Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power
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The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle.
It also provides the argument that wanting to bury reactors 1 mile deep shows how incredibly dangerous nuclear power really is.
My guess is we'll need to see newer safer designs before public options shift.
Nuclear and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands. They are fundamentally incompatible.
For every passing year more existing reactors will spend more time turned off because the power they produce is too expensive.
Let alone insanely expensive new builds.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-...
Batteries are here now, and delivering nuclear scale energy day in and day out in California.
No one will want anything from your desalination plant in Norway, and shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive.
The next problem is energy cost vs. duty cycle. The less you run due to only utilizing cheap prices the higher the impact of fixed costs on your business.
Except for a significant portion of the GDP of Fiji
There is a very small amount of people working on low-capital industries (normally with higher operational costs), and they seem to be close to some gain here or there. But almost all of our knowledge is biased against turning things off.
that's the bit I don't quite understand - yes, in a simple economic model where you want the numbers to go brrr, it makes sense, but is there a physical limit? could a country decide to own the big facility and use the excess electricity and sell the results to commercial ventures? the government can afford to have a piece of land taken that doesn't return a profit 100% of the time?
Additionally, California is ideal for solar panels, but I assume you haven’t put even an ounce of thought into how New York or Chicago will handle it, have you?
This will reduce the effective load factor of nuclear power and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with a strong feedback.
It gets worse because, on the technical level and despite some progress, nuclear power cannot (due to technical limitation and for safety-related reasons) adjust its production ("load following") to always exactly match demand.
This will promote the deployment of an RE system based on a continental a mix (wind, solar, etc.), smart grid, clean backup (green hydrogen), storage, etc. which will reduce the variability of its production (intermittency effect) so nuclear power will be less and less useful and more and more expensive.
The effect on nuclear is easy to predict.
> That’s why you have a blend of renewables. Yes, we then have to build wind turbines, plenty of under-utilised transmission (because wind is in the wrong place), methane CCGT/OCGT backup (and they need to receive capacity payments to keep them in business) and perhaps eventually electrolysers to convert excess electricity to H2 (which then have to operate at low utilisation). The overall system seems quite complicated and more complex than the first step of deploying cheap solar panels so save a bit of methane.
I believe both have their uses, but I don't buy they go together well.
For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.
It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.
Fentanyl is a prime example. I believe (from memory) over 100,000 people die of it each year in the in the US. Everyone knows it's a problem. We should "do something". But, we don't. Nobody cares enough (except as a platitude come election time). However if 1000 people died in a bomb attack (or similar) it would be top news for weeks and they would be scrambling the military and make us take our wedding rings off for scanning at airports.
If 10% of people who died in auto accidents each year were to perish in one horrible spectacular event it probably would be "transformative" as far as public policy.
(Never mind that cracking down actually increases the death rate. And the fentanyl problem came about because of cracking down on heroin. Fentanyl is far cheaper to make and far easier to smuggle due to being much smaller. But it has a tendency to clump and thus when handled by street dealers they can't produce a uniform product.)
How much expense is justified for each life (or year of life) saved from radiation exposure by scraping up the soil and bagging it? Can we justify the evacuation of elderly from close to Fukushima on the grounds that in 20 years time they will have an elevated risk of cancer? How is that balanced with deaths caused by the process of relocation? What about the human cost of an energy shortage caused by shutting down the nuclear power stations in Japan?
The same goes for chemical cleanup (heavy metal poisoning, pesticides, dioxins, PFAs, fly-ash, asbestos).
To make the cleanup decisions we need some notion of tradeoff between cost and benefit. Otherwise we'll end up in a situation where an indeterminate amount of money can be spent on something with no benefit (other than achieving something a politician willed to happen).
Even our legal systems address singular events better than low level harms because it's harder to deflect blame because the damages are so immediately identifiable; Fukushima and Chernobyl destroyed their closest cities and areas overnight in ways that they'll likely never recover from and the effects of their poisons are rapidly identifiable.
A gun is dangerous even if it hasn't killed anyone yet. We know that if you point the gun at someone and pull the trigger they die, hence it is considered dangerous. We knew this even before the first gun killed the first human.
Similarly, we know that nuclear power plants can cause immense disasters in a worst case scenario, even though it hasn't happened yet.
It's the worst case for a runaway reactor. Did it cross the prompt critical line or not--I don't think this will ever be resolved but it doesn't matter. We saw what happens--power level through the roof, destroys the reactor, other than the radioactivity it didn't do much.
It's also the worst case for a China Syndrome. Nothing happened, as a lot of the more sane people thought would be the case. The molten reactor core burned through the reactor floor but was no longer in an ideal configuration and thus no longer critical. (And it could not be critical as the moderators were destroyed, which would inherently take it subcritical.) Note that this is inevitable--the margin between critical (below which you don't get the heat to burn into the ground) and prompt critical (where it destroys itself and thus ceases melting) is very narrow.
It's also the worst case for a radioactive spill. No containment dome, fire in the reactor contents. The supposed thousands of radiation deaths simply did not show up. We have about 90 that are clearly caused by the accident. We have a huge variation in the estimated numbers since then, the first that looks reasonable is the UN estimate of 4,000--to a large degree in the people Russia sent in to deal with the situation without proper safety equipment. For comparison the largest coal disaster was 1,500 dead--and I doubt you've ever heard of it.
>It's the worst case for a runaway reactor.
No it was not. The worst case would have been that anyone involved with Chernobyl ran for their lives and abandoned the plant leaving it to burn to the ground, no sarcophagus was built, nobody spent billions on treating farmland all over europe, nobody destroyed animals unsuitable for human consumption for decades and nobody started screening for the excess cancer cases (which occurred everywhere in europe as well as behind the iron curtain) leaving them untreated until too late.
None of that happened, luckily, but it could. Instead people gave their lives at the scene and others have worked their entire careers since to prevent Chernobyl from actually becoming a "worst case scenario".
It is also a mistake to think that Chernobyl is a disaster in the past, it is not over yet. The latest sarcophagus was built not even a decade ago at a cost of over 2 billion USD. Why do you suppose that was deemed necessary?
Also, it is currently in a warzone.
You are right though that you will never win the safety argument. Nuclear has become entrenched in our culture as a world ending bugbear. Meanwhile the actual possibility of world ending climate change is just scooting along while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines.
You still need some level of containment along with environmental studies and the additional complexity of excavating a large underground cavern. Even then, someone will be concerned (possibly rightfully so) about groundwater contamination. Fracking is a prime example of how connected that all can be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text....
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump...
These are all issues for fossil fuel extraction as well, and I have bad news for you about how this problem is currently handled.
Containment and disposal is largely a red herring. It's actually more or less a solved problem, from a safety perspective, because it turns out that the laws of exponential decay mean that you can just store it with proper shielding and it's safe for storage pretty much anywhere. I'm oversimplfying, but only a little bit - the public's perception of "nuclear waste" is extremely untethered to the actual reality.
The whole fiasco with Yucca Mountain was driven not by science, but by a desire to appease objectors by adhering to an arbitrary and unscientific perception of safety, not an actual assessment of the risks.
> while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines
Where are you seeing this? Nuclear energy has lost a lot of energy for active support, but active protest ("picket") of nuclear facilities is exceedingly rare these days. Wind turbines are a different matter: they're sustainable, but they're opposed by monied individuals/groups who don't want their beachfront views "ruined".
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump...
A leak or accident in one of these deep-buried reactors could contaminate vast underground water reserves, rendering them unusable for generations. The environmental and human cost would be catastrophic and irreversible.
This should never be attempted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal#:~:text....
We know how to design safe nuclear reactors. We just can't build them cost-effectively, because there is always some subsubsubsubcontractor that doesn't bother doing things by the book. Then an inspector notices that something is wrong and orders it dismantled and rebuilt. And this will be iterated until everyone manages to do the right thing at the same time.
It’s a space where you can’t cut corners.
Which is all to say -- it is not clearly and obviously correct to say that nuclear generation is cost prohibitive, and repeating it as if it were is a signal of bad faith.
(I still think it won't compete with solar+batteries. It still needs valves, turbines, and moving generators. Those things used to be considered cheap, but are becoming incapable of competing nowadays.)
- major accidents will be very rare (if any),
- industrial breeding will become possible (in order not to be dependent on uranium reserves or suppliers),
- nuclear power was the only option (at the time there were no industrial way to exploit renewable energy)
- terrorists, war and suicidal operators were not factors,
- dumping nuclear waste in various places (even in the sea) is adequate
All this is now way more difficult to believe.
You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that.
Meanwhile fossil fuels have killed tens of millions of people, billions of animals, and changed the climate. All directly or indirectly.
Somehow, it's a version of the quote "Kill one man, and you're a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you're a conqueror", a few deaths due to Chernobyl, and people are focused on it.
But those dead miners? Or those old people with lung disease? Or those thousands of miles of bleached, dead coral?
Where's the outrage for that?
Why are we still building coal plants then?
Another way to put it: if the worst case happens, and a dam breaks and floods a large area, you can immediately go there and walk all over the damaged area with little more protection than a pair of sturdy boots. The worst you'd find would be things like transformer oil and some generator lubricants.
I would urge you to look at https://xkcd.com/radiation/ and compare the lines:
Living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant for a year (0.09 µSv)
Living within 50 miles of a coal power plant for a year (0.3 µSv)
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... (which concludes with "Thus, Malaysia needs to consider the possible future study of radiological impact from airborne routine discharges of coal-fired power plant.")
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698... - "Detailed studies on naturally occuring radionuclide emissions due to a 2420 MW coal-fired power plant in Malaysia."
---
I'm personally much less worried about the radioactive materials from a uranium nuclear power plant than I am from coal or bad decisions on how to dispose of radioactive waste products.
We'd likely lower our radioactive footprint by completely switching from coal power to uranium.
A nuclear plant that emitted like a coal plant would be shut down pronto.
And consider the Palo Verde nuclear plant. They had to get an NRC exemption on radioactivity of their discharge water. They had a little problem: their intake water didn't meet the discharge water requirements. They're using reclaimed sewage water--and getting the radioactivity that goes down the toilet from nuclear medicine patients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
List: the low amount of victims (given the amount of existing dams and electricity produced/stored) and the causes (many acts of war) seem enlightening to me. Moreover this list is laughable: Malpasset, for example, was not a hydroelectric station.
California is building batteries at neck breaking speeds:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...
10 GWh of storage is peanuts. That's what one nuclear plant produces in about 5 hours. The USA uses 500 GWh of electricity per hour.
We just need to spend on the most economic places to save CO2.
- Every EV purchased can be part of the solution by supporting vehicle to grid charging.
- Annual production capacity can increase. IEA estimates 6,000 GWh per year will be manufactured in 2030. I am sure it will grow further.
- We need way less than 60,000 GWh to provide batteries for an average day, because solar, wind, hydro are covering part of this.
Wind is subject to intermittency, too. It's not a magic bullet that eliminates storage. Unless you're overprovisioning wind by a factor of 10 (in which case it's not cheap anymore), you'll still have weeks-long stretches where there is insufficient energy.
Hydro is really the only non-intermittent carbon-free energy source besides geothermal and nuclear power. The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap in the context of a non-intermittent source that can fill in for the intermittency of renewable production. Running a minority of your grid on solar and wind, supplementing gas plants is one thing. Running a grid mostly wind and solar is totally different beast.
This will push down CO2 emittance. That all that matters really (at reasonable cost).
Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours.
Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.
It just requires some money. If you research it, it is surprisingly little in relation to global annual GDP (at least less than I was expecting).
And what, exactly, is that speed? The US plans to deploy "15GW" (presumably the authors mean GWh of storage, GW is not a unit of storage) of grid storage in 2024. That's less than 2 minutes of storage!
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202#:~:tex....
Again, global battery production is only about 6-700 GWh (be careful with figures that cite capacity, which is distinct from actual production). And very little of that is dedicated to grid storage.
So 16 GW battery allow you to power the US similarly to 3x times the power of the largest US nuclear reactor for probably 3 hours.
If such projects are economically feasible now, the economics are just getting better and better and this means we will see exponential growth. California is seeing improved grid stability and reduction in CO2 emissions due to batteries today.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte...
Since 2020, battery prices have gone flat. Moore's law works because computers get faster as transistors get smaller. That's not the case for batteries, or most other goods. A new car cost a million dollars in 1900, $100k in 1910, and $10K in 1920. Would it have been reasonable to assume that a new car would cost $10 by 1950? Of course not, the steel and rubber in the car is worth much more than $10. A car cannot cost less than the input materials used to build it.
Input materials account for 75% of the cost of a battery already (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...) The room for further price reductions become ever more slim.
In 2023 renewables made up 52% of power production in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
The remainder being almost entirely fossil fuels including 25.6% from burning coal, largely necessary because Germany chose to phase out nuclear energy.
Electricity is not the whole story either. Renewables accounted for less than 20% of Germany's primary energy consumption in 2023.
Interestingly when you include these nuclear is much more competitive. But this depends on the studies and you should pay very close to the assumptions those studies make. Regardless, these are always in aggregate. So even with biases the case always is made that when considering the heterogenous nature of environment that some places will favor nuclear and others will favor renewables (which is again nonhomogeneous as wind and solar aren't always strongly coupled and certainly hydro isn't available everywhere). This is true for the studies that show the best results for nuclear and the studies that show the worst. A major problem with these discussions is people are operating on aggregate assumptions and acting as if it's one or the other.
One interesting part that people might not be aware of is hydrogen production. Nuclear is often argued as a base load so the question is what to do when the sun is shining and wind is strong? You can throttle nuclear but this is not cost effective. But you can in turn produce hydrogen, which can even be used to cheapen and make renewable storage more green. One of the biggest concerns here though is that hydrogen production might be so valuable that nuclear producers might favor that over providing base load.
So as everything, the reality is much more complicated than our general conversations reveal. It's even far more complicated than what can be included in a HN reply. But I hope I gave a sufficient response than can also point to more information.
There are many ways to alleviate unwanted impacts of 'intermittency' (PEM membranes, central plant enabling many sites exposed to different wind regimes to feed it, batteries...)
Hydrogen overproduction (from the grid perspective) isn't a challenge because various industries need huge amounts (~94 millions metric tons/an) of it.
Therefore the 'hydrogen' approach favors renewable sources.
> the real costs will become apparent
It is mainly true for the hydrogen part (water electrolysis) of the system, which is common to nuclear and renewable sources.
Rather, we spent enormous subsidies on nuclear power and it was proven to not provide energy at commercially workable rates.
Moreover in case of any mishap (major accident, hot waste wandering around...) all bets are off.
> Moreover in case of any mishap
Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment) and have been for many years now, so no 'all bets' are not off. That's just FUD.
All taxes considered (not only income tax) "the highest shares of taxes and social contributions as a percentage of GDP being recorded in France (48.0 %), Belgium (45.6 %) and Austria (43.6 %)." https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/france-becomes-the-worlds-most-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oecd-tax/government-tax-t...
> Isn't preserving vast natural areas and ecologies (instead of covering them up with solar and wind farms) worth a bit more money?
Indeed, however the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented as off-shore wind turbines (globally the biggest reserve) don't use any land and offer sanctuaries to exhausted seas, while solar panels on roofs and agrivoltaics... aren't really a burden, either.
> Isn't it worth it to reduce pressure on strip-mining huge amounts of earth to eke out some meagre amounts of minerals for batteries?
These raw materials have substitutes and they are recycled.
Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually), has no substitute, is hardly recycled in practice and as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment.
>> Moreover in case of any mishap
> Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment)
Clearly write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about. An hydrogen / vapor explosion is possible, and it may let dangerous stuff escape in the wild, and this is true in France. The subject of debate is not this danger but the associated risk (probability and effects of such an events).
Also the carbon intensity of generation is 10 times lower than Germany's: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Talking about overall tax levels is a red herring. We have to look specifically at the costs of power generation (both internalized and externalized).
> the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented
Surely you're joking. Wind turbines are the size of football fields and they basically can't be recycled after their useful lifespan of 20 years. They have to be buried, using up huge amounts of space.
> Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually)
Again, I hope you're joking, because leaving aside all the existing uranium mines operating today, even leaving aide the fact that spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!), we know how to extract it from seawater. If you think seawater is a scarce resource, I don't know what to tell you.
> write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about.
As opposed to writing 'as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment' which is perfectly legible to everyone? Sure dude.
Also, you realize that the burden of proof lies with the person claiming something is possible, because you can't prove a negative, right? You know that's not how the scientific process works, right?
Source? The real TCO isn't. Fact: EDF gobbled during decades public money and various advantages, and is now crushing under a >50 billions € debt
> the carbon intensity of generation is 10 times lower than Germany's
In the 1960's France coal reserves were vanishing (France switched to nuclear) while Germany's were massive (in RDA it was huge). This is the root cause.
In Germany nuclear-produced electricity peaked at 30% (around 1999), electricity being there around 12% of the consumed energy. Far, from the huge deal sometimes touted. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_mix_in_Germany.svg )
> Wind turbines are the size of football fields
So? The facts remain: they don't use any land and offer sanctuaries to exhausted seas.
> and they basically can't be recycled
Nope, they can be recycled and in more and more nations this is even mandatory. In France: https://factuel.afp.com/le-socle-des-eoliennes-resteront-dan...
> after their useful lifespan of 20 years
Nope, even with such a young industry there are many counter-examples of big (industrial) old wind turbines. https://www.tvindkraft.dk/stories/a-new-nacelle-back-end/
> They have to be buried
Nope. This is now illegal in most nations. Even recyclable blades now exist, and old ones are more and more burnt in cement killns.
> uranium > spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!)
Nope. Source? Even France doesn't recycle (MOX) more than a few percent, and it only is recyclable once. Industrial real 'eternal' recycling (possible with renewables, as most components such as copper or aluminium are 'infinitely' recyclable at human timescale) of uranium isn't achieved anywhere. If it is, please state where and how.
> we know how to extract it from seawater
This is nothing more than an old dream. Please state (source) where it is, at industrial stage. It simply isn't, anywhere, and all attempts (since the 1970's) failed, and this is a well-know fact. Quote: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium". Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
> ore grades
Is playing with words your best counter-argument? I quoted a source, everyone may check my assertion: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
Sheer facts happening since the advent of industrial renewables indicate that many believe that the 'renewable sources' path is the best one: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
All the other options haven't been built at scale. Hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air have all been suggested, but aren't deployed widely enough to prove viability.
2) Batteries
3) Charge more money for electricity so people shift their demand.
4) Make hydrogen, store it and burn it to make the electricity.
Surprisingly, if you only did 4 (which is the most expensive) all of the time for every watt of power generated from solar and wind it would be very expensive, but would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear power is just that expensive.
And the price only gets more horrendous if you try to use it as a peaker.
Massive? Where in Germany would you store 1,000 GWh of energy, to run the country for half a day or so?
This kind of abject extremism is sadly par for the course on topics like this due to the kind of propaganda that the nuclear industry spews out. It generates zealots.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Profile-of-wind-power-ge...
If you disagree with the view that half a day of backup is reasonable, then provide a specific number and justification.
I find it amusing that when I cited a study that modeled exactly this scenario you poured scorn on it because it was modeled around a specific country. You didn't respond with actual figures demonstrating that this altered the results significantly, you just said "AUSTRALIA EASY MODE".
Seriously?
Yet the guy that presumed that the wind doesnt blow... ever? You didnt respond to that.
It's an interesting insight into the mind of a nuclear activist.
Renewables reduce oil and gas use. Period. You still need just as much generating capacity and you still release a lot of CO2.
And in that other comment what I said is that going pure renewable would get people lynched for how badly they wrecked the economy. The "green" approach is basically "pay no attention to the fact that the storage tech does not exist." In the real world we see it *increasing* emissions. (Shut down nuke, the load falls onto gas because it actually exists.) What would happen to our economy if power was dollars per kWh?? Because that's what it would take to ensure the lights always stay on in a pure renewable environment.
It's the exact opposite.
I actually provided a link to a model which explicitly calculated required storage using real production data.
Meanwhile, you said "16 hours! The sun doesn't shine at night!" and handwaved away the existence of wind turbines.
Solar + wind + nuke, might as well simply use nuke for just about everything.
An environment with a bunch of renewables is effectively forced to use fossil fuel.
But, if you assume the existence of wind turbines (I hope that isn't too much of a stretch for you):
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
>With that in mind, exactly one year ago I started running a simple simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with approximately five hours of storage
Germany has very few renewables, so do the math for them.
Report in Swedish though: https://www.svk.se/siteassets/om-oss/rapporter/2024/lma_2024...
Where will you move the goalposts now?
The roundtrip cost of electricity generated this way is expensive (it's ~50% efficient) but even then it is still cheaper than the cost of baseload nuclear power electricity.
Give up already.
Whatever happened to the notion of local/decentralised energy? Plus it relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection. Sweden and Norway are not so happy about other countries taking their hydro energy when it suits the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorthConnect
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/swedish-government-s...
When it comes to gridpower working at continental-level is, and for quite a while, the best way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Network_of_Transmissi...
> relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection
Exactly as, right now, each and every country in the continental grid sometimes starts a production unit in order to help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
> taking their hydro energy
Because, right now, the system is far from being complete: not enough production units deployed on the continent, interconnections, lines, storage... This transition, a huge ordeal, is in progress.
The larger the interconnection the bigger the failure domain. See also https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/european-clock... which shows that power is political.
> help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
Not so for Norway, where electrical prices have gone up as a result of all of these inter-connectors and a drought. Norwegian people and businesses have lost out. Politicians have taken note.
True, however we have to consider the chances of a given proportion of the grid to fail: a more spread-out and heterogeneous (wind, solar...) fleet of production units is way more robust.
> power is political
True, however such incidents are rare (this one dates back from 2018) and their extent more and more reduced as grid-control devices and backup plants are continually enhanced.
As already shown there is no way for nearly all nations to ever hope to obtain an autonomous grid, and even those able to plan on this will obtain a less-robust and more expensive grid. Team play is becomes more and more mandatory and efficient, on all accounts, and bad players may lose the support of the biggest group.
> electrical prices have gone up
Yes, because there now are not enough ways to store, causing some over-pressure on existing ones. Storing in order to sustain the grid when production isn't sufficient only makes sense if we store overproduction, and overproduction remains rare (esp. at continental-level) because way too few renewable are producing. We reached the very first step: more and more overproduced renewable electricity, which triggers investments towards the next step: massive storage. V2G is a major contender.
2) Not even in the ballpark of economic.
3) You'll really crater our economy, you'll get lynched and people will go back to the old way.
4) You realize the low efficiency of the loop you are proposing and big storage headaches it causes?
And nuclear power isn't "just that expensive". Rather, US nuclear power is by regulation defined as too expensive. There is a horrible provision in the nuclear world: "as low as reasonably achievable." Sounds good, and probably is good in the medical side. But on the power side it inherently defines nuclear as too expensive because if it wasn't too expensive then additional "safety" (which I find questionable, there comes a point where additional "safety" means more to break and thus doesn't really work) would be reasonably achievable.
The Republicans keep crusading about "too much regulation" but because they're not actually interested in the best possible outcome they miss the biggie: We should define that which is say 2x as safe as the status quo is deemed safe enough. And the flip side of this, that which is 2x as dangerous as the status quo is deemed unsafe. (I'd be open to different ratios, I just need to put something down.)
Let's look at the reality.
Nuclear safety? It's about 10x as good as natural gas. (5x if you count Fukushima--but all of those deaths are from the evacuation. Staying put had an expected death toll of zero.)
Natural gas is about 10x as safe as oil.
Oil is about 10x as safe as coal.
Yes--coal is 1000x as dangerous as nuclear.
(And note that these numbers do not include any harms from climate effects and thus are actually an understatement.)
Waste? There are two basic types:
Low-level: stuff that might have been contaminated. Compare it to ambient (things which aren't hotter than ambient shouldn't be treated as nuclear waste) to see if you need to care, usually you don't.
High-level: Yeah, it's hot. Very hot. But we are handling it wrong. The problem is that in the name of preventing proliferation we made reprocessing a dirty word. Plutonium is plutonium, isn't it? No. Bombs need Pu-239 with low amounts of Pu-240. It's extremely hard to make a bomb from reactor plutonium because it's got gobs of Pu-240. Yes, they can be separated--but anybody who can separate them can also separate U-235 from U-238. Pretty much the same thing, it's just the plutonium is 3x harder to separate.
Reprocess the spent fuel. 90% of it goes back into the reactor, even more if you're using a breeder design. Of what's left there are some commercially useful isotopes. Cobalt-60 would be pretty nasty spread over the environment but it's pretty darn good at killing things you really want dead. Say, to make shelf stable meat and dairy products. Once you get done with that you have some actual waste. Which will decay to ambient in 10,000 years and note that most of that decay is in the early part. You simply don't need elaborate precautions.
They supported anti nuclear stuff , anti renewables stuff and anti fossil fuel extraction stuff.
The end effect being people in Europe would be dependent on buying natural gas from Russia.
Stasi and green activist contacts are also documented. (Most funding came from fossile fuel orgs/persons, not eastern block.) https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-...
I didn't see anything in that in that wikipedia article about it. Besides, the claims of defectors are frequently exaggerated and fall apart. They have a strong tendency to try to say what they think their audience want to hear.
>Stasi and green activist contacts are also documented. (Most funding came from fossile fuel orgs/persons, not eastern block.) https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-...
This article is 0% about the conspiracy theory and 100% about how the stasi tried to infiltrate a political party - which is, yes, quite plausible.
As I said, it's quite the conspiracy theory.
That doesn't mean they favored (or otherwise sought to promote) all of the aims and goals of the organizations. Or even any of their aims, necessary.
Their primary goal in doing so was, first and foremost, that of their very motto:
To know everything
Simple test. Look for issues which aren't really green but which benefit Moscow (and these days, Beijing.) Where do the "green" groups stand? I haven't been paying attention for quite a while because I spotted too many such things long ago and figured Moscow was pulling the strings.
Care to cite some examples? You know, the factual kind?
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00153R0003000...
Nuclear power is not, as a photograph of a banner on the CND's website tells me, the answer to climate chaos.
If we go by the article you provided (and I am skimming it properly) - it doesn't mention nuclear power at all.
The NKVD/KGB/FSB was and continues to be known to engage in kneecapping actions in enemy states. Many Northern nations were kindled into taking an anti-nuclear stance. It is taking a lot of initiative for Northern Europe to extricate itself from dependence on Russian natural gas. Russia used natural gas control as retaliation following sanctions.
Occam’s Razor would suggest these things are linked.
Occam's Razor would seem to cut the other way, actually.
And also, it was a better solution to their particular set of challenges: powering remote installations far from the nearest urban center (and powerplant).
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe seems to have hardened as a consequence of (a) Chernobyl, (b) Germany realizing they'd be on the front lines in any war, & (c) various other nuclear incidents (US and UK).
They weren't Soviet puppets: they formed their own positions and advocated for them.
(Another reason I missed above: the conflation of nuclear power with nuclear weapons)
There's usually far too much squabbling inside a given volunteer group for any external pressure to be able to redirect their will.
Which is simply: even after several iterations on this topic -- no one seems to be able to point to any actual indications of the Soviets having promoted such propaganda in the West.
What the hell are you talking about? That’s like saying it’s inconsistent for a basketball team to try and score points while also trying to prevent the opposing team from also scoring points. It’s certainly adversarial, but so was the geopolitical relationship between the Soviet Union and the West.
> I think you meant to say…
Don’t patronize me. I meant to say exactly what I said.
The hypothesized messaging, that is. There's no evidence of such a propaganda campaign from Soviet side in those years (cover or overt), so this entire discussion is moot anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/k4iggr/a...
It's also why the Chornobyl facility was officially named the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, and so on.
The only thing they didn't do was "promote anti-nuclear propaganda in the West".
And no one said that they were, nor are they "attacking" that point of view.
More to the point it's still a rather harebrained conspiracy theory with no evidence to support it.
It was definitely not "third world", and you aren't even using the term correctly. As Wikipedia explains:
In the Cold War, some European democracies (Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland) were neutral in the sense of not joining NATO, but were prosperous, never joined the Non-Aligned Movement, and seldom self-identified as part of the Third World.You’re making a tedious semantic argument while conceding my central point, that Finland was non-aligned. I’ve heard of respectful disagreement but you’ve managed to pull off disrespectful agreement.
And when people do fact-check you, you say they're making "tedious semantic arguments", or being disrespectful.
There's nothing disrespectful in their doing so, of course. They're just setting the record straight -- again, chiefly in regard to this nutty theory you've been promoting. If anything, they're doing you a favor.
Though I do agree that this discussion has gotten quite tedious.
My point—which seems to be well-received since it’s up about 12 points—is that if the Soviets did, in fact, support these movements, it wouldn’t be inconsistent with their own use of nuclear power, or even their efforts to develop nuclear power in “non-aligned” countries in an attempt to curry political favor. Your attempts to claim otherwise are bizarre and incoherent, and none of your fact checks are factual or indeed even relevant to the topic at hand.
The Western antinuclear movement had their own agency and motivations, but because they happened to align with Soviet interests
> they may have received material support from the Soviets. If they did....
It should be obvious that it would have served the interests of the Soviet Union if their geopolitical adversaries had less abundant energy and less practical expertise in nuclear technology. I make no claims about whether or not the Soviets attempted to advance these particular interests by interfering in the domestic politics of their adversaries, even though they did interfere in other ways to advance other interests.
I think we can leave it at that.
Your question was:
> Which "interests" were you referring to, other than the interest of discouraging nuclear power development in the West?
There is no “other than”. Discouraging nuclear power development in the West (by which in this context, I am reiterating because it was insufficiently clear earlier, I mean the countries aligned with the US and against the USSR during the Cold War) was the Soviet interest that would have been served by Soviet attempts to interfere in the domestic politics of Western countries (by which I mean “First World”, US-aligned countries, just so we are crystal clear on that point).
And I expanded on that point, actually:
> It should be obvious that it would have served the interests of the Soviet Union if their geopolitical adversaries had less abundant energy and less practical expertise in nuclear technology.
Why would you expect some other Soviet interest to be served? Perhaps you were confused by my use of the superficially plural term “interests”? In that case, please forgive the imprecision of my language. As I’ve explained, the Soviet interest in curbing the use of nuclear power in Western countries (by which, let me remind you, I mean countries that were Soviet adversaries) was multifaceted, but in common usage, when someone speaks of a country’s or a party’s “interests”, they are not necessarily thinking of some countable number of distinct points of interest.
Last month a bus caught fire in some random village in Czech Republic and apparently that was Putin’s fault too.
This is getting to the point where I have to check if he is hiding in the closet before I leave the house
Meanwhile we have dozens of official think tanks influencing our politics and their sources of funding are not disclosed. Could be oil companies, could be China, could be the devil himself!
I always think it's funny when HN thinks that Greenpeace is omnipotent. Their very first campaign in 1971 was against commercial whaling, which still hasn't stopped more than 50 years later. Greenpeace also has a decade-long campaign against oil, which has not exactly succeeded.
Why are HN readers so quick to think that Greenpeace is all powerful? Or is Greenpeace just a convenient boogeyman to trot out whenever anyone is critical of nuclear power?
I think it's because Green Peace's stunts against whaling got them lots of press and made them the most famous of the green organizations.
They may not be the only driver of that discourse, or even the primary origin, but they're arguably the face of that viewpoint.
Because of that, the green parties in most countries sold their votes in exchange of policies against nuclear as a first priority.
Are there green groups that support whaling? Coal-fired electrical plants? Global climate change?
There are any number of other problems that "green parties" have in common. Having said that, it's important to note that Greenpeace and Sierra Club are not green parties, but non-profit organizations.
The line is much blurrier than you might think. The green parties originate directly from those movements and there's significant exchange with the non-profit world.
And yes, whaling or coal plants aren't pushed as much as nuclear as a subject, that's not even close.
In the 1970s the BBC news programmes gave huge amounts of air time to Greenpeace and CND. Greenham Common and CND being given the most coverage.
When the only source of information is a daily newspaper, or nightly news programmes, a huge number of people can be influenced by whatever a channel like the BBC was broadcasting.
Unlike today where you can read wikipedia (!) or switch to one of a hundred other channels and simply just not watch the news.
TV set the agenda back then, and the course of nuclear sentiment for a few decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_the_U...
The nuclear lobby cant exactly blame the exhorbitant cost of nuclear power for their problems. They need a more exciting scapegoat that isnt "it's 5x the cost of the competition".
Actual implementation of said design has had a lot of issues, hence the escalation of costs. And it’s not easy to iron out and iterate on something that is billions of dollars a piece when a solar panel is in the thousands and a wind turbine is in the millions.
But nuclear has to be built here, and we in the west suck (especially UK/US, France still holding out) at building any big infrastructure without cost overruns. ‘Free market’ doesn’t like the risks of large, hard to finance, one off projects. And our governments have decided that if central planning doesn’t work, then they don’t need to plan anything at all.
Combine that with lack of skilled staff workforce as all the people who built previous nuclear powerplants have already retired and the western firms wage war against their own skilled engineers, and you have a toxic cocktail.
TL SR: the only reason Small Module Reactors are interesting is because they could be made in China and imported by our lazy system
If you are going to wind up with the same energy storage problems with nuclear or newer renewables then you may as well go with the cheaper option.
Those challenges vanished ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current , https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr... ...)
None of those are meant to be sufficient ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy ), as for any system this is for the complete set of ways to reach the 'good enough' stage: a continental ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ) mix (wind, solar, geothermal, biomass...) backed up by storage, clean backup (green hydrogen)...
We aren't in the "good enough" stage but more "we need a breakthrough" stage. We are multiple orders of magnitude away to use those at a large scale.
For green hydrogen that's pretty much the same issue, the efficiency is beyond terrible and we would need another breakthrough there.
That's why no country on earth is managing with those.
> the efficiency is beyond terrible
... when used in transportation. Green hydrogen produced then stored nearby a turbine or fuel cell acting as backup for the grid efficiency is similar to fossil fuels' or nuclear (about .3 to .4).
> That's why no country on earth is managing with those.
No, that's because all this (especially industrial renewable sources, really soaring in the 2000's) is too new, this is a work in progress starting with production: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
Ever looked at an electricity demand graph? The electricity demand isn't linear, it's not linear in a day, not linear in a week and especially not linear in months either in the northen hemisphere. And the more you decarbonize the economy, the worse it's going to get for renewables here since fossil fuels are used for highly non linear usage.
> Green hydrogen produced then stored nearby a turbine or fuel cell acting as backup for the grid efficiency is similar to fossil fuels' or nuclear (about .3 to .4).
You are mixing up two things. Nuclear, since it's a baseload technology, only needs to adapt itself to the demand, the production can mostly be planned. Renewables on the other hand need to adapt both the demand and the production.
Those efficiencies figures aren't needed for nuclear because you don't need P2G or any of that, you can just adjust the production. So you get the usual production. Nuclear doesn't drop abruptly to 5% capacity and those bandaid solutions aren't really needed.
What you are quoting is the efficiency of the production, which is a totally different subject. The efficiency of the production is more of an indication of how far you can actually go in the future.
A continental spread-out mix (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, biomass...) reduces production variability ( this is tru even considering a single type of source: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... )
Overproduced electricity can be stored. V2G will play a major role.
> You are mixing up two things
I doubt so. I was stating that hydrogen may become a clean backup, replacing fossil-fuel existing plants, some of them (burning methane) may be retrofitted. Water electrolysis done in centralized plants gathering electricity overproduced at continental level in order to obtain and locally temporarily store hydrogen, maybe even benefiting from co-generation, will locally burn it (gas turbine or fuel cell) in order to produce electricity when the grid needs it while renewable sources cannot provide enough.
> aren't needed for nuclear because you don't need P2G or any of that, you can just adjust the production
Nuclear can 'modulate' its output up to a certain level and frequency, which in practice are insufficient. Even over-nuclearized France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) because exploiting enough reactors to cope with the mandatory load-following and also with the peak load would be way too expensive.
There are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter. Pertinent document (French ahead!): https://www.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
Those "bandaid" solution are needed with each and every low-carbon type of source, even nuclear. We have to consider the amount of emissions caused, in each type of system, by those solutions.
On a grid when it comes to the "production = consumption" rule there are 2 big types of challenge:
1/ short-term adjustment (under a few seconds). Nuclear, per se, just cannot cope. It is done by the sheer inertia of the turbo-alternator drive shaft. On a renewable system it can also be done this way, thanks to flywheels. It is already done.
2/ long-term adjustments. It is either done by reducing the output of production units, or storing or wasting it or (if production isn't sufficient), by a reserve of "production" units (batteries, green hydrogen turbines...).
Well no, they simply aren't. It's true that nuclear simply cannot do the same as gas but renewables on the other hand are in a league of their own way outside of any baseload tech. That's why they are considered intermittent.
No nuclear fleet drops to 5% capacity for weeks at a time like solar or wind, that's simply not a thing.
> short-term adjustment (under a few seconds). Nuclear, per se, just cannot cope. It is done by the sheer inertia of the turbo-alternator drive shaft.
The nuclear fleet takes around 30min to adapt the production right now in France. Not only it is done but it works in real life right now, unlike large scale P2G, green hydrogen or batteries which aren't used anywhere on earth for grid management.
> Overproduced electricity can be stored. V2G will play a major role.
Unfortunately no it can't. Unless there's a new breakthrough, dams is all we have for large scale electricity storage. And we can't count on tech which doesn't exist yet.
At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, even Germany which built tons of supposidly green hydrogen pipes will use them for transporting ... gas.
> ( this is tru even considering a single type of source: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... )
Well no, unfortunately that doesn't work either. And the best example is winter 2022 where the whole western europe was out of wind for 3 weeks.
That's a nice idea but unfortunately it doesn't work with the real figures.
You can even check right now on electricity map, most of the EU countries have similar wind capacity production at around 20%. (Terrible figure in itself but that's another debate)
Edit : I forgot to answer that part.
> Even over-nuclearized France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) because exploiting enough reactors to cope with the mandatory load-following and also with the peak load would be way too expensive.
Unfortunately, France replaced a lot of the coal plants with gas plants to follow up renewables and is now stuck with it. France only had a single gas plant before 2010.
The consensus at the time was that those renewables would eat up the share of the gas plant and they could be removed altogether.
We now know that it doesn't work and the gas plants are there for good.
Source?
Reality: a continental mix production is way less variable.
> The nuclear fleet takes around 30min to adapt the production right now in France.
I referenced proofs showing this is insufficient.
> unlike large scale P2G, green hydrogen or batteries which aren't used anywhere on earth for grid management.
Batteries already are ( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/solar-energy-battery-storage...
Even at surprising places: https://governorswindenergycoalition.org/texas-will-add-more... )
Green hydrogen is a work in progress, granted, however such "it was never done before" argument would have condemned France attempt do produce most of its electricity thanks to nuclear power.
>> Overproduced electricity can be stored. V2G will play a major role.
> Unfortunately no it can't.
What do you mean? Electricity cannot be stored?!
> Unless there's a new breakthrough
I proved (above) that stationary batteries already are a thing, quickly growing up.
> even Germany which built tons of supposidly green hydrogen pipes will use them for transporting ... gas.
Yes, due to a lack of finance and a very debatable plan (transporting hydrogen is more and more probably doomed).
> winter 2022 where the whole western europe was out of wind for 3 weeks.
Nope. Source?
Reality: https://proceedings.windeurope.org/biplatform/rails/active_s...
Check https://windeurope.org/intelligence-platform/product/wind-en...
> most of the EU countries have similar wind capacity production at around 20%.
20% is the usual load factor for terrestrial wind turbines. Offshore is way better (about 2x) but not as widely deployed. The goal is not to maximize a load factor but to produce enough energy to serve the needs, at minimal total long-term impacts and costs.
> France replaced a lot of the coal plants with gas plants to follow up renewables and is now stuck with it. France only had a single gas plant before 2010.
Here is a list of some fossil fuel backup plants and their building/extension dates: Brennilis (1981, 1981, 1996), Dirinon (1981), Gennevilliers (1991), Vaires-sur-Marne (2008, 2009), DK6 (2005)...
> The consensus at the time was that those renewables would eat up the share of the gas plant and they could be removed altogether.
True, however this will only be fully possible when the French fleet of renewable plants will be complete. We are far from this as France is notoriously way behind, partly because it wastes money on nuclear late-and-overbudget projects (EPR...). France was punished by the UE because it missed its own renewable objectives, there is no other case in the UE ( https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/eu-beats-2020-re...).
In France RTE is in charge of the grid (less the "last kilometer") and is a subsidiary of EDF (electricity producer, head of the nuclear sector. Here is what it officially and publicly declares about this: https://www.youtube.com/live/xP4jL4b_Nnk?si=g2-cryDt62TyJWuA...
Translation: "I absolutely confirm that technically every running wind turbine reduces the amount of consumed gas somewhere".
Source of what? That nuclear doesn't drop to 5%? It never happened so I can't get any source...
> I referenced proofs showing this is insufficient.
Well, it works in reality so the proof is in the pudding, it works.
> Nope. Source?
The Germans even have a word for that, Daunkelflaute
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65b3e159d25a6097b6ca5815/...
> Batteries already are ( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte...
Well no they aren't, they are used for very low scale grid management, such as stated in your link.
> What do you mean? Electricity cannot be stored?!
No it can't in large scale, those battery needs to make a x100 here to be used for that. The only large scale tech to store electricity are dams.
> Brennilis (1981, 1981, 1996), Dirinon (1981), Gennevilliers (1991), Vaires-sur-Marne (2008, 2009), DK6 (2005)...
The only exisitng gas plant stil used before 2010 is DK6 and it's not even connected to the gas pipeline but reusing factory gas.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_centrales_thermiqu...
All the other existing gas plants in France were built post 2010 for renewables.
> We are far from this as France is notoriously way behind, partly because it wastes money on nuclear late-and-overbudget projects (EPR...).
France spent more than a hundred billions on new renewables alone (roughly half of the total cost of the nuclear grid). It's true that the results look even worse than the EPR though. And it's not counting these new gas plants and external costs on the nuclear grid in the total.
The renewable investments look so bad that there's people like you who think they haven't been done but they have.
There's multille reasons France is bring the nuclear program back from the dead and one of them is that the renewable investments underdelivered.
> In France RTE is in charge of the grid (less the "last kilometer") and is a subsidiary of EDF (electricity producer, head of the nuclear sector.
RTE benefits from grid investments for renewables so yeah it's not a surprise they are all for it. They are especially afraid of a merge to go back to the previous statu quo.
Remember that big hole in the production on the graph before? That's exactly the time where the president of RTE made a public speech for building renewables, when they produced closed to nothing.
> Daunkelflaute
It's "Dunkelflaute" (only one 'a')
"a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours" and "more than two days over most of Europe happen about every five years" (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute ), here is for your "weeks at a time". Moreover regions outside North of Europe are way less impacted.
> are used for very low scale grid management
And what exactly forbids to manage all local grids this way? This is more and more true, as being able to isolate a local grid is useful.
> The only large scale tech to store electricity are dams
As of 2022, the total combined energy capacity of electric vehicle (EV) batteries sold in Europe reached approximately 690 GWh, and grows very quickly.
Note: dams are a renewable source.
> The only exisitng gas plant stil used before 2010
It is about fossil fuel, and factually the French nuclear fleet always used some: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+...
> hundred billions on new renewables alone
With a clearly promising result: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
> (roughly half of the total cost of the nuclear grid)
This is highly debatable as the real total cost of the nuclear fleet is disputed. Remember: EDF's debt now surpasses 50 billion €...
> It's true that the results look even worse than the EPR though
Source? Reality: the French EPR should have started around 2012 and didn't (right now) did so, while https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...
Lol, so for context, a single French person is using 2.5GWh/year. One single inhabitant.
France is consuming 1.2TWh of electricity per DAY in winter.
So the whole electric vehicle fleet in the whole Europe is worth half a day (being generous) of electricity just in France during the time which is the tightest in electricity. That's so low it's not even worth mentioning. And that's the whole Europe compared to a single country, that's not going to make it.
> Note: dams are a renewable source.
There's also pretty much no new place where you can build one in a developped country as it's an old technology.
> You wrote that "solar and wind" can drop "to 5% capacity for weeks at a time", and I ask for the source of this
Solar produces most of it's production during 6 months and only gives 3% of the yearly production on each month of January and February. That's the two months where the countries are using the most electricity for context and need the most production.
For wind, that happens regularly, even right now as we speak, Germany has a 7% capacity which isn't far.
> deployed on whole continent. Guess what?
The wind production is synchronized right now, you can check it. That's another kind of strange of being shown the reality right now and denying it.
https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/eolien_grap...
Here is the statistics, when it blows in Germany, it blows in France and when there's no wind in France, there's wind in Germany either.
> This is highly debatable as the real total cost of the nuclear fleet is disputed. Remember: EDF's debt now surpasses 50 billion €...
No it's not disputed, there's extensive reports in France on that subject as it's a common talking point.
I don't know any study about the external costs of renewables though so 100 billion for around 10% of the production is the best scenario. And calling it a failure seems pretty fair even with the most generous figures possible.
At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding anyway, if it had worked, the nuclear program wouldn't have been brought back from the dead. France already tried ambitious renewable investments to replace the nuclear fleet during a whole decade and it failed. What the country got instead was mediocre results for the price paid and an increased dependency on gas which proved to be a huge issue with the Russian war. Those who don't learn from the past are condemn to repeat it.
Source? Fact: France generates ~8kWh/inhabitant/year and is a net electricity exporter. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...
"Lol"?!
> There's also pretty much no new place where you can build one in a developped country
Not true in some parts of Europe (North, esp Scandinavia, Balkans...)
https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2024/02/15/10971...
Moreover, esp on the generation side, new approaches (small hydro) is ramping up https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffopperman/2018/08/10/the-une...
> The wind production is synchronized right now
Your document (Jancovici) analyzes current production of the very incomplete fleets of neighboring nations while the pertinent studies take into account wind regimes of geographic zones where wind turbines can be deployed and which are far appart. Conclusions of adequate scientific (J.-M. Jancovici expertise isn't about wind regimes) in reviewed and published studies (J.-M. Jancovici isn't) are quite different (please find some pointers in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41397343 )
The last part of your answer is mostly devoid of sources, and I don't want to write about mere opinions.
> if it had worked, the nuclear program wouldn't have been brought back from the dead
The French nuclear program was never killed. When was it killed, according to you, by who and how? Facts: EPR programme, EPR ordered and exported, Grand Carénage, R&D budgets ( https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/politiques-publiques/energie-re... )...
> France already tried ambitious renewable investments to replace the nuclear fleet during a whole decade and it failed
Those industrial renewables are very new tech, they evolve very quickly, France missed its own objectives on renewables (sole nation in the UE to do so), France isn't rich anymore (during its nuclearization it benefited from the '30 Glorieuses' and from an intense and expensive R&D at home and in the US)... https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
Even in such a context the result is very promising and there is no plan to dump renewables: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
> mediocre results for the price paid
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
Determining which project delivers a 'mediocre result' is easy.
You completely forgot that there's companies using electricity and we live in a world where individuals are on the top of that electricity chain.
Your figures are completly wrong and do not include the whole electricity chain.
France produces close to 500TWh/year.
So yeah, I confirm what I said, the whole europan fleet of battery which you thought was impressive can only last half a day of a single country.
Also assuming that nobody want to use their car in Europe of course for that particular half day.
> Not true in some parts of Europe (North, esp Scandinavia, Balkans...)
That's not going to revolutionize anything, the biggest spots in the EU are already taken.
> Conclusions of adequate scientific (J.-M. Jancovici expertise isn't about wind regimes) in reviewed and published studies (J.-M. Jancovici isn't) are quite different
That's amamazing, you are plain denying reality, I'll do it once again, right now:
Germany 15% France 16% Spain 16% Italy 15% Poland 15% Greece 15% ...
There you have it. The reality is in front of your eyes, the statistics confirm that the wind patterns are matching and even the real-time data that you refuse to look also does!
Sure there's some existing differences in some regions and some outliers but not nearly enough change the fact that relying on neighbors when the wind isn't blowing is a dead idea.
> Determining which project delivers a 'mediocre result' is easy.
Yeah sure it's easy, the new renewables took half the cost of the nuclear fleet for 10% of the production.
You can't put any lipstick on that sorry, you can try to tweak it the way you want, it's so bad that France had to restart its program back from the dead.
And those figures aren't even including the adaptations to the grid and the gas plants which I think they should.
> The French nuclear program was never killed. When was it killed, according to you, by who and how?
It was killed in 2012 by president Hollande and even written officially in the law in 2015 with a maximum of 50% nuclear production. The idea was to do maintenance while renewables took over. The nuclear program only got brought back from the dead in 2023, because of the Russian war and the failure of renewables to take over.
Do you really believe that 'per capita' only takes into account electricity produced for industrial applications? It doesn't.
The subtitle ("Annual average electricity generation per person") seems clear to me.
Your "a single French person is using 2.5GWh/year" assertion is not backed up and clearly wrong. As the referenced graph ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge... ) shows its around 8MWh/year (France is a net electricity exporter), which is more than 300 times more.
> France produces close to 500TWh/year.
Indeed. France has approx 68 millions inhabitants. Let's consider (* 68M 8MWh): 544TWh
Bingo, I was right, isn't it? How much with 2.5GWh instead of 8MWh?
> So yeah, I confirm what I said,
LOL
> nobody want to use their car in Europe
https://www.reinventingparking.org/2013/02/cars-are-parked-9...
> The reality is in front of your eyes, the statistics
Don't you understand that in order to know if a continental 'renewable' mix will alleviate a fair part of the effect of 'intermittency' on production, we have to take into account all potential wind-turbine sites on the whole continent, NOT the very weak existing fleet (especially at the time of this document) of a few neighboring nations?
Here is a published serious study. Table 6, in section 3.3.1, is a concise way to convey it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
I won't answer to your mere opinions (assertions provided without any source).
According to you the French nuclear program was "killed in 2012 by president Hollande and even written officially in the law in 2015 with a maximum of 50% nuclear production."
This is complete BS: as showed in my previous answer everything ran as usual, this law didn't change anything. A law is not magically effective. What did it cause? The only theoretical effect of this law was the shutdown of the "Fessenheim" nuclear plant, the oldest one, exposed to seismic risk (Germany and Switzerland owned part of the plant and wanted it closed). This plant was only 2,8% of the fleet capacity!
Moreover preserving this plant would have been easy, however EDF didn't want to do so. Details (French ahead): https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
The effect of this law was soon postponed to 2035: https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/2018/11/27/20002-2018112...
Even at this date it would be moot because approximately 60% of France final energy is provided by fossil fuels, which have to be booted, implying a massive electrification and therefore a real need to produce more electricity... creating space for nuclear inside those 50%.
Then this law was merely abrogated, and 50% became a minimum: https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/nucleaire/le-gouvern...
Allow me to repeat: which practical effect had this law?
"That's amamazing, you are plain denying reality"... OMG!
+ it is decentralized, cheap, low tech, low waste, easy to scale.
Did I miss some big news about easy recycling solar panels?
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S09596526220213...
Much lower than fossils. Magnitudes lower than municipal waste or other e-waste.
From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
If you basically ignore that they are all built in China. I'd say that's the most centralized mainstream technology to generate electricity by far, it's all down to a single country. We could even say it's down to a single person even, the power being so vertical in China.
> easy to scale.
Well if you don't care about how you are going to pass the winter maybe.
Then with that leftover margin, you need to cover everything from land costs to new equipment as thing break over 50+ years. Manned 24/7 operations take ~500 people per GW over the plants full lifetime, as are less obvious expenses like insurance and mandatory downtime for weeks at a time requires something to pick up the slack, etc.
Nuclear just ends up expensive even without any safety concerns.
The physical bit of reactor where the fission happens is left alone in operation. All the pipes, steam turbines, pumps, plumbing, cooling towers, etc etc do and this wants all of that on the surface.
It's actually possible to run a reactor on natural unenriched uranium. IIRC the first man-made reactor ever, the Chicago pile, used natural uranium. Why did we stop using natural uranium in reactors?
There’s a lot of different trade offs you can make with nuclear designs, but so far non of them have been demonstrated to actually be meaningfully cheaper.
Compare that with renewables, the subsidy of which is reported to be up to 6B EUR for 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-24/french-su.... It is unclear how this relates to the 30B EUR subsidy program approved by the EU Commission in 2021 https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/29/european-commission-a...
You're making the same logical error you're accusing others of. But if you'd like to know, it's because there's a frequent association between the two. But truthfully I think people use "Greenpeace" as a stand in for any environmentally focused organization because it's the one they're most familiar with. There is direct connection with the nuclear case, but as another user points out the Sierra Nevada Club has uncontestable bias given that there are records showing that they took money from natural gas companies to support their anti nuclear campaigns. (I'm unsure if there's as clear evidence for GP. Maybe someone could link. I'm aware of indirect evidence but if someone has financial statements -- like we have with SNC -- I'd appreciate that)
As for why might success in whaling be different than nuclear? For one, whaling was already a huge established industry, while nuclear was budding. I think that's a key difference you can't ignore. Not to mention that whaling doesn't have a direct connection to bombs, not to mention that biggest bombs we've ever made.... Importantly, I think you're also undermining the success of their anti whaling campaigns. Synthetic oils almost certainly had a larger impact but it wouldn't be surprising if their efforts helped accelerate the adoption. Whaling might not have "stopped" but it has as a global industry.
As for oil, well, again, harder to take down a well established large industry. Especially when so much is dependent upon it and ethics gets complicated when you get into nuance (you want to shut down hospitals?). It's also a not harder to do when you fight against alternatives because they don't pass a purity test, even if they are strictly better (and by a lot).
Having said that, your reasons for the campaign against nuclear power include the fact that it's related to bombs, which has nothing to do with Greenpeace. You also reasonably said that "Greenpeace" is short for "environmental groups at large". To me this means that civil society in general came out against nuclear power, which lead to nuclear power being curtailed, which is... how civil society is supposed to work?
If the underlying argument is "I wish people in the 1980s had a better understanding of the benefits of nuclear power plants and we had continued to build them, albeit with better safeguards" then I would 100% agree with you.
But every time there is a discussion of nuclear power on HN there is a top comment blaming the current lack of it on Greenpeace. It's lazy and intellectually bankrupt.
To say that civil society came out against nuclear power after two high profile disasters, due in part to mainstream environmental groups' campaigning, but also due to high construction and electricity costs, low trust in the industry, and the availability of (imperfect!) alternatives, would be much more accurate, if less exciting to upvote.
> the fact that it's related to bombs, which has nothing to do with Greenpeace.
>> Greenpeace got its start protesting nuclear weapons testing back in 1971.
> "Greenpeace" is short for "environmental groups at large". To me this means that civil society in general came out against nuclear power,
As to the claim that there was dirty money involved, well I find that when I post sources my comments get less engagement. But here's an example (there's others that are easily searchable. Including governments because yes, weapons and energy production are related. Due to enrichment. They don't need to be, but it is an avenue to justify enrichment even if the quantities are dramatically different).
https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra...
> But every time there is a discussion of nuclear power on HN there is a top comment blaming the current lack of it on Greenpeace. It's lazy and intellectually bankrupt.
Truth here is that these conversations are excellently complicated. Climate change is one of the, if not THE, most complicated challenges humans have ever faced. All the sub topics have a lot of nuance and complexity to them as well as a lot of misinformation. Even with strong domain backgrounds these are hard topics! (And I doubt many HN users have strong backgrounds in atomics, PV, battery production, energy transmission, various physical engineerings, and so on, let alone all at once) But I do believe a lot of people care and a lot of people are on the same side (fixing the planet and moving away from fossil fuels). And I think it'd be better if we saw that common ground and would argue as if we're on the same team instead of not. So let's bring what pieces we have to the table. Because when we argue like we aren't on the same team, oil is the winner. But I think we can all agree that be it renewable or nuclear (or honestly some combination that is best suited for a given situation and location) are leagues better than fossil fuels and gas. It's also important to recognize that neither camp offers a full solution to the problem. Luckily their solutions aren't complete overlaps. So please do still advocate your position, but we need to also recognize a common enemy who wants to split us apart. Let's save most of the arguing until they're dead. Clearly fighting each other hasn't worked.
His complaint is that GP stopping nuclear is BS with no evidence. Your comment can be summarized as "I don't see why it couldn't be true" without presenting any evidence that it is true.
People are very much afraid of radiation thanks to a lot of misinformation, crappy movies, and yes, also to the fact that radiation is damn scary and dangerous.
Greenpeace and the green parties, while meaning absolutely well, have been useful idiots who helped shape the public opinion against nuclear and effectively doom an incredibly clean competitor of coal, oil and gas.
Doesn't matter - time's up. Wind and solar are now a viable alternative for generation, for a small fraction of the cost of nuclear, and if the Lithium and Sodium chemistries actually hit the implausibly low costs they are thought to be destined to, storage will also be solved before a single new nuclear plant can be built in the West. Pity, we would have a substantially less fucked planet by now.
> against commercial whaling, which still hasn't stopped more than 50 years later
I used to be a Greenpeace supporter and would donate to them, even. Then I started to get harassed by their "premium donation agents" and stopped. Over the years, I have realised that they have taken up certain good causes (anti-oil, anti-whaling) but have also been rather misguided (e.g. stop all nuclear rather than argue for realistic-safe nuclear).
You can thank the USA and the war against Japan for that. It’s pointless to try to ignore that Hiroshima and Nagasaki did happen.
That’s the paradox. Nuclear fission probably would never have become viable without the massive investment in its weaponisation but the same weaponisation made it unpalatable as a source of energy.
I think there remains a deep seated association between nuclear energy, the nuclear weapon armed powers and imperialism amongst the members of most green parties, which are all historically alter-mondialist.
Only after anti-nuclear misinformation got huge starting in the 70s.
The fact remains that nuclear opposition is rooted neither in safety concerns nor in environmental impacts. If you ignore that, you are condemned to always miss the point - which is often happening when people discuss the nuclear question to be fair.
This is not a battle of reason but a confrontation between two incompatible moral frameworks.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
... even in the most heavily nuclearized nation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
... even in the most touted nuclear-leading nation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
And dismantling is a huge cost that is often left to the state because the operators don't bother factoring it in.
Unless you give credence to Moller & Mousseau's contested research, Chernobyl's exclusion zone is a wildlife haven.
> Fukushima pollution is all over the Pacific.
Detectable/attributable is not the same as significant. That especially goes for the tritium releases which are a non-event.
> And dismantling is a huge cost that is often left to the state because the operators don't bother factoring it in.
The UK has the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Liabilities_Fund, and in the USA the NRC keeps track of decommissioning funding https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html .
Even then, that may say more of the negative impact of human industry and urbanization on those species and their habitats, as opposed to the safety of any isotopes.
The perceived safety is the result of being operated by highly trained and vetted personnel 24/7/365 for decades on end.
In actual fact nuclear reactors are extremely dangerous.
5 Rem is 50 mSv; the Wikipedia Sievert page lists this as "U.S. 10 C.F.R. § 20.1201(a)(1)(i) occupational dose limit, total effective dose equivalent, and the global average background radiation dose is 2.4 mSv/a, so ~20 years worth of background radiation.
Nuclear advocates hand-wave away Chernobyl ("because Soviets") like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? Over $100 billion has been spent on the clean up and compensation so far, with the ultimate cost to approach $1 trillion, require tech that hasn't been invented yet and will take decades if not a century or more [1]
And for what? The highest LCOE of any power source used for mass power generation.
Now this idea (Deep Fission) is an interesting one. It's basically a take on geothermal where instead of relying on natural heating (eg from lava) you basically just use a small reactor. If anything goes wrong, you just bury the whole thing. This requires some more thought about what the failure modes look like and some analysis on what the cost of power is. It is an interesting idea though.
[1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...
One is an accident, the other is a natural disaster. Most countries don’t have earthquakes and tsunamis, so it’s not relevant.
But more to your point, if we paid fair compensation to everyone harmed by fossil fuels, I doubt would it cost any less.
A tsunami isn't the sole way to trigger an accident as there is an infinity potential human errors enabling a series of minor incidents leading to a disaster, nor will it always trigger one: another nuclear plant, closer to the tsunami epicenter than Fukushima was, didn't suffer much ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... ).
Therefore the challenge is: "don't let any room for any human error: design, build, exploit and maintain perfectly" and this is clearly impossible.
Another way is: use an approach (wind, solar...) not letting any room for a disaster.
This is not socially accepted (Act of God in law). It cannot even logically be true - an asteroid falls on your head, whose fault is that?
In this particular case, the powerplant was designed to withstand a certain height of tsunami and this tsunami was larger, breached the sea wall and flooded the generators.
By the way the tsunami also killed 20,000 people, that’s a colossal death talk but for some reason no one talks about it.
This entire hand-wringing about how no-one should die from nuclear feel disingenuous. We could have had zero-carbon grid 50 years ago, in the 70’s just like France. Renewables weren’t ready at the time.
Now millions of people will be displaced or dead by climate change and that could have been prevented.
May 'Act of God' qualify an industrial accident?
Even in such a case (asteroid falling on a nuclear plant?) there is a pertinent comparison: if the very same cause (asteroid?) falls on a field of wind turbines or solar panels the net effect will no be a disaster. Therefore the cause for a major nuclear accident is the sheer human decision to build a nuclear plant instead of wind turbines or solar panels.
> the powerplant was designed to withstand a certain height of tsunami
Human error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
> the tsunami also killed 20,000 people > no one talks about it
'Act of God'...
The evacuation triggered by the nuclear accident made more than 2,200 victims.
> This entire hand-wringing about how no-one should die from nuclear feel disingenuous
This is a way (granted: inelegant) to state that the effect of the worst possible accident triggered by renewable sources is less daunting than its nuclear counterpart, underlining a reason to prefer renewable sources.
> We could have had zero-carbon grid 50 years ago, in the 70’s
Nope. Nuclear never produced (worldwide) more than ~17% of the electricity and now produces about 9% of it ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source ) and there is just enough known exploitable (at current conditions) uranium to feed existing reactors for approximately 130 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium ). With ~10 times more reactors about 40 years ago we would be in a severe crisis or even stuck. At the time experts knew it (since the 1950's) and planned to industrialize breeder reactors (dividing the need for uranium by about 2 orders of magnitude), but it failed.
> just like France
Nope. France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) because exploiting enough reactors to cope with the mandatory load-following and also with the peak load would be way to expensive.
> Now millions of people will be displaced or dead by climate change and that could have been prevented
Nope. You are confusing 'electricity' with 'energy consumed'.
Even in France about fossil fuels produce ~48% ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-energy-source-sub?c... ).
Right now nuclear produces less than 4% ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-energy-source-sub ).
This statement doesn't mean anything and feel disingenuous - we both agree it currently does not produce most of the world electricity. This statistics does not prove or disprove anything.
You have not provided any reasoning or logic to why my counterfactual would be impossible.
> Nope. France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel
So you are complaining that it's 94% carbon free, better than any major Industrialised economy, by year 1970? What do other countries aim for, 2035 in case of UK? that's 65 years later, you think that's a success? I will take the French deal, thank you very much.
> Nope. You are confusing 'electricity' with 'energy consumed'.
I am familiar enough with the difference to know that you are again and on purpose using a misleading statistic. Most fossil 'energy' consumed is wasted, as combustion based machines are only 30-40% efficient. Replacing Petrol car with electric car cuts energy 'consumption' by a factor of 3. This argument is a farse
Secondly, expected impact from climate change is over 100 million people displaced. One third or one quarter of the emissions is from electricity generation. So millions is accurate.
Thirdly, renewables are worse in this regards because we could have nuclear powered container ships and, if we really wanted, nuclear powered airplanes. You can't have solar/wind powered ships unless you are going back to sails.
Nope. Take it into account all facts described in my previous answer. Short version: to produce at most 17% (and now 9%) of the electricity we built reactors. We therefore now need about 10 times more reactors to have 100% nuclear-produced electricity. Then we need about twice as much to replace most of fossil fuels. Therefore 20x reactors are needed. Known accessible uranium reserves (~130 years for the existing reactor fleet, and therefore about 6 years for the needed 20x fleet) are not sufficient to sustain this. It was not considered as a challenge as we know of a way (breeding) to close the uranium cycle, thus obtaining x100 more energy. However our numerous and very expensive attempts to industrialize breeding all failed flat ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reacto... ).
If it is not clear please allow me to avoid wasting my time trying to explain it more clearly.
> you are complaining that it's 94% carbon free
Nuclear is NOT carbon-free (even a 100% nuclear electricity emits, mainly due to uranium mining and enrichment), moreover it needs fossil fuel backup. I'm not complaining, just showing that your statement ("We could have had zero-carbon grid 50 years ago, in the 70’s") isn't accurate (to put it with a friendly tone).
> I am familiar enough with the difference > This argument is a farse
No. It is not about primary/final energy ( https://ourworldindata.org/energy-definitions ). You wrote "Now millions of people will be displaced or dead by climate change and that could have been prevented" and I showed that is a farce.
> we could have nuclear powered container ships
I doubt so. Think insurance, to begin with. Civilian nuclear exists only because all nations using it neglect to insure it properly, as an exception. How exactly would such a ship be competitive if they cannot access to many (more and more nations are phasing-out nuclear) territorial waters and ports?
Moreover all existing nuclear ships are exploited by military personal (yes, even ice-breakers), that is to say in a context where the TCO is way (way!) higher than in a commercial ship.
The amount of available uranium is also a challenge: all those new reactors will deplete the reserves and lead to some crisis.
To begin with...
> if we really wanted, nuclear powered airplanes.
Source?
> You can't have solar/wind powered ships unless you are going back to sails
Nope. "solar/wind powered ships" now mainly means "electric ship". Please check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_boat#List_of_battery-...
Moreover it can also be done with some e-fuel.
And?
Or do you not understand the terminology of "known reserves" and why no one would bother "proving" known inferred resources to become known proven reserves when there's 130 years worth already.
If you're implying that current JORC reserves* are all that exist and nothing else exists other than that which has had money spent being drilled and modelled and queued up ready to mine then you might need a refresher course on mineral exploration.
* whether uranium, lithium, iron ore, copper, bauxite, oil, gas, etc.
... and no one will invest into nuclear plant which are to be amortized in (best case) 40 years, along with all the megastuff needed to operate them (formation, fuel processing, waste disposal...) if they are not pretty sure to be able to exploit them for at least 40 years. Note: currently all planed nuclear plants replace (at global scale) existing ones and therefore do not cause pressure over fuel (because there are very few of them), and their amortization plans are done upon 60 years.
> If you're implying that current JORC reserves* are all that exist
Nope, however massive prospection since the 1940's largely bumped up after the bubble (nearby 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_bubble_of_2007#Impact ) didn't lead to disruptive reserves discoveries, therefore this evaluation (about 130 years for the current fleet, at current conditions) is realistic. Who exactly will invest tens of billions of USD to build many nuclear plants (and their auxiliaries) on such a bet?
If there are other ways to obtain enough nuclear fuel at realistic conditions the burden of proof weights on you. Please state at least one.
Bonus: lowering uranium ore grade leads to more emission, threatening the 'low-carbon' qualification for nuclear. Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050") https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
If this were true we would have buried coal plants decades ago
Ain't it funny how only the companies who aren't already rich have to do the stuff that protects people.
A problem with organizationally managed safety is just the human error problem, and two that human organizations come to resent and undermine regulations, particularly at the management level. This attitude is rite in the nuclear industry in America, and similarly from what I can tell from tepco management of Fukushima.
Nuclear needs a scalable price competitive meltdown proof full fuel usage reactor. I think LFTR, materials issues aside, is the solution, but possibly even that won't be able to compete long term with solar wind even with miraculous materials engineering.
This is debatable. What is pretty sure is that a field of wind turbines or solar panels just cannot trigger any disaster involving durably dangerous (and difficult to recover) stuff spread on a large geographic zone.
> they still can't be built because of safety concerns
Source?
The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville
Short version: it is very late and costs way more than planned, and the most prominent causes weren't "safety concerns" even if the Fukushima disaster happened during this project, and therefore added new requirements which, while non-negligible in absolute terms, were very minor causes of problems for this project.
One of the main causes is known: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
How do you deal with the situation where the electric grid goes down for multiple days or weeks for whatever reason?
Nuclear powers don't want to facilitate other countries joining their club. Popularizing nuclear reactors will, as it did with India.
We're long past the time when the biggest criticism of nuclear power was its safety record.
>so if it does manage to overheat, the nuclear reaction will automatically dampen itself down.
This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
I am a believer in nuclear power. It can already be done safe and is being done safe in most cases. This isn't solving any real problem.
As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, so even with a meltdown there would be no effect on water sources. Presumably if something like Chernobyl happened they would bury the hole and the fuel would just melt its way further down without ill effect. There were plenty of underground nuclear tests already so some of the effects might be understood in practice as well.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a819fe740f0b...
But! What's not apparent until you read the article is that the planned reactor is .. 76cm across. That is, it's designed to fit down an oil well. Effectively you get "artificial high temperature geothermal", a hot object buried deep underground that you circulate water past.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
As far as safety, I would expect this
depth to be below and away from any groundwater,
Can you realistically have a nuclear power plant far enough away from groundwater that this isn't a concern?
Not a rhetorical question. Maybe you can!
Just put these in areas where the water is already contaminated from fracking. Then when the stuff starts bubbling up it can be toxic AND radioactive!
We humans have a bias. We live in the biosphere, and from our perspective, we are surrounded by it. Everywhere we go from day-to-day, life abounds.
But this is a very deceptive bias. Most of the universe is not the biosphere. Outside of the biosphere, the universe is rather nasty. High levels of radiation are the norm. Extreme temperatures (or what we consider extreme temperatures) are the norm. Very life-unfriendly chemical regimes are the norm, either by being full of nasty chemicals (Venusian sulpheric acid) or, more commonly, being so full of boring chemicals that life is very very difficult (Mars).
This comes up most often in space exploration, when I see someone being concerned about putting nuclear power on the moon, whatever will we do with the waste, and the answer is that the lunar surface is already a radiation hell-hole. If you dump something like that on the surface, yeah, we humans will want to stay away from it, but it's a lot less material change than our intuition thinks. Our intuition wants to say "but what about all the wonderful life that will be affected", because everywhere we go, there is life. But there isn't any on the moon. Nothing will die because we dumped a couple hundred pounds of waste on the surface.
Similarly, the subsurface of Earth below the biosphere... and I include the bacteria living in rocks and the water table and everything like that as part of the "biosphere", we know it goes deep but it doesn't go down forever... is already an incredibly harsh place. The chemistry is already nasty. It's already full of chemicals either too "interesting" or too "boring" to be useful for life.
I'd like to see a good analysis to make sure this isn't going to work its way back up into the biosphere, yes, but your intuition that anywhere we put something, some life is going to be affected, does not necessarily apply to a mile under the surface. "Radiating its surrounding environment" is definitely not an issue in the slightest. There is no "environment" there, in the sense you mean. I'm more worried about what might physically migrate around into something that does have an "environment", but a mile is a long way for anything to travel through solid rock, and it needs to move pretty quickly too to get up into the biosphere while it's still a danger.
But I agree that "radiation" is something we should be thinking about more pragmatically. For decades it's been a scary buzzword that the public completely misunderstands and fears. We should be having more rational discussions about it.
Nuclear power has unfairly suffered attacks from "both" "sides" here in the US. The "left" has tended to be generally anti-nuke in what I consider to be very blind ways. And the "right" has closer ties to the fossil fuel industry and has always had a vested interest in torpedoing nuclear. These are vast generalizations with plenty of exceptions, but that's the big picture and I hate it.
Do they really? You might want to check out just how concentrated US nuclear plants are in southern, deeply red states: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/map-power-reactors.ht...
- I explicitly said both "sides" dislike nuclear, and made no proclamations about which "side" was more anti-nuclear, so pointing out that "red states have nuclear plants" is a non sequitur
- There are quite a few party-independent factors at work as well, obviously, such as the need for plants to be near running water, and the fact that NIMBY anti-nuclear pressure is higher in more populous areas which tend to skew blue
- Red/blue maps at the state level are nearly useless for anything but discussing electoral politics; all states have individual counties that are intensely red or intensely blue, so this level of detail tells us nothing of use
NPP's location is best characterised as "eastern US", which tends to reflect other factors, most especially population, industrialisation, generation alternatives, and per-capita electrical demand (most especially cooling demand).
Population: the US population is largely concentrated in the east and specifically north-east, which already has a large concentration of nuclear power plants. This elevation-based population catogram gives a good visualisation: <https://infographic.tv/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Visual-US-...>
Industrial output (about 30% of total power consumption) is still concentrated in the old "rust belt", but has increasingly moved toward the south-east. This will drive some power consumption.
Generation alternatives: Coal remains predominant in the Apallachian region (WV, KY, TN) and a fair bit of the central US. The Pacific Northwest has immense hydroelectric capacity. California also relies strongly on hydro as well as solar and natural gas, with nuclear (Diablo Canyon) providing 7% of the state's power. Plains and southern states in particular lack large-scale hydroelectric capacity (possibly excepting the Tennessee Valley Authority, a/k/a TVA).
Per-capita energy consumption tends to be highest in ... AK, WY, ND, and LA, all of which are low-population states. Several of those states have higher heating loads (generally on-site combustion-based) and transportation demands (long distances, sparse populations). But you'll see both higher-than-average energy consumption and higher population in the southern US. Much of that demand is also summer-time cooling load, which is both electrical and fairly continuous over time, a pattern which matches well with NPP operating modes. Nukes like to run continuously at constant output, rather than ramping up and down quickly as with gas and hydro power.
Put that together and ... NPPs tend to be found in Eastern states with larger populations and higher electrical demand. Not exclusively in the SE, but that's a region with a good match generally.
[1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
Most deep-bore geothermal proposals call for many wells to be bored, on the order of dozens to hundreds. These have a limited lifespan (a few decades), and provide relatively low amounts of energy per well (perhaps tens of MW, as compared with 100s to 1,000s of MW from a nuclear reactor).
Scale and efficiency matter.
(I'm not advocating for or against either alternative here, simply noting the relative scale/effectiveness.)
It is well below the water table
> risk of explosion
According to the article it is "self limiting" so that risk is very small, and an explosion a mile underground is a lot less threatening than an explosion in a facility on the surface. A mile of rock is going to provide a lot more protection than any amount of concrete and steel.
> potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes
From what I can tell (see for example https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-nuclear-explosions-cause-earth...), underground nuclear weapons tests, which have larger explosions than this could possibly create have a rather limited risk for earthquakes.
I'm not a seismologist, but I think the risk there is less than the risk of an explosion in a reactor on the surface.
> digging isn't cheap
No. But it might be cheaper than building a large facility above-ground that meets all the necessary safety regulations for a nuclear reactor. And probably produces less carbon emissions in the process as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Essentially what is being proposed here is an artificial geothermal well. The cost of the drilling is offset by not having to pay for the construction of huge concrete buildings and disposal of secondary nuclear waste. Disposal of waste on-site would essentially be filling the well with concrete. You are killing two birds with one stone.
In addition, ground water is usually filtered through miles of sand, coal, and limestone. Well water is often radioactive and needs to be tested regularly because it has been filtered through uranium and thorium decay products. If such a reactor were to be breached, it's waste would not reach the surface unless it were placed in a mile deep spring that no one knew about somehow.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/natural-radionuclides-private-we...
https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/d...
Fossil reactors are just an example of the nuclear world we live on. There are also countless other nuclear materials in the earth's crust. It's part of why we have to test for nuclear contamination of our wells.
The destruction of one of these reactors a mile deep would be a blip on the radioactive material being unearthed. We would have to be careful not to place them next to existing aquifers, but they would be way more safe than surface plants which already have an amazing track record.
Digging isn't cheap if you wanted to drill a gas well for yourself. A mile would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million. A million is chump change when talking about a nuclear plant, which are priced either in the tens of billions or possibly even in the low hundreds of billions.
Groundwater is not a mile down.
Nuclear reactors cannot explode in the same way that nuclear weapons explode. But if they somehow could, a mile down isn't going to hurt anyone.
> This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
Did you read the same article as the rest of us?
Where does the "1 mile down" come from? That seems more like based on emotion than on science / engineering. If it isn't, I'd like to see some of the tradeoffs of different depths.
I could imagine that drilling this deep might be the most expensive part, so if you could get away with, say, half of the depth, that would be quite the advantage.
What do we know about the safety tradeoffs of putting a reactor that far underground?
I'm not trying to shoot down the idea, it's just so unexpected that I feel I haven't even begun to think of the right questions yet.
The general idea is probably "if anything bad happens", nobody will really care, we'll just seal the shaft.
https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...
>the pressure of water at a mile deep is 160 atmospheres, the same as that found in the thick pressure vessel of the standard PWR.
https://www.google.com/search?q=160+atmospheres+%2F+%281+kg%...
2. The idea is to use the earth as a substitute for the containment building, so as long as the cost of drilling are less than those costs, it would be a net.
3. Geothermal is not readily available at shallow depths everywhere. The deeper you go, the higher the costs. Also with some types of geothermal you run the risk of earthquakes, as they use the same process as fracking to develop the wells.
Unless the concern is that there's too little energy after going through the turbine that the water may condense and fall back down the "wrong side" of the pipe and add a bunch of resistance to the turbine.. although I'd imagine it might still be cheaper to do some one way valves and pump out the drainage pans while still being a net energy producer
Millimeter wave drilling should help make this more broadly useful
There are many to choose from now.
The high cost of nuclear fission plants comes from deliberate government, petro-corporation and environmentalist attempts to kill it off (usually funded by petrostate interests like Russia, Qatar or oil corporations directly).
I've nothing against green renewable energy and welcome it but we not only need reliable base load energy but lots more of it than we have now—and that base load will continue to increase at an exponential rate into the future (especially so with conversion to EVs).
Making a move to nuclear has almost become a necessity whether we like it or not. We've now three-quarters of a century of nuclear engineering experience behind us and it's pretty much sorted. It's not without risk but it's now about as safe as any of our other major engineering infrastructure.
The term "base load" is not that useful; it's just the amount of load which can be supplied by generators which cannot vary their output quickly, like coal power plants. An increase on "base load" only means you can use more of these slow power plants (coal, nuclear), instead of requiring more flexible power plants (gas peakers, hydroelectric, solar, wind, batteries); but you don't have to.
The simulation studies I've read show that the US can get to 90%+ clean energy with existing renewables and storage solutions quite "easily", and likely at a far cheaper price tag and much faster than if new nuclear was part of that mix at all. So what are you basing your views on that new nuclear has to or should be part of the mix?
We should deregulate and clear the way for fission startups, but I don't expect them to be able to compete with renewables+storage on either a cost or time basis.
My position is that nuclear energy should be part of the mix.
That said, I've struggled for years before arriving at that position. I say that as someone who once worked on the surveillance side of nuclear energy, my job was (as part of a team) to ensure that nuclear power plants/industry were safe and that nuclear materials were safely secured and not diverted for nefarious purposes.
It is just not possible for me to fully justify my position here as it would require a full-length blog to do so. I will say however that my above comment was based on a number of factors, the first is that despite some recent progress in fusion it won't be a viable option for decades. Second, the demand for power is increasing exponentially, as I've mentioned elsewhere (_ph_), we've been perpetually on the edge of just having enough power with precious little in reserve for many decades when in fact we really need much more energy than we have now (unfortunately, again, I cannot do full justice to that point here).
Third, this story—at least at face value—shows how nuclear reactors could be installed safety and quickly and at a significantly lower cost than traditional above-ground ones.
I'd suggest you watch Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube post on the problems and high costs of constructing of nuclear power plants in the present political climate. Essentially, I agree with her position but I'd point out that her video was made before this 'underground' proposal (personally, I've held the view for years that deeply-buried nuclear plants—if constructed property and with safety in mind—would be a pretty good solution in respect of all three key factors: cost, safety and speed of construction: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5EsBiC9HjyQ.
We need much, much more energy than we have now for advanced industrial processes—many hundreds of percent more energy per capita and its growth will be exponential. That's what will happen, like it or not—or it will in some places.
Society has a choice, tread water and keep its head just above to stop drowning as it's been doing for years or swim with the flow. On indications it seems the swimmers won't be the US or the West. I'm putting my money on newly developing countries who've no cultural baggage about such matters.
Yes, we will need more electricity, and renewables are the only way to facilitate that. They can be built up quickly and they are way cheaper. So if you want more power, you need renewables.
Positive feedback loop isn't needed for a nuclear accident to happen. Sure it's what happened in Chornobyl, but not in TMI or Fukushima. And from an engineering perspective Chornobyl isn't that interesting as an accident example because it's mostly a product of brainwashed egotic manager who had all the power over the engineers.
Also it's not always entirely straightforward to keep the void coefficient negative at every point of the operating cycle, especially if things go wrong: PWR have a negative void coefficient most of the time but not 100% of the time: when the reactor is cold you put tons of boric acid into the water to counteract the reactivity and avoid divergence, but at this particular time the void coefficient is positive because of the high level of Boron. Of course in regular events it doesn't matter because the reactor is off, but that's something that can also happen during an emergency situation where you inject a massive amount of boron in the water (there are scenarios where you do that).
But again, the reactor's power getting out of control isn't the biggest risk anyway, the biggest problem comes from the fact that residual power is still annoyingly high even when you've shut down your reactor and you need to deal with it. The fact that you can't just shut it down and everything's OK when something is wrong is the real pain of working with a nuclear reactor.
Source: I have a nuclear engineer specialized in immediate response to incidents and accidents at home.
And the high cost mostly comes out of the fact that we don't build nuclear reactors as series + the fact that we finance it at insane rates. Antinuclear activists have their responsibilities in that, but even without them I suspect most states wouldn't be doing the right thing either: nuclear isn't a good fit for neoliberal thinking anyway.
Pretty sure it's actually extremely interesting.
The test was considered such a non-risk that it required next to no oversight [1] [2]. If something that doesn't require oversight results in a nuclear disaster then something is wildly wrong with your regulations and design.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Safety_test
[2]: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...
You missed the from an engineering perspective part at the begining of this sentence.
Perhaps _now_ it's less interesting as the faulty design has been studied at least twice with computer simulations (and a lot more skepticism on the initial Russian presentation which blamed the operators).
[1]:https://www.iaea.org/publications/3598/summary-report-on-the...
[2]: https://www.iaea.org/publications/3786/the-chernobyl-acciden...
TMI also wasn't mainly an engineering problem: it was the way the incident reaction guidelines where written and how crisis group was set up that was the largest cause, and as such there has been little engineering changes following TMI but a lot of organizational changes.
But it has been addressed with governance rules, in my country's power plant the guy responsible for safety is hierarchically independent from the guy responsible for running the plant so the later cannot command the former and let his hubris destroy the plant.
With more heat the boron atoms (and water) get further apart. Fun times.
> the high cost mostly comes out of the fact that we don't build nuclear reactors as series + the fact that we finance it at insane rates
The UK has had a hard time getting this. Sizewell C is still pending a final investment decision (while we risk the loss of experience from Hinkley Point C), although the Regulated Asset Base model may help reduce the finance rates.
China appear to get it, mind you. 11 new reactors forecast to cost 33B USD, using experienced teams. But they have energy security issues.
Not only this, but with the Doppler effect, their ability to capture neutrons diminishes as well.
Nation-states don’t have any problem getting uranium…and weapons proliferation isn’t a concern with any nuclear power. In other words, these could be installed widely in suitable US, British, French, Israeli, Russian and Chinese locations with no concern at all.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4510010-plutonium-pits-us....
Also, there are a lot more ways to produce weapons grade nuclear materials now than there were in the 1970s when most of these weapons were created. The invention of lasers, high temperature superconducting magnets, higher quality centrifuge materials, and better particle accelerators have made the creation of weapons grade material way easier.
In other words, when it comes to weapons proliferation, we are so utterly screwed. Only political change will ever reduce the number of weapons in existence. Commercial power production isn't even a factor.
https://apnews.com/article/iaea-iran-nuclear-enrichment-stoc...
Another important example because they're at war, Ukraine. And in the vaguely possible event of an Asian Pacific war, Japan and Australia have no nukes, but that's more by choice.
If running reactors under the surface isn't significantly more expensive than surface containment then I think it's a wonderful idea.
Google tells me the largest geothermal power plant is in California and it's gigawatt scale and takes up something like 45 sq miles of space.
The other factor might be location flexibility. You can probably dig a mile down just about anywhere but geothermal needs access to magma chambers. Are those everywhere?
No, not really. Geothermal can work wherever there's a big enough positive temperature anomaly in the ground. Rift systems with hydrothermal heat can work as well as regions over a deeper magma plume.
Exploiting shallow magma chambers is only possible in a couple regions like Iceland.
And is that in as many places as you can dig a mile down? IS the temperature delta in those places on the same order of magnitude as when magma chambers are tapped? If not, gigawatt scale plants would take even more space, no?
1. Less dependent on local geology. Geothermal wells are well suited for hot, non-pourous (?) geology.
2. Might be cheaper. It can take years to drill the wells for a closed loop system (e.g. Eavor), less for a fracked geothermal well (e.g. Fervo). I imagine drilling a single borehole for this is way simpler.
3. Less water loss. Fracked geothermal well wells can be pretty lossy (20%?). If water supply is an issue your options may be limited.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-average-temperature-...
> The average temperature gradient for planet Earth is 20 °C per kilometre. In many areas around the world the gradient is higher, and the temperature increases at a faster rate with depth below the ground. With a temperature gradient of between 50 and 100 °C geothermal resources are more readily accessible. Above 20 °C geothermal waters can be used for direct uses like greenhouses, aquaculture and district heating applying heat pumps. Above 75 °C the water is hot enough to be used for electricity generation using binary cycle technology. Above 160 °C flash steam generation can be used to produce clean, renewable electricity. Source: Geothermal Resources Council
Obviously, that’s not a meter wide hole, but it’s clearly possible.
That is not really what the article is discussing though. They are talking about putting it down a drilled hole, and a mile is a very common depth for drilling. In a USGS publication summarizing deep wells in the US through 1998 [1], it talks about a dataset of more than 20,000 wells over 15,000ft (4,572 m), more than 1,000 wells over 20,000ft (6,096 m), and 52 over 25,000ft (7,620 m).
Drilling and putting a nuclear reactor underground, much shallower than the deepest coal mines, can be quite expensive and still be cheap as a part of the total cost of the nuclear power station?
What happens to the two one mile long pipes attached to the reactor?
On the other hand disassembling two miles of a segmented pipe like the ones used for oil drilling in an hour or two does sound pretty ambitious. Drilling pipes are - according to a quick search - up to 45 ft long, so one would have to unscrew more than 200 connections. One could use longer sections but that will probably complicate the handling at the surface and might not actually help in terms of time.
> Since the water column is a mile high, it would pressurize the reactor by its sheer weight, much like sticking it a mile under the sea, so no need for a pressurizer and the cooling system would be entirely passive.
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
Why is it cheaper to have this with a ready to activate shaft filling sarcophagus (and the redundant backup systems for that) vs doing it on the sea floor or land + a 0.1 mile deep hole?
Every once in a while some crazy idea like breaking down atoms to generate electricity works out and we're all better off thanks to it.
But molten salt ones are literally impossible to cause any harm.
Cant explode, cant cause uncontrolled pollution, can be safely decomissioned whenever.
But they are not cheap.
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
"Solid rock" feels like there's a lot of geological asterisks there. How about the casing around that mile-deep hole? Where do you pump all the inevitable leaks?
9 out of 10 startups go bankrupt, what happens to the hole if the company (or the project-specific LLC) goes belly-up? "Just fill it up" is a bit disingenuous and ignores how groundwater tends to seep into everything given enough dozens of years... Texas is littered with half-capped polluting shale wells that were just kinda left there when the wells stopped being productive and the project-specific drilling LLC was dissolved when it hit the bankruptcy-by-design phase of the corporate lifecycle.
Centuries of potential contamination feels like a risk that should have more than 2 sentences.
Let's set aside the safety argument. They're claiming $0.46 per kilowatt-hour for a technology they haven't developed yet. I believe that's about an order of magnitude more expensive than what wind can do right now. Heck, right now my local utility's website is reporting a retail spot price of seven cents per kilowatt-hour. Maybe paying six times as much is worthwhile for the reduced carbon footprint relative to fossil fuels, but if that's the argument then just say that rather than weakening your position by calling it "cheap" when it's easy to see that it isn't.
I also found this [1] chart from 2022 which has nuclear fuel costs around 0.6 ¢/kWh and fossil fuel costs around 3.2 ¢/kWh. So the 0.46 would be 1/7 rather than 6x.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html
No they're not, they're claiming 0.46 ¢/kWh, as in $0.0046/kWh. That is insanely cheap. You could completely charge an EV for under 50 cents.
My electricity is $0.11/kWh and ranges from $100-300/month depending on season. At $0.0046/kWh, that would reduce to $4-12/month.
A nuclear power plant is a nuclear rector plus a thermal power plant, i.e. a turbine. Even if the safety of the reactor is 100%, what happens if there's an accident with the turbine? How do you perform maintenance? Sure, you have elevators to move people up and down, but how do you move things that are several tons up and down? A typical fuel rod assembly is about 4-5 meters long. The efficiency of the thermal power plant is about 30%, which means you need to dispose of 70% of the heat coming from the reactor. With regular nuclear power plants you use cooling towers; how are you going to do this when you are 1 mile underground? Do you install some pipes that bring cold water from the surface? Sounds reasonable until you do the math and find out you need to move 10 tons per second. The pumps that need to push the water up will need to fight the gravity of a column of water one mile high and push 10 tons each second. The math is not that difficult (potential energy = mgh), such pumps need to have a power of about 150 MW. That's ignoring the friction of the water in the pipe. But that's a big thing to ignore for a mile-long pipe. Oh, and the pressure at the bottom is 165 bar, about the same as the pressure in the reactor. You can avoid this huge pressure by creating moving the water up and down in stages, but that complicates the engineering, and increases the construction and maintenance cost.
Those who oppose will simply keep coming up with new reasons not to do it. They will only accept a reduction in usage. Anything that allows us to maintain our existing level of energy consumption will not be tolerated.
Initially the $/kWh is actually one of the lowest cost services, but this hides the $9B subsidy the public pays for construction and the 30000 year waste stewardship.
Some people think easy solutions are without tradeoffs. Yet fission power only makes sense for remote regions and space missions.
Renewables overtook coal this year in some regions. As the economics are an unstoppable force, that will silence the hubris of those that like dangerous toys.
My bet is on goat carts for our future =3
For one thing, radioactivity is related to half-life. Basically the more radioactive something is, the shorter the half-life and therefore the less time you have to deal with it. When something has a long half-life, that is almost by definition less radioactive. And it's not so hard. Water blocks most of the worst radiation anyway.
More importantly, 10,000 or 30,000 years or whatever is just a really, really long time. Storing and "stewarding" the waste is already a sufficiently solved problem. All of the material your family would use in your entire life would fit in a shoebox, and can be stored in a few gallons of water safely. Borrowing hypothetical problems from that far into the future is an example of exactly what I'm talking about: an effectively un-addressable concern that serves only as a placeholder for "I don't want to. Use less energy."
The reason that solar and wind haven't fallen victim to this is that they don't scale well enough, and would force us to reduce consumption. If they were on track to increase our overall energy production and use, they would lose support.
"The reason that solar and wind haven't fallen victim to this is that they don't scale well enough"
That is a dumb lie, these have already exceeded non-renewable facilities in many jurisdictions last year. While not perfect in every locale, I like distributed solar+battery as they are resilient to localized disasters. Note, many in TX and FL have already shifted over due to faster <8yr payoff periods (i.e. an 18 year service life means near $0/kWh for 10 years).
Fission is a nonrenewable loss leader technology, and should be reserved for remote areas or space missions. =3
You have serious constraints in neutronics when constrained to a drillable borehole diameter and low-enriched uranium. The radial peaking will be high. May still be an ok tradeoff.
What a strange, science fictional way to describe fission! Surely it's not breaking down matter itself any more than burning wood or coal is. Would you say, about eating a sandwich, that it 'offers the promise of limitless energy by breaking down matter itself'?
It shouldn’t matter anyways, surely fusion will be here sooner rather than later…and possibly LENR.
The usual figure given is fission fuel is about 1 million times as power dense as chemical fuels like gasoline.
If it will put people at ease, then just do it so we can finally have nuclear energy.
EDIT: There's also the fact that your steam is fighting a 1mi vertical column worth of pressure.. If your steam at the boiler is limited to 600°F that seems counterproductive to put it 1mi underground?
To go a mile down you have to go past the aquifers and then anything that happens to the shaft after an accident causes the same problems.
Peoples hubris is very dangerous, but maybe Fusion will solve all our problems one day. lol =3
It's not too dissimilar from running a hydro energy turbine backwards.
Anything around water, acid rain, or anaerobic bacteria will fall apart in time.
All mines eventually fill with water, and collapse in time.
Putting the PR BS in a hole in the ground does not make it safer. lol =3
Why bother with the nuclear reactor, then?
YMMV - figure pulled from
Drilling Costs Estimation for Hydrocarbon Wells (2015) https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7569/jsee.2014.629...
that's a rough $2 million basement estimation (sans casing + headwork) with many complicating factors that can easily blow it up.
It would cause me no great surprise if "a sufficient hole"; widened, maybe three actual close holes for down pipe, up pipe, and reactor vessel, with casings and head mechanics, came to $50 million.
Your point stands, in the great scheme of capital projects of this scale the hole boring and fitting is cheap.
Sixteen odd years ago I tracked, with a group, every global mineral exploration activity and subsequent development. When it came time to launch a mine, deemed to be feasible, and raise forward capital for building plant and processing our lower bounds cut off point was $50 million US - anything smaller than that was too small scale to bring to the attention of our subscribers.
Capital costs for mining plants, power plants, oil and gas extraction run high - and the G20 costs for nuclear plants are fully in the billions.
I failed to see how one mile deep shaft is going to help that, standard boring or not
If you're wanted to dig a mile down for a massive piece of infrastructure, wouldn't geothermal be more price competitive at that point?
I mean part of the problem with meltdowns is the pollution of groundwater. "It's beneath the water table" yeah sure, there's no way fission products can go up a shaft. No way.
So what safety does this really address besides paranoia? I mean I guess if you have a runaway solid rod fuel reaction, you can just drop a bomb down there and blow the fuel rods apart.
Initially the $/kWh is actually one of the lowest cost services, but this hides the $9B subsidy the public pays for construction and the 30000 year waste stewardship.
Some people think easy solutions are without tradeoffs. Yet fission power only makes sense for remote regions and space missions.
Renewables overtook coal this year in some regions. As the economics are an unstoppable force, that will silence the hubris of those that like dangerous fission toys.
My bet is on goat carts for our future =3
If the pressure vessel fails they autoscram the reactor don’t they? I mean assuming they didn’t get hit with a torpedo.
The plasticity, or ductility, of rock increases at higher pressures and temperatures, making it harder to drill through it, thus making it rapidly more expensive for additional units of depth beyond a certain point.
I'm not sure where this idea came from. Perhaps from the mistaken notion that uranium, being heavy, sinks into the core? Uranium is actually highly enriched in the Earth's continental crust, by a factor of about 1000 vs. the planet as a whole.
That’s…not actually cheap? As a consumer, I pay less than half that per kWh delivered at peak hours.
Even the cheapest way to produce electricity nowadays (PV) isn't below 1 cent/kWh (production, not end-user costs) yet and your quote refers to only the costs of the fuel itself.
Consumers are now having a PV problem because they have to pay for their panels (I was asked to pay 800 euro per year). So, there is the incentive for many consumers willing to purchase a battery.
An alternative solution is the position of the panels. It is useless to have panels facing south, and don't use the roof, use the facade to improve the off season performance.
Either way you have to buy the panels. What am I missing here?