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No to Nuclear Power

reason.com

17 pointspsawaya46 comments

Even if the article is right about the cost of nuclear energy (for which it provides zero evidence), it is ignoring some major points:

- peak oil: eventually (probably not in a distant future) oil is going to become too expensive. What then?

- coal causes horrible pollution

- natural gas is non-renewable, just like oil

- nuclear power technology hasn't stagnated in the 70's

On a more empirical note, I live in France and energy here is much cheaper than anywhere else I lived (and this includes public transportation, which runs mostly on nuclear power in Paris). My home country, Portugal, has destroyed its industry with a government-subsidized windmill scheme. 70% of your energy bill there is tax.

Yeah, this article reads like a propaganda piece. Littering in little bits such as "Surprising as it may seem, the United States still generates around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants." It's like the author WANTS you to think that nuke plants are worthless.

Also, yes nuclear does have its associated costs and risks, but they are capable of making shit tons of power, on the order of magnitude that solar and wind and hydro combined are not yet capable of doing.

Also, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and nobody thought any the worse of it that there is a nuclear power plant at three mile island.

And this is just my guess, but I would be a big big cost of nuke plants is the regulation and permit process. Not that this isn't necessary, but I would wager it's a reason the costs are so high still.

> Also, yes nuclear does have its associated costs and risks, but they are capable of making shit tons of power, on the order of magnitude that solar and wind and hydro combined are not yet capable of doing.

Wind and solar yes, hydro no. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Quebe...

Hydro is capable and proven in GW-scale generation.

Hydro is great and proven technology where you have the geography for it. The Three Gorges Dam, for instance, provides up to a staggering 22.5 GW. The limitation is geography.

Unfortunately most of the good large-scale hydro sites were exploited long ago.

"Yeah, this article reads like a propaganda piece."

Reason is largely funded by oil interests like the Koch brothers (one of them is on their board). They've been running pro-oil for at least 6 years or so (when I saw the first of the articles). Reason is a non-profit so you can see their contributors, and it's not hard to find other publications calling them out for conflict-of-interest issues.

It also misses that fossil fuels enjoy massive government subsidies, some explicit (tax credits, etc.), and many implicit (not having to pay the massive costs of the pollution they generate). Yes, coal is really cheap, but one reason it's really cheap is because we allow people who burn it to pass on a huge proportion of the cost to the public at large.

Any article discussing the cheapness of coal without mentioning the high hidden costs we pay in the form of pollution is really misleading.

There's also the mountain-top removal and other forms of destructive mining for coal, that will be a loss to future generations for thousands of years.

Also, no mention of thorium (or other liquid-salt) reactors, other novel reactors such as WAMSR, or the fact that a coal plant dumps much more radiation into surrounding environment than a nuclear plant ever does.

It's cheaper for the consumer directly, but it costs a similar amount to produce (according to this article, which is again not cited anywhere). The difference comes in the government subsidies, which the consumer pays for only indirectly.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that small semantic difference.

> coal causes horrible pollution

Source? There is a lot of FUD about coal, but modern generation facilities ("clean coal") produce little more than water vapor. We have enough coal to power the country for centuries, and modern technology to have clean power generation. The only problem spot is in mining it, and that's a much more trivial problem to solve than issues like fracking, nuclear safety, peak oil, etc.

I seem to be missing some terms in the "clean coal" equation:

C + O2 --> H2O

maybe it's more like:

C + O2 --> 2(H2O) + 6n + 4p (but I think this would be endothermic, to the tune of a few million EV here and there)

If somebody can supply the missing terms in this "equation", then I learn something. Otherwise, take it as simple sarcasm.

Oops. Should have been ... + 6n + 2p (barring some heavy water creation)

Coal is not pure carbon.

Begging your pardon, but what are you smoking?

SO2 and NOX filtration are great, and significantly reduce emissions (~80% seems to be a common figure cited by FGD and SCR manufacturers), but mercury and radionuclide emissions, especially in fly ash, are still a real thing. It also doesn't address the lifecycle problem: we don't really know whether sequestration will work, and you still have to extract and transport the coal itself.

As far as I know the investments in coal-process carbon capture have yet to be seriously implemented, which is probably why coal-fired power plants are still responsible for 20% of US CO2 emissions. :-/

As an engineer working on expensive and safety-sensitive systems, I really have to disagree with everyone claiming (without evidence) that the high cost of nuclear power stems largely from over-regulation.

My experience has been that good engineers genuinely care about building things safely. And we burn through a lot of money doing so.

Every mark on every blueprint gets checked and rechecked by multiple, well-paid engineers. We go through elaborate and time-consuming testing procedures. Multiple layers of redundancy are built in.

All of this costs. And the greater the danger, the more of this kind of stuff we have to do. Nuclear accidents are black swan events. Though unlikely, their impact can be huge. So for nuclear power, the engineering requirements are extreme. This is as it should be.

If nuclear power were deregulated, the industry would still have to spend boatloads to provide adequate safety. And if the industry instead cut corners, they'd eventually get bit by another disaster, and the business would once again stagnate.

This, by the way, is coming from a guy who doesn't work in the nuclear power industry. I'm just extrapolating from my experience with safety-sensitive engineering.

The author is in a tough spot. Nobody is really really sure a free market system can actually build black swan proof things. If your competition can be slightly less safe and therefore charge less money that solution will find its way into production. You know, perhaps more than anyone else in the thread, that we can increase reliability a bunch of ways, but they're all expensive.

It's easier, from a libertarian point of view, to sidestep the issue. So, the author says this problem is irrelevant in the real world, cause nukes aren't feasible.

> The main reason no new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States in 30 years is that they have proven to be poor investments

Uh... no. The main reason no new nuclear power plants have been built in the US is because 3 mile island and chernobyl scared the shit out of people.

Both of those incidents were caused by people going outside the safety protocols. Nuclear power, just like anything else, is VERY dangerous if you ignore safety.

Potential conflict of interest here. The author is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a think tank affiliated with the Koch family, who make their money in oil and gas (among other things).

Not reason enough to throw it away, but perhaps to suspect the absence of any evidence to back the cost claims.

Just checked the same stuff.

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

What is missing in the original article and what some "I'll just leave it here (bar of consumption vs. bar of green production)" comments omit is the grid.

The electricity is not some component part which you order in China, stock it up in thousands in your warehouse and wait until you need it.

The total electricity production and consumption must be absolutely equal in ANY. GIVEN. MOMENT. If you are not generating enough, the generators would be overloaded, start slowing down and bad things would happen (frequency would lower, your own generators and/or power lines between countries will go out of phase and bang, you have a nice large several-country-wide blackout). Similar things happen when you generate too much.

Therefore, mentioning the current AVERAGE green production per day and consumption per day is totally out of reality, as the "base" energy is still provided by the dreaded nuclear, peak oil and very dirty coal power plants. In order to cover the consumption with the "holy" green energy, the capacity of such power plants would have to be several times the current consumption in order to generate the energy for times when there is no wind, no sunlight (night!), etc. AND many storage plants (e.g. pumped storage) have to be built. And one pumped storage plant alone (without the power plants providing the electricity into the storage!) cost the same as adding the same net power capacity in nuclear, which goes by the projections until the next scheduled shut down, no wind onsets, etc.

Also, please do not be fooled with the "Austrian model" - ban nuclear energy in the constitution and import (nuclear!) energy from surrounding countries. Or with the "German model" - promise to stop nuclear power plants and: a) use "green" government subsidies to start COAL power plants instead (yes, environmental funds are being used to build new power plants of the most dirty kind!), b) overload surrounding grids (Polish, Czech) to dissolve peak effects of current, very unstable, "green" sources, c) start inventing crazy things like using home water heaters running on fossil fuels (!) controlled by computers to generate electricity into the grid when the green sources are not enough...

Whenever anybody is speaking about noes to nuclear power or green sources, these issues should be foremost addressed. Otherwise it is the same beating around the bush, as when biofuels are governmentally subsided and made mandatory by law to be mixed into ordinary fossil fuels, but it is kept secret that the agricultural vehicles running on the fossil fuels, spreading pesticides and fertilizers made from fossil fuels, use more energy than is finally made in the "biofuel". However, this happens in some other country across the globe, so it is none of our business and it is very "green" in our "bio"fueled country...

Source: electrical engineer controlling the power grid of a European country.

Since I live near DC and work in the energy field, I occasionally get the pleasure to attend seminars on nuclear power. I'll preface by saying that I know practically nothing about nuclear power. That said, people seem to be very pumped up about Generation IV reactors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

No mention of thorium fission reactors, that would be far cleaner and would consume 232Th which is far cheaper and more abundant than 235U.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Thorium fission cycle, the first five minutes of this Creative Commons film give a good overview with a more detailed exploration of the topic later in the film:

http://thoriumremix.com/2011/

Yes. Thorium is the yummy chocolate and sprinkles donuts version of todays nuclear reactor. All the benefits and almost none of the drawbacks.

You're talking specifically about liquid fluoride thorium reactors. Other types of thorium (or thorium-uranium mix) reactors exist, and are in commercial use now. Canada's CANDU reactors, for example, can run on thorium.

They don't exist, do they?

Not at serious production scale yet, no. There have been molten salt reactors, and there have been thorium reactors of various types, and many commercially-operating reactors now are capable of running wholly or partially on thorium, and pebble bed reactors can run on thorium fuel if you're clever with the pebble handling (or willing to mix in uranium), but at the moment the nuclear plants that are ready to build are primarily pressurized light water reactors running on lightly enriched uranium.

The strongest source in the article appears to be Moniz and Kazimi 2009. Not sure if I've tracked down the one they're referring to, but the MIT Nuclear Power Update, on which they are coauthors (http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/nuclear-update.sht...) states:

The 2003 report found that “In deregulated markets, nuclear power is not now cost competitive with coal and natural gas. However, plausible reductions by industry in capital cost, operation and maintenance costs and construction time could reduce the gap. Carbon emission credits, if enacted by government, can give nuclear power a cost advantage.” The situation remains the same today.

... citing increased construction costs across the board, increases in interest rates during construction of recent plants, and a decline in the cost of oil and gas costs after a spike in the mid-2000s. Their base case suggested nuclear at 6.7 cents/kWh, and coal/gas at 4.3/4.1. With carbon corrections, coal/gas rises to 6.4/5.1. With capital corrections equivalent to coal plants, nuclear falls to 5.5 cents/kWh.

Keep in mind that US data on nuclear efficiency is limited because we haven't built any new reactors in the last 30 years. We're running plants a generation (and a half) behind current technology, and they're still this efficient. Meanwhile, extracting gas and coal is becoming more difficult, and not likely to get any easier. Just take a look at the economic feasibility studies of Alberta's tar sands.

MIT's opinion?

In sum, compared to 2003, the motivation to make more use of nuclear power is greater, and more rapid progress is needed in enabling the option of nuclear power expansion to play a role in meeting the global warming challenge. The sober warning is that if more is not done, nuclear power will diminish as a practical and timely option for deployment at a scale that would constitute a material contribution to climate change risk mitigation.

Honestly, the phrase "clean coal" should have have been clue enough to stop reading. :-/

Coal plants pump out TONS of radiation into the air, far more than living near a nuke plant causes not to mention megatons of CO2 (coal is the range of a ton of CO2 per megawatt, if not a little north of that)

They put out regulations in March that basically made fossil fuel plants require a redesign before constructing more of them (Gas currently has a small enough CO2 footprint)

The costs are regulatory. Just cut out the NNSA oversight and nukes will be cheap.

edit

ok, unsubstantiated assertions are bad. Here's just one example of regulatory overhead that other types of power don't have to deal with,

"Since it may cost $300 million or more to shut down and decommission a plant, the NRC requires plant owners to set aside money when the plant is still operating to pay for the future shutdown costs." straight from the nrc http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/decommissio...

The OP shows this not to be the case. US costs are in-line with French costs, while the US has much greater regulation than France.

Is it possible france's costs are higher because of all the other stuff they provide, like free health care and six weeks of vacation?

The op blew off 30 years of thinking on the expense of nuclear power with a reference to an unlinked paper. Sure. It's possible nukes are just kind of expensive "because", but there's nothing compelling in that article to change my thinking that it's regulatory cost.

The money put aside to pay for decommissioning is actually a pretty minuscule part of the cost; that's all included under operating costs, which are lower than coal's, i.e. very cheap. A much bigger problem is the delay and uncertainty introduced by a chronically backlogged and red-tape-infested NRC. Think about it this way: building a modern giant nuke plant takes a lot of money, and every month you're waiting for approval is a month you're paying interest on that money. Interest on loans is a huge part of the construction costs of a nuclear plant, and one of the harder to predict.

Say no to moronic articles like this. There are ways to make nuclear power better, just because some governments fail doesn't mean it's impossible.

Fossil fuel kills more people than nuclear power, the reason people seem to ignore it, is because nuclear disasters kill a lot of people in short time.

This article should not be taken seriously because it fails to examine the possibilites of nuclear power, and by that it fails to backup its claim that nuclear power should be totally rulled out.

Several omissions in this article, for example compared to oil, uranium is available from more stable trading partners with huge reserves (Australia).

this article is garbage at best. clear bias from the very first sentence and only argues from a current cost structure perspective.

tl;dr argument: currently existing nuclear power plants produce electricity that costs more than using coal

my comment on this argument would be that I find it less persuasive than the article seems to want it to be.

I think it's irresponsible to just say no to nuclear power wholesale. The holy grail of nuclear energy is cold fusion, of course. But in the meantime, we can get safer nuclear energy by using thorium in our reactors instead of uranium. The reason why uranium is used over thorium is because uranium has applications not only in energy generation, but also in nuclear weapons. Uranium was more lucrative to mine than thorium because governments around the world bought so many of it to create so many bombs.

Here is an article explaining some of the advantages and drawbacks of using thorium as a nuclear power source:

http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/

Cold fusion is the ultimate clean energy, but until that is accomplished (if it can even be accomplished), we shouldn't bury our heads in the sand with regards to nuclear energy. Thorium isn't very clean energy, it still produces radioactive waste like uranium reactors, but thorium reactors have the potential of meeting our energy requirements while being safer than uranium reactors, so there's less of a chance of a Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima happening.

The idea behind nuclear power isn't "cost-effectiveness", you fucking idiot. It's about staying away from energy resources that fuck up our planet and our atmosphere. This world's thirst for energy has gone far beyond the capabilities of oil, gas and coal to provide without seriously damaging our planets infrastructure. Nuclear accidents can be prevented with proper care and maintenence, whereas "the moment we stop being able to produce oil" (whatever you want to call it) is GOING TO HAPPEN at some point, and we've seen the horrible effects of coal and gas on our ozone already.

Regardless of your views on nuclear power this article is a load of BULLSHIT and I wish I could vote things down on HN.

You could vote things down if you behaved properly ;)

While the parent post wasn't behaving properly -- not adding anything to a rational debate -- it's not true that he could vote things down.

Newbies can't down-vote comments, it's true. But there is no down-vote for articles themselves.

I feel your pain, but apparently the exact form of your response was considered rude. Rephrase and repost? (hint: replace "bullshit" with "nonsense" - people are less offended by that, and it means pretty much the same thing; etc)

Picture oneself readings ones' comment aloud on the BBC :-)

"The author apparently seems to have missed the likelihood that current resources may be nearing a depletion curve in the near future, and is rather dismissive of the environmental damage attributed to these sources. One must wonder if he is perhaps seriously short sighted."

Something like that (feel free to add just a bit of acid, for flavor, at the very end)

Because the energy grows on trees and it will be enough to sustain our civilization after it runs out of coal and oil to burn.

I will just leave it here: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16... and http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c18/page_10...

"Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" is a great book, but I always wondered about using a 1,000 time horizon. I don't expect the development of fusion power anytime soon, but I'd be very surprised if it took more than 200 years!

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