Back to the Future – Advanced Nuclear Energy | Hacker News Reader

Back to the Future – Advanced Nuclear Energy

brookings.edu

67 pointsmarkmassie51 comments

China is producing 60 new nuclear plants while the U.S. is making 5. Everything in China is happening much faster and on a larger scale. We should recognize this fact and more actively work with them to further develop nuclear energy.

A couple other examples of China's ability:

* This week China opened 32 new high-speed rail stations: http://rt.com/business/212719-china-opens-high-speed-train/

Their current 10,000 miles of track probably cost them only 3x-5x what the high-speed train in California will cost when it's done.

* A decade ago, they built a 20 mile maglev train for $1.2 billion: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train

* More airports:

"According to the Chinese government’s 12th five-year plan, the total number of airports is set to expand from 175 in 2010 to 230 in 2015."

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fedb9308-8501-11e3-8968-00144...

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China simply has the ability to move much faster and cheaper than the U.S.

Wages are lower in China. You can't compare the costs directly.

As are environmental regulations

I doubt wages are why our stuff is so expensive... or, more accurately, I doubt that wages for people actually doing construction is why our stuff is so expensive.

Some of the speed China has is that their government is willing to just stomp over anything and anybody in the way and Get It Done. We don't necessarily need to copy that element. On the other hand you can make a damned good case that we are far, far too good at paying very expensive people lots of money for months and years at a time to come up with reasons why we can't do something, and once finally placated, reasons why we have to do it more expensively than we initially planned.

Wages: so I just googled the average Chinese wage and the first answer I got was around $5000. you don't think a difference of an order of magnitude in wages could explain the difference?

Regarding waste in administration: I'm sure the same happens in China.

For construction wage differences to matter, we have to be actually constructing. Spending billions of dollars on clearing red tape isn't due to construction wage differences. Of course we are paying the people implementing the red tape much better than the Chinese do, that is true. And we probably pay a lot more of them.

And please spare me the obvious black & white "oh, so you want no regulation, then?" I want reasonable levels. Not levels that were clearly designed to be punitive.

Spain is able to build railroads and subways for only 1/10 as much as in the US. France for 1/5. Neither of those are low-wage countries.

Regulatory culture is a lot more important than wages.

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

Spain and France are #19 and #20 respectively. Relative to the US these are "low wage" countries. Compared however to China, they are not.

Average is a bad choice for comparing labor costs, as it is distorted by the high earners. Median is a much better choice, and it's $30,932 in US and $29,636 in France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income

If you are going to use household incomes to compare between countries, you should also give some thought to the differences between household structures. I am not sure what difference it would make in this case, but I have seen it make a big difference in other analyses.

Oh I agree, but I couldn't find median individual income.

Good point. Using median income as the measure, France compares closely with the US, while Spain improves but is still ~50% of the US value.

The parent point however that France and Spain are able to build railroads at 1/5 and 1/10 the rate of the US needs some reference.

Healthcare, housing and education is also lower, so go ahead and compare but account those in as well.

No arguing with a decision to build, not much regulation, but also, no accountability, corruption at the highest levels, heaps of nepotism, looking good being more important than doing it right, and a cover-up culture. I expect China to have its Fukushima, try hard to cover it up, get a lot of people killed pretending there's no radiation, eventually fail and create a huge scandal, and then turn and savage the nuclear industry as a scapegoat.

Mostly they're paying for it by not having expensive wars and slightly higher inflation.

"no accountability, corruption at the highest levels, heaps of nepotism, looking good being more important than doing it right, and a cover-up culture."

So, their politicians and ours should get along just fine...

EDIT: Why the downvotes?

Face the facts:

No heads have rolled because of the torture report or anything like it that's been published. We are at historically low approval rating, and yet what percent of incumbents get re-elected? There's no accountability.

We have outright legalized corruption in the form of lobbyists and regulatory capture, just look at the FCC/FDA/.mil jobs post- and pre- office.

As for nepotism, look at the Bushes. Or the Kennedies (though they're mostly all dead now).

As for looking good, notice the focus placed on stupid PR stunts and the execution of projects like Healthcare.gov--go listen to the googlebro's post-mortem and tell me that's not exactly what happened.

Cover-up culture should be pretty obvious after all the leaks that have been coming out, especially at the local level of law enforcement.

Don't disagree with...disagree with the system that made my comment accurate.

> EDIT: Why the downvotes?

Probably because your comment above the edit added nothing to the discussion.

It was a rhetorical question, and at the time it did add something to the discussion by way of saying "hey, this is not a problem unique to these Chinese officials". To be fair, it was phrased as a joke, and didn't have much in the way of exposition--because I assumed people wouldn't need it spelled out for them.

As usual, a bad assumption.

The problems are different. The USA has much more accountability - people are not necessarily held to account, because of partisan sympathies and realpolitik, but they are restrained from levels of excess.

I find comparing both sides of the Taiwan Strait helpful in assessing what China is doing. Both sides teach elementary pupils mathematics far better than the United States does,[1] and that provides Taiwan, China, and for that matter other countries that have the same educational practices big advantages in high-tech projects, because there are more engineers and more technicians who have the quantitative chops to do the work efficiently.

But Taiwan, now a democracy with protection of civil rights and a free press, is on the whole not eager to build a lot of new nuclear plants. Taiwan has no domestic sources of petroleum and meager supplies of coal (China has a lot more of both), so Taiwan has to get hydrocarbon fuels mostly by engaging in international trade. The opposition political party there, the Democratic Progressive Party, just won big in the local elections, and looks set to have a good chance to retake the presidency of Taiwan in the next presidential election. The DPP has always been strongly aligned with the worldwide green movement, and what Taiwan will do for energy policy is first of all emphasize efficiency and conservation, as it has long had to do, and second of all look deeply at possibilities for renewable energy sources. I don't think China's current policies will be any more influential worldwide than they have been in China's nearest neighboring country.

AFTER EDIT: In other words, as long as China is governed as a one-party dictatorship, I wouldn't take everything it does as a sign of good governance, but would rather look at individual policies on their individual merits. I do not advocate that the United States build a high-speed rail network on China's example. I don't think that China's policy of building a lot of nuclear reactors for electric power generation is convincing, even to me (my dad built electric generators as an industrial engineer, and was generally pro-nuclear as to what should spin the generators), that the United States should do more of the same. I do think that primary educators in the United States should take a close look at the content of elementary mathematics textbooks in China and at the actual classroom practices in China (and several neighboring countries). Those practices include subject-matter-specialist teachers in primary school, a very rare practice in the United States.[2]

[1] http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf

[2] http://www.nctm.org/about/content.aspx?id=26069

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

What exactly is the position you are arguing?

"We should recognize this fact and more actively work with them to further develop nuclear energy."

No, we should not, at least not in regard to nuclear power. We should not forget what happened not so recently ago.

I do not want the waste problem go grow bigger. I do not want to pass closed out areas such as at Fukushima or Chernobyl to our kids and their kids.

Yes, that might be just me :)

Energy production is a question of literally picking your poison. Do not make the mistake of ignoring the costs of the status quo simply because it is the status quo. When you choose against nuclear today, you are choosing for fuels like coal, natural gas, and hydropower. Each of those have their own environmental costs, which you are passing on to your kids every day right now.

No, I am not for fuels like coal, natural gas etc. I am pro solar and pro windpower. I didn't state that because the focus on the article/discussion is nuclear.

Ah, so you're pro coal and natual gas then. You do know that it is these source of energy that the grid is engineered to fall back on to even out fluctuations in supply? And that even if the grid was "100%" renewable, it'd end up supplying something like 60% of the aggregate energy from these fallback sources?

You can't escape the choice. 100% renewable is a fantasy.

"You can't escape the choice. 100% renewable is a fantasy."

It might not be there yet, but it will eventually. How the grid is engineered now is not what it will be in 50y to come.

And no, I am not pro coal and natural gas. Don't put words in my mouth, thank you.

I am also pro solar and wind. But the reality is that the globe, and the U.S., get only a couple percentage points of electrical generation from solar and wind right now. They are mostly future promise, and it's easy to be for that.

Even deployed at large scale, solar and wind are not capable of providing consistent base load, or handling spikes. There must be an energy source that can scale generation on demand. Until we get fusion, your choices are nuclear, natural gas, coal, oil, or hydropower.

That might be correct for the world and the US, but as said in other threads, e.g Germany has around 30% of reneweable energery right now, that is more than "a couple percentage points". Some other countries have even more.

Hydro I am also fine with - of course only if pumped with net plus energy of wind and solar and not with cheap nuclear power at night.

>China simply has the ability to move much faster and cheaper than the U.S.

Of course. They have cheap labour, a lackadaisical approach to safety/environment and a political system that is efficient (in some part due to corruption). It is not clear that you would be able to replicate China's successes in the US quite so easily.

I didn't say we should replicate them. I said we should partner with them.

Regardless of how much you hate (or love) nuclear power, it is important to remember that radioactive decay is a stochastic process that doesn't give a crap about politics, policy, or nation states. As such, any prudent forward looking nuclear path needs to include methodology to transmute the unfortunate nuclide spectrum left over from light water reactors (LWR) into shorter lived species that don't need storage measured in epochs. New nuclear reactor technology with different neutron spectrums is likely the most prudent approach to effect this transmutation at scale.

The "green movement" anti-nuclear camp cannot seem to see the scientific need to continue with nuclear fission at least long enough to clean up most of the mess we've already created. A coherent "full stop" nuclear policy should still include reprocessing and transmutation of the existing waste stockpile. Stopping short of this makes the extant waste problem catastrophically worse.

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I took radiochemistry in graduate school several years before the the origin story in the Brooking's article, and the appeal of molten salt reactors was well known then, albeit with more conventional fuel loads.

The engineer in me gravitates towards the elegance of the proposed "Gen IV+" nuclear technologies, but the convoluted realities of nuclear power in today's form makes it hard for me to justify continuing the current path towards bigger and bigger light water reactors.

My personal opinion is that we need to diverge from, or stop, the building of ever larger LWR. Because these reactors operate at elevated pressure, and have multi-megawatt levels of decay heat, accidents are always a specter.

Research energy must then be diverted into technologies that will consume most of the long lived TRU waste. By the time the existing waste is transmuted, the performance of the transmuting reactor systems will be established enough that retaining or shuttering of those systems should be more clear. There will also be a long enough stretch of time in parallel to ascertain the asymptotic maturity state of the various renewable energy technologies.

The "green movement" anti-nuclear camp cannot seem to see...

As a bleeding heart treehugger myself, the "green movements" are routinely susceptible to "letting perfect be the enemy of good", which is where a lot of my objections to those movements come from, and IMO where your particular point stems from as well.

I very much understand the pull of the perfect over the good, and I'll bet you are right about it here.

What I find most unfortunate in this specific context is the educational disconnect that prevents people from seeing the long term waste problem left by the immediate cessation of all present nuclear activities.

That some people have an implicit understanding of "if all present nuclear activity was halted, suddenly things would become alright in the world of radioactive waste" seems like a large educational failure.

That's the proximate cause, but you need to go back one level to the root cause:

The environmental movement of today is a political alliance between a group of essentially science-oriented types who see a looming problem and want to solve it most efficiently, and an essentially anti-scientific group who have a philosophical objection to aspects of modernity that they see as being opposed to a desirable state of nature.

This alliance happened more than a generation ago, and like most close political alliances, it has resulted in a lot of cross-pollination of ideas from the two camps. So now you'll see people who are fundamentally anti-science use scientific arguments on, say, climate change.

But nuclear power, GMO food crops, and geoengineering are none-the-less dead issues for the modern environmental movement because about half of that movement is not interested in the science of whether or not those things are on balance good: they are ultimate expressions of the un-natural modernity that that half of the movement wants to get rid of. They aren't being irrational, and they aren't just waiting to hear the right argument for why nuclear power is less likely to provoke a catastrophe that will lead to the loss of human life than the status quo. They are opposed to nuclear power per se, for what it inherently is, not for the specific effects it will have on humans or particular animals or anything.

This isn't going to change unless the current big tent breaks up, and it's not clear that, like, scientific environmentalism has enough political clout to pass any part of its agenda if the current tent does break up.

Edit: To make it more explicit, there are people within the environmental movement who prefer solar and wind power to fossil fuels, and fossil fuels to nuclear, not because they believe that the damage to current living things goes renewable < fossil < nuclear, but rather because the sun and the wind go on around us all the time even in a state of pure nature, and we're just redirecting the energy a little with windmills and solar cells, whereas fossil fuels are in a state of nature sitting around underground and should remain there, but at least they are in and of themselves natural objects, whereas nuclear power creates isotopes and elements that simply do not exist in any measurable quantity in a state of nature. It's about being as close as possible to that state of nature, not about the harm to humans or animals that nuclear waste does versus the harm that fossil fuel waste does.

>Compare that to the amount of electricity produced by the other main non-emitting sources of power, the so-called “renewables”—hydroelectric (6.8 percent), wind (4.2 percent) and solar (about one quarter of a percent). Not only are nuclear plants the most important of the non-emitting sources, but they provide baseload—“always there”—power, while most renewables can produce electricity only intermittently, when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

He neglected to mention that renewables are cheaper:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/13/wind-powe...

Of course, since the piece seems designed to promote nuclear subsidies of some kind, this isn't entirely surprising.

No.

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is estimated to be far greater for PV and wind. Why? The operation and management (O&M) for PV and Wind is insanely high. Grid scale PV has to be continuously cleaned with deionized water because dust and greenery can dramatically decrease efficiency. If a leaf lands on a cell, energy builds up like a capacitor in the shadowed area, and it can eventually decimate the whole cell.

On wind: the intermittency is overwhelming, and the cost to deal with that at base load is estimated in the trillions without even adding an extra megawatt to the grid.

In an urbanized setting, plants must be able to concentrate energy using small land mass. Neither wind or PV can do this at scale.

Some panel data on LCOE in this paper:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w17695.pdf

Naw, you're still oversimplifying it and being way too pessimistic. Renewables aren't 100% the answer yet, but their LCOE in practice isn't that bad right now at all[1]. I realize this is at relatively low levels of penetration, but their uptake has been extremely rapid and tech progression has been quick. Solar is still expensive as fuck, but everyone knows that. Look at those variable O&M costs though, those are some sexy zeroes if you can lock in your other costs adequately.

Pages 10 and 11 here [2](warning, pdf), discuss wind curtailment in MISO, where they've tackled the curtailment problem head-on with great success. They also estimate that they can keep manual curtailment incredibly low until wind doubles in capacity from the time of the report. The intermittentency is not overwhelming until you have much more wind in the system than we currently do. Additionally, there are exiting traditional storage techniques that don't get much traction for a variety of reasons (like pumped storage), which we could build out hard if we actually needed to.

A healthy mix of renewables, storage technology, grid upgrades, and more efficient traditional generation technologies would leave us in a fine position.

[1]http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

[2]http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

Hmm, never been downvoted before for providing a sourced comment with relevant information. Guess people aren't down for discussion today.

>Grid scale PV has to be continuously cleaned with deionized water because dust and greenery can dramatically decrease efficiency. If a leaf lands on a cell, energy builds up like a capacitor in the shadowed area, and it can eventually decimate the whole cell.

tl;dr the maintenance requirements of a solar panel are that it needs to be wiped down occasionally or it very gradually produces less power.

>On wind: the intermittency is overwhelming

Except in the places its been tried - e.g. Germany or Denmark or China. You can check out a live feed of how much energy is produced by wind energy in those countries and the intermittency is overwhelmingly underwhelming.

He doesn't even try to pass for unbiased...

> the so-called "renewables"

lol Apparently they aren't really renewable: that's just some tree-hugger propaganda...

The usual TerraPower and Transatomic stuff. An interesting aspect is that the molten salt reactor can chew up large parts of the light water nuclear waste. So even if we decide that nuclear power is not the way forward, and even if we have a working fusion reactor - is there a case to be made for reducing nuclear waste by processing it in such a reactor?

Yes, and some are making the argument that the remaining funds in the disposal account be used to fund this as it is a much more credible disposal solution than Yucca Mountain was. And it should help pay for itself with "free" power.

The nuclear dream. Is it coming back - or not?

There was an interesting article some time ago: http://thebulletin.org/2013/march/how-close-us-nuclear-indus...

Unfortunately it is now paywalled.

I personally doubt a come back - costs have gone up while the competition (wind, solar) is getting cheaper. When you factor in the time and associated costs to develop new nuclear designs and field test them, it doesn't seem to me that it can work out.

As long as proper and real scrapping costs are not flowing into the price for nuclear generated electricity, there will be a comback.

Just have a lock at what's happening in certain european states, i.e. Germany: Costs for dismantling are or will be exploding.

http://www.dw.de/scrapping-nuclear-plants-to-cost-billions/a...

I personally doubt a come back - costs have gone up while the competition (wind, solar) is getting cheaper.

You make a good point- it doesn't seem like the cost of nuclear will ever go down. Our fear of all things nuclear seem to have made it resemble a quintessential bureaucracy. We only add more and more safety regulations, stacking and stacking and stacking. There's no indication we will ever stop. Wind & solar on the other hand has virtually no fear factor.

> More than 1,164 nuclear engineering degrees were awarded in 2013—a 160 percent increase over the number granted a decade ago.

> So what, after a 30-year drought, is drawing smart young people back to the nuclear industry? The answer is climate change.

I am one of those 1,164 and graduated in a class of ~100 for a Bachelor's Degree. (About a third of my classmates upon graduation went straight to Navy Power School in Charleston, SC or other Navy schools -- so climate change probably was not their motivator)

I would argue that the climate change implied by the article is the incorrect one that motivated a lot of people in our class. There were far more dicussions about the (USA) political climate than the weather climate and how to properly dispel myths without misinforming people.

EDIT: Formatting

EDIT2: Reading other comments, it does seem like a consistent theme within the nuclear industry is to properly educate the public -- being honest about the physics and challenges without getting too technical, but with enough detail to understand the significance and consequences of the problems.

Meanwhile barrels of nuclear waste that are supposed to last for thousands of years are rusting, leaking or are all together missing. We really need that fusion thing to get going. All the waste from fission power is a disaster waiting to happen.

And the BP oil spill leaked over 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. All technologies have different risks and trade-offs. Fission is no silver bullet, but I think it certainly has very real benefits - just like wind, solar, etc. Fusion would be great - but we can't do it nearly close to the scale required to use as an energy source (at least not for ~50 years ;-).

"All that waste" ... you mean the 60 years of waste that if you amassed together would fit in the endzone of a typical football field?

You mean that "waste" which could actually be separated into medically and scientifically useful radioisotopes, and a large portion of the remainder reprocessed as fuel for a 2nd or 3rd generation nuclear reactor?

You mean that waste which, after having its useful components removed, reduces to less than background levels in under a hundred years?

Oh, this must be a cheap thing to do then - how much would such an operation cost? We'll have it done by this afternoon!

Oh one little snag: that reprocessed fuel for the 2nd gen reactors I referred to? It's plutonium. You know, the kind you use to make bombs and really awesome spacecraft. If we actually started doing that you might end up with a plutonium economy, where there are well guarded warehouses and armored transports full of this stuff. Then anybody with an extremely specialized remote operated machine shop for shaping explosive lenses, having insanely accurate detonators, and the balls to brazenly steal the most well guarded commodity in existence might be able to build a bomb! One big enough to take out a few city blocks!

We can't have that, obviously. No, better that we just stockpile this stuff in rusting metal bins.

I mean this kind of waste:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/legacy-danger-old... http://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/schleswig-holstein/atommuell25... http://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/schleswig-holstein/Rostige-Ato... http://www.taz.de/!103885/

Even if it's just supposed to survive for 100 years this looks bad. Humans simply aren't capable of dealing with dangers that big and time spans that long. The number of reported incidents is staggering. And who knows how this all looks like in less open countries like Russia or China?

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