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.
