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Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis

• stjohnswarts 7y ago
  It's a shame these stories only appeal to the choir :(
• s5ma6n 7y ago
  Nuclear energy has the lowest death rate (deaths per TWh of any type of energy generation technique/source [1][2][3]. It is the obvious answer to the climate crisis but unfortunately the cultural and public effects are blocking the way for this solution. Unfortunately, facts do not change our minds. I believe the best approach is to show people gradually that newer generation reactors are much safer and better than older generations. Just to give an example, the technology of reactors at Chernobyl is from 1953. Newer reactor technologies are much safer and there are some types of reactors that they even use spent fuel rather than enriched fuel that all other types of reactors use. I believe Bill Gates also has invested some resources in this 'traveling wave reactors'[4]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-nuclear-power.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-ch... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
  • appleflaxen 7y ago
    I'm confused because I don't even see wind and solar on the first citation you provided, but you seem to be using it to say it's better than renewables.
    • pengstrom 7y ago
      A cursory Google search puts the solar number between 0.4 and 0.8 deaths per TWh.
      • bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Which is mostly people falling off roofs doing residential solar. It'd be nice to split out residential and industrial solar.
    • acidburnNSA 7y ago
      I usually say that nuclear is on par with wind and solar in terms of deaths/TWh. The numbers at these low levels have large relative error bars, and there's not much value in comparing them to each other when 80% of the world is fueled by fossil fuel, which is very clearly killing at least 4.2 million people/year from air pollution alone, (nevermind future effects of climate change). Whenever someone says or implies that nuclear is safer than wind or solar it turns into this low-value debate that totally misses the point that nuclear, wind, and solar are vastly safer than our normal way of making power. The surprising bit is nuclear because most people think it's really dangerous. https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/ https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/
      • socialdemocrat 7y ago
        It is an apple to orange comparison though. Somebody falls down and break their neck from installing a wind turbine is pretty obvious. Nuclear accidents in contrast are very hard to assess the deaths from because a lot of people don't die straight away. You don't know how long these people would have lived otherwise. Not to mention many get sever health problems over many years. You don't get that kind of effects from wind and solar. It is far more clear cut if somebody died from it or not. From the articles I've read it seems pretty clear that assessing the actual damage from Chernobyl is an utter mess. You cannot really put that much faith in any of the numbers. The errors bar will be very large for nuclear power because you have a few massive accidents which are very hard to determine the full outcome of. When a few people die from say solar power installation authorities have no interest in covering it up. When huge number of people die from a nuclear accident there is a VERY strong incentive to downplay the accident and its effects, because it reflects very badly on the government.
        • acidburnNSA 7y ago
          I agree that the perception of risk is because of the indirect effects you mention. There's a strong similarity between climate science and low-dose radiation science. Both have huge well-coordinated UN and WHO-organized teams of experts who have reached consensus (IPCC for climate, UNSCEAR for radiation). Both have passionate counter-advocates saying that the UN experts are in cahoots and lying (Breitbart for climate, Greenpeace for radiation). You appear to be referring to the Greenpeace side of the story (which is also who the recent Chernobyl HBO series listened to, unfortunately). Let me direct you to the UNSCEAR side of the story: https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html Today, we understand that low-dose radiation causes very little negative health effects over the long term. It's not the boogeyman we're lead to believe by the opponents of nuclear power. Including all the long-term deaths caused by Chernobyl, nuclear has still saved over 2 million lives simply by displacing air pollution deaths. Nuclear is definitively a life-saver. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen
    • s5ma6n 7y ago
      You can check out the second citation for this value. Also here is a relatively newer link which also explains the calculations: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-sourc...
  • sago 7y ago
    I don't disagree. But death numbers I think gloss over the antinuclear point. Nuclear problems have been catastrophic black swans. A nuclear plant is mostly great. Unless it's not. In a way nobody expected, (that is probably obvious in hindsight). Whereupon the cleanup is huge, requires state intervention, and possibly decades. When someone dies because of an accident in wind power the implications are far more local. It is not entirely unreasonable to prefer more highly-constrained danger to a smaller risk of catastrophe.
    • Symmetry 7y ago
      On the other hand these black swan events usually aren't that bad. For instance the Fukushima disaster, without an evacuation, wouldn't have killed any more people than a equivalently sized coal plant operating in the same place for as long as Fukushima had operated. The difference is just that with Fukushima the deaths are relatively concentrated in time. Now, Chernobyl was a disaster you're not going to see with the normal operation of any class of power plant. But hydroelectric dams also have the potential and sometimes do fail in ways that kill thousands of people but I don't usually hear people oppose those power plants on these grounds. I think that the real reason people have such a fear of nuclear power plants is that we use the same terms, "radiation" and "fallout," for the dangers from a nuclear reactor failure and a nuclear war when the magnitudes are as different as a pebble and a boulder. I grew up mostly after the Cold War and always associated those terms with nuclear power and never realized that if you're a hundred kilometers downwind of a megaton scale groundburst you can die puking your guts out from fallout a couple of hours later.
      • socialdemocrat 7y ago
        That is like comparing getting killed by pollution by getting shortened your life expectancy to getting killed by getting stabbed in the heart with a knife. It is the absurd statistician's view of life. That is not what it actually feels like to people. People would rather have a shorter life span due to say unhealthy eating than having a higher expectancy of getting stabbed to death by a maniac. Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people. It is easy to be a smart ass in hindsight when you know all the facts But when a nuclear accident happens you will not have all the facts. You will not know the severity. You will have to evacuate lots of people. And it is going to have a severe mental toll on these people. These are factors entirely lost in your statistical approach to looking at this. Not to mention the Fukushima disaster cost a FORTUNE!! 182 BILLION dollars! That is not pocket change. Who pays that? Not the nuclear power generators. It is tax payers. In other words Nuclear power is getting a huge subsidy because they don't pay for their own clean. They don't pay for any insurance. Had they paid for insurance, they selling nuclear power would have been impossible. It would simply have cost WAY too much.
  • socialdemocrat 7y ago
    The death rates of nuclear power makes no sense to talk about. It is very hard to measure the reduced life expectancy due to radiation. Not to mention a lot of the horrors of Chernobyl was covered up. It also does not take into account the large number of people will severe health problems the rest of their lives. A nuclear accident is more like a terrorist attack, while deaths from other power sources are more like car accidents. Sure more people die in car accidents, but it does not have the profound psychological effect of a terrorist attack. Nuclear accidents is like a terrorist attack. They cause massive panics and scare. Uncertainty roams. It is an invisible danger. I don't suddenly get sick from pollution from coal power. Radio activity can make me seriously sick in short time without realizing it. It is an invisible danger. And even if nuclear accident caused as little health problems and death as the most rose tinted stories suggest, you still cannot run away from the fact that these accidents carry MASSIVE price tags. Chernobyl involved hundreds of thousands of people doing cleanup. It cost 235 billion dollars to do. Fukushima cost 182 billion dollars. For my native Norway that is roughly a whole state budget. It would bankrupt the country having an accident like that. Or at least if we did not have a big fat oil fund. Most countries don't have a big fat oil fund to finance huge nuclear disasters. Unless you nuclear advocates start talking serious about the cost issue, you are just glossing over the most serious issues with nuclear power.
    • mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Do most countries have big fat oil funds to finance the cost of the incoming environmental disasters? > I don't suddenly get sick from pollution from coal power Coal power is actually worse for health than nuclear power and releases more radioactive material into the environment.
    • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      > It is very hard to measure the reduced life expectancy due to radiation. No it is not. The ability to fairly precisely calculate cancer risk over time based on radiation exposure is exactly how we get the death numbers for nuclear. It's basically no different than calculating deaths from other airborne pollution except that radiation gives you cancer whereas coal soot (for example) gives you lung problems.
  • relativitypro 7y ago
    You had me at nuclear, and lost me at technology that won’t ever be licensed by the nrc in the next 20yrs. How will you save the climate?
    • 08-15 7y ago
      Honestly, the NRC doesn't matter anymore. Because with respect to carbon emissions, the US doesn't matter all that much. (Harhar, not even you emissions are worls class anymore. An empire in decline. SCNR.) China does, and India will matter soon. Therefore, technology built in China will matter, and they don't give a rat's ass about the NRC.
  • tstrimple 7y ago
    I don't think you're giving enough credit to the real cause behind nuclear power's unpopularity. It's too expensive. Even France who went all in with nuclear power is moving away from it due to expense. Look at how many people protested the Dakota Access Pipeline, and how little difference it made to the companies building it. Investors don't care about hippies keeping nuclear power plants away, and if they saw enough profit in nuclear power they would find a way to get it done. Even with the subsidies and grants offered by the Obama administration, there wasn't much commercial interest in nuclear power. If nuclear power is really the solution to climate change, then it needs to be even more subsidized if not nationalized in government run facilities by people who are motivated by something other than investor profit margins.
    • lucb1e 7y ago
      > Investors don't care about hippies keeping nuclear power plants away, and if they saw enough profit in nuclear power they would find a way to get it done. Surely, if this is true, investors wouldn't sink a few billion into a project only to find that the politicians don't like it and shut it down? In Germany, a new reactor was completely built and ready, only to find that the government prevents them from ever taking it online. Investors saw money but the public perception in Germany (which is about as far from reality as anti-vaxxers are) changed it after all.
      • tstrimple 7y ago
        Maybe that's true in Germany. I don't think corporations are as powerful there as in the US. That being said, it's my understanding that, like France, Germany is undertaking a massive shutdown of existing nuclear infrastructure. Do you have more details on the plant which was built but not turned on?
        • lucb1e 7y ago
          I'm on mobile and on the move, but it shouldn't be hard to find if you look at Wikipedia's list of nuclear plants around the world or in Germany or so.
        • 7y ago
  • Retric 7y ago
    That's factually incorrect, rooftop solar is ~5x as dangerous as nuclear based on reasonable estimates. However, grid connected photovoltaic solar is incredibly safe. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... Talking about rooftop solar in a safety context is very much a straw man argument. Putting stuff on roofs is dangerous, but you don't need to put solar on a roof. PS: Concentrating solar is also very different from a cost and risk perspective than photovoltaic solar.
    • boomboomsubban 7y ago
      Your source is behind a paywall, but the small part available says >In comparison, nuclear energy was considered the safest energy source At the same time, their second source addresses that non-rooftop solar likely has a far lower mortality rate, and either way has 100x less of a mortality rate than coal.
    • lucb1e 7y ago
      Isn't that exactly what they said, that nuclear is the lowest, so it makes sense that rooftop solar is worse (in terms of death only, of course)?
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    • audunw 7y ago
      The problem with these comparisons, is that a death from installing rooftop solar is arguably something that the person doing the work actually have at least some ability to prevent. A death in a nuclear accident, or premature death from pollution, is not something the person doing the dying has much if any control over.
  • kbr2000 7y ago
    > Nuclear energy has the lowest death rate [...] Unfortunately, facts do not change our minds. arguably, it's not the right technology to solve these human problems then. for that you'll need one with the highest death rate possible.
  • brodouevencode 7y ago
    > Unfortunately, facts do not change our minds. Ben Shapiro frequently throws out the adage "Facts don't care about your feelings." Unfortunately for a lot of people "their feelings also don't care about the facts".
    • deleted 7y ago
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    • MyHypatia 7y ago
      Ben Shapiro makes awful statements like,"I am getting really sick of people who whine about 'civilian casualties'... when I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really care". And "We're above 800 million Muslims who are radicalized – more than half the Muslims on earth." and then he throws out the adage "Facts don't care about your feelings" as if the statements he makes are objective truth, and any disagreement is by people who only care about feelings and not facts. Ben Shapiro's M.O. is making emotionally charged statements that disparage groups of people. When people react, he labels that reaction emotionally driven in contrast to his "logic" and "facts". This type of disingenuous dialogue happens all the time, always to the detriment of the actual problem or issue that would be beneficial for society to solve.
      • 0-_-0 7y ago
        Here is what he said about it later in an article called "So, Here’s A Giant List Of All The Dumb Stuff I’ve Ever Done (Don’t Worry, I’ll Keep Updating It)": The “Enemy Civilian Casualties” Column. In this column, written when I was 18, I suggested that civilian casualties in war were of no concern. While the larger point of the piece — that we must calculate the risk to American service members when we design rules of engagement — is partially correct, the piece is expressed in the worst possible way, and simplifies the issue beyond the bounds of morality (particularly by doubting the civilian status of some civilians). It’s just a bad piece, plain and simple, and something I wish I’d never written. It’s also good evidence that a lot of the stuff you think is smart at 18 is just you being an idiot at 18.
  • WhompingWindows 7y ago
    Cost, cost, cost. Point to a cost-effective, new-build nuclear in the USA and SHOW me that it's more cost-effective than renewables or LNG. Until we have a carbon tax or a massive policy shift in favor of extremely capital-intensive new-build nuclear, we will continue on our current path of renewables, batteries, and LNG dominating the grid. I'm all for nuclear, by the way, but let's not pretend that cultural attitudes (which haven't dented GOP denialism) and misinformed lefty greens (which haven't ended fracking or coal) are to blame here. Nuclear is just way too expensive and hard to do in the USA, it's as simple as dollars and cents.
    • CydeWeys 7y ago
      And cost matters. More than anything else. Everyone pointing to nuclear power as the solution conveniently ignores how insanely expensive it is. New reactors cost many billions of dollars, and aren't cheap to operate either. We're at an inflection point where new solar and wind plus batteries is cheaper than new nuclear, so that's what's going to be built. It's a simple economic reality having nothing to do with whether fears of nuclear power are overblown or whatever.
      • readams 7y ago
        Battery storage is not an option for large scale. Battery technology is good for bridging gaps measured in minutes while larger power plants spin up and react to demand. That's a real benefit, and helps to eliminate some expensive peaker power plants, but the technology is simply not even close to being able to fill in the gaps needed for a grid where large percentages of the energy is wind or solar. Nuclear is currently the only technology that exists that can do this.
        • cygx 7y ago
          Power-to-gas technology can possibly fill that niche.
          • readams 7y ago
  • pacala 7y ago
    Nuclear energy is deeply irresponsible. It requires maintenance of reactors to prevent significant environmental contamination. On a long enough timescale, it is impossible to guarantee continuous maintenance. At some point in the next millennium there will be a technological downturn, leading to thousands of unmaintained reactors dotting the landscape, leaking highly radioactive materials. Hard to imagine human civilization recovering in such an environment.
    • EricE 7y ago
      Actually it doesn't. There is no reason we could be burning todays "waste" in Thorium or other reactors. Reactor designs that also coast to a stop if their systems are interrupted vs. melting down like many of the current high pressure designs in use. There are many ways to produce nuclear power and there are plenty of designs that are far more efficient and safe than the currently widely used designs. Indeed China doesn't have to deal as much with irrational hype and is set to pass the rest of the western world: https://neutronbytes.com/2018/01/07/recent-developments-in-advanced-reactors-in-china-russia/ https://neutronbytes.com/2018/01/07/recent-developments-in-a... It's a combination of politics and hysteria that has painted nuclear into a corner, not science or reason. The Japanese have been researching micro-reactors for a long time - hopefully they can make it work. I'd love to have a refrigerator sized thing in my basement that makes my power and removes my dependency on the grid.
      • pacala 7y ago
        Nuclear reactors contain highly toxic materials. No matter how smart designs they use, they'll decay and leak if left unattended for a long enough period. We have huge spent radioactive material storage problems right now. Just imagine if every Dick and Mary had a reactor in their basement. If only 1% of these reactors go under maintained, we have a serious problem on our hands. That before considering a major civilization blip like a communist revolution or a world war. As of China, they are the dirtiest civilization in human history. Not an example to emulate if we are to leave our children and grand-children a livable Earth.
  • balabaster 7y ago
    I think it was Churchill that the quote is ascribed to - "Many more men die from whisky each year than bullets. Men would still rather be full of whisky than bullets." Unfortunately the same holds true when it comes to many people's opinions of nuclear power.
  • ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    If I said I'd invented a new technology that would have less deaths per Terawatt than Nuclear, what would your first question be? I'm going to guess it was "how much does it cost"? Because we all instinctively know that human life is precious but not priceless. even if we're not familiar with the economic scoring that's done on new projects that might save or cost lives. If nuclear costs so much that we could save more lives by spending that money on something else, then it's not a good deal. Different people might die, but overall less people will die. I know nuclear fans are a bit emotional and don't like dealing with hard facts and figures. The thought of a single person dying is too much for them to cope with and they can't make logical decisions as a result, but think about it for a while and you'll see that expensive but safe power isn't particularly helpful if there's much cheaper alternatives with only slightly higher death rates. Plus I think solar and wind are actually safer than nuclear now, but even if they weren't, their cost would probably still edge it.
    • weberc2 7y ago
      > I know nuclear fans are a bit emotional and don't like dealing with hard facts and figures. The thought of a single person dying is too much for them to cope with and they can't make logical decisions as a result, but think about it for a while and you'll see that expensive but safe power isn't particularly helpful if there's much cheaper alternatives with only slightly higher death rates. I don't have a dog in this fight, but comments like this hardly seem helpful and are very likely against HN rules.
      • beat 7y ago
        It's not helpful, but it's spot-on. I always think of this whenever nuclear arguments pop up here. The pro-nuclear side tends to be extremely emotional, but think of themselves as the "logical" ones. It's kind of annoying, actually.
      • ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        It was actually an ironic take on the common "more-logical-than-you" stance that nuclear proponents often take, pre-emptively writing off anyone not gung-ho about nuclear as people who can't make objective evaluations either because they're either so irrationally scared of nuclear or are so hippy-dippy that they just want unworkable solutions that sound good but can never work. But yes, it is annoying isn't it?
  • beat 7y ago
    "Nuclear is safer because people smash their thumbs with hammers installing solar panels" is THE stupidest argument made by nuclear proponents. Please, stop doing that. It makes you sound like a jerk.
    • lisper 7y ago
      It may well be the stupidest argument, but it is not the argument that the person you are responding to actually made. If you're going to admonish someone to stop advancing stupid arguments the least you can do is speak to what they actually said rather than raising a straw man.
      • beat 7y ago
        No, they just said what I said, with flowery science words. Morally and emotionally, it's exactly the same thing I said. And just to be clear here... arguing "nuclear power is much safer than commonly believed" is perfectly reasonable. Arguing that "nuclear power is safer than solar and wind" strains credulity. Doing it with carefully groomed and overtly partisan "facts" is just a way of saying "Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid, hahaha!" It's not stupid because it's wrong. It's stupid because it doesn't convince anyone on the fence about anything except that you're being a jerk.
• DubiousPusher 7y ago
  Has anyone done a comparison of capital costs of nuclear vs. renewables with pumped hydro storage? The comparisons I see are usually with li-ion battery storage.
  • deschutes 7y ago
    How do you create new pumped hydro capacity?
    • sanxiyn 7y ago
      You can't, not really.
      • sitkack 7y ago
        Every existing dam can be used for pumped hydro.
        • cesarb 7y ago
          Not really, for a dam to be usable for pumped hydro it needs both an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir, with enough height difference between them, while a dam for non-pumped hydro needs only an upper reservoir (it can discharge directly into a river, for instance). Some existing dams can be used as the upper reservoir or the lower reservoir of a pumped hydro plant, but for that there has to be a suitable location for the other reservoir nearby.
    • DubiousPusher 7y ago
      Usually you need to find geography conducive to building a new structure. One such location exists on the Columbia River and is being considered for development. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/2cgzqsbue3ikdpciag4wyg2 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... It is also possible to modify existing damns to have pumped hydro capacity. One under consideration is the Hoover damn. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-considers-3b-pumped-storage-project-at-hoover-dam/528699/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-considers-3b-pu...
• beobab 7y ago
  I get a security error clicking the link above. Does anyone have another link?
  • dreen 7y ago
    Same here, my corporate DNS is blocking the domain
    • skrause 7y ago
      Maybe they use Cloudflare DNS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
  • jaytaylor 7y ago
    Original link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-nuclear-energy-is-a-vital-part-of-solving-the-climate-crisis/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-nuclear-ene...
• ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
  It will require huge government expenditure though. The strike price of offshore wind in UK energy capacity auctions came in at less than half that of prospective nuclear plants. Only one nuclear plant is going ahead, Hinkley C. I guess that countries without plentiful renewable potential have no choice though, its nuclear or nothing.
  • sanxiyn 7y ago
    Nuclear does get cheaper as you build more. France is a shining example.
    • ollie87 7y ago
      https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclearpower/building-new-nuclear-plants-in-france-uneconomical-environment-agency-idUSL8N1YF5HC https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclearpower/building...
      • realusername 7y ago
        France does have the same problem with renewables though, they are way over schedule and much more expensive than planned.
    • selectodude 7y ago
      And, ironically, Illinois, which gets a full 54 percent of its energy from nuclear.
    • pygy_ 7y ago
      The know-how seems to have been lost though. The latest nuclear power plant they've tried to build (the Flamanville EPR) is severely late, and the budget has ballooned to several times the initial estimation.
      • jcelerier 7y ago
        > The latest nuclear power plant they've tried to build (the Flamanville EPR) is severely late it is only late because the managers insisted on marketing and building it on 5 years while the engineers knew that it would be 10 years from the beginning. Pretty sure most people here know this exact situation from their job :-)
• ricw 7y ago
  Have we not learnt our lesson? Nearly 70 years of massive global subsidies have gone by and yet the nuclear industry has not been able to produce anything competitive, let alone anything that doesn’t require government guarantees / externalisation of costs. I love the idea of nuclear, but it just hasn’t worked out. Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there, and they are still regularly falling in cost. We can invest our money better elsewhere. The nuclear age has come and passed.
  • sillysaurusx 7y ago
    Some of the most important advances came from making previously expensive things cheaper. Your argument could have applied to the space industry, for example. Then SpaceX happened.
  • Gravityloss 7y ago
    It has one massive advantage though. It's perceived to be "hated by the greenies". That makes some circles really love it - and that could make it very viable where those demographics wield enough power.
    • mc32 7y ago
      It’s sadly ironic that the greens historically opposed nuclear and thus share partial responsibility for where we are with respect to our energy production mix. But I don’t see them flagellating themselves over this flagrant mis-step they share responsibility for. It’s unfortunate that people who become activists are often (but not always) more dogmatic than scientific in their approach to dealing with issues. I think, looking retroactively, that there was an opportunity to coöperate with industry to address issues and work towards a working solution. I mean Yucca mountain. Where would France be if they had capitulated to this thinking.
      • Gravityloss 7y ago
        There is some movement around small modular reactors. I hope they could be done in a fast and safe way. Even just heating cities could provide a huge saving in emissions. The reactor design simplifies and the whole facility simplifies even more massively if you forgo power generation. You can operate with low pressures and temperatures.
• justplay 7y ago
  the original link has paywall, putting archive.is to unblock and submitting into public domain ... is it legal ? just asking.
• cagenut 7y ago
  I was "pro-nuclear" from like the 90's until 2017. Every year since then it has made less and less sense. The cost of wind, solar, and batteries has plummeted, and the curves continue to bend in the right direction. The cost of nuclear has "increased" in that the last several projects have been total failures and the companies that build them have gone bankrupt. The curve points in the wrong direction. The kind of massive overhaul/re-de-regulation it would take to bring back a nuclear manufacturing capability and functioning market in america today would be much much harder than simply running HVDC between the grids and building twice as much wind. It just doesn't pencil out anymore. It used to. But even optimistically going forward I don't see it. The curves have crossed. edit: here's a source for all the downvoters https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Nuclear: $118 - $192 Solar + 4hr: $102 - $139 Wind: $28 - $54 You can literally build 3x as much wind and have it cost about the same as nuclear.
  • apcragg 7y ago
    Not to mention the capital costs of building a nuclear plant far excede renewable new-builds. Why spend 20 billion and deal with the costs/risk associated with 50-year financing when you could spend a few tens of millions and throw up a few smaller renewable builds where they're needed and start seeing returns on invetment in 2-3 years rather than 15.
    • Accujack 7y ago
      The cost of building a plant with old technology is high. That's because it's been over-regulated and because it's old tech. Newer plant designs will be cheaper to build and simpler. They will need to be regulated differently as a matter of course because they're fundamentally different designs. What you're saying here is that building a 1960s nuclear power plant design with modern regulation is expensive, which is true, but that's like saying that driving a 1955 Ford Thunderbird is expensive when compared to a Tesla S. That's true, but you're comparing apples and rocks, here.
      • 7y ago
• multiplegeorges 7y ago
  Gen IV and V, as well as SMRs[0], are really the only way to replace the baseload power generation we currently get from oil, coal, and natural gas. Solar and wind will be integral to the overall mix, but unless there's a wild breakthrough in battery technology we need to be building nuclear to replace fossil fuel power generation. If people are uncomfortable with the word "nuclear", let's go with isotopic batteries. [0]: https://smrroadmap.ca https://smrroadmap.ca
  • cygx 7y ago
    unless there's a wild breakthrough in battery technology we need to be building nuclear to replace fossil fuel power generation How about a 80% power-to-gas-to-power roundtrip efficiency? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218320693 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
  • sanxiyn 7y ago
    Pumped storage works where available. Norway's dams are the secret behind the success of Denmark's wind.
    • obmelvin 7y ago
      This is very interesting! I've not heard about too much water storage despite how fondly it is talked about by some. For those who want to know more: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/wind/norway-wants-to-be-europes-battery https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/wind/norway-wants-to-be...
• ivolimmen 7y ago
  I agree that we require nuclear energy but not based on plutonium. I am in favor of thorium with molten salt reactors. It is cleaner and safer. China is already researching it and invested a lot of money and people into it. A lot of countries are but it is on a very low scale because it is nuclear and has a bad reputation.
  • gnode 7y ago
    Despite nuclear being statistically the safest power source per electrical energy generated, people will always complain that it isn't perfect, and that we must wait for X speculatively perfect technology to be developed before we can stop melting Antarctica and choking on smog.
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    > plutonium Modern nuclear reactors don't use plutonium or weapons grade uranium. The ratio of U-235/U-238 is only 3~5% unstable in a nuclear power plant (where weapons grade is over 95%). Thorium rectors have been experimented with in the US, but they do have problems with corrosion.
    • gnode 7y ago
      Reactors primarily use uranium, but plutonium is routinely used in the form of mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel (about thirty reactors in Europe, at least). One reason is to spend the plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons. Using MOX in conjunction with thorium is also being tested to improve the void coefficient, making reactor operation more stable and safe.
    • code_code 7y ago
      I don't have any connection with these folks, but it seems a game changer on projected price, walk-away safety, thorium compatibility, and claimed use of existing materials: moltexenergy.com . Molten salts in tubes. They claim "cheaper than coal" can be realistic again.
• Fej 7y ago
  Nuclear energy is often talked about as if it is in opposition to other clean energy sources, as if we need to choose between solar/wind and nuclear. Global warming is an existential threat to human civilization and we need to throw absolutely everything we have at the problem. Wind, nuclear, solar, even hydrogen (and whatever other esoteric energy generation methods you can think of) - these are not mutually exclusive. It doesn't have to be one or the other. It can't be.
  • Andrex 7y ago
    Yes, if the world had infinite resources and manpower, attempting all solutions simultaneously would be the preferred method for dealing with climate change. But dollars and the attention that produces them are finite. In that light, nuclear has to compete on its merits with the alternatives.
  • manfredo 7y ago
    Because it largely is. If we have enough nuclear capacity to meet 100% of demand during the evening, then there's no reason not to keep running at 100% for the whole day. This would displace wind and solar power, which is why wind and solar investors are often hostile to nuclear power.
• socialdemocrat 7y ago
  I am utterly baffled by these old solar and wind advocates who suddenly NOW are becoming big advocates of nuclear power. I have gone the complete opposite and for GOOD REASON! I was a big advocate for nuclear power some 10-15 years ago, because we were promised that thorium reactors, pebble reactors and a whole host of other innovations were around the corner. Not to mention wind and solar at the time seemed to not have made any dent in electricity production. But to suddenly abandon renewables now in 2019 when wind and solar is seeing staggering success and really impressive price drops while every nuclear reactor is profoundly delayed and over budget is simply odd. We have been talking about nuclear power for decades and invested massively in it, yet got little to show for. Prices are not dropping. When you bring up the safety issue advocates are quick to point out todays reactors are much safer. When you point out today's reactors are extremely expensive and slow to build, they counter with that is just because of safety.... eh well yeah. You cannot have a cake and eat it too. Nuclear power is NOT CHEAP! No private company is willing to insure them. Hence governments have to give insurance for free. That means the tax payer. Chernobyl cost tax payers 235 billion dollars to clean up. Fukushima cost tax payers 183 billion dollars to clean up. Nuclear power is getting a free ride because they are not pay for this. That is a massive subsidy to nuclear power. Solar and wind meanwhile is beating coal on price even without subsidies. Yeah sure... it doesn't always shine or blow wind. But we have a multitude of storage solutions: thermal, pumped hydro, flow batteries, gas-to-power and there are many good solutions for adjusting power usage on demand to fit lower production. It seems like these nuclear advocates have not even investigated all the storage solutions that exist before going crazy about nuclear power. These solutions will only become more viable as we get a bigger renewable mix, because it will cause the spot price of power to drop really low, making it profitable for companies to buy and store power.
  • Accujack 7y ago
    >to suddenly abandon renewables now in 2019 when wind and solar is seeing staggering success and really impressive price drops while every nuclear reactor is profoundly delayed and over budget is simply odd. No one's suggesting abandoning renewables, far from it. Renewable use will continue to increase. They're simply not enough, because of their nature as a variable power source. >Nuclear power is NOT CHEAP! The power itself is cheap. The amount of regulation around 40 year old reactor designs is high, so that's expensive. Implementation of a newer design would be much, much cheaper. >Chernobyl cost tax payers 235 billion dollars to clean up. Fukushima cost tax payers 183 billion dollars to clean up. Source? Neither of them are actually "cleaned up", you know. Also, both of these are very old reactor designs. You're complaining that a piece of 1950s technology which qualifies as an antique has problems 65-70 years later. > But we have a multitude of storage solutions: thermal, pumped hydro, flow batteries, gas-to-power ..none of which are scalable enough to meet the demand. We'd have to have a dedicated energy storage system for each house, school, factory and store in the world. That's not only not possible due to physical space constraints, it's disastrous in terms of carbon load. Our power systems work from a central source. There is no technology that can replace the multiple fossil fuel plants that run the grid except nuclear, period. >It seems like these nuclear advocates have not even investigated all the storage solutions that exist before going crazy about nuclear power. I can't speak for other people, but I have investigated and I continue to research. No storage solution exists that even comes close to meeting the demand for power when renewables aren't generating on the scale needed. The individual ideas are good, but they can't match decades of investment and expertise in generating electricity from giant central sources. To take advantage of the distributed nature of renewables and corresponding energy storage, we'd have to completely rebuild the worldwide electrical grid AFTER we research and agree on standards for control and maintenance. That will take decades, and we don't have time. It'll happen eventually as renewables continue their growth, and maybe a century in the future we'll use all renewable sources with distributed power storage and a fully distributed, redundant power grid. But if we want to survive climate change, we need nuclear, or else we need to force every person on earth to accept a lower standard of living that uses far less energy than we do now. The latter just won't happen, our species isn't that advanced.
• djsumdog 7y ago
  My dad worked in nuclear plants for over 20 years, and I use to tout the pro-nuclear line. Our reactors were safer than Chernobyl was even at the time it was built (Chernobyl was an uncontained reactor. US reactors are encased in a shell of concrete). Safety is still a concern, and don't let anyone tell you it isn't. Simply look at Brownsferry Nuclear Plant. One of their three reactors was shut down for decades due to a fire, another reactor had a turbine blade break off and hit the reactor wall in the 2000s, and the reactors themselves are an old Boiling Water design where the radioactive water runs the turbine (newer Pressurized Water Reactors use transfer pipes for heat so the steam generator isn't radioactive). Newer reactors like Bellefonte were almost complete, but never went online after Three Mile Island brought the industry to a standstill. TVA also has bought up more land around Wattsbar nuclear to hide the fact that they couldn't find where a tritium leak was occurring. The biggest problem with nuclear reactors is the waste. Most of it is still stored at nuclear sites. I use to think the protesters at Yucca Mountain were being overzealous and non-nonsensical, until I stayed a week with a friend of mine who was a newspaper editor out in Vegas. They had published several stories about existing facilities leaking radiation into the environment. There are a lot of reasons to avoid nuclear. Honestly if we want to be serious about pollution in general, we have to consume less power. Each renewable takes metal, dirt, oil and various hydrocarbons to make. We can't consume out way out of, not only CO2, but all the other massive amounts of pollution that go into all our construction effort. We can't buy ourselves out of environmental disaster. We have to consume less; and that takes much bigger changes in the way we live our lives and look at the world.
  • tstrimple 7y ago
    How are long shutdown times factored into the costs of nuclear power? The nuclear power plant by me is shutting down early due to being too expensive compared to renewables. It's shutting down next year, but will be slowly cutting staff until 2025 and will require a maintenance contingent of about 50 people after that for the "indefinite future". https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Cheaper-wind-gas-energy-leaders-to-earlier-closing-at-DAEC-nuclear-plant-489368221.html https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Cheaper-wind-gas-energy-le...
    • 7y ago
• sproketboy 7y ago
  Is that a good link? I get warnings from it.
• gfodor 7y ago
  People who oppose investing in nuclear who, in the same breath, claim climate change is the greatest existential threat to humanity, reveal just how seriously they take the climate threat. If we had an inbound asteroid headed to hit us and there were technologies we could deploy to mitigate it that had potentially large negative downsides there would be no hesitation. In this case, hand wringing over the threat of nuclear implies the threat of climate change is not being taken as seriously as one might think.
  • joshypants 7y ago
    What you're missing is nuclear is too slow to spin up! We simply don't have time. We need to cut emissions 50% in 10 years, and nuclear is not going to get us there. Look to other renewables.
    • greedo 7y ago
      If we need to cut emissions worldwide by half in 10 years, there's no solution. Renewables can't expand fast enough.
      • Tade0 7y ago
        Of course they can. It doesn't take more than 2 years to setup a solar/wind farm, meanwhile a nuclear plant takes an average of 7 years to build and deploy. Solar is especially good at this, because with the right incentives you can have people put it on their roofs - it's the sort of scaling that's impossible to achieve in megaprojects like nuclear power plants.
        • greedo 7y ago
          Rooftop solar isn't viable in a large portion of the world, and solar is much better served in mega deployments. Scale matters. That said, if you look at the total amount of energy consumed worldwide, the grow rate of this energy consumption, the amount currently generated by renewables, and the growth rate of renewables, it's pretty obvious that there's no realistic way to cut emissions 50% in a decade. Absolutely none short of a global war that devastates both modern society and reduces world population by 25%.
• virmundi 7y ago
  Keep in mind that with solar there externals that we’re not calculating right now as a group. The panels will die. They are full of terrible chemicals. We don’t have large scale decommissioning plans now. Depending on which country manufactured the panels, they will die sooner.
• dougweltman 7y ago
  It's not clear to me where we net out on nuclear. On the one hand, you get much higher energy density. Earth has 2-3 billion people coming online with higher standards of living, greater needs for (desalinated) fresh water, etc. Do we have enough space for large-scale wind and solar to address this? And do we truly understand the local effects of wind farms, like less surface wind? Against nuclear, when we see statistics like "nuclear has fewer deaths" I sense that there's a snow job taking place. How do you measure the public health effects of radiation? Do these really account for that? When there's an accident, clean up costs are socialized but when things are going well, profits are private. Maybe that's worth it for carbon-free energy, but if the costs of a single accident annihilate the entire economic value of the industry, I scratch my head. The silver bullet would be if there were truly economically viable and safe reactor designs. How scalable are the former, and how confident we can be of the latter?
  • rootusrootus 7y ago
    > How do you measure the public health effects of radiation? How often does a typical nuclear plant emit nonzero levels of radiation? How does this compare with normal background levels?
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    >How do you measure the public health effects of radiation? However you do it, be sure to measure the public health effects of radiation emitted from coal plants, which is far higher than that of nuclear.
• jellicle 7y ago
  The author's job is the President of the Canadian Nuclear Association. https://cna.ca/team/john-gorman/ https://cna.ca/team/john-gorman/ This is probably helpful to evaluating his arguments. (My view, if it matters: we can put inexpensive solar and wind in the field today, the best nuclear plant comes on line in ten years, and we need action today, so: forget nuclear, it's too slow. But no, don't decommission nuclear plants as long as there are fossil fuel plants to decommission.)
• tomazio 7y ago
  One point I think some people are overlooking are the military implications of launching nuclear facilities. These become prime targets in times of conflict that can cause a ton of damage if successfully attacked. Maybe that is part of the reason countries are hesitant to build them?
  • RandomBacon 7y ago
    > military implications of launching nuclear facilities. These become prime targets in times of conflict that can cause a ton of damage if successfully attacked. As opposed to a nuclear explosion delivered by an ICBM?
    • ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
      I think the issue is that a small country or simply a terrorist organization that doesn't have ICBM capabilities could still conceivable cause a nuclear disaster through a lower tech attack on a nuclear facility.
• jackdeansmith 7y ago
  My Take: 1. Keep existing reactors running as long as it's safe to do so. Nuclear that goes offline is generally replaced with fossil energy. 2. Don't invest too much in building new nuclear with current designs. They take a long time to come online and we have cheap and fast pathways available with renewables. 3. Invest much more in R&D for new designs. They will be important once the low hanging fruit of mitigation is already dealt with. They will also probably become more important as energy demands for things like manufacturing synfuels and DAC become important around mid-century.
• drchewbacca 7y ago
  Does anyone know a good comparison of the cost of Nuclear with Solar + Batteries? I feel like just comparing against panels alone isn't really helpful. I would imagine that if we really cared about climate change the best approach would be maximal effort on all fronts. So build renewables as fast as we can and build nuclear as fast as we can. That would be the quickest way to get carbon emissions to 0. We could always spend the latter half of the century decommissioning the nuclear again.
  • stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Current battery technology is not up to what you are talking about. No one can come up with a price because we don't have the technology to store that much offline energy to handle the variability. Anyone who says we do -right now- is lying to you. We would need a factor of 100X energy storage density to what we have right now to even be close.
    • jes5199 7y ago
      people who end up on opposite sides of this argument are usually talking about two different things: 1) Do we build exactly enough solar to meet our average power needs but have to build several-month-long battery storage capacity to bring summer sun into the winter, 2) Or do we build enough surplus solar so that we can run 100% load for 24 hours on a cloudy winter solstice, and just need big enough batteries to get through the longest night of the year, and under every other circumstance just be wildly over-provisioned #1 is probably impossible with current technology. But our solar installations already produce surplus power during the summer that we don't use ("curtailment"), even at today's prices. It doesn't seem out of the question that we'd just build much more absurd extra solar to make up for our lack of storage. And then maybe we'd find a use for the excess summer electricity, like desalination or hydrogen production or bitcoin mining. It's technically possible, but it does increase costs - twice as expensive? three times? That might still be economically viable, if solar costs continue to fall or if the cost of natural gas spikes upward
• mumblemumble 7y ago
  Nuclear does seem like it can be a cleaner technology than fossil fuels. And a greater investment in nuclear might have helped avert the climate crisis. There are other concerns about nuclear, yeah, and a lot of them are legitimate, but they're all at least theoretically solvable, and I certainly don't believe we can afford to make the perfect the enemy of the good. That said, I just don't believe it can be part of a realistic solution to the climate crisis. Not anymore, at least. These things are very difficult to design, engineer, and build, and the costs of a screw-up can be so high that taking things slowly and methodically is imperative, much more so than with most other alternative energy options. Combine that with decades of divestment in nuclear, and it just doesn't seem realistic to think that this is a solution that can be brought to bear quickly enough to count as a serious option for diverting a climate crisis. The time for using nuclear to stave off climate change was a quarter century ago.
• atoav 7y ago
  A even more vital part is less consumption and all the consequences that come with it. More clean energies and products won’t save us. The usage of earths resources is now roughly double of what the planet could sustain long term and it is still growing and I am afraid more cheap energy won’t help to solve this very systemic issue. Todays teenagers are consuming more than teenagers ever before, mostly due to availability and online shops. Three decades ago you had to go to the next city and find something, nowadays you just order the thing and it is in your doorstep next day. Adding cheap and clean energy into this mix is like taking painkillers when you have a open fracture so you can keep going. Might soothe your short term pains, but is ultimately a counter productive thing if applied just on its own.
  • ekianjo 7y ago
    > The usage of earths resources is now roughly double of what the planet could sustain long term Based on what data exactly? Mankind has only ever scratched the Earth's surface for resources, and still only on land. If you imagine the Earth is a perfect sphere, we have far from used much resources at all.
    • imesh 7y ago
      We have been using the resources we need. A bunch of rock and magma isn't really useful to us. It's things like soil which only exists on the surface, or oil, which has been getting harder and harder to extract.
      • ekianjo 7y ago
        The day we need more resources, you can be sure we will go and get them where they are. We have not have had the need to dig deep or explore the oceans so far (because other resources were readily available), but there is no telling we will never do so. > or oil, which has been getting harder and harder to extract. Harder to extract but still in much larger abundance than what was predicted by mostly everyone back in the 70-80s. I don't know if you were around then, but you may have heard of "peak oil". It never happened (as in, not yet, and that was already a long time ago).
• thomasfl 7y ago
  The YC request for startups list, could contain nuclear energy. Everything from thorium to new ways of disposing nuclear waste.
• buldoeo 7y ago
  Even though nuclear power reactors do not produce direct carbon dioxide emissions (unlike fossil fuel-fired power plants, nuclear reactors do not produce air pollution or carbon dioxide while operating),the processes for mining and refining uranium ore and making reactor fuel all require large amounts of energy.
• boyadjian 7y ago
  There is no way to solve the climate crisis. We should have listen to the Club of Rome in 1972. Now, it is much too late.
• jes5199 7y ago
  I'm not sure that _any_ centralized power generation will survive the next 50 years
• kingkawn 7y ago
  Regardless of how much one may believe in the myths of self-assured competence demonstrated so thoroughly here and in our comments, there really has yet to be an institution trustworthy enough to operate at such high stakes over the long term. After the disaster the true-believers will have a million and one reasons why it shouldn’t have happened; but it will. Not worth it.
  • manfredo 7y ago
    > Regardless of how much one may believe in the myths of self-assured competence demonstrated so thoroughly here and in our comments, there really has yet to be an institution trustworthy enough to operate at such high stakes over the long term. France has done so.
    • kingkawn 7y ago
      So far.
• Teknoman117 7y ago
  98 nuclear reactors in the United States produce 20% of our electricity, and account for 60% of our "zero-emissions" power sources.
• typeformer 7y ago
  So many people on HN (perhaps more than other communities) think that they are subject experts on just about everything... well, sorry to burst your bubble, but we have aging nuclear plants we can't even take care of right now that are losing money, we have thousands of tons of nuclear waste that we still have no fking idea what to do with, nuclear is the past, the future is very cheap and efficient decentralized solar, paired with very cheap and efficient decentralized grid storage (batteries), the smart money already understands this.
  • juanjmanfredi 7y ago
    I think your point would be much better communicated if you provided citations for your claims. As it stands now, your comment comes across as condescending.
    • typeformer 7y ago
      Sorry just bitter
  • metric10 7y ago
    Are you giving your opinion as a legitimate “subject expert” or should we take it as a “non-expert” opinion?
    • typeformer 7y ago
      Certainly non-expert
• ozten 7y ago
  I've been reading "Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming" edited by Paul Hawken https://www.drawdown.org/the-book https://www.drawdown.org/the-book My impression so far is that offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar are promising solutions for doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for energy production. Of course it isn't an all or nothing, but scaling up nuclear isn't 'vital'.
• jokoon 7y ago
  A french consultant/teacher who regularly make 1 hour or 2 hour presentation said that generally, renewables like solar and wind always benefit the coal/gaz industry because you can't have wind and sun on demand, and it's highly impractical to store electricity. so you always complement renewables with coal/gaz. So in the end, the coal/gaz industry benefits from renewables and they would obviously advocates for those renewables. Not to mention you need a lot of metals (which emit co2), other resources (and energy) to build those renewables. Installing wind turbines is no easy task either. It's crazy how the interests of coal/gaz would intersect the arguments of greenpeace, but it actually does.
• EricE 7y ago
  I guess better late than never? The utter demonization of nuclear for the last 50 years is beyond criminal. Many in Germany probably regret their recent knee jerk reactions. Should be a fun winter for them (not!)
• philipkglass 7y ago
  I own Introduction to Nuclear Engineering, 2nd Edition by John Lamarsh. All the "new" "real soon now" nuclear approaches that people get excited over today are already in this textbook from 1983. It has: - Gas cooled high temperature reactors - Gas cooled breeder reactors - Liquid metal fast breeder reactors - Molten salt thorium breeder reactors In the intervening 36 years, none of these have reached commercial/industrial operation in North America, France, Japan, India, South Korea, or China. Russia has one industrial scale liquid metal FBR [1], and it has indefinitely suspended plans to build successors [2]. Any new approach to nuclear power that promises to be "cheaper, faster, safer" than boring old light water reactors should be evaluated with extreme care. These aren't new ideas. Why didn't anyone build them up in the past 40 years? If your answer is "blame the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," keep in mind that most of the world is not under the thumb of the American NRC. But e.g. India didn't build out MSRs either, even though they have fully domestic nuclear technology and thorium resources plus a vast need for more electricity. The chances of a revolutionary new reactor design actually powering a grid near you appear, empirically, to be about as poor as those of the Battery Breakthrough of the Week ending up in your next mobile phone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor
  • manfredo 7y ago
    We don't need revolutionary design, though. France uses pressurized water reactors to generate over 70% of it's electricity. And they pay half the cost for that electricity as Germany, which shut down its nuclear plants and tried to build solar and wind instead (and their emissions remained mostly flat because of all the gas plants they build to replace their nuclear plants).
    • philipkglass 7y ago
      France's newest PWR reactors, using the EPR design, are being built in France and Finland. They're both grotesquely late and over-budget. If Flamanville 3 could switch on today and incur no further construction costs, the electricity from it would still cost more to generate than German electricity costs to generate. What will happen to the EPR in Europe after Flamanville 3 and Olkiluoto 3 are finally complete? The faithful would say "build more EPRs. Future ones will be cheaper due to lessons learned on these original projects." And they might well be correct. Unfortunately, the Flamanville 3 and Olkiluoto 3 projects were also touted as affordable and predictable to build back when they were originally started. How do you convince buyers that the lies and/or irrational exuberance that lead to bad predictions in 2005 have been tamed, and that the next reactor project will be the real affordable, predictable reactor project?
• freebear 7y ago
  Oh, such techno-utopianism, cheer the tech!! Sweden still has increased death rates due to Chernobyl, this disaster is still killing by a statistical significance, if we make it to the future we could forget it and later remind ourselves by looking in the atmosphere, in the mud, in the food, in the oceans, in the animals, in the ice and we can find traces of the man made disaster in DNA, in the fingerprint of God, we are the Gods now... If you haven't figured it out yet, if you still believe in the government's figures, I've got one thing to tell you: pull your head out of your ass. For one example, the leaders of the free world are now leaving the so called Paris Agreement, because they believe anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. Are they still telling you the truth? Okay, back to nuclear now for a second round. We are likely to see a worldwide collapse due to many reasons, but lets blame a lot of it to the actions of the government's mentioned. Before you dismiss this premise I would like to inform that this is a major fear, and therefor a major field of research for the nuclear industry and is a major reason to why we even care about long term storage of the waste – if everything "went well", why would we care about a thousand years? if we can manage "it" now we for sure can in the future when our GDP is like risen by a gazillion percents. We must pause here, this is the thing: we are talking about waste that is extremely insanely dangerous if it would "leak" out, if this would happen our civilization would be finished, life could die out (not like we are not killing of 100-200 species a day already, but hey, gotta go faster!) Where were we now, right: can you imagine this planet in five hundred years? and the nuclear waste has to be securely stored for hundreds of thousands of years. This is the reason they try to universal signs instead of writing the warning in plain language [1]. I am way off the article now, so Sweden and France has a decarbonized their economies? Where a the figures? I would guess without looking into any numbers, that both Sweden and France has in fact increased their carbon output since they started using nuclear power, I would go so far that I would argue that they have in fact increased their carbon output because they have added nuclear. By using nuclear power we grow our economy, the larger the economy the more carbon output. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
  • tekkk 7y ago
    You are ranting a bit too much. The reality isn't that excitingly gloom. If the waste would leak out, it would just contaminate the area around it (not that it wouldn't be bad). But it wouldn't cause the global armageddon as you describe it. I mean Chernobyl happened which was a far worse outcome (radioactive waste aerosolized due to the burning graphene), yet it didn't kill us off. Nuclear is scary, I understand your fear. But your thesis hangs a lot on the emotional side, so it's hard for me to emphasize with what you are saying.
• amai 7y ago
  Nuclear energy is much too expensive. The costs for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds or thousands of years are so high, that it is cheaper to use solar and wind energy.
  • tekkk 7y ago
    Did you really think through your argument? If the waste in enclosed in some concrete shell, two hundred meters deep inside bed rock, there won't really be any on-going expenses after it has been deposited. Now one can argue about the method itself, if it's the right way to do it (I think it's a bit overkill), but what you are saying doesn't really make sense based on that argument. The plants themselves of course are expensive, storing the waste for long periods of time not so much.
• nipponese 7y ago
  I'm surprised there's no mention of Kirk Sorensen. He's one of the most effective Nuclear Energy advocates of our generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kybenSq0KPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kybenSq0KPo
• llsf 7y ago
  France produces much of its electricity from nuclear. It used to be 75%, but it is less now with renewable coming online. I guess France did a good job at educating/brainwashing its citizen because they do not worry much about their nuclear power plant. And the official track record has been good enough over the past ~60 years (first in 1962). There has been some green movement trying to shutdown some nuclear plants over the years, but lately it is more foreign green activists that complain about France recycling/vitrifying Japanese or German nuclear waste (arguably transporting waste around the world could be dangerous). The technology improved a lot in the last 60 years. But years of anti-nuclear propaganda still make it difficult to talk about nuclear in a rational way.
• briwang2050 7y ago
  France completed construction on 76% of its current 58 reactors at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330 billion (€290 billion). The complete buildout of the 58 reactors was less €400 billion. Germany has spent about €500 billion over the last 20 years to get to 35% renewables. 7% of this is burning biomass. France gets more than double the TWh from nuclear than Germany gets from renewables (solar, wind, biomass, hydro). Germany would need 50% more nuclear energy than France to completely replace all other power generation. This would cost €600 billion if Germany could match France’s build from the 1980s. Costs and safety regulations have increased even though France’s nuclear power has operated without incident for over 30 years. 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany. This would still be cheaper than the estimated costs for the solar and wind buildout that is underway. Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside. Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2019, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050. Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its electricity. And as much of Germany's renewable electricity comes from biomass, which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from solar. Germany gets 33% of its electricity from solar and wind. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/09/frances-nuclear-clean-energy-is-over-three-times-faster-and-cheaper-than-germanys-solar-and-wind.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/09/frances-nuclear-clean-...
  • the_why_of_y 7y ago
    > Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually... The reason why this is so expensive for Germany is the political decision to subsidise renewable energy generation by guaranteeing energy purchase prices for 20 years via the EEG law. This led to a lot of the non-competitive inefficient early-gen solar and wind being installed in Germany, which will continue to receive subsidies for another 5-10 years; for new generation being installed, the subsidies reduce every year. One of the intended effects was that the solar and wind industries had income that they could invest in research to improving the cost and efficiency of solar and wind generation. IIRC an article that I'm sadly unable to find now claimed that this accelerated the development such that today's very competitive costs would only be achieved 6-7 years later if there had never been an EEG, which I find a remarkable achievement. Of course if you're installing solar or wind in your country today you'll benefit from these improvements. > Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2019, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050. Assuming this is the article you mean: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-on-the-road-to-a-renewable-future-a-1266586-amp.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-... What the article actually says: According to ESYS, [...] by 2050, the costs would add up to 2 to 3.4 trillion euros, depending on the scenario. Other forecasts fluctuate between 500 million and about 2 trillion euros. I'm thinking 500 million has to be a typo and should be 500 billion; still that's quite a range of estimates.
• briwang2050 7y ago
  Germany spending will be three times higher on solar, wind and biomass will be more than three times higher than a nuclear build-out. Germany needs 1.5 times the power of France's nuclear. Estimates are that Germany will spend over 3 trillion euros through 2050. They will have to rebuild the solar and wind twice because they last 15-25 years vs nuclear lasting 40-80+ years. That is a lot of cost savings even if there were accidents or accident cleanups. There are lot of certain increased costs on the solar and wind side of the ledger.
• RenRav 7y ago
  The problem is that emissions for regions beyond north america, europe/eurasia keep climbing. NA/EU haven't changed much since the 80s. EU has actually shrunk. All other regions keep growing their emissions. China is still fueling itself with coal and is only building more plants.
• einpoklum 7y ago
  The author - John Gorman - is the President & CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Association. Somehow the linked-to page neglects to mention this fact... but let's not consider only his personal bias. Gorman bases some of his assessments on a report by the IEA - International Energy Association. Consulting the Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Energy_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Energy_Agency we read that: "In the past, the IEA has been criticized by environmental groups for underplaying the role of renewable energy technologies in favor of nuclear[23] and fossil fuels.[24] In 2009, Guy Pearse stated that the IEA has consistently underestimated the potential for renewable energy alternatives.[25]" Indeed, it is quite possibly the case that renewables _can_ entirely replace fossil + nuclear - e.g. in the USA - soon. See here for example: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1111183_scientists-debate-could-renewable-energy-entirely-replace-fossil-fuels-in-u-s-by-2050 https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1111183_scientists-deba... I have not read the arguments on both sides, but the article we are commenting on simply makes the assumptions convenient for Gorman's support for nuclear technology.
• t-h-e-chief 7y ago
  ah... no
• stefek99 7y ago
  http://genesis.re/book/ http://genesis.re/book/ ️ specific tweet about nuclear ️ https://twitter.com/marsxrobertson/status/1167837086688468992 https://twitter.com/marsxrobertson/status/116783708668846899... ••••• Germany phasing out nuclear and opening new coal. Business as usual.
  • jirikonecny 7y ago
    Interesting. Like your attitude.
• sunstone 7y ago
  The window of economic viability for nuclear energy has very likely closed for good at this point except for niche applications. This is because the costs of solar, wind and HVDC have been dropping so quickly. This technologies have the killer attributes of almost no externalities, incremental investment and very short implementation horizons. Sure, countries will still like to keep training physicists in nuclear fusion to maintain a skilled group for nuclear weapons which is fine.