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I find it hard to understand why there's still support for nuclear power, particularly given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at a

• karlshea 11y ago
  Because we need to get off of fossil fuels and wind/solar is intermittent, so it can't provide base load power without huge numbers of batteries or other technology that hasn't scaled up yet (e.g. molten salt/flywheels).
  • thrownaway2424 11y ago
    Hydro provides base power. No fancy technologies needed.
    • chc 11y ago
      Doesn't hydro require certain preconditions that are not true everywhere?
      • IkmoIkmo 11y ago
        Generally, yes, very much so. Technically, no. Artificial hydro (more commonly known as pumped storage) means you can essentially store energy in gravity, anywhere. i.e. build a container at an elevated position, pump water into it using intermittent energy (e.g. wind at night, excess solar etc), drop water down through a turbine to generate electricity again to provide a low baseload. The reality is that 1) this is hugely expensive and so generally pumped storage is restricted to exploit existing natural resources with lots of elevated mountains between which one can store ridiculous volumes of water rather than build your own giant water container. So generally hydro is limited to existing water resources (e.g. large rivers), or storage resources (e.g. mountains) which are quite limited.
    • karlshea 11y ago
      Hydro's problem (along with wind and solar) is transmission requirements. Not everyone lives near a location where hydro is feasible. It's also not particularly environmentally friendly to dam rivers everywhere. Some of the wave-action stuff is interesting, but you've obviously got to be near a large body of water for that to work.
      • thrownaway2424 11y ago
        Hydro doesn't have to be large scale. If you can have small-scale wind and solar, you can have small-scale pumped storage, too.
        • karlshea 11y ago
          Sure, it doesn't have to be large scale. But you brought it up as a replacement for base load nuclear, which small-scale pumped storage isn't going to do.
    • sjwright 11y ago
      You want to talk about failure modes? The nuclear "worst case" has nothing on hydro. Hydro power is responsible for the most fatal electricity generation incident ever: Banqiao Dam. It catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people. Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison.
      • gus_massa 11y ago
        Link for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam > According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. Video with computer simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPLXim9WG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPLXim9WG8
      • Turing_Machine 11y ago
        Indeed. Imagine what would happen if the Three Gorges Dam were to fail. There are over 360 million people living downstream of that one.
        • sliverstorm 11y ago
          Christ. That's five percent of the entire world population.
        • sliverstorm 11y ago
          Christ. That's five percent of the entire world population at the mercy of a single dam?
  • toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Why is nuclear power a better option than utility scale battery storage?
    • karlshea 11y ago
      Utility-scale battery storage could definitely be an option, but batteries can be pretty nasty themselves. The alternatives like I mentioned (molten salt for solar, etc) need to be scaled up and could provide similar capacity.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  • zik 11y ago
    The "base load" argument for nuclear isn't really convincing any more now that Iceland and Costa Rica are already using 100% renewable energy sources and several other countries are approaching it rapidly.
    • karlshea 11y ago
      Bringing up Iceland as an example is a little disingenuous since the whole island is a volcano so they can use geothermal cheaply. Costa Rica uses its large amount of rainfall and dams to use generate hydro power, and this article discusses a drought they had in the last year that meant they had to fire up the old fossil fuel plants: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/truth-behind-costa-rica-renewable-energy-reservoirs-climate-change http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/truth-b... So I'd still consider having some base load capacity available fairly important.
• chc 11y ago
  > It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar. You're probably looking at best-case vs. worst-case here. The expense of getting sufficient wind power in areas without wind or solar power in low-light areas can get pretty crazy. And a large portion of the expense of nuclear power is regulatory hurdles we impose on it. > Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic than the alternatives. The success mode of the current most popular alternative (fossil fuels) has proven much more catastrophic. As for other things like wind and solar power, I think a lot of people are unconvinced that it's fair to call them "alternatives" yet. Nuclear has proven itself as a good general-purpose solution and they have not, and nuclear seems to be a lot better than what we are doing now.
• thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  > Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable. [citation needed]
  • toomuchtodo 11y ago
    It does happen. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/04/world/the-us-too-has-dumped-waste-at-sea.html http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/04/world/the-us-too-has-dumpe... http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304773104579268563658319196 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023047731045792685... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_... http://www.cbrneportal.com/the-disposal-of-nuclear-waste-into-the-worlds-oceans/ http://www.cbrneportal.com/the-disposal-of-nuclear-waste-int...
    • trothamel 11y ago
      Ocean floor disposal (also know of Sub-seabed) seems like a quite reasonable way of getting rid of nuclear waste you don't want to see again. Load it into a giant dart, drop it from a ship, allow it to pick up speed as it drops to the ocean floor, and it buries itself deep in the ocean's clay. It helps deal with concerns about access to the waste, as the number of submersibles that can work that deep is likely very small. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_floor_disposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_floor_disposal
      • toomuchtodo 11y ago
        That's sounds like a process with no risk whatsoever.
        • dllthomas 11y ago
          For one thing, you're likely to piss off Godzilla.
• cjslep 11y ago
  > given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all. Your metrics for "success" are interesting: > It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now. According to [0] only onshore wind beats nuclear in terms of cost. However, that does not include the scaling issues wind has if you want to produce as much total MWe as a nuclear reactor (ex: there is only so much high quality wind onshore land). > Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic. This is the same logic for many anti-terrorism bills, but I will ignore that for now. This is also why they are regulated to such lengthy extremes, such as having backup power both onsite and offsite. It is also required to withstand winds that occur only once in 10,000 years. > The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable. Sources? Much of it I know of is stored on site in giant pools because the waste belongs to the DoE, and the DoE still cannot find a compromise on how it should be handled. > Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change. Replace "nuclear" with anything else and it is just as true. For example, structural engineering has had millenia lengths of time over nuclear to rack up disasters. Ultimately, nuclear accidents amplify human error to a magnitude that many people find uncomfortable. Which is why the industry is regulated to a magnitude more than any other. It is not like they hand out reactor operator licenses to just anybody, either. 1 out of my undergraduate peers of ~7 got licensed to operate NCSU's PULSTAR research reactor, which has much simpler systems than a commercial power-producing reactor. It is also easy to forget that the nuclear industry in the USA has been near-paralyzed at the 1950's and 1960's level of technology, which is only about 20 years into the commercial reactor field. Unfortunately, there really is not any other industry I know of that, at 20 years into its growth, was paralyzed and allowed to operate for an additional 60-70 years. In that context, I think the US has done well given the little wiggle room regulation has allowed growth in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
  • 7952 11y ago
    That magnitude of regulation is hugely expensive though and tends to go up as new issues are detected.
• brownbat 11y ago
  The WHO did a massive study[0] and actually found nuclear killed far fewer people per watt than all others, even solar: Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh) Coal – world average 161 Coal – China 278 Coal – USA 15 Oil 36 Natural Gas 4 Biofuel/Biomass 12 Peat 12 Solar (rooftop) 0.44 Wind 0.15 Hydro 0.10 Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 Nuclear 0.04 Note that rooftop construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US, with high mortality rates from falls.[1] Coal mining is extremely hazardous, it would top this chart even just looking at production. Folding in air pollution deaths from burning coal and you add thousands of deaths per day.[2] Each year coal and oil kill more people than the entire 60 year history of nuclear, including every nuclear disaster. Even if we focus on worst case scenarios, nuclear is safer. The impact of Chernobyl is wildly overestimated by the public.[3] For hydro, let's just note that a dam failure in Banqiao killed 171,000. The highest death estimates for Chernobyl (and this is including expected early deaths from radiation exposure that still haven't appeared a few decades after the incident) and you're looking at maybe 4,000. You could add a Chernobyl every year, even take the most aggressive estimates for early deaths caused by that accident, then ignore all air pollution deaths, and coal and oil would still be more dangerous. They're just that insanely deadly an industry. Nuclear's worst case is safer than coal and oil's average. On cost I think you're mistaken too, nuclear remaining an incredibly cheap source of power per watt, but power economics are complicated and that'd take another discussion. All I can say is that this was the standard wisdom of everyone I knew who worked in the energy industry, despite occasional scare stories in magazines about how the "true" cost of nuclear is disguised by subsidies - the math doesn't quite add up.[4] [0] Energy deathprints: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener... [1] http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf [2] Studies on air pollution deaths (spoiler: among the leading contributing factors to mortality worldwide): http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61766-8/fulltext http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... ; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature15371.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature1... [3] An overview of the actual mortality impact of Chernobyl found it responsible for a few dozen deaths in emergency workers (fewer than 50, and some of those dying 20 years after the accident). It might be possible to eventually tie a few thousand early deaths to the incident, but we're still waiting, decades after it happened. In general, radiation hazards were widely exaggerated. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ [4] Admittedly biased source, but it runs a few publically available numbers, even nuclear projects with cost overruns look better than some renewable projects: http://nuclearradiophobia.blogspot.com/p/cost-of-nuclear-power.html http://nuclearradiophobia.blogspot.com/p/cost-of-nuclear-pow... I mean, ideally you get a mix of both sources, because they serve different purposes on the grid, but your bursty diurnal power isn't meant to serve as your cheap main source of power.
• ternaryoperator 11y ago
  In part, b/c nuclear power has had a successful run in other countries. In France, for example, nuclear generates 75% of the electricity and the country is the 7th cheapest in the EU (28 countries) for delivered KwH. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France