31 ms·

The Necessity of Nuclear

126 points by nikhizzle 7y ago

pmoriarty 7y ago
But is he willing to live next to a nuclear power plant or a nuclear waste storage facility?
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  Yes? Do you have any reason to think he isn't?
- mlyle 7y ago
  I'm willing to live moderately close. I don't really want to be in the shade of a cooling tower; I wouldn't want to be next door to a coal-fired power plant or a gas turbine, either, or even really a wind farm. But if you want to put it in an industrial area a few blocks away, sure, I'm good with it. I'm not sure we have a great source of cooling water here, though, except up in the hills which is really not a wonderful siting for a nuclear plant.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I want to live outside the leak permanent evacuation radius. Unfortunately that can be pretty huge and I think my city is already in one.
- wiredfool 7y ago
  From the article: > And here’s a little story. I grew up within a few miles of Britain’s first, and largest, nuclear power plant.
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    He'd probably be telling a different story had he grown up a few miles from Chernobyl or Fukushima.
    - lucb1e 7y ago
      Right, and after you've been in a plane crash you are likely to develop a fear of flying.
      - jay_kyburz 7y ago
        I'm scared of the planes emission. Hope we'll soon tax jet fuel usage appropriately.
        lucb1e 7y ago
        Different issue, but yes, I very much hope so too. There aren't any good alternatives for long haul flights so I shouldn't judge people for doing them for work or visiting family (even if we should avoid them for holidays), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't collect money for projects like compensating the emissions, literally pulling it back out of the air (Climeworks), developing alternatives, or something else I can't think of right now. And for short haul we need to push people to trains (or in the USA, to create proper trains).
    - wiredfool 7y ago
      At the risk of violating site guidelines, Fukushima was mentioned in the article as well. I understand that you’re against nuke power because of the scary problems, but reading the article first and responding to the points raised is a better approach then the same old same old repetition.
    - flukus 7y ago
      I doubt it, it seems there's enough cognitive dissonance that he'd be happy living next to Chernobyl, the station he grew up next to leaks like a sieve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
- bno1 7y ago
  would anyone rather live near a fossil fuel power station if they have to choose?
  - gdy 7y ago
    Between a coal plant and a nuclear one I would choose nuclear any time.
    - jay_kyburz 7y ago
      What about if you were choosing between a coal plant, nuclear plant, or solar on the roof of your house with 2 tesla powerwalls and off grid.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        For living next to? Obviously the solar installation. For generating energy to power our economies as we scramble to mitigate the impact of climate change? Obviously nuclear. What was the point you were trying to make?
        jay_kyburz 7y ago
        The thread is about what you would like to live next to. I agree with you, I would like to live next to solar. With regard to powering our economies, I think we should just use a lot less energy. Turn the lights off, turn down the aircon, shut down the malls and find better ways to do things.
        gdy 7y ago
        Shut down the factories too?
        jay_kyburz 7y ago
        Factories might need to find efficiencies as well, or invest in enough solar to run themselves. We'll have to pay the true cost of consuming the products they produce. Update: I didn't do it very well, but what I wanted to say was that nobody runs their home like a shopping mall. Thousands of lights blasting, air so cold you have to put a jumper on in summer, and doors wide open to let the cold out. There is a lot of waste in the commercial world that I think we should fix before we freak out that there is not enough energy.
KingMachiavelli 7y ago
> I am now pro-nuclear—at least as an intermediate technology until we really get renewables, and, as you say, BETTER BATTERIES, sorted out. > An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized. Isn't this why we won't get nuclear power? It's always been my impression than nuclear is more financial challenging than technical, it takes forever to recoup the initial cost of the reactor and by the time it does, we will want to move onto 'cleaner/safer' renewables. Perhaps if public perception changed considerably and we were willing to have our base energy load (what coal & natural gas* provide today) come from nuclear. I just don't think nuclear makes financial sense currently if it's only intended to be temporary.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  So far, we don’t have any technology even in design phase, much less in the deployment stage, to deal with the storage problem. For our current needs, lithium batteries simply will not do, and we do not have enough viable sites or water for pumped storage either. There is nothing suggesting we’re going to solve the storage problem in our lifetimes, so nuclear is really the only viable solution to get off fossil fuels completely.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Large grids (with DC interconnects) make the storage problem less (because the covariance falls between different generation sources and demand sinks), as do a diversity of approaches (e.g. solar, wind, hydro; only tapping hydro when there's a shortfall). People will point to power->gas->power as a technology for this, and I do think that's something we should be pursuing... It is probably viable for some fraction of fill-in power. I still think some nuclear in the mix makes things much easier, though as some people point out the economics of nuclear get even worse when there's a lot of renewables on the grid (because nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize extensive construction costs, and a lot of that time power is basically free).
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    Flow batteries, thermal salt storage and simple overcapacity + long-distance transmission are all possibilities. There's an 800 MWh / 200 MW Vanadium flow battery being built in Dalian, China, for example. Thermal salt storage is already coupled to thermal solar plants in Spain, but could be run with a heat pump, using any power source. There are actually several promising technologies. It's not as dire as you're suggesting.
Vomzor 7y ago
Is nuclear waste even still a problem? We have been storing nuclear waste for more than 60 years in ‘temporary facilities ’ while we’re looking for permanent solutions. As far as I know, nothing happened in that time. Let’s just drop the ‘temporary’ label, keep doing what we’re doing and stop worrying about hypothetical scenarios where society will collapse and some farmer 1000 years from now will get radiation poisoning.
- mlyle 7y ago
  The temporary really sucks. We shouldn't have lots and lots of waste sitting in spent fuel pools random places and should move to something more permanent and reliable.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    Like Yucca Mountain?
    - mlyle 7y ago
      Yup. Yucca Mountain wasn't a perfect plan, but it was pretty damn good and definitely much better than the alternative of doing nothing.
      - nickik 7y ago
        No it wasn't. The US has a perfect place for nuclear waste that we discovered a while ago but politics made it be Yucca Mountain and that is not a good place. And then even worse becuase of politics the technical targets have been moved to absurd demands that make it utterly impossible to move forward. The US has the right location and the money already stored, there is still the Yuca Mountain inpass as it currently required to be the selected site. I think finding such a site in the first place is nonsense as in 50-100 years we should be consume that fuel anyway.
        blaser-waffle 7y ago
spsrich2 7y ago
Brian Eno's full name: Brian Peter George De La John Sieur LaBaptiste Roger Farfisa Schweppes Lea Bernard Fancourt Richard Peter Loonhouse De La Salle Eno
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
brazzy 7y ago
Nuclear power plants are not safe, never have been, and never will be. That's because no matter how great your technology and redundant safety systems are, it's all still run by humans who are fallible, often stupid, and very often greedy. If you can make a buck by cutting corners and shirking security regulations, someone will. Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology. And as the 737 MAX and its insights into Boeing company culture and the FDA shows, people can and will piss away already gained safety improvements.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Maybe not, but we can bound the number of people they kill at much lower than other forms of power generation.
  - pvaldes 7y ago
    At this moment talking about how few people has killed nuclear versus other energy sources is BS. We can compare both values only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, in a world that is getting unstable at a fast pace, with politicians even more unstable that act in totally random ways. We will not have a trustable nuclear body count value until many generations in the future. Is not over until is over.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      > only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, But rapidly becomes less lethal, with the vast majority of the risk removed in tens of years. Vs. many kinds of chemical waste which are potent effectively forever.
  - brazzy 7y ago
    WTF? That is pretty much the exact opposite of reality.
jacquesm 7y ago
I absolutely love Brian Eno's music. Apollo and The Pearl are engraved in my memory and will stay with me until my last day. But I really don't see why I would take Brian Eno's ideas on why we need nuclear power any more serious than some sports person talking about politics or a computer programmer talking or writing about the finer bits of mechanical engineering. This whole 'famous person speaks about subject they have little knowledge about with authority' thing goes right past me, it's weird how we seem to project all kinds of magical properties onto those who manage to get name recognition. As though fame somehow automatically bestows instant expertise on a hundred unrelated fields on the famous. I'd love to hear Brian Eno write and say more about music though, like Vangelis, Tomita, Jean-Michel Jarre and Klaus Doldinger he managed to make electronic music sound organic, which was - given the tools at hand - a magnificent accomplishment. Renewables are sorted out, massive deployment is more of a political problem than a technical one. Better batteries would be useful but windpower doesn't need batteries as much as solar does. Better transmission lines, that would make a big difference. Creating more nuclear power plants is a dead end economically, the power produced is going to be more expensive than the same amount of power produced using renewable energy. On top of that you will still have to deal with the waste and the eventual decommissioning, assuming you get the license to operate the thing in the first place and your budget overruns won't kill the project. So regardless of what - insert favorite famous musician - who was against nuclear power for all the wrong reasons and now is pro nuclear power - also for all the wrong reasons - thinks we are on a different path now and just maybe it will be possible to get through the eye of the needle without relying on nuclear technology. And if it has to be nuclear, then let's hope that fusion will finally be delivered, that would be a game changer.
- Jedd 7y ago
  > But I really don't see why I would take Brian Eno's ideas on why we need nuclear power... This was my initial reaction also. On any story about 'nuclear power' I tend to search for fission and fusion, just to see if the author is sufficiently informed / concise. I'm starting to dismiss any article that doesn't qualify this basic difference. I'm happy to see money poured into fusion R&D, but not happy to advocate more fission reactors being constructed -- and the appellations pro/anti-nuclear simply doesn't describe that not uncommonly held position.
tekkk 7y ago
It's been my view for a long time that Green Party has been unreasonably stupid being generally so hard core anti-nuclear that they can't even think about logically anymore. Like it's one of the best clean energy sources out there, works in any climate and location and the waste is quite trivial to store away for time being - until we find out a way to use it. But no, they rather stoke fear with doomsday scenarios scarier than another and advocate building expensive wind turbines and solar panels in places where they just can't support the energy demands of the whole country. It's just dumb. They are too stuck emotionally with their idealism on "non-polluting" things. Everything pollutes, nuclear waste albeit worse than the normal garbage can be taken care of quite easily. I'd rather have that than coal plants. Sure it would be nice to not to have even the nuclear waste, but sometimes you have to be pragmatic. That's what engineering is about. Here's a fun story I heard about the woefully famous Finnish Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant. As some of you might know it was the most expensive building in the world for a while costing 8.5 billion euros (it seems some hotel complex in Mecca is now more expensive with 12 billions). Why you might ask? Well Olkiluoto 3 is a nuclear plant with 1600 MW output consisting of only a single reactor, unlike no other plant. Commonly nuclear plants are built in sets of 2 reactors, so that they are easier to maintain (one is still running when the other is offline) and in general easier to build than one massive reactor. But why only 1 reactor you ask? Well, as some Nokia engineer told me in sauna, the administration at the time consisted of multiple parties one of them being the Green Party. And Green Party was terribly afraid of nuclear energy, and the decision to build a new nuclear power plant really didn't sit well with them. Everybody knew that Finland needed a new power source and nuclear power plant was the only viable option. But Green Party just didn't. want. the. nuclear. plant. So a compromise was made. Green Party agreed to allow the building of a new nuclear plant but only with one reactor. Dumb idea, but I guess they thought that 1 nuclear reactor was less scarier than 2. What the other parties then decided to? Well in order to supply the energy demands Finnish industry required, they said "hey let's build a reactor that in fact has the power of two reactors". Which was never done before, and the results are now well-known. In the end, what Green Party gained from this? A nuclear power plant with only a one reactor, but which is double the size of regular one and whole thing billions of euros over-budget and everyone generally unhappy. But hey, only one reactor.. I'm not even sure does it produce the same nuclear waste as two reactors would. A major success nonetheless.
mch82 7y ago
TLDR: Extrapolating current trends in renewable power generation, by the time we’re able to complete construction of new nuclear plants those plants won’t be necessary. There are six significant flaws in most recent pro-nuclear arguments I’ve read. To me, these flaws undermine the pro-nuclear case. 1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online (>7 years). 2. Authors focus on the percentage of energy production contributed by clean sources (solar, wind, etc.) TODAY, but ignore the growth trend (which matters since reactors take so long to bring online). 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years. 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted. 5. Authors ignore energy efficiency trends (electronics get more efficient over time). 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported. [1]: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-reactor https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle..., “Quora” [6]: https://youtu.be/rUeHPCYtWYQ https://youtu.be/rUeHPCYtWYQ, “Chernobyl Podcast” Edit: added TLDR. I’ll update with references for points 2-5 later. Slow internet connection now.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  > 1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online As per the article: > An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized. True, development costs are big, but these can be spread over multiple reactors. And once you have trained the workforce constructing one, the others can come much quicker. See historical values for France [1]. If we were to pipeline new reactors buildup everywhere, we'd be quite close to netting 0% emission in the energy sector. Granted, calculations and finding the optimal isn't that simple. > 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years. The consequences of our fossil fuel reliance are staging _right now_ what the ecosystem will look like millions of years in the future. Even if we were to produce 1000 times the amount of nuclear waste we currently have, we wouldn't come close to that. At least, it is easier to keep the stuff in one place. This is an emergency. Yes, nuclear is far from optimal, but is a whole lot better than the status quo. The other arguments aren't really valid in my opinion. 2. Builds on 1. The point is that nuclear can ramp up pretty quickly, as has been shown in the past. > 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted. This isn't really a problem with nuclear. Provide the baseload. You can tune up/down the amount of power, depending on your renewable output. Exchange energy with the neighbors depending on the needs. Pumped hydro can store quite a bit of energy as well. > 5. I fail to understand your point. Are we using less energy? I don't think so. [2] And a lot more stuff is going to need electricity in a clean energy transition (heaters, cars, industrial ovens...). If anything, cleaner/cheaper energy is likely going to increase consumption. > 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported. What safety data? The points they talk about in the article and use to say that reactors seem safe? Other energy generators aren't that safe, and also likely under-report. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by_sources_in_France.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
etamponi 7y ago
Unfortunately, nuclear is just too far away from being a popular option for it to be considered by politicians, policy-makers, or anyone else that makes important enough decisions. Politicians will continue to silently approve the creation of new nuclear centrals (because they know we need them) but won't publicly push for them. Public opinion has been biased so much against nuclear that no one of those people sees a benefit _for themselves_ to solve the environmental crisis with nuclear. Which brings me to the core point of this post: a lot of people care about the environment, and would like to help as much as they can, learning what's best to pursue. But politicians, policy-makers, and public personalities in general are not among the ones that really want to help the environment. For them, being an environmentalist is just a _mean_ to capture some votes, some money, some power. _That_ is what the seek. Paradoxically, I think they will attempt to delay the solution to the problem as much as they can, because that would mean they lose their power.
- brighteyes 7y ago
  At least one presidential candidate does support some form of nuclear, https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ but yes, it's a rare position.
imtringued 7y ago
Nuclear power suffers from piss poor economies of scale. If you want your country to invest into nuclear then it should be prepared to build dozens of identical plants at the same time. Of course this will require at least a trillion dollars of funding but the upside is that costs per plant will go down significantly after the learning phase.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nickik 7y ago
  Exactly, its to efficent. Switerland for example has a couple of plants, and once you build them you don't need to build more for like 40-50 years. And because nuclear is so country-by-country you don't get global economics of scale.
spentatom 7y ago
Uranium is the most energy dense material on this planet, check out energy density of various fuels on wiki. Uranium like any fossil fuel ie crude and coal has waste issues, its also, due to its energy density, more of a hazard that a tank full of coal or gasoline. Saying that in the 50's nuclear aircraft were built and tested but the risk of fallout from any number of potential aviation incidence put paid to that idea becoming common place. Smaller nuclear reactors are still used in secure trusted locations though, like submarines, ships and even the US embassy in London (you'll need to analyse metadata to find that out). I do sometimes wonder if the eco warriers are Nazi's hiding under the green banner, wanting to send everyone back to the stone age or whether they just like acting as the brake on technological developments that could otherwise rush off into the sunset. Any country would be sensible to have a range of electrical power generation technologies, the isotopes from nuclear fuel can be used in medicines, depleted uranium in military armour (tanks) and ballistics. In fact when the US dropped the nukes on Japan, the ensuing scientific knowledge gained spawned the radiotherapy developments in cancer treatments, after it was observed that nuclear radiation killed stem cells in bone marrow and the spleen. Doctors even worked out the minimum amount of stem cells and spleen cells to kick start the immune system as a result of the WW2 nukes. So its hard for many to quantify the benefits of nuclear power and military experiments, but the problems still remain, how to deal with the waste. Robots need to be made nuclear proof, there is a spill over into space technology here as space is highly irradiated, so solving things like Fukashima and Chernobyl will benefit space exploration even more. And there is the attainment of knowledge which gets us closer to understanding and importantly, controlling fusion. Besides waste disposal could be made into the fastest fault lines of two plates of the earth crust, effectively sending the radation back into the earth's core. If people are worried about radiation, they should look up Radon and granite rocks. That kills more people than uranium waste.
spenrose 7y ago
It is an abject failure of our amplification systems, notably HN and Stewart Brand's Long Now, that we are listening to two Baby Boomer musicians debate energy policy. Who cares what Eno and Byrne think about nuclear power?
air7 7y ago
Imo, the fact that the world didn't put a huge dent in global warming by building lots of nuclear plants is one of the saddest "misses" of our recent history. This I feel is due to irrational, emotional public opinion. Nuclear is the safest cleanest and most stable energy source we have so far but it's also "scary" because radiation is spooky and invisible. Coal is simple and local and it just silently kills millions through pollution. It's similar to the common fear of flying vs the common non-fear of driving. Even today when people talk about the "cons" of nuclear power (spent fuel management, risk of catastrophe, terrorist target, etc) they are usually oblivious to the fact that there are 450 active NPPs today, and they are supplying 10% of the worlds energy and things are going great.[0] So even if these were acute concerns (and they're not) we would only have needed to increase them by a max factor of 10 to get 100% non polluting energy. That's not a lot, and definitively worth the "hassle". Even in Chernobyl (which was the main reason for the doom the nuclear effort) the number of casualties due to radiation, including long term effects, are estimated to be in the thousands, not millions as most people assume. [1] In Fukushima that number is 1. [2] The number of NPPs were growing exponentially until suddenly plateauing globally since 1987 til today [0]. This is because building a new NPP is very expensive, time consuming, and since Chernobyl, headline-grabbing. Keeping an existing one running on the other hand is almost free, and a non-issue. The other culprit is the fact that it seems that NPPs are not dominantly cost-effective as of now [3]. If they were, then maybe savvy entrepreneurs would have found a way to circumvent the public opinion and convince governments to build them. But as it stands, no one has the incentive to push this agenda: Not businesses, and not politicians who couldn't stand the backlash (on the contrary, France, who leads the world with 75% reliance on nuclear power, wants to reduce that number to 50% by 2035 because that's the will of the people [4]) In a (better) parallel world, the people would demand more nuclear power and get the governments to subsidence the costs to make it cost effective and removing the reliance on coal. Instead we're building wind turbines and solar panels that are so unreliable they stop producing energy when there's no wind or it's cloudy/night. I think it's quite clear that these green technologies can't really be effective at a large scale (at least without some major break-throughs), but it's what the people demand, so it's what we do while we continue to burn coal. [0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537816/why-dont-we-have-more-nuclear-power/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537816/why-dont-we-have-m... [4] http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-French-energy-plans http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-...

126 points by nikhizzle 7y ago

pmoriarty 7y ago

But is he willing to live next to a nuclear power plant or a nuclear waste storage facility?

bpodgursky 7y ago
Yes? Do you have any reason to think he isn't?
mlyle 7y ago
I'm willing to live moderately close. I don't really want to be in the shade of a cooling tower; I wouldn't want to be next door to a coal-fired power plant or a gas turbine, either, or even really a wind farm. But if you want to put it in an industrial area a few blocks away, sure, I'm good with it. I'm not sure we have a great source of cooling water here, though, except up in the hills which is really not a wonderful siting for a nuclear plant.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I want to live outside the leak permanent evacuation radius. Unfortunately that can be pretty huge and I think my city is already in one.
wiredfool 7y ago
From the article: > And here’s a little story. I grew up within a few miles of Britain’s first, and largest, nuclear power plant.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  He'd probably be telling a different story had he grown up a few miles from Chernobyl or Fukushima.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    Right, and after you've been in a plane crash you are likely to develop a fear of flying.
    - jay_kyburz 7y ago
      I'm scared of the planes emission. Hope we'll soon tax jet fuel usage appropriately.
      - lucb1e 7y ago
        Different issue, but yes, I very much hope so too. There aren't any good alternatives for long haul flights so I shouldn't judge people for doing them for work or visiting family (even if we should avoid them for holidays), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't collect money for projects like compensating the emissions, literally pulling it back out of the air (Climeworks), developing alternatives, or something else I can't think of right now. And for short haul we need to push people to trains (or in the USA, to create proper trains).
  - wiredfool 7y ago
    At the risk of violating site guidelines, Fukushima was mentioned in the article as well. I understand that you’re against nuke power because of the scary problems, but reading the article first and responding to the points raised is a better approach then the same old same old repetition.
  - flukus 7y ago
    I doubt it, it seems there's enough cognitive dissonance that he'd be happy living next to Chernobyl, the station he grew up next to leaks like a sieve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
bno1 7y ago
would anyone rather live near a fossil fuel power station if they have to choose?
- gdy 7y ago
  Between a coal plant and a nuclear one I would choose nuclear any time.
  - jay_kyburz 7y ago
    What about if you were choosing between a coal plant, nuclear plant, or solar on the roof of your house with 2 tesla powerwalls and off grid.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      For living next to? Obviously the solar installation. For generating energy to power our economies as we scramble to mitigate the impact of climate change? Obviously nuclear. What was the point you were trying to make?
      - jay_kyburz 7y ago
        The thread is about what you would like to live next to. I agree with you, I would like to live next to solar. With regard to powering our economies, I think we should just use a lot less energy. Turn the lights off, turn down the aircon, shut down the malls and find better ways to do things.
        gdy 7y ago
        Shut down the factories too?
        jay_kyburz 7y ago
        Factories might need to find efficiencies as well, or invest in enough solar to run themselves. We'll have to pay the true cost of consuming the products they produce. Update: I didn't do it very well, but what I wanted to say was that nobody runs their home like a shopping mall. Thousands of lights blasting, air so cold you have to put a jumper on in summer, and doors wide open to let the cold out. There is a lot of waste in the commercial world that I think we should fix before we freak out that there is not enough energy.

KingMachiavelli 7y ago

> I am now pro-nuclear—at least as an intermediate technology until we really get renewables, and, as you say, BETTER BATTERIES, sorted out. > An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized. Isn't this why we won't get nuclear power? It's always been my impression than nuclear is more financial challenging than technical, it takes forever to recoup the initial cost of the reactor and by the time it does, we will want to move onto 'cleaner/safer' renewables. Perhaps if public perception changed considerably and we were willing to have our base energy load (what coal & natural gas* provide today) come from nuclear. I just don't think nuclear makes financial sense currently if it's only intended to be temporary.

xyzzyz 7y ago
So far, we don’t have any technology even in design phase, much less in the deployment stage, to deal with the storage problem. For our current needs, lithium batteries simply will not do, and we do not have enough viable sites or water for pumped storage either. There is nothing suggesting we’re going to solve the storage problem in our lifetimes, so nuclear is really the only viable solution to get off fossil fuels completely.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Large grids (with DC interconnects) make the storage problem less (because the covariance falls between different generation sources and demand sinks), as do a diversity of approaches (e.g. solar, wind, hydro; only tapping hydro when there's a shortfall). People will point to power->gas->power as a technology for this, and I do think that's something we should be pursuing... It is probably viable for some fraction of fill-in power. I still think some nuclear in the mix makes things much easier, though as some people point out the economics of nuclear get even worse when there's a lot of renewables on the grid (because nuclear needs to run 24/7 to amortize extensive construction costs, and a lot of that time power is basically free).
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  Flow batteries, thermal salt storage and simple overcapacity + long-distance transmission are all possibilities. There's an 800 MWh / 200 MW Vanadium flow battery being built in Dalian, China, for example. Thermal salt storage is already coupled to thermal solar plants in Spain, but could be run with a heat pump, using any power source. There are actually several promising technologies. It's not as dire as you're suggesting.

Vomzor 7y ago

Is nuclear waste even still a problem? We have been storing nuclear waste for more than 60 years in ‘temporary facilities ’ while we’re looking for permanent solutions. As far as I know, nothing happened in that time. Let’s just drop the ‘temporary’ label, keep doing what we’re doing and stop worrying about hypothetical scenarios where society will collapse and some farmer 1000 years from now will get radiation poisoning.

mlyle 7y ago
The temporary really sucks. We shouldn't have lots and lots of waste sitting in spent fuel pools random places and should move to something more permanent and reliable.
- goatlover 7y ago
  Like Yucca Mountain?
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Yup. Yucca Mountain wasn't a perfect plan, but it was pretty damn good and definitely much better than the alternative of doing nothing.
    - nickik 7y ago
      No it wasn't. The US has a perfect place for nuclear waste that we discovered a while ago but politics made it be Yucca Mountain and that is not a good place. And then even worse becuase of politics the technical targets have been moved to absurd demands that make it utterly impossible to move forward. The US has the right location and the money already stored, there is still the Yuca Mountain inpass as it currently required to be the selected site. I think finding such a site in the first place is nonsense as in 50-100 years we should be consume that fuel anyway.
      - blaser-waffle 7y ago

spsrich2 7y ago

Brian Eno's full name: Brian Peter George De La John Sieur LaBaptiste Roger Farfisa Schweppes Lea Bernard Fancourt Richard Peter Loonhouse De La Salle Eno

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brazzy 7y ago

Nuclear power plants are not safe, never have been, and never will be. That's because no matter how great your technology and redundant safety systems are, it's all still run by humans who are fallible, often stupid, and very often greedy. If you can make a buck by cutting corners and shirking security regulations, someone will. Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology. And as the 737 MAX and its insights into Boeing company culture and the FDA shows, people can and will piss away already gained safety improvements.

mlyle 7y ago
Maybe not, but we can bound the number of people they kill at much lower than other forms of power generation.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  At this moment talking about how few people has killed nuclear versus other energy sources is BS. We can compare both values only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, in a world that is getting unstable at a fast pace, with politicians even more unstable that act in totally random ways. We will not have a trustable nuclear body count value until many generations in the future. Is not over until is over.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    > only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, But rapidly becomes less lethal, with the vast majority of the risk removed in tens of years. Vs. many kinds of chemical waste which are potent effectively forever.
- brazzy 7y ago
  WTF? That is pretty much the exact opposite of reality.

jacquesm 7y ago

I absolutely love Brian Eno's music. Apollo and The Pearl are engraved in my memory and will stay with me until my last day. But I really don't see why I would take Brian Eno's ideas on why we need nuclear power any more serious than some sports person talking about politics or a computer programmer talking or writing about the finer bits of mechanical engineering. This whole 'famous person speaks about subject they have little knowledge about with authority' thing goes right past me, it's weird how we seem to project all kinds of magical properties onto those who manage to get name recognition. As though fame somehow automatically bestows instant expertise on a hundred unrelated fields on the famous. I'd love to hear Brian Eno write and say more about music though, like Vangelis, Tomita, Jean-Michel Jarre and Klaus Doldinger he managed to make electronic music sound organic, which was - given the tools at hand - a magnificent accomplishment. Renewables are sorted out, massive deployment is more of a political problem than a technical one. Better batteries would be useful but windpower doesn't need batteries as much as solar does. Better transmission lines, that would make a big difference. Creating more nuclear power plants is a dead end economically, the power produced is going to be more expensive than the same amount of power produced using renewable energy. On top of that you will still have to deal with the waste and the eventual decommissioning, assuming you get the license to operate the thing in the first place and your budget overruns won't kill the project. So regardless of what - insert favorite famous musician - who was against nuclear power for all the wrong reasons and now is pro nuclear power - also for all the wrong reasons - thinks we are on a different path now and just maybe it will be possible to get through the eye of the needle without relying on nuclear technology. And if it has to be nuclear, then let's hope that fusion will finally be delivered, that would be a game changer.

Jedd 7y ago
> But I really don't see why I would take Brian Eno's ideas on why we need nuclear power... This was my initial reaction also. On any story about 'nuclear power' I tend to search for fission and fusion, just to see if the author is sufficiently informed / concise. I'm starting to dismiss any article that doesn't qualify this basic difference. I'm happy to see money poured into fusion R&D, but not happy to advocate more fission reactors being constructed -- and the appellations pro/anti-nuclear simply doesn't describe that not uncommonly held position.

tekkk 7y ago

It's been my view for a long time that Green Party has been unreasonably stupid being generally so hard core anti-nuclear that they can't even think about logically anymore. Like it's one of the best clean energy sources out there, works in any climate and location and the waste is quite trivial to store away for time being - until we find out a way to use it. But no, they rather stoke fear with doomsday scenarios scarier than another and advocate building expensive wind turbines and solar panels in places where they just can't support the energy demands of the whole country. It's just dumb. They are too stuck emotionally with their idealism on "non-polluting" things. Everything pollutes, nuclear waste albeit worse than the normal garbage can be taken care of quite easily. I'd rather have that than coal plants. Sure it would be nice to not to have even the nuclear waste, but sometimes you have to be pragmatic. That's what engineering is about. Here's a fun story I heard about the woefully famous Finnish Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant. As some of you might know it was the most expensive building in the world for a while costing 8.5 billion euros (it seems some hotel complex in Mecca is now more expensive with 12 billions). Why you might ask? Well Olkiluoto 3 is a nuclear plant with 1600 MW output consisting of only a single reactor, unlike no other plant. Commonly nuclear plants are built in sets of 2 reactors, so that they are easier to maintain (one is still running when the other is offline) and in general easier to build than one massive reactor. But why only 1 reactor you ask? Well, as some Nokia engineer told me in sauna, the administration at the time consisted of multiple parties one of them being the Green Party. And Green Party was terribly afraid of nuclear energy, and the decision to build a new nuclear power plant really didn't sit well with them. Everybody knew that Finland needed a new power source and nuclear power plant was the only viable option. But Green Party just didn't. want. the. nuclear. plant. So a compromise was made. Green Party agreed to allow the building of a new nuclear plant but only with one reactor. Dumb idea, but I guess they thought that 1 nuclear reactor was less scarier than 2. What the other parties then decided to? Well in order to supply the energy demands Finnish industry required, they said "hey let's build a reactor that in fact has the power of two reactors". Which was never done before, and the results are now well-known. In the end, what Green Party gained from this? A nuclear power plant with only a one reactor, but which is double the size of regular one and whole thing billions of euros over-budget and everyone generally unhappy. But hey, only one reactor.. I'm not even sure does it produce the same nuclear waste as two reactors would. A major success nonetheless.

mch82 7y ago

TLDR: Extrapolating current trends in renewable power generation, by the time we’re able to complete construction of new nuclear plants those plants won’t be necessary. There are six significant flaws in most recent pro-nuclear arguments I’ve read. To me, these flaws undermine the pro-nuclear case. 1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online (>7 years). 2. Authors focus on the percentage of energy production contributed by clean sources (solar, wind, etc.) TODAY, but ignore the growth trend (which matters since reactors take so long to bring online). 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years. 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted. 5. Authors ignore energy efficiency trends (electronics get more efficient over time). 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported. [1]: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-reactor https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle..., “Quora” [6]: https://youtu.be/rUeHPCYtWYQ https://youtu.be/rUeHPCYtWYQ, “Chernobyl Podcast” Edit: added TLDR. I’ll update with references for points 2-5 later. Slow internet connection now.

MayeulC 7y ago
> 1. Authors ignore how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online As per the article: > An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized. True, development costs are big, but these can be spread over multiple reactors. And once you have trained the workforce constructing one, the others can come much quicker. See historical values for France [1]. If we were to pipeline new reactors buildup everywhere, we'd be quite close to netting 0% emission in the energy sector. Granted, calculations and finding the optimal isn't that simple. > 3. Authors ignore the waste storage problem, which is a debt future generations will be saddled with for hundreds or thousands of years. The consequences of our fossil fuel reliance are staging _right now_ what the ecosystem will look like millions of years in the future. Even if we were to produce 1000 times the amount of nuclear waste we currently have, we wouldn't come close to that. At least, it is easier to keep the stuff in one place. This is an emergency. Yes, nuclear is far from optimal, but is a whole lot better than the status quo. The other arguments aren't really valid in my opinion. 2. Builds on 1. The point is that nuclear can ramp up pretty quickly, as has been shown in the past. > 4. Authors ignore the power storage problem, which causes lots of energy to be wasted. This isn't really a problem with nuclear. Provide the baseload. You can tune up/down the amount of power, depending on your renewable output. Exchange energy with the neighbors depending on the needs. Pumped hydro can store quite a bit of energy as well. > 5. I fail to understand your point. Are we using less energy? I don't think so. [2] And a lot more stuff is going to need electricity in a clean energy transition (heaters, cars, industrial ovens...). If anything, cleaner/cheaper energy is likely going to increase consumption. > 6. Authors ignore the safety data and that safety incidents are likely under-reported. What safety data? The points they talk about in the article and use to say that reactors seem safe? Other energy generators aren't that safe, and also likely under-report. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by_sources_in_France.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

etamponi 7y ago

Unfortunately, nuclear is just too far away from being a popular option for it to be considered by politicians, policy-makers, or anyone else that makes important enough decisions. Politicians will continue to silently approve the creation of new nuclear centrals (because they know we need them) but won't publicly push for them. Public opinion has been biased so much against nuclear that no one of those people sees a benefit _for themselves_ to solve the environmental crisis with nuclear. Which brings me to the core point of this post: a lot of people care about the environment, and would like to help as much as they can, learning what's best to pursue. But politicians, policy-makers, and public personalities in general are not among the ones that really want to help the environment. For them, being an environmentalist is just a _mean_ to capture some votes, some money, some power. _That_ is what the seek. Paradoxically, I think they will attempt to delay the solution to the problem as much as they can, because that would mean they lose their power.

brighteyes 7y ago
At least one presidential candidate does support some form of nuclear, https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ but yes, it's a rare position.

imtringued 7y ago

Nuclear power suffers from piss poor economies of scale. If you want your country to invest into nuclear then it should be prepared to build dozens of identical plants at the same time. Of course this will require at least a trillion dollars of funding but the upside is that costs per plant will go down significantly after the learning phase.

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nickik 7y ago
Exactly, its to efficent. Switerland for example has a couple of plants, and once you build them you don't need to build more for like 40-50 years. And because nuclear is so country-by-country you don't get global economics of scale.

spentatom 7y ago

Uranium is the most energy dense material on this planet, check out energy density of various fuels on wiki. Uranium like any fossil fuel ie crude and coal has waste issues, its also, due to its energy density, more of a hazard that a tank full of coal or gasoline. Saying that in the 50's nuclear aircraft were built and tested but the risk of fallout from any number of potential aviation incidence put paid to that idea becoming common place. Smaller nuclear reactors are still used in secure trusted locations though, like submarines, ships and even the US embassy in London (you'll need to analyse metadata to find that out). I do sometimes wonder if the eco warriers are Nazi's hiding under the green banner, wanting to send everyone back to the stone age or whether they just like acting as the brake on technological developments that could otherwise rush off into the sunset. Any country would be sensible to have a range of electrical power generation technologies, the isotopes from nuclear fuel can be used in medicines, depleted uranium in military armour (tanks) and ballistics. In fact when the US dropped the nukes on Japan, the ensuing scientific knowledge gained spawned the radiotherapy developments in cancer treatments, after it was observed that nuclear radiation killed stem cells in bone marrow and the spleen. Doctors even worked out the minimum amount of stem cells and spleen cells to kick start the immune system as a result of the WW2 nukes. So its hard for many to quantify the benefits of nuclear power and military experiments, but the problems still remain, how to deal with the waste. Robots need to be made nuclear proof, there is a spill over into space technology here as space is highly irradiated, so solving things like Fukashima and Chernobyl will benefit space exploration even more. And there is the attainment of knowledge which gets us closer to understanding and importantly, controlling fusion. Besides waste disposal could be made into the fastest fault lines of two plates of the earth crust, effectively sending the radation back into the earth's core. If people are worried about radiation, they should look up Radon and granite rocks. That kills more people than uranium waste.

spenrose 7y ago

It is an abject failure of our amplification systems, notably HN and Stewart Brand's Long Now, that we are listening to two Baby Boomer musicians debate energy policy. Who cares what Eno and Byrne think about nuclear power?

air7 7y ago

Imo, the fact that the world didn't put a huge dent in global warming by building lots of nuclear plants is one of the saddest "misses" of our recent history. This I feel is due to irrational, emotional public opinion. Nuclear is the safest cleanest and most stable energy source we have so far but it's also "scary" because radiation is spooky and invisible. Coal is simple and local and it just silently kills millions through pollution. It's similar to the common fear of flying vs the common non-fear of driving. Even today when people talk about the "cons" of nuclear power (spent fuel management, risk of catastrophe, terrorist target, etc) they are usually oblivious to the fact that there are 450 active NPPs today, and they are supplying 10% of the worlds energy and things are going great.[0] So even if these were acute concerns (and they're not) we would only have needed to increase them by a max factor of 10 to get 100% non polluting energy. That's not a lot, and definitively worth the "hassle". Even in Chernobyl (which was the main reason for the doom the nuclear effort) the number of casualties due to radiation, including long term effects, are estimated to be in the thousands, not millions as most people assume. [1] In Fukushima that number is 1. [2] The number of NPPs were growing exponentially until suddenly plateauing globally since 1987 til today [0]. This is because building a new NPP is very expensive, time consuming, and since Chernobyl, headline-grabbing. Keeping an existing one running on the other hand is almost free, and a non-issue. The other culprit is the fact that it seems that NPPs are not dominantly cost-effective as of now [3]. If they were, then maybe savvy entrepreneurs would have found a way to circumvent the public opinion and convince governments to build them. But as it stands, no one has the incentive to push this agenda: Not businesses, and not politicians who couldn't stand the backlash (on the contrary, France, who leads the world with 75% reliance on nuclear power, wants to reduce that number to 50% by 2035 because that's the will of the people [4]) In a (better) parallel world, the people would demand more nuclear power and get the governments to subsidence the costs to make it cost effective and removing the reliance on coal. Instead we're building wind turbines and solar panels that are so unreliable they stop producing energy when there's no wind or it's cloudy/night. I think it's quite clear that these green technologies can't really be effective at a large scale (at least without some major break-throughs), but it's what the people demand, so it's what we do while we continue to burn coal. [0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537816/why-dont-we-have-more-nuclear-power/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537816/why-dont-we-have-m... [4] http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-French-energy-plans http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-...