19 ms·

A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal

A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant But it got canceled, and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone thinks its better to truck in heavy fuel oil for generators vs having a small reactor buried in the ground for 30 years. I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of coal and natural gas plants because they scream "green energy" and end up with a few MW of wind (ignoring the hydro built 50 years ago which to this day is still the majority "green energy" source) and a bunch of natural gas or in the past coal plants. If they said yes to fission 40 years ago we wouldn't be having the climate crisis discussion today. We don't have 40 more years to overbuild wind/solar and perfect battery technology at 2-5x the current price for natural gas. Because if people don't start saying "yes" for carbon free power sources like this we _WILL_ be trying to figure out how to built them in 50 years to recapture all the carbon we burned into the atmosphere while trying to avoid more and more of the forests/etc from burning.

skybrian 7y ago
It all depends on how much they end up costing to build compared to alternatives.
- StillBored 7y ago
  A huge part of that is all the lawsuits and "regulations" designed to keep new plants from being built. Regulations pushed for by the green energy constituency... I'm all for safety but if you read some of the regulation stories we would be banning CT scanners from hospitals..
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Fukushima was a good reminder that these “regulations” exist for good reason.
    - Tostino 7y ago
      I highly doubt the regulations the GP is referencing would have anything to do with preventing an accident like Fukushima. Regulations are not inherently bad, but they can be used in negative ways by those in power. The devil is in the details, and we'll written and though out regulations are a great thing and are absolutely necessary for society to function. It's easy for the public to lose track and conflate good regulations with regulations that are poorly written, have intentional loopholes, or are mean to stifle an industry or technology by protecting the entrenched players.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      > Fukushima was a good reminder that these “regulations” exist for good reason. As if the Japanese nuclear market was deregulated? Japan is a developed country that loves bureaucracy so don't be afraid, there is plenty of regulation in every sector here.
      - ptaipale 7y ago
        And Fukushima was built to the requirements of 1970's, not those of today (which are much stronger).
        natmaka 7y ago
        The plant was active and very well-maintained, and its operator even planned to extend it (2 more reactors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Reactor_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...
        ptaipale 7y ago
        Yes, but the original location of site would not be approved today, precisely because of the risk that actualised in the tsunami (even though it is an extremely rare an unlikely occurrence - a tsunami which caused large-scale devastation where the nuclear plant's problems were just a minor issue compared to the huge loss of life and material damage from tsunami itself).
i_feel_great 7y ago
"... better to truck in heavy fuel oil..." Your answer right there. The nuclear power industry just doesn't lobby hard enough.
thawaway1837 7y ago
Only if the “green energy” people actually had that much power... In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics. But the green energy people are an easy punching bag for the nuclear advocates who are simply unwilling to face up to the reality of why nuclear keeps failing to take off.
- StillBored 7y ago
  The costs to built the plants dominates the price. Once built the actual operation and fueling costs are best in class https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Nuclear-energy-in-doubt-amid-high-costs-11946922.php https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/artic... The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    >> NIMBYism > The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost. NIMBYism is a large reason why the risks are so uncertain and the costs so high. When dozens of judges at several levels have jurisdiction to require expensive and time consuming state/federal EPA, zoning, air quality, shading, etc. reviews and plaintiffs can use delay tactics to block appeals to those rulings, you get lots of uncertainty and expense.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Capital costs matter. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have mortgages or lease cars.
marcosdumay 7y ago
Small nuclear plants are actually something that can possibly help (differently from the large ones). But I doubt anybody will get the costs down enough to make them viable, wind and solar are power horses. It's like creating a non-mainstream computer architecture at the 90's and early 00's, it won't improve fast enough to even match their speed. About emissions, coal is responsible for a huge share of emissions on electricity generation. If you replace half of it with a 0 emissions source, and the other half a source 4 times more carbon efficient, it does go a long way to help. If we are luck, this will give us enough time to develop batteries, because that is very likely what will happen.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > will get the costs down enough to make them viable, wind and solar are power horses. Except in areas where you don't have much sunlight or much wind exposure, and both of these sources of energies require huge land occupation which is not ideal either. Energy-density wise you can't really beat nuclear.
- StillBored 7y ago
  I think you under-estimate the amount of CO2 produced by a NG plant simply because its 2x-4x less than coal. Put another way, adding 60% renewable to NG only 1/2's the CO2 output. At the rate of consumption growth your still increasing the total C02 footprint year over year. Plus, that solution is literally 2x-3x the CO2 footprint vs the french solution put in place 40 years ago. Explained another way, going to renewable+NG only buys you about a decade in CO2 emission reduction. If everyone magically fit that formula today, it would be the equivalent of 2009, a far cry from where we need to be. Worse, you still have the problem that you need to convert all the automobile/planes/tractors/etc somehow. Without super cheap electricity that process is going to be much slower than it needs to be. What you need is electricity so cheap that it can compensate for the inefficiencies producing hydro-carbon sources for planes and other applications where the battery technology isn't even possible with infinite economic solutions. The _ONLY_ solution we have today is fission and a reduction in the build price forced in place by COTs and precerification.
- esqqfskaw 7y ago
jlawson 7y ago
The most extreme-left political advocates, who dominate green advocacy because of their high motivation, aren't interested in solving climate change alone. What they want is to dismantle what they see as an entire system of racist sexist capitalist corporate transphobic colonialist evil. Nuclear power, if it was used and solved climate change, wouldn't help with the other aspects of that goal. And, in fact, it would weaken the attempts to dismantle those aspects by taking away a strong source of panic and power. The strategy is to use climate change to spike fear and thus convince people to give up thier political power to multinational undemocratic entities and expanding bureaucracies of advocates and evironmental commissars who they ordinarily would reject. They don't want to solve the problem, they want to exploit the problem. Here's an example: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-strikes-un-conference-madrid-by-greta-thunberg-et-al-2019-11 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-strikes... "That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities."
- vidarh 7y ago
  "The most extreme-left" has historically been firmly pro-nuclear. There's a massive schism between the traditional far left, whose ideologies tends to be founded on the basis of a firm belief in the advancement of technology (e.g. half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is praise for the advancement brought by capitalism and what it will make possible), and the groups you describe, that tends to elicit disdain from the far left.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    Indeed. I mean, "left" and "right" do an awful lot of work. "Left" simply means anyone who isn't opposed to the current order, or it can mean one of several particular ideologies. "Extreme left" would tend to mean communist. But green communists are a real thing, so while I would prefer to say "some of the extreme left is anti nuclear" or some such. Or perhaps more relevantly for the OP's point, "many greens". Because not all greens are left, and not all leftists are green. Indeed, many contemporary Green voters in Australia are positively mainstream in terms of their economics. I think in Germany they can even trend right. And in east Europe, they're outright right.
Krasnol 7y ago
> A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska. What an understatement. Let's quote one of the sources there: > But the project never began the mandatory, lengthy and extremely costly process of gaining approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. > This would include a site license, which takes tens of millions of dollars and several years, as well as a design permit. No design of this type has ever been approved, though one other has made it through the first step of the process, which took about six years. So they were far away from "going to build" there. > I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of coal and natural gas plants Yeah we heard you. It's a quite popular tactic in this "last scream of nuclear" advertisement. In the same generalistic way the evil green energy only advocates could say that you are an ignorant shill. There is nobody on the side of coal who wants green energy and natural gas or gas as battery for renewables is not the same thing as coal... Fission has been in development for many decades. Eating up money and not coming up with a solution. So please...tone it down. Nuclear is expensive, dangerous and most of the countries on this planet have no space or (economic) means to make the waste disappear.
- arkh 7y ago
  > Fission has been in development for many decades. You're thinking of fusion. Reading the comments here from France where 80% production is nuclear with a nuclear waste reprocessing site it feels like the USA problem has more to do with local regulations than technology.
  - chefkoch 7y ago
    And even they struggle to come up with replacements for their agying fleet of reactors.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    Oh yeah France our lovely neighbour with the rotting fleet of "should have been turned off" reactors underreporting accidents and an deficitary agency managing it all while the politicians chuckle it all off due to having slept on the renewable front. Yes, yes. It's great. If you don't blow half of the continent into a radioactive paradies one day, you'll end up being overthrown by some yellow vested nutjobs who will have to pay more taxes because the money for this ridiculously subsided energy project including the waste "management" (hello Russia) has to come from somewhere and decommissioning is not even priced in yet. PS. Winter is coming. Time to buy some energy from Germany again...
phreeza 7y ago
Non-hydro renewables overtook hydro a couple of years ago in the US, and are on track to overtake nuclear, too, in a couple more years. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig34.png https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig34.png
varjag 7y ago
Everyone was saying "yes" to fission 40 years ago. It was not until Chernobyl that global backlash against nuclear really started. The pace wasn't however particularly impressive back then already as technology, safety and waste management limitations became clear.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  No, the backlash against nuclear long predates Chernobyl. And it was driven by economics, not safety. In the US, new nuclear construction collapsed after the first big nuclear building spree, when promises collided with reality. This was even before TMI.
pjc50 7y ago
People underestimate how much of the opposition to nuclear plants in the past was due to the "dual use" nature of the technology, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the 80s it was hard to care about the effects of climate change in a mere hundred years when global policy was to keep civilization-destroying quantities of weapons on hand that could be delivered in 45 minutes. The war between nuclear weapons and environmentalists went "hot" when the French DGSE sank the Rainbow Warrior and murdered a photographer in retaliation for trying to stop their nuclear testing. If you think the question is solved, ask yourself this: would you prefer that Iran solve its energy needs from a fleet of nuclear reactors or a fleet of solar panels?
- reacweb 7y ago
  I find it very hard to imagine that a 74 years old technology remains complex enough to be available only to governements.
  - lizknope 7y ago
    It's not. Nuclear fission reactors are built by large corporations like General Electric and Hitachi. If these companies wanted to they have the expertise to build a nuclear bomb but why would they unless their governments asked them to?
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      A huge number of 74 year old technologies are available for $0.75 direct from China. The fact the nuclear reactor hasn't been miniaturized to the size of a coin and included in every $15 childrens toy to power lights is in large part because of public perception and government regulation rather than real safety/health concerns - there exist plenty of typical household materials that are more dangerous than the safest nuclear materials.
      - pvaldes 7y ago
        On the other hand, a child swallowing a tiny nuclear plant in the shape of a smiley would be an entirely new experience in the A&E department but that would never happens? would it?. I could see from here the lawyers salivating with a case like that. Not to mention that those toys would end in a few days in the garbage, ready to be shipped by volume to be burnt ("recycled") in some other country.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
The problem your comment doesn't mention is that new build nuclear is VERY expensive, far more expensive than renewables. Until new-build nuclear is MUCH cheaper, natural gas and renewables will be the vast majority of new capacity additions. All one need do is look at the debacle in South Carolina to see how expensive nuclear can truly be: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/abandoned-nuclear-reactors-fit-a-global-pattern-of-new-build-troubles https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/abandone...
cartoonfoxes 7y ago
> But it got canceled, and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone thinks its better to truck in heavy fuel oil for generators vs having a small reactor buried in the ground for 30 years. I don't understand it either. My best guess is that nuclear is scary, and most "green energy" advocates would prefer to believe that panacea eco-friendly alternatives exist. I live in northern Canada. I've witnessed a plenty of FUD surrounding nuclear, and the concomitant excessive unrealistic optimism around wind and solar. Every year the power outages become a little more frequent, and every other year brings some new story of power projects cancelled due to "environmental concerns" and "lack of consultation". So many people seem convinced that the lack of wind and solar projects is strictly due to government bungling or never-specified interference from oil-industry incumbents. Green gets used as a kind of security blanket. You can't escape the fact that you have a carbon footprint running a car and heating your home and workplace through six months of winter. Many green energy advocates are less than serious, and are just looking to feel better. They're content to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something. Preferably without having to think too hard or entertain compromise positions.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  It's probably a smallish power plant. Small nuclear power plants wouldn't be competitive even with oil, due to diseconomies of scale in staffing and operation. If you want a baseload source in Alaska I'd look at geothermal. Even moderate temperature (below boiling) hot water there can be used, due to the moderate or low ambient temperature. And Alaska has many areas with good geothermal resources.
im_with_stupid 7y ago
I'm with you 100%. One thing that people don't realize is that nuclear technology is the only fuel technology that has nuclear regulations. If coal has a little radioactivity in it, there's no limit to what radiation can be exposed to the atmosphere in burning it. I believe the same applies to oil, gasoline, and diesel.
cmonnow 7y ago
Every technology has pros & cons, effects & residues. Coal : Effect/Pros - Energy/Cheap. Residue/Cons - C02/GlobalWarming Nuclear : Effect/Pros - Energy/Clean. Residue/Cons - RadioactiveWaste/Contamination. Where do the nuclear byproducts go currently ? Into the earth? Rivers? Oceans? 30 years ago, we switched from paper based products to plastic, to save trees. Today, we want to switch from plastic based products to paper, to avoid pollution. Every 'switch' will come with side-effects that the current generation is fine with, because they're not going to be ones dealing with it.

skybrian 7y ago

It all depends on how much they end up costing to build compared to alternatives.

StillBored 7y ago
A huge part of that is all the lawsuits and "regulations" designed to keep new plants from being built. Regulations pushed for by the green energy constituency... I'm all for safety but if you read some of the regulation stories we would be banning CT scanners from hospitals..
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Fukushima was a good reminder that these “regulations” exist for good reason.
  - Tostino 7y ago
    I highly doubt the regulations the GP is referencing would have anything to do with preventing an accident like Fukushima. Regulations are not inherently bad, but they can be used in negative ways by those in power. The devil is in the details, and we'll written and though out regulations are a great thing and are absolutely necessary for society to function. It's easy for the public to lose track and conflate good regulations with regulations that are poorly written, have intentional loopholes, or are mean to stifle an industry or technology by protecting the entrenched players.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    > Fukushima was a good reminder that these “regulations” exist for good reason. As if the Japanese nuclear market was deregulated? Japan is a developed country that loves bureaucracy so don't be afraid, there is plenty of regulation in every sector here.
    - ptaipale 7y ago
      And Fukushima was built to the requirements of 1970's, not those of today (which are much stronger).
      - natmaka 7y ago
        The plant was active and very well-maintained, and its operator even planned to extend it (2 more reactors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Reactor_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...
        ptaipale 7y ago
        Yes, but the original location of site would not be approved today, precisely because of the risk that actualised in the tsunami (even though it is an extremely rare an unlikely occurrence - a tsunami which caused large-scale devastation where the nuclear plant's problems were just a minor issue compared to the huge loss of life and material damage from tsunami itself).

i_feel_great 7y ago

"... better to truck in heavy fuel oil..." Your answer right there. The nuclear power industry just doesn't lobby hard enough.

thawaway1837 7y ago

Only if the “green energy” people actually had that much power... In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics. But the green energy people are an easy punching bag for the nuclear advocates who are simply unwilling to face up to the reality of why nuclear keeps failing to take off.

StillBored 7y ago
The costs to built the plants dominates the price. Once built the actual operation and fueling costs are best in class https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Nuclear-energy-in-doubt-amid-high-costs-11946922.php https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/artic... The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.
- akiselev 7y ago
  >> NIMBYism > The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost. NIMBYism is a large reason why the risks are so uncertain and the costs so high. When dozens of judges at several levels have jurisdiction to require expensive and time consuming state/federal EPA, zoning, air quality, shading, etc. reviews and plaintiffs can use delay tactics to block appeals to those rulings, you get lots of uncertainty and expense.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Capital costs matter. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have mortgages or lease cars.

marcosdumay 7y ago

Small nuclear plants are actually something that can possibly help (differently from the large ones). But I doubt anybody will get the costs down enough to make them viable, wind and solar are power horses. It's like creating a non-mainstream computer architecture at the 90's and early 00's, it won't improve fast enough to even match their speed. About emissions, coal is responsible for a huge share of emissions on electricity generation. If you replace half of it with a 0 emissions source, and the other half a source 4 times more carbon efficient, it does go a long way to help. If we are luck, this will give us enough time to develop batteries, because that is very likely what will happen.

ekianjo 7y ago
> will get the costs down enough to make them viable, wind and solar are power horses. Except in areas where you don't have much sunlight or much wind exposure, and both of these sources of energies require huge land occupation which is not ideal either. Energy-density wise you can't really beat nuclear.
StillBored 7y ago
I think you under-estimate the amount of CO2 produced by a NG plant simply because its 2x-4x less than coal. Put another way, adding 60% renewable to NG only 1/2's the CO2 output. At the rate of consumption growth your still increasing the total C02 footprint year over year. Plus, that solution is literally 2x-3x the CO2 footprint vs the french solution put in place 40 years ago. Explained another way, going to renewable+NG only buys you about a decade in CO2 emission reduction. If everyone magically fit that formula today, it would be the equivalent of 2009, a far cry from where we need to be. Worse, you still have the problem that you need to convert all the automobile/planes/tractors/etc somehow. Without super cheap electricity that process is going to be much slower than it needs to be. What you need is electricity so cheap that it can compensate for the inefficiencies producing hydro-carbon sources for planes and other applications where the battery technology isn't even possible with infinite economic solutions. The _ONLY_ solution we have today is fission and a reduction in the build price forced in place by COTs and precerification.
esqqfskaw 7y ago

jlawson 7y ago

The most extreme-left political advocates, who dominate green advocacy because of their high motivation, aren't interested in solving climate change alone. What they want is to dismantle what they see as an entire system of racist sexist capitalist corporate transphobic colonialist evil. Nuclear power, if it was used and solved climate change, wouldn't help with the other aspects of that goal. And, in fact, it would weaken the attempts to dismantle those aspects by taking away a strong source of panic and power. The strategy is to use climate change to spike fear and thus convince people to give up thier political power to multinational undemocratic entities and expanding bureaucracies of advocates and evironmental commissars who they ordinarily would reject. They don't want to solve the problem, they want to exploit the problem. Here's an example: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-strikes-un-conference-madrid-by-greta-thunberg-et-al-2019-11 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-strikes... "That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities."

vidarh 7y ago
"The most extreme-left" has historically been firmly pro-nuclear. There's a massive schism between the traditional far left, whose ideologies tends to be founded on the basis of a firm belief in the advancement of technology (e.g. half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is praise for the advancement brought by capitalism and what it will make possible), and the groups you describe, that tends to elicit disdain from the far left.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  Indeed. I mean, "left" and "right" do an awful lot of work. "Left" simply means anyone who isn't opposed to the current order, or it can mean one of several particular ideologies. "Extreme left" would tend to mean communist. But green communists are a real thing, so while I would prefer to say "some of the extreme left is anti nuclear" or some such. Or perhaps more relevantly for the OP's point, "many greens". Because not all greens are left, and not all leftists are green. Indeed, many contemporary Green voters in Australia are positively mainstream in terms of their economics. I think in Germany they can even trend right. And in east Europe, they're outright right.

Krasnol 7y ago

> A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska. What an understatement. Let's quote one of the sources there: > But the project never began the mandatory, lengthy and extremely costly process of gaining approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. > This would include a site license, which takes tens of millions of dollars and several years, as well as a design permit. No design of this type has ever been approved, though one other has made it through the first step of the process, which took about six years. So they were far away from "going to build" there. > I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of coal and natural gas plants Yeah we heard you. It's a quite popular tactic in this "last scream of nuclear" advertisement. In the same generalistic way the evil green energy only advocates could say that you are an ignorant shill. There is nobody on the side of coal who wants green energy and natural gas or gas as battery for renewables is not the same thing as coal... Fission has been in development for many decades. Eating up money and not coming up with a solution. So please...tone it down. Nuclear is expensive, dangerous and most of the countries on this planet have no space or (economic) means to make the waste disappear.

arkh 7y ago
> Fission has been in development for many decades. You're thinking of fusion. Reading the comments here from France where 80% production is nuclear with a nuclear waste reprocessing site it feels like the USA problem has more to do with local regulations than technology.
- chefkoch 7y ago
  And even they struggle to come up with replacements for their agying fleet of reactors.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Oh yeah France our lovely neighbour with the rotting fleet of "should have been turned off" reactors underreporting accidents and an deficitary agency managing it all while the politicians chuckle it all off due to having slept on the renewable front. Yes, yes. It's great. If you don't blow half of the continent into a radioactive paradies one day, you'll end up being overthrown by some yellow vested nutjobs who will have to pay more taxes because the money for this ridiculously subsided energy project including the waste "management" (hello Russia) has to come from somewhere and decommissioning is not even priced in yet. PS. Winter is coming. Time to buy some energy from Germany again...

phreeza 7y ago

Non-hydro renewables overtook hydro a couple of years ago in the US, and are on track to overtake nuclear, too, in a couple more years. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig34.png https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig34.png

varjag 7y ago

Everyone was saying "yes" to fission 40 years ago. It was not until Chernobyl that global backlash against nuclear really started. The pace wasn't however particularly impressive back then already as technology, safety and waste management limitations became clear.

pfdietz 7y ago
No, the backlash against nuclear long predates Chernobyl. And it was driven by economics, not safety. In the US, new nuclear construction collapsed after the first big nuclear building spree, when promises collided with reality. This was even before TMI.

pjc50 7y ago

People underestimate how much of the opposition to nuclear plants in the past was due to the "dual use" nature of the technology, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the 80s it was hard to care about the effects of climate change in a mere hundred years when global policy was to keep civilization-destroying quantities of weapons on hand that could be delivered in 45 minutes. The war between nuclear weapons and environmentalists went "hot" when the French DGSE sank the Rainbow Warrior and murdered a photographer in retaliation for trying to stop their nuclear testing. If you think the question is solved, ask yourself this: would you prefer that Iran solve its energy needs from a fleet of nuclear reactors or a fleet of solar panels?

reacweb 7y ago
I find it very hard to imagine that a 74 years old technology remains complex enough to be available only to governements.
- lizknope 7y ago
  It's not. Nuclear fission reactors are built by large corporations like General Electric and Hitachi. If these companies wanted to they have the expertise to build a nuclear bomb but why would they unless their governments asked them to?
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    A huge number of 74 year old technologies are available for $0.75 direct from China. The fact the nuclear reactor hasn't been miniaturized to the size of a coin and included in every $15 childrens toy to power lights is in large part because of public perception and government regulation rather than real safety/health concerns - there exist plenty of typical household materials that are more dangerous than the safest nuclear materials.
    - pvaldes 7y ago
      On the other hand, a child swallowing a tiny nuclear plant in the shape of a smiley would be an entirely new experience in the A&E department but that would never happens? would it?. I could see from here the lawyers salivating with a case like that. Not to mention that those toys would end in a few days in the garbage, ready to be shipped by volume to be burnt ("recycled") in some other country.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

The problem your comment doesn't mention is that new build nuclear is VERY expensive, far more expensive than renewables. Until new-build nuclear is MUCH cheaper, natural gas and renewables will be the vast majority of new capacity additions. All one need do is look at the debacle in South Carolina to see how expensive nuclear can truly be: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/abandoned-nuclear-reactors-fit-a-global-pattern-of-new-build-troubles https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/abandone...

cartoonfoxes 7y ago

> But it got canceled, and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone thinks its better to truck in heavy fuel oil for generators vs having a small reactor buried in the ground for 30 years. I don't understand it either. My best guess is that nuclear is scary, and most "green energy" advocates would prefer to believe that panacea eco-friendly alternatives exist. I live in northern Canada. I've witnessed a plenty of FUD surrounding nuclear, and the concomitant excessive unrealistic optimism around wind and solar. Every year the power outages become a little more frequent, and every other year brings some new story of power projects cancelled due to "environmental concerns" and "lack of consultation". So many people seem convinced that the lack of wind and solar projects is strictly due to government bungling or never-specified interference from oil-industry incumbents. Green gets used as a kind of security blanket. You can't escape the fact that you have a carbon footprint running a car and heating your home and workplace through six months of winter. Many green energy advocates are less than serious, and are just looking to feel better. They're content to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something. Preferably without having to think too hard or entertain compromise positions.

pfdietz 7y ago
It's probably a smallish power plant. Small nuclear power plants wouldn't be competitive even with oil, due to diseconomies of scale in staffing and operation. If you want a baseload source in Alaska I'd look at geothermal. Even moderate temperature (below boiling) hot water there can be used, due to the moderate or low ambient temperature. And Alaska has many areas with good geothermal resources.

im_with_stupid 7y ago

I'm with you 100%. One thing that people don't realize is that nuclear technology is the only fuel technology that has nuclear regulations. If coal has a little radioactivity in it, there's no limit to what radiation can be exposed to the atmosphere in burning it. I believe the same applies to oil, gasoline, and diesel.

cmonnow 7y ago

Every technology has pros & cons, effects & residues. Coal : Effect/Pros - Energy/Cheap. Residue/Cons - C02/GlobalWarming Nuclear : Effect/Pros - Energy/Clean. Residue/Cons - RadioactiveWaste/Contamination. Where do the nuclear byproducts go currently ? Into the earth? Rivers? Oceans? 30 years ago, we switched from paper based products to plastic, to save trees. Today, we want to switch from plastic based products to paper, to avoid pollution. Every 'switch' will come with side-effects that the current generation is fine with, because they're not going to be ones dealing with it.