Nuclear is one of a number of alternatives that needs to be seriously considered but due to the long timelines and high costs of nuclear it is also one of the best stalling tactics for the fossil fuel industry seeking to extend the life of their assets. Possible increased adoption of nuclear in the future is not a reason to avoid setting sunset dates for emitting technologies now and commence transition to whatever low emission technologies are the most available and affordable right now.
We can't afford to wait or not to hedge our bets. Nuclear is a hell of a hedge since we know it works. We know the French model works really well, but for some reason we, the country with the most heavily armed forces in the world, can't "protect" it. BS, moneyed interests and tree huggers are keeping us from fixing the problem until fusion comes along or uber cheap battery density 100x better than what we have currently comes along.
Hedging bets is fine but there is a lot of money and influence using nuclear to muddy the climate debate and reframe the the issue as nuclear power vs greens/environmentalists. People should be aware of how the debate is being manipulated by fossil fuel apologists/lobbyists.
The moment people blame things on tree huggers they have fallen into the trap. Tree huggers are not the problem. The problem is carbon emissions. Tree huggers aren't stopping nuclear. They barely have any political power or representation. Nuclear's problems are the huge capital costs and the nimby attitude of the general public.
Nuclear is a clear win in countries like France with the capability and commitment. Climate change is a global problem and it doesn't matter where the nuclear reactors are as long as global emissions are reducing. Countries that can increase nuclear should. Those that can't may find it harder but they will have to innovate more and move faster.
The late 1960s through 1980s saw a shift in the antinuclear movement toward protesting the development of nuclear power as an energy source. The antinuclear movement succeeded in virtually halting the governments' development of nuclear power.
How does one manage to stop nuclear energy but not fossil fuel use? These are arguably the same sorts of groups, with probably a large overlap. How did they have such power in one area, but not in another? If there is lack of lobbyist or industry pressure pushing for it, then we have to wonder why? Nuclear isn't cost effective as a business is the likely answer, and under our current system that drives most of the decisions.
I think people freak out much more easily when imagining a Hiroshima or Chernobyl or Fukushima in their home towns than when trying to picture the slow but unrelenting worsening of climate conditions over time caused by fossil burning, even though the former is local and unlikely and the latter is global and certain.
One of the issues I've found is that people genuinely believe nuclear reactors run on the same tech as nuclear weapons, and think that if something goes wrong they will have a mushroom cloud.
I'm very happy for countries like France to have nuclear power but a little scared of less stable countries. While nuclear weapons require enrichment, dirty bombs or unmaintained power reactors are terrifying.
Politically it's was infinitely easier to stop expansion of nuclear power than to stop using fossil fuels. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was issuing more than 12 permits to build new reactors on average every year prior to 1979 (the year Three Mile Island accident occured) guess how many were issued between 1979 and 2012? Zero...
And I'm not even sure the people in the anti-nuclear movements were really that concerned about CO2 emissions in the 70's or 80's. While currently renewables are much cheaper than nuclear that wasn't the case 30 or 40 years ago. Without the absurdly irrational reactions to TMI and Chernobyl a few years later, we would have been much better situated to considerably reduce CO2 emissions but sure blame the oil lobby (of course there are plenty other things to blame them for) ...
> How does one manage to stop nuclear energy but not fossil fuel use?
It's easier to target marketing against a few 'smoke stacks' than ten millions tail pipes. It's easier for people to get people to sign petitions against an 'industrial site' that is many kilometres away that most people will never see, compared to having people trash their own personal possession (their car).
They don't. But it benefits *for profit* energy companies to blame the lack of nuclear power on the hippies than on their ROI calculations. They can literally make money on wind power after 6 months, or they can spend billions of dollars and a decade on a nuclear plant that may never get finished. But it's the environmentalists that's stopping this development.
This is what I tell them pro-nuclearists, who mostly, in my circles, tend to be engineers or tech-savy minds with a better-is-better mindset:
Nuclear is the mainframe. Let's just concede, for the sake of argument: the hands-down better, more reliable tech.
Renewables is the distributed. Worse but worse-is-better [1]. Setup and investment is incremental. Take down and/or upgrading is also simpler. There's huge traction in the battery and renewable tech ecossystem. The lower entry barrier makes it a competitive, highly decentralized market where costs are going down fast. There are "killer apps" and a constant flow of innovation happening everywhere else too, outside of power generation: from cars, to airplanes to homes. And it's all that swarm, and not a single "because it's better", that makes the renewable+battery duo the winner.
Maybe nuclear could have been that distributed, pop energy too, but the fact today, for various well-known reasons (regulation, monopoly, distrust...) it isn't. And, by the looks of it, it probably won't be in the future. Nuclear failed to capture the traction in the West for decades already. Just like the IBM mainframe it's not going away, and it's a perfectly good solution for some people (banks for the mainframe, China for nuclear in this metaphore). But most of us are heading into a "cloud" of multi-tiered renewable tech solutions and nothing can stop it.
Because strategy A beats both B and A+B. It's either VHS or Betamax, not both. And this again has to do with worse-is-better. A+B could be wise in certain scenarios, but it's unrealistic as it requires double effort in all fronts, generates market uncertainty due to doubious messaging and no immediate gains in time or costs.
Solar has the huge problem of not being available when it's needed. Early in the morning and late in the evening. Until that is solved with some form of storage it can't solve the problem of greenhouse emissions.
Ah yes, the "it's useless unless it's perfect" argument.
Nuclear has the huge problem of not being available for another decade (because that's how long it takes to build plants). Until that is solved with some form of pocket reactor it can't solve the problem of greenhouse emissions.
> Nuclear has the huge problem of not being available for another decade (because that's how long it takes to build plants).
At the very least we can stop shutting down the plants we currently have.
There is a finite amount of infrastructure that can be built at any one time: instead of shutting down nukes and building renewables to take their place, we should be shutting down fossil fuel plants and having renewable take over them.
Once all the fossil fuel plants are gone we can talk about nuclear at that point.
Yeah, no single technology can solve the problem yet. I don't think the build time is really the main problem with nuclear.
If you could replace most of the coal and gas generators in a little over a decade the impact would be immense. Far sooner than I'd expect to see solar have a similar impact. But nuclear only works in wealthy nations.
The main problem with nuclear is the dangers of letting them get into a state of disrepair. In a politically unstable county it could be a real danger if they cannot secure the fuel or waste. A dirty bomb could be an environmental disaster.
Here in NZ many install solar and back feed the grid. They get paid to do so. But this doesn't help reduce emissions. During peak load the coal plants still fire up. We have significant hydro generation but require fossil fuels to deal with peak load. If home owners invested in batteries alone I suspect we could do a better job reducing our emissions.
Has there ever been a dirty bomb anywhere? Is it a realistic concern? I don’t think it is; my opinion is it was drummed up by the US government and media in the post-2001 frenzy.
It works so "well" that the French taxpayer will have to pay the UK so they can deliver their guaranteed energy prices the over-due and over budget reactor they desperately try to finish will generate.
It's so fantastic that every summer they have to buy dirty coal energy from Germany because their rivers get too hot and every winter because...it's too cold and their ageing fleet is breaking down all the time.
The success is so staggering that they plan to reduce their fleet by 50% until 2030 and replace that with renewable energy.
Hooray...
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Edit: since the Astro-Turf reached me and I can't reply anymore due to downvotes, here are the answers to Bayart:
> I don't down where you get that broadly France relies on German coal in the summer and winter.
Why do you try to lie about something everybody can google. This is the first result for "France river hot":
> Pretty much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades and losing the associated skill-set and industrial base.
Weird because EPR didn't stop building. They just stopped building in France so this can't be right. Also: the reactors currently still under construction started construction when all the people from the peak construction times where still there. They still can't manage to build on budget or on time. Not even close.
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@corban1:
Only because Germany doesn't hide their subsidies doesn't mean that the French taxpayer is not paying for their ageing fleet (or overpriced projects abroad) with their taxes...
Also the fact that coal is an important job motor in troubled regions of Germany which is why it's still there (but is being phased out completely soon).
??? we're talking about the economic cost and carbon output of energy vs. how it is generated. Do you think there's some other common factor that explains France using lots of nuclear power and having a low carbon footprint and energy costs?
Imports and exports help to smooth out the load curve, but I don't down where you get that broadly France relies on German coal in the summer and winter. French net CO2 emissions remain stable and low the entire year, that's it. As far as I'm aware, heat waves have very little impact on nuclear energy production. Their impact on river temperatures is a few tenth of a degree and they can function on fairly high water temperatures (bellow 28c). I've read that over the last decade, which had several heat-waves, they accounted for an average production loss of 0.3%.
>It works so "well" that the French taxpayer will have to pay the UK so they can deliver their guaranteed energy prices the over-due and over budget reactor they desperately try to finish will generate.
Pretty much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades and losing the associated skill-set and industrial base.
> much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades
In 1999 a new reactor started in France (Civaux-2).
In 2005 a new building site started (at Olkiluoto, Finland).
Even by considering start dates (Civaux-2: 1991) and neglecting that skills are needed during the building (and not only when it started) they only are 14 years apart.
Moreover many skills are needed for the maintenance of the existing fleet (in France).
Olkiluoto was planned as soon as in 2000, when its builder Areva NP created an agency in Finland in order to sell the project.
Also: most skills (concrete, welding...) aren't completely specific to the nuclear industry: part of those are shared with many other fields.
How a huge and well-organized heavy industry which sells projects could let key skills evaporate in a few years (no, not 'decades')?
looks like you missed the most important part of your own source : "Atomic power from France’s 58 reactors accounts for over 75 percent of its electricity needs. Available nuclear power supply was down 1.4 percentage points at 65.3% of total capacity compared with Wednesday."
this missing capacity is less the usual slowdown of reactors because of the hot rivers (which by the way is done for environmental and not technical concern) and maintenances process, than a consequence of a previous nuclear plant closing (for political/electoral reasons). another consequence of this missing plant was to reopen two charcoal power plant _this_winter_.
a large part of the EPR slowdown in fr is due to security concern that changed while the project was already started, china EPRs which was similar but a lot less constrained was done in time.
on the price: 25% of the energy produced by nuclear in fr is sold under the market price to private retailers because of anti-monopolistic EU laws and stupidity of our governement. the electricity price in EU is usualy indexed on the worst gaz plant available, with the actual price of gaz raising and all of the 25% already acquired, a lot of them are just closing.
given those constrains, yes this model works more than well...
the project to close "50%" (in fact 15 reactors) until 2030 is another political subject which will probably never become a reality given that most renewable alternatives projects end up being blocked/hated everywhere.
funny fact: replacing ALL the current transport and electric energy supply in fr by wind turbines has been evaluated to require one of the most efficient available turbine for each km² on ALL the french territory...
Moreover it leaked (shouldn't happen!) due to defective combustible rod(s). This is relatively minor but in order to analyze they had to temporarily shut it down.
> this missing capacity is less the usual slowdown of reactors because of the hot rivers (which by the way is done for environmental and not technical concern) and maintenances process, than a consequence of a previous nuclear plant closing (for political/electoral reasons). another consequence of this missing plant was to reopen two charcoal power plant _this_winter_.
And I mean seriously...this is France we're talking about. Those informations are easy to google. Please stop spreading misinformation.
> a large part of the EPR slowdown in fr is due to security concern that changed while the project was already started, china EPRs which was similar but a lot less constrained was done in time.
Yeah they should just look away more like in China...it's just a nuclear reactor after all! France should also get some Tofu-dreg experience from China. This is the way.
Sorry...but I can't take such statements seriously. It's madness.
> funny fact: replacing ALL the current transport and electric energy supply in fr by wind turbines has been evaluated to require one of the most efficient available turbine for each km² on ALL the french territory...
Why would you even evaluate such a narrow scenario? This is beyond stupid. Renewables are not just wind.
Also I doubt this has been done seriously since there was a study years ago that you could power the whole of Europe if you take just the available building space on the coast and use wind.
> The report was from 2019 because it was the first search result
yes and all your sources are post 2019 (the fessenheim reactor has been slowed since 2017, the project/idea to close it started in 2012, and the effective (not reversible) closing has happened on feb 2020 while it was stopped since more than 2 years) dont really see what's your point here...
> This is why you diversify your energy.
no, our electric mix was simply not build on nuclear, hydroelectric and charcoal was our first power source, nuclear allowed us to close charcoal mines and plants while fullfilling the growing electric needs. nuclear is'nt without constrains that hydroelectric dont have, however there is not much more places to have new hydros. "renewables" will maybe goes up to 8% in the coming years and has already cost us more than 50billions€ (governement subvention) which is nearly two time our current non running EPR cost :) note that those 50billions was only for deployment they does'nt include exploitation cost, that's a big difference between wind turbines and nuclear, nuclear cost is mostly capitalistic (start investment for 60years in the case of an EPR) while wind turbine cost must be evaluated over their full lifetime including market fluctuations, try to evaluate that for the 60 years comming, good luck!
> Yeah they should just look away more like in China...
what's your point here again ? changing a project constrain while it is already started add cost and delay, however once done, acquired expertise usually reduce cost and delay. we have choosen our way to do it, probably for good reasons.
> but I can't take such statements seriously. It's madness.
actually this is your statement, your making a straw man here.
> there was a study years ago
what let you think that an old study with probably outdated constrains and knowledges would be more serious than actual studies from recognized sources (ecole polytechnique, les mines) ? and more important, those studies to be comparable must have the same subject, replacing nuclear with wind turbines is not the same as replacing nuclear + transportation(gas) for example. with the current urge (climatical and political) to reduce gas based transportations, there is also an urge/need to grow electric supply up to two time the actual production (unless your looking for economical collapse by replacing gas with nothing). from this point of view, current renewable are just a joke in france since we have no industries on renewables (they poorly failed/died) which means we will be fully dependent on external supply, and yes that's madness.
ho one last point, those studies are usually done with wind turbine because solar panels end up using a lot more surface than wind turbines, that let you think of the surface needs with a mix of the two...
> this is France we're talking about. Those informations are easy to google.
actually i'm french and in france (in case my poor english was'nt a sufficient hint), those subjects are a perpetual technical and political debate here, i dont really need google press report to explain me what i'm living (actually its a known fact that press is'nt an opposable source in techical subjects, try google schoolar maybe...) :)
How can that be? The whole discussion is not that long and you picked up this specific argument I was supporting with sources. Yes other sources were after 2019 and I can give you even more from before. This supports my argument but you don't even know what that was??
> no, our electric mix was
Says "no" continues to agree with what I said...man...
> however there is not much more places to have new hydros
Why did you chose hydro? I mean...what? I didn't even mention it and the most obvious things are solar AND wind. Hydro is our battery in the Nordics and alps.
> and has already cost us more than 50billions€ (governement subvention) which is nearly two time our current non running EPR cost
That is half of what EPR needs to invest to keep your ageing fleet from falling apart...
> nuclear cost is mostly capitalistic (start investment for 60years in the case of an EPR) while wind turbine cost must be evaluated over their full lifetime including market fluctuations
Yeah but only because you just accepted to ignore all the costs generations will have to come up with just to cover nuclear waste processing and storage. You just hide it while you complain about transparent costs on renewables. This is hilarious.
> what's your point here again ?
It's not my point. It's your point. You said that safety costs too much and we should look to China...a country known for terrible safety.
> actually this is your statement, your making a straw man here.
It's not my point. It's your point. You said that safety costs too much and we should look to China...a country known for terrible safety.
> what let you think that an old study with probably outdated constrains and knowledges would be more serious than actual studies from recognized sources
The fact that while nuclear only gets more expensive, renewables not only got cheaper but also better and there are now other studies which look much better than what you suggest.
Why don't you link your study? You've obviously found it now.
> actually i'm french and in france
That makes it even worse. You must know about the energy shortages caused by either broken or not running nuclear reactors. It's known all over Europe and you still chose to lie about it? Why?
> this specific argument I was supporting with sources
none of thoses sources is contradictory of what i explained on the history of our shortages.
> Why did you chose hydro?
because you talk about mix, today its fr secondary electricity production, and hydro plants are older than fr nuclear plants/projects.
>That is half of what EPR needs to invest to keep your ageing fleet from falling apart...
i'm not sure of what your talking about again, that's probably half or even less of what we must invest to keep our ageing (not EPR) nuclear fleet yes, which provide 75% of our production, in other words: 8% production for 50billions imported external products + exploitation cost on 20years vs 75% for 50billions local supply one shot to add 20 years to the current fleet, the choice is easy technicaly speaking (not politicaly). our ageing fleet is not linked to EPR at all which may be considered as a prototype for an eventual next fleet, we will see, and as already explained, the cost of our first EPR is not the cost of an EPR in a future fleet. side note: most of our ageing fleet have been build in only 10 years after 20 years of research and "prototypes".
> you just accepted to ignore all the costs generations will have to come up with just to cover nuclear waste
we started a project in 2000 for longterm deep storage which will provide waste stockage for more than 100years of our current dangerous waste production ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratoire_de_Bure ), for less dangerous product we are already treating not only our waste but most of the EU nuclear waste.
> You said that safety costs too much and we should look to China...
no i said our safety changes extended cost and delay, while china without changes respected cost and delay. which imply that our acquired expertise _with_ safety changes will probably respect and reduce cost like delay if we produce more EPR. this does'nt mean and i never said that we must do like china, that's your straw man.
> The fact that while nuclear only gets more expensive
source ? for the same type of product nuclear does'nt get more expensive, what get more expensive is more efficient, more secured, better and new/first try nuclear plants
> renewables not only got cheaper
renewable cost is a market cost not a local/production cost, like lithium for batteries, china got a mostly exclusive (quantitavely speaking) market on solar and parts of wind turbines (and for a time lithium) not by lowering cost but to acquire the market. we will talk about renewables production cost when they will be produced with renewables energy sources and not charcoal, gaz, gas and nuclear sources. yes nuclear actually rely on the same energy sources with one big diffence: it does'nt rely on it all it's lifetime.
> Why don't you link your study
because you have'nt link your "contradictory old study" and like i already said, to compare them they must apply to the same subject. but if you really want sources on this topic and a lot more about the same subject, there is the 20 hours
videos of courses of the "ecole des mines", one of the two or three most recognized schools in fr (largely better than any master or ph.d) :
you may find the site of the professor in the link which will provide a lot more ressources on nuclear and climate data and expertise, and probably some sources in english.
> You must know about the energy shortages
yes and you seem to not realize that those energy shortages are only on our own production, most of them where usually compensated by introducing/buying energy from others EU country with some minor exceptions like lowering the max available power on smalls customer populations and in rare case short cuts; no critical supply was ever stoped, no home get total shot down for more than a few hours, if those happens that was for small sets, nothing comparable to (for example, even if not linked to production i think) what happened in texas last winter, even occasional energy cut for technical problems which happen to all electry energy supply in all countries are worse than those "production shortages".
> you still chose to lie about it ? why ?
i'm not lying, you just seem to simply not knowing what you'r talking about, building some sort of fantasy disaster looking everywhere on google to confirm your bias (which will always be a success whatever may be the topic of your fantasy).
Easily processed uranium will last us 80 years at current consumption rates. If you start building current nuclear reactor designs everywhere, we'll run out of it in less than 40 years. Then the price will skyrocket, and nuclear is already more expensive than renewables.
We need different nuclear reactors, fast reactors or thorium that use uranium more efficiently to stave this off, but they're more dangerous and still experimental, respectively.
I think we're better off using that nuclear money into building lots of grid storage for renewables.
> Easily processed uranium will last us 80 years at current consumption rates. If you start building current nuclear reactor designs everywhere, we'll run out of it in less than 40 years.
This is a little pessimistic: these numbers rely on current proven reserves without reprocessing. Of course, if you want to use a bunch more uranium, prices will go up and the number of proven reserves will increase. This won't necessarily take a massive price swing-- heck, even at current prices new reserves will continue to be found.
> Then the price will skyrocket, and nuclear is already more expensive than renewables.
Fuel is a negligible portion of the cost of nuclear. You could triple the cost of fuel without materially impacting the operating costs of a reactor, and the overall costs of nuclear energy are not dominated by operating costs, but instead capital costs.
And, we're leaving out that reprocessing fuel is possible and proven (though there are proliferation concerns0.
>> we'll run out of it in less than 40 years. Then the price will skyrocket
This has already been addressed. Natural uranium can be gathered from seawater at about 2 to 5x the current cost. Considering how small fuel costs are in nuclear, that isn't much of a problem. And the amount available from all the world's oceans is orders of magnitude greater than that available from terrestrial mines. Even if we start extracting vast quantities from seawater some believe that more will be leached from rock, renewing the supply.
"The advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost of extraction by a factor of four in just 5 years, but the cost is still about $200/lb compared to traditional uranium mining which ranges between $10 and $120/lb."
Given reactors can take 10-20 years to be built and that they don't expect to make profit for decades, if the 40-year figure is true, then it likely is a good reason not to.
Yeah, we are unable to make a good product that is actually safe and to show a real sensible solution to deal with the residues, but lets undust again the stupid narrative of the big bad tree huggers. Yawn. Please cut the BS an don't blame other people for your own failures that are incredible expensive for everybody and erase the benefits.
It seems that in their strange world every citizen is either pro-nuclear or a hippie living in a caravan. This is not how they will sell it.
I can't imagine any type of plant I'd like built in a mad rush less than a nuclear power one. I am not against it, but it is not a magic bullet, either.
I find it interesting that people who advocate we make major policy changes to avert a climate disaster refuse to entertain making minor policy changes to reduce the cost and timeline of nuclear power plant construction.
China builds literally dozens of 1GW plants simultaneously for a fraction of the price, and in a fraction of the time, using western nuclear companies.
The time and cost limitation are entirely avoidable if we make sensible policy changes.
1. We need to issue an executive order opening the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. This one facility can hold ALL the nuclear waste we will make even if we move to 100% nuclear power.
2. We need to immunize nuclear plants from environmental lobby lawsuits which constantly delay projects and multiply costs.
These two changes ALONE will make nuclear plant construction attractive again in the US. Remember that large capital cost finance for profitable projects is not a problem. It's literally what Wall Street was built for. We wouldn't even need to fund the plants with gov't money.
Policy makers already have to battle deeply entrenched cultural attitudes towards nuclear technology. They can't be seen as lowering the safety measures for it too.
Nuclear is socially and therefore politically non-viable because
(1) When nuclear accidents happen, they suddenly overturn the lives of a LOT of commoners all at once as opposed to slow and creeping and often "statistically determined" impact of other energy tech
(2) technocrats have consistently failed to demonstrate the ability to create organisations that over the long term prioritize safety and the ability to prevent accidents over all else (maybe with the exception of US Naval Reactors org - but who knows given the secracy)
People instinctively get this now. Fukushima was especially a bad shakeup because "if even the Japanese can't do safety right, why would we trust the dumb nerds we went to school with to be able to do so".
We should move on and focus on other clean energy tech, scaling up storage tech and stop wasting time and energy debating fission. And Maybe figure out a rebranding for "nuclear fusion" whenever it works (hopefully within my lifetime) assuming it's safety profile is better.
> (1) When nuclear accidents happen, they suddenly overturn the lives of a LOT of commoners all at once as opposed to slow and creeping and often "statistically determined" impact of other energy tech
Hydroelectric dams have the same issue. I also bet, that if one of those gigawatt lithium battery storage facilities had a fire, it would be a very bad day for people around them.
Does France not exist? Also Japan is already restarting its nuclear reactors because their projected emissions targets are impossible to hit without restarting the plants.
Japan: in the past they invested in nuclear power, now they don't want it anymore BUT need gridpower and have no other way to obtain it than to (reluctantly) restart some reactors.
Planes are socially and therefore politically non-viable because
(1) When flight accidents happen, they suddenly overturn the lives of a LOT of commoners all at once as opposed to slow and creeping and often "statistically determined" impact of cars
(2) technocrats have consistently failed to demonstrate the ability to create organisations that over the long term prioritize safety and the ability to prevent accidents over all else
Except plane casualties happen to the people actively opting into air travel; an individual choice can mitigate one's exposure to air travel risk. Not so nuclear accidents.
It is absolutely comical you can claim that and cite a paragraph that concludes, “in January 2015, the number of Fukushima evacuees was around 119,000, compared with a peak of around 164,000 in June 2012.[174]”
Or maybe not. It was Navy training that destroyed TMI-2.
Instead of worrying about the loss off coolant, the operators worried about the reactor "going solid", which is slang for "no steam bubble is left in the primary coolant circuit". This made sense on the small Navy reactors they were trained on, but on the large land based ones. Arguably, it never made sense to take a submarine engine and turn it into a power plant.
Yes in retrospect this was definitely a missed opportunity to not put Rickover's org in charge of civillian reactors. But then the problwm outside US would persist. However trust is now lost, will be very difficult ro regain
Rickover was in charge of developing Shippingport, the USA's first terrestrial nuclear power plant. After that, it was largely necessary to pass things over to the private sector because of capitalism.
The US regulatory scheme (among others) guarantees that nuclear power is expensive. ALARA - As Low As Reasonably Achievable. In practice, this means that if nuclear power is cheaper than alternatives, regulators can demand that more "reasonably achievable" steps are taken to reduce exposure to radiation.
What I don't understand from these groups is why they don't go after nuclear _after_ coal, natural gas, and oil are gone from the grid. There are arguments against nuclear, but they aren't that great when there are still fossil fuel plants operating.
Also, a pet peeve of mine is when people say "replacing nuclear with zero-carbon sources" (as per the wiki article). That doesn't exist. There's energy sources that have zero operating emissions, but nuclear is one of them. But if we talk about lifetime then there's nothing that fits this criteria. So I don't get why this is in opposition.
There are no arguments against nuclear that stand up to scrutiny beyond emotional knee-jerk reactions.
Nuclear is safe, cheap and most importantly reliable.
Renewables are not reliable. Baseload renewables is a pipe dream that has been disproven repeatedly. Hence why jurisdictions that have dived into a heavy renewables energy mix are building gas peaking plants, utilising diesel generators in emergencies or adding batteries to the grid powered by child slaves in the Congo.
Even some of the more reliable renewable solutions like hydro occasionally have lulls that wipe out literally years of the benefit of running them.
As an example, the state of Tasmania in Australia runs on close to 100% hydro power year round, except when rare drought hits. When hydro didn't produce enough power one year, the Tasmania government flew in diesel generators to power the state and ran them for months, wiping out years of progress (diesel is worse than coal).
Except, it is not cheap at all: lately, in the US, you spend tens of billions of dollars for ten years or more, and get exactly zero watt-hours out, ever. $30B for zero watts of generating capacity is not a good value.
No arguments other than price and time to build. But most nuclear proponents will claim nuclear is perfectly safe, while simultaneously saying we should cut through the legislation and "red tape" in order to build it more cheaply. The very things which would make it safe in the first place.
Russia essentially has Europe right where it wants it with natural gas because Europe is closing all their coal plants. I really don't want that in the USA. I want us to be domestic energy only, nuclear, solar, and wind mix makes the most sense by far until real Fusion comes along if we are really serious about the climate.
There are lots of good arguments for nuclear, but considering that the US is the number one producer of natural gas (by, like, 50%) this isn't one of them.
North America has achieved full fossil fuel independence via shale. You don’t need all the fossil fuels, you only need enough to be able to cap the price. We have enough.
"Though it was built less than a mile from the Shoreline fault line, which was not known to exist at the time of construction, and is located less than three miles from the Hosgri fault,"
In hindsight Fukushima should not have been operating in a tsunami zone, and in foresight no nuclear power should operate in earthquake zones or next to volcanoes or in general in any place prone to high-energy natural disasters.
The problem with high-energy natural disasters is that you generally don't get a nice upper bound on the energy, rather you get an exponential falloff in probability of a disaster happening of higher and higher energies. So it's basically impossible to guarantee that the plant will survive, you can only make probabilistic arguments. That isn't good enough.
Thanks to the "Friends of the Earth" and "Natural Resources Defense Council" for pushing us to coal, natural gas, and blackouts... Also raising rates to pay for the premature decomissioning.
The blackouts are because of fire-risk from transmission lines, and this is largely because PGE paid out bonuses instead of paying for needed repairs to the transmission system.
This group of corrupt execs are the same people entrusted to make safety and maintenance decisions for Diablo Canyon.
While it's true that the bonus scandal is a thing, that's about trimming trees in urban areas near powerlines, and is unrelated to the problem of how one can run lines through millions of acres of forests that should never exist in California.
The state has ~150 million dead trees ready to ignite, and needs to reduce the size of its forests by roughly the size of Maine in order to get back to a safer fire risk. That is just irresponsible forest management.
When you are in that situation, needing to run power lines across a tinderbox that should have never been allowed to exist, then you're not going to be able to have reliable power no matter the bonus scandal.
"PG&E paid top execs $17 million in bonuses from 2012 to 2017"
You really think 17 million would have made a difference? Is that enough money to even bury 1 mile of transmission lines at Californian's exorbitant infrastructure cost?
Why bury when all those lines needed was replacement of worn parts? Burying power cables is expensive and increases maintenance costs an order of magnitude.
Much cheaper to replace hooks that are worn through so the cables don’t fall off the tower and start a fire.
Should probably also add ground fault interruption as a protection measure too. I saw a quite-impressive video of some hardware that was going in on parts of the Australian grid that managed to turn off super-quick as the cable arced to the earth, limiting the heating energy tremendously.
You are committing the fallacy of the seen and the unseen here.
Nuclear power could be literally 10x as dangerous, and it would still cause far less harm to humans than existing non-nuclear sources of energy, and that's when you ignore the negative effects on the climate from those energy sources.
It does well when you compare it to coal and gas. It's not 1980 though. We have cheap battery backed solar and wind now.
3x the cost (5-7x if you take out the batteries) with a small chance of catastrophe doesnt really add up any more unless the country is trying to maintain a nuclear industry for military purposes.
That ramshackle contraption should never have been turned on in the first place. It is being shut down now not because of hippies, who have much less influence than is often claimed, but because it would cost $billions to get it into good enough shape to operate until the next big earthquake.
I'd be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper, that's what's going to get built.
Also, renewables don't require a high degree of trust in the human operators to manage risks appropriately. I think that's really the main sticking point with nuclear; reliable reactors can be made, but how do you manage the humans who maintain the plants in a way that's not susceptible to corruption or corner-cutting?
If nuclear can be made to handle more of our energy needs for a reasonable cost, then that's a good thing, and if it can be made cheaper by updating regulations without sacrificing safety, then I think that would be awesome. But I think we should plan for the future under the assumption that most of our energy will come from renewables. That's the lowest-risk plan that doesn't require major regulatory changes or new technology. (Apparently there are also some major lithium iron phosphate patents that are expired or expiring soon, which should open up cheap battery manufacturing to companies outside of China.)
Solar, wind plus batteries (and other intermittent sources) are only cheaper because it is subsidized by the base power stations.
Only about 20% of the cost of coal and 5% of nuclear comes from the fuel. Almost all costs are fixed costs. They need to be paid regardless of whether people use the power or not. But in the current system, those who use solar or wind and only use base power occasionally aren't paying those costs. Instead everyone else has to cover those costs, which is why the price of electricity skyrockets wherever there are more 'renewable' (or specifically, 'intermittent') sources.
This is why electricity costs 10c per kwh in many parts of the US, but 40c per kwh in European countries with lots of windmills.
basically it is a huge market distortion. The real cost of base power is a fixed yearly fee to get access, then 2c per kwh after that (i.e the 20% fuel cost). If this is what was charged no one would use wind or solar at all. (or you would have people using solar but disconnected from the grid, which would be great too).
If you'd add the cost of maintaining radioactive waste for thousands of years on the cost of power, you'd end up with even higher prices and how do you think those reactors came into existence in the first place? Not even Bill Gates wants to pay for his reactor by himself.
Than there is maintenance. EDF will have to pay staggering 100 billion € to increase the life of their fleet for another 10 years and the price won't go down in the future. Even though the fleet is quite well maintained and France relies on it, accidents, overheated rivers, too cold winters force them to buy (often dirty) power from Germany.
So yeah...number juggling is quite trendy in Shillenbergers Astro-Turf but it won't change the facts: nuclear is too expensive and too slow to fight climate change.
Say it's a cold cloudy day with no wind and it's been so for a week. You'll need the capacity of that coal/nuclear plant those days. And let's say every other day of the year solar and wind make enough power. So who pays the extremely high fixed cost of the nuclear and coal plant so it's available that one week you need it? No one wants to, so they're shutting them down. The power company could still be paying the bond for the plant, but ultimately that's the consumer's money. Then, surprise, you end up with blackouts or you pay for new natural gas plants to be built. Prices and fragility go up.
It's likely cheaper to make demand more flexible, but that has a cost too.
Those batteries only have a few hours of storage at max power, they're for solving the duck curve not a week-long supply shortage (let alone seasonal fluctuations). If we got the Midwest on heat pumps, how you planning to keep places heated when there's a week of blizzard? Right now we have no plan for addressing the occasional bad week besides overbuilding natural gas. That's worse than keeping our nuclear running and expanding, but the solar and wind is subsidized but not the natural gas. The way the market for power works, bidding on a daily or hourly basis, doesn't account for seasonal variation. The solar and wind builders are off the hook on blizzard week but get subsidized enough to run the reliable plants out of business the rest of the year.
>how you planning to keep places heated when there's a week of blizzard?
When the wind is blowing really hard? Wind turbines?
The texas winter was a bit of an anomaly. It got so cold that every power source ending up failing because none were set up to deal with it even though all of them in theory could have (& would have if they were in, say, alaska).
I think their point still stands - even if every town/city has both solar panels and wind turbines, there are times when you won't get enough power from them to meet demand (remember demand can vary too), just due to natural fluctuations in weather. You either need an absurd amount of battery storage, or some sort of backup power source.
I think if you combine demand shaping, overbuilding, grid scale LIon batteries, better grid interconnects (another thing texas failed miserably at) & pumped hydro you'll find that demand can be met for most people.
It'll take time to shift to using green energy and there will be problems but the same would be true for any other kind of shift to any new sources of power.
Probably not 16 years like the new UK nuclear plant will take though :/
Yes, we could do that, but that's not what is incentivized by the market so it's not being done on a large scale or with any urgency. Changing the way the market works is what is needed to make those things the action chosen.
This is something people get confused about. Grid scale batteries are definitely not cost effective or in existence. The media does their best to obfuscate this. What has been built around the places are battery packs to absorb dangerous power fluctuations caused by windmills. They destroyed the grid in South Australia a few years ago, and Elon Musk famously went in and installed batteries (maybe that is what you are thinking of).
If you don't believe me go back and have a look at how big the batteries were. The 500 million dollar project installed 130 MWh worth of electricity storage. That is enough to produce the same energy as a power station for 10 minutes before being fully drained.
> Grid scale batteries are definitely not cost effective or in existence.
California has more than 1.5 GW of utility-scale chemical batteries interconnected to it's grid with another 1 GW anticipated to enter service by the end of the year. Most of these batteries can sustain full output for four hours. This is in addition to the more than 3.0 GW of pumped hydro "batteries."
1 GW is roughly the output of one nuclear power plant.
I remember people saying something similar about the amount of deployed solar and wind shortly after it became cost competitive. There used to be a tiny amount deployed but it was the cheapest form of power.
Then over the course of a few years there was a lot.
All that really matters is A) is it cost effective B) will there be scaling problems C) will there be political impediments.
Solar is not cost-effective today for applying power after the sun sets (duck curve) or at night. Wind is not cost-effective at supplying power on calm days. If they were required to build the rest of the system to be reliable (longer interconnects, batteries, etc) it suddenly wouldn't be cost-effective, this explaining why energy cost continues to go up while this supposedly cheap power ramps up.
Combined solar+battery is not just cost effective at dealing with the duck curve it is downright cheap. Hawaii canceled an inter-island grid interconnect because of this.
I'm thinking of battery backed solar farm in Hawaii that cost around $70/MwH and supplied about 1/5th of the power for the island. There's a few new projects in California/Nevada/Colorado that are allegedly costing around $30-40MwH (although I'm skeptical of how much storage they have for that price).
Either way, conservatively speaking, $50-60/MwH for battery backed wind/solar on the mainland seems fairly doable. Prices will likely keep dropping too.
By contrast, in the UK Hinkley Point C is being paid $124/MwH guaranteed for 20 years. It doesn't exist because it's a cost effective way of supplying green energy that's for sure, but it does bolster the nuclear economy. The military do like to hire nuclear technicians and buy parts for PWRs in nuclear subs, etc. and somebody has to pay for these things. Rate payers, I guess.
These numbers are way off though, maybe those are just the cells?
If we look at the 2021 estimates by the National Renewable Energy Labs for utility scale 4h batteries [0] We get cost estimates of 250 $/kWh for the high case, 200 $/kWh for the middle case and 150 $/kWh for the low case by 2030.
[0] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf.
Assume enough energy is supplied to charge the batteries. So lets say we want 1kWh during 4 hours, that puts our capital cost at 4 kWh*200$/kWh = 800$. Now we assume this system runs every day for 4 hours during ten years. Ten years sounds reasonable, but it could be less. 7 years maybe? So about 1kWh*365,25*10=14610kWh in total. That gives us 800$/14610kWh = 0,0548$/kWh or 54,8 $/MWh in 2030 if I didn't make a major mistake somewhere and assuming no efficiency losses. That's pretty good.
>Say it's a cold cloudy day with no wind and it's been so for a week.
What if it's been so for a month?
What if the country is Sweden?
What if the month is January?
What if the average temperature is -20C?
>So who pays the extremely high fixed cost of the nuclear and coal plant so it's available that one week you need it? No one wants to, so they're shutting them down.
Change the way the market works, pick a baseline power and bid it yearly. Then the nuclear stations can compete. But our current one results in shutdowns while we pay for extraneous wind capacity and new natural gas.
The ones that ensure with several 9's that the lights come on 24/7 regardless of time of day or weather. LCOE covers the generator alone, but not transmission lines, idled gas plants, energy storage, smart load balancing, etc.
You can keep big gas plants around in a high intermittent grid and fire them up 10% of the time. The way we view LCOE right now, those plants would be insanely expensive while wind/solar would be super cheap. But we would still pay for the backup capacity. This kind of system cost is what matters dramatically more than LCOE.
LCOE is just an investment tool to figure out where you get the most bang for your buck as an investor. It does not tell us what the best option is for the energy system as a whole.
The thing that bothers me about the whole energy discussion is that there seems to be little room for a middle ground, it's just a political discussion at this point. In reality we won't have 100% renewables and we won't have 100% nuclear either. Neither of those 2 options, at their extremes, is best from a cost perspective.
What you are talking about is the marginal cost of producing an extra kWh of electricity. That does vary between different sources. For nuclear, solar and wind it is exceptionally low. For gas and coal it is higher due to fuel costs and market volatility (see gas prices now). A further factor is how quickly a generator can turn on, maintenance costs, and fuel efficiency. Also, different locations have better grid connections closer to population centres.
These kind of discussions always touch on a few of these points. But actually a well designed market absolutely can take these factors into account and price accordingly. You have strike prices to cover capital costs, capacity markets, bidding to reduce costs etc.
The low price of wind is just an acknowledgement that it is less valuable due to intermitancy. But you guarantee the rate regardless of the market because the low CO2 emissions are valuable.
Nuclear is expensive because it is more valuable due to low CO2 and low intermitancy. Give it a relatively high subsidised rate. It should be more expensive than wind.
Gas peakers are valuable because they can be turned on quickly. But they are dirty. So they charge a high rate but the rate is not guaranteed. The market avoids using them.
You could and maybe should replace all of this with a state run electricity company that makes all the decisions. That is really what people are arguing for rather than a particular type of generator. But in an energy market costs need to actually mean something more than a political point.
While it's nice to believe that through the magic of the market, everything just evens out, a simple thought experiment easily shows this isn't the case.
Take the simplest case and ignore CO2 and carbon tax for now. The base power stations have to be sufficient to supply the whole power grid when the wind doesn't blow, and the sun doesn't shine. Ok, so now imagine what happens if we simply remove all the solar panels and all the wind turbines. What happens? Nothing happens. The grid still works normally. In other words the cost of all those windmills, solar panels, their construction, their maintenance, etc, it is all extra cost that the consumer has to pay somehow.
So isn't the magic market supposed to fix all this? Why doesn't market dynamics take care of this? Because government regulation doesn't allow fixed power plants to charge a fixed yearly fee. If the government did allow this then the market would indeed price everything correctly.
Now if you add a carbon tax, having a number of windmills on the side does eventually become advantageous, but never compared to non-intermittent sources of renewable power like hydro or nuclear which could also charge this fixed yearly fee.
> Because government regulation doesn't allow fixed power plants to charge a fixed yearly fee. If the government did allow this then the market would indeed price everything correctly.
In the US, in most markets (except ERCOT/TX), it's the opposite of what you say. Government regulation _requires_ either the market operator or load serving entity to contract for capacity (as opposed to energy). PJM, which operates the largest market in the US, runs an annual auction for capacity. Incredibly, due in part to subsidies offered to the natural gas industry, existing nuclear power plants have not cleared in the auction. [0, 1]
The fact that wind and solar are included in this purchase 3 years ahead of time, should make it clear this isn't what you think it is.
Solar and wind can't know even a day or two in advance whether they will be able to deliver the power.
In fact, this auction, which allows intermittent power to compete on the exact same footing as base power, is exactly what I mean by a market distortion in their favor.
You seem to be fixating on the word "market". I don't mean that in a liberal economic way. Electricity markets are natural monopolies and need intervention. That is what subsidies are. The energy markets let you bundle up different issues into a single price per kwh. But that doesn't always work. For example in the UK there are capacity markets that give fixed payments for reliable capacity. Most of which are fossil fuel power stations.
You are trying to simplify things too much. Unpicking a few factoids to make an argument. The advantage of this kind of energy market is that individual companies don't have to do that. Small developers don't need to worry about building backup for their solar panels. And nuclear power stations can take on a big risk. All bundles into the price.
But all this is specific to particular markets. No idea what is going on in the USA and as a European I assume it is probably a mess.
> d be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper
Cost is not just a single factor. Energy density is very important too. Solar farms take huge amounts of space to produce very little energy compared to a nuclear plant.
A solar farm that produces the same power as a nuclear power station (1GW) requires 1000 3MW turbines (33% efficiency) at 700 meters apart.
That's 500 square kilometers of turbines (something like 200 square miles).
I once did the calculation and it came out to something like 10 times as much concrete and steel to build the turbines as it would have taken to build the nuclear power plant.
> 10 times as much concrete and steel to build the turbines as to build the nuclear power plant
But all those materials are 100% recyclable as raw matters the next week after the wind turbines close.
With nuclear, you can't touch those iron an concrete in generations. And we need to include in our calculus the two concrete sarcophagous that were required in Chernobyl also. We will be pouring tons of concrete for a lot of time in that place.
Solar farms can be pretty big, but we have the space for it. If you look at a map of the United States, there's a lot of land in the Southwest that gets a lot of sunlight and isn't usable for growing crops. It's an ecosystem, and anything that intrudes on that ecosystem will be somewhat disruptive, but as long as reasonable care is taken I don't see it as a problem to use a smallish fraction of that land for solar production.
Not all of the United States is in the southwest, and why should the southwest destroy all their natural environments to power the rest of the rest of the country over lossy power lines when local nuclear could do it?
Decent high-voltage DC lines can move that power around with pretty small losses. (Wikipedia quotes about 3.5% per 1000km.) And the Southwest doesn't have to destroy all their natural environments; they just happen to have a natural advantage in power generation on land that otherwise isn't economically productive. (Not that all land has to be economically productive.)
This could be a major industry in those states.
Ecological impact should be looked into and installations should be done in a way that creates minimal environmental impact, but I'm not going to say that it should be an absolute showstopper if sagebrush is interspersed by the occasional array of black panels.
The environmental costs of major solar farms aren't going to be zero, but just because it's non-zero doesn't mean we shouldn't do it if it's environmentally preferable to burning coal and natural gas.
I'm also not against nuclear, I'm just not optimistic we can get the costs down.
While the losses aren't too big, transmission lines are very expensive and take many years of planning to get the land rights required if there isn't already a transmission line going there. There aren't currently a lot of lines going to the middle of nowhere, except for some hydroelectric dams.
Solar farms don't need to be near water courses or water masses. They can be put in arid places blown by the wind where people typically don't like to live. Deserts are wide and empty
Nuclear requires water. Humans societies need water also. So nuclear normally competes for the same areas that humans inhabit. All big cities were built near water sources.
The thrust was correct according to your source, or am I misreading it? Nuclear median 12, Solar 48 (4x nuclear), gas 490 (10x solar), coal 810 (20x solar).
From TFA: "Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste the greenhouse-gas emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and around 1/400th as much as solar. For any given power output the amount of raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce about a half-ounce of waste human mortality from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times as many lives."
Affordable by looking at the decimation of the plantet. It comes at a fraction of the cost (destruction of human civilization and 80% plus of the world's animal population)
I read an excellent article written in Physics Today by a nuclear physicist once. For the life of me I have never been able to find it again. But he describes this in detail.
Basically, in his description this is entirely due to the environmental movement. Any time a nuclear plant gets planned the green groups move in a mountain of lawyers and lock down the process for years and years. The costs this adds to the projects are staggering and it is solely because of this that nuclear power can't be built in the US. In Europe, people have no problem building nuclear cheaply and on time.
> In Europe, people have no problem building nuclear cheaply and on time.
Not true, unfortunately. The same political dynamics that made nuclear expensive in the U.S. eventually made it expensive in Japan, France and, mostly recently South Korea. None of those countries, which were global leaders during their respective nuclear industry booms, can build nuclear nearly as cheaply as they used to; certainly not domestically, and not even internationally as the absence of continuous construction meant loss of skilled labor and project management expertise. See, e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u... (Google other more recent articles that better detail the current state for South Korea.)
"The main contractor, Areva, is building the unit for a fixed price of €3 billion, so in principle, any construction costs above that price fall on Areva."
[...]
"The total cost of the project, therefore, is estimated to be €11 billion."
Since it's hard for me to track the scandals surrounding Areva and the different ownership structures of it, involving EDF, Framatome, TVO and who-knows-what-else, take this with a grain of salt, but I think the cost overruns may ultimately have to be paid by French tax payers?
"The construction of the unit began in 2005. The start of commercial operation was planned for 2010,[19] but has been pushed back several times.[20] As of August 2020, the estimate for start of regular production is June 2022.[21]"
"EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.[6][2]"
And there were also problems with the EPR reactor containment vessel EDF/Areva/Framatome delivered to China.
This is all from the foremost "experts" at fission plant production in France.
To my knowledge, only China has successfully (that we know) built new reactors lately.
I imagine there are probably ways to make nuclear power cheaper than it is without sacrificing safety, but can it compete purely on cost with solar and wind, or even coal and natural gas?
If you have a plan to fix the regulatory environment in a way that makes it cheaper than fossil fuels (ignoring long term hidden costs of fossil fuel use), then by all means advocate for that. I just think that we shouldn't assume that the technical, economic, and political hurdles will be overcome. Wind and solar are the cheapest option we have right now, so I think that's what we should plan to use. If another better option becomes available we can use it too. I just don't think we should put our eggs in the "nuclear will save us" basket. Maybe it could, but maybe it won't and we need a plan B.
From what I've read, most cost and time overruns from nuclear are due to lots of design revisions during construction to make site-specific adaptations that need to be intensively reviewed, approved, revised, over and over again. Small modular reactors are designed to address this since they're preassembled at the factory and small enough that you can easily just move the reactor to adjust for any site adaptations. Unfortunately still years away from approval.
Nuclear can compete purely on cost with coal. Which is fundamentally the problem. A decade ago nuclear was still legitimately the cheapest source of power but the economics have totally changed and now coal is not profitable and nuclear is likely on the way out.
We are also producing more coal than ever before (modulo the dip during covid lockdowns), and coal use is projected to increase:
"Global coal production is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.3% between 2021 and 2025 to reach 8.8 billion t in 2025. While thermal coal production is expected to have a relatively marginal 2% CAGR to reach 7549.6 million t, metallurgical coal is forecast to register stronger growth of 4.2% per year, to reach 1216.9 million t in 2025."[1]
By that chart it looks like mining coal is quite profitable. On the other hand, if you're generating electricity from coal, high coal prices make generating electricity from coal more expensive, and thus less competitive with nuclear or renewables.
The price represents the intersection of supply and demand. Since supply of coal is steady, the higher price is coming from an increase in demand.
Of course coal purchasers would prefer a lower price, but the fact that the price is high is proof that there is great demand for coal. This does not mean that there is not demand for renewables, either. Both the usage of renewables and the usage of coal is predicted to increase.
Increases in coal-fired generation in Other non-OECD Asia—which includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, among other countries—will account for over 75% of our projected increase in global coal-fired generation from 2030 to 2050. For Other non-OECD Asia, we project that renewable energy sources will account for about 60% of the generation increase over the projection period, primarily from wind and solar. Coal-fired generation will account for nearly all of the remaining growth.
It is the solution to the climate change problem caused by coal and natural gas. Competing with their price should not be in the equation.
Your second paragraph seems hostile, no, I don't have a plan and won't submit one.
Sadly competing with coal and natural gas on cost is relevant. I think we should close those plants as soon as possible even if it means replacing them with a more expensive option, but sometimes it's hard to get political traction on things that cost more. Solar and wind tends to be cheaper than fossil fuels, anyways, though that might not be true if you have to factor in batteries. (Whether that's an issue is geography-dependent: I'm in Oregon, and we get a lot of our power from hydroelectric, which means we can use bodies of water essentially as capacitors to buffer out the irregularities in wind and solar. The East coast doesn't really have that option.)
I don't mean to be hostile, I'm just saying that as far as I understand it, nuclear is expensive which means that people who are looking to get the most power for the least cost probably are going to go with wind and solar. If we can somehow make nuclear cost competitive then that's great but I don't know what's needed for that to happen and in the mean time I think the sensible thing is to treat nuclear as something that might work, but we aren't counting on it.
I like nuclear and I used to think it was a silver bullet. I still believe that nuclear is very safe for life (in fact, it is even safer than solar on a per-kWh basis due to the high number of deaths associated with people falling off roofs while installing panels) and the enviroment, but I now understand more about some of it's disadvantages. Specifically:
1. It is very expensive. Nuclear has a levelized cost of over 10 cents per kilowatt hour, which is very high compared to solar and wind (not including energy storage). The levelized cost means that it is a cost which includes the costs of capital.
2. Load shifting can greatly reduce the need for energy storage. By shifting certain loads (e.g., some particularly energy intensive industrial processes) away from peak hours, we can greatly reduce the need for energy storage. Further, application tailored energy storage solutions (e.g., thermal energy storage for HVAC applications) can also be an effective solution.
3. While nuclear is not dangerous to humans anymore, the financial cost of accidents is huge. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, while it only killed one person, cost one trillion dollars to contain and remediate. When you add it the probability of disasters and the cost of remediating them, the levelized cost of nuclear would be much, much higher.
Thus, while I don't oppose new nuclear power plants, I do think our society's resources are better spent on further research into nuclear (both fission and fusion) and lower cost energy options like wind and solar.
I used to oppose nuclear, but I now think it's a worthwhile backup, or perhaps one strand in a diversified approach to getting off fossil fuels.
There is, sadly, no one single technology that can replace fossil fuels for even any one major category of use (electricity, industrial, buildings, transport). We're going to end up with a massively more complicated energy supply system.
In this context I think it's still worth pursuing nuclear.
The cost argument has only arisen recently. As late as 2010 nuclear was competitive, or at least not obviously uncompetitive apart from its massive regulatory burden.
It seems to me that a lot of nuclear's costs arise from the "as low as reasonably achievable" doctrine (ALARA), which in turn is founded in the "linear no threshold" theory (LNT) of the effects of radiation.
LNT is falsified by the health statistics of the Denver population vs the coasts, and many other real-world observations.
If fission had fixed, scientifically determined thresholds and performance standards to work to, and a less hostile regulatory environment (removing the veto of NIMBYs), it would really interesting to see how it competes. It can scale up to the necessary scale in 30 years.
Fusion, on the other hand, can't conceivably help us with the transition in the time we have available. It'd be best to park it for 50 years and redeploy those physics Ph. D.s into material science for photovoltaics, batteries, electrolysis, and fuel synthesis.
Nukes might have been useful as a climate-change solution if they were not intimately, inextricably tied to massive, long-term (wholly legal) corruption. The bulk of the cost goes to corruption; but much worse is that they take many extra years to complete beyond what normal construction would take, because nobody actually involved wants that gravy train ever to dry up--anyway, not until after their kids graduate college--and deliver exactly zero watt-hours of energy, in the meantime, if indeed they are ever completed at all.
The latest failed US nuke project has cost ratepayers $30B already, is nowhere near done, and most likely never will be done.
Fortunately, solar and wind projects seem thus far immune to corruption. They often start delivering power immediately after they are begun, or anyway long before the project is done. They may easily be extended after they are "done", either on-site or somewhere entirely else.
Long before solar and wind produce enough power that we have reason to worry about "grid stability", storage solutions will be coming on-line, cheaply. Factories for iron-air batteries are being constructed at a frenzied pace, but they will compete with liquified air, ammonia, hydrogen, and other solutions according to local conditions. (Ammonia and hydrogen have the advantage that they are, also, feedstock for other processes.) In the meantime, the single best possible use for a renewable-energy dollar is more solar panel; later, storage will be a good investment.
Besides generating capacity, and storage, we will need a lot of long-distance high-voltage transmission lines, and ships to carry liquified ammonia to burn at higher latitudes where solar is not practical, and where relying just on long transmission lines is too risky.
It's a shame that this totally genuine supporter of nuclear power doesn't believe in electric vehicles. You'd think EVs and nuclear would make a great pairing. But no, strangely, in his opening paragraph in this very honest attempt to sell nuclear power to a skeptical public he's more worried about gasoline costs and silly politicians subsidizing uneconomic cars. Hmmm, whatever could he mean by that surprisingly vague swipe.
> The United States has only 241 coal units in operation, so shuttering them would be a meaningless exercise in virtue-signaling.
I'm beginning to doubt the authors sincerity in seeking solutions to this problem.
Batteries etc are falling too, so project ahead so solar seems to win out. Which is good news really as we've had nuclear for decades and it still hasn't stopped developing countries burning fossil fuels and probably never will. On the other hand if solar costs like a quarter that of fossil it'll probably take over.
Realistically if we were going to go big on nuclear we needed to do so 30 years ago. In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service.
"In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service."
In France it's another matter altogether, there are nuclear power stations everywhere and about 70% of the country's energy comes from nuclear. (Years ago, during a conference I was at in Avignon we even had a tour of the nearby UF6 gaseous diffusion plant and it was almost considered matter of fact.)
Compared to anglophone counties like the US, UK, Australia and NZ, France is heavenly peaceful when it comes to establishing new nuclear plants.
Why is it that if one speaks English one's overly likely to object to nuclear power?
While it used to be a different matter in France, they last completed a reactor more than 30 years ago and the one currently being built is beset with the same time and cost overruns as those in the U.K.
> A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022.
Yeah, perhaps the French have eventually 'caught' whatever it is that English speakers caught long ago. :-)
More seriously, I've not been there for some years now so I'm somewhat out of touch, but at one point I was working in the industry (but not employed by any French organization, EDF, etc.), nevertheless I had a reasonable overview of what the French were doing as far as power generation was concerned.
Everyone who I met almost to a person including my nontechnical aunt and uncle who lived in Paris, were pro nuclear power. They saw it as a cheap source of power and also it represented engineering excellence and prowess for France.
I'm guessing, but perhaps the main reason for this collective view stems from de Gaulle's early entry into both military and nuclear power immediately after WWII - from early 1946 onward, thus nuclear power was well established in the the halcyon days of the 1950s before worldwide controversy broke out over the nuclear industry. There's also France's rebuilding phase after WWII, where modernist ideas took hold more strongly there than in many other countries. That attitude probably smoothed the way.
Then there's that French Gaullism (which I admire but it's no fun being on the pointed end of it), which basically says 'we're doing it our way and to hell with the rest of you'. Perhaps that attitude has dissipated somewhat by now (at least as far as the nuclear industry is concerned). Flamanville, though, does seem to be overly uncharacteristic when compared with previous efforts.
Anyway, whatever the French did early on in nuclear power genertaion, it was very successful compared to other countries, as the percentage of nuclear power produced in France is second to none.
I always assumed it just made more sense for France to go all in on nuclear since they didn’t have coal or oil and gas.
I don’t know how much of the problem is that the new reactors they’re trying to build are so much more complex or that after building as many as they needed, the 30 year gap in construction meant there was a loss of industrial knowledge of how to do it efficiently.
Why does it need to take decades to build something we already know how to do, assuming we're actually facing a dire climate catastrophe? Is it the case that we can't technically build nuclear plants in a few years time? Because I very much doubt that.
Not true, it's too late for nuclear power.
Additionally it is quite expensive compared to renewables and makes the burden on future generations even bigger.
Anyway, don't shut down any working plant early...
We need everything we have atm
It is more expensive mostly because the government creates economic incentives for renewables, and disencentivises nuclear. Politicians act this way because public was taught by the militant ecoactivists that nuclear energy is baaaaaaad (better use coal, right), and now vote against politicians that support it.
That +33% rise in nuclear energy prices is precisely what I'm talking about. It is a product of relentless attacks on nuclear power. Had it seen the same promotion and investment as solar/wind over the last 20 years, it would be -90% too.
Nuclear costs, particularly in high latitude countries like most of Europe, are pretty reasonable and competitive in a future where you’re 100% decarbonized. Renewables are cheaper if we are just 80% decarbonized. Check it: https://model.energy
The cost is also HIGHLY dependent on time to complete. And a big part of that time, besides contractor inexperience because we don’t build them much any more, is the constant battles with activists and environmental groups and NIMBYs
So if you plan on building 4KW solar, and then decide to do 100X that, you can generate ~1800KWH per day (400 * 5 hours per day of ideal sun * fudge factor). If you have the battery storage for that you can probably get through 66 days from one sunny day. The cost would be super prohibitive too, but not everyone needs 100X out there solar to get through some rough days.
My personal plan is 30KW (over the next few years) so I can get through like 4 days. And heck, a stormy day will still generate enough electricity.
At an equivalent total cost of ownership most will prefer renewables to nuclear: no risk, no waste, no geopolitically touchy nuclear fuel, no adventurous decommission...
Solar could be free, and still the battery costs would be prohibitive.
In terms of "hard to believe", ask yourself why countries have not managed to roll out storage capacity to match the solar capacity? It's because solar is relying on fossil fuels or nuclear or hydro to be there when it's dark.
Indeed, because building wind/solar/biomass/... production units took most of the investment capacity, while coping for variability was cheap because we already had thermal (fossil fueled) powerplants. Those are aging up and more and more expensive to use due to carbon taxes, therefore storage-related projects get boosted. H2 (and fuel cells), thermal and kinetic storage... are getting traction.
The sheer amount of electricity produced by intermittent renewables (solar & wind) while nobody wants it grows. Many markets have more and more negative prices timeframes, where the producer is ready to pay in order to get rid of it (gridpower network stability implies "production == consumption", any over/under-load is dangerous for it). However electricity prices are way, way up during under-production periods. This creates an already huge and growing incentive for storage.
Also add electric vehicles batteries (and, maybe one day, home batteries) which will more and more be usable to store overproduction thanks to smartgrid and various tricks ( such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid).
The landscape is quickly (relatively to its huge inertia) changing.
All of the above facts are exactly correct. There is a huge financial incentive for storage. Right now.
And yet the storage is not being built in any meaningful sense. At best we have "ideas" but these have not been actually deployed at scale. People keep throwing out ideas, but when there is a crunch they fly in diesel generators or add gas peaker plants.
That alone should tell you how expensive the storage problem is to address. It's a very hard problem.
This just isn't correct. There are dozens of pilot projects for novel grid storage systems being built right now all around the world, and existing battery based grid storage like Tesla's megapack have multiple installations already in use, and dozens more planned this year. Pumped hydro alone is already in the hundreds of GW range.
The reason grid storage hasn't been built is because batteries were too expensive, but more importantly, grid storage was never needed. It takes 5-10 years for new tech to see widespread deployments, and it's only been a few years that grid storage had been getting this investment.
And as I said, we have hundreds of 100MWh+ battery plants, and hundreds of GWh of pumped hydro. The idea that they haven't been deployed at scale is just wrong.
We should be using the best energy for the job, which in many cases/places is nuclear.
Nuclear is a clean and reliable source of energy that doesn't need grid-level energy storage in order to be a comprehensive solution. Solar and wind need storage. Not everywhere is windy and not everywhere is sunny.
If you look at the total cost including storage and decomissioning, solar and wind are not nearly as cheap as you think they are.
The dirty little secret is that renewables are consumable. They wear out and have to be replaced. Like discount shoes: they're cheap, they don't look good, and you throw them away after a while.
The dirtier non secret is that all the critical parts of a nuclear reactor become radioactive waste. We still have no long term plan for dealing with the radioactive waste that had already been generated.
The heavy metals used in batteries and solar panels are also very toxic [1]. Only reason we don't talk about them is because they can be offshored since they can't be weaponized.
Batteries: huge recycling projects ( such as https://northvolt.com/ ) are moving forward and the market is ready: in many industrial nations battery-equipped vehicles and buildings are already recycled, not thrown in a trashcan.
The cool thing about solar panels is that they are recyclable like old clothes. People are super super happy buying 5 year old panels for $80 that are rated at 250 watts but are giving someone like 235 now.
More expensive?Yeah, probably, because the alarmist message about nuclear has been the rhetoric for decades.I would argue nuclear is greener, yes, than some renewable sources like wind/solar (of whom the effects to our atmosphere and fauna are still vastly ignored or not documented enough).
Many people focus on carbon or some other element that in vast amounts is damaging to our climate, but forget the fact that animals,birds,and life in general can sustain and even undo the effects of pollution in some cases.
A 0-carbon atmosphere is rendered useless if there are no birds, plants(which by the way USE it) or life (besides humans, presumably).
People should look at the individuals/entities that push for climate _alarmist_ (not awareness, a distinction to be understood) messages and think beyond the political and economic gain that those entities benefit if such messages are to be followed.
You're very welcome to argue that renewables are less green than nukes, but you're going to have a hard time backing up your argument with independent research, because the facts argue against you.
As for animals etc undoing the effects of pollution "in some cases" - some practical examples would be helpful, because I suspect most people have never heard of any examples that aren't trivial or anecdotal.
The whole point of zero carbon is literally to keep the planet as hospitable to life as possible. Your vague argument about... something is the exact opposite of the point here.
I think talking about "no birds" is extreme, but I do agree that covering the planet with trillions of solar panels is not environmentally friendly. The size of the footprint has to be taken into account.
See, you can't "believe in climate change" and be against the cleanest, most abundant energy source we have: nuclear. It's just not a logically consistent position, a litmus test to determine if one's environmental advocacy is real or merely performative.
That is why China has announced they're building 150 new nuclear reactors in the next 15 years. The US will _inevitably_ have to follow suit to remain competitive.
China is investing far more in renewables than nukes - by 2030 the plan is for 7.7% of total energy from nukes vs 20% from renewables.
If you ignore the colourful but factually incorrect rhetoric and look at the reality, nuclear power is expensive compared to renewables, and renewables will only get cheaper over time.
But more importantly, when you consider a complete lifecycle analysis instead of cherry picking operational emissions and ignoring the rest, nukes are not a genuine low carbon energy source.
The problem here is that China's share of total energy from renewables has decreased from about 33% in 1990 to 13% in 2018[1].
Solar and Wind are not particularly useful given they are unreliable. Hydro is useful as it is reliable, but after the three gorges dam project, there isn't a lot left on the table in terms of hydro for China.
Note that this is not because China is reducing renewables but rather it's energy needs are increasing so rapidly.
And 58% of China's energy usage - 74 Terrawatt hours - is from coal, and that number is increasing -- 220 million more tons of coal being added just this year[2]
> this is not because China is reducing renewables but rather it's energy needs are increasing so rapidly.
This is key (also: in the graph hydro isn't accounted for), and the reason why the current observed trend (huge push to renewables, increasing their share despite the rapid energy needs increase) is another key.
> Solar and Wind are not particularly useful given they are unreliable
Their variability can be reduced, maybe even totally compensated, by various methods: continental-scale deployment of wind turbines, using a mix of sources (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... shows that is is true in Europe (quote: ""we demonstrate that the European energy system would strongly profit from exploiting the implications of these regimes for continent-scale wind generation patterns."), and maybe also for China (quote: "Liu et al. investigated wind energy complementarity across China, demonstrating that whereas a combination of wind and solar resources over a given area reduces the occurrence of zero-power hours, wind resources alone are sufficient to provide baseline power production, if a large enough area is considered.")
I guess we'll see, since China knows that GDP is directly tied to energy, and they are pursuing "all of the above" strategy. We've been pursuing the "make Al Gore rich" strategy so far.
Interesting, that's a pretty good illustration of the low capacity factors of wind and solar given that renewables figure includes 356GW of hydro power. And it shows them increasing nuclear power 4x but renewables only 50% by 2030.
Nuclear now costs three times as much as solar & wind! And that data ist from 2017. Both technologies are also not showing any slowdown in improvements, while nuclear tends to get more expensive.
The trend for batteries happens to be extremely similar.
Nuclear is dead. Maybe people arguing against it in the 1980 were wrong. Maybe it’s safe. None of that matters, because it’s simply too expensive. And, increasingly, it’s also just too late: a nuclear power project takes 15 years, which is twice as much as we have.
The only energy that still keeps it in the news is this weird tie-in with the culture wars, where, apparently, a certain segment likes nuclear power because it’s big, ugly, dangerous and sciency. They are living the future of the past.
Cost should always be a consideration, but when you see people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't clear what they are really trying to accomplish.
The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it. Why is that?
The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)
Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a direct cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super station hasn’t been completed yet. The potential costs don't seem to matter to some advocates for some reason.
Some advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term. (There are lots of atmospheric losses in the capture and distribution of natural gas.) No one concerned about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas is a long term answer.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The US government has been taxing power generated by nuclear power for decades and has collected billions of dollars to cover any costs in the future. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste and no money has been collected to cover the costs. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)
> In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled
Waste is not "recycled" it's reprocessed. Recycling is what you do with materials from renewable energy sources.
Also, it's not "waste" but only the fuel which is a tiny amount of the waste you have to store for decades and reprocessing is not making it go away. Those small parts which are added to fresh fuel come back later, the rest remains and needs to be stored too. Also: the whole process is extremely expensive and those costs also do not appear on the energy price.
You people sound sometimes as if you believe that the waste somehow magically disappears or something.
"In January 2018, it was reported that "the first installation of the pressure vessel cover of the world's first Gen IV reactor" had been completed on the HTR-PM.[12]"
"Work on the first demonstration HTR-PM power plant, composed of two reactors driving a single steam turbine, began in December 2012 [...] On 12 September 2021, one of the two reactor achieved criticality, becoming the first 4th generation nuclear reactor in the world to do so, and is scheduled to be connected to the electricity grid before the end of 2021"
So you have ONE reactor. In China. It took 9 years to get it into operation. How is this again supposed to fight climate change? You don't even know how well it works...not even mentioning the costs in countries with proper safety and construction laws.
> The US government has been taxing power generated by nuclear power for decades and has collected billions of dollars to cover any costs in the future
Interesting.
I'm sure you have some facts to support this claim. I'm especially interested in the estimates for "future" and what they're based upon. Especially in the US where nuclear power has been known for different reasons regarding taxpayer money: https://news.yahoo.com/ex-ceo-oversaw-doomed-nuclear-0529034...
> The amount of waste is very manageable
This is a gross generalisation which has not source in reality. There are different storages of waste. Some are good, some are bad. Some leak. Others don't...yet. Some waste just lies around in remote areas. Stop spreading misinformation.
> the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum
> and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
No we won't.
As I said above and you could have found out with very little research (actually just reading some of the wikipedia articles you've linked would help), it is only the fuel which can be reprocessed and only if it has been properly stored just for this cause and if you have the facility which almost nobody has. Most of the fuel we have and is being used atm is not suited for reprocessing and never will be. We usually don't even know the state of the stored stuff because we don't even have the facility to "look" into the containers.
And as I said: fuel is only a very small amount of the waste a nuclear facility produces and which has to be stored for generations.
I won't even go into your whataboutism for coal because there is no connection to this discussion. You know...the one where you desperately try to play down the cost for nuclear waste storage instead just admitting that those costs are nowhere to be found in the energy prices.
>> In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled
>Waste is not "recycled" it's reprocessed. Recycling is what you do with materials from renewable energy sources.
There is no need for you to try and redefine the word 'recycling'.
>..."Work on the first demonstration HTR-PM power plant, composed of two reactors driving a single steam turbine, began in December 2012 [...] On 12 September 2021, one of the two reactor achieved criticality, becoming the first 4th generation nuclear reactor in the world to do so, and is scheduled to be connected to the electricity grid before the end of 2021"
>So you have ONE reactor. In China. It took 9 years to get it into operation.
You misread what I wrote. What I wrote was:
>Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel
The obvious point I was making was that this isn't like nuclear fusion where there are huge challenges. The Integral Fast Reactor design was based on the EBR-2 which ran for over 30 years without problems and the IFR was killed for political reasons way back in the Clinton administration - as Clinton said "I know; it's a symbol." As you point out, the Chinese have developed a different type of 4th gen design and it is operational. The web page lists a few other designs that are being worked on.
>How is this again supposed to fight climate change?
You misread what I wrote. I never said this was important for climate change. I said that soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel. A breeder reactor could be used to basically burn all transuranic waste, getting much more energy out of the fuel - greatly reducing the need to mine uranium and reducing the material that needs to be stored. As I quoted from the wikipedia article:
>...The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium
You obviously don't need a breeder reactor to deal with climate change - you just need to generate power without using fossil fuels (geothermal ,hydro, nuclear power, solar, wind, etc.)
It is more accurate to say they were able to make it into an art museum. If it wasn't obvious, one point here is that the volume of waste is low and another is that it can be stored safely enough that you can have tour groups come through.
>...As I said above and you could have found out with very little research (actually just reading some of the wikipedia articles you've linked would help),
Please don't lower yourself to trying to do personal attacks such as this - it is against Hacker News guidelines and people will simply ignore what you are saying if you can't follow the guidelines.
>...I won't even go into your whataboutism for coal because there is no connection to this discussion.
I bring that up to give context. Historically coal plants and nuclear plants can essentially be substitutes for each other as they both can produce similar amounts of electricity with high capacity factor. A double standard is:
>...the application of different sets of principles for situations that are, in principle, the same.
Focussing on the waste issues of nuclear power and ignoring the waste issues of its direct substitute would be a double standard.
Coal burning has produced hundreds of millions of tons of toxic solid waste products and has few safety regulations:
>…In the United States, due to few federal and state regulations concerning ash ponds, most power plants do not use geomembranes, leachate collection systems, or other flow controls often found in municipal solid waste landfills.
So it isn't surprising that:
>…The EPA classified 44 sites in the US as potential hazards to communities. Such a classification means that the waste sites could cause death and significant property damage if an event such as a storm, a terrorist attack or a structural failure caused a spill.
This will be a problem for many generations. Billions of dollars have been added to the cost of nuclear energy to have a fund to pay for waste management. Nothing of the sort has been done for coal waste - I think you would agree this is unfortunate. It is important for people to learn about the environmental impacts of burning coal as there actually are people who argue that nuclear power plants should be shut down when there are still coal plants that are operating.
In terms of "whaaboutism". The definition of Whataboutism is:
>...is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument.
>>I like how you talk about ignoring costs but don't even scratch on that nuclear waste burden which generations will have to carry.
You threw out a low effort comment to distract from talking about the issues I brought up in my original message. That is an example of the fallacy of whaaboutism.
>...You know...the one where you desperately try to play down the cost for nuclear waste storage instead just admitting that those costs are nowhere to be found in the energy prices.
That is simply wrong. It is pretty much accepted all over the world, that those who produce nuclear waste should pay for the costs of it. International organizations like the OECD, US department of Energy, etc compare cost estimates and approaches with each other. For LLW the costs are pretty well known and for ILW and HLW counties are getting better at figuring this out as planning continues on long term repositories. Funding in the US for this is provided by a tax on power generated through nuclear power since 1982. Billions of dollars have been collected from that tax and if it turns out that more money would be needed for long term storage, there would likely be additional taxes applied.
While I am sure there are areas that we disagree on, I hope we can both agree that in the future, the grid has to stop using fossil fuels and the grid has to be at least as reliable as it currently is.
I think it's misleading to compare peak nuclear generation against peak solar/wind- in order to be comparable with nuclear's baseload, renewables need to be built in conjunction with a boatload of batteries. Otherwise you just end up burning fossil fuels at night time.
In order to cope with renewables variability various approaches complement each other but need investments in order to produce the baseload: continent-scale wind generation patterns benefiting from lo-correlation between wind regimes, a mix (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid...
Money spared because they are more and more cheap will be invested in those ways, letting us benefit from their main characteristics (no major risk, no combustible, very low emissions, no dangerous waste, no risky and expensive decommission...).
So you are comparing two energy sources, one that provides constant power 99.999% of the time and one that provides volatile power ~35% (if best) of the time?
These price graphs hide the obvious fact. Normalize solar and power by adding the price to make the source constant(shitload of ESS maybe?) and removing government incentives.
Yeah, I, too, read slashdot when those arguments were still current. Now, they just aren’t. The stats above are already levelized. The change in output is also smaller than what people believe: with solar and gas as two independent systems, some improvements to interconnects to allow averaging over larger regions, smart devices on the consumer side picking the right times to recharge (and maybe even de-charge when it’s useful), and the improvements in battery tech, the path is all but inevitable.
It also wasn’t solar or wind power that lead to blackouts in France last summer, but nuclear plants that ran out of cooling opportunities because the rivers they use were overheating. And in Texas, it was natural gas that failed.
Not a single one of the power source/price studies I've seen has normalized the price in regards to making the source constant or government incentives. Not one.
Energy sources have their caveats. Nuclear plants using rivers decrease output when rivers overheat. Solar panel efficiency falls 0.38% per degrees celcius under and over 25. We think failing nuclear and gas is a big deal because it's reliable most of the time. We do not think failing solar panels in night (because they can't produce energy) or hot and cold weather is not a big deal because it's designed to be that way. If that's the case, how is it viable to compare the prices?
Comparing the price of unreliable energy with the price of reliable energy is like comparing the yield of a bond without taking default risk into account. It's just terrible.
Similarly thinking you can combine a bunch of unreliable energy sources and "tranche" them in order to get a smaller stream of reliable energy is very much like the gaussian copula problem that got us into the financial crisis. Yes, it's possible to do it in theory, but very hard to do so in practice due to the financial incentives involved and lack of knowledge about risk.
The level of discourse in our energy markets really needs to be improved, and quickly, otherwise we are going to make a lot of foolish choices.
We can't build reactors fast enough. And electricity is only a part of what generates emissions. It's no where close to a solution. Looking up the world's energy numbers, how much of total energy production and emissions are from electricity, how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant, how many nuclear power plants are built per year etc. will show you this.
... and in the same time they build even more hydro and other renewables, with even more money. china is just using everything to stop being that dependant on coal. it's just that their governement just does not care and builds everything, because china needs more energy every year. they quadrupled their energy needs in the last years.
just because they build nuclear does not mean that they don't build other stuff.
Let's ignore the fact that uranium is a finite resource and that existing reactors have EOL dates and assume that the west, India and the rest of the world matches China and the world collectively build 600 reactors in the next 15 years, for 2 trillion USD. Congratulations, you barely doubled the amount of reactors and their share of the world's energy production rises from around 2% to 4%.
Meanwhile the world needs to hit net zero emissions in around 2050. I'm agnostic about nuclear power but it's not the solution to global warming. Rich nations still need to reduce their emissions by 10% per year over the next decade and the developing world has to do the same starting around the 2030s.
CGN has exponentially increasing cost overruns and delays like the rest of 'em. It's just cheaper to have the cost overruns and delays because of their low cost of financing - which in turn is a big ol' chunk of the underlying problem behind the rash of state bank insolvencies that was the big news before the real estate insolvencies eclipsed them
If it were important to us, we could build modular reactors on a massive scale. There are several manufacturers with serious designs. And yes, electricity is "only a part", but it's a big part. A solution needn't be a singular one to make a huge difference. Personally, I think nuclear isn't our best choice. But it is a viable choice and we could make it work.
^ This. Also, It's the Wall Street Journal, so consider the source, its own by Rupert Murdoch, whose media companies, until very recently were climate change deniers, so from a rather crude sort of climate denialism, they will likely move to supporting technical "climate fixes" spruiked by the fossil fuel industries. This is a more subtle way of sabotaging real climate action.
Investing in less CO2 intensive building technologies. (The carbon dioxide emissions from the production of concrete are so high that if concrete were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of CO2 behind China and the United States.)The central ingredient in concrete is cement, which is made by crushing limestone and clay and adding iron ore or ash. The mixture is heated in a kiln to more than 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, a process that consumes vast quantities of fossil fuel.
When heated, the calcium carbonate in limestone breaks into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, which is released into the air. The calcium oxide is ground with limestone and gypsum to make cement.
Half of the CO2 emissions in the production of concrete come from the reaction that breaks up the calcium carbonate and the other half from the fossil fuels required to heat the kilns and transport the materials.
Things we should also consider.
Getting rid of cars.
Investment in mass International and intranational public transit.
Meat alternatives that require less physical space.
reining in massive fishing fleets (half the oxygen and half the carbon captured comes from the ecological systems in the ocean which we ravage)
Invest in renewable energy, like tidal, solar, geothermal, etc
Even if we were to go 100% nuclear tomorrow (which just isn't possible, we'd (the entirety of earth) would run out of nuclear fuel in 90 years), that would account for about 1/4 the carbon emissions of the planet per year.
Climate change is more than just the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it's about how we as a species, integrate with the rest of the species on this planet.
Why do you think the fossil fuel industry wants nuclear power? How do they benefit? They appear to have gained immensely from the halt of nuclear power deployment in the west.
E.g. France famously decarbonised it's electric grid in a couple of decades after 1970s due to the energy crisis using nuclear power. How did this help fossil fuel companies? On the other hand, Germany has continued to be more reliant on coal and natural gas for electricity generation after deciding to abandon nuclear power post-Fukushima and pursue energiewende. Or remember BP, an oil and gas company, and it's whole Beyond Petroleum thing trying to make people believe it was into renewables?
If we are going to hypothesize conspiracies, then just looking purely at outcomes over recent decades, it would make more sense that the fossil fuel industry supports RE and RE targets, rather than CO2 targets or nuclear power, because the former works out far more favorably than the latter for their industry.
If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.
Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors.
Then how do you intend to decarbonize other energy uses without electricity? Want to replace gas furnaces with heat pumps? electricity. Produce hydrogen for shipping or CO2 free steel? Electricity. Charge everyones car battery? Electricity. So on, right?
The carbon industry wants delay on decarbonisation. New nuclear projects are poster children for delay, because the industry has been mostly incompetent at shipping and lacks urgency.
Why do you say that? Not agreeing or disagreeing, just curious what the fossil fuel industry might have to gain from pushing adoption of nuclear power.
WSJ pushes a lot of "Carbon Capture" stories and Nuclear fusion stories. (Chevron is one of Nuclear Fusion's biggest investors)
Each day more than 2 million people pick up a copy of The Wall Street Journal or read it online, more than any other newspaper in the country, except USA Today, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
“More than three-fourths of them have a college degree, and their average household income is $234,909.
These are affluent individuals who are executives or business owners.
The Wallstreet Journal will never push an idea unless there's money to be made by its investors or affiliates, in the short term. and in the short term, I mean over 10 or 15 years.
A forest has more value, in the short term, cut down than is does if left alone. Petrochemicals have more value, in the short term, if they are being pumped, refined, and processed (and then that carbon is captured) than it were just left alone to begin with.
The absolute truth about dealing with the current climate crisis is that doing it right will not be profitable, in the short term, it will be an enormous undertaking across many fronts, and scientific disciplines, political agreements across nations states, etc.
It's interesting how research into nuclear tech has resulted in one thing that can get us all killed and one thing that can save us all from being killed.
> The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things. Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does.
> I learned a way of expressing this common human problem on a trip to Honolulu. In a Buddhist temple there, the man in charge explained a little bit about the Buddhist religion for tourists, and then ended his talk by telling them he had something to say to them that they would never forget — and I have never forgotten it. It was a proverb of the Buddhist religion: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”
> What, then, is the value of the key to heaven? It is true that if we lack clear instructions that determine which is the gate to heaven and which the gate to hell, the key may be a dangerous object to use, but it obviously has value. How can we enter heaven without it? The instructions, also, would be of no value without the key. So it is evident that, in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it can produce something.
When you compare the energy density of nuclear to chemical materials, it sorta makes sense. It’s almost mind-boggling in its potential. In the early days of atomic energy it’s easy to see why people (or at least sci-fi)l authors) imagined so much promise. We really thought we were entering a new era in humanity. Sadly, it didn’t really work out that way, and the most significant application of this new energy source ended up being weapons. Interestingly, those opposed to nuclear technology only managed to stop its peaceful application.
Why is this surprising? This honestly seems rather unsurprising to me. You have a thing with a high energy density. So you release energy from it. Do you collect that energy or just expend it in a destructive manner?
We can do the same thing with batteries if we really wanted to, but they don't have a high energy density compared to other things (and it would likely be a war crime...). We could easily do the same thing with nitrates (think dynamite) or other bomb ingredients. They all can create heat that we can use to turn turbines and create energy. We just would want to burn them in a controlled manner.
Nope. Most of the construction attempts of the last two decades failed. We need coal replacements before 2032. Even if you try to build nuclear plants _on time_, that will fail. So it cannot be _the_ solution -- no matter your stance on nuclear power; maybe part of the solution; but not _the best solution_!
You are not going to get a replacement for coal before 2032. That's like 10 years away.
If you work really hard and get incredibly lucky, you may limit the increase in coal use by 2032 to be roughly zero. But you are talking about massive infrastructure projects, and that's a really tough sell because, for example, you are seeing significant increases in energy usage in developing countries:
Of the world’s existing coal-fired generating capacity, 99% consists of boilers and steam turbine units that are as much as 30% less efficient than natural gas-fired combined-cycle units that use the latest technology. Because natural gas-fired generators are more efficient than coal-fired generators at converting fuel to electricity, natural gas-fired generation is often a lower-cost option, even if the fuel price of natural gas is slightly higher than the fuel price of coal.
However, the absence of regional carbon policies or regulations along with rising natural gas prices after 2030—particularly in Asia and in regions that rely on higher-cost liquefied natural gas (LNG)—is likely to make coal the most economical generation fuel to pair with increased intermittent generation from wind and solar. This shift reverses the trend observed over recent decades. Although the cost of mining coal will likely raise coal prices after 2030, we project that coal prices will remain low relative to natural gas prices and provide a cost-competitive option to natural gas-fired generation.
Increases in coal-fired generation in Other non-OECD Asia—which includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, among other countries—will account for over 75% of our projected increase in global coal-fired generation from 2030 to 2050. For Other non-OECD Asia, we project that renewable energy sources will account for about 60% of the generation increase over the projection period, primarily from wind and solar. Coal-fired generation will account for nearly all of the remaining growth.
Does the US really need more electricity generation?
Electricity use is stable or even dropping although 2020 may be an outlier. Electric cars will change this though.
At a personal level I use significantly less electricity now compared to 15 years ago. HVAC replacement, insulation upgrades, computer and consumer electronics power reductions, lowered my summer electric bill by 40%
"I use significantly less electricity now compared to 15 years ago."
You're lucky.
Often the more financially well off one is the easier it is to introduce energy efficiencies. Many poorer people are handicapped by the cost of house repairs, insulation upgrades, window double glazing, etc. Moreover, the condition of their houses are more likely to be in a worse state in respect of necessary maintenance, this further reduces their starting base. The same situation will also apply to their motor vehicles, they'll be the last to convert to electric cars, etc.
Yes, huge amounts of it. Aside from electrified transport, there’s also a lot of industrial processes that use natural gas for direct heating. We need a lot of extra electricity generation to cover these cases. Some of these can be shifted when renewables are overproducing, others cannot.
Our grid literally cannot handle the demand that electrifying transit and industry would create.
A lot of places do what's called cogeneration: rather than buy electricity and gas, they just buy more gas and generate electricity on-prem, using the waste heat for heating their facilities/boilers/whatever.
Still; moving those off of fossil fuels will put a lot of strain on our grid. Some of those facilities will put solar panels up and run their energy intensive processes during the day, but not all of them will. The grid needs to be able to handle that process, or we’ll just keep consuming fossil fuels.
Cheaper electricity means more electrification. The majority of my energy use is natural gas (for home heat) due to its low cost relative to electricity. Plus, there's coal and gas plants to shut down and something needs to replace them.
Quality of life goes up with cheaper energy. If energy were free it would be 22-23 C inside my home right now, rather than 18 C, and I wouldn't be wearing a jacket while sitting on my couch.
Now, the fact that it takes $400 of natural gas per month to keep my home 18 C when it's 11 C outside has a lot to do with how hard it is to get building permits in CA. But that's a different issue.
Even if that's true (and according to the EIA total generation has been approximately flat for like 10 years) there's still the roughly 20% of generation which is done by burning coal. Replacing that with nuclear makes a meaningful change in total carbon emissions.
Yes, this is what we have to plan for. 20 to 30% of new cars sold in the US will be electric by 2030 (I suspect it'll even be higher than that). Projected to be 45% to 50% by 2035. We'll need more generation and some major grid improvements.
Nuclear energy is not tenable given the current political climate. We’re not optimizing on technology alone. We’re optimizing along the manifold that includes people’s opinions since they do have de-facto veto rights here.
I see nuclear power as a solution to climate change as unviable since no one wants one in their vicinity. The plants are unbuildable because of unions and widespread corruption.
Nuke fans are just like big C Communists. If only we all worked together for the good of humanity, we could all live in comfort and there wouldn’t be any hunger and all the little kitty cats will have warm beds and fluffy pillo- no. Well, your comrades in the venture are corrupt fucks. Nuke is unbuildable and pissing away money into an abyss of non power generation is not okay.
China can build nukes, blessed are they. The US cannot.
I grew up in a nuclear community (Richland WA, the town where it seems like half of everyone works at Hanford). My first job (after lawn mowing) was working at Exxon Nuclear (which got bought by Siemens then sold to Framatome and then morphed into Areva). I learned to code there. My first tools were tools that helped engineers optimize nuclear fuel assembly design for efficiency.
I see these articles. I barely read them. I’m a supporter already. I get all the various details and arguments.
I left that industry though. For two reasons.
1. Regulation makes it so that what seems cool and high tech is mostly 60’s tech.
2. I got discouraged working in an industry that I knew could help the world but was so reviled and feared at large.
These days I work in ag automation. Feed the world. Robots and the cloud. That sort of thing. And yet… yesterday, some of the assembly techs were spooked by the supposed ability to have a small magnet stick to the injection site of a Moderna vaccine. I watched grown men spend multiple hours coming to the conclusion that “the magnets didn’t stick after all but something weird was going on.”
I’ve concluded that Darwin was wrong. Humanity has the ability to out wit natural selection any more.
That leads me to believe that nuclear technology (sufficiently advanced to be indiscernible from magic) has as much likelihood of mankind applying it to their benefit as they do of burning witches to save the planet.
Electricity is only 28% of global emissions. What about the other 3/4ths?
And on that 28%...
The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.
Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors.
> Electricity is only 28% of global emissions. What about the other 3/4ths?
How much of fixing the other 3/4ths requires more electricity to substitute?
> The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.
Indeed! Nuclear breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan all along, are just as sustainable as wind and solar on Earth. It's sad how many people have forgotten about breeder reactors. One of the first reactors ever built on the planet was designed to prove that breeding was possible, which it did in 1952. [1]
Plus, nuclear makes heat and electricity. The heat can be used to help with building heating directly with conventional reactors, and can help with industrial processes as well. Higher-temperature reactors can more directly handle industrial process heat.
It is a shame that I see a title like this and my first thoughts are “who is paying for this article to be published” - is it genuinely someone with the right answer or an agenda - I would need to read the article then try to understand the particular points of view, instead I’ll do something else
A fair question to ask - about any opinion piece on any topic whatosever. You think solar/wind proponents are any less likely to be corrupt/intellectually dishonest/self-serving than oil, coal, or nuclear ones? Come on
It also is the potential "phase-out chain reaction": after most accidents more nations begin a nuclear phase-out (closing plants before they could be profitable).
Each accident also adds to the financial risk, for a nuclear investor, induced by a legal action against a nuclearized neighbor initiated by a non-nuclearized nation, claiming that it is unduly exposed to a risk.
There also is a feedback loop there because more and more nations phasing it out reducing the market, to the point of more and more nuclear companies folding up.
Areva, the French one, is bankrupt and consumed billions of euros.
Westinghouse nuclear division was bought by Toshiba then filed for chapter 11.
KEPCO (South Korea) is healthy and performs but the Korean gov plans a nuclear phase out.
Siemens is out of this market for quite a while (due to Germany nuclear current phasing-out process).
Most current and perceptible projects (there are less and less of them) are Russian (Rosatom) and set for non-democratic nations (this is IMHO related to the NIMBY effect and to cronyism).
No, it isn't. Building up the needed capacity will take decades and cost an enormous amount of money that is better spend elsewhere. Fuel supply is limited, with cost for exploration quadrupled over the last 15 years, and a doubling cost for uranium fuel over the same period. Commercially viable known uranium reserves are used up by roughly 1/3 since 1950, depleting ever faster with more reactors. Even if we had the reactors already, even if we wouldn't need to spend trillions, the fuel simply isn't there for cost effective usage until the end of the century. Alternative reactors, thorium or fusion are experimental at best. So no, nuclear won't change anything soon.
Once built nuclear plants are basically giant nuclear batteries which we can run up or down on demand which is easier and probably more efficient than storing a huge excess of renewable surplus at creation.
Nuclear power stations have very slow demand response. That used to be done by gas peakers and hydro; in a decarbonised world that changes to battery peakers and hydro.
But Nuclear could still an excellent option depending on various metrics. I rather see some 'risky' nuclear options being considered before any of the geo-engineering ideas take hold (as they will if we don't get a move on).
South Australia is building brand new gas peaking plants, and the state says further investment in gas is necessary. So it seems this isn't correct. [1]
Gas is not renewable, and it's nearly as bad as coal.
It's also worth noting their batteries to store renewable energy are not renewable either, not to mention the huge societal impacts on relying on child slavery to prop up your grid (lithium and cobalt mining have a big child labor issue).
Especially worth noting South Australia's battery manufacturer Tesla has an extremely poor record when it comes to supply chain environmental management. Some of Tesla's suppliers have dumped toxic wastewater into water systems, as well as utilised child slaves in the Congo to source rare earth materials. [2]
Interesting... thanks for the links. SAPGen is a private company so what ever they build will need to compete with all that wind and solar. Also did you look at the graph from Tasmania? - too bad they are doing other unrelated environmentally bad things.
For frequency control, it seems like the Tesla batteries now have some competition in the form of synchronous condensers. For storage there seems to be several better alternatives than lithium.
Nuclear power is one of the safest means of electricity generation, but it's very costly due to over regulation. Contrast this to commercial aviation which is tightly regulated and in turn very safe, but it's not over regulated that it becomes too expensive or regulations with diminishing returns that only put unnecessary road blocks.
No it isn’t. 500 million years ago when Earth’s CO2 level was 5000 ppm, did they have nuclear power?
Is that what saved the planet to make it habitable for humans? No - the levels changed because of exposed olivine rocks that absorbed the CO2. That’s how nature fixes high CO2 levels. Why does the solution have to be anything other than that?
If humanity spent $1 trillion per year on extracting olivine, and putting those rocks on tropical beaches, we’d easily solve climate within a couple decades. It costs $21/ton of CO2 sequestered.[1] It’s easily the most affordable solution.
They didn't burn fossil fuels at that time. The only sane way to approach this problem is at the root, hence we need to stop emitting additional fossil CO2. What's here already is hard to put back in the ground.
As I understand it, olivine is not the same as asbestos and does not cause mesothelioma. Does the carbon capture reaction cause it to become dangerous?
Fun fact, I just saw yesterday evening at the theatres an ad by EDF (the French multinational electric utility company, largely owned by the French state, and the only operator of all the nuclear plants in France) to promote nuclear energy as the best climate-change solution, since it is a "97% CO2-free electricity". You can see the ad here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js85xSOamhQ
Look at how they use in the ad a young girl (probably very concerned about CO2) to promote nuclear energy... I was a bit shocked by this gross greenwashing manipulation. Nuclear energy is by no way a solution:
- The cost of dismantling a nuclear plant is huge.
- The storage of nuclear waste (which we will now have to keep in France) is a joke: how can buried silos withstand several millennia?
- We will have a major nuclear accident in France one day. The question is not if it will happen, but when it will happen. In 1999, there was a level 2 incident at the Blaye nuclear power plant (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Blayais_Nuclear_Power_Pla...), admittedly an incident and not an accident, but to use a metaphor, it is like driving a car with no spare wheel and no brakes. On a straight road, no problem, but if there is a bend... When we have our Fukushima, we will have another talk about it ;)
Until we find a proper way to deal with nuclear wastes or succeed with the nuclear fusion, we all know the best way to reduce the CO2 emissions is to reduce the energy consumption drastically. This means somehow giving up with the growth mindset aka capitalism. I'm afraid we won't make it.
The market agrees, just look at recent prices of uranium, uranium mining companies, and now nuclear infrastructure companies are also starting to take off
We definitely know how to do it. We just have to get people to agree to do it. We are supposed to put it in Yucca Mtn but that is stalled out politically.
Finland, meanwhile, is proceeding with their equivalent at Onkalo.
Honestly, that’s not the actual problem. Waste is basically solved already. I am very pro-nuclear, but if I were to steelman the anti-nuclear argument, it’d be proliferation concerns.
The author of the above article also wrote a book called “Apocalypse Never” that explores practical approaches to managing climate change and recently appeared on the Jordan Peterson podcast to talk about it, including the role of nuclear energy: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-...
Haven't read the paywalled article but the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale. Nuclear pollution is about 1 trillion trillion times worse than coal and is sufficiently common - roughly one major nuclear accident per decade to be non-negligible. It's not safe to assume nuclear power is getting safer when terrorism and nations that sponsor terrorists are getting worse.
Including all accidents mentioned, nuclear energy is a few hundred times safer than coal, per TWh generated [1].
In fact, air pollution from fossil and biofuel combustion kills as many people that died and will die from Chernobyl (around 4000) every 7.5 hours, and counting. When you dig into the data, nuclear is shockingly safe. And that's not even considering climate change impacts, where nuclear is about as low carbon as you can get, in the full lifecycle.
>the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale
What kind of “evidence” is that? If you add up all the deaths that resulted from these disasters, it’s an small fraction of the people that die from coal pollution every year—670,000 in China alone. How are you getting a trillion times worse?
I will probably never care about “climate change solutions”, but I’m happy to support this campaign to rehabilitate nuclear power, because it is a very good idea.
Pretty sure LESS industrial feedback loop generating behavior is the best climate-change solution.
Nuclear power probably seems pretty great to WSJ and capitalist readers who want to own it all, and need the public to be ok with nuclear power again, though.
