Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel
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Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success:
- ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures
- we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generations
- OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?
The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759 people. The earthquake was a terrible tragedy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it. Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted, always safely enclosed within the vessel.
Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon, etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless. See the section "Radionuclide release" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting Wikipedia:
No adverse health effects among non-worker Fukushima
residents have been documented that are directly
attributable to radiation exposure from the accident,
according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
Insurance compensation was paid for one death from lung
cancer (4 years later), but this does not prove a causal
relationship between radiation and the cancer.
Six other persons have been reported as having developed
cancer or leukemia. Two workers were hospitalized because
of radiation burns, and several other people sustained
physical injuries as a consequence of the accident.
This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").
Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.
It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_c...
Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths are the only dimension people use to compare with other electricity sources. You can't just put on a blindfold and ignore all of the other factors. Just because only a handful of deaths can be directly attributed, doesn't mean nuclear isn't an absolute nightmare when it goes wrong.
Long-term effects on health are disputed: http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor... http://www.fukushima-disaster.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/e... https://apjjf.org/thierry-ribault/4761/article
The nuclear accident cleanup cost is very high ad raising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
The primary source for that wikipedia quote argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.
Over 65,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity. One such death, for example, was 102 year old Fumio Okubo who lived 30 km inland and hanged himself after being forced to move for no good reason.
There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima\*, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide; so far, there has not been a single case of cancer linked to radiation from the plant.
That is prompting a shocking reassessment among some scholars: that the evacuation was an error. The human cost would have been far smaller had people stayed where they were, they argue. The wider death toll from the quake was 15,895, according to the National Police Agency.
Of the disaster-related deaths, 1,984 were people over the age of 65.
\* technically not "in Fukushima" but any deaths over the following seven years in the group evacuated from Fukushima.
During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ).
This is biz as usual: after a war many armchair experts, especially those acting upon one of the parties, are quite sure that "tackling this was easy". During the event, they are nowhere to be found.
It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue.
Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable, due to extreme bushfires destroying every building, would the stress on the elderly be any less?
An evacuation triggered by a nuclear major accident seems specific to nuclear to me, in the sense: if, instead of this nuclear plant, some field occupied by wind turbines or solar panels were build, there would be no need to evacuate.
> Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable
No human being can control nor counter this sort of event. We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.
Or add passive safety measures to nuclear power plants. Fukushima failed because it was still generating too much heat, but that excessive heat couldn’t power a turbine to cool itself down.
That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)
No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.
So let's see :
- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).
- They don't want nuclear because politics.
- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")
- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.
The two main end results of this policy are :
- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...
Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?
Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.
No. Because Fukushima. At the end of 2010 Germany enacted a law extending the operating life of nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened and all political parties in Germany closed nuclear reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
> sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated
Facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy
> The only other solution left is coal,
Facts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41768679
Yes, coal is a disaster. Nuclear risks (major accident, waste, proliferation...) is a potential disaster.
> deaths in neighbouring countries, every year
True, and quite sad. No nation yells because each is a culprit: emissions caused by France's fossil fuels (transportation, industry...) is far superior to those of the German gridpower system. We can agree that all this is a catastrophic state of affairs. Germany's nuclear phaseout is a drop in the sea and wasn't conducted due to some whim.
> Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer
The amount of victims of past accident is controversial, therefore this is controversial.
We'll never know. Doing history fiction, a more probable outcome would be a lot of people dying by "natural causes" in the next months. We talk about places that were mostly ghost cities for a decade, for some reason.
This common discourse of "but nobody died ever by the direct impact in the left eye, of a radioactive atom called John, on a Thursday", seems a little ridiculous frankly. If we have a pool of people that died, and we dismiss all this people one by one with different tricks and shades of "can't prove, not my fault", yes, of course, "nobody" died.
And Santa Cancer doesn't exist, is the parents.
They know that is false, we also know that is false, and they know that we know it, so what's the point of keeping saying that?
What is questionable, as you point out, is the application of different tricks and shades of "can't prove, must be nuclear" to claim all deaths in the pool as a direct result of nuclear.
As others have pointed out there are similar yearly figures for tenuous "coal deaths" as there are here for seven years of post disaster "evacuation deaths".
If we review average annual percent change on Thyroid cancer incidence, there was a more or less stable value between 2008 and 2011. Then in 2012 there is a sudden increase of 10,8% on Fukushima, versus a 3,7% for the whole Japan in the same year [1]. Some increase is normal in a population that is growing and aging but a jump, not so much.
We even have a control population: The Tochigi prefecture (at the South of Fukushima and bordering it). This landlocked prefecture has a big industrial complex, including a strong sector of X-ray machines makers. Tochigi has the lower increase on Thyroid cancer of the three between 2011 and 2012 (3,2% increase). [1]
The death ratio didn't changed, but people that is diagnosed with cancer does not die immediately, so just looking for mortality increase that year is a deceptive measure.
So, something happened in 2012 that increased Thyroid cancer on Fukushima more than in the rest of Japan.
Lets assume that we forget all about the elephant in the room, and past experiences where radioactivity accidents typically increased thyroid cancers. How would you explain that? Any alternative hypothesis?
-----------------
[1] Shibata A, Saji S, Kamiya K, Yasumura S. Trend in Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Fukushima From 2008 Through 2015. J Epidemiol. 2021 Dec 5;31(12):653-659
(The article covers only up to 2015 to remove artifacts from 2016 when the way to report cancer changed, causing another increase on the registers).
Compiling statistics about a population is more difficult than doing so for a well-specified group of workers, and given the treatment of workers... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/special-report-he...
The obvious answer would be that radioactive iodine-131 entered the food chain and that strontium-90 also was being ingested by dairy cattle and was being concentrated (biologically magnified) in cow’s milk.
As demonstrated in Australia by Hedley Marston.
This seems unrelated to what was being discussed .. the direct attribution of deaths amoung the excavated cohort to nuclear causes.
Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?
> Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?
This is a matter of debate. During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ). The extent of the implemented evacuation was considerably inferior. Nowadays, after the battle, according to some pro-nuclear no evacuation was necessary.
Much of the damage caused by natural events can be avoided with proper planning and prevention, but they cost money. Most natural defenses against extreme weather are also removed in order for developing land or extracting natural resources.
Is there a debate about those raw facts?
https://damfailures.org/case-study/oroville-dam-california-2...
> handled with care > proper planning and prevention
I agree. Everyone can fail. Letting very dangerous tiny material undetectable without a complex equipment and active for years getting out then be dispersed on huge areas by wind/rain/... is a nuclear exclusive. Moreover the most risky type of renewables (dams) has more inertia (it cannot trigger an accident in mere minutes, it is more robust). As we now have industrial renewables there is no reason to deploy nuclear anymore.
Come on.
The ocean already contains a billion tons of uranium and is mildly radioactive, the cannister and components are far too heavy to float or get carried much by currents, water is a fantastic radiation blocker (a few meters away and you're quite safe) and carries away exces heat and there's almost no life on the abyssal planes.
I really should get around to properly writing up all the details and background knowledge in a blog post at some point... (the above is missing a lot, including references, common objections and numbers)
Something I found out recently was that the city of Brussels discharged raw sewage into the rivers until 2007. This from a wealthy city at the heart of the European project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
Radioactive waste disposal is seldom paired with a cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps this is because the benefits are harder to quantify.
Does anyone know how many lives will be saved by spending an estimated 4.7B EUR to commence retrieval of the low and intermediate level waste from the Asse II mine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
4.7B EUR could provide humanitarian aid to many around the world, saving lives and enabling yet more to more fully reach their potential.
In the case of the Asse II mine it is not clear how strongly connected the water at the mine is to water at the surface. Given it is a salt mine I would not expect a strong connection.
> Everyone has consistently treated mining waste as an unavoidable side effect of mining
Yes, there are better and worse ways to dispose of it. Tailings are a huge problem and have caused many a dam disaster. Plainly Difficult Youtube channel dam disasters makes for sobering viewing. https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/playlists
No wonder that dumping nuclear waste to river and oceans is cheaper than having to safely store it for at least a couple of centuries.
Dig into the rising costs, and you find root causes like 3 mile island showing the industry it needed to increase maintenance spending. It wasn’t some arbitrary overreaction but simply the damage accumulated enough to cost a billion+ dollar asset. Thus much of that “increased” spending is simply asset preservation.
If we can't responsibly keep track of the waste we're producing then we shouldn't produce it. I'm pro-nuclear, and I think we can do it, but we need to be the kind of civilization that can plan beyond the next quarter first.
[1] https://oceanliteracy.unesco.org/ocean-exploration/, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/exploration.html
Now, seriously, screwing with ecosystems we know nothing about is a very bad idea, even if for no other reason than we being unable to study them after we turn them into radioactive deserts.
Personally I think deep bore hole disposal in geologically inactive regions makes the most sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
If you were to commit such a large amount of cash - a reparation for the disaster - would you spend it all on this?
Do you mean that the Fukushima nuclear accident dumped locally in a few days 0.45% of all dumped nuclear waste during the last ~80 years?"? If so it seems non-negligible to me.
> 20 years earlier (nothing on tectonic timescales) this wouldn't be up to much discussion
Not sure about this. Maybe ~50 years ago, and even so the accident at Three Mile Island (1979) didn't pollute much but triggered quite a bunch of discussions.
> would you spend it all on this?
Yes, because there is no other realistic way: it is about losing citizens' trust and having to cope with other nations' claims, whatever the real risk. Associations of women were created to periodically measure radioactivity in various areas! In Japan! No government exposed to such distrust can decide to ignore it. A stain was made, it has to be cleaned.
AFAIK in theory the people knows what is good for itself, and therefore making voters happy is governing well.
ObQuote: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
TMI was an expensive mistake but the public wasn't at risk.
The reactor itself is high enough to be safe from tsunamis.
Nukes, as with rockets, are complex. Many things have to go right and keep going right for them to operate as intended.
(See Rickover's "Paper Reactors" paper for a similar take on this.)
Another factor that contributed not only to Fukushima but other inundations following the Tohoku earthquake was that in response to the megathrust-fault slip, the east coast of Japan sank about a meter lower.[1] Engineers building seawalls failed to take this into account, as I understand.
I'd first realised that such quakes could lower land on the continental plate of megathrust faults when looking over satellite imagery of Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami. Regions along the coast were flooded long after the tsunami had passed, which I realised must have come from a lowering of the land itself.
Seattle and the Pacific Northwest may face similar issue should their Big One occur eventually.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003808061..." <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003808061...>
And so on.
Pile up enough binary choices, each individually cheap as dirt, and you've got a large problem.
Even dirt in quantity gets expensive to manage: dams (earthen), mines, levees, landslides, etc.
Nukes are complex with variance conditions that are extreme to the extreme.
The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central government's third supplementary budget of 2011.
Subsidizing Japanese companies to develop technologies that may be exported elsewhere isn't that bad of a deal actually.
Do you think the technology already exists off the shelf already?
> does the tax payer get any of that privately held revenue back in return?
Japan's taxpayers also happen to be Japanese people employed in these companies, so they get their share of that revenues. And the price doesn't even account for the taxes that are paid back to the government directly.
I don't think there is any need to try justify a screw up on this level as being good. Fukushima was a disaster, economically and for the image of nuclear globally.
Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade. This was a disaster, politically, economically and environmentally. Yes some good will come from it, but ultimately, it was better off not happening. All that money could’ve and should’ve went on new and safer power plants.
French experts stated it clearly:
1/ 'Cour des comptes' (France's supreme audit institution) established the cost of the nuclear fleet at approximately 228 billion € (2012 Report "Les coûts de la filière nucléaire"). It was contested and is probably under evaluated because some costs were paid for on various budgets (defense, scientific research...) but isn't too far fetched.
2/ IRSN (Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire: Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute") stated that the cost of a single major accident may surpass 430 billions € ( https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/crise/cout-economique-... ).
Worse, we store untreatable chemical waste forever (see Germany's many chemical waste dumps), unlike nuclear waste which will eventually become safe.
Chemical industry also produces very dangerous waste (Seveso...), I agree. This cannot serve as an excuse for nuclear, especially as, nowadays, we know how to industrially obtain electricity from renewable sources (no major accident similar to a nuclear's one, nor such dangerous waste).
Unfortunately the two sites have no english entries in Wikipedia, I just put them there because they are the two largest, but still mostly unknown to the general population.
With the exception of the locals, who fear for them leaking into their groundwaters. Which may be unfounded for Herfa-Neurode because that is sitting in a real stable formation, for now...
...which says nothing about larger timescales, which we are dealing with here, because much of the stuff stored there has no 'half-life', and is way nastier than anything which caused Seveso.
The other site, Ihlenberg, formerly called "Schönberg" ('nice Mountain', get it?) has a more interesting history. It's located right next to the former border between West-Germany and East-Germany, seperating them from the end of WW2 until reunification.
In those times they buried much western trash for money in rather 'hush-hush' and corrupt ways there. The nastiest ones. They were poor and needed the money. What exactly, and how much, at which position und which conditions is still unknown, and not easy to assess, because that probing would disturb the other nasty stuff which it is embedded in.
The fear there is much more founded, because it happend in rather uncoordinated ways, because of the 'hush-hushness' due to corruption, and that site is not stable. If it leaks, it has the potential to poison the whole Bay of Lübeck.
It also sits on something like a geologic fault line roughly spanning from Kiel in the Northwest to there, caused by glacial rebound of Scandinavia. Slowly and gentle for now, but one never knows, right?
That was that. As to an excuse for nuclear...
Do you really think all that oh so sustainable green shit is growing on trees? Maybe look into so called 'superfund sites' in the USA, and how they overlap with semiconductor production sites, which also applies to solar cells. Japan should have had some of those 'oopsies', too. But probably not spoken about, because the nail that is standing out has to be hammered in, right?
Wind? How long do they last? What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?
Their disposal after use?
The large fundaments they need in the form of concrete, and the OH MY GAWD ALL THAT NASTY CARBON!1!! that is causing? Not to speak of the disturbance of ground water tables, when they have to go 15 to 40 meters (or even more) deep for stability.
Geothermals? You have much of that. Why is it used so rarely?
Sayonara.
As already stated by Kon5ole: we get the benefits and future generations gets the burden.
Nuclear (decommission, hot waste...) plays the same game.
> Do you really think all that oh so sustainable green shit is growing on trees?
No, but AFAIK we know ways (some are expensive) to alleviate part of their burden and the net result cannot be matched by other type of sources.
> Wind? How long do they last?
It depends. https://www.tvindkraft.dk/stories/a-new-nacelle-back-end/
> What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?
Nothing is perfect. Nowadays a coating is used ( https://weatherguardwind.com/leading-edge-erosion/ ).
> Their disposal after use?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783908
> Geothermals? You have much of that. Why is it used so rarely?
Because in some places it can trigger earthquakes. Renewables is a set of solutions, none is perfect (one-size-fits-all). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Are you aware about the current economic and demographic situation in Japan ?
It’s not good here. That money could’ve went to a lot more useful things. Also remember this was a man made disaster. The plant was not upgraded (as recommended) to meet new safety guidelines, because, as if a mega tsunami would actually happen, right ? Then right after the event the operator was downplaying the extent of meltdown for too long. The PM had to step in and get a proper response team organised.
And others on this same thread are trying to use the same disaster to paint nuclear as expensive.
Full story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
What works is local and managed by a few people, any Big Thing is a colossus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... feet of clay collapse is all the more painful. This state of affairs doesn't seem to benefit to nuclear (vs. 'renewable sources').
We're talking about moving backup generator to the roof level work:
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2012/03/why-fukushima...
When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver, weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and kicked infrastructure spending down the line.
The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years.
When the tsunami hit and Fukushima #1 lost power and was at risk of meltdown, TEPCO was ready to scuttle the reactors by dumping seawater in them. It would have rendered the reactors unusable, but meltdown would be prevented.
The Japanese government at the time, coming from the Prime Minister (Naoto Kan) himself, denied TEPCO from scuttling them because the government wanted the reactors usable. TEPCO was begging for authorization but it was not meant to be.
So what happened was the meltdown happened and the reactors became unusable anyway.
The blame was then scapegoated on TEPCO, because elite politicians surely can't and shouldn't be prosecuted for their ineptitude.
What happened at Fukushima #1 was a human failure that did not have to happen.
Bittersweet revenge was that the incumbent party at that time, the Democrat Party of Japan, lost the subsequent general election and the party subsequently fell apart.
The nuclear (TEPCO) people in the field were and are amazing, and it is a cardinal sin they got scapegoated for political purposes.
"Everything would have been fine if it weren't for the politicians" is not a path forward. These sorts of disasters will continue to happen.
Isn't it always true, for such matters?
As we cannot avoid committing errors it seems better to prefer a way without any risk of major accident (very dangerous radioactive things, difficult to cleanup, travelling long-distance thanks to wind, rain...). No wonder renewable sources quickly gain traction.
Humans working in the nuclear industry are "the" nuclear industry. By definition all economical sectors are arranged around human workers. Remove each human and the industry will lose its reason to exist.
I mean. If the story is true (which I have my doubts about). Then the simple change required would have been to make it clear that TEPCO has the sole authority to decide to scuttle the reactors. The politicians could have been morons going on a power trip all they wanted, and the reactors would have been safely scuttled.
If you are a firefighter you wouldn't ask the government if you should pump gasoline or water on a fire. Why did the people managing the nuclear reactors gave the government an opportunity to choose wrong? (Or rather, why was the system set up such that it was not already clearly defined under which technical circumstances the reactor must be be scuttled.)
For the simple reason that the 3/11 Tohoku Earthquake defied and rewrote essentially all the geological/maritime scientific and political expectations up to that point.
I doubt the same errors will happen today, but hindsight is 20/20.
Don't worry, experts are perfectly able to maintain a high level of safety (nope), then to assess correctly during an accident (nope: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ), and also to manage the aftermath (nope... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/special-report-he... ).
PM Naoto Kan infamously declared "I know nuclear!" in unilaterally ordering TEPCO around during the crisis and ultimately denying their request to scuttle the reactors. Nevermind that TEPCO had the finest nuclear engineers Japan could muster at that moment.
For his valiant achievement of causing a nuclear meltdown and turning back the clock on nuclear power for the better part of a century, PM Naoto Kan was rewarded with merely the loss of his premiership, loss of his parliament seat in the subsequent general election (regained in the same election by proportional vote), and the victim card (sympathy from guys like you).
TEPCO's engineers meanwhile got dragged through the judicial mud before they were finally cleared a few years ago, the train to repair their reputation having left the station long ago.
A solid source detailing the story would be useful.
TEPCO ignored his order to stop pumping in order to avoid re-criticality, and Kan soon accepted TEPCO views on the matter: This seems sourced to me (no mention of scuttling anything): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoto_Kan#Fukushima_nuclear_ac...
> was rewarded with merely the loss of
I don't think so. Japan was, then, in a political turmoil with 4 prime ministers from September 2006 to June 2010 (when his mandate began): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Jap...
He passed a bill to promote the use renewable energy. This is sufficient, even for this ex nuclear enthusiast, to be blacklisted and villified.
61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation in nuclear and saving the environment 2024 means acting fast. Nothing about nuclear is fast.
[2] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/ausbau-erne...
PS. because it automatically comes up: no, Germany could not phase out coal before nuclear because there are much more jobs connected to coal and no politician would survive such a fast exit. How important it is, can be seen from the name of the commission tasked with the coal phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a €1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be happily written off for the sake of the planet.
A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now.
For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heating purposes. Not enough happened in Germany in the last years electrifying them.
Right. Coal stayed online where it would have otherwise gone away. That was true for close to a decade.
> gas use electricity production is just a minor
And growing. Look at your own chart. The change in natural gas electrical generation is about as large as solar’s entire controbution.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
(this was later un-done in 2009 and then redone in 2011 which is the cause of confusion).
IE. Germany got INCREDIBLY lucky that China went hard into renewables and dropped the price of them dramatically. Because they did basically replace or plan to replace all the nuclear plants with coal plants.
Lets have a look at how the German electricity production has shifted over the years:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
- Fossil gas: 2011 -> 2023 = stable.
- Coal: 2011 -> 2023 = large reduction
At the height of the energy crisis when half the French nuclear fleet was off line due to corrosion issues.
Germany temporarily reopened a few mothballed coal power plants to keep the lights on in France.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.
Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.
But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.
The causality here seems debatable.
Cheap Chinese goods which take market share from German goods aren't just cheap because of cheap energy.
In Spain, where we didn's shut down nuclear energy nor have oil or coal, energy intensive industry is also threatening or shutting down (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/alcoa-threatens-to-shut...). The threats are barely hidden "subsidize our costs or else...".
Those require a large amount of baseload energy.
This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time...
Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend.
Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years, which doesn’t look like it’s directly substituting nuclear — but surely it could have gone down had nuclear be kept around?
(Personally, I wish politics would have pushed harder against coal and simply ignored nuclear for a couple more decades. But political feasibility is important ofc, and I don’t know how hard of a sell that would have been in 2010.)
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR...
Note that France has lost more nuclear generation than Germany over this period.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...
Maybe it's not always clever to use US-logic on the rest of the world.
Germany is not Texas.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(passage from Dec. 2018 Physics Today; Texas natural gas is even cheaper than that now)
The yearly balance (imports - exports) is key.
472g of C02 per kW/h as we speak[1]. 20 times more than France and its nuclear.
A resounding success…
Ironically there was a spike in coal usage in 2022, that was caused both by the war Russia started against Ukraine and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
Centrifuge enrichment and improved extraction techniques (high quality ore in Canada or else in-situ leaching) mean CO2 emissions are very low.
Would you care to provide references for CO2 emissions from already built nuclear power stations (preferably not the infamous StormSmith and Sovacool papers)?
For new-build, Hinkley Point C "not an EPD" make interesting bed-time reading. https://www.edfenergy.com/sites/default/files/hpc_-_life_cyc...
What can be done and what is being done are miles apart. Investing into new fossil fueled power plants is not what the best thing Germany could be doing, nor is it what they should be doing. In 20 years there will be a large fleet of fossil fueled power plants and people will be again arguing that historically they burned too much of it but nothing can be done retroactively. Changing the current plans of new fossil fueled power plant would not be a retroactively change today, but it will be in 20 years.
They aren't “optimistic”, nuclear simply doesn't emit CO2 directly, and indirect emissions are dwarfed by direct emissions of fossils fuel plants.
> What can and is being done is to replace coal as quickly as possible and that is happening.
It has been happening for the past 13 years, and there's no end in sight. We'll be able to have the same discussion in 13 years with only marginal progress (maybe they'll be around 200g/kWh at that point if we're being optimistic…).
> and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
And so what? French nuclear has been filling the gap for defunct German nuclear for more than a decade now … And Germany could have filled this gap with coal even if they had much less regular coal use thanks to their nuclear.
There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years, both because the CO2 prices have started to move the balance and also because the buildup of renewables has been accelerated again. And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
It may cause a “lot of emissions” per kilogram of enriched Uranium, but it is very low compared to the amount of energy it produces because you really need little Uranium to produce tons of energy (that's also why all French nuclear fuel waste over 60 years of nuclear industry fit in a single room).
> There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years
This has been the narrative for the past 10 years, yet here we are. And in ten years Germany will still be producing way too much CO2 from its coal plants…
> And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
So is France, but that doesn't mean there's no gap to fill when the wind isn't blowing…
An ICE car is 20-30% efficient, an EV is 90% efficient. Generally we are looking at a grid expansion, but it is not massive.
See this amazing chart on rejected vs. useful energy:
An EV is 85-90% efficient with power coming out of the batteries. However, the charging efficiency of the batteries is at about 80%. So the overall efficiency is 80% of 90%, or 72%.
No, the Fukushima accident was decisive. Just before, at the end of 2010, the operating life of nuclear reactors has been extended by law. The Fukushima happened and public opinion reversed, wanting an as-quick-as-possible nuclear phaseout. Not a single political party could save those reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.
Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.
Presumably these are from very long-lived isotopes, so will continue to emit at this rate for the forseeable future.
In contrast, the fission products (from Chernobyl) tend to have short half lives of the order of a few days, giving a short burst of radiation. Caesium 137 looks to be the most troublesome isotope in the long term (with a half life of 30 years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...
Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid those when blowing stuff up. Because they don't have containment vessels.
And then see how difficult it is to clean up an accident like Fukushima where the containment mostly held. It feels like playing with fire.
The others created big headlines, but the real human casualties were smaller than a bad traffic accident.
The core argument here is "you never know!". And that argument is always true. But people only apply it to things they're afraid of.
You’re comparing rubber ducks and battleships
Much safer to burn the rest of the planet instead.
We're just adding more risks to the mix. And externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
> externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
is this the "nuclear would take 20 years" we've been hearing for the last 60?
I understood that one benefit of molten salt reactors is that the fission products were easier to process or burn.
Edit: "MSRs enable cheaper closed nuclear fuel cycles, because they can operate with slow neutrons. Closed fuel cycles can reduce environmental impacts: chemical separation turns long-lived actinides into reactor fuel. Discharged wastes are mostly fission products with shorter half-lives. This can reduce the needed containment to 300 years versus the tens of thousands of years needed by light-water reactor spent fuel."
If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
So, if electrification cannot be done on this, industrial society as we know it is doomed, and nuclear cannot save it. Unless you're thinking we're going to have nuclear reactors in our mining vehicles...
Uranium has to be mined.
It really does appear that believing in renewables as a way to perpetuate industrial society at scale has become part of some people's identity, and regardless of any actual study on the subject, this belief appears to be a necessity to be part of non-deplorable human society.
Nuclear reactors are a safe way to electrify as much as can be and reduce the body blows societies are going to take in the coming decades. Some industry is not doomed, and social stability can be maintained, at some cost, if and only if we use all technologies at our disposal for what they are, and calculate the risks and rewards right.
Facts are sadly unmoved by any faith, and the real path forward as painful as it may be, is only open to those that accept that they can always be wrong, and will always have to learn more.
Please pfdietz cite your sources and please prove me wrong.
The lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgy0rW0oaFI&list=PLMDQXkItOZ...
The (already provided in a previous comment) EROEI study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...
The one specific slide about the low EROEI of solar panel is in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJvoAm__WVtumohStkF4KwT66cS... The 2.7 value is from 2019, as calculated for Spain, this one slide is in english. Panels have not made a x10 EROEI explosion in the past 5 years, a lot of the energy costs in that calculation are independent of panel technology improvements.
What would a disinterested observer make of this?
They'd look for objective evidence to determine which of us is closer to reality.
For example, they might look at what the world is doing right now. What is being installed, renewables or nuclear? Presumably those who are spending money are trying to get the most bang for the buck.
If we look at that, renewables are soundly trouncing nuclear. Even in China, that country that is held up as the last best hope by nuclear advocates. New installs (which reflect the current conditions better than total installed capacity, which is a lagging indicator) are massively in favor of renewables there and elsewhere.
The nuclear advocate who explains away nuclear's troubles as due to the selective omnipotence of greens (selective, since they don't seem to be doing nearly as well on other issues) must really stretch their conspiracy theorizing to explain such a widespread result.
I will also note that you didn't explain how nuclear can power mining in a way that renewables can't.
Of course if we ignore the need for batteries. Renewable advocates conveniently forget to include that in the calculus (there’s active action in progress to strip mine the ocean floor creating untold ecological damage to try to keep up with requirements for batteries). And they also tend to ignore the fact that renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes. Nuclear fission remains the best option for large scale power and is still cheaper than directly comparable renewables with batteries included despite being divested from raising overall costs.
Hopefully we get fusion soon and renewables and fission become a thing of the past.
They are needed for transportation, whatever the way we produce electricity (even with nuclear).
> renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes
Why? There is no difference between nuclear-produced electricy and renewable-produced (or battery-stored)-electricy.
> Hopefully we get fusion soon
Does some optimistic scientist hope to enjoy an industrial prototype before 2050?
Indeed. So? There are more and more vehicles, and the average amount of electricity they store (reflected by their autonomy) grows. One of the reasons is well-known: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
> no forward movement
This isn't true, many experiments are running ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid#Research )
Even EDF, France's leader of the nuclear industry, field-experiments it: https://www.edf.fr/entreprises/transition-energetique/mobili...
> JB Straubel, then chief technology officer of Tesla Inc, discounted V2G, claiming that battery wear outweighs economic benefit.[87] A 2017 study found decreasing capacity,[88][89] and a 2012 hybrid-EV study found minor benefit.[90] A 2015 study[91] found that economic analyses favorable to V2G failed to include many of the less obvious costs associated with its implementation. When these less obvious costs were included, the study reported that V2G was an economically inefficient solution.
The great thing today is that we don't need to accept radioactive releases from either nuclear power or coal. Simply build the cheap scalable option instead: renewables.
Please name an industrial ready-to-deploy fast reactor. AFAIK there it doesn't exist, therefore its (after decades of expensive R&D in many nations) just a vague hope, not a potential part of the solution.
Russia BN-600 is obsolete and was so leaky (sodium!) is isn't even funny. It was superseded by the BN-800 which started in 2014 and has various problems (most related to fuel, the core of this challenge). This path is officially paused (a planned BN-1200 project didn't start). If it works satisfactorily, as you implicitly claim, please state why it isn't declined (other units built) while Russia tries another breeder architecture (BREST-300, using lead instead of sodium)?
India is even farther away, encountering major difficulties with a prototype ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor ).
China is also exploring ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600 )
Nothing industrial and ready-to-deploy, as I wrote it.
Phénix is not pertinent, it worked perfectly but was a research reactor (small, expensive...).
Superphenix never reached the industrial stage, even the enterprise exploiting it (NERSA) never said so. They simply declared that they were willing to continue and hoping to reach the goal (13 years after first reactor divergence, 24 years after project start, with gigantic amounts of money poured at the project).
You mentioned China. Last year, China brought more than 100x more PV on line than they did nuclear (on a rated power basis; levelized basis maybe 30x as much.)
So, if your fathers started coal plants, you close them, stop paying for them and can forget about them. this is not at all the case if your fathers started nuclear plants, not only do you have to pay, your children have to pay, all their lives, and all your grandchildren, and so on.
What bugs me is the tendency of proponents to pretend that the decision is no biggie. It is a biggie. At least understand that, then we can have a rational discussion about it!
Energy storage solutions and infrastructure for generating synthesized fuels (hydrogen and others) will require investments, but those investments will be a gift to the future. We will bear the burden of building the infrastructure now, but future generations will benefit from what we have built.
Nuclear is the opposite, we get the benefits and the future gets the burden.
Nuclear costs are way higher than anyone has ever accounted for and they are kicked to future generations. This is a fact and we can do better.
The right thing to do is surely to spend now on tech that continues to pay dividends in the future. Maybe we ourselves won't see the benefits directly in our wallets but the future will.
I suspect you don't live in e.g. Tuvalu? Or in a country experiencing desertification like Spain?
My issue is that this statement is wrong, though. All the greenhouse gas from coal that was burned in the past, and all the coal we're still burning, will still be around and is still going to slowly bake the planet we live on for the next millenia [1].
Effectively, coal emissions are only considered this way because, after we stop producing, we stop seeing the smokestacks and we forget that the byproducts are still there. This is also true for most other pollution sources: industrial sites with heavy metal pollution don't magically clean themselves when the factory closes. WW1 battle areas are still deeply polluted and some are still unfit for agriculture. "Eternal" chemicals are never going back to the oil well. And, for us technologists, ewaste does not magically disappear [2].
It's really maddening that some people develop an acute perception that radioactive waste is "forever", but somehow fail to understand that the same is true for a very large part of the waste we create now, for which nature hasn't (over millions of years) evolved organisms able to eat them.
[1]: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41765334
OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.
> Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up
Read about the concept of vertical migration
If so, Wikipedia's first para makes it clear that that migration occurs at vastly shallower depths than an ocean trench.
To achieve the same effect of leaving a barrel of nuclear waste in the middle of the sea (hoping in vain that nothing will move from there) we could better to put nuclear dust in the way of a stampede, or leave the barrels in the beach before the tornado season. Would achieve the same effect but saving much more money.
Geological studies of the locations where the nuclear waste is burried show that it would take millions of year for the isotopes to escape.
Meanwhile, the effects of low dose radiations on health are vastly exaggerated. Every industry is releasing pollution in the ecosystem that are way more toxic and dangerous. And these get barely any attention for some reasons.
https://archive.nytimes.com/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/...
Also note my phrase "bury them". Radwaste is not some magical Sealed Evil in a Can. If bound in compounds with substantially higher density that the ocean sediments, and emplaced a few tens of meters below the sea floor, then gravity will quite strongly discourage its upward migration.
*EDIT - I'm referring to the US-centered anti-proliferation lobby. Though "national security establishment" might be a better term. And yes, its ability to influence French, Japanese, etc. domestic nuclear power policy is much more limited.
These is a constant whataboutist argument from nuclear apologists, but it falls apart when examined closely, as all pro-nuclear power arguments do.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-t...
https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-...
The same is true for solar panels. These are NOT unique problems to renewables, of course, except they tend to produce more waste compared to their energy output than other methods at the moment.
Recycling is a big area of research, but is not yet especially CO2 positive for solar versus just burying them, and non existent for wind.
The point isn't that the problem is impossible, but that these things are overlooked and green washed.
> The same is true for solar panels
I doubt so, details will be welcome.
Instead, they supply 1/5 less power than they were originally rated for, which means the system needs to be expanded or replaced to do what it was provisioned to do.
This next round of criticism is also weak, it seems to me you just have an axe to grind.
1) System cost
Sure, it's high. That's because we spend huge amounts of money on energy. ANY system to replace fossil fuels will be expensive, in the trillions of dollars.
But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables.
2) Recycling
At worst, we can bury the stuff. Recycling it is not necessary. After all, the amount of material is small compared to everything else we do in society, and it's not some special kind of waste (like high level nuclear waste) that requires some particularly unique handling.
3) Lithium and cobalt
Lithium is abundant. If you hadn't been paying attention, the price has been crashing, as it pretty much always does after a price spike of a mineral resource, when the price spike encourages investment to increase the amount available. As for cobalt: probably the same is true, but why do you think cobalt is needed?
4) poison the environment
This is just emotional bullshit. No, renewables would not "poison the environment". You beclown yourself with this nonsense.
5) absurdly high energy cost
As opposed to those still burning fossil fuels where they are foisting off the cost of the externalities on others? Ignoring those external costs doesn't make them go away.
In any case, the place that's normally pointed to is Germany, where they made a large investment in renewables from 2009-2012. Solar was much more expensive then, and they are still paying that down. But the costs of renewables crash with time, so pointing to past expenditures is grossly misleading. Going forward renewables will be much cheaper. That's why we're seeing so much investment in them now globally.
One can tell the intellectual barrenness of the pro-nuclear position when you have to resort to this sort of deplorable nonsense.
So to clear the air I propose you look at this substantive set of answers:
https://youtu.be/Z4teA8ciuRU?si=9L-_bHawmM8MI5UA (cc to english should work ok)
> But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables.
I agree that the nuclear power stations are more expensive per kW of generation capacity. But that does not mean that the overall system must be more expensive (fallacy of composition?). It would depend on the quality of the intermittent resources, their location, demand profiles, cost to build, cost of transmission and storage and so on.
Production costs: renewables are way cheaper than nuclear ( https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-... ) and this is not a new trend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Last but not least... there is no running project.
Therefore writing "US nuclear capacity has the potential to triple from ~100 GW in 2024 to ~300 GW by 2050." in a title is for sure easy, however there is now sign of such potential to become anything else.
As long as the source is not consuming any fuel nor producing much waste any EROI greater than one seems OK to me.
> why they assume 4h storage?
AFAIK because they consider that electric vehicles' batteries will be useful (through V2G).
> What you'll do in case both solar&wind will be low?
AFAIK the idea is to interconnect at continental scale, as this is useful whatever the type of sources (even if it is mainly nuclear), then to benefit from diverses wind (or even solar) regimes.
> overcapacity will need to be subsidized heavily because excess solar capacity will be unused a lot of the time
Not with an electric fleet of vehicles, to begin with. Green hydrogen will also absorb part of it (for industrial applications, electric backup...).
> if it'll be used less and less, youll need subsidies
This will kill nuclear (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg ).
> AFAIK because they consider that electric vehicles' batteries will be useful (through V2G). - lol, kinda interesting assumptions, especially considering that it'll still imply additional costs
> AFAIK the idea is to interconnect at continental scale - lol, at such scales that sounds as a bigger pipedream than cheap h2 emission free generation
> if it'll be used less and less, youll need subsidies
> This will kill nuclear (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg ).
This will kill basically any peaker plant be that fossil, hydro or nuclear. That's kinda the point. With a renewable grid you'll need huge overcapacity of both production, peaker and storage that'll be rarely used. No matter the technology - any of it will get extremely expensive the higher the renewable share will get. Even Norway starts facing similar problems since they import cheap renewable in peak production, meaning their hydro is earning less
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Not all opinions are created equal.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/01/the-man-in-...
After having gotten 0/5 in terms of correctness on actual facts, maybe tone down the sneer?
No, at scale recycling doesn't become a "real issue" in the sense of being a showstopper. It would be nice if it could save some money (recover aluminum frames, say) but it's only a "nice to have".
"High enough concentration" is dependent on technology. Like other mineral resources, one can expect lithium extraction technology to keep ahead of demand. The doom and gloomers on this sort of thing are never right. Stationary storage doesn't even require lithium; there's a large variety of storage technologies that could be used instead (including some like pumped thermal that use nothing more than cheap materials like common steel.)
> solar panels, read the docs please
Empty nonsense. Solar panels are not toxic. Please stop making things up.
> again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3
Completely wrong.
About your "Completely wrong." I hope you take the time to consider sources, for example:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...
As you wrote about "well debunked" studies then please please^3 debunk this one. Thank You
The current fad of buying old nukes to power data centers is going to be a learning experience for the tech industry about taking on the liabilities entailed.
They import about 90% of its energy requirements. This includes nuclear fuel. So this is far away from "perfect" if you can get wind and sun without having to import it.
Nuclear fuel is both relatively plentiful, and can be sourced from a multitude of countries, both Eastern, Western, and, most importantly, unaligned. A lot of countries have economically viable (for power generation) uranium reserves, but do not exploit them because global prices for it are so low.
It differs significantly from oil in this respect.
So it seems not to be such an easy solution.
It gets even worse for poor countries which jumped on the Rosatom train being fully dependent on Rosatom tech, fuel, personal.
Even if it wouldn't be for that, it's far away from the availability of sun or wind.
Here is a nice read on the topic:
https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/04/16/russia-is-earning-b...
This is desperate, keeping alive an outdated technology. France slept on the change and now has to do everything to keep the show running.
> You'll basically have the same problems with renewables if china would ban export to eu/us
The solution would only include scaling up existing technology which is already there. Technology which doesn't require safety measures compared to nuclear. Technology which isn't that expensive. It would actually be fabulous if they'd do that because maybe countries like Germany could regrow their potential in this sector. They used to be on the front of it before the Merkel goverment killed a whole sector.
So yeah...it's not even close.
Nuclear has peaked, and its share knows only one way. Down [1]. It neither has become in any way more significant better nor has it become cheaper or faster to build.
Meanwhile, renewables, got better, cheaper and faster to build.
Nuclear is tech from the past. We needed it once. Now it's clogging up the grids, wasting taxpayer money and leaving waste behind for generations to care about.
how calculate yourself how much fossil fuel you need to power 1 GW power plant for half a decade, and how much CO2 emissions will you generate?
How many rail cars of coal Germany will need to generate 1 GW 24/7/365 for 5 years reliably ?
it is just unfair comparison, nuclear is several orders magnitude better in all aspects compared to fossil fuel and renewable - just due to physics of the process. Nuclear is capturing strong and weak forces, while combustion is capturing electromagnetic force with piss poor thermal efficiency and losses abound.
The only reason countries fumble nuclear energy is because they dont invest enough into new designs and constructions and still employ old design plants.
If there was as much investment into new nuclear plants as it was in renewable tech - we would have solved many of our energy needs long long time ago.
This is not a real concern for renewables.
> Nuclear is capturing strong and weak forces
Other (way more practical and determinant) parameters are less enticing. For example: it 'burns' uranium and produces dangerous waste.
not an issue at all, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, bunch of other nations mine and sell uranium. Whenever there are big mountain ranges, there is uranium. and it is cheap as a commodity
Nuclear now produces, worldwide, less than 10% of electricity (which is less than 2.2% of total final energy).
Double the reactor fleet and each new one will only produce under current conditions for 60 years (in other words it will probably be quite difficult to finance).
Canada and Australia pertain to the Anglosphere, therefore if nuclear enjoys a 'Renaissance' in the US they will provide uranium to their friends first, and will not provide it to any nation not aligned with the Anglosphere. For quite a bunch of nation Canada and Australia aren't dependable providers.
Kazakhstan can be subdued by Russia (yeah, I know, their current stance is apparently defiant, however recent history is quite clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan%E2%80%93Russia_rela... ) or even China. Uzbekistan, also extracting uranium, stands in similar shoes. Who wants to have to beg Russia for uranium?
Read on: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/business/economy/russia-n...
https://www.hydesmith.senate.gov/hyde-smith-questions-us-rel...
> bunch of other nations mine and sell uranium
Not really. Niger, Namibia? China and Russia are more and more in control there.
> Whenever there are big mountain ranges, there is uranium. and it is cheap as a commodity
Not at all. Please source. In many places obtaining it is very difficult due to local conditions, ore grade...
During the 'uranium bubble' (around 2007) prospection hugely intensified and raised a mere 15% new known and inferred reserves ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_bubble_of_2007#Impact ). Who wants to bet billions on this?
When it comes to commodity trading - $$$ trumps everything.
uranium reserves are plentiful, given that you dont need a lot of Uranium to recharge the plant
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-rese...
the most importantly: for Uranium producer there is zero reason to withhold uranium. Like what are you gonna do by stockpiling radioactive rock ??? You just gonna lose your customer to another country. Isn't it better to get rid of radioactive rock and get $$$ instead?
even OPEC cannot agree to maintain oil production to keep price stable, there is absolutely ZERO chance someone can cause trouble on uranium market
This single fact shows, according to you, that no embargo can ever happen in the future. I abandon this "conclusion" to you.
Uranium reserves are to be considered in current conditions, all reserves are not immediately available nor equivalent (ore grade...).
> there is zero reason to withhold uranium
There will be more and more reasons to do so if it becomes scarce and needed by superpowers.
> even OPEC
Because the superpowers are at ease with the current situation (shale oil plays a major role here). Oil already triggered wars.
Every country that has nuclear weapons does have nuclear reactors, and supply is basically not an issue. The technology is the main moat (uranium enrichment & reactor tech & turbine tech & missile tech)
Doing so may trigger a market tension.
France reprocesses only part of its fuel, and only 1 time.
> the problem will be the same
Uh?
An existing fleet of reactors is moot without uranium.
An existing fleet of renewables just works (it only needs wind, sun, geothermal activity...)
and you need to replenish uranium fuel like once in 5 years - so this is not an issue at all for nuclear energy
I disagree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783584
> you need to replenish uranium fuel like once in 5 years
At best. Then, if you cannot obtain uranium, your reactor is just a pile of hot waste.
> France does have several years worth of fuel
Indeed, 'le stock stratégique', about 9 years at best (counting the average amount of uranium already present in reactors). 9 years at best for an overall of your gridpower production system... good luck with this!
Plus oil rich countries lobbying LNG as a greener alternative for nuclear is another fail
And energy production is not some science experiment where you can control all the baseline conditions. It exists within a complex mix of economy, environment, social system, manufacturing etc. There is no scientific method for navigating that. And your industry will probably ignore it if there was. Politics is all we have for deciding complex interrelated questions.
Perhaps it will take generational change (and stopping the propagation of anti-nuclear tropes). Perhaps it will take societal selection (where those who invest will out-compete the others).
Second, it's the nuclear insurance. The scheme is codified in the Price-Anderson Act [3]. Basically, all the nuclear power plants need to purchase insurance for $0.5 BN per reactor. If anything happens, and the cleanup costs exceed this number, then the rest of the industry has to chime in, and the total is up to $16 BN per reactor. So, if 3 reactors were to have a core meltdown, the industry would have to pay close to $50 BN. The total estimate of the Fukushima cleanup stands currently at about twice that, so one can say that $50 BN is too little, but it certainly is not nothing.
Edit: the efficacy of the Price-Anderson Act was tested at the Three-Mile Island. Virtually no taxpayer money was used in the cleanup [4]. Of course, there were other costs incurred, such as in collecting data, doing investigations, upgrading regulations and enforcing them, but that's how Government should work.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2132/ML21322A288.pdf
[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/fukush...
According to [3] the industry is liable for 16b per reactor but the industry doesn’t have that much money to pay out. Entergy for example operates its nuclear plants in a subsidiary that generates about 100 million in revenue per year. They would have to raise the price of nuclear electricity by orders of magnitude to gave any chance of paying 16 bn, let alone the 10x more for a Fukushima-esque incident.
So when things go pearshaped the operators will undoubtedly go bankrupt, and since the cleanup is very mandatory the taxpayers end up paying basically everything.
Also consider who has paid for the decades long paperwork around Yucca mt, who pays the military that has had guards stationed at closed plants for decades (rancho seco) and so on and so forth.
In short, even in the US, the hidden costs of nuclear power are immense.
I think you are under the impression that if a company files for bankruptcy they can discharge debts they owe to the government. Good luck with that. They will get their power plants sold to the highest bidder, and the proceeds will be used to pay whatever cleanup cost they owe under the Price-Anderson act.
Here's a link to a story that BP paid more than $60 BN for the cleanup related to the Deepwater Horizon spill [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/bp-deepwater-horizon-c...
No impressions here, surely you realize that if a company has no money, they won't get money just because the government demands it.
>Here's a link to a story that BP paid more than $60 BN for the cleanup related to the Deepwater Horizon spill [1].
But BP has lots of money. Nuclear operators don't.
I also doubt that coal includes the health costs associated with many decades of emissions.
The odds of some weird future generation digging this stuff up for bad reasons already adds enough incalculable costs.
I found this interesting. I wonder how many of the ICs onboard the robot are radiation hardened, and how many are just COTS with the hope they'll last for the brief mission.
The idea being that failure is bimodal: most stuff fails very quickly, _or_ after a long time, but rarely in the middle. So they just do 100 test cycles in a messy test environment.
ICs for "normal use" also got tests like this, but generally the test suite was a bit nicer. The rad-hardened ones got way nastier tests done to them, and the yield was (of course) much lower. So you charge way more for them.
Radiation hardening is, well, harder. It typically means some combination of different semiconductor processes (often silicon-on-sapphire and/or larger feature sizes) and added internal redundancy (ECC memory, TMR, watchdogs, etc). All of these require that the rad-hard parts be manufactured separately from the commercial ones; some require that the part be designed separately as well.
I just might not be sure on the "space-rated" things being "radiation-hardened" or if it's more just "well they're gonna be more tested".
Sometimes the vendor will add a little more to the substrate that doesn't increase cost much but does provide a little bit more radiation tolerance. Other times there are certain things the customer must do like constantly rewriting registers. It's not perfect but you can save a lot of money taking an off the shelf TI part and flying it versus spending tens of thousands for something of similar performance but with a guaranteed level of radiation hardness beyond what you actually need. I've used a commercial TI ADC that works really well in a radiation environment (perhaps as long as 5 years in GEO) despite not being sold as such. We just decided to screen it to see how well it performed and based on that test data, we made the decision to fly it. I'm not sure who's idea it was but something about the design of the chip led us to believe it might perform decently. TI was not involved and was at first a little concerned when we told our sales rep we were planning to fly it.
Older chip designs use larger features that generally perform better in a radiation environment than newer designs using smaller features. An old 74-series logic chip might actually perform just fine when it comes to heavy ions but may not live as long as something like a 54-series that has a larger substrate that can absorb more gamma over time.
Another method is flying unscreened radiation hardened parts, they were built to a certain standard but you buy them without all the extra testing to save a few grand because you trust the vendor has a good process.
[1] https://diakont.com/nuclear-services/radiation-tolerant-cctv...