7 ms·

The idea nuclear plant cutting costs scares me, especially if it comes from the safety budget.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
What if I told you that, if you look at the data, nuclear is the safest form of energy known to humanity [1]. It's on par with passive energy collectors like wind and solar where a tiny number of people die installing things on roofs or doing maintenance. How much extra money should we be spending to keep saving so many millions of lives simply by displacing air pollution? Obviously we can't be cavalier with radiological hazards, but we don't have to make it as expensive as we've chosen to. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy Nuclear is like a lot like air travel. More people are afraid of it, but it's statistically very safe. Human minds, unfortunately, don't work like this. I fully understand that saying this doesn't make you or anyone else feel any better about cutting costs at nuclear plants. It just seems weird to have this demonstrably excellent energy source sitting here ready to decarbonize the world rapidly (as done in France in the 1980s), and have everyone be more influenced by pop culture and the media than by simple comparative analysis. I wish I knew how to change people's minds here but I fear we're up against some evolved human nature, and it's an uphill battle. Fukushima death rate from radiation? 0 (maybe 1, but highly debated). Deaths from air pollution this year? 4.3 million. Future deaths from climate change? Potentially hundreds of millions. In this real world, I'll take my low-carbon nuclear energy any day.
- digitaltrees 7y ago
  I am less concerned with the immediate safety and more concerned with the long term waste that we don’t really adequately deal with.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    I am glad you asked because this is an interesting time in the nuclear waste world. The simple answer is that you put it deep underground in geologically stable places like crystalline bedrock or salt beds where it will sit out of danger until after at least 100,000 years, when it will have released all of its excess energy and reached stability. For example, the Finns, being a pragmatic people, decided collectively to build and operate a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste called Onkalo. It's mostly complete and has test canisters in place as we speak. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-waste/worlds-first-underground-nuclear-waste-storage-moves-forward-in-finland-idUSKCN1TQ1NL https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-waste/wor... Relatedly, a company in Berkeley called Deep Isolation is now working to commercialize a new waste disposal technique called deep borehole disposal. Rather than mining out something a few hundred meters deep, you use modern oil/gas techniques (ironically, the same tech that allows fracking) to cheaply drill down 5-8 km and put the spent fuel down there where it really has no credible way of making it back up. This particular company is run by a woman and they focus on community outreach first. It looks to be a good approach [2]. [2] https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/ https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/ Also worth noting is that once it's out of the reactor, there's no more high pressure coolant or nuclear chain reaction to drive its dispersal. It sits in incredibly robust canisters on parking lots at the plants where it's almost impossible to imagine anything going wrong. See my buddy Jim doing a walk-through in Washington state to get a visual [3]. [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g The comparison of risk between stored nuclear waste vs. things like air pollution and climate change is astronomical: nuclear waste risk is incredibly low. In a high-carbon, high air pollution world, it's hardly a footnote in the world risks. Yet, for every person I talk to, this is the primary concern. I feel like we've let too many MacGyvers and Captain Planets and Simpsons and HBO's run wild without correction. Nuclear PR people have been hiding under rocks since Three Mile Island. The millennial new nuclear people are much more aggressive because we got into this to cut carbon emissions, and this appears to be pretty urgent.
    - Moru 7y ago
      I'm more wondering how we get the nuclear fuel in the first place and how long we can keep picking it up until it gets too expensive to find/process? And are we still using coal powerplats to process the fuel to usable quality? Then it's not very carbonfree.
      - acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Excellent question. As with many minerals, uranium-bearing minerals are found in various parts of the world in various grades of ore. Some areas have high-grade ore, and others are more diffuse. The best information on this that I'm aware of is at world nuclear [1]. In summary, there is a whole lot of uranium. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... At the diffuse extreme, there's nearly infinite uranium in seawater, and lots of research has been done recently to extract it passively with special polymers. In 2016, this special edition journal summarized the progress [2]. It's still more expensive than conventional mining, but not so much that it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to economically get uranium from seawater. Then nuclear is renewable for billions of years, as uranium in seawater replenishes via runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever imagine using it. [2] https://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15 https://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15 This is all further complicated by the fact that conventional nuclear reactors burn about 1% of the nuclear fuel pulled out of the ground. More advanced breeder reactors with recycling facilities can get up to 90% of the energy (there are always some process losses). This extends known resources by another factor of 90x. There's also Thorium, which can be used as nuclear fuel. There's a whole lot of that too [3]. [3] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... Regarding power to enrich, France and some others uses nuclear power plants to power their nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities. In the USA, I believe there's still lots of coal and fracked gas powering enrichment plants. The gas centrifuge enrichment plants are so energy efficient that this matters much less than back in the day when we used gaseous diffusion. In the end game, the plan would be to do as France does and make the whole fuel cycle ultra low carbon.
    - 7y ago
- dev_dull 7y ago
  You seem to be knowledgeable. What do we do with the waste?
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    There is an unbelievably small quantity of nuclear waste produced from traditional power plants as compared to other power sources. Coal plants likely release more total radiation into the environment than nuclear plants -- 100X per unit energy according to [2]. Breeder reactors and Fast Nuclear Reactors (FNRs) produce orders of magnitude less total nuclear waste [1] than traditional plants. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Fast breeder reactors make sense when uranium is expensive or scarce. They and their reprocessing facilities are universally more complex, expensive, and unreliable than their water-cooled brethren. In today's fracking world, we need to bring nuclear costs down. Breeders will make costs go up, almost for sure (I study the history of this, and current efforts, very carefully). Honestly just disposing of nuclear waste in deep geologic repositories is a really pragmatic and relatively cheap approach for now. If we do end up ramping nuclear to 50% of the world energy supply, then breeding will likely become important. With breeders, we can use uranium dissolved in seawater effectively forever (hundreds of millions or even billions of years at 10x world scale consumption, effectively fully renewable).
      - tremon 7y ago
        Breeder reactors are not intended to bring down costs, they are intended to bring down the scale of the waste problem. As someone already said upthread, there is a $40Bn fund for managing said waste, paid for by current-generation nuclear plants. If the breeder reactors reduce waste by 90% (low estimate, most figures predict 99%), that frees up $36Bn to offset the higher cost of breeder reactors.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  I see that link about nuclear safety a lot. It's worth pointing out that it's explicitly not comparing with wind or solar: "Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy". There's another similar, but bloggier, link that only includes rooftop solar but excludes grid scale. So it's basically saying fossil fuels suck, something I'd agree with. I wouldn't consider myself anti-nuclear, but think it would still get beaten pretty thoroughly on price in a market with carbon priced in. Yes it's better than coal and fracked gas, and a carbon price would help existing plants compete with those but anyone pushing nuclear because they think renewables are hopeless are likely to be angry right-wingers looking for a convenient scapegoat for the fact that they repeatedly voted for conmen in the pocket of big oil. If you genuinely want to change minds here, then show how nuclear could be rolled out on a global scale starting today cheaper than renewables. Which I don't think it can, and don't think I've seen anyone try to make that claim. They usually stop at "it's better than coal" and "baseload!" and "you know who is responsible for climate change? Anti-nuclear hippies" or my favourite "if climate change was real, then the greens would support nuclear".
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    There are indeed lots of angry right-winger variable renewable haters. The people who got into nuclear specifically to fight climate change (i.e. everyone under 40, and lots of others) are not among them; we are all in on renewables and anything else that's low carbon. New-age nuclear designers are pushing for design features like intimate integration with large thermal storage facilities to work appropriately in a future world powered by ~50% variable renewables (or more!). Variable renewable prices are excellently low, with solar PV falling from $350/MWh to like $43 in 10 years. The variability and massive land/material use is where I suspect they will eventually run into modest troubles at scale (around 50% of total energy). Already, in San Bernardino county (of all places!), large new solar installations in the desert were banned, largely (from what I can tell) because of NIMBYism. Thus, I personally believe that at scale variable renewables will eventually struggle, as almost all other energy systems have in the past. The exponential curve in the sub-10% range gives way to a plateau in many cases. I think there's sufficient reason to consider this, if not likely, at least imaginable. Many studies, including some from NREL, show costs of solar going absolutely vertical at certain levels of penetration, for intuitive reasons that when you're building that last solar panel that's only needed on December 15th at 1pm for 1 hour, it's pretty darn expensive. Energy storage helps, but has externalities and cost. As usual, there is no free lunch. So, you want some ideas to make nuclear cheap? Ok! Barring what's been dubbed the Mobile Chernobyl, building large nuclear plants in huge shipyards and floating them to their location where they're either embedded on land and operated terrestrially or (even better) operated 10 km offshore is the kind of idea that can cut costs dramatically while actually improving safety. Sounds crazy, but hear me out! Shipyards are like assembly lines. It's Henry Ford meets decarbonization. You can pump out massive components and assemble them in a controlled environment with local labor without any temporary structures or shops or roads or anything that makes heavy engineering projects expensive. You get economies of mass production and economies of scale. When operating at sea, you are intimately coupled to an infinite heat sink that can cool you in all situations. If you're in deep water, tsunamis are long wavelength and non-threatening. Earthquakes don't exist. Weather can hurt, but the Prelude was designed to operate in category 5 cyclones. For maintenance, you just get relieved by a spare powership and go to the shipyard. All fuel handling equipment is shared across the fleet, not duplicated in each plant. The uptime at the customer site is 100% because of the spare ship. In case of military attack, you design it to sink safely and coolably, and have a salvage operation built into the design. Absolutely epic. This could decarbonize the planet extremely rapidly. Anyone working on this? You bet! This is Thorcon's entire pitch, and they think they can hit $1000/kW capital cost. MIT studied it too. [1]. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-look-floating-nuclear-power-0624 http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-look-floating-nuclear-power-062...
- dorgo 7y ago
  in comparison to wind and solar nuclear power - is more centralized - is a better target for terrorists - favors monopolies - uses fuel which could be used to build bombs? Just speculating, but I guess nobody will be happy if some of that stuff gets into wrong hands. - produces waste which we need to keep in mind for thousends of years - has serious PR issues ( is less accepted by society )
  - realusername 7y ago
    > - is more centralized Any form of energy production with decent prices is centralized, that also includes wind and solar. Solar panels on rooftops has to be the most inefficient way of producing electricity right now.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    > uses fuel which could be used to build bombs? If we banned every technology because which has a potential for destructive misuse, we'd have no technology. Sticks would be banned because you could rub them together to make fire and burn down the village.
    - perfunctory 7y ago
      Nuclear technology IS banned for most countries. If one advocates nuclear technology as a solution to climate change they should accept the right of other countries to have that technology too, e.g. Iran
      - NikkiA 7y ago
        Actually, it's not, the NPT Article IV explicitly grants access to nuclear power technology for any country that is willing to rescind any interest in nuclear weapons. Most countries signed it.
        htek 7y ago
        Iran signed it. Why can't Iran produce safe, clean, rainbow creating nuclear power technology?
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  I think- people are afraid of dying but more than that, are afraid of dying _badly_. Death from radiation poisoning can be one ugly motherfucker death and its rarity also makes it strange and otherworldly which only helps to stoke the flames of terror. Reading about the symptoms of radiation victims I'm often reminded of H. P. Lovecraft's stories- it seems like some other-dimensional horror has caught them in its tentacles [1]. Dying from air pollution is not exactly fun either. Chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, having to spend the last years of your life on oxygen, lung cancer... but there is something going on here that is quite separate from people not being good at statistical reasoning [2]. Perhaps dying from air pollution has becoe commonplace, exactly because it happens so often, that it has lost its edge. Perhaps we have all internalised the fact that our cities are full of deadly pollutants that we breathe in daily. Fear of air travel is similar: it's an ugly way to die, trapped in a giant metal cigar with strangers, and it's also rare. Yet another example is fear of sharks: it's rare that a shark kills a person, but the way they kill you is really not how most people hope to die. Maybe, if you wanted to change attitudes, you'd have to make death from radiological accidents much more common and death from air pollution less so. But I don't think that really solves your problem. _____________________ [1] I was just now reading the article about Louise Slotin's death. Some choice cuts from his symptoms: "The hand eventually took on a waxy blue appearance and developed large blisters"; "He had internal radiation burns—what one medical expert called a “three-dimensional sunburn.”". That is horrible and also _weird_. [2] It's more complicated than that: https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-n...
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    In real life basically nobody who isn't walking around a nuclear disaster site, preventing a Russian submarine from becoming a nuclear disaster site or doing dumb things in a lab dies of radiation poisoning though. You just have a higher chance of getting cancer later. Your comment is exactly the kind of sentiment that is not backed up by numbers that the person you are replying to is complaining about.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
- ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
  >What if I told you that, if you look at the data, nuclear is the safest form of energy known to humanity Because so much money is spent on safety. I feel like you are almost saying the safety budget is unnecessary. Nuclear power is safe because of, not despite, the many millions poured into safety.
mrfusion 7y ago
Now why can’t we build nuclear plants underground? Seems like that would be pretty safe. Or build them in a depression and flood it with water if there’s a major problem. Or build them on a floating platform in the ocean and simply sink it if something goes wrong?
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Indeed! And this was a fundamental pillar of Edward Teller's quest for socially-acceptable forms of nuclear energy. Nuclear legend Alvin Weinberg towards the end of his career favored the PIUS passively-safe BWR, undergrounded [1]. I think the biggest practical concern is that underground construction is more expensive that above-ground construction, and nuclear's active constraint today is cost. There may be opportunities for step changes if people make fully autonomous, maintenance-free, factory fab reactors that can slide into easily-constructed holes. Unfortunately, all of this is hard, and so far economies of scale have dwarfed gains from economies of mass production. The small reactors of the past have all been crazy expensive. The truck-mounted ML-1 military reactor, for example, was 10x too expensive for the Army back in the early 1960s. As for floating, this is my single favorite idea ever, as expressed elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817497 [1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6332659-process-inherent-ultimate-safety-boiling-water-reactor-pius-bwr https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6332659-process-inherent-ultimat...

What if I told you that, if you look at the data, nuclear is the safest form of energy known to humanity [1]. It's on par with passive energy collectors like wind and solar where a tiny number of people die installing things on roofs or doing maintenance. How much extra money should we be spending to keep saving so many millions of lives simply by displacing air pollution? Obviously we can't be cavalier with radiological hazards, but we don't have to make it as expensive as we've chosen to. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy Nuclear is like a lot like air travel. More people are afraid of it, but it's statistically very safe. Human minds, unfortunately, don't work like this. I fully understand that saying this doesn't make you or anyone else feel any better about cutting costs at nuclear plants. It just seems weird to have this demonstrably excellent energy source sitting here ready to decarbonize the world rapidly (as done in France in the 1980s), and have everyone be more influenced by pop culture and the media than by simple comparative analysis. I wish I knew how to change people's minds here but I fear we're up against some evolved human nature, and it's an uphill battle. Fukushima death rate from radiation? 0 (maybe 1, but highly debated). Deaths from air pollution this year? 4.3 million. Future deaths from climate change? Potentially hundreds of millions. In this real world, I'll take my low-carbon nuclear energy any day.

digitaltrees 7y ago
I am less concerned with the immediate safety and more concerned with the long term waste that we don’t really adequately deal with.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  I am glad you asked because this is an interesting time in the nuclear waste world. The simple answer is that you put it deep underground in geologically stable places like crystalline bedrock or salt beds where it will sit out of danger until after at least 100,000 years, when it will have released all of its excess energy and reached stability. For example, the Finns, being a pragmatic people, decided collectively to build and operate a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste called Onkalo. It's mostly complete and has test canisters in place as we speak. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-waste/worlds-first-underground-nuclear-waste-storage-moves-forward-in-finland-idUSKCN1TQ1NL https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-waste/wor... Relatedly, a company in Berkeley called Deep Isolation is now working to commercialize a new waste disposal technique called deep borehole disposal. Rather than mining out something a few hundred meters deep, you use modern oil/gas techniques (ironically, the same tech that allows fracking) to cheaply drill down 5-8 km and put the spent fuel down there where it really has no credible way of making it back up. This particular company is run by a woman and they focus on community outreach first. It looks to be a good approach [2]. [2] https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/ https://www.deepisolation.com/technology/ Also worth noting is that once it's out of the reactor, there's no more high pressure coolant or nuclear chain reaction to drive its dispersal. It sits in incredibly robust canisters on parking lots at the plants where it's almost impossible to imagine anything going wrong. See my buddy Jim doing a walk-through in Washington state to get a visual [3]. [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g The comparison of risk between stored nuclear waste vs. things like air pollution and climate change is astronomical: nuclear waste risk is incredibly low. In a high-carbon, high air pollution world, it's hardly a footnote in the world risks. Yet, for every person I talk to, this is the primary concern. I feel like we've let too many MacGyvers and Captain Planets and Simpsons and HBO's run wild without correction. Nuclear PR people have been hiding under rocks since Three Mile Island. The millennial new nuclear people are much more aggressive because we got into this to cut carbon emissions, and this appears to be pretty urgent.
  - Moru 7y ago
    I'm more wondering how we get the nuclear fuel in the first place and how long we can keep picking it up until it gets too expensive to find/process? And are we still using coal powerplats to process the fuel to usable quality? Then it's not very carbonfree.
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Excellent question. As with many minerals, uranium-bearing minerals are found in various parts of the world in various grades of ore. Some areas have high-grade ore, and others are more diffuse. The best information on this that I'm aware of is at world nuclear [1]. In summary, there is a whole lot of uranium. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... At the diffuse extreme, there's nearly infinite uranium in seawater, and lots of research has been done recently to extract it passively with special polymers. In 2016, this special edition journal summarized the progress [2]. It's still more expensive than conventional mining, but not so much that it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to economically get uranium from seawater. Then nuclear is renewable for billions of years, as uranium in seawater replenishes via runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever imagine using it. [2] https://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15 https://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15 This is all further complicated by the fact that conventional nuclear reactors burn about 1% of the nuclear fuel pulled out of the ground. More advanced breeder reactors with recycling facilities can get up to 90% of the energy (there are always some process losses). This extends known resources by another factor of 90x. There's also Thorium, which can be used as nuclear fuel. There's a whole lot of that too [3]. [3] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... Regarding power to enrich, France and some others uses nuclear power plants to power their nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities. In the USA, I believe there's still lots of coal and fracked gas powering enrichment plants. The gas centrifuge enrichment plants are so energy efficient that this matters much less than back in the day when we used gaseous diffusion. In the end game, the plan would be to do as France does and make the whole fuel cycle ultra low carbon.
  - 7y ago
dev_dull 7y ago
You seem to be knowledgeable. What do we do with the waste?
- arcticbull 7y ago
  There is an unbelievably small quantity of nuclear waste produced from traditional power plants as compared to other power sources. Coal plants likely release more total radiation into the environment than nuclear plants -- 100X per unit energy according to [2]. Breeder reactors and Fast Nuclear Reactors (FNRs) produce orders of magnitude less total nuclear waste [1] than traditional plants. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Fast breeder reactors make sense when uranium is expensive or scarce. They and their reprocessing facilities are universally more complex, expensive, and unreliable than their water-cooled brethren. In today's fracking world, we need to bring nuclear costs down. Breeders will make costs go up, almost for sure (I study the history of this, and current efforts, very carefully). Honestly just disposing of nuclear waste in deep geologic repositories is a really pragmatic and relatively cheap approach for now. If we do end up ramping nuclear to 50% of the world energy supply, then breeding will likely become important. With breeders, we can use uranium dissolved in seawater effectively forever (hundreds of millions or even billions of years at 10x world scale consumption, effectively fully renewable).
    - tremon 7y ago
      Breeder reactors are not intended to bring down costs, they are intended to bring down the scale of the waste problem. As someone already said upthread, there is a $40Bn fund for managing said waste, paid for by current-generation nuclear plants. If the breeder reactors reduce waste by 90% (low estimate, most figures predict 99%), that frees up $36Bn to offset the higher cost of breeder reactors.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
I see that link about nuclear safety a lot. It's worth pointing out that it's explicitly not comparing with wind or solar: "Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy". There's another similar, but bloggier, link that only includes rooftop solar but excludes grid scale. So it's basically saying fossil fuels suck, something I'd agree with. I wouldn't consider myself anti-nuclear, but think it would still get beaten pretty thoroughly on price in a market with carbon priced in. Yes it's better than coal and fracked gas, and a carbon price would help existing plants compete with those but anyone pushing nuclear because they think renewables are hopeless are likely to be angry right-wingers looking for a convenient scapegoat for the fact that they repeatedly voted for conmen in the pocket of big oil. If you genuinely want to change minds here, then show how nuclear could be rolled out on a global scale starting today cheaper than renewables. Which I don't think it can, and don't think I've seen anyone try to make that claim. They usually stop at "it's better than coal" and "baseload!" and "you know who is responsible for climate change? Anti-nuclear hippies" or my favourite "if climate change was real, then the greens would support nuclear".
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  There are indeed lots of angry right-winger variable renewable haters. The people who got into nuclear specifically to fight climate change (i.e. everyone under 40, and lots of others) are not among them; we are all in on renewables and anything else that's low carbon. New-age nuclear designers are pushing for design features like intimate integration with large thermal storage facilities to work appropriately in a future world powered by ~50% variable renewables (or more!). Variable renewable prices are excellently low, with solar PV falling from $350/MWh to like $43 in 10 years. The variability and massive land/material use is where I suspect they will eventually run into modest troubles at scale (around 50% of total energy). Already, in San Bernardino county (of all places!), large new solar installations in the desert were banned, largely (from what I can tell) because of NIMBYism. Thus, I personally believe that at scale variable renewables will eventually struggle, as almost all other energy systems have in the past. The exponential curve in the sub-10% range gives way to a plateau in many cases. I think there's sufficient reason to consider this, if not likely, at least imaginable. Many studies, including some from NREL, show costs of solar going absolutely vertical at certain levels of penetration, for intuitive reasons that when you're building that last solar panel that's only needed on December 15th at 1pm for 1 hour, it's pretty darn expensive. Energy storage helps, but has externalities and cost. As usual, there is no free lunch. So, you want some ideas to make nuclear cheap? Ok! Barring what's been dubbed the Mobile Chernobyl, building large nuclear plants in huge shipyards and floating them to their location where they're either embedded on land and operated terrestrially or (even better) operated 10 km offshore is the kind of idea that can cut costs dramatically while actually improving safety. Sounds crazy, but hear me out! Shipyards are like assembly lines. It's Henry Ford meets decarbonization. You can pump out massive components and assemble them in a controlled environment with local labor without any temporary structures or shops or roads or anything that makes heavy engineering projects expensive. You get economies of mass production and economies of scale. When operating at sea, you are intimately coupled to an infinite heat sink that can cool you in all situations. If you're in deep water, tsunamis are long wavelength and non-threatening. Earthquakes don't exist. Weather can hurt, but the Prelude was designed to operate in category 5 cyclones. For maintenance, you just get relieved by a spare powership and go to the shipyard. All fuel handling equipment is shared across the fleet, not duplicated in each plant. The uptime at the customer site is 100% because of the spare ship. In case of military attack, you design it to sink safely and coolably, and have a salvage operation built into the design. Absolutely epic. This could decarbonize the planet extremely rapidly. Anyone working on this? You bet! This is Thorcon's entire pitch, and they think they can hit $1000/kW capital cost. MIT studied it too. [1]. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-look-floating-nuclear-power-0624 http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-look-floating-nuclear-power-062...
dorgo 7y ago
in comparison to wind and solar nuclear power - is more centralized - is a better target for terrorists - favors monopolies - uses fuel which could be used to build bombs? Just speculating, but I guess nobody will be happy if some of that stuff gets into wrong hands. - produces waste which we need to keep in mind for thousends of years - has serious PR issues ( is less accepted by society )
- realusername 7y ago
  > - is more centralized Any form of energy production with decent prices is centralized, that also includes wind and solar. Solar panels on rooftops has to be the most inefficient way of producing electricity right now.
- sjwright 7y ago
  > uses fuel which could be used to build bombs? If we banned every technology because which has a potential for destructive misuse, we'd have no technology. Sticks would be banned because you could rub them together to make fire and burn down the village.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    Nuclear technology IS banned for most countries. If one advocates nuclear technology as a solution to climate change they should accept the right of other countries to have that technology too, e.g. Iran
    - NikkiA 7y ago
      Actually, it's not, the NPT Article IV explicitly grants access to nuclear power technology for any country that is willing to rescind any interest in nuclear weapons. Most countries signed it.
      - htek 7y ago
        Iran signed it. Why can't Iran produce safe, clean, rainbow creating nuclear power technology?
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
I think- people are afraid of dying but more than that, are afraid of dying _badly_. Death from radiation poisoning can be one ugly motherfucker death and its rarity also makes it strange and otherworldly which only helps to stoke the flames of terror. Reading about the symptoms of radiation victims I'm often reminded of H. P. Lovecraft's stories- it seems like some other-dimensional horror has caught them in its tentacles [1]. Dying from air pollution is not exactly fun either. Chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, having to spend the last years of your life on oxygen, lung cancer... but there is something going on here that is quite separate from people not being good at statistical reasoning [2]. Perhaps dying from air pollution has becoe commonplace, exactly because it happens so often, that it has lost its edge. Perhaps we have all internalised the fact that our cities are full of deadly pollutants that we breathe in daily. Fear of air travel is similar: it's an ugly way to die, trapped in a giant metal cigar with strangers, and it's also rare. Yet another example is fear of sharks: it's rare that a shark kills a person, but the way they kill you is really not how most people hope to die. Maybe, if you wanted to change attitudes, you'd have to make death from radiological accidents much more common and death from air pollution less so. But I don't think that really solves your problem. _____________________ [1] I was just now reading the article about Louise Slotin's death. Some choice cuts from his symptoms: "The hand eventually took on a waxy blue appearance and developed large blisters"; "He had internal radiation burns—what one medical expert called a “three-dimensional sunburn.”". That is horrible and also _weird_. [2] It's more complicated than that: https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-n...
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  In real life basically nobody who isn't walking around a nuclear disaster site, preventing a Russian submarine from becoming a nuclear disaster site or doing dumb things in a lab dies of radiation poisoning though. You just have a higher chance of getting cancer later. Your comment is exactly the kind of sentiment that is not backed up by numbers that the person you are replying to is complaining about.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
>What if I told you that, if you look at the data, nuclear is the safest form of energy known to humanity Because so much money is spent on safety. I feel like you are almost saying the safety budget is unnecessary. Nuclear power is safe because of, not despite, the many millions poured into safety.

mrfusion 7y ago

Now why can’t we build nuclear plants underground? Seems like that would be pretty safe. Or build them in a depression and flood it with water if there’s a major problem. Or build them on a floating platform in the ocean and simply sink it if something goes wrong?

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Indeed! And this was a fundamental pillar of Edward Teller's quest for socially-acceptable forms of nuclear energy. Nuclear legend Alvin Weinberg towards the end of his career favored the PIUS passively-safe BWR, undergrounded [1]. I think the biggest practical concern is that underground construction is more expensive that above-ground construction, and nuclear's active constraint today is cost. There may be opportunities for step changes if people make fully autonomous, maintenance-free, factory fab reactors that can slide into easily-constructed holes. Unfortunately, all of this is hard, and so far economies of scale have dwarfed gains from economies of mass production. The small reactors of the past have all been crazy expensive. The truck-mounted ML-1 military reactor, for example, was 10x too expensive for the Army back in the early 1960s. As for floating, this is my single favorite idea ever, as expressed elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817497 [1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6332659-process-inherent-ultimate-safety-boiling-water-reactor-pius-bwr https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6332659-process-inherent-ultimat...