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A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

199 points by peterkshultz 8y ago

mimixco 8y ago
No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas). When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.
- mikestew 8y ago
  Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind From what I've been reading, seems CO2 tops that list. One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine. From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container, so the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me. The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment How much compared to, say, coal mining? Mining rare earth metals for solar panels and wind turbines? Yeah, nuclear power has some downsides. But I'm not hearing the "versus" part in your argument.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - hunta2097 8y ago
    Great insight. I am fond of the phrase "final generation nuclear". We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion. I think we're already past the point where some nuclear risk is acceptable. It's not a zero sum game - fossel fuels are already being used with risk. We need to take some (calculated) risks again.
    - abraae 8y ago
      Agree, and maybe we should start installing more, smaller, less safe nuclear reactors (hence cheaper and more widespread), to the point where people are ok with the occasional failure and even with occasional loss of life resulting. The vastly greater dangers of environmental collapse from global warning are so relatively long term that people can't make sensible risk analyses about them, hence the terror around nuclear and the nonchalance around reducing carbon emissions which are far more threatening.
      - PavlovsCat 8y ago
        I don't think there is a dichotomy between taking nuclear waste seriously and taking global warming seriously. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if taking one seriously is positively correlated with taking the other seriously.
    - credit_guy 8y ago
      > We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion. Not sure where that comes from. I don't think we'll have competitive fusion in the next 50 years. Sure, people who talk about ITER draw (quite optimistic) plans for when we'll be able to get more from the fusion reaction than what energy we pump in, but they forget to mention that's not the end of the story. Fusion may be clean, but it's terribly inefficient. In the Sun, fusion generates about the same amount of energy per liter as a liter of warm chicken soup releases to the ambient environment [1]. The Sun is huge, so overall the amount of generated energy is huge, but on Earth a power plant that has the same power density as the Sun would need to have a volume of 4 billion m3 to be similar to a typical fission power plant (1GW). That's 4 cubes of 1 square kilometers each. And don't bet on us getting to that efficiency in the next 20-30 years. So, sorry for the bad news, but no, we won't have viable fusion power plants in the foreseeable future. [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns-power-density-compared-to-a-compost-heap https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns-powe...
      - nbanks 8y ago
        The Joint European Torus had a 67% efficient reaction back in 1997. The torus wasn't designed for it, so they never tried again. It seams that ITER could achieve break-even quite realistically simply because tokamak reactors are more efficient when they're bigger. Yes, it has to be hotter than the sun and use a deuterium/tritium fuel, but it's all doable with known physics. I'm not sure when or if a sustained reaction can be done economically.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    We can build one CO2 capture factory in Nevada desert to capture excessive CO2 and bury it there. I see no difference.
    - Johnny555 8y ago
      It seems easier to not produce the CO2 in the first place than to produce it then run another industrial process to remove it... which in turn uses even more electricity.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      The amount of CO2 is orders of magnitude more than the amount of radioactive waste; you cannot just build “one factory in Nevada” and sequester all the carbon dioxide produced.
      - v_lisivka 8y ago
        We need to capture about 1 trillion of tons of CO2 to return to sane levels, and then capture about 25 billion tons of CO2 annually. It looks doable. See http://www.climatecentral.org/news/first-commercial-co2-capture-plant-live-21494 http://www.climatecentral.org/news/first-commercial-co2-capt... .
        Graham67 8y ago
        That process absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere at low concentrations (400 ppm) onto stones coated with X-material. Later the stones are heated (using more fuel) to release CO2 at much higher concentrations (more than 75%). Then what? It is a gas. You need to bury the carbon. They suggest feeding it to greenhouses, to grow food, which re-releases it later.
      - acidburnNSA 8y ago
        Six orders of magnitude, to be precise. Nuclear fuel has 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel or storage system.
    - mikestew 8y ago
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    > CO2 is the most dangerous waste > the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me Not. It doesn't work like that. CO2 is not even waste in the strict sense of the term; is basic for our survival. If you wipe all CO2 from the air, humankind will go extinct in a hurry because all plants would die really fast. All what we eat started as a CO2 molecule being captured by a plant somewhere. The problem to recycle or clean it from the air has been solved for us by plants millions of years ago. Plants love CO2 and clean it for free. Therefore, in the real life, many CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants will be soon captured by a weed or a tree. The rest will go to the atmosphere where will hang on, maybe for a long time, but far away from you. If you touch or inhale radiactive waste you could die in literally seconds. If you encounter CO2, as long that there is also enough oxygen around, nothing will happen. You will inhale it, will readily enter in your bloodstream, do a couple of roller coaster trips and will be discarded. All of we do it, many times a day for our entire life, without noticeable damage in our body. And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate, but again, there are much worse molecules in this sense. Methane for example.
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      2 soda cans are produced by a US citizen getting 100% of their primary energy from nuclear fuel in a full lifetime. It's toxic but it's tiny. It's very VERY reasonable to bury it in deep crystalline bedrock and be done with it. That's a reasonable technical solution to a legitimate problem. The problem of global warming from CO2 emission is much harder than nuclear waste, even if we increased nuclear generate 100-fold.
    - mikestew 8y ago
      And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate Uhh, that’s exactly what I was saying. Maybe too subtle? I wasn’t suggesting that we’d choke on it. there are much worse molecules in this sense. And therefore CO2 shouldn’t be a concern? Where are you going with this?
      - pvaldes 8y ago
        > And therefore CO2 shouldn’t be a concern? And therefore CO2 is not topping the list of worse waste created by man over radioactive waste, as you claimed previously... Is not logical to keep denying that radioactivity is a very, very dangerous stuff at this point. After the Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima experiences we should expect to start talking seriously about it, instead to deny the problem again and again.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    Was this included in what you've been reading? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste > One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine. Yeah, for a million years. The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m... > Because some radioactive species have half-lives longer than one million years, even very low container leakage and radionuclide migration rates must be taken into account.[21] Moreover, it may require more than one half-life until some nuclear materials lose enough radioactivity to no longer be lethal to living organisms. A 1983 review of the Swedish radioactive waste disposal program by the National Academy of Sciences found that country’s estimate of several hundred thousand years—perhaps up to one million years—being necessary for waste isolation "fully justified." Look through all that. It's ideas and proposals and things we're trying. We don't even have one thing you could call "a solution", and haven't found one in decades. > From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container Just plant trees, then store the wood. Okay, it's probably more complex than that, or there's much better ways. But this is no anywhere near the "a bunch of proposals, and good luck to future generations" level that nuclear waste is. You're basically saying "CO2 is a gas so it will move to me, and nuclear waste can be buried and you just have to stay a few hundred miles away". There is more to it than that. (apart than CO2 moving to you probably being a good thing, because then you can trap it)
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      > The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan. We already have a plan. Publish the information on the internet. It will still be here in 1 million years. YouTube will outlast the Sun.
- nickik 8y ago
  This is mostly wrong. > No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear waste is incredibly well controlled, unlike waste from solar, wind or fossil. Most Western countries didn't have contamination from civil nuclear waste at all and specially not in the last 30 years. Civilian Nuclear waste has basically killed nobody. Calling it the 'most dangerous' is nonsense. > Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas). Nothing is as cheap as natural gas in the US. Specially don't just look at creation but also the grid, the end to end price. Nuclear on mass scale is very competitive and has been proven to be able to replace fossil fuels on large scales. South Korea and China can produce very competitive nuclear reactors and we could do the same in the West. France did it in the 70/80 with 1960s tech. Nuclear has the massive advantage of being able to replace coal plants directly without redesigning the countries or even continents grid. These cost (and others) are always ignored when solar advocates claim of low dispatch cost. > When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Cleanup for any modern plants in the West are already part of the dispatch price. It takes a while to clean up, but the overall land use of nuclear is still 100/1000x smaller then anything else. > Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth. This is another failure in understanding scale. Uranium mining is not very heavy in terms of equipment compared other mining. Furthermore Uranium has a far higher energy density then anything else we could mine for energy. Solar, Wind and literally everything else involves far more mining and far more 'gray CO2' in the production. Nothing is zero carbon but nuclear is easily the closest thing we have. No other form of energy has a lower land use, lower resource use and produces less CO2. These are well established facts, however much anti-nuclear advocates want to ignore it. One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced (and the resource mined).
  - jws 8y ago
    One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced… 1.1 billion hectares of land are farmed to feed the 7.5 billion people. That works out to 2000 square meters per person. World energy consumption (all sources) runs about 18 terawatts, or 2400 watts per person. That is 58kWhr per day. Using an insolation factor of 3.0 (that is a 1W solar panel averages 3Whrs per day) each person will require 20kW of solar panels to replace ALL sources of energy. That is about 100 square meters of panels per person. That's a lot, but not unthinkable. You could buy 8 pallets of panels today for $13k and cover a person, and it only takes 5% as much land as the land used to feed that person.
- qball 8y ago
  > No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. You can't have this both ways. Either CO2 is the most dangerous waste and must be dealt with severely, or it is not. >When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Solar and wind are going to require billions of dollars for the same output as well, plus additional lithium mines for batteries since the sun doesn't shine every day (and reprocessing when the cells run out), plus those who are going to get killed in construction/maintenance (roof work is dangerous). We've just externalized the consequences for some of that since we don't bother to tax products based on how badly the source country destroys the environment through the manufacture of the product. Life creates waste, and it's time to accept that reality; you won't get a perfect solution so maybe it's time to start accepting merely good ones instead. Saving the environment is too important to wait.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Sure we do: reprocess it, like every country except the US that uses nuclear power does. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Not really true. Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper. It's a economic issue. France recycles their fuel once but they still only get 2% of the total energy out of the resource that's mined. Another super-reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste is burying it in large salt deposits or deep crystalline bedrock. Both are actually totally reasonable and practical solutions. People just go nuts though when you talk about it.
    - pdonis 8y ago
      > Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper. That's true now, yes. But anyone who realizes this also realizes (as you do) that nuclear waste disposal is not an issue: you just store the spent fuel now, and at some point (in the not too distant future if we were actually using nuclear energy for a large portion of base load power), mining and enriching new fuel will be more expensive than reprocessing, at which point all of that so-called "waste" will be useful. The idea that it needs to be stored safely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years is just ludicrous. Also, reprocessing makes disposal of what's left over much easier, because the stuff you actually have to dispose of afterwards (i.e,. the stuff that isn't now reprocessed fuel) has much shorter half-lives and so only needs to be safely sequestered for a much shorter time.
      - acidburnNSA 8y ago
        Yeah the reduction of long-term radiotoxicity achievable by partitioning and transmuting spent nuclear fuel really is astounding. I'm not totally convinced that uranium mining will ever be more expensive than reprocessing. For one thing, (and especially when you go to deep-burn non-reprocessing breeder reactors) the required uranium is so minuscule that extracting the (near infinite and truly renewable) uranium from seawater is practical using tech that's 3-6x more expensive today than traditional mining. On the other hand advances in industrial controls and robotics could conceivably reduce reprocessing costs. Either option would be fine for a much expanded nuclear fleet providing 24/7 low-footprint carbon-free energy.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  > Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment Numbers. Show numbers. Without numbers you have said NOTHING.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    The numbers are clear. Nuclear lifecycle is 11 gCO2-eq/kWh, less than almost anything and on par with wind. The idea that uranium mining requires tremendous amounts of anything compared to the alternatives is ludicrous simply by the physical fact that there are 938 MW*days of energy in every kilogram of natural uranium. That's 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel, and that results in a very small mining requirement compared to anything else to power humanity at world-scale.
    - Graham67 8y ago
      70 is a a lot closer to the truth. That 11 is a selective figure. None of these numbers includes the carbon used to bulldoze the East side of Japan, or Belarus. And again, as the first attempt was clumsy, and a minimum.
      - acidburnNSA 8y ago
        Which study are you using to suggest 70? That's on the high end on any study, but not the highest. The IPCC has min, median, and max estimates on these kinds of things. See Table A.III.2 in [1], 12 being the median. So worst case by any estimate is that nuclear emits 110 gCO2-eq/kg. Solar PV (utility) max is 180. Hydro is an astounding 2200 (twice as bad as coal, due to biogenic methane associated with large reservoirs). By any estimate, nuclear is a very low-carbon energy source, in a whole different class than fossil fuel and biofuels. In other words, it's one of the few low-carbon options we have. The minimum for nuclear is not 11 but rather 3.7. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
kartan 8y ago
I'm writing this from Japan. I do not have the numbers, but as I cross the country in the Shinkansen I see a sea of solar panels. Fukushima has been a lesson here. Strategically, Japan has to import it's energy, except for solar energy. With a float of trains electricity is already at the core of their transportation system. Here, at least, nuclear doesn't look like it's the future.
- s21n 8y ago
  The growing share of renewables in the mix doesn't mean there's no place for nuclear in the future – it's a false dilemma fallacy. Also, Japan's solar panels may be visually imposing, but they constitute a tiny amount of total energy generation in Japan. After Fukushima Daiichi disaster Japan shut down all it's reactors and switched to fossil fuels, not renewables, and this is the most tragic outcome of the disaster. Neither nuclear nor renewables could entirely replace fossil fuels, we desperately need both. Hopefully Japan is restarting it's nuclear reactors (5 reactors were restarted in 2018) and investing in renewables, but I'm afraid it's still not enough.
  - petre 8y ago
    Offshore wind is a good bet for Japan but it has to be supplemented with base load power coming from nuclear or geothermal. I think they have resources for geothermal being a volcanic island.
- nickik 8y ago
  People live in a fantasy world when thinking about solar. Solar is nicely visible and gives people a worm heard. The reality is that solar is a tiny part of global energy and even in countries like Japan it did not even come close to replacing nuclear. Japan will have nuclear future because they simply have to much capacity already. However the poplar nature of nuclear politics makes it a problem, they will continue to be import depended and fossil fuel for many years to come.
  - misiti3780 8y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted --- solar and wind account for 1.5% of total, taken from Enlightenment Now by Steve Pinker: > A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. Although renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind, have become drastically cheaper, and their share of the world’s energy has more than tripled in the past five years, that share is still a paltry 1.5 percent, and there are limits on how high it can go. The wind is often becalmed, and the sun sets every night and may be clouded over. But people need energy around the clock, rain or shine. Batteries that could store and release large amounts of energy from renewables will help, but ones that could work on the scale of cities are years away. Also, wind and solar sprawl over vast acreage, defying the densification process that is friendliest to the environment.
treya 8y ago
This is a ridiculous and fundamentally flawed proposition. The obvious omissions and lack of consideration of other factors threatening the planet belies this author's bias/naivete/stupidity/other motivations. First, the demand for energy is only a small fraction of numerous ways the planet is being compromised - irrevocably. Satisfying all energy demands worldwide cleanly will not "save the planet". Second, carbon-free is completely different than being clean energy. The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) are significant, highly toxic, and long-lasting. While the emissions of fossil fuels is considered, other cleaner alternatives are not. Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions.
- nickik 8y ago
  > The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true. While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything. Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable. > Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions. Sure if you forced everybody how you would like to live then we could do a lot. The idea that we should artificially restrict peoples energy needs as a way to save the plant just so we can avoid the very minor issue of nuclear waste is absurd.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true. While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything. Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable. While I view nuclear power relatively favorably, this is an extremely rose-tinted view of the situation. Nuclear waste can and does leak.
ouid 8y ago
Just a nitpick, neutrons aren't blasted into the nuclei of fissile isotopes. The faster a neutron is going, the less likely it is to cause fission. You want slow neutrons.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Depends what you're going for. If you have the fissile concentration to support it a fast-neutron chain reaction has lots of benefits: more neutrons per absorption in fuel leads to the ability to breed fuel for millennia or alternatively get lots more energy out of nuclear waste. Fission product poisons don't affect fast neutrons that much so you can get way more energy out of the fuel in fast reactors.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  Indeed. In a thermal reactor, the energy of the neutrons is moderated down to the reactor operating temperature, and is typically a few tens of milli-electron volts (some tens of millions of times less energetic than when they were produced). These slow neutrons do impart a lot of energy when they are absorbed into a nucleus, but that's because of their binding energy into that nucleus. Due to nuclear shell effects, they add slightly more energy to nuclei with an odd number of neutrons, which is one reason why 235U can be fissioned with thermal neutrons and 238U cannot.
imtringued 8y ago
With a new projected cost of 25 billion USD the cost overruns of the Vogtle Plant are worse than I thought. There is a reason why nuclear is losing to natural gas and coal. It's too damn expensive and takes too long. If this money was instead spent on building more storage capacity we'd have solved our energy problems a long time ago and even if we started today we'd be done long before the nuclear plant is online. The nuclear plant consists of two units each with 1200MW production capacity. Let's be pessimistic and assume that we need 24 hours of storage or roughly 57600MWh. A modern redox flow or lithium ion battery can cost as little as $100 per kWh but Tesla's grid battery with 129MWh cost 66 million which is around $500 per kWh so we will use that. Well it turns out 57600MWh * 500$/kWH is exactly 28.8 billion USD. No power grid on earth needs a 24 hour battery but even with this crazy assumption grid storage isn't significantly more expensive than nuclear power.
- thatcat 8y ago
  Your cost analysis neglects replacement, disposal costs for batteries, long term costs of carbon emission, and coal flyash disposal. The only reason nuclear is losing to gas and coal is because the externalities of the mess they make are dumped on the public, whereas nuclear pollution and waste processing is heavily regulated.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Batteries can be recycled, nuclear waste is stockpiled with no permanent disposal or recycling plan in sight. Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity). Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste disposal, liability insurance).
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      this might sound silly (and it probably is), but I don't understand why we don't build a hulking great cannon and shoot our nuclear waste into space.
tpkj 8y ago
Another factor to consider with nuclear is how it perpetuates complete dependence upon the grid, a single point of failure model. Perspective articulated here by Sunnova CEO John Berger. https://youtu.be/6Dx0U2y-YgU?t=2922 https://youtu.be/6Dx0U2y-YgU?t=2922
- intopieces 8y ago
  Nuclear doesn’t perpetuate complete dependence, because it has never been intended to be the sole provider of energy to its customers. Even the most ardent nuclear cheerleaders pose it as a single component in an energy mix.
  - arkh 8y ago
    Example with how the French grid handled a little added demand lately: https://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fthreadreaderapp.com%2Fthread%2F1073608820071505921.html https://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A... Dams used as batteries charged by pumping water.
  - tpkj 8y ago
    "...a single component in an energy mix". And that mix relies on the grid? With nuclear or other centralized power source, yes.
    - intopieces 8y ago
      From your link, solar doesn't rely on the grid, and in fact it acts independently of it on some islands.
      - justtopost 8y ago
        For the network effects and efficencies, solar absolutly needs a grid. If not a grid, you need local storage, another inefficiency.
        8y ago
lucb1e 8y ago
I see so many people against nuclear but I wonder if they read books such as Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air. As I understand it, either we kill ourselves fast, or we use this as a stop-gap until we can figure it out for real. With newer reactors being much better, maybe another generation (helped by more implementations) will even be good enough not to have to be a stop-gap solution.
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  Three questions that I have never had satisfactorily answered by nuclear advocates: * If nuclear is that safe, why don't we eliminate or at least, significantly raise the nuclear liability cap? The nuclear industry keeps trying to sell us (this article included) on the idea that disasters are now close to impossible. It'd be an easier sell if they voluntarily increased their liability, to, say $150-400 billion and found private insurers willing to take a risk on their safety, no? * Did you personally consider Japan's nuclear plants unsafe before Fukushima? (as far as I can tell it took most of us by surprise) * If the strike price for Hinkley point electricity is 1.5x-2x renewable strike price today (never mind in 10 years when renewable prices have plunged again), what exactly was so great about building a "next gen" nuclear plant?
  - NickM 8y ago
    These seem like very reasonable questions to me. Is this comment just getting downvoted because pro-nuclear HNers don’t like the opinions being expressed, or can someone legitimately justify the negative comment score I’m currently seeing?
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Pro nuke here advocating for advanced reactors. I agree that we should get rid of Price Anderson.
  - tbrownaw 8y ago
    For #1, insurance relies on the law of large numbers. If you expect an average of less than one event per whatever time, it stops being insurance and becomes either gambling or just an escrow account.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
The thesis, A new generation of environmentalists is learning to stop worrying and love atomic power is unsupported by the text if the article. My readthrough of the article failed to reveal supporting evidence that there is widespread change in opinion about nuclear in younger generations, much less that a pro-nuclear movement is growing.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Now there'a title that Ed Bernays would be proud of. 'A new generation approves.' So, where's this new generation? What demonstrates their love? Show me pictures of a dozen, or it didn't happen. Then, show how that scales with full knowledge of history, not just free jelly babies. Fantasy fiction isn't going to solve our dilemma. Advanced, less toxic technology will. Nuclear has had its chance.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Nuclear is the safest, most scaleable, greenest most reliable power source we know of bar none and blows every other alternative energy out of the water at 1000w per m2. Far less people have because of nuclear power in all its time than gets killed by nature in a year. The environmentalist not rationality kille nuclear.
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    No! Even the 'new' ones are killing it? Too slow, too expensive, too toxic. Hmmm, let's see: how many years before the residents of the San Onofre region finish paying for its recent failed upgrade ? Then how much more will they pay for decommissioning it? That 'clean, safe, too cheap to meter' line is from the 1950s. Before longer we'll have a decentralized, more secure power source that actually lives up to those lies. And best of all? The fuel supply will never be exhausted ... never need to be decommmissioned ... and lives a nice safe 90M miles away.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      Thats not because of the technology but legislation around it. Most of the pricing will go down once more gets put up so yes and its a hell more effective than wind snd solar which arent even supporting 1% of the worlds supply and not even close to a realistic solution to them beeing unreliable and frankly inferior even with a 300% improvement which isnt possible.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > Nuclear is the safest, most scaleable, greenest most reliable power source we know of bar none That doesn't change the article we have here.
deleted 8y ago
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simoneau 8y ago
I recommend Whole Earth Disciple by Stewart Brand. One of the founders of the environmental movement explains why he was wrong about nuclear power and other issues. “We are as gods, and have to get good at it.”
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  I am idly curious whether the environmentalist movement was deliberately seeded with anti-nuclear sentiment by the fossil fuel industry. Could be coincidence, but it seems awfully convenient.
Graham67 8y ago
We have the opportunity now, to decide to not kill everything bigger than bacteria. We could shutdown nukes, and store the waste. Or we could go for broke - if we go extinct - everything goes extinct.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Seems like an exaggeration. I like your point but I don’t understand why you draw a line at bacteria.
vertline3 8y ago
These are hard problems that I am not sure about: decommissioning, spent fuel storage.
Jedd 8y ago
Yet another article about the complex subject of power generation that wilfully conflates fusion with fission. (Usually it's 'nuclear power' - here it's 'atomic power'. That's assuming we're happy to think we have a power problem, not an an energy problem. Anti-solar types (who similarly conflate PVC with solar thermal) like to mix or muddle those. Fission apologists who think that because Lithium is mined, then mining Uranium should be just fine, also seem keen to blunt some semantic nuances. Nuclear fission's time has been and gone - it's great for bombs, and was an interesting experiment, but the costs are way higher than anyone should reasonably expect to pass onto future generations. (Plus they snuck in that nasty 'metric ton' construct. 1000kg is a tonne.)
- amsaleka 8y ago
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Jodlenisse 8y ago
It helps to be born after 1986.
- DennisP 8y ago
  I lived in Germany in 1986. For over half a year we were told to avoid fresh milk and produce and avoid walking barefoot on grass. But now I know that Chernobyl was a ridiculously poor design that lacked a containment dome. If you want to build another Chernobyl I'll fight you, but if you want to build a modern plant or research MSRs I'm all for it, because climate change is set to do way worse than anything nuclear has ever done, Chernobyl included.
throw2016 8y ago
The recent piece by HCN on our nuclear past stands in sharp contrast. [1] Anyone reading that, environmentalists or not, will have reason for extreme concern and skepticism about a single generations ability to manage consequences that can last thousands of years. [1] https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.21/nuclear-energy-theres-no-easy-fix-for-our-nuclear-past https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.21/nuclear-energy-theres-no-ea...
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  The consequences of not using nuclear alternatives will last 1000s of years too. There’s no way out of consequences.
lando2319 8y ago
Question, why do people talk so pessimistically about the potential for solar? I see lots of comments like, "there is not enough land for solar panels". People seem to have a fixed view about how much power can be drawn. Sure right now the payoff might be underwhelming in relation to the size requirements, but with more development wouldn't the technology improve? I imagine a future where the technology improves to the point where people who live in cloudy areas can still generate plenty of power. Is that unrealistic?
- sullyj3 8y ago
  A certain number of photons will fall on any given square meter per second. You can't extract more energy from that square meter in a second than those photons provide.
- richardburden 8y ago
  Why not imagine a future where fusion technology improves to the point that there's no point in using anything else? With fission, we're already there, and taking full advantage of fission now, with breeder reactors and spent fuel reprocessing made legal again, will give us the energy to pursue fusion worldwide with a budget similar to the U.S. defense budget. Sticking to solar and other "green" energy means mass-homicidal energy austerity!
  - petre 8y ago
    The tech is there, only breeders are quite expensive, anti nuke lobby and politics screwed things up to such a degree that nuclear became overpriced and overengineered. Still we can fix things, SMRs such as NuScale (basically naval scale PWR tech) are a solution if the licensing hurdles are be resolved and so is geothermal where it's available.
- Twisell 8y ago
  The point is that climat change is real and it’s coming fast. So from a purely pragmatic standpoint it seems more reasonable to deploy solutions as soon as possible with available technologies than to wait for a plausible technology improvements. Otherwise you risk being almost as inactive in the required efforts than an average climat change denier.
mothsonasloth 8y ago
The Russians have been building floating nuclear power plants to deploy to remote areas that need power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...

199 points by peterkshultz 8y ago

No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas). When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.

mikestew 8y ago
Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind From what I've been reading, seems CO2 tops that list. One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine. From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container, so the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me. The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment How much compared to, say, coal mining? Mining rare earth metals for solar panels and wind turbines? Yeah, nuclear power has some downsides. But I'm not hearing the "versus" part in your argument.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hunta2097 8y ago
  Great insight. I am fond of the phrase "final generation nuclear". We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion. I think we're already past the point where some nuclear risk is acceptable. It's not a zero sum game - fossel fuels are already being used with risk. We need to take some (calculated) risks again.
  - abraae 8y ago
    Agree, and maybe we should start installing more, smaller, less safe nuclear reactors (hence cheaper and more widespread), to the point where people are ok with the occasional failure and even with occasional loss of life resulting. The vastly greater dangers of environmental collapse from global warning are so relatively long term that people can't make sensible risk analyses about them, hence the terror around nuclear and the nonchalance around reducing carbon emissions which are far more threatening.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      I don't think there is a dichotomy between taking nuclear waste seriously and taking global warming seriously. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if taking one seriously is positively correlated with taking the other seriously.
  - credit_guy 8y ago
    > We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion. Not sure where that comes from. I don't think we'll have competitive fusion in the next 50 years. Sure, people who talk about ITER draw (quite optimistic) plans for when we'll be able to get more from the fusion reaction than what energy we pump in, but they forget to mention that's not the end of the story. Fusion may be clean, but it's terribly inefficient. In the Sun, fusion generates about the same amount of energy per liter as a liter of warm chicken soup releases to the ambient environment [1]. The Sun is huge, so overall the amount of generated energy is huge, but on Earth a power plant that has the same power density as the Sun would need to have a volume of 4 billion m3 to be similar to a typical fission power plant (1GW). That's 4 cubes of 1 square kilometers each. And don't bet on us getting to that efficiency in the next 20-30 years. So, sorry for the bad news, but no, we won't have viable fusion power plants in the foreseeable future. [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns-power-density-compared-to-a-compost-heap https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns-powe...
    - nbanks 8y ago
      The Joint European Torus had a 67% efficient reaction back in 1997. The torus wasn't designed for it, so they never tried again. It seams that ITER could achieve break-even quite realistically simply because tokamak reactors are more efficient when they're bigger. Yes, it has to be hotter than the sun and use a deuterium/tritium fuel, but it's all doable with known physics. I'm not sure when or if a sustained reaction can be done economically.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  We can build one CO2 capture factory in Nevada desert to capture excessive CO2 and bury it there. I see no difference.
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    It seems easier to not produce the CO2 in the first place than to produce it then run another industrial process to remove it... which in turn uses even more electricity.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    The amount of CO2 is orders of magnitude more than the amount of radioactive waste; you cannot just build “one factory in Nevada” and sequester all the carbon dioxide produced.
    - v_lisivka 8y ago
      We need to capture about 1 trillion of tons of CO2 to return to sane levels, and then capture about 25 billion tons of CO2 annually. It looks doable. See http://www.climatecentral.org/news/first-commercial-co2-capture-plant-live-21494 http://www.climatecentral.org/news/first-commercial-co2-capt... .
      - Graham67 8y ago
        That process absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere at low concentrations (400 ppm) onto stones coated with X-material. Later the stones are heated (using more fuel) to release CO2 at much higher concentrations (more than 75%). Then what? It is a gas. You need to bury the carbon. They suggest feeding it to greenhouses, to grow food, which re-releases it later.
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      Six orders of magnitude, to be precise. Nuclear fuel has 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel or storage system.
  - mikestew 8y ago
- pvaldes 8y ago
  > CO2 is the most dangerous waste > the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me Not. It doesn't work like that. CO2 is not even waste in the strict sense of the term; is basic for our survival. If you wipe all CO2 from the air, humankind will go extinct in a hurry because all plants would die really fast. All what we eat started as a CO2 molecule being captured by a plant somewhere. The problem to recycle or clean it from the air has been solved for us by plants millions of years ago. Plants love CO2 and clean it for free. Therefore, in the real life, many CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants will be soon captured by a weed or a tree. The rest will go to the atmosphere where will hang on, maybe for a long time, but far away from you. If you touch or inhale radiactive waste you could die in literally seconds. If you encounter CO2, as long that there is also enough oxygen around, nothing will happen. You will inhale it, will readily enter in your bloodstream, do a couple of roller coaster trips and will be discarded. All of we do it, many times a day for our entire life, without noticeable damage in our body. And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate, but again, there are much worse molecules in this sense. Methane for example.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    2 soda cans are produced by a US citizen getting 100% of their primary energy from nuclear fuel in a full lifetime. It's toxic but it's tiny. It's very VERY reasonable to bury it in deep crystalline bedrock and be done with it. That's a reasonable technical solution to a legitimate problem. The problem of global warming from CO2 emission is much harder than nuclear waste, even if we increased nuclear generate 100-fold.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate Uhh, that’s exactly what I was saying. Maybe too subtle? I wasn’t suggesting that we’d choke on it. there are much worse molecules in this sense. And therefore CO2 shouldn’t be a concern? Where are you going with this?
    - pvaldes 8y ago
      > And therefore CO2 shouldn’t be a concern? And therefore CO2 is not topping the list of worse waste created by man over radioactive waste, as you claimed previously... Is not logical to keep denying that radioactivity is a very, very dangerous stuff at this point. After the Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima experiences we should expect to start talking seriously about it, instead to deny the problem again and again.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  Was this included in what you've been reading? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste > One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine. Yeah, for a million years. The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m... > Because some radioactive species have half-lives longer than one million years, even very low container leakage and radionuclide migration rates must be taken into account.[21] Moreover, it may require more than one half-life until some nuclear materials lose enough radioactivity to no longer be lethal to living organisms. A 1983 review of the Swedish radioactive waste disposal program by the National Academy of Sciences found that country’s estimate of several hundred thousand years—perhaps up to one million years—being necessary for waste isolation "fully justified." Look through all that. It's ideas and proposals and things we're trying. We don't even have one thing you could call "a solution", and haven't found one in decades. > From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container Just plant trees, then store the wood. Okay, it's probably more complex than that, or there's much better ways. But this is no anywhere near the "a bunch of proposals, and good luck to future generations" level that nuclear waste is. You're basically saying "CO2 is a gas so it will move to me, and nuclear waste can be buried and you just have to stay a few hundred miles away". There is more to it than that. (apart than CO2 moving to you probably being a good thing, because then you can trap it)
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    > The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan. We already have a plan. Publish the information on the internet. It will still be here in 1 million years. YouTube will outlast the Sun.
nickik 8y ago
This is mostly wrong. > No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Nuclear waste is incredibly well controlled, unlike waste from solar, wind or fossil. Most Western countries didn't have contamination from civil nuclear waste at all and specially not in the last 30 years. Civilian Nuclear waste has basically killed nobody. Calling it the 'most dangerous' is nonsense. > Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas). Nothing is as cheap as natural gas in the US. Specially don't just look at creation but also the grid, the end to end price. Nuclear on mass scale is very competitive and has been proven to be able to replace fossil fuels on large scales. South Korea and China can produce very competitive nuclear reactors and we could do the same in the West. France did it in the 70/80 with 1960s tech. Nuclear has the massive advantage of being able to replace coal plants directly without redesigning the countries or even continents grid. These cost (and others) are always ignored when solar advocates claim of low dispatch cost. > When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Cleanup for any modern plants in the West are already part of the dispatch price. It takes a while to clean up, but the overall land use of nuclear is still 100/1000x smaller then anything else. > Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth. This is another failure in understanding scale. Uranium mining is not very heavy in terms of equipment compared other mining. Furthermore Uranium has a far higher energy density then anything else we could mine for energy. Solar, Wind and literally everything else involves far more mining and far more 'gray CO2' in the production. Nothing is zero carbon but nuclear is easily the closest thing we have. No other form of energy has a lower land use, lower resource use and produces less CO2. These are well established facts, however much anti-nuclear advocates want to ignore it. One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced (and the resource mined).
- jws 8y ago
  One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced… 1.1 billion hectares of land are farmed to feed the 7.5 billion people. That works out to 2000 square meters per person. World energy consumption (all sources) runs about 18 terawatts, or 2400 watts per person. That is 58kWhr per day. Using an insolation factor of 3.0 (that is a 1W solar panel averages 3Whrs per day) each person will require 20kW of solar panels to replace ALL sources of energy. That is about 100 square meters of panels per person. That's a lot, but not unthinkable. You could buy 8 pallets of panels today for $13k and cover a person, and it only takes 5% as much land as the land used to feed that person.
qball 8y ago
> No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. You can't have this both ways. Either CO2 is the most dangerous waste and must be dealt with severely, or it is not. >When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense. Solar and wind are going to require billions of dollars for the same output as well, plus additional lithium mines for batteries since the sun doesn't shine every day (and reprocessing when the cells run out), plus those who are going to get killed in construction/maintenance (roof work is dangerous). We've just externalized the consequences for some of that since we don't bother to tax products based on how badly the source country destroys the environment through the manufacture of the product. Life creates waste, and it's time to accept that reality; you won't get a perfect solution so maybe it's time to start accepting merely good ones instead. Saving the environment is too important to wait.
pdonis 8y ago
> we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it. Sure we do: reprocess it, like every country except the US that uses nuclear power does. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Not really true. Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper. It's a economic issue. France recycles their fuel once but they still only get 2% of the total energy out of the resource that's mined. Another super-reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste is burying it in large salt deposits or deep crystalline bedrock. Both are actually totally reasonable and practical solutions. People just go nuts though when you talk about it.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > Reprocessing is expensive and mining and enriching new uranium is just cheaper. That's true now, yes. But anyone who realizes this also realizes (as you do) that nuclear waste disposal is not an issue: you just store the spent fuel now, and at some point (in the not too distant future if we were actually using nuclear energy for a large portion of base load power), mining and enriching new fuel will be more expensive than reprocessing, at which point all of that so-called "waste" will be useful. The idea that it needs to be stored safely for tens or hundreds of thousands of years is just ludicrous. Also, reprocessing makes disposal of what's left over much easier, because the stuff you actually have to dispose of afterwards (i.e,. the stuff that isn't now reprocessed fuel) has much shorter half-lives and so only needs to be safely sequestered for a much shorter time.
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      Yeah the reduction of long-term radiotoxicity achievable by partitioning and transmuting spent nuclear fuel really is astounding. I'm not totally convinced that uranium mining will ever be more expensive than reprocessing. For one thing, (and especially when you go to deep-burn non-reprocessing breeder reactors) the required uranium is so minuscule that extracting the (near infinite and truly renewable) uranium from seawater is practical using tech that's 3-6x more expensive today than traditional mining. On the other hand advances in industrial controls and robotics could conceivably reduce reprocessing costs. Either option would be fine for a much expanded nuclear fleet providing 24/7 low-footprint carbon-free energy.
BurningFrog 8y ago
> Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment Numbers. Show numbers. Without numbers you have said NOTHING.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  The numbers are clear. Nuclear lifecycle is 11 gCO2-eq/kWh, less than almost anything and on par with wind. The idea that uranium mining requires tremendous amounts of anything compared to the alternatives is ludicrous simply by the physical fact that there are 938 MW*days of energy in every kilogram of natural uranium. That's 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel, and that results in a very small mining requirement compared to anything else to power humanity at world-scale.
  - Graham67 8y ago
    70 is a a lot closer to the truth. That 11 is a selective figure. None of these numbers includes the carbon used to bulldoze the East side of Japan, or Belarus. And again, as the first attempt was clumsy, and a minimum.
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      Which study are you using to suggest 70? That's on the high end on any study, but not the highest. The IPCC has min, median, and max estimates on these kinds of things. See Table A.III.2 in [1], 12 being the median. So worst case by any estimate is that nuclear emits 110 gCO2-eq/kg. Solar PV (utility) max is 180. Hydro is an astounding 2200 (twice as bad as coal, due to biogenic methane associated with large reservoirs). By any estimate, nuclear is a very low-carbon energy source, in a whole different class than fossil fuel and biofuels. In other words, it's one of the few low-carbon options we have. The minimum for nuclear is not 11 but rather 3.7. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

kartan 8y ago

I'm writing this from Japan. I do not have the numbers, but as I cross the country in the Shinkansen I see a sea of solar panels. Fukushima has been a lesson here. Strategically, Japan has to import it's energy, except for solar energy. With a float of trains electricity is already at the core of their transportation system. Here, at least, nuclear doesn't look like it's the future.

s21n 8y ago
The growing share of renewables in the mix doesn't mean there's no place for nuclear in the future – it's a false dilemma fallacy. Also, Japan's solar panels may be visually imposing, but they constitute a tiny amount of total energy generation in Japan. After Fukushima Daiichi disaster Japan shut down all it's reactors and switched to fossil fuels, not renewables, and this is the most tragic outcome of the disaster. Neither nuclear nor renewables could entirely replace fossil fuels, we desperately need both. Hopefully Japan is restarting it's nuclear reactors (5 reactors were restarted in 2018) and investing in renewables, but I'm afraid it's still not enough.
- petre 8y ago
  Offshore wind is a good bet for Japan but it has to be supplemented with base load power coming from nuclear or geothermal. I think they have resources for geothermal being a volcanic island.
nickik 8y ago
People live in a fantasy world when thinking about solar. Solar is nicely visible and gives people a worm heard. The reality is that solar is a tiny part of global energy and even in countries like Japan it did not even come close to replacing nuclear. Japan will have nuclear future because they simply have to much capacity already. However the poplar nature of nuclear politics makes it a problem, they will continue to be import depended and fossil fuel for many years to come.
- misiti3780 8y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted --- solar and wind account for 1.5% of total, taken from Enlightenment Now by Steve Pinker: > A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. Although renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind, have become drastically cheaper, and their share of the world’s energy has more than tripled in the past five years, that share is still a paltry 1.5 percent, and there are limits on how high it can go. The wind is often becalmed, and the sun sets every night and may be clouded over. But people need energy around the clock, rain or shine. Batteries that could store and release large amounts of energy from renewables will help, but ones that could work on the scale of cities are years away. Also, wind and solar sprawl over vast acreage, defying the densification process that is friendliest to the environment.

treya 8y ago

This is a ridiculous and fundamentally flawed proposition. The obvious omissions and lack of consideration of other factors threatening the planet belies this author's bias/naivete/stupidity/other motivations. First, the demand for energy is only a small fraction of numerous ways the planet is being compromised - irrevocably. Satisfying all energy demands worldwide cleanly will not "save the planet". Second, carbon-free is completely different than being clean energy. The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) are significant, highly toxic, and long-lasting. While the emissions of fossil fuels is considered, other cleaner alternatives are not. Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions.

nickik 8y ago
> The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true. While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything. Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable. > Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions. Sure if you forced everybody how you would like to live then we could do a lot. The idea that we should artificially restrict peoples energy needs as a way to save the plant just so we can avoid the very minor issue of nuclear waste is absurd.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true. While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything. Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable. While I view nuclear power relatively favorably, this is an extremely rose-tinted view of the situation. Nuclear waste can and does leak.

ouid 8y ago

Just a nitpick, neutrons aren't blasted into the nuclei of fissile isotopes. The faster a neutron is going, the less likely it is to cause fission. You want slow neutrons.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Depends what you're going for. If you have the fissile concentration to support it a fast-neutron chain reaction has lots of benefits: more neutrons per absorption in fuel leads to the ability to breed fuel for millennia or alternatively get lots more energy out of nuclear waste. Fission product poisons don't affect fast neutrons that much so you can get way more energy out of the fuel in fast reactors.
pfdietz 8y ago
Indeed. In a thermal reactor, the energy of the neutrons is moderated down to the reactor operating temperature, and is typically a few tens of milli-electron volts (some tens of millions of times less energetic than when they were produced). These slow neutrons do impart a lot of energy when they are absorbed into a nucleus, but that's because of their binding energy into that nucleus. Due to nuclear shell effects, they add slightly more energy to nuclei with an odd number of neutrons, which is one reason why 235U can be fissioned with thermal neutrons and 238U cannot.

imtringued 8y ago

With a new projected cost of 25 billion USD the cost overruns of the Vogtle Plant are worse than I thought. There is a reason why nuclear is losing to natural gas and coal. It's too damn expensive and takes too long. If this money was instead spent on building more storage capacity we'd have solved our energy problems a long time ago and even if we started today we'd be done long before the nuclear plant is online. The nuclear plant consists of two units each with 1200MW production capacity. Let's be pessimistic and assume that we need 24 hours of storage or roughly 57600MWh. A modern redox flow or lithium ion battery can cost as little as $100 per kWh but Tesla's grid battery with 129MWh cost 66 million which is around $500 per kWh so we will use that. Well it turns out 57600MWh * 500$/kWH is exactly 28.8 billion USD. No power grid on earth needs a 24 hour battery but even with this crazy assumption grid storage isn't significantly more expensive than nuclear power.

thatcat 8y ago
Your cost analysis neglects replacement, disposal costs for batteries, long term costs of carbon emission, and coal flyash disposal. The only reason nuclear is losing to gas and coal is because the externalities of the mess they make are dumped on the public, whereas nuclear pollution and waste processing is heavily regulated.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Batteries can be recycled, nuclear waste is stockpiled with no permanent disposal or recycling plan in sight. Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity). Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste disposal, liability insurance).
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    this might sound silly (and it probably is), but I don't understand why we don't build a hulking great cannon and shoot our nuclear waste into space.

tpkj 8y ago

Another factor to consider with nuclear is how it perpetuates complete dependence upon the grid, a single point of failure model. Perspective articulated here by Sunnova CEO John Berger. https://youtu.be/6Dx0U2y-YgU?t=2922 https://youtu.be/6Dx0U2y-YgU?t=2922

intopieces 8y ago
Nuclear doesn’t perpetuate complete dependence, because it has never been intended to be the sole provider of energy to its customers. Even the most ardent nuclear cheerleaders pose it as a single component in an energy mix.
- arkh 8y ago
  Example with how the French grid handled a little added demand lately: https://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fthreadreaderapp.com%2Fthread%2F1073608820071505921.html https://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A... Dams used as batteries charged by pumping water.
- tpkj 8y ago
  "...a single component in an energy mix". And that mix relies on the grid? With nuclear or other centralized power source, yes.
  - intopieces 8y ago
    From your link, solar doesn't rely on the grid, and in fact it acts independently of it on some islands.
    - justtopost 8y ago
      For the network effects and efficencies, solar absolutly needs a grid. If not a grid, you need local storage, another inefficiency.
      - 8y ago

lucb1e 8y ago

I see so many people against nuclear but I wonder if they read books such as Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air. As I understand it, either we kill ourselves fast, or we use this as a stop-gap until we can figure it out for real. With newer reactors being much better, maybe another generation (helped by more implementations) will even be good enough not to have to be a stop-gap solution.

crdoconnor 8y ago
Three questions that I have never had satisfactorily answered by nuclear advocates: * If nuclear is that safe, why don't we eliminate or at least, significantly raise the nuclear liability cap? The nuclear industry keeps trying to sell us (this article included) on the idea that disasters are now close to impossible. It'd be an easier sell if they voluntarily increased their liability, to, say $150-400 billion and found private insurers willing to take a risk on their safety, no? * Did you personally consider Japan's nuclear plants unsafe before Fukushima? (as far as I can tell it took most of us by surprise) * If the strike price for Hinkley point electricity is 1.5x-2x renewable strike price today (never mind in 10 years when renewable prices have plunged again), what exactly was so great about building a "next gen" nuclear plant?
- NickM 8y ago
  These seem like very reasonable questions to me. Is this comment just getting downvoted because pro-nuclear HNers don’t like the opinions being expressed, or can someone legitimately justify the negative comment score I’m currently seeing?
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Pro nuke here advocating for advanced reactors. I agree that we should get rid of Price Anderson.
- tbrownaw 8y ago
  For #1, insurance relies on the law of large numbers. If you expect an average of less than one event per whatever time, it stops being insurance and becomes either gambling or just an escrow account.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

The thesis, A new generation of environmentalists is learning to stop worrying and love atomic power is unsupported by the text if the article. My readthrough of the article failed to reveal supporting evidence that there is widespread change in opinion about nuclear in younger generations, much less that a pro-nuclear movement is growing.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Now there'a title that Ed Bernays would be proud of. 'A new generation approves.' So, where's this new generation? What demonstrates their love? Show me pictures of a dozen, or it didn't happen. Then, show how that scales with full knowledge of history, not just free jelly babies. Fantasy fiction isn't going to solve our dilemma. Advanced, less toxic technology will. Nuclear has had its chance.

ThomPete 8y ago
Nuclear is the safest, most scaleable, greenest most reliable power source we know of bar none and blows every other alternative energy out of the water at 1000w per m2. Far less people have because of nuclear power in all its time than gets killed by nature in a year. The environmentalist not rationality kille nuclear.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  No! Even the 'new' ones are killing it? Too slow, too expensive, too toxic. Hmmm, let's see: how many years before the residents of the San Onofre region finish paying for its recent failed upgrade ? Then how much more will they pay for decommissioning it? That 'clean, safe, too cheap to meter' line is from the 1950s. Before longer we'll have a decentralized, more secure power source that actually lives up to those lies. And best of all? The fuel supply will never be exhausted ... never need to be decommmissioned ... and lives a nice safe 90M miles away.
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    Thats not because of the technology but legislation around it. Most of the pricing will go down once more gets put up so yes and its a hell more effective than wind snd solar which arent even supporting 1% of the worlds supply and not even close to a realistic solution to them beeing unreliable and frankly inferior even with a 300% improvement which isnt possible.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > Nuclear is the safest, most scaleable, greenest most reliable power source we know of bar none That doesn't change the article we have here.

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simoneau 8y ago

I recommend Whole Earth Disciple by Stewart Brand. One of the founders of the environmental movement explains why he was wrong about nuclear power and other issues. “We are as gods, and have to get good at it.”

erikpukinskis 8y ago
I am idly curious whether the environmentalist movement was deliberately seeded with anti-nuclear sentiment by the fossil fuel industry. Could be coincidence, but it seems awfully convenient.

Graham67 8y ago

We have the opportunity now, to decide to not kill everything bigger than bacteria. We could shutdown nukes, and store the waste. Or we could go for broke - if we go extinct - everything goes extinct.

erikpukinskis 8y ago
Seems like an exaggeration. I like your point but I don’t understand why you draw a line at bacteria.

vertline3 8y ago

These are hard problems that I am not sure about: decommissioning, spent fuel storage.

Jedd 8y ago

Yet another article about the complex subject of power generation that wilfully conflates fusion with fission. (Usually it's 'nuclear power' - here it's 'atomic power'. That's assuming we're happy to think we have a power problem, not an an energy problem. Anti-solar types (who similarly conflate PVC with solar thermal) like to mix or muddle those. Fission apologists who think that because Lithium is mined, then mining Uranium should be just fine, also seem keen to blunt some semantic nuances. Nuclear fission's time has been and gone - it's great for bombs, and was an interesting experiment, but the costs are way higher than anyone should reasonably expect to pass onto future generations. (Plus they snuck in that nasty 'metric ton' construct. 1000kg is a tonne.)

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Jodlenisse 8y ago

It helps to be born after 1986.

DennisP 8y ago
I lived in Germany in 1986. For over half a year we were told to avoid fresh milk and produce and avoid walking barefoot on grass. But now I know that Chernobyl was a ridiculously poor design that lacked a containment dome. If you want to build another Chernobyl I'll fight you, but if you want to build a modern plant or research MSRs I'm all for it, because climate change is set to do way worse than anything nuclear has ever done, Chernobyl included.

throw2016 8y ago

The recent piece by HCN on our nuclear past stands in sharp contrast. [1] Anyone reading that, environmentalists or not, will have reason for extreme concern and skepticism about a single generations ability to manage consequences that can last thousands of years. [1] https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.21/nuclear-energy-theres-no-easy-fix-for-our-nuclear-past https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.21/nuclear-energy-theres-no-ea...

erikpukinskis 8y ago
The consequences of not using nuclear alternatives will last 1000s of years too. There’s no way out of consequences.

lando2319 8y ago

Question, why do people talk so pessimistically about the potential for solar? I see lots of comments like, "there is not enough land for solar panels". People seem to have a fixed view about how much power can be drawn. Sure right now the payoff might be underwhelming in relation to the size requirements, but with more development wouldn't the technology improve? I imagine a future where the technology improves to the point where people who live in cloudy areas can still generate plenty of power. Is that unrealistic?

sullyj3 8y ago
A certain number of photons will fall on any given square meter per second. You can't extract more energy from that square meter in a second than those photons provide.
richardburden 8y ago
Why not imagine a future where fusion technology improves to the point that there's no point in using anything else? With fission, we're already there, and taking full advantage of fission now, with breeder reactors and spent fuel reprocessing made legal again, will give us the energy to pursue fusion worldwide with a budget similar to the U.S. defense budget. Sticking to solar and other "green" energy means mass-homicidal energy austerity!
- petre 8y ago
  The tech is there, only breeders are quite expensive, anti nuke lobby and politics screwed things up to such a degree that nuclear became overpriced and overengineered. Still we can fix things, SMRs such as NuScale (basically naval scale PWR tech) are a solution if the licensing hurdles are be resolved and so is geothermal where it's available.
Twisell 8y ago
The point is that climat change is real and it’s coming fast. So from a purely pragmatic standpoint it seems more reasonable to deploy solutions as soon as possible with available technologies than to wait for a plausible technology improvements. Otherwise you risk being almost as inactive in the required efforts than an average climat change denier.

mothsonasloth 8y ago

The Russians have been building floating nuclear power plants to deploy to remote areas that need power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...