7 ms·
Can Nuclear Power Offer a Way Out of the Climate Crisis?
- breeny592 7y agoNuclear gets pointed to because the mining companies still have a large role to play in digging material out of the ground for nuclear energy. Lobbyists gon' lobby. As an asset, much like coal power stations, they require huge Government subsidies to be profitable to run. Renewables are the only way forward - they've proven to be far more efficient, stable, and infinitely cheaper when mixed across multiple mediums.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoDo you how many people are killed yearly mining coal vs uranium? [0] Uranium is mined in open pits, and when the radon is handled properly is safe > Renewables are the only way forward How do you reconcile the article that Germany is already failing their goals before they shut nuclear down in 2022? [0] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-... Edit: well, I guess that is how polarizing Nuclear is, HN is ready to ignore reality as poised in the article, and a nasa link.
- rayiner 7y agoRenewables are a dead end if we want to keep evolving society. Imagine what possibilities there would be with 10x or 100x the available energy. Renewables are not even at the point where they can currently replace the existing electric grid. (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline.) You certainly can’t build a Star Trek world with wind mills. You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar.
- nl 7y agoEnergy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline. Right now reliable baseload can be provided by renewables plus gas fired turbines for intermittent supply much cheaper than nuclear. http://www.energyscience.org.au/BP16%20BaseLoad.pdf http://www.energyscience.org.au/BP16%20BaseLoad.pdf If the argument is that we want nuclear power on Mars, then sure, that seems a reasonable position to take.
- 0xy 7y agoGas-fired turbines are extremely bad for the environment. Why would you compare nuclear, which is 100% green, to 'renewables + gas + batteries' which is far from green energy?
- nl 7y agoGas isn't great, but it isn't terrible (especially in a world where gas plume burn-offs is a thing). It's much better than coal, and can be migrated to incrementally (which is much easier than the huge up front investment in nuclear).
- breeny592 7y agoImagine what possibilities there would be if humanity finds a way to power all its current and future needs that produces no harmful side effects rather than trying to equate science fiction with reality. > (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline Because traditional baseload isn't a concept in a fully renewable grid - distributed storage and production naturally evens out demand and production, and also makes the grid more resilient to freak weather events (the kind we see more and more thanks to climate change) > You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar. You're not doing them with anything at the moment so whats the point of conjecture. You really think that energy is the biggest concern over, you know, the colonisation of space?
- buzzkillington 7y ago>Imagine what possibilities there would be if humanity finds a way to power all its current and future needs that produces no harmful side effects rather than trying to equate science fiction with reality. So when do we turn off the giant nuclear reactor in the sky we don't understand and might evaporate the planet if something goes wrong? There is no such thing as 'no harmful side effects'. We can put our head in the sand and pretend that the universe is a friendly place for life and go extinct in the next 100k years or so. Or we can acknowledge that there is no such thing as 'nature' and make the universe fit for us.
- quelltext 7y agoNot if we want to mitigate climate change. Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point.
- breeny592 7y ago> Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point. Construction of new nuclear plants takes on average 7.5 years, and are extremely prone to cost overruns and delays. Renewables are a much faster and cheaper option to come online, be profitable and allow for shutdown of legacy infrastructure in the same period of time. And they are viable now - several countries have run for days and weeks on renewables alone. Several regions of Germany are also fully renewable powered.
- blake1 7y agoAlso, nuclear power plants are very slow to start up/shut down (ramp rate), and need to be periodically offline for refueling, many technical issues require the reactor to shut down, and they need a huge staff a highly trained technicians and engineers. The slow ramp rate, and lower reliability means the power they output is less economically attractive, and the other factors makes the price higher. Combined, they mean that nuclear plans sit around idle a decent amount of the time, so much so that some locations just flat-out subsidize them (like Illinois). I used to work in power markets.
- coin 7y agoRenewables also requires digging stuff out of the ground
- breeny592 7y agoAnd look at the companies that publicly advocate for things such as battery storage, typically they have vested interests in things such as lithium. Nuclear gets thrown about because it's an easy pivot for mining companies - especially in Australia which has a powerful mining lobby and large amounts of both coal and uranium.
- robmccoll 7y agoHopefully much like how renewables went from being unprofitable, inefficient, and requiring subsidies to where they are now over the last decade and a half thanks to R&D, subsidies, and a market that has scaled up, nuclear could become a more desirable solution if we incentivize it and start pursuing it seriously again. The thing about most renewables is still that you can schedule and control output easily to meet demand so you have a storage problem unless you can pair it with another production method to cover the gaps. Maybe nuclear is a good option to lean on for that.
- Krasnol 7y agoThere has been significant R&D in all directions in nuclear in the past decades. Even if something would come out of the current development it's slow and expansive. Too slow and expansive compared to the rapid development in renewables to justify throwing even more money on it. Those funds are much better invested in renewables which is why only those few you hear about do invest in it.
- cameldrv 7y agoUranium is such a dense fuel that mining it isn't a huge market. The total market is about 6 billion a year. In contrast, oil is about 2,000 billion a year, so oil is about a 300x larger market, and oil only produces about 4.5x as much energy per year as oil. The fuel is practically free compared to any fossil source.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoCan you imagine when nuclear would be now without the stalls, delays, feet dragging, protests, fear mongering?
- keanzu 7y agoI don't have to imagine it, none of those things are relevant in China, they've discovered a different problem - the economics don't work and so China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoWhat about once you factor in the long-term economic costs of climate change? If that was truly factored into the cost of producing electricity, I suspect nuclear would come out well ahead.
- xxgreg 7y agoOr perhaps China would build more wind and solar instead. China generates more electricity from both wind and solar than nuclear, and the annual installation rates continue to increase.
- elchief 7y agodeleted
- BurningFrog 7y agoOceans will rise a few mm/year at worst. The vast majority of land is eternally safe
- acollins1331 7y agoThere should be an international law restricting nuclear plants on fault lines. Fukushima is 100% Japan's fault. You're on the most active fault in the world and constantly at threat to tsunamis and the world let's you build a nuclear power plant there!? Preposterous.
- olivermarks 7y ago'The core of the reactor will be almost entirely filled with nuclear waste, which is a great way of disposing of it. Furthermore, the reactor should be able to operate for 60 years without refueling. Indeed, the spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants in the United States alone would be sufficient to cover the entire world's energy needs for centuries to come.' I've always liked this win win way of disposing of nuclear waste. What isn't apparent in the article is the size of the 'mini' reactors and what the worst case scenario is for failures, and ways to lessen failure states.
- fuckyah 7y agodisposing it by spreading it around the world? no thank you
- RickJWagner 7y agoI really believe Bill Gates is using his money to try to improve the world. He's a smart guy, almost all of his decisions are well-grounded. I think Gates is right again on this one. Nuclear power is efficient and reliable, day and night, windy or not, rain or shine.
- baron816 7y agoWhat still scares me about nuclear power is the black swan events. If we have 100,000 reactors spread across the world, what’s the likelihood that over 100 years one of them, I don’t know, gets hit by a meteor and contaminates half a continent? With enough reactor over enough time there is bound to be one or two that fail catastrophically, right?
- xupybd 7y agoBut are those one or two catastrophies worse than the alternative. We know coal kills thousands each year and harms the planet. Would the net impact of Nuclear be better than running the current course. Ideally we'd use renewables but there are limits to the current tech that need to be solved before we can go 100%.
- Areading314 7y agoYou can't heat your house in winter with wind + solar. For a carbon-free world, you need nuclear, period.
- xupybd 7y agohttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261919317660 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191... In this paper the authors model renewables in Artic isolated settlements. It's only a model but looks promising.
- crdoconnor 7y agoWhy not? Wind is a ~50% cheaper source of energy per kWh than nuclear. Edit : apparently the answer to this question is "downvote" :)
- Recurecur 7y ago> Why not? Wind is a ~50% cheaper source of energy per kWh than nuclear. That's an illusory number. Wind requires backup power, or lots of storage. Wind turbines have a ~20 year lifespan, compared with ~60 years for coal/nuclear plants. Once the safety and economies of mass-produced Gen IV SMRs are accounted for, nuclear is MUCH cheaper than wind. What would be really bad would be the first time thousands of people die when the wind/solar powered grid goes down during a cold snap.
- crystaldev 7y agoHumans are ridiculous. Coal, solar, wind are all stone age compared to nuclear power. If humans went full bore nuclear, they'd have so much energy it would be nothing to move spent fuel to space. It's sort of depressing how this technology that can be used to colonize space gathers dust, so little progress.
- blake1 7y agoNuclear power is pretty Stone Age. Hold a bunch of special rocks close together. They get hot and make water hot. And turns into hot, wet air, which turns a big fan. Hook a magnet to that fan, and spin it in some hoops and you get electricity. Oh, and always, always, always keep the rocks from getting too hot. Compare that to solar cells, which are semiconductors doped with cleverly designed impurities, and layered to exploit quantum effects to deliver electrical power simply by pointing it at the sun. You can make it more useful by hooking it to a rechargeable battery, which also exploits clever quantum chemical effects to store that electricity. And the combo of these two wonderful quantum-technological devices is cheaper than the reactor. Both technologies require understanding of modern physics, but it's pretty telling that you can do enough math to make a fission reactor with a hand calculator, and not a high-powered computer.
- buzzkillington 7y agoAh yes, the stone age phase change turbine. Well attested in cave paintings and stone chippings. Solar cells in space are a great idea. Much more efficient than nuclear power when you're closer than the orbit of Venus. A lot less so when you're at the bottom of an atmosphere with dust and clouds.
- wyre 7y ago> Ah yes, the stone age phase change turbine. Well attested in cave paintings and stone chippings. Because coal and nuclear are in so many cave paintins
- xupybd 7y agoThe economics of nuclear are good but not as good as you're implying. It takes a long time and a lot of money to start earning on a nuclear plant. Given the risks involved it's not that easy to build one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY I don't think firing nuclear waste into space would be wise either. The risk of that blowing up on launch is high and the fall out from that would be a disaster.
- vinniejames 7y agoYes, it always has been a way out. The blocker is public opinion. Nuclear, taking into account disasters, is far safer for society than any other known energy source.
- millstone 7y agoNuclear is really far safer than solar panels? How is that?
- johngalt 7y agoScale. Nuclear puts a huge denominator in the 'deaths per kwh' ratio.
- keanzu 7y agoBy measuring deaths per TWhr. Nuclear power plants generate a lot of power and very few deaths. The amount of energy generated by nuclear is so vast that it more than outweighs incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima over the long-term. This source only has "rooftop solar" which is more deadly than nuclear power. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... I don't have numbers for non-rooftop solar.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoYou don't have the numbers for rooftop nuclear either.
- millstone 7y agoI suspect this is just a proxy measure for rate of construction. Construction workers fall off roofs because they're installing solar panels. They don't fall off nuclear towers, because the world has mostly stopped building them.
- DuskStar 7y agoI'd think the size of the project matters more. Nuclear power plant? Better bet OSHA's there. But a rooftop solar installation? Lol no.
- pmoriarty 7y ago"What should we fear more: inevitable global climate change or the regional dangers associated with a possible reactor meltdown?" But earlier in the article, the author said: "There is one thing almost all model calculations do agree on: Moving forward, the majority of electricity will be supplied by a mix of solar, biomass, wind and hydro power." So if the majority of power will be non-nuclear, how is nuclear supposed to prevent inevitable global climate change? And why aren't we just pushing to go for 100% non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel energy? Why is that not an option? In another part of the article, they say "Qvist believes the lower costs are the primary advantage offered by the smaller nuclear power plants." So even according to this pro-nuclear consultant, the primary advantage of nuclear is not its ability to prevent inevitable global climate change. There are some other important things this article does not touch on, one of them being the gross mismanagement of Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the record of nuclear power companies and corrupt regulators not taking safety seriously enough, leading to accidents. You can have the best technology in the world, but when the companies managing these plants cut corners and don't prioritize safety the ostensibly wonderful technology might be broken, missing, inactive, or inadequate when its needed most. Fukushima and Chernobyl were cases in point. I'd also take authoritative-sounding pronouncements on the safety of nuclear power in threads like these with a couple of grains of salt. I remember paying close attention on HN when the Fukushima accident was under way, and there were plenty of people on HN and elsewhere swearing that the Fukushima reactor would never melt down, that it was designed to prevent just such a meltdown. It melted down nevertheless.
- Recurecur 7y ago> So if the majority of power will be non-nuclear, how is nuclear supposed to prevent inevitable global climate change? And why aren't we just pushing to go for 100% non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel energy? Why is that not an option? First off, they have "biomass" as one of the options, which happens to be a bad one in almost all cases. Second, it's very hard to have reliable grid power once more than 50% of your power is coming from unreliable sources. Even storage isn't a great answer, due to 10/100/1000 year events. As the article points out, less than 2% of current power comes from wind/solar. It's very difficult to scale that to even 50%. Nuclear, on the other hand, can easily be scaled beyond 50%. In France, it was 80% at one point. To have a great future, the human race needs clean, abundant, cheap energy. Nuclear is a win!
- Krasnol 7y agoBefore some one comes up with the baseload story: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 > Summary > Arguments that renewable energy isn't up to the task because "the Sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow all the time" are overly simplistic. > There are a number of renewable energy technologies which can supply baseload power. The intermittency of other sources such as wind and solar photovoltaic can be addressed by interconnecting power plants which are widely geographically distributed, and by coupling them with peak-load plants such as gas turbines fueled by biofuels or natural gas which can quickly be switched on to fill in gaps of low wind or solar production. Numerous regional and global case studies – some incorporating modeling to demonstrate their feasibility – have provided plausible plans to meet 100% of energy demand with renewable sources.
- boyadjian 7y agoNo, Nuclear is not a sustainable system. The nuclear waste are a big problem for future generation. The only solution, is to lower our energy consumption.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoThe tricky bit will be not doing it but doing it such that it is cost competitive and able to keep up with wind, solar, & battery all of which are currently rapidly improving in terms of cost, economies of scale, and exponentially growing existing deployments with prices continuing to drop. 0.01 $ / kwh is soon becoming a reality for some of the most competive bids. When it comes to safety, part of the deal with anything nuclear is going to be security measures needed to prevent somebody from depopulating an area with a dirty bomb using the nuclear material inside the reactor. That alone can prevent this type of solution from ever reaching a point where it is actually cheaper to use than simple & safe wind/solar deployments. People are putting solar on their roofs, batteries in their car, and windmills on their farms. Security is not a cost factor for this. It is for nuclear. This doesn't have to be a show stopper but it does limit the applications and contexts where this is going to be useful. Fundamentally solar + batteries is going to be pretty reliable, predictable, and cheap given enough mass production capacity. Also most of the timelines nuclear is supposed to happen on (measured in decades) give us plenty of room to vastly improve output, price, and efficiency. Therefore, I doubt that nuclear will be very relevant significant short term but it may help us get rid of the few remaining gas/coal plants in 2-3 decades. Longer term that and fusion will be great in supplementing power needs anywhere solar/wind are just not practical.