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Nuclear Engineer here. I like to point out a few things that this article kind of gleans over about nuclear energy. In particular it bothers me that the Sierra

Nuclear Engineer here. I like to point out a few things that this article kind of gleans over about nuclear energy. In particular it bothers me that the Sierra Club made that Bugs Bunny quip. The fact is, nuclear fuel has ~2 million times more energy in it per mass than fossil fuel, and while splitting atoms intrinsically requires no carbon emissions, combusting fossil fuels do Carbon+Oxygen = CO2 + energy. When your fuel is 2 million times denser, you need 2 million times less mining, less transportation, etc. And if you run your enrichment plants off of nuclear reactors (like France does), then that process is low-carbon too. Nuclear is extremely clean and very low carbon. Anyway, the nuclear scorecard is: * Nuclear is currently producing 60% of the USA's carbon-free electricity (the article nailed that one) * Nuclear worldwide has saved 1.8 million lives net by displacing air pollution * Nuclear worldwide has prevented the emission of 65 billion tonnes CO2-eq * If you got all your energy for 80 years from nuclear you'd make 1.3 soda cans of waste * Advanced nuclear makes additional advances in already-fantastic safety and can improve cost * Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France) * Nuclear is great for regions that get winter storms, lots of darkness, hurricanes, hail, very little wind, etc. while wind and solar are good in places that do not have those. Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint.

makmanalp 10y ago
Hey, while we've caught you here as someone knowledgeable, I've always worried about one thing re: nuclear power: What do you think the risks are in terms of nuclear facilities being easy targets for malicious people? Both in terms of the power network being less distributed because of the much higher energy production per plant, but also much more about the potential consequences of leaks and meltdowns. The Fukushima incident gave me serious doubts about whether containment buildings were truly sufficient to withstand a targeted attack in a war scenario. Sabotage is even more scary, but I'm guessing there are safeguards against that too. Sounds a bit paranoid, but seems worth thinking about before putting more and more civilians near these things :)
- sambe 10y ago
  Last time I checked (maybe a year ago) there was not a single person who had died from Fukushima (the reactor problems - obviously the quake/tsunami had many fatalities). There was one worker who died but the last official stance was that it was from exposure. I think also some elderly or frail people died as part of the evacuation. Estimates in the abstracts of papers I skimmed were low hundreds of potential future deaths, but quite some uncertainty there obviously. I think the models nearly always estimate on the high side due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model being used but I'm not an expert. Obviously you can continue to argue about environmental damage and cost of the land being unusable for many years as well. I actually felt a bit better about nuclear safety though - if old reactor designs that are poorly managed can be hit by tsunamis, melt down and still not result in many deaths, the safety looks better than expected. Possibly the risk model changes for a determined attacker? EDIT: current state of Wikipedia is pretty much in agreement with the above, but it's an article with a lot of edits and some points have no references. The number of deaths "due to evacuation conditions" is much higher than I remembered (~1500).
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    Low hundreds of future deaths for a nuclear plant that was standing for over 40 years is a hell of a lot lower than a single coal plant, as well. Fukushima sucked, but the potential loss of life is MUCH lower than fossil fuels.
    - sambe 10y ago
      Yes, I would imagine people don't generally account for the deaths due to a coal plant when they think about it casually. The grandparent already made some claims around that, but no references.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Good question. For sabotage, right now they are not easy targets because most plants are behind one of the strongest structures known to man (reinforced concrete containment domes) and employ ~130 paramilitary guards. For wars it's another story, most militaries could bomb the hell out of a nuke and cause some grief. One rather crazy idea to deal with this is to build nukes on large ships, 10 miles offshore. Worst case, they retreat as designed into one of the most unaccessible places on the planet (the bottom of the ocean), where they stay cooled and avoid releasing radiation until things calm down and the planned recovery operation begins. Other pluses in this scenario include possible shipyard construction (could be cheap), ability to use power purchasing agreements to get nuclear power to countries that don't have nuclear regulatory infrastructure (the NRC could regulate plants worldwide), and enhanced safety since you're always coupled to a great heat sink and there are 0 people living within your evacuation zone. Anyway that's a bit far-fetched but I love the idea.
nsxwolf 10y ago
The soda cans... does that mean 15.6 ounces by volume of waste (1.3x a 12oz can), or about 20 grams of waste (1.3x a 15 gram aluminum can)?
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  I mean a full soda can's volume full of high-level nuclear waste.
  - giarc 10y ago
    If that were true, where did all the waste that we are currently burying/storing come from?
    - quicklyfrozen 10y ago
      Pretty sure he means per person.
      - acidburnNSA 10y ago
        Yes, per capita.
    - Twisell 10y ago
      As I understand he meant by capita. Meaning your personal impact in term of nuclear waste would be a soda can for your whole life. Considering the volume of non-recyclable regular waste we produce as northerners, this actually look pretty small. Of course this soda can must be stored with more precaution than our other wastes. And we cannot just assume that future generations will be able to recycle all nuclear waste using futuristic engineering. But from a practical standpoint it's seems, as of now, more easy to manage some precisely located wastes than to disseminate CO2 in vast quantity and expect that our kids can catch them using futuristic engineering.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        It has to be stored, but it doesn't have to be stored on Earth.
code_duck 10y ago
what do you think about thorium?
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  It's good stuff, but not a total panacea. Some of the advanced reactor designs that work well with it have very interesting features (Molten Salt Reactors) that we need to develop as a civilization. Until we run them at scale we can't be totally sure of the benefits but some in safety and cost seem very intriguing.
cm2187 10y ago
I agree with all of these points and am rather a pro-nuclear myself. But the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk cannot be dismissed. What would be great is a form of nuclear energy that doesn't run this meltdown risk. I hear contradictory opinion on Thorium. Does Thorium eliminate this risk?
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  28 people died in Chernobyl, 0 in Fukushima. How many have died due to coal related air pollution? And this is completely ignoring global warming effects of coal fired plants.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Not an expert, but 28 is very much a low estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000 However, the rather large exclusion zones are another large risk. The cost of insurance to pay for such events is very significant.
    - cm2187 10y ago
      The cost to Ukraine's economy is not small too. There is still a large part of Ukraine where you cannot grow anything.
    - acidburnNSA 10y ago
      Correct. I usually include the up-to 4000 early cancer deaths in my comparisons. Still pales compared to air-pollution deaths from coal.
    - tremon 10y ago
      If we don't factor in the number of premature deaths from air pollution in coal fuel figures, why should we factor in the number of premature deaths from radiation in nuclear fuel figures?
  - 10y ago
Retric 10y ago
Coal has a much higher concentration in mines than uranium so it does not take 2 million times the mining. The 60% figure is also off as it excludes a lot of small scale off grid solar power.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Fair point on the concentration. I concede. I will have to adjust the number, but I suspect it will still be in the 1e4+ range. In the meantime I'll pivot to the fact that seawater uranium extraction (while currently more expensive than mining) is renewable on a world-scale. It replenishes through rain runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever use it, even if triple the world's current consumption was provided by 100% nuclear. Off-grid power is very small compared total energy used in the USA.
  - Retric 10y ago
    If you run the numbers there is a surprising amount of solar lighting for example in the US. Solar hot water heating and passive solar are also not counted in these numbers. The single largest energy use in the US is of course growing plants, but nobody thinks in terms of 'solar power'. While a reasonable argument that this should not be counted, bio fuels are used as an energy source. So sure, grid connected PV solar is a very useful comparison point, but the others are used to fulfill our energy demands.
the8472 10y ago
> When your fuel is 2 million times denser, you need 2 million times less mining, less transportation, etc. That's assuming the raw materials have the same concentration and accessibility. I would naively assume that just pumping oil up requires no stripping of overburden while some surface uranium mining would. Not saying that oil is great, it's just that the comparison is not as straight-forward as you make it out to be.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Fair point.
legulere 10y ago
> * Advanced nuclear [...] can improve cost It seems more likely that the opposite is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... > * Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France) You mean except in Summer when the rivers are too hot to use their water as a coolant or in Winter when it's getting to cold and France needs to import electricity: http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-to-france-increasing/150/537/33036/ http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-... > Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint. Still lifecycle CO2 emissions are very similar. Building nuclear power stations and mining is also extremely resource-intensive.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  I mean advanced nuclear as in GenIV guys like Molten Salt Reactors, HTGR (which can do process heat and expand the market), fast breeders, etc. None of these have been shown to be cheaper in practice yet but they have attributes that logically would reduce cost once developed. The problem here is that advanced nuclear development is very slow and costly. So far really on the US Navy has done this successfully and at scale (giving us today's LWRs).
  - legulere 10y ago
    The last time I talked with some people in the nuclear industry (that was before fukushima) I was kind of excited for GenIV reactors. They destroyed that enthusiasm by telling me that they're still decades off. The thing is that we need to build low-CO₂ plants now and at least in the west solar and especially wind seem to be the way to go currently.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      I'd take your advice 50 years ago. It is way too late for such milquetoast measures now. Even best coal plants given perfect fuel produce a lot of CO2 per MWh. This not counting mining and energy required to purify coal. Oil is even harder to clean up and there is just not enough natural gas.
teh 10y ago
That's just a list of the positives. I think it'd be useful to your argument to also provide some "real world" nuclear experience. E.g. * The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the estimated 100+ billion Euro cleanup of their reactors over the next 100 years. * Sellafield cleanup alone is going to be £120 billion [1]. * New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget and not finished yet. So if we started constructing immediately then 2030 is optimistic [2]. * The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. Have a look at Google maps some time. I'd rather spend the 200 billion that new reactors will cost us on energy storage and many lower-risk, known-good providers like wind, thermal to spread risk. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/537397/NDA_Annual_Report_and_Accounts_2015_to_2016.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Construction_delays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  I agree that listing downsides is important too. But the Greenpeace person did this in the article. I did look at the Google map you're referring to and I converted the scary colors to numbers using the hard-to-find scale and was shocked to learn that the numbers were well within the safe zone. Even the orange. European reactor constructions are looking rough. But that doesn't have to be the only case. In UAE, the South Koreans are building 4 huge PWRs on budget and schedule. The South Koreans somehow consistently deliver on nukes. The Americans and Europeans could hopefully learn from them how this is done. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516...
- 08-15 10y ago
  > The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the... cleanup. Indeed, because it's cleanup of political, not nuclear fallout. Energy policy is Germany has always been a political issue. The government decides what gets done, who does it, how it is cleaned up, and who makes money from it. That can work, except it doesn't if politicians are fickle. The fast breeder at Kalkar (SNR-300) had been planned and construction had started. Then the government changed (from CDU to SPD), the new government didn't like the idea of the reactor and added new ridiculous requirements, for example a cooling device for the ground under the reactor already in construction. You can probably guess how expensive it is to install anything under an existing building. In the end, the whole power plant was constructed, but never fuelled, and finally demolished. Now it serves as an example for how expensive nuclear power is---but really, the expense is all due to politics. Decommissioning of the current light water reactor fleet is just the same thing. They got shut down prematurely because one particular reactor in Japan was flooded by a tsunami (and everybody knows Germany gets inundated by tsunamis all the time), which makes decommisioning relatively more expensive. It is obvious that the operators don't want to pick up the cost for this purely political decision. Given the political landscape right now, it's likely they aren't able to, either. In addition, the government promised to take care of the waste, but isn't actually doing it. (The original plan involved recycling in fast breeders, which isn't happening, thanks to politics.) Since there is no plan for the waste (thanks to politics) and the industry isn't allowed to come up with a plan themselves (thanks to politics), the expected cost for waste disposal is infinite. Decommisioning of the plants should have been funded by the operators. But the rules have been changed for no good reason. Effectively, everything has to be decontaminated to ridiculously low levels, and the workers doing it must not be exposed to anything. This is impossible, so it's infinitely expensive. Thanks not to technical difficulties or health concerns, but politics. So yes, the needed money is stolen from everyone ("the tax payer picks it up"), but that's not the fault of the nuclear industry, it's the fault of incompetent, technically illiterate politicians. > Sellafield cleanup Military facility. (It was purely military when it was still called Windscale, and that's when it got contaminated.) > New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget Everything in Europe is over budget. Berlin Airport, Stuttgart central trainstation, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg... Europe, but especially Germany, lost the ability to get anything done. Sad, but true. The Energiewende (German energy turnaround) is also over budget, and underdelivering. > The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. If that chunk is a no-go zone, then so is Denver, Colorado. The customary limit of 1mSv/a is below natural background! And people live in areas that "badly contaminated" all over the world with no ill effects. Calling something that radiates that weakly a "no-go zone" is another political hatchet job. > I'd rather spend the 200 billion... on energy storage Go ahead. Do that and get rich by buying electricity when the sun shines and selling it when it doesn't. If you can do that, more power to you! The practical problem with that plan is---you can't. And if you could... well, you'd probably be buying nuclear electricity at night and selling it during the day.
ilostmykeys 10y ago
Fukushima and all the radioactive tuna that was eaten by all the sushi lovers before it was discovered it had too much radioactive content. And Chernobyl? How many cancers did those two cause?
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Chernobyl estimated 4000, Fukushima less than 100. My bet is that dust inhalation during coal mining caused an order of magnitude higher number, that is not even counting accidents such as groundwater pollution. Human body is quite good at dealing with radiation damage, compared to chemical damage, chronic physical irritation or other sources of inflammation.
helthanatos 10y ago
Agreed. Some factoring in of maintenance costs and production costs, but other than that, it would be very good if nations gave more support. Also, there is a greater chance of devastation based on negligence or sabatoge over other energy production means.

makmanalp 10y ago

Hey, while we've caught you here as someone knowledgeable, I've always worried about one thing re: nuclear power: What do you think the risks are in terms of nuclear facilities being easy targets for malicious people? Both in terms of the power network being less distributed because of the much higher energy production per plant, but also much more about the potential consequences of leaks and meltdowns. The Fukushima incident gave me serious doubts about whether containment buildings were truly sufficient to withstand a targeted attack in a war scenario. Sabotage is even more scary, but I'm guessing there are safeguards against that too. Sounds a bit paranoid, but seems worth thinking about before putting more and more civilians near these things :)

sambe 10y ago
Last time I checked (maybe a year ago) there was not a single person who had died from Fukushima (the reactor problems - obviously the quake/tsunami had many fatalities). There was one worker who died but the last official stance was that it was from exposure. I think also some elderly or frail people died as part of the evacuation. Estimates in the abstracts of papers I skimmed were low hundreds of potential future deaths, but quite some uncertainty there obviously. I think the models nearly always estimate on the high side due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model being used but I'm not an expert. Obviously you can continue to argue about environmental damage and cost of the land being unusable for many years as well. I actually felt a bit better about nuclear safety though - if old reactor designs that are poorly managed can be hit by tsunamis, melt down and still not result in many deaths, the safety looks better than expected. Possibly the risk model changes for a determined attacker? EDIT: current state of Wikipedia is pretty much in agreement with the above, but it's an article with a lot of edits and some points have no references. The number of deaths "due to evacuation conditions" is much higher than I remembered (~1500).
- snuxoll 10y ago
  Low hundreds of future deaths for a nuclear plant that was standing for over 40 years is a hell of a lot lower than a single coal plant, as well. Fukushima sucked, but the potential loss of life is MUCH lower than fossil fuels.
  - sambe 10y ago
    Yes, I would imagine people don't generally account for the deaths due to a coal plant when they think about it casually. The grandparent already made some claims around that, but no references.
acidburnNSA 10y ago
Good question. For sabotage, right now they are not easy targets because most plants are behind one of the strongest structures known to man (reinforced concrete containment domes) and employ ~130 paramilitary guards. For wars it's another story, most militaries could bomb the hell out of a nuke and cause some grief. One rather crazy idea to deal with this is to build nukes on large ships, 10 miles offshore. Worst case, they retreat as designed into one of the most unaccessible places on the planet (the bottom of the ocean), where they stay cooled and avoid releasing radiation until things calm down and the planned recovery operation begins. Other pluses in this scenario include possible shipyard construction (could be cheap), ability to use power purchasing agreements to get nuclear power to countries that don't have nuclear regulatory infrastructure (the NRC could regulate plants worldwide), and enhanced safety since you're always coupled to a great heat sink and there are 0 people living within your evacuation zone. Anyway that's a bit far-fetched but I love the idea.

nsxwolf 10y ago

The soda cans... does that mean 15.6 ounces by volume of waste (1.3x a 12oz can), or about 20 grams of waste (1.3x a 15 gram aluminum can)?

acidburnNSA 10y ago
I mean a full soda can's volume full of high-level nuclear waste.
- giarc 10y ago
  If that were true, where did all the waste that we are currently burying/storing come from?
  - quicklyfrozen 10y ago
    Pretty sure he means per person.
    - acidburnNSA 10y ago
      Yes, per capita.
  - Twisell 10y ago
    As I understand he meant by capita. Meaning your personal impact in term of nuclear waste would be a soda can for your whole life. Considering the volume of non-recyclable regular waste we produce as northerners, this actually look pretty small. Of course this soda can must be stored with more precaution than our other wastes. And we cannot just assume that future generations will be able to recycle all nuclear waste using futuristic engineering. But from a practical standpoint it's seems, as of now, more easy to manage some precisely located wastes than to disseminate CO2 in vast quantity and expect that our kids can catch them using futuristic engineering.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      It has to be stored, but it doesn't have to be stored on Earth.

code_duck 10y ago

what do you think about thorium?

acidburnNSA 10y ago
It's good stuff, but not a total panacea. Some of the advanced reactor designs that work well with it have very interesting features (Molten Salt Reactors) that we need to develop as a civilization. Until we run them at scale we can't be totally sure of the benefits but some in safety and cost seem very intriguing.

cm2187 10y ago

I agree with all of these points and am rather a pro-nuclear myself. But the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk cannot be dismissed. What would be great is a form of nuclear energy that doesn't run this meltdown risk. I hear contradictory opinion on Thorium. Does Thorium eliminate this risk?

maverick_iceman 10y ago
28 people died in Chernobyl, 0 in Fukushima. How many have died due to coal related air pollution? And this is completely ignoring global warming effects of coal fired plants.
- Retric 10y ago
  Not an expert, but 28 is very much a low estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000 However, the rather large exclusion zones are another large risk. The cost of insurance to pay for such events is very significant.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    The cost to Ukraine's economy is not small too. There is still a large part of Ukraine where you cannot grow anything.
  - acidburnNSA 10y ago
    Correct. I usually include the up-to 4000 early cancer deaths in my comparisons. Still pales compared to air-pollution deaths from coal.
  - tremon 10y ago
    If we don't factor in the number of premature deaths from air pollution in coal fuel figures, why should we factor in the number of premature deaths from radiation in nuclear fuel figures?
- 10y ago

Retric 10y ago

Coal has a much higher concentration in mines than uranium so it does not take 2 million times the mining. The 60% figure is also off as it excludes a lot of small scale off grid solar power.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
Fair point on the concentration. I concede. I will have to adjust the number, but I suspect it will still be in the 1e4+ range. In the meantime I'll pivot to the fact that seawater uranium extraction (while currently more expensive than mining) is renewable on a world-scale. It replenishes through rain runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever use it, even if triple the world's current consumption was provided by 100% nuclear. Off-grid power is very small compared total energy used in the USA.
- Retric 10y ago
  If you run the numbers there is a surprising amount of solar lighting for example in the US. Solar hot water heating and passive solar are also not counted in these numbers. The single largest energy use in the US is of course growing plants, but nobody thinks in terms of 'solar power'. While a reasonable argument that this should not be counted, bio fuels are used as an energy source. So sure, grid connected PV solar is a very useful comparison point, but the others are used to fulfill our energy demands.

the8472 10y ago

> When your fuel is 2 million times denser, you need 2 million times less mining, less transportation, etc. That's assuming the raw materials have the same concentration and accessibility. I would naively assume that just pumping oil up requires no stripping of overburden while some surface uranium mining would. Not saying that oil is great, it's just that the comparison is not as straight-forward as you make it out to be.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
Fair point.

legulere 10y ago

> * Advanced nuclear [...] can improve cost It seems more likely that the opposite is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... > * Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France) You mean except in Summer when the rivers are too hot to use their water as a coolant or in Winter when it's getting to cold and France needs to import electricity: http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-to-france-increasing/150/537/33036/ http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-... > Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint. Still lifecycle CO2 emissions are very similar. Building nuclear power stations and mining is also extremely resource-intensive.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
I mean advanced nuclear as in GenIV guys like Molten Salt Reactors, HTGR (which can do process heat and expand the market), fast breeders, etc. None of these have been shown to be cheaper in practice yet but they have attributes that logically would reduce cost once developed. The problem here is that advanced nuclear development is very slow and costly. So far really on the US Navy has done this successfully and at scale (giving us today's LWRs).
- legulere 10y ago
  The last time I talked with some people in the nuclear industry (that was before fukushima) I was kind of excited for GenIV reactors. They destroyed that enthusiasm by telling me that they're still decades off. The thing is that we need to build low-CO₂ plants now and at least in the west solar and especially wind seem to be the way to go currently.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    I'd take your advice 50 years ago. It is way too late for such milquetoast measures now. Even best coal plants given perfect fuel produce a lot of CO2 per MWh. This not counting mining and energy required to purify coal. Oil is even harder to clean up and there is just not enough natural gas.

teh 10y ago

That's just a list of the positives. I think it'd be useful to your argument to also provide some "real world" nuclear experience. E.g. * The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the estimated 100+ billion Euro cleanup of their reactors over the next 100 years. * Sellafield cleanup alone is going to be £120 billion [1]. * New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget and not finished yet. So if we started constructing immediately then 2030 is optimistic [2]. * The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. Have a look at Google maps some time. I'd rather spend the 200 billion that new reactors will cost us on energy storage and many lower-risk, known-good providers like wind, thermal to spread risk. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/537397/NDA_Annual_Report_and_Accounts_2015_to_2016.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Construction_delays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

acidburnNSA 10y ago
I agree that listing downsides is important too. But the Greenpeace person did this in the article. I did look at the Google map you're referring to and I converted the scary colors to numbers using the hard-to-find scale and was shocked to learn that the numbers were well within the safe zone. Even the orange. European reactor constructions are looking rough. But that doesn't have to be the only case. In UAE, the South Koreans are building 4 huge PWRs on budget and schedule. The South Koreans somehow consistently deliver on nukes. The Americans and Europeans could hopefully learn from them how this is done. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516...
08-15 10y ago
> The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the... cleanup. Indeed, because it's cleanup of political, not nuclear fallout. Energy policy is Germany has always been a political issue. The government decides what gets done, who does it, how it is cleaned up, and who makes money from it. That can work, except it doesn't if politicians are fickle. The fast breeder at Kalkar (SNR-300) had been planned and construction had started. Then the government changed (from CDU to SPD), the new government didn't like the idea of the reactor and added new ridiculous requirements, for example a cooling device for the ground under the reactor already in construction. You can probably guess how expensive it is to install anything under an existing building. In the end, the whole power plant was constructed, but never fuelled, and finally demolished. Now it serves as an example for how expensive nuclear power is---but really, the expense is all due to politics. Decommissioning of the current light water reactor fleet is just the same thing. They got shut down prematurely because one particular reactor in Japan was flooded by a tsunami (and everybody knows Germany gets inundated by tsunamis all the time), which makes decommisioning relatively more expensive. It is obvious that the operators don't want to pick up the cost for this purely political decision. Given the political landscape right now, it's likely they aren't able to, either. In addition, the government promised to take care of the waste, but isn't actually doing it. (The original plan involved recycling in fast breeders, which isn't happening, thanks to politics.) Since there is no plan for the waste (thanks to politics) and the industry isn't allowed to come up with a plan themselves (thanks to politics), the expected cost for waste disposal is infinite. Decommisioning of the plants should have been funded by the operators. But the rules have been changed for no good reason. Effectively, everything has to be decontaminated to ridiculously low levels, and the workers doing it must not be exposed to anything. This is impossible, so it's infinitely expensive. Thanks not to technical difficulties or health concerns, but politics. So yes, the needed money is stolen from everyone ("the tax payer picks it up"), but that's not the fault of the nuclear industry, it's the fault of incompetent, technically illiterate politicians. > Sellafield cleanup Military facility. (It was purely military when it was still called Windscale, and that's when it got contaminated.) > New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget Everything in Europe is over budget. Berlin Airport, Stuttgart central trainstation, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg... Europe, but especially Germany, lost the ability to get anything done. Sad, but true. The Energiewende (German energy turnaround) is also over budget, and underdelivering. > The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. If that chunk is a no-go zone, then so is Denver, Colorado. The customary limit of 1mSv/a is below natural background! And people live in areas that "badly contaminated" all over the world with no ill effects. Calling something that radiates that weakly a "no-go zone" is another political hatchet job. > I'd rather spend the 200 billion... on energy storage Go ahead. Do that and get rich by buying electricity when the sun shines and selling it when it doesn't. If you can do that, more power to you! The practical problem with that plan is---you can't. And if you could... well, you'd probably be buying nuclear electricity at night and selling it during the day.

ilostmykeys 10y ago

Fukushima and all the radioactive tuna that was eaten by all the sushi lovers before it was discovered it had too much radioactive content. And Chernobyl? How many cancers did those two cause?

AstralStorm 10y ago
Chernobyl estimated 4000, Fukushima less than 100. My bet is that dust inhalation during coal mining caused an order of magnitude higher number, that is not even counting accidents such as groundwater pollution. Human body is quite good at dealing with radiation damage, compared to chemical damage, chronic physical irritation or other sources of inflammation.

helthanatos 10y ago

Agreed. Some factoring in of maintenance costs and production costs, but other than that, it would be very good if nations gave more support. Also, there is a greater chance of devastation based on negligence or sabatoge over other energy production means.