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
