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Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment
- peoii 11y agoIt's the sad truth that people seem very for nuclear, but no one wants to live near it. Of course, I've seen articles regarding people who don't want to live near wind turbines, so maybe people are just far to fickle.
- rhino369 11y agoThe solution to that is to strip local governments power to interfere with power plant construction. Or just put the plants in the middle of nowhere and pay the transmission line loss cost.
- pyrocat 11y agoPeople have been migrating to cities for years and years now, the rural areas of America are less populated than ever. I'm sure there's some middle ground where we can put new power plants that are relatively unpopulated.
- jo909 11y agoTransporting electrical power over long distances is expensive. If most demand is in cities, most power plants need to be relatively near cities.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoHigh voltage transmission lines are actually pretty efficient. We routinely distribute power over hundreds of kilometers. There are a couple that are over 2,000 km long, and numerous examples over 1,000 km. http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-longest-power-transmission-lines-4167964/ http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-l...
- mikepurvis 11y agoChernobyl was in the middle of nowhere, too— the meltdown destroyed some of the best farmland in eastern Europe.
- matthewmcg 11y agoCooling water availability is a major factor in plant siting. So you're looking for unpopulated areas on coasts, lakes, or rivers, which is probably a smaller set.
- interconnector 11y agoHave you ever stood next to giant wind turbines? While driving through an area with hundreds of 100 meter wind turbines, I stopped to take a closer look at them. They are genuinely fear inducing, and feel alien. I could not stay close to one for more than a few minutes before I was overcome with dread.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoEnergy policy should not be based on irrational fears.
- blakeyrat 11y agoHow do you feel about windmills like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/De_Liefde_Windmill,_Sakura,_Chiba,_Japan_-_20060417.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/De_Liefd... Genuinely curious. I've never heard of a phobia like yours before, is it just because of the motion, or is there something different about steel towers than stone ones?
- interconnector 11y agoI think a few aren't too bad, it was just the sheer numbers that unnerved me. The wind was quite strong, it felt I was standing next to many powerful jet engines.
- logfromblammo 11y agoWhile driving south on I-65 through Indiana from Chicago, there is a huge wind farm just north of Lafayette. Each one of the elevated turbines, as a potential hazard to air traffic, has a blinking red light on the top. At night, you can look out across the flat terrain and see dozens of red lights, blinking in unison. Every time, I think to myself, "This place wouldn't be half bad for riding out the zombie apocalypse." Though now that you mention aliens, the first strikes of an alien invasion are far more likely to hit the more centralized generator plants, so areas served by wind farms might just retain grid power long enough to organize some form of resistance. Or at least until the second-wave bombers arrive. When I stand next to one, I just think "free electricity" and sometimes also "free bird stew", but usually "Why don't these things get covered in graffiti?"
- andrewstuart2 11y agoNobody wants to live by garbage dumps either, but I'm not aware of that ever being a problem. I mean, the fallout radius of a garbage dump is smaller but it seems like that's basically a non-issue with modern reactors as well. I feel like the crux of the problem, as usual, is education (and likely trust). If you're not aware of modern reactor tech, or you don't believe those telling you, then you're probably just expecting an inevitable Chernobyl.
- hansjorg 11y agoI think more nuclear power is the way to go, but I don't want (heavily subsidized) privately owned nuclear plants in my back yard. For how long did TEPCO fake their safety records? Private capital is far too single minded and powerful to be responsible for nuclear power plant safety.
- Eeko 11y agoWhen I was studying, we had an active (research) reactor running on the campus under thousands of student dorms. Less than 10km from the center of the capital (Helsinki) too. Most people do not even know it's there. Most people don't know that a lot of hospitals on densely populated areas also house running reactors. The power plants generally are pretty dull industrial sites. I don't blame for people not wanting them in their back yard. Luckily, one does not need to build them near habitation. There's plenty of space.
- acrefoot 11y agoMIT has a nuclear reactor on campus right on Massachusetts Ave, between Harvard and Boston. (It's not a power-generating reactor.) There is also a cogeneration plant that produces electricity, steam heat, chilled water, and compressed air. I've never heard anyone complain about either. Most people don't know or care except if it's super obvious (generating tons of obvious smoke/steam). However, they will raise all sorts of fuss while it's being proposed.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoSure. UIUC had one for many years, also Rolla, and no doubt many other engineering-oriented universities. My office was literally in the next building over from the UIUC reactor for a while, and I never worried about it. That's about as "in my backyard" as you can get. :-)
- jhallenworld 11y agoWPI has one also: I remember when they switched out the HEU fuel to reduce the proliferation risk.
- jcranmer 11y agoPeople object to living near: * Nuclear plants (fallout fear) * Wind turbines (ruins the view, kills birds) * Offshore wind turbines (ruins the view) * Coal/oil/gas plants (polluting) * Hydroelectric (house is now underwater, dam breaking) * Geothermal (for pretty much the same reasons as fracking) About the only sources of power that people don't object to are photovoltaic solar and tidal, which produce only piddling amounts of energy (and probably most people don't know enough about tidal to find some reason to object to it). In truth, no one wants to live near anything that smacks of industry. Even trying to find places to put the trunk power lines or substations can find a lot of resistance, so sticking power plants in the middle of nowhere doesn't really solve the NIMBY problem.
- kuschku 11y ago> trunk power lines Germany found a solution for that: Underground.
- PeCaN 11y agoI can't imagine there are many people who would want to live near a coal mine or coal power plant, either. Frankly any energy production other than solar is rather undesirable to live near.
- aianus 11y ago> but no one wants to live near it Source? Can I buy a house near a nuclear plant for 50% off? If so I'm down. I'll even increase my "risks" by buying a Ferrari with the savings I made off the irrational fools :)
- vanessapu 11y agoI absolutely agree that nuclear is our best option as long as the reactor and the waste is located in your backyard.
- wycx 11y agoI would live next to a warehouse full of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc
- satori99 11y agoIt frustrates me as an Australian, that our government scientists invented Synroc, and we have vast amounts of uranium, and probably the most geologically stable continent on earth, but no energy creating reactors.
- merpnderp 11y agoPlease build one in my backyard. Jobs, cheap power, no guilt over CO2 when I crank my AC. I'm all in.
- DanBC 11y agoI'd be happy for it all to be in my backyard. I don't know how small those Toshiba[1] mini reactors are, but I'd happily have one of those in my garden if it fits. Or any modern design right next door to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
- zbyte64 11y agoWas curious how long the reactor is designed to last, seems the answer is 30 years: https://www.fastcompany.com/1594671/bill-gates-goes-nuclear-toshibas-4s-reactor https://www.fastcompany.com/1594671/bill-gates-goes-nuclear-...
- DanBC 11y agoYep, I think I'd still have one. I think the UK learnt a few lessons from the mess of Sellafield. The clean up associated with that is pretty harsh. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-26124803 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-26124803 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-21298117 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-21298117 etc etc.
- skybrian 11y agoI skimmed, but I think this is missing the value of the land that people won't be able to use in case of an accident. A semi-permanent mass evacuation isn't cheap.
- coddingtonbear 11y agoWell, we're definitely making the whole planet unusable just by producing energy the way we are today.
- merpnderp 11y agoNot even counting CO2, yearly coal production is like having nuclear meltdowns all the time. Mercury, uranium, particulates, lead, heavy metals, and arsenic.
- sjwright 11y agoUnusable by some species of life in their present habitable zones. Climate change is going to seriously screw around with humanity in unpredictable ways. But don't worry about the planet. Earth will be just fine.
- DrScump 11y agocontrast, however, with the results of a tanker spill or oil-drilling disaster like Deepwater Horizon. Also note that more nuclear waste enters the atmosphere every DAY from coal burning than in the entire history of nuclear power generation excluding Chernobyl.
- skybrian 11y agoOf course they should add the cost of those to the spreadsheet as well.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoConsidering all the delays involved in getting up new plants (both technical and political) we're looking at what, a decade out for something with a break-even point of several decades? How far will renewables be then? There might be some logic to further invest in renewables instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a stop-gap solution that's guaranteed to just take us to peak uranium sooner than later. That said, we shouldn't be decommissioning existing plants for political reasons like the Germans are. From a personal perspective I think I'm using less electricity than ever. I only have CFL/LED bulbs, flat screen TV's use less power than old tubes, every appliance I own is tons more efficient than the stuff just a generation ago, etc. Heck, even my powerful desktop PC uses a lot less power than before.
- ebbv 11y agoThis article is pretty terrible. The bias is just ridiculous. When discussing wind and solar the author constantly makes assumptions that favor worst cases, and makes questionable comparisons. For example; stating that "more Americans" died from installing rooftop solar than have died from construction or use of nuclear power, cherry picking the most dangerous possible activity related to solar power (some guy up on his roof, which is a dangerous activity with or without solar panels) to the least dangerous thing about nuclear energy (professional contractors constructing the plants and the plants running normally.) He cites figures when they will be favorable for nuclear or impressive for the point he's making, and leaves them out when they would undermine it. He cherry picks American nuclear experience in the examples above because we have so far avoided truly terrible disaster here with regards to nuclear energy. (Three Mile Island wasn't good but it wasn't Chernobyl or Fukushima.) He also cites figures for the amount of space needed for solar and wind to replace all current forms of power without sources. Never mind the fact that actually replacing all of our power with renewables is something that will take a century or more, nobody's talking about completely replacing our entire power generation system in the next few decades with renewables or nuclear. The real question is not "what can replace our whole system today." because the answer to that is nothing. The real question is, as we expand and replace generators that are being decommissioned, what should they be replaced with? The concerns there people have about nuclear are not about whether it's more cost effective than renewables (if all we cared about was cost we'd keep burning coal, we know we can't do that), or whether it's safer to build, but what is the long term effect and what are the long term dangers. The long term dangers of a solar farm are basically nothing. You cannot get a Fukushima like disaster out of a solar plant. The pro-nuclear side will tell you "Oh the new reactors are totally safe, you could never have a problem like that." But they've always said that about nuclear plants. "Oh this new design is safe." Then a disaster happens and they say "Oh well that was the old design, the new design is safe."
- merpnderp 11y agoI think ""more Americans" died from installing rooftop solar than have died from construction or use of nuclear power" includes all aspects of nuclear power. The "or use" would seemingly include operating nuclear plants. And given the incredibly low number of deaths in the US associated with nuclear power production, it seems fair.
- garyclarke27 11y ago1 cm3 of water weighs a lot more than 1 gram ?? From a quick skim through, many of his calcs seem to be based on this i.e. major error.
- ksenzee 11y agoThe weight of one cubic centimeter of water is in fact one gram. By definition.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoOnly at one specific temperature (4 degrees C).
- jcranmer 11y agoNot by definition: a kilogram is defined as the exact mass of a lump of iridium-platinum alloy sitting in a vault in Paris (well, Sèvres). But the kilogram was designed to be the weight of a liter of water at its melting point, and then later 4°C (where water achieves maximum density).
- aexaey 11y agoOne cubic centimetre of water at 4 degrees Celsius used to define one gram (or more precisely one litre -> one kilogram, which comes out to be the exact same thing) [1], [2]. Although 1 cm^3 of water is still pretty damn close to 1g. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_%28unit%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_%28unit%29 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMByI4s-D-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMByI4s-D-Y (around 1:50, and actually the whole video is excellent)
- garyclarke27 11y agoYes it is sorry and thanks, I knew that 1 ml = 1 but I did not check out my incorrect instinct re volume. I was thinking of 5 grams to a teaspoon, intuitively 5 cc seems to me, much bigger than 1 small teaspoon. Still surprising to me though, how 5 grapes can fit on a teaspoon ?
- teraflop 11y ago
- mbil 11y agoI don't know anything about nuclear energy, but a friend who works in nuclear tech told me that the reason thorium as an energy source hasn't been embraced is because its byproduct can be used for weapons. That doesn't look to be exactly accurate (based on a few minutes of googling), but there might be some truth to it. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-wonder-fuel.html http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-w...
- PaulHoule 11y agoU233 can be used to make bombs, but when you make U233 in a reactor, the progenitor to U233 is Pa233, this has a half life of 27 days. Inside the reactor, Pa233 gets hit by neutrons and one of them will knock another neutron loose so you get Pa232, then you get U232. U232 makes a very heavy gamma ray that makes it difficult to work with the resulting U233, that is, you get killed trying to make a bomb from it. Also the fabrication of solid U233 is difficult because of the U232 contamination. If Thorium is used in an LWR the neutron exposure on the Pa233 is enough that the U233 produced is hard to work with. If you had a special reactor like the ones they use to make weapons grade plutonium you could make weapons grade U233. As for the various liquid salt reactors, it all depends on whether or not and how effectively Pa is removed. The Pa + neutron reaction hurts the breeding ration by consuming both Pa and neutrons. To maximize the breeding ratio it would be desirable to separate out the Pa and put it somewhere away from neutrons where it can decay to U233. If you had a process for this that was incredibly efficient than you could make weapons grade U233.
- zbyte64 11y agoWe have used thorium reactors in the past but having radioactive molten salt is pretty rough on the components and drastically diminishes the life of the reactor.
- DDub 11y agoFrom what I understand it is the opposite, that because it was much easier to turn uranium byproducts into nuclear warheads it was the technology that won out over thorium.
- PolLambert 11y ago
- tomcam 11y agoI am not reflexively anti-nuclear. However, I have never heard a satisfactory answer to the simple question: "How do we store nuclear waste safely?"
- voidlogic 11y agoBy not hiding it away, but using warehouses that are actively staffed just like the plant that made the waste. Of course these facilities should be secure installations. But the root of the problem is not wanted to actively take ownership responsibility for the waste. I imagine every major city having its secure storage installation. Consider the scale of waste generated as well. All the waste used to power a life of electrical usage creates was the size of a pea.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- theoh 11y agoThe complex "social" side of the problem (for example, the vast amount of waste produced by the manufacture of nuclear warheads during the Cold War) means that it is not easily solved. There's a documentary film coming out about this by Peter Galison and Rob Moss. http://containmentmovie.com/ http://containmentmovie.com/
- lojack 11y ago> All the waste used to power a life of electrical usage creates was the size of a pea. Source on this? Best I could find shows that 3 cubic meters of waste is generated per year for a "typical 1000 MWe light water reactor" after reprocessing and all (which isn't always done). [1] With 99 plants in the US (not counting the plants with multiple reactors) that leads to 297m^3 of waste. With a population of 318 million, that's about 9.3x10-7, or approximately 4-5 peas per year or 367 peas over the course of a lifetime. [1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Radioactive-Waste-Management/#ManageHLW http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear... EDIT: Forgot that we only get about 20% of our power from nuclear energy, so it's actually closer to 1835 peas.
- bradleyjg 11y agoThe biggest problem with nuclear is making the numbers work. You end up paying something like 80% of the cost 1 GW/year * 50 years before you get your first cent in revenue. That's a very tough thing to finance. Cost and especially time overruns during construction can easily tank the project financially. About the only way to make it work is to be a regulated utility that has a long term captured audience for its power. One that's very likely to be the same size or bigger for the next half century. Even there you still have to worry about technological change pulling the carpet out from under you in 20 or 30 years. That's leaving aside the questions of insurance, local and federal regulatory approval, and waste disposal / decommissioning costs.
- lighthawk 11y agoSo you're saying that no nuclear plants are going to be built because of the threat of renewable energy sources becoming cheaper or perhaps other tech like fusion?: http://www.geek.com/science/germany-is-ready-to-switch-on-its-stellarator-fusion-reactor-1638483/ http://www.geek.com/science/germany-is-ready-to-switch-on-it...
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAre you comparing an experimental technology like Germany's fusion reactor to proven wind generation that is driving commercial reactors out of business? http://midwestenergynews.com/2015/05/01/exelon-we-have-to-have-an-answer-on-nuclear-plants/ http://midwestenergynews.com/2015/05/01/exelon-we-have-to-ha...
- lighthawk 11y agoI'm saying that > 50 years is a long time and a lot can happen. I could have also pointed at Google's Sunroof project as an example of a large company betting that solar can compete: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/212363-google-is-launching-sunroof-for-solar-skeptics http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/212363-google-is-launchin... I couldn't guess what energy producing and distribution technologies will be most prevalent in 100 years. Advancements could just as easily be made relating to fission reactors, so I don't think it's fair to say that large power companies shouldn't invest in more reactors. But, I agree there is probably risk in investing in them.
- brrt 11y agoActually, renewable energy is, when you actually run the numbers in a sensible way, pretty cost effective: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312... - this finds that with 90% solar/wind and modest amounts of storage, electricity would be cheaper in 2030 than it is today, and that the cheapest option is actually a vast overcapacity. There are plenty of flaws with that article, but still less than this post.
- lappa 11y agoJust to be clear, the article is saying that using solar power technology from 2030 would be more cost effective 90% of the time, not that using 90% solar energy today would be cheaper by the time we reach 2030.
- Retric 11y agoThey assumed electrochemical storage which is really expensive and invalidates there findings, renewables would be significantly cheaper than there suggesting.
- brrt 11y agoThey also assume a wide grid and overcapacity, which balances it out. And their storage capacity is minor, and they assume relatively cheap backup power. Like I said, there are plenty of things wrong with it, but it's nothing like what is wrong with the OP.
- steffenfrost 11y agoBattery cost are projected to drop significantly over the next 5 - 10 years.
- beat 11y agoBattery costs have been dropping radically for the past decade, and there's both aggressive startups (Tesla) and established giants investing heavily in the technology, which will continue to drive prices down.
- lumberjack 11y agoThe article looks at the cost of energy over the lifetime of the nuclear power plant. There is no argument that energy generated through fission is very cheap when looked at that way. However that totally ignores the enormous startup costs. The great thing about wind and solar is that you don't have to build a whole farm. You can start small and keep adding as you come across more capital. In any case I don't see why one needs to make it a dichotomy. The entities who invest in alternative energy are probably not the same ones who could invest in a nuclear power plant because of the above mentioned startup costs. It's not clear to me whether fission will come back any time soon but wind and solar will keep gaining in market share.
- iaw 11y agoThe startup capital required for nuclear fission is so immense that it doesn't make sense from an economic time-value perspective. The problem with most renewables (excl. thermal and hydro) is that they are incapable of meeting 100% of electricity demands by their nature without better storage technology. The economics are pushing towards renewables but I feel that nuclear makes more sense for our society in the near-term (we need to get away from coal and other fossil fuels).
- beefman 11y agoNothing about nuclear fission requires startup capital to be large.
- iaw 11y agoThere is a 5-10 year lead time between digging the first hole and opening the plant. That's >$100 million in capital investment for 5-10 years without any return, so the plant has to have a present lifetime value >$140 million the day it opens. This ignores various risk cases associated with building a plant that drive the return on capital further up. Source: used to value these types of investments professionally.
- beefman 11y ago
- mtgx 11y agoIt seems to me that the recent few articles on fusion have inspired a lot of people - who now seem to be thinking "hey you know what would be great? If we moved back to fission reactors!" I'm not talking about people writing these articles. I'm sure there's one appearing on the Web every week. I'm talking about people who are suddenly upvoting these articles. But to me that doesn't make any sense. Fusion, I get. It's something like 10x more efficient than fission, and it's not radioactive or as dangerous as fission. But just because I support having more companies and research into fusion, does not mean that I would support fission reactors. Despite this article, solar power is still the most practical way of getting renewable energy in the next 20 years. Thinking about building new fission reactors is like getting excited about some "breakthrough gas-powered engine that uses 50% less fuel", when everyone is already thinking about getting an EV for their next car.
- iaw 11y agoOne thing I want to point out that a lot of the recent articles seem to ignore. With fusion reactors there is absolutely no risk of runaway reactions like those observed at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island but there is a huge potential (and likelihood) for local material being radioactively contaminated due to neutron bombardment over long periods of time (this is the principle material science challenge faced in attempting to make fusion practical). Fission reactors operating in this country are all over 40-year old designs. The newer designs actually have substantially improved safety capabilities over the old models, but political and economic challenges have prevented the adoption of new plants.
- blumkvist 11y agoNuclear energy is very expensive when adjusted for building the plant. Companies building those plants know this and their usual tactic is to severely underbudget, knowing that a government cannot refuse to pay because it is committed. The Olkiluoto plant in Finland was estimated at €3bn before start and at the most recent revision the estimation was €9bn with a 10 year delay. The plant is not yet operational and I expect there will be even further delays. Don't drink the nuclear cool aid.
- anon1mous 11y agoExactly. Most of the numbers and arguments in this article are made up. Has there been a single nuclear plant built anywhere in the developed world on budget? They all end 3x-6x the budget. Decommissioning those is extremely expensive as well. Nuclear waste is a huge problem. The nuclear industry always has magical solutions 20 years in the future. The US ends up melting that waste into Depleted Uranium weapons and dumping them on the Balkans or the Middle East (killing millions in the long term). A single accident at an NPP can kill millions of people. How much would that cost? E.g. a Stuxnet clone can destroy complete states/countries.
- akie 11y ago> "killing millions" Do you have a source for that?
- ju-st 11y agoThe German wikipedia does have some interesting references to reports on thorium reactors from the British National Nuclear Laboratories [1][2]: > In the foreseeable future (up to the next 20 years), the only realistic prospect for deploying thorium fuels on a commercial basis would be in existing and new build LWRs (e.g., AP1000 and EPR) or PHWRs (e.g., Candu reactors). Thorium fuel concepts which require first the construction of new reactor types (such as High Temperature Reactor (HTR), fast reactors and Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)) are regarded as viable only in the much longer term (of the order of 40+ years minimum) as this is the length of time before these reactors are expected to be designed, built and reach commercial maturity. 1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCssigsalzreaktor#Kritische_Expertenstudien_zu_MSR_und_Thoriumnutzung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCssigsalzreaktor#Kritis... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20130126205622/http://www.nnl.co.uk/media/8241/nnl__1314092891_thorium_cycle_position_paper.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130126205622/http://www.nnl.co...
- kuschku 11y agoThe reason for this is that Germany had developed and build 2 prototype thorium reactors, and had its fair share of issues with them.
- badloginagain 11y agoThorium in LWRs are inefficient. If you're going to use a LWR, use the fuels they were designed for. The efficiencies of Thorium only really come into play using a MSR.
- pjc50 11y ago"We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel." This is not a production-ready technology, though. I believe there are lingering problems with corrosion. And the claim that the MSR doesn't require secondary water cooling is odd: what's the turbine working fluid heat dump supposed to be? I really object to phrasing energy policy as either/or. Build out renewables, now, because that's ready. Let's give the MSR a fair go at getting to production-ready, see if the problems can be worked out. Let's not build a nuclear plant whose output is subsidized to twice the normal wholesale cost: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22772441 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22772441
- jandrese 11y agoYeah, there are a lot of alternate nuclear reactor designs that look great on paper but have never had the full scale engineering done to see if it is practical. And they look cheap because you don't even know half of the stuff you have to do that makes it expensive. It's like rocket design where you go "just put a bunch of explosives in a tube and go into space, this shouldn't be too expensive or difficult..."
- madaxe_again 11y agoYup. Rocket science is dead easy. Tsiolkovsky, and... that's about it. Rocket engineering, on the other hand...
- berntb 11y agoI thought e.g. TerraPower was beyond that stage? Sources?
- 13thLetter 11y agoTrue; many of these dream reactors probably won't work, because that is the nature of things. But the full-scale engineering never gets done because of anti-nuclear propaganda playing on mass public ignorance, so at the rate we're going now we'll never know.
- bluthru 11y agoGreat points as to why nuclear isn't our best option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nhhOitYmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nhhOitYmk
- PolLambert 11y agoNot great points: 1. Isn't a business POV or about deadends and it applies to any shift in energy production. 2. I think some geologists are going to want to have a word with him concerning tectonics. Also just because US can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done. E.g. Finland is doing it. 3. The production cost of nuclear based electricity is very weakly dependent on the price of natural uranium. A doubling of the cost in U-nat results in a cost increase of a few %. Also backstop technologies (U from seawater or Th or bomb deconstruction) are available and technologically viable (though not economically viable with oil below $150) 4. No terrorist is going to build a Pu-bomb. It's orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than a U-bomb. Moreover, no terrorists is going to 'build' a bomb. Also, reactor grade Pu is unusable for a bomb due to its isotopic composition. 5. I'm calling BS. Freshwater consumption for energy generation is typically a few % if cooling towers are involved. As for coastal NPP's: Fukushima Daini is located 12km from Fukushima Daichi one the same coast yet nothing happened there.
- thomasahle 11y ago> 40% of the freshwater in France is used on cooling nuclear power plants. Wow, I never heard this. And apparently salt water plants are much harder, and part of what made Fukushima go down.
- vlehto 11y ago1. You can make same argument about any energy recourse. "we need so big number of them, that it's futile." I guess my grandchildren will die then. 2. No way to recycle.. Except there is. Over half of current energy production happens in countries that already have nuclear weapon, or are part of NATO. So because Ghana can't have heavy water nuclear power plant, U.S. can't either? 3. Price going up with the cheapest fuel out there does not sound like much of an issue. He does not quantify anything. 4. France needs to use huge amounts of water for cooling because they produce about 75% of their electricity with nuclear. If average would be even 50% of electricity produced by nukes, we could breathe lot easier with the climate change. You can also cool with seawater. Fukushima proved that even with completely fucked up security culture, dated power plant and overall completely unpredictable carnage, nuclear is still safe. 5. Nuclear is centralized and that's not hip-n-cool. This last point is the best one IMO. But it's more of an argument why we should not rely only on nuclear. Not a reason to abstain from it.
- jerven 11y agoIts a nice write up but I don't believe it. It focusses to much on capacity factor, which is an interesting easy measure. But not nearly as important as one might expect. The key measure is actually dispatch-ability. i.e. how quick can you turn it on and off again. In markets with energy trading this is key for profitability. The CSP plants with molten salt storage do really well on the market because they can turn on and off as fast as gas peaker plants. (For as long as they have storage of course). They will off course have a low capacity utilisation as they are peakers in all but name (aimed at daily evening peak load). Nuclear has a high capacity factor, not because they are base load. But because once they are on they are on. And being on they will sell all they produce for as long as possible. Driving all other producers of the market. i.e. in the current market with 20% nuclear in the US they are rarely forced off the grid because demand is always greater than what they can supply. Once we hit 50% peak load supply by nuclear this high capacity factor will drop. For the simple fact that while a Nuclear power plant can produce, no one is buying. So for a whole system using just nuclear capacity factor will be around 60% not 90% due to market realities on the supply side. Wind is at 40% capacity factor, not because of technical limits (one could build 90% capacity factor windmills if you where crazy, you just derate the generator but keep the same blades, e.g. put an 1mw generator in a turbine designed for 3mw and you will get your 1mw most of the time, but never capture the 3mw you could some of the time) Wind power plants are repowered at the moment after 20 years, not due to limitations of the tech. But because turbines made today are so much better than those of 20 years ago. Most of these old windmills are actually resold on the second market, and its quite difficult to get enough 500kw mills at a good price. Also upto 2/3 of the value of a wind mill is in its steel tower, value that exists in 20 years as much as it does today (little rust and easy to recycle) He also takes 2.5mw turbines from GE as an example but those are rather small these days. They are heading into the 8mw territory today and we will see 12MW plus mills in the coming years. Critically, looking at it on an economic perspective. Once you start building a wind farm, it takes 18 days to build on site a turbine, from base to grid connection. That means you know if its going to work in a month. This leads to easy financing compared to nuclear, where the average best case build time is 4 years, which often descends into decades of building. Financing wise that is a completely different game. Also wind and solar power are added at 100Mw order of magnitude to the grid in single year projects. This is better for project financing and risk management. Panel in project phase1 bad buy a different one for phase2, same for wind turbines. All in all 500, 1000APs could not be build in 20 years even if we lined them up one after the other. The infra in forging and assembly is just not there, not even if we went all in on it. Wind and solar can be build at that scale. Because its distributed manufacturing. Best case nuclear numbers barely meet offshore wind numbers today. Wind which has manufacturing on scale benefits that nuclear does not, will reduce costs much faster than nuclear. PV efficiency will go up, e.g. look at the first solar efficiency roadmap. If you are buying a power plant, then you will quickly see that Nuclear is not a cheap or easy to finance option. A 1 billion windfarm not working out, you cancel midway in construction with 500 million of pain. A 4 billion nuclear power plant not working out, you are decade down stream with a 10 billion bill. 4 billion is a sum few electricity companies can gather, 500 million borrowing for 18 days during construction after which a wind farm is sold on a power purchase agreement made is much easier for many more electricity companies. Think: if you owe 1 million the bank owns you, if you owe 100 million you own the bank... Nuclear should work, and if it did it would sell like cup cakes. The problem really is that these cup cakes cost as much as a trip to the moon... You might wonder why I am bringing up financing so often. In a energy market like the EU or US where there is enough current generation this is key for a plant/farm to be build or not. Often you can only finance if you can drive an other generator off the market, by being cheaper. Solar and wind benefit from the law of large numbers, nuclear does not. If a nuclear plant goes into maintenance you lose 1gw. If a turbine goes down you lose 10mw, a substation blows up you lose 100mw. A nuclear power plant transformer fire, and you lose 1gw in a minute, is a major grid issue. Design issue in your plant, 4gw offline for regulatory reasons, major grid issue. Nuclear power plants are to big and to expensive, small modular nuclear could work. But no serious market players are in this field. Energy storage is currently still to expensive, but even there prices are dropping utility scale power storage is not just pumped storage. (Funnily enough in the UK this was build because of the nuclear investment). Hydrogen, heat, batteries, compressed air, fly wheels are all being investigated and each has deployments in the market. Currently still rather specialised depending on local market needs, but getting closer to taking on gas peakers.
- pippy 11y agoI'm in the awkward position of supporting nuclear power in a country that has its anti-nuclear stance apart of its national identity. New Zealands Prime Minster David Lange famously argued against it at an Oxford Union debate, and ever since kiwis have viewed it as us standing against the 'big guy'. Some people I've spoken to view this as on par with not supporting the All Blacks. To top this off, they typically have an irrational fear of nuclear power steaming from pop culture such as The Simpsons. It's New Zealand's dirty little secret that we're no where near the "100% pure" ad campaigns we're running. Half our rivers are polluted beyond repair. We have less forest coverage than Japan. We flooded vast tracts of land for our dams. And we're still dependent on non renewables for our electricity.
- JacobAldridge 11y agoPlus Uranium is dug up across the ditch and comes in a Wallabies jersey - how very unpatriotic.
- geezer 11y ago> We have less forest coverage than Japan. Japan has forest coverage of 67%, which is very respectable. New Zealand has 31.87%. Next 3 countries after New Zealand are Germany, Canada and United States. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
- switchbak 11y agoCanada is funny though - with so much arctic and prairie land it throws off the calculations. That's not necessarily due to deforestation however (even though there is a ton of that going on). http://www.biodivcanada.ca/380C93C6-737C-440D-BA5E-011787F424B5/1-1-Tree-Coverage-Sep18.gif http://www.biodivcanada.ca/380C93C6-737C-440D-BA5E-011787F42...
- mikekchar 11y agoAs another commenter has mentioned, Japan is kind of a special case (although it would be great if it weren't). In 1600, when the shogun rose to power, there was a real threat of deforestation. Many laws were passed to stop the cutting of trees. Japanese people endured many hardships over the centuries because of these policies. However, there was an understanding that the forests were key to the ecological balance of the area (they control water run off, which helps the farmers and allows rivers to deliver nutrients to the sea which helps the fisheries). My understanding is that in the Edo period (from 1600 to the late 1800s) virtually everything was recycled and then when it couldn't be used any more, it was burned as fuel -- there just weren't resources available to do otherwise. There is an ebook [1] extolling the virtues of Edo society, and while I think you have to take it with a grain of salt (it paints a very rosy picture), it is very interesting. I noticed another book [2] which looks like it would be an interesting read, but I haven't done so yet. One of these days I'd like to learn more about current forestry practices in Japan. I live in Shizuoka prefecture and I see some areas cleared occasionally for tea fields. Also, some of the cedar stands are threatened by invasion from bamboo and you can sometimes see them trying to clear the bamboo and replant cedar. But firewood is currently so cheap that you can often get it for free in my area, which worries me slightly. [1] http://japanfs.org/en/edo/index.html http://japanfs.org/en/edo/index.html [2] http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520063129 http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520063129
- yk 11y agoSo nuclear is cheaper if one takes the numbers from the industry for cost, while ignoring the problem of spend fuel. And ignoring the actual main cost of nuclear power, which empirically is the property damage in Pripyat and Fukushima.
- cthalupa 11y ago>Pripyat The USSR was horrendous at building things in a safe manner. Go look at their track record building submarines vs. the US. Someone making a shitty version of something and it being bad is not a good argument against making a proper version of it. >Fukushima I've spent a fair amount of words talking about Fukushima elsewhere in here, so I'll keep this short: A 4 decade old plant that was being decommissioned was hit by a 9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami, among the worst in modern history, and still could have been fine if it had better design choices (Higher seawall, backup generators not being stored underground) or if the condensers had been serviced in the past decades rather than being left sitting there to break down since the plant's opening. The issues with Fukushima were not hard ones to solve - they were a matter of negligence, and that is an argument for making sure we aren't negligent, not not doing something in the first place.
- yk 11y agoThing is, catastrophic failure occurs if safety assumptions fail. There is nothing in your argument that improves my opinion of the current safety assumptions.
- yazriel 11y agoThe article is completely unprofessional. The tone itself is very one-sided - which is bad enough. However, the factual omissions are ridiculous. Here are a few examples: the area used for wind turbines is large, but it is usually re-usable for agriculture, or increasingly off shore official nuclear death are low - but there is a lot of dispute on the "long tail" of long term deaths from the big nuclear disasters of Ukraine and Japan they (correctly) mention the environmental cost of materials for renewable energy, but ignore the similar pollution of Uranium mining and enrichment 4th generation nuclear reactor are still not even past the design stage. How can anyone even put a price tag on these ? 3rd generation nuclear reactor are more expensive than claimed in the article. The real prices of real reactors in the real world in the past decade are x3 the expected costs. There is simply not enough uranium for a full build out of 3rd generation nuclear. 4th generation will be required, and it is still in the r&d stage There is no mention of the huge problem of load-following when using nuclear plants. You cant just assume 90% CF and then ignore this. Most importantly, IMHO, they completely ignore the learning curve for solar & wind. This is a proven trend, over last decades, appears to be set to continue, and completely changes the discussion. And on and on.... My own views are pro-nuclear AND pro-renewable. But this requires a scientific and accurate discussion!
- ageofwant 11y agoYou assert that an article of this nature needs to be "professional", why is that ? It was written for the great mass of laypeople that (supposedly) holds the power over our nuclear future. It is intended to challenge the ongoing anti-nuclear narrative and re-educate. It achieves those aims admirably. While your criticisms may be arguably valid for a different audience they are irrelevant here.
- epistasis 11y agoI didn't mean to downvote you but accidentally clicked on the button and can't go back. However, I do disagree with your point. I'm pro-nuclear to the degree that it's economical, and found the article to be somewhat insipid due to grandparent's reasons. Just as there are plenty of people that are irrationally anti-nuclear, being irrationally pro-nuclear is no better at all.
- natch 11y agoThe word "centralized" does not appear anywhere in their post, which tells me that they are not thinking about that as an issue. But it is an important bias of nuclear energy, the bias toward centralization. One of the benefits of solar is that it can be either centralized, or decentralized, or a hybrid of the two. Being less biased in this way, it opens up more flexible options. Another important aspect of solar is that its performance is a moving target. Because solar cells are improving over time, comparisons against them need to be kept updated, or else the underlying assumptions of the comparison are invalid.
- gruez 11y ago>The word "centralized" does not appear anywhere in their post, which tells me that they are not thinking about that as an issue why is centralized power an issue? It was only recently that power generation became decentralized (through renewables such as wind and solar)
- lutorm 11y agoFor one, the argument that "solar takes a ridiculous amount of area" becomes less compelling if you realize that each home can supply its own energy using existing roof area.
- michaelpinto 11y agoEvery form of energy generation has positive and negative points, to claim that one is the best is oversimplification. In fact when I met people who worked for that industry their argument to me was that no single source of energy generation could meet full demand. To me the real prize in the energy game is efficiency, and there's quite a bit of wasted energy if you look around.
- blazespin 11y ago"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- sea2summit 11y agoI'm really tired of all the internet kids plugging nuclear. The numbers don't work, and the cost of failure is huge. We can put solar on everyone's roof and turbines in windy areas and it's completely safe, dumb nuts simple, and decentralized. Nuclear energy is dead. Let it go.
- gruez 11y ago>it's completely safe let's ignore all the toxic chemicals used in making the solar panels.
- vlehto 11y ago>We can put solar on everyone's roof and turbines in windy areas and it's completely safe, dumb nuts simple, and decentralized. ...and not enough. http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ That's from British perspective. Most of the world population lives at similar population densities. So it's kinda representative. The only major exception is U.S.
- ageofwant 11y agoThe numbers work and the cost of "failure" in gen 4 reactors is zero. Try reading the article, its written for people like you. I'm getting tired of old brainwashed hippies pushing their 70's nuclear-hate narrative while gleefully cooking the planet. Every anti-nuclear statement is a pro-coal statement.
- lolc 11y agoI assume you're talking about the molten salt designs. The ideas sound great and all. So why exactly are they not being built?
- roflchoppa 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOgS8gTATv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOgS8gTATv8 Nuclear Energy is the cleanest energy
- blazespin 11y agoThe article neglects to mention the insurance costs of running a nuclear power plant versus the insurance costs of running solar / wind. It's nice to just hand wave away insurance, except when you discover that only nation states have the ability to insure these things.
- wnevets 11y agoI'm not willing to live next to a reactor and I'm not willing to force someone else to. If people really think nuclear is the best option put your money where your mouth is and raise your family next to one.
- 13thLetter 11y agoThat is certainly your right, but we should base important technical decisions like this on peer-reviewed science, not knee-jerk emotional reactions.
- knieveltech 11y agoOk. Source: within 30 miles of two reactor facilities.
- Avshalom 11y agoBeen there done that. Twice. Port Saint Lucie Florida, Chattanooga Tennessee.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- blazespin 11y agoA new study in Nature says that using thorium as a nuclear fuel has a higher risk for proliferation into weapons than scientists had believed. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the-superfuel-thorium-riskier-than-we-thought-14821644/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the...
- tim333 11y agoHmm... the article has solar/wind costing 6 or more times as much as nuclear Wikipedia has them costing about the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... Plus solar etc. are dropping in price in each year in a way that nuclear isn't. I suspect someone's numbers are a bit off.
- frankus 11y agoIf they're going to have something called a NERD NOTE, they should at least get their units right: "The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours." 5TWh per what? Per second? Per hour (then why not 5TW?)? Per year? Cumulative over all of human history?
- ageofwant 11y agoWatt is joule/second. Write it out and algebraically cancel the units and you'l understand that you don't understand, and then maybe you will. As a rule, in future, try to understand before mocking, its a better way to live, take it from me...
- marvin 11y agoA terawatt-hour is 3600 terajoules (a measure of energy, not power). So you've got your units wrong, unfortunately.
- carpdiem 11y agoI think you've misunderstood the point. Terawatt-hours is ambiguous, without specifying a time period. In particular, Terawatt-hours can be converted to Joules. To say that humanity's energy usage is X Joules is meaningless without specifying the time period that that energy is used over. For example, it means very different things to say that humanity uses 5 TWh per day than to say that humanity uses 5 TWh per year (versus 5 TWh since the dawn of recorded history!).
- ageofwant 11y agoThe context is deathprint” (casualties per terawatt-hour) or deaths/joule, time cancels out. If you read the NERD Note alone your right of course.
- nkurz 11y agoThat's not the context that everyone else is referring to. They are referring to this: "[NERD NOTE: A terawatt is a trillion watts. The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours. One TWh (terawatt-hour) is a constant flow of a trillion watts of electricity for a period of one hour.]" The argument others are making (which I think is correct) is that it is meaningless to say "The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours" without specifying a time frame over which that consumption occurs.
- Animats 11y agoWell, we'll know soon how the new AP-1000 reactor works. The first unit starts up next year, in China.[1] The first US unit should start up in 2019. It's a boring old pressurized water reactor and should work. The history of large exotic reactor designs is poor. Sodium-cooled reactors have sodium fires. Helium-cooled reactors have helium leaks (The Ft. St. Vrain story is sad; good idea, but some badly designed components in the radioactive section.) Pebble bed reactors jam. (A small one in Germany is jammed, shut down, and can't be decommissioned.) Molten salt reactors require an on-site chemical plant which processes the radioactive molten salt. Chemical plants for radioactive materials are a huge headache and have the potential to leak. With pressurized water reactors, you only have to handle water, not radioactive fluorine salts. All designs where the radioactive portion of the system has much complexity have had major problems. Fixing anything in the radioactive part is extremely difficult. But the reactor has to run for decades to be profitable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station
- stock 11y agoSolar PV is less than 3 cents and nuclear is at least 15 cents. A nuclear meltdown is called a "sacrifice zone" and a solar meltdown is called a sunny day. Make me proud, go solar!
- opo 11y agoI think you are going to need to add some citations (from a source without an agenda). Each country is going to have different costs for energy usage so it isn’t clear why you are claiming the costs you do without putting them in context. For example, as might be expected, solar PV is more expensive in Canada. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...: “...Independent reviews rarely show that nuclear power plants are necessarily very expensive,[21][22] but anti-nuclear groups frequently produce reports that say the costs of nuclear energy are prohibitively high.[23][24][25][26] This is despite the fact that the cost of electricity in nuclear France is approximately half of that in Germany and Denmark.[27][28][29] In Ontario, hydroelectricity and nuclear have by far the cheapest generation costs, at 4.3c/kWh and 5.9c/kWh respectively, whilst solar costs a massive 50.4c/kWh.[30][31] " For example, on the wiki page, the Brookings Institute (which doesn’t appear to have a financial stake in supporting or attacking nuclear power): “...In 2014, Brookings Institution published The Net Benefits of Low and No-Carbon Electricity Technologies which states, after performing an energy and emissions cost analysis, that "The net benefits of new nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle plants far outweigh the net benefits of new wind or solar plants", with the most cost effective low carbon power technology being determined to be nuclear power.[106][107] Moreover, Paul Joskow of MIT has determined that the "Levelized cost of electricity"(LCOE) metric is a poor means of comparing electricity sources as it hides the extra costs, such as the need to frequently operate back up power stations, incurred due to the use of intermittent power sources such as wind energy, while the value of baseload power sources are underpresented.[108]” Also the EU found: “...An EU-funded research study known as ExternE, or Externalities of Energy, undertaken from 1995 to 2005, found that the cost of producing electricity from coal or oil would double, and the cost of electricity production from gas would increase by 30% if external costs such as damage to the environment and to human health, from the particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, chromium VI, river water alkalinity, mercury poisoning and arsenic emissions produced by these sources, were taken into account. It was estimated in the study that these external, downstream, fossil fuel costs amount up to 1-2% of the EU's Gross Domestic Product, and this was before the external cost of global warming from these sources was included.[109] The study also found that the environmental and health costs of nuclear power, per unit of energy delivered, was lower than many renewable sources, including that caused by biomass and photovoltaic solar panels, but was higher than the external costs associated with wind power and alpine hydropower.[110]” In the US: “...In 2014, the US Energy Information Administration estimated the levelized cost of electricity from new nuclear power plants going online in 2019 to be $0.096/kWh before government subsidies, comparable to the cost of electricity from a new coal-fired power plant without carbon capture, but higher than the cost from natural gas-fired plants.[98]” >...A nuclear meltdown is called a "sacrifice zone" and a solar meltdown is called a sunny day. Installing/maintaining PV solar (particularly on roofs) is not as safe as you imply in your comment. Even including Chernobyl, the deaths from nuclear power have been significantly less: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
- stock 11y agoSolar PV is less than 3 cents and nuclear is at least 15 cents. A nuclear meltdown is called a "sacrifice zone" and a solar meltdown is called a sunny day. Make me proud, go solar!
- lolc 11y agoHahaa, look how they considered the cost for nuclear waste storage: "Because the future cost of safe storage is uncertain, we refrained from including any numbers." Of course I'm joking. They just didn't mention it.
- lolc 11y agoHahaa, look how they considered the cost for nuclear waste storage: "Because the future cost of safe storage is uncertain, we refrained from including any numbers." Of course I'm joking. They just didn't mention it.
- moonbug 11y agoFor a rather more sober -- not to say sobering -- assessment of the state of the nuclear industry, I do recommend the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Reports http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20151023MSC-WNISR2015-V4-LR.pdf http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20151023MSC-WNISR2...
- Thiz 11y agoOr just install solar roofs with power walls in every single american home for 1 trillion dollars and be done with it. No need to occupy extra land or run expensive machinery and power lines all over the country. Distributed energy is the future.
- Bluestrike2 11y agoMaybe for some applications (low usage residential), but not for all. Certainly not for energy-intensive industrial applications. And if you're running lines to industrial sites--which are located all over the country in all sorts of areas--you might as well hook up residential developments to the grid as well to be more efficient and cost effective. That's not to say that distributed generation is a bad idea, or that it isn't going to happen. It's not, and it will. But it'll still be connected to the grid. No one's really proposing doing away with grid connections, outside some very limited and specific types of situations.
- lutorm 11y agoI find the argument about area needed spurious. By using the same point, I could claim that there is no way automobiles will succeed in society, because of the enormous area that would need to get paved... except that doesn't seem to have stopped us.
- intrasight 11y agoUtilities are mostly free to build nuclear power plants. They don't because a) they can afford the construction cost, and b) they can't afford the insurance cost. So the nuclear industry says "no problem, we'll just ask the government to subsidize the construction cost and pass laws to shield you from liability". But they are finding that the "public risk - private profit" paradigm doesn't sell so well anymore for some reason.
- jessaustin 11y agoHere in Missouri, Ameren tried for years to get the CWIP-financing ban [0] overturned so that rate-payers would build a new nuclear plant rather than investors. In a rare victory for representative government, they spun their wheels until the dropping price of natural gas made the whole exercise academic. They're hoping that other fuels will simultaneously peak at some point so they can lock their customers into decades of expensive power, but it won't be anytime soon. [0] Why is there a ban, you ask? Because the first nuclear plant they built, in the 1970s, had such catastrophic cost overruns that the entire state swore, "never again".
- DaniFong 11y agoThe numbers here are off by about two orders of magnitude on the cost of pumped hydro storage.
- jorangreef 11y agoA nuclear researcher from iThemba Labs gave a talk at University of Cape Town shortly after the Fukushima accident. 1. During his talk, he mentioned that nuclear plants are designed to have a very low probability of Chernobyl-scale failure, and that the current rate of Chernobyl-scale failure given the number of nuclear plants in production is roughly 1 every 20 years. 2. He eventually concluded his talk by saying that we should double the number of nuclear plants in production around the world to remove our dependence on coal. I asked a question at the end of his talk, given point 1. then point 2. would mean 1 Chernobyl every 10 years. He was completely dumbfounded. He had never combined his ideas with simple probability theory. One physics student present then said angrily: "Yes, but we will get better at building nuclear plants."
- Jean-Philipe 11y agoAny idea why the uranium enrichment process is not mentioned in the article? It's quite expensive and even generates more CO2 than a modern coal based power plant in its lifetime.
- kgarten 11y agoI wonder why hacker news is so positive on nuclear power. The article is full of false information or misguided information. I always recommend "Into Eternity" to understand why nuclear is one of the worst options for eternity ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)
- PolLambert 11y agoWhile I strongly disagree with you on nuclear power (especially since radioactive decay means that 'eternity' by definition is always safe, unlike chemical waste), I strongly agree that "Into Eternity" is a must-watch. The only real long-term risk to geological disposal are future humans. The question the documentary adresses is 'how to communicate to future generations not to dig there'.
- jagermo 11y agoI have nothing against nuclear energy, but I have a problem with "let's just put the waste, idunno, here and let it sit for a few thousand years". In Germany, several of the energy companies completley distanced themselves from the waste they produce. I was at a conference once, where one of the heads of EnKK (a dauthger of EnBW) said after beeing asked what he things his responsibilities for the waste are: "Well you know, you don't care what happens to your waste at home. Look to the law, we are not responsible." I think this is one of the biggest reasons why nuclear power has run its course. I might be feasable for contries like the US, Russia or China to find a spot where to store their nuclear waste, but in densly populated areas in Europe? No way. Just look at the catastrophy that is the Asse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine Tl;dr: As long as there is no secure way to store nuclear waste for a thousand years, nuclear has no future.
- bigbugbag 11y agoWell once again an article that fails to address that the energy production issue could be addressed with controlling our energy wants instead of mindlessly using more and more combined with local self-production instead of centralized giant production plants and transportation. Let's not forget that nuclear plants are basically huge and optimized steam dynamos and that a breakthrough in producing electricity would be a game changer.