If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy.
Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physicists, notably Egil Lillestøl at the University of Bergen, have talked to official figures about this for a long time about this without getting any kind of traction.
Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean and cheap next-generation nuclear power. If these researchers manage to develop something without official support, it would be impressive indeed. That the Norwegian government isn't willing to support clean energy research is really quite baffling, given that the energy sector is hands-down the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy. And Norway has the world's second-largest known thorium reserves. For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.
Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium.
Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all?
I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I would much rather have the focus of the energy industry be solar energy right now.
I hope countries in the future are powered 70-80% by solar, and 20-30% by other sources like nuclear energy (at least until we figure out how to store solar energy cheaply for night use), than the other way around. And we can only get there fast if we have the industry's almost complete focus on solar energy, and have them invest billions into researching it and lowering the cost of solar panels.
Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2].
Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby. Utah doesn't really have the spare water capacity to use it as a potential energy store, either.
The point being that, as great as renewables are, without a way to cheaply store vast amounts of renewable energy or a way to shuffle energy from great distances, it isn't going to work on its own. We need a solid baseline, which, of course, is coal today, but I'd much rather keep looking for better nuclear.
There's a lot of energy in those bonds; I have a great deal of confidence we can find a way to leverage it without all of the nasty side-effect. We just need to get past the knee-jerk reaction of "nuclear is bad" and to a better place of "today's nuclear leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't mean tomorrow's will"[3].
3. http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html - You can see that Nuclear is far less deadly than coal, but, when things go wrong, it costs a whole lot more than coal.
Better still, adjust demand to it changes with supply by having electric cars with removable batteries, the batteries being recharged when there is excess power.
> Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby.
Utah is connected to the rest of the USA. Is it ever not sunny and not windy everywhere?
CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.
Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.
CANDU reactors are designed to put less radioactive material back into the earth than came out of it, and when problems occur in a CANDU design it fails safe.
>CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.
There is less uranium in the waste, but there will be fission products and trans-uranium elements just like in the fuel of regular reactors. Radioactivity of uranium is hardly a problem, when dealing with spent fuel. In short term (less than 100 years) fission products produce most of the radioactivity. In long term trans-uranium elements are the problem.
>Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.
Halting a normal fission chain reaction is hardly a source of accidents in any current nuclear reactor design. Decay heat is produced in the spent nuclear fuel of CANDUs just like in Fukushima or Three Mile Island.
CANDU is an interesting reactor design, but there is none as great alternative as you propose. However, various active and passive safety measures may get you very close. I don't know CANDU design so well, that I could judge those.
Interesting, I thought the large heat sink inherent in the CANDU design essentially ensured that with no human interaction that CANDU reactors would failsafe. My understanding was such that the 'reactor' might be destroyed but the design was such that the failure cascade would not release radioactive materials outside of the containment units.
As I said, I don't know the safety systems of CANDU :)
Large heat sink buys you time to get the cooling working again. Ultimately the heat must be transferred out somehow. In modern reactor designs these systems are usually designed to passively for very long times. With CANDU's it is very likely to be the case too.
In nuclear engineering one must always consider also the chance, that not everything is working as designed (like the destroyed diesel generators and external power sources at Fukushima). PRA (Probabilistic Risk Analysis) is used for that. PRA analysis are used for detecting most vulnerable systems in a nuclear power plant and this information is used to design new safer reactor types and to update the old ones little by little to be still safer. Harsh weather, seismic activity etc. is also considered in these analysis, but sadly in Fukushima even detected vulnerabilities didn't lead to improvements in time.
Even, if everything is done as well as possible, there is still a chance (although with modern designs almost arbitrarily small) that under certain conditions all the safety systems will fail. An ultimate example of such an event, would be a 100 km meteorite smashing the plant to atoms.
We agree on older plants being not as safe as new ones. My original sentence was about things you just can't prepare for (with any reasonable means). After that I just wanted to say, that it is possible to build plane-safe NPP.
Maybe yes, maybe no. Some CANDU negatives I'll chip in though: CANDU is one of the more successful vectors to creating nuclear-armed states; and it's not all that reliable - the uptime of the Bruce reactors is tolerable if you adopt a flexible definition.
Uranium fuels were never deployed because of cost or safety, they were deployed because various militaries funded the technology for use a) producing plutonium for weapons, and b) producing energy for large Navy customers.
Civilian nuclear energy based on the uranium fuel cycle is a spin off from a warfighter's R&D project.
Compare that with the thorium fuel cycle which does not produce weaponizable byproducts.
Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not. That is, if the reactor starts to overheat will that make it generate more power or less. In light water reactors, such as pretty much all existing commercial reactors, you need complicated feedback systems to keep the reactor under control. And if those are damaged, as at Fukushima, you're looking at a melt down.
>Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not.
The void coefficient is only appropriate, when you are dealing with a criticality accident like in Chernobyl. Criticality accident (fission chain reaction getting out of hand) has never happened in commercially used Western reactors. In fact, in Western countries you can not get a license for a reactor design, which has positive temperature coefficient for power i.e. the fission power must decrease, if temperature increases.
95% of the power generated in Norway comes from hydropower[1] so we already have a sustainable and green power source. I think it's more likely that the government sees power generation in Norway as a "solved" problem, and wants to be careful about introducing nuclear power. The general opinion is basically "nuclear is dangerous!", and no-one wants to be the first politician to support it.
"Norwegian crude oil production peaked in 2001 and as of 2012 it has declined about 50% from the peak. This fact has been overshadowed by the oil price growth in recent years."
No, no, theyre fully aware of that. The people behind this are the Halden Reactor Project, they already operate this small nuclear reactor that was (don't know if it still is) used to power a paper mill. The whole thing is just for some clout in world research. Leave it to the Norwegians!
They're a wonderful bunch of people, I had the chance to study some safety in software engineering principles with them, about 6 months ago. I had no idea they were planning to implement Thorium.
They do a huge bunch of research in Human Factors, and half of the team basically hack about with Kinects as their job designing AR solutions rehearsing dangerous nuclear sites/oil rigs
Actually, that's not being cynical. A lot of engineering brainpower goes to the oil industry since it is so big. Almost any engineering company has oil and gas companies as their biggest customers. In comparison, hydroelectric is mainly maintenance and upgrades since most of the waterfalls have been built out.
Good point. The Norwegian oil companies are, in fact, swimming in money (mainly due to high oil prices), but getting oil up from the North Sea in 2012 is vastly more complex than drilling a hole in the ground and attaching a hose to it. There are lots of incredibly smart and dedicated people working in these companies.
Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.
That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons.
OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise.
That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are treated as if it was a proposal to build 1050s Soviet-style reactors.
I am not trying to be hostile here, but you are making the exact same assumptions and fallacies as most of the Norwegian detractors to thorium reactor research. Although the criticism I was referring to in my post was rather the type you most commonly see: Uninformed dismissals of the type "We're still feeling the effects of Chernobyl", "Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe" and "Nuclear waste cannot be handled in a safe way".
Traditional counterarguments to nuclear energy should not be enough to dismiss using a couple of million a year to look into promising, alternate solutions.
> ..would be rather 'pissing in the ocean' though on this issue, don't you think? (and thus could be considered a waste of money)
Again, as he stated. You are basing your hypothesis off of old nuclear technology. The same arguments were made against solar and wind. Many still believe it is a waste of money, yet we keep funding it. Why not also look into Thorium?
The cost of power from nuclear is quite competitive. Capital costs are high but, like renewables, amortized over a long lifetime with low operational costs. Your wiki link puts nuclear cheaper than solar or offshore wind, and barely more expensive than onshore wind.
Moving to small modular reactors, as many outfits are trying to do, will lower the required investment and time to production. Liquid thorium or fast uranium would largely eliminate long-term storage problem...in fact, we'd eliminate the long-lived wastes we have right now. (In the meantime we should keep wastes in a form we can use for fuel later.)
Renewables are great as far as they go, but there are only so many places you can build a good dam, and wind needs either a large oversupply, an economical energy storage system (which, other than the limited hydro, doesn't exist), a drastically souped-up and expensive power grid, or possibly all three. You don't have to worry about that if you're just adding power on the margins, but you do if you want to run civilization carbon-free. Taking all that into account, it's questionable whether wind would really be cheaper, especially as we're forced to expand into less suitable locations.
> Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.
I checked some facts; 2W / m^2 for wind[0], 1000W / m^2 for nuclear[1]. Even if they didn't account for some infrastructure, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't decrease that number 500 times.
Nuclear fission is one of the most powerful energy sources (in energy per unit of mass of fuel) known to mankind, to be replaced only by fusion and annihilation. Renewables on Earth don't even begin to compare.
I always wonder why people disregard nuclear like its low efficiency. It is taking elements that are inherently (in the case of uranium / plutonium, any passive nuclear power source) or situationally (thorium) emitting radiation (photon emissions, a kind of light, which is a form of energy) and using that heat energy to boil water.
And these unstable atoms were made by exploding stars. It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning that it seems ridiculous to not take advantage of the dense energy gifts of destroyed stars.
> It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning
Yeah, that's why a hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb as a trigger. But getting a stable, self-sustaining fusion reaction would quickly recoup for initial energy investment.
Unfortunately, as for the third reaction, I don't see much future for us using annihilation large-scale, at least in the coming centuries. It's simple: we don't have any antimatter around in significant quantities [0] and making it is a terribly inefficient process.
[0] - maybe it's fortunate; pure antimatter is probably the most dangerous source of energy out there; one mistake and we'd kill ourselves with it.
My mistake! Clearly nuclear is far more energy dense.. memory failure. TBH i thought there would be a far greater exclusion zone around it than shown on your links (good source, btw)-- obviously fission is going to be off the scale on energy/kg of fuel.
Don't forget to consider the cost of externalities (environmental damage, health costs), which probably roughly double the true cost of nonrenewable fuels:
In my mind, we crossed the peak when diesel became more expensive than gasoline, because that meant that availability/exploration became the primary cost instead of refinement (because diesel has more energy and is easier to refine).
In fairness, we won't reach peak coal for at least several more decades, but my guess is that the externalities associated with coal will become unpalatable once a category 5 hurricane takes out New York City or Florida is under water. Or, when disaster relief crosses say 50% of the government's budget.
I forgot to mention that I'm against all new nuclear unless it can burn waste and plutonium. Partially because I saw the reactors underwater outside Omaha and realized that we are only a human error away from a Fukushima event here in the US.
"The four-year test at Norway’s government owned Halden reactor could help thorium inch closer to replacing uranium as a possible safer and more effective nuclear power source. Many people believe that thorium is superior because it leaves less long- lived dangerous waste, makes it far more difficult to fashion bombs, runs more efficiently, and can be made meltdown proof."
Again, I am not an expert on Thorium but it's my understanding that the health and safety risks involved are much lower than traditional nuclear plants.
Wind and hydro does not begin to address the need for exponentially more energy and neither of them are the future in any important factor.
Furthermore. It is estimated that 100.000 people die from the use of coal to generate energy every year. More than nuclear power have ever done ( 4,000 people ever).
The only thing that is problematic with nuclear is storing it, a problem which can be solved.
This is a factual disagreement, hopefully a resolvable one.
Take a look at this book by David MacKay, Cambridge physicist. He presents detailed calculations on each energy source and, despite being anti-nuclear in initial orientation, agrees by the end of the book that nuclear energy is far cheaper and more scalable than any other renewable.
Thanks for, without giving actual examples, telling us that the people opposing nuclear are uninformed and unable to form complete sentences. Without this enlightened information one might have listened to them and judged them based on their arguments. Edit: spelling
Norway might not support, but Finland is majority owner of Fortum (51%), which the news article states as a partner. So governments aren't completely out of the picture.
Fortum actually has slightly more nuclear power production in Sweden than in Finland. But your sentiment rings true, indeed only Finland is pro-nuclear in this common energy market (NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, previously Nord Pool).
But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year.
Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff.
In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.
I was surprised about "about the size of a beach ball". Wikipedia says thorium is 11.7 g per cubic centimeter, so the one ton beach ball works out to a diameter of roughly 55 cm if my math is right, which is a reasonable beach ball. It turns out my intuitions aren't much use with metal beach balls.
People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.
I'm just saying, if people can survive thorium lamps, we can probably manage to use modest amounts of thorium in much more controlled circumstances without undue difficulty.
This isn't one of the fancy liquid fluoride thorium reactors that people immediately think of. It's a scheme for incorporating thorium into the fuel mix in existing reactors. Still very cool.
This is not the first time Norway has been interested in Thorium, already in the sixties they had plans to exploit their rather large Thorium deposit. India also has large deposits and also has a trial reactor scheme going similar to the one in Norway with Thorium-Plutonium MOX fuel.
Also, this is the first I've read that thorium reactors can also use up (dispose) waste. (Not an expert, or even an informed layperson, just a news junkie.)
We need to reduce, reuse, eliminate waste and weapons grade stockpiles. Something less evil than using depleted uranium bullets to convert foreign countries into uninhabitable radioactive hotspots.
From my casual reading, that's meant traveling wave reactors. Having another energy source is just a happy side benefit.
I'm not a genuine nuke geek, but hopefully there are a few around who can shed some light into what sort of impact the commercial use of thorium as a fuel is on the viability of the fuel in the long-run.
Kirk Sorenson has calculated that in a new molten salt thorium reactor, the thorium burned would be worth 5x its weight in gold, based on 10 cents per kWh.
I am a huge advocate of thorium as a fuel. Unfortunately, using thorium in any reactor today only gives marginal benefits. The CANDU reactors in Canada can and do already take thorium in their fuel cycle.
In the long run, you only have to store the waste for 100 years before it is safe. This is because you can re-use the waste, creating further efficiency and less storage time.
China has stockpiled thorium since 1999, and started a MSR program in the past few years. That shows how far behind we are in this tech, even when we pioneered it (I am referring to molten salt technology). The head of the program got a phd in electrical engineering from Drexel. Oh, and is the son of some finance? minister as well, so it definitely has the political clout to be accomplished. China desperately needs clean energy - they are making water plants, for coal plants, for manufacturing plants. And each of these stresses out the environment in so many ways, it's very risky to the long term health of the region. Visit circleofblue.org to learn more about the water-energy nexus.
And sorry, but not really a step closer. Everyone in the nuke world has known thorium can be used. Like I said before, it will only provide marginal benefits. Did you know, thorium is 3-4x more present in the earth's crust than uranium?
If instead of those loans to all those solar companies, and put $50 billion to a Thorium program, and made a space race effort, I can confidently say we would be energy independent in 10 years. Five years to develop, Five years to build. With all these new advances in materials and alloys (which was the main issue), there would be very little problem. Instead, we are making private companies do this, by specifically targeting military applications.
How sad would it be if Thorium molten salt technology was developed in the US, and we sold it overseas first?
In response to this, here is a summary copied directly from a reputable source. [1]
Thorium is a radioactive element similar to uranium. Formerly used to make gas mantles, it is about three times as abundant in the earth’s crust as uranium. Soil commonly contains around 6 parts per million of thorium, and some minerals contain 12% thorium oxide. Seawater contains little thorium, because thorium oxide is insoluble. Thorium can be completely burned up in simple reactors (in contrast to standard uranium reactors which use only about 1% of natural uranium). Thorium is used in nuclear reactors in India. If uranium ore runs low, thorium will probably become the dominant nuclear fuel.
Thorium reactors deliver 3.6 billion kWh of heat per ton of thorium, which implies that a 1 GW reactor requires about 6 tons of thorium per year, assuming its generators are 40% efficient. Worldwide thorium re- sources are estimated to total about 6 million tons, four times more than the known reserves shown in table 24.7. As with the uranium resources, it seems plausible that these thorium resources are an underestimate, since thorium prospecting is not highly valued today. If we assume, as with ura- nium, that these resources are used up over 1000 years and shared equally among 6 billion people, we find that the “sustainable” power thus gener- ated is 4 kWh/d per person.
An alternative nuclear reactor for thorium, the “energy amplifier” or “accelerator-driven system” proposed by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia and his colleagues would, they estimated, convert 6 million tons of thorium to 15 000 TWy of energy, or 60 kWh/d per person over 1000 years. Assuming conversion to electricity at 40% efficiency, this would deliver 24kWh/d per person for 1000 years. And the waste from the energy amplifier would be much less radioactive too. They argue that, in due course, many times more thorium would be economically extractable than the current 6 million tons. If their suggestion – 300 times more – is correct, then thorium and the energy amplifier could offer 120 kWh/d per person for 60 000 years.
Gates's foundation has made a handful of bad investments (generally small) but I'm generally really impressed with the thought they put into where to invest and why.
While it's a little bit scary that Japan and Germany are both trending (more than trending) away from nuclear, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. Neither country will go for coal. Both countries will need to invest in other technologies (some basic, some consumer-oriented) in order to meet their emissions reductions goals.
But I get scared about the possibility of additional countries backing away from nuclear.
Uh? Not only does Germany rely on coal energy (more so since they plan to get rid of nuclear) they also export it (which is great for politicians in Sweden, cut back on nuclear and call yourself green is great PR (then import coal energy from Germany)).
I'm curious why that is? I remember a table that showed the deaths per terawatt-hour of each energy source [1]. Coal was the highest, and nuclear was the lowest (below all the renewables even). I don't know if this data is accurate, but assuming it is, I can't understand why nuclear doesn't have more support.
It is not so much a meltdown. Those meltdowns are rare. And most people don't die at the point of the meltdown but from the long term consequences of the meltdown. But many Nuclear supporters doesn't accept those death as consequences of the nuclear meltdown. BTW, not knowing data is accurate but assuming it is, is like finding a gun and assuming it is not loaded.
What I'm really concerned about nuclear power is the problem of waste. The dream of fuel recycling has been dreamt for 40 years now and those existing plants are everything but clean. Currently the idea of a closed fuel circle for nuclear power is just a dream.
Also citing new reactor designs is pointless. Old designs are still running. Old Russian designs are still running, and I don't speak about Chernobyl like reactors. And it would take decades to replace those reactors and you still have to deal with the old ones. E.g. Germany shut down all Russian WWER reactors in the East after the reunification, those reactors are still there, the deconstruction of those reactors has just started a few years ago.
In that time frame you might just as good replace nuclear power with a decentralized system of renewable energy. I really wonder, why people who love the internet, love freedom, love markets don't root for that. Decentralized renewable energy are much less likely to create a monopoly for electricity. It is much more likely that you could have an autonomous energy supply.
Most of them are going to be using the latest iteration of some tried-and-true series of reactors from another country. Russia is exporting the VVER-1200, Korea is exporting their APR-1400, and China is looking to export their ACPR-1000 and large components of American, Japanese, and European reactors.
The common thread here is that all of these are very conventional, directly descended from designs that have seen extensive service and have an excellent record of reliability. You're not going to see newbie countries screwing up the designs. (You might see them mess up the operations.)
I passed the video by my uncle who was an expert/engineer dealing with control and safety of water cooled reactors. This is what he had to say:
"I found the video very informative technically, as well as being effective in countering many of the the arguments of those who profess to be against nuclear power in any form. I also found the details of the design of the liquid thorium fluoride reactor intriguing. To become an advocate for further investment in this concept, I would have to learn more about how the concept deals with the safety issues involved in the handling of fluorine gas and fluoride materials."
The title is misleading. They only test thorium in an already built conventional reactor. Meanwhile in Germany they developed a conceptionally more safe reactor type powered by thorium, built a test reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor) and an industrial reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300). They're both shut down now, partly because of safety concerns: Water leaking into the cooling circuit can lead to explosions (which happened in small amounts)
So I guess only time will tell if new reactor types really are better than current ones.
Interestingly this has already been done in the U.S. kinda. Back when I was working on Indian Point Units 2 & 3 I found a paper about Unit 1 where - about 30 years ago - they mixed in some of the fuel bundles with Thorium to see how well the neutron flux would turn it into Uranium and possibly breed more fuel. It was really fascinating but, although they had some success, there was really no need for it in the U.S. because Uranium is not in short supply and as this article points out, solid fuel reactors kind of dismiss all the advantages of thorium.
While germany is getting out of nuclear power altogether... their "Energiewende" plan is very ambitious but i wonder if its not better to invest into nuclear power to make it saver instead of getting rid of it completely. I dont know much about it though, what do experts think?
Is that an offer to pay all the external costs of nuclear power? I mean, all of them. From final deposit, over insurance policies in case of a meltdown to environmental consequences of the entire nuclear supply chain?
Nuclear power is just too expensive for an economy. Nuclear power is limited, there is just not endless amount of uranium on the planet. Also globally nuclear power is pointless, IIRC nuclear power has a global market share of 6% for primary energy. Too believe it could solve our energy needs sounds weird to me.
Also nuclear power is inefficient. Efficiency is usually way below 50%, since nuclear power plants are far away from anything you can't usually use the heat an nuclear power plant produce for anything productive, so it's lost.
But of course there are new and better plants in development, they are safer and bigger and produce less waste. But the old plants still exist. You can't replace them within a few years, it takes decades. And the costs for such a programme will be very high.
Since 2005, there is a nuclear power plant being build in Finland, called Olkiluoto III. The reactor was priced at three billion euros, currently the price increased to about six billion. The reactor might go online in 2015, a decade after the construction started.
The reactor will provide 1600 MW of electrical power. For comparison, in 2011 alone wind power plants were build with the combined power of 9600 MW (Europe wide, Germany about 2000 MW, GB about 1300 MW).
I know, this is not directly comparable but it gives you a hint, that you could have easily get the 1600 MW in ten years with renewable sources.
Nuclear power might be an interesting technology, but for me it is just a steam machine, which leaves a huge pile of waste behind. Nobody knows how to handle it, and people got it wrong. Search for Asse II if you want to know more about it. For Germany it will be very hard to find a safe final deposit for all the nuclear waste.
"Nuclear power is limited, there is just not endless amount of uranium on the planet."
A finite quantity can be quite large. Uranium is not that scarce even with a ramp up of nuclear activity. And even then, there is thorium, a more abundant fuel.
"you can't usually use the heat an nuclear power plant produce for anything productive, so it's lost."
That is a problem with conventional low-temperature high-pressure designs, however LFTR (low-pressure high-temperature) produces high enough temperatures to be usable in industrial processes directly (700C). Designs can be modified to get to 1000C or so which is useful for hydrogen production.
"But of course there are new and better plants in development, they are safer and bigger and produce less waste."
LFTR not only produces less waste, but it can be used to burn existing waste. So if we consider the costs of long term security and storage, just developing LFTR to process waste is going to be worth it.
"Since 2005, there is a nuclear power plant being build in Finland, called Olkiluoto III."
That is indeed a problem with all large industrial/construction projects that need government funding or complex regulatory processes. If you are arguing against nuclear power you should be against all such projects.
One problem with wind power is a poor ability to provide base grid load. Yes, if you have a widely distributed (continent-wide) network things may even out. But then that means you have to waste energy in the transportation network, as well as investing in powerlines. The same argument about inefficiency starts to come up.
The main argument then for wind and solar is that the costs scale linearly with output, whereas for a government-backed power plant the costs tend to escalate (bribes, kickbacks, cost-plus etc). That is acceptable, it just means people can become more independent of the inherently inefficient state-run grid. But with a state-run renewables system you have to contend with a centralized and potentially oversized grid. You trade away centralism in one area (identical turbines or panels) and have to buy it back in another (large scale power distribution system).
I think many nuke advocates go much too far in the "nuclear power will solve all our problems!"
That said, the strongest arguments for nuclear power has always been as part of a balanced energy diet, not as the off the shelf answer to everything. So, how do we figure out where it's appropriate and where not?
Properly price carbon, and remove all distorting subsidies to all forms of energy, from fossil fuels to solar to wind to nuclear. Then let the market do what it does best: figure out the best way to allocate capital to produce goods.
Nuclear certainly needs proper regulation and safety requirements, but contemporary designs are much lower risk than the Fukushima reactor from the 1970s or the ancient design of Chernobyl: despite that, they're nearly impossible to build. I've heard it wouldn't even be allowed, in the current regulatory regime, to replace those old plants with new ones. Something's broken there.
Markets can only work, if the prices for something tell the truth about the costs of something. You won't solve that with just cutting subsidies for all energy sources.
And carbon emissions are not everything. The idea to reduce them by trading certificates collapsed in the minute when the total amount of certificates were not lower than the amount of carbon emissions in the past or when it was not adjusted for the solar and wind power which were build over time. If you would cut the amount of certificates in half and auction them off, it might work. Otherwise the market will fail.
To me it seems that taxing unwanted effects is far better than subsidizing good techs. With the taxing scheme you are not endorsing a single technology but are attacking the root cause of your problem.
For example, would coal powered power plants be a problem if they didn't produce greenhouse gases?
Nuclear waste is the problem? Put tax on nuclear waste and raise it until the tech is either abandoned or the problem is solved.
I fear it is not possible to determine a price for the storage of nuclear waste, because it needs to be taken care of so long. If one could estimate a price, I would doubt that any of todays companies companies is yet big enough to pay for it.
If you look at germany for instance: We are using nuclear power since decades, in almost 20 plants. Yet there is no solution for waste storage, so far. And it will be society paying for it, not the companies.
The US had a ban on reprocessing nuclear material and the industry is currently not commercially viable. However, other countries (France and Germany) do recycle their nuclear material. This can help reduce the amount of nuclear waste.
That's nice and all, but "help reduce" doesn't really equal a "solution for waste storage", and does not change the fact that society, not the companies that built, run and extracted profits from these plants, will have to pay the costs (which we cannot even calculate as long as we don't even have a storage solution, which makes shrugging them off even more criminal -- yeah, maybe it won't be so bad, but we shrug it off because we'll be dead by then, not because we know, and that's rather weak at best, disgusting at worst).
In that wikipedia article you linked, Germany only occurs only once on that page, with a facility that has been out of operation since 1990 - WTF?
I made a mistake about Germany (my info was from an old article) - sorry, about that. I did mentioned that it is not commercially viable (it requires government subsidies). Keep in mind that nuclear power is the backbone of France's energy needs (78.8%). I am sure they create a lot of waste - we should at least look at what they are doing to reduce their waste.
I agree that reprocessing is not a long term solution. However, we do have a lot of nuclear garbage and every little bit counts. Repossessing will slow the growth of nuclear garbage.
Look at the amount that is recycled every year (paper, cans, bottles). Now imagine that in added to the current landfills.
Recycling/Reprocessing buys TIME (and so does electric cars, higher MPG, etc). The question is which will kill us first? Nuclear poisoning, climate change, or ourselves.
That’s kinda beside the point, you know. We already have all that waste. We already have to deal with it somehow. There is no avoiding it. So we might as well add to it.
The idea that nuclear waste needs to be isolated for (pick your arbitrarily large number) of years is a misconception based on the assumption that everything else remains static.
It won't. In particular, we are in the middle (actually, maybe still near the beginning) of a biotechnology revolution every bit as profound as the electronic one that started with the transistor.
What we fear most from radiation is cancer. If it weren't for cancer, nuclear power would be a no-brainer. Its environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels because the volume of fuel mined and transported is so much less. This was shown in a book titled "The Health Risks of Not Going Nuclear", now sadly out of print.
And in fact, radiation is a very weak carcinogen. Frank Von Hippel, a Princeton professor who is no friend of nuclear power, has estimated the total cancer deaths resulting from Fukushima at somewhere near a thousand -- pretty bad for an industrial accident, but hardly the Black Death all over again.
Consider cancer treatment today compared to, say, Ben Franklin's time. Now imagine how much more detailed our understanding of cancer treatment, possibly even prevention, will become in another century or two.
If cancer becomes the kind of non-issue that smallpox is today, a disease which used to kill one child in three before the age of 5 in many parts of the world, our descendants will regard us with the same pitying disbelief that we apply to the self-flagellators of 1348 trying to propitiate an angry G*d.
Consider this slideshow:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54904454
entitled "A Rational Environmentalist's Guide to Nuclear Power".
I don't know about other countries, but at least in Finland nuclear power companies pay the nation annually a deposit, which is used to take care of the spent fuel and to decommission the power plants. For now there is more than 1.5 billion euros in the fund.[0] Despite this the nuclear power plants there have been an excellent investment.
As money is not a problem for seeking solutions for the final disposal of the waste, Finland is advancing in finding the solution. By now they are planning to begin burying the waste in 2020. More information can be found at: http://www.posiva.fi/en
A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Ractor is as safe a unit as is possible. Look it up online. Much safer, cheaper, and more versatile than a bulky CANDU. It can be throttled and scaled which is a huge advantage. There is plenty of easily accessable thorium worldwide. It also can generate radioisotopes that are extremely useful and much more readily extracted from the reactor than those currently used.
Time to begin building these.
According to an article in a norwegian newspaper[1], there are much bigger challenges in extracting the thorium from the ore in Norway. The thorium in India is supposedly easier utilize.
The technology today requires use of a lot of nasty chemicals to extract thorium. I think this is a big issue for the government in addition to running nuclear reactors.
There's no insinuation in my posting this link, and it's not directly pertinent to Thorium reactors, but the free PDF downloadable from here is a good reference for these kinds of discussions, I think. Helped me with perspective anyway.
"I think from a long-range standpoint--I'm talking about humanity--the most important thing we could do is start by having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons and then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too." - Hyman Rickover, January 28, 1982
Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physicists, notably Egil Lillestøl at the University of Bergen, have talked to official figures about this for a long time about this without getting any kind of traction.
Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean and cheap next-generation nuclear power. If these researchers manage to develop something without official support, it would be impressive indeed. That the Norwegian government isn't willing to support clean energy research is really quite baffling, given that the energy sector is hands-down the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy. And Norway has the world's second-largest known thorium reserves. For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.