As long as nuclear energy is treated as PICK_ANY(obsolete, uneconomical, systemically dangerous) it leaves me with zero hope for humanity.
Nuclear is way more than technology, it's Prometheus' fire. It may burn the unprepared but it is incomparable to anything else we possess. That factor million more energy per gram than chemical reactions should be enough for us to treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development.
This petty discussion on whether it is sustainable, dirty, expensive or dangerous is simply mind-boggling. Yes, it requires a much deeper "readiness" to utilise by our civilization than any other energy source, but the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against.
If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet.
Nuclear (fission) technology is not the problem, we are the problem. Looking at the recent history of political leadership all over the world, and the baffling level of support even the most immature of policies have, it's clear we have a ways to go. Most people doesn't even seem to realize that as a species we've only just emerged, we're so young. Toddlers on any timescale but the most naïve and short sighted.
> If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet.
If we should only be allowed to use technology when we fully understand its consequences, then we should still be living as hunter gatherers (agriculture).
Heck, most people don't understand how wood has shaped humanity:
Either we use it and learn to use it or we wipe out wide swathes of the human population over the next hundred years. I'm sure the millions who die and suffer over the next few decades will be grateful to your absolute principles.
1) We already have a ton of nuclear weapons laying around, without even getting the upside of lots of electricity. Stopping nuclear power to avoid nuclear proliferation has not worked.
2) The alternative for lots of the world is coal. Between letting the Germans have access to refined Uranium (not highly refined) and letting the Germans continue to burn coal, I’d take the former.
3) This argument falls apart once you realize how little we’ve invested in Thorium reactors, which don’t post a nuclear proliferation risk.
I think that the ugly reality is that fossil fuel companies have cynically co-opted legitimate fears about nuclear power (and there are legitimate concerns) in order to shut them down or push them off into “we can use them once <impossible condition> has been met” specifically because nuclear power is the only serious threat to their continued profits.
How about airplanes and internal combustion engines?
Those are weaponised with track record off killing millions and millions.
Should we immediately throw away those as well?
That seems like a little bit of a non sequitur to the topic in this particular thread chain.
Anyway, yes of course they happen. They happen in every power producing industry. It's hard to find good numbers of course as there's going to be some amount of error, but here's one [1].
The point isn't that in that report nuclear has fewer deaths than wind and solar as I'm sure that will cause an emotional reaction. The point is that it's so low and comparable. Even if it was 10x worse it would be worth the tradeoff of replacing coal.
Nuclear is our only choice for replacing industrial scale use of coal and oil. It's unfortunate that that's the case, but those are the facts on the ground currently and there's no sign of that ever changing. The way Wind and Solar generate energy are wholly incompatible with high temperature industrial uses where coal and natural gas are used let alone the problems of variability (batteries help, but there are limits and batter manufacturing at scale brings its own challenges).
If you're comparing Nuclear to Wind and Solar power generation, you're comparing power sources that don't compete. Nuclear is about replacing the worst problems coal and oil present us and staving off global warming. It's an extremely critical and underdeveloped resource and only gets safer and better with time. It would be erroneous to state any risk in a vacuum - you have to compare it with what's happening today.
To boot, almost every time a nuclear reactor is decommissioned, it is replaced by more fossil fuel plants, not by renewable energy. You can’t be seriously opposed to climate change and nuclear energy at the same time.
I’ve learned there are two distinct groups of people who claim to be concerned about climate change. One group that sees it coming and sincerely wants to find viable solutions to the problem, and a much larger group who use it to fuel somewhat misanthropic psychological control issues. This second group spend most of their time thinking (and arguing!) about how other people are not riding bikes to work, not using reusable grocery bags, not buying electric vehicles, and voting in ways that they don’t like. They see Greta thunderberg as the solution to climate change, “if only we could shame enough people into riding their bike to work, we will save the planet,” they think. “If we just invest in solar” they say, never mentioning the tricky details like battery manufacture and placement, “we won’t solve the problem, because it’s too late for that, but it would be better.”
These people are not going to solve the problem of climate change. That’s not really what they are in it for. And so the much smaller first group of people, who aren’t focused on changing behaviors of other people (social control) are the only hope. They, the first group, are hampered at every turn by the second group. The second group indeed are the cause of “climate denialism.”
It’s good to learn to spot these people and simply not engage. When they make inane claims about nuclear being unsafe, just correct the record and move on.
Does that mean hydroelectric dams should be shut down?
Over the many decades of nuclear operation, there have been two major incidents: Chernobyl and Fukushima. And Chernobyl could probably have been prevented with a containment building.
I live with-in 50km of a nuclear power station: I'll take my chances with nuclear over climate change, given the choice.
> When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale.
Just wanted to point out that stone (trebuchets), wood (arrows), bronze (swords), and steel (guns, bombs, tanks, etc) fall into this category too. Silicon is probably there already as well, but hasn’t been used yet.
Mankind has used everything as his disposal to gain the upper hand over another group of humans since well before history began. I don’t ever expect it to stop.
I wonder what the pathway would be (in a perfect everything-matures-at-a-constant-rate way)
Probably better representative systems that don’t pit countries or peoples against eachother. A way to identify as a human or earthling above all nationalities.
A revolutionary better economic understanding so we don’t have to choose politically and have clear economic growth tied to wellness of people.
Probably connected to the above is a superior education system for everyone who wants to and help to realize mature atomic sciences.
The issue that concerns me about nuclear power isn't so much weapons (they tend to be well-guarded, and it's hard to make weapons from reactor fuel), but decomissioning.
The UK was one of the first countries to build nuclear reactors; no UK reactor has ever been fully decomissioned, and from what I can see we haven't even got a strategy - WP says they're still working out whether decomissioning should occur over a 20-year or a 100-year span. The UK's first nuclear reactor, Calder Hall, was built in the year of my birth, and decommissioning is estimated to take well into the next century; my grandchildren will have died of old age.
You can stand next to a thermonuclear bomb without a mickey-mouse suit; you can even open it up, take the components out, and render the weapon unusable, fairly easily. Nuclear reactors, not so much.
I have grandchildren under 5. Until we've proved that a reactor design can be fully decommissioned, I don't think we should build more. That's not a problem that I want to dump on their shoulders.
What sort of world will your grandchildren inherit if we don’t invest in nuclear? What happens if the mystery renewable energy storage and carbon scrubbing technologies never materialize? What happens if the climate scientists are right about the increasing droughts and floods and the knock-on effects to food supplies and so on? By comparison the risk of nuclear is negligible.
That depends. The trajectory we're on is one of unrestrained economic growth. In that scenario, demand for power will only increase. Growth has many other harmful effects, including ever-greater quantities of plastic waste, and depletion of natural resources like fish stocks and rainforests.
I have no idea how to tame growth. Most governments put growth near the top of their objectives. But I think it's growth that will blight my grandchildren's lives, not a shortage of electricity.
Am I missing something? Why is decommissioning nuclear power plants the problem here? There are plenty of nuclear power plants that has been decommissioned. So this is nothing new.
In the UK, several nukes have been taken out of service; none has been "decommissioned", in the sense that the site can be re-used, people can live and work there. The first nuclear power plant in the UK was built in 1956, and the current plan is that decommissioning will be completed by 2104; I will be long gone. Until then, the site will be closed to the public.
Perhaps you know of nuclear power plants elsewhere that have been fully decommissioned. I don't, but there is an infinite number of things I don't know, and I would love to be surprised.
>using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet.
So now this big countries like US,Russia and the rest still have the bombs, you don't reduce the risk of a nuclear war or a big country accidentally or intentional detonating one by reducing the number of nuclear power plants.
Unfortunately the nuclear weapons already exist and any country with enough budget can create one, I suggest you try to understand that you can't have a group of terrorists dropping a plane in a nuclear plant and have it explode like a bomb, nuclear plants do not explode like an atomic bomb.
I tend to agree with you, but it should not be the conclusion. We must become ready to handle this, it is in my opinion the real underlying challenge behind the climate problem.
We have started this technologically driven expansion of the human footprint, and either we revert to pre-industrial levels or progress. Assuming that non-nuclear technology will let us have the cake (of prosperity) and eat it too (without drowning our cites) is the collective lie I see propagated politically.
In the spirit of the recent TV series release of "Foundation", this is our Seldon problem.
Running a nuclear reactor does not produce nuclear weapons. This is simply fear-mongering fake news.
Also, modern nuclear reactors are dangerous. The GenIII+ specification for all new reactors requires the use of passive shut off. Which means the operator must actively keep the reactor on.
If they were to all turn into zombies, for example, the reactor would simply shut off.
Omega Tau podcast also did an extensive series on nuclear waste storage that I highly recommend every skeptic listen to. Nuclear waste storage is not a problem.
The problem is that naivete people seem to have that renewables can provide 99% uptime baseload, the boomer ignorance that all-things-nuclear-are-bad-because-Greenpeace-told-me-so.
Moreover, China has proven that nuclear Gen III reactors can be built cheaply - they are concurrently building 24 1GW plants.
Steamline ancient western regulations, block the endless lawsuits against plant development, re-open the Nevada storage center, tell boomers to stop stonewalling the only ready climate change solution, and BUILD THE DAMN NUCLEAR PLANTS.
We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance.
> We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance.
No we don't. We don't have even one new Gen reactor running and even more important we don't have the people educated to build them in a massive scale.
It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them.
And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.
It’s frustrating that the anti-nuclear folks (perhaps not you specifically, parent) worked to drain western societies of nuclear experience and advancement, and then use that inexperience and associated costs as a reason not to invest in nuclear.
Yes, nuclear has a long lead time, but so does economics grid-scale storage for renewables. “Long lead time” isn’t an excuse to forestall investment, it’s a reason to start now.
Moreover, nuclear has promising solutions for criticisms of cost, safety, and experience: Small Nuclear Reactors. A relatively small number of nuclear engineers can design blueprints for nuclear facilities which can be mass produced and shipped to site. The cost projections seem very favorable and certainly worth looking into more, but the biggest obstacle is anti-nuclear FUD. I’m not asking the anti-nuclear folks to help, but I do wish they would get out of the way so everyone else can save our planet.
Also the most efficient and safe reactors are arguably in the bellies of the leading edge Submarines. It's no surprise France is going all in on the Small Modular Reactor tech since they are rumored to possess some of the best in the world already. Likely a question of declassification.
The reactor at MIT has students allowed to run parts of the operation after they pass a few strenuous tests. This hypothetical scenario where the political will is ready to go and the skill gap is what is holding it up is imaginary.
Military reactors tend to use weapons grade fuel. Would not want to spread that across all unstable regions of the world. So quite the different beasts compared to the civilian side.
> It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them. And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.
How did they do it in the past then? The first power station opened in 1956 when the technology was secretive and when there was no internet. The real problem looks completely because of red tape and NIMBY
As i said to another commenter, you are right, i was thinking of Gen III+ like EPR.
When we started out building nuclear plants the where much simpler, much smaller designs and a lot of designs didn't work out the way hoped.
Nuclear is hard, it's hard on the materials and often you problems appear while building or running it.
Define "we" and "running". While the US nuclear industry is admittedly a bit moribund at the moment, there are already many gen 3 plants in operation with passive safety features, and several gen 4 in late research and plans to build commercial plants. But the majority of plants in operation are gen 2. We could be doing so much better by just building out gen 3/3.5 plants today.
The big 3 nuclear disasters, Chernobyl (started construction in 1972), Three Mile ('67), and Fukushima ('67), were al really early gen 2, designed in the 60s.
> Also, modern nuclear reactors are dangerous. The GenIII+ specification for all new reactors requires the use of passive shut off. Which means the operator must actively keep the reactor on.
This seems confused. Shouldn't this read not dangerous?
100% agree though on the broad point. Newer reactors have way better passive safety, and the way to cheaper, safer nuclear energy is build more new plants and retire the old ones.
Earth gets hit by 170 000 TW of sunshine every hour. That's more than the yearly global consumption of energy.
If we could capture only 1% of that, we'd have 80 times more than we need, from just the sunshine reaching earth.
This makes the photovoltaic cell and related technologies more interesting than nuclear to me. A way more abundant energy source with none of the downsides of nuclear is clearly within our reach. It's not even unknown technology, we just haven't made the infrastructure to capture it yet.
Nuclear seems to me to be similar to Coal in that we may think it's a good idea now, only to discover later on that it actually killed us due to things we didn't think about. Or didn't want to think about.
They are also similar in that we who get the benefits today are leaving the problems with it to future generations.
Listing large numbers and then saying "if only we could get this small percentage" doesn't make for a solid business plan, and it doesn't make a solid energy plan either. We're talking about insane amounts of land, for one thing, and ignoring distribution for another. Plus "80x more than we need" assumes a fixed level of need forever, humanity capped off, the book of progress written and closed.
But knowing the potential is a first step, wouldn't you agree? You don't build the mine before the geologists have determined that there is indeed gold to be found, so to speak.
Distribution is not as big a problem I think, since you can have small installations everywhere, combined with larger installations where possible. Storage is a problem, but we know of several solutions that could be developed.
As for land, the land already wasted to man-made lakes for hydroelectricity more than covers it 100-fold if my roughly estimated math is correct (assuming ~30MW per km2 from newer solar installations and based on a list of man-made lakes on wikipedia). Floating solar is already a thing, it works.
How about a hydroelectric dam-duo where solar panels on the artificial lakes pump the water back to the upper reservoir when there's lots of sun? Energy and storage combined! Elon Musk - are you listening? ;-)
Solar can also easily be installed on buildings or in deserts, so I don't think large amounts of any valuable land would be needed.
As a whole it seems totally feasible to me, at least as a big part of the puzzle, much bigger than it is today.
Solar isn't without its flaws. The solar deployed today will be EOL 25-30 years from now. That's 6M metric tons of waste yearly estimated by 2050 and almost 80m metric tons total [1]. Coupled with the increased demand for materials in PVs and supporting battery infrastructure, more mining and mines have real environmental and social consequences.
That's a lot of lead and other toxic elements that if not properly disposed of will lead to massive ecological consequences. The current strategy of dumping in north africa is not a solution, and we're setting ourselves up with a PV waste problem for future generations.
A valid point for sure, this is indeed a problem. Luckily it seems like it can be solved and that people are trying to do it. The first european solar panel recycling plant opened just 2 years ago:
I think the reason why it hasn't been done earlier is that the volume was not there to make it a good business. 20 years from now it surely will be. Just like the business of recycling batteries.
I agree about hypotheticals, and sadly I find that is usually the problem with this topic.
Some people "know" why some thing will definitely work because they ignore problems, and others "know" why something will not work because they don't realize the problems are solvable or even non-existent.
Such as in your example - the three countries you mention are already (at least combined) self-sufficient in renewable energy. (Norway is a net exporter and covers the diesel generators some of the 50 000 people living in Greenland use).
Not only that, but solar is totally feasible in all those countries. The notion that solar can't be used far north or far south is just not true. They even use solar power in Antarctica:
Norway is powered 95% by hydro and Iceland by geothermal, so it says nothing about feasibility of wind / solar.
Also being a 'Net Exporter' is not enough - Scotland is a net exporter of wind energy, but was actually only able to cover ~30% of it's own needs, because sometimes there is too much wind, and sometimes not enough.
"Not only that, but solar is totally feasible in all those countries."
Research station in Antarctica is not a suitable benchmark: if their setup produces electricity at £2/kWh, that's a great deal because their only alternative is shipping diesel thousands of kilometres at 50x the price.
But charging even £1 for electricity in UK would have major repercussions.
In the UK, during the summer there is 10x more solar irradiance than in Winter, Norway will be even more extreme.
Anything is feasible if you invest enough, but you probably have to overbuild your renewables, and have cross-continent power transmission to even it out.
While I agree with you regarding the political dimension, the technical, especially regarding safety may not be underestimated regarding cost implications. But the right political setting could imply cheap, mass produced plants, e.g. SMR's. The problem is that were too late, would take several decades to scale up to where we we should be already...
I'm not sure I follow this. Nuclear power is significantly less deadly than coal and that's just talking about accidents in power generation. If you include general death by radiation pollution, that difference grows more disparate (coal energy production emits an enormous amount of radiation into the atmosphere as pollution).
Will do. Nuclear energy is 10x less deadly than rooftop solar per Twh and 4x less deadly than wind.
Solar kills! Maybe we need to mount a campaign to shut down this deadly and dangerous form of energy generation. I will start working on the posters and clickbait web site, you gather the activists to organize a protest.
China is shifting their entire coal production to nuclear. America is shutting down nuclear and replacing it with? Coal. Wind and PV cannot handle the load requirements so you end up having to build coal anyway.
I’m not against wind and PV. I’m just realistic about where the energy mixture has to look like to actually accomplish the goal of sustainable energy production. The earth can’t handle us dithering yet more on this argument.
The United States is not replacing nuclear power with coal. Coal-derived electricity has declined dramatically in the past 15 years while nuclear power has declined slightly. See this chart of US electrical generation from 1950-2020:
Fossil generation peaked in 2007, as did generation from coal.
Coal plus gas generation in 2007 was 2913 TWh, composed of 2016 TWh from coal, 897 TWh from gas. In 2020 gas generation was up to 1617 TWh and coal was down to 774 TWh for a total of 2391 TWh (-522 from 2007).
Between 2007 and 2020, renewables grew from 353 TWh to 792 TWh (+439 from 2007).
No, the US is not replacing nuclear with coal. It is shutting down nuclear that is aging out, but all energy growth in the past 20 years in the US has been renewables and gas. Mostly gas. The US is drowning in cheap natural gas from fracking and because of this switch away from coal it is one of the few major western nations to actually reduce its CO2 footprint over the past couple of decades.
My bad. Natural gas still emits 50% of the CO2 that Coal does, so it's still a very significant emitter of CO2 as compared with nuclear. That's ignoring the methane leaks inherent in transporting natural gas.
China can also build anything they want where they want and sell power for state guided prices which is not possible in e.g. europe where people oppose. Also solar is much cheaper already which makes such investments uninteresting for power companies.
The parent comment said overprovisioning and storage. With enough overprovisioning, you'd need storage for half a day at most (keep in mind that the parent thread was talking about pure solar with storage, not wind). The question on this sub-thread is: what would be the optimal (minimum cost) balance between overprovisioned solar and storage, and what would be the cost of that solution (the question was about 1GW, but it probably scales almost linearly), with similar reliability to pure nuclear (I'm assuming this pure nuclear scenario is overprovisioned too, since it has to deal with refueling pauses and the occasional electrical faults)?
(Of course, except for very small isolated networks, a real-life solution would not use only pure solar and storage; adding other things like wind to the mix would probably decrease the cost while keeping the same reliability.)
“Too late” relative to what? We don’t have an alternative. It will similarly take decades to scale up renewables (we need some combination of economical grid-scale storage and massive over-provisioning).
>the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against.
how about the long term risk? we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom. we're talking about a waste product that does not cease to create a danger for hundreds of years at minimum. Reactor 4 at chernobyl is predicted to be "safe" in 20,000 years and before you say thats an exception id like to remind you that ALL high level nuclear waste has a cooldown of tens of thousands of years and it is routinely generated in the pursuit of the electron today.
The Roman empire only lasted 1500 years. these nuclear byproducts last so long that modern scholars cannot unilaterally agree on a simple means of warning the future inhabitants of whatever society exists, let alone passing on any tips or tricks for processing or salvaging these lethal artifacts.
we are talking about a waste product that outlives not only written but spoken language and dozens if not hundreds of civilizations and the stalwart of the atom --the United States-- still couldnt even manage to get Yucca mouuntain together as a disposal ground after two decades.
nuclear isotopes do not have a rate of return. they do not care about profit or equity or economies and will without remoerse kill you all if you forget them.
waste is currently stored in large pools at your local nuclear plant that require constant cooling. once these sites are inoperable they will require the care of generations for millennia before with a clear conscience you can say 'nuclear power was worth it'. that the atom will be taught as a religion is less far fetched a premise to a Fallout game when you realize in 12,000 years the only means of conveying the lethality of our hubris will be as such.
This is anti-science fear mongering for a variety of reasons.
Most importantly, we need to consider the risks of NOT investing in nuclear, which are that we continue to burn fossil fuels while we pray for a solution for the renewable storage problem. This is a civilization-ending risk by which the worst nuclear disaster pales in comparison.
> we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom.
Plastics are a problem because billions of people throw their trash haphazardly into the environment. As long as we don’t do that with nuclear waste, we’re fine.
Yes, nuclear waste takes a long time to decay, but the risk is inversely correlated with the time it takes to decay. Something with a long half-life by definition emits low rates of radiation. Moreover, nuclear waste is very dense, so we can easily manage a lot of it (and we already have to manage some of it anyway). Lastly, we already have the answer for managing nuclear waste—deep geologic storage.
There is a lot of uranium ore in the ground already, much of it radioactive enough that it will absolutely cause illness if you live or work in its proximity (not even counting the radon it gives off).
Any analysis of the dangers of long term disposal shouldn't concern itself with risks comparable to that given by rich natural deposits of radioactive materials.
We seen it first hand in these last 2 years how hard it was for the government to control the lowermost layers of society, even when we talk about a life, and death matter, just because they can't get a hamburger, and toilet paper.
Now, imagine talking about rationing electricity, or fuel for F150s
> treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development
That was literally the way it was thought about a three quarters of a century ago. It... didn't work out.
It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources, and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away.
It did work out. The only reason we don’t have more of it is because of anti-nuclear FUD campaigns.
> It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources,
It’s disingenuous to compare unreliable energy sources with reliable energy sources and claim the two are equally advantageous. We can make renewable energy reliable at significant cost, so we must compare that cost with nuclear. Moreover, the price projections for SMRs handily beat out fossil fuels and reliability-adjusted figures for renewables.
> and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away.
This is rich considering (1) we know what the “fix” is and it’s not magic (mass produce nuclear reactors i.e., SMRs) and (2) the plan for reliable, economic renewable energy is “pray for an unknown miracle breakthrough in storage” as though that will be discovered and scaled in less than a decade…
No longer true. New reactors coming that are way, way less expensive. If we can stop thinking in terms of a quarter century ago, we can finally get to that future we used to imagine.
> Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
Stop with the conspiracy theories. There are no "anti-nuclear folks" in this thread. It's a bunch of people looking at a balance sheet and trying to decide on how to prioritize energy spending. And nuclear doesn't fit. Maybe it will. But it doesn't. It's not there. If you have $100M to spend on non-carbon electricity right now you build a wind farm, not a reactor.
That's the problem you have to fix. Make something people want, basically.
Oh, it's safer than all other reactors ever designed? Yeah, but it isn't PERFECT, is it? What if I <impossible scenario>? Then it might be dangerous!
Oh, it has 1/10th the nuclear waste of all other reactors ever? But it STILL MAKES NUCLEAR WASTE.
Oh, it can be built at half the cost of previous reactors for twice the energy? THAT'S STILL WAY TOO MUCH.
And to be clear, I think renewables are major important part of the solution. But waiting for them to meet the demand that nuclear can hit immediately means decades of dirty energy generation. We need to do both renewables and nuclear right now.
>> Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.
>> This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.
Basically the safety regulations (some of which are nonsensical -- the whole article is worth a read) preclude cost-effective nuclear. I won't address your point on waste, I think it's covered elsewhere on this page well enough.
> * don't disturb the neighbours (not met reliably)
This is a false dichotomy that’s always bugged me. I’d sure find living near a nuclear plant a lot less disturbing than living near a coal plant. And with nuclear plants, far fewer people would have to live near any power plant.
I don't see this as a requirement. The cheaper options that provide the large base load needed are all fossil fuel based. They are "cheap", but only if you don't charge for the CO2 cost to the environment.
Ontario has a 60% base energy load provided by nuclear. Smog is rare, except when it blows up from the south. The CO2 production is very low.
> no waste that takes >100y to decay
The waste from alternatives are huge amounts of CO2, which is causing far more harm to the world than the small amount of nuclear waste that would be produced.
We have so many nuclear power plants running and the amount of waste so comparatively negligible (compared with coal, oil, natural gas) that it's moving the goal posts to require it to hit everything.
Humanity doesn't get better at doing something by doing it less. We need more power plants so that we build experience and costs go down. The market has to be there so that power plant design is invested in to drive down costs, improve efficiencies and reduce risks further.
Repeatedly building and improving is how South Korea and France have nuclear power plants that work pretty swell despite the massive political obstacles in their way. A great deal of the costs of nuclear come not from intrinsic technological or process costs but the bureaucracy setup that will almost guarantee non-viable economics. It thus becomes nearly impossible to compare nuclear and solar / wind sources in terms of cost efficiency honestly whatever you support. Costs of anything are a function of the technical, market, and political factors.
This so much. One barrel per year per reactor means we can run the US on 100% nuclear and store all the waste for the next 1000 years in the one existing facility in Nevada.
Maybe. But until we have that first plant, it's too early to go for mass implimentiion.
I wish Musk would take a shot at it. He's the only engineer/financier/crazy-person who I think could make an impact. Government's clearly aren't interested and no one else can get the cash together.
As he’s said numerous times, solar is fusion at a distance and solar combined with batteries is the future, both of which can be safely recycled and manufactured rapidly at scale. Tesla’s entire business is selling batteries to store clean energy for later use (either in vehicles or stationary storage), and enough sunlight hits the earth every 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Lithium is abundant in the world’s crust, and there are no proliferation risks.
“That free fusion reactor in the sky conveniently converts ~4 million tons of mass into energy every second. We just need to catch an extremely tiny amount of it to power all of civilization.”
I don't disagree that there is abundant solar opportunity at the planet-level, but it's unrealistic to build infrastructure to funnel energy from eligible deserts to the rest of North America.
Here where the sky is cloudy as much as it is sunny, and clear even less, and where it snows, solar works but isn't reasonable to replace all power needs at an individual, county or state level. The logistics involved are much more complex than, say, having a few nuclear reactors in the state. Which work regardless of the weather.
HVDC transmission, pumped storage where the geography allows for it, and grid interconnectors allow for moving power between geographies. Seasonal deltas are solved for with overbuilding renewables and curtailment when there is oversupply.
If nuclear was easy, it’d be done, but it isn’t because it is the more complex, more expensive technology. The sun is free and requires no human management.
I cannot stress enough (as an armchair energy analyst who tracks renewables and energy storage manufacturing and deployment rates) how fast solar PV, wind, and batteries are being deployed.
It is done? It is easy? My power needs are completely served right now by hydroelectric and nuclear.
Just because you don't have nuclear reactors in your neighborhood doesn't mean they're more out of reach than solar. HVDC is already widely available. Grid interconnects are mostly political.
We looked at installing PV on a semi-remote home and it was not feasible. The roof was only large enough for a few panels and significant tree removal would've been necessary. The cost was prohibitive.
Existing nuclear is of course valuable as a zero carbon energy source, its new nuclear that can’t get built. We should continue to support existing nuclear as long as can be done safely so carbon intensive generation doesn’t fill in for those generators if they’re retired early (Illinois recently enacted policy to subsidize Exelon’s aging nuclear merchant fleet in the state so that generation wasn’t replaced with natural gas, for example).
> We looked at installing PV on a semi-remote home and it was not feasible. The roof was only large enough for a few panels and significant tree removal would've been necessary. The cost was prohibitive.
That particular home design-- its siting, dimensions, energy usage, etc-- were just not viable in a particular energy environment. That doesn't mean that grid detached PV isn't viable-- many parties use it today-- it means it wasn't viable for that design.
A mostly insulated home wouldn't be a viable design in the arctic but they're acceptable designs in places with mild climates.
As the energy landscape changes some designs and locations that were viable in the past won't be viable anymore. There is no natural law entitlement for a given set of choices to work out. :)
Nuclear is way more than technology, it's Prometheus' fire. It may burn the unprepared but it is incomparable to anything else we possess. That factor million more energy per gram than chemical reactions should be enough for us to treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development.
This petty discussion on whether it is sustainable, dirty, expensive or dangerous is simply mind-boggling. Yes, it requires a much deeper "readiness" to utilise by our civilization than any other energy source, but the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against.