3 ms·

I never understood what the problem is. This page http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ has great information about nuclea

I never understood what the problem is. This page http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ has great information about nuclear energy. The gist is that there are no problems, just "stupid" people ("radiation is scary") and policies. I never really see this referenced anywhere. Is there some problem in this analysis or has this been "debunked" somewhere? It's a very old paper. For example nuclear waste disposal http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html Quote: For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity.

philipkglass 10y ago
I would say that a significant part of it has been debunked by ongoing events. For example, here the author talks about the then-future AP-600 reactor design that later became the AP1000: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html "Probabilistic risk analyses yield estimates that a core damage accident can be expected only once in 800,000 years of reactor operation, and that there is less than a 1% chance that this will be followed by failure of the containment. This makes the AP-600 a thousand times safer than the current generation of reactors. It is also much simpler, reducing the number of valves by 60%, large pumps by 50%, piping by 60%, heat exchangers by 50%, ducting by 35%, and control cables by 80%. The volume of buildings required to have a very high degree of earthquake resistance is thereby reduced by 60%. It is estimated that the plant can be constructed in 3 to 4 years. All of these factors contribute to reducing the cost." In actual fact, the AP1000s under construction are more than 3 years behind their original schedules, both in the US and China. Sanmen Unit 1 was originally supposed to take 5 years to become operational and if it starts this year, as currently projected, it will have been 8. Costs have escalated in tandem with schedule slippages. In the 1970s and 1980s EDF in France demonstrated that a steady commitment to reactor builds can produce reactors on a predictable schedule at acceptable cost. The degree of uniformity and long term commitment required seems to be incompatible with market competition. Since EDF ceased to be a state-owned electricity monopoly in France in the late 1990s, it has struggled to build new reactors. Current reactor projects it's involved with are disastrously late and over-budget. Since it no longer has insulation from political oversight and market forces, I will also guess that EDF will not get to just try again until it can complete new-design builds predictably. Per unit of generated energy, measured by human morbidity and mortality, nuclear power has a very good safety record. It has unpredictable schedules and costs that tend to the high side. Some of the proposals for reducing costs are bad (just deregulate nuclear power!); others are worse (make it immune to lawsuits; stop letting the public vote about it; don't let politicians make decisions about it). The elephant in the room is that fossil power doesn't have its externalities priced in while nuclear does (at least to a much greater degree). In theory, a carbon tax could make all kinds of non-fossil energy more competitive against fossil energy without technology-specific incentives from the government. In practice, there are even more members of the public and the donor class who hate internalized emissions costs than who hate nuclear power. Even if you pass a carbon tax now it can be quickly repealed later, as Australia's example shows. Nuclear reactors need to operate for decades to justify their initial construction.

philipkglass 10y ago

I would say that a significant part of it has been debunked by ongoing events. For example, here the author talks about the then-future AP-600 reactor design that later became the AP1000: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html "Probabilistic risk analyses yield estimates that a core damage accident can be expected only once in 800,000 years of reactor operation, and that there is less than a 1% chance that this will be followed by failure of the containment. This makes the AP-600 a thousand times safer than the current generation of reactors. It is also much simpler, reducing the number of valves by 60%, large pumps by 50%, piping by 60%, heat exchangers by 50%, ducting by 35%, and control cables by 80%. The volume of buildings required to have a very high degree of earthquake resistance is thereby reduced by 60%. It is estimated that the plant can be constructed in 3 to 4 years. All of these factors contribute to reducing the cost." In actual fact, the AP1000s under construction are more than 3 years behind their original schedules, both in the US and China. Sanmen Unit 1 was originally supposed to take 5 years to become operational and if it starts this year, as currently projected, it will have been 8. Costs have escalated in tandem with schedule slippages. In the 1970s and 1980s EDF in France demonstrated that a steady commitment to reactor builds can produce reactors on a predictable schedule at acceptable cost. The degree of uniformity and long term commitment required seems to be incompatible with market competition. Since EDF ceased to be a state-owned electricity monopoly in France in the late 1990s, it has struggled to build new reactors. Current reactor projects it's involved with are disastrously late and over-budget. Since it no longer has insulation from political oversight and market forces, I will also guess that EDF will not get to just try again until it can complete new-design builds predictably. Per unit of generated energy, measured by human morbidity and mortality, nuclear power has a very good safety record. It has unpredictable schedules and costs that tend to the high side. Some of the proposals for reducing costs are bad (just deregulate nuclear power!); others are worse (make it immune to lawsuits; stop letting the public vote about it; don't let politicians make decisions about it). The elephant in the room is that fossil power doesn't have its externalities priced in while nuclear does (at least to a much greater degree). In theory, a carbon tax could make all kinds of non-fossil energy more competitive against fossil energy without technology-specific incentives from the government. In practice, there are even more members of the public and the donor class who hate internalized emissions costs than who hate nuclear power. Even if you pass a carbon tax now it can be quickly repealed later, as Australia's example shows. Nuclear reactors need to operate for decades to justify their initial construction.