Spent nuclear fuel, sometimes called waste, is actually a resource that next generation reactors will be able to tap - both for energy and uncommon element feedstock. Just like shale used to be "garbage" until the tech to make it useful was developed, spent fuel will be seen as waste until we can make it useful. Letting this very manageable amount of waste sit in repositories until we get our shit together is utterly reasonable. In the US, it would take just one facility to deal with all 99 reactor waste streams.
I don't think we need to spend money and energy to transmute it by theses questionable laser schemes. Accelerator driven transmutation of waste was shown the dustbin a few decades ago, hopefully this will have the same fate. Please don't ruin our valuable trash.
And no one ever talks about how we’ll handle solar waste. Has it changed and is no longer a problem going forward? Last I looked into it a few years back it was shaping up to be a very serious and toxic problem. They were very difficult to recycle, and full of lead, cadmium, and other nasty things. Something needs to be done with them but everyone was pretending they’re completely clean and safe.
I mention this all the time to coworkers who blindly believe solar is a perfect technology. It is really, really bad - especially the old stuff with all these REE's and extremely low efficiency. I am pretty upset that California now REQUIRES solar for new construction. It really feels we should have waited for the efficiency/cleanliness/recycling to mature a lot before that.
solar panels actively reduce CO2 emissions every day they are in use. They only pollute if they are dumped irresponsibly after their ~15 year service life. why would it be good to forego something that reduces emissions now, in order to develop recycling for something that won't be discarded until 15 years?
I don't think the implication was that there is no data out there. I think it's more about the popular conversation. I have this same problem all the time when I discuss this topic with people. It's very common for people to respond quickly about nuclear with "but what about the waste". To which I typically respond "what about the solar waste". The problem is, the question is generally only applied to one side while the other side gets a pass.
Spent fuel is only a part of it though. There is also tubes, piping, tools... Basically, components that are used for maintenance and are now effectively useless.
And sand from sandblasting of painted metal to remove contaminants. There are tons and tons of very slightly radioactive sand that needs a place to live.
> That's just hope. How convenient not having to deal with the mess! To me, it sounds like a religion.
Er, no this is demonstrably false. France recycles >98% of its spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors. This isn't fantasy, this is already existing technology. It's not as profitable at the moment which is why few countries recycle waste but it is absolutely something that could be done in the future.
It's not like rising CO2 levels, and this comparison is intellectually dishonest in the extreme. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere levels impact the environment, spent nuclear fuel buried underground does not. The possibility of contamination is either nullified by storing waste in areas already contaminated by nuclear testing, or by burying it miles underground.
I think there are important differences. We know that wastes has energy (otherwise they would not radiate), there are stored in a well specified area.
Unfortunately nuclear energy had a very bad PR for past 50 years, as a result nobody wanted to do any searcher in areas related to it).
It seems that it is slightly better now, environmental organizations at least are not trying to occupy nuclear reactors, unfortunately still they are pushing wind farms and solar farms, even though they cannot be usable on a massive scale without efficient way to store energy surplus.
> nuclear energy had a very bad PR for past 50 years
There is not a positive way to tell people that will be forced to quit their homes, workplaces and properties when nuclear problems eventually arose but hide information or lie systematically about it does not help, neither does the "see no evil/ what could happen?/ but nobody died / your cancer is not my fault" permanent defensive stance deployed again and again.
Nuclear energy sector worked hard to earn the current mistrust
> There is not a positive way to tell people that will be forced to quit their homes, workplaces and properties when nuclear problems eventually arose ...
That is an enormous problem, but the problem there is that governments aren't being held accountable for forcing people out of their homes.
The Fukashima evacuation debatabley caused ~3 orders of magnitude more deaths than the Fukushima nuclear disaster ([0] see the sidebar for 2,000:1 figure and the opening paragraphs for the debatable part).
When the cure is that much worse than the disease, we have to ask why we are forcing people to evacuate.
Whenever the government enacts a policy there are the potential for statistical deaths. Approve a coal plant? Statistical deaths. Change safety standards? Statistical deaths. Drop speed limits? Statistical deaths. We can cope with some unidentifiable people being worse off. It happens all the time. The responses to nuclear risks are not only irrational, they are out of line with how we treat all other physical and chemical hazards.
Statistical illness and deaths from nuclear are not worse than any other health issue. This is a fantastic time to use the science to make decisions, and it isn't at all obvious to what standard the exclusion zones are being managed. When the gap in damage done by the response and the crisis is that large there is a lot of room for questions to be asked (I wish I spoke Japanese so I could look up some primary reports on the subject).
It's more than hope, it's engineering. Future generations don't need to figure anything out, because the last two generations already did.
The Integral Fast Reactor was a reality in 1994, including a reprocessing scheme and inherent safety, when congress cut its funding. It's not my favorite reactor. My favorite, the molten chloride fast reactor, was theoretically investigated in 1972, including its potential for transmutation of actinides (excellent), I-129, Tc-99 (both good) and even Sr-90 and Cs-137 (both rather pointless).
What could go wrong and in fact did go wrong is politics. That's what prevents the practical investigations.
In your analysis, have you included the required base-load generation systems required when renewables aren't generating (night time, no wind) or the required storage systems (which actually don't exist) to time shift the energy supply?
It depends on what period of time you are trying to cover for. Yes there are solutions today that work for short periods of time, but as renewables increase as a percentage of generation capacity, the more storage you need. Grid-level battery storage for large periods of time is unproven and crazy expensive if you just extrapolate from smaller solutions.
In your analysis, have you included the required base-load generation systems required when renewables aren't generating (night time, no wind) or the required storage systems to time shift the energy supply?
I would add that as renewables get cheaper, there will also come a point at which that will also lower the price of fossil fuels. At present, demand for fossil fuels exceeds supply. If/when renewables cover that demand, the demand portion of the price will fall.
It's politics that prevents research into improved nuclear, and it's politics that prevents the waste problem from being solved. Politics, namely the structure of licensing fees, is also the reason why NPPs come in one size only, which is "hyuge", and why everything used in an NPP is much more expensive than the same part used in a gas fired plant.
Meanwhile, my home country is phasing out "expensive" nuclear and building up "cheap, easy" renewables, and electricity gets more expensive every year.
I agree that cost is likely a factor; but not so much renewable cost as cheaply available natural gas due to fracking which changes the economics of every other energy source; including nuclear and renewables.
That's how most of the power plant waste in the US is "handled" right now, because it's so far been politically impossible to agree on long-term storage and transportation. It's an inferior solution, though. There are security issues, and many points of failure for environmental damage. It's particularly problematic when plants are decommissioned and the waste is still stuck there requiring indefinite security and storage facilities for an otherwise-defunct plant. We'd be better off with all of it in one secure and safe facility, pending a better solution in the future.
Its been done since days of nuclear plants. And no - there are no security issues, since as the name indicates, its a “waste”; you can’t make a bomb out of it and spreading it would not be as efficient as some type of gas that you would have easier access to. I imagine actually officials would love just to give away that nuclear waste to ISIS, preferrably deliver it to them for further handling by their peers, without gloves of course ;)
You're ignoring the legitimate safety concerns over nuclear waste. It's not about an explosive nuclear device. It's about the risk of contamination, particularly of water supplies, and the psychological impact that radiation has (rational or not). There are both security concerns (preventing intentional misuse) and safety concerns (transportation accidents, leaky permanent storage). If it were harmless, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
I agree, and objectively there are pollutants that are far worse than nuclear waste, both in actual harm potential and in ubiquity, but there's a strong fear factor about radiation that drives all the NIMBYism. It's rational to be concerned, but not rational to be concerned to the level people are. Alas, irrational people still vote. Maybe they can be distracted with a train full of vaccines.
I wasn't afraid of terrorists or people making bombs, I'm not American. I was worried about a truck or train crashing and showering an area in nuclear waste.
> The cask systems are designed to handle a wide range of severe environmental conditions, including earthquakes, flooding, extreme temperatures, and tornadoes. This includes objects that may impact the cask at high speed, such as during a tornado.
I suppose that means they withstand a car crash too.
Depleted uranium is used in artillery munitions by the US since the early '90s. It is, allegedly, a cause of increased cancer rates in NATO personnel and others involved in conflicts were the US deployed heavy artillery.
If you cannot think of security issues around nuclear waste, you have no business discussing nuclear waste and you are doing your "cause" a disservice.
Uranium is also toxic. The personnel that used DU ammo has mainly lung diseases due to Uranium dust. Metal toxicity has nothing to do with radioactivity.
> there are no security issues, since as the name indicates its a “waste”; you can’t make a bomb out of it
Without applying a lot of imagination, I can think out about some non trivial security issues in the idea of adding deplected uranium waste to a bomb as shrapnel. Definitely a bomb can be made with this stuff.
Depleted uranium is uranium that isn’t as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium. That’s what the depleted means. It’s so dangerous that they use it in hospitals as X-ray shielding.
Paper, your clothing, or even your dead skin cells is enough to block what little radioactivity is present in DU. What is dangerous about DU is that it’s a heavy metal (and pretty toxic). It’s not easy to work, so even forming it into bomb parts would kill more ISIS members than using it would kill the general public.
All modeling fails, because it's worthless until proven otherwise. It's future breakthroughs - JFK speech at Rice, just replace space with nuclear: " Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority--even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us."
The article doesn't go into technical details, but it appears this boils down to a compact proton accelerator. Those protons could be smashed into heavy metal atoms, which will release high energy neutrons. Those neutrons could in turn be used to irradiate nuclear waste, transmuting it.
The first problem with that idea is that stable atoms would be transmuted, too. So unless the waste is separated chemically (aka reprocessed), irradiating it with neutrons tends to make matters worse. In some cases, notable cesium, isotopic separation seems necessary. But if you assume reprocessing, you might as well stuff the components to be irradiated into a reactor, where the actinides act as fuel and some waste products will transmute away.
The second problem is the ridiculously low efficiency of such an accelerator system. Carlo Rubbia has been talking about the concept (ADS, Accelerator Driven System, also called Energy Amplifier) for something like 20 years, and even he only envisions supplying comparatively few neutrons to a subcritical reactor. But a barely subcritical reactor isn't all that different from a critical reactor, except you can turn it off by turning off the accelerator instead of by moving a control rod.
In short, this is another guy with a solution (the accelerator) looking for a suitable problem.
(For the record, continuous recycling of actinides is a good idea that turns "the waste problem" from an unsolvable million-year problem into a manageable 500 year problem. Transmutation of iodine and technetium may be a good idea, too, because these are the only long term radionuclides that would leach into water.)
I wonder what our attitude towards landfills would be if they were described the same way that nuclear waste storage facilities are.
> no country can claim to have a comprehensive solution for dealing with its toxic waste.
> more than 60 years after getting into nuclear energy, [France] still has no definitive way to cope with it.
Sentences like these imply that there's dangerous waste just sitting sitting around while officials scratch their heads about what to do.
We do have comprehensive solutions. We build giant concrete wells and just put the waste there, problem solved.
This solution seems to be accepted as reasonable for garbage via landfills, but for nuclear waste its somehow treated as a workaround until we find some other magical way to get rid of it.
"For Cedric Villani, a French lawmaker and the winner of the Fields Medal—the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics—that’s no reason to give up. “What Mourou is really after is the accelerator that the laser creates,” he said. “It’s far-off, but why not?” "
Or we could just use that valuable fuel and put it into nuclear reactors to make energy and other useful stuff. But that seem to be a totally crazy idea.
Reprocessing is its own nightmare and, I think, only France tries to do it. All of these processes (the "uranium cycle") are terribly polluting in their waste outputs and dangerous places for the people who have to work there and live near them.
France's power is cheap by European standard [0]. So there isn't an economic issue.
Going by order-of-magnitude of input materials, if it is an environmental nightmare it is still going to be better than the mining process for raw materials going in to solar panels and whatever else. AFAIK they all use rare earths that get mined in China and refined with some horrible process. Pure volumes of solar panels suggest the incidental environmental damage will be worse from, eg, trampled grass and land disturbed.
So it isn't an environmental or an economic nightmare relative to the alternatives. In what sense is it a nightmare? It seems to be working for France.
> France's power is cheap by European standard [0].
Because France heavily subsidized its nuclear infrastructure. They also have a big problem right now because most plants are old and have to be decomissioned,
and building new plants is not economical.[0] Energy from nuclear power plants is pretty expensive sans subsidies, not just in France.
Just as an example of the live cycle costs: An old plant in my country is in the process of deconstruction - for over 25 years now. The company created as a legal umbrella for the job employs over 500 people since its creation. No end in sight.
Ah, yes, decommissioning, that dirty little word no one in the nuclear industry likes to talk about. Decommissioning can take decades and cost billions, usually passed on the ratepayers. These costs are never mentioned when the industry discusses its economics.
I'm also getting kind of tired of the "solar pollutes, too" argument. Yes, solar pollutes. So does making PC processors. But neither of those activities create radioactive materials which can poison people from a distance and persist in our environment for thousands of years. There is simply no comparison between poisonous heavy metals and radioactive nucleotides.
There is one aspect in which non-radioactive heavy metals are worse: since they are stable elements they must be stored away and guarded forever, not just for a limited number of years.
Heavy metals can't hurt you unless you ingest them. Proximity or handling doesn't hurt people. Radioactive materials, however, vomit particles everywhere in an untraceable way. Radioactivity cannot be removed from contaminated materials without transferring the radioactivity to something else. This is the key difference. Heavy metals can also be filtered from water and segregated from other substances, while radioactivity cannot.
Renewables are way cheaper without subsidies. Just compare how nuclear got financed in the 1950s compared to what flows into renewables in recent decades, it's an order of magnitude smaller. And those subsidies don't include nuclear plant decomissioning, the costs of which dwarf everything else. The plant in my example cost over a billion already, and isn't even finished. A single plant.
Also those per kilowatt numbers in the chart don't mean much without comparing total consumption per household. I pay way more than the most expensive example in the charts, at 30 cents per kilowatt, yet our monthly total is only 80 Euros for a 5 person household.
It's like the US doesn't already have a number of remote areas like Hanford, Oak Ridge, Idaho Falls, the Savannah River Site, Rocky Flats, etc. that are already set up (and somewhat contaminated already) for handling this sort of material and process. In reality it's a political nightmare, not a pollution one.
Hanford and Rocky Flats are two of the most polluted places on Earth. Hanford has polluted the Columbia River, a tragedy in itself.
Nuclear is like the insolent child who refuses to clean up his room. There isn't any cleanup, really. The waste keeps piling up (usually in something that looks like a swimming pool). It must be attended to by humans for decades or centuries. And the uranium cycle leaves its dirty underwear all over our planet.
Thus reprocessing - if Hanford's government contractors could get over the hump and get the vitrification plant online, it'd be a lot easier to clean up the waste that's interred in the solid dump and tank farms. And if we didn't have state governors screaming about "No atoms and radiation in my state!" and not allowing passage of waste through their state in properly designed containment and transfer casks, we'd be able to get that waste to a facility where it can be made safer.
The radiation plume under Hanford is not as terrible as certain sources make it to be, the same with the contamination of the river. The area around the reservation itself has led to a recovered and strong population of many endangered indigenous animals in the area as well.
Regarding Rocky Flats, again, not as terrible as many make it out to be. Once you factor in living at high elevation there's not a huge increase in overall exposure.
An important consideration that comes into this is that most of these were weapons production facilities (dealing with purifying and handling some of the nastiest material around).
The waste from properly designed and operated power reactors is a much cleaner and much easier to contain process. Condemning an entire avenue of clean energy (most of the fuel needs for a century+ which have already been extracted and refined) because the work done on the technology in the 40's-60's (when we were still figuring out how awful some of the waste is), is not conducive to progress.
Source: Field engineering on projects at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Yucca Mountain
I just don't get the problem, like at all. Dig a 5-6km deep shaft(we already have the technology for that depth, no issues), put the waste at the bottom. Keep drilling shafts until all waste is burried. That's far below the depth of any water sources, and unless you bury it near a tectonic fault, it's not making its way back through geological processes for eons. Like, can someone explain to me why we're not already doing that?
The deepest mine in the world is 4km deep. There are only a dozen or so more than 2km deep. Going down 5-6km may be possible, but definitely not with "no issues".
You don't need to drill tunnels for people to walk in - just a borehole wide enough to fit a cylinder filled with nuclear waste.
In fact, this very idea was already researched and test holes drilled - but of course was cancelled due to public opposition, even though we could get rid of our nuclear waste almost overnight using this method. Typical.
As per your Wikipedia article, current technology limits the borehole to 50 cm. That gets us 500 to 1000 m^3 worth of storage per borehole, assuming the lower 1km to 2km is used for storage.
From this[1] page, as far as I understand, on a global scale the current amount of nuclear waste in need of such storage is 482000 m^3. So roughly 500-1000 boreholes to store the current waste inventory.
Anyone got any ideas on how much it costs to drill a 5-6km 50cm hole?
As others have pointed out, most issues are political, not technical. There are already places which would be perfect(deep mine shafts surrounded by salt deposits, so they are literally impenetrable as salt is self-sealing) but the countries/states they are in object to keeping the waste as some sort of ideological issue.
What I want to know is whether there is a technical issue with what I am suggesting.
You just literally proposed to dig a 5-6m deep hole and assumed that would be enough...not even salt mines are enough. See Germany where there is suddenly groundwater seeking into a salt mine full of radioactive waste. A salt mine that was considered safe once. Now they are looking for years now to find a new safe spot and Germany stopped producing new waste. Still they have those problems. Tax payers are paying for this search. They'll also pay for the retrieval and they are paying for pumping out of the water.
There are many issues there obviously. This is not some easy thing you try to dig in there. It'll be there for a very long time.
My argument was also not aimed at the depth but at the unreflected "just dig a hole and hide it there" idea which reminds me of the dumping of nuclear waste into the sea.
Well, the clear difference is that stuff dumped into the sea will make it to the surface sooner or later. Containers will eventually leak and the dangerous materials will get into water, which then will carry it all over the world. Waste dumped into a 6km deep borehole is not coming out ever. I've made another comment above with a link to the wiki article about project deep borehole - where exactly this was researched and found viable for long-term storage of radioactive material. But was of course stopped by......public protests.
But at least we know were it was or came from and that pretty soon. Hiding the stuff in a deep hole and probably be forgotten before it becomes safe is just irresponsible. I would even prefer that you keep it in one of the dumps on the surface in case we do come up with an economical way to reprocess or "zapp" it in 10, 50, 100 years. At least we know where it is.
I won't even touch geological issues that may come up. A few decades ago we wouldn't know that we would be able to cause earthquakes because we're shooting chemicals into the ground. Who knows what will be in 100 years or in 200?
I mean, if there is a geological process that can bring stuff up from 6km depth then we're all dead anyway - the layer of impermeable rock above it is not called that for no reason. And with the half life of some of the elements in the waste as long as 100k years yes, it's ideal if it's buried and forgotten where no one can get to it. Irresponsible is storing this stuff on the surface - if the civilization collapses and no one is there to look after these containers they pose mortal danger to anyone finding them even in thousands of years. But no one is in danger from stuff quarter of the way from the Earth's mantle.
The irony here is that you already propose to disturb this layer. Even though the technology is pretty new. Despite that you already not only want to penetrate this layer, you want to drop radioactive waste in there.
Btw what about Countries like Japan. They can't do that for obvious reasons. Will the US take this waste? I mean, they will keep producing it. And what about the next country that comes along. I'm sure they can pay good because it won't be every country that can afford this procedure. What about the former soviet republics (currently already used as dump by France for example)? They can't afford that. Will the US take that too or will they pay for it? Maybe the EU because they are closer and are more afraid?
And yes I agree with you that it's irresponsible to store that on the surface. It's even more irresponsible to produce even more of it. But hiding it away in the hope that some later generation in the future will still remember where it is and not touch it, not do anything to the terrain around it or dig it up to misuse it is not only naive, it lacks imagination. You should read more SciFi. It teaches you to think in time frames that are relevant here. Looking back at our own short history may help also.
But....we already do penetrate it, routinely. Oil and gas fields are below it more often than not. Punching a 50cm hole in impermeable rock does nothing to it.
As for other countries - again, just because Japan cannot do it doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing this altogether. They can store their waste on the surface until we come up with a better plan. But countries like US can, and US has enough nuclear waste to fill 800 of these boreholes already - it's definitely worth doing for them, even if Japan can't. The answer to your question would be ultimately political, and yes, I imagine Japan would pay someone else to have it disposed of. But that's just a guess.
And I do read a lot of Sci-Fi, thank you for your concern. I just don't think you realize what sort of depths we are talking about - there is no geological process bringing material up from these depths to the surface. When we dig to that depth we literally find material buried for millions of years. You'd be talking about rupturing of the Earth to a point where a new mountain range rivaling the Alps would be created - and if that happens then like I said - we're all dead anyway.
As for the lack of imagination - quite the contrary! The mantle in the shallowest spot is only 7km below the surface - and the temperatures there can be as high as 4000C. That's enough to melt nuclear fuel, in which case it would just become part of the Earths crust forever - and it's not like you're polluting the Earth with filthy waste that someone might dig up at some point - the composition of the Earth at that point is already radioactive itself, dropping our nuclear waste into it is not just a proverbial but a literal drop in the ocean. Just like sending this stuff into the sun doesn't make the sun any worse off - the Earth's mantle is already an extremely dangerous place where no Sci-Fi would even suggest digging or future human activity of any kind. In that sense it's a good place for our most dangerous waste, since putting it there doesn't really make it any worse off.
And finally - as you noticed, whatever we do is irresponsible. In my mind, keeping it as we do right now is more irresponsible than burrying it in a way that makes it completely safe even if a comet struck our planet and civilization was completely wiped out. Whoever survives that won't accidentally run into steel containers full of death pebbles. And if civilization emerges that is somehow capable of not only digging but also retrieving material from close to the Earth's mantle, then that civilisation will understand what radioactivity is - no one will ever dig this stuff out "by accident". It's just the sensible option right now, while keeping it around isn't.
What nightmare? Reprocessing is a net cleanup compared with letting the waste sit. I have some nuclear engineering background and honestly I don’t know what you’re referring to.
Reprocessing isn't clean. It creates its own waste which is worse than the spent fuel you started out with. Reprocessing plants (like every part of the uranium cycle) are dangerous places to work and live near.
The UK still has a site too but yes there's only a handful globally. The former site at Dounreay in Scotland used to leak particles on a regular basis which were all kinds of bad news for anything living that came into contact with them or perhaps one kind of bad news: horrible death.
This is wrong. There are many ways of reprocessing and many are far better then the limited once used so far. Its just that we haven't advanced in terms of nuclear technology in the last 40 years.
We will never solve any of these problems if we don't embrace nuclear technology.
> The idea is to transmute this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms which don’t have the problem of radioactivity. What you have to do is to change the makeup of the nucleus.
Ok, but what exactly is it transmuting the atom to?
Here's the list of the 7 long-lived fission products [1]. The nastiest appears to be Caesium-135 [2]. If you zap this with a proton it becomes Barium-136, which is a stable element (the half-life is so long that it cannot be estimated; probably it is in the trillions of years).
I also wonder about that. If it transmutes into the natural decay products, energy must come out, and, depending on the size of that laser/proton gun, we could (although I think that’s highly unlikely) even be talking about a way to make small nuclear bombs.
Also, will the end result still be energy positive? Even if the transmutation doesn’t add energy to the nucleus, that can be problematic, as that laser will need to be powered.
And of course, there’s the question of ‘aim’: can we really target individual atoms well enough to ‘hit’ them exactly once? (this might be fairly easy if the process requires specific energies that the radioactive atoms, once ‘hit’ no longer are sensitive to)
It depends on the decay mode. Through beta decay they usually go up (eg. Cs135 › Ba135) one spot in the periodic table (straight line in the diagram). Through alpha decay they go down as shown in the diagram. What the diagram represents is natural decay of Uranium which isn't "waste". The long lived fission products in the GP link are more or less of an issue.
I think the best option would be to accelerate the decay. That should be relatively easy (i.e. has a net energy output) and massively reduces the radioactivity.
Yes, but short-term high-radioactivity material is easy to do with, as is the super-long term low radioactivity material. The problem is the stuff in the middle which has a long enough half life that it's hard to store safely for that long but enough radioactivity to be dangerous. So if you can turn that stuff into either of the previous two catagories it's a win.
Radioactive materials are dangerous because their subatomic makeup is unstable, meaning they emit dangerous particles as the atom degrades from the inside. So it would seem that, in order to fix that, you'd have to re-populate the innards of the atom with enough protons to make it stable again.
It's worth noting that transmutation is definitely possible. The alchemists of old would be thrilled to know that we can, in fact, make gold from base metals (in a nuclear reactor). The problem with that is that the cost of doing so is worth more than the gold could be sold for.
Yes - you can burn it for energy, which is already done in many countries. With good enough filters it's the best solution to plastic waste that we have.
There are multiple ways. Grinding it up and then using a plasma furnace to break down the molecules is a proven way to reduce a waste stream to component elements.
This is another of many "silver bullet" proposals to reverse the environmental damage caused by Western civilization. Most of they won't work and will have unintended consequences. As always, prevention is the best cure.
Maybe so, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN, especially about grand divisive topics? It leads to much less specific and much less interesting discussion.
This is about nuclear waste that came from power plants that massively helped the amount of greenhouse gases we emit (cause the alternatives were fossil fuelled plants) so I’m not sure what you mean exactly
Everything we do is about trade-offs. Solar panels have toxic chemicals, too (Cadmium compounds, Hexaflouroethane, Lead [1]). Wind involves rare-earth metals like Neodymium which are produced in mines that resemble toxic war zones in far-flung regions of China [2]. None of us will ever exist on this earth without leaving fingerprints. It's not about 'zero' it's about 'better' one step at a time. Defeatism and refusing to accept anything short of perfection is a good way to get nowhere.
For reference 1 ton of Thorium produces as much electricity as 200 tons of Uranium or 3.5 megatons of coal -- which would you rather use?
> Yeah but most nuclear waste came from the US, UK, France and Russia.
That's merely a short question of time. China will end up #1 on that list. The US only has 98 nuclear reactors in total. The UK has a mere 15. China already has 45 operating, with more than a dozen under construction. In less than 15 years they'll surpass the US figure. Nuclear power will be used by more nations in the future, rather than fewer. It rather emphasizes the importance to all nations of waste disposal breakthroughs.
My understanding is that Thorium reactors are far less likely to produce transuranic elements with long half-lives, and less waste in general (two order of magnitude). [1] However, it does in fact require some fissile material such as recycled plutonium, so the two reactor kinds can work in conjunction to yield a net drop in long-half-life nuclear wastes. [2]
Here's the authoritative summary of the capabilities of transmutation and partitioning [1].
Thorium reactors do indeed produce fewer transuranics, since Thorium-232 is 6 AMUs lower down the chain than Uranium-238. Used nuclear fuel is generally 95% U-238, 1% Pu and minor actinides, and 4% fission products. If you do chemical separation to partition the transuranics you can then try to burn them in a variety of reactors. In slow-neutron reactors using Thorium or Uranium fuel, they'll burn ok if they're well partitioned. In fast-neutron reactors, you can burn them with out as aggressive of partitioning. So it's probably easier and cheaper to reprocess UNF for fast reactors. They're far less sensitive to neutron-poisons and fertile species (e.g. fission products and U-238).
Any breeder reactor will make 2 orders of magnitude less TOTAL waste than a non-breeder. Thorium can breed with slow neutrons (which requires continuous removal of the neutron poisons via online chemistry, usually requiring fluid fuel). Uranium can breed with fast neutrons in solid fuel or in fluid fuel. Note I say total waste, not high level waste. High-level waste is proportional only to the burnup (fraction of the fuel you put in that gets fissioned) and doesn't include any process waste from before that (e.g. enrichment or reprocessing waste like U-238).
In a fast neutron uranium-fueled reactor, you can transmute the hell out of all actinides, leading to waste that decays to low levels in a few hundred years. See the link below.
Thorium's only true physical advantage is that it alone allows breeding with slow neutrons, which can be done with low fissile densities. Other than that, Uranium and Thorium have pretty similar characteristics and capabilities in advanced reactors.
“A radionuclide is an atom that has excess nuclear energy, making it unstable.”
This seemed like a vague definition, didn’t sit well with my memory of high school chemistry and physics. Turns out it’s the first sentence on Wikipedia:
It's accurate and not really vague at all, it's just not highschool level physics. I'll try to explain it in layman terms.
Imagine that you have a bunch of free particles that are not connected to each other in any way, and are far enough from each other that any interaction between them (such as electromagnetic fields) is negligible. Ignoring their own masses, the energy of the system is zero. Now imagine these same particles, bound together into a single atom.
Obviously, for the atom to be stable, you don't want it to be able to fall apart on a whim. You want a system where you have to input a lot of energy for the atom to fall apart. But as we just said, the state where the constituent particles are separate is the default, zero-energy state.
Therefore, a stable state where you have to add energy to reach the default free state must actually have negative energy! To be specific, the binding energy is negative while the energy related to the mass of the particles, i.e. e=mc2, is positive. The atom is actually lighter than the sum of its parts!
An atom that doesn't have negative binding energy, i.e. has "excess energy", has nothing binding the constituent particles together, since they have more than enough energy to go run free on their own. Therefore it is unstable.
Elements with a small enough binding energy, small enough that random fluctuations can overcome it and make the atoms fall apart, are what we call radioactive elements.
Your periodic reminder that - despite the propaganda campaign run by nuclear advocates to make it seem like being anti-nuclear is to be anti-science - nuclear power remains massively expensive and even less safe than people think.
Here's the most comprehensive peer-reviewed survey around:
We summarize the results of a recent statistical analysis of 216 nuclear energy accidents and incidents (events). The dataset is twice as large as the previous best available. We employ cost in US dollars as a severity measure to facilitate the comparison of different types and sizes of events, a method more complete and consistent that the industry-standard approach. Despite significant reforms following past disasters, we estimate that, with 388 reactors in operation, there is a 50% chance that a Fukushima event (or more costly) occurs every 60–150 years. We also find that the average cost of events per year is around the cost of the construction of a new plant. This dire outlook necessitates post-Fukushima reforms that will truly minimize extreme nuclear power risks. Nuclear power accidents are decreasing in frequency, but increasing in severity.
The problem is that people who are anti-nuclear are often also anti-coal and anti-fossil-fuel and anti-everything-that-actually-sustains-current-human-level-of-development.
For those people, it has to be "clean renewables", with the speculation being that technology will fix all the issues with it. That ignores that maybe technology can also fix the issues with nuclear - and more readily so.
This is really not compelling. If you can't provide any more compelling evidence for nuclear vs clean energy improvements, why not gamble on the currently safer/cleaner bet?
It's not a bet or a gamble. It's always a mix. Renewables other than geothermal and solar-thermal + molten salts cannot currently provide base load power. They have something like 0.2..0.5 capacity factor, meaning that 50 to 80% of the operational lifetimes of the power generation facilities are spent idling. Those two that can provide base load power that are very location specific (volcanic area or desert). So rather than mix coal with renewables it's preferable to mix nuclear with renewables since it's much cleaner.
Hydro can also provide base-load. Especially when used as storage for overproducing intermittent renewables.
It is still highly location specific though.
Might there be value in efficient energy transport using high voltage DC? There is probably a lot less fluctuation in power supply and usage if you sum up over larger areas (especially east-west, as you average out time-of-day effects)
Everything else apart from solar is generating AC. You'd need expensive converters and more expensive switching equipment with arc supression in order to transport DC. HVDC is mainly used for underwater cables because it's more efficient to transport DC than AC by cable. We'd probably benefit by interconnecting these cables coming from offshore wind farms and imports with parallel land based HVDC infrastucture.
I was thinking of cables like NorNed for moving surplusses around. Especially if such a cable runs east-west and can ease some of the temporal effects due to both people's living pattern, and solar intensity.
Yes, that's what Renewable electricity superhighways in the Wikipedia link basically refers to. But it's a bit ahead of its time and there are still challenges to overcome and more renewable capacity to be built in order for HVDC ground based networks to be viable economically. I’ m sure we'll see it being built in the next 20 or 30 years.
Don't read the clearly partisan sources uncritically, they are generally misleading.
"The north German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein are already operating on 100% net renewable energy, mostly wind. The ‘net’ indicates trading with each other and their neighbours. They do not rely on baseload power stations."
These rather sparsely populated states combined make up for only 4.5 million of Germany's 83 million population. Germany still supplies 50% of its power with fossil fuels, of which coal makes up 35%.
It is also completely misleading to say that these states are 100% "net renewable". They're part of the national grid. Perhaps they're the places where disproportionately many wind turbines are deployed (e.g. on the coast).
Think about it, if Germany knew a way to fix the problem of base load, why haven't they implemented it? It couldn't be a problem of financing, they spent a huge amount of money on subsidizing renewables already.
"In 2014 the state of South Australia had 39% of annual electricity consumption from renewable energy (33% wind + 6% solar) and, as a result, the state’s base-load coal-fired power stations are being shut down as redundant. For several periods the whole state system has operated reliably on a combination of renewables and gas with only small imports from the neighbouring state of Victoria."
Same story, Australia nationally relies on 30% coal to support its base load. To even out peaks from renewables, natural gas is used. The idea that the "base load requirement" is a myth is in itself a myth. If you use the right numbers, they don't add up.
> It is also completely misleading to say that these states are 100% "net renewable". They're part of the national grid. Perhaps they're the places where disproportionately many wind turbines are deployed (e.g. on the coast).
> Think about it, if Germany knew a way to fix the problem of base load, why haven't they implemented it?
Because of politics, money and lobbying. There are jobs in the coal industry especially in the east germany where Fascism is getting powerful. You don't want to lose those votes. There are also long running contracts with energy suppliers that force Germany to pay for coal plants who are not producing power at all. Wind turbines have to be turned off because the sparse power lines infrastructure is clogged with dirty power. Adding to that, there is a movement of people who are afraid of power lines nearby...and yes, there are many and they are slowing down the expansion of north-south infrastructure.
> Same story, Australia nationally relies on 30% coal to support its base load.
Yeah same story, Australia relies on their coal industry. Who wants to tell the voter that they'll cut those jobs and coal is being mined everywhere throughout the continent.
> The idea that the "base load requirement" is a myth is in itself a myth. If you use the right numbers, they don't add up.
As you have seen, the reasons why renewables are not even further and even more relevant are beyond the technically related reasons. Most of them are political and this is surely no reason to turn back to nuclear. Especially because the growth is there and it's unstoppable:
> They are at the coast and it's not misleading since they produce much more and even have to turn off turbines.
It is clearly misleading to point at an island of green energy when there's coal all around it.
> Because of politics, money and lobbying. There are jobs in the coal industry especially in the east germany where Fascism is getting powerful.
That still doesn't add up. Just because you want to keep coal jobs alive doesn't mean you have to burn it at home. You can just export it, coal is valuable. The only reason you need subsidies is because extraction is too expensive when done by German labor.
> Wind turbines have to be turned off because the sparse power lines infrastructure is clogged with dirty power.
That's an "interesting" way to frame the high volatility of wind energy against the low volatility of other methods, when having to buffer that volatility is the main problem.
> As you have seen, the reasons why renewables are not even further and even more relevant are beyond the technically related reasons.
I haven't "seen" anything. No numbers, no calculations. I'm sure there's some impact of coal lobbying, but that can't be what prevents the development of alternatives. Germany has blown an incredible amount of subsidies into wind energy, so now you're telling me there's none left to solve its problems because of coal?
> It is clearly misleading to point at an island of green energy when there's coal all around it.
...which is the reason why they have to turn off turbines. And the reason why they keep this coal running is because nobody want's to kill jobs when there are elections incoming and the right wing party is on the run in the region.
> You can just export it, coal is valuable.
No, it's not. It's already heavy subsidized and coal in Poland or even further east is so cheap, it's still cheaper if you carry it through half of Europe. Most of the mines in Germany has been closed down because of this even before the environmental movement got popular. How do you not know this?
> That's an "interesting" way to frame the high volatility of wind energy against the low volatility of other methods, when having to buffer that volatility is the main problem.
No it's not. If I have cheap renewable energy but can't transfer it because I have to pay for coal, it's clogging the infrastructure. So just what I wrote.
> I haven't "seen" anything. No numbers, no calculations.
It's not like those are the 90s. You didn't even know how cheap coal is. Maybe you should invest some time googling. The information is out there.
> that can't be what prevents the development of alternatives. Germany has blown an incredible amount of subsidies into wind energy, so now you're telling me there's none left to solve its problems because of coal?
What are you talking about?
https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?source=ren-share&... This is the development of alternatives and it's not stopping or anything like that. Coal power plants are being turned off and there is already a deadline for them all. There is not even theoretical space for nuclear there.
Come on, coal is not clogging your infrastructure. Coal plants can be fired at will (3 hrs hot stratup, 6% of full load per minute ramp up) when there's demand. Gas turbine fired plants are event better in this regard (quicker startup and/or ramp up). There's no point in firing up coal plants if you already have renrewable electricity in the infrastructure. Which means that they're only fired when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. 40% nuclear in the mix would definitely fix that. Just look at France's power mix. They have legally capped the nuclear power in the mix based on the premise that they'll go from >70% nuclear now to about 50% in 2035 and replace the rest with renewables. It looks like a much more sensible option. Germany uses something like 47% coal and 13% gas [2]. It's energy mix is much more dirtier, even though half of it is renewables.
> Come on, coal is not clogging your infrastructure. Coal plants can be fired at will (3 hrs hot stratup, 6% of full load per minute ramp up) when there's demand.
Coal is clogging up the infrastructure...this is why wind generators have to be stopped. It's a very known fact here we even get it explained by power providers at the end of the year when they explain the bills and this is also the reason there are huge projects to expand the infrastructure. We even have to pay for coal plants which HAVE been turned off (especially in states which do not produce coal) because of the ongoing contracts.
We have coal plants which never have been turned on and the company which build it now tries to sue for money from the tax payer for all those Euros lost or at least to cover the costs to remove it again...and no those lignite-fired plants are not that easy to fire up/down. That's why they run through even in East Germany where there is more then enough renewable energy.
And why should I look at Frances power mix (calling it "mix" is ridiculous...)? It's dangerous remains of a dead technology. Germany can only hope Fessenheim will finally be turned off before it falls apart and Luxembourg can hope that Cattenom doesn't eradicate it completely one day. Meanwhile Germany is exporting energy and has to turn off renewables after they dropped nuclear. There is no way back to that and only because France doesn't care about their nuclear waste (especially if it disappears in Sewersk),doesn't make it less of a problem. Germany will have to deal with that for decades and millennia to come even without a single new plant. Nobody wants the shit back here and all over the world. You need to finally face the facts. Meanwhile renewables grow further and further.
My impression is that nuclear works right now and that the risk is overblown, relative to all the other risks we incur.
Renewables are not working right now (see Germany) and they aren't necessarily cleaner, considering that all this infrastructure needs to be produced with ordinary industrial processes.
Of course it's not an either-or, renewables can make more sense in some places and not so much in others.
> Its clear that its not at an acceptable level of safety.
I am no nuclear safety inspector, but I would argue that there's large variance in terms of safety in different nuclear installations. Not putting a nuclear plant next to a Tsunami-coast would be a major factor here.
> Large scale disasters like Fukushima can't be hand waived away.
Neither can the Bhopal disaster, yet we continue to engage in large-scale chemical production. It needs to be put into perspective.
> What am I supposed to see from Germany? They're the largest electricity exporter in Europe.
In terms of kilowatts, perhaps, but not economically. Energy prices in Germany are almost double those in France. Germany exports a lot of surplus wind energy, sometimes for negative prices just to keep the powerlines from overloading. Lack of wind needs to be compensated by dirty coal (50% of their energy mix) or import of (likely nuclear) energy from neighboring countries.
Without coal (or nuclear from the neighbors) the system would collapse. There are no means of storing the wind energy in a remotely economical fashion on the horizon and there are no obvious alternatives to wind (at least for Germany).
Germany is lucky they're neighbours with France, which has >70% nuclear in its power generation mix. They are planning to reduce this to 50% by 2035 and cap nuclear power in the mix, however it's not very clear what they will replace it with (renewables but no details given).
Yeah they are so lucky...the happiness regarding old and breaking nuclear reactors (Fessenheim & Cattenom) just behind the border is overwhelming.
Cattenom is especially great for Luxembourg as it's the only country on this planet which is threatened in it's entirety by a nuclear disaster from a single nuclear reactor.
Fessenheim is going to be closed down after Flamanville 3 comes online. Germany's alternatives to French nuclear power are either coal and power outage. Germany still imports more electricity from France than it exports:
There is so much wrong here, I'm not even sure if I should start answering to that. Why do you write this? You must be aware that it's easy to fact check. Are you desperate or really so heavy misinformed?
You should have seen through you charts that the small difference can't be related to the actual amount required in Germany. Germany sells more energy elsewhere...Much more: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/p... The main problem right now in Germany is that you don't have the transfer infrastructure to deliver the amounts of energy generated by renewables everywhere. https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie.htm?year=2019&month=... You also HAVE to let coal in even if you don't need it and turn renewables off because of standing contracts with the providers. Germany is still paying for coal plants that have been turned off because of this. This is the main reason why energy is so expensive in Germany. There are newly build coal power plants which will never run because nobody needs them. And the amount of renewables is rising: https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?source=ren-share&...
PS. there is also Gas but you don't seem to care about all that I guess because I can't imagine how one could overlook that.
There is not a single reason for Germany to turn to nuclear again. Its time has passed and no, Germany doesn't need Frances nuclear power...
Yes, I forgot about Russian gas. The US basically had to threaten the EU with tarrifs (hint: on vehicles, I wonder who's EU's biggest vehicle producer) if we don't import LPG from the US to reduce dependency on Russian gas. Norway, your other suppiler, isn't building any new capacity either.
Wait, your country is building coal plants in 2019? At least reconvert them to gas or oil.
Otherwise I agree that the difference is small. Your country is probably exporting for cents at a dollar during wind peaks and importing at night when France sells surplus nuclear energy at a discount. The issue with many variable renewables in the mix is that you have to build excess transport capacity which only gets used during peaks. Not to mention that solar has 0.2 max capacity factor and wind around 0.45 - the difference between that and 1 is idling.
> The US basically had to threaten the EU with tarrifs f we don't import LPG from the US to reduce dependency on Russian gas. Norway, your other suppiler, isn't building any new capacity either.
I don't get what you want to say with all that. Of course Norway is not expanding capacity. Why should they? Renewables are coming. Here and there. And if the US wants to deliver cheaper LPG, why shouldn't we buy it?
> Wait, your country is building coal plants in 2019? At least reconvert them to gas or oil.
You don't start building something like that the year before it's finished and no. There are no new coal plants planned. The exit from coal is planned and no the ones that have been finished last year or the year before and never been turned on will not be converted to gas or oil because nobody needs that too. How is it you don't get that? I gave you an overview over a whole years energy production in Germany. We're selling the stuff for cheap in masses.
> And if the US wants to deliver cheaper LPG, why shouldn't we buy it?
Because it requires building a terminal in Hamburg or another Baltic port and a distribution pipeline. It's easier to keep buying from Russia.
What you do not understand is how energy is being produced/sold. Supply has to meet demand at all times, otherwise energy is sold at a discount or lost. Pure end of the year statistics don't mean much.
We're doing both at the moment and what you don't understand is that if you have more then one source for the product you want and the producers really really want to sell it, you are in a better position then being depended on one source. Something that will surely be a risk with Russia being Russia.
The new regulations the EU will probably slam onto the project will also add to the good outcome. And all this for a technology that in the end will be and probably already is a bridge and backup between the old and new energy sources.
Whats your point exactly? Earthquakes and other natural disasters will continue to happen. Until catastrophic failure can be eliminated or the scope of the damage can be reduced, nuclear power will not be considered safe. Saying "ok that happened but it won't happen again" is simply not acceptable.
Sure, but people saying they don't want nuclear power in Germany "because of Fukishima" is absurd. No power plant is Germany is at a risk of tsunami or a major earthquake.
Should Japan be building nuclear power plants in areas which are at risk of both? Probably not. Should that be stopping countries like Germany fro building them? Also not. The same standard doesn't have to apply everywhere.
The cost of nuclear disaster in Fukushima was only a small part of the total cost. There were zero deaths caused by the accident but about 20 000 deaths from the whole disaster.
An infinity of them, as there are very few deaths attributable to Fukushima, whereas the coal generation plants spew pollution and radionuclides into the atmosphere which result in definitely attributable deaths.
Attribution is a hard thing. Moreover, displacing a population and making land unlivable are bad things in and off themselves, even if people don't die.
First of all, we were talking about Fukushima, do you have any data about that ?
Anyway, about the first link:
Wow, 40000 cancers attribuable in Europe by 2065 to Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history. That sounds bad, until you finish reading the abstract, where the authors evaluate that impact as "several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes ... unlikely that the cancer burden from the largest radiological accident to date could be detected"
Try to compare with the number attributable to coal pollution now ?
Second link:
Greenpeace, overtly being against nuclear power, will bring the biggest estimates of impact right ? Anyway, what they find is 200k additional deaths in Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and 2004 (first para page 9). But around 34M deaths were recorded in those territories in that time. By Greenpeace's own admission, 0.59% of those are attributable to Chernobyl.
> First of all, we were talking about Fukushima, do you have any data about that ?
How can I? Who would provide that? Especially in Japan where politics and ignorance go hand in hand with avoidance to even talk about the whole thing or any disastrous event.
The piles of white bags full of earth next to the roads in the region are the only silent reminders that something really bad happened there.
> Anyway, about the first link: Wow, 40000 cancers attribuable in Europe by 2065 to Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history. That sounds bad, until you finish reading the abstract, where the authors evaluate that impact as "several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes
I don't understand what you want to say by that. Do you mean it's okay to ignore the fallout of this disaster because people die of cancer either way? I mean seriously. There are radioactively contaminated wild animals running around in Bavaria's forests today and the accident happened almost 2000km away. Can you imagine how Europe would look like if one of those old and leaking reactors in France goes sideways?
There is nothing to compare to besides a nuclear war.
I can understand it's a nice thing with this radioactive accidents. There is usually a small amount of people who die in a spectacular and direct way while the rest dies a silent deaths over a long period of time. It's very handy if you want to push a technology which is too expensive and outdated and the only other argument out there is the death count of accidents. But this is not the case. Renewables are coming while even gas is a better solution then building even one nuclear reactor and most of the people, Governments and energy providers got the message already. The people never wanted a nuclear waste dump or reactor in the neighborhood in the first place. The only people left are those directly profiting from the immense subsidies (nuclear lobby) and those who fell for the recent artificial hype created by this lobby.
Nuclear is not a yes or no question, it's a how much question. Wind/solar/battery are going to be a huge part of moving us off fossil fuels, but it doesn't seem likely that they will be sufficient in all cases across the world. Nuclear seems like the best option available to fill in the gaps.
You make it look like nuclear is a all case solution across the world. It never was and it never will be so it's definitely not the best option available.
And yes it as an yes or no question. Especially if you consider building a new reactor today and investing into that. It doesn't look like many people consider to vote "yes" on that now with the alternatives growing. It's also not a bridge technology. A gas or even oil power plant would be better then a decade long involvement in a nuclear plant.
It's done and we just can hope now that what's still there won't fall apart before it gets demolished.
All things considered, particularly climate change, probably better to keep those old designs running rather than replacing them with fossil or bio fuels.
Once you have a 100% fossil/bio-free grid, you can replace those pesky nuclear plants with hamster wheel power for all I care.
Both Fukushima & Chernobyl would have been essentially non-issues if built further away from population centers. I know this is Sim City logic: but my answer to that would be: quite a lot!
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone covers 2,600km². It's irregularly shaped so it's unlikely you can predict which area will actually be irradiated, so a nuclear power plant in fact endangers an even larger area. Good luck finding a place in Europe, let alone Japan, that is far enough from population centers.
Also consider that NPPs need cooling water so they are often located near rivers. As are population centers.
Kind of agree. There's been 4 catasrpohpic reactor meltdowns and there are ~400 reactors. That's a 1% failure rate. That's really bad. That's the status quo, which does not mandate continued low safety and lack of economic advantage. That's why there is R&D. Today what you say is true - great. Tomorrow, who knows. High energy density and human ingenuity could make genIV a reality.
Three mile Island's core also melted by didn't breach containment. That fact hasn't been widely publicized. And there is a tendency to skip over that TMI is on the Susquehanna River which drains into Chesapeake Bay.
TMI came within hours of being a monumental disaster.
yea, not sure how to get to 4. Either you stop at 3 or you expand your scope to include contained meltdowns and meltdowns at small scale experimental and military facilities, in which case you end up around 7-20 depending on how serious a meltdown has to be to be included.
> Mourou and Tajima want to create a high-speed laser-driven accelerator to produce a beam of protons that can penetrate atoms.
Is it only me who is reminded of Iron Man 2 and the new element created by that hacked together accelerator in Tony Stark's basement?
As for the topic of the article: I would really find it interesting how much "bandwidth" (=kg/day) such a setup has and what the energy requirements are. If the process consumes more than half the energy that the fission process generated, is it still profitable then? Also, what are the byproducts? I can't really believe that this leaves stable lead and other things only behind.
Nuclear energy has its advocates—it spews little by way of emissions and is produced relatively cheaply.
Nuclear is anything but cheap. It's a net negative energy source, meaning the the electricity costs more to produce than it can be sold for. This is why the industry requires massive subsidies to stay alive. (If I recall correctly, the last round of subsidy in the US was over $50 billion.)
Nuclear power also requires massive amounts of carbon, as the uranium fuel must be mined and extensively processed before it is useful. The mining and milling process is horribly polluting and has ruined the land and water in many places on Earth.
Now, having said that, I certainly hope this guy can come up with a way to transmute radioactive elements with lasers. That would be terrific. But I'm doubtful.
A big problem with nuclear is expense. The figures from France are misleading because the state and the power companies are deeply entangled financially. A clearer view is possible in the UK because they have market system, and subsidies tend to be more transparent. The message from the UK is that nuclear power is not financially viable, and no nuclear power stations would be built without government subsidy. The subsidy required is far greater than that required by renewables. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/22/hinkley-poin...
does that take into account that the designs for nuclear reactors are optimised not for economic production of electricity, but for plutonium output for nuclear weapons programs?
Not a coincidence that nuclear power plants have been mostly built during the cold war. Or that nuclear power is inextricably linked with nuclear weapons in the minds of defence people (see Iran).
However, there's no actual need for this, and a pacifist nuclear power program could be very economically viable. But there wouldn't be any government subsidies for it, of course, because it would be useless militarily.
> does that take into account that the designs for nuclear reactors are optimised not for economic production of electricity, but for plutonium output for nuclear weapons programs?
France is highly powered by nuclear and is on the cheaper side of European cost of electricity. Not the cheapest, but cheaper than the average and especially so for being a major country.
Part of the reason France does so well is that 17% of its energy comes from recycled nuclear waste. That's not 17% of nuclear power is from waste, that's 17% of TOTAL power is just from waste.
> Try coming up with a price for safely storing nuclear waste for the next few thousand years.
Quoting the article:
"Environmental group Greenpeace estimates that there’s a global stockpile of about 250,000 tons of toxic spent fuel spread across 14 countries, based on data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Of that, 22,000 cubic meters—roughly equivalent to a three-meter tall building covering an area the size of a soccer pitch—is hazardous, according to the IAEA."
That's really not a lot. Who says we need to store this for thousands of years? There's no physical limit to what we can do with it, just economic limits. Future technology may well reduce this waste to nothing at an affordable price.
Let's be honest here, Greenpeace is an environmental group the same way PETA is an animal rights group.
One thing I think a lot of people forget is that many of the same problems that nuclear has are issues with other power sources. For example, coal also has radioactive waste. To put it into perspective, an average coal plant produces 5-10 tonnes of Uranium and Thorium ash per year.[0] Let alone the 400tonns of coal ash. I should also note that ash is more dangerous.
I'm not trying to say here that these aren't concerns. But I'm trying to say that when people mention these things that it always feels either uninformed or disingenuous. There is an issue of scale, so if the concern is about radioactive contaminants then we should be prioritizing the one that is producing more.
> That's really not a lot.
Which shows an understanding of scale (which is difficult). For reference, total waste per person from most nuclear powered countries is about a liter bottle per year, which only ~3% is high level waste[1] (~30ml, < a 10th of a soda can). So taking into account the scale, even when including toxicity and radioactivity, it is still one of the cleanest forms of energy we have. But the reason for that is scale. More radioactive, more toxic, but magnitudes less waste.
But nuclear is competing against carbon. The price of those externalities is also not priced in. We have not stored carbon safely, we dumped it into the atmosphere.
It's not a counter source.
The subsidies in those old reactors they are running now are already in there. France payed for it.
You can see what it looks like if you want to build a new one now in France here[1]:
"Two EPR reactors under construction in France and Finland are years behind schedule and billions of euros over budget."[...]"Building a single EPR in 2030 would require 4 to 6 billion euros of subsidies"
The simplest source is the closure of many existing nuclear plants and the cancellation of all but one which we're planned for the US.
It's not well known that the industry requires billions in government subsidies to even exist today. If taxpayers are footing the bill, that tells you that selling electricity isn't paying its own way.
Fewer people still know that nuclear plants are uninsurable, for somewhat obvious reasons. Government insurance for nuclear accidents is another huge subsidy that shows the industry isn't viable on its own.
For more info, see Helen Caldicott's excellent book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.
Nuclear plants in the USA are closing early specifically because electricity revenue dropped below what was expected (and needed) to pay for operation and maintenance costs. Revenue dropped specifically because fracked natural gas became very cheap and undercut the price in deregulated markets.
The idea that nuclear plants are net energy negative is very inaccurate. A 1 GWe plant runs for 60 years releases roughly 2000 PetaJoules of energy from atomic nuclei. Vastly less energy goes into building and operating the plant. They're massive, massive carbon-free energy sources.
But operation cost is high. There are lots of highly trained operators working 4 shifts. There are complex regulations, and safety upgrades after 9/11 and Fukushima.
As for insurance, if fossil plants had to pay insurance for the global warming they're causing, they'd be far far more uninsurable. Right now, fossil makes 85% of the world's energy. Would it be viable if it was liable for climate change? Not a chance. Also, nuclear energy kills fewer people per Watt*hour generated than almost all other energy sources. So why wouldn't it be insurable compared to the others? [3].
Nuclear subsidies in the USA are 1% of the total energy subsidies [1].
Helen Caldicott is not an authority on nuclear energy. She is the number 1 anti-nuclear activist in the world and has said countlessly many things that are wholly unsupported by even minor scrutiny [2].
> There are lots of highly trained operators working 4 shifts. There are complex regulations, and safety upgrades after 9/11 and Fukushima.
Comment of mine about utility scale solar. Those plants don't require a lot of specialized skills to keep running. And they're fundamentally redundant. There aren't oopies that take them offline for 18 months.
A lot of base load demand is driven by industrial customers balance sheet economics tho. They use power at night because it's subsidized by peek demand.
For instance my dad managed wind tunnels. They typically ran in the late evening at the whim of the power companies schedule. Because that's when PG&E had the extra capacity. Otherwise there was no technical reason they needed to run at night.
So if the pricing structure for electricity means power is very expensive at night, a lot of current customers will just switch. Which will reduce the demand. In this case economics 101 gives the right answer.
From what I understand, this is still scheduling in blocks of hours. One problem with solar & wind is that their variability happens on the scale of minutes. If you use them for base load, you'll be randomly losing or gaining large amounts of power output - much faster than industrial loads could switch. It would be unrealistic to try and plan around it, and supply/demand won't help here - even if you're selling sudden solar surplus at negative prices, there won't be enough buyers ready. For this to work, we need much more energy storage. Then there're seasonal variation; the industry your dad worked in probably wouldn't be happy if they were told they can't run wind tunnels in winter because there isn't enough power in the grid.
Wrong. Here is an IPCC meta-analysis reference from a consensus of scientists showing that it's very low, 12 gCO2-eq/kWh, on par with wind. Solar is 40. Natural gas is 490 [1]. See Table A.III.2 | Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies.
Think about it. There is 2,000,000x more energy in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal or gas or oil or lithium. A single train car of uranium can power a nuclear reactor for a year, vs. a mile-long traincar per day for a equivalent power coal plant. Energy density is where nuclear shines. And shines it does! That's why it's exciting and useful for a carbon-free future. It's the only large-scale low-carbon energy source we have that runs 24/7 and can be installed in very many geographical locations. It also has a tiny overall footprint. This is why James Hansen and Jim Lovelock and Bill Gates are so excited about it.
Same data in graphical form too, if you prefer [2].
You don't get to claim "carbon free" when the uranium cycle uses heavy equipment (dozers, loaders, trucks, trains, etc) that use fossil fuels. So please stop spreading that falsehood.
That's a ridiculous nitpick. GP just quoted you that nuclear has the carbon footprint comparable with wind power, and also most of that is completely incidental. All heavy equipment could be in principle electrified. It isn't because of various reasons, but then the same equipment is used for manufacturing and transporting everything in every other type of power source.
And, as far as deaths go, you can't get numbers for something you didn't count. No real accounting has ever been made of the number of people who got cancer and/or died from nuclear activities, starting with the activities at the Hanford Site on through atmospheric testing and today's nightmares like Fukushima.
The nuclear industry regularly uses this technique of "nothing to see here" to hide the fact that all nuclear plants leak and discharge radiation. All produce waste with an un-fixable lifecycle.
As far as your Wikipedia link, it was uploaded by an individual person. No references there.
Helen Caldicott is widely respected and far more of an authority on the subject that you or I or the journalist at the Guardian whom you cite.
Yeah that's not really true. Incredibly extensive accounting was done for instance on the total number of premature deaths from Chernobyl, and the UN sets the number right around 4000 from all causes -- including people who committed suicide because they thought they were 'contaminated'. The current radiation levels in Pripyat are around the same as being on an airplane [2, 3] and much, much, much lower than getting a CT scan. FWIW, they continued to operate reactors on the site until 2000.
This stuff is incredibly well studied. [4]
The total number of premature deaths from burning fossil fuel is 7.3 million every single year. [1]
> No real accounting has ever been made of the number of people who got cancer and/or died from nuclear activities,
First of all, nuclear weaponry waste from WW2 and the Cold War are wholly unrelated to activities of civilian nuclear power. While the material is similar in nature, you do not need to melt commercial waste down into radioactive vats of acid to extract pure weapons-grade plutonium in order to make low-carbon commercial nuclear energy. The civilian waste is solid ceramic and sits on parking lots at nuclear sites, where multiple decades of waste can fit nicely on a small area. Again, that's the glory of high energy density.
For Chernobyl and Fukushima, people absolutely count the effects. For example, UNSCEAR's entire mission is to do just that [1]. So far the counts are in, ~60 direct deaths from Chernobyl plus up to 4000 early cancer deaths on top of a few million that would have occurred naturally (small increase). Up to 1 death from Fukushima. As it turns out, more people die from coal plants operating normally every day than have died from nuclear accidents ever.
> As far as your Wikipedia link, it was uploaded by an individual person. No references there.
That'd be Figure 2 from the CBO in [2].
Helen Caldicott is the laughing stock of many respectable scientists. Don't make me dig up some of the ridiculous stuff she's said. She's a true clown.
> Helen Caldicott is the laughing stock of many respectable scientists. Don't make me dig up some of the ridiculous stuff she's said. She's a true clown.
In my recollection, most US plants are closing or have closed due to end of lifetime. Plants are reaching end of 50-60 year planned lifetimes. New plants are hard to build due to burdensome regulations, mostly nonsensical negative public sentiment and enormous capital requirements. I remember hearing that you have to upfront the cost of waste disposal in a trust. I don't have any citations handy, but you're looking at something like 10 billion upfront to build a new fission plant in the US. They also take a long time to build and start up, so you're lucky to see any revenue for at least 5 years on a multibillion investment. Not a very attractive investment, is it?
That said, I'm a fan of nuclear fission for power baseline. It has its warts, but it's better for us long term than coal or gas.
> Only one nuke plant in the US was shut down over protests (San Onofre) and that took 20 years.
You are overestimating the effectiveness of protests and underestimating the effect of sentiment.
It isn't normal for a project to get shut down by protests; capital is already deployed, the government is already on side (having given the requisite approvals) and there is a lot of logistical momentum in place. A couple of protestors aren't going to slow down that sort of juggernaut.
On the flip side, sentiment has a huge impact on whether investors feel like funding cost-up-front ventures. It takes a decade to make the initial investment back, so they have to be confident that 2-3 distinct governments are not going to come up with a hare-brained energy policy that would disrupt the project's profits. They'd have to be very bold in the current environment, especially given the risk of the recent government activism in Germany spreading.
It isn't just possible, it is likely for a nuclear project to have some nonsensical change in standards applied to it by, ironically, anti-science environmentalists.
Generally on HN, unlike other comment zones on the Internet, it's on people making claims to back them up with sources. Ideally if you have something controversial or interesting you provide links and resources, so we can all learn, instead of farming out the work of backing up your opinion to each reader.
I found a story about a new nuke plant in Georgia [1] which they seem like they are regretting building.
It's a $25 billion project which is several years late now. [2]
They are building two new generators which should each produce 1,215 MW of power. So that's ~$10 million per MW. Solar by comparison is about $1 million per MW, although a 1,215 MW solar installation would cover about 10 sq km.
I have to assume that solar, without any waste to process or high security requirements or chance of a meltdown, also has lower operating costs.
You also have to factor in the capacity factor. Sun isn't shining steadily all the time. You have night-time, notably, but also clouds and fog and smog. Capacity factor is very much location dependant, but all the places with good capacity factors are where people don't want to live either.
It can be as low as 12% [0], so divide your $/MW by the capacity factor to ascertain the true cost: something like $8 million/MW for solar in Swabia.
Thank you for that. I didn’t realize that was a fake headline grabbing number. It makes no sense to me that the headline numbers are not actual 24/7/365 average generating capacity and rather peak capacity, since it can be calculating quite accurately in the long run.
The numbers make a lot more sense with that. As I was typing it it didn’t seem right.
I appreciate that and I often do. However, nothing I said was controversial. Many nuke plants in the US have closed and all others (but one) have been cancelled. This is stuff you can see on the evening news. I don't really have to time to re-research every single case but, if someone doubts me it might be worth their time to do it.
Most likely, it's easier to just dismiss comments like mine if you're already pro-nuclear. It happens to me whenever I talk about nuclear here.
This is true not of nuclear energy in general but -- if what you're saying is true -- of the Uranium cycle commonly in use today. To my knowledge, it was originally selected because it can support production of weapons-grade Plutonium. I'd wager, at the time, the power generation (and economics) was more of a side-effect.
I'm personally more interested in seeing Thorium reactors re-visited, as Thorium is much more prevalent in the earth, can't be used to produce weapons-grade Plutonium, is much safer, more stable, yields fissile products with much shorter half-lives, and so on. That's not to say there aren't challenges but I think this would be something worth investing in. [1]
>Thorium [...] can't be used to produce weapons-grade Plutonium
Sure it can. Thorium breeder reactors do not burn Thorium as Thorium is not fissile. Thorium is fertile and a blanket of Thorium is used to generate fissile Uranium. It's pretty straightforward to introduce U-238 into the U-233 from the Thorium. Then at that point it's no different than breeding Plutonium in a traditional reactor.
The difference is that Plutonium is an unavoidable waste product for traditional reactors but you don't need to produce it operating a Thorium molten salt reactor.
A detail worth mentioning is that the U233 produced in the Thorium cycle is mixed with U232 which is higly gamma radioactive, it's still Uranium, not another element, which means beast of luck separating it U233 from in the mix. You'd have to wait quite a bit for it to decay to Pa232 before you an chemically separated it. That's why the Thorium cycle is touted as being proliferation resistant. It's not, but it's makes it harder and more expensive to build nuclear weapons.
Since there is no working thorium reactor at scale, it would be more accurate to say that it is true today and some people hope that we could escape the uranium cycle with thorium. So far, no one has.
I'm saying that "nuclear power" != "uranium cycle power" and that if we continue to couple the two, nobody ever will. It's on us, if we think there is opportunity, to advocate for better technology options where possible. Casually linking the two is part of why we don't have use at scale.
Yet, in practice, the two are the same. It's like Uber saying "Never mind, we're not profitable. We'll make flying taxis!"
The reasons that thorium reactors don't work aren't because people don't like nuclear. They don't work for technical reasons.
Besides, this story is about uranium power and that's where all our problems lie today. Even if we had thorium reactors tomorrow, we still have over 100 nuke plants in the US that would need to be de-commissioned along with all the waste they've already created -- and that's billions more in subsidies.
Sort of. If you'd read my links you'd see that Uranium cycle was originally developed and popularized because the US army wanted Plutonium for nuclear weapons. That has nothing to do with Thorium's intrinsic quality as a power source. [1]
The lack of investment into Thorium (and into nuclear power in general) had a lot to do with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and of course much more recently Fukushima. [2] On my chart, that would be the giant slump in 1986 and 2012 (what could that have been?). It became far harder to secure funding for any kind of nuclear research because people lost their taste for it, and frankly, the remaining funding came from governments so they could have a steady supply of fissile material for weapons. This kind of research requires huge capital outlay. [5]
Thorium is far more efficient per unit weight (1T is equal to 200T of uranium and 3.5MT of coal), a lot more abundant, safer (from a stability perspective, and also from a non-proliferation perspective) and requires some of the waste products (such as Plutonium) from traditional reactors because it's fertile, not fissile. [4] As such, nuclear waste can be utilized by thorium reactors.
This is all very well documented ([1,2,4,5]).
Uber doesn't work because of its unit economics, but that's a totally unrelated conversation we can leave up to the judgement of the public markets to resolve. [3]
I don't think we need to spend money and energy to transmute it by theses questionable laser schemes. Accelerator driven transmutation of waste was shown the dustbin a few decades ago, hopefully this will have the same fate. Please don't ruin our valuable trash.