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I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastr

by jwr 7y ago

I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I'm reading "Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies" by Charles Perrow and it's scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power. By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of "close calls" that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence. I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow's book. One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.

dv_dt 7y ago
I find it very likely to be wrong when statements say xxx is the "only" way to do something. Particularly with nuclear which has strong evidence in the US, France and China that plants can't be built in sufficient time to make a difference at this point, while it's pretty clear that renewables and storage are not only feasible, but more cost effective and faster to rollout, as well as to advance technologically vs nuclear.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  I agree that nuclear isn’t technically the only option, but statements like “Can’t be built fast enough to make a difference” is also not true, particularly if you use historical examples YES in France. We’re going to need deep decarbonization, and actually the most likely scenario is it will take decades, so there’s actually substantial time for nuclear to make a difference. It doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to build a nuclear power plant. I’m firmly in the “every zero carbon option now, as fast as possible.” And nuclear is definitely part of that. I’ve become worried about the stalling solar power deployment rate in the US (and other places). It hasn’t stopped, but it no longer appears to be on the same exponential growth curve we needed it to be on. We’re going to need everything we can get.
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    France itself is saying it shouldn't build a new round of of nuclear power plants and instead should invest in renewables & storage (and would save money and risk) going that route. If you look at the timeline and frequent schedule overruns of nuclear plants we can't build them fast enough in the US to make a critical difference at this point. If you look at China without many of the supposed anti-nuclear legal deterrents, their projects were getting more and more overrun vs estimates and they halted all new plants except for a couple plants of their own design. (and those obviously have self-development motivations). They're trying to finish their initial round of plants right now and likely have come to a similar conclusion of too slow, too expensive vs renewables.
    - Robotbeat 7y ago
      France is not immune to the social forces impacting the rest of the world.
      - dv_dt 7y ago
        I assert is more of a financial & time to carbon reduction question: France calculates it would save $45B by going to renewable energy instead of replacing aging nuclear power plants with new ones. https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energy-france https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...
  - imtringued 7y ago
    The statistics tell me a different story. Seasonal differences in the renewable share are almost nonexistent. Maybe somewhere around +-20%. Sure we will need storage that lets us bridge weeks and if it is economic even up to a whole month but anything beyond that is not about trying to compensate energy shortages, it's about capturing the overproduced energy to sequester carbon. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=monthly https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Also I recommend you to take a look at the daily variance. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=daily https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Anything below the average of 40% is awful. The longest interval below 40% I have found was from 19.03 to 29.03. A month of storage is more than we would ever need. two weeks would be the sweet spot, one or zero weeks is doable if we use gas plants. Really the only amount energy storage that I would consider absolutely mandatory is 24 hours because we still want to use solar energy at night and wind power that is mostly generated at night during the day.
- belorn 7y ago
  Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. It would be great if Germany replaced all their natural gas power plants in favor of storage. It is the perfect solution and it would end the nuclear power discussion rather quickly if nations would actually start to use it rather then building more gas based power plants. I am in the political camp that says we should ban all burning of fossil fuels today. Doing so would create all the incentives needed to answer the question of storage vs nuclear in a very short time.
  - mimixco 7y ago
    Banning fossil fuels would also set society back 100 years. They're literally the basis of all of modern life. I don't think you'll get many takers for that argument.
    - newswriter99 7y ago
      This is the short version of my argument.
  - cesarb 7y ago
    > Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. Wikipedia says otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
    - belorn 7y ago
      Thanks for the link. Compared to salt reactors which only holds a few experimental 100MW generators in the world, it seems that storage in comparison is clearly ahead in development with the largest producing around 3GW at peak. In order to replace fossil fuels in the US they would need to build about a million new ones of the current biggest version, through 11hrs capacity sounds low in regard to seasonal changes. They also need to build a matching number of renewable power plants to fill the storage, plus some overhead since storage use more energy that they produce. It is definitively plausible solution which I have nothing against. Looking at the US grid I interpret it to mean that storage is currently responsible for less than 0.1%.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  As a huge renewable energy fan, I need to point out that your viewpoint is factually incorrect. For example: I built a very low carbon home a year ago, with giant solar panels sized to charge two electric cars, and to heat the house with heat pumps. I live in the Northeast US, where it gets cold in the winter. The reason why it gets cold in the winter is because the days are very short. Because the days are shorter in the winter, the solar panels do not generate enough electricity to heat the house, so I end up using a lot of grid electricity in December and January. And, what really stinks is that April was unusually cloudy this year. So, when I should have generated excess, I ended up pulling from the grid. In contrast, I have a lot of excess power in the summer when the days are long. (Air conditioning doesn't use as much electricity as heating.) Now, comes the facts: We don't have technology that can store the energy that I generate in the summer for use in the winter. Batteries are great for short term storage: Charge at noon when the panels generate the most power, discharge at night. Even worse, my very expensive Powerwall can't run my heat pump, nor could it hold enough charge to heat my home overnight. Even if I doubled my panels and had a few more Powerwalls, I'd need to pull from the grid in some of the rather bad cold snaps we had this winter. This is why people say that Nuclear can solve the problem now. Renewables are a great long-term solution, but we still need a lot of R&D to solve the problem of storing energy in the summer for use in the winter. In contrast, the nuclear power plant 15 miles from my home can run my heat pump in the dead of winter, without requiring any new storage technology.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It sounds to me like maybe you should consider a hybrid of solar and wind power. When I lived in Northern Ontario (where winters are brutally cold) whenever we did not have sun we had plenty of wind. Once the wind generator was up we never needed outside power (in our case: a generator).
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    I agree that storage really isn't up to seasonal demand variation yet. But I also don't think we should take out current nuclear and should run current plants to end of life - even extending their life where practical. But I strongly think that project success/completion data points to new nuclear plants being a poor investment financially and time wise for carbon suppression vs our other options. I am a bit curious why running a wood fired stove in the winter doesn't meet your heating needs in a modern well-insulated low carbon home? We need a set of different, possibly non-uniform solutions. For heat, why not store power by growing forests in the spring/summer, and burning wood in the winter? Not high-tech I know, but some of the automatic pellet feed systems are very low touch.
pdonis 7y ago
We already know how to safely operate nuclear power plants: the US Navy has been doing so for decades with no incidents. We could have imposed a similar level of discipline on civilian nuclear power plant operators back in the 1970s, when commercial plants started being built in the US in quantity. Or we could have done it after Three Mile Island (which harmed no members of the general public but clearly showed inadequacies in the way civilian nuclear plants were operated). The fact that we didn't is a political problem, not a technical or operational problem. Furthermore, even the operational problem is now nonexistent with newer reactor designs. Older designs, like the reactors at Three Mile Island, required the operators to correctly execute a fairly complex procedure in the event of a problem to prevent the reactor from being severely damaged or destroyed; the TMI operators failed to do that. Also, as Fukushima showed, older reactor designs require reliable backup power for decay heat removal. Newer designs have neither of those requirements; you can literally pull the shutdown switch and walk away and there will be no problem. So while I don't disagree with what you say about complex systems in general, I don't think nuclear reactors, with today's designs, are even that complex. We know how to design and build them so that it is impossible to operate them unsafely. We just don't have the political will to do it.
- The-US-Navy 7y ago
  Yeah, and the Navy can also impose the death penalty and lock people in jail and throw away the key for fucking up on the job. Great example. Let me draft my resume.
- newsoul2019 7y ago
  >> civilian nuclear power plant operators Maybe you just solved the problem. The Navy should operate the civilian nuclear power plants.
  - mimixco 7y ago
    The problem is scale. Today's nuclear plants are just big scaled-up versions of the Navy's original small reactors for ships. Unfortunately, scaling the power output also scales the risks and consequences of an accident.
dkarl 7y ago
It's sad, but significant, that nuclear disasters seem small to us in retrospect. A dozen Chernobyls would cause far less disruption and far less death and suffering than we'll get from climate change even if we act fast now.
diafygi 7y ago
> nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. Fortunately, within the past few years, this is no longer true. Renewables + storage are now cheaper than nuclear as a carbon free and dispatchable resource. They are actually not only winning bids for new generation, they are actually starting to win power purchase agreements over _existing_ coal power plants and expecting to start beating existing gas plants within 5-10 years. It's truly remarkable how fast solar, wind, and batteries have scaled up and started competing on price in the base load markets over the past few years. The current expectation in the utility industry is that by the time next gen nuclear is commercialized, the grid will already be >90% carbon free. So even if we missed the boat on nuclear, there are other carbon free alternatives that are scaling up to meet decarbonization needs.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  90% isn’t enough, and being able to decarbonization all of it is super helpful, so yeah, even if new nuclear helps just with that last 10%, that’s still hugely important. Remember, we’re going to have to be carbon NEGATIVE because of how much time we’ve wasted. We need every resource at our disposal.
  - diafygi 7y ago
    Oh totally. If next gen nuclear can help decarbonize the last 10%, that would be great. However the tone in OP's comment seemed more like nuclear is our only hope. When in reality it will likely be something to meet edge cases rather than base load.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Nuclear is uniquely terrible at filling in the occasional time slices renewables cannot. Nuclear's economics degrade horribly when used at low capacity factor like that. They are not complementary sources.
      - Robotbeat 7y ago
lopmotr 7y ago
> if you look at the number of "close calls" that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges Surely you're not comparing the rate of near misses in nuclear to the rate of actual deaths in coal? Every industry is full of sloppy practices, and that's why ships occasionally sink and bridges occasionally collapse. That's not unique to nuclear. Part of the fear might be that a nuclear accident could harm "innocent" ordinary people who don't work there, but mining accidents feel more acceptable because we're not miners and it's their decision to do dangerous work, and we don't have to worry for them because it'll never affect us.
- jwr 7y ago
  > Surely you're not comparing the rate of near misses in nuclear to the rate of actual deaths in coal? I wasn't comparing anything of the kind. Please read my comment again.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    You are implicitly comparing nuclear to the status quo. I'm curious, how much have you read about the fossil fuel industry? Near misses or not, the actual death rate per unit of energy produced is far higher for fossil fuels than nuclear [1]. [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
brycesbeard 7y ago
It’s such an interesting debate, because while I think we have solved the technological safety issues (which is what us engineers think of), we have not solved the human issues. I’m reading Midnight in Chernobyl, and while the reactor design was flawed, the problem was created and compounded by just how stupid us humans actually are. Things like the builders not being able to get quality cement, for example - is that a technical problem or a human one? FWIW, I am pro nuclear. The problem w renewables is they are focused on meeting current energy demand. But growth is based on innovation which is tied with energy use. In other words, what could we accomplish if we could consume 100x our current amount of energy (with the caveats of clean energy and safety)? I don’t think renewables are going to get us there.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  > The problem w renewables is they are focused on meeting current energy demand. What does that even mean? That renewables run into some hard limit beyond current energy consumption? That would be wrong.
  - brycesbeard 7y ago
    It means I don’t see renewables getting us to a point where people can consume 100x the energy they currently do. Fusion could get us there. OOM increases in energy tend to correspond with huge improvements in quality of life. I don’t see renewables getting ya there.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Why do you not see renewables getting to that point? I see no physical or (soon) economic constraint from them doing so. In particular, the levelized cost of renewables are already much lower than new nuclear fission, and fusion will almost certainly be even more expensive than fission. That advantage will make even use of low efficiency storage more economical than baseload nuclear (fission or fusion) plants.
PaulHoule 7y ago
I have mixed feelings about Perrow's book. Sometimes he leaves out details in his stories that make the behavior of the people involved seem less perverse. Some of his predictions were also wrong, like the one that problems with aviation safety and marine safety were going to get worse.
- jwr 7y ago
  I am halfway through and I definitely have reservations, too. He does have an angle and it shows. That said, I'm concentrating on the facts and the nature of the systems involved, and that alone makes me question the hubris of saying "we know how to safely build and maintain nuclear plants".
mbell 7y ago
There seems to be something much deeper about nuclear fear. If ones concern is 'worst case scenarios' then they should be at least, if not more, afraid of hydro power or dams in general. Dam failures are nasty, the Banqiao Dam failure killed ~200,000 people alone. While nuclear may be more 'complex', both are subject to human failure and I don't think the protection systems for dams are nearly as automated as they are for nuclear. IMO with modern nuclear power the most likely cause of a major incident is a natural problem (earthquake) leading to failure which I think is also true of dams (rainfall). With climate change looming I'm actually a little more concerned about dams, there were several fairly close calls in the last few years alone caused by rainfall amounts the dams were barely able to handle. e.g. Oroville Dam had 180,000 people in danger, the dam in Lynchburg, VA, Bell Falls Dam in Quebec a month ago, etc.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  > Banqiao Dam failure I can't believe I'd never heard of this tragedy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam > According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people
keldaris 7y ago
Taking into account close calls is a fine idea, but they have to weighed by not merely how close to disaster they actually came but also by the magnitude of the potential consequences. Very few (but not zero, granted) of the known close calls in the civilian nuclear industry had any chance whatsoever of becoming disasters comparable to something like Chernobyl. Meanwhile, you would also have to take into account similar close calls in other complex industries with the potential for mass casualty failure modes - hydroelectric dams, chemical plants, oil refineries, etc. Note that despite a litany of such cases, no one's seriously talking about abolishing any of the industries I've mentioned, except nuclear power. I think the title of the article is exactly right - nuclear power is just the usual plane vs car safety fallacy scaled up, with potentially devastating consequences for our civilization.

by jwr 7y ago

dv_dt 7y ago

I find it very likely to be wrong when statements say xxx is the "only" way to do something. Particularly with nuclear which has strong evidence in the US, France and China that plants can't be built in sufficient time to make a difference at this point, while it's pretty clear that renewables and storage are not only feasible, but more cost effective and faster to rollout, as well as to advance technologically vs nuclear.

Robotbeat 7y ago
I agree that nuclear isn’t technically the only option, but statements like “Can’t be built fast enough to make a difference” is also not true, particularly if you use historical examples YES in France. We’re going to need deep decarbonization, and actually the most likely scenario is it will take decades, so there’s actually substantial time for nuclear to make a difference. It doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to build a nuclear power plant. I’m firmly in the “every zero carbon option now, as fast as possible.” And nuclear is definitely part of that. I’ve become worried about the stalling solar power deployment rate in the US (and other places). It hasn’t stopped, but it no longer appears to be on the same exponential growth curve we needed it to be on. We’re going to need everything we can get.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  France itself is saying it shouldn't build a new round of of nuclear power plants and instead should invest in renewables & storage (and would save money and risk) going that route. If you look at the timeline and frequent schedule overruns of nuclear plants we can't build them fast enough in the US to make a critical difference at this point. If you look at China without many of the supposed anti-nuclear legal deterrents, their projects were getting more and more overrun vs estimates and they halted all new plants except for a couple plants of their own design. (and those obviously have self-development motivations). They're trying to finish their initial round of plants right now and likely have come to a similar conclusion of too slow, too expensive vs renewables.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    France is not immune to the social forces impacting the rest of the world.
    - dv_dt 7y ago
      I assert is more of a financial & time to carbon reduction question: France calculates it would save $45B by going to renewable energy instead of replacing aging nuclear power plants with new ones. https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energy-france https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...
- imtringued 7y ago
  The statistics tell me a different story. Seasonal differences in the renewable share are almost nonexistent. Maybe somewhere around +-20%. Sure we will need storage that lets us bridge weeks and if it is economic even up to a whole month but anything beyond that is not about trying to compensate energy shortages, it's about capturing the overproduced energy to sequester carbon. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=monthly https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Also I recommend you to take a look at the daily variance. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=daily https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Anything below the average of 40% is awful. The longest interval below 40% I have found was from 19.03 to 29.03. A month of storage is more than we would ever need. two weeks would be the sweet spot, one or zero weeks is doable if we use gas plants. Really the only amount energy storage that I would consider absolutely mandatory is 24 hours because we still want to use solar energy at night and wind power that is mostly generated at night during the day.
belorn 7y ago
Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. It would be great if Germany replaced all their natural gas power plants in favor of storage. It is the perfect solution and it would end the nuclear power discussion rather quickly if nations would actually start to use it rather then building more gas based power plants. I am in the political camp that says we should ban all burning of fossil fuels today. Doing so would create all the incentives needed to answer the question of storage vs nuclear in a very short time.
- mimixco 7y ago
  Banning fossil fuels would also set society back 100 years. They're literally the basis of all of modern life. I don't think you'll get many takers for that argument.
  - newswriter99 7y ago
    This is the short version of my argument.
- cesarb 7y ago
  > Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. Wikipedia says otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
  - belorn 7y ago
    Thanks for the link. Compared to salt reactors which only holds a few experimental 100MW generators in the world, it seems that storage in comparison is clearly ahead in development with the largest producing around 3GW at peak. In order to replace fossil fuels in the US they would need to build about a million new ones of the current biggest version, through 11hrs capacity sounds low in regard to seasonal changes. They also need to build a matching number of renewable power plants to fill the storage, plus some overhead since storage use more energy that they produce. It is definitively plausible solution which I have nothing against. Looking at the US grid I interpret it to mean that storage is currently responsible for less than 0.1%.
gwbas1c 7y ago
As a huge renewable energy fan, I need to point out that your viewpoint is factually incorrect. For example: I built a very low carbon home a year ago, with giant solar panels sized to charge two electric cars, and to heat the house with heat pumps. I live in the Northeast US, where it gets cold in the winter. The reason why it gets cold in the winter is because the days are very short. Because the days are shorter in the winter, the solar panels do not generate enough electricity to heat the house, so I end up using a lot of grid electricity in December and January. And, what really stinks is that April was unusually cloudy this year. So, when I should have generated excess, I ended up pulling from the grid. In contrast, I have a lot of excess power in the summer when the days are long. (Air conditioning doesn't use as much electricity as heating.) Now, comes the facts: We don't have technology that can store the energy that I generate in the summer for use in the winter. Batteries are great for short term storage: Charge at noon when the panels generate the most power, discharge at night. Even worse, my very expensive Powerwall can't run my heat pump, nor could it hold enough charge to heat my home overnight. Even if I doubled my panels and had a few more Powerwalls, I'd need to pull from the grid in some of the rather bad cold snaps we had this winter. This is why people say that Nuclear can solve the problem now. Renewables are a great long-term solution, but we still need a lot of R&D to solve the problem of storing energy in the summer for use in the winter. In contrast, the nuclear power plant 15 miles from my home can run my heat pump in the dead of winter, without requiring any new storage technology.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It sounds to me like maybe you should consider a hybrid of solar and wind power. When I lived in Northern Ontario (where winters are brutally cold) whenever we did not have sun we had plenty of wind. Once the wind generator was up we never needed outside power (in our case: a generator).
- dv_dt 7y ago
  I agree that storage really isn't up to seasonal demand variation yet. But I also don't think we should take out current nuclear and should run current plants to end of life - even extending their life where practical. But I strongly think that project success/completion data points to new nuclear plants being a poor investment financially and time wise for carbon suppression vs our other options. I am a bit curious why running a wood fired stove in the winter doesn't meet your heating needs in a modern well-insulated low carbon home? We need a set of different, possibly non-uniform solutions. For heat, why not store power by growing forests in the spring/summer, and burning wood in the winter? Not high-tech I know, but some of the automatic pellet feed systems are very low touch.

pdonis 7y ago

We already know how to safely operate nuclear power plants: the US Navy has been doing so for decades with no incidents. We could have imposed a similar level of discipline on civilian nuclear power plant operators back in the 1970s, when commercial plants started being built in the US in quantity. Or we could have done it after Three Mile Island (which harmed no members of the general public but clearly showed inadequacies in the way civilian nuclear plants were operated). The fact that we didn't is a political problem, not a technical or operational problem. Furthermore, even the operational problem is now nonexistent with newer reactor designs. Older designs, like the reactors at Three Mile Island, required the operators to correctly execute a fairly complex procedure in the event of a problem to prevent the reactor from being severely damaged or destroyed; the TMI operators failed to do that. Also, as Fukushima showed, older reactor designs require reliable backup power for decay heat removal. Newer designs have neither of those requirements; you can literally pull the shutdown switch and walk away and there will be no problem. So while I don't disagree with what you say about complex systems in general, I don't think nuclear reactors, with today's designs, are even that complex. We know how to design and build them so that it is impossible to operate them unsafely. We just don't have the political will to do it.

The-US-Navy 7y ago
Yeah, and the Navy can also impose the death penalty and lock people in jail and throw away the key for fucking up on the job. Great example. Let me draft my resume.
newsoul2019 7y ago
>> civilian nuclear power plant operators Maybe you just solved the problem. The Navy should operate the civilian nuclear power plants.
- mimixco 7y ago
  The problem is scale. Today's nuclear plants are just big scaled-up versions of the Navy's original small reactors for ships. Unfortunately, scaling the power output also scales the risks and consequences of an accident.

dkarl 7y ago

It's sad, but significant, that nuclear disasters seem small to us in retrospect. A dozen Chernobyls would cause far less disruption and far less death and suffering than we'll get from climate change even if we act fast now.

diafygi 7y ago

> nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. Fortunately, within the past few years, this is no longer true. Renewables + storage are now cheaper than nuclear as a carbon free and dispatchable resource. They are actually not only winning bids for new generation, they are actually starting to win power purchase agreements over _existing_ coal power plants and expecting to start beating existing gas plants within 5-10 years. It's truly remarkable how fast solar, wind, and batteries have scaled up and started competing on price in the base load markets over the past few years. The current expectation in the utility industry is that by the time next gen nuclear is commercialized, the grid will already be >90% carbon free. So even if we missed the boat on nuclear, there are other carbon free alternatives that are scaling up to meet decarbonization needs.

Robotbeat 7y ago
90% isn’t enough, and being able to decarbonization all of it is super helpful, so yeah, even if new nuclear helps just with that last 10%, that’s still hugely important. Remember, we’re going to have to be carbon NEGATIVE because of how much time we’ve wasted. We need every resource at our disposal.
- diafygi 7y ago
  Oh totally. If next gen nuclear can help decarbonize the last 10%, that would be great. However the tone in OP's comment seemed more like nuclear is our only hope. When in reality it will likely be something to meet edge cases rather than base load.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Nuclear is uniquely terrible at filling in the occasional time slices renewables cannot. Nuclear's economics degrade horribly when used at low capacity factor like that. They are not complementary sources.
    - Robotbeat 7y ago

lopmotr 7y ago

> if you look at the number of "close calls" that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges Surely you're not comparing the rate of near misses in nuclear to the rate of actual deaths in coal? Every industry is full of sloppy practices, and that's why ships occasionally sink and bridges occasionally collapse. That's not unique to nuclear. Part of the fear might be that a nuclear accident could harm "innocent" ordinary people who don't work there, but mining accidents feel more acceptable because we're not miners and it's their decision to do dangerous work, and we don't have to worry for them because it'll never affect us.

jwr 7y ago
> Surely you're not comparing the rate of near misses in nuclear to the rate of actual deaths in coal? I wasn't comparing anything of the kind. Please read my comment again.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  You are implicitly comparing nuclear to the status quo. I'm curious, how much have you read about the fossil fuel industry? Near misses or not, the actual death rate per unit of energy produced is far higher for fossil fuels than nuclear [1]. [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...

brycesbeard 7y ago

It’s such an interesting debate, because while I think we have solved the technological safety issues (which is what us engineers think of), we have not solved the human issues. I’m reading Midnight in Chernobyl, and while the reactor design was flawed, the problem was created and compounded by just how stupid us humans actually are. Things like the builders not being able to get quality cement, for example - is that a technical problem or a human one? FWIW, I am pro nuclear. The problem w renewables is they are focused on meeting current energy demand. But growth is based on innovation which is tied with energy use. In other words, what could we accomplish if we could consume 100x our current amount of energy (with the caveats of clean energy and safety)? I don’t think renewables are going to get us there.

pfdietz 7y ago
> The problem w renewables is they are focused on meeting current energy demand. What does that even mean? That renewables run into some hard limit beyond current energy consumption? That would be wrong.
- brycesbeard 7y ago
  It means I don’t see renewables getting us to a point where people can consume 100x the energy they currently do. Fusion could get us there. OOM increases in energy tend to correspond with huge improvements in quality of life. I don’t see renewables getting ya there.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Why do you not see renewables getting to that point? I see no physical or (soon) economic constraint from them doing so. In particular, the levelized cost of renewables are already much lower than new nuclear fission, and fusion will almost certainly be even more expensive than fission. That advantage will make even use of low efficiency storage more economical than baseload nuclear (fission or fusion) plants.

PaulHoule 7y ago

I have mixed feelings about Perrow's book. Sometimes he leaves out details in his stories that make the behavior of the people involved seem less perverse. Some of his predictions were also wrong, like the one that problems with aviation safety and marine safety were going to get worse.

jwr 7y ago
I am halfway through and I definitely have reservations, too. He does have an angle and it shows. That said, I'm concentrating on the facts and the nature of the systems involved, and that alone makes me question the hubris of saying "we know how to safely build and maintain nuclear plants".

mbell 7y ago

There seems to be something much deeper about nuclear fear. If ones concern is 'worst case scenarios' then they should be at least, if not more, afraid of hydro power or dams in general. Dam failures are nasty, the Banqiao Dam failure killed ~200,000 people alone. While nuclear may be more 'complex', both are subject to human failure and I don't think the protection systems for dams are nearly as automated as they are for nuclear. IMO with modern nuclear power the most likely cause of a major incident is a natural problem (earthquake) leading to failure which I think is also true of dams (rainfall). With climate change looming I'm actually a little more concerned about dams, there were several fairly close calls in the last few years alone caused by rainfall amounts the dams were barely able to handle. e.g. Oroville Dam had 180,000 people in danger, the dam in Lynchburg, VA, Bell Falls Dam in Quebec a month ago, etc.

EForEndeavour 7y ago
> Banqiao Dam failure I can't believe I'd never heard of this tragedy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam > According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people

keldaris 7y ago

Taking into account close calls is a fine idea, but they have to weighed by not merely how close to disaster they actually came but also by the magnitude of the potential consequences. Very few (but not zero, granted) of the known close calls in the civilian nuclear industry had any chance whatsoever of becoming disasters comparable to something like Chernobyl. Meanwhile, you would also have to take into account similar close calls in other complex industries with the potential for mass casualty failure modes - hydroelectric dams, chemical plants, oil refineries, etc. Note that despite a litany of such cases, no one's seriously talking about abolishing any of the industries I've mentioned, except nuclear power. I think the title of the article is exactly right - nuclear power is just the usual plane vs car safety fallacy scaled up, with potentially devastating consequences for our civilization.