14 ms·

How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment

137 points by yinso 10y ago

creshal 10y ago
Nuclear's inability to be both cheap and reliable is hurting it more. Once you add up all the costs for decommissioning old power plants and nuclear repositories (usually paid by the state, not the company owning the power plant), it becomes really uneconomical. Even compared to solar, nowadays.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  There have been far fewer accidents involving nuclear plants than fossil fuels, and even with those disasters the environmental impact is considerably less severe than running fossil fuel plants. The problem is that radiation is scary, no one cries about cancer rates and other stuff when you live 20 miles downwind from a coal power plant, but anytime there is even a slightly elevated radiation everyone freaks out.
- witty_username 10y ago
  How is nuclear not reliable? There's no dependence on other countries for fuel and no need for the sun or wind to be there.
  - deelowe 10y ago
    The op said CHEAP and RELIABLE. They kind of have to be reliable and as a result are very expensive.
Klasiaster 10y ago
And where does the uranium come from…? Nobody cares about the enviornmental and health issues in Niger etc.
- reacweb 10y ago
  The exploitation of uranium reduces the amount of radioactive materials in Niger (tongue in cheek).
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Recovered from tailing of existing precious metal mines. An its a differential measurement, not absolute, compare it against the damage being done by coal and oil mining.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- paulmd 10y ago
  Where does the lithium or neodymium come from? Those have to be mined too. > The Chinese Society of Rare Earths estimated that the refinement of one ton of rare earth metals results in 75 cubic meters of acidic wastewater and one ton of radioactive residue. The 1998 leak of hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive wastewater into a nearby lake was a contributing factor to Molycorp’s shutdown in 2002. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-will-we-have-enough/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-wi... And with those materials (and especially with coal) we're talking about entirely different scales of material. A couple dozen tonnes of uranium will run a reactor for a year. You need millions of tonnes of coal to produce an equivalent amount of power. As for where, the interesting thing about uranium is that it's pretty much everywhere. Nobody really prospects for it because it's not commercially valuable. Let's say you go prospecting, and you find a big deposit, then you spend a bunch of money starting up a mining operation. Who's going to buy mass quantities of your uranium? What do you do with it? Beyond nuclear activity and a few things that need super-dense weights for balance, nobody uses it for anything. Why would you even bother prospecting for it? Canada actually has larger feasibly-recoverable uranium reserves than Niger does. Russia has more than Canada. Australia has more than four times as much as Niger. The US has about half as much. And because it's not really something people go looking for, it's quite likely that there are other large deposits that nobody has found yet. http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reserves-in-the-world.html http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reser... This also has some interesting implications for the cost of nuclear fuel. Fuel costs are essentially rounding errors in the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant (14% including refining). This means that you can withstand massive flunctuations in fuel costs with very little impact on energy prices. There's actually a huge amount of uranium diluted in seawater. It currently costs twice as much to extract it as it does for terrestrial deposits, but that's a massive quantity if we needed it. About 4 billion tons total (vs 1.7 million tons of known deposits in Australia). And as you extract it, it'll leach from deep-sea rocks which contain about 100 trillion tons total. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#73ed390a46e2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-se...
sharemywin 10y ago
Interesting article about cyber attacks and proliferation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724697
gioele 10y ago
Redutio ad bombarolum: Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a nuclear power plant => possible irreparable ecological disaster. Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a solar plant => a few broken glasses to clean up. You choose. More seriously, nuclear power is the future of clean energy. But (future) nuclear fusion, not (current) nuclear fission.
- Cpoll 10y ago
  Someone runs coal and gas plants for several decades => Possible irreparable ecolo- Whoops, too late.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  Without quantifying "possible" and "irreparable" this is nothing but fearmongering. What would it take to accidentally or intentionally breach the containment vault on a reactor? What are the chances of that happening? Ignoring paranoid overreactions, what is the worst ecological damage that could be done? How is it "irreparable"?
- Kenji 10y ago
  Actually, as it stands, modern nuclear power plants should withstand such a plane attack.
- default_user 10y ago
  You may be joking, but seriously the possible irreparable damage is indeed an argument for me that gets insufficiently addressed by the pro nuclear people. Off course, more people die because of coal power plants and off course the net loss of land due to global warming is bigger compared to nuclear due to rising sea levels. But you can still go to those flooded places (albeit in a diving suite) and not get cancer... This is not the case for the Chernobyl area or Fukushima. This place is lost and cannot be used by humans for a long time. This cannot not happen when using coal power plants. Take a small country like Switzerland. We cannot afford to lose any land. You can do something about the death of people in the coal mining industry and you can also do something to reduce the atmospheric CO2. But once a nuclear accident happens the land is lost and nothing can be done about it. And this point is never addressed properly. I don't care about the probability, I care about the possibility.
legulere 10y ago
Nuclear power has three big issues: - Costs: In recent years it has become prohibitively expensive in the west to build nuclear reactors. Hinkley point C in the UK will have higher cost per MWh than wind or even photovoltaics. - Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all. - Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.
- antris 10y ago
  > Costs Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated. > Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little. You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to compare the data between different solutions. > Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes. Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#45914f7349d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
  - Symmetry 10y ago
    Well, the radiation from Fukushima is expected to cause a few hundred cancer cases[1] even if nobody died from acute radiation poisoning. And there likely would have been acute radiation poisoning deaths if there hadn't been an evacuation, though probably far less than the 1600 deaths the evacuation caused. But even with all that the ~1 trillionkWhr Fukushima generated over it's lifetime puts it's death toll well below the Forbes numbers for even a US coal plant at 10,000. On the other hand, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air gives coal mortality at 350 to 60[2] after converting to the same units which is well below Fukushima's death toll. [1]http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd... [2]http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml
pents90 10y ago
Some of the worst data presentation offenses are being committed in this talk, including graphs with misleading axes, trend lines derived from too few data points, and no acknowledgement of exponential trends, such as solar energy's adoption.
- berntb 10y ago
  Solar can certainly solve the energy problems for many countries, given that cheaper energy storage really is created. But not for e.g. northern Europe. There just is too little sun, especially in the winter. Also, it seems transports will be radically electrified the coming two decades, which will strongly increase the demand for electricity. I have no problems with environmentalists, my problem is that so many of them rather burn oil than build nuclear plants.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    Solving energy storage on that level is a non-trivial task. People don't understand just how energy-dense liquid and solid fuels are, but you essentially need geological-scale solutions in order to replace them (pumped-storage hydro or compressed-air in deep caverns). Those require specific geological formations and in the case of pumped-storage hydro has a pretty negative environmental footprint. You take a mountain range and you flood it and drain it on a daily basis, anything that used to be there is now underwater half the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... There is about 740 TWh of pumped-storage capacity available worldwide. If we gave every single US household a Tesla Powerwall (6.4 KWh) it would add up to 0.7936 TWh of capacity. If we keep the US average of 2.55 people per household and scale that up to the 7.4 billion people worldwide (2.89 billion households) that's still only 18.49 TWh. One per person worldwide, 44.8 TWh. Maybe double that if we give every person on the planet an electric car that's tied into the grid too. So if we gave every person a Powerwall, that's 6% of the presently extant pumped-storage capacity. And it's certainly not like we've made any sort of systematic attempt to fully exploit pumped storage, if we are doing worldwide solutions then we can go a lot farther on the other side of the equation too. Again, people vastly underestimate just how great liquid fuels are at storing energy in comparison to how shitty batteries are. We're talking about liquid fuels having more than 100x the energy density of a lithium-ion battery here. Batteries are convenient from a design perspective but they are wildly inefficient from a density perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density If anything, the advent of cheap clean electricity from nuclear should shift us toward synthetic liquid fuels for the energy density involved. There's nothing stopping you from pulling carbon out of the air and synthesizing it back into a long-chain hydrocarbon. It's also significantly cleaner than fossil-derived fuel. The Fischer-Tropsch process has been around for a century and there's lots of neat modern tweaks to it. It just takes a lot of energy (more than you get out of it obviously) but if we have lots of nuclear power then why not use it as a dense energy-store over batteries? It saves us a heck of a lot of rebuilding infrastructure too.
jlebrech 10y ago
the future of nuclear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
woliveirajr 10y ago
If I understood it correctly, one big problem is that some "clean" energy like solar and wind don't accumulate, i.e., it must be used as it is produced, and that doesn't scale well with spikes in consume during the night and so on. In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting. They would charge during the day and discharge during the night. The fact that they move around is a bonus :)
- dogma1138 10y ago
  >In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting. No, it really does not seem interesting, it seems like a terrible idea up there with solar freaking roadways. Car batteries have a completely different profile than long term storage batteries. Different voltage, charge and discharge cycles and drain and output attenuation. While Tesla does sell a "power wall" it has nothing to do with the car batteries they use, it's a completely different beast and even that is not optimised that well compared to dedicated household level battery storage. >They would charge during the day and discharge during the night. Nighttime electrical use is when it's at it's lowest, not to mention that why would you want your car to be discharging at night? You need to drive it in the morning, and if you want to save power you want to charge it at night not to add to the day time use so you want a full battery in the morning. >The fact that they move around is a bonus :) A bonus for what? having a system that is unpredictable/unreliable because the location, availability and density of your storage changes constantly?
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    Long term storage ? Since when is 12h drain/fill cycles "long term". The Tesla power wall is functionally identical to its car batteries, using the same Li ion battery tech. Optimisation is a matter of power profile programming, modern converters are very capable. What makes this tech more interesting is the fact that you could buy cheap electricity from the garage you park you car during the day (the one with the massive solar roof, close to cheap to maintain central transmission lines). A million grid-connected batteries represents a very resilient power system with interesting real-time energy markets on top. It is very interesting indeed.
- 10y ago
szemet 10y ago
According to the article 150 people die / trillionWh due to wind power. According to wikipedia 269 birds die / trillionWh due to wind power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#Birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... So the death rate for birds is nearly the same that for people? Seems strange. We can protect clueless birds better from the turbines, than the intelligent and educated working people up there??? Or something is wrong with either of the estimations...
- Tharre 10y ago
  You should actually read the wikipedia article. The 269 birds / TWh number stems from the lower estimation that between 20,000 and 573,000 birds per year are killed from wind turbines in the US.
  - bjelkeman-again 10y ago
    A tangent. If we worry about bird deaths there are more important factors to consider. https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml
- ekun 10y ago
  I assume that the human deaths are related to the toxicity involved with mining rare earth metals which are part of the magnets in the turbines.
  - szemet 10y ago
    Then they have to estimate how big is the market effect of the turbines on mining. It is very very hard, wonder can it be done well enough... For example: It may even happen (logically possible at least) that stopping building turbines brings down the price but not the demand (others will buy it anyway), and the net effect will be that due to lower prices miners close safer but more expensive mines and reopens cheaper but more dangerous mines. Once, I've read an estimation where they even calculated deaths due to iron mining, into wind energy deaths!!! They simply added the deaths that may occur mining the needed amount of iron.... Big big mistake, according to what I wrote earlier. Wing turbines hardly have that direct market effect on iron miners life. And because that study (I can't find it now) was sponsored by nuclear power organizations - guess the mistake was intentional - so it was not a "mistake" more like a disgusting ethical crime...
vg2001 10y ago
In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. It's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Just like 20 years ago fusion was only 15 years out.
_ph_ 10y ago
As a consequence of the Chernobyl incident, parts of western Europe are still contaminated. For example, it is still not entirely safe to eat mushrooms or wild boar from Bavaria. And that is not going to change in my life time. About a 1000km away from Chernobyl. I am a physicist and certainly do not have irrational fears of nuclear energy. But the risks and uses of nuclear have to be carefully considered. Looking at the prices paid for modern reactors being built right now, they seem to be quite more expensive than wind and solar installations.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yep. Some sheep farmers in Norway still have to monitor and medicate their herds because of the accident...
- hiddenkrypt 10y ago
  As a consequence of the Centralia incident[1], a portion of Pennsylvania, USA has been rendered practically uninhabitable since 1963. The fire may continue burning for up to two hundred and fifty years. It is not the only persistent coal mine fire in that state, let alone worldwide. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of the Chernobyl incident or the dangers of nuclear accidents, but to provide context. Even ignoring the energy balance which show nuclear as being safer per KWH than any other tech (including wind and solar), even including the disasters of fukushima and chernobyl, Nuclear has been safer and less damaging to the environment than coal. Wind and solar are great, I'd love to see more use and developments there. They can't compete with the energy density of coal, let alone atomics.
vg2001 10y ago
In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s. It a truth renewed every year. We may need gen IV fission for one reason, and one reason only: to get rid/at least reduce nuc waste and weapon plutonium. Lets get that shit off the planet, its as bad as CO2
- nailer 10y ago
  > In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s. This is fascinating. I was an 80's kid, and we learnt in primary school that by the year 2000, major cities will be underwater due to the greenhouse effect from CO2 emissions. Not that climate change isn't still a threat: it's just that we seem to forget the hype the media often builds up around legitimate concepts.
slifin 10y ago
The way nuclear is always pushed like this on Reddit and Hacker News makes me wonder if there is a PR company behind these posts If they are, are they acting in our collective interests? I frankly don't even know My gut feeling is I'd rather have wind solar hydro or something green on my door step
- dandelion_lover 10y ago
  The push is driven by the people who do not believe their "gut feeling", but are trying to understand the depth of the problem, me included.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > The way nuclear is always pushed like this on Reddit and Hacker News makes me wonder if there is a PR company behind these posts Damn hard to tell.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Do not believe everything you think, your "gut" is about as trustworthy a source of data as any other organ. Have you considered that this really is just reality as it is ?
- witty_username 10y ago
  Nuclear power is green.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  The audience of these sites are generally liberal (aka green), interested in technology, and young (not adults in the Cold War era, where a lot of the fear of nuclear originated). It doesn't seem odd to me that there would be interest in nuclear.
- lmm 10y ago
  You can check people's post history. The tone doesn't seem very PR-company-ey to me, shrug. Nuclear is greener by most reasonable measures. Wind and solar don't scale (and kill people during installation/maintenance, and in the case of solar require a lot of environmentally-damaging mining); hydro renders larger areas uninhabitable during business-as-usual than nuclear does in disaster scenarios, and leads to many more deaths in proportion to the energy produced.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
libeclipse 10y ago
The UK green party has some very good policies overall, but one pitfall is that they're heavily against nuclear fission. I was given the chance last year to question one of their MPs about their stance on nuclear fusion and the general gist of the response was that they didn't think that it would succeed but they're "not against research in the field".
known 10y ago
Cost of electricity by source. 1. Natural gas 2. Hydro 3. Coal 4. Nuclear 5. Solar 6. Wind
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  In terms of direct cost to consumer, maybe. This is ignoring literally all externalities and loss of life due to pollution by coal or the tremendous environmental damage of hydro/coal.
digi_owl 10y ago
I found Adam Curtis' A is for Atom quite interesting regarding this. Apparently at least the US reactors were essentially scaled up military submarine reactors.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Yep, and of course you have very different design goals for a submarine than you would have in a fixed installation (long time between refuelings, compactness, etc). They're also based on designs which were intended to breed plutonium. There's a lot which we could improve on if we were doing a clean-slate redesign of our nuclear power infrastructure with an eye towards power generation rather than military purposes. Unfortunately it's very difficult to realize those reforms with the rampant NIMBYism surrounding nuclear power. We can't even build plants that use upgraded versions of existing technology let alone plants that are running on novel technologies. They sometimes get pilot plants but they never make it out of the prototype stage.
throwaway98237 10y ago
Nuclear power is the problem of the "Black Swan" embodied.
exDM69 10y ago
Does anyone know of a reliable source for comparison of the environmental, cost and health effects of different forms of energy? I've had a hard time finding a good source that isn't politically motivated and biased. It's very difficult to evaluate e.g. wind turbines (poor output) and photovoltaics (exotic raw materials) against nuclear with the information I've found.
- iaw 10y ago
  Having worked in a related part of the electricity industry: not as far as I know. As far as I can tell everyone has an agenda. I am in favor of fission as a primary energy resource but there's no way to have an honest comparative conversation because everyone is jockeying for the upperhand.
  - exDM69 10y ago
    My thoughts exactly. I'm under the impression that e.g. wind power should not be built at all for electricity production (output is just too little) but all the subsidies it enjoys makes it a worthwhile business. Considering whether this is true is difficult because the facts are intentionally obscured and for example the wind power capacity is often at some nominal wind speed which is often a lot more than the average at the location. In my home country, a 1MW wind turbine was built but the nominal output is at 13 m/s while the average wind speed is around 6 m/s, yielding about an eighth of the nominal power (proportional to the speed cubed). The same is true for photovoltaics as the raw materials need a huge volume of earth to be mined for a miniscule amount of material. Nuclear isn't any different, it's hard to get facts from uranium mining and enrichment, especially given its military value and the surrounding secrecy. For this reason, I usually refrain from any energy policy discussion. I can't have an opinion if I can't have the facts. Without facts, these discussions often devolve into emotional shouting contests.
    - iaw 10y ago
      From what I've eked out over the years: - Wind is not that good of an energy source but in some areas can provide offsetting capacity. Built at any scale wind becomes useless due to numerous factors, especially predicting production and storage. - Solar in some very specific areas makes perfect sense (Mexica, Southern US, etc) but in most places will never be economic. While a little more predictable than wind it's still not ideal and suffers from similar storage problems. At scale it does serious damage to the environment (Mojave desert installation is a good example...) - Hydro & Geothermals are phenomenal in the few areas where they exist (e.g. Canada). - Coal is pretty bad both for the miners pulling it out of the ground and the environment we burn it into. It's an economic powerhouse and a ton of capacity exists so it's going to be hard to get away from. - Gas Turbines are horribly inefficient but will probably become more and more common as the political will to solve the underlying problems is lacking and they are the only feasible stopgap. - Nuclear Fission is between a rock and a hard place. On one side, too much regulation is preventing active development. On the other side, without sufficient regulation the companies will play fast and loose with a seriously dangerous substance. Deepwater horizon can give you an idea of how much buck-shifting could occur. Sadly, fission is the only resource that is currently practical and won't exacerbate an already tenuous climate. Nuclear Fusion is the holy grail of power generation but there are serious engineering challenges behind it. We are as far from economically viable controlled fusion now as we were from the moon in mid-1962 but there's no JFK swinging the force of a nation-state behind the technology making it's likelihood of realization low. In short, we're screwed.
petre 10y ago
This guy is right in many ways, but also check out other TED talks from actual scientists, or at least engineers: Kirk Sorensen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw Sunniva Rose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKl5X72NIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKl5X72NIc Srikumar Banerjee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE
staticvar 10y ago
No one will ever trust corporations or governments to operate a nuclear power plant safely. Imagine if Enron had been managing a nuclear power plant. They would have blown it up way before it came out that they were frauds and crooks.
DannyB2 10y ago
On the safety issue. It's not that I don't trust the technology. It's that I don't trust the people in charge of safety. It doesn't happen over night. But it is a gradual cost cutting which leads to corner cutting. It is slow, inevitable and inexorable.
ilurkedhere 10y ago
Thorium based reactors, anyone?
pasbesoin 10y ago
It's fear of the humans engineering, managing, and politicking it. Those humans haven't changed, and they don't seem to show much propensity for changing.

137 points by yinso 10y ago

Nuclear's inability to be both cheap and reliable is hurting it more. Once you add up all the costs for decommissioning old power plants and nuclear repositories (usually paid by the state, not the company owning the power plant), it becomes really uneconomical. Even compared to solar, nowadays.

dogma1138 10y ago
There have been far fewer accidents involving nuclear plants than fossil fuels, and even with those disasters the environmental impact is considerably less severe than running fossil fuel plants. The problem is that radiation is scary, no one cries about cancer rates and other stuff when you live 20 miles downwind from a coal power plant, but anytime there is even a slightly elevated radiation everyone freaks out.
witty_username 10y ago
How is nuclear not reliable? There's no dependence on other countries for fuel and no need for the sun or wind to be there.
- deelowe 10y ago
  The op said CHEAP and RELIABLE. They kind of have to be reliable and as a result are very expensive.

Klasiaster 10y ago

And where does the uranium come from…? Nobody cares about the enviornmental and health issues in Niger etc.

reacweb 10y ago
The exploitation of uranium reduces the amount of radioactive materials in Niger (tongue in cheek).
ageofwant 10y ago
Recovered from tailing of existing precious metal mines. An its a differential measurement, not absolute, compare it against the damage being done by coal and oil mining.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
paulmd 10y ago
Where does the lithium or neodymium come from? Those have to be mined too. > The Chinese Society of Rare Earths estimated that the refinement of one ton of rare earth metals results in 75 cubic meters of acidic wastewater and one ton of radioactive residue. The 1998 leak of hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive wastewater into a nearby lake was a contributing factor to Molycorp’s shutdown in 2002. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-will-we-have-enough/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-wi... And with those materials (and especially with coal) we're talking about entirely different scales of material. A couple dozen tonnes of uranium will run a reactor for a year. You need millions of tonnes of coal to produce an equivalent amount of power. As for where, the interesting thing about uranium is that it's pretty much everywhere. Nobody really prospects for it because it's not commercially valuable. Let's say you go prospecting, and you find a big deposit, then you spend a bunch of money starting up a mining operation. Who's going to buy mass quantities of your uranium? What do you do with it? Beyond nuclear activity and a few things that need super-dense weights for balance, nobody uses it for anything. Why would you even bother prospecting for it? Canada actually has larger feasibly-recoverable uranium reserves than Niger does. Russia has more than Canada. Australia has more than four times as much as Niger. The US has about half as much. And because it's not really something people go looking for, it's quite likely that there are other large deposits that nobody has found yet. http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reserves-in-the-world.html http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reser... This also has some interesting implications for the cost of nuclear fuel. Fuel costs are essentially rounding errors in the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant (14% including refining). This means that you can withstand massive flunctuations in fuel costs with very little impact on energy prices. There's actually a huge amount of uranium diluted in seawater. It currently costs twice as much to extract it as it does for terrestrial deposits, but that's a massive quantity if we needed it. About 4 billion tons total (vs 1.7 million tons of known deposits in Australia). And as you extract it, it'll leach from deep-sea rocks which contain about 100 trillion tons total. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#73ed390a46e2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-se...

sharemywin 10y ago

Interesting article about cyber attacks and proliferation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724697

gioele 10y ago

Redutio ad bombarolum: Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a nuclear power plant => possible irreparable ecological disaster. Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a solar plant => a few broken glasses to clean up. You choose. More seriously, nuclear power is the future of clean energy. But (future) nuclear fusion, not (current) nuclear fission.

Cpoll 10y ago
Someone runs coal and gas plants for several decades => Possible irreparable ecolo- Whoops, too late.
vonmoltke 10y ago
Without quantifying "possible" and "irreparable" this is nothing but fearmongering. What would it take to accidentally or intentionally breach the containment vault on a reactor? What are the chances of that happening? Ignoring paranoid overreactions, what is the worst ecological damage that could be done? How is it "irreparable"?
Kenji 10y ago
Actually, as it stands, modern nuclear power plants should withstand such a plane attack.
default_user 10y ago
You may be joking, but seriously the possible irreparable damage is indeed an argument for me that gets insufficiently addressed by the pro nuclear people. Off course, more people die because of coal power plants and off course the net loss of land due to global warming is bigger compared to nuclear due to rising sea levels. But you can still go to those flooded places (albeit in a diving suite) and not get cancer... This is not the case for the Chernobyl area or Fukushima. This place is lost and cannot be used by humans for a long time. This cannot not happen when using coal power plants. Take a small country like Switzerland. We cannot afford to lose any land. You can do something about the death of people in the coal mining industry and you can also do something to reduce the atmospheric CO2. But once a nuclear accident happens the land is lost and nothing can be done about it. And this point is never addressed properly. I don't care about the probability, I care about the possibility.

legulere 10y ago

Nuclear power has three big issues: - Costs: In recent years it has become prohibitively expensive in the west to build nuclear reactors. Hinkley point C in the UK will have higher cost per MWh than wind or even photovoltaics. - Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all. - Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.

antris 10y ago
> Costs Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated. > Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little. You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to compare the data between different solutions. > Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes. Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#45914f7349d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
- Symmetry 10y ago
  Well, the radiation from Fukushima is expected to cause a few hundred cancer cases[1] even if nobody died from acute radiation poisoning. And there likely would have been acute radiation poisoning deaths if there hadn't been an evacuation, though probably far less than the 1600 deaths the evacuation caused. But even with all that the ~1 trillionkWhr Fukushima generated over it's lifetime puts it's death toll well below the Forbes numbers for even a US coal plant at 10,000. On the other hand, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air gives coal mortality at 350 to 60[2] after converting to the same units which is well below Fukushima's death toll. [1]http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd... [2]http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

pents90 10y ago

Some of the worst data presentation offenses are being committed in this talk, including graphs with misleading axes, trend lines derived from too few data points, and no acknowledgement of exponential trends, such as solar energy's adoption.

berntb 10y ago
Solar can certainly solve the energy problems for many countries, given that cheaper energy storage really is created. But not for e.g. northern Europe. There just is too little sun, especially in the winter. Also, it seems transports will be radically electrified the coming two decades, which will strongly increase the demand for electricity. I have no problems with environmentalists, my problem is that so many of them rather burn oil than build nuclear plants.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Solving energy storage on that level is a non-trivial task. People don't understand just how energy-dense liquid and solid fuels are, but you essentially need geological-scale solutions in order to replace them (pumped-storage hydro or compressed-air in deep caverns). Those require specific geological formations and in the case of pumped-storage hydro has a pretty negative environmental footprint. You take a mountain range and you flood it and drain it on a daily basis, anything that used to be there is now underwater half the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... There is about 740 TWh of pumped-storage capacity available worldwide. If we gave every single US household a Tesla Powerwall (6.4 KWh) it would add up to 0.7936 TWh of capacity. If we keep the US average of 2.55 people per household and scale that up to the 7.4 billion people worldwide (2.89 billion households) that's still only 18.49 TWh. One per person worldwide, 44.8 TWh. Maybe double that if we give every person on the planet an electric car that's tied into the grid too. So if we gave every person a Powerwall, that's 6% of the presently extant pumped-storage capacity. And it's certainly not like we've made any sort of systematic attempt to fully exploit pumped storage, if we are doing worldwide solutions then we can go a lot farther on the other side of the equation too. Again, people vastly underestimate just how great liquid fuels are at storing energy in comparison to how shitty batteries are. We're talking about liquid fuels having more than 100x the energy density of a lithium-ion battery here. Batteries are convenient from a design perspective but they are wildly inefficient from a density perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density If anything, the advent of cheap clean electricity from nuclear should shift us toward synthetic liquid fuels for the energy density involved. There's nothing stopping you from pulling carbon out of the air and synthesizing it back into a long-chain hydrocarbon. It's also significantly cleaner than fossil-derived fuel. The Fischer-Tropsch process has been around for a century and there's lots of neat modern tweaks to it. It just takes a lot of energy (more than you get out of it obviously) but if we have lots of nuclear power then why not use it as a dense energy-store over batteries? It saves us a heck of a lot of rebuilding infrastructure too.

jlebrech 10y ago

the future of nuclear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY

woliveirajr 10y ago

If I understood it correctly, one big problem is that some "clean" energy like solar and wind don't accumulate, i.e., it must be used as it is produced, and that doesn't scale well with spikes in consume during the night and so on. In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting. They would charge during the day and discharge during the night. The fact that they move around is a bonus :)

dogma1138 10y ago
>In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting. No, it really does not seem interesting, it seems like a terrible idea up there with solar freaking roadways. Car batteries have a completely different profile than long term storage batteries. Different voltage, charge and discharge cycles and drain and output attenuation. While Tesla does sell a "power wall" it has nothing to do with the car batteries they use, it's a completely different beast and even that is not optimised that well compared to dedicated household level battery storage. >They would charge during the day and discharge during the night. Nighttime electrical use is when it's at it's lowest, not to mention that why would you want your car to be discharging at night? You need to drive it in the morning, and if you want to save power you want to charge it at night not to add to the day time use so you want a full battery in the morning. >The fact that they move around is a bonus :) A bonus for what? having a system that is unpredictable/unreliable because the location, availability and density of your storage changes constantly?
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Long term storage ? Since when is 12h drain/fill cycles "long term". The Tesla power wall is functionally identical to its car batteries, using the same Li ion battery tech. Optimisation is a matter of power profile programming, modern converters are very capable. What makes this tech more interesting is the fact that you could buy cheap electricity from the garage you park you car during the day (the one with the massive solar roof, close to cheap to maintain central transmission lines). A million grid-connected batteries represents a very resilient power system with interesting real-time energy markets on top. It is very interesting indeed.
10y ago

szemet 10y ago

According to the article 150 people die / trillionWh due to wind power. According to wikipedia 269 birds die / trillionWh due to wind power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#Birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... So the death rate for birds is nearly the same that for people? Seems strange. We can protect clueless birds better from the turbines, than the intelligent and educated working people up there??? Or something is wrong with either of the estimations...

Tharre 10y ago
You should actually read the wikipedia article. The 269 birds / TWh number stems from the lower estimation that between 20,000 and 573,000 birds per year are killed from wind turbines in the US.
- bjelkeman-again 10y ago
  A tangent. If we worry about bird deaths there are more important factors to consider. https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml
ekun 10y ago
I assume that the human deaths are related to the toxicity involved with mining rare earth metals which are part of the magnets in the turbines.
- szemet 10y ago
  Then they have to estimate how big is the market effect of the turbines on mining. It is very very hard, wonder can it be done well enough... For example: It may even happen (logically possible at least) that stopping building turbines brings down the price but not the demand (others will buy it anyway), and the net effect will be that due to lower prices miners close safer but more expensive mines and reopens cheaper but more dangerous mines. Once, I've read an estimation where they even calculated deaths due to iron mining, into wind energy deaths!!! They simply added the deaths that may occur mining the needed amount of iron.... Big big mistake, according to what I wrote earlier. Wing turbines hardly have that direct market effect on iron miners life. And because that study (I can't find it now) was sponsored by nuclear power organizations - guess the mistake was intentional - so it was not a "mistake" more like a disgusting ethical crime...

vg2001 10y ago

In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. It's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s

sqeaky 10y ago
Just like 20 years ago fusion was only 15 years out.

_ph_ 10y ago

As a consequence of the Chernobyl incident, parts of western Europe are still contaminated. For example, it is still not entirely safe to eat mushrooms or wild boar from Bavaria. And that is not going to change in my life time. About a 1000km away from Chernobyl. I am a physicist and certainly do not have irrational fears of nuclear energy. But the risks and uses of nuclear have to be carefully considered. Looking at the prices paid for modern reactors being built right now, they seem to be quite more expensive than wind and solar installations.

digi_owl 10y ago
Yep. Some sheep farmers in Norway still have to monitor and medicate their herds because of the accident...
hiddenkrypt 10y ago
As a consequence of the Centralia incident[1], a portion of Pennsylvania, USA has been rendered practically uninhabitable since 1963. The fire may continue burning for up to two hundred and fifty years. It is not the only persistent coal mine fire in that state, let alone worldwide. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of the Chernobyl incident or the dangers of nuclear accidents, but to provide context. Even ignoring the energy balance which show nuclear as being safer per KWH than any other tech (including wind and solar), even including the disasters of fukushima and chernobyl, Nuclear has been safer and less damaging to the environment than coal. Wind and solar are great, I'd love to see more use and developments there. They can't compete with the energy density of coal, let alone atomics.

vg2001 10y ago

In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s. It a truth renewed every year. We may need gen IV fission for one reason, and one reason only: to get rid/at least reduce nuc waste and weapon plutonium. Lets get that shit off the planet, its as bad as CO2

nailer 10y ago
> In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s. This is fascinating. I was an 80's kid, and we learnt in primary school that by the year 2000, major cities will be underwater due to the greenhouse effect from CO2 emissions. Not that climate change isn't still a threat: it's just that we seem to forget the hype the media often builds up around legitimate concepts.

slifin 10y ago

The way nuclear is always pushed like this on Reddit and Hacker News makes me wonder if there is a PR company behind these posts If they are, are they acting in our collective interests? I frankly don't even know My gut feeling is I'd rather have wind solar hydro or something green on my door step

dandelion_lover 10y ago
The push is driven by the people who do not believe their "gut feeling", but are trying to understand the depth of the problem, me included.
digi_owl 10y ago
> The way nuclear is always pushed like this on Reddit and Hacker News makes me wonder if there is a PR company behind these posts Damn hard to tell.
ageofwant 10y ago
Do not believe everything you think, your "gut" is about as trustworthy a source of data as any other organ. Have you considered that this really is just reality as it is ?
witty_username 10y ago
Nuclear power is green.
sliverstorm 10y ago
The audience of these sites are generally liberal (aka green), interested in technology, and young (not adults in the Cold War era, where a lot of the fear of nuclear originated). It doesn't seem odd to me that there would be interest in nuclear.
lmm 10y ago
You can check people's post history. The tone doesn't seem very PR-company-ey to me, shrug. Nuclear is greener by most reasonable measures. Wind and solar don't scale (and kill people during installation/maintenance, and in the case of solar require a lot of environmentally-damaging mining); hydro renders larger areas uninhabitable during business-as-usual than nuclear does in disaster scenarios, and leads to many more deaths in proportion to the energy produced.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

libeclipse 10y ago

The UK green party has some very good policies overall, but one pitfall is that they're heavily against nuclear fission. I was given the chance last year to question one of their MPs about their stance on nuclear fusion and the general gist of the response was that they didn't think that it would succeed but they're "not against research in the field".

known 10y ago

Cost of electricity by source. 1. Natural gas 2. Hydro 3. Coal 4. Nuclear 5. Solar 6. Wind

whamlastxmas 10y ago
In terms of direct cost to consumer, maybe. This is ignoring literally all externalities and loss of life due to pollution by coal or the tremendous environmental damage of hydro/coal.

digi_owl 10y ago

I found Adam Curtis' A is for Atom quite interesting regarding this. Apparently at least the US reactors were essentially scaled up military submarine reactors.

paulmd 10y ago
Yep, and of course you have very different design goals for a submarine than you would have in a fixed installation (long time between refuelings, compactness, etc). They're also based on designs which were intended to breed plutonium. There's a lot which we could improve on if we were doing a clean-slate redesign of our nuclear power infrastructure with an eye towards power generation rather than military purposes. Unfortunately it's very difficult to realize those reforms with the rampant NIMBYism surrounding nuclear power. We can't even build plants that use upgraded versions of existing technology let alone plants that are running on novel technologies. They sometimes get pilot plants but they never make it out of the prototype stage.

throwaway98237 10y ago

Nuclear power is the problem of the "Black Swan" embodied.

exDM69 10y ago

Does anyone know of a reliable source for comparison of the environmental, cost and health effects of different forms of energy? I've had a hard time finding a good source that isn't politically motivated and biased. It's very difficult to evaluate e.g. wind turbines (poor output) and photovoltaics (exotic raw materials) against nuclear with the information I've found.

iaw 10y ago
Having worked in a related part of the electricity industry: not as far as I know. As far as I can tell everyone has an agenda. I am in favor of fission as a primary energy resource but there's no way to have an honest comparative conversation because everyone is jockeying for the upperhand.
- exDM69 10y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I'm under the impression that e.g. wind power should not be built at all for electricity production (output is just too little) but all the subsidies it enjoys makes it a worthwhile business. Considering whether this is true is difficult because the facts are intentionally obscured and for example the wind power capacity is often at some nominal wind speed which is often a lot more than the average at the location. In my home country, a 1MW wind turbine was built but the nominal output is at 13 m/s while the average wind speed is around 6 m/s, yielding about an eighth of the nominal power (proportional to the speed cubed). The same is true for photovoltaics as the raw materials need a huge volume of earth to be mined for a miniscule amount of material. Nuclear isn't any different, it's hard to get facts from uranium mining and enrichment, especially given its military value and the surrounding secrecy. For this reason, I usually refrain from any energy policy discussion. I can't have an opinion if I can't have the facts. Without facts, these discussions often devolve into emotional shouting contests.
  - iaw 10y ago
    From what I've eked out over the years: - Wind is not that good of an energy source but in some areas can provide offsetting capacity. Built at any scale wind becomes useless due to numerous factors, especially predicting production and storage. - Solar in some very specific areas makes perfect sense (Mexica, Southern US, etc) but in most places will never be economic. While a little more predictable than wind it's still not ideal and suffers from similar storage problems. At scale it does serious damage to the environment (Mojave desert installation is a good example...) - Hydro & Geothermals are phenomenal in the few areas where they exist (e.g. Canada). - Coal is pretty bad both for the miners pulling it out of the ground and the environment we burn it into. It's an economic powerhouse and a ton of capacity exists so it's going to be hard to get away from. - Gas Turbines are horribly inefficient but will probably become more and more common as the political will to solve the underlying problems is lacking and they are the only feasible stopgap. - Nuclear Fission is between a rock and a hard place. On one side, too much regulation is preventing active development. On the other side, without sufficient regulation the companies will play fast and loose with a seriously dangerous substance. Deepwater horizon can give you an idea of how much buck-shifting could occur. Sadly, fission is the only resource that is currently practical and won't exacerbate an already tenuous climate. Nuclear Fusion is the holy grail of power generation but there are serious engineering challenges behind it. We are as far from economically viable controlled fusion now as we were from the moon in mid-1962 but there's no JFK swinging the force of a nation-state behind the technology making it's likelihood of realization low. In short, we're screwed.

petre 10y ago

This guy is right in many ways, but also check out other TED talks from actual scientists, or at least engineers: Kirk Sorensen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw Sunniva Rose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKl5X72NIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKl5X72NIc Srikumar Banerjee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE

staticvar 10y ago

No one will ever trust corporations or governments to operate a nuclear power plant safely. Imagine if Enron had been managing a nuclear power plant. They would have blown it up way before it came out that they were frauds and crooks.

DannyB2 10y ago

On the safety issue. It's not that I don't trust the technology. It's that I don't trust the people in charge of safety. It doesn't happen over night. But it is a gradual cost cutting which leads to corner cutting. It is slow, inevitable and inexorable.

ilurkedhere 10y ago

Thorium based reactors, anyone?

pasbesoin 10y ago

It's fear of the humans engineering, managing, and politicking it. Those humans haven't changed, and they don't seem to show much propensity for changing.