11 ms·

I'm slightly skeptical of accident tolerant fuels (ATF). In terms of deaths per kWh generated, nuclear is already the safest form of energy generation we have.

• igravious 7y ago
  Very good point. Incremental safety measures with an eye to swaying public opinion is pretty pointless as public opinion changes very slowly I imagine and we must be hitting the law of diminishing returns w.r.t this particular set of tech. On the other hand a pure win would be figuring out how to enlarge the market share of nuclear by persuading those who are already willing but balk at the large up-front costs, the insurance, the regulatory environment, the long planning processes (etc. etc. – basically everything but the tech). If the USA and the EU both made a commitment to doubling the share of nuclear tech in their jurisdictions to combat climate change (and we're going to need loads of cheap juice to power all those EVs) by streamlining the processes and creating an Atoms for Peace mark II umbrella that would make this HNer a happy camper. Don't see it happening unfortunately. Every time this topic comes up I get so disheartened.
  • epistasis 7y ago
    Public opinion won't matter at all until construction itself becomes a reliable process. There are plenty of sites willing to host nuclear, and as our current fleet ages out many sites would welcome replacement reactors to keep the community's economic base going. However it's abundantly clear that the current tech's time has come and gone. The current designs can't be constructed in the US, as it becomes a Mexican standoff between utility, designer, and contractor, each just waiting to sue the others for what they assume will be inevitable and costly delays and construction/design errors. The Rankine cycle for converting heat to electricity is just not super exciting any more, and wind/solar/storage may outcompete thermal electricity generation as an entire class of technologies.
    • craftinator 7y ago
      Exciting? Who cares if it is exciting? It's the most dense means of energy production that we have, in terms of cost, square footage, and like, every other positive metric I can think of.
      • epistasis 7y ago
        In terms of cost, we are on the exponential improvement phase of the logistic technology curve for wind/solar/storage. For thermal energy, we are long past that. That's why "exciting" matters. Already wind/solar/storage have beat nuclear on cost, are beating coal, and in many areas solar+storage is beating natural gas for new installs. We don't know how much wind/solar/storage will improve on cost, but we know it will be quite a bit. We know that thermal generation of electricity is optimized to its max. As far as dense energy production, what benefit does that have? If you want to stick a steam turbine on wheels, or a nuclear reactor in a submarine, that would make sense, but I'm not sure how it helps for the grid.
        • lokimedes 7y ago
          At some point it will dawn on us that the resources needed to build solar/wind is defined by the energy density available in these resources. Nuclear is basically invoking a deeper level of reality, one where energy is measured in MeV rather than paltry eV of chemical binding energy. Solar and wind are even less dense. It may be an old Physicist’s ramblings, but we have backed away from Prometheus’ fire way too soon to save ourselves.
          • epistasis 7y ago
            With wind and solar we are capturing leftover energy from the sun's fusion; the internal amount of storage is not relevant. With fossil fuels, we are simply using the stored energy from past fusion. It's likely that we will start creating synthetic fuels from the electricity that comes from wind and solar, if you want a dense storage mechanism for keeping fuel close by for mobile applications or isolated sites. There's nothing magical about nuclear, it's just a heat source. Unfortunately it's difficult to transmit heat long distances.
• amluto 7y ago
  deaths per kWh (or even various adjusted life year metrics) aren’t all that matters. Cost of cleaning up and other economic losses due to accidents also matter. The Fukushima accident may not have caused much in the way of injury, but the cleanup is projected to cost over $100bn. It’s not so easy for nuclear power to compete when those costs are factored in. So yes, passively safe reactors are a big deal in my book.
  • option 7y ago
    What is more important than deaths/twh? Costs? I would disagree. Perhaps, area lost to contamination (e. g. Chernobyl exclusion zone, Fukushima area). But then, how much is lost/flooded due to coal excavation, hydro dam flooding, etc.
    • api 7y ago
      It's important in terms of adoption. Fukushima destroyed the economics of Japanese nuclear power. One accident like that per 100 years and nuclear suddenly becomes very expensive.
      • option 7y ago
        global warming has sever long term consequences for economies as well. People need energy, problem is that the costs of dirty energy are spread out and “average Joe” doesn’t think of them as energy costs (pollution, worse health, wars for oil, etc.)
    • rfrey 7y ago
      I don't think amluto said the clean-up costs were more important than deaths/kwh. The point is that these improvements are necessary and welcome even though nuclear is already safer than the options, for reasons other than safety.
      • amluto 7y ago
        Indeed. If I were a nuclear regulator, I would not permit construction of a plant that could, by design, be a danger to anything other than itself if it lost power. I would also consider requiring existing plants to retrofit themselves to have the same property if the technology became available.
• Zigurd 7y ago
  It is misleading to claim current generation plants are safe, for all relevant meanings of safe. If they were actually safer than other power sources, the plants would be insurable. You could call them safe if they did not pose a bomb proliferation risk. You could call them safe if cleanup after accidents was a well-understood and feasible process. You could call them safe if the risks did not reach to somewhere between hundreds of miles and the entire planet. Safer nuclear power is not just about reducing the possibility of immediate death, which, of course can't be entirely eliminated. You still have risk to employees from non-radiological parts of a power plant. What you won't have from safer nuclear power plants is the risk of spreading stuff like Strontium 90 over a wide area. That by itself is a very valuable goal that will vastly reduce the maximum downside risk and the cost of mitigating that risk. Cost is part of risk, in the form of financial risk. Smaller, less expensive plants are less likely to become white elephants on rate payers' bills. They won't lead to To Big To Fail entities that may need bailing out because they are the custodians of a big nuclear mess. Safety is multi-dimensional. People opposed to building more nuclear plants with current technology understand that. They want to keep their wallets safe AND their milk safe. They want to keep the value of their property safe. That's perfectly rational.
  • dalore 7y ago
    Safe is measuring how many deaths per user various power generations sources cause. Coal etc is less safe then nuclear because it causes more deaths. Yes when a nuclear accident happens, it can be bad, but that doesn't happen that often at all. Compared to the numerous accidents and deaths that happen every day with say coal. Also coal is outputting pollutants into the atmosphere which causes more deaths (a slower death but dead is dead). Cleaning up that air is also just as difficult as cleaning up nuclear waste.
    • anoncake 7y ago
      > Safe is measuring how many deaths per user various power generations sources cause. No. Safety depends not only on deaths but on all kinds of damage. It also does not depend on how many people nuclear kills per year. That number is predictable so it isn't even a risk (to society), it's a cost. Nuclear is unsafe because of the damage it causes in the worst case. What happens when NPPs are operating correctly isn't even relevant to the discussion.
• ThomPete 7y ago
  That's a big reason for why it got so expensive though :) You could probably remove quite a lot of requirements and still have the safest energy generator and that would bring down the cost.
• Retric 7y ago
  That’s not accurate. “Rooftop” solar is minimally dangerous to install, but large scale solar fields on empty land is extremely safe per kWh. PS: Nuclear also has many deaths not generally included in these statistics. As building and operating a power plant is not the only risky things you need to do to have nuclear power. Ex: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4164879/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4164879/
  • sovnade 7y ago
    It depends if you're including the carbon footprint of the entire solar panel build/shipment process (from raw materials to shipping/etc). I'm not sure of the numbers, but installation is a negligible part of the total solar impact to the environment.
    • Nasrudith 7y ago
      If you use that level of accounting nuclear plants also have a sizeable footprint just from their concrete useage in construction. I am a fan of nuclear but current economics seem against it even if they are driven by irrational reactions.
    • Treblemaker 7y ago
      But doesn't that carbon footprint assume that the energy to manufacture and transport the panels comes from fossil fuels? Then it seems we would eventually reach a point where a sufficient fraction of the energy to produce and transport would itself come from solar, leading to a reduction and eventual elimination of that carbon footprint.
• acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Hear hear! I think the nuclear industry struggles with finding a balance between sunk costs (e.g. TRISO fuel development under NGNP, the TREAT reactor, ATR, the BISON fuel performance code), and what advances the nuclear industry really needs to survive and thrive. At a NRC meeting a while ago, one of the members of the ACRS asked pointedly what regulatory relief they expect to get from ATF. No one knew. Is the NRC going to relax a bunch of regs when we have ATF and somehow allow nuclear to be cheaper without compromising safety? No way. We need ways to minimize financing costs during construction, and get the number of staff required at operating plants way down to decrease O&M. My favorite solution? Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. Solves almost all problems assuming you can get them to operate largely autonomously. In attacks or ship collisions, design it to sink safely and cool itself with seawater. Build in a recovery operation to the design. Also, the nuclear industry really needs to find ways to consolidate effort. There are literally 50+ SMR designs in work right now, and dozens more larger reactors. The industry is wayyy to small to be fighting over limited investor and government money to develop that many reactors in isolation.
  • adamsea 7y ago
    Because nuclear power such a charged issue (pun intended), transparency and trust is especially important. The nuclear struggles with genuine transparency, which, imho, would go further than anything else to shifting the public's feelings on nuclear power.
    • acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Totally agree. Nuclear technology was born in secrecy but civilian nuclear energy stands to benefit from much more openness now. I've been hearing people talking about finding ways around institutional friction via various open-source inspired collaboration and design practices. Could be hopeful.
  • erentz 7y ago
    > Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. What’s your opinion on Thorcon? Also I’m wondering if you have some thoughts on this: I’ve been wondering what holds us back from taking a scale out approach rather than a scale up approach we have now (e.g. with EPR design now producing 1.6GW). Instead couldn’t we pump out naval sized nuclear plants in mass production style since we can apparently still build those and my limited understanding is their smaller size and output makes them safer (less decay heat etc). Ship those around as needed for refueling. And just have a couple dozen on each site to produce the equivalent power. It would combine a national strategic need that we have to do anyway (naval nuclear power), with another need that we seem to be failing to do (getting back on the horse with producing reliable clean power).
• baybal2 7y ago
  > Where nuclear fails, and where improvement is desperately needed, is ability to deliver on budget and within schedule. Indeed, this is what is glanced over way too often with the urge of politicians and industry bureaucrats to rush builds of the bleeding edge and experimental designs. The only economic nuclear power stations today were big, multi-gigawatt PWR and BRW designs with more than 4 reactors. In comparison to power output/fixed costs, all other factors pale in comparison.
• aioprisan 7y ago
  Solar panels can't kill. You could have a very large field of panels, 0 deaths.
  • djcapelis 7y ago
    People falling off roofs while installing or maintaining panels is the biggest contributor to deaths from solar electricity. Per TwH, current solar is far from the safest: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html?amp https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
    • fooster 7y ago
      What about the carbon footprint from the manufacturing and materials for the solar panels?
      • pfdietz 7y ago
        It's weird you think that use of fossil fuels is inherent in the production of solar panels, and cannot be substituted for.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      Rooftop solar is a small fraction of solar installed worldwide, those stats are incomplete without also listing solar farms.
      • djcapelis 7y ago
        Yeah, agreed entirely. It's not the best document. But "solar panels never killed anyone" just turns out to be not true is all. It turns out everything has risks. I find post-construction rooftop solar to be a perfectly acceptable risk, personally. Grid-scale solar not on rooftops is even better.
    • ZeroGravitas 7y ago
      That chart strangely leaves off grid scale solar? I wonder what explains that mysterious oversight? And of course if you fit the panels at the same time as building the house you don't get any additional deaths and even rooftop solar sails to the top of the list. I'm sure we'll find another obscure stat to focus on though (even if we have to leave off anything that beats nuclear). Dont let the facts get in the way of a good story.
• sovnade 7y ago
  I'd say one of the biggest roadblocks to nuclear power right now is public opinion. Nobody wants one in their backyard because there's a lot of false information (and shows like Chernobyl don't help). Even though we're well into the safe area, showing that we're making them even safer might help sway public opinion to build one where it otherwise wouldn't have been at all, regardless of the multi-billion dollar cost and decade+ timetable.
  • AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
    I personally would not mind having a nuclear plant in my backyard, but please, may I have something in return for the increased risk? Something like lower property taxes would do. Or free electricity and heating for all residents.
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    But that's not the big roadblock to nuclear power. The main obstacle is that it's grossly uneconomic. Even in locations where the locals are nearly 100% for reactor, the reactors are not being built. The people controlling the money don't see them as good investments.
• weaksauce 7y ago
  I agree with you that it’s important to make nuclear reactors more cost efficient but also what you are leaving out is twofold. One, The costs of a cleanup after an accident is massive which affects total cost. Two, the public perception of nuclear being scary and an invisible killer inhibits adoption. Just look at Germany’s knee jerk reaction to Fukushima to see that in action.
• ptaipale 7y ago
  The ability to deliver on budget and within schedule is dependent more on political than technological development. Arbitrary delays caused by political meddling (including with pretext of safety concerns) are a significant part of the schedule problems. However, minor incremental safety improvements may be a tool in addressing this political risk - though it is true that cost still needs to be controlled.
• adrianmonk 7y ago
  From a tech point of view, you're probably right. But one of the biggest things holding back nuclear energy is public perception and politics. Maybe the biggest thing. If you can say "prevents the type of accident that happened at Fukushima", those could be powerful words. Fear is often not rational, and it's human nature to be acutely fearful of things you have seen happen (even if they aren't actually larger risks). Even if the actual safety impact is small, something that hits directly at the thing people are worried about could have a large impact on the political reality. Yes, it's inefficient to have to placate people who don't know a lot about it, but if nuclear is to succeed, we have to realize that the majority of people are never going to understand the risks in depth. It seems worthwhile to spend some resources just to make it so "nuclear" is less of a scary word.
• CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  In the HBO series Chernobyl they claim to have been hours away from causing a much larger incident killing about 60 million people and making large parts of Europe and Asia uninhabitable. Is there truth to this claim? If so, and if such failure modes are possible, I’d say that current deaths per kWh is not be the best way to estimate risk.
  • thg 7y ago
    > Is there truth to this claim? No, there isn't. They invented quite some nonsense to add drama and the reactors blowing up like thermonuclear bombs is among that. https://theconversation.com/ten-times-the-chernobyl-television-series-lets-artistic-licence-get-in-the-way-of-facts-119110 https://theconversation.com/ten-times-the-chernobyl-televisi... point 5 It's entertainment, not a documentary.
    • CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
      Noted. Thanks for clearing that up. Since they did state that some of the characters were made up I had some hope they’d be a bit careful about other things, such as this claim that didn’t add that much to the actual drama.
    • sebazzz 7y ago
      They probably should have added "Based on a true story" so you know it is partially fake.
    • FireBeyond 7y ago
      One of the comments I heard was that while the physicists knew that wasn't possible, at that point, they were 1) battling with politicians who weren't overly concerned with anything except perception, and their own asses, and 2) wouldn't know enough to call them on the lie, and felt that claiming such a thing was possible might "wake them up" and hopefully provide some forward progress.
      • garmaine 7y ago
        Did it actually happen that way though? It’s my understanding that we don’t know (the people at those meetings are dead) and HBO/Sky made it up in a way to add drama. Likewise with the 3 plant workers on a suicide mission to open the sluice gates, who were supposedly sent to their deaths. They’re still alive and healthy today (except one who died of non-nuclear causes).
• cco 7y ago
  >Where nuclear fails… Nuclear fails because the public is uncomfortable with these plants, not for any technical or cost reason. Though to your point you could avoid spending the R&D on safety technologies and instead spend it on marketing which would likely yield better results.
  • effie 7y ago
    Come on, the classical nuclear power plant is highly expensive to build and decommission. If the problem was purely public perception, we could have hundreds of plants far away in deserted places and transport the power on power lines. In reality, many nuclear constructions stalled or were stopped when cheaper alternatives became viable.
    • cco 7y ago
      I think the Yucca mountain debacle is enough evidence to show that putting nuclear facilities, granted not generation, “in the middle of nowhere” is not a panacea. It’s a third rail after Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island, the public perceives it as far too risky to allow anywhere near them. No one wants to touch the idea and yes, it doesn’t help matters that nuclear is insanely expensive.
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    You have that totally backwards. Nuclear has failed because the people building the plants have consistently blown through their cost estimates. Like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, at some point they have to be held responsible for this.
• cryptonector 7y ago
  Problems with nuclear: - waste mgmt - safety - proliferation risk (for uranium-/plutonium-based reactors, not so much for thorium-based reactors) - outrageous construction costs - heat pollution (heat discharge into local waters) - baseload-only - slow to blackstart Thorium reactor designs solve the first three issues only (unless they can be blackstarted soon after a blackout -- do thorium reactors suffer from poisoning?), in which case they'd solve four of the above problems. Or perhaps thorium reactors can be cheap to build? (I'll believe that when I see it, but only then will nuclear [fission] begin go be appealing.) The only good things about nuclear are that the fuel is cheap (maybe) and it has no air pollution (barring accidents). That's not enough to justify the issues.
  • garmaine 7y ago
    Nuclear isn’t intrinsically expensive. Most of the cost is due to safety regulations, which in principle safer designs would need less of.
    • tehabe 7y ago
      Safer designs are the result of safety regulations, if you lift those regulations you will get less safe reactors. They might be cheaper but also less safe.
      • labawi 7y ago
        For reactors built here a significant part of cost is plain mismanagement, corruption and/or profiteering. This results in costly and less-safe reactors. Don't know about others.
        • tehabe 7y ago
          Partially this is certainly true and it is easy, since everybody assumes that the costs will increase, nobody is surprised that the reactor which should have costed 3 billion euros will cost over 10 billion euros in the end. For a technology where the prices are decreasing, this is harder to do.
• jayd16 7y ago
  I like nuclear but the death numbers are not as relevant when exposure time to radiation is the relevant factor and we've abandoned many cities to prevent those types of deaths.
• naasking 7y ago
  > Where nuclear fails, and where improvement is desperately needed, is ability to deliver on budget and within schedule The onerous safety regulations are mostly the reason nuclear plants run over budget and schedule. Safety improvements that can relieve some or all of that burde arr probably worth it to scale nuclear.
• rsync 7y ago
  "Where nuclear fails, and where improvement is desperately needed, is ability to deliver on budget and within schedule." Something that see nobody discussing and that I gave almost no thought to myself is the embedded carbon cost of the mining and enrichment of Uranium itself. Never mind the building of the plant, etc., but the actual carbon expended to achieve a workable fissionable fuel. This process was brought to my attention in the long, detailed chapter on Uranium enrichment in _No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies_ by William Vollmann.[1] It's really quite amazing how many steps are involved and how expensive those steps are in terms of embedded carbon cost. In the absence of fully non-fossil-fuel power sources to do that mining and enrichment it is difficult to see how that process makes any sense absent the massive economic and military subsidies we have in place for gasoline/diesel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Vollmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Vollmann
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    The cost of enriching uranium used to be a problem, then gas centrifuges replaced diffusion and reduced the energy cost by a factor of 50.