25 ms·

My undergrad is in Physics and I took engineering classes in Rickover Hall. I was stationed on a nuclear ship. Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster,

• DennisP 10y ago
  Solar plus all the infrastructure required to run a wind/solar grid without fossil backup is not yet competitively priced. It looks great at low market penetration but we need to eliminate emissions, not just lower them a little. We're going to end up with plenty of mass hysteria if we don't put the brakes on climate change as fast as we possibly can, by every means available.
  • ianai 10y ago
    Only mass hysteria will force societal change.
    • labster 10y ago
      This is the kind of comment that sounds sarcastic on first read, but is entirely genuine. Human societies, en masse, are terrible rational decision makers. Or maybe it's that they're very good rational decision makers on the individual level, leading to the tragedy of the commons? So we'd need mass hysteria to cause group rationality? Ooop, that's the bell, Pretzel Logic class dismissed!
      • ekianjo 10y ago
        > Human societies, en masse, are terrible rational decision makers. Never seen "societies" making any decision. Most of the time, there are very few people in positions of power who make such decisions. If you want to see "societies" making decisions every single day, look at the market. Not so irrational at all, though.
        • adwn 10y ago
          > If you want to see "societies" making decisions every single day, look at the market. Not so irrational at all, though. Except for the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, the dot-com bubble, the housing bouble followed a crash, the tulip mania, ... Markets are not always rational.
          • ekianjo 10y ago
            >Except for the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, the dot-com bubble, the housing bouble followed a crash, the tulip mania, ... Markets are not always rational. Crashes are expected in the market theory. Crashes are actually healthy outcomes that get rid of mal-investment. There could have been much less severe crashes in the situations you described if there has been less government involvement (there is ample evidence of the government agencies and the FED being involved in the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble).
            • ianai 10y ago
              Except the crash of 1929 taught the world that free economy knows no bottom. It can spiral down continuously and require a world war level stimulus for extra-market reasons to pull up.
            • damptowel 10y ago
              Rational markets fly in the face of complexity theory. I would very much like to see the evidence.
          • schiffern 10y ago
            You forgot the biggest insanity of all: the wholesale undermining of our ecosystem for short-term private gain. The biggest offender by far is idiotic practices that deforest and degrade soil in agriculture and animal husbandry. Throughout history these practices have made more land "useless" through desertification than nuclear accidents could even dream of. Currently the Amazon rainforest is being slashed and burned for a mere decade or so of beef production, before the fertility is washed out to sea, the vegetation dies, the continental transpiration cycle shuts down, and that land too is desertified. A similar process has already happened the Middle East, which was forested in accounts as recently as Napoleon's campaigns. I liken it to the crew of your spaceship busily axing away at the life support generators... :-\
      • ianai 10y ago
        I'm glad you caught my earnestness. The saying is that "counties will say they're going to war for whatever reasons, but it always boils down to water, food, or resources." That's because it takes a serious threat to the livelihood of every single person for people to rise up in one way or another. Right now, climate change does pose a threat and has harmed many. The negatives are too diverse though. People won't demand change until the Florida Keys aren't anymore. They're going to need to see camera footage of an entire nation finally washing under the sea. They're going to need to see crazy things coming their way before burning oil becomes unpalatable. Only then will they see the actual motive to change.
    • ekianjo 10y ago
      Ridiculous claim. Societal changes occur when the right incentives are at play for the change to occur.
      • labster 10y ago
        {{citation needed}} Maybe gradual social change works that way, but you certainly can't force change without a little insanity.
        • ianai 10y ago
          I'll remind the court that irrationality merely means "not rational". I.e. "No identifiable rational is known". Often times decision makers appear to be acting without reason merely because they're responding to something the observer does not see/know about. The root reason is stil up for grabs. I'd bet that existential threats tend to motivate people only once they can comprehend the threat as a reality.
    • 72deluxe 10y ago
      I'm still waiting for someone to invent a mathematical formula for predicting society's behaviour, akin to Hari Seldon in Asimov's books!
  • smaddox 10y ago
    That's a perfectly valid complaint, but it's not necessarily a good argument for nuclear, since nuclear has similar issues, I.e. controlling production to meet demand. In particular, nuclear cannot provide more than the minimum base load without huge investments in storage and/or transmission.
    • barney54 10y ago
      No, nuclear would provide all the base load and it can we ramped up and down some too. Solar is far more limited.
      • makomk 10y ago
        Solar can be ramped down pretty trivially, we just don't currently because we want to use solar in preference to other power sources for environmental reasons and the contractual and communications structures to do it aren't there yet.
        • spangry 10y ago
          Sorry you've completely lost me here. I thought the problem was mainly that we haven't figured out a way to control the sun or the clouds (soon though, soon...)
          • throwaway729 10y ago
            Parent said ramping DOWN, which is trivial regardless of weather. Ramping solar UP at night or during cloud coverage is indeed a much more difficult problem :)
            • natch 10y ago
              I agree with what you said, and I would have added: but a less important problem because 1) there are batteries and other forms of storage and 2) consumption is lower at night.
• antidaily 10y ago
  The problem is that these old plants are getting replaced with coal and natural gas.
  • jat850 10y ago
    Are they really replacing with coal, still? Natural gas contribution to energy is on the rise, but coal seems to be on the decline. (I'm not calling you wrong, I just can't find data to back numbers of plants - only coal as an energy production method.)
    • aianus 10y ago
      Germany replaced their nuclear power with new coal. It boggles the mind. https://cna.ca/news/germany-replaces-nuclear-coal-ghgs-skyrocket/ https://cna.ca/news/germany-replaces-nuclear-coal-ghgs-skyro...
      • jat850 10y ago
        Thank you for the link. That is indeed mind-boggling.
      • grzm 10y ago
        It sounds like this is something that's important to you. There were reasons why this is happening, regardless of whether you agree with them or that they're rational. If this is an issue you would like to be more active about, rather than remaining boggled, I encourage you to dig in to determine what those reasons are so you can effectively counteract them.
        • aianus 10y ago
          I don't know if you consider this an effective rebuttal but I live in a place (Ontario, Canada) that made the opposite move at the same time as Germany. All coal plants have been shut down and replaced with additional Nuclear, Hydro, and Natural Gas generation. We now have some of the cheapest electricity in the world (~$0.055 per kwh residential off peak vs. something crazy like $0.30 in Berlin) and haven't had a single smog day in Toronto for nearly two years.
• hueving 10y ago
  >in an era where solar is competitively priced We're not in that era though. Solar is only competitive if you don't account for storage, which is required if it's going to replace any large percentage of generation.
  • cma 10y ago
    Nuclear waste storage is subsidized and nuclear liability is too (capped near $12billion; plausible accident scenarios can go over $1trillion).
    • blackguardx 10y ago
      Nuclear waste recycling is heavily restricted in the US. It only makes sense to subsidize storage if recycling is restricted.
    • hueving 10y ago
      >plausible accident scenarios can go over $1trillion Citation? Something like Chernobyl isn't even plausible with newer reactors and it wasn't $1t.
      • lamontcg 10y ago
        Fukushima is up to $200bn and rising.
        • MichaelApproved 10y ago
          Here's a recent source that puts it close to that figure ($180 billion) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38131248 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38131248
        • Crito 10y ago
          If you took AGW seriously, you would laugh as such a pitiful expense.
        • DennisP 10y ago
• ianai 10y ago
  Solar, afaik, requires a natural gas installation, too, for off hours.
  • m_mueller 10y ago
    Not with enough batteries or hydroelectric storage.
    • ibejoeb 10y ago
      As I understand it, the batteries are dangerous also, being lithium or sodium. These are potentially city block-size Note 7s, right?
      • toomuchtodo 10y ago
        Not when engineered properly. https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test-safety/ https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test-saf... EDIT: Wide swaths of land aren't off limits to humans for decades when a lithium ion substation burns down.
        • redial 10y ago
          So are reactors, in fact everything is bulletproof if you only count the successes.
        • cesarb 10y ago
          Interesting. So, it's much less impressive than a substation transformer explosion; I had expected it to be similar. A "transformer substation explosion" scenario is a good base for a comparison, since we have a lot of experience with them, and the scenario (within a city, near other buildings, with high-voltage wiring) is similar.
      • m_mueller 10y ago
        AFAIK the danger of Note 7s is mostly due to the small size of these batteries, i.e. how close anode/cathode are times the energy density times the amount of space it has for thermal expansion. In infrastructure sized batteries this isn't really a big issue.
• r00fus 10y ago
  Two words: Baseload power... solar is cheap but batteries at scale are not yet.
• sounds 10y ago
  So let me get this straight: 1. It's a given that somehow, somewhere, a nuke is going to get away from humanity. I'm honestly optimistic that it'll just be a reactor problem, and that we -- humanity -- learn every time one happens. (Because engineers are a careful lot.) Then the environmental damage will be less than Fukushima. 2. Solar + A Storage Miracle (that much storage would be a certifiable wonder of the world) is competitive to nuclear on the following axes: risk, cost, and ability to regulate to match demand. Because I don't think that's true. Happy to be proven wrong, but the problem appears to be political, only. Once a small reactor, or a country hungry enough (China) succeeds with nuclear, US politics will catch up. They always do. tl;dr: I'm long on nuclear.
  • wallace_f 10y ago
    > Once a country hungry enough (China) succeeds with nuclear, US politics will catch up. They always do. At least one journalist believes we are already trailing behind China, and have been for a while now[1] 1 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...
    • petre 10y ago
      China licensed almost evey nuclear reactor design out there and sent its finest nuclear scientists to study in the West. They are going to copy every design and build new ones. India already has a working research Thorium reactor based on their modified version of CANDU (the Canadians pulled out when India made its first nuke).
  • nandemo 10y ago
    I think the issue is moot because the real danger isn't a nuclear reactor accident, it's a nuclear weapon detonation -- especially if it's from an nuclear power to another. I think worrying about global warming is rather optimistic.
  • sanxiyn 10y ago
    From 2012 to 2016 (5 years), China connected 20 GW (20863 MW to be exact) nuclear power capacity to grid. You can check yourself at IAEA Power Reactor Information System: https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.a...
• AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. The downside of solar is that it provides no electricity at night. We should be building enough nuclear to provide the nighttime load and enough solar to make up the difference between that and the daytime load. > The political capital lost in a reactor accident isn't worth it. The only use for political capital in favor of nuclear reactors is to have more nuclear reactors. It seems like you're arguing we shouldn't have more reactors because a reactor accident could make it politically more difficult to have more reactors.
  • jessaustin 10y ago
    My reading of the political argument is a bit different. Recent elections testify to a strengthening antipathy to expert authority. In an argument about nuclear power, the authoritarian experts are all going to be on one side. If the authoritarian experts happen to win, and then within a decade or two something awful happens as it inevitably will, that will just undermine those authoritarian experts even more. Then how will they convince the public to stop eating meat or whatever?
    • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      Some people believe that vaccines cause autism. Experts assure us that they do not. If we vaccinate children some of them will be autistic and vaccines will be blamed, which will reduce confidence in experts. Therefore we should stop vaccinating children. Yet clearly the answer is not to stop vaccinating children. That's letting the terrorists win. The answer is to do the right thing even if loud people are wrong about it, and answer them with facts and evidence when they object. If the opposition is reasonable then the truth will out. If they're unreasonable then you have to fight them because you always have to fight unreasonable people. You can't get out of it by giving them what they want because in five minutes they'll find some other irrational thing to want and if you keep giving in, by the end of the day the world will be on fire.
  • brohee 10y ago
    Solar is not only photovoltaic. Thermal solar (heat stored in molten salt) provides electricity at night. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
• hackuser 10y ago
  > The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. ... The political capital lost in a reactor accident isn't worth it. The lost of faith in technology, the loss of trust in science That omits what is by far the largest risk and issue, climate change. The cost of climate change dwarfs the risks mentioned above. If solar or other renewable sources can't prevent climate change, then nuclear is a small price to pay.
  • flexie 10y ago
    Are you sure about that? Wouldn't a 1 or 2 degrees temperature increase be preferable to nuclear meltdowns becoming more frequent because we get much more nuclear power plants?
    • Bluestrike2 10y ago
      And just how common are nuclear meltdowns over time? It's a flawed risk analysis, further mitigated by newer Gen-IV reactor designs that are going to be coming out of China and India before long. Altogether, there have only been two INES level 7 incidents and one level 6 incident since 1954 [0]. And while unfortunate and expensive, they're incidents that can be cleaned up and recovered from. By contrast, you're stuck with the consequences of a 1-2 degree temperature increase. And they're guaranteed, and will be around for centuries before the carbon cycle could ever even hope to compensate. The loss of low-lying property and other problems tied to rising sea levels would be in the tens of trillions [1]. People tend to bake in all sorts of potential negative externalities for nuclear energy, and much of that's baked into current regulations. Unfortunately, the same isn't done for other energy sources. When you start to try and look at those externalities (and that's a very difficult task, as many are hard to precisely measure), it can drastically change the math involved. And many of those negative consequences aren't a matter of chance. They're 100% guaranteed byproducts, especially with coal for instance. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc... 1. http://www.un.org/climatechange/blog/2014/06/sea-level-rise-in-small-island-nations-up-to-four-times-the-global-average-to-cost-us-trillions-in-annual-economic-loss-and-impede-future-development-shift-to-green-policies-and-investment-criti/ http://www.un.org/climatechange/blog/2014/06/sea-level-rise-...
• CN7R 10y ago
  That means the only countries that are going to invest and progress in nuclear technology are the ones not subjected to public accountability, such as China. Perhaps we need other coubtries to either outpace us or show what can be accomplished before the United States jumps in.
  • andromeduck 10y ago
    China, France, Canada, and Japan? What a group of deplorable countries.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  And the interesting thing is that no nuclear plant built starting today would have any of the issues that hit Fukishima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. Both because the material safety is better today, and we better understand how to engineer these to passively fail safe rather than have safety systems that can themselves fail. But the political will is hard to muster. And even though something like the traveling wave reactor design will burn its fuel almost completely up, leaving very easily containable waste products, the voices against it will be shrill and loud and full of emotion. No matter how detailed your design, or solid your physics and mathematics, they cannot win an argument with someone who is simply afraid of the concept.
  • tmnvix 10y ago
    > And the interesting thing is that no nuclear plant built starting today would have any of the issues that hit Fukishima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. This might be true and is obviously a good thing but it does not make a good basis for your argument. That we have more faith in our designs now does not mean they are safe. There is still risk. I think there is a real possibility that nuclear may be necessary (due to climate change concerns). I do not think though that it is helpful to dismiss concerns as being naive or simply emotional. Especially when the only actual proof we have for the safety of nuclear is negative (the historical accidents). What we need is honest cost-benefit assessment. That assessment should include climate change, waste storage, decommissioning costs, comparison with alternatives, and an acceptance that although nuclear accidents are highly unlikely, the consequences are great (loss of productive land is the big concern in my opinion - more so than potential loss of life). Let me ask you, what are your concerns about nuclear power?
    • ChuckMcM 10y ago
      Fair enough. I don't dismiss an emotional argument, I recognize that one can't engage in it, there is no counter point to emotion. Its sometime hard to explain but if someone is afraid of the dark, no amount of explaining risks will change their emotional response. What you can do is ask someone what it is about something that makes them afraid and give them tools to be less afraid. I don't have any major concerns with nuclear power at the moment. Minor concerns are weapons proliferation which is solvable with thorium cycle reactors. From an engineering perspective. Also I have minor concerns with lifetimes of reactors that have run for decades. Irradiation of metals does degrade them over time so in terms of maintenance I'd like to see more investment in building new capacity so that older capacity could be retired and then packed up for long term storage.
• afterburner 10y ago
  Don't even bother talking about political capital. Nuclear is a worse option because it is overpriced, period. It's not just the downsides that are subsidized by the government, the actual running cost is hidden behind reams of bureaucracy, hidden program budgets, optimistic amortizations, and underestimated decommissioning costs. And even then the reactors still manage to go massively over budget with the initial construction. People like to feel superior to others by citing fear as the reason nuclear is being avoided, but the real reason anyone should oppose it is straight up costs, without even any disasters factored in. Any other choice with the current and next-3-decades technology is just pissing money away, when it could be spent continuing renewables' rapid decline in cost.
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    Most estimates are inflated. From 2002 to 2008 UCS's estimate for a nuclear plant went from $2 to $8 million, for no real reason. Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation).
    • afterburner 10y ago
      I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s, and I would wonder how costs were hidden back then, and how much subsequent safety overhauls cost.
      • paulddraper 10y ago
        > I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s Me neither. Unfortunately, that's all we have, since we're not building any more :(
        • philipkglass 10y ago
          There are 4 new AP1000 reactors under construction in the United States. Unfortunately, they're over budget and behind schedule. UCS is if anything charitable to estimate $8 billion for a new reactor. http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-... Last spring, at the Plant Vogtle construction site near Waynesboro, Ga., executives representing Georgia Power, its lead contractors and trades groups gathered to commit publicly to turning around the $16-billion nuclear power plant expansion. At least three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over its original budget, the massive effort—the first U.S. project of its kind in decades—is a closely watched bellwether of the country’s nuclear plans, which could fizzle if this project fails to deliver, many believe. Executives with Westinghouse and Fluor, which represent the contracting team that took over on Jan. 1, publicly vowed to do what they already had contractually agreed to do: deliver the project according to schedule by achieving the in-service target dates of June 2019 and June 2020 for Vogtle Units 3 and 4, respectively. Now, nearly a year into Westinghouse and Fluor’s Vogtle project takeover from former contractor CB&I, the site’s workforce has swelled, but productivity and schedule have actually slipped, say state construction monitors. In joint testimony, PSC analyst Stephen Roetger and construction monitor William Jacobs noted, “The contractor has failed to achieve the project’s critical milestones in accordance with the January 2016 Integrated Project Schedule, which reconfirmed the June 2019 and June 2020 Commercial Operation Dates.” Jacobs, the state’s construction monitor, holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering and has more than 12 years of nuclear-plant construction and start-up experience. AP1000s are also behind schedule in China. Whatever problems are causing the schedule/budget misses, they seem to be coming from inside the nuclear industry itself.
• abalone 10y ago
  I just want to point out that it's not the number of people who die installing rooftop solar that matters. It's the delta between rooftop solar and regular roof install deaths, given that it will eventually come down to a choice in materials (see: solarcity). From that perspective solar has very little incremental harm while nuclear has vastly greater risk to public health, not just "political capital".
• ywecur 10y ago
  What about the problem that solar also needs batteries?
• greggman 10y ago
  I feel like I prefer solar (musk style) because there isn't one point of failure. If the power plant fails tons of people lose power.
• bluthru 10y ago
  >I'll even allow for the high, high likelihood that more people will die installing roof-top solar than will ever die in the lifetime of all nuclear reactors combined. And this could be virtually zero with proper safety harnesses. (Amateurs almost always neglect them.)
  • jessaustin 10y ago
    Yeah it's kind of hilarious how people assume all sorts of pie-in-the-sky nuclear innovation will just magically occur, and then turn around and adopt this "the morons falling off roofs, we will always have with us" tragic posture about bolting stuff onto roofs. News flash: somebody built that roof in the first place!
• amorphid 10y ago
  In the USA, I recently met a random nuclear power plant worker at a bar. They claimed that many currently operational nuclear plants have trouble remaining competitive in today's market. Apparently expanding or refurbishing an operational plant to extend it's useful life also requires a cost prohibitive retrofit to make it comply with current nuclear codes. For example, a plant opened in 1972 might still be running on 45 year old building codes that mandate the ability to withstand a 5.2 magnitude earthquake, and current building codes mandate withstanding a 7.something quake (guessing what old and new regulation might be). Can someone comment on whether the above claim sounds true? Is it common for the true price of a nuclear plant to significantly exceed the costs of initial constructon plus normal operational costs? If yes, what are thoses costs and how do they compare to the estimated total cost?
  • philipkglass 10y ago
    Yes, the claims about economic weakness are correct. Mature American reactors looked like they would be amazing money-printing machines when natural gas prices were high and rising; then the shale revolution happened. Nuclear power has higher fixed O&M costs than any other large scale electricity source: http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant-om-how-does-the-industry-stack-up-on-cost-4417756/ http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant-... That's a major handicap when competitors have cheap fuel (natural gas) or don't buy fuel at all (renewables). It's partially offset by very high nuclear capacity factors, but not enough. I suspect that much of that high O&M cost is going to wages; a nuclear plant employs something like 4x the number of full time workers per MWh generated as a well-sited large solar plant, and I would expect equal-or-better wages for the nuclear workers.
• maxnevermind 10y ago
  "The downside of solar is approximately 0" Don't think only about electricity in your home, think about some steel mill which maybe located in places with no sun, consume huge ammount of energy and has to run 24/7.
  • Aeolun 10y ago
    They don't have a nuclear reactor next door though. The energy gets there somehow. That wouldn't change with either energy source.
• jwr 10y ago
  …and this is how it will end. We will endlessly quabble over what is worth it and what isn't, burning fossil fuels in the meantime. Until climate change becomes irreversible.
  • thmsths 10y ago
    As terrible as it sounds you are probably right.
• throwaway1892 10y ago
  Well, compared to solar energy, nuclear power plants produce energy at night and during cloudy weather. And their production is way more regular, you get the same amount during the whole day.
• madshiva 10y ago
  This is wrong, wrong analyze because it's not about accident. It's about toxic material first. We don't have any other solution than dig a big hole or throw them in the ocean. Maybe our future generation will not die directly with a bomb, explosion but they will suffer for the world that we will give to them. Nuclear was never a long term solution or in any way a good solution.
  • WalterBright 10y ago
    A third solution is dispersal. I.e. dilute it to the point where the radiation level is insignificant. A fourth solution is concentration, since a smaller amount of material is easier to deal with a larger amount, and if the concentrated material produces heat, you can harvest more power from it.
• _coldfire 10y ago
  >But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. Competitively priced is a misnomer. Different regions have vastly differing needs. Renewable power generation is largely solved, storage is the problem now, barring an actual breakthrough from the 1900's tech we essentially still use, the other option is a move to smart metering and the energy regulator in your country deciding when your fridge and airconditioner turns on. Letting someone else turn your fridge on and off is invisible to most, but when an algorithm decides your AC must turn off in the middle of a heatwave, there's going to be serious political resistance. To me for all the huge engineering challenges of a storage breakthrough, it still seems much easier than convincing the public to give up control over their household appliances. This is why nuclear still survives as an option.
  • WalterBright 10y ago
    By modulating the price, consumers will still have control, but they will voluntarily engage in time shifting usage, or deciding that they can live with a higher temperature during the heat wave. Modulating price so that demand = supply works very well. For example, when a frost wipes out the orange crop in Florida, the consumer price of oranges rises. People cut back their use of oranges to match automatically.
• inimino 10y ago
  Do people lose faith and trust because of the accidents, or does it just uncover existing perspectives? From a rational perspective, people should lose faith in technology when it spactacularly fails, or rather, we should prefer sober risk assessment over "faith" in the first place. I'm just not sure about the political capital argument.
  • niels_olson 10y ago
    The problem is that people take the accidents as reasons to retreat into pre-scientific beliefs in gods and goblins. One step forward, two steps back is still a step back.
    • inimino 10y ago
      Gods and goblins? Are you being metaphorical? When things that were assured to be perfectly safe blow up, people tend to distrust the people who said they were safe. I think the pro-nuclear side faces extraordinary skepticism at this point, and not unreasonably so. The problem with nuclear is that we don't have the perspective yet to know the risks. Maybe in a couple hundred years we will know the actual costs of the installed nuclear capacity we have today, but all we have now are projections, and we know how easy it is for humans to be overoptimistic.
• Iv 10y ago
  Price is not the only factor if we seriously want to fight global warming. 1. What is the energy ROI? (ie how much energy does it cost to build a station) 2. At what speed can we transition out of fossil fuel? Germany tried to phase out of nuclear. What happened? They raised their part of renewable sources a lot, but that still amounted to only about 15-20% of their national needs. They ended up reopening coal plants. We know how to build a shit ton of nuclear power plant fast. It has been done in the past, the tech is proven, the grid is appropriate. Even in France, where a lot of the electricity is nuclear (~70%) transitioning out of fossil fuel would require to double the nuclear capacity. Oh, and the plants are getting old so they need to be decommissioned/restored. I agree that the politcal factor is important, but, damn! People should not say they are concerned about global warming if they refuse to consider the nuclear option. It is a shortcut to a post-fossil fuel future. (No, uranium is not a fossil resource) It would then allow a much more optimal and stressless path toward full renewables.
  • r1k 10y ago
    > (No, uranium is not a fossil resource) Could you elaborate?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • niels_olson 10y ago
      Every atom of every element heavier than iron is stardust (1). Uranium is no more fossil than gold is. (1) Most of the lighter stuff is stardust too, but there's some small number of heavy nuclei that decayed down to more stable, lighter isotopes, which ultimately leads to iron, the most stable of all.
    • Iv 10y ago
      First, and mostly irrelevant, is a definition thing: a fossil resource comes from organic decay. Oil and coal mostly come from ancient prehistoric forests. As far as we know, you can't find these outside earth and even the most optimistic projections do not expect oil to last more than one more century (pessimistic projections are surprised it did not stop yesterday. Without shale oil we would be past peak oil.) It has an important consequence: coal and oil can only be found on a relatively thin layer of the earth, its outer crust. Uranium on the other hand can be found outside the earth (we have found some of the moon for instance and it is a mineral: all planets are expected to have some) and inside the mantle. Actually, the deeper we go, the more we expect to find. It is believed that the heat of earth's center is partly caused by fission reactions. Second, it is not scarce like oil is. Known reserves may seem small but mineral resources tend to plateau at ~80 years of global consumption as it is usually not profitable to do exploration at a higher pace than that, so the actual reserves are probably much more and likely very extensible as we improve our boring techniques. It is pretty realistic to say we have several centuries of regular uranium for the most common fissile reaction used in power plants. Third, we have mastered more than one nuclear reaction for energy production. And by that, I mean that we have demonstrated their use on industrial scale: we know how to use plutonium and uranium-238, an isotope of uranium that is 100 times more common than the one we use in regular power plants. Huge plants using these have been built and operated. They are a bit more complicated and expensive, but they work. With these known and industrialized tech, and only accounting currently known and profitable reserve, you reach an amount of reserve that has to be counted in tens of millennia. And that is not counting reactions that we know work from experimental reactors, or more futuristic prospects like nuclear fusion.
• pjc50 10y ago
  A lot of people are talking about the political cost only in a Western context, but let's not forget that the rest of the world needs electricity, even if its political stability is poor. I know talking about nuclear proliferation is unfashionable, but this is the reason Iran's reactor got held up for decades. Solar can be deployed incrementally down to the level of individual watts, and it works better the closer you are to the equator. It doesn't need the same level of political stability or security as nuclear (although you do need to make sure nobody steals the panels). It's the obvious first choice for large areas of Africa and South America.
• spsgtn 10y ago
  Don't forget wind energy as being price competitive for large utility scale renewable energy. Innovation is slower than solar, but in the near future we will be able to build wind farms in lower wind speed areas and offshore.
• IsaacL 10y ago
  There's lots of creative accounting behind the recent headlines on the competitiveness of solar. Without an efficient means to store solar power, you can't run an electricity grid off solar alone, and you need a more reliable baseload. Not only that, but the base load stations need to be able to raise and lower their own power generation (gas is best for this) to accommodate the sudden spike in solar energy supply.
• stymaar 10y ago
  > Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster, I am a fan of nuclear power. I'm quite the opposite, I'm really affraid of this technology where everything could go wrong if your are not paying 100% attention to every single details. This is quite the opposite of the way our era works where everything most be done as quickly and cheaply as possible. > But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. Price is a really bad metric in this case, as long as people use most of their electricity by night or during winter (which is the case in most of Europe, and in the US for everybody living nothern than DC) your can't rely on solar as your main power source. Solar only makes sense for regions where the biggest power consumer is air conditionning. For countries like Morroco, Saudi Arabia and maybe California, but don't expect solar to be relevant to supply Beijing, New York or Paris. It will never happens until we make enormous breakthrough in electricity storage (which I bet we'll never do at this scale). Their is no silver bullet, especially when we talk about renewable ressources, and the best energy is the energy we don't consume !
• na85 10y ago
  >The downside of solar is approximately 0 Solar doesn't work at night, and suffers greatly on cloudy days. How will baseline demand overnight be supplied with solar? How will people run their air conditioners and datacentres?
  • douche 10y ago
    > How will baseline demand overnight be supplied with solar? How will people run their air conditioners and datacentres? Coal, natural gas, and hydro, the way we've always done it.
    • na85 10y ago
      So in other words, solar can't replace fossil fuels.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  I'm still hoping for self securing small molten salt to reach the realm of feasibility. Is it crazy ?
• norea-armozel 10y ago
  I think nuclear should be used to replace peak load plants where battery technology can't fill the same role. But I agree that base load should come from renewables. Especially since wind works well in states like Kansas. I just wonder why so many people are still against renewables.
• wangchow 10y ago
  Solar is better because it is decentralized whereas other sources we have today are controlled by single entities. This puts the power (hehe) back in the hands of the people.
• daveheq 10y ago
  It depends on how the nuclear reactor is managed. Have companies shown they care about the people over profit? Has government proven to not be inept at regulations and inspections and punishments? On top of that, a natural disaster can cause one to melt down. If we move to thorium, it's almost impossible to have a disaster, but it can't be made into a weapon and the profits are low so nobody wants to build the best source of feasible big power known to man.
  • natch 10y ago
    "best source of feasible big power known to man." I'd prefer small power. Nuclear is too centralized. It leaves all the control in the hands of government and corporations. It is inherently biased to control by large entities, rather than the individual.
    • Thorncorona 10y ago
      You can't feasibly construct small power though. It's hard enough to run an electrical grid built on "big power." Very expensive too. With "small power" you would have to completely change all existing infrastructure along with costs of small power generation . Just think of how long and how much it costed for decentralized computing to become a "thing." and computing is practically cost free when compared to computing
• logfromblammo 10y ago
  If a solar-tile roof lasts longer than an asphalt-shingle roof, any solar-installation accidents are actually stealing injuries from the next time the roof would have needed to be serviced.
• n2dasun 10y ago
  I graduated 3 years after you (just snooped your linkedin) and was a Nuke Submariner. I've always been a big proponent of nuclear, even after leaving it, but I'd have to agree somewhat with your statements. Fear drives narratives very easily. The Fukushima disaster occurred 5.5 years ago, and still holds a leading spot in news headlines today.
  • pvaldes 10y ago
    > The Fukushima disaster occurred 5.5 years ago, and still holds a leading spot in news headlines today Maybe is for the recurrent events of "oups, another leak of radioactive water to the ocean, the third this month. Our salutes to Alaska" in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.
    • n2dasun 10y ago
      Fair point
• lucb1e 10y ago
  > The downside of solar is approximately 0 1. No sunlight at night, making it twice as expensive and, depending on the recyclability of batteries, not a "renewable" energy source. 2. Batteries can combust ("the note 7 is da bomb"). Doesn't happen often, but neither does a nuclear facility blow up every day. 3. Solar needs a lot more surface area than nuclear. If you fill all the rooftops on the planet, you still won't have enough solar. I'm not saying nuclear is better, but please be objective.
  • nine_k 10y ago
    Gravitational "batteries", aka moving large quantities of water uphill / downhill, can be pretty efficient, landscape permitting. A dam can also be dangerous if breached suddenly, though. A really safe, auto-shutdown, no-meltdown, nuclear-waste-burning nuclear facility, e.g. based on molten Th salts, would beat solar in many areas. Needs significant R&D yet, like solar needed it 15 years ago.
• dctoedt 10y ago
  I became very skeptical about civilian nuclear power back when I was a Navy nuclear engineering officer in the Rickover program, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN-65), which had eight nuclear reactors. After a couple of years of sea duty, with shipyard maintenance periods from time to time, one of my colleagues and I were sent back to Washington DC to take the two-day chief engineer's exam (which we both passed). Before the exam, we were put through a one-week review course; one of the things we did was to play the what-if game with senior officers about various unpleasant scenarios that could occur --- things we hadn't covered in basic nuclear power school. That was eye-opening. I'm still not convinced civilian workers would operate safely enough without the ferociously zero-defects culture of the Rickover program and military discipline. (Of course, this was in the late 1970s. I've not heard of any operator-error reactor accidents since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, which is causing me to revisit my thinking.)