17 ms·

The World Really Could Go Nuclear

58 points by tdaltonc 11y ago

brc 11y ago
"If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored" Well, exactly. The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population. Of course nuclear fission is the answer to large scale energy. It always has been. Weapons proliferation can be addressed with new designs and materials. Safety can be addressed with passive systems. The technical answers are simple compared to fusion or elaborate harvesting of diffuse energy such as sunlight, wind or tides. The logical conclusion is that the people making the most noise are not in it for the solutions, but for the noise and attention. I'm not the only one to think this, but expect the groupthink to smite my comment anyway.
- cft 11y ago
  >The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population. No. They are actually interesting in assuming power in the society by foregoing the standard societal ascension mechanisms.
  - Retra 11y ago
    There are no 'standard' ascension mechanisms, and no reason anyone should follow them if there were.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Your comment makes less sense than the underpants gnomes' business plan.
- bigdubs 11y ago
  Another side benefit is addressing water shortages with nuclear desalinization.
  - eitally 11y ago
    Apparently this is starting to happen in select places (like Saudi Arabia). This is a very.good.thing.
- tgflynn 11y ago
  I agree with you on the problem of modern society seeming to be unable to make good collective decisions. I'm not convinced restarting nuclear makes sense today though. Solar seems to be on an economically winning trajectory and building nuclear plants is very expensive, apparently even for countries that are good at it, like France.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I'm pro-nuclear, I think, but no argument on HN ever got more persuasive by tacking on a preemptive dismissal of disagreement as "groupthink". Do you want to talk about nuclear energy on HN, or do you want to talk about how you feel about talking about nuclear energy on HN? The former topic seems much more interesting than the latter.
  - mgalka 11y ago
    Great! I'll chip in on both. Don't think he meant it as a dismissal, just as a preemptive nudge to discourage actual groupthink. For countries that already have nuclear weapons, I don't even see a valid argument against nuclear power. Agree, the only think holding us back is politicians who are afraid to use the word "nuclear."
    - tptacek 11y ago
      That can't be right. There are obvious arguments against nuclear power. I don't think they're dispositive, but it doesn't seem right to claim they're invalid. For instance: * Serious, INES 7 nuclear incidents can render whole regions uninhabitable. * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. There are probably many other valid arguments. I think people underestimate the impact of coal, and de-industrialization is totally unrealistic and would almost certainly do far more damage to more people than nuclear would. But to suggest that nuclear isn't fraught, or that the only concern was proliferation... that doesn't seem intellectually honest.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        > * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. Incidents from non-nuclear plants cause way more deaths (in short term and long term). Coal kills people too, by polluting the air with fine particles. > * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. Where? There's tons of space deep in the ground, it's not like we are running out of place of where to put it. Plus, there are ways to recycle used nuclear fuel to make it less radioactive.
- grecy 11y ago
  I've been pro-nuclear for a long time, though the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little. What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?". I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.
  - ploxiln 11y ago
    I think Fukushima, and various investigations and revelations it inspired, showed how the problems are more social than technical. Nuclear power plants produce a lot of power very cheaply for many years. But companies can't help but push the boundaries to boost profits, extending plant life past spec and skimping on maintenance and safety measures, with just a bit of regulatory capture to smooth the process. I'm still pro-nuclear. We just need to follow through on the regulation. Maybe we can start by not being so damn secretive about nuclear stuff. Anyway, we have to build new ones to take on the capacity so we can shut down old ones. Which means we can't be so scared of building them, since not building them is what's unsafe.
    - 3pt14159 11y ago
      Also the Japanese culture is too deferent to authority to really trust that the safeguards are in place. There was not one, but TWO completely failed safeguards that caused Fukushima. Both were reported and went unfixed for over a decade because of top down pressure. This would never happen in Canada. Someone would whistle blow to the government or the press.
  - wisty 11y ago
    Fukushima was caused by a Mw 9.0 earthquake / tsunami which cased over 15,000 deaths, in a 1st world country with the world's best earthquake mitigation. The meltdown was caused by an absolutely huge disaster. The contamination might kill a few hundred, and has resulted in an exclusion zone. IMO, the biggest problem with nuclear is how unacceptable disasters are. One old reactors built in high risk zone has a little meltdown, and the entire world freaks out over it. This is a major practical impediment to nuclear - you won't get costs getting driven down (for better or worse), because people see the risk as completely taboo. It's like people worrying about tall buildings, because of 9/11. There's always risks.
- datenwolf 11y ago
  > The technical answers are simple cough waste management cough We're talking about megayear timescales when it comes to nuclear fission waste. Humans have been around for how long? What's the age of the oldest building around? What's the usual timescale for modern age buildings to deteriorate?
  - odonnellryan 11y ago
    Is dumping it in a mountain hoping we'll figure it out in 100,000 years not valid? I'm being completely serious. Our current problems are on the span of hundreds of years. If we have hundreds of thousands we will be able to sort it out. It's barely borrowing on the future.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    I am completely OK with burying it inside a mountain or a geologically suitable mine. True, we should be very selective about where we put it given that waste can be hazardous over geological timescales.
  - DennisP 11y ago
    Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, one since 1980. The U.S. had the Integral Fast Reactor almost complete in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration shut down the program. The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. That's a human timescale. When I lived in Germany, we had a brewery in town that had been continuously operating for 800 years.
    - datenwolf 11y ago
      > Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Not every transuran is viable fuel. Some of the stuff is actually actively getting in the way of an efficient fission chain reaction. The key benefit of fast breeder reactors is, that you can fuel them with stuff that's more abundant on Earth, so you're not getting into a fuel shortage (our supplies of U235 are quite limited, some 70 years or so, using conventional fission reactors). So you need to either go through a fast U238→Pu239 or a Th232→U233 process if you want to make use of the abundant stuff. Oh, and most of the fission products are not very pleasant either and you can't efficiently burn them in any way whatsoever. Burner Accelerators? I've got a few things for you to look up: Penetration epth, Bragg peak, small volume active zone. > The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. Unfortunately not. The generation zero of nuclides will decay in that timeframe. But all the other stuff to follow, less radioactive, but still dangerous, takes much more time to decay; and those daughter generation nuclides is where the headaches start. And it's not just the physics that's a problem, it's also chemistry. Some of the elements that are born are quite aggressive, chemically.
- DennisP 11y ago
  James Hansen is often considered pretty noisy and alarmist. He was one of the first to raise the issue, thinks we can't afford to go above 350ppm (we're at 400), and recently published a paper saying sea level rise could be much worse than generally expected. In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he strongly advocates nuclear power, especially GenIV designs. In particular he talks about the Integral Fast Reactor. Plenty of other prominent environmentalists are advocating nuclear these days; the documentary Pandora's Promise highlights several of them. And James Lovelock, who invented the "Gaia" concept, has advocated nuclear for years.
Animats 11y ago
If only it didn't cost so much. And, about every 20 years, there's a Chernobyl or a Fukishima sized disaster. China has 13 nuclear stations under construction, with 61 reactors and a total capacity of 40 to 75 gigawatts.
- tptacek 11y ago
  What's the youngest nuclear plant to have suffered a major (say, INES 5+) incident? Fukushima Daiichi was pretty old.
  - dreamfactory2 11y ago
    If we ignore the challenges of creating and operating an earthquake and human error proof station, waste is still not a solved problem. I once met an architect who was part of a group designing the early stations in the 50s. They asked back then about the waste and were assured that this would be solved in short measure before it became any kind of issue to worry about.
  - khuey 11y ago
    There's selection bias involved in answering that question, because most nuclear plants (at least ex-China) are pretty old.
  - Animats 11y ago
    The US still has Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania. Same reactor design as Fukishima. If they ever lose cooling water pumping, they will have a meltdown, just like Fukishima. All the regulators know this, so they have a lot of backup generators in different locations, and nine ways to get cooling water into the reactor. But the design is still not a good one.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  Many people are terrified of flying, in part because the very few but big accidents get a lot of news coverage. Meanwhile vastly more people die in many daily smaller accidents. Something similar is happening with nuclear energy vs fossil fuel. I wish this could be reframed somehow, but maybe it's just how humans deal poorly with risk.
squozzer 11y ago
I have a very simple to understand yet very unlikely to be implemented standard of persuasion. Industry executives and engineers - and their families - should make a point of living near their plants.
chjohasbrouck 11y ago
I never really understood the arguments against nuclear. From the data I'm able to find, coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours globally, compared to about 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours generated from nuclear. That would mean that burning coal for energy is nearly 2000x more dangerous than nuclear power. Is there something more to the opposition's argument than safety? Or is this just a case of the public being misinformed?
- ericd 11y ago
  >coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per kilowatt-hour Are you saying that running a gaming PC for 2 hours results in 170k deaths?
  - Syrup-tan 11y ago
    If the PC is powered by coal energy, he's saying something like that.
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- c-slice 11y ago
  I think you mean giga-watt hour.
  - slyall 11y ago
    Actually the number seems to be per Trillion Kilowatt Hours. and the US rate is 15,000 or 1/10th of that. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/print/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
  - chjohasbrouck 11y ago
    Sorry, deaths per trillionkWhr: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
tgflynn 11y ago
Yes, and if we had done that 30 years ago when it made sense there would probably be far less concern about global warming today. Today, with the rapid decline in the cost of solar energy, I'm far less convinced this would be a wise move.
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akamaka 11y ago
This article, like many pro-nuclear arguments, doesn't address the most basic problem -- is nuclear power cost effective? Sure, it's cheap in theory, but nuclear power projects bring with them enormous project management risk. If you complete 90% of a wind farm installation, you get 90% of the power out. Completing 90% of a nuclear reactor gets you no power at all, and unexpected cost overruns can add up to billions of dollars. When a reactor shuts down for repairs, they sometimes take decades to complete. As of today, it can be argued that many countries' nuclear power programs were a financial mistake. Then, once in a while, you find out that the original cost-benefit analysis was wrong. After the Fukushima accident left $200 billion of real estate uninhabitable, nuclear power plants across the world have revised their risk models, and now are spending more money for safety upgrades. Finally, emerging technologies like wind and solar are showing immense promise, but predicting their future cost is equally difficult. All the best minds can only put together a very educated guess. Yes, if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision. But we got it wrong, and the today risks of getting it wrong again are bigger than ever.
- DennisP 11y ago
  That's why there's such focus now on small modular reactors, with a bunch of startup companies attempting to develop them. The main impediment is the NRC, which has been slow to come up with licensing rules appropriate for small reactors or advanced designs (some of which have very good passive safety).
  - mmmBacon 11y ago
    Here's a recent article from IEEE Spectrum that argues that small reactors will never be cost competitive. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-forgotten-histor...
    - DennisP 11y ago
      That's an argument based on a lot of old reactors, mostly light-water variations. Solar wasn't economically viable back then either, but technology improved. The same is happening with nuclear. In particular, simple molten-salt reactors like those designed by Terrestrial Energy and ThorCon look very promising.
anigbrowl 11y ago
I wish we would. Caution over nuclear externalities and criticism of poor safety/risk management by various nuclear authorities over the years are laudable, but too many greens look at te downsides of nuclear power in isolation, rather than in the context of the even more problematic fossil fuel incumbents and the realities of high demands for energy in developed economies. There is a huge opportunity cost to this ecological purity theater. The US administration has not really provided any leadership here, but at least it has approved and helped finance the construction of the first two reactors to be built in the US in 30 years so I suppose that's better than nothing.
hanniabu 11y ago
I'm not against nuclear as long as it's done properly and responsibly, but they usually aren't. As we all know, nuclear reactors can fail from either operational malfunctions or exterior effects such as earthquakes or tsunamis. However, when things go wrong, there are no backup plans in place for the backup plans when things go wrong, which is very much needed when we're talking about the types of consequences nuclear meltdowns can have. Not only this, but when things go wrong, the companies that run them try to keep the seriousness of the situation under wraps for as long as possible in order to protect the company and b then at which point it becomes too late to take more proactive measures. To make matters worse, most nuclear reactors in the United States were built in the 1960s and 1970s and they were only designed for a lifespan of 40 years, which means most of them should be shut down. However, since a lot of money is at stake with how much reactors cost, regulators rewrite the rules and extend the useful life of the reactors and put us all in danger. That is what bothers me and that is why I am against nuclear reactors - because when money is on the line, all bets are off.
a3n 11y ago
Not that I need everything perfect, but these are my concerns: - The corporations building these things are hyper-corporations, many in the defense industry. Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral. To meet environmental, safety, disposal and cost concerns, they will go part way, but when they hit the knees of the various curves, they will convince Congress and citizens through advertising, co-opted scientists, and bribed members of Congress that everything is great and it's been taken care of. - Waste. After however many decades, where is all the nuclear waste? Are we finally implementing the long range plans, to take care of wast and make future generations safe? At least out hundreds of years I would expect. I think the answer here is effectively no. I think we're still just studying it, and all involved are hoping someone else will deal with it later. There will never be enough Senators to vote for specific locations in their states, and transportation through their states. "On site" will magically be found to be perfectly fine after all. And it will end up being Hanford and Rocky Flats, with leaks into the water table, and shit stored next to shit that shouldn't be. - Safety. What happens when we finally experience a catastrophe, because the corporations and governments kicked the safety can down the road so that these things could be built? It's going to happen, they're corporations and they must above all make a buck. What hyper-corporation could resist turning uranium into gold? - Environmental. These things need to be cooled. They're next to rivers and oceans because of that. Ecosystems dwindle and die, because downstream temperatures will always be "within acceptable levels" that were set by agencies suffering from regulatory capture that are funded by bribed Congressmen. No one wants to be the single point of failure on the money pipeline. - Cost. Balloon. Corporations make money no matter what. Even if a corporation is fined in proportion to its overrun, even if they refuse to pay and people are jailed (ha!), that money is still lost. The only thing above that I'm inclined to give on is safety, it's probably an engineering possibility. But that's mere technical possibility, in the face of amoral corporations with a drive for profits stronger than the human drive for reproduction. Color me sceptical.
- brc 11y ago
  "Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral." sorry, but this is just wrong. Lots of people posting and reading this work for corporations. Do bad actors exist? Sure. Are all corporations at scale amoral? You make them sound like machines programmed by megalomaniacs, not places created by, worked at and invested in by ordinary people. Every 'corporation' I have ever worked at has been filled with people trying to do a good job under whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Brushing off the majority of good that large companies do as an argument is not correct.
ClintEhrlich 11y ago
I spent a year of my life digging through the relevant literature back in 2008-2009 when I was coaching policy debate and the topic was alternative energy. Based on my reading, I decided that the arguments in favor of nuclear power were significantly better than the defenses of renewable energy. So I made the strategic decision to write affirmatives about uranium enrichment and targeted procurement of nuclear-powered vessels. That was how we won the national championship. In other words: Even when the best debaters in the country have a year to prepare their counter-arguments, nuclear energy still tends to come out on top. Like facts, energy density is a stubborn thing.
aftbit 11y ago
Both of the countries lauded in this article undertook their nuclear programs at least partially for strategic reasons. The U.S. has massive reserves of coal - 480 billion tons[1]. Our strategic need is much lower. Also, isn't Sweden supposedly phasing out nuclear power? [1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=70&t=2 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=70&t=2
hackuser 11y ago
Perhaps the best argument for nuclear energy is that it's a nearly certain, affordable (if expensive) remedy to a catastrophic problem, climate change. How can we - how dare we - risk the lives of millions of people? I'll add that we especially are risking other people's lives. While most people reading this have reaped the benefits of fossil fuels, likely we and our decendents mostly will survive while people in poor countries die.

58 points by tdaltonc 11y ago

brc 11y ago

"If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored" Well, exactly. The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population. Of course nuclear fission is the answer to large scale energy. It always has been. Weapons proliferation can be addressed with new designs and materials. Safety can be addressed with passive systems. The technical answers are simple compared to fusion or elaborate harvesting of diffuse energy such as sunlight, wind or tides. The logical conclusion is that the people making the most noise are not in it for the solutions, but for the noise and attention. I'm not the only one to think this, but expect the groupthink to smite my comment anyway.

cft 11y ago
>The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population. No. They are actually interesting in assuming power in the society by foregoing the standard societal ascension mechanisms.
- Retra 11y ago
  There are no 'standard' ascension mechanisms, and no reason anyone should follow them if there were.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Your comment makes less sense than the underpants gnomes' business plan.
bigdubs 11y ago
Another side benefit is addressing water shortages with nuclear desalinization.
- eitally 11y ago
  Apparently this is starting to happen in select places (like Saudi Arabia). This is a very.good.thing.
tgflynn 11y ago
I agree with you on the problem of modern society seeming to be unable to make good collective decisions. I'm not convinced restarting nuclear makes sense today though. Solar seems to be on an economically winning trajectory and building nuclear plants is very expensive, apparently even for countries that are good at it, like France.
tptacek 11y ago
I'm pro-nuclear, I think, but no argument on HN ever got more persuasive by tacking on a preemptive dismissal of disagreement as "groupthink". Do you want to talk about nuclear energy on HN, or do you want to talk about how you feel about talking about nuclear energy on HN? The former topic seems much more interesting than the latter.
- mgalka 11y ago
  Great! I'll chip in on both. Don't think he meant it as a dismissal, just as a preemptive nudge to discourage actual groupthink. For countries that already have nuclear weapons, I don't even see a valid argument against nuclear power. Agree, the only think holding us back is politicians who are afraid to use the word "nuclear."
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That can't be right. There are obvious arguments against nuclear power. I don't think they're dispositive, but it doesn't seem right to claim they're invalid. For instance: * Serious, INES 7 nuclear incidents can render whole regions uninhabitable. * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. There are probably many other valid arguments. I think people underestimate the impact of coal, and de-industrialization is totally unrealistic and would almost certainly do far more damage to more people than nuclear would. But to suggest that nuclear isn't fraught, or that the only concern was proliferation... that doesn't seem intellectually honest.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      > * Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge. Incidents from non-nuclear plants cause way more deaths (in short term and long term). Coal kills people too, by polluting the air with fine particles. > * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem. Where? There's tons of space deep in the ground, it's not like we are running out of place of where to put it. Plus, there are ways to recycle used nuclear fuel to make it less radioactive.
grecy 11y ago
I've been pro-nuclear for a long time, though the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little. What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?". I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  I think Fukushima, and various investigations and revelations it inspired, showed how the problems are more social than technical. Nuclear power plants produce a lot of power very cheaply for many years. But companies can't help but push the boundaries to boost profits, extending plant life past spec and skimping on maintenance and safety measures, with just a bit of regulatory capture to smooth the process. I'm still pro-nuclear. We just need to follow through on the regulation. Maybe we can start by not being so damn secretive about nuclear stuff. Anyway, we have to build new ones to take on the capacity so we can shut down old ones. Which means we can't be so scared of building them, since not building them is what's unsafe.
  - 3pt14159 11y ago
    Also the Japanese culture is too deferent to authority to really trust that the safeguards are in place. There was not one, but TWO completely failed safeguards that caused Fukushima. Both were reported and went unfixed for over a decade because of top down pressure. This would never happen in Canada. Someone would whistle blow to the government or the press.
- wisty 11y ago
  Fukushima was caused by a Mw 9.0 earthquake / tsunami which cased over 15,000 deaths, in a 1st world country with the world's best earthquake mitigation. The meltdown was caused by an absolutely huge disaster. The contamination might kill a few hundred, and has resulted in an exclusion zone. IMO, the biggest problem with nuclear is how unacceptable disasters are. One old reactors built in high risk zone has a little meltdown, and the entire world freaks out over it. This is a major practical impediment to nuclear - you won't get costs getting driven down (for better or worse), because people see the risk as completely taboo. It's like people worrying about tall buildings, because of 9/11. There's always risks.
datenwolf 11y ago
> The technical answers are simple cough waste management cough We're talking about megayear timescales when it comes to nuclear fission waste. Humans have been around for how long? What's the age of the oldest building around? What's the usual timescale for modern age buildings to deteriorate?
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  Is dumping it in a mountain hoping we'll figure it out in 100,000 years not valid? I'm being completely serious. Our current problems are on the span of hundreds of years. If we have hundreds of thousands we will be able to sort it out. It's barely borrowing on the future.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  I am completely OK with burying it inside a mountain or a geologically suitable mine. True, we should be very selective about where we put it given that waste can be hazardous over geological timescales.
- DennisP 11y ago
  Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, one since 1980. The U.S. had the Integral Fast Reactor almost complete in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration shut down the program. The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. That's a human timescale. When I lived in Germany, we had a brewery in town that had been continuously operating for 800 years.
  - datenwolf 11y ago
    > Fast reactors can eliminate almost all the long-term waste, which consists of transuranic isotopes that fast reactors use for fuel. Not every transuran is viable fuel. Some of the stuff is actually actively getting in the way of an efficient fission chain reaction. The key benefit of fast breeder reactors is, that you can fuel them with stuff that's more abundant on Earth, so you're not getting into a fuel shortage (our supplies of U235 are quite limited, some 70 years or so, using conventional fission reactors). So you need to either go through a fast U238→Pu239 or a Th232→U233 process if you want to make use of the abundant stuff. Oh, and most of the fission products are not very pleasant either and you can't efficiently burn them in any way whatsoever. Burner Accelerators? I've got a few things for you to look up: Penetration epth, Bragg peak, small volume active zone. > The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. Unfortunately not. The generation zero of nuclides will decay in that timeframe. But all the other stuff to follow, less radioactive, but still dangerous, takes much more time to decay; and those daughter generation nuclides is where the headaches start. And it's not just the physics that's a problem, it's also chemistry. Some of the elements that are born are quite aggressive, chemically.
DennisP 11y ago
James Hansen is often considered pretty noisy and alarmist. He was one of the first to raise the issue, thinks we can't afford to go above 350ppm (we're at 400), and recently published a paper saying sea level rise could be much worse than generally expected. In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he strongly advocates nuclear power, especially GenIV designs. In particular he talks about the Integral Fast Reactor. Plenty of other prominent environmentalists are advocating nuclear these days; the documentary Pandora's Promise highlights several of them. And James Lovelock, who invented the "Gaia" concept, has advocated nuclear for years.

Animats 11y ago

If only it didn't cost so much. And, about every 20 years, there's a Chernobyl or a Fukishima sized disaster. China has 13 nuclear stations under construction, with 61 reactors and a total capacity of 40 to 75 gigawatts.

tptacek 11y ago
What's the youngest nuclear plant to have suffered a major (say, INES 5+) incident? Fukushima Daiichi was pretty old.
- dreamfactory2 11y ago
  If we ignore the challenges of creating and operating an earthquake and human error proof station, waste is still not a solved problem. I once met an architect who was part of a group designing the early stations in the 50s. They asked back then about the waste and were assured that this would be solved in short measure before it became any kind of issue to worry about.
- khuey 11y ago
  There's selection bias involved in answering that question, because most nuclear plants (at least ex-China) are pretty old.
- Animats 11y ago
  The US still has Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania. Same reactor design as Fukishima. If they ever lose cooling water pumping, they will have a meltdown, just like Fukishima. All the regulators know this, so they have a lot of backup generators in different locations, and nine ways to get cooling water into the reactor. But the design is still not a good one.
BurningFrog 11y ago
Many people are terrified of flying, in part because the very few but big accidents get a lot of news coverage. Meanwhile vastly more people die in many daily smaller accidents. Something similar is happening with nuclear energy vs fossil fuel. I wish this could be reframed somehow, but maybe it's just how humans deal poorly with risk.

squozzer 11y ago

I have a very simple to understand yet very unlikely to be implemented standard of persuasion. Industry executives and engineers - and their families - should make a point of living near their plants.

chjohasbrouck 11y ago

I never really understood the arguments against nuclear. From the data I'm able to find, coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours globally, compared to about 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours generated from nuclear. That would mean that burning coal for energy is nearly 2000x more dangerous than nuclear power. Is there something more to the opposition's argument than safety? Or is this just a case of the public being misinformed?

ericd 11y ago
>coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per kilowatt-hour Are you saying that running a gaming PC for 2 hours results in 170k deaths?
- Syrup-tan 11y ago
  If the PC is powered by coal energy, he's saying something like that.
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c-slice 11y ago
I think you mean giga-watt hour.
- slyall 11y ago
  Actually the number seems to be per Trillion Kilowatt Hours. and the US rate is 15,000 or 1/10th of that. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/print/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
- chjohasbrouck 11y ago
  Sorry, deaths per trillionkWhr: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

tgflynn 11y ago

Yes, and if we had done that 30 years ago when it made sense there would probably be far less concern about global warming today. Today, with the rapid decline in the cost of solar energy, I'm far less convinced this would be a wise move.

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akamaka 11y ago

This article, like many pro-nuclear arguments, doesn't address the most basic problem -- is nuclear power cost effective? Sure, it's cheap in theory, but nuclear power projects bring with them enormous project management risk. If you complete 90% of a wind farm installation, you get 90% of the power out. Completing 90% of a nuclear reactor gets you no power at all, and unexpected cost overruns can add up to billions of dollars. When a reactor shuts down for repairs, they sometimes take decades to complete. As of today, it can be argued that many countries' nuclear power programs were a financial mistake. Then, once in a while, you find out that the original cost-benefit analysis was wrong. After the Fukushima accident left $200 billion of real estate uninhabitable, nuclear power plants across the world have revised their risk models, and now are spending more money for safety upgrades. Finally, emerging technologies like wind and solar are showing immense promise, but predicting their future cost is equally difficult. All the best minds can only put together a very educated guess. Yes, if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision. But we got it wrong, and the today risks of getting it wrong again are bigger than ever.

DennisP 11y ago
That's why there's such focus now on small modular reactors, with a bunch of startup companies attempting to develop them. The main impediment is the NRC, which has been slow to come up with licensing rules appropriate for small reactors or advanced designs (some of which have very good passive safety).
- mmmBacon 11y ago
  Here's a recent article from IEEE Spectrum that argues that small reactors will never be cost competitive. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-forgotten-histor...
  - DennisP 11y ago
    That's an argument based on a lot of old reactors, mostly light-water variations. Solar wasn't economically viable back then either, but technology improved. The same is happening with nuclear. In particular, simple molten-salt reactors like those designed by Terrestrial Energy and ThorCon look very promising.

anigbrowl 11y ago

I wish we would. Caution over nuclear externalities and criticism of poor safety/risk management by various nuclear authorities over the years are laudable, but too many greens look at te downsides of nuclear power in isolation, rather than in the context of the even more problematic fossil fuel incumbents and the realities of high demands for energy in developed economies. There is a huge opportunity cost to this ecological purity theater. The US administration has not really provided any leadership here, but at least it has approved and helped finance the construction of the first two reactors to be built in the US in 30 years so I suppose that's better than nothing.

hanniabu 11y ago

I'm not against nuclear as long as it's done properly and responsibly, but they usually aren't. As we all know, nuclear reactors can fail from either operational malfunctions or exterior effects such as earthquakes or tsunamis. However, when things go wrong, there are no backup plans in place for the backup plans when things go wrong, which is very much needed when we're talking about the types of consequences nuclear meltdowns can have. Not only this, but when things go wrong, the companies that run them try to keep the seriousness of the situation under wraps for as long as possible in order to protect the company and b then at which point it becomes too late to take more proactive measures. To make matters worse, most nuclear reactors in the United States were built in the 1960s and 1970s and they were only designed for a lifespan of 40 years, which means most of them should be shut down. However, since a lot of money is at stake with how much reactors cost, regulators rewrite the rules and extend the useful life of the reactors and put us all in danger. That is what bothers me and that is why I am against nuclear reactors - because when money is on the line, all bets are off.

a3n 11y ago

Not that I need everything perfect, but these are my concerns: - The corporations building these things are hyper-corporations, many in the defense industry. Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral. To meet environmental, safety, disposal and cost concerns, they will go part way, but when they hit the knees of the various curves, they will convince Congress and citizens through advertising, co-opted scientists, and bribed members of Congress that everything is great and it's been taken care of. - Waste. After however many decades, where is all the nuclear waste? Are we finally implementing the long range plans, to take care of wast and make future generations safe? At least out hundreds of years I would expect. I think the answer here is effectively no. I think we're still just studying it, and all involved are hoping someone else will deal with it later. There will never be enough Senators to vote for specific locations in their states, and transportation through their states. "On site" will magically be found to be perfectly fine after all. And it will end up being Hanford and Rocky Flats, with leaks into the water table, and shit stored next to shit that shouldn't be. - Safety. What happens when we finally experience a catastrophe, because the corporations and governments kicked the safety can down the road so that these things could be built? It's going to happen, they're corporations and they must above all make a buck. What hyper-corporation could resist turning uranium into gold? - Environmental. These things need to be cooled. They're next to rivers and oceans because of that. Ecosystems dwindle and die, because downstream temperatures will always be "within acceptable levels" that were set by agencies suffering from regulatory capture that are funded by bribed Congressmen. No one wants to be the single point of failure on the money pipeline. - Cost. Balloon. Corporations make money no matter what. Even if a corporation is fined in proportion to its overrun, even if they refuse to pay and people are jailed (ha!), that money is still lost. The only thing above that I'm inclined to give on is safety, it's probably an engineering possibility. But that's mere technical possibility, in the face of amoral corporations with a drive for profits stronger than the human drive for reproduction. Color me sceptical.

brc 11y ago
"Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral." sorry, but this is just wrong. Lots of people posting and reading this work for corporations. Do bad actors exist? Sure. Are all corporations at scale amoral? You make them sound like machines programmed by megalomaniacs, not places created by, worked at and invested in by ordinary people. Every 'corporation' I have ever worked at has been filled with people trying to do a good job under whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Brushing off the majority of good that large companies do as an argument is not correct.

ClintEhrlich 11y ago

I spent a year of my life digging through the relevant literature back in 2008-2009 when I was coaching policy debate and the topic was alternative energy. Based on my reading, I decided that the arguments in favor of nuclear power were significantly better than the defenses of renewable energy. So I made the strategic decision to write affirmatives about uranium enrichment and targeted procurement of nuclear-powered vessels. That was how we won the national championship. In other words: Even when the best debaters in the country have a year to prepare their counter-arguments, nuclear energy still tends to come out on top. Like facts, energy density is a stubborn thing.

aftbit 11y ago

Both of the countries lauded in this article undertook their nuclear programs at least partially for strategic reasons. The U.S. has massive reserves of coal - 480 billion tons[1]. Our strategic need is much lower. Also, isn't Sweden supposedly phasing out nuclear power? [1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=70&t=2 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=70&t=2

hackuser 11y ago

Perhaps the best argument for nuclear energy is that it's a nearly certain, affordable (if expensive) remedy to a catastrophic problem, climate change. How can we - how dare we - risk the lives of millions of people? I'll add that we especially are risking other people's lives. While most people reading this have reaped the benefits of fossil fuels, likely we and our decendents mostly will survive while people in poor countries die.