What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal).
Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.
Indeed, coal is even worse than nuclear. So let's have neither but renewables instead :). Compared to europe, the USA is a big country and it is also further in the south which means more sun for solar collectors.
Hang on, are you absolutely sure that renewables are less damaging than nuclear? The footprint for nuclear is tiny, it might be competitive.
Fukashima was a level 7 nuclear distaster, so that is as bad as it gets. The actual damage done is objectivly not that bad compared to a lot of things we have accepted in the past with only increased safety regulation (like dam failures). 2 lvl 7 accidents in 35 years; and design standards generally go up in civilised countries. The footprint of nuclear is so tiny that might be competitive with renewables, accounting for the fact that the reacion to nuclear disasters is paranoid but the response to environmental damage by renewables is basically to ignore it. Renewables need materials, which are mined, and need to be installed, which creates hazards, and use land/airspace, which is costly. I believe some highly questionable rare earths are used too where the environmental impacts are not usually accounted for because it happens in China.
Purely in non-human terms, the land clearing for a solar plant is definitely worse than a nuclear disaster, because a level 7 nuclear disaster is net-positive for biodiversity ("suggest biodiversity around the massive radioactivity release has increased" [0]). Ie, humans are worse than a nuclear disaster if they happen to want space for their own use.
So, what about mining fissile materials? How clean is that, particularly with regard to tailings and wastewater?
Are there any studies out there without a bias on this? I mean, it's okay to be biased against coal, any non-metallurgical uses really put the "fossil" in fossil fuels.
But I know there are all sorts of weird edge cases. Like we're going to want to continue to collect and burn hydrocarbons that we collect from landfills, since the methane is so much more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We should continue to burn that. Hydropower will continue to be a happy side-effect of flood control.
I worked with Rio Tinto (mining corporation) for some time, and happened to know a few people in management positions at the Ranger Uranium Mine. I can assure you it was one of the most environmentally conscious operations the group was managing, and super-senior management seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. It was a source of much frustration, because as a company we had a good grasp of what acceptable mining practice looks like and Ranger was beyond the standard of reasonable. I dunno, what can you do? Follow the Environmental Management Plan.
Anyway, any comparison is a bit academic, because we can exhaustively list everything that has ever gone wrong in the nuclear industry but the renewables are too diverse for there to be a fair comparison. Which is why I suspect the environmental damage done by renewables is being glossed over.
Ranger may well be run to the highest standards...now. However it was not always the case [0].
I used to work for Western Mining Corp (early 90s), and am familiar with how 'patchy' adherence to environmental principles can be across a large organisation. I'm not implying malfeasance (or any other explicit cause).
A few other instances where Rio's failed to hold itself (or its subsidiaries) to the highest standards: Lassing, Austria [1]; Panguna, PNG [2].
This is what I love about HN, instant access to experts in the field, so we don't have to argue our assumptions.
I guess it's unsurprising that uranium operations run a lot cleaner than fossil fuel extraction, given the politics involved.
I'm not against fission power itself, but being in California makes me kind of a NIMBY on the issue. All you need is somewhere with water and without active fault lines, and nope, not seeing a good spot. The evacuation plans for San Onofre involved moving one to eight million people, or about eight million ways something could go wrong.
"I'm not against fission power itself, but being in California makes me kind of a NIMBY on the issue. All you need is somewhere with water and without active fault lines, and nope, not seeing a good spot."
The TerraPower design, and many other of the next-gen designs, don't require water cooling. That greatly expands siting options.
You could have the plants out in the desert, or on other less desirable real estate.
"The evacuation plans for San Onofre involved moving one to eight million people, or about eight million ways something could go wrong."
I'm originally from the area, and was sad to hear of San Onofre closing. However, its siting was terrible.
Given California's stance on climate issues, it should be the world's largest promoter of next-gen nuclear power.
Several very interesting designs are being pursued, I'm hopeful the government will eventually adopt a better policy stance. Bill Gates looks to be helping a lot there!
Possibly hopeful, but the energy market in California is kind of a mess right now between the Community Choice Energy collectives, PG&E declaring bankruptcy, and SoCal Edison being snafu as usual. You need a lot of capital for nuclear, and with a fractured market, I don't know how it comes together. The only CCA with enough credit rating to attempt it is Marin Clean Energy, and I'm not trusting an area with that high of an anti-vaxxer population to consider nuclear rationally.
In other ways, the Democratic coalition in California is so big that they can afford to annoy one end of the base. But at the same time, pro-nuclear is not a natural stance for an administration trying to balance environment and housing development.
My perspective is as as a former meteorologist and climate scientist, and currently involved in the Democratic party. We're in such an oil town that the high school colors are black and gold, the birthplace of Unocal -- but people are so anti-oil here now that we'd love to make a switch. You know, as long as gas prices at the pump don't increase.
I've talked to enough people that I think the politics is doable but hard, but the capital man, I dunno. Maybe that comes from Bill Gates.
Uranium vs fossil fuel exploitation is also a density & economics issue. Since the energy density of uranium is several orders of magnitude higher than for any fossil fuel, one can afford to be much more pedantic about uranium mining without wrecking the economics.
> The footprint for nuclear is tiny, it might be competitive.
Parent noted distinction between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. I'm assuming here you're talking about nuclear fission exclusively.
In any case, how sure are you that the footprint for nuclear is tiny?
As I understand it the construction / commissioning costs are enormous - more than a coal or gas plant (eg. a breathtaking volume of concrete). The costs of acquiring fissionable material seem to often be overlooked, but mining (currently) requires fossil fuels.
That's before you get to decommissioning costs (which may not be within the 'footprint' category) or waste management.
The UK's recent experience [1] trying to get one nuclear fission plant up and running provides an abject lesson.
> As I understand it the construction / commissioning costs are enormous - more than a coal or gas plant (eg. a breathtaking volume of concrete).
The construction costs are high predominantly as a result of inefficient (or in this case purposely obstructive) legal requirements. The government has literally been known to change the requirements a new reactor must be built under after the portion of the reactor subject to those requirements has already been built. This predictably leads to cost overruns, but it is also an artificial problem.
> The costs of acquiring fissionable material seem to often be overlooked, but mining (currently) requires fossil fuels.
It's overlooked because it's tiny. The energy produced through fission from one pound of uranium is the same as from burning 2.7 million pounds of coal. In other words, the weight of coal vs. uranium to operate a coal fired power plant for an hour would run a nuclear reactor for more than 300 years.
Moreover, the fuel rods we already have sitting around at existing reactor sites that we don't know what to do with? Can be used as fuel in newer generation reactors. Plus all we have from decommissioned nuclear weapons that we also need to get rid of.
Everyone currently alive will die of old age before we have to mine any more uranium for newer generation reactors.
> That's before you get to decommissioning costs (which may not be within the 'footprint' category) or waste management.
Decommissioning costs are a thing invented to make nuclear seem more expensive by counting it in one place but not the other. Do you know how much it costs to clean up the superfund sites left at the mining operations for coal and the raw materials that go into solar panels?
And long-term waste management is only a thing for legacy reactors. The newer reactors use their "waste" as fuel, solving both problems.
> The construction costs are high predominantly as a result of inefficient (or in this case purposely obstructive) legal requirements.
This seems unlikely given a) several western governments are dead keen on nuclear renaissance, b) the high construction costs are historically, and in recent times, seen in each country dabbling with new nuclear fission plants, and c) the absence of claims from construction companies and investors in new nuclear fission plants about this alleged obstacle.
(Aside - Jeremy Legget's site has some great resources for cost and scheduling blowouts. He's partisan, but I've found no reason to doubt his sources or conclusions.)
> The energy produced through fission from one pound of uranium is the same as from burning 2.7 million pounds of coal.
I wasn't suggesting a disparity in source fuel volumes - I'm aware of how both burning stuff and fission works.
My point was that obtaining clean high quality fissionable material is non-trivial (if it weren't the case we'd probably all be dead).
I'm unconvinced that existing fuel rods can be used to power newer model fission reactors -- unless you're talking about MSR's, which I thought went out of favour last century, and we don't really have any 'modern' plants built (yet). Again, I refer to some of Leggett's work analysing some of the new UK plant constructions - way over cost and time expectations, and likely about to be abandoned by investors.
> Decommissioning costs are a thing invented to make nuclear seem more expensive by counting it in one place but not the other.
I don't understand. Are you suggesting it shouldn't be counted, or the comparison costs to renewables is being misstated?
Comparing it to coal mines is disingenuous, unless you think I'm pushing coal (I am not).
Comparing it to mines for 'raw material that go into solar panels' is more interesting, but I highly factoring that in would shift the balance sheet in favour of fission.
> And long-term waste management is only a thing for legacy reactors. The newer reactors use their "waste" as fuel, solving both problems.
If you're talking thorium and MSR's here, it's not strictly true, is it? Apart from the absence of any existing viable reactors, thorium reactors need, and produce, rare isotopes of uranium, with longer half lifes than say 235 or 238.
I'm at the edge of my knowledge here, to be sure, but ultimately the ramp-up times to build MSR's, the sheer volume required to replace the existing fission reactors, the experiences around the world of cost / schedule blow-outs, the trend for wind, solar thermal, storage, and and even solar PVC -- all seem to indicate fission isn't really a sensible option now.
Actually renewables are rather famous for not being very safe at all. Turns out that mounting heavy glass plates on rooftops ... can end with a very quick trip to ground with a heavy (and if broken: sharp) glass plate right behind you. Example [1].
Wind turbines need a lot of mechanical components mounted 50 meters (up to 150) off the ground. Needless to say, these components aren't what anyone would call roomy. One component is a big gearbox, or as the technicians call it a "meatgrinder" [2].
Note that Coal and Oil numbers exclude health impact of the intoxication that is highly visible in places like India and China, but really also plays in many US cities. Even if they're not quite at the point where the sky turns brown and acutely toxic.
Only Hydro power is even remotely competitive with nuclear power in deaths.
(global for nuclear means believing the numbers claiming Chernobyl caused more deaths than 2 US nuclear bombs, or you could more reasonably interpret it as including all deaths due to nuclear weapons. You can freely add in all deaths due to radiation research (low 3 digits), it won't affect the numbers)
In a way it's funny. Solar has already killed more people than nuclear (realistic Chernobyl numbers), including the 2 bombs. And will pass the threshold of adding all numbers together just after this decade ends. Somehow that's never mentioned.
So taking the most pessimistic numbers, Nuclear is 60% safer than Wind turbines, and a staggering 500% safer than solar power. If taking the optimistic numbers for nuclear ... it's absolutely ridiculous.
Even while you dont include deaths involved in construction and ongoing security required by nuclear plants, those deaths-per-Wh-so-far figures do not represent risk, which is much more complicated. Its not possible to fully insure nuclear plants - because no company can take on board liability for disasters which nuclear is demonstrably capable of but fortunately have avoided to date, with considerable expense on safety measures.
It should be obvious when you think about it; if "it'll never happen" (because it can't or hasn't happened) is true, then insurance actuaries could establish that and there would be no problem with insuring the "safest source of power", but governments have to wave the responsibility for full liability instead. There is a real probabilistic risk of great and persistent tragedies from nuclear plants, the more there are the greater that risk.
Fortunately wind, solar and storage are cheaper already than nuclear [1] and their prices are continuing to drop fast. There may be a good case for improving safeguards on these industries too - it should not be as expensive as trying to fully safeguard nuclear has been.
> because no company can take on board liability for disasters which nuclear is demonstrably capable of but fortunately have avoided to date
Recognising that this is a minor portion of a larger post - there are a lot of industrial companies that couldn't possibly cover the damage if something goes badly wrong (eg, explosives supplier flattens a major port, 3rd world mining accident, electrical utility causes wildfire, most mid-sized building companies if a skyscraper collapses, etc). Even many insurance companies won't pay out if a flood or fire hits a city, because they can't afford to cover large-scale disasters. Contamination in drinking water is also a pretty big risk. At that level of probability, the only way of dealing with these threats is government. No other organisation else has the manpower or resourcing to deal with rare catastrophes.
It is a fact that liability for a nuclear catastrophe would overwhelm a companies ability to pay. However, we do a lot of things that are more risky and more costly at that level of probability. The fact that there is risk is a very real consideration. That fact we can't insure it is not - there are too many things where, if a rare event happens, the liability cannot be shouldered by a corporation.
Fukushima cleanup, one of the worst disasters we've seen in 30 years, seems to have cost about $15 billion damages + $60 in compensation [0][1] vs $250 billion due to the actual disaster that caused the nuclear plant to fold (the tsunami). And this is as an unexpected, low probability, cost. If a corporation can't handle this, it is tiny bikkies to a government to cover the $15 billion in actual cleanup. And the probability of the government needing to act is tiny to start with. The risks here are so small we don't even talk about them outside the context of nuclear power.
> there are a lot of industrial companies that couldn't possibly cover the damage if something goes badly wrong (eg, explosives supplier flattens a major port, 3rd world mining accident, electrical utility causes wildfire, most mid-sized building companies if a skyscraper collapses, etc)
Of course this is why in developed countries they are required to buy insurance. Insurance companies exist which can take on extremely large liabilities for industry, the point is that Nuclear has never been able to afford the size of premiums which would make the full risk of its liabilities profitable to cover.
Fukushima was by no stretch an example of the worst nuclear event liable to occur. A bad accident or attack on any one of the worlds hundreds of nuclear plants CAN seriously irradiate many thousands, even millions of people in some locations, poison water tables and make land unlivable for decades - continuing harm to many creatures even if people are able to avoid it.
After each disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima we don't just have a new "rate of deaths so far" line to work with, that average line is a one dimensional extremely simplistic measurement. Scientists and engineers who have taken it and as a valid summary of hazard should really know better.
> if "it'll never happen" (because it can't or hasn't happened) is true, then insurance actuaries could establish that and there would be no problem with insuring
Calculating an actuarial probability was never the problem. You can't know the lower bound on the probability of something that has never actually happened, but you can calculate an upper bound based on the period of time it hasn't happened, which is all you really need. They can calculate what the premiums should be.
The issue is that you're asking them to carry a hundred billion dollars in insurance, but insurance companies have capitalization requirements. AIG's market cap is less than seventy five billion. They can't write an individual policy they don't have the resources to pay out on in the event of a claim, regardless of the probability that it actually happens.
So the problem isn't the risk calculation, it's the amount of insurance you want them to carry. The solution is to find someone who could actually pay out a claim that large in the unlikely event that it comes to that, which could only be the government, so that's what they did.
The annual revenue alone of the worlds ten largest insurance companies is about 20 thousand billion USD [1]. This sector is prepared to cover larger risks than most governments - for a somewhat competitive profitable amount.
> Calculating an actuarial probability was never the problem.
Of course is wasn't - revealing and paying the resultant premiums is the problem, which is why governments make alternative arrangements for nuclear.
> The annual revenue alone of the worlds ten largest insurance companies is about 20 thousand billion USD [1]. This sector is prepared to cover larger risks than most governments - for a somewhat competitive profitable amount.
I think you mean two thousand billion. Which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US (each of which would need to be insured), even if that wasn't revenue.
Insurance companies are competitive. If they take in a hundred billion dollars, they pay out more than ninety in claims the same year. They can't pay a claim using the money they're already using to pay other types of claims.
> Of course is wasn't - revealing and paying the resultant premiums is the problem, which is why governments make alternative arrangements for nuclear.
The resultant premiums wouldn't be that bad if it was only the risk of a nuclear disaster they had to account for.
But a smart insurance company is going to take into account that US courts have a way of connecting sympathetic victims to deep-pocketed or well-insured corporations, even when there is only a tangential relationship with them, when it's the only way to save a devastated community. For example, if Fukushima had happened in the US, there is a decent chance that courts would have tried to tack a lot of the cost of the damage from the tsunami on the plant operators. Or for another example, PG&E and the recent wildfires in California.
That's a different kind of risk, but it's one an insurance company that doesn't want to go bankrupt has to account for, and it's also the one that makes buying that amount of insurance prohibitively expensive in the private market.
Sorry right I did overcount that. But that is still 2 trillion USD - revenue per year. It establishes the scale of this sectors financial clout. Insurers payed out $135 billion USB in North America last year for natural disasters, and business is continuing as usual. Nuclear plants liability are capped in north america at 13 billion USD the nuclear industry is simply exempt from arranging full cover - unlike other industries. Its not really viable to contend the arrangements are not exceptional and are beyond the capabilities and interest of modern financial arrangements.
This statement > "which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US" shows a misunderstanding about the insurance business. It is not necessary to have assets to cover worst case events everywhere simultaneously. I expect you do understand that but have not given this subject your best attention.
> Insurers payed out $135 billion USB in North America last year for natural disasters, and business is continuing as usual.
Because they expected to. If you take in $145B in premiums and pay out $135B in claims, everything is fine. If one year they took in $145B in premiums and paid out $235B in claims, where does the rest of the money come from?
In theory they could collect the premiums and accumulate them over time so that by the time there is a claim there is the money to pay it, but that allows you to pay a single claim of that size in year 50, what is covering it in year one?
> Nuclear plants liability are capped in north america at 13 billion USD the nuclear industry is simply exempt from arranging full cover - unlike other industries.
What other industries? I don't see oil and coal companies each having to be insured against claims for billions in damages from climate change. PG&E isn't covering the full liability from the camp fire, they're filing for bankruptcy.
> This statement > "which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US" shows a misunderstanding about the insurance business. It is not necessary to have assets to cover worst case events everywhere simultaneously. I expect you do understand that but have not given this subject your best attention.
That's assuming you can consider them all to be independent. The problem with very low probability events like this is that if they do happen the cause is often another very low probability event. You get something like the Yellowstone Supervolcano or a coordinated terrorist attack and all the claims come at the same time.
Or even at the same time as other types of claims -- you get damage to a nuclear plant or three from a ten thousand year storm or an 8.5 magnitude earthquake and now you're paying that claim on top of the disaster claims from what caused it. Insurance companies want to pool risk, not assume 100% of the damages from a massive disaster with a single dependent cause.
All industries need to arrange cover for accidents (this should not be news in an argument about industrial insurance and liabilities). Some companies are big enough to hold their own funds, for example Shell has payed out $20 billion in settlements for the Deepwater horizon accident. That is more than the $13 billion dollar fund arranged to spend in the event of nuclear accidents in the whole of the US.
The idea of holding oil companies liable for climate change has a ring to it, but insurance wont cover it because there is no legal precedent. There is legal precedent to claiming damages on industrial accidents and nuclear industry accidents. If one nuclear plant fails badly for any number of reasons and fallout is blown towards a city or across valuable farmland, the claims could easily exceed 13 billion USD.
> All industries need to arrange cover for accidents (this should not be news in an argument about industrial insurance and liabilities).
Rarely in the amount of the theoretical maximum amount of damage they could possibly do. In practice when a company has more liability than insurance coverage, they end up in bankruptcy and it's the insurance policies of the victims that end up paying out, or some kind of government assistance. This is especially true for very rare and very large claims, because nobody really carries that much insurance.
For example, Boeing no doubt has insurance, but their worst case failure mode is something like the hypothesized worst-case scenarios for the Y2K or Y2038 bug where some integer rolls over and every plane they've ever made crashes into the ground at the same time. There is no way they have enough insurance to cover that -- it would be a trillion dollars. But neither do we expect them to, because it's very unlikely even though it could theoretically actually happen.
The same kind of thing could happen to a major auto company, or really any company that runs the same software on a million different pieces of industrial hardware. A company could sell a million pacemakers and have them all fail at once, or elevators, or emergency dispatch equipment. None of them are insured for that amount of liability.
The oil companies are rare in the sense of having extremely deep pockets, enough to cover a major claim like that on their own, but they're about the only instance of that. And even they would be completely bankrupt if the courts ever start allowing claims against them for the damage from climate change.
Thank you. Whenever I see someone compare nuclear deaths to solar deaths (lot of solar death are falling off a roof), I slap my forehead when they suggest full speed ahead with nuclear (despite it being too expensive, uninsurable without government backing, and no waste disposal plans) instead of...making it harder to fall off of roofs when installing rooftop solar.
We allow cities close to the ocean even though the Japanese tsunami damages cost more than ten times as much as the nuclear accident it caused. We allow cities on fault lines as well, even though earth quakes could kill hundreds of thousands of people.
What does ”uninsurable” mean? If nuclear power plants are uninsurable Silicon Valley is uninsurable.
Uninsurable means a nuclear generator cannot obtain commercial liability insurance due to black swan events that could incur hundreds of billions of dollars in liability.
Silicon Valley is insurance because the liability exposure is substantially less.
> By refusing to support an alternative solution, you are supporting the status quo.
I do support an alternative solution: making rooftop installs safer, and more utility scale ground mount solar. Both are infinitely more tractable as problems than properly managed nuclear power. The US is already on track to install more utility scale solar this year (~150GW) than total existing nuclear generating capacity, even accounting for capacity factor. One year!
I would disagree. Thousands of that can only be done by humans are by many measures better than a single dangerous plant that produces the same economic output in a more concentrated fashion.
I think people rightly fear a type of damage they can't see. Radiation is scary because you could get a dose of it and not even know it, or have no idea how bad it is. People are taking the devil they know.
> I think people rightly fear a type of damage they can't see. Radiation is scary because you could get a dose of it and not even know it, or have no idea how bad it is. People are taking the devil they know.
By this logic people should be deathly afraid of coal and what it puts into the air.
If you're exposed to enough radiation for the effects not to be "marginal and diffuse" then you can detect it with your senses. High dose radiation will literally burn you.
People misunderstand the risk. The amount of radiation you need to be exposed to for a 50% chance of getting cancer would be a fatal dose from radiation poisoning. The way people end up with cancer isn't by one person getting a large dose, it's by a million people each getting a small dose, so that they each have a one in ten thousand chance of getting cancer and then a hundred of them do.
Which is exactly the same thing that happens with coal -- not least because coal is radioactive and burning it puts the radioactive materials into the air.
Except that coal does it as a consequence of normal operation rather than only in the event of a catastrophic failure.
I'm not so sure about that. Gamma radiation is one thing, getting a bunch of alpha and beta emitters more or less permanently stuck in your body, is another.
> I'm not so sure about that. Gamma radiation is one thing, getting a bunch of alpha and beta emitters more or less permanently stuck in your body, is another.
About the only practical way to do that is to eat them, at which point you're in the same category as any other adulterated food. How is caesium any scarier than prions or mercury or various pesticides or a thousand different chemical carcinogens?
Or getting fallout raining on you? Or eating stuff that's been growing in fallout rain. Or eating meat from livestock grazing on polluted areas. I don't know, but I thought Chernobyl was pretty damn scary when it happened. Iodine supplemented in table salt as a prophylactic. Pretty grim stuff when you think about it and lived in the Cold War. It scared me.
Yeah that's fortunately increasingly an option we can take, but the world would sure suck less if we weren't dealing with the compounded effects of 50-70 years of the sort of nuclear skepticism expressed in your comment upthread.
But still, even if we're going to aggressively build out renewables there's still room for a lot more nuclear in the energy mix. There's use-cases for it where solar, wind etc. isn't a substitute, e.g. shipping[1].
We have had 30+ years of skepticism in coal power, which made near enough to approximately fuck all difference (until perhaps very recently). I would suggest the historical stagnation of nuclear has sfa to do with activism and quite a lot to do with the astronomical costs of building, mining and operation.
Also just a thought re. your eg. on shipping.. I read a random blog a while back that suggested that a couple of large cargo ships go missing every week (sinking or piracy mostly). Not a thing I would like to see with nuclear reactors and material on board.
Isn’t that what the tesla semi electric truck and airbus e-fan x electric plane projects aim to help mitigate though: the reliance on gas for shipping/transportation?
Just because some use cases are not practical for renewables now doesn’t mean they won’t be in the near future.
Are you willing to live next door to a nuclear plant? People don't experience coal related problems unless they live in areas that are heavily polluted. Sure it impacts them and everyone else but it's perceived less harmful.
There is an idle plant near San Diego they've been wanting to open for a long time but the residents in surrounding areas fight it tooth and nail. For a changebof scenery, residents in Nagasaki are fighting an ongoing battle (losing but trying) to shut down the plant in the area. I have yet to hear of other cases but so far it seems people living in the vicinity of nuclear plants are not happy.
Ok, so what you are saying is that you would prefer to live next to a dirty coal power plant that is much more likely to cause you to get cancer or other horrible health effects?
I would say that's a false equivalency because coal operators (until recently) were profitable enterprises whereas nuclear lobbyists are generally concerned not just with public tolerance but public funding.
Coal is/was only profitable because externalities are not priced in.
Everyone knows the externalities of nuclear power and it gets priced in to any discussion of new plants in 2019. The fear (about meltdowns) and concern (about waste) typically outsizes the actual risk substantially.
But most people don't seem to realize that coal far more produces aerosolized radioactive waste, other carcinogens, and as a result, cancer, per watt, than nuclear. Even if you assume every single nuclear plant melts down. Burnt coal is just absymal for public health, but it doesn't get the scary branding that nuclear power does.
It’s at the southern tip of Orange County, not that far from both San Diego and Los Angeles, and there are millions of people nearby. It has been closed for about 7 years, and the claimed risks/fears seem plausible.
I can see Seabrook Station from here, and there are houses within a mile of the reactor. The popular beach towns of Seabrook and Hampton beach are within two miles. AFAIK, neither my neighbors nor the tourists give it much thought.
Krško is a Westinghouse design. I've spent quite some time in the area, and nobody really worried about the power plant. The smell of the cellulose plant in the city center on the other hand, ...
I currently work in data science for an Australian power company. Renewables are the reason why we had electricity spot prices of A$14500/mwh three days in a row, rolling blackouts and the grid being nationalized for several hours.
Because of the unregulated attachment of intermittent power sources South Australia has no base load generation any more, this is coal or nuclear stations. Victoria had an incident with one coal plant shutting down on Tesday which was the first $14500 spot price hike. Then because of weather and plant maintenance the same thing happened for two more days in a row with the power regulator stepping in when the rolling blackouts started on Friday telling everyone to run everything at full blast.
A renewable only grid will cost an order of magnitude more to run than one based on coal or nuclear, if not more.
The above is hugely simplified for obvious reasons and only my opinion and not that of my employer.
First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online. Where you have a serious problem is when spot prices spike, no one responds and load-shedding starts. I appreciate that SA has actually got to the point of load-shedding several times now, which is indicative of a severe problem.
However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Nuclear plants don't inherently melt down if they are properly designed and operated and renewables don't inherently cause load-shedding if they are integrated to a properly planned and operated bulk power system.
What is occurring in SA is a power system planning and market design failure that is not inherent to any one technology.
It seems the system operator has been relying on reliability services provided by large synchronous generators without actually pricing and creating a market for those services, which has caused them to disappear with coal retirements and leave the power system in a chronically insecure state. In order for the market to ensure both day-ahead generation adequacy and as well as real-time operating reserve margin for unit contingencies, generators need to be able to get paid for providing those services, at a level that makes it economical to invest in new assets or maintain existing ones.
This is a policy problem, not a technical one.
FWIW I work for the company that owned the now decommissioned Hazelwood coal plant in Victoria, but I'm not involved with that plant at all.
> However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Nuclear plants don't inherently melt down if they are properly designed and operated and renewables don't inherently cause load-shedding if they are integrated to a properly planned and operated bulk power system.
Isn't this just juggling semantics? Nuclear is very much a necessary condition for nuclear meltdown. Removing nuclear power is a foolproof option to avoid nuclear meltdown.
Likewise displacing dispatchable generation with renewables enables the conditions where we can get these super high spot prices. To guarantee supply during peak load you need a lot of redundant dispatchable generation sitting around gathering dust until the $14500 day. On that day it needs to pay for itself, hence $14500 per megawatt hour.
EDIT: Oh wait, I'm a dummy who didn't read your post correctly. I agree with your comments about the market needing to correctly price reliability of supply. In WA we have a capacity market for this reason.
There are a lot of economic scenarios for a 'peaker' plant that don't necessarily involve it having to recover its full capital cost in just a few days of operation. Often these are plants that have been retired from the energy market due to high operating costs, but can still start up and run for a few hours well below the $1000/MWh level because the owner has already recovered their cap-ex over many years of operation. They may have other revenue streams that cover their operating costs, like black-start services, and operating reserve is just the cherry on top.
This works well for the current 30 minute market. At 5 minutes there are no non-battery plants, other than hydro, which can start up fast enough to provide power to the market.
True for cold start, but gas plants can ramp in the 5 minute window if they are already running. But the market conditions would have to such that it makes economic sense for them to be in that operating condition.
Right and it takes them five minutes to ramp down, and the price market window will be 5 minutes. Which means they will have to bet on the price being high the next windiw too. Which means higher prices sustained longer because gas units won't be quick enough any more.
If they're ramping as part of a system reliability service, then should be doing it under automatic generation control, not betting on the energy market, and they would have committed a certain amount of up and down regulation some hours in advance. The cost question is whether it makes sense for them to bid for that reliability service to begin with.
Which goes back to my argument that this is to a large extent about market design and not technology.
>First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online. Where you have a serious problem is when spot prices spike, no one responds and load-shedding starts. I appreciate that SA has actually got to the point of load-shedding several times now, which is indicative of a severe problem.
As you should well know being in the business the spot price has a hard cap of $14500. You should also know that spot prices were maxed out from 3pm to 8pm in Vic and SA on Thursday and would have been maxed out for the whole of Friday if not for AEMO stepping in and effectively nationalizing the electricity market.
Anyone with a spreadsheet and publicly available data can see that the SA shedding events have expanded to Vic for the first time this year. Further anyone who even looks at the ages of the coal plants providing base load generation will realize it will get worse on from here.
For the rest of your points: this is absolutely a technological problem. Physics and maths, contrary to what our old prime minister used to say, are respected in Australia. Electricity generated by heavy spinning things takes a long time to ramp up and down and needs a different grid to that used by renewables and batteries. Batteries are about 5 orders of magnitude too expensive to be used as the backbone of the energy network. So the only things renewables do today from the pov of the network is add spikiness both the production and demand side of the market, making both the market and the grid more unstable, more expensive and worse for everyone who isn't a speculator.
In short: with current technology you can have a stable network or a renewable one, you can have both if you're willing to pay at least 10 times more for electricity.
Or we can build nuclear power plants and solve all our problems for the next 50 years.
I agree that a 100% renewable grid is not economical at this time. Nor is 90%, nor 80%. The question is where the threshold lies for the maximum amount of renewable generation we can accommodate while maintaining reliability and delivering power at an economical price for consumers.
That number is going to vary in different grid systems based on the size of the balancing area, the strength and resiliency of the transmission system and amount of storage available. Balancing areas with large amounts of hydro-storage will be able to accommodate more renewables, as will those that connect 10s of thousands of MW or more.
This isn't about physics and math. It's about SA being a very small grid where contingencies (both transmission and unit trip) dominate reliability planning. There are grids operating with the same level of renewable penetration as SA or more that have never experienced load shedding.
SA could accommodate perhaps one large nuclear power plant. And then the entire system design would be dictated by unit tripping contingencies. The cost of planning the system to prevent load-shedding when a 500+ MW unit trips at that plant would be massive. Nuclear is not a panacea for system security.
Please don't generalize the problems of a very unique and small system to the rest of the world. SA has unique challenges as a vast and sparsely populated region that don't exist in Europe, Asia or even most of North America. ERCOT has run with 40% wind penetration on a 44 GW system, and they've done it cheaper than anyone can build nuclear today.
> It seems the system operator has been relying on reliability services provided by large synchronous generators without actually pricing and creating a market for those services, which has caused them to disappear with coal retirements and leave the power system in a chronically insecure state. In order for the market to ensure both day-ahead generation adequacy and as well as real-time operating reserve margin for unit contingencies, generators need to be able to get paid for providing those services, at a level that makes it economical to invest in new assets or maintain existing ones.
Aren't these frequency response services the same provided by Tesla's battery system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve? If so, those reliability services are paid for by the South Australian government. Additionally, the Hornsdale Power Reserve responds to frequency sags within milliseconds, whereas legacy thermal needs upwards of 15-20 minutes to raise the frequency or voltage back up.
> First, let’s recap on some of the important points. The Tesla big battery was built without subsidy, in a period of just 4.5 months from design to full operations, and at a cost of $91 million. If the figures available to date are any guide, it is making plenty of money ($24 million in revenue this year) and may deliver a payback to its owners of less than four years.
> Even better, it is delivering an even bigger market benefit for consumers ($40-$50 million in its first year) by lowering costs, particularly in the frequency control market, but also in wholesale price. Add in the value of grid security, and the avoidance of blackouts, and the savings are considerable.
> Tesla makes its money through a $4 million a year contract (for 10 years) with the South Australia government, and sets aside 90MW and 10MWh to provide grid security, mostly by intervening when major events happen.
It's more than just frequency response, though. After reading some of the event reports from South Australia, some of them are caused by a simple lack of generation adequacy (demand exceeded capacity for a sustained period due to generation unplanned outages) and others by transmission contingencies (cascading failure caused by a transmission line going out of service). These aren't problems that batteries solve per se but yes, the future definitely has more batteries in it.
> However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl.
Are you suggesting SA renewables suffered an unplanned failure this summer? I havn't heard anything about that and I expect that they have been functioning as expected and that you are mistaken. Do you have a source?
What I'm saying that is the loss of system security events that have occurred in Australia this summer are not inherent to the operation of the grid with high renewable penetration, but rather a failure of the system operator to plan adequately for foreseeable system conditions and contingencies, just like Chernobyl was not an inevitable occurrence linked to the underlying technology. So using the SA load-shedding events to say "renewables can't work at large scale" is similar to citing Chernobyl as a reason not to build new nuclear plants.
However, there was a very well documented failure of LVRT performance on wind turbines during the 2016 SA blackout.
Some people die every year from wind and hydropower [1]. If we measure lives lost per unit of energy, nuclear power is orders of magnitude better than wind or hydropower.
Do solar farms and windmills harm birds? How many birds are killed each year compared to how many die from nuclear? The flippant “lets do renewables” ignores that plastering the landscape with windmills and solar panels has some significant effects on wildlife that would exponentially increase with more widespread deployment. How many birds have died in France as a result of nuclear power?
Perhaps the answer is to not put nuclear plants in seismic areas and instead improve storage and transmission technology so that nuclear can be used more. Putting a reactor on a fault line, in a tsunami zone isn’t necessarily a beat practice, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Solar farms and windmills are ugly and environmentally harmful.
Yes, fossil fuels are an ongoing disaster, one that in the form of global warming has a capacity to possibly make the planet unlivable. But all the disasters of fossil fuels are invisible and thus provoke little reaction in the public - and moreover, fossil fuels have vast vested interests protecting them.
We need to come up with an alternative to this. Nuclear in the ideal could be that. But nuclear's track record is murky, nuclear's cost is murky. For all I know, solar and wind are X times less effective than nuclear though as mentioned real world costs versus theoretical costs are still problem. I mean, consider raw solar now is the cheapest energy source but maybe solar plus reverse hydro would be some proportion more expensive.
Thus if we're creating an alternative to fossil fuels, solar and wind seems like a clear real world win.
An nuclear requires huge upfront money because it requires huge upfront energy investment. This risk of nuclear isn't just disaster, it's that this huge investment fails to pay as calculated and this is a risk that's materialized in the past.
It would be ideal if we could replace fossil fueled power plants with solar and wind, but it is not currently technically possible and as they provide different forms of services. Fossil fueled power plants generate power based on demand. Solar and wind generate power based on weather.
With current technology we really only have two distinct options. We can use solar and wind when the weather allows for it and then burn coal, gas and oil when it doesn't. The global warming impact is the combined result averaged over the year, and the energy cost is similar to the combined price.
The other option is nuclear which has the huge upfront cost and nuclear waste, but with minimal global warming.
In the future we could get more alternatives. Different form of batteries (like reverse hydro) would allow solar and wind to be separated from on-demand fossil fueled power plants, and dynamic energy market could change demand based on supply so that a lower base generation from nuclear and regular hydro would work in combination with wind and solar.
The other option is nuclear which has the huge upfront cost and nuclear waste, but with minimal global warming.
I don't see why the various battery types aren't practical today. Unlike nuclear, there's no huge political resistance and once solar and wind are online, investment in energy storage becomes online energy fairly quickly. Moreover, the huge energy include huge uncertainties, uncertainties whether the plant will shutdown early, especially.
Remember, the huge upfront costs of nuclear includes energy expenditure and as you're pointing out, expending more energy means more global warming until we have fully replaced fossil fuel.
Long ago, solar and wind advocates were derided for contrasting hypothetical ideals with current realities. Nuclear proponents now seem much closer to doing that.
Most nuclear renewable energy competitors are cheaper than nuclear.
Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere.
It seems foolish to divert money intended to reduce polluting sources of energy into the more expensive nuclear alternative, until the share of coal and natural gas is low enough that more stable sources of energy are neeeded.
It's a question of path dependency. A least-cost grid with 80% less GHG emissions than current will likely be, depending on the location, lots of wind and solar, improved transmission, a little bit of batteries and demand response, and then NG backup.
For a deep decarbonized grid (95%+ less emissions), the least-cost will OTOH likely involve a rather high fraction of nuclear, plus a somewhat smaller fraction of the aforementioned wind, solar, transmission, demand response, batteries on top.
Dealing with climate change requires a deep decarbonized grid. So while most grids can take a lot more wind and solar than currently, if we overbuild those sources we can get locked into higher emissions long-term.
All non-nuclear renewable energy competitors require us to derive ~40-60% of our energy generation from burning natural gas, that generates GHGs. This natural gas comes from either fracking, or Russia.
Climate change is an exsistential threat to our way of life.
> Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere.
Yes, it is a concern. We need to hit net zero emissions in the next five years, or net negative emissions, with massive carbon sequestration, in the next 15. How exactly are we going to do that between shipping, air travel, AND fossil-fuel baseload power?
As an engineer I do feel that just because a risk is diffuse, doesn't make it better. I.e. if coal kills more people, it's objectively worse.
But I'm not sure if you can say that definitively. Peoples feeling of the "badness" of an outcome matters. And you also have to consider that dying a bit earlier might not be as bad as some of the immediate consequences a nuclear disaster can have to people of all ages.
I'd be all for building more nuclear, but I feel like it's just unrealistic to expect a sudden revival of nuclear. I think it's likely more productive to focus more R&D and investment on solar/wind and storage.
Solar/wind+storage also has some really nice benefits like being more decentralised and does not depend on a steady source of fuel. This has big benefits for developing nations as they don't need to build out big centralised grids.
Accelerating solar/wind+storage could have a bigger impact on the developing areas in e.g. Africa, as if their choice is between coal and nuclear, they may be more likely to go for coal as it's just much simpler for a nation that's not as advanced.
Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.