10 ms·

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion. A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reacto

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion. A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that) Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you realize that once we double or triple the number of reactors, accidents will be so frequent, that the public wont stand for additional expansion within the time it takes to build more reactors. We need 10x nuclear to solve global warming. Thats a major accident every 3 years or so. Yes, Nuclear can be made safer, but probably not by as much as needed. Even a country like Japan, who has high safety standards, and a historical heritage of nuclear fallout, has had an accident, and most new reactors are likely to be built by China who has less then stellar safety record.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Just a month before Chernobyl happened, the staff at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II in Idaho successfully demonstrated something new and incredible: passive shutdown. They had the reactor at full power and killed the pumps. It shut down and started cooling itself with natural circulation (no external/backup power needed). No control rods were inserted. This state would last indefinitely. Then they did it again, this time cutting off the heat sink. Same result [1]. This was the ultimate energy source. But we all turned our backs on this team. Clinton cut funding in '94 and the reactor shut down. Advanced low-pressure reactors can do this, and eliminating loss-of-decay-heat-removal accidents takes the probability of a large early release well into the 10^-7 or even 10^-8 range according to probabilistic risk assessments. So even though nuclear is, by the actuarial tables, almost as safe as you can get in energy systems, you're right that the public opinion is a big hurdle and that Fukushimas are not acceptable. These low-pressure designs get us there, and it's been demonstrated. Molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, and some gas cooled reactors all have this capability. It's basically the main event of what the nuclear industry called Gen IV reactors [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II#Passive_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II#Passive_safety [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
- madez 8y ago
  I wonder why nuclear rectors were ever built without the ability to shutdown passively in case of power and equipment failure.
  - grecy 8y ago
    Because as a society we continually overestimate our ability to control nature. i.e. "We have multiple layers of redundancy. It's all under control." Which is true, until it isn't.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Normal reactors do shut down when the power fails. the control rods lose power and fall in. The hard part is cooling the reactor afterwards due to nuclear decay heat. Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this. This works fine until you out your diesel in the basement in a tsumani zone. Ebr-2 can shut down without CR insertion (crazy robust, CRs always go in) and then can cool itself without external power.
    - madez 8y ago
      > Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this. Relying on diesel generators is not a passive solution. That is basically the part where I wonder why not a passive solution was picked.
      - acidburnNSA 8y ago
        We'll have to go deeper in to the history and physics. The first reactor was passively cooled by air. It was very low power and didn't split very many atoms, so the nuclear decay heat was low after shutdown. Many reactors have been made that cool with natural circulation of air or water but they're all low power. Quickly, the Manhattan Project came along and the military wanted enough plutonium to make an atomic bomb to fight the Nazis. They built a reactor that could do this out at Hanford (the B reactor). They realized that to make enough plutonium, they'd have to increase the rates of the reactions that produce it. This required splitting more atoms, which released more heat, which required more cooling. They quickly went past the regime where it was possible to use natural circulation with the known coolants at the time (air, water) so they used forced flow, eventually passing the heat into the Columbia River. Fast forward to the 1950s. Admiral Rickover wants nuclear powered submarines to effectively fight the Russians in the Cold War. Submarines are small but want high power, on the order of a few hundred megawatts. This puts them beyond natural circ decay heat removal regime for air and water. So he builds them, and installs appropriate redundant backup systems. Now Eisenhower has given the Atoms for Peace speech and the commercial industry is starting. They can build a compact high power reactor or large low power reactor (recall it's a heat removal issue). They choose compact, high-power one modeled after the Naval reactors. They were running great and had a whole supply chain. The low-power ones would be orders of magnitude more expensive per kWh. Meanwhile, starting in the late 1940s and continuing for a few decades, exotic-coolant reactors were developed, with things like Mercury, liquid sodium metal, molten salt, organics, aqueous homogeneous slurry, etc. These reactors can do high power compact cores with passive natural circ. Many were built and operated. But they remained exotic and underdeveloped. The Navy and commercial nukes had built up an infrastructure and experience base. Exotic reactors were more expensive and the LWRs were fine instead of passively-cooled ones. Today, dozens of startup companies have dug up the paperwork on these exotic reactors and are rushing to try to develop them and associated supply chains to build them cheaply. So that's how we ended up with the reactors we have.
Lammy 8y ago
> Even a country like Japan, who have high safety standards Reading about TEPCO’s management of their facilities and people both before and after the Fukushima accident doesn’t really mesh with this claim.
- rurounijones 8y ago
  Quite, TEPCO was a shitshow. These guys had the right idea: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-that-didnt-melt-down-on-3-11/ https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...
fastball 8y ago
That assumes the technology won't get much better. But there are a ton of potential ways to improve nuclear, like LFTR.
- Krasnol 8y ago
  Just like renewables getting better. So why even bother with that old, dangerous and radioactive tech? I really hope the lobby runs out of money soon...this artificial hype is terrible.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure. Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few people e.g. from ice throw and falling off roofs). Radioactive? Ok, fission products are radioactive. Can't argue with that. Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby No, he's just safely away from any fallout, hugely optimistic, naive about government competence and private sector morality (e.g. in cutting corners), and perfectly fine to rush technology and just wait and see the consequences and let the second order effects and externalities be suffered by others (which has nothing to do with science per se)...
    - Krasnol 8y ago
      > Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure. Old as in "outdated". > hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident Yeah flooding are surely more dramatic than a slow death through cancer, I give you that...and it's such a good selling point isn't it? You just can't see it or put a finger on it. Some numbers are far less dramatic then a flood. Too bad Netflix comes with that documentary on Chernobyl now. Need to pay for some more op-eds to cover that up. > Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby? Do you have to be part of the lobby if you take the money? And I doubt it came from Goldstein or his publishers just to promote his book. The timing of the whole nuclear hype is just too coincidental.
epistasis 8y ago
In the US, public opinion has nearly nothing to do with the lack of new construction. The problem is far simpler here: nobody can build a reactor reliably without going vastly over budget, or off schedule. Going off schedule also means going off budget because costs are front loaded over the 40-60 year lifespan and therefore every year of delay costs massive amounts of interest. There are plenty of viable sites for nuclear in the US where the local population is eager and willing, usually where there's already a nuclear power plant and it forms a strong economic force for the area. The NRC can't wait to approve more reactors and is doing its best to come up with new ways to certify safety. So why wasn't nuclear built? Project management failures in the 1970s, combined with utility management far overestimating demand, led to a glut of reactors that were gigantic losses for those trying to build them. This was happening before TMI and Chernobyl turned more public opinion against nuclear. There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment, but the massive financial losses taught the money guys to stay the hell away from nuclear. Fast forward to the 2000s, there's a renewed push to build more reactors, especially as the current fleet ages and will need to be retired. Nobody wants to do it, because of massive financial risk for little gain. Finally, regulatory capture of the Georgia and North Carolina state legislatures enables bills so that the utitlties socialize all risks of construction failure into their ratepayers, while keeping the profits privatized. Only in that remarkable situation would any utility be willing to take on the insane risk of trying to build a reactor. Four were attempted, two have been abandoned, and North Carolina electricity customers pay something like an average of $20/month on their bill for reactors that will never get completed. Georgia is behind schedule, 2x-3x over budget at the moment, with no end in sight of the cost overruns. So it's not public opinion that kills nuclear, it's nuclear construction that kills nuclear, at least in the US. We do not build massive projects well, and it blows out any sort of competitive nature for nuclear. Even if nuclear costs 5x renewables stored in energy, there may still be a financial case for it being a part of a grid, just as peaker plants right now cost much more than, say, combined cycle gas turbines. But it seems unlikely that the massive GW+ reactors of yore will be attempted again any time soon. "Small" modular reactors in the 50MW range will be attempted next, even though in the past these were disregarded as too small to be cost effective. We shall see what their costs end up being, but the best I've been able to glean from news articles is that it's about the cost of Vogtle's new construction in Georgia, I.e. not going to be price competitive with batters and renewables in 10-15 years. Building nuclear right now is a massively expensive bet on a technology that gets more expensive the more experience we have with it. Meanwhile it's competitors are getting cheaper every day. There may be a spot for it in the future grid, but only if it's boosters focus on nuclear's true problems rather than wasting effort on excuses that are not truly blocking the tech.
pfdietz 8y ago
No, nuclear is sadly not a viable solution, due to cost. If nuclear were affordable it would be pushed through regardless of opposition. But it has just not worked out. The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were just unable to execute. This failure should not have been a surprise, as it mirrored what happened in the last big nuclear construction boom. That didn't stop because of accidents; it stopped because the nuclear plants in that boom experienced substantial cost overruns (i.e., the nuclear vendors were not honest about what the technology would actually cost.)
- DennisP 8y ago
  Half the article was about the reasons costs are so much higher in the U.S. than South Korea, and how to fix it.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    We've heard that sort of thing for decades. How many more times does Lucy have to pull the football away before you catch on?
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      To be fair, the US never did any of the things that we now know make nuclear cheap. Standard design, experienced workforce, established supply chain. Until we try those things you can't quite say Lucy has been pulling the football. There's a really awesome way of getting all this: build nuclear reactors in shipyards.
  - godelski 8y ago
    I never buy the cost problem. I mean look at France. That's another great example. Has some of the cheapest electricity and is 75% nuclear.
    - 8y ago
jk27277 8y ago
Thorium reactors?
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Thorium is an alternate fuel that can be used in breeder reactors with fast or slow neutrons. It's particularly well-suited for thermal breeders, which work best in fluid fuel systems. Fluid fuel systems (like the now internet-famed Molten Salt Reactor) have lots of great capabilities that fall into the broader category of Gen-IV nuclear reactors (near infinite sustainability, super-safe, reduced waste, higher temperature, etc.). There was some internet hype for a while that Thorium was a end-all/be-all but those were slightly misguided in the sense that all Gen-IV reactors are end-all/be-alls. The Thorium itself had very little to do with it. It was an attempt at rebranding nuclear. As a nuclear engineer I prefer precision and promote all Gen-IV stuff including Th-fueled ones. Maybe I should have gone with the rebrand.
crazy_monkey 8y ago
Clearly, we just need to outsource reactors to third-world countries that are ok with being irradiated! ... I nominate Alabama!
kakwa_ 8y ago
Not to mention the small nuclear waste issue. Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic. Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need to be managed for thousands of years.
- est31 8y ago
  And all of this waste management run by the government is another government subvention of nuclear technology of right now unknown height.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  The consensus solution to nuclear waste is to put it in geologic repositories where it will be safely out of the biosphere until well after it decays to stability. This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change. As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    Is there any geologic repository in existance and operating though? At least in Europe, I am aware of none. Even worse, the one in Germany, which was used for a limited amount of waste (Schachtanlage Asse) got flooded by water and the cleanup cost of that has been estimated to be 6 billion. If there are no cost overruns...
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      Well there's WIPP. [1] In Europe, Finland has one under construction, not in operation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
coldtea 8y ago
>If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years Plus the ones we had were happy accidents thus far. We could have much worse, and they also involve terrorism and other such motives. Plus disposing toxic byproducts that last almost forever (and which we regularly dump on the lowest bidder to take care off). Lastly, to do nuclear properly costs too much. If it weren't for huge subsidies it wouldn't be viable...

acidburnNSA 8y ago

Just a month before Chernobyl happened, the staff at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II in Idaho successfully demonstrated something new and incredible: passive shutdown. They had the reactor at full power and killed the pumps. It shut down and started cooling itself with natural circulation (no external/backup power needed). No control rods were inserted. This state would last indefinitely. Then they did it again, this time cutting off the heat sink. Same result [1]. This was the ultimate energy source. But we all turned our backs on this team. Clinton cut funding in '94 and the reactor shut down. Advanced low-pressure reactors can do this, and eliminating loss-of-decay-heat-removal accidents takes the probability of a large early release well into the 10^-7 or even 10^-8 range according to probabilistic risk assessments. So even though nuclear is, by the actuarial tables, almost as safe as you can get in energy systems, you're right that the public opinion is a big hurdle and that Fukushimas are not acceptable. These low-pressure designs get us there, and it's been demonstrated. Molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, and some gas cooled reactors all have this capability. It's basically the main event of what the nuclear industry called Gen IV reactors [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II#Passive_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II#Passive_safety [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

madez 8y ago
I wonder why nuclear rectors were ever built without the ability to shutdown passively in case of power and equipment failure.
- grecy 8y ago
  Because as a society we continually overestimate our ability to control nature. i.e. "We have multiple layers of redundancy. It's all under control." Which is true, until it isn't.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Normal reactors do shut down when the power fails. the control rods lose power and fall in. The hard part is cooling the reactor afterwards due to nuclear decay heat. Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this. This works fine until you out your diesel in the basement in a tsumani zone. Ebr-2 can shut down without CR insertion (crazy robust, CRs always go in) and then can cool itself without external power.
  - madez 8y ago
    > Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this. Relying on diesel generators is not a passive solution. That is basically the part where I wonder why not a passive solution was picked.
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      We'll have to go deeper in to the history and physics. The first reactor was passively cooled by air. It was very low power and didn't split very many atoms, so the nuclear decay heat was low after shutdown. Many reactors have been made that cool with natural circulation of air or water but they're all low power. Quickly, the Manhattan Project came along and the military wanted enough plutonium to make an atomic bomb to fight the Nazis. They built a reactor that could do this out at Hanford (the B reactor). They realized that to make enough plutonium, they'd have to increase the rates of the reactions that produce it. This required splitting more atoms, which released more heat, which required more cooling. They quickly went past the regime where it was possible to use natural circulation with the known coolants at the time (air, water) so they used forced flow, eventually passing the heat into the Columbia River. Fast forward to the 1950s. Admiral Rickover wants nuclear powered submarines to effectively fight the Russians in the Cold War. Submarines are small but want high power, on the order of a few hundred megawatts. This puts them beyond natural circ decay heat removal regime for air and water. So he builds them, and installs appropriate redundant backup systems. Now Eisenhower has given the Atoms for Peace speech and the commercial industry is starting. They can build a compact high power reactor or large low power reactor (recall it's a heat removal issue). They choose compact, high-power one modeled after the Naval reactors. They were running great and had a whole supply chain. The low-power ones would be orders of magnitude more expensive per kWh. Meanwhile, starting in the late 1940s and continuing for a few decades, exotic-coolant reactors were developed, with things like Mercury, liquid sodium metal, molten salt, organics, aqueous homogeneous slurry, etc. These reactors can do high power compact cores with passive natural circ. Many were built and operated. But they remained exotic and underdeveloped. The Navy and commercial nukes had built up an infrastructure and experience base. Exotic reactors were more expensive and the LWRs were fine instead of passively-cooled ones. Today, dozens of startup companies have dug up the paperwork on these exotic reactors and are rushing to try to develop them and associated supply chains to build them cheaply. So that's how we ended up with the reactors we have.

Lammy 8y ago

> Even a country like Japan, who have high safety standards Reading about TEPCO’s management of their facilities and people both before and after the Fukushima accident doesn’t really mesh with this claim.

rurounijones 8y ago
Quite, TEPCO was a shitshow. These guys had the right idea: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-that-didnt-melt-down-on-3-11/ https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...

fastball 8y ago

That assumes the technology won't get much better. But there are a ton of potential ways to improve nuclear, like LFTR.

Krasnol 8y ago
Just like renewables getting better. So why even bother with that old, dangerous and radioactive tech? I really hope the lobby runs out of money soon...this artificial hype is terrible.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure. Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few people e.g. from ice throw and falling off roofs). Radioactive? Ok, fission products are radioactive. Can't argue with that. Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby No, he's just safely away from any fallout, hugely optimistic, naive about government competence and private sector morality (e.g. in cutting corners), and perfectly fine to rush technology and just wait and see the consequences and let the second order effects and externalities be suffered by others (which has nothing to do with science per se)...
  - Krasnol 8y ago
    > Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure. Old as in "outdated". > hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident Yeah flooding are surely more dramatic than a slow death through cancer, I give you that...and it's such a good selling point isn't it? You just can't see it or put a finger on it. Some numbers are far less dramatic then a flood. Too bad Netflix comes with that documentary on Chernobyl now. Need to pay for some more op-eds to cover that up. > Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby? Do you have to be part of the lobby if you take the money? And I doubt it came from Goldstein or his publishers just to promote his book. The timing of the whole nuclear hype is just too coincidental.

epistasis 8y ago

In the US, public opinion has nearly nothing to do with the lack of new construction. The problem is far simpler here: nobody can build a reactor reliably without going vastly over budget, or off schedule. Going off schedule also means going off budget because costs are front loaded over the 40-60 year lifespan and therefore every year of delay costs massive amounts of interest. There are plenty of viable sites for nuclear in the US where the local population is eager and willing, usually where there's already a nuclear power plant and it forms a strong economic force for the area. The NRC can't wait to approve more reactors and is doing its best to come up with new ways to certify safety. So why wasn't nuclear built? Project management failures in the 1970s, combined with utility management far overestimating demand, led to a glut of reactors that were gigantic losses for those trying to build them. This was happening before TMI and Chernobyl turned more public opinion against nuclear. There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment, but the massive financial losses taught the money guys to stay the hell away from nuclear. Fast forward to the 2000s, there's a renewed push to build more reactors, especially as the current fleet ages and will need to be retired. Nobody wants to do it, because of massive financial risk for little gain. Finally, regulatory capture of the Georgia and North Carolina state legislatures enables bills so that the utitlties socialize all risks of construction failure into their ratepayers, while keeping the profits privatized. Only in that remarkable situation would any utility be willing to take on the insane risk of trying to build a reactor. Four were attempted, two have been abandoned, and North Carolina electricity customers pay something like an average of $20/month on their bill for reactors that will never get completed. Georgia is behind schedule, 2x-3x over budget at the moment, with no end in sight of the cost overruns. So it's not public opinion that kills nuclear, it's nuclear construction that kills nuclear, at least in the US. We do not build massive projects well, and it blows out any sort of competitive nature for nuclear. Even if nuclear costs 5x renewables stored in energy, there may still be a financial case for it being a part of a grid, just as peaker plants right now cost much more than, say, combined cycle gas turbines. But it seems unlikely that the massive GW+ reactors of yore will be attempted again any time soon. "Small" modular reactors in the 50MW range will be attempted next, even though in the past these were disregarded as too small to be cost effective. We shall see what their costs end up being, but the best I've been able to glean from news articles is that it's about the cost of Vogtle's new construction in Georgia, I.e. not going to be price competitive with batters and renewables in 10-15 years. Building nuclear right now is a massively expensive bet on a technology that gets more expensive the more experience we have with it. Meanwhile it's competitors are getting cheaper every day. There may be a spot for it in the future grid, but only if it's boosters focus on nuclear's true problems rather than wasting effort on excuses that are not truly blocking the tech.

pfdietz 8y ago

No, nuclear is sadly not a viable solution, due to cost. If nuclear were affordable it would be pushed through regardless of opposition. But it has just not worked out. The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were just unable to execute. This failure should not have been a surprise, as it mirrored what happened in the last big nuclear construction boom. That didn't stop because of accidents; it stopped because the nuclear plants in that boom experienced substantial cost overruns (i.e., the nuclear vendors were not honest about what the technology would actually cost.)

DennisP 8y ago
Half the article was about the reasons costs are so much higher in the U.S. than South Korea, and how to fix it.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  We've heard that sort of thing for decades. How many more times does Lucy have to pull the football away before you catch on?
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    To be fair, the US never did any of the things that we now know make nuclear cheap. Standard design, experienced workforce, established supply chain. Until we try those things you can't quite say Lucy has been pulling the football. There's a really awesome way of getting all this: build nuclear reactors in shipyards.
- godelski 8y ago
  I never buy the cost problem. I mean look at France. That's another great example. Has some of the cheapest electricity and is 75% nuclear.
  - 8y ago

jk27277 8y ago

Thorium reactors?

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Thorium is an alternate fuel that can be used in breeder reactors with fast or slow neutrons. It's particularly well-suited for thermal breeders, which work best in fluid fuel systems. Fluid fuel systems (like the now internet-famed Molten Salt Reactor) have lots of great capabilities that fall into the broader category of Gen-IV nuclear reactors (near infinite sustainability, super-safe, reduced waste, higher temperature, etc.). There was some internet hype for a while that Thorium was a end-all/be-all but those were slightly misguided in the sense that all Gen-IV reactors are end-all/be-alls. The Thorium itself had very little to do with it. It was an attempt at rebranding nuclear. As a nuclear engineer I prefer precision and promote all Gen-IV stuff including Th-fueled ones. Maybe I should have gone with the rebrand.

crazy_monkey 8y ago

Clearly, we just need to outsource reactors to third-world countries that are ok with being irradiated! ... I nominate Alabama!

kakwa_ 8y ago

Not to mention the small nuclear waste issue. Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic. Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need to be managed for thousands of years.

est31 8y ago
And all of this waste management run by the government is another government subvention of nuclear technology of right now unknown height.
acidburnNSA 8y ago
The consensus solution to nuclear waste is to put it in geologic repositories where it will be safely out of the biosphere until well after it decays to stability. This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change. As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  Is there any geologic repository in existance and operating though? At least in Europe, I am aware of none. Even worse, the one in Germany, which was used for a limited amount of waste (Schachtanlage Asse) got flooded by water and the cleanup cost of that has been estimated to be 6 billion. If there are no cost overruns...
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Well there's WIPP. [1] In Europe, Finland has one under construction, not in operation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

coldtea 8y ago

>If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years Plus the ones we had were happy accidents thus far. We could have much worse, and they also involve terrorism and other such motives. Plus disposing toxic byproducts that last almost forever (and which we regularly dump on the lowest bidder to take care off). Lastly, to do nuclear properly costs too much. If it weren't for huge subsidies it wouldn't be viable...