I'm not anti-nuclear, but the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so high, that the engineering must be to similarly high standards. Unfortunately, as we have seen in the cases of 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima, this is not the case. We need to really figure that part out before opting for this route.
And then there's the problem of nuclear waste disposal.
According to this article, coal power in China killed 300,000 people last year, which itself is way more than were displaced (not killed) by Fukushima. Even US coal power, which is much safer than Chinese coal power, is 160x more deadly per joule than nuclear, and it appears that's not counting climate change effects.
I don't mean to suggest that nuclear power is without risk -- of course it's risky business. But we need to compare the risk to the alternatives.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
I'd much rather see wind, tidal or geothermal anyway. In the scheme of things they have lower regulatory hurdles and can even be tinkered with in your back yard for the former. One of the houses I walk past on my way home has a wind turbine made out of a washing machine motor and PVC pipe, it's extremely cool to watch.
Which has an interesting outcome: The irrational response to Fukushima (in particular, the shift from nuclear to coal generation) will undoubtedly kill several orders of magnitude more people than the actual Fukushima disaster did.
Sometimes it's hard not to get cynical and bitter.
> Germany responded to Fukushima by shutting down their nuclear power plants
Germany did not do that. Some of the oldest were shutdown. Basically Germany went back to the original plan from 2000, which was made together with the industry. The last nuclear reactor will be shut down around 2022.
> In fact, they've embarked on a program of building new coal plants across Germany, which is madness by basically any metric you care to use.
Germany did not do that. Various coal power plants were planned long ago. Also many old were and are taken offline. That Germany is using coal is not actually madness. Germany has basically only one fossil fuel in larger quantities in the country: coal.
> Which has an interesting outcome: The irrational response to Fukushima (in particular, the shift from nuclear to coal generation) will undoubtedly kill several orders of magnitude more people than the actual Fukushima disaster did.
Germany is on a long missions towards renewable energy. Nuclear energy is not a part of the plan. Nuclear will be replaced early, since it is a very costly energy which needs decades to be replaced. So Germany wanted to stop investing into it very early.
There is no shift to coal. This year for example coal use is going down. What you think is a shift to coal, is just a temporary effect in a long-term plan.
> Sometimes it's hard not to get cynical and bitter.
If you would be better informed about German plans, you would not need to be cynical and bitter.
Item 2: Germany is building a raft of new coal plants; something like 30 are in various stages of planning and building. According to Die Welt, power generation from brown coal (the dirtiest form) is climbing, at the highest level since 1990, and projected to increase further. Overall fossil fuel use for power generation is staying constant. If it wasn't for the decline of nuclear power in Germany, fossil fuel use could have declined. And according to Germany's energy regulator, coal fired plants will be essential to replace the closing nuclear plants.
> There is no shift to coal.
Yes, there is. As you go on to admit, even if you label it a "temporary effect in a long-term plan". (But given that the coal plants now being built are projected to be operating for 40 years, it's not what I'd call temporary.)
And that shift will result in a net increase in deaths. You seem very defensive, but you haven't actually disputed any of the underlying facts.
Those were to close anyway in the very near future. Germany did not greatly accelerate the plan.
> Item 2: Germany is building a raft of new coal plants; something like 30 are in various stages of planning and building.
It does not. 'Planning' is not building. Germany currently discusses the closing of 50 fossil fuel plants.
> According to Die Welt, power generation from brown coal (the dirtiest form) is climbing, at the highest level since 1990, and projected to increase further.
It is not. This year coal use is going down.
> Overall fossil fuel use for power generation is staying constant.
Only for a few years.
> If it wasn't for the decline of nuclear power in Germany, fossil fuel use could have declined. And according to Germany's energy regulator, coal fired plants will be essential to replace the closing nuclear plants.
Fossil fuel plants will be greatly reduced during the next decades.
Already the industry is closing them faster than we want:
http://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/rueckzug-aus-der-kohle-r...
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/rwe-strom-energieriese...
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article119000950/RWE-und-E-on-...
> Yes, there is. As you go on to admit, even if you label it a "temporary effect in a long-term plan". (But given that the coal plants now being built are projected to be operating for 40 years, it's not what I'd call temporary.)
We have a lot of old ones to close.
> And that shift will result in a net increase in deaths. You seem very defensive, but you haven't actually disputed any of the underlying facts.
Your so-called 'facts' are mostly wrong. I told you for example that coal use is going down this year. That's a fact.
You are including the coal used to build solar cells right?
No, of course you aren't. Germany is just shipping their coal emissions to China, so that on paper they look good, but are actually making things worse.
Greenwashing at its finest: Country wide and government supported.
You know that renewable energy is more than solar?
> Germany is just shipping their coal emissions to China
We were not shipping emissions to China. Germany has build a lot of solar cell plants. Many got financial problems when China entered the market.
> Greenwashing at its finest: Country wide and government supported.
Personally I like our greenwashing more than your greenwashing.
What would happen if the Chinese took the same attitude with nuclear power?
I'd bet it would be pretty calamitous, as you imply. I can't say I'm comfortable with the idea.
However, would it kill 300,000 people every year? I'm not so sure.
I have different number: 1,049 from [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#Accidents_and_de...
Chernobyl is a bad example too, not because it didn't do harm, but because nobody since the Soviet Union is going to be insane enough to build a plant without secondary containment, or to run uncontrolled experiments with a reactor, or to build a reactor with a positive void coefficient of reactivity.
Fukushima is a somewhat better example, but the engineering that needed to be done better in that case was not nuclear engineering: the problem was siting the backup power generators and switchgear behind a seawall that got overwhelmed by the tsunami. (To be fair, newer reactor designs don't need backup power to cool the reactor after a shutdown; but those designs didn't exist when Fukushima was built.)
Nuclear waste disposal is only a problem if you refuse to reprocess the waste, which only the United States has done among all nuclear-using countries (because of misplaced concerns about proliferation; other countries have been reprocessing for decades and there have been no incidents).
Finally, if you're going to be fair in assessing nuclear power, you have to compare the overall cost of nuclear power with the overall cost of other forms of base load power generation. You have to look at the damage done by coal mining, coal ash and soot (not to mention radioactivity in coal ash, which is actually worse than many forms of nuclear waste), oil spills, fracking for natural gas, etc.
...because they'd built a sensibly sized sea wall. I'm all for learning lessons from Fukushima, but the lesson basically seems to be "don't put reactors on the coast without big sea walls".
As you obviously know, the Fukushima disaster was not because of quake or tsunami damage to the reactors. It was because of water damage to the diesel generators that circulated the coolant to remove decay heat. Then failures in 3 (4?) redundant backup measure to provide that power occured, too.
What would happen, hypothetically in the event of an human generated EMP (or general infrastructure because of war) or a multi-stdev CME from the sun? What if a sufficiently dedicated group was able to infiltrate a reactor and intentionally damage it? There's always a way to imagine a failure scenario that is possible, even if unlikely.
Thankfully Fukushima wasn't nearly as bad as Chernobyl. Had the fuel breached the containment unit and triggered a steam explosion with groundwater. it would have been worse.
No, they don't.
> they require a huge number of highly educated operators.
Older designs, like Fukushima, do require operators to take certain actions in the event of failure in order to prevent damage to the reactor. (Newer designs don't even require that, which is certainly an improvement; but that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the features of older designs.) But they do not require operators to take certain actions in the event of failure to prevent radiation release to the outside world. They just require backup power. (Again, newer designs don't even require backup power, which, again, is certainly an improvement. But that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the features of older designs. As another poster noted, a similar reactor even closer to the tsunami had no problems--because the backup power generators were sited properly.)
> There are too many factors to assure they will be safe, and their failure mode can reach catastrophic levels.
This is not true either. Even if we grant that Fukushima has harmed many people, the main reasons for that harm were unrelated to the reactor itself: they were the bad siting of the backup power, and the fact that TEPCO and the Japanese government refused to admit what was really going on and take proper steps to contain it, including asking for help. The same sorts of human errors have caused much more harm in connection with other technologies--for example, consider the people harmed due to coal mining (several orders of magnitude more than those harmed due to nuclear energy).
> There's always a way to imagine a failure scenario that is possible, even if unlikely.
Sure, and this is true of any technology. But just imagining the failure scenario doesn't quantify the risk, and it's the quantitative risk that you need in order to make a fair assessment of the technology.
I can't go on at length responding to you - too much time on this thread and only so many hours in life^H^H^H^Hthe day. However, I think you really know the issues but are approaching it from a slightly contrarian tack.
I think it's very fair to say reactors operate on the edge of disaster. But I say that in the same sense that motorcycles operate on the edge of disaster (for the rider). It's the controlled fission of a super critical amount of enriched uranium.
Even if there is a hypothetically perfect reactor, imperfect people with build it, run it, make decisions about it, and design/implement the risk control protocols around it. Just look at a few of the almost infinite examples of human factors mistakes in complex systems: Colgan 3407, Air France 447, Chernobyl, Challenger... I would even be kinder to Fukushim Daiichi because 1) the risk at the site was not as well known at the time of construction 2) there were backup power sources beyond the diesel generators that failed 3) most damage was not preventable after the wave hit whether help was requested or not.
People are the weak link and we're pretty much intrinsic to the process.
If solar gets to the point where it can provide reliable base load power, I will too. I keep watching for solar thermal plants to take off.
> It's the controlled fission of a super critical amount of enriched uranium.
No, it's the controlled fission of a critical amount of enriched uranium. Supercritical means the reaction is not controlled--that's a bomb, not a reactor.
As far as operating "on the edge of danger", that depends on how the reaction responds to various changes in conditions, particularly those caused by failures in other parts of the plant. The key is that you want reactivity to go down in response to a failure condition (i.e., you want the reactor to become subcritical, so the chain reaction dies out). Early on, we did not know how to design reactors that had this property under all failure conditions; but now we do, and we have for quite some time (and, as I noted in an earlier post, nobody since the Soviet Union has been insane enough not to make use of that knowledge when designing a reactor).
The problem with the Fukushima reactor was something different: decay heat removal, i.e., once the reactor shuts down, you still have fission products inside the core that are producing heat because they're highly radioactive. At the time the Fukushima reactor was built, we did not know how to design a reactor that could remove that decay heat in a controlled fashion without backup electrical power available. Now we do know how to do that; in fact there are at least two different ways to do it (either design the cooling system to operate using natural convection, or redesign the reactor core so that fission products can be removed and reprocessed while the reactor is operating).
So while I'll agree that early reactors were more like motorcycles, recent reactor designs are more like family sedans, with all kinds of safety features that protect the driver even from his own mistakes. (The Fukushima and Three Mile Island designs were somewhere in between.)
> People are the weak link
Agreed; we humans are almost always the least reliable component of any system that includes us.
> and we're pretty much intrinsic to the process.
Not necessarily; it's often possible to design passive safety features (i.e., ones that work automatically without human intervention), and in systems where reliability is paramount, this should be done whenever possible.
Exactly. Also, it happened in 1957, when nobody really knew a lot about how to reprocess properly--but unlike the Russians, everybody else recognized that and worked on getting it right.
Also it was of the type that melts down if the cooling water is lost. Other reactor designs (eg 3-mile island) need water to operate so they shut down automatically if there's any major breakdown.
Furthermore, coal is far more dangerous. We just don't care when thousands of Chinese coal miners die every year as much as we do when Japanese farmland is rendered unusable once in a lifetime.
I don't trust anybody with nuclear power. I don't know whether I should be eating fish from the pacific ocean. I have some idea how much cesium is in our ocean water because somebody is tracking it, but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
There isn't enough. Not even close. It's not as abundant as you think - the amount of our planets resources we would have to consume to make use of this "renewable" energy is enormous.
> but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
Well now you do. There are no ramifications whatsoever.
As for Fukushima: I can't find a single source suggesting there is any danger short of eating fish caught right in front of the facility, which would indeed be a bad idea.
Photovoltaics could not do it, no way. But solar thermal probably could. Storing power would require immense amounts of land for pumped water storage, but we could do it.
We'd also need huge amount of land for the solar collectors, but we could do it.
And huge amounts of copper for power lines and transformers. Again, possible.
But none of that is worth it, not when we have something as good as nuclear.
Perhaps you are conflating capacity with transmission and storage?
Compared to what? Solar cells last a long time, and in sunny climates generate a lot of power, far more than enough to pay back the energy cost of their construction.
> Solar thermal at scale uses less energy for what it returns.
That may be true, but don't dismiss solar panels, in particular in remote locations where there's adequate sunlight.
Also, I don't understand your response. 1.) what is "too much" energy. 2.) what's your source on solar thermal vs PV EROEI at scale? 3.) what's the relevance of the solar thermal vs PV comparison, since every building in the US can have solar on the roof but not solar thermal. 4.) what's the relevance of your response to what I said?
More energy than it costs to make them, or at least enough energy that it's better to build something else.
> what's your source on solar thermal vs PV EROEI at scale?
Solar thermal just needs a mirror (ideally aluminium rather than glass and silver) and the rest of the plant is the same as a regular power plant. A mirror costs less than fuel I'm sure.
Solar cells need ultra pure silicon which is very very expensive to make.
> what's the relevance of the solar thermal vs PV comparison, since every building in the US can have solar on the roof
What would be the point if the energy return is not there?
> 4.) what's the relevance of your response to what I said?
I said they could meet global energy needs, just that it's not worth it. You assumed for some odd reason that I said they could not, so I figured you were asking about a comparison.
So sayeth the poster, sitting at a computer filed with the same kind of silicon out of which panels are made. The reason solar panels are so cheap to buy, is because they're cheap to build.
> What would be the point if the energy return is not there?
Everything except evidence that this is so. If solar panels didn't pay for themselves, people wouldn't buy them.
And very expensive it is indeed. A piece about 1cm square costs $200 or more. Solar panels need square meters of the stuff.
> If solar panels didn't pay for themselves, people wouldn't buy them.
Exactly my argument. Thank you. People in fact don't buy them - except when they get subsidies that artificially reduce the price.
Excuse me, but what planet are you posting from? Your claim above suggests that a monocrystalline silicon solar panel that's of average size (120 by 54 cm), 6480 sq. cm., should cost $200 per square centimeter, or 1.3 million dollars. In fact, such a panel costs $168.50:
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/200W-100W-X-2PCS-monocrystall...
> People in fact don't buy them - except when they get subsidies that artificially reduce the price.
All your claims have been falsified using readily available evidence.
It wasn't MY claim, it was the poster above me.
I was saying his comparison was absurd. Obviously it doesn't cost that much.
And that would be a real problem if solar panels producers had to have microprocessors etched into panels, had to pay the scientists to design the processors, and had to build the plants to scale that process to industrial levels, like Intel.
Happily, they just have to buy an ingot of the stuff and cut it with a saw into a 250 micrometer by 1 meter squared (or so) piece. I will leave it as an exercise to you to verify the spot price of solar grade silicon is less than $30/kg.
So lets say a panel takes 250 micrometers * 1 meter * 1 meter * 2g/cm^3 (density of silicon) * $30 / kg (assuming spot prices and not long term contracts or internal sourcing). That's 250 cm^3 * 2g/cm^3 * $30/1000g, or $15 for a whole panel of the stuff.
I was ridiculing him for even suggesting it as a reply.
It was a reply from absurdity.
Solar (and wind) of x MW average power means at least 2x of max power, and thus needs at least 2x of 'reserve' non-solar power to cover the gaps when it's not being produced due to daytime or weather.
This means that solar, even if it'd be completely free and perfect, can't fill a majority of global energy needs - I'd guess that a third would be an absolute maximum unless/until we get radical breakthroughs in energy storage technology.
Those types of unpredictable energy don't replace other power plants, as those nonrenewable power plants are needed anyway - they only save fuel for those plants by allowing them to reduce load at random times.
There are fluktuations every day due to the differend demand and loads in any case. Thats why you link many sources together in a Virtual Power Plant. Works quite well. The biggest Virtual Power Plant in Germany is the one of Statkraft (a Norwegian Company); it has about 8GW capacity.
If we generate power some people are going to get hurt no matter which technology you pick. If we don't generate power some people are going to get hurt because we don't have access to the power necessary extend their lives.
Nuclear, hydroelectricity and wind have pretty much the best deaths per MWH, solar happens to be worse than nuclear.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
Nuclear is鈥攅ven counting all the accidents鈥攖he safest and one of the greenest forms of energy we know of. Geothermal is hugely limited; wind is flaky, limited, and bad for the environment; solar is promising and getting economical, but it's still faced major practical and safety challenges.
> I have [...] no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
None. Zero. Absolutely no impact or ramifications whatsoever. And that you'd even feel like that was in question is a crushing indictment of our sensationalist media.
How? If you dig down you'll get heat. Wind power is bad for the environment? Solar has safety challenges? What?
> None. Zero. Absolutely no impact or ramifications whatsoever.
Clearly it has some impact, the question is how to measure it. Whatever the answer, zero isn't it.
Have you been to Kingston, or Martin County, or Buffalo Creek or .... I should stop or I'll be here all day.
Coal has killed hundreds of times as many people, and contaminated thousands of times as much land as nuclear, even including the worst accidents.
But this doesn't mean that we should be subsidising nuclear, we should be able to see and pay for the true costs of all our power sources. But instead we have crazy incentives where for residential and commercial energy contracts, the more you use the lower your unit cost. So a highly energy efficient house pays more per unit than an inefficient one.
Which is to say, people are terrible at risk assessment.
I'd say we have figured out the engineering more than you claim.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...
Sounds much like an aircraft. Let's revert to cars. Oh wait those aren't any safer, either.
I'd say 3 incidents in the almost 50 years of solid nuclear power usage is a pretty good track record. These incidents were also relatively "contained", that is, their meltdowns didn't trigger worldwide environmental catastrophe, or even a catastrophe inside their own countries.
While that's obviously tragic, the WHO has far less pessimistic estimates, it's worth noting that some 15,000 people died just from the earthquake itself, and another couple thousand or so from exposure as a result of evacuating to nowhere.
More importantly though, if they hadn't been utterly and woefully incompetent on safety, would almost certainly have survived the earthquake without incident.