Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any way?
Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.
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.
These is a constant whataboutist argument from nuclear apologists, but it falls apart when examined closely, as all pro-nuclear power arguments do.
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.
> 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-...
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)
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
> 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
No, your "Advanced Nuclear - Pathways to Commercial Liftoff" plays the usual "we benefit from failures because we learn" card, and concludes with promises "The next AP1000s would also realize substantial cost reductions". This is not IMHO solid, especially given well-known pertinent experience (about gaining from experience!), such as https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
V2G seems solid to me and to most experts (even France seriously studies it!).
The continental scale ('copper plate') is an official objective in many continents, and already actively and for quite a while pursued: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Network_of_Transmissi...
> With a renewable grid you'll need huge overcapacity
Not at continental level ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... )
Unit 4 proved that work units in a given project, sharing the same lapse of time and space, can benefit. Extrapolating it to a whole set of projects is another matter (see the referenced study).
> a continental scale grid
Already exists and is continuously extended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Network_of_Transmissi...
> dunkelflaute
Its real impact (surface, frequency, duration...) is vastly overstated. In a glimpse: https://x.com/JonaSalKupper/status/1707035071394238889
> huge overcapacity
You didn't source this. This vastly depends on many parameters. Moreover as renewables machines are cheap, recyclable, and can be installed in unused places (or even protect them, as offshore wind does for oceans) you have yet to show which challenge this 'huge overcapacity' stems.
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.
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.
Elsewhere, with more reasonable boundaries, one finds EROEI is much higher, and has been found to be better than for fossil fuels. An EROEI of about 8 for PV in Switzerland, for example (and Switzerland is not the sunniest place on Earth; the EROEI would be even higher at those locations; it also becomes higher as renewable technology advances, for example with longer lifespans and thinner PV cells.)
That EROEI can't be bad should be obvious. Energy is only a small fraction of the cost of making renewable equipment. If EROEI were bad then renewables could not be as cheap as they are. That they are being sold so cheaply debunks the EROEI arguments directly.
And isn't coal responsible for all that concrete nuclear plants there are built with? The vision of a nuclear-powered world implicitly assumes concrete will produced in some other way; this is a harder task that replacing coal electricity with renewable electricity.
If the world and industrial civilization are going to survive, it's either nuclear or renewables.
Also note that you seem to mean new-renewables (wind and solar) when you write "renewables". At this point and for a long time the large-scale and frequent renewables are hydropower and biomass, that are renewable, but are not new.
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.
Show me one model that does work with any technology, please, any source anywhere I promise I will review.
Mining to get renewables to anything like the GWHours needed is very significant, look at the graphs in the data I provided
Instead of any kind of data that would show me how I am wrong, all the data I am getting is downvotes and wordage.
Are these arguments what led you to the belief, or are they rationalizations you've tried to construct after the fact? They don't appear to be things that a skeptical, rigorously rational person would have come up with.
For copper, as with many other underground resources, discoveries eventually decline over time. It's similar for oil: the peak of annual discoveries of "conventional" oil fields—everything except shale oil—was 60 years ago, and 50 years ago for gas.
Additionally, the copper content in new mines tends to decrease: it is now about 0.5% on average (it was ten times higher a century ago). This means that to extract one kg of copper, you need to extract, crush, and process 200 kg of rock. The higher this number, the more energy is required for a mine to maintain the same production.
For the current production of 20 million tons of copper per year, a few billion tons of ore need to be processed annually—more than for iron! Incidentally, over a billion tons of rock is also processed annually to extract 3,000 tons of gold.
The International Energy Agency has long pointed out that copper production may start to decline in the coming years (even though more is needed in its decarbonization scenarios). A 15-year forecast is reasonably relevant because it takes this long—or even 20 years—to bring a new mine into operation after discovery.
It's not just about permits: roads must be built, a power network for high-power machines, water supply and wastewater treatment facilities, processing plants, etc.
Thus, the production from existing and planned mines is fairly predictable over the next one to two decades. Is it serious if there's less copper?
Maybe, for electrifying 1.5 billion two-ton vehicles. For having only half or a third of that fleet consisting of small vehicles (an electric bicycle requires 100 times fewer materials than an electric car, and there are, of course, intermediate possibilities), maybe not.
For energy, the economic world has not understood that the signal of its decline won't be an indefinite price increase but a contraction of "physical" production (happening in Europe since 2007). A decline in energy means a shortfall in production, hence incomes, leading to less energy but less solvent consumers, with a new price that could settle "anywhere."
For a systemic metal, it will be the same: reduced supply will result in decreased material production, but not necessarily an indefinite price increase. The economy is primarily about the physical!
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.
... didn't at the time (circa 2015) like V2G because it competed with its Powerwall project. This is a completely obsolete consideration: https://zecar.com/reviews/2024-tesla-model-y-bidirectional-c...
> decreasing capacity
This is true. However this is to put in perspective with the financial impact: batteries are (from a technical viewpoint) more and more able to cope with this and charging during cheap electricity times then partially discharging when electricity is expensive will reduce the overall cost of the vehicle.
> A 2015 study
Obsolete.
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."
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.
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?
You’re comparing rubber ducks and battleships
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.
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...
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.
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.)
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).
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
So at least 15 years of effort to get one plant online during which time the country will continue to pump CO2 to the tune of 70% coal in their electricity mix. CO2 that will, as you say, continue to bake the earth. Nuclear is a terrible choice for decarbonization.
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.
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.
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/...
> 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.
*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.
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.
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).
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.
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...)
> 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!
Some recycling operations (past contracts) involving Russia also had to be maintained during the current embargo.
No major problem for now, indeed.
However a war or a nuclear renaissance may abruptly lead to challenging conditions, if superpowers need more uranium.
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.
No such risk with renewables.
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)
Short version: the amount of uranium needed to build an impressive arsenal of nuclear weapons is way, way lower than the amount needed to produce a fair part of gridpower for years.
> Every country that has nuclear weapons does have nuclear reactors
Yes, because a reactor is needed to 'cook' uranium (in order to obtain high-grade Pu-239) for weapons. This very need was what led nations to build reactors, electricity-generating nuclear plants were at best an aftermath and in some cases an excuse (hiding the real objective).
> This very need was what led nations to build reactors, electricity-generating nuclear plants were at best an aftermath
In absolute history, though, this is arse backwards.
The UK and the US both had piles and generation plans before they even thought building nuclear weapons was at all possible.
The US, in particular, had a nuclear science body that were pretty damn sure weapons weren't feasible and had a major focus on atomic power to generate energy.
They ignored the letter by Einstein that highlighted the dangers of a German nuclear program suspected of chasing weapons and only paid heed after several approaches by Tube Alloys (the UK nuclear weapons group) when the Australian nuclear scientist Mark Oliphant visited the US and laid out in detail a method by which a bomb could be feasibly constructed.
In fact the first man-made nuclear reactor was the 'Chicago Pile-1' ( 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 ), which was built by the Project Manhattan, exclusively aiming at building a nuclearbomb.
In WP's article please don't miss this: "Emilio Segrè later recalled that: I thought for a while that this term was used to refer to a source of nuclear energy in analogy with Volta's use of the Italian term pila to denote his own great invention of a source of electrical energy. I was disillusioned by Fermi himself, who told me that he simply used the common English word pile as synonymous with heap. To my surprise, Fermi never seemed to have thought of the relationship between his pile and Volta's."
The world's first reactor used to generate electricity (another one generated some during an experiment in 1948), albeit it wasn't its main purpose, was the 4th reactor, and it started nearly 10 years after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I
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.