23 ms·

I want to believe that the mainstream could accept nuclear again but I don't have huge hopes. I'm French, we've been getting cheaper and cleaner electricity tha

by simias 7y ago

I want to believe that the mainstream could accept nuclear again but I don't have huge hopes. I'm French, we've been getting cheaper and cleaner electricity than our neighbors for a long time. Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down. And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. I find it depressing personally. We're at 75% now, apparently we're on track to hit 50% by 2035. There's nuclear waste and there's a waste of nuclear.

jjoonathan 7y ago
Ugh, if the US had just kept up the pace of nuclear construction in the 80s instead of shutting it down, we would be approaching 100% CO2-free electricity today. Not 50 years from now, today. But we threw it all away!
- godelski 7y ago
  I'm not sure this is true. Simply because I'm not aware of a technology that has a 0 CO2eq lifetime emission. Production, yes (nuclear, renewables), but lifetime, no. It would be a HUGE step in the right direction and have dramatically reduced our load (20% of global) on the climate problem (probably influenced other countries too). But I want to be accurate here. (I know I'm splitting hairs here)
  - travisporter 7y ago
    You’re technically right (the best kind of right!) but so is he when he says nuclear approaches 100% CO2. Maybe solar+storage could get even closer close?
    - mrpopo 7y ago
      Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse. The rationale behind it is simple physics. Enriched nuclear fuel is the most energy-dense material we can access, so unless a new fundamental law is discovered, nuclear energy will have the best EROI, e.g. require the least energy overall to be produced (also note that most of the energy deployed is for security reasons). EDIT: another option for solar+storage to tend towards 0 residual carbon footprint is a life duration 10 or 100 times longer. Something to consider.
      - godelski 7y ago
        > Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse. I'm going to add some nuance. As far as I'm aware, this is only true for photovoltaic solar. My understanding is that concentrated solar (mirrors heat up water tank and you have a steam turbine) has lower lifetime emissions than nuclear. That being said, storage does have a heavy footprint that many ignore. This is a harder number to accurately measure the impact, but if we're talking about a sane fully renewable system you have to have a lot of storage. Places like Southern California can get away with a day or two's worth of storage because there is little variation in conditions. But if you travel up the coast 500 miles things get drastically different. Even more so as you get into Washington. You're going to have to have at least a week's worth of storage. Same thing for the east coast. That said, these options are still better than coal. It is debatable if we're talking about coal + CCS though and likely doesn't beat gas + CCS. Though the counter argument to this is CCS in the manufacturing of your solar and batteries. Again, gets tricky and there's factors to include like tearing down existing coal and gas plants. TLDR: this problem is unsurprisingly extremely complicated even though we make it out to not be.
        billti 7y ago
        Could a highly efficient grid solve the "local weather" problem? While it might be cloudy in Washington, at the same time it's likely sunny in Nevada, or Texas, (or Mexico if you had cross border production), etc.. The broader the area you can depend on, the less you need "bad weather backup" systems.
        godelski 7y ago
        Potentially. But there's a big if and quite a few drawbacks. If our power is dependent on such long range travel there is a lot more opportunity for failure. Since we're talking about power, this does mean both lives and millions to billions of dollars worth of economic activity. There's various reasons things could go down. A bird. Russia hacking our grid. Joe Schmoe crashes his truck. You name it. The only way to reduce two of these events is to build a large and complex network with many fail-safes, but that makes the second possibility easier. But if it goes down in Texas we're talking about Northern California, Oregon, and Washington potentially losing power. Having local sources of power is highly reliable and contains disasters to only be local. While I do believe we should have smarter grids there is much wanting in using this as a solution to the regional issues of renewable efficiencies and storage requirements.
    - godelski 7y ago
      I'm aware I'm splitting hairs. But I bring this up because there are a lot of misconceptions about climate, including the energy sub-problem. I.E. people think if we go renewables (or nuclear) we've solved the climate issue, let alone just the energy problem. Or rather, I think people think all we need is renewables and electric cars. Where in reality even after implementing these two (important) parts we still have a long way to go. And that the idea of this is so prevalent that it is actually hindering progress. So I'm being nuanced. But HN is a place for nuance.
      - unethical_ban 7y ago
        What is there, other than energy (and storage/use of it, such as on ships)? My understanding is the VAST majority of climate-change contributions are from energy production and transportation. There are other environmental concerns, but plastic in the ocean isn't raising global temperatures.
        kcolford 7y ago
        Construction is another big one. Steel and concrete are massive producers of green house gasses
        godelski 7y ago
        Transportation and energy account for a little under 60% of the problem.[0] (There's a lot more to those than electricity and cars) Another more mainstream issue is agriculture, but people pretty much talk exclusively about water usage and emissions from animal byproducts. This has a political motive. It is the majority of that sector though, to be fair to the vegans. If cows were a country they would be the third worst polluter (please support lab grown meat and reduce your meat intake. Even just eating red meat once a month and chicken the rest of the time has a significant impact on your personal emissions. And please don't bring up cows eating algae). But there's a lot of less sexy parts that we're nowhere even near close to solving. Concrete and steel production is one of them. These are the largest contributor to emissions in construction, and pretty much the only way to solve this issue is with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) or new materials that we don't yet know about. [1] The same is for plastics. Frankly, we don't have a good way around steel, concrete, or plastics without making some extremely hard compromises. These materials MAKE the modern world and literally save lives. Another less sexy issue is air-conditioning/refrigeration and heating. These systems are almost pure emitters yet we never discuss them. Again, we're nowhere near solving these issues. Again, these technologies save lives and enable the modern world. They are extremely difficult problems and even harder to scale. I'd suggest reading some of Gate's Notes, since they do provide a good high level introduction to the material and I think he is pretty informed on the subject (unfortunately much more than any politician that I'm aware of). I'd start with: A Question To Ask About Every Climate Plan[2]. And then: Climate change and the 75% problem[3]. For another perspective I'll suggest Rees's blog post: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist[4] (article includes link to part 2). I work with some climate scientists and these blogs reflect a lot of their concerns (in much more approachable ways). I'm actually deeply upset that the topic has become so politicized. I personally do not feel that either side is taking the issue seriously (though one side is at least acknowledging the problem and partly addressing less than half the problem but also encouraging the infighting. Better than nothing I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) But if you're wondering why climate scientists outright say: "We're fucked" are are extremely pessimistic, this is a short introduction to why. We don't have the technology to fix the problems, we aren't willing to admit many things are problems, a significant part of the political elite won't acknowledge that the problem even exists, and even if we solved all of this in America that only accounts for 20% of global emissions and how can we ask developing nations to either go without modern technology and let their people die or emit greenhouse gasses? I'm pretty on board with the "we're fucked" sentiment. But I hope we're wrong and I hope people can learn the facts and the non-sexy parts can become of great concern (i.e. get a shit ton of funding). And for the love of god, I hope CCS stops becoming a political topic... [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis.... [1] I personally get upset about the people that don't want to use CCS in gas and coal facilities partly because of this. It is a great way to force mass adoption of these technologies. Plus, it isn't like we can just dump coal at this point. Pretty much for the same reason a heroin addict can't cut cold turkey. We're in too deep /minirant [2] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/A-question-to-ask-about-every-climate-plan https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/A-question-to-ask-about-ev... [3] https://www.gatesnotes.com/energy/my-plan-for-fighting-climate-change https://www.gatesnotes.com/energy/my-plan-for-fighting-clima... [4] https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/11/Climate-Change-Realist-Face-Facts/ https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/11/Climate-Change-Realis...
  - nickik 7y ago
    Nuclear energy actually had the most extreme growth adoption curve of every energy source ever. Even faster then the adoption of coal or oil in the centuries before. It was totally crazy, but then form basically one year to the next, it totally flat lined. You can guess when that was.
    - swixmix 7y ago
      The problem with nuclear power is that it's a hard decision to reverse. Once we make it, we have to stand by it to the end. We can't reduce funding on nuclear power and expect it to end well.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Nuclear was in trouble before Three Mile Island. Costs were exploding and electricity demand growth suddenly stopped.
      - nickik 7y ago
        While this is true, the regulatory chances after Three Mile Island and the general changing attitude towards nuclear made it impossible for the industry to adjust to the changing market. Nuclear growth was so incredibly fast at first that it was maybe a bit unsustainable, but going from the fastest ever growing energy to total stagnation for 40 years is a difficult thing to explain.
        pfdietz 7y ago
        The regulatory change with the biggest impact on nuclear occurred before TMI. It was the Calvert Cliffs decision, a SCOTUS case that nuclear power plants were not exempt from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Committee,_Inc._v._Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Co...
        nickik 7y ago
        While this had the largest short term impact, I would argue the larger cultural, organisational, regulatory approches had the more fundamental long-term effect.
  - esyir 7y ago
    Depends. If you run at overcapacity and use that power for carbon fixation, I'm pretty sure you could get net negative carbon output. We're still burning stored resources that way, but of the sort that have been estimated to last at least the next few centuries.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      Imagine a crazy tycoon on a gigantic barge in the middle of the ocean using gigantic nuclear reactors to direct-carbon-capture CO2 into fuel and then selling it to become a 21st century petro power. I want to see this movie.
  - maelito 7y ago
    France is at a lifecycle 30gCO2e/kWh right now (clement weather). Nuclear is 6g. Less than 10g for a year is possible.
- StanislavPetrov 7y ago
  That's right! Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown due to flooding. Or somewhere in the midwest where one suffered a Fukishima type disaster from a tornado. Or if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed and irradiated a massive area. The fact is that nuclear energy carries real and tangible risks along with its benefits. Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks which only serves to increase skepticism among an already skeptical public.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    > Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown If the nuclear industry were a person, when it built Fukushima it wouldn't have been old enough to drive a car. Today, it would be retired. It learned a thing or two in the intervening years. If Fukushima had been built a mere 2 years later it wouldn't have had its fatal flaw. There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic. > if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed https://youtu.be/Bu1YFshFuI4?t=114 https://youtu.be/Bu1YFshFuI4?t=114 > Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks The people who don't take the risks seriously are the people who refuse to perform numerical comparisons and instead make snap judgements on the basis of meltdowns being scary. Other energy sources have risks too. The Banqiao dam makes Chernobyl look tame, but hydroelectric has a squeaky clean rep. Even solar and wind do worse per kWh, because their density is so low that they require (comparatively) tons of install work and upkeep, so the severe slip & fall accidents add up. So yeah, we do care about the tangible and serious risks. We should pay more attention to them. I don't think that calculus points in the direction you think it does.
    - StanislavPetrov 7y ago
      >There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic Pretending that the only potential danger posed by nuclear power and its toxic byproducts come from older plants is exactly the attitude my post addressed. No system is perfect, even under "ideal" circumstances. Natural disasters, negligence, greed, incompetence and human error are only a few of the everpresent factors that lead to inevitable system breakdowns - no matter what sort of system it is. Its disheartening but not at all surprising that those who worship blindly at the altar of technology exhibit many of the same delusional tendencies that those who worship at other religious altars do. >Other energy sources have risks too. Every endeavor comes with potential risks and rewards - which should be dispassionately scrutinized and quantified. The fact is that nuclear power is uniformly touted as a risk free panacea by the overwhelming majority of its advocates and any discussion of the very real risks is ridiculed or dismissed.
- d10r 7y ago
  Maybe it would. Or maybe one of them would have blown up (lets say e.g. on 9.11.2001) and due to bad luck (winds not blowing onto the pacific, but towards densely populated areas during crucial hours) have rendered some major cities inhabitable for years or decades. We will never know. That said: I agree that replacing nuclear power with coal power is insane. I am for continuing nuclear research and for using nuclear power with designs which are inherently safe if it's cheaper than renewable alternatives at a given location.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Nuclear already provides 20% of our energy, and that with old dangerous plant designs, so we've already seen a healthy slice of that risk. Was avoiding the risks of building new reactors worth pumping our atmosphere full of carbon? After 40 years of stubbornly refusing to use the green energy at our feet, solar and wind tech finally advanced enough to become practical, and they'll gain marketshare faster than people will give nuclear a fair shake, so they're pretty clearly the way forward. The carbon-free atmosphere that nuclear could have delivered is just a historic could-have-been at this point, and we'll just have to live with the consequences of our bad decision.
genocidicbunny 7y ago
My personal opinion is that in large part, the reason people have such an aversion to nuclear power is the imagery that is associated with the word "nuclear". Bring up the word, and there is an immediate association with nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, irradiated wastelands. Just think of how many entertainment properties use the trope of a nuclear wasteland or things glowing green, mutants and radiation beasts..etc. We know that media significantly affects culture, so it's not that surprising to me that if how we picture nuclear anything in entertainment leaks into how people think of it in the real world. We're also not very good about perceiving continued effects. The radiation that a coal plant spits out is in effect diffuse. Yes there's a lot, but its a lot over a time scale instead of immediately. Whereas a nuclear meltdown, well, that's quick and extremely potent. We're far more likely to react to the latter viscerally. For a parallel, consider air travel vs car travel. Air travel is far safer per miles traveled, but we still get our collective panties in a bunch over airplane accidents, despite there being far more car accidents in any given span of time. I think nuclear power's biggest issue is image. It has far too many negative associations in most people's minds. Until that image is changed, I don't know if nuclear power is viable culturally. Maybe once we start going further out in space and nuclear becomes the only viable power source, that might change. Right now, a few RTG-powered probes aren't going to do it.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  You do have a point, but it is also what makes that particular fear not completely without merit. Over the past few decades, the number of nuclear arsenal wielding countries increased. It is genuinely hard to keep the two separated when having a nuclear power plant can easily lead to a weapon.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  No need for weird opinions there. People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story. Germany is sitting on decades of dirty waste and has no hole to make it disappear. It creates ridiculous costs that have been shifted to the tax payer and they will pay for it for hundreds of years. Again: no sane person wants to do that or would blame them. Meanwhile there is renewable energy getting better and better with every year and decade. This whole story is a no-brainer. Nuclear is dead. Renewables is the way to go.
godelski 7y ago
One of the things I find amazing about France is that out of all the energy they produce about 17% if from recycled nuclear[0]. Not 17% of the total nuclear power is from recycled, 17% of TOTAL power is from recycled nuclear. That's pretty neat! And with regards to greenhouse gasses, hard to argue with this [1]. That being said, I don't mind the the reduction to 50% by 2035. Renewables are a good thing. I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...). If slack can be picked up by renewables and that lessens the requirement for nuclear, that's a good thing. As long as this reduction doesn't involve building coal or natural gas plants in place of nuclear, I'm all in support of it (i.e. nuclear is being replaced purely by renewables). Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first. [0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?countryCode=FR&page=country https://www.electricitymap.org/?countryCode=FR&page=country
- kaibee 7y ago
  > (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...) Nuclear power is too expensive to leave idle capacity on standby.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Not sure why you were downvoted, but this is correct. Outages are super expensive for a nuclear power plant, and plants take days to start and stop. Not only that, but capital costs are so large, you need to run it as much as possible to have any hope of just keeping up with interest payments. People think waste is the biggest problem with nuclear, but I think it is huge capital costs and lack of flexibility are even larger problems (not to mention insurance for accidents, but only the government can provide that). Coupling nuclear with some kind of large scale battery would work to even out load requirements, but the only thing that might work is pumped storage, which would require a huge reservoir at a decent elevation, not to mention being pretty inefficient.
qwerty456127 7y ago
> ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more How can a person having some idea about ecology ever advocate opening coal plants and closing nuclear ones?
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Because much of the modern environmental political movement had its roots in the anti-nuclear (war and power) movement. They simply hate nuclear power more than they hate fossil fuel power, and then they push for idiotic swaps like this. There's an extra layer of irony in that coal power plants cause more radiation and more cancer than nuclear power plants.
  - maelito 7y ago
    Also because of defiance against science / cherry picking. The French "ecological" party, EELV, has prominent anti-vaccine advocates.
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      I believe anti-vaccine advocates are there for the sole reason of getting the votes of the anti-vaccine-minded people (and for pushing some into this category just to get their votes). It's improbable real politicians are suicidal enough to actually risk facing a pandemia once they get to power.
  - wazoox 7y ago
    Exactly. Greenpeace even goes as far as plain lies, pretending that nuclear power is a significant source of greenhouse gas. Shame on them.
    - xenonite 7y ago
      Actually, nuclear power indeed _is_ a significant source of greenhouse gases. Please take into account: a) construction and teardown of the power plant (massive amounts) b) uranium mining c) responsible contaminating radioactive waste (in mountains, etc) I didn't research for numbers now, but I think one can find them.
vbezhenar 7y ago
What is mainstream? Western world? I think that many countries are building nuclear plants and will build more, for example China where real world production concentrates nowadays.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  The great majority of countries are not building nuclear plants. There are only 19 countries in which reactors are currently under construction, and some of those reactors would not have been started had it been understood what the economics would turn out to be.
dntbnmpls 7y ago
> And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. The problem with nuclear is that they don't have the lobby and the political backing that oil and gas does. > Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down. "Partially" while we fight with the russians over who gets to supply germany with natural gas. Much of the geopolitical issues today results from the fight over who gets sell gas where and who buys gas from whom. When you supply energy to a country, you have leverage over a country. It's why we limit how much energy russia supplies to japan, korea, etc. It's why we got upset when russia built a major pipeline from siberia to china. It's also why russia wants to build more pipelines to germany/europe. It's also why iran is such a major issue ( guess who has the largest gas reserves in the world? ). "Clean gas" isn't winning because they are "cleaner" than anything, it's because the players backing gas are much more powerful than those backing nuclear. In the near term, it will be "clean" oil and gas dominating the energy sector. Unless Trump is successful with his "clean" coal.
- pauljurczak 7y ago
  > players backing gas are much more powerful Many players backing U.S. shale gas are just naive and greedy investors who are getting their haircut as I write it. European countries, which counted on long term U.S. LNG imports and invested in required infrastructure, e.g. Poland, are in for a rude awakening.
  - simloo 7y ago
    Don't forget Russian gas. Eastern Europe is still heavily reliant on Russia for gas supplies, and Germany is heavily expanding its use (look at the Nord Stream pipelines). Nuclear power phase-out means more reliance on Russian gas and Russia extending its sphere of influence. As a European, I really don't like that scenario.
Ericson2314 7y ago
If we can just get some carbon tax, I think these projects will be be forced into existence whether people like it or not, which in turn will allow a higher carbon tax. Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off.
- DeathArrow 7y ago
  >Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off. Funny, but at first I've read "vicious" instead of "virtuous". I don't trust people who ask for higher taxes.
  - kazagistar 7y ago
    Forget the word tax then. Every instance of releasing carbon must pay for recapturing said carbon given current infrastructure and technology to bring us to carbon 0. It doesn't particularly matter who this money flows through, as long as the real costs are paid by polluters to clean up their mess.
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    > I don't trust people who ask for higher taxes. Why?
ajross 7y ago
Mainstream acceptance is like third or maybe fourth on the list of biggest roadblocks to nuclear power. The simple truth is that nuclear electricity is outrageously expensive relative not just to gas but to renewables. The plants represent huge investments, and waste storage remains a problem that has literally never been solved by the market (i.e. nuclear waste processing has always been a government subsidy in some form or another). Nuclear needs to make sense on a balance sheet first before you'll see uptake from environmentalists like me. But it'll happen. Make it a cheap carbon-free energy source and I guarantee you we'll advocate for it. Right now it mostly looks like another boondoggle.
- 7952 7y ago
  I work in environmental impact assessment and most of our major projects have substantial opposition, usually on environmental grounds. That is true of schemes that are usually seen favourable by environmentalists. But government's can and do ignore that opposition if they want something built. Also, these kind of comment threads talk about "environmentalists" or even "ecologists" as a single homogeneous group. That is simply not true. Most people in rich countries care about the environment to some degree but differ hugely in what they prioritize. The environment is a big topic that is more complex than just yes/no questions.
tim333 7y ago
I'm a brit and would be in favour of nuclear if it was cheap and safe but the progress of our Hinkley C reactor has not been promising on the 'cheap' bit. >construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, As a result I say go batteries, wind, solar!
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Economics of nuclear will only be found with serial mass production, as in Korean APR-1400s, Japanese ABWRs, Russian VVERs, etc. One-off builds with inexperienced construction/management teams are guaranteed to be expensive. We can still build many tens of GW of carbon-free nuclear per year if we ramp up a serial production capability, e.g. in a shipyard. Batteries, wind, solar have high costs at deep decarbonization. The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining. Intermittency adds $30-$50/MWh at deep decarb, according to numerous EIA, NREL, OECD/NEA studies.
  - godelski 7y ago
    Obligatory citation :P https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
  - tim333 7y ago
    Ah. We were supposed to get some of those in the UK for a proposed Moorside Nuclear Power Station >From December 2017 to July 2018 Kepco was named as preferred bidder.[4][5] Kepco were thought to prefer their own APR-1400 reactor but the deal all seems to have fallen apart >National Grid expects the £2.8 billion North West Coast Connections project for new power-lines to be abandoned Not sure exactly what went wrong. Sounds like the economics didn't work.
  - simloo 7y ago
    > The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining. Yes and don't forget all the different subsidies and government grants renewable sources still get. All other sources of power, including nuclear, are generally hit with extra tax in a lot of countries.
Reedx 7y ago
> Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down When nuclear is shut down, it's often replaced by coal. See also Japan, with a lot of coal plants coming up: "It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush... And a lot of people aren't aware nuclear is the safest form of energy per TWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- Puts 7y ago
  Maybe depends on how you define safest. Where I live in Sweden, there are parts of the country where it's still not safe to hunt and eat wild boar because of a nuclear accident over 30 years ago 3000 kilometers away. If you just divide the number of meltdowns (5) with the number of active power reactors in the world (449) we learn that statistically 1% of reactors will have a core meltdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
  - matwood 7y ago
    A localized problem which is still nowhere close to the worldwide problem of mercury levels in fish attributed to fossil burning and coal plants.
  - maelito 7y ago
    Well, ~100% of coal plants do kill lots of people.
    - jpdus 7y ago
      That's such a short-sighted argument. Same as with "more deaths through flu" we heard so often in February. Think about fat tails and asymmetric risk. If you read in the newspaper next year: "Hundred thousand people dead/displaced due to power plant accident" - more likely to be coal or nuclear?
pfdietz 7y ago
Nuclear isn't failing because of safety or waste or political negativity. It's failing because it's too expensive. France is giving up on new nuclear plants because the can't build them sufficiently cheaply. Ultimately, this comes back to the unforgiving complexity of nuclear technology. The plants have to be big to get economies of scale, but then they have so many critical parts that the economies of scale are illusory. A truly scalable technology is made of large numbers of mostly independent pieces that don't have to be so expensively reliable.
- maelito 7y ago
  > France is giving up on new nuclear plants because the can't build them sufficiently cheaply. No. France aiming at 50% of nuclear electricity (down from 75%) is a purely political move, to please some people that fear nuclear more than they fear climate change.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    It's the 50% that's the political statement. It's not realistic, given the state of the French nuclear industry, and their recent experience at building reactors. And I'm pretty sure their politician know this. There are no commitments there, real commitments with real money, to stay nuclear.
  - audunw 7y ago
    I've never seen that anyone has been able to document this claim. Meanwhile it's pretty easy to show that nuclear today is too expensive. LCoE studies shows wind power being cheaper, and attempts at building nuclear reactors in Europe has repeatedly led to economic disasters. You could argue that you could get the cost down if you make a huge push for nuclear. But the last time we did that it was a combined push for nuclear weapons and energy, which made it easier to get support and funding for education and research. Now the only major application is energy. And though you could probably get the cost down to where it was before, the cost of renewables and storage is dropping very rapidly. It seems likely that renewables will reach a price point that nuclear could never catch up to, way before the cost of nuclear will be reasonable again. And since renewables will be so cheap, most countries will want at least 50% of energy to be renewable. And that will make covering the remaining 50% with nuclear more expensive, since you'd need more advanced and expensive load balancing power plants to support the renewables. I also think that the fact that renewables give us an increasing amount of days with overproduction, i.e. extremely cheap electricity, might be a very good thing when we'll want to create more hydrogen and synthetic fuels.
Krasnol 7y ago
Oh please, you make it look like it wasn't Germany jumping in when your old and already long overdue reactors fell apart again and need to be shut down for repairs or when your rivers were too hot because...summer and they couldn't provide cooling anymore. Germany is moving away from coal. They have a plan, a timeline and everything that was slowing them down was politics. There are voters to be lost around coal. Especially in the east where right wing populists are getting strong. It was not about power requirements (https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374) and the only reason this one coal plant is being opened is because they got the allowance for it before the whole political process started and buying them out of it would cost even more than the industry is getting through massive lobbying. Which brings us back to costs: those astronomical amounts of money Germany drowned into nuclear energy just to sit on it's remains for hundreds and hundreds of years costing the taxpayer while they get nothing back for it. There is absolutely no need for more of the same when there are alternative energies which get better from year to year and decade to decade and do not leave radioactive was behind them. For further reading on costs of this dead energy: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_... (fixed link to english version)
- maelito 7y ago
  > Germany is moving away from coal In 2038. They probably haven't heard about the climate issue.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    Not "in 2038". TILL 2038.
kstenerud 7y ago
Nuclear will forever be shunned, not because it's inherently unsafe, but rather because WE are unsafe. Every nuclear disaster so far has exposed incompetence, negligence, corruption, or unsafe practices at some level, and has usually been accompanied by delays, denials, and attempts to bury the evidence. When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable. Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).
- DangitBobby 7y ago
  > Nuclear will forever be shunned, not because it's inherently unsafe, but rather because WE are unsafe. This position is self contradictory. If it weren't inherently unsafe, our treatment of it, incompetent or otherwise, could not lead to global catastrophe. The problem is simultaneously that Nuclear is inherently unsafe and people cannot be trusted.
  - kgabis 7y ago
    Can nuclear energy lead to a global disaster? The Chernobyl disaster was local and it's pretty much worst case scenario. Global warming is a global disaster and if using nuclear energy is a way of avoiding it then we must use it.
    - donjoe 7y ago
      Depends on what you call 'local'. Up until now, eating wild mushrooms and boars in the south of Germany is not considered healthy due to Caesium-137 emitted by the Chernobyl-accident decades ago [0]. Each shot wild boar needs to be tested before you are actually allowed to eat it. [0] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
      - 7y ago
_ph_ 7y ago
That is not quite correct. There was a lot of discussion about the coal plant in question (Datteln 4). It is ready built, but might not have gotten into the operation at all. In the end, it seems it goes into production replacing some very old east german coal plants which get shut down early. Supposedly, the new plant is cleaner and more efficient than the aged cold plants it replaces. Usage of coal in Germany is in a strong decline, as CO2 certificates and the carbon tax are making it less and less attractive for the power companies. Closing the nuclear power plants certainly increases the challenges in becinung CO2 neutral, but we are talking about aging power plants which would have to be closed pretty soon anyway. Which is an even bigger problem for France, its fleet of reactors is approaching the end of the life time and there are not enough new reactors being built to replace the aging reactors. So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that, independant of ecological concerns.
- maelito 7y ago
  > So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that Not for now, Fessenheim wasn't closed because of its age evaluated by the French ASN, but because of the assessment of the risks of its age by the French EELV party, politicians. But yes, in the future, that is true.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "not of its age" when it was the oldest operating reactor in France and the one with the worst security precautions. There was also a significant amount of pressure from the German side (main affected by a possible large accident) about its safety. But yes, I was mostly speaking about the future - as the ramp up of renewables is rather slow in France, of course they try to keep their reactors running as long as possible. But this only delays the inevitable.
    - maelito 7y ago
      Yes, but they could probably be safely delaid by decades. You don't close a reactor because it is the oldest or the worst security, you close if its security doesn't or can't meet some criterias. > There was also a significant amount of pressure from the German side (main affected by a possible large accident) about its safety. Well another accident, not highly hypothetical, is happening right now : German coal plants polute our air, leading to thounsands of deaths yearly, and contributes to climate change with certainty.
maelito 7y ago
"cleaner" is an understatement. It's not 10% or 30% cleaner in terms of climate impact, it's more like 80%. Same for air pollution.
itronitron 7y ago
I wonder what will happen when people realize there are other sources of radioactive waste [1] ... they may either seek to reduce those as well or lose interest in eliminating nuclear energy. 1. https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2019/06/an-extraordinarily-severe-emergency-the-radioactive-leak-at-harborview/ https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2019/06/an-extraordinaril...
xorcist 7y ago
> we've been getting cheaper and cleaner electricity than our neighbors In reality, EDF had sunk billions in debt, despite multiple injections of capital by the state.
jokoon 7y ago
I tend to believe technocracy should be encouraged. I wish science could have an important place in politics, and hold some form of power. Maybe the word scio-cracy should be invented.
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
I have a possibly rude but serious question. Do you think French culture, which stereotypically at least is more at home with a centralized, top-down control, might be more suited for nuclear development than Angloamerican which tends to be more ad hoc?

by simias 7y ago

jjoonathan 7y ago

Ugh, if the US had just kept up the pace of nuclear construction in the 80s instead of shutting it down, we would be approaching 100% CO2-free electricity today. Not 50 years from now, today. But we threw it all away!

godelski 7y ago
I'm not sure this is true. Simply because I'm not aware of a technology that has a 0 CO2eq lifetime emission. Production, yes (nuclear, renewables), but lifetime, no. It would be a HUGE step in the right direction and have dramatically reduced our load (20% of global) on the climate problem (probably influenced other countries too). But I want to be accurate here. (I know I'm splitting hairs here)
- travisporter 7y ago
  You’re technically right (the best kind of right!) but so is he when he says nuclear approaches 100% CO2. Maybe solar+storage could get even closer close?
  - mrpopo 7y ago
    Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse. The rationale behind it is simple physics. Enriched nuclear fuel is the most energy-dense material we can access, so unless a new fundamental law is discovered, nuclear energy will have the best EROI, e.g. require the least energy overall to be produced (also note that most of the energy deployed is for security reasons). EDIT: another option for solar+storage to tend towards 0 residual carbon footprint is a life duration 10 or 100 times longer. Something to consider.
    - godelski 7y ago
      > Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse. I'm going to add some nuance. As far as I'm aware, this is only true for photovoltaic solar. My understanding is that concentrated solar (mirrors heat up water tank and you have a steam turbine) has lower lifetime emissions than nuclear. That being said, storage does have a heavy footprint that many ignore. This is a harder number to accurately measure the impact, but if we're talking about a sane fully renewable system you have to have a lot of storage. Places like Southern California can get away with a day or two's worth of storage because there is little variation in conditions. But if you travel up the coast 500 miles things get drastically different. Even more so as you get into Washington. You're going to have to have at least a week's worth of storage. Same thing for the east coast. That said, these options are still better than coal. It is debatable if we're talking about coal + CCS though and likely doesn't beat gas + CCS. Though the counter argument to this is CCS in the manufacturing of your solar and batteries. Again, gets tricky and there's factors to include like tearing down existing coal and gas plants. TLDR: this problem is unsurprisingly extremely complicated even though we make it out to not be.
      - billti 7y ago
        Could a highly efficient grid solve the "local weather" problem? While it might be cloudy in Washington, at the same time it's likely sunny in Nevada, or Texas, (or Mexico if you had cross border production), etc.. The broader the area you can depend on, the less you need "bad weather backup" systems.
        godelski 7y ago
        Potentially. But there's a big if and quite a few drawbacks. If our power is dependent on such long range travel there is a lot more opportunity for failure. Since we're talking about power, this does mean both lives and millions to billions of dollars worth of economic activity. There's various reasons things could go down. A bird. Russia hacking our grid. Joe Schmoe crashes his truck. You name it. The only way to reduce two of these events is to build a large and complex network with many fail-safes, but that makes the second possibility easier. But if it goes down in Texas we're talking about Northern California, Oregon, and Washington potentially losing power. Having local sources of power is highly reliable and contains disasters to only be local. While I do believe we should have smarter grids there is much wanting in using this as a solution to the regional issues of renewable efficiencies and storage requirements.
  - godelski 7y ago
    I'm aware I'm splitting hairs. But I bring this up because there are a lot of misconceptions about climate, including the energy sub-problem. I.E. people think if we go renewables (or nuclear) we've solved the climate issue, let alone just the energy problem. Or rather, I think people think all we need is renewables and electric cars. Where in reality even after implementing these two (important) parts we still have a long way to go. And that the idea of this is so prevalent that it is actually hindering progress. So I'm being nuanced. But HN is a place for nuance.
    - unethical_ban 7y ago
      What is there, other than energy (and storage/use of it, such as on ships)? My understanding is the VAST majority of climate-change contributions are from energy production and transportation. There are other environmental concerns, but plastic in the ocean isn't raising global temperatures.
      - kcolford 7y ago
        Construction is another big one. Steel and concrete are massive producers of green house gasses
      - godelski 7y ago
        Transportation and energy account for a little under 60% of the problem.[0] (There's a lot more to those than electricity and cars) Another more mainstream issue is agriculture, but people pretty much talk exclusively about water usage and emissions from animal byproducts. This has a political motive. It is the majority of that sector though, to be fair to the vegans. If cows were a country they would be the third worst polluter (please support lab grown meat and reduce your meat intake. Even just eating red meat once a month and chicken the rest of the time has a significant impact on your personal emissions. And please don't bring up cows eating algae). But there's a lot of less sexy parts that we're nowhere even near close to solving. Concrete and steel production is one of them. These are the largest contributor to emissions in construction, and pretty much the only way to solve this issue is with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) or new materials that we don't yet know about. [1] The same is for plastics. Frankly, we don't have a good way around steel, concrete, or plastics without making some extremely hard compromises. These materials MAKE the modern world and literally save lives. Another less sexy issue is air-conditioning/refrigeration and heating. These systems are almost pure emitters yet we never discuss them. Again, we're nowhere near solving these issues. Again, these technologies save lives and enable the modern world. They are extremely difficult problems and even harder to scale. I'd suggest reading some of Gate's Notes, since they do provide a good high level introduction to the material and I think he is pretty informed on the subject (unfortunately much more than any politician that I'm aware of). I'd start with: A Question To Ask About Every Climate Plan[2]. And then: Climate change and the 75% problem[3]. For another perspective I'll suggest Rees's blog post: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist[4] (article includes link to part 2). I work with some climate scientists and these blogs reflect a lot of their concerns (in much more approachable ways). I'm actually deeply upset that the topic has become so politicized. I personally do not feel that either side is taking the issue seriously (though one side is at least acknowledging the problem and partly addressing less than half the problem but also encouraging the infighting. Better than nothing I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) But if you're wondering why climate scientists outright say: "We're fucked" are are extremely pessimistic, this is a short introduction to why. We don't have the technology to fix the problems, we aren't willing to admit many things are problems, a significant part of the political elite won't acknowledge that the problem even exists, and even if we solved all of this in America that only accounts for 20% of global emissions and how can we ask developing nations to either go without modern technology and let their people die or emit greenhouse gasses? I'm pretty on board with the "we're fucked" sentiment. But I hope we're wrong and I hope people can learn the facts and the non-sexy parts can become of great concern (i.e. get a shit ton of funding). And for the love of god, I hope CCS stops becoming a political topic... [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis.... [1] I personally get upset about the people that don't want to use CCS in gas and coal facilities partly because of this. It is a great way to force mass adoption of these technologies. Plus, it isn't like we can just dump coal at this point. Pretty much for the same reason a heroin addict can't cut cold turkey. We're in too deep /minirant [2] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/A-question-to-ask-about-every-climate-plan https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/A-question-to-ask-about-ev... [3] https://www.gatesnotes.com/energy/my-plan-for-fighting-climate-change https://www.gatesnotes.com/energy/my-plan-for-fighting-clima... [4] https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/11/Climate-Change-Realist-Face-Facts/ https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/11/Climate-Change-Realis...
- nickik 7y ago
  Nuclear energy actually had the most extreme growth adoption curve of every energy source ever. Even faster then the adoption of coal or oil in the centuries before. It was totally crazy, but then form basically one year to the next, it totally flat lined. You can guess when that was.
  - swixmix 7y ago
    The problem with nuclear power is that it's a hard decision to reverse. Once we make it, we have to stand by it to the end. We can't reduce funding on nuclear power and expect it to end well.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Nuclear was in trouble before Three Mile Island. Costs were exploding and electricity demand growth suddenly stopped.
    - nickik 7y ago
      While this is true, the regulatory chances after Three Mile Island and the general changing attitude towards nuclear made it impossible for the industry to adjust to the changing market. Nuclear growth was so incredibly fast at first that it was maybe a bit unsustainable, but going from the fastest ever growing energy to total stagnation for 40 years is a difficult thing to explain.
      - pfdietz 7y ago
        The regulatory change with the biggest impact on nuclear occurred before TMI. It was the Calvert Cliffs decision, a SCOTUS case that nuclear power plants were not exempt from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Committee,_Inc._v._Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Co...
        nickik 7y ago
        While this had the largest short term impact, I would argue the larger cultural, organisational, regulatory approches had the more fundamental long-term effect.
- esyir 7y ago
  Depends. If you run at overcapacity and use that power for carbon fixation, I'm pretty sure you could get net negative carbon output. We're still burning stored resources that way, but of the sort that have been estimated to last at least the next few centuries.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Imagine a crazy tycoon on a gigantic barge in the middle of the ocean using gigantic nuclear reactors to direct-carbon-capture CO2 into fuel and then selling it to become a 21st century petro power. I want to see this movie.
- maelito 7y ago
  France is at a lifecycle 30gCO2e/kWh right now (clement weather). Nuclear is 6g. Less than 10g for a year is possible.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
That's right! Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown due to flooding. Or somewhere in the midwest where one suffered a Fukishima type disaster from a tornado. Or if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed and irradiated a massive area. The fact is that nuclear energy carries real and tangible risks along with its benefits. Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks which only serves to increase skepticism among an already skeptical public.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  > Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown If the nuclear industry were a person, when it built Fukushima it wouldn't have been old enough to drive a car. Today, it would be retired. It learned a thing or two in the intervening years. If Fukushima had been built a mere 2 years later it wouldn't have had its fatal flaw. There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic. > if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed https://youtu.be/Bu1YFshFuI4?t=114 https://youtu.be/Bu1YFshFuI4?t=114 > Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks The people who don't take the risks seriously are the people who refuse to perform numerical comparisons and instead make snap judgements on the basis of meltdowns being scary. Other energy sources have risks too. The Banqiao dam makes Chernobyl look tame, but hydroelectric has a squeaky clean rep. Even solar and wind do worse per kWh, because their density is so low that they require (comparatively) tons of install work and upkeep, so the severe slip & fall accidents add up. So yeah, we do care about the tangible and serious risks. We should pay more attention to them. I don't think that calculus points in the direction you think it does.
  - StanislavPetrov 7y ago
    >There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic Pretending that the only potential danger posed by nuclear power and its toxic byproducts come from older plants is exactly the attitude my post addressed. No system is perfect, even under "ideal" circumstances. Natural disasters, negligence, greed, incompetence and human error are only a few of the everpresent factors that lead to inevitable system breakdowns - no matter what sort of system it is. Its disheartening but not at all surprising that those who worship blindly at the altar of technology exhibit many of the same delusional tendencies that those who worship at other religious altars do. >Other energy sources have risks too. Every endeavor comes with potential risks and rewards - which should be dispassionately scrutinized and quantified. The fact is that nuclear power is uniformly touted as a risk free panacea by the overwhelming majority of its advocates and any discussion of the very real risks is ridiculed or dismissed.
d10r 7y ago
Maybe it would. Or maybe one of them would have blown up (lets say e.g. on 9.11.2001) and due to bad luck (winds not blowing onto the pacific, but towards densely populated areas during crucial hours) have rendered some major cities inhabitable for years or decades. We will never know. That said: I agree that replacing nuclear power with coal power is insane. I am for continuing nuclear research and for using nuclear power with designs which are inherently safe if it's cheaper than renewable alternatives at a given location.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Nuclear already provides 20% of our energy, and that with old dangerous plant designs, so we've already seen a healthy slice of that risk. Was avoiding the risks of building new reactors worth pumping our atmosphere full of carbon? After 40 years of stubbornly refusing to use the green energy at our feet, solar and wind tech finally advanced enough to become practical, and they'll gain marketshare faster than people will give nuclear a fair shake, so they're pretty clearly the way forward. The carbon-free atmosphere that nuclear could have delivered is just a historic could-have-been at this point, and we'll just have to live with the consequences of our bad decision.

genocidicbunny 7y ago

My personal opinion is that in large part, the reason people have such an aversion to nuclear power is the imagery that is associated with the word "nuclear". Bring up the word, and there is an immediate association with nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, irradiated wastelands. Just think of how many entertainment properties use the trope of a nuclear wasteland or things glowing green, mutants and radiation beasts..etc. We know that media significantly affects culture, so it's not that surprising to me that if how we picture nuclear anything in entertainment leaks into how people think of it in the real world. We're also not very good about perceiving continued effects. The radiation that a coal plant spits out is in effect diffuse. Yes there's a lot, but its a lot over a time scale instead of immediately. Whereas a nuclear meltdown, well, that's quick and extremely potent. We're far more likely to react to the latter viscerally. For a parallel, consider air travel vs car travel. Air travel is far safer per miles traveled, but we still get our collective panties in a bunch over airplane accidents, despite there being far more car accidents in any given span of time. I think nuclear power's biggest issue is image. It has far too many negative associations in most people's minds. Until that image is changed, I don't know if nuclear power is viable culturally. Maybe once we start going further out in space and nuclear becomes the only viable power source, that might change. Right now, a few RTG-powered probes aren't going to do it.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
You do have a point, but it is also what makes that particular fear not completely without merit. Over the past few decades, the number of nuclear arsenal wielding countries increased. It is genuinely hard to keep the two separated when having a nuclear power plant can easily lead to a weapon.
Krasnol 7y ago
No need for weird opinions there. People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story. Germany is sitting on decades of dirty waste and has no hole to make it disappear. It creates ridiculous costs that have been shifted to the tax payer and they will pay for it for hundreds of years. Again: no sane person wants to do that or would blame them. Meanwhile there is renewable energy getting better and better with every year and decade. This whole story is a no-brainer. Nuclear is dead. Renewables is the way to go.

godelski 7y ago

One of the things I find amazing about France is that out of all the energy they produce about 17% if from recycled nuclear[0]. Not 17% of the total nuclear power is from recycled, 17% of TOTAL power is from recycled nuclear. That's pretty neat! And with regards to greenhouse gasses, hard to argue with this [1]. That being said, I don't mind the the reduction to 50% by 2035. Renewables are a good thing. I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...). If slack can be picked up by renewables and that lessens the requirement for nuclear, that's a good thing. As long as this reduction doesn't involve building coal or natural gas plants in place of nuclear, I'm all in support of it (i.e. nuclear is being replaced purely by renewables). Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first. [0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?countryCode=FR&page=country https://www.electricitymap.org/?countryCode=FR&page=country

kaibee 7y ago
> (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...) Nuclear power is too expensive to leave idle capacity on standby.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted, but this is correct. Outages are super expensive for a nuclear power plant, and plants take days to start and stop. Not only that, but capital costs are so large, you need to run it as much as possible to have any hope of just keeping up with interest payments. People think waste is the biggest problem with nuclear, but I think it is huge capital costs and lack of flexibility are even larger problems (not to mention insurance for accidents, but only the government can provide that). Coupling nuclear with some kind of large scale battery would work to even out load requirements, but the only thing that might work is pumped storage, which would require a huge reservoir at a decent elevation, not to mention being pretty inefficient.

qwerty456127 7y ago

> ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more How can a person having some idea about ecology ever advocate opening coal plants and closing nuclear ones?

henrikschroder 7y ago
Because much of the modern environmental political movement had its roots in the anti-nuclear (war and power) movement. They simply hate nuclear power more than they hate fossil fuel power, and then they push for idiotic swaps like this. There's an extra layer of irony in that coal power plants cause more radiation and more cancer than nuclear power plants.
- maelito 7y ago
  Also because of defiance against science / cherry picking. The French "ecological" party, EELV, has prominent anti-vaccine advocates.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    I believe anti-vaccine advocates are there for the sole reason of getting the votes of the anti-vaccine-minded people (and for pushing some into this category just to get their votes). It's improbable real politicians are suicidal enough to actually risk facing a pandemia once they get to power.
- wazoox 7y ago
  Exactly. Greenpeace even goes as far as plain lies, pretending that nuclear power is a significant source of greenhouse gas. Shame on them.
  - xenonite 7y ago
    Actually, nuclear power indeed _is_ a significant source of greenhouse gases. Please take into account: a) construction and teardown of the power plant (massive amounts) b) uranium mining c) responsible contaminating radioactive waste (in mountains, etc) I didn't research for numbers now, but I think one can find them.

vbezhenar 7y ago

What is mainstream? Western world? I think that many countries are building nuclear plants and will build more, for example China where real world production concentrates nowadays.

pfdietz 7y ago
The great majority of countries are not building nuclear plants. There are only 19 countries in which reactors are currently under construction, and some of those reactors would not have been started had it been understood what the economics would turn out to be.

dntbnmpls 7y ago

> And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. The problem with nuclear is that they don't have the lobby and the political backing that oil and gas does. > Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down. "Partially" while we fight with the russians over who gets to supply germany with natural gas. Much of the geopolitical issues today results from the fight over who gets sell gas where and who buys gas from whom. When you supply energy to a country, you have leverage over a country. It's why we limit how much energy russia supplies to japan, korea, etc. It's why we got upset when russia built a major pipeline from siberia to china. It's also why russia wants to build more pipelines to germany/europe. It's also why iran is such a major issue ( guess who has the largest gas reserves in the world? ). "Clean gas" isn't winning because they are "cleaner" than anything, it's because the players backing gas are much more powerful than those backing nuclear. In the near term, it will be "clean" oil and gas dominating the energy sector. Unless Trump is successful with his "clean" coal.

pauljurczak 7y ago
> players backing gas are much more powerful Many players backing U.S. shale gas are just naive and greedy investors who are getting their haircut as I write it. European countries, which counted on long term U.S. LNG imports and invested in required infrastructure, e.g. Poland, are in for a rude awakening.
- simloo 7y ago
  Don't forget Russian gas. Eastern Europe is still heavily reliant on Russia for gas supplies, and Germany is heavily expanding its use (look at the Nord Stream pipelines). Nuclear power phase-out means more reliance on Russian gas and Russia extending its sphere of influence. As a European, I really don't like that scenario.

Ericson2314 7y ago

If we can just get some carbon tax, I think these projects will be be forced into existence whether people like it or not, which in turn will allow a higher carbon tax. Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off.

DeathArrow 7y ago
>Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off. Funny, but at first I've read "vicious" instead of "virtuous". I don't trust people who ask for higher taxes.
- kazagistar 7y ago
  Forget the word tax then. Every instance of releasing carbon must pay for recapturing said carbon given current infrastructure and technology to bring us to carbon 0. It doesn't particularly matter who this money flows through, as long as the real costs are paid by polluters to clean up their mess.
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  > I don't trust people who ask for higher taxes. Why?

ajross 7y ago

Mainstream acceptance is like third or maybe fourth on the list of biggest roadblocks to nuclear power. The simple truth is that nuclear electricity is outrageously expensive relative not just to gas but to renewables. The plants represent huge investments, and waste storage remains a problem that has literally never been solved by the market (i.e. nuclear waste processing has always been a government subsidy in some form or another). Nuclear needs to make sense on a balance sheet first before you'll see uptake from environmentalists like me. But it'll happen. Make it a cheap carbon-free energy source and I guarantee you we'll advocate for it. Right now it mostly looks like another boondoggle.

7952 7y ago
I work in environmental impact assessment and most of our major projects have substantial opposition, usually on environmental grounds. That is true of schemes that are usually seen favourable by environmentalists. But government's can and do ignore that opposition if they want something built. Also, these kind of comment threads talk about "environmentalists" or even "ecologists" as a single homogeneous group. That is simply not true. Most people in rich countries care about the environment to some degree but differ hugely in what they prioritize. The environment is a big topic that is more complex than just yes/no questions.

tim333 7y ago

I'm a brit and would be in favour of nuclear if it was cheap and safe but the progress of our Hinkley C reactor has not been promising on the 'cheap' bit. >construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, As a result I say go batteries, wind, solar!

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Economics of nuclear will only be found with serial mass production, as in Korean APR-1400s, Japanese ABWRs, Russian VVERs, etc. One-off builds with inexperienced construction/management teams are guaranteed to be expensive. We can still build many tens of GW of carbon-free nuclear per year if we ramp up a serial production capability, e.g. in a shipyard. Batteries, wind, solar have high costs at deep decarbonization. The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining. Intermittency adds $30-$50/MWh at deep decarb, according to numerous EIA, NREL, OECD/NEA studies.
- godelski 7y ago
  Obligatory citation :P https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
- tim333 7y ago
  Ah. We were supposed to get some of those in the UK for a proposed Moorside Nuclear Power Station >From December 2017 to July 2018 Kepco was named as preferred bidder.[4][5] Kepco were thought to prefer their own APR-1400 reactor but the deal all seems to have fallen apart >National Grid expects the £2.8 billion North West Coast Connections project for new power-lines to be abandoned Not sure exactly what went wrong. Sounds like the economics didn't work.
- simloo 7y ago
  > The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining. Yes and don't forget all the different subsidies and government grants renewable sources still get. All other sources of power, including nuclear, are generally hit with extra tax in a lot of countries.

Reedx 7y ago

> Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down When nuclear is shut down, it's often replaced by coal. See also Japan, with a lot of coal plants coming up: "It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush... And a lot of people aren't aware nuclear is the safest form of energy per TWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Puts 7y ago
Maybe depends on how you define safest. Where I live in Sweden, there are parts of the country where it's still not safe to hunt and eat wild boar because of a nuclear accident over 30 years ago 3000 kilometers away. If you just divide the number of meltdowns (5) with the number of active power reactors in the world (449) we learn that statistically 1% of reactors will have a core meltdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
- matwood 7y ago
  A localized problem which is still nowhere close to the worldwide problem of mercury levels in fish attributed to fossil burning and coal plants.
- maelito 7y ago
  Well, ~100% of coal plants do kill lots of people.
  - jpdus 7y ago
    That's such a short-sighted argument. Same as with "more deaths through flu" we heard so often in February. Think about fat tails and asymmetric risk. If you read in the newspaper next year: "Hundred thousand people dead/displaced due to power plant accident" - more likely to be coal or nuclear?

pfdietz 7y ago

Nuclear isn't failing because of safety or waste or political negativity. It's failing because it's too expensive. France is giving up on new nuclear plants because the can't build them sufficiently cheaply. Ultimately, this comes back to the unforgiving complexity of nuclear technology. The plants have to be big to get economies of scale, but then they have so many critical parts that the economies of scale are illusory. A truly scalable technology is made of large numbers of mostly independent pieces that don't have to be so expensively reliable.

maelito 7y ago
> France is giving up on new nuclear plants because the can't build them sufficiently cheaply. No. France aiming at 50% of nuclear electricity (down from 75%) is a purely political move, to please some people that fear nuclear more than they fear climate change.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  It's the 50% that's the political statement. It's not realistic, given the state of the French nuclear industry, and their recent experience at building reactors. And I'm pretty sure their politician know this. There are no commitments there, real commitments with real money, to stay nuclear.
- audunw 7y ago
  I've never seen that anyone has been able to document this claim. Meanwhile it's pretty easy to show that nuclear today is too expensive. LCoE studies shows wind power being cheaper, and attempts at building nuclear reactors in Europe has repeatedly led to economic disasters. You could argue that you could get the cost down if you make a huge push for nuclear. But the last time we did that it was a combined push for nuclear weapons and energy, which made it easier to get support and funding for education and research. Now the only major application is energy. And though you could probably get the cost down to where it was before, the cost of renewables and storage is dropping very rapidly. It seems likely that renewables will reach a price point that nuclear could never catch up to, way before the cost of nuclear will be reasonable again. And since renewables will be so cheap, most countries will want at least 50% of energy to be renewable. And that will make covering the remaining 50% with nuclear more expensive, since you'd need more advanced and expensive load balancing power plants to support the renewables. I also think that the fact that renewables give us an increasing amount of days with overproduction, i.e. extremely cheap electricity, might be a very good thing when we'll want to create more hydrogen and synthetic fuels.

Krasnol 7y ago

Oh please, you make it look like it wasn't Germany jumping in when your old and already long overdue reactors fell apart again and need to be shut down for repairs or when your rivers were too hot because...summer and they couldn't provide cooling anymore. Germany is moving away from coal. They have a plan, a timeline and everything that was slowing them down was politics. There are voters to be lost around coal. Especially in the east where right wing populists are getting strong. It was not about power requirements (https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374) and the only reason this one coal plant is being opened is because they got the allowance for it before the whole political process started and buying them out of it would cost even more than the industry is getting through massive lobbying. Which brings us back to costs: those astronomical amounts of money Germany drowned into nuclear energy just to sit on it's remains for hundreds and hundreds of years costing the taxpayer while they get nothing back for it. There is absolutely no need for more of the same when there are alternative energies which get better from year to year and decade to decade and do not leave radioactive was behind them. For further reading on costs of this dead energy: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_... (fixed link to english version)

maelito 7y ago
> Germany is moving away from coal In 2038. They probably haven't heard about the climate issue.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Not "in 2038". TILL 2038.

kstenerud 7y ago

Nuclear will forever be shunned, not because it's inherently unsafe, but rather because WE are unsafe. Every nuclear disaster so far has exposed incompetence, negligence, corruption, or unsafe practices at some level, and has usually been accompanied by delays, denials, and attempts to bury the evidence. When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable. Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).

DangitBobby 7y ago
> Nuclear will forever be shunned, not because it's inherently unsafe, but rather because WE are unsafe. This position is self contradictory. If it weren't inherently unsafe, our treatment of it, incompetent or otherwise, could not lead to global catastrophe. The problem is simultaneously that Nuclear is inherently unsafe and people cannot be trusted.
- kgabis 7y ago
  Can nuclear energy lead to a global disaster? The Chernobyl disaster was local and it's pretty much worst case scenario. Global warming is a global disaster and if using nuclear energy is a way of avoiding it then we must use it.
  - donjoe 7y ago
    Depends on what you call 'local'. Up until now, eating wild mushrooms and boars in the south of Germany is not considered healthy due to Caesium-137 emitted by the Chernobyl-accident decades ago [0]. Each shot wild boar needs to be tested before you are actually allowed to eat it. [0] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
    - 7y ago

_ph_ 7y ago

That is not quite correct. There was a lot of discussion about the coal plant in question (Datteln 4). It is ready built, but might not have gotten into the operation at all. In the end, it seems it goes into production replacing some very old east german coal plants which get shut down early. Supposedly, the new plant is cleaner and more efficient than the aged cold plants it replaces. Usage of coal in Germany is in a strong decline, as CO2 certificates and the carbon tax are making it less and less attractive for the power companies. Closing the nuclear power plants certainly increases the challenges in becinung CO2 neutral, but we are talking about aging power plants which would have to be closed pretty soon anyway. Which is an even bigger problem for France, its fleet of reactors is approaching the end of the life time and there are not enough new reactors being built to replace the aging reactors. So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that, independant of ecological concerns.

maelito 7y ago
> So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that Not for now, Fessenheim wasn't closed because of its age evaluated by the French ASN, but because of the assessment of the risks of its age by the French EELV party, politicians. But yes, in the future, that is true.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "not of its age" when it was the oldest operating reactor in France and the one with the worst security precautions. There was also a significant amount of pressure from the German side (main affected by a possible large accident) about its safety. But yes, I was mostly speaking about the future - as the ramp up of renewables is rather slow in France, of course they try to keep their reactors running as long as possible. But this only delays the inevitable.
  - maelito 7y ago
    Yes, but they could probably be safely delaid by decades. You don't close a reactor because it is the oldest or the worst security, you close if its security doesn't or can't meet some criterias. > There was also a significant amount of pressure from the German side (main affected by a possible large accident) about its safety. Well another accident, not highly hypothetical, is happening right now : German coal plants polute our air, leading to thounsands of deaths yearly, and contributes to climate change with certainty.

maelito 7y ago

"cleaner" is an understatement. It's not 10% or 30% cleaner in terms of climate impact, it's more like 80%. Same for air pollution.

itronitron 7y ago

I wonder what will happen when people realize there are other sources of radioactive waste [1] ... they may either seek to reduce those as well or lose interest in eliminating nuclear energy. 1. https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2019/06/an-extraordinarily-severe-emergency-the-radioactive-leak-at-harborview/ https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2019/06/an-extraordinaril...

xorcist 7y ago

> we've been getting cheaper and cleaner electricity than our neighbors In reality, EDF had sunk billions in debt, despite multiple injections of capital by the state.

jokoon 7y ago

I tend to believe technocracy should be encouraged. I wish science could have an important place in politics, and hold some form of power. Maybe the word scio-cracy should be invented.

SuoDuanDao 7y ago

I have a possibly rude but serious question. Do you think French culture, which stereotypically at least is more at home with a centralized, top-down control, might be more suited for nuclear development than Angloamerican which tends to be more ad hoc?