Nuclear Energy: the Case Against (theguardian.com) 362
"We do not need to plunge headlong into a nuclear future," argues Serhii Plokhy, author of the book Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima.
He notes Belgium's adding a 10-year extension to the life of two of its nuclear reactors, France's program to build 14 new reactors, and Boris Johnson's pledge to create supply 25% of the UKs power needs with nuclear energy by 2050. On the surface, the switch to nuclear makes sense. It would not only enable European countries to meet their ambitious net zero targets, since it produces no CO2. It would also make them less vulnerable to Russian threats, and allow them to stop financing the Russian war machine....
What the Russian takeover of [Ukraine] nuclear facilities exposed is a hazard inherent in all nuclear power. In order for this method of producing electricity to be safe, everything else in society has to be functioning perfectly. Warfare, economic collapse, climate change itself — all of these increasingly real risks make nuclear sites potentially perilous places. Even without them, the dangers of atomic fission remain, and we must ask ourselves: are they really worth the cost...?
Technological developments, growing international cooperation and rising safety standards did indeed do a great deal to ensure that no major nuclear accident occurred for 25 years after Chernobyl. But the Fukushima explosions demonstrated that such improvements have not eradicated the dangers surrounding nuclear power plants.... Can anything be done to make reactors safer? A new generation of smaller modular reactors, designed from scratch to produce energy, not to facilitate warfare, has been proposed by Bill Gates, and embraced, among others, by Macron. The reactors promised by Gates's TerraPower company are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. But his claim that in such reactors "accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics" must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are no laws of war protecting either old or new reactors from attack.
There is also serious concern that the rapid expansion in the number of plants, advocated as a way of dealing with climate change, will increase the probability of accidents. While new technology will help to avoid some of the old pitfalls, it will also bring new risks associated with untried reactors and systems. Responsibility for dealing with such risks is currently being passed on to future generations.
This is the second great risk from nuclear power: even if a reactor runs for its lifetime without incident, you still have a lot of dangerous material left at the end of it. Fuel from nuclear power plants will present a threat to human life and the environment for generations to come, with the half-life of some radioactive particles measured in tens of thousands of years.... Nuclear power plants generally have no alternative to storing their high-level radioactive waste on site....If what we bury today in the New Mexico desert — the waste created by our nuclear ambitions — is so repulsive to us, why do we pass it on to others to deal with?
The author's counter-proposal: expanding the use of renewable energy: New research should be encouraged, grid infrastructure should be built up, and storage capacity increased. Billions that would otherwise go to new nuclear infrastructure, with all the attendant costs of cleanup that continue for decades and beyond, should be pumped instead into clean energy.
In the meantime, we obviously have an existing nuclear industry, and the solution is not to run away in panic, but to take good care of the facilities that already dot our countryside. We must not abandon the industry to its current state of economic hardship, as that would only mean inviting the next accident sooner rather than later.
He notes Belgium's adding a 10-year extension to the life of two of its nuclear reactors, France's program to build 14 new reactors, and Boris Johnson's pledge to create supply 25% of the UKs power needs with nuclear energy by 2050. On the surface, the switch to nuclear makes sense. It would not only enable European countries to meet their ambitious net zero targets, since it produces no CO2. It would also make them less vulnerable to Russian threats, and allow them to stop financing the Russian war machine....
What the Russian takeover of [Ukraine] nuclear facilities exposed is a hazard inherent in all nuclear power. In order for this method of producing electricity to be safe, everything else in society has to be functioning perfectly. Warfare, economic collapse, climate change itself — all of these increasingly real risks make nuclear sites potentially perilous places. Even without them, the dangers of atomic fission remain, and we must ask ourselves: are they really worth the cost...?
Technological developments, growing international cooperation and rising safety standards did indeed do a great deal to ensure that no major nuclear accident occurred for 25 years after Chernobyl. But the Fukushima explosions demonstrated that such improvements have not eradicated the dangers surrounding nuclear power plants.... Can anything be done to make reactors safer? A new generation of smaller modular reactors, designed from scratch to produce energy, not to facilitate warfare, has been proposed by Bill Gates, and embraced, among others, by Macron. The reactors promised by Gates's TerraPower company are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. But his claim that in such reactors "accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics" must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are no laws of war protecting either old or new reactors from attack.
There is also serious concern that the rapid expansion in the number of plants, advocated as a way of dealing with climate change, will increase the probability of accidents. While new technology will help to avoid some of the old pitfalls, it will also bring new risks associated with untried reactors and systems. Responsibility for dealing with such risks is currently being passed on to future generations.
This is the second great risk from nuclear power: even if a reactor runs for its lifetime without incident, you still have a lot of dangerous material left at the end of it. Fuel from nuclear power plants will present a threat to human life and the environment for generations to come, with the half-life of some radioactive particles measured in tens of thousands of years.... Nuclear power plants generally have no alternative to storing their high-level radioactive waste on site....If what we bury today in the New Mexico desert — the waste created by our nuclear ambitions — is so repulsive to us, why do we pass it on to others to deal with?
The author's counter-proposal: expanding the use of renewable energy: New research should be encouraged, grid infrastructure should be built up, and storage capacity increased. Billions that would otherwise go to new nuclear infrastructure, with all the attendant costs of cleanup that continue for decades and beyond, should be pumped instead into clean energy.
In the meantime, we obviously have an existing nuclear industry, and the solution is not to run away in panic, but to take good care of the facilities that already dot our countryside. We must not abandon the industry to its current state of economic hardship, as that would only mean inviting the next accident sooner rather than later.
NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we go againâ¦
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Nuclear really wants to be on a coastline. Coastline real estate is really expensive/unavailable. (Whether it's for commercial uses or not.) Long distance power transmission really can be mitigated more than you would think. Well under 1% for really long stretches. Why not just put nuclear along coastline that currently isn't habitable? Some place like Alaska or something, lol.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear really wants to be on a coastline.
You're just demonstrating your Gen 3 technological ignorance. Nuclear power plants like being near bodies of water, which is why they like coastlines. That is because Gen 3 nuke plants use pressurized water to do the transfer of energy and keep the reactor cooled.
But you don't need to use H2O in a 4th generation nuke plant. Molten salt reactors don't use H2O for cooling or heat transfer. Molten salt has a higher temperature threshold, so they don't need to be pressurized either. Finally, the reactor can be designed to drain off molten radioactive slurry into safety storage, no control rods to screw up. This makes nuclear plants way, way safer than Gen 3 nuke plants.
A nuke accident like Chernobyl will never happen, except in former Soviet nuke plants that may still be in operation. The Fukushima fiasco was totally avoidable. They should not have left spent fuel rods at the location, which required "active" cooling. None of those problems experienced could ever happen to a Gen 4 nuke plant, running on molten salts.
Fukushima was not a modern reactor design (Score:5, Interesting)
You said it. NIMBY, complete with baseless scare tactics.
There are legitimate concerns with nuclear, but the article reveals itself to be a baseless attack with lines like
rising safety standards did indeed do a great deal to ensure that no major nuclear accident occurred for 25 years after Chernobyl. But the Fukushima explosions demonstrated that such improvements have not eradicated the dangers surrounding nuclear power plants.... Can anything be done to make reactors safer?
Fukushima was built 10 years before Chernobyl was BUILT, in 1967. They didn't finish building the first reactor at Chernobyl until 1977, and the disaster didn't strike until nine years after that, in 1986. Using Fukushima to call the safety of modern reactors into question is either stupidity or intentional deception. Regulations can only do so much in the face of antiquated technology.
The biggest problem in my eyes with traditional nuclear is that the reactors are so incredibly expensive to build, that there's *huge* incentive to keep antiquated reactors operating as long as possible. Long after everyone knows they really should be retired.
That, and practically every reactor is a custom job, or at best a very limited edition run. Which means every one has its own unique, undiscovered, flaws.
I'm much more hopeful about modern small modular reactors coming off an assembly line and installed in a site-specific power plant. Any specific failure is limited, and any problems or weaknesses translate directly to lessons for every other reactor of the same model in the world. And mass production and modularity promises to drive cost per GWh down low enough to dramatically reduce the incentive to milk a few more decades out of a reactor that you know should be retired. You don't have to decommission a whole power plant - just shut that crusty old reactor module down and swap it out with a newer, safer module. The rest of the plant is mostly unaffected.
Re:Fukushima was not a modern reactor design (Score:5, Insightful)
Fukushima was built 10 years before Chernobyl was BUILT, in 1967.
It is not when they where built, it is when they where designed. Chernobyl was designed in the late 40's and early 50's. It was a graphite based reactor, and a poor design. It was a accident just waiting to happen.
What happened at Chernobyl could not happen at any western designed reactor. Not even at Fukushima.
Re:Fukushima was not a modern reactor design (Score:5, Informative)
>And why was an old nuke plant being run? Money.
Not just money - huge amounts of money. Traditional nuclear plants are ridiculously expensive to build, and would quite likely never actually break even without being indemnified against responsibility for any possible catastrophe.
Which is exactly why I like modern reactor designs and especially SMRs - they address most of the potential economic failure modes - something large reactors decidedly do not.
Most modern reactor designs are extremely unlikely to fail catastrophically - for many of them (like molten salt) an explosion is basically impossible - the fuel itself is designed so that the reaction chokes itself out unless the rest of the plant is actively pulling away heat fast enough to keep it going. Had the same tsunami struck a badly managed modern reactor with all of Fukushima's other problems, it would just shut down.
Individual SMRs are also small, so even if you manage to make a reactor explode somehow, it's only going to affect a relatively small area, quite likely never escaping its protective vault (aka reinforced hole in the ground).
SMRs are produced on a factory assembly line rather than in-place - so any corner cutting in production that causes a problem is going to lead to a massively expensive recall of thousands of identical reactors, far exceeding the damage done.
Far less money is associated with each individual reactor - especially since it's essentially a "battery" plugged into a power plant, not the whole power plant. So if a particular reactor shows damage you don't shut down the power plant and stop making money (and then incur enormous expense decommissioning it) - you just shut down one reactor for replacement. Potentially not even reducing production as many power plant designs call for (relatively simple and inexpensive) vaults for at least an extra reactor or two so that you can get the replacement up and running before you shut down the one that's at risk.
There's still a vulnerability to malicious activity - I don't think there's any realistic way to completely protect against, e.g. being intentionally targeted by military action or sufficiently competent terrorists. But there are now options that are almost completely immune to greed and incompetence, which are the far larger threats.
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Materials are a problem - we definitely need to realign our economies into embracing closed loop recycling rather than the current single-use throwaway culture we have going now (One of the biggest reasons I support offworld colonies is they would create an ideal environment to force the incubation of such a new culture, and the cost-streamlining of the supporting technologies)
Energy itself is not actually a problem though - all of human annual energy production is a drop in the bucket compared to the plane
Re:Fukushima was not a modern reactor design (Score:5, Informative)
Good point.
Where geothermal works it's *awesome*. Unfortunately it's really only well suited along major fault lines that allow lots of heat to accumulate near the surface. In most places it would be prohibitively expensive to drill deep enough (many kilometers) to get enough heat without also fracking (with all the geostability issues that introduces). And in many locations the local rock structure is sufficiently water-soluble to present serious fouling concerns, dramatically increasing the operating costs. And the world being what it is, cost gets the final say in the matter - though we could help things along with massive subsidies.
An interesting overview on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Oh, and nuclear in the form of SMRs could be rolled out extremely rapidly. There's already pilot factories being built for the reactors, and power plants are very similar to coal or gas plants (aside from the reactor vaults) - to the point that there are several proposals on how to quickly retrofit existing plants to use them. It's primarily regulatory hurdles aimed at massive reactors, along with NIMBY opposition, that are likely to slow adoption - thing which governments can sweep out of the way at will, and often have for other things.
The short-lived nuclear waste is also a potentially valuable resource, as it's exactly the sorts of materials needed for RTGs and other "nuclear batteries". I would be opposed to widespread use of such things on Earth because of the contamination risk they pose (though Russia at least is fond of powering remote lighthouses that way) - but with SpaceX's Starship poised to enable the industrialization of space, there could be a huge demand for such things in an environment where contamination would present a negligible change in ambient radiation levels.
Heck, with a little caution you could turn the waste storage facilities themselves into good sized power plants in their own right by harvesting the decay heat.
Re: NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: NIMBY (Score:4, Funny)
Calling people expletives definitely really gives you an edge in this discussion! Wow, I'm totally digging your arguments now.
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Angel'o'dumbass is an idiot. He'll come in a nuclear related thread and spout off a bunch of out of date FUD or just plain lie about nuclear safety. When you won't cave to his FUD, he'll call you a dumbass or idiot and stomp off.
Re: NIMBY (Score:3)
Hereâ(TM)s the thing - sea level rise from climate change will happen in 5% of peopleâ(TM)s places. It really doesnâ(TM)t matter if we have 1000 Chyernobyl scale disasters, it will still be far better than climate change, and far fewer people will suffer the effects of being shoved out of their home by a permanent disaster.
Re: NIMBY (Score:3, Informative)
The point is, accidents happen in all power generation schemes. Nuclear power has among the lowest deaths per TWh generated. So, no matter where I got my power from, it would be risky for people in my area. Statistics matter, unless your a dumbass, like angelosphere over here.
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The Soviets had a habit of skimping on safety designs at the expense of lives. Chernobyl was a bad design, and accident waiting to happen. It did not have in place the safety systems that western reactors have.
Lets turn to the west most over blown nuclear incident, 3 Mile Island, as an example. That incident was also caused by human error, but the way the anti nuclear crowd tries to pass it off as a Chernobyl event. It wasn't and never could have been. Despite human incompetence, the safety system
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Take your idiocy some where else. Yes, it was a accident, and no it can't happen in a western reactor. You clearly have no clue about the difference between old soviet reactor and western designs of those era. You just want to spread FUD.
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Tell me, where you born this stupid, or did you have to work for it? You constantly talk about things you have no understanding of, but act like you are an expert. When you are called on your bullshit you just insult them and stomp off like some deranged toddler.
If you don't understand the science do us all a favor and shut the fuck up.
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Would you live beside a nuclear power plant?
I do (until it was shut down because of an accident). I live by SONGS. So, yeah. I did live near one that was operating, and I do live by one that is no longer operating. Accidents may happen, but the loss of life from them are counted in individuals, not in thousands. That was true in Chernobyl, and Fukushima. So, stop sounding like an idiot. It makes any valid points harder to take seriously.
Are you willing to die or have your closest loved ones die, because you are willing to have a little oopsie now and then?
Yes. And, so are you. You do get in a car, dont you? You do fly in airplanes? Go to work? Eat food? Fatal opsies ar
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Here is the problem with the anti nuclear crowed on Slashdot, you being part of that problem. Your information is old and out dated. Everything on that with the exception of fusion and, possibly, thorium is based on outdated information. We have plenty of easy access fission material today, enough to last several centuries, when used in conjunction with renewables, solar, wind, and water.
I watched a video out of India the other day on thorium and it looked promising. I'm still not sold on the viab
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And no, my info is not old and out-dated,
Yeah, it is. Your data might as well crossed the desert with whats his name and his followers after leaving Egypt. That is how out of date it is.
But that is not your fault I assume. Good data on the current state is hard to find among all the FUD that gets posted on nuclear power. Just be more diligent in your research and don't believe everything you read.
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Then the data you based your facts on is old. An Wikipedia links are subject to suspicion.
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I would prefer that you linked to reliable and modern data from trusted sources, but honestly, I don't care.
Basically, your data is out of date. Just do some more research, don't trust sources that spread FUD.
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They can bury it in my backyard, quite literally. I'm cool with it.
Fission problems aren't fusion problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet another bad example of calling it nuclear when they mean only fission.
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Absolutely correct. Anyone laying out huge amounts of cash on fission, solar, or wind now may regret it shortly.
https://www.nature.com/immersi... [nature.com]
Re:Fission problems aren't fusion problems (Score:4, Informative)
Absolutely nonsense, we are decades from fusion power plants and it may be impossible. Many have terrible misconception about NIF "breakeven" which only counted x-ray energy from metal irradiated with laser, directly into fuel... it took 1.8 MJ of energy but the experiment only released 14 KW. Needless to say, for power production that's useless. ITER in 2035 might *start* experimenting with DT fuel but of course even if it hits a true breakeven of energy out surpassing energy in, that might be 2040 or later or may never happen. And that thing won't generate one watt of useable electric power.
Fusion power plants have been touted as "right around the corner" since the 1970s, and still is decades away, if succh are even possible.
Re:Fission problems aren't fusion problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely nonsense, we are decades from fusion power plants and it may be impossible.
Indeed. We haven't even reached energy breakeven. Reaching economic breakeven will be far more difficult.
Anyone looking to fusion for affordable energy in the next 50 years is delusional.
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Fusion has never been right around the corner.
What ever happened to cold fusion? Last time I heard, years ago, they where about to make some kind of massive break through, then nothing. Are they still seriously researching that or did it finally pan out to be the bullshit we all thought it was?
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Sweet. That is what I like to see. Thanks for the link.
Sorry but I'm just not impressed (Score:3, Informative)
I think the article makes a good point to focus on the technology that is available today and I agree with the article that that techno
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They will not regret it shortly because the science is at least ten and possibly twenty years away from being ironed out, even with recent progress. Then it will be another ten or even twenty years while the first commercial plant is built. Everyone else will wait to see how that one goes, unless they come up with a vastly better way to build one while the first one is still under construction... and becomes obsolete before it's even produced.
Best case, proliferation of fusion power would be at least 40 yea
Re:Fission problems aren't fusion problems (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now they're 10 years away. So that's an improvement anyway.
Re:Fission problems aren't fusion problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, when somebody gets more *electricity* out of a fusion reactor than they put in, I'll agree with you. Turning troublesome waste neutrons into electricity is a big part of the ITER research program and if they or someone else manages to do this, we're well on our way. But those chickens haven't hatched yet, we aren't even sure the eggs have been fertilized.
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ITER is designed to produce (actual) breakeven even while throwing away the neutrons. The scaling properties of tokamaks are pretty well understood, so it would be surprising if it didn't accomplish that. Surprising if it didn't do rather better actually, since quite a bit of progress has been made since ITER was designed.
DEMO, the actual demo powerplant, isn't scheduled to be completed until 2033 though, and it's not likely anyone will build a real commercial plant until after that, unless ITER or someone
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Yet another bad example of calling it nuclear when they mean only fission.
As long as nuclear fusion remains vapourware 'nuclear' == 'fission' ... unless you have solved the problem of nuclear fusion in which case you should patent it first thing Monday morning.
Energy is intent. (Score:2)
So here in the US lets figure out how to plan more that 1-4 years ahead at a time first...
Enerhodar was a psyop. (Score:4, Informative)
The attack on Enehodar NPP was a psyop to get European governments and voting sheep to cower away from nuclear energy. The more they do, the more they stay dependent on Uncle Putin's fossil farts and fossil piss (gas and oil). Don't buy the Russian narrative.
But yes, the future is ALSO renewables, but nuclear for baseload sounds very good.
Re: Enerhodar was a psyop. (Score:2)
Is this the weakening of Russia better for climate change? I am seeing Biden redirecting climate funds toward Ukraine war, and I would like to hear an argument either way.
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Well, if less of Ukraine is blasted to dust and/or burned to a cinder, it'll be that much less pollution in the atmosphere.
If people too stupid to avoid disturbing the irradiated soil around Chernobyl can be kept out of Ukraine, well - that one speaks for itself.
If Europe can be made to understand that Russian energy comes with too high a price tag . . . do I really have to finish this one?
The decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
0. Do we want to minimize the use of fossil fuels?
1. Do we acknowledge there are few, probably no risk-free energy generation alternatives. Do we demand any new initiatives be risk-free?
2. Is resistance to the effects of warfare a real and pressing issue, or are we overreacting to current events?
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On the one hand, we can build a buttload of renewables and use batteries for short term storage and balancing, and hydrogen for longer storage. Weâ(TM)ll need to beef up our grid for that to work as well. On the other hand, we can build a bunch of nuclear power stations to ensure we have sufficient power. Both options are expensive and will take a few decades to implement. And I think weâ(TM)ll need to do both, even if it means spending a bunch of money on something that might be obsolete before it goes into operation.
Every dollar spent on nuclear represents a dollar that will not be spent on some other production method that's fundamentally cheaper per produced MWh. Even with storage, wind is cheaper than nuclear, and we can build it faster. Capitalism is not all of the reasons we can't have safe, sane nuclear power, but it's most of them.
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Even with storage, wind is cheaper than nuclear
What kind of storage are you talking about here?
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Even using batteries it's cheaper than coal, take for example the big plant in SoCal. Nuclear is just stupid expensive when the entire lifecycle is taken into account, but renewables have really come down.
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Even using batteries it's cheaper than coal,
No lol. You need to lay off the hallucinogenics.
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That depends on many factors of course, but in some cases it's already happening [spglobal.com] - recent long-term PPAs for solar plus storage are in the $32-40/MWh range. That's not only cheaper than the LCOE of most coal plants, it's cheaper than the marginal running cost of many existing plants.
Obviously this is for favourable PV areas with limited storage, and this won't replace all coal stations any time soon, but it's clearly competitive. BNEF says PV plus storage is already outcompeting [bnef.com] gas peaker plants. In South
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Even with storage, wind is cheaper than nuclear, and we can build it faster.
Citations please. Don't get me wrong - I hate nuke power and would gladly do away with it in a heartbeat if I really thought wind and/or solar could get the job done in a short enough time-frame. My overwhelming impression is that sufficient non-nuclear, non-fossil power to support our extravagantly wasteful 'lifestyle' won't be up to capacity fast enough. Indeed, halting AGW and having a chance of reversing it might require a time machine.
Capitalism is not all of the reasons we can't have safe, sane nuclear power, but it's most of them.
I agree wholeheartedly. We sure as hell aren't going to transition t
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Thank you for that information. I still think we need to keep existing nuclear generation online and viable, but I'm coming around to the idea that investing in new nuclear facilities is ultimately counterproductive.
Re:The decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
"Even with storage, wind is cheaper than nuclear,"
No it isn't. For baseload you need about 60 hours of storage, using the optimal mix of solar and wind. The optimal system comes in at about $32 billion for a 1 GW baseload system, of which 43% is batteries. Nuclear is about $10 billion if you do it the silly way, $6B if you are more sensible.
Gas, for reference is about $1 billion. In my opinion the correct solution is to have an hour or two of batteries, massive overbuild of wind and solar, and then use a gas peaker 20% of the time. Compared with coal this reduces the CO2 emissions to 10% of what they were. That system would cost about the same as nuclear.
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Sorry, doesn't necessarily work. You get continent sized wind droughts for days at a time several times per decade in Europe. I looked at daily wind production for 2 years around the UK, and the correlation between those farms spanning an area 1000 miles by 400 is strong.
Thanks for the link, I'll have a ponder.
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Every dollar spent on nuclear represents a dollar that will not be spent on some other production method that's fundamentally cheaper per produced MWh. Even with storage, wind is cheaper than nuclear, and we can build it faster. Capitalism is not all of the reasons we can't have safe, sane nuclear power, but it's most of them.
It is not correct to compare cost of intermittent sources on equal terms as dispatchable sources. As mix of intermittent sources grows corresponding investments in storage and long haul interconnection required to maintain stability become unreasonably expensive in terms of both dollars and environmental impact.
https://globalchange.mit.edu/s... [mit.edu]
In the absence of nuclear in many areas the only economically viable option is to burn hydrocarbons to meet some proportion of demand.
Three years to build nuclear reactor (Score:3)
Every dollar spent on nuclear represents a dollar that will not be spent on some other production method that's fundamentally cheaper per produced MWh. Even with storage, wind is cheaper than nuclear, and we can build it faster.
It only takes three years to build a nuclear power plant. ... The mean construction time of 441 reactors in use today was 7.5 years."
"18 reactors were completed in 3 years! 12 of those in Japan, 3 in the USA, 2 in Russia and 1 in Switzerland
http://euanmearns.com/how-long... [euanmearns.com]
Most of the delays have to do with politics. And politics is increasingly delaying renewables projects, in particular wind. The Nantucket Sound wind energy project took 20 years.
Plus you wave your hand and say we can just build a
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No, its not. Not in the long run. But when you add everything up, safety, environmental damage, reliability and cost. Then compare it with projected costs of new plants and designs that are coming out, almost everything fails when compared to nuclear.
Re:The decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
It was interesting that the current war's interaction with Chernobyl was brought up. Tell me again, what bad thing did that cause? I must have missed it.
But for war's interaction with energy production, I'll counter with that wacky time Iraq set Kuwait's oil wells on fire.
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3. How much are we willing to distort the free market to achieve this? (how many subsidies, how much high-risk long-term loans that the markets are unwilling to price, ...)
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Is resistance to the effects of warfare a real and pressing issue, or are we overreacting to current events?
I don't think it is an overreaction to stop buying fuels from Russia. I think it fair to say that this kind of sanction should have been applied much earlier. It might have saved a lot of lives, and not just in Ukraine.
I would actually prefer that trade had continued with Russia, because I think that would have been better for all concerned. But you have to draw the line somewhere, rather than holding your nose and closing your eyes, while shaking hands on a deal with a cruel tyrant. I would like to apply t
I'm fully vaccinated and boosted (Score:3)
I'm perfectly capable of evaluating risk. In this case the risk is I'm going to end up with my home and all of my possessions destroyed by radiation because some rich asshole who doesn't live anywhere near the nuclear power plant skips required maintenance in order to make a fast buck. And assholes like you vote for pro corporate, right wing politicians because they have the best advertisements and rallies and they let that wealthy
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Your position is completely irrational. Chernobyl was a bad copy of a 1940s US plutonium production reactor that would never be built in any modern country
There are still plenty of nations on earth that are not modern, so we still need to pay attention to what they build. Hopefully, though, they will all be safe designs in suitable locations.
These same idiots.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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These same idiots will be spewing this garbage as the world burns down around them and half of the US coastal regions are under water.
So your solution is to go all in on a technology with such long timescales that you'll be underwater before you even turn them on? The time for nuclear has passed. It's like preventing a gunshot wound by sending someone to get you a kevlar vest after someone has shot you. The timeframes in which we need to act are all now shorter than the time it takes to get even one nuclear power plant built, and critically those time frames assume a ramp down in emissions, not a sudden cut of emissions on the 31st Decem
Climate change is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The major problem we have right now is climate change. This is a serious, massive problem. And it looks very hard to see how we are going to deal with that without some nuclear power. Solar and wind are going to play a part (and are getting cheaper and cheaper) but if we had built more nuclear power 30 years ago, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have today. France made nuclear power work by building a lot of similar reactors with nearly identical designs. The US has made a massive regulatory burden on building new nukes, especially the ALARA rule https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/alara.html [cdc.gov], which essentially means that any new improvement in nuclear power which saves money has to be immediately plowed back into reducing radiation even further, making it very difficult for nuclear power to commercially compete.
The particulars of his argument are also not compelling. And frankly, any book that is titled "Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima" is pretty clearly from someone with a pretty big axe to grind. (Hint: Bikini Atoll was a bomb test which has nothing to do with the safety of nuclear power.) The concern about building more plants for example doesn't make sense; if countries simply adopted the well known French, German, British and South Korean designs, there wouldn't be any issue. And things get safer when you have more copies of something because you learn from errors and mistakes made. A single airplane of a single design is not very safe. A hundred airplanes of that design is by nature safer. Same applies here. His other arguments are also uncompelling. For example, yes waste is a problem, but it isn't a massive problem, and we've thought a lot about where to put it. Even in the worst case scenarios, the amount of room needed to store the highest level wastes is not much larger than the areas needed to be cordoned off from any large industrial process.
He's also engaging in what is essentially a false dichotomy that things have to be either "clean" energy like wind or solar, or nukes. But we can and should build both. An all solar/wind grid is going to have a lot of trouble providing power when there's not much sun or wind, and that's true even with advanced battery systems, pumped hydroelectric storage, and large-scale HVDC transmission lines. But a system with some nuclear for baseline along with a lot of solar and wind works better.
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Solar and wind are going to play a part (and are getting cheaper and cheaper) but if we had built more nuclear power 30 years ago, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have today.
And if we had built more solar 30 years ago, we also wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have today. But we didn't do either, so now we have to talk about what to do today — and even the nuclear industry says that renewables are cheaper and faster to implement.
For example, yes waste is a problem, but it isn't a massive problem, and we've thought a lot about where to put it.
I've thought a lot about becoming a porn star and moving to the moon, but in the really really world hopes and prayers don't amount to a fart in a windstorm. We have thought a lot about where to put nuclear waste and then wound up leaving the
Re:Climate change is the problem (Score:4, Informative)
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Solar built 30 years ago wouldn't have done that.
Yes, actually, solar built 50 years ago (which is what I am talking about) would have. Many panels made back then did in fact last for thirty years. Most of them, though, just got thrown away when they got old (or perhaps sent to the third world where they got spread across the landscape and lost to first world surveys) because it was economically beneficial to replace them with newer, more modern panels.
It is true that in general solar and wind are cheaper, but there's a limit to how much of the grid we can have from them until we have much better storage.
You can't build more nuclear plants without grid improvements, because they produce so much power in one
Re:Climate change is the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, actually, solar built 50 years ago (which is what I am talking about) would have.
That seems like an odd claim given how even 30 years ago how expensive and inefficient solar panels were. https://news.energysage.com/solar-panel-efficiency-cost-over-time/ [energysage.com]. In the 1970s that was even more the case. Yes, if we had built more, they would have gotten cheaper due to more economies of scale , but even that wouldn't have been enough.
You can't build more nuclear plants without grid improvements, because they produce so much power in one place, you have to run new connections to accommodate them.
This is a valid point. If you build your nuke plants near where you have coal plants you are getting rid of you don't have to build as much but still need to build some more. A lot of nuclear plants are in the range of 600 or 700 megawatts, with a gigawatt being a very typical size. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 [eia.gov]. A lot of coal plants are being retired in the range of 400 megawatts. There's been more work the last few years to make smaller reactor designs but that's something that again regulation is holding up a lot.
Closer, but nuclear is still more expensive. Also, I don't want less regulation of nuclear plant design, siting, construction, or operation, thanks.
Are you asserting that France doesn't have enough regulation? Or for that matter, are you arguing that US siting rules and design rules make sense? The US literally didn't approve any nuclear plants between 1978 and 2012 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-new-nuclear-reactor-in-us-since-1978-approved/ [scientificamerican.com]. How can that possibly be happening within a sensible regulatory framework?
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Are you asserting that France doesn't have enough regulation?
What kind of regulation are you talking about? A holiday home in Cornwall could be considered a nuclear hazard, because of the natural radioactivity of the rocks causing a buildup of radon gas. I admire the practical attitude of the French on this issue. If you want to eliminate all risks, just stay in bed all day, which is actually quite risky, because you will get fat, and suffer nasty skin diseases, and go bonkers.
I suggest one of the problems with nuclear power safety is that any amount of radioactivity
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"There's been more work the last few years to make smaller reactor designs but that's something that again regulation is holding up a lot."
The AP 650 is already approved. The accountants continue under the delusion that one big one is cheaper than two two smaller ones, so the AP 1000 is what is being built.
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Eh, I guess you have points, but at the end of the day NIMBY and the sheer cost and unprofitability of running a nuclear power plant makes nuclear a non-starter.
Look at the cost of Hinkley. How much grid storage could we have built with that much money? Yes, grid-scale storage is largely untested tech, but new nuclear plants are too. A lot of the time and delay in getting new nuclear plants online is all of the testing and certification, even if the reactor design itself is tried and true. Every site has it
Re:Climate change is the problem (Score:4, Informative)
Look at the cost of Hinkley. How much grid storage could we have built with that much money?
Grid storage assumes there are significant surpluses of energy at times to store, presumably from renewables. Britain and nearly every other large nation runs deficits in renewables, mostly covered by burning gas and adding to global CO2 levels. There is usually no surplus to store hence there is no point to building more storage (Britain already has two large pumped-storage stations, one more is being considered but its utility is in doubt since we're burning lots of gas instead).
Nuclear power plants produce electricity without emitting large amounts of CO2. Storage does not generate any electricity in itself, indeed it wastes some electricity in the round-trip from input to output.
Re: Climate change is the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Incorrect. The biggest problem we have right now is a recession and inflation. No one cares about climate change except for leftist tech bros and people who want to profit from the hype. When the midterms come along all this climate change hype bullshit will be swept aside for another couple of decades and we will concentrate on what is important: the economy and jobs and energy independence.
I'm not sure how your comment has to do with my comment much at all. You can argue that lots of people in the US care about inflation, and that's true. Right now it is the highest priority issue for the most people https://money.com/inflation-top-concern-america-poll/ [money.com]. But it is a mistake to think that because lots of people explicitly care about an issue that therefore that issue is the biggest problem we have. I'm reasonably confident that if the majority of people were concerned about climate change, you wouldn't consider it to be the biggest issue still.
As for energy independence, increasing solar, wind and nuclear power helps the US get to that goal. There's no contradiction there.
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Nuclear is incapable of solving the climate change issue
Just like wind isn't capable of solving the climate change issue. Just like solar isn't capable of solving the climate change issue. None of them will solve the issue by themselves. They are all tools in the same tool box to use to solve the issue. An of all the tools in the box, nuclear is simply the best one to use at the current time, period.
New research? (Score:2)
New research is all well and good, but research has no guarantees. What if this research doesn't pay off, or takes a long time? Do we just continue burning russian gas?
Nuclear works, it's a known quantity, and if future renewables provide a better alternative the nuclear plants can be shut down later once they are no longer required.
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We don't need to do any research to figure out how to supply all of our power needs with renewables. All we need is the will to do it. The same reason we're not doing it now is the reason we didn't do it in the 70s, when solar panels became reliable and energy-positive and therefore could have been installed en masse back then — and which would have continued to produce the bulk of their rated capacity for around thirty years. So by 2000 we would have been upgrading in place to newer, better equipment
Staffing problem (Score:3)
Setting aside the minor problem that the world's financial institutions don't think nuclear energy is a good investment, and therefore will only fund it at very high interest rates, the nuclear power industry is experiencing the same problem that the aviation industry and similar industries which requires high levels of skill and long arduous working hours in unpleasant conditions: it is getting harder and harder to find anyone who wants to work in nuclear. Add to that that current safety regulations requires that the plants be built in the hind end of nowhere and you end up with field of nightmares facilities: build them and no one will come.
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Would it be a tragedy if the industry had to move to normal working hours (5x8) or even shortened hours (4x8) to entice new workers? Labor isn't the primary cost in the industry.
There are a lot of people who actually LIKE living in East Nowhereswille, especially if the jobs are well paid and have reasonable working hours/benefits.
Sounds like an argument for stable government (Score:3)
Because a fusion reactor is going to be a huge boon for humanity. Once we are comfortable with fusion reactors, it is a small step to take the extra neutrons they produce and aim them at radioactive waste. Burning it slowly into less radioactive isotopes, producing a small amount of fission energy as you go.
We will need infrastructure for storage and transport of radioactive waste. Funding for building of an increasingly sophisticated generations of fusion reactors. Maintenance and expansion of existing fission reactors. And stable governments that don't go around invading everyone then threaten to fire tactical nukes whenever things don't go their way.
subject (Score:2)
Which doesn't negate its very useful function, but still a bummer. But my base stance hasn't changed much: underlying nuclear with homes having solar feeding the grid when saturated; and maybe wind somewhere with some other novel energy source down the line.
I went slightly anti-nuclear with the assumption solar panels' raw material can be recycled easily?
Re:subject (Score:4, Informative)
We have plenty more years than that. For a start, we can reprocess rather than burying 90% of the fuel in concrete. Next, we can breed plenty from U-238.
By reprocessing, the U.S. could probably run it's existing reactors for another 50 years or so just one the existing "waste".
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I went slightly anti-nuclear with the assumption solar panels' raw material can be recycled easily?
Yes, solar panels can be reprocessed relatively easily. They have distinguishing marks that make it easy to identify their type so they are easy to sort, which helps a lot. It takes a substantial percentage of the energy of making a panel in the first place, but at least the materials aren't wasted and you don't have to dig them up again.
People (including others who replied to your comment) like to point out that we can use reprocessing, but one of the big arguments against nuclear is that it is even more e
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Russian war machine (Score:3)
The Russian war machine is going to run out of power in the next 90 days. Building nuclear power isn't going to make a difference there.
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There are only 2 sources of energy (Score:2)
(1) Fusion
(2) Fission
Fossil fuels are fusion energy, stored as carbon compounds. We need to stop using those since the CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high.
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Let engineers and scientist build safe plants (Score:4, Informative)
Fukushima seems to be the main counter example. Problem is that politics got involved. Engineers and scientist wanted to put it where the periodic tsunamis wouldn't cause problems, they were overridden as a political favor so the jobs ended up in a particular district. Then engineers said they need a large seawall to protect it, but was overridden by politicians, and the wall was built to 1/4th of what was asked for.
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The whole world is capitalist.
That means that every single large capital project is going to suffer from greed and graft.
It makes much more sense to build smaller projects.
But small reactors don't make sense because of per-unit costs like inspection, monitoring, and security. Plus, nobody has ever demonstrated a practical one, to this day.
Nuclear just doesn't make sense in our world of selfishness.
Unproven and will take too long (Score:2)
Nuclear isn't clean (Score:2)
People have this misconception that nuclear would be clean energy. It is not, when taking into account the emissions for generating the fuel.
When taking into account mining, extraction, refinement and enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear reactors, the CO2 output per unit of energy is around half of that of fossil fuels. It's better, sure, but not nearly as good as renewable energy sources.
So let's run our nuclear power plants using the fuel we have!
Let's do research in nuclear energy, to find better mor
Re:Nuclear isn't clean (Score:5, Insightful)
By the same metric, solar and wind aren't "clean" energy because of the pollution created in building PV panels and turbines. That's just the reality of manufacturing anything while fossil fuels power the grid.
The more of our grid that gets shifted to nuclear, wind, and solar, the cleaner ALL manufacturing becomes.
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That mining / refining total has been debunked, nuclear power just produces on order of a hundred thousand times what chemical reactions do for given mass. A ten gram uranium pellet has the energy of a ton of coal. It does not take burning five hundred kilos of coal to make that pellet (or 75 gallons of oil), that's nonsense.
The whole nuclear fuel production process emits 30-64 grams CO2 per KHW. Typical fossil fuel plants are in hundreds, 300 and up.
https://css.umich.edu/factshee... [umich.edu]
or (it's a big one b
I'm going to propose an obvious straw man here (Score:4, Insightful)
then knock it down to make a point.
Strawman: we should put *all* our hope in nuclear to solve meet *all* our energy needs while solving *all* our climate problems.
Put this way it's obvious that it makes no sense to take such an extreme position; there's no need to exclusively depend on nuclear to be the solution to everything, in fact it's unnecessarily risky. That's also true if you substitute "renewables" for "nuclear" in the straw man.
When you think X is the solution to everything, you can only see problems with Y. For example nuclear advocates like to say how do you use renewables when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? Well it turns out that nuclear has the mirror problem: you can't save money on nuclear plant operation by turning down the output. That means you have to sell you power when demand and prices are low. The real problems with nuclear power plants haven't been safety or proliferation, although those are important. It's been you can't make money with the things. That's why Texas is building wind plants like crazy but not nuclear plants; it's easy to make money with them.
Here's the mind bending thing: a lot of the things we need to solve the practical problems with renewables are the exact same things we need to improve the economics of nuclear. We need an advanced grid that can deliver power to distant places with substantial power storage capabilities. Such a system will make solving our problems easier no matter which approaches we take.
Apparently (Score:5, Interesting)
The author of this book is living 50 years ago when Gen I reactors ruled the earth. The only reactors that have failed are Gen I reactors. In addition the soviets that built Chernobyl were scrapping together a rector, they didn't have funds to build a decent reactor, they knew it had design issues but everyone was too afraid to talk about it. And on top of that, no containment vessels on Chernobyl, when it exploded you could see the core, not so with today's reactors. So quit talking about Chernobyl when talking about nuclear plants.
These same people who don't want to have nuclear in the equation want everyone to go back to the stone age and farm, they also want energy to be so expensive that no one can afford to live, because they want less people on the planet.
Don't listen to them, nuclear is not the best tech but a necessary one.
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You are just an idiot.
And got modded up for no reason.
There are fundamental differences between Chernobyl style reactors and US ones.
And "containment vessels" has certainly nothing to do with it.
Hint: the Chernobyl reactor indeed did explode. And what do you think broke first? Oh, the containment vessel - dumb idiot.
No credibility at all (Score:3)
In the meantime, we obviously have an existing nuclear industry, and the solution is not to run away in panic, but to take good care of the facilities that already dot our countryside.
I was skeptical until I read this quote; then right there he lost all credibility. The inherent problem with nuclear is this exact problem; it's expensive to decommission and build a new plant so the short sighted choice is taken to extend the life of the plant. Fukushima was a Gen 2, 50 year old plant hit by a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami which wiped out it's backup generators. 3 mile island; same thing; 50 year old plant with some design issues. Heck Chernobyl was a mess by modern standards.
Much has been learned from these events, and the modern designs are passively safe and designed to deal with these issues. So the proposal is keep plants in operation, that still have the same design characteristics that led to problems, long past their intended life, instead of deccomissioning them and building new ones that incorporate lessons learned and are far safer?
That's just idiocy.
Poorly thought out. (Score:5, Interesting)
Author made a basic mistake of not comparing to the alternative. It does not matter if Nuclear kills 5 people per million watts if Natural Gas killed 10.
Nuclear is and always has been safer than other methods. The fossil fuels all killed FAR more people than nuclear ever did. Coal left us with MORE radioactive waste than nuclear has (Damn thorium spread pumped into the air). We just ignored it because it happened incrementally rather than all at once in large incidents.
The newer methods - Hydro (Dams), solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal have similar, though lesser problems. Dams destroy ecosystems (though they do replace them with lakes). Solar and wind have lifespans and takes plastics to create. Tidal is likely the best, though we simply do not have enough info about it. Geothermal is still being developed and we do not know if the risk of volcanic activity is real.
Yes, nuclear has issues. We KNOW them. We can deal with them. They are better than the Fossil fuel issues ever were. It is possible that the new, renewables will be better, but not certain. Batteries are hard to recycle, and may cause similar problems. It is still a good idea to use Nuclear as long as we still use any Fossil Fuels. After all fossil fuels are gone, then we should take another look and see if nuclear should go then.
But not till then, nuclear definitely makes sense. It solves horrendous problems we have today, while making sense financially. While it might create problems in the future, if the other power methods make sense, then nuclear's problems will never become half as big as fossil fuels are. If the other power methods do not make sense, then we NEED nuclear.
Needs to list options when rejecting nuclear. (Score:3)
Fuck this scumbag (Score:3)