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Why We Need Innovative Nuclear Power

253 points by jkuria 8y ago

nicoburns 8y ago
Suppose we took the money being invested into nuclear research and put it into power storage research instead. Wouldn't that be better all round?
- krastanov 8y ago
  Why should two of the best solutions try to starve each other? The premise that nuclear is inferior compared to wind or solar in terms of safety or cleanliness is wrong (especially with the current generation of experimental reactors), it is just different.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    > The premise that nuclear is inferior compared to wind or solar in terms of safety or cleanliness is wrong (especially with the current generation of experimental reactors), it is just different. There is no long term storage option for nuclear power in the US. The ability to recycle it is questionable at best. If you want to build nuclear, I wholly endorse it, as long as you provide both functional waste recycling facilities and storage repositories before you load one pebble or rod into a reactor core. As of today, recycling wind turbines and solar panels is feasible, and failure scenarios for both are benign. Recycling of batteries from utility scale storage systems is also readily available through existing supply chains. "The United States has over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that requires disposal. The U.S. commercial power industry alone has generated more waste (nuclear fuel that is "spent" and is no longer efficient at generating power) than any other country—nearly 80,000 metric tons. This spent nuclear fuel, which can pose serious risks to humans and the environment, is enough to fill a football field about 20 meters deep. The U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program has generated spent nuclear fuel as well as high-level radioactive waste and accounts for most of the rest of the total at about 14,000 metric tons, according to the Department of Energy (DOE). For the most part, this waste is stored where it was generated—at 80 sites in 35 states. The amount of waste is expected to increase to about 140,000 metric tons over the next several decades. However, there is still no disposal site in the United States. After spending decades and billions of dollars to research potential sites for a permanent disposal site, including at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada that has a license application pending to authorize construction of a nuclear waste repository, the future prospects for permanent disposal remain unclear." https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear_waste/issue_summary https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear... Everyone can clamor on for nuclear while wind and solar continue to rapidly decline in cost, and manufacturing capacity for both continually increases. The hill for nuclear to climb gets higher every day. Lazard just released their 2018 Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 12.0); check out how wind and solar cut the legs out from under every other generation source. https://www.lazard.com/media/450769/unsubsidized-analysis-certain-100.jpg?width=994&height=442 https://www.lazard.com/media/450769/unsubsidized-analysis-ce... https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
    - Fej 8y ago
      Nuclear waste storage is a political problem, not a technical one. The Yucca Mountain project is the long term storage option. It's isn't really that hard, relatively speaking, to dispose of nuclear waste. Just put it in a hole and mark it so no one goes there. But no one wants to be the host - not because it's inherently dangerous, but because it's scary. Yucca Mountain would already store all the waste if it weren't for one Senator from Nevada.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        It doesn't matter why it's a problem, all that matters is that it's a problem, and you have no ability to demand the residents of Nevada allow Yucca Mountain to open. With that said, there are valid geological and hydrological concerns as to why Yucca Mountain should not move forward. They are outlined here [1]. Therefore, there is no adequate solution, only a demand that a suboptimal solution be implemented to support a suboptimal generation technology. [1] http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/techcon1.htm http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/techcon1.htm
        acidburnNSA 8y ago
        The salt deposits in New Mexico are a wonderful place for nuclear waste. It's almost a no-brainer [1]. "It doesn't matter why it's a problem, all that matters is that it's a problem..." Intermittency of wind and solar is a problem by any stretch of any imagination. Year-averaged wind capacity factor in USA is 35%. Solar is 25%. There are massive seasonal variations that batteries don't solve. It's a legit concern. Nukes help alleviate that because they're the only known dispatchable 24/7 carbon-free energy that we can scale to the necessary scale. Just gotta figure out how to make the more cheaply. Curing fears spawning from the linear no-threshold dose response model will help with that. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/02/09/americas-high-level-nuclear-waste-is-gone/#2eb63c6f2e02 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/02/09/americas-...
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - soundwave106 8y ago
    The politics might be another story though? In particular, since there is a link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, I wonder if, just due to the politics involving this alone, if nuclear can ever be adopted as a global solution for every nation.
- Hextinium 8y ago
  One of the main benefits of nuclear power is that you can take coal fired base load power plants offline which are a major producer of emissions. The need for large amounts of base energy consumption will never go away, it will increase as we add more manufacturing capability and to match this nuclear plants are the clear option to cheap, constant supplies of clean energy. This maintains a lot of infrastructure while essentially hot swapping power supply.
- arduanika 8y ago
  If you have remote (and non-seismic) enough area, and build a large enough nuclear plant, it won't matter how lossy your battery or carbon-capture-into-dense-fuel or hydraulics or whatever your favorite storage technology is. Any inefficiencies will be overwhelmed by the fact that you're producing what's essentially arbitrarily much power. Or -- let's start building these colocations today, and let the market determine which piece is more worth R&D dollars to improve.
arduanika 8y ago
The way to get bright young minds thinking about nuclear power again is to start building the nuclear plants that we know we'll need to get out of this mess. This will signal to every student that there's a steady career in nuclear engineering. Random grants and Bill Gates' hobby investments aren't going to cut it. Job security will. And once we start investing in this again, of course we'll have new ideas, and the next generation of plants will be even better.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- metaphor 8y ago
  > This will signal to every student that there's a steady career in nuclear engineering. Signaling likely not required. It was an open secret at my alma mater that the number of students accepted into the nuclear engineering program was artificially kept low.
  - arduanika 8y ago
    Woah...why? How? I'd be interested to hear more details. There were more interested students, but they were deterred?
    - metaphor 8y ago
      I'm an EE but had a few close friends who completed the program. Girlfriend at the time was dissuaded towards chemical engineering...ended up doing NMR spectroscopy research as an undergrad before moving to USC for PhD. Another close friend who interned every summer at a nuclear plant in Crystal River, FL suspected the status quo was upheld to ensure graduating engineers would continue to command relatively high salaries in industy. He also mentioned how industry would swoop in on Navy submarine vets that came out of Kings Bay, but I'm not certain those guys competed for the same plant positions that professional engineers did.
- legulere 8y ago
  > we know we'll need Do we? Everything points to renewables like wind now. Of course there are problems to overcome but they’re not bigger than with nuclear power.
alexnewman 8y ago
We overvalue the strong entropic and under estimate the weakly entropic forces. NASA has been trying to scale up nuclear heating as a means of propulsion but I’ve heard it’s now being used in fracking. On the other hand I’m psyched about the future of fission and fusion.
ozborn 8y ago
"But I could already see major limitations looming ahead: the huge amounts of land needed, the lack of scalable ways to match their inconstant power to society’s unremitting thirst for energy." I sometimes wonder if authors of these pro-nuclear articles are paid to astroturf for the nuclear power industry or if they are just unaware of what solar is capable of. The "huge amounts of land" claim is incorrect (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power-the-entire-world-by-harnessing-solar-energy-from-1-of-the-sahara/#7a8b60f5d440 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power...) and in reality much of solar power could be deployed on urban hardscapes. The second claim seems to ignore the possibility of batteries and other large scale energy storage, never mind that solar would be complemented by other renewable energy sources. The other problem with the nuclear industry (ignoring all the much talked about safety and waste storage issues) is that it ends up being a centralized power source. Living in a solar unfriendly state with the most profitable energy utility in the country (no rate review in 30+ years) I do not want to see any more centralization and the corresponding corruption. Yeah, I know centralization doesn't imply corruption and abuse of power, but it sure makes it easier.
- cagenut 8y ago
  arguing the pros and cons of alternatives absent the timeline is false framing. the question is not what can solar and batteries do some day, the question is what can we do to drive emissions to zero by ~2050. solar and batteries alone cannot do that.
  - AtlasBarfed 8y ago
    Yes! There's wind! And pumping water up a mountain as storage. I'm a fan of LFTR reactors and similar new designs, but the writing is on the wall for nuclear power. Alternative energy shot by it. I still think we should invest in Thorium reactors at the state level, but solar/wind energy has won.
    - pyrale 8y ago
      Countries in Europe have saturated their hydro potential, and aside for a few exceptions, it's far from giving enough storage. Examples like Iceland and Norway are nice, but most countries can not use them. On the other hand, e.g. France and Sweden have driven their co2 emissions down without such natural advantages.
xvilka 8y ago
It is fun to see that Germany abandoning its nuclear power due to "green" protests, but in fact increasing the coal burning rate. Problem of political populism - it is probably what will destroy humanity one day.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  not just coal but gas also, while simultaneously becoming more reliant on Russia to supply that gas. So not just environmental but also political consequences.
- shard972 8y ago
  I'm starting to think that these green protesters in germany are just Russians pushing an energy agenda that benefits Russia.
  - arduanika 8y ago
    Never attribute to malice...
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      Just generally don't talk behind the back of and about people you don't know the first thing about.
      - arduanika 8y ago
        Sorry if I was unclear. I mean to say, I don't want to jump to the conclusion that Die Grünen are some kind of astroturf for Gazprom. More likely they're expressing genuine opinions and care about saving the world, and I simply disagree with their assessment of tradeoffs. I'm also unclear on how I'm talking behind anyone's back on an open forum in a language readable by a majority of Germans.
        PavlovsCat 8y ago
        Well, I added to what you responded to that other person, who talked about "these green protesters in germany". These sweeping explanations of what is going on in Germany by non-Germans are hilariously bad 99% of the time, I'm used to that, but here I just think "tell that to them, not to yourself by proxy of telling us". Look them in the eye and tell them that. And you know, screw Fukushima (which made even China, those crazy hippies, pause for a bit, but hey)... I remember Chernoybyl, and yeah nothing bad happened (to us), but it was real scary in those weeks, when it rained. I remember these stickers... "Unsere Kinder sollen lachen, nicht strahlen" ("our kids should laugh [have a beaming smile etc.], not emit radiation"). The nerve to throw all that, and all these people into one big bucket... I'm at a loss of words that are allowed on HN, to be quite frank. Oh, and when vaguely important things like human extinction come up on HN, most of the comments are along the lines of how it's all really depressing or best to not have kids, or "AI" this or that. But these ignorant people who don't have the full picture and don't get everything exactly right when they protest between barely getting by on two jobs, they're surely the problem. Jesus Christ. I know I'm ranting, and please don't take it too personally, but I totally stand by what I'm ranting about. I just don't have good place where to put it, it's off-topic in all of the hundreds of discussions it would apply to, and of course it's nothing to do with HN per se. > When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk. -- George-Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour" How many miles is everybody here flying per year on average? I mean, that's just for starters. What about those insanely cheap short holiday flights? How will nuclear energy help there? At some point, you will have to step on toes, maybe make sacrifices, nuclear energy or not. Even if you had perfectly clean, infinite energy, we would have to make uncomfortable changes either, and rethink some things, certainly consumerism as a way to compensate for being unfree. But that's hard stuff, that might require principles, courage, drawing lines and then holding your ground -- painting "green protesters" with a broad brush, that's easy. Solving problems is fun, being told to stop causing them, that's gross. > I simply disagree with their assessment of tradeoffs. And you attributed it to "stupidity", without even having the courtesy to fully type it out. The assessment of tradeoffs by whom, exactly? Who spoke, to whom is it a response? To nobody in particular, just a very vague cherry-picked aggregate, just like the initial comment by the other poster.
davemp 8y ago
> This why it is imperative that we __turbocharge__ the pace of innovation in nuclear power. TerraPower is just one of dozens of startups around the world that are now exploring new and better kinds of reactors As promising as nuclear power is as a renewable energy source, the last thing the world needs is nuclear powered by innovative software from VC funded, fast returns oriented, move fast and break things types. Nuclear reactors do not have the same economics as software. The field is a bad investment in comparison (and in comparison to __many__ other fields). Encouraging young, bright people to go into the nuclear power is dishonest. The future for nuclear researchers in uncertain. Change that before encouraging citizens with great potential to gamble their future away. New, much more efficient reactor designs have and will be in the works. Theses designs are in various stages of regulatory approval. Most designs are not economically viable. Rigor is not quick, and is not to be disrupted. Again, change the incentives. (or just have Bill email fellow billionaires who can afford gambles). I agree with the main point. The rest of the article is irresponsible and/or dishonest rubbish that leaves out important details and actionable ideas. Waste of readers' time and doesn't do much to actually educate the population. Maybe this article even encourages people to spread ill thought out and uninformed ideas in the name of the environment. Subpar editing and publishing. --- nitpick below --- I've worked on embedded software in the nuclear industry (designing inspection tools). I've done work with formal methods and verifying programs. Anyone who jabs at "designs drafted during the slide-rule era and adapted from reactors used on aircraft carriers and submarines" is being disingenuous to the level of rigor that went into these PE signed engineering designs. Our modern software development methods are a joke in comparison.
- ekun 8y ago
  The US invests a lot of money into researching advanced reactors only so the money can be sprinkled around to different labs, companies, and universities to keep our knowledge/workforce updated until they shift focus every couple years to a new 'important' reactor concept. With all that money and time we could have prototyped advanced plants and gone through licensing so we'd be building them today. Unfortunately I don't think that's a priority.
lchengify 8y ago
The Interchange did a great episode about Nuclear Power a while back [1]. They mentioned a few problems everyone knows about nuclear (NIMBY, financing, licensing, etc), but one of the unintuitive problems was the lack of institutional memory for construction. Westinghouse et.al. will design the core of the plant, but each plant is constructed by a series of contractors and subcontractors who many times, have never constructed anything this precise before. Jessica Lovering compared it to constructing cathedrals (in that each one was bespoke). This makes each one effectively as expensive as the last. This is one of the many problems companies like TerraPower are trying to solve: Not just dropping up front cost (finance) or making it more stable (NIMBY), but also trying to build a living knowledge of how to build reactors repeatably. Total tangent: My pet theory is that if it gets really bad, we'll just start building floating nuclear reactors and park them within transmission distance from cities. Ironically we have a ton of experience with floating nuclear reactors from maintaining a large nuclear-powered navy. [1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/can-we-make-nuclear-power-great-again#gs.2th7GMg https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/can-we-make-nuc...
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Great point. Maybe time for a large dedicated body to cut costs and improve quality.
  - lchengify 8y ago
    Yep, the report the podcast mentions (from the breakthrough institute) compares how similar industries (like pharma and spaceflight) manage regulation while still fostering innovation [1]. A lot of the differences are around nuanced things like having clear checkpoints for regulation and points of contact from the regulating bodies. [1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/struggling-nuclear-industry-breakthrough-institute-trump#gs.FcVu1WI https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/struggling-nucl...
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  The construction knowledge struggle is real. There are people overseas, particularly in some S. Korean and (yes) Japanese construction managers. The Gen-II LWRs they were building on time and on budget would be perfectly sufficient to stave off global warming. We could as a world decide to have those guys swoop in and re-teach us how it's done if we really decided to. Of course, the whole supply chain has to be ramped up, which is pretty non-trivial. Hey, it looks like TerraPower at least has some people who share your pet theory [1]. [1] https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789813148994_0047# https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/978981314899...
metaphor 8y ago
On a related note, Jacksonville Electric Authority is rolling on a 250 MW distributed solar supplement to their existing grid. Presentation from their October public board agenda can be found here[1], pp. 65-76. There's some interesting visuals of their solar distribution, land allocation, and proposed panel layouts...but perhaps more importantly, a purchase power agreement comparison against a nuclear deal with the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia[2] gone super sour (and currently under litigation). Takeaway is, indeed, nuclear is in dire need of innovation. [1] https://www.jea.com/Events/Board_Meetings/2018_10_16_Board_Meeting_Agenda_and_Package/ https://www.jea.com/Events/Board_Meetings/2018_10_16_Board_M... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
specialist 8y ago
I support traveling wave reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor We need to clean up our stockpiles somehow. The only other feasible option is dropping it all into the Marianna Trench. (Meanwhile, we really should store it all deep in a mountain.) If we get some useful, usable energy out of TWV, terrific. But it's not a motivator. (This is me being optimistic: Assuming enough humans survive the clathrate gun hypothesis that they'll need to bother cleaning up our messes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Finland is building a nuclear waste repository right now in deep bedrock [1]. It's totally reasonable scientifically. And in the US we have those Permian salt deposits [2]. Commercial nuclear waste really isn't nearly the boogeyman that people make it out to be in pop culture. It's solid, sitting around in dry casks, can be put safely in geologic deposits, and has yet to hurt anyone as far as I'm aware. Meanwhile fossil fuel kills hundreds of thousands per year from air pollution and god knows how many from climate change and we're sitting here saying "but what about nuclear waste?" while looking at 24/7 baseload carbon-free fully-scalable technology that's as safe or safer than wind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
  - justatdotin 8y ago
    > has yet to hurt anyone as far as I'm aware whoa, don't leap to conclusions: give it a few more thousand years
  - specialist 8y ago
    That WIPP wiki entry reads like a strong argument to burn thru our stockpiles with TWR. Thanks for Onkalo reference. Maybe the Finns will prove more competent than us. Did I mention fossil fuels? No. Did I say TWR or fossil fuels? No. Any survivable future scenario is wind, solar, and if we're lucky bioreactors (carbon capture). It'd be nice if humans could be trusted with (non-TWR) nuclear. But we can't. And even if we could, anything started TODAY will be decades too late, so why bother. Meanwhile, feasible affordable wind and solar capacity is doubling every 30 (?) months. It's happening. Everyone forgets about the weapons. Assuming we survive to care, what are we going to do with all the decommissioned nukes? Answer: TWR. I'm befuddled why anyone supporting nuclear power would oppose TWR. More power. Less waste. Less proliferation risk. Probably makes too much sense. Or sounds like magic.
jesterjester1 8y ago
Test
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There are some very practical problems with nuclear that people are hand-waving away. One of the most significant is simply longterm cost, because you have to consider what nuclear, at large scale, would entail. Because of the specifics here costs would likely go much higher, not decline - and it's already one of, and by some metrics, the most expensive methods of energy production. Right now nuclear accounts for 10-15% of the world's energy production, yet even at that level we only have known uranium reserves to run these for about 200 years. [1] Bump that up to where nuclear is a major player in energy production and we're suddenly running out imminently. This means we're going to need to turn to things like saltwater extraction and breeder reactors. But these technologies are going to send costs skyrocketing. And as well as scarcity becomes an issue, we can also expect to see the cost of uranium itself start to skyrocket. And this is before getting into the other issues of nuclear at scale. Decommissioning is a lengthy, expensive, and complex process. Nuclear accidents are rare, but nowhere near as rare as they should be, on paper. There are currently about 450 plants operating worldwide. That's a disconcertingly low number given the number of accidents throughout the years. And breeder reactors would be absolutely required for longterm uranium perspectives, yet that technology not only greatly increases costs but also complexity and volatility. And another issue that becomes even more critical at scale is disposal. We already have some 90,000 tons [2] of nuclear waste (in the USA alone) the requires disposal. And this waste needs to be stored for thousands of years before it becomes remotely safe. And that also means we need to consider the waste that will pile up over centuries of nuclear usage. And as the article mentions, we're likely to see major increases in global energy usage over the years to come which further exasperates these problems. These are very real practical problems that seem to have no clear solution. In my opinion solar is the most logical option for the future. The one and only downside there is the lack of production during the night, yet this can be resolved in a countless number of basic technical ways ranging from batteries to even just mundane things such as shifting objects (or liquids or whatever) to create potential energy that can be harvested during off times. If we take a utopic view of the future, it's even possible to envision worldwide high energy direct current lines transiting power worldwide. All of these things involve losses of energy of course, but as far as our needs are concerned solar can provide a practically infinite amount of energy and so optimal efficiency is not so relevant. I also think that the decentralization of energy is also desirable. Even something as benign as rooftop solar will end up providing an immense amount of energy. Centralization of energy, let alone when it relies on a scarce resource is something I think we've learned a lot about for the past century. A bit of hindsight would be valuable here. [1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo... [2] - https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear_waste/issue_summary https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear...
thewhitetulip 8y ago
I don't understand why we are still obsessed with Nuclear. Nuclear produces toxic waste, plants are costly and take years to start functioning. Compare that with what Tesla Energy did with the electric stabilising grid in Australia, within 100 days! For a solar plant all you need to do is deploy panels and battery. Nothing else. And yet lobbyists, I presume, will advocate clean coal, clean petrol and whatever clean thing they are probably paid to market.
- RealityVoid 8y ago
  Nuclear has obvious advantages as a network baseline and if you think about it all energy is nuclear. Also, usually the choice posed is not nuclear or solar, it's nuclear vs coal. And, from my point of view,(although this might sound like an insane, non-pragmatic issue I am thinking about) if we, as a species ever want to become a multiplanetary species, mastering nuclear is a must. That way we will be able to create our own, micro-solar system wherever we will go.
  - justatdotin 8y ago
    > usually the choice posed is not nuclear or solar, it's nuclear vs coal. usually? historically. sure last century that was the choice. Today, no one in their right mind would build either a nuclear or a coal plant. in my part of the world, there is no coal, no nuclear, only solar and gas. And the solar is cheaper than the gas. Coal and nuclear cant get a look in, and no one is going to build a new gas plant. But new solar is popping up all around me, at block, microgrid and array scale.
    - thewhitetulip 8y ago
      Exactly. We need solar because it is distributed. For nuclear we need a lot of money, and it is dangerous. Coal is horrible. Solar is cheap and much better
  - lispm 8y ago
    > obvious advantages as a network baseline Given that they are currently large centralized reactors with very little flexibility, combining them with distributed solar makes no sense.
killjoywashere 8y ago
Isn't Myrvohld the same guy that runs Intellectual Ventures? This guy's like Bond-villian level bearish on humanity. Anyway, as someone who lived on a nuclear vessel and responded to Fukushima and has degrees in physics and medicine, I'm honestly fine with nuclear power, but renewables, by having lower energy density, are just way more managable. The workforce problems being a major part of it. I have solar on my house. I'm not putting a reactor on my house, ever. I always go back to this: I'll grant that more people will die falling from roofs while installing solar, than will ever die in all nuclear events, including Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagisaki. Still, solar and wind are the better options. Energy density matters. Not to high. Not to low. Juuust right.
- nukemandan 8y ago
  Why not a "nuclear battery"? ;-) https://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batteries.html https://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batt...
  - nukemandan 8y ago
    really this: http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Autonomous%20Battery%20Reactors.pdf http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2...
nukemandan 8y ago
Love this. Close to my heart - Nuclear power is key to making a clean, reliable, safe, and robusts electrical grid. Plus - this is the only realistic way _right now_ to phase out fossil fuels! Great advancements to keep an eye on: https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small-modular-nuclear-reactors https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small... Specifically Molten Salt (Liquid Floride) Thorium Breeder reactors are my personal favorite technology I hope to see come around! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto... Great place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3rL08J7fDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3rL08J7fDA Great videos to follow: https://www.youtube.com/user/gordonmcdowell/featured https://www.youtube.com/user/gordonmcdowell/featured
- piokoch 8y ago
  For years Greenpeace and other "eco" organizations were fighting nuclear energy and now we have what we have. I understand that using solar or wind sounds sweet and in some places on the Earth it might even make some sense if we learn some day how to efficiently store energy. But we need something that works regardless on the weather. Nuclear energy does not comes for free, there are nuclear wastes, but the dangers and difficulties were greatly overblown in the course of anti-nuclear propaganda. I believe we can find the way to reuse nuclear wastes - my guess is that nobody was doing serious research in this area since being "pro" nuclear was not fashionable (and it is still not in many places).
  - lambdadmitry 8y ago
    > if we learn some day how to efficiently store energy But we do. Redox batteries basically solve the problem of storage and scale very well [1], it's just the question of commercialization now (which is ongoing) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
  - walkingolof 8y ago
    >but the dangers and difficulties were greatly overblown in the course of anti-nuclear propaganda. The nuclear waste generation is a _HUGE_ problem, the problem is so big that very few (if any) country really know how to solve it, look a the US for example as a really frightening example of an out of control waste problem, both from civil and military sources... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...
Annatar 8y ago
There is no need for better nuclear power; the stellarator works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
- agildehaus 8y ago
  Works? Yes. Produces energy in a self-sustained reaction? No.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    It can't do it with Helium, which was used to test whether it is operational. Still doesn't make searching for nuclear alternatives legitimate or warranted.
Pristina 8y ago
Nuclear is too scary. Last time there was an earthquake that wiped out 10000 people and shutdown a bunch of reactors (nobody died from the reactors), a country shut down all their nuclear power plants. It would take a HUGE amount of effort to change people's opinion, that's gonna be 90% of the work to bring nuclear back.
- dancek 8y ago
  It would only take mainstream media to change the way it portrays nuclear energy and a couple of years. But yes, you're right.
  - KnightOfWords 8y ago
    > It would only take mainstream media to change the way it portrays nuclear energy and a couple of years. The media and government have limited ability to shift public opinion.
    - theshrike79 8y ago
      Seriously? That might be true for certain values of "media", but not otherwise.
superpermutat0r 8y ago
Nuclear power unfortunately comes with invisible tail risk. No mathematical model can predict it. Unless power plants are built deep below the ground eventually something will bring the catastrophe.
- nukemandan 8y ago
  or just below ground : http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Autonomous%20Battery%20Reactors.pdf http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2...
  - VyperCard 8y ago
    Does one exist right now commercially?
    - nukemandan 8y ago
      right now? not that I know of. Regulatory frameworks that make sense vs the present standards are in the works.
    - nukemandan 8y ago
      check out this: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608271/small-reactors-could-kick-start-the-stalled-nuclear-sector/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608271/small-reactors-cou...
- ALittleLight 8y ago
  I don't think that's true. We've used nuclear power for decades with exceptionally few problems or deaths. There are single hydroelectric dam failures that have killed more people than everyone who has ever died from nuclear power - including Chernobyl, Three mile island, Fukushima, etc. Banqio dam killed 174,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam Chernobyl, on the other hand, the deadliest and worst nuclear power plant disaster in history killed 45 directly and was possibly responsible for increased cancer incidence adding another 4-6,000 cancer deaths. Should we discontinue hydroelectric power because all dams will eventually fail and may flood inhabited areas? Nuclear power is incredibly safe.
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
too dirty, too risky, too much burden on future generations, too centralized.
atoav 8y ago
One crucial question when it comes to nuclear power IMO is, how to make nuclear power without profiting from A) the public and B) from future generations. Nuclear waste is toxic, radioactive, hard to operate with, hard to contain and very often has half life times well beyond a few thousand years. The answer to the question who is going to be paying for a safe and controlled storage for a few milleniums has often been answered by the state taking responsibility (and very often the cost). Storing anything for multiple thousand years without causing disasters or having the public take the cost is a non-trivial task, because this surpasses generations, maybe even nations. Even advancements like this one: https://www.deepisolation.com/ https://www.deepisolation.com/ are not that fulfilling. Somebody has to continuosly check on these things for the future and a thousand years of guaranteed inspection is even something a nation state fails to provide. Maybe we should give it to the catholic church? If you would have to pay the containment/inspection/insurance costs for every ounce of nuclear waste for the rest of its projected life (to be fair: lets say only while it stays dangerous), it would get uneconomical quite fast. Not to mention that this will cost money centuries after all nuclear fuel has been burned. Is there money layed back for a thousand years in the future? If not, it is profiting from future generations. Maybe we find a better way to deal with nuclear waste than letting it rot in some underground location for centuries.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Maybe we find a better way to deal with nuclear waste than letting it rot in some underground location for centuries. We have ways, but not much is invested in developing and deploying them due to political reasons (some coming out of mass hysteria, but some that are pretty legit - like ability to weaponize substances involved). Those ways are: alternative reaction chains that produce shorter-living waste; reusing parts of the waste in other industrial applications (e.g. medicine); transmuting some of the waste into shorter-living elements, including ones reusable as fuel for different reactors. Unfortunately, I don't have the number on how much this would cut down the need to store anything long-term.
varjag 8y ago
It's amazing how quick HN switches to sucking up Myhrvold when it comes up to their favourite toy.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Shameless.
Tade0 8y ago
Here’s why it’s so crucial that we develop better nuclear that we can all live with: before this century is out, there’s good reason to believe that we’ll see almost everyone in the world consuming energy at least as fast as Americans do now. No, there isn't. EU's emissions/energy use for example has been in steady decline for years now. Also Americans tend to use an outsized amount of energy. An amount that also peaked around 2008, declining since then, so not even Americans will use as much energy as Americans today do. My take is as follows: currently nuclear loses with gas + renewables on price alone and is not getting cheaper, while renewables are. It takes and average of 7 years to build a nuclear power plant. Renewables haven't yet exhausted their price reduction potential so it's safe to say that in these 7 years their price will be even lower. On top of that cheap energy storage in the form of zinc-air batteries is being deployed today for a price competitive with gas peaker plants. Needless to say its price has been decreasing as well.
- riffraff 8y ago
  > No, there isn't. EU's emissions/energy use for example has been in steady decline for years now. where do you get the data for this? I am not saying it's wrong, I'm genuinely curious. Also, how much of this is due to heavy industries going to other countries?
  - Tade0 8y ago
    The EU loves statistics: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/primary-energy-consumption-by-fuel-6/assessment-1 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/primary-e... About the heavy industries: I don't know, but given that energy usage was actually increasing before the recession I would say that it isn't a large factor. Heating is though and there's a lot of room for improvement here even given that ironically enough climate change reduced the need for it measurably.
rurban 8y ago
I really wait until one of this disaster is ripe to happen. Diablo, Palo Verde or South Texas to blow up one day, and we can finally bury those discussions then. Hurricane Harvey almost blew up South Texas, but nobody noticed or cared. Those new designs have a double incident rate, they are not better, but much higher risk and more trouble. South Texas and Palo Verde are experimental versions of these 3rd gen reactors, and they are amongst the most risky in the world. Esp. Palo Verde with no cooling water, Diablo at the heart of ring of fire, and South Texas with the danger of polluted cooling water besides the troubling technical problems they have all the time. Once they blow up they'll carry the cloud all over the midwest, right to New York and then this business opportunity will be finally over. The nuclear lobby only needs it to produce nuclear weapons nobody needs. Nobody knows how to store the nuclear waste. This problem is still not solved after decades of false promises.
- atoav 8y ago
  This also has conceptual issues: Nuclear waste will remain dangerous much (very much) longer than it will produce energy. We might run on uranium for 200 years. The nuclear waste produced today has a half life of well beyond thousand years. Today we do as if we can just bury and forget these things but they won't go away and they will produce cost for the public and future generations in one way or another (either we have to maintain it, keep it safe and inspect it all the time, or we loose patches of land forever or there are environmental/health costs). We speek of inspection, storage and insurance costs for multiple thousand years that are not paid by anybody using nuclear energy today. So we can use up all uranium in the next 200 years, but what then? Who will pay the next few thousand years of dealing with that corroding, highly toxic, radioactive waste? I assume the companies who earn their money with nuclear power don't have that money laid aside. Because if they would, that stuff would not be profitable at all. These future costs should be paid with every ton of waste produced today, and not paid by the public and our grand-grand-children.
Reason077 8y ago
From the article: "The amount of energy consumed by an average person in China (averaged over the year) has jumped by a quarter since 2006, to three kilowatts (kW) ... it’s still less than a third as much as the American average, which at 9.2 kW is equivalent to nine toasters, running 24/7." According to eia.gov[1], average residential electricity usage was 10,399 kWh per year in 2017. That's about 28.4 kWh per day, or an averaged power draw of 1.18 kW. And that's per residential utility customer, not per person! So the 9.2 kW claim seems extremely high. Is there really another 8 kW being used by business and industry? Or does the author not understand the difference between power (kW) and energy (kWh)? [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
- Arnt 8y ago
  Yes. Wikipedia's number is quite close to that 8: "Primary energy use in the United States was 25,155 TWh or about 81,800 kWh per person in 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Primary_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Pr...
  - Reason077 8y ago
    Right, but that's total energy use rather than electricity use. Energy consumption tends to drop significantly where fossil fuel applications can be converted to electric. An electric vehicle is dramatically more efficient than a fossil-fuel burning one, for example. Likewise, an electric heat pump is much more efficient than a gas boiler.
    - Arnt 8y ago
      Oh, that was much too quick of me. Sorry.
    - jwilk 8y ago
      Presumably the article is talking about total energy use too.
myspy 8y ago
Mayor issues that were thought to use over the years are that fuel is not easy and ecologically good to mine. And it will run dry in two or three generations and where should we put the radiating waste. Usually users from the states in these comments downplay the issue of radiation and the European media / society says it's a big problem. Probably because Tschernobyl has shown many people what happens when it's going wrong. I would like a good pro/contra argumentation for this issue.
Uhrheber 8y ago
Maybe we need it, but we're definitely too dumb to use it safely.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
There is innovative nuclear power already. It's fusion-based, causes no emissions, and is so modular it can be placed in massive desert arrays or even on top of anyone's home. Fusion-powered solar energy is here now, cheaper than nuclear, and far easier to produce and scale. I'm all for modular nuclear reactors, safe pie-in-the-sky builds that don't suffer from the long list of problems the huge plants do. For now, the South Carolina nuclear debacle is enough to show that new nuclear based on old, clunky paradigms is not ready to compete without carbon taxes or some big financial incentive. So yes, either nuclear needs to innovate or it won't beat out renewables and gas in the 21st century.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
can someone recommend some good books/texts on nuclear reactor design and control (i.e. with accurate detailed breakdown of the operation controls and the computation graph for reverse-mode automatic differentiation (adjoint sensitivities) ?
jillesvangurp 8y ago
There's a big problem with building new coal and nuclear plants: the price per kwh is a moving target and it has trended down for years in clean energy projects and widely predicted to continue doing that for the foreseeable future. Coal plants are shutting down because they are getting too expensive to operate. Plans for new plants are shelved because they can't be operated cost effectively. Clean energy is completely killing investment opportunities in this space. And that's just at the current price levels. They are predicted to go down further at around 7% annually for the next few years still. This is the main reason investors are no longer eager to invest in either. Sure, nuclear is technically capable of delivering our power needs. It's even possible to do at vastly increased levels of safety given modern designs for plants, improved technology (relative to the 1960s era stuff used right now), etc. It's just that it will be very expensive to do it that way. It will take many billions to do the R&D, billions more to build the plants. In other words, these projects are prohibitively expensive and unlikely to be able to compete on price.
vectorEQ 8y ago
stop global warming with tons of reactors adding to background radiation of the world, increasing decay and causing other further issues. great idea. let's go!
amai 8y ago
We need innovative ways to get rid of nuclear waste first. Otherwise nuclear power is dead.

253 points by jkuria 8y ago

Suppose we took the money being invested into nuclear research and put it into power storage research instead. Wouldn't that be better all round?

krastanov 8y ago
Why should two of the best solutions try to starve each other? The premise that nuclear is inferior compared to wind or solar in terms of safety or cleanliness is wrong (especially with the current generation of experimental reactors), it is just different.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  > The premise that nuclear is inferior compared to wind or solar in terms of safety or cleanliness is wrong (especially with the current generation of experimental reactors), it is just different. There is no long term storage option for nuclear power in the US. The ability to recycle it is questionable at best. If you want to build nuclear, I wholly endorse it, as long as you provide both functional waste recycling facilities and storage repositories before you load one pebble or rod into a reactor core. As of today, recycling wind turbines and solar panels is feasible, and failure scenarios for both are benign. Recycling of batteries from utility scale storage systems is also readily available through existing supply chains. "The United States has over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that requires disposal. The U.S. commercial power industry alone has generated more waste (nuclear fuel that is "spent" and is no longer efficient at generating power) than any other country—nearly 80,000 metric tons. This spent nuclear fuel, which can pose serious risks to humans and the environment, is enough to fill a football field about 20 meters deep. The U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program has generated spent nuclear fuel as well as high-level radioactive waste and accounts for most of the rest of the total at about 14,000 metric tons, according to the Department of Energy (DOE). For the most part, this waste is stored where it was generated—at 80 sites in 35 states. The amount of waste is expected to increase to about 140,000 metric tons over the next several decades. However, there is still no disposal site in the United States. After spending decades and billions of dollars to research potential sites for a permanent disposal site, including at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada that has a license application pending to authorize construction of a nuclear waste repository, the future prospects for permanent disposal remain unclear." https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear_waste/issue_summary https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear... Everyone can clamor on for nuclear while wind and solar continue to rapidly decline in cost, and manufacturing capacity for both continually increases. The hill for nuclear to climb gets higher every day. Lazard just released their 2018 Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 12.0); check out how wind and solar cut the legs out from under every other generation source. https://www.lazard.com/media/450769/unsubsidized-analysis-certain-100.jpg?width=994&height=442 https://www.lazard.com/media/450769/unsubsidized-analysis-ce... https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
  - Fej 8y ago
    Nuclear waste storage is a political problem, not a technical one. The Yucca Mountain project is the long term storage option. It's isn't really that hard, relatively speaking, to dispose of nuclear waste. Just put it in a hole and mark it so no one goes there. But no one wants to be the host - not because it's inherently dangerous, but because it's scary. Yucca Mountain would already store all the waste if it weren't for one Senator from Nevada.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      It doesn't matter why it's a problem, all that matters is that it's a problem, and you have no ability to demand the residents of Nevada allow Yucca Mountain to open. With that said, there are valid geological and hydrological concerns as to why Yucca Mountain should not move forward. They are outlined here [1]. Therefore, there is no adequate solution, only a demand that a suboptimal solution be implemented to support a suboptimal generation technology. [1] http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/techcon1.htm http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/techcon1.htm
      - acidburnNSA 8y ago
        The salt deposits in New Mexico are a wonderful place for nuclear waste. It's almost a no-brainer [1]. "It doesn't matter why it's a problem, all that matters is that it's a problem..." Intermittency of wind and solar is a problem by any stretch of any imagination. Year-averaged wind capacity factor in USA is 35%. Solar is 25%. There are massive seasonal variations that batteries don't solve. It's a legit concern. Nukes help alleviate that because they're the only known dispatchable 24/7 carbon-free energy that we can scale to the necessary scale. Just gotta figure out how to make the more cheaply. Curing fears spawning from the linear no-threshold dose response model will help with that. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/02/09/americas-high-level-nuclear-waste-is-gone/#2eb63c6f2e02 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/02/09/americas-...
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- soundwave106 8y ago
  The politics might be another story though? In particular, since there is a link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, I wonder if, just due to the politics involving this alone, if nuclear can ever be adopted as a global solution for every nation.
Hextinium 8y ago
One of the main benefits of nuclear power is that you can take coal fired base load power plants offline which are a major producer of emissions. The need for large amounts of base energy consumption will never go away, it will increase as we add more manufacturing capability and to match this nuclear plants are the clear option to cheap, constant supplies of clean energy. This maintains a lot of infrastructure while essentially hot swapping power supply.
arduanika 8y ago
If you have remote (and non-seismic) enough area, and build a large enough nuclear plant, it won't matter how lossy your battery or carbon-capture-into-dense-fuel or hydraulics or whatever your favorite storage technology is. Any inefficiencies will be overwhelmed by the fact that you're producing what's essentially arbitrarily much power. Or -- let's start building these colocations today, and let the market determine which piece is more worth R&D dollars to improve.

arduanika 8y ago

The way to get bright young minds thinking about nuclear power again is to start building the nuclear plants that we know we'll need to get out of this mess. This will signal to every student that there's a steady career in nuclear engineering. Random grants and Bill Gates' hobby investments aren't going to cut it. Job security will. And once we start investing in this again, of course we'll have new ideas, and the next generation of plants will be even better.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
metaphor 8y ago
> This will signal to every student that there's a steady career in nuclear engineering. Signaling likely not required. It was an open secret at my alma mater that the number of students accepted into the nuclear engineering program was artificially kept low.
- arduanika 8y ago
  Woah...why? How? I'd be interested to hear more details. There were more interested students, but they were deterred?
  - metaphor 8y ago
    I'm an EE but had a few close friends who completed the program. Girlfriend at the time was dissuaded towards chemical engineering...ended up doing NMR spectroscopy research as an undergrad before moving to USC for PhD. Another close friend who interned every summer at a nuclear plant in Crystal River, FL suspected the status quo was upheld to ensure graduating engineers would continue to command relatively high salaries in industy. He also mentioned how industry would swoop in on Navy submarine vets that came out of Kings Bay, but I'm not certain those guys competed for the same plant positions that professional engineers did.
legulere 8y ago
> we know we'll need Do we? Everything points to renewables like wind now. Of course there are problems to overcome but they’re not bigger than with nuclear power.

alexnewman 8y ago

We overvalue the strong entropic and under estimate the weakly entropic forces. NASA has been trying to scale up nuclear heating as a means of propulsion but I’ve heard it’s now being used in fracking. On the other hand I’m psyched about the future of fission and fusion.

ozborn 8y ago

"But I could already see major limitations looming ahead: the huge amounts of land needed, the lack of scalable ways to match their inconstant power to society’s unremitting thirst for energy." I sometimes wonder if authors of these pro-nuclear articles are paid to astroturf for the nuclear power industry or if they are just unaware of what solar is capable of. The "huge amounts of land" claim is incorrect (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power-the-entire-world-by-harnessing-solar-energy-from-1-of-the-sahara/#7a8b60f5d440 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power...) and in reality much of solar power could be deployed on urban hardscapes. The second claim seems to ignore the possibility of batteries and other large scale energy storage, never mind that solar would be complemented by other renewable energy sources. The other problem with the nuclear industry (ignoring all the much talked about safety and waste storage issues) is that it ends up being a centralized power source. Living in a solar unfriendly state with the most profitable energy utility in the country (no rate review in 30+ years) I do not want to see any more centralization and the corresponding corruption. Yeah, I know centralization doesn't imply corruption and abuse of power, but it sure makes it easier.

cagenut 8y ago
arguing the pros and cons of alternatives absent the timeline is false framing. the question is not what can solar and batteries do some day, the question is what can we do to drive emissions to zero by ~2050. solar and batteries alone cannot do that.
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  Yes! There's wind! And pumping water up a mountain as storage. I'm a fan of LFTR reactors and similar new designs, but the writing is on the wall for nuclear power. Alternative energy shot by it. I still think we should invest in Thorium reactors at the state level, but solar/wind energy has won.
  - pyrale 8y ago
    Countries in Europe have saturated their hydro potential, and aside for a few exceptions, it's far from giving enough storage. Examples like Iceland and Norway are nice, but most countries can not use them. On the other hand, e.g. France and Sweden have driven their co2 emissions down without such natural advantages.

xvilka 8y ago

It is fun to see that Germany abandoning its nuclear power due to "green" protests, but in fact increasing the coal burning rate. Problem of political populism - it is probably what will destroy humanity one day.

oh_sigh 8y ago
not just coal but gas also, while simultaneously becoming more reliant on Russia to supply that gas. So not just environmental but also political consequences.
shard972 8y ago
I'm starting to think that these green protesters in germany are just Russians pushing an energy agenda that benefits Russia.
- arduanika 8y ago
  Never attribute to malice...
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    Just generally don't talk behind the back of and about people you don't know the first thing about.
    - arduanika 8y ago
      Sorry if I was unclear. I mean to say, I don't want to jump to the conclusion that Die Grünen are some kind of astroturf for Gazprom. More likely they're expressing genuine opinions and care about saving the world, and I simply disagree with their assessment of tradeoffs. I'm also unclear on how I'm talking behind anyone's back on an open forum in a language readable by a majority of Germans.
      - PavlovsCat 8y ago
        Well, I added to what you responded to that other person, who talked about "these green protesters in germany". These sweeping explanations of what is going on in Germany by non-Germans are hilariously bad 99% of the time, I'm used to that, but here I just think "tell that to them, not to yourself by proxy of telling us". Look them in the eye and tell them that. And you know, screw Fukushima (which made even China, those crazy hippies, pause for a bit, but hey)... I remember Chernoybyl, and yeah nothing bad happened (to us), but it was real scary in those weeks, when it rained. I remember these stickers... "Unsere Kinder sollen lachen, nicht strahlen" ("our kids should laugh [have a beaming smile etc.], not emit radiation"). The nerve to throw all that, and all these people into one big bucket... I'm at a loss of words that are allowed on HN, to be quite frank. Oh, and when vaguely important things like human extinction come up on HN, most of the comments are along the lines of how it's all really depressing or best to not have kids, or "AI" this or that. But these ignorant people who don't have the full picture and don't get everything exactly right when they protest between barely getting by on two jobs, they're surely the problem. Jesus Christ. I know I'm ranting, and please don't take it too personally, but I totally stand by what I'm ranting about. I just don't have good place where to put it, it's off-topic in all of the hundreds of discussions it would apply to, and of course it's nothing to do with HN per se. > When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk. -- George-Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour" How many miles is everybody here flying per year on average? I mean, that's just for starters. What about those insanely cheap short holiday flights? How will nuclear energy help there? At some point, you will have to step on toes, maybe make sacrifices, nuclear energy or not. Even if you had perfectly clean, infinite energy, we would have to make uncomfortable changes either, and rethink some things, certainly consumerism as a way to compensate for being unfree. But that's hard stuff, that might require principles, courage, drawing lines and then holding your ground -- painting "green protesters" with a broad brush, that's easy. Solving problems is fun, being told to stop causing them, that's gross. > I simply disagree with their assessment of tradeoffs. And you attributed it to "stupidity", without even having the courtesy to fully type it out. The assessment of tradeoffs by whom, exactly? Who spoke, to whom is it a response? To nobody in particular, just a very vague cherry-picked aggregate, just like the initial comment by the other poster.

davemp 8y ago

> This why it is imperative that we __turbocharge__ the pace of innovation in nuclear power. TerraPower is just one of dozens of startups around the world that are now exploring new and better kinds of reactors As promising as nuclear power is as a renewable energy source, the last thing the world needs is nuclear powered by innovative software from VC funded, fast returns oriented, move fast and break things types. Nuclear reactors do not have the same economics as software. The field is a bad investment in comparison (and in comparison to __many__ other fields). Encouraging young, bright people to go into the nuclear power is dishonest. The future for nuclear researchers in uncertain. Change that before encouraging citizens with great potential to gamble their future away. New, much more efficient reactor designs have and will be in the works. Theses designs are in various stages of regulatory approval. Most designs are not economically viable. Rigor is not quick, and is not to be disrupted. Again, change the incentives. (or just have Bill email fellow billionaires who can afford gambles). I agree with the main point. The rest of the article is irresponsible and/or dishonest rubbish that leaves out important details and actionable ideas. Waste of readers' time and doesn't do much to actually educate the population. Maybe this article even encourages people to spread ill thought out and uninformed ideas in the name of the environment. Subpar editing and publishing. --- nitpick below --- I've worked on embedded software in the nuclear industry (designing inspection tools). I've done work with formal methods and verifying programs. Anyone who jabs at "designs drafted during the slide-rule era and adapted from reactors used on aircraft carriers and submarines" is being disingenuous to the level of rigor that went into these PE signed engineering designs. Our modern software development methods are a joke in comparison.

ekun 8y ago
The US invests a lot of money into researching advanced reactors only so the money can be sprinkled around to different labs, companies, and universities to keep our knowledge/workforce updated until they shift focus every couple years to a new 'important' reactor concept. With all that money and time we could have prototyped advanced plants and gone through licensing so we'd be building them today. Unfortunately I don't think that's a priority.

lchengify 8y ago

The Interchange did a great episode about Nuclear Power a while back [1]. They mentioned a few problems everyone knows about nuclear (NIMBY, financing, licensing, etc), but one of the unintuitive problems was the lack of institutional memory for construction. Westinghouse et.al. will design the core of the plant, but each plant is constructed by a series of contractors and subcontractors who many times, have never constructed anything this precise before. Jessica Lovering compared it to constructing cathedrals (in that each one was bespoke). This makes each one effectively as expensive as the last. This is one of the many problems companies like TerraPower are trying to solve: Not just dropping up front cost (finance) or making it more stable (NIMBY), but also trying to build a living knowledge of how to build reactors repeatably. Total tangent: My pet theory is that if it gets really bad, we'll just start building floating nuclear reactors and park them within transmission distance from cities. Ironically we have a ton of experience with floating nuclear reactors from maintaining a large nuclear-powered navy. [1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/can-we-make-nuclear-power-great-again#gs.2th7GMg https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/can-we-make-nuc...

agumonkey 8y ago
Great point. Maybe time for a large dedicated body to cut costs and improve quality.
- lchengify 8y ago
  Yep, the report the podcast mentions (from the breakthrough institute) compares how similar industries (like pharma and spaceflight) manage regulation while still fostering innovation [1]. A lot of the differences are around nuanced things like having clear checkpoints for regulation and points of contact from the regulating bodies. [1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/struggling-nuclear-industry-breakthrough-institute-trump#gs.FcVu1WI https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/struggling-nucl...
acidburnNSA 8y ago
The construction knowledge struggle is real. There are people overseas, particularly in some S. Korean and (yes) Japanese construction managers. The Gen-II LWRs they were building on time and on budget would be perfectly sufficient to stave off global warming. We could as a world decide to have those guys swoop in and re-teach us how it's done if we really decided to. Of course, the whole supply chain has to be ramped up, which is pretty non-trivial. Hey, it looks like TerraPower at least has some people who share your pet theory [1]. [1] https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789813148994_0047# https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/978981314899...

metaphor 8y ago

On a related note, Jacksonville Electric Authority is rolling on a 250 MW distributed solar supplement to their existing grid. Presentation from their October public board agenda can be found here[1], pp. 65-76. There's some interesting visuals of their solar distribution, land allocation, and proposed panel layouts...but perhaps more importantly, a purchase power agreement comparison against a nuclear deal with the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia[2] gone super sour (and currently under litigation). Takeaway is, indeed, nuclear is in dire need of innovation. [1] https://www.jea.com/Events/Board_Meetings/2018_10_16_Board_Meeting_Agenda_and_Package/ https://www.jea.com/Events/Board_Meetings/2018_10_16_Board_M... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

specialist 8y ago

I support traveling wave reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor We need to clean up our stockpiles somehow. The only other feasible option is dropping it all into the Marianna Trench. (Meanwhile, we really should store it all deep in a mountain.) If we get some useful, usable energy out of TWV, terrific. But it's not a motivator. (This is me being optimistic: Assuming enough humans survive the clathrate gun hypothesis that they'll need to bother cleaning up our messes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Finland is building a nuclear waste repository right now in deep bedrock [1]. It's totally reasonable scientifically. And in the US we have those Permian salt deposits [2]. Commercial nuclear waste really isn't nearly the boogeyman that people make it out to be in pop culture. It's solid, sitting around in dry casks, can be put safely in geologic deposits, and has yet to hurt anyone as far as I'm aware. Meanwhile fossil fuel kills hundreds of thousands per year from air pollution and god knows how many from climate change and we're sitting here saying "but what about nuclear waste?" while looking at 24/7 baseload carbon-free fully-scalable technology that's as safe or safer than wind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
- justatdotin 8y ago
  > has yet to hurt anyone as far as I'm aware whoa, don't leap to conclusions: give it a few more thousand years
- specialist 8y ago
  That WIPP wiki entry reads like a strong argument to burn thru our stockpiles with TWR. Thanks for Onkalo reference. Maybe the Finns will prove more competent than us. Did I mention fossil fuels? No. Did I say TWR or fossil fuels? No. Any survivable future scenario is wind, solar, and if we're lucky bioreactors (carbon capture). It'd be nice if humans could be trusted with (non-TWR) nuclear. But we can't. And even if we could, anything started TODAY will be decades too late, so why bother. Meanwhile, feasible affordable wind and solar capacity is doubling every 30 (?) months. It's happening. Everyone forgets about the weapons. Assuming we survive to care, what are we going to do with all the decommissioned nukes? Answer: TWR. I'm befuddled why anyone supporting nuclear power would oppose TWR. More power. Less waste. Less proliferation risk. Probably makes too much sense. Or sounds like magic.

jesterjester1 8y ago

Test

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

There are some very practical problems with nuclear that people are hand-waving away. One of the most significant is simply longterm cost, because you have to consider what nuclear, at large scale, would entail. Because of the specifics here costs would likely go much higher, not decline - and it's already one of, and by some metrics, the most expensive methods of energy production. Right now nuclear accounts for 10-15% of the world's energy production, yet even at that level we only have known uranium reserves to run these for about 200 years. [1] Bump that up to where nuclear is a major player in energy production and we're suddenly running out imminently. This means we're going to need to turn to things like saltwater extraction and breeder reactors. But these technologies are going to send costs skyrocketing. And as well as scarcity becomes an issue, we can also expect to see the cost of uranium itself start to skyrocket. And this is before getting into the other issues of nuclear at scale. Decommissioning is a lengthy, expensive, and complex process. Nuclear accidents are rare, but nowhere near as rare as they should be, on paper. There are currently about 450 plants operating worldwide. That's a disconcertingly low number given the number of accidents throughout the years. And breeder reactors would be absolutely required for longterm uranium perspectives, yet that technology not only greatly increases costs but also complexity and volatility. And another issue that becomes even more critical at scale is disposal. We already have some 90,000 tons [2] of nuclear waste (in the USA alone) the requires disposal. And this waste needs to be stored for thousands of years before it becomes remotely safe. And that also means we need to consider the waste that will pile up over centuries of nuclear usage. And as the article mentions, we're likely to see major increases in global energy usage over the years to come which further exasperates these problems. These are very real practical problems that seem to have no clear solution. In my opinion solar is the most logical option for the future. The one and only downside there is the lack of production during the night, yet this can be resolved in a countless number of basic technical ways ranging from batteries to even just mundane things such as shifting objects (or liquids or whatever) to create potential energy that can be harvested during off times. If we take a utopic view of the future, it's even possible to envision worldwide high energy direct current lines transiting power worldwide. All of these things involve losses of energy of course, but as far as our needs are concerned solar can provide a practically infinite amount of energy and so optimal efficiency is not so relevant. I also think that the decentralization of energy is also desirable. Even something as benign as rooftop solar will end up providing an immense amount of energy. Centralization of energy, let alone when it relies on a scarce resource is something I think we've learned a lot about for the past century. A bit of hindsight would be valuable here. [1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo... [2] - https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear_waste/issue_summary https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear...

thewhitetulip 8y ago

I don't understand why we are still obsessed with Nuclear. Nuclear produces toxic waste, plants are costly and take years to start functioning. Compare that with what Tesla Energy did with the electric stabilising grid in Australia, within 100 days! For a solar plant all you need to do is deploy panels and battery. Nothing else. And yet lobbyists, I presume, will advocate clean coal, clean petrol and whatever clean thing they are probably paid to market.

RealityVoid 8y ago
Nuclear has obvious advantages as a network baseline and if you think about it all energy is nuclear. Also, usually the choice posed is not nuclear or solar, it's nuclear vs coal. And, from my point of view,(although this might sound like an insane, non-pragmatic issue I am thinking about) if we, as a species ever want to become a multiplanetary species, mastering nuclear is a must. That way we will be able to create our own, micro-solar system wherever we will go.
- justatdotin 8y ago
  > usually the choice posed is not nuclear or solar, it's nuclear vs coal. usually? historically. sure last century that was the choice. Today, no one in their right mind would build either a nuclear or a coal plant. in my part of the world, there is no coal, no nuclear, only solar and gas. And the solar is cheaper than the gas. Coal and nuclear cant get a look in, and no one is going to build a new gas plant. But new solar is popping up all around me, at block, microgrid and array scale.
  - thewhitetulip 8y ago
    Exactly. We need solar because it is distributed. For nuclear we need a lot of money, and it is dangerous. Coal is horrible. Solar is cheap and much better
- lispm 8y ago
  > obvious advantages as a network baseline Given that they are currently large centralized reactors with very little flexibility, combining them with distributed solar makes no sense.

killjoywashere 8y ago

Isn't Myrvohld the same guy that runs Intellectual Ventures? This guy's like Bond-villian level bearish on humanity. Anyway, as someone who lived on a nuclear vessel and responded to Fukushima and has degrees in physics and medicine, I'm honestly fine with nuclear power, but renewables, by having lower energy density, are just way more managable. The workforce problems being a major part of it. I have solar on my house. I'm not putting a reactor on my house, ever. I always go back to this: I'll grant that more people will die falling from roofs while installing solar, than will ever die in all nuclear events, including Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagisaki. Still, solar and wind are the better options. Energy density matters. Not to high. Not to low. Juuust right.

nukemandan 8y ago
Why not a "nuclear battery"? ;-) https://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batteries.html https://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batt...
- nukemandan 8y ago
  really this: http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Autonomous%20Battery%20Reactors.pdf http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2...

nukemandan 8y ago

Love this. Close to my heart - Nuclear power is key to making a clean, reliable, safe, and robusts electrical grid. Plus - this is the only realistic way _right now_ to phase out fossil fuels! Great advancements to keep an eye on: https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small-modular-nuclear-reactors https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small... Specifically Molten Salt (Liquid Floride) Thorium Breeder reactors are my personal favorite technology I hope to see come around! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto... Great place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3rL08J7fDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3rL08J7fDA Great videos to follow: https://www.youtube.com/user/gordonmcdowell/featured https://www.youtube.com/user/gordonmcdowell/featured

piokoch 8y ago
For years Greenpeace and other "eco" organizations were fighting nuclear energy and now we have what we have. I understand that using solar or wind sounds sweet and in some places on the Earth it might even make some sense if we learn some day how to efficiently store energy. But we need something that works regardless on the weather. Nuclear energy does not comes for free, there are nuclear wastes, but the dangers and difficulties were greatly overblown in the course of anti-nuclear propaganda. I believe we can find the way to reuse nuclear wastes - my guess is that nobody was doing serious research in this area since being "pro" nuclear was not fashionable (and it is still not in many places).
- lambdadmitry 8y ago
  > if we learn some day how to efficiently store energy But we do. Redox batteries basically solve the problem of storage and scale very well [1], it's just the question of commercialization now (which is ongoing) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
- walkingolof 8y ago
  >but the dangers and difficulties were greatly overblown in the course of anti-nuclear propaganda. The nuclear waste generation is a _HUGE_ problem, the problem is so big that very few (if any) country really know how to solve it, look a the US for example as a really frightening example of an out of control waste problem, both from civil and military sources... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...

Annatar 8y ago

There is no need for better nuclear power; the stellarator works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X

agildehaus 8y ago
Works? Yes. Produces energy in a self-sustained reaction? No.
- Annatar 8y ago
  It can't do it with Helium, which was used to test whether it is operational. Still doesn't make searching for nuclear alternatives legitimate or warranted.

Pristina 8y ago

Nuclear is too scary. Last time there was an earthquake that wiped out 10000 people and shutdown a bunch of reactors (nobody died from the reactors), a country shut down all their nuclear power plants. It would take a HUGE amount of effort to change people's opinion, that's gonna be 90% of the work to bring nuclear back.

dancek 8y ago
It would only take mainstream media to change the way it portrays nuclear energy and a couple of years. But yes, you're right.
- KnightOfWords 8y ago
  > It would only take mainstream media to change the way it portrays nuclear energy and a couple of years. The media and government have limited ability to shift public opinion.
  - theshrike79 8y ago
    Seriously? That might be true for certain values of "media", but not otherwise.

superpermutat0r 8y ago

Nuclear power unfortunately comes with invisible tail risk. No mathematical model can predict it. Unless power plants are built deep below the ground eventually something will bring the catastrophe.

nukemandan 8y ago
or just below ground : http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Autonomous%20Battery%20Reactors.pdf http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2...
- VyperCard 8y ago
  Does one exist right now commercially?
  - nukemandan 8y ago
    right now? not that I know of. Regulatory frameworks that make sense vs the present standards are in the works.
  - nukemandan 8y ago
    check out this: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608271/small-reactors-could-kick-start-the-stalled-nuclear-sector/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608271/small-reactors-cou...
ALittleLight 8y ago
I don't think that's true. We've used nuclear power for decades with exceptionally few problems or deaths. There are single hydroelectric dam failures that have killed more people than everyone who has ever died from nuclear power - including Chernobyl, Three mile island, Fukushima, etc. Banqio dam killed 174,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam Chernobyl, on the other hand, the deadliest and worst nuclear power plant disaster in history killed 45 directly and was possibly responsible for increased cancer incidence adding another 4-6,000 cancer deaths. Should we discontinue hydroelectric power because all dams will eventually fail and may flood inhabited areas? Nuclear power is incredibly safe.

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

too dirty, too risky, too much burden on future generations, too centralized.

atoav 8y ago

One crucial question when it comes to nuclear power IMO is, how to make nuclear power without profiting from A) the public and B) from future generations. Nuclear waste is toxic, radioactive, hard to operate with, hard to contain and very often has half life times well beyond a few thousand years. The answer to the question who is going to be paying for a safe and controlled storage for a few milleniums has often been answered by the state taking responsibility (and very often the cost). Storing anything for multiple thousand years without causing disasters or having the public take the cost is a non-trivial task, because this surpasses generations, maybe even nations. Even advancements like this one: https://www.deepisolation.com/ https://www.deepisolation.com/ are not that fulfilling. Somebody has to continuosly check on these things for the future and a thousand years of guaranteed inspection is even something a nation state fails to provide. Maybe we should give it to the catholic church? If you would have to pay the containment/inspection/insurance costs for every ounce of nuclear waste for the rest of its projected life (to be fair: lets say only while it stays dangerous), it would get uneconomical quite fast. Not to mention that this will cost money centuries after all nuclear fuel has been burned. Is there money layed back for a thousand years in the future? If not, it is profiting from future generations. Maybe we find a better way to deal with nuclear waste than letting it rot in some underground location for centuries.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Maybe we find a better way to deal with nuclear waste than letting it rot in some underground location for centuries. We have ways, but not much is invested in developing and deploying them due to political reasons (some coming out of mass hysteria, but some that are pretty legit - like ability to weaponize substances involved). Those ways are: alternative reaction chains that produce shorter-living waste; reusing parts of the waste in other industrial applications (e.g. medicine); transmuting some of the waste into shorter-living elements, including ones reusable as fuel for different reactors. Unfortunately, I don't have the number on how much this would cut down the need to store anything long-term.

varjag 8y ago

It's amazing how quick HN switches to sucking up Myhrvold when it comes up to their favourite toy.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Shameless.

Tade0 8y ago

Here’s why it’s so crucial that we develop better nuclear that we can all live with: before this century is out, there’s good reason to believe that we’ll see almost everyone in the world consuming energy at least as fast as Americans do now. No, there isn't. EU's emissions/energy use for example has been in steady decline for years now. Also Americans tend to use an outsized amount of energy. An amount that also peaked around 2008, declining since then, so not even Americans will use as much energy as Americans today do. My take is as follows: currently nuclear loses with gas + renewables on price alone and is not getting cheaper, while renewables are. It takes and average of 7 years to build a nuclear power plant. Renewables haven't yet exhausted their price reduction potential so it's safe to say that in these 7 years their price will be even lower. On top of that cheap energy storage in the form of zinc-air batteries is being deployed today for a price competitive with gas peaker plants. Needless to say its price has been decreasing as well.

riffraff 8y ago
> No, there isn't. EU's emissions/energy use for example has been in steady decline for years now. where do you get the data for this? I am not saying it's wrong, I'm genuinely curious. Also, how much of this is due to heavy industries going to other countries?
- Tade0 8y ago
  The EU loves statistics: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/primary-energy-consumption-by-fuel-6/assessment-1 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/primary-e... About the heavy industries: I don't know, but given that energy usage was actually increasing before the recession I would say that it isn't a large factor. Heating is though and there's a lot of room for improvement here even given that ironically enough climate change reduced the need for it measurably.

rurban 8y ago

I really wait until one of this disaster is ripe to happen. Diablo, Palo Verde or South Texas to blow up one day, and we can finally bury those discussions then. Hurricane Harvey almost blew up South Texas, but nobody noticed or cared. Those new designs have a double incident rate, they are not better, but much higher risk and more trouble. South Texas and Palo Verde are experimental versions of these 3rd gen reactors, and they are amongst the most risky in the world. Esp. Palo Verde with no cooling water, Diablo at the heart of ring of fire, and South Texas with the danger of polluted cooling water besides the troubling technical problems they have all the time. Once they blow up they'll carry the cloud all over the midwest, right to New York and then this business opportunity will be finally over. The nuclear lobby only needs it to produce nuclear weapons nobody needs. Nobody knows how to store the nuclear waste. This problem is still not solved after decades of false promises.

atoav 8y ago
This also has conceptual issues: Nuclear waste will remain dangerous much (very much) longer than it will produce energy. We might run on uranium for 200 years. The nuclear waste produced today has a half life of well beyond thousand years. Today we do as if we can just bury and forget these things but they won't go away and they will produce cost for the public and future generations in one way or another (either we have to maintain it, keep it safe and inspect it all the time, or we loose patches of land forever or there are environmental/health costs). We speek of inspection, storage and insurance costs for multiple thousand years that are not paid by anybody using nuclear energy today. So we can use up all uranium in the next 200 years, but what then? Who will pay the next few thousand years of dealing with that corroding, highly toxic, radioactive waste? I assume the companies who earn their money with nuclear power don't have that money laid aside. Because if they would, that stuff would not be profitable at all. These future costs should be paid with every ton of waste produced today, and not paid by the public and our grand-grand-children.

Reason077 8y ago

From the article: "The amount of energy consumed by an average person in China (averaged over the year) has jumped by a quarter since 2006, to three kilowatts (kW) ... it’s still less than a third as much as the American average, which at 9.2 kW is equivalent to nine toasters, running 24/7." According to eia.gov[1], average residential electricity usage was 10,399 kWh per year in 2017. That's about 28.4 kWh per day, or an averaged power draw of 1.18 kW. And that's per residential utility customer, not per person! So the 9.2 kW claim seems extremely high. Is there really another 8 kW being used by business and industry? Or does the author not understand the difference between power (kW) and energy (kWh)? [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

Arnt 8y ago
Yes. Wikipedia's number is quite close to that 8: "Primary energy use in the United States was 25,155 TWh or about 81,800 kWh per person in 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Primary_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Pr...
- Reason077 8y ago
  Right, but that's total energy use rather than electricity use. Energy consumption tends to drop significantly where fossil fuel applications can be converted to electric. An electric vehicle is dramatically more efficient than a fossil-fuel burning one, for example. Likewise, an electric heat pump is much more efficient than a gas boiler.
  - Arnt 8y ago
    Oh, that was much too quick of me. Sorry.
  - jwilk 8y ago
    Presumably the article is talking about total energy use too.

myspy 8y ago

Mayor issues that were thought to use over the years are that fuel is not easy and ecologically good to mine. And it will run dry in two or three generations and where should we put the radiating waste. Usually users from the states in these comments downplay the issue of radiation and the European media / society says it's a big problem. Probably because Tschernobyl has shown many people what happens when it's going wrong. I would like a good pro/contra argumentation for this issue.

Uhrheber 8y ago

Maybe we need it, but we're definitely too dumb to use it safely.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

There is innovative nuclear power already. It's fusion-based, causes no emissions, and is so modular it can be placed in massive desert arrays or even on top of anyone's home. Fusion-powered solar energy is here now, cheaper than nuclear, and far easier to produce and scale. I'm all for modular nuclear reactors, safe pie-in-the-sky builds that don't suffer from the long list of problems the huge plants do. For now, the South Carolina nuclear debacle is enough to show that new nuclear based on old, clunky paradigms is not ready to compete without carbon taxes or some big financial incentive. So yes, either nuclear needs to innovate or it won't beat out renewables and gas in the 21st century.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

can someone recommend some good books/texts on nuclear reactor design and control (i.e. with accurate detailed breakdown of the operation controls and the computation graph for reverse-mode automatic differentiation (adjoint sensitivities) ?

jillesvangurp 8y ago

There's a big problem with building new coal and nuclear plants: the price per kwh is a moving target and it has trended down for years in clean energy projects and widely predicted to continue doing that for the foreseeable future. Coal plants are shutting down because they are getting too expensive to operate. Plans for new plants are shelved because they can't be operated cost effectively. Clean energy is completely killing investment opportunities in this space. And that's just at the current price levels. They are predicted to go down further at around 7% annually for the next few years still. This is the main reason investors are no longer eager to invest in either. Sure, nuclear is technically capable of delivering our power needs. It's even possible to do at vastly increased levels of safety given modern designs for plants, improved technology (relative to the 1960s era stuff used right now), etc. It's just that it will be very expensive to do it that way. It will take many billions to do the R&D, billions more to build the plants. In other words, these projects are prohibitively expensive and unlikely to be able to compete on price.

vectorEQ 8y ago

stop global warming with tons of reactors adding to background radiation of the world, increasing decay and causing other further issues. great idea. let's go!

amai 8y ago

We need innovative ways to get rid of nuclear waste first. Otherwise nuclear power is dead.