10 ms·

Your cost analysis neglects replacement, disposal costs for batteries, long term costs of carbon emission, and coal flyash disposal. The only reason nuclear is

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.
  - Eric_WVGG 8y ago
    because a misfire would result in a fine mist of nuclear fallout spread over the entire planet
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      hmm, I guess that's not ideal.
      - WalterBright 8y ago
        If it's spread out over the planet, the resulting radiation would be insignificant.
    - pvaldes 8y ago
      We'll have to pack it very carefully in any case. Perhaps we should assume that this will happen and work with that scenery in mind. The concept of a fire resistant box is not new at a smaller scale; We can vitrify the less dangerous waste and store the crystal in steel containers. Then we could theoretically design explosion-proof containers for it with some outer sacrificial disposable layers made of a plastic clay-like matherial or so.
      - erikpukinskis 8y ago
        There’s some more weight.
        pvaldes 8y ago
        Is much worse than that :-). The "space solution" can be split in three different possibilities. I will name the first "The slingshoot" We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category. We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018. Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.
  - eseehausen 8y ago
    Because we already know how to store it for thousands of years with minimal leakage without creating a contraption that could lead to nuclear waste raining down on our heads.
    - pvaldes 8y ago
      To be fair, we already know how to store it with minimal leakage for thousands of years, but the tentation to just dump it in the Mediterranean (1980's), Somalia (1980-90's), seed it over Irak (Gulf's war) or leak it into the Japanese Sea (2011-17) is irresistible.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Oh, this reminds me of high school, when I asked a physicist my mother dating about the same idea. He worked for the Rand corporation and was overall pro-nuclear. Still, He considered for a second and did his best to explain... What I remember of his explanation was the point that if you launch a payload of material into space, you have essentially placed that payload in an elliptical orbital path, one that intersects earth's elliptical path. And since orbits are periodic, that payload is going to be intersecting earth's orbit regularly, meaning that in this instance, the chance of the material coming right back into the atmosphere is quite high.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    I like to remind people that we already live on a radioactive planet. We can build nuclear reactors because radioactive stuff naturally is everywhere. There probably wouldn't be life here without it. So to me the "let's get it off the planet" idea is an overreaction. Radioactive material just need to be handled with common sense.
    - jazzyjackson 8y ago
      Hmm... what's the over-under on dropping barrels into a volcano? You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust... As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster? Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?
      - archgoon 8y ago
        > As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Short answer: No. Definitely not in a Volcano. Long Answer: Decay rates are ultimately determined by the subatomic structure of the nucleus. This is why different chemicals, and different isotopes of said chemicals, will decay differently. A lone neutron will decay after about 15 minutes (which is a long time in subatomic scales), however, the two neutrons in (4/2)He will happily stick around forever. So melting a material won't have any impact on the structure of the nucleus, you're just disassociating the intramolecular bonds; same goes for turning said material into a gas. If you were to raise the temperature high enough, and we're talking sun-like (not the measly 5000k that you get on the surface, I mean like 27-million degrees you find in the core), then you'll actually start stripping and fusing nuclei, which will at that point change (but not necessarily decrease) the radioactive rates of whatever material you started with.
      - BurningFrog 8y ago
        The classic answer is to bury extremely long lived waste in a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench. A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons. I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think it would "contaminate the oceans".
  - ben-schaaf 8y ago
    I know others have addressed the dangers of this, but I had a little fun looking at the logistics. The UK alone produces 2Mt of radioactive waste[0] per year, ~9% is of "intermediate" level. Just sending those 18Mt into LEO would take 129,000 Saturn V launches per year. That's about one launch every 4 minutes. And LEO is not where we want to send anything. Lets assume a Trans-Lunar Injection is enough, bringing that number up to 370,000, almost one launch per minute. Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone. Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone. [0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-waste-is-there/ https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast... [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-to-the-moon?redirected_qid=38695501 https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-t... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-falcon-9-co2-emissions https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...
    - richardburden 8y ago
      2Mt is two metric tons, right? It surely is not 2 million metric tons. See the IAEA's estimates of total radwaste in storage or disposal worldwide: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue... Because of the extremely high energy density of nuclear fuel, the amount of waste produced per Gigawatt-year of electricity generated is very small. A Saturn V has a payload of 140 Mt to low earth orbit. Total high-level waste is 22,000 cubic meters, possibly 220,000 Mt, assuming a density 10 times as great as water. 1,572 Saturn V launches would carry away all of that. All the high-level waste ever produced that has not been recycled. Most of it can be recycled in breeder reactors, so there is no need to carry it away!
      - 8y ago
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Uranium (elemental) has a density of 19.1 g/cm^3. For comparison, lead has a density of 11.34 g/cm^3. It's heavy.
    - ryacko 8y ago
      Yes, but how much coal versus uranium would a household use, if used to generate electricity in the most efficient way possible (cogeneration presumably)?
  - skywhopper 8y ago
    One answer is that it probably isn’t possible to do what you say, but if it were the failure states are wildly unacceptable. Any “cannon” (or rail gun) capable of accelerating an object to escape velocity from the surface would likely burn the object up during its flight through the atmosphere, spreading its radioactive contents into the air to float around as low level global fallout for decades. But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution. One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that. Its not too expensive its very cheap, its the regulation around that makes it expensive which can be solved too.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    If it was easy to solve, it’d be solved already. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap, and for those reasons it’s likely it won’t be done. It’s already cheaper to build new solar plants and wind farms than continue to run an existing coal plant (which itself is cheaper to run than nuclear).
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      No it wouldnt be solved already since the political environment is completely against nuclear, so simply false. Solar is a fraction of energysupply and will not even be close to being signifficant whare it really matters which is in transportation.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        How is nuclear being expensive political? It is fundementally untenable as a commercial enterprise when compared to natural gas, solar, and wind. 90-95% of all new generation coming online each year are renewables in the US. Renewables cost continues to decline year over year, speeding its uptake. I cannot fathom how one would think nuclear can compete at all in such an environment. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31192 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31192 “Nearly all nuclear plants now in use began operation between 1970 and 1990. These plants would require a subsequent license renewal before 2050 to operate beyond the 60-year period covered by their original 40-year operating license and the 20-year license extension that nearly 90% of plants currently operating have either already received or have applied for. The AEO2017 Reference case projections do not envision a large amount of new nuclear capacity additions. By 2050, only four reactors currently under construction and some uprates at existing plants are projected to come online.”
- petre 8y ago
  Most of this nuclear "waste" could be recycled as well by processing and further burning it in breeder reactors. Of course the processng equipment gets contaminated but that's life.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
skybrian 8y ago
Doesn't nuclear power have subsized costs as well? I'm thinking of the Price-Anderson Act.
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  There's also the nuclear liability cap. Taxpayers cover disaster cleanup costs that exceed some fairly low level ($200 mil I think). It's very expensive but also free insurance, basically.
  - cma 8y ago
    That's the Price-Anderson "Nuclear Industries Indemnity" Act he was talking about.
rblion 8y ago
I love Hacker News. Reddit is elementary compared to the quality of comments like these.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

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.
- Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  because a misfire would result in a fine mist of nuclear fallout spread over the entire planet
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    hmm, I guess that's not ideal.
    - WalterBright 8y ago
      If it's spread out over the planet, the resulting radiation would be insignificant.
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    We'll have to pack it very carefully in any case. Perhaps we should assume that this will happen and work with that scenery in mind. The concept of a fire resistant box is not new at a smaller scale; We can vitrify the less dangerous waste and store the crystal in steel containers. Then we could theoretically design explosion-proof containers for it with some outer sacrificial disposable layers made of a plastic clay-like matherial or so.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      There’s some more weight.
      - pvaldes 8y ago
        Is much worse than that :-). The "space solution" can be split in three different possibilities. I will name the first "The slingshoot" We have succesfully used a "Slingshoot" approach to put heavy things up to 100t in the space many times. Hubble telescope (12t) or the orbiter from the space shuttle (100t) fall in this category. We could split our waste in chunks of 500Kg, pack it really well and just put it in an orbiter; the problem is that we can't go really far with this system (around 500 Km or so). We just will put the waste in a low orbit where things can fall again into the earth sonner or later. We had the Thiangong-1 case in 2018. Thus this "solution" after a few years would be the same as dumping the waste into the sea, but in a very expensive and creative way.
- eseehausen 8y ago
  Because we already know how to store it for thousands of years with minimal leakage without creating a contraption that could lead to nuclear waste raining down on our heads.
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    To be fair, we already know how to store it with minimal leakage for thousands of years, but the tentation to just dump it in the Mediterranean (1980's), Somalia (1980-90's), seed it over Irak (Gulf's war) or leak it into the Japanese Sea (2011-17) is irresistible.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Oh, this reminds me of high school, when I asked a physicist my mother dating about the same idea. He worked for the Rand corporation and was overall pro-nuclear. Still, He considered for a second and did his best to explain... What I remember of his explanation was the point that if you launch a payload of material into space, you have essentially placed that payload in an elliptical orbital path, one that intersects earth's elliptical path. And since orbits are periodic, that payload is going to be intersecting earth's orbit regularly, meaning that in this instance, the chance of the material coming right back into the atmosphere is quite high.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  I like to remind people that we already live on a radioactive planet. We can build nuclear reactors because radioactive stuff naturally is everywhere. There probably wouldn't be life here without it. So to me the "let's get it off the planet" idea is an overreaction. Radioactive material just need to be handled with common sense.
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    Hmm... what's the over-under on dropping barrels into a volcano? You get a little radioactive steam surely...but eventually turns into radioactive dust... As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Like does more beta-decay mean it gets to safe levels faster? Maybe a few years in between tectonic plates would do a planet good eh?
    - archgoon 8y ago
      > As an aside, ignorant physics question, does the half-life of something decrease with heat? Short answer: No. Definitely not in a Volcano. Long Answer: Decay rates are ultimately determined by the subatomic structure of the nucleus. This is why different chemicals, and different isotopes of said chemicals, will decay differently. A lone neutron will decay after about 15 minutes (which is a long time in subatomic scales), however, the two neutrons in (4/2)He will happily stick around forever. So melting a material won't have any impact on the structure of the nucleus, you're just disassociating the intramolecular bonds; same goes for turning said material into a gas. If you were to raise the temperature high enough, and we're talking sun-like (not the measly 5000k that you get on the surface, I mean like 27-million degrees you find in the core), then you'll actually start stripping and fusing nuclei, which will at that point change (but not necessarily decrease) the radioactive rates of whatever material you started with.
    - BurningFrog 8y ago
      The classic answer is to bury extremely long lived waste in a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench. A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons. I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think it would "contaminate the oceans".
- ben-schaaf 8y ago
  I know others have addressed the dangers of this, but I had a little fun looking at the logistics. The UK alone produces 2Mt of radioactive waste[0] per year, ~9% is of "intermediate" level. Just sending those 18Mt into LEO would take 129,000 Saturn V launches per year. That's about one launch every 4 minutes. And LEO is not where we want to send anything. Lets assume a Trans-Lunar Injection is enough, bringing that number up to 370,000, almost one launch per minute. Just the RP-1 & LH2 fuel cost would be around $600,000 per launch[1], so about 222 billion USD per year (The fuel is the cheapest part of the launch). Each launch releases around 440,000 kg of CO2[2] into the atmosphere. That's 163Mt, an increase of 44% of the UK's current CO2 pollution from the launches alone. Just for fun, if we wanted to send all nuclear waste all the way to pluto using only Falcon Heavies we'd have to launch around 1.8 per second. Going off the 80 million USD price tag for these launches, that's 4.5 quadrillion USD. That's about 60 times the Gross World Product to cover the UK alone. [0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-waste-is-there/ https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast... [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-to-the-moon?redirected_qid=38695501 https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-t... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-falcon-9-co2-emissions https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...
  - richardburden 8y ago
    2Mt is two metric tons, right? It surely is not 2 million metric tons. See the IAEA's estimates of total radwaste in storage or disposal worldwide: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue... Because of the extremely high energy density of nuclear fuel, the amount of waste produced per Gigawatt-year of electricity generated is very small. A Saturn V has a payload of 140 Mt to low earth orbit. Total high-level waste is 22,000 cubic meters, possibly 220,000 Mt, assuming a density 10 times as great as water. 1,572 Saturn V launches would carry away all of that. All the high-level waste ever produced that has not been recycled. Most of it can be recycled in breeder reactors, so there is no need to carry it away!
    - 8y ago
- ethbro 8y ago
  Uranium (elemental) has a density of 19.1 g/cm^3. For comparison, lead has a density of 11.34 g/cm^3. It's heavy.
  - ryacko 8y ago
    Yes, but how much coal versus uranium would a household use, if used to generate electricity in the most efficient way possible (cogeneration presumably)?
- skywhopper 8y ago
  One answer is that it probably isn’t possible to do what you say, but if it were the failure states are wildly unacceptable. Any “cannon” (or rail gun) capable of accelerating an object to escape velocity from the surface would likely burn the object up during its flight through the atmosphere, spreading its radioactive contents into the air to float around as low level global fallout for decades. But if instead you just launched it into space on a rocket... well what happens when a launch fails and the rocket blows up on the launch pad? If you’re lucky, you mark a few square miles as no-go zones and then move on to the next launch pad? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable solution. One of my favorite ideas is to encase the waste into giant glass blocks, and build pyramids in the desert... but I doubt that’s very practical either.
ThomPete 8y ago
Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that. Its not too expensive its very cheap, its the regulation around that makes it expensive which can be solved too.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  If it was easy to solve, it’d be solved already. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap, and for those reasons it’s likely it won’t be done. It’s already cheaper to build new solar plants and wind farms than continue to run an existing coal plant (which itself is cheaper to run than nuclear).
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    No it wouldnt be solved already since the political environment is completely against nuclear, so simply false. Solar is a fraction of energysupply and will not even be close to being signifficant whare it really matters which is in transportation.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      How is nuclear being expensive political? It is fundementally untenable as a commercial enterprise when compared to natural gas, solar, and wind. 90-95% of all new generation coming online each year are renewables in the US. Renewables cost continues to decline year over year, speeding its uptake. I cannot fathom how one would think nuclear can compete at all in such an environment. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31192 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31192 “Nearly all nuclear plants now in use began operation between 1970 and 1990. These plants would require a subsequent license renewal before 2050 to operate beyond the 60-year period covered by their original 40-year operating license and the 20-year license extension that nearly 90% of plants currently operating have either already received or have applied for. The AEO2017 Reference case projections do not envision a large amount of new nuclear capacity additions. By 2050, only four reactors currently under construction and some uprates at existing plants are projected to come online.”
petre 8y ago
Most of this nuclear "waste" could be recycled as well by processing and further burning it in breeder reactors. Of course the processng equipment gets contaminated but that's life.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

skybrian 8y ago

Doesn't nuclear power have subsized costs as well? I'm thinking of the Price-Anderson Act.

crdoconnor 8y ago
There's also the nuclear liability cap. Taxpayers cover disaster cleanup costs that exceed some fairly low level ($200 mil I think). It's very expensive but also free insurance, basically.
- cma 8y ago
  That's the Price-Anderson "Nuclear Industries Indemnity" Act he was talking about.

rblion 8y ago

I love Hacker News. Reddit is elementary compared to the quality of comments like these.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]