in and of itself?
If they're lying/mistaken about stuff obvious to scientists half a globe away then who can you trust with nuclear?
edit to add some sources to back up this third hand anecdote:
https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/communicating-science/
> The government was telling us nothing. TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the plant] was telling us nothing. We had very little input from the scientific community in Japan. Here we are trying to figure this out, and we had first one, then two, then three explosions.”
Fackler had to talk with scientists overseas to learn that what he had witnessed were likely hydrogen explosions, which probably meant partial meltdowns of the affected reactors. “But when we reported this, we had so much criticism from the Japanese side for using the word ‘meltdown,’ ” he said.
There's not much that an individual can do to verify the safety of any given nuclear installation, however, and, bluntly, the global track record isn't great. Even countries with regulatory environments that we'd expect to be very effective have had INES 4+ incidents, and some of those could have been far worse were it not for pure luck. You could rightfully counter that any large civil engineering project relies on trust in a similar way, but a bridge collapse or even dam collapse, while horrifying, cannot conceivably render a large area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
I think the reason that regulations in nuclear power have become overly burdensome is ultimately an attempt to try to build trust and demonstrate to the public that the risks are being taken as seriously as possible, in an attempt to prove that a worst-case nuclear disaster will never happen. You could think of it as safety theatre or something, but were it not for these regulations, in a democratic country, the public would simply not allow NPPs to be built, and therefore complying with these regulations is just an inescapable cost of that form of power generation. Arguably we even give NPPs a pretty significant subsidy by limiting their total public liability.
This wasn't true in 2021 and has been getting less true over time.
Not one mention of Solar or Wind in the whole article.
Even though I believe that nuclear no longer has a role in energy (fuel sources, disposal, concentration of risk into few small units), the statement is still correct and it has another dimension:
There is a conflict between poverty, climate change, gravity of climate change harms and the speed at which we can reduce climate change impacts.
The problem is that there is a shrinking window to limit harm, and the harms will disproportionally affect poor nations which at the same time lack resources to mitigate. I'd definitely call that a gordian knot.
[1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
As the cost of solar plummeted and nuclear went up they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. For the last 5 years they've built several TW's of solar capacity and a similar amount of coal peaker plants to run when the sun isn't shining.
Now in 2024 they're starting to scale back coal and they're building massive batteries instead. IOW, batteries are now cheaper than coal to offset the intermittency of solar.
Also, the lithium shortage has come and gone already: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
Currently (June 2024) they're all the way down to:
China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years, far faster than for most other nations.
China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology.
China is leading in the development and launch of cost-competitive small modular reactors (SMRs).
From 2008 to 2023, China’s share of all nuclear patents increased from 1.3 percent to 13.4 percent, and the country leads in the number of nuclear fusion patent applications.
Which is quite the wind down from . . . ?
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Now they're aiming for 18% by 2060, by which time they will also be net zero carbon.
And the article is about nuclear energy and the premise of it being a flop and why that might be, based on a book about the topic. I don't think it has to mention solar and wind. Though I can see, as competing energy sources, why it would be useful to look at their impact on political momentum for nuclear, or how they reduce economic demand for the extra energy nuclear can supply.
Defining poverty as "wealth relative to the richest person on earth" or whatever you're doing here is unproductive crab-bucket envy, not a useful definition. If you're talking about wealth, all that matters is if the baseline is going up. If you're talking about status, be honest and say that explicitly instead of dressing it up as a wealth issue.
Housing costs often aren't included in popular measures of inflation. If you do use an inflation measure that includes housing and all other everyday expenditure, then I think it's a reasonable to argue the baseline going up is good enough.
And you're right - this is possibly the single biggest issue that's a downgrade for people vs their parents/grandparents, and it's a huge one. But the problem needs to be attributed correctly.
Seems to be mostly an American problem, like many others.
I agree it doesn't necessarily mean rents rises. You might actually expect higher price to earnings ratio with more wealthy people competing to buy assets (see also stocks).
But it will lead to the shrinking of the home-owning middle class.
That's not to say there isn't also a problem with lack of supply.
On a world-scale we've been reducing the overall number of people below the poverty line each decade, however there is a discussion to be had around inflation and whether the poverty line itself needs to move (there a re lots of poverty lines used in analysis, I'm not referring to any single definition).
And I'm not talking specifically about wealth. Wealth is fine in a vacuum. Looking at excessive wealth and means to recirculating it can be helpful when addressing the issues the poorest people in society are facing.
And I'm not talking about status, no idea how you got that impression. I'm re-reading my comment and trying to figure out where you got that fantasy from.
As in, how can someone be both getting poorer but also enjoying increasing access to resources? Buying power is a pretty good measure here unless I've missed something?
(I'm talking about this in a global context where we can assume asset wealth is pretty much negligible, i.e. it's not a case of people burning through savings to access resources)
For a poverty line definition then, as I mentioned, we can observe fewer people being below the poverty line as time goes on, but we're ignoring inflation and buying power. Fewer people being under the $1/day poverty line is great, unless essential purchases have doubled in price.
What we've seen in recent decades has been a mix of inflation and basic resources becoming more assessible/cheaper. So when I say people are getting poorer, I'm saying poverty lines ignore this the access angle unless they adjust for inflation, but then also counter to that some essentials have become more accessible, like access to medicine, education and energy. So whilst buying power may get worse for some, they're 'wealthier' in terms of things that they have increased cost-free/low-cost access to.
There have been attempts to use definitions that do adjust for access but they're a lot more difficult to normalise across countries. Something like the Big Mac Index is a quick and dirty tool but obviously it focusses on a single item in a single category (food) so it can't provide a very detailed picture of access to resources, buying power, and poverty on the whole.
If your income is below 60% of median, you're in poverty per the government's definition.
Russia have been quietly lobbying against nuclear in the EU for a long time (looking at you german Green Party).
And, given this, they might even have a perverse incentive to destroy nuclear facilities, if only as yet another form of pro-oil, pro-gas propaganda.-
1. “we need more like 25 TW”. That seems too high to me. Is that based on a direct conversion of the primary energy consumption today? The alternatives solutions needed for decarbonisation is generally much more energy efficient than the fossil fuel based solutions we use today. In addition, the energy used per capita to live a European lifestyle is decreasing year over year. And finally, the energy use will drop dramatically as we shift from primarily making stuff out of mined virgin materials to using recycled materials. For instance, commercial EV battery recycling is ramping up rapidly already today. Making virgin concrete is energy and CO2 intensive but that might not be a viable option for the long term anyway, as it requires sand that we’re also running out of. There’s already huge pressure to reduce the use of concrete.
It should also be said that 25TW or more of nuclear thermal power will contribute to thermal forcing of the planet that we probably can’t afford when the planet is already on the precipice of dangerous climate tipping points. The global warming effect of the thermal power plants we have today is already on the same order of magnitude as greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes.
2. I miss a discussion about the labour costs when it comes to nuclear. I think one of the reasons it was cheap to build in the past was access to cheap labour in the countries building the nuclear power plants. Changing demographics is an irreversible trend that will keep these labour costs high. Solar lets you outsource much of the labour costs of the production of the panels, and that production will probably end up being fully automated and then on-shored in the end anyway.
I realise GHG from their waste gases is a huge problem, but direct thermal forcing?
And people could trivially disprove the notion in mere seconds by Googling the solar irradiance of the sun over the Earth, but for some reason they never do before posting.
Solar insolation is about 120 000 TW or something like that I think.
Regardless, these other countries didn't contribute that much to increase global nuclear power capacity. In both India and China nuclear doesn't even count as the majority in their low-carbon energy mix, which is still dwarfed by the massive deployment of coal. S. Korea is slacking on low-carbon sources in general. Japan has lost trust (rightfully) on nuclear and decided to reset their entire nuclear generation capacity. No country has expanded their energy grid with nuclear. Except France, who only did it because of the oil crisis.
bullshit. Japan is in the process of restarting all of their nuclear plants. Price of energy had doubled after the grid went off nuclear.
> Japan is in the process of restarting all of their nuclear plants.
They are still "in the process" after 12 years, and their capacity is still less than half of pre-Fukushima level. Japan has had more solar generation than nuclear since 2014.
That's factually wrong. France has a program of nuclear building. We don't build a lot of plants in Europe, but we do.
Even in France the trend visible in other European countries will happen: Wind, solar combined with large-scale batteries or pumped storage hydropower. Those are more simple to construct with less resistance from today's public.
It is clear after three EPR projects have massively overrun in a row that Areva/EDF can't do it, and when faced by paying a foreign company to do it they will choose solar and wind instead.
About the trains too...
Today: when a single nuclear powerplant is estimated at 20 billion you calculate how many windmills you can build for that money. Ironically wind power is now the proven technology.
Or in short: if you don't understand the goals you must navigate towards, it doesn't matter how much of the technical implementation you know.
"How Big Things Get Done" by Flyvbjerg and Gardner zooms out a bit (well, a lot) and draws a relatively clear picture of what approximate shape the solution space has for nuclear. Yes, the book gives a high level perspective. And yes, transforming the industry so it can fit within the constraints outlined in the book will be expensive and time-consuming. But it is worthy of serious consideration.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-...
I tend to point out that the country where I live is uniquely suited to design and build reactors precisely because we don't have a nuclear industry. (We had a research reactor, but that's an entirely different matter and you would NOT want to involve the cowboys who ran that)
Then there's the unforgiving accidents.
Fukushima proved that the nuclear industry in fact isn’t designing reactors safe ENOUGH and that Mother Nature is very difficult to predict. Everything needs redundancies and even higher levels of safety as a nuclear “incident” large enough could destroy humanity.
I disagree strongly on this.
I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that I would be willing to trade of <some> risk of mortality in exchange for keeping and staying at my home (especially older people!).
If you displace over 100000 people you need a good justification-- if you lack observable excess mortality from radiation in the non-evacuated population, you clearly, objectively overevacuated in my view.
I do agree with the article that current regulation tends to focus too much on mitigating irrelevant/marginal risks (driving up costs too much), but I think this can still be true even though the resulting cumulative risk is too high: "Overregulation" is NOT a one-dimensional quantity.