I remember during my undergraduate physics years at the University of Otago, we had a visiting guest speaker - I think it was Dale Bridenbaugh around 1976 when he had resigned as a manager in GE's nuclear division worried that their plants were not safe [0]. He had just also toured Australia as a guest speaker toward the anti-uranium effort [1].
At the time, Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister of New Zealand and was pursuing "think big" projects for NZ including a planned nuclear power station. As one of the "GE Three" [2], Bridenbaugh blew the whistle that the quoted price tag of the
power plant did not include necessary safety precautions which he eloquently explained would cost at least an order of magnitude more (greater than the GDP of NZ). Of course the whole idea made no sense in a country blessed with hydro and geothermal resources. In the end the project was abandoned for total cost of ownership budget reasons rather than nuclear issues.
There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it.
It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks. Mitigating the acute risks is too expensive, so instead, you accept being the frog boiled alive because long term risks are harder to quantify and more nebulously terrifying. You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning. A nuclear meltdown that kills hundreds or thousands is terrifying, but coal burning that quietly kills millions from air pollution is silent.
Other examples...
* When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.
* When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable.
* When a small group of religious radicals kill 3000 people in a fantastical way, so you set yourself on a trillion dollar war to lose thousands more of your young people to combat deaths and directly and indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners, coming away not practically any safer than the basic changes to airline security policies would have done for a fraction of the dollar and human life costs.
> When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.
This example (that I suspect you shoe-horned in to rant) undermines, but also fully demonstrates, your entire point because you've just casually and conveniently ignored the reduced risk _to society as a whole_. I.e., those actually vulnerable from getting sick in the first instance, but further still overwhelming the health and welfare services to the detriment of *everybody*.
Why so offended to suggest that some people could have overdone it to the overall negative? Parent isn't necessarily suggesting that the reaction was the typical one.
This is a complex topic, mostly emotional ones (since cold hard facts can be presented on both sides but they don't sway most people at this point).
I was all for various covid measures, did all the vaccines, didn't travel, practiced social distancing meticulously... to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first time.
Looking back, many governments around the world applied ridiculously strict restrictions, which just highlighted how badly incompetent in the best headless chicken form they are in SHTF scenarios. You couldn't travel more than 1km from your home (ie France), you couldn't be out after 6/7/8 pm even if you just want to go for a stroll or run in the forest, alone (which I do a lot). Things like these were completely needless and heavily infringed on common folks basic rights, not even going into the topic of fucking up population physical health massively down the road. Not surprisingly population's overall mental health decreased significantly too.
Forcing education of kids from home is seen as failure of even greater proportions. Not only was the system utterly unprepared in first months, but this form just doesn't work as well as direct physical contact. Kids missing tons of societal development that will never work well in digital form. We should have just put extra care into protecting vulnerable and otherwise move on with our lives. If I would be an old fart and somebody would give me choice of fucking up my grandkids lives for some potential extra safety for me, I would choose my grandkids anytime, everytime.
When we could have handled it ie like Sweden (from what I've heard), without any significant basic rights restrictions, and with resulting covid numbers very much the same. Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump through the roof (within these diseases number ranges of course). Diabetes, cardiovascular and mental issues are already up.
And one more point I haven't seen much mentioned - society as a whole completely fucked up its approach to healthcare workers. Yes there were evening claps for few months. While a nice gesture, they won't fix the burnout many had. So anywhere I look, health systems have much less medical personnel, mainly nurses simply left their jobs. The situation ie in France is so bad some big cities have to close emergencies through the weekend (!!!). Some emergency doctors left too. There is no quick fix for this. An example - I've recently spent 4 hours to get 1 blood test done (something taking 15 mins before) - and that is already optimized for timing and location since my wife is a doctor.
This period won't be judged nicely by our descendants.
It’s worth remembering that the US and many other healthcare systems around the world got absolutely slammed by COVID and stayed that way throughout most of the pandemic. Restrictions kept being tightened and loosened not out of incompetence but in response to actual hospitalizations and deaths.
In the end, US casualties only being ~1 million was actually a positive outcome, things could have been a lot worse even if exactly the same people got sick but they did so even slightly faster. Worse suffering 5+ times as many casualties in 2020 would not have prevented the variants which would happily reinfect people.
There wasn’t any great options, but many of them where far worse.
This really annoys me, because I see the following chain.
1) Healthcare is too important for light touch regulation =>
2) Big political fight over regulation =>
3) Competition in healthcare largely disappears =>
4) Oh no something went wrong, now we have to adjust what human rights are available based on how prepared the government is for a rather predictable crisis (COVID wasn't/isn't even the bad-case for a highly contagious respiratory disease).
There are people seriously trying to argue that walking more than single-digit kilometres from a body's home depends on what the government's hospital policy was 5 years ago. In complete seriousness, this is crazy. I thought we'd agreed that basic rights were a thing but it turns out large segments of the population and bureaucrats seriously don't believe that.
And exactly what we got to show for this is questionable. Border controls are the only government tool that I have faith in after that pandemic. Even the vaccine we only managed because people agreed that the usual safety procedures would take to long and that we could skip them because the economic damage caused by fearful people was too great. The governments of the world caused a lot of problems these last few years.
Curtailing freedoms due to disease is a very old thing and it works with COVID being no exception.
Mary Mallon was forcibly quarantined, let go resulting in 2 additional deaths, and then permanently quarantined in the US because she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever in the early 1900’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon The most common versions historically was locking people in their homes or isolating a community from the outside.
As to your complaint, walking outside does carry the risk of infecting others as people demonstrably have gotten COVID from walking past each other. It’s a low risk which why it was generally acceptable, but officials where balancing even this vs more people dying.
It’s all trade offs, there isn’t an objectively better plan.
The US for example encouraged but didn’t mandate the general public get vaccinated. It’s easy to say that’s the wrong choice, but people would have seriously objected.
People did seriously object, lost their jobs, and lost their faith in the system so much that a recession follows sooner than that those now unemployed try again to be humanized.
Off topic I know but I can't let the idea that Sweden's death rate wasn't significantly different to other similar nations with stricter restrictions slide - that was true only for people under 70. I don't know about you but I intend to be fully fit & healthy and living a meaningful existence at 70 that I don't wish to have cut short because public health measures in a crisis are insufficient. Further, talk to some frontline healthcare workers about the extreme case load they had to deal with.
Sweden's total COVID death rate per unit population is three times that of neighbouring Norway. 190 per 100k versus 65 per 100k It wasn't just the over 70s in Sweden who were dying.
That’s death attributed to Covid. If you look at total excess mortality you will see that Sweden mostly did fine and it’s probably be even better if you look at long term trend. Obviously no country wants to talk too much about it. Who wants to tell their population than the sacrifice they made were useless?
I don’t know about the situation in the USA where everything seemed very political and what was done was far less stringent than in my own country but here in France it was pretty obvious that most of the measures were taken haphazardly mostly to placate an ageing population. It was very funny. The media kept blaming the young socialising for cases when it was painfully obvious that most contaminations came from schools.
I can only assume your Norwegian is a lot better than mine. But I had read from a reliable source that excluding those over 70 the excess death rate (all causes) in Sweden wasn't notably higher than other Nordic countries.
I can't say anything about the excess death rate. My source is the VG webpage I included. It seems unlikely that there are enough people over 70 to make a 3 to 1 difference between the two countries. Perhaps someone can provide a reference to correct me.
It's likely to be somewhere in the order of 20% (that's the figure for over 65s for Europe as a whole).
Excess deaths is definitely a better measure than those attributed to Covid - e.g. it was reported in Australia deaths were recorded as due to covid in any case that a hospital patient tested +ve even if the immediate cause of death was unrelated - i.e. they almost certainly would have died anyway regardless of Covid.
So if you exclude the largest category of deaths and cherry-pick from the remaining data you think a point is being made? Sweden and Norway has similar covid death rates for children aged 6-8, therefore the public health policy differences between the two countries had no effect? Do you know what actually was the same among the various Scandinavian countries? The economic impact of covid. Swedish policy failures that ended up killing more people did not provide the expected economic benefit. Sweden fucked up and their population paid the price.
What % of people over 70 are in care homes (in Australia it's about 6% and we apparently have one of the highest rates in the world)? Pretty sure if it were just those in care homes dying from COVID it would barely show up in the stats.
> to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first time.
That parahraph seems to contradict itself. By locking down we slowed down transmission, until treatments and vaccines were available. That is why the effects were so mild for you vs the people who caught it in the earlier waves. How was it to 'no avail', when you state the benefit right afterwards?
> Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump through the roof
The reason we have annual flu shots is because influenza mutates so readily, so it's not like most people have a highly developed immunity to whatever common influenza strain is going around anyway. And fun fact (truly, it's awesome), at least one strain of influenza appears to have gone extinct. It seems possible that your prediction is completely backwards, and that our scattershot headless chicken COVID mitigation policies have managed to permanently improve flu season.
Hospitals the world over were completely and wholly overwhelmed with patients sick with COVID-19. Lockdowns reduced transmissions, hospitalisations dropped.
During a pandemic? No. Not while your freedom can pose a direct threat to the safety of the community.
Sometimes you have to put on your adult pants, realize you live in a society and not n million individual states of nature, and give up a bit of individual freedom, temporarily, for the safety of the whole.
Surely' you yourself enjoyed _some_ freedom during "lockdown". How did you come to the conclusion that it was the proper amount? Why didn't you give up more?
Because I didn't need to, and no one required me to? Because I didn't believe having to wear a mask, get a vaccine and not being able to eat out at a restaurant was an intolerable violation of my rights, given the alternative?
The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others. Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
Obviously the balance between liberty and safety leads to anarchy on one extreme and authoritarianism on the other, but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
With similar logic, we should ban all the cars (say apart from firefighters and ambulances). Think about all the lives we will save, few hundred thousands every year globally, ignoring injuries and damages. Let that number sink.
And once it sank, we can add few other easily bannable cases (random examples - sugar, no exercise) which will put the number of saved lives in few millions, per every year.
Yet suddenly all those internet warriors who feel righteous and know by heart what needs to be done for society and by society are quiet about these. Nobody is arguing government should force people to exercise, yet school showed us how easily it can be done. It would save more lives than any covid measure ever taken, it will measurably improve people's lives, its quality and happiness, and no adverse effect apart from US HFCS industry.
Where do you draw the line? Certainly elsewhere than I do. But I am not showing that line down your throat and forcing you to live by it, do I. Can you please righteous people like you let people like me take a walk in the forest, alone? Is it really that hard to understand?
This is typical internet discussion for 21st century - few people are very vocal, and they give the impression their voice is consensus. Yet reality is a bit more complex.
You're being to conceptual and that's why you can be so confident. Of course government can set limits on freedoms. Literally nobody is arguing that except the most extreme anarchists/libertarians. The dispute isn't that the government _can_ draw a line, it's over _where_ they drew the line.
This isn't an objective argument.
> Because I didn't need to... Because I didn't believe...
I agree with all the things you mentioned here. However, you failed to mention a myriad of things the government imposed that were, at best, worthless and, at worst, counter-productive. Did you agree with closing beaches/parks? Closing outdoor gatherings is and was known to be anti-science at the time. It had the nice side effect of having people gather indoors because people are social and you won't stop them from gathering.
> The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others
Would you be on board with the sealing in of doors as happened in China or is that too much imposition on your freedom? Would you agree with the travel restrictions placed on people in Australia? Both of those instances achieve your goal of reducing your chance of getting and spreading COVID.
There is an entire population of people who have different, subjective, opinions. You're going to have a bad time if you think yours is the _one true opinion_ and fail to tolerate any descent.
You and I seem to be of similar minds in what restrictions are reasonable (and I tolerate a bit more or less because I know I'm not objectively correct). The difference between us is that when some people think the line should be drawn elsewhere, I don't derisively refer to them like this:
> Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
> but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
And (nearly) nobody thinks it is because that's the easy question. The hard question is always how much and you've done a masterful job of acting like people who have a different answer to the hard question instead have a different answer to the easy question thereby making your disdain of them justified.
Sweden did not fare as well as you appear to think it did compared to its closest neighbors and cultural analogs, either by number of infections or per capita death rate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8807990/
> * When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable.
This sounds a lot like "we should ignore warnings about pollution because the cost of moving away from fossil fuels would be too expensive," actually.
Picking such an open-ended thing like this really undermines your point here. You want people's Covid-prompted behaviors (exaggerated into stuff like "two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds") to be compared to "fear of nuclear meltdown." But you can't substantiate those long-term risks in anything like the same way we can those of burning coal at this point. Is Covid more "potentially unrecoverable" for kids and young adults than themselves or family members being drafted for a world war and dying en masse? Than school shootings that we tolerate for vague "protect our liberty" talk?
I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect someone to do that work, or even have the tools or data sources to do that work.
Sure, I think it's reasonable to expect people to provide sources to support ideas when possible, but it's a little unreasonable to expect people to do extensive first-party research to support their opinions.
I think there's value in the discussion either way. Most of the time I don't think we're going to change people's minds with this sort of discussion, but I do enjoy seeing what people's positions are on these sorts of topics, and find that I learn things from it.
Why do you require sources from majormajor and not anonporridge? Neither presented supporting data for their opinions, but majormajor was simultaneously pointing out that anonporridge didn't. You seem to be showing your bias in favor of anonporridge's positions by who you choose to demand evidence from.
Seems like a close cousin of the effect described here, the "drip drip drip" effect, where problems that arise as a sequence of discrete events and that are easy to solve with a simple top down approach get solved, while problems that are more serious in total, but that are continuous is nature and require a more distributed bottom up approach to solve, don't.
> There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it.
"Cowardice"? From an old version of the Wikipedia article, "Fear and excessive self-concern lead one to not do things of benefit to oneself and one's group" [0]
> When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.
It's funny because I was actually able to lose 50 pounds by establishing an exercise routine at home.
I understand your argument but it doesn't work for COVID: if anything lockdowns gives people more time to exercise instead of commuting via car.
Those odds are why not a single insurance company will insure a nuclear reactor for more than 0.3% the cost of a nuclear disaster.
Speaking of fallacies, your argument squarely falls under the false dilemma fallacy. Nuclear is not the only form of green energy. In fact it is by far the most expensive one as well as the only one that imparts a small chance of catastrophe.
It isnt needed to provide reliable power either. Wind, solar, pumped storage, batteries and demand shaping can, together, do it cheaper:
That would be progress, but I don't think we'll get there until the new reactors have a proven operational safety record, and enough are built to retire the old reactors.
Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens? They are constantly undergoing change. We estimate low probability that mutated viruses or bacteria descended from strains we are familiar with will have dramatically more harmful long-term effects, but we don't actually know for certain that any given year's new strains won't have very different risk profiles until much later. We can make probabilistic models based on historical data, but they are unavoidably vulnerable to underestimating the risk of black swan events.
One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.
> Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens?
Yes. The distinguishing factor there is that most new strains do not kill millions of people within the first year or two of discovery. Compare, for example, the H1N1 variant that caused the 2009 flu pandemic, which killed "only" around 300,000 people (based on best excess death estimates).
> One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.
This has long been an established part of the messaging: we're more or less confident that short term effects to young, otherwise healthy individuals are minor. The guidance has still been to avoid infection, because we're not confident that mild short term guarantee or protect against serious long term effects. Chickenpox (and subsequently shingles) exemplify this.
I understand the intuition that a non-zoonotic origin would lend credence to the possibility of long term risks, but I don't think the epidemiology actually supports the intuition: my understanding is that viruses that jump the species gap tend to have higher variability in terms of their harm to the new species.
I've noticed the same strange misaligned covid explanation/behavior. Lab leak would make me more fearful of the virus itself, pure zoonotic origin and I say Jesus take the wheel and by that I mean countless generations of evolution tuning my immune system against similar virus for familial survival take the wheel.
This mis-states the relationship between your immune system and novel viruses, especially ones that cross species boundaries. Viruses adapt to avoid the adjustments the immune system makes, and zoonotic transmission means that your immune system is "seeing" all kinds of novel adaptations for the first time.
to be clear : the events of 9/11 were the impetus for war; not the motivation.
that trillion estimate, one of the lower ones by the way, is a cost figure without the associated profits and revenue. As horrible as it is and was, the 'military industrial complex', as a whole, profited incredibly -- this 'trickled down', a phrase I hate to use , all across the United States in the form of jobs from market players and call-for-bids across the nation to fill in niche topics (like airport security, for example) that were otherwise un-worked beforehand.
Another aside : the proof that airport security has changed anything for the better is scant at best, and corrupt at worst.
tl;dr : if you think any of the wars in the middle east were fought for the sake of 'American Safety', whatever that might be, then you're just not paying enough attention.
I mean, a trillion spent is a trillion spent: it'll trickle down regardless of how you spend it, the question is if you could have spent it some other way that would have given more jobs?
A trillion spent building factories, highways, public housing, schools, etc. may employ exactly as many people as a trillion spent building weapons, dropping bombs, and killing people.
What you end up with after spending that trillion is a bit different though.
> it'll trickle down regardless of how you spend it
That's an article of conservative dogma dating from the Reagan and Bush eras, and it's pretty-much discredited now. For most major capital expenditure programmes, the majority of the money trickling down stops trickling once it reaches shareholders and executives.
So, instead of nuclear waste we can package up and store away where it won't hurt anyone, we have plenty of coal and gas plants, whose waste goes into the atmosphere where it hurts everyone.
But we can't! There have been several issues with stored nuclear waste already, and we only had to do it for like what, 70 years? How can you project that to even just a couple hundred years and not expect total desaster? nuclear would be great if every single person involved were reliable, diligent engineers and scientists. But at the end of the day, the most important decisions always get made by greedy managers and CEOs, and clueless politicians.
I’ve never understood why just storing them in a big pool next to the power plant is a bad idea. The radiation is not a concern because the water filters it all out, it’s stable for long periods of time with very little maintenance, what’s the downside exactly?
As in literally dig a hole the size of an Olympic swimming pool, store literally all the nuclear waste that has ever been produced (maybe you’ll need a few pools, I haven’t checked), and spend a few million a year maintaining it for the next century or so.
To be fair, if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning and potentially could've provided electricity cheap enough in combination with hydro and renewables that would've seen some big industry shift away from burning coal.
NZ has a very green power grid but it's not perfect and suffers from reliability issues dependent on snowfall to fill the hydro lakes. Nuclear would have and still could provide a lot more security in that area.
I'm hoping NZ sees the light and accepts small nuclear as a decent method of going to 100% green sources (currently it's 85%)
> if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning
If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down, and then you have the domino effect that Fukishima had (e.g., Germany shutting down all their plants). Nuclear can be viable when both proper safety can be ensured economically, and when that surety can be shared by its voting population
> If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down
Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of those would have made large areas of dense urban area unlivable.
Seems to work just fine? This will of course penetrate down to less ideal locations as costs continue to decline.
> South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy transition, having transformed its energy system from 1% to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years.
> By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%.
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030. In 2021, South Australia met 100% of its operational demand from renewable resources on 180 days (49%).
Your examples don’t support your point. 60% renewable isn’t enough and they aren’t even into the hardest part of replacing the base load at that level.
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030
That link you sent is bleak. They just now are hitting the point where renewable generation causes excess energy during peak solar hours sometimes. They have no concrete plans to store at the scale required to actually get through the troughs. They are just now beginning to kick the tires on storage projects which is where much of the southwestern US was a decade ago.
1 to 60% was possible in 15 years. All the while we have had these cost curves for wind and solar. [1] So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?
Like, I just don't understand your negativity. Projecting to reach 85% renewable penetration in ~3 years and it is a bleak outlook? You're looking for a magic finger snap and it is 100% tomorrow?
>So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?
Without massive storage, yes. The 60% it picked up is the easy part of the demand that follows the renewable production. The last 40% is 95%+ of the difficult work.
The difference here is making a rocket that gets to space vs one that achieves orbit. They seem similar but they aren’t even in the same league.
>Like, I just don't understand your negativity.
It’s not negativity, it’s what has happened in every country that is a decade or more ahead of Australia here. Australia is not magic, it has nighttimes and slow winds like every other place on the planet. This problem has plagued everyone at the head of the technology curve here and there still isn’t a solution. What do you think Australia will do differently?
When was this crane thing? It would have been long after the reactor had reached cold shutdown, so what exactly was the accident it was supposed to have almost caused?
Not the OP but the crane incident was shortly after the first incident. The higher ups wanted to use the polar crane to lift a bunch of radioactive debris out of the core that almost melted down. At least one of the workers (Rick Parks) ended up whistleblowing over it because the crane was the same one that was there during the incident and most likely had taken damage. He was concerned the crane would fail while lifting the radioactive debris out (around 1000 lbs of it) and fall back onto the core. Check out the Netflix document Meltdown: Three mile Island for more info.
Yeah, that "shortly after"... the reactor top wasn't lifted off until FIVE YEARS after the accident.
So I ask again: just what horrible public-relevant accident is supposed to have nearly happened here? I can't imagine anything that would have caused anything catastrophic. The lid falling back onto the reactor vessel wouldn't be that.
They added large amounts of borate to the water before opening the top. There was no way it was going to go critical (and if it had, it would at best have been a steam explosion, not a nuclear bomb, as the chain reaction if it could have occurred at all would have been with slow thermal neutrons.)
The natural disaster was responsible for killing people, not the nuclear meltdown... maybe if we had been consistently building nuclear since the 60s we wouldn't be in this global warming catastrophe? Obviously speculation, but I'm curious what our global CO2 levels would be if all the major industrialized nations transitioned to 100% nuclear Over the last 60 years. Anyone happen to have some charts?
The majority of the man-made CO2 in the atmosphere today comes from power generation IIRC. A lot also comes from transportation, but less than power generation.
If what you say took place, along with the solar and wind power advances that happened, we'd at least be looking at a lot longer warming runway than we are today.
An outage that was caused by something that, through a rare confluence of events, also destroyed their outage-backup-plan. The plant could have easily dealt with most power outages.
Not to say there isn't a lesson to be learned, obviously, but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.
> but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.
Did you mean "disingenuous"? "Ingenuous" means lacking in guile or craftiness. "Disingenuous" means having the intent to deceive, and is used much more often.
I feel like the biggest benefit of small nuclear is that it can be put anywhere and you don’t have to build extremely costly transmission infrastructure. Just dot these things around. It surely isn’t cost-effective enough for the first 85% or whatever of a state’s needs, but for that last mile problem? Sounds good.
The electricity grid does not have a last mile problem for supply. And just putting them anywhere will just raise costs. Better to put multiple units next to an existing substation on the backbone. Then those units can supply electricity to potentially millions, not just the city at the end of the last mile.
I don’t think dotting nuclear reactors around everywhere would be politically very acceptable.
Each plant will also require some level of staffing, operational and security staff.
Seems more likely that small modular reactors would just be deployed in large batches to lower the fixed costs, and accept the transmission losses.
I would be a bit worried about physical security with lots of small plants. What do you think? I suppose in theory there is nothing preventing having similar levels of physical security from today's large plants.
Up to 12 x 60 MWe per station reactors means 720 MWe, as much as a CANDU plant. Yet it looks like a bunch of warehouses on the outside because the reactors are stored in underground water pools. I guess you'd need similar security as for any power plant. The NRC also requires that all new reactors designs post-9/11 are able to withstand impact with a commercial airplane.
Radiation alone provides security. The plant diagram already has two fences with coresponding checkpoints. One needs to stop potential looters, so basically checkpoits with a guard each and a patrol vehicle with a team of two. Make it armed guards if you're in the US where everyone and their grandmother owns not one but several firearms. That plus the usual access cards and CCTV. This isn't a military nuclear weapons lab, it's a civilian power facility.
Cost always comes up around nuclear, and maybe justifiably so, but I think it shouldn't be such a large factor. The U.S. for example could easily afford this. We just passed a $700B bill for clean energy and heavily subsidize oil & gas.
What matters more imo is reliability and energy security and in those respects nuclear makes me a lot more confident than renewables such as solar or wind.
The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know the real costs in hindsight.
With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change.
With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs.
> long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price.
Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years.
In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem.
And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence.
> I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood"
Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic.
> So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government.
> and the cost of nuclear accidents
The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.
One thing to remember about nuclear waste, or radioactive material in general, is that the high-level waste has the shortest half-life, and the longer half-life waste is low-level radioactive.
With waste with a half-life of 10,000 years for example, each 2 atoms will on average emit one particle or photon in that time. Many generations of people could eat or drink those atoms safely. You could live your life next to a pile of it, and get very little radiation over your lifetime from long half-life radioactive atoms.
The long term storage of this waste is a concern, for sure. But it is a concern for the far future, and we can delay addressing it for decades with impunity (which we have been doing, actually). But we are facing a climate emergency that must be addressed right now. Nuclear waste is the least of our worries at the moment.
I appreciate your overall point, but it's probably also worth considering the concentration or dilution of that waste. When you mention eating or drinking the atoms, or living next to a pile of them, the radiation dose will obviously depend both on the atoms' half-lives and on the overall number of atoms.
There's an extra Avogadro factor of around 23 orders of magnitude when going between atoms and grams, so those atoms really add up -- if they are highly pure and concentrated, at least.
Secondly, regarding waste, I share your view, and I think there’s an additional travesty that we’ve had breeder reactor technology for decades. That can significantly shorten the volume and half life of waste while also producing new nuclear fuel. Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders.
The US is not, in fact, collecting money for disposal, and has not been for years.
The US is, instead, handing back all the money that was collected to the remaining nuke operators.
Not, notably, to the ratepayers it was collected from.
This is fallout from a court case where nuke operators argued that disposal was flimflam, so the money was collected fraudulently. The court agreed, and ordered the money returned. Not to those it came from, but just to whoever was still operating.
These are important points you're raising that change the course of the conversation significantly, so please also add citations so that folks can see them, otherwise, the argument falls flat and gets dismissed.
Links or your argument is just noise. Here is the closest I could find to what you are talking about, explicitly saying an appeals court ruled against a nuclear operator trying to get the refund you are talking about:
Non of this is in the least bit convincing. And your sources mostly provided by the US highly political and mostly nonsensical discourse that ignores a whole bunch of very relevant information.
Waste is an incredibly easy problem to solve: bury it in impermeable bedrock. That said, there's no real point in storing existing nuclear waste since we don't reprocess our fuel. So the existing waste is a source of fuel in the future.
Solar and wind should also be transparent in the fact they require fossil fuels to fill in gaps in production. Thus, they do not represent a solution to climate change but merely delay it. Thus the cost of solar and wind includes the cost of climate disaster.
Solar and wind currently use fossil fuels to fill in gaps, but they don't require that. It's just that while we're still burning fossil fuels without CO2 charges, using them for gap filling is the cheapest thing that will do it.
It does until we achieve many times cheaper storage technology. Existing storage solutions don't provide nearly enough capacity to scale (especially since Li is very scarce, and is also required for cars and other modes of transport).
Hydrogen (or Methane) are an existing storage solution that scales very easily. The truth is that currently we have so little renewable generation capacity that we save more CO2 by building more wind turbines and PV per dollar than by building storage.
No, hydrogen and methane storage do not scale easily. Almost all hydrogen production is done through steam reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis has continued to be difficult to do at scale, due to inefficiency and difficulty in getting reliable electrolysis sytems. Then there's the issue of storing and transporting that hydrogen, which is mostly handwaved by assuming there's a salt cavern handy wherever people need to store hydrogen.
Synthetic methane requires hydrogen as an input, so all of the above applies to it, too. It also requires as source of carbon dioxide. Extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not viable, which leaves either scavenging CO2 byproducts from industrial processes and biofuels. Both of those are not in sufficient availability to produce synthetic methane at grid scale.
We already have excess renewable generation in several energy markets. And it's been the case for years, but the promised energy storage revolution has not come to pass.
Electrolysis can easily be done at scale. A couple of megawatts of electrolysis equipment is about the size of a shipping container. Many such systems are in operations right now and have been for a decade. The technology is fairly mature and reaches efficiencies of 70-80%. You also don't need salt caverns to store the hydrogen. You can store it underground without a salt cavern. Sure, there are losses, but they're not unmanageable.
We're also not going to run out of industrial processes that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, at least as long as we still build things out of concrete, so if for some reason hydrogen is too hard to transport or store, we can pay the extra price of turning it into methane and use all the infrastructure that we already have for natural gas. We can even recapture most of the carbon when we burn the methane again.
This really doesn't scale to the level of a whole country, or continent, having to contend with low power output for months, as recently happened with wind in Europe. And even if it can in principle scale, it's unproven and requires much more complex ops than a nuclear plant, which has been a well understood solution for decades.
Not to mention, this requires huge over-production, which is a problem in areas with already high land usage, such as Europe. It is probably much less of a problem in the USA, so maybe there the calculations are different.
I'd you're going to be the future of the planet on something, getting on a solution that has worked for over half a century is a lot safer than something that has never been done outside of prototypes.
"Let's just use fusion for all our energy needs. We don't need fission, nor do we need wind and solar. Just because it hasn't been done now, doesn't mean it'll never happen. If you don't support this you're just an anti-fusion conservative reactionary!"
But you see, going with renewables is not betting the future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.
The worst case for renewables would be that costs stop declining. Stack the deck just right and nuclear might end up a bit cheaper. But this is just a financial risk, not a risk of the planet. And if one is looking at financial risks, one must also look at the risk of cost overruns in nuclear. Unlike with renewables, which typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost, nuclear plants are famously subject to enormous cost overruns. Factors of 2, 3, or even more.
Pretending that the promises of nuclear will absolutely come true, but that renewables haven't absolutely demonstrated their cost declines will continue, is a blatant double standard and not how one does proper analysis. That's why utilities and financiers have walked away from new nuclear, especially in markets where they're not allowed to foist overruns off on the ratepayers.
> But you see, going with renewables is not betting the future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.
We have lots of experience with hydroelectricity. So we can just build more dams, it's all just a question of cost right? With more money we can just build more dams until we reach 100% hydroelectric generation right? This is the kind of logic you're using.
Possibility and feasibility are two different things. Lithium ion batteries exist, but we'll never deploy a day's worth of battery storage. The scale just isn't there. No amount of money thrown at the problem is going to make it possible.
Sure things like hydroelectricity and electrolysis exist, but they have significant barriers to feasibility. The likely path for an attempt at solar and wind grid is to build a bunch of solar and wind, try to build storage, fail, and keep using fossil fuels. Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever built grid scale storage for more than an hour's worth of electricity use (let alone total energy use). Energy storage remains an unsolved problem, and it's not just a question of cost. There's no telling if it can be done even with unlimited financial resources.
By comparison we just need to build 4 nuclear plants for every existing one in the US. No massive 10,000x increase in storage capacity required. No reliance on technology that's never been deployed at scale.
No continent currently runs on nuclear power, not even a single country currently runs on nuclear power. Nuclear power is hence unproven at scale by your logic.
France generates over 70% of it's power from nuclear energy. At it's peak it was over 80%, with the remainder fulfilled by preexisting hydroelectricity.
France gets 70% ef its electricity from nuclear. It only gets about a third of its primary power from nuclear. Clearly, the technology can't handle the task if the country can't even run its electric grid on 100% nuclear. /s
Does not scale, I hear that a lot about everything that isn't nuclear. Maybe people said that to the semiconductor industry before the explosion in person computers or smart phones.
Nuclear has got to have the worse scalability story of any hyped technology ever. Very monolithic system with tight integration between components. Hazardous materials. Complex science and engineering that needs lots of different highly trained people. Exotic materials. High temperatures. Enabling works with quantities in the millions of square metres. Processes that are difficult to model. Endless secrecy for national security. Very strong buildings. Harsh design margins. Sites in remote areas with absolutely no night life.
We should be optimistic about nuclear. But also apply optimism to other technologies and industries. If the petro-chemical industry want to make hydrogen work they will succeed. So will the battery industry and solar. If nuclear can scale than so can they.
And yet for all the complaints about nuclear, France powers over 75% of it's grid with nuclear. Several other countries have it at around 40-50%. Nuclear continues to produce more electricity than wind and solar combined.
And yet for all the scepticism about renewables it has almost caught up with nuclear in a much shorter time.
But my wider point is that we need to be more consistent in how we apply scepticism and optimism to different technologies. In some dimensions that gives a benefit to nuclear and in others the benefit is with renewables or storage.
That hydrogen is currently produced by SMR is irrelevant. Electrolysis is of course trivial to scale, you just build more electrolyzers. There is nothing that prevents arbitrary numbers of them from being operated in parallel.
Would this cost money? Yes. But it would likely cost less than a grid based on nuclear power plants. The key insight is that hydrogen can feed combined cycle power plants, which cost a factor of 10 less than a nuclear power plant of the same power output. So, one could (if necessary) back up the entire grid with CC plants at a fraction of the cost of powering the same grid with nukes. If desired, one could use simple cycle power plants, which (while less efficient) are even cheaper by another factor of about 2, or 20x cheaper than the nukes.
What? How on earth is it irrelevant that almost all of our hydrogen comes from steam reformation? We have very little experience with large scale electrolysis, and its proven to be difficult and expensive to do at scale.
Those gas plants may be cheaper build, but if the electrolyzed hydrogen is expensive the total operating cost is higher since the fuel is too expensive. If you're using single cycle gas plants you'll need even more of this hydrogen, and thus driving up costs. Are you really just comparing cost of construction and ignoring the cost of electrolyzed hydrogen fuel? And remember this is on top of the solar and wind that needs to power this electeolysis in the first place.
Also again, to convert hydrogen to methane you need a large source of carbon dioxide.
A summary of this comment is, "it's cheaper if we just ignore all the technical challenges of synthetic methane."
This is exactly the point I'm making: storing hydrogen for electricity storage has to be done through electrolysis, because steam reformation emits carbon dioxide. But we don't currently use electrolysis for our hydrogen production, because it's not cost competitive with steam reformation. It's not cost competitive with existing energy storage either.
Dude, we use natural gas because that is cheap. Why is it cheap? Because we externalize the costs of climate change. By that argument we should ditch nuclear and burn lignite. It's a lot cheaper and proven technology.
Nobody claimed electrolysis is cheaper than using natural gas. Nobody even claimed that electrolysis is cheaper than batteries at small scales. The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.
I agree we should include the cost of climate change. That's why nuclear is cheaper than solar and wind: because solar and wind require either energy storage or fossil fuels. And since energy storage at grid scale does not exist, solar and wind contains the cost of climate change.
> The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.
And my point is that this is false. Electrolysis is not proven technology at scale, almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation. No, it does not scale better than lithium ion batteries. If we try to build it at scale it'll make solar and wind more expensive than nuclear power.
You provide zero supporting arguments for your point. Megawatt electrolyzers exist today. They existed ten years ago. They don't use anything in large quantities of which supply is limited. You give no reason why we can't just build more of them.
A megawatt is basically nothing. Average load for electricity in the US is 500 GW. How much did that megawatt electrolyzed cost? Does it also include the cost of converting that hydrogen back into electricity? And remember this cost is on top of the cost of generating the stored energy in the first place.
But is it cheaper to build more electeolysis storage, and lots of overproduction in renewables? Well, until someone actually offers hydrogen storage commerically, there's no price. If it were cheap, we wouldn't be using steam reformation.
Oh good grief. Titanium ore is literally dirt cheap. Titanium has been pricey because of how it's made from the ore, not because the ore is scarce. Titanium is the 9th most abundant element in the Earth's crust.
Yes, because we can rely on fossil, nuclear, or hydro to give us reliability and pick up the slack when renewables falter. Just look at Germany, which just approved new coal plants because it needs more energy, and they are stuck to their demented plan of decommissioning nuclear plants.
It's also worth noting that France is producing less than half the greenhouse gases of Germany, despite having significantly less renewables, because it has a serious nuclear infrastructure.
They will continue to require fossil fuels until energy storage comes along and we have no idea when that will occur. So far, all of our storage systems have proven inadequate.
You can't adequately model energy with a single price per MWh. There is more to it than that and that is true of all energy types. But the low cost of renewables is still a feature that grids can exploit. It will make storage viable when it otherwise wouldn't have been.
No source of energy is a silver bullet for climate change. Wind and solar aren't. And neither is the nuclear industry. There just isn't a serious plan for scaling up quickly enough. The supply chain and expertise just doesn't exist and will take years. And moaning about mistakes in the past is irrelevant to the present.
> With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents.
Long term storage is actually trivial, just requires actually storing it.
Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.
This controls the temperature and acts as a radiation shield and there's more a hundred times more life on the surface than in the abyss. Also, no humans who get prissy about 1 in 100 chances of cancer than animals don't fare about. The ocean's also big enough that a your case corroding and some material being dissolved and spreading in the water is irrelevant (unless all your nuclear waste you ever dump manages to escape and spread throughout the ocean rather than just sit in a sullen pile you'll be under EPA limits).
> best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.
You say as if it's a done deal. Hanford is 14 years behind schedule on this, and now it looks as if it will off-gas toxic chemicals. Original budget was $4B and now is $17B.
The chemical they're using easily ignites and turns into hydrogen cyanide.
Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while waiting for construction to complete.
The amount spent just on coal and coal plant operation during those ten long years is enough, by itself, to build enough renewables to displace the nuke. The cost of building the nuke itself is enough to build several times enough to displace the nuke, beyond.
And the renewables would come on immediately, displacing carbon immediately.
Without radically increasing build-out of renewables, we will fail to avert climate catastrophe. The exact mode of civilization collapse in that case is debatable, but global thermonuclear war punctuates many.
In comparison against renewables and storage, new nuclear isn't competing against batteries and storage right now, it's competing against batteries and renewables that could be installed during the operating lifetime of the power plant (earlier in the life more so than later.) So the question is what will renewables and storage will cost in (say) 2030 or later.
Batteries have been falling in price by 27%/year recently, and PV by nearly that much, so it's a bold position to assert this will suddenly stop.
Past advancement is not necessarily an indication of future advancement. Battery tech is still exploring ways to improve Li batteries, but capacities have stopped increasing dramatically as far as I know. Even worse, even at the theoretical maximum capacity for these types of chemical batteries, there just aren't enough resources on Earth to build enough to cover the storage requirements of a huge grid.
Now, is it possible that a new type of battery will appear and take over the market by 2030? Yes. Will there be enough of them to compete with the stabilizing power of a nuclear power plant? Maybe. Will there be enough nuclear + storage so that the best use of that storage will be to shut down the nuclear plant? Absolutely not.
Basically, we need massive amounts of new electrical power (so we can transition transportation to electrical), and we need to shut down all fossil fuel power generation yesterday. Since we can't have enough storage yet for an exclusively green grid, nuclear shouldn't be competing with green energy in this discussion. Our choices are not "all green by 2030 VS green by 2030 + nuclear", they are "green + coal/gas by 2030 vs green + nuclear + less coal/gas". If we're instead talking about 2100, or 2200, then yeah, well probably be able to shut down nuclear as well.
Lithium batteries are adapted for cars, where weight matters. Anything happening with lithium has no relevance to utility power.
The best use of a nuclear power plant is not to build it at all. Having not built it, the storage built instead at a tiny fraction of the cost will certainly be more than enough to replace it.
Building any nukes means, for each, building several times less new renewable generating capacity than could otherwise be.
Then what storage of some good few hundreds of megawatts would you build for a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant, that also fits where a nuclear power plant could be built?
Space requirements for storage are not dictated by optimal nuke construction site criteria. In particular, no storage method has the potential to render a whole region uninhabitable, and does not need the square-mile exclusion zone.
There are many alternatives to batteries, for longer term storage. Tanked anhydrous liquified ammonia may be common, particularly for smaller and more isolated utility districts, in part because tankage can be topped up from imports if it runs low.
Underground or sea-floor compressed air are practical, as is buoyancy, in many places. Many more places can use pumped hydro than have an existing dam, or watershed; either up a hill or down to an underground cavity.
The method used will be whatever is cheapest in the place and time constructed. Cost for most methods is falling fast.
Building a nuke is by far the most expensive baseline alternative, provided it can even be approved and built on a useful schedule.
Let's compare the largest pumped water storage plant in the world - Nant de Drance in Switzerland [0] - with reactors at one of the largest nuclear plants in the world - Hanul in South Korea [1].
Nant de Drance has 900MW of storage, and took 14 years to build. Each of the last generation reactors in Hanul generate 950+MW of power, and took 5 years to build. The first newer generation reactor is 1340MW, and (assuming it keeps its schedule) has taken 10 years to build. They've done the first tests so they have some chance of connecting to the grid this year, but let's be pessimistic and say that it will take another 4 years - matching the construction time for Nant de Drance.
That's still ~50% more power, and it is actually generating it: for Nant de Drance to help, it also needs >900MW of actual renewable power generation plants to be built and operated.
There is little economy of scale, in pumped hydro. California stores a much larger amount of energy in numerous reservoirs all over the Sierra Nevada range.
Let's look at simulation/optimization results as to what it would cost to use renewables + storage to produce "synthetic baseload" to compete with nuclear, using real historical weather data.
(The "synthetic baseload" comparison is favorable to nuclear, as dealing with variable demand can only help renewables as it already requires storage, and that storage can serve double duty in the variable demand case. Similarly dispatchable demand and transmission between countries also only helps renewables.)
It's difficult to get nuclear to compete with wind+solar+batteries+hydrogen in the 2030 cost scenarios. Nuclear does least worse in places like Poland then.
The overwhelming majority of utility storage will not be in batteries, so battery cost is immaterial. Batteries will be useful for load-smoothing, and short-term storage in smaller grids.
It's striking to me about the US's fuel 'dole' and comparisons to the Roman's grain dole. Not the same at all, but the similarities and how different governments through time prioritize the goods and services to achieve their ends is fascinating.
Safetyism in regards to nuclear power is nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change. They will lose an excellent source of political capital if climate change is solved, so they will always fearmonger nuclear power.
Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0].
The renewable industry is still incredibly nascent and does not wield (much) power (yet). In the future, that may not be the case, but to compare this with the existing fossil fuel industries is really quite disingenuous. There's orders of magnitude difference between the two as of yet. Will they become similarly corrupt? Perhaps. Likely, even. But it will shift the profit from massive, world-changing effects to something different, and we're already more tuned into the issue that energy production, consumption, and use has serious side effects.
they already conspired with the fossil industry to kill nuclear power in germany. their minister for energy is "Green" and they're busy reopening coal plants and opening new coal mines to make up for the shortfall of russian gas. they wield immense, malign power.
Does political lobbying have to be done by business, or do the efforts of religious groups to influence policy count as lobbying? If there is a Green lobby then it has more in common with the, I dunno, "Christian lobby" than lobbying from big business.
Ah yes, it’s a sinister plot by the evil “environmental lobby”…
No, it’s just that the roots of the green movement are mixed with the nuclear disarmament movement, and the rejection of nuclear unfortunately got carried on to civilian power plants :(
This is an important point. The green movement agenda is obviously mixed with something other than environmental concerns, or they would embrace nuclear.
the environment doesn't have any money to lobby with. we make money out of it.
fossil fuel lobby though... they have billions of reasons to lobby against nuclear, to the point that they may give eco-terrorists money to do their work for them. can't say this happened, but see Germany - it's the least effort rational explanation.
The design maybe? This quote from the article may be a part of it
> In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.
I wonder what strategies need to be employed to feel confident that you have even surfaced all the problems. Presumably there is a list of unmitigatable problems or worst defended attack vectors. But that is probably the hidden success of our last century, that and tight machine tolerances it's everywhere.
Well, to some extent it is a simple calculation. Depending on the amount and radioactivity of an isotope, you get a certain amount of heating.
If you go past some amount, you start requiring active cooling to stop it from increasing faster and faster in temperature and reacting more violently - this may happen in traditional power plants. If instead you limit the reactor to a much smaller amount of fuel, it starts losing more heat to air than it produces from radioactivity, and this problem goes away.
Of course, the problem is then to obtain that heating while the reactor is operational, but I understand the solutions are known.
This is similar to why fusion reactors are not a risk of becoming nuclear weapons: the system requires external power input just to keep the reaction going. So, in the event of a problem, you'll lose the reaction, instead of it running away uncontrollably.
Of course, there are other risks. For example, a fusion plant may suffer a breach of the reaction chamber, and all that energy will violently explode, releasing radioactive tritium and bits of radioactivated materials from the reactor structure around. I would guess MMRs have similar bad-but-not-catastophic failure modes.
"The SMR’s 12 modules, each producing 50 megawatts"
So each module is a little smaller than the reactor of the 1960's era submarine I served on and is based on the same pressurized water technology. I was a "nuke" so had to go in the reactor compartment several times. As far as I can remember, the reactor was about 10 feet in diameter. We went in the shipyard for refueling after the lifetime of the rods, which was 15 years. I could never understand why we didn't build these for civilian use (cost I figured) but now we will. Cool.
I've had friends that served on nuke subs. It still blows my mind that a sub only needs to refuel once every 15 years.
I never understood the argument nuclear power is so "dangerous". The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl. Almost the entire fleet is nuclear-powered, including all aircraft carriers, subs, and battleships.
The fact is we could be doing a heck of a lot of cool things, if it weren’t for the anti-nuke crowd that set the technology back 20-30 years.
Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. EVs would be a no brainer Natural gas would be obsolete. Nuclear desalination would completely solve the water crisis in the US West. I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. Really the possibilities are incredible. It would be the equivalent of humanity going from horse and buggy to using fossil fuels, but another order of magnitude.
The other problem is that the anti nuke crowd had a point back in the day - they were wrong about Nuclear not being safe theoretically - but they were right about a few asshole corporations doing things too cheaply.
Instead we got decades of coal power which has caused at least tens of millions of deaths and has led to runaway global warming which might kill billions.
Truly glad we prevented a few assholes corporations from making a mess of things. I get grossed out just thinking about the clean air and normal climate.
The anti-nuclear argument pretty much simplifies to: Nuclear is hard, maintenance needs to be done diligently and regularly, no corners can be cut, and humans are historically really bad to doing ANY of that!
> Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance.
Economies of scale were applied from the inception of commercial nuclear power, yet the promise of electricity too cheap to meter has never materialized. Quite the opposite. In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive method of generating electricity, and the anti-nukes don't enter into it. Even if every individual on the planet was pro-nuke, it would still be too expensive. If it was otherwise, nothing whatsoever could prevent investors from coming out of the woodwork to fulfill your dream of nuclear power plants everywhere. Make nuclear energy economical and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, as well as being absurdly wealthy. But when you fail, try to avoid blaming anything other than nuclear energy itself.
None of this is true in Japan, you might want to read up about the cost scaling that’s happened there.
The short version is, you need to have enough generations of reactor building to allow later projects to benefit from previous learnings. Because of various outside effects (this is a euphemism for the anti-nuke lobby) that type of iterative improvement and workforce skilling didn’t happen in other countries.
The capital costs of nuclear are so high the current model of marketing electricity doesn’t work.
The same will be true of fusion. Set a target level of service and make electric generation a government service. The government is better at capital projects anyway and if energy were a taxpayer funded service it would transform society in many ways.
> The capital costs of nuclear are so high the current model of marketing electricity doesn’t work.
It doesn't work because nuclear is the only power where all the externalities are accounted for. The average coal plant kills more people with radiation released from burning coal every year than all nuclear accidents combined.
Can you name any capital projects in the last 30 years where the US government did a great job of a) controlling costs, b) meeting the stated design goal, c) on time?
I have a family member who was an engineer in the Federal Highway Administration for many years. The amount of waste and excess cost on these projects is really hard to exagerate.
Comparative costs to other OECD countries for similar infrastructure - there really isn't one, as the US is way out of line in terms of cost and quality.
My family member communicated with counterparts in other countries, impressed with what they were doing. When asked what the research was that they based their projects on, they all said it was the US funded research (which the US doesn't take advantage of).
Maybe you should stop electing people whose campaign talk is that US agencies are a big mess?
I mean, these people basically gain popularity when government is shown to be inefficient, but at the same time, they're the ones tasked with running the government.
> You shouldn't leave it there, because that accident has nothing to do with cost scaling.
The accident, that single accident on its own, probably doubled the cost of nuclear power to Japan. It is hard to tell because the costs have not all been paid and are mounting still.
This is the Achilles heal of nuclear power, that the boosters want us to ignore: The risk of catastrophic failure. One reactor can be looked after carefully (not economically - others have pointed out here the eye watering costs) and safely. But lots of reactors? No. We will keep have catastrophic failures until we stop.
> But lots of reactors? No. We will keep have catastrophic failures until we stop.
The military have fielded many reactors for a considerable amount of time. We've got a bit over fifty years of fielding nuclear reactors in submarines. Where are all the inevitable disasters, if that is the case?
> The military have fielded many reactors for a considerable amount of time. > We've got a bit over fifty years of fielding nuclear reactors in submarines. Where are all the inevitable disasters, if that is the case?
Three from the USA navy. It is a lie that the nuclear reactors on submarines have been safe. Two have been lost at sea (one was sunk in harbour)
Nuclear reactors on ships generally, submarines in particular, are a terrible idea. As evidenced by the fact that the US Navy has sunk three, two catestrophically. If the US Navy cannot do it, who can?
The number of oil spills that happened in that same time frame, that we're still trying to recover from, exceeds that by a great number. The environmental damage caused by those isn't purely theoretical.
Compare that, to the Exxon Valdez, and the Deepwater Horizon.
Why don't you keep reading the article on the list submarines that you referenced, all the way down to the 4th paragraph that talks about causes of sinking.
1 of 9 (Soviet K-37) was scuttled with no loss of life due to reactor issues spanning years. 1 had an undetermined cause of sinking with theories having to do with the usual submarine issues (fire, torpedo accent, ballast/pressure issues), not its reactor. All others were lost for reasons having nothing to do with nuclear reactors.
Huh? Only one of those subs had issues with its nuclear reactor, but there was no "disaster": it was scuttled in a controlled manner (though unfortunately in a location that the IAEA disagreed with).
All the other incidents listed had nothing to do with their nuclear reactors; they would have all sunk just the same had they been powered by diesel fuel.
I'm not sure what you mean by the US Navy sinking two "catastrophically": none of the deaths listed on the page you link have anything to do with the fact that nuclear power was used.
However, you probably should have linked this section of the overall article on nuclear submarines:
It's weird that the section starts off with "Some of the most serious nuclear and radiation accidents by death toll in the world have involved nuclear submarine mishaps", as the following list doesn't seem to support that, only cataloguing 28 deaths and 162 cases that probably included lifelong health problems. (These numbers are not great, but still not as bad as for land-based reactor incidents, and tiny compared to deaths and health problems caused by burning fossil fuels.) They do claim "substantial radioactivity released" in several of the incidents, but don't quantify the effects, or what the effects would have been if it had been a land-based reactor (so maybe very bad!).
I hesitate to mention this (as I don't want to sound dismissive), but it might be notable to consider that all of these incidents occurred on Soviet subs, and that there hasn't been an incident since 1989. The navies of the US, UK, France, China, India, and post-Soviet Russia have never (at least as far as we know) had a reactor incident with their nuclear-powered subs.
I don’t think you actually believe that the bottom of the ocean is a good place to keep nuclear waste.
You would probably agree with me—and most other people—that a nuclear power plant, the was caught throwing their waste into the ocean, would be an environmental disaster. The US navy doing the same thing is also an environmental disaster.
Presumably the reactors in submarines are commanded to scram when the sub is in trouble.
So the reactor is a high corrosion resistant stainless vessel in non-critical state at the bottom of many tens (hundreds?) of metres of ocean.
All told, that doesn't seem an entirely unreasonable place for it. Even if it was critical, in the active state before the sub sank, it'd probably just heat water for a decade or too before it eventually cools down.
Even if it suffered a meltdown, that's not ideal, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it.
Genuine question: is this a nuclear power failing, or a business failing?
According to the wiki article, several issues from the inception of the plant through the failure were ignored, all of which either made the failure worse or would have arguably prevented it. My understanding is that the plant itself was already supposed to have been shut down, but duty was extended; I'm not sure if this was to move towards break-even on cost, or just to prevent a power generation gap, or make more money. Note that the plant in question is one that had been shut down previously because TEPCO had been caught falsifying inspection and repair records.
IMO (as a total non-expert) nuclear is probably safe, it's the people running it that screw it up for everyone. Maybe that's not a meaningful distinction? I'd sure like to have a discussion about nuclear that doesn't conflate failures of leadership with failures of technology, though.
> In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive method of generating electricity
Just wonder if we're pricing in those externalities from coal, like hundreds of thousands of deaths per year due to air pollution and the fact that it is completely fucking up the atmosphere, leading to a global catastrophe. Because...we're not.
Nuclear is uneconomical because safe, economical nuclear is illegal. That's it. If everyone were pro-nuclear, those laws wouldn't exist (or would exist in a sane form), and nuclear would be cheap.
Nuclear never achieved economies of scale because of the anti nuclear crowd. The cumulative number of nuclear power plants built is a drop in the bucket compared to coal and gas plants.
I'm not sure how the anti-nuclear crowd stopped that. There was a general mismanagement and misestimstion of how much nuclear was needed. And then there was a massive amount of construction mismanagement.
Even in France, which has a very supportive population, and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they build more of the same reactor model.
Construction productivity doesn't increase like manufacturing productivity does. Nuclear's failures are, as far as I can tell, entirely the responsibility of those tasked with building it. And it's quite possible that nuclear only makes sense at a certain level of economic development, with the right level of technology, but not too much technological development such that manufacturing has completely eclipsed construction.
Go to any investor that would build nuclear, and they won't cite public opposition as the reason not to build, they will cite the construction risk.
And that's why this SMR design is being tried rather than large reactors.
> Even in France, which has a very supportive population, and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they build more of the same reactor model.
I'd be curious to learn where you got your data for this, because I have never been able to find such data. Best I could get was average cost of a plant in a "pallier".
What I can provide is building duration, which definitely goes down as more of the same model are built, but there's no guarantee that building duration and cost are equal here.
I spent years asking people who claim that France's cost were low for the data behind it to no avail, but only finally stumbled upon somebody linking to this paper in a different context:
There's another paper somewhere in my bookmarks that shows this for reactors of the same model built in the US, and maybe also France, but I'm having trouble locating it right now...
As with any single publication, it can't be taken as the revealed truth, but it's the best I have at hand.
Edit: how could I have forgotten about the infamous Loveringe, Yip, Nordgard paper! This is impressive because it does the analysis across many countries, and finds a few with cost decreases, but a dominant trend towards more expensive construction:
My personal, untested, hypothesis is that these variations have mostly to do with the general cost of labor in a country, and in particular their level of economic advancement, which establishes a floor on the value of an hour of a person's labor. Specifically, my guess is that construction is only feasible for nuclear when a country is in a magic sweet spot where labor is cheap, and technological advancement is moderate, like 1950s-70s US level. But not so advanced that labor has gotten so expensive that skilled labor like welders have more productive uses of their time.
If my theory is correct, future costs for South Korea should rise from where they were before stopping their program (in a flurry of corruption scandals, I would note. Nobody brings up South Korea as an example of successful construction anymore, instead having to resort to suggesting Rosatom should embark on a massive building spree across the globe.)
The abstract looks interesting, but I can't find it in open access. If you have access to it, what would be interesting to look at is cost evolution within a batch ("pallier" in french). Cost of newer batches compared to older batches isn't really relevant, as France progressively moved from 900MW reactors to 1450MW ones. Newer batches were also notably smaller, leaving less room for design improvement or cost optimization.
The reality is economies of scale have kicked in for solar and wind energy in a way they never can for nuclear. We are at the point where it makes sense, at times, to overprovision renewals to ensure enough supply.
The issue with renewables is storage, of course. But that problem looks to be more solvable than cost effective nuclear, a problem which we have not solved in over 50 years. One can say if we were only smarter we could make nuclear more cost effective, which is probably true. But we built a nuclear power plant where a tsunami occurred in the past, only to find it occurred again, so we aren't that smart. The issue with nuclear is everything has to be right for it to be cost effective and safe, and nuclear is too complex for humans to consistently do this.
Safe nuclear power that is also cost effective is not a problem we have solved.
SMRs are an opportunity for economies of scale to kick in for nuclear. If you can start building reactors in factories, and interate on designs, then you can see economies of scale kick in.*
That said, I am not super bullish on nuclear, and agree with your position. Solar and wind are just getting too cheap for nuclear to get the investment needed to catch-up. If we see someone crack the code on cheap storage of electiciy, solar and wind will runaway with the prize. Not coincidentally, storage is has vastly more investment of money and brains on looking for ways to scale vs nuclear.
*Safety concerns with nuclear will make iterative design difficult to pull off!
There was scarcely any financial incentive to address the grid scale energy storage problem until like two or three years ago. There are a half dozen startups working on it now.
My vote is to rapidly install renewables while we have the natural gas backstop, and give the storage startups a few years to make it happen. Energy Dome, Hydrostor, and Form Energy all look promising.
And if new nuclear turns out to be less expensive than expected, great.
It’s really hard to invest billions of capital dollars that won’t produce any return for a decade while you can realize immediate return on solar with costs that drop
every year.
Accountants are the worst enemy of nuclear, not activists.
Fortunately, that very rarely happens, so backing it up with gas turbine plants (burning hydrogen, ultimately) is cheaper than dealing with the 365/24/7 high cost of nuclear.
This uses real weather data for various countries and optimize solar + wind + batteries + hydrogen to provide a constant output at minimum cost. The results are interesting. You can tweak the cost assumptions.
That vision needs waste disposal or processing, which Jimmy Carter halted when he took office. It matters little that Ronald Reagan removed the prohibition, as investors will not put capital toward that again because the investment can be wiped out a few years later based on whims of politics. Without waste processing, storage of waste onsite forever creates an investment problem for new construction in USA.
This is such a misguided argument. Amount of nuclear waste is so negligible compared to common waste, it doesn't deserve to even be argued about. Not only that, but today's nuclear waste in couple of decades could become a treasure for next generations. Discussion should be: we either develop new energy sources or we don't. Either works for me, but if you don't want to go on with progress, then shut up about climate change and stop calling yourself progressive
The proliferation concerns probably got worse. I wouldn't invest in this in the US unless there was like a constitutional amendment saying we can reprocess.
The investors didn't put money toward it because it had no economic foundation. Uranium is too cheap, enrichment became cheaper, and separated plutonium has negative value. The French have admitted their reprocessing was net more expensive than not doing it.
You'd think control over the materials in these small plants would be much better than for the radioactive materials already widespread and easy to obtain, like cesium 137 calibration sources used in healthcare [1]. Apparently one of these would allow a dirty bomb to contaminate 40 city blocks [2]. So I reckon there are easier existing sources for radioactive materials if one wanted to cause mass panic, I don't think spent fuel rods are going to end up in the municipal waste.
> I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age.
I'm absolutely certain of it. In regards to nuclear rocketry, it wasn't even the anti-nuclear crowd that killed one of the most promising technologies but they certainly guaranteed it would die in the dustbins of JPL's archive.
NASA and the United Aircraft Corporation came up with a reactor design called the nuclear lightbulb [1] that used tens of kilograms of uranium instead of thousands by heating uranium hexaflouride [^1] to a plasma and using an irrotational vortex [^2] of neon gas to compress it until it became a self sustaining [^3] black body radiator [^4]. They were just about to test the reactor with real fuel when it was canceled (during Nixon's administration as part of the Mars program) but they managed to experimentally identify the remaining production challenges like the computational power needed to keep the core stable and the material science necessary to separate the vortex from the fluid economically. There has been so much progress in fields that address those challenges that many of the problems are considered solved and the remainder are surmountable engineering problems.
I really hope with this renewed interest in nuclear someone eventually revives the design and tries to bring it to its conclusion. Just based off of the declassified publications from the 60s and early 70s [2][3][4][5] it is obvious how much potential this design had: it's safe [^5], useful for rocketry and terrestrial power generation, and self breeding by nature of its design [^6]. Who knows where we could be in space exploration and the battle against climate change had the design been fully explored.
[5] and many more in the JPL archives! Search for "gas core reactor"
[^1] UF6 is the most common intermediate in the enrichment process and depleted UF6 is how most of our nuclear waste is stored... and this reactor is a perfect breeding reactor for the waste (see [^5]). All of the infrastructure for dealing with the materials have existed since the Manhattan project.
[^2] the opposite of a rotational vortex like a tornado, which have calm centers. In an irrotational vortex the particles in the center have the highest velocity and in the reactor it acts like a centrifuge, forcing the uraninum to the center and compressing it to tens or hundreds of atmospheres. This part was tested experimentally.
[^3] the energy of the plasma and compression from the vortex increase the neutron cross section to the point where the nuclear reaction becomes self heating with only 20kg of fuel. They stopped just short of testing the full cycle but this is the same concept behind nuclear weapons, which use precise explosives to compress nuclear fuel until it reaches criticality, except the vortex can't generate the kind of pressures necessary for a nuclear explosion.
[^4] the NASA/UAC design heats the UF6 till it radiates most of its energy away as UV. Classical steam turbines or hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles (in the case of a rocket engine) allow the system to extract power.
[^5] since it's an active design, tons of power is required to pump the vortex and keep the core in a fissile regime. If any part of the system fails, the core loses pressure and becomes a really expensive gas canister until the chamber is cleaned up and the core restarted. With a plasma window separating the core from a vacuum, the entire system can be designed to depressurize safetly.
[^6] anything injected into the core gets bombarded by neutrons and the vortex system constantly wicks away small amounts of the core. The system forms a closed loop that recycles unused fuel via centrifuge and it can also separate out transmuted waste [*]. The NASA/UAC team tested this with a neutron gun to simulate fission in the core.
This is wishful thinking. France for example never had a Three mile island type of disaster which tilted the public opinion of nuclear power, like the USA did. They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests.
In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables.
EDIT: I feel like people are focusing on the wrong point here. I was apparently—and unintentionally—disingenuous by touting Germany’s success in replacing coal power with renewables, as compared to France. However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
> They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests.
> In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
Rarely have I seen reality mistreated so blatantly.
France has barely used coal in the last 4 decades, and so it seems to be enough to claim that, by slowly reducing their coal use, Germany does much better.
That reminds me of the popular definition of chutzpah: the person that asks for mercy after murdering his parents, since, afterall, he's now an orphan.
> However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
Your main point is wrong. [1] shows that each model has experienced faster build time as new units were built. What is true is that new, more advanced designs can take more time to build than older, less advanced designs.
That graph shows nothing of the sort, and it conveniently excludes the 2010s, where Areva's Olkiluoto 3 plant in Finland has been under construction for 17 years and is still not finished.
CP0: first reactor 6.5y, last reactor 5y
CP1: first reactor 6y, last reactor 5y
CP2: first reactor 5y, last reactor 6y
P4 : first reactor 7y, last reactor 6y
P'4: first reactor 7y, last reactor 6.5y
N4 : first reactor 12y, last reactor 7.5y
That's 5/6 designs where building multiple plants lead to faster build times.
> it conveniently excludes
Honestly, I suspect you're just namedroping here. But let's adress the point: Olkiluoto and Flamanville are the first 2 reactors of their generation, I'm not sure what you want to compare them to in terms of build time. My guess is that Hinkley point will get built much faster, and that we may see further improvements if more are built.
> they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
That sounds a less impressive when you rephrase it as saying they went from 15x more coal use than france to 9x as much. Percentage wise the decrease seems similar in the last few years.
> governments have historically put to much faith in it
If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear.
Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that was one helluva waiting cost.
This is false dichotomy. The US government also had the option of investing in renewables as early as the 1970s. They simply didn’t. The success of Germany’s recent investment suggests that was a wrong choice.
In fairness solar efficiency was below 10% in the 1970s, while the world was already producing many gigawatts of nuclear energy at that time.
It's not as though Germany could have 'decided' in the 1970s to have 2022 technology. Sure, increased investment at the time may have sped up the development of renewables, but it still wouldn't be fast. Science doesn't quite work that way.
Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they are today by 1990, and we would not now be facing imminent, impending Climatic Catastrophe. Energy during ie past 30 years would have been radically cheaper. Coal plants and nuke plants alike would have been shuttered as unsustainable, not for their CO2 but just because they cost too damn much.
But here we are, instead. Thank Reagan. And Bush. And Bush, again.
US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
> Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they are today by 1990
This seems to be implying that basically all the research was done between the 2000's and now, and that scientists had been twiddling their thumbs between 1970 and 2000. Actually, scientific advances between 1970 and 2000 were critical to enable the renewables boom that we experienced since 2000.
Could it have gone faster if more funds had been made available? Maybe. But claiming that we "lost" 30 years in research on that topic simply shows ignorance about the way research works.
> US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
Yeah, and if the Romans hadn't spent so much time fighting with their neighbours, we would all be eating free lunches now.
Simply not subsidizing polluting fossil fuels would have been a major boon to solar, wind, nuclear, energy efficiency, economic growth.
There's reports around about what actually drove the price drops in renewable, and while research plays it's part, market support and scale are big factors, we definately squandered multiple opportunities to nip climate change in the bud.
So you're argument is that in an alternative timeline where we'd invested more money we would have invented technology in the 1980s that still doesn't exist in the 2020s?
Uhh, renewables are here today. The parent was refuting that "solar wasn't ready" by making the point that the progress in renewables is attributable to increased industrial activity and funding.
Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy. That regime lasted until the 90s and by then any memory of the oil crises in the 70s was long gone.
>Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy.
The panels installed on the White House were not photovoltaic solar panels - they were solar water heater panels. (After they damaged the roof, they weren't replaced after the repairs were done.) It wouldn't have been possible to run the economy on solar water heater panels.
Not OP, but yes! I believe the argument is that in an alternative timeline where the US government invested in renewables, they would be both more technologically advanced and more commercially feasible today.
I’m not the biggest fan of arguing about alternate history, but this thread originally spun out after an ancestor poster claimed we would have a rosy present if only we had invested more in nuclear energy. I claim I find way more wishful then claiming the same about renewables.
> On the other we have a technology that still doesn't exist in the 2020s
You keep saying this, but I'm not sure where it's coming from. Reading upthread, my interpretation is that we are specifically talking about the technology that exists today, in 2022.
I think it's entirely reasonable that, if investments into renewables were made in the 70s and 80s at a level comparable to investments in fossil fuels or nuclear, we would have seen, in the 90s, renewables technology comparable to what we have today. No, it wouldn't be the same technology, but I could see efficiency numbers being similar, though perhaps at a bit higher cost.
German success? You mean the country headed into a winter where they will be shutting down their industry have people freeze to death at the whim of Putin?
I shudder to think what failure looks like to you.
Germany is today burning less coal than would have been necessary if they had refurbished their nukes instead of spending the money building out wind.
Operating the wind farms is much cheaper than operating the nukes and mining the extra coal would have been. That opex savings goes to more capex wind generation capacity, further reducing costs by each GW displaced.
So, yes, success. Not being off coal already is not failure. Replacing an entire country's energy infrastructure takes time, no matter what.
> Germany is today burning less coal than would have been necessary if they had refurbished their nukes instead of spending the money building out wind.
> France for example never had a Three mile island type of disaster which tilted the public opinion of nuclear power
Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger.
On the other hand, the costs grew because the standards for risk grew to tremendous levels that are way, way above those applied for the coal and gas industries, or wind and solar for that matter.
> Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger.
The wiki article you linked says the plant was unfinished. This would indicate the attack was a protest against the construction of the plant, not an attempt to induce a nuclear meltdown. You are perhaps unintentionally twisting the facts.
> They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests.
Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale and with full support of the state. I don't trust promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all.
But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing their electricity production. It's a pretty notable success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could afford it.
I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well. The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by comparison.
That's wrong. France is a net exporter of power, by over 50%. So even on aggregate it is a net benefit to the world since 90% of the power generated is CO2 free.
Yes and? French electricity is 10 times less CO2 intensive to produce than German. Given that France exports 30% more electricity to Germany than they import it reduces the carbon footprint of both countries.
>This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables.
Historically the countries that invested in nuclear and hydro have been most successful in lowering the carbon intensity of their energy sector. Looking at the data, Germany does not appear to be nearly as successful as France. In 2021 France's electricity averaged 68 gCO2/kWh, and Germany averaged 364 gCO2/kWh.
It still blows my mind that a sub only needs to refuel once every 15 years.
One of the things making this possible is 90+ percent enrichment of U235 in the fuel. That's weapons grade and won't fly in a civilian reactor. I haven't read NuScale's application in great detail but I'd be surprised if they used anything above 5 percent.
There are two uranium isotopes present on earth, U-235 and U-238. U-235 is the fissile material which powers nuclear reactions in both nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants. The 5% number represents the fraction of uranium in the fuel which is U-235 instead of U-238. Anything above 20% or so is considered "highly enriched", and nuclear bombs often have fuel which is 80-90% U-235.
And the reason why bombs have more of the U-235 is because is splits easier than U-238, so it's easier to end up with a self sustaining chain reaction, where every U-235 that splits produces enough neutrons to split off two more U-235 atoms, which in turn splits 4, then 8, then 16 and so on - the chain reaction splits the whole lot all at once and you've got a bomb.
To add to what other commenters have said, apart from the weapons proliferation issues, enriching uranium is very expensive.
U-235 only makes up about 0.72% of natural uranium, the rest of it being U-238. Running a reactor on low enriched uranium is much more cost effective, although reactor designs that can run on LEU can be less safe, like Chernobyls RBMK design.
For whatever it's worth, Russia continues to operate several RBMK reactors today, and haven't blown any of them up since Chernobyl in the 80s. This is probably attributable to some combination of the retrofits they made after Chernobyl, generally treating the matter more seriously, and maybe luck.
That's taking a blameless post-mortem approach which is a valid tool, but not the entire answer.
The reality is to cause the issue, the operators had to drive the reactor well into a dangerous and hard to control regime which it would not get into under any normal operation circumstance.
So while yes, it shouldn't have been physically possible to do it, even with that design it took substantial, deliberate malfeasance to get that result (you can also only get that result with that design - a meltdown is not normally an explosion).
From what I’ve read some of the safety systems did not give real-time feedback and the critical error occurred because the operators didn’t know they were in trouble due to lack of real-time feedback. I’m not an engineer and know nothing of these things but the test was not unauthorized and it wasn’t an experiment. As far as I read about the accident.
Civil nukes have never had any strong safety culture. The emphasis has always been on cost-cutting, because nukes have always been too expensive to compete fairly in an open market.
Every nuke, ever, has been massively subsidized.
NuScale has been and is still being massively subsidized by the USDoE. It would be wholly uncompetitive with renewables if not so propped up.
> NuScale has been and is still being massively subsidized by the USDoE
Given the longstanding cozy relationship between the NRC, the DOE and industry it's hard to feel confident in this approval being sufficiently stringent, e.g. on worst-case scenarios, waste disposal and the like.
There is a difference between a nuclear reactor blowing up in a country with low overall population density (e.g. the US; in Chernobyl also it wasn't that taxing to designate an exclusion zone for a few centuries), it happening in a very densely populate country (where it would be a desaster), or it happening in a military sub where the owning state doesn't care about collateral damage [1]
I don’t think the US military is a positive example of safe usage of nuclear. First the Hanford nuclear site in Washington is one of the most polluted site in the entire state. The cleanup effort is the regions biggest employer and is costing the local communities, the state, and the federal government millions of dollars every year.
The Bikini Atoll in the Marshall islands is one of the most polluted places in the pacific ocean. The US military conducted nuclear testing around there and simply swept the pollution in one place. There are dozens of reports of cancer from both former military personnel an nearby local population. And concerns are rising with elevated sea level that pollution will be leaking at greater pace then currently.
These are just two examples of the US military neglecting safety concerns with their nuclear technology. There is no single spectacular event like the Chernobyl disaster. But rather decades of neglect and disregard to public safety which polluted many areas leaving potentially an overall damage on par—and potentially greater—then the Chernobyl disaster.
It's not the US Military generally that is held up as an example of nuclear safety, it's specifically the US Navy's track record for operating nuclear reactors. Hanford was a big mess, but that wasn't run by the Navy. Bikini Atoll was bad, but that wasn't caused by a mistake operating a nuclear reactor.
Your supposition that reactor accidents smaller than Chernobyl might be hidden from the public doesn't seem well grounded either; we know the US Army fucked up the operation of the SL-1 reactor, resulting in 3 deaths. Here's a big list of nuclear fuckups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid... Some of those severe, some minor. I don't see much reason to believe that substantial naval reactor incidents have been omitted from that list. Such accidents are hard to hide from long, particularly if it means a bunch of sailors got irradiated or a ship had to be taken out of service for decontamination / repair. The incidents on that list bracket the sort of mystery accident you're supposing; it lists accidents much less severe and much more severe.
> Your supposition that reactor accidents smaller than Chernobyl might be hidden from the public doesn't seem well grounded either.
I supposed no such thing. You don’t need an accident to leave a mess (as evidenced by our current climate crisis). You just need to be negligent of the environment and surrounding population center. The US military (including the Navy) has a terrible track record when it comes to environmental issues around its military bases around the world. My supposition is that they are simply equally inconsiderate with their nuclear logistics as they are with their other operations. And Bikini Atoll is my ground for thinking so.
That list of military nuclear accidents was interesting. My impression is that the rate of accidents dropped off quickly over time. Maybe the military got better at handling nuclear material? Maybe some other explanation?
You're saying that nuclear testing produces a lot of radioactive fallout? Yeah, it does. This is absolutely not the same thing as operating a nuclear reactor.
But that is despite the point. Their safety record with nuclear is horrendous. Full of examples of neglect and pollution. I’m not an expert in the nuclear history of the US military, but I wouldn’t be surprised that many of their smaller reactors have similar stories as Hanford. It is just not as spectacular—and therefor not as much in the public consciousness—as Chernobyl.
Hanafords mess dates back to the manahatten project and processed uranium and plutonium for fat man and little boy. the 1940s was a long fucking time ago. and when have learned a lot since then and technology has advanced. the testing in Bikini atoll was awful but has nothing to do with nuclear power its about weapons testing which is a entirely unrelated issue and we stopped doing that.
> In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department of Energy and 7–9% of all nuclear waste in the United States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US, with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.
Same reason people are afraid of getting robbed at night when they're more common during the day when everyone is at work, or why we're scared of heights and planes, but cars and horseback riding don't phase us. Fear is an emotional reaction, not a rational one.
I’m not sure what you mean by “battleships”, but the US navy is definitely not mostly nuclear. Super carriers and most subs yes. Everything else (many, many vessels) are not.
Only a small fraction of the US Navy's fleet is nuclear powered, specifically just the submarines and carriers. Their last battleships were decommissioned many years ago, and those were all conventionally powered. The Navy did build a few nuclear powered surface warships decades ago, but that was largely a failure due to high costs and operational limitations; they don't plan to build any more.
What really killed the CGNs (nuclear powered destroyers) was VLS (vertical launch system) and AEGIS - the sensor suite that newer Navy destroyers and cruisers are built around. CGNs were all built around magazine fed rail-style missile launchers, and sensors were all designed when state of the art was a transistor. Refitting ships to modern sensors like AEGIS and modern VLS was almost a complete rebuild. Even early Ticonderoga class conventionally powered cruisers (CGs) that had rail launchers were retired early because of the cost of refit to VLS.
Incidentally, VLS allows for much faster deployment of missiles, and doesn't require deck space for different launchers for different missiles, and a ship with a modern VLS have a huge rate-of-fire advantage on older rail launcher equipped ships.
That may have been the reason for mothballing the old ship designs, but why weren't the new ones nuclear powered? That seems to be independent of the missile launcher design.
* Role of the ship: why have an expensive ship that turns into a radioactive reef in a role when one of its missions is to "take a bullet" for a carrier?
Mainly for cost reasons, plus nuclear reactors also take up more space and can't accelerate quite as rapidly compared to modern gas turbines. If the Navy ever decides to build a new cruiser class to replace the old Ticonderogas then it might be worth considering nuclear propulsion, but realistically the budget just isn't there to make it happen. The Navy can barely afford to provide enough qualified crew for their existing few nuclear vessels.
Not battleships, but America did have several nuclear powered cruisers which lasted around 15-30 years (but all were decommissioned in the 90s.) They weren't battleships, but that term is sometimes used colloquially to refer to any surface warship other than carriers.
> but that term [battleships] is sometimes used colloquially to refer to any surface warship other than carriers
Really? I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone call a frigate a cruiser or a littoral combat ship a destroyer or an amphibious assault ship a carrier but everyone knows battleships are the biggest big-gun ships out there.
I think so, at least for some people who don't have an interest in military stuff or machines generally. Similar to the way any armored but unarmed truck may sometimes be called "a tank." (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=police+tank&iax=images&ia=i...)
I try not to judge, I'm probably equally wrong without knowing it about things as far outside my area of interest.
I would not be surprised if many people who don't have knowledge of naval vessels would use "battleship" as a generic term for "surface naval vessel". A possible driver of this could be the "Battleship" game.
I would also not be surprised if there were many people who'd never heard the terms "destroyer" or "cruiser".
They're obsolete. There was some debate in the 90s and 00s over whether they should be kept around since they had an incredible amount of firepower and some people still thought that maybe contested beach landings were a good idea. But ultimately they were stricken from the Navy and are now museum ships.
Yes, and it was a colossal waste of money keeping them running even that long. Realistically they should have been scrapped in the period after the Korean war.
It has been proposed that the reason the battleships were in Pearl Harbor was so they would be the ships sunk when the Japanese attacked. The aircraft carriers were all far out to sea.
Whether this is true, it shows that the obsolescence of battleships (since aircraft carriers came on line) was recognized well before WWII.
Pearl Harbor converted the US in the Pacific from a 17 knot navy to a 25 knot navy.
We did get five of the eight battleships back (although some were basically cored out like a rotten tooth and rebuilt almost from scratch.) Two ships were left there (Utah and Arizona). Oklahoma was raised mostly to free up its slot in the harbor, but sank in 1947 while being towed to San Francisco Bay to be scrapped.
The BB's role in the Pacific War was as AA platforms and for shore bombardment.
All of America's supercarriers have been nuclear powered since the USS Kitty Hawk was decommissioned in 2009.
But if you include "amphibious assault ships" like the Wasp class, which can carry a lot of helicopters and STOVL airplanes like the F-35B and Harrier, then US Navy still has a lot of conventional powered carriers.
The military has a much lower bar for safety though, given all the incidents around chemical poisonings and pollution like soldiers getting exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam or burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Nuclear Navy has an extremely high bar for safety, hence no nuclear accidents. Unlike the Air Force apparently, which sometimes loses hydrogen bombs. Go Navy!
The US Navy has fumbled a few nuclear bombs too (from airplanes and also submarines), their impeccable safety record is for nuclear reactors specifically. They've lost two nuclear powered submarines, but neither of those was due to reactor problems.
The nuclear navy has had numerous nuclear accidents, just like the air force. Also just like the air force they have avoided any spectacular meltdowns so far, but that doesn't mean they've been problem free.
Navy has an extremely high bar for safety according to Navy itself, but accidents sometimes get classified for a couple of decades. It happened before, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site for example.
The Hanford site is a horror show of the reality of how the US handles decommissioned nukes:
> The DOE later found water intruding into at least 14 single-shell tanks and that one of them had been leaking about 640 US gallons (2,400 l; 530 imp gal) per year into the ground since about 2010. In 2012, the DOE also discovered a leak from a double-shell tank caused by construction flaws and corrosion in the tank's bottom, and that 12 other double-shell tanks had similar construction flaws. ... Intermittent discoveries of undocumented contamination have slowed the pace and raised the cost of cleanup.
> In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department of Energy[7] and 7–9% of all nuclear waste in the United States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US, with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.
And yet despite they lower bar, there have been no nuclear accidents. Perhaps the NRC's bar for nuclear safety is needlessly high. A realistic safety regime needs to weight the risk of accidents with the immense risks of continued carbon emissions.
> I never understood the argument nuclear power is so "dangerous".
The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is quite literally 1000 square miles. Nuclear advocates try to treat Chernobyl (and Fukushima and [insert nuclear disaster here]) as an irrelevant outlier rather than what it is: tangible evidence of the impact of inevitable human failure.
A plant has to be well-maintained and competently run. Waste products have to be safely stored and transported. As soon as you add corporations to the mix, you've now created a profit motive to neglect safety and maintenance because the risk of disaster is low but the failure modes are incredibly large. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at managing low-probability high-impact failures.
> The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl.
Military use of nuclear reactors is quite limited, being largely limited to a handful of submarines and aircraft carriers using highly enriched fuel. It's not done out of economic merit either. Having a nuclear missile submarine that can stay deployed for months can literally be done no other way.
All that has very little to do with commercial power generation.
Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per unit of power of all commercial power generation methods [1]. The externalities of nuclear power are highly visible and concentrated in a small physical and temporal range. This makes them obvious and scary. The externalities of other power generation methods are diffused through time and space, to the point that they appear mundane if they are noticed at all.
Coal power kills 1000x as many people per unit as nuclear. Natural gas kills 40x as many. Solar kills 4x as many. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at comparing chronic and acute risks at scale.
1: https://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArt...
This does likely include roof mounted residential solar.
>Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.
It is probably more accurate to say that most solar in a solar-powered world should be on the ground. The reality is that roof-top solar is the most expensive form of power in the world and yet it continues to be heavily subsidized. These subsidies are in the form of direct tax breaks and usually higher electricity prices paid by those who can't install it. A dollar wasted on roof-top solar would be MUCH better spent on solar panels installed on the ground by the utility.
solar panels arent born in nature and dont degrade biologically. also consider output by scale. most of heavy production occur in xinjiang where there isnt a safety culture, installations are anothoer issue. btw the data on solar is understimated for sure due to chinese data quality
> Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per unit of power of all commercial power generation methods
This is a poor metric to use. The official death count from Chernobyl was 31. It may be as high as 50. There are probably more deaths attributable through long-term effects, etc but you start getting into subjective modeling to figure out a number for that.
It's almost 40 years later and the absolute exclusion zone is still 1,000 square miles. Treating this as only 31 (or 50) deaths grossly under-represents the magnitude of the disaster.
This fairly thorough analysis comes up with a higher estimate of around 300-500 [1]. Of course, deaths per unit of energy is not the only meaningful metric, and it ignores the environmental impact that you mention. But have you considered the environmental impact of using fossil fuels for energy?
Chernobyl is estimated to cause 27,000 fatal cancers in the larger population. You can't dismiss these just because they can't be directly demonstrated. Technology regulation is not criminal law; the technology doesn't have to be shown guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
The comment I was replying to was arguing nuclear power caused the least deaths and I was explaining how that's a bad metric because it doesn't capture the impact and damage of the absolute exclusion zone.
So if the actual death count is 27,000 instead of 31 or 50 that's actually much worse, which further undermines that commenter's argument.
i advise to look up at hiroshima and nagasaki today, or even look at wildlife in chernobyl no-go zone. obviously some dangers are bigger (and leave permanent scars) but technologies have progressed by far and wide. deaths/damages by fossil fuels are more sneaky. the "world" 40 years ago made a bad decision letting go of nuclear energy, wich will haunt the world for generations to come
>A plant has to be well-maintained and competently run. Waste products have to be safely stored and transported. As soon as you add corporations to the mix, you've now created a profit motive to neglect safety and maintenance because the risk of disaster is low but the failure modes are incredibly large.
When are we outlawing hydroelectric dams? Accidents with those have killed far far more people.
Here are the 3 big problems with the pro-nuclear argument:
1. Using deaths as a metric;
2. Focusing on operational cost of a nuclear power plant rather than total cost (ie including capital cost). The total cost is borne out in the relatively high cost of nuclear power to users. If that point is even acknowledged, let alone conceded, it's just dismissed as the fault of government regulation or that scale will somehow magically solve the problem; and
3. Writing off disasters as irrelevant outliers because they're inconvenient to the argument. Less than 700 nuclear power plants have been built and we've had multiple huge disasters.
So are deaths a bad metric? And by "deaths" here I mean any form of the metric (eg absolute, per-kWh generated, etc). Because deaths doesn't capture the negative externalities and consequences of nuclear power. Chernobyl killed less than 100 directly. Who knows how many contracted various cancers in a wide area. But 1,000 suqare miles of land remains uninhabitable nearly four decades later with no real end in sight.
Deaths as a metric doesn't capture that, which is precisely why pro-nuclear advocates focus on it. Nuclear power has its own propaganda just like the oil and gas industry does.
The nuclear stans' focus on deaths may not be leading in the direction they want.
The way to account for the cost of deaths is by the "statical value of a human life", a finite quantity that is considered what would be reasonable to spend to avoid one death. The NRC uses a figure of $9 million when evaluating reactor safety systems.
Using that figure, deaths in normal operation contribute negligibly to the cost of energy from nuclear or renewables (but not for coal; there deaths contribute greatly to the real cost.) Because of this, if nuclear stans are focusing on deaths, what they're doing is implying that the $9 M figure is much too low. And that would imply that the NRC is not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants. I doubt this last point is one they'd be happy with.
1000 square miles is a square 32 miles long or a circle 36 miles in diameter. The size of an average county in the US Midwest.
So if you’re that worried about it, find the least populated place in western Kansas or Nevada or Maine and build the biggest plant you can. Worst case scenario it turns into Chernobyl and you fence it off and call it a day.
Alternatively, we can keep using slave labor in China to build solar panels fabricated with toxic compounds obtained via strip mining that require natural gas and coal power plants to actually function on hot days.
Either you care about climate change or you just hate nuclear power. Discussions like these are great at revealing where folks stand on the issue when push comes to shove.
Alright, you find the county to be declared a no-mans land. Remember, you need a bunch of staff to run the plant, a source of water for the cooling towers, and of course you need to spend all that money actually building the plant. Let's not get into the fact that the primary reason people don't build nuclear power plants is that they're extremely expensive to build in the first place!
A serious question I don't have an answer to: is Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know.
Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt weird when we're talking about market-based economies. Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else would we not build these supposed money printers?
More renewables requires more slave labor from China. If we produced those solar panels here under US environmental and labor regulations, nuclear would be very competitive. That we have to buy them from China for solar power to even make remote economic sense here in the US should tell us something.
A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.
I don't think that solar panel enthusiasm has to answer for the cross-sector near-universal effect of outsourcing of industrial production outside of the US, for Americans.
According to a google search:
> American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to $0.80 per watt (W) – about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt than imported panels. The highest quality, ‘premium’ American panels may even come in around $1.00/W.
I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though really I would like to see working conditions improve across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus is perhaps different from yours.
I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%.
And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot simply be handwaved away in our current economic models. But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for it. It's not an either/or!
And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be a lot of things that we could do differently that would also have great effects.
Military reactors run on very highly enriched fuel, nearly weapons grade. That dramatically increases proliferation concerns when you're talking about large fleets of civilian reactors.
I'm rooting for NuScale, but so far every attempt at realizing the SMR dream has failed, so I'd caution people about thinking this is a pure slam dunk and it's just some sort of mass stupidity keeping the technology back.
Cost is a larger issue than proliferation. Civilian nuclear reactors care a lot more about fuel costs than military reactors do and highly enriched uranium just costs more.
Isn't weapon's grade uranium at 85%? I know that western powers got really worried at Iran past 19.75%. But, I still doubt it's that heavy for energy applications, even if military.
You are mistaken. US naval reactors run on around 95% enriched uranium. There's a desire to switch to lower enrichment fuels, but it meets a lot of competing concerns, such as state of the art naval reactors can be fuel'd just once for a ~40 year lifetime. Basically, military naval reactors are not a pathway to economic civilian reactors because the military has different concerns and less price sensitivity vs those concerns.
Obviously a very US-oriented perspective, but: yes, to the extent that the US has historically attempted at least sometimes to be a global police power, they're significantly constrained when the country they're trying to police has nuclear weapons. The US response to Russia invading Ukraine has been fundamentally different in kind from, say, Iraq invading Kuwait, in which Iraqi forces were pushed back to the border in a matter of days. There are lots of reasons for this (much greater asymmetry in conventional military forces, etc.), but at least in part this is because of US concerns that direct conflict with Russia would escalate to nuclear war. Similarly, can already start to see how US posture towards North Korea is starting to change and will likely continue to do so as a result of their nuclear advancement.
Yeah I never quite got this. We can have Putin say “you’d better let me kill whoever I want or I’ll destroy the entire world”, but we can’t have power plants.
Sure, terrorists will rummage around these and steal the fuel rods. Then they somehow figure out how to make a thermonuclear weapon.
"Standard LWR fuel in 17 x 17 configuration, each assembly 2 meters (~ 6 ft.) in length; up to 24-month refueling cycle with fuel enriched at less than 5 percent"
Frankly, I think the most dangerous countries have nuclear weapons already. I mean of course those countries prone to starting imperialistic wars, threatening their neighbors, apartheid, etc.
I would be rather concerned if Iran gained nuclear weapons. They have recently had both overt and covert wars of aggression and have threatened their neighbors etc. But they have also had a recent insurgency demonstrating instability.
It seems China and Russia are actively building SMRs. [0] I'd be a pity if the west do not get serious at least about exploring the opportunity to test some of the designs being made.
> I could never understand why we didn't build these for civilian use (cost I figured)
If Nuscale can hit their LCOE goal of $65/mWh by 2030, they will still be 2-3x the LCOE of Solar+storage today [1] (which will only get cheaper).
In the long term both technologies will play an important role, but the zero carbon technology we can deploy at scale today is the technology we need today.
It appears that the LCOE for utility-scale solar which you're referencing here, community and rooftop both being significantly more expensive, is based on existing installations. But existing installations would have used the cheapest available land, and the cheapest available land tends to be in short supply. Solar installations on a significantly larger scale would have to use less ideal land (less accessible, more rugged, more expensive) and would incur associated cost increases. Solar is like a huge orange tree where we have been mostly picking from the lower branches — there are more than enough oranges on the tree for everyone, but you can't expect them all to be as easy as the low-hanging fruit.
However, I am optimistic about storage, particularly since zinc-bromine seems poised to break into the market, with excellent resource availability. Zinc production is about 13 Mt/yr [1], and the battery offers about 67 Wh/kg, with ~1/3 the weight in zinc, so 200 Wh/(kg Zn), so potential production is over 1 TWh/year before running into availability problems. There are also about half a billion tonnes of bromine in the Dead Sea alone [2]. (Since this is my third Zn-Br post, I'll add that I don't currently have investments in them, but I'm considering it.)
Cheap land is cheap specifically because there is a very great deal of it. But it is a stupid place to site solar, anyway: there are much better places, already in use, that may continue in that use, but with added solar revenue.
The overwhelming bulk of utility scale storage will not be in batteries. They cost too much per kWh stored. Bulk storage will be in media where incremental kWh are cheapest. Think tankage.
>The overwhelming bulk of utility scale storage will not be in batteries. They cost too much per kWh stored. Bulk storage will be in media where incremental kWh are cheapest.
One side of this comparison has cost estimates, the other one is vaporware. You need a certain generation capacity for hydrogen (or whatever) measured in watts, not watt-hours; these plants require maintenance and operation costs likely much higher than batteries. With battery costs approaching $100/kWh, many TWh of storage are attainable.
I'm assuming that nuclear will be a significant part of the energy supply, so I would not expect it to be necessary to, for example, store six months' worth of energy for the winter.
Nukes will soon be unable to find buyers for their power at a price they can offer, most of the time, so will be unable to collect enough revenue to continue operating, anywhere they are not propped up from money coerced by taxation.
There is an enormous amount of cheap land, globally. Any land that is cheap enough for farming is cheap enough for PV, and land that isn't even adequate for farming tends to be even cheaper than that.
Apparently, my use of the phrase "cheap land" was misleading. The acquisition price is one thing. But then you have site suitability, regional suitability, site access (running powerlines/roads), and construction labor availability. Any of these can drive up costs. Desert sands are soft and blow around, rocky hillsides are difficult to maneuver equipment on, forests have to be cleared, et cetera.
Nuclear uses far less resources and land area than both wind and solar plus storage. So sure, it costs some more money but it costs less actual real stuff.
Furthermore, it is not feasible to power individual personal vehicles or homes with nuclear reactors, so using nuclear for the grid frees up those resources that can be used for other stuff, for that stuff.
We cite costs in money because it’s useful. But you can’t eat money and you can’t build from it. You need actual stuff and land to do so. That is limited in a way that the money supply isn’t.
Case in point, the currently ongoing global supply shortage.
I would think the point is that if nuclear costs more money, it's suggestive that it doesn't really use less resources than other options that cost less.
Of course, that's not entirely true, as some of the costs for nuclear are insurance, which isn't priced particularly rationally, and of course, for human expertise, but that's arguably a far more scarce resource as are land and raw building materials - i.e. if you're using highly-skilled human brain power to design/build/run nuclear power plants, it prevents us from using that brain power to do other potentially more productive things (which might include coming up with better solutions for our environmental challenges).
To be clear - I'm quite supportive of more nuclear power, but certainly not because it uses less land or resources.
I realise that, but this argument is based on the assumption that things in the world are rationally priced.
When an NFT sells for more than a small power plant and a celebrity dog walker can be paid more than a nuclear engineer I don’t have a lot of faith in that premise.
Fair call. But while obviously imperfect, cost in $ is about the best estimate we have of the underlying value of all resources involved for a given economic output. Unfortunately it typically doesn't include externalities - if it had done so historically nuclear might already be cheaper now than fossil fuels.
Land use is a substantial concern for renewables and energy storage. We pay for electricity in marginal dollars. Currently we are building solar in low cost/utilization land. At some point prior to full rollout of renewables, this “cheap” land will run out.
Land use is of absolutely no concern for renewables or storage.
Solar and wind coexist synergetically with existing uses, so renewables do not need any dedicated land at all. There is enough existing reservoir area to float solar on, alone, for many times the world's conceivable power needs.
Solar farms are built in deserts only because idiot investors want them there. They are fantastically less efficient there, and degrade in the heat.
Concern trolling about land demand is the low road.
Notes that at 80% penetration, solar will occupy roughly 5% of total land. The paper goes on to study methods of ensuring that this land use change does not drive net carbon increases from vegetation loss etc.
I posted a response on some of the challenges with marginal economics in renewables and responded to your comment with a peer reviewed and cited journal article on these issues and the relevant data point from this study.
Your response contains an ad-hominem personal attack, and does not contribute to the discussion.
Presuming a total adoption of solar across all reservoirs on the planet. We would have roughly 220k sq km of available “land”, roughly enough to support the EUs energy demand (assuming the energy could be magically transported from reservoirs on other continents)
Placing panels everywhere we can is a great idea, however pretending that there is a silver bullet is putting our heads in the sand.
Solar is not the only clean, cheap energy source. Wind coexists nicely with agriculture.
And, constructed reservoirs are not the only still water. California has estimated it can gather 12 GW just from its canals.
Solar may also usefully be sited on active pastureland, which is not in short supply. There, it reduces water demand and offers shelter for livestock. Livestock keeps down weeds.
There is a fair amount of industrial roofing in use, where solar extends its life. Some people have already installed there.
> Solar is not the only clean, cheap energy source. Wind coexists nicely with agriculture.
Then why not nuclear too? The world sorely needs options where we can spend some CapEx and solve global warming. I see nothing wrong with a mix of hydro, solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear. There is no reason not to expect capital efficiencies in larger nuclear build-outs compared to the sporadic reactors we've built for the last ~50 years.
Right now we are seeing coal and natural gas plants getting built because there aren't enough renewable options. As has been the case for the last 50 years while renewables catch up.
This is a fair statement, major industrial metros such as Chicago emerged due to proximity to resources (iron, grain), transportation (lakes, rivers, rail), and energy (coal).
There surely will be a new equilibrium including newer power generation means, however many sunny places are far from water and other industrial inputs - moving steel mills to New Mexico is not quite a slam dunk in terms of transportation.
The link you provide seems to say that the cost of wholesale PV + storage is $85-$158 (bottom figure, line 3). Am I misreading that?
I’ve noticed that many solar+storage installations these days are 4-hour storage, so not sufficient for baseload. I think the number would be higher if we were shooting for baseload from our storage.
This site is using a benchmark of 4 hours for storage. This is sufficient for California, but not really anywhere else. Here in Finland, it would be literally 3 orders of magnitude too low. This, er, has an impact on cost.
> This is sufficient for California, but not really anywhere else. Here in Finland, it would be literally 3 orders of magnitude too low.
Yes, but compared to California (and all the other very sunny parts of the US and the world where huge populations live), from an energy consumption perspective, tiny Finland doesn't really matter much. Or put another way, it matters far more to the future of the climate to decarbonize energy production in California than Finland.
That said, companies in Finland have been developing some neat grid scale heat storage batteries lately, so there is an opportunity for them to have a big technological impact that way.
Yep. SMR is a much better drop-in replacement for fossil sources than renewables (generally stable/controllable output, dense locating so no expansion/upgrading of grid required unlike solar and wind, and can provide large winter outputs in more northerly climes where solar efficiency fades in the winter).
Wait, am I reading it correctly that your reference is saying that the cost of fuel and operation of a nuclear reactor alone are already around the same value as the total costs for PV solar?
Just the turbine part of any power plant that converts heat to electricity is expensive enough that it has problems competing with PV in sunny locations (if you only include a little bit of storage in your calculations)
What I got is that if you had a perfectly fine already working nuclear plant, completely paid off, it's about as profitable to abandon it and build a solar plant as it is to run it.
There's no viable way to build storage at the scale required to run a wind and solar grid. Even building just 1 hour of electricity storage amounts to 2,500 GWh. The entire world's annual output of battery storage is somewhere between 300 and 400 GWh. Any attempt at grid scale storage would lead to shortages driving up prices.
Similar bottlenecks occur with pumped hydroelectricity. To build it economically you not only need an alpine lake handy, it also needs to be close to transportation infrastructure. As those sites are developed, we'd turn to more and more remote sites.
As has been pointed out to you many times before, there is no need to use batteries to store utility-scale energy, so battery production capacity is immaterial. Mentioning battery production of the moment again is disingenuous, not to say dishonest. Production capacity, anyway, increases with demand.
The key principle of bulk energy storage is E = Fx, applied liberally worldwide for centuries. It is taught to every freshman engineering student. Nothing blocks further application of the principle, at any scale.
And as has been pointed out numerous times, no existing alpine lake is needed for hydro storage. And, the site does not need substantial "transportation infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1920s via roads a car cannot use.
> The key principle of bulk energy storage is E = Fx, applied liberally worldwide for centuries. It is taught to every freshman engineering student
Hi there, I graduated engineering and am currently applying for professional licensure. I took only one course focused on energy, but I've never heard of E=Fx. Googling it brought up no relevant results. Could you expand on what it is?
They are likely referring to force * distance = energy. Which in context is a pitch for pumped hydro storage.
This all sounds well and good, however it’s highly unclear that utility scale pumped hydro is viable. To make it work you need to have plentiful water, limited evaporative loss/other losses, and two large basins to store both the charge, and discharge of water.
In the event of drought, these facilities could become impractical. Hydro facilities have their own environmental concerns. Combined with shifting climates and rainfall patterns there are many challenges to be solved. (some of which go away if the hydro storage is in underground ceiled chambers… which also has a cost associated)
Pumped hydro is not the only storage; otherwise I would have said E = mgh.
Pumped hydro is practical in many, many more places than have hydro generation today, because unlike those, it does not need a watershed. It can use a deep underground cavity where a hill is not forthcoming. Where water is scarce, other methods will be used.
Other applications of Fx include (but are not limited to) compressed air, and buoyancy.
Places that run low on storage resource can import and burn fuel, as they do now, or schedule power from a transmission line, where they have one. Soon, liquified anhydrous ammonia will be cheapest and most practical, but liquified hydrogen may be cheaper and sufficiently practical for bigger utilities. Ammonia has the advantage that it does not need cryogenic treatment. These will be available from numerous tropical sources.
You may go back to your freshman physics textbook.
If you get a professional engineering license without recalling basic Newtonian physics, that just tells us the licensing process has utterly failed us.
> You may go back to your freshman physics textbook.
I may, but I live in a country that doesn't use the word freshman, so I don't know which year physics text that would be.
I assume from context you were meaning to refer to gravitational potential energy, which is generally represented as ∆U=mg∆h (change in gravitational potential energy equals mass times gravity times change in height). The variables you used (E=Fx) would mean energy equals force times (variable). From dimensional analysis the variable would have to be units of length (m), however it clearly only applies in the vertical dimension so it's better to use a specific variable like ∆h
Regardless, energy storage via gravitational potential energy (i.e. pumped storage) has been in use for about a century, and still makes up a rsmall proportion of grid operations. It has very specific requirements that aren't available everywhere. It's not an end-all solution for energy storage.
Not the parent, but feel compelled to clarify the physics here. Delta E= force * distance always holds. This is the same physics of a car breaking or a jet accelerating.
However a more general formula would be the integral of net force over distance.
I understand gravitation isn't the only force... how are you proposing to store energy? Other options (beside pumped hydro as gravitational potential energy storage) that come to mind are flywheels, springs, or batteries .... all of these technologies have existed for more than 100 years, and batteries are the only ones currently growing in usage - there's a good reason for that.
Batteries are being used primarily in electric vehicles, for, as you say, good reasons, and for domestic backup. For bulk utility storage, batteries are the most expensive choice, although battery cost is still falling fast and numerous utility-adapted chemistries are competing.
F may be water pressure, as in pumped hydro (which is growing) using elevated or underground reservoirs, or air pressure, as in CAES underground or underwater compressed air, or buoyancy using sea-floor pulleys and floats. No doubt as a soon-to-be Licensed Professional Engineer you will soon be able to think of other persistent forces.
Springs and flywheels will not be used for bulk utility-scale storage.
Generally, utilities will use what is cheap and reliable at the time they build it. Building storage before you have enough spare renewable capacity to charge it would be a bad misallocation of capital
Anhydrous ammonia will not be the cheapest medium, but has advantages of transportability and fantastic usefulness. Any unused overbuilt capacity will be put to work synthesizing for sale.
What do the values of E, F, and x even stand for? Googling this yields no related results [1]. Presumably F and x stand for the energy output of a storage system and the duration that system is online, respectively. But simply stating that equation is pointless, unless you actually give a plan to deliver on appropriate values of F and x. It's about as inane as saying "E + MC^2 so let's just build fusion and be done with it."
You really are fooling no one. Why maintain the imposture? Are you not embarrassed at being called out on falsehoods each time you trot them out again?
For the third time, what do F, E, and x stand for? Are you not embarrassed about telling people to go back to their physics textbook when the equation you're writing has nothing to do with energy storage?
Then what will be used for grid-scale storage if not batteries and hydroelectricity?
> And as has been pointed out numerous times, no existing alpine lake is needed for hydro storage. And, the site does not need substantial "transportation infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1920s via roads a car cannot use.
Such as? How did they get heavy machinery to these dams to build them? All of the dams I can find like the Shasta dam, Orville dam, etc are in fact close to major transportation infrastructure.
The Sabatier process has significant blockers to actually being used: First, it needs a source of carbon dioxide, and the small concentration of it in he atmosphere is insufficient. Biofuels could be used for this, but they aren't produced in sufficient quantities. Second, it needs a source of hydrogen. Almost all hydrogen produced today is done through steam reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis accounts for a slim minority of hydrogen produced today, mainly due to inefficiency and issues with electrodes corroding. Nobody is operating commercial power to gas storage facility, it's only prototypes.
Commercial power-to-gas facilities are in operation in Germany, but large scale investments make little sense right now. The money is better spend in increasing the supply of renewable energy, or electrifying things that currently burn fossil fuels. Days where we have too much renewable energy are very rare still. It would be a waste to turn it into Hydrogen.
I agree: nobody is fooled by your baseless claims that we can build dams where there's no transportation infrastructure. How does heavy machinery get to the site? How does the concrete get poured?
You insist the dams high in the Sierra Nevada range of California don't exist? You choose a strange hill to die on: anybody can see them in Google Maps satellite view.
They are not generally made of concrete, not being deep enough to need it. Their high pressure is confined in the penstock well downslope.
Earlier you claimed it was trivial to find these inaccessible dams. You took the time to respond to my comment, and could have easily taken the trivial step of finding a few of these dams but curiously chose not to. Or, maybe these dams don't exist.
No such inaccessible dams exist, and if they do they hold an inconsequential amount of hydroelectric energy. Just exercise a modest amount of reasoning: no transportation infrastructure means all work is done by hand and all material transported manually as well.
Pre industrial dams did exist, but they were very shallow and used for irrigation rather than power. Moving enough earth and concrete to make a usable gradient is not possible without heavy machinery.
Pointing to one or two current storage technologies as evidence that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable is quite a logical leap.
Can we apply the same reasoning and conclude that because existing nuclear reactors are inadequate, no possible future nuclear reactors can be adequate?
Why does pumped hydro have to be close to transportation infrastructure, btw? Can one not build roads or rail lines?
The point is that no existing storage system is sufficient and thus solar and wind is really solar, wind, and fossil fuels. And nuclear power is indeed sufficient. They can indeed modulate power output, and we have the capacity to build them at the required scale. Some countries already have, like France.
> Why does pumped hydro have to be close to transportation infrastructure, btw? Can one not build roads or rail lines?
You can, but the more remote the build site the more expensive it becomes.
Current nuclear technology isn't sufficient either. A world powered by nuclear burner reactors runs out of uranium very quickly. Breeder reactors or seawater uranium extraction would be needed, and neither of these are "existing" in the sense you're using for storage.
Nuclear seawater extraction is already conducted, at a price of about $200 per pound [1]. Raw fuel extraction is a small portion of nuclear's cost (enrichment is a much bigger portion) so this is not a significant cost increase.
To power the world with nuclear would require many more reactors. Current world average primary energy consumption is 18 TW, which is 6000 3 GWth reactors. That's an order of magnitude more than currently are in operation. Add in demand growth from industrializing countries and the uranium would last maybe a decade.
Uranium availability is not an immediate problem if you assume nuclear remains a sideshow on the global energy stage. That's to assume nuclear is neither needed nor particularly useful for addressing global warming. Is that what you're assuming?
> However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years
Yes, I did read it. Did you lose track of what I said? I'll help by quoting myself:
"Current nuclear technology isn't sufficient either. A world powered by nuclear burner reactors runs out of uranium very quickly. Breeder reactors or seawater uranium extraction would be needed, and neither of these are "existing" in the sense you're using for storage" (emphasis added)
So, your comment about seawater there doesn't contradict what I wrote at all.
> And these advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost by a factor of four in just five years. But it’s still over $200/lb of U3O8, twice as much as it needs to be to replace mining uranium ore.
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
This is technology that actually has a demonstrated cost. Moreover it doesn't need to get cheaper at scale since raw extraction is such a small portion of nuclear power's cost. It's not like synthetic methane or hydrogen storage where it's all white papers promising cheap cost, but not actually delivering any storage systems at that cost.
Yes, and none of that is demonstrated, in the sense you seem to demand for renewables and storage. Lab exercises are smaller than what would happen in the field by many orders of magnitude and are happening in idealized conditions. The cost estimates are aspirational. This hypocrisy of yours is what I've been pointing out.
Extracting uranium from seawater on the scale needed to fuel burner reactors requires massive engineering. The estimate I've seen is that fueling one 1 GWe burner reactor takes a seafloor uranium absorption field (suspended in a strong ocean current; if you have to pump the seawater yourself it's already too expensive) of 170 square kilometers. The power/area is already much lower than the time-averaged output from PV.
Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.
> Yes, and none of that is demonstrated, in the sense you seem to demand for renewables and storage
All I demand is that people deliver at the specified cost. Not, for example, a prototype with unspecified cost or a pilot program with much higher cost to and promises that it'll get cheaper at scale.
> Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.
I could say the same about you.
Nobody is seriously considering pumping seawater to filter uranium. This is a totally bad faith argument.
And you give this estimate of 170 without actually giving a source for it nor specifying details like how far apart the buoys are spaced, or if reprocessing is used (which cuts down fuel use by more than an order of magnitude).
These “levelized” costs are always comically inept.
- Assumes solar installation in a sunny climate. It’s an order of magnitude difference in potential solar output between San Diego and NYC.
- Underestimates battery requirements by multiple orders of magnitude. Again, because it has comically inept assumptions.
- We literally cannot deploy solar at scale today. We do not have anywhere near the battery production necessary for utility scale deployment. We would need to double our worldwide battery manufacturing ability, double it again, double it again, and then double it one more time.
- Massive demand for solar and battery, combined with finite production capacity, would lead to dramatic increase in prices.
TLDR the other energy technologies can actually be deployed at estimated prices. Solar cannot be deployed at scale globally. At all. Period.
> I could never understand why we didn't build these for civilian use
Because they use enriched uranium, 30% compared to ~7% in LEU which is used in civilian power plants. It's seen as a proliferation risk. And big reactors are more efficient. The problem is they cost a lot and have always had cost overruns. The reactor vessel has to be comissioned for building and rach one is esentially a prototype build to specs. There were even cases were the reactor vessel was defective and had to be scrapped. Building a larger fleet of smaller reactors in production facility with QA could bring these costs down and enhance safety.
The NuScale design will use >5% LEU with a 24 month refuelling cycle. At least we won't have to shut down an 1000 MWe reactor for refuelling every 2-3 years.
We shall see.
The US now has an equilavent to China's Belt and Road initiative, caled PGII, that it will use to finance infrastructure projects in developing contries. There are plans to build a 6 reactor NuScale plant in Eastern Europe with studies financed through this project.
> I could never understand why we didn't build these for civilian use (cost I figured) but now we will
Is there a single small nuclear reactor of this kind that has ever been successfully dismantled? As far as I know, all small nuclear reactors that have ever been used by any navy are still in storage somewhere [1] until someone figures out how to get rid of them properly. Maybe that's one of the reasons why they aren't common in civilian use.
[1] Well, except for those still in use or on the ground of the ocean somewhere.
We never had a single problem with it in the years I was on board. There were few moving parts besides the control rods and a few valves. When I stood watch on the steam throttle the reactor power would spike when I opened the throttle up. I tell my kids I've controlled a nuclear chain reaction with my bare hands.
I was on the sub for three years. I am not aware that we had any incidents with the reactor. We had a pipe break and start to flood the sub, but that wasn't nuclear related. In the shipyard we had an incident where the neutron detector pegged high but it was determined to be caused by TIG welding.
People on submarines tend to know the systems they are responsible for very well since their life may depend on it. In this case they knew which valves to turn to stop the flow.
I really don’t understand this reliability question. There was Fukushima and Chernobyl in my lifetime. Fukushima got earthquake and tsunami at the same time. Shit happens. I have no opinion about Chernobyl since it was in a country with extremely poor working culture. But otherwise in my opinion nuclear power plant is just another piece of big machinery. Comparable to semiconductor fab. They have there enough of interesting gases to gas whole population of the next city. But it never happened yet.
The crew running the reactor during the accident were poorly trained, poorly managed, and weren't comfortable pushing back against bad management. There is no doubt that Chernobyl had a poor work culture, a rot that came from the top but nevertheless permeated the whole facility.
The person most personally responsible went on to manage another, similar system.
Management failings are part of the risk profile of any hazardous technology, from nukes to feedlot pig farming. Leaving them out produces dishonest numbers.
What are you responding to? I am responding to a claim that acknowledging poor work culture at Chernobyl is bigotry.
It's not bigotry (an intolerance of others) nor is it even prejudice (judging before you have the relevant facts.) It's a widely acknowledged historic fact that Chernobyl had a terrible workplace culture.
If you want to criticize somebody for ignoring Chernobyl's workplace culture, then you should have responded to sitkack, who seems to think that people shouldn't talk about this aspect of the disaster.
> who seems to think that people shouldn't talk about this aspect of the disaster
You are putting words in my mouth.
The failings of the team running a poorly designed uncontrolled experiment are widely known. Attributing it to a "poor working culture" needs to address specifics and just sounds like Ukrainians are bad at their jobs because ???
IMO the future of energy is decentralisation not centralisation.
One of the reasons I do not think nuclear fits. It is impossible to handle nuclear in anything other than huge establishments (I feel this proposal for mas produced nuclear plants is going to end in tears).
While this is an overall good development, and I wish the company luck. Its really not the solution.
While scale is what killed nuclear, the people who initially decided on scale, did so for good reason. You lose a huge amount if you scale down, specially with PWRs.
These small PWRs try to get some of that efficiency back with factory production, but at best it just evens out. The advantage is the added flexibility. So I don't think that putting traditional PWR in a tube is really any kind of series solution to transform our energy system.
However there are good things coming out of this. For example, NuScale went threw a process managing multiple reactors from the same control room. That is the same thing that essentially all GenIV reactors want to do as well. Having managed to get that concept threw the regulator will make it massively easier for anybody that follows.
Its a damn shame that we don't have GenIV reactors since the 80s. We had the technology and every reason to use it. We could be living in a nuclear age right now, and I consider it the largest failure of humanity that we failed to do so. People in 100 years will look back and think we were insane that we did not use the technology we discovered.
Knowing nothing about the intricacies of building nuclear power plants, but agreeing whole heartedly with you that humanity dropped the ball when it came to advancing the tech and construction of large scale plants, I am hoping this will have a positive effect.
Large scale plant construction is hard, takes a long time and the knowhow is disappearing (see recent issues in France with their latest project).
With a miniaturized plant the time to market is quicker, which hopefully will start having a positive effect on peoples opinions sooner when it comes to nuclear power.
It may not be optimal, but it has the potential of changing things for the better.
I in general am in favor of scale to make the grid CO2 free. However, doing it with PWRs is just very sub-optimal. A 1.5GW plant is basically a gigantic civil engineering project and those are always late.
However, if you move to a molten salt reactor (cooled or fueled) you can significantly reduce the scale while still doing a 0.5-1.5GW plant. And you can use CCGT as well. This totally transforms the economics and while it would still a large plant it would be much more comparable to a gas plant in terms of capx. And in terms of opex the fuel should be significantly cheaper, while the labor required should be less in a modern plant.
The PWR real cost are the gigantic heat pumps and the huge required containment system. A molten salt reactor can be air cooled even in the desert of Arizona.
Hopefully in the future we can replace the CCGT with even smaller turbines like Super-critical CO2 turbines.
So I prefer large plants 500MW+ but they need to be molten salt cooled at least. My favorite design (for what is achievable in a reasonable time) is by Moltex Energy, the Static Molten Salt Reactor. Its basically the idea of filling the fuel assemblies with molten salt fuel rather then pellets and to cool you use another molten salt. And with some small amount of repossessing you can use current 'waste' as fuel. I think that design is of a scale and complexity that if some real capital got behind and government were willing to invest in their 'waste' rather then to drop it into a cave it could solve both the 'waste' problem and the grid problem.
Large scale is not inherently hard, the problem is lack of industrialization (lack of economies of scale). The "West" after the Cold War went all in on short-term-ism (both fueled by market liberalization, financialization of everything, globalization, plus as a consequence of all this the political gridlock that ensued).
There's also, honestly, the fact that full-size nuclear plants look threatening. They have an imposing size and shape, they dominate the horizon, they look like "if that thing blew up it would be catastrophic" (I know that's not exactly what happens, but still)
So as dumb as it sounds, just making the thing smaller might be enough to soften public opinion
Another reason to move to GenIV reactors, because once you don't need cooling towers. So if you design it right, most people will not even get that it will be a nuclear plant.
Its really the cooling towers that make it clear what it is and those look absurdly big.
I can see two large use cases for small PWR at this point in time even if the price per watt is similar/higher than large reactors. One is the exact same argument for why small PWR was installed in submarines, that is replacing diesel generators that operate 24/7. Those still exist in some locations and situations, and diesel generators that operate 24/7 are very dirty and require a lot of fuel to be transported. They could in theory also displace backup generators if multiple locations require uninterruptible power and each has an expensive diesel generators that require testing every week/month or so. Not sure if there exist studies done on emissions from backup generators at hospitals, but I am pretty sure I read about the problem somewhere.
The second big use case would be Europe right now. If small PWR can be produced fast, like say within a year, those could be economical viable. The energy price for next winter is predicted (depending on which gloom and doom you read) to reach around 2x to 20x compared to the record prices of last year. Such prices can make a lot of technology economical viable, and a big factor will then be product availability.
Could Europe even use electricity to heat? I assumed the gas was mostly being used directly in gas furnaces. Heat pumps are only just getting to where they can work in extreme cold right?
Heat pumps are between 2 (worst case scenario) and 5 times more efficient for heating than burning the natural gas directly - and that includes transmission and generation losses. Unless natural gas, due to the reduced demand, falls to between 20 and 50% of the price of electricity, heat pumps are still cheaper long-term - and provide AC in the summer!
There are already plans being made for next winter, where if the shortage of power hit expected levels then some places in northern Europe will have to be disconnected from the grid in order to save the grid as a whole. It is times like that when government will borrow or even print money in order to fix the situation regardless of how expensive the answer is.
The average operational cost of a nuclear power in the US is around 2.5 cent to 3.4 cent per kw/h, which is still higher than many other energy sources. The spot price in some locations in Europe is feared to reach $1 per kw/h this winter. Gas furnaces are part of the problem, but society is dependent on electricity for basic function. Voters only accept limited amount of pain before forcing governments to take action and bail people out.
> try to get some of that efficiency back with factory production, but at best it just evens out.
It's not just factory production.
There's a lot of savings from just scaling down the design. Currently the pressure vessels for a typical large reactor (the AP1000) are build using forges that weigh (take a moment to appreciate the number) 15 thousand tons [1]. No such forges exist in the US.
Truth is, NuScale plans to source their pressure vessels from one of the existing vessel manufacturers, the South Korean Doosan [2]. However, it is very likely that their vessel can be produced with much smaller forges, and in time more manufacturers will have the capability to build it.
You are talking past the point I made to only focus on raw scaling efficiency, I am talking about capabilities, both technical as well as economic. You are arguing big-o.
How could cost scale with surface area? The mass of a nuclear power plant scales proportionally to volume. The thickness of a pressure vessel or pipe increases as you scale it up, at constant pressure.
The pressure vessel is not a solid mass of steel, it's a hollow container. The thickness of the walls remains the same for the same pressure (it does need to increase slightly because it needs to support the weight of the pressure vessel itself) but the volume increase is cubic.
Cubic volume increase vs. quadratic surface area increase means larger sizes are more effective.
No, that's wrong. For a pressure vessel made of the same material, the same geometry (scaled), and operating at the same safety factor, the thickness of the wall is proportional to the linear dimensions of the vessel.
> Take any plane that slices through the pressure vessel, and consider the
problem of trying to prevent the vessel from separating at that plane.
The pressure load trying to cause such a separation is proportional to the
surface area of the slice. The wall length available to resist it is the
outer edge of the slice. The load scales with the square of size, the
wall length only linearly... so as the size goes up, the wall thickness
must grow as well. Chase it through the math, and wall mass is simply
proportional to volume.
It's also a consequence of the virial theorem of mechanics.
Below a certain size you run into code minimums, but nuclear power plants will be well above that size.
Here's a simple analogy: you have a 2 foot kiddie pool in your back yard. The pressure is whatever pressure water is at under a depth of 2 feet. If you have 2 pools, one radius 5 feet and one radius 10 feet they're both at the same pressure. The depth of the water didn't change. Length of the wall doubled (circumference) but the area squared. This is why you can hold back a storm surge with sandbags. The fact that effectively infinite water is behind it doesn't matter.
If you have some gas stored at 100 psi, you need a wall thickness to withstand 100 psi. If you create a sphere with twice the radius you still need a wall thickness to withstand 100 psi. A bit more than that because the tank also needs to support itself, but that's minor relative to its contents. That's why methane storage tanks are big spheres, to minimize surface area: https://i0.wp.com/tmicoatings.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09...
I'm not sure how applicable rocket motors are to this comparison (maybe you missed that they were talking about rocket motors?). Rocket motors have a big bell and throttle at the end, which is analogous to a big load. And the bigger the rocket combustor the more thrust it needs to support. This is a whole different kind of load, it's not a simple pressure vessel.
In particular:
> The pressure load trying to cause such a separation is proportional to the surface area of the slice.
This is probably taking into account something like greater fuel combustion. Because otherwise it's blatantly wrong. A tank at 100 psi still has 100 psi of pressure whether it's got a volume of 1 cubic meter or 10 cubic meters.
There is no "wall thickness to withstand 100 psi" that is independent of the size of the tank. Stop thinking that that is a real thing. The thickness of the wall needed to withstand 100 psi increases as you make the tank bigger.
Here's a simple online calculator for wall thickness of pressure vessels. Change the radius of the vessel and watch the wall thickness go up in proportion.
You are forgetting about security. One of these things and some explosives could do a lot of damage. Think dirty bombs. Each and every one will need 24x7 security for the duration of it's life. They simply can't be left unattended. Not impossible to do but it adds a lot of cost One of these things falling into the hands of extremists would be very bad.
The sensible way to deploy these would be in groups close to existing infrastructure in places that can be easily secured. For example de-commissioned coal plants or nuclear plants. Security also raises the cost of operation of course. Just because it is small physically does not mean the risk is smaller. So, same level of security as with a big nuclear plant. Same level of cost. But less energy. Co-locating allows you to reduce that cost.
Electricity is pretty easy to transport over 50-100 miles. One big plant servicing a whole metro is as efficient as smaller reactors distributed around. It's only when you have to transport electricity over 300+ miles where more exotic things like HVDC lines become necessary.
I am not against that in general, but your never gone do that seriously with PWRs. There are designs where this does make some sense.
However that is not the backbone of your infrastructure. I makes much more sense to start with one large scale design 500MW+ and deploy that as many times as you can and then you can see the places where that is overkill and you develop smaller reactors for those regions.
But in most countries with ~500MW design you can reach 80-90%+ of the population and since the design would be so well known and so mass produced it might make sense to just build more of those rather then some 50MW reactor that might be only be 25% the cost but 10% the production.
They are so big and complex they have paradoxically lost advantages of scale. Allegedly, if you build two of the same nuke, it’s actually more expensive to build the second one because you have to do a whole bunch of change orders to adapt the existing design to a completely different site.
Is disposal of nuclear reactor waste products a solved problem yet?
Last I heard, the big "solution" was to stick it in sacred Native American mountains in Nevada and New Mexico and let future generations worry about it.
If that's all we can do, people in 100, 200, 300 years may not be thinking what you're thinking they will think.
> Last I heard, the big "solution" was to stick it in sacred Native American mountains in Nevada and New Mexico and let future generations worry about it.
Sorry, but given that the climate catastrophe is the most pressing concern for humanity, I think that gives more weight that religious superstition over the "sanctity" of a mountain in the middle of the desert miles from any humans.
Securing nuclear waste to decay at the bottom of a mountain is a pretty good solution, the only thing against it really is political nimbyism.
the only thing against it really is political nimbyism
Actually, from what I've read in the local newspapers in the areas affected, the politicians are all for it, so you're making assumptions there.
The people who are against it are the people who actually have to live with the stuff for the next thousand years.
If it's so safe, so stable, so easily rendered harmless, why not bury it in the bedrock beneath Manhattan, or Boston, or Virginia? All places that are far more geologically stable than, for example, Yucca Mountain.
There is no climate catastrophe. That’s simply a modern version of the superstition you lament. The end of the world is always conveniently just 12 years away. I’m old enough to remember the Prophesy of Al Gore (peace be upon him) and how none of that came to pass. 2009: “the North Pole will be ice free by 2013.” I also remember the dire predictions of acid rain, the ozone hole, and numerous other proclamations that stirred up the anti-capitalist faithful.
There’s always some sort of catastrophe just looming just over the horizon of the next election. Televangelists have made careers from warning the faithful that their doom is assured — unless you reprint (and contribute.) The climate alarmist crowd has taken pages right out of the tent-revival handbook of the 19th century. Snake oil.
The only reason you're not hearing about the acid rain or the ozone hole anymore are because decisive international action was taken to stop both, and wouldn't you know it, it worked.
And, are you really "old enough to remember" a single politician mis-stating a climate forecast during a speech, or are you just "old enough to remember" seeing it repackaged into a meme on social media a decade or so after the fact? Either way, it is an asinine basis for your leading claim.
I think anyone with even a passing understanding of the data can summarily dismiss your "argument", which is full of logical fallacies.
Atmospheric CO2 has gone from about 280 ppm pre-Industrial Revolution to 415 today. Yes, figuring out all the impacts and feedback loops is incredibly difficult, but it requires only a passing understanding of physics to understand how being on track to doubling the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will result in a massively warmer planet.
> 2009: “the North Pole will be ice free by 2013.”
I'll agree that was hyperbole, but interestingly this[1] article featured just the other day in the news here, about how a research vessel reached the north pole several days ahead of schedule because there was significantly less ice than expected. The scientists interviewed said conditions had changed drastically over the last 10 years. So maybe add 20 years to Gore's prediction?
mega droughts, record heat waves, wildfires, more numerous and violent storms of all kind but sure there is no problem with the climate. shaping the climate doesn’t happen overnight and if no action is taken now the world will be very different in 50-100 years. just because dinosaurs lived on a hotter earth doesn’t mean than 10 billion people can comfort at do so too ...
The world is a very complex system and it is of course logical that people will not be completely accurate in their numbers and dates.
> the North Pole will be ice free by 2013
The tendency is unmissable if you look at the data[1]. People might have been wrong about the exact date at which it would happen, but you should not let the exactitude of the date distract you. It will eventually happen (unless something changes drastically).
And we honestly don't know how the weather will behave on an iceless Earth. Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up. Once it is gone... the blue water will absorb and accumulate more heat.
> I also remember the dire predictions of acid rain, the ozone hole, and numerous other proclamations that stirred up the anti-capitalist faithful.
Everyone is starting to feel the change, it's no longer "just words". If you have not started yet you will start feeling it soon.
In my country (Spain), this summer we have had 3 heatwaves in a row, as well as two very unusual clouds of Sahara dust, the first of which reached Finland. I was born in the south of Spain, were's the hottest. When I was little the max summer temp used to be 41 degrees Celsius (105F). Now it's 47C(116F). Max temperatures have increased through the Iberian Peninsula, 41C is "the new normal" in all places except some coastal fortunates and some very northern regions. My options for escaping the summer heat are dwindling.
In the United States my understanding is that the most visible exponent is the extreme drought, in particular the water levels in the Colorado river basin seems worrisome. You might find more information about where you live in [2].
> People might have been wrong about the exact date at which it would happen, but you should not let the exactitude of the date distract you.
Herbert W. Armstrong predicted that 1936 would be doomsday, and then that 1943 would be doomsday after 1936 came and went, and then that 1972 would be doomsday after 1943 came and went, and then that 1975 would be doomsday after 1972 came and went. How would you rebut that sentence if he said it in 1973 or 1974? Or if Harold Camping, who did basically exactly the same thing, said it? Why wouldn't that rebuttal apply equally to your use of it?
> Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up.
But isn't the reason that the ice is at the poles that hardly any of the Sun's heat gets there?
I don’t know the numbers, the thought experiment on the last point:
Imagine that without ice the ambient temperature is 5 degrees C. And that the area being ice rather than dark colored rock causes a drop of about 10 degrees C.
So the ambient temperature in the area is under 0. But as it melts for reasons then this cooling effects disappears and now the thing is basically gone forever.
Not commenting too much on the actual theory but you could easily imagine an ecosystem disappearing due to these kinds of changes
Political nimbyism is what put the waste where it is. It ended up in the back yard of the least powerful political force in America. Curating nuclear waste for longer than any human can actually comprehend isn't something to just brush off. You'd be trading one climate catastrophe for another.
And that doesn't even account for securely transporting the waste across the country. Imagine scaling nuclear to the size of coal. What does waste transport look like then?
Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
> You'd be trading one climate catastrophe for another.
No you actually don't. Even under the most absurdly bombastic delusional fantasy of nuclear-haters the amount of damage nuclear waste deep in a cave in a desert can do is about a billion times less then climate change.
And even based on the pessimistic assumptions, it would be save for 1000s of years.
Are you seriously gone tell me that we should worry about 1000+ years into the future. If we do not have massive technological decay, the people in the next 1000+ years will have the technology to reprocess the fuel if they feel like it.
And if you do assume massive technological decay then the nuclear fuel is in a cave in a desert that will be essentially uninhabited and will most likely never seriously impact humans.
Even further this whole debate is incredibly dumb since putting into a deep cave is terrible idea anyway. As a human society we can just store it above ground in a save location and in case some danger is identified, we just move it to another location. Moving a few tons of nuclear fuel around ever couple 100 years is really no big deal. And again, if society collapses to a point where this isn't possible, that nuclear fuel is the least thing to worry about.
And even all of that is totally irrelevant, because the real actual solution is to simply ut it into advanced reactors, burn it up to a point where it is only 300 years away from matching natural uranium and you simple put it back into the mine where it came from.
If you do it correctly, we can get every person in the world using US like energy and we can store the complete output of world nuclear waste on a single abandoned Walmark parking lot in Gary Indiana.
If we used basic rationality this would be a non issue. This is a cultural political issue, not really a technical one.
> What does waste transport look like then?
Mhhh well it would be an occasional train going along the train network that would never hurt anybody.
And nuclear isn't that far away from coal level of production.
> Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
I'm totally fine with storing all nuclear waste around the Whitehouse if that gets people to stop bringing it up as a problem.
Keep in mind that the US is generating about 20x the amount of high level nuclear waste than if it were to recycle spent fuel. The French do it, but Americans won't.
One thing to remember is that while the half-life of a very small portion of the waste from nuclear reactors is measured in thousands of years, so it's important not to release it into the environment, the half-life of the mercury that is absolutely released by coal mining is...infinite.
To be honest, I think this is mostly a bad idea. Like to be 1 billion $, for that price you could have developed a brand new advanced reactor and the required reprocessing facilities to create a circular fuel stream that could have changed the world.
Yet instead of advanced technology to the next stage, we spent that money to dig a bit hole.
And even worse, every country spends billions digging holes.
Even a fraction of that money could have been used advanced humanity into the next nuclear age, rather then dumping the output of the last one into a hole.
Coal, gas, and oil are being phased out in favor of renewables, just as fast as capital is allowed to be applied. They just cost too much to operate. (This is why the feds massively subsidize them.)
Nukes are not in competition with them. Nukes are in competition with renewables, where they lose badly.
Renewables literally require us to redesign the grid, and require supplementary sources of power for when they are unable to produce. I truly wonder what your assertion is based on.
It’s pretty solved. There is very little of the dangerous stuff, and it is far less dangerous after a few decades. It can safely sit in casks for more than a thousand years. At which point there’s a negligible amount of anything really nasty left. At any point we can basically just stick it all in a salt mine and call it a day.
Future people will be fine. Shit we discovered uranium because some guys wandered into a cave and it burned their skin. Locals avoided it afterwards and eventually it was studied by people who knew what radiation was. Any actual storage though would be deep underground, in casks, and behind concrete with lots of warning signs.
All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a whole football field to a height of approximately 10 yards
Solar and Wind require a backup for when there's no wind or it's cloudy. Their current default backup is burning fossil fuels.
Of those, coal plans are particularly salient because they do generate radioactive waste. Continuously. And pour it over the atmosphere. They contribute far more radiation to the environment than nuclear power stations.
> let future generations worry about it.
I think they will appreciate having to worry about that in exchange of not having to deal with not existing because of climate change.
Nuclear reprocessing and breeder reactors would entirely solve the nuclear waste problem. The only reason we're not using them yet is that people think we'd use the output to make nuclear weapons with (even though we can already do that without them).
Note that the reactor vessel doesn't generate electricity, but steam. You need a turbine to make it useful. Once you include that, it doesn't look quite as miniature[0]. As far as I can tell, these aren't targeted at anything other than utility-scale power.
> Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.
Unfortunately, it can't. Nuclear reactor cores can obviously get very hot, but for safety reasons they are not allowed to. They work at about 300 degrees Celsius. The linked heat engine has the high efficiency quoted only when the hot element is extremely hot, a few thousand degrees Celsius.
I think you could use these to "upgrade" coal power plants to nuclear power plants, no? Those already have turbines, cooling towers, transformers, grid connection, etc.
This may be for the best. The size alone would make it a no-go for average homeowner. I am saying this, because while I am sure there are plenty that know what they are doing on their property, there is a substantial non-zero amount of those that do not. And, separately, can you even begin to imagine that non-zero amount demanding that they have remote access to it via their favorite app?
All I can think of is Snowcrash and multiple sovereigns.
Sure, but there are a couple of things to consider like peak consumption (everyone gets home from work and plugs in) or potentially much better utilization of electric vehicles from av adoption which might happen in the timeframes needed to get this tech out.
Or people will just have a nuclear tower on their lawn. If it can be buried (or partially buried), the tower need not be taller than the house. With some decorations similar to the ones on cell phone towers, it could even look reasonably attractive.
Interesting, Rolls Royce is doing the same in the UK and have been working on this since last year [0].
After having dealt with SONGS not long after Fukushima and seeing first hand the long-term adverse effects of Chernobyl in Europe I became anti-nuclear, but in time I realize that in reality what I was actually anti 20th Century nuclear business model and the corrupt regulatory frame work as most were built haphazardly in locations with immense inherit pitfalls, coupled with poor long-term logistical and waste management planning and ignored continuous warnings to decommission--TEPCO stated that the Fukushima disaster was entirely avoidable.
And that is what I think still needs to addressed, because the regulatory capture of these agencies poses a much bigger issue than these small reactors do, which are seemingly promising solutions to contribute to the World's energy needs.
Yes. When I attended an IAEA Safeguards conference in 2018, there were a number of these civilian nuclear battery designs but none had been built. A small nuclear battery can replace building-size diesel generators which remote communities and islands, data centers, etc. currently use as a primary or backup power source.
$ 3 billion for 720 MW of power (2019 figure) [1]. More recent figure of $ 5.5 cents per KW/h [2]. So about 4x cost overrun leeway to be competitive in Europe. That seems manageable?
Solar panel imports are even slapped with tarriffs. It's unlikely if you compared like for like it would come anywhere near the subsidies nuclear demands.
Overbuild of solar and wind has become cheap. But overbuild required is nowhere near that commonly assumed.
Storage will of course be built too, at overwhelmingly less cost than nukes, and much, much faster. But, first, the generation capacity to charge it up from.
You still have the problem of transmission, and grid scale storage is basically not deployed anywhere outside of a pilot program in Australia right now.
This video [1] talks about some of the potential cost savings and reduction in time to deployment. There is one being installed near me so I guess time will tell how realistic the projections are.
The most reliable output of the nuke industry has always been dishonesty. There is no reason to expect this will change suddenly, or that it has already.
No. Fukushima is a price I'd gladly pay and I expect every reasonable person to agree.
The alternative isn't "no Fukushima", the alternative is hundreds of thousands deaths per year by burning coal. It's just not "one huge bang" so people don't realize it, because understanding abstract dangers is hard.
Zero known fatal injuries out of 20,000 were caused by the reactor.
If I've done the math right, a nominally operative coal plant over Fukishima's 40 year lifetime would have caused 5ish deaths.
Fukishima did cause a few cases of cancer, but so does nominally operative coal.
People can gripe about tail risks from environmental pollution when it's not displacing a worse modal risk. Right now it's unreasonable to. Proliferation risk is concerning; most of the rest is just scale insensitivity.
In hawaii they canceled a proposed inter-island power connector because batteries + solar were just cheaper.
Pumped storage is generally a lot more economic and can store a lot more than batteries but it cant be built quite as quickly & is somewhat geographically dependent. It takes 4-5 years to deploy rather than months.
Before a thing has been built, it needs to be built. Do you need this explained further?
The overwhelming bulk of utility storage will not be batteries, because that is the most expensive alternative. Utility storage will be whatever is cheap and locally practical.
You should look up the cost (in whatever metric you like: dollars, lives, cancers, etc.) and compare it to coal. Don't forget to normalize, since coal is much more common than nuclear power.
I learned on HN that we almost did this in the 1970s, albeit with large but modular reactors. The effort extended far into construction of the (very large!) factory facility.
I think siting challenges and getting permitting approvals are likely to drive costs to non-competitiveness even if the reactor is free. And that's a terrible shame since the factory-built approach makes so much sense and our need for clean, reliable base load is so dire. Europe could really use quite a few boatloads of these reactors right now.
And the grid already has good connections to those sites.
Whether that actually can be done is another question. Many people want traditional nuclear located as far away as possible from populated areas, but with coal they aren't as picky about location.
NuScale's version of nuclear is supposed to be much safer, but who knows if that will put people at ease enough that it can be put wherever is convenient.
What's interesting is that these are actually getting used for solar and wind projects today for mostly the same reason (connection to the grid that exists; new transmission takes years to come online if it ever does)
And 40 years later, after dozens of billions or more spent, someone might just be allowed to finally build an amazingly clunky, drastically bloated up version of it that has been finally approved by a myriad storm of shifting regulations and unhappy contrary interests.
It's not just the approval process. The late Admiral Rickover may have put it best,
“An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
“On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."
Could be. But I think reactors suffer from the same "NASA Problem" (and also some dose of second-system syndrome) as rockets
> It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."
Correct. That's why you design once and build multiple ones
How did SpaceX manage to get the costs down?
Re-prioritizing is also important. Safety of course should be the main issue. But I suspect most current designs focus too much on efficiency and max power as well.
SpaceX learns by building and failing. Learning to land was using the basically free discarded first stage from various launches paid for by other people. You can't really do that with reactors.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
How would you "bloat up" a reactor that uses passive convection, submerged in millions of gallons of emergency cooling water?
Light Water Reactors aren't the ideal way to generate nuclear energy, but they're proven technology, and it's hard to imagine a safer LWR design than what NuScale is planning.
Which, hopefully, because of all these regulations and bureaucracy, won't have any issues that will cause (again) a meltdown of the public opinion about nuclear reactors. If some serious accident happens with something like this, be prepared to wait another 40 years before anyone dares to propose nuclear energy again.
Though public opinion and regulations might be a barrier too, there's a more elementary and fundamental problem around nuclear: cost and time.
Even France, without the regulatory or public opinion problems, is having difficulty building nuclear, and the construction project at Flamanville is an unmitigated disaster, just exactly the same as the US's recent projects at Vogtle and Summer.
And that's the reason that SMR designs are even being attempted. The design has always been rejected in the past as uneconomical. But with large reactor design proven to uneconomical, and a huge devotion to nuclear among some, SMRs are giving it a go again.
If nuclear worked well, there are always populations that welcome them nearby. Most, but not all, of our current 100GW has supportive neighbors.
But I always find it curious that these lesser problems of public support and regulations get so much more attention than a far more fundamental problem: economic efficiency.
These could be used to create a real "smart grid" where very local variations are smoothed out among various reactors, with some battery storage for peaking. So long as people are willing to live near them.
Not exactly. Nuclear reactors have a difficult time following the load because of Xenon poisoning. Xenon generated during the fission reactions absorbs neutrons that could have been used for fissions. Luckily, it decays away over time. If you turn down the reactor power, you have to wait hours or day for for Xenon buildup to decay so that you can turn the reactor back on. Some reactors manage to load follow more easily by adding lots of excess reactivity (more potent control rods) which is less safe overall. Smaller reactors will have the exact same issue. The amount of Xenon poisoning is proportional to the power density. NuScale reactors run at even higher power density than normal light water reactors, so they will have even worse Xenon poisoning. They won't be load following. One exception where this isn't true is micro gas-cooled reactors that have so low a power density that they have negligible xenon poisoning and can follow loads easily if necessary. Even then, it's not a great idea because of thermal cycling issues.
Some reactors can also more effectively let xenon escape. That is one of the reasons why Alvin Weinberg wanted a liquid molten salt reactor, you can let the xenon bubble out like CO2 in a soft drink.
And if you do that, then the 137Cs ends up in the off gas storage rather than in the molten salt. A good fraction of the fission products escape the salt, which kind of shoots down one of the main selling points of MSRs.
Nuclear can modulate it's output by more aggressively cooling the water. There's no xenon poisoning since the reactors output is the same. This is undesirable because it's essentially wasting fuel, by deliberately reducing the efficiency of the steam turbine. But it can be done, and fuel is not a big driver of nuclear cost.
Most of a nuclear plants' cost is in construction. It doesn't really affect operating costs. Furthermore nuclear is the most competitive decarbonized energy source, because wind and solar rely on fossil fuels.
During the ten years it takes to build a nuke, 100% of the power it is hoped to displace is supplied by fossil fuel. The thousands of tons of concrete are produced by cooking limestone with, again, fossil fuel. And the thousands of tons of steel are refined and smelted with, again, fossil fuel.
Most of a nuke plants' cost is in construction, but that is not because its operating cost is low. It is just insanely expensive to build. Then, its operating cost is high. Each moment it is not producing at 100% rated power, its per-kWh cost increases accordingly. Its operating cost does not decrease proportionally when it operates at below rated maximum power, so the operating cost per kWh is multiplied by the difference. And, operating at below rated capacity, the construction cost is amortized over fewer kWh, again making the per kWh cost greater.
You already well understood all of the above, but evidently hope readers will not.
> During the ten years it takes to build a nuke, 100% of the power it is hoped to displace is supplied by fossil fuel.
By comparison gas turbines will always emit carbon dioxide, and there's no realistic plan to run a solar and wind grid without fossil fuel backing. No, there is no realistic plan to store electricity despite your incessant insistence to the contrary.
> The thousands of tons of concrete are produced by cooking limestone with, again, fossil fuel. And the thousands of tons of steel are refined and smelted with, again, fossil fuel.
Both of these can be replaced with thermochemical processes powered by nuclear power.
> Most of a nuke plants' cost is in construction, but that is not because its operating cost is low. It is just insanely expensive to build. Then, its operating cost is high.
Incorrect, nuclear power is quite cheap once the plants are constructed.
No cement or steel process, over the 60+ years nukes have operated, has been switched over to nuke-powered. There is no reason to think any will be.
Nuclear power operating cost is about commensurate with fossil fuels, which are not competitive. Operating at 50% rated power makes each kWh, marginally, twice as costly. Operating at 50% rated power long term makes each kWh absolutely twice as costly.
At the time when their power cannot be sold at any price sufficient to continue operating, nukes not propped up by tax coercion will be mothballed. Their huge construction cost will end up amortized over only the kWh produced up to that time. So, the finally recognized cost per kWh will balloon to many times over what was promised at construction time.
> No cement or steel process, over the 60+ years nukes have operated, has been switched over to nuke-powered. There is no reason to think any will be.
Isn't this also a barrier to building hydroelectric facilities? They're basically big dams.
Also you believe we'll be able to create massive electrolysis plants to create energy storage for solar and wind? Interesting how you're so confident in massive changes to industrial processes when solar and wind require them, but totally dismissive when other solutions do.
Regardless, metallurgy and cement just need a source of heat and unlike solar and wind which need to convert electricity to heat nuclear plants produce heat directly.
Nukes do not produce output of sufficiently high temperature for cement or steel production.
Hydro-power dams are expensive to build, too, but operating cost is extremely low. New ones will not be competitive with wind & solar, but existing dams will remain useful, where not demolished for ecological or fisheries reasons.
There are no technical impediments to electrolysis. It all just needs to be built out. Efficiency is rising very fast.
Nuclear power does produce enough heat to drive thermochemical water splitting, which can produce hydrogen at better scale than electrolysis (since it avoids issues around electrodes corroding). That hydrogen can in turn be used for metallurgy.
You are correct, most of the cost is in construction. Buildings have finite lifetimes, so each second it doesn't run at 100% capacity you make the average kWh more expensive.
I may be missing something important here, but I'm not a nuclear fission SME. Please do correct me if I'm not making sense.
Doesn't the modularity (multiple 60MW reactors in a single installation) in the NuScale design obviate the "Xenon poisoning" issue, since shutting down one or more reactors doesn't mean halting power generation as it would with a single, larger reactor?
Presumably the reactors can be shut down and powered up independently so addressing the "Xenon poisoning" issue should be just a matter shutting down, then powering up some fraction of the reactors, scheduled to maintain the base load required, no?
Outstanding! Instead of 300MW coal or gas-fired plants in metro areas we could have clusters of these. The shorter transmission distance will mean less line-loss, the factory-built design means economies of scale, and the passive-cooling post-scram ability means that it would be impossible to have a Fukushima type of accident due to loss of primary loop cooling. If every city acquire enough of these to cover 80% of their base load then we could cut carbon emissions so fast we it would astonish us all.
Yeah. I'd note the need for a centralized fuel supplier, as you don't want hundreds of little municipal nuclear plants trying independently to dispose of the waste. Have a centralized "library" of nuclear fuel, where the plants "check out" the fuel and then turn it in when spent. The centralized authority can concentrate expertise on the issues of sourcing uranium, tracking where it is, then disposing of it safely. The small plants are then freed to focus on running the actual plant and providing reliable electricity to their cities.
Matt Ridley from The Rational Optimist opened my eyes to Nuclear and how the issues have been how we were almost too careful and too afraid to test and implement and so we are now decades behind nuclear reactor research and implementation.
Poland does have lots of salt under it, which bodes well for hydrogen storage in solution-mined caverns.
Because of Poland's unfortunate renewable position, it's understandable that nuclear is still strongly considered there. But that's not really going to help Poland compete globally against countries with better resources. If solar can provide power for $0.013/kWh in UAE, it's tough for Poland's heavy industries to compete with that with more expensive nuclear.
Oh I wouldn't say nuclear has been strongly considered here - the renewed interest has come only with the recent situation. If anything we've been severely lagging on this front. We have zero nuclear energy.
I would clarify that the domestic political discourse in Poland has instead been about discrediting the notion of climate change altogether and pushing to become even more dependent on non-renewable energy sources like coal. Most of our efforts in non-renewables are riding on EU funding, and the view of that is even more cynical.
This certifies NuScale's 50 MWe reactor. But the CFPP project has moved to the 77 MWe version, and as I understand it that has not been certified. UAMPS also has only 103 MWe of subscriptions out of 476 MWe (6 x 77 MWe).
My problem with nuclear is the lack of a solution for waste. Geologic sequestration sounds like it could work, but it has been politically dead in water in the US. There are few success stories in this category internationally and lots of little nuclear waste depots. Some pose catastrophic risks to the communities they are stored in. The clean up efforts at these sites are often endless feast for government contractors way behind, insanely over budget.
I want to see modular reactors succeed, but the prospect of more nuclear waste depots with no long term plan in the US comes of to me as brazenly irresponsible.
> My problem with nuclear is the lack of a solution for waste
Waste management is pretty much a solved problem [1][2]
> Some pose catastrophic risks to the communities they are stored in
"catastrophic" would have to be qualified here, and I think you are being hyperbolic, but essentially the only waste sites that have major risks are those from decades ago before we had good solutions. Nuclear is incredibly safe [3]
I think you misunderstand my criticism. It's not that vitrification can't be done, its that efforts in the US to perform it are behind schedule and woefully inadequate to process the existing waste in US in a timely manner, let alone the waste from numerous additional plants. Despite decades of pubic debate, billions spent, we still cannot agree on where to put it.
Plans to vitrify waste at Hanford are only barely reaching operation, more than a decade behind schedule. The plant won't be able to process all the waste on site when running at capacity until after 2100.
Meanwhile 56 million gallons of high grade waste is slowly seeping into the water table of the Columbia River basin.
My problem is with the lack of success in this area towards competently reducing risk and sequestering waste. It hardly seems like a solved problem when we our concrete implementation of a solution has yet to arrive.
My apologies if I misunderstood. When you said "My problem with nuclear is the lack of a solution for waste" you meant "My problem with nuclear in the US is the lack of a currently implemented solution for waste"? And the "our" in "It hardly seems like a solved problem when we our concrete implementation of a solution has yet to arrive." is referring to Americans?
It's so much a solved problem that no country other than France has a permanent solution. Meanwhile it will cost hundreds of billions if not trillions to get it done for the existing waste alone, all funded by the tax payer because the nuclear industry would just declare bankruptcy if they had to deal with it. You know you're in a world of pain when stating facts sounds like a rant.
> It's so much a solved problem that no country other than France has a permanent solution
I think it's reasonable to acknowledge the difference between "we have a solution that has been implemented in the real world" and "the solution we have has been implemented everywhere it's needed". Yes, not every country who needs proper waste management has implemented it, but I don't think that means we haven't solved the problem of what to do with waste.
Also while France has La Hague, the Netherlands also has COVRA :)
> Meanwhile it will cost hundreds of billions if not trillions to get it done for the existing waste alone
Yes, we will have to face the consequences of past choices, but I don't think that should preclude us from pushing for more modern implementations.
nuclear waste is a non problem, expecially after fast breeding recycling. geologic sequestration is a long term solution, but these wastes are potential fuel due to their "heavy weight", we just need the tecnology to fissile them or break their radioactive isotopes. Today we can recicle over 90% of waste in new fuel and turn the rest in low to medium radioactive waste to store for few centuries on general.
Probably the same or longer. In fact, the NuScale concept has been pursued since 2002, so more like 2 decades from concept to NRC certification. And you can tack on another 10 years for their hardware demonstration according to their published timelines. Size is not the question here. It's the analysis of the neutronics, thermal hydraulics, coupling of various systems, accident sequence prediction, etc. What takes time is credibility, ultimately getting all the parties involved to believe the calculations and understand the engineering decisions, and collectively agree that it's gonna work out. Have to convince the regulators, the advisory boards, the utility customers, the DOE, the suppliers.
Fully half the development cost, and all of the construction and deployment cost of the first few placements, was picked up my US taxpayers. But Bill Gates and cronies retain 100% ownership.
> But Bill Gates and cronies retain 100% ownership.
NuScale is publicly traded. You can buy shares, the ticker is SMR.
The majority owner (about 60%) in NuScale is Fluor Corporation [1], another publicly traded company (FLR). The top 10 Fluor owners are mutual funds, such as BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity [2] . If your 401(k) is managed by one of these funds, chances are you own shares in FLR too.
I don't see how Bill Gates is involved in NuScale.
But why? To get a dividend? The state gets to tax the profits. To tell the management how to run the business? The state has the NRC, which can pretty much tell a company like NuScale what they can do and what they can't.
> The state has the NRC, which can pretty much tell a company like NuScale what they can do and what they can't.
Regulatory agencies can only say "no". They can only "make things happen" by saying no to other options. That is not good enough.
We have a stagnant government and society built around "no" --- NIMBYism and all the clientelist back-scratching that goes with it. That's not good enough.
I want a state that can do things actually make them happen.
the (US) state is too (politically) biased/volatile to manage even something that isnt basic science. look at Nasa. And btw this is an investment wich could create more economic activities and down the line tax revenue.
Jist noting that most of the cost was regulatory as well. So I am not really sure you can say the government "on the whole" helped it. I mean, just look at this approval timeline, totally insane. Hundreds of millions to get approval on a design generally regarded as safe, for a product whose track record is very safe (measured in injuries/deaths per watt produced).
To worry some people, the commission certifying this also downplayed the three miles incident.
"However, the NRC faced the same problems in obtaining accurate information as the state, and was further hampered by being organizationally ill-prepared to deal with emergencies, as it lacked a clear command structure and did not have the authority either to tell the utility what to do or to order an evacuation of the local area."
Wow, the sarcastic and judgemental language in the FAQ for a perfectly legitimate question says it all. It's borderline "how can your little brain not understand that..." and yet fails to answer it. Another "magnets, but this time it works" perpetual motion BS.
Quote:
> But I've been told that free energy is impossible because of the Law of Thermodynamics.
> Does your mental flexibility allow for the scenario where the KryonEngine doesn't actually break this law? Can you imagine that there actually is no energy "coming out of nowhere"? Can you imagine that this "new" energy has in reality always been there, and we simply haven't been able to perceive it, because we haven't been taught how and where to look and measure? Don't stay trapped inside mental prison cells somebody else has built for you.
So, how much time and how many people (# trained/specialist, # non-specialist) do I need to steal the core and fence it to unnamed Eurasian wanna-be nuclear power ?
low enrichment grade (<5%) is there for this reason. Centrifuges to enrich fuel are really above wanna-be nuclear threat, and who can do it (NK,Iran) doesnt need to steal some bars here or there they have their own supply chain.
> just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US
What a colossal failure. This seems more like evidence that the regulatory regime was designed to make nuclear power expensive and controlled by a small number of companies with deep pockets.
I think this is an area where industrial policy should play a serious role.
I am firmly against a technology with such a unequal downside/upside ratio. It's not that nuclear fission is inherently unsafe, it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.
We need to be lucky every day, mother nature only needs to be lucky once.
Maybe, maybe we can treat these as giant durcell batteries and use them for five years then seal it in concrete on site. But that does not seem to be the play here - so all the recycling and transport and handling just scales up - and it costs to be on your A game. The US military might afford this. but even they will probably want to run down the costs in the next few decades.
> it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.
That is not necessarily true of modern reactor designs. Reactors can be designed so that neglect by the operators, loss of coolant and other failures result in the reaction passively coasting to a halt.
This is the big difference between most of the large deployed reactors and the modern designs.
Which leads me to an idea: a power plant divided into four parts, where each part starts construction on 1/3 the eventual power using the newest designs every decade. They run for 30 years. Then deconstruct and rebuild the last one with the newest design.
This would incentivize a continuous market for new designs over the next century.
"Deconstruct" is doing a lot of work here. Nobody knows how to take apart fission reactors promptly after they are shut down at the end of their economic life. All we know how to do is wait many years for activity levels to decline, then incrementally remove materials starting with the least contaminated, which itself takes decades. The materials can only be recycled into other nuclear facilities, which means that essentially none of this material has been recycled, because nobody is building.
Many of the supposed guarantees are valid only in the absence of water and/or oxygen intrusion into the core, which are huge caveats here on planet Earth.
> it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.
What if you start by assuming failure, and then account for that by operating your reactors under millions of gallons of emergency cooling water? That is NuScale's approach.
Overall what I understand of NuScale's approach seems to account for most everything that can go wrong. But what happens if there is a natural disaster that causes much of that water to leak away quickly? Is there a failsafe for that as well?
It's also a terrible attitude to an engineering and operations challenge. What is this dark box of 'luck'? We know the potential concerns, and can design and act accordingly.
At the time, Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister of New Zealand and was pursuing "think big" projects for NZ including a planned nuclear power station. As one of the "GE Three" [2], Bridenbaugh blew the whistle that the quoted price tag of the power plant did not include necessary safety precautions which he eloquently explained would cost at least an order of magnitude more (greater than the GDP of NZ). Of course the whole idea made no sense in a country blessed with hydro and geothermal resources. In the end the project was abandoned for total cost of ownership budget reasons rather than nuclear issues.
I wonder what has changed since then?
[0] https://www.times.org/nuclear-power-back/2018/3/8/the-long-t...
[1] https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82alternatives.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three