11 ms·

The New Atomic Age We Need

258 points by markmassie 11y ago

PaulHoule 11y ago
The key problem in my mind is the failure of project management in building reactors. If they said it was going to take 2 years and 1 billion dollars and it stretched out to 3 years and $1.5 billion that is one thing. Back in the 1970s it was more like 2 years stretches to 9 years and $15 billion and you could blame union workers who never did nuclear work before, the no nukes, high interest rates, etc. The industry was supposed to come out with standardized reactor types like the EPR, and we have low interest rates, little active opposition to nuclear power, and projects like Olkiluoto-3 are still 9 years late. Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule. The fear of Fukushima is just icing on that cake.
- Amorymeltzer 11y ago
  Absolutely, but don't discount the FUD. Much as people fear an airplane crash more than a car crash, the prospect of nuclear power is far more terrifying to most than just another coal plant. It's not enough that the coal plant is orders of magnitude more deadly, it's the perception. Even the image the NYT used will convey to many a disregard for life, pumping harmful radiation into our environment, rather than merely a large cooling tower releasing water vapor. Fear is a VERY big deal. And once you get past fear and perception, there's NIMBYism.
  - legulere 11y ago
    I think the big fear of nuclear power is because we don't know how to handle catastrophic risks. With coal power you will have a few dead mine workers. It's only mine workers that are affected and they have a definite risk in front of their eyes. You can rise the worker protection regulations for making this safer. You have the problem of air pollution through fine particles and sulfur. You can solve this with filters. The CO2 Problem isn't caused by one coal plant alone, so that problem is ignored. With nuclear on the other hand you have a history of failures that were tried to be covered up, while being told that nuclear is 100% safe. The failures were unforeseen and led to a few catastrophes we weren't prepared to handle. We're more scared of the things we don't know than of the things we do know. And then the effects were very far reaching. The area around Chernobyl still isn't habitable today, more than half of the boars caught in Bavaria still aren't deemed safe for consumption because of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl. Fukushima and Chernobyl had a huge effect on the people living around them and both were in relatively low populated areas, so effects at a catastrophe in a nuclear power plant more near to a big city would be far greater. I'm not saying that nuclear power is creating more damage than coal power, I just want to show why people fear nuclear power more.
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      Why is it that Fukushima isn't an argument _for_ nuclear power, considering the plant even closer to the epicenter came through with flying colors? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
      - i1568658 11y ago
        From the article :P >Following the tsunami two to three hundred homeless residents of the town who lost their homes to the tsunami took refuge in the Onagawa nuclear plant's gymnasium, as the reactor complex was the only safe area in the vicinity to evacuate to, with the reactor operators supplying food and blankets to the needy.
    - BurningFrog 11y ago
      > while being told that nuclear is 100% safe When were you ever told that? I've been hearing all my life how risky and scary nuclear power is.
    - electronvolt 11y ago
      I think the fundamental thing is that it is not a rational fear--nuclear is associated with bombs that flatten cities and radiation is, to many people, a simply scary unknown that they can't touch, smell, or see, but which might kill them. (Many of the people I've met who were against nuclear power didn't really emotionally understand radiation as something you get some of every day anyways--it's a bogeyman that gives you either cancer or superpowers.) Smoke/smog, in comparison, is something you can see and can expect to interact with daily if you're in a city. Despite the fact that it's much more dangerous, people don't perceive it as such.
    - Symmetry 11y ago
      You can filter the output of coal plants and that does help a lot. In the US coal only kills 15 people per terawatt-hour compared to 150 in China. But a coal plant generating as much power as Fukushima did will still tend to kill about 20 people even with safer US style plants. If you add up all the coal power in the US that's about 20,000 deaths per year. More or less the same order of magnitude as the damage from Chernobyl. But of course that's normal and doesn't make the news.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  It is simply not possible. They know that, so they lie.
- masklinn 11y ago
  Nuclear plants are also central points of failures, the plant itself needn't even fail, just the electrical distribution from it and you lose 1~6GW. If they pan out, Small Modular Reactors (30MW~300MW range) seem like they could solve many of the issues with existing "large" nuke plants: the sealed core can be built on largeish assembly lines (similar to airliners in size) then floated, flown or driven to site, more units would mean more opportunities for automation and economies of scale instead the more pharaonic and necessarily more unique existing systems. This would be further boosted by the inherent flexibility of SMR: they can be kept mobile (for emergencies, temporary setting, interim power, etc…) e.g. Rosatom's Akademik Lomonosov barge, which should have a total capacity of 300MWt/70MWe.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 11y ago
    There's a great deal of engineering/economic appeal to factory made modular reactors, but the weak point is you'd need a cultural shift for people to not be freaked out about having lots of small reactors everywhere.
    - ommunist 11y ago
      Cultural shifts are funcion of political will.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      On the one hand yes, on the other hand you don't need prime estate locations (coastal and riverside) to cool down SMRs and they're way less noticeable than hectares of nuke plants, so to an extent your can put them everywhere yet not in anyone's backyard.
    - vlehto 11y ago
      Also political shift is needed. Currently in Finland you need parliament permission for any new nuclear plant. If you are likely to get only one permission every 8 years, you have to go big to have any impact. Which seems to be the reason why Olkiluoto-3 got so big. Which seems to have contributed to the schedule fuck ups from day one. For example they had the concrete heating too much while curing when casting the floor. This was because the floor slab was lot bigger than engineers we're used to cast. Yes, they should have taken that into account. But the point is it's harder to take all things into account when you are going to unexplored territory.
- pdonis 11y ago
  > Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule. The lack of predictability comes from lawsuits, not technical problems in construction. Plants that were completed and ready to go online on schedule were stopped at the last minute by lawsuits, and in many cases were never started up.
  - PaulHoule 11y ago
    Yes and no. Definitely there have been places and times where people opposed to nuclear energy have filed lawsuits against nuclear power plant construction. On the other hand many times the trouble is between the constructing company, the electric company and maybe regulators and it usually is in the form of a lawsuit because this is how you decide who owes who money in the end.
cft 11y ago
I am afraid that the real goal of at least 50% of climate change activists is not clean energy, but the disruption of current elite and wealth redistribution by taxation vs value creation. It is because of these 50% the realistic proposals like Peter's will not fly politically.
- Retra 11y ago
  There are better ways to redistribute wealth. And I find your ">50%" statistic to be unreasonably exaggerated.
- chaz72 11y ago
  Wait, what? Why do you think climate change is about wealth redistribution? Aren't you concerned at how much it will cost to protect all the cities on our coastlines if climate change is right? That's sure going to redistribute some wealth if we do nothing.
  - draaglom 11y ago
    While the overall issue is not about redistribution in the traditional sense, the battle lines often are. On the one hand you have capitalist-optimists like Thiel who basically focus on increasing energy output from non-carbon sources (which tends to mean: nuclear). The effect is to maintain the status quo (everyone can keep on using energy without worrying about depleting a public good). On the other hand you have the left focusing mainly on limiting / reducing carbon emissions. That is - in my opinion - an inherently redistributive project: when you allocate carbon emission allowances, you're effectively allocating production allowances. Edit: specifically, it's redistributive on a country level: poorer countries would quite like to have a big carbon budget to burn while their economies grow.
    - chaz72 11y ago
      Was it a "redistribution of wealth" when paint makers were told "hey, stop making paints with lead in them, people are getting hurt"? If it was, was that a bad thing? I would argue it was sure inconvenient for paint companies but a net gain to society. Perhaps some level of funding should be given to these companies as we take their rights away - and perhaps not, depending on how foreseeable and expensive their issues were - but the fact is, sometimes we as a society need to force them to make changes. To my mind, it's not redistribution because the point is not to take their income away, the point is that it's time to stop. Yes, that will have an effect on their income. Not doing it will have a much higher dollar cost, and the company won't pay it directly but the country sure will.
squozzer 11y ago
Forgive my skepticism, but Mr. Thiel did not offer to live near a reactor. For someone with his obvious intelligence, his oversight could not have been accidental. Does he fear the radiation or the decline in property value? When a robber baron like Dale Carnegie wanted people to believe in his steel bridges, he staked his life and reputation and walked across the damned bridge. Another major risk not mentioned by Mr. Thiel is a financial one, as it seems every nuclear project in the West at least has become a boondoggle. Even the project a few hours from my house - Plant Vogtle - where the state legislature generously transferred the financial risk to the taxpayers and customers - is behind schedule and over budget. Until nuclear cheerleaders develop a taste for risk that will not be borne by others, maybe we should reduce consumption. If Las Vegas were to shut off 90% of its' outdoor lighting and fountain displays, would everyone there go blind and lose their enthusiasm to play slots? I doubt it. Just a thought.
- incepted 11y ago
  > Forgive my skepticism, but Mr. Thiel did not offer to live near a reactor. Living next to a coal plant is even more dangerous than a nuclear plant, are you suggesting we should ban both plants based on these considerations?
  - ommunist 11y ago
    Actually the late USSR had a technology of small fully automatic single loaded reactors for long-term supply of electric power in middle-size cities. Fully sealed unit. After use (decades) - you just cover it with a lawn. But back then the USSR had enough fuel in production. Right now the know how in Russia is lost and nuclear fuel generation is very weak. Also HMD generator by Oleg Gritckevitch was very promising. The town in Armenia was fed by electricity generated by a small prototype in 1988.
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      What happened to it during the earthquake?
T-A 11y ago
> We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. Is this really true? In Lazard's 2014 comparison of total cost per MWh, both wind and solar beat coal and nuclear [1]. Costs have fallen so much that it's becoming hard to justify continued subsidies [2]. [1] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-energy/ http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene... [2] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-secretary-solar-and-wind-energy-cost-competitive-without-subsidies.html http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-secreta...
- pilom 11y ago
  The problem is scale. Here is a really good analysis of renewable resources in the UK: http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ Conclusion: The UK doesn't receive enough sunlight or have enough wind/waves/tidal pools/land to grow food, power cars (of any kind) and meet other energy needs. The UK can never get all of their energy carbon free without nuclear or importing power. The US is in a better place because of solar in the Southwest but we still don't have the technology/infrastructure to transport all of that power.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    The UK relatively recently backed full cycle of Uranium fuel production in Kazakhstan. Tony Blair became personal advisor to Nazarbayev. And I ve heard, the UK is going to build new nuclear plants. Its supply is secured and the know how will be both French and USSR (Kazakhstan). Those interested can ask themselves, what Atomic Kitten was doing in Astana in 2010?
    - guelo 11y ago
      Are you suggesting that UK is going transport electricity from Kazakhstan back to the UK? presumably via Russia? If so, that seems like a really bad plan.
      - ommunist 11y ago
T-A 11y ago
> We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. Is this really true? In Lazard's 2014 comparison of total cost per MWh, both wind and solar beat coal and nuclear [1]. Costs have fallen so much that it's becoming hard to justify continued subsidies [2]. [1] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-energy/ http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene... [2] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-secretary-solar-and-wind-energy-cost-competitive-without-subsidies.html http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-secreta...
jkot 11y ago
Coal plan produces more radioactivity than nuclear plant. There are radioactive elements in coal and they get released in smoke into atmosphere.
- bro-stick 11y ago
  This old one again. As someone who's actually worked in the nuclear energy industry, it's a common but wrong refrain... diffusion of petrochem radioactivity is much less of a liability than the very real, concentrated dangers of radioisotopes, even factoring in all of the other many negatives of coal.
  - jkot 11y ago
    Negative externalities? It would be great to concentrate all pollution from ocean, land and air into single place. And I do not mean CO2.
etaty 11y ago
I like how Thiel writes his sentences about safety, to avoid saying anything wrong. I invite him to spend the rest of his life in Chernobyl or Fukushima. Personally nuclear energy is dangerous because when it goes wrong the result is really bad. And the source of error is infinite, human, software, design, terrorists, war, civil plane, drone ...
- wstrange 11y ago
  Hydro Dams cause immense catastrophe when they fail. They have killed far more people than Nuclear power. According to Wikipedia, the failure of a single Dam in China caused: 26,000 dead from flooding, 145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics, 11 million homeless All forms of power generation have risks and tradeoffs. We should use the best available science to evaluate those risks - not emotion and fear. The future of our planet depends on it.
  - witty_username 11y ago
    The planet will survive well. We'll be screwed.
- vertak 11y ago
  0 people have died in the US as a result nuclear power. Chernobyl failed because its operators turned off the emergency failsafe system in order to do a test of the reactor, which was also botched. Look up the Linear no-threshold model of radiation. There's no statistically significant evidence that radiation exposure of even 1000 millirem (average US dosage is 360 millrem, and 2/3rds of that is from natural radiation such as the sun and rocks) has negative health effects. Also what do you even mean by "the source of error is infinite"? All of those sources of error apply to coal and gas plants, except that nuclear power plants are so much more tightly regulated and protected that these "sources of error" are far more likely to affect coal/gas plants than nuclear. Check out this information where they crash an F-4 into 10 feet of concrete, reducing the F-4 to dust. Nuclear power reactor containment shields have more than 10 feet of concrete, and even so have procedures for automatic shutdown of the fission process that don't rely on electricity (eg gravity). FUD such as this is a large part of why we do not have fission today.
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
YC has two nuclear start ups: Helion and UPower. How are they doing? What is their path to prominence?
danbruc 11y ago
Why not simply outlaw nonrenewable energy sources over ten years or so? Problem solved. EDIT: Would someone care to point out why that is not an valid option? Lack of technological viability? Lack of energy storage technology or capacity? Ideological resentment against a political over an economical driving force for the change?
- bjacobel 11y ago
  > simply Browse the FEC website for contributions from oil & coal companies to 2016 candidates. That's why it won't be simple.
  - danbruc 11y ago
    I am presupposing that you really want to get rid of fossil fuels. If the people making the decisions prefer to keep oil and coal in business for whatever reasons than the discussion is pretty pointless to begin with, no matter what alternative you are discussing.
- chc 11y ago
  This reminds me of the episode of Star Trek where Data asks Q how to solve a problem and Q answers, "Simple — change the gravitational constant of the universe."
namespace 11y ago
I think that recent initiative by YC under sam to invest in startups that may herald breakthroughs in sustainable fission is a great start. This should lead to a healthy competition which so far has been missing since it used to be a government only venture for a long time.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  I'm not convinced that YC is the vehicle through which the next major breakthrough in the field of energy generation will be conceived. YC companies that do relatively tiny hardware projects tend to fail at a rate much higher than their software siblings and the kind of investment required to get a next generation nuclear reactor from the drawingboard to a reality is not usually associated with start-up accelerators. I know they're funding two start-ups in this domain but I don't believe this is a path that will work out. On the other hand, I've been wrong in the past on other predictions so feel free to ignore me :)
ommunist 11y ago
Currently only France, US, and Russia can build reactors for energy, but these are using U or Pu in different flavours. This fuel is hard to get. China can't afford that kind of fuel in quanities it will need. This is why China backs breakthrough research in Th fission, delivered by Norway. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.
- NumberCruncher 11y ago
  We have 4x more Thorium on Earth than Uran, 1 gram Thorium gives 3x more energy than Uran and has a shorter halft-time, this means it produces less radioctive waste. The problem is, that a Th-plant can not be used to produce nuclear weapons. That shows that we have a political crisis and not an energy crisis. If Japan wouldn't be afraid to build his nuclear plants on the west-coast (protected from tsunamis but easy to get hit by a chinese rocket), Fokushima still would be a nice place to live.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    Well, U is 10x more common element than Sn. Not just sny U isotope is good for fuel. But you are not quite right. Thorium fuels can breed fissile uranium-233 to be used in various kinds of nuclear reactors.
Zigurd 11y ago
After reading this, I still have mixed feelings about nuclear. On the one hand, we have an overhang of old-tech nuclear power that is dangerously obsolete, poorly run, and insanely expensive to build, run, and clean up after. On the other hand, new-tech nuclear looks very attractive. The argument gets circular, because new-tech nuclear is speculative. Lots of old-tech nuclear should get shut before we get another Fukushima. So despite the theoretical ability to scale up faster, does nuclear really have an advantage over renewables?
lumberjack 11y ago
Nuclear Fission is not a plug and play solution either. Unlike other possible solutions like a breakthrough in mass energy storage, we know that fission could satisfy our needs. But it will still require some 30 years of investment to figure out the new breed of reactors and where to source the fuel from.
- bro-stick 11y ago
  It can be if it's standardized as Taylor Wilson suggests... build uniform, low pressure, high temp molten salt reactors in a factory.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > Nuclear Fission is not a plug and play solution either. That's actually the intent of SMRs. Small-ish reactor (30~300MWe) assembly plants, then ship them wherever they're needed/desired, and either bury them or keep them mobile depending on the purpose. When the fuel load is expended (10~30 years, similar to nuclear subs and ships) you just replace the whole reactor assembly, pop a new one in, and send the old one for recycling and disposal.
bro-stick 11y ago
Thiel skips the fact that Chernobyl is uninhabitable for thousands of years (save bloggers on motorcycles), all of the dispossessed persons and extra 40k+ cancer deaths. Plus Fukashima. Big PWR/BWR reactors will always be too inherently dangerous because of high pressures and too expensive to build, regulate and insure (in the US, without insurance and NRC approval, there is no project). And the risks of dual-purpose reactors and long-term storage for large amounts of waste. Taylor Wilson's TED talk on low pressure, molten salt, modular reactors built as standardized modules with a scram / recycle pool underneath and made in a factory is one of the best ways to go. Smaller, isolated, modular setups limit failure risk compared to a single reactor having a big, explosive meltdown. The other one is thermal generation using chip-like technology with tiny amounts of radiological material isolated in individual "wells" making it safer, more efficient and scalable for many types of battery and generation use-cases. I think we can do fission safer, cheaper and smarter, responsibly, but repeating the same failures by taking the same risks without learning from the past is inherently dumb. Disclaimer: nuclear energy consultancy alum
- ommunist 11y ago
  Bro, I worked in Gomel for 4 years and spent 2 field seasons in 'Chernobyl radioactive wasteland'. Relax, life is ok there. Just do not eat local apple seeds in the 80+ Ci/sq km zone. Pulp for cider is OK.
shaunrussell 11y ago
It is a shame that we went all in on uranium reactor technology (so we could make bombs) instead of further pursuing liquid fluoride thorium reactors, which are much safer. Kirk Sorensen at http://flibe-energy.com/ http://flibe-energy.com/ has some great talks about this. I highly recommend watching some of his content on youtube. This is a good place to start: https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternati...
blisterpeanuts 11y ago
Where are we at with nuclear fusion? At this time, the only promising progress I know of is happening at Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks[1] where they are developing a truck-sized 100 MW [corrected from Mhz] power plant in an incremental, iterative fashion and claiming to have something operational by 2020. As regards solar and other "clean" alternatives, there exists vast potential for reducing daytime electric grid load by throwing a few panels on residential and office rooftops. Why don't more people do it? As the cost of panels plummets, the payoff time is decreasing and ROI over time is increasing. A whole industry of solar panel leasing has sprung up, whereby residential home owners let an installer put in the panels for free, then pay a discounted electric rate. Not exactly like going off-grid, but it does have the same effect of reducing demand for coal/oil/gas generated power. I'm envisioning future new home developments where every house comes with solar pre-installed. No decisions to make; the cost is baked in (so to speak) and you get a home that will incur minimal electric bills. I don't see a government role in all of these initiatives, which are market driven. People want green energy these days; it's become a fad. Almost gone are the days when homeowners associations sue a member for putting "ugly" solar panels on his roof. 1. http://www.eweek.com/news/lockheed-martin-claims-sustainable-fusion-is-within-its-grasp.html http://www.eweek.com/news/lockheed-martin-claims-sustainable...
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- jessriedel 11y ago
  All things considered, ITER is much more likely to lead to commercial fusion.
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macco 11y ago
I have a feeling Mr Thiel didn't cosider important facts. Nuclear energy is highly deficient, building nuclear plants uses much more energy and concrete (bad for the environment) and you have to store nuclear waste. I know Thiel is a long term thinker, but maybe Kaynes view is also important.
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nova22033 11y ago
In 1949 the federal government built a test facility at Idaho National Laboratory to study and evaluate new nuclear reactor designs. We owe our nuclear power industry to the foresight of those New Dealers, and we need their openness to innovation again today. Thiel is a self-described conservative libertarian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Political_activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Political_activiti...
- jessaustin 11y ago
  My grandfather died with multiple cancers plus pulmonary fibrosis caused by multiple exposures he received while working in DoE facilities in the early-mid 1950s. In those facilities there were basically no safety procedures. Safe nuclear power was not a goal; more nuclear weapons was the goal. It's no surprise that TFA exaggerates the "foresight" of the damned "New Dealers". They were just like Thiel is, looking to make bank off a public that's not always paying attention. He will feel no more guilt about it than I do for driving on public highways.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    I'm sorry for your grandfather but what does that have to do with anything happening today? You think safety standards and understanding of risks are still the same today as in the 1950s?
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Perhaps it's a small point, but I wished to counter TFA's false claim that "nuclear New Dealers" possessed any admirable sort of foresight. Do you think the publicly-stated level of safety standards is less exaggerated today than it was back then?
mronge 11y ago
How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels). Is that not feasible? https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187 https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  US has lots of sunny areas with little people, agriculture or wildlife, but UK doesn't. Many European countries are dense and cloudy. It can still help.
  - nickhalfasleep 11y ago
    I'm surprised they don't invest in production just south in North Africa, it would be pretty trivial to lay cables across to Gibraltar. They would of course have to do it with a sense of economic fairness and fairly pay the countries in money and technology / education transfer.
    - T-A 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
    - Gravityloss 11y ago
      It's quite unstable politically. Spain might be a better bet. On the other hand, maybe one could just move people to Spain and avoid this whole electricity transportation mess.
- beefman 11y ago
  It's not feasible, no. The "reasonable area" is on the order of all the concrete in the world. You have to duplicate civilization but with precision electronic devices instead of stone.[1] Musk is, unfortunately, not thinking outside his prejudices on the subject of energy systems. In all fairness, this is very common. Discourse on energy systems in our culture is closer to religion than engineering. [1] http://lumma.org/energy/EnergyLCA.html http://lumma.org/energy/EnergyLCA.html
dfar1 11y ago
Coincidence that this article is released at the same time as the youtube/google petition campaign?
jensen123 11y ago
He does not mention bombs. I'm certainly no expert here, but I think I read in the book An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore a long time ago, that if you have the ability to build a nuclear power plant, then building a bomb is not very hard. I'm not terribly keen on living in a world where most of the countries in Africa, the Middle East etc. are able to build nuclear bombs.
- pjscott 11y ago
  Having nuclear reactors doesn't mean your country can build them. For most countries it would almost certainly be cheaper to just import them from whoever offers you the best deal. Countries with nuclear reactor export industries include China, Russia, France, and South Korea, so there's some decent competition here.
  - jensen123 11y ago
    You are probably correct that it would be cheaper to purchase nuclear power plants from others, rather than developing yourself. I'm thinking though - maybe many countries would be reluctant to rely on foreigners for something this essential.
- beefman 11y ago
  It's actually easier to build production reactors (for weapons) than power reactors.
Michael_s45543 11y ago
Its funny how we have to fall for these fake hackers all the time before we either give up or find the real one. I wont allow others fall for the fakes i did, paid several times with no results till my sister in law found out and opened up to me she has a private investigator which i later found out was a hacker Scott Edwards greyhatcreator001@gmail.com. He brought life back to me, did the Whats app hack, Facebook, emails and even some things i shouldn't mention here, am talking of bank transfers and credit cards. Basically all i needed although his fee was on the high side but who cares, i'll rather pay well for the right thing than lose to cheats. i don't think its right to give his cell out like that but if you tell him you are from Michael he will definitely respond as he is a busy man so he selects who to respond to. Michael is the key to get his fast response or he might just read your mail and not reply. I hope my friends here get their problems solved either by the help of Scott or a real one not fake
ScottBurson 11y ago
I'm in the middle of reading a great book on geoengineering, Oliver Morton's The Planet Remade. Engagingly written and comprehensive; I recommend it highly. From the introduction: If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about three or four nuclear power plants a year, and retires old ones almost as quickly). Morton goes on to make the case for considering geoengineering, and for ramping up research on it. I don't know that I can do justice to the argument in a short summary, but one key point is the extent to which we're already doing it in an unplanned way. We all know about all the carbon dioxide we're putting in the air, along with other greenhouse gases -- nitrous oxide, for example -- but there's also the massive amount of reactive nitrogen we're creating, mostly for fertilizer. We all know about the massive local environmental effects of burning coal, but there's also some evidence that coal smoke has a cooling effect; changing from coal to nuclear may actually worsen warming in the short run. I was favorably disposed toward geoengineering before I got the book, so I can't claim to have been won over, but there was an awful lot I didn't know about it -- for example, how the various approaches would affect different regions of the globe differently, and how those effects could be adjusted to some extent, though not optimized for everyone simultaneously. Again, I highly recommend it.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about three or four nuclear power plants a year, and retires old ones almost as quickly). That's extremely hard to believe. Does he show the math?
  - ScottBurson 11y ago
    No, but I see on Wikipedia: In 2007 there were over 50,000 active coal plants worldwide and this number is expected to grow. [0] One nuke plant a week for 20 years would be 1000 plants. So the numbers don't seem unreasonable at all. That's not necessarily an argument that we shouldn't build more nuclear power capacity; only that we can't expect it to be the entire solution to global warming this century. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station#Environmental_impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station#Envi...
Pietertje 11y ago
Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass. A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-case scenario - energy will be stored in land/water as well, dissipation etc. - but still. Compared to fossil fuels, the plus side is you do not produce any greenhouse gases. However, I'm unsure which contributes more to global warming, could well be the former is negligible. Would love to hear an expert on this.
- andbberger 11y ago
  All energy sources carry the same essential thermodynamic burden. The difference is that nuclear doesn't also emit green house gases.
  - Pietertje 11y ago
    I highly doubt your first statement. Solar, for example, is no burden since if you do nothing it would land on earth anyway. For fossil fuels you release chemically stored energy as heat. The same applies for nuclear power. Which is an additional thermodynamic burden...
    - danbruc 11y ago
      That is true but human energy consumption is still insignificant compared to solar radiation - about a factor of 10,000 according to numbers I just looked up on Wikipedia - so even if we get everything from fossil sources that doesn't make a big dent in the energy balance.
- hguant 11y ago
  Greenhouse gases matter. The heat generated by power plants etc is irrelevant. Venus and Earth receive (very roughly) similar amounts of sunlight. They generate similar amounts of heat through radioactive decay in their core. The reason Venus is a hellhole and Earth is, well, Earth - greenhouse gasses.
bjt 11y ago
While I agree with the basic argument that we are hurting ourselves with an irrational aversion to nuclear power, some of Thiel's arguments seem weak or overreaching. The worst, in my estimation, is this: > Critics often point to the Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union as an even more terrifying warning against nuclear power, but that accident was a direct result of both a faulty design and the operators’ incompetence. Fewer than 50 people were reported to have died at Chernobyl; by contrast, the American Lung Association estimates that smoke from coal-fired power plants kills about 13,000 people every year. So on one hand you take the failure of a single nuclear plant, and count the direct, local deaths from that. On the other hand you take the sum of all coal-fired plants, and count the number of global, indirect deaths from them. OF COURSE the latter number is going to be bigger. The comparison is dishonest.
- another-one-off 11y ago
  It is an apples to oranges comparison, but wouldn't the honest comparison would come out about the same? My memory is that nuclear emissions from a coal fired station are comparable to a nuclear station, and nuclear doesn't produce smoke. So nuclear should still come out 13,000 people/year ahead.
  - foobarian 11y ago
    The problem with the coal vs. nuclear pollution impact is the liability structure. With a coal death, there is no easily identifiable responsible entity. With a nuclear accident, there would be a line around the courthouse: irradiated and condemned properties, cleanup costs, claimed deaths, etc. This cost translates to insurance and regulatory overhead. It just sucks that coal impact is so anonymized by all pumping into a shared atmosphere. Unless there can be a successful class action against the whole industry that won't change.
- lappa 11y ago
  A bit more than 50 >The risk projections suggest that by now Chernobyl may have caused about 1000 cases of thyroid cancer and 4000 cases of other cancers in Europe, representing about 0.01% of all incident cancers since the accident. Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident http://allthingsnuclear.org/lgronlund/how-many-cancers-did-chernobyl-really-cause-updated http://allthingsnuclear.org/lgronlund/how-many-cancers-did-c...?
tomohawk 11y ago
Any technology that requires political machinations to work is a non-starter. Nuclear technology's achille's heel is waste disposal. Sure, there are technical aspects to it, but it's mostly a problem in the political realm. The Feds were supposed provide a disposal mechanism, but there's apparently no political will to do that any longer. Instead, we have nuclear waste piling up all over the place at facilities that were never meant to store it. As soon as we have a natural disaster at one of these facilities, it will be like fukushima all over again. Such a shame.
ilaksh 11y ago
That equation changes when you move to a sustainable society. Much smaller residential plots in suburban/rural areas, cut out commuting by 60 plus percent by using Skype etc. Move to much smaller single passenger electric vehicles (300 pounds instead of 3000). Switch to high-tech (or low tech) efficient ultra-local food production, like potato bags on every roof, a tilapia farm on every corner. Solar on every roof, transparent VAWT on every roof. Solar roadways. Ground-source heat pump and net zero airtight ventilated homes. Wide deployment of residential energy storage. We can literally make society 5-10 times more efficient. https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage
- jensen123 11y ago
  I love this idea of tiny houses and 1-person vehicles! I'm currently living in an apartment and using public transportation, which of course is what many environmentalists are recommending. However, this is not a good solution because of the noise from neighbors. I'm currently tempted to move to a house and get a car, but of course, that is not good for the environment. The tiny house and tiny car idea solves this!
  - ilaksh 11y ago
    Right, thanks for pointing that out. I have had similar thoughts about public transportation and apartments which is part of what lead to this idea. They could be human powered or maybe self-driving transport pods, much more efficient than cars or buses. Also, airtight construction helps a lot with noise pollution from neighbors.
indifferentalex 11y ago
As much as the causes at Chernobyl can be attributed to the poor quality of the systems installed and of incorrect safety procedures, it shows that bad things can indeed happen, simply saying that they were caused by incompetence doesn't prove nuclear power is safe. Likewise stating that "fewer than 50" died at Chernobyl, while possibly true (referring to the immediate area), is a severe understatement of the crisis. All european countries were forced to react, radioactive dust sent up into the air by the fires was carried across the continent and whole crops had to be destroyed. The low figure of consequential deaths is thanks to a large and costly effort to prevent further problems. Much like Fukushima. This article is reverse fear mongering and it is just as wrong, nuclear energy is without a doubt an incredible resource and the pros objectively outway the cons compared to fossil fuels, and the claim that the gap left open by insufficient adoption of renewable energy can be closed by nuclear in the meantime is a valid one, downplaying the dangers of nuclear however is not the correct way to move forward.

258 points by markmassie 11y ago

The key problem in my mind is the failure of project management in building reactors. If they said it was going to take 2 years and 1 billion dollars and it stretched out to 3 years and $1.5 billion that is one thing. Back in the 1970s it was more like 2 years stretches to 9 years and $15 billion and you could blame union workers who never did nuclear work before, the no nukes, high interest rates, etc. The industry was supposed to come out with standardized reactor types like the EPR, and we have low interest rates, little active opposition to nuclear power, and projects like Olkiluoto-3 are still 9 years late. Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule. The fear of Fukushima is just icing on that cake.

Amorymeltzer 11y ago
Absolutely, but don't discount the FUD. Much as people fear an airplane crash more than a car crash, the prospect of nuclear power is far more terrifying to most than just another coal plant. It's not enough that the coal plant is orders of magnitude more deadly, it's the perception. Even the image the NYT used will convey to many a disregard for life, pumping harmful radiation into our environment, rather than merely a large cooling tower releasing water vapor. Fear is a VERY big deal. And once you get past fear and perception, there's NIMBYism.
- legulere 11y ago
  I think the big fear of nuclear power is because we don't know how to handle catastrophic risks. With coal power you will have a few dead mine workers. It's only mine workers that are affected and they have a definite risk in front of their eyes. You can rise the worker protection regulations for making this safer. You have the problem of air pollution through fine particles and sulfur. You can solve this with filters. The CO2 Problem isn't caused by one coal plant alone, so that problem is ignored. With nuclear on the other hand you have a history of failures that were tried to be covered up, while being told that nuclear is 100% safe. The failures were unforeseen and led to a few catastrophes we weren't prepared to handle. We're more scared of the things we don't know than of the things we do know. And then the effects were very far reaching. The area around Chernobyl still isn't habitable today, more than half of the boars caught in Bavaria still aren't deemed safe for consumption because of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl. Fukushima and Chernobyl had a huge effect on the people living around them and both were in relatively low populated areas, so effects at a catastrophe in a nuclear power plant more near to a big city would be far greater. I'm not saying that nuclear power is creating more damage than coal power, I just want to show why people fear nuclear power more.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    Why is it that Fukushima isn't an argument _for_ nuclear power, considering the plant even closer to the epicenter came through with flying colors? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
    - i1568658 11y ago
      From the article :P >Following the tsunami two to three hundred homeless residents of the town who lost their homes to the tsunami took refuge in the Onagawa nuclear plant's gymnasium, as the reactor complex was the only safe area in the vicinity to evacuate to, with the reactor operators supplying food and blankets to the needy.
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    > while being told that nuclear is 100% safe When were you ever told that? I've been hearing all my life how risky and scary nuclear power is.
  - electronvolt 11y ago
    I think the fundamental thing is that it is not a rational fear--nuclear is associated with bombs that flatten cities and radiation is, to many people, a simply scary unknown that they can't touch, smell, or see, but which might kill them. (Many of the people I've met who were against nuclear power didn't really emotionally understand radiation as something you get some of every day anyways--it's a bogeyman that gives you either cancer or superpowers.) Smoke/smog, in comparison, is something you can see and can expect to interact with daily if you're in a city. Despite the fact that it's much more dangerous, people don't perceive it as such.
  - Symmetry 11y ago
    You can filter the output of coal plants and that does help a lot. In the US coal only kills 15 people per terawatt-hour compared to 150 in China. But a coal plant generating as much power as Fukushima did will still tend to kill about 20 people even with safer US style plants. If you add up all the coal power in the US that's about 20,000 deaths per year. More or less the same order of magnitude as the damage from Chernobyl. But of course that's normal and doesn't make the news.
TheLogothete 11y ago
It is simply not possible. They know that, so they lie.
masklinn 11y ago
Nuclear plants are also central points of failures, the plant itself needn't even fail, just the electrical distribution from it and you lose 1~6GW. If they pan out, Small Modular Reactors (30MW~300MW range) seem like they could solve many of the issues with existing "large" nuke plants: the sealed core can be built on largeish assembly lines (similar to airliners in size) then floated, flown or driven to site, more units would mean more opportunities for automation and economies of scale instead the more pharaonic and necessarily more unique existing systems. This would be further boosted by the inherent flexibility of SMR: they can be kept mobile (for emergencies, temporary setting, interim power, etc…) e.g. Rosatom's Akademik Lomonosov barge, which should have a total capacity of 300MWt/70MWe.
- jasonwatkinspdx 11y ago
  There's a great deal of engineering/economic appeal to factory made modular reactors, but the weak point is you'd need a cultural shift for people to not be freaked out about having lots of small reactors everywhere.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    Cultural shifts are funcion of political will.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    On the one hand yes, on the other hand you don't need prime estate locations (coastal and riverside) to cool down SMRs and they're way less noticeable than hectares of nuke plants, so to an extent your can put them everywhere yet not in anyone's backyard.
  - vlehto 11y ago
    Also political shift is needed. Currently in Finland you need parliament permission for any new nuclear plant. If you are likely to get only one permission every 8 years, you have to go big to have any impact. Which seems to be the reason why Olkiluoto-3 got so big. Which seems to have contributed to the schedule fuck ups from day one. For example they had the concrete heating too much while curing when casting the floor. This was because the floor slab was lot bigger than engineers we're used to cast. Yes, they should have taken that into account. But the point is it's harder to take all things into account when you are going to unexplored territory.
pdonis 11y ago
> Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule. The lack of predictability comes from lawsuits, not technical problems in construction. Plants that were completed and ready to go online on schedule were stopped at the last minute by lawsuits, and in many cases were never started up.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  Yes and no. Definitely there have been places and times where people opposed to nuclear energy have filed lawsuits against nuclear power plant construction. On the other hand many times the trouble is between the constructing company, the electric company and maybe regulators and it usually is in the form of a lawsuit because this is how you decide who owes who money in the end.

cft 11y ago

I am afraid that the real goal of at least 50% of climate change activists is not clean energy, but the disruption of current elite and wealth redistribution by taxation vs value creation. It is because of these 50% the realistic proposals like Peter's will not fly politically.

Retra 11y ago
There are better ways to redistribute wealth. And I find your ">50%" statistic to be unreasonably exaggerated.
chaz72 11y ago
Wait, what? Why do you think climate change is about wealth redistribution? Aren't you concerned at how much it will cost to protect all the cities on our coastlines if climate change is right? That's sure going to redistribute some wealth if we do nothing.
- draaglom 11y ago
  While the overall issue is not about redistribution in the traditional sense, the battle lines often are. On the one hand you have capitalist-optimists like Thiel who basically focus on increasing energy output from non-carbon sources (which tends to mean: nuclear). The effect is to maintain the status quo (everyone can keep on using energy without worrying about depleting a public good). On the other hand you have the left focusing mainly on limiting / reducing carbon emissions. That is - in my opinion - an inherently redistributive project: when you allocate carbon emission allowances, you're effectively allocating production allowances. Edit: specifically, it's redistributive on a country level: poorer countries would quite like to have a big carbon budget to burn while their economies grow.
  - chaz72 11y ago
    Was it a "redistribution of wealth" when paint makers were told "hey, stop making paints with lead in them, people are getting hurt"? If it was, was that a bad thing? I would argue it was sure inconvenient for paint companies but a net gain to society. Perhaps some level of funding should be given to these companies as we take their rights away - and perhaps not, depending on how foreseeable and expensive their issues were - but the fact is, sometimes we as a society need to force them to make changes. To my mind, it's not redistribution because the point is not to take their income away, the point is that it's time to stop. Yes, that will have an effect on their income. Not doing it will have a much higher dollar cost, and the company won't pay it directly but the country sure will.

squozzer 11y ago

Forgive my skepticism, but Mr. Thiel did not offer to live near a reactor. For someone with his obvious intelligence, his oversight could not have been accidental. Does he fear the radiation or the decline in property value? When a robber baron like Dale Carnegie wanted people to believe in his steel bridges, he staked his life and reputation and walked across the damned bridge. Another major risk not mentioned by Mr. Thiel is a financial one, as it seems every nuclear project in the West at least has become a boondoggle. Even the project a few hours from my house - Plant Vogtle - where the state legislature generously transferred the financial risk to the taxpayers and customers - is behind schedule and over budget. Until nuclear cheerleaders develop a taste for risk that will not be borne by others, maybe we should reduce consumption. If Las Vegas were to shut off 90% of its' outdoor lighting and fountain displays, would everyone there go blind and lose their enthusiasm to play slots? I doubt it. Just a thought.

incepted 11y ago
> Forgive my skepticism, but Mr. Thiel did not offer to live near a reactor. Living next to a coal plant is even more dangerous than a nuclear plant, are you suggesting we should ban both plants based on these considerations?
- ommunist 11y ago
  Actually the late USSR had a technology of small fully automatic single loaded reactors for long-term supply of electric power in middle-size cities. Fully sealed unit. After use (decades) - you just cover it with a lawn. But back then the USSR had enough fuel in production. Right now the know how in Russia is lost and nuclear fuel generation is very weak. Also HMD generator by Oleg Gritckevitch was very promising. The town in Armenia was fed by electricity generated by a small prototype in 1988.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    What happened to it during the earthquake?

T-A 11y ago

> We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. Is this really true? In Lazard's 2014 comparison of total cost per MWh, both wind and solar beat coal and nuclear [1]. Costs have fallen so much that it's becoming hard to justify continued subsidies [2]. [1] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-energy/ http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene... [2] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-secretary-solar-and-wind-energy-cost-competitive-without-subsidies.html http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-secreta...

pilom 11y ago
The problem is scale. Here is a really good analysis of renewable resources in the UK: http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ Conclusion: The UK doesn't receive enough sunlight or have enough wind/waves/tidal pools/land to grow food, power cars (of any kind) and meet other energy needs. The UK can never get all of their energy carbon free without nuclear or importing power. The US is in a better place because of solar in the Southwest but we still don't have the technology/infrastructure to transport all of that power.
- ommunist 11y ago
  The UK relatively recently backed full cycle of Uranium fuel production in Kazakhstan. Tony Blair became personal advisor to Nazarbayev. And I ve heard, the UK is going to build new nuclear plants. Its supply is secured and the know how will be both French and USSR (Kazakhstan). Those interested can ask themselves, what Atomic Kitten was doing in Astana in 2010?
  - guelo 11y ago
    Are you suggesting that UK is going transport electricity from Kazakhstan back to the UK? presumably via Russia? If so, that seems like a really bad plan.
    - ommunist 11y ago

T-A 11y ago

jkot 11y ago

Coal plan produces more radioactivity than nuclear plant. There are radioactive elements in coal and they get released in smoke into atmosphere.

bro-stick 11y ago
This old one again. As someone who's actually worked in the nuclear energy industry, it's a common but wrong refrain... diffusion of petrochem radioactivity is much less of a liability than the very real, concentrated dangers of radioisotopes, even factoring in all of the other many negatives of coal.
- jkot 11y ago
  Negative externalities? It would be great to concentrate all pollution from ocean, land and air into single place. And I do not mean CO2.

etaty 11y ago

I like how Thiel writes his sentences about safety, to avoid saying anything wrong. I invite him to spend the rest of his life in Chernobyl or Fukushima. Personally nuclear energy is dangerous because when it goes wrong the result is really bad. And the source of error is infinite, human, software, design, terrorists, war, civil plane, drone ...

wstrange 11y ago
Hydro Dams cause immense catastrophe when they fail. They have killed far more people than Nuclear power. According to Wikipedia, the failure of a single Dam in China caused: 26,000 dead from flooding, 145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics, 11 million homeless All forms of power generation have risks and tradeoffs. We should use the best available science to evaluate those risks - not emotion and fear. The future of our planet depends on it.
- witty_username 11y ago
  The planet will survive well. We'll be screwed.
vertak 11y ago
0 people have died in the US as a result nuclear power. Chernobyl failed because its operators turned off the emergency failsafe system in order to do a test of the reactor, which was also botched. Look up the Linear no-threshold model of radiation. There's no statistically significant evidence that radiation exposure of even 1000 millirem (average US dosage is 360 millrem, and 2/3rds of that is from natural radiation such as the sun and rocks) has negative health effects. Also what do you even mean by "the source of error is infinite"? All of those sources of error apply to coal and gas plants, except that nuclear power plants are so much more tightly regulated and protected that these "sources of error" are far more likely to affect coal/gas plants than nuclear. Check out this information where they crash an F-4 into 10 feet of concrete, reducing the F-4 to dust. Nuclear power reactor containment shields have more than 10 feet of concrete, and even so have procedures for automatic shutdown of the fission process that don't rely on electricity (eg gravity). FUD such as this is a large part of why we do not have fission today.

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

YC has two nuclear start ups: Helion and UPower. How are they doing? What is their path to prominence?

danbruc 11y ago

Why not simply outlaw nonrenewable energy sources over ten years or so? Problem solved. EDIT: Would someone care to point out why that is not an valid option? Lack of technological viability? Lack of energy storage technology or capacity? Ideological resentment against a political over an economical driving force for the change?

bjacobel 11y ago
> simply Browse the FEC website for contributions from oil & coal companies to 2016 candidates. That's why it won't be simple.
- danbruc 11y ago
  I am presupposing that you really want to get rid of fossil fuels. If the people making the decisions prefer to keep oil and coal in business for whatever reasons than the discussion is pretty pointless to begin with, no matter what alternative you are discussing.
chc 11y ago
This reminds me of the episode of Star Trek where Data asks Q how to solve a problem and Q answers, "Simple — change the gravitational constant of the universe."

namespace 11y ago

I think that recent initiative by YC under sam to invest in startups that may herald breakthroughs in sustainable fission is a great start. This should lead to a healthy competition which so far has been missing since it used to be a government only venture for a long time.

jacquesm 11y ago
I'm not convinced that YC is the vehicle through which the next major breakthrough in the field of energy generation will be conceived. YC companies that do relatively tiny hardware projects tend to fail at a rate much higher than their software siblings and the kind of investment required to get a next generation nuclear reactor from the drawingboard to a reality is not usually associated with start-up accelerators. I know they're funding two start-ups in this domain but I don't believe this is a path that will work out. On the other hand, I've been wrong in the past on other predictions so feel free to ignore me :)

ommunist 11y ago

Currently only France, US, and Russia can build reactors for energy, but these are using U or Pu in different flavours. This fuel is hard to get. China can't afford that kind of fuel in quanities it will need. This is why China backs breakthrough research in Th fission, delivered by Norway. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

NumberCruncher 11y ago
We have 4x more Thorium on Earth than Uran, 1 gram Thorium gives 3x more energy than Uran and has a shorter halft-time, this means it produces less radioctive waste. The problem is, that a Th-plant can not be used to produce nuclear weapons. That shows that we have a political crisis and not an energy crisis. If Japan wouldn't be afraid to build his nuclear plants on the west-coast (protected from tsunamis but easy to get hit by a chinese rocket), Fokushima still would be a nice place to live.
- ommunist 11y ago
  Well, U is 10x more common element than Sn. Not just sny U isotope is good for fuel. But you are not quite right. Thorium fuels can breed fissile uranium-233 to be used in various kinds of nuclear reactors.

Zigurd 11y ago

After reading this, I still have mixed feelings about nuclear. On the one hand, we have an overhang of old-tech nuclear power that is dangerously obsolete, poorly run, and insanely expensive to build, run, and clean up after. On the other hand, new-tech nuclear looks very attractive. The argument gets circular, because new-tech nuclear is speculative. Lots of old-tech nuclear should get shut before we get another Fukushima. So despite the theoretical ability to scale up faster, does nuclear really have an advantage over renewables?

lumberjack 11y ago

Nuclear Fission is not a plug and play solution either. Unlike other possible solutions like a breakthrough in mass energy storage, we know that fission could satisfy our needs. But it will still require some 30 years of investment to figure out the new breed of reactors and where to source the fuel from.

bro-stick 11y ago
It can be if it's standardized as Taylor Wilson suggests... build uniform, low pressure, high temp molten salt reactors in a factory.
masklinn 11y ago
> Nuclear Fission is not a plug and play solution either. That's actually the intent of SMRs. Small-ish reactor (30~300MWe) assembly plants, then ship them wherever they're needed/desired, and either bury them or keep them mobile depending on the purpose. When the fuel load is expended (10~30 years, similar to nuclear subs and ships) you just replace the whole reactor assembly, pop a new one in, and send the old one for recycling and disposal.

bro-stick 11y ago

Thiel skips the fact that Chernobyl is uninhabitable for thousands of years (save bloggers on motorcycles), all of the dispossessed persons and extra 40k+ cancer deaths. Plus Fukashima. Big PWR/BWR reactors will always be too inherently dangerous because of high pressures and too expensive to build, regulate and insure (in the US, without insurance and NRC approval, there is no project). And the risks of dual-purpose reactors and long-term storage for large amounts of waste. Taylor Wilson's TED talk on low pressure, molten salt, modular reactors built as standardized modules with a scram / recycle pool underneath and made in a factory is one of the best ways to go. Smaller, isolated, modular setups limit failure risk compared to a single reactor having a big, explosive meltdown. The other one is thermal generation using chip-like technology with tiny amounts of radiological material isolated in individual "wells" making it safer, more efficient and scalable for many types of battery and generation use-cases. I think we can do fission safer, cheaper and smarter, responsibly, but repeating the same failures by taking the same risks without learning from the past is inherently dumb. Disclaimer: nuclear energy consultancy alum

ommunist 11y ago
Bro, I worked in Gomel for 4 years and spent 2 field seasons in 'Chernobyl radioactive wasteland'. Relax, life is ok there. Just do not eat local apple seeds in the 80+ Ci/sq km zone. Pulp for cider is OK.

shaunrussell 11y ago

It is a shame that we went all in on uranium reactor technology (so we could make bombs) instead of further pursuing liquid fluoride thorium reactors, which are much safer. Kirk Sorensen at http://flibe-energy.com/ http://flibe-energy.com/ has some great talks about this. I highly recommend watching some of his content on youtube. This is a good place to start: https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternati...

blisterpeanuts 11y ago

Where are we at with nuclear fusion? At this time, the only promising progress I know of is happening at Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks[1] where they are developing a truck-sized 100 MW [corrected from Mhz] power plant in an incremental, iterative fashion and claiming to have something operational by 2020. As regards solar and other "clean" alternatives, there exists vast potential for reducing daytime electric grid load by throwing a few panels on residential and office rooftops. Why don't more people do it? As the cost of panels plummets, the payoff time is decreasing and ROI over time is increasing. A whole industry of solar panel leasing has sprung up, whereby residential home owners let an installer put in the panels for free, then pay a discounted electric rate. Not exactly like going off-grid, but it does have the same effect of reducing demand for coal/oil/gas generated power. I'm envisioning future new home developments where every house comes with solar pre-installed. No decisions to make; the cost is baked in (so to speak) and you get a home that will incur minimal electric bills. I don't see a government role in all of these initiatives, which are market driven. People want green energy these days; it's become a fad. Almost gone are the days when homeowners associations sue a member for putting "ugly" solar panels on his roof. 1. http://www.eweek.com/news/lockheed-martin-claims-sustainable-fusion-is-within-its-grasp.html http://www.eweek.com/news/lockheed-martin-claims-sustainable...

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jessriedel 11y ago
All things considered, ITER is much more likely to lead to commercial fusion.
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macco 11y ago

I have a feeling Mr Thiel didn't cosider important facts. Nuclear energy is highly deficient, building nuclear plants uses much more energy and concrete (bad for the environment) and you have to store nuclear waste. I know Thiel is a long term thinker, but maybe Kaynes view is also important.

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nova22033 11y ago

In 1949 the federal government built a test facility at Idaho National Laboratory to study and evaluate new nuclear reactor designs. We owe our nuclear power industry to the foresight of those New Dealers, and we need their openness to innovation again today. Thiel is a self-described conservative libertarian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Political_activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Political_activiti...

jessaustin 11y ago
My grandfather died with multiple cancers plus pulmonary fibrosis caused by multiple exposures he received while working in DoE facilities in the early-mid 1950s. In those facilities there were basically no safety procedures. Safe nuclear power was not a goal; more nuclear weapons was the goal. It's no surprise that TFA exaggerates the "foresight" of the damned "New Dealers". They were just like Thiel is, looking to make bank off a public that's not always paying attention. He will feel no more guilt about it than I do for driving on public highways.
- ams6110 11y ago
  I'm sorry for your grandfather but what does that have to do with anything happening today? You think safety standards and understanding of risks are still the same today as in the 1950s?
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Perhaps it's a small point, but I wished to counter TFA's false claim that "nuclear New Dealers" possessed any admirable sort of foresight. Do you think the publicly-stated level of safety standards is less exaggerated today than it was back then?

mronge 11y ago

How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels). Is that not feasible? https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187 https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187

Gravityloss 11y ago
US has lots of sunny areas with little people, agriculture or wildlife, but UK doesn't. Many European countries are dense and cloudy. It can still help.
- nickhalfasleep 11y ago
  I'm surprised they don't invest in production just south in North Africa, it would be pretty trivial to lay cables across to Gibraltar. They would of course have to do it with a sense of economic fairness and fairly pay the countries in money and technology / education transfer.
  - T-A 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
  - Gravityloss 11y ago
    It's quite unstable politically. Spain might be a better bet. On the other hand, maybe one could just move people to Spain and avoid this whole electricity transportation mess.
beefman 11y ago
It's not feasible, no. The "reasonable area" is on the order of all the concrete in the world. You have to duplicate civilization but with precision electronic devices instead of stone.[1] Musk is, unfortunately, not thinking outside his prejudices on the subject of energy systems. In all fairness, this is very common. Discourse on energy systems in our culture is closer to religion than engineering. [1] http://lumma.org/energy/EnergyLCA.html http://lumma.org/energy/EnergyLCA.html

dfar1 11y ago

Coincidence that this article is released at the same time as the youtube/google petition campaign?

jensen123 11y ago

He does not mention bombs. I'm certainly no expert here, but I think I read in the book An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore a long time ago, that if you have the ability to build a nuclear power plant, then building a bomb is not very hard. I'm not terribly keen on living in a world where most of the countries in Africa, the Middle East etc. are able to build nuclear bombs.

pjscott 11y ago
Having nuclear reactors doesn't mean your country can build them. For most countries it would almost certainly be cheaper to just import them from whoever offers you the best deal. Countries with nuclear reactor export industries include China, Russia, France, and South Korea, so there's some decent competition here.
- jensen123 11y ago
  You are probably correct that it would be cheaper to purchase nuclear power plants from others, rather than developing yourself. I'm thinking though - maybe many countries would be reluctant to rely on foreigners for something this essential.
beefman 11y ago
It's actually easier to build production reactors (for weapons) than power reactors.

Michael_s45543 11y ago

Its funny how we have to fall for these fake hackers all the time before we either give up or find the real one. I wont allow others fall for the fakes i did, paid several times with no results till my sister in law found out and opened up to me she has a private investigator which i later found out was a hacker Scott Edwards greyhatcreator001@gmail.com. He brought life back to me, did the Whats app hack, Facebook, emails and even some things i shouldn't mention here, am talking of bank transfers and credit cards. Basically all i needed although his fee was on the high side but who cares, i'll rather pay well for the right thing than lose to cheats. i don't think its right to give his cell out like that but if you tell him you are from Michael he will definitely respond as he is a busy man so he selects who to respond to. Michael is the key to get his fast response or he might just read your mail and not reply. I hope my friends here get their problems solved either by the help of Scott or a real one not fake

ScottBurson 11y ago

I'm in the middle of reading a great book on geoengineering, Oliver Morton's The Planet Remade. Engagingly written and comprehensive; I recommend it highly. From the introduction: If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about three or four nuclear power plants a year, and retires old ones almost as quickly). Morton goes on to make the case for considering geoengineering, and for ramping up research on it. I don't know that I can do justice to the argument in a short summary, but one key point is the extent to which we're already doing it in an unplanned way. We all know about all the carbon dioxide we're putting in the air, along with other greenhouse gases -- nitrous oxide, for example -- but there's also the massive amount of reactive nitrogen we're creating, mostly for fertilizer. We all know about the massive local environmental effects of burning coal, but there's also some evidence that coal smoke has a cooling effect; changing from coal to nuclear may actually worsen warming in the short run. I was favorably disposed toward geoengineering before I got the book, so I can't claim to have been won over, but there was an awful lot I didn't know about it -- for example, how the various approaches would affect different regions of the globe differently, and how those effects could be adjusted to some extent, though not optimized for everyone simultaneously. Again, I highly recommend it.

CamperBob2 11y ago
If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about three or four nuclear power plants a year, and retires old ones almost as quickly). That's extremely hard to believe. Does he show the math?
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  No, but I see on Wikipedia: In 2007 there were over 50,000 active coal plants worldwide and this number is expected to grow. [0] One nuke plant a week for 20 years would be 1000 plants. So the numbers don't seem unreasonable at all. That's not necessarily an argument that we shouldn't build more nuclear power capacity; only that we can't expect it to be the entire solution to global warming this century. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station#Environmental_impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station#Envi...

Pietertje 11y ago

Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass. A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-case scenario - energy will be stored in land/water as well, dissipation etc. - but still. Compared to fossil fuels, the plus side is you do not produce any greenhouse gases. However, I'm unsure which contributes more to global warming, could well be the former is negligible. Would love to hear an expert on this.

andbberger 11y ago
All energy sources carry the same essential thermodynamic burden. The difference is that nuclear doesn't also emit green house gases.
- Pietertje 11y ago
  I highly doubt your first statement. Solar, for example, is no burden since if you do nothing it would land on earth anyway. For fossil fuels you release chemically stored energy as heat. The same applies for nuclear power. Which is an additional thermodynamic burden...
  - danbruc 11y ago
    That is true but human energy consumption is still insignificant compared to solar radiation - about a factor of 10,000 according to numbers I just looked up on Wikipedia - so even if we get everything from fossil sources that doesn't make a big dent in the energy balance.
hguant 11y ago
Greenhouse gases matter. The heat generated by power plants etc is irrelevant. Venus and Earth receive (very roughly) similar amounts of sunlight. They generate similar amounts of heat through radioactive decay in their core. The reason Venus is a hellhole and Earth is, well, Earth - greenhouse gasses.

bjt 11y ago

While I agree with the basic argument that we are hurting ourselves with an irrational aversion to nuclear power, some of Thiel's arguments seem weak or overreaching. The worst, in my estimation, is this: > Critics often point to the Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union as an even more terrifying warning against nuclear power, but that accident was a direct result of both a faulty design and the operators’ incompetence. Fewer than 50 people were reported to have died at Chernobyl; by contrast, the American Lung Association estimates that smoke from coal-fired power plants kills about 13,000 people every year. So on one hand you take the failure of a single nuclear plant, and count the direct, local deaths from that. On the other hand you take the sum of all coal-fired plants, and count the number of global, indirect deaths from them. OF COURSE the latter number is going to be bigger. The comparison is dishonest.

another-one-off 11y ago
It is an apples to oranges comparison, but wouldn't the honest comparison would come out about the same? My memory is that nuclear emissions from a coal fired station are comparable to a nuclear station, and nuclear doesn't produce smoke. So nuclear should still come out 13,000 people/year ahead.
- foobarian 11y ago
  The problem with the coal vs. nuclear pollution impact is the liability structure. With a coal death, there is no easily identifiable responsible entity. With a nuclear accident, there would be a line around the courthouse: irradiated and condemned properties, cleanup costs, claimed deaths, etc. This cost translates to insurance and regulatory overhead. It just sucks that coal impact is so anonymized by all pumping into a shared atmosphere. Unless there can be a successful class action against the whole industry that won't change.
lappa 11y ago
A bit more than 50 >The risk projections suggest that by now Chernobyl may have caused about 1000 cases of thyroid cancer and 4000 cases of other cancers in Europe, representing about 0.01% of all incident cancers since the accident. Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident http://allthingsnuclear.org/lgronlund/how-many-cancers-did-chernobyl-really-cause-updated http://allthingsnuclear.org/lgronlund/how-many-cancers-did-c...?

tomohawk 11y ago

Any technology that requires political machinations to work is a non-starter. Nuclear technology's achille's heel is waste disposal. Sure, there are technical aspects to it, but it's mostly a problem in the political realm. The Feds were supposed provide a disposal mechanism, but there's apparently no political will to do that any longer. Instead, we have nuclear waste piling up all over the place at facilities that were never meant to store it. As soon as we have a natural disaster at one of these facilities, it will be like fukushima all over again. Such a shame.

ilaksh 11y ago

That equation changes when you move to a sustainable society. Much smaller residential plots in suburban/rural areas, cut out commuting by 60 plus percent by using Skype etc. Move to much smaller single passenger electric vehicles (300 pounds instead of 3000). Switch to high-tech (or low tech) efficient ultra-local food production, like potato bags on every roof, a tilapia farm on every corner. Solar on every roof, transparent VAWT on every roof. Solar roadways. Ground-source heat pump and net zero airtight ventilated homes. Wide deployment of residential energy storage. We can literally make society 5-10 times more efficient. https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage

jensen123 11y ago
I love this idea of tiny houses and 1-person vehicles! I'm currently living in an apartment and using public transportation, which of course is what many environmentalists are recommending. However, this is not a good solution because of the noise from neighbors. I'm currently tempted to move to a house and get a car, but of course, that is not good for the environment. The tiny house and tiny car idea solves this!
- ilaksh 11y ago
  Right, thanks for pointing that out. I have had similar thoughts about public transportation and apartments which is part of what lead to this idea. They could be human powered or maybe self-driving transport pods, much more efficient than cars or buses. Also, airtight construction helps a lot with noise pollution from neighbors.

indifferentalex 11y ago

As much as the causes at Chernobyl can be attributed to the poor quality of the systems installed and of incorrect safety procedures, it shows that bad things can indeed happen, simply saying that they were caused by incompetence doesn't prove nuclear power is safe. Likewise stating that "fewer than 50" died at Chernobyl, while possibly true (referring to the immediate area), is a severe understatement of the crisis. All european countries were forced to react, radioactive dust sent up into the air by the fires was carried across the continent and whole crops had to be destroyed. The low figure of consequential deaths is thanks to a large and costly effort to prevent further problems. Much like Fukushima. This article is reverse fear mongering and it is just as wrong, nuclear energy is without a doubt an incredible resource and the pros objectively outway the cons compared to fossil fuels, and the claim that the gap left open by insufficient adoption of renewable energy can be closed by nuclear in the meantime is a valid one, downplaying the dangers of nuclear however is not the correct way to move forward.