With a new projected cost of 25 billion USD the cost overruns of the Vogtle Plant are worse than I thought. There is a reason why nuclear is losing to natural gas and coal. It's too damn expensive and takes too long. If this money was instead spent on building more storage capacity we'd have solved our energy problems a long time ago and even if we started today we'd be done long before the nuclear plant is online.
The nuclear plant consists of two units each with 1200MW production capacity. Let's be pessimistic and assume that we need 24 hours of storage or roughly 57600MWh. A modern redox flow or lithium ion battery can cost as little as $100 per kWh but Tesla's grid battery with 129MWh cost 66 million which is around $500 per kWh so we will use that.
Well it turns out 57600MWh * 500$/kWH is exactly 28.8 billion USD. No power grid on earth needs a 24 hour battery but even with this crazy assumption grid storage isn't significantly more expensive than nuclear power.
Your cost analysis neglects replacement, disposal costs for batteries, long term costs of carbon emission, and coal flyash disposal. The only reason nuclear is losing to gas and coal is because the externalities of the mess they make are dumped on the public, whereas nuclear pollution and waste processing is heavily regulated.
Batteries can be recycled, nuclear waste is stockpiled with no permanent disposal or recycling plan in sight.
Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity).
Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste disposal, liability insurance).
Most of this nuclear "waste" could be recycled as well by processing and further burning it in breeder reactors. Of course the processng equipment gets contaminated but that's life.
I know others have addressed the dangers of this, but I had a little fun looking at the logistics. The UK alone produces 2Mt of radioactive waste[0] per year, ~9% is of "intermediate" level. Just sending those 18Mt into LEO would take 129,000 Saturn V launches per year. That's about one launch every 4 minutes. And LEO is not where we want to send anything. Lets assume a Trans-Lunar Injection is enough, bringing that number up to 370,000, almost one launch per minute.
Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone.
Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone.
Launching waste into space with a rocket is a silly idea. We don't really care if the waste gets damaged as long as it doesn't break up and make a mess. Why not build a giant railgun to launch it?
I'd consider them equally as silly, considering we're actually capable of launching rockets into space yet the closest we've gotten with a space gun is a measly 180km apogee @ 3.6km/s[0]. The original question was why we don't send our nuclear waste into space. We can't send our nuclear waste into space using a rail gun because we can't currently send anything into space with a rail gun.
Cause someone murdered the leading scientist in the field. Also there's concerns that it'd be too easy to turn it essentially into a very long range, highly effective weapon that could lob nuclear or conventional projectiles at countries on the other side of the planet with little to no warning.
We already have highly effective weapons that can lob nuclear or conventional projectiles at countries on the other side of the planet with little to no warning: ballistic missile subs.
It's cheaper and safer to store it in deep crystalline bedrock. I guess if we geologists can't convince we the people of that maybe the railgun idea would work, especially if you could hit the sun where the fast fusion neutrons would consume the hell out of it.
Because of the extremely high energy density of nuclear fuel, the amount of waste produced per Gigawatt-year of electricity generated is very small.
A Saturn V has a payload of 140 Mt to low earth orbit. Total high-level waste is 22,000 cubic meters, possibly 220,000 Mt, assuming a density 10 times as great as water. 1,572 Saturn V launches would carry away all of that. All the high-level waste ever produced that has not been recycled. Most of it can be recycled in breeder reactors, so there is no need to carry it away!
2Mt is 2 mega tonnes. If you look at the source only 0.03% of radioactive waste in the UK is "High Level". The expended fuel itself is a tiny portion of the nuclear waste. At lot of things other than nuclear reactors also produce radioactive waste that requires proper disposing, as your source confirms.
Oh, this reminds me of high school, when I asked a physicist my mother dating about the same idea. He worked for the Rand corporation and was overall pro-nuclear. Still, He considered for a second and did his best to explain...
What I remember of his explanation was the point that if you launch a payload of material into space, you have essentially placed that payload in an elliptical orbital path, one that intersects earth's elliptical path. And since orbits are periodic, that payload is going to be intersecting earth's orbit regularly, meaning that in this instance, the chance of the material coming right back into the atmosphere is quite high.
I like to remind people that we already live on a radioactive planet. We can build nuclear reactors because radioactive stuff naturally is everywhere. There probably wouldn't be life here without it.
So to me the "let's get it off the planet" idea is an overreaction. Radioactive material just need to be handled with common sense.
Hmm... what's the over-under on dropping barrels into a volcano?
You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust...
As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster?
Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?
> As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat?
Short answer: No. Definitely not in a Volcano.
Long Answer:
Decay rates are ultimately determined by the subatomic structure of the nucleus. This is why different chemicals, and different isotopes of said chemicals, will decay differently. A lone neutron will decay after about 15 minutes (which is a long time in subatomic scales), however, the two neutrons in (4/2)He will happily stick around forever.
So melting a material won't have any impact on the structure of the nucleus, you're just disassociating the intramolecular bonds; same goes for turning said material into a gas.
If you were to raise the temperature high enough, and we're talking sun-like (not the measly 5000k that you get on the surface, I mean like 27-million degrees you find in the core), then you'll actually start stripping and fusing nuclei, which will at that point change (but not necessarily decrease) the radioactive rates of whatever material you started with.
In most cases a faster decay rate does mean the material becomes safer at a faster rate, but consequently produces more radiation in that same time. If it was reprocessed we could reuse the high-output waste over and over until all that was left was the low energy but long half life material, but old regulations based on poorly understood science in the past, public ill-will, and potential international political conflicts could appear as the reprocessing technology is basically the same technology needed to make nuclear or radiation bomb source material.
The classic answer is to bury extremely long lived waste in a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench.
A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons.
I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think it would "contaminate the oceans".
I dont think it is so easy. Subduction zones have what are called accretionary prisms, which are basically sediment that is sloughed off the top of the subducting plate. Thus, if you want the nuclear waste to be subducted, you have to bury it deep enough, though I can't say quite how far - given the scale of the crust, I'd say you're looking at something on the order of miles at least. Which is extra challenging considering subduction zones are already under thousands of feet of ocean.
And even if it were subducted, the descending seafloor sediments liberate water and other volatiles once they get deep/hot enough, and this produces volcanism.
Because we already know how to store it for thousands of years with minimal leakage without creating a contraption that could lead to nuclear waste raining down on our heads.
To be fair, we already know how to store it with minimal leakage for thousands of years, but the tentation to just dump it in the Mediterranean (1980's), Somalia (1980-90's), seed it over Irak (Gulf's war) or leak it into the Japanese Sea (2011-17) is irresistible.
Yes, but how much coal versus uranium would a household use, if used to generate electricity in the most efficient way possible (cogeneration presumably)?
One answer is that it probably isn’t possible to do what you say, but if it were the failure states are wildly unacceptable. Any “cannon” (or rail gun) capable of accelerating an object to escape velocity from the surface would likely burn the object up during its flight through the atmosphere, spreading its radioactive contents into the air to float around as low level global fallout for decades.
But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution.
One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.
We'll have to pack it very carefully in any case. Perhaps we should assume that this will happen and work with that scenery in mind. The concept of a fire resistant box is not new at a smaller scale; We can vitrify the less dangerous waste and store the crystal in steel containers. Then we could theoretically design explosion-proof containers for it with some outer sacrificial disposable layers made of a plastic clay-like matherial or so.
Is much worse than that :-). The "space solution" can be split in three different possibilities. I will name the first "The slingshoot"
We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category.
We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018.
Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.
> Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that.
No it can’t. Any given atom stops being uranium after it fissions. Some of the waste can be reprocessed because not all is fissioned, but even then there is a lot of literally untouchable waste left over — well, literally untouchable if you want to live: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
But I don’t get this untouchable concept. Lava is untouchable. Deep oceans are unreachable. Why is it a requirement that we have to be able to go and touch every single spot on earth? What is the problem with having one minuscule location on earth where you are not supposed to go and stock pile this material there? It is contained, we have full control over it, unlike the immense volumes of chemicals currently released in rivers or the atmosphere. And there are already countless locations where you are not supposed to go because it is private or military property, polluted with chemicals, or too cold or too warm for humans, or a protected natural reserve, etc.
I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively. The risk of an uncontained explosion of a reactor is a more legitimate concern. But I understand many modern designs like molten salt reactors reduce this risk to pretty much zero.
I am somewhat sympathetic to your points, but was responding to a comment that seemed to claim it was a non-issue.
I’m only “somewhat” in agreement because humans are terrible at reading warning signs, especially from long-dead people. “Oh,” they say, “that was ages ago. It’s just a primitive superstition. Anyway, we’re special.”
Agree, but that being said you can walk around in Rome and read signs that were written 2000 years ago. Same characters, similar language than most european languages. English is the modern latin, and I would argue, with even more significance than latin given its global scope. I just can't think of a scenario where our descendants would not know what radiactivity is, and would have forgotten english.
As a collective culture, I agree with you (assuming we don’t turn the planet into a Dyson swarm in that timeframe, which is surprisingly plausible and I don’t know how to start making forecasts).
Absent scenarios which Isaac Arthur has already made YouTube videos about, I’m more worried about atomic analogs of antivaxxers or homeopaths. Or “Traditional Chinese Medicine”. Or… well, you get the idea.
> There is a debate over what should constitute an acceptable scientific and engineering foundation for proceeding with radioactive waste disposal strategies. There are those who have argued, on the basis of complex geochemical simulation models, that relinquishing control over radioactive materials to geohydrologic processes at repository closure is an acceptable risk. They maintain that so-called "natural analogues" inhibit subterranean movement of radionuclides, making disposal of radioactive wastes in stable geologic formations unnecessary. However, existing models of these processes are empirically underdetermined: due to the subterranean nature of such processes in solid geologic formations, the accuracy of computer simulation models has not been verified by empirical observation, certainly not over periods of time equivalent to the lethal half-lives of high-level radioactive waste. On the other hand, some insist deep geologic repositories in stable geologic formations are necessary. National management plans of various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.
So, various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.
That's all we have for now.
> I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively.
Yeah, but so far we have no way of doing that, so it's a legitimate concern. I might as well say "we can just turn off all nuclear reactors now, we just need other means oto generate the energy and do the shutdown responsibly". Leave it allll up to the reader, or in this case, future generations, why not.
> At Hanford, a rough rule of thumb for planners is to look ahead 1,000 years. That’s like a Viking trying to conceive of an astronaut, then trying to pass a note to him.
> Experts inside and outside of DOE have pondered this communication conundrum. The agency has assembled panels of scientists, historians, artists, and others to tackle from all angles the question of how a 21st century sign should look to a 31st century person. From symbols to colors to materials to size, everything’s up for grabs — and nothing’s been decided.
We don't have solutions. Pretending we have solutions will not help us get solutions, either.
The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.
Furthermore, the price of uranium is so cheap that it's financially feasible right now. It will be over time but that should also show you just how abundant and available it is as a resource.
If we actually got politicians to sit down and go through the requirements with engineers and scientists they would realize how cheap and still safe it can be.
> The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.
Well, if that "counts", then solar power will become totally free and have a net positive environmental impact, we'll just plant some nanobots that grow and repair solar panels inside a marked area, and can be scooped up should we need them elsewhere, hence "100% free once we perfected them". They'll smell like vanilla, and change color according to the moods of people using the energy.
Latter on we make nanobots and send them to the sun to hang out there for a few thousand years and grow a scaffolding from, uhh, space dust or something, and then we shoot nanobots at it that grow solar panels on it, and we have our Dyson sphere. Add some nanostuff that creates material from energy and flings that at Earth, then convert material back to energy.
This didn't even take me 5 minutes, so I really don't get what the problem is :P
Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.
On the contrary, current efficiency of even cheap-and-dumb electrolysis is 70% {1}, which means that cheap solar like the 2.155¢/kWh plant from 6 montgs ago {2} can easily provide baseline load.
This is pretty much entirely because PV keep getting cheaper faster than everyone expected — even as recently as five years ago, pessimism like yours wouldn’t have been unreasonable, and yet the problem is now essentially solved and all we need to do is build the stuff at the prices we can already afford.
Of course they can't and of course it doesn't get cheaper unless you decide to frame it in a way that not at all realistic.
Solar is less then 1% and that's with 300% increase it's not even close to being able to deliver baseline anything regardless of how cheap it gets. It's a dream that's not even close to be realistic and frankly highly naive.
Again 47w per m2 vs. 1000w per m2 and with solar panels needing continous repeairs and no grid or fuel cells in sight plus reliance on coal, nuclear and oil for when the sun doesn't shine.
Your first sentence is missing a word. Can’t what? I gave you links to show my working.
I have no idea what you’re referring to with “47w per m2”, can you elaborate?
Ditto “needing continuous replairs“. There’s a rover on Mars that’s been running for about 15 years continuously on solar with no human maintenance.
From an engineering point of view (though not political), you don’t even need to worry about night time, because the earth is round and even planet sized grids don’t lose enough power to raise my example of 2.155¢/kWh to even as high as coal. And that’s if you refuse to use the fuel cell tech that already exists.
They can, when teamed with dispatchable sources, destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources.
This is why you're not seeing new nuclear plants much in the west. The decision makers know they face huge risk from future cost declines of renewables which, combined with gas, would leave those reactors unable to amortize their construction, financing, and fixed operating costs.
There are other solutions for long term storage of renewable energy to make it dispatchable. For example, making hydrogen, then burn it in turbines. The efficiency of this is lousy, but the capital cost can be quite low.
I see plenty of self-inflicted damage. Inability to meet cost estimates for new nuclear plants, for example. If nuclear had been as great as the salesmen had told us, the opposition would have been much less, and would likely have been steamrolled. As it stands, utilities largely don't want to build new nuclear plants. They even shit talk it in public. They aren't doing this because they are secret radical ecoterrorists; they are doing it because they are hard nosed business people with no time for failures.
This is nothing new. As the Forbes cover story on Feb. 11, 1985 said: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale… only the blind or the biased can now think that the money has been well spent.”
In recent years, they gave nuclear another chance. And it failed again. You are unlikely to get a third chance anytime soon.
So by that argument if wind and solar where so great it wouldn't only be supplying around 1.5% of our energy and growing much more rapidly than it does.
You can't both have your cake and eat it.
The difference is that we KNOW that nuclear can deliver way more energy per m2 than wind and solar can. We know how to get it to work and we know that the primary cost of nuclear is political NOT technical completely opposite wind and solar which have technical issues to provide as much as nuclear or coal or oil can.
What? No, that argument is nothing like the claim you are trying to make in that first paragraph. Please stick to actual working logic.
Yes, nuclear can deliver more energy per m2. But this is irrelevant, since we have no shortage of m2. What we have limits on is $$$. On the metric of energy/$, nuclear fails. And no, we do not know that the problem with nuclear is political. You can keep repeating that, but it doesn't make you any less wrong.
Of course it is. You are claiming that the lack of success of nuclear shows that it doesn't work financially. The same can be said about the effectiveness of solar. If it was so effective and could support most of our energy needs why haven't it?
The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.
What condemns nuclear is the stubborn lack of improvement it has shown.
Solar and wind have shown impressive and sustained improvement along so-called "experience curves". The cost of each has declined as a power law in cumulative installed capacity. This decline has been sustained while they've declined in cost by orders of magnitude (PV has improved in cost by more than a factor of 200 since the 1970s.)
Nuclear, in contrast, has been largely free of such sustained improvement. If anything, costs have increased with experience -- negative learning. The complexity and scale of nuclear appears to be such that learning effects are cancelled out.
And no, regulations are NOT the reason. That's the increasingly lame excuse nuclear fans confabulate to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their precious technology not actually living up to their fantasies about it. And as I've said elsewhere, if your complaint is that government doesn't let reactors meltdown enough, you might as well hang it up and go home. You are not going to win that one.
Because even though only 5 of the last 20 years had less than 30% annual growth, even though the annual average compounded equivalent rate since records began has been 73% per yer (which I think places it second in growth between improvements to cost reductions in genetics (#1) and Moores law (#3)) it takes time to do that.
This year PV alone is forecast to reach half a terrawatt. I’m not sure if that’s peak or average but at 30% per year growth, it doesn’t really matter. World electric use is only 2.7 TW, after that point we want to start electrolysing hydrogen out of water even if only to replace jet fuel.
If it was easy to solve, it’d be solved already. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap, and for those reasons it’s likely it won’t be done.
It’s already cheaper to build new solar plants and wind farms than continue to run an existing coal plant (which itself is cheaper to run than nuclear).
No it wouldnt be solved already since the political environment is completely against nuclear, so simply false. Solar is a fraction of energysupply and will not even be close to being signifficant whare it really matters which is in transportation.
How is nuclear being expensive political? It is fundementally untenable as a commercial enterprise when compared to natural gas, solar, and wind.
90-95% of all new generation coming online each year are renewables in the US. Renewables cost continues to decline year over year, speeding its uptake. I cannot fathom how one would think nuclear can compete at all in such an environment.
“Nearly all nuclear plants now in use began operation between 1970 and 1990. These plants would require a subsequent license renewal before 2050 to operate beyond the 60-year period covered by their original 40-year operating license and the 20-year license extension that nearly 90% of plants currently operating have either already received or have applied for. The AEO2017 Reference case projections do not envision a large amount of new nuclear capacity additions. By 2050, only four reactors currently under construction and some uprates at existing plants are projected to come online.”
Super-expensive safety regulations are often based on the linear no-threshold model of biological dose response. There is more and more data showing that this is illogical at very low doses. Changing that is highly political.
The large 3-shift security staff at nuclear power plants is based on political concerns.
The contractor and financing models in play in the US to build nukes causes lots of misalignment, and contracts end up suing each other over trivialities rather than building the plant like the Koreans do or French did (in the 1970s). That's nearly political.
Anti-nuclear intervenors watch over plant plans and try to delay at all costs. Totally political.
If flyash disposal, mining, carbon emission, and fracking were equally regulated then these regulations create incentive to R+D nuclear technology, making it more affordable. The results of a rigged race don't prove anything.
That doesn’t address solar and wind being drastically cheaper than nuclear fission. It would be wasteful to continue to poor dollars into fission at this point, versus scaling up renewables and battery manufacturing further.
Whether the race is rigged is irrelevant; the race is over.
Solar and wind are environmentally dependent sources that aren't possible in all locations or times and are unlikely to work on their own. Even when they are generally available, they don't have the same utility for industry as a constant source like nuclear because of the uncertainty. Since coal and gas will certainly run out, nuclear still may have a future in small scale modular nuclear reactors produced offsite, at scale.
Again, they aren't cheaper when you compare to output.
Just to put things in perspective. Solar can do roughly 50W per m2 at best and I am being generous.
Nuclear does 1000W per m2.
Solar is not even close to being able to deliver stable energy so you would have to factor either coal, nuclear or oil into the mix too to provide stable delivery.
Renewable can't deliver the needed energy not even close. Less than 1% right now and not even close with anything like fuel cell technologies or distributed grid systems which would be very very very expensive.
Nuclear whether you like it or not is cleaner, more stable, cheaper and more scaleable.
Just to put things in perspective. Solar can do roughly 50W per m2 at best and I am being generous. Nuclear does 1000W per m2.
Apples and oranges. We have plenty of desert land and /or roof space for solar. Granted solar is not with its enviro issues but nuclear stands apart. Also costs. A Nuclear power plants costs $20+billion to be built. But then solar by definition is only during the day
But we have no fuelcell technology and no grid and no signs of anything even closely resembling a solution thats possible to pay for, nuclear provides energy for a very long time and doesent need to be fixed all the time like dolar and wind.
Solar and wind are currently very cheap on an LCOE basis, but LCOE is a poor proxy for the entire system cost. Due to their variable nature, the value of these resources shrink rapidly as their grid penetration increases. That being said, in most grids there's still plenty of space for wind and/or solar before these effects become a problem.
The end goal is a lowest cost deep decarbonized grid. We should design policies to give us that ASAP. In many cases, nuclear has a robust role to play in such grids.
You use it as baseload to replace coal. The problem with renewables is the variability, which would lead to overcapacity or other issues as it scales up.
When we say a source is "baseload", we're not saying something good about it. What that means is that source's business case depends on being able to sell its output most of the time. It's a word describing economic inflexibility.
There is no reason why a grid needs any baseload sources whatsoever.
It’s not good or bad, it’s just the nature of the beast.
The nature of a nuclear plant is that it is incredibly capital intensive, and needs to operate at capacity to work financially.
Solar is interesting because it’s peak output aligns with peak demand. Your solar farm isn’t going to do much for you st night, but that’s ok because you don’t need the power!
PV is also interesting because the levelized cost of power from it has become very good, especially in areas of high insolation, and because its costs continue to rapidly decline. Low cost gives all sorts of headroom for such things as overbuilding and low efficiency storage.
The missing link is to build up solar capacity to refill your battery.
To refill the battery you need to generate 57600MWh each day. Assuming that we get 12 hours of sunlight per day at 50% efficiency, you that comes down to 2 (efficiency factor) * 57600MWh / (12 hours / day) = 9600 MWh solar installation.
At $1 / Watt, 9600 MWh solar installation comes down to $9.6 billion.
Assuming my math is correct, this seems pretty competitive. In particular, I am assuming that $1 / Watt means $1 per Watt of electricity at max luminosity. If $1 / Watt means $1 per 1 Watt of absorbed solar energy, the efficiency should be 10% - 15%.
> assume that we need 24 hours of storage or roughly 57600MWh. A modern redox flow or lithium ion battery can cost as little as $100 per kWh
I think the flow battery can get even cheaper than this for 24hr storage. Recent price claims[1] were $150/kWh at 4hr, and $100/kWh at 8hr - this puts the cost of charge/discharge rate at $400/kW and the cost of the energy storage at $50/kWh.
1kW @ 4hrs = (400+ 50* 4) /4 = 150$ (50+400/4)
1kW @ 8hrs = (400+ 50* 8) /8 = 100$ (50+400/8)
1kW @24hrs = (400+ 50* 24) /24 = 66$ (50+400/24)
So it really was a bit crazy to estimate 500$/kWh for that storage, 200$kWh would be absolute maximum present price for flow battery, and under $75kWh seems likely.
The press release contained current and next years prices - 200$/kWh @ 8hr storage is the current cost of flow storage.
Its not really sensible to price 24hrs of li-on storage considering li-ons charge/discharge rate capability is fixed. There is no use for the capability to charge and discharge 24hours of power within a couple of hours, but you cant avoid buying it with li-on. With flow batteries you price the discharge rate and the capacity separately. This is why flow batteries should work out a fraction of the cost even at todays price.
I would rate the reliability of a battery press release slightly higher than a signed-off budget and timeline for nuclear construction.
And when it's press from a battery maker, rather than a battery researcher's university press department, the battery press release is far far more reliable. I'd say their cost overruns will be at most 20%-30%, compared to nuclear's usual 200%-300%.
The 57,600 MWh figure is the peak usage in California on the hottest of summer days. We only need that for roughly 2 hours of one of those days, and we can typically meet that without engaging rotating blackouts. The generation capacity is there. And it’s a lot more efficient to operate plants as needed to recharge storage than to spool them up in response to demand, the Tesla battery farm in Australia has already proven this. The key reason is there is lest waste if you have storage as a buffer.
And think of all the CA plants sitting idle on a day like today, where peak load was 28,000 MW.
Not an expert but I think solar power would also be uneconomical if it wasn’t done at scale. The problem is that most recent new power plant constructions are unique designs, with ever changing regulations. I am sure nuclear energy would be economical if you were renewing a large number of plants at once (which will need to happen as a lot of plants are becoming really old).
It hasn't priced itself out of the market - Governments insisting that it is many orders of magnitude safer [1] than any other form of power generation have unsurprisingly made it very expensive and over-engineered.
Nuclear quite simply needs to be given its fair share of blood to be competitive - to get wind power down to the same level of safety we'd have to build robots to climb the turbines to maintain them.
The argument that governments aren't letting reactors melt down enough is a nonstarter. If nuclear proponents have to resort to that, you might as well give up.
I suggest instead pushing for designs that can achieve acceptable levels of safety at lower cost. In particular, molten salt designs, such as the one from Moltex, that allow the size of the containment building to be shrunk by a factor of five from that of an LWR (for a given power output). Moltex's design does not dissolve the fuel in the primary coolant and has other attractive features vs. other MSR designs.
Such designs are not on the market today, and will take time and money to bring to market. I think R&D on them is a good idea, and supporting that is a proper role for governments, just as it was for renewables, but they are still something of a longshot, given where the competition is likely to be in 20 years.
It isn't just the reactor that is over-specced - anything to do with nuclear is held to a much higher standard than anything else, relative to the actual risks.
Thorium molten salt reactors have been bandied around for a while, especially in India due to necessity, but I fully expect governments to still make unrealistic demands of them, and therefore drive them up to unrealistic prices.
Stuff like this depresses me - I don't see how politics can handle grown-up conversations about trade-offs like this when people will just vote in the cake-and-eat-it parties.
I see so many people against nuclear but I wonder if they read books such as Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air. As I understand it, either we kill ourselves fast, or we use this as a stop-gap until we can figure it out for real. With newer reactors being much better, maybe another generation (helped by more implementations) will even be good enough not to have to be a stop-gap solution.
Three questions that I have never had satisfactorily answered by nuclear advocates:
* If nuclear is that safe, why don't we eliminate or at least, significantly raise the nuclear liability cap? The nuclear industry keeps trying to sell us (this article included) on the idea that disasters are now close to impossible. It'd be an easier sell if they voluntarily increased their liability, to, say $150-400 billion and found private insurers willing to take a risk on their safety, no?
* Did you personally consider Japan's nuclear plants unsafe before Fukushima? (as far as I can tell it took most of us by surprise)
* If the strike price for Hinkley point electricity is 1.5x-2x renewable strike price today (never mind in 10 years when renewable prices have plunged again), what exactly was so great about building a "next gen" nuclear plant?
A) The reason why the liability cap don't follow rational argument is that policy does not follow rational arguments. Politics dictate that and just like with airport security, security management is about the perceived risk rather than true risk.
B) Transparency is not great when it come to power plants. It is impossible for citizens to make a informed decisions about which countries has safe power plants and which are unsafe.
C) The environmentalist argument is not that renewable electricity is worse than nuclear, but that we still burn material and put co2 into the air for power and heat. Even in a place like Sweden, we still sometimes burn coal. If we could ban all such usage without building more nuclear than great, but we don't look like we are any nearer a ban on burning gas, oil and coal today than when renewable prices was prohibitive expensive. Nuclear power plants directly replace other power plants, while wind and solar seems mostly just supplement the market with cheaper electricity during good conditions while coal keep burning when the wind is calm and the sun is set.
Fukushima didn’t have any serious human or ecological costs, compared to accepted industry norms for fossil fuels. It looked bad, but did not cause serious damage. Coal has done far worse to Japan and it is accepted.
I don't know what a strike price or a Hinkley point is, but if you're saying that it's more expensive than some other renewables, then the issue is still: we can't build enough renewables (in some countries it's physically impossible, in others you'd have to appropriate a lot of land for power production, and in a small number of exceptions the only issue is expenses) so price will have to go up in order to save mankind. I mean, we can haggle over prices, but that's what we're talking about. I'm not advocating nuclear because I see other options, I'm advocating it because I see no other options.
Fukushima was before I was into the topic. I really can't say anything either way, except to parrot what others say: it was tech from the 60s and they built it on a major fault line.
I haven't read up on insurance for nuclear reactors, so I can't say much about that either. Again, though, even if it's dangerous, I don't see a way out that does not include dependency by all countries on solar power from the Saharah and similar places, or nuclear power. Assuming it's somewhere in the middle between the current safety levels and the claimed ones for newer designs, we should not exclude nuclear. It's also not as if we would build 1000 reactors worldwide simultaneously. Some will be built earlier than others and we'll learn more about their safety, allowing us to steer whether we want to appropriate more land for renewables or continue building more reactors.
These seem like very reasonable questions to me. Is this comment just getting downvoted because pro-nuclear HNers don’t like the opinions being expressed, or can someone legitimately justify the negative comment score I’m currently seeing?
For #1, insurance relies on the law of large numbers. If you expect an average of less than one event per whatever time, it stops being insurance and becomes either gambling or just an escrow account.
I'm writing this from Japan. I do not have the numbers, but as I cross the country in the Shinkansen I see a sea of solar panels.
Fukushima has been a lesson here. Strategically, Japan has to import it's energy, except for solar energy. With a float of trains electricity is already at the core of their transportation system.
Here, at least, nuclear doesn't look like it's the future.
The growing share of renewables in the mix doesn't mean there's no place for nuclear in the future – it's a false dilemma fallacy. Also, Japan's solar panels may be visually imposing, but they constitute a tiny amount of total energy generation in Japan.
After Fukushima Daiichi disaster Japan shut down all it's reactors and switched to fossil fuels, not renewables, and this is the most tragic outcome of the disaster.
Neither nuclear nor renewables could entirely replace fossil fuels, we desperately need both. Hopefully Japan is restarting it's nuclear reactors (5 reactors were restarted in 2018) and investing in renewables, but I'm afraid it's still not enough.
Offshore wind is a good bet for Japan but it has to be supplemented with base load power coming from nuclear or geothermal. I think they have resources for geothermal being a volcanic island.
I was interested in your statement, and a brief search on wikipedia says that Japan has slowly been restarting their nuclear power plants and is planning on growing nuclear power as a total percentage of power over the next several decades.
It's very clear cut. The sentiment is the same. I don't know where you got it that it's not clear cut. The only thing which is not clear from your article is how will Abe and his corny friends shove their nuclear-friendly world-of-view down the Japanese people's throat.
And your claim that Japan is planning on growing might mislead some readers to think that they are expanding the nuclear capacity in Japan. Which is not the case at all. They signed the Paris agreement and unlike the US they try to keep their promise. But they are not expanding any capacity to do this. They simply restart their reactors (which by the way if they might be able to do so is to be seen).
What actually happened is that they started to decommission the Genkai 1, Mihama 1 and 2, Shimane 1 and Tsuruga 1 reactors while they completely abandoned the plan to build Fukushima Daiichi Unit 7 & 8 for obvious reasons among others.
So if anything than the exact opposite can be said that you implied: Japan is slowly but surely phasing nuclear energy out.
I'm about as pro-nuclear as they get, but the Wikipedia articles seem to support a story of the Japanese government shutting down nuclear and being very tentative restarting the existing reactors [0].
It is difficult to guess what is going on in a country that doesn't report in English, but the info in Wikipedia (mostly a little dated) seems to support a rollback of nuclear. Reduced generation, limited new developments. Either they are using less energy or something else is filling the void left by nuclear plant shutdowns.
"In June 2015, the Japanese government released an energy proposal that includes the revival of nuclear power to account for Japan's energy needs. The proposal calls for an increase of about 20% in nuclear energy by 2030.[2] This reverses a decision by the previous Democratic Party, the government will re-open nuclear plants, aiming for "a realistic and balanced energy structure"."
People live in a fantasy world when thinking about solar. Solar is nicely visible and gives people a worm heard.
The reality is that solar is a tiny part of global energy and even in countries like Japan it did not even come close to replacing nuclear.
Japan will have nuclear future because they simply have to much capacity already. However the poplar nature of nuclear politics makes it a problem, they will continue to be import depended and fossil fuel for many years to come.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted --- solar and wind account for 1.5% of total, taken from Enlightenment Now by Steve Pinker:
> A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. Although renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind, have become drastically cheaper, and their share of the world’s energy has more than tripled in the past five years, that share is still a paltry 1.5 percent, and there are limits on how high it can go. The wind is often becalmed, and the sun sets every night and may be clouded over. But people need energy around the clock, rain or shine. Batteries that could store and release large amounts of energy from renewables will help, but ones that could work on the scale of cities are years away. Also, wind and solar sprawl over vast acreage, defying the densification process that is friendliest to the environment.
Net wind energy percentage in Germany in 2017 was 18.9%. And that's a fact. Which clearly voids your argument. Yes, there are limitations how high it can go and I don't expect it to be anywhere near 100%. But it's clearly a huge source of energy already and it will increase even more in the coming years.
The reason why it totals 1.5% is because it costs money to replace existing power sources and the lobby power of the coal industry is still huge. It has nothing to do with solar energy itself.
The renewable parts of that is bound to go down: As part of the push to renewables, when spinning up capacity, you get prices guaranteed for 20 years. The different to market rates is spread across the whole market ("EEG Umlage", "renewable energy law contribution").
But: that law is approaching 20 years now and so in 2021 the first installations will drop out of that subsidy scheme. Prices and guaranteed rates were dropping ever since, and so will the subsidies - with a delay of 20 years.
> there seems to be no choice for the heavy industry than to use coal
Comparing the numbers in 2000 and 2017 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung#Bruttostromerze...), coal used to account for more than 50% of power generation in 2000, down to 36.6% in 2017. Even in absolute numbers to account for the rise in total power production, coal is less in 2017 than in 2000. Petrochemicals are up from 9.5% to 14.1% though.
Non-regenerative power was 436.5 TWh in 2017, down from 538.7 TWh in 2000.
The stats you have provided are the numbers for the whole electricity generation, while I was talking of the heavy industry alone. I am not an expert, but AFAIK for steelmakers in particular it is crucial to have a reliable constant power supply, which neither solar nor wind can provide (let alone steel production itself relies on coal).
18% at a horrible cost and not for all uses of energy. The german energy politics is a diaster. You are confusing reality with potential. Most countries get energy outside their own countries just like Denmark who are even higher on wind but still had to get coal based energy from germany because of the lack of wind this summer. Solar and wind isnt even close to solving actual energy needs which includes transportation one of the biggest co2 immitors.
And no realistic fuelcell technology or disrributed grids.
France does not have enough nuclear capacity for high winter electricity demand and it has too much nuclear capacity relative to domestic demand in temperate weather. It ends up reliant on imports from Germany in winter time and exports surplus electricity at times of low demand. As I write this, France is importing 6.7 GW from Germany: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
If France were forced to disconnect from its neighbors, its electricity would be more expensive and/or more emissions-intensive. It would need more fossil combustion to deal with seasonal demand swings and/or it would get less utilization out of its nuclear reactor fleet. The same goes for Germany, of course: electrically isolating itself would also increase costs/emissions. Germany and France both rely on international electrical connections to improve utilization of their non-combustion electricity sources. Both use imports to meet part of their electricity demands. Both are net electricity exporters over the course of a full year.
Just a nitpick, neutrons aren't blasted into the nuclei of fissile isotopes. The faster a neutron is going, the less likely it is to cause fission. You want slow neutrons.
Depends what you're going for. If you have the fissile concentration to support it a fast-neutron chain reaction has lots of benefits: more neutrons per absorption in fuel leads to the ability to breed fuel for millennia or alternatively get lots more energy out of nuclear waste. Fission product poisons don't affect fast neutrons that much so you can get way more energy out of the fuel in fast reactors.
Indeed. In a thermal reactor, the energy of the neutrons is moderated down to the reactor operating temperature, and is typically a few tens of milli-electron volts (some tens of millions of times less energetic than when they were produced). These slow neutrons do impart a lot of energy when they are absorbed into a nucleus, but that's because of their binding energy into that nucleus. Due to nuclear shell effects, they add slightly more energy to nuclei with an odd number of neutrons, which is one reason why 235U can be fissioned with thermal neutrons and 238U cannot.
The thesis, A new generation of environmentalists is learning to stop worrying and love atomic power is unsupported by the text if the article.
My readthrough of the article failed to reveal supporting evidence that there is widespread change in opinion about nuclear in younger generations, much less that a pro-nuclear movement is growing.
Another factor to consider with nuclear is how it perpetuates complete dependence upon the grid, a single point of failure model. Perspective articulated here by Sunnova CEO John Berger.
Nuclear doesn’t perpetuate complete dependence, because it has never been intended to be the sole provider of energy to its customers. Even the most ardent nuclear cheerleaders pose it as a single component in an energy mix.
IIRC there was some article linked to on hn some time ago where it was explained that most rooftop solar installations actually don't work at all without a grid. If the grid goes down, so does the solar. It's of course technically possible to fix, but costs more.
Now there'a title that Ed Bernays would be proud of. 'A new generation approves.' So, where's this new generation? What demonstrates their love? Show me pictures of a dozen, or it didn't happen. Then, show how that scales with full knowledge of history, not just free jelly babies.
Fantasy fiction isn't going to solve our dilemma. Advanced, less toxic technology will. Nuclear has had its chance.
Nuclear is the safest, most scaleable, greenest most reliable power source we know of bar none and blows every other alternative energy out of the water at 1000w per m2.
Far less people have because of nuclear power in all its time than gets killed by nature in a year.
The environmentalist not rationality kille nuclear.
No! Even the 'new' ones are killing it? Too slow, too expensive, too toxic.
Hmmm, let's see: how many years before the residents of the San Onofre region finish paying for its recent failed upgrade ? Then how much more will they pay for decommissioning it?
That 'clean, safe, too cheap to meter' line is from the 1950s. Before longer we'll have a decentralized, more secure power source that actually lives up to those lies. And best of all? The fuel supply will never be exhausted ... never need to be decommmissioned ... and lives a nice safe 90M miles away.
Thats not because of the technology but legislation around it. Most of the pricing will go down once more gets put up so yes and its a hell more effective than wind snd solar which arent even supporting 1% of the worlds supply and not even close to a realistic solution to them beeing unreliable and frankly inferior even with a 300% improvement which isnt possible.
> So, where's this new generation? What demonstrates their love? Show me pictures of a dozen, or it didn't happen.
That's the point of the comment. "Nuclear had it's chance" is what you latched onto, concluding with "The environmentalist not rationality kille nuclear". So I guess you agree, the title is BS.
I don't care about the title. I care about the claim that nuclear had it's chance which anyone who knows their history know isn't true whatso ever.
Again solar has 1% of the worlds energy covered that's it. This is with all the bells and whistle and political support and economic investments.
Nuclear will EVEN without that deliver way more energy, much more stable, in abundance form and scaleable plus it's safe and greener than even solar.
Claiming it had it's time is ideologically blind in a way only people who listen too much to politicians like to think.
Call me when sun is used for most of the tranportation industry and for large constructions etc. Call me when the poor countries can solve the problems nature provides via solar.
Question, why do people talk so pessimistically about the potential for solar? I see lots of comments like, "there is not enough land for solar panels". People seem to have a fixed view about how much power can be drawn. Sure right now the payoff might be underwhelming in relation to the size requirements, but with more development wouldn't the technology improve?
I imagine a future where the technology improves to the point where people who live in cloudy areas can still generate plenty of power. Is that unrealistic?
The point is that climat change is real and it’s coming fast. So from a purely pragmatic standpoint it seems more reasonable to deploy solutions as soon as possible with available technologies than to wait for a plausible technology improvements.
Otherwise you risk being almost as inactive in the required efforts than an average climat change denier.
Hum... Do you have any actual solution? One that does solve carbon emissions, can be deployed in reasonable time, and does not involve people getting poorer?
The most pragmatic thing to do is to improve solar generation and all kinds of storage. Those can actually solve the problem. Nuclear can't be here on time (nor on budget), and everything else just won't happen.
We could have avoided a lot of problems on the last few decades if the nuclear countries decided to push for safer reactors with no proliferation problems. They didn't. They all kept going for more weapons. Now we have to live with those problems, and the nuclear economical window passed away, it does not make sense anymore.
>and the nuclear economical window passed away, it does not make sense anymore.
Say’s who?
Because laws of physics say it’s the more efficient solution yet (not the cleanest thought) to tackle climat change problem. You have to put serious study out to counter that, not hearsay’s by coal lobby or anti-nuclear activists.
A certain number of photons will fall on any given square meter per second. You can't extract more energy from that square meter in a second than those photons provide.
Why not imagine a future where fusion technology improves to the point that there's no point in using anything else? With fission, we're already there, and taking full advantage of fission now, with breeder reactors and spent fuel reprocessing made legal again, will give us the energy to pursue fusion worldwide with a budget similar to the U.S. defense budget. Sticking to solar and other "green" energy means mass-homicidal energy austerity!
The tech is there, only breeders are quite expensive, anti nuke lobby and politics screwed things up to such a degree that nuclear became overpriced and overengineered. Still we can fix things, SMRs such as NuScale (basically naval scale PWR tech) are a solution if the licensing hurdles are be resolved and so is geothermal where it's available.
I recommend Whole Earth Disciple by Stewart Brand. One of the founders of the environmental movement explains why he was wrong about nuclear power and other issues.
The recent piece by HCN on our nuclear past stands in sharp contrast. [1] Anyone reading that, environmentalists or not, will have reason for extreme concern and skepticism about a single generations ability to manage consequences that can last thousands of years.
No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas). When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.
Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind
From what I've been reading, seems CO2 tops that list. One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine. From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container, so the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me.
The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment
How much compared to, say, coal mining? Mining rare earth metals for solar panels and wind turbines?
Yeah, nuclear power has some downsides. But I'm not hearing the "versus" part in your argument.
Agree, and maybe we should start installing more, smaller, less safe nuclear reactors (hence cheaper and more widespread), to the point where people are ok with the occasional failure and even with occasional loss of life resulting.
The vastly greater dangers of environmental collapse from global warning are so relatively long term that people can't make sensible risk analyses about them, hence the terror around nuclear and the nonchalance around reducing carbon emissions which are far more threatening.
I don't think there is a dichotomy between taking nuclear waste seriously and taking global warming seriously. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if taking one seriously is positively correlated with taking the other seriously.
> We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion.
Not sure where that comes from. I don't think we'll have competitive fusion in the next 50 years. Sure, people who talk about ITER draw (quite optimistic) plans for when we'll be able to get more from the fusion reaction than what energy we pump in, but they forget to mention that's not the end of the story. Fusion may be clean, but it's terribly inefficient. In the Sun, fusion generates about the same amount of energy per liter as a liter of warm chicken soup releases to the ambient environment [1]. The Sun is huge, so overall the amount of generated energy is huge, but on Earth a power plant that has the same power density as the Sun would need to have a volume of 4 billion m3 to be similar to a typical fission power plant (1GW). That's 4 cubes of 1 square kilometers each. And don't bet on us getting to that efficiency in the next 20-30 years. So, sorry for the bad news, but no, we won't have viable fusion power plants in the foreseeable future.
The Joint European Torus had a 67% efficient reaction back in 1997. The torus wasn't designed for it, so they never tried again. It seams that ITER could achieve break-even quite realistically simply because tokamak reactors are more efficient when they're bigger. Yes, it has to be hotter than the sun and use a deuterium/tritium fuel, but it's all doable with known physics.
I'm not sure when or if a sustained reaction can be done economically.
> The Sun is huge, so overall the amount of generated energy is huge, but on Earth a power plant that has the same power density as the Sun would need to have a volume of 4 billion m3 to be similar to a typical fission power plant (1GW). That's 4 cubes of 1 square kilometers each.
The density, in terms of fusion events per m^3 per second, is orders of magnitude higher for a tokamak than in the Sun. Stars are very inefficient at fusion, as you point out, because the cross section oh H-H fusion is so low. Deuterium-Tritium fusion has a higher cross section, and the conditions we can reach realize a much higher rate of fusion.
> the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me
Not. It doesn't work like that. CO2 is not even waste in the strict sense of the term; is basic for our survival. If you wipe all CO2 from the air, humankind will go extinct in a hurry because all plants would die really fast. All what we eat started as a CO2 molecule being captured by a plant somewhere.
The problem to recycle or clean it from the air has been solved for us by plants millions of years ago. Plants love CO2 and clean it for free.
Therefore, in the real life, many CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants will be soon captured by a weed or a tree. The rest will go to the atmosphere where will hang on, maybe for a long time, but far away from you.
If you touch or inhale radiactive waste you could die in literally seconds. If you encounter CO2, as long that there is also enough oxygen around, nothing will happen. You will inhale it, will readily enter in your bloodstream, do a couple of roller coaster trips and will be discarded. All of we do it, many times a day for our entire life, without noticeable damage in our body.
And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate, but again, there are much worse molecules in this sense. Methane for example.
2 soda cans are produced by a US citizen getting 100% of their primary energy from nuclear fuel in a full lifetime. It's toxic but it's tiny. It's very VERY reasonable to bury it in deep crystalline bedrock and be done with it. That's a reasonable technical solution to a legitimate problem.
The problem of global warming from CO2 emission is much harder than nuclear waste, even if we increased nuclear generate 100-fold.
And therefore CO2 is not topping the list of worse waste created by man over radioactive waste, as you claimed previously...
Is not logical to keep denying that radioactivity is a very, very dangerous stuff at this point. After the Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima experiences we should expect to start talking seriously about it, instead to deny the problem again and again.
No, that was you making up quotes I never actually typed. Right now, concentrations of CO2 affect my life more than nuclear waste ever has and likely ever will. Since you’re content to make up quotes and then argue against them, I’m gonna chalk you up for a loss on this one and go about my day.
It seems easier to not produce the CO2 in the first place than to produce it then run another industrial process to remove it... which in turn uses even more electricity.
The amount of CO2 is orders of magnitude more than the amount of radioactive waste; you cannot just build “one factory in Nevada” and sequester all the carbon dioxide produced.
That process absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere at low concentrations (400 ppm) onto stones coated with X-material. Later the stones are heated (using more fuel) to release CO2 at much higher concentrations (more than 75%). Then what? It is a gas. You need to bury the carbon. They suggest feeding it to greenhouses, to grow food, which re-releases it later.
> One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine.
Yeah, for a million years. The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan.
> Because some radioactive species have half-lives longer than one million years, even very low container leakage and radionuclide migration rates must be taken into account.[21] Moreover, it may require more than one half-life until some nuclear materials lose enough radioactivity to no longer be lethal to living organisms. A 1983 review of the Swedish radioactive waste disposal program by the National Academy of Sciences found that country’s estimate of several hundred thousand years—perhaps up to one million years—being necessary for waste isolation "fully justified."
Look through all that. It's ideas and proposals and things we're trying. We don't even have one thing you could call "a solution", and haven't found one in decades.
> From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container
Just plant trees, then store the wood. Okay, it's probably more complex than that, or there's much better ways. But this is no anywhere near the "a bunch of proposals, and good luck to future generations" level that nuclear waste is.
You're basically saying "CO2 is a gas so it will move to me, and nuclear waste can be buried and you just have to stay a few hundred miles away". There is more to it than that. (apart than CO2 moving to you probably being a good thing, because then you can trap it)
> The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan.
We already have a plan. Publish the information on the internet. It will still be here in 1 million years. YouTube will outlast the Sun.
> No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it.
You can't have this both ways.
Either CO2 is the most dangerous waste and must be dealt with severely, or it is not.
>When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense.
Solar and wind are going to require billions of dollars for the same output as well, plus additional lithium mines for batteries since the sun doesn't shine every day (and reprocessing when the cells run out), plus those who are going to get killed in construction/maintenance (roof work is dangerous). We've just externalized the consequences for some of that since we don't bother to tax products based on how badly the source country destroys the environment through the manufacture of the product.
Life creates waste, and it's time to accept that reality; you won't get a perfect solution so maybe it's time to start accepting merely good ones instead. Saving the environment is too important to wait.
The numbers are clear. Nuclear lifecycle is 11 gCO2-eq/kWh, less than almost anything and on par with wind.
The idea that uranium mining requires tremendous amounts of anything compared to the alternatives is ludicrous simply by the physical fact that there are 938 MW*days of energy in every kilogram of natural uranium. That's 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel, and that results in a very small mining requirement compared to anything else to power humanity at world-scale.
70 is a a lot closer to the truth. That 11 is a selective figure.
None of these numbers includes the carbon used to bulldoze the East side of Japan, or Belarus. And again, as the first attempt was clumsy, and a minimum.
Which study are you using to suggest 70? That's on the high end on any study, but not the highest.
The IPCC has min, median, and max estimates on these kinds of things. See Table A.III.2 in [1], 12 being the median.
So worst case by any estimate is that nuclear emits 110 gCO2-eq/kg. Solar PV (utility) max is 180. Hydro is an astounding 2200 (twice as bad as coal, due to biogenic methane associated with large reservoirs). By any estimate, nuclear is a very low-carbon energy source, in a whole different class than fossil fuel and biofuels. In other words, it's one of the few low-carbon options we have.
Almost no one reprocesses, because it doesn't make economic sense at current U prices. Even the french have admitted this.
The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one. You will notice that after Reagan lifted Carter's ban on reprocessing, no commercial firms here jumped into the market. That's because it's not economically justified.
I don't think burying waste anytime soon at Yucca Mountain is economically justified either, by the way.
> The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one.
Not in context, because the context was that that decision was part of a general policy on the government's part to kill nuclear energy. If the government had wanted to help nuclear energy, it would have said, sure, reprocess if you want to, as long as you're willing to deal with whatever the economics of it turn out to be. (In the 1970's, when the Carter administration made the decision, uranium mining was considerably more expensive than it is now, so reprocessing might well have made economic sense then, even if it doesn't now.)
The context was that nuclear growth was going to slow down, both because electric power demand growth was slowing, and because nuclear power plants were even then experiencing large cost overruns. If the government pivoted away from nuclear, it wasn't some plan to kill nuclear, but rather a reaction to these market facts.
In that environment where nuclear growth did not match the central plans, reprocessing made no sense.
Not really true. Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper. It's a economic issue. France recycles their fuel once but they still only get 2% of the total energy out of the resource that's mined.
Another super-reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste is burying it in large salt deposits or deep crystalline bedrock. Both are actually totally reasonable and practical solutions. People just go nuts though when you talk about it.
> Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper.
That's true now, yes. But anyone who realizes this also realizes (as you do) that nuclear waste disposal is not an issue: you just store the spent fuel now, and at some point (in the not too distant future if we were actually using nuclear energy for a large portion of base load power), mining and enriching new fuel will be more expensive than reprocessing, at which point all of that so-called "waste" will be useful. The idea that it needs to be stored safely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years is just ludicrous.
Also, reprocessing makes disposal of what's left over much easier, because the stuff you actually have to dispose of afterwards (i.e,. the stuff that isn't now reprocessed fuel) has much shorter half-lives and so only needs to be safely sequestered for a much shorter time.
Yeah the reduction of long-term radiotoxicity achievable by partitioning and transmuting spent nuclear fuel really is astounding.
I'm not totally convinced that uranium mining will ever be more expensive than reprocessing. For one thing, (and especially when you go to deep-burn non-reprocessing breeder reactors) the required uranium is so minuscule that extracting the (near infinite and truly renewable) uranium from seawater is practical using tech that's 3-6x more expensive today than traditional mining.
On the other hand advances in industrial controls and robotics could conceivably reduce reprocessing costs.
Either option would be fine for a much expanded nuclear fleet providing 24/7 low-footprint carbon-free energy.
> No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it.
Nuclear waste is incredibly well controlled, unlike waste from solar, wind or fossil. Most Western countries didn't have contamination from civil nuclear waste at all and specially not in the last 30 years. Civilian Nuclear waste has basically killed nobody.
Calling it the 'most dangerous' is nonsense.
> Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas).
Nothing is as cheap as natural gas in the US. Specially don't just look at creation but also the grid, the end to end price.
Nuclear on mass scale is very competitive and has been proven to be able to replace fossil fuels on large scales. South Korea and China can produce very competitive nuclear reactors and we could do the same in the West. France did it in the 70/80 with 1960s tech.
Nuclear has the massive advantage of being able to replace coal plants directly without redesigning the countries or even continents grid. These cost (and others) are always ignored when solar advocates claim of low dispatch cost.
> When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense.
Cleanup for any modern plants in the West are already part of the dispatch price. It takes a while to clean up, but the overall land use of nuclear is still 100/1000x smaller then anything else.
> Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.
This is another failure in understanding scale. Uranium mining is not very heavy in terms of equipment compared other mining. Furthermore Uranium has a far higher energy density then anything else we could mine for energy. Solar, Wind and literally everything else involves far more mining and far more 'gray CO2' in the production.
Nothing is zero carbon but nuclear is easily the closest thing we have. No other form of energy has a lower land use, lower resource use and produces less CO2. These are well established facts, however much anti-nuclear advocates want to ignore it.
One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced (and the resource mined).
One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced…
1.1 billion hectares of land are farmed to feed the 7.5 billion people. That works out to 2000 square meters per person.
World energy consumption (all sources) runs about 18 terawatts, or 2400 watts per person. That is 58kWhr per day. Using an insolation factor of 3.0 (that is a 1W solar panel averages 3Whrs per day) each person will require 20kW of solar panels to replace ALL sources of energy. That is about 100 square meters of panels per person.
That's a lot, but not unthinkable. You could buy 8 pallets of panels today for $13k and cover a person, and it only takes 5% as much land as the land used to feed that person.
I never claimed its impossible with solar, its just not very smart. Your calculation also leaves out a lot of issues with solar and intermittency. But even those things could be overcome.
However, how is that better? Uranium mining is tiny and a non issue. Thorium is even more plentiful, literally a waste product. We have enough of that stuff for 1000s of years. We have the technology to use it on mass scale and it has PROVEN track record of replacing fossil fuels at mass scales.
Solar panel waste is further duplicated by the live cycle and the lack of life cycle planning in the global supply.
The weapons lobby has nothing to do with it. The widely talked about claims that Thorium is not usable for weapons is false.
Uranium would most likely be picked for an industrial scale nuclear weapons program for a couple reasons but thorium does not eliminate these problems.
Furthermore many of the benefits people talk about when talking about Thorium is really about the reactor. Many of the same benefits could also be achieved with Uranium.
Thorium really shines for some specific reactor types.
Whats holding reactors back in general is regulation in all parts of the supply chain, from research to operational licenses, and a wide popular anti-nuclear feeling.
That is the 3.0 insolation I chose. It’s reasonably representative of areas of northern hemisphere cities. The United States average by population is probably between 4 and 5 according to this map, but winter is lower and you have to plan for that.
Northern Europeans are going to want to have some power lines to the south. Chile might be the new aluminum refining capital of the world. Africa would be energy rich.
I sometimes wonder if some of the resistance to a solar-powered world stems from their discomfort with the implied economic shift of heavy industry to brown-skinned countries.
So choose land that is poor for food production and good for electricity production, then find a way to transport the energy (one good advantage of gas/coal/oil is transportability with current infrastructure).
We have the opportunity now, to decide to not kill everything bigger than bacteria. We could shutdown nukes, and store the waste. Or we could go for broke - if we go extinct - everything goes extinct.
I lived in Germany in 1986. For over half a year we were told to avoid fresh milk and produce and avoid walking barefoot on grass.
But now I know that Chernobyl was a ridiculously poor design that lacked a containment dome. If you want to build another Chernobyl I'll fight you, but if you want to build a modern plant or research MSRs I'm all for it, because climate change is set to do way worse than anything nuclear has ever done, Chernobyl included.
Yet another article about the complex subject of power generation that wilfully conflates fusion with fission. (Usually it's 'nuclear power' - here it's 'atomic power'.
That's assuming we're happy to think we have a power problem, not an an energy problem. Anti-solar types (who similarly conflate PVC with solar thermal) like to mix or muddle those. Fission apologists who think that because Lithium is mined, then mining Uranium should be just fine, also seem keen to blunt some semantic nuances.
Nuclear fission's time has been and gone - it's great for bombs, and was an interesting experiment, but the costs are way higher than anyone should reasonably expect to pass onto future generations.
(Plus they snuck in that nasty 'metric ton' construct. 1000kg is a tonne.)
This is a ridiculous and fundamentally flawed proposition. The obvious omissions and lack of consideration of other factors threatening the planet belies this author's bias/naivete/stupidity/other motivations.
First, the demand for energy is only a small fraction of numerous ways the planet is being compromised - irrevocably. Satisfying all energy demands worldwide cleanly will not "save the planet".
Second, carbon-free is completely different than being clean energy. The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) are significant, highly toxic, and long-lasting. While the emissions of fossil fuels is considered, other cleaner alternatives are not.
Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions.
> The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste)
The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true.
While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything.
Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable.
> Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions.
Sure if you forced everybody how you would like to live then we could do a lot. The idea that we should artificially restrict peoples energy needs as a way to save the plant just so we can avoid the very minor issue of nuclear waste is absurd.
> The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true.
While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything.
Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable.
While I view nuclear power relatively favorably, this is an extremely rose-tinted view of the situation. Nuclear waste can and does leak.
Nuclear waste form civilian power production has not done much. Basically not a single person died from it. I tired to separate civilian waste from nuclear weapons waste, that has a worse track record.
The few accidents that have happened are far smaller in scale then the 'horror' stories that people believe in and pretty much all of those are overhanging issue from the early nuclear age.
>The obvious omissions and lack of consideration of other factors threatening the planet belies this author's bias/naivete/stupidity/other motivations.
The vast majority of problems facing the planet can be solved given extremely cheap energy:
- Need clean drinking water? Simply desalinate ocean water if you have enough energy.
- Need clean air? Various catalytic converters can remove most and in many cases all harmful molecules, they just cost energy.
- Need to sequester carbon? Sure we know how to do it, provided you have enough energy.
- Need to feed the world? We already grow enough food, the main problem is transportation of that food. Again, easy with enough energy and electric vehicles.
The nuclear plant consists of two units each with 1200MW production capacity. Let's be pessimistic and assume that we need 24 hours of storage or roughly 57600MWh. A modern redox flow or lithium ion battery can cost as little as $100 per kWh but Tesla's grid battery with 129MWh cost 66 million which is around $500 per kWh so we will use that.
Well it turns out 57600MWh * 500$/kWH is exactly 28.8 billion USD. No power grid on earth needs a 24 hour battery but even with this crazy assumption grid storage isn't significantly more expensive than nuclear power.